We are currently doing Valakas raid on bartz server several of us crashed inside while fighting valakas when we logged back in we were in town there are no gms now and we need someone to put us back. Please respond as soon as possible. My fellow members are in there dying and im stuck in town. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah this is horrible hearing your clannys getting frustrated because so many random disconnects. We need a GM NOW on Bartz server to help us out here. I got disconnected with 4 other people at the same time 30 minutes into fighting Valakas and when I relogged in 1 minute later I was feared by Valakas still running into the wall in Godard with the rest of them. If we don't take Valakas down I blame the GM/NC for not being around to over see this and make sure it went smoothly. We should get full reimbursement of quest items, adena, items used, and exp. Some people right now that are 75 are fighting regulardless of being down 15%+........ NC HELP!
I suggest this being brought up on your Monday meeting and discussed. You have assured us that events like this is always being monitored by GM's and in this case something failed. People kept disconnecting and once they logged back in (usually within 1-2 minutes) they found themselves in the nearest town.
The rules state:
When restarting at the Lair of Valakas or the Hall of Flames after a server returns to service, if a player fails to log in within 30 minutes, the character will be transported to the nearest town upon reconnection.
1. So, what happened here? Obviously there is a major bug somewhere as the above rule did not apply!
2. Where were all the GM's that supposedly monitor all these events?
3. People worked their butts of and lost 15% +++ percentage points. I can assure you that loosing this at level 76+ is a MAJOR time loss in trying to XP that amount back. How will you deal with this?
4. All the time that was lost upon this can not be given back but some kind of symbolic gesture would be much appreciated and at least, an explanation to WHY you did not have ANYONE available to help us during this event. Shame on you.
I hope Mistryl or GMSpam will address this in someway as it was a major disaster.
G/L finding a GM online to help you at the time of any crisis. They don't have online Gms anymore, which is a crime considering how many users are coughing up subsciption fees for this game.
Don't post here if you have nothing to add Bhodosativa.
I've also noticed that they keep that announcment that they had at the beginning of C4 going every hour. Says response times can be low but everytime I do a /gmlist there are no GMs providing service. As I understand it there is a way for GMs to go on without having their name show up I guess to avoid being spammed for personal petitions when someone recognizes them. But having them stay in that or not even log in at all is really sad.
All in all the support ticket system on this site is the more effective way to get through to them or even pming spam or... someone else that's a mod? (So many have come and gone so quickly that I don't know who else to say but spam)
But for something active like a raid where the rules of the event are not working needs NCs attention. If there are any GMs I'm **** sure they would keep tabs on the first Valakas killings or else what's the point of adding him to the game? What I mean by this is they'll throw it in their newsletter and on the main page saying they are all proud of you.. even if they didn't even care about you when it happened O.o
When we were raiding Antharas, they put up an announcement that the servers were going to be restarted. We petitioned and shortly after a GM showed up, looked around, then petitioned us back that they would delay the restart. Something similar should have happened here.
The thing was we DID petition gm earlier that morning letting them know we would be raiding Valakas ... Its over now and isnt nothing to do about it this thread is no longer needed as it wa sonly posted as a hope to contect gms during the raid. Please feel free to delete it thanks.
We tried it on Kain yesterday. We petitioned 24 hours before Raid started. Actually one gm was there ,but vanished as Valakas appeared. We had discons and people were back in Town, as they logged back.
We stopped after a hour. We didnt get any help .We didnt get any response from our petitions.
Was a lot of wasted time for about 180 ppl.
Even if they didnt help on Bartz or Kain ,they should give the exp back who participated. Atleast that they should do.
Why does it always take so long to get an answer on hot irons like these? Afraid to burn some fingers?
Yes, it was rushed. Yet again. Loads of bugs made it in, some even dating back to the C2 and C3 launches. This bug is, as with the sweep bug, one of the more ludicrous ones, seeing how both kill a mayor part of the game. This bug here even kills one of the key selling points of C4.
"Oh! Looky! We got dragons! Shame you can't really kill 'em though since we can't code for our lives and have to wait for Daddy Korea to fix things."
:( When I heard PDA was going for Valakas, I wondered aloud in vent if "they will crash like the other server did". Guess that's what happened :/ What a complete waste of everyones time. Zaken anyone?
Its clear that the gms want us Gustin people to be the first to defeat the new dragon again. Please give up, we will post on how its done soon enough! :D
People shouldn't be crashing out in the first place though, now should they? Even if you did tell them days in advance, you'd still need to petition the time OF the course, if you did crash. I'm assuming not everyone bombed out. And you'd be lucky if you petition and it didn't get auto closed :/
Why would you try it when it's known that it's bugged?
The GM staff has been very clear that they will not respond quickly to anything these days. It wouldn't be right to get valakas raiders bumped ahead of everyone else, just because they're attempting a known-to-be-bugged encounter.
Does anyone know what's the reason for the diminished gm staff?
Did they get moved to a different game temporarily, or just downsized?
Does anyone know what's the reason for the diminished gm staff?
Did they get moved to a different game temporarily, or just downsized?
Cheap support. They have their subscriptions in place, most of them farmers, why should they care? They reduced the number of GM staff, checked the amount of dropped subscriptions and didn't see much of a change so they left the number of GMs low or at none.
I think the real problem is not that it takes a long time for petitions to get through, but that they don't have the GMs to handle them. There used to always be 2-3 GMs online. Now there's 1, at most? I originally thought it was because of C4 being tested, that they were all on the PTS. When C4 went live, I expected to see them all return. Not so.
What really gets me is that RustNC just made a post about getting new people into the game with C4, new advertising, promotions, etc., so you would think they'd at least continue the paltry GM service we've all "enjoyed" the past 1.5 years (too much to expect them to improve it, I suppose.) But why would they diminish the service even more? It makes no sense.
This is not the first thread where people have complained about the lack of GMs, where people's enjoyment of the game has been compromised because of the lack of GMs. I think the players deserve an answer on this, but I'm not stupid enough to think that they will actually give us one. Most likely they will let us tire ourselves out complaining about it, hoping we'll eventually forget about it and this whole thing will blow over. Either that or they'll make some excuse as to why every thread on the topic needs to be locked/deleted.
To hire a GM with the technical/interpersonal/game experience which seems to be suggested would require paying an annual salary of (guessing) at least 45k. For benefits, FICA etc. add 30% additional cost so we are talking close to $60,000 a year. That one person is only available online roughly 35 hours a week. Considering vacations and so forth, it will take at least four of these hires to add one 24/7 GM to L2. People seem to demand another half dozen or so online at any one time (my approximation) so we are talking two dozen new people at a total cost approaching $1.4 million per year, plus new computers, office space, and so forth.
So would the people who want more GMs online mind paying $100 a month instead of $15?
I think that we pay a VERY reasonable price, almost a trivial price, for a wonderful game.
I think you over estimate how much a GM can command. That's way more than my friend who GMed for Everquest got. I don't know exactly what he got paid, but it was enough that moving to a graduate student stipend wasn't a bad thing. :p
And supposedly the first tier are in India or someplace like that where the costs are lower.
Head GMs, sure, they have more skills and responsibility. But the others are just customer service jobs, only without the french fries.
We don't pay a lot, but even so w/ the number of monthly subscribers, the revenue is over $1.1 million per month. For a game that is primarily developed elsewhere. That'll buy a lotta crispy cremes!
Moreover, it appears that the number of accounts has been increasing.
So the decrease in support is disconcerting, even if it is echoed in the industry and overall economy.
Experienced Customer Service/Technical Support reps make about $10 an hour, at most, in the United States. Certain markets with abnormally high wages or a highly skilled labour force (such as LA, Houston and Seattle) might make as much $15 an hour.
As an aside, Codemasters (the producers of the US/Euro version of RF Online) hired a company called Alchemic Magic to provide in-game GMing/Customer Service. In the last few days of beta, we had GMs announcing events about 30 minutes beforehand, then appearing in random places in the world and taunting players to attack them as they spawned hordes and hordes of random monsters to defend themselves with. Of course, things got extremely hectic when members of all 3 factions in the game appeared and it became RvRvRvGM/Mobs... good times.
Anyway, my point is that hiring a passably decent Customer Service team isn't really that difficult, nor that expensive. All that really needs to happen is that the GMs are given a clearly defined range of what it is they cover, what it is that gets escalated, and what it is that gets ignored. Then you tell the playerbase the same thing. Lastly, you empower your Customer Service Reps to be able to flex a little muscle and enforce the policies that they are there to enforce. If that means changing offensive names, issuing chat-bans or even temporary bans from the game, then so be it.
From what I could tell about the lowest-tier GM staff so far, I'd be surprised if they could get anyone to CS for them, having absolutely no tools and no power to deal with the neanderthals that are the average L2 player.
All that really needs to happen is that the GMs are given a clearly defined range of what it is they cover, what it is that gets escalated, and what it is that gets ignored. Then you tell the playerbase the same thing. Lastly, you empower your Customer Service Reps to be able to flex a little muscle and enforce the policies that they are there to enforce. If that means changing offensive names, issuing chat-bans or even temporary bans from the game, then so be it.
Its clear that the gms want us Gustin people to be the first to defeat the new dragon again. Please give up, we will post on how its done soon enough! :D
I suggest this being brought up on your Monday meeting and discussed. You have assured us that events like this is always being monitored by GM's and in this case something failed. People kept disconnecting and once they logged back in (usually within 1-2 minutes) they found themselves in the nearest town.
The rules state:
When restarting at the Lair of Valakas or the Hall of Flames after a server returns to service, if a player fails to log in within 30 minutes, the character will be transported to the nearest town upon reconnection.
1. So, what happened here? Obviously there is a major bug somewhere as the above rule did not apply!
2. Where were all the GM's that supposedly monitor all these events?
3. People worked their butts of and lost 15% +++ percentage points. I can assure you that loosing this at level 76+ is a MAJOR time loss in trying to XP that amount back. How will you deal with this?
4. All the time that was lost upon this can not be given back but some kind of symbolic gesture would be much appreciated and at least, an explanation to WHY you did not have ANYONE available to help us during this event. Shame on you.
I hope Mistryl or GMSpam will address this in someway as it was a major disaster.
Respectfully
Matilda
/Bump as this question still stands, especially as the results of the raid on kain proved that it is really a bug and one that needs to be addressed.
People kept disconnecting and once they logged back in (usually within 1-2 minutes) they found themselves in the nearest town. ... So, what happened here? Obviously there is a major bug somewhere as the above rule did not apply!
If a player is disconnected or restarts while in battle with Valakas, they will be returned to the nearest town even if they re-connect within 30 minutes. This is by design and not considered a bug at this time. The feature note you mentioned specifically refers to a server down, not a player disconnection.
As for a possible crashing issue with Valakas, the QA team is investigating now.
People kept disconnecting and once they logged back in (usually within 1-2 minutes) they found themselves in the nearest town. ... So, what happened here? Obviously there is a major bug somewhere as the above rule did not apply!
If a player is disconnected or restarts while in battle with Valakas, they will be returned to the nearest town even if they re-connect within 30 minutes. This is by design and not considered a bug at this time. The feature note you mentioned specifically refers to a server down, not a player disconnection.
As for a possible crashing issue with Valakas, the QA team is investigating now.
Mistryl,
Am I misunderstanding this then?
Other Details
If the server or the NPC server goes down, Valakas’s HP will revert to the amount prior to the server going down.
When restarting at the Lair of Valakas or the Hall of Flames after a server returns to service, if a player fails to log in within 30 minutes, the character will be transported to the nearest town upon reconnection.
It's the "after the server returns to service" part of the note -- it refers to a server down, not any time a player reconnects in the Lair.
I can understand your confusion, so I can add that a reconnection or restart without a server down will cause the player to return to the closest village. (No offense taken. :))
If a player is disconnected or restarts while in battle with Valakas, they will be returned to the nearest town even if they re-connect within 30 minutes. This is by design and not considered a bug at this time. The feature note you mentioned specifically refers to a server down, not a player disconnection.
As for a possible crashing issue with Valakas, the QA team is investigating now.
Are the crashes also by design? Your bugs caused people to lose a ton of XP and items. Are you doing anything to reimburse them?
I will say this, the C4 patch notes do not mention Valakas when someone crashes/restarts, here:
If a player is disconnected or restarts while in battle with Antharas, Zaken, Baium, Anakim, and Lilith, the player will not be returned to town upon login if they reconnect within 30 minutes.
Considering all the crashes with Valakas, players should restart in the lair, not in town. Why don't they? I don't see how this can be exploited.
This isn't actually a bug, it's one of Valakas' defensive strikes, called NCNA. If Valakas is in fear of being destroyed, it will cause all major players clients to crash, thus resetting them to town. NCNA will then inform all "victims" of the NCNA skill that it is "a client side problem, not a game issue, thank you for playing."
It's the "after the server returns to service" part of the note -- it refers to a server down, not any time a player reconnects in the Lair.
I can understand your confusion, so I can add that a reconnection or restart without a server down will cause the player to return to the closest village. (No offense taken. :))
Mistryl, as it is right now nobody will even try Valakas anymore as the attack forces will risk to much (xp and items wise) with the disconnect issue still in place as those forces get masacred when they lose 1/3 of their numbers and/or key classes like 50% of all the buffers etc.
This is really such a shame as I have been inside his vulcano lair, actualy battled him and **** it looks awesome (even if the dragon is at least 3x more malicious then Antharas).
IN instances like this I doubt it was really a 'choice' rather than that's just how they did it for no real reason, and now we all have to deal with it....or not.
This isn't actually a bug, it's one of Valakas' defensive strikes, called NCNA. If Valakas is in fear of being destroyed, it will cause all major players clients to crash, thus resetting them to town. NCNA will then inform all "victims" of the NCNA skill that it is "a client side problem, not a game issue, thank you for playing."
It's the same skill Zaken used but he supposedly got nerfed - relog there, not town, whatever much good it does you when your raid party got slain because all the healers crashed and have to reload 2-5 minutes to get back. :p
So Mistryl, how about bugging the 'higher ups' about a design change, like making people not port to town from Valakas, too? Especially with all the ridicoulus amounts of crit crashes and discoonnects that seem to be connected solely to him?