Allies useless in Living Story 2 missions
Cant get past this mission because the AI is ABSOLUTELY BROKEN.
Id just forget doing the LS2 stories altogether but the nag box pops up every time I log into the game. If you can’t fix your game, at least do me the courtesy of allowing me to cancel all LS2 nag boxes and never deal with this garbage again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5op9c9/the_npc_ai_is_bugged_since_months_now/dcmbdwt/
there’s a few different things that could be at fault with these kinds of reports. Our characters have several layers of “AI” which interact with each other and sometimes create unpredictable results like the kind you’re describing. At the basic level there’s hard-coded combat behavior, then there’s some level of designer-specified behaviors, and then on top of that designers can hand-script characters to do very specific things through actions on script handlers.
One of the biggest problems that we have in trying to solve these sorts of issues is, because of the variables inherent in a complex system like character behavior/scripting is being able to reproduce the issue in order to debug it. Even when we know that an NPC is exhibiting unpredictable behavior on Live (which gets reported on the forums or elsewhere), in order for us to determine how to fix it without introducing other, riskier problems, we need to have our own internal QA or one of us designers repro the issue consistently. Many times I’ll get a report of a stalled NPC, and I will run through the mission 5-10 times and never see it happen myself. This doesn’t mean the report is invalid, it simply means that there’s some variable unaccounted for (of which a huge game like GW2 has MANY examples) that is likely causing the issue, but without knowing what that variable is, there’s nothing the designer can do to resolve the bug without such work being a “shot in the dark” which is just as likely to break other things as it is to resolve the original issue. Other times, it’s a very simple matter to find and fix, but we don’t know which it is until it’s reported and QA can write us a bug.
As for why NPC allies sometimes don’t fight until they are attacked, this is often done by design, because one of our design pillars is that NPC’s should not be allowed to complete content for the player. We think it’s a bad player experience if they can simply get up and go make a sandwich and let the NPC’s tank everything until they win. Having said that, we also believe that NPC’s should look and feel useful to you when you are actively playing the game, but sometimes getting that balance right can be tricky, and the AI or the scripting doesn’t always cooperate. In cases where the allied NPC’s are literally doing nothing, even if you are getting ganged up on and/or attacked, that’s a bug and should be reported, definitely.
In the examples above – Braham stalling out in the HoT story instance looks like a bad scripting bug, whereas the Into the Labyrinth clip looks to me like it might just be some balance/AI changes that have made the instance more difficult than it should be. Both are issues worth looking into, so hopefully we can get them looked at.
emphasis added
tl;dr The devs are tracking this.
Editorial comment: there’s no estimated date for a fix. Consider bring a few other people with you next time.