Upcoming Group/Raid Improvements

Taryth

Administrator
Staff member
On 12/10, we will be releasing the long-awaited group and raid improvements. Thanks so much to everyone who helped test - I am hoping there are relatively few issues upon release, but the change is massive, so there may be some emergency patching. I sure hope not.

The purpose of this post is to explain the changes and new features. You should find raids in particular FAR less irritating now. First, let's talk about the major changes and let folks know what features are live:
  • Group leaders should always appear in the "F2" slot regardless of group changes. Ordering should also not randomly change anymore
  • You can now change group leaders (use /makeleader [name])
  • Groups will persist through linkdeath and even zone shutdown/reboot. They should no longer come back terribly broken or not at all
  • You can remove other people if you are the leader. Target them and type /dis
  • Cross-zone invites should still work using /inv [name]
  • You will get messages when an enchanter is enhancing your group or raid via Shared Mind. You will also be told when they are no longer improving your group. They must be in zone to gain the bonuses, of course
  • If there is more than one enchanter, the server will determine which the "better" one is by first looking at the raw Shared Mind AA value (highest wins) and in the event of a tie, will next choose the person with the largest TOTAL benefit. So this calculates the sum of all the improvements (including the secret server calcs) and will pick the highest person. In some cases, a new member with the exact same values might accidentally get picked to replace someone, but hopefully those are minimum
  • If one enchanter dies while Shared Mind is active, the other will take over with whatever their values happen to be. If both (or all 3?) die, you lose Shared Mind, and are probably about to wipe anyway
  • Paladin undead crits should actually work consistently now. For raids, as before, they are on a per-group basis. If the paladin dies, you lose the crits. If there is more than one paladin, the other will pick up the slack. Unlike Shared Mind, there are no messages for this ability, so don't worry if you're not seeing it
  • You should get warnings if you try to invite someone who is already in a group
  • Features in raids, may be "stubbed in" but not actually functional. We may implement these in the future, like "Raid AAs" from live and additional raid management functions, but the goal is to get the base system up and running
  • You do not need to be in a group to get a raid invite. A player added with /raidinv will appear in ungrouped players (more on this below)
  • /cm raidrefresh is gone as it is no longer necessary. /cm grouprefresh still exists just in case your group members become unordered, but this, too, should not be needed anymore
  • Most importantly: You should not need to reform the raid every 10 minutes just because someone died/left! Like groups, they are durable across linkdeaths/zone and server reboots, etc.
Folks should like the raid management system - a lot of functionality is now available to make running a raid smoother. By far the most important is the raid locking function. By clicking the Lock button in the raid management window, the raid leader suspends the ability of anyone to invite new people or make changes. At that point, the raid leader may select a person in the window and click the corresponding number of the group they should be in (1-3). Players without a group appear at the bottom - you may take someone out of a group by selecting them and clicking NoGroup. You may also kick a person out by selecting them and clicking Disband.

Once you are done making changes as a leader, click the Unlock button and people will once again be able to invite others, etc.

The Looter feature hasn't been thoroughly tested, and honestly probably is irrelevant given our small raid sizes. The idea is you can restrict who is allowed to loot a raid corpse. I suggest just leaving it at the default, which mirrors current behavior.

Finally, the Dump button outputs the current people in the raid to a file called RaidRoster along with the date. This shows the name, group number, level, etc. Might be handy for people tracking raid attendance.

As I said, other features are not yet turned on, and I'm not sure if/when they might be.

I think that about sums it up. Please report any bugs as quickly as possible - Discord is best immediately following the release so we can triage any issues, but otherwise /bug is likely your best bet.
 
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Hey, we used this extensively in our raid last night and it worked very well.

our raid leader invited everyone in a big bucket, and then put them into our groups.
We were able to shuffle people around for ports.
Multiple people crashed and came back in without breaking the raid, or booting them from their groups.
I don't think we experienced any issues with phantom (empty) mana bars and the like.

at one point we had a strange scenario where a group in the raid zone had an empty slot. we sent a porter to get a late arrival, but then couldn't give the porter leader. we ended up tinkering with it and ultimately just invited everyone across zones and it seemed to work.


I would say it had a positive improvement on our raid and I like it. thanks for the code smashing dev-folks!

raid leader may have more to say about it, but as a player on the raid, it worked great!
 
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