Timeline for planes?

I posted the code over in the Guides and Aps section: http://www.takproject.net/forums/index.php?threads/pc-eq-logs-chat-text-remover.2898/
I'll edit as I find errors or people post enhancements.

 

Regarding the planes: I just want to clear up some possible confusion.

Hate and Fear as far as I know are working as intended. Don't expect them to get much easier.

I'll be tweaking some things but they will be relatively minor. Things like LoS turned off in Hate is entirely intentional.

These zones are very dangerous at level 50-- particularly with pre-planar equipment. Staff will not CR players who die from intended gameplay.

NPC hitpoints, damages, attack delays, and procs are highly accurate. Fear NPC aggro radii were precisely measured on Live.

I would seriously recommend googling old hate and fear guides for breaking strategies since they apply to the zones on this server and in some cases are where I got some of my data.

 

Oh man... to fear the plane of fear once again gives me chills breaking into the plane!

 

I know exactly what you mean. This is fantastic. Thanks Torven!

 

Good to hear.

 

This is great Torven, thank you for all the hard work collecting this information. This goes for all the dev team as well =)
)

 

Fear/Hate data may be correct but there's a lot of things wrong with the core game, such as constant LD's on zone, group bugs, wizards porting themselves and not the 5 other people in group, no 0-6 sec aggro roll on initial aggro.

 

If you wait for every minor little bug to get fixed, you may never see new content again. Cavedude takes long breaks and he's the only one fixing those kinds of bugs. There's always going to be something to fix.

Likewise you can't expect GMs to summon your corpse out of fearplane just because you got group bugged.

Planes should give people something to do for awhile anyway

 

I didn't really agree with the corpse summoning personally, minus when zone straight up crashed. Maybe it should be alil less risky on entrance spots until LD on zoning/group bugs gets ironed out a tad bit though.

Edit: not saying make it 100% risk free, just alittle less risky than it is until LD on zone stops crashing 10+ people every attempt on zoning in

 

At least one of the crashes was due to some Cazic Touch code I put in which had a really stupid error on my part that somehow never showed up locally after many tests. I'm not sure if Rob wants to hotfix that or not; it should get fixed by Wednesday if not. Golems have a large assist radius, so beware of that until the fix is in.

Small rant here: The problem is if I don't do some of this stuff, it'll never get done, and I think C++ is an awful archaic language that needs to die, so I have little experience with its idiosyncrasies nor care to learn them more than I have to. Furthermore, users refuse to test anything. I consider it a minor miracle that a few users killed a few mobs in hateplane on the development server before launch. Nobody made a serious attempt in fear as far as I know. That is why these obvious bugs slip through.

Crashes causing wipes is certainly worthy of GM intervention however.

The gate area in fearplane is a little more crowded than I'd like it to be due to the way the roaming algorithm works. The problem I'm often faced with is that, due to the limitations of the emu code, there are situations where I'm forced to choose between making it way too easy or making it a little too hard; or areas become harder in some respects and easier in others. The gate being a bit more crowded means other spots in the zone are a bit less crowded, which can actually make breaking it easier than what it was years ago.

I'm still making some minor changes to the zones, so hopefully I can level out the difficulty a bit more.

 

I didn't realize so many people were having major issues with LD's still. Mine are very rare anymore. Night and day from back in January.

 

I can't function without running some obscure VPN taken from a hint by another user on this board (tried several VPN variations, this is the only one that introduces some semblance of stability). Using this VPN, however, causes me to be unable to zone into Foreign Quarter of Neriak, nor can I connect to the Ventrilo server that my guild uses, so, when voice communication is vital, I have to deal with the zone disconnects (which are constant and almost a guarantee when the VPN is not running).

I do hope that some progress is made with the connectivity. This alone would have been far more enjoyable than planes in terms of priorities, at least in my book (but I'm just one voice of many).

This is just my opinion, but I still feel there's loads for the majority of people to do in terms of preparation for planar readiness. The population here isn't exactly bursting at the seams, and there are three guilds operating at raid level. Doing some basic math gives some perspective as to how many individuals are performing raid attempts, leaving a significant portion of the population which hasn't reached 50 yet. Compound this with bare minimum gear recommendations for planar attempts multiplied by the rare rate of spawns/droprates and low market availability of recommended best-in-slot items for pre-planar gearing and the picture becomes rather clear in terms of how ready people just might be.

Granted, there are some people who are ready (and have been for some time). Keeping things in perspective, however, sometimes doing things well requires numbers, and not everyone boxes efficiently. Warm bodies playing one minimally geared character well is a lot better than one person operating three marginally equipped characters less than optimally.

Sometimes that means helping others to get to a point where they will be more of a help to you in the long run, and I see a great community of people from several guilds doing this already (shout out to people like Tarkonia and Hailey who embody this kind of community spirit). I intend to give back to this community wherever I can in the spirit of people like this. Kudos guys

Sorry for the tl:dr nature of this post, but thanks for taking time to read it

 

You're assuming every developer has the expertise to fix that problem.

One other thing I'd like to point out is that the developers don't really play the game very much, so we're not seeing some of these problems and nobody is reporting them. User feedback is required to both know a problem exists and where to look for it. The best thing a user can do is figure out how to replicate a bug/crash at will and tell us how. Even just jumping in a thread and saying 'I have this same problem' can tell us how widespread it is or rule out a user's end as the source.