PumBumbler

Well?

OK here's the extended breakdown of KHTF's last mission, with a team that decided to help me out. Many thanks to all of you who decided to hang around with me while we tried various things out. All testers had at least 36 months under their belt and have run KHTF hundreds of times each. At least half of the teammates have participated in closed beta, that I know of.

1) No changes were noted in the TF from previous issues for all other missions. Task force was set at even (no -/+ conditions) and was a full team of 8 players. No one disconnected or mapserved at any point during the Task Force. *edit: mission door for last mission had moved? It is now non statically bound to a single door?

2) Katie's Spirit, when rescued, does NOT follow the rescuer. This is with no stealth powers activated. I observed the rescuer from a distance and the rest of the team was near the entrance.

3) Katie refused to move at all, regardless of whether the rescuer was flying or running/jumping. She went through her lost dialog when the rescuer went too far away, and got her reacquired dialog when she returned. She had not moved at all from her original spawn point.

4) She started moving again once the first ambush made its way close to her. She then subsequently attacked the mobs and would temporarily follow the rescuer until no more attackers were around.

5) She stopped moving again once aggro had dissipated. No amount of cajoling or vet tping would make her follow the team or rescuer.

6) Mobs that didn't aggro on her or her rescuer wouldn't seem to snap her out of her stuck state. IE, I tried 'feeding' her a mob that was pushed using hurricane over towards Katie.

7) Mobs that aggro'd on Katie or her rescuer were the only thing that made her move. If a mob was a fair distance away but still trying to attack her or the rescuer, she would then follow the rescuer for a short distance or attack the ambusher.

*This was likely the reason why she followed me for a time in the initial report. If the ambush is still trying to attack the rescuer, but the rescuer is flying out of reach, Katie will keep following the rescuer until the mob gives up or is defeated. It is likely the ambushing mob was defeated while I had Katie out of reach from subsequent ambushes, in which case she stopped and could not be led again.

8) Katie's friends, Jessica etc., seemed to have the same problem that Katie's spirit had, in that they stopped following when aggro was lost.

9) We were able to eventually finish the mission by immobilizing the ambushes and pushing them towards the exit, thus luring Katie to the door. Using -kb immobs was the only effective way to prevent Katie's kb powers from spreading the mobs around.

10) If Katie cannot follow the mobs without being under aggro conditions, most teams will not be able to finish the Task Force. Even tanks with taunt may not find the Task Force finishable since Katie's hurricane and gale tend to scatter mobs everywhere instead of a focused direction towards the exit.

11) The entire TF is unbalanced now because controllers get access to their full secondary set (level 40). It was ridiculously easy to finish the first mission, where it used to pose some modicum of challenge. Since the team was highly experienced, the toons were likely equipped above average and the players were able to finish everything without difficulty (excepting the last mission). Most had commented that the TF felt too easy now, especially the Mary MacComber portion.

*sent to Castle but also post here since many people seem to have difficulties checking out the TF for themselves.

I have a hard time believing that since people were noting the drop rate differential in i16 and went as far as to analyze what the difference was before launch.

People will test the things they are invested and interested in. If you haven't told them it was changed they will assume it works the same. If you tell them there is a change, they may test it or they may not.

In other words, Hess TF changes would have been easily caught if it was noted that changes were made and someone tried it out. KHTF likely not if there was a global change to AI noted, but it could have been caught if the AI change was noted for KHTF.

How is that so hard to understand?

In the case of KHTF, it could be a global AI change that caused it, but in the case of Hess, the map was changed in multiple missions.

Either the map IDs were overwritten with new ones, in which case someone should have logged that change, or the TF was updated with new maps, in which case someone should have logged that change. Do you have an alternate theory about how 3 (or 4) maps in a stable and well known Task Force got changed?

And if someone enough is bold enough to change Hess TF without making notes, why would it be so far fetched to consider that KHTF could have been changed without notes? Occam's razor can cut both ways and it is plenty sharp.

I noticed that Numina TF got it's last map changed the previous issue and nothing seems awry, but also no patch notes had mentioned it. I believe whoever was doing those kinds of updates borked Hess TF, and maybe KHTF as well.

Spock dies in the MoKhan so it's always an autophail.

Thank you for your honest reply about Hess. I will try and see if enough people are willing to do repeated KHtf runs to find out what is going with Katie.

My comments about getting a code logging system into beta testers and semi public users still stands though. Make them NDA up even harder if you're concerned about pre-announcements and leaking exploits. I think it you will benefit in the long run for putting together an implementation that includes those people.

Roderick Mueller is a red herring anyhow. A false objective. Or a broken one.

Just get to the final room (with Roddy) and defeat the mobs in there including the hero, then click on the objective yourself.

The outstanding hostage rescue will not block you from completing the mission.

If this is a bug consider it reported. If this is an exploit then consider it exploited.

Again, it is in the OP, in a paragraph on its own.

"We basically had the same experience as this fellow's post."

And again, this is not a bug that anyone wouldn't notice if they were on a Hess TF. It would have and should have been caught in beta if there was a way for people to check or be notified of changes to Hess TF.

I understand that you already have a process for reporting bugs, I'm just telling you that it's akin to keystone cops.

Find a better way to get the reporting system to the people who can and want to help you is my point. The fact that Hess and Katie were screwed up isn't the root of the problem, it's a symptom.

I'm not going to go through a thorough QA analysis of the Hows and Whens Katie in KHtf gets stuck because I believe this could have been caught in beta. I *could* do so if I was so inclined on live, but I'm steamed that things get screwed up when I have guests over, capiche?

If you want me to spend an entire day running KHtfs and trying to find out when and where she gets stuck, don't charge me $15/month to do so...I volunteer my time when I think it will accomplish meaningful change, and right now I want to spend that time trying to impress upon everyone here the idea that the users/players/beta testers need a better way of finding out what is happening before product gets pushed out the door.

Catch me on a better day and I might be more reasonable. Better yet, change the process to mollify me.

Buffing before entering a mission is an exploit. Attempts to avoid a hangover will result in bans.

You should have just said tl;dr.

My point again is that instead of finding 5-8 other people who want to be doing QA on live, perhaps it would be better served by documenting changes to the system on beta so people who are so inclined to help out can do so.

If you want me to do your homework for you, the least you can do is tell me what the assignment is ahead of time.

It also is the height of self centeredness to walk into a thread that has the word 'rant' in the title and somehow expect that there would be something that wasn't verbose and angry. Do your own homework and read the thread. Jumping in with your canned response about submitting bug reports etc. Is tantamount to trolling.

Doing it backwards has a huge advantage over going 'forwards.' Simply making the statement that you've seen plenty of teams face plant and fail in trying to go fast doesn't invalidate the fast method. It's risky, that's the point of doing it. There are some people who like riding motorcycles and go boarding, too.

Since you have 2 objectives, one where you have to defeat 300 Cims and take down Rommie and his 3 Nictus AV friends, the time in which you are downing Rommie can also be done concurrently with defeating Cims. Each time Rommie gets dropped a Cim ambush spawns as well, giving the team the added benefit of defeating Cims that count towards the 300. Doing it in reverse doesn't give you that bonus.

The additional mobs also has the added benefit of allowing AoE debuffs to work continuously and at their maximum benefit. With aggro caps being so low having the entire team run as many Cims to Rommie and his gang is like throwing gasoline onto a fire. Certain powersets even benefit from having the mosh pit of doom going as well, like kinetics and Brutes. Rain powers and immovable pets like Lightning Storm also benefit because of obvious reasons as well.

This is more like a feed forward reaction rather than just surgically taking down Rommie. A good team can take him down quickly but a great team can do that and as many Cims as they can aggro at the same time.

A great team can defeat Romulus in the same time a surgical strike team can and have about 160 or 170 Cims left to defeat at the end of the Rommie defeats. That puts the entire team just under 50% the Cim body count. If you have a push herder you can also conglomerate the two towers worth of Cims and finish the TF in two spots alone.

While some people may not like doing things in that manner, some people like pushing the limits of the game. It makes going fast a challenge, rather than moving slowly and cautiously. So they can get things done faster, why is that viewed somehow as a punishable offense or exploit? At least the ones who took that the chance of face planting actually felt like they took a risk and got a well deserved reward, the time is just a bonus.

I'd say that doing it the fast and risky way saves about 3 to 5 minutes on the last mish alone. When you can do the entire TF in about 23-26 minutes on average, time savings wind up to be 11% to 21%, which is significant enough. Without the lag inducing herds I'd suppose you might be able to tag 20 minutes if you're lucky.

The biggest benefit to doing it fast is that you can leave the TF when you're done, or you can clean up the mobs in the last mission. I've done it both ways, and it simply allows you to get on with another mission, or starting dinner to reduce Significant Other aggro, or read bedtime stories to your kids. Going slow means you are 'stuck' with your teammates and slogging your way through.

I'm going to assume that your definition of an exploit has the bad connotations associated with the *bugs* as you've pointed out. Feel free to correct me if you have another definition/connotation for 'exploit'.

The notion that somehow good gameplay should not be more efficient and also unrewarded (and possibly even punished) would lead to the homogenization of the entire experience. A sense of fair play should also be balanced with the idea that competitive play is an acceptable manner of playing as well. Lumping them all as an exploit demeans the idea that good players should get better rewards, whether it is realized as time saved or more loot.

The concept of cleverly leveraging mechanics is central to the point of good gamesmanship. If a controller casts a rain power from around a corner as to not get hit by return fire, is that somehow an 'exploit'? Should that controller stand point blank in the center of a mob and cast that power? If that is a sign that the player is using an exploit, I guess I want that exploiter on my team.

If you take all the metagaming aspects out of the game itself you will wind up having a boring unmemorable experience. Then we may as well have speed limiters on every mission in the game, where every mission is timed to a certain benchmark and you could not get the subsequent mission until the previous mission timer has counted down. And everyone would get a reward at the end of it, whether they successfully completed the goals or not.

You can make a valid point that a great team might be 200% more efficient than a standard team. Certainly there are limits to the variance that might be too great for the developers to stomach. But the developers need to be more clever about how to ensure the range of gameplay doesn't vary so much between the teams, rather than attempting to put roadblocks up that make the game less fun and engaging.
I think the OP was referring to the travelling between the mobs while invisible, thus bypassing them. Being able to click something without any chance of being seen was an exploit because there was no risk involved for the reward.

7-10 minute Edens are still possible. That's why the merit reward is low. It's been benchmarked and the reward level is appropriate for the time it can take.
Loopholes exist in every system. If the devs choose to plug it up that's great. However good gameplay shouldn't be considered a problem that needs fixing.

Somehow you have decided to make this post into a Dev conspiracy. I really have no problem with the effort to make changes to the TFs in round them out. I'm complaining about the lack of process in documenting said changes.

In your edit, you imply that somehow that I fault the AI for problems with Hess. No, I am saying that I had the same problems as the other poster. Please read carefully. I am saying that 2 TFs over 10 issues old are getting tweaks and changes that are undocumented, leading to bugs, some of which are show stoppers.

Unfortunately, your Occam's Razor suggestion that there is simply some misunderstanding about how Hess had changed. When there are ENTIRELY NEW maps in place of old ones (just like in the last mission of Numina TF from the last issue), it is highly doubtful that someone made an 'oops' coding error in changing out 3 (4?) maps in Hess TF. It is more likely that someone went in and deliberately made a change. I never suggested this was some conspiracy over laziness and ineptitude.

My point, before you leapt up and started blindly defending the devs, was that if you are to make changes you NEED to tell someone about it, especially if you have a PROCESS to find bugs and squash them before it goes live, and even more telling when you have a Beta testing process specifically designed to catch bugs. If you missed it, the original post highlighted that portion in red.

With respect to the KHTF, I also stated that it was entirely possible that the hostage AI was collaterally damaged by some other change to the game, perhaps due to AE changes. This may or may not be true because the devs have stated and shown that portions of the game and changes can be firewalled from each other. If it wasn't KHTF, then *somewhere* there needed to be a note saying that global AIs were tweaked that could affect rescues and escorts.

As to your stated testing of the hostage AI, someone else made the same comment about it being changed so they noted a difference as well. When you mention the repetition and testing, you are entirely making my point. This needed to be done in beta, and not on live. Introducing 2 new players to the joys of waiting for support because of QA shortcomings is not a good way to grow your userbase.

Somehow you wish to make this a point of deception when I want to make this a point of process. There's nothing more disappointing than seeing amateurish behaviour from professionals.

If people can't give honest and genuine feedback, especially about a screwup like this, then we may as well skip the betas and launch things wholesale, since there will always be others who will leap to the devs' defense. Oh wait...

Not necessarily true. If you needed to knock a server off you need to spike it just like in pvp. Probably a half dozen people in late night could cycle negative votes enough within a couple of hours to knock off any server, no matter how highly voted it is.

Once the server is dead it can't be rezzed.

When did you start sleeping with Uber?

Greaaat. Asymmetric boobs for all!

Looks like ATi graphix to me

*Packs a Maribelle, just in case*