Feldon 
Hot on the heels of today’s Update which introduced seven new flavors of Guild Depots, it seems a number of glitches have slipped through as well which were not discovered on Test. The first glitch affects smaller in-home Personal Harvest Depots. While players are still able to craft from the comfort of their own homes using said Depots, any attempt to manually remove stacks of harvestables leads to a zone crash, kicking the player from their homes.
Meanwhile, players have reported sporadic issues with items disappearing from Guild Hall depots and inability to add or remove items. Windstalker had this tweet in response. Hopefully both issues can be resolved in this afternoon update:
Sigh…we are aware of the bug transferring items from old to new depots. We will do another hotfix today to fix the issue. 🙁 #EQ2
— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) December 18, 2012
Update from Maevianiu:
We are going to have to do a quick downtime to push the fix for this one. Thank you for letting us know! ETA… “very soon”.
This issue is being discussed on the EQ2 Forums.
i can’t believe this is happening.
D’OH!!!!!
And they actually MISSED this in testing?
huh, an update from SoE with bugs in it… who would have thought?
Yes Sigh is right but not in the context in which you are using it.
These new depots are a great idea, but the fact that they were rushed to live in a broken state, just like this expansion was is the real Sigh
I guess this glass wall that has been removed is different from the one where Slippery almost proved his own insanity in trying to get Gninja to realize that Drinal was in fact broken.
Just because a mob dies when a dev clicks his mod destroy clicky does not mean it is killable.
I’m not surprised in the least that this happened, and I will be shocked if all of the issues are fixed with the patch from this emergency downtime.
My quote was specific to the EQ2 team being more open to player feedback as well as internal feedback. Under the previous Lead Designer, EQ2 planning meetings were a place where great ideas went to die. At least now, ideas both from within the team, and from players, get the proper consideration. As for the execution and pushing things live bugged, that’s still a constant struggle for the EQ2 team.
I too have been cringing while reading the very public autopsy of the Drinal fight. Gninja’s refusal to believe the leaders of top raid guilds who describe in extreme detail exactly how this fight was not difficult, but in fact broken has been mind-boggling. Looking to the past, designers would launch raids broken and there’d be a cone of silence for weeks and then out of the blue (prodded by direct e-mails from top raid guilds to the raid designer), a patch would come out that made them killable. Drinal has been very different in that the mechanics have been discussed entirely in public, with direct interaction between players and devs. This is progress of a sort, but we’re still up against the reflexive disbelief of players that many designers and devs have.
EQ2 code would have to be a patchwork further complicated by massive warehouses of “configuration data”. I don’t mind that they rolled this to live so quickly, if they have someone on standby to fix bugs (it sounds like they have) . It’s unlikely that test server would nearly cover the real world scenarios on “nice” (but non-critical) features like harvest depots.
Funny enough, being able to play EQ2 less makes me like it a lot more, especially compared to the many “alternatives” out there. Enjoy life, it never lasts as long as you expect it to, and reserve sarcastic tantrums for those where policy changes screw the game (the original PS1 deal comes to mind).
I wonder if Holly starts to think of her “We’re sorry we didn’t get it right” excuses the day or two before every patch. If not, she might wantt to start now and just stock pile a few dozen really good ones.
Let’s be proactive and get ahead of the “We’re sorry” curve and just make a list and sticky it on the EQ2 Forums. Give each a number, then Holly could simply put the corresponding number to their apology. This would save a lot of time on her part in the long-run. Players, or should I say “Pay”ers would only to memorize a few numbers and not read paragraphs of extra crap.
Just a thought.
I guess I don’t understand why it’s up to players to both play and test a game.
Don’t they have a QA department at all?
@Gina: the obvious answer is no. lol
@Feldon,
I didn’t know that was your words about the glass wall, I thought it was a reference to Smedley banging his chest saying that they are listening more now. They may well be listening more but it still seems to be the selective hearing syndrome.
They have done some really nice polishing lately, the quest window and not having to search for a clicky item in your bags, the concept of these depots and depositing en masse is great but just get it right before pushing it live.
They even got the AA mirrors right this time, and the respec options the past 3 times there were major changes to the AA system there was something in that chain that was completely broken.
@Electri
While I didn’t miss your tone, you DO raise a point that Holly and her team could learn a lot from; expose their bug tracker (except exploits) to the EQ2 public. It would make their debugging workload visible, the priority of the bug against their program, and activities taken to try to fix the bug. I’m sure people would go ape that THEIR big isn’t the most important thing Sony is doing, but having no visibility is worse.
Could the EQ2 community handle transparency at that level? If they had visibility would people use it? (Recall DF, and to a lesser degree DM were both attempts to do what many players SAID they wanted). Who knows?