My first experience with the new Ragefire Progression server was that it was down. I had left work a bit later than I wanted to, and when I got home the server was Locked already. Apparently people were on and playing, but nobody else could get on. This went on for about 45 minutes before I eventually learned that they had left /betabuff on, and level 50 characters with full gear were being made(and currently played while others were locked out.)
People were using said characters to buff their ‘real’ characters(because obviously they knew they were doing wrong and the 50s would get wiped) – but for those unfamiliar with the low level EQ game, this short span of time with that level of buffing will cause an immediate 10-20 level gap between players who got in that door and players who didn’t.
I’m not competing for first to 50, and I’m probably not going to fight much for contested content, but it does annoy me that Type A exploiters(lets not pretend they’re anything else) are going to be the ones first to 50 and establishing the cost of goods on the server by controlling all the high level spawns and gear drops.
Daybreak posted about how they left betabuff in, how they removed the L50 characters, and how the 50s supposedly didn’t interact meaningfully with other characters and ‘it’s fine, it’s fine.’ Even though the 15 plat that L50s start with probably got traded immediately, and even though even an hour of buffs creates a huge imbalance. The low level of EverQuest understanding over there was a bit surprising to me, but I suppose they’ll get it together eventually.
The best was yet to come, however… the servers came back up and I logged in to create Vomm, my Dark Elf Wizard. Since I had elected to play in First Person mode only and not use the map/compass, it was a trial to get out of Neriak since I didn’t really know it, but I was able to follow the stream of newbie dark elves out.
After struggling against dozens of people trying to get some of the few level 1 monsters(yellow cons were beating me badly, I only had enough mana for ~2 nukes) the news surfaced that more L50s were being generated, and the server was going down in 1 minute.
That’s right, after the entire previous episode was caused by /betabuff being left in, they took some inadequate emergency cleanup actions, then proceeded to forget to remove /betabuff again. As someone who does a lot of release management, I feel like they totally winged this launch and had no plan.
Here’s hoping it gets a little bit better. I only ended up with 2 screenshots of when I was in somehow, here’s the second.
