Got "aggro bugs?" Post them here!

[Trust]

Well there's Distract FoewhichI think is a Warrior ability, and Clerics have Protectorate and Defend Other, not sure of any others...

Just ran a test in the Marble with Malachite, a lvl 90 dragon guildmate.I am rated at 143 as a lvl 100 Ranger.

She was quarrying Marble, minding her own buisness. Doing her own thing.
We were not grouped.I was proximate but pretty far from her, like 2 people working a field would be. I cast on a golem that was on an interception course andit came toward me untill she came intoits range, then went straight for her. even thoI was casting bolt on it the whole time. Only one golem did not follow this pattern and I think it was because I had a DoT rolling on it

I forsee many problems in the resource fields. aside from the griefing issue, the LAST thing a guildie is going to want is me out helping them gather resources.I used to be able to go out to the Ironsilk or the Mithril and helpkeep the mobs off their backs and shoot the breeze, help them pack stuff back. Heh, not anymore.
*E* Unfortunately I don't think this is a bug but is 'as intended',howeverI feel whatever good they had in mind will be outweighed by the bad.

[Senkeleron Fell]

I think it is a 100% bug to have a mob that you are attacking go off and attack someone who is not grouped with you. That totally lends itself to massive griefing possibilities.

The other aggro behaviors you can argue for and against, but once a mob is attacking or being attacked by one individual/group it should only change targets within that group.

[imported_Elspeth]

On a similar point, I was strolling along (lvl47 dragon) and spotted a lvl 6 player fighting a couple of level 4 zombies and in a need of a heal. I quick cast of instant heal on them caused the zombies to break off and attack me!.

Often I in the past, I have throw a quick friendly heal on someone who needed it, but no longer can this be done without accidently kill stealing

Regards
Elspeth

[Brambles]

If they could put in place collision detection between players and monsters, it would create several opportunities:

The warriors could ring the mage/healer and keep the monsters at bay while the mage/healer does their job.

Players could form a wall around city entrances etc, and hold back the WA invasions while lower rated players could stand behind and heal/deal some damage. If anything broke through, the reserves could pounce on it to defent the weaker players!

Of course, to accomplish this properly, monsters would have to be restricted by walls and mountains just like us.

Would certainly be a nice addition!

[Vizharan]

I was at the Oak Treants today, doing a dragon quest. I'm level 52, nearby player is level 100. We are not grouped(honestly never saw the person before). Level 100 casts Spirit Bolt on Oak Treant, Oak Treant heads towards me. I can kill the mob, no problem. But in my opinion the level 100 called dibs on the monster when he casted Spirit Bolt on it. I tried to fly away, but the Oak Treant rooted me. I can kill the mob, no problem, but I cant tank for too long. I had no choice but to kill it. I felt like I was kill stealing. I was guessing the level 100 was looking for tech comps, since he was in adventure gear. I was doing my quest..but it seemed stupid. Like I said, he 'called it' via casting on it. I was about to cast Long Reach on it, but I saw that he already attacked. So I was about to move on to the next Treant, and noticed him running at me. I can see where this would be used to hurt other players too. Luckily I didnt see that level 100 for the rest of the time I was hunting, but I'm guessing he could probably take on quite a few of the treants at a time, and if I had happend to walk by at that point....

[Hyacinthe]

Here is what little I have seen on Chaos.

I have been fortunate enough to have guildies close to my level so we hunt together. Out at abandoned island we, a level 38(38)warrior and myself a 39 dragon,were mass killing large rexus.We didn't seem to have any problems with agro there. Later we were joined by a level 37(38) healer andlevel 13(50)mage. Things pretty much held true the whole time, we were out therefighting for about 2 hours. The only real noticealbe difference was in the amount of xp i was getting. Solo with the same mobs i would get about 1k for a lvl 35 large rexus, with the warrior it cut to about 800, with thelevel13(50) mage i could barely manage 300 a kill.

On the other hand, after a guildie completed his RoP we amassedfellow guildies and well wishers on the Peak of Storms. 2 of my fellow guildiescould barely reach the sumit even though they were escorted by several highly leveled dragons.
If I'm not mistaken it took 2 hours to finally get both safely up the mountain at about a combined7 attempts [img]/Web/emoticons/emotion-6.gif[/img]

[Silverhawk]

The Aggro system as it stands works for groups close in rating how close it's anyones guess....but I do know grouping has become shuned and this is a bad thing for the game. Aggro should be more manageable hard to do when alot of people only need to hit a mob 2-3 times to kill it. the system needs to be redone or set up to come into play when the next set of lvl's come in ie. 120+ where they can tweak the mob's hit points so battles are more like killing SOG....the rating system thier going to put in was bad enough in some ways taking the most experianced players and making them use alt to be a part of the group or guild hunt would be bad enough....but understandable to keep power lvl'ing out of the game or at least limit the scope some.
but the aggro system makes grouping atm unfun...and unfun= less players doing so...do we really need this aggro system only 1/2 done and poorly thought out?
This system afects alot of people and I Know the Dev's had it on blight first but hard to do when blight has the least amout of groups but they should have let us know how the system is to work and the reasons behind it just shoving a system out and say here you go...Just deal.....is poor management....Now they could have released a summary and said try this and give us the feedback...now most of us can agree that something needed to be done but less grouping the way to do it?......most of the trouble with power levling can be traced back to lvl 100's not having more lvl's to grind out or long involved quests to do taking them out of the group situations more
I feel a set xp to lvl divided by rating system is the only way you can save grouping when you have a game that soloing is a part of...also would make multi lvl 100 players work harder to grind up the next class and not penalize players that stay true to one class......so making multi 100 doeable but harder without killing grouping for the most part

[Varangaard]

In the interests of science, we put together a small group last night. It included a dragon, rating 98; a healer, rating 79; a cleric, rating 84; and a warrior, rating 55. Target: ice island critters. The experiments proved what has been said here already. All mobs went for the lowest rating character without fail. Who pulled did not matter, the rating 55 person always got the initial aggro.

We observed two methods to pull aggro away from him. The dragon could pull aggro with gold rage, taking 75-95% of the mob's health in one go. The healer could pull aggro by chainhealing. When fighting icy dire wolves, we noticed that group heals pulled aggro exceedingly well, usually sending the whole wolfpack after the healer. Many times even just one group heal or instant group heal was enough. Wolfpack's initial aggro was somewhat distributed amongst the group, although majority always seemed to head for the rating 55.

Without the rating 55 warrior around, the next lowest rating person - 79 healer - was getting initial aggro without fail. We didn't observe too closely, but it may have been somewhat easier to pull the mob off the healer than the rating 55 warrior.

As an aside, the grouping code seemed all too intense. All icy dires we came across were either solo or in groups of six, which is the maximum wolfpack size. There were no groups of 2-5 wolves observed during several hours we hunted.

edit: Surprisingly, we found little to complain about the experience we were getting. Rating 79 and 84 characters were gaining roughly double to rating 55 character, and the rating 98 dragon had a large impact on exp when he joined, bringing it down by roughly a third. Then again, our guild is not a powerleveler guild, so our definition of "good exp" is much more conservative than than getting from 90 to 100 in one evening - YMMV.

[imported_Arcat]

My Rating: 113 - Current Level 100
Mule's Rating: 1 - Current Level 1

Went with my level 1 mule and myself (2 accounts) to the level ~60ish mountain wolfies (west of desert's edge). Even if I had a pack under attack, the incoming mule did pull them off me. Wasn't able to pull them back- neither Whirlwind nor Dispirit Foes worked.

Next I moved to the ~80ish blighs in WDL - near the Spiral's Entrance. Same thing. Even rezzing wasn't possible, when my Mule was during Rez Animation he got killed already. Also the Kwellen did attack him.


best,
Arcat

[Bassalisk]

I am rather displeased with the new aggro system as a whole. One of the greatest benefits of this game over all others is that I used to be able to hunt with pretty much anyone and everyone gained by it. Now, being a level 100 dragon, I can no longer hunt with my level 30 friends. I dont really mind the lack of EXP as at those level differences it wasnt credible hunting anyway. We did it largely just to hang out together and have some fun.

Now though, with the agro going straight for them every time, it guarantees them nearly instant death and short of exhausting hoard frantically I stand no chance of keeping them alive.

I'm not particularly thrilled about having to shelve one of the best ways for different leveled friends to have fun together, becauseone of the fundamental pretexts of this game's difference from other games has being changed so drastically.

[TheRock]

Seems like we are all having the same problem with guild or group hunts. I too am displeased with the system change.
My question is : Why did you (Devs) create this problem? We want things fixed in the game ....not more problems created. If this was tested before going live...did you not see this and know we would not be pleased? Or maybe you enjoy watching us complain. Now we will spend a week complaining about this and it will probably take another 12-16 hrs to fix. Guild hunts were great before the last fix. Now the low lvl's rack up dps and the high lvl's share a poor xp rate. Four of us killing 6 dire icy wolves and only getting about 1500 xp plus a few hundred in bonus all total is pityful. We would get about that for each kill before.
Even if you don't change the xp at least fix it so the low lvls don't get targeted all the time.
thank you :)

[Aamer Khan]

These examples will be common if the aggro system is left as is...

Lone hunter will be fighting a few mobs for exp. Wayward crafter heading to gather cotton will run past, but because he has a lower AR, the hunters mobs will leave him and attack the poor crafter. Now, the hunter is pissed since he mow has to defend a player just running by, and the crafter will be pissed because he just died.

Guildies go out to help a crafter gather ironsilk. But now, instead of helping they get him killed. Oops, now you have 4 players pissed.

Player (a) with high level AR, dislikes player (b). While running by the silks north of aug, player (a) spots player(b), and gathers ups 6 spiders drags them over to player(b) and hits cancel action. Next he laughs as player(b) dies and has to recall. I'm curious, can he be called down for griefing if the game is setup this way?

In an attempt to keep other gatherers from the ironsilks, a couple high AR crafters just make sure to attack something when ever another player gets to close. If one mob dont kill them they just keep pulling more till they are delt with.

So, even though this may have been done with good intentions, the side-effects are a killer.

[Kulamata]

Yes, it is a bad idea. I feel that it was implemented to suit a fairly small, but fairly loud, group of players, and was not broadly evaluated or tested by the average player.

In the past it took months to de-implement a bad idea; hoard leak and 25 craft skill/tech tier come to mind. I hope this gets fixed much more quickly with the new policies.

I had hoped this sort of lurching fix was a thing of the past. I hope it will be the last.

[Tryagain]

problem is you are now dealing with Tulga's Vision of the game. If I were to look at this NOT knowing anything about Horizons I would say they are planning for the future with the idea that Horizons is going to be having 800 to a 1000 people plus per server and they just re balanced the grouping scenario.

Umm however I doubt the game will ever hit those numbers and these changes do not work with horizons as it is NOW. The question is and if Tulga is in touch with their game are they betting that the populations of the server are going to quadruple. Cause these changes only work in a populous game where similar leveling grouping is the norm. Horizons as it is now and probably way into the future will never be that way.

[Senkeleron Fell]

These changes wouldn't work no matter how many people were playing. No matter what kind of aggro scheme you have for a mob engaged with a group, you just can't have mobs break aggro with a group to go after someone not in that group. Bug bug bug! Totally open for massive griefing. That part of the new aggro system is a BUG.

[Entilzah]

This topic is for detailing bugs or issues found with the new agro system. Let's leave the discussions for a seperate topic (preferably in the Discussions forum please) so that this topic remains relevant. I am concerned that this topic will end up going downhill as did some other discussions of the new agro system.

[Tryagain]

I was offering a scenario as to why it was done. As far as this being a bug... officially posted responses elsewhere say it is by design and due to large gaps in rating. They do not believe this to be a bug but rather as intended. So I would say this aspect of the changes falls under needs to be tweaked and adjusted rather than a bug. However who is to say that the scenario of mobs running to non grouped lower rated people isn't a bug. This is probably a bug. But the targetting lowest rated member does not seem to be a bug.

[Flozzie]

I'm happily fighting some Fireopal golems mining them for gems. A 100 dragon comes along collecting golems up for mass slaughter. Since his rating is lower then mine, even though we aren't in a group, the golem I'm fighting attacks him and leave my battle. I'm left standing there with nothing to kill.

I understand that you don't want low levels leeching in a group, but come on, this is someone not in my group and will allow someone lower rated then me to jump in and kill anything I'm fighting just by being in the same area.

Is all this really worth a few boneheads powerleveling? Taking the fun from those that are just trying to play the game?

<Steps off his soapbox and grabs another beer.>

Flozzie

[Snowdonia Honeythorn]

Yup, gotta agree. They went from one extreme to the other with this one.

[David Bowman]

We met yesterday to discuss this type of consequence to the current aggro system. We will be making further adjustments to the system. Yours is an example of behaviour that we do not want to occur.

David