It looks like those EverQuest2.com Freeblood vampire screen shots we saw weren’t ready for prime time. SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

The screenshots that were released were not intended to be public-facing. Those have been taken down from the EQ2Players site and will be replaced with real shots soon.

Those screenshots were not approved. Real ones are coming later today that will hopefully reassure you that they’re cool.

He even went this far when asked why such awful screen shots saw the light of day:

I cannot disagree. Those shots should never have been published.

From the EQ2 Forums, when asked if we might see a bonus XP weekend, SmokeJumper dropped this hint:

Yes…but I have to stay mum about details until the announcement is ready.

Looks like the best way to find out is to ask. 🙂

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

The Mistmoore Crag Estate item limit should not have been less than the other large houses already available. We’ve decided to up the limit from 600 to 800. This change should be going out in the next hotfix.

Some characters still have x or xx after their name, despite meeting the qualifications necessary to NOT have those extra characters. Namely having the character with that name, with the longest playtime.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Our rename script was interrupted by the server maintenance last night, so every name conflict has not been resolved yet. We’ve restarted the script and the remaining name conflicts should be resolved in a couple of hours.

UPDATE:  the Character/Guild Name Cleanup Script has completed running. If you still have an issue or wish to dispute the name that was chosen for your guild or character, please open a /petition.

SmokeJumper and Rothgar have been weathering the storm of the Blackburrow -> Everfrost server merge, which knocked out in-game chat channels such as 1-9, 70-79, and cross-server chats on ALL servers for 24 hours, followed by 12 hours of an even deeper chat blackout on ALL servers, with guild chat, group chat, public channels, cross-server chat, login to SOE games, and even access to the SOE forums all intermittently interrupted.

SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums perhaps being too truthful:

It was basically the other way around and our announcement wasn’t very smooth. The [vampire] race was originally intended as a marketplace-only offering and then we decided to also create a way for players to get it as a promotion also.

The marketplace offering comes out sometime this month (it’s not done yet, so dates aren’t exact), but the winter promotion doesn’t end until Velious comes out, so that’s when we’ll give it away to those that want to wait for it.

Lemin summarized it thusly:

Frankly I don’t know which of the two announcements i find more deplorable, you actually come to the live servers and post you intended to add a race through the marketplace? You expect not to lose accounts over that? Quite a lot of people will find that this was your original intent an unforgivable betrayal giving it to us as a afterthought probably wont soothe these people.

to which SmokeJumper said:

I’m sorry that this bothers you, Lemin. But frankly, that offering breaks none of the rules we set for this marketplace on Live. And we are giving it away if you’re patient…and we decided to give it away before we told you about the race in the first place. I don’t see the issue here.

Since putting races on the Marketplace is something that has never been announced to the players until today’s ham-handed announcement, I’m not quite sure how we can compare it to any preconceived set of “rules”.

Players have been wondering exactly how vampires are going to be sewn into the EQ2 storyline as a playable race. And some have wondered if any other medical conditions such as lycanthropy will make an appearance.

A new article has appeared on EverQuest2.com with Lore explaining the presence of the Freeblood vampire race and their place in Norrath. This article also includes teaser screen shots of the new Freeblood race.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Beginning on Thursday, December 9th, at 1:00 am PST (9:00 GMT), the following SOE Services will be unavailable or interrupted while we undergo data center maintenance.

• Chat Services
• All Star Wars Galaxies Servers
• All EQOA Servers
• All PlanetSide Servers
• All EQ servers
• All Vanguard Servers
• Session (Game Log-In)

We expect this maintenance to take approximately 11 hours, with a return to normal functionality around 12:00 pm PST. During this maintenance period, some game servers will not be accessible. During Session maintenance, some servers may remain online, but players who log out may not be able to log back in. This maintenance may also affect the ability to log into our forums.

We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.

Last night, the Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge concluded. Here are some things you should know from Rothgar:

• Issues with Character Names are being addressed via scripts and Customer Service, so give them 24 hours before petitioning if you have character names with x or xx after the name.

• Titles are being worked on and so will become available in the next few days. Players from the Blackburrow server will be able to have a title of “of Blackburrow“.

• Some characters are reporting issues with Chat Channels and may need to rebuild their chat channel setup.

Players are reporting in the chatroom that Splitpaw has been down for approximately 30 minutes.

Keeping in mind that dates and servers listed are ASSUMING nothing goes wrong, check out the preliminary list of server merges from Rothgar:

We should be able to give more notice for the upcoming mergers. This first one was a special situation where we wanted to start it ASAP and just got the final green light from QA yesterday. If we had then given 48 hours notice and delayed the merger, we wouldn’t have been able to do it Thursday due to a conflicting network maintenance so the next opportunity would have been the following Tuesday, putting us a week later. We just weren’t willing to wait that long since we also may need time to adjust the merge process after the first one and before we start the following merges.

The next merges will be:

Najena -> Unrest

Kithicor -> Butcherblock
Nektulos -> Guk
Mistmoore -> Permafrost
Befallen -> Oasis
Runnyeye -> Splitpaw
Innovation -> Valor

Editor’s Note: This is not the final sequence of servers, but just a list of mergers.

I can’t give dates for the following mergers because they are very subject to change depending on any problems that occur or other unplanned maintenance.

I can tell you that if everything goes smoothly today that we will shoot for starting the next merge on Tuesday the 14th and possible the next one on Thursday the 16th.

These dates and even the order of mergers are subject to change if necessary.

Beyond the initial announcement that cross-server chat channels and in-game mail would be affected during the 24-hour long Server Merger process, players are reporting problems with all public chat channels, even server-specific ones like 1-9 and 80-90 (some would insist it’s a feature that these channels are rendered inaccessible), and Friends lists.

We’ll try to find out if we can expect this behavior on all servers during each of these Server Merges.

We’re a bit late on this, but the last update from SOE Headquarters in San Diego on the Blackburrow -> Everfrost Merge was as follows from Rothgar:

It’s 4am and the merge process is going smoothly so far with no surprises. A few steps are running faster than expected, so that’s good news.

and:

I haven’t been to sleep yet, but going to try to catch a cat nap in the next few hours so I can deal with any post-merge issues.

We have a group of very dedicated people from different departments all working together to make sure this goes smoothly. None of them are going to get much sleep tonight and some of them have another 24-hour maintenance to do right after this merge.

More as we have it.

Originally announced as a 2 hour update, then revised to an 8 hour update, Splitpaw and Runnyeye are finally coming up after 11 hours, 30 minutes of downtime. Apparently the TSA wanted to pat down McScroogle himself before allowing this export of Frostfell goodness to Europe.

Rothgar‘s comments when queried about the long update:

I’m not sure why the downtime estimate was 8h. It should be publishing the hotfix which shouldn’t take nearly that long.

I just checked with our operations department and apparently there were some networking issues that caused the file transfers to take much longer than normal. They report that the servers are being smoke-tested right now and should hopefully be up soon.

The Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge has commenced.

From the EQ2 Forums:

The Blackburrow and Everfrost servers will be merging on Wednesday, December 8, 2010. Both servers will be offline for an estimated 24 hours, beginning at 12:00 am on Wednesday, December 8. The merged Everfrost server is scheduled to come back online around 12:00 am on Thursday, December 9.

The following services will be affected for all EQII servers during this downtime and may experience interruptions:

• Cross-server chat
• In-game mail
• Friends Lists

Please feel free to join in the discussion in the Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge Discussion Thread.

If you purchased a Research Assistant for your Guild Hall, you may have noticed that after today’s patch, he or she seems befuddled as exactly what to do now that players can tackle their own Spell Research from within their Knowledge window. Some have reported these despondent Research Assistants taking up crochet and browsing the want ads.

Since the Research Asssistant Guild Hall Amenity has both a recurring and up-front cost, some players have expressed their concern that choosing to Refund the amenity only returns 50% of the value of the amenity. Since a change in the game has rendered said amenity useless, should a 100% refund be due?

Rothgar is on the case, looking for an amicable solution. His quotes after the jump.

Incidentally, if you run a custom UI and are crashing whenever you open the Knowledge window, until your custom UI provider offers an update, you can temporarily delete these files from your custom UI folder:

• eq2ui_mainhud_knowledge.xml
• eq2ui_mainhud.xml

Today’s hotfix adds house items (furniture) to a merchant in Hua Mein, moves Research Assistants into the UI, fixes an exploit in StationCash Item Gifting, and offers additional tweaks to PvP and PvP Warfields. After the jump, your Hotfix Notes for December 7, 2010.

From the EQ2 Forums:

From 1:00 am PST (09:00 GMT) until 1:00 pm PST (21:00GMT) on Tuesday, December 7, SOE account services, commerce flow, and the Station Store may be unavailable during maintenance. Session servers (the ability to log into games) may also have interrupted service during this time.

All Battlegrounds servers will be locked during this maintenance.

We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.

Earlier this week, we commented on a change to Research Assistants which would have an effect on Scholars (Sage, Jeweler, and Alchemist). Namely, it allowed players to Research a spell all the way from Adept to Master without needing the assistance of a crafter to make the Expert first. Some players have downplayed the ramifications of this change, pointing out that most players will not want to wait for the Adept -> Expert upgrade, as with a 28~30 day Master, it adds another 13~15 days wait.

After the jump, SmokeJumper has posted his own thoughts on this change and what it means for crafters going forward.

While it was never officially announced, you may recall that Game Updates shifted from monthly to a 3 month cycle in the beginning of 2009. The game-breaking Fighter Revamp was stripped from Game Update 51, which was eventually cancelled. Its features were released as two small hotfixes. So it was up to the massive Game Update 52: Monument and Might to finally kick off the current 3-month release schedule in May 2009 with 3 new dungeons, 80 new quests, player-written books, Research Assistants, and a rework of Spell Naming.

It was hoped that a 90 day release cycle for Game Updates would lead to more testing and larger updates, but this has not always been borne out.

SmokeJumper has suggested that we may see a return to monthly updates:

I don’t know why anyone promised you 90-day updates. That’s a rigid structure that imposes a three-month drought between updates. I’d much rather come up with a system to constantly move content out to Live on a monthly basis so that there’s always something new to look forward to…and we’re discussing implementation details for that now. (No promises that things are changing yet, but it’s the way I’d personally like to move toward.)

We first heard about Server Mergers in an initial announcement in October. The first possible date for the merges was put forth as November 16th. As revealed by SOE’s answers to some questions about Server Merges by EQ2 ZAM on November 8th, 2010, SOE aren’t simply using the same old Server Merge scripts which have been used in the past. It seems more attention is being paid to make sure there is less work for players, and less issues for Customer Service as well.

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.

Here are your hotfix notes for November 23, 2010:

MARKETPLACE
You can now use the Marketplace at Login / Character Create to purchase account related items such as character slots!

You can now send gifts to your friends from the Marketplace!
 
ABILITIES
If the caster cancels a maintained spell that he cast, it will cancel the spell for everyone in the group.
 
PVP GENERAL
Fixed a crash bug from Battlegrounds and PvP combat.
 
QUESTS
Sinking Sands: The Beetle Herding quest line should be working correctly now.

From the EQ2 Forums, the Blackburrow -> Everfrost server merger has now slipped to sometime next week.

Update: No new updates at this point. We’ll be aiming for sometime next week. Enjoy your weekend in Norrath!

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

We’re doing another QA pass on the merge process tonight, after making some additional changes to the procedure. If all goes well, we would most likely start the first merge early Thursday morning.

We’re going to go out on a limb and estimate the downtime could be 8-14 hours, but we may be surprised in either direction. As soon as we know which servers are being merged next, we’ll let you know!