This is why TBM Items and such is not getting done..

Denied. You didn't define armor, helm, nor did you designate what 1 is - a int perhaps? No return statement or do you want it to be continuing?

Where do I send my application.

I really dont care who is responsible for the calls. Its the teams responsibility which includes management. I didnt mean just devs issue. Its all of DBG that should be held accountable for this.

Who is the manager anyway? Holly?

The initial complaint was items not getting done because a dev was on vacation. Then it slowly branched out to the whole expansion being released while broken. The devs were in no control of the release date. That was all on the managers. The only thing the devs can control is their work and now fixing what wasn't completed due to the unjust time constraints placed on them by management.

Minimal blame should be on the devs. What should the devs be held accountable for? Working their tails off to release a product that their bosses put mindless deadlines on? The manager's decision to release two things at once? The decision to release something during the holiday season? I don't think so.

I work in IT for a major hospital chain in New York and I specialize in one thing and one thing only. If I go on vacation, there really isn't many people to back me up completely so I understand why the devs won't take on the roles of another dev. It's never fun getting a panic call from my boss over a problem I have to fix while I'm away. I have a coworker in the same department as I and it took me 2 weeks to get him anywhere near my competency at what I specialize in and this is coming from my own department. I can't image taking on the role of an outside department.

Read out loud. You'll hear it over and over

Lets be real. most companies when stuck with a hard deadline or critical task are pretty much all hands until the issues are resolved. Unless death in family or something really important.

heck most companies do not even give paid vacation and if they do can pull the plug on your time off at a moments notice.

bottom line is major product release is broken all over the place and they just ho-hum about it. ahh take off for the holidays no big deal. pawns have already paid it dont matter.

initial complaint yes. replied to a comment one made about the product in general. and people taking vacation and such during critical product launch.

if these devs have absolutely no say one product release i would be shocked. I would find it really difficult to believe that they just pawns to a manager that dont listed to what they think. I would think that if the dev staff as a whole said this stuff is broken and needs to be beta tested longer that manager would have to bend to their wishes. If the manager did not care and released anyway they should take a walk.

You have no idea when he put in for this time off so you have absolutely no right to lay judgement.

I understand people's frustrations, but they are just taking it out on every little thing now. It's just getting absurd.

There's a cloud in the sky today? THANKS A LOT FOR RUINING MY DAY DBG!!!

Trying to defend Aristo makes you sound absurd.

I'm not defending any person in particular. If a person puts in for a vacation in timely fashion, they have every right to take it. Just because people can't play a video game to 100% effectively is not a reason to cancel a previously scheduled vacation.

Trying to start a witch hunt over a person taking a vacation during the holidays is absurd. People must really be miserable scrooges to complain about somebody taking time off a week before the 2nd most important Holiday for a major part of the world's population.

Here's an idea. Take a breath, go visit your family and enjoy the all the time you can with them because they won't be around forever. FFS.

Respectfully, we have every right. We pay for this service. We pay for these expansions. It's not a charity, in which case we should all $tfu. But this is a for profit company who has been more than willing to take our money in exchange for brokea$$ $h1t. I personally am not piling on the developers. But DBG as a whole has a lot of 'splainin' to do, Lucy.

No, you really does not. It's his life. Not yours. Just because a person decides to go batsh*t crazy over something that costs a mere $30.00, it doesn't equate to needing to cancel a vacation for something 1) not life threatening (and if it is, you have issues) 2) Doesn't affect our every day necessities of survival 3) Our normal lives and if EQ stacks up that highly in your normal life, maybe you should do some priority rebalancing?

It's a game to play to enjoy. If you paid $30.00 and don't feel it worth it, tough. The median income for the USA is about 50k per year. That's about $25/hr. So essentially a person paid about 1 hour and 10 minutes of their time.

End result is its not the Dev's that make the decision to send a product live. They can argue all they want to keep it in Beta or whatever stage but Management is the one that gets that call. Sadly management can say the game is fine because X% of the content quest wise is functioning properly or can be bug fixed later and is not game breaking. Also they can back it up in the fact the game is not crashing non stop so its playable and other issues can be patch fixed later. There for the expansion is ready for live.

Is that the answer we as players want? no but it is reality. Is the new armor being fubared game breaking? No, its not but it is very frustrating and was a key point of this expansion just like class spells. There is a lengthy list of player complaints and it doesn't matter how we feel about specific Dev's they all do try to produce a quality product for us and they take the brunt of our frustration. Keep in mind we all do not like or enjoy the same things.

The decision time wise to launch the expansion could be questioned heading into the holidays but, but you also know its a perfect time to make new sales. Maybe the biggest issue taking Dev time could have been the new TLP being launched in roughly the same time frame. Need to look above the Dev team for responsibility though and realize they are the workers and don't get to make policy or deadlines.

Also have to agree the Dev team rate their time off and vacation like anyone else. The Dev working on whatever could very well have told management that what was being asked was totally out of reach in whatever time allotted and asked for more time or to not implement it with launch and add it later once it was working properly.

I just have to think of one major thing that is very critical that needs fixing ASAP.. "Shield of Dreams" There are still dozens of other item issues but i dont think none are as bad as this item.

Every second this items goes on being what it is makes it even worse for when they go and nerf if later. As it would seem this item will probably not be fixed until after December.

You telling me not one dev can fix this? They have to know about its existence and just how over the top it is relative to the best raid shields. I am certain it has been brought to there attention with PMs and the long thread about it.

You know Items would not be half an issue if we had some sort of Dev attention to items in beta to begin with. I do not even know if a dev was work one bit on items in beta. By the level of feedback in the item section in beta i have to believe that no one was responsible for this.

I guess what bothers me more than anything is a lack of acknowledgment or communication on the issues at hand. Even a blanket generalized statement or post like:

"Hey this is DBG. We understand everyone's frustration with a lot of the issues with TBM. Our item developer is on vacation until xyz date. When he gets back he will look at all items and we will be submitting out a weekly or bi-weekly patch to fix them as we get to them. We apologize for the issues you are experiencing and we hope to resolve them in the immediate future. Thank you."

But we have not received that. There has been pretty much silence.

There is a thread about game issues, bug issues, problems, etc. Very few posts by us get any sort of response by anyone from DBG. If it is intended that Faerune is not to be on helms, then say so (as an example). Or let us know when we should expect an answer so that a hundred people are not making nine threads with fifty-five posts in each thread about it.

It is the lack of acknowledgment and common courtesy via communication that is the issue. Games vet released with bugs and issues; rarely if ever is something released that is 100% perfect. As gamers we get that, but it is the lack of a simple "Hello" that bothers many...

I could not agree more.. This is what i thought Roshen's Job was all about, not so much as forum police. I figured he would be all over this forum with feedback to our concerns. While an explanation would not put out the fires it would prevent them from becoming a raging wildfire.

Customers are very easy to deal with and a lot of concerns could be eased with some sort of communication. As a frequent poster my self i know how much time it does and does not take to communicate to the playerbase.

A 10-15min post could ease the minds of a lot of people. A lot of the issues cold be responded to in <1min.

Absolutely, the decline of the population and the dissatisfaction of the players falls on senior management. Are they listening? Can we get a hold of them? No.

What i have learned in customer service is it is not all the difficult to take someone that rates you 1/5 and talk to them in such a way that would make them change the rating to 4/5. you can have them most raged customer and calm them and turn them into a happy customer with simple feedback and communication. If you have ever tried to run a small business or something dealing with customers you know how important feedback is.

Good business men and leaders are very good at this. I have seen great product fail and poor products succeed simply based on communication skills.

They have started working with flying bunnies, asking them to take over their workload because it's to much for them..

Anyone got the # of that bus?!

This article is from 2014. In just one year, it has snowballed into an issue across the entire gaming community. Article talks about how games shipping(or being released) unfinished has become the norm.
Article Link

There seem to be so many problems and errors with items that one of the following must be true -

A) the dev responsible has done the job for the previous expansion, in which case he ( or she) is now incompetent

Or

B) this is a new dev doing the items, in which case daybreak ( or old Sony) kept no records of what generally should be associated with each item type , in which case daybreak are incompetent.

oh my...
it is ALWAYS the company, no single person.

The company is responsible for
- how the documentation goes
- how the product is managed
- how the product is developed
- how the product and its development distributed between devs
- how the billing system is done
- how the schedule is set
- how the advertising / merchandizing is done

and on and on and on...

If the management is not able to find the right person as a dev, if the control system does not balance documentation and distribution with the devs, if the schedule is set to tight, if money is more important than quality because mostly every software company is working in that way and if the support staff is unable to neutralize the bad side and no fail safe is built in releasing a product then the only reason to blame ONE SINGLE GUY is simply to give the people what they need to not blame the whole game (product) or the company so that the customer can feel good in cruzifying somebody but never the product in whole or the company itself (psychological 101).

EQ is not mainstream, the most have a kind of addiction and will pay nevertheless how crappy the state of development is. Even the guys complaining the most here and threaten to not pay further only cancel their account for a bit and start it again after a month. Why? If the game would be so crappy that nobody wants to play it anymore, nobody would even complain. Complaining means "I want to still have it".

In devs case: there is no need to crucify one single person who gets into vacation (and even that is only a cheap excuse). The company has been sold, a new complete staff works on products, they promised "heaven" and created "hell" in some form.

September->October: server chaos without refunding or communication
November: Expansion in Alpha without an optional warning (not very likely)
December: Patch to Beta status.

Like most companies today there are many false promises regardless what reason it may be like incompetence in development, greedyness in getting money and using the best timing window to sell it and hold the schedule or complete lack of people doing what they first thought to make perfect. It is rarely the case that you do something bad because you like to make it bad. If the Management lacks of forsight how to do things (I sometimes doubt there is a kind of management since Daybreak ) then things can go wrong. How many people are still left in Daybreak? I don't know that. So the whole package makes things which lack of professionality in parts and how that is working in the future you can imagine too. Look at the last 15 years and you have a framework to approximate it.

As long as EQ is an addiction factor and so many buy it nevertheless, nothing will change very much. Stop paying EQ over and over again then you have no game anymore to complain. Is that a solution? Sure, more time in real life but if you play so much in that game then real life will not make you very happy, does it

More interesting would be a solution or work around for the most important things but at the moment a big part of the game is playable since the "beta patch". Perhaps that timing frame is enough until the next december patch in hope that the next patch does correct things instead of nerfing half of the stuff again and avoiding repairing the things which are broken.

and btw: why is it possible to nerf things like
- focus heal from 75-100% down to 55-about 75%
- correct a part of the augment problem
if no dev is there to do itemization?

So the discussion is simply a waste of time except to blow of steam instead finding better ways to use the most precious everybody is owning: - time -