Funcom: Pet /Summon Proposal

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Originally posted by Lividsquash


Improving pathing in MMOGs is very hard because of the server side intensive calculations going on with pet AI, so most MMOGs don’t have anywhere near path finding such as recent FPS etc. While I am sure Funcom will in the future improved and tweak the path finding this problem needs to reduced right now. Don’t view it as a quick fix, because not for a very long time will path finding get up to a level of the intelligence of a human player (and warping doesn’t count). Giving us this ability now is going to save a ton of headaches, especially those delays in getting the group to wait for your stuck pets!

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While I definately agree, in EQ (no, I don't love EQ) pets "jump" over obstacles in front of them.
Steps, boulders, logs, etc.

I agree with a summon nano or command.

OK, I agree pet summoning is simplier to implement although it would be nice to create some sort of in-game justification for this. Maybe you could just give up on the whole pet following you around nonsense, and have it appear like a nano cloud that is on the current player/npc it is told to guard. And only when that player attacks, is attacked, or tells the pet to attack will it manifest as the pets we know and love. If you made it like a nano program that appears in your NCU list but consumes no NCUs then you could use the existing interface for time to live info on the pet and other stuff like that. At least then you could say that the pet is a nano-bot construct that goes dormant when not in use. The healing pets would be a touch tricker to handle but if you tied them to the player object they are told to heal in the same way but maintain a similar graphic that "floats" x distance above and behind the player object then you could maintain the impression of "being a pet" while losing the costs/difficulties of pathfinding.

(I play a NT now but played a eng. for the first month or so after the game went live so I feel all you pet owner's pain. I gave up on my eng. after realizing that at the time it was next to impossible to make anything, make money at it, or live on wimpy gun boosts and pitiful shields.)

Excellent post, and the huge response shows how frustrating this is for everyone.

Simplifying the mission layouts and eliminating sticky water traps would help, but the /pet summon command is likely to be far more effective and easier.

Listen to the masses, please Funcom. I have signed off for the rest of the weekend because my crat died six times today SOLEY DUE TO PATHING BUGS in missions. I'm jack of it and it's seriously hurting my enjoyment of the game.

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Originally posted by Gurthang
OK, I agree pet summoning is simplier to implement although it would be nice to create some sort of in-game justification for this.

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How about the justification that an advanced android or charmed Level 60 human is perfectly capable of walking past a metal beam lying on the ground, or getting out of an ankle-deep pool of water?

First off, if this summon trick is to be a "fix", it must be a command and not a nano. We should not have to spend any extra time, nano, or creds because FC can't path pets properly.
The real fix should be to fix pathing or world object comprehension by AI.
Oh and Thyrra is pissing me off...

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Originally posted by Thyrra
fazun please do us both a favor and read my post in the order it was writen. reading it backwards can tend to cause you to get the message backwards.

i'm not telling you that all players are at fault. i'm telling w that its the player's fault because he asked to be told that, and he asked nicely.

maybe pressing 'u' like a trained chimp will help. i hear that they are better at it than normal chimps.

i don't see how you can exhonorate players completely here. if nobody played a pet prof, or at least if nobody cast a pet, there would be no pet pathing or pet ai problems.

lets work on things together. and lets try to help each other out instead of just going on and on about the game. lets try to figure out what would make people happy and try in our own small little ways to make the heppier.

anyway, furniture should be the main priority for the devs to work on.

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...I think you wrote it backwards.

....He didn't want some smart alec remark, taking his statement literally, he wanted you to experience our problems...now he probably wants you to STFU or take a long walk off a short dock...

....more sarcascm. Not "helping" either, see below...

....if nobody played melee characters, there wouldn't be a minimum damage bug...how about if nobody played any of the proffessions, then we wouldn't have ANY problems at all....

....as I said before, smart alec remarks and blatent hipocracy does not help this thread one bit

..well, i have to agree about the furniture, we should be able to use any piece as a weapon not just the chairs....I wanna hit someone with the refrigerator I found the other day!!

Plain and simple:

Fix pathing.

No more Tricks or Walkarounds.

Provisioner

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Originally posted by iorit


How about the justification that an advanced android or charmed Level 60 human is perfectly capable of walking past a metal beam lying on the ground, or getting out of an ankle-deep pool of water?

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Bahh.. expecting or demanding perfection will only make you disappointed. My point was that if it is too difficult/expensive to solve the pathing poblem maybe re-thinking how pets interact in the game might be a better solution than some /pet summon band-aid. After all we are here to debate the merits and deficits of eachother's ideas in the hopes of that maybe one of these ideas will see the light of day.

Having a visual bug like pets walking on water is silly but not particularly important.

(Of course not much debate going on here just a bunch of yea me too.. and flames.)

I agree whole heartedly with a /pet summon command. I am a lvl 42 eng and for the last 15 lvls I have been exclusively hunting and not missioning - the reason - cos at least I stand a reasonable chance of my pet being near me if I get into a fight.

My bot is pretty much my only weapon - sure I have a small gun, but I have developed my stats so that I can have the best bot possible so that I am purely an eng, rather than an eng/soldier char.

As we all know it is very frustrating when you walk into a mission room with a table - I just groan as I watch my pet do a u turn and run off trying to find a different route, leaving me a nervous and sitting duck.

I understand that pathing is a complicated issue, but come on Funcom some people have come up with a workable short term fix that you could implement without it becoming an exploit.

I want to start doing missions again and get some decent reward items!

While I think that the summon command/band-aid would help, the other part of the problem is when you have to send the pet into the next room to attack. Half the time it will just hang on the door or head into a corner trying to get to the target. At other times it will pop thru to the next room and agg the target, which in turn comes running after you with the pet now stuck in the wrong room.

Fix the pathing.

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Originally posted by VdpMeat
... the other part of the problem is when you have to send the pet into the next room to attack. Half the time it will just hang on the door or head into a corner trying to get to the target.

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press 'u' when the bot has to go through doors ....

this doesn't work when your bot (pet) has some kind of slow-nano runnin on him .... then you just have to wait ....

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Originally posted by Fazun


press 'u' when the bot has to go through doors ....

this doesn't work when your bot (pet) has some kind of slow-nano runnin on him .... then you just have to wait ....

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Think I may have tried this with a gladbot about 70 lvls ago with no results, but I'll try it again, thanks.

Still... no reason I should have to bring up my skill view to get a pet to do what I want.

Fix the pathing.

/pet summon for the people!

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Originally posted by Ellusion
/pet summon for the people!

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I agree, having grouped with an Engi a lot, a pet summon command and/or LOW QL nano AVAILABLE in STORES would help.

Even EQ has a pet summon spell ;) (shaman class, not sure of others)

All the BLA BLA BLA is for the dog...

only thing i want is the PATCH, and that real soon, i am bored comming home from a hard work day and knowing i would love to play and do some missions but i cant without loosing my last hairs on my head. (nah i still got a few to loose)

Cosmik you heared what we want now go to your DEV team and tell em to stop all the Development of Future things,Expansion and what all crap they are working on. I am would be happy if my pet would work i really dont care about the rest. just missions is what i want to do, and that with my fat ugly rusty Guardbot.

Help me to have fun evennings after work instead of frustratings.

Thank you

P.S again the NANO idea is crap, i want a simple
/PET SUMMON AND FOLLOW
or
/PET SUMMON AND GUARD
or
/PET SUMMON AND BEHIND

so thats safest way to do it.
i dont wanna waste another Spot on my Hotkey Bar.
There 8 Slots which arent enough already... Greetings to EQ and DAOC.

So dont waste my and your time by creation 50 Nanos for that Pet summon thing..... make the easy and fast solution please i am impatient now

I havent read this entire thread, but enough of it to want to put my 2 cred in and keep it alive.

All I play is pet classes. I have all of em, crat, engie and MP, all post 50. And I can tell you, pathing is the single biggest problem with AO at the moment. For me, at least. NOTHING is more frustrating the having to /terminate a pet every few rooms in a cave. Its so bad, I simply wont do cave missions any longer. Running back and forth to try to get a pet or 3 off of a doorjamb is just about as fun, too.

/pet summon would be an incredible boon to pet classes, one who's positives would far outweigh the negitives. Theres been some fine suggestions in this thread to limiting the command, like disabling it during combat (cheaters note: /pet follow STOPS your pet from fighting), as well as a few others. Lets face it, almost anything can be used to the players advantage if you approach it from the right angle. I once saw Clanners training big red mobs onto Omni parties, then /terminating themselves, just so the Omni's would get weakened to the point where they'd be easy meat for the Clanner's friends. There's no end to the legnths folks will go to gain an advantage. In THIS case, however, the problem is so bad that some kind of fix needs to be implemented. And /pet summon is just the thing.

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Redtaype, 54th Solitus Crat
Dierdri, 58th Solitus Engie
Gargoyle, 53rd Solitus MP

"Omni and lovin' it!"

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Was on test last night, and was talking to pet classes and they said caves have been fixed... so lets hope that they are :) They arent the pet traps that they are now.

Although I still wouldnt mind seeing a /pet summon command.

/pet summon is the most needed thing for Eng/Crat. Mps are also effected but they are the only prof. that can rebuff them self and make the same lvl pet.

How many engies out there you think suffers the pain when going into a mission with a bot they got mochams and a wrangle for, spedning 100k+, too have it get stuck in a mission and destroyed... Ive personally spoken to 3 ARKs and 2 GMs about pet pathing and the issuse about the engy heal nano going offline from time to time and havnt gotten any real respones.

As I have said to them... If you can't fixed the pathing problem 100% then atleast give us the ability to summon the pet... then you would have all the time in the world to fix the pathing problem!

Quadiz lv96 eng RK1
Quadez lv53 mp RK1

Path-finding problems with pets are intolerable.

I have both MP characters and Engineer characters. Life is a little better for an engineer but still there are plenty of structural elements in dungeons that can make you to get grey hair and abandon playing pet-based classes.

I propose that instead of making various work-arounds, the designers should consider changing the architecture of elements which are pet-traps in missions. There are in fact not so many of them. Make the doors bigger, get rid of deep-water rooms with high ledges, get rid of that room which has several rows of columns in it - that's just designed to be a pet-sieve. Junk the dungeon with catwalks over toxic waste - that's virtually undoable with a robotic pet. This is in wild-type environment. In urban-type
misions, there is one kind of room that just drives me crazy: it's a
very tiny room with a huge L-shaped table in it that occupies pretty much the whole space. The robot who wants to walk in straight lines cannot make it across. This is just a short list of examples.

My point is, there are certain structures in missions that trap pets.
Please reconsider those structures.

-Stareblade

COSMIK you did what i expected..... NOTHING !! :)) you are really doing nothing....

2 weeks later you havent brought us any update to this and thats what i expected from you. You promising alot in other threads aswell but you never come back to bring any news.. The last News you brought was that the 13.6 patch which is really needed, is delay because this unneeded Stupid new dungeon is not balanced. Guy you are kiddin us, thats all i can say.

Make a sticky Thread and ask how many people would like to see patch 13.6 without this Dungeon with just all the technical problems fixed. start that. the result it will be no surprise....

People dont want new stuff in the game before you fixed the bugs, cant you get this ?

Well Cosmik. how about helping the programmers to fix this bugged game then instead of making us more frustrated with no answers here ??

Well well........................................... LOL i cant stop laughin boy really..