What's with the mercs?

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by chattie, Dec 10, 2018.

  1. Gninja Developer

    I do know that if the merc is fighting they will have a lesser chance of using res than if they are not fighting but the line of sight thing still plays in for both situations.
    Rosyposy likes this.
  2. Kawoosh Well-Known Member

    Over the years it's been more 50/50. Our work around is changing the setting. From 'active' to 'passive' or 'passive' to 'active.' Then switching it back. That works sometimes will get the Merc out of it's stupor. At least when you're alive.

    There's one '''amusing''' Merc habit. During combat some will prioritize healing themselves, over real people. If you're very unlucky, they get stuck in a heal loop.
    1. Merc #1 heals Merc #2
    2. Merc #2 heals Merc #1
    3. Die Human
    4. GO TO 1
    Most times our Merc is standing on top, or right next to Mr. Body. Which in itself a weird behavior, moving from where they were to Mr. Body. That's a very

    Disposing of the Body https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisposingOfABody

    moment. Then there are the times I've been thrown into some kind of abyss, and die, and the Merc emotes a revive from out-of-sight and out of range.

    That's not a line-of-sight issue.
    Years back our Kiwi first call it that, and the term stuck. Now that's for two Mercs. When it's three (heroic) or more (Hilarity Ensues in raid, but don't do this for newer raids) they've gone Terminator on us; they're unionizing.

    Twelve people and twelve Mercs (check the right border for #12). What could possibly go wrong?
    [IMG]
    Juraiya likes this.
  3. Alarra Well-Known Member

    Would it be possible to make it distance based as opposed to line of sight based?
    Maybe 20 meters and they can rez you, and further and they can't no matter where they are?
  4. Gninja Developer


    We've discussed/tried doing that internally, however it opens up a much larger can of worms and allows specific damaging exploits.
  5. Kawoosh Well-Known Member

    Have you considered altering the algorithm where a Merc moves toward it's owner? When the fighting stops/player dies, currently the Merc will stand still or weirdly move to the player. Like it's 'thinking' 'how do I dispose of the body and not be noticed?'.

    How about having the main algorithm:
    1. Consistently move Merc toward the player.
    2. Move to within revival range, and check line-of-sight.
    3. IF line-of-sight fails, move Merc with Brownian Movement/Drunkard's Walk function. Go To 2.
    4. IF line-of-sight succeeds, revive.
    5. IF other failure occurs, Go To 2.
    6. End.
    Step three is essentially, have the Merc continue to find a optimum location to revive.
    • Never do the same pathing twice.
    • Never check just once.
    Just a thought*.
    * Royalty free.
    Juraiya and Rosyposy like this.
  6. Zeddicious Well-Known Member

    Its a love / hate thing with mercs I'll tell ya. Their performance lately has been pretty lackluster in the heal / rez department. Not sure if it has to do with other sweeping changes to healing for players... these guys have really be giving me the pucker factor 6 on the heals though. Clearly, I don't expect them to usurp the role of a human, but dang..

    (if player health red, then heal)
    (if player health zero, then rez)
    (if range to player = 0, then back the truck up to 5)

    I don't mind jockeying them around running in a lil circle so they're not in my personal virtual bubble, especially since a majority of the "good" mercs are like 900000 percent bigger than every other race in Norrath. Even with the shrink merc feature.. but I digress.

    I've been having fun with the new fire guy merc though.. (Oqdan). I've also been running Zizzlebit Windburn through her paces.... and Twiggy the Stick B... (troub).

    But if you could look into the heal / rez scenario.. that would be grreaaat.
    Rosyposy likes this.
  7. Mermut Well-Known Member

    That's only in heroic and raid content.. no player heal changes in solo
  8. Pixistik Don't like it? You're not alone!

    While line of sight does have something to do with it, somewhere there was a change made to the mechanics of how mercs work that really triggered it. I am now seeing the same pattern in POM zones as well, I have never had that problem before in those zones.
    Breanna likes this.
  9. Merriel Well-Known Member

    Gninja, perhaps the line of sight issue needs to be addressed, in and of itself.

    Ever since Chaos Descending has gone live, I and my friends have had some very odd line of sight issues. To cite one very specific example I encountered just yesterday:

    I was trying to harvest a Celestial Nursery in the Bixel Hive where the queen's guards spawn. The plant was in plain sight, I was standing right next to it, and got the message that I could not see my target. I moved closer, and closer, until I was standing right on top of it, and still got the message. I then began to circle around it, and kept getting the message until I got right up on the edge of the platform closest to the queen's platform, when it finally let me harvest it.

    Being that this is not a perfectly flat platform, but I think we can all agree that it is pretty flat, this seems to be quite an odd issue. The fact that I could not harvest it while standing right on top of it really seems odd.

    Perhaps instead of making our toes the line of sight requirement, you could raise it a bit to our shins or something. Then maybe these line of sight issues wouldn't be so bad and maybe the mercs would actually do their jobs? I don't know, just saying... :D
    Moonfyre and Dude like this.
  10. Alarra Well-Known Member

    Would it be exploiable if the merc was 0m or 1m from your corpse?
  11. Alarra Well-Known Member

    I would say it probably has something to do with the implentation of the engine. They probably stick the line of site on the root bone which also does it's thing with collision detection.
    It might be possible if they were able to separate the line of sight function from the collision function I guess. Moving the root bone up would probably make our models sink into the ground though hehe sonds like it would be trying to fight the spaghetti monster with code.