Dear soeFollow

It's been over five weeks now and every new patch (few that they have been) makes the problems even worse,
not better. You continue to add features we neither need or want or asked for. Autoduck? Huh? I would really
like to know what bozo decided that we couldn't play without that little "feature", what a joke. Autostand?
Huh? I'm playing EQ not DAoC. WE DON'T NEED MORE ZONES but thanks anyway. And that goes for the new
Graveyard.

We don't want to get stuck in doors anymore.

We don't want to get stuck on trees anymore.

We don't want to get stuck on rocks anymore.

We don't want to get stuck on walls anymore.

We don't want to get endlessly stuck on boats.

We don't want to get stuck on anything anymore.

We don't want to see 60 people running around with the lower half of their bodies sunk into the ground.

We don't want to fall through the floor or ground and die.

We don't want to have to wait 30 days to have our petitions answered.

We don't want to irretrievably lose our corpses.

We don't want to hear the sounds of 60 people's footsteps constantly looping over and over.

We don't want to walk around in a world that resembles London or San Francisco on their worst fog days.

We don't want to be in a world where it's constantly raining, especially when we're in a desert zone.

We don't want to be in a world where the thunder is 10 times louder than any other sound.

We don't want to see rain coming down so thick we can't see anything else.

We don't want to fight creatures that suddenly disappear just as we're about to kill it.

We don't want to hunt and fight creatures that we cannot hear.

We don't want to have to left click our mouses 10 times to target a creature 3 feet in front of us.

We don't want our spells blocked because there is a mound of dirt 3 inches high between us and our
target (I sure as hell CAN see my target, and it sure as hell can see me because it's pummeling me
to death, thank-you).

We don't want to lock up randomly in various zones.

We don't want 1018 Errors for 15 - 30 minutes after we crash to our desktops.

We want you to communicte with us better.

We want to know when the servers are up and when they are down.

We want to know when patches are scheduled ahead of time.

We want the patch messages to tell us what was changed between one patch and the next.

We want our spells to work the same after a patch as they did before the patch.

We want our equipment to look like it should look when equipped.

We want our Quests to work after we've spent 40 hours or more doing the rediculous things you ask us
to do to complete them.

We don't want new features or quests or zones or NPCs added until our game works reasonably well. No new
stuff please. Fix the stuff thats broken first.

We want you to fix the game Sony. Just do it even if you have to put us back on DX8 code.

Oh boy, here we go with yet another SOE-bashing pity party.

Wow, none of those things he(she) listed really bothers me.

I especially like when the mob disappears and my dots kill it.. kind of like free exp. I like the sound of the thunder and the wierd horse sounds in POK.. I can't believe that really bothers people.

As a necro, the word spells (low level evocation spells) never worked. They casted but no effect. Doh.. I just stopped using them. My other spells work fine.. I think.

I like the new content because no one is in the old zones. When I get bored I camp rare items that no one gets anymore because their all in the new areas. They sell nicely in the bazaar.

I did get stuck in a tree.. but managed to get out fine. I had to wait for a petition to be answered, but at least it was answered.

The Mobs running around half in the ground never bothered e either.

So.. is this a rant or an anti-rant?

I'm not saying SOE is doing a great job... but I think you should seriously try out a few other games for a while and see what you get....

Try something from NC Soft... L2 for example. Give it less then a week and you will be /begging for their servers and game to be as stable as EQ's. In comparison to all MMORPGs... EQ ain't doing half bad. Hell, you people ******* enough for them to change stuff in game currently instead of releasing new expansion, they said "OK!" How often do you see that in online games. Almost never.

And then they go to work on them and then people whine about having to patch and saying it will be buggy, you people are never happy (the ones that are doing the complaining, not all EQ players).

I have played alot of online games... from old text based games to a large portion of the famous ones today. EQ is rock solid compared to most.

A lot of it has to do with the money grubbin publishers, the developers wanna make everyone happy, but the higher ups want more money.

And a lot of those problems probably stem from EQ's extremely outdated graphics engine, even the simplest of problems are nearly impossible to fix. Most of the problems you listed are directly or indirectly related to the actual graphics engine, once EQ2 rolls around, 99% of those problems will be fixed.

And about the petition thing, almost 500,000 people play EQ, customer service is probably one of their top priorities, but its tuff when you have THAT many people, people tend to whine a lot when there's a problem, yours isn't the only petition, and it probably isn't the most important, one that they're dealing with.

Edited, Wed Jun 2 22:36:04 2004 by Krazagore

And my experience of CS is not too bad.

I was chatting to an ex-guide a while back and he told me that they have a blacklist of "nuisances" who won't get petitions answered until everything else is clear (if then). From the way you are moaning about inconsequential issues along with the serious ones I wouldn't be surprised to find you made that list

Speak for yourself, I'm a slacker who spend his whole work day posting messages to buletin boards about computer games.

I haven't had any kind of collision issues or problems getting stuck on scenery in weeks. I don't know what everyone is moaning about there.

I haven't been able to play much since the last patch, but most of the half-sunken or floating mobs seem to be fixed.

The thing with mobs being pushed into walls right away seems to be much improved.

Sound can be a little wierd at times with the footstep audio looping, and I've always hated the loud booming noise of the thunder. But whatever, that's about the most trivial "bug" ever.

You can easily target NPCs by mapping a key to cycle targets. Tap the key, NPC is targeted. Not a fix but a functional workaround and very usefull for many different situations.

Overall things seem to be getting taken care of fairly quickly. I wonder what the whiners will complain about next.

Another armchair-expert in business management and MMORPG software development? That's great.

Edited, Thu Jun 3 06:47:39 2004 by OnePrime

/em cheers for Carthion Carthion Scholar's post

Boy, if I did like to knock people....I'd have a ball with this one. I will say that while I may disagree strongly with neverdone, his punctuation and spelling are excellent. Nuff said.

Hello? Irony?



Oh, there it is.

I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

AutoDuck is a critical option if you are a caster. It prevents you from automatically ducking when you are too close to an overhead item, like the wall edges in Ssra. It always interrupts casting when you duck, and I want the option to turn that off when proximity to arbitrary scenery casues your spells to fail 100% of the time. You can't possibly play a caster, or you would know this. So, lets assume you are a melee. Take the autduck out of the game, and you will have to live with failure of heals hitting you, because some piece of scenery interrupts the healers casts; and it none to obvious that its scenery that is interrupting 100% of the spell casts.

Autostand is awesome. One less line to have in the macros I set up for casting. Also, previously if a mob was coming up to you and you try to stand up and cast root or mez on it, there was a very good chance that you get hit before your stand command hit, so you are already standing when you trigger the sit/stand key; so you sit back down. Now you can't cast and you take maximum damage from the next hit again. With autostand, that issue goes away. Furthermore, many illusions such as wolf form make sit/stand look backward - appear you stand lower than you sit.

These are all perfectly good and valid reasons for the features to be added. Yes, I sumbitted bug reports and feedback about those very complaints, and these features were SOE's response to feedback - not just from myself but from many people as who had this issue.

Just because YOU decide you don't want it, doesn't mean no one wants it. I want those things, they are HUGE differences in the game. If you don't like the options, you can turn them off since they have a button for that. So, what is your ***** all about? Its a ***** to have a *****, is all I see.

And yes, I like new zones. Duh.

Edited, Thu Jun 3 12:37:58 2004 by Trellium