Bug: Mobs Not Adjusting in TFs to SSK Feature

Tonight, I ran into something annoying with the new auto-sk feature during TFs. I had bad luck with Vista and my graphics card not playing nice, but that's not the real issue. I was leading an Imperious TF with my level 50 Tanker. Vista decided to crash me just before we started the TF, and during the first mission, so the next person below me had the star, who was also a 50.

But then they crashed during the second mission. We got out, and the third person to get the star was... level 42 (or 41). He got the next mission before we caught this, dropping us all to 41. This would have been okay with the new system (despite losing a couple of powers), but... all the foes in the 3rd mission were still level 50. Ay yai.

We ended up dissolving since most of the team didn't want to wait for a GM or restart. Anyone else run into this same problem? I'll probably draw Arbiter Kim's attention to this, as I can't believe we're the only people it happened to, but more info would be good.

Why not have the next person logoff until a 50 got the lead again?

Because once the mission is received from the contact the mission level and team level are fixed. Moving the star around has no effect (had this exact issue during a Numina TF today).

I was leader and level 42 (Numina tops out at 40).
I crashed and the new leader was level 36 and got the next mission.
We get to the mission and the enemies are all 40 because signature TF's are fixed at max level.
We were based on level 36.
We had the leader log out to get the star to a 50.
The star DID move to the 50, but the SSK *DID NOT CHANGE*. We were still based on level 36.

Once the mission was selected, our SSK levels were set in stone. Nothing could change it. MAYBE if everyone logged out long enough to reset (20 minutes, I believe) that might have helped. We didn't feel like waiting so we fought +4's.

Ah, forgot about adding that part. When we discovered the issue, we all left the mission, and had the next 2 people log out so the star would get passed to a 50. We all went in together, and nothing changed: the mobs were still 50, and we were still 41. As Ironblade says, it stays fixed. The level 41-42 guy became leader during the second mission, but the baddies and us stayed at the same level there. It didn't change until the 3rd mission got set.

Silly me, not being thorough with a bug report! Anyway, hopefully this will get changed fast, as it is quite common for someone to disconnect for one reason or another.

I know Vista likes to make my graphics card crash now and again, so I don't want to have to worry about this happening again while leading a TF (which I do about once a week).

Just curious on your vid card issue..

what card are you running and what verison of Vista. I picked up a 9800 shortly after they came out when there were all the driver issues, but a windows hotfix took care of everything. I haven't had a vid card caused game crash in well over a year.

Zombie-we would have tried to switch leaders around if we had noticed the problem. It's harder to notice this kind of thing on the fly now with the SSK features. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have run into this if we had managed to switch leaders to a 50 before we got the third mission, as I didn't get exemped to 41 until he grabbed the third mission.

Even so, this is NOT a good setup for TFs. Really, the new SSK feature should just automatically put everyone at the max level for the TF OR the mobs should be able to scale appropriately. Players should not have to keep an eagle eye on who has the star if disconnects happen. That's just asking for disrguntled people all over.

For us, we all left the mission, and we had two people log off that were next in the list, so that a 50 would be getting the star. It didn't change anything. We didn't ALL log off, but I don't see how that would change things if we left the mission, etc. The settings get a new "look" upon entering a mission, as I was asked if I was okay being exemped down upon entering the mission.

Mike, I have a GeForce 9800 GT, 512 MB. It will occasionally encounter an unrecoverable error while playing CoX, crashing me to the desktop. No other game has the same issue, so I know it's a CoX thing. I didn't see any potential changes to this that didn't involve changing up settings that I didn't want to do, as I play other games on my computer. Unless the Windows hotfix you mentioned won't mess up other games... let me know, and I'll give it a try.

You're running the same card I am. I had that issue that was SO bad that I couldn't get more than 15 min into the game without a crash.

The hotfix is fine. I have had no other crashes in any game be it L4D, WoW, CO, DnD Online, or Sins of a Solar Empire.

Granted the only one that got any decent amount of time playing them was CO because if I payed for that P.O.S. game I might as well get my fill of it before I uninstall it.

As far as where the hotfix is, I honestly don't remember, BUT I do believe there was a sticky to it in the old fourums under vista error/fixes and that SP2 has it in there. I'm 95% sure that when I built this rig (same vid card new MOBO/CPU etc) I just installed SP2 and didn't bother with the hotfix.

I've said it a dozen times but... we need to be able to use the Promote button in a task force. I have no idea why they disabled it to begin with.

But I suppose even then you'd still have to reinforce to people in the team that the leader (as opposed to whoever has the star) is the only one who can talk to the contact without express permission.

I'm sorry you had such problems but thanks for the heads-up.

[Edit] My new machine is Vista with a 9800 and I have the unrecoverable error too. It's a once every few days occurrence. I uninstalled a particular windows hotfix and ran all day yesterday just fine. Of course, that may be a coincidence. If I go the rest of the week then I'll believe it.

I was told that if the whole team logs out for around 5 minutes and then the 50 log back in, it would reset the mission. We had this same issue with an ITF we ran. Had to all log out after to 50 tank crashed, after 5 minutes we all logged back in and finished.