Open Letter to Nilbog & Co: Raid Item Nerfs

[Ravager]

Originally Posted by notColgate [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

TL boxes are not infinite

If you are notColgate, who is Colgate?

[Yuuvy The Destroyer]

Originally Posted by Ikon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Why? Its the truth. I do not recall any time that Verant lied to players. Should I?

If you are old enough, I guess.

[Ikon]

Originally Posted by Yuuvy The Destroyer [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If you are old enough, I guess.

So basically the arguments are:

1. Verant were liars, everyone (not specified who this everyone is) knew it.
2. The developers who designed, developed and coded and then maintained the game didn't know anything about it.
3. The person in charge of communicating between the developers, coders and the EQ community didn't know what he was talking about.
4. You had to be a certain unspecified age to know about these things.
5. These are all facts because you remember this from 16 to 17 years ago.
6. You have no evidence other than your 16 to 17 year old memory but I should believe you anyway because.
7. Despite a time relevant post from an Everquest employee which completely contradicts what you are saying, you are right, because.

You've sold me [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[NegaStoat]

Originally Posted by Ikon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

We''ll have to agree to disagree. I played EQ for a number of years and have no memory of Verant lying. I'm sure they made mistakes but when it comes to evidence developer posts are pretty much at the top of the list for reliability.

I'm late to the party, but I distinctly recall Absor assuring magicians posting on the forums that their Elemental pets could accept traded weapons and would both hold and use them, just like Necromancer pets and Enchanter animations. This was back when weapon delay was still important to pets, and necros tore up the world using skellys armed with FS daggers.

Magicians submitted screenshots of the trades always failing, elementals would NOT hold or use weapons, and Absor earned the nickname "A BS'er" over the incident. Mage pets were hotfixed to hold and use weapons at the same moment pet attack speed was normalized regardless of weapon held. I dearly wish I could dig up his original quote but this was within the first 5 weeks of the game being live. Oldschool players will recall what I'm talking about if they were a pet user, I'm certain.

[Ikon]

Originally Posted by NegaStoat [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm late to the party, but I distinctly recall Absor assuring magicians posting on the forums that their Elemental pets could accept traded weapons and would both hold and use them, just like Necromancer pets and Enchanter animations. This was back when weapon delay was still important to pets, and necros tore up the world using skellys armed with FS daggers.

Magicians submitted screenshots of the trades always failing, elementals would NOT hold or use weapons, and Absor earned the nickname "A BS'er" over the incident. Mage pets were hotfixed to hold and use weapons at the same moment pet attack speed was normalized regardless of weapon held. I dearly wish I could dig up his original quote but this was within the first 5 weeks of the game being live. Oldschool players will recall what I'm talking about if they were a pet user, I'm certain.

A lie is a deliberate attempt to mislead someone - it was a bug and was fixed with an emergency patch. Absor was not a coder afaik, all he could do was relay information from coders and testers to the community.

Date : 29/01/2000

Topic : Patch

January 28th, 7:00pm
Emergency Patch

The servers are currently being brought down individually for an emergency update. This update is being done to correct a bug in the server code that led to the instability that the servers have experienced over the past week. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Included with this patch are several changes that were not supposed to occur until the regular patch next week. These changes are inseparable from the changes required to fix the network problems, and as such are being implemented a little earlier than we would like. There will be additional changes in the next patch that we wanted to include with the current changes, however to reduce overall downtime and customer inconvenience, they are being postponed until next week.

Changes in Current Patch

Warriors

Warriors now have a chance to strike a "Crippling Blow" when berserk. "Crippling Blow" is much the same as a "Critical Hit" with increased damage and an integral stun.

Magicians and Necromancers

We discovered a bug whereby all NPCs will not utilize their "Dual Wield" skill unless they have a weapon equipped in their off-hand. This bug would not allow magician and necromancer pets to use their "Dual Wield" skill unless handed two weapons by their masters. Since magician pets could not wield weapons at all, they never used their "dual wield" skill.

Correcting this bug would cause all NPCs above the mid-20s to suddenly begin using their "dual wield" skill to attack players with their off-hand. This would cause a drastic shift to game balance, as most non-pet NPCs are generally considered balanced.

Magicians may now equip their pets with weapons. This will allow their pets to utilize their "dual wield" skill, thus increasing the number of attacks that the pet can make per round.

Since magician pets can now wield weapons, an ability previously reserved for necromancers, high level necromancer summons (44 or above) will now randomly cast spell effects upon the creatures they fight.

An additional change has been made to make it easier for necromancers and magicians to equip their pets. Previously, necromancers had to equip their pets with two *different* weapons in order enable them to "dual wield". This change allows magicians and necromancers alike to hand their pet two *identical* weapons, thus making it easier for them to get their pet to "dual wield".

These changes drew our attention to the disparity that exists between melee characters and caster pets. Both of these pets, after the initial round of changes, could wield certain weapons that would significantly increase their attack speed. We acknowledge that necromancers always had this ability, and apologize for our delay in addressing it, but weapons will no longer increase the attack speed (lower the attack delay) of a pet.

In the near future, several new spells are planned for necromancers of level 12 and above, including a new type of necromancer-only spell that is very group-friendly. We were planning to include these new spells with the changes in pet/weapon interaction, but those additions require downtime best restricted to the planned update schedule. We expect to implement the new spell effects in the next patch, tentatively scheduled for next week.

- The EverQuest Team

[Yuuvy The Destroyer]

Originally Posted by Ikon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So basically the arguments are:

1. Verant were liars, everyone (not specified who this everyone is) knew it.
2. The developers who designed, developed and coded and then maintained the game didn't know anything about it.
3. The person in charge of communicating between the developers, coders and the EQ community didn't know what he was talking about.
4. You had to be a certain unspecified age to know about these things.
5. These are all facts because you remember this from 16 to 17 years ago.
6. You have no evidence other than your 16 to 17 year old memory but I should believe you anyway because.
7. Despite a time relevant post from an Everquest employee which completely contradicts what you are saying, you are right, because.

You've sold me [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Weather they lied or not I don't care. They were frequently wrong about how game mechanics worked. You would think the people who made the game would know everything about it but that isn't the case.

Mage pets being broken for 10 months is a good example.

Another is early on shamans couldn't train alchemy. It wasn't available on the gm.
And so whatever dev would roll a shaman, level it to 25 and train the skill np. But it still didn't work for players. Eventually they figured out why devs could do it in house but players couldn't. I don't recall how that one turned out.

[Swish]

Originally Posted by OfftuneRZ [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Just disable item recharging and make these items must equip to cast and add cast times. Red server has to deal with it, why shouldnt blue? This shit trivializes raid content its fucking ridiculous.

[Ikon]

Originally Posted by Yuuvy The Destroyer [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Weather they lied or not I don't care. They were frequently wrong about how game mechanics worked. You would think the people who made the game would know everything about it but that isn't the case.

Mage pets being broken for 10 months is a good example.

Another is early on shamans couldn't train alchemy. It wasn't available on the gm.
And so whatever dev would roll a shaman, level it to 25 and train the skill np. But it still didn't work for players. Eventually they figured out why devs could do it in house but players couldn't. I don't recall how that one turned out.

Unfortunately thats how software development works, especially with complex systems where you have teams of people working on different things. Might work in testing and then doesn't work when deployed. Or worse it works for 90% of people but not for 10%.

As you can see from the patch message posted a few posts up they had to deploy the mage pet changes against their wishes because they were 'inseparable' from the code causing connection issues.

You would think the people who made the game would know how the mechanics worked and they did. The problem is its a massive game with massive amounts of quests, mechanics, code and lots of people working on different things that all have to go together to create Everquest. If you read the dev posts on the forums back then you had Abashi and Absor answering questions and repeatedly saying, I'll have to check, I'll need to consult this team or that team, so no they didnt know everything no one could especially given the game was constantly changing.

Dev boards from 2001 - https://web.archive.org/web/20021030...0&startpoint=0

[NegaStoat]

Thanks for the research on the mage pet issue. I had to dredge that up from a looong while back. I think I will agree with the notion that the EQ staff went out of their way to not bald-face lie to their players, but the pet issue was one of those rare ones when the players were informed that they were wrong multiple times and the screenshot proof had to be handed off before they were even listened to.

At the time, it fostered some bad feelings from magicians not so much that the situation existed, but how their concerns and words were being treated by the company. Hence the nickname Absor picked up from it. I'm kind of sad that the topic of the post has been lost in this shuffle. I think it was over raiding, classic 'features', and not-so-clever use of them reducing intended encounter challenge? Our current players aren't wrong to voice some opinions for the hope of changes being made to the next server. No one wants a Chardok PL consumer service yet again.

[Bubbles]

As for proof the devs didn't know their posteriors from a hole in the ground....

As someone who beta-tested far, far, far too many zones in classic eq.. six words:

Plane of Sky

Plane of Fear (the first two weeks)