EQ2Wire‘s Morgan “Feldon” was invited to sit down (virtually at least) with Dellmon and Aliscious for their 29th episode of the EQ2Talk podcast. It was a great pleasure to talk about the present and future of EQ2, Fan Faire, and what goes into running EQ2Wire.

From EQ2Talk.com:

In this episode, Dellmon and Aliscious are joined by Feldon of EQ2Wire! He talks about how Wire got started and what’s involved in keeping it going. He also gives us his take on some of the things going on in EQ2. And, because we have such an insightful guest, we have our very first Feldon Angle!

Click here to listen to Episode 29.

If you read the above headline and immediately checked your bank statement, well, that’s probably not a bad habit to get into, but we weren’t actually talking about Account Security. In today’s article, we talk about how plat farmers have gotten more sophisticated and are picking SOE’s pocket via new (StationCash Gifting) and old tricks (Legends of Norrath packs).

Fraud Happens

Every online business has its share of Credit Card Fraud. However digital currencies like StationCash have been especially prone to this problem, due to the immediacy of the conversion from real dollars to virtual ones. Scammers can create thousands of SOE accounts using automated scripts, activate them with stolen or faked credit card information, “fund” them with StationCash via more fraudulent transactions, and now with the new StationCash Gifting feature, “sell” items to players in-game using their ill-gotten StationCash. The scammer gets the platinum for the sale of the SC item, and then they can turn that platinum around to a plat-selling service. They get money for nothing via a bit of digital switcheroo.

If I had to summarize Fan Faire in one statement, one consolidated takeaway thought, it would be: We’re gamers too. If we can, let’s give the players what they want.

Giving players options and trying new things were the prominent themes throughout Fan Faire’s EQ2 panels. SmokeJumper in particular seemed eager to break away from tradition if it could lead to better gameplay. “Because we’ve always done it that way” must undoubtedly be one of his pet peeves in EQ2 meetings. Yet, it’s been barely three weeks since Fan Faire, and the glossy slides and upbeat pronouncements of flexibility have given way to many perplexing aspects of Game Update 61 which recently appeared on Test.

In between Double XP and Tinkerfest, the buzz this weekend was the upcoming Game Update 61.

So let’s take a look at the upcoming changes to how Alternate Advancement (AA) points can be spent. From the GU61 Update Notes currently on Test:

• The Subclass Alternate Advancement tab now unlocks at level 30.
• The Shadows Alternate Advancement tab now unlocks at level 50.
• The Sentinel’s Fate Alternate Advancements now unlock at level 80.
• The Heroic Alternate Advancement tab now unlocks at level 80.

EQ2Wire wants to know…

• So how many AAs or Levels have you earned this weekend?

• Are you focusing on Tinkerfest?

• Are you checking out Game Update 61 on the Test servers?

From the EQ2 Forums:

This week on the Jethal Silverwing Show.. Jethal and Elquin either have the show of their dreams, or get their accounts banned for life, as they are joined by Sony Online Entertainment President, John Smedley!  Do YOU have a question for The Smed? Leave your question Here and we’ll make sure to get the answer you’re lookin for!

Tuesdays at 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific
As Always, Join us IN GAME by typing /join antonia_bayle.ogr

As borne out in several different threads on the EQ2 Forums, starting with the original Dragon Ring and Wizard Spire Event Feedback Testing thread created on May 15th, all has not gone smoothly during the Spires and Dragon Ring Events. These events are still running on most servers, although the lucrative Spires event has been completed on many. So what were the biggest problems? Let’s spell them out and address them one by one.

Dragon Ring: Hiding A Serious Raid Mob?

Once our server (Butcherblock) reached 99% Spires completion, we got a 10 minute warning that something big was coming. For us, this coincided with the regular hourly Spires event, so we got to fight the regular “x4” event, and then the final “super x4” a few minutes later. This new epic x4 boss Ulbrow, nicknamed the Unibrow, appears, along with all of the previous bosses of the x2 and x4 epic stages of the Spires, all at once. There wasn’t anything too tough about this event other than server lag, players crashing to desktop, and knockbacks. Ultimately, we killed the encounter without too much difficulty.

What took many people by surprise is the final stage of the Dragon Ring…

Less than 18 hours after launching a new World Event to help Rebuild the Wizard Spires and Dragon Ring in Velious, the events have been suspended due to a series of issues including exceptionally fast completion rates. On Antonia Bayle, the event had already reached 99% when the event was shut down.

Completion rates have been a chronic problem with Live Events in EverQuest 2 in the past 2 years. The lengthy, story-rich prelude quest for The Shadow Odyssey was unavailable to most players due to the time it took to be unlocked. Many players had less than 48 hours to complete it on all of their characters.

There is a lot of psychology at work in getting a player to come back, month-after-month, year-after-year, to a single game. I wasn’t there, but I’m guessing that the designers of the original EverQuest probably didn’t have the luxury of having a behavioral psychologist on staff to tell them where to put the roadblocks, the sticks, and the carrots, let alone exactly how to balance everything to build a “sticky” audience that would still call EverQuest their ‘home’ 12 years later.

The irony of Destiny of Velious is that it is one of the best expansions we’ve had in years. There is a ton of content, the quests are well-written, and the dungeons are a bit more interesting than in the past. Sure, the creative design of the dungeons and intricate raids have resulted in months of fixes and patches which wouldn’t have been seen in more mundane zones. But above all else, most players have found the dungeons and raids interesting. The major malfunction with Velious has been Itemization.

I posted my opinion about every ground-based mount in EQ2 getting increased to 130%. This change applied to everything from the 2 silver piece, level 1 horse, to 35 plat rhinos, to quested carpets, to raid-acquired war horses, to StationCash mounts. So far the responses to my Op Ed have been interesting, but we turn now to a comment by SmokeJumper.

In one of the many threads on the EQ2 Forums about the 130% Runspeed change, a player (vamp548548) theorized that all mounts got the same speed in order to shift mount progression from a ‘speed’ basis to an ‘appearance’ basis, SmokeJumper responded:

That’s exactly what we’re thinking. There is no need for a “speed progression” because there is more than one type of mount now and [for] you the “progression” is unlocking the different mount types at different levels.

These comments don’t change my viewpoint at all. Awarding the fastest car in a racing game the moment you put in the disc removes a major purpose of the game. While EQ2 is not a racing game, tiered rewards are the bread-and-butter of MMOs. Somewhere down the road, someone is going to say “EverQuest 2 feels small, I can run across the whole world in a few minutes.” SmokeJumper seems to be banking on players being Collectors rather than playing for Progression. We’ll go to the ends of the earth to get all different mount appearances, even if they all travel at the same speed.

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.

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.

EQ2Wire would like to know, will you attend Fan Faire 2011?

Do you have a question you’d like asked at Fan Faire by EQ2Wire? If so, post it in the Comments, or send us an e-mail!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a week and a half since EverQuest II service was restored, and harder still that EQ2 was offline for 12 days, an exceptional operational gap for a game modeled on “sticky” customers who login daily to check in on and advance their characters.

During the downtime, EQ2Wire wanted to give the EQ2 team an opportunity to come out from behind the bushes and share a bit of what they’ve been working on and maybe break some of the tension. After all, the EQ2 team had only just taken the wraps off 3 months of hard work by unveiling Game Update 60 on the Test servers. The Shutdown arrested feedback just a scant 72 hours after testing had begun.

The Sony/SOE security breach precipitated a communications blackout that fell over the company like a cone of silence, almost completely cutting off SOE from its customers. We submitted some questions a few days after the outage and are now able to share the responses with you. Due to the timing (and lawyers), there will be few revelations, but it’s still worth a read.

Check out SmokeJumper‘s responses to our questions after the jump…

Today’s notifications at SOE Facebook and SOE Twitter explain that services will not be restored today. With no indication that we’re any closer to a resolution, the question on everyone’s minds is: When will SOE, and by extension EQ2, become available again?

Crossed Wires About Dates

Bloomberg.com latched onto a terse quote from a Sony spokesman and published a service restoration date of May 31st, leading many publications to report that the PlayStation Network and SOE networks had little hope of recovery before then. But that’s incorrect, according to Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold. In fact, Sony has yet to announce a date for the restart of the PlayStation Network, which has been down since April 20th, or the games and websites of Sony Online Entertainment, down for 9 days now. At one time it was hoped that service could be restored by Friday May 6th but that deadline was scrapped once the extent of the intrusion into the SOE customer database became known.

Speculation Running Rampant

The lack of information from Sony and SOE, with communications to the public no doubt being funneled through a team of Sony lawyers, has encouraged a great deal of speculation. CNET‘s Erica Ogg certainly had a red letter weekend, posting articles thinly sourced from unknown individuals in an IRC chatroom, first prognosticating a third attack, and then basking in the credit for Sony’s alleged thwarting of said attack. Apparently the idea that there was no attack even planned never occured to her. 😉

Other news sites have posted missives no less farfetched, with conflicting theories as to whether Sony’s PSN and SOE networks were running outdated Apache software, and trying to pin the blame on Anonymous, perhaps a splinter group, or maybe profiteers hoping to acquire reams of credit card data. Readers interested in the lengthy and tangled speculative mess of the PSN/SOE Compromise have had a virtual buffet of editorials and articles to choose from by security professionals, linux gurus, and players big and small inside and outside of Anonymous and other hacking crews.

But is all this speculation helpful?

Sony could tell us more, a lot more. Most of us are not demanding a restoration date so much as a window when it *won’t* be done. Checking several times a day has only magnified our perception of time. For those asking “Well, how would you handle it?” look no further than this exemplary press release which might serve as a model for how Sony should be handling this situation:

Amazon EC2 Service Outage notification

Yet none of this helps to pinpoint a date. The 51% of our readers who voted “After May 11th” in our How Long Do You Think SOE Will Be Offline? were right on the money, but the only prize forthcoming seems to be a bit of grim satisfaction.

Our most commented post here on EQ2Wire so far has been the “What if?” discussion started by SmokeJumper pondering whether EQ2 should offer some sort of shortcut to level 90.

Many players expressed their opinions from one extreme to the other and everything in between. Some players demanded that this take place on another server. Others made the fair point that many players would find themselves at 90 with utterly no idea how to play their class.

I fell along the line that since 1-85 has *already* been trivialized due to itemization changes and neglect in the last ~18 months, why not provide a way for players who already have a a level 90 character to ding another from, say, 50 to 85? Already, many of us earn our AAs from level 15-65 when it’s most easily obtained, and then close our eyes, grit our teeth, and push through the mind-numbing errand quests from 70-85.

In a thread from a returning player who demanded a flying mount before he’d commit to coming back to EQ2 as a full-time player, SmokeJumper posited a rather interesting thought regarding flying mounts, Velious content, and the fact that both require level 86+. What would you think about being able to start a character at level 90?

Read on…

Hey folks, the OPs comment about not wanting to level up to play in Velious and get a cool mount is a reasonable discussion. At the risk of laying foundation for a flamewar here, I’d like to propose an idea to you and see how you feel about it.

Ready? Try not to judge until you’ve read it all. It’s definitely going to make a few of you think about wearing a troll costume, but if so, please keep in mind that this is just an idea. It’s a discussion. That’s all. I am serious that I’m asking for feedback.

Destiny of Velious introduced an unparalleled strict progression to both its group and raid zones. Players wanting to group up in Velious instances have discovered that there are 3 sets of group zones which each require completing the one before it in progression before being granted access.

For instance, you must clear Tower of Frozen Shadow: Shadowed Corridors to gain access to ToFS: Umbral Halls, which must be cleared to gain access to ToFS: Haunt of Syl’Tor. And aspiring raiders must clear all 3 of these group zones in order to gain access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone. And as we also saw in The Shadow Odyseey expansion, raiders who wish to take on the most difficult x4 Raid content in Velious must first acquire a clickable debuff item by clearing the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2.

With such a daunting interdependency on all Velious zones from group instances through x2 raid and onto the x4 raid zones, you would think that Progression Quests would have been fully tested through QA and ready for players on day 1 of the expansion. Alternately, you would expect that if bugs were discovered, some of these quests would have been passable through other means. Any MMO is going to have adjustments, tweaks, nerfs, etc. after the launch of an expansion. But it’s quite another to release content that MUST all work smoothly end-to-end, yet doesn’t.

Necretia the Widowmaker

Tuesday’s Update restored Necretia the Widowmaker, a boss of Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 nearly a week after she was removed from the game due to two problems. First, it was noticed several weeks ago that she could be killed and respawned. However it was when an extraordinary item on her loot table, the Necretia Bow of Webs was discovered that she was despanwed. This bow had inflated stats and effects such that it was equivalent to a “level 300 item”. However the issue here is one of progression. Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 cannot be completed without her.

It took several days to get this resolved, and guilds who had already started the zone must wait for their zone to reset and start over to get a chance at fighting her. Until then, certain guilds remain unable to raid Velious x4 content through no limitation of their own.

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…

Let’s Be Honest…

Public Quests completed even at the highest “x4 raid” level demand neither the coordination nor the discipline of any of the raid content in the last 3 expansions. Storm Gorge requires a little more focus than Ring War, but generally speaking, 24-40 players standing in the right place, killing the right mobs, in the right order, stand to inherit a wagonload of Legendary gear with Yellow adornment slots, all without such challenges as timing AOEs, switching to an Off-Tank, agro-juggling, or any complex strategy. The biggest enemy encountered is usually Server Lag.

Public Quests offer a speedy alternate route to gearing up for players who largely skipped Sentinel’s Fate, are gearing up alts, or just aren’t interested in more solo questing (although as we found, the Othmir questline writing, structure, and payoff are all above average and keep the obvious time sinks to a minimum).

So what’s to stop players from logging in alts, parking them near the scene of a Public Quest, and going to get a coffee while their toon “earns” amazing gear? Apparently not enough. While we have taken issue with certain players who spend an awful lot of time critiquing how others play the game and all the ways in which those methods are unfair or unbalancing, even we would be foolish to defend standing around AFK in a Public Quest all while earning Legendary or Fabled gear. We believe its in everyone’s interest that your favored MMO have a long-term plan besides “More dungeons and more lootz in the next Game Update!” Gameplay that allows leapfrogging most of the content progression is disruptive for the game. Velious has got to last us the next year, and as robust as the Game Updates may end up being, the end of the treadmill should never be visible.

Today came down to a choice: Write or Play?

So tomorrow we’ll be back with lots of news about Itemization, Server Performance, and continued roadblocks in Zone progression.

Many of EverQuest 2’s most dedicated players owe their gameplay roots to the original EverQuest and still carry strong memories of the patience and community the original game required. Soloing was almost unheard of. Camping mobs for hours (or days), the difficulties and perils of travel, and contested spawns of much-needed named mobs were all experiences players would not soon forget. It sure was a different game before WoW forced all MMOs to become approachable and remove any aspect that might be considered as a “waste” of the player’s time.

When we heard about Chronoportals, a live event running on EQ2 servers that celebrates EverQuest’s 12 year anniversary by bringing players back to an earlier time to experience memorable encounters from before the Shattering, we hoped that the event might go that extra mile and include a real impression of how the world looked in EverQuest, and revisit some of the original zones.

Since the launch of the Destiny of Velious, there have been nearly 250 posts by Developers, Producers, and Animators on the EQ2 Team. While we appreciate this degree of feedback (it’s refreshing after the tight-lipped Velious Beta), it has been challenging to keep with it all, much less compose it into news stories that have context and are useful for our readers.

No doubt if you are already familiar with the EQ2 Dev Tracker, you check it out on occasion. I personally follow the EQ2 Dev Tracker at EQ2Flames because it’s easy to read, however the comments and feedback may be a bit blue for your tastes.

There is an avalanche of feedback about bugs and design issues with Quests, Armor, Reflections, Public Quests, Heroic and Raid Dungeons, Access Quests, etc. etc. If you haven’t been reading it, you may not be aware that there is renewed discussion about a /sit command (and possibly others), or about incoming fixes to any number of things which were discovered during or after Beta.

It seems every year, thousands of bug reports are submitted to the EQ2 team during Beta. And it seems every year, a few highly visible bugs/exploits make it through. Last year, it was large encounters in The Hole that would respawn if all but one mob were killed. In The Shadow Odyssey beta it was widely reported that most of the dungeons could be completed when mentored down and greyed out.

So this year, so far we know of two:

Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar (Lord Bob) could be exploited to provide loot over and over. Lord Bob was fixed in today’s hotfix.

If you have been abusing milking enjoying the Refer-a-Friend 300% XP bonus for its high speed leveling (and thus AA earning) goodness, especially by parking a level 1 trial account character at the zone-in, well, I’m afraid that has finally come to an end.

From Rich Waters 0n the EQ2 forums:

The Recruit-a-friend program is a great way for you to bring your friends into EverQuest II and help them level up a bit faster by playing together. When you group with a character you’ve recruited, you both gain a hefty 200% experience bonus. Unfortunately, many people were recruiting themselves and using it as a way to power-level their main character, rather than actually playing with a friend.

We’ve added a couple of limitations to the recruit-a-friend bonus to prevent it from being a solo leveling tool. In order to get the recruit-a-friend experience bonus:

EQ2 Servers will be going down in about 10 minutes to commence preparations for the Destiny of Velious expansion. We thought we’d take a quick look around the web to see how other press and EQ2 sites are covering the expansion.

• Calthine and Cyliena over at EQ2 ZAM have been working their fingers to the nubs catalogging every Quest, NPC, and Item in Velious. They plan to unlock their quest guides throughout the day.

• Niami Denmother at EQ2Traders has loaded up her site with tons of Tradeskill info about Velious.

• Karen Bryan at Massively has checked in another edition of the Tattered Notebook, providing an outlook on EQ2’s seventh expansion. SOE provided their Destiny of Velious “sizzle” trailer exclusively to Massively.

We are hopeful that EverSeek, Beetny’s AA Calculator, and Mitzy’s Adornment Guide will be updated soon to reflect Velious changes.

If you find any other sites that are working on EQ2 coverage, please drop a note in the comments and we’ll update this article!