Players grass Blizzard GM up for naming violation, get bans

[Righ]

BOFH

[Trippy]

I'm not exactly clear on what happened there but it looks like GFrazier aka Geoff Frazier aka Nebu in Kali Compton either himself abused his board moderating privileges or got another moderator to ban people/delete threads etc. Rumor has it that GFrazier was fired from Blizzard (hence the immediate opening for a Web designer) over this incident.

[Nebu]

For all of the new people:  I am not nor have I ever been affiliated with Blizzard.  I am not Geoff Frazier.  Please DO NOT SEND ME ANY PM's.

That is all.

[schild]

For all of the new people:  I am not nor have I ever been affiliated with Blizzard.  I am not Geoff Frazier.  Please DO NOT SEND ME ANY PM's.

We would have banned you if you were. I'm surprised anyone thought that, anyway.

[Margalis]

Dude, that's lame how you made a clan that clearly broke the naming guidlines then closed a bunch of threads when people called you on it.
...

Did anyone actually send you PMs or is it just a pre-emptive strike?

[schild]

Technically, Bat Country shouldn't have been allowed. Particularly on an RP server I guess.

But then, the only thing Blizzard reps seem to be good for is ridiculous bannings and procrastinating on the reply. This however, stems back through the history of Blizzard. They've always had, quite possibly, the worst customer service in the industry. Perhaps behind Interplay - but that's a personal story and sample size of 1 on my part.

I will always stand by my original assumption that their inability to handle customers and their abysmally slow patch speed will be WoW's downfall. At the rate most people are going, any numbers blizzard releases after 6 months from release, that are anywhere near half the original boxes sold will be highly suspect. Whatwith Guild Wars coming out and all.

[Merusk]

I will always stand by my original assumption that their inability to handle customers and their abysmally slow patch speed will be WoW's downfall.

My god, something I actually agree with you on. I've said the same thing for a while.  It's the more 'fun' of the current MMOs and the reduction of catassery is a real kick in the pants, but I can't stand the update schedule.  Ditto on their apparent lack of any real communication with their customer base or understanding of what makes a successful MMO.

Top that off with a healthy dose of, "Bots? It's your job to let us know if they're out there," and a zone where mobs have low HPs and High Cash drops and WoW is all set to be a short-term game.

I keep watching and thinking, "It's just like SOE circa Abashi."  I can only wonder how long the Bliz' fanbase's forgiveness can last.


That web designer position was advertised at least as far back as December.  GF may or may not have been fired, but they've been looking for a web designer for a while.  Ever since the Korean WoW site went live there's been a complaint that the US site sucks.  Comparing the two sites, I think it's a pretty valid complaint.

[Signe]

I've always liked the name Geoff.

[Soukyan]

Dude, that's lame how you made a clan that clearly broke the naming guidlines then closed a bunch of threads when people called you on it.
...

Did anyone actually send you PMs or is it just a pre-emptive strike?

I believe HRose thinks he is the same Nebu as GFrazier.

[Righ]

It was this Nebu

[Nebu]

Did anyone actually send you PMs or is it just a pre-emptive strike?

This time it was preemptive.  I had gotten a few during the WoW beta period here and even more on other forums.  Most of them were kiss asses attempting to sweet talk me out of beta keys.

I believe HRose thinks he is the same Nebu as GFrazier.

HRose knows who I am from the Wish beta.  I actually appreciate the time and thought the guy takes in analyzing games.  If he could learn to tame the anger and be concise in his analyses, he'd probably have a few fans.

[Pineapple]

I'm not exactly clear on what happened there but it looks like GFrazier aka Geoff Frazier aka Nebu in Kali Compton either himself abused his board moderating privileges or got another moderator to ban people/delete threads etc. Rumor has it that GFrazier was fired from Blizzard (hence the immediate opening for a Web designer) over this incident.

Good. They need to clean house a little. They also need to put distance between themselves and Kali Compton, who are some of the biggest griefer gank assholes in the game.

Now if they could just respond to support tickets faster then 2 days, or even never, then they might be going in the right direction.

[kaid]

I find WoW fairly amusing to play at the moment but I have to agree with schild that the glacial rate of patchs is likely going to be its downfall. EQ2 already has a clear roadmap of where they are going and what they intend to do expansion wise.  They also seem to have the willpower and programers to actually produce those on the time table they are dicussing.

Love it or hate it content is a huge deal in mmrpg and I simply do not think WoW will be able to keep up. Given the number of level 60s I see on one of the most recent low pop servers I would guess in another 2 to 3 months anybody who wants to be maxed level likely will be. If you let the game lead you by the nose and follow the quest paths laid out for you leveling goes by very very very rapidly.

Also I am still just baffled that blizzard released their game with the shittastic patching scheme it has. My god even a small company like cryptic managed to make a professional patching scheme for their game why the hell can't blizzard.


kaid

[Pineapple]

Also I am still just baffled that blizzard released their game with the shittastic patching scheme it has. My god even a small company like cryptic managed to make a professional patching scheme for their game why the hell can't blizzard.


kaid

Because Blizzard are newbs to the MMOG realm. Not newbs to game making or even online, but the patches for Diablo 2 didnt exactly have as hot a timeline. Its a new ballgame for them.

EQ on the other hand has really fine tuned their patching and information process over the past year and a half. Like the game or not, their patch info and patch process has been solid.

EQ's design changes have been interesting and professionally thought out, even if you dont like a particular design decision. They have become good at the live game aspect.

Blizzard are showing some growing pains in support, patching, other areas. They will eventually get it together. Hopefully the success wont go to their heads.

[Alkiera]

Blizzard are showing some growing pains in support, patching, other areas. They will eventually get it together. Hopefully the success wont go to their heads.

Diablo II 1.10.

That is all.

Alkiera

[Rasix]

Blizzard are showing some growing pains in support, patching, other areas. They will eventually get it together. Hopefully the success wont go to their heads.

Diablo II 1.10.

That is all.

Alkiera

[Pineapple]

Diablo II 1.10.

That is all.

Alkiera

Yes, I know they have done online games before. This is why I pointed out that an MMOG game is a different sort of beast. They are new to that TYPE of online game. It really is not quite the same thing.

They do have a few things to learn, or at least modify in their process.

[WayAbvPar]

I think the point was that DII 1.10 took SO long to come out that it was barely relevant. At least that is my recolllection of it.

[Toast]

I think the point was more along the lines of a vault-esque provoking of fans of World of Warcraft. Regarding Diablo 1.1: what kind of resources are you going to commit to patching and updating an online game that generates no revenues?

That being said, slow patch rate combined with fast levelling curve is definitely cause for concern. But, mainly it will only be powergamers who are impacted. They are vocal but a minority. Most casual players (like me) would be happy with some new instances, some pvp, and maybe a raid or two.

[Nija]

Slow to patch? They fixed Scarlet Monastary farming pretty swiftly, after they realized it happened.

Actually, common knowledge DOESN'T know that it's been fixed. You're a rogue, you stealth to Doan, you kill him, you stealth, sap, and loot that chest, then exit the instance. Repeat. You take your 7 staves and 10 daggers to brill and sell, each one shows up as 1.6g or 1.8g in the trade window.

You're only getting 40s for each one, though, if you actually check yourself.

No high end content? Please. Shit just isn't in the game yet, but it's sitting there. And if you look around on other forums, you can find screenshots of places that have been "explored" but are "closed". Let me run through a list, off the top of my head, of places I've been that aren't "open" yet.

Caverns of time, Tanarais. Level 60-61 dragons all over here. Looks like a high end 5  man instance.
Uldamn, Tanaris. No idea what's going here. Perhaps another RAID place.
Silithius, south of Tanaris. Hive-mind colony of crazy ants. No idea what's happening in here.
Dune Maul, Feralas - Supposedly another 50-55 instance for 5 man groups.
The Emerald Dream - Feralas again, covered in 60-61 dragonkin. RAID place, I'm guessing
Medivh's tower - Deadwind pass no clue on this one
Hyjal, the entire zone - nobody knows.
Strange looking closed off areas near Furbolgs in Felwood and Azshara - these will probably lead to all kinds of new shit, considering these furbolgs have their own faction, and control the path to Winterspring.
Molten core - this place was open the last month(?) or so of beta, yet the first time it was accessed was last week. This shit is in the game, yet nobody really knows what is in there. It's not been documented and Thott'd out yet.

What it boils down to is that people have spent 50-100 hours "farming" Blackrock Spire and they're not even done "farming it out". That's one place.

I guess I could add Scholomance to my list, since it's so fucking buggy it's not really that accessable yet.

Also, have people already forgot that they added Maraudon in a patch? A single dungeon that's bigger than every single dungeon in AC2 combined, released in a 26 meg patch.

DIZ GAME SUX I WISH IT HAD CONTENT LIKE THAT AC2 GAME AND STUFF, PLUS THE GFX SUX I WISH IT LOOKED LIKE EQ2 SO I COULD SEE DOUBLE DIGIT FPS ONCE PER DAY.

OTOH, lag has been awful lately. I don't see 'patch speed' as being a problem. Lag might lead to bad things, though. I've not seen an insta cast spell that has taken less than 2 seconds in the last 2-3 weeks.  Queue isn't that bad, even with 300 in line. Hell, increase it again if it'll fix the lag. (I have no idea why login processing lags looting/spell casting)

My rant for the day.

PS: don't nerf paladins.

EDIT: Also, if you want to be a l33t haxx0r, open up some of your local .mpq files with WinMPQ and look over the overhead map of the entire continent of Northrend. Sitting right there in your data files which came from your retail CD, or open beta client. I'm guessing that when EQ2 announces it's first pay-to-play expansion, Blizzard is going to drop the Northrend bomb on them. I've not found much more than the graphical maps, but I've not spent much time looking at it.

[schild]

Fixing game-breaking exploits does not equal patching. And comparing WoW to AC2 is TOTALLY UNFAIR.

[Rasix]

Heh, yah. Instacasts haven't been insta for a week or two and that's on a low pop server.

We should set you up for the blog.  But I think it might stunt your otherwise great bursts of common sense beat downs.

Hit 60 yet? I think I saw on wowrankings that you're close.

[Rasix]

Fixing game-breaking exploits does not equal patching. And comparing WoW to AC2 is TOTALLY UNFAIR.

What is it then?  Hell, you look at most companies and they patched at what we'd consider a glacial pace.  I don't remember Dark Age doing interesting in the brief amount of time it took me to quit their game. When I came back, they kept adding things, THEY PROMISED WOULD BE IN BETA.   What game has an acceptable patching rate that hasn't been out for a while or is just adding shit they listed on the box? (HINT: don't bring up CoH)

He's comparing it to AC2 because I believe it's the last game FPDoMs played as a group.  It was a good PVP experience but the game was so goddamn buggy and hacked together, getting huffy about WoW patching and state of game seems laughable.

[Nija]

Nah, i've not hit 60 quite yet. I've saving up rested exp for that and helping people do wailing caverns and scarlet monastary runs.

And Maraudon every now and then, even though i've been through there 23432433333333333 times.

I think I might sit down for 5 or 6 hours with my tree friends in Felwood and hit 60 tonight. Depends on who is doing what, though.

Rogues being able to do SM runs wasn't a game breaking bug. Who else will pay 300g for a shitty bow that gives +14 agi?

Azshara is probably the most 'gamebreaking' thing going on now. They have already done one stealth fix to those birds though (lowered the item drop rate by probably 500%) and I'm sure they'll add more soon.

edit: i also added in the ac2 refrence because I find it quite funny (note: if you dont find it funny, remove stick from ass) that wow has more dungeon content in a single patch than AC2 has overall.

[kaid]

Most of the exploit fixes that they have done are back end patchs to the servers that do not require going through the hell that is their patching.

I shit you not the first time I tried to patch the game I had to put a bogus password in at the log in prompt before it put me correctly to download the patch. My valid password simply would not work. Once I patched it my real password now works fine.

Yes compared to eq2 they are noobs and eq2 should deffinatly and does have a better patcher scheme. I however compared them to cryptic makers of COH who are also mmrpg noobs of a much smaller dev house and they managed to make a very good patcher that does not make me swear violently or use fake passwords to trick it into working.


kaid

[Righ]

Azshara is probably the most 'gamebreaking' thing going on now. They have already done one stealth fix to those birds though (lowered the item drop rate by probably 500%) and I'm sure they'll add more soon.

The farmers will always pwn the players for drops, cash, et al. Reducing the drop rate only increases the resale value to non-farmers, who now are very unlikely to see the drop outside of a trade. Game breaking by design. The sky really is falling in this case.

[Nija]

No they won't.

Here's why -

I play on a PVP server, and I've been playing these games since the dawn of time. I've met many people through the years. A few I know happen to be on alliance, on the same server on which I'm horde.

So we crossteamed in Azshara - two horde shamans, upper 50s. Two alliance players, upper 50s, a mage and a warrior. We ran around together slaughtering farmers from each side. So much in fact they started grouping up together and completely stopped farming birds, and started camping our corpses. We made /trade "playername" macros so when our alliance friends were killing horde farmers, we'd spam the horde guys with trade requests.

It's great fun and I'll start doing it "fulltime" once I'm 60.

PS: it's easy to tell who is a farmer and who isn't. If the character is a level 60 rogue using a 28 dps sword, unguilded, CHANCES ARE he's in a basement in Shanghai working for $1/hr.

[schild]

Doing anything "full time" in an MMOG is the first and only necessary sign that says "put down the keyboard, back away from the monitor, go the hell outside and seek a support group."

[sinij]

 GFrazier

Couldn't happen to more deserving guy.

[Paelos]

Doing anything "full time" in an MMOG is the first and only necessary sign that says "put down the keyboard, back away from the monitor, go the hell outside and seek a support group."

But the light, she burns!

[Nija]

Doing anything "full time" in an MMOG is the first and only necessary sign that says "put down the keyboard, back away from the monitor, go the hell outside and seek a support group."

"full time" in quotes, means that "whenever i'm playing, i'll probably be doing this."

NS captain anal.

[Nebu]

We made /trade "playername" macros so when our alliance friends were killing horde farmers, we'd spam the horde guys with trade requests.

It's great fun and I'll start doing it "fulltime" once I'm 60.

Frustrating people for fun... where have I seen threads about this before?

<sighs>

[Rasix]

It's frustrating EBAY farmers.  No harm in that.

The crap we did in UO was downright sinister compared to that.

[Nebu]

It's frustrating EBAY farmers.  No harm in that.

The crap we did in UO was downright sinister compared to that.

Are you proud that you spent your time in UO annoying people?  I mean damn Rasix, you're a mature, intelligent, and very articulate person.  I'm sorry, but being an ass is never ok.  Your fun comes at the expense of a real person.  Yes, this is a carebear attitude... but I struggle to understand how anyone could think that their fun is more important than the fun of another.  We're all responsible for our own behavior.  

As for the EBAY farmer part... isn't that up to Blizzard to handle?  They do have legal and in-game mechanisms to handle these people.  

This vigilante shit really pisses me off.

[Signe]

He's mature, intelligent and articulate NOW, but  UO was EONS ago.  He's soft and mushy these days and wouldn't hurt a fly, I'm sure.  I bet he even shed a tear for his poor, dead camels.

I was bad in UO, too, but now I'm very, very sweet.  

Really.