Guild Wars 2

OK, lets face the facts… a lot of skill-challenges are broken because one of two things happen:

1. The NPC you got to talk to is dead
2. The NPC you got to kill is (for whatever reason) alive and can’t be killed

So… why not add a small piece of code to the servers which act as a “watchdog”. It should check all skill-challenges ever few minutes and see what the NPCs are doing.

If a NPC is dead that shouldn’t be dead (usually, SC-NPCs are never dead just out of HP), the code should revive the NPC and TELEPORT (IMPORTANT!!!! Because sometimes NPCs get stuck while walking back to where they belong) it to its usual location (and reset everything regarding that skill-challenge).

The same (reset+teleport) should happen if the NPC is in “combat-mode” and the last time the NPC took damage was more than 150s ago (and it should really keep track of DAMAGE! not when the NPC was last HIT!!!). So if the NPC gets stuck inside a wall where people can’t hit him… after 150s, the watchdog would reset the skill-challenge. Same would happen if the NPC is invulnerable for whatever reason.

This isn’t probably a “perfect” solution to the problems regarding broken skill-challenges… but it should take care of 99% of the current issues and it should’nt be that hard to add to the server.

Update:

Somebody (BrutusW -> https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Reset-f-r-h-ngende-Events/99269) on the german board proposed a “workaround” for the normal quests, too.

Just add a timer to all Events and reset them if their “state” hasn’t changed for 30 minutes. This means the following:

Lets say the quest is to defend a village against waves of undead. Now whenever a new wave is launched, the timer gets reset. So lets say 4 waves have successfully been killed by the players. every time a new wave started, the hidden/internal event-timer got reset. Now a 5th wave attacks (and the timer is reset again) and one of the mobs gets knocked back inside a mountain. Nobody can hit him and he can’t attack the players. As no new waves are launched, the event-timer keeps running… until it hits the magical “30 minutes” mark. The server then resets the event by killing all remaining mobs belonging to that event and resetting all NPCs to their default-locations (by teleporting!!! reason for that was explained above).

This would also work for escort-missions. In their case, the event-timer would be reset whenever the game launches a new wave of attackers. So if the mobs or the NPC the players have to escort get stuck, the timer won’t be reset and after 30 minutes everything is reset.

This should pretty much “fix” most of the common “stuck quest” problems. OK, not really “fix” them… but at least make them work for now.

On my journey around the world of Tyria I came across a number of bugged DE’s and only one bugged skill challenge. The DE’s were usually fixed when I logged back in the next day, but this one skill challenge (near Bayt Fallahin in Malchor’s Leap) has been down for a week now on several servers. I jumped on different ones to check it out each day until server transfer got limited to once/24h.

Long story short: I hope those suggestions or something similar gets implemented.

I know of three broken skill challenges on my server at the moment, and a couple of dozen dynamic events that are stalled and uncompletable due to one problem or another. These have been going on for days, and the problems only multiply the longer the server stays up without a reset.

A reset timer would be a great temporary fix for most of these problems – at the very least, a daily server reset would allow them to be completed occasionally.

I think the “check for status and reset if there’s no change for too long” system is pretty obvious and probably already in place.

I suspect most events that get stuck are caused by “deeper” bugs such as threads becoming mutually locked due to some race condition, so, to paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “the system can’t see that the event is stuck because the bug causing the event to get stuck is also causing the monitor thread to become stuck”.

I’ve noticed that some zones become very “choky” (with a kind of intermittent lag that also affects the AI’s behaviour) when events are stuck. That makes me suspect some thread(s) on the server might be getting stuck in a loop.

I guess the only solution for that would be a watchdog-watchdog :-)

But seriously… i’ve never seen a SP or event resetting after getting stuck. So far I’ve only seen perfectly working quests ending at random times (one moment you’re killing mobs and everything is fine, the next moment the event disappears and nobody gets a reward). So there might be a system like that… but if its there, it doesn’t work very well (IMHO).

And currently, the german servers are kinda laggy most of the evening ATM (but only for some people while others can play perfectly). So nobody can tell if the lag is caused by some threads going bonkers or because of the general problems the servers currently seem to have.