GOA Homework and Server Upgrade Rumours

With the beginning of the new year i feel it's time to point the finger at GOA again and ask them to quickly do their homework when it comes to certain things the EU is still lacking in service compared to the US. When it comes to implementing new features, you wonder if GOA and Mythic talk enough about it in advance and not doing so is a reason GOA is behind schedule or if it's because GOA fails to plan their projects with a proper timeframe. Many players lost trust in GOA after the epic fail of the open beta and because some already had mixed feelings due to bad DAoC experience. Like i wrote before, nice words - especially the word soon™ - won't cut it for many players. We want results, and quick. I know its unfair to point fingers at the beta fail again and again, but so far GOA did not do anything to astonish the player base which resulted in a /bravo well done. Here is my master list of things GOA should work on...

The EU Realmwar pages are still in beta and don't work properly. There are many items missing in their database and don't show any icon or stats. The stat calculation seems to be off as well if i compare what the game shows me and what's on the website. Maybe due to some item & set bonuses not being counted properly. Very annoying is the messed up localization of the Realmwar pages. I use a German browser and for me all the items show with German names. Either take the language selection from the mainpage into account or at least get the & lang=en flag working properly. I want to read the names in the same language i play the game in! Guild experience calculation is not showing properly. The guild search needs a selection for realm side (both, O, D) as well so i can compare guilds better. The paperdoll does not reflect my character at all. And when will we get all the cool features the US has to follow the WAR campaign for our server out of the game? The EU Realmwar pages were announced on the 14th of November 2008 and since then they stayed in the same beta version stage - that's 50 days and counting to get it working.

Player Statues in the capitols are not working for EU. Those were announced with patch 1.1a also for the EU and one month later those are still not working inside the EU capitols. BTW GOA your main website news archive doesn't show the whole month (eg. for Dec2008 it ends with the Dec 13), you might want to fix that as else there is not much point for a news archive.

I had a brief chat with Nic from GOA about those issues and he told me the main problem is still the localization issue for the different EU versions and that's why the Realmwar page is not working properly yet. If the Realmwar pages are fixed, the player statues will work as well, the problem is connected like i assumed when i wrote about it earlier. According to GOA its the top priority for the website/database team atm. Let's hope the guys had relaxed holidays and will get crackin' now. As IMO it's really annoying they need so much longer time to implement features they even publicly announced as being in game. Maybe don't just copy/paste patch notes if the stuff is not working yet, but announce it properly.

Many EU players asked about the Recruit a Friend program the US is running. You can hand out an invite to a friend who can play one week for free to test the game. Apparently we might get something like this for the EU as well, so your friends can try out the game, but no ETA on this. Like with the xmas EU online buy option discount we had, the marketing vehicles GOA & Mythic use will probably never be the same and depend on the situation. IMO that's fine in general as that's pure marketing strategy and its two different companies. Only sad thing is when it involves ingame items the EU customers will probably never get their hands on, like the Signet of the Cursed Company i discovered recently, which was a reward from the US Road to War program.

One last thing I'd like to mention are rumours about some super-duper server hardware upgrades the US got and that fortress assaults and large scale RvR is no problem for the US servers anymore. I heard a lot of stuff about this but have to say that i could not find any proof for that claim. If you read the forums like WHA the US players still have similar problems then the EU players with fortress sieges when too many players are around. They also still have crashing zones or have to work around 1-5 FPS during those fights. GOA states their servers are exactly the same configuration then the ones the US uses and should upgrades be necessary ('cause the US does them) those will be done immediately for us as well. They work closely together with Mythic on the server/fortress issues. And until someone can prove different, I'd say innocent until proven guilty as especially those problems will make or break the game, i doubt they'll slack on this. If anyone has knowledge about the claims for the US servers upgrades and no problems anymore for fortress fights, feel free to share with us. But please no additional rumours, more concrete information is appreciated.