Change to Dungeon Alert

[eshadowbringer]

The XP gains from killing has to offset the loss of time on my SOV pot that's ticking down every second I'm in a quest. Offering new XP pots that have X quest completion charges (vs 3(6) hours of better zerg to maximize that XP bonus ticking away) would be a good start. The current system encourages me to move fast to not waste the DDO points/cash I spend on XP pots; it's trap of SSG's own creation for pushing us deeper into the zerg mentality.

Well said! This is a thing!

 

[Rull]

Incentives is also something we're exploring atm, I would like there to be a stronger motive for people to want to thin down the minions besides "the dungeon master gets upset if you dont".

Just don't turn DDO into a game of thinning down minions too much, I'd play Path of Exile if that was what I enjoyed. DDO is great because the goal of a quest is to meet the quest objective; the monsters only try to prevent the players from doing that and killing all monsters is not a goal in itself. That truly is what makes the game good compared to others.

 

[jotmon]

Reapers cause dungeon alert

 

[Levina]

Greetings!

As we look at our lag metrics since our changes last week, we have seen that one unfortunate side effect is that the player behavior of evoking high Dungeon Alert levels by moving quickly through dungeons has spiked, and that behavior is contributing to a different form of lag (the conditions that cause dungeon alert cause lag).

We have made an adjustment this morning to make this behavior less rewarding. All red named boss monsters will be buffed if you encounter them while dungeon alert is active. The buff is gentle for green and yellow, and gets more severe at higher dungeon alert levels. This means that players will have an easier time if they defeat minions before tackling red named bosses if dungeon alert is active.

(As an aside, bosses always got buffed with dungeon alert, but we have leaned more heavily into this. Bosses will take much longer to kill at higher levels of dungeon alert, so kill those minions!)

We will be looking further into modifying content that tends to provoke Dungeon Alert, and change Dungeon Alert to discourage play patterns that provoke the highest levels of Dungeon Alert for long periods of time.

perhaps you could create situations where large spawns do not cause dungeon alerts, especially in dungeons like the Slave Lords that have very large spawn groups, so that players are not unnecessarily penalized by developers intentionally coding in large spawn groups on a "chance to spawn" which can potentially end up with a high Dungeon Alert simply because the size of spawns that occurs and is alerted is larger than the group allowance for the server architecture (software/hardware).

i have in many cases back when i played encountered such situations where all we did was trigger the spawn directly ahead and then we had Dungeon Alert 4 because of the sheer size and scope of the spawns that had occurred. In such a case it is little more than "the dungeon master wishes to give you an extreme challenge here without explaining why".

 

[Levina]

I say that Dungeon Alert should be removed in slayers zones

better yet keep the "teleport to quest" mechanic and omit the slayer zone run throughs entirely...

the "you have to travel through the dangerous area to the quest on horseback because this is World of Warcraft and not DDO" mechanic was
never loved and is now causing problems which could severely negatively impact players by progressively "increasing the penalty for dungeon alert 'to discourage it from happening'"

 

[Levina]

Mobs in this game seem to briefly pause when a player first enters their render/detection distance, which allows the player to bypass a lot of fights/groups, in turn causing mobs to build up the dungeon alert system. I think that the Dungeon Alert system was put into place to counter that brief moment before a monster reacts so that they may have the opportunity to react if a player were to run through and "abuse" this moment. Along with the pause, most monsters in the game are significantly slower than the player, so buffing the speed of monsters throughout the levels could help.

As a designer, I definitely understand the reasoning behind it, and at first glance its a simple and somewhat effective system. This said, slowing player movement and buffing the monsters up cause the players in most scenarios to be completely encircled, if not lifted, by a red alert mob group, which cripples their gameplay and limits the player's ability to counter it. Updating the AI for mobs to have a faster reaction time upon initiation would be a better route to go in my opinion. While yes, there needs to be a counter to speedrunning through a dungeon with absolutely no kills or encounters, crippling your player's ability to play the game isn't the way to go. Additionally, a dungeon alert should only apply to mobs within a certain line of sight & area of sound of the initiating mob group and player, not through closed doors or in other rooms.

take off Haste and Striding and disable Mounts and then try again.

in fact i don't know why mounts are even a thing. The phiarlan pendant of time was good enough.

 

[Holgar]

As others have indicated, you have too many quests that trigger DA as soon as you enter the room, even if you've slain everything else before. It's a real joy soloing on elite to get hit with DA through no fault of my own. Now you're going to make it even more frustrating?

 

[Blunt Hackett]

Honestly, this just seems like attempting to resolve an unwanted side effect by causing different unwanted side effects.

What if monster count were rebalanced so that there were fewer enemies that have more hp, or something to that effect? There are too many instant red alerts in this game, something that honestly shouldn't exist since it causes lag as you say. And those mobs are not the players fault.

If AFTER you have fixed inherent problems in the game you still need to do something about the zergers, come up with a solution that actually discourages excessive zerging. But don't do it in such a way that it punishes all players like this solution does.

I like this idea (again, once inherent problems with the game design are resolved that cause the dungeon alert, not starting here):

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.

Edit (Afterthought): It occurs to me, if you are wanting mobs to get thinned out to reduce the lag and make the red alert go away, why would you make it take longer for the mobs to go away by making the beefiest one take longer to kill? That means players that are focusing on the red-named before the trash mobs will just be causing their contribution to the lag take longer to resolve.

 

[seph1roth5]

First off, there's a lot of talk about this being a recent problem. Was this last week(end) just the time you guys happened to check the numbers and see a spike in DA lag? Or, was that info you could and have looked at before and noticed a spike this weekend? Because if it's #2, it makes no sense to kneejerk change anything when you don't even know why there was a spike.

I'm also completely at a loss as to why devs are so against a specific playstyle of going as fast as possible. It's literally what the majority of everyone in every MMO wants to do. Get xp/levels/gear fast. I get that you want to decrease lag, but it seems like there should be better ways to do it than constantly trying to slow us down (sharn sticky anyone?).

Why not, as someone had mentioned, give enemies smaller range of uhhh noticing you, like in saltmarsh wilderness. That range blows in the wilderness because you want to kill as many mobs as possible, but in a dungeon it would be far more beneficial for people who want to zoom through a quest.

Honestly, dungeon alert isn't going to stop zergers anyway. You can buff up the red name but unless you get ridiculous/vindictive and make them invincible, people are still going to zerg and take the extra 20 sec to kill it, if that. Instead of trying to punish the majority of players for playing one way, figure out a way to change stuff to help us.

For what it's worth, my static group raaaaaaaarely deals with DA. Maybe in 2-3 quests a life I might leave my pet/hireling/whatever out, knowing it'll aggro everything (like in no refunds) because it'll save me maybe a minute of having to chase stuff. They're a little beefier and harry me, but in the end it's slightly easier so that's what I do.

 

[Monkey_Archer]

Lots of terrible ideas in this thread lol...

The entire point of reducing lag is to improve gameplay. Suggesting different ways to worsen DDO's gameplay to reduce lag is counterproductive.

The Red alert changes are fine.

 

[Dragnilar]

I don't see how this change is going to do much to discourage zerging...

 

[Crisom]

What is the point? SSG can not control themselves with the basicly constant powercreep. So they buff up the rednames, and soon the powercreep will offset it, and you are back to square one.

 

[Verran]

and change Dungeon Alert to discourage play patterns that provoke the highest levels of Dungeon Alert for long periods of time.

Yeah, quite a few of those "play patterns" are in reality design patterns you put into your game. There are still a lot of quests where dungeon alert is unavoidable. And that includes decently modern ones like Sharn too.

But far more importantly then that... by forcing even more penalties down our throat you won't change our play patterns. You will make us avoid those quests. In a game with more content then any other MMPORG I've ever played, I already only repeat a VERY small subset of these quests each live. This is not because of choice, not really. It's because grinding the most efficient way is the ONLY VIABLE WAY LEFT in a game that adds past lives at break-neck pace to stay relevant. That one is on you.

All your player-blaming will do is make that subset of quests we play each live even smaller, because we gotta start avoiding quests that trigger high alert if played the right way (which is seldomly the way *you* envision these). So looking forward to playing fewer and fewer quests each live, while you keep adding content we farm once for items, then ignore for the rest of it's existence....

 

[Itchybeard]

Someone in this thread mentioned rewarding Players with a bonus to Named Loot drop rate by killing additional mobs. What if getting Conquest bonus meant we got another +5% to our chance of getting Named Loot in chests? This might be the incentive people need to not zerg so much (not that it bothers me personally) and thin-out the minions.

 

[BuckGB]

The past week was likely worse than normal due to so many players running the revamped Droaam quests, and two quests in particular generating a LOT of dungeon alert - Frame Work and Undermine.

As the poster above suggested, as long as you are asking people to shell out good money for XP and discovery elixirs that last a specific duration of time, people are absolutely going to zerg quests and wilderness zones.

 

[Yvonne Blacksword]

I think this only happens when you ar playing way below yur level or you have played the dungeon sooo many times you know where the mob tethers...
I only do this in those solo (aracnophobia&the kobald's dogs) that should have really been upgraded to multi levels since they are no longer starter area quests. Oh, and every time I have to combat a purple ooze with my crossbow and irondefender... because we are pointy!

 

[Itchybeard]

Perhaps Discovery Elixirs could change to adding a certain number of chest pulls rather than being time-based.

 

[Verran]

It is not the Dungeon Alert system causing degraded game performance, but rather the behavior of aggroing an exceptionally enormous bunch of enemies and not defeating them that is causing the poor game performance.

It is not the players not killing room fulls of enemies that causes DA, it's the archer on the ledge, the ******* phase spiders / ghosts phasing out / ..., the oozes that take forever to drop down, the mobs standing in traps, the mobs standing on literally unreachable spaces, the mobs that still not got their correct HP values set after the stat squish and have more HP then bosses, the mobs that heal from your element...

See how that goes? Simple solutions such as "force players to kill every mob" do not work for a game as complex as this. Either you turn every mob into a hobgoblin in a narrow hallway (and the game into Doom) or you gotta live with the fact that we as players got to skip some mobs and gotta group up the rest.

This is not even touching the point of casters running out of SP if they kill every pack of 2 mobs separately (and other classes out of their resources, to a lesser extend..).

This game, like it or not, requires us to group up mobs to kill 80%ish of them efficiently, and ignore the rest of the dungeon. That is how it is designed (maybe not how it was intended, but how it currently is) and that is how you have to play it, if you want to keep the pace dictated by the relentless onslaught of new past lives these last few years.

Punishing players for playing your game in the best (and at this point really only viable) way is not going to get you more players, that is for sure...

 

[xaktakorf]

I hate to be that guy, but if SSG really want to dicurage zerging, give an XP penalty for each alert you triggger. Higer level alert, higher penalty.
This makes slow running a viable alternative, without breaking the game one way or another, or forcing a specific playstyle on players.

or anyone sayin that sometime you cannot avoid triggering an alert, I know. That is just how some of the other optional goals are not always something you can do. Optimal is not always an option in DDO.

 

[Monkey_Archer]

The decision to zerg through red alert vs kill everything is a simple calculation. Raise the xp bonus for conquest and it changes the calculation.