This is no longer an issue with shifting into walk-mode. It has become something akin to texting while driving. Leave a boxed character in first-person mode with the lead to follow on auto-run (even in the mountains of Shard's Landing or Plane of Health) and the toon will follow along merrily without issue. Take first-person control of lead toon placing box in background and instantly, the toon will either walk, turn randomly, or start climbing mountains as if it is on autorun. I understand trying to thwart robot groups by purposely messing with auto-follow effectiveness, but you are ruining the game for those of us who play all the characters in the group except for the real robots. BTW, the mercs have no problem following the leader if the other toon is labeled puller, so what mechanic do you need to fix?
I regularly use auto follow on my boxed alts and rarely have issues. The main culprit usually is too low FPS in the backgrounder Everquest windows. Make sure you have good frame rates and things rarely become an issue at all and that Everquest is using all cores for all your different windows. EQ is mainly cpu driven. Of course you might also need to turn down effects and view distances etc depending on your hardware.
It seems to work alright to me, but it would be great if it could adjust pitch when following with lev or when swimming.
Auto-follow. The one and only EQ "feature" that is accompanied by a big red-text warning statement advising you it does not, and has never, worked very well.
Thoxsel is right...have two computers next to each other, with one window each. One toon can follow the other as close to perfect as you get in EQ. Start having multiple windows follow on one or the other (or both) and you start getting issues. Background frame rate is the biggest issue, but the newer zones have more intensive graphics and cause more issues than old zones for me (I run EQ on two old iMacs booting into Win 7). Best advice is have a multicore computer, with at least as many cores as you have windows. Auto follow has always, always been like this. If you have been boxing a long time, you just learn to live with it. You make straight runs as much as possible. Come to a full stop before sharp turns. And know that you will probably have the circling toon every now and then. It's really not that bad. If you are dragging 3+ toons on the the same computer...it's not driving a car...it's driving a Sherman tank...and you should plan accordingly. The devs have made zero changes to the behavior of auto follow. It's not a grand conspiracy to thwart robot groups (who usually don't use the game auto follow but just mirror movement on all toons as it has been explained to me). I understand the frustration of having toons go all over the place. But nothing has changed...and you will be come even more frustrated by expecting a better system rather than just adapting to what is. Or you add a mage and just coh everywhere.
Usually i put levi on all toons and dont use mounts a mount seems to me makes it slip off easier and keep all toons on third view ,yes theres the occasion they slip away gets annoying in those want to get to there quick times
Set max fps on bots to 60 (presuming you have a 60hz monitor) - this frees up resource on your primary bot that can go to the others on that PC. Set min to 30 / 45 My second PC is an old FX6300 with a nvidia 660ti running two sessions on two monitors. Never ever have a problem with follow (apart from the vertical thing - that is a bit of a pita). What are the specs of the PC you are using? I can run multiple sessions on one of my Intel-GPU laptops, so you should be fine with almost anything...
Well, after reading Thoxsel's initial reply, I started wondering if I'd done something at the same time the last patch came out and sure enough, I had. I had followed some advice to -1 all my CPUAffinitys. I went back and stifled the windows to specific cores and instead of lowering FPS, I increased max and background to 100. For the most part things are working WAY better. Shards, Health and SulVius are still somewhat tricky, but nowhere near the PIA they had become. I'm not running a beast, simple Quad Core laptop with a 1gb NVidia mobile GEForce Card and 16 GB of RAM. It's running EQx3 with all models and high graphics, no flora/grass and I have no lag issues at all except in the expected locations in the GL. Things much better now. Thanks all for the assist!
