It’s been nearly two months since RDF dropped. AoE heals, Beacon of Light, etc. still don’t function properly in dungeons due to PvP flagging. Why is this? There is no reason that being PvP flagged should have any effect whatsoever on friendly, multi-target abilities in 5-man PvE RDF instances. Whether or not things have functioned this way throughout the expansion, this is clearly broken behavior, and now it matters.
Are we just to expect major aspect of gameplay are to remain broken indefinitely in Classic? This game has literally no minimum standard for quality, and it’s sad and shameful.
EDIT: I and other players have been posting about and reporting this issue for months. It hasn’t been fixed or even acknowledged. Now, as of November 11th, the same fundamental issue is causing chaos in raids. I hope this serves as a lesson.
I think it’s just how it interacts with instances, we’re not really in a party but we are in a group together I think it works like this in PvE servers too since this is pretty much what happens on the PTR.
There is no good design-oriented reason for this interaction to happen in 5-man instances, and therefore it should not happen in 5-man instances. It’s bad design and it should be fixed. Period.
There is no technical limitation that prevents Blizzard from changing this behavior. It can be fixed. Period.
I’m a software engineer. The notion that this is “just how it interacts with instances” is malarky.
Blizzard writes the code. Blizzard literally determines the behavior. If Blizzard wants to make it so that in 5-man instances, friendly, multi-target abilities affect nearby players in the same instance group regardless of whether they are PvP flagged, they have the ability to do that. If Blizzard wants to turn us all into chickens who can kill each other with lightning balls that shoot out of our tails when we enter the instance, they have the ability to do that. They simply haven’t done it.
Why hasn’t Blizzard made the needed changes? Maybe their bug-reporting system is balls, and they don’t know about the issue. Maybe they’re just bad at design, and don’t realize it needs to change. Maybe they’re bad at software, and don’t know how to fix it. Maybe they’re bad at prioritizing work, and just haven’t fixed it. Maybe they don’t care about Wrath and the team has moved on to Cataclysm. Maybe Activision-Blizzard is AIDS, and the skeleton crew that they’ve allocated funding for doesn’t have the bandwidth to fix the game.
I don’t know the answer, but I do know that all of the potential answers suck, and make me hate the game and the company.
I still get messages all the time that say “You are not in a party” when I am quite OBVIOUSLY in a party, so I think there are just more bugs to the original code than the current development team can handle. Maybe the original developers didn’t document enough?
I agree it should be a straightforward and easy fix so I am just guessing that the current team on Classic just either doesn’t have the experience, knowledge, talent, or any motivation to fix the code?
Fortunately for me, the only thing the PvP flag does is stop people from getting my Int buff and my haste buff when it procs. So, they just have to do without. Not nearly as bad as when they don’t get heals but I guess that’s just the way Blizzard wants it to be.
Because the behavior is correct in all other situations outside of RDF matchmaking, and Blizzard is apparently reluctant to add yet another layer of special-case code to handle this specific situation.
I hope this gets fixed before Cata. Don’t plan on using RDF if it’s not, people are so toxic when you ask them to flag and then it takes 5 minutes after that anyway.
In wrath gamma’s its annoying, but in Cata Heroics it’ll be a wipe causing problem since aoe healing is a lot more impactful in Cata Heroics.
All in all just laziness on the dev’s side. As someone else has pointed out you already get auto unflagged when using a flightpath. Copy/Paste code lines in front of being ported into a dungeon and boom problem solved.
At lower levels it’s confusing to new players. Another really annoying thing is the toxic level boosting restrictions that can cause you to get 7xp a mob when using RDF to level are both ridiculously easy to fix and are really poor game design.
Not sure, but if it happens on PVE realms then the coding is already there. Doesn’t matter where it is happening just that it isn’t happening when people enter dungeons and it should be put there.
EDIT: Tested on PVP realm and doesn’t work, not sure where the guy was saying it happens, but I remember testing it when I saw him post it and getting it to work.
EDIT2: Guy below me has the answer. All hail Heydownthere!
Just stating my opinion that RDF instances and PvE servers (at least on the PTR) share the same issue. Hope it’s fixed, will likely only be fixed with Cataclysm though.
Not all fightpaths, if you go from one safe zone (Darnassus) to another safe zone (Darkshore) then yes you’re no longer PvP flagged. I did this all the time in Classic to get Onyxia buff to avoid the dispellers.
The code for this must exist somewhere because It wasn’t a problem in later patches. I don’t know when they fixed it but at some relatively early point they did.
This doesn’t work in many cases, dingus. If the tank has a different PvP flag state than the DPS, Beacon of Light doesn’t work. I can’t get the other players to change their flag. I try every time. Changing my flag has no effect.
Also, is it asking too much to want the game to work correctly? It’s pretty absurd to act like the correct solution for major bugs is to just deal with it.
Wanting to keep the code clean is a great reason to come up with long-term design solutions that capture the conceptual nature of systems. But if your obsession with clean code goes so far that you’re willing to let major bugs exist in your application if it avoids special-case code, you’re a terrible at managing software projects, and should be fired.
You don’t release crap that is broken because the code looks cleaner. Like what?
Except it doesn’t. I can’t heal correctly because some instance members are flagged and some are not. I tell them to flag themselves, and they don’t. I have no control over what other players do. Eventually, people die and kick the healer. How is this an acceptable work-around?
… you’re aware that special-case code does not just affect how it LOOKS, right?
It’s harder to write.
It’s harder to test.
It’s harder to debug.
It’s harder to document.
It’s harder to explain to new developers.
Its behavior is harder to predict.
