Halloween Quest

[Quinner Sparrowhawk]

I'm sure that everyone here got the quest done on the first night and got the bone mask in short order so I probably won't get much sympathy.

I was laboring under the false impression that when the MOTD stated until the 14th that the 14th was included. Just in case, I attempted to complete the quest on Sunday, the 13th.......

The NPC's despawned at 12am, GMT. I did not complete the quest. I guess I was also laboring under the misperception that SOE always measured time by PST, not GMT.

I have to say that I feel cheated, lied to, and ignored by the powers that be. And if one more person tells me that I should not have procrastinated, I will become enraged. I planned my questing according to the information I was given. (Of course, the fact that some of the quest mobs and sources of items were evercamped did not make it easy to do any of it.)

I come back to EQ, all happy and ready to finally progress through the upperlevel content and SOE stabs me in the back. In the past, I have always been an SOE loyalist but I can only take so much betrayal. I don't know if I will bother to continue playing EQ at all or any other of SOE's products....

[Redi]

It's crappy that they got their signals mixed on when the quest was going to end - especially since it wasn't working well for the whole time (WC pumpkins just got fixed recently, no?).

It's not personal, though. You weren't stabbed in the back or betrayed. They just screwed up.

[Kcalehc]

- Due to the issues in the Halloween events the time they will be available has been increased. The events will now remain available until the morning of Monday, November 14th.

Thats what the patch message said (copied and pasted from it). And as a moment past 12am on the 14th is 'the morning of the 14th' then it is entirely accurate for them to end it then. You lucked out because you misunderstood. It happens...

[Winenose]

I think the real issue here is that the quest ended at midnight GMT, not PST. For like if you were raiding sunday night and thought "oh, it's still 9 hours until midnight in America", I'll complete the quest after raid.. and got screwed, it's not a good feeling.

Patches always happen by SOE time, meaning when they say "start at 4 am and last for 9 hours" it REALLY means that the servers come up 11 pm for me and not 1pm (4am+9h). It's especially "nice" after something broke or new expansion as you can imagine.

So, there you have 2 contradictory time systems used by SOE and that's the real problem. If you kill events by midnight GMT, do the patches at 4am GMT also!!!

[Ilona]

So, there you have 2 contradictory time systems used by SOE and that's the real problem. If you kill events by midnight GMT, do the patches at 4am GMT also!!!

Hear, hear!

[Ndaara]

i got screwed, too. i came in to finish it up sunday night PST, and none of the NPCs were up. they put out a few messages saying they would be resolved by the next morning, and please quit petitioning about them, so i gave up (as i had most other nights, due to evercamping) and came back the next morning to a message that all the NPCs were gone now and hope you enjoyed it!

at least it kinda makes sense that they went away at midnight GMT but no one ever said that, until i read it here just now. i was working on bits of it on 3 characters and just my luck, none of them got any of it done =p /sigh

at least on my server, there were issues with the NPCs even being up, let alone being camped. so yeah... poorly implemented and all... oh well, that's the way it goes i guess....

[Taadieri]

Actually, they went away at 2:30am GMT (7:30pm GMT). Given that odd time and the fact that all the GMs responding that night were responding as if it were a bug not a planned shutdown, it seems clear that this was a screw-up of some kind at SOE.

Overall, I loved the Halloween quest. It was creatively designed. The missions/tasks/quests were varied and fun. The reward offered appropriate stats for the characters' levels and for the time required to complete the quest. It is slightly better than what someone might get for similar effort outside holiday events but not extremely so and the fun click effect encouraged many people that have better gear to complete the event anyway.

Unfortunately, the implementation was very poor and the repeated problemns left many players feeling more frustrated than if there had been no event.

The problems started with the failure of 3 events out of 5 to return the proper flags for the first 3 days of the event. They continued with having half the NPCs for the Trick or Treat even stop responding for several hours a week into the event. Having to fight over a limited number of scarecrow spawns with lines of players doing the quest and even worse hordes of people camping the parts for resale because special halloween mobs in WC were not spawned until 4 or 5 days before the end of the event was probably the worst screw-up.

Having the whole event end several hours before the time stated in the MOTD was just the final straw for many people and the complaints are entirely justified.

So, kudos to the designers that thought up the event and many thanks to the GMs, to Ngreth and to others at SOE that worked to resolve the problems as they came up, but a big wish that whoever was responsible for programming and testing the event and pushing it live had done a better job.