Apotheosis vs. Raid "ID" Lockouts

Welcome to the second of three posts today, part of what I’m jokingly calling “Contentpalooza 2011”. In this post, I’ll talk about how Apotheosis broke our raid IDs last night and what happened to fix it.

Picture it: Azeroth, 2011. A band of 28 people wanted to raid and wanted to kill things. On the agenda, normal Maloriak (after spending about 3-4 hours on him on heroic on Sunday and Tuesday), normal Atramedes, attempts at heroic Chimaeron and then normal Nefarian.

I had 8 healers signed up, much to my joy, which meant I had more options for H Chim. But I also knew that we didn’t need 8 healers for the first two fights.

Being a healer, I decided to sit myself out of those first two fights. I hadn’t sat myself out of anything except Baradin Hold for at least a couple of weeks. This had the happy coincidence (honest, I didn’t plan it out this way!) of allowing me to watch just about the whole NHL playoff game between my beloved Montreal Canadiens and our hated rivals, the Boston Bruins. (The Habs, or the Canadiens, beat Boston 2-0 just as my guild was finishing off Atramedes.)

So with Maloriak and Atramedes dead, I made some swaps. I swapped out three DPS for two healers and another DPS. The healers were myself, our resto druid and the DPS I brought in was a rogue.

We zoned in together and clicked “accept” when warned that if we downed any bosses, we would be saved to this version of the instance where Magmaw, Omnotron, Maloriak and Atramedes were dead. We ran around the right side of the area in Blackwing Descent and got to Atramedes’ area and helped with the trash clearing to Chimaeron.

So there we stood at Chimaeron. I switched to my Chim healing spec and was talking on Mumble and such and our tank officer, Dayden, who had been raid leader to this point, made me the raid leader. While inside this instance, I switched the difficulty from 25 Player to 25 Player Heroic.

The druid, the rogue and myself found ourselves back at the start of the instance — on heroic.

The other 22 people were still in the normal mode of the instance, with an error message of sorts.

This is about the time when we started trying every variation of Dayden or myself as raid leader with 25/25H difficulty combinations we could think of. Bottom line, Dayden and myself could not exist in the same heroic instance together.

The officers were pissed. The raiders were getting cranky. I, of course, opened a ticket. I have probably opened about six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-three tickets in the five years that I’ve played this game. :P It’s what I do. Don’t judge me.

We headed to BoT and right before pulling trash, a GM wants to talk to me! Yaaaaaay, I got to stand in the back and do nothing to do with Halfus trash because I was trying to explain to the GM what the eff the problem was.

At that point, he wanted me to give him all the raid IDs and names of people. The trouble is, there no longer ARE raid ID numbers visible to us. It just tells you what bosses you’ve killed and which are available. And if someone from that group of 22 linked their raid ID, we were told we were eligible to join that raid.

So they get me to get Dayden to log off his toon so they can log on as him and look at the raid info available.

My guildies are nuts. Below, all instances of “Daydyn” are actually the GM, logged on to his toon. The rest are raiders who were in Bastion of Twilight at the time.

So I’m witnessing all this in chat, and whisper the GM to apologize for my “idiot” guildies who are harrassing him…

Naturally, I felt a compulsion to apologize.

He then asked us what we wanted to do — were we going to continue in BoT or BWD?

You’d think that would be the end of it, right?

Hilarious, no? Quite an interesting exchange. And throughout all this, the poor GM is sitting there on Dayden’s toon, being /cheered at, /hugged, /licked, etc:

Whew.

So after something like an hour, total, of messing with ID stuff and trying to get it resolved, we finally got to pull heroic Halfus. Now, we were doing this without Fog, one of our main spec tanks. The first few pulls were pretty bleak, but we swapped a couple of things around and somehow managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, then we went on to clear regular V&T and… yeah. The night was salvaged and we had an interesting time with a couple of GMs, but GOOD GOD, what kind of buggy shit is that lockout crap? I miss the old lockout system when something like this happens. I’ve never pugged a ton of stuff in terms of raids, so the flexible lockout thing is just irritating to be. I don’t need flexibility, dangit! ;)

Anyways. That was the raid night and we’ll see if we’re all propely saved or whatever for Sunday’s H Chimaeron/etc attempts. (H Chim probably for a bit, then normal Chim, Nef, over to BoT for Council and Cho. I think.)

14 Replies to “Apotheosis vs. Raid "ID" Lockouts”

  1. We had this happen a couple of months back while we were working on Heroic Maloriak. We were very close to a kill when 5 or 6 of our raiders who weren’t there that night (or were late) were locked out of the instance. Set us back a week of progression. Our GM was unable/unwilling to resolve the issue for us :(

    Our happened from killing a heroic boss then a normal boss, and then swapping it back to heroic again. Since then – we try not to do that – and have everyone zone out of the instance before we change it if we find that we need to take that action.

    It was a very common bug for a lot of guilds early in the game’s release – and the source of frustration for a lot of guilds who were pushing for “firsts”. Supposedly it was “fixed”, but I’ve seen a number of people still complaining about experiencing the bug.

  2. We had an issue recently, and we did find out a little bit about how they worked and some ways to avoid them.

    Ours came when we were working on Heroic Magmaw and Omnotron. We had originally gone in and killed heroic Magmaw, then started working on Omnotron heroic. The next night, we went in, and killed Omnotron on normal. Well, apparently the raid ID does not like it if you kill one boss on heroic then the next on normal. In fact, it completely goes crazy and refuses to let anyone in who wasn’t in on the normal kill; even if they were in on the heroic kill.

    So what happened was, we killed Omnotron on normal with some alts and a couple friend ranks, then went to do the roster swaps to do heroic Chim, Atramedes, Maloriak. Unfortunately every single person who had been on the Magmaw heroic kill the previous night, but wasn’t in the Omnotron kill (Which consisted of about 4 DPS 3 healers and a tank) were completely unable to do any other heroic in the instance. It took about 4 hours and 3 GMs to finally resolve it, and then we were told they were doing an exception, and that they normally wouldn’t be able to adjust raid IDs at all, and that we would have to just deal with it in the future.

  3. I would just like to say that I would like to participate in this boss fight at least once a month.

  4. I’m impressed with your GM. Every time we had raid id lockout failure from killing HM Mal then working on HM Omni before killing Omni on normal (thus only having the people in for the normal kill able to zone in for later bosses regardless of if they were in on HM Mal) the GMs we got told us it was working as intended. ><

    The new lockout system is just terrible.

  5. Osephala – It was pretty awesome, considering how annoying it was to not be saved to the same instance and such. The GM I was talking to, as well as his boss, who was on Dayden’s toon, were clearly cool. :D

    Beru – As I understand it, it’s fairly common and happens to a lot of raid groups. A lot of people are describing it as what happened to you (heroic, normal, heroic). I wonder if our attempts on heroic Maloriak, then killing normal Maloriak and normal Atramedes, then trying heroic Chimaeron is in the same vein or if it was just that I (as RL at that point) was not saved to the Maloriak/Atramedes are dead version?

    So what do you do, exactly?

    Everyone zone in on normal, flip to heroic, kill a boss, flip to normal, kill a boss, zone out, flip to heroic, zone in?

    Or:

    Everyone zone in on heroic, kill a boss, flip to normal, kill a boss, zone out, flip to heroic, zone in?

    Would love to hear tips and tricks about this! :)

    Apple – I know, right? Too funny!

    Hulrok – I love that he was all like “I can see this too” in /g!

    Selyndia – That’s horrifying! Have you had to deal with any other tweaks? Have they told you how to avoid that from happening again?

    xmolder – haha, not me, thanks. Much like Al’Akir, one kill is good enough for me. (Although we’ll do more Al’Akirs, but one STILL is enough for me.)

    Imalinata – The GMs working with us were DEFINITELY awesome. I really do appreciate what they did for us. Have you had any other issues or have you found a way to resolve this?

  6. Hestiah – Oh, MAN! That’s awesome!!! I’m going to snag his name and the name of the one I was talking to and write to the GM feedback address, thanking them for being awesome. Thanks for sharing!

  7. Unfortunately, the way we resolved it was to work on HM Omni first, kill it on normal if we were getting close to the end of the raid week and didn’t have more time to spend, then kill HM Magmaw. Now we’re killing both HM so we don’t have to try to work around it.

    I believe at the tail end we also told people not to ever accept the raid lock when first zoning in if the raid wasn’t on heroic. I don’t recall if that actually helped or not though.

    Mostly we were just screwed with comp for a few weeks until our officers decided that it was just easier to skip the hassle by going for Omni first.

  8. I literally laughed out loud at you apologizing to the GM and him telling you it was his boss that your guildies were harrassing. I feel your pain but still, what an epic story you got out of it!

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