Shaman Cannibalize II

[Teppen]

my human monk completed this quest on live and did all the way up past shackle of tynn and did the whistling fist quest which is given by cazic thule in fear... dunno why you couldnt start quest on live, maybe your faction wasnt high enough with swift tails. my human monk was agnostic. I was able to walk freely in cabilis and the evil town (shipyard) in overthere. anyways human monks could complete it, you just had to do alot of faction quests and faction grinding.

[sfisque]

one thing to note wrt to the VS faction. different zones had different hit levels.

case in point:

on live, many years ago:

my troll shaman hunted in kaesora several times, going from amiable to dubious. after some work in OT, got this repaired back to amiable. only some of the ghosts gave hits, but all the spiders gave negative VS hits. i cant remember if zalgoz gave a negative VS hit.

hunting in karnors was a non-issue. i leveled from 51 through 55 in karnors and went from amiable back to dubious, requiring more OT faction work. not every drolvarg gave a faction hit (depended on the type i think), only certain ghosts gave hits, and i cant recall if the hands did or did not.

hunting in charasis (howling stone) gave VERY HUGE faction hits. after about 20 kills, i was KOS and forever barred from banking/vendoring in OT (unfortunate since i would use the gate-hammer for convenience porting).

thus it seems the level of impact on faction was highest in HS, followed by kaesora, followed by karnors (not including the huge faction impact of killing venril sathir himself).

AFAIK, the only way to fix KoS VS faction was by killing Ring of Scale dragons, and that was pretty much a pipe dream because of the 5-7 day respawn on most of them.

not sure if the various DB's reflect these differing levels of faction impact, but something to be aware of when tuning your servers.

== sfisque

[Teppen]

Yeah, well with my human monk, never went anwhere that damaged VS faction once I had high enough faction to walk freely there. I took other characters into such area's.. why? dunno, I just liked seeing my human monk banking beside evil characters in an evil town. Agnostic characters started out able do the rotgrime quest which was to handing sarnak warbraids which was great considering others had to get wolfform. Only think that got you kos'ed was if you struck up a conversation with the gargoyle guards or conversations with the gm trainers (think it was gm trainers), anyhow, I did rotgrimes quest over and over countless times and was finally able to hail guards and gms without pulling any aggro. Which came in handy when I had to get a gem from one of the guards for part of an iksar monk shackle quest, and that quest was a daisy because human monks couldnt forage so I had to run my druid everywhere waiting and foraging then handing them to my monk, because they never seemed to be sold in bazaar heh. Anyways, back to the overthere town, it eventually became worthless once the PoP books were implemented since one is right outside the evil town it was just easier going to PoK, but I thought it was cool for awhile hehe.

[BWStripes]

I know faction was a lot harsher on live, and the current datbase contains a lot of...lets just say "forgiveness". Sadly, I know from experience that the majority of people on live didn't give a monkeys about faction.

Personally, I loved taking the time to bank in Cabilis

I know I mentioned it as a "warning", but an overhaul of faction needs a thread starting if its not being looked at already.

[sfisque]

even after PoP came out, the OT quests were worth it, just for the hammer. i cant tell you how many times i hunted in PITA locations like sebilis and used the hammer to go home because i was bound outside for convenience (lets face it, a sebilis CR when you're soloing or duoing without a rezzer is annoying at worst)

== sfisque

[cavedude]

Added the quest to PEQ, thank you!

Yeah, faction does need a major overhaul I have been planing on doing it for some time but it is a huge undertaking. Getting the data alone would take days.

[sfisque]

one request i'd like to make:

streamline the faction entries. currently the faction data is set up as one faction entry per npc_type entity, which is highly inefficient. there doesnt need to be one entry for EVERY freeport guard, froglok, cyclops, etc. we could probably get by with one entry for "all generic freeport guards", "all unamed wurms in skyfire", etc. that way the table gets alot smaller.

for example:

select * from npc_faction where primaryfaction = 105; -- freeport militia

yields a bunch of entries. since most of these guards are not special quest npcs, wouldnt it be more efficient to use a single npc_faction entry and have point to it. the same should be done for all the npc_faction entries. the npc_faction_entries table would have to be updated accordingly to point to the streamlined entries.

i know some of this stuff is cached in memory because i found that they are stored in an array keyed by id, and just arbitrarily removing entries (creating holes) causes the server to hiccough and fail to launch. thus it would require some work and not just arbitrarily removing the redundancies and updating the backpointers (foreign keys).

thus, reducing the clutter "should" make the server leaner memory-wise and run a tad more optimally.

i've started working on this in my personal DB, and i plan on sharing it once i get it all cleaned up and finished. if anyone is interested.

== sfisque