Not seen anything like this before. Came across a very odd Ghost Ship last night. It seemed to have double everything: two rings of clouds, two lots of skulls on the beach and twice as many cannonballs, ghostly things. Odd shaped map too, though that could just be one thing spawning where another had. I soloed much of the battle and without a sceptre to deal with them it would have been overwhelming.
There was only one ship though, one HP bar for it, one death message. As best I could tell it had no more HP than a normal ship.
Then when it died two Davy Jones Lockers appeared at the same time, offset so they were at the centres of the two overlaid maps.
It was as if it spawned two ships at the same time, witth 2x everything they spawn, but their behaviours were somehow merged. When it died both set pieces were told to spawn portals:
There was once a problem with two Avatars in Realm, where they weren’t that close but were clearly interfering with each other.
Thing is then the only things meant to appear more than once were Skull Shrines, Cubes and Penteracts. Everything else was once per Realm, and this makes a difference to how you handle them in code: with "once per … " items you can refer to them uniquely which is much simpler. Having 2 or more is more complex, often much more complex depending how the code was initially written.
(For a non-game example think of all those apps you’ve used down the years that work fine on a single display but as soon as you connect a second display they throw a fit: always defaulting to a particular display, making odd choices about menus + borders, even refusing to work at all on all your displays. Such apps still ship today, and were far more common a few years ago).
They recently expanded the number of quests that can appear two or more times, including at the same time and virtually on top of each other. I posted one example of this here. But doing so means fixing all the places where code assumes there’s only one of them. Looks like they missed something with the Ghost Ship.
It happened again, but this time I got there earlier and got more info.
First just your average day in Realm, two events at the same time and the’re not even on top of each other. Just close enough that you can see both their HP bars and their oceans overlap each other:
We kill the right/lower of them first – you can see the death message in the log and its HP bar is gone .But its clouds are still there and will be there until the other one dies. And it didb’t spawn a Davy’s:
The second one is as normal, though possibly made easier by the half dozen or more people that take it on. Then when it dies two Davy’s appear, at the centre of each ocean (visible on the minimap):
This suggests the one yesterday had started as two ships, but one was killed and then whoever killed it gave up, annoyed at there being no Davy’s or overwhelmed by 2x as much being spawned.
It seems definitely like the Avatar bug from a couple of years ago. In a similar way something in the code is preventing one ship get through its phases until the other ship has. Whether it only happens when they are next to each other I don’t know. It would be even more confusing if they weren’t.
It’s happened two more times to me. Both times the ships were not close. Each time when the first one died there was something other than a ship as the next quest. This is an image of the first time, you can see where the first one was on the map, and most people are doing the Penteract which is nearest to it while I went looking for the other ship:
Meanwhile someone else has reported it in a separate thread. I am sure many more people are seeing it as it seems very common, probably happening any time two ships appear in the same Realm.
