nomination of for the worst fun-killers in DDO

[Zretch]

This is completely false. It's a proverbial canary in the DDO coalmine. DA was not implemented as a solution for lag, only as an indicator and a disincentive to stress our pathing system.

Are there any current plans to performance tune / optimize your pathing system?

[janave]

.. a game where dragging around 50 monsters simply ..

Warlocks - The Way It's Meant to be Played.

[zehnvhex]

Are there any current plans to performance tune / optimize your pathing system?

Oh my sweet summer child...

[Thrudh]

This is the kernel of information people did NOT pull from my EQ1 example.

While you can drag around a ton of mobs and not experience lag anywhere close to the degree it happens in DDO with a fraction of that number, no one wants to pull high numbers of mobs in that game. The player character will get carpet rolled in a hurry.

The solution isnt some arbitrary out-side-of-game-immersion penalty for causing pathing calc to skyrocket. The "penalty" is character death delivered by the army of mobs that were aggro.

But that doesn't currently work in DDO. We have abilities that let us move faster than mobs. We have ladders and ledges where mobs can't follow, and doors that lead to a new zone. Invisibility is an option.

Currently, it's trivial to run past all mobs, and not get killed.

You think the EQ method is a better design, where the penalty for running past a ton of mobs is "death".

DDO's penalty is to slow you down and annoy you, and make death a little more possible, but it's more of a annoyance factor for power-gamers, who turn and kill a bunch of mobs to get rid of the slow debuff (which reduces server lag - the real goal of DA - it's just incentive to kill mobs as you zerg)

Is it your suggestion that DDO get rid of DA, and add some new mechanic that makes DEATH the new penalty? Like EQ?

Isn't that even MORE restrictive on the playstyle?

This doesn't make a lot of sense...

You: "DDO developers put in DA just because they hate people running past a bunch of mobs! They are forcing a playstyle! EQ does it better!"

Me: "How does EQ do it better?"

You: "Oh, they kill you if you run past too many mobs. That's the penalty."

Me: "That's better? Doesn't that also force a playstyle? Is that what you want for DDO?"

[Lynnabel]

You: "DDO developers put in DA just because they hate people running past a bunch of mobs! They are forcing a playstyle! EQ does it better!"

Me: "How does EQ do it better?"

You: "Oh, they kill you if you run past too many mobs. That's the penalty.

As a developer I drastically prefer the EQ option. If people really do want appropriate penalties to rail jumping to bypass fights, I don't mind upgrading red DA to Death!

[Zretch]

Y'all need to stop trying to surreptitiously justify your right to zerg without DA/lag.

This is an exceptionally unhelpful comment. People aren't trying to justify their right to zerg, they're saying that game lag is unfun. The fact that someone else zerging in their own private instance causes my game to lag, even when I'm playing the "right" way is 100% unfun. They're also saying that receiving a dungeon alert when you agro a single mob pack in a dungeon like Thrill of the Hunt, or even while simply running past the cages to the boss to initiate the fight (which you MUST do), is unfun.

The entire game lagging out mid combat or while zoning because someone running OOB and blitzing to the end should probably be addressed. Other customers impacting our gameplay in this way is a form of griefing, and SSG should be interested in addressing it. DA is a step towards that, but the implementation of DA has a few issues in a few quests. Beyond DA, I would hope that there's an initiative to address the larger problem of players in one instance impacting players in all other instances.

[zehnvhex]

EQ didn't kill you for pulling too many mobs. They just awarded you more experience. AE pull groups were fairly common. Breaking into fear was basically a giant AE pull. If you played a druid, necro, wizard or shammy on release pulling all the things was a very common experience. Twinking was basically "Can I pull everything in BB in one pull?"

[Zretch]

As a developer I drastically prefer the EQ option. If people really do want appropriate penalties to rail jumping to bypass fights, I don't mind upgrading red DA to Death!

EQ penalty isn't just death. Death in DDO is extremely lenient compared to EQ. In EQ, when you die, you return to your spawnpoint naked, you lose a percentage of your gained experience (to the point where you can lose a level), and you have to go back and retrieve your corpse. No cakes, no rez shrines, find a cleric to give you back some of that lost experience.

You don't want to die in EQ. In DDO, if you're not dying in an instance, that probably means you're not at a high enough difficulty.

BTW, players do deliberately train huge clumps of mobs in EQ, and they do so without dying. Invis is a thing in EQ, and bard run speed in EQ puts all runspeed for ANY class in DDO to shame. But in EQ, combat is an entirely different mechanic. It takes far longer to kill a single trash mob in EQ than it does in DDO, and the trash mobs don't hit as hard, so fights are much slower paced. You can't grab a pack of 40 mobs and nuke 35 of them down in a sub 4 second alpha strike like in DDO. EQ doesn't need to implement penalties for gathering too many mobs as the mobs themselves are the penalty. If you can get away, good on you, but if you can't, then you die, you lose your gear, you lose your experience, and you have to work to get them back (the easy way by paying for a stone, getting a necro to summon your corpse, and getting a cleric to rez you, or the hard way by fighting back to your corpse and grinding out the experience you lost all over again).

I think the point is that in EQ, pulling giant trains of mobs didn't lag out the whole server. It certainly screwed over everyone in the zone, but not the whole server.

[Zretch]

I'm seriously curious what kind of counter tactics and environmental changes you'd suggest. I personally can't think of any that wouldn't either trivialize content or impose an equally-infuriating BS restriction, like locking a door ahead of you until you've killed some trailing mobs.

They already do it in reaper. A kill count as a quest objective.

If the objective of the quest is to "retrieve the shiney" or "kill the bad man at the end", then doing so should complete the quest, and if you can do it without having to kill any of the guards or minions or lackeys, then more for the better. Think of the Breaking the Blocade quest. You're told to blow up the ships without raising an alarm. They're telling you to stealth past everything and not kill anything as an optional quest objective, and the end NPC gives you **** if you just bull rush the quest.

If the objective is to "kill the bad man at the end and at least 50 of his minions", then that's a different story. When the quest giver in Slavers 1 says "I want you to kill them...all of them", then she should mean the generic slavers roaming the halls as well.

If you want to force people to kill stuff, make killing stuff a quest objective. You can then have "kill quests", "stealth quests", etc and tune each quest to support that style of play.

[zehnvhex]

This is an exceptionally unhelpful comment.

There's a reason in DnD you get awarded XP for completing adventures, not for killing NPC's. Being a murder hobo is not the only way to play this game. It's probably the most popular, and I can appreciate that being further pushed on us in a video game, but the fact that we have the option to skip mobs at all is even more appreciated. It's part of what makes DDO unique in the MMOsphere.

One of the neat things about early pre-MOTU DDO is the game is more about the entire dungeon experience and less just a bunch of murder sprees. Crucible, VoN4, Wizard King, etc... it feels like it's me against the dungeon and the mobs are there to slow me down and drain my resources.

That spirit has been lost in recent years in DDO and I think a big part of it is that the game is more about slaying the copy pasted mob pack every 10 feet. MoT had huge potential but they screwed that up thanks to whoever is in charge of mob HP and XP reward amounts. Same guy just added insult to injury when it came to White Plume. Those are awful quests made worse by hyper inflated HP. Whoever thought 700 hp mobs at level 6 was a good idea needs to have their dungeon design allowance revoked.

Anyways...

I don't mind DA. Most quest blitzing these days accounts for it and alters your path and kills enemies in key locations to prevent it. It's barely a concern now. 99% of my yellow/orange DA's these days are due to packs of mobs auto-triggering it even with just one pull. Thrill of the Hunt, as others have noted, is the worst offender. I think there are 4 auto-DA's in there? That's like 1/3rd of the pulls in that dungeon.

[zehnvhex]

You can't grab a pack of 40 mobs and nuke 35 of them down in a sub 4 second alpha strike like in DDO.

Sounds like someone was never invited to an AE group in Fungus Grove. I think our record was like 87 shrooms in one pull. Granted it took about 16 seconds to AE down.

[Chai]

I'm seriously curious what kind of counter tactics and environmental changes you'd suggest. I personally can't think of any that wouldn't either trivialize content or impose an equally-infuriating BS restriction, like locking a door ahead of you until you've killed some trailing mobs.

Making the "penalty" for pulling too much aggro part of the immersion.

In my EQ1 example, if you run past a bunch of mobs, you will experience an acute bout of sudden melee death syndrome. Theres your penalty for causing too many active mobs. While it might be infuriating to the XP farmer, its a realistic penalty.

Another way to do it is make it part of the quest objective. Cut the completion XP in half, and then give that half back for getting conquest.

Example: Epic daily quests for ETR XP such as Wizard King and Spies in the House are good examples where people run past trash mobs to get to the optionals, then the end. They do it on low enough difficulty where even red alert imposes minimal if any chance of character death. If my market audience is a bunch of XP farm optimizers (and the blind defenders of this terrible DA system sure like to make it sound like it is), I can pretty much guarantee you if I took literally half of the total completion XP in the quest away from the completion objective and provided it back as a reward for killing 90% or more mobs in the dungeon, the XP farm optimizers would respond by killing 90% or more mobs in the dungeon.

[Chacka_DDO]

As a developer I drastically prefer the EQ option. If people really do want appropriate penalties to rail jumping to bypass fights, I don't mind upgrading red DA to Death!

You missed what Chai means when he says the penalty is that they kill you and this most likely because you got a questionable attitude and therefore you read what you want to read...

Chai means that many monsters simply are more dangerous than a few monsters so the chance that many monsters kill you increases if you pull more monsters.
But there is NO additional penalty like the Dungeon Alert in EverQuest.
And even less any kind of instant death effect as an extension of a Dungeon Alert-like system

You should maybe consider that there is something wrong with DDO and this is something YOU can and you SHOULD change!
There many quests where a player end up with Dungeon Alert because the imperfection how DDO handles monster agro especially how monsters aggro each other.
The keyword for me is here hive-mind
And there a lot encounters who agro enough monsters at once to cause a Dungeon Alert and it is inevitable.
And the pathing code is quite obviously inefficient and could be improved to cause less server load.

But your attitude is, it is always the player's fault and he has to be punished and at its best, he has to be instantly killed and this is indeed VERY questionable!
This is of course quite convenient for you because you have not to change anything then and you can fool yourself that everything is fine.

The Dungeon Alert feature DDO has is simply no fun and you should find other ways to solve the problem than a system that is based on the assumption that the players are guilty.
This reminds me that I thought the USA is a land where the customer is the King but I have more the feeling the customer/player is just a disturbing element for you.
The DDO servers would run so lovely smooth without those unneeded players who cause lag...

[Powerhungry]

The sacred Helm- After killing the minotaur berserker and heading up the long ladder, there are bars showing an area deeper into the quest- every melee mob in there activated and ran all the way around the dungeon to get to me - DA created by your own 'revamped' aggro mechanic.
Rescuing Arlo - area with the three bridges- lower the right side bridge and head up. (killing everything along the way) - open the gate and hit one mob- everything on both floors now agro and instant DA (again, the new agro system)

[barecm]

There was a time when DDO had a death penalty. Sure, it was annoying when trying to figure out how to do a raid... remember when we had to figure out how to do a raid on live servers? So yeah, I would have a ton of negative xp when trying to figure a raid out. No need for that nonsense now that everything is already figured out prior to raids going live. XP DP was not well liked, but in hindsight, would probably change people's attitudes on certain playstyles if they brought that back.

[Gywiden]

As a developer I drastically prefer the EQ option. If people really do want appropriate penalties to rail jumping to bypass fights, I don't mind upgrading red DA to Death!

I know you are kidding, but threatening instant death when DA IV already happens at no fault to the player in several situations (e.g. The Black Loch's zombie room on higher difficulties) isn't really helping the frustrations.

I don't think DA should happen at no fault to the player (even DA I). It is broken, and the threshold should be higher, aggro could use a redesign, or monster density (particularly in dungeon scaling) could use a redesign. I'm guessing a combination of the three would be the optimal solution so that it has the least impact on current gameplay and balance (relatively speaking; I know the game doesn't have hardcore balance like an RTS needs). Plus working on all three may mean you only have to tweak them rather than do drastic reworks.

[ahpook]

... or impose an equally-infuriating BS restriction, like locking a door ahead of you until you've killed some trailing mobs.

Simply locking the door until you kill mobs (like they do in several quests now) would be irritating (but not as bad as DA IMHO). If however the doors were handled more intelligently I don't see it as a problem. For example, when you start the quest all the doors are open. If you aggro too many (cause too much disturbance) the doors close and you have too open them (taking time for mobs to catch up). If you cause even more agro (like red alert), then the doors lock and you have to kill mobs to get them to unlock (or pick the locks). In other words make the DA triggers cause environmental reactions to your presence. Other things like wards appearing (slow wards) that would be intended to slow you down or limit your area but don't exist if you don't hit those "DA" levels could be include. The problem with this approach is that it would require a quest by quest implementation while DA was a blanket policy and easier to implement. But we can see what kind of game quality that approach provides.

[Lynnabel]

I know you are kidding, but threatening instant death when DA IV already happens at no fault to the player in several situations (e.g. The Black Loch's zombie room on higher difficulties) isn't really helping the frustrations.

I don't think DA should happen at no fault to the player (even DA I). It is broken, and the threshold should be higher, aggro could use a redesign, or monster density (particularly in dungeon scaling) could use a redesign. I'm guessing a combination of the three would be the optimal solution so that it has the least impact on current gameplay and balance (relatively speaking; I know the game doesn't have hardcore balance like an RTS needs). Plus working on all three may mean you only have to tweak them rather than do drastic reworks.

If a player is actually just playing the game and red DA swings out of nowhere, pester Flimsy Firewood - he's deputized himself earlier in this very thread into tackling some of the crunchy spots. We don't ever want a player to reach red DA - even if it's our fault because of monster placement, it's still not an intended design. There's a Vargouille quote somewhere around here that says it better than I can, along the lines of "this is basically never a part of our design."

[Chacka_DDO]

There's a reason in DnD you get awarded XP for completing adventures, not for killing NPC's. Being a murder hobo is not the only way to play this game. It's probably the most popular, and I can appreciate that being further pushed on us in a video game, but the fact that we have the option to skip mobs at all is even more appreciated. It's part of what makes DDO unique in the MMOsphere.

And exactly this basically hits the nail.
The point is that a players do what he do because they got a reason for it and not because they are either mad or evil.
If the quest gives the player a task and killing monsters is not a part of this task is it wrong if he doesn't do it?
I dont think so.
To penalize players for something that is basically just objectively reasonable for them (skipping monsters if it does not need to kill them for the quest) should not be punished.
If the developers want that players kill and not bypass monsters make it a part of the quest or introduce some other mechanics like the barriers you have in some quests.

[Chai]

As a developer I drastically prefer the EQ option. If people really do want appropriate penalties to rail jumping to bypass fights, I don't mind upgrading red DA to Death!

The death comes when one of the mobs roots your character limiting its mobility, and the pack catches up to the character and sudden melee death syndrome occurs.

It doesnt happen because some arbitrary counter reaches a threshold and "DM Kills" the character.

Id be perfectly fine with the former.