[Genjiro]

Disclaimer: This will be a long post, but goes along with what some of the others posted here, and even though perhaps just anecdotal, I think it should help understand why it was such a collosal clusterfuck. Maybe that's a bit harsh, let's just use the timeless parental adage and say they never "lived up to their potential".

First off, I think I have had a pretty unique look into the nuts and bolts of (at least what was) EQ2 and it's team. I led the top guild in EQ2 (Ardent Legion) from release till about a year later, not long after Desert of Flames was released. It was at this point, we had just had enough, but more on that later. Now, that's not some e-peen self pat on the back, and "best guild", or "top guild" are relative terms, but going by the amount of raid content that was killed first gamewide, and the numbers we used to kill it, we had the most and did with the least, so take that for what it's worth. Their team noticed, so they invited us (along with FoH) to test their upcoming expansion packs for them. Let me just preface this next section and say that Scott Hartsman is one of the coolest guys I've met in the mmo industry, and was one of the few we worked with/talked to (and Blackguard) who really seemed to care about their product and its success. He was our sort of e-mail liaison, who set up the testing, too fucking bad the rest of your team isn't like Gallenite (cough Moorgard + Faarwolf etc). Anyways.....

So, we get our guild copied to the test server. They asked us to come test out this new raid zone for their first expansion pack, The Bloodline Chronicles. Cool deal, should be fun. We even get to have our guild in a movie on the website promoting it, showing us fight the final boss vampire T'Haen at the end, sounds good right? So far things are looking great, that was until, we actually got there to test with the devs. There were actually two developers with us, and they seemed like they were about as far down the totem pole as one could get. They watched us blast through the zone with our 16 people, then comes the final encounter with T'Haen. I know there are bugs in new content, and that's what we're there to help find, so when T'Haen flips out and his script has 20 of him spawn we dont think much about it. Those 2 devs got a good laugh, as the trigger which was supposed to keep him from doing that (it was supposed to be preventable) was indeed not present on the test server. Ok....two devs witnessed this with their own eyes, we even repeated this about three times, faceplanting for fun just to make sure it always happened, and sure enough it did. There is no fucking way this bug will go live in the next month when this expansion is released right? Bzzt, wrong. Sure fucking enough, this happens to us the night the expansion is released. Given the brilliant mechanic of the lockout timer in EQ2, attempting the content the first night just means you are screwed until your timer is up, even if it is fixed soon. Now you might be saying, well Genj, maybe it took them this long to fix the bug. So, if that's the case, either A) they released content knowingly bugged as fuck, or B) I dont buy that, they hotfixed that bug in a patch the very next day or so when this happened to a number of other guilds on different servers who all went to the forums bitching about it.

Warning: more long-winded diatribe incoming, but hey, I'm bored.

Anyways...surely this would be an isolated instance, right? So, we kill T'Haen when he is *fixed* after our lockout timer is up, some other guild gets the gamewide first kill since they didn't attempt it till it was fixed (and everyone else was locked out). It's fun getting gamewide firsts, or at least having competition for them, but oh well, hopefully they will learn their lesson. I politely asked what was the deal with us finding bugs as big as this on test and them not getting fixed until it goes live-->I got no response back. Looking back I feel incredibly naive, I really was excited about testing their content. Call me a googly-eyed mmo idealist, but after having bitched about monk problems for years in EQ1, I saw this as a way to take advantage of the fact that we had the ears of the people in charge. Not only to fix the bugs in testing the content, but to try to get them to fix other broken shit so we could all slaughter things relatively bug-free. It's a sad thing to realize that you probably cared more about a games success than many of the people who relied on this as their living. And if that's not the case, I can only be left wondering how so many big problems get pointed out and which nothing was ever done to fix. Case in point...

Your honor, we would like to present Evidence B: frogluks.

The official poster child race of Everquest, the frogluks. You know, those things we were told were in the fucking game from release and were waiting to be found. This was posted by the developers not once or twice, but numerous times. Aside from that, I specifically sent a /tell to one of the devs we tested with and asked if they were in game for sure, and was told yes, which was a straight up lie. Batphone indeed... So, for the next couple months after the lackluster release of The Bloodline Chronicles, which was a giant failure on many levels, we had a couple very dedicated hardcore guildmates looking for the hidden frogluks. They spent money getting the books of lore (which actually were really interesting reads, if only you guys had put clues in there for quests and such....but I digress), and searching night and day through zones like the Feerott and Cazic Thule for any sort of clues. What a slap in the face it was to them to find out through an email to me, that the devs want us to test the upcoming frogluk expansion pack which would make the frogluks a playable race. Evidenced by the current thread about WoW lore going on, I can only guess that a lot of developers underestimate what kind of interest their playerbase takes in the history of their world. Aside from the powergaming dork inside of me (and most of you), I do enjoy sitting down and reading game lore, it makes the world feel more alive and adds a lot of continuity and life to a bunch of boring pixels. Anyways, I hope you developers start using things like this in the future. Back on track though....

So this time, we are informed we will go to the test server to test with the lead programmer of EQ2 for this big upcoming change with the frogluks (who will just remain nameless and be referred to as lead dev guy). Apparently, this is the guy who the buck stops with concerning all major gameplay changes--hawt damn! Finally, someone who has a clue, someone who knows what's up with the inner workings of game mechanics like we do, and can really get things fixed. Boy, could I have not been more fucking wrong. Ok, so, this frogluk raid zone is supposed to be chalk full of tough as nails raid content testing the limits of the current top guilds. So, we are told we are going to be recopied to test with our current gear to tackle this new content, but, I show up on test and what the fuck is this? Some genius copied all of our characters from a save point about 4 months back, before we were even doing most raid content. It would be the equivalent to show up to test Naxx and be in blues from your ubrs days. So, lead dev guy is informed of this, and doesnt really seem to think it will matter, or care. He was really trying to act like some sort of internet badass the entire time we are around this guy, who has to be bothered with this duty, but who is being a good corporate nerd and obliging his superiors. So, our requests for our actual gear and spell upgrades are met with a flatout "no". What he does do, is give us all the same melee weapons, and we just have to get by with the shitty spell upgrades we had at the time. Gee, this is off to a good start.

So here we are in our copy/pasted asstastic gear, crappy spells, and this guy keeps telling me that my guild is going to get its ass kicked by his little pet raid zone and how impossible it will be for our raid of 20 instead of full raid of 24. He is quite shocked when we start stomping the living shit out of all the mobs, and he makes a brilliant discovery. He now for the first time sees that our troubadors are stacking their stamina buffs, the low medium and high level version of the same spell. He even tries to imply we are exploiting, right in front of his dumb ass. Ok, hello mr out of touch with reality devguy, if you had ever opened the forums ONCE to your own fucking game you would see countless threads in every dirge and troubador forum about how overpowered this was, posts which dated back to release. This guy had NO clue this was even possible, and he is a lead developer? The rest of the population of bards and raiders sure as hell knew about it. If this doesn't show you how those developers had no feel for the pulse of their own game, I don't know what would. Being guilded with someone like Tigole and Pardo for years (in LoS), I can guaran-fucking-tee you that those guys would know very quickly if something like this was unbalancing game content, not SIX goddamn months down the road. Ugh, this guy was the epitome of everything wrong in EQ2 all congealed and rolled into a mass of carbon based life. So, where were we?

Oh yea, the frogluk instance. Ok. Basically, when you finished half the zone, it caused a repop of the rest of the zone, where you could fight the final boss. However, to do this, you had to defeat a mini boss in the basement of Cazic Thule to cause this pop to happen. Getting ahead of myself here, previous to our first arriving at this point in the instance, the lead dev guy after an hour and a half or so of being there on test decides he's done for the evening, and leaves us in the zone to basically do whatever we want. Hey thanks, you got me to drag my entire guild on a Saturday night as it were (I remember because I had to appeal to people to go to test on a weekend night), then you leave shortly after we get started, which was massively delayed because of your own incompetence to even copy our characters correctly. Before he leaves though, he makes sure to tell me how impossible it will be for our guild to kill the bosses below.....right. So, we get to the boss that is supposed to cause the repop of the zone, only one major problem. They used the lvl 40ish Cazic-Thule zone from the live servers to be their instance zone for this. It would be like having an expansion of different mobs all be spawned in an exact copy of Stratholme or something, pretty fucking lame. Anyways, dating back to beta, this zone was notorious for getting mobs lost under the world since collision detection basically didnt fucking work here (had been bitched about since back in beta). Seeing where this is going? This encounter which unlocked the rest of the zone was designed in such a pisspoor way as to almost guarantee at least one of the mobs in the encounter would get stuck under the world.

Sure enough, this happens to us, and we couldn't progress. Seeing as how this completely makes the event undoable and that mr dev guy left, I send in a detailed several page long e-mail to him directly about this encounter, the mob placements, the collision detection problems, and several quick fixes to the encounter they could use to make this a non-issue until they can fix the bigger issue of things getting stuck. So he shows up the next night, I even discuss this shit with him in tells. It's going to be fixed asap Im told, remember that. Anyways, we finish testing out some of the rest of the zone, and he tells us about some upcoming combat changes going to take place they are excited about, and wants our guild to be the first to check it out so they can gauge the difficulty. Thank God, praise Jesus, they have listened. We had been asking to make raiding something you could do not half asleep and it seemed they were listening. I do at least give you guys props for realizing it at all....So, we take our 20ish, and he ports us all to test a giant statue called the Fist of Solusek Ro in Lavastorm, version 2.0 with the new changes.

This is where it gets really funny.

So, since we only have 20, he is there as a paladin and tells us he will *help* us in the encounter. We really dont like this asshole, but whatever, I put him in a raidgroup. We pull, kill the adds, and about 20 seconds into the fight...he fucking pulls agro off our main tank. Now, apparently he had his damage set to some sort of high dev level (or so he tells us), and he dies like twice and we keep combat rezzing his dumb ass (and laughing hysterically in ventrilo this entire time). Not only does he pull agro, but you know when you play with some total (I hate this word) newb player who runs around like a chicken with their head cut off when they have agro? Well that was this guy. So, picture this giant flaming statue chasing this dev around, us chasing him trying to keep his sorry ass alive, and all the while we can barely play because we are laughing so hard in ventrilo. One of the true highlights to my mmo career. He also gives insightfully detailed explanations while he's tuning this encounter that since he turned the damage up, that our healers will need to heal more. No fucking way??! And to think after all these years I was playing blindfolded before I saw the light of this principle you learn 10 minutes into your first mmo.

Fast forward a month and a half later. Frogluk expansion is released. Guess what happens the first night to most every major guild in the game. Remember that bug I told you about with collision detection? The one I pointed out to Mr lead dev guy in tells and in email? Well it went fucking live, and we all get fucked and locked out of the instance when we all experience this first-hand live. Guess what happens the very next day (remember the T'haen hotfix I told you about before)? It gets hotfixed, and all the guilds looking to tackle this challenge sit on the sidelines as everyone else gets to have fun with it the next week while we all waited. Yay, glad you fuckers had me waste our time on the test server for this. That was one of the final nails in the coffin for me/us, and the next few months along with Desert of Flames just further cemented that most of these guys had no clue what was going on or just didnt give a fuck enough to fix things, even when they were waived in their faces to try and save them some embarassment.

My personal experiences with a lot of the people over at EQ2 really showed me first hand in testing, what was wrong with that game. Seriously, can you honestly think the EQ2 Onyxia version (Venekor) could go exploited in its first kills and think guys liike Tigole would not know shit about it? To me, this signals a bigtime hands-off approach in EQ2 that differed with WoW, and was a major failure of EQ2 at least when I played. Venekor was their pre-release baby you saw in all the promo vids for the game. We found the exploit early on when he was unkillable, that you could pull him to spots where he basically turned off and stopped doing anything...just sat there and died. Instead of cheesedicking him like this, and trust me the temptation was there, I pulled my guild out and tried getting it fixed through proper channels. Killing shit that way to me means you have no skills, so I opted for the high road. Considering this mob was bugged and had an AoE that hit for like 9k in the early days, he was absolutely unkillable without exploiting, which the guild who killed him first used. The devs knew nothing about this, or even acknowledged the problem, or attempted to fix it for months....with their poster raid dragon. Maybe these internal issues were all fixed down the road, but like the guy quoting Pardo pointed out, after you keep releasing buggy shit time after time it doesn't matter, you already get a reputation for that and people will move to something else. Anyways, that's my take on the major problems with the game and where it went wrong. We loved the game, we tried to make babies with it and make it a good game, but we got the cold shoulder and moved on to bigger and better games (WoW). I don't harbor any resentment (ok just a tiny bit), and I do hope EQ2 somewhere along the way went towards the light. It's just a shame they didn't do it when I was around, because with the history of EQ1 to build on, the game did in fact, have a lot of potential.