Pets are STILL broken? WTF?

It's a fix in that it resolves the problem without requiring the character die. Unresponsive pets are useless, yes, but /releasepets is a 90% reliable method of regaining control of your minions...after resummoning and upgrading them.

Is it annoying? Yes, but it allows you to actually play the AT rather than come here to the boards and whine impotently about a problem the developers are aware of.

The reason it hasn't been fixed yet? It's hard to reproduce reliably since it happens at random! Bugs that are easy to reproduce can be fixed faster since the methods to force them to happen can be tested, bugs that strike at random are MUCH harder to fix because they are much harder to test.

Not the end of the world issue, but as someone has already mentioned all these little bugs ( unlisted features ) and quirks can be annoying. I would really like if they just explained what it would need to fix some of these issues, even if it required a whole overhaul and rethinking how masterminds work.

I would imagine in hindsight they are probably thinking we could have done this better knowing what we know now.

funniest part is they already have the fix for it; the OLD pet AI. The one that would make your pets just stand back and use ranged attacks. What they need to implement now is a toggle that allows you to choose between the 2 AI's for each pet. IT could go in the right click menu with everything else about your pet.

I agree that the bug is a pain in the butt and has been lingering a bit long now. However, the previous pet bug was far more annoying than this one, and while I did come up with a work around for that bug, it wasn't 100% reliable. For those who don't remember it, if you went through any sort of in-map transition in a mission (ex: Going up/down any elevator or entering the bank in mayhem mission), your pets may or may not actually come through with you. Usually only happened while soloing OR if the MM was the first to go through the transition. I think it was actually caused by a pet going through into a map that had not yet been exposed to the player, but that's simply by observation. Certainly made solo mayhems interesting on my MM though... fight to the bank to rack up extra time, get to the bank and trigger the longbow ambush, duck in the bank to get ready...here they come...wait..where are my pets...aw <bleep!>

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

My suggestion: A Forced Auto Summon command. For instance /summonpets. In which case the pets will appear right next to you no matter what, complete with upgrade if applicable.

Another suggestion for pets going or not going into melee, or staying or not staying at range, is a Forced Goto command. In which case the pets will goto THEN STAY at the exact very location of your choosing. They will not move from that location afterwards, may be by disabling the pets' movement or by giving them a 10000mag immo with that Forced Goto command.

I have been making the same suggestions from time to time when I see posts like this one.

Well, at least they don't get lost at elevators anymore....

My pets sometimes get stuck going from zone to zone but nowadays I just leave them there. When I rezone or enter a mish, they show up working fine. I find they never get stuck at normal missions, TFs, BAF or UG but always stuck at the start of a Lambda and Keyes Trials.

One thing I do notice is when I enter a mish, my pets zone in 3 times. They'll enter the mish, disappear, re-enter mish, disappear, enter again and then start working normally. I never had a problem with /releasepets when I used it in the past.

A different problem, but sort of a silly/annoying one.

Anyone tried using Seed Membranes in conjunction with pets? Ran my necromancer through First Ward to get the badge for killing different seedlings. Worked.. okay? but using the membrane for the group fly *really* screwed up their pathfinding. Unless I was directing them to attack a specific target, whenever they were 'idling' they all just flew off in different directions for no apparent reason >>

sounds like the usual pet AI antics in flight form to me

I'm usually a very optimistic person, but I learned not to hold out any hope for bug fixes in this game a long time ago. The Paragon dev team (and Cryptic before them) both have very strong historical tendencies to simply pave over existing bugs with cement and keep building on top of them. I still have to pay my SG group's upkeep by sending monthly bug petitions and I've been doing it for years.

The unsummon bug has been there since COV beta and the pet AI "fix" has been active since 2009. I honestly don't have a lot of confidence that either of them is even on the dev's to-do list.

It might get higher priority if every MM starts reporting the bug every time it happens. I still haven't gotten over how neat the robot upgrade animations are. That might be why I don't complain as much as I should.

I haven't noticed the demons bugging out so they must know what they need to do to fix this. As a programmer it strikes me as pretty silly that it's been around for years now.

A: it was the addition of demon summoning that broke all other mm sets. they changed the AI when demons were added.

B: Other than demons Bots are subject to the Run-In bug the least. They are also my favorite set in the game btw.

lets not forget that it's not just MMs pets that are affected by the melee bug. Other pets like Phantoms, which also do not have any melee attacks, also run into melee range

Actually I haven't tried it with bot's so I cant confirm for Set's that have multiple pets without melee attacks, but with Demons and Necromancy the Ember Demon and Lich both respond differently but end up the same. The Lich will stay at range for a much longer time, and in a normal mission setting might not have enough time to decide to move into melee. However If the Lich is given enough time without attacking (I.E His power recharges cycle to create a few second timeframe of inaction), he will move to a point 20' from the target. While he's there, he doesn't move. I've had the Zombies attacking for some 20 minutes. He never moved.

The Ember Demon seems to want to move in much sooner. I'm not sure if it's the PbAoE buff, but he takes position 20' from the target a great deal sooner. However he also doesn't move from that position.

Interestingly enough, it seems as if one of the Thug Leutenants tries to stay away, but ends up deciding to Brawl the target. Obviously forcing him into melee range. However, I have yet to see more than one pet stay away. The dark servant doesn't have any melee attacks, yet it charges in beautifully while the Lich remains content in the back.

From what I can recall with bots (I've not been playing my MM all that much because of this), every bot has a habit of randomly running into melee. The Assault Bot tends not to do it so much, the Prot Bots and Droids are more frequent. During long fights with, say for example, a GM, I'm constantly spamming "goto Defensive" or "follow defensive" as 1 or 2 droids will run off into melee after just firing 2 ranged attacks, and 1 of the 2 Prot Bots will run in every 5 or 6 attacks.

Given a short enough time without using any command macros, the entire squad would be in melee range