Goblin Squad Member
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If your friendly is hitting you with AoE, we can't tell the difference between someone not paying attention, someone being a jerk, and someone actually trying to kill your PC.If he's in your party and you're grouped up what's supposed to happen?
Being partied with someone doesn't change PvP rules. Is that what you meant?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am becoming convinced a lot of my issues arise from party members ranged shooting with AoE attacks at mobs that are charging at me.
Having heavier armor I usually shoot first to draw the group towards me. Party members then start attacking which is fine until the escalation monsters get close to me and suddenly I am getting AoE damage and autotargetting my own party members.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am becoming convinced a lot of my issues arise from party members ranged shooting with AoE attacks at mobs that are charging at me.
Having heavier armor I usually shoot first to draw the group towards me. Party members then start attacking which is fine until the escalation monsters get close to me and suddenly I am getting AoE damage and autotargetting my own party members.
And they may not even realise its an AoE if they are only careful of bursts. Some of the line AoE's, and cones may not be to obvious to players yet.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I generally like that, Kero. If someone is attacking party members with AOEs, it might take a moment, but the party leader can always kick him out.
As far as parties intermingling during raids... In the absence of 12-man parties, or other expansible system, parties will learn not to intermingle in ways that make mistargeting easy. (We'll take the left side of that group and you take the right. No AoE in the middle.)
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Goblin Squad Member
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And they may not even realise its an AoE if they are only careful of bursts. Some of the line AoE's, and cones may not be to obvious to players yet.I am becoming convinced a lot of my issues arise from party members ranged shooting with AoE attacks at mobs that are charging at me.
Having heavier armor I usually shoot first to draw the group towards me. Party members then start attacking which is fine until the escalation monsters get close to me and suddenly I am getting AoE damage and autotargetting my own party members.
That is very true.
However the point I am making is even if your party members are ultra careful about AoE attacks, if Player A have a couple of AoE queued up on a target and the target suddenly charges at Player B, then Player B will get hit by Player A's queued AoE and there is nothing Player A can do to stop it. Assuming player A even notices his target charging towards Player B the attacks are queued and cannot be recalled.
Now if Player A's attacks actually kill the target (at the same time as accidentally hitting Player B) and Player B had queued ranged attacks (even single target ones) aimed at the now dead target the system will automatically redirect the rest of Player B's attack back at Player A.
What makes this confusing is Player A may take no Rep loss even though he was the one that used the AoE and player B may get a Rep loss even though he was firing single target ranged attacks.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm increasingly inclined (so inclined I'm writing an email about this in parallel) to see if we can get rid of the queue. A big part of this is due to queued attacks interacting with auto target I think.
An alternative is for queued attacks to be canceled whenever the target is dropped; through death or changing target or whatever. That could be done client-side right, so it never interferes with the server's resolution of actions that actually happen?
If the combat system was highly responsive I wouldn't mind not having attacks queued. The combat system is NOT highly responsive, that's why the queue exists isn't it? Because trying to throw attack feats at enemies with 300ms this and animation delay that and range tolerance turning into a Marsha in mixed melee-ranged groups without a queue to smooth it out makes combat a staccato hurricane of aggravation or at least so not fun or engaging that most people don't want to bother with it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm increasingly inclined (so inclined I'm writing an email about this in parallel) to see if we can get rid of the queue. A big part of this is due to queued attacks interacting with auto target I think.An alternative is for queued attacks to be canceled whenever the target is dropped; through death or changing target or whatever. That could be done client-side right, so it never interferes with the server's resolution of actions that actually happen?
I like this idea.
+1
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Goblin Squad Member
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I hope friendly fire is possible, because AoE in melee of your own group is just a very bad way to play. It also means that if you need to take out a target/targets and they also have your friends in there, well then, what's more important, keeping your friends alive, or keeping the battle in your favor?
That's where moral choices are made. Without negatives, you really can't have positives.
We're not concerned about occasional friendly fire. We're concerned about occasional friendly fire triggering the anti griefing system and turning the unwitting victim into a criminal who can't return to their settlement for days or weeks and having a negative effect on their chosen settlement's reputation.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not accidentally catching people in AoEs. Every Rep loss came from a half-draw bow attack on someone I hadn't intended to target.
We need a way to declare friendlies as friendlies and not be able to target them for attacks without making an explicit choice even if they target us. I'll happily take many unexpected PvP deaths in preference to trashing my reputation by accident in a busy fight.
If you can throw up a "switch declared friendly attacker to hostile?" that would be nice, but we need to have a way to work beside people who are not in our pitifully small six-person companies for escalations that, by design, require 20-50 people to suppress.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I concur with Proxima that the simplest solution is to clear the character's action queue on target loss (death). But I hope the team does not lose sight of Mbando's other point regarding the difficulty of reducing an escalation. It seems to me that the impulse to overmatch the power of characters and character parties to discourage independence and encourage cooperation is literally irrational: The challenge does not mathematically scale in a manner that will encourage play unless there are enough friends/comrades not only online, but immediately active and available.
I wanted to get that said now, before I have to worry about unqualifiedly assertive epeenions like 'L2P noob'.
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Goblin Squad Member
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What I think may be happening is that the player is generating a click without meaning to.You think they're clicking the target?I think they are tabbing or clicking (or combination of both) the target or the mouse cursor for a split second is on the center of the screen as soon as the mob dies, and the PC ends up being a target.
That might be causing the action that triggers my response, but I absolutely have never accidentally targeted anyone by mouse.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How many of the adjacent hexes had the same escalation happening? Did you start at a hex in the periphery of the escalation blob or strike at the heart of it?
It would be interesting to know since the effort to wipe out the escalation is supposed to vary based on how fast it is reinforced from neighbouring hexes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've only been reading this now - so a few additions
First - it was great fun. It was a long way to walk though
Desync issues - I will check with my son if he had any issues at all. But I think this gives a good idea that it is the client site indeed
Lito: Ethernet cable and desktop PC with 8GB and new dedicated Graphicscard - no desync issues I aware off
Thod: WiFi - 2 floors down from router, Aging laptop that is just cappable to handle PFO - at some stage a lot of desync issues
AoE: Lito might have been the main culprit. He got a few new spells and was proud of it. I think he might sometimes not even been aware when he did AoE spells.
He died A LOT - guess several times by friendly fire.
I didn't lose and reputation at all - but I tried to always know whom I was targeting and didn't just spam attacks. I had Lito more than once as target
Missile vs melee - it just seemed easier to do missile and stay rooted instead of doing any melee. With 10 players and sometimes 20 monsters moving I had trouble to follow who was where. Quite different to doing monster groups as a pair (with my son) where I use my great sword a lot more
GJ to the folks who organized this, it looks like it generated a good amount of feedback for GW to tweak and improve the experience. +1
I feel like we need to organize some small gang PvP stuff like this too. Just doesn't seem like there is much PvP going on what with the tower capture mechanism being broken and all.r
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Goblin Squad Member
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I played Erikaal on Sat night and I was only in for about an hour and a half or so. However I have still never had an issue hitting someone by accident. I always confirm my targets before hitting an attack and have only auto targeted other players a handful of times when I was using an axe and getting into melee. Now that I've switched to Longbow only it's not happened yet. Not trying to say it isn't an issue, and I think the queue system combined with auto targeting someone that has hit you with an attack whatever the reason, it the problem.
My vote is for changing targets clearing the ability queue.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Okay, questions.
If encumbrance had been activated, would you have been able to fight as long as you did or would you have to break off to go to the nearest village to unload your "loot"?
If you would have had to break off to unload loot, I would think that it either means that the escalations are building too fast or going down too slow, or that you need 6+ groups round-robin attacking the escalation. A couple of groups fighting, a couple of groups heading in to unload their loot and a couple of groups having unloaded their loot, heading back to the hex to fight the escalation.
And if you leave the hex to unload, doesn't that reset the escalation for you?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think our next project might be to divvy a target hex up into sections, and let each company of six take on a section by themselves. Neighbouring companies could decide to attack large mobs from opposite sides if they want. If all ranged folks stay away from firing at the center once things start to mix-up, they shouldn't get within reach of the other team. We could have separate "rooms" in mumble for each company, with some shared spaces for groups that decide to work together.
If people are interested, we could target a monster home hex near map center. There's one on the line half-way between Hammerforge and Iron Gauntlet. That puts most groups within about 10-15 hexes if they want to travel to play.
I imagine a scenario like that is what GW has in mind for those "Outpost" deployable buildings.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Encumbrance only would have been an issue because I carried spare Pot Steel armour and great sword with me.
So if you fight close by you likely leave spare equipment somewhere save. I contemplated to leave some at Rathglen but joined late anyhow.
So to make it short:
Encumbrance seems not an issue if
a) you leave all unnecessary stuff at home
b) you don't fight loads of starter monsters which might drop armour
c) you don't fight while having a lot in your crafter queue
I guess increasing carrying capacity will ease it even further.
But yes - it means that if you want to fight extensivly (die extensivly) then you have to think about resources. I like to 'use up' my items until they are gone and then replace. With encumbrance this is not necessarily a good way to do it.
And if you leave the hex to unload, doesn't that reset the escalation for you?The timed quests might default to fail if everyone leaves the hex, but it would be easy enough to leave a party in the hex while other paries drop loot.
Escalations and their associated events don't pay any attention to whether or not there are players in the hex. They can start up, progress, and end even when the hex is empty. And once they've started, they absolutely will not stop, ever, until they've either timed out or been completed.
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Concering Proxima's suggestion, do escalations actually strengthen after 100% is reached? There is that first number (sometimes as high as 50,000). I have read Bob suggesting that you need to get that number down to 500. I am unclear on how that all works.
Escalations top out at 100%, so there's no strength increase past that. In monster hexes, somewhere short of that (maybe 80-95% depending on the escalation) the Fail Boss appears. Some of the Fail Bosses just stick around until you get the strength back below their trigger point. Others have timers, and if you fail to kill the Boss before the timer runs out, then the escalation ends with the monsters winning (later, that will mean missing out on the settlement-level rewards).
If you drop the strength in a monster hex below 500, then the Win Boss appears. If you defeat the Win Boss, then the escalation ends with the monsters defeated (again, this will eventually mean receiving big settlement-level rewards).
After a desynch of 20 hexes one day, I did totally kill an ecalation that I ran across (on the way back). It was only (I think) at 5%. I did it solo with one quest finished and just killing mobs. It dropped at a decent rate with each cluster killed. Took .... less than a hour, if I remember right. No Bosses spawned.
Given the state of the alpha map, I'd guess this was an infected hex bordering a different escalation. That would have helped keep the hex from increasing in strength faster than you could lower it on your own.
Also, only monster/source hexes have bosses, so the lack of a boss here makes complete sense. Infected hexes just need to be dropped to zero to clear them out.
--> Is it possible to alter the growth rate of escalations based on their current size?
Not at the moment. We've been discussing some changes to the way escalation strength works, particularly in the early stages of the escalation. Not sure when we'll have time to actually make such changes, but they should allow us to control the growth rates in more satisfying ways.
[list]We had two multi-hour sessions--I wasn't there for all of it, but maybe 6 hours total, with a force from 10-8 players generally geared/leveled out at the top of what Alpha allows. In all of that time, we made a dent in the escalation to 70%. In one hex. That's a lot of effort for a dent in one hex. Does that sound right to you, Dev's? I'm just imagining in EE, by the time we're hitting 3 or 4th level, the entire map is covered by 100% escalations. Maybe there needs to be some tweaking to match escalations to the population/power curve of the server?
That actually does sound about right, assuming that the hex you were in was getting reinforced pretty heavily by neighboring 100% hexes. I suspect you're correct that the map will be somewhat over-run before the bulk of players have leveled up a bit to take them on, but then I think you'll be able to chip away at them by removing infected hexes before attacking the monster hexes.
Also, all the escalations will be reset at EE. At that point, all of the source hexes will be closer to 15-30%. At that strength, several of the escalations (particularly Skeletal Uprising and Broken Men) are low-level enough that even a party of 6 club-wielding starter characters could put a dent in them. It will take a few days before any of the monster hexes hit 100%, and until that happens, they'll be spreading pretty slowly. I'm not saying you'll necessarily be able to defeat many escalations until players level up enough to tackle the bosses, but organized settlements may be able to at least hold nearby escalations in check until they're ready to shut them down.
Part of the slowness was (I think) that we had to primarily kill mobs--as we took down most of the mobs in the hex, more mobs, rather than the escalation achievement events, spawned.
Hopefully, this is a bit of a visual illusion, since event encounters should get precedence. However, once you've cleared some sites, then you need to get far enough away for the sites to respawn. That means you'll clear some non-event sites, then move away and find more non-event sites, then eventually wander back to the sites you've originally cleared and finally find event encounters there. For this reason, it's kind of nice to have two or three separate parties sweeping the map fairly far apart. That way the parties can follow in each other's wakes, clearing event sites for each other and making it likely that any new event encounters will spawn near at least one party.
Hopefully we'll get this issue fixed up soon and events will more forcefully clear encounter sites for their own use.
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Goblin Squad Member
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A note on quest timing.
Having them cycle regardless of player activity is counterproductive and a pointless. Currently you can enter a hex start a quest that has zero achievements in the counter get the counter up a couple and have it reset.
It makes far more sense if the timer starts when the first player achieves something on the counter.
That way you can make informed choices. if the counter is zero you know you have a full cycle to complete. If the counter has started but only low you know there is a fair chance it may expire on you. If the counter is high you know to get in and try and finish the last few as fast as possible.
ON ANOTHER NOTE ---> How about showing us the timer as a reducing bar or something.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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That sucks. And we probably can't fix it. :( We're due for a GM command that lets us summon a character to our location but it has not been implemented yet. I will see if there's any way to get the character moved to a different rez point. Can you PM me with character details?
(PS: You're in a random NPC settlement. It doesn't have anything to do with where you've been or what you've done.)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, there is a bit of work to be done on many of these systems.
Yes, that sounds likely. Actually, what's even more likely is:
You have no target and a cued attack
You get hit by AoE
You auto target the AoE source
Your cued attack fires
You think you're targeting something else, hit another attack and tag the friendly with the 2nd attack
Two comments on this. First is that I am pretty sure, from observing my own attacks, that a queued attack might go off still if the target dies, but it goes off "no where". At least for longbows.
Secondly, isn't there something wrong if the system puts the AoEer back to friendly that fast? You have a situation where someone strikes you once and if you retaliate a few hits, you are now red and probably losing rep. Good for accidental AoEs and accidental friendly fire. Bad for all other cases, some of which could be abused.
IMO, it should only be the individual that gets the first flag that suffers, if there is any rep penalty or accidental targeting.
A note on quest timing.
Having them cycle regardless of player activity is counterproductive and a pointless. Currently you can enter a hex start a quest that has zero achievements in the counter get the counter up a couple and have it reset.
It makes far more sense if the timer starts when the first player achieves something on the counter.
That way you can make informed choices. if the counter is zero you know you have a full cycle to complete. If the counter has started but only low you know there is a fair chance it may expire on you. If the counter is high you know to get in and try and finish the last few as fast as possible.
ON ANOTHER NOTE ---> How about showing us the timer as a reducing bar or something.
Completely agree on getting a timer in, it's high on the list of requested UI improvements. Once that's in, you'll be able to tell pretty quickly whether it's worth your while to try completing the event. Eventually, we also plan to let players use the map to see what escalations and events are running in other hexes (hopefully including timers), so you'll be able to look around and find promising hexes to target.
Having the escalations and events run regardless of player presence is in large part because of the sandbox nature of the game. Just as other players, factions and settlements roll along whether anyone is paying attention to them or not, the escalations continue their merry way until players intervene.
Escalations build in strength when ignored, not unlike potentially hostile neighbors. Part of that strength build-up is that events time out (because nobody's doing anything about them), resulting in additional strength increases that are accounted for in the overall balance equations.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I love just about everything behind the escalation concept. I am really looking forward to seeing where you take it.
There is a concern (probably just my own) that they may occur too often and build too fast to reasonably deal with. It almost seems that they will be a full time occupation, if we are talking about 6+ hours for a single party to knock one out. That is a lot of time to get many people coordinated and participating. Even if it is a round robin thing with different parties taking over. How many settlements (even fairly large comparative to others) will have that much time and personnel available and still get other things done?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, same here Cal; I logged out in Blackwood Glade without any troubles yesterday. I don't think I even fell through the world once while playing.
Today, I logged in to find myself literally on the opposite side of the map... Farther nw than Rathglen. AND the feats I trained yesterday were gone...
Needless to say I didn't play for long today.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Is there a reason that reputation penalties can't be turned off for actions against party members? It seems that's the major issue here. Accidentally targeting and hurting/killing party members might be frustrating, but it isn't unrealistic.
As a long term solution, could a system be implemented where hostile actions against party members get reported to the offended party member in a log and can be chosen to be ignored or passed on to authorities? I feel like the actions taken by the players shouldn't be limited and it should be up to the players to not go on a berserk rampage and accidentally kill the cleric. Tab targeting is useful for selecting a target, but making it too smart removes choices (good and bad) from the players.
You might also consider making it so reputation losses in parties are limited to only dropping the player to +2500 rep. This gives other players a possible signal that a player is poor at managing their target in parties.
+2500 is too high as at -2500 they can still enter town
anyway ... some thoughts ...
- limit rep loss per individual incident
- make the whole system (gain and loss)work on a percentage of the difference between -7500/+7500 and the current value rather than an absolute number (EVE does this)
- resurrect -2500 or worse characters at Rotters Hole or out of town
- enable some minimal but very slow rep gain while logged out
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I love just about everything behind the escalation concept. I am really looking forward to seeing where you take it.
There is a concern (probably just my own) that they may occur too often and build too fast to reasonably deal with. It almost seems that they will be a full time occupation, if we are talking about 6+ hours for a single party to knock one out. That is a lot of time to get many people coordinated and participating. Even if it is a round robin thing with different parties taking over. How many settlements (even fairly large comparative to others) will have that much time and personnel available and still get other things done?
Part of the question here is what it means to "reasonably deal with" the escalations. On the one hand, we do want to incentivize you to deal with the escalations on your door step efficiently, so to that end there will be carrots and sticks that push you to remove them relatively quickly. On the other hand, escalations are basically the core PvE content, so we want you to be able to find a good selection of nearby escalations to confront most of the times that you log in.
To achieve that balance in the long-run, we'll need to have escalations run for an average of 3 days each time they start, followed by around 24-36 hours where the source hex is clear. Some will run longer, some shorter, but the average should be about 3 days. That means we'll constantly be adjusting the balance so that average settlements need 3 days or so of average effort to clear out an average escalation. As such, the system will consider you to be "reasonably dealing with" your nearby escalations if you shut them down over roughly that time, and the rewards and punishments (once we have all of them in) will match with that timeline.
Clearly, we can't expect most settlements to have 1-2 good-sized parties running around 24 hours a day battling escalations (at least not yet). So, the numbers have been balanced such that every 2-3 hours of effort by a good-sized party is roughly equal to 24 hours worth of escalation growth, meaning one big gameplay session per day by a party will at least hold an escalation in check, and will likely drop it slowly. I can fiddle with those numbers over time, and with the balance of high-level to low-level escalations, to keep up with population growth and character leveling.
That does mean that you'll almost always find that finishing off an escalation is a multi-day project, and that you won't necessarily be participating personally at all the crucial junctures, most importantly at the end. We'll need to do more work to give players a better sense of accomplishment along the way (when events are successfully completed, when the escalation phase is lowered, etc...), so that each gameplay session has the potential for some sense of closure, even if it's not the ultimate sense of closure that comes from being there to shut the escalation down.