I was just in a group to run Deadmines. I knew I had done it once already today. My stupid brain just forgot to integrate the knowledge that this was Official Hardcore and I was in for a surprise. When I passed through the portal, naturally I got kicked back out. The problem was that the train of mobs the tank had pulled on the way stayed in combat with me even though I saw a client load screen. I guess your character doesn’t actually get removed from threat tables until the transfer process from the world server to the instance server is allowed to start.
It didn’t kill me. I ran away using Frost Nova and Mana Shield like an absolute ninja. Still, had I not gotten into a mob dead zone in time or whatever, it would have felt kinda weird to have died to a clerical error – perhaps even grossly upsetting if it had been a much higher-level dungeon. Since the Classic Dev Team made it clear in interviews that they’re actively seeking this kind of feedback (technicality deaths surprising players), I’m wondering what could be done about this, not at all questioning the need for lockouts in the first place.
Now, I know you, dear reader, would never make this mistake and you’re absolutely itching to reply and say that baddies that don’t check /raidinfo before going after the Emberstone Staff twice in the same 24-hour period should get what’s coming to them. And you know, you do you. I can’t stop ya.
But for the rest of us diligently testing and carefully considering the design decisions which the Classic Team has thoughtfully made, what ideas do you have about this? Of the ideas of others you may read in the thread below, which are your favorites?
Mine are:
Teleport the character to the nearest graveyard instead of dropping them back outside the dungeon. This is probably doable, but may potentially be abused. It’s effectively adding a reset spot outside of each dungeon, like the water wheel in Deadmines. At least they wouldn’t get to stay right next to the portal so they couldn’t really effectively use it to repeatedly attempt to solo an elite or something. But still, I’m not sure.
Warn the player when their character is approaching the portal for an instance already locked out. This could probably be done simply with some LUA changes to the default UI, but might be rather tedious. In weighing this as an edge case, project managers may easily decide the work isn’t worth the value. If the Classic Team doesn’t want to do it, it might be a wonderful gift from the add-on author community, who knows?
Remove the character from threat tables before the lockout query. This would at least give the player a chance to use their Hearthstone or request the party help them clear a path back out if it’s on cooldown. In addition, it’s a more uniform change than the last one. Unfortunately, it kinda smells like more of an engine change than a design change, and there could be some development bandwidth issues doing it.
I completely understand where you’re coming from as that would be a very unfortunate side effect, however look at it this way as I respond to each of your 3 bullet pin suggestions.
1- Teleporting to nearest graveyard would be pretty OP for a large number of reasons. Think of the commitment and struggle to get down to BRD and the amount of possible ways to die when doing that dungeon. Remember all the times you did a dead run back to BRD or MC? That graveyard is a massive teleport that many people would finish dungeon, run out, and immediately try to run back in so they instantly get teleported back to town to be able to sell gear ect. Unfortunately I think the teleport suggestion would be abused so heavily that it’s purpose would almost never truly be used for its intention.
2- Warning the player about approaching a portal causes the same issue you already have. Say your tank ran past all those mobs and goes into portal, you are approaching portal and you get the pop up saying hey btw you already did this dungeon. So all those mobs are already getting aggrod onto you because tank went into dungeon. Only thing this did was prevent you from walking up to the entrance but your main issue still exists. Not to mention the additional effort coding this in will do for a design that they likely won’t see as a neccesary change. Sure it would be nice but end of the day they don’t do any type of appeals for deaths caused by their server or issues on their end. They prob aren’t gonna be interested in making a whole new trigger command for players who don’t track their lockouts they just prob say “that’s unfortunate go again”
3- While I agree with this being the most likely thing to be done and help with getting all the threat when people enter the dungeon this now opens up another way that could be abused ect. Think of it like the tank is already locked to dungeon, he runs past and pulls 12 mobs. goes to enter dungeon, discovers he’s already locked, all threat drops off him and instantly turns and starts hitting all his squishies who were following. If one of them dies now they all report tank saying he intentionally griefed. Even if an accident did he get them killed? and They took away bubble hearth from paly’s so they couldn’t avoid consequences of mistakes, I highly doubt they make another functionality for players to hearth out when they make a mistake.
I do think the situation would really really suck if that happened. I would say the simplest thing that they could do is every time you do a /reload or go through a load screen it just posts your current lock outs that are active in the chat bubble below.
This would likely annoy a lot of people but it’s the only thing that they could do as a reminder to avoid people saying “i forgot” without adding something that’s abuseable ect. but I do appreciate you bringing this up as it’s a simple thing to miss and has dastardly consequences.
Grats on surviving, would be pretty easy to die to that situation.
Although it feels less like a bug and more like an opportunity to improve the design to me, fair enough. I’m just hoping that the designers and reading these forums. I didn’t want to in any way impact the reporting and correction of simpler and cleaner problems.
My good sir, your concerns were already generally addressed in the OP, to wit:
But, if a more specific response will be helpful, then I shall say that being put into an overly dangerous situation not because of lack of game knowledge or cockiness but simply forgetting a typically insignificant detail—such as what dungeons one has already run today in Vanilla or that this side-effect can occur from a rule intended to deal with an unrelated issue—is kinda crap. And “gamer signaling” about it doesn’t really hold water.
I don’t think that you should be able to run a dungeon more than once a day. And I’m not crying over this issue, either. I can just foresee it causing problems for some people who will understandably feel that it was unfair or beat themselves up about it. I don’t think you or I benefit from that. So, I see this as a potential opportunity for improvement on the design for something that is already a #change.
These last two are both better than what it does now and I think even less complex/problematic than the solutions I came up with. Kinda jelly I didn’t think of them.
I think I like this one more…
It would be even better if a message got printed to the chat window explaining what just happened. Or… could it leave you in the party but put you in your saved instance and leave it to the party, who can still communicate with one another, to figure it out.
If you are in a group and people have already zoned in to a new id you get locked out at the entrance. If you are on your own or in a group that shares the same lockout you zone in to the dungeon id you are locked to. If you zone into a dungeon id that you finished 20 hrs ago the trash has usually respawned but the bosses are absent.
That is not the case. Install the PTR and try to enter a dungeon a second time in the same day after someone in your party who doesn’t have your ID zones in first. It will immediately boot you out, not zone you in to your previous ID.
Yeah, I struggled with my own issues with them and found them seriously wanting until others came along and, you know, productively contributed better ideas.
And no offense to you either, but I’d find your opinion carried more weight if you didn’t
both criticize my original ideas for vaguely defying “the spirit of hardcore” (thinly veiled gatekeeping) and annihilate your own credibility by demonstrating that you don’t actually know how the game behaves in your first sentence.
