A Day in the Life of a Bug: The Skyshrine/Kael Drakkel XP Nerf That Wasn’t
I’m a bit late on this as the bug has already been fixed, but I wanted to get this out there just the same.
Shortly before the introduction of Heroic characters, a few players noticed that Experience gained from the contested zones of Skyshrine and Kael Drakkel had dropped by as much as 90%. Conspiracy theories abounded that the EQ2 team was secretly reducing XP rates for these zones to prevent discourage grinding of Heroic characters to 95.
However I knew that this was not an intentional change. How? At past SOE Lives, I’ve informally asked for the EQ2 team’s viewpoint on the different ways that players level in EQ2. This answer has changed over the years and, in my opinion, for the better. With our current lead designer (Kander) we just haven’t seen the type of sweeping XP changes like we did in the past. If players wish to group, raid, or solo their way through 320 AAs and 95 levels, that’s their prerogative. It’s a refreshing viewpoint after all the XP reductions that happened to the once-popular The Hole.
RadarX stepped in to indicate that this was not an intentional change:
As a policy we generally don’t comment on rumors but this one has been going for about a week now. There have been no changes made to Kael or Skyshrine experience. There is no way we could “sneak” such a change by you guys, because you’d notice, so there would be no benefit to not announcing it.
The fourth day is when we started to get some real traction. Caith checked out the data and reported:
A quick look through this doesn’t show any changes, the zone experience modifiers haven’t changed, and code tells me that how those functions are handled hasn’t changed, but we’ll do some more checking.
Lyndro then went into further detail that any XP “nerf” was unintentional and askedplayers to provide more details about where and when they saw the changes:
As Caith said, we didn’t intentionally make any changes to the experience awarded in any zones (or creatures) with this update, but that doesn’t mean that something isn’t bugged. We can take a look, but it would be helpful to have more information to track this down.
He also reiterated some details about how Group XP splits work and possible explanations for what players might be seeing.
But it was Endymion with the good news:
We have an idea of what the issue is now and are investigating a fix. Thanks for the tests.
The next day (Friday), US servers saw the bug fixed!
Adjusted group experience gain.
It took a bit longer for EU servers to get the fix. Why? EU servers patch later than US servers so that patches don’t take place during prime time playing hours.
RadarX put the issue to bed with this:
As the experience bug has been resolved, we are going to go ahead and close this. Feel free to drop me a PM if you have any additional concerns.
People talk about the “good old days” but often forget that it used to take many multipage threads, sometimes with hundreds of posts running for weeks to get a reply on a bug, let alone a bug fix. Now, it’s not unusual to get a response the same day or a couple of days after an issue is raised. With a 11 year old code base (assuming EQ2 began development in 2002), it’s inevitable that innocent changes in one part of the code will result in bizarre behavior somewhere else, so it’s helpful to know that when issues do arise, it won’t be weeks before they’re addressed.
“The faucet only drips when the plumber isn’t there.”
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Comments (9)
Venomizer
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That is some horrible logic by Radarx.
Ppl DID notice a change. That is a point of reference, of evidence.
His argumentation is in the theoretical: we wouldnt do that cuz ppl would know and be upset.
He is fighting evidence with theory. horrible logic.
Would be interesting to hear the words out of his mouth if his wife caught him cheating red-handed. Something like ignore what you see cuz you know i would never do that cuz it would make you mad.
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Rotherian
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Ven, it is a difference of intent. I suspect that you are smart enough to realize that. If you really think about it, you would realize that the message that RadarX is attempting to convey is: “SOE wouldn’t try to put an unannounced xp nerf in on purpose, because the players would catch it.” That, of course, doesn’t preclude the existence of a bug – which is what it turned out to be.
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bob0builder
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In Clefts Fabled zone my level 92 was getting maybe 300XP per heroic kill
In Kael it jumped up to maybe 1k
In SS I was making 5k per kill
Check your exp in each zone (roughly same lvl in all zones)
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Atan
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The issue is the fix for CoV not working cause you were locked in combat, also broke encounter XP bonuses.
The issue with CoV was many scripted fights destroy adds when the named died. The game though didn’t fully clean up the fact you were engaged with those adds, it just destroyed them without ‘killing’ them.
When a change was made to prevent destroyed encounter elements from remaining engaged, that same few lines of code broke encounter xp rewards cause the server had already forgotten about previous encounter elements that were already dead, so when it evaluatedf the final mob in the encounter it saw no reason to add a bonus.
That’s the highly technical reason they didn’t want to go into. I suspect so you guys didn’t know exactly how long it had been broken.
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milliebii
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So perhaps the real reason CoV was not fixed in all that time is that the coders new it would break XP and saw no way of fixing it that would not do that. People get laid off knowledge gets lost. CoV gets ‘fixed’, XP gets broken.
….. and now, hopefully XP gets fixed without breaking something else.
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Feldon
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Or they could just stop worrying about using CoV in combat, except on PvP servers. I mean really who cares if someone uses CoV in combat? Then again, why can I no longer suspend or dismiss my merc in combat? Why can I not leave group in combat? All these unnecessary changes…
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Charn
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You can’t leave group in combat? I know it’s been that way for raids, but in groups as well? When did that change occur? I still have a /disband macro from WAAAAAY back in the first year of EQ2, when EVERYONE would share in the debt when someone in your group died.
When things went south in Wailing Caves, as well as trying to zone (with as much 15 Commonlands it made it difficult) people would spam their disband macro hoping to get out before others died . . . because, for some reason, you couldn’t disband when you were dead and were stuck getting all the debt. It was a real mess . . . and it sucked being the tank, ’cause that’s who usually died first.
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Griffon Lady
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I imagine the coding after all these years is like a big ball of necklaces and string and trying to untangle one bug is an intricate process. XD
And I think the game was in development before 2002. In 1997 or 1998 a friend in a website called The Gryphon Guild showed us a white and un-detailed animation of the crested griffon (flying) that her dad was part of the team working on a big project involving it. Wish I could have saved that image somehow or able to find it again. That forum has been moved a couple times and lost all the old posts. XD gahh we all felt like such excited lil rebels to get a sneak peek like that. XD
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Nessari
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Wouldn’t that be much more likely to have been Everquest itself?
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