Spires and Dragon Ring Events — What Went Wrong?
As borne out in several different threads on the EQ2 Forums, starting with the original Dragon Ring and Wizard Spire Event Feedback Testing thread created on May 15th, all has not gone smoothly during the Spires and Dragon Ring Events. These events are still running on most servers, although the lucrative Spires event has been completed on many. So what were the biggest problems? Let’s spell them out and address them one by one.
Dragon Ring: Hiding A Serious Raid Mob?
Once our server (Butcherblock) reached 99% Spires completion, we got a 10 minute warning that something big was coming. For us, this coincided with the regular hourly Spires event, so we got to fight the regular “x4” event, and then the final “super x4” a few minutes later. This new epic x4 boss Ulbrow, nicknamed the Unibrow, appears, along with all of the previous bosses of the x2 and x4 epic stages of the Spires, all at once. There wasn’t anything too tough about this event other than server lag, players crashing to desktop, and knockbacks. Ultimately, we killed the encounter without too much difficulty.
What took many people by surprise is the final stage of the Dragon Ring…
The final boss of the Dragon Ring turned out to none other than Kreegar Krikneck, ripped straight from the hardmode (challenge) version of Kraytoc’s Fortress of Rime. As a result, many of the same things needed to complete that fight were needed here. Kreegar Krikneck was largely invincible and was kicking out powerful AoE damage until he was debuffed with the Fighter Debuff clicky item available only from a Velious x2 raid zone. Yes, an event that started out as being open to level 85+ adventurers (tradeskillers and low levels were left out) suddenly required an x2 raid item, as well as off-tanks to handle the adds, and having over 150% crit mit didn’t hurt either.
Brother Against Brother
As a further complication, only the fastest instances of Eastern Wastes and Great Divide got credit for defeating each boss. Once Ulbrow or Kreegar was defeated in one instance, a 15 minute timer started, at the conclusion of which, the event despawned in every other instance, even as players were in the middle of combat.
On some servers, notably Antonia Bayle, Raid Guilds who easily completed the Dragon Ring event mercilessly taunted players in other instances who missed out, either due to not having the Fighter Debuff, or because their encounter despawned before they could finish it. We won’t print some of the comments that were made, but it’s pretty horrific stuff.
Many Players Didn’t Pick Up the Spires Conclusion Quest
Once the Spires event ticked over to 99% and things started gearing up for the Final Event, if you THEN traveled into the Spires area, you auto-received the final quest which rewarded 500 Tokens, a Title, and a Portable Spires item. However for those players who were already in the area when the event rolled over to 99%, unless they saw the new Quest feather over the NPC, or the various Shouts, Raid yells, and other attempts by players to notify them, if they didn’t go and manually pick up the 500 token quest, they missed out.
Were the Spires Properly Tested?
Some finger-pointing has been directed towards members of the permanent Test and in-flux Test Copy servers. However this blame is misplaced. The core of these events, including the Heroic encounters, were all tested and feedbacked 2 months before the event was switched on on live servers. Some, but not all, of their feedback was applied to the event.
However, as with all events that are designed to reach an ‘epic’ state as the event progresses, via hundreds of players participating, there just wasn’t any way to recreate those conditions on the Test server short of advancing the event. Was not the conclusion of the Spires and Dragon Ring event meant to be surprising and unexpected?
None of us on Butcherblock had any idea what to expect when the Spires event reached 99% and triggered the final Epic x4 boss. It was exciting, and due to some luck and the right players being present, we were able to succeed, but for countless other players in other instances and on other servers, it was an unmitigated fiasco.
Keeping the most complex part of your carefully-scripted Live Event a secret, has a flip side, especially when players will only get one bite at the apple and never see that event again. It’s the requirement that everything has to be pitch perfect with no oversights, no glitches, and no bugs. There’s just no second chance to clean up bugs or correct oversights in a one-time event.
And yet as we look at today’s Update Notes, we see two puzzling changes. First, the requirement of Debuffs has been removed from Kreegar Krikneck. Second, the automatic 15 minute despawn of mobs won’t trigger if players are still in combat. Requiring a Debuff is not something that can accidentally get added to a mob — someone had to flag the mob that way. This seems like more than a bug. It seems like a design change being done mid-stream, after some servers have completed the event while others haven’t. With the scrutiny put on Live Events, changing the design of the encounter mid-stream seems inappropriate.
Hard Feelings
There are a lot of hard feelings from players who either WERE present, killed Ulbrow or Kreegar Krikneck, but didn’t have the right quest and thus got no credit. Still others got knocked so far out of the area, or revived so far away from the Event that when mobs were killed, it didn’t count.
There are plenty of other players who repeatedly crashed to desktop with Out of Memory errors due to 100 players, 5 epic mobs, and countless trash mobs all trying to move at the same time.
There were players present who had the numbers, the right healers, but didn’t have the Debuff and so couldn’t succeed. And there were players who fought the good fight, but weren’t fast enough and their mobs despawned before they could finish.
There Were Bugs Too
When the Spires and Dragon Ring events first went live, almost immediately, numerous problems were discovered. Players weren’t getting updated on quests. Anyone getting knocked out of the Spires area was getting the quest deleted from their journal. Also, some of the events were running more frequently than intended. However it wasn’t until both Antonia Bayle and Freeport servers got to 99%, yet were unable to kill the x4 final boss due to a bug in the encounter, that the event was taken offline.
Speculation was that the event had been taken offline primarily to slow down its progress by increasing the interval between battles. However it’s just as likely that the event was disabled to correct the many reported bugs.
We hoped that with the changes, the event would last longer, allowing more players to participate. Yet, even with the changes, Freeport (EQ2X) completed the event in 17 hours. I know Butcherblock completed the event Saturday morning at 1:30am Eastern Daylight Time. It was only due to a text message from a guildmate that I woke up and participated in the final event.
We Can Fix It Later
We have no doubt that the Developers and Designers are now turning their attention from the post-Fan Faire frenzy to address bugs and problems with this Event. However at this point isn’t it already too late?
The collaborative process that works so well for creating quests, dungeons, and content within the EQ2 team is great if you can follow it up with a solid patch or two. But for a Live Event, shouldn’t there be a concrete plan for who the event is targeted towards and a plan for how the event is expected to play out? I wouldn’t want to put on an event without knowing roughly how long the event will last (using scripting to control the completion rate). And I’d want to be sure of what kind of gear is needed to complete it.
The necessary loss of flexibility in planning and designing a Live Event is more than made up for by how happy the players will be when they get to participate in a smoothly conceived, consistent experience. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and the impression that many Live Events over the past 3 years have given is that of crossing fingers and hoping it all works out. For the best possible experience, Live Events really need consistent management from concept to design to implementation.
If we’re so reliant on Testers to find not only bugs but also design oversights in these Events, then Testers need a chance to participate in these events at all levels, from 1-100% and everything in between. Some of the mystery will be lost, but at least you won’t have a lynch mob on your hands.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Gninja volunteered for the unenviable task of giving credit to everyone who was present at each Named kill and participating in the Spires event at its conclusion. However, this proved impractical to do on every server, so he made this announcement:
I was going to hang out on every server and update players as it happened, however that proved to be a huge task as it took me upwards of 6 hours to fix one server. Instead we will be putting in a fix for it via hotfix that should take care over everyone’s in one swoop. It was not that one server got special treatment — it was I got through one server before I realised it was going to take a lot longer that originally thought so it was better to put in a code fix to counter the issues.
Domino has already addressed some of these issues, including an announcement we previously reported that indicates we can expect some kind of special bonus event this weekend.
As promised, we have reviewed the issues that have been reported for this event. We will be hotfixing later this week (not tomorrow’s hotfix, but after that) and we believe this will address the issues you’ve reported. Once that hotfix goes live (there will be further details in the hotfix notes) we’ll review the situation once again to ensure that there are no outstanding issues.
Once again we apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
For Those Servers…
If the events are still running on your server, you can look forward to fixes today and in the coming days. From Gninja:
We are looking to get the fix for the encounters despawning in with tomorrow morning’s hotfix. The other fixes will likely be a day or two after as we are testing through them to get the kinks worked out. If you still have the quests in your journal do not delete them we will be adding a way for you to complete them now that the events have completed.
We are working on some changes now that should fix the majority of issues going on right now in regards to this event. So if you currently have the quests and they did not update or you are unable to turn in one of the repeatables due to the event completing and the NPC going away hang on to the quest and we will give instructions on how to remedy the situation once we get the fix on the live servers.
We appreciate your patience.
Dragon Ring House Item — 50 Tokens Still?
From Gninja:
Found the issue and I am correcting it. We won’t be able to give refunds but if you hold off on buying it till we can get it to the live servers you will be able to purchase it for 25. I will make sure its called out in the patch notes.
What Did You Think?
Did you participate in the Spires or Dragon Ring rebuilding on your server? What do you think of the event?
Trackback from your site.
Comments (31)
Lempo
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Who in the hell made this statement? It is not even close to being correct.
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Aethn
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If you have a day job or classes, you were screwed out of this event on most servers. What they needed to do was make it so the event could advance XX % per day, then the event timer actually kickoff at 5pm PST on all servers once it was completed to 99%, that way everyone could have participated, not just the unemployed or the Bon-Bon eating house fraus.
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Aethn
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Who in the hell made this statement? It is not even close to being correct.
Yes it was absolutely correct, we were finally able to kill our instance on AB only after the raid debufffs were applied from a few savy raids who realized what was happening. Our Unibrow was AEing us for 10-30k a pop up until those debuffs were applied
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Kosovos
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I missed 98 percent of all of these events due to work. But It’s disgusting to see something that requires hard core raider guilds to kill for a world event in an OVERLAND zone.
That’s assuming if the article is accurate.
I was left out of the entire event unfortunately (again due to work) so I can’t really say anything else.
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Lempo
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The statement is not even clsoe to being correct the debuff does not come from hard mode challenge zones it comes from a x2 that has been nerfed to the point that it is a joke. It does not require anyone in a hardcore raid guild to complete, examining the buffs on the mod is all that is required. I know, I know that is a lot to ask of the WoW crowd. The debuff is also not only related to the HM zones, that mechanic is on some of the EM zone bosses as well. So even though you didn’t write the statement, and though you were just gonna make a snap reply to try and show someone up you only showed that your reading comprehension appears to be lacking and that you don’t know what you are talking about as it relates to this.
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Chris
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Welcome to the final nail in the coffin for SOE and EQ2.
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Aethn
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You aquire the debuff from x2 to use in x4, the only place that the debuff was designed for. You’re crying about apples and apples here, who cares where the debuff was aquired. The real issue is you needed to apply that debuff on a casual world event open to all in any gear level, which was impossible to complete unless your raiders showed up to the fight. Stop glazing over the major parts of teh story while you cry and bitch over the smallest issue out of the whole subject. I bet you got pissed when Potato was spelled wrong too.
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Lexxie
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I’m a little confused by this article. Ulbrow was the Wizard Spire final named in Eastern Wastes and was killed with ease in my raid.
Kreegar Krickneck was the HM named at the end of the Dragon Spire event in Great Divide that required the fighter debuff, from the x2.
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Alasoy
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Lexxie,
It came to the attention that Equillibrium and their ilk in AB were able to exploit such and SOE turned a blind eye and the playerbase caught on and they been covering their tracks since then and it is a quarmire for them.
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Anaogi
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I’m far from hardcore, yet my defiler has this debuff. As does much of my fairly casual raiding alliance.
That doesn’t excuse the design of this event. I think I know what smoke is blowin’ with the devs now…
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Thundy
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I don’t think it’s nitpicky to correct a reference to the debuff which was mentioned multiple times in this article incorrectly. The x2 debuff required here is easy to get now, yet you make it sound like some herculean task. EQ2Wire does a great job in my opinion but the facts should be stated correctly.
That said, I don’t really think it’s necessary to have that debuff needed on world event mobs, and the entirety of this event was a disaster. It should have been as difficult as a PQ and that would have been fine.
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Kwill
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The point is, the design was terrible. The attempt to make the event “live” backfired terribly, for the many reasons Feldon pointed out in his article.
Addressing just one of the issues: perhaps the devs thought that the server populations would somehow know what needed to be done and cooperate with the guilds that had players with the debuff? That would have been great, except that there wasn’t enough time or clues, even, to make it some kind of server wide cooperative fight — for every server and every instance! Getting hundreds of players in one place with the right equipment and with an understanding of what needs to be done takes more than a wing and a prayer. Obviously, it didn’t work this time.
I am quite disappointed that the dev team was not up to this challenge.
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Glenolas
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Nothing surprising here. NONE of the 9 heroic instances launched with DoV worked when they went live either, after however many months of dev time in the making. Remember Bob? Not only bugged, but with an added exploit coded in, and set as the gatekeeper for 6 other broken instances.
Read the forum notes in Zones and Population for the 3 weeks after DOV launch. It reads like something 6 months before launch, in an early beta. Nothing worked in the instances. Read about the PG’s. Both bugged. Raids? same.
It’s the SOE culture. Software failure is okay, as long as they have a long list of excuses showing it wasn’t their fault. Had any of us foisted that stuff on our clients in real life, we’d have been looking for a job, not sent to do another one for the spires.
Arguing over whether the debuff was HM (it was) or also a few of the EM last bosses (it was) takes away from the big message. The event was bugged as hell for 2 days, was taken down for 7 days, reset to 50%, and finished in about 1 more day. Even after a do over, it was pitiful to the end. Congrats to the peeps who got tokens, but otherwise a normal SOE heroic/raid encounter.
Management 101. Same people, same result. You want a different result? Change the people.
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Makya
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Ya, most of the above mentions of Ulbrow (wizard spire final name) should be replaced with Kreegar (dragon ring final name). Ulbrow was pretty easy and as far as I know didn’t require anything special (confidence debuffs for example) to kill it. We haven’t gotten to 99% on Everfrost yet but from what I heard from those on other servers that did kill it, the final spawn for the dragon rings was the HM Kreegar encounter out of HM Fortress which would have required tank confidence debuffs, off tanks to handle the adds to prevent coop strike and about 200 crit mit to handle the AOEs.
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Peter
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The information in this article is INCORRECT.
Ulbrow was the boss of the spire event and DID NOT required the fighter x2 debuff.
On the other hand, the boss of the dragon ring event, hardmode version of Kreegar Krikneck, required the fighter x2 debuff and caused the issue.
EW spire was completed fine, the dragon ring was the one having issues.
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Kwill
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@peter — assuming you are correct, the fact remians that the basic design and implementation of the entire event was done poorly. A clear lack of planning, forecasting, and a dearth of information to the player base all contributed to the downfall of the event.
I for one was not able to participate in the final battle, because I was not on at the ridiculous time it occurred on the Butcherblock server — I don’t play at 12:30 am central, as a rule. You might argue, well it was live, it ended when it ended — but it didn’t even occur to me that it would be less than 36 hours after the event was restarted! I thought the team was slowing the event down. Silly me.
I agree as well that serving the workers beer and bringing them stuff would not necessarily make them complete the task faster. A little more realism would have made it make more sense.
Here’s my problem: the EQ2 team has literally 12 years of experience in their own game stable (EQ as well as EQ2) with live events. They know players tackle unique events with a vengeance. They know from experience things get finished long before any dev thought they could be (and dungeons mastered, as well). This isn’t some new thing no one has ever done before. So I would expect more from a team, even if the some of the individuals haven’t designed a live event before. Dave Georgeson, where was your leadership here?
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Peter
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Hehe Feldon, just one more correction. You said the hardmode version of Fortress spire, it is actually the hardmode version of Kraytoc’s fortress of rime. The difference is in the name really.
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Rasaraja
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What really pissed some people off was that when the spire reached 99% you had to delete the ‘old’ quest and hail the NPC for the ‘final’ quest. Some people didn’t know this and missed out on getting credit for the final.
Some shouted to delete the old etc., however, in the midst of this zergfest, many have that chat in another chat tab and missed the shouts. Additionally, you easily had 100+ players piled up trying to hail the npc – major lag. So at the end of the encounter you had people going wtf?
In GD, when you entered the area, the 25 token quest popped up automatically. This quest should also have popped up automatically at the appropriate time. This oversight offered a fail condition for many.
Petitions did no good. GM responses were as follows:
“I’m sorry to hear that you were unable to finish this event. Unfortunately, I’m afraid there won’t be much that we can do to help you since you didn’t have the quest at the time the event happened.”
The final reward – Tokens – Title – Gadget – xp are not the issue. It is the principle of the thing. i.e. Quite a few people were there in good faith, having a fun time (in spite of the known issues), only to be disappointed and screwed in the end by a poorly designed quest. Developers in their sandbox failed to take into consideration the “what if” factors.
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Lexxie
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@Alasoy I’m on AB, afaik Equilibruim didn’t exploit anything. They had a decent turn out for their raid and knew to fighter debuff the mob and the strat for HM Kreegar, thus killing it. Not sure how that translates as an exploit?
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Tist
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I logged in to testcopy when I first saw the notes, months ago, about the event being on test. I ran to the dragon ring expecting some quest related stuff to be there and got jumpedby Kreegar x4, who at that time, for several days, was spawned and standing with his encounter buddies, in the dragon ring.
Not quite the surprise climax as portrayed here.
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Ryan
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Yeah, I’m sure they didn’t exploit it. They are a hard mode raid guild and it was a hard mode encounter. They usually just save their exploiting for things such as getting flying mounts on day one…
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Feldon
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Ah if only I had a staff to do fact-checking. 😉
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Gaige
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I try to save my exploits to whatever I believe will piss of the casual playerbase of AB the most, and I was glad that I chose to exploit the flying mount this expansion.
LOL @ reporting stuff that wasn’t even factual and LOL even more at players insinuating that debuffing a mob is exploiting.
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Striinger
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Wow @ whining because everyone who touched this event didn’t get a shiny “You’re a Winner!” participation trophy. Screw that noise…it devalues the REAL accomplishments. I think there should be an achievement with title reserved ONLY for the group/raid who ACTUALLY finished first on each server. This isn’t preschool soccer.
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Whilhelmina
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The testing problems we had are that :
– when we finished the spires, 1 day later Gninja auto-completed the event to check the price droping and the sole riding guild on Test had not tried the mob yet.
– the druid ring was bugged for 3/4th of the testing phase
– the druid ring more or less crashed at 50% so we couldn’t check stage 2 and even less stage 3
– we lack the player base needed to stress-test that and no dev called players for stress-testing on Copy.
On Storms we reached the final boss of spires just 1 minute before the stage2 mobs spawned. The zone server crashed repeatedly (between 95 & 100 players in EW2) and after crashing the zones (EW1 & 2 5 times each or so) we were able to sort ourselves between the 3 EW instances created. It was pretty awfull. Hopefully I was aware of the quest not switching to new one and spammed the zone and 80-89 channel repeatedly so everyone got the right quest (yay!) and raiders switched zones to help EW3 with the killing so our 3 instances validated.
Needless to say, I’m very happy to see the patched changes for GD. Our server probably can’t handle more than 60 odd people in the zone so the “no-debuff no-despawn” fix is appreciated.
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Feldon
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Wow @ demanding that a Live Event be a competitive, world-first-rewarding, raid event.
Keep in mind that EVERYONE can buy both the Slayer of Ulbrow title and the Portable Spire item, not just people who were present at the raid. The only thing ‘unique’ to those who personally defeated Ulbrow was getting 500 tokens in one shot. So that kinda defeats the whole “Only reward the first EW instance force to kill Ulbrow and nobody else” mantra.
EQ2 used to have the whole World Contested factor with Avatars. Believe it or not, I like the idea of world Contested. There should be a brass ring that players look up to as the ultimate prize. But of course human nature is to be immature about such things. It’s obvious that the EQ2 team have moved away from this type of competitive e-peen wagging — years ago in fact. Some people just didn’t get the memo yet.
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Luminata
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I was only up by chance at 5:30am (UK time) on Saturday morning which is when the Spire Event on Splitpaw was completed, at a time when 95% of the server population would have still been asleep and probably for some hours to come. If you want to turn into an achievement to be proud of then it should be something that everyone can at least participate in at an appropriate time…
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Gaige
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Actually Feldon, they’re working on a new contested system. They removed them due to the server hardware being unable to support multiple raids pulling them – not because they’re moving away from that kind of content.
They’re hopefully going to have the new contested system in with the expansion in November.
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Mysticalluna
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Everquest should be a coorperative game, you can always play a fps or fighting game if you want to be the top of the leaderboard. Why are you playing an mmo to be competitive? Or just go play on a pvp server!
World events and temporary events should always be open to everyone, because they won’t be there for players to return and compete in later… Everyone has to be lucky enough that they can be around for the event, or actually cancel their real life plans for it…
Hopefully, this new contested raid system won’t lag out the zones that the contested mob is in? Having 48 or 80 people plus show up for some contested totally lags out their zones, we proved that with how lagged out Eastern Wastes was for the Wizard Spire event lol.
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Mysticalluna
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Oh, and Avatars are okay, because they actually respawn, the Wizard/Dragon Ring events are gone forever once completed ~ No one time shot event should ever require fabled raiding gear ~
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Mysticalluna
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I got lucky on Butcherblock that it was prime-time on a Saturday… Most horrendous lag ever, but I got it *yay*
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