It's been almost 25 years that EverQuest has been around, and many great quality of life changes have been added over the past couple decades. But... There is one huge quality of life update that we have been waiting for a very, very long time; improvements to /follow. We all know that /follow can be better than it currently is due to the fact that some not-to-be-named-here software makes /follow work flawlessly, and has been doing it for many, many years. I, for one, do not use said software because I don't believe in breaking the rules just to benefit myself. I would like to see DPG improve the built in /follow system to work better. I would like to see /follow do the following: Follow closer to the leading character Avoid cutting corners on turns and falling off bridges, smacking face first in to walls, etc Follow in the UP and DOWN as well when levitating or swimming Let's make the 25th anniversary just that much better by finally fixing /follow. If you support this idea, the BEST way to let Darkpaw Games know you like it is to hit that LIKE button. Let them know you want /follow to be improved.
I 6 box and have very few issues with /follow. The rules I follow are shrink, take turns wide with the leader and go slow when turning onto a bridge. Making them closer would screw me up with boxing as I turn to face the mob when crawling and my followers are in perfect melee range already. If closer they would be o ntop of the mob. That's a me issue of course but just think it works pretty well and take a little adapting. As far a swimming and lev. Well just look up or down with the followers in 1st person maybe.
I think most people who have /follow issues are those who have the default limit background fps enabled. This makes auto follow fail, just disable it.
Follow is the worst on multi level zones (Curse you Tower or Rot, Argath, etc), and very narrow zones with sharp turns (basically all indoor building based zones). With the launch of VOA on aradune, I forgot how awful follow is in Argath. Not sure what it is - geometry, the aqueducts, multiple levels - but follow will just go haywire out of nowhere and I find my box just running in a completely different direction with just the slightest movement of my main. He also just refuses to turn for some reason. Will just keep running straight, completely clueless
well same for me , the distance is just perfect for me.. and i don't use any 3rd party software btw while boxing. /follow is not too bad for me, but some mission if my main toon get pushed away , or some mechanics like oubliette , my other toons can start to run in circle. i agree /follow could be better.
Reducing the follow distance could be an improvement. But it could also cause more problems because of lag. Most stuff had been already tested several times. If follow would work like dragging a corpse, just without the FD status...
If this is changed we need to be able to adjust the follow distance. Similar to Yoda, I rely on the follow distance to position my melee toons. If they revamp the follow system and decrease the follow distance, that would break quite a few folks. I do agree with the spirit of the post. My advice for players is to make sure fps (performance and cap) is 60 higher, take wide turns, strafe when fine positioning is needed, and if you aren't super comfortable with the other techniques, don't play selo unless your leader is on a mount. I'm in full support of z axis auto follow through, it is annoying to be adjusting the pitch on all characters continually. Another issue is the descent rate in water or levitate is tied to frame rate. This is weird, but again the workaround is maximizing fps. Somehow the mounts acceleration factor makes auto follow more stable. Perhaps we could have an option to adjust this acceleration when not mounted to improve the feedback loop stability?
yup having /follow distance be adjustable would be one of the big things to include imo Even if it was just like 3 settings example. /follow Barton 50 /follow Barton 75 /follow Barton 100
Autofollow with strafing rather than running forward behaves completely differently and is much more accurate for moving around. If they could even just make the forward movement autofollow behave like it does with strafing, it would be a huge improvement.
Yeah I think adding a command for setting delay and acceleration when not mounted would be the easiest path to improving it. With this, one could set distance to 0 when climbing stairwells or ramps and reset to some default longer with a hotkey for combat. Acceleration adjustment as a command when not mounted would prevent overshoot when positioning toons.
Perhaps EQ could ignore the background FPS setting automatically if you're in /follow mode. Since it's all client side, it seems like that would be one of the simplest fixes they could do to address this issue.
