How Devs Can Stop Kill Stealing with this Weird Trick

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Brontus, Sep 28, 2022.

  1. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    I played WoW for a year. I've played EQ since it started.

    I had more people just run up and kill the mob(s) i was killing more times in that year than in all my years of EQ.


    DPS race is after all is said and done, proper D&D roleplay. The bigger DPS wins.

    It isn't the most elegant solution, but is final and decisive and doesn't introduce hokey mechanics.

    Pretagging a bunch of mobs with a low damage spell to pre killsteal mobs someone is killing isn't any better as a solution.

    On the bright side, in almost all cases, the type of player who does this stuff has a short attention span. If it happens to me I go do something else, as EQ has lots of that and inevitably in short order the griefer moves on as griefing doesn't work on no target.

    If guildmembers are on /cast summon guildmates is a thing.

    If not, try /tar griefing player and do /guildstatus, which ANON status does NOT hide. Often, if they're in a guild a well placed tell or even a shout out in general chat ends it (and in some cases gets them tossed from their guild)

    Mostly I don't even bother with them and go farm something else a bit and downplay the drama. I have better things to do with my time.
  2. Windance Augur

    Bottom line there is no technical solution that is going to fix what is fundamentally a human problem.

    The only way to 'fix' the problem is to look at the root problem.

    Why do people KS?

    - Greed? Oh look there is something shiny over there I want and to he!! with anyone else ...

    So how do you eliminate that?

    - Sadly you can't. There will always be those who just want to get ahead rather than 'play nice'


    What about [some other magic fix] like ...

    - Give anyone who is on the agro list a full set of the drops Loot for EVERYONE !

    Will people exploit this mechanic to devalue all the 'hard work' = 'reward' for completing something difficult? - YES.
  3. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    First, if a group is 'automated' they aren't 'boxing' - that's botting. And whether the other group is boxing, botting, or a 6 PAK (Players At Keyboard) is 100% irrelevant to your argument.

    Second, what you're asking for is a handicap. So you were unlucky in spawning the named - you were also unlucky in that another party showed up to contest the spawn. Doesn't matter. They win. You lose. It happens.

    Get up. Dust yourself off. And get after it. That's how winning is done.
  4. Zunnoab Augur

    The solution to in game constraints not being there is let the bullies run wild? No.

    One of the things I'm really proud of for Stromm when raids weren't instanced was putting an end to that nonsense. Guilds discussed and agreed on schedules for the open world raid mobs and established rotations.

    If some cocky "it's a competition we get whatever we want" guild popped up we'd show them the power of cooperation with currently online members of rotation guilds teaming up to perma-lock the spawns before the high and mighty would-be l33t first come first serve guild either joined the rotation or imploded to internal drama.

    Most of the time they played nice and joined the rotation, and a guild that was higher in tier would bow out to make room for others.

    I remember two incidents with would-be rotation breakers, both with the GMs siding with the cooperating guilds. The hilarious one was a Stromm Euro guild's leadership deciding they would take the Plane of Time whenever they pleased due to everyone else being asleep. We showed up in force at like 2-3AM and naturally the people who didn't want to play nice were enraged to discover we beat them at their own game. A GM intervened and they joined the rotation.

    Another interesting memory is Fabled Planes of Power. There weren't any rotations as Haven's Edge locked down pretty much whatever we wanted. If people asked we'd let them take it. It was the strangest thing getting a tell from someone in a higher tier guild saying they thought I was nice but we were being mean by so effectively farming. It doesn't give me satisfaction denying content to others. So we cancelled our last run on the Fabled Rathe Council and that guild obliterated the Avatar before it could turn Fabled.

    Basically I couldn't disagree more. We don't need the game bogged down by all kinds of artificial shackles or garbage like trivial loot code. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be rules of conduct.

    If they are botting it's extremely relevant since that's blatantly cheating. One person controlling multiple characters isn't remotely the same thing as an automated group. If they are automated they aren't even playing so they are in the wrong no matter what.
    Windance likes this.
  5. Treiln Augur

    Not at all. It’s the first thing that comes to a lot of peoples minds if you read through the thread :)

    I guess the real issue with the tag first mechanic is: what’s considered tagging? Aggro or damage? As others have said, you’re gonna have those specific people who will be able to tag any mob (regardless of how we look at “tagging”) before anyone else.

    With a tag first system, I could round up an entire zone and bring them into my group in the center of the zone one by one (minus a few with mechanics that disable kiting: I.e. roots/snares/summons/binds). Enchanter Ranger Bard Druid and Necro’s would be innately adept at this with snares/CC/kiting capabilities.

    We already see issues with Enchanters charming mobs and being summoned back to their camp and warping said mob with them, or charming and dropping to keep resetting until they can take it. Granted, TLP problem, but just an example of how it would tie into “tagging”

    Edit: Actually…I’m all for this tag first mechanic. Talk about a new faster way to PL everyone. I can make a mint. Walk into a level 90-100 zone with a level 5, have them tag from a distance and just decimate everything and watch them jump 30 levels at a time.
  6. Svann2 The Magnificent

    One really obnoxious part of first tag systems is the people that get the tag then sit back while you finish the kill and get nothing. Then run up and loot it in front of you.
    code-zero, Treiln and Waring_McMarrin like this.
  7. code-zero Augur

    The point that you have totally missed is that DPS Race and no camps is the current ruleset for all servers, live and TLP, and has been since sometime early in RF/LJ and so around the end of 2015. Kill stealing is not now nor has it ever really been a problem save for a notorious botter on AB. We don't need a code rewrite just for a single miscreant
  8. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    This is the problem first tag to get kill credit means you need to make sure it only agros on the person who is able to get kill credit so they can't try and get others to do all damage while they get the credit and loot.
  9. Zunnoab Augur

    In case there's any ambiguity, I'm not suggesting there should be any code rewrite.
  10. Kaenneth [You require Gold access to view this title]


    I think that's just Undead aggro rules. Even skeletons in newbie yards did that.
    Zunnoab likes this.
  11. Velisaris_MS Augur

    Or...just don't play on TLP servers.

    Since I started playing again in 2014, I've experienced maybe a dozen, real "kill stealing" incidents on Drinal. And most of those are because of scripted bot toons (with no one driving) that got yanked after I reported them.

    Usually, if someone does actually "steal" a mob, it's typically because of miscommunication or an accidental pull. And I've rarely encountered real players that are unapologetic about it.
    code-zero and Nennius like this.
  12. Zunnoab Augur

    That's hilarious I didn't catch that and you are probably right. I remembered undead acting like rooted mobs and just casually had "weird undead aggro" in my mind. I didn't put two and two together that we had two expansions heavily full of undead.
  13. Brontus EQ Player Activist


    You mean people like the Blizzard developers who used to play EQ and went on to create the most profitable and successful MMORPG of all time?

    When did EverQuest become a survival MMORPG with no rules?
  14. Brontus EQ Player Activist

    Blizzard solved it. Why can't Darkpaw?

    It would be easy enough to prevent people from tagging. If they don't do DPS within a few seconds, they lose the tag and tag/ownership of the NPC goes to the person doing the DPS.

    I agree with you in principle. This is is a human problem.


    Fantasy MMORPGs like EQ were specifically designed to have human gamemasters overseeing the conduct of players. The first EQ dev team will tell you this. Gamemasters are not customer service reps, they are gamemasters who were more like gamemasters in D & D, with god-like powers in the world.

    Every single major sport has referees. Football, soccer, baseball, hockey, etc. Imagine if all of these sports eliminated the refs to save money. You'd have absolute chaos and mayhem. Chaos that some in this thread would euphemistically call emergent gameplay. I'm not buying it for a second.

    If Darkpaw really wants EQ to become a survival anything goes Lord of the Flies MMORPG, then by all means go for it, but don't hold back. Go all the way. Just give us a heads up and I'll stop subscribing and take my hard earned money elsewhere.

    SOE got rid of bona fide gamemasters for financial reasons and in the process removed a critical mechanic in a fantasy virtual world. They changed the rules not because it enhanced gameplay, but to justify their cost saving scheme. Therefore it was incumbent on the studio to introduce additional mechanics to offset the chaos and anti-social behavior caused by their decision. The problem is that the devs didn't think this through and never came up with a solution and this is why kill stealing still exists as one big factor in degrading the quality of the EQ player experience.

    Blizzard also removed the gamemaster component from WoW as their are no traditional GM admins or guides performing traditional gamemaster duties. However, they made sure to provide a mechanic to compensate: he who tags the mob first, gets the kill.

    All I'm saying is that, their is no shame in the EQ devs borrowing solutions from other MMORPGs to enhance the player experience. After all, most of their competition borrowed heavily from EQ, so some occasional reciprocity is completely justified.
    cadres likes this.
  15. sieger Augur

    Nothing was solved by going to first to tag instead of highest DPS. The crux of your complaint, in your own words, is camping a rare named mob and having someone else take it from you when it spawns. That is not fixed by first to engage--someone can easily come in 5 minutes before the named spawns, after you've been camping it for 12 hours, and use an instant attack ability faster than you and secure the mob. You would likely then call this stealing.

    I don't really care that much about the idea of first to engage vs most DPS, both are more or less valid ways to settle the issue. But the idea that first to engage "solves" the problem and means no one "steals" is simply not true. I put steals in quotation marks because, there is no actual stealing involved. This is a persistent, online gaming world where we all have an equal right to the open content in the game. The real fallacy is believing you own an online resource in a shared public game. The only way to likely give you the ownership interest in this content that you want is to do something like they did for the new p99 servers, where you had to enter some sort of in-game list to get the ability to kill a named, and once you killed it once, you had to leave the list and the next person got to take the camp. I think that would be a very undesirable feature for retail EQ, either on live or TLP servers.
    Svann2 and Waring_McMarrin like this.
  16. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    I do understand & sympathise with the OP.

    However, while the current solution is not ideal, what we have is the least awful solution to the problem given the available alternatives.

    A more complex solution would involve the server polling/checking how many targets the player currently has aggro on & what range each has to the aggroed player - meaning once any player has a certain number of mobs on aggro they cannot aggro any more than that unless they drop below the aggroed mobs / within range cap.

    The other end of the problem - loot & who gets some, well the game could calculate the "contribution" made to the kill of the contested target & award loot based on that - group A did 51% damage to the mob, while group B did 40% & group C did 9% each group gets an amount of loot proportionate to that contribution, if there is only 1 item then use weighted rolls (group a rolls 1-51, group b rolls 1-40, group c rolls 1-9).

    But with current lag issues, the last thing EQ needs right now is more calculations to do.
    Viper1 and Brontus like this.
  17. Waring_McMarrin Augur


    Blizzard designed it that from the start and EQ2 did something similar. It isn't that EQ can't solve it but that it would be a massive change for how the game works.
  18. Zunnoab Augur

    It's been years since I played the game but EQ2 walked back from it a bit too, if I recall correctly.

    EQ1 doesn't need stifling artificial constraints.
  19. Windance Augur

    I still haven't seen any convincing arguments that would make either system inherently better or worse. I still think you'd just trade one form of KS'ing to another.

    If other games do not seem to have a problem, then its likely they don't have the same time sinks.

    I only played WoW for about 6-9 months and during that time there was no reward for going off to kill a rare spawn, thus there was no problems with KS'ing. In fact once you got away from the cities it was fairly rare to even run across anyone in the same area.

    The fundamental issue then is that EQ has chosen to make spawning and killing rare mobs a valuable thing to do. To truly 'fix' the issue would be to remove name spawns, or make it easy enough to spin up instances where everyone can just camp their area.
    sieger, Brontus and Waring_McMarrin like this.
  20. jeskola pheerie

    The scum of Norrath knows not the boundaries of "servers". It sounds like you don't dwell outside your guild/friends group, down in the pickup groups where the real scum lies.