I'm Your New Community Manager!

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by dreamweaver, Jul 29, 2019.

  1. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    That's an excellent question, especially since not everyone has a Super Cray Computer to be able to handle ginormous downloads all at once (mine can now, but that wasn't always the case), and some of us are still using DSL (yeah, yeah, and stone knives and bear skins. So sue us). :-/

    One of the things I'd always loved about EQ2 and WoW is either the gentleness of giving it to us one small-ish bit at a time, or WoW's having a mirror site if one had issues with the main site (do NOT ask me about NCSoft and City of Heroes; one big reason why they went under [and imho, rightfully so; they should've sold CoH back to its original creators though, the spoil-sport bad loser dogs] was their completely awful customer "service"). It's sad to have to get it all in one big lump, and I can't imagine that de-bugging li'l bits at a time, then handing them over to us (or even, gasp, handing them over to the Public Test server to be further, y'know, tested), would be much harder than having to scramble around de-bugging everything at once. It could be that it's an issue with lack of staff size? :-/

    Uwk
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  2. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    Speaking from experience with test servers at a big company not associated with gaming, testing on the test server wont bring out all of the problems.

    We had two big computers, I signed a NDA so no details, both same brand and model. They would test on the test server, then after several days put it on the main company computer.

    The devs would stay there on shifts to make sure things went okay. I worked at night and they would call me up 'do you see that error message ?'. I would reply yes, its asking such and such.

    And they would try to fix it on test, then copy it over to live.

    Sometimes things went well, first night. Other times it took over the weekend or a week.

    My guess is that in EQ/EQ II the number of lines of code are significantly higher. I thank Ghu they aren't in Fortran nor RPG. Don't know what those are ? Well, my suggestion is don't look them up, you could get a migraine headache.

    I did my unversity homework in Vax Pascal.
  3. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Ow ow ow ow ow! Fortran and Pascal? Ghu's pity on thee! :-/

    Uwk
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  4. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    The Fortran was on Apple ][+s and a Corvus 20 megabyte networked hard drive. Fortran 1.0.

    That was about 1984. The professor was used to an IBM 360. So one of his grad students had to translate punch card Fortran to Apple Fortran, then check the program to even see if the assignment could be done.

    One of his lovely assignments was to read in a text file of Roman numerals, and convert them to Arabic ( the system we use today ), print that out, them take the Arabic numbers, convert them back to Roman numerals, and print that out.

    Coded in Fortran.

    You would think some of the students were being tortured.

    Why yes, one of the class' questions was 'What's a Roman numeral ?'.

    Ah, the good old days. :)
  5. Wulfgyr I've got friends in EQ2Wire places

    So when did you get to start working on COBOL? :p

    I used punch cards for book marks through high school - we always had a couple boxes in the basement. Dad's company didn't upgrade from a mainframe (yes, an actual IBM, complete with tape backup and "cold room") to server/client architecture until the late '90's or early 2000's. And unfortunately, that was the system responsible for all of the billing (customer, supplier, etc), for the municipal water district...... I'd been out of the house for years by then, but can still remember some of the frustration and problems they had (especially the ones he and the other sysadmins warned them about in advance).
  6. Wulfgyr I've got friends in EQ2Wire places

    Windstalker mentioned a limited run of T-Shirts on Amazon in the Darkpaw announcement. :)
  7. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    No COBOL thank ghu !

    The Fortran was at community collegte. 4-year university was Pascal, except for two classes in C. We did pseudo-3D graphics, etc. GKS, Graphical Kernal System on MS-DOS computers, with huge 32 meg hard drives.

    After graduation I was console operator or worked on Crays, IBM AS/400s, various Windows versions, mostly repaired Windows desktops and laptops. Ordered toner... ekh.
  8. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    I learned to code in COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, and APL initially, and I had to hand-punch all the cards and pop a JCL stack on top, turn it in to the operations desk, then we'd go to Earl Abel's (late night restaurant with nary a waitress younger than 80 but the best pie and coffee you could get in San Antonio at that time) and while away a few hours before going back to see if our output was ready. Once I was working, I added Autocoder (an Assembly-like langugue for the IBM 1301), then Autocoder running via emulator on an IBM 360, then figured out how to use BASIC with PEEK and POKE to do things on a Trash 80 that you normally couldn't do. And did I ever clean up fixing COBOL installations in 1999.

    But I eventually switched to technical writing and technical analysis/business analysis work. It paid the same, with no sleeping under my desk during crunch times.
  9. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Ah, lucky you! :D

    Do you still have work in that? I'd heard that in the early 2000s, the various corporations in America canned all their technical writers, since "no one needs no stinkin' manual no-how, and once you wrote it, that's it" and were considered fluff... :-/

    Uwk
    who's done some dabbling in that; fascinating stuff :)
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  10. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    I'm retired, but heck yeah there's tons of work for technical writers. Textbooks must be produced, advertising collateral created, policy manuals created, technical specifications created before coding starts, business analysis before the tech specs can be written, web content.... there's tons. Check the Society for Technical Communications website for jobs, salary ranges, training, etc.
  11. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Brilliant! That's very reassuring, and good to know! :D

    Thanks! :)

    Uwk
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  12. Jenni0576 New Member

    I am really hoping someone of importance can help me with the plea! Since you are the new Community Manager, I have no idea who i can talk to about getting more item count into these houses... i am a major decorator I want to do so much in these houses but there just isn't enough item count.. each expansion you all just keep adding more and more house items which i absolutely love! but there just isn't enough space in these houses to place the new items! I have quite a few of the houses... even with both expanders attached it still just isn't enough! If you could see that this request makes it to the proper people I will forever be indebted to you... thanks so much in advance from every decorator who's only purpose in this game is to make houses beautiful!!! (lol it says i'm a new member... maybe to the forums.. i've played this game since beta =P)
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  13. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Yep, new to the forums... I was a slightly major pest -- er, fixture on the old school forums (where we had the black backgrounds everywhere and the BRIGHT COLORS we had to use hurt the eyes :-/), who probably held some sort of record for having posts removed without being banned outright from there, especially once the Pro7 debacle started. ;) When I first started posting here in the new forums, I too was a "new member." ;->

    As far as item count goes, yeah, I've run up against that limitation before a time or two (surprisingly; usually I don't get anywhere near it... :oops:), but one issue could very well be the SIZE of the places, physically. Try to decorate the Grotto or the Deepwater place with only the default 900+100+200 for the expanders? Only 1200 Items and 1200 Blocks? Oy! :-/

    The issue on their end is, apparently, too much stuff in our houses bogging down the servers, so I don't think we're gonna get any bigger expanders or more room any time soon. :-/

    You should see the Tier 3 and 4 Guild Halls... :-/

    Uwk
    whose old WinXP wouldn't be able to handle even a total of 700+ house items (and blocks [well, that was before they had that definition]), but with at least a Win7 these days...
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  14. Cyrrena Well-Known Member

    Would be nice if the stackable items could still count as stacked when placed in a house, like tiles. Just tiling a house could eat up a good number of your blocks not to mention skinning the walls. All of the items used for those stack, so why can they not still count as stacked? Books do not count. Not all items of course, but perhaps just building blocks, that would help immensely.

    And of course, giving us or allowing us to craft depots for the tinkered items, the building blocks, the house items, etc, that we store in bank boxes, vaults, dungeons, on mules, and everywhere else we can, that would clear up a lot of the bogging as we could all get rid of our dungeons that we use to store our items, we could clean up our banks, vaults, mules and everything else we store things in or on and I think they would become very happy with us very, very, very, quickly!!! Who is with me??? Let us start a depot campaign to help clean up Norrath!!!!!!
  15. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Keep NOrrath Beautiful (KNOB)! :D

    Uwk
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  16. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    What I think would be great is when we put up wall pieces, we had the option of having them conform to the shape of the walls. Not just be a flat wall in front of the walls the prestige house came with.

    And Ttobey could animate it the manouver...
  17. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    LOL! :D

    What I would give more than a few body parts for (mainly 'cause I'd love to trade them in anyway, for bits that worked...) would be to have the tools we had in Landmark, a wonderful sandbox game (shame it died, but that weekly-or-else copper rent requirement was untenable). Granted, we could "carve up" things like dirt, sand, rock, etc. to get raw-looking things, but we wouldn't need to have to do that here, just to be able to do it with stuff we could make ourselves, like Blocks, Dividers, etc. Wouldn't we all love to be able to carve a SPHERE (or an actual flat, thin, real Triangle "Tile"?) out of, say, a block of Redwood, and have a lovely Redwood Ball and a lovely ROUND hole in a Block or Half-Block or Column? Or a Disk from a Divider, if that's too much to ask for? :-/

    Oh, and make such circular/spherical tools actually have more than 10 sides, please... X-P

    Uwk
    who speaks for the Nx4-sided "round" polygons...
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  18. PsiberDaemon Active Member

    Oh, I totally get not "on the fly" patching the .exe file, what I was mainly curious about was downloading the actual graphics. Then again, I do the full local install (all graphics downloaded to my machine, not streamed) so that might have something to do with it. Forgot about the streaming option. :D
  19. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    Sigh, what do you have against the lowly 10-sided die ?

    d12s and d20s can't handle the entire load.

    Side note: I collect dice, but I don't have the most, so they range from d3s, d4s, d5s, d6s, d7s, d8s, d9s., d10s, d12s, d14s, d16s, d18s, d20s, d30s. There are supposedly some others between 20 and 30 sides, but I don't remember what they are.

    No, I'm not the guy in the Guiness Book for I think 1998 or 1999. He currently has around 100 thousand dice. I have a mere 3 thousand.
  20. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    LOL! Not what I meant...if they'd given us "Rounded" Tiles of 8 sides, or 12 sides, at least then we'd have the option of having flat sides going N/S AND E/W at the same time. :-/ Now all we have with 10-sided "Rounded" Tiles is either a flat side N/S and a point E/W, or vice versa. :-/

    And with 12 sides, it would look more truly "rounded." :-/

    Uwk