New Progression Server confirmed

So does Trak just drop a mess of teeth?

Vaclav_sl said:

Shockingly Daybreak dealt with the key bottlenecks in advance - imagine that.

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I hope you're not suggesting they did this all on their own. We had a PM laying out the spawn timers and key drop stats in comparison to the player and guild populations on both servers, outlining the issues that would exist in some depth a month or more ago. I invited multiple parties from both servers to speak on this PM with the Devs.

To see what DBG does when you don't take this proactive approach please reference the instance caps that cockblocked guilds from raid mobs. You could only get 86 people in Sebilis and Karnors rofl, so if 50 people were exping in arguably one of the best zones in Kunark you couldn't raid Trakanon. Some of the epics were broken too. That's what DBG does when players don't give them very specific outlines on predictable and obvious issues.

Zaide_sl said:

I hope you're not suggesting they did this all on their own. We had a PM laying out the spawn timers and key drop stats in comparison to the player and guild populations on both servers, outlining the issues that would exist in some depth a month or more ago. I invited multiple parties from both servers to speak on this PM with the Devs.

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/rolleyes...

You do realize the problem you're mentioning and the fix you're talking about are two completely separate issues right? One is a design issue that was a simple fix - the other is a symptom of a NON-DESIGN person fixing something having an unintended consequence. (JChan fixed the instancing code to allow them to separate out the bosses - she clearly only thought of the one side of the issue and left the rest to design that apparently didn't think about it)

But keep praising yourself as the master of this fix - Prathun wasn't already on the ball, honest.

Vaclav_sl said:

/rolleyes...

You do realize the problem you're mentioning and the fix you're talking about are two completely separate issues right? One is a design issue that was a simple fix - the other is a symptom of a NON-DESIGN person fixing something having an unintended consequence. (JChan fixed the instancing code to allow them to separate out the bosses - she clearly only thought of the one side of the issue and left the rest to design that apparently didn't think about it)

But keep praising yourself as the master of this fix - Prathun wasn't already on the ball, honest.

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Wait you mean how they got everything else right?

Launch Day - Broken, unplayable.
Queue - There won't be a queue
Queue - Added
AFK's - Not an issue
AFK - Auto afk boot added
Instances - Rejected outside of Newbie zones
Instances - Added to Mid Tier Zones
Instances - Added to Solb/Perma
Planes - Respawn Timer had to be Reduced
Bosses - Spawn timer had to be reduced
Second Server - Released a week later even when it was obviously necessary
Mages - Can't be nerfed
Mages - "Nerfed" like three months after they were relevant in raid content
Raids - Overbuffed
Raids - Overnerfed
Lockjaw - Accidentally became a live server for half a day
Lockjaw - A week of constant roll backs
Kunark - Opened a half hour late
Kunark - Obvious Instance Issues Overlooked
Kunark - Certain Epic quests broken
Instanced Raids - Not Classic, enforces mandatory rotations
Test Server a month ago- Trak spawning every 2.5 days
Test Server Today - Trak spawning approx 24 hours

I really like Prathun and the other EQ devs, but lets not pretend they have a great track history of catching shit before it's a major issue.

Yea, but unless he was fibbing or you were commenting to him previous to commenting here - his answer when I PMed him about your concern (which I did express positivity here beforehand, and it took him like 2 days to respond - my positivity wasn't a tell of knowledge) was "We already have a plan on the whiteboard to go through and evaluate the key parts for the current realities of TLP for all effected expansions". [I take that to mean they took a look at ST and VT key [maybe Acrylia even?] as well while they were adjusting VP key - maybe PoP as well, but can't imagine that would need it barring making sure 85%ing works or doesn't work as they feel is appropriate]

I wouldn't be shocked if you helped him/them come around to the numbers they decided to use, but I'm quite sure they were already thinking of the problem of it. Frankly, they kinda had to - they had to make a ton of decisions about things like "Do the AJ and similar spawns show up in instances or just Prime?", "Do groundspawns appear in instances?", etc that Trak is obviously part of.

Not saying they've been doing things perfectly, but they've always had a fix in the wings for everything besides player drama thusfar - sometimes delayed because of patch schedule or "trying to avoid the need to do X" - but whether or not it's the ideal fix, they've had their finger on TRYING to have fixes mused in advance. [with the exception of the login queue because JChan is amazing]

Zaide_sl said:

I really like Prathun and the other EQ devs, but lets not pretend they have a great track history of catching shit before it's a major issue.

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Have you ever had a client that acts like they know your job is really easy, when in reality they only see 10% of the whole picture and don't know shit about your day to day reality?

I reached out to them on August 12th and continued sending feedback on it for probably ten days after that as we got more info.

I don't think their job is easy by any means, I don't mean to undermine their hard work but the post above is just factual. It's only been three months and there were a ton of problems that could have been avoided entirely by having an actual beta and listening to actual input before the server launch where almost all of these issues were predicted. Have they fixed most issues we've been encountering? Yes and that's great. But almost none of these weren't obvious and/or often brought up by the playerbase before the server launched. Oh and I think I forgot to mention the plat dupe in the original post too.

Overall this is much better than Fippy/Vulak where we had warping as a standard activity that went largely unpunished and raid breaking Harm Touch that was rampant and almost entirely unaddressed for six months. There's still a lot of improvement to go and a lot of it could have been done pre launch if they'd just not rushed the product.

I think the no-box server is going to be amazing. These servers are the real beta test for it and it shouldn't see any of these issues.

Only real worry with the No-Box is if they don't learn that a player designed rotation is going to be a big headache for everyone involved at this point. (and/or stupid timeframes being used - but that's probably going to be a vote and people will be more fresh in their mind about how bad 6 months is)

Zaide_sl said:

Have they fixed most issues we've been encountering? Yes and that's great. But almost none of these weren't obvious and/or often brought up by the playerbase before the server launched.

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Yeah, I get it, but the fact remains that you don't know, and will likely never know, what else the devs and managers had to deal with behind the scenes. Everything has a varying amount of priority and if game documentaries have taught me anything, they were probably fixing game-breaking critical bugs up until the last minute.

Lenas_sl said:

Yeah, I get it, but the fact remains that you don't know, and will likely never know, what else the devs and managers had to deal with behind the scenes. Everything has a varying amount of priority and if game documentaries have taught me anything, they were probably fixing game-breaking critical bugs up until the last minute.

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but hey maybe they really are just sitting in the office not doing anything until someone gets mad

I think it's more that an ultra small dev team is responsible for far too much content and bug fixing etc. They're busy working on a new expansion while running TLP servers where new shit is found broken every day.

I don't see why you nerds are hating on Zaide so much; if anything you should be thanking him for making your in-game experience more enjoyable. He's essentially propping up their understaffed team by being pro-active.

The no-boxing server has me intrigued - how far could it even progress? Guilds would have to merge left and right. By GOD you'd have to powerlevel random noobs just to fill slots.

Too bad it would still have the pet problem. Hell, even on live servers pets are better than anything short of a raid geared tank, that shit is just plain broke.

Kreugen_sl said:

The no-boxing server has me intrigued - how far could it even progress? Guilds would have to merge left and right. By GOD you'd have to powerlevel random noobs just to fill slots.

Too bad it would still have the pet problem. Hell, even on live servers pets are better than anything short of a raid geared tank, that shit is just plain broke.

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No-box is somewhat a misnomer - it's no ISBoxer with a 1 client per machine limit - plenty of people will box but it should be more mild. (i.e. I'll probably have 3-4 between the wife and I if we bother with it)

Also, considering how the population on TLP 3.0 is holding with all the fixes thusfar, I'm not so sure attrition will be that awful with a few more tweaks (basically adjusting things to some better rotation method or instancing instead) I could see it really never hitting that problem.

And come SoD logically they'd take off the no-box limit, since SoD adds mercs - fundamentally boxes.