SOE has sent out another mass email advertising Fortune League, their EQ2-themed Facebook game.  I was curious enough to go look.  They entice players to play by offering Alternate Advancement scrolls and other in-game goodies.

Sounds great to me, until you click on the “Play Now” button.  Up pops a screen asking you to share with SOE and other players all your basic information on Facebook — friends, personal information, and all your contacts.  Whoa, hold on a sec guys. I personally appreciate an MMO where all that stuff is revealed on a purely voluntary and individual basis, like, oh, the one you publish now, SOE.   Why, exactly, do you want all my information?  My life is nicely compartmentalized, thank you very much, and I don’t want to share all my friends, photos, and personal information with the entire EQ2 community.   Not that anyone would particularly care, but it’s the principle of the thing.  I am already on the grid enough, I don’t need to make my life any more transparent.

It’s a shame, because I might play Fortune League, but not until they change the requirements and quit fishing for details about my life.  No amount of incentives can change my feelings about that!

My report on this EQ2 feature is, just: I never got past the login screen.

After today’s update, players have been checking out the re-structured Storm Gorge to see how the fights have changed, and how server lag has been reduced.

Players generally reported improvements in lag, and also shared their strategies on dealing with the changes in the fight, which in some cases make it more challenging and interesting.

Windslasher’s response:

It’s great to hear that the latest lag fixes worked! With that game-breaking issue mostly solved, I can now turn more my attention to other important issues.

For example: Goredeth Maulhammer has always had the ability to heal himself while enraged. His fight is certainly not “impossible to win” but I’ll take a good hard look and see if it needs to be tweaked.

I’m also going to try and optimize performance on the Ring War a little more, and take care of some uncommon but serious glitches that many of you have reported. Thanks!

From SmokeJumper:

I’m only going to speak about “EverQuest II” because that’s the project I’m authorized to speak about.

We were impacted also today. We lost two people from the team that we’ll miss. I’m not going to mention who they are because I think privacy is important.

However, we still have a large team on this project, in fact, one of the largest in the company. SOE fully supports not only EQII and EQ2X, but also EverQuest and EQ Next as well. The “EverQuest” franchise is the backbone of this company and we’ll do what it takes to ensure that the world of Norrath and the EverQuest games are as close to ForeverQuest(tm) as possible.

I’ll post a Producer’s Letter, probably next week, outlining where we’re going and what we’re doing in the coming year. I’m enthusiastic about it and I think you will be also. This year is going to be an extremely good year for EQII.

But today…well…today’s just sad. If you know anyone that was affected, please extend your sympathies. Losing a loved job is like losing a friend. There’s nothing good about it.

The names of the 2 designers who have been laid off from EQ2 have begun to circulate.

• Besides the Golden Path, Zaphax worked on the Butcherblock Mountains, Stonebrunt Highlands, and the Bristlebane Deity quests.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Fellow Adventurers,

We wanted to share this information with you here, rather than having you read about it on another site. The EQII community is a large part of the ongoing success of SOE, and the game is in a strong position to succeed. Development continues unabated on EverQuest II, and you can look forward to a Producer’s Letter next week with more information about what lies ahead for the game’s development in 2011.

For those who wish to comment, please use THIS thread. It will remain unlocked as long as conversation remains constructive and polite. Our CMs and Mods have been asked to redirect all other related posts to this one as well.

~Linda “Brasse” Carlson

Director, Global Community Relations

Following is the official notice that you may see on other sites:

As part of a strategic decision to reduce costs and streamline its global workforce, SOE announced today that it will eliminate 205 positions and close its Denver, Seattle and Tucson studios.  As part of this restructuring, SOE is discontinuing production of The Agency so it can focus development resources on delivering two new MMOs based on its renowned PlanetSide and EverQuest properties, while also maintaining its current portfolio of online games.  All possible steps are being taken to ensure team members affected by the transition are treated with appropriate concern.

This strategic decision will have no impact on SOE’s current portfolio of live games; additionally SOE will transition development efforts for the Denver and Tucson studios’ suite of products to its San Diego headquarters.  This strategic alignment of development resources better positions SOE to remain a global leader in online gaming and deliver on its promise of creating entertaining games for players of all ages, and servicing the 20 million players that visited SOE servers in just the past year.

As first reported by Kotaku.com:

Sony Online Entertainment, makers of D.C. Universe Online and Free Realms, closed three studios and will lay off nearly a third of its workforce, Kotaku has learned.

Word began spreading when George Broussard, best known as the co-creator of Duke Nukem Forever, tweeted earlier this evening that SOE was seeing layoffs and “studio closure is possible.” Kotaku has confirmed through a source familiar with the matter that the closures affect SOE’s studios in Seattle, Tucson, Ariz. and Denver. Half of the workforce at SOE offices in Austin, Texas were pink slipped along with a sizeable portion of San Diego. In sum, it accounts for nearly one-third of SOE’s manpower before today.

Kotaku has reached out to Sony Online Entertainment for official comment.

Sony’s MMO Makers Close Three Studios, Lay Off One-Third of Workforce @ Kotaku

With the faltering FreeRealms now a huge drag on the SOE profit-and-loss report, and no sign of The Agency, a lot rests on EverQuest 2, DC Universe Online, and a growing gaggle of Facebook games. I wouldn’t be surprised if EQNext make a big splash at Fan Faire.

UPDATE: Kotaku has a second source confirming this news.

UPDATE: Sites around the web carrying this article:

• SOE to close The Agency studio | Massively
• Doomsday for Sony Online Entertainment — PC World
• Joystiq – Report: Three SOE Studios Close, Layoffs Abound

Notably, SOE Seattle has been the lead development studio of The Agency, which had been slated to launch in the second half of the year (after a long delay). Neither SOE Denver nor Tucson has been working on anything as high profile as The Agency, though both have continued to operate a number of SOE titles, including Denver’s Legends Of Norrath and other digital card games, and Tucson’s PoxNora strategy game.

Today’s Update Notes for March 31, 2011 bring those Itemization changes we’ve been hearing about, a redesign of the Storm Gorge Public Quest, and the Aether Races flying event has now been folded into City Festivals, starting with Antonica. From SmokeJumper:

There will be a new track for each city until we start looping around again. Each city’s track will only be available during the City Festival and you can earn festival coins and titles when you race.

We might trot them all out at once at Tinkerfest or something, but they’ll usually be linked individually to the City Festivals now.

The full update notes after the jump…

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Raid Zone Lag can add randomness to an already challenging fight. There are many causes such as how an encounter is designed, unintended interactions in the zone code itself, etc. This issue is of particular importance in Velious because the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone drops a Clicky item which is required to take on most of the Velious x4 raid content. Players receive an item which must be clicked by certain classes at certain times in certain named fights in Velious hard mode raid zones in order to make them defeatable.

Although some guilds have been unable to progress due to lag specific to certain zones/encounters, compounding a consistent level of lag already present on their server (Unrest, etc.) I have received word that guilds on every server have managed to get these items, albeit with a lot of extra runs and some luck.

That said, while we wait for new server hardware, Rothgar and his team have been working on fixing specific issues within the raid zones to reduce lag:

All Velious raid zones should be running much better from now on. We’ve also found a few other performance improvements today that should hopefully make it out next week.

We are focusing very hard on performance along with the features for GU60.

added another quote:

Please do try the zones again and let us know how its working for you. We do have plans in place to resolve issues like these and we were able to make some changes last night without taking the servers down that should have helped tremendously.

We have additional plans in place to improve server performance even more over the next few weeks and months.

So, you’ve heard all the hullabaloo about Itemization changes. Well ‘big deal’ you think to yourself. There will always be adjustments and shuffling around of things missed in Beta. The last 2 years have seen big changes to itemization after the expansion comes out. Why is this news?

Well never mind the confusion and inconvenience for players, but there’s the feeling that players have wasted their time defeating a much more difficult mob only to receive an item that is only a minor upgrade or in many cases with Velious, a downgrade in quality. Quite a few players have told me that they now bank ALL of their gear for the first 60 days after an expansion, just in case we see sweeping changes.

However, with Velious’ astounding dependence upon Adornments to provide any uniqueness whatsoever to gear from the Othmir quest gear all the way up to Hardmode Raid gear, Adornments matter now more than ever.

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If you thought the Itemization threads on the EQ2 Forums have been harsh, they really took a turn for the worse after players took Silius‘ advice and checked out the changes on Test and Test Copy, only to find that several items had lost upwards of 75% of their MultiAttack, 4.0 weapons received additional boosts (leaving out 6.0 weapons), and most of the ‘boosts’ were upwards of 0.6% increases on just a handful of stats.

SmokeJumper came to Silius‘ defense:

Silius has made huge strides into setting things up so that the completely haphazard systems of yore, where half a dozen designers just made stuff up on their own without checking anything against each other, is eliminated. Systems have been created, and like with any new systems, there were hitches in a few assumptions here.

We’re fixing those assumptions (thanks in large part to some of the feedback provided here) and the systems will keep improving. We hope to avoid the typical “expansion item debacle” in the future by providing reasoned methods to make items in the future.

So yes, there were a few glitches here, but it’s all in the interest of progress.

Silius is doing an excellent job. If you think he’s doing his job in a vacuum, then you’re incorrect. Half the design team is working with him to make things better. Please feel free to continue to hate him, because that’s your prerogative, but he’s not going anywhere.

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Players have expressed concerns that the changes in the difficulty of dungeons this week will make Kael Drakkel far too easy. However SmokeJumper seems to be backing up the designers on wanting to keep the contested Kael Drakkel sufficiently difficult:

(Making the zone super easy is) not our intent at all. And I’m glad that your group is able to play through those areas. But it must have been verrry lonely in Kael, because we know how many people were playing it…and it’s not many.

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SmokeJumper has assured players in a thread “Where did my adventure go?!” that not only does EQ2 have a long-term plan besides the standard game updates and expansions, but that much will be revealed soon. If you have taken for granted that next year’s expansion will be Velious Part 2, raising the level cap to 100, you may want to read on!

Watch this space. I’ll be posting stuff soon to describe this year’s slate. Probably next week sometime, maybe the week after. We’re going to be doing some VERY cool stuff this year and I think you’ll start to see more and more of the kinds of things you mention here.

We’re already one of the best. Now it’s time to get unique.

and:

We’ll be posting next year’s slate of coming attractions soon.

Considering the extremely tight leash that Marketing and PR have kept the EQ2 team on in the recent past, it just seems unlikely that all the permissions have been acquired to tell us what’s coming more than a few months out. We’ve never gotten information that far in advance (except Fan Faire), so consider us skeptical.

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There have been many reasons in the past not to allow PvP to PvE or PvE to PvP server transfers. Over the years, with itemization changes and server merges, some of those reasons have become less important. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

We’ve created a poll and asked for feedback related to PvP and PvE transfers over in the PvP forums. Since many players may not watch that forum, I wanted to make a post here because this decision can impact PvE servers as well.

Please feel free to vote and post your feedback/opinions in this thread.

PvP to PvE Server Transfer PLAYER POLL

The question: How do you feel about allowing Marketplace transfers to/from PvP and PvE servers?

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SOE is looking for your feedback on two recent changes that went in on Tuesday. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Today’s hotfix introduced a couple of fixes and I’d be interested to hear how it has affected you.

First, we’ve made some changes to improve the performance for public quests. We still expect them to contribute towards a higher level of lag than other types of content due to the sheer number of people that participate, and we are working to make them even better. However, you should hopefully notice an improvement after today’s hotfix.

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If you have been remiss in venturing in the past in the EverQuest 12th anniversary Chronoportals event to get all the items your characters may need now and in the future, today is your last day!

If you haven’t checked these out and the loot available from them, check out the Portal Event Treasure thread (scroll down a bit for the list of loot). If you need help with the locations and strategies for these events, check out the Chronoportals Event Guide.

Also, there are several books, paintings, and of course house replicas of the nameds monsters from each Chronoportal instance. As they are replicas they cannot be resized or placed in a guild hall, but they will fit in any guild hall. They are also LORE NO-TRADE. Having dozens of giant Allizewsaurs rampaging around a guild hall would have been hilarious. It is unclear if the Chronoportal merchant, currently located in Antonica, will be staying on after the event, so spend those tokens (I’ve still got dozens) now!

By the way, ttobey, who animated the Allizewsaur T-Rex model for EQ2, has posted a video showing its different animations and states.

Also, as Domino posted, if you looked at the paintings a few days ago and were puzzled that one of them showed a dwarf, that was actually an EQ2 launch painting that snuck through. It’s since been changed to match the actual artwork that was planned for this event.

The Chronoportals event ends at 10AM PDT, 1PM EDT, 18:00 GMT, 19:00 Central Europe time.

Players logged in yesterday morning to find that their Ranged items, including bows and thrown weapons, had rejected their adornments. Those adornments ended up back in the Overflow slot.

Rothgar responded:

This appears to be a bug related to some item changes.  Our QA department is working on it now and we will have the items fixes asap.

From EverQuest2.com:

Jesters, thieves, bards and fans of mischief are invited to enjoy the adventuring and new crafting festivities that surround Bristlebane Day! You never know what riddles, laughs and pranks are to be found during this enjoyable time of year.

Celebrators are present in every home city, and the oddest of objects have been spotted in Antonica, The Commonlands, Darklight Wood, Timorous Deep, Greater Faydark and Frostfang Sea! Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for special events, especially in Enchanted Lands, occurring only on the Highest of Silly Days, April 1st, 2011!

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If you just can’t wait for Thursday to see what (if any) changes you’ll see to your gear, you may be interested in these additional Test Update Notes (beyond the notes already posted on Tuesday):

ITEMS

• Dungeon dropped loot has had its power increased.
• Dungeon shard armor has had its power increased.
• Raid items have had their power increased.
• The gap in power between easy and challenge mode raid items has been increased.
• The power of a few War Runes has been increased.

Silius brought this to our attention:

Just a heads up that test server should have the biggest chunk of the item increase on it now. If you want to test copy and check it out your feedback is appreciated.

After posting a promising thread on Friday entitled “Upcoming Itemization Changes (No Nerfs)“, it seems SmokeJumper has gotten egg on his face today. Players logged in after today’s Tuesday Game Update to find sweeping nerfs and huge reductions in the effectiveness of Velious gear across the line, especially Fighter items.

In a cantankerous discussion on the EQ2 forums, players linked numerous items which underwent substantial losses in stats and desirability. SmokeJumper initially tried to defend the changes with:

Please go back and take a look at my original post. I did say that we were being “intentionally conservative” with these changes and that this we’re likely to do a second pass after judging the impact of the first changes. Hang in there.

When cornered about why today’s update included all nerfs and no buffs:

I’m the wrong guy to try to answer your questions, but I’ve forwarded this thread to those in charge of itemization and they’ll write a response soon. There weren’t supposed to be nerfs, so I’m trying to find out why that occurred.

The full explanation, and our commentary about EQ2 Itemization after the jump…

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If you are a level 80+ Master Crafter who has completed the Tradeskill Epic, this post by Domino may interest you:

Epic crafters, you might want to visit the tradeskill society in your home town while Bristlebane Day is with us. The grand jester has been having some fun with red collectibles for the season…

Players immediately noticed that every red shiny was dropping just one item. It seems there’s something else you have to do to get the others.

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From SmokeJumper the EQ2 Forums:

These itemization changes did *not* happen today, on Tuesday.

Instead, they will happen on Thursday morning’s hotfix. Sorry for the delay. Soon!

All U.S. servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The U.K. worlds will have their update at 5am London Time on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours.

The full reformatted patch notes are available after the jump….

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From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

We’re making some changes to make dungeons more attractive to players in DoV. We’re adjusting base pop and boss health so that the dungeons take less time to complete so they’re more fun for folks, as well as to allow more frequent chances at boss loot drops on revisits. We’re also making a few changes so that bosses don’t wipe parties so easily since they seem to be a bit tougher than we’d originally planned.

We’re approaching these changes conservatively so that we don’t overshoot the mark. If these changes don’t do the trick, we’ll probably do another round of small changes later. But the overall goal is to make the dungeons more attractive for everyone.

P.S., These are not the only fixes we’re making for tomorrow’s hot fixes, but we wanted to call these changes out specially because those of you that gave up on dungeons because they were too challenging for the payoffs you were getting may want to give it another go now.

UPDATE: This event has been extended until April 1st.

Edited from EverQuest2.com:

From Friday, March 25th through Monday, March 28th Friday, April 1st, our players will be invited to purchase specially created Cherry Blossom items via the in-game marketplaces in their preferred games.

These Cherry Blossom items can be displayed in player in-game homes, as a sign of ongoing support and to raise further awareness amongst our deep player communities. For every Cherry Blossom item purchased between March 25th and March 28th, SOE will donate $10 to the American Red Cross* in support of ongoing relief efforts.

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Client Crashes FIX!

If you have had your fill of “EverQuest2.com has stopped responding” errors, Rothgar seems to have finally gotten to the bottom of this one:

We think we’ve finally tracked down a bug that has been happening for awhile and leading to client crashes and the “EQ2 has stopped responding” problem. I can’t guarantee that this fixes EVERY problem out there, but it certainly fixes the most common crash we’ve been seeing lately.

This should get pushed out with next week’s hotfix along with some performance improvements to public quests!

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EQ2 PvP Guru Olihin has given PvPers a taste of Game Update 60:

GU60 will bring lots of changes to PvP.

• Fame is being reworked
• Fame and title gains will now have their own EXP BAR, no more trying to figure out how long or why you gain/lost a title
• New armor and adornments
• Ongoing balance changes (this will never stop and will never be perfect in any realistic way)
• New Battleground
• Enhancements to the Matchmaker for Battlegrounds
• Cross faction communication

There will be more details as we get closer to GU60.