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 |  | It's BAAAAACK - the Grab Bag |  |
|  | Posted By: Sanya Thomas | 2002-06-21 19:43:21 |  |
| |  |  Taken from the feedback forms you've been lovingly filling out! But first, some gentle reminders on behalf of the CSR team:
Q: (Insert question about the appeal process here)
A: Guess it’s been a few months since we covered the whole appeal thing, so let’s go over Appealing 101. (Note to people who have been writing to take issue with my use of the masculine gender when referring to non-specific people – I say “he” when I mean “he or she” because, well, it’s technically proper grammar. No offense intended.)
For the best and fastest results:
** Choose the correct option from the menu. If you’re stuck in the landscape (and the /stuck command doesn’t get you loose), you want us to respond as fast as possible. Sending your “I’m trapped” appeal to the main, non-emergency queue could mean a several hour wait – but selecting the “stuck” option from the menu will get you help in just a few minutes. Same with all the other options – your high priority problem will be dealt with much faster if you use our system to tell us where in the priority list you are. There’s no little elf in a pointy hat routing the appeals – it’s all done by the program itself.
** Be detailed. The most time consuming aspect of customer service is gathering information. If we know what your problem is before we talk to you, we may be able to have a solution ready before you even lay eyes on one of our CSRs. Sending an appeal that says “help,” and then appending it to read “help NOW” is not going to be terribly informative to our brilliant but not omniscient staff. Tell us names, zones, times, anything we might need to solve your problem.
** Be specific. “My quest is broken” means a CSR is going to contact you, and ask what quest, what step you’re on, what exactly went wrong, and so forth. If you give us that information in an appeal, your problem will be fixed (assuming it’s not an issue that needs a developer to address it) much faster.
** Don’t try to work around the system. If you send your non-emergency problem to a queue like the stuck list, the CSR will just move it to the proper queue without talking to you =)
** The bug appeal queue is different from the others. You won’t hear back from a person. Instead, two people on the strike team read every single bug appeal, and add it to the list. There are actual humans reading this queue. They are sitting twenty feet away from me. Their entire job is reading this stuff and verifying the problems. But you won’t hear anything from them, because if they answered each appeal, they would have no time to read the appeals. On a related note, please don’t send your bug appeal to the regular queue. If you do so, the CSR who talks to you is only going to send your appeal to the bug queue. The time he spent doing this might have been better spent helping someone with an emergency. That person with the emergency could be you next time, so help us help you.
** Name violations are another area you won’t hear anything back from us. We do read them, we do take care of them, but there is a priority order here as well. We are committed to removing the worst first – racial slurs, open obscenity, etc.
** Escalations are not visible. If the CSR told you he’d send it to the bug queue, he did it. If he told you he could not assist you, and would need to escalate your appeal, that is exactly what he did. The supervisor queue is not visible with the tools you have to see the status of your appeal. Someone WILL get back to you as soon as they can, unless the issue at hand was a bug.
** If you send a harassment appeal, make sure you’re being harassed. Please don’t appeal people who walk up, say something insulting, and then leave. This person is a simpleminded jerk, not a harassment appeal waiting to happen. The key difference between harassment and simple jerk behavior? The jerk has an extremely short attention span, and walks away. By the time you’ve finished appealing him, he has already left, and we can do absolutely nothing. Unless he said something really, really foul (“ur a stoopid noob” is not really, really foul), just let it go, or /ignore him. Harassment is repeated bad behavior after you have politely requested that the individual go away and leave you alone. If that’s the case with you, by all means, contact us and choose the harassment option, and provide the name of the evildoer, so we can take care of the problem.
** Cancelling appeals is easy. If, in the heat of passion, you decided to send an appeal and then think better of it, you CAN cancel it without having to log out and in to get the pop up refresh window. Just type /cancelappeal (all one word), and it’s gone.
** Emailing us for help? Make sure you give us an account login name when you do so – some of you have more than one email address and more than one DAOC account, and it’s not always possible for us to tell which account you need help with.
Hopefully, you’ll never need to talk to us. If you do, we want to take care of your problem as fast as possible. Thanks for checking out these tips.
Q: How exactly do the attribute caps work?
A: Three factors here, separate caps that stack with each other. Here’s how to calculate your caps:
1) Item bonuses = 1.5 times your level, rounded down.
2) Combo buffs (that buff two stats) = 1.5 times your level, rounded down.
3) Single buffs = your level
Add those three things, and that’s your stat cap. At level fifty, your cap is whatever your stat is plus 200. I am not entirely clear at this time how realm ability buffs calculate into this formula, and I’ll try to get that for next week, but the above is the basic formula.
Q: Does having stealth higher than 50 affect movement speed while stealthed, damage done in Perforate Artery, and increase your detect hidden range?
A: No, no, and yes.
Q: In an earlier grab bag, you told us that 2H weapons are modified by strength, and thrust weapons were modified by strength and dexterity. Well, what about 2H thrust weapons?
A: 75% strength, 25% dexterity.
Q: Regarding Spirit Ward Shield, does it decrease the chance the spell will land, or decrease the duration of the spell when it does land?
A: This answer applies AFTER 1.51 goes live, since it’s a little screwy right now. When it is working properly, it will decrease the duration of the spell. The chance to land is simply your level versus the level of the caster. (On Mordred, that is still true, except for that server we’ve removed a multiplier for level differences. There’s still a level difference, but it is not as marked.)
Q: For 1H/shield users, do you block AND parry, or block OR parry? What I mean is, if I have a 10% chance to block and a 10% chance to parry, will I block/parry 10% of the time or 20%?
A: It doesn’t work exactly that way, because block and parry are at different points in the order of combat resolution. (For more information, see an earlier grab bag – the Herald is fully searchable.) It’s impossible to give you percentages, because you only have the chance to parry what you don’t block.
Q: Do +pac items do anything?
A: Nope. Most +skill items increase damage taken or given. In the case of the pac line, the only way it could do “more damage” would be to make the spells have a longer duration, which would be… interesting. So, we’ll either change the way +pac works, or do like we did with evade and simply remove items with that bonus and add more appropriate stats. I have no ETA on a change, but it is something we are aware of.
Okay! Keep sending those feedback forms - except for Appealing 101, everything this week came straight from the forms. Heck, everything in the last few patches have come from our team leads, our testers, and those forms.
Have a nifty weekend; we'll see you Monday.
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