1. I have corrected the e-mail settings so that outgoing e-mails from these forums should be sent now. If you tried to Register or Reset your Password, please try again!
    Dismiss Notice

Ooh dear ...

Discussion in 'EverQuest II General Discussion' started by Tkia, Mar 26, 2020.

  1. Zynt

    Zynt Active Member

    ^
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
  2. Castegyre

    Castegyre Active Member

    What blows my mind is that people still buy in to the TLE servers. It's ok, though, next time will be better.
     
    • Agree Agree x 4
  3. Errrorr

    Errrorr Active Member

    Itemisation is a cursed job honestly. EQ2 has been spoilt over the years by items with special/unique effects. In some cases these have been balanced, but in the large majority, they were either OP or useless.

    The opposite end of the spectrum is you go for a linear based itemisation, where each tier upgrade is X % better than the previous one. Then you get the situation like DoV where everybody is like "Omg it's so boring playing for only a X% upgrade.

    Then you take your big pile of turds, and throw in a bunch more turds in the form of Infusion, Experimenting and Reforging. What do you get? EQ2.

    Class specific effects are never balanced, and I've been saying this for years. PoW Cloaks, AoM Charms, ToT Cloaks, Epic 2.0s, Ethereal Runes. Each year is basically a lottery if you get something OP or the same useless ****.

    Using a loot script is 100% the best thing they can do in current form. Nearly all blue stats should be done via scripts to provide the linear increase in stats. You then combine that with stat boosting effects, that are not class specific, and vary those throughout content. TLE should be 1 itemisation pass from 1-100, all liner stat increases, and then agreed that itemisation for any future TLEs follows those stats. Content can then be fine tuned/balanced around that each expac/server depending on the focus.

    Biggest problem? Lack of resources. Caith doing itemisation, as well as mechanics/class balance is just doomed to fail. It's clearly too much for 1 person. However unless they find some money in the budget (Fire Deadweight), it's not going to happen.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  4. Endymion

    Endymion Active Member

    Ding ding ding. All of this is compounded by everyone having 100% cast speed/recovery speed/haste so casting/attacking very frequently, too. But of course fixing it would require change which they think players don't want, which IMO is more of an excuse to avoid the pain it would take to rip off all of the band-aids layered on over the years. I'm not sure I can blame them though since obviously there's a contingent of people that will play no matter what.
    While I don't know for certain, I'm pretty sure whatever Fyreflyte wrote is new because I can't imagine what a process it'd be to dredge up whatever Aeralik was working on and understand wtf was going on. Fyreflyte knows how to program so I'm sure it would've been easier for him to just create his own thing.
    I'm definitely in the camp that hates purely linear stat increases -- it's part of why I always bounce off of FFXIV after I catch up on story and can only get interested in WoW when they do fun things with their itemization (like the legendaries in Legion, though there you had the problem of there being comparatively useless legendaries as well). But as you said, there's a lot of useless garbage and it feels really bad if you play a class that gets a shitty class effect for the year. The other problem is they've frequently boxed themselves in with how OP their effects are and ended up having to just repeat them time and time again. I really wish they EQ2 team could've done a Legends of Norrath-like game that didn't have the balance concerns of a typical MMO so they could really go crazy with itemization because the "fun" itemization was really fun.
     
    • Informative Informative x 4
    • Agree Agree x 1
  5. Zynt

    Zynt Active Member

    The whole, "The players don't like change," line is tired, dishonest, garbage. They change **** all the time, break it or make it useless and then use the complaints from that to justify not doing anything worthwhile.
     
    • Agree Agree x 9
  6. Errrorr

    Errrorr Active Member

    Agreed, linear stats aren't really fun, but at least they provide a progression that makes some form of sense.

    The biggest issue I believe currently is there is no one looking at the game and saying "How can we make what we currently have better?". It's all just a case of "What can we push as the next update". It's quite obvious with the lack of balance that goes in to anything. OP effects? It shouldn't be hard to realise within 2 weeks if an effect is overpowered. Tweak the numbers in the next patch and monitor again. Not enough, or too much? Adjust 2 weeks later.

    Instead the game is lucky if the OP items/effects get looked at once per year, and those usually involve making it even more OP, or pointless.

    I'm sure the next expac will have a new wave of Balance though, to be fixed in the following expac.
     
    • Agree Agree x 3
  7. Endymion

    Endymion Active Member

    The encounter progression has to make sense along with the items too. Part of what made DoV and its itemization suck was breaking your balls on some of the encounters and getting a small % increase. It didn't feel rewarding to kill a mob and see effectively the same item you saw in the tier 1 heroics (or public quests, lmao) with a few extra % on it. Not to mention the 'fun' of doing normal mode and hard mode raids, **** hit boxes on a lot of the mobs, and the stupid rotating class debuff mechanic. Man DoV sucked, though the art was great at least (and some of the fights were indeed fun).

    Very excited to see the AA rebalance that's supposedly coming next expansion. I'm expecting more bandaids.
     
    • Agree Agree x 4
  8. Dano84

    Dano84 Active Member

    Most Ranger shiver thinking about the upcoming AA Revamp and Caith, which usually doesn't bode well for the class.
     
    Last edited: Sep 29, 2020
    • Agree Agree x 1
    • Funny Funny x 1
  9. Alarra

    Alarra Active Member

    Had an update from DW that this change is server side only.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  10. Anaogi

    Anaogi Active Member

    It'll be client side too. Guarantee.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  11. Mermut

    Mermut Well-Known Member

    I saw that... but it makes zero sense.
    How would reducing server side logs improve peformance? And why would they remove such important debugging information from the devs.... and still provide it to players via player logs?

    Having worked in software QA and from past track record of the EQ2 devs... something else is going on. Either they changed their mind and that is there way of walking the change back without ADMITTING it, or 'logging the hits' means something completely different 'server side' than it does client side.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
  12. Tkia

    Tkia Active Member

    As somebody who now only plays below level 100 I'm seriously dreading the 1001 ways they're going to break it for anyone below 120.

    And an update on the current crafting issue of eating rares because generic recipes take from the lowest stack first says that they are fixing that in the expansion too. So they're digging into the crafting mechanics code too now. Yep, you can be sure I'm worried. :eek:
     
    • Agree Agree x 3
  13. Tkia

    Tkia Active Member

    • Agree Agree x 1
    • Funny Funny x 1
  14. Endymion

    Endymion Active Member

    The log is probably stored in a DB, constantly hitting the DB with the logs is going to have an impact. And the value of said logging is reduced if mobs are constantly hitting for that much now.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  15. Alarra

    Alarra Active Member

    You sure it would be a DB. From the make up of the game I would have thought it would have been a file which would be an even bigger IO hit.

    WHen you output to fiile or even to DB the speed of doing so is a major performance hit rather than working in memory.
    DB's usually sore stuff in memory so it is generally faster than files, but the buffer still needs to write to file at some point.

    Outputting to file versus doing stuff in memory you will see a 10 fold speed loss. Sending it to a DB will have less of an impact, but will still require that the process has either an open connection to the DB or if coded badly will do a connection to the DB for each and every transaction. All depends on how much they buffer the lines in memory as to how much of an impact it will have overall.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  16. Cheggers

    Cheggers New Member

    I'd really hope they weren't doing something as blunt as a DB call every time a log is generated. And I certainly hope that logging DB is not physically or logically connected to the game DB. There's a reason things like Cassandra, Redis, HBase, RabbitMQ, etc., exist, and why they're used by high-traffic applications.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  17. Feldon

    Feldon Administrator Staff Member

    Logs like this seem like data that is stored once and only accessed when something goes wrong. Flat file CAN be fast if you are just writing it and not searching it. MongoDB and other flat file NoSQL solutions only keep indexes in memory. Non-indexed searches are basically impossible however.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
  18. Endymion

    Endymion Active Member

    TBH, I'm not sure, I never really looked at the logging code, I only know that it exists. :p I was mostly just trying to say that I buy their story about the mistaken patch note in this case.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  19. Mermut

    Mermut Well-Known Member

    Any software company( especially one that KNOWS their software is buggy) that chooses to reduce logging is one that has given up even the pretense of attempting to find and squash bugs all but the simpliest and most obvious of bugs
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  20. Fuli

    Fuli Well-Known Member

    Step One:
    Charge beta testers to find them.

    Step Two:
    Mermut.

    Step 3:
    Decide if they care about the problem.

    Step 4:
    If the bug is worthy of attention, guess and jerry-rig a solution that just might work.
     
    • Like Like x 3
    • Winner Winner x 1

Share This Page