Hasn't happened to me yet. As I said the only fail I had was when I was trying to type and experiment at the same time...think it was the 4th experiment. Bad idea. Focus and you'll be fine.
It's 2 buttons I use while experimenting 1-6? Like I said would have to log on my experimenter, haven't messed around with that in a couple of months now. Experimenting is easy but mind-numbingly boring.
Still annoys me when I see that experimentation just requires close attention argument. It also requires stable internet - there is no 5 minute period I can rely on not getting a significant lag spike, whether it be everquest or simply browsing. Result - 100% fail rate if I want to do several steps of experimentation. I can get one or two levels done - then zap.
I see occasional lag spikes, and I am dead center in the U.S. Midwest probably as far from a server as can be, and maybe that is why I see such different behavior than some report. Makes me wonder if they have 'guaranteed' that I see all 'counters' or if it just fails me on some that never show up on my screen.
I don't get lag spikes very often. When I have the game very quickly flashes what would of happened. If you blinked, you'd miss the counter that flashes up for a tenth of a second and then you hear the fail noise and the other rounds display. Look, if you don't have a stable internet connection then your missing something incredibly basic to playing any game. While EQ2's general crafting system is very forgiving you will fail on occasion if you have constant lag spikes. Experimentation is suppose to be a challenging system that rewards players for taking on the risk of loosing the item your working on. In its own way, it is like raiding for crafters. And I can tell you for certain, if you wanted to play in a serious raid group but you had major lag spikes every hour I don't care how good you are at playing the game the rest of the raid would want you gone because your causing the raid to wipe when you lag out and trigger a fail condition. It isn't anything personal, it is just you can't meet the base expectations of the game designers and players. It isn't a pleasant situation to be in. Saying that, does a situation that affects a few players need to drag the entire game down? This isn't something that coding can fix, unless you open it up to being entirely client side and thus open for programmers and script bunnies to exploit. Trust me, if it was entirely client side there would be hacks out within a week to make crafting/experimenting take no time and be 100% successful.
LOL, opposite luck for me. I have 4 crafters with assistants. Three are level 95, the other one is in the forties. Since I posted 9 or 10 days ago, I have gotten two reactants.... both on the level 40ish guy, so powerful reactants Nothing on the 3 x 95 crafters! Tat
One thing you need to be careful of is having anything else using the internet while you are crafting. If you have any other computers or devices (cell phones, video recorders, internet TV boxes, voice-over-ip telephones, etc), or even a background process running, that can cause problems. Even when you aren't using these devices, they can occasionally connect to the internet to do updates, check email for messages, etc. Just having a webpage open in a browser can cause repetitive internet activity, because the advertisements keep refreshing every so often (ZAM is particularly bad for this at low internet speeds).
Got another reactant yesterday... on the level 40 So I now have more Powerful reactants than I'll ever use, but can't get a Colossal to save my life!
If it's that touchy, it's too touchy. And from my chair it looks far too iffy by far right now. While all the fanboy min maxers that come here sing it's praise, in chat all I see is people talking about it blowing up their stuff. I have teenagers, so at any one time there is like 12 devices on my router doing stuff. That would seem to be a 'normal' household today.
Same - up to 4 computers, 4 smartphones and occasionally an ipad. LED TV has wireless, and a console (rarely). Funny thing is, it doesn't matter if I am home alone or if the entire family is home and online, there is absolutely no detectable difference to the internet performance (unless someone decides to download a large video - which causes a slow effect rather than spikes) Someone said about raid forces not being happy if you got these each hour - lol - I can get two or three of them in the three to four minutes it takes to do a rush order - and almost always one.
While I assume you take the usual precautions with firewalls and anti-malware software, it might be worthwhile to do some extra scans on the computers in your household and/or updates for OS and apps to remove security holes. Another source of problems can be someone leeching a connection through a wireless router so check to see if any unknown devices are attached and if necessary change the security password - I assume that if you use a wireless router that you have enabled the security. Once one of my computers was infected with something that ate up a chunk of my internet bandwidth - I was probably part of someone's botnet - but was able to remove it with my AV and Windows updates. I also checked my Firewall to ensure that only the minimum needed was active.
Yes I do that, I do work from the house so I have to check things regularly. Back on topic, I haven't gotten any colossal since this last 'update' but 3 since this thread began, which is weird.
Yes pseudo-random is very bad and streaky. However, I think there needs to be more transparency to head off this kind of conspiracy theory. If the tables were published and the rolls shown we would 'know' it's a pseudo random problem (normal bad luck) or something is broken. This is why loot rolls were put tot he window for instance. This is why loot rolls were put to the chat window for instance.
That's the thing though, random should be streaky. If it were not then it would be a uniform distribution and not random. In a truly random system any result that is possible should happen sometime. Even results that have small odds of occurence will happen given enough tries and with so many players it is likely that it will happen to at least one of them over time. That coupled with the human tendency for selective memory accounts for the typical anecdotes you see on games forums. While hardware random number generators based on some truly random physical process are possible they are not common and the typical software pseudo-random number generator is good enough for most purposes, indistinguishable from truly random to anything but the most rigorous mathematical analysis.
Wowzer, you guys still in here? My average on the Colossal is running 1-2 every three months. That's running 9 crafters pretty much everyday.
