dralk grand hall still completed

[dorrin]

i was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that halls and grand halls were going to be put back to "under construction" this morning. (it does actually say so in yesterday's news on the login page.) i realise i'm in the minority here, but the fact that it's still completed and wasn't reset has me more than a bit miffed. i've wasted the last 2+ months working the tier 6 work on that grand hall. time i could have been spending doing something that would actually matter. instead, the project got done for us, and if you'll excuse my saying so, that cheapens it 100% in my eyes. besides that, since it was said it was going back to being unbuilt, i went ahead and turned radiant essence and travertine bricks i had on-hand into cast stones which i no longer have any use for.. but would have plenty of uses for the resources beforehand. so again, a waste of many hours (probably 20+ between silang and myself) because something didn't go as was said.
i don't care if everyone else gets to keep their finished grand halls. if that's what they want... so be it. but i would rather have the satisfaction of finishing the dralk grand hall by hand and know that the heart, soul and time i put into it wasn't worthless.

[Starmind]

Any of them T6 cast stones you don't want, I'll take
I have plenty room for them in my T6 Consigner and Pawnshop

[Velea]

You may want to try submitting a ticket and seeing if they can reverse pop it for you. It can't hurt to ask.

And the patch notes today said very clearly that halls which popped due to this bug wouldn't "unpop". However, they also said that if you deconstructed before today's patch and lost novians because of it, they would reimburse you 100%. So again, you might want to submit a ticket, ask if you can deconstruct your hall, get 100% of the novians needed so you can then rebuild it back to it's "pre patch" status as it would have been last week.

[Death-knell]

I hear what your saying Dorrin.

I was working on my grand hall and it got auto-completed. At first I felt cheated but then I thought about it.

I did the T1, T2, T3, T4, T5 with some help but mostly on my own. The T6 portion I needed help from my guildmates which they happily provided. The only thing I had left was the violet lattices. If T6 gems were in game or would be soon I'b be joining your protest but I don't feel cheated because it saved me so much time digging T5 gems just to get the T6 bonus drops. I spent weeks on weeks just to get the 2000 raw diamonds/saphires/rubies I had which turned into 100 violet lattices that turns into 50 applied with 147 applied to go 294 lattices x20 would be another 6000 raw. which means I had more months of digging T5.......no thanks.

Now that being said....if they came out and told us T6 gems would be in game shortly then I to would want a reset. But not now with the state the gems are in.

[Starmind]

Woot! No "Unpop"?

I'm happy. I don't mind digging for years on end, but if I can skip it, I will.
My Hall was all done with T5 and I was storing up hoards and hoards of T6 stone to start my T6 work. If I don't have to do it, I'm more than happy

I do understand the "Cheated" Fealing.

Here's a suggestion: Build a T6 Consigner and Pawn. This will give ya tons more work to do and so you can be happily digging for another 3 years.

[Alladania]

If having it 'pop' is truly that distressing, tear it down and start again with your novians. It's certainly your option.

[Deth]

It is a community project. At least the one Dorrin speaks of.

[walkerglassmire]

And the patch notes today said very clearly that halls which popped due to this bug wouldn't "unpop". However, they also said that if you deconstructed before today's patch and lost novians because of it, they would reimburse you 100%. So again, you might want to submit a ticket, ask if you can deconstruct your hall, get 100% of the novians needed so you can then rebuild it back to it's "pre patch" status as it would have been last week.

This is the Grand Hall in the community lair in Dralk. So, we're not talking about novians. Is more the rather LOT of work we've been doing.

[Velea]

Yeah, I saw that now.

Guess now I'm not understanding why you're not happy that it's popped and can move on to something else. But that's just me, I'd rather see the hall as all full than a quarter empty. (Ok, so that's not a great comparison to the glass full/glass half empty thing, but it's late.)

[Jaraiden]

i realise i'm in the minority here, but the fact that it's still completed and wasn't reset has me more than a bit miffed. i've wasted the last 2+ months working the tier 6 work on that grand hall. time i could have been spending doing something that would actually matter. instead, the project got done for us, and if you'll excuse my saying so, that cheapens it 100% in my eyes.
. . . .
but i would rather have the satisfaction of finishing the dralk grand hall by hand and know that the heart, soul and time i put into it wasn't worthless.

I don't think you're in the minority Dorrin, but unfortunately more players are happy that the game mechanics finished the work they didn't have to. As they build (or as they see "grind") on their lair, the aspect of community projects is a distant thought. It was to me.

Be proud of your accomplishments and hopefully VI will refocus their internal QA efforts or at least err on the side of caution and consider delaying Deltas.

However, VI should have followed through on their statement and "rolled" back all halls and not taken the easy way out. As I see it, and as I remember VI's statement, halls (and esp. the Grand Hall) is a rather special structure in dragon lairs. Seems no going back now and players will tend to take advantage of this exploit-now-condoned (until the hotfix).

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

However, VI should have followed through on their statement and "rolled" back all halls and not taken the easy way out..

I'm sorry, but the "easy" fix here would be to have done nothing. Unless I'm mistaken to "roll back" lairs would have been to do a complete rollback on the entire game, including any construction work done on the entire shard during that time.

As much of an inconvenience this has been for people, it was all an accident done with the intent of reducing grind, arguably one of the most common complaints about the game.

[Kulamata]

And it's still worth remembering that those halls that auto-completed had had a LOT of work done on them. Maybe, just maybe a pewter platter, but certainly not a silver platter...

[Jasmeen]

I don't think you're in the minority Dorrin, but unfortunately more players are happy that the game mechanics finished the work they didn't have to. As they build (or as they see "grind") on their lair, the aspect of community projects is a distant thought. It was to me.

Hang on a moment, how can you speak for anyone but yourself? And you say he's not in the minority, but then say "more players are happy". Which is it? Personally, it didn't bother me to have the parts of my lair completed that were either way. Not happy about it not crying about it. It just was.

Be proud of your accomplishments and hopefully VI will refocus their internal QA efforts or at least err on the side of caution and consider delaying Deltas.

I don't think it's fair of you at all to blame this on internal QA. If they'd have delayed the delta until they found this bug, well, then the delta might never have gone live. Doesn't seem to me to be something they knew was going to happen and they just decided not to fix, now does it? There were players galore posting daily about when the patch was going to go live, almost begging for the changes. The devs decided to patch when they thought the changes were ready and would give the players things they'd been waiting more than a year for.

However, VI should have followed through on their statement and "rolled" back all halls and not taken the easy way out.

I don't recall seeing them say where they were going to roll back the shards. Could you please find that for me? This couldn't have been the "easy way" out at all. They discovered the problem Tuesday night/Wednesday morning sometime (not sure when they got in to work, obviously). By that afternoon they posted about the problem, what the intended fix would be. They fixed it, tested it on Blight to see what would happen, and patched this morning. I don't know about the rest of you, but that seems like a pretty fast turn around time to me. I've seen bigger problems that have a greater effect on the whole of the player base take longer to be diagnosed, fixed, tested and put live for games that have a much bigger support team than Horizons has.

I do understand you're upset and wished you could have been there to complete the hall yourself. But please, give a little credit where credit is due. This was a huge patch for Vitrium to put out. Something went wrong, they admitted that, and have worked to fix it, and fast. Rather than pointing blame, remember, to err is human. To forgive, kind.

[Pharcellus]

Yeah, I saw that now.

Guess now I'm not understanding why you're not happy that it's popped and can move on to something else. But that's just me, I'd rather see the hall as all full than a quarter empty. (Ok, so that's not a great comparison to the glass full/glass half empty thing, but it's late.)

I think what Dorrin is pointing out is that he was basically robbed of the opportunity to have the hall "pop" as a result of his (and others) hard efforts, and instead a broken (and rushed to live; sorry, but that's what it was; another week or two of proper QA probably would have caught it) game mechanic caused it to pop without anyone getting the "thrill".

I don't know how it is nowadays for folks, but we used to have big parties when a significant community (or even private) structure was completed. That awesome and satisfying *poof* as the completed structure rezzed when the last piece was placed. It vindicates the awful grind that led up to that moment.

You don't have to understand it, Velea, but it is nonetheless a valid concern in the greater scheme of things. I mean, if it means that little, why not just have a "game mechanic" finish off everyone's structures beyond a certain percent of completion so they can move on to "something else"?

[brainbasher]

Any reply to ticket,i assume this is a fault.

[Vahrokh]

another week or two of proper QA probably would have caught it) game mechanic caused it to pop without anyone getting the "thrill".

I have been in the Blizzard QA procedure and PTR servers - they are supposed to be pretty superior to our 3 men factory here (plus consultants blah blah).

Guess what, they slip stuff like this too, because some bugs can't be easily catched with automated regression tests and this is one of them.
Sometimes they have to halt the hundreds servers in production (pissing off several millions - not some dozens - of players in prime time) to emergency patch some gross exploitable bugs or gamebreaking issues that pop up when such a sheer player base uses the software.

I even doubt AE implemented automated (if any) regression tests at all and Vi can't create a suite from scratch for such a big program in the time they took the ownership.

So, like for WoW, they have to create a PTR server and have players stress test it and report about it. The players are given "premade" gear and more so that they can try the new features without starting from zero. It's a quite long process, patch 2.2 ie is taking *months* to be tested and fixed (mostly due to WoW getting ported to full Windows Vista compatibility due to the voice chat new features).

This resembles Blight delta testing.

Difference: thousands and thousands of "testers" (players) on WoW PTR on pre-made things ready to stress and pin point on the new features.

Blight: a few dozens of good willed (have yet to see more than 10 online, but I connect from Europe so I can't really know how it's there in prime time) players trying the new features. But they are not given a "99% complete" T6 hall or other premade stuff to really test the exact things being patched, nor you can force those guys to grind structures to blow them 2 days later after the test is over.

Basically, it's years you make it look like there's a bunch of idiots down there that can't perform "proper testing", but forget we miss some thousands Blight players to try every feature out, Vi is inheriting spaghetti non documented code whose knowledge Smeglor is trying to sing them like a Bard.

Knowing how totally ignorant about software industry DA was, I am pretty sure they don't have any manual or automated QA tool as well, the entire game could have been developed on a "waterfall model".

Hopefuly, slowly (it'll take months) Vi will improve on these things, starting from the deep bottom where they started from and inherited from the past.

People takes this takeover like it was the descent of some new *** on earth and then pissing off bugs happen and suddenly you see the thumbs down irated threads on general (they should go in the aptly named "bugs" forum) which will achieve only to toss dirt on Vi. And they need not to be put down in this transition and players demotivated, remember if you don't give them a rest and return to the negative behavior of the past, you could end up like me, in a dead game, and you can't begin feeling how dam bad it is to be dead.

Expecially when the alternative is a sea of canned WoW like monkey games that "OOOOH! in just 2 years" will implement one of the 5000 features Horizons has since 2004.

Deal with it, this game will never be anywhere as debugged and polished like a mainstream product, they lack of funds, structure, subscriptions to be like that.

Due to the extreme niche and abysmally small player base this will remain a "cult game" for the few who can "endure" a week or two of errors before they correct them.

Play on Blight more as well, what slips off there is because they had too few people ready to dump their payed free time in bug reports. Don't always ask for someone else to be in charge, this is more of a common project where we co-develop and co-debug than a real industry product. Not for now.

[Dremora]

I have to agree a little with Dorrin on this. My mere T2 hall was finished on that day I logged in, and I was a bit disappointed, to be honest. It may have been just a low-tiered hall, but finishing even those by myself up to the last lair piece and then seeing it "pop" is really satisfying. That's why I'd rather work on my lair myself, or at least be there when the structure gets completed.

That said, I'm not angry at all with Vi making a slip-up. This stuff happens, and I'm not about to reconstruct the whole thing, even with some novians to help me. And, personally, if it was my grand hall that got completed over this, I would be more overjoyed than mad.

[Amerelium]

What happened was that components were moved about a bit, by some rules only the devs know about. I had 11 chambers in the works, and after the upgrade, two of the larger ones was completed, and the unfinished ones reduced to five. Also, I had a couple of instances of having way overshot the amount of components in a few of them (like 56 crimson lattices where now only 20 were needed).

Not to be helped I guess. I chose to scrap and replace those chambers, to get the surplus components as novians...

[LaughingOtter]

a broken (and rushed to live; sorry, but that's what it was; another week or two of proper QA probably would have caught it) game mechanic caused it to pop without anyone getting the "thrill".

I don't think the game mechanic was broken at all. It did what it was told to do quite nicely. The problem was that it was told to do the wrong thing. VI admitted that this was a mistake, apologized for the error, and offered to compensate players for Novians lost because of it.

Sure, everyone would have been happier if the mistake had been caught & corrected before going live, but it wasn't. That's just the way of the world. Mistakes are going to happen; what matters is how you respond when they do. VI's response was prompt, professional, and very customer-oriented. Successful service recovery deserves to be acknowledged just as much as opportunities for service improvement.

[Guaran]

I think what Dorrin is pointing out is that he was basically robbed of the opportunity to have the hall "pop" as a result of his (and others) hard efforts, and instead a broken (and rushed to live; sorry, but that's what it was; another week or two of proper QA probably would have caught it) game mechanic caused it to pop without anyone getting the "thrill".

But the Grand Hall WAS in fact completed thanks to his and others efforts....

If no one had placed units, then it would not have popped....

This is a really minor issue to be bitching about considering the size of the patch, and the fact that they allowed halls completed using the temporarily lowered amounts to remain completed. They made it right in me eyes.