MM pets despawn when leveling while exemplared

[Captain Fabulous]

I'm not a big MM player so I haven't been following all the recent changes, but I don't remember this ever happening before. Playing a beast/nature MM in their teens, once on a Frostfire team and then on a Posi 1 team. Every time I leveled up, but my level stayed the same due to being exemplared (either by the level of the team lead or the max level of the TF) all my pets would despawn. It's almost as when I leveled up the game auto-leveled up my pets, then realized the pets were too high due to me being exemplared and killed them. Or something like that.

[srmalloy]

This is a known issue. When you exemplar, your pets despawn to prevent the exploit of, say, a 50 spawning their pets, then exemping to run a Synapse TF and having level-50 pets steamrollering the TF. What is happening is that, when you ding, the game momentarily recognizes your new level, then exemps you back to the mission/TF limit. When this happens, the server notes that your effective level has been reduced by exemplar and orders your pets to despawn.

 

The fix for this would involve something like checking the level of each pet when this happens, and only actually perform the despawn if the pet level is greater than the character's exemped level. But the current code is just a simple 'character exemps down, despawn all pets' action; this would need to be changed to pass the exemp level into the function so it can check the pets' level against the exemp level. That your pets despawn if you ding while exemped is a misfeature that needs to be fixed, but it's not technically a bug, because the code is doing what it was written to do. 

[Captain Fabulous]

47 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

What is happening is that, when you ding, the game momentarily recognizes your new level, then exemps you back to the mission/TF limit. When this happens, the server notes that your effective level has been reduced by exemplar and orders your pets to despawn.

Yeah, that's what I figured was happening, I just don't ever remember seeing this behavior before (again, not a big MM player), so I wondered if it was something that snuck in with the recent changes. It really sucks being in the middle of a battle and having all your pets instantly vanish because you dinged. Kinda surprised the MM diehards aren't making a big stink about it.

[gameboy1234]

The behavior dates back to live, it was basically a hack because I guess a proper fix was too hard.

 

Anyway, it should be fixed, I'm just not sure what the dev priority should be on this.  Seems like it should be pretty easy, just check that the new pet level is < player level and you're good, but god knows how this is actually implemented.

 

As an aside the same behavior occurs with other "pets" such as an Ouroboros portal.  End Synapse, summon a portal for folks to use, someone quits the TF and you change level, and your portal is despawned to prevent exploits from having a too high level portal.  What?

 

 

[Captain Fabulous]

8 minutes ago, gameboy1234 said:

The behavior dates back to live, it was basically a hack because I guess a proper fix was too hard.

Oh wow, I didn't realize it's always been this way.

 

9 minutes ago, gameboy1234 said:

As an aside the same behavior occurs with other "pets" such as an Ouroboros portal.  End Synapse, summon a portal for folks to use, someone quits the TF and you change level, and your portal is despawned to prevent exploits from having a too high level portal.  What?

YES!!!! That happened to me the other day and I was like WTF???

[srmalloy]

22 hours ago, gameboy1234 said:

The behavior dates back to live, it was basically a hack because I guess a proper fix was too hard.

The funny thing is, a 'proper' fix could have been implemented simply, and we would have never had the issue. Since your pets don't change level when you do -- if you're level 30, and ding to 31, your pets will still be 30 -- the code that handles status changes when you exemplar (whether this happens when you start a TF or ding during a TF; the check is applied after the exemplar level adjustment) would need something like "for each active pet, if pet level > character level then despawn pet". You're a level 30 MM exemplaring to 16 to run a Posi 2? Your pets despawn. You ding to 31 in the middle of the TF? You're still exemplared to 16, your pets are still 16, so they aren't affected.