Test Update 08/10/2021 - Patch Notes and Discussions

Hopefully, they may have people working on different things, some coders / operations team / infrastructure partners working on the lag problem some on other projects.

The lag probelm is likely a much trickier, involved and multi-faceted issue where design decisions/reversions will also need to be made as to what direction to take potential solutions in once they have a full list of what changes would be required to fix it.

Then there will be a need to "roadmap" design changes to stay within processing budget to avoid this situation recurring later on.

its not what they list they did its what they don't list. They have said before that lots of back end issues don't get posted on the thread. would anyone put it pas them to add in something to the launcher or software that keeps a eye out for banned software and just dose a direct report lol

That sounds like a very good idea.

This might be a game changer if the test bug reports are true that pulling with /taunt skill always fails to gain aggro.

This seems like an answer in search of a problem... was the fact you could mez and mana drain em really that big an issue?

the worst change made in 15 years. what an absolute disappointment.

Agreed. This game doesn't have the population for every group to have a perfect group comp. Tanks being able to pull at least gave us some options. It was already super inefficient and horrible in a regular group.
Stop nerfing fun.

TLP servers. Every head-scratching change they make now is because of the TLP servers.

responding this here, where it's supposed to be.

It's been the way it currently is since launch...22 years. It's been known to work as it currently does, since about that long. To make an assumption that it's supposed to work a different way makes sense to something within a couple years? maybe? But to be the way it's been literally since launch, I don't see it as the new change being the intended way. and as usual, no additional details surrounding taunt from the dev who decided to make this change...

Ok, I've had enough. Flame on!

Nearly every response in this thread is somewhere in the range of ignorant to idiotic. It's fine to have an opinion, but if it's uninformed, and you put it out there, then it just makes you look stupid.

So let's get started. When I read these patch notes, as a person who follows these forums pretty closely, my first though was that nearly everything on this list is something that has been a hot topic on the forums recently. Some from the bug forums, and some from the TLP forums, maybe other places too, it's a long list and I'm not gonna waste time going through it all. The point is, people said sh*t, DPG listened to their sh*t, and fixed that sh*t. And you all are going to complain about that? You need some d*mn perspective, so here it is.

There isn't just one dev, nor are they the borg collective, working on each item together in unison. There's a list of sh*t that needs to be done, somebody prioritizes it and assigns it, and they do it. Issues with a known root cause can be solved, and those are the low hanging fruit, because they just need dev time for a solution to happen. Issues without a known root cause have to be investigated, tested, yelled at, revisited, and so forth. They aren't gonna put some new junior dev on the lag issue, they are gonna put them on things like you see in this patch. If you didn't know that, now you do, merry christmas.

So here's where I give the complainers one little crumb of justification. Your frustration over certain issues is warranted, some things have drug on and there has been little communication about them in the interim. I would ask Accendo to remedy that by looking into and reporting back on where they stand on the lag issue, or wizard dps, or whichever issues these posters are frustrated about. Had something like that happened a while back there might be less rage about it here. Even if the news is bad, it's still better than knowing nothing, which leads to assumptions they are doing nothing.

Next lets talk about rat ears, because some people are losing their minds over nothing. It's been pointed out in the discussion thread about the rat ears disappearing, that there is a wine quest that is better anyway. This really only matters on a TLP, where you are leveling in the old slower exp rates. Anybody on live can just pop a tank merc and go to town on some mobs. It'll probably be less carpal tunnel than turning in a million stacks of ears/wine, and not take that much longer. This is the most subjective of the discussions here, so if you disagree, that's fine, but it's relatively unimportant anyway.

Hunter stuff, there's been a lot of discussion about this in the Bug Report forum with the new additions to the hunter achievements recently, and with those expansion packs opening soon on some TLPs. Should they have fixed the bag thing first? IDK, does it matter what order they fix it? Should they have fixed the stuff they fixed, yes, of course. No question.

By now I'm sure somebody will accuse me of being the in tank for the devs, or being one of the devs. Let me be clear, I'm not holding DPG blameless as a fixer of bugs in their game, but as a dev myself, it drives me nuts to see people with no f*cking clue going off like they wrote EQ themselves with their bare hands. They don't come to your job and tell you which order to put the items on the hamburger, even if they are the one ordering the hamburger. So maybe you could back the h*ll off and be grateful for continuous fix cycles of stuff that actual players reported and complained about. This is the second patch in a row with some good fixes in it. Probably more than that in a row, but I'm going from recent memory.

The lag fix isn't just gonna be a patch note that says "We found a stick in one of the server gears and removed it, lag fixed." It's going to be a series of changes, some that will help, some that will not. Intermittent issues are the hardest to fix. Anything you can't reliably recreate in a test environment is a serious challenge, you end up analyzing the underlying components and guessing at what could be it, then trying the change and seeing what happens.

I should also add that I often forget there is a lag problem at all. I don't raid, so I don't see it. I saw a couple mobs rubber banding on Agnarr back in February, and nothing since. If I didn't read patch notes I might think they fixed it already. My point isn't that it isn't a problem, but that it's not a problem for everyone. So while it certainly should be fixed, and should be a high priority, waiting for that one magical patch where it's gone, and complaining when a patch isn't that patch, is stupid.

Finally, I almost forgot the Phinigel and Drusilla changes. It still surprises me when people are surprised by this stuff. They don't want 6 level 50's taking down Phingel in Classic, or whatever mini team people are using to do this, even if it takes a long time. People talked about it on the forums, they saw it and changed it. This is not the first time that's happened, nor will it be the last.

Ok, I'm done, you can call me names now, you whiny buggers.

What does this mean exactly?


- Corrected an issue where NPCs with low hatred for all their opponents would not always choose to attack a player that successfully used the taunt skill.

I think it means that taunt did not always work on a success in some cases and they fixed it so that it will.

Hahaha... this means way more than that as it has been proven on the Test server.

This one is way, way, way bigger than people realize.

There will be nashing of teeth when this goes live lol. That reminds me. I need to order more popcorn from Sams.

Ah... finally a fix to Mangling/Disconcerting!

Expect a whole heap of bug threads if that goes live.

What is this supposed to be saying for those that don't want to watch a 33 minute video?

Well said, I mostly agree. But a few things.

Sure they put the new devs on low hanging fruit.

There is lower hanging fruit that could make them money in the the marketplace, but they choose hunter achievements?

I agree people shouldn't ask for something and then complain when they get it. It feels to me like putting devs on low hanging fruit from Forum Quest is reacting to vocal people without a roadmap forward.

But that's a given, they don't have a roadmap for the future of this game.

The lag is from years of changes with no concern for the future, and no roadmap to plan for this game to continue for years to come.

I said years ago this should be a curated game, a stable functional version enshrined to preserve it's legacy.

They are far too random, and they shouldn't be listening to Forum Quest at all.

The customer is not always right. The customer always has a point, and finding out where their point lies within your business plan and software model, is the key to deciding if you need to change something or not.

Wine quest is far more expensive and not as good XP as rat ears was. You're misinformed and that's only one of the elements of which you are misinformed.

You cannot taunt pull and now taunt requires line of sight. It's a much bigger change than that patch note would indicate.