Customer Service

A funny thing happened yesterday...

My friend Roulph/Belzur was able to log in during the day to run a few quests with me, in between all of the other things he has going on in the middle of the day.  And, we decided to take our lowbies, his Krinjen and my Trinarias, through Redfang the Unruled, with the difficulty set to Hard.

I'd tried to solo this quest earlier in the day with Trinarias, also on Hard, but found the CR:7 Troll to be a bit more of a challenge than Trin was up to at the time.  Especially since he didn't have an appropriate weapon for such an encounter, and was relying solely on the fire traps to bypass the Troll's natural damage reduction.

Mind you, that didn't stop Trin from making three good attempts at the Troll, before finally dying by the swing of the Troll's club.

Still, it was far more interesting when Krinjen joined me later in the day.

As we made our way through the quest, I'd noted to Krinjen that in my earlier attempt to complete the quest, I finally discovered why it was not possible to earn the Conquest bonus for the quest.  As I learned by paying close attention to the Experience Report, the Baby Glass Spiders that spawn from the many spider eggs within the quest are *not* counted in the report's Monsters Killed section.

In previous attempts to complete the quest, both Krinjen and I had made a point to try to force each and every spider egg to spawn into a Baby Glass Spider, in an attempt to finally earn the Conquest bonus.  As careful attention to detail revealed, it was a wasted effort.

Which is why I submitted a Bug Report on the issue.

I mean...  why put them in there if they aren't going to be counted!?!

But, Trinarias still needed the Favor granted by the quest, so we set out for another go.

As we made our way down through the chambers, we found we'd earned the rare encounter for Goliath the Gargoyle.

This is always an interesting encounter, since Goliath likes to curl up into a regeneration cycle after he's suffered a certain amount of damage.  Meaning that if you can't beat him down quickly enough, you might not survive the encounter.

So, Trinarias took swigs from several potions to buff-up his Strength and Dexterity, and threw a Shield spell on himself.  Krinjen similarly buffed himself and summoned a Gray Wolf.  Then, we initiated the encounter...

After what seemed to be only a couple of hits landed on Goliath, he curled up into his regeneration cycle.

And he continued to regenerate.

Over and over again.

In fact, he became stuck in his regeneration cycle.

How disappointing.

For some odd reason, I decided to attempt to contact a Game Manager to see if someone couldn't help us out with this bothersome little glitch.  Mind you, I wasn't necessarily expecting anything, as in-game Customer Support has been notoriously slow and ineffectual in the past.  Still, I decided to give it a shot.

To my surprise, in less than two minutes, I received a message from Sparker, on of the Senior Game Managers.  Clearly, he took the time to read the ticket I had submitted, as he asked to verify whether Goliath was still stuck in his regeneration cycle.  Which I promptly confirmed.

Then he asked me what seemed to be the strangest question...

Had there been any other members of the party who were no longer in the quest?

Huh...  no, just the two of us, which I conveyed to Sparker by reply.  But I thought it an odd question, so I let Krinjen know what question I'd been asked via voice-chat.  He thought it a bit odd, too.  But, then he said something that clued me in to why Sparker had asked such a question.

"Nope, just you, me and my wolf..."

The wolf...

It had been active when we initiated the encounter.

And, then, shortly after Goliath entered his regeneration cycle, the wolf disappeared, as his timer had run out.

Quickly, I typed a reply to Sparker that, while there hadn't been any other Player Characters in the quest with us, there *had* been a Gray Wolf with us that had since "left" our group.

While Sparker didn't formally confirm this was the problem, I suspect that the wolf had somehow pulled Goliath's aggro shortly after we initiated the encounter, and that, once the wolf had disappeared, the focus of its aggro was gone, so it got stuck in its regeneration cycle.

How funny.

It's often difficult to tell what a computer program will become hung upon until you put it into play.

But, it was more interesting that Sparker went the extra step to help us complete the optional encounter by attempting to re-spawn Goliath for us.  Notice what happened...

Notice the inactive form of Goliath still perched upon the crates in the top-left corner of the image, while the newly spawned version on the floor has suddenly entered a regeneration cycle, even though his health is nowhere near the threshold used to start such a cycle.

Sparker noticed that Goliath had bugged out on us again, when the second Gray Wolf finally disappeared.  So, Sparker killed Goliath for us.  And, his action gave us credit for the encounter and unlocked the chest.

I thanked Sparker for his assistance while he finished out the support incident.

But, as we moved over to see what Goliath had kept in his chest, he spawned for a third time.

This time, without any Gray Wolf, or any other buffs, both Krinjen and Trinarias managed to defeat Goliath without any unexpected surprises.

It was funny how Sparker had noted that Goliath just wasn't interested in playing nicely that day, as Goliath had become stuck a second time.

I have to tell you, I was rather surprised by the timeliness of Sparker's response, his helpfulness, and his sense of humor through the encounter.

*THAT* is the kind of customer service I can really appreciate.

Thanks, Sparker!

Keep it fun, folks!

Wow...

Time flies when you're unemployed... I can't believe it's been ten days since I last posted something to my blog. This despite the fact that I've had ample time to play DDO during the day. Which has given me the chance to bring both EmmDee and Trinarias up to Level 5.

But, much of it has been through solo play; I've had several bad PUG experiences lately, so I'm not inclined to run my characters with groups who don't also value playing to earn all of the XP bonuses within any given quest. Which may seem silly, but I was looking to level my characters up, not zerg through every quest just to see how quickly I could get it done. Odd as it may sound, I prefer to enjoy the quests Turbine has given me. That means I would probably find more entertainment value in completely exploring the quests, rather than taking the shortest path to the end boss. I mean, it's not like the end rewards are all that stellar at low level anyway...

I've also had plenty of time to work on my little side project. I've decided to write a novel for the Eberron setting that actually spends a significant amount of time in Stormreach, and which takes place almost exclusively on the continent of Xen'drik. It's been rather entertaining to imagine some of the interactions my characters might have with many of the NPCs any player can find in the game. I look forward to substantial completion of the project, as I may have to obtain permission from Turbine to use the names of the NPCs in the game. But, I think that's what's so interesting about this project, too. It might be something someone who's never played DDO picks up off the shelf in their local bookstore, and then, after reading the book, decides to join the game, and meet and see some of the things I've written about.

It's an interesting diversion, anyway, when I'm not looking for a new job.

And, Module 8 must be getting close. There seems to be an awful lot of uproar about when it's due out and what the various new features will be like. Time will tell, but I think it's going to be a few more weeks, myself. Turbine tends to run a little long on their estimates. That whole bug thing, I think.

At any rate, I'm still around, and I'm doing what I can to keep things fun.

See you in Stormreach!

What it's All About

Friday evening was the first time in quite a while where I think we simply gathered a bunch of folks together, and laughed our way through the entire evening.

Sure, there was XP to be had, some favor earned, and plenty of "über" lowbie loot to be had.

But I think it's pretty safe to say that we quickly forgot about the fundamentals of game-play...

Depending upon how you look at the group composition, we had three Face Stabbers and three Lifetakers. I could be counted as two and four, if you consider the fact that I was running EmmDee, who's technically a Lifetaker, but my only alternate character in that guild. Still... It was an unusual combination of players, and things digressed rather quickly.

Which is what made it so much fun.

In many ways, it hearkened back to the days of running with Kruella and Meany, in which *anything* could be said in voice- and party-chat.

And usually was!

Yeah, Friday was more like a guy's night out than an evening's questing in DDO.

But, I suppose that's what made it so much fun. Especially since we were running some of the less thrilling quests in the low levels.

There were several times where I was laughing so hard that I couldn't keep the other members of the party healed up.

Not that that was a huge concern, as everyone was carrying *some* sort of self-healing with them, but it was obvious when I couldn't concentrate on the Clerical tasks.

My cheeks hurt well before we were done with the first few quests, and felt as though they'd fall off my face by the time the evening was through. It was a rather insane but thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an evening with friends.

I look forward to more of the same.

Many thanks go out to Danthrag (Elainee/Killiayn), Krinjen (Roulph/Belzur), Sephrena (Bashal/Confrag), Sundiata (I don't know any alts yet), and Truesong (True... many things), for an entertaining evening. We'll have to do that again some time...

Keep it fun!

The Hazards of Playing Against Level-Cap...

As you may have read in my previous post, I've been using EmmDee as a pet project to see if I can run and re-run quests "at level" to maximize the XP (eXperience Points) he earns so that he spends the smallest amount of time in the mid-level "wasteland" as possible.

He ran into his first level cap as a Level 2 character, at 49,999 XP; one point shy of the Level 4 XP threshold of 50,000. At that point, the game stopped him from earning any more XP until he talked to his trainer and became a Level 3 character.

Since that time, I've been working on bringing him up to the next level-cap at the Level 5 XP threshold of 90,000. I'd done a pretty good job of running all of the content solo up through yesterday, when I found that attempts to complete the quest Missing in Action on Hard to be much more difficult than "hard." In fact, it required the assistance of a couple of the lifetakers, without whom EmmDee would not have survived the quest.

But that quest didn't bring EmmDee up to the cap. In fact, most of the week, I've been running EmmDee solo through various quests, but I've run into a couple of problems...

First, there's the whole thing with blind invites.

It seems that EmmDee has been the only Level 3 Cleric online most mornings, resulting in a rather preturbing pattern of behavior from some of the folks on the server at those times. Such as incessant blind invites. I've talked about this before... I *don't* do blind invites. I believe in good manners, respect and consideration for one's fellow players. Blind invites exhibit none of these behaviors. In fact, blind invites are rather telling as to how selfish some players are. And, I simply don't care for that.

I realize it's cliché, but there is no I in team.

Well, it's gotten to the point where I've had to squelch a couple of players. Skyrathiel, for one.

*Every* morning this week, the player behind this character has insisted on sending me a blind invite *while* I'm in the middle of a quest.

Usually when I'm in the middle of a battle of some sort. As if keeping EmmDee alive isn't difficult enough, try fighting through a blind party invite!

The first couple of times I tried to ignore him.

The third time, I sent a /tell in return: "Welcome to DDO. It's generally considered impolite to send blind invites to other players. Please send a /tell to ask whether I'm interested in joining your group first."

That shut him up for a while. But, then they started again. Yesterday, they got to the point where he sent *THREE* blind invites in a row, *while* I was attempting to negotiate The Butcher's Path on Hard.

I was fed up!

I sent a /tell in return: "Didn't your momma teach you any manners!?!"

No reply by /tell.

Instead...

Another blind invite!

/squelch add Skyrathiel

But, I was so aggravated by the whole thing, I was telling allied guildies about the whole ordeal in the chat panel. Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to check on the Who panel to see if this character belonged to any particular guild. Perhaps chatting with one of their officers might help clarify the fact that not everyone appreciates a bull in a china shop.

That's when I found this...



















Now... *THAT* is pathetic!

*NO* one at Level 4 *needs* a Cleric *IF* they play smartly.

*NO ONE!*

In my view, it's the true mark of a selfish player who can't even bring his own self-healing to the party.

Unsatisfied with the fact that I wouldn't respond to him, Skyrathiel passed the star to another player in his group, who then sent a blind invite to me. I could tell he was in the same group because their group was listed on the Grouping panel, and there was Skyrathiel in the character list for that group.

Some people just don't take a hint.

I was surprisingly close to filing a harassment report.

But, I decided to let it go and continued with my morning's quests.

When I was finally able to return to playing EmmDee late last evening, well after most everyone else had logged out for the evening, I was presented with another annoying situation.

A group had asked me if I'd like to join them to run the Kobold's New Ringleader on Elite. I had only run it to Normal so far. And, as a Level 3, running it on Elite, above level, would earn me a sizable portion of XP toward the ever-so-close level-cap that I'd been working toward. So, I agreed to join them.

And, they zerged their way through the quest.

The only times I saw the other characters all together was when I stepped in, they were all waiting for me so I could throw them some buffs, and again, just before the end battle with the Ogre, for another round of buffs.

In fact, one of the group died because he'd zerged off away from the Cleric. I had absolutely no idea where he'd gone. It took me a while to finally find his soul stone and haul it off to the shrine... while the Ogre was still running around trying to kill everyone.

But, he managed to get himself back on his feet at the shrine, I threw a couple of heals on him and he decided to take on the Ogre again, with only half health, after electing to not use the Rest shrine to recoup his own health.

I see how it is...

Knowing the behavior of the group, though, I elected to remain with them, as they decided they wanted to run the Waterworks on Hard. Something I could really use to close the gap of the final 2,700 XP that EmmDee needed to reach the level-cap.

And, I told them that once I'd earned the requisite XP that I would *have* to level, as the game would not allow me to earn any more after that, and that I wouldn't run a quest for no XP. And, the group leader acknowledged this.

HOWEVER! Once I'd finally hit the cap, and told them I was off to take my level, they jumped right into the next part of the quest chain. Not that I'd expected them to wait for me at the entrance, but I did expect them to wait to open any chests.

Wow, was I mistaken!

I saw chest loot messages begin scrolling across the chat panel and thought WTF?!?

So, I sent a message in party chat asking them what they were doing.

No response.

"Did you not see my statement that I *had* to go level?"

No response.

Okay then... I guess they don't need a Cleric after all...

So, I dropped group and logged out.

And, with no apologies.

They deserved none.

I can see that there won't be very many groups with which EmmDee gets to run. Certainly not PUGs, if that's the way they choose to behave.

You know, I try not to impose too many of my personal principles on the other players in this game, but one principle I WILL NOT compromise upon is respect for one's fellow players.

And I *expect* other players to show me some respect if they want to benefit from my Cleric's services.

And, that's just the way it is.

So, I guess that EmmDee will be left to playing in groups with only allied guildies from now on. But that seems to be my only choice if I have any hope of maintaining the discipline I need to play my characters the way I want to. Because that's what makes playing this character fun for me. Otherwise, I might as well just go ahead and delete him right now.

But, I'd prefer to keep it fun!