Hey everyone,
Sorry for the delay in replying, but here is what went down:
- On Apr 16th I started moving a few things running on the LS server to a new server node that was sitting idle in one of my arrays. Serious hardware upgrade, even though the old LS machine was extremely powerful and fast (about 1% ram usage, and 0% cpu usage). In any case, it was an aging server, one of the originals from 2006!
- Part of moving them meant recompiling everything, and the latest OS version uses a different stock compiler now. Shouldn't have been a big deal, but it warned on a few things the other didn't, so I went through and fixed them up. Things seem good.
- On Apr 17th, I moved over LS, and waited until the 19th to start correcting the few compile warnings. Compiled, did a quick test, things looked good. Shut down LS on the old server, made firewall changes, and fired it up on the new one. This is what you all noticed originally.
- Saw this post indicating monsters increased in difficulty. Starting some testing and logging to try and track it down. Was very strange, at the stuff I looked at, didn't see any problems with difficulty, but as many of you mentioned, higher level monsters is where it really got weird. Lots of code to sift through, needle in a haystack sorta thing, was trying to figure out if it was part of a bigger problem (compiler, new server, etc), or some weird bug, confirmation bias, etc.
- This morning I came at it fresh with a new idea, to check the differences I made to get rid of the warnings, starting with mob related files. In doing so, I noticed one function that I had changed, but what I changed wouldn't have caused the issue. Long story short, there was a bug in the way it was coded all along, however, the old compiler had a different scope optimization apparently, so it never showed up before. Fixed the issue, and restarted the server this morning at about 7:38am CST.
In any case, the overly difficult monsters issue should be resolved. That said, there should be no other differences to gameplay, other than a slight buff to drops that I also did when moving everything to the new servers (which a few of you also noticed, I think).
Sorry again for not replying sooner. Have fun!