Death Point Eliminator Token

[Creme]

Well, we had a death on Chaos this morning due to the water not loading properly situation.

If the player were to turn in a ticket, probably by the time the ticket got reviewed and forwarded to the live team, his death point could already be gone.

So, my suggestion is that if a death point has been gained through a known issue (and not Leroy Jenkins-type behavior), i.e., water loading bug, that a token be placed in the characters inventory upon review of his ticket/screenshots/logs, that is attuned and will remove at any point in the future upon use, 1 death point. No casting delay or delay should be attached to said "token".

Since the death point for the occurrence itself will likely be gone, and the coin expended and time spent in eating; there's no way to recover that...the coin yes, but the downtime, no.

So I propose some method of crediting the player in these types of situations. If he gets the token quickly enough, he can use it to remove the death point (if he still has it), if more time has passed, he has the token to remove a legitimate deathpoint, to "trade" for the one he incurred through gameplay issues.

I saw some players suggest that he watch his breather bar or watch the coastline, but this is not always easily done.

I have intermittent water myself and it's very peculiar. Sometimes it doesn't load until I turn to a certain angle. Then suddenly I'm way underwater; too far to wade back to shore. I do try to watch coastlines, but it is almost impossible to know where the coastline is on the island with gems next to ice island. I have great difficulty there.

[Charys Stormchild]

I like this idea a lot. One of the dragons in my guild had this happen when he was testing out fishing...he was only doing this to see if he could help me with confectioner resources. After dying from fishing he went and got me a ton of star anise

Have to say that giving dragons the ability to gather certain organic resources was a great idea...had a very happy friend wading through the minnows near Sslanis the other day trying to fish...he succeeded, hehe.

But since dragons have to go into the water to fish then the non-loading water is a problem and does incur accidental death points, a DP token would be a good solution.

[Zexoin]

Well, maybe they could slow down the breath timer when fishing. Or allow us to fish at the same range as bipeds ?

[Favoran]

I haven't tried my claw at fishing yet... I didn't know you had to actually be in the water to do it! On the bright side, when I need air I can always fly out...

Death by drowning isn't an accident; it's a very intentional part of the game. But death by not-loaded water... there's not much that can really be done to stop that. I think that those who gain a DP through such methods should get some sort of reimbursement. I like the idea of a token (or something) to completely remove a DP, but as has been pointed out already it may take time to procure such a token (or something). Not to mention the fact that this could be abused; say someone got into the habit of drowning quite often, and gets a token for it even though they had the water loaded the whole time. Is there any way to track whether someone actually drowned by accident, so you won't have someone who chooses to just load up on these tokens and use them whenever they have a ton of DPs?

[Steelclaw]

I feel that asking CSRs to manually compensate every player who gets a death point by accidental drowning is asking a bit much of them. Reviewing logs and screenshots is very time consuming, and to be asked to do that on a daily basis would draw them away from more important tickets.

How about reducing the death point timer by 1 death point's worth of time upon drowning?

That would resolve the death point issue (well, you'd still get a penalty if your DP count was > 1) while preserving the travel limitations imposed by water and some types of lava.

A possible downside I see to that is people diving off into the water to drown and escape a death point from combat. That may not be as big a deal as it seems -- mobs will happily follow a player into the water and continue to beat the crap out of them. Also remember that a drowning player moves very slowly. I think between those two factors, it makes drowning to escape a death point no more effective than some combination of flying away, running away, and/or recalling.

[Creme]

I feel that asking CSRs to manually compensate every player who gets a death point by accidental drowning is asking a bit much of them.

I'm not saying that accidental drowning should be compensated, only water loading issues.

If someone submits a screenshot of them lying in the water underneath the ice bridge from IoI to IoF, I'd not expect reimbursement; and I would think that would only require enough time to open the screenshot to make a judgment call. But there could be situations that would be more complicated.

I think to make a blanket forced recall and then credit of a death point if death is due to drowning would work, if it seems as though too much time would be spent in crediting that type of death (bug death).

However, a "DP Eliminator" token would be useful for any gameplay issue related death--and I'm not talking about lag death; but there have been other things that have occurred where death has resulted unfairly, i.e. massive delay after one restart where specials didn't fire until some hours after the game had come up, and mob specials kept firing well after the mob was long dead. Those types of "special" incidents could justify some means of death point compensation.

[Steelclaw]

... massive delay after one restart where specials didn't fire until some hours after the game had come up, and mob specials kept firing well after the mob was long dead. Those types of "special" incidents could justify some means of death point compensation.

That sounds like a really special case!

[Creme]

It was pretty special

[Steelclaw]

How about reducing the death point timer by 1 death point's worth of time upon drowning?

After some thought, I rescind that suggestion.

My understanding is that drowning and death by drowning are initiated on the client side. That means it would be possible for someone to send an "I've died by drowning!" message to the server, die, and get credited for their death point -- any time, nowhere near water, such as in the middle of a losing battle. No, that doesn't sound desirable.

Maybe a better thing to do is set speed and flight speed to 0 and inhibit flight when the breath timer runs out. That should allow the player to recall without dying and without proceeding past the barrier set by the water.

[gopher65]

It isn't the fact that water causes death that bothers me, its the bugs associated with water loading that causes me pain. Sometimes my water simply doesn't load. Sometimes when it doesn't load I still drown (not lag or slow rendering. I can sit there dead for 10 minutes and it won't load).

Normally when that happens I notice that my speed is reduced, and I look at my map and figure out where the water's edge is. Sometimes though the water doesn't load, and the drowning action doesn't load either. In some places the ground doesn't change texture at the water's edge (the beach is sandy, and so is the underwater part), so you can't tell what's underwater and what's above ground. Then *poof*, for no apparent reason, entirely at random, the water will load. It could be seconds after you run into the water, and it could be hours. Completely random. Then you die, unless by happenstance you happen to be right by the edge.

I hate this bug. It was introduced in one of the patches right before the EII thingie, and it's never been fixed.

And I'll say again: When I first encountered this bug I was working on a newly formatted harddrive, in a new partition with nothing but HZ on it, on a fresh install, with no mods to the game. So this isn't a self inflicted bug, no matter what a few self-righteous people like to claim. It has something to do with low viewdistances. It doesn't happen if your viewdistance is above ~25% of max. (I therefor don't see this bug on my new computer)

[Favoran]

I'm not sure what makes the water load slowly like it does, but I know we used to have that problem but since we reformatted the hard-drive on this computer the water's loaded annoyingly fast.

I miss being able to run in the ocean...