Feldon 
Less than 18 hours after launching a new World Event to help Rebuild the Wizard Spires and Dragon Ring in Velious, the events have been suspended due to a series of issues including exceptionally fast completion rates. On Antonia Bayle, the event had already reached 99% when the event was shut down.
Completion rates have been a chronic problem with Live Events in EverQuest 2 in the past 2 years. The lengthy, story-rich prelude quest for The Shadow Odyssey was unavailable to most players due to the time it took to be unlocked. Many players had less than 48 hours to complete it on all of their characters.
To our knowledge, no server ever unlocked Player Titles for completing the Quellthulian Spires Rebuilding event. This can be largely be attributed to the lack of special rewards for defeating the challenging x2 and x4 bosses for that event. I personally participated in the Heroic and x2 bosses and once my groups saw that there were no rewards except more tokens, we lost interest and ceased further participation.
Despite these past issues, there seems to be a lack of monitoring and regulation of the completion speed of Live Events. One of EverQuest II’s greatest strengths are its Live Events, but to say the timing has been problematic is an understatement.
There are a few other issues we hope to see addressed in the Wizard Spire and Dragon Ring Rebuilding events as well. Players have reported losing their progress on the Dragon Ring quest if they are knocked out of or leave the event area, as the quest is auto-removed from their journal. Note that this and other issues were all reported while the event was on Test.
The event is disabled at least until next week as the changes will require a hotfix according to Domino:
We’re temporarily disabling the event to work out a couple of issues (thanks to those who reported them!) Please see this thread for further details. We’ll post in the forums when we have a firmer date for the reactivation of the event, but it won’t be this weekend as it will require a hotfix.
It escapes me how SOE could mess up something like this.
Did they even think about completion speeds and how fast it would take live servers?
What did they do, some internal testing with 6 people and base the completion speeds on those 6 people or something?
They really should stop doing it % based and just do it time based like RIFT does their world events. this event has 3 phases, wish phase 1 quests lasted 2 week, and phase 2 and 3 each lasted a week, that would give us 1 month to get the tokens we wanted to get the mounts an other fun stuff from the event.
You must be new to SOE games, Chris…nothing surprises me anymore…
I know what I won’t be doing this weekend. Based on the fact that at 10:40 PM MDT last night the progress was at 23%, I figured I would have to cram as much of this event in as quickly as possible if I were to get any benefit out of it. I figured it would be done by tonight. I agree with Dirgus, forget the progress percentage and just make it a timed event. Why even bother with progress anyway? So one server gets to have a druid or wizzy port before another? Big deal.
@ Dirgus
I agree 100% with you. It should be a fixed time, not % based.
Actually, there was a real big problem with the Circle on Vox. The event was happening every 30 mins, rather than the once every hour and a half that they said it would happen.
@Dirgus, actually there were similar complaints about the River of Souls event (it completed too quickly, too many people missed it, etc.). The difference being the Trion seems to learn from their mistakes and (a) admits that they screwed up, and (b) fixes problems quickly. Neither of which is something SOE is particularly known for. That’s why the Waves of Madness world event is designed how it is, that’s the direct result of Trion actually listenting to and acting upon the suggestions of their players.
Oh, and this whole “you have to suck it up for the weekend because it requires a hotfix” is also something you don’t see in Rift. If they need to push out a hotfix over the weekend to address a problem, they’re in the office working and they do it. They’re a whole lot more customer-focused than SOE ever has been.
I realize that Rift has a lot more players and Trion has a lot more resources than SOE these days, but even back when EQ2 was new, I don’t see the level of dedication to the game that Trion has for Rift. They actually remind me of the original crew at Mythic, before they imploded and then sold out to EA.
@Arketh, The same thing was happening on Everfrost, the GD event was every 30 minutes. Plus we noticed (and I accidentally did it once) that people got credit while AFK and not participating at all. I’m sure even the AFK people added to the percent done.
I also like the general idea of a timed event versus “we got there first method”.
I think it’s time for SOE to admit that their Test Server cannot effectively test anything anymore. I played there for FOUR YEARS and the fact of the matter is that while those who still test are good testers (they investigate and report bugs – they killed TWO guild halls tracking down the specifics of the relinquishing bugs, for instance) they’re present part-time for the most part. It’s impossible for Test to test anything that takes gear much more powerful than mastercrafted; they simply do not have the capabilities required to get to where they need to, and those who could get a character on Test Copy generally won’t because of the difficulty with getting onto the server and the fact that there’s no lasting reward for doing so. Why take a night out from raiding or instance grinding to test content when you’ll go back and have nothing to show for it?
The problem with these statements is that I have no ideas for a solution.
My first thought was to move Test into the Extended system so people can play there for free, just click an option on the launcher to pull/stream the Test version. But why would you do that, even on a persistent server (which Test has been – no resets to date and the only rollbacks have been related to crashes), when you have to pay for the various unlocks? You’d have the same problems you do now – a bunch of casuals/solos in gear insufficient for the new content.
My second thought was to do a lot more organization on Testing on the Test Copy server. Big announcements, lots of devs present to handle the crowd that’d show up, etc. with a /claim going onto accounts for those who were actively involved in the testing session. Maybe that’d work, for all that it would exclude those of us playing on Extended – but we chose to play on the redheaded stepchild server, so I won’t complain about it there.
Regardless, both of the above ideas shows that Test in its current form has failed. Come up with a plan to honor the players who have helped in the past, and come up with a new system that gets testing done – and never allow events like this one again!
When this happens, you can only ask yourself one question. Do employees of SOE actually use their own products?
The most worrying thig about me is the fact that it was delayed from going Live for quite some time and then still managed to be buggy.
It’s things like this that make me dread the AA / stats revamp discussed at FF. You can’t help but begin to lose faith every time things like this happen.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I have to see ANY EQ2 content released that is not completely broken or bugged beyond playability. I really cannot think of single thing implemented that didn’t required months of attempted fixes. Do they even have a QA team?
They should make then final reward be offered on the token merchant from the beginning and state on the item’s description that this reward is to be given at the time of the most dire need and closest progression of this undertaking. Allow it’s purchase after the event has finished it’s final stage. Just don’t make it buy-able until you have either participated in the final round or have a large horde of the tokens, given it’s 50-75 per hour[50 if they fix it] then make the final reward cost 500-600 tokens. That would provide ample involvement.
Make the final reward something that would be worth the effort. Either a house item with a crit mit or crit chance buff, a re-useable debuff item that can be used on epic mobs. There are a million unique things you could do that would make the final stage worth saving up for or participating in.
Karith – was there a lack of participation?
Magar,
When SOE fixes all the issues reported by Testers in Beta and on Test and there are STILL problems, then you can blame the Testers. Most of the problems with the Dragon Ring and Spire Rebuilding events were reported 2-3 weeks ago on Test.
On my server there was =/……Guess I gotta remember I’m on vox =/
Depends what side you were on, on Vox, and time. The Q side had a 3x and 2x holding down the ring for several hours. The Freeporters at the time seemed to be more interested in getting PVP updates as opposed to doing the event.
There was 3 zones going on at once point, so there must have been a few people doing it.
I don’t blame the testers themselves. Never did. I blamed SOE’s mismanagement of their Test Server (the kind that got myself and several other testers to leave, and keeps the rest of the player base away) and their inability to come up with a better system. The testers are wonderful. They know what they’re doing, how to replicate bugs or find out why they’re not replicating and submit all the details to SOE.
Of course many of the bugs present in the event were reported weeks ago. And I know (because of who is still on Test doing the testing) that the bug reports were undoubtedly good ones. It sounds like the process of using the bug reports, replicating, adjusting, and re-testing is where it’s gone awry. That’s not a problem with the Testers – that’s a problem with the full system as it stands today. I suppose I should have focused less on the capabilities of the testing characters and more on the way SOE has been content to let Test turn into what it is today – an ineffective place for Live/Extended players to blame when things turn out like this. For that I apologize.
When testers feel ignored…testers will ignore testing.
There was a solution which attracted alot of testers in the past, and that was a reward on live for testing miragul planar shard. (exclusive title)
Unfortunatly its very rare to see those kind of incentives.
I wonder why…
So there’s still no proper transport to Velious; boring! Suppose I have to renew Rift again then see if SOE actually wants people to play their expansion.
Actually Daffodil, there’s the transit from SS docks, the paintings, the seashell from the EW Othmir quests (the third is actually guild hall friendly!)
Remember, transit from zone to zone wasn’t always as dead simple as it is now. For me the issue isn’t that super-easy transit isn’t built in from the start–that to me is a far more proper state of affairs, something to actually EARN in the game!–but that they activated the means to earn it in a half-assed, broken state
Every time I think the devs are starting to learn, they pull a stunt like this. No wonder my faith in them lies in a shallow grave just outside Freeport…
Daffodil,
That’s why you don’t want to play Velious? Because travel to it is not instant? Pretty lame excuse if you ask me.
Velious CE comes with 4 in-house paintings that port you to different parts of Velious. Further, the Live Event to rebuild the Wizard Spires and Druid Rings within Velious are running right now, although they were actually completing TOO quickly and so had to be suspended.
I don’t know anyone who is having any difficulty reaching Velious with all the travel options currently offered.
The DoV zones are probably the easiest of all to get to beside the zone out the front door of your house.
Think Daffodil is just trolling.
Oh and btw. You did not have to get the CE to get the paintings.
What quest gives the sea shell item you can place in a guild hall? Think I musta missed it.. because I could of sworn I done em all.. hmm..
New tradeskill quests, I believe.
Here be the link for the quest…
http://eq2.eqtraders.com/articles/article_page.php?article=q110&menustr=060000000000
The event is back up tomorrow, Friday, “late afternoon” Pacific. Details:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2x/posts/list.m?&topic_id=8514
We were also at 99% on the Freeport (Extended) server. I ended up depriving myself of a little sleep for it, as I calculated the % rate over the few hours of events/errand runs I had done, and determined we would be getting near 99% by early to mid afternoon. I was up way too long that morning, but I feared that if I went to sleep, I’d miss out. I think a lot of people felt that way, which is why we were so unusually active for that time of day. Nobody wanted to leave because they thought they’d miss the final fight.
A little ahead of my calculated schedule, the final event was declared in Eastern Wastes and we soon found ourselves facing several raid level mobs. We killed everything, except for one stupid x2 Ry’Gorr. He bugged out and we were unable to attack him (“Target is not an enemy”). In retrospect, I think there was some kind of failsafe they had programmed in to prevent completion if it was reached prior to a specific date. If that Ry’Gorr had died, we would’ve gotten our titles and tokens. I wonder, was that the same situation AB players experienced?
Regardless, dozens of players that were present submitted petitions and feedback, and several minutes later the announcement came on our server that the event was shut down and on hold pending further investigation. The immediate promise was that progress would not be lost. They succinctly reneged on that promise with the announcement it would be reset to 50%. Yet the server MOTD is still promising us (at least as of yesterday) that our progress will not be reset. I think they should probably ditch that MOTD instead of constantly reminding us every time we log that SOE doesn’t keep their word. It also reinforces the belief that there is a serious of lack of communication between SOE employees.