I frequently set myself to follow my wife while we are playing together, and I have a sadly frequent bug where I spontaneously start taking rapid 'fall damage' and die. It always says that I was killed by '0 fall damage' and sometimes I fall through the ground entirely. Oddly, whether I fall through the ground or not, she cannot target me to revive me and I must always run back to wherever we were. Any ideas on how I can prevent this or what is going on?

 

I usually set her to follow because I have bad wrists, so I like to take it easy whenever I can. Not the biggest of deals, but frustrating nonetheless.

I frequently set myself to follow my wife while we are playing together, and I have a sadly frequent bug where I spontaneously start taking rapid 'fall damage' and die. It always says that I was killed by '0 fall damage' and sometimes I fall through the ground entirely. Oddly, whether I fall through the ground or not, she cannot target me to revive me and I must always run back to wherever we were. Any ideas on how I can prevent this or what is going on?

 

I usually set her to follow because I have bad wrists, so I like to take it easy whenever I can. Not the biggest of deals, but frustrating nonetheless.

 

Has been reported before, but so far nothing has been said or done about it

WARNING: slightly long.

 

BACKGROUND:

I'm going to draw on my experience with another MMORPG called Runes of Magic. It's a Taiwanese import with occasionally odd localisations (example: a male human NPC called Janice), and a well-deserved reputation for client-side crashiness and a total refusal to fix it. (The volunteer forum mods issue warnings or suspensions to anyone who contests their assertion that the crashiness is caused by a player's PC being faulty, that sort of thing.) It's also fairly P2W, but enough of that.

 

It has substantial problems with client/server synchronisation, yielding any or all of the following symptoms:

• You can't shoot that bear that's six feet in front of you on level open ground because it's too far away.
  
• You can't shoot that bear that's six feet in front of you on level open ground because it's behind you.
  
• You can't shoot that bear that's six feet in front of you on level open ground because it's behind some other object.
  
• Your character spontaneously dies.
  

 

The last one is the game's solution to your client and the server disagreeing too strongly about where your character is, and happens most often when you try to walk along narrow beams or ledges, and the server thinks you strayed off the beam/ledge and fell outside the "desync" range. (That's not "you fell so far you died of falling"(1), but "you fell so that the difference between the server's view and the client's view of your location got too big" - the critical distance being no more than ten feet.)

 

Anyway, how does that relate to /follow? Well, RoM has two-seat mounts (huge flaming horses, that sort of thing), and it's common for the passenger to spontaneously die at random moments. A a two-seat mount with a passenger is kinda sorta like using /follow, and in either case, there are three machines involved in the client/server synchronisation dance - your client, my client, and the server. I *think* that the server trusts the leader's client more than the passenger's client, but either way, it's more likely that the follower's desynchronisation is at fault (leader thinks we're going left, server thinks we're going almost left, and follower thinks we're going right - the follower's view of his position gets out of range of the server's opinion long before the leader's does.)

 

SPECULATION:

SWTOR's follower death thing is caused by a similar mechanism, but one that doesn't affect leaders or independent characters at all often.

 

(1) Falling far enough to kill your character isn't *impossible* but I've jumped off of RoM bridges with a drop that was easily more than 200 feet, and my character lived to tell the tale.

Desynchronization does make sense, and I actually speculated that it might be the cause. Often time it seems to happen around hills. She'll be just over the top going down the other side, and i'll go through the mountain and die... although it often happens at the most seemingly random times.

I figured others must have had this problem, but didn't see it myself. Oh well! Thanks for the replies.

When I bring my second account along on /follow it often happens with stairs, ramps, or other changes of altitude. I'll be going along just fine, but my second acct will fall through the floor or trip doing up the stairs, then die, and even though the body is right at my feet I can't res them. Once had them die when a lift came down on them. Very annoying. And if they don't die they get stuck on a pebble. I walked over it why can't my /follow'er?