Community answers - part 4

[______________Scorus]

Any chance for an estimate on 14.6 preliminary patch notes?

Scorus

[Darkbane]

Hmm, think we had kinda guessed that But nice of you to drop in and tell us anyway. I await next week with baited breath

Have a fun weekend! Me, I *will* hit 100 tonight (only 320K to go...) with my Enf, and I'll be on test to get some more levels on my Doc.

(and anything on 14.6, even pre-pre-patch notes covered in disclaimers would be nice...)

[Warlock]

Originally posted by Cz
/me leaves some ice cream and heads home to log in his Atrox and swing that Support Beam all weekend

err shouldnt you be 'best 'trox' at someones wedding or something? :-)

[Sean-Roach]

Where DOES an atrox stand at the wedding? Best man? Or maid of honor?

[secondkenlon]

Bouncer.

[___________McFarlane]

Ok I have a question, and I appoligize if its listed in another thread, I couldnt find it

While soloing a mission I came upon a shrine, that gave me +528 to damage (approximatley), which lasted about 2-3 minutes. I do not remeber the name of the buff...wolf something I think.
Anyhow, the next mob that I attacked, I had a shot of 73 damage. How is it possible, if I have a +528 damage buff running, that I hit for 73? Is this considered a "critical miss?" and is this intentional?

Thanks,


Green.

[_______MartinDeShade]

+528 to damage!! Wow I have never even hear of anything adding +528 to damage. However, I have instances where I have a much smaller + to damage, yet hit for a little less than the + to damage. With a gun with a min 1 damage. I guess AC doesn't consider it part of the min damage of the weapon or something.

Martin

[Cz]

Green Tea, I'll report it as a bug and ask QA to test it.

[_____________Browken]

Originally posted by Green Tea
While soloing a mission I came upon a shrine, that gave me +528 to damage (approximatley), which lasted about 2-3 minutes. I do not remeber the name of the buff...wolf something I think.

If it was a Shadow Rift of the Wolf, then I've seen these add about 500 to your speed. It buffs all your inits plus your runspeed by something like that number.

As another person said, I've never seen a Shadow Rift which adds that much damage. One of the nicest ones is the Rift which adds a huge chunk to xp (I've seen 80%ish bonus)

Browken

[______________Scorus]

This would have been +528 to your init, NOT your damage! The damage one added +111 to me in a level 130ish mission.

Scorus

[Darkbane]

IIRC

Wolf: +run speed and inits
Bear: +damage
Frog: damage shield
Spirit: +xp bonus
Eagle: +evades
Pheonix: HoT
Firefly: NoT (nano-over-time)

[______________Scorus]

What is the delay with 14.6 preliminary patch notes? Is there something big coming in it or is it delayed because of the Shadowlands work or what?

Scorus

[DaWicked]

How come AO doesn't act so well together with dual monitors?

Is this a thing that is going to be looked in to? It is very anoying to have to disable you secondary monitor to be able to play AO. I have other programs running that I want to keep an eye on while I play, thats why I installed a second monitor

All other games I've tried seams to support this now, just not AO :/
----------------------
DaWicked

PS : If not in a patch, at least have it fixed when the expansion pack comes out

[Brad, STL/MO]

I'm running AO on a tinkertoy system with crappy graphics support, and running multiple monitors works fine for me. Not as fine as I'd like; I'd love to be able to move the control palettes and the info window and such to the second monitor. But it makes no trouble for me.

[DaWicked]

Ao isn't happy here..

If I run Ao in fullscreen more, it start up on the secondary monitor. If I run in window more I'll end up with a black screen. I can tell I'm loged in cos I can hear ppl walking around me, but there are is nothing to be seen, everything is black.

I have a GeForce 4 Ti4600 card w/128 MB RAM.
-------------------
DaWicked

[Sean-Roach]

Try selecting a different display device when you start the game.

For awhile, I was running AO on a dual head system. I had a GeForce 4 as my primary, and a GeForce 2 for my secondary. (I had to give this up, as the video card combination was making XP unstable.)

Before that, about 10-12 months ago, I was running AO on a dual head system built around a Voodoo3/3500 TV/AGP, and a no-stat nvidia video, (NOT Graphics) card.

I would try to figure out why two GeForce cards are making XP unstable, but to be honest, since AO won't let the mouse off the screen when you're running full screen, the advantage of having that extra screen is minimized, and since you can't spread AO over multiple monitors, you're still stuck with the limited FOV that a single monitor allows.

[Vindispite]

Agree with the graphics problems with morphs, and I have a question about 3rd person view in general.

In 1st person I can hold down the right mouse button to go into free mouselook mode. When I'm in 3rd person perspective, I can hold down the right button to turn, but I cannot adjust the camera vertically. Is this by design or is it just me? If it is by design, I should like to ask to be able to look down to see my last kill using mouselook if that's not incredibly complex.

[Jayde]

I don't know if this is your forte or not, but the issue of quality control came up in one of my earlier posts. You replied to it, so I'm pretty sure you're aware of the issue...

Is there any clue when we're going to have a "fix the patch patch" for the last emergency bugfix that broke a LOT of things?

I'm sure you folks had some pressing exploit reason why you worked an emergency patch in, but it would be much better if you made sure the devs patched in only what was intended, and not break (or re-break, as the case may be) things?

Things that are broken now...
1) Calms. Don't work if the MOB isn't aggro when its cast. I'm sure you realize what this does ot the new advent calms? Sometimes it does work even if they are aggro. Also, the calm stays on the MOB, meaning something like this can occur:

-Advent warps down calms MOB
-MOB starts attacking again
-NT/Crat goes to calm MOB, cannot calm mob because Advent calm is higher on the stacking order of the strain.
-Tank dies, team dies, end of mission

2) Wandering MOBs. MOBs don't stay in their room. May be a new "feature", would be nice to be documented, eh? It is good when people can plan strategies.

3) Aggro in team missions is occasionally really, really high. I've had MOBs aggro from way around a corner, no LoS, no attack in the room, nothing...just spontaneous aggro. Also had a "cry for help" assist with the assisting MOB out of visual sight, with no attacks in the room at all...just assist aggroed the second the first MOB did. This can be really bad--I'm sure you wouldn't want 2 or 3 angry Vet Enforcers trailing you. =)

4) Phantom nano recharge bar. Team heals will cause your NCU to run a nano recharge bar up in the normal stack of bars. However, this is NOT just a visual glitch. Team heals can now short circuit the casting of YOUR spells, cause all sorts of odd error messages ("Nanobots are busy...", and some others you don't see very often) and problems. When your hela doesn't go off after you've clicked the button a few times, and you're tanking, that can spell the end of you.

5) Over-nuking. Nukes are running wild right now...and I have a sneaking hunch than either Rule of One or Cascade of the Storm (haven't been able to determine which class in question due to one instance being a boss, and 2 instances involving multiple battles that caused the messages to be scrolled out for the people who experienced it) has snuck into some wrong places in the nano tables. Otherwise, I'd like the devs to rationalize why a level ~72 MOB used a 2000 point energy damage nuke on a level 84 player tonight. (Here for reference: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...threadid=40800 ) MOBs are also nuke a lot more often, with very over-powered, basically insta-kill nukes. Every night I hear from a friend or guild affiliate who has been insta-killed by a nuke of some sort.

6) There are more, but those are the main ones...various issues like getting stuck in missions, mission keys disappearing, etc. have been far more frequent...but I'm not gonna make this post any longer than it already is. =)

Now, I KNOW there is a bugs forum...but, I'm posting this here for a reason.

First, I want to make another point that for your customers to take you seriously, these patches really need to be tested first. An exploit or serious glitch is NOT an excuse to let MORE bugs slip through. A "fix" that breaks 4 things for every 1 it fixes is NOT a fix--it's an amputation for a papercut.

Second, when an emergency patch is issued, devs really need to be on high alert, and work some overtime. Why? Because they ALWAYS introduce bugs...and they very rarely get fixed. New bugs are tossed onto the stack to get fixed in 16.2, while the devs preen over the fact that they kept UberD00d541 from gaining 10 more xp per hour.

Third, it would be nice if we could get some response on the bug fix boards. For all intents and purposes, the board is silent. It rarely gets any response as to what is a known issue, what is being fixed, what is high-priority, what is low-priority, and when we can expect a patch for it.

Many of the above issues are SERIOUS. And if we have to wait until 14.6 (which still has no prelim patch notes, and still hasn't even grazed test, and probably won't appear for another 2 months), lots of people are gonna die cheap deaths..and lots of people are gonna get really pissed off.

If nobody's gonna answer on the bug forums, at least tell us what we all assume already--that most devs are working on Shadowlands and can't be bothered to maintain any level of version/quality control in the "legacy" code--since more changes will only mean more work for the Shadowlands folks...

So, the simple questions are:
1) Are they aware of these issues?
2) When are they getting fixed?
3) If they aren't aware of these issues, do they care?
4) When are they getting fixed?

Sorry if it always sounds like I'm complaining at you...but, to be honest, when things are all peachy-keen, I'd rather play the game. =)

-Jayde

[Sean-Roach]

I coudldn't find the post that asked the question, so I'm hoping the person who wrote it is reading this thread.

At some point, a couple weeks? ago, someone expressed concern that the number of lockpick attempts aversely affects the loot that's in the chests.

Several months ago AO had an interesting bug. If you got knocked off line and came back, you'd sometimes find your mission re-populated. This repop was both mobs and chests. At this time, I had to re-complete a mission by 60 some odd percent to clear the mission, and I noticed something. I was opening the same chests, with the same loot inside.

I just remembered this a little earlier, and I wanted to convey it to the person mentioned above. I don't know if this is still true, but at one point loot was pretty much locked in when the mission was started.

And no, I didn't figure it for a dupe-exploit, as I had to kill the mobs over to get the loot.

[Cz]

New answers thread is up. Closing this one.

Please take the dual monitor discussion to the tech forums. While I find it both interesting and important, I won't have a chance at following up on it.

JaydeStargunner...
#1, 4 and 5: Will be reported as bugs and forwarded to QA.
#2: I'll check with the (World) Designers whether it's intended.
#3: Goes to the World Designers too. Might be a sync problem (MOB is actually not around the corner, but in the doorway, seeing you), or a Line of Sight problem. Or something completely different.

And don't expect the "devs" (that would be coders and designers, I suppose) to stay updated on the bugs forum. That's for Community and QA.

Sean Roach, the number of lockpick attempts on a chest has absolutely nothing to do with the loot inside the chest. (Though higher level missions have better loot and higher level chests, so with the same skill as 20 levels ago, you will of course need more attempts to open it.)

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Ok, thread is closed. Head to the next one folks.