Unfortunately it wasn't just the PC client instability. Plane of valor shakerpaging would take down Sony's POV zone quite often, a side effect on EQ Mac. It was pretty rough even on Sony's hardware. Best Regards,
I remember that even on a mac you would go LD. Also remember the zone would break a lot more often if the shakerpage failed to kill all the mobs (in Pov, Fungus Grove was a lot more stable kinda).
And the ones that failed to get killed and got stuck or forgot their origin points. Almost always ended up wiping Fiend groups. Undead ALWAYS killed me from no where heh
Yep, leftover mobs seemed to path right towards fiends. Undead also got bugged out but can't remember if it was an increased aggro range or what
Yeah it was increased aggro range. You'd be down near the water at Fiends and still draw the danged undead from up on top of the hill, making the camp unplayable
so whats gonna happen when I spawn 24 callers in FG and I'm pbaoe'ing 360 mobs? nothing about that is illegal
I figured shakerpaging was already banned under the guise of zone disruption. But I guess that wouldn't apply to FG since no ones goes there besides to kill the last BL epic mob. lol
tiny cloak of darkest night / lucid shards are some must haves out of FG apart from the BL Epic. I imagine if you summoned 24 callers you could almost guarantee to instant LD on the current netcode.
Absolutely correct, I don't believe I ever saw a POV Shakerpage where the bard (puller) and warrior did not LD... the only other characters in PoV that would usually LD were those looking at the kill spot at that moment. I had more fun with the multi-grimling spawn point in Grimling Forest caves... I was able to shakerpage those guys without going LD too much (although it did happen sometimes)... if my warrior stared up at the roof of the cave when she did it, she would usually not LD.
Back in the day, before PoP launched, FV mushrooms were an awesome place to solo as a melee with no healer. I think I did about 50AA there as a solo ranger. I'm guessing with boxing, places in kunark and velious will beat that by miles for AAs.
It will be a sad, quiet, and cold day if that ever happens Torven. It genuinely upsets me to hear this. I would have loved to group with you sometime and play a game for fun like it's supposed to be. You have done SO much for this project and I hate how some have disregarded your work (and the work of many developers) here to say some of the things that they have or to question all of you. The sense of entitlement is astonishing to me. I think that people need to chill out a little, and let the developers here do what they want to do (ultimately it's THEIR project, not yours) and just enjoy what they have done. Nothing will ever be perfect. It wasn't that long ago when AK was gone that I thought I'd never see anything like it again and missed it a lot, and now many are being dramatic and bickering over small potatoes. So what if you can't' shakerpage, they have legitimate reasons. Just group with someone and have fun. I don't have any documentation but I'm pretty sure this game was meant to be difficult and social without any quick easy horse shit (even if it was fun and advantageous). I don't care if 50 mages form a mage-only guild and take down a bunch of old-school bosses instead of a typical tank and spank scenario but when they decide something isn't allowed, just take a deep breath and find another way. It's not like they aren't' considering every option. Sony wouldn't have listened to a word anyone said on forums, they would just send out the patch and let you deal with it. So deal with it, not a single rule or patch here has ruined one of our favorite games, they're doing their best. And from what I can tell it seems like a full time job on top of everything else they're doing with their lives. Look what this nonsense is obviously doing to one of the best guys on the team. So don't be dicks about it, they're working on it. Respect, appreciate, relax.
guess you are not familiar with the caller event in FG... nothing about the event and spawning 100+ mobs is illegal in the eyes of sony, so why would it fall under zone disruption here?
Yeah spawning multiple callers probably wasn't an exploit, or they would have changed it eventually (I don't think they did). If you crash or lag a zone multiple times though, that's where the problem usually comes in. Me and my buddy did some shakerpaging on live before it was nerfed in plane of fire and I remember people asked us to stop because of the lag, was getting kiters killed.
We might as well just ban PBAOEing now and get it over with the way this thread is going. In fact, you know what really lags up a zone? RAIDING Should we ban raiding because it lags zones and therefore falls under the category of zone disruption? The main problem is the netcode can't handle a lot of mobs. The caller event is isolated to a small section of the zone, a zone in which was rarely visited on AK. As far as zone disruption there is a distinct difference between shakerpaging in FG and Grimling Forest VS Plane of Valor/Fire. Never had FG or Grimling zones crash on me either.
If 1-2 people can lag/crash a zone, it's a bit different than a raid full of people lagging/crashing a zone.. in my opinion at least. I agree netcode is still a big issue, although it has come a long way since beta started in january. I went from not being able to keep 1 character connected for more than 10 minutes, to being able to 3-box for hours on end without LDing outside of raids. So I'm still holding out hope that it keeps improving so I can box on raids reliably, eventually.
If a zone crashes and causes disruption it doesn't matter if its 1 or 100 people... the fact is the zone still CRASHED. I personally don't buy into the mob mentality argument that a raid force has any more right to crash a zone/disrupt it then a single group does. Now, is shakerpaging in PoV while people are exping at fiends jerkish behavior? Yes, especially if the zone crashes or you fail and /wipe the group. On the other hand, shakerpaging in some empty zone in the middle of the night that probably 1/2 the players on the server have never even stepped foot in doesn't really harm anyone.
I happen to be in a timezone where it is "off peak" for the US but it is my prime time every night. Shaker paging in POV harmed my experience.
Did you not read the above post? I clearly stated that shakerpaging PoV is jerkish if people are xping. LTR.
As somebody who did that a lot, I can say that PBAoEs with color stuns are an order of magnitude more difficult to pull off, required twice as many characters, (or more) and was much more dangerous. It took several attempts to PBAoE the entire 12 callers worth of mobs, and each fail meant everybody died-- not just a single character with a sword. Normally I kept to pulling one cave at a time because of the risk. Shakerpaging actually makes you wonder why you waste your time using enchanter PBAoEs when you can one button faceroll it instead.
I wasn't implying PBAOEing was easy, just that it lags the crap out of zones. I had fun pbaoeing chardok on p99.
If a zone can't handle a raid force, doing what it needs to do, typically that is a bug somewhere that causes that. Its either the script or some exception that the code will throw. Its usually not the netcode that can't handle NPC swarm type events, its server side. It usually has to do with the fact that every mob needs to have its path calculated at multiple points and the zone simply can't handle the number of requests and so the zone starts to hiccup and mobs would warp back and forth, making it unplayable for anyone else. It was precisely for this reason that mage beaming and sk swarming was nerfed on PC side live in recent years. Too many people were bringing down zones. So, what you're saying is that if you go to a zone and start shakerpaging with no one in it, that's okay. Well, what if someone wants to xp in that zone after you get there? Should anyone be allowed to camp an entire zone? Let me clarify, I have no problem with shakerpaging, PBAEing, swarming, etc. I just have a problem with people overdoing it and the zone stops responding for anyone else.
I'm sure Fungus Grove was a ghost town on AK because it launched with Planes of Power already active... but FG is probably going to be pretty busy when we get Luclin here. I remember people staying there until level 60 killing shrooms. Not to mention the ring camp, the VT shard camp. Basically, if you are spawning 300 mobs in the caller event while there are a bunch of others trying to use the zone as well... Kind of a dick move.
I think between cavedude, haynar, secrets the server side is very strong. In my stress tests locally I can't get my character to LD or zone to crash when I #aggrozone. It only happens if I do this on takp or dev across the net. This tells me the server can handle the calculations just fine. Where i think the issue lies is in the netcode. EQ runs on UDP. By nature it has no out of order and dropped packet correction. SOE made their own library to compensate for this as best they could. This is based on a SWG guide, but the SOE part applies. http://wiki.swganh.org/index.php/SOE_Protocol_Breakdown Since it is pretty much a "hack" on the UDP procol it is bound to have some issue. I compare a server across the net and client on the other end doing #aggrozone or paging to be akin to throwing a bucket of color marbles at the wall expecting them to hit the wall by order of the color spectrum. Secrets understands thie netcode far better than I and can chime in on this description better or differently. But this is how I understand it so far. Aside from this. I stated earlier that the network stability is a minimal reason for me to not sign off on allowing paging.
Thanks for the clarification. On PC side live EQ, it didn't seem to have much to do with the netcode, but rather the inability for the zone server to even send the udp packets in the first place.
If I recall hearing correctly, SOE would span server process across multiple systems. So it could have still been a network issue internally. Fairly transparent to us.
