I feel the group mob ownership feature is detrimental to player cooperation and fun with the way it is currently implemented. I do not think it is a bad idea. I can imagine situations where it makes sense. However, the number of times it has been a detriment in my experience FAR outweighs any theoretical benefits. Here's some situations that I've come up against multiple times. I'm working on a project with a group, usually somewhere out in the wild or rarely in town. Someone not from my group asks for my help. It usually goes something like - "We lost control of our Wither out in waste X. Can you please come help us?" "All my stuff is on the ground and I can't get it back because Momentus keeps killing me. Can you please come help me?" Being an idiot, I usually go running out to help them. I get there and we run into the group mob ownership issue. I can't help them because they're already in a different group. I have to leave my group and join their group. I really don't want to do be forced to do this. The reverse frequently happens also. We just had it happen while renovating NHG. I asked for assistance testing the kill floor. A number of people were awesome enough to show up and give me a hand. Several of them were already in other groups and we were using local chat at NHG. And here we go again with now no one can help each other out there because the groups were conflicting. If we make the mistake of leaving the group thinking "ok now I'm not part of that group, anyone can kill the mob", it gets even worse. Because now a mob belongs to a group that is no longer even physically present. Even if every person in that group leaves the group, the mob will still belong to a now defunct group. I have had this happen in the waste also when 2 or more groups run into each other and decide to kill stuff together. Mass mob group ownership confusion. That's probably the worst, and someone usually winds up dead from it because they can't defend themselves against an attacking mob belonging to a different group. I've stalked the wiki looking to see if there is a way for a group to release mob ownership or share mob kills, and I've come up empty. If I've missed something, please let me know. I would love to see this feature implemented with groups as an option the group leader specifically chooses to turn ON. A walkthrough of how I think it should work - My group is going to spawn a wither or ender dragon. We want to mark it as "ours". I start the group and turn on "/group own mobs". Yay, only we can kill the boss we just spawned. 10 minutes later, something happens that makes us go "uh oh, we need help". We call for help, and assistance arrives. I type "/group own mobs" to turn our ownership off (or release mobs, whatever), and now fellow players can render assistance without a jumble of confusion with multiple groups owning different mobs. No one has to re-organize the groups (leave old group, start new group, invite to existing group, etc). Since this is not the default setting for a group, everyone can happily stay in their existing chat group and seamlessly pick back up where they left off what they were doing when they came out to help.
This seems like a problem, especially that they stay bound to a non existent group. Your solution would seem to work. +1 from me c:
+1 This sounds like a good solution. Also mobs should not be able to damage players who can not defend themselves because they are not part of the group, so mobs you can't damage should not be able to damage you.
+1 I've also ran into similar issues several times. One thing though: the protection doesn't last forever, it stops after 5 or so minutes (I'd have to look up the exact time). But I agree that the lock can often hinder game play. I think anyone who actively uses the group feature (which by itself is an awesome feature IMO) has experienced this. So it would be awesome to have a setting for it, and maybe also a command where the group leader can release the lock (/gr mobrelease ?) You didn't miss anything
