spells? it's one spell every 3-5 minute if you can reset the lockout. on drinal those spell sell for a million or more.
Thanks for being somewhat objective. Its not envy. Its more like boredom. At least from the eyes of a spectator. See the same people win every year...well it marginalizes the whole sport to a degree. Its great when its your team always winning but for everyone else it gets to be..."Another season. Same outcome". Maybe this year MLA might be more fun to watch.
No company that is focused on customer service lets an entire team take a week off. The actual holiday is one thing, the week between two holidays is another. There should be enough overlap of skills so that the team members available can cover for those that are out. That's just competent management planning. At a minimum, you have people on call for critical issues. Now, it could be that they just don't consider this critical. Fair enough. In that case, they called someone in to perma kill the npc and will fix the actual issue next patch.
This is probably not true. Both the part about people not disrespecting the timing, and the part about there being plenty of other possible solutions. Plenty of people have been impatient throughout this thread and don't care what the devs have to do to fix it, they just want it fixed now. That's not really abnormal in any sense, and it's understandable from some perspectives. However, the real reason we have this thread is the second part. Killing an NPC to prevent an exploit has been done before in this game and it's generally done when they don't have any other good immediate options. There are some fixes that can be done hot, as in immediately, without a patch. Those are usually minor tweaks. Everything else requires a patch, and some patches require extensive testing. Furthermore, some issues require research first, possibly a decision by a team or team leader, before development and testing can even happen. People don't seem to know this, some don't care even if they know. Patches aren't one offs, they are all or nothing. So if you have a big patch scheduled and something big comes up, you either have to add it to that patch and wait, or pull that patch ahead to to include it. There may be a few other options in there, I'm not DBG so I don't know their internal specifics. The point is that most of the people in this thread that think this is so easy to fix, or to address differently, or to address quickly, probably have no idea what it takes to address anything programming related. I'm not saying they shouldn't fix it ASAP, but what is possible is not determined by uninformed speculation. It is determined by the reality of what the problem is, what it takes to get it fixed, and what resources are available to make that happen at the time. We also don't know for sure the true reason they felt this was bad enough to kill the NPC. This is all speculation layered over speculation. The only thing we know for sure is that it would be nice if this didn't happen, but it did, so here we are.
How hard can it be to take out three lines of dialogue for a certain time so that the raid event is not triggerable?
Well first off it's probably not the lines of dialogue but the engine that the NPC uses to listen for responses. We don't know how complicated that is. Second of all, even if that is easy, it probably requires a patch to deploy. Third, see what I said about patches being all or nothing. If they have a big update planned for next week but they are testing internally then they can't move that up to deploy this. Fourth, if they have to patch to turn it off then they have to patch to turn it back on. So raids would be down even longer.
Folks, the trick to having immediate action taken on this NPC is to frame it as a potential TLP problem. Look how fast the devs were able to instance Vule prior to DoDH opening. Wordsmith, yo.
I agree that more than perma-killing an npc is likely a patch requiring bringing servers down. Although they've been able to hot patch stuff that is constrained to instances before. Regardless of having another patch in the queue, source control should allow them to make a one-off hot fix patch without much hassle. But.... with the leaks of beta code to live before RoS launched, I question either their source control system or the abilities of the team to properly check in to correct branches or the team's ability to properly maintain changesets and do clean merges from their local to the repository.
That's why I said patches were all or nothing. I don't know what they use for source control and that might not actually matter. What matters is the bits that need to be pushed for changes, and from what I've seen in the past, their patch changes are additive only. I'd guess that they are limited by the age of the system, and have to build deployment packages manually. That makes it harder to go back and split up something that is already put together. Now they could potentially just push this one fix and delay the rest, but chances are they stuff that is already packaged is important too and they don't want to delay it. But now I'm the one speculating, and there really is no way to know. But based on past experiences this seems correct.
Yes. RoI scheduled their whole RL scheduling around the lockouts, however.They expect butts to be in seats and ready to raid when the lockouts lift, even if its not traditional after business hours times. Or even when most normal human beings chose to be awake. Their window sounds very specific, very tight and with no margin for contingency. For them, this is an existential threat to their dominance. As for the technical aspects mentioned, that sounds like quite a bit more than what the last guy out of the office running to catch a flight home for the Holidays can handle. Probably more than what the on call intern can handle as well too.Killing an NPC off probably takes just a few minutes and might be their SOP for these sort of things until they can get a handle on the situation. If its the exploit on lockouts where you can /kickplayers before the task is finished and still get a chest, than this is an exploit that has been around for years. If it was simple, it would have been fixed by now and represents MANY instances that would need to be looked at. That is if they wanted it to be globally fair for all missions and not just put some bandaid fix on it for just this particular case. The group version of this particular mission gives valuable rewards and at this early stage, a fairly significant boost in power. You could make millions of plat farming spells or completely farm a groups worth of complete spells sets in short order. Its an unfair advantage compared to those who respect the lock out timers. It is just amazing that something known to be an issue for years was not attempted during testing. Part of good testing is trying to break things.
It is simple really. A few other missions already give you the lockout when the chest is opened. That is the fix. The reason every mission doesn't do this is because not every mission is created by the same dev. As for the npc. You shouldnt need a patch to fix it. Remove the text from the npc so he does not respond to it then repop the npc on every server. Its not as complicated as you guys are all making it out to be.
Lots of things are very easy at face value. It might depend on their administrative procedures however. Most (which means not all) companies large or small, disallow any kind of unilateral decision making or modifications to a product. The primary decision maker who authorizes any modifications may not be available or there may not be any way to easily confer between team members. That's just to come up with a bandaid. The bandaid still has to be tested and assurances made that the fix didn't break other things in the process. There is also the case of DBG being a small company. They might have their books closed out for 2017, sent everyone off to Holiday break and can't authorize anymore manhours as an expenditure for this year.
I know you may find this hard to believe Bamboompow, but Everquest is a "game". Waking up early in the morning to have fun and play a video game doesn't equate to being a "freak show" as you call it. For someone that has all these supposed real life responsibilities, you certainly have plenty of time to post about people you claim to not care about
I dont see how it changes their scheduled raid times at all. It just extends the time to do Tier 1, but for them less than for anyone else. They should still schedule the same raid times every 4.5 days, but will just have to keep it up for a few more cycles. They will still win the race to tier 2 over every guild that is raiding on a weekly or even a 5 day schedule. The only way I can see it giving anyone a disadvantage is if someone didnt do the 2nd "week" of cactus before it got removed. Then everyone that did do cactus right before it was taken out have 1 extra flag. And Im almost certain ROI did get that flag in. Anyway, the race almost certainly wont be decided by who got more cactus runs in. It will be decided by who finishes tier 2 and tier 3 without fails.
RoI aren't the only ones that scheduled this way. I think CT did as well, though I'm not sure? Further, it's impacting the schedule of every raiding guild in the game that is able to do the T1 content in one day. Personally, I don't care; I'll be a few minutes later tossing dinner on the table twice a week instead of once until T2 when I will join these intrepid adventurers in altering my schedule so I can get home and feed the kids before raids a few nights a week. I do feel for those that set time aside to raid the lockouts. It's not for me, but it'd be a bit ridiculous for me to take shots at the extreme minority in EQ that chooses to play like this when I'm in the extreme minority IRL that wastes my time playing EQ to begin with. We are all idiots for playing this, stop treating others like bigger idiots for playing it in a different manner than you do.
It's simple really. Nobody knows how long it'll take to clear T2 the first time. So, people may want to free up a little extra time in their day to account for it. And that's a lot easier to do if your plans are set a couple weeks ahead of time.
