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EverQuest Players Defeat 'Unkillable' Monster
Thanks to Got Game? for their posting discussing the in-game slaying of Kerafyrm, aka The Sleeper, in PC MMO EverQuest. This event, commemorated with a screenshot on the site of one of the guilds involved, is notable because the players "...killed what Sony Online Entertainment intended to be unkillable. But rather than actually make it untargetable, Sony just gave it a hundred billion hitpoints. For those non EQers out there a reference scale: a snake has about 10 hitpoints. A dragon has about 100,000. A god has 1-2million." So, it took "close to 200 players almost 4 hours to beat the thing down into the ground", after an earlier failed attempt where the guilds "beat it down to 27% and then it mysteriously disappeared. Without dying. It seems that one of the Game Masters at SoE reset the zone because 'they thought the encounter might be bugged'."
If it's supposed to be unkillable, why didn't they just give it unlimited hit points?
Course this will probably mean 'we need 2000 people for this one guys' for some MMO gamers..
Proving they have too much time on their hands one unkillable monster at a time.
So what treasure did he leave behind? Hwo much experience? Etc.??? And yes I read the linked articles and none of them mention anything... and if he dropped nothing then that sucks almost as bad as Sony resetting the zone...
While it is all good and well that they bonded together to put the smack down on him, is there anything unfathomably cool to show for it?
Making something difficult is no substitute for making it impossible.
That reminds me of a little incident on Ultima Online years ago where a prankster with a firefield scroll managed to kill Lord British during one of his in game cameos.
The guy got banned from the game, though Origin claimed that it was for other TOS violations. Back then UO was looking so broken, and Origin was claiming that there was no problem with the game client. This was a real slap in the face to them when their own slowed buggy servers let someone kill the most important personality in the game universe.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
If this monster has been in the game since the games inception, how does it get it's hitpoints back? When no players are in the immediate vicinity (ie: viewable) of it?
In my experience in these types of games, if i get into a fight with a monster, then die/give up against it, it will then wander around with the remainder of its hit points until it dies.
This is half the fun of MMORPGs and it happens all too infrequently.
Half the articles on here are about how designers want to create camraderie amongst players and keep them from griefing newbies. Here's a secret-- give them a challenge, something that they can't do, then wait and see how long it takes. And on a PVP server too, bravo.
On an old MUD I used to play the designers created quests that were insanely hard to crack. People would spend hours trying to figure them out. New games rarely have this sort of thing-- even the high level EQ quests are waaaay too straightforward and don't require any brainpower.
I suppose it just costs too much to have to make unique quests that are reworked after being solved.
I would like to be there when they try to use their 15 minutes of fame to get laid at a bar.
Really, if Sony wanted an unkillable monster they should have done more to prevent it. Invulnerability would be the best choice, since giving people any chance means they'll take it. Failing that, a obscene hp regeneration rate coupled with pornographic hp and insta-death to anyone within theoretical attack range might work. Given the ingenuity people display when trying to circumvent the rules, however, I suspect that anything less than complete invulnerability would be overcome eventually.
Of course, the above ideas are based on the assumption that the game rules are followed. Exploits and other rule-breaking techniques throw everything out the window.
The monster was kind of like an Agent from the Matrix. Even though it was "all powerful" and supposedly impossible to kill, it was still bound by the laws of system. Same as an Agent. Instead of running away from it, some users decided to go all "Neo" on it and take it down. Not bad.
One of my guys here at work is an evercrack addict, and he was saying that the dragon that was killed was a set-piece for a quest/storyline that was running.
It'll be interesting to see how they rewrite the quest/story to relfect the realities of the situation....
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
how long until it gets solo-ed?
One of my DMs was fond of saying: "If you give it hitpoints, the players will kill it" when describing god design. I guess he was right...
--
$tar -xvf
i think it's pretty d*d funny that the one thing gameplayers could agree on for an in-game large-scale social goal was to thwack the monster meant to be part of the permanent landscape. Somewhere, an executive is going mad under their desk, whispering things about a revolution...
i wonder whether such things will be deliberately introduced into future games, as a quiet little way to increase teamwork?
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
It depends whether the NPC in question had been thought of when the engine was written, or whether it was added later. I don't know how often Everquest developers update the client, but if it had no concept of "invincible", it's possible that they would decide a client update would be too much effort, and stick to things the client could already do.
I used to make mods for X-Wing vs TIE Fighter; admittedly, the available tools were all reverse-engineered, so we never really knew for sure what the engine was capable of, but it was pretty limited in areas Totally Games (the developers) hadn't needed.
One of the early XWvTF missions that used add-on models was the Death Star trench run from A New Hope. The Death Star was represented by a square something like a hundred miles wide, with a trench running across it (10 polygons making up 5 rectangles - "ground" to the left, "ground" to the right, and two sides and a floor for the trench). A few other mod makers (including me) used the same mesh as a convenient representation of "the ground" in other ground-based scenarios.
It turned out that the XWvTF engine didn't have a form of invincibility that was useful; the "invincible" flag in mission files actually meant "no collision detection", and flying down the Death Star trench pursued by TIE fighters would be no fun if you flew straight through it whenever you should have crashed, so people usually just gave it a few million points of hull strength instead.
In the sequel, X-Wing Alliance, "invincible" was implemented in a much nicer way: invincible ships could get hit, they could lose shields, they could even be seriously damaged (slightly alarming in one mission where you fly alongside Luke Skywalker), but they never dropped below 1% hull strength.
(If you still play XWvTF or XWA, see my linked homepage for some old custom models and an XvT mission pack)
1.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All into the Impossible
Rode almost two hundred.
"Forward, the Heavy Brigade!
"Charge the dragon!" they said:
Into the Impossible
Rode almost two hundred.
2.
"Forward, the Heavy Brigade!"
Was any wizard dismayed?
Not though all guildsmen knew
Someone had blundered:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to go and try:
Into the Impossible
Rode almost two hundred.
3.
Dragon to right of them,
Dragon to left of them,
Dragon in front of them
Fumed and thundered;
Stormed at with sword and shell,
Boldly they fought and well,
Fought with old Kerafyrm
Fought at the the mouth of Hell
Fought almost two hundred.
4.
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed spells they turned from air,
Pelting the Dragon there,
Charging a Fortress, while
All the world wondered:
Plunged into fire-breathed smoke
Through 2 billion hit points they broke;
Dragon unkillable
Reeled from their mighty stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they returned back, but not
With a bit of loot
No rust-sword for the bold
Almost two hundred.
5.
Quiet to right of them,
Quiet to left of them,
Quiet behind them
No mighty thunder.
No "Jolly good!" and "well!"
No grand applause to tell
How they had fought so well
Came, killed old Kerafyrm
Came, did the Impossible.
All that was left for them,
For almost two hundred, then,
Was burnt Dragon.
6.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Dragon Slayers,
Nearly two hundred!
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only on /. would something this lame make headlines.
Get Virtual.
The saddest part is that it dropped no items nor did the EverQuest GMs give out anything for defeating the dragon (that I know of).
3+ hours for nothing but posterity.
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
...it was Chii who did the Sleeper in. :)
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
You know, the board game that Starbucks sells in their coffee shops.
The rules are so pathetically thin that situations come up with no ready answers in the rules, so we make it up. Consequently, everyone I know plays the game a little diffently.
I had the inspiring idea during Sculptorades (where you sculpt your clues in plasticene) that I could spell the answer out in the clay. Of course, the rules say nothing about this.
People will always try to achieve the impossible or seemingly impossible.
Never underestimate the power of a couple hundred geeks. Next on the hitlist? How about the RIAA!
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Orca of the Azure Sea.
I wonder if the descendants of Fionna had anything to do with this?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
> Can't attack dead things, eh?
Something tells me you haven't played many fantasy RPGs...
Look out! There's a lich behind you!
Sentimentality is merely the Bank Holiday of cynicism.
- Oscar Wilde
A 32 bit integer can only hold a value of up to 4 billion, and that's if you don't allow negative numbers. If you allow negative numbers, then it's half that.
I seriously doubt they put special code into the game for handling integers larger than that if only one creature would need it.
The fact that the proles rebelled and killed the unkillable God when they were supposed to be killing each other. It is insurrection at its best.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
Was it a sea urchin?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Reminds me of "Harry" in Asherson's Call which was a shard that had to be destroyed as part of the story line. On the thistledown server a band of PK's got together and protected it 24hours a day long after it had been killed on the other servers. So the devs had to actually force it to be killed by spawning in Admin control monsters and getting one person on the server to volunteer to be the villain. They even made a statue to commemorate the event in the game.
Now, one could go through the code and change ALL those lines of code, just to accomodate this creature... or they can just assign it a high number. The design decision was reasonable, and hey, the outcome of the effort of these players is only a good thing. It's a nice story for all the players involved. After all, we know EQ players give up their pathetic real lives in favor of their EQ virtual lives.
(that last part was a joke. Mostly. Don't anyone kill themselves over it.).
We did this on MUDs I've played. Ever killed the Executioner in Midgard? I have :-D
Just follow the day, and reach fo
It's interesting that the story says that the beast had 100 billion hitpoints. This wouldn't fit into a 'long' on a 32-bit architecture. So either is EQ using more than 32-bit numbers for hitpoint counting, or it was something like 2147483647 (2^31, two billion) hitpoints and they actually managed to underflow the counter ...
Looks like the Sleeper can't awaken anymore!
Can I buy the corpse on Ebay?
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
Congratulations, you are ignorant. Use TWO 32-bit ints. Four extra bytes aren't about to bring the EQ servers to a screeching halt.
Well that would mean special code to handle those large values, unless you meant they compiled EQ with larger ints.
They got teh powerup and won teh game!
A winner is you!
As a hardcore gamer (though not of EQ) I totally understand the drive to succeed in a near-impossible videogame task like this, and I've seen milestones come and go time and again. The perfect Pac-Man game. 43 seconds Minesweeper Expert. Quake 1, completed in under 12 1/2 minutes. Perfect Dark, done on all difficulty settings in less than 100 minutes. I know the dedication you put in for an achievement likely to be recognised by only a tiny fraction of the whole world, and I know the elation when the barrier falls, the timer stops one second faster than the previous record, the final objective completes. I can only hope that there exist more and greater challenges out there, because, seriously, who in the world would want to stop here?
"Nearly impossible" = "possible".
qntm.org
sure. either with special code, or with something like long ints (http://www.technipal.com/cpp/datatypes.html).
As an avid Role-Player myself this rings true to a debate a friend and I have had for years. I play alot of D&D (3.5) and my friend plays Shadowrun. In D&D they came out with a book of Gods & DemiGods and gave them stats that it would probably take 4 - 50th level PC's to take out. As the game only supports level 20 by default (ie minus the Epic Level Handbook) I am of the opinion that that's enough to make sure they won't die should I bring them into a campaign. My friend however pointed out that in the Shadowrun universe any "plot character" such as Harlequin the Immortal Elven Mage has a character sheet that simply states "Harlequin always wins, Harlequin can do anything and everything" And I've argued that this takes away from the game. It's not even a fair playing field! I used to argue that at least the Gods in my campaign, while uber-powerful, had to follow the rules and roll a die before they accomplished something (though the odds of failure were approximately 1 in 20.) This however gives me a new perspective. And I think should my players ever beat a god ... I'll give them good loot.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
only on /. would people post so senseless comments.
what happens if the server is a 64-bit binary, meaning that the int type is 64 bit wide?
The server is actually a Commodore 128 with the RAM expansion unit (They need the RAM for the new graphics)
And that's why downtime is usually 6 hours per patch.
That page is blatantly wrong.
The language specification doesn't give lengths for short [int], int, or long [int]. In fact, K&R say that typically a short is 16 bits, a long is 32 bits, and an int is typically 32 or 16 bits, depending upon the native integer size.
On most current platforms, short is 16 bits, int is 32 bits and long is also 32 bits. Many compilers also support long long and ultra long long, although those aren't in the standard (well, maybe they are in C99; I'm not sure).
Typically gcc uses a 32 bit long and a 64 bit long long, with int being 32 bit or 64 bit depending upon the native integer size. So not only is long not necessarily bigger than an int, it is actually smaller on some platforms. Again though, this is all implementation specific, and not specified in any standard.
The issues that would likely prevent Sony from using a 64 bit value here would be that the extra memory for changing the field on all monsters would be huge. Secondly (and more importantly) they are likely running 32-bit servers, so the extra overhead of performing 64-bit integer operations would be very significant.
You're missing the point. Of course the developers *could* have made the hitpoint field larger than 32 bits if they wanted to using various techniques, the question is why would they have bothered if no other monster in the game even gets close to the 32-bit limit. Programmers are lazy, remember. ;)
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
point noted.
The developers of EQ have used the "short-cut" of giving a monster several million hitpoints rather than making it invulnurable a number of times. I can think of at least 2 monsters besides the sleeper invulnerable in this fashion. In both cases the monsters are present for part of a quest scripted event. Sadly, the limitations of the everquest scripting engine require that "things you interact with" to be basically monsters. Which leads to the brutal and unnecassary slaying of the "File Cabinet"
if we ever have giant space invaders with 100 billion hit points wandering Earth, there'll be a few hundred brave people with pointy sticks to hack away at it until it dies. Maybe humanity will survive, afterall. =)
long long (but not "ultra long long") is in the C99 standard.
That page is comically wrong. All integers are rational, all rationals are real, floats and doubles can only exactly represent certain rational numbers. A char is the smallest addressable unit, which may or may not be called a byte. They neglected signed char, wchar_t, and all the actual size constrants (such as char at least eight bits, short at least 16, long at least 32).
The developers didn't mess up not accounting for such a large battle. It's most likely minimally difficult for them to make an object invincible.
The point, in MMOG especially, is that having something possible, but very difficult actually serves a role beyond him just being there. In this case it united an entire server.
Making games realistic whereas nothing is invincible makes them better (in my opinion).
If I had it my way, as a character, I could destroy whatever it is I wanted. Obviously this holds true, everyone wants to be strong. I'm talking about everything being possible, just someone has to gather the means to do it.
Imagine if a group of X amount of players was able to actually destroy a town in everquest by bashing at it for a day? That would be an amazing news item, and be something that SoE should use to propel the story on each server.
Good stuff, congrats!
then the long is typically 64 bit, at least if you're using a modern language.
-
Nobody seems to know for sure exactly how many hitpoints Kerafyrm had, or what his regen rate was. It can definitely be considered in the "obscene hp regeneration rate coupled with pornographic hp" range. As for "insta-death to anyone within theoretical attack range", he hits for just under 7000hp with each swat. For comparison, my level 52 has about 2000hp. At the time, level 60 was the upper limit. 7000hp would be enough to kill just about anyone near him, and that's not taking into account his other attacks. The clerics were constantly resurrecting the dead. It wasn't just that people are now ten times stronger (current level cap is 65 plus Alternate Advancement abilities) and could stand up to the guy.
As was stated, the story goes that Kerafyrm was put to sleep to prevent him from destroying a whole bunch of stuff. When players manage to kill the four warders guarding the Sleeper, he wakes up and goes on his scripted rampage through the zones. Once he is awoken, that's it; it doesn't happen again. Other creatures will eventually regen or respawn, but Kerafyrm was a special creature that played an important role in some of Sony's scripts. GMs (the in-game Sony people) have said in the past that Kerafyrm was a part of the EQ2 storyline, so they simply wouldn't allow him to be killed. Resetting the zone, spawning other creatures to attack the players in the middle of the Sleeper fight, or whatever else they might think up. I guess we'll have to see how that one plays out.
Sony has also outsourced some EQ stuff to other companies in foreign countries. The Sleeper was just recently killed on one of these outsourced Asian servers, but they are several expansions behind, and therefore Kerafyrm hasn't received the upgrades that the main servers have. It was an official Sleeper kill, just not the same Sleeper most of us are used to.
While it may not be "Stuff that matters." in the grand scheme of things, it's definitely "News for Nerds." Congratulations again to those who took down the beast.
Anybody ever heard this exspression? Seems very apt here.
No. Smith was taking over the system and was killed by sacrafice.
Also, had the developers wanted, they could simply make the thing invincible. They could give it an infinite amount of hit points, make it untargatable, make it immune to all forms of damage, etc. It's not hard to make truly incincible enemies that obey the laws of the system of a video game.
Like mnay of the NPCs in Star Wars Galaxies. Guns will not fire at them, (the game just fails to respond to the attack command if they are targeted), splash damage (like from a grenade) does not affect them, and they have no hitpoints on which to do any damage anyhow.
I've used it extensively to process time tags, which are often larger than 32-bits.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Some game experiences come to mind. Hmm let's see if I can pick a specific example...
Approx 14-16th level party vs like 26-28th level spellcaster. This was supposed to be a "plot" encounter where the DM smacked us around a bit before having our asses saved by divine providence. Unfortunately it was his broken NPC that needed saving.
After a few minutes of stalemate with the party hiding in an antimagic field set up by my cleric cohort and my paladin and the others figuring out that running outside it, flying up, and whacking with a sword, even a good sword wouldn't work, we changed tactics. Next time I came flying up with an extra-fluffy towel I'd had sitting in my inventory since level 9 or so (about a year and a half of previous gameplay). So, grapple check, got him wrapped in towel. Now what? I throw him in the antimagic field of course. Then the rest of the party proceeds to kick the stuffing out of him.
Unfortunately they always have tricks like hiding their souls and stupid minions always show up to bail them out, otherwise we'd have had him easy.
Shortly after this we started a new campaign to get away from the rampant munchkining that had occured. Our DM found out that even at level 1, giving me things like a crowbar, a net, some paint, or pepper can be a bad idea.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!