2.5.5 Major Bug - NPCs level 1, one-shotted, instance failed

I bugged this, but wanted to share it here also.

In Volume 2 Book 5 Chapter 5, the three instances seem to be majorly bugged since the patch. We had a kin run planned for today and only managed to barely do the Way of Smiths one by the skin of our teeth, since most of the NPCs were below level 20. If eight of them die, we fail. Since some of them had less than 100 morale, they were easily killed. Even Stothkell, who we were to keep alive, was only level 15 with around 600 morale. We tried 21st and Deep-way also and the same problem applies, with NPCs ranging in levels from 1 to 80ish, but mostly below 20.

Please fix this bug, as it makes the content unplayable.

-Bel

Is there a LoTRO Store button when you click on one of those NPCs? Maybe you now have to purchase levels for them too?

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Originally Posted by DunasConnor

Is there a LoTRO Store button when you click on one of those NPCs? Maybe you now have to purchase levels for them too?

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Well played. + rep.

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Originally Posted by DunasConnor

Is there a LoTRO Store button when you click on one of those NPCs? Maybe you now have to purchase levels for them too?

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I wouldn't be surprised if this were truth.

rep+

Hmmm...sounds like they're trying to turn it into a Skirmish and the wrong version got added to the release build.

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Originally Posted by Elderban

Hmmm...sounds like they're trying to turn it into a Skirmish and the wrong version got added to the release build.

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God I hope this is true.

Same thing here, our group ran it 5 times and then found out. Brogur and guards went from lvl 4 to 74. The barracades went from 2K to 30K HP.

How do they break more than they fix?

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Originally Posted by Kostrizer

Same thing here, our group ran it 5 times and then found out. Brogur and guards went from lvl 4 to 74. The barracades went from 2K to 30K HP.

How do they break more than they fix?

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It is easy to do when you are giving something a do over. Include the wrong modules into the production load.

People always tell me fix it in software. It is far easier to make it worse than to make it better.

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Originally Posted by Yula_the_Mighty

It is easy to do when you are giving something a do over. Include the wrong modules into the production load.

People always tell me fix it in software. It is far easier to make it worse than to make it better.

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^^^ Yula hit the proverbial nail on the head.

This is a known issue with the most recent November patch. The team is aware of it, and they are working on fixing it. As Kostrizer mentioned, the levels are varying wildly, and this problem is undergoing work.

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Originally Posted by Belnavar

NPCs ranging in levels from 1 to 80ish

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Hm... does this imply the game has an early version of mechanics to handle NPCs/mobs in the 70-80 level range?

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Originally Posted by BINKLEY1

Hm... does this imply the game has an early version of mechanics to handle NPCs/mobs in the 70-80 level range?

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Well, you can run skirmishes at level 70, so it's a pretty safe assumption that they do.

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Originally Posted by Yula_the_Mighty

It is easy to do when you are giving something a do over. Include the wrong modules into the production load.

People always tell me fix it in software. It is far easier to make it worse than to make it better.

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Aww, but all it takes is 5 lines of code - heck I'm in college (or sometimes even highschool) and I could do it in five minutes! I know this through my months of working with software projects that might reach a few thousand lines, is chock full of bugs, is edited only by me, and once I get my grade will never be touched again! Epic fail Turbine, if you had me write the code then all would have been happy - indeed you will never find someone more confident of their ability to write perfect code in minutes than me at this very moment, better hire me while it lasts and I face the Real World.

Sadly I've been been told that by some people who should know better too. Our archery club needs a new door entry system and an ex-member who was supposedly some type of programmer (applied mathematics and was a supervisor) kept telling me it ought to take around a week - he could do it in just a few hundred lines of code.

Uh huh, you are going to maintain data integrity, catch all boundary conditions, set timeouts, set state changes that occur outside normal operations, and implement the user interface all in a few hundred lines of code? Your going to do that and have it tested in less than a few weeks? I later saw some code he had written - *no* error checking (apparently the C library did it all). It worked flawlessly if you counted the couple of times it crashed whilst demoing it (but he would have his engineers sort that out later).

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Originally Posted by strcpy

Aww, but all it takes is 5 lines of code

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This sort of game isn't really built as a single program. It's a huge collection of entries in databases, some entries are objects, some are fragments of scripts, and so forth, and they're all giving cryptic names or numbers to refer to them. There is no original source code to go back to, no easy way to rebuild it all from scratch. So you can't just find the offending line of code, change it, and then type "make".

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Originally Posted by Elderban

Hmmm...sounds like they're trying to turn it into a Skirmish and the wrong version got added to the release build.

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Not terribly far off the mark. As you already know we plan on updating our older instances to the new scaling instance tech. Clearly a little bit of the tech seeped into the current build and is randomly scaling the NPCs.

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Originally Posted by Lohi

This sort of game isn't really built as a single program. It's a huge collection of entries in databases, some entries are objects, some are fragments of scripts, and so forth, and they're all giving cryptic names or numbers to refer to them. There is no original source code to go back to, no easy way to rebuild it all from scratch. So you can't just find the offending line of code, change it, and then type "make".

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That whole post was tongue-in-cheek :)

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Originally Posted by Sapience

Not terribly far off the mark. As you already know we plan on updating our older instances to the new scaling instance tech. Clearly a little bit of the tech seeped into the current build and is randomly scaling the NPCs.

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Which leads me to believe the devs are currently in the process of making all of Volume 2 Soloable, with these instances made into skirmishes, just as in vol2 bk9 certain chapters were skirmishes.

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Originally Posted by strcpy

Aww, but all it takes is 5 lines of code - heck I'm in college (or sometimes even highschool) and I could do it in five minutes!

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Y'know, when I interview folks for programming jobs at my company, I look for people who think like this. So we can AVOID hiring them.

I'm so glad I had finished this quest the day of the patch.

Any word as to when the patch will be out? I have a few characters that will need to do 2.5.5 soon.

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Originally Posted by Elderban

Any word as to when the patch will be out? I have a few characters that will need to do 2.5.5 soon.

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If I had to guess, it'll be January-ish with the next content patch. If anything is done before that, it will be to shut down those instances until the next content patch.

But again, that's just a guess on my part.

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Originally Posted by BellusDuFenna

If I had to guess, it'll be January-ish with the next content patch. If anything is done before that, it will be to shut down those instances until the next content patch.

But again, that's just a guess on my part.

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There's a hotfix incoming, probably next week, but it's not clear what it covers. I believe the RK bug will be fixed then, but not sure about this. However, there's still room for a small patch inbetween now and the next Update, which is usually the case after every major Update.

-Bel

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Originally Posted by Shukar

Y'know, when I interview folks for programming jobs at my company, I look for people who think like this. So we can AVOID hiring them.

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You know, I am not a programmer. I have trouble with HTML script usually, and only really know how to do italics, sub text, bold, and hyper links.

And I find it amusing how many unemployed expert computer programmers there are who play MMOs. :) No, they go beyond expert. They can flawlessly write extremely complex code, then integrate it into an already established piece of code without any bugs. And then rewrite the already existing code to eliminate all the bugs and unexplainable weird interactions. And they can do it all in five minutes. I mean seriously, why don't these people have jobs in the software industry yet? :)

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Originally Posted by Red_Knight1979

You know, I am not a programmer. I have trouble with HTML script usually, and only really know how to do italics, sub text, bold, and hyper links.

And I find it amusing how many unemployed expert computer programmers there are who play MMOs. :) No, they go beyond expert. They can flawlessly write extremely complex code, then integrate it into an already established piece of code without any bugs. And then rewrite the already existing code to eliminate all the bugs and unexplainable weird interactions. And they can do it all in five minutes. I mean seriously, why don't these people have jobs in the software industry yet? :)

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It's not that we're unemployed, we just don't work in the software industry any more. I mean, once you achieve this God-mode level of expertise, the challenge just goes right out of programming and you move on to something really fun like marketing.

/sarcasm {* for those sub-God-mode programmer types who may have missed a marker in the live text *}

Oh, I'm sure ^^

In one MMO I've played for a long time, there's one power that has had a very specific bug. The power worked properly 100% of the time in an indoor quest map, 0% of the time on an outdoor quest map, and 50% of the time in an outdoor public area. The dev in charge of the 'powers' stuff worked for five years to fix this bug. He could duplicate it, but nothing he tried could fix it. And he had no idea why it wasn't working. At one point he commented that that power gave him so much trouble, he wished he'd never created it. He finally licked the problem, but doing so introduced several other bugs. I don't think he ever really figured out what exactly was causing the problem either. The only variable shouldn't have mattered.