Issue 16 Custom Group question (not a farming thread)

Since i16 I have a big problem with a few of my mishes/arcs that I designed to be playable by multiple level ranges, without making them SK or Ex to a certain level.

An example of what I'm seeing is #2074, The Maker's Warehouse. It was done relatively simply and was used as an experiment in the first few hours to play with different features like glowie spawn points, ambushes, patrols, etc. Nothing too exotic in design, but my SG enjoys playing it for change of pace between arcs, radios, TFs, or whatever so it's stayed up. It's a staple for our players to run through for fun occasionally, while getting them the xp they need for the next level's range of contacts.

I created a custom group for this mission called "Salvaged Robots," making sure there were regular, dev-created robot units taken from every level range in the game, so players would have something relevant to their level whenever they would play this mish. It uses all three ranks, and includes some Elite Bosses (Vanguard and Rikti Heavies) in the Boss category for higher level toons to face.

Here's the problem now though, which is what I'm here to ask about. Issue 16 appears to have changed the spawning in mishes for these kinds of groups. I found out when I started getting reports of level 40 toons finding enemies that were sometimes level 30 or lower, as well as reports of level 10 teams having to face Vanguard Heavies, RAM Series I, and Hercules titans in patrols. Even scaled down to their level, it is now a bloodbath, completely destroying what was supposed to be a soloable mish for any level toon.

So my question is this: how can I save this mish and make it so it spawns enemies like it used to, with units appearing that are relevant to the level of the players instead of this scaled up/down garbage we're seeing now that skews everything so badly?

I went through the editing process and couldn't find any options that would allow it to be saved, so I'm hoping one of you knows something that I'm missing here.

This exact same thing started happening with all of my mishes as of yesterday, and I'm clueless. I'm not even sure if this is a feature or a bug, but it made all 3 of my arcs either pointless or impossible depending on level.

Same problem here with my groups that are supposed to be levels 25-54. Guess I'm done with AE till they fix these spawning bugs.

I just spent a bunch of time editing up a story arc I intended to post today, just to find out my custom groups are now broke. Played as a level 50 and while the enemies that actually were supposed to scalefrom 25-50 spawned properly there were a lot of random greys thrown in and my other custom group refuses to spawn the level 45+ enemies that are in it.

I've got the same problem in my missions.

I created custom groups out of multiple standard groups, with a range from 1-54.. And in the missions I saw some 10s, some 30s, etc all together in one group, and throughout the mission.

I believe is has something to do with SSK maybe? Getting confused and such?

Really annoying, and not much I can do about it.. Hopefully it gets fixed soon.

Hm, one of my missions has a custom-grouped set of foes like that, I'll have to check it tomorrow when I get home. Thanks for the heads-up.

I hope you guys have filed some bug reports - I know I will if I see a problem.

I noticed the same problem. I think the information got jumbled up somehow. My arc that I had been working on since AE came out, has three custom groups in it. One group is the first two mishes, another is the second two, and the third is the last mish. Well, they're all showing up together now.

Part of me wonders if it has more to do with the difficulty settings? I ran it bumped up to 8 person team and +1 higher than me to see if my tank could handle it.

For the record, no. My tank could not handle all the stormies and necro MM Ninjas in my mish. lol

@The Omega Elementress
Currently playing Project Willow lvl 50 DB/WP Incarnate Shifted Scrapper

The problem is that AI factions are divided into sub groupings so there's provided spawn for certain level ranges, but that 1 sub group seems to be given spawn priority over all others... If it's on the list, it spawns regardless of the players Level, or what else is on the list, but only to it's upper/lower limits; In my case, an edited 5th Column (without supernatural/robotic spawn) would only spawn Nacht not Raserei after Issue 16 went live, even when my test character was L50, thus making the spawn grey to him. I imagine that other groups are getting priority for your custom factions, and are spawning way above the players level because there's nothing in that particular sub group below Level X in turn...

The work around for me, as they weren't an important spawn, and the Raserei covered the levels I needed anyway, was just to remove the Nacht, and use the space for more cow puns instead. Once that group had gone, the Raserei and custom bosses spawned matching the player's level again. But it wasn't a plot vital spawn for me, so I got lucky; it would have totally destroyed the arc if one of the sub groups of Devouring Earth had done the same thing.

If this happens to you /bug it. If you play an arc where this happens, /bug it.

My theory? There were some issues on test at one point that allowed authors to fill out a custom group with underlevelled minions and lieutenants to create all-boss spawns that circumvented the XP reduction for all-boss groups. This was still being discussed quite late in closed beta. What may have happened was the devs threw a band-aid fix on the exploit, that may have inadvertently messed up legitimate custom groups made up of Standard critters, and since players didn't really have time to test this, it was pushed live.

The enemy spawning code in AE seems to be broken. If any of your ranks has a mix of enemies with various level range restrictions (example: minion 1-20, minion 21-30, minion 31-54) and some of them would be gray spawns, then you will get only gray spawns, the appropriate-level enemies will never be selected.

The only way around this is to carefully select a single (or very few) types of enemy, and restrict the mission level to match the level of the enemies.

AE farms with only one enemy type, will of course never run into this problem.

Next time I'm on I'll bug it from both of my arcs.. Feel free to use them to bug it if you want

With my one arc (#77311), you can see how it works okay if the custom groups are all similar level ranges (Carnies and Warewolves in the 1st mission)... But it was the 2nd and such where I have the variety of groups, that generator it..... I'm not sure if it is based on any time of special ordering, since I have like 10-15 different groups mixed together with certain pieces (I wanted normal looking guys for a security force, so used all the different police views, security, etc). And when I check it out... well lets just say I had groups with characters ranging from 1-30ish (the level of the char I tested it with was in the mid 30s). I didn't spend enough time trying to figure out the Rhyme or Reason for how it occurs... I just find it annoying.

Had to temporarily restrict levels on my arcs a lot more tightly, I hope this is fixed soon.

Spent an hour or so creating the alternate Nemesis army for my arc Crown of Iron, Heart of Steel Part 1. Re-coloured, new biogs, the lot. I used the standard humans from 30-54, minions and LTs. However, when I was customising them, I noticed the LTs level range started screwing up massively. So, for the 30-32 spawning LTs, the range after editing said 34-54...wtf?

I also ran into the problem of encountering nothing but the one custom minion and custom LT I had made. No regular spawns. I ended up deleting them, because I had a version of the arc published and I didn't want to have to deal with that problem on live play-throughs.
I also ran into something wierd, in that my ambush (set to Hard, I think...) the LTs I got were both custom Bosses. They conned as LTs, but they weren't the customised Nemesis LTs. Does the 'Fight Bosses as LTs' also screw that up too?

Really, really badly broken. Why can we not actually save the customised standards as their own files? Something that would make editing them a whole lot easier? And be able to treat them a bit more like PC rigs, rather than just NPC rigs, at least for saving the colour pallette?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Is this fixed yet?

Seems partially fixed. Enemies are spawning at the right level, but now I'm seeing that LT problem that Techbot Alpha mentioned. Doesn't effect me much anyhow, since I just happened to log in a character who I haven't soloed with since the difficulty changes. I intend to always have bosses turned on.

Except that I don't understand what he's saying.

Custom bosses can end up downgraded to lts and end up spawning in place of regular lts since customs seem to take all precedence over standard enemies in a group. But this is only if you have your difficulty set to not spawn bosses.

I'm just glad the other problem seems to be fixed. Until this other issue is fixed, at least I can just keep my custom bosses in a seperate group. Sure I'd like them to spawn as regular bosses for larger teams but not if it's gonna screw everything up.

The mission is set to 20-24. My custom group has a mix of standard mobs (20-29) and custom flavor (1-54). When I run through the mission, the only foes that spawn are the customs. How can I get a mix of both standard and customs to spawn?

At the moment it seems you can't Sumericon. It's a bug they need to fix. You used to be able to.

Customised standard groups end up with their level ranges all out of whack.

So, a mob that is meant to only spawn from 30-34 might end up spawning from 32-54...
Very, very wierd.

At least I fixed up my arc (Heart of Steel, see Sig) so it works fairly well.
Wish they would just let us fully customise standard mobs, but there you go.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.