Feldon Last night, the Destiny of Velious beta forums were taken offline and then restarted from scratch under the EQ2X Forums. It has been indicated that this change was to allow EQ2X players to contribute their feedback and reports in the Beta forums. However this means all discussions and threads about the Beta will need to be restarted, as the current Forum software lacks the ability to move threads from one game to another. Users who have signed the NDA and wish to participate in the Destiny of Velious beta forums must now first navigate to the EQ2X forums and, if necessary, re-register their account to access them.
The situation is summed up on the EQ2 Forums by Zalakria of Guk:
I’m very disappointed, not only did they not post an announcement anywhere, they didnt even transfer the active topics to the new board. I should not be forced to go to the forums of a game I will never play to submit feedback for a game that is supposed to be completely seperate from the other.
This change ruined beta for me. Why they didnt just give EQ2X their own beta forum is beyond me, but I’m sure it’s due to laziness and not wanting to have to read more feedback threads.
To quote SmokeJumper:
EverQuest II Extended (EQ2e) is a new service with its own servers, its own forums and its own communities, completely separate from EverQuest II (EQ2) which will remain pay-to-play.
During the transition to EQ2X, it appears that the Beta forums were temporarily open to the public, and further that some of the developer posts in the Beta forums appeared in the public Developer Tracker. Some things we’ve been able to glean from this:
- Public Quests
- There will be a x2 raid zone with a Normal mode (but not a Hard mode)
- Overland Mobs are being tuned to ‘present a challenge’ (note the thread title is ‘Mobs hit like a ton of bricks’)
- Some of the raid zones will require completing heroic zones to unlock them.
- Mounts will now pitch (tilt back and forth) to match the terrain.
Nothing really earth-shattering in there of course, but it’s news.
The mount pitching is freaking horrible. I bug reported it. It’s horrible when you can walk up the side of a wall and do a complete 90 degree rotation like you’re sonic the hedgehog or something. Just look. (pic removed)
Also “Mobs hit like a ton of bricks” is just bad history repeating it’s self. Remember when RoK went live and the “Mobs hit like a ton of bricks” but was later fixed? Well now it’s going back apparently…
LOL at the piccy this bunch of devs have i’m sad to say no clue as to what they’re doing to the game you’re right about RoK but during beta they lstened and did tone it down to the point where it was fun,but it took time for them to react
This xpac is going to be a car crash i can feel it.
Destiny of Poo
At least that’s what some people are starting to call it now.
“Eschia” I wouldn’t post pics of bugs up, its a beta and this is exactly what we should expect, as much as I’d like to comment the NDA prevents this.
So on the mount pitching feature, all I’ll say is that I’ve been wanting this for ages, ever since some of the extreme examples where in RoK I would be standing 70 degrees to the actual surface clipping through it. So there are plenty of examples where the mounts look wrong on live that we’ve learnt to live with, you can bet there are plenty of examples of things wrong in the beta, but unlike live its getting fixes daily.
The end algorithm they’ll need to implement to get it 99% right will be reached eventually, it’ll probably take a few goes though since while its a simple problem I suspect the solution takes a lot of thought, I for one really hope they can pull this one off.
And I wouldn’t believe everything you read on the reports, I couldn’t agree completely after first hand experience with some of the feedback, all I can say here without breaking the NDA is beware, many people sending feedback are colouring it with their own wants and desires too, or might have specific issues with their classes etc, its going to take a lot of feedback to get a proper picture.
Personally I would sit back and wait for the real disclosures before coming to any conclusions there, Johnny Ball will reveal all 🙂
But as to the real reason for posting here, got to say it feels a bit of a punch in a gut to have to log onto the EQ2X forums, we were promised we could ignore this service if we wanted to, here I feel we’ve been let down.
Yes, its a small possible petty thing, but I think they should have gone out of their way to make the live players feel good about being the main goto people for beta testing (after all, they’re the bulk of the player base) just for once then to score some positive PR with their fanbase.
As I see it SoE had three choices:
1. Leave Free to Play out of the beta
2. Establish a separate beta forum on its own hardware for both communities
3. Unite the two separate forums on one or other service.
1 was not possible when they are putting so much hope on the free to PAY
2 has a cost penalty for equipment and support. Also would have had people whining about logging into something new.
So would you really have preferred having the people from free to PAY on the live forums?
As we don’t have any kind of legal team, I have removed the link to the screen shot.
NDAs do exist for a reason. People have a hard time getting past their first impression. And developers and paid testers alone cannot find every bug. So you bring players in. Every expansion has had major bugs during Beta testing, but I don’t see any reason to nail developers to the cross for them.
These types of obvious bugs like mounts pitching get fixed pretty quickly.
I do wish expansions would launch polished, without a lot of “oh crap!” bugs and nerfing happening in the hours/days after each expansion is released. As I promised last year, I intend to log into Velious the moment it launches and level up my AAs as quickly as possible before all the AA honeypot zones/areas are “fixed”. 😉
The Rift Beta have been a good example of how betas sould be preformance and stress based, not opps sorry about that. EQ2 is RIP after 7 years of my time, thatks for the rid but time to move on