Feldon Tuesday’s update seems to have disabled the 48 hour grace period for trading loot/items between the members of a group or raid. This change was pushed straight to Live with no testing. And now it may be that the reasoning for this “fix” was to stop a low-priority “exploit”.
From Crismorn of Nagafen:
SoE tried to fix Contested Kael quest pieces from being traded between group members and thought it was so important and such a huge issue that breaking the entire ability to trade any type of dropped loot would be an acceptable loss, or they [did] just another half job as per usual.
Considering that Contested Kael Drakkel has been open for nearly 9 months and few people visit it these days except for Primal Velium Shards to get adornments, it’s odd that action is being taken now. You can see the update note that tells only half the story:
Kael Drakkel
All dropped quest items that were previously flagged no-trade now consume the dropped quest item once the quest has been taken.
The problem with such an unannounced change is that many raid guilds have migrated to running the zone and then splitting up and deciding loot AFTER the raid. With this change, guild leaders are now stuck holding all the loot from the entire raid and are unable to trade it. Customer Service reps are going to be awfully busy with Petitions.
UPDATE on November 4th from Customer Service Top Issues:
The recent update may have broke the ability to trade with those present at the kill for 48 hours. Customer Service is happy to move the item to the intended recipient providing it’s petitioned within those 48 hours, is not attuned and both were present for the kill. This will be addressed in an upcoming hotfix.
“You can’t have nice things” – EverQuest 2 Development Team.
I wonder how many times that SOE will push patches Live before testing them at all before they learn? I think this is at least the second occurrence of a major issue from a lack of QA and testing.
In addition, it looks like some items lost their red slot (e.g. Wand of the Zekian Idol, regular and empowered version). Adornments were already restored for us from a /petition.
The red adorn thing was most likelly a bug, the update notes say that they intended to fix the damage on them because it was too low (or something like that) and doesn’t mention getting rid of red adorns.
Loot trading being broken is probably unintentional as well, the fix in KD shouldn’t have anything to do with this. That fix just deletes the queststart item when you accept the quest so you can’t trade it to groupmember and get everynone in the group that quest from the same drop.
Do we have any official commentary on this yet? It was quite a rude realization for us on Tuesday night when a fabled our MT wanted dropped and somebody deer-in-the-headlights rolled on it and we couldn’t trade it later. It definitely made us realize how much we use the trading feature, and like others have said we tend to redistribute and swap things around later.
I really thought it would be hotfixed by the next morning and I sure hope it’s hotfixed today.
Shit like this is why I stopped playing. As a fellow software developer, I’d love to know what kind of QA process they have in place, and just how often they break it. Because from my experience, if you aren’t following a Qa process as a developer, than your process is broken.
Sadly, they don’t seem to understand that if they would spend the time to get a good QA process in place, the quality of their game would improve dramatically and save them money. Instead of developing/bug-fixing, re-fixing, re-patching, over and over, you do it right the first time and save money in the long run.
SOE strikes again. I am really amazed that they have any QA on these things. Just wow. 🙁
Last night we ran x2 drunder I accidently got an ittem assigned to me by the raid leader it took a petetion fo fix it. I would bet lots of folks are having to turn in petitions. So for right now make sure you loot what you need, and be sure about it.
No one at SOE actually plays EQ2 so they have no idea what the consequences of their actions will be.