Goblin Squad Member
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So today we put together a little testing group for an hour and a half of client and escalation testing. We had 4-6 players over the course of our playtime, and took on one of the baby escalations--mostly white mobs with occasional yellows, all wolves and hunters. Some observations:
-Over that period, we made about a 7% dent in the escalation. So while the mob groups were easier, the process is just as slow as any other escalation. I guess that's working as intended? On a much higher population server I would guess they get whittled down a lot quicker.
-All of our progress was from killing mobs. No quests ever popped over the hour and half of killing. Is that working as intended? Regardless of the rate of taking down an escalation, this is just plain boring.
-I tried to tank, and made the unfortunate choice to leave Whirlwind on my hotbar, and managed to trigger multiple times. What's interesting is that while no one died, I still managed to lose over 2k reputation. That doesn't sound like a well-implemented mechanic--reputation will likely reflect damage management within parties, not social behavior.
-We had Mac and Windows clients in the group. We had one Windows desynch, and the Mac Client would crash about every half hour I would say.
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Goblin Squad Member
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-I tried to tank, and made the unfortunate choice to leave Whirlwind on my hotbar, and managed to trigger multiple times. What's interesting is that while no one died, I still managed to lose over 2k reputation. That doesn't sound like a well-implemented mechanic--reputation will likely reflect damage management within parties, not social behavior.
This has been a worry of mine. It doesn't help to have all sorts of cool and fun abilities if you can never use them because you'd hurt your party members. I don't know a good fix but there is something wrong.
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Goblin Squad Member
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-I tried to tank, and made the unfortunate choice to leave Whirlwind on my hotbar, and managed to trigger multiple times. What's interesting is that while no one died, I still managed to lose over 2k reputation. That doesn't sound like a well-implemented mechanic--reputation will likely reflect damage management within parties, not social behavior.This has been a worry of mine. It doesn't help to have all sorts of cool and fun abilities if you can never use them because you'd hurt your party members. I don't know a good fix but there is something wrong.
It's something that requires thought and planning about an issue that we don't have to do in most mmo's. It's not wrong insomuch as it is different. I feel bad mainly for the healers who end up getting hit by the people their helping, but I don't necessarily blame the mechanic.
PFO appears to be positioning itself as simple to start, complex and difficult to learn to advance, with a lot of choices with no perfect answers. It goes against the grain of a lot of games nowadays that have adapted themselves to the migratory pattern, of the influx/egress of players with periodic short-term interest. It will be fascinating to see the type of community that develops.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...We had Mac and Windows clients in the group. We had one Windows desynch, and the Mac Client would crash about every half hour I would say.
I was testing the Mac client. No issues with partying up. Crashed once while running to event. Crashed twice during the one and a half hours play. No real pattern. Never happened in combat, and didn't seem related to hex border crossing. No desync symptoms, just complete freeze. Able to Command-Option-Esc to Force Quit PFO, relaunch, back in with little down time. No durability loss, or death. Quite acceptable for the first release.
DAeglin, what level are you running graphics on? And how much GRAM and regular RAM do you have?
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Goblin Squad Member
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DAeglin, what level are you running graphics on? And how much GRAM and regular RAM do you have?
Pretty sure I put setting to Fast before grouping, might have been one up from that (?Simple). Using 27inch iMac, late 2012, 3.4GHz Intel Core i7, 24GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048MB, running OS X 10.9.5.
I suspect my RAM and GRAM may not be typical, since a lot of mac users go the MBP route.
Edit: should say, they won't be useful, because they won't be typical of MBP's.
I have 16 GB of RAM and just about the same NVIDIA. I had the exact same problem you described, only it would happen very shortly after logging in if I tried to run on Fantastic. Switching back for Fast fixed the issue- or, I should say, it took a good 2 hours to surface again.
So today we put together a little testing group for an hour and a half of client and escalation testing. We had 4-6 players over the course of our playtime, and took on one of the baby escalations--mostly white mobs with occasional yellows, all wolves and hunters. Some observations:
I'm assuming you were battling the Nature's Wrath escalation, since that's the only one I can think of that includes wolves and enemies labeled as hunters. That's a full-blown escalation, though a fairly low-level one in phases 1-3.
-Over that period, we made about a 7% dent in the escalation. So while the mob groups were easier, the process is just as slow as any other escalation. I guess that's working as intended? On a much higher population server I would guess they get whittled down a lot quicker.
-All of our progress was from killing mobs. No quests ever popped over the hour and half of killing. Is that working as intended? Regardless of the rate of taking down an escalation, this is just plain boring.
The fact that there weren't any events implies that this is an orphaned hex, one that remains infected after the source hex has been cleared out. As a result, that hex is no longer getting reinforcements or running events. While not having reinforcements will help you make steady progress, the lack of events is cutting your progress in half or more, which isn't ideal. We don't want cleaning up orphaned hexes to turn into a slog.
I'll look into some fixes that will improve the experience in orphaned hexes, but they'll probably all require some new code, unfortunately.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thanks for the explanation, Bob. It was indeed Nature's Wrath. We reduced it from approximately 100% to 93% (I joined partway through, so I don't know whether it started at 100%, 99.6%, etc.)
We definitely noticed that having no events made clearing the escalation less exciting / engaging / interesting / fun than an escalation with events.
I'm glad to hear you're looking into ways to improve orphan hexes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So today we put together a little testing group for an hour and a half of client and escalation testing. We had 4-6 players over the course of our playtime, and took on one of the baby escalations--mostly white mobs with occasional yellows, all wolves and hunters. Some observations:I'm assuming you were battling the Nature's Wrath escalation, since that's the only one I can think of that includes wolves and enemies labeled as hunters. That's a full-blown escalation, though a fairly low-level one in phases 1-3.
-Over that period, we made about a 7% dent in the escalation. So while the mob groups were easier, the process is just as slow as any other escalation. I guess that's working as intended? On a much higher population server I would guess they get whittled down a lot quicker.
-All of our progress was from killing mobs. No quests ever popped over the hour and half of killing. Is that working as intended? Regardless of the rate of taking down an escalation, this is just plain boring.
The fact that there weren't any events implies that this is an orphaned hex, one that remains infected after the source hex has been cleared out. As a result, that hex is no longer getting reinforcements or running events. While not having reinforcements will help you make steady progress, the lack of events is cutting your progress in half or more, which isn't ideal. We don't want cleaning up orphaned hexes to turn into a slog.
I'll look into some fixes that will improve the experience in orphaned hexes, but they'll probably all require some new code, unfortunately.
When we started, I thought that if we cleared some spots, an event would spawn but after a few circuits, it became apparent that wasn't going to happen.
You are correct regarding the escalation. It was Nature's Wrath located 2nd hex directly east of Freevale. Started at either 100% or 99.8% (can't remember if we killed something before I first checked it and it was at 99.8). Initially we went to the Monster Home (or ruins? fortress symbol) hex directly south of it, but it was Nature's Wrath at 0% and we left looking for a full escalation. So your thought that it was an orphan perhaps originally tied to that hex would fit.
When we started, I thought that if we cleared some spots, an event would spawn but after a few circuits, it became apparent that wasn't going to happen.
Clearing spaces is only necessary once an event has started. The event will try to spawn encounters, but if there aren't any open spaces of the right sizes, it will just queue those encounters up to spawn when there's room. Events themselves will start up regardless of whether there's room available for their encounters.
You are correct regarding the escalation. It was Nature's Wrath located 2nd hex directly east of Freevale. Started at either 100% or 99.8% (can't remember if we killed something before I first checked it...
Nice, that exposed another bug. The source hex for that escalation was changed from Monster to Home recently, leaving the escalation that was running at the time in a weird state. Some parts of the game were treating the hex as cleared out, while other parts treated it as still infected. End result is that the hex can't be fully disinfected right now. Paul put in a fix that will clean such situations up, which should go out in the next build or so.
I attacked one of the actual baby escalations (Mercenary Raid) in a monster home hex yesterday. I was by myself as a lvl 8 cleric/fighter (using mainly longsword melee attacks and the occasional self-buff or heal), decked out in T1 +2 gear and appropriately leveled attack feats (mostly used whirlwind).
At the start, the escalation was at 36%, it took me about two hours to clear it completely (initially taking my time to slowly kill each mob type one at a time to document the amount of "damage" to the escalation strength per kill). Later on, I'd just run into the camps and whirlwind them to death.
Only one event/"escalatoin quest" was available ("Questionable coinage" - kill 10 paymasters), but these paymasters where few and far between and the escalation was over when I had killed 5 of them. The only mob type to be of any danger to me where the yellow "stone claw mages", which could do noticable damage. The win boss(?), a yellow "stone claw captain" did not prove a significant challenge and did not drop any noticable or special loot. The quest to kill him appeared when the escalation was at about 8%. After killing him, the escalation (which had about 3% left at the time) ended.
For now, these mini-escalations only have one event, meant to be completed once or twice during the drop from 100% to 0%. Since you started at 36%, only getting about 50% of the way through isn't too far off the expected result.
Escalations and events in general don't drop any special loot at this point, though you do get some special achievement credits for participating in events, including for killing the boss. There will eventually be settlement-level rewards, once that system becomes available.
Even by myself, I was obviously over-powered for this type of escalation. Maybe it would have increased in strength and spawned more powerful monsters at a higher level/percentage.
The mini-escalations actually only have one phase (so they launch the same monsters and events no matter what their strength is), and their source hexes never rise in strength. They will be in heaviest rotation during the first few weeks of Early Enrollment, when players will generally be much lower level. As the player population ramps up, other escalations will be put into heavier rotation to keep things balanced. That said, it will always be possible for higher-level characters to tackle lower-level escalations by themselves whenever they find one. However, the reward system will be balanced such that players are much better off teaming up and focusing on enemies much closer to their own power level.
In addition, I just returned to that hex today to gather and found that the same escalation had returned in force (now at 63%, and in its yellow stage 3). From a quick scan still the same mobs, still only the one quest. Gathering was not as good as I'd hoped, so I'll leave it to grow and check again tomorrow.
Yeah, we don't have anything in the code blocking a hex from running the same escalation twice in a row, which would certainly be nice to have.
Also, mini-escalations slowly drop in strength when left alone. Fighting them just makes them drop in strength faster.