Artisan Archive
Thread: Weapon Powerups From Factories: Still Broken.
The Bug: Weapon powerups made in factories don't have stats at all. They are completely useless. This bug seems to affect other classes. Stimpacks are affected but less broken: They have stats AFTER they are removed from the crates taken from the factory. No such luck for weapon powerups.
They just introduced this bug 2 days ago. Are they going to fix it? Are we doomed to grind them out by hand for a month? Whats up with this? Weapon powerups are my primary trade.... Please don't leave them broken..... *sniff*
I just did a run and they are still broken as of Saturday the 6th.
You would think that given the current unemployment rates, that SOE could hire competent programmers. Alas, I guess this is what you get with minimum wage, inept, and thoroughly incompetent employees.
If only my IT group could get away with trying to fix one problem and breaking one or more other areas. I also wish that I could give my end users 20 minutes notice before a system shutdown, or wait until the server crashes and then report that it is down for maintenance during prime hours. Hmmmm. Aren’t you glad that SOE is not in control of something other than a game? I know I am.
Logging in is becoming a jaunt into the unknown. You never know what to expect from day to day because these imbeciles will tweak something one day, tweak it again the next day, and then maybe by the third day they will get it right.
Okay, I’m done ranting.
BoboPen
And another thing, SOE have you ever heard of the concept called testing? You know, you actually use the test server to test changes with a QA team?
Oh and SOE? Redeed this (grabs body part).
Okay, now I feel better - lol
Patch update said that equipment factories make powerups with correct attributes again. So I trustingly put my factory back up and runa test. However, based upon past experience with SOE promises of "it's fixed", I only put in enough resources to make one item. 
A couple minutes later it's done and I check it out.
The factory crate STILL does not list the attributes of the items inside the crate. (FYI for those non-factory users out there, this worked PRIOR to the 4 September patch).
So then I pop out the single powerup and check it out - sure enough, it does have the correct stats - so at least that part works.
However, the crate itself does not list the attributes - making it extremely difficult (if not impossible) to sell crates except to established customers with high degree of trust.
How many people are willing to plop out their credits for a crate of items based solely upon what the seller says is in the crate? This is like buying one of those brown paper "grab bags" - you might like what you get, you might not.
Save your redeed costs and don't put your factories back up yet - they are still broken.
How annoying. I hope this will be fixed by the 3pm EDT time for servers to go back up.
Yeah. I will make a test run. Quantity 2-5, items, not crates, just to find out what's the real story. 
WellI redeeded and tried it this morning and mine are still COMPLETELY BROKEN... I could have lived with it if the actual powerups in the crates had stats, but unlike what was posted above... they don't.
TheCRATES LIST NO STATSand the POWERUPS insideHAVE NO STATS. Thanks for the bad info posted above.. I am now up to 75 crates of worthless powerups as my supply of irreplaceable materials to make the 32/16 powerups continues to dwindle away.
Yup, saturday after daily restart, still not functional. Crates dont list stats, and powerups havent stats too. I lost time of factory, and resources for 20 crates of wery nice powerups, also lost count of makeable items on schema. Very nice. Im programmer too, so i can forgive first 2 bugs with factories, but i willl be shamed if i prog like these idiots. So much bugs, repeated bugs. Prosising of repairing. Still same bugs etc.
Robik Bandorf - Eclipse
Master Artisan, Expert Weaponsmith
WICK12345 wrote:
His information above was correct you DID get the items out of the crate with stats.... I just read elsewhere that they reverted to before fridays patch b/c it created a huge issue with something else (haven't found out what) so for a short while he was correct but as of now i belive we are back to nothing useful in the crates
Actually my favorite thing is the patch messages.. which always say they fixed something and never bother to warn you to not use factories and such. So you always get to find out the hard way that you just got screwed yet again by another bug. There should be a list in the login message of all the stuff that isn't working... especially considering that you have to burn irreplaceable resources to find it out otherwise. Thats just cold messing with people that way.. I can deal with bugs, I just can't deal with being told something is working, wasting thousands of resources then coming here and finding out they knew it wasn't working a day before I attempted to do it and they never bothered to update the patch messsage from "Factories are fixed" to "factories are broken again"..
Sorry for my rude posts above. My frustration got the best of me, and I should be able to act better on these forums.
Bugs are killing this game, and there is no excuse for how SOE implements changes. They make changes almost daily. This is a schematic (sorry I could resist) for disaster. I have never worked in an operational environment that would ever attempt to make daily changes. It is far better off to make no change than to make a change that breaks something.
If you do, you will get:
1. Users that loose faith in the technical staff
2. Users that cringe every time they log in because they never know what the system will DO to them today.
It’s bad for the users, and it’s bad for business.
Usually, a change control process shoots for one bi-monthly change or maintenance day(the day is dependent on business needs – in this case, I would assume that a Tuesday or Wednesday reboot time would work best to keep the servers up over the weekend, but also give time to fix issues before the next weekend). Changes are first made in a test environment. After days of testing, the changes are then moved to production per the maintenance day.
Only a select few production servers would be changed. These could either be by designating a few as “first change” servers, or it could be done in a round robin selection, but all the rest of the production servers are left untouched. If the changes are stable, then the rest of the servers are updated on the following maintenance day. New servers are selected for the next changes, and the process is stated all over again.
You can’t or shouldn’t make continual quick fixes. Why? Because you will get the current environment that we are in resulting in upset customers. Will we see changes as fast? No way, but we will gain the most important feature – stability. No one like to be surprised, especially customers. They want rock solid and stable systems. People will live with known bugs if they know that they are being addressed, AND see that the change control process corrects a handful of bugs every other week with NO new bugs added.
In the current environment, how much time is spent in redoing work? This is why major bugs are not being fixed because everyone has on a Fire Chief hat from Radio Shack running around with their heads cut off trying to fix things on the fly.
Right now, I feel like I am paying $15 a month to be a Beta tester (or Alpha in some cases). Why do I feel this way? I think mainly because of the daily changes. You just never know from day to day if what was working will be working the next day.
Just my opinion,
I think they reverted because of the Chef and Food factory crate bug( I'm a food maker so i know). I think the devs decided to revert to prevent them from making 25 charge items from 25 item crates(thus making 25x25 use items which is um... 625 uses) all in one crate.
Nice that they nerf nerf nerf and screw up more. I share your sentiments in that regard.
Also, the other side, is well they at least fix it eventually and actually contact me to make sure things are going smoothly so it's ok if they screw up and nerf nerf nerf. I just hope they don't do what EQ nerfers do. That would really piss me off since that's why I left that damned game.
