Below is a snip that I got from EQ Vault - that was cut from the Verant
boards. I had to chuckle that he actually used the expression "unintended
fix"...

Slyde

Hello all,

I noticed a number of people here talking about the way that creatures
decide to flee, referring to a change that went in with the last patch.
After speaking with the programmer responsible for AI among other things,
it's apparent that there was a change made while optimizing code that caused
an "unintended fix" to the AI. Though no one sat down and said, "I'm going
to make creatures flee more", that's the result.

Without going too far into specifics and formulae regarding the decision to
flee, there are several "components" that NPCs use to determine how brave
they are. One of the common ones that everyone knows about is the
interrelation of hitpoints and level with the attacker. One of the other
less-known components was using some uninitialized memory (memory space
allocated to a variable that hasn't yet been 'set' to anything, and usually
contains garbage) that had the effect of making NPCs much more brave than
they should have been.

We are going to discuss this in the tuning meeting Monday, but my initial
impression is that the AI is now working as it should, and I like how things
are turning out so far.

What are your thoughts?

-Gordon