Announcement Regarding Changes to Weekly Patches

Ok. I will accept that it was a grammatical error on your part.

Raff....Even a player called "Member" has been around awhile and posted many times. There really are far more "Active Members" and "Well-Known Members" in this thread than "New Members." Sorry, you and I have been here for many years, and I do tend to agree with you on many things, but I have to call you out on this one.

What may be throwing you off is that you are seeing many names that don't post here as often as we do-- more names you don't see on a daily or weekly basis here. This is most likely because things are getting worse to the point where even quieter folks feel compelled to speak up.

And for everybody here:

Was there another round of layoffs for EQ2 very recently (I don't mean when Fyreflight and Syrah were let go, but much more recently than that)? Did I miss something? Is that why BoL and beyond have gotten so much more messed up even than usual?

I don't think so. The Darkpaw Twitter photo shows a large team. Chaos Descending was a very good expansion and 2019 a strong year. I think they were overthinking the Overseer mechanic in relation to itemization and TS.

That can't be true. I checked on EQ2 Progression: world-wide, there are only 52 raid groups active in BoL. That's a mere drop in the bucket.

I think there's a long-standing hostility among non-raiders because raiders get the really good loot, and some raiders are then jerkheads about their "superiority". Raiders are a minority, and jerkhead raiders a minority of that subset. You just can't make a valid case for raiding as being The Great Satan here.

A few thoughts come to mind after reading the original post and community comments.

1) In theory, switching to a bi-weekly schedule sounds completely reasonable. It should give devs more time to work on meaningful fixes rather than rushing to fix things like item naming issues and appearance changes for house items (which is a total joke when core mechanics and content bugs remain unfixed).

2) The comment "[...] Echoes of Faydwer will now be available on the 25th, we know that this delay contradicts our earlier stated date of release, but since this is the one we were going to be on time, it didn’t feel right not delaying it just a little." seems like a flagrant middle finger to TLS players. Devs could still do bi-weekly patches while making an exception to launch the EoF content on the originally stated date. Or just simply delay announcing the bi-weekly patch changes until after EoF went live lol. The excuse that "well, we were finally going to be on-time for once, so it didn't feel right not to make you wait after all" speaks volumes of how much they value the people on TLS. Thankfully, I never bothered to make a toon over there... but I feel for them after reading this post.

3) The proposition of using the test servers to test patches for bugs before they go live makes total sense - in theory. However, with server populations as low as they are (only Maj'Dul is ever rated as "medium" load, rest of them are "light") and no mention of server merges on the horizon, I question whether there will even be enough people that will take the time to use the test server. MOREOVER, I am incredibly skeptical whether the devs will even take advantage of the feedback that the eq2 community provides them via the test server.... I think we can all agree that TONS of bugs/issues that were identified in the BoL beta server went unaddressed and remain a problem to this day in an expansion that's 2 months old.

All of this reeks of unprofessionalism... but frankly it's not unexpected anymore.

Sincerely,
Skeptical Subscriber

I believe the raider/non-raider "war" is largely imaginary.

Sure, there might be some resentment because over the years the eq2 devs have mostly only cared to take feedback from "hard core" players, which tend to be raiders, but no exclusively.

To arrive at my speculation, I simply observed what eq2 has done with content:

Overland content: reduced to the bare minimum.
Heroic content: reduced to the bare minimum.
Tradeskilling: Anyone who believes that what happened to tradeskilling this year is merely a mistake that will be corrected is drinking a particularly strong vintage of bubble gnome jum-jum juice. The dismantling and marginalization of nearly all crafting was fully intended.

Which leads us to the raiding environment, the only environment that has not yet been eviscerated.

It is a good bet that probably 80-90% of DBG's revenue (for eq2) now comes from the shop, and the only environment fully gated by continued character power progression requirements is the raid environment.

Oh, I think they'll keep some crafting stuff around - but mostly home deco'ish things because those folks spend money in the shop. Spells are a shop competitor. Gear costs development resources and eq2 has become heavily dependent on infusing, which can be viewed as a substitute to crafted gear. Consumables? Absolutely no reason why they can't sell crates of the stuff in the shop for $5.

I think people confuse game population numbers with profitability. If eq2 can run 1,500 to 2,000 customers and be more profitable by stripping out most of the casual game even if it means losing those customers, then that's what they'll do, and I'm of the opinion that's where they're headed.

That's why I happen to believe that at the end of the day, eq2 is going to have just enough overland, heroic, and crafting content to introduce an expansion and funnel folks toward the raiding game. Sure, people can play the casual side, but there's not going to be a lot there.

If this is true, will it work? I don't happen to believe it will but we'll just have to see how everything unfolds.

Spot on. Anybody not seeing it is wearing poorly itemized rose colored glasses. Also, "bubble gnome jum jum juice" - I'm dead.

I've been a member since 2013, and posted frequently on the old forums under the same name, I just hadn't posted at all, since 2013, until this expac because of the glaring issues it has.I posted for awhile when the forums switched over to this format but it was with my other account which was my main account at the time.

Are you finally playing Blood of Luclin?

ZOMG that's untrue. Raiding is just as big a mess as everything else.

Go to EQ2 Progression and look at who is killing what. The slower guilds were just slower in getting people to raid resolve, I am pretty sure. I've seen complaints in the forums here about folks having real problems attaining T2 Resolve.

If you were a high end guild and killed everything the first few days when they were broken, you can now raid everything. Raid groups that were slower have seen mobs broken, "fixed", "fixed" again, etc. Until we kill the Shik'nar Imperiatorix in The Blinding raid zone, we can't progress... we have three killable mobs in The Blinding, three in Aurelian Coast (where the T2 guy we've killed in the past is now on hiatus while he's "fixed".

The end mobs in The Blinding and AC have T2 Raid Resolve, but drop T1 loot, which seems insane.

We can get about three hours of raiding out of the content we can get at. We were missing a few of our best DPS earlier this week but hopefully we'll kill the bug here Real Soon Now.

Sigrdrifa - same here - we have 3 mobs in Blinding and 4 in AC (when the 4th one is back up).

The "T2" in Blinding has a time limit to kill. I think the adds have too much HP or are de-targeting everyone way too much, so our dps drops by 2/3 on name - which at this time makes it near impossible for "average" raid guilds to do. Although we will keep trying for sure.

I honestly do not get the point of a "T2" mob (with a time limit to kill) to progress to other zones with T1 mobs.

Our raid guild (which is not on the progression list lol, cant be bothered putting it up) is just rotating thru the 3 raid names in each of the zones atm as thats all we can do till we get more people with gear which isnt easy outfitting an entire raid when you only get 1 piece of loot in a chest and its a monk/bruiser of which we have none lol, plus the bugs that keep happening to the names that we can kill is starting to slow us down (mainly in AC one)

That was less the point of my post than an alliteration to yet another molehill being made into a mountain in these forums.

But sock puppet accounts do exist. And I believe there may be more than few in this thread..so we differ on this issue.

Any chance they will give us all access to the suburbs again since they will have twice the development time?
While we are at it, how bout adding the old battlegrounds back in as well, I will happily help test it.

I'd be all for that if we could level lock at 39 for them again. Hell, I'd even roll another toon just for it!

So many good comments and points made in this thread. I love the 'bubble gnome jum-jum juice'. I would also be happy to help test if we could /test copy (didn't actually know that was no longer a thing). Guess its really been a long time since I ventured over to test. I have hope that this new schedule is an improvement and it should be with more time to work on the fix but without adequate testing it might come up short.
For the love of Norrath can we please get this right?

I've stayed pretty quite on the forums the last 6 months or so. But I think ill speak now. I raid on AB, so we are not the furthest along, and now our progress is stopped because the we just got Blinding flagged (by the way that Bug fight at the end with the 90% to 10% time is garbage), and can't finish getting flagged in AC zone because the last named doesnt spawn. And we have already killed him a month ago.

I was not a fan of the release date of this expac as it seems most of the limited staff had Christmas vacation right after and it was almost a full month before fixes started happening at all. Not smart thinking. Again I know with the size of the staff cash flow is probably an issue, and i have a few idea about that, but thats for another forum.

The test server idea simply wont work if no one is there to test it. Correct me if I am wrong but isnt there a raid council of some sort that gives feedback to Gnija? Maybe you need to like give say 24 people sometype of payment like a free expac every year, but their job to earn that is to do test stuff. allow them to copy toons over, and only accept toons that would constitute an average raid force, not an elite one. Then they would have to test any new changes that are made.

Im not against the 2 week cycle at all, as long as we start to see some results. Anyway rather than just bash the devs I was hoping to help with an idea. Maybe it wouldnt work either, i dont know. But as it sits the raids arent working right anyway. heck the whole expac has been a bad deal, and overall I love the content.

We have had major issues getting past the Blinding "Bug" mob affecting our progression (we finally beat it last night).
I personally don't have enough resolve to do much more than 200m dps on it, the rest of the raid seems to have done their best to get higher resolve.

We must have been on the very edge of the dps check.

It has, remove the deliberate resolve checks, the raid is nothing but turn and burn scripts for most part with little to no effort required. The scripts are stale and have been done before. The only reason to keep on doing them is to just meet another resolve check.

Given that Gninja had to take up on tradeskilling after people leaving the company, I am not surprised he has been stretched to more than what he can handle. If his forte is raid scripts and is forced into taking up TS, logic would dictate that one of those areas will suffer and sadly both have suffered very very badly because of this.

The rest I agree with.

Thats because the engine can litteraly not handle anything. Just look at the stone colussus. It had 10 swirling rocks when Luclin launched resulting in insane lag. As soon as these rocks were made stationary, the lag was back to the usual network lag.

TLDR; You cant even have 10 rocks swirling around a mob before the network lag and the engine crumbles.