Ranger Archive
Thread: Success in using /areatrack to find Krayts or other rare spawns?
Has anybody had any success with using /areatrack to find Krayts or other rare spawns? Krayt-hunting seems to have become my in-game occupation of late, but I've realized some things about the using /areatrack in the Krayt Graveyard.
Tonight for instance, when we first got the to graveyard I pulled up the menu and got a Giant Canyon Krayt 260 meters Northeast, we go northeast for a little while, don't find anything, pullup /areatrack again and no krayts are on the list, now we only travelled about 300 meters in a northeast direction so it should still be on the list right? Nope, I figure it has despawned, which I'm sure is the case as we were the only group in the graveyard. For the next two hours we wander the graveyard killing all lairs and spawns with me constantly tracking and find no signs of Krayts anywhere at all. Half our group gets bored and leaves. The whole group starts getting fairly spread apart so we take a break to regroup, while we are regrouping I pull up the menu again and there are three Krayts on it, one is 160 meters east. We spread out and begin combing an eastward direction nobody finds it, I pull up the menu and once again there are no Krayts.We decide to regroup again and while people are on the way to me, somebody says over group they were just slain by a Krayt,he is200 meters away and the Krayt does not show on my /areatrack, maybe it was truncated off, I can't be sure, I got toward his location and find the krayt.
This is always happening to me, I'll verify no Krayts in the area and suddenly one will be on top us killing us all, or I'll find krayts on the list that nobody can ever find. This doesn't happen with more common spawns, I can always find them right off.
So anybody else had any experiences like this? Is this skill completely useless for finding rare creatures?
That happens to me all the time..On corellia, talus, tattooine, lok, dath, and endor. I will get what I am looking for on the area track and drop a waypoint and then head in the direction listed until I get at the correct distance and then start looking around and staying at that distance. I figure 5 times out of 10 the creature is not there. I experience that alot when I am out side the standard mission spawn areas. Of' course if you move even farther out from the cities the area track wont show anything at all..that is until you move a hundred meters and have a lair spawn on ya
Jebus -lowca-
Master Ranger
I have had that same issue happen to me repeatedly this last Sunday on Dathomir.
Today [Tuesday], on Endor, the track has been dead on.I was able to pinpoint mobs 400m+ from my location 100% of the time. It was pure pleasure (except that 30sec wait hehe)
Speculation1 : A wild guess is that mob data is not loaded client side once you zone in like EQ did it (but the zones were also a lot smaller) , but remains server side till a query happens (that could be why track takes 30secs) or you move within range of 100m. Now, my guess would be that anyquery done for mob data across server boundaries might give wrong results, and once the server boundary is crossed and /areatrack is refreshed, we are loading newand complete different data. [Then again I know jack about game design, server clustering and all that other stuff
]
Specualtion2: Developers did some [stealth] tweaking the code yesterday
I've got the same problems in Dathomir, looking for Fliers & Graulswith a CH friend...
Most of the times something spawned on our head even if my track didn't find anything...
The difference between SWG and EQ Spawning system IMHOis, EQ got a "static" system even for random mobs, SWG not.
I was with Ember last night and can verify that it was quite frustrating. It sounds to me like you have two issues here (I'm not a Ranger, so someone may have to straighten me out). First, is the /areatrack list scrollable? If it's a fixed length, you really need to report this as an issue. There's no telling what your missing out on if you can't see the whole list. Second, large prey/predators that are somewhat rare and have random spawns seem to not work on the /areatrack unless someone has already been by there and established there spawn.
Ember has witnessed the /areatrack work on krayts before, but that was because when we got there, they were already engaged by other players.
PadiOne, the list is scrollable, but like the old insurance list it will truncate to 50 items, so if there are more than 50 things out there all you get is 50, considering it shows pets, droids, andfaction petson the creature list sometimes when we are out hunting them it hits the 50 limit a lot.
The 50 creature limit though is not what is causing us the most problems though I don't think although it is a pain. I think the way the spawns work in the game makes /areatrack useless to find stuff like this. Most of the time an area wont spawn any creatures in it until somebody actually goes into it, and if you leave an area what is there will sometimes despawn. To Illustrate this point find a lair somewhere out in the wild where you are the only one around, count the creatures around it, run about 300 meters away, then turn around and run back to the lair, most likely the lair itself will remain, but it will respawn different creatures around it when you get back. This is really obvious when you have almost killed something and go back to finish it off, and get there to discover it has full health again. This also happens on Talus when I'm hunting Giant Dalyrakes since the lairs typically spawn Giant Dalyrakes, Dalyrake Matriarchs, and regular Dalyrakes, not to mention a number of baby dalyrakes of varying types. If there are three Dalyrakes around a lair I can back off and sometimes come back to five Giant Dalyrakes being around that same lair. Weird how that works...
/areatrack when used, during its godawful delay, should have the affect of me running around everywhere and spawning creatures into those areas... then it should report to me whats there. Maybe this is how it works already and I'm experiencing the problem I just talked about that once you actually get to that area the spawn generates something else there.
"I'm not sure if there is a problem with Krayts in general, but I've had several people report Krayts despawning on them. Maybe it's horrible pathing and they're warping, I dunno. "
- Its a general NPC issue. I've had creatures (not big ones like Krayt, but smaller ones like snakes and such) I was fighting simply vanish mid-battle for no particular reason at all.
- I suspect that if a creature gets too old (has been in the system for too long), it is simply removed. However it is not supposed to be removed while actively engaged with someone.
- The developers did attempt to fix the problem of them vanishing while in combat during beta. Apparently there are still issues regarding it.
"Most of the times something spawned on our head even if my track didn't find anything..."
- Sadly, /areatrack only finds creatures that currently exist in the system... Not ones that will be added in the near future.
- Many people have noted that they sometimes find closer spawns of creatures while running towards a point located via /areatrack.
- These new spawns were probably added by the system after the area scan was performed, and were therefore not picked up.
- I still say that /areatrack should locate the spawn points, and not the creatures themselves. That way the listing would be smaller, and you would be able to locate areas where newly spawned creatures will appear.
Yes that would be most useful, at least if we know an area is a spawn for Krayts we can leave it and comeback and likely a Krayt will spawn there.
NRaas wrote:
- I still say that /areatrack should locate the spawn points, and not the creatures themselves. That way the listing would be smaller, and you would be able to locate areas where newly spawned creatures will appear.