Hire Power

Wow, I have been ranting about how bad the whole Station Players services are for quite some time. Here's an example. If you don't know how bad the guild site service offered by SOE is, well, you've never tried using it as much as I have. It's an exercise in frustration we eventually had to abandon. The most recent problem was news articles not posting in the proper order. There's a thread about it and I have tested this and found it to be accurate.

So, I was happy to see SOE is looking to hire someone to "assist with the ongoing development of Station Players services." I hope that means fixing the Guild sites and some of the other "features" I've complained about.

Unfortunately, it looks like that person's job will also entail Station Exchange work. But I'll try to let that slide.

I question the wisdom of using the EQII Players news page as a recruiting tool. It's not that I have a problem with reading job announcements. It's not that I don't realize this is a low cost way to do a candidate search. It's just that I can guarantee that there will be a very large number of resumes from people whose qualifications include "being an UBER zerker lol" and running a Geocities Lindsay Lohan fansite. But I guess that's the problem of the person who gets stuck reading all these resumes and not me.

In this case, I would suggest hiring the best qualified person in terms of web design talent for the job regardless of how much EQII they play. If it was a game design position or something like that, then obviously I would feel differently. But I just want someone who is going to come in and help get things running smoother on the SOE web pages. I love the web-based Guild Chat (which I pay extra for) and it hasn't worked for days.

Okay, I know you're thinking, "All this employment news is fascinating and all, yawn, but what about, um, the release day for Live Update 13 and DoF tomorrow?"

Well, I hope it goes smoothly. I'll be at work most of the day but I'll be checking the forums to see the status. Two minor things worth noting:

1. SOE injected a little humor into the beta with these temporary bobbleheads (screenshots courtesy of EQII Vault). Nice to see some joking in EQII. I find the in-game humor to be somewhat lacking.

2. There will be bonus xp for a week because of the combat changes but it will not extend to those at level 50 or above or to tradeskillers. Personally, I probably wouldn't have gone the bonus xp route at all, but I can't say I have a problem with it. If I was to give bonus xp for a week I would have hooked up the tradeskillers as well. Tradeskill grinding is painful. I agree with the decision not to do it post-50 as I don't want to rush through the expansion content too fast, as tempting as it may be to do so. It might actually be a nice idea to play a lower-level alt for a week to rake in the bonus xp and the let the expansion settle down for a bit. But we all now I won't really be doing that.

And, just in case the EQII servers or your expansion download are stressing you out today, you might want to consider this EBay auction for some relief (via Kotaku).

Good luck with the combat changes and the expansion. See ya on the other side.