MAJOR EVE BUG

[Souca]

So gotta love patch day, huh?

What I've figured out so far. If you have a player that is training a skill that takes them over the 1.6 mil SP point, when you log in, you will lose skill points to take you back to how many you would have had if you had trained the skill at normal speed from the begining. Got bit on two characters. First went from less than two days till Frigate 5 was completed, and 1.75 mil to 1.6mil SP. Second character had finished Astrogeology 5, logged on, got skill completed window and then lost 400k SP and Astrogeo was set back to partially trained.

As far as I can tell, if you had a skill training that would take you over 1.6 mil when they patched this morning, you are FUCKED. You will lose half of you skill points for that skill and if it takes you below 1.6 mil, you will no longer even get the 2x training speed multiplier.

I have two petitions in, but I'm terrified to play any of my accounts since this impacts all but 1 or 2 of my accounts in total. If you can't tell, I am FUCKING PISSED off right now. Coming home and being excited that you finally got a skill to 5 to find out that you lost it and now you have to wait ANOTHER FUCKING SIX DAYS is the worst kind of bullshit.

For a bit of context, I have worked the past 11 days in a row without a day off. I was suppossed to get 4 days off, but because of an idiot at work I only get two days off starting tomorrow. I had really looked forward to getting some sleep and playing some Eve on my precious two days off before I go back to work on Sunday and put in what will likely be the first of another long week of 12-16 hour days. Needless to say, this patch has the potential to fuck over my entire faux weekend and I'm a little nonplussed by it.

- Souca -

[moosejaw]

I don't play EVE and you got me pissed off at them!! :evil:

[RobinGBrown]

This is one of the reasons why I stopped playing EVE the last time, their customer service is utterly dire adn they act is if screwing you over is a perfectly normal business behaviour - I know they consider themselves 'hardcore' and therefore that anything they do you should just 'suck it up' but sooner or later their attitude is going to bite them in the ass.

I had a similar problem with the ghost training change, I've discovered as I've ben opening accounts to play them again that most of my toons have lost half a million SP on level 5 skills that they were training. Thats up to 14 days of training to get them back to 'where they were', a shitty change to say the least.

Souca I know you've been burning the candle at both ends recently but try to stick it out with the petitions - EVE support is poor so keep getting them to raise it to a more senior GM.

Lastly, to counterbalance the crappines from CCP, here's a little item of interest:

The EVE special edition retail box is falsely marketed. On the outside of the box it says that you will get a special ship and access to factional warfare. However, there's an unmentioned condition to getting these items - you have to open a new account.

Unfortunately, you can use the supplied game time card to create PLEX without running across the warning about the new account only provision.

What this means is that every single retail box can be returned to the seller for a refund after the game time code has been used in the EVE client.

Now it seems to me that a little campaign of returning retail boxes might make Atari and CCP realise that they either have to recall all the boxes or provide the bonus items to accounts that have used the codes. Or it might drop the retail box price so that it makes it the cheapest option for buying game time.

Either way, you can stick it to CCP if you want to, and legally too!



p.s. In the UK if goods are falsely described you can get a refund for them. You can also complain to the trading standards, mass produced goods like MMO retail boxes need to accurately describe what is inside them, and if there are special conditions those need to be on the outside of the box too. US laws are likely to be similar but I don't know for sure.

[Korruptor]

I feel for ya Souca.

I've played EvE before and am familiar with how much time it takes to "learn" skills. That a pretty big bug, I'd be furious as well.

[Enndo]

Eve sounds really complicated.

[Souca]

So still no response to my petitions. I have a few characters that went over the 1.6 threshold and have completed skills according to EveMon, but I know if I log into them I'm going to get fucked. I logged on to one of the two I discovered this on and tried changing the skill to something else and then back. I got he following message in a dialog:

Training Astrogeology to level 5 will take you 81,174 skillpoints above the 1,600,000 skillpoint bonus limit so it will not be trained at bonus speeds, nor will any skills after that.

So basically they went back and adjusted my training time for the previous 6 days before the patch and lowered it to 1x training time. Of course there was no warning, so I couldn't have stopped training and switched to avoid this. This has got to be the dumbest "fix" ever. If they are concerned about people queueing up a log skill when they have 1,599,999 SP to get the double time then the fix would be to make the skill train at 1x once you hit the 1.6 mark, not to make an entire skill train slow if it happens to go over the limit. Hell, even if you did the above trick to try and get 2x, the old client recalced everytime you opened the skill window. It's not like you could get ver far past 1.6 unless you just didn't play the character.

3 petitions, 2 official forum posts, no response.

- Souca -

[Thulos]

Ya they put this in very hastily because there were a very large number of people exploing the 2x training system to get an unlimited amount of skills trained at 2x speed. In typical CCP fashion they botched a fix to a botched implementation. I love EvE but CCP has very poor testing.

[RobinGBrown]

I love EvE but CCP has very poor testing.

That is it, right on the nail.

EVE is a great game ruined by a lousy company. Or to put it another way, EVE has the capability of being a resoundingly superb game but it's hedl back and dragged down by CCP and the 'hardcore' players.

Like your highschool sweetheart becoming a crack whore.

[Souca]

I hate to keep bitching, but this is really getting to me. I have 5 characters affected by this "fix" They were all within a day off completing long skills and are all now 5-11 days away. This has got to honestly be the worst experience I have ever had with a MMO. I had two miners that should have Astro 5, I had a character that was completing Frigates 5 and would be flying a Covert Ops ship tomorrow morning. The other two were working through Gunnery 4 and Frigate 5. The part that really pisses me off is that the time I was training before the patch, when the characters where below 1.6 and thus should have 2x training has been altered by the patch. They have gone back in time and made those 6 days training Astro half as effective. How the fuck can I plan for that? The new system actually makes it harder to gt over the 1.6 hump because any skill that will put you over by even 1 point will train at 1x. To continue to get your bonus until 1.6 you can only train skills that won't go over. This is the worst thing you could do to a new player.

Ugg. Even if I take the approach that this sucks, and nothing will be done about it, I'm still about a week out from the skills I needed to play this characters again.

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. I'm having a really hard week and this is only the icing on the cake.

- Souca -

[Alptraum]

after the amazingly super awesome patch.....4 out of my 5 characters were no longer training skills when I logged back in from work..despite what evemon as telling me. I to also lost some almost lvl 5 skills put back to level 3, so im again training threw level 4...which is complete BS....I to am working nealry 24/7 right now without any serious time off..so I was really pumped to be getting my toons all trained up to where they'd be useful..only to have CPP do this..its very very heart shattering to say the least.

Despite this though I'll keep playing, I just hope they dont do anymore jackass moves anytime soon like they just did with that last patch.