I’ve seen a lot of controversy surrounding the Stygian Coffer purges failing to start or stopping halfway through.. bases that worked fine in the past suddenly unable to get purged etc. with people trying to guess the reasons behind this or assume that these things are somehow static and changed by updates and so on.
The purge and NPC AI in general actually have some pretty volatile systems influencing them, which I believe to be the primary cause of why purges also fail quite often.
I initially wanted to explain this in a post, but I figured it would be far too complicated to try and describe what’s actually happening, however it’s far easier to show in action, so… I made a video instead.
Ignore the rambling as this was done on a single take (after some initial failed attempts lol) and it’s not something edited.. I did throw on a quick horrible thumbnail and some free youtube BG music
Enjoy:
Disclaimer: Things presented in the video are my own opinions and observations and I made it in good faith to help people understand some of the limitations of this game and game engine. Try not to weaponize this against the devs or burst into random arguments over it, thanks
Hmm I don’t think it was necessarily this, Al-Merayah had a lot of issues so this would’ve been just some small factor - when it comes to this it was no worse than some of the very large player bases on servers.
But Al-Merayah had some wonky code (some of which I rewrote in the mod where I re-released it) and it’s just a huge base with a lot of pieces, that is being used with a fairly experimental system (the base spawner that creates it). It just seemed to have a higher impact than it should’ve - though I think letting it run wild on servers and people always jumping in for the katana then leaving it unfinished was also a contributor.
I initially disabled it on my own server too because I was getting intermittent mini lag spikes every 4-5 seconds up in the North highlands (it seemed to have affected people in a large radius around the 0 point - possibly due to spawning CDOs idk), but then later when I re-released it as a mod I actually had it on my server and I didn’t notice that big of an impact except when I was actively attacking it.
Overall it was just big and clunky I guess and a bit more of a theatrical effect than function as far as the base goes, plus the bugs which made the soldiers even attack people all the way at the noob river (that was funny)
I did recently update that mod and added some settings to tame the very rapid respawn rates it had.
Interesting that the navigation mesh daisy chains.
This seems to also explain why when purges are run on a server that other players can feel it? I’m imagining the crazy amount of additional navigation meshes.
Well yes, the area is extended as more NPCs are spread out around a player - which also contributes to large bases with many thralls being unhealthy for server performance. Usually when someone goes near those types of bases you do get a bit of a spike for the whole server as you instantly get the combination of everything, AILOD turning things back on and possibly navigation being generated for them, etc.
One purge wouldn’t cause significant issues though, it might be noticeable on a weak server, but nothing crazy, so when I say that it’s heavy on performance, I’m thinking in relatively normal terms, it’s one of the more expensive things, but it is part of normal game operation so there’s that. Having a better server obviously mitigates a lot of these things.
This part had solution. This particular Katana should be in the boss room or main drop from this particular boss.
Another thing players was stealing both pve and pvp was the bombs . Hardened steel or star metal tools were easy to loot, so people who new the game a little could harvest star metal even from day one.
I cannot blame devs however that most players spend thousands of hours in this game and learn how to do late game things in day one. From a point of view it’s a bit rewarding for spending time in the game to be able to speed up things.
With your permission @Xevyr i would like to add in this conversation my gaming experience both online and single player, but from the players eyes and understanding, what stopped me from accepting purges.
1st. Difficult paths. Often very complicated paths to my treasury became reason not to accept a single purge on something i was working for hours to build. Especially a spiral path failed every single time. In my understanding the distance npcs will cover to go to your treasury should be easy and clean, so this way the “necessity” of purge camp to spawn in multiple places can be covered and i almost always enjoyed purges on bases with easy path. So this lead to the next which is…
2nd. Open landscape. Open landscape without other buildings around if you play online. Large plateau around will maximize the chance not only to accept purge but to finish it properly as well. Multiple times the entrance of the purge spawned on a great rock or a great tree and the purge didn’t manage to continue. The worst part of course came when a small opening existed and the purge proceed, but the last boss never appeared lost in the graphics or the mase and my purge couldn’t end.
3rd. Minimum building pieces and decorations. It’s better your perimeter to have double foundations only to the height golems can reach and hit, than putting unnecessary decorations to something you fix for purpose to be destroyed. The good part of this choice can only be noticed on death. If a player dies in his purge then the area render extremely slow especially on pstato like my brother @LostBrythunian says. So be very careful with the number of place ables and storages you have in a purge base. I won’t lie, especially after some time in our purge bases we have many storage boxes filled with anything you can imagine, or receptions with thralls we don’t use. At this time when we die the render may literally take 5 minutes, so it’s best to keep your purge base “clean”.
4th. Minimum door frames. Many times multiple door frames didn’t allow my purge to start or stooped it in the middle. Door frames can also create a huge collision on npcs and the performance even in single player go really down.
I know that all these are well know to mostly all the veteran players, but although i have build decades of purge bases nearly 50% of them worked properly.
It would be best if the game had a mechanic from green to red and warn players for their mistakes while they build a purge base.
I don’t think it was necessarily this, Al-Merayah had a lot of issues so this would’ve been just some small factor - when it comes to this it was no worse than some of the very large player bases on servers.