Change to Dungeon Alert

[Nokowi]

Just a quick reminder that DDO used to have everything it needed to control this.
1. Give players tools to control aggro
2. Let players choose how many mobs to aggro

With reaper designers came up with the idea that letting players control mob density was a problem. This never would have been an issue as we always want to take on as many mobs as we can handle. You can get rid of your angry-bees design and go back to what worked.

The trash mobs are about speedy progression at the pace we can handle and the boss fights are where you provide challenge.

No more re-designing mob locations every time the game changes. Make the penalty even stiffer for too many mobs but let us control the number of mobs at the pace we can handle.

Making mob abilities impact players will also help tone this down.

Good basic design choices solves the issue.

 

[Bjond]

Could solve it by adding "realistic" AI. All the NPCs know they're going to die as soon as they see a single PC. Anything with Wolf-IQ or higher should simply run away screaming and despawn the instant you zone in. This would save a lot of server resources and speed up questing.

 

[Natashaelle]

Could solve it by adding "realistic" AI. All the NPCs know they're going to die as soon as they see a single PC. Anything with Wolf-IQ or higher should simply run away screaming and despawn the instant you zone in. This would save a lot of server resources and speed up questing.

Something like that is actually not such a bad idea -- in LOTRO, if you're largely over level in a Wilderness area, trash mobs are greyed out and ignore you, unless you attack them.

Something of the sort in DDO could at least reduce mob pathing AI drain on the servers from people favour farming low level quests in heroic at high speed with high level characters ...

 

[The Narc]

Distance/path/line of sight should be the key to mobs going inactive.

For example a stationary mob that uses missile either spell or attack should simply go inactive once line of sight is broken at a reasonable length of distance. Ie some archer in tear of dhakaan that is two rooms back should not still be firing arrows from their stationary position, make them
Inactive in the AI(takes effect 2 seconds after these conditions are met)

For example mobs that are chasing should go inactive if you cross some barrier(ie a ladder/a swim/a bunch of mario jumps) that the mobs are unable to maintain the pursuit and suddenly become equivalent to missile movs in the example above. Make this change to the AI(takes effect 2 seconds after these conditions are met).

And the final example is for those mobs chasing that continue to have a path, just simply rubber band them to their starting point once they are a certain distance from their spawn point, yes this might not be the most accurate of examples of realistic AI but players are going to continue to run past trash mobs to avoid wasting time and energy on trash, so for the sake of lag and the game make this change to the AI.

As a side note if the reason for the devs not to do this is to slow players down on loots runs to push the use of treasure rerolling with shards. Just put a count on AI deactivated mobs and once you hit a certain number the first pull of any chest in that quest will be void of named gear forcing shard rerolls for loot hunters.

This would eliminate a large percentage(not all but the majority) of the strain on the servers. The best part of it is that it is a two way solution some from the devs and some from the players change in questing.

 

[Archest]

so what your doing is making it even harder on the non zerg players who get caught up in someone's zerg fest.... having to fight off the fodder left behinds...

 

[The Narc]

so what your doing is making it even harder on the non zerg players who get caught up in someone's zerg fest.... having to fight off the fodder left behinds...

Why are you grouping with someone whose playstyle doesnt match yours??

Most people who move fast dont want to have slow movers in their group anyways, they are two completely different paths to take thru a quest.

If your group has someone rude, who hasnt told you they move fast and just starts ramming thru the quest. Just recall and regroup wothout the rude zerger in your group.

I move fast thru quests but i am always open about my playstyle and give people the choice to play or not, those that want to leave the group and form their own groups i their own playstyle are welcome to it.

The suggestions in my post are to help with the games lag which benefits everyone.

Again Archest I ask why would you be grouped with anyone that is not playing relatively close to the speed of playstyle you like to play??

 

[Nimueh]

so what your doing is making it even harder on the non zerg players who get caught up in someone's zerg fest.... having to fight off the fodder left behinds...

Yes, nobody is forcing you to be there.

 

[Lotoc]

so what your doing is making it even harder on the non zerg players who get caught up in someone's zerg fest.... having to fight off the fodder left behinds...

How? The only enemies that are stronger with the change are bosses.
If someone is zerging PASSED the bosses you've got a much bigger issue.

 

[Labuff]

Can we please notice the fact that the devs since then never gave a single reply, and probably never will ?

They don't care. They never did, in fact. If they did they would have replied to the flame war by then they would have replied to all the other previous flame wars in their own patch notes. But they never did.

Nothing will change about this. Our voices don't matter, they never did.

So why bother continuing ?

 

[Nokowi]

Imagine you are playing tabletop D&D and the DM decides to roll all of the dice to prevent the problem of someone cheating a roll or fudging a number. You are trying to play your character to the fullest and end up with so many die rolls that the DM gets mad at you and starts doubling the HP of all of your enemies, ignoring your critical hits, halving your movement speed, and one-shotting your character.

Wouldn't it be easier to offload the work to the players and let them manage the rate of dice rolls so that the game is fun for them? They will find the balance between having fun and rolling too many dice if you offload this task to them.

The solution is to offload the work of predesigning quests to not red alert and let player manage how much agro they get. Let them control avoiding red alert without all the design load of predicting player behavior. People will avoid red alert and maximize play experience if you give them the tools to control agro. Don't make us dependent or your dungeon design, surviving every enemy agroing at once, or how you expect us to play the game. Groups of mobs activating is okay - just not everything within radius X. Remember when we could throw an item near a mob and get just that mobs attention? Or bluff a smaller group of mobs to us. That is the kind of slower play that can allow us to avoid red-alert if we want to. This type of tool is essential to a good play experience for all play styles.

Reapers:
Appear upon red alert but do no longer agro other mobs.
They can appear however else you wish but no longer agro other mobs.
This will prevent reaper appearances from red-alerting a dungeon.

 

[Alesthane Garfield]

So lag is our fault...again.

No. What they said was that they fixed a bunch of things that helped players, and we did a good enough job that it exposed other problems on our end.

 

[Alesthane Garfield]

For sure, certain folks have gaslighting down cold.

Yes you do.

 

[Arkat]

..it exposed other problems on our end.

"Our end"...meaning the players.

So the players were the problem then.

You see the issue here?

 

[Everbright]

I still think a system where closed doors are locked to prevent progress until DA is cleared will go a lot further.

The problem with the current DA system is that it punishes the slower members who usually are not the ones that created the DA.

I agree that zerg DA punishes slow party members unfairly. I like your idea but it er, opens doors for griefing.
Am guessing it would be overly complicated to debuff the specific players running ahead.
But an option at quest entrance for individual players to load up on debuffs for extra XP perhaps...?
Might solve the core issue of different playstyles within the same group.

*also i feel like mobs activated by failed stealth checks should de-activate after a little while.

This thread is super long, apologies if anyone's already covered this. Hi new forum!

 

[Br4d]

DA is a broken solution to a behavioral problem presented by the player base.

The invisi-zerging in appropriate level content was plain and simple an attempt by players to bypass the obstacles the game system placed in their way. This was done primarily to increase the XP/min. It's not like the bypassed content was really dangerous it just required players to take time to deal with it which reduced XP/min.

The result of the invisi-zerging was that many mobs were activated in the instance and few of them were deactivated by being killed. Resetting to their original positions would also have deactivated most of the AI decision-making for them however players were finishing the instances too quickly for most of the mobs to reset properly.

So you think: problem solved! The instance goes away when the players exit it after completion. The excess AI resources to deal with that many activated mobs are freed up and everything is hunky-dory for the population as a whole.

Well, not quite, because that group then goes into the next quest and the problem repeats. So each group doing this uses a lot of back-end resources during their runs and then rinses and repeats over and over again until they are done.

The actual answer was either to remove AI from the mobs in question or prevent groups from invisi-zerging by them in the instance. The former option would make DDO less of a game and the latter would make it a slower game. Slow is better than less for most people and so DA and kill-locked doors were added to keep the number of active AI's in an instance as low as possible while still presenting fights for the players.

There are probably better mechanisms to do this but DA and k-ld's are the ones we have.

 

[The Narc]

DA is a broken solution to a behavioral problem presented by the player base.

The invisi-zerging in appropriate level content was plain and simple an attempt by players to bypass the obstacles the game system placed in their way. This was done primarily to increase the XP/min. It's not like the bypassed content was really dangerous it just required players to take time to deal with it which reduced XP/min.

The result of the invisi-zerging was that many mobs were activated in the instance and few of them were deactivated by being killed. Resetting to their original positions would also have deactivated most of the AI decision-making for them however players were finishing the instances too quickly for most of the mobs to reset properly.

So you think: problem solved! The instance goes away when the players exit it after completion. The excess AI resources to deal with that many activated mobs are freed up and everything is hunky-dory for the population as a whole.

Well, not quite, because that group then goes into the next quest and the problem repeats. So each group doing this uses a lot of back-end resources during their runs and then rinses and repeats over and over again until they are done.

The actual answer was either to remove AI from the mobs in question or prevent groups from invisi-zerging by them in the instance. The former option would make DDO less of a game and the latter would make it a slower game. Slow is better than less for most people and so DA and kill-locked doors were added to keep the number of active AI's in an instance as low as possible while still presenting fights for the players.

There are probably better mechanisms to do this but DA and k-ld's are the ones we have.

And the devs created the xp/min problem by creating the hamster wheel that is past lives, and if we didnt have past lives than players such as you would be happy and content to have endgame power!! I dont play endgame nor desire to grind to get there, but i understand competely why players do it and the behaviour is fully caused by the saturation of mobs and the over bloating of hit points of said mobs, builds that have AOE room clearing attacks dont care either way. Single target builds do care and would much rather zerg past trash then spend there game time beating down bundle after bundle of threatless trash mobs!

 

[Br4d]

And the devs created the xp/min problem by creating the hamster wheel that is past lives, and if we didnt have past lives than players such as you would be happy and content to have endgame power!! I dont play endgame nor desire to grind to get there, but i understand competely why players do it and the behaviour is fully caused by the saturation of mobs and the over bloating of hit points of said mobs, builds that have AOE room clearing attacks dont care either way. Single target builds do care and would much rather zerg past trash then spend there game time beating down bundle after bundle of threatless trash mobs!

DA was put in before the trend towards endless packs of the same mobs over and over again. The first update I saw that looked like the whole dev effort was around numbers over quality of play was Temple of Elemental Evil. Most of the updates since then have feaqtured formless packs of the same mobs over and over again - which, of course, creates a heavy incentive for an AoE meta.

 

[Ethril]

I was wondering the same thing. Its one thing in quests where ideally you should be killing mobs, but in slayers/wilderness areas I am just trying to get to the next quest. Feywild is a perfect example of this. Going from quest to quest often triggers Dungeon Alerts... Maybe the answer is to turn off DA for those areas.

They should also take a good look at "Stealthy Repossession" in the harbor. While I understand it is a "sneak" style quest.. it is easy to trigger DA in there. Maybe change it to something like the werewolf room in "Quid Pro Quo" where you have to get by a few patrolling sentries, and the rest of the mobs do not wake up at all.

I second this idea. I would actually run that quest if they made that change. My strategy, on the few times I actually do run it, is to kill nearly everything buy the prophets and just hope they don't trigger DA.

 

[Phoenicis]

I second this idea. I would actually run that quest if they made that change. My strategy, on the few times I actually do run it, is to kill nearly everything buy the prophets and just hope they don't trigger DA.

I actually like Stealthy Repo the way it is. One of the few pro-stealth quests in the game.

Quid-Pro-Quo doesn't have a stealth section, it has a timing section. Time the werewolves and yer golden.

 

[The Narc]

I actually like Stealthy Repo the way it is. One of the few pro-stealth quests in the game.

Quid-Pro-Quo doesn't have a stealth section, it has a timing section. Time the werewolves and yer golden.

Both of these are easy without stealth!

With my 3 current toons on hardcore i have already run stealthy repossession quest with all on reaper 2 without danger alert impacting the run