Tag: Ragefire

Rant: Customer Service Doesn’t Get Much Worse Than A Full Guild Suspension


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As you read this, Daybreak Game Company is busy cleaning up the mess of another incident in a series of customer service missteps. This time it involves the unfair suspension of several hundred (sources place the figure at least 400 and possibly upwards of 600), in a guild-wide three day ban in retaliation for the actions of one member. Yes, an entire guild had their accounts suspended because one player broke not the terms of service, but player-agreed rules.

Here’s how the story goes: Everquest’s lack of instancing means that the community has to compete for raids, leading to a raid schedule agreed upon by the leaders of the top guilds. If your guild isn’t scheduled to raid, and they do so anyway, breaking the rotation can result in penalties levied against the entire guild. Yes, the entire guild, even you members who don’t raid or might raid every once in a while.

That’s exactly what happened when one player from the Modest Man guild was recorded on video killing mobs outside of the Sky raid. In total, the player allegedly killed two mobs with a multi-box group of five accounts. The player was reportedly booted from Modest Man before Daybreak Game Company handed out a three day suspension to every single member of the guild. The suspensions were quickly overturned with players being allowed back into the game, but the policy that would hand 3-day and potentially 7-day suspensions to entire guilds still seems to be in place.

It also doesn’t address the underlying problems here. The fact that, as one player put it, a single player can “blow a 4-6 hour block for a whole guild” is ridiculous, a sign of a game far out of touch with today’s expectations. The idea that Daybreak is willing to suspend an entire guild, hundreds of players in total, for the dissociated actions of one member (who was kicked out) is unacceptable, regardless of it being overturned, and the fact that it was even considered for a moment to be an appropriate response should be worrying to Daybreak’s customers, aside from perhaps the toxic portion that supported the decision.

 

But ultimately every fiasco that seems to come out of Everquest’s timelocked servers is Daybreak’s fault, fostering and encouraging an atmosphere of exclusion, and nothing encompasses the attitude of a company that once stated that casual players don’t deserve to access content like Nagafen, than punishing an entire guild for the actions of one person. Again they pretty quickly reversed the decision, but they went ahead with it in the first place. And that is the problem.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Daybreak Ignores Everquest Ragefire Vote


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When it comes to Everquest and time-locked servers, polls ensure that the servers only progress as fast at the community wants them to. For Ragefire/Lockjaw, the latest set of progression servers, players voted by a very large percentage in order to keep the servers as they are for another six months, with the second most popular option being ASAP on Ragefire and 3 months on Lockjaw.

In an announcement posted on the official forums, however, Daybreak developer Aristo announced that the company will react to player votes by ignoring them, bending the rules and combining answers from two categories (ASAP and 3 months) and calling it the majority opinion. Instead of going with the top voted option (six months), Daybreak will instead open up voting for the Kunark expansion after three months.

Players stuck on Ragefire might have the option to transfer to Lockjaw, perhaps. It’s a possibility that Daybreak is investigating with no details or confirmation that it would be possible, also noting that the transfer wouldn’t be possible until after the servers fell out of sync.

Once Ragefire is settled into Kunark we’ll have to explore whether they want to return to the 6-month schedule or adjust it to a faster track. Likewise, although Lockjaw will hopefully be full of people who want to stick around in an era for a long time, we’ll check to make sure that remains the case as time goes by.

Daybreak Game Company seems to be suffering from a case of foot in mouth disease, as earlier today community manager Holly Longdale ruffled some feathers by stating that “casual players shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen,” a rather out of touch comment considering that much of the content and competition is currently being nullified by large groups of players multi-boxing and botting.

“What we don’t want to do is instance raids, which is what casuals want us to do because they want to fight Nagafen. Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen… that diminishes the achievement of others. That’s part of the challenge: You have to be better than the other guy; you have to be more strategic that the other guy.”

As for multi-boxing, Longdale assures us that they are “looking into it.”

(Source: Everquest)

[Community] Are Boxers Harshing Your Ragefire Buzz?


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(Community is a weekly column discussing ongoing events in various MMOs. Agree or disagree, we’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.)

Everquest’s Ragefire progression server has been up for less than a week, actually it’s been up for about four days, but if you’ve been trying to make headway in the game it might feel more like a week. Unfortunately, parts of the community are at each other’s throats over the issue of people not being able to play, and who is responsible for clogging Ragefire and camping its mobs. Daybreak has been working to alleviate problems without trampling on either side’s shoes, and the fighting is getting worse.

The culprit of choice for Ragefire are the boxers, players who run two or more copies of Everquest simultaneously, either controlling accounts separately or using programs like isboxer to direct multiple characters at once. A distinction between boxing and botting is important, since botting is unattended and boxing is one player actually operating multiple accounts. Boxing has become very common over the years in Everquest, as computers have expanded and become capable of running multiple instances of the game very easily. For Ragefire, where getting a spot on the server has been rather difficult, members of the community are understandably angry over long queues that are at least partially the fault of single players taking upwards of six or more slots.

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With Ragefire requiring a subscription, it’s also easy to see why Daybreak doesn’t want to tread on the shoes of someone paying $15 per month, per account.

On Daybreak’s end, the company has implemented an afk timer that apparently goes up and down based on how much demand there is to get into the server. I haven’t been able to test this out myself, but reports from other players indicate that the timer can swing as high as over an hour to as low as under ten minutes. In addition, Daybreak cobbled together a server queue that allows players to get their place in during peak hours and alt-tab out of the client or go into chat without worrying about the system automatically logging them out.

How do you feel about boxers in Everquest?

Half-Elfs Break Everquest’s Progression Server


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If you’ve been waiting for Daybreak to unlock the Ragefire progression server for Everquest, you’ll be waiting a bit longer. The server has been taken down due to a bug allowing players to log in with fully-formed level 50 characters. The Daybreak team is currently looking into what caused this.

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