City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

"Fog of War" bug is back with access to more zones

all_hell

By all_hell,
Posted on: 2010-08-20 11:00 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

Didn't find any reference to this earlier today, so plonking this in the Bugs forum for awareness and/or corroboration.

Some background:

The reference "fog of war" is the phrase given to the unopened "dark" areas on your map for a given zone. When you first log in to COH in Atlas Park, for example, the map is "opened" immediately around you, with the rest of the area only partially revealed. Once opened, the fog of war would stay opened for the rest of your toon's life.

When the new Faultline debuted back in issue 8 (and honestly, was noticed beforehand with the Shard zones), players who'd previously opened all their zone maps noticed they could not open Faultline's fog of war map permanently (i.e., it would reset when you'd leave the zone). Once this was seen as a fault point, the Devs addressed it shortly after Issue 8's release. The problem here was basically a "ceiling value" for how much of a fog of war you could reveal. The previous value was set back in the days of COH's release, which had less zones than it had by issue 8. That ceiling value was increased, and fog of war has begun to work again for players.

With issue 18 opening the opposing side to players, this behavior has begun again, where we've apparently hit the fog of war ceiling value. I've opened up all but 3 COV zones, not including the Praetorian areas (which aren't available as of yet).

Feel free to chime in with your own experience; if you've opened all the COH maps and are able to do the COV maps as well, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Other players have noted the behavior I outlined above, however, so I'm presuming from that small data set that it's probably a universal issue.

 

Posted

I had this problem with Port Oakes map.

My controller got all exploration badges there as well as "Pirate", "Spectral" and associated gladiators. I logged him off in Markoneville building for the Day Job. Next time I logged in, PO map was in "Fog of War". I thought maybe was some rollback, but all badges I got day before were still there.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kheldarn View Post
They really, really, REALLY need to ditch the whoe FoW idea. With the internet, it's pointless, since it's easy to find the maps.
/this.

It makes sense for a RTS, for instance. For the MMO... not so much (since even "in game," it would be logical that someone could, oh, *buy a map of the city* and find where they're going. Or look at the ones on the trams, blueside.) Admittedly it helps keep track of where you've been in missions, but for the zones themselves... not so much.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Turgenev View Post
I'd rather they'd just up the value, myself. It helps for me, as a badger, to know where one of my toons has been or not.
I agree, at least in regard to city zones where I can 'see' where badges/plaques are with the greyed fog, and know if I've been to that location or not yet. For Hazard zones, I adore my vet Fog revealer.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kheldarn View Post
They really, really, REALLY need to ditch the whoe FoW idea. With the internet, it's pointless, since it's easy to find the maps.
No thanks. I like exploring and uncovering the map myself.

 

Posted

Ick, it took a ton of bug reports and PMs to get this fixed the first time. Hoping it can be addressed more quickly if this is happening again.

 

Posted

I made a thread about this during Beta. It was happening to me there. The database space for cleared fog of war needs to be increased again, or just do away with the fog altogether. I'm fine with either, really.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zaion View Post
No thanks. I like exploring and uncovering the map myself.
That's fine when you doing it first time. But after you uncovered the map it should stay uncovered, not going dark again after you logged in day later.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by NordBlast View Post
That's fine when you doing it first time. But after you uncovered the map it should stay uncovered, not going dark again after you logged in day later.
I don't think Zaion disagrees with you. She was commenting on someone who said "They really, really, REALLY need to ditch the whoe FoW idea. With the internet, it's pointless, since it's easy to find the maps."

 

Posted

Yes, I agree the bug needs to be fixed, but I don't want the whole system removed like was suggested in the post I quoted before.

 

Posted

as a old timer player,I remember the first game to have "fog of war" it was a freeware/shareware game on the amiga,it was a Battlemech game, written by a fan of the boardgame,

Now tht the history session is over, fix the bug keep the feature.

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Posted

Update: Well, this is interesting. I'm seeing Fog of War corruption on my Praetorian toons too. (i.e., not an issue with hitting the cap, but something else?) I'd previously explored about 40% of Novo Praetoria, but hadn't logged that toon in for about 5 days. Logged in last night, and instead of the normal blotch pattern showing where I'd been... it looked like something had made it into tiger stripes across the zone, like if you take a ball of Play-Do and then twisted it about 180 degrees... VERY weird. The toon continues to open the map normally, but "something" seems to be going on with the fog that might be beyond the unveiling cap...

Anyone else seen this? Log in a newer toon that's just exploring a zone, and see how the map looks...

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kheldarn View Post
Yup. I had it happen on one of my Praetorians. The area where you first enter Nova was covered, even though I was obviously there.

This is a pic I took of it. It's gotten worse.
That's exactly what I'm seeing too.

 

Posted

Oddly, I have had the opposite occur in instanced maps for SFs that I do regularly. Sometimes I'll will zone in and there will be no FoW at all. The entire instanced map will be revealed.
Doesn't happen always, or even frequently, but has happened more than once.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by all_hell View Post
Oddly, I have had the opposite occur in instanced maps for SFs that I do regularly. Sometimes I'll will zone in and there will be no FoW at all. The entire instanced map will be revealed.
Doesn't happen always, or even frequently, but has happened more than once.
If somebody uses the [Reveal] power before you zone into the mission map, it will be uncovered for you as well. If you are inside the mission when the power goes off, nothing happens... but leave the mission for any reason, you'll usually come back in to see it uncovered as well.

I'm not sure if that's working as intended or anything, but that's the way it's been working since it was released.

Either way, I'm not sure it's really connected to the issue in this thread. It's more likely a simple side-effect of the mission maps being shared by the team.

As for the actual issue in this thread.. I have certainly run into the "cap" as well. Once I moved a Hero to Villainside, almost none of the Rogue Isles zones will stay uncovered.

And for the secondary issue in the thread, corruption.. I have seen this almost since day 1 playing the game, but not quite to that extreme. Occasionally, I'll see an uncovered area of a map that I couldn't possibly have ever visited. For example, a small patch of water at the edge of a zone with no other lines connecting it, as if I was TPd there and back at some point. It seems silly. Even on new characters, it would happen now and then. Once uncovered, I'll see that same patch every time I go back to that zone.

On my main character, even after the previous "cap" was raised, there were areas toward the South end of some Shadow Shard maps that would refuse to stay uncovered. The top 80% would be fully uncovered, and I'd have a path at the bottom to my mission, and when I get out of the mission, the line was gone. The top 80% was still uncovered, but I was standing in a black area. At some point later, that stopped happening as well.

I guess when the number of possible zones increases, so does the degree of corruption.

Just to provide a little more specific info:
I have never downloaded or used any add-on maps for this game... which means that couldn't be any kind of possible cause for the issue.

 

Posted

Summary:
I know this was reported in the beta test, and I know this was an problem a few years ago. The Fog of War for the minimaps keep resetting after a certain point. It used to only happen in the shadow shards, the hive, of PVP zones as those were usually the last zones visited. With the [Reveal] vet power, the zones will not clear the fog of war. The power actually will reset these zones to faded or black status. Now with Going Rogue, characters are able to visit more zones and now can hit the new upper limit just by switching sides, and not including starting from Praetoria.

Bug details:
The bug stems from the fact that each character has a buffer that can hold X amount of non-mission zones. The problem stems from the fact that there are more non-mission zones than this buffer allows. I'm guessing that there are some buffer overruns related to this as the clear data is not saved.

On my controller that I've had since 2005, I've visited or been to the following non-mission zones:
Hero Tutorial (map data is persistent between logins.)

  1. Atlas Park
  2. Brickstown
  3. Founders' Falls
  4. Galaxy City
  5. Independence Port
  6. Kings Row
  7. Overbrook "Faultline"
  8. Peregrine Island
  9. Salamanca "Croatoa"
  10. Skyway City
  11. Steel Canyon
  12. Talos Island
  13. Sewer Network
  14. Paragon Dance Party
  15. Abandoned Sewer Network
  16. Astoria "Dark Astoria"
  17. Baumton "Boomtown"
  18. Eastgate "The Hollows"
  19. Eastgate Tunnels "The Tunnels of the Trolls"
  20. Perez Park
  21. Striga Isle
  22. Terra Volta
  23. "The Hive"
  24. Venice "Crey's Folly"
  25. White Plains "(The) Rikti War Zone"
  26. Woodvale "Eden"
  27. Fire Base Zulu
  28. Cascade Archipelago
  29. The Chantry
  30. The Storm Palace
  31. Pocket D
  32. Bloody Bay
  33. Siren's Call
  34. Warburg
  35. Overbrook "Faultline" revamp
  36. Recluse's Victory
  37. Sharkhead Isle
  38. Grandville
  39. Nerva Archipelago
  40. St. Martial
  41. Port Oakes
  42. Mercy Island
  43. Cap au Diable
  44. The Abyss
  45. Monster Island
It is at number 41 where the fog of war starts resetting and the [reveal] vet power stops working in outside zones for this character. On the test server I changed the order I visited and had different blackout zones. I still had the same amount of blackout zones however.

What this means:
With the addition of the 7 Praetorian maps (Praetorian Tutorial, NP, IC, Neu, and the 3 underground maps) that Praetorians that start blue side might not be able to clear any of the CoV zone's fog of war, and even have CoH zones "stuck". Given that more Praetorian zones will likely be added in future issues, the maximum amount of zones that can be buffered should be increased.

Edit:
As a note I looked for a similar thread to this before making my own and couldn't get results from the search engine.



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Posted

My personal experience for the Fog of War on zone maps was that there were 4 zone maps which worked CORRECTLY when visited after my Hero became Vigilante, as movement and using the 63 month Veteran power "Reveal" removed the Fog of War permanently: Cap Au Diable, Sharkhead Isle, St. Martial, Grandville. Pocket D and Midnighter Club also tested as still correctly working, aka the "Reveal" power did not incorrectly restore the Fog of War.

This character previously used "Reveal" on all 37 Hero and Co-Op zones in March of 2010. Why? Because I had just earned the 63 month Veteran power "Reveal" and the OCD part of me wanted to be sure I had cleared every map sliver possible. I even used a spreadsheet to make sure I got them all. Anyway, these zones are: Pocket D, Midnighter Club, Atlas Park, Galaxy City, Sewer Network, Kings Row, The Hollows, Perez Park, Steel Canyon, Skyway City, The Tunnels, Boomtown, Faultline, Bloody Bay, Independence Port, Talos Island, Striga Isle, Dark Astoria, Siren's Call, Terra Volta, Ouroboros, Croatoa, Brickstown, Crey's Folly, Warburg, Founders' Falls, Eden, Abandoned Sewer Network, Cimerora, Rikti War Zone, Recluse's Victory, Peregrine Island, Firebase Zulu, Cascade Archipelago, The Chantry, The Storm Palace, The Hive.

Thus I had a total of 41 zone maps cleared before encountering issues.

*** The problem is on the 6 remaining zone maps on that same Vigilante: Mercy Island, Port Oakes, Nerva Archipelago, Ouroboros (villain version), The Abyss, Monster Island. These zones have Fog of War RESTORE obscurity (instead of removed) when using the 63 month Veteran power "Reveal", and the Fog of War will also RESTORE obscurity every time I zone into these maps.

(Note: This summary does not include the Outbreak hero tutorial ran in February 2005, nor the Breakout map ran in villain Ouroboros last week after changing to villain alignment.)



Snow_Globe, I did not see either the hero or villain version of Ouroboros in your list. Does that affect your numbers?



Second-hand information: I've heard complaints from other players who switched from hero to villain side that NONE of the villain maps would retain cleared Fog Of War for them. I can't imagine how they had already reached the cap.



*** I encourage everyone to /bug this as you switch alignments to record the exact extent the problem is occuring. My /bug report submitted (with Account name xxxxxxxxx out below but filled in the actual /bug) was:

/bug Fog of War problem

Account: xxxxxxxxx, Server: Freedom, Character: Dynexus (originally a Hero who had issues when turned Vigilante). Error: Fog of War problem on the following 6 zone maps: Mercy Island, Port Oakes, Nerva Archipelago, Ouroboros (villain version), The Abyss, Monster Island. These zones have Fog of War RESTORE obscurity (instead of remove) when using the 63 month Veteran power "Reveal", and obscurity is also RESTORED every time I zoned into those maps.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yydr View Post
Snow_Globe, I did not see either the hero or villain version of Ouroboros in your list. Does that affect your numbers?
Yeah, the hero Ouroborus wound be 37, and I'll have to check the villain Ouro to see if it is affected or not. So start of this bug for me would be 42-43.

Edit:
The villain Ouro is also affected by this bug for me. So 42 on my list, but if the old Faultline and PDP is taken off and the midnighter club added (forgot to list it, but it would be just after the Hero Ouro): yeah, 41 is where the bug hits.



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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kheldarn View Post
Yup. I had it happen on one of my Praetorians. The area where you first enter Nova was covered, even though I was obviously there.
Oh, good, it's not just me.

 

Posted

I finally got Going Rogue for my live account yesterday and I can confirm the same 41 zone limit on cleared fog of war on my main. When I got to the 42nd zone, St. Martial for me, Reveal, zoning or logging out and back in would reset the fog for the zone.

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A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes."

 

Posted

Also confirmed for me but includes Grandville on top of St. Martial.

I also have the zone limit/Reveal vet power bug.

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