Disappearing Mobs

[novacadian]

Now what is one of the first things a new player is likely to do and do so on a regular basis?

Kill Mobs!

Somethings must really be done with those time out mobs. A new player may invest all they have in potions and/or ammo only to have the monster disappear moments away from death and that desired loot drop. This is annoying to me somewhat at my level and takes me out of immersion yet to a new player/character it would be hair pulling and enough to think this game is bug ridden (which by and large it is not).

This was brought up at the last Dev Q&A and it was brushed off suggesting that it may be dealt with with the Unreal release. It is hard for this programmer's brain to see how Unreal integration is going to fix a bug in the NPC code, yet it has literally been years since having the code compiled and running on my site and my guess is that that bug is likely hidden in the database equations at any rate.

My feeling is that this should be given a top priority as it distracts from the game in so many way.

While looking into this fix one might consider only sending the dead mobs to the Death Realm once the time has been met and the attacker is out of range of the corpse. Rushing against time to get the loot can be anxiety generating. Especially when they are hard to re-target for a plethora of reasons.

- Nova

[cdmoreland]

Nova is right. It is very discouraging to spend a long time trying to take-down a tefusang or trepor with a bow only to have them disappear just before the kill.

The other thing that needs to be addressed is loot. I made a new character and was killing rats. The first 2 hides were easy enough, but then, it took over a dozen kills for the 3rd hide with several "nothing to be looted" where I got like 4 or 5 of them in a row. That could be a real turn-off for a new player.

Waesed has even quit hunting neotens because of the poor loot.

[Migg]

This thread is already a bit stale, but please bear with me 

The way I read Nova's post, it seems the complaint was that killed mobs vanish before one has a chance to loot them, and indeed that can be an issue sometimes, especially if the mob is big and you need to retarget fast or risk getting eaten. What I do is add a macro for /loot, if you assign a key to it (I have assigned a mouse button) you will be able to loot fast. Assign another key to select next mob and things improve a lot.

As for the teleport issue, I have no workaround, if you are hunting above ground however you can hope to find your target somewhere near if you look at the usual spawning places. I do accept this is frustrating, and ever more so for new players who can't possibly know where their target has moved to - or dare risk patrolling the hunting grounds to find them. All I can say it's the last resort mobs take when their path-finding gets them stuck, which is to teleport back to a starting point. This is a bug needs fixing, but my guess is no one will do any bug fixing on this build anymore, all we can hope for is it will get looked into once the UE port is out.