No, you"re full of shit or something Ut. Luckily for me, I don"t work in the industry now, so I can shoot back if I feel like it.
EDIT: I see your retraction, appreciate it to a degree, but read on.
First off, with the above ad hominen out of the way, fuck you very much. I don"t think you should be banned from this board, of all places, but you"re so full of hatred and misconceptions and just fucking so wrong most of the time, you"re not doing yourself, your cause, or this board much service beyond providing fodder for 100 page threads. Believe what you want to believe, but keep in mind you weren"t there...I was.
6 months my ass, it was mid December when the proper data was pushed over...days, notmonthsafter release. Furor, Nino, et all were in the zone just as soon as they got a key, and key drops for a few people were easy enough...once aga in, days.
And I never forgot anything. Hell, ask Furor, or Sean, or Nino, or any other people that were actually there doing the content back in 2000/2001, I fessed up to the cloth caps stunt in person at the San Diego Fan Faire, and via email or ingame long before that. It was no great secret. They were left in because they were meant to be left in. Joke in poor taste? Probably. Mistake? Probably. Sign of unfinished content? No.
The old data had a giant human model (the default when the engine couldn"t find the model listed), the correct data had a the same model Yelinak used, and it wasn"t until January that Milo Cooper decided to build a unique model for the Sleeper...that new model was NOT part of the original plan but it sure was cool, and I was more than happy to use it.
But the very damned HOUR that Furor posted those screenshots of a "Doug" in the dome, the correct data was pushed. I"m fast, but I"m not so fast that I can repop an entire zone inside an hour.
Zones crashing just happened because there were 50 gazillion people deciding to watch what was happening when Kerafyrm went on a rampage. That was not good, but it doesn"t mean ST wasn"t finished, it meant that EQ had and always had issues with player counts in a zone.
Wanna know what the Sleeper script did? It sent Kerafyrm on a rampage though ST for 20 minutes, caused a shout to the world that Nag, Vox, a few RoS dragons, Jalidar, etc were listening for, and prompted them to say a few lines of text. When Kerafyrm depopped in ST, he moved on to Skyshrine to rampage there for a bit, and then was gone, ostensibly to chase after Veeshan herself, perhaps to return one day. After that, a new dataset was manually triggered for ST that didn"t include the Warders.
That wasit, the entire grand plan, and it worked as long as nobody dicked with the triggers. EQ"s trigger system was incredibly clunky back then, most triggers were basically invisible NPC"s that shouted invisible text that other NPC"s would listen for and react to, and a few things could be triggered on the death of an NPC. If a GM was dicking around in the zone and killed a trigger, or if for some reason the servers hiccuped and a trigger didn"t spawn, the whole chain could collapse...that was a problem for more than just the ST script.
As for Conquest, hell, I"ve talked to Conquest people after the fact (one just recently in Vanguard), and even they admitted to deliberatly exploiting (with some tips from certain other people on a different server).
It was egregious, high profile, and was trivializing content that others were actually working hard to do legit. And it wasn"t all Z-axis, there were other loopholes being exploited to pull that off as well. Banning them wasn"t me, I simply pointed out what they were doing to Jeff Butler, after getting a phone call from a GM that had been watching them that evening.
Had it been up to me, I"d have stripped them of the Warder gear they had, reset the zone, and told them to watch the bullshit. The Dain shit was handled differently, and if I recall, the designer of that zone didn"t make it a point to inform management that his content was being exploited, he just tried numerous fixes. Grieg"s exploits happened after I left, I have no idea how that was handled, though GE was my zone.
I THINK a GM took it upon himself/herself to perma-kill the 4th warder until the Conquest thing was figured out. I know nothing of the Warder data being changed, if it was, it didn"t happen while I was there.
I wanted my content to be played, not displayed like some untouchable gem. Players beating my shit was a warm fuzzy, not an attack on my ego, and I think if you look at all the content I did for EQ, you"ll see this is true.
Luclin was an unfinished pile of poo, my work included, because we didn"t have the time to finish it, we were all strung out from working too many hours, etc. No real defense on that one, other than it was a combination of errors, once again not some attempt to defraud the consumer.
I"m not a big fan of Smed, but give him credit, that man was absofuckinglutely livid at the state of the game when Luclin shipped. I spent 5 years as a grunt in the Marines, and I know a good asschewing, and Smed would have made many a crusty old NCO proud with the asschewing he handed out in the meeting right after Luclin shipped. Hardly the response of a money grubbing huckster. He gave a shit, we all gave a shit (with the possible exception of some marketing department people, but take that with a grain of salt, EVERYONE hated SOE"s marketing and their "tude and mandates).
PoM? That zone was not finished, and wasn"t supposed to be entered by players until it was, until somebody leaked the way to get in. The employee in charge of that zone had moved to another team, and the replacement employee ended up being let go a few months later for non-performance in general, if that matters at all to you. Everyone else was just too busy working on their own zones to spend any time trying to fix "somebody else"s problem", and we"d already been down that route with ToFS and Siren"s in Velious.
PoP? No fucking clue, I left before that expansion was more than a concept name.
And that"s enough derailing of a Vanguard thread with old EQ trivia.
