Hey everyone. I was a long time player on Al'Kabor from 2008-ish to late 2012. I played a shaman named Break and a magician named Kurtis. I was in DC for most of my time on Al'Kabor. I started up a few magicians here when the server first opened, but I hadn't played in years until recently. TL/DR: Pets shouldn't always get you a faction hit. I'd love if this could actually be seen in logs, but I don't have any that prove it. Long version: This post is to try to describe the mechanics related to pets and faction hits as best I can remember. I will preface by saying that I don't think most people will believe that faction hits work the way I'm going to describe. Most posts that I have seen claim the opposite. I could only find scarce evidence that what I am going to say was true. I rarely used the log feature, so I don't have any way to back up my claims other than a conversation I had with Zamiel while we were fighting one of the Praes. I can almost guarantee that it was on the old message board, but obviously that is long gone as well. My claim is that simply sending in a pet was not a guaranteed faction hit. I first noticed this behavior while trying to leach faction during a ring war. I would send in a magician pet, he would cast and attack, and there wouldn't be a faction hit. I think the mechanic probably also contributed to pet pulling. Not always getting a faction hit hurt for ring wars, but it was nice in other places. I used this mechanic to my advantage quite often for farming concillium reports, the slow stick in Chardok, and possibly other places that I am forgetting. The reason it was beneficial was that I would never cast with Kurt. I would still be able to send in the pet for additional DPS and stuns. This way I could add dps while staying non-kos to the mobs in the zone. Anyone fighting Praes should know that a non-kos mage is a godsend. You can simply run him into their room and coth up your party against a wall without aggroing them. So how did the faction mechanic actually work for pets? I gave this a lot of thought because I would still get faction hits on a rare occasion. I think there were a few overlapping mechanics based on your faction standing with the mob, your distance from the mob, the mob's aggro radius, and whether or not you were sitting. Also, if your pet died and a group finished off the mob, I believe you would get faction hits as well (although I don't remember a specific instance of this). For instance, if you were fighting a non-kos mob and standing, you would have to get into melee range at some point during the fight to get a faction hit. Meanwhile, if you were fighting a kos mob while sitting, you would merely need to be in their kos aggro range at some point during the fight. I believe the way the faction and aggro worked also help explain part of why pet pulling worked; ie. that you weren't added to the aggro list until you cast on the creature, got in melee range, or your pet died. I've noticed that this faction mechanic does not work the same way here. You definitely get faction no matter how far you are from the creature that dies. I mentioned before the scant evidence I have to back up my claims. I actually on have two pieces of evidenc. One is a post from a daybreak forum, which I'm not sure is accurate to our era, and the other is my aforementioned conversation with Zamiel: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/has-it-occured-to-anyone-to-faction.200406/ "See, I don't have that option right now. I'm playing a Necromancer. The best I can do is get buffed in lobby, make sure I have steadfast and flameskin, then go pull messes of mobs in dranik's scar with a quick-casting dot and let them kill themselves on me while my pet helps. If I don't get that dot in, I don't get faction. If I pull a swarm, I can't guarantee I'll channel my pbae nuke before some or most of them die to the ds. If my pet kills them before I can damage them (the ds doesn't count), I don't get faction." The conversation had him telling me that he got a faction hit only sending in a pet during a Prae fight (pretty damning to my case). Then, I told him that Rysia said it was actually due to him cothing a character that got banished during the fight (less damning). Unfortunately, I was not playing my magician during the fight. This is one of like 3 logs that I found on my old computer. I actually had quite the obsession with the Praes because I thought maybe they had a secret quest due to all the stories they would give to text triggers. Anyway, this post was a bit longer than I anticipated. I hope someone can dig up some old logs where they used a pet exclusively to try to faction. Edit... I just realized something about using a pet for faction. I would wager that most people doing this would be in a place like Droga where all the mobs would be kos and very close to you. They wouldn't attack you because they are green, but they would still fit into one of the categories I listed above. Therefore, most people would just assume they automatically get faction for sending in a pet. This would also explain another thread I saw where people were complaining about pets running at a sitting caster not feeling correct. They shouldn't be aggro to the owner until the owner is in melee range or casted on them.
Yeah good to see you, Break! A few folks from that old DC crew have headed to Destiny, like Tulu and I. If you see me on I’m Drepidus, Stanton here - poor Cillipis is only level 10 or something.
Hey Tuluvien and Cillipus. I saw some other threads with some old DC people. Good to see you guys still around. I'm still trying to figure out my main crew. I've got Heat, Cinder, and Coth as level 20 magicians. I've also got a trio at levels 6 and 7 of Mind, Mend, and Bomb who are enchanter, cleric, and wiz. I'm not really planning to be on much other than the occasional morning before work or when my fiance is out of town. Maybe I'll eventually get up to raiding level.
How pet pulling worked was explained by a Sony developer. It had to do with the pet's level and the NPC call for help logic, not faction. I can say that on Live right now, if you send in pets to mobs you will certainly get on their hate list and receive faction hits. I did some searching on this however, and I did find a few (just these) comments that support your claim: [Wed Nov 28 22:15:21 2001] Gozzrem has been slain by Shiznettobam! [Wed Nov 28 22:15:46 2001] Velandra tells the guild, 'no faction hits if yer just sending pet apparently' [Thu May 31 22:04:48 2007] Taien tells the guild, 'what does katta drop? and what is the faction hit?' [Thu May 31 22:05:30 2007] Lithi tells the guild, 'If we pet tank her, we can avoid the faction hit )' [Thu Sep 13 21:54:47 2007] Trooper Sardek has been slain by Kusobabaa! [Thu Sep 13 21:55:02 2007] Magnu tells the guild, 'interesting' [Thu Sep 13 21:55:10 2007] Magnu tells the guild, 'using just the pet doesn't get me any faction hits' and also one that (kind of) disputes it: [Wed Jun 20 18:06:45 2012] Dicing tells alliance:2, 'anyone know for sure if you let pet do 100% dmg if you get only a small portion of a FACTION hit or full faction hit?' [Wed Jun 20 18:06:55 2012] Dicing tells alliance:2, 'i know exp is reduced' [Wed Jun 20 18:07:09 2012] Pestoso tells alliance:2, 'you get the same faction hit' [Wed Jun 20 18:07:14 2012] Dicing tells alliance:2, 'thanks!' [Wed Jun 20 18:07:37 2012] Lanceavvar tells alliance:2, 'XP reduced to 30&PCT; (I think) and full faction hit' I also checked my druid log when I was using a charm pet to kill mobs in LOIO for the IVA ring. There I didn't care about exp so I didn't bother to damage the NPCs. I was getting faction hits there, even well outside of melee range. If the solo caster did not get on the NPC's hate list, then the corpse would simply poof after the pet killed it, and that would be very noticeable, so I extremely doubt that occurred much if at all. This sounds like some sort of bug that may have been fixed long ago, because I can't find anything online about this or in patch notes. There was however an issue in the early PoP era where the Sony developers mentioned that hate lists had a limit as to the number of people that could be on it, and that was causing aggro issues so they enlarged it.
I'm glad to see there are logs of people saying that simply sending in a pet doesn't hit faction. I think it that particular mechanic is generally pretty hard to notice for a lot of the reasons I mentioned. People assumed it worked one way when it mostly worked that way because they were kos and close enough that they would have aggroed the mob if they were low enough level or sitting. An example of this was a patch note I saw about mob push and gating. We assume it happens for one reason, but in certain instances you can see it didn't. You killing sarnaks (I'm assuming) in LOIO makes me think you fell into the KOS and close enough that they would have attacked you but didn't based on level. Or they would have attacked you but didn't because they were already engaged with your pet by the time you got into auto attack range. It may also be a difference between charm pets and summoned pets. I don't think this was a long hate list issue. As I mentioned, I used this in Chardok to farm a couple of slow sticks. When I did that, it was just the Shaman/Magician duo. I also used it for hundreds of mobs in Seru when a group of 4-5 was farming reports.
Could it be that lvl55+ mobs don't poof if some player is on agro and does 1pt dmg? Most of examples you gave of no faction seem to be for higher level mobs Also yes charm pet agro is always different to summoned pets. You can run a summoned pet through any areas without agro, but charmed pet will get agro next to kos mobs as if it was a player of the same level as pet.
I actually didn't notice Torven's point about corpses poofing until today. All of the examples I provided used at least a second character who had aggro. I do agree that corpses disappearing after sending in a pet to slaughter low level mobs would have been noticed and remembered. I wonder if there was another check for owners when it came to exp and corpses poofing rather than just a hatelist check.
There is just always going to be quirky edge-case stuff that won't be replicated because we don't have a server to observe anymore. I'm quite sure there are things wrong or missing with our hate model. Also Sony of course changed things over the years and patch notes during PoP mentioned significant hatelist changes. But we can't implement things without having a good idea about how it should work. I'm willing to look for things if we can think up things to look for to try and figure this out of course. For all we know Sony put in some kind of delay to ignore pet owners for a brief period to prevent the sit issue. Could be any number of things.
It wasn't my intention to stir the pot on this again, but I'm glad you are always open to changing things. I respect the decision made here and understand why it likely will never be changed. I just thought the patch notes from Rashere provide a logical reason for this particular mechanic that I remember. It could also explain why people form the sitting pet aggro thread remember that mechanic differently as well. I think what we really need is for someone to get a job over at [redacted] and do a little snooping to see if there is some old source code repo. Surely, there is some coding wiz somewhere who got an early retirement and loves classic EQ.
From what developer interviews have said on youtube, they did not have proper version control or backups for some reason, and the old old source is lost. That's part of the reason that they can't make true era-accurate progression servers.
Didn't they implement some zones(PoM and Grimling) on progression servers using AK's code and DB? Seems like I remember reading that somewhere.
They should still have AK's source. I believe they are using AK's source and data to reverse some things for TLPs. They don't make more accurate servers simply because of the amount of work to do so and the userbase over there simply doesn't want it.
Makes sense, I suppose. If forced to choose, I'd rather play on a good server than an AKurate one (in terms of mechanics, class balance, encounter tuning, bugs, user interface, etc.). And it sure seems easier to dev "good" from scratch than to reverse engineer "AKurate."
