We’re working on an article about Shared Stats and Destiny of Velious. Share your comments about Destiny of Velious and shared stats and how they benefit:
Also, any comments on Damage Over Time limitations for Necromancers and other pet classes above are appreciated.
Now the calm before the storm…
Tomorrow morning at 3:00am PST (11:00 GMT), the EQ2 servers will go offline to begin the process of installing the Destiny of Velious expansion and its related Game Update 59 patch. According to the announcement, the servers are scheduled to come up at 9:00am (17:00 GMT).
So what are you looking forward to?
Give us your comments, good, bad, or indifferent. Even if it’s just that there’s 2 days to go until Rift launches (There’s a Fan Site for that).
EQ2Wire has just received special authorization to share screen shots with you taken during the Destiny of Velious Beta. We’re still waiting to find out about video. You may also start to see screen shots on other fan sites today as well. This is just happening so please bear with us.
We would like to thank SOE for changing their mind on this issue. Fan Sites provide an opportunity for us to showcase parts of new expansions and we put a lot of effort into informing players.
Thanks for your patience, everyone!
The Itemization Battle
When examining any piece of equipment, players must evaluate whether that item is an upgrade for their class based not only on their existing stats, but also whether the stats and effects on that item are of benefit to their class. The character’s spells, combat arts, AA setup, and existing gear must all be considered. Choosing item upgrades has never been an exact science.
At one time, all 5 main stats including Intelligence, Wisdom, Stamina, Agility, and Strength had a part to play in the effectiveness of an item for every class, not just hybrid classes. This is not to mention +Health, +Power, Offensive and Defensive Skills, and the various Resists. The last 3 expansions have added or greatly expanded upon effects such as Crit Chance, Multi Attack (formerly Double Attack), Crit Bonus, Potency, AOE Autoattack, Flurry, Strikethrough, etc.
You would think that the Non-Disclosure Agreement for the EQ2 Destiny of Velious beta had already been lifted, given the Youtube videos and unintended leaks on EQ2’s own and other sites. But we can assure you it remains firmly in place. Today, we plant tongue firmly in cheek and deliver another illustration brought to us by CheesePirate.com.
The Destiny of Velious NDA is likely to be lifted towards the end of January. Until then, please be aware of the legal ramifications it may have for you, not to mention losing access to EQ2 and SOE games, should you choose to leak information which has not been released by SOE.
Last night, the Destiny of Velious beta forums were taken offline and then restarted from scratch under the EQ2X Forums. It has been indicated that this change was to allow EQ2X players to contribute their feedback and reports in the Beta forums. However this means all discussions and threads about the Beta will need to be restarted, as the current Forum software lacks the ability to move threads from one game to another. Users who have signed the NDA and wish to participate in the Destiny of Velious beta forums must now first navigate to the EQ2X forums and, if necessary, re-register their account to access them.
A cantankerous discussion on the EQ2 Forums posted over the New Year’s holiday addresses the issue of Account Hacks and Compromised Accounts. Due to the holiday schedule, some players have experienced as long as a 2 week wait to have their accounts restored or rolled back. Update: We’ve found a far more constructive thread on the subject of the increase in Compromised EQ2 Accounts.
Amnerys has posted an update on the situation as well as a word on Velious Winter Rewards for those who were not automatically granted them:
I’ve been helping Feldon out here at EQ2Wire for about eight months now. My first post was on April 4th 2010 so I haven’t quite been here a full year. In that time I’ve sifted through over seven thousand items to bring you almost 100 articles here on EQ2Wire. Hopefully you’ve found at least a few of them useful.
I look forward to continuing my work in 2011 and bringing you all the latest highlights of what’s going on in the world of EQ2.
Happy New Year Everybody!
Wishing you a Merry Christmas Kwanzaa Hanukkah Solstice Festivus etc. and a Happy New Year.
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
CheesePirate.com for EQ2Wire
Looking for something to do while the servers are being merged? Check out Rothgar’s Christmas Lights! Today he added “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey.
Watch the new one and the original four videos in the original article posted here.
If you played EQ1 and are familiar with Magelo, you’ve probably been clamoring for SOE to let us outsource the whole EQ2Players/EverQuest2.com data stream to fan sites who will put in the hours to produce accurate, powerful search engines for the EQ2 data stream. If you have, or are just tired of EQ2Players and want to see something new, this news from Zoltaroth should brighten your day:
The current [data] feeds server can generate XML, YML and JSON for consumption. It isn’t quite ready for prime-time yet but it is getting really close.
So you may remember that Racial Traits/Traditions were nerfed adjusted in Game Update 53 to remove all uniqueness, including all offensive buffs and abilities such as Ratonga bite and Sarnak fire breathing. From Frizznik:
Offensive buffs have been removed. We did this to help balance races better against each other.
It seems this ‘balance’ applies to only free races. Left out of the initial version of the The Freeblood: More Information and Images announcement on EverQuest2.com was this Racial Trait:
Another Racial Trait, “Bloodletting,” grants a minor Lifetap spell to occasionally drain health from targeted enemies.
Do you think those offensive buffs and attacks previously available as Racial Traits should be restored in light of this announced Freeblood ability?
image courtesy Kotaku.com
Kotaku.com landed an exclusive interview with SOE President John Smedley and got some of his reactions to World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm update. Some selected quotes:
Next week’s world-changing expansion for World of Warcraft may not be the only cataclysm to hit a major massively multiplayer online game soon.John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, tells Kotaku that the publisher has been considering a similar game-wide reset for EverQuest II.
“We are looking at it closely, we have been for a number of years now,” he said during a visit to Sony Online Entertainment Denver. “Is it something we would do within the next expansion cycle? Probably not. But I think it’s interesting.”
…
You can read the full interview at Kotaku.com.
A thread was created on the EQ2 Forums a couple of weeks ago entitled “Why is there no hype about Velious?” which elicited responses from Amnerys and Rothgar indicating that we’re still 3 months away and not everything is nailed down. This thread raged on.
However the real discussion about the EverQuest II expansion Destiny of Velious and future of Norrath beyond its release has been happening in the elephantine Server Merges Announced by Email thread, which has become sort of an omnibus discussion between SmokeJumper, Rothgar, and the players.
EQ2Players received an incomplete revamp last December, leaving the site graphically refreshed, but with significant issues including problematic content updates, buggy Javascript, and various statistical oversights. The site was also re-branded as EverQuest2.com and became a free service, instead a paid feature.
The SOE Platform Team were initially responsive to the issues brought up and some of them were fixed, but it seems there was some personnel shuffling and as a result, little else has been done to the revamped EverQuest2.com since the release of Sentinel’s Fate. Players have been trying to nail down some kind of response from the EQ2 team about when the site will get some attention. SmokeJumper finally went on the record with:
We haven’t given up on it. It wounds our souls that it’s in that state.
But December is always the busiest month in a game company and this one is no exception. We hope to give the site love early next year sometime.
EQ2Wire would personally prefer some type of public API to this data, but we’ll take what we can get.
In response to a conversation about the division of development time between EQ2, StationCash items, and Legends of Norrath, Calthine of EQ2 ZAM made a statement that elicited a response from SmokeJumper. That response confirmed on Thursday what many of us have believed but been unable to prove.
Since the introduction of StationCash Marketplace, StationCash Items have been designed and tested by the main EQ2 team and not, as has been posited, by a separate team of artists and programmers. SmokeJumper indicates that this is changing, and with the revenue from SC/LoN, SOE have been able to justify hiring an artist to create said items.
Editor’s Note: Post has been updated with 2 additional quotes.
If you’ve been following the EQ2 Dev Tracker, you know that EQ2 Senior Producer SmokeJumper has been tearing things up the past few days with much dodging, parrying, and responses to player concerns.
In response to the argument that “EQ2 is dead”, EQ2 Senior Producer SmokeJumper had some words for competing MMOs out there. While he didn’t mention Rift: Planes of Telara by name — which just opened with what some people are calling the smoothest, most successful Beta Test of any MMO in history, and which will be launching head-to-head with Destiny of Velious next spring — well, check out the quote after the jump…
Amnerys posted this today on the Everquest2.com forums:
As of yesterday afternoon, the decision has been made to hold the merge until next week. We want to be sure we have full staff on hand to make everything goes smoothly.
Commentary: Some of you are probably wondering what the heck is going on with the merges and thinking that if they’re pushing it this many times, this probably isn’t going to end well. From what I understand, they needed to give people 30 days notice of the upcoming server merges (not sure exactly why but sounds like a good idea regardless). So I’m guessing that they asked their devs/engineers when they thought would be the earliest that they could be ready for the merges and they said Nov 16th if all goes well and we don’t run into any hiccups. So they announced the merges would take place starting on Nov 16th. When Nov 16th rolled around, they were down to the final rounds of testing the process and hit a few hiccups. They are now in the process of working through the final hiccups in their testing environment before inflicting running the merge scripts on the live servers.
I’m personally glad that they are taking the cautious approach to make sure as few hiccups as possible make it to the live servers. In the software industry it’s all too often that management forces devs to push something out the door whether it’s ready or not just so they meet the deadline that was announced. I’d much rather have quality pushed a little late than bugs pushed on time. These delays are a good thing. It shows they are taking their time to get it right rather than rushing it out the door. Even with the delays, I’m sure some things will still go wrong, but hopefully it won’t be very many.
I remember several years ago preparing to raid Deathtoll.
The first thing I did was ride a cloud up on Bonemire and jump off at just the right spot so I could land on the floating island containing Arbiter Selek. But before I could talk to him, I had to speak Draconic. That’s right, first I had to do the quest Speak as a Dragon that started with a raid and then sent me all over Norrath looking for items.
Search Engine Rankings
Internet search engines use many different methods to rank the results of searches. One method of choosing which page to show first is by counting up the incoming links from other sites. The theory is that the more sites that are linking to a given page, the more likely it is to be useful. But what if you just want to show ads on your site and trick people into visiting? How to you get a higher ranking in the search engines? One method is to use programs that go out and post comments on websites that include links to your site. Then when the site is indexed by the search engines, they will see these links back to your site which will increase its ranking.
EQ2Wire Spam Comments
EQ2Wire.com receives its fair share of spam comments that are automatically marked as spam by the filters in place (over twenty thousand and counting). Some of them though are worded in such a way as to make it through the filters. These are the ones that the moderators here at EQ2Wire have to read through and approve or mark as spam manually. It’s usually fairly easy to tell the spam from the actual comments, especially when you look at the sites in the links. In the six months or so that I’ve been here at EQ2Wire, there have been a few that have caught my eye. Here are some highlights for your amusement from the 120+ from September 2010 after the break (links have been removed from the original pieces o’ spam.):
Community.
What does that word really mean in an MMO? We don’t live in the same neighborhoods, nor even know each other outside a virtual world, so what does a gaming community mean to those playing the game?
Would EQ2 benefit from its Lead Designer (Rich Waters) having a presence on the EQ2 Forums?
This straightforward question is the subject of a colorful new forum thread on the EQ2 Forums.
The Lead Designer is as much a gatekeeper for the development of a game as the Senior Producer, and so they need to have a good working relationship. I’m sure it’s been too short a time to know how things are gelling on the current EQ2 team, but a more accurate term for the previous setup might be “curdled”.
Recent prominent departures which have shaken the EQ2 team have likely cleared the decks for a more “well-aligned” team. But at what cost? Brenlo must surely rue the day he ever considered leading the EQ2 team. At least he’ll never have to hear the question “How does WoW implement this?” in a meeting again. Timetravelling‘s stellar raid designs will also be hard to duplicate.
Update: Rich Waters posted on the EQ2 Forums regarding a bug with XP Potions.
Rumors aside, here are some good quotes from that thread (after the jump)…
I’ve been advised that my previous post on Comment Abuse was alarming, so I wanted to post something more detailed and lay out the situation.
EQ2Wire is starting to develop a community of loyal readers, some of whom post comments under our articles. We appreciate these comments, as it helps give us direct feedback on how we are doing at communicating ideas, summarizing information, etc. as well as give us ideas for coverage.
We currently moderate or approve the first few posts of each new user here to make sure that comments are not offensive, abusive towards other players, or containing content likely to get EQ2Wire filtered out by workplace filters and firewalls. Once a user has had a few posts approved, they are then able to post freely without waiting for their message to appear. Quite a few people read EQ2Wire because it’s the only EQ2 website that is not yet blocked at their office.
With this in mind, over the last few days, we have seen a growing number of comments which are offensive or attacking other members. Most of these have not been visible to the public, or if they were, they were deleted quickly by our crack team (oh wait, that’s just me and Dethdlr) of comment approver monkeys. We have no problem with constructive criticism, but some folks have been crossing the line, trying to turn this site into EQ2Flames.
It’s just a few people, less than a dozen, and so we are able to deal with the issue relatively quickly, but if it does become a growing problem in the future, then we may have to take some actions. These actions may include approving more posts before a user is ‘free and clear’ to post. Another possibility is to start using user registration for expedited commenting and all other posts would be moderated.
We also are retaining the right, in extreme cases of abusive posts directed towards EQ2Wire, SOE, EQ2, or other players, to gather information and report it to ISPs. This, of course, would be extremely rare, but in the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to make this information available up front.
So far we have been very lucky to have a growing community of people who are genuinely interested in posting constructive comments. We’d like to keep it that way!
Morgan
Fan Faire is now over and one thing seems to be clear: SOE does not have a plan to balance the new players coming into the game between EQ2X and EQII Live, at least not one they are willing to share with us…