Feldon 
When the EQ2 team came up with the six year Veteran Reward for loyal EQ2 customers, they likely never dreamed that its devilish complexity would haunt them years later. Call of the Veteran is both extremely popular, and frequently maligned for its maddening inconsistency. Although numerous bugs have been fixed with it over the years, the overriding need to prevent exploits has tended to expose strange glitches that take Indiana Jones-level archeology to resolve.
At this year’s SOE Live, EQ2 Lead Programmer Zoltaroth made it a point that he wanted Call of the Veteran to operate reliably. A tall order which he backed up today by posting some of the fixes he has committed, and the debugging that went into determining their cause: something nicknamed “phantom hate”.
It turns out that when you defeat an enemy, or it respawns, it may still be “mad” at you. This is usually a nonissue, but Call of the Veteran will not function unless you are completely out of Combat. I can only wish the EQ2 team the best of luck in continuing to chip away at these strange edge cases that keep Call of the Veteran from being perfect. It really does work most of the time, but as players, we naturally only remember the times it doesn’t!
Id bring up two points on the COV topic.
1) Everyone that has one seems to complain about it usually stating that it only works 50% of the time, yet those of us without it (due to being younger than 6 yrs) wish that someday it would be made available via SC marketplace purchases.
2) “Phantom Hate” sounds like it could cause huge issues with the forth coming XP changes, but might be the primary reason to fix the COV.
@Nrgy: Not sure you meant it this way or not. If you meant that the primary reason to fix the COV may be because of upcoming issues with the forth coming XP changes, I can tell you that wasn’t the reason for the fix. Not to say it wouldn’t have caused issues with that as well.
As Feldon mentioned above, Zoltaroth really has been trying to fix COV. He managed to get someone in a state where COV was not working to hold still long enough for him to look at the character and see why it wasn’t working. He noticed that even though the character wasn’t in combat, there were still unknown things that hated him which were preventing COV from working. Zoltaroth was specifically tracking down the COV issue when he found this. Only time will tell how many of the COV issues this fixes.
It really doesn’t matter anymore since travel has become even that much more trivial since the ‘reward’ was introduced, but it’s just strange that something can remain broken so long with nobody being able to figure out the pattern of what is breaking it. (By nobody, I’m not taking a shot at devs or players…just odd that nobody has with so many in the community willing to dig in on the most random topics.)
The problem is, it’s not one pattern. A lot of the strange bugs with Call of the Veteran have been fixed, but we just keep finding stranger bugs.
As long as they have to prevent exploits in PvP, raids, and every other type of content imaginable, making CoV work 100% may be a pipe dream.
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I am one of those who would vote to have this item questable, or on the marketplace (much more likely). It is so community friendly, even with the bugs, that more players should have access to it. How many times have vets used it for people that don’t qualify for the reward?
The still mad at you happens all the time to my SK especially if using blue aoe. Same issue with sk merc. Which might be why my cov never seems to work when I want it.
Why don’t they just allow COV to work in combat?
I guess I dont see what exploit that could allow.
Gash: You’re in raid, handling a name that needs a certain amount of dps. In the middle of raid one dps type (mage) goes linkdead deliberately to log in another dps type (mage or scout). They’re CoV’d in during combat, and away they go to kill the name.
Another example: the Coercer is having problems keeping the whole raid fed, one with an Coercer alt drops, comes in, gets brought in during combat.
Now, as a raider, I know we’ve changed out one class for another, but we do so between pulls, not in the middle of a fight. Bringing people in during a fight can open the door to many types of switch outs in raiding or heroic grouping or overlanding.
we just keep finding stranger bugs.
Had some guildies in Tofs on Tuesday.My cov failed.As did the next 3 attempts by them.That was a first for me,4 failures in a row.