bigby's crushing spirit bug

[disastro]

during an extra intense ice troll session i got killed/raised a few times. at one point i got hit with a troll bigby while i was down and immediately lost 136000 xp:



Senator Malkron [IO] in frostdale inn is now 8th level (11 level loss)

[Daltian]

That's one seriously ugly sun elf!

[DM_Kim]

I will try to catch you in game if another DM doesn't get to you first.

[Zysek]

Makes note to self to RUN LIKE CRAZY when confronted by trolls....

[Lokey]

It wasn't a bug. I just didn't have time to properly express my displeasure at thinking I'd found a source of lag, then find it's IO packing 50 ice trolls into an AoE-able area 5 seconds before I have to go. (Doing that is an exercise in exponential growth. Creature can't pathfind out of the pile, so it calls the on blocked script, etc... we can't fix the resource allocation on pathfinding.)

Do you have an exploit to report that needs fixing, or does your guild need a creative lesson to learn that other people play on the server as well?

[DM_Kim]

Well, well, well, a turn of events. Lokey has spoken.

I guess for any fixes disastro I'll refer you to Lokey.

[Amoenotep]

aaaahahahahahaha

[disastro]

sorry, i honestly didnt know that would cause lag (spawns of greater than that size happen routinely in carousing halls and ice giants, areas that seemed designed to generate similar situations so I did not think it out of place). I'll avoid doing that in the future. it was just basic wail of death action, no exploit was being used as far as i know. while i was on a tagged toon, the rest of the guild was not involved and did not really know what was I was doing, so I'm more than willing to take any punishment onto myself.

[Gornickthy]

Of course... it may help to point the situation out to the player, guild, and player base. I agree with disastro on this... he was simply gathering and wailing to his knowledge. None of us knew of the bug, and now that we do none of us will continue down that path.

Can he please have the toon fixed? It was an honest mistake.

Edit: Is this a known bug just for trolls or do we need to take caution in other areas too?

[Lokey]

At least 3/4 of the cpu time in NWN is pathfinding. The larger the model, the worse it is (I do like having lots of Ice Giants, and it's the third time we've given them more space to move around, but they may need to go someday.)

In this case, they'd gathered all the spawns on the map into one place. I saw a diamond shield on someone and what was probably a sunken staff, so being equipped to mow them down probably was not a problem. So I'll consider it innocent for now, and ok a few levels being thrown back to Senator Malkron, provided they're pre-20 levels

For us it's a never-ending balance of making areas big and populated enough to be interesting--which is larger than all 4x4 tile micro-set areas (like rural but only has like 10 tiles total) with the one placeable and creature per tile that the game seems to actually be able to run without puking on us.

[VagaStorm]

lol, I think almost anyone that has ever had a toon wit vail has ran around gathering trolls, then boof!. Trolls and omfg the Jin area in effrets are probably where vail is the most effichent

[Korr]

I agree with Vaga for sure, every toon Ive had with wail has loved level 17/18+ because they can now run around and gather a bunch of giants/trolls/efreeti/this/that/the other to wail and get mass xp in 1 shot. As far as I knew it was acceptable, I think stripping almost 140k xp is a little excessive without first confronting the player and saying "Youre causing alot of lag by gathering these monsters like this". Im sure anyone would stop doing that because noone likes lag... my vote is a good warning (which 140k xp gone is good) and let him go on his way to wail whatever spawns section per section. If hes seens mass wailing again then by all means strip it down!

[VagaStorm]

I agree with Vaga for sure, every toon Ive had with wail has loved level 17/18+ because they can now run around and gather a bunch of giants/trolls/efreeti/this/that/the other to wail and get mass xp in 1 shot. As far as I knew it was acceptable, I think stripping almost 140k xp is a little excessive without first confronting the player and saying "Youre causing alot of lag by gathering these monsters like this". Im sure anyone would stop doing that because noone likes lag... my vote is a good warning (which 140k xp gone is good) and let him go on his way to wail whatever spawns section per section. If hes seens mass wailing again then by all means strip it down!

lol, 140k xp is like a slap on the wrist..... with a battle axe.... That, is how you go old testament on someone

[disastro]

my guess is that if logjammed pathfinding is a source of lag, then the new "personal space" brought about in 1.69 probably has made the problem worse in several specific zones. previously a giant pack of baddies could all get at you pathwise, but now they have to queue up.

some zones are prone to this. For example, the last two zones of ice giants are small in size, feature a great many spawns (large creatures to boot), and have long uninterrupted sight lines. This makes it hard to avoid pulling 50% - 75% of the map into one area once major combat begins.

the new changes to the last two ice giant maps have made this even worse: previously there were a few choke points where you could take on a smaller number of giants while not aggroing them all. now there are few ways to hide your visibility from 3 corners of the map once fighting begins. i have yet to take on giants with a crew and pull less than 75% of the map (lord knows we try every time to pull the minimum). on a bad pull (rogue pet or party member who wasnt clued in on the plan) I've seen near total pulls.

because of this the standard plan now has been to run into one corner, set your tanks in a diagonal line across the corner with the casters and other squishies in the pocket, so to speak. then when the ice giant horde comes they will literally pile up across the line of tanks 2+ deep. the design of the map makes this hard to avoid. as these changes have made the map harder I thought they were intentional to provide more challenge and force players to use blocking and tactics. if the changes were meant to reduce logjams, then in practice they've made the problem worse. the last ice giant map in particular suffers from this problem. each time the party i was in DIDNT run these tactics, we've gotten pincered by sets of giants and wiped.

my tank toon has often been "last man standing" after such a wipe, with my back to a corner, and a line of 10-20 giants waiting to pound on him.

note that the first ice giant map rarely suffers from this: it has packs of giants separated by walls and tunnels, and so you are able to take them on in bite size chunks. Thus the first map's design rarely if ever has a lot of creatures logjammed up (though you will get a line of critters on a few of the single file tunnels.)

the second map of efreets also has this issue: its a large open area with tons of creatures that can see you from a mile away. however i think the fogginess of the map helps reduce visibility.

a suggestion to zone design around logjams is to make more maps like the first efreet/giant zones, and less like the second/third efreet and giant zones. making the zones strictly larger in size without reducing visibilty in some way will still result in pileups.

So logjams of this nature probably happen every 30 minutes or so on a busy night just in frostdale. carousing halls are another zone where you're one bad pull away from an identical situation. during our troll run most of the creatures spent their time chasing us and then immediately died in the first wail, leaving about 8 trolls. I dont recall significant amounts of time with logjammed trolls.

Lastly,some of the details Lokey mentioned don't match our situation. there were two of us, and both of us were level 17 (and so neither of us could have been using a diamond shield as far as I know, as its level 20 item). the guy i was with may have had one in his inventory in preparation for hitting 20 however. I was using only a crafted staff (the very first buff staff you can craft), and i had no sunken gear. we were doing your basic wail of the banshee run that's been going on for as long as i've been playing here.

if this kind of action is now causing problems then i guess i'll be the guy to take a bullet and serve as a warning to everyone else.

[Lorkar]

To comment only on part of your last post since most of the earlier posts echoed my sentiment.
The fix they made for the whirlwind attack has in my opinion has solved one problem but made the overall situation much, much worse.
Now in addition to the above problem the new spacing fix has caused me and others innumerable '"unable to reach target" messages as well as being bumped out of combat by creature and player movements increasing our vulnerability by being flatfooted.
The skells in icy crypt used to do this (not sure about now) on a constant basis, now its a server wide issue.
I have seen it on the mountain, in skara, in formians, in trolls, in giants, in orcs, in gobbos, in IoD, in Earth Plane, in Molemen and in Zons. These are my observations and observations I have witnessed firsthand.