Comment Not surprised, coming from Verant ... (Score 1) 207
I played everquest with a group of friends for about 2 months after the initial release, and while it was fun I have to say that the lasting impression was that Verant is not very interested in making decisions which are fair to the users.
During this early phase, there were countless bugs and errors which had a strong impact on users. The game shipped in a state where some of the player classes had abilities advertised on the box which didn't work at all in the game (until months after release).
Periodically, they would run "role playing events", whereby human beings at Verant would take control of monsters in a region and move them about and speak for them, presumably to liven up the game world. In one such event that I recall, it was a full moon and a pack of "werewolves" (really Verant admins in the guise of werewolves) descended upon an area and set about massacreing a group of players ... but then they realized eventually, "Hmm, this is strange - not a single one of the werewolves has died yet!" ... well, turns out they never tested the code well enough, and the admin-controlled entities turned out to be unkillable. So basically it was a situation in which the admins came in and just slaughtered a ton of users - and the users had NO chance to do anything about it. When they figured it out, they started yelling ,"Hey, come back, we're killable now!", but that's pretty weak for the paying customers they fucked over.
I was playing once in a game, and a bunch of robotic guards in a given town went apeshit and killed a bunch of players (myself included). Admins showed up and said ,"Hmmm, sorry, that happens sometimes ... it's a bug. I would give you your experience back, but I can't since you already took your belongings off your body" (what the fuck?)
Let's see other things ... monters can run and attack through walls ... attacking monsters don't have to worry about the z dimension (standing on a roof, a wolf on the ground can attack me, despite the 20 feet of intervening space) ...
Verant is making a ton of money, and most of their users don't seem to care that they get constantly treated like shit.
Anyway, I know this is off-topic -- I'm just saying, it doesn't surprise me. They're a bunch of wankers who don't really seem to give a shit about their customers rights, as long as they are clueless enough to keep paying to get screwed ...
During this early phase, there were countless bugs and errors which had a strong impact on users. The game shipped in a state where some of the player classes had abilities advertised on the box which didn't work at all in the game (until months after release).
Periodically, they would run "role playing events", whereby human beings at Verant would take control of monsters in a region and move them about and speak for them, presumably to liven up the game world. In one such event that I recall, it was a full moon and a pack of "werewolves" (really Verant admins in the guise of werewolves) descended upon an area and set about massacreing a group of players
I was playing once in a game, and a bunch of robotic guards in a given town went apeshit and killed a bunch of players (myself included). Admins showed up and said
Let's see other things
Verant is making a ton of money, and most of their users don't seem to care that they get constantly treated like shit.
Anyway, I know this is off-topic -- I'm just saying, it doesn't surprise me. They're a bunch of wankers who don't really seem to give a shit about their customers rights, as long as they are clueless enough to keep paying to get screwed
