The problem:  The Official Forums are so over moderated, that it’s most likely suppressed many fundamentally important ideas that could have moved the game out of it’s 1999 thought process, and most likely cost them 1000s of accounts due to alienating customers.

Remember problem 5? “The Last Straw” ?  The other day, someone decided to post the question on the offical forums:

GrunEQ wrote: I have been killing Enslaved Warboars for a very long time.  I have sent /feedback and /bug report, but still there has been no key drops from them to advance the quest.  Is it broken?  Also tried other boars just in case, but still no drops.  This is for the quest The Last Straw.

Well, you and I both know it’s broken.  Some nutbag was responding to the guy saying, “Dude, just kill more stuff! You are killing the wrong things and you suck” basically.  I decided to step up and post a copy of my correspondence with the GM’s, so this guy’s stupid misinformation would stop being spread.  I wanted them to see the hopeful response that GM Blassreitergave me, that said that he’d attempt to open a new line of communication with the devs.  You can view the post here, if you’d like.

Nearly a day later, I get this message sent to me in my mail box:

Tsunai the forum moderator wrote: Your post (quoted below) to the thread titled “The Last Straw” has been removed. Dialog between you and CS is considered private material and therefore quoting this dialog (especially with the inclusion of names) is against the Forum Rules. If you would like to post a summary of your dialog without names, that would be acceptable but we cannot allow direct quoting of private discussions.

Hey, Tsunai, was our conversation right here considered private too?  Guess I fucked that up too, right? For the record, my post was simply my conversation with the GMs, I don’t consider them private at all.  Don’t say anything to me as Customer Service if you can’t back your shit up. Instead of going into a diatribe about everything wrong with this, I’m going to include my response to his moderation, which will explain a lot of my feelings:

Hey there, Tsunai.

I just wanted to talk to you a minute, about the post of mine you removed.  Certainly, you probably get responses in a similar frame to this, and, for all I know you completely ignore them.  But I’ll humor myself and send you a message.

There is probably something in some TOS for the forums, or TOS in the game, prohibiting me from relating customer service emails on your forums, I’m guessing, right?  I can ‘maybe’ understand that. You probably had one bad apple, posting is, “GM TeddyRuxpin is ghay and banned me, wtf?! Read what he said here!” I guess, the best thing to do to moderate that kind of thing, is moderate everyone.

However, in my situation, I simply posted a response to a thread, that I had already spoken to the gm’s about.  My post showed GM Blassreiter in a good light, and made it seem possible that this quest would be worked on fairly soon, and fixed.  My message was something hopeful, and it brought something to the questing community, about a specific issue many of us have had.

If anything, I showed to the customer base, that the GM’s listened to our problems, and the dialogue brought nothing but positive feedback for you.  However, now all you have done is instill a deep distrust in me.  I’m sure you read my post (Atleast, I hope you did.) I’ve left this game for years, and just recently returned.  I have no desire to be in a community that I feel is over moderated and overhanded with it’s customers.  I’m not sure if you’re a volunteer staff, or not, if you are not, then I would hope my subscription means something to you.

My other question is, what is wrong with posting their fake GM handles?  It’s not like I posted their real name’s and addresses.  No one knows who GM TeddyRuxpin is, and it’s just a silly standard from past MMOs and Muds to have wonky non-existent names, whereas every other customer service entity works with a first name.  I’m sure there is a policy against it, somewhere, with me breathing out a GM’s name, but why? Why do you think that exists?  Am I not allowed to attribute anyone’s word’s with an actual person? 

Also, another thought.  Could I post my correspondence on my own blog, and just link to it and say something like, “Well, I talked to a GM and they said they would open some new communication with the developers, read about it - here.” ?  I don’t see why anyone would take my word for it, because I could spout that in every thread, atleast with a transcription of my dialogue, people could see that I was probably telling the truth.

 

I’m going to leave this with just one last thought I touched on.  Moderating is a fine thing when it blocks things that disrupt the community.  When we let the rules drag us all down, the helpful, etc.  You only stand to alienate everyone as a whole.  My infatuation with EQ2 isn’t so much that I couldn’t drop it at a flip of a coin, especially when I feel I’ve been wronged.

 

Thanks

Relon/Rookerith (BTW, if you transcribe this message to anyone else, feel free to include my names over there, they’re fake, don’t include any personal information, and what the hell, you know?)

I didn’t bother waiting for him to respond.  He wont.  I can only blame the 13 year olds sending pictures of penis to forum moderators the world over, every time they get banned.  See, forum moderators generally have God complexes, they remove posts without a second thought, and never listen to any objection to their behavior.  Good forum moderators don’t last, because they’re objective, and too caring to face the onslaught of idiocy.  It’s only the battle worn ones that simply see things in black and white, with no chance of a crisis on conscious that make it for any length of tenure.  These moderators don’t have time to read return messages…well, they might, just to see if any other TOS has been broken in the containing message. You go Tsunai!

Solution:I think Tsunai needs to get laid.  Maybe his power mongering “Oh oh, they broke the rules, fapfapfap!” spree would end.  My post didn’t need to be deleted, unless they’re allergic to my 15 dollars a month.  They did do one thing, they stopped me from posting on the official forums. Kudos!  You really want to get eq2flames.com to be the number 1 EQ2 forums out there, don’t you?  Oh wait, they already are?  How did that happen? Oh, right..you guys over moderate your forums!  *facepalm*

Problem: “The Last Straw” fantastic name really; who knows, it might be my last one too.  Anyhow, it’s a quest, that near the end of your tasks, ask you to find a key. Fun part about that? It hasn’t dropped from the mob it used to drop from, about 6 months ago.  It’s a quest that has been broken for literally half a year.  It’s in the 30-40 level range.  A range that new customers quickly get to, and you have a broken quest? Not good.

I did send a message to the GM’s (as I’ve started doing) and this is my response:

Hello Relon!

Thank you for contacting Sony Online Entertainment’s In-Game Support, this is GM Aphobiance. I understand you are having troubles progressing The Last Straw and would like some assistance in this matter. This issue has been reported and is being looked into at this time. Unfortunately with all of the new content and games coming out older content can be overlooked at times. Unforutnately I can not give you an ETA on when this will be addressed. You may want to check our forums for any possible updates on this matter in the future. I wish you the best of luck in and out of game!

If you have any other issues we can assist you with, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Safe travels,

GM Aphobiance
Sony Online Entertainment LLC

Alright, so basically this is what we learned from GM Aphobiance:

• Our best bet to find out if problems are fixed is reading their forums.
• It’s been reported before, they know about it, they just haven’t fixed it.
• They’re ‘overlooking’ it because they’d rather work on new content.  It’s fairly apparently they’re short staffed on developers that have the skillset to fix quests like these for whatever reason, and they’re working on the high end content, lowbies be damned, right?
• Aphobiance enjoys telling us how unfortunately things are. Sometimes he likes to tell us how Unforutnately, which is funny, because you’d assume with how many times he informs customers of their unfortunate situation, he’d get the spelling right everytime.
• He’s willing to assist us with other questions, which is good, because we really got far here.

Now, I decided to respond again, because they closed my ticket down, like they had done an awesome job and it was time to hit the bar and order a round of beer for everyone, because Rookerith’s problem was a slum dunk win! No, no you guys didn’t.  You kinda just brushed me off and said you didn’t care about my problem:

Well, this is marked solved, but I’m going to respond to it in any event, in hopes that you atleast read it, Aphobiance.

I’m a returning player, having not played in years. I’m enjoying myself, but the first thing I see, is your older content. People working up new characters see your older content, new players see your older content. I’m of the mind that things shouldn’t be broken for months, especially older things, this isn’t the impression you want to give to newer players leveling up, and the frustration of the amount of quests I’ve seen that are broken or misleading as I level up just shouldn’t be here.

I understand that you have to work on expansions and whatnot to keep retention at the high end, but you seriously need to work on your older content, if you want to keep new players from quitting due to frustration, because new subscriptions, or returning players just don’t care about the high end content, they care about your old content that has magically stopped working.

In an attempt to smooth me over, they must have sent my ticket to Level 2 GM, the one that doesn’t outright say, “Low end content, lol, we don’t work on that anymore.” Anyhow, for what it’s worth, he atleast pressed my buttons right and gave a bit of hope:

Greetings Relon,

This is GM Blassreiter. I understand your frustration over this issue, and after further review I see that quite a few players are having trouble with this quest. I have opened a new line of communication with our Development team, and I am urging them to fix this issue with all due haste as it seems that players are being hindered from completing the quest normally. I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this issue has caused you, and I thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to resolve this issue, however, like GM Aphobiance said, we do not have a timeframe on when this issue will be addressed. If you have any other issues please do not hesitate to contact us again and the first available GM will be happy to assist you.

-GM Blassreiter
Customer Service
Sony Online Entertainment

For the record, I like what Blassreiter said.  He made it sound like they were actually going to work on it, instead of the, what I’ve learned normal response of GM’s is of, “LOL, Go check the forums someday maybe it’ll say we fixed it!” 

Solution: Well, damn, obviously fix it.  Get the key to drop again.  For what it’s worth, GM Blassreiter said the right things, even if nothing happened, and made me, as a customer happy.  That being said, this shit has been broken for a long time, there really is no excuse. How do things like this even get broken? Good lord.

The problem:There is a quest called “The Kragbak Strongox“, 3 of the 4 monsters needed for it is stupid rare.

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/The_Kragbak_Strongbox

Alright.  So you get this quest from a Kragbak Gnoll item drop in Kaladim (Kaladim is another one of those pesky shared group dungeons, where other groups can run around and steal your mobs/bosses).   Any of the damn gnolls can drop it.  It’s called A Kragbak Ringlet;  it’s a piece of the gnoll’s chest that you find on top a cliff in the same dungeon.  After searching the chest you find that you need 4 more ringlets from rather rare Kragbaks.

One of the ringlets is held by a rare “champion” Kragbak from the arena ring event.  I guess I should explain ring events really quick, so you can realize how utterly gay this is.

A ring event is something, where you kill the first wave, and a second wave appears, etc.  After all the waves, the ring event is out of commission for a specific period of time before it “Respawns“.   The reason it’s gay, is, it’s in a public dungeon.  If another group beats you to it, congrats! You gotta wait until it respawns for you to get a go at it.  Especially when you need some type of rare spawn from these ring events for a quest..guess what, that’s exactly our problem! 

For the arena:

• First wave is a wave of generic spectators.
• Second, you fight a wave of generic mobs fighting in the arena.
• Third wave is one of three arena champions.
• Fourth wave is some stupid gnome that shouldn’t even be a wave, and got lost on his way to gnome academy or something.

The problem here is we need a specific arena champion during the third wave named “The Claw”.  There is some rumors that killing the spectators in a different order will spawn a different champion.  I don’t buy it.  See, the problem with EQ2 is, not many people bother playing it, so there is a real lack of information out there.  From what I’ve seen it’s just random which champion you get.  There appears to be a goblin, a bugbear and a kragbak champion.  You need the Kragbak (The Claw!) one.  We were rather lucky, in my group, and got it on our second try. (First try was the bugbear).

Here’s the kicker though…  These Kaladim ring events despawn for 2 hours after completion, so people don’t farm them.  Since this is a shared dungeon, someone else might have already done it.  Based on a long night of 5ish hours playing, you’re only going to get one or two shots at this part of the quest, assuming another group doesn’t beat you to it, and only a 33% each time to get the right Champion.

This isn’t difficult, this didn’t make the quest hard.  See, EQ2 has this shitty idea, instead of making complicated or difficult or memorable fights, that just make specific monsters retardedly rare, and consider that fun for the players. The challenge is getting it to respawn and seeing if the dice roll you up the right monster.  It’s called “Place holders” or PHs, and whoever came up with the idea, congrats!  Whoever continues to roll the idea out after WoW showed us it was a shitty idea, and instances are far far better, where the mobs you need for quests are always up, you can go to hell.

—

Two of the other mobs you need are a part of another ring event, the Kragbak “Cliff” ring event in the same dungeon. In this one, you clear multiple cliffs of Kragbaks.  Again, this is another 2 hour respawn marathon, and one of the bosses is really rare. One spawns on the first wave, the other spawns on the third and final wave.  On EQ’s offical forums we hear these quotes:

Drazala writes: The channel lord is part of the cliff ring event and is an uncommon spawn. When he is up, he spawns up on the top cliff by the chest.

Rakk writes :The channel lord is part of the cliff event, he spawns up on one of the cliffs (where the chest is). I saw the Reverend about 3 or 4 times before I saw the channel lord - his name is not capitalised cos he is not a named and is either called ‘a kragbak channel lord’ or just ‘a channel lord’ - I really cant remember. I think I musta done the cliff event about 10-15 times before I got the channel lord. Note I’m guessing at how often I did it, I did it for a few days, and it was boring so it all kinda blurred into one hideously long ring event for me

Alright Raak.  I’ve cleared the cliffs 3 to 4 times now…trying everyday when I get home.  By your numbers, if I decided to sit there and get it at each respawn, I’d be spending 20-30 hours, to get some rare spawn monster for a quest. 

Solution:Look, SoE.  I get it, you have some narcissistic love for creating quests that are puzzling, unitutive, and generally face-slapping for players.  You enjoy quests that aren’t accessible, and make people want to cry in frustration.  You enjoy the satisfaction you get when you see a quest in a quest log for months.  I wouldn’t put it past you all to have a stat tracker, to track how long quests are in quest logs so you can throw a goddamn party for whoever created the longest quest to complete on average that quarter.  Well, instead of throwing that goddamn party, maybe you should use that tracker, and see which quests never get completed because of some asinine rare spawning monster, and up the spawn count, so people can actually do the quest.  Stop making quests difficult by making PH/rare mobs a part of it.  That is not a difficult encounter.  Learn to make an MMO right, goddamn. 

The Problem:  “Silver Wares” it’s a quest.  It’s in a zone that is not solo.  It’s designed for ‘probably’ 3+.   You can kinda duo it, most would probably take a full 6 man group to handle the place, as the respawn rate is INSANE.  Even though you could fight through it with fewer numbers, as you weave and bob through the different rooms, respawns will eventually spawn on you unless you are fast enough, and a duo usually isn’t fast enough.

This brings us to Silver Wares.

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Silver_Wares

It’s a quest, to pick up 3 knives from these tables in the dungeon, so they have something to fight the werewolves with.  Cool! The werewolf hunters didn’t bring silver weapons, how funny! So we have to find them weapons in the dungeon with the werewolves!

However, when you pick up the knife, it disappears, and has to respawn..but..it doesn’t respawn..20 minutes later, it still has not respawned.  My group and I gave up waiting.  This morning, I look up the quest on Allakhzam.  From the allakhazam article, we see these comments:

Gardengnome writes:The respawn is definately upwards of two hours. Grabbed one and waited for the next one to spawn for a friend and no sign of another spawn and we’ve been waiting for over two hours now. Kinda long respawn imo…

NapFloridian responds:Yeah this is confirmed. It takes days for these silver spoons to respawn. I am waiting now for 3 days for two of my guildmates and me to get the 2 last DINGS. Should be reported as a gamebreak…. Insane Thanks Sony

Really?  You have a quest in a dungeon, that requires a group of people to successfully soldier through.  A dungeon that you may bring upwards of 5 other people with you to. A SHARED dungeon, that can have multiple other groups in there, beating you to the silverware knives.  Who the hell makes such a shitty quest and thinks it’s fun to only allow one person a day to finish a quest in an area that will ultimately have many, many people wandering through it.

Solution: Fix the respawn rate, or don’t make it disappear in the first place.  This isn’t a release dungeon, this was the third f’in’ expansion.  You should have realized by now that people don’t enjoy this crap.  People leave your game in frustration because of this crap.  Make your game fun, instead of punishing us for playing it.

Read Rao’s blog post for what should easily be identified as a “problem”

http://raoworld.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/the-lost-art-of-reading-comprehension/

One line to sum this up:  Broken links in the knowledge base.

Here are a couple choice quotes:

On to the knowledge base I went. After a few minutes there, I found another link to the e-mail support forums.  I clicked that and got a broken link.  Foiled again.

And:

I did some more searching but I didn’t find any answers to that question.  I figured the safest way would be to explain what I was trying to do and request directions.

I wrote:
“Dear Sony.  I would like to request a character transfer for one of my characters.  As the automated website is still down, I would like to request a manual transfer.  I searched the message boards and the knowledge base, but I was unable to find out if I am supposed to include all the information in the initial request or if you will send me a form to be filled out.  Please inform me of which avenue I am supposed to take.

Thank you for your assistance.”

I submitted the request comfortable that I would at least find out what I was supposed to do.

Today, I received this response:
“Dear SOE Customer,

Your request for a character transfer has been denied due to insufficient information.”

So, here’s the jist of all this.  Sony’s Knowledgebase is out of date, with broken links.

You simply cannot have out of date information/broken information/etc when people go to your knowledgebase for information.  You expect it to be up to date, and not raise more questions that it answers. 

Before you fix anything even in your game, that Knowledgebase should be the Holy friggin bible of accuracy.  Fix it SoE.

Holy Crap, do we even use this anymore?

*scratches his head* I had half of a review for 99 Nights written, and haven’t finished it..I really should. I’m sorry guys, I just took a slight break from 360, and started playing EQ2 a bit with the women.

It’s enjoyable to a degree, because it’s “new”.  It’s got enough of an achievement-set to it, that I can feel like I’m accomplishing something, which is a fun component for me, though slightly dangerous as I get obsessive about such things (Hello Gamerscore!)  But, it feeds a roleplaying tick that I have, and gives me an excuse to spend time with the lady, so, why not, right?

However, I must be honest with you all.  This game has problems.  Simplistic, easy to see, why the hell are they still there problems.  It just baffles my mind that the problems that I’m running into, each and every day are in the game.  Maybe they fired most of the developers?  I know quite a few people have moved on to other projects and companies, which isn’t saying much, since many of the problems are day one problems, or fairly old 05/06 issues, that still plague this game today.

So, while I’m taking a break from consistent 360 playing, and doing the EQ2 thing, I’m going to try something.  I’m going to post an issue daily.  Not a long post.  Just a WTF SOE post, to explain my displeasure with at least one thing I’ve found in the game.

When the list has grown, I will create a single thread with all the issues.  Hell, maybe SoE can use it as their QA issue database.  I question whether they have one with all the issues I’ve seen.

Problem 1)

Kilzak the Twisted

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Kilzak_the_Twisted

What is suppose to happen: He is suppose to give you AA, a special kind of Rare Experience.

What happens: He doesn’t.

Whenever you kill someone with a proper noun name, they are suppose to give you something called Achievement Points (AP, or AA as the community calls it, which is the name derived from EQ1).  Kilzak the Twisted doesn’t give AA.  He’s part of a questline, where the next boss in the series gives AA, so why not him?  Is “Kilzak the Twisted” a generic name?  Is it the name of a tribe of crazy human alchemists?  Maybe he is Bob, of the Kilzak the Twisted tribe.   WTF. 

See, AA was added post release…they most likely didn’t have a flag indicator in their monster database to mark if a monster was a named monster, so they probably went, line by line making monsters worth AA.  Why then did this guy get skipped?  Maybe they went by zone, because this guy is in a BFE zone, that people only go into for 15 minutes, late in the game, for this one quest..and I’m sure few people even do it anymore.  Do you think their monster database is split by zone?  I guess it could make sense, since very few monsters exist in multiple zones, maybe this table was overlooked.  I still don’t see why they couldn’t get a QA code monkey to sift through the database and update anything that even remotely looks like a named monster with AA.  Kilzak isn’t the first, or the last named monster I’ll run into that wont give me AA. 

So what happens when you petition SoE about it? 

I wanted you to know that I have forwarded your concerns about this quest to our development team. Unfortunately, I cannot say whether or not this will be changed in the future, but I wanted to thank you for providing feedback on this.

Galatee

Hey Galatee, I wasn’t even talking about quests, I was talking about named mobs.  Way to pick the wrong prewritten response.  Sorry SoE, this isn’t something you get to brush off and not fix.  Hire more data monkeys to fix your data.  Be consistent, because this is simply unprofessional.