Gibnibs, Chirpies and other similar mobs kill themselves

Darkaruki

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Formerly "Darkaruki Dorkaruki Kakiro"
These mobs and other mobs using the same new AI as them will run into water while running away from you and die from drowning. I should hope this is not intended behavior because it feels dumb, cheap and unfair.

The fact that these mobs run away insanely fast at all feels silly enough, but having them literally kill themselves seemingly on purpose just makes players feel like the developer is trying to find ways to steal their PED.
 
These mobs and other mobs using the same new AI as them will run into water while running away from you and die from drowning. I should hope this is not intended behavior because it feels dumb, cheap and unfair.

Small birds on calypso (chirpy, gibnib, turp, fuga) have historically taken off if aggroed, Though they have (I Think) have stopped running after some 200m.

So it's not a bug, its their original behaviour that has come back.

There is one maturity of one of the birds that doesn't run away though; it's the one that leaves White dots on the radar.

The only peoople who Think this is "cheap" is probably only the new generation of sweaters that have been accustomed to that they can sweat them easily :laugh:
 
Agree with Aia, it's a fix, not a bug. Now those 20 bonus tokens for a bunch of chirpies make more sense.
 
Let's take the tin foil hats off and stop thinking mindark are trying to cheat to steal your PECs not PEDs. They get enough without going black hat.

Don't kill them near water now that you know their behavior.
 
I'm okay with having them run away like crazy being a game mechanic, they're cute harmless birds, their only method of defending themselves is running away, rather than becoming aggressive like other mobs, but I don't think it makes sense for them to kill themselves by running into water and drowning, that's just silly.

They should try to have them turn around or do at least something different than just killing themselves if they run into the water.


For fun, here's another water+mob related bug! There is a high maturity Traeskeron spawn right next to the Fort Victoria TP in the mountains, mixed in with some annoying bugs (haha) called "The Spawning Pools", I believe. The Spawning Pools has some tiny little water puddles that are very hard to notice on the floor that are barely deep enough to get your feet wet. Traeskerons breathe out of their toes or something, because they will drown after like one second of walking into one of these puddles, if you try shooting them there they will drown in a tiny puddle while on their way to you, and if you spend a bit of time observing them there they frequently spawn and then die or walk into a puddle and die randomly as part of their idle movements.

This bug feels similarly scammy and is even more illogical, as there are the only mobs I've ever seen drown in such shallow water and this spawning area is fundamentally flawed because of this.
 
For fun, here's another water+mob related bug! There is a high maturity Traeskeron spawn right next to the Fort Victoria TP in the mountains, mixed in with some annoying bugs (haha) called "The Spawning Pools", I believe. The Spawning Pools has some tiny little water puddles that are very hard to notice on the floor that are barely deep enough to get your feet wet. Traeskerons breathe out of their toes or something, because they will drown after like one second of walking into one of these puddles, if you try shooting them there they will drown in a tiny puddle while on their way to you, and if you spend a bit of time observing them there they frequently spawn and then die or walk into a puddle and die randomly as part of their idle movements.

This bug feels similarly scammy and is even more illogical, as there are the only mobs I've ever seen drown in such shallow water and this spawning area is fundamentally flawed because of this.

Ive spent countless hours killing (mostly low maturity first wave) spawns of traesk at this wave event, and I have only seen this happen once or twice.
 
The only peoople who Think this is "cheap" is probably only the new generation of sweaters that have been accustomed to that they can sweat them easily :laugh:
While I'm not pre-gold, it just struck me my avatar is five years old, and I too still think this "AI" behavio(u?)r is really bad.

I remember when I joined, thinking "surely this drain-bamaged 'AI' must be some placeholder added for the migration to CE2", only to be informed "Naah, this is it".

I can understand if newcomers find this laughable, even absurd. Similar "AI" could be found in titles like "Escape MCP" for the C64. Back in the early 80's.

If you look around outside (IRL), the probability you (by yourself) could ever get an animal to run into a lake and drown itself (provided there's a land-based escape route) just to get away from you is probably rather small. Yet in PE/EU it's seemingly the norm.

Without (intentionally) bashing MA, I can honestly say I have not seen worse "AI" in any commercial title 2009 and onwards. I'm even at loss how to find superlatives to express how bad MA's mob "AI" is - and that could be a problem. A very real problem.

If newcomers find the AI "laughably bad", I fear the chances of them staying and starting to pay money to MA (and indirectly, us) may diminish. IFF that is correct, that "AI" is hurting revenue.

That, I believe, is the only way to make MA care - tell them "This may hurt the bottom line".

As for the idea of sweating Chirpy - good luck! :)
 
Ive spent countless hours killing (mostly low maturity first wave) spawns of traesk at this wave event, and I have only seen this happen once or twice.

You're thinking of a different spawn, although I might have said the wrong name for the spawn, the one you are thinking of have little to no issues for some reason, it's pretty nice in fact, a model for what the other one should work like, considering the fact that even though it has some puddles the Traeskerons don't drown in the same fashion.
 
The spawn I was referring for to for high maturity Traeskerons is located around 54900, 59800.
 
There's no cost benefit in improving AI. Infact, the hardest grinders (i.e. highest ped throughput) moan when mobs don't follow straight lines.

There was an attempt years ago to improve AI (example given was berycled hunting in packs) but it proved too difficult to implement versus the relative reward of having it.
 
This really isn't anything new.. the birds only stood still while being attacked for the past year or so.. before that they always ran off in a random direction, which was to be expected really. Other than the past short while they stood there and took whatever damage was given, since at least early 09 they they ran away. You could actually use a fist weapon and jump on top of them and surf them for a bit as they ran off. And they would run into the water if thats where they were headed for ages.
 
If you look around outside (IRL), the probability you (by yourself) could ever get an animal to run into a lake and drown itself (provided there's a land-based escape route) just to get away from you is probably rather small. Yet in PE/EU it's seemingly the norm.

The original behavior was (as I saw it) to run from you and hide outside radar range. Now when everyone say they drown themselves, I don't know if they run indefinitely (until hitting the ocean), or if it's just coincidental (most spawn locations is near the sea/lake and accidently they run that way, not avoiding the water).

Actually, I Think IRL, most animals (except predators) try to run and hide if approached or attacked.

http://www.entropiawiki.com/Info.aspx?chart=Mob&id=33:

Creature: Fugabarba
This animal is a very swift runner. It has six eyes, which help to keep it alert to its surroundings, thereby avoiding stalking predators. If it feels threatened it will run away at great speed.

Name Meaning
Fugabarba - This one is a funny one. It's derived from 2 Latin words.
"fugere" is Latin for "to flee", or "run away", and "barba" is "beard". lol , so we have a mob with a big beard that runs away a lot. That kinda fits to a Fugabarba.

Historically, people have never sweated birds seriously. You've used to be able to get one or two pulls, if lucky. Long time ago a reason to sweat them was to make them attack you :laugh:

As for hunting them, they used to run in straight lines so it wasn't impossibel to hit them (with auto-aim as they're small on distance...). You just need(ed) a big enough weapon to kill them in Three hits or so Before they got out of range.
 
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This thread, and bug report, is not regarding the A.I for the birds in any aspect aside from the fact that if they are running away from you into water they will literally just run straight into water and drown themselves. They should not be running straight into water and killing themselves. They can run away and be annoying all they want, but they should be programmed to not drown themselves.

Please stay on topic and stop addressing the A.I change, I am not speaking about the A.I change in this topic.
 
Hunt birds at Medusa Head TP... the walls cause them to become 'trapped.' Then you can just kill them after a while It is still hard to do sometimes since they run along the wall back and forth like a yoyo sometimes if you don't use your avatar as a roadblock to stop that behavior...

If that is that an exploit or not is debatable, but you are right on low end hunting it feels like a Mindark draining you of peds if you can't loot the birds, especially if your focus is on melee weapons. However, that challenge does make the hunt a little fun. Too bad better AI can't be put in to higher health mobs. I guess Mindark's changes in regeneration rate over time is 'their answer' to that.

a little side note - if low end hunting is your thing and you actually want to hunt little mobs like this, get the hell off of Calypso and go explore the mean streets of Rocktropia where the trolls and Rocktropians don't run away from you, and some have health lower than puny mobs... or alternatively go to Arkadia's Quarry and hunt carabok until the end of time (at least there's a mission chain for that one)
 
If that is that an exploit or not is debatable, but you are right on low end hunting it feels like a Mindark draining you of peds if you can't loot the birds, especially if your focus is on melee weapons. However, that challenge does make the hunt a little fun.

They were doable with melee - but generally you had aobut two swings on you to kill them Before them taking off. And though them taking off in a way could be annoying it's also what you said that did them challenging. In other Words, to hunt them, you had to use quite a bit of "overkill".

Hunting birds was not for everyone, you must be a bit crazy to hunt them. Fugas and turps were hunted for their skin (that had some markup).

Main nerf on Chirpies I guess is when they stopped dropping CB5(L) :lauch: (weird noone complained about *that*).

They should not be running straight into water and killing themselves. They can run away and be annoying all they want, but they should be programmed to not drown themselves.

If they do run straight for water then it's nasty, but I don't Think they do that. I Think they just don't *avoid* water.

In a way I miss Another thing since long time ago: Rippersnabbers scurrying around on the land. Actually there was a land area where they *spawned* on land. On land rippersnappers behaved pretty much like birds, well or moved randomly, (until they hit water).

I Think the "bad" thing MA did, was more or less not advertising the change of the AI, as there are lots of new players who didn't experience how they worked in the past.
 
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For fun, here's another water+mob related bug! There is a high maturity Traeskeron spawn right next to the Fort Victoria TP in the mountains, mixed in with some annoying bugs (haha) called "The Spawning Pools", I believe. The Spawning Pools has some tiny little water puddles that are very hard to notice on the floor that are barely deep enough to get your feet wet. Traeskerons breathe out of their toes or something, because they will drown after like one second of walking into one of these puddles, if you try shooting them there they will drown in a tiny puddle while on their way to you, and if you spend a bit of time observing them there they frequently spawn and then die or walk into a puddle and die randomly as part of their idle movements.

indeed that place is annoying as hell, there was one mission that required to shoot them at that spot, and they died alot there while comming to you, you had to be very carefully to pick the right one.
indeed very silly they drown in that puddle of water, please MA get that little puddle water out there.
 
indeed that place is annoying as hell, there was one mission that required to shoot them at that spot, and they died alot there while comming to you, you had to be very carefully to pick the right one.
indeed very silly they drown in that puddle of water, please MA get that little puddle water out there.

Glad another player here can back me up on this.
I believe I encountered this issue while working on the same mission as you, I recall I was working on a mission and decided to look it up on google and found a link to a wikia with a page documenting the mission and it specifically mentioned that you had to be extremely careful as a large amount of the mobs in this particular spawn would die for seemingly no reason while walking through puddles or spawning on puddles.

Regarding the birds, I'm okay with their A.I being the way it is, it's annoying, but that's just part of the game design, sometimes you just need some annoying little birds to spice things up, I just believe they should not drown themselves, and perhaps to make it fair they could also be changed to not run endlessly into walls, as both of those things are silly, although I personally could much more easily imagine a scared bird running away and getting trapped against a wall than I could imagine a scared bird running into the water at full speed magically and continuing to run until it drowns. :laugh:
 
maybe add the Hiryuu ai to some of the birds? Make em fly away.
 
Hunt birds at Medusa Head TP...
Sorry for the late response, but a few months-or-so ago I got a "Daily Hunter" mission to kill 50 Chirpy. That would be a breeze you think, right? I mean, in the VU9/10 time frame you'd just zip to Corinth and be done with it, so it must be quick and easy now too, right?

Wrong. It took me literally days (IIRC 3-5) to find enough Chirpy to kill. At Medusa, there were at most 5 spawned at a time (often only 1-2), and spawn rate seemed to be once in a blue moon.

MA, or rather Kim (head of AR AB or whatever it's called this month) really messed this up; a 50 Chirpy "Hunter lvl 1" mission should be suitable and accessible for newcomers. By accessible I mean both close to a newcomer TP, AND having a spawn good enough to fulfill the required amount of Chirpy without having to stay logged on for 24 hours straight just to effing find 50 Chirpy.

The "spawn" (which isn't really a spawn at all, but more a random anomaly) at Medusa Head matches neither of those requirements.
 
hunt chirpies on the small island directly east of fort victoria.

I dont have the mental fortitude to do the 50 chirpy (etc) daily, but I'll take the 10 bird bonuses!
 
I love it when people that have never done any scripting, think game behavior is dumb. its just a simple toggle on the mob that makes it run in a random direction away from player.

in order to make it avoid obstacles and water. you would first have to design a system that would support this. like from the ground up.

and it would have to make a bunch of calculations on the fly, so between having to flag each rock tree and water hole as an obstacle, and then check for each as the mob move (causing a lot of server client lag). they just a pick a random direction and assume you wont be dumb enough to hunt it next to the water.

as a tip, if you think it might run in a bad direction, sweat it first. after a few attempts with it running it might even stop running (they used to behave this way)
 
There is one maturity of one of the birds that doesn't run away though; it's the one that leaves White dots on the radar.

Hell yes, when was it seen last time ?
 
as a tip, if you think it might run in a bad direction, sweat it first. after a few attempts with it running it might even stop running (they used to behave this way)

They stop as soon as they are out of radar range :)
I like hunting birds!
Bad if you use auto aim, for birds you should be a real hunter with the skills to shoot while running :)
 
They stop as soon as they are out of radar range :)
I like hunting birds!
Bad if you use auto aim, for birds you should be a real hunter with the skills to shoot while running :)

or just get a bigger gun :) chirps should be 1 shot kills anyway lol
 
Glad another player here can back me up on this.
I believe I encountered this issue while working on the same mission as you

I'm still working on the same mission, or one of the chain anyway, and I know exactly what you are talking about. Personally I found it quite funny actually, didn't really bother me.
What did bother me in that area though - sorry for off-topic - is those many, almost impossible to hit, bugs that attack you. Their number rivals that of the Traesks in the area, often I find I have to switch to 3rd person pov and rotate the camera to find them.

On-topic again:
As for AI, I say the more the merrier, it's boring if all the mobs behave exactly the same. And the little birdies, I remember them behaving like that, for me that is how they "should" behave.
 
Hell yes, when was it seen last time ?

The Last time I saw one was the last WOF - it was a requested mob in the competition by Hurrikane himself. I was in a team that hunted one. I was around level 30 at the time - the other 3 members were level 50 - 60. We had a healer with a mod fap. It was killed (eventually) after all of us had revived a number of times.

Responding to the OP, My avatar is about 2 and half years old so I don't remember theses mobs originally behaving like this but I quite like it and as previously posted it the chirpy daily bonus now makes more sense. If you wanna kill these just follow the mantra in my signature. For these sneaky little buggers get a big fat gun shoot them once and make sure you don't miss. My preference is the Marber Brava Plasma Annihilator.

I have noticed that spawn locations of these small birds have now changed as well, they seem far more scattered and appear usually individually, there used to be a spawn of gibnib on the south part of the island south of port atlantis where the free beacon mission is, but when i picked up gibnib as a daily the other day, I went there and the spawn was gone, maybe they migrated with the other migration mobs.

Incidentally if you were a small defenseless bird and you were being attacked by a nasty human in a full set of armour toting a weapon , wouldn't you run a mile and possibly run into the water out of total fear, there actions are probably instinctive rather than carefully thought out.
 
I have to agree with the OP I got a Daily 1 hunter gibnib and Daily 2 hunter chirpy but not on same day. I just kept the daily 1 for a bit. Anyway the directions mindark gave for each I went to half the spots and couldn't find any. I found gibnibs south of port atlantis I think people call Jennifer's island. It was very frusterating because the gibnibs either ran up the hill and was really tough to shoot or drowned themselves. Before they just stood there. I had to waste a lot more ammo this time overkilling or quickly killing before drowning. I wanted to use TT weapons but had to use bigger gun. I then went to fort victoria little island to kill chirpies and they just sprinted to the water. None drowned but that could've been because I killed them a second before they hit the water. All in all it was not fun and very frusterating.
 
I have to agree with the OP I got a Daily 1 hunter gibnib and Daily 2 hunter chirpy but not on same day. I just kept the daily 1 for a bit. Anyway the directions mindark gave for each I went to half the spots and couldn't find any. I found gibnibs south of port atlantis I think people call Jennifer's island. It was very frusterating because the gibnibs either ran up the hill and was really tough to shoot or drowned themselves. Before they just stood there. I had to waste a lot more ammo this time overkilling or quickly killing before drowning. I wanted to use TT weapons but had to use bigger gun. I then went to fort victoria little island to kill chirpies and they just sprinted to the water. None drowned but that could've been because I killed them a second before they hit the water. All in all it was not fun and very frusterating.

personally I will ONLY do the bonus mission for all three of these mobs. killing 50 for 1 token just plain isn't worth it.
 
Late to the party.

For the last 2 years maybe, gibnib and chirpy were running away only when sweated - was a response probably to the sweating bots as they are the only mobs not doing damage.

Since the introduction of daily missions, I hunted them quite a few times due to the missions and once hit, they stood still.

Now after a break I was given a bonus mission (was thinking those were removed as I did not got one in ages) and tried to hunt them again - they run away after the 1st shot, at Medusa TP, either towards water or towards the turret.

To argue that this particular mob deserve this behaviour... why exactly? is not like whoever is grinding them for a mission or fun is taking fabulous loot anyway, but to lose mobs this way is plain dumb. Also "use a bigger gun" is moot, a gun with 15 max damage will most likely not produce 10 damage most of the time. What now, carry a cannot to hunt a dumb little mob?

Next time when a larger mob will run away from you quite fast so you can barely put at most another shot (if) before it will run to a turret or towards the horizon, ask when it all started.
 
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