On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, Christopher Andrews wrote:
>
> yesterday alone i encountered two separate occasions when i could not
> sing a song due to another song being what appeared to be "locked" into
> verse. now the peculiar thing was that one of these times, i was in east
> commons grouped with another bard, and some others. i decided since i was a
> little higher than he was, to sing my hymn song instead to heal up the party
> a wee faster. his song ended. i attempted to start my hymn. did not take...
> at all. i tried maybe 20 times. grrr... this wasn't the first time it had
> happened to me, so i didn't panic. i simply zoned. it seems to fix the
> problem, but isn't necessarily something you want to do while either
> fighting some mobs, or trying to heal your party while preparing for the
> next battle.
> even while i was running towards the zone, i asked the other bard to sto
> singing his song again. he did once more. i was maybe half the zone away
> from him and still kept getting the message "your wounds begin to heal."
> hmmm... i left clicked on the icon to try removing the effects that way.
It's a client/server synch problem causing this. Due to lag,
packet loss, a spell (procs used to do this), or hitting the
buttons too darn fast, the server thinks you're singing when
the client thinks you aren't (or vice versa). You hit a song
button to start it, the client tells the server "I'd like to
start this song," the server says "No you can't, you're
already singing a song," so the client turns off the song.
People are experiencing the same problem with AE fear
"sticking" their spell buttons so they can't cast anything.
I'm surprised to hear healing works this way too - I'd thought
that only certain effects were client-side (Accelerando, see
invis, etc). It's possible that all the songs (and spells)
work this way.
To fix it, Verant needs to add better client/server messaging
and logic. If the server tells the client that it can't start
a song because one is already in play, it should tell it that
(as opposed to just "you can't start that song"). Then the
client can say "Oh, I didn't know I was already playing a
song. Well stop it, I'd rather play this song instead."
Considering the extremely severe consequences of not being
able to start a song or a spell, my guess as to why they don't
fix it is the people who wrote the networking code for EQ have
been shuffled to other jobs inside Sony.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...