Quest "A light in the darkness" Still bugs
What’s your current objective? If it’s the part I think it is, there’s still some enemies around.
It says the same thing it always does… “Follow the Pale Tree through the vision of orr”. I’m in an instance right now, just happened a THIRD time.
Update: just ran a circle around the perimeter. NOTHING around. Looked everywhere, there are no enemies… unless they are WAY outside the perimiter of the circle.
UPdate 2: Turns out there was one stuck in the tree. Cluster bombing the tree randomly showed damage, and I was able to kill it and clear it. PLEASE PUT IN SOME KIND OF FAILSAFE FOR THIS. It is rediculous. I don’t even have a knockback, which means it either walked in there, or some friendly npc knocked it into there.
(edited by Xyrm.5602)
The issue is, what sort of failsafe is going to work? If it’s timed, why wouldn’t all the guides just say “Wait 10m and the objective will complete without you doing anything.” That’s not very fun. Was it IN the tree?
One failsafe you might want to consider is a time-out type check on quest steps. For example, when a quest initializes or progresses to a new step start/reset a timer (set to 10 minutes maybe?) If everything goes smoothly the timer will get reset each time the quest is advanced by the player.
If the timer expires, run a check to ensure that the current step is not yet completed and confirm that any mob that has to be killed is actually present in the instance AND that there is a path from the player to the mob. This will (should) catch situations such as “mob failed to spawn”, “mob spawned (or was knocked) under the floor, through a wall, in a tree, or whatever and isn’t targetable by the player”, “mob is dead but somehow the death didn’t trigger the this_mob_is_dead counter”, etc. If the player simply went to answer the phone and make a pot of coffee, the quest can sit there waiting for him/her to return. But if there’s something missing or if there’s a target the player has to kill that isn’t reachable or there, you can either despawn/respawn it or artificially mark it as “completed” (and auto-file a bug report to yourselves that it happened and bears looking at).
I can assure you that mobs can get into very problematic locations since I encountered this issue earlier this week when doing the mid-70’s quest in the Straits of Devastation where you accompany the Largos into the under water lost temple of the forgotten god (can’t remember the exact quest title). In the first “room” you enter ther is a group of mobs you must kill and in my case one of them spawned or somehow got knocked under the floor. I killed the rest but the quest wouldn’t progress. As I swam around I happened to notice the tip of a fin protruding from the floor but I couldn’t target the mob. The only thing I was able to do was swim close to it, switch to my spear, and use vortex. It never attacked me back, and I was never able to target it, but miraculously it also didn’t become invulnerable so I was eventually (with a lot of patient waiting on vortex’s cooldown) able to kill it even though it didn’t get pulled out of the floor and into view. As to how it got there in the first place, your guess is as good as mine but I never use Illusion of Drowning to sink a mob (because exactly this sort of thing can happen and even if it doesn’t 99% of the time the mob will become invulnerable anyway, even in open water) so it wasn’t me. Maybe the Largos has that skill and used it? Maybe the mob spawned there initially? Maybe a previous use of vortex moved it there while I was fighting other mobs?
Whatever the case, a pathing check on that mob would have picked up the problem, whereas if I hadn’t happened to notice that little sliver of fin in the floor, I would have been completely stuck on that quest with no way to advance it other than to restart it. (I’ve done that same quest without any hitch on 3 other characters so it’s not a consistent bug)
The issue is, what sort of failsafe is going to work? If it’s timed, why wouldn’t all the guides just say "Wait 10m and the objective will complete without you doing anything." That’s not very fun. Was it IN the tree?
How about one that doesn’t let them get up into a tree like they tend to? Like, make the tree where the groups spawn and the Pact soldiers engage them not a pathable area for AI.
Since this is a just a text medium, that may read as a cynical response. But really talking about timers seems like introducing extra steps and complication when it sure seems like the easiest solution would be to limit AI movement away from geographic objects they shouldn’t enter.
This is not a problem unique to GW2; I have seen it in other games. Hubby and I were working a legendary story line and had a spider (a stupid spider!) enter a wall. We had already cleared tons of elite mobs and only had 2 left to spawn the boss guy when the spider disappeared. It then walked around in the wall and only occasionally showed enough of a leg that we could hit it once in awhile. We eventually killed it, but since it wasn’t an instance, in the meantime, some of the elites spawned again, and it took three times longer than it should have.
My hats off to players here for finding the fin the floor, the mob in the tree, etc. and overcoming the “extra” challenge. Been there; done that.
I totally agree that mobs should not be allowed to enter “objects” like floors, trees, walls! But I don’t have much confidence that I will see that fix anytime soon.
Yes, things accidentally spawning or getting knocked into places they shouldn’t be is a very common issue in many games, hence my suggestion.
Granted, timers (or a mechanism of that type) is perhaps an unnecessary complication if one can safely assume that no key mob can ever get into a place where it shouldn’t be; but since that’s demonstrably not the case one would hope that if it’s an integral mob that prevents a quest chain from advancing there should be some way to check for and correct that situation without the user being required to abandon the instance and start all over again. A “quick” pathing check done on these mobs would seem to be a solution, and my timer suggestion is merely a way to have it only be done periodically to avoid undue load on the processor (since pathing algorithms tend to be CPU hogs). But at least that would identify a mob that is blocking progress and then provide some mechanism (either respawn it, despawn it, nudge it artificially to the closest position where it can path, or figure out what bounding box is containing it and place it outside that box and recheck the pathing) to resolve it.
EDIT: Oh…and then doing that pathing check you could also check to see if the player is the one in the wrong place…something that still happens far too regularly for a mesmer with a staff (the #2 skill frequently zips you through/into walls, under terrain, etc) and nudge the player back into “legal” turf instead.
The issue is, what sort of failsafe is going to work? If it’s timed, why wouldn’t all the guides just say “Wait 10m and the objective will complete without you doing anything.” That’s not very fun. Was it IN the tree?
Yes. I could see one arm sticking out when I looked closely. The tree RIGHT in the middle.
Well, Im in the same quest and stuck at the same spot. I’ve looked everyone and around the perimeter. I finally got one to spawn out of no where but the quest is still stuck at the same point. I cant even talk to her. Don’t know what to do so I just reported it and logged out.
One failsafe you might want to consider is a time-out type check on quest steps. For example, when a quest initializes or progresses to a new step start/reset a timer (set to 10 minutes maybe?) If everything goes smoothly the timer will get reset each time the quest is advanced by the player.
If the timer expires, run a check to ensure that the current step is not yet completed and confirm that any mob that has to be killed is actually present in the instance AND that there is a path from the player to the mob. This will (should) catch situations such as “mob failed to spawn”, “mob spawned (or was knocked) under the floor, through a wall, in a tree, or whatever and isn’t targetable by the player”, “mob is dead but somehow the death didn’t trigger the this_mob_is_dead counter”, etc. If the player simply went to answer the phone and make a pot of coffee, the quest can sit there waiting for him/her to return. But if there’s something missing or if there’s a target the player has to kill that isn’t reachable or there, you can either despawn/respawn it or artificially mark it as “completed” (and auto-file a bug report to yourselves that it happened and bears looking at).
I can assure you that mobs can get into very problematic locations since I encountered this issue earlier this week when doing the mid-70’s quest in the Straits of Devastation where you accompany the Largos into the under water lost temple of the forgotten god (can’t remember the exact quest title). In the first “room” you enter ther is a group of mobs you must kill and in my case one of them spawned or somehow got knocked under the floor. I killed the rest but the quest wouldn’t progress. As I swam around I happened to notice the tip of a fin protruding from the floor but I couldn’t target the mob. The only thing I was able to do was swim close to it, switch to my spear, and use vortex. It never attacked me back, and I was never able to target it, but miraculously it also didn’t become invulnerable so I was eventually (with a lot of patient waiting on vortex’s cooldown) able to kill it even though it didn’t get pulled out of the floor and into view. As to how it got there in the first place, your guess is as good as mine but I never use Illusion of Drowning to sink a mob (because exactly this sort of thing can happen and even if it doesn’t 99% of the time the mob will become invulnerable anyway, even in open water) so it wasn’t me. Maybe the Largos has that skill and used it? Maybe the mob spawned there initially? Maybe a previous use of vortex moved it there while I was fighting other mobs?
Whatever the case, a pathing check on that mob would have picked up the problem, whereas if I hadn’t happened to notice that little sliver of fin in the floor, I would have been completely stuck on that quest with no way to advance it other than to restart it. (I’ve done that same quest without any hitch on 3 other characters so it’s not a consistent bug)
Problem Number 1 with this solution: not feasible, in an mmo you would have to put that tool in every instanced story quest with each different quest needing different specifications. So in short its not that simple and would be a kitten to download