Extruded Black Pearl removed

I think it's fine that if it was an exploit (do only first part of mission), they remove the aug. But. Was all 6 in group getting aug on full mission completion by design? or a bug? exploit? if 6 getting was bug/exploit, it should be removed from 5 of 6, whether they finished the mission or not. OR, if all 6 is suppose to get the aug at once, why is it now only 1 can get it. That seems like a change, not a exploit. Mixing something your calling a exploit and something your just deciding to change that was working how you intended, seems odd. Like fixing the exploit part is fine, but taking it from 6 to 1, assuming that wasn't a bug is just mean. Most all the people will have done it already getting it in groups of 6, and the stragglers who were working or on vacation have to come back and get it 1 by 1 now.
If it was tested, with groups of 6 getting 6 augs. And then, for a month, groups of 6 were getting 6 augs. What changed now, why all of a sudden only 1 of group should get aug? I don't get the logic.

I'm guessing far too many people did it the incorrect way. Giving people vacations likely would have left servers very empty

It was on test for a week. There was a back and forth in the test patch discussion thread about it with the developer from those that were testing it. Either the shortcut wasn't found in that week or people chose to not mention it.

It could have been designed better. The script could have not spawned certain things until certain steps were complete. My impression is the anniversary tasks are not scheduled things and if a dev has time to work on one, we get one. If not, we don't. So part of me is grateful that Ngreth took time to give us something to do, while the other part wishes he'd be a bit more attentive to the details when doing so.

Because they reduced the difficulty of all the mobs except the end one (murder). So it's easier to complete now.

I got a pocket full of quarters, and I'm headed to the arcade.
I don't have a lot of money, but I'm bringing everything I made.
I've got a callus on my finger, and my shoulder's hurting too.
I'm gonna eat them all up, just as soon as they turn blue.

The logic is that if you follow other Anniversary quests, they only give out one bonus item for completing the bonus phase/requirements of the task (Miniature Horn of Unity, Shimmering Black Pearl, etc). I am assuming (and yes, I know what it makes me look like) that the 6 berry pies was a coding mistake and it should have only been handing out one per task from the get go.

No , the error was players during early anniv release getting the pearl without completing the mission. A so called cheat which has been addressed. Muahahahahaha!!!!
The multiple berry pies have been reduced in the future, but players that finished the mission and each received the pearl will not be penalized.

My doctor says I need 14 hours of Everquest a day to stay alive, please hurry!

You only have 4.5 hours left. Watch some YouTube videos about EverQuest, quick! It will extend your life, but only for a few hours. You're living on borrowed time, son. Get your affairs in order. This doesn't look good.

I feel like this entire situation is because Ngreth got offended that players figured out a way to do it that he didn't intend, because he didn't let real players test it. He was bragging pretty hard about how many times he ran the script and how many times he tested it when it went Live.

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SO. by that logic. It was clearly a coding mistake, and you took the reward anyway, isn't that the definition of an exploit? exploiting a coding mistake?
It was giving out 6 while it was on test? it was giving out 6 since it was on live? and all this time, it was a coding mistake? If you say so.

What's considered an exploit is a Dev stating it's an exploit. It was called an exploit as a bandaid to poor design.

Lost but Not Forgotten: Complete the entire mission, maybe you could leave the Vampire Lord alive and kill Harris to get the Tent without completing the mission and maybe you can complete the mission without killing Stonewall Nightwing which means no one gets a Tent but it's pretty straight forward, the bonus is being the one lucky person who gets the drops.

A Formal Dinner Party: Ngreth has so little to do that instead of simply dropping one aug (or six) for completing the mission he attaches the bonus to a script which checks 3 things: first guess on room is correct, first guess on murderer is correct and murderer is killed. On FV it produces a massive exploit you could have actually turned in the Red Berry Paste for the aug, parcel the aug, re-enter instance, get another Red Berry Paste and repeat, it's unknown by the general public if anyone did this or if any action was taken against anyone who did this.

Ngreth decided that completing every initially required step for the Bonus was an exploit and a hotfix went in a few days after the anniversary started and the script required 4 things, the 4th being completion of the mission, after this patch it has 5 elements it also requires the first piece of food handed to Melion to be correct.

Then with all his free time also makes the batling, the super clever must suspend pet script and writes all the brilliant quest dialogue which mostly consists of Ngreth vicariously insulting anyone who does the mission. There was absolutely nothing that Ngreth could have improved with the mission itself or anything else in EverQuest that was more important than the Red Berry Paste and all it's associated mechanics.

Irrelevant. The mission was supposed to award one reward, instead, due to a bug, it awarded 6. That makes it an exploit. End of story. Difficulty has nothing to do with it, you are not entitled to a reward over and above what was intended simply because the mission was poorly designed to start with.

What you are trying to rationalize is your taking advantage of a bug and then arguing that you are somehow entitled to that extra reward by virtue of the poor design of the encounter. You are not. Cheating is cheating, if the rules apply to others, they apply to you as well.

The devs need to remove this aug from EVERYBODY. The mission is easier now, there is no impediment to stop people from going and doing it the proper way, and that includes you.

How do you justify that? Many people got the aug legitimately but the heck with them?
smh

The problem with the Dinner Party mission is not the mission itself, it is that they apparently messed up and used the raid instance as the template instead of the regular zone when designing the mission. That is why the mobs were hitting so hard and why mercs initially on test could not be used in the zone. Mercs were only allowed when people started asking wtf they were not allowed in this mission when literally every other mission in the game allows them. The mobs were a proportional scale up the old raid trash. Hell, they hit harder than trash mobs on CURRENT raid encounters, that is how crazy it was. The consequence of that is, for most people, the raid (I mean mission) was simply not doable as a group encounter. Some people did manage after a LOT of work, and others after the mob density was thinned out a bit, but the fundamental design error in the mission was not fixed (until now, if I understand the patch notes right).

Of course they are never going to admit to that, but it is pretty obvious that is what happened.

If the mission had been correctly implemented in the first place, everyone would likely have done it properly to begin with and we would not be having this argument.

This is what i hope for really, for this mission to be comparable somewhat better to the LDoN-based one for the tent. Especially since it now gives only one reward per run.
While i did not "cheat" and take the short route, i have characters that for some reason did not get credit (the checkmark in the achievements) for the anniversary things i did with them - some didn't get credit for the tasks, some not for the bonus items - even though all should be checked like with my main, since i did it all the same way. (i'm assuming chat-lag related issues being responsible for this)

For the Aug mission this thread is about, pulling/CC was the difficult part imo, even though mobs hit quite hard apart from having to tank many at the same time which was hard even with discs the rest was easy enough.
My 105SHD was quite good for the pulling, but if i used him i was missing on the healing side a bit...
My last run of this one was with me on my cleric only in a group - and the tank was kind of hard to heal, harder than i remembered it with me as tank. We wiped a total of 3times even though the ROG did a phantasic job at pulling, much better than the BRD (and the extra SHD tank we had did not pulling at all).
It'd be nice not to have to look for a "good group" anymore, to redo this for anyone that's missing it or for any character of mine that might have gotten his aug removed.

Now, before the server-down for the re-patch that is still going on, i was only able to log two characters on and those both still had their augment, so i am more curious than worried about the others. But if they indeed did a simple select or update, based on the achievement checkboxes, then i might loose some rewards too. Which is why i am waiting to see how "easy" this will be - or how "hard" the other one's final fight will be now, with the named and 5adds linked to each other.

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love the song good old memories when I used to play the record.

Andarriel

Only one person in their group got the aug legitimately, the other 5 did not. Since you cannot determine which of those 6 got it legitimately, and which of the other five did not, you have to remove it from all of them. After all, they were all complicit in exploiting the mission. If it was not clear who should have got it legitimately, then all six were morally obliged to destroy the paste.

Like I said, the only fair way to resolve this is to remove the aug from everyone and have them redo the mission (which presumably is much more doable now than it was on launch). Start from a clean slate or do nothing at all. There is no inbetween where benefiting from a bug is OK done one way but not another. A bub is a bug, and benefiting from it no matter how justified you might feel you are needs to be addressed across the board, not just in some cases.

Remove all of the augs or remove none, because EVERY SINGLE ONE WAS OBTAINED AS A RESULT OF A BUG.

I just hate it when people cast shade on others for not doing things the proper way when they themselves have not done it in the proper way and benefited from a bug. There is a word for it, it is called hypocrisy.

This is but an assumption.
From where i stand, the mission was supposed to grant 6augments, based on it's difficulty.
The "bug" (or rather, design oversight - and an totally understandable one that was used by players, given how simple the "riddle" is and how quickly it can be done - could be done even these days IF you only had to present the minimum number of drops to be sure of the class) would have been that the NPC accepted things he shouldn't have for "proof"..
It is getting changed to yield just one aug per run based on the new difficulty.
Just an assumption too, yes. But from where i stand a more realistic one than the one you made.

IMO, the varying player opinions have validity. Truth is DB screwed up and any revert/change is nearly impossible to be fair to everyone. We are left to bash each other that our varying perspectives have more validity than someone else's, when the blame as usual is more the process DB uses to implement. It would appear they are dealing with a competency issue, or more likely, they have limited personnel to do all they try to do to maintain customer base.

I guess we deal with it or move on. With many accounts and off and on play for many years - I am probably on the bubble. I am largely tired of these wastes of time requiring rinse repeats and/or acceptance of these screw ups affecting my quality of game-play, but still having a good bit of enjoyment figuring out ways to progress my characters.

It is often very difficult to understand what is acceptable play any more in this game. There certainly is the EULA, but there seems to be disparity b/t some of what it says and what actually gets uniformly enforced. Again it may be limited resources, or from a more skeptical view, what they enforce may be economically motivated, or maybe its a hodge podge of several variables.

Can I deal with this change and get the item by revisiting this content for whatever entertainment it will provide? Sure and I probably will. However, this kind of screw up goes on an ever increasing list of frustrations that may chase more customers than the game itself attracts.

I do note that DB tends to be heavy handed in there sporadic approaches to their fixes these days. For eg, 'Oh we screwed up on some class ROS dots, let's nerf them for 2 expacs and move on.' The lack of uniformity, sometimes harsh 'fixes' and varying delays in said fixes, doesn't seem to be good PR for the customers DB has left. It would seem like better communication and a more measured approach would gain them some good graces.

I mention the communication issue not only b/c a complete understanding of policy and enforcement is lacking or not accurately written, but also b/c I did not appreciate how much this particular event was in controversy. I play the game, I do not typically read the forums. Maybe I should, but I do not prefer it. An in game message or an email might have eased this issue for many, but I dunno.

In terms of a measured approach, why not leave the event alone for the rest of the anniversary period and only change it for future anniversaries? It punishes no one for DB's poor implementation except somewhat arguably, those who did not care enough to play this cycle, or maybe in DB language, those who aren't as likely to be regularly paying and playing customers. As it stands, we have a limited amount of time than intended to get this item. Since DB's intent on the event is guiding their hand on taking back the aug - completion and one reward - are they also going to extend this event to allow the full time they originally intended we would have for completion?

I am sure I will attract some bashing, but I had a free night to play and little else to do but reflect my thoughts on the matter at hand. So troll away - nfg.