As here you can see… this new leash for the NPCs waay to short lads?
5 Likes
This one agrees.
That is an extremely short leash.
All the leashes seem very short right now, and the enemies extremely absent minded.
Perhaps the current way of things is just a little bit of over correction from certain critters that would follow you home from a quarter of the map away.
5 Likes
This is the result of two issues being resolved at the same time.
One was to get camps from swarming a player, and reducing the size of the encounters in the camps. The result is what we have. These are supposedly getting adjusted in the future.
But like I told them in the feedback I’ve given… the effects were overdone. If its not fixed by Chapter 2, consider it botched up and forgotten.
3 Likes
Its is not so bad but AI humans even more restricted now =(
Swarming issue can be corrected by limiting NPC sigh (spot) zone, but when you get spotted they must not rest until you leave the area (in this case - camp).
But for now NPCs even quit from active battle with you if you make some steps back, thats veryyyy unpleasant to see.
This one is still trying to wrap their minds around how letting the Exiled stroll into the city gate, slaying and maiming, shouldn’t raise an alarm and get the whole community to swarm.
How is this a feature?
If this one strolls into a FOB and starts lighting them up, everyone under arms is going to be engaging with a quickness, and everyone not under arms is going to be arming themselves.
Personal view point, this over correction was an attempt to fix a problem that wasn’t a problem.
9 Likes
Combine that with the lowered health of enemies and pretty easy to wipe said city… I don’t think this update was “game breaking” but some of the changes are making me scratch my head…
3 Likes
Maybe… but I still get ganked by 8 npcs at once…
Yeah. I admit I haven’t tested very extensively (I only went to a few Stygian Invader camps) but I feel the aggro radius once you provoke someone hasn’t changed that much. Only, once the NPCs do get aggroed, they sometimes decide it’s not their fight after all, and return to their regular spots.
Some people also seem to be fine about letting my shoot their friends to death.
1 Like
Each camp should have an anchor point for that camp. THAT point is what NPCS are “Defending” in a given radius. Think of it as three circles of escalating aggression, the largest is max distance that you can aggro from hitting someone and also the last point before they go back to their assigned location. The next one in, is aggro on site UNLESS you are crouching and “sneaking” by, the final and closest point is the camps “KoS” circle where it becomes immediate aggression. Just a thought on it. Secondary would be smaller circles for just the npcs. Not a comprehensive idea, but thought it would sound better than, hitting someone in the head with an arrow a mile away and watching them just stand there.
2 Likes
Now i understand the post of @rigultru in another topic, i believe in the tension one.
What i don’t understand is why you don’t take a step forward to maintain the necessary agro distance?
Maybe they saw your gear and said “shіt, better not mess with that dude”? 
On a more serious note, this is like going to the bad old days where you could just pick NPCs off one by one or in very small groups, without really being in danger of having a whole bunch of them charge you, surround you, and kick your ass because you got too cocky.
I’m going to miss that danger 
I hate to be one of those “who asked for this” people, but if this wasn’t done by popular demand – and I have a hard time imagining that it was – then what was the reason for it?
The cynic in me wants to say “optimization”, but that would mean that they’re prioritizing crappy G-portal servers and obsolete console hardware over good gameplay experience, and that would be… sad.
I still remember when they introduced the change that made it impossible to stroll in and just start laying about and slaughtering NPCs while their buddies stand a bit farther watching calmly. The first time I ran into New Asagarth with my old attitude and got ground into dirt by angry Nordheimers was glorious!
2 Likes
I haven’t done it yet to understand how annoying it can be @rigultru. I promise that i will and i will provide my feedback as well. But before this, understand no different please, i do trust you and @Denversetti about the annoyance you feel about this issue. Even if it doesn’t annoy me, only the fact that you are annoyed is something big already.
Dennis wanted to and he is lead producer, he’s already explained himself in the way he’s going to. But at the end of the day if he wants to do something, it gets done hell or high water. Not saying its right, just saying how it goes.
The biggest issue I have with this whole thing isn’t the end goal design style. Its the iterations that it takes to get there. There was feedback on this, very very early into the public beta. Because we felt there was two systems being used to solve a problem and it was too much.
Thankfully he seems he agrees. At least from what his response to one of these threads (which is why thread mergers need to happen, I don’t exactly feel like fishing for it right now). So some of this will be tweaked. I just wonder if that will be in a hotfix or in Chapter 2.
I do know the system has some decent depth to it in how NPCs react to danger. Its more similar to older MMORPGs and has a little nuance to it when tuned properly. Like there’s ways to pull a single group without pulling a whole camp with a less threatening method (aka not shooting someone). So skilled pullers (an old MMORPG role) can single pull in many cases where you’d otherwise get dozens.
But… with how its tuned now, that doesn’t work and isn’t really needed. There’s two ways they can tweak it back. They can do a blanket change that more or less works and that takes like… 20 minutes tops. Or they can tweak it camp by camp… and that can take a long time. Its not hard, but tedious. If they did the latter it would feel really good.
But in reality if they put in the system where only 3 NPCs can attack you at once and the others sit around and watch. Well… we didn’t need the radius of their detection and all that shortened at all. But I don’t think that part is in yet.
I get that. Like I tried to convey, I’m not complaining that the “devs aren’t listening to us and that’s not right”, but rather asking if anyone has any idea about why the earlier design decision was basically reverted.
I figured maybe I missed something that Dennis or someone else said to explain it 
If they do, they do, but I still can’t really understand why anyone would think that’s a good game design choice.
I’ll tell you what I do know. Pretty much Dennis and a few others did some playtesting a while back and got some ideas. You could effectively say Age of War is what happens when the developers do play their own game. So when people make complaints that it seems they don’t. Just point to this update. 
3 Likes
You know, that makes a lot of sense. I don’t like the results, but it definitely makes sense. I’m actually gonna bookmark your post for future discussions about devs not playing their own game 
1 Like
The moment you ser foot in a camp, you should have the whole camp coming for you. I already considered the previous aggro range too short. You could EASILY kill everyone in the mounds alone. Now, it’s ridiculous. You shouldn’t even think about raiding a whole camp without two or three thralls coming along, something that should be a possibility. You should need a whole heavily armed squad.
The whole thing is higly unrealistic and needed to be turned on its head.
1 Like
I wouldn’t put it that way. Rather, it comes down to devs having different ideas from the rest of us about how the game should be played.
That said, I’m still partial to my tin-foil-hat theory that this is an optimization measure, so that the official servers can cope. 
Or you run straight in, gather a whole bunch of aggro, then go back to the entrance and around the big rock to the right of the entrance, and the whole group decides to go around the hut instead of around the rock. When they reach you, whack a couple of them and just back out around the rock, and there they go again around the hut
Of course. There’s no rational reason for leaving the camps half enpty while reducing to the bare minimum the number of actors in a situation.
The less things moving and calculating, the better.
If it was a matter of difficulty, they could just have nerfed npcs even further.
The only moment New Asagarth presents a little difficulty is when Ladagara spawns (I so hate having to kill her!). Other than that, it’s easy territory. Not even Misha presents much of a menace and you only cross paths with it if you want.
Yeah I can snipe people with arrows from a distance and nobody comes to find me.
I hate it.
1 Like