Feldon 
Players on the Nagafen server have had little to celebrate over the last year. Between a number of unpopular mechanics changes, and the popularity of Battlegrounds continually nibbling away at ‘proper’ PvP, it’s been a long time since there’s been any good news.
But as if the forthcoming Game Update 64‘s substantive changes to PvP and Battlegrounds weren’t enough, tonight Nagafen players are celebrating the server first kill of Vyskudra the Ancient. If you haven’t heard about this, you’re not alone. Observers of GuildProgress may be puzzled to learn that this enemy has been defeated at all on Nagafen, as only the top 3 guilds worldwide have slayed it. It turns out, this enemy of Skyshrine did not perish at the hands of a raid guild, but instead suffered a one-shot death by a single individual.
Update from Kander:
I do not know what happened to it. I am more then a little upset we missed it. No excuses.
Either way, I will talk to Zoltaroth about whether or not we can wipe those discos.
Two months ago, a curious bug was brought to the attention of an EQ2 developer (confirmed with a sources who spoke on condition of anonymity). This bug allowed items to be Reforged with faulty or obscenely inflated stats. It turns out, item reforging could not merely be initiated by hailing an NPC, but also by using a slash command.
The first mention of this bug appeared on the EQ2 forums on May 20th in the thread Strange Reforging Stats. A week later, a more direct thread was posted, this one on May 27th. As of today, this thread has vanished but can still be found in Google’s Cache.
The latter thread included a screenshot of a single item having been reforged with a gobsmacking 308,007.6% Crit Bonus and later a screenshot depicting an item with over 9,000 Multiattack. These are not typos or fakes.
So here we are two months later, and a number of items have been discovered for the first time due to this bug. Perhaps at last, the purging of these discussions from the EQ2 forums indicate that a fix is forthcoming.
This issue is being discussed on EQ2Flames (the official forums do not permit discussion of exploits).
UPDATE: We have it on good authority that this exploit has now been fixed.
What i cant understand, that people on Official Forum and EQ2Flames are defeating those Exploits as a legit action by player and call others are Jealous, this can only be an argument made by someone wo has used that cheat self. This is really ridiculuos, SoE should perma-bann all those Cheaters…
LOL 1/3 of all servers would be banned then most likely. Not that that many cheat to this level but cheating is cheating no?
You know, it would almost be worth getting banned to play with this.
Someone supposedly went and killed Rallos Zek to check this nice little bug out. Amuses me how far SOE’s head is up their rear.
Personally I’m glad people cheat the system. SOE will literally ignore problems until it becomes commonplace. Without these cheaters most of the time we could count on issues remaining for months on end…oh wait.
We all know of several exploited items to this day that not a soul mentions. This particular problem just happens to be a godmode style cheat.
Also I cannot access the forums or even turn on the launchpad as of yesterday. The hell is going on?!
…I find it {very} hard to believe that the number 9001 is unintentional. And no, I’m not making that joke. It’s old.
an item with over 9,000 Multiattack.
…like Sarken, I see what they did there.
Seriously, in this case, what most would call ‘cheating’, I think of as ‘extreme Beta-testing.’ Maybe a test regime with any real rigor would possibly sniff these out without this happening, no?
The one with the obscene crit bonus should have been the red warning sign, by the way. That’s not one of the stats you can reforge by standard means.
lol, I want to see the parse from these. lol.
This is outrageous! The cc on the PoW neck is 20 lower than the one off of Teldek in UD. Oh, cb on the boots seems high too.
@ Anagoi
Reguarding testing: The problem with beta tests it that most people who are testing (not just getting a sneak peak at the new content) tend to be people who test for bugs that come up while playing the game as it is ‘intended’ to be played. Not because they’re intentionally ignoring the opportunity to find/test exploits, but most don’t think that way. I’ve been in QA for a number of years and it wasn’t until I’d run my own NWN PW and seen the kind of lenghths and ways people will go to cheat, that I learned to test my own quests and such not just for bugs, but for ways people would attempt to exploit and cheat. It takes a different mind-set.
@Mermut
Per the Flames thread, the devs were made aware of this issue three months ago.
Let me repeat that. The development staff have been aware that this was generally accessible since April of this year.
At what point does a potentially show-stopping thing like this get off the “We’ll get around to fixing that” list and onto the “Holy $#!+, fix this and push it live YESTERDAY” list?
The only thing really and truly exposed by this is the absolute dysfunction rampant in the staff at SOE. The only way the point could have been made more publicly is if a group of folks exploited this, then rampaged across Norrath to slaughter everything in sight, then posted the video to You-Tube. This failure is absolutely that egregious.
@anaogi
i said this once ill say it again welcome to f2p soe no longer cares about exploits to make it an holy shit fix now as log as ppl are buying the fluff stuff they put out every week via smed cash. and i woulda loved to see this guy frap everything and send it to every game site out there
Was only a matter of time before something like this happened tbh…
Kander has posted that this has now been fixed. I’ve posted an update in the original article. He’s also looking to see if the discovery data can be cleaned up.
If they clean up the discovery data and it works like it usually does, it may be a week or so before the updated item data makes it into the data feeds and is reflected on EQ2U and other sites that use the data feeds. New discovery data for an item is updated within minutes of the discovery but there isn’t any mechanism in place to remove discovery data other than a full item export to the data feeds which usually happens about once a week.
@uncle
You’re probably right. Which can only mean they just don’t care about surviving in the marketplace as a AAA publisher, as I have a suspicion the decision to go F2P was made based on faulty economic models…but that’s a rant for another time.
Idiots.
Hi guy. I made the 9001 ma neck. It’s a fake. I just edited the link information in notepad.
I’m too bad at exploiting to figure out how to actually bug reforging or else there’s so many things I would try 🙁
its shocking how easy this exploit was and how long it went un noticed. they basically just left the command for crit bonus unlocked for people on nagafen to alter if they knew how to type the parameters for stats in along with the item ID.
I just hope they restore the discoes and remove all the loot that peopel ever atttained on nagafen through this bug. The kander post was a response to me kind of being a jerk on flames but yeah it still sucks. I know discoes are nothing but bragging rights, but whatever keeps the players in my guilds going is all that matters to me.
@ Ardur I don’t think this is/was a nagafen only problem.
For the sake of posterity, SOE should post the parse from the Vyskudra fight in a sticky on the official forums 🙂
It would serve as a reminder to their people to LISTEN to your playerbase 🙂