I left the game and came back to try out the new levels and do the epic quest that comes with OoW. But wait a minute, as usual nothing works. I have yet to complete my 1.5 epic because of at least 3 broken parts, the newest of which has been the blackened treant event at the very end which won't spawn.

Can these morons code at all? I mean how incompetent can you be? It's unbelievable to me that they get away with this time and time again. Well this time it's quits for me permanently.

I'm sick and tired of the non-existent customer service, the horrible coding, and just overall pos substance and design of this game. I will be heading over to WoW when it comes out and I suggest SoE get the hell out of the gaming business right now before they get their azzes kicked by a company that knows how to make a game that works. Congratulations to said company for losing yet another customer due to their incompetence. Good job!

It is silly when things are this bad. They held off on the OoW release to fix other things (which they did like what? I can't think of anything off hand.... a few things out of all the lists provided?). OoW comes out and BLAM!!! The biggest draws to OoW are the new levels and the new epics. Well the uber's are already level 70 with most if not all their spells. So they will get bored again soon. The epics are really not up to par, some effects don't seem to be working, and the path to get there is friggin bugged!! I don't want to hear again that they couldn't test the epic quests because they needed to keep it a secret. That works for beta testing but hey, any real programmer can come up with better test cases. 'Oh duh - we didn't think to test with more than one druid in a zone trying for the new epic at the same time, or that you might bring help into the zone, or failed attempts' I would be fired asap if I told my users crap like that. Remember this is not just one little problem. FM was bugged, EW (not really sure on the Ulthork), Feerrott combine (plus was the terror supposed to summon or was that an afterthought?), SK and Kith. That's over half the major parts of the quest. GM's can't help. Who knows where bug reports go. If it was the company where I work we'd be working 24/7 to fix it at least. And maybe they are. But if it's that bad then OoW never should have been released.

I mean WTF...

Lets take a look at our epic...When first went live and before fixes, or even still, look at how buged our epic was..

1. Goblin event, when triggered, almost 100 hiders poped, and the event not depspawning at the event end time

2. Tho I dont consider it a bug, some druids have complained about having to kill the Raider upwards of 20 times.

3. The Piranha in CT, on agro, if you tried to kill them too close to a wall, would just summon you into the wall, then kill you while you was stuck in it. Or, 6-7 would get stuck in the wall at ZI, on agro would summonyou into another wall and kill you while you was stuck in the wall.

4. The singing event in Toxxulia was filled with pathing bugs, causing the skelles to get lost or stuck in walls, making this part impossible to do.

5. The combine in Feerrott to get the diseased rune only allowed 1 druid per server to do the combine and get the rune, if anyone else tried, they would lose the Soul stone, and you would have to get another one.

6. If you dont let the Great Bear in PoJ get killed after you do your turn in, the next druid that tries to charm the bear will not be charmable, have to kill the bear and wait 2hrs to do the turn in.

7. The South Karana coven event, extremly buged getting the coven to spawn

8. The final event in Kithicor, on a fail or despawn of the treant, can no longer trigger the treant, making finishing the quest impossible till the GMs stop saying that the event is working as intended and finally realise that we are not trying to scam them and fix the event.

9. The actual epic, while getting a worthless right click (DD modifier), the actually right click does NOTHING. if you have your epic, test it. Take off all your DD focus items, then cast any nuke, like sylvan fire, which has a base of 1705. If you have no DD focus on, should land for 1705 everytime (provided no resists on the dd). Now cast your epic on the mob, atm your DD will land for 1705 still.

Hey! Look at the bright side of all this! Think how messed up it would have been if they had released "on time". These are probably just considered minor flaws toSOE. :D

Oh, I understand that there *can* be bugs in the game, look at the scope of how large the game is, my point is that once we have reported these bugs, DONT tell us that the event is working as intended or that it is not buged. How about a little customer service?

I have to say I'm disappointed in the number of things that can go wrong incidentally, through no incorrect action of the player.

Bad NPC pathing in the Toxx skelly event, for instance, is a very strong indication that this particular encounter was not tested more than once or twice. Pathing which can go bad because of a roaming mob that happens to get in the way would be a 'live server' variable that might not occur during several test runs; however, the whole point of testing is to anticipate as many variables as possible and plan for them.

Any developer who has actually played EQ should know to plan pathing to compensate for both static and dynamic objects, including terrain, other NPCs, and PCs. I can empathize with devs who must deal with old buggy pathing code left by previous devs (e.g. Sanctus Seru), but there's no excuse for poor coding on *brand new* encounters, even in older zones.

Even more disappointing is SOE's determination to impose long respawn timers for epic-related mobs. Having to sit around waiting 2 hours for a certain NPC to spawn is certainly not as bad as old ragefire, but what is the point? How detrimental could it possibly be to allow each person to begin an encounter when he/she is ready for that part of the quest? If a timer must be used at all, there's no reason it need be more than 30 minutes to reset.

Most of all, I'm disappointed that with all the bugs discovered and confirmed after release, GMs were not allowed to investigate claims and provide assistance, even if it was only in the form of telling the affected player how to avoid the same bug when they repeat part of the quest.

I'm glad Absor was willing to work on getting bugs fixed as they were found, but I haven't been satisfied with their explanations about why so many bugs went live in the first place.

~Firemynd

I don't like the way the thread started, but I have witnessed every bug here.

What bothers me is not that they have bugs. Anyone who has programmed knows that bugs happen. They definately should test more, but whatever. What bothers me is the poor way they handle bugs after the fact.

Time was broken for a good 2 months, where if more than 3 guilds were in it, you would get attached to other people's instances. For a full month, my guild did time twice a week, only to end up in a fully cleared instance after P1 every time. We lost dozens of guildmates to frustration. The bug wasn't as much of a problem as the lack of response. Petitions from our officers/guild leaders were answered with 'you should /bug this matter'. Is this an appropriate response for literally hundreds of hours of wasted effort on several different days? As an officer, I sent an email to Sony. All I asked for was a confirmation that they knew about / were working on the bug or if they could send someone to witness it for us if they didn't. That way I could give my guildmates at least some kind of answer. My response was that I should /bug the matter, and they didn't have an answer. The problem was never announced, and was stealth fixed in a patch weeks later.

I have called 4 raids for our guild now for the ranger epic mobs where they have to hail the survivor. All 4 times, the mob was bugged / ranger got no response. Ok, so there's a bug. We /bugged. Posts were already made on eqlive and ranger's forums, so as an officer I petitioned. I just wanted to know if it was a bug we could avoid by doing something sepcial, or if we should hold off getting our whole guild together for these fights. The response to my petition (and I quote) 'I request you to file a bug report regarding the issue using the /bug command in game or by emailing eqbugs@soe.sony.com. Your report will assist our development team in better investigation of this issue and faster resolution. You are also welcome to visit our forums at www.everquestlive.com for any announcements about upcoming changes to the world of Norrath. Also you can post questions there for other players...' and so on. No answer to my actual question.

Here is the big problem: Players want some response to their questions about bugs. Players never get a response to /bug. We seldom get official word on bugs when they are found, let alone after they are fixed. The druid epic, for example: how many of these items have been announced as real bugs, and how many had announced fixes? Most of them were stealth fixed as though they had never existed.

How would I fix this lack of customer service:

1. Give GMs enough time to investigate / witness bugs that are not known.
2. When significant, reproduceable bugs are found, announce them officially so that people don't waste their time.
3. When bugs are fixed, announce them in the patch message instead of stealth-fixing them as though they never happened.
4. Have a database of known bugs. It should include a description of the problem, mobs involved, etc. If there is a way to avoid it happening, that should be noted. If there is an estimated fix, that should be added. This way, GMs could give a real response to the question 'is this a known bug?' Better yet, the database could be made available to the Sony customers. (This probably exists, but either GMs don't have access to it, or they don't bother to look in response to petitions).
5. For any bug players report, try to link it to an npc or item. If more than xx bug reports come in during a short period for a certain npc or item, investigate it.
6. If players are not allowed to access the bug database, at least give them a response other than 'I request you to file a bug report' for known bugs.
7. Because officers and guild leaders are responsible gathering together large groups of players to undertake tasks, don't brush their petitions off with canned responses.

Why is this a surprise? EVERY expansion has had these problems with the exact same non-response from Sony (eg. working as intended). I remember it was the same way when EQ was released. For example according to Sony Hell levels did not exist, Shaman Alchemy was working fine, etc.
As long as you continue to pay your monthly payment to Sony they have no reason to change. Look what happened when Woody (GU Comics) proposed a boycott on OOW. They had a big expensive meeting with people, promises to fix things, etc.

OOW was released, as usual they have really good drops the first few weeks and then they will be nerfed to very rare drops (just like every other expansion). This just gets people to buy the expansion to get the good loot, then they nerf it.

If you want things to get fixed, then cancel your accounts and have others do the same (in bulk and express reasons why). Then and only then will they get fixed in a timely manner. As long as you are paying they have no reason to change.

Ah, the good old days of EQ. For a while, when the new epics were announced, I did wonder about missing out because I won't be getting OoW. But now that I've officially left EQ, I'm suprised by how much I don't miss it at all.

Oh and regarding the bugs and summit and such, well all I have to say is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. There are enough expansions, broken promises to establish SOE's pattern of behaviour. Did you really expect them to change just because they promised so?

I left the game and came back to try out the new levels and do the epic quest that comes with OoW

I'll just stop there and remind you that you must have some excellent guild members who are willing to help you, and as always, it's too bad you think the game is too poor to be able to work with such people.

Yes, there's bugs, but they are being worked on. The origional epics infact took far longer to fix, and their scripts were not nearly as diverse. For once we have a major quest with components other than turn in, kill, loot, and a I thank sony for making that leap, regardless of a few weeks of growing pain.

They took down the Kithicor zone this afternoon for a brief update. I'm guessing that the "non-existent customer service" has found and fixed the problem and pushed it into the game without even waiting for an official patch. Just like they have with the other epic bugs. We reported the bugs, they fixed 'em. Sorry to contribute to the derailing of a good rant and SoE bash thread. :p

Just to add about the testing, they kept the testing in house on the epics so they would be a surprise for the players. I'm glad they did, bugs and all. A lot of us had a blast figuring out the clues and steps, one by one, after the release came out. It was like original EQ all over again, without everything being handed to us by the beta players. I had the chance to meet other druids on the server I never would have met while doing the epic, and enjoyed the fact that we all ended up helping each other as needed.

Bash all you like, but I think the implementation of the epics has been outstanding, and the bug fixes very quickly done.

While I'm glad to see them fixing bugs, Kithicor is another example of a bug they never officially announced, GMs were telling druids it was working correctly, and didn't announce when they fixed it. Maybe I missed where they announced/confirmed the bug, but I've been reading the dev's corner and druid boards, and I didn't see it.

Bugs will happen. They're good about fixing them. But give customers a real answer when they ask if something is bugged, and let them know when there are problems and fixes.

It sounds like the problem is more over a lack of communication with their players than anything. They should inform the players so you don't spin your wheels doing stuff that is broken.

You mean other than the fact that Absor had come by almost every other day giving us updates about the status of epic bugs? Not to mention the fact that he was harvesting information about the bugs directly from threads on this board?

Bingo, Pana. But you know exactly how well SOE has ever done that... And Stormy, despite what we may like to believe, TDG is not an "official" source of SOE info. A post on the official boards would go a long way towards credibility, and they obviously arent keeping the GM staff informed about current bugs. I remember debugging Kunark, and there was a whole spreadsheet and forum and crap, with threads and threads of known issues where any of us could post new ones... I can only assume they dont have such a thing anymore.

And what's with all the Xegonites on this thread? 8P

I (thankfully) stand corrected. Absor did start posting here about bugs here last week. I stopped reading the bug thread about our epic once I was to the Kithicor step to be honest. If this is a trend, I like it.

The problem I see is a lack of communication, and this is a step in the right direction, but by no means the overall fix.

There still seems to be a lack of communcation between the devs and the GMs. We still either cannot get an answer from a GM at all or get incorrect 'working as intended' responses in game when we ask. Our ranger was told by a GM that the bloodfields fight was not bugged. A druid on Xegony just yesterday was told by a GM that Kithicor was working correctly. When time was bugged, we couldn't get anyone to even admit is was bugged for the full month we dealth with it, and the fix wasn't announced either.

Lack of communication with players is the other half. If GMs don't know if something is bugged, why not just say so instead of 'working as intended?'. If things are fixed, why not let players know they were fixed?

Imagine how much wasted time could be saved if players could open up a window in game, select a zone, npc, or item, and see known bugs related to it along with ways to avoid the bug (if any). If bugs were reported in game with a link to an item, zone, or npc, the devs would would know when many bugs were reported relating to the same issue, and this kind of in-game support system would be trivial. It would probably even greatly reduce petitions.