Good Morning, Two simple proposals to address both the technical issues with Mangler and the resulting customer service challenges: 1. The EQ player base contains a disproportionate share of IT workers, who are also passionate about EQ. Recommendation is to take resumes, screen candidates for past hacking suspicions, forming a virtual work group to investigate and remediate the technical issues with Mangler, and perhaps other servers. Intent is to fix the issues while building trust among the player base. Compensate these folks with some form of EQ immortality (NPCs, titles, spells, etc.) 2. Reset all DZ timers each time the server crashes. If this increase the flow of loot, so be it, until the technical issues are addressed. Intent is to mitigate the CS frustration of rollbacks and interrupted raids. Yakita ROG Stephie DRU Twistkita BRD
Please reset DZ timers. The first time I played EQ almost 20 years ago, it was on a PvP server. Because I was in casual guilds we were always kept out of VT and Elemental Planes and beyond by other guilds. My second time around I'm finally getting to raid VT. My guild is getting close to time. We beat Fennin Ro, and Cornaiv. This week Thurs we had planned Rathe Council. Server was up and down. Sat we started air, were clearing to Xegony. The server crashed and was up and down. I fear we'll never get to time as people grow frustrated, to the point of giving up. This isn't right. I've spent money not just on subscription fees, but on Krono to gear up, to help my guild progress. This isn't right, and I understand sometimes problems are difficult to track down and fix, but at least apologize, and do something to help. Communicate, and reset DZ timers.
They should just change the global AOC replay timer to 1hr the same as later expansion instances have such as Anguish. Leave the loot lockout timer the way it is if they have to so people can't farm Fear/Hate/Halls of Testing etc for armor drops off trash but there is no real reason to not be able to spin up your PoFire instance again if you havent killed Fennin and the server goes down.
I work for a large IT consulting company, and there are a few of us in the Datacenter infrastructure team that have played EQ (or still do). I was just telling the team in virtual happy hour how I would love to "intern" part time to help fix the mess of the down times.
I appreciate the sentiment but IMO no company will do this with "outsiders". There's too much risk if you don't do it right and too much overhead if you do. If you know of a company who has done this, I'd be interested in hearing the story.
