Tag Archives: QA

[EVE] Unintended Consequences and Unfortunate Timing

EVE Online, ,

So, CCP rolled out Rubicon 1.3 for EVE Online this week. In totally unrelated news, the New Eden Open tournament is two weekends in. The finals will be this weekend. How do these two relate after all? Let me quote CCP Fozzie:

Currently there is a defect that causes the Crucifier to apply a 10% bonus per level to Tracking Disruptor optimal range and falloff disruption, rather than the correct 7.5% per level. This only affects the range disruption effects, not the tracking disruption.

There is also a defect that causes tracking disruptor scripts to not affect the falloff disruption values of Tracking Disruptor modules. This means that a Tracking Disruptor will always reduce target falloff by the same amount no matter what script is loaded.

The fix for these bugs will not be ready to apply to TQ until Monday […].

I’m not deep enough in the know to judge whether that’s a big thing or not, but it sounds like one. For a highly-trained character (and I assume that’s what all tournament pilots are), the Crucifier temporarily boasts a 50% bonus instead of 37.5%, or 6km additional optimal range, and 3km falloff. That sounds like quite a bit, and can potentially change the power of certain group compositions that the finalists might have planned to bring.

I know CCP likes to handwave problems as “unintended consequences”, to the point where by now that phrase has become their version of Blizzard’s “working as intended”. But instead of dropping a major upgrade in the middle of tournament that thousands of people follow on live-streaming, wouldn’t it have made sense to delay it for a couple of days?

The In-Depth Testing of Everquest II

Everquest II, ,

Today, EQ2wire quotes Everquest2.com announcing the incoming start of the beta phase for their upcoming expansion “Age of Discovery”. The beta will start on October 27th and end on November 14th.

Yes, that’s less than 3 weeks of testing. For an expansion. Granted, people talked a lot about how this expansion mostly seems to deliver things that were originally promised for their Destiny of Velious expansion, and that AoD looks more like an adventure pack than a real expansion. I can’t say, I’ve not played the game for long enough to judge.

But still. 3 weeks. Last time SOE tried such a breakneck speed, GU61 ended up horribly broken and needed numerous fixes. (Yes, that’s a different link for each word.) There’s still itemization broken in  several places, two months later. And here I thought mistakes are something you learn from.

I really would love to like Everquest II, but why, oh why do you make it so hard to do that?