The Praetorian Invasion = Lame?

While participating in this event, I noticed a lot of chatter about the problems with this event. Namely that there was to much lag (on a low population server) to the point where a few of our powers wouldn't eve trigger for an attack. Here are a couple of the other issues:

2. Neuron - Why the heck would a Dev activate a power that greys out every power you have even with the lag. This is not acceptable for gameplay.

3. GMs that you cannot damage - I mean how many heroes does it take to take out a GM? Answer: More than you can possibly imagine. We had well over 100 people with pets, etc that did not do any damage to GM in AP.

4. Neuron (Again) - Not enough that he nullified all powers for everyone around any copy of him, he had enough copies to outnumber the people fighting him.

Devs, though the concept was fun, you need to think these things through.

Well see, by graying out your powers they were just cutting out the middleman. I mean, you said they weren't even triggering, right? Better to just cut them off completely and save you the worry.

My only issue was that during the event on my main server, the zones involved seemed to increase as a response to the lag caused by the hordes of players. This was a good idea, really - if you can divide the players among enough zones the lag lessens and it becomes more workable.

Unfortunately there seemed to be just as much spawned in zones with fewer players as in AP/PI where I gave up because the server-side lag made it too annoying. And I get it that should the Preatorians invade, there's no reason for them to send a "reasonable" amount of forces... but it just crossed the line from "difficult but fun" to "futile, why bother". As league wipes became increasingly frequent, with less and less progress being made on existing forces as more spawned.

Although, one good thing did come from the invasion... a somewhat vague and unhelpful answer from Mother Mayhem on how she doesn't impale herself on her belt buckle; "Mind over matter" ... I'm assuming this is also how she doesn't suffer from chronic back pain from her huge... tracts of land.

On Champion, it was pretty rough. Someone suggested lowering my graphics to the minimum, and the lag was still terrible. As someone else pointed out: "Now instead of just lag, I have UGLY lag"

I went to Steel, where the lag was more bearable... but quit after about fifteen minutes.

Thank you, Champion.

It was insane on Infinity. And while we are on the subject. What was really the point? I get the whole "we wanted to test the servers" bit, but if that is the case, where do I put in my vote for "failed"? Sure, it was neat playing against actual people bad guys instead of AI, but other than some humorous moments (which there is TONS of on Infinity I.Trials) where the baddies actually interacted with the players, it was just a cluster %$#@. I just didn't get it. Oh well.

I just want to thank the devs who left the Hive on Guardian, instead of staying and making a total mess of a Hamidon Raid.

They enter and chatted a bit, and we responded with how uncool it was for them to interfere with a hami raid and they obliged and left. We then completed it successfully.

Again, thanks for being considerate of those attempting this trial on Guardian.

Atlas on Liberty was awful... You could hardly move for the lag.

I gave up trying after about five minutes and went to try it out on the red side in Saint Martial and *that* was much, much better. Granted, there were less than 30 of us in that zone taking part, which lead to its own complications, but at least we could use our powers.

I'm not sure how the people who stayed in Atlas put up with it. o_0

I play on Virtue, and I was on Virtue for the invasion night ... until the lag monster found the Assertion Failure way to prevent me from participating, at which point I gave up in disgust.

I started out on my MA/SR scrapper main, Redlynne, and "mucked around" in Steel Canyon a block away from Positron for a while (maybe 15 minutes or so). But as the event wore on, it became less and less "oooh shiney!" and more and more "well this is lame" for me. The sheer quantity of AoE and Mez that the Praetorians were tossing around pretty much made it fairly pointless for anyone who wasn't Melee Oriented once there were sufficient spawns beating down everything in sight. *I* was doing "okay" ... but that's because I have NO GET HITSU! slotted up to the max and could "hang out" in the mosh pit and not get hammered in no time. So for me, in less time than it takes to complete a Rikti Invasion round, I was pretty much BORED with the Praetorian Invasion. And the server lag was ruinous since I could syncronize any of my attacks with what I was seeing on my screen (WTB FPS > 1).

So I switched out to my Huntsman, Leggs, on redside and took off to Cap Au Diable. Cap Au Diable was being handled a little bit better since there were fewer people in zone, and Beastyle was the Red Name handling the spawns in Cap. Once the action "moved" over to the factory area on top of Mt Diablo, things went downhill. The lag got to be so excessive that upon logging in, I would Mapserver and get either kicked from the server, or I would try to move (or even just turn in place!) and get an Assertion Error that would crash my client. A couple of times, my CoH Client (Mac) crashed so hard that I had to cold boot to recover. After the *SIXTH* time in a row of crashing out on trying to zone back into Cap Au Diable, I threw in the towel and didn't launch CoH again until the day after the event on Virtue.



Personally ... I'm really disappointed in the Praetorian Invasion. It follows the same (lame?) scripting to a substantial extent that we see in the Rikti and Zombie events. The basic, underlying problem is that the event(s) are scripted in such a way as to "favor" players clustering up into dogpiles that stay stationary. That's why every zone has a designated "Rally Point" for dealing with these events.

Instead, what ought to be happening, is something where you get a sort of "hole in the middle" scheduling which causes the mobs to spawn where the players are NOT but which is still "nearby" to where the players are. The spawn patterns for these sorts of events need to be scripted in such a way as to promote/cause players to DISPERSE rather than to CLUSTER so as to encourage a sort of "spreading battle line" that spreads outwards through the zone, rather than a sort of scripting which rewards/encourages players to camp spawn points and just never move until the event is over. Events like this ought to be about PURSUIT of the incoming hostiles ... not about Come And Get Me!

Be even better if the Event Mobs spawned hostile to all the "native" zone mobs, so that rather than having the zone mobs just stop spawning when the Event starts, the invading hostiles battle with the native mobs and the PCs in a free-for-all.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...