Command Pet to Stop Attacking Does Nothing

2/3/2016 6:51 AM
Title: Command Pet to stop attacking does nothing.
Reproduction Rate: 100%
Blocker? No
Details: The Command Pet to Stop Attacking feature doesn't work. In fact, if I dismiss a pet, flee from combat and re-summon the pet, it charges off to attack whatever it was attacking before, forcing me to dismiss it again or risk pulling a huge amount of bad guys.
Steps to Reproduce: Summon any tamed pet and attempt to command it to stop attacking.
User Specs:
OS: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (6.1.7601) 64bit
CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 840 Processor (4) System RAM: 8191
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 5570 GPU RAM: 2037
SotA.EarlyAccess.Win.64.374.Date.02.02.16
Area: Novia_R1_Hills01_01
Loc: (-20.4, 69.3, -82.8)

 

The pet behaviors are working as intended when testing locally. Can you check to see which behavior setting you have active for your pet? What you're describing sounds like when a pet is set to Aggressive, at which point it will largely disregard your commands.

 

@Attenwood perhaps that should be clarified in the documentation?

 

I'm genuinely interested to know what players imagine Aggressive would be if not behaving like above. And how that would differ from Defensive.

 

@Attenwood @DarkStarr

Here's the entire description of this feature in the R26 instructions:

Note it doesn't say just what each of the aggression levels does. Now I actually think that's fine - figuring out just what things do is part of the game experience. What's not so fine is this:

That's what you call a side-effect, or non-orthogonal commands, where one affects another's status, without warning. Not so good for figuring things out, a no-no in UX design, and marginal even in a game setting. Likely to produce frustrated users and/or bug reports, as witness this thread.

I stand by the suggestion: Document what's going on or - better - modify so that the aggression level and explicit commands are independent of one another.

 

That is what will most likely become the case as the game gets further developed and AI gets closer to finalized. We are still in a fluffy place of testing changes and tweaking behaviors every release. Heck, within just a couple weeks, defensive pets were following similar behavior patterns of just going after any hostile target they could. The current design is left as open and... well.. vague in some cases because user experience with the system is still so new and there's no telling how it will be changed in even a day if the right feedback is received.

As we get closer to what we feel will be the finalized behaviors, I suspect you'll start to see more intuitive UX choices. As you say, making aggression levels and explicit pet commands independent of one another will be some low-hanging fruit for how to do so. Especially if the intended final design of "Aggressive" behavior pets is to disregard and ignore some player commands (like stopping), then the commands should be a nonexistent component while pets are in that state. There are commands that do work in the "Aggressive" state however, like commanding them to switch targets. It's uncertain yet how much control we want to have over Aggressive pets, or if we want them to behave as their independent AI would have them.