Stealth changes to Anguish events in last patch?!?

Prathun stated that a query they ran against the scripts found the missing parenthesis. Once a problem is pointed out, it doesn't take long to figure out what happened. I would wager from start to finish these changes took less than 10 hours labor. I would rather they fix things as they find them.

Yeah, and that's all well and good, except I would wager Prathun didn't go looking through each of these missing parenthesis to see how adding it back in would change each script from how it currently functions. Maybe he did? But I bet if he did it would have taken a whole lot longer than 10 hours, unless it was all cut and paste stuff that functioned identically. (And since in the two anguish examples that Prathun reported, the change in mob behavior resulting from the fix was completely different, I tend to doubt that is the case.)

When fixing a typo results in events that have worked one way for as long as they have existed, 15+ years in some cases, now working a very different way, I still contend that the changes each should be tested, and some more evaluation done than just "this was the devs' original intent."

Take the Keldovan change. Original intent or not, the fact is that the Keldovan event worked one way for fourteen years, through live and three or four generations of progression servers, and now it has changed to something different. I am not willing to say that it must be a good change just because a dev forgot a parenthesis in the code in 2003, and Prathun now caught the typo and fixed it. If it were a NECESSARY change, certainly the devs would have noted that the mobs didn't act the way they should back in 2004 and found a fix for it then. I'd like to believe that how the mobs actually functioned, missing parenthesis and all, was part of the balancing portion of testing before the expansion launched.

If they did actually go through and look at each of these missing parentheses individually, evaluate the impact and test each of the changes, then my apologies to Prathun for misconstruing the situation.

I think the real issue is that they are forgetting about the intent of things like Epics also. And other quests that are just much harder on TLP due to all these people crammed into ONE server. The intent was not for 20 people to be packed into Neriak socking the chanter epic. That's just one example. It might not seem obvious to the current Devs, but if they want to talk about intent... there are so many examples of what was not intended to go on... but they refuse to change currently.

Let's look at Velious and the 8th ring war. Do you think it was intended that people could just snipe someone elses 8th ring without consequences? It was either intended that it can't be sniped or it was intended that if it WERE sniped, that the punishment would be harsh enough that no one would do it again. But, instead, you have this happening CONSTANTLY on TLPs and the punishment is nothing that these people worry about. The person who gets their 8th ring stolen, may get their turn in back, who knows. But, the people who steal the quest items are rarely punished, hence why they keep doing it TLP after TLP.

Reread what I read. It DID work. Adds ALWAYS respawned when this was current content (you kept entire groups (couple tanks and healer I mean) down there and offtanked them or tried to kite them the entire event.

As a knight, I was down there a lot so I know the stuff respawned back then, which is why we didn't kill them.

The fact they broke it at some point in the last X years and now fixed it doesn't make it any less a fix when talking about basic content scripts. TLP servers don't need it even easier.

Reread what Prathun wrote. The "change" didn't impact whether they respawned or not. It simply makes them autoaggro with Keldovan, when before, they didn't (and never previously did). Back in the day, you didn't HAVE to offtank or kite all four mobs, and they certainly wouldn't come out of the pit onto the raid if you just ignored them and stayed away from them. Yes, there were guilds that did the event this way, but not out of necessity.

It's not a fix.

Wail of Anguish was originally planned as Dispel, Stun and to essentially require 50 AT to raid Anguish. The Omens launch patch removed the Dispel. The December patch raised the requirement to 150 AT, a spring patch fixed Drunk effects on spells and 150 AT was actually essentially required and the Dev team including Prathun and Absor reacted by a hotfix to immediately remove Wail of Anguish and then removing the Drunk effect from Wail.

If there is a 2018 patch to add Dispel and/or Drunk to Wail of Anguish that's not a fix, it's simply increasing the difficulty of a 14 year old raid zone which mainly impacts Prog servers and occasionally someone who had never bothered to drink a few thousand units of alcohol would be surprised when their high level character was crippled while trying to get an Epic and/or BP for an alt or new player.

Fixing things is indeed useful, either Captain Russell Cooper should offer Heroic Adventures to anyone who says "work" or a bunch of other mobs should no longer offer Heroic Adventures to low level players by saying a key phrase when the hail dialogue will lead to a dead end until the player has reached a high enough level and/or completed pre-requisites. Level 81 players should not get TDS Bonus HA tasks or it should be possible for a Level 81 to complete the HA.

A fix is something where deductive reasoning and/or basic logic indicates that something is not working as intended and a patch corrects that inconsistency or flaw. An option to do a raid for 14 years by killing one round of adds and fighting away from the pit being removed is a change along a whole bunch of other undocumented changes are not fixes.

Ah well. Not your game. Not my game. It's their game.

Cheers. I'm out.

Right, so let's not give them any feedback or anything. Might as well just shut these forums down, because it's not our game so who cares what we think?

See Huldwulf's famous quote.

Every month (today's the day!) we comb through queries run against the DB that look for bad data or bad combinations of data. These queries identify things like scripts that don't compile, NPCs with bad race / mat / gender data, unprintable characters in text, spells that won't work properly, +mana on items that cannot be worn by mana users, and much more. Sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds of changes are made for the next update, especially when we've added a new query that identifies problems we were previously unaware of. We're working under the assumption that bad data is bad and broken things should be fixed. It is not even remotely feasible for us to push pause on the process in order to hold a conference, put together a poll, or otherwise discuss whether or not we should fix something that's clearly not working properly.