Today marks the introduction of Game Update 57 to the live servers. Key features of this update include:

• The EQ2 User Interface has received a facelift, with a new toolbar, a refresh of various windows, and a merged Character/Inventory/Profile window. The default theme is red, but easily switchable to blue by typing /loadui and choosing the Blue graphic set.
• More character classes are now neutral and may start in either good or evil cities.
• Spell animations and effects have been revamped.
• Intrazone travel now supports path linking. Travel within Kingdom of Sky has been improved.
• Erudin group instances (level 86-90) are now easier to reach.
• New tradeskill quests have been added in the level 10, 20, and 30 tiers. These quests reward a mount as well as access to what have previously been overpriced Advanced recipe books.
• Starting areas in Greater Faydark and Darklight Wood have received substantial revamps. Gorowyn has received further architectural rebuilding to improve navigation.
• All classes have had some group-specific spells postponed until later levels to reduce the number of spells new players get in the first 20 levels.
• Fighter heals will no longer critically heal.
• The “Notable Norrathian” contest winning paintings are now available within Norrath but only during the monthly City Festivals (next is Sept 1-7). They are guild hall placeable.
• Lucan D’Lere has returned to Freeport.

• Today’s update contains no new dungeons or raid zones.

EQ2X

Also going live today is the public beta for EverQuest II Extended, the Free-to-Play alternative to a monthly EQ2 subscription. Game Update 57 will arrive simultaneously on both servers. EQ2X, as it’s being abbreviated, may be discussed on the separate EQ2X Forums.

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)…

Sometimes people don’t believe it, but I know for a fact that developers at Fan Faire really do listen, or at the very least take extensive notes which they reflect upon when getting home.

Some changes are relatively easy and make a lot of sense when the context is explained interactively in a conversation with the developer. Of course big sweeping changes are unlikely while the developers are already in full press mode working on the next expansion, but it’s great when open discussion at Fan Faire can trigger a small but significant improvement. So enough of that…

Olihin (PvP and Battlegrounds dev) has posted a writeup of all the changes he is currently considering or outright planning for the future. He has already indicated that the earliest we might see some of these changes is Game Update 58, but there are no promises. Further, Olihin is requesting feedback on these changes. They are far from going live, so now is your chance for constructive conversation.

The team over at EQ2 ZAM have buckled down and delivered complete documentation to the new Tradeskill quests being added in Game Update 57. These quests now fill out the entire level 10-90 range in EQ2 with at least a few Tradeskill quests on each tier so you have some options other than discovery XP from new combines and grinding Rush Order writs.

Of course these quests provide new rewards, including a 25% runspeed mount which, for some players who have low level adventurers but high level tradeskillers, will be quite useful.

These new level 10-30 tradeskill quests will also help players who think paying over 1 plat for a level 10-30 Advanced crafting recipe book is a bit over-the-top. At the conclusion of these quests, players will be able to buy Advanced recipe books from a vendor.

To get a grapple on the details of these quests and their rewards, check out the EQ2 ZAM guide.

From Amnerys:

All U.S. EQII servers are scheduled to come down on Wednesday, August 18 at 5:00 AM PDT for Game Update 57. Servers are expected to be offline for around 4 hours, coming back online around 9:00 AM. The UK servers will be updated according to the usual schedule.

Notable Norrathians Paintings

What about those Notable Norrathians paintings? Kaisha has dropped some hints regarding how the 10 winning paintings will become available. If our interpretation is correct, it looks like they may be available from the City Festivals for 10 city tokens each.

Tribute to the Huntress and Druid Reconstruction Live Events

The Tribute to the Huntress quest has been confirmed to end with the launch of GU57, but the Druid Ring Reconstruction event has been extended to last until GU58. (from EQ2 ZAM)

Whence Update Notes?

We’ll post the Game Update notes when they become available (assuming we’re awake!).

Emily “Domino” Taylor, Tradeskill developer for EQ2 has been fielding some intense comments from players regarding the first ever Tradeskill Heritage Quest coming to EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious, specifically the Coldain Prayer Shawl quest. This was previously an adventure quest in EQ1 so some players have expressed their concerns about this being a tradeskill quest rather than for adventurers.

You can follow this discussion of the Coldain Prayer Shawl Quest on EQ2 Forums.

Gary Daughtry, graphic artist/animator on the EQ2 Team, set about to revamp the spell animations, specifically the particle effects, for Game Update 57, currently expected to go live tomorrow. The intention has been to reduce the number of “pyrotechnic”, “over-the-top” effects and create something more gradual, with larger effects based on the tier and level of the spell.

However players have been expressing their displeasure with the sometimes sweeping changes.

Here is the 4-part Destiny of Velious panel for EQ2 from Saturday at Fan Faire 2010. I cut out my own off-the-screen capture of the Destiny of Velious preview trailer because it has been released to the press in High Definition.

[EQ2Wire] EQ2 Expansion “Destiny of Velious” Panel (playlist)

Here is the 6-part Question & Answer panel for EQ2 from Saturday at Fan Faire 2010.

[EQ2Wire] Fan Faire 2010 – EQ2 Q&A Saturday Panel (playlist)

I have just posted all 6 parts of the EQ2 Mechanics / Class Balance panel from Fan Faire 2010.

[EQ2Wire] Fan Faire 2010 – EQ2 Mechanics Panel (playlist)

A View From the Top‘s Karen and Adam sat down with Paul “Frizznik” Carrico, SOE’s Lead Mechanics Designer at Fan Faire. On this episode they discuss a few different aspects of EverQuest II, the upcoming Velious expansion, and even a little about EQ2 Extended. Take a moment to listen to Frizznik’s thoughts on the game. Thanks to Kiara and Calthine for putting the meeting together.

Listen to A View From the Top Episode #15

Calthine over at EQ2 ZAM has just posted high resolution concept art as well as the teaser trailer for EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious.

If you are looking for the teaser trailer in High Definition, look no further than OnlineGamerPortal-DE who have posted the Destiny of Velious teaser trailer in 720p.

Although there has been no post to EQ2Players.com or the EQ2 Forums, it seems that all SOE login servers are down for up to 9 hours of maintenance, as well as several hours of downtime for the EQ2 game servers. Here is a post from the SWG Forums from their Community team:

On Monday August 9th, we will be conducting maintenance across several different systems. The work will affect customer login and authentication, and we will be bringing down the galaxies while work is ongoing. Once the intrusive part of the maintenance is complete, we will bring up the galaxies and make them available to players.

The maintenance window is scheduled from 12:30AM through 8:30AM PDT. If additional time is needed to complete the work, we’ll update this thread accordingly.

We appreciate your patience and understanding during this process, and apologize for the disruption.

and from the Vanguard forums:

We have some maintenance to do on the servers on Monday and this will unfortunately mean you won’t be able to get to the login servers during the hours of 12am to 7:30am Pacific time on Monday 9th August.

If you’re already inside the game during these times you will be fine to continue playing, but should you log out you won’t be able to get back in.

There’s a rampant discussion on the EQ2 Forums on this subject.

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

Now for the slides from the PvP/Battlegrounds panel. It’s really recap of what’s been done in the past year and then opening up the floor to questions. No big revelations but a lot of questions were asked, as you can read about in my notes from that panel.

Here are the EQ2 Tradeskill Panel slides. The last picture is folks lining up to ask questions…

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… 

While I’m working on getting my own photos posted…

Billy!

[Rystall] Costume contest winner “Billy”!!!

It has to be frustrating at home to read “We’ll look into it” or “We’ll talk about it”. Realize that my writeups of each panel are on-the-fly and I simplify and summarize questions and answers as best I can. So any answer from the devs like “That is something we can look at” or “This is something we weren’t aware of” or “We need to talk to the team about this” or “We’ll put it on our list” sometimes got distilled into the ubiquitous “We’ll look into it”.

So what questions didn’t you see get asked at Fan Faire? I sense a lot of exasperation at the questions that do get asked that we’ve heard before (Q: When can we get armor dyes? A: If you want this, EQ2 will have to add flat-shaded armor that doesn’t use any Shaders 1.0 or 3.0) instead of the hard-hitting questions. Even I was surprised at how few raid content questions were asked compared to housing, grouping, itemization, PvP, and class balance questions.

Apologies for any typos. They jacked up the AC in here!! Remember folks, lots of EQ2 t shirts, hoodies, and polos.

The Battlegrounds and PvP Panel, moderated by Olihin.

Nandy “Zoltaroth” Szots, Greg “Rothgar” Spence, Paul “Frizznik” Carrico, Mike “Xelgad” Ganz, Juan “Olihin” Cardenas.

EQ2 Mechanics and Class Balance panel.

Rich Waters, Greg “Rothgar” Spence, Paul “Frizznik” Carrico, Mike “Xelgad” Ganz.

Update: As of 2:00AM CDT I have made some cleanup and additional information added to these notes based on memory. There are 3-4 missing questions which will get filled in after the video is reviewed.

The EQ2 Tradeskill panel….

Note: I have gone back and cleaned up these notes with additional details from memory as of 2:15AM PDT.

Friday night was the big Pool Party. We took up the entire Bally’s outdoor swimming pool area. There was live music, bars dispensing refreshing beverages at every corner, water misters, and crystal blue swimming pools.

Dave Georgeson was making the rounds all night talking to anyone and everyone who wanted to give him the business about the EQ2 Extended service, and the long-term effects on the EQ2 servers. Say what you will, but he puts himself out there and communicates with the players. He is self-assured that this will work, and quotes his 20 year history of successful games.

Calthine of EQ2 ZAM and I questioned him mercilessly for about 30 minutes and I have to say he is very charismatic and understands the concerns. He wanted to reiterate that this is an experiment, that it’s not even beta yet, that many things can change, and that if they start to see a huge shift from EQ2 to EQ2X, they will add more incentives to the EQ2 subscription side. They want to use EQ2X to attract new players who aren’t currently staying in EQ2 after their 14-day trials end, not to siphon players off the live servers.