Gates of Discord Expansion Goes Live on Fippy Darkpaw At Last

It is time for another update on the Fippy Darkpaw Time-locked Progression Server.  I wrote this main portion of this post more than six weeks ago, assuming the first vote around Gates of Discord would go as all past votes, passing and letting those out in front of the pack get along with their race to finish.

And then, of course, the no votes prevailed, one, two, and then three times.

Finally though the high end raiding block got their act together… or the no vote coalition wandered off to do something else… and the vote passed both on Fippy Darkpaw and on Vulak.

Of course, things could not go completely smoothly.  The expansion opened up automatically on Vulak this morning, but did not do so on Fippy Darkpaw despite the results showing that votes for opening were the winning choice.  And so it was into the forums looking for answers as people speculated whether the “yes” vote won but did not clear the magic 51% requirement.

Piestro chimed in that he was checking up on the status.  We get pretty good service from him, considering he isn’t actually the EQ community manager any more.  A few hours later, he had good news for those waiting for the expansion.

Oil has been applied to the hinges. GoD should be open shortly if it is not already.

So where are we now?

When we last looked in on a new expansion going live on Fippy Darkpaw, it was part of a struggle to get the Lost Dungeons of Norrath and Legacy of Ykesha expansions to come online.

Those two expansion were… odd… at least in terms of the Progression Server.  They did not get their own launch, but we pushed out as lesser content during the Planes of Power time frame.  Originally they were set to unlock 15 days after the Planes of Power went live and 15 days after Rallos Zek was slain respectively (this happened the same day… Go Speed Racer!), which was how it went on the previous Progression Servers.  But that turned out to have changed and a vote was required and they didn’t go live until March 12th.

Of course, March 12th put the unlock in the midst of  a tumultuous week for EverQuest.  That was the week the game converted to the free to play model, just in time for its 13th birthday.

Among other things, the change to free to play broke the Fippy Darkpaw timeline display, as it still shows LDON and LoY as locked… well, they are not lit up despite some content being shown as completed… and nothing has updated since March 14th.

Timeline stuck in time

I hope SOE finds some time to fix the timeline at some point.  But for now it appears to be broken.  At least I got an acknowledgement from Piestro that they know it is broken, though there is no word on when it might get fixed.

All of which leads us to the Gates of Discord, possibly the most aptly named MMO expansion ever, all the more so given the voting drama, though I am sure some people would nominate Cataclysm.

Discord indeed!

But Cataclysm did not ship with broken and unbeatable content.  Nor did it represent as drastic a paradigm shift in game play.  With Gates of Discord, contested, open world raid content was a thing of the past.  Such content would be instanced going forward, a precursor to what people would see in WoW just 9 months down the road.

The one-two punch of broken content and instancing has been claimed to have set the stage for the migration of many players from EQ to WoW at the end of 2004.

That is a matter of history, something for others to debate.  In the here and now there is the usual call in the forums to vote against unlocking the expansion.  This has happened with every expansion except Kunark so far, though only with Gates of Discord did it actually come to pass.

The list of Fippy Darkpaw events now stands at:

• Fippy Darkpaw server goes live with classic EQ content
• Classic EverQuest competed, February 24, 2011
• Ruins of Kunark unlocked, June 6, 2011
• Ruins of Kunark completed, June 19, 2011
• Scars of Velious unlocked, August 29, 2011
• Scars of Velious completed, September 14, 2011
• Shadows of Luclin unlocked, November 21, 2011
• Shadows of Luclin completed, December 4, 2011
• Planes of Power unlocked, February 13, 2012
• Lost Dungeons of Norrath unlocked, March 12, 2012
• Legacy of Ykesah unlocked, March 12, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, May 7, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, May 21, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, June 4, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlocked at last, June 18, 2012

The next stop is Omens of War, the last EverQuest expansion before the dawn of the WoW era.

We should see the vote for Omens of War some time in mid-to-late August I would guess.

We shall see what comes to pass then.

Gates of Discord Closer, But Still Locked on Fippy Darkpaw

Another vote has come and gone to open up the Gates of Discord expansion on the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server.  Having failed on May 7th and May 21st, this was the third unlock vote.

I’ll keep coming back until you say “Yes!”

It appeared that the raiding guilds decided to drop the obnoxious behavior and actually try to build a coalition to get the Gates of Discord expansion vote to go their way this time as they faced up against the “no” faction.

An “Occupy Norrath – Vote No” sit in

Feeling better about their chances, the raiding guilds were online early in the morning waiting for the expansion to unlock.

They were disappointed.

The anti-GoD faction won out again, but only by the smallest margin possible.  Per Piestro:

So in a stunning turn of events, the Fippy vote resulted in an exact tie. People voted yes and no in exactly equal numbers. In order to unlock an expansion at least 51% of the populace must vote yes, so GoD was not unlocked. I’ll be very anxiously awaiting the results next time.

A dead heat.  The hope for an unlock is not in vain with things running that close.  Still, it will be June 18th at the earliest now before the unlock can happen.

Meanwhile, over on Vulak, which has caught up to the Fippy Darkpaw server and now has its vote running in parallel, chances of an unlock look dim.  Piestro relayed the results:

For Vulak, it was 56% no, 40% yes, 4% don’t care.

And so the time locked progression servers run on with the Planes of Power, Lost Dungeons of Norrath, and Legacy of Ykesha as the last set of expansions to be unlocked.

Gates of Discord Vote Fails Again on Fippy Darkpaw

I figured out why the GoD vote on Flippy keeps failing, it’s the DPS classes, they fear the Berserkers massive DPS!

Alendi, in the EQ Forums

Another vote came and went, Monday morning rolled around, and the Gates of Discord expansion on the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server remained closed.

Nobody Loves Me

Now some on the forums are trying to figure out why, with the usual lack of success.  Click on the link at the top of the post for examples.

Meanwhile, there was a request to find out what the actual results of the poll were.  Piestro did not have the results to hand.  It apparently requires a developer to go in and extract results from polls.  In response to the inevitable “why don’t you just show the results by default?” Piestro answered:

The voting system is intended for more than just TLP votes, so making that change would mean every vote would be displayed. That’s not necissarily desirable.

And, of course, he is right.

When SOE is adding in things like health, power, and self resurrection potions based on simple majorities in polls,  they certainly do not want to give anybody opposing adding a potentially lucrative item to their cash shop any leverage by letting them know anything beyond vague details.  55% in favor sounds good, but if you knew what percentage of the actual playing population voted… and we don’t know that number… the percentage of ‘Yes’ votes might sound considerably less impressive.

Anyway, on the Fippy Darkpaw Time Locked Progression server, the times seem to be favoring “locked” over “progression.”  The next vote will come up in a week, but Gates of Discord won’t be unlocked until June at the earliest.

Addendum:  Piestro posted the voting result percentages.

Vote to open Gates of Discord on Fippy Darkpaw – Yes: 40% No: 58%  Ron Paul: 2%

Oddly, this second vote on Fippy Darkpaw ran concurrently with the first vote on Vulak, which ALSO failed to pass.

Vote to open Gates of Discord on Vulak – Yes: 42%  No:  56%  Harold Stassen: 2%

More on this as it slowly ceases to develop.

Anger About Discord on Fippy Darkpaw

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx

The surprise “no” vote on the unlock of the Gates of Discord expansion on the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server has some people quite annoyed.  It seems like a more aptly named expansion as each day goes by.

Gates of Discord indeed

There were threats of bad in-game behavior posted to the forums, intended to protest the results.  According to one poster on the forum (post since removed by SOE, but save here via the magic of RSS) these threats were being made good.

So the threats from Citi/TL have come true. Because GoD was not released they have now jumped the rotation and are killing everything, and then saying ” you don’t like it, vote yes for GoD”. Heck, some of them are even training people to get what they want. Is this going to be tollerated, I WOULD HOPE NOT

I suppose there is some small irony in this happening in relation to the Gates of Discord expansion, since its high level content is instanced and thus would make this sort of bad behavior much more difficult.

Cooler heads were interested in knowing how close the vote was.  SOE, however, has a policy of not releasing the actual vote count, for reasons they won’t list, which seems to me like a dubious stance at best.  Questions about the results lead to a forum thread of its own.

Initially Piestro, who seems to be on EverQuest duty again, announced that the “no” vote won by a 13 point margin.

Overall there was about a 13 point difference between No and Yes, with No being victorious. That’s a pretty significant victory.

Then questions came up as to exactly what that meant (something people should ask any time they see poll results without any context) with people trying to derive possible result scenarios.

Piestro followed this up with a single clarification.

Yes, it was 13% difference with greater than 50% of the populace voting no.

After that he left the thread to itself, which was probably wise if that was all the information he could release.

I, for example, wonder how they defined “populace.”  That seems like a very large number of people potentially, given how popular the server was initially.  I suspect that it means “eligible voters who have logged on to the server recently.”

Eligible voters was, of course, another of the points of contention that flared up in the thread.  For this round, anybody within 21 levels of the level cap were eligible, which meant characters who were level 44 or higher could vote.

This lead to the usual argument about such franchise, with one side declaring that only players at level cap should be allowed to vote, since the next expansion only matters to them, while others pointed out that if everybody pays the same subscription fee, then they all ought to be allowed to vote.

And things went down hill from there, devolving into the usual “if you aren’t at level cap then you aren’t really playing on this server” argument, which ended up out in left field arguing about tax law in the state of Washington, proving once again that you should avoid analogies at all cost.

The thread was abandoned at that point and a new thread started up in an attempt to regulate behavior based on vote outcomes, which seemed, to me, to be an effort to validate the behavior complained about in the initial quote above.  This thread devolved as well, but it is a official game forum, so what do you expect.

There *should* be a new vote up next week.  We will see what the outcome is this time around.

Gates of Discord Vote Fails to Pass on Fippy Darkpaw

Well the issues have been resolved and the results of the vote are up. I’m slightly surprised, but it appears that more of you wanted PoP to last a bit longer. The next vote will definitely prove interesting.

Thanks,

-Piestro
EverQuest II Community Manager

I am not sure what Piestro was doing posting to the EverQuest forums, being he is supposed to be the EQII guy now, but there he was answering the question that had come up Monday morning.

The vote for the Gates of Discord expansion ended and people logged on in the morning to see it unlock.

Gates of Discord

Only it did not unlock.  Nothing happened.  People were upset.

You guys really need to get this fixed, hundreds of players on in the middle of the night US waiting for release and apparently no one notices at SOE that it isn’t working right until 10 hours later?  That’s unacceptable.  Especially since this isn’t the first time it’s happened.

Please change the release time for expansions to a time of day when someone from SOE is actually in the office and paying attention.

No vote had gone against an unlock so far, but SOE had fumbled the last couple of unlocks, so the assumption most easily arrived at was “Another SOE screw up!”

Even I jumped the gun a bit.  I wrote up a “Gates of Discord Unlocked” post this past weekend, fully expecting to post it this week, only to find it will have to wait.

But then Piestro’s message was posted.  The vote had failed.

Of course, there was a message from one person who said voting was screwed up and that he had not been able to vote with any of his four accounts, an issue that petitioned without getting a reply.  So who knows how many votes got cast or counted.

So now we wait for the next vote.

According to the Progression Server FAQ, there is supposed to be a week off from voting, with a new vote coming up next week, meaning the next potential unlock date should be May 21.

But then somebody reported that there was already a new vote up.  I haven’t been able to verify this because all of the servers were down for a while and then the Fippy Darkpaw server remained locked when all the servers were brought up.

So there might be a week or two… or more… of Fippy Darkpaw staying at the Planes of Power, Lost Dungeons of Norrath, and Legacy of Ykesah expansions.

Discord remains at bay for now.

Addendum: Or not.

SOE sowed a bit of their own discord when Fippy Darkpaw was finally unlocked.

Subject: you rerolled the servers to classic EQ MORONS

yep, everyone is level 50 and you reset the server to classic.

That post was quickly deleted by SOE… they always say the posts were “moved,” but the destination always appears to be someplace beyond the reach of the forums.  But it appears that SOE did inadvertently (I hope) revert the server back to classic EQ.

Zatozia was on the forums with the following message:

The Fippy Darkpaw server is being restarted to re-enable expansion-specific content (including advanced levels) which were disabled due to the issues experienced earlier.

SOE had to prove they could indeed screw up today I guess.  Anyway, they restarted and restored everybody.  And the new poll is down as well.  In fact, when I looked, all the polls were gone from the list.

What will tomorrow bring?