seems like there are more "errors" in patching as of late. goin ld is not as much of a problem as it used to be. before u had an ai take over esp, during a battle, and it would make u run away if low on health. this is a brilliant idea, especially when you are in a dungeon. the designer who thought of that feature should got to the back of the unemployment line.
The post about the game not being threadsafe sounds pretty accurate. of course sony is lying when they blame it on the connection, but it would be almost imposible to prove. With the US govt spending billions to monitor evry email fax and phonecall its citizens make, it seems strage to me they do not monitor dishonest business practices like this a little more closely. I guess you can get away with any crime u want in the states if you do it by committe an have enough money to cyoa in court.
Not one person will ever win a case like this in court. SOE has way more money than an individual person, and will fight to the death in court to set an example. Also judges are under strict orders these days not to rule against corporations, esp tech ones. that industry is fragile enough as is. Since they are new these companies are enjoying a free for all, excluding themselves from any warrany obligations with bad faith license agreements.
As far as being a proggrammer on a "project of this magnitute" geos, u should own up to your responsibility. If its too hard, dont do it, find another line of work. There are plenty of less frustrating jobs out there, you can pump gas, cobble shoes, collect garbage; and if event that is too stressful for you, abandon your profesional identity an be a bum, go on welfare or something, then you wont have to make anything work.
But when you take peoples hard earned money an knowingly put out a halfassed product, you are lower than even the laziest welfare bum, you are a thief. Sure the real con men are teh execs at soe, constantly cutting corners, and lining their pockets with as much revenue as their fatcat fingers can grab. But that is the way to make money these days, spend minimal amounts on quality, and customer service. The advertising buget should only be exceeded by the executive salary fund.
Here is a little paralell. Has the soe account server ever had a bug that casued anyone to get something for free? I highly doubt there were any errors on a project of that magnitude
The solution is simple, less fatcat execs, nobody really needs tehm, and more programmers. Yes competent programmers do cost money, they are educated and skilled labor. I am talking about those with a ba (min) in comp sci, and at least a few years of experience. These will require 100k a year or more, but will produce code that works, as compared to some shmoe who just graduated from devry, and will work 15 hours a day fer 20k a year/
so verant we know you are cheating us on quality, and its time to spend more in that department. personally i dont care if your execs have to take a pay cut; oh poor baby one less ivory backscratcher, or a 5 bedroom cottage instead of 4, well times are tuff all around, its time to tighten the belt, or it willg et tightened for you.

I have been playing for about a year and a half and find it very hard to cope with the ld programming problem and various bugs. time down during daytime hours because ia am on the eastern side of the country. i pay for the game as do the rest of the players. but i think one of the problems is that instead of taking time to fix correctly the bugs they (sony) are in too big of a hurry to put in something new. i beleive u should fix the old and then put in additions.Yoyrs truly sadary merrymakers.

I disagree with allot of people on this. Yes they have to patch, yes it sometimes doesnt work and they have to patch the patch. However we are talking about a huge game. We are also talking about them trying to fix how the game works and also adding new affects, new items and new quests. . . Now personally i think that its worth not being able to play for a few hours to a day to have new and exciting things pop up, to get new powers in a item, to perhaps find something my char does now works better. *shrug*

In the end they try to keep it fresh and balanced. . . and that is some trick when you have as many char/race combos to deal with.

I'm not sure that firing the programmer is the answer.

It had been mentioned a long time ago, by Aradune, that the code had gotten to massive, and very difficult to adjust, and that changing one thing in one place, would affect another class inadvertantly somewhere else. Fixing many of these, is nice, now, but, one would have to wonder if all these fixes are being done by strings and rubber bands, and not directly in the code section that it pertains to ... in other words, how snare works for a Ranger, a Bard, or any other class, should not exactly be the same, but the code they are using is the same (so it seems) and when one wants to adjust the way that a Bard does this, it affects the other classes as well, which, of course is not intended.

I don't know what the solution is, other than a complete re-vamp of the code, and I am not sure that at this stage of the game design and structure, that this is possible. I hope that it is.

But if this code is to work properly, and correctly, I do believe that the inter-designed dependency on any spell/song, should be separated for each individual class, thus making testing much easier to do, and consequently, to fix. This is my idea of it ...

This would mean that similar classes, let's say Hybrids, while being called that, would no longer share the code ... and each claass in this game would have their own, and should not "refer" to anything else, other than when another class is casting like spells/songs ... but I can not say that doing this would improve things, since there are a lot of things that each class has that would be duplicated, which may affect the way that the game runs, and possibly cause other problems for us to deal with.

The patching, I think, is a necessary evil, sort of like having to deal with red lights when you drive ... you have to stop! Or swear at the guy that ran his red light (call it role play ... LOL)! But, yes, I do believe that Verant should/could take a look at their patch history and realize that they make a few too many mistakes, and all this states is that they need to use the folks at the Test Server some more ... which I don't believe they do. I have played some in there, and not once was I invited to help test anything for the class that I was goof'ing around with, or with my very own class that I am more familiar with, and could easily duplicate the use of a song for them to log and analyse.

Programming, for many folks, Unix or otherwise, is a thank-less job. For the most part, they do not get enough credit for what they do, and this is sad. This is a good game, and while there are some issues, being on the combative end of it all is not fair, or helpful in an environment that is not easy ... you have to know way too much about this game, before you can actually work with a group of programmers in this situation ... and this means that there will be mistakes, since there isn't enough time to train everyone, and you hope that the new programmer, just out of San Diego State can figure out what the code that is already there really means ... ohhh, it's called this, but does he/she know what that spell/song do? I think sometimes they do not ... and then to give a list to that group that says there are 132 links in the code you are revising for that spell under all kinds of different conditions -- including lag'ing out senselessly and not allowing you to heal when you are doing the Ring of War in GD, as an example ... they tell us to get more memory, or a faster hard drive and processor ... what do you think I want to tell them? Would it help? I am not sure that it would.

I for one am gettin tired of all the patch ***** ups by sony programmers, and this is the worst so far. A massive item ***** up, that was so blatant it defies common sense. Low lvl items getting lvl 60 effects? Wasn't anybody checking this.
This is probably the worst ever ***** up soe has ever done in terms of how many players it has negatively impacted. Many plat and many hours have been lost because of this. Soe has played on the enthusiasm of the player community, an once again manage to dissapoint a majority of the.
What is even worse is Soe feels that it can do this anytime they like, with no negative consequences. But that is being covered up. It seems subscriptions are falling even faster now, and the free account program does not look like it is going to help. It all started when soe decided to hide how many people were really online in the logon screen. remember that? It would tell you how many players were on each server at any given time.
Since the beginning eq has been plagues with poor programming, needing patch on top of patch. After 3 years am I the only one asking the question "why arent these incompetent programmers fired?" Is is because they are the imbecile son of an executive? Firing these morons would send a message to future programmers. Evryone makes mistakes, but if you ***** up really badly, especially due to lazieness you should lose your job.
How many ppl agree with me on this point? I'm curious to see how you fell about this, so please post, i'll be reading it later. A
Another question to ask is how many ppl were working on this patch, as opposed to planes of power, eq2, and any other money making scheme soe yas yet to unleash on this gaming community? Last I checked Shadow of luclin was done by only FIVE programmers. Would a patch have even half that? The sooner they get these products out, the sooner more money will come rolling in. And as a patch brings in zero revenue where do you think they will focus?
And if soe is reading this, and I'm guessing you are, feel free to post an explanation of why this wasn't tested prior to patching. What are the test servers for? personally I hope your terrible track record and indifferent attitude to player setback will cause a huge boycott of your new revenue schemes. It seems that is the only thing that would casue some changes around here, even though that is way in the future. Somebody should start a boycott e2 campaign. I'll be the first to join. Yeah that's it, nobody buy e2 until e1 is working properly.