Mist thoughts?

[MojoJojo]

^ monster swarms that show up in wreathed deep*

(why can’t we edit forum posts anymore?)

[Stitch]

I definitely think pathing should take the mists into account so you’re not inadvertently driving your vehicle into them, and I can imagine it being super frustrating thinking that you’re driving to one address only to drive smack dab into it. I think an easy change there would be for ‘drive’ to tell you where you set off driving towards so you can have warning.

The other thing is that, thanks to a bug, rescuing anyone is near impossible right now because enemies just immediately respawn on top of you and in droves.

[Kaiser]

Always bring a buddy and be ready to run if you’re going monster hunting!

Incorrect, the more players their are the harder the mists become and spawn more monsters. So bringing along a T1 with 150k cexp is to your determinate. Tested, not hersay. The more players the more chances at larger and stronger groups instantly attacked your group.

The only thing I cannot verify is if the Mists respond to the level of each PC’s, their Tier, and their overall combat exp.

[Rev]

As a non combat character I have never been captured in the mists. Or crashed my car in the mists. Yes it would be great if your car could try not to go into the mists. But people have pointed out if your GPS is dumb then you need to be the smart one. If you’re going to somewhere near the mist you make sure you go left then up. Instead of up then left into the mist. So you do that by driving to 20 the up to 28 for example. When you set out to drive you need to make sure the address is correct. I stopped someone who I was with driving to the wrong place because I noticed it say you set out for blah street and that wasn’t where they were supposed to go. Turned out they typod the address.

That being said mists should probably stop spawning monsters right on people trying to rescue others. But being smart about it will prevent you from crashing in the mists.

[Stitch]

I definitely haven’t had any issues driving into and crashing into the mists by basically doing the same thing that Rev said, but it stinks for anyone who doesn’t realize due to how they typed in their drive location that they’ve driven smack dab into them. I do think the drive message should tell you where you’ve elected to drive to to help eliminate that.

But yeah, in general, it helps to ensure that you’re regularly checking the weather and map to know where the Mists are. I personally really like this system. The only time I can imagine it getting really bad is if the Mists blow into your neck of the woods when you’ve got an event planned or they linger at your house for literal days so getting back home or to your shop can be horrid. I see a lot more magical cabinets being a thing this iteration.

[MojoJojo]

Sadly, I have seen the game bork up even driving one stop to the west/east/north/south. Parked outside of mist. Wanted to move one stop west. It, somehow, pushed me all the way north into the mist and then turned east until it literally hit Mariner. And yes, I -was- looking West before starting my drive command. Thankfully, I was on horseback so not at risk, but it’s definitely got its moments where the drive pathing just forgoes any and all logic and shouts ‘PARKOUR’ at you while taking the weirdest sidepaths. Not to mention I’ve also seen it already cycle into an unfinishable loop in an alley for over 30 minutes — It would seem that the whole ‘automatically get booted from your car at your drive location after X minutes’ is removed.. but that’s a petition I’ve already made. (kept me trapped in a car for >2 hours, once, could not even fire ‘park’ after the first 20 or so minutes)

[Crayon]

Lots of misinformation and dated information in this thread.

Most of the mob AI issues seem resolved. Mobs spawning on top of you or behind you is incredibly rare. As in, using some obvious tactics to mitigate surprises, I’ve had spawn-on-tops and spawn-behinds happen twice in probably somewhere in the vicinity of 500 spawns? I believe both occasions happened because the mist epicenter shifted on me.

The majority of the time you’re experience a mob “appearing on top of you” what’s actually happening is that the mob is spawning at a noncardinal location concealed by a wall and as you walk around the corner into its view it walks into you. You can avoid this happening by being mindful of your angle of approach relative to the mist’s center and understanding sightlines.

I largely like the system as it stands. I agree with Pingpong that the ankle/waist bands should be a little wider to give people a little more time to react before having a [SPOILER] run them down for 50+ damage a hit. I believe they actually were a little wider at the start but were made smaller at some point, but I could be misrecollecting.

Adjusting drive-pathing to intelligently avoid driving into the mist unless the destination is in it would be a huge QoL change and vastly reduce abductions and crashes. Providing a warning/requiring a confirmation if it is in the mist would be good, too, and ensure the player knows they need to be ready to roll on-arrival.

I do think MJJJ has a point about having places to stop and RP while working your way into the mist. That would be a big boon. That said, I don’t think the random safe-parks/lawns were great either.

There should probably be some mechanism to both let a newly logged in character know that the building they’re in is enveloped by mist when they log in, and to facilitate their leaving short of using escape or owning a horse and being fast. They can/should call players but maybe underground tunnel networks could give people some fun, abolition-era themed venues to escape from misted areas without having to go outdoors, as well as fun access points for Delves.

Because of the exponential nature of mob loot values, any loot that doesn’t need to be butchered, like the necklaces, is always incredibly low value relative to difficulty. These could probably be 2x as valuable and still be substantially worse than other equally hard stuff, but maybe worth the inventory space.

Also kobold (and all mob) knockbacks are cracked out and sometimes whip you hundreds of distance away. This should probably not be the case.

[Luka]

Agree with a lot of what Crayon is saying here. I’m curious what exactly Crayon is suggesting people do when he suggests people are “mindful of their angle of approach” and I’d like to hear what that specifically means (Does looking both ways before moving onto an intersection square let you know if there’s monsters nearby? It’d be great if it did) but he’s pretty on the money here.

The underground tunnels idea seem kind of jank at first pass since underground tunnel networks have a reputation for being something newbie MUD players struggle with and they are the population that the tunnels would be there to help out, but maybe it’s possible to execute that idea in a newbie-friendly way.

Pushbacks are indeed strange, and so are some mobs. I’ve had Rats teleport 60 distance away from me right before they died. I don’t know if some mobs just have a “teleport on near death” ability or something or if the game is just being janky, but if Kobold knockbacks are teleporting people hundreds away (Really? Hundreds?) that makes me think there’s some buggery going on here.

[Toodee]

I have been hunting pretty extensively solo. It is true a lot of the jankiness from the launch has been fixed, however there are a few things which feel a little off and I will try to explain them here.

1. While mobs no longer spawn on top of you, they do absolutely spawn in front of you, usually 3 rooms in front. The delay between mobs spawning and combat starting is usually so tight that you can get dragged into combat as soon as you get a ‘You hear something in the mist’ message. Mix with the right mobs (medusae, satyrs), maybe an unfortunate stacked cardinal movement, or a ranged snare – it can quickly become something of an unfair situation. All of this generally isn’t a problem because mob spawns tend to scale appropriately to number of players, except when…

2. Except when they don’t. Normally when I’m hunting alone in the ‘deep’ mist, I’ll spawn 1-2 mobs. Their actual strength seems a bit random but 1-2 is a fair number, and its exceedingly rare to get a combination that gives me trouble. However, there are days, and I suspect this has to do with the weather/mist level, where walking around in deep mist will spawn 4-5 mobs 3 rooms in front of you. Basically what this means is that while the ‘look’ command caps out at ‘This area is wreathed in mist’, it seems likely that the mist level can rise beyond that in the code and start spawning absolute doom stacks on people. This was happening to me some 16 hours ago as of writing this.

3. Mob stagger is miserable. Granted, this is coming from someone who prefers melee and short-medium range. In the aforementioned situations where 4-5 mobs can spawn, it is entirely unwinnable because mobs start attacking from 100 distance and every attack, no matter the damage, builds up 10 stagger. Combine with the fact it takes a minimum of two attacks from you to kill any single mob, and you have a serious stagger economy problem whenever 3+ mobs are attacking you.

3.1. Similarly, mob status conditions are also miserable. Wooden women can snare you once every other attack. A goddamn rat will snare you for a full round. I’ve been chain stunned by a living trees in melee combat, which was just enough to give me a mild wound. In isolated scenarios, 1v1, 1v2? These are entirely fine. Where it gets really out of control is when the mob spawns get out of control and you get 4-5 monsters per person, same as with stagger.

4. A niche problem I had is that ranged mobs can and will phase through a shop door, while you are trying to engage them on the streets. Because automatic doors cannot be opened or passed through by players during combat, this essentially lets that mob cheese you if you were trying to engage in melee. I’ve had this happen with a Medusa (the one that deals 60 ranged damage) and it was very much not fun.

5. People have reported that in some abduction cases, mobs in dens respawn non-stop and on top of people attempting a rescue. I haven’t personally had this issue, infact when clearing a very weak den of just one frog man, this didn’t happen, but it was enough of a problem that it got most of a faction and a society put into the hospital with severe wounds.

6. Butchering is super tedious and actively discourages ‘hunting parties’, on top of scaled mob spawns also discouraging hunting parties. Whenever I want to butcher something, if I respect my own time at all, I basically have to lift the corpse and drag it to the nearest shop/office to sit still for 7+ minutes. Then go out, repeat. If I try to do this with a group, we waste so much time fighting exponentially more mobs, and the kill ownership system means the task of butchering cannot even be offloaded to someone specialized in occult knowledge.

7. Mist level should show up in brief descriptions. Period. I’ve crashed a car before because I stepped out of my apartment a dozen blocks away from the mist, just for it to be misty weather throughout the entire city, causing me to instantly crash. All because I had brief room descs turned on and didn’t notice it was ankle-level mist outside.

8. The map could be more accurate in reporting where the mist is. Sometimes it lags behind and takes 30+ minutes to update for a drastic shift in the mist’s center, sometimes it doesn’t account for risen mist levels causing the mist to affect a full extra block.

That’s all the feedback I have. Keep in mind, this is as an entirely green player. I joined for H7.

[Toodee]

Bonus points:

10. Mobs can’t spawn on top of you, but they sure can spawn around corners. On a bad day, I’ve stepped on an intersection to be greeted by 2 minotaurs and a golem sitting at [1N], like some Tom & Jerry episode.

11. CXP gains being tied to damage dealt creates sort of a ‘noob trap’ phenomena, where if you don’t invest your initial 150k CXP correctly as a new player, it becomes insanely slow to climb up. Basically, it is always the right move to max out a melee discipline + striking/grappling first, so that you can actually generate good CXP just by sparring, which as a sub 250k~ CXP player, is your only reliable source of CXP, since kobolds and rats give nothing, and stepping further in has the real chance of spawning a griffon or gargoyle that will just end your career. I no longer have any of these issues, but I know some people who got seriously frustrated by the combat system as a whole in part because of this.

[Crayon]

Some notes:

Regarding being mindful of your angle of approach, we’re verging on the line between clarifying mechanics and advising optimization, so all I’ll say is that you can deterministically avoid or minimize dangerous/invisible noncardinal spawns by carefully choosing how you approach the mist. This will also solve your problem most of the time if you think nothing is spawning. It is spawning, it’s just spawning on the other side of a wall somewhere.

Mist spawns don’t scale to the number of people at all unless multiple people are in different rooms and manage to trigger a multispawn before getting pulled into a combat instance.

Doom stack spawns only happen if you’re very near to the absolute center of the mist. Difficulty does indeed scale the further you go into ‘wreathed’. Another idea might be having more levels of description for how deep you are, but this might detract from the difficult but very thematic loss of understanding which way the mist thins. Doom stacks only normally happen if you’re way overambitious, crash near dead center in the mist, walk out of a building into near dead center, or the mist’s center sneaks up on top of you when you’re not paying attention.

Mob stagger can be a bit rough, but it can be mitigated with Stamina. A good impmrovement would be requiring mobs to do a certain minimum threshold of damage in order to apply stagger so you don’t get turbo staggerfucked by four kobolds hitting you for 1 damage each assuming they can manage before knockbacking you into the ocean.

I don’t know that ranged mobs are phasing through doors so much as it seems like some are flying up on roofs? I’ve seen frost sprites do that a few times and mysteriously wind up with Z-level distance on me. If medusae are doing it then that’s not cool.

Mob status effects should not stack. This would also be a huge improvement for the some-say-he’s-still-snared issue that’s been cropping up in raids and operations for a very long time.

Rescue respawns seem to be resolved but it does seem to instantly trigger a depth-calibrated spawn on clearing the lair camp which can be problematic.

Butchering is okay, imo, but the kill ownership should probably only apply to Big Game Hunts. With Mist Hunting, it causes more issues than it solves.

I agree that the CXP calculation is punitive to a lot of character types and has perverse efficiency incentives.

Kobolds and rats are actually worth plenty of CXP at low experience and if you’re spawning griffons and gargoyles you’re going way too deep for your britches.

The bigger noob trap for low CXP characters is devourer plants which are a pretty harsh stat-check to going deeper than waist-high, but maybe actually necessarily so to train people to be careful with depth. I hate them and love them at the same time.

[Lykaia]

I’ve liked the mist. Am treating it very carefully when I hunt, but what I’ve liked the most is the RP that’s sprung from rescuing or being rescued. Has provided with some meaningful ties and narratives I’m hoping to see grow.

[Toodee]

Regarding being mindful of your angle of approach, we’re verging on the line between clarifying mechanics and advising optimization, so all I’ll say is that you can deterministically avoid or minimize dangerous/invisible noncardinal spawns by carefully choosing how you approach the mist. This will also solve your problem most of the time if you think nothing is spawning. It is spawning, it’s just spawning on the other side of a wall somewhere.

I understand what you are talking about, and I have adopted similar strategies to minimizing the risk. Mostly, it boils down to: Stay on the streets, avoid alleys, NEVER queue room movements in the mist, always backpedal as soon as you see the ‘You hear something moving’ message, and only then consider looking in that direction to see the number of foes (combat seems to only start at 3+ rooms of distance if you look in the direction of enemies, otherwise they try to ‘sneak’ up on you). I am a very optimization-minded person, however, and I can imagine for others none of this comes naturally, or intuitively.

Doom stack spawns only happen if you’re very near to the absolute center of the mist. Difficulty does indeed scale the further you go into ‘wreathed’. Another idea might be having more levels of description for how deep you are, but this might detract from the difficult but very thematic loss of understanding which way the mist thins. Doom stacks only normally happen if you’re way overambitious, crash near dead center in the mist, walk out of a building into near dead center, or the mist’s center sneaks up on top of you when you’re not paying attention.

This one I have to say, is not what my experience has been. I wish I had a map of what the mist looked like in the website, but yesterday, I was getting stacks of 4-5 monsters two or three blocks away from the center. So I will just draw a rough sketch: The blue X is where the mist petered off to waist/ankle height, roughly. The red X is where I was getting groups of 4-5 mobs whenever I stepped on that intersection. The yellow X is roughly where the mist center was located, according to the map. Castle Haven marked for reference (fun fact, Castle Haven is a safe spot in the mist. Very thematic for its drawbridge and gatehouse. I was using it to avoid said doomstacks.)

Again, this varies a lot each day and I think it has to do with mist levels rising/falling, but you can absolutely run into doom stacks just one block away from where the mist says ‘waist-high’.

[Maina]

I’m sure most people know about this, but I didn’t see it in the thread: if you type ‘drive slow’ BEFORE entering the mist, you will almost(?) never crash. Played less than many here, but I’ve never had a wreck with even a junker car so long as I ‘drive slow’ if there is any chance of mist-travel.

You can even toggle the command before even getting into the car.

There is also a command that tells you which intersection the Mist is currently centered around. Unfortunately, I can’t find the documentation for it or remember what I typed. I found it on accident. I’d be curious how it compares to the visual map.

[Toodee]

There is also a command that tells you which intersection the Mist is currently centered around. Unfortunately, I can’t find the documentation for it or remember what I typed. I found it on accident. I’d be curious how it compares to the visual map.

‘weather’. Funnily enough, testing it right now says the mist center is at Birch and Blackstone, whereas the map would have you think it is at Birch and Lake, 2 blocks away. Not sure which is most accurate.

[Author]

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