Today’s Update Notes for March 31, 2011 bring those Itemization changes we’ve been hearing about, a redesign of the Storm Gorge Public Quest, and the Aether Races flying event has now been folded into City Festivals, starting with Antonica. From SmokeJumper:

There will be a new track for each city until we start looping around again. Each city’s track will only be available during the City Festival and you can earn festival coins and titles when you race.

We might trot them all out at once at Tinkerfest or something, but they’ll usually be linked individually to the City Festivals now.

The full update notes after the jump…

Raid Zone Lag can add randomness to an already challenging fight. There are many causes such as how an encounter is designed, unintended interactions in the zone code itself, etc. This issue is of particular importance in Velious because the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone drops a Clicky item which is required to take on most of the Velious x4 raid content. Players receive an item which must be clicked by certain classes at certain times in certain named fights in Velious hard mode raid zones in order to make them defeatable.

Although some guilds have been unable to progress due to lag specific to certain zones/encounters, compounding a consistent level of lag already present on their server (Unrest, etc.) I have received word that guilds on every server have managed to get these items, albeit with a lot of extra runs and some luck.

That said, while we wait for new server hardware, Rothgar and his team have been working on fixing specific issues within the raid zones to reduce lag:

All Velious raid zones should be running much better from now on. We’ve also found a few other performance improvements today that should hopefully make it out next week.

We are focusing very hard on performance along with the features for GU60.

added another quote:

Please do try the zones again and let us know how its working for you. We do have plans in place to resolve issues like these and we were able to make some changes last night without taking the servers down that should have helped tremendously.

We have additional plans in place to improve server performance even more over the next few weeks and months.

So, you’ve heard all the hullabaloo about Itemization changes. Well ‘big deal’ you think to yourself. There will always be adjustments and shuffling around of things missed in Beta. The last 2 years have seen big changes to itemization after the expansion comes out. Why is this news?

Well never mind the confusion and inconvenience for players, but there’s the feeling that players have wasted their time defeating a much more difficult mob only to receive an item that is only a minor upgrade or in many cases with Velious, a downgrade in quality. Quite a few players have told me that they now bank ALL of their gear for the first 60 days after an expansion, just in case we see sweeping changes.

However, with Velious’ astounding dependence upon Adornments to provide any uniqueness whatsoever to gear from the Othmir quest gear all the way up to Hardmode Raid gear, Adornments matter now more than ever.

If you thought the Itemization threads on the EQ2 Forums have been harsh, they really took a turn for the worse after players took Silius‘ advice and checked out the changes on Test and Test Copy, only to find that several items had lost upwards of 75% of their MultiAttack, 4.0 weapons received additional boosts (leaving out 6.0 weapons), and most of the ‘boosts’ were upwards of 0.6% increases on just a handful of stats.

SmokeJumper came to Silius‘ defense:

Silius has made huge strides into setting things up so that the completely haphazard systems of yore, where half a dozen designers just made stuff up on their own without checking anything against each other, is eliminated. Systems have been created, and like with any new systems, there were hitches in a few assumptions here.

We’re fixing those assumptions (thanks in large part to some of the feedback provided here) and the systems will keep improving. We hope to avoid the typical “expansion item debacle” in the future by providing reasoned methods to make items in the future.

So yes, there were a few glitches here, but it’s all in the interest of progress.

Silius is doing an excellent job. If you think he’s doing his job in a vacuum, then you’re incorrect. Half the design team is working with him to make things better. Please feel free to continue to hate him, because that’s your prerogative, but he’s not going anywhere.

Players have expressed concerns that the changes in the difficulty of dungeons this week will make Kael Drakkel far too easy. However SmokeJumper seems to be backing up the designers on wanting to keep the contested Kael Drakkel sufficiently difficult:

(Making the zone super easy is) not our intent at all. And I’m glad that your group is able to play through those areas. But it must have been verrry lonely in Kael, because we know how many people were playing it…and it’s not many.

SmokeJumper has assured players in a thread “Where did my adventure go?!” that not only does EQ2 have a long-term plan besides the standard game updates and expansions, but that much will be revealed soon. If you have taken for granted that next year’s expansion will be Velious Part 2, raising the level cap to 100, you may want to read on!

Watch this space. I’ll be posting stuff soon to describe this year’s slate. Probably next week sometime, maybe the week after. We’re going to be doing some VERY cool stuff this year and I think you’ll start to see more and more of the kinds of things you mention here.

We’re already one of the best. Now it’s time to get unique.

and:

We’ll be posting next year’s slate of coming attractions soon.

Considering the extremely tight leash that Marketing and PR have kept the EQ2 team on in the recent past, it just seems unlikely that all the permissions have been acquired to tell us what’s coming more than a few months out. We’ve never gotten information that far in advance (except Fan Faire), so consider us skeptical.

SOE is looking for your feedback on two recent changes that went in on Tuesday. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Today’s hotfix introduced a couple of fixes and I’d be interested to hear how it has affected you.

First, we’ve made some changes to improve the performance for public quests. We still expect them to contribute towards a higher level of lag than other types of content due to the sheer number of people that participate, and we are working to make them even better. However, you should hopefully notice an improvement after today’s hotfix.

Players logged in yesterday morning to find that their Ranged items, including bows and thrown weapons, had rejected their adornments. Those adornments ended up back in the Overflow slot.

Rothgar responded:

This appears to be a bug related to some item changes.  Our QA department is working on it now and we will have the items fixes asap.

From SmokeJumper the EQ2 Forums:

These itemization changes did *not* happen today, on Tuesday.

Instead, they will happen on Thursday morning’s hotfix. Sorry for the delay. Soon!

All U.S. servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The U.K. worlds will have their update at 5am London Time on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours.

The full reformatted patch notes are available after the jump….

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

We’re making some changes to make dungeons more attractive to players in DoV. We’re adjusting base pop and boss health so that the dungeons take less time to complete so they’re more fun for folks, as well as to allow more frequent chances at boss loot drops on revisits. We’re also making a few changes so that bosses don’t wipe parties so easily since they seem to be a bit tougher than we’d originally planned.

We’re approaching these changes conservatively so that we don’t overshoot the mark. If these changes don’t do the trick, we’ll probably do another round of small changes later. But the overall goal is to make the dungeons more attractive for everyone.

P.S., These are not the only fixes we’re making for tomorrow’s hot fixes, but we wanted to call these changes out specially because those of you that gave up on dungeons because they were too challenging for the payoffs you were getting may want to give it another go now.

Client Crashes FIX!

If you have had your fill of “EverQuest2.com has stopped responding” errors, Rothgar seems to have finally gotten to the bottom of this one:

We think we’ve finally tracked down a bug that has been happening for awhile and leading to client crashes and the “EQ2 has stopped responding” problem. I can’t guarantee that this fixes EVERY problem out there, but it certainly fixes the most common crash we’ve been seeing lately.

This should get pushed out with next week’s hotfix along with some performance improvements to public quests!

EQ2 PvP Guru Olihin has given PvPers a taste of Game Update 60:

GU60 will bring lots of changes to PvP.

• Fame is being reworked
• Fame and title gains will now have their own EXP BAR, no more trying to figure out how long or why you gain/lost a title
• New armor and adornments
• Ongoing balance changes (this will never stop and will never be perfect in any realistic way)
• New Battleground
• Enhancements to the Matchmaker for Battlegrounds
• Cross faction communication

There will be more details as we get closer to GU60.

When prodded about upgrading the graphics engine of EQ2, if not to improve the graphics, at least to address the spate of flickering graphics and shadows which seem to have plagued the game for some players (including me) since the launch of Velious.

SmokeJumper addressed this concern and others including graphical glitches and performance slowdowns in Public Quests:

We redirected our efforts yesterday to trying to resolve some of the PQ issues. We fixed one issue last night, and although I had been getting similar behavior to what you describe on my home rig, I couldn’t make that duplicate last night, so I’m hoping the improvement we made was a good one. (Admittedly, I was still turning my graphics down to High Performance when multi-raid groups were in the PQ area.) We’re not done yet and there will be more improvements next week.

Engine improvements are also on our list for this year. Those definitely take time to accomplish but there are some obvious things we should do to bring the engine up to par with other modern engines.

Server upgrades are something we want to complete also. In the last six months, we’ve upgraded Antonia Bayle, Crushbone, Nagafen, and Freeport because they were the most highly populated servers. Since the merges, it’s obvious that Splitpaw and Unrest (at least) need upgrades also, and we would like to just go ahead and upgrade all of the remaining worlds. Budget requests have been made.

Stay hopeful.

If you have run a few Destiny of Velious dungeons (and raids), compared the loot/gear to Public Quests, and said aloud “no me comprende”, this should be a good week.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

We are bumping up the power of Velious dungeon and raid items. We’re doing this to make those items more competitive when compared with Public Quest items, because instances are tougher than the PQs and deserve better rewards. This does include shard armors.

We are also going to bump up the power of hard-mode raid loot so hard modes are even more rewarding, as they require significant time and effort to beat. NOTE: This doesn’t include war runes since they are already quite powerful.

The net result of these changes makes dungeons and raids a bit more rewarding and also balances things out so that people with a full public quest set will be able to find solid item upgrades in dungeons.

These changes will occur next week sometime. If they happen sooner than that, we’ll let you know.

Your updates notes for today, March 24, 2011, include several crash fixes, problems linking items in chat, Auction channel spam, and also some substantial nerfs to Critical Mitigation on Destiny of Velious gear.

If multiple updates per week have been getting on your nerves, SmokeJumper has something to say:

I’m sorry that these updates have been bothering you. We’ve made a conscious decision to be as responsive to issues from our recent release as possible, fixing any issues or exploits found as quickly as possible and then getting those out to the Live servers so that your gameplay is as great as possible.

They will be reducing in frequency after this week.

In the run up towards Game Update 60, there are several things of note regarding Player Housing and Graphics that we’ve been meaning to cover. These include House Item Limit Expanders, Prestige Houses, the Network Status Page, and also a tip of the hat to Ryan “Imago-Quem” F. who has moved on to PlanetSide 2 and incoming graphics guru Alex “GermInUSA” who continues to polish up the EQ2 graphics engine while adding new features.

Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of the launch of Destiny of Velious. Over the last month, we have seen an avalanche of bugs impacting progression with dungeons and raid zones alike throughout Velious. While these have been steadily fixed during the nearly daily updates, at least one issue remains unresolved: The series of doors in Kraytoc’s Fortress of Rime x4 raid zone. It seems that these doors can get locked due to wipes, zone resets, etc.

Discuss this on the EQ2 Forums

In response to a concise Berserker Class Issues post-Velious thread created by Bremer, Xelgad said that we should see some of these fixes hopefully before but at the latest by Game Update 60:

Hey guys, thanks for the thread!

We’ve got a bunch of quick fixes for these issues on the way. They’ll be live by GU60 at the latest.

Most of the changes are pretty straightforward and some are exactly as suggested here.

As we first discovered in our Critical Oversight in Public Quests Gear? article, the progression from solo quest gear, to Public Quest gear, to Group Instance gear, and on to Raid gear, has not made a whole lot of sense. In particular, Critical Mitigation has been all over the map.

Silius has announced some upcoming changes in the Critical Mitigation numbers of various gear throughout the Velious itemization range.

Today’s Update Notes for March 23, 2011, launch the Chronoportals event as well as tweaking how mounts with a number of charges work. I have corrected the notes to indicate 10 AM PDT and 17:00 GMT for US servers as the US is already on Daylight Savings but Europe is not (until Sunday the 27th of March).

LIVE EVENTS

• Chronoportals have opened in multiple locations across Norrath!  They are said to lead to an ancient time.  These phenomena are being researched by Chronomancers who will reward adventurers brave enough to venture inside.
  • Event Start Times:
    • US Servers: 10 AM PDT [17:00 GMT]
    • International Servers: 9PM PDT [March 24 @ 05:00GMT]
  • Known issues (to be fixed on 3/24):
    • Allizewsaur does not have his sounds fully implemented.
    • Quillmane has a stutter in its wings when it is descending.

ITEMS

• Mount whistles with a limited number of charges will no longer remove the mount buff when the last charge is consumed.

After the jump, your Update Notes for today, Tuesday, March 22nd 2011 include the addition (for real this time) of loot to trash mobs in Kael Drakkel, and the removal of Yellow Adornments from some items.

You may have noticed this little tidbit in today’s patch notes:

Kael Drakkel

• Base Population in the contested dungeon now has legendary and fabled drops.

With this information you may be thinking of heading in there and trying your hand at killing some of the level 92 mobs to see what kind of trash drops you can get.  Not so fast!  Raviel on Guk apparently had the same idea and didn’t have the best of luck

Raviel@Guk wrote:

so ive been in here for about 2 hours now. wheres the trash gear we were promised?

Kander responded with this:

The hotfix said it was added, however it was not. We will try to have that corrected as soon as possible.

I am extremely disapointed myself.

Sorry about that all.

Guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer before seeing those trash drops.

Continuing the Windslasher News Network reports… 😉

I’m pleased to report that a deities revamp is, in fact, on the schedule. I can’t make any promises on when it will happen, though, because it’s not up to me.

I can tell you that the [deity] pet stats are likely to be fixed before the full revamp, though. So expect a change Soon™.