The Forbidden Zone in Atlas Park

[Bopper]

@Myrmidon and I were testing something else today when we happen to come across an oddity. We found a spot in Atlas Park where if you are inside it, you become invisible to the rest of your team that is outside it, and vice versa. 

 

 

Notice the Yellow region where we are on the map. We see eachother fine as we both are inside its bounds, and we can see each other's health bar. The moment the teammate leaves the zone, they are gone from my map. THey are only across the street but it might as well be on another map.

 

 

I won't bore anyone with another screenshot, just know that Kllomatrix will see the same thing from where they're at. I will be gone from the map and grayed out.

 

 

[ZorkNemesis]

That's actually working as intended.  Atlas Park and Mercy Island have interesting mechanics related to how the missions work which result in areas changing with mission progress.  That spot is where you would fight off 5 random Hellions, then the next mission you go back and PPD has the place locked down with all the Hellions under arrest.  When it greys out like that, it means you aren't on the same leg of the missions so you won't experience the same situation, if that makes any sense.

[Bopper]

27 minutes ago, ZorkNemesis said:

That's actually working as intended.  Atlas Park and Mercy Island have interesting mechanics related to how the missions work which result in areas changing with mission progress.  That spot is where you would fight off 5 random Hellions, then the next mission you go back and PPD has the place locked down with all the Hellions under arrest.  When it greys out like that, it means you aren't on the same leg of the missions so you won't experience the same situation, if that makes any sense.

It certainly does. I never played close enough attention to it before when not running missions. Then again, I don't normally team while in Atlas, so I wouldn't have seen teammates disappear. Thanks for the details

[TemporalVileTerror]

There's another one of those zones off to the north of Back Alley Brawler, and a couple in Mercy Island as well west of the starting area.

 

It's some really interesting tech which I hope can be leveraged for new content in the future.

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, TemporalVileTerror said:

It's some really interesting tech which I hope can be leveraged for new content in the future.

The ability to do this was added to the game with, IIRC, issue 18 (Going Rogue); one example I remember is a mission that had you searching the flowering bushes in the plaza of Nova Praetoria, which were glowies, but only you and your teammates could see the glowie visuals. The devs had made a start on updating the rest of the game to use them -- Matthew Habashy's and Aaron Thierry's arcs in Atlas were some of the ones that got rolled out, but the Destroyer of Worlds sacked the studio before more use could be made of the functionality.

[SwitchFade]

Multi-instanced open zones, the tech was intended to supplement door missions. Matthew habashy arc is one of them.

[Techwright]

1 hour ago, TemporalVileTerror said:

There's another one of those zones off to the north of Back Alley Brawler, ...

 

Is that around a certain mission giver whose status changes by the end of the story arc?   If so, I think there's a similar setup in mid-north Steel Canyon.

[ZorkNemesis]

18 minutes ago, Techwright said:

Is that around a certain mission giver whose status changes by the end of the story arc?   If so, I think there's a similar setup in mid-north Steel Canyon.

Nope, this kind of full-on zone tech only really shows up in Atlas and Mercy.  Some contacts disapear after their arc, like Laura Lockheart or Aaron Theiry, but most zones remain unchanged.  The only other instance I can really recall is that after completing Provost Marchand's third story arc you'll find a bunch of the First Ward survivors hanging around in Brickstown, and also Marauder next to Manticore with six or seven PPD Shells aiming their guns at him.  The group from Mr. G's arcs in St Marital may or may not continue inhabitting the warehouse depending on what you decided to do with them.

 

Edited March 4, 2021 by ZorkNemesis

[UberGuy]

FYI, I am not sure we should expect to see this expanded. It's very buggy and problematic with things like Flashbacks, and causes very strange behavior with teams doing anything in open zones. Hunting for Winter Lord GMs in Atlas, for example, is complicated when part of your team disappears from your map and says they found a GM - that no one else can find because the people who found it are hidden from view / targeting.

 

Basically our devs appear to have long hated dealing with this tech, thus I'm not sure they're likely to increase how often it comes into play.

Edited March 4, 2021 by UberGuy
Typo

[GM Impervium]

The Phasing tech also apparently prevents Ritki invasions from happening in a given zone, which is why you never see invasions in Atlas or Mercy, and another reason the feature wasn't expanded (that, and, well, the Sunset)

 

[wjrasmussen]

1 hour ago, GM Impervium said:

The Phasing tech also apparently prevents Ritki invasions from happening in a given zone, which is why you never see invasions in Atlas or Mercy, and another reason the feature wasn't expanded (that, and, well, the Sunset)

 

I miss atlas park rikti invasions.

[UberGuy]

Rikti invasions used to happen in Atlas and mercy. There's not a hard mechanical restriction that prevents them from working in those zones. They were turned off by the devs, primarily because the way the invasion critters scale makes them horribly hard for level 1-5 characters to defeat. The fact that in addition they might teleport into these hidden areas is just a further complication.

Edited March 7, 2021 by UberGuy

[RikOz]

WoW had similar problems with phasing, particularly if completing an arc resulted in visual changes to an area. There was one story arc in the Cataclysm expansion that, when it was over, an area previously occupied by the enemy forces was now occupied by friendly forces. But somewhere in the middle of the arc, you needed to fight a particularly tough mob in that area. If you couldn't beat him yourself, you might put out a call asking for help. Somebody would come to help, but they'd get there and not be able to actually find you, because they had already finished that arc. There were in a completely different phase from you, and would be seeing something completely different. I think it was finally fixed via grouping mechanics - you would have to form a party, and party members would be pulled into the same phase as the party "leader".

[UberGuy]

CoH's phasing mechanics honor group settings too, but only sort of. If someone is in one of these areas, no one outside it can see them until they also enter the area. Since it "phases them out" in your map and team/league list too, that makes it annoyingly hard to find them unless you happened to notice where they were just before they entered the "forbidden" zone. Once you do find them, you see what they do.

 

Honestly, I'm not sure why it acts like that, where they disappear off of your team lists that way.