Some maintenance notes from the EQ2 Forums and SOE Operations Team…

US Servers:

The US servers will come down on November 16, 2010, at 6:30 am PDT (3:30pm GMT) for a hotfix.  The expected downtime is 1 1/2 hours.

There are no update notes for this hotfix.

Europe Servers:

This is a notification that UK worlds will be updated at 5:00 AM London Time on 11/17/2010. The estimated downtime will be 2 hours.

Crushbone, Befallen, Permafrost:

On Tuesday, November 16, 2010, the following servers will be coming down at 5:00 AM PST for network maintenance: Befallen, Permafrost, Crushbone.

The servers are expected to be down for about 3 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience and will have the servers back online as quickly as possible.

and we’re keeping our eyes peeled for news of Server Mergers.

Amnerys posted several messages on the Everquest2.com forums today about the upcoming server merges. The first one happening is Blackburrow into Everfrost which may happen as soon as tomorrow (Nov 16th, 2010). As for the rest of them:

I can definitely tell you that we’re not going to be announcing a full schedule ahead of time.

From this post it looks as though the plan is to do the first server merge tomorrow if they get everything in place in time:

At this time, we are still getting all the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed, and we cannot confirm just yet if the merge will happen on 11/16 or if there will be a delay, but Blackburrow to Everfrost will be the first merge to take place.

As soon as we have official confirmation, I will update this thread and its subject line with a date and time.

It has been asked if at least the order of the merges can be released even if there are no firm dates. We’ll let you know what we find out.

Update:  It doesn’t look like a schedule is forthcoming.  Amnerys posted this on the Everquest2.com forums in response to the the questions about the order of the merges:

We don’t have a schedule that can be shared right now, because we’re still working on things on the back-end, and the details that go into deciding the order could still change. Because this is a very fluid transition, I don’t know that we’ll be posting a master list of order at all. We will definitely announce each one before it occurs, but I’m not sure if we can post an overall sequence.

Also from Amnerys on Everquest2.com:

 The first merger will not be taking place on Tuesday. Possibly Wednesday. We’ll let you know as soon as we know.

From the EQ2 Forums:

The US servers will come down on November 9, 2010, at 5am PDT for a hotfix.  The expected downtime for most servers is 1 hour, with the exception of Befallen, Permafrost, and Crushbone. These three servers will have a 2 hour downtime for maintenance.

and…

This is a notification that UK worlds (Runnyeye & Splitpaw) will be updated at 5:00 AM London Time on 11/10/2010. The estimated downtime will be 2 hours.

and here are the Update Notes:

GENERAL

• Fixed a client crash condition.

ITEMS

• Most single target effects that proc off of beneficial spells should no longer clutter up the maintained spells window.

POPULATION

• All of the guards at the Academy of Arcane Science in North Freeport are now level 45.

QUESTS

• Cleansing This Temple Needs…: The void-stalker should now be able to attack the necessary targets to update the quest.
• Certain tarantulas in the Sinking Sands will once again attack certain skittish scarabs. This fixes the Beetle Herding quest line.

The folks over at EQ2 ZAM were able to seed some questions to the EQ2 team about the upcoming Server Merges. Their  answers to those questions have now been posted. Questions covered topics such as purging of old character and guild names (not happening), character rename potions (they’ll need to /petition if there is a conflict), EQ2Players stats and discoveries (good luck!), and Server Titles for the target/destination server (nope).

The largest pool of questions cover  items placed in bank slots, shared banks, houses, and guild halls. Some characters and guilds have thousands of items so this is a substantial concern. It sounds like there may have been some improvements in the Server Merge automation scripts because unlike past server merges, it sounds like items placed in houses and guild halls will in fact NOT be reassigned to the house or guild hall owner, and items will NOT need to be re-placed in houses after the merger. This conflicts with the initial announcement, so there must have been some programming breakthroughs.

Server Merges start on or about November 16th. It’s not been announced which server is first or what the ultimate schedule will be. More as we have it…

From the EQ2 Forums:

On Monday, November 8, 2010, the following servers will be coming down at 6:00 AM PST for network maintenance: Befallen, Permafrost, Crushbone, Runnyeye, Mistmoore, Oasis and Innovation. The downtime will also affect Battlegrounds servers. The servers are expected to be down for about 1 and 1/2 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience and will have the servers back online as quickly as possible.

Now that both Europe and the US are on off Daylight Savings, that puts the downtime from 14:00-15:30 GMT or 15:00-16:30 for mainland Europe.

EQ2 dev Bunji has posted on the EQ2 Forums regarding the Daily Solo Void Shard Mission:

We’re working on a fix for this one which is planned for the next Hotfix.

Remember that patch that went in yesterday?  The one that caused raid zones to crash over and over again?  Today we get the patch for the patch.  “Fixed a crash issue related to pet immunity” apparently means, “we fixed the raid zone crashing bug that we introduced yesterday“.  This bug was apparently reported on the website late last week but the info didn’t make it to the developers.  Remember, always /bug when you find a bug.  That doesn’t mean they will always see it, but at least that gets it into their system. Notes after the break…

EQ2 Test Update Notes give a glimpse of what changes we may expect in the future of EQ2. They are always subject to change, sometimes due to player input, sometimes because an item is not ready to go live yet (i.e. Multi Attack over 100%). We nevertheless keep an ear to the ground and an eye on the EQ2 Test Update Notes and occasionally present that information here.

The detailed Test Update Notes, which can be found on the EQ2 Forums, contain numerous tweaks and fixes large and small. October 28th’s notes reference the Currency window, Tradeskill Writs, Stonewill effects, Heroic Resistance effects, LoN-dropped Petamorph wands, the Heroes Festival, and Battlegrounds. Pretty routine stuff. But a line item in these Test Notes was brought to our attention which may have a substantial impact on Raid Progression:

It should no longer be possible to bug the swarm adds portion of the Roehn Theer fight.

Roehn Theer is a unique fight in that the difficulty is chosen by the raid and there are 1, 2, 3, and 4-rune versions, each adding an additional effect the raid force must survive.

EQ2Wire Mailbox: For those guilds that are taking down the 3- and 4- rune versions of Roehn Theer, will this change affect your raid force? If so, is this an unnecessary roadblock, or a well-considered exploit closure? We’d like to hear your comments!

Today’s hotfix notes include the ability to relocate your City Bind Point to any city you are aligned with, more crafted Marks of Manaar equipment, and other changes to live events and raids.

Here are your update notes for Thursday, 21 October 2010 after the break:

Here are your update notes for Tuesday, 19 October 2010 after the break:

Initially released in an email message sent out to players and posted on the official forums by Xalmat, word comes to us that the long awaited server merges will begin on 16 November 2010. The following servers will be merged: 

• Nektulos merges into Guk
• Najena merges into Unrest
• Befallen merges into Oasis
• Blackburrow merges into Everfrost
• Mistmoore merges into Permafrost
• Kithicor merges into Butcherblock
• Runnyeye merges into Splitpaw (UK)
• Innovation merges into Valor (DE)

More info after the break…

Here are your update notes for 14 October 2010 after the break:

Hiding in every Game Update, there are changes that go through that are either undocumented, or otherwise slip under the radar. Some of them appear as a single line item in the Update Notes, but have significant ramifications. Some don’t appear at all. Today, we shed some light on these changes.

If you have been /feedbacking to the EQ2 team for years that you would be ready, willing, and eager to sell family members, limbs, or just pony up a few extra bucks to increase your house item limit, then I have some great news.

If, however, you hate StationCash and everything it stands for, and SOE will never get a penny of your money over the $14.99 (or less depending on your subscription plan), then I have some bad news.

But first, let’s look at some cool changes to housing in Game Update 58. 😉

Update: This has been pushed to Wednesday.  Unknown if the update notes will stay the same.

The current estimated down time is 3:15 PDT with an uptime of 4:00 PDT 12 October 2010.  Here are your hotfix notes for the downtime:

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug causing the client to crash when using a third-party UI that hasn’t implemented the mount or currency windows.
• Fixed a server side crash bug.

SmokeJumper posted this on the EQ2X forums:

Silver members can now buy items from the Broker.

They still need to purchase broker credits to *place* items onto the Broker, but they now have unlimited capacity to BUY from the Broker.

Enjoy!

Wondering why the XP bar for your guild went down with GU58?  Don’t worry, you’re actually closer to level 90 than you were before.  Rothgar explains on the official forums:

Your XP value behind the scenes, which is some number like 183627, did not change unless your level would have gone down.  For example, that number may have put you at 54 prior to the change but would now put you at 52.  In this case, we added XP to the number to increase you to level 54 but it would look like you lost progress in 54 when in fact you would have been 52 on the new curve.  The total amount of XP needed to get to 90 was lessened, so you are now further along than you would have been before.

In some cases, depending on where you were in the curve, you just passed a hell level and will now be further along than you were before.

Regardless of what the progress bar shows, when you reach level 90, everyone will have put in the same amount of work.  It just depends on whether or not you’ve already been through the “hell levels”.

I’m really sorry this is confusing and looks like you’ve lost XP, but everyone should have benefited from this change in the long run.

If its not already as clear as mud, to summarize:

If your guild looks like you lost XP on the progress bar, you were one of the guilds who had XP added to get you up to your old level when you would have been behind.

If your guild gained levels after this, you unfortunately didn’t receive any “free xp”, but since you just went through a hell level that required more XP than the other levels, you now are higher than you were before.

Prior to GU58, totems didn’t stack.  If you wanted to sell large quantities of these, you could get a Jewelry Box and stuff a bunch of them in there to sell.

With GU58, new totems now stack up to 100 (old ones remain the same).  Because of this, they no longer fit into Jewelry Boxes, they go in Potion Cabinets.  DominoDev explained this on the official forums:

Due to the new format of the totems (essentially acting like potions, and stacking) they are now considered potions by the sales crates and would now fit into a potion cabinet instead of a jewelry box.  Apologies for the confusion, it hadn’t occurred to me that this would be a side effect of the change or I would have called it out in advance.

Update: Apparently, this change currently only applies to the following totems:  Fearstalker, Void, Otter, Jaguar, Butterfly, Owl, Turlte, Chameleon, and Escape.  I’m sure this will change one way or another eventually.

Once GU58 went live, some users reported crashing while using Profit UI.  Rothgar loaded up Profit to see if he could reproduce the problem.  Fairly quickly he came up with a work around.  Amnerys posted this note on the official forums:

Some players are reporting a crashing issue after today’s update. If you are experiencing this, here’s some info from Lead Programmer, Rothgar:

The crash is related to having a UI without the Mount tab.  We will have a fix for it as soon as possible but in the meantime, you can delete your eq2ui_mainhud_persona.xml file from your custom directory and revert back to the standard Character window.

They intend on having some short downtime later today to patch in a server side fix for this as well.

It should be noted that this workaround will also get you the new currency and mount tabs regardless of which custom UI you are using if the author hasn’t updated their UI to be GU58 compliant.  By deleting this file from your custom UI folder you are telling the game to revert back to the default version of that window which contains the new tabs.  This is the same thing that my GU58 bandaid patch does for FetishNightfall.

Profit has apparently been updated for GU58 but it seems as though you may need to manually drop in some files from TalTal to get it to work properly.

Update:  SmokeJumper just posted this on the official EQ2X forums.  Basically, by telling people to delete their eq2.ini file, he’s telling them to not run Profit until after today’s patch since that’s where the game reads which UI it should load.  If it doesn’t find this file, it loads the default UI.  Not sure all this is needed since I’m pretty sure the workaround above would work fine but here goes just in case it’s helpful to someone out there.  In his instructions, replace Freeport with the name of your server:

I don’t know if this has been posted on these forums yet, so here goes:

If you are running Profit UI, then there is a crash issue. We have it fixed and will be updating the servers in a couple hours with the fix…however…in the meantime:

You may want to make backups and then delete the following files and folders from your game folder:
cache folder
eq2_recent.ini
eq2_default.ini
EverQuest2.exe
eq2.ini

As well as the character specific files, these will appear as such:
Freeport_CharacterName_EQ2_uisettings.ini
Freeport_characters.ini

That will let you run the game now, and then after today’s update, you can restore those files back into your game folder and run Profit normally.

If you are crashing and NOT running Profit UI, please speak up!

Update 2: Reading through some of the threads about crashing clients, people are reporting the same crashes with the default UI.  If the game is crashing on you repeatedly and you’ve tried the steps above already, it might be a good time to find a good book until the server patch a few hours from now.  Looks like this one really caught them off guard.  I tried it out on Test this Saturday and it was working fine.

Amnerys has posted the complete Game Update Notes for Game Update 58: Arcanum Revealed on the EQ2 Forums.

Here they are after the break:

Dethdlr brought us the news from Rothgar that Game Update 58 will indeed contain some changes to the Call of Veteran reward which many of us have a love-hate relationship with.

When it works, it’s great, as it can summon your friends to another zone, even into an already established instance, speeding up gameplay as a reward for being an EQ2 veteran for many years. However, the reasons this item may fail are almost too numerous to mention. I have personally seen messages indicating that I had not yet harvested the druid ring bush in a zone so could not travel there, or I did not meet some nebulous zone ‘requirements’ to enter that zone.

Here’s Rothgar‘s welcome comments:

Several fixes for CoV are coming out with GU58. I can’t guarantee that all bugs with it are gone, but it should be a big improvement. We’ve streamlined the process and added more error messages when things don’t work correctly.

We still have a few more changes to make that we might introduce in a later hotfix, but I think you’ll see an improvement in GU58.

Game Update 58 is looking to be a massive update, not so much in content, but in changes large and small to the game, and its User Interface.

Game Update 58 includes:

• A level 90 dungeon – Zraxth’s Unseen Arcanum
• New bosses in the Vasty Deep dungeons with new loot
• Spell Animation and Sound Effect tweaks
• Click-to-Cure
• Mounts and Currency tabs
• Numerous UI tweaks
• Outdoor Balconies have been added to 6+ room houses, making them feel a part of the city they belong to.
• House item limits have been increased, and Moving Crates now count independently of house item limits.
• Additional house items have been added to Moonlight Enchantments, City Festivals, and of course Nights of the Dead
• The adventure Vitality XP bonus remains effective at level 90.
• Betrayal now suspends your access to spells and spell upgrades you are no longer permitted to use, but does not totally reset them. Should you betray back to your original class, your spells will be restored including any spell upgrades you have purchased or researched. Changing your alignment or citizenship without changing class no longer resets your spells.
• Numerous Tradeskill tweaks

We have been unable to confirm if we can expect:

• New loot for Marks of Manaar

Update: We’ve been able to confirm this feature of Game Update 58:

• A fix for the Call of the Veteran to reduce some of the problems, and better messages when it doesn’t work.

Our more detailed preview of Game Update 58 after the jump…

EverQuest2.com has been updated with the first of several previews of Tuesday’s Game Update 58, named “Arcanum Revealed”. A news item has been posted which says that each time a new instance is created, there is a chance of an additional named spawning in each of the Vasty Deep zones. Check out the original news item for pictures of each new named.

Niami Denmother over at EQ2 Traders has put together some excellent previews of some upcoming crafting updates.

Check out the Game Update 58 Crafting, Housing and Event Preview and the Nights of the Dead 2010 Crafting Preview.