Blasted spawn system is ****NO**** fun. FIX IT NOW!

[CallakDW]

To truly fix it they would have to do a complete, I think it is server but I could be wrong, re-write. Something that is not going to happen any time soon. Or maybe it is a data base re-write, I am not sure.

Or mabe it just needs money spent on proper hardware as mentioned above?

[Deth]

That would be a temporary fix. Because as more players come on board more and more memory would be used. At least the way I understand it.

[Tryagain]

No they got 9 million subs based off a name and having money from said name to pay the people to work on other things. Myself I would rather have a nitch game like horizons then a game 9 million people play and whine about.

whining happens in HZ just as much as any other game. Wait till Vitrium starts fixing the exploits that A LOT of HZ players use. Holy bananna's bat man there will be more whining than any over powered hunter rant that we see in WoW on a regular basis. Did you miss the wholesale whining and B***h slapping that was going on when Tulga folded ? Or the great arguments that happen in market place chat ?

This spawn system is the topic of the thread. Not how everyone wants HZ to remain their own little cozy sandbox. Mind you that sand box can remain relatively spacious even with a revamp of said spawn system which does suck to high heaven and back. It seems most people are more concerned with keeping the game population free than Vitrium actually being able to afford keeping the game up.

btw Ophelea umm this spawn system has been in place since the merge. it is known that it was put into place due to server load issues and the limits on the hardware they were able to afford in a lease. To alleviate this problem they will either need new servers and infrastructure akin to what AE had under Verio which won't happen. Or the games underlying engines all of them need to be revamped.

a spawning system thats actually challenging won't turn Horizons from a niche game to a block buster. it will take a lot more than that. So I wouldn't worry to much.

[Ophelea]

Gah, I got caught up recovering from a flu/getting out a promised review to a vendor and didn't check back like I'd intended.

The whole issue with "no spawns then pop" is something that was only determined days before the sale.

Way back in the dawn of time when the database fields were built there were two files for each monster - I don't mean monster type - I mean monster SPAWN. This could be the same monster that spawns in areas a, b and c in quantities of 20 but is spawning in area x in a quantity of 4 only. OR, it could be a monster that spawns in rotation in areas d, f and j. Horizons is interesting that way.

Also...there was a designer who, instead of building larger areas with multiple monsters would put a single monster on a smaller leash. So, in a Valley that could hold say 5 golems in the Valley, you'd get 3 golems but in very restricted paths.


NOW...these two fields had NO documentation. Like back to pre-black days. None, nada zip. But, they had numbers in them. And the numbers were always the same - X, X. Say, 60, 60. (They could be other numbers but we'll go with that.)

NOW....

Field one is the amount of time from when a player enters an area for the minimum number of monsters assigned to that area to spawn.

Field two is the maximum time until the FULL spawn occurs.


Assuming multiple types of monsters with different spawn rates you should get lots of different monsters from beginning to end.

Instead you get nothing then - min/max all at once.

Why did this change after merge? Because the monster spawns were moved and instead of being broad swaths of monsters (the 5 per Valley example) you got small leashes with single monsters...so pops.

Many creatures, dragons in flight in particular, can enter a spawn zone and leave before the minimum time is ever reached.


OK, so no documentation. Smeglor figures this out. You can't simply mass jumble the numbers. It becomes incumbent upon Amon, Misanthrope and Dyn to touch every monster as they created/fixed content and updated tiers.

That stopped about 10 days after the whole mess was even figured out.

Today, the person who creates the content, writes the quests and fixes the content bugs ALSO has to touch the monsters.


VERY SLOW PROCESS.

[CallakDW]

Very interesting. Is VI listening?

Starting with the bligted areas is IMO the best beginning step, since they seem to be the most consentrated at this time.

[Ophelea]

Very interesting. Is VI listening?

Starting with the bligted areas is IMO the best beginning step, since they seem to be the most consentrated at this time.

Umm...Amon IS VI.

Remember, he can build content and fix everything he touches.

Or he can fix.

And no new content.



Ya'll gotta lower yer expectations to that of a itty bitty dev team for a leetle game.

Because the aforementioned dev made the spawns - stupidly - each one counts as ONE. This means there are 1000's if not 10,000+ to fix. Each by HAND. And they have to be balanced with every other monster in that zone...

And if that spawn is across multiple zones, then all of those zones have to be balanced, too.

Things are NEVER as simple as they appear at first glance or it would all be fixed.

[velveeta]

call, first off, let me say i mean no disrespect, i just really don't know how to put my words together more....politely.

i am really sorry you are not having fun. i honestly do not see the prob, but i admit i am not as experienced as most of you guys. horizons runs pretty much the same as the other games i have played, tho. i guess blight had been shutdown for change you speak of, cause i haven't noticed a change from tulga to vi in the spawning system.
maybe the prob isn't the game, maybe its you? have you tried to start a new character? maybe a biped? yes you know where everything is, but you will need to learn how to use your new skills. i know when i switched to a hatchie from a saris, it was a totally different experience. i still have a long way to go before vel is uber of ubers, but when i do - mourningwood is ready to provide me which some new fun and new experiences.

it just sounds like to me, you are ready to go. not that i want to send away paying players, but a game is supposed to be fun, especially if you are paying for it, and you are not having fun. don't let other peeps keep you somewhere you don't want to be.
(here's the prolly rude part) and to be honest, i am kinda tired of peeps whining about vi and their 'slow' progress. vi is showing a much more open and communicative relationship than even tulga. all things that can be done will be done in time. things that can't be done will be said to be so. i hope anything that changes this game will never happen. i like horizons, i like its crafting system, i like its combat system. sure it would be nice if some things are added to the game, but i am not interested in any major changes - and let's be honest, that's what you are pissing for.
at the risk of sounding like the ugly american i am, put up or shut up. if you don't like it, leave.

[Vermithraxx]

i am really sorry you are not having fun. i honestly do not see the prob, but i admit i am not as experienced as most of you guys. horizons runs pretty much the same as the other games i have played, tho.

ROFL, glad we're in the rant section of the board. So, this game runs the same as others? How many MMOs have you played? WoW and EQ2 have already been mentioned...

maybe the prob isn't the game, maybe its you?

No, the problem is well and widely known, even if you have no idea what we're talking about.

---------------------------------------------------

Getting back to the actual thread:


CallaDW said:
They didn't get 9 MILLION subscribers by twiddling their thumbs. They made a good game, not a nitch game.


Ya know, I've been thinking about this... CallaDW, we're screwed, time to get used to it.
I'm counting this game as WYSIWYG (What you see is all you're ever gonna get!)
Ophelea's explanation finally convinced me.
---------------------
Quick story: I'm a programmer, have been for 34 years. For ten years I was working for a major retail corp. (May Co. for anybody that remember them). Our credit card transaction DB was well over a million line per day, I guesstimate 100,000 page of COBOL base code (if you printed it VERY small), JCL packed so tight we were running out of designations, etc. You get the idea.

Having been in the business since punch-card days, some of their code had been written by some VERY old timers, and the company didn't decide to standardize how they wanted their code written until late into the game.

We were NOT allowed to use the GOTO command, for instance. Everything was to be controlled by GOSUBs only. One day I get an assignment to add a few new features to a program, crack it open, only to find the programmer who'd written it 2 decades before had been smokin' da good stuff, and loved GOTOs. I look one look at the 200+ pages of code, counted over 100 GOTOs... figured out where my data segment needed to be inserted and got out.
-------------------------------------

Horizons (the entire game) reminds me of that. Tulga/Virtrium inherited a piece of ill-coded, spaghetti twisted, piece of code/database design. What can you do? You either shut the entire thing down and re-write it from the base code up, learning from the mistakes of the past (This would be known as Horizons 2), or you figure out where you can make the occasional change safely, and tiptoe away, hoping it's not going to crash the moment you look away.

And that quote from above about 9 million subscribers? EQ2 got those subscribers by learning from the mistakes of EQ1. Every Alternate Advancement (AA) item that was a hole-patch in EQ1 showed up in EQ2 as a base feature from the start. Add a new graphic/server/spawn system on top of a fully evolved EQ1 system, and of course they had it made.

Personally, I like the crafting system (promptly stolen by EQ2), hate the spawn system (as we've been bemoaning), and will be amazed (and impressed) if they can get the plot reclaim done before year's end.

[velveeta]

vanguard (a little), rubies of eventide, wow, some very small games you prolly never heard of.....

like i said, it all seems the same to me.....

but regardless of the system faults, my original comments stand. if, for whatever reason, you aren't having fun here, move on. no one should spend hard earned cash just to tour plots one may have worked on. take lots of screenshots and move on to the next one.

and the one after that, when something changes there, and so on and so on.
if you don't like the combat system, or the craft system, or the devs, or the community, go find one that suits you.

not trying to be harsh, just realistic. when blight closed, i spent some time looking into other games. horizons was the one i want, and i was playing nothing even remotely big (just some web based games i still play at work when i can't play horizons) until it came back. nothing else is horizons and i love and appreciate that fact. if i didn't, i would be moving on.

[CallakDW]

i am really sorry you are not having fun. i honestly do not see the prob, but i admit i am not as experienced as most of you guys. horizons runs pretty much the same as the other games i have played, tho. i guess blight had been shutdown for change you speak of, cause i haven't noticed a change from tulga to vi in the spawning system.

The change didn't occur between the change from tulga to VI, it took place after the merge. And I don't believe it took place as part of the merge. What happened is after the merge, players were having problems finding anything to fight. My percieved reason for this is that they made the land too big for their hardware to handle. Shortly after that, they gimped the mob system to work the way it does now so the hardware could manage it.

maybe the prob isn't the game, maybe its you?

No, I don't think so. I don't have this problem in other RPGs I've played or in WoW. Besides this, look around, I'm not the only one complaining here about the problem. I'm just doing it more loudly than the others.

have you tried to start a new character? maybe a biped? yes you know where everything is, but you will need to learn how to use your new skills. i know when i switched to a hatchie from a saris, it was a totally different experience. i still have a long way to go before vel is uber of ubers, but when i do - mourningwood is ready to provide me which some new fun and new experiences.

My charactor list is actually 1 or 2 over what I'm paying for right now, simply because they were created before the new restrictions were put in place. I have 7 charactors and I play them quite often. They suffer the same problems, though it's a little bit easier because the lower level mobs dont seem to be as tightly packed as the high level blight area mobs.

it just sounds like to me, you are ready to go. not that i want to send away paying players, but a game is supposed to be fun, especially if you are paying for it, and you are not having fun. don't let other peeps keep you somewhere you don't want to be.

I've mentioned that I (somewhat) enjoy the crafting, but I don't allways feel like crafting, then I get depressed when I look for a challenge in a fight. Honetly, comments like might make me want to go though.

(here's the prolly rude part) and to be honest, i am kinda tired of peeps whining about vi and their 'slow' progress. vi is showing a much more open and communicative relationship than even tulga. all things that can be done will be done in time. things that can't be done will be said to be so. i hope anything that changes this game will never happen. i like horizons, i like its crafting system, i like its combat system. sure it would be nice if some things are added to the game, but i am not interested in any major changes - and let's be honest, that's what you are pissing for.
at the risk of sounding like the ugly american i am, put up or shut up. if you don't like it, leave.

I asked if VI was listening. I have no way of knowing if VI even knows about what Ophelea is talking about. Sometimes I forget the who's who as well. As Ophelea said, Amon is part of VI, so aparently yes VI knows about it if he does, and hopefully they are improoving on it.

As for me leaving, I don't know. Wouldn't be the first time, but the last time I left it was because of this same spawn problem, I would prefer they fix it rather than me getting sick of it again and having to leave again. I'm here because of my love for dragons, and to some extent my like of the crafting system. But the game is unbalanced as far as adventure vs crafting. I honestly will say I may soon completely tire of it and leave (again) especially if people like you are encouraging it.

Ok, now my thoughts on a possible solution to the spawn issue:
First choice would obviously be ever presant mobs, the way it was pre merge, but it sounds like everyone seems to think that no one is going to bother putting money into the servers needed to do this.

Second might be more acceptable.
My problem is not even with a nice even slow spawn so much as with things appearing suddenly close enough to agro you before you can notice them and react. The settings Ophelea speaks of may help this a bit, but not solve it. What I'm thinking is mabe two zones are needed, a spawn zone and an inner non spawn zone, creating a donut around the player where monsters can spawn (preferably out of sight). This way they are not allowed to spawn within agro range, but may wander into range, and time is available to manuver a current combatant to a safer location or flee the current fight before being "ganked". This would also allow areas to be cleared untill the player(s) passed. Clearing is somthing of a problem in HZ at times. Mobs have a habit of instantaniously respawning a few moments after they are killed in an area. This is kind of dumb. When you kill somthing and secure an area, it should remain safe unless somthing wanders or patrolls in. This is more acceptable than what currently happens.

[Shian]

Alright, I'm looking for someone who has seen this spawn system before it was "broken" Is it like Saga of Ryzom where there were so many mobs in the world that you had to learn the paths to aviod getting squished into nothing? Or was it... something else?

Maybe like EQ2 where creatures had thier own sections of the map and they were just "there" and loaded almost instantly on your screen? Or maybe more like now where if you were going at a certain speed, the enemies would not load instantly and could possibly bypass, but if you were going slow, they would load faster?

[Pharcellus]

Back in the early days, there were no spawns without mobs when you first came upon them. There were always at least a few in the spawn, milling around. More would pop once you killed the existing ones and, to my recollection, they would not despawn if you left for a while and came back.

HOWEVER, in those days, there were a lot of people running around Istaria, and it was rare to encounter a mob spawn which didn't have someone at least nearby, if not in it. Still I remember plenty of mob spawns which, at certain times of the night, were quite deserted of players, but there were still mobs spawned and milling around in them.

All of this changed with the merge. It is apparent, because of a reduction in hardware capacity, that they chose to limit spawns to only be around when players were, and long enough to bother, in order to conserve resources.

Horizons was not very well designed from the ground up. It was a brute-force-slap-it-together-to-ship-it effort, because Atari was making the calls late in the game. It was a disaster from the perspective of good design, but there is just no known way to get around the "good-fast-cheap, pick any two" rule. I would venture a notion that they couldn't even get the "two"; it certainly wasn't "cheap", and "good" is dubious, but it most certainly was "fast" towards the end. They crammed as much as they could of what should have taken another year plus of development into the final 6 months, and it shipped.

ANYWAY, yeah, the spawn system has serious issues. Supposedly, it is very advanced in its capability. The problem is that the entire system a) still isn't very well documented, and b) is designed to be so cumbersome, that even small changes require a ridiculous amount of time to effect. There's something to be said for tool/utility development in complex applications.

The upshot? Either get used to the way it is, and pray that someone will come along and fix it up good eventually, or lose hope and play another game. Losing hope is OK. I did once already. Don't really have much hope at this point even still. I'll enjoy what I can out of it until it (or the company) pisses me off beyond my desire to stay any longer, then I'll leave again. This time around, I don't have any "addictive" pathology towards the game, so I expect that it will be quite easy to encounter that last straw again. We will see, though.

[CallakDW]

Alright, I'm looking for someone who has seen this spawn system before it was "broken" Is it like Saga of Ryzom where there were so many mobs in the world that you had to learn the paths to aviod getting squished into nothing? Or was it... something else?

Maybe like EQ2 where creatures had thier own sections of the map and they were just "there" and loaded almost instantly on your screen? Or maybe more like now where if you were going at a certain speed, the enemies would not load instantly and could possibly bypass, but if you were going slow, they would load faster?

I was here before it was "broken". I haven't played any of your mentioned games, but I will state it was like how WoW spawning allways worked. They are milling around even before you get there, you fought and killed them then went searching for somthing else in the area. There were also a few patrolls that wandered on paths between towns, very mean ones I might add, but I wouldn't say they were so numorous as to be unavoidable.

[Sigi]

There were also a few patrolls that wandered on paths between towns, very mean ones I might add, but I wouldn't say they were so numorous as to be unavoidable.

Oooh, I loved (hated ) those little groups of undead that would creep up on you while chopping elm. Watch your back!!

[Fratricide]

I truly think that all of you are mistaken when the mob spawn change occurred. I don't remember the exact dates.. but some of the mob spawn was changed well before the merge and was further adjusted after words... The first mob spawn change occurred about 5 months or so before the merge... There were a few folks complaining that mobs were spawning as Grey blobs before they came to full fruition.. so some Bright folks said that they should make the client not able to see the mob till they are fully able to be rendered by the client PC... Well.. that was the first change that lead us to where we are now.

The second change was to improve server performance I believe and yes.. that was done after the merge.. if my recollection is good... things get a bit fuzzy after 2 years or so... it was changed a tad to make it so that the Named mobs would be spawned and running amok most of the time, to all the time for some of them.. of course with their death timers, and then start spawning the remainder of the blighters after folks get within a certain range of the spawn area...

The problem I see isn't the fact that the mobs wait until you get to the area.. it is they are not starting to spawn when you get within the initial spawn range of the mob area... There should be allowances for no mobs to be in a spawn field if there are no PC's running around there... but the mobs should spawn when you are within a reasonable distance away from that same area..

[Ophelea]

Frat,

The problem you are describing is the timer issues. 60, 60 = 60 seconds, 60 seconds.

So you enter the area and it takes a FULL MINUTE for the pop to occur. By then you've either left of boredom or entered another spawn zone (because they're all so tiny now).

[CallakDW]

You know, if each mob has to be touched independantly, what I don't understand is why somthing like SQL scripts can't be made to query and mass modify creatures by sector and type. THis just blows my mind. I work in computer programming in a very large retail store chain. We just recently implemented a centralized time and attendance system that manages several thousands (possibly millions) of employees. More often than not if there is some mass change that has to take place, we develope and run an SQL script to make the change on a large scale. So why is it I allways hear that this or that in Horizons has to be touched independantly? There must be a flag type in the system that says what kind of MOB it is, and I know there's got to be one for location. Can't these be queried?

[Pharcellus]

Because, in the real world of programming, where you can take the time to design it right, you can make it so that things that would normally make sense to do can be done like that.

In the world of *squeeze hard, pinch it out yesterday* game development, bad decisions and poor design end up making those kinds of things difficult, if not completely unfeasible. Even worse, the people that designed and developed the core of the system didn't document it at all, they weren't working from a codified design specification, and they are LONG gone now.

The result is what you have in Horizons. A giant black box with few orifices to peer into to see how it works, and some pretty scary things inside that you don't want to go poking at without causing an explosion of gears, shafts, and other parts, flying out at you as the whole thing grinds to a rather permanent halt.

[CallakDW]

The result is what you have in Horizons. A giant black box with few orifices to peer into to see how it works, and some pretty scary things inside that you don't want to go poking at without causing an explosion of gears, shafts, and other parts, flying out at you as the whole thing grinds to a rather permanent halt.

Heh, I've poked at one or two black boxes in my time and got them to do what was needed. This is what a development server is for, poke it and see what you break, you break somthing you cant fix, you dump production back to developement and try again, eventually it should be possible to see where things conect and design a query to do anything you want with it, even if it wasn't documented- Believe me, I've done a bit of this myself.

As far as how HZ is designed, I have no idea what kind of DB it uses, mabe you can't even query the thing? Mabe it isn't compatible with SQL? This seems like it would be idiocy, but oh, that's right HZ turned out a nitch game not a big money maker didn't it?

Besides all this, you wouldn't take so long to do this stuff if you had queries and tools to modify mass amounts of data.

[gopher65]

I still say we'd all be happier if someone came along and 'just' dumped 40 million into building Horizons2 from scratch.

Any takers? I have *digs around in pockets and counts* a dollar 45... that's Canadian though. So more like $1.50 US. That's close. Only $39999998.50 left to go!