SOE has laid their cards on the table for Game Update 63. First up, a level cap raise to level 92. No, that’s not a typo. As of April 17th, players will be able to gain 2 more levels, as well as a new form of player advancement called ‘prestige points’. GU63 brings the promised Destiny of Velious content of new group and raid instances, a variety of solo content includind a new overland zone and more! Also Age of Discovery owners will be able to tame new Beastlord warder types.

Game Update 63 hits Test on Thursday, March 15, 2012!

From the EQ2 Forums:

The Destiny of Velious saga continues! Adventurers breach the barriers of the Withered Lands, seeking entrance to Skyshrine, the glorious, ancient dragon city!

The great citadel of Skyshrine has long housed the Claws of Veeshan behind its massive walls and arcane protections.  Now, the unthinkable has happened — Skyshrine is under siege! Battle and befriend dragons and their wurmkin in the forbidden city of Dracur. Explore the past to unravel the mysterious events that transformed the formidable draconic city into a battlefield full of daunting challenges, terrifying foes and unimaginable treasures!

Here are your update notes for Wednesday, 14 March 2012:

QUESTS

Players who have completed the quest “The Fallen Swords: All Roads Lead To…” should check their mailboxes for a letter from the Duality himself.  Another chapter in the Age’s End saga is about to unfold, and he will be looking for help.  Seek him out in Thurgadin once more.

ITEMS

Vampiric incisors are no longer labeled as junk as they are used for a mastery quest.

For many years in EQ2, I was a casual raider.  What I mean by that is, I would primarily run group zones with guild mates but from time to time I would join a pickup raid or tag along when another guild needed to fill some raid slots.  Several times, when filling those empty raid slots for other guilds, myself and some of my guild mates were asked if we would be interested in coming along on a regular basis.  In one of those cases, I even worked my way up to being one of the raid leaders even though I was in a different guild.

The reason myself and some of my guild mates were able to do this is because we like being good at our characters.  We try to get whichever upgrades we can from instances, quests, faction merchants, etc.  We make sure all our spells/CAs are Expert or above.  We make sure our items are adorned.  We try to come up with the best AA spec we can and consult with each other to try and be as good a player as possible.

NOTE: Originally, Double XP was scheduled to run through January 2nd.  Apparently it’s now January 3rd.

From Isulith on the Official EQ2 Forums:

This coming weekend, from 12:01 AM PST on Friday, December 30th and ending at 11:59 PM PST on Tuesday, January 3rd, EverQuest II will be running a Double XP promotion (+100% XP). Take advantage of these four days and watch those XP bars fill up!

The bonus applies to AA, tradeskill, and adventure experience gained this weekend. Our French, German, Japanese and Test servers will also be enjoying the increase in XP gain.

Happy New Year and happy adventuring!

Time Zone Conversions

• PST: December 30 @ 12:01AM ~ January 3 @ 11:59PM
• EST: December 30 @ 3:01AM ~ January 4 @ 2:59AM
• GMT: December 30 @ 8:01 ~ January 4 @ 7:59
• CET: December 30 @ 9:01 ~ January 4 @ 8:59

Here are your Update Notes for Friday, December 9th, 2011 from the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Characters created before 12/6/2011 no longer have class or race pack restrictions.  Characters created after that date are still subject to your current membership restrictions, if applicable.

• Fixed a crash that could be caused by doing a raid with a large number of mercenaries.

• Fixed a bug that was preventing mentoring on PvP servers.

• Dungeon maker items in the marketplace that contain house items will now display previews in the paperdoll window.

• Fixed issues with Shader 3.0 causing client crashes.

The complete Update Notes after the jump…

When EQ2 went Free-to-Play two days ago, emails were sent out to people who had played in the past but were not current subscribers.  The emails mentioned the conversion to F2P and that they would be able to return and play at the Silver level for free.  But when a lot of these players made it back, they were hit with quite a surprise.

After installing 14 gigs worth of game files (for those that didn’t choose the streaming client) they headed to the character select screen.  That’s when they were kicked in the teeth.  Unless they got really lucky and picked a race/class combination that was free, they were staring at a list of locked characters.  In order to play, they would have to pay for race/class unlockers.  If they wanted to create a new character, they would have to delete all but three of their old characters since silver membership only has four slots.  The only other choice was to create a new account that wouldn’t have silver access.  This was not a good way to welcome back returning players.

SmokeJumper agreed.  Today this announcement was posted:

Hi, folks,

We’ve been listening to you since we launched the Free-to-Play service across all servers. One of the most frequent issues is from folks that used to play EQII Live and are now coming back to the Silver membership level and becoming very confused because they’ve never played under those restrictions. “Why can’t I play my characters? Why are they locked?”

Of course, the reason is because those players are returning to a Silver membership (which is free of charge) and those older characters are often locked behind the Silver membership race/class restrictions. There are two easy ways to get around those restrictions: Upgrade to Gold, or buy the race/class packs.

But, we don’t really want to force those decisions on returning players. It’s not a fun experience to come back to something that seemed exciting (F2P) and then get hit with a bill as soon as you arrive, just for the privelege of using your current characters.

From Rich Lawrence on the EQ2Forums:

Hi folks, this is Rich Lawrence, CTO with SOE. Some of you probably remember me from original Planetside as “Twist”. TR rules, but I digress.

I must apologize for the extended down time of EQ2 while we get everything in order for free to play. Obviously we didn’t anticipate it being this long. I know how important it is for the game to be available when you want to play, and what it means to miss a raid you were looking forward to, or check out new features. In this case the issues that are keeping you from playing are under my watch, so I need to say it: I’m sorry. I value my game time as well when I can get it, and I know how you feel.

EQ2 is a great product with a long history for us, and part of the reason we are taking so long on this update is because of that. Let me explain a bit. In order for everyone that played in the past or currently to get the best experience when logging in on the first day of free to play, there were many changes that had to be made in data to represent all of the features those players (past or present) were entitled to, plus new goodies, and the merge of what amounts to two different products in a business sense (EQ2 and EQ2X). This is a lot of accounts – millions – and a lot of ‘business rule’ complexity. While we have top of the line hardware running our databases for this kind of thing, and folks dedicated just to keeping it working well, the result of all that took quite a bit longer than we thought it would.

I hear the engineers of you out there (and yes, I know we have many very capable developers in our audience) saying, “But you should have modeled it ahead of time and known how long it would take!”. You’re absolutely right. We did. Turns out our model was just a tad less than 1:1 scale in some respects. I know, I know, Captain Obvious calling.

In the end we realized two things as the maintenance progressed – that this was going to take much longer than we thought it would, and correspondingly the results would be not as well tested as they should be before release. For instance, there was a risk that some out of those millions might not end up with the right race packs or character slots. In the end, we decided it was best to extend the maintenance through the night so we could do a better job of checking that kind of thing.

Please understand that we don’t do this casually or think that it’s a lack of dedication. Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you’d be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that.

I’m committed to changing how we do this type of operation going forward so that it has much less visible impact on you the players – we will trade more back end prep time and resources against less publish downtime, basically. I do hope everybody enjoys the massive effort the game team has put into this release. I’ll see you online tomorrow.

From the Everquest2 Facebook Page:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Trolls…

We have just evaluated the status of the current update and have come to the conclusion that we can either unlock servers and risk broken content, or ensure that we provide the best experience possible and delay the update to tomorrow morning.

We have to do it RIGHT. For all of you and for all of us.

So please, bear with us, relax overnight, and let us sortie into the new day together. Community will be in office at 7:00am PST and will immediately review status and give you all an update. We are aiming for morning and working as hard as we possibly can.

Yer faithful Dwarf,

Brasse

Update:

Friends,

A final update this evening… Smed would like us to share that with the Platform Team working all night to complete the maintenance, we expect to be up at 10:00am PST.

Again, the Community Team will be in at 7:00am and will get you a status update.

Thank you, once more, for hanging in there with us. We are honored and appreciate your support of our efforts to make Norrath more enjoyable for all!

Brasse

From Everquest2.com:

SOE Trick-or-Treat Event is Here!

It’s time to trick-or-treat in your favorite games*! Today through October 31, 2011, get treats and tricks when you visit your participating games each day. For EverQuest® II and EverQuest® II Extended, check the mailbox for your tricks and treats!

For more details visit www.soe.com/trickortreat.

Participating games include: EverQuest EverQuest® II,;EverQuest® II Extended, Free Realms®, Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™, PoxNora® and Magic : The Gathering – Tactics™

Note: This actually started on Friday, Oct 28, 2011

From Everquest2.com:

Trick-or-Treat! Double Your Treats on 10/29/11!

What better way to fill your Halloween goody bag than with DOUBLE STATION CASH®! Get Double Station Cash on Saturday October 29, 2011 starting at 12:01 AM PDT when you redeem any SOE Pre-Paid Game Card or buy Station Cash*.

Plus, we have more tricks and treats in participating games throughout the SOE Trick-or-Treat Event! For more details visit www.soe.com/trickortreat.

*Offer runs October 29, 2011, 12:01 AM PDT through 11:59 PM PDT; excludes purchase by mobile/SMS.

Participating games include: EverQuest® EverQuest® II,;EverQuest® II Extended, DC Universe™ Online, Free Realms®, Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™, PoxNora® and Magic : The Gathering – Tactics™

Smokejumper responded to a thread from nine days ago on the EQ2 Forums asking for a clear answer to what exactly is Age of Discovery.  He basically said what we already knew about the content included in Age of Discovery.  Reading through it and some of his follow up posts, it looks as though the “expansion” will be coming out near the end of November but price and distribution information won’t be released until next week by the marketing folks.

From the EQ2 Forums:

There have been several reported issues of players who are unable to get the Nights of the Dead quests from Ponchy. If you have done them in previous years, there seems to be a bug where it won’t let you get them again. While we are working on fixing this, please petition Customer Service to have the old quests removed. We greatly apologize for the inconvenience and will message again when we have this working normally.

From the EQ2 Forums:

We are inviting the most fearful, dreadful and simply awful creatures to the frighteningly decorated Community Lounge to celebrate the Nights of the Dead holiday with us. Show off with your costume creations, partake in a variety of unique drinks, and meet new players!

From the EQ2Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Temple of Rallos Zek [Challenge]

• Bosses should no longer get double buff packages.

Temple of Rallos Zek: Foundations of Stone [Challenge]

• During the Statue of Rallos Zek fight the automatons of escalation have reduced abilities and should be easier to handle. The statue itself will wait much longer after its final text before it activates retaliation.

Sullon’s Spire [Non-Challenge Mode]

• Hragdold the Frenzied: Ironclaw Priests now heal for less. Clawstorm mana drain is lessened, and it’s not cast quite so often.

Spire of Rage

• Spells that the Sullonites use now have longer casting times and they will start using them later in the fight as opposed to right away.
• Grolla Skullwielder will now say she is casting Sweeping Crash and it now has a longer casting time.

Strategist’s Stronghold

• Hypatia should now tell you when she will cast Fortification of Blades and it now has a 3 second cast time for her.
• War boars in Warmaster Korok Hai’s encounter should now stun a lot less.

Tower of Tactics

• Lady V’uul will only make her orbs vulnerable if she reaches 100% damage reduction. She should call out when this happens. All three orbs should be targetable and killable.

ITEMS

• Temple Guardian’s Shard of Illumination is now heirloom.
• Soul Touched Crystal Wand is now heirloom.

Tank and Spank vs. Complex Scripting vs. Fun

In recent years, I’ve seen numerous posts from people complaining about how the different group/raid encounters work.  A lot of the complaints say that they don’t want simple “Tank and Spank” encounters. But they also don’t want encounters with complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. They want encounters that are fun and challenging without any of those things.

So it got me wondering, how do you do that? How do you make an encounter without complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. without turning it into a tank and spank in the process?

Last week, SOE released their new server status page.  I took a look at this to see if there was anything there that I might be able to use myself.  There was.  I’ve put together three different versions of an EQ2 server status page, two of which can be embedded into your own website.

After people started wondering where oh where has the Shady Swashbuckler gone, Gninja had this to say on the EQ2Forums:

Shady is currently permakilled for an exploit he will be returning tomorrow after the update. Sorry for not letting you guys know.

This just in from Smokejumper on the EQ2 Forums:

Apparently, two additional days wasn’t adequate to fully test everything coming in with GU61.  Who could have guessed?  There are reports that gear is randomly re-attuning itself when you zone or log off.  There is also some strangeness going on with AAs.  Rothgar has posted this on the official forums:

We will be hotifixing this bug tomorrow.  The downside is that all of your items will become unattuned again and we will refund adornments applied to any equipped gear.

After this runs tomorrow, the items should remain unattuned until you decide to attune them again.

Tomorrow’s hotfix will also include a fix for the AA trees not resetting properly or resetting at incorrect times.

Smokejumper has also chimed in on the issue:

Tomorrow’s hotfix will reset *all* AAs as originally planned. If you reassign AA points today, they will be reset again tomorrow, so feel free to experiment with settings today. You’ll get to reassign them again tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s hotfix will also properly unattune *all* items, even the ones in your bank. So you’ll need to reattune and empty out your overflow again tomorrow.

So I wouldn’t bother going through all your toons and making sure everything is set just right since tomorrow you’ll be thinking it’s GROUNDHOG DAY!

With GU61 right around the corner (Tuesday, 23 Aug 2011), SmokeJumper has posted a note on the official forums warning players of some of the changes that will have an immediate impact on players. Read on to see what Smokejumper had to say and our commentary on ways to prepare.

Having used my adornment calculator for a while now, there have been a few times where having the short descriptions in the drop down lists instead of the name of the adornment has been frustrating.  Usually, this is when I’m trying to put in what I currently have adorned, rather than starting from scratch.  The descriptions work well when you’ve never adorned a particular slot, but there are times when you don’t need them and would rather see the adornment names.  For example, if I wanted to send a link to someone that shows my current adornments, I would first need to enter all the ones I’m currently wearing.  Sometimes that’s easier by using the short descriptions but a lot of times it’s easier to go by the name of the adornment.  Now, you have a choice.

You can now choose which way you want the adornment calculator to show the drop down lists.  And you can change it back and forth at any point without losing what you’ve already chosen.   Just click the radio button for “Adornment Descriptions” or “Adornment Names” just above the list of adornments.

Enjoy!

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.

Here are your update notes for May 9th (17th?), 2011:

USER INTERFACE

• Fixed a bug with dragging currency to the currency list in the Character window.
• Fixed a bug with the Character window’s location not saving correctly between session.

HOUSING

• Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause stubborn portals to come back after being picked up.
• Fixed a potential bug with buying a house in a zone that instances.
• House portals should no longer port you while they are being moved around.
• Fixed an issue with item placement in the Maj’dul Vacation Suite.

QUESTS

Hold of Rime: The Ascent

The collection “Trinkets of the Ascent” can now be found within the Ascent

At the time of this writing, the linked notes said “Update Notes: Monday, May 9, 2011”.  My guess is that either the *hope* was for these to go out on May 9th or someone looked at the calendar wrong.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, these may be the notes from an update that occurred on Monday, May 9th and they are just now being posted.

That’s right! The servers are back up! I’ll let Feldon fill in details or replace this with a “real” article about the servers being back up. I’m headed in to play! Just wanted to get the word out. WE’RE UP!

From Everquest2.com:

Restoration of SOE’s game services will begin today. This phased restoration will include the return of nearly all of our portfolio of online games, the reinstatement of our game forums and websites, and added functionality to require players to reset their passwords.

Posted on SOE’s security website:

May 12, 2011

We thank you for your patience as we continue to work around the clock to restore our game services. We know this has been a frustrating time for you and appreciate your understanding as we work to confirm the security of our network.

In light of the recent outage of Sony Online Entertainment’s game services due to April’s cyber-attack, we are committed to compensating our loyal player base for the inconvenience caused by the data breach and lost game time while we improve our security measures.

We are currently in the process of an extensive upgrade to our network to further protect your information from future attacks. It will likely be at least a few more days before we restore our services, and when we come back online, here is what you can expect for each of our game services.

First and foremost, all impacted players will receive 30 days of game time added to the end of the current billing cycle in addition to one day for each day the system is down. Additionally, many games are offering a variety of in-game items and special events to welcome players back once our services resume (per the outline below). This is true for both PC and PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system based products.

• EverQuest II and EverQuest II Extended: A series of events, including Double XP, Double Guild XP, Loot Bonanza, and City Festivals

For our lifetime subscribers, we’ll grant in-game currency; specifically 20,000 coins for Free Realms, 7,500 Galactic Credits for Clone Wars Adventures and 10 Marks of Distinction for DC Universe Online (in addition to the items listed above).

And finally, our Station Access subscribers will receive 500 Station Cash, in addition to the subscription time and items listed above.

Additionally, we announced today that SOE will provide its U.S.-based Station Account holders with complimentary enrollment in an identity theft protection program through Debix, one of the industry’s most reputable identity protection firms. For Station Account holders who live outside the U.S., SOE will be offering similar programs, if and as available, and will provide details as they’re confirmed for each country or territory.

We continue to work around the clock to restore SOE’s services and thank you for your continued patience as we complete our investigation of this criminal attack.

Thank you,
Sony Online Entertainment