0.10.4 Unhelpful and unfriendly NPCs [RESOLVED]

[Jay_H]

That appears to be working properly. Asking about people is intended to be far more difficult than buildings: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2145&start=20#p25430

[pango]

Thanks!

But should it be harder as in people are more likely to tell you to f... off or as in people are more likely to not know? I don't know how the TalkManager works, but I feel that it could be a real issue

[BansheeXYZ]

I think either DFU is missing something still, or it fixed a bug in classic that is adversely affecting gameplay.

Just a guess: Is it possible that classic NPCs spawn with a range of reaction bonuses, which offsets the -10 penalty and keeps it positive for chars with 0 starting rep? That might explain why in DFU, the -10 adjustment is causing the penalties themselves to almost always be the reaction for 0 rep players. I also noticed that NPCs keep their reaction for this question.

Classic: 41 PER and 0 commoner rep

negative fail (x3)
positive fail (x2)
positive success (x8)

DFU: 41 PER and 0 commoner rep

negative fail (x7)


Something else worth noting about classic: when I ask for directions to a store (not a quest person), I can get different reactions from the same person if I close the talk window and ask again. See: 30second mark, I get a negative fail in a sea of positive successes



btw, here's the saves in case you want to verify my results

dfuSAVE7.zip

(187.18 KiB) Downloaded 216 times

classicSAVE4.zip

(44.85 KiB) Downloaded 185 times

[Interkarma]

Thanks for all the details and feedback everyone! Definitely still some tuning needed here.

Ferital is currently the one most involved with this system now. He's taking a short break, but I'm sure he'll take a look when he returns.

I think we have enough info now to move this into bug reports for tracking.

[Ferital]

Just to mention this should be fixed in next DFU version. To quote what I said on the PR:

This restores random seed based on current NPC guid so each NPC in the same town will now react differently as this was already the case before PR #1370.

I also lowered the difficulty level required to get a successful answer when asking for people location with low personality characters, balancing this change by also lowering the bonus given to find a location (+5 instead of +10). Still, it's much more difficult than classic to find people, where we nearly always get a successful answer even with a very low personality, because of an incorrectly applied modifier (classic seems to always apply +10, regardless of the kind of question).

As with my previous PR #1370, Streetwise and Etiquette are more useful than in classic where one would always use Normal tone since it almost always gives better results. As an example, in DFU, I managed to get a positive answer from the same NPC by switching from Normal to Blunt tone (NPC was a commoner, for a Noble I would have used Etiquette of course).

And as requested on the forums (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2404), tone now remains checked as it was during the last talk session.

[Interkarma]

I have merged Ferital's changes and this problem seems resolved.

If NPCs are unhelpful and hostile at this point, I think it's legitimately going to be from poor reputation or personality. That is something for the player to work-around or roleplay as preferred.

Closing this one.