Feldon Destiny of Velious introduced an unparalleled strict progression to both its group and raid zones. Players wanting to group up in Velious instances have discovered that there are 3 sets of group zones which each require completing the one before it in progression before being granted access.
For instance, you must clear Tower of Frozen Shadow: Shadowed Corridors to gain access to ToFS: Umbral Halls, which must be cleared to gain access to ToFS: Haunt of Syl’Tor. And aspiring raiders must clear all 3 of these group zones in order to gain access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone. And as we also saw in The Shadow Odyseey expansion, raiders who wish to take on the most difficult x4 Raid content in Velious must first acquire a clickable debuff item by clearing the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2.
With such a daunting interdependency on all Velious zones from group instances through x2 raid and onto the x4 raid zones, you would think that Progression Quests would have been fully tested through QA and ready for players on day 1 of the expansion. Alternately, you would expect that if bugs were discovered, some of these quests would have been passable through other means. Any MMO is going to have adjustments, tweaks, nerfs, etc. after the launch of an expansion. But it’s quite another to release content that MUST all work smoothly end-to-end, yet doesn’t.
Necretia the Widowmaker
Tuesday’s Update restored Necretia the Widowmaker, a boss of Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 nearly a week after she was removed from the game due to two problems. First, it was noticed several weeks ago that she could be killed and respawned. However it was when an extraordinary item on her loot table, the Necretia Bow of Webs was discovered that she was despanwed. This bow had inflated stats and effects such that it was equivalent to a “level 300 item”. However the issue here is one of progression. Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 cannot be completed without her.
It took several days to get this resolved, and guilds who had already started the zone must wait for their zone to reset and start over to get a chance at fighting her. Until then, certain guilds remain unable to raid Velious x4 content through no limitation of their own.
Six Weeks Later
Destiny of Velious’ progression structure ended up concentrating players into just a few certain dungeons, trying to ‘open up’ the game. Yet due to a variety of bugs, players have been flummoxed in their progression. This started right from the beginning with Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar (Lord Bob). He was at first nearly unkillable, and also bugged so that he could be killed repeatedly by raid guilds. He had to be removed from the game, thus making it nearly impossible for players to complete any group dungeons at all unless they had raid gear from Sentinel’s Fate.
In the past weeks, we have continued to see a high volume of progression bugs and script problems with locking and unlocking doors in dungeons, and the mobs themselves despawning, bugging out, or being unkillable.
- ToFS X2 Necretia Bugged/Removed
- ToFS x2 Bug List Heroic/x2 (Long)
- Fun with broken zones
- Eireen the Broken – is Broke
- Fix the doors in Kraytoc’s Fortress of Rime x4
- Hold of Rime: Ascent into bugs
- Today’s Patch – 4/5/11
- Raid Progression stopped due to crappy servers!
Progression bugs have not been limited to new zones either:
By many accounts, Destiny of Velious is a good expansion with lots of great dungeons, challenging encounters, well-written quests, and lots of things to do. Although the itemization has been widely panned for boiling down EverQuest II’s 24 class system to a 4 class system, and graphical glitches have partly tarnished the otherwise great artwork, it is these progression bugs that have prevented some players from just logging in and enjoying the content.
Six weeks after the launch of Destiny of Velious, bugs still remain in the progression and completion of the 9 group dungeons and 4 raid zones in this expansion, presenting additional challenges for those players who wish to enjoy the entire expansion’s content. It seems fortuitous that Velious also brought Public Quests with powerful gear as a distraction while bugs with the instances were resolved.
Your Feedback
Are we making a mountain out of a molehill? Have you been able to find plenty to do in Velious with faction grinds and questing and public quests such that a few bugs here and there in instances and raid zones don’t affect you that much?
In the beginning, after about 2 weeks of trying to get throw the TOFS zones i quit them and moved on to other areas of the expansion. I think i started into Pools and PQ’s for about 2 weeks then went back to TOFS after they fixed a balk of the bugs with the TOFS zones so that they where doable with a group of raid geared ppl.
The funny think about the TOFS zones is that the 2nd one is probably the lease rewording for dropped loot, has the most quests that require it and takes 2-3 times longer then the 3rd. the 3rd TOFS is simple and fast, but to get into it you need to have finished the 2nd and the High Priest in the 2nd zone.
This is not even getting into the gear discrepancy that have bin rampant and not completely fixed.
and they wonder why people are leaving in droves
This expansion is chock full of good ideas, strangled by a lethal combination of poorly thought out concepts and abysmal execution. What should have been an epic experience has, sadly, wound up an epic fail.
For me personally, it’s been a great expansion so far. But then again, my guild and I tend to pace ourselves a bit when it comes to the instances rather than trying to quickly run through them all. The bugs described though definitely took their toll on our progression as well.
We started with ToFS:SC and got beaten down by Xalgoti. We took this to mean that we were going in without enough crit mit. So we had everyone run the begining quests in Icy Fingers, actually PUT ON THE GEAR, and try again. We were then able to make it past Xalgoti and clear the zone (except corpsemonger, haven’t tried him since he was fixed). They later fixed the mem-wipe on Xalgoti and made it WAY easier. If it had been that easy when we started, we may not have sent everyone off to do quests for the new gear (and would have been slammed later for the same reason).
Umbral Halls stopped us when the mirror didn’t spawn after killing Deception. After spending over an hour trying to figure out how to progress in the zone, we finally discovered that we had a bugged zone and called it. Had to try again once we could reset the zone. That’s still our least favorite zone so far. Too long. Haven’t cleared that one but we’ve taken out both x2 access mobs and are working on the High Priest encounter when we feel like being tortured. Something just doesn’t seem right to me with that encounter.
Forgotten Pools was a fun zone but we didn’t try it until after Lord Bob was already fixed. Two days ago, my wife and some guildies went in and cleared The Ascent for the first time and from what I hear, that was a fun one as well.
Can’t really speak for any of the other zones since we haven’t tried them yet.
One of the problems I see with beta testing the instances however is something that is pretty hard to fix. You send players into an instance and ask for their feedback. Unless there are major bugs, the high end raiders are most likely going to clear it with little regard to the intended script. But how do they know what the intended script IS? They pull the mobs, tank and spank, zone cleared. Xalgoti had a wicked mem-wipe when he first came out. We worked on him, tried some different things, and finally got to where we could consistently take him down just with gear from Icy Fingers. But he was BROKE! How were we supposed to know that he wasn’t supposed to be that hard? If the devs tell you the intended strat, they’re spoiling content. I believe there was a scandal a few years back because of something like that (yes, I remember the details, I’m just not drudging up old news). During Beta, the devs need to put together groups of characters with the intended level of gear for the instances and see how they go. But I could have sworn, they did something pretty close to that and the bugs still made it into the game.
I guess it really does come down to this. Bug free software is a myth. It doesn’t exist. Never will. Too many moving parts. They do as good a job as they can but bugs still make it through. Plus, they’re doing it with a smaller and smaller team. From what I read from the Devs, they at least seem to be trying to fix things. It’s just a matter of priorities. Fix the bugs that affect the most amount of people first. I’ve got patience. Could be that that with six level 90s, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy until they get around to fixing it all. 🙂
ToFS:HoS Encore, if you aggro the second version and dont kill him (one player aggro room and get killed befor group take aggro, or groupe wipe)
then he despawn and respawn in first place. Then your stucked for quest 😉
Ascent: Dont clic the door, someone in group closed the door and we was not able to reopen it, and do the travel in other way with the epic is not that easy 😉 (but doable)
But what i dislike the most in ascent is AE on the etin name… that aggro room from bottom and you see epicx4 comming that spash the group in one hit. That happen every time we fight close to the trap.
…and lot of other.
Nothing is well done 😉 just nothing. It’s like they push everything to live with eye closed. They never watch they do.
Everything is pushed to lived without be verified.
They do more mistake than me in english :p
Enjoy Ascent ? yes…
but after more than 30 run i feel i m bored of ascent/pool/fortress… the farming token is NOT fun
And i m affraid when they ll add new teir of armor brough with token if they dont give a way to refund the armor we brough for get some token back i feel they ll lost more people. We ll not farm them infinite
Some people are already more than happy to have spend 140 token for 2 item when now they could have 4 for same price…
This expansion is a complete mess, bugs and lag everywhere. In my veiw the SOE staff has lost control of the game and its slowly turning into 2nd rate game. I have played and raided since launch and its really frustrating seeing something you love be abused by the lack of funding and personel. I am slowly turning to Rift for my game of choice. I love EQ2 its a better game then Rift, but the SOE staff still can’t even fix the doors in Kraytocs, what does that tell me?? They are really losing control of the whole situation. It is truly a sad situation. The only reason I’m still plugging away are my friends in my guild, but people are not logging in and I don’t see a good future ahead for EQ2.
LOL @ Lathain’s commentary.
Accurate on SOE’s lackadaisicality & a good read.
A lot of bugs seem to be ADDED since beta, but it’s hard to tell. There didn’t seem to be much “progression” testing for obvious reasons. How can you get people to take the time, collectively, to test properly?
Maybe allowing guilds to apply, picking profiles that reflect desired groups, then let them hit the content with a reward for unlocking achievements. I mean REAL REWARDS that carry back to the live game after release…or free copies of the game, or SC….something.
I really like the expac content a lot, but the strict progression and associated bugs has pretty much killed both groups I used to raid with. We only hit easy mode and a couple of HM mobs, but 4 times per week I was raiding. We tried to get into DoV x4 content several times since doing the SF content seems pointless with he stat revamps…but we got nowhere. Now, our people no longer show up for raid calls unless they just turned 90 and don’t know any better. At least for 46 other players and myself, DoV is the expac that killed raiding.
I’ve not been hit much by bugs here. Going from how it was during beta to live and I’ve been impressed with the solo zones, they’re as bug free as WoW:Catacylsm solo zones were on their launch, but without the 4 month of beta.
The only problems encountered were in the itemisation where critical mitigation was clearly over the top for most solo gear (most solo gear gave a ton more then PQ and instance gear – daft and fortunately fixed).
And in the instances themselves, Bob was nigh on impossible, and some of the AI/scripts was buggy, that though was due to the few people in beta who ran the instance content. I think the raid content was a little better tested in general.
Overall its looking solid, Smokejumper is taking a cautious philosophy with gear and mechanics where almost everything but the gear (which was OP in many cases with crit mit) is given out sparingly, high shard costs, too hard bosses etc. Long term its healthier to aim hard and nerf it a little down, the one thing though that I still think needs real thought is the itemisation, too many linked stats on gear still (crit bonus and potency for example), if they made the gear a little more random and added a personal touch on the odd key item I think it would be about perfect.
Even the forums have been better the last few months since all the Rift Fanboi’s have moved off.
I wonder now if the big mistake Scott Hartsman made there was in aiming a little too hard at the WoW crowd (same res sequency, chat system, gcd, even adverts mentioning wow etc) since the forums there seem very toxic. If that’s a reflection of the playerbase then they have real trouble, their “shard” status page is wafty (apparently the US never goes below medium even 2am), but there are few high and no full servers anymore barely a month after launch.
Still, will it be GW2 or KoToR as the next big thing?
I’ve done TOFS1, Pools and Ascent so far, and Ascent is a mess. I’ve attempted the zone twice now. Both times, the x4 mobs have aggroed through the walls/floors during the second name fight and killed everyone for no apparent reason. Both times, the in-game cinematic that plays midway through has crashed at least one player’s client. One time, as Lathain mentions, we managed to close the doors on the way out after killing the Witch Doctor, trapping two group members on the other side and ultimately forcing us to disband at the last boss.
Overall, not quite ready for prime time, and the forced linear progression only exacerbates the problem.
Quite a few of the solo quests and tradeskill quests went live bugged, but were fixed in a week or two after the expansion launched.
And just think, we’ll be getting more dungeons and/or raids in GU60, and multihousing. We may get notes for GU60 today, otherwise next week.
What amazes me is that even though bugs esp intermittent ones are difficult to fix, they are NOT difficult to identify. That would be so of course if anything more than rudimentary testing were done.
Contrast that yesterday with the whiner on the official fora that was crying because he didn’t get a good time on the Aether races. To see how Smokejumper spent 4 hours flying the course to clarify the complaint follow the link: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=498439 Sorry I can’t link it, maybe a mod can do the biz with it.
If only treated all their testing so seriously. It beggars belief that they have a test population that comes for FREE. They MUST have known about the most serious of these bugs esp the progression bugs when they made the decision to go live! Or would they have us beleive that DoV progress was not tested end to end? Either way, it’s an atrocious way to treat your paying customers.
Kneecracker Wrote:
Sorry, but at the risk of sounding like an SOE fanboi, I’ve got to dispell this myth. I’ve been writing software since around 1983 and that is very much not the case. Which of the following steps in fixing a bug do you think is the most difficult:
1. Discovering there is a bug in the first place.
2. Being able to duplicate the buggy behavior at will.
3. Discovering what is causing the bug.
4. Fixing the bug.
For intermittent bugs, #1 can be pretty tough. You sit there and think up as many possible test cases as you can but you just can’t think of EVERYTHING. So things go live with bugs you didn’t know existed since that content passed all your tests and was able to be completed multiple times by multiple people. In the MMO world, even if they are reported in beta, I would imagine wading through the sea of /feedback and /bug that they get, a large amount of time is spent weeding out the ones where the problem wasn’t a bug but actually the player not doing what needed to be done. If they can’t repeat it, they may not know it’s an actual bug.
Once you have several people reporting a bug, you move on to #2. This can be a royal pain as well even when people are telling you exactly what they did to cause the problem. Recently, a bug was found where after you had talked to an NPC and gotten all the updates you needed from him, if you didn’t keep going and click on your response text instead of just walking away while it was still available to click, the guy wouldn’t let you progress the next time you talked to him. Since that’s never been a problem before, it’s not something I would think to test. Turned out, that’s what was causing the bug and they were finally able to repeat the problem.
Once you’ve made it past #1 and #2, you move on to trying to find the problem code. Once you can repeat the problem, this is usually fairly easy to identify. It can be time consuming sometimes depending on how many moving parts there are but for things like quests, this should be fairly easy.
And then we come to the last step. Actually fixing the problem. In all but the most major of bugs, this is usually the easiest step. Once you’re looking at the block of code causing the problem, it’s usually pretty easy to fix it. To use my previous example in completely made up code, you would change this:
NPC Response
Character Response Confirmation
Update Flag
To this:
NPC Response
Update Flag
Character Response Confirmation
The hard part is not fixing the bugs. The hard part is finding them, being able to repeat them (probably the toughest part), and then finding the actual bug in the code.
With intermittent bugs, it can be a real pain in the rear since it passed all the tests you wrote up for it. Not to mention, there are some who aren’t having the problem and cleared the content in question.
Now, is that an excuse for releasing buggy content to the live system? No. 🙁 Not giving them a free pass on that. But I will back up the statement that most software developers will agree with: “bug free software is a myth”.
Sorry but at the risk of not wanting to start a flame war with what is just my opinion, you seem to have repeated what I said. I stated firstly that intermittent bugs are the worst.
I too, have been in software and system development for over 25 years, staying with each development through system and user acceptance and I know an untested system when I see one.
The clear thing is, especially when you consider beta was only 4 weeks, a broken product was released. That is the problem.
I was not for a minute suggesting that DoV could have been released bug free, but some absolutely KEY elements did not/still do not work. They are not intermittent and they are not difficult to identify. God, every player who has experienced the KEY ones KNEW they were bugged. How hard is that for Sony? QA obviously wasn’t non-existent, they pushed a flawed product through regardless and that is what is so wrong. There is no myth for you to dispel, it is fact, I am afraid.