118315-thanks-for-dropping-in-cougar

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Cougar dropped into Entity to kind of hang out and answer questions in chat for a while.  If there's one thing I really appreciate, especially about ops, it's that when things go wrong, they don't hide in a dark corner until the heat is off.  And they're certainly not too good to drop into the game and say hello.
 
Thanks for being there and putting up with our collective idiocy, man.  Good luck fixing the issue completely on the first go-around.
 	
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			Strain hoverboard /drool	
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That's some pro gear :)It was honestly really cool of him to show up and hang out for a bit. Little things like that go a loooooong way.
 	
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			Did he fix something in-game for you or something?	
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So what. That guy obviously knows nothing about Wildstar as he openly demonstrates every week.
How does this go a loooong way?
 
If he didn't fix stuff (he can't do that since he's not a dev), meh?	
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So what. That guy obviously knows nothing about Wildstar as he openly demonstrates every week.
How does this go a loooong way?
 
If he didn't fix stuff (he can't do that since he's not a dev), meh?
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Seriously man, no need to be hostile. When I said it goes a long way I meant for morale.
 
People were up in arms about a certain exploit. Rightfully so. https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/118297-reported-gold-exploit/
 
He was there to talk about it. People got the banhammer. Servers were brought down to address it.
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and you're still here, why?
Cause from your posts, you obviously seem to dislike the game.	
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"Not to be a negative nancy"
 
"I love this game and the potential it has to be great"
 
Not trying to jump you, but it's obvious he DOES enjoy the game, just not the way it's being managed. Drop 3 was pushed back to the point of many people quitting due to one singular reason. That reason being that they wanted to release content with no bugs. Guess what? It launched with a ton of bugs. A game breaking, economy killing exploit that went on for far too long. 
 
I understand that "things happen" the sad part, unfortunately, is that things keep "happening" in a game that people are already on the fence about.
 
So yeah, I have to agree. A dev logging on and having a little fancy get together doesn't solve a damn thing. I'm glad you enjoyed it. But let's not act as if it created any solution. 	
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So what. That guy obviously knows nothing about Wildstar as he openly demonstrates every week.
How does this go a loooong way?
 
If he didn't fix stuff (he can't do that since he's not a dev), meh?
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I don't mean to sound like a negative nancy here but having Cougar drop in and talk to you guys is basically a slap in the face.
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and you're still here, why?
Cause from your posts, you obviously seem to dislike the game.
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Hey folks, just a reminder to please keep on topic and try to play nice with one another. I know it's not always easy when we're all passionate about the game and different things in the game, but there's no need for personal insults here. Your experience may not match someone else' experience but we do ask you please respect one another when replying to threads and posts. We do also already have threads discussing the current issues with the game, and we have a list of known bugs in our bug forums, so lets not derail this one too much. 
 
Thank you.
- Team WildStari 	
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I'm here because people like you spend your time roleplaying the general forums and blowing rainbows up Carbine's booty instead of holding them to a level of professionalism most people respect.
 
If you'll notice in my post, I said I love the game, but I dislike the management and the decisions being made.   I think there's plenty of evidence out there as to issues that cause my opinions, so I don't need to get into it here.  I will say however, that now that my time spent in Wildstar to obtain a certain level of currency to progress my character now has almost value, I'm pretty displeased at the actions of Cougar here.
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Whatever you think of anyone on the dev team, Cougar isn't that guy.  He's the operations manager, he didn't code the gardening exploit, he's just in charge of things like servers, implementing the patches, etc.
 
More than that, every game has these kinds of crises.  With Cougar flat out saying that day that a rollback will not be required, that they can fix everything without killing our progress, it's pretty obvious they didn't have to respond in the first hour.  They had to have time to meet and discuss their options.
 
Most of all, whether you're angry with them or not, Cougar personally showed up in the most populated zone on the most populated server and answered our questions, as well as hanging out and being a great guy.  How that doesn't help, I'm not sure.  It went a long way with the people that were there.  I didn't see Blizzards ops crew dropping into Stormwind on my server to hang out and answer questions while we waited for a restart.
 
Good on them!  Most companies treat us like farm chickens laying 15 dollar a month eggs or whales they're looking to render us for oil.  Carbine's devs are the first one's I've ever personally experienced that have a habit of coming down off their cloud to treat us like human beings and paying customers.  That's worth a lot more than immediately slamming the brakes on the game when it wasn't necessary and doesn't hurt their process.	
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You know that a professionally run company would have disabled gardening the moment they knew of the severity of the exploit, right?  It wasn't until certain people started publicly yelling and telling everyone that the economy was going to ruined that they even stepped in.
 
I don't mean to sound like a negative nancy here but having Cougar drop in and talk to you guys is basically a slap in the face.  He utterly failed you at his job description, "protecting the servers from abuse," and you're now praising him for his actions.
 
One of the things that you guys need to understand is that CRB is clearly in a state of POOR management, and they need to be held accountable for that.  I love this game and the potential it has to be great, but time and time again CRB is taking the worst of courses and as players you need to hold them accountable, not throw them an in-game party for logging in.
 
Honestly, it's a joke, and is a very CORE reason as to why this game isn't as successful as it should be.
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I heard he was in Thayed from a guildie.
 
Frankly I was too busy helping get another guildie attuned to drop by more than a few moments. It was funny how many goldsun auras where piled on him though ;).	
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Whatever you think of anyone on the dev team, Cougar isn't that guy.  He's the operations manager, he didn't code the gardening exploit, he's just in charge of things like servers, implementing the patches, etc.
 
No one at Carbine ever seems to be the guy responsible, for anything.  The way I and others see it, when an exploit this big comes out in the open and shatters the economy, the first thing that comes to mind is the disabling of gardening post server shutdown.  Cougar is the first person I'd go to if the servers were taking too long to get shut down.
 
More than that, every game has these kinds of crises.  With Cougar flat out saying that day that a rollback will not be required, that they can fix everything without killing our progress, it's pretty obvious they didn't have to respond in the first hour.  They had to have time to meet and discuss their options.
 
Every game does have these issues from time to time, and how it's managed reflects on the people in charge.  Other games have a heavy hand against exploiters.  Other companies bring the servers down and are known for their quick action in regards to keeping the playerbase healthy and at a level playing field.
 
Most of all, whether you're angry with them or not, Cougar personally showed up in the most populated zone on the most populated server and answered our questions, as well as hanging out and being a great guy.  How that doesn't help, I'm not sure.  It went a long way with the people that were there.  I didn't see Blizzards ops crew dropping into Stormwind on my server to hang out and answer questions while we waited for a restart.
 
He showed up on the server that the problem DID NOT originate on, for no reason except to tickle his own fancy.  What kind of questions are there to ask / explain?  Shits going down and the economy is trashed.  Servers need to go down. Perhaps him hanging out with you guys and making you feel special about yourselves is good for you, but ultimately it doesn't do anything for the state of the game overall.
 
You don't see Blizzard's OPs crew on your server to hang out while waiting for a restart because they're paid to fix issues and get stuff done.  You can see this by the wild success of the World of Warcraft franchise and contrast it with the overall displeasure and poor review of Carbine Studios.
 
Good on them!  Most companies treat us like farm chickens laying 15 dollar a month eggs or whales they're looking to render us for oil.  Carbine's devs are the first one's I've ever personally experienced that have a habit of coming down off their cloud to treat us like human beings and paying customers.  That's worth a lot more than immediately slamming the brakes on the game when it wasn't necessary and doesn't hurt their process.
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You realize action plans take time to implement right? They can't just "disable gardening" with a press of a button from their office PC. 
 
It's the same bloody unreasonable expectations of having a display bug fixed the same hour it's found.  In reality, the fix has to be coded, handed off for review, handed off again for integration into the patch, then it has to wait for all of the other stuff they want to patch, then when the patch is ready it will go out.  That's why the community is faster at fixing bugs in the UI - they don't have a process to follow and bypass pretty much all standard software development channels.
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I'd like him to drop into luminai again, he's done it before :P
 
Potato could make him an honorary member if he wants :D Maybe then he might see how passionate and supportive (still) the pvp community is on EU at least.
 
EDIT~ that is if he can find anyone on luminai.	
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Keeping the servers up is just adding more and more time for people to exploit / distribute the platinum etc.
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			Aye, was the best server shutdown ever, I appreciated Cougar came in-game to chat with us while the countdown was going on.	
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It didn't "just" do that. It ALSO allowed people to play the game, which they've paid good money to do.
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			Here's the thing. You keep insistently tossing around the idea that the only correct way to address the problem was a deliberate shutdown of service. Any professional with half a brain knows that's the absolute last resort, and hearing you say it over and over multiple times in every topic doesn't change that, or make them less professional for ignoring it.They monitored things while they were talking about it internally, they didn't make a bunch of statements they'd have to amend or retract later. They didn't cater to the Chicken Littles on the forums, and when they determined they couldn't hotfix the issue in less than a day, they disabled gardening to stop people from using the exploit. These are all reasonable steps well short of the nuclear option, and just because you disagree doesn't make what they did invalid.Ever stop to think that the reason Cougar was around in order to chat was he was on duty to monitor the situation and decide to pull the plug if they had to? If he chose to use part of his available bandwidth during that time to talk to players about what was going on or the game in general, then that's nothing but a good thing, no matter what you say.	
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Whatever you think of anyone on the dev team, Cougar isn't that guy.  He's the operations manager, he didn't code the gardening exploit, he's just in charge of things like servers, implementing the patches, etc.
 
No one at Carbine ever seems to be the guy responsible, for anything.  The way I and others see it, when an exploit this big comes out in the open and shatters the economy, the first thing that comes to mind is the disabling of gardening post server shutdown.  Cougar is the first person I'd go to if the servers were taking too long to get shut down.
 
More than that, every game has these kinds of crises.  With Cougar flat out saying that day that a rollback will not be required, that they can fix everything without killing our progress, it's pretty obvious they didn't have to respond in the first hour.  They had to have time to meet and discuss their options.
 
Every game does have these issues from time to time, and how it's managed reflects on the people in charge.  Other games have a heavy hand against exploiters.  Other companies bring the servers down and are known for their quick action in regards to keeping the playerbase healthy and at a level playing field.
 
Most of all, whether you're angry with them or not, Cougar personally showed up in the most populated zone on the most populated server and answered our questions, as well as hanging out and being a great guy.  How that doesn't help, I'm not sure.  It went a long way with the people that were there.  I didn't see Blizzards ops crew dropping into Stormwind on my server to hang out and answer questions while we waited for a restart.
 
He showed up on the server that the problem DID NOT originate on, for no reason except to tickle his own fancy.  What kind of questions are there to ask / explain?  Shits going down and the economy is trashed.  Servers need to go down. Perhaps him hanging out with you guys and making you feel special about yourselves is good for you, but ultimately it doesn't do anything for the state of the game overall.
 
You don't see Blizzard's OPs crew on your server to hang out while waiting for a restart because they're paid to fix issues and get stuff done.  You can see this by the wild success of the World of Warcraft franchise and contrast it with the overall displeasure and poor review of Carbine Studios.
 
 
Good on them!  Most companies treat us like farm chickens laying 15 dollar a month eggs or whales they're looking to render us for oil.  Carbine's devs are the first one's I've ever personally experienced that have a habit of coming down off their cloud to treat us like human beings and paying customers.  That's worth a lot more than immediately slamming the brakes on the game when it wasn't necessary and doesn't hurt their process.
 
I think that I'd rather have a healthy dose of professionalism and quality content than good ol' boys coming in to talk to us.  
 
What do you think a lot of us did when we heard there were giant exploits going around and the economy was destroyed?  We didn't want to play anyway, and just found other things to do.  Keeping the servers up is just adding more and more time for people to exploit / distribute the platinum etc.  All in all it's a poor decision. 
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It didn't "just" do that. It ALSO allowed people to play the game, which they've paid good money to do.
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I keep monitoring this thread and wanting to post...and then thinking better of it. The thing that keeps coming back to me is just how LONG we waited for this drop. It kept being toted and livestreamed as "You said you didn't want buggy content, Well that's what you're going to get" to the point where people straight up quit the game due to the elongated process of releasing this drop. So here it is. And what do we get on what, day 2? An economy breaking exploit that people ALREADY KNEW ABOUT. 
 
So say what you want about how they handled it AFTER it happened. My problem is that it happened in the first place. Along with gadget/LAS issues. etc etc etc. The myriad of bugs in game doesn't justify the amount of time it took for the drop to come out. It's also the reason why new life has not really been breathed back into this game. 
 
 
"Exploits aren't fun, but they happen" Is just purely a lazy opinion. In my humble opinion.	
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What do you mean, Cougar is the guy you blame if the servers aren't shut down quickly enough.  First of all, quickly enough for what?  You may not have been playing, but I was and, it appears, I didn't lose any time.  Downtime for the servers was just a few minutes; I was back on in about fifteen.  Nothing needs to be rolled back to fix it.  It literally would have been no different at noon.  Second of all, he did answer questions about why it took until it did to formulate the plan of action, what they were doing, what was happening to the people using the exploit, what was going to happen to our progress, what would be happening to the AH/CX.  Remember that not all players (I daresay most players), aren't all over social media following the game, they just log in.  Cougar explained a lot, and his presence was well appreciated.  And the reason he showed up on Entity is because that's where most players are.  He could have showed up somewhere empty and not said a word, instead he was talking directly to the largest hub of players on the largest server in the game.
 
I actually spent a significant amount of my time farming modules, and stand to lose a great deal in the event of a rollback.  Still, I'm for it. When you compare the 100 plat I have accumulated from playing the game, to the 100 plat an hour people were making off the exploit, my 2 days of farming is an easy trade for future where I can actually afford to compete in the market with others.  What was Cougar's statement on what they'll be doing to the AH/CX?  I don't see anything posted on the official forums about repopulating ability / amp points / CREDD that was consumed with ill gotten vendor plat.  Perhaps he should post those things on the official forums as well as in-game, so that not only the "largest group of hub of players on the largest server" got to hear about it.
 
And he was very professional about it.  If he wasn't, he would have done what everyone asked and spawned a raid boss in the spaceport beta style.  While fun, that would have been unprofessional.  I don't see why you should be mad at the ops team because they actually thought something through before taking action (and believe me, thinking the options through and doing what will work best is always preferable to going in with a flamethrower and completely rolling back the servers like some people were just assuming would happen).
 
You know, that's kind of your opinion.  When things happen, people that take time and succeed call it thinking it through.  When people that take time and fail, it's called hesitation.  It is my opinion that Carbine hesitated too long to take action.  Honestly, if it takes longer than 2 days to find all of the people, ban them, redistribute platinum and items throughout the economy,  then a 2 day rollback was definitely the better choice.  Only time will tell, and as  player's we'll suffer for it.
 
I don't think a much better decision could have been made.  If you want to look down your nose at them because they didn't do it on your timeframe, I suppose that's your prerogative, but I'd really rather they take the best action rather than the fastest.  I won't lose anything in this exploit fix.  I would have if they'd done what the people here on the forums were asking.  Between the two, I think Cougar and the dev team proved they're better at fixing these things than forum whingers.  And Cougar wasn't afraid to drop right into the middle of us and explain it.
 
Well you know, nothing is fixed yet.
 
So kudos to them and good on them, exploits aren't fun, but they happen, and so far, it looks like this one is getting handled right.
We'll see when people return from their 3-7 day slaps on the wrist for their blatant exploiting and crushing of the server economies.
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I keep monitoring this thread and wanting to post...and then thinking better of it. The thing that keeps coming back to me is just how LONG we waited for this drop. It kept being toted and livestreamed as "You said you didn't want buggy content, Well that's what you're going to get" to the point where people straight up quit the game due to the elongated process of releasing this drop. So here it is. And what do we get on what, day 2? An economy breaking exploit that people ALREADY KNEW ABOUT. 
 
So say what you want about how they handled it AFTER it happened. My problem is that it happened in the first place. Along with gadget/LAS issues. etc etc etc. The myriad of bugs in game doesn't justify the amount of time it took for the drop to come out. It's also the reason why new life has not really been breathed back into this game. 
 
 
"Exploits aren't fun, but they happen" Is just purely a lazy opinion. In my humble opinion.
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Folks, I already asked the thread to get back on topic and point out that we do have an ongoing discussion currently about the exploit, we also have a thread for discussing drop 3 - since this is just copying both of those threads, I'm going to lock this and request we please keep the conversation to the already active threads. 
 
Exploit stuff here
Drop 3 issues / feedback here 
 
Thank you. 
- Team WildStar 	
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