Still working to recover. Please don't edit quite yet.
Concentration of fire
The close relationship between electronic war games and the military industry means that the informal military strategy term Concentration of fire has entered into gamer's understanding, and to a lesser extent, into game terminology.
The basic principle, in games, is one of damage reduction when facing multiple targets, by means of every friendly damage dealer choosing the same target.
The rationale behind CoF is particularly well suited to the normal game mechanics of these games, in which any target, including players, almost unfailingly are impossible to kill in one shot. More specifically, 'enemy' targets usually have a large amount of hit points in comparison to the players.
If it only took one shot to kill them, then the only problem with targetting would be Overkill (WP), and the strategy would be to assign different targets to each player.
Instead, a new consideration comes into play: the amount of damage that the 'enemy' target is doing to players while it is still alive. Every source of damage that can be removed means less damage incoming, and therefore the strategy becomes assigning everyone the same target, until each dies.
It is in fact the very stylization and limited reality of these mechanics that points directly at CoF's failing as a military theory: In real life, things don't have hit points.
They do, however, have things like brittleness, hardness, and tensile strength, and it is these considerations that lead to the better military theory (if I can just find out what it is called. Something about the minimum required destructive force)
For more on concentration of fire, albeit in a context that may have too much terminology specific to a particular game to be easily understood by entry-level readers, see the article Concentration of Fire at the Anarchy Online Developers Wiki. This article also shows some of the counterindications of CoF, in particular the effectiveness, in Anarchy Online itself, of group healing.
Another example of CoF's counterindications in a specific game is with the Hibernian Pulsing Blade Turn (PBT) hit negation and to a lesser extent the Midgard Pacification Healer/Point Blank Area of Effect damage (PBAE) vs Recaps levelling combo in Dark Age of Camelot.[1][2]
External links[edit]
- Concentration of Fire at the Anarchy Online Developers Wiki (AO Devs)
- Concentration of fire Another instance of what, truth be told, is a fairly rare game term, although it is considerably more widely used in practice, and is invaluable
Citations[edit]
- ↑ DAoC Realm of Midgard "what is the best one (highest drop rate, ease of mobs, etc)? For a tank/shaman duo or a pac healer, pbae sm, and valk trio"
- ↑ DAOC2 Catacombs.com "just run over to mod and ride the redcap groups til 50...this is where a pac spec healer beats your aug spec for xp, you might get to 44 faster than he does but he'll woop ur ass once he gets in redcaps."
