Wednesday 20 May 2009

The great aura scandal of 2009

If you've ever attended a busy Fortress or in fact any of WAR's other lag magnets, you may have encountered the DoT Aura of Doom. Just in case you've never encountered it, basically this is what happens.

Chosen and Knights of the Blazing Sun auras take 12 seconds to deactivate, so when you click a new aura the old one lingers for 12 seconds before turning off. It's something that is part of the class, players "twist" their auras by clicking a new one before the previous one deactivates and by doing so will often run 3 auras at once. This requires a lot of monotonous clicking or the use of the Twister add on which helps make it easier.

That's fine and just the way the class works, nothing wrong there. However when you twist your auras in a laggy environment, the game freaks out and auras do not shut down properly. End result of which is massive amounts of stacked auras. We're talking double figures... Normally this doesn't really cause any problem to anyone except the Chosen/KotBS themselves, because stat buffs don't actually stack, it's just a visual thing on your UI. Damage Over Time auras are a totally different kettle of fish. In these laggy situations they DO stack, causing huge amounts of damage to any poor soul within 30 foot... This is generally considered as an exploit.

I'm not going to argue with that, though it's not as clean cut as some may think and there is a lot of misinformation going around. I'll quickly clarify a couple of things:

- The Twister add on does NOT cause this. Actually it's a case of twisting auras in any manner whilst lagged can cause it. It's a flaw of the chosen/kotbs mechanic when the game is lagged.
- It is impossible to twist auras and choose NOT to lag stack them. If you play your class as intended and twist auras, then there is a risk of this happening.
- Once it's started its hard to stop, logging out is more than likely not going to work, so you're left with ctrl+alt+delete to shut down WAR.
- People can just choose not to use a DoT aura in forts at all... That doesn't fix the bug though, just avoids it.
- BOTH factions are "abusing" this exploit. People can deny it all they like, but if there's an option to cheat, then some people will.

Get your asbestos lined suit and factor 9000 suncream, then have a look at this thread in my server's forum on WHA: http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=289186

I'm sitting quite comfortably on the fence about the right and wrongs of that night's events. Otherwise I'll get dragged into all the rambling about two wrongs, ivory towers, glass houses and all that crap. There are some good points being made by both Order and Destruction players in that thread, but as so often with a topic coloured in dramatic shades of grey, they're being smothered by all the bile and trolling.

All this anger, rage, denial and nonsense caused by the laggy servers/code/etc. Mythic you're about to cram us all into Land of the Dead... With lag as it is, I'm not alone in feeling a little bit uneasy...

6 comments:

  1. Interesting..most...

    ReplyDelete
  2. With the added traffic, hopefully it will surpass Marilyn Monroe in popularity and get Mythic to fix the game's real issues instead of cramming more laggy & buggy content up our arses

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've read some more of that thread today and I have to say Kolapz (regularly comments on here actually) has made an excellent point:

    "What's the next step? You see someone using Warbuddy, so you shout in region that everyone should get it, cause well, they're doing it too? "

    So true. Dangerous ground all of this and I don't think we've heard the end of it on Karak-Norn. Last thing we need is a bloody exploit arms race.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm just very disappointed with the posts made and stances taken by some of the most influental people on Destro side, whom I, until now, respected a lot.

    I think I said everything I wanted to say there, as did the part of destro responsible for it.

    My point is that cheating or encouraging of it ,even more so, is never OK, not under any cirumstances. Never. Ever.
    "Them" (and you know who I'm talking of) seem to think it's OK if "it proves a point", "is for the greater good" or "the other side does it" and that is something I just can't agree with.

    No point in dragging it to your blog though, although I guess I already did.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I saw Kill Frenzy were 'black listed' and slagged off by CIR for daring to disagree with them recently. I bet that means Bootae is avoiding stirring the pot more. On Order we know his guild play fair.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Tiger, tbh CIR's black listing us was pretty irrelevant to KF. We mostly do stuff with our guild or alliance. We'll support other alliance's efforts as we always have, but CIR know bugger all about us (which was obvious to most from their comments) we don't answer to them and they most certainly do not speak for us in this latest debacle. But I am not going to wade in on that aura thread or here because whilst I will not endorse cheating, I can understand why they and others (its not just about CIR) did it. I just don't agree with it.

    ReplyDelete

About Me

My photo
Half man half pixel. Music obsessive, likes a drink, occasional bastard.