I thought I’d like the new and improved EQ2. Turns out that the experience is almost as infuriating as it was 14 months ago. It’s not only the game that is lacking, it’s SOE’s quality of service – or the lack thereof.
Some of my gripes may be specific to the German servers. One thing to keep in mind is that there was no server merger for the two German servers, apparently because they are aren’t as deserted as some of the US servers.
Which brings me to my first problem: lag. It’s bad. Really bad. As bad as it was at release. I’m not making that up. I’m talking 10+ second spell lags here. Some zones are simply unplayble during prime time. What’s even worse is the lack of communication with the German player base. The community rep relayed the lag complaints to SOE almost a month ago. Since then, nothing has happened – not even an official acknowledgement that the problem exists and is being worked on. There has been zero feedback and the problems are as badly as they have been weeks ago.
You see, we have a new community guy. It’s a girl, actually. And get this: she’s fluent in German. The old one (Xaycon) wasn’t. That’s right. SOE had initially hired a guy to manage the German language community who only knew German as a second language – and who wasn’t even particularly proficient at that. His postings were riddled with errors and were sometimes barely readable. I’m sure he did his best but you can’t really manage a community when you aren’t absolutely fluent in the community’s language. As a foreign English speaker, I know how long it takes to write up postings in a foreign language and my English is far better than his German ever was. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason why he rarely communicated at all. Back when I was writing for a German EQ2 fansite, I quickly learned that we’d better stick to the French (!) community gal – she’d actually answer our (English) emails. I always thought it was kind of hilarious that the German fansites had to communicate with the French community rep in English in order to get any decent information.
I digress. Anyway, this new community rep chick does her job reasonably well. I’m guessing she is as powerless as the rest of us about the lag situation. If SOE gave a rat’s ass about the German player base, they would have fixed it by now. I guess SOE is quite satisfied with taking our money but they don’t want to properly support us. And it’s not like the German EQ2 player base was tiny. It’s not. We have two servers that constantly show as “red” during prime time. US EQ2 has ten half-empty servers. EQ2’s German player base is probably a rather sizable chunk of EQ2’s total player base. I’m not surpirsed though. SOE has always been asinine in their treatment of their non-American customers. Pre-release they had vowed to get it right this time around – well, they didn’t.
There’s more shit going on. During the past four days, the server I play on came down about half a dozen times, sometimes at as little as a 5 minute’s notice.The broker system is constantly crapping out. It was non-functional when I started playing again. It worked after the KoS patch and now it’s inoperable again. I hope the unscheduled downtime right now fixes it. I’m not getting my hopes up though.
Technical issues aside, I’ve also been frustrated with the Splitpaw Saga Adventure Pack. Yeah, I shelled out the €8 and bought this spectacular crapfest. The content isn’t as bad as it could be, definately not worth €8, but it offers a reasonable, albeit overpriced, amount of content. I could actually get used to the idea if those things went for €3. A retail-packaged expansion usually goes for €24 and Splitpaw sure as hell doesn’t offer 1/3 of the content of a fully fledged expansion and you don’t get a nice box with your download either.
What pisses me off most about Splitpaw is SOE’s antediluvian instancing system. I wish someone would invent some device that lets me kick the asses of MMORPG designers through the Internet. I’ve been frustrated to death by this whole instance lock-out timer retardation some sadistic devil at SOE cooked up. While I’m not the most retarded MMORPG player out there, I’m certainly not particulary l33t either. That means that sometimes it takes me a while to figure things out.
That being said, there is this quest that takes you to an instance called “The Hideout” where you have to destroy supply crates with exploding barrels. Props to SOE for successfully managing to bring crates and exploding barrels into the realm of MMORPGs. Like we don’t get enough of that shit in first-person shooters…
Anyway, this instance has a 15 minute lock-out timer. I tried it four times and each time I failed after 2-3 minutes. Thanks to the lock-out timer I got a whooping ten minutes of gameplay out of a one hour time investment. It’s not like you could do anything productive in 15 minutes so you’re forced to wait in front of the instance until the timer runs out. I stared at brown cave walls and a dozen of repetitive gnoll models for 50 minutes, marvelling at SOE’s substandard artwork. This must be the single most retarded gameplay mechanic I’ve yet to see in a MMORPG. Ok, there were the EQ1 boat rides but those weren’t instanced so you could at least fuck around with your fellow catassers while waiting at the docks.
At this point, I’m not sure why I should continue playing EQ2. Yeah, there is this compulsive “must-log-on-and-level” thing that most MMORPG nerds suffer from but fact is that with EQ2 I’m not feeling satisfied after a couple of hours of gaining good exp and phat lewts. I’m feeling pissed off.