I can also confirm that I regularly experience this in PoK (and have for a long time), but I do not experience this problem in the neighborhood.
seems to happen to me when toons gate in or multiple log in. always stops the auto feature, has never happened to me in a zone where I am always alone
I can confirm the stoppage happens 992.86% (yeah, kinda made up though) less often when doing combines in the guildhall than in PoK. Now if we could get all the PoK tradeskill vendors in the GH, that'd be awesome.
Fletching stopped in Plane of Knowledge for me earlier for no reason, had done 10 bow combines had 10 more to do and it just stopped.
Every time this has happened to me it was when a bunch of achieves were going off in guild chat. Coincidental maybe, but just an observation.
Not for me. It just happens randomly. It could be server lag because of multiple people zoning into PoK at once, or it could be overall server connectivity, writing to the player database, or numerous other problems the EverQuest devs seem blind to because they for whatever reason don't monitor server performance (or even worse, they do and aren't acting on it). Sometimes I will stop auto-combining after 3 or 10 combines, other times I can do 40+ combines before it seizes up. I am thinking the number of folks porting into PoK using the stein, instead of Throne of Heroes / Anchors, could likely be a factor.
This is as old as the auto feature. My observation is that it happens in PoK quite often, but it also happens in other zones. I have seen it in Northern Felwithe as well
I have noticed that if your game client misses some packets while doing the combines it will stop the automated combine process.
Quite true in my own experience. In PoK the auto-combine will fail frequently and in the GH very infrequently. Lag would seem to clearly be the cause. On Bristlebane this is complicated by the crowd of folks massing by the entrance to the Guild Lobby soaking up buffs and being AFK. Moving that crowd somewhere else could help, but making that happen is at best problematic. Perhaps we could have AFK folks be logged off after some predetermined time. I am certain that would piss a lot of folks off thus making it unlikely to happen. The paradigm could shift and have buffs count down once again in the PoK? Not going to happen. Make pets and mercs. invisible in PoK? Anyway, I don't personally know of a simple solution to the problem, which is why I will either tolerate the problem or just do multiple combines in my GH. You thoughts please. I am not a coder or a game designer and I hope there are solutions of which I am completely unaware.
How is the QA process going with this? Have any bug-fixing or tradeskill-focused devs tried testing on a populated live server?
I first noticed this in my neighborhood, where only 2 people's toons ever exist and I always know when he logs in...and he rarely enters the zone usually gl to gh direct. I have all the containers laid out in my yard near the npc building so I can run to parcels and bank and vendors all I want. But, I get the random stops here all the time with nothing to cause it. Lately however there's been a lot of lag just with chat- tells and general-purpose so it may be more prevalent now because the servers just seem to be having a hard time keeping up, before AND after CoV launch. Perhaps they could spread the servers physically back out to a couple more machines
This problem is a result of the Autocombine feature being instituted on the client side (On your PC) Load recipe->Check Components->Send combine request to Server->Server does combine/skillup checks->Results added to cursor->Client receives->Client Auto inventories->Server logs Inventory changes->Checks components The problem is there is no back/forth communication on some steps (presumably to reduced I/O with server); so it relies on timing to combine, autoinventory, etc- any disruption of that... say in an area with lots of lag/load - the timing can get a little off and auto-combine isnt ready for the next cycle so it just stops. Adding to the I/O in an already heavy I/O zone such as PoK would seem to be a bad choice. Just go to Abysmal Sea or Crescent Reach ; those quieter zones still have most of the stockpiles of PoK for supplies and your autocombines will go MUCH smoother.
Or, they could just make guildhall/neighborhood versions of the merchants in PoK (the ones with all the stuff for each tradeskill), and we could avoid the lag entirely.
I was messing around with a macro for fishing, and noted that sometimes /autoinventory fails and broke my macro, unless I insert a /pause n. where n is lag-dependent. It seems to mostly be with "lucky" extra fish. Maybe /autoinventory is not very robust when returning multiple items under lag conditions? If auto combine uses /autoinventory "internally" as a subroutine, then that could be a hint where the bug is?
I thought this was just me. This has been happening for years, especially in pok. But it also happens in Crescent Reach, just not near as often. This has occurred over different computers.
I just assumed it happens due to lag spikes. Zone never mattered because some ore better than others.
I just have two lines with autoinventory the first of the two has a pause, assuming you have something like that also? No problems normally unless the zone is really laggy.
Yep, thats what I ended up doing. My thought was: does the fact that a pause is needed, break auto-combine assuming /autoinventory functionality is used. Maybe the devs just added a "/pause n" somewhere in the UI-code for auto-combine and thought "this works on our test-server, thats good enough". Real servers have occasional lag-spikes, but Im not sure the internal test-server have them.
Yeah this has been going on forever. PoK is the worst. It seems to be related to small lag spikes from people zoning in/out. Even with the most beast of computers their is still a small spike every time someone zones in. Like Axxius said, small / nearly un-used zones are the best like hometowns and AS. Guild halls work great too as long as you face away from the front of the GH. One tiny lag spike when it goes to combine and it stops. Nothing more annoying than setting up for 500+ combines, start it, come back 2 hours later to see it did 3 combines then stopped.
