smelly stuff hits the fan in EverQuest II

[Pave Low]

there be BIG trouble in the land of EverQuest II and the natives are mighty unhappy & restless over news that TWO entire guilds were transferred from a test server to the live system

Unhallowed Triad/Unrest - moved from Test by SOE

This is probably going to set back my relations with SOE a bit, but I think it needs to come out.

It seems that the guild Unhallowed Triad, now on the Unrest server, was recently moved there lock, stock and barrel from the Test server.

They were moved to Live despite SOE's prior assurances that no guilds would ever be moved from Test to Live.

As you all probably know, you get double exp for kills on Test, so it's twice as easy to level there.

As you may not know, this guild formerly had a GM account in it. That GM account helped this guild gear up on Test by killing monsters they couldn't kill on their own, so they could loot them.

Fortunately, the person at SOE who was required to move these toons at least stripped all their mythical gear before they were moved. They had a decent amount of mythical gear before they moved, from what I'm told.

I personally feel betrayed by this, that this amounts to signficant corruption of the regular servers. I especially feel bad for the legitimate Unrest guilds who will have to compete with these people now.

What's next, moves off Station Exchange servers?

Check Station Players for the guild Unhallowed Triad. They obviously have a few recent server transfers off other servers, but the majority of their toons that are 70+ HAVE NO PRIOR HISTORY. They appeared on Unrest out of thin air.

Houston, we have a problem.

Seems that Unhallowed Trinity was only one of the guilds copied.

The SECOND guild (many of the same players) copied over was Unholy Trinity. Unholy Trinity is now also on Unrest. Each character was copied over by hand, with the guild retaining full levels and status. My understanding is that it took two solid days of dev time to manually copy over all these characters and the two guilds.

Before you look at the screenshots below, know this - about 90 percent of these characters now have their eq2players profiles locked. Coincidence huh?

Well, of the ones who don't, there are the same curious issues:

-None has any prior leveling history before level 70.

-All are in basically full treasured gear, with a few Labs/relic pieces, but then, some jump up to some pieces it seems unlikely this guild was capable of obtaining. See screenshot below of player Zindi with all treasured, a few legendary pieces, but then a Matron spear. None of this makes any sense.

-Most with unblocked profiles show alts in the Unhallowed Trinity guild.

Honestly, I feel like the game I love has been compromised and corrupted. Level 60 guilds magically appearing on a Live server with uber loot that was stolen rather than earned.

SOE, I think you need to undo this.

Any Devs Wanna Explain Test->Live Transfers

Why now after 3 years of saying no to Test->Live transfers have you transferred a guild from test to live servers without any apparent losses or costs?

and news hits digg EverQuest II PR Disaster!

Community in uproar as SoE employee transfers two guilds with GM given gear from a test server to a live server! HUGE thread on official and fan sites! Largest disaster since the EVE event!

Ulgor's story:

My char on Test and guilded with Unholy Trinity is Ulgor (lvl 70 Warlock), my wife´s is Elesia (lvl 70 Monk no longer in UT) be both now play on Innovation on our pre lu13 chars we played up the hard way.

Some Time after LU13 we both left for Test where we met Lucky who at that time had the best equipment on Test also his wife´s char.

After a time he invited us in his Guild and after that guild was more or less dissolved after some drama we all went to Unholy Trinity. We started to raid T6 together in may 2006 and Lucky handed out stuff to help compensate for the Test inviroment to get some raiders geared. That was tradeable fabled and masters and rares.

It took me until August 2006 to find out the truth behind that. Lucky is a personal friend of a high level executive at SOE and a char on Lucky´s second account (officially his wife´s) had GM powers, the GM chars name is Drunkinn i think.

Some time in summer 2006 I got access to the inner circle of UT and he took me and a few others into Deathtoll and showed us how he gets the gear by oneshotting epics with his GM account. There was a player with us that never raided but that got most of the stuff (I did not take anything).

I confronted Lucky and asked him if he thinks it is fair that my wife and me get up every saturday and sunday at 2 am to raid (we are gmt+1) for 6 months and a twink gets better gear that my wife has without ever raiding.

So fact is that lucky used his GM powers to buy people and cement his raidleader status and of course no tank got stuff good enough to ever be able to replace him.

One time in summer 2006 Lucky made a mistake by being too greedy and looting a mythical item he got oneshotting epics and that of course produced a server wide message on test. He was banned for a week for that but was still able to keep his GM powers.

I helped a dev a few times testing stuff for the german servers so I mailed him to say goodbye and he asked me why so many people from the test raiders left and I told him.

That dev spent a big part of his christmas vacation checking logfiles and found out that Lucky nearly cleared whole raid zones weekly with his gm powers. After this got out Lucky´s GM powers where revoked.

So the people that say he never cheated while they raided with him are right because he could not cheat after january 2007.

There have been other things like the friendly competition I had with Lucky getting a crafter to 70. I was in my mid 30´s and he early 30´s on a saturday and on monday i meet his char again and he is 70 crafter with all advanced books scribed which is practically impossible on test. All of this was for testing purposes of course as he likes to put it.

Now to the current situation:

I came back to Test 3 months ago and got reinvited to UT again and wanted to do some raiding again because i really missed EQ2. It never came to that because the UT people talked about moving to unrest and shortly after that started levveling up new chars there.

Lucky did not want to have the hassle of rebuilding the raidforce and handed his friend at SOE a list of chars he wanted there. That person assigned a dev to do the work. The dev spent two days manually preparing them for copying and of course none of them paid for it.

I did not want to be part of that because i could see the drama. I really want my char moved also especially because of my 5 room house i worked my ass of for months to get irreplacable stuff for it.

I think it is ok to copy them because we all really did a lot to get stuff tested and I mean testing till your armor is at 0% and paying for it with my very hard earned money. SOE never managed to hand us repair kits even when we tested completely broken stuff.

So now I sit in an empty guild where only the really honest or really stupid stayed without money because I gave everything away when I left without anyone to raid or even group.

And the worst part is that they also copied the lvl 60 guild over so I bet after the people start to forget this drama they leave Unhallowed Triad on unrest and rejoin Unholy Trinity. I you want to see the other copied chars nobody knows about look up Unholy Trinity on Unrest.

Edited December 15, 2007 by Pave Low

[Rocky]

This sounds huge, but I have to admit being so far outside that gaming world, I just don't get it lol.

[Pave Low]

SOE's reply

There has been quite a bit of discussion recently about something we were doing to show kindness to some valued members of our testing community who have been working diligently to improve EverQuest II for the last three years.

What we did was take a group of characters from the test server, scrub them by hand of all test gear, and any 'privileged' equipment, titles, etc, and grant their wish to continue to play as a group of friends, on a live server.

Had we been aware that being a little extra kind to these folks would cause such an uproar, there is no doubt we would not have taken this step. However, due to the current situation, I find myself apologizing to you for allowing this situation to occur.

We are in the process now of removing the characters that we copied to the live servers. Obviously, we overstepped the bounds of kindness in attempting to thank these people for their efforts in testing, and we are working to rectify this situation before the end of the day today.

Thank you,

Bruce "Froech" Ferguson

Senior Producer, EverQuest II

community reaction:

Aphlos@Lucan DLere wrote:

Jesus Christ Bruce, man do I feel like an idiot.

I personally vouched for you on another forum when some talk cropped up about you taking over for Scott, because I've worked with you before you joined SOE. I'm not taking back the things I said, but wow, this is much below the caliber I expected.

You have allegations that:

* a staff member gave away free gear

* gave access to staff-only abilities to non-staff

* transferred specific characters against normal policy or mode of operation

* somehow guild levels appear inflated

* gear was almost definitely allowed to be transferred over, not "scrubbed"

And you responded to none of that. You gave this community a guilt trip for trampling on a good samaritan deed. Are you serious?

Think about this. You decided to allow a small subset of the test server population move over to live servers as some kind of "reward"? What about everyone else on test? What did this guild magically do that made them such a huge asset to SOE? And you've not responded to the other allegations which do have some evidence to at least support them if not prove them outright.

This is being handled very horribly, and I for one will come right out and say it's being handled far less ably than I have seen from you in the past. This is not the way to start out your new job as Sr. Producer by snowing over people and trying to use a guilt trip to smooth things over.

I'm very sorry to just rip into you in public like this, but I'm not an employee, I'm a customer, and an darn right offended one. You likely know I run my own gaming service if you realize who I am, and you know I have my own staff and there would be no apologies for the offender in a situation like this. There would be disciplinary action and immediate re-assurance to the customers that what happened is inexcusable, totally undefendable and measures would be taken to prevent it in the future. And I just run a little mom and pop company with only a few thousand accounts.

Yep...that GM response did it. Now you made me reply to this monster...So these valued testers you wished to thank were exclusive to one guild? That's messed up. It wasn't a group of valued testers across the board. It was a group all in one guild...yeah that's interesting.

I don't even play on test and that sounds messed up to me. Expecially after reading about this all day, and the other people who have been on test for years also. Yet it was just one/two guilds consiting of the same group of people who were honored with this charity?

show kindness to some valued members of our testing community who have been working diligently to improve EverQuest II for the last three years.

While I'm glad you're undoing it, comments like [these] make me sick. I've been on Test far longer than most of UT have, and no one showed kindness to me. This whole incident sours me, and I think you may have lost the accounts of many of your diligent testers over this, including mine.

Keth and her husband Joren, Aela and her husband Rydahl, many many others who I can't even begin to name, although I've had issues with a FEW of them in the past, those people worked VERY hard, for a lot longer than the select guild you secretly transferred. They didn't cheat or abuse powers. They didn't cause issues with live players who came over to test. You were NOT showing a kindness to the good testers, you did something shady and hidden for them that you did for no one else, nor offered to any of the other testers.

Now what you've done is lost the people who ARE the good testers, you're deleting a guild that should never have been copied and in the meantime, that guild is still on live, using gear they brought over from test, on their new characters as they level them up. They've already stated they are never coming back to test no matter what.

Sorry, SO sorry that test is having to go through this. It was dead already there, hope you left pvp test open cuz you're sure gonna need it now.

My girlfriend and I have been playing EQ since EQ ONE BETA.

That a LOT of money from us.

Where is our special treatment?

Why did WE have to PAY 150$ to transfer three characters a year ago?

Oh thats right...we dont "know the right people".......

[Parabellum]

There are other people here at GR.net that play EQ2? *boggles* I figured for sure I was the only rp nerd here.

@ Rocky: Basically, players are angry because SOE doled out thousands of dollars in personal favors for some of the developers friends, giving them a free service (character transfers) that cost everyone else $50/a pop. Not only that, but the transfers from the "test" server are supposedly impossible. It's like a constant beta server, if you will. We've been told for years that transfers from the test server to the live servers were impossible, and lo and behold, these guys got transferred en masse.

However, it gets better. One of the people involved, going by the screen name of Lucky, worked for Prima Games writing a strategy guide for EQ2. He was given a suite of in-game developer abilities to help him do this. However, Lucky used these developer abilities to get gear, in-game money, and other things for himself and his guildmates. Imagine if UbiSoft gave a few select people hidden console commands to use in online play, and then those people turned around and used those commands to gain an unfair advantage in MP games against other players. That just BEGINS to describe what happened.

Now, if that isn't bad enough, Lucky and his band of merry men then were able to somehow get transferred off of the test server onto a live server (which is supposedly impossible), taking their ill-gotten loot with them. Things that everyone else has had to put in hundreds of hours of play time to get, he and his fellow dufuses got by cheating. And *gasps* one of the developers from Sony helped them do it.

Edited December 15, 2007 by Parabellum

[Rocky]

I get it now, that does suck.

The "apology" by Bruce "Froech" Ferguson that Pave quoted though is astounding. Could he have been more unprofessional? That's really shocking.