Literally ANYTHING to stop ranged henchmen from brawling

[DR_Mechano]

34 minutes ago, Craigrx said:

On the Thunderspy CoH server brawl was removed from the ranged pets attack chain and I didn't read any complaints about them doing that. Even tho I am not a dev that if one server can do it so could Homecoming. Of course I would want it to be tested on the Beta server to make sure that works properly.

 

Personally I wouldn't cry if the brawl power was removed period. I never use it unless I am bored and just want to play around with it

In that case one of the guys here is probably going to have to talk to their guys and see how it was done. Also it isn't people crying about removing brawl it's more we're trying to figure out how we remove the melee attacks from ranged pets without them just running in to melee and firing off a ranged attack.

Edited September 21, 2019 by DR_Mechano

[Craigrx]

Wasn't trying to imply people were crying about it over here but I also was talking personally about MY opinion that when I say I wouldn't cry means I wouldn't miss the power sorry if you misunderstood what I was trying to say

 

[Neogumbercules]

How about update the Stay command that masterminds have to apply a mag 1000 unresistable, infinite duration Immobilize to all henchmen? 

[PaxArcana]

Doesn't even have to be Mag 1000.

Mag 20 would do it.

For duration, it could be only, say, 3 seconds ... and pulsed out every 1-2 seconds through the Supremacy aura.  Get too far, and the pets are no longer nailed to the floor - their usual behavior vis-a-vis stay/move would reassert.

Edited September 22, 2019 by PaxArcana

[Black Zot]

On 9/20/2019 at 10:30 PM, Jeuraud said:

I spent 10 Years in Navy Aviation, and every squadron I had contact with had a Rob Bird. A Bird that we would pull parts from (Break), so that the other Birds could make the mission (Fix). This removes your "period" statement.

 

As for MM Pets you had one set that was not making mission, and the other was, and it was required that both make the mission.

Sometimes shit happens, and sometimes shit has to happen.

I'm not saying that Castle did not screw up, I'm just saying that you cant sit in your chair, and say that something should not happen... unless of course you know the CoHV MM Pet code. If so then maybe you should be fixing the code instead of telling us what a shit-bird Castle was.

 

Or maybe you should take a look at what Castle did and realize you got your analogy backward.  He took a situation where all but a small handful of pet powers were working properly (the majority of MM sets, plus all Controller/Dominator pets, plus the SoA and patron pets) and basically reversed it, so that ONLY the two previously-broken pet sets were properly functional and everyone else got stuck with a bunch of suicidal muppets.

 

That would be the equivalent of tearing parts out of every working plane in the hanger to get Rob Bird airborne again.  Tell me again how Castle did anything right here.

[Vanden]

Are we even sure that immobilized henchmen would use ranged attacks, instead of doing nothing when they decide they want to use melee attacks and can't close to melee?

Edited September 22, 2019 by Vanden

[Steampunkette]

5 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Are we even sure that immobilized henchmen would use ranged attacks, instead of doing nothing when they decide they want to use melee attacks and can't close to melee?

They do, currently, so should if you immobilized them rather than the enemy.

 

 

[Steampunkette]

16 minutes ago, Black Zot said:

 

Or maybe you should take a look at what Castle did and realize you got your analogy backward.  He took a situation where all but a small handful of pet powers were working properly (the majority of MM sets, plus all Controller/Dominator pets, plus the SoA and patron pets) and basically reversed it, so that ONLY the two previously-broken pet sets were properly functional and everyone else got stuck with a bunch of suicidal muppets.

 

That would be the equivalent of tearing parts out of every working plane in the hanger to get Rob Bird airborne again.  Tell me again how Castle did anything right here.

I don't think I can properly convey the amount of 'Meh' I hold in my heart for your position...

 

The melee pets who wouldn't get into melee were so broken that those pet sets were basically nonfunctional. Most of their damage was tied up in the melee-damage that wasn't getting done.

 

Meanwhile "Suicidal Pets" still survive in melee, if you take care of them. And still dish out their respective damage at appropriate levels.

 

Castle created an annoyance in other pets to fix something so broken it made certain powersets nearly unplayable.

 

The Rob Bird analogy is still off. Try to imagine it this way: You have 7 total planes including Rob Bird. For a specific mission, you -absolutely- need to get all seven planes up in the air, including Rob Bird. They don't have to be perfect, but they need to function. So you take parts from each of the other 6 planes to make all the planes fly. Not perfectly, but well enough for the mission to be completed.

 

That's what Castle did. Of course, the fact of the matter is he was working with 7 Rob Birds and trying to get them all to fly with half the pages in the repair manual burned out of the book. Each bird having it's own foibles so that "Removing Brawl breaks everything"

 

So, y'know... Shit happens.

[Shazbotacus]

Castle’s fix for melee pets using ranged attacks too much was to make pets immune to recharge modifiers, right? Would it have gone better if he just took melee pets’ ranged attacks and lengthened their recharge times by a lot, maybe with more damage to compensate?

 

Eh, too late for that I guess.

[Jeuraud]

 

 

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

The Rob Bird analogy is still off. Try to imagine it this way: You have 7 total planes including Rob Bird. For a specific mission, you -absolutely- need to get all seven planes up in the air, including Rob Bird. They don't have to be perfect, but they need to function. So you take parts from each of the other 6 planes to make all the planes fly. Not perfectly, but well enough for the mission to be completed.

Actually we had to do this every time we deployed, because every bird had to make deployment, but they did not need to be fully mission capable.

 

1 hour ago, Black Zot said:

Tell me again how Castle did anything right here.

"Anything"... really???

He got two non-functional sets running.

1 hour ago, Black Zot said:

so that ONLY the two previously-broken pet sets were properly functional and everyone else got stuck with a bunch of suicidal muppets

"A bunch"... again.. really???

 

I'm not Castle's white knight, I'm not saying he didn't screw things up, I'm just saying you cant know the shit, unless you have done the shit.

Some of the most critical armchair quarterbacks I have known are people who have never touched a football.

If having one manacle pet is that big a deal to you then get into the code and fix it. If you don't know how to code then learn.. if it's that big a deal.

 

Edited September 22, 2019 by Jeuraud
spelling

[Steampunkette]

17 minutes ago, Shazbotacus said:

Castle’s fix for melee pets using ranged attacks too much was to make pets immune to recharge modifiers, right? Would it have gone better if he just took melee pets’ ranged attacks and lengthened their recharge times by a lot, maybe with more damage to compensate?

 

Eh, too late for that I guess.

Not... exactly.

 

The Ranged/Melee preference was implemented, but it still 'Broke' when people slotted their pets for recharge and Brawl would cycle faster than any other power, forcing ranged pets right into melee and a 'Brawl Centric' low-damage attack cycle. To offset that, he changed the recharge time of the Pet Brawl to 16 seconds and made the pets immune to recharge rate modifiers so that you couldn't get them into a Brawl Recharge Loop even if you wanted to try and break it.

 

He tried to remove Brawl altogether, but it broke the AI for Moon Logic reasons (The AI was ridiculously complex and spaghettified so he couldn't remove Brawl and find all the interdependencies it had to truly fix it). 

 

As it is, after they Brawl once you can move them away, and 16 seconds later (plus the animation times of any recharged higher priority attack) he'll run back over to do it, again. 

 

 

8 minutes ago, Jeuraud said:

Actually we had to do this every time we deployed, because every bird had to make deployment, but they did not need to be fully mission capable.

... Wow. That's amazing! Nice to know!

Edited September 22, 2019 by Steampunkette

[TheAdjustor]

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

I don't think I can properly convey the amount of 'Meh' I hold in my heart for your position...

 

I believe you did when you asserted that Castle was a hard working guy who was oppressed by those above him.

[PaxArcana]

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

As it is, after they Brawl once you can move them away, and 16 seconds later (plus the animation times of any recharged higher priority attack) he'll run back over to do it, again. 

Change the recharge time to 600 seconds, then.  Few fights last long enough for that to allow any one pet to re-muppet itself, if it takes 10 minutes for their Brawl-analog to recharge.

[MetaVileTerror]

I think the whole "Castle's fault" thing isn't really contributing to the intrinsic conversation of establishing potential solutions to the Henchpet behaviours.  Whether any one of us blame a particular developer, justly or unjustly, it doesn't add any kind of progress to what we really want to tackle in this thread.

Pretty please?

[Steampunkette]

6 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

Change the recharge time to 600 seconds, then.  Few fights last long enough for that to allow any one pet to re-muppet itself, if it takes 10 minutes for their Brawl-analog to recharge.

Maybe. *shrugs* We'd have to ask the current Devs if it'll work.

[PaxArcana]

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

Maybe. *shrugs* We'd have to ask the current Devs if it'll work.

Or someone who runs a private server can give it a poke, and see what happens.  🙂

[TheAdjustor]

3 hours ago, MetaVileTerror said:

I think the whole "Castle's fault" thing isn't really contributing to the intrinsic conversation of establishing potential solutions to the Henchpet behaviours.  Whether any one of us blame a particular developer, justly or unjustly, it doesn't add any kind of progress to what we really want to tackle in this thread.

Pretty please?

If you want real progress go into the code. From what I have seen here and taking as fact. There has been a server that removed brawl without issue.  Not being burdened by trying to defend someone's position, testing that here seems to be the obvious solution.  I doubt many would be upset if it were removed or replaced with an equivalent ranged attack  (say 80 foot range and .75 damage of brawl)

 

Otherwise there was the suggestion of moving the Lich AI, or the Protector Bots AI.

 

All very good (especially changing the range of minion brawl). But dancing around and obfuscating  things without actually looking at things will just endlessly get this further mired .

[Shazbotacus]

Agreed, can we please get some testing going? I'm probably too stupid to figure out how to do all this, but I'm still dying to see something happen to move us forward. It's been nothing but speculation and "what if" for years.

Edited September 23, 2019 by Shazbotacus

[Weylin]

I still want to know what directories the relevant files are in. I have dozens of tabs open in Notepad++ and none of them seem to be relevant to specific configurations.

[DR_Mechano]

Currently only William Valanence seems to know how this system works and have some inkling of what is going on with the Pets. See here's the problem with slapping on Brawl's recharge...It's, once again, our old friend phantasm. It doesn't have brawl, it doesn't have any melee attacks but it still charges in to melee. Now William mentioned that the Phantasm had no preference one way or the other with regards its config, it was set to a default one, not ranged or melee so setting it to Ranged may solve that issue but if it doesn't we'll know that it's not just having a melee power that's the problem.

 

Having attempted to look through all the files and code myself I, like Weylin, am left staring at a complete mess with no idea where all the pet stuff is located and this is without trying to get a server up and running and just looking at the files.

 

Looking at this stuff its a wonder the game is even running at all, someone was not taught the KISS theory on this game and I'm now positive each section (powers, FX etc.) was coded by a different person and then bodged together somehow...

Edited September 23, 2019 by DR_Mechano

[Weylin]

I've recently tried using Thugs, and they seem to have no problem at all attacking from range.

They have a 16 second melee, and a 2 second pistol shot, and no other attacks unupgraded, but they seem to have no problem holding back from my current observations.

 

Robots though? the T1s and T3 both make a mad dash to smash the very moment they can.

Against tough melee enemies this is instantly fatal, or else I wouldn't have brought this issue up in the first place.

 

They simply shouldn't be attacking at melee range unless they are well-equipped to do so.

[Steampunkette]

5 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:

Currently only William Valanence seems to know how this system works and have some inkling of what is going on with the Pets. See here's the problem with slapping on Brawl's recharge...It's, once again, our old friend phantasm. It doesn't have brawl, it doesn't have any melee attacks but it still charges in to melee. Now William mentioned that the Phantasm had no preference one way or the other with regards its config, it was set to a default one, not ranged or melee so setting it to Ranged may solve that issue but if it doesn't we'll know that it's not just having a melee power that's the problem.

 

Having attempted to look through all the files and code myself I, like Weylin, am left staring at a complete mess with no idea where all the pet stuff is located and this is without trying to get a server up and running and just looking at the files.

 

Looking at this stuff its a wonder the game is even running at all, someone was not taught the KISS theory on this game and I'm now positive each section (powers, FX etc.) was coded by a different person and then bodged together somehow...

... You're not entirely wrong on the last point!

 

In the beginning, the developers of CoH didn't have the specific coding experience to build an MMORPG game engine from scratch, so they bought the commercial license of a game engine that, at the time, was a bit... let's say 'Out of Date'. CoH was released in 2004, but the engine they were using was purchased back in 2000 when Dakan and Lewis founded Cryptic. And it had been built far enough before 2000 that the company that owned it was interested in selling...

 

So you've got 3 former Atari employees working on an engine bought off an older company trying to build a game unlike anything they've ever worked on with Emmert telling them what to do/how to do it.

 

Things were not... smooth. But in 2002 they convinced NCSoft to bankroll the venture and started hiring a bigger employee pool to work on expanding the Production Demo (what you show to production companies and investors) into a full game.

 

So you've got an old-ass game engine, some Atari Pros doing it 'The Atari Way', and a bunch of new people joining the project after some of the work to kludge the game together has been done on an engine that was not -built- for what it was being asked to do... And Emmert asking the newblets to create a massive array of new functions for the game with a 2 year deadline for release. And those Newblets? Not trained in 'The Atari Way'. Some of them trained in the 'Blizzard way' or the 'Activision way' or the aforementioned 'Interplay way'. All trying to do their best to make the already old engine get up and go in new directions.

 

Things were hectic. 2 years is not a lot of time to develop an MMORPG, regardless of what anyone claims. Wherever deadlines loomed, shortcuts were taken. Pseudopets became the main method of doing basically anything that wasn't as simple as "This player hits that NPC" and holy forking shirtballs is there a -lot- of that...

 

And that's not even getting into any understanding of Outsourcing work, which basically every developer does to some degree or another.

 

So yeah... Spaghetti Code. Each developer doing code that their experience informed them was 'The Right Way' while everyone else did it the wrong ways. There was some attempt to get things uniform from the directors and such, but with deadlines... you know how it is.

 

TLDR: They weren't working in isolation from each other, but they were each working on the game with their own 'Language' and trying to get each one to work together.

Edited September 23, 2019 by Steampunkette

[GunnyBarney]

17 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

Change the recharge time to 600 seconds, then.  Few fights last long enough for that to allow any one pet to re-muppet itself, if it takes 10 minutes for their Brawl-analog to recharge.

 

See, now, that, right there, sure SEEMS like a 'simple fix' answer -- change brawl to a near-infinite effective-cooldown duration. Like, 24 hours. Ranged minions would attempt to brawl ONCE, and never try again for the remainder of your play session, since its cooldown would never finish up. The spill-over effects to melee minions is that they would stop using the near-worthless brawl power as well.

[PaxArcana]

39 minutes ago, GunnyBarney said:

Ranged minions would attempt to brawl ONCE, and never try again for the remainder of your play session, since its cooldown would never finish up. 

Well, to rain on my own parade a bit:

• It may be TOO simple a solution, and might not work at all.  Only testing could be sure.
• Pets could brawl once per summon, not per day.  🙂
• They might still run up to melee range before shooting things.  Again, only testing could be sure.

[Shazbotacus]

1 hour ago, GunnyBarney said:

The spill-over effects to melee minions is that they would stop using the near-worthless brawl power as well.

I don’t think that has to be so. The only pets that seem to share the same “Brawl” are all of Mercs and T1 and T2 of Thugs. Battle Drones and Assault Bot have different “brawl” powers, and almost all melee henchmen don’t have a “brawl” at all, it’s just Zombies that do and even then “Zombie Brawl” is a unique power as well.

 

Of course the AI might still direct ranged pets to go to melee range, but what I’m saying is there won’t be any “spill over” since it seems possible to only change whatever “brawl” powers are used by ranged henchmen and leave melee henchmen alone.