Battlegrounds vs. Oasis

Battlegrounds were locked this afternoon/evening due to significant lag and zone time issues. The servers were also rebooted. However the biggest issue is that Oasis is almost unplayable for some players.

This quote from the EQ2 Forums:

We’re aware of the problems facing the Oasis server right now and several people are working on it.  It will be addressed more fully tomorrow when everyone is back in the office and I’m sure we’ll have more information then.  There is an active thread on the Oasis server forum.

Character Corruption

A few players are reporting sporadic issues with losing AAs, levels, gear, etc. after lagging out from playing in Battlegrounds. I and others have played Battlegrounds and not had issues, so this seems pretty random issue. Sometimes, I did have a 5-10 minute wait leaving the Battleground and being sent back to my home server, but saw no other issues.

A Word about Forum Moderation

When I started using the EQ2 Forums I remember how intolerant the moderators were towards differing opinions and constructive criticism. Any kind of useful feedback was deleted and members banned for expressing themselves. I just plain stopped posting there. I, along with thousands of other players, moved to EQ2Flames.

It is only under Kiara’s guidance that the EQ2 forums clawed their way back to being a place where constructive criticism is allowed and players are truthful about their favorite parts as well as the major issues within EQ2. She has fought at every turn to allow players to speak their mind.

Do I think Kiara is perfect? Of course not. Nobody is. But in my 9 years experience in moderating 2 other forums, I think she’s doing a damn good job.

And yet, in the past couple of months, I have noticed unbelievable hostility towards her, blaming her for EQ2 development choices, database issues, expansion launch pains, etc. I see people shooting off at the mouth about things they don’t even understand.

But what has really turned my stomach is when I heard about players gloating to their friends that they reported her to her supervisor.

You know, I manage to post on the EQ2 Forums and express EXACTLY what I feel I need to say about all of the shortcomings and problems at SOE and the EQ2 development, and I manage to do so without getting banned. And when Kiara has done something I’ve disagreed with, I’ve told her. We’ve had some pretty heavy conversations.

But really, if someone out there is too chickenshit to resolve their issues with Kiara, why don’t you send *me* a mail here on EQ2Wire. You might learn something.

Remember those awesome Player-made Paintings for the 5th anniversary of EverQuest II Timeless Heroes celebration? Brasse has put together a player contest on the EQ2 Forums to win a set of these house items!

The Challenge: We want your best screenshot of (and a brief description of the event) you falling to your death in The Hole. This is inspired by Brasse happily going splat many times in both EQ and EQII!

Deadline: Friday, March 12th 2010 at 10:00am PST
Submissions for this challenge will be accepted until Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 10:00 am US PST. Winners will be announced the week of March 15th.
Reward: The reward for this challenge is a set of the in-game paintings from the Timeless Heroes contest.

Check out this contest on the EQ2 Forums.

Y’all are cordially invited to the next exciting EQII ZAM Developers Chat!  Members of the EverQuest II Developer and Community Teams will be there, bring your questions!  If you’d like to submit questions in advance, send e-mail to Calthine@allakhazam.com (subject Dev Chat).

• Thursday, March 4 @ 5:00pm PDT (8:00pm EDT; 01:00 GMT; 02:00 Copenhagen)
• In the #EQ2 channel on ZAM IRC
• General chat during the actual event will be in #EQ2FFA

New to Allakhazam IRC?  Instructions here! Or use EQ2Wire’s EQII ZAM Chat portal.

Check out this Time Zone Converter to help you find what time to sign in.

source: EQ2 Forums

It seems there were some instability issues with the Login servers this morning. Players currently logged into their various servers are able to stay logged in, but players wanting to login cannot. No servers are reported as down according to the Network Status page.

We do not yet have today’s Hotfix notes, however players are reporting that Marks of Manaar (the new SF heroic gear shards) are dropping again from enemies in SF dungeons.

We’ve now heard word (EQ2 Forums) about the the repeatable faction quests in The Hole not granting any XP. The XP these quests produce has been reduced, and limited to one repeat per day, in preceding hotfixes. However yesterday’s hotfix removed any XP whatsoever for completing these quests.

Also Research Assistants are currently showing as not researching the last spell they were asked to.  Players are advised not to reset and request another spell, but to wait for this display bug to be fixed. (EQ2 Forums).

From Rothgar on  EQ2 Forums:

Customer Service has made these petitions their highest priority and they are restoring players as fast as they can. In the meantime, Battlegrounds is working fine now. It only took a few minutes this morning to bring them down after the problem, fix the configs and bring them back up.

CS is also manually restoring your XP and AA’s rather than doing a rollback of your character. So you should be safe to continue playing while you wait for them to answer your petition.

According to player reports, it seems an unintended consequence of today’s patch is that Marks of Manaar have disappeared from loot tables of enemies in various Sentinel’s Fate dungeons. We’ll update you as we know more.

UPDATE: It appears that all Quest Drops off of mobs may now be broken. More info as we have it.

When the expansion launched, tinkerers (and others) noticed that Tinkering Blueprints for the expansion were not dropping. This has now been resolved with today’s hotfix.

As of 12:40pm PST From Kiara:

EU servers are now up.

The BG’s have not been enabled for any of the international servers, due to the database issue.

We’ll let you know when they will be available.

Thank you for your patience today, we appreciate it.

To deal with the AA/Level loss from players who jumped into Battlegrounds, we’ve heard from Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

There will be no server-wide rollback.  This problem affected about 200 users and rolling each back individually will be much less intrusive than taking down every world and rolling back all of their databases.

Please be sure to petition if you lost AA or XP due to battlegrounds.

From Rothgar, who is now officially having a bad day:

The issue with AA’s being reset seems to be a server configuration error.  We have locked the battlegrounds world to keep new matches from starting up while we fix the configuration.

We will have more information very soon about how to proceed if you’re missing some AA after coming back.

Minutes after Battlegrounds went live on U.S. servers we are already hearing reports from players of numerous problems when their characters reach the Battlegrounds servers and further problems upon returning to their home servers. Reports include:

• Alternate Advancement (AA) points are being reset to 200 points.
• Any percentage gain over your level (for example level 88 with 90% to level 89) is lost.
• AA trees are completely reset.
• Macros that use AA-derived spells do not work on Battlegrounds.

At this point, we are advising players to NOT touch Battlegrounds until they are fixed.

US Servers are unlocked and Battlegrounds are now live. EU Servers still have approximately 1 hour of downtime remaining.

For more info on Battlegrounds: EQ2Wire Battlegrounds Strategy Guide and Battlegrounds @ EQ2Players

As we reach 5 hours of downtime, Brenlo has tweeted that servers are “Minutes…” away from being back up.

Here are your Hotfix Notes for February 25th, after the jump..

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According to Brenlo on his Twitter, work continues on getting Battlegrounds up today. This is resulting in a longer than expected downtime.

Maintenance is running a little long. We are working on some network settings for the Battlegrounds.

UPDATE:

We are restarting the servers and expect to have everything up and running about 10am PST.

If you read our coverage of Game Update 55 including Consolidated Stats and Primary Stat Changes and have checked out the EQ2Wire Mega-FAQ, you’re probably fully up to speed on the changes to Stats, Stat Consolidation, etc.

But if not, or you want to hear it from the source, timetravelling has posted a thread which covers these topics. He’s received several questions after the fact, so it’s likely that his writeup will continue to evolve.

Rothgar is looking for your feedback on some planned changes for Macros to improve server performance.

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So today marks the release of the Digital Download in North America and Canada. For those unfortunate souls who couldn’t get their hands on a retail copy, your expansion begins today.

Do you really miss anything by being a week late? Well, there are those server discoveries (which EQ2Players isn’t tracking properly). And there’s the chance of making a lot of plat being first to sell shinies, tradeskilled materials, rare items, etc.

We have received player reports but have not yet empirically confirmed ourselves that there may have been some monkeying around with how combat XP is converted to AA XP. This may be a bug, an oversight, or it may in fact be an intended change. But for now, if these player observations are true, then players joining the expansion today will not be following in their fellow player’s footsteps of briskly earning AAs and picking up levels 2 at a time. Here’s what we know…

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Server downtimes have been announced for both Wednesday, February 24th, and Thursday, February 25th.

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Players who do all of their gameplay on Test (and work hard to find and report any bugs they find) were rather concerned about the idea that Test would be down for “a couple of days”. Fortunately, Windslasher has reported in:

Test is now unlocked. Thanks for waiting!

Glip the Gnome also chimed in:

The Test Server is open and ready for business. We just wanted to be super careful that the potential corruption issue relating to battlegrounds affected as few characters as possible.

Antonia Bayle, Bazaar, and Sebilis came up after approximately 3 1/2 hours. We’ll see a similar situation on Thursday when the servers come down for another hotfix (possibly patching Battlegrounds) but Butcherblock, Lucan D’Lere, and Nagafen will be down for additional time. We’ll let you know when we have more exact downtimes.

Several players have reported that Xilaxis the Explorer in the new Labs x4 raid zone is not dropping any loot other than small wooden chests of plat (not a bad reward, but some armor would be nice). Fortunately, timetravelling is on the case:

I found the issue with both his normal- and challenge-mode item tables and corrected them. Should be hotfixed soon, apologies for the frustrations!

No words on those pants though.

You’ll remember that one of the biggest complaints about the Rise of Kunark expansion is that combat XP was so minimal that hours spent in a dungeon barely budged the adventure level meter. The only means to level was to Solo.

In an ironic twist, players are reporting that it is not possible to level from 80 to 90 entirely by soloing in Sentinel’s Fate.

At level 86 or 87 with mastercrafted or T1/T2 gear, the first wing of the Hole should be no problem for 2-3 casual players. And you’ll earn enough XP to reach 90 in just a few hours of play.

If you are a questaholic, then take a look at using a Chronomage to adjust your level to 70 and do the ~50 new quests in Tenebrous Tangle, Barren Sky, and Bonemire. That, plus some of the easier quests in The Hole (which should be soloable at level 88-89) should get you to 90. I do understand some folks play EQ2 entirely as a solo game (I personally feel there are much better solo games out there, but I digress).

We feel that no one gameplay style should be the “only” way to level, so this is worthy of addressing. Hopefully it won’t take 2 years to fix.

All EQ2 servers are back up after today’s hotfix, with the exception of Antonia Bayle, Bazaar and Sebilis which will remain down for some additional maintenance as announced yesterday. Test came down for a few hours as well.

Here are you February 23 Hotfix Notes:

GENERAL

Ole’ Man Silvers should be willing to talk to you now.

Players who have lost or dropped their Huge Tiger Claws for the quest “Justice for Jojo” can loot another pair.

TRADESKILLS

The rare 10 quicksilver +1 rare harvest from gem nodes in Odus is now awarding kaborite instead of ulteran diamond as the rare.

With every expansion, a few of the guards in Qeynos and Freeport, especially the “stronghold” or most-defended area of each city, in this case North Qeynos and East Freeport, are dinged to a level that would make them perilous to invaders of the opposing alignment.

So imagine our surprise when we logged in after Game Update 55 (coinciding with Sentinel’s Fate) and found that every man, woman, and child guarding the cities of Qeynos and Freeport, in every area of the city, all magically dinged level 95. These guards are packing heat!

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