Do any Devs actually play this game anymore?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Mannhec, Oct 27, 2019.

  1. Leigo You come here often?

    it should have been the chicken sink.. #jadenpain
  2. Benito EQ player since 2001.


    Thank you for your continued work!
    Nennius and Sancus like this.
  3. Zamiam Augur

    I'm all for an expansion with more zones I wish they would/could skip a year of an expansion release and on year 2 come out with a massive expansion 10+ zones ..

    However the Dev's are doing the best they can with what they have the time / resources for .. I for one am grateful that they even gave us the 6 new zones plus a lvl increase .. I appreciate what the dev's try todo for US to keep this game running and come out with new expansions year after year .. and they give us bonuses too once in awhile. ( GMM zone , I'm not sure if that was released on TBL launch but since I did not buy TBL it was nice when I came back after a 4month hiatus that I could go and group to do GMM runs and did not have to have TBL to do it .. and I got all my non vis gear which was better than TBL upgraded .. ) after TBL went on sale I did end up buying 5 of them 1 premium and 4 standard ..

    My point is there will always be things we wish the dev's could give us , and I like to believe they try to do the best they can . Sometimes they can and sometimes they can't .. I would not use the word PATHETIC to me that feels like a disgusted word like a parent telling their child your pathetic . You just dont do that .. Think of another way to better articulate your response before you actually post anything ..think before you speak .. if you cant say anything nice then maybe you shouldn't say anything at all .. Words to live by ..

    Sometimes I have that habbit as well ..

    I thank you dev's for the work you do .. I may not have played in TBL at launch but eventually I did end up purchasing it to help support the game as I always have the last 20 years .. I dont think there are enough words to bestow on your team of hard working techs, programmers, designers, coders and anyone else I left off this list that keep this game going after 20 yes TWENTY years plus of this game ive played and loved since I was 25 .. THANK YOU THANK YOU ThANK YOU .. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3..
  4. Dahaman Augur


    Glad I could entertain you!

    After as long as this necro DOT issue has been on the plate, it's obvious they are stuck (don't know how, or more likely deem it requires too much effort to justify easily). It might be good to "go along" with the devs, entertain them as it were, rather than complain. The devs certainly get enough rants. Plus, we can slip in potential solutions to percolate in the back of their minds. My post might not be the solution, but it might drive a corollary thought that spawns THE solution.

    It's worth a shot! :-D
  5. Fian Augur

    One key piece of evidence that the devs don't play EQ is how easy the GMM Darkness Howls mission was on release. Players recognized the difficulty/reward was out of balance in favor of reward, and everyone started running it. If Devs were playing on servers, they would have been playing it too and noticed how easy it was.
  6. sauron3030 Elder

    I am a group geared SK, typical group makeup is Sk, cleric, monk, shammy, merc x2. I'd say we have a 95% success rate on those two mobs.
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  7. TheStugots Augur

    Yeah, same as above...I box an all group geared group, 1 tank 1 healer and don’t have issues with either of those mobs.
    Duder likes this.
  8. Vumad Cape Wearer


    Maybe it was working as intended? Maybe it was a way to get better gear in the hands of group level and casual players who were continuing to struggle with TBL? Maybe it was intentionally made so people could quickly gear up before bumping the mission difficulty up? Maybe they knew that ToV was going to be released soon and the "best gear" was still weaker than TBL raid gear and the soon to release ToV group gear?

    I have been with poorly balanced groups with poorly geared players and the mission wasn't was easy as it was with a fully raid geared team. Sure I liked the weaker group so I could CC more but I also liked when we just pulled 6 at a time and finished the mission in 20 minutes. I think in this very thread people have talked about solo'able, less than 6 players and sub-optimal group missions for people to do. Here we have an example of one and there are still complaints. That dissatisfaction is not one devs can solve for us. Balance is not about appeasing just the players of one strength.

    There are many reasons why things happen other than the easy to say "they didn't try" or "they were too dumb to know better".
  9. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    Even when we don't get the answers we want it is appreciated that you are sharing all this. The one thing I see most problematic on the forums is that a lot of people simply make no effort to see things from the other side. Lack of empathy or just laziness I don't know which. So I think it is a good thing that you paint a picture of things from your side. While many of us DO try and see things from the dev side we are just guessing and don't know the whole picture. Thanks for helping to flesh this stuff out for us.
    Duder likes this.
  10. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    25th Expansion, 20th Anniversary. It Was Intentional. Later in the year it was inevitable they would find some excuse to adjust the difficulty level once the celebration was over.

    And to be fair it was a shot in the arm when a lot of casuals got fed up over TBL progression.
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  11. Dzarn Developer

    There are far less accusatory or hostile ways to express the idea here.
    The question was a prompt to encourage people to consider the greater implications behind the issue presented, which is not necessarily obvious depending on your experience with project managemen


    The responses to the fade changes thread resulted in a number of changes I had overlooked (forgetting to remove the cast time for some classes for example) as well as a readjustment of costs. I would say that, overlooking the vitriol that many people felt compelled to add, it was at least a productive discussion in terms of output.


    I'm curious what the community in general believes we have as a toolset and procedures for tuning efforts. I can't help but feel people would be generally surprised with how rudimentary they are.


    The premise of "have to" is the heart of the internal schism on an issue like this. The team is not necessarily unified on how to deal with items without deprecation timelines. Possible outcomes discussed over the years since OOW have included; capping the Necro 2.0/2.5 focus at a maximum level (around 75 to be in line with other epic focuses), adjusting itemization in a way that deprecates the epic via means that require renewed item chase loops, adjusting spells in a way that does away with the difference in power the item provides, adjusting AA abilities in a way that supports the deprecation of the time, replacing the focus on the item with something more easily deprecated, etc.

    None of which has resulted in a consensus we've been happy with internally, which story behind the ongoing frustration the class feels due to the "need" to optimize minutia that describes the "majority" of the necromancer community. A fact I personally feel is closely tied to how overly complex necromancer gameplay has become.


    See my response below for more detail, I would say this is strongly correlated to our design process which has relied on just two human beings to brainstorm, design, implement, test, and balance all of the raids in our expansions.

    If it's any consolation, the team is currently planning to share this workload for next year's expansion to alleviate the stress we've put on the content designers. All members of the team will be expected to contribute to the brainstorming and design aspects of encounters and story. So while implementation, testing, and balancing will still fall into the laps of the same people, there should hopefully be a little more diversity in mechanics.

    Can you cite a specific example that isn't the experience adjustments that were put into place to curtail Gribble Heroic Adventures as the sole source of experience for the larger segment of the playerbase?

    Standard zone content is typically implemented by 2-4 people in an expansion cycle. The mechanic for flying NPCs was being explored by someone who was new on the team at the time and while it was conceptually interesting the implementation was far from ideal due to the behavior to seek targets that the NPCs aren't currently engaged in combat with.

    The same segment of the team that believes in the 'old ways' where there was danger and consequence to actions as opposed to what they see as the 'new ways' where roaming player-gods have nothing to fear from anything around them.

    Specifically the encounter design or the zone stability and lag issues that cause aberrant behavior? I'm personally less familiar with GMM content than the designers who worked on it, but if you can offer a specific list of actionable items, it's something we can look into.

    If you're referring to the massive framerate drops the client suffers when dealing with a mass of character models; improving client performance falls into the category of tech debt which is a large determiner of its priority on the schedule.

    While I agree our client performance is essentially unacceptable in raid encounters and heavily graphics intensive zones, it's once again a matter of resources. As a team we have to be able to justify the work we do and we've yet to devise a formula that correlates revenue to player happiness due to client performance improvements that wins over the opinion of the people in charge of determining our yearly schedule. Many of us are on your side here and want nothing more than the game to run well and be more fun but the reality is that our work has to keep the lights on.

    I've not encountered this, but it feels like a matter of opinion on how long is too long to recover. What would you deem as a player as an acceptable amount of time to recover from a death, given that there's essentially no repercussions other than lost time?

    I would encourage you to review the number of people listed on the development team (art, design, engineering) in the in game credits (viewable at server select) for House of Thule as compared to Torment of Velious and hope that would be enough to explain the difference. I promise you we're also not thrilled that the breadth and depth of what we can share with the players correlates so heavily with headcount.


    As noted in a previous post I'm looking into ways to mitigate the current situation. A likely, potential but not promised as a guarantee, subject to terms of the agreement, not valid outside of Norrath and not to be taken as a statement of exact outcomes, change to DoTs will be to replace the current AA extension with equivalent damage focus ranks as at least one step in the process to getting DoTs in a better place and easier to retune over time.


    While the mission and subsequent balance changes were in the hands of other designers, from my memory, the issue in this case was that the NPCs weren't using the proper scaling for power vs the scaling the mission was using for rewards. It's a difficult thing to catch between the constraints of only having 1.5 assigned QA testers for all of the work our team produces and the lack of automated validation tooling that might have been able to look heuristically at 'proper reward balance'.
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  12. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    If I tried quoting all those message in one post it would have ended up a mess. You are a Forum Master!

    And well said. Thanks again for the engagement. Especially the parts about discussing things instead of attacking.

    And from what you say GMM mission difficulty was a mistake I am glad it happened to be honest. It wouldn't have made an appreciable difference to me I wasn't churning the mission for exp and I always had CC. But I can tell you it was very well received by the majority of my guild members. True some of my top tier folks upset that they beat TBL content and then saw others catching up with GMM but overall most were happy with it. I saw some of my more casual players get more engaged with the game because of it.
  13. Sancus Augur

    I really appreciate your candor, but my heart sank when I read this. What I'm about to write will probably sound critical (I imagine - I have yet to write it), but I want to preface it by saying this is very obviously not something you have control over, and therefore this is not in any way intended as a criticism of you (or any of the other coders who put in a ton of work to keep this game running).

    Dealing with the atrocious zone/client/server performance is the single biggest issue I have with raiding. I'm at the point where every time I write a Mage guide or work with an applicant, I have to write a ton about what to do in theory, and then tell them to forget half of it because raid instances are too laggy for it to matter. Frenzied Burnout upgrades? New Dissident Companion? Nah, pets don't actually swing enough on raids to do more than they've done for the past six expansions. Oh, you found a new rotation that is more DPS? Actually, it isn't because you modeled it with a 1.8s GCD, and it's actually closer to 3 seconds in real raid encounters. You spent months getting an item clicky to use during the GCD? Nope, it'll slow down spell casting too much and actually decrease your DPS.

    The experience of raiding should be working with a large group of friends to defeat bosses. Right now it feels like the real boss is the server and the client, not the encounter. I know inevitably someone is going to suggest "turn /afk on" or "check your settings," and no, that has nothing to do with it. Every few weeks we have at least one raid instance that's so laggy swarm pets begin showing up on xtar, dying, and coming back to life. It really drains what will I have to farm the same raids over and over.

    I'm someone who (despite being overly passionate/emotional in situations like this) prefers numbers/analysis, but part of my frustration in this post is I have no idea how to correlate it with revenue. Even if I could (or you could), it's entirely possible the effort required to alleviate zone lag wouldn't be worth it. The performance deteriorates every expansion, though, and I wonder how much longer it will be viable to even create raids in EQ as the issues proliferate. I know this was originally something only the top guilds saw during heavy raid burns, and now I see it raiding on my alts in mid tier guilds (albeit to a lesser degree than what we experience in RoI).

    I know I'm preaching to the choir; it isn't a lack of will that's kept these issues (and the whole pet lag thing) in the game as long as it has. That said, I know a number of players who have moved on because lag issues sapped the fun out of actually playing the game, and when I eventually quit, that will probably be why as well. I have to believe if EQ is really intended to last another ten years (as Holly mentioned), fixing this issue is in its best long term interest. Other than expressing my frustration with the company (not the developers)/reality I don't really know what this post accomplishes, but /sigh.
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  14. Xanathol Augur

    The idea you posted in this thread was:
    Please do not do that. The nature of DoTs is to last over time - not to be basically 'x hit' nukes. I realize you are trying to squeeze out more debuff slots but that needs to be addressed on the spell side, not the AA side. The consolidation most classes got was a good way to free up slots... if only those slots weren't promptly filled with the new alliance spells... (again, a spell design issue; not an AA one).
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  15. Fian Augur

    Fian said:
    Dzarn response:
    First off, I want to thank you for taking the time to respond and listen to the players. On the above, my statement still stands. I understand that QA didn't catch it, but the point we are making is Dev isn't choosing to play the game much on their own on Production servers. Now how you spend your free time is entirely up to you, but if you were playing the game this is something you would have noticed.

    Another poster suggested that this mission was working as designed, and it was intentional by Devs. We already had a dev post say that it was not intentional and they weren't aware of the problem until they heard about it months later on the boards.

    roth said:
    “...
    Dzarn response:
    First off, I really appreciated that you did present to customers the planned changes before it went to test. Once things are on test, we almost never see any balance changes to what is pushed for live. Doing it earlier gave you time to listen and adjust based on feedback. However, there is still room to improve your communication. Figuring out what you changed based on feedback was like reading tea leaves. It is not surprising that customers are thinking you didn't listen at all. Just as you took the time to write up the proposal, it would have been helpful to write up how you changed the design based on feedback.

    One final comment on the fade changes. I was a little confused about the write up. Taking beastlord as an example, apparently you didn't touch the Playing Possum AA, you merely gave us a new AA for an instant fade. If you had said Playing Possum - no change, it would have made things clearer.
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  16. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    I don't play a necro, but I still don't get why you just don't make an aa for it, available at level 80, and then cap the 2.0/2.5 effect to level 80.

    Saying that you don't want it to be permanent, well, let's be serious, its 2019. Omens of War came out in 2004. Let it go and move on.
  17. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    Not that I care at this point, but do you really believe this is the only example of the developers nerfing things in order to force people out of older content to play the game "the right way"?

    Really?

    Artificially reducing the exp gains from a mob outside of the experience formula, based off your level going up (originally a nerf to RoF and below experience, and then apparently has been applied since then in more recent expansions)? That is like, BAM, a blatant one.

    How about every time an ability that players have used for 1, 3, 5, 10, 15 YEARS gets modified because a developer decides we aren't using it how it is intended? Not exactly the same thing, but conceptually is the same, and in line with what the guy you were replying to was complaining about.
  18. Lilura Augur

    Realize something: all of the issues you are dealing with here could and would be addressed if you finally held the fan faire we were promised in the Ars Technica article. You'd have several hundred people who do play this game every day giving you direct feedback. The downturn in this game can almost be directly linked to when they stopped.

    I don't know your tenure but I do remember the GoD debacle. Rather than fix a horribly broken expansion, Smed and company just pushed ahead to what would be Omens of War. /GU Comics creator Woody Hearn called for a boycott of the expansion and it worked. OOW was halted and a conference with players who flew on their own dime was held at the SD HQ. The result? GoD got fixed and Omens was one of your best expansions.

    These forums are simply no substitute for face to face discussion.

    My question is why has it been allowed to go on so long? Pretty much all the epics are useless save shaman and cleric. It should have been addressed SOME TIME in the last 10 years.

    Solution: necro-only drops. Enough with the rogue-only pokers. Within 3 months of an expansion those are going to alts. Introduce a necro-only primary drop that has the epic focus.

    Did no one say to them hey, you used this DPS balance raid down 10 times already, use something else?

    I don't follow the question. But I do remember one massive nerf in particular: HoT mercenary missions got killed when Alaris came out. Man were people mad.

    1) If you ground exp even for an hour in the zone you'd have figured that out.
    2) This gets into another problem cited before about. Beta isn't for testing it's for uber guilds to work out raid strats so people can race for the honor of being second to RoI. When you jack levels on an expansion you always let people copy their main and then boost them 5 levels. Stop doing that. MAKE THEM GO GRIND before they do the raids.
    3) As I understand it, some people DID complain in beta feedback and it was ignored. That's on your heads if true.

    The dragon raid, GMM1. Last time my guild tried I was getting GINA triggers 5 minutes after we wiped and rezzed.

    And the design. That narrowing before the Magus is arty but impractical. And you can do two things to fix frame rate if you won't toss the GL and redesign it:

    1) Disable mounts. I absolutely hate this. There is absolutely no reason for an AFK player looking for driveby buffs to sit on a giant winged mount. None. ANd people do it in the Bazaar, too, just to block other traders.

    2) Auto suspend mercs after 15 minutes. Give cleric mercs time to do their work but then go away.

    Two simple fixes will greatly reduce the number of bodies in the GL.

    Oh, and why does it rain in the GL?

    I will use a timer next time. But I can tell you that recovery in TBL feels like it takes 2x what it takes in the GL.
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  19. Metanis Bad Company

    Regarding the OP's question, I don't think the Devs should be required to play the game unless they get paid for it and can do it on company time. It's a job, not a hobby. At 5pm they should be allowed to have a life outside of work. And if they DO stay late to keep working on tasks related to the job then they should be compensated for that time.

    Now having said that, there should be a paid staff member who plays nearly full-time and is tasked as a community liaison and player advocate. This person would have a tough time maintaining an element of independence but it would be needed.

    Regarding Dzarn's posts: I think it's pretty awesome he's been proactive here. But I think that DBG has painted themselves into a corner by creating so many calculation requirements and variables and there's no solution that is feasible with the resource constraints they face. However, I know they are a very creative lot so I hope they keep nibbling around the edges and that people will keep paying until we all grow old and die.
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  20. Vumad Cape Wearer

    This seems kind of an oversite issue. GamParse exists and it's free. DBG reaching out to the developer to create a partnership to make it a DBG EQ1 endorsed product seems like an all around win even if it costs DBG a small endorsement costs.

    The next step from that is developing a community partnership for obtaining the test data.

    There are actually a lot of community resources that DBG can access for little to no cost.




    Lol. How ridiculous. You can /beta buff to 110 with max AA. Hail the NPC to get to 115 and get all you can eat ToV group gear with unlimited rez tokens, unlimited guild tribute, free trophies and everything else. Why should anyone have to go grind XP so they can go fall through the floor in a zone with an unknown bug? Making players grind in beta is... lol

    The guilds that are not raid geared are actually at the advantage on Beta. They can try raids with every player in the guild with max AA and max group gear from the latest expansion with just the effort of logging in and making a few hails. Changing /beta does nothing to help the lower guilds and everything to hurt the development process.

    For all the support I have voiced recently for adding easy mode to raids for lesser geared players to have a way to develop strats, I whole heartily have to disagree with a negative attitude towards the ability of any guild to get maxed everything before trying a raid.