L1ndara
02-28-2003, 04:16 AM
I've noticed a disturbing trend with recent patchs, that being closeing down people's methods of doing things which improve the game but aren't strictly in line with how some people think the game should work. That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing but the problem is that there is nothing being done about the actual problems with the game that people are trying to get around. I'm not talking about blatent self-profit exploits like cracking to PK people but about workarounds to game problems.
One problem we often see with the game is mobs "under the world." Western Waste is a good example of a zone with this problem, often bronthos and wolves get trapped in the water under the ground not far out from Siren's Grotto. Not a big deal. Sometimes however, Cargalia or other dragons get trapped down there, and sometimes, they can agro on you. When Cargalia is led to a low area of the landscape like one of the chasms or the ocean around the zone, she will pop out and start pathing on land normally. This leads to people completely innocently training their own raid with a dragon from under the earth. Another common example is the very well known spot in fear where a mob either quickly paths under the world or hell maybe even spawns there, typically a samheim or fright finger, and will agro on a puller, follow them to a raid and start beating on people. Now, in these cases these problems have a simple solution, these are flagged as non-dungeon zones (indoor and dungeon are distinct flags with different meanings) so it's possible to nuke mobs under the world here. You won't be able to loot the frightfinger (without exploiting) but you can at least kill it. However not all outdoor zones are flagged non-dungeon so you can't always nuke through the ground, and not all mobs that get stuck under the world are trash mobs. Mons Letalis and some other Luclin zones got made dungeon zones and have minor named get trapped under the world occasionally. Plane of Nightmare is another example in which only 1 named heart dropping mephit could be up at one time. We have in fact had one stuck under the world at one point. We were able to use an exploit to target it since it was too far down to agro on us from proximity and then agroing it with a spell and bringing it out, but only because PoN is still non-dungeon so you can nuke through walls etc. Had the group not had a tracker (me) they could have ground the caves all night long and never gotten a named not knowing the mob was up but not accessible. Had we not had an exploit to target a mob we can't normally target, we would have had no way of getting the mob out and going through petitions which is at best hit or miss and usually wastes most of a night even when answered. When PoN becomes flagged a dungeon zone like some others have been it will take some more major exploits to get to these mobs and deal with them. Targeting and seeing mobs that I normally can't has been invaluable in dealing with this problem and ones like it and prevented some major aggrivation with the game. Recently SOE has been working at preventing things like Macroquest which lets you target things more easily from working, in the past they stopped pets from being able to target mobs that weren't close, and no doubt they're working on some of the other methods of targeting things you can't directly see even when being able to target these things is a good thing. However I don't see them fixing the actual problem, that people NEED to be able to target things they "shouldn't." Plane of Fear and Western Waste are perfect examples, how long have those mobs been getting stuck down there 3 years? Why isn't effort being put into dealing with these glareing problems, problems which exploits are primarly being used to deal with, instead of on blocking these exploits?
Lets take another glareing problem, link death. People LD and 1018 and often can't get back into the game for 10+ minutes quite frequently. Instead of fixing this problem, what does SOE do? They impose a 72 flag limit on mobs, require you to be in a raid to flag, and... drumroll... make planar projects despawn in 10 minutes and nerf the ability to keep them around longer! 10 minutes, just long enough that people that 1018ed are gaurenteed to miss the flag. Dear god. One unlucky person in our alliance has now had this happen twice in a row for them. Meanwhile, they also "fix" Z-axis exploits with the intent you can't... agro mobs you can't see (my favourite way of pulling black reavers without a rogue, AE to bring them out of the building) but now you can also no longer catch people trapped, invariably due to SOE's crap code and LDing, on a different level of a dungeon in your TP to get them out (thats if, of course, you still know an exploit to target them in the first place.)
Speaking of the 72 flag limit, again, thanks for the nerf. Apparently unbeknownst to every player in the game we're only allowed to have guilds of 72 players and none of us are allowed to have alts. Being in a large alliance of casual players the 72 flag limit which was no doubt meant to stop large crowds of people flagging means that we'll have to flag a minimum of twice and we won't get to flag alts. Already this has caused us an immense headache with our last flagging and means we'll have to flag the same mob again and my cleric and wizard alts are screwed for advancing in PoP. Instead of fixing the flagging system to work per account (or frankly pitching the whole grotesque thing) and get rid of horrible problems with it they penalize their own players who are doing nothing other than trying to enjoy the game. One utterly mindblowing stupidity with the flag system comes about if you haven't killed Bertoxxulous yet but are doing Torment. You can kill The Prophet, have a sick Tylis Newleaf there but... you can't flag for him because some other evil guy who worshipped Bert needs help more. Yeah, so you're sitting there, you can save Tylis in minutes but... he won't let you because he wants you to first go kill Carprin half a dozen times then kill Bert a three times (thank you 72 flag limit and people that can't play every single day) because this other guy is in more pressing need, more pressing than apparently a couple minutes to save him would take. BUT BERTOXXULOUS IS DEAD AND WON'T RESPAWN FOR 3 DAYS BECAUSE 12 OTHER GUILDS WANT HIM TOO! So you're in Torment, with your dick in your hands thinking, holy crap, I just killed a zillion of the same damn stupid mobs to have SOE stick me with this @#%$? To top that off, the loot nerf. None of the named even dropped ethereal toilet paper let alone anything off their craptastic loot table. Fleshgrinder could rape a lot of Luclin and most Velious mobs pretty bad and him and all his red, yellow and white con buddies drop... nothing. Not a damn thing.
Call of the Hero, oh boy, mages love this one. SOE gives magicians an ability and then disable it all over the place saying it was a mistake. So what did we used to do? Corpse summon. The Deep, Airplane etc. you couldn't CoH but you could still corpse summon. A huge inconvience, a pain in the @#%$, a stupid waste of time that did nothing but sap the fun out of the game. Now what happens with PoP? Shroud of Stealth. Yep, rogues can now walk from zone entrance to raid dragging a body with no problems but magicians can't CoH. A huge inconvience, a pain in the @#%$, a stupid waste of time that does nothing but sap the fun out of the game. I can't think of a better example of the left hand beating the right hand repeatedly with a heavy object.
Recently there have been a few other nerfs. Not being able to exit an illusion if it would put you "through" an object which is used to walk through walls or leave crouch if it would do the same thing, akin to what people used to do to get across Siren's Grotto, when the seahorses actually meant something a few expansions ago, and thereby saved me having to tp to CS for the fifth time that night to succor them across. It's also what is used to get people into Aerin'Dar's lair to get flagged when they logged on 5 minutes late or they died with their corpse poofing to the GY or if they got the flag but had to leave without zoning in via the PoV entrance which is needed to activate your access. So with 72 flag limit, planar projectsion poofing in 10 minutes and you have to be in the raid to get flagged... you can't click the orb to get down and you can't get CoHed into the bowl once Aerin'Dar is dead for absolutely no valid reason... these are PROBLEMS. People exploiting shrink or illusion to get through the glass or walls is a good thing to get around these problems. FIX THE DAMN PROBLEMS SOE and not the workarounds to them!
And on to horses... The most visible nerf and one that best points out SOE's willingness to harm players instead of help them. Despite numerous bugs persisting with horses SOE chooses to instead nerf the ability of people with weak computer systems to use their horse than to fix the existing problems. Crouching which was kludged in as a mechanism to abort casting doesn't work on horses like it should, targetting in the most popular camera angle almost invariable ends up targeting yourself for no apparent reason (fixed with lizards... so apparently not an exploit but only if you own LoY), your mouse icon gets "stuck" holding spell icons, luclin models are hideous poorly implamented system hogs, horses can't jump, horses like Khan have no idea how to go down when flying, the list of horse bugs is endless. Some people to get around some of these bugs disabled models, others simply do it because they have to because they have systems that can't handle luclin models (in extreme cases low end systems present luclin models bare naked, like really naked, and really bare) but have horses. Instead of simply adding the movement of horses to players without the model (something I'd have cheered since I have a 96kpp horse and kept all models off for framerate and zonetime) they instead nerf the crap out of it. Thank you for makeing the game less fun. Thank you SOE for being the worst that you can be.
Buybacks are an ongoing nerf I've felt a couple times. Recharging things via vendor is something commonly done to recharge things like SoW potions and the like. Some nerfs, like swollen fungus beast glands are outright silly. The problem with these was that they were instant cast so allowed people to easily acquire a massive amount of agro. Instead of fixing the instant cast aspect, something they should never have been, they change the buyback price. People who put effort into getting a couple of these for the legitimate use of actually snaring things get screwed for no reason, left with a few 10 charge things that are not even close to being worth the effort of getting... except for guilds with money who can continue to use them for massive agro on tough fights because the recharge price isn't a big deal to them. Another stupid one, Crypt Master's Conjuring Stone got it's price taken from negligeable to being more than 2 stacks of coffins to recharge. Hello? SOE just implamented graveyards so then they go and nerf something whose value had already been significantly reduced. In the case of the stone they're LORE so recharging already is a hassle taking 2 people, and getting them in the first place takes a fair bit of effort or a fair bit of PP and as I said they're already not worth it most of the time because of graveyards EXCEPT... to get around problems with the game. Unsoulbound keys in BOT or to Aerin'Dar's lair... guess what, I can bank my key each time we go up or... maybe just enjoy playing the game instead of running back and forth between the bank all the time and just leaveing a conjuring stone banked in the rare case we wipe I can simply get my corpse with a stone and retrieve the key and get back to the wipe with a cleric and rez and proceed from there instead of waiting 20 mintues for the fricken GY and proceeding from the GY. A hassle, a stupid pain, a waste of time and a way to sap fun. Instead of stopping mobs from getting pushed through a wall and falling under the world and then summoning you down there (retrieving bodies under the world was a popular use for the stone in Luclin sadly), or soulbinding keys that should be soulbound, or makeing graveyards work like they should, that being simply giving you the ability to do /corpse zonewide, they go and nerf the stone recharging whose primary use is to get around annoyances and bugs with the game. People who had put effort into acquireing these and use them to make the game less of a hassle or get around bugs get their efforts rewarded by SOE screwing them with a this massive PP hit. Staff of Forbidden Rites is another one, popular to recover from wipes if a monk survived and a necro didn't, we're now wasting our time killing VoX again and stealing it from lowbie guilds with a 60+ magician pet and a 50s cleric... oops did I say that, I meant with a couple groups of non-exploiting twinks which are a pain in the @#%$ to get to Permafrost Keep. Waste of time, annoying, stupid, fun sapping for both us and the lowbie guilds deprived of what, to them, is a challenging fight. If recharging the Forbidden Rites Staff was an exploit, it's sure as hell preferable by everyone than what we have now. SOE, fix the problem, stop nerfing our solution and stop punishing people for putting effort into trying to have fun.
One problem we often see with the game is mobs "under the world." Western Waste is a good example of a zone with this problem, often bronthos and wolves get trapped in the water under the ground not far out from Siren's Grotto. Not a big deal. Sometimes however, Cargalia or other dragons get trapped down there, and sometimes, they can agro on you. When Cargalia is led to a low area of the landscape like one of the chasms or the ocean around the zone, she will pop out and start pathing on land normally. This leads to people completely innocently training their own raid with a dragon from under the earth. Another common example is the very well known spot in fear where a mob either quickly paths under the world or hell maybe even spawns there, typically a samheim or fright finger, and will agro on a puller, follow them to a raid and start beating on people. Now, in these cases these problems have a simple solution, these are flagged as non-dungeon zones (indoor and dungeon are distinct flags with different meanings) so it's possible to nuke mobs under the world here. You won't be able to loot the frightfinger (without exploiting) but you can at least kill it. However not all outdoor zones are flagged non-dungeon so you can't always nuke through the ground, and not all mobs that get stuck under the world are trash mobs. Mons Letalis and some other Luclin zones got made dungeon zones and have minor named get trapped under the world occasionally. Plane of Nightmare is another example in which only 1 named heart dropping mephit could be up at one time. We have in fact had one stuck under the world at one point. We were able to use an exploit to target it since it was too far down to agro on us from proximity and then agroing it with a spell and bringing it out, but only because PoN is still non-dungeon so you can nuke through walls etc. Had the group not had a tracker (me) they could have ground the caves all night long and never gotten a named not knowing the mob was up but not accessible. Had we not had an exploit to target a mob we can't normally target, we would have had no way of getting the mob out and going through petitions which is at best hit or miss and usually wastes most of a night even when answered. When PoN becomes flagged a dungeon zone like some others have been it will take some more major exploits to get to these mobs and deal with them. Targeting and seeing mobs that I normally can't has been invaluable in dealing with this problem and ones like it and prevented some major aggrivation with the game. Recently SOE has been working at preventing things like Macroquest which lets you target things more easily from working, in the past they stopped pets from being able to target mobs that weren't close, and no doubt they're working on some of the other methods of targeting things you can't directly see even when being able to target these things is a good thing. However I don't see them fixing the actual problem, that people NEED to be able to target things they "shouldn't." Plane of Fear and Western Waste are perfect examples, how long have those mobs been getting stuck down there 3 years? Why isn't effort being put into dealing with these glareing problems, problems which exploits are primarly being used to deal with, instead of on blocking these exploits?
Lets take another glareing problem, link death. People LD and 1018 and often can't get back into the game for 10+ minutes quite frequently. Instead of fixing this problem, what does SOE do? They impose a 72 flag limit on mobs, require you to be in a raid to flag, and... drumroll... make planar projects despawn in 10 minutes and nerf the ability to keep them around longer! 10 minutes, just long enough that people that 1018ed are gaurenteed to miss the flag. Dear god. One unlucky person in our alliance has now had this happen twice in a row for them. Meanwhile, they also "fix" Z-axis exploits with the intent you can't... agro mobs you can't see (my favourite way of pulling black reavers without a rogue, AE to bring them out of the building) but now you can also no longer catch people trapped, invariably due to SOE's crap code and LDing, on a different level of a dungeon in your TP to get them out (thats if, of course, you still know an exploit to target them in the first place.)
Speaking of the 72 flag limit, again, thanks for the nerf. Apparently unbeknownst to every player in the game we're only allowed to have guilds of 72 players and none of us are allowed to have alts. Being in a large alliance of casual players the 72 flag limit which was no doubt meant to stop large crowds of people flagging means that we'll have to flag a minimum of twice and we won't get to flag alts. Already this has caused us an immense headache with our last flagging and means we'll have to flag the same mob again and my cleric and wizard alts are screwed for advancing in PoP. Instead of fixing the flagging system to work per account (or frankly pitching the whole grotesque thing) and get rid of horrible problems with it they penalize their own players who are doing nothing other than trying to enjoy the game. One utterly mindblowing stupidity with the flag system comes about if you haven't killed Bertoxxulous yet but are doing Torment. You can kill The Prophet, have a sick Tylis Newleaf there but... you can't flag for him because some other evil guy who worshipped Bert needs help more. Yeah, so you're sitting there, you can save Tylis in minutes but... he won't let you because he wants you to first go kill Carprin half a dozen times then kill Bert a three times (thank you 72 flag limit and people that can't play every single day) because this other guy is in more pressing need, more pressing than apparently a couple minutes to save him would take. BUT BERTOXXULOUS IS DEAD AND WON'T RESPAWN FOR 3 DAYS BECAUSE 12 OTHER GUILDS WANT HIM TOO! So you're in Torment, with your dick in your hands thinking, holy crap, I just killed a zillion of the same damn stupid mobs to have SOE stick me with this @#%$? To top that off, the loot nerf. None of the named even dropped ethereal toilet paper let alone anything off their craptastic loot table. Fleshgrinder could rape a lot of Luclin and most Velious mobs pretty bad and him and all his red, yellow and white con buddies drop... nothing. Not a damn thing.
Call of the Hero, oh boy, mages love this one. SOE gives magicians an ability and then disable it all over the place saying it was a mistake. So what did we used to do? Corpse summon. The Deep, Airplane etc. you couldn't CoH but you could still corpse summon. A huge inconvience, a pain in the @#%$, a stupid waste of time that did nothing but sap the fun out of the game. Now what happens with PoP? Shroud of Stealth. Yep, rogues can now walk from zone entrance to raid dragging a body with no problems but magicians can't CoH. A huge inconvience, a pain in the @#%$, a stupid waste of time that does nothing but sap the fun out of the game. I can't think of a better example of the left hand beating the right hand repeatedly with a heavy object.
Recently there have been a few other nerfs. Not being able to exit an illusion if it would put you "through" an object which is used to walk through walls or leave crouch if it would do the same thing, akin to what people used to do to get across Siren's Grotto, when the seahorses actually meant something a few expansions ago, and thereby saved me having to tp to CS for the fifth time that night to succor them across. It's also what is used to get people into Aerin'Dar's lair to get flagged when they logged on 5 minutes late or they died with their corpse poofing to the GY or if they got the flag but had to leave without zoning in via the PoV entrance which is needed to activate your access. So with 72 flag limit, planar projectsion poofing in 10 minutes and you have to be in the raid to get flagged... you can't click the orb to get down and you can't get CoHed into the bowl once Aerin'Dar is dead for absolutely no valid reason... these are PROBLEMS. People exploiting shrink or illusion to get through the glass or walls is a good thing to get around these problems. FIX THE DAMN PROBLEMS SOE and not the workarounds to them!
And on to horses... The most visible nerf and one that best points out SOE's willingness to harm players instead of help them. Despite numerous bugs persisting with horses SOE chooses to instead nerf the ability of people with weak computer systems to use their horse than to fix the existing problems. Crouching which was kludged in as a mechanism to abort casting doesn't work on horses like it should, targetting in the most popular camera angle almost invariable ends up targeting yourself for no apparent reason (fixed with lizards... so apparently not an exploit but only if you own LoY), your mouse icon gets "stuck" holding spell icons, luclin models are hideous poorly implamented system hogs, horses can't jump, horses like Khan have no idea how to go down when flying, the list of horse bugs is endless. Some people to get around some of these bugs disabled models, others simply do it because they have to because they have systems that can't handle luclin models (in extreme cases low end systems present luclin models bare naked, like really naked, and really bare) but have horses. Instead of simply adding the movement of horses to players without the model (something I'd have cheered since I have a 96kpp horse and kept all models off for framerate and zonetime) they instead nerf the crap out of it. Thank you for makeing the game less fun. Thank you SOE for being the worst that you can be.
Buybacks are an ongoing nerf I've felt a couple times. Recharging things via vendor is something commonly done to recharge things like SoW potions and the like. Some nerfs, like swollen fungus beast glands are outright silly. The problem with these was that they were instant cast so allowed people to easily acquire a massive amount of agro. Instead of fixing the instant cast aspect, something they should never have been, they change the buyback price. People who put effort into getting a couple of these for the legitimate use of actually snaring things get screwed for no reason, left with a few 10 charge things that are not even close to being worth the effort of getting... except for guilds with money who can continue to use them for massive agro on tough fights because the recharge price isn't a big deal to them. Another stupid one, Crypt Master's Conjuring Stone got it's price taken from negligeable to being more than 2 stacks of coffins to recharge. Hello? SOE just implamented graveyards so then they go and nerf something whose value had already been significantly reduced. In the case of the stone they're LORE so recharging already is a hassle taking 2 people, and getting them in the first place takes a fair bit of effort or a fair bit of PP and as I said they're already not worth it most of the time because of graveyards EXCEPT... to get around problems with the game. Unsoulbound keys in BOT or to Aerin'Dar's lair... guess what, I can bank my key each time we go up or... maybe just enjoy playing the game instead of running back and forth between the bank all the time and just leaveing a conjuring stone banked in the rare case we wipe I can simply get my corpse with a stone and retrieve the key and get back to the wipe with a cleric and rez and proceed from there instead of waiting 20 mintues for the fricken GY and proceeding from the GY. A hassle, a stupid pain, a waste of time and a way to sap fun. Instead of stopping mobs from getting pushed through a wall and falling under the world and then summoning you down there (retrieving bodies under the world was a popular use for the stone in Luclin sadly), or soulbinding keys that should be soulbound, or makeing graveyards work like they should, that being simply giving you the ability to do /corpse zonewide, they go and nerf the stone recharging whose primary use is to get around annoyances and bugs with the game. People who had put effort into acquireing these and use them to make the game less of a hassle or get around bugs get their efforts rewarded by SOE screwing them with a this massive PP hit. Staff of Forbidden Rites is another one, popular to recover from wipes if a monk survived and a necro didn't, we're now wasting our time killing VoX again and stealing it from lowbie guilds with a 60+ magician pet and a 50s cleric... oops did I say that, I meant with a couple groups of non-exploiting twinks which are a pain in the @#%$ to get to Permafrost Keep. Waste of time, annoying, stupid, fun sapping for both us and the lowbie guilds deprived of what, to them, is a challenging fight. If recharging the Forbidden Rites Staff was an exploit, it's sure as hell preferable by everyone than what we have now. SOE, fix the problem, stop nerfing our solution and stop punishing people for putting effort into trying to have fun.