Distance Restrictions
Why is my damage way off fighting some NPCs?
Some of our NPC profiles have a "maximum distance" setting configured into their profiles that prevents damage beyond a certain distance. This is for a number of reasons:
- Our NPCs are also configured to "diminish damage based on distance" meaning the further away from them you are, the less damage they deal. The trade off being that we do not want you to be able to snipe them from a distance so great that they are not capable of harming you in return.
- Some of our monuments are designed in a way that inadvertently allows players to cheese them by sniping off all the NPCs at a distance or from a vantage point that the AI just cannot fight back from.
Again, as with all things, there always has to be risk with reward. This configuration lets us keep that policy enabled.
Example: In the old days of Zombie Island, when we just had giant swarms of zombies that would respawn in mere seconds, and would be worth a ton of RP and drop a ton of materials players would sit at max range on a rowboat and just pick off zombies non stop. With a 3 second respawn it was like an ATM machine for RP.
Sure we had SAR zombies on the island to prevent people from camping the melee ones where they could not be harmed in return .... but at max range the SAR ones could not do their job of preventing this cheese tactic. So "max distance" is a fairly new feature (we've been using it for almost 4 months now) that allows us to say "OK, if you are 250m or more away, your damage to this NPC gets nullified". This prevents players from finding a camping spot far far away where the NPCs could never return fire.
It only recently came into question because our damage report plugin that outputs your damage to chat could not communicate with the damage blocking feature. So you could unload a thousand rounds into an NPC and our damage output plugin only sees what you dish out, it does not know that the bot plugin prevented the damage because you were 400m away. So when the damage gets displayed in chat it could read some crazy high number.
Believe it or not this inaccuracy happens with a lot of things. If you have damage boosting skills or enchantments for example, the damage output to chat could have serious inaccuracies. There's no real way to avoid this without a massive reprogramming of numerous plugins and forcing them to talk to each other, which would also be a performance hit. Not worth the trouble and is just a bug we will have to live with.