90% of Kill All - No Kill All

Hi:

I know that the core subject of this thread has been addressed before, yet I believe it needs to be re-looked at some.

Long ago, there was a pretty good crowd for a number of reasons, some good , some bad, that kept suggesting to do away with kill all missions.

The developers at one time, actually did take them away, and then brought them back in different sizes and flavors. Thus creating mini kill alls, for instance, it could be just the boss, or kill the boss with spawn with him, kill the boss with all spawns in tiny room, to the kill boss, friends and family rooms. Which in a way were forms of compromises to the player demand against kill alls.

Personally, there is one reason, I dislike and oppose "kill alls", and all of us have experienced it at one time or another: "Miss Spawn"

A miss spawn is when a mob is formed below the floor, inside a wall, or what not, and it is simply unfindable and unkillable. Even after all the otehr mobs have been killed, and the location of the last mob is highlighted for you.

Incidentally, the reveal the location of the last mob, is actually an effort by the devs to deal with some of the arguments of the stop-kill-all player base. Unfortunately, having a mob location that you can not engage, is not of much help.

When you get the "bad spawn", you have 2 options; contact a GM and hope you get lucky and get support before your team disintegrates; or have everyone log out of the game, and come back so the mission respawns in the case of a TF/SF. While either can be by some considered perfectly reasonable and acceptable, I bet others find it annoying and would wish for a better way.

So why not have the "Kill All" complete when you have defeated the boss and say 90% of the chaff in the room? Of course, you could still remain and kill all in the room, despite the mission had completed.

Stormy

I'm guessing because they know that if they set a precedent by reducing it to 90% that people will start whining that 90% is too high and needs to be reduced further.

Yeah sometimes I find "kill alls" to be annoying. Much less so now that we have the map "hint" that let's us find any leftovers. But sometimes I actually don't mind kill alls if I'm working on a badge and/or need the kills for whatever reason.

I'd agree that for any new content kill alls ought to be kept to a reasonable minimum. But I doubt it's worth the Devs effort to try to change any of the existing content for that at this point. As Forbin_Project implies you're never going to make everyone happy with it regardless.

P.S. As far as the "mis-spawn" concern goes in my 6+ years of playing this game I've only seen that problem happen a few times. Hardly anything that needs extra special effort from the Devs to deal with.

Well, the 90% should eliminate the impact od a "bad spawn". So yeah, I'd go for it. But, surely the devs have had this same thought0...Maybe the devs are concerned that people would finish missions too quickly?

An under-level spawn ruined a Synapse TF for us, with no way to progress.

I'd be for such a thing.

I wouldn't mind if the 'last mob of enemies' actually showed up on Kill All maps. It often doesn't, yet it shows up on objective based maps.

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.

I'd settle for fixing the "show last few enemies" feature so it actually, you know, works more than 10% of the time. All too often, I'll get artefacts like "????" or "Target" on my map tagged as enemies where no enemies are, sometimes companion NPCs and enemies will not show up at all, sometimes they'll blink in and out of existence, and sometimes the feature won't activate at all.

And even when it works, it's range-limited to something like 300 yards, so on a big map, you won't see an enemy you missed at the start even if he should theoretically be shown.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't really have a preference; I guess I don't really mind kill-alls as c game convention.

But historically it's silly. In historical battles there have been very few kill-alls (perhaps Cannae counts, heh). In fact, battles in which one side takes very heavy casualties, is defeated, retreats on a long retreat and suffers additional casualties, yet winds up with 50% of its original strength are often characterized as "destroying that army," decisive, even war-ending. And that's basically "kill, wound, or scare off half" -- a far cry indeed from "kill all."

Same goes for organized crime, if you think in terms of police. Nobody ever expects to end organized crime; merely nailing most of the top guys in one or two syndicates is hailed as a major blow.

In terms of immersion, I always find it funny, rather than frustrating, when a contact chides you for failure after you completely destroy a base, capturing or killing everyone but two errand boys sent out for pizza and that one part-time accountant on the third floor, and seize all their money and weapons. Too bad they got the better of you this time!

Not being able to complete a mission cause the target is stuck in a wall (And no one had teleport enemy) really sucks. Auto killing unattackables would be enough to satisfy me.

Mmm...


I love Penny's idea, it seem simple to do as well,if its outside the map, its defeated. The only reason I placed this post was to deal with mobs defectively placed, and Penny's idea is a rather elegant solution to the problem.

Stormy

If we can't rely on the game knowing for sure if a spawn is inside or outside of the map maybe the Devs could provide a command line command that would "TP Foe" one critter to a player as long as that critter is the only one left alive in the mission. This would solve the vast majority of the problems people ever seem to have with MOBs either stuck in a wall or outside the map.

I realize there might be ways to exploit this command (like being able to TP a big mission-ending boss even if he's not technically stuck somewhere) but if it can only work as long as there's only one enemy left it doesn't really matter exactly where you fight that one last guy does it?

Maybe they could make this an automatic thing that would happen after say a 5 minute timer. If there's only one enemy left alive on a "kill all" map after 5 minutes that guy is auto-TPed to your location regardless of where he is. Seems a bit convoluted but doable I guess.

Actually, the game seems to have at least some idea as to what's in the map and what's out of it. The /stuck command doesn't do anything if you're out in the open, but shifts you, sometimes across the map, if you manage to jam yourself inside geometry or fall out of the map. Remember that hole in Arachnos maps that let you fall down into the blackness and walk around on the "floor?" If you hit /stuck while "in the black," the game would shift you to the entrance, but if you hit /stuck while up in the map next to the hole, nothing would happen. At most, you'd be budged an inch to the side.

I'm not sure what the implications of this are, but it may be something worth looking into for enemies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

If the /stuck command is "smart enough" to know where we are in relation to the map then you'd think they could apply that to the MOBs. Maybe after the mission spawns all the MOBs they could run a /stuck on themselves just to make sure.

Seems a simple enough idea but since it does seem pretty simple maybe the Devs have experimented with something like this already and it didn't work well. There could be a number of "under the hood" reasons why this might not work as straightforward as it seems because we don't exactly know all the reasons why MOBs appear outside the confines of the map to begin with. *shrugs*

I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible to just add a "killzone" to the empty space in each map. Then again, if the killzone is misplaced it'll kill spawns that are placed correctly...

Also, adding a kill zone outside every mission map would take a LOT of work, likely adding them in manually, to every single mission map in the game.