Ringwar post mortem - post thoughts here

[Nuggie]

that map is slightly inaccurate in that 8 spawn at spawn location #5(spires). not 6. atleast on P99.

[Sorn]

Did anyone have trouble with desyncing in the zone?

[Pan]

Originally Posted by Nuggie [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

that map is slightly inaccurate in that 8 spawn at spawn location #5. not 6. atleast on P99.

The way I understand the map (and from what I remember from live) the formations don't necessarily line up with the spawn locations. I think it's random what can pop where. But I might be misremembering. I didn't see the numbers on the map and associated with the formations as being 1:1 - but rather that the formations were just examples of what the spawns could look like - anywhere.

[dafier]

I've not done this in beta, but I did do it on live.

The success we had, from what I remember was NOT to ever touch or engage the giant spearmen.

From what I read, it looks like people were in range of them or engaging. Excuse me if I miss read.

Anyway, there are only 3 or 4 locations in which you need multiple groups. Virtual lines are drawn in which Tanks stand out front in order to engage the giants. NEVER move past the tanks/invisible lines.

Pets, like mage and necro can off tank some adds (chain pets if needed) for CC purpose.

As far as I remember they only hit for 200s on the 3rd wave. So if you are lucky to have 3 or 4 mage pets on 1 of the adds, it should be OK until the tanks/groups can focus it down.

All of this is great information. And, the number one thing I think would help this to be a success other than fixing the giants falling through the earth is making sure all Coldain attack as they should.

[Pan]

Originally Posted by dafier [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I've not done this in beta, but I did do it on live.

The success we had, from what I remember was NOT to ever touch or engage the giant spearmen.

The spearmen were a non factor. I've seen it done both ways. With the force we had, I wanted to get them out of the equation early. They summon if you get too close - and we had pets loose following people running around. So we popped them during the first wave without consequence.

If we were trying it with 30 people and a crack force, we'd give them a wide berth. As it was, I'm glad we knocked them out early.

Originally Posted by dafier [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Pets, like mage and necro can off tank some adds (chain pets if needed) for CC purpose.

Yeah, the pets were useful today. But they didn't work well as CC b/c the giants kept moving even when engaged a lot of the time. It's really strange. Sometimes they stopped. Sometimes they didn't. And it didn't seem to matter where on the map they were (read how close they were either to Thurg or their spawn point).

It's like they were disinterested. And I swear the dwarves were on giant faction half the time - or at least uninterested in defending their city.

[Daldaen]

Yea the largest issue I had was the Giants not stopping when properly engaged and having to spend half my time worrying about getting the Giants that fell under the world handled.

If they could fix both of those issues it would be grand, but I believe they are both rather annoying ones to code. That fall through the world bug has existed for a long time on P99.

[bktroost]

Sure but they HAD to intentionally code that bit about giants ignoring people. Mobs naturally prioritize hate. Why wouldn't they just trigger rushing to thurg as a mob on their hate list. It doesn't generate aggro, but if there is nothing else on the hate list they will run towards it.

It looked like they were spamming that trigger to the top of the hate list in waves or cued on when they are initially engaged to pulse to the top every X seconds. It seems like a lot more coding to do what it is CURRENTLY doing.

But of course it depends on how they have it coded. All I'm saying is that it seems rather intentional.

[Sorn]

Originally Posted by bktroost [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Sure but they HAD to intentionally code that bit about giants ignoring people. Mobs naturally prioritize hate. Why wouldn't they just trigger rushing to thurg as a mob on their hate list. It doesn't generate aggro, but if there is nothing else on the hate list they will run towards it.

It looked like they were spamming that trigger to the top of the hate list in waves or cued on when they are initially engaged to pulse to the top every X seconds. It seems like a lot more coding to do what it is CURRENTLY doing.

But of course it depends on how they have it coded. All I'm saying is that it seems rather intentional.

In defense of the devs, code is extremely counter-intuitive just because it's so logical and conflicts in formulas can produce unexpected results. Add to that the fact that several people have had their hands in it, all with different styles of coding, and 90% of debugging is just finding the problem spot in the pages and pages of code in the first place...it probably wasn't intentional.

I'm thinking what's really happening with the code is that the behavior of the giants (running to a trigger point when they have no one in arm's reach to attack) is actually unique in the game, and in programming that, something about it is conflicting with the standard behavior of mobs (stopping when they don't have anyone to kill and then pathing wherever). It's possible the devs had to do the giants from scratch and the lack of consistency is the issue.

The behavior is similar to the orc runner in BBM, but I'm sure there are differences. The orc runner will jump off its path to attack. In a chaotic ring war I'm sure there's a lot of conflict in the code, which is why we have so many problems. It'll take a lot of tests to figure it out since there were really only a few tests on beta for this event.

[Kender]

on live we used to have a couple of dedicated spearmen groups who killed them all as early as possible just so they werent and issue

[Haynar]

Found two issues that can cause mobs to fall below world. Were they the problem? Dunno. Hope they patch soon.

H