Grab Bag - November 22, 2006

 Laaaaaaaag.

Edit Tuesday, 11/28

People think I make these “questions” up. Oh, but no. This is a cut and copied, verbatim feedback form.

The Grizzled Code War Veteran was here until the wee hours, working. There are indeed still some issues (apart from the “normal” lag in places where dozens of people are casting spells). However, there is no pattern to the remaining issues that we can see, and so I need your help. I would REALLY appreciate it if you would use the feedback form, not a CS appeal, and use the following format. (If you choose to use a different format, that’s totally cool… but it will be much, much faster for us to count and tally the feedback if you take my suggestions.)

Choose the Negative feedback form category.
Fill out the other fields.
In the “comments” field, give me ONLY the following.

- The word “LAG”
- Zone name
- /loc
- Time (don’t forget the time zone) and date
- Number of seconds from initiating an action to the action occuring

Why does the feedback form not have an option for bug reports?

Because we want you to use the bug appeal in the game. The feedback forms are read and counted by hand (although not answered personally due to volume). The bug appeals receive a tracking number, are timestamped, and assigned to someone for investigation.

(Insert comment about my use of the term “shroom farm” on the Herald yesterday.)

I do apologize for my failure to be clear. I was specifically referring to the situation where millions of mushrooms were being placed on the hub platforms in the Labyrinth, which made zoning in to use the area quite impossible between lag and immediate hot death.

This was our fault, not the fault of the animist, because we failed to place restrictive measures in those areas. Lightning bolts now keep the hub platforms from being a fungal version of a seagull flock.

How long will the Labyrinth have double RP?

Until Monday, November 27th. And if you were wondering, the super bonus on Agramon is on until December 1. The current double exp in SI and RVR, formerly of the classic zones, I have no new information on an end date. We’re still talking about it.

With another round of Team Lead reports coming up, I was reading through some of the old ones trying to find any lingering issues that I felt had not yet been addressed so I could comment on them in the threads the TLs had made asking for feedback/input/suggestions.

One thing I noticed is that the length of the issues seemed to be restricted to a rather paltry three to four lines.

Now, I tend to be pretty long winded when I get into a discussion, and I'm certain that there is plenty of further discussion that goes on behind the scenes (including suggestions for fixes, since those seem to be left out of the reports intentionally), but I guess my question is mainly this:

Are these reports the only thing presented at a meeting for a specific class? Or is there anything extra that shows up (printouts of posts on other forums, notes from internal board discussion, etc.) aside from say someone repeating a conversation that they had with a TL?

It just seems that only having three or four lines to get into the crux of why something is an issue would be insufficient (it's one thing to say that paladin heal chant is weak compared to similar abilities in the game and a completely different thing to bring in a chart showing healing over time or a timeline comparison of the chant versus say a realm ability or item).

You are fairly typical of a Camelot player in terms of verbosity. You are slightly less verbose than a typical Team Lead.

Pretend you are me, and read your question out loud. Time yourself. Have three other people (call one a producer, one a programmer, and one a designer) read it to themselves silently while you time them. Take their times and add it to the time you had.

You have just figured out why we have length restrictions, and very severe ones at that. Your total number of seconds just involved READING the question, not discussing it, arguing about it, digging up research, running tests, or anything at all. When we are talking about a spreadsheet with hundreds of items, seconds count.

Bear in mind that there is a discussion message board where the TLs get specific. They also email us, and work directly with devs and testers when necessary. The team lead report is really just the tiniest summary of an issue, and not intended to be an in-depth discussion. Certainly we do not make decisions based only on the handful of words we allow for the report.

We are going to start back in with class changes in the next patch. I'll announce the classes ASAP.

***

Clarification: I corrected the grab bag from last week, where I answered “can I do this or this” with “yes.” Sigh. I meant to say that the only folder accessed by your desktop shortcut to Camelot… is the folder where that .exe is located. So if you exclusively use the Labyrinth desktop shortcut, aaaaaall of the other folders named things like “Shrouded Isles” and “Trials of Atlantis” are just hogging up your hard drive. Use the “add/remove program” feature of Windows, found on your control panel. I just uninstalled Catacombs using that method. To be 100% honest with you, I REALLY should have copied down my keyboard mapping before I did that. Gah.

All right! I’m hitting the road before the traffic goes to heck in a handbasket. (If you live on the east coast, you are already aware of the storm and the state of Interstate 95, the Capital Beltway, and Interstate 66 on the Wednesday before a holiday. Think happy thoughts for me, and I’ll return the same.) You guys have a great long weekend if you’re in the States, and a good time wherever you are.