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BUG: "Saving the Son" (Kragenmoor, Stonefalls) and "Bad Medicine" (Serk Quarantine, Deshaan)
Shadowshire
✭✭✭✭
2015-09-19 WARNING: LONG!!!
After a lot of time and repeated effort, Greysmoke managed to complete "Saving the Son" at Kragenmoor in Stonefalls. The object of the quest, given by Denu Faren, is to enter the Dres family crypts via a mining tunnel at the base of the cliff west of Kragenmoor, then find the son of Grandmaster Omin Dres who is being held captive there.
Of course, after the long series of fights was again bringing my avatar, Greysmoke, near the goal, yet another player's avatar came along. This is always potentially bad news. He was moving so fast that his avatar must have been at least two levels higher. I knew what would happen if he reached Sen Dres before Greysmoke did. So:
(1) Greysmoke kept moving on while the other avatar was fighting a pair of mobs;
(2) in the room from which the tunnel leads to Sen Dres, Greysmoke killed two mobs, one after the other, as the other player's avatar raced past into the tunnel, then
(3) Greysmoke ran up the tunnel past the ongoing final fight and talked to Sen Dres, who was sitting outside the locked cage.
While Greysmoke was doing that, the other player's avatar arrived and stood nearby. Whether he was also able to talk to Sen Dres I cannot say. In my prior experience, I doubt that he could.
Regardless, at the end of the conversation, Sen Dres preceded Greysmoke down the tunnel to the prior room and out the door on its north end, then continued moving to the entrance of the Dres keep and disappeared through the door. Greysmoke used the door and found Sen Dres standing near his father. So the quest ended successfully for me (finally, but without much satisfaction, frankly).
That said, I wish that I could say the same for the other player's avatar. I never saw him again after Sen Dres set out down the tunnel with Greysmoke following. My guess is that the other player was just "out of luck".
I've been thinking about this quest a lot. I spent way too much time and effort trying to find a way to complete this quest, including waiting until after the weekly server maintenance to reset the NPCs after I abandoned the quest. Unlike World of Warcraft, an avatar cannot return immediately to a quest giver to receive an abandoned quest again, because the TESO software does not immediately remove the flag from the quest giver that is set when the player's avatar accepts the quest. You won't find the quest giver at the location where they offered the quest, regardless. Indeed, when a player abandons a quest, the quest-giver disappears entirely from their view of the game.
This flaw in the game software design should not be difficult to correct, in my humble opinion. Also, the quest giver's location should never change until the quest is completed, even if the player's avatar must move to another location to receive credit for it from either the giver or from another NPC instead.
Two other considerations:
First, the fact that an avatar who is independent of a group can continue moving through or past a fight without being attacked reflects the fact that Bethesda knows how to design and program single-player games -- but, evidently, not multiplayer games. In any true multiplayer game, a new arrival(s) would be regarded by the NPCs as "reinforcement" if the arrival(s) move into aggro range during an ongoing battle. This applies whether an individual avatar or a group of avatars are engaged, and whether an individual avatar or a group of avatars arrive on the scene. Allowing player(s) to adopt the attitude "not my fight" has the potential for various problems to occur as a result, depending upon how the quest in which the respective parties are engaged is designed.
Second, with regard to "Saving the Son", the problem is that what is initially a straightforward solo-player or group find-and-kill quest becomes an "escort quest" when Sen Dres joins the avatar(s) to move together. The Bethesda designers failed to recognize that.
As it stands, only one avatar or group can have Sen Dres as a companion at any given time. Any avatar or group that arrives while Sen Dres is "away" cannot complete that quest, because of this flaw in the design. To put it another way, two or more avatars who are not in the same group can each compete an escort quest only when they acquire that quest separately. The only way that two or more groups can complete the same escort quest is to aquire it separately.
For a long time this was a problem in World of Warcraft (among other multiplayer games) -- one which Blizzard Entertainment eventually corrected in WoW 5.0. From the design perspective, finding Sen Dres ends the quest to do that. Escorting Sen Dres to his father is a separate quest. That allows Sen Dres to "remain" at the cage so that another player's avatar will find him, insofar as he becomes the next quest giver in the chain, which ends upon arrival at his father's location. The quest initially given to find him also ends there (as presently done), not by returning to the quest giver. The process of terminating nested quests is already solved, from an implementation point of view -- one should hope.
"Bad Medicine" AKA "Bad Programming":
A similar problem occurs with the quest "Bad Medicine" at Quarantine Serk in Deshaan. The avatar must enter the disease quarantine compound through a locked door on the east end. Somewhere near the door is a bag that contains its key. When the avatar searches the bag and obtains the key, two armed opponents appear and attack him/her.
First, in my experience, the player is not given any info that the sack with the key even exists, or even that they are supposed to search that area to find it. The angry female NPC obnoxiously yelling repeatedly "You're going the wrong way!" is of no help. I am not a masochist and I don't find features which reflect personal issues of Bethesda designers and programmers amusing, just unprofessional. She is nothing but yet another example of mysogyny in role-playing games. If I find one too many more examples of this crap in TESO, then I will be playing another company's games instead.
That said, often the sack is simply not present, and there is no evident way to obtain entry via the door, which the avatar simply cannot open -- no message is displayed to state that it has a lock, thus requires a key. While the sack is not present, the circumstances under which it will eventually appear -- whether it ever will appear! -- are very uncertain. (If you ever see the face of a keylock on an TESO door, then please send a screenshot of it to me. Photoshopped images are a waste of your time.)
Be that as it may, when the avatar moves into its vicinity, the sack might be present, but there is also a Skyshard visible only a short distance away from its location. If the player overlooks the sack, or decides to search it after obtaining the Skyshard, then the player will lose the opportunity to obtain the key if another player's avatar comes along and searches the sack.
Searching the sack initiates the fight, so it doesn't matter whether the player's avatar participates with the other player's avatar, since that one already has the key. Regardless of whether the avatar that searches the sack wins or loses the fight, the sack and the key inside do not respawn as it should. The sack and its key should soon respawn so that any other player's avatar who is also present can obtain it, but it doesn't.
In my experience, when yet another player's avatar arrives, the sack will appear to them, but it cannot be seen by the player whose avatar's presence spawned appearance of the sack previously.
Evidently: when an avatar arrives, the sack eventually appears. However, if another player's avatar arrives before the first avatar searches the sack, then another sack is generated and replaces the existing one. So the first avatar's player will never again see the sack that was generated by his own avatar's arrival.
Again, clearly, the designers forgot that TESO is a multiplayer game.
Logging-out and re-logging will not resolve this problem, regardless of how much time passes between those two events.
At best, logging-in and logging-out are "workarounds" for a flawed sofware design and/or implementation even when they might work. Such a situation should be remedied immediately, because continuing to issue patches without correcting them causes an increasing accumulation of such problems, which requires an increasing accumulation of time and effort on the part of the players to attempt to resolve them, including seeking help to do so.
Failing to correct such errors and oversights will inevitably drive support costs through the roof, which cannot be resolved by capping or rationing such support, let alone reducing it.
Eventually, the game turns to crap, especially for anyone who is a new player. The only players who benefit from the constant development of new DLC -- which will almost certainly contain the same flaws because programmers re-use buggy code as well as sound code -- are those who have been playing the game from the beginning.
When they tire of it, who is left?
--- Shadowshire
Edited by Shadowshire on September 20, 2015 2:13AM After a lot of time and repeated effort, Greysmoke managed to complete "Saving the Son" at Kragenmoor in Stonefalls. The object of the quest, given by Denu Faren, is to enter the Dres family crypts via a mining tunnel at the base of the cliff west of Kragenmoor, then find the son of Grandmaster Omin Dres who is being held captive there.
Of course, after the long series of fights was again bringing my avatar, Greysmoke, near the goal, yet another player's avatar came along. This is always potentially bad news. He was moving so fast that his avatar must have been at least two levels higher. I knew what would happen if he reached Sen Dres before Greysmoke did. So:
(1) Greysmoke kept moving on while the other avatar was fighting a pair of mobs;
(2) in the room from which the tunnel leads to Sen Dres, Greysmoke killed two mobs, one after the other, as the other player's avatar raced past into the tunnel, then
(3) Greysmoke ran up the tunnel past the ongoing final fight and talked to Sen Dres, who was sitting outside the locked cage.
While Greysmoke was doing that, the other player's avatar arrived and stood nearby. Whether he was also able to talk to Sen Dres I cannot say. In my prior experience, I doubt that he could.
Regardless, at the end of the conversation, Sen Dres preceded Greysmoke down the tunnel to the prior room and out the door on its north end, then continued moving to the entrance of the Dres keep and disappeared through the door. Greysmoke used the door and found Sen Dres standing near his father. So the quest ended successfully for me (finally, but without much satisfaction, frankly).
That said, I wish that I could say the same for the other player's avatar. I never saw him again after Sen Dres set out down the tunnel with Greysmoke following. My guess is that the other player was just "out of luck".
I've been thinking about this quest a lot. I spent way too much time and effort trying to find a way to complete this quest, including waiting until after the weekly server maintenance to reset the NPCs after I abandoned the quest. Unlike World of Warcraft, an avatar cannot return immediately to a quest giver to receive an abandoned quest again, because the TESO software does not immediately remove the flag from the quest giver that is set when the player's avatar accepts the quest. You won't find the quest giver at the location where they offered the quest, regardless. Indeed, when a player abandons a quest, the quest-giver disappears entirely from their view of the game.
This flaw in the game software design should not be difficult to correct, in my humble opinion. Also, the quest giver's location should never change until the quest is completed, even if the player's avatar must move to another location to receive credit for it from either the giver or from another NPC instead.
Two other considerations:
First, the fact that an avatar who is independent of a group can continue moving through or past a fight without being attacked reflects the fact that Bethesda knows how to design and program single-player games -- but, evidently, not multiplayer games. In any true multiplayer game, a new arrival(s) would be regarded by the NPCs as "reinforcement" if the arrival(s) move into aggro range during an ongoing battle. This applies whether an individual avatar or a group of avatars are engaged, and whether an individual avatar or a group of avatars arrive on the scene. Allowing player(s) to adopt the attitude "not my fight" has the potential for various problems to occur as a result, depending upon how the quest in which the respective parties are engaged is designed.
Second, with regard to "Saving the Son", the problem is that what is initially a straightforward solo-player or group find-and-kill quest becomes an "escort quest" when Sen Dres joins the avatar(s) to move together. The Bethesda designers failed to recognize that.
As it stands, only one avatar or group can have Sen Dres as a companion at any given time. Any avatar or group that arrives while Sen Dres is "away" cannot complete that quest, because of this flaw in the design. To put it another way, two or more avatars who are not in the same group can each compete an escort quest only when they acquire that quest separately. The only way that two or more groups can complete the same escort quest is to aquire it separately.
For a long time this was a problem in World of Warcraft (among other multiplayer games) -- one which Blizzard Entertainment eventually corrected in WoW 5.0. From the design perspective, finding Sen Dres ends the quest to do that. Escorting Sen Dres to his father is a separate quest. That allows Sen Dres to "remain" at the cage so that another player's avatar will find him, insofar as he becomes the next quest giver in the chain, which ends upon arrival at his father's location. The quest initially given to find him also ends there (as presently done), not by returning to the quest giver. The process of terminating nested quests is already solved, from an implementation point of view -- one should hope.
"Bad Medicine" AKA "Bad Programming":
A similar problem occurs with the quest "Bad Medicine" at Quarantine Serk in Deshaan. The avatar must enter the disease quarantine compound through a locked door on the east end. Somewhere near the door is a bag that contains its key. When the avatar searches the bag and obtains the key, two armed opponents appear and attack him/her.
First, in my experience, the player is not given any info that the sack with the key even exists, or even that they are supposed to search that area to find it. The angry female NPC obnoxiously yelling repeatedly "You're going the wrong way!" is of no help. I am not a masochist and I don't find features which reflect personal issues of Bethesda designers and programmers amusing, just unprofessional. She is nothing but yet another example of mysogyny in role-playing games. If I find one too many more examples of this crap in TESO, then I will be playing another company's games instead.
That said, often the sack is simply not present, and there is no evident way to obtain entry via the door, which the avatar simply cannot open -- no message is displayed to state that it has a lock, thus requires a key. While the sack is not present, the circumstances under which it will eventually appear -- whether it ever will appear! -- are very uncertain. (If you ever see the face of a keylock on an TESO door, then please send a screenshot of it to me. Photoshopped images are a waste of your time.)
Be that as it may, when the avatar moves into its vicinity, the sack might be present, but there is also a Skyshard visible only a short distance away from its location. If the player overlooks the sack, or decides to search it after obtaining the Skyshard, then the player will lose the opportunity to obtain the key if another player's avatar comes along and searches the sack.
Searching the sack initiates the fight, so it doesn't matter whether the player's avatar participates with the other player's avatar, since that one already has the key. Regardless of whether the avatar that searches the sack wins or loses the fight, the sack and the key inside do not respawn as it should. The sack and its key should soon respawn so that any other player's avatar who is also present can obtain it, but it doesn't.
In my experience, when yet another player's avatar arrives, the sack will appear to them, but it cannot be seen by the player whose avatar's presence spawned appearance of the sack previously.
Evidently: when an avatar arrives, the sack eventually appears. However, if another player's avatar arrives before the first avatar searches the sack, then another sack is generated and replaces the existing one. So the first avatar's player will never again see the sack that was generated by his own avatar's arrival.
Again, clearly, the designers forgot that TESO is a multiplayer game.
Logging-out and re-logging will not resolve this problem, regardless of how much time passes between those two events.
At best, logging-in and logging-out are "workarounds" for a flawed sofware design and/or implementation even when they might work. Such a situation should be remedied immediately, because continuing to issue patches without correcting them causes an increasing accumulation of such problems, which requires an increasing accumulation of time and effort on the part of the players to attempt to resolve them, including seeking help to do so.
Failing to correct such errors and oversights will inevitably drive support costs through the roof, which cannot be resolved by capping or rationing such support, let alone reducing it.
Eventually, the game turns to crap, especially for anyone who is a new player. The only players who benefit from the constant development of new DLC -- which will almost certainly contain the same flaws because programmers re-use buggy code as well as sound code -- are those who have been playing the game from the beginning.
When they tire of it, who is left?
--- Shadowshire
--- Shadowshire .......... ESO Plus on PC NA with Windows 7 Pro SP1
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