Change to Dungeon Alert

[Bjond]

It has been said over and over again that dungeon alert is not the thing causing the issues, dungeon alert exists to address the behavior causing the issues.

Same thing either way. DA is an extremely artificial immersion-destroying mechanism that has no place at all within the context of the game. That it exists at all is disappointing. It could be done sooo much better, including saving server resources.

For instance, having critters chase players forever is weird. The entire NPC population is ridiculously fixated and suicidal in it's intent to slay players.

 

[Buddha5440]

It has been said over and over again that dungeon alert is not the thing causing the issues, dungeon alert exists to address the behavior causing the issues.

This...yet again.

DA is not the cause of the LAG... It's the players/Zergers (in situations where there isn't an automatic DA) that are causing the LAG, and their response is, basically, who are you to tell me how to play the game?

WELL, when your playstyle is causing LAG for everyone... WE are the ones to tell you not to do that.

 

[Phoenicis]

Now wait a minute.

I like this, but FIRST, some of the problems above HAVE to be fixed.
There are rooms; TOEE comes to mind; that DA when you barely walk into the room, there are SO many mobs! Or, if you carefully pull 1 mob, there are 12 behind a wall that come with him.

We have to be able to play carefully and not have a DA before you start punishing people for something that's not their fault.

Just did TOEE on heroic elite and didn't get a single DA that I can recall.

I do know there are some, though specifics escape me at the moment, but calling out TOEE when I just completed it, well, my experience was different.

 

[eshadowbringer]

Just did TOEE on heroic elite and didn't get a single DA that I can recall.

I do know there are some, though specifics escape me at the moment, but calling out TOEE when I just completed it, well, my experience was different.

Not trying to be adversarial here.

Heroic Elite does not address the issue with Reapers aggroing entire rooms with a domino effect like you will find in higher reapers.

 

[Phoenicis]

Same thing either way. DA is an extremely artificial immersion-destroying mechanism that has no place at all within the context of the game. That it exists at all is disappointing. It could be done sooo much better, including saving server resources.

For instance, having critters chase players forever is weird. The entire NPC population is ridiculously fixated and suicidal in it's intent to slay players.

If I was a dev here is how I would have handled it.

1. There would be NO player notification.

2. All doors in the quest are now barred. All the mobs have to be killed before the door and they must be bashed open.

3. All intelligent mobs get improved AC and damage, they are waiting for the players and have made all their preparations to repel the invaders.

4. Unintelligent mobs are gathered (thier numbers increase) to keep the PCs busy while the intelligent mobs shoot/cast spells at the PCs.

5. Orange named mobs get bigger boosts to AC & Damage, again, they have had time to prepare.

6. Red names, again, get boosts, and increase the number of minions in their fights.

7. The odds of loot go down, they are using it and it was destroyed in the fight.

But hey, I'm a mean evil sonova as a DM so...

 

[Phoenicis]

Not trying to be adversarial here.

Heroic Elite does not address the issue with Reapers aggroing entire rooms with a domino effect like you will find in higher reapers.

In reaper the DM is trying to kill you.

The devs specifically said that.

If you are complaining about DA in reaper, well...

 

[eshadowbringer]

In reaper the DM is trying to kill you.

The devs specifically said that.

If you are complaining about DA in reaper, well...

No where was I complaining!

I was simply stating that the difference between heroic and high reaper exists!

 

[KylerrTheMajty]

when you put black ants in to jar with red ants nothing happens but when you shake the jar black ants will kill red1 and red1 will kill black1 bc they take each other as enemy , the real enemy is jar shaker

and we get this here , its always our foult that lag exist

not old crapy data server
not bad coding


and ofc when they will "fix this issue" and lag will still be there they will finde another excuse why lag exist

 

[Xgya]

4. Unintelligent mobs are gathered (thier numbers increase) to keep the PCs busy while the intelligent mobs shoot/cast spells at the PCs.

NO! The very fact this is part of your suggestions means you haven't fully understood the problem.
The problem is the players gather too many mobs.
Adding more mobs doesn't help fix the problem - at all.

The rest of your suggestions are feasible, but boring - barring every door until mobs die would work, but it'd be boring and would be even more immersion-breaking than current dungeon alert is.
They're also all stick, no carrot.

Just give an extra 1-5% chance for named loot if you manage to reach aggression/conquest or give that specific objective more experience (people have been complaining about optional experience for years now, this would be a good start)

 

[DreamForge]

This is really a very very bad implementation. I just played Wheloon and the playing experience was extremely bad.

A Lesson in Deception: Dungeon Alert IV. Impossible to kill boss with his healing while doing very little damage to him. The worst part is you can't go back to clear the dungeon alert because it's drop down area to go to boss, you can't go up. Without ddoor, you have to recall and reset to redo the whole quest.

Army of Shadow: I made sure to clear every single mob before get into boss room. I took my precious time to do this only to get Dungeon Alert II after zoning into boss room. It took significant longer to finish the boss even at Dungeon Alert II.

Please get rid of this feature. I can't imagine doing Inferno of the Damned where you get Dungeon Alert IV without seeing any mob and need to go to every nook and cranny to clear all these mobs only to find them respawning over and over everywhere else, rinse and repeat.

Also, the lag is not getting better. It is still there. You have the false impression (from probably the only one source) that lag is gone so people can rush to the end.

 

[seph1roth5]

Like I said, this change really doesn't affect my group, I'm more worried about the punitive nature of the fix and am hoping devs find a way to fix/change things without just forcing different playstyles on people.

There have been many suggestions in this thread already for stopping people from zerging and aggroing everything, but (again, like people have suggested), instead of just trying to get people to stop doing something, make it so they don't want to do that. Like suggeted, little xp bonuses, hell even a +1% named item drop would probably be enough lol.

 

[Bjond]

If I was a dev here is how I would have handled it.

Those are all fine from a meta-game perspective, but .. they're horrifically bad from an in-context perspective. How do the doors become barred? Why is it a universal behavior for all doors in all dungeons?

The difference between being a good DM or Dev and a bad one is exactly this. It's whether what happens fits the situation or not and exactly none of those suggestions work in context. They're simply imposed from outside the world. It's absurdly hard to make everything fit AND get the meta-behavior you want. It takes a ton of creativity and effort.

Everything needs a fitting explanation that makes sense from the perspective of a person living in the game as if it was a real world. The more you do that has no such explanation, the more you destroy immersion and drive people to also meta-game or simply leave. Characters become just "toons" and the whole experience dries up and becomes a stale manipulation of the rules that makes the Dev/Player relationship adversarial instead of cooperative.

 

[Justfungus]

Given that I personally have no opinion on zerging itself and this is
from the standpoint of reducing zerging to reduce lag (if that is a thing)

An easier and less 'punishment based' way to do it is ... to make zerging itself
difficult to do.

Make door triggers slower to use (based on strength) anyone can operate the
door valve, but the lower your strength, the slower it is (max, twice as long to
trigger, slower animation)

You can move at max speed with 1/2 weight allowance but past that your
walk/run speed slows down a >bit<.

Make skipping (jump moving) through water ineffective if you do not have substantial
points invested in tumble. You can still walk through it like normal.

Numerous SMALL things that slow the pace to something that does not
cause lag (only the developer would know how much slowing is needed).

To be fair, if a player invests specifically in STATS and SKILLS to bypass the
slowing effect ... cool for them ! They are dungeon sprinters. Of course,
leaving your healer in the dust is usually a bad call, but you be you.

Bring a bit of realism to slow stuff down (a bit)
Weak folks (and pets) open rusted valves slow.
Clumsy folks can't dash through knee high water.
Weak folks can't carry a lot of gear and still walk briskly.

Small bits, to control the pace.

 

[The Narc]

If large numbers of aggro'd mobs are causing performance issues, maybe SSG should stop cramming as many packs of large trash mobs as they can into all the new content? Crazy, right?

Cut the mob counts in half, bump their HPs by 2x and voila, hit on server performance is halved. Obviously, that's an oversimplification, but the general theory holds.

It's basically the age-old quality vs quantity adage. SSG long ago went all in on the quantity side. Look at any of the original content (Korthos, Harbor, etc.) and notice how many fewer mobs there are per pack than in anything they've put out in the last 5 years.

Moving away from the design crutch of using large numbers of weak trash mobs in an attempt (and usually a failed one) to add difficulty to new content would also have the secondary benefit of helping to add some value and relevance back to non-AoE DPS builds while TRing. If an AoE build can 1-2 shot the trash mobs, it makes no difference to them if there's 2 mobs in a room or 10.

Given that, all content designed with large numbers of trash mobs in packs does is actively steer the TR zergers into running nothing but AoE builds and gathering as many mobs together at once as they can, then blowing them up with 1-2 spells, cleaves, etc. On the flip side, it's miserable for builds with little or no AoE dps capability.

It'd be refreshing to have dungeons where 1/3 of the rooms were populated by somewhat challenging rednamed encounters rather than, "Just cleared trash_mob_pack_234234 from dungeon_room_34. Ooooh, here's dungeon_room_35 with trash_mob_pack_234235, let me nuke that and move to room_36...".

Part of the reason people zerg is that the non-cap content is mostly just repetitive clearing of packs of trash mobs in every room until the end. That gets boring fast. By the 10th TR, it's absolutely mind-numbing.

Everything said by Kimbere is an accurate portrayal of what is happening in game.

The devs created these large groups of mobs to push everyone towards one select group of gamestyle with that gamestyle being AOE dps. By creating this paradigm it makes it easier for them to set the bars that need to be reached by these AOE builds thereby making it easier for them to design repetitive content and put gear that is required to meet these bars in new content in order to drive people to want/need that gear.

We used to have a game where they dealt us the goods, now we have a game where they push the goods upon us and we eat it up without question like some kind of addict.

The only way to change their paradigm of building the game this way is to force them to build it another way for them to entice us to spend our money.

We as a community have the ability to force their hand with purchasing power, you just have to stop listening to some of the fanboi streamers that are supported by the game and devs with free things like coupon codes during hardcore for their ships and xp potions for their friends as long as these people tow the line for what propaganda the devs are selling.

The single greatest attribute of DDO that no other game can compete with is the variations in your characters design, this goes out the window if everything is pushed towards some form of AOE build, whether its a giant sword, a druids spell or an exploding potion. They are all cookie cutter versions of each other with just a different visual effect.

 

[Dandonk]

I agree that DDO has gone far in giving us big packs of mobs and therefore pushing us towards AOE damage dealers. I wish they'd dial back on that, which might help lag and at the same time give room for players to use singletarget DPS builds more.

Ideally, there should be some sort of balance, or perhaps variation, but at the moment I mostly see big packs of mobs. CC, AOE dps, move on.

Of course, dialing down mobs numbers and giving the mobs more HP to compensate would the mean a push towards instakilling. Hmm. Tricky. Still, dialing back at least some could be nice. I haven't played a DPS without AOE DPS in years, I think.

 

[Oxarhamar]

I agree that DDO has gone far in giving us big packs of mobs and therefore pushing us towards AOE damage dealers. I wish they'd dial back on that, which might help lag and at the same time give room for players to use singletarget DPS builds more.

Ideally, there should be some sort of balance, or perhaps variation, but at the moment I mostly see big packs of mobs. CC, AOE dps, move on.

Of course, dialing down mobs numbers and giving the mobs more HP to compensate would the mean a push towards instakilling. Hmm. Tricky. Still, dialing back at least some could be nice. I haven't played a DPS without AOE DPS in years, I think.

Indeed it is possible to get alert running solo clearing mobs as they are encountered with the way agrro works combine with mob density in certain areas

Dungeon alert should never happen in the case where you are clearing as you go

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

If I was a monster and found a shiny knight invading my beloved cave, I'd like to get rid of him and his party ASAP. I'd use by cell phone to call up all my brothers and friends and try to hase him out.

 

[dunklezhan]

Last night my boys 16 and 13 each had a few mates over and stayed for supper .........i actually read this post word for word to them to see what avid young gamers thought of this .......they all had the same general answers but the 2 points that really stood out to me as someone with zero gaming knowledge other than ddo for 17 +years .......1 ...that any MODERN game this would be a instant death nail if the boss tried to tell her player base how to play .......2....lol and this 1 kinda hit home ...........ddo is full of bunch of old farts that dont know any better and refuse to let go of a dead horse...............i think they may be right

I think it's quite telling that the new adjustment to DA is once more still to "discourage" certain behaviours. DA already does that and its been in for 13+ years. You've got a stick, it hasn't fully worked.

Don't make the stick bigger, introduce a carrot. Heck, try introducing several.

XP bonuses and +% chance for mythic and reaper bonuses on items in the end chest for not triggering DA are two ideal carrots suggested in this thread which also utilise a system players are already familiar with.

I have no idea how hard they would be to implement, but they get my vote.

That said:

I actually like the core concept of DA as it applies to a DnD game and when it is triggered as intended (by 'making loads of mobs aware of you at once throughout a decent chunk of the dungeon)'.

I think it's actually quite immersive and I would have no issue, for instance with Green/Amber/Red DA being actively applied for a short time as a mob buff on hard/elite/reaper modes in those dungeons where a creature goes off to ring a bell and legit raise an alarm. Those mobs come spilling out *prepared* for you. They've drunk their potions they've cast their buffs and you are on their hit list. I could totally intuit that.

If nothing else it could be used in just a limited way early doors as a new player in game training option since those 'ring an alarm' dungeons are quite frequent in the lower levels: "this is what DA looks like. You want to avoid this." That lesson could itself set player behaviour early on more towards a cautious path without smacking them between the eyes about it.

So if you want to use DA more tactically or as a teaching aid for player behaviour, consider that as option before you starting adding DA considerations to boss buffs.

But please do prioritise removing all the places where it kicks in "just because", e.g. end fight in the Dorris or stormreach codex chains if you don't kill the constantly spawning mobs fast enough, and many of the codex chain quests in general are atrocious for this throughout. Its deeply unpleasant to go into a boss fight having fully cleared a dungeon and then end up with DA anyway because the boss spawns waves of mobs every so often. If we're not on top of it, that's going to kill us anyway DA should not be kicking in. Note it's not the "overwhelmed by waves" that is unpleasant. Its the fact your behaviour nudge mechanism is kicking in when you are the ones adding mobs not us! Make the mobs in the waves tougher if you want us overwhelmed with fewer mobs involved.

 

[Phoenicis]

8<snip>8 Its deeply unpleasant to go into a boss fight having fully cleared a dungeon and then end up with DA anyway because the boss spawns waves of mobs every so often. If we're not on top of it, that's going to kill us anyway DA should not be kicking in. Note it's not the "overwhelmed by waves" that is unpleasant. Its the fact your behaviour nudge mechanism is kicking in when you are the ones adding mobs not us! Make the mobs in the waves tougher if you want us overwhelmed with fewer mobs involved.

Subversion comes to mind, where the boss spawns LARGE packs of mobs when he hits certain HP thresholds. DA should not trigger in these circumstances, I agree.

Re a previous reply to my 'what I would do as a dev' post.

The logic is the mobs know you are there and they are pulling out all the stops to, well, stop you. Thus they make it harder for you by barring the doors so they must be broken down, making sure everyone is as well equipped and prepared (buffed, etc.) as possible. Entirely logical and within the game.

 

[Batman]

Hey guys, just like to say we got some GREAT IDEAS here on this thread, keep it up.

And I hope these forums stay like this for the foreseeable future. A place to generate ideas and help the game, hopefully the riffraff stay out of here.