The problem is that this is a slippery slope. I spent many hours working on my necro's 2.0. I was on the very last stage of the quest at 4am in the morning and I handed everything (the 1.5, the last few pieces, everything) to the last NPC, or so I thought..... I handed them to my necromancer's pet...... I was devastated. Sony support graciously helped me, gave me all the stuff back to hand in again. This may have been something that had to wait behind a misloot in the customer service queue, it is possible, but should it really jump ahead of such things? Once again it was my mistake. Are you going to stop helping any customer simply because it was their fault in the first place? Mistakes happen, and we appreciate your help when they do, and it is more than frustrating when they won't.
No, we've taken a look at the amount of time taken by raid loot issues (both real and less real) and how they impact our CS times overall. An epic quest issue is something altogether different (although CS has been in contact with Dev over some epic quest related issues in an effort to make making mistakes less frequent) and we fully understand the significance to players.
I have not followed this issue closely. But I remember when it was first brought up a few months ago. Since it has now been officially announced (not sure if it was before, but you just said so in the quote) that there has been a change of policy, I decided to see if SOE has posted the new policy. I just looked and found under [EQ] Mistakenly Looted No-Trade Items: This is a major change. While there was a vague Message of the Day in the game a while back, this is the first clear statement that "Customer Service will not assist in errors". So basically, should an item be looted in error, SOE is saying they will do nothing. There is no point in bothering to petition because that is it. Of course, I doubt this will stop people petitioning. It is unfortunate that the game is not more forgiving. People make mistakes and to lose what could be hours of work because of one mistake is not conducive to fun. Has there been a discussion involving SOE regarding possible technical solutions? I know people have mentioned ideas (some seen in other games) like allowing a short time period where you can transfer an item, or, in the case of missions and raids, allowing it to be transferred to anyone else in the task/expedition. Was there ever a statement by SOE that this was being explored? Or an explanation of why not? In the 21st century, especially with a computer game over the internet, to make a negative change without taking advantage of technical mitigation factors is a failure of concern for your customers. So, is it my fault for not reading every post ever on this subject, or has SOE announced they are going to implement a technical mitigation (actually it should have been done at the same time as the policy change) or posted meaningful reasons why not?
My understanding from reading the entirety of this thread is that no replacement has been announced, and that Piestro says they are listening to our feedback on the issue. Meaning now is the time to show our support for such a loot management system.
We've talked about potential systems but have not decided if and when one will be implemented to my knowledge.
Had this been the policy years ago, I'm pretty sure the frustration of losing a (rare) item, would/could have caused me to retire ages ago. I've been running my guild's dkp site for 10 years, and honestly I can only remember a handful of cases of raid loot being looted by the wrong person. Out of 4000 items bid on in a year. maybe 4 got looted wrong? But 1 could be the rare must have class defining item. That's where it should be fixed. The bracer that will drop 50 more times? Not so much. Currently, with raid coinage this is less of an issue. Weapons seem to be much more common now. Hate masks are much easier to get than in HoT or VoA. Is it an alt? Is it CoF, RoF, or VoA? I could see ranking the currentness of the content against how much CS help should be given... We all have had our struggles with CS over the years, but more often than not, they are our heroes when they come through and help us with an issue. Are you telling your CS people they CAN'T be our heroes? Or are you just telling us that fixing a mislooted item on the wrong alt has been lowered in priority for them? Having won a Cloak of flames on the last night of the Naggy revamp, I'd been apeshiii if someone else had mislooted it before I got a chance to loot it. It's a pretty rare item, with near zero chance to replace it, as the revamp was being removed a day later... Is there code the CS people can look at to see the rarity of a drop? if it's rarer than X, then fix it. If it drops more than Y, then just tell them to kill the mob again?
I would tell them not to waste their limited resources and time on such a system. EQ has measures in place to mitigate mis-loots on no trade items. They are sufficient to the task. Any other system implemented will have its own passel of problems associated with it and the Devs will be back to square one on the issue having accomplished essentially zip.
Has there been a marked increase in the number of loot petitions that has lead to this policy change or maybe a marked decrease in the number of CS people? Also does this policy change apply to upcoming MMos like EQnext or will you somehow find the resources to be able to deal with those issues in that game?
I play on the progression servers and we are on The Buried Sea expansion Last week when we defeated Two Gods we had a cleric mistakenly loot a knight cloak ( cleric cannot equip it ) He tried to petition to get it moved, mentioned he can't even equip the item and mentioned it was an end boss loot and basically got the same response everyone else is getting with the whole we don't do that anymore.... I understand why you guys quit doing it due to people exploiting it however i don't agree with you guys quitting it without putting in another system and or easier system to do it for you either via marketplace or a timer to trade loot after looting.........its honestly quite disappointing.
Like I said up-thread, I never had a problem with CS at all. Usually I wait till after the weekend to /petition an issue - so as to avoid the weekend slam. As for the issue at hand - Any mechanism that allows players to fix what CS now will not fix, is better than none at all. Those 2-boxing can easily loot with the wrong toon by accident, and there's no "message mechanism" that can fix that kind of a brain fart. -Rat
of this i have no doubt, but i can't help but continue to feel that the solution is to give players the ability to fix the problem themselves - not to simply remove the ability to fix the problem from within the game entirely. i totally get how from a CS perspective this issue sucks and i don't blame SOE for wanting to cut back on what i am sure is a huge amount of tedious busy-work generated by requests to fix loot, bit just throwing up your hands and declaring "that's it, from now on we don't allow the most common and simple human error to be corrected anymore" really doesn't strike me as the correct route to go on this. well for myself, my opinion is that this is such a fundamental core issue in an MMO environment that you MUST have some kind of system in place to deal with it, pure and simple - there has got to be some kind of way for a mislooted item to be moved from the person who looted it to the person who should have gotten it. whether that method is via petition, or whether it's via an in-game trade system, or removing all gear drops from raids and making EQ a currency only reward system for raids, or some other completely different thing... there HAS to be at least something. i don't expect you to hang this hat on the CS team forever but "there is no option within the game to fix this" isn't a viable policy, IMO - and until an in-game way of fixing the problem has been implemented, i think that it's unreasonable to change the policy of CS helping fix mistakes. once you have an in-game system in place for self-correcting this problem, sure implement a policy change where CS won't help you out anymore, i'm fine with that.
well then i for one think you should revert the CS policy, until if and when such a system has been implemented.
Here is one problem with the current stance on "loot issues"... It appears the CS team is operating on the assumption that anything involving a loot item transfer must be player deception or stupidity and cannot possibly be a game glitch. Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but the current responses echo that sentiment. Last month we requested an item transfer when the winning player was unable to loot it from the corpse (group content). CS replied with a 2 sentence, generic statement that the loot system is "thankfully working properly". The comments strongly suggested they had not even read our petition. I can count on one hand the number of times my group has requested an item transfer since Kunark. Some of those years we didn't bother because it was assumed nothing could be done. In recent years, there seemed to be a greater desire to help if the logs or other evidence supported a claim. As such, when quirky things happen, we may open a petition. Sometimes we just let it go. The truth is, EQ has numerous issues. But we all continue to play and pay for it regardless. The devs, coders, designers, et al continue to improve the game on the front end and back end, but there is always an array of bizarre, unexpected things that pop up. EQ is a game with code spanning the mid- to late 1990s through present. Things happen. I recall talking to SKlug about the lack of server-side data when mercenaries were new. CS would repeatedly claim to have no records showing a character experiencing problems with a merc EVER had one to begin with. Perhaps some people are abusing the loot transfer assistance, and that should be addressed, but punishing the rest of us unilaterally is not helpful... until you can prove that EQ is 100% error/glitch/bug free.
Would love to see added raid pop window object chest style on the chest or body where the raid leader can set who can loot what specific object like a banker settings in future raids. but it must include peeps in the raid not in the Guild for thoes pick up raids or Allicance raiders.
Have you given consideration to the overall amount of effort needed to attain raid items? An epic may be extremely valuable to the individual player, and may take quite a few hours for the individual player to achieve, but a raid takes time from 54 players. I'd think a single mislooted raid item represents more man hours down the drain than most epic mistakes. For an event that drops 3 items and takes an hour to beat, a misloot represents 18 man hours lost. Sometimes the time loss can be far greater. I play on the progression servers. One of the guilds on our server recently beat one of the event six in Solteris (our current end zone) for the first time, after about a dozen attempts, only to have the entire chest ninja looted by a recruit. They have literally a thousand man hours invested in earning four pieces of loot which were all "mislooted," including a best in slot weapon that far exceeds the class epic in value. As I understand the current policy, although the ninja looter will be punished the loot will no longer be returned (according to the GM's that assisted us in a similar situation.) Is a thousand man hours of time investment really less worthy of customer service's help than someone screwing up an epic turn in? A new looting system won't necessarily fix this either. Giving the raid leader the ability to pass out loot for instance, as some have suggested, just shifts the potential problem from individual players misclicking to the raid leader misclicking. There will still be mistakes. We need something in place to fix the mistakes, whether that's CS getting involved or some in game mechanic. Even if mistakes only happen one event out of a hundred, there needs to be some sort of remedy.
Thanks for answering, Piestro! Nonetheless I have to say that I find it absolutely wrong to make this change before having implemented another system to help players. I have been raid leader/guild leader or loot officer for more than 10 years in 3 different guilds and in each of them it has happened more than once that people mislooted. In the very early times (PoFear or Kunark) there was no CS, so people had no way to fix this, which lead to upset players and grief. Then came a time when CS actually DID help and people were still ashamed if they looted wrong, but at least they could fix this and get the player who deserved the loot what was theirs. Now you bring us back to the dark ages of subpar CS and quite frankly, this makes me sad and worried.
While that sucks...alot...you can't really say 1000 man hours = that single chest...unless you never intend to go back and beat that event again. I feel as though saying a mistake happens one out of hundred is probably 100x greater than how often it actually happens. If loot mistakes actually did happen 1% of the time, that would be a considerably amount that would make me question many things.
You miss the point of technology. It serves to aid in mitigating stupid mistakes. If the goal is to bolster one's self through the simplicity of hard work, toil and unforgiving rigid values where if there was a baseball game played then you only get one strike, than check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish About as narrow minded as a tight rope in everything they do but do craft outstanding furniture! Creating a technical solution for this is probably not that difficult or time consuming. If it is being considered than there is probably some bureaucracy that has to be gone through first before there will be an actual commitment, if there is to be one. Otherwise, I don't think that your angle is one about saving resources or solving problems, at least going by your signature. For you it would seem to be about passing judgement on those who lack your level of infallibility and than watching people cook when they screw up. Well, they tend to not give lethal injections for the first parking ticket, mainly because people do make mistakes. Maybe lighten up a bit?
