Literally ANYTHING to stop ranged henchmen from brawling

[Black Zot]

2 hours ago, Steampunkette said:

It's definitely a problem, yeah. Thank you for understanding!

 

Though if there -is- a simple fix? You'd think one of the Devs would've just flipped the switch. Or maybe there is a simple fix, but it's just SO SIMPLE that no one has thought of it in a serious manner. One of those "It can't be -that- easy... oh shit... CAN IT BE?!"

 

When I took my computer hardware course, the first thing they taught me to check was that everything was plugged in.

[Steampunkette]

8 hours ago, Black Zot said:

 

When I took my computer hardware course, the first thing they taught me to check was that everything was plugged in.

Good old ID:10t error!

[DR_Mechano]

I'm curious to see if and what can be done with mastermind and ranged pets in general. As mentioned prior to the 'fixes' it was broken in another way that melee pets would sit at range and spam their useless ranged attacks (since their ranged attacks recharged faster than brawl) instead of getting stuck in and the 'fix' broke it the opposite way, with ranged pets running in to melee things when they really shouldn't. So essentially it broke the AI for Mercs, Robotics and Thugs (with demons being somewhat ranged and somewhat melee) along with pets like Phantasm. This suggest it was a bodge fix that essentially told the pets that brawl = most close the distance in their AI, whether it made sense or not.

 

So essentially the fix was, noticing a pattern here with the CoH devs, a massive bodge job that didn't really fix the problem so much as transfer it. Unfortunately, in a perfect world the Dev team would have had the planning to include two different Pet AIs, one for melee and one for ranged...sadly this was not the case and instead it seems like pets share a generic AI since this problem affects all pets. So this means just removing brawl might not work because then its removed from all the melee pets as well which might result in them reverting to their ranged spamming ways and never closing the distance. It also means that just making brawl a ranged attack won't work for the same reasons.

 

Really we need someone who knows how to dive into the code to give us at least a TL:DR version of what the problem is, until then we're sort of stuck speculating.

[Crysis]

On 9/16/2019 at 3:00 AM, Steampunkette said:

"Hold This Position" Temp Power.

Targets Pet-Class Allies Only, TAoE Mag 100 Immobilize, Range 50ft, Area 15ft Radius, Toggle Duration, 0.01 End/Sec.

Use the same code to make it affect only the Caster's Pets as the Upgrade Powers.

 

Could work as a kludge.

 

 

 

Would work as a serious grieving tool for mean spirited players.  Block a doorway, done.

[SmalltalkJava]

46 minutes ago, Crysis said:

Would work as a serious grieving tool for mean spirited players.  Block a doorway, done.

Yah. I’m surprised that players have collision detection with friendly pets. 

[PaxArcana]

Speaking as a Mastermind loving player ... I would LOVE it if Players did not have collision with friendly Pets.

 

❤️ So.  Many.  FEWER.  Complaints.  On.  Teams.  ❤️ 

[Chuckers]

1 hour ago, PaxArcana said:

Speaking as a Mastermind loving player ... I would LOVE it if Players did not have collision with friendly Pets.

 

❤️ So.  Many.  FEWER.  Complaints.  On.  Teams.  ❤️ 

Players have collision issues with NPCs... We're Heroes, dammit!!! They should move out of OUR way.... 

or Villains and they should RUN out of our way.

Edited September 18, 2019 by Chuckers

[MetaVileTerror]

Usually I just have to push on teammates' Henchmen for a few seconds, and they'll rubberband out of my way, unless there's a LOT of them in one spot and they'll just billiard-bounce in to one another and prevent me from moving.

Is that not how it works for anyone else?

 

But anyway . . . why not replace Brawl with Single Shot on Mercs?  Not the Death Ray Single Shot, silly.  The Soldier of Arachnos Single Shot!

I mean, other than there being /how/ many Mercs you would need to go in and change that on, since apparently each model for the Merc is a unique creature.  Still . . . how many hours of work would that be, realistically?

[City_of_Jedi]

I remember the early days when CoV came out. 

 

We had discussions about this all the time on the boards.  These were the heady days when...

 

1. Bots/Dark ruled the roost 
2. Then people started to realize Bots/Traps was a thing
3. You could turtle up in personal forcefield and still command pets
4. You had to summon all your pets at the start of every mission, and upgrade them each time, one at a time
5. There was no bodyguard mode
6. People actually played Mercs.  Can you imagine? 
7. I know.  It sounds heretical. 
8. But Thugs weren't around back then.  We had to make do. 

 

Ranged pets had all the advantages.  They would sit back and plink away at Sky Raiders and never move.  It was glorious.  Once in a blue moon, a bot would try to melee a guy.  But honestly, the guy probably had it coming, to get b-slapped by a robo fist.  But it was nothing like today, in the post-Castle-fix era.  (The medic was always suicidal... don't get me started on that).  We've inherited the legacy of that design decision, good or bad.  It's a mixture of both. 

 

It sounds like I'm assigning blame here.  That's because I am.  But there was a legitimate problem that Castle was trying to solve.  He was a good guy.  He was trying to help us.  He got a red name, and later his own avatar in Peregrine.  We were so happy for him.  But I digress.

 

The idea was that melee pets would be totally helpless without ranged attacks in the event that they couldn't reach the enemy.  (CoV has more flying foes.)  But they were using their ranged attacks at the exclusion of the melee ones.  They would sit back and daisy chain ranged attacks.  Shoving them with the go-to command didn't help.  I mean obviously they would use them eventually.  But it took a lot of coaxing to get the damn grave knight to pull out his sword and start hacking off limbs.  So you had a situation where ranged pets were more survivable by virtue of being ranged, and more damaging by virtue of having ranged attacks which did more damage.  Melee pets were bottom-feeding jerks.  The red-headed step-children of that crazy uncle that keeps showing up to Thanksgiving even though no one actually invites him.  It was untenable.  Something had to be done.

 

Edited September 28, 2019 by City_of_Jedi
typo

[DR_Mechano]

12 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

Speaking as a Mastermind loving player ... I would LOVE it if Players did not have collision with friendly Pets.

 

❤️ So.  Many.  FEWER.  Complaints.  On.  Teams.  ❤️ 

This just caused a major problem for us on the Katie Hannon Taskforce an MMs pets would push and shove Amy, which caused her to first be wedged into the ceiling and then wedged into a wall once she got free from the ceiling, with it being late, most people just gave up on the TF because its not like live where GMs were working around the clock. There is a reason why most MMOs don't have player and NPC collision but it's something we're just going to have to live with.

 

IIRC someone WAS working on a fix for this just prior to sunset so there must be something we can do. Unfortunately, like I said, the pets seem to have a very basic and generic AI plastered on to all of the. Without the Castle bodge job of making Brawl a priority (which is what seems to be happening here, that brawl has priority over every other attack which is what forces the pets to go in and use it) then Melee pets would still be just useless. So, speculating here, what we need is someone to go in and rewrite a shit-ton of coding (good luck with that) so that pets have two AI scripts, one for ranged and one for melee. Melee pets would keep the current one and Ranged would have to have a version that is like the pre-fixed version where brawl is used as a last resort.

 

The amount of work this would take since you'd need to go into each individual pet AND their variations to assign to them which of the AI scripts to use. However it is something that needs to be done in my opinion but sadly I've got no idea how to go about or even if such a thing is feasibly possible.

 

Thinking of a MASSIVE kludge fix is, as mentioned on the first page, the upgrade powers can add or remove powers. What you'd have to do is change both the upgrade powers in mercs and bots so that they remove brawl. Thugs is an odd case because it wants its tier 1 and 2 pets at range but its tier 3 at melee.

Edited September 19, 2019 by DR_Mechano

[Weylin]

Do we actually know what the AI script is like... at all?

Or is everyone here just going off of conjecture?

Is each pet AI scripted individually, or does it use a modular and scalable system? Something in between? Who knows!

 

There still hasn't been any official reply to this besides telling me to shut up and stop bringing it up 3 times a week.

[DR_Mechano]

1 minute ago, Weylin said:

Do we actually know what the AI script is like... at all?

Or is everyone here just going off of conjecture?

Is each pet AI scripted individually, or does it use a modular and scalable system? Something in between? Who knows!

 

There still hasn't been any official reply to this besides telling me to shut up and stop bringing it up 3 times a week.

We're going off of speculation BUT with a little logical thinking to back it up that all pets share a generic AI script. If MM pets had their own script and Castle 'fixed' this then we wouldn't see Phantasm having the same problem of trying to use brawl and getting smooshed by AoEs constantly.  The fact that this change affected ALL pets, whatever their AT implies it is indeed a generic fix to a single basic AI coding.

 

As mentioned there are ways around this using the upgrade powers, the first and second upgrade for Bots and Mercs would simply remove brawl from their power list, we know it can be done. Tier 1 Demons, during their middle upgrade, lose all their melee attacks IIRC (I may be wrong on this front it has been a very long time since I played a Demons MM) but gain it back with the third upgrade.

[William Valence]

Being vague while still trying to be helpful.

 

There is not AI baked into pets or powers, there is a bunch of behaviors, spread about in the spaghetti of the entity code, and a Pet "Brain" which controls pet specific behaviors and takes inputs from configuration files that inform preferences and parameters of the pet. Pets themselves point to the configuration which is supposed to determine it's behaviors.

 

Removing brawl would not work on it's own nor would adding a "Ranged Brawl", definitely not in sets with only ranged pets. All you get is a pet that thinks it's supposed to melee, runs in, and use a ranged attack every 4s. There may be potential to side-step this issue, but it will take effort, time, and testing.

 

Fun facts: the Bruiser, Oni, and Lich all have the same behavioral configuration. The Arsonist and Medic have the same behavioral configuration. In fact I'm convinced thugs were copy/pasted from Mercs initially and then modified from there.

 

Questions that the Mastermind community may want to ask themselves, and that could be useful to the developers that could be working on this one day, is:

1. Could they live without "Pure" Ranged set? I.E Replacing a pet in Mercs and robotics with a melee pet (I main Necro so Ha!) 
2. Could they live with "Hybrid" Pets such as the Oni being refocused into ranged or melee?
3. Could you handle the potential toning down of some sets that may perform a tremendous deal better after any possible behavioral changes

[PaxArcana]

Honestly at this point, I'm sorry for the melee sets, but I'd like to have things back the way they were before Castle screwed everything up fixed things.

[William Valence]

8 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

Honestly at this point, I'm sorry for the melee sets, but I'd like to have things back the way they were before Castle screwed everything up fixed things.

Ranged sets are no where near as bad as melee was. Melee sets were practically unplayable, and Castle's fix made them playable.

 

And Bots is still top tier, so /jranger

[PaxArcana]

"Top tier (in a pile of crap)" would still be crap.

 

I'm not saying Robotics is crap, just pointing out that "top tier" is relative.

 

And, regardless ... I want my robots to be as awesome as they were before Castle's changes.  The first time I opened up with an all-bots alpha after training to level 32, I couldn't stop laughing maniacally for several minutes.  And kept starting up again, every time I opened up on a new spawn of NPCs.

 

I just want that back. 😢

[DR_Mechano]

8 hours ago, William Valence said:

Ranged sets are no where near as bad as melee was. Melee sets were practically unplayable, and Castle's fix made them playable.

 

And Bots is still top tier, so /jranger

As pointed out this isn't just effecting MMs, it causes problems for controllers as well. Prior to the change my Phantasm would sit back and just hurl ranged damage downwind towards the enemy staying just out of AoE range. Now it seems intent on running in to brawl and then proceeding to get smooshed by AoEs. Now I know ill/rad isn't exactly a combo set in need of buffs but it is rather annoying to see the Phantasm running in all the time.

[quixoteprog]

8 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

As pointed out this isn't just effecting MMs, it causes problems for controllers as well. Prior to the change my Phantasm would sit back and just hurl ranged damage downwind towards the enemy staying just out of AoE range. Now it seems intent on running in to brawl and then proceeding to get smooshed by AoEs. Now I know ill/rad isn't exactly a combo set in need of buffs but it is rather annoying to see the Phantasm running in all the time.

I agree that Ill/Rad doesn't need buffs, and I also agree that it would be nice if a ranged pet, like Phantasm, just behaved in a reasonably logical way. I'm cool with the illusion he summons running in and mixing it up with a hord of Knives of Vengeance bosses. He can't be hurt. The Phant can, and DOES. And if he had even ONE melee attack you could argue that he maybe should run in there once and a while. And since I don't think he does, yeah. He should just hang out with me and watch the fireworks from the PA pack, and feel free to shoot in there whenever the mood strikes him.

Edited September 20, 2019 by quixoteprog

[DR_Mechano]

It honestly speaks to how much of this games coding is just awful that Castle had to basically break ranged pets to make melee pets worthwhile. In a perfect world the team would have been sensible enough to have two different 'pet brains' depending on whether they were ranged or melee and each pet would be given a set of behaviors depending on what it was (so the Bruiser would be melee, the thugs and enforcers would be ranged). Instead we have a generic AI for all pets. The whole thing is a massive mess.

 

As mentioned it seems like a pet having no melee powers at all (for example the Lich and Protector bots do not have any melee attacks and thus tend to stay back at the max range for their abilities) IS a work around, since we can see it working on several examples so the question becomes, why do the Lich etc. stay at range with no melee attacks while the Phantasm runs in thinking it has a melee attack despite it not having one, I think the answer may be its running in to cast the Decoy, which is interesting.

 

Ok having a look at the pet powers list, Battle Bots and Assault bots all have a specific melee power called 'Smash'. What if we just removed that option from them during testing to see if it reverted them back to their original selves.

Edited September 20, 2019 by DR_Mechano

[Steampunkette]

22 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

It honestly speaks to how much of this games coding is just awful that Castle had to basically break ranged pets to make melee pets worthwhile. In a perfect world the team would have been sensible enough to have two different 'pet brains' depending on whether they were ranged or melee and each pet would be given a set of behaviors depending on what it was (so the Bruiser would be melee, the thugs and enforcers would be ranged). Instead we have a generic AI for all pets. The whole thing is a massive mess.

 

As mentioned it seems like a pet having no melee powers at all (for example the Lich and Protector bots do not have any melee attacks and thus tend to stay back at the max range for their abilities) IS a work around, since we can see it working on several examples so the question becomes, why do the Lich etc. stay at range with no melee attacks while the Phantasm runs in thinking it has a melee attack despite it not having one, I think the answer may be its running in to cast the Decoy, which is interesting.

 

Ok having a look at the pet powers list, Battle Bots and Assault bots all have a specific melee power called 'Smash'. What if we just removed that option from them during testing to see if it reverted them back to their original selves.

It's worth considering... But it's been said that 'just removing brawl' breaks the AI. I'm not sure 'just remove Smash' is going to be any different, in the end.

[DR_Mechano]

28 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

It's worth considering... But it's been said that 'just removing brawl' breaks the AI. I'm not sure 'just remove Smash' is going to be any different, in the end.

The thing is we can see it doesn't break the AI for a pet to have no melee powers, The Lich and Protector bots sit at their max range and pew pew since they have no melee powers at all, so the simplest solution may be to just strip melee attacks out of them, like I said, it's something that if I had any knowledge (is there a good place to learn?) where I'd set up my own private server and tweak with the Pet Powers using the Pineapple style test set up to be able to auto-50 on command so I could work my way through all the pets.

 

I'd also test if the decoy casting was the cause for Phantasm running in to melee range, which if that is the case, well we're just going to have to live with it.

Edited September 20, 2019 by DR_Mechano

[Steampunkette]

26 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

The thing is we can see it doesn't break the AI for a pet to have no melee powers, The Lich and Protector bots sit at their max range and pew pew since they have no melee powers at all, so the simplest solution may be to just strip melee attacks out of them, like I said, it's something that if I had any knowledge (is there a good place to learn?) where I'd set up my own private server and tweak with the Pet Powers using the Pineapple style test set up to be able to auto-50 on command so I could work my way through all the pets.

 

I'd also test if the decoy casting was the cause for Phantasm running in to melee range, which if that is the case, well we're just going to have to live with it.

We see that the Lich and Protector Bots don't have melee attacks. But we don't see what's different in the Lich or Protector Bots AI that causes them to function like they do.

 

But we can infer that it's either incompatible with other pets (for some reason or another), else Castle or one of the other powers team members would've "Just fixed it". However we know that pulling brawl "Breaks" the AI. Why? How? Fucked if I know. But apparently it does.

 

I don't think "Removing Smash" is going to be any different.

[DR_Mechano]

Just now, Steampunkette said:

We see that the Lich and Protector Bots don't have melee attacks. But we don't see what's different in the Lich or Protector Bots AI that causes them to function like they do.

 

But we can infer that it's either incompatible with other pets (for some reason or another), else Castle or one of the other powers team members would've "Just fixed it". However we know that pulling brawl "Breaks" the AI. Why? How? Fucked if I know. But apparently it does.

 

I don't think "Removing Smash" is going to be any different.

In which case it might be an option to take whatever it is that guides those pets and transplant it to the rest of Robotics. I'm also slowly start to disbelieve that removing a power would break the AI, I have my suspicions that it was just something the devs didn't want to do instead of couldn't do. Currently I'm looking in to the rather complicated option of setting up my own CoH private server for testing purposes but there is a ton of documentation to go through and very little on how to modify pets so it'll be a while before I get everything set up and I'm not a programmer so it will be a lot of trial and error.

[Steampunkette]

8 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

In which case it might be an option to take whatever it is that guides those pets and transplant it to the rest of Robotics. I'm also slowly start to disbelieve that removing a power would break the AI, I have my suspicions that it was just something the devs didn't want to do instead of couldn't do. Currently I'm looking in to the rather complicated option of setting up my own CoH private server for testing purposes but there is a ton of documentation to go through and very little on how to modify pets so it'll be a while before I get everything set up and I'm not a programmer so it will be a lot of trial and error.

I played D&D with Castle for literal years and had a fun friendly relationship with him the whole time literally spending hours on Skype or Discord shooting the shit, talking about game design, and stuff on the -daily-. The dude wasn't lying that removing brawl breaks shit. If it was that easy he'd have just done it. It's not like he never thought of it, or never heard people suggest it on the forum. If he said it broke things, it broke things.

 

And a lot of the time, Castle didn't really discuss how things were broken behind the scenes with us as players. Both because it was pointless and it would cause a whole bunch of fatalistic "Game's Broken, let's all leave" ridiculousness.

 

So if Castle said 'Removing Brawl Breaks It' he freaking -meant- it. It means that it was such a big problem that was so often recommended that he had no choice to discuss the matter with the playerbase... Like his involvement in PvP discussion threads and the like and we all remember how those things were massive tire fire trainwrecks.

 

Castle was a hard worker, diligent and brilliant and often hampered by a bunch of people above him who didn't understand the game's inner workings issuing orders on what they wanted done that couldn't be done or -shouldn't- be done demanding he do it, somehow, regardless. (But that's basically how it ALWAYS works, regardless of what studio you're working for)

Edited September 20, 2019 by Steampunkette

[DR_Mechano]

Fair enough I'm still curious, Like I said, we have pets who have no melee powers who don't engage in melee and they function perfectly fine so we need to find the key difference between those pets and other pets. Someone pointed out to me that Cast Decoy is a ranged power so it that can't be the problem on why the Phantasm is going into melee range despite not having any melee powers. We need to pin down WHY certain pets do it and certain pets don't.

 

Is it a case that removing the melee powers from pets causes them to act like the Phantasm and just run into melee anyway, which might very well be the case. Lets be honest, what he did was a massive bodge job, it was needed because melee pets were unplayable but the way it was done comes across as incredibly clunky.

 

Like I said, once I've gotten everything set up and actually know how to remove powers from pets I can actual test this stuff.