Why not use the community rather than breaking things?

It is EXACTLY like painstakingly restoring a piece of art. And no you can't call Monet on your cell phone and ask him what he meant by this painting.

The main problem is, they have not been 'taking pains' about it for a number of years. I've been complaining about just this for over 2 years now on the forums.

The have not taken all the things, Niente rightly points out about working on 20+ year old code, into account with all their additions and bloat over the years.

They called it 'tech-debt' in house for many years. The move to 64bit is a really good sign.

The rapid changes consisting of pulling things to save server calculations speak for themselves. And are not a good sign.

I started out years ago saying 'curation', Skuz eventually mentioned Stewardship.

I'm looking for better Stewardship I guess, and sadly, I'm not seeing it.

Ehh I think their Test environment is more like a Prod-like Stage environment. They don't just willy-nilly deploy "whatever" to it whenever. They probably have an internally isolated "Test" environment that can more readily be wiped or reset for the kind of "will the server come up" deploys you mention.

I've driven our development team on our modern development to the point that unless there is 100% unit test coverage the code merge request is denied. All code merges are reviewed by a lead and all unit tests are also validated to actually do more than return just "true". It's a matter of getting buy-in from management to be able to take the proper time to add automated testing. It's a complete culture change top to bottom in the company.

(This can also be difficult with older codebases, but with new code you need to start somewhere.)

100% unit test coverage is great but that doesn't mean that bugs and issues are not sill slipping through and making it to production.

I agree with the poster that said to notify the player base about a change that will have potential ramifications.

When I zone into an area and invis and run thru and get destroyed, my first thought was, hmm maybe my invis didn't cast. When I zone back in to recover my corpse and I get destroyed again, this time knowing invis was up, is extremely frustrating. I go back to the patch notes and see this line that says they made some changes to mob types. OK so now I go back for the third time to get my two corpses and I have double invis and whammo I get killed a third time because now the mobs see through SoS. Where in the patch notes did it tell me "The game as you have known it for several years just became 1000% harder to move around in"? I have given up trying to move around in ToL because I don't have time to /con every mob and fight my way through an entire zone just to be able to get to further zones. I can totally understand a few mobs that cause problems and having to kill those to continue on, but having to kill 20+ mobs (20 being generously low) to just get to the next zone is unbearable let alone the effot that will now be needed to to the quests in the zones. And this is just ToL, I haven't even looked at older zones.

I totally understand the work the devs are putting in and I appreciate it. What I don't appreciate is the lack of communication. If this is an intended consequence then tell us, but this game does not have the player base to make such changes and have us work through it.

I will just go play another game until I get more details on when to come back and play my favorite game that I have played for 23 years.

Yep I know. Just less slips through. I would hope they're starting modern practices was more my point. Often times it's easier for devs to just accept the bad standards of a codebase and compound the problem.

Test, for the most part, isnt for us to test their changes, thats been made pretty clear the last few years. Its for them to see if the game can launch after they make said changes.

The server environment has changed significantly from what it was even in the EoK era, and we lost a number of highly active people who would test swaths of things the second the servers came up as a result of those changes.

Theres a number of things that dont even hit test before they're pushed live, and test has to then be patched to catch up. Artisans Prize and Epic Retelling were released on live first (and AP by a significant amount of time), as examples. The first Artisan Prize and several weapon plaques on test were claimed via /testcopy.

Test has been having stability issues the last couple weeks, and a number of people active in testing and fiddling with numbers have been on live and/or not logging in.

I should also point out that unit testing won't catch issues that are related to design. Take the NPC's that are now seeing through all types of invis, unit testing would indicate that the code lets them see invis things but not that they are expected to not see invis thigs. When it you are talking about an MMO (or other game) there is a big difference between the code working as expected and the content working as designed/intended.

I find it a bit hard to believe that some of the issues we had in this patch had anything to do with bad code but the massive amount content that got changed.

Not sure if this is true as they did continue to make changes after various issues where caught on test, they just didn't catch all of them.

Not disagreeing that there are things unit testing won't catch. Anyway, we're veering a bit off topic lol.

I for one completely agree with the OP. I've been saying this for countless years now that they need to consult with some veteran players before making big changes so they can point out massive issues before they become one. While the Devs may know the behind the scenes game better than we do but we know the gameplay, common sense, basics better than they do. Every year, their is massive amounts of time completely wasted all because they didn't take 1 minute to ask someone if this or that would cause a problem.

For example, The DoT revamps. I'm not even caster class and as soon as I saw the purposed changes to DoT's, I knew it was going to break the game / class balance. And not by just by a little bit but a massive amount. The idea was good in that reducing the amount of Dots it takes to do descent damage in exchange for higher mana cost was a great idea. However, you can't just double DoTs base damage... Because of ADPS and power-ups of all kinds, doubling the base damage pretty much turned out to be 4-6x more damage in the end. Anyone who even half-way knows the game, knows that was way over board and would not work. Countless people including myself chimed in and told him this. Just 1 MINUTE could have saved a ton of hours of wasted time. But as usual we were ignored. Best part is, this huge mistake was then repeated what, 3,4, 5,6 times in a row? Unreal.

Their are countless more examples of this, I could go on for days and days about how many huge mistakes could have been avoided if they even bothered to run this stuff by veteran player first. But they NEVER do. You guys have a massively helpful resource at your disposal yet you NEVER utilize it.

I'm not saying players should control all changes or whatever. But considering how stressed for time the Devs are, wasting massive amounts of time for no good reason other than you just didn't want to run an idea by someone who knows what impact will make, is well just plain #$%* IMO.

The spell Dev doesn't even know the basics of the monk class, repeating the same 100% useless discs over and over every year. A few years ago he did at least try to finally make a new Drunken Monkey Stance which monks had been asking for a long time. I applaud that he tried to make something new, I really do, but the disc was fundamentally flawed from the start and impossible for us do because of how our special attacks work. If he had taken 30 seconds to run this by a monk, then we would have told him that it was flawed and impossible for us to do and all the time wasted making it would have been avoided. We were also told we would receive something else as compensation since it had to be scrapped, but as usual we did not.

In a game this complicated, the Devs need our help more than ever. Yet it's like you guys have this huge issue with letting us help in any way. I don't know if it's a "We have to justify our position" thing or not. But whatever it is, you need to get over it and let us help. You have endless people willing to help you, but you'd rather waste countless amounts of time making un-needed changes and changes that have huge unintended consequences that could have been easily pointed out if you just ran it by someone first real fast. It blows my mind. I've never seen a company before that is so un-willing to receive any help before.

Sure but I felt it was important to point out that some of the bugs that people are complaining about have nothing to do with the quality of code, coding standard or unit testing. It was that design intention of some mobs in the many zones that we have got impacted by the body type changes.

Let those helpful souls that were willing to play on Test for free do it again. It was a mistake by the past company to take this away and the game has suffered because of it. You need to create a Test environment where skilled players that understand the game are properly compensated for their time. You need raiding guilds there, it's really helpful to the game. They dealt with random server downs for fixes, broken raids Live didn't have broken yet and such a laundry list of other things that simply did not work so that when Live patches occurred, they were the most quality patches possible. It wasn't perfect, bugs and unintended changes slipped through but it was a big help. Please bring this back.

They still can play for free - one retains gold access without paying a subscription on the test server. The only major change I can recall is they no longer acquire expansions for free - so they either have to purchase an expansion each year, or wait for the FTP unlock for new content.

Test absolutely could use more people testing content after the test patch each month before things go live; I use /testcopy and put in some time every month myself, but there's a limit to what I can test solo.

I think test does have a raiding guild, or they did until recently, Primal Blood - I'm not sure how active they are though as I've never played with them.

Test just suffers from the same population problems that most other servers have over time: population decline. It could use some more adventurous Norrathians, particularly during the week between the test patch and live patch each month to try to catch more bugs; /testcopy FTW!

They changed it so that anything "wearable" can not be picked. It was also in the latest patch, and in the notes.

I love your signature. Every time I see that I wanna take a hostage.

Outside anniversary raids, PB does not raid current content. All test raids (that I am aware of) are done through the Test Server Raid Friends discord these days, and prior to Anniversary raids, it was EoK raids.

Any time in the last ~8 years Test has been close to having even a 1 expansion-old raiding force available, shenanigans, either unintentional or otherwise, resulted. After the last time we tried, back in the RoS era, it resulted in a huge chunk of people seemingly vanishing for good from both live and test after a single raid night, including our raid leader, who was also raid leading a top end live guild.

I've wondered in the past - If they made test server basically a free to play newplayer uproute server, people could test, level up, gain Krono and all access and at level cap, transfter to any live server, even make a Krono a completable quest, non repeatable and only available to characters "born on" test server to disallow /testcopy characters from slummming free Krono.

This reminds me of cleaning the Sistine Chapel and other very old artworks, which have been patinaed for so long, nobody expected the vibrant bright colors behind the smoke and grime. Cleaning the artwork permanently altered it in everyone's mind, yet that was how the artist made it.

Thanks for the clarification. That's understandable, but unfortunate.

Thank you for the insight of some of the intricacies you and the development team deal with. After reading your post I am convinced more than ever that the team is short on Quality Assurance staff to test these changes and assure the quality and integrity of that work. That or that the department/procedures themselves are defunct to some degree.

Regardless of what you experience from an internal aspect, from an external aspect, as customers we see what appears to be a complete lack of a functional Quality Assurance program. Even with the insight on the intricacies of working with the EQ code that you provided in your post. What we see, which can only be taken for face value as customers, is patch after patch that feels like more is broken than is fixed. Often including game/class breaking bugs. And then those fixes of fixes of fixes of fixes come only after an unreasonable amount of time of neglect then break something else. As if it had never seen a single second of testing or Quality Assurance. In my opinion, the Quality Assurance department/program catastrophically fails the development team. On the surface, during the aftermath of each patch, what we the players view is a failure on behalf of the devs. When in fact it seems that it is the QA department/program that is what ultimately fails the players and devs alike. Please, I implore you, as a representative for the studio to bring this matter up. Currently as it stands, the only assurance we the players have, is of poor-quality patches that do not address core issues that break parts the game over and over again. There is very little faith among the community that patches can be performed in a reasonably not-game/class-breaking fashion. As patch day draws closer and closer each month, more and more conversations occur that joke about what will break in this patch and just how bad the resulting damage will be. That is the only thing we can assuredly rely on, that the fixes introduced in patches will be of poor quality and seemingly performed with no foresight whatsoever.

Please, I bring this to you with the utmost of respect. You are one of my personal favorites of the dev team. Your involvement with the community is top notch and your efforts I have experienced are above and beyond your responsibilities. Like logging onto my server at very late night hours to fix people's specializations, etc. Which it then took a course of hours itself to help the players one by one. I appreciate you and the entire dev team alike, I just hope that the company can get itself up to date and organized in a working manner and within a reasonable time frame. Because right now, at best, we have a dysfunctional game.

Genuinely sincere,
An avid Everquest player named Duder.