Allow all pets/helpers to survive mission exit

[Black Tangent]

One of the worst pain points of a Mastermind on Live was that your pets only lasted as long as the mission - so every time you entered a new mission, you had to summon and upgrade all over...  It took a good minute or two, as (using Robotics as an example) Upgrade Robot and Equip Robot had to be applied to each Robot every time.  By the time you were finished, the team was seemingly halfway through the mission.  🙂

Well, obviously that all got fixed - bots soon survived, and the Equip and Upgrade became targeted AOE powers, making life much more bearable - and happened automagically on entry and exit.   Now, the final pieces of the puzzle - Maintenance Drone and Combat pets like Shield Drone must still be summoned at every mish entry.  Can this be fixed up too?  It would avoid even that small delay before one can be completely ready to start a mission.  

 

[srmalloy]

As I recall, it was a moderately complicated issue to fix. Making pets survive zoning was easy; the problem was that they would become uncontrolled, and be hostile to everything, attacking the pet owner and their team. It would be necessary to go back into the pet code and winkle out what the solution to reasserting control after zoning was, and carry that across to other pets.

 

And there's a surprisingly large number of 'ancillary' pets that this would need to be applied to -- Dark Servant, Force Field Generator, Seeker Drones, etc. -- and you've got oddities like the Acid Mortar from the Traps set, which already gets pulled out of missions with you if it hasn't run out of mortar charges when you exit (a bug having been fixed with that, where the base, but not the mortar proper, was drawn after exit).