Today’s update contains just one announced line-item fix:
MARKETPLACE
- Fixed an issue with adding Credit Cards through the in-game interface.
UPDATE: SmokeJumper provided some backstory on this change:
It wasn’t a security issue. The company changed some stuff on the backend and we realized that our in-game CC registration didn’t work any longer. This is the fix for that.
As more and more onerous “slacker detection code” has been added to Public Quests, healers have felt the burn, and repeatedly asked if they are being left behind due to a lack of DPS. Windslasher has always reassured us that healers get counted too. Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. Take a look at his advice and it may just improve your chances at getting better gear, if you can find someone in need of healing on a Public Quest that is.
Today’s update adds additional tweaks to Velious dungeons, increases the overlooked Gnomish Hoverpads to 130% runspeed, re-allows Crit Chance adornments in all the slots they were previous allowed in, a few quest glitches, and also corrects a few issues with the new Leaper and Glider mounts.
From EverQuest2.com:
Station Access has a new name, lower fees and more plan options!
Why pick just one of our amazing games to play when you can get access to an exciting line-up of all of our most popular titles for one low price? We’ve listened to your feedback and we are happy to announce the launch of the SOE All Access game pass!
Formerly called Station Access, SOE All Access will allow you access to play many of our most popular games including: DC Universe™ Online (PC version), EverQuest® (PC and Mac versions), EverQuest II, EverQuest II Extended – Gold Membership, EverQuest Online Adventures™ (PlayStation® 2), Pirates of the Burning Sea® – Captain’s Club Membership, PlanetSide®, Star Wars Galaxies™, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes®, Free Realms® (PC and Mac versions) Membership, and Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™ (PC and Mac versions) Jedi Membership.
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
Just an update to let you know that maintenance is scheduled for Splitpaw tonight at 9pm PST for hardware upgrades.
When you see one occurrence of something, it’s unique. Two occurrences can be ascribed to coincidence. But three, that’s a pattern. What are we seeing? The replacement of progression. We’re seeing the abolishment of stratification and in its place, bland, uniform, one-size-fits-all rewards.
It began with the starting gear acquired by new players in the four (originally six) starting cities. Rather than bringing parity to the items, which would have retained the uniqueness of items to each home city, this variety was paved over with one set of gear for everyone. The result was the absurd reality of Sarnak or Frogloks wearing furs and coon-skin caps. The unique appearances of the original gear were replaced overnight with wall-to-wall New Halas looks.
The second and most publicized example of the gutting of choice has been the Destiny of Velious itemization. The items have been so formulaic that players pressed Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson for an explanation. He eventually admitted that the items originated from an item-generating script. He insisted that the generated items were supposed to be a starting point, with better items getting finessed and customized for each class. To date, we’ve seen little of this ‘finesse’.
Our third example, showing a clear and present pattern, is last week’s mount revamp. While we were excited to see 2 new mount types — Leapers and Gliders – bring more variety to an area of EQ2 that has traditionally lagged behind, we were a little puzzled at some of the runspeed numbers. But our surprise gave way to shock at seeing every ground mount in the game being set to 130% runspeed.
Every year at Fan Faire, we get to watch EverQuest II Designers and Developers answer some really fantastic on-topic, valid questions from the Question & Answer panels. These questions help shape the future of the game and get problems addressed that the devs may not be entirely aware of.
However, every year, we also see some of the strangest, uninformed, facepalming (is that a verb?) questions that completely puzzle us (and the developers). Hey, they paid their Fan Faire admission price too, right?
Over the years, fastidious players have wised up and managed to intercept EQ2 devs in the breezeway between hotels (or anywhere else they can find them including at the Pool Party) and get their questions posed. To quote a dev, “If you see me standing at a booth or demo all by myself, please come talk to me! I’m probably bored!”
It’s time to work through the backlog of videos from last year’s Fan Faire so the slate is clean for 2011.
We recorded the two EQNext panels from last year’s Fan Faire in decent audio and video quality and are glad to be able to share them with you in the weeks running up to Fan Faire 2011.
We’re still anxiously awaiting a finalised schedule for this year’s Fan Faire, running from July 7-9, in blistering Las Vegas (where else?). We understand that last minute changes are still being made. For one thing, we’re hopeful that either the EQ2 Mechanics or first ever SOE Geek Panel can be shuffled, otherwise I’ll have to make a hard choice. Notably absent from the posted schedule on SOEFanFaire.com are any mention of PlanetSide Next or EQNext. The former already has some kind of splashy introduction planned, while SOE has remained mum on the latter.
At last year’s Fan Faire, SOE President John Smedley made a surprise announcement at the Welcome Reception introducing EQNext and inviting players to Feedback panels on Friday and Saturday mornings. Players were able to see concept art and screenshots of the in-progress EQNext, as well as provide their feedback to the team. We attended these two panels and share those videos with you.
An upcoming event has mysteriously appeared on the in-game EQ2 calendar. Thanks to Jeehi on Everfrost for submitting this.
Summer Celebration Fireworks
Start Date: 07/01/2011 09:01AM
End Date: 07/05/2011 08:59PM
The cities of Norrath are celebrating the arrival of summer with fireworks displays! Collect your free festive sparkler, and visit fireworks coordinators in North Qeynos, West Freeport, Kelethin, Gorowyn, Neriak, and New Halas.
And in case you’re wondering, nobody on Test has heard of this event. Because the event happens over a weekend, during a time when devs will be busy getting ready for Fan Faire and not to mention a number of players already en route to Fan Faire or who may already be in Vegas making a whole week’s vacation, well, it could be interesting to say the least.
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Class-specific red adornments have been added to the EQ2Wire Adornment Calculator by Dethdlr.
That’s 221 adornments added to the existing 175 for a total of 396 T9 adornments. And I still haven’t added the ones that drop from the public quests.
Choose your class in the class dropdown to have that class’ adornments added to the proper dropdowns.
Rather than converting the class specific red adornments from their names to what they do, I’ve just included the names in the dropdowns. For one thing, this should help with those that don’t stack. For another, it means you don’t have to wait for me to find time to convert 221 adornment descriptions into text that will fit in the dropdowns. Once you click calculate, you can hover your cursor over the item names to see the tooltip popup of each adornment or click them to see them on Zam.
I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to try and convert them or just leave them as is. I’m leaning towards leaving them as is.
Also, the in-game item links will be added as time allows for the new adornments. There are 221 of them and I can only cut and paste for so long before falling asleep. 
If you click through to Zam though, they should have the in game links already.
Let me know if you find any errors/bugs. I still need to indicate the items that only work on shields, but that will most likely be another day.
Let me know if you find any errors (other than the shield/secondary slot issues, I already know about that).
Update: 96 additional adornments have been added that can be purchased in Thurgadin after completing The Fallen Swords questline. This brings the total up to 492 T9 adornments. Thanks to Maikeruu for emailing me the info.
Leapers and Gliders have come to EQ2 as per Today’s Update Notes., taking advantage of a tremendous effort by the EQ2 animators and programmers to allow mounts to be more quickly added to the game. With the “killer app” of flying mounts at level 86, we’ve been wondering if something would be done about the hodgepodge array of mounts at lower levels. During the week where we could have free flying mounts on all our characters, I certainly took the opportunity to knock out a bunch of quests that would have easily taken twice as long to complete on foot.
Leapers and Gliders
So let’s take a look at the new mounts.
As previously reported, Leapers are mounts which are able to jump very high, and glide for a reasonable distance. They are available at level 30 via either an Adventure or Tradeskill quest, or via the Marketplace. Gliders are mounts which are able to not only jump a remarkable height, but then glide a great distance, possibly across entire zones. They are available at level 60, also via either Adventure or Tradeskill quests.
What’s important to note here is that unlike the 5 day “waiting period” for flying mounts, Leaper and Glider mounts can be acquired through a quest that only takes about 20 minutes.
Servers are now offline, and all players have been sent packing 90 minutes after today’s Game Update was scheduled to begin. Those players who stuck around (as well as those who logged in later hoping to see the new Gliders and Leapers), chatted, dueled, and a few made progress in Kael Drakkel contested.
UPDATE: A post from SmokeJumper regarding the Content Distribution Network (CDN):
Working on it. It’s a problem with the CDN. Fixing.
Apparently, Storms players (Thanks Whilhelmina!) received an announcement that their server won’t be patched for several hours still.
We’re now 56 minutes into what is supposed to be the “Leapers and Gliders Update” yet servers from Antonia Bayle to Everfrost to Storms to Butcherblock remain online. However because of the automated scripts announcing the downtime, nobody has been able to join a dungeon, guild hall, or any other “instance”. So players continue to hang out in open areas such as Sinking Sands, Butcherblock Mountains, and ponder the meaning of life and ineptitude.
We’re all dressed up with no place to go.
If you are running the Original Launcher (EQ2.exe), you will be able to login. You won’t be able to login with Launchpad 3 however.
While we’ve heard indirectly from Silius that work on existing items from level 20-80 was being done, SmokeJumper has an official quote for us:
We have a full itemization plan in place now and we’ll be unveiling much of it at Fan Faire.
I’ll tell you this much though. We’re going to itemize *all* of the level 20-80 items by GU 61.
When asked if this includes raid Fabled items from levels 40-80:
“All” includes Raid items.
We’ve already been informed that crafted gear especially Mastercrafted gear from level 22-77 are being tweaked to have the right stats for the appropriate Archetypes. There’s also a chance that we may see a reversion of the unpopular revamp of all itemization for level 1-20 characters. Handing out coon skin caps and furs to Sarnak or Fae didn’t make a lick of sense.
We are hesitant to make any prediction about how this will all go. There are thousands of items in EQ2 with similar stats that exist mostly for appearance. We would be very disappointed to see those items washed away in favor of a single progression of items shared by all dungeon bosses and trash. We don’t know what form this revamp will take, but it seems an insurmountable amount of work to do it “right”.
No word on if we’ll see any improvement to Destiny of Velious itemization which has replaced cool items that people strive to acquire, with a stat odometer propelled by incrementally more powerful yet completely unmemorable items.
Today brings a substantial update with lots of fixes, tweaks, as well as the much-lauded introduction of Leaper and Glider mounts to EQ2 at levels 30 and 60. In a perplexing move, Ground, Leaper, and Glider mounts will all travel on the ground at speeds of up to 150%, making them as fast as any of the current Flying mounts, only lacking the differentiating ability of flight.
All servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT (3pm BST / 4pm CET) on Friday, June 24, 2011. U.S. servers are expected to be down for one hour. International servers should expect a two hour downtime.
This information is not exactly a secret, but it’s a question that comes up often. Where is your EQ2 server located? Thanks to Rothgar for the list which we supplemented.
Servers on the west coast [San Diego] include:
- Guk
- Everfrost
- Antonia Bayle (RP)
- Unrest
- Butcherblock
- Nagafen (PvP)
- Vox (PvP RG)
- The Bazaar (RG)
- Freeport (EQ2X)
- Sebilis (JP)
East Coast includes:
- Permafrost
- Oasis
- Crushbone
Our European [Amsterdam] data center includes:
- Valor (German)
- Storms (French)
- Splitpaw (UK)
- Barren Sky (Russian)
- Harla Dar (Russian)
Leaper and Glider mounts for levels 30 and 60 respectively are nearly here, but Testers are concerned that they are being left out. After the jump, SmokeJumper’s announcement on the EQ2 Forums and some player reaction:
We’re putting the final touches on leapers and gliders now. They’ll be Live very soon.
It seems the only differentiation we have in gear now is Adornments, so those Adornments ought to work smoothly. Well, they didn’t. Many proc effects were getting resisted or weren’t able to be stacked. Fortunately, we have good news from Xelgad after the jump…
From EverQuest2.com:
This Thursday, June 23rd, at 4:00PM PDT, Linda “Brasse” Carlson and Tiffany “Amnerys” Spence host ZAM diva and all-around EverQuest II expert, Amy “Calthine” Lanam! We’ll be talking about Fan Faire, ZAM, and definitely a bit of EverQuest II, so be sure to stop by!
Join us on Thursday, June 23, 2011, at 4:00 p.m. US Pacific Time*, as we live stream this webcast on the SOE channel on Stickam! You can also tune in through the Stickam tab on our Facebook page. The webcast is expected to last about 20 minutes.
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I always intended to post an article about Fortune League. Yes, it’s only tangentially connected to EverQuest II. Yes it’s a Facebook game, a service I don’t use (I already tried its forebearer AOL in the 90’s). Yes it’s a StationCash money sink. But I also know quite a few people who really liked the idea of a Fantasy Football type game with some of the concepts of EQ2 as a background.
Sure most people played Fortune League for the Alternate Advancement (AA) instant XP potions. But I thought it was popular enough to sustain. Apparently not.
Aliscious of EQ2Talk brings us the obituary:
AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM SONY ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT
As of Monday, July 11th this Facebook game will no longer be operational. In the meantime, you may continue to play and redeem prizes until the conclusion of this final season. However, the ability to add Station Cash funds to your wallet will be disabled on Friday, June 24th. Any existing funds in your wallet can still be used until the game is turned off.
Beginning on Monday, July 11th, you may request a refund of the non-promotional Station Cash in your wallet if you play Fortune League and do not also currently play any other SOE game (EverQuest II, Free Realms, etc.) where you can still continue to use the Station Cash in your wallet after this Facebook game has been turned off. If you are eligible for a refund, please contact a Customer Service.
As we prepare for our busiest weekend of the year we’re keeping an eye out for any and all advice on how to survive another blistering Las Vegas trip, cover EQ2 (and we’re guessing EQNext), and not forgetting to occasionally eat and/or sleep.
Calthine’s annual Fan Faire Guide over at EQ2 ZAM is a favorite and includes helpful tips to save time and money.
Karen Bryan has turned in her own Fan Faire Survival Guide over at Massively and it’s worth a read with advice on food, meeting guildies, and the value of planning ahead.
You may want to download the Hotel Maps @ the SOE Fan Faire Forums to your phone.
If you haven’t already, download the Fan Faire app for your iPhone by Greg “Rothgar” Spence.
UPDATE: The new version of this app has been revised for 2011 and is now available.
I saw this post on the EQ2 Forums and just had to share it.
Mikbove asks:
I’ve heard this phrase being bantered around a lot on this forum. However not being technological minded and all that, could someone please explain to me what it means on plain English.
Thanks in advance
Bawango of Antonia Bayle responded:
It goes like this: game designers are a creative bunch and they want to make games which, like a great movie, move the story along at an exciting pace. In come the thugs from accounting who tie them down and whip them until they promise to put countless repetitive and time consuming requirements into the game. The accounting thugs claim the company can’t make any money unless games are made this way. We’re still waiting for the MMORPG game which proves them wrong.
As we reported last week, raid zones have been ‘freaking out’ with players suddenly doing massive amounts of damage while all other players on the raid are frozen. Rothgar’s on the case from this post on the EQ2 Forums:
We have a fix for this problem and it should be going out soon.
There is one downside to this fix going in: Brigands won’t be doing 400k DPS with a mysterious unexplained tank pet.
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Moonlight Enchantments is back, as it is every month on the 20th and 21st, but for June there are two interesting developments. First are 10 new items including house/guild placeable tiles which are rolling white, red, or blue clouds, a tile which looks exactly like a plowed garden, and tiles for fallen leaves and coolest of all, a tile of wooden shingles, perfect for those house breakouts when you want to make a clubhouse.
More importantly, there’s been a change to the Strong Brew Root Beer quest such that 1 character can repeat it indefinitely.
If you need 30-40 tiles, the idea of running multiple characters through each of the 5 Grottos throughout Norrath may be rather daunting. While each of the 5 grottos offer different types of quests and a variety of rewards, sometimes you just want to grind. Fortunately with the change to the Root Beer quest, if you want to just make barrels of root beer and get as many tokens as possible, now there is such an option!
We’re less than 3 weeks away from Fan Faire, and we have heard that there is some significant shuffling of the Fan Faire panel schedule still going on with some surprise panels planned. Although we expect the important panels to fall within the 9am-6pm time slots on Friday and Saturday, if you’ve been trying to nail down anything more specific, you may want to wait a bit.
We wouldn’t be surprised to see a few EQNext panels shoved into the morning hours. We’ve been told to expect a full reveal of PlanetSide Next and a lot of EverQuest II news including the 25th race CLASS.
UPDATE: I must have been half-asleep as I put race above. Of course I meant class. 
We’ve heard from a lot of folks who are absolute regulars of Fan Faire and have attended many years who can’t make it this year due to the economic calamity downturn that continues to ravage the US. Looks like registration numbers are on the lean side:
This just in! Fan Faire registration has been extended! You now have until 12:00PM PDT on Wednesday, June 22nd so get your passes before it’s too late!
Looking forward to seeing you there and bringing live instant coverage of Fan Faire to those who can’t make it.
