Tinkerfest 2010: Friday July 23 – August 2nd

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events

Tinkerfest opens this weekend, and what better place to find information about this event then at EQ2Traders?

Niami Denmother‘s ever thorough writeup of this event includes all the new quests, collections, and new house items available. Among the many new crafting additions include both diamond plate and hammered steel deck plating. Perfect for adding a small factory or work area to your house or hall.

Tinkerfest will be a limited duration Live Event. It is currently expected to be available from July 23 starting at 12:01 a.m. PDT, through August 2, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. We’re waiting for an announcement from EQ2Players to get confirmation on the end date for this event.

SOE Block Party — July 24, 2010

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events

Will you be in the San Diego, CA area on Saturday, July 24th?

The SOE Block Party at SOE Studios in sunny San Diego, CA brings a day you will never forget. Join fellow gamers and developers from SOE for music, food, tours, game previews, giveaways, raffles and much, much more.

SOE will offer activities for the young ones, so bring everyone in the family! Attendance is free!

The SOE Block Party is Saturday, July 24th, 2010, from 4:00 pm – 8:00 pm at the SOE Studio (8928 Terman Ct, San Diego, CA, 92121.). Shuttle buses are scheduled to travel round-trip to SOE from Comic-Con every 30 minutes from 4:00pm-6:00pm.

You can read more information including how to RSVP in the full EQ2Players announcement.

Behind the Scenes at the SOE Fan Faire

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events

From EQ2Players:

With just over a month left until the big event we thought it would be fun to give you a behind the scenes look at Fan Faire!  What goes into planning such a big event you may ask?  When do we start?  Just how many pallets of stuff are shipped to the event, and how many rolls of shrink wrap does it take to keep everything together?  Look no further folkswe have all of the answers right here!

In our quest for insider information we looked to the experts, the Events Team!  Three wonderful ladies make up this team: Jen Belfield (Manager, Marketing Services), Lauren Zeiger (Marketing Events Manager) and Dawn Wilson (Marketing Coordinator Services).

Read More at EQ2Players…

Seeing Double for July 4th Weekend

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Daybreak Cash, Live Events

From the EQ2 Forums:

This weekend, from 4pm Pacific on Friday, July 2nd (23:00 GMT) until 10am Pacific on Tuesday, July 6th (17:00 GMT), we will be running BOTH a Double Station Cash promotion *and* a true Double XP (+100% XP) promotion.

We’ve gotten clarification that this is:

Double Adventure XP

Double Tradeskill XP

Double Alternate Advancement (AA) XP

Double StationCash

A StationCash Card Reminder:

The only StationCash cards currently available for purchase are branded as FreeRealms cards with StationCash value. Do not buy EverQuest II gameplay time 30 day cards (if you can even find them), they will not work.

StationCash Instructions on EQ2 Forums

Also, it appears there is a glimmer of hope that we may finally see some movement on European solutions for StationCash cards.

June 22, 2010 Update Notes

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Grouping, Itemization, Live Events

Here are your June 22, 2010 Update Notes:

DRUID RING EVENT

  • The druid rings in Feerrott and Loping Plains are now safe destinations for newbies to zone in.
  • Kurista, Elwe, Dalarim and Tolla Clorto no longer change appearances every time they zone.
  • The Defender of Growth guards are now much more powerful, to better protect the druid rings.
  • A couple harvest nodes near the Stonebrunt Highlands druid ring were left floating when the terrain was adjusted. This has been fixed.

PVP WARFIELDS

  • Antonica will once again broadcast the call to arms.

PVP ITEMS

  • Fallen Foe Charms can now be used by Wardens.

PVP POPULATION

  • The Priest of Discord in New Halas now resides closer to the PvP merchants.

UNDERFOOT DEPTHS

  • Vaclaz Encounter: Crippling Nausea no longer stuns players.  Instead it causes their actions to have a chance to impede those around them.  Players hit with keen insight no longer can be hit with crippling nausea.  Players with crippling nausea will never be picked to handle the keen insight adds.  Roekillik beastmasters now have more health.
  • The Taehric Construct and Vaclaz no longer debuff player’s physical and Noxious mitigation levels.
  • Rathgar will now hit players with Deathblow once per 55 secs rather than once per 45 secs.
  • Master Syfak’s Roekillik Deathbringers will not cast festing plague as quickly as they did before.

The Vigilant: Rescue

  • Amahn Prime Nirel now summons flames and fire more quickly during the fight.

UK-US Battlegrounds, Tinkerfest, Class Balance

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events, PvP/BG/Proving Grounds

We’ve got a rollup post of news from the weekend on a few different topics.

UK-US Battlegrounds might be finally getting the necessary kick in the butt to start working tomorrow. There might be a solution in the pipeline for players on distant servers unable to acquire Smuggler’s Den Tokens. Tinkerfest is coming to Test with new quests and rewards. And finally, a new Class Mechanics forum has mysteriously appeared on the EQ2 Forums.

Druid Ring Reconstruction – JW and SS Issues

Written by Dethdlr on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Live Events, Tradeskill

Several people have reported on the EQ2Forums that the progress bushes aren’t spawning in the Jarsath Wastes and Sinking Sands druid rings.  Windslasher chimed in with this update:

Drat!

I goofed with the spawns in Jarsath and Sinking Sands, so the progress signs aren’t appearing in those two zones. Unfortunately it’s not a server-specific thing or a setting that I can just change on the fly, so even though I have the fix in the pipeline I can’t tell you how soon it will be on the live servers, yet. It’ll be fixed as soon as possible.

Update: According to the update notes, this should be fixed with the hotfix going in tomorrow morning.

Thursday, June 3, 2010 Hotfix Notes

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Grouping, Live Events, PvP/BG/Proving Grounds

Here are your hotfix notes for June 3, 2010:

GENERAL

  • Effects can once again proc on an AE autoattack.

DRUID RING EVENT

  • Tunarian supply officers will now buy items for coin, like many other merchants.
  • The druid portal to Nektulos Forest now lands adventurers closer to the druid ring.
  • An issue preventing players from harvesting magiliths after they died has been fixed.
  • The bug that prevented looting A Floret of Growth with certain group loot settings has been fixed.

SPELLS

  • Ancestral Sentry can once again be cast on raid and group friends.  It can no longer be cast on pets or NPCs.

ROYAL PALACE OF ROEHN THEER

  • Plane Cracker should no longer occasionally cast if Approaching Equilibrium is slain before reaching Roehn Theer.
  • Approaching Equilibrium should now despawn almost immediately upon being slain.
  • Void-charged Soul and Star-charged Soul should now correctly be dispelled from both players when they successfully reach each other.
  • Void-charged Soul and Star-charged Soul now have a 3s delay after being applied before they begin reacting to other nearby charged souls.

BATTLEGROUNDS

  • Hook arrow will no longer cause the victim to drop the flag.

May 27 and June 1st Hotfix Notes

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Grouping, Itemization, Live Events, PvP/BG/Proving Grounds, Raiding

Today’s Hotfix (Patch) fixes a bug in the Druid Ring Live Event, and includes tweaks to itemization, the new PvP Warfields, and numerous bugs in the Icy Keep raid zone. We also include the hotfix notes from May 27, 2010 which somehow got left out.

May 27th’s hotfix notes make mention of a change to Procs which were not working on spells. However, this change resulted in certain procs, specifically Pestilential Rain and Torrent, no longer working properly for melee. You can read more about this issue on the EQ2 Forums. Xelgad has responded:

Thanks for all of the information. We’ll take a look and see if we can’t get this working.

Players noticed that the cap on Arcane, Noxious, and Elemental Resists was seemingly lowered from 80% to 75%.  Xelgad has clarified this change:

The cap was always 75%. The 80% you all were seeing when your resists were high enough in the persona window was a display error. The display error has been fixed, so it is now showing 75%.

Do note that that 75% is against a target that is your level. A higher level target will require higher resists to reach the 75%. Also, some spells are harder to resist than normal (you should see this effect in the spell’s description) and will need even more resists to get to 75%.

Inside SOE Broadcast on Ustream

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events

Inside SOE Broadcast on Ustream

From EQ2Players:

Join us on Wednesday, May 26, 2010, at 1:30 pm PDT, as we take a look behind the scenes in this edition of the Inside SOE Broadcast on Ustream! We’ll be in the SOE Ustream channel! The event is expected to last about 30 minutes.

1:30pm PDT | 2:30pm MDT | 3:30pm CDT | 4:30pm EDT |9:30pm GMT | 10:30pm CET

Activities include:

  • Live Chat and Q&A! – Attendees can chat live and ask questions with members of the Community and Development teams.
  • The Agency: Covert Ops and Pox Nora – Join us as we chat with our Tuscon office about these Facebook games.
  • EverQuest II – Tune in to chat with the EQII team about the release of Halas Reborn!
  • Free Realms – Find out more about the newly released Free Realms goodies!

To watch our live webcasts, you can visit the channel or you can create an account and log in to Ustream to chat via text with the Community Team and our special visitors.

See you on Ustream!

NOTE: The event is now 15 minutes late.

   

Rebuilding the Rings

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Live Events

One of the preamble events leading up to the Destiny of Velious expansion will be the reconstruction of several dilapidated and corrupted Druid Rings. Read the article on EQ2Players.

As we reported in April, we are expecting the druid rings in Nektulos Forest, Loping Plains, Zek, and Feerrott to be rebuilt.

Windslasher has posted extensively about how this event will work and what participants can expect…

Try Sentinel’s Fate FREE for 3 Days & Free Armband

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events

From EQ2Players:

We’re making it easier than ever to try out EverQuest II’s most recent expansion, Sentinel’s Fate. For three days, May 12th through May 14th, everyone who doesn’t already have Sentinel’s Fate can try it out for free.

Also, there is a $5 discount off the cost of the expansion for active players, and an additional $5 discount off the cost of the 1st month’s subscription for inactive players.

Finally, all players can claim the Rose Quartz Inlaid Golden Armband for free from the Station Marketplace!

So make sure you log in between now and 11:59pm on May 14th to try out Sentinel’s Fate and to claim your armband.

We can imagine the armband color won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you’ve been looking for a discount off the expansion, or to come back and play for a few days, check out the EQ2Players announcement.

City Festival: Freeport — May 1~7

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing, Live Events


image courtesy Jethal Silverwing

Come to the Faire: Freeport @ Kithicor.org

The first week of every month sees the arrival of a traveling City Festival. This month, the City Festival wraps its first tour of the five known cities of Norrath by visiting Freeport. Next month, the City Festival will no doubt make its first appearance in the newly-found New Halas.

While some players have shared their exasperation with the obviousness of the ‘content delivery system’ feel to these events (repeat a runaround errand-type quest dozens of times, or craft dozens of items, to earn enough tokens to buy a few house items), others look forward to the addition of new items each time the City Festival sets down in a new city.

We have been assured that each month, the cache of recurring rewards (available no matter which city hosts the event) will continue to grow even as new items are added specific to each new city.

End-of-the-Week News

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Live Events, PvP/BG/Proving Grounds, Tradeskill

The focus this week has been on new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson, and EQ2 Server Performance, which has been a persistent black cloud over EQ2 for the last 2 months.

Test Copy

Test Copy is getting some major use as it is where PvP and Battlegrounds changes are tested.

Gninja advised us:

We will be working out a schedule as to when the test_copy server will be pvp vrs pve. We are working it out now and will get back to you guys shortly.

Stuck at Character Select

An issue with being stuck at Character Select on Thursday was caused by a Configuration issue which has been corrected. EQ2 Forums

Adventure/AA/Tradeskill XP Weekend

The e-mail and EQ2Players announcements for this weekend’s Bonus XP event neglected to mention that Tradeskills will also see a bonus. We have not yet been informed what % the bonus will be, but 30% is a good guess.

Zone Start End
Pacific US Friday, April 23 @ 3:00pm Sunday, April 25 @ 11:59pm
Eastern US Friday, April 23 @ 6:00pm Monday , April 26 @ 2:59am
GMT Friday, April 23 @ 22:00 Monday , April 26 @ 06:59
Copenhagen Saturday, April 24 @ 00:00 Monday , April 26 @ 08:59

Game Update 56 Goes to Test Soon

We don’t have an exact date, but Game Update 56 will be moving to Test and Test Copy soon. When we know exactly what content will appear on Test and Test Copy, we’ll let you know. It would not be surprising if New Halas is not in the first build. EQ2 Forums

Thundering Steppes Revamp Mothballed

Gninja has confirmed the news we speculated about earlier this year.

Unfortunately we will not be making drastic changes to Thundering Steppes this time around. That doesn’t mean there will be no changes but we are not considering it being revamped. GU56 will be full of cool stuff though (Including but not limited to New Halas and some new raids) you should see it hitting test servers in the not too distant future.

A revamp of Thundering Steppes seems to be completely off the development radar at this point, with Butcherblock Mountains stepping in as the “place to be” for level 20-35 content.

Although subject to change, our understanding is that, just like Timorous Deep, level 20 players will be offered a quest guiding them from New Halas to the Butcherblock docks to begin level 20-35 content.

Level 82 Mastercrafted Armor

It seems the strength of level 80 Tier 1 and Tier 2 Shard armor from The Shadow Odyssey was always destined to overshadow Level 82 Mastercrafted armor. But that doesn’t mean the EQ2 team haven’t given up on it yet! Domino has managed to land some additional upgrades to the Level 82 set:

Look for some changes coming to level 82 mastercrafted armor with GU56 (for a start, it should all be level 82 now …) including the addition of yellow adornment slots and some resists. We are also in the process of discussing the possibilities of some stat tweaks.

It now seems even less likely that any of the Tier 1 Marks of Manaar gear will be an upgrade to any player. Note that Tier 2 Marks of Manaar gear (which has Critical Mitigation and better stats) must be sought out in Moonfield Hamlet in Stonebrunt Highlands.

Bristlebane Day pays tribute to Gary Gygax, brings Holiday Mash-up

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events, Tradeskill

Bristlebane Day (April 1st) always brings out festivities and a bit of zanyness to EQ2. In past years, we’ve seen /cutemode (also try /cutemode 3 ) and in EQ1, turning everyone into wireframes. But this year, Bristlebane Day has put practicality in the place of tomfoolery.

Today, Bristlebane Day, a unique quest has appeared in the Enchanted Lands, offered by a Sphinx, which pays tribute to the father of Dungeons & Dragons — Gary Gygax.

The folks at ZAM were first to note that 2 of the 3 riddles given were also found in a FreeRealms quest.

Further exploration of the Enchanted Lands and other zones has revealed not only crafting tables from Frostfell, but also harvestable nodes for every recurring Norrath live event, including Nights of the Dead, Frostfell, Tinkerfest, and Erollisi Day.

If you have a desperate need for some event-specific craftables for your house or guild hall, don’t miss your opportunity!

City Festival Rolls into Qeynos (and Freeport?)

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events, Tradeskill

A Story of Dark and Light

Perhaps some Bristlebane Gremlins got into the works because briefly this morning, the monthly City Festival rolled into both Qeynos AND Freeport. According to this report, a few quick-thinking (and possibly light fingered) individuals snapped up a few Freeport furniture items before they vanished. The polished white marble of the regal Qeynos decorations have been countered by Freeport accoutrements with a decidely black color scheme.

Alas, this was a short-term glitch and only those who were quick on the trigger were able to buy these items before the event reset and Qeynos became the only game in town for this month’s City Festival.

While today marks its first appearance with a Live server, Qeynos was the location of the City Festival on the Test server. As a result, the items available have already been fully documented by Niami @ EQTraders,

Become the EverQuest II Producer for a Month!

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Live Events

I don’t know if you got this e-mail, but I did chuckle aloud…

Become the EverQuest II Producer for a Month!

Psych! Bristlebane Day Kicks Off Tomorrow!

Bards, jokesters and thieves unite, this is the holiday for you! Now’s the time to let it all hang out for the holiday named in honor of Fizzlethorpe Bristlebane, the King of Thieves and the Grand Prankster.

Now that everyone has recovered (we hope!) from Brewday and paying their respects to Brell, it’s time to celebrate that sneaky, prank-playing halfling, Bristlebane! The Bristlebane fesitivities will begin on March 30th and conclude on April 12th, with special events only available on April 1st.


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