R.I.P. Old Traditions

[Atrax]

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[Atrax]

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[nutrageti]

I haven't been to those statues in years, completely forgot about them...We'll find another way for it.

 

[Atrax]

I looked through my stuff for some more old pics but I only have 1 or two and can't find the one I wanted.

There were pics deleted off of the old ark forum of me hiding blueprints around arkadia, and I used to put 1 bar in pets so I could leave them around Icarus or PA.

Since the Ark moon opened several people have been pushing along a gift chain over there, as well. Not two weeks ago someone I was chatting with found a daikiba skull, in a bush.

I know there has been some occasional pointless litter, but I suspect the reason for this is drop trades? Maybe it's lag but, it's not like you see a lot of texture carpets or castles built in the air any more.

I have a chair in my inventory that I'll be putting away as I won't be sitting on my porch or near the terminals anymore, either.

Anyways, gift chains, tributes, bonus loot, scavenger hunts, noobie surprise, all gone now. Probably others I'm not thinking of. Post them if you feel like it.

R.I.P.

 

[Spawn]

Oberon won't be pleased.

 

[Detritus]

I haven't played long, so don't know about the old traditions, but I always made a habit of leaving little surprises around Ark, just a PED or a noob weapon or something.

There was a fun hunting event on Monria once where they also hid small weapons and tools throughout one of the domes, and if you found one you got a bonus from DarkMoon. Everyone loved it, and most people who found something would also leave something else in exchange for the next person to find. It's sad that we can't do stuff like this any longer. I don't really understand this decision on MA's part.

 

[Sub-Zero]

It's sad that we can't do stuff like this any longer. I don't really understand this decision on MA's part.

To prevent bots from dropping earned farming cash so it can be picked up by main avatars would be my guess.

Imo they should still make it possible to drop items, if your avatar has reached a certain agility or overall total skills or like have graduated.

 

[safara]

No more "Find it Add to it" games

 

[Atrax]

Yeah drop trading almost certainly. Litter hasn't been a problem for a long time.

 

[juicy001]

Oberon won't be pleased.

he wont care ... hes now DM´s < insert your fitting word here xD >

 

[Nakor of Boreft]

Yeah drop trading almost certainly. Litter hasn't been a problem for a long time.

I've heard this term "drop trading" used more. What is it?
Why would you do it?

 

[GoNi]

Sadly never took any screenshots from dropped items.

If I would have taken a screeny from every fun drop, I could post an awesome number of pictures here.

Sad its no longer possible!

 

[Killahbee]

Listen to the community mindark! We want this back!

This was a fun way for us to interact with other players in the firm of events.
Also monrian events will never be the same without scavenger hunts.

 

[Billy Jean Ruby]

just sad! It seems there are new guys @ MA and they have no clue what is all about!


(@ OP: need to spread some rep...blah blah blah)

 

[Detritus]

To prevent bots from dropping earned farming cash so it can be picked up by main avatars would be my guess.

I didn't realize botting was an issue in this game... what on Earth are people farming for? Sweat? I mean any actual game activity would just be a constant loss. And why would you have the bots just drop the stuff rather than grab it via private trade - which is presumably what they will do now anyway so I fail to see what this is preventing other than players having fun with each other.

 

[mastermesh]

I didn't realize botting was an issue in this game... what on Earth are people farming for? Sweat? I mean any actual game activity would just be a constant loss. And why would you have the bots just drop the stuff rather than grab it via private trade - which is presumably what they will do now anyway so I fail to see what this is preventing other than players having fun with each other.

different auction bot, hunt bot, mining bot, and crafting bot on each planet dropping stuff to be picked up by main alt mule avatar later...

Honestly, I suspect though, botting is only one of the reasons this is done. My bigger suspicion is it's got to do with the invisible wall/floor bugs everyone's been complaining about. If there's fewer things for the engine to look for to render scattered all over the landscape, in theory, the engine will be able to quicker render what it's supposed to so walls won't take so long to show up, etc. Probably just coders removing a couple of lines that were causing lag in rendering things in cities, etc. If the code knows there's not junk laying around in the environment to try to find to render outside of an estate, it doesn't need to go looking for the items to add in to the render, so they can start doing more tweeks to optimize the code.

 

[BruuD]

I doubt that botting is the reason..
Why would bots not be able to initiate a private trade?

Dropping and picking up by other avatars is monitored by MA, just like trades are.
Maybe technically in a different manner, but you can be sure that MA is able to track exactly how items (and PEDs) exchange hands whether it's through drop-trade or private trade.

I do really wonder why they have removed it though..
Have good memories of "the old days" where people would make PEC-art and hide goodies in the field etc.

Listen to the community mindark! We want this back!

Please no! Yes, I think it was a bad decision removing it (although we don't know the reason), but noooo don't spend time on putting it back in! Spend time on actual important shit!!!

 

[Detritus]

Honestly, I suspect though, botting is only one of the reasons this is done. My bigger suspicion is it's got to do with the invisible wall/floor bugs everyone's been complaining about. If there's fewer things for the engine to look for to render scattered all over the landscape, in theory, the engine will be able to quicker render what it's supposed to so walls won't take so long to show up, etc. Probably just coders removing a couple of lines that were causing lag in rendering things in cities, etc. If the code knows there's not junk laying around in the environment to try to find to render outside of an estate, it doesn't need to go looking for the items to add in to the render, so they can start doing more tweeks to optimize the code.

Nah, when the culling is done, the objects are either part of the graph or not, it doesn't "go look for them". If having too many objects to cull was an issue then we wouldn't see the bug in empty shops, and we do. Preventing people from dropping items doesn't make the rendering more efficient (rendering is done by your client, btw).

The shops in EU are not separate zones, they are part of the world (not an interior zone that loads). Usually MMOs use Area of Interest to accomplish this - when the player moves it calculates all of the relevant objects to load and monitor events for based on a given radius or calculated area around the player. I'm guessing when you walk into a shop, MA is setting the AoI to the bounds of the shop, probably based on the wall colliders. There appears to be a major bug there in determining the AoI, which in turn causes the scene to vanish, but as you look around or move it's recalculating the AoI and sometimes gets it right. This is all just a guess though, I have no idea how they actually coded it.

The most perplexing thing is this bug has existed as far as I can recall since I started playing about 2 years ago, so presumably it existed before that? If I were a shop owner I would be furious and demand some sort of compensation.

 

[Atrax]

I've heard this term "drop trading" used more. What is it?
Why would you do it?

Drop Trading is simply putting items on the ground for another avatar to pick up. This obscures the logs obviously you shouldn't be able to hide the history of an item, it just makes things harder to track.

Players have a history of putting things on the ground for a lot of reasons, many listed here. Family members with shared computers can log in and out at the same spot and use this techniques to trade gear or other items. Sometimes it's just fastest to put a gift or some supplies at another avatar's feet, rather than do a trade dialog for a one way handoff.

It's also easy to log into a quiet outpost,cycle through three or four alternate avatars dropping stuff on the ground, and then log in on your main character, and pick it up. Peds, items, whatever. This way you don't need any help to get PED from your noob female begging avatar or your space pirate avatar to the avatar you hang out and make friends with.

There may be a technical issue for this but it isn't floors I'd bet money. Either too much activity is clouding up logs they need to monitor or someone has been doing something they don't like is my guess.

Sad to see this go. Those pictures at the top are less than a week old. I found the melchi there on the memorial, and added a ring of belkar around it. When I eventually made it back up north, I found the PEC at Half Moon Bay the same day. I'm glad I decided to snap a couple pics, though. Good timing.

 

[Atrax]

...The most perplexing thing is this bug has existed as far as I can recall since I started playing about 2 years ago, so presumably it existed before that? If I were a shop owner I would be furious and demand some sort of compensation....

Shops and apartments, 5 + years.

Compensation? I have other players telling me I should shut up and stop talking about it like anybody cares, or telling me I "shouldn't talk about the game" because I don't throw money at mobs for 8 hours/day.

It's way past compensation. It's past begging for a fix. It's past thinking that a planet partner might take some obvious steps to try and mitigate the issue (like putting ground under the damn floor). It's past the point that other players even care to hear about it any more.

Furious lol.

 

[Billy Jean Ruby]

removed - irrelevant

 

[San]

I had made a suggestion a while ago to make items dropped at the old Memorial disappear after a minute or two and donate the TT value thus collected to charity; and inform about this by system chat message (or on-screen in the format used at wave spawns) upon entering the special area. This would provide for a fine custom to observe a minute of remembrance of those we lost while knowing the donation doesn't just feed opportunists. It would be a good time to put this in now.

 

[Zaith]

I had made a suggestion a while ago to make items dropped at the old Memorial disappear after a minute or two and donate the TT value thus collected to charity; and inform about this by system chat message (or on-screen in the format used at wave spawns) upon entering the special area. This would provide for a fine custom to observe a minute of remembrance of those we lost while knowing the donation doesn't just feed opportunists. It would be a good time to put this in now.

Another creative idea, but I would personally not want any kind of AI or algorithm to be involved in deciding what to do with my donation, or gift to newbs, or homage, etc. An algorithm/AI being involved in any way cheapens the entire thing. A guilty pleasure of dropping items is that you know that someone else will eventually see it. That was the main reason (at least, in my opinion) why it was fun. (Not the amount of TT value donated)

 

[Zaith]

The shops in EU are not separate zones, they are part of the world (not an interior zone that loads). Usually MMOs use Area of Interest to accomplish this - when the player moves it calculates all of the relevant objects to load and monitor events for based on a given radius or calculated area around the player. I'm guessing when you walk into a shop, MA is setting the AoI to the bounds of the shop, probably based on the wall colliders. There appears to be a major bug there in determining the AoI, which in turn causes the scene to vanish, but as you look around or move it's recalculating the AoI and sometimes gets it right. This is all just a guess though, I have no idea how they actually coded it.

In response to the "disappearing wall/floor" bug. Does this bug refer to the fact that you can run into a mall shop really fast and sometimes the shop interior takes a couple seconds to appear? If not, and if I have misinterpreted that, then disregard the rest of this post --

--

I've worked with UE4 on a Navy simulation for carrier ships (it was basically a game) and yes, that is essentially how it worked. (I know that EU is CryEngine, but I'm 99% sure that, at least this aspect, is programmed exactly the same.) The world was divided into zones such that wherever you currently are, you are in "some particular zone". There is a list of linked zones for every zone... So if you're inside ZoneA, the engine knows that it needs to not only display ZoneA, but also B,C,H, and M. When you're in ZoneB, it needs to also load A,C,M,X and Y, etc. Typically those "child" zone lists are manually defined, because just rendering the immediately adjacent zones is not always satisfactory.

So for example in the Port Atlantis Mall, if you're in the main corridor on floor 1, then every single hallway leading to each shop on floor one is also loaded, BUT, the shop interior zones themselves are not loaded. Once you step into the entry hallway for any shop, then the shop's interior should load. And when you're fully inside the shop, the main floor 1 mall corridor UN-loads, and now it's just the shop interior you're in, and its entry hallway. To be clear, the main corridor, the entry hallway into each shop, and the shop interiors themselves are all separate zones. This is exactly how we did it, too. (Btw when I say "zone" I do not mean "instance". I just mean a grouping of meshes and items that can be loaded and unloaded as a single chunk.)

My guess as to why zones disappear sometimes is mostly due to server lag or client lag. You run quickly into a shop corridor and for whatever reason the game does not update fast enough and doesn't load the new required zone list fast enough, and you end up going through a wall or floor and getting stuck. If you manage to fall through the floor, now you're either in the "outside" zone (outside of the mall), or, the game just assumes you're still in the last zone that you were in just a moment ago... not sure which one EU does, I think the latter.

--

IN ANY CASE, the point of me describing this is I, too, am quite certain that this has nothing to do with the ability to drop items, at all. I have fallen through the floor in empty shops, too. It's just a case of the engine (or server) not being able to react quickly enough to your movements.

And once again if I've misinterpreted the "invisible floor/wall bug" to mean the wrong thing, I apologize.

As for the removal of dropped items, I'm incredibly upset about this and this might be the last straw for me.

 

[Atrax]

Another creative idea, but I would personally not want any kind of AI or algorithm to be involved in deciding what to do with my donation, or gift to newbs, or homage, etc. An algorithm/AI being involved in any way cheapens the entire thing. A guilty pleasure of dropping items is that you know that someone else will eventually see it. That was the main reason (at least, in my opinion) why it was fun. (Not the amount of TT value donated)

100% on the sentiment. Though no matter about how the PEC would get distributed.

These items send a message besides "have some PEC". The message is "someone else was here".

I would love to hear that the person who put that melchi came back days later and saw it surrounded by belkar stones lol. I never met Island Girl, I wasn't there for her - I've been traveling EU a lot more the last few weeks and in passing by memorial island I stopped to stew in some memories.

It's a remote location and no reason to go there or even pass by for most players anymore and I was warmed by the sign that someone else had come by since the last reset, to think about whatever it could possibly mean to them. I left a mark of my own both to acknowledge theirs and leave something more for the next person to see.

100% no matter if it sat there until the next cleanup, or got picked up by someone. If they needed 7 PEC more power to them.

This doesn't even touch on the motivations or the hundreds of hours of fun that people have had with scavenger hunts, gift chains, and other entertainment passing items around in this persistent-world sandbox MMO.

Seriously for many years I've carried a chair or a stool around much of the time. It's a funny little adrenaline rush sometimes to see if you can get in it before somebody flat steals it out from under you, and I like to sit around at a terminal or somewhere else occasionally. Not many beach parties any more

Even when you could litter anything on the ground there were times when I would dump whole batches of low level looted blueprints or other items near new player areas and scavengers would have them in minutes if actual new players didn't grab them. For every new crafter spared a couple of PED buying level I component BPs at auction it was fine for someone to TT a few PEC of loot I would have otherwise TTd myself.

Somebody else mentioned the screenshot lamps. I didn't realize that people were using these out "in the wild" but that's pretty awesome I think.

I'm unexpectedly saddened over this really. You don't realize how much such a simple thing adds until it's gone, I guess.

 

[San]

Another creative idea, but I would personally not want any kind of AI or algorithm to be involved in deciding what to do with my donation, or gift to newbs, or homage, etc. An algorithm/AI being involved in any way cheapens the entire thing. A guilty pleasure of dropping items is that you know that someone else will eventually see it. That was the main reason (at least, in my opinion) why it was fun. (Not the amount of TT value donated)

I didn't suggest any AI to be involved in it, only that within a special zone at the Memorial any dropped item would disappear after a short period of time which could be observed waiting there and seeing to that it doesn't get taken by scavengers. (In case of mistakes, the same rules should apply like for accidentally tt'ed items - just to cover all imaginable situations.) I used to like dropping something at this place occasionally, but knowing where it ends up would feel better. Anyhow it's not about that little value, the idea is to make use of this nice place to establish a tradition in its original spirit after the Island Girl memorial was moved.

 

[mastermesh]

The shops in EU are not separate zones, they are part of the world (not an interior zone that loads).

could be right, but not sure about it exactly... I do know there's something weird that goes on in EU with entrances to buildings, apartments, shops, etc... and it's something related to the back buffer or something odd like that.... probably like you said... zones... zones that aren't set up to load fast enough for some reason.l

because... when you try putting items in the 'edge' of the estate, like pushing a big piece of furniture through a wall or something, only near the door entrance can you 'see' it outside of the estates walls, but the rest of the walls make it sort of disappear in to a negative zone inside of the wall or something, which I'm guessing is somehow the engine renders 'indoors' areas differently than outdoor zones....

Also, in places like malls, etc., pets get confused and sort of 'stuck' at the main entrance of some areas... it actually does some weird crap with back buffer I'm guessing since you can get a pet stuck there at entrance, go inside, despawn and respawn pet, and his clone will still be setting out there at the entrance... and you can do that over and over and over hundreds of time. I'm not sure if anyone's ever tested that much, but you could, in theory use that as an exploit to block access to terminals in certain locations if it blocks other avatars from going there while pet is still there... Could make some interesting things to test in certain events I suppose...

I do think you are right about area of interest... since Mindark in various Vus in the past have changed amount of distance between how long it takes something to render in an apartment... at least once they had it set where certain small items didn't show up til you were practically sitting on top of them.

Haven't tested things in most recent VU but the old place glitch/bug/feature/exploit sort of seems to be somehow linked in to the pet thing listed above that sort of creates a 'virtual clone'... hope it doesn't get 'fixed' too soon since it's kind of nice hanging things in the air from time to time.

 

[Wistrel]

Personally I don't think we should stand for this.

I can't sit on the floor... I can't sit on my stool...

Who's for a protest? How about.... we line up and trade poo to every MA representative we encounter until they get the message that this kind of hap hazard cheap ass "fix" for whatever it is that they think is worth messing the game up for, is not acceptable and bring back the ability to put stuff down.

Wistrel

PS if it is botting, limit stacks dropping to stacks < 1 ped. The code is already in place more or less (because we can't drop anything of value less than 1pec - just edit the if statement a little)

 

[Zaith]

Personally I don't think we should stand for this.

I can't sit on the floor... I can't sit on my stool...

(We shouldn't stand for the fact that we're being forced to stand...)

PS if it is botting, limit stacks dropping to stacks < 1 ped. The code is already in place more or less (because we can't drop anything of value less than 1pec - just edit the if statement a little)

Even this would be problematic, because of "leaving game" giveaways where people drop many many piles of 10, 20ped, etc, all around them on the ground, for new players to pick up (which, ironically, you cannot do anymore because you can't drop items on the ground). (Btw, I saw a player doing exactly this in Icarus about one month ago)

Also if the 1ped limit only applies to peds, can I still drop an item worth more than 1ped? If so, one could still buy a TT item (such as ammo), drop those, pick them back up and sell them to bypass the 1ped pile limit. If it applies to item TT value as well, then that would ruin other fun like dropping a chair, or lamp, etc, or even just being generous and dropping a nice weapon for someone, the uzi that I'd found on camp icarus roof one day was ~6.50ped, for example. A TT value limit (can't drop anything over 1ped tt) would also still punish/prevent trading equipment to your significant other or child who shares your computer, which is also an unfair punishment since the patch is effectively telling you that you need to buy an additional computer just to hand your son some armor.

I think the best solution for the problem (if it really is money laundering or whatever) is just to implement something to better track and detect and deal with those players only. If somebody is dropping/finding piles of 100s of PEDs, can't there be a system that detects and monitors/flags them so that can be addressed selectively, rather than punishing everybody

 

[mastermesh]

http://www.entropiaplanets.com/threads/why-did-mindark-disable-item-dropping-exploits-d.22222/

Seems it may be less about money laundering, or fixing invisible walls, and more about trapping?