New World drops

Iniari, Alchemy 1999-2002 ... enough said? People make mistakes. That doesn't make it intentional.

edit: I am not defending SOE. I do believe the devs do try hard and do care about what they do. I don't believe there was/is any ill intention here. Companies have many layers and things can/are generally very complex.

Question.... Is there a planned patch in the works to put the items back in game as intended to fix the drop rates in heroics?

A ton of police work is being done but where is the end and what's the cost?

But people do have a tendency to jump the gun and start the blame game quite fast. I agree with you... mistakes were made... they mistook what was being released.. similar to when Defiant was put in game by accident before its official release and then stated that the stats were way off... Same deal... someone who didnt make the item or was in the items development tried to respond on the situation and made a mistake.... it happens.. Thats why they are human and not bots. I say this will all blow over.. items that were deleted by mistake will be given back... all people have to understand is that every single person that exploited... is probally bombarding these poor GM's in game with tells and yells and shouts... they are overwhelmed because of they are few in numbers and so its hard to sort out the liers from those who are being honest. Give them time and it will clear up...... yell at them.. and you will end up with nothing.

Anyone get lucky from any of the Base zones since hot fix?

Exactly. We made mistakes. We introduced the game play as it was and it was no fault of anyone but ours. Unfortunately, some people went the extra mile to exploit the situation and these items were never meant to drop at the rate they were and we needed to take action. As with most exploits, we address it as quickly as possible in order to keep the integrity of the game in tact and that came by way of removing items accumulated by a select few. We felt that if there was a certain amount in possession or accumulated, then we would delete that amount deemed unreasonably acquired via exploiting.

Some people had placed Augments on those items and the deletion of those Augments will be replaced. Please create a customer service ticket and you will have them replaced as soon as possible. If they can be replaced before the ticket is placed, we will do so. However a ticket will help us to ensure that this is addressed.

A select few reported this matter to us and I would like to thank you on behalf of the team. We appreciate your honesty and assistance.

Thank you

Can you confirm these items are no longer dropping?
Can you confirm it is now safe for everyone to purchase any items that are still in game?
Can you also let us know how if those who paid Kronos will be reimbursed for deleted gear?

You are a very special person. I bet wild flowers spontaneously spring from the ground as you walk down the path.

Dexar

Just so I get this right, you only deleted the items from people who accumulated a lot of those items. You did not in fact delete the items from people who were doing this and did not loot as many items. This honestly does not make much sense to me.

That's ridiculous if true.

He's a warrior not a druid, his superpower is not bleeding.

I looted one item Saturday in the few hours I had to play. Since my luck in EQ is normally about as awful as can be, I did the natural thing. I logged out and went to the store to buy a PowerBall ticket before I left town on a business trip. I didn't win the lottery, and if my one item is deleted I'll be none the worse for wear.

Thanks for working through the issues and ironing out the problems.

Go back to your petition and quote Phanthom or Roshen, both say you shouldn't have lost your augs and ornamentatons.

Looks like somewhere someone has misunderstood what was to be destroyed.

I personally just wish they had disabled the NPC(s) in question and/or disabled the drops from HA's as soon as it was first reported and read. That being said, better a couple days late than never!

Aint nobody got time for that!

The problem occurred in the Heroic Adventures and Missions and they are no longer dropping there.
Is it safe to purchase any? I would hold off for a day or two. Maybe try the static zones to get some
Krono purchases for this exploit? I haven't noticed an increase of Krono purchases over the past couple of days. I would have to get more information from our Customer Service team about this. Please put in a ticket.

If someone had 20 krono they used to buy these items, they didn't buy them with money, they traded plat for them and are probably a reseller gaming the market, so no sympathy from me.

No people bought kronos to trade for these items then lost the item and the kronos. Or they lost the 5+m plat they payed for the item. But hey screw the players remove the items but dont return the purchaser what they paid. This is whats wrong here you don't care if someone bought 5 of these items and lost 30m plat. The buyer had NO idea people were getting these from an exploit but again you don't care. It's like nothing you buy in game is safe.

The mistake made was adding T4 ROF raid items that you can trade and no raid effort to get it.

Sorry to all you non raiders but join a guild if you want high end gear.

I have played EQ for over 14 years and this will not help EQ it will just leave a bad taste with raiding guilds that work real hard to get what they have and I still have some T1 ROF gear on my toon and I do raid a lot.

EQ needs some real excitement. The way we camp names needs to updated in some kind of random way. Have events pop in all the time and have the named pop that way. You fix it I don't know.

Think of something but the way its going sucks. Sit there for hours and wait for a named to pop or never pop is not working. Have the named drop more loot or a rare loot something to mix it up.

Now you have a total random loot that is over powered well its a start but you over killed the loot.

Well, there's probably a nimbus for that.

Being shrewd and "gaming the market" is neither against the rules nor unethical. Players have been playing the market in this and other MMORPGs since their inception and it's part of the beauty of an alternate online universe with it's own player run economy.

This, of course, assumes that:

1) the goods used in transactions are "real"
2) no over dishonesty occurs in the transactions (bait and switch)
3) the goods being traded were acquired honestly (ie not duplicated or afk farmed with hacks)

If I were a somebody who played the "player run" economy to my advantage and accumulated a wealth in that economy honestly, I'd be ticked to high hell if I lost said wealth when I finally cashed it in for usable goods. If I bought/acquired 20 Kronos over the course of a year, used them to buy 10 items, and then had those items deleted by Sony, I'd want compensation for the ~360$ I just lost. Unlike platinum and other items in game, Kronos carry real, legitimate dollar for dollar currency value.

This scenario does not apply to me. I don't fiddle with in game marketing because I both find that boring and would easily be capable of generating more in game cash more quickly (and now legitimately thanks to krono). By just working extra hours of over-time and turning real life cash into platinum more efficiently, twerking with the market is a waste of time. But ... I never do that either because the best gear available to me (group gear) isn't purchased with platinum these days and my routine game play already provides me with more platinum for my routine daily activities than I need.

But ... yeah I'd be ticked off had I taken that route and then lost a huge chunk of pocket change just because SoE screwed up. If any of these people who abused the drop rate sold off a ton of these items AND SoE went to great lengths to remove these items, it's the responsibility of SoE to now go back and track each of those transactions and reverse them entirely. Thanks to the whistle blowers, this got stopped quickly. For those who profited from this venture ... those profits should be reverted and I'd honestly like to see them (all of them) receive rollbacks. If any of those people profiting massively were also in the whistle-blower camp (the self-righteous hypocrites), I'd also prefer to see them suspended for a long period of time.

Axxius, this is not targeted directly at you but you've been high profile enough in this thread to make a theoretical case against you drive the point home. If Axxius after finding the problem with the drop rate and notifying the community, sharing the common knowledge, and blowing the whistle of imbalance ... If Axxius took his self-proclaimed 10s or 20s or 30s of items out to the general market and cashed those ill gotten goods in for a few dozen Kronos ... that alternate-universe Axxius should be punished.

Having said all that, I'm sure Axxius didn't actually do that ^

But I'm sure there a few out there that did it. They reasonably expected the drop rate to be nerfed, the gear weakened or flat out removed from the game. What's a jerk to do under this impending market collapse? Cash in before it hits the fan. It's human nature - we saw this happen with the housing market collapse in the US. The rats saw the writing on the wall and turned what was going to be their total loss into a spread out loss for all those around them.

Oh well ... if anything on this planet is true, it's that there is no social justice.

My personal opinions:

1) this gear should never have dropped in group content - ever
2) the presence of this gear disrupts game balance risk vs reward
3) the presence of this gear (even rarely) ruins group game balance
4) groupers do not need it and should never need it
5) the current balance between group/raid gear is just fine. My play is balanced around the content I choose to do. The rewards for raiding are appropriate and balanced around the content raiders choose to do. I'm not jealous of what they have, I could have it to if I chose to commit to their playstyle - I don't.

To the devs:

1) you don't win the hearts of the masses by giving away freebies
2) stats for the sake of stats does not make players happy
3) when you participate in rapid/easy mudflation, you make your players appreciate what they rightfully earn even less. You can see this easily on the test server where a person can easily acquire a testcopy of raid gear from FV. Strong gear doesn't make a player happy - it's a hollow satisfaction at best that will burn out quickly.

EQ was at it's best when upgrades, levels, and progression were hard. You appreciated every little bit of ac that bronze armor afforded you over your 1pp per ac banded. Everyone around you had to work for what they had to, so we were all happy relative to each other. The problem of mudflation took off like a rocket after SoF on ... and the game has subsequently been cheapened. Unfortunately, now we expect those fast upgrades. I, on the other hand, wish those upgrades came slower and at greater effort. It would make those upgrades more meaningful.