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EverQuest Live : Class Boards : The Bards Lounge : Bard Definition Discussion : What happened to the Dot Agro post?

Re: What happened to the Dot Agro post?
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Archimede999
Journeyman
Posts: 29
Registered: 07-14-2004

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The post was in August, I think the 22nd, and it was regarding the stealth nerf of the july 14th patch.


Tremelo quickly stickied it, then took about 2 months to get a "I've e-mailed a dev about this".
Then about a month later we got news (if you can call it that) that the dev answered that he didn't
know anything about this, and that we would be kept updated. Then Tremelo quit as community rep, and
the post quickly vanished.

The dot aggro is still pretty much as bad as it was, the only difference is that with the new dots you feel
it less since it's more damage.

What happened is pretty simple. They took dot aggro away so that they could give us new AA's that we could
use to increase our aggro back to its original level. Unfortunately, as the nerf kicked in, we found out
about the new AA's on test, and cried foul. So to cover their tracks, Sony quickly deleted the new bard
aggro AA's and has been denying knowledge of the nerf since. The end.

'Stuce
12-07-2004 08:41 PM

Re: What happened to the Dot Agro post?
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Jarsh92
Journeyman
Posts: 91
Registered: 09-14-2004

Server: The Tribunal
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I don't understand why Sony would do that? As the game developers they do have every right to lower the aggro on songs and gives us a way to get it back. Yeah that pretty much stinks, but at least we would have a way to get it back, which now we don't. I love it how they say we are the most powerful class, yet we always have 10 issues on our list and I have noticed some other classes are having trouble keeping 10 issues on thier lists. Yes I know we are powerful, but I don't think we are anywhere close to being the most powerful class. We will just keep doing what bards do best, adapt. Thats where our "real" power is.
12-09-2004 06:14 AM

Re: What happened to the Dot Agro post?
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Meresya
Journeyman
Posts: 101
Registered: 05-20-2004

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For the most part I think the coding for bards is still pretty much spaghetti code, so SOE only enters into it when absolute necessary. Five months to just get a response regard missed notes. Close to the same on the dot agro nerf. No alteration of the AoE nerf (mobs trying to move TO the bard), and a host of others. Epic fixes were quests, not bard coding. The only thing to date for that time is auto twisting, which was done by a programmer, so the code is fresh, not meshed with hundreds and thousands of lines coded by only SOE knows hou many different people. I think it takes them months to sift thru the coding on any one aspect, with testing and whatnot. Only possible valid reason for no list item completion on anything code related. And melee issues won't be looked at to alter the imbalance of PoP's balancing because it can just be addressed in total later.

Just look at posting counts per day now. Compare it to when the board opened. Posting went from multiple times a day for people, down to probably once a week or bi-weekly. Bards discussed, argued, cursed out SOE, in a nutshell pretty much the whole gambit. Now we post when moved to, not for SOE but for other bards. Just like the preverbial horse, let it get its own bloody water. We've stop wasting our time trying to lead it.

Polara
12-10-2004 12:10 PM

Re: What happened to the Dot Agro post?
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Grumbuk-Dev
EQ Programmer
Posts: 161
Registered: 03-04-2004

Server: Test
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I was the person who said I'd follow up on the DoT agro/hate (and coded /melody, fwiw). We had to change the way PBAE DoT's worked a while ago to prevent exploits, and one unfortunate side effect of the change was that hate generation from DoT's was affected. Basically, damage is a key source of how much NPCs will hate a player, and without the damage being applied, less hate is created. We tried a few things, but were met with various problems and then more pressing issues came up and this was left behind. I'll try to get some progress on this one soon.

Regards,
---------------------------

Eric Cosky - "Grumbuk"

Assistant Lead Programmer, EverQuest

Sony Online Entertainment
12-10-2004 11:23 PM

Re: What happened to the Dot Agro post?
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weekly_ab_downage
Journeyman
Posts: 83
Registered: 06-21-2004

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Somehow being promised progress on an issue thats over 4 months old doesnt fill me with enthusiasm or hope. Saying you had to nerf AE kiting because of an exploit is true, but only because you failed to fix the source of the exploit being macroing.
12-11-2004 02:45 AM

Re: What happened to the Dot Agro post? [ Edited ]
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Grumbuk-Dev
EQ Programmer
Posts: 161
Registered: 03-04-2004

Server: Test
Viewed 172 times


I'll try to answer what I can.

weekly_ab_downage, the issue about chant agro was something in the top 10 list. This doesn't mean anything will be changed because it's in the top 10 list. Being in the top 10 list means that it's the top 10 things players want to see done. We do our best to change the game so that these items happen, because we want players to be happy with the game, but being in the list that players provide us isn't a promise it will be implemented.
That said, I don't know what changed - if anything - related to chant kiting agro, but I can say that the changes that went in related to AA's should not have affected it. The only thing I can think of that might be a plausible explanation for code changes at that time affecting chant agro is perhaps the migration of AA's to a new system actually fixed a bug with Spell Casting Subtlety. It's not out of the question that it was bugged before, and perhaps isn't now. I can't think of anything else that might affect chant agro because as far as I know nobody made any changes directly to that song.

Thiberg, thanks for the clarification about it being more specific to chants. I think it's still a good idea to revisit the PBAE DoTs in order to give them the same amount of agro when the damage element is ignore due to movement, but that is a different issue as you point out.

Meresya, unfortunately there is a misunderstanding with what the top 10 lists are for. You describe the items in the top 10 as pending "fixes" when in fact they are things players would like changed because they think it would improve the game. They are in fact almost always feature requests with only an occasional legitimite bug. The designers may or may not agree with the changes, and when they don't, they aren't going to happen. That doesn't mean it's broken, it just means it's not what you think is how it should be. In my post above where I said "hate generation from DoT's was affected" I meant specifically, PBAE DoTs. This is because when the damage element is bypasses due to the PBAE changes, no damage related hate is generated for the PBAE dot. The change had no effect on any other song or spell, it was a very isolated and specific change. That is why I think it may be possible to identify how much hate would have been generated at that time and apply it to the hatelist - but it may not be as simple as that so I won't make any promises.
As for altering the PBAoE nerf, we spent as much time on it as we could trying to minimize the side effects of the change and unfortunately I doubt it will be changed much at this point. Anything is possible I suppose but using your example, for instance, of enabling damage if the NPC is moving away from the bard then the main problem we were trying to avoid (engaging and killing an unlimited number of NPCs with no mana cost) would again be possible. You'd just need to bring two bards (we definitely considered this possibility).
We are in a bind here because if we want the game to be rubber-band lag free with respect to player movement, then the player is going to continue to be able to do these kinds of exploits as long as the game mechanics allow for it to happen. This is because cheaters will use macros to move to exact positions at exact times and take advantage of this. Would I like to stop macro users? Absolutely, and we've spent literally hundreds of man-hours fixing exploits and have banned many, many accounts this past year alone. It's very important to us that the game is played fairly. Can we stop everything? No, and that's just a fact. But we do as much as we can and will continue to invest developer time making game systems more secure, less prone to abuse, and more robust in terms of identifying various ways people are cheating.
When the client is on someone's physical machine, we simply have to accept that people can and do have the ability to mess with the memory and generally do whatever they want with it. There is nothing we can do to prevent that. Even if we could scan and find cheater tools on a player's machine, it would just become a game of cat and mouse as hackers hid the tools from us in ways we wouldn't possibly be able to identify. It would be a pointless exercise. The solution here is to move as much as we can that matters onto the servers where the server is the authority for what happens, and provide as little information to the client as is neccessary to play the game so that snooping at memory is as useful as looking at your screen (This isn't news for anyone who is familiar with computer security issues). The server is already the authority for almost everything that matters in EverQuest except for movement, because moving movement authority to the server would require the introduction of an intolerable amount of lag & latency (there are a few other things too, to be clear, such as NPC info that is used for tracking). Some games have tried server-authority movement in the past and have almost universally changed to use the same client-side authority for movement because it's just not worth ruining everyone's experience just so that a few hackers can't warp around. There is still room for improvement though, and just this past week I was in a meeting discussing our options so it isn't something that is being ignored.
Stacking issues for the bard songs in raids seems like a worthwhile subject to explore. I know there are similar issues with enchanter mezzes stacking, but these are topics best suited for designers.


Regards,

(edit- minor typo)
Message Edited by Grumbuk-Dev on 12-11-2004 09:27 AM

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

Eric Cosky - "Grumbuk"

Assistant Lead Programmer, EverQuest

Sony Online Entertainment
12-11-2004 09:25 AM

Re: What happened to the Dot Agro post?
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Archimede999
Journeyman
Posts: 29
Registered: 07-14-2004

Viewed 139 times
2 ratings - 3.0 average


First of all it's not 1 song. There's about 14 chants now, and for all of them the same behavior is found. Pre
July 14th, bards get enough aggro from 2 chants and assonance so that a shammy casting slow won't get aggro. Post July 14th patch, Bard needs to have 3 dots + assonance for at least 2 ticks before shammy slows, or mob
bee lines for shammy.

Secondly, pre-july 14th patch we don't know of any new AA's Omens will bring us. Post-july 14th patch a new AA
appears on test, 3 ranks of aggro increase for bards. Bards quickly put 2 and 2 together, and realize we lost
all our dot aggro so that we could purchase it back in Omens. We were very upset. Less than a week later the
aggro-generating AA's vanish from test. We never hear from them again.

A lot of work has already been done for you. All you have to do is look at the code changes for the July 14th
patch, anything that relates to bards. It's hardly looking for a needle in a haystack. How about this, I'll
even do more work for you.

At the beginning of july, one of the most active threads on bard boards was how a bard is supposed to hold aggro. A lot of bards didn't know it was possible, so it was explained exactly how and why it was possible. One of the main arguments was the fact that a chant from a bard is 2 types of aggro, there's the direct aggro generated by the amount of damage dealt by the DoT, and there's indirect aggro generated by the debuff component of the DoT.

I have a strong feeling that the July 14th patch stealth nerf, basically killed any aggro generated by the
debuff component of a chant dot.

So all the work is done, all you need to do is go look at that code, and fix it!

'Stuce
12-11-2004 11:00 AM