The site is loaded right now, so it may be hard to get in, but check it out — EQ2Flame’s LFG was just kicked from the Community Influencer’s program, and is raising hell over it.
Community Influencers are just that — people whose opinions of SOE games are influential within the community. EQ2Flames is one of the best places on the web for getting to know the EQ2 community, and is generally full of information you won’t find anywhere else. When I started on my recent guild search and (thought) I had exhausted the possibilities on my home server, EQ2Flames was the first and only place I went. And I got results I could never have gotten on the official forums. EQ2Flames is the community site everyone should read.
It’s hard to figure out why someone so VERY influential in the EQ2 community would be kicked out of the program unless they had broken an NDA or something heinous like that, but that does not appear to be the case. Not yet, anyway. Instead, they claim a lack of participation and a tendency to sensationalize the negative and harm the Community Management team’s ability to do their jobs.
It’s a PR disaster in the making.
I’m making some popcorn.
8 thoughts on “EQ2: LFG kicked from the raid.”
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Ermm… ouch. This is not going to play out in a way of which Dale Carnegie would approve.
I’m still reading the flames, on page 7 now and still exploding. Apparently, a dev’s player character name was revealed yesterday, though not by LFG. Scuttle is that triggered his booting.
And now laundry is being hung out to dry.
Someone doesn’t stop influencing the community just because he’s no longer in the CI program, after all.
Rumors that there’s a paid SOE employee in EQ2’s serverwide, #1 guild? I remember how well that worked out for EvE Online.
Mmmm, this popcorn is good.
Actually I’m surprised they didn’t do it sooner. The last infraction that I am aware of was posting that the senior producer of EQ2 was leaving before the official announcement. Sensational and in poor taste if you ask me. What ever happened to having some respect?
The difference between EVE and EQ2 is that it is general knowledge among top end raiders although only whispered about that most high end raiding guilds have some friends in high places. Do you really expect someone that has been raiding in EQ and EQ2 for 5+ years to suddenly give everything up just because they got a job at SoE?
I would expect that their guild would never know they worked at SOE unless they had no connection at all with EQ2.
Of course, I, like everyone else, figured SOE employees were telling the high end guilds how to do the epic quests; I imagined it was a formal deal where they were just flat out given the information. Now I wonder if they just relied on their employees to give the info out on the down low to their player guilds.
In EQ1, it took several months to solve the epic quests. The EQ2 ones were solved in a couple of days, but the quests are just as obscure.
Until now, I *didn’t* know SOE employees were openly “out” about being EQ2 devs in their high-end, #1 raiding guilds. I would have expected them to be in Test guilds with other devs. I have EQ2Flames to thank for telling me that info. I don’t read EQ2Flames often — who has the time to crawl through forums? — but it feels good to know that someone is out there finding this stuff out.
When I learned the #1 guild on Stromm (EQ1) when I played was widespread cheating and exploiting (and I became a victim of it as well), I immediately lost all respect for them and their accomplishments. But they had already cheated legitimate guilds of those same, first-on-server accomplishments. Now this has made me doubt the top guilds here in EQ2 in the same way.
Wow, all the excitement happens while I am away. 🙂 I think the wording of the revocation is pretty telling – they talk about influencers giving feedback and that LFG was not. There seems to be a pretty clear reference to sharing information he shouldn’t have (suspect Zygwen is right on that one, I remember being quite shocked at LFGs decision to go public on that one) and the complaint that he was saying lots on EQ2flames but not actually feeding back to SoE at all.
I’m not sure the epic accusation is fair – we were really not that well organised at the time. Working out the epics is a lot easier when you have people listing every new NPC and item in the game so that the questers who’ve done a previous step can run around and see if they trigger anything. The knowledge sharing in cross channel chat and on message boards was simply awesome – with lots of people collating information (eq2i, Brasse) so that any detail that had been discovered was available to all.
I’ll admit that most of the people were doing the epics legit, but here’s the thing. A lot of the epic quests contain objects that are only visible to someone on the correct stage of the quest — for other people, they will just be inert, unselectable objects or entirely invisible. For mine, only when a troubadour on that specific stage of the quest looked at one specific object, would they know this was for their epic.
And yet the quest was almost entirely solved in two days and entirely done in four. Given the mandatory harvesting etc you had to do, this would be about the minimal time to do the quest IF you knew the steps ahead of time.
I remember people being incredibly well organized for EQ1 epics. They had people with ShowEQ that were able to identify every new NPC in a zone, instantly, listing out the new NPCs and what they said, and all new drops. They didn’t have class specific drops back then, so people would get these things and know they were for an epic, but not whose or which step. And yet it still took them months.
It’s pretty clear to me that information is being fed to the top guilds. Did you see the full Trakanon kill walkthrough posted on EQ2Flames? Remember the guild transferred off Test? It’s absolutely clear that some players are more favored by devs than others.
Even setting aside the SOE policy to let guilds into beta, give them the best gear and weapons, and learn the raids before they go live. Day 1 of the new expansion, the favored guilds know how to do everything.
In the end, though, what the top guilds do or don’t do doesn’t really effect my own enjoyment of the game, so I’m not off making emo, drama-filled posts on EQ2Flames and canceling accounts. And heck, I appreciated the full walkthrough of my quest so quickly. Way back in EQ1, it was murder. You always had to be on the lookout for new stuff or unusual things, because it might help a class with their epic. EQ2, day two, I had a checklist 🙂 Not sure how long it’s been since the epics were put in, but everyone has at least their fabled epic now, if they were working on it at all. EQ1 took longer, but granted. each one usually included a significant number of raids as well.
Patches and Expansions usually have beta testers. The top guilds often have 1 or several people in the beta, if not their whole guild to test the raid functions. This gives them inside information even if the Devs don’t leak any. While it is possible this is what happened, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Devs did leak info either during the beta or when the patch went live.