The Mangler server just hit The Darkened Sea expansion. Just in the first day I've run into more bugs than I've seen in the last few months of EQ combined, and I'll probably have some other TDS related bug posts up soon. But by far the most disruptive one so far is the infinite zoning loop when taking the boat between Tempest Temple and Brother Island. This occurs due to automatic load balancing in Brother Island or Tempest Temple. If you zone from one to the other and your destination zone has very few players in it, there will only be the main pick available and there are no issues. However, if there are picks open in your destination zone, it may try to send you and your groupmates to a pick that is not the main pick. If this happens, EQ has no idea what to do because you were on the boat in the original zone, and there's no boat in the pick you're loading into. This results in an apparently infinite zoning loop going back and forth between Brother Island and Tempest Temple, as seen in this pic: There is no way out of this loop except to force EQ to shut down. Then you can log back in and roll the dice. Depending on the boat location and where the game thinks you are, you may or may not immediately enter the infinite zoning loop again. Or you can wait for the Return Home ability to refresh. If you'd like to recreate this bug for yourself, log into Mangler during primetime tonight or this weekend and try to zone your group into Brother Island or Tempest Temple via the boat. Suggested fix would be to add an NPC at each of the docks in these zones to transport you, similar to Butcherblock/Freeport. An alternative band-aid fix would be to simply remove the possibility for Brother Island to load balance and spawn picks. Going TO Brother Island is by far the more problematic of the two routes since there is no way to enter besides using the boat, and going through Brother Island is the only way to reach the tier 3 zones in TDS. Going FROM Brother Island back to Tempest Temple is less problematic because we can just go back to Katta to get there.
This has been happening on Brother Island for... probably since ever. Ragefire reported the issue, but received no fix or dev attention. Phinny most likely had it, along with the other elder forgotten TLPs. Hope you guys manage to get it fixed.
