I decided this needs its own thread. Hopefully it won’t get lost among the tens of threads consisting of complaints and criticism.
I’ve done over 50 legend runs on the latest patch. God knows how many for 1.0.5. A hundred at the very least.
Not ONCE have I had a silent Leech. Not once have I had a silent anything. In every single run, I have been able to hear the special (regardless of what it is). I have been able to hear the patrol, regardless of type. I can hear exactly where they are coming from.
Not ONCE have I had a patrol spawn on top of me or anything of the sorts - an obvious bug with the earliest release, which (as far as I’m concerned has been completely fixed).
I don’t know where this huge dissonance between my experience and that of so many other people here is coming from. I struggle to believe that it is coming from faults within the software itself that are being exhibited only on certain PCs, and thus experienced by some people, but not all.
Please do not use this thread to complain about the AI Director in terms of the amount of specials spawned or the difficulty spikes that might involve, etc., unless you think the AI Director and the general behaviour of the game is influenced by the specific CPU, RAM or something of the sorts, which might be possible. I wouldn’t know.
Where is this massive difference in experience coming from? Am I the only one and simply going crazy?
Different users seem to be bugged to different degrees. This was the case even in 1.0.5. We could do 20 perfect legend runs then someone would leave and a new person would join and all of a sudden, every single run without fail would be the ai director on crack + bug central. That person would leave and someone else would join and it would change again.
i’ve never had them appear right on top, but 15 feet ahead is an extremely common thing. every single run of halescourge i’ll see a stormvermin patrol appear in front of that gate before the elevator while we’re cleaning up enemies.
do you host every run? because i notice silent special spawns tend to happen way less on my end if i host. as for silent chaos patrols, everyone in my group’s sound seems to bug out when they’re stomping about. not only do their stomps and chants cut in and out but multiple combat sounds will either not play or just be a garbled mess, like the patrol is somehow destroying sound channels. i doubt it’s CPU end as myself and the other guy that tend to host are running beefy rigs
Since the fix to Leaches I only rarely get silent ones now. However, It’s always been Packmasters that are the main culprits for silent spawns. Though I can’t easily define whether they are completely silent, or just spawn right behind me and only begin making sounds after grabbing me. It could also be that they only start making noises when extremely close.
From my own experience, having them at least boost the sound of Packmasters, or specials in general (happens with gas too sometimes) might help with this. I’m no expert but I do rely on sound to track specials, and when I’m intently listening and hear nothing, it makes me jump out of my skin to suddenly be dragged away.
Honestly I think it comes down to host PC power and connection quality. Director seems to get wonky when the host PC is either significantly over-or-under powered.
I have (a handful of times at most) had a patrol or horde spawn right on my face since the last patch, and every time it was a game where I was not the host and the connection for the whole game seemed really laggy and unstable.
It makes sense to me; if the connection is lagging a lot then my client PC might not get the message from the host about a patrol spawn up ahead, instead receiving it when the spawn is no longer up ahead and instead right on my face. Or maybe the director can’t spawn a thing until all the clients have responded back with an affirmative to spawn the thing, so if the director picks a location for a patrol and then has to wait around for a slow client to respond affirmative… Alternately depending on how the director works it may have sort of a queue of things it is spawning / processing / doing and on slow hosts simply not get to things in a timely fashion.
I’m just pulling ideas out of my a** here but from working in IT I can say that if software is reported to be performing differently on different computers, one of the first things you check is for underlying hardware/OS differences. The OS bit is a whole nother can of worms, even though this only runs on Windows there’s still a pretty wide range of Windows 7 & 10 versions and patch levels that could potentially be causing issues.