EQ2U Gear Report V1.1

I’m happy to report that the next version of the EQ2U Gear Report has just been pushed live and we have some new features that hopefully folks will appreciate!

First up is Crit Bonus and Potency have had an amicable breakup and are now just going to be friends in their own separate columns. This should help melee-focused Priests and Mages going forward. Previously, only one of these stats was shown, biased towards certain Archetypes.

Second, we’ve got a new Tooltip when you mouseover the White, Yellow, Red, and Green adornment summaries which shows you exactly which equipment slots are missing adornments. This feature required a new Javascript file, so you may need to hold down Ctrl and press the F5 key a couple of times to get it to load the new file.

Third, it’s been suggested that we show, at-a-glance, which equipment has yellow or red slots. This can be helpful to distinguish between two 183 stat items, one of which might be an old HM drop vs. a brand new heroic item. I hope to add a simple checkbox on the page to hide/show these dots as they can be a bit distracting if you are wanting to look at just the numbers.

When EverQuest II added the StationCash Marketplace, beside all the discussion and debate about the merits of Subscriptions vs. Pay-as-you-Go gaming, slippery slopes, and so forth, I had another question on my mind:

If SOE is betting the future on microtransactions in the Marketplace, shouldn’t EverQuest2.com’s flagship feature be an online catalogue of every item up for offer?

But year after year, we have yet to see any such website materialize, likely due to the work required to build and then maintain such a site.

Dethdlr and I have been very fortunate to be involved in Census right from the beginning, both in giving reams of feedback and suggestions to improve the service for all fansites, as well as using it to build our own EQ2U site. Over the last 18 months, the EQ2 team have continued to add more data to Census which allows us to make EQ2U even more complete, but in any business, resources have to be justified. So what better way to reinvigorate interest in Census within SOE than to add a highly visible feature like the EQ2 Marketplace?

Start Browsing the EQ2 Marketplace @ EQ2U

Imagine the ability to view a spreadsheet of your characters, your friends’ characters, your guild, or your guild alliance, all with their most valuable stats and gear scores (Stamina). Now imagine being able to sort this view by columns, add characters, hide certain guild ranks based on participation or perhaps if you have a main or alt raid force. Or imagine you’ve just joined a group and want to see what gear they’ve got, what upgrades they’ll be rolling for, or what areas you could help them improve on.

Today, EQ2U is happy to announce the introduction of the Gear Report!

We’ve heard from a number of guilds that hand-maintain such a spreadsheet, but there has been a growing desire to be able to automate such a view. Errrorr was the catalyst for this feature as he showed me a screenshot of the stats that their guild tracks for each character. Then I stumbled upon Soresha‘s EQ2 Data site where she has built quite a bit of this functionality for her guild. But we wanted to expand this idea outside of Guilds and allow any group of characters, even Guild Alliances, to build lists of characters and view their stats at a glance.

So how do you access this Gear Report feature?

Today we’re happy to add Class Focuses and Racial Traits to EQ2U. This is something we’ve wanted to add for a while, but it took a little while longer to do as the spells and icon positions for each class and race required data entry. Please let us know if you find any stray icons or missing info.

EQ2Wire sits down with Dedith to talk about his new Data-driven EQ2 site which he launched over the weekend.

Q: What made you want to create Dragons Armory? Is there a history to the name?

Dedith: The reason behind the site was to help those players who may not know or not have the time to find the finer points of optimizing their characters.  *grin*  My wife insists that I wrote it for her.  I did realize while researching the design of this site that everyone plays their characters differently, so I concentrated on making the tools so no matter your play style this would be useful.  Even the min-maxer types will find use in the features as it just makes things much clearer and easier to find.

Q: What’s unique about the site? What’s your favorite part of the site?

D: While the site is somewhat similar to your own EQ2U site, it specializes in analyzing the character and making the player aware of points that could be optimized on the character.  Some examples of optimizations are warning about missing items, missing adornments, low level gear, sub-expert rank spells, stats over the cap, uncompleted epic quest, etc.  My favorite features are the item and adornment upgrade search options.  These let one easily look for items and adornments for the class, level, slot, and socket color in question.

We are thrilled to officially release Guild Achievements on EQ2U as well as an improved Guild Detail page with Guild Recruiting info including Cloak Heraldry!

NOTE: The rounded corner blue style is temporary and we intend to replace it with something more becoming in the future!

From the EQ2 Forums:

The update on February 26th was discussed in Podcast #143, as well as in articles about the PvP Updates and Bag Sorting Abilities. Now, it’s time to take a look at two more major features that round out the update: new raid content and guild achievements!

X2 and X4 Raids

As posted by Praetorian, owner of the Raid strategy discussion site EQ-Raiders, on the EQ2 Forums:

It is now official that EQ-Raiders will be hosting a brand new Raid Guild Progression website.

This new website will have both manual kill submissions (For guilds that fall out of the realm of accurate auto-updaters) as well as automated kill verification updates through a unique RaidHub interface being created by Mecrab, the author of RaidHub. The website is being designed and coded by Mecrab and should be launching this weekend. RaidHub will not be required by any means but with the added capabilities and the already large amount of guilds that utilize RaidHub, it only seemed natural to make that the platform of choice. The website will also take full advantage of kill verifications with the upcoming new SOE Data Feeds that feature guild kill updates as well.

As some of you have no doubt noticed, EQ2U has had some performance issues lately. Usually these outages have been short-lived but last night, EQ2 data updates stopped around 8:15pm last night and only sporadically worked today.

According to a recent tweet from John Smedley, PlanetSide 2 will soon be launching its own twice-delayed API service which will enable player-driven PS2 sites just as the EQ2 Data Feeds have enabled EQ2U and other sites. Hopefully they’re just working out the kinks and things will work themselves out over the next few days.

Just in the last hour we’ve seen data coming in again and starting to catch up. We wish the best of luck to the PlanetSide 2 folks and data team as they launch the second of what will hopefully be a companywide initiative to offer data to the public for all of SOE’s games.

Meanwhile we’ve started looking at some new data which we’re very excited about. Updates as we have it.

I am thrilled to announce that EQ2U now supports Spirit Stones (green adornments) which were added with the Chains of Eternity expansion, and for which we recently received the necessary data. We hope you will find that the progression of stats on this new type of adornment is a lot easier to follow with our choice of presentation/layout.

Spirit Stone shown on a character’s equipment with stats appropriate to the Spirit Level.

So while we’re crossing our fingers that EQ2U will get access to Loot Tables someday soon, I wanted to take our new Item Popups for a spin and put together a collaborative loot article. We’ll be covering loot from Advanced Solo, Group, and Raid Zones, and even Collections as I know there are some good reward items out there.

What do I do?

Please post item names below and who the item is from (as well as any adornments that are bundled with the item), which zone, and whether it was the EM or HM version. I’ll be reading through the comments and updating this article.

Surround each item’s name with {eq2u}and {/eq2u} (replacing the { and } with [ and ]) and it will automagically turn into an item popup.

I’m thrilled to announce that the last three weeks of Javascript hell endured by Dethdlr have paid off, as EQ2U is now running totally revamped display code for Item Popups (Tooltips if you prefer). While we were at it, we also took the opportunity to switch our Spells pages to internal popups. This applies both when viewing a Character, and when browsing Spells directly.

[eq2u]Chains of the Baleful Soul[/eq2u] | [eq2u]Torrent of Pestilence[/eq2u] | [eq2u]Assassin’s Drape of War[/eq2u]

Once I started testing out the new code, and I saw item popups snap into nice neat positions rather than going off the screen or flickering, I was spoiled. This change applies sitewide to EQ2U, from Item Searches to AA Popups to Spells. This is not the only thing we’re working on, but wanted to push this out there and you’ll see in a followup article why we’re excited about Item Popups.

A lot of you out there (myself included) will be on the road in the coming days so I just wanted to wish folks in the U.S. a Happy Thanksgiving. Alas, my well-wishes are a month late for Canadians, and as for Europe, well, the best description I’ve heard is:

• Thursday: We eat turkey and innumerable harvest foods ’til we want to die
• Friday: We nearly kill each other while retail shopping for marked down electronics
• Saturday: We engage in awkward social activities with crazy Cousin Eddie and odd Aunt Edna
• Sunday: We bid fare-thee-well to in-laws who we are thankful that we see just once a year!

Where’s My EQ2 Updates?

A boatload of updates have been queued up to hit the Test Server next Monday. In addition to numerous tweaks and fixes for Quests, as well as adjustments to Solo, Group and Raid zones, there are a few other changes in store including an improvement to the in-game appearance of Spirit Stones (green adornments).

EQ2Talk Episode #55 — Second Wind

This weekend Dell and Ali talked to the producer of Everquest 2, Holly “Windstalker” Longdale. In this podcast, find out which way the wind is blowing, and learn about some of the things behind the making of Chains of Eternity, EQ2’s ninth expansion. Also, learn about what’s in store for Norrath in the coming months and the future.

Rumor has it that one of the questions relates to Census, and Holly indicated that the team is fully committed supporting the service and my name was mentioned.

Download EQ2Talk Episode #55

So Dethdlr and I had a heart-to-heart and we decided to take today off and sip mojitos. Just kidding. About taking the day off that is.

Dethdlr spent all morning making sure that our backups of almost everyone’s Alternate Advancements worked and wouldn’t be overwritten by the new data.  He then reloaded the data for 121 AA trees, 2,882 AA nodes, and 11,193 AA spells.  Also, the spell data for all classes has been added for levels 93-95.  I’m currently working on adding the Tradeskill Prestige AA tab. By the way, the in-game AA window has undergone some significant changes which make it more usable. That’s great, but for the time being, we are planning to leave our AA window as-is but of course we are open to feedback on changing it.

Dethdlr and I were very fortunate to make it to SOE Live this year and further, to present a panel on EQ2U, including the new Achievements feature, and talk a bit about what went into creating this site, what we plan for the future, and how SOE is going to shortly be burying us in a lot more data.

The panel starts with Clif Bate, Director of Commerce Services & Web Presence, and Morgan Bonar Lead Web Developer and Web Producer, PlanetSide 2, and then at the 20 minute mark, we get to the EQ2U bits.

So last night, we announced that we had made a snapshot of the AAs for some 150,000 characters which people could view at Beetny.com. We were pretty proud of ourselves until someone asked if that included the Beastlord warder AAs.  It didn’t.  Beatny doesn’t cover Beastlord warders.

So because we try harder, we’ve gone back and made an actual backup of every character’s AAs right here on EQ2U and will hang onto it until well after the expansion.  That’s over 416,000 characters.

If you haven’t got an EQ2U account, please feel free to sign up and do your own AA Backup! And let us know in the Comments if you have any questions!

With the EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity expansion comes new Prestige abilities, and that means an AA reset. In years past, news of an AA reset has seen players scrambling to capture screenshots of their AA tabs or scribbling down notes about where you’ve spent points (and how many) on each tree.

This year, we have a better suggestion: Sit back, relax, and let EQ2U do the work for you!

On October 28-29th, Dethdlr wrote and ran a script to Backup the AAs of every followed character on EQ2U, plus every single level 90, 91, and 92 EQ2 character ever looked up on EQ2U. Since 96% of level 92 characters have been looked up on our site, you’re probably covered!

The Data Feeds (Census) panel is just starting in Las Vegas and Dethdlr and I will be presenting a talk about how EQ2U started and our plans for the future. The big news is, we are unveiling a feature we’ve been working on for some time — Achievements.

I wanted to do this feature right, and further, I wanted it easier to read than both EQ2Players, and the in-game Achievements window. I hope you’ll agree that we’ve accomplished that!

Go ahead and head over to EQ2U and check out the new Achieve tab on each character.

For months, the question in my mind has not been IF, but WHEN the SOE forums would need to be replaced. On September 18th, word broke on the Vanguard forums that SOE will finally be leaving their crufty homegrown forum solution behind in favor of new forum software.

After the jump, we look at why new forum software is absolutely imperative, and just what will happen to the millions of existing forum posts amassed over the last 5 1/2 years.

In the most recent episode of EQ2Talk, Dellmon and Aliscious address SOE’s notion that “We’re players too”. From SOEmote to Dungeon Maker to loot distribution and balance, the podcast asks the question — Why are so many things missed, overlooked, or left behind?

Also in the podcast, EQ2U gets its moment in the sun as Ali compares it to EQ2Players. I encourage listening to the whole podcast, but if you want to focus your attention on the bit about EQ2U, that’s from 41 minutes until 46 minutes with a brief followup from 52:30-53:30.

From EQ2Talk.com:

If the summer sun has you all hot and sweaty, cool off with a little Frostfell in July, as Dellmon and Aliscious talk about things they’d like to see come to EQ2. What past game changes have fulfilled your hopes? Which ones fell short of expectations? Download this episode to find out if your hosts share any of the things that made your list. Also, some listeners chime in with their thoughts, and play along with Are You Smarter than a Dellmon.

Click here to listen to Episode 48

We receive word this evening that the Item Discovery data within the Data Feeds API has been refreshed, with those ill-gotten item discoveries through an exploit of Item Reforging have been removed from the data stream.

Please let us know if you see any issues with item discovery data on EQ2U after this change.

A few hours ago, Amnerys was kind enough to shoot me an e-mail with much better screenshots of the EQ2Players Sneak Peak from Thursday night. As I was poking around, I had a moment of sheer curiosity and checked what I knew to be the URL for the new EQ2Players site. To my surprise, I discovered that the site was up and running!

It’s February 16th, and EQ2Players is LIVE!

An Unbiased Review?

These days, I’m wearing at least two hats, one as the operator of an EverQuest 2 News & Commentary site (EQ2Wire), and as the designer of a competing site to EQ2Players — EQ2U.

We appreciate all the hard work that SOE has put into building a Data Feeds service so that EQ2Players can be just one of what will be a growing number of websites that build on EQ2 data. As Dan Kinney told me, each website will have different strengths and thus attract a different audience.

So with that, I did want to just do a brief, and what I hope is objective, review of EQ2Players.

Today, EverQuest2.com has provided the necessary instructions to players so that they can Opt-in or Opt-out of EQ2Players data.

And at the risk of Inception, EverQuest2.com also made a point of mentioning our new EQ2U site, our FAQ which talks about the Data Feeds and matters of privacy, and our Transcript of the EQ2Players Sneak Peek Webcast!

With a few exceptions, the past few days have been a bit euphoric. Thanks all!

Today, players gain more control over their Privacy for EQ2, EQ2Players, and API-driven websites like EQ2U.

Starting today, you can now Opt-in the discovery of your Alt characters when players lookup or search for your Characters on EQ2Players or EQ2U.

If you DO NOT WANT players to be able to find/see your Alts, then do nothing. By default, the Link to Alt Characters setting is disabled for all characters.

If you want players to be able to find some or all of your Alts, then enable the Link to Alt Characters setting on EACH character that you want to be discoverable.

And as we have discussed before, if you don’t want anyone to be able to view or search for any of your characters, simply uncheck the Enable EQ2Players Updates setting on each character.

UPDATE: EQ2U is now supporting Alts for characters that have this feature enabled!

NOTE: Players with custom UIs such as DrumsUI and ProfitUI have reported problems enabling their Character and Alt settings. Until there is an update, we suggest renaming your \EverQuest II\UI\%uiname%\eq2ui_mainhud_persona.xml file, logging in each character and setting your permissions how you want, then renaming the file back.