Players on a variety of servers (in two different threads) have reported that yesterday’s change to how players reach the Palace of Roehn Theer, requiring each player to individually click on the zone-in, instead of a raidwide zone-in, is resulting in multiple separate instances.

Currently there seems to be no fix, as even players who zone in one-at-a-time are still ending up in separate instances and must wait 30 minutes before their timers reset.

From the EQ2 Forums:

This is a notification that UK worlds will be updated at 5:00 AM London Time on the 08/25/2010. The estimated downtime will be 2 hours.

– SOE Operations team

then…

Runnyeye and Splitpaw are being kept offline a little longer while the team inspects an issue that has, well…several NPC’s seem to have forgotten to get dressed when they woke up from the downtime! /blush

We apologize for their indecency and the fact that the servers will take a little longer to be brought back online.

and then:

I don’t have an official up time for the server, but based on the emails I’ve seen, it seems like it might come up around 2:00 am PDT, which would be around 10am London time, if I’m calculating correctly. Around three hours after the original planned up time.

I’m very sorry about the delay, everyone. Fingers crossed that the NPCs decided to finally get dressed and everything else is right as well.

You can follow the humorous discussion on the EQ2 Forums (until it gets locked).

Remember when Player-vs-Player was the red-headed stepchild of EQ2? Remember when there wasn’t even a PvP developer, but instead those tasks were delegated to developers who already had a full workload? Fast forward to today and one of the areas of the game getting the most attention is the PvP side, including those issues that extend into Battlegrounds.

So let’s go down the list of responses so far from PvP developer Olihin…

Players on standard EQ2 accounts with more than 7 characters in a region, or players on Station Access accounts with more than 12 characters in a region were locked out of accessing these “hidden” characters with a change in Game Update 57. Although intended to close an exploit, the primary motivation for this change has been to protect the monetization of character slots, which are for sale on EQ2 Extended servers.

Note: This change has been rolled back as of Tuesday, August 24th, to allow players to “get their house in order”. On Tuesday, August 31st, players who have more characters than are allowed by their account type will only have the option of deleting characters to access “hidden” characters. The /camp command will not load any character not visible on the character select screen, and changes to the character list INI file will be ignored.

If you have no more than 7 EQ2 characters on your EQ2 account, or no more than 12 EQ2 characters on your Station Account, you do not need to do anything.

If you haven’t read the Game Update 57 Feedback thread, it’s a real eye-opener, let me tell you.

I have always seen players who manage find a silver lining in every cloud, and always find something good in each Game Update, even the relatively content-light Game Update 54 “bug stomp” from last fall. However I have never seen such universal negativity as that directed towards Game Update 57. Players have overwhelmingly expressed their distaste for many policy initiatives included, and content excluded in GU57.

One of the changes in today’s hotfix was that some Mastercrafted items now also show a Fabled or Legendary tag. Domino gives us further explanation.

EQ2 Lead Designer Rich Waters is seeking player feedback on why players stick with Exile despite the huge disadvantages. He posed the question:

Exiles were definitely a side-effect of the betrayal quest, and not an intentional feature. Some support was given to them in the past, but I wouldn’t plan on anything new.

Other than a wider deity choice, what motivates players to stay as exiles on the PVE servers?

From Xelgad on the EQ2 Forums:

As a quick update, internally, we have changed Crane Twirl to grant a total of 20% AE Auto-Attack in addition to the proc it currently grants.

On Thursday evening, a player logged in to discover that one of their gameplay-acquired mounts, a War-Barded Black Cavalry Horse, had unattuned itself. This led to the discovery that a variety of in-game mounts had vanished from the in-game Stable Merchants, only to be found later on the StationCash Marketplace for a cost of 1250SC ($12.50). Other mounts included the Two-Toned Warg , and the black-saddled Blue Flame Nightmare.

Hotfix notes for Tuesday, August 24, 2010 after the jump:

Although there are no update notes or official announcement just yet, numerous forum posts from EQ2 devs have indicated that a Hotfix is expected on Tuesday to correct some issues caused by Game Update 57.

We’ll keep you posted as these notes become available.

This is reprinted from the original EverQuest2.com article which seems to have gone missing.

Greetings, Norrathians!

We are thrilled to make the highly-anticipated announcement of the winners of our Notable Norrathians Forum Challenge!

It was not easy to choose just ten out of the amazing entries we received. The talent and creativty displayed were truly wonderful and there’s a certiain very-jealous dark elf in the office right now!

We’d like to thank everyone who submitted an entry (the dark elf made note that she’s saving a few for her own desktop wallpaper) and we invite everyone who didn’t win this time to resubmit the next time we have a similar challenge.

The following entries will be made into in-game paintings:

My Immortal	Felwithe by Moonlight
Adiene of Antonia Bayle	Shanyssa of Blackburrow
Wrath of the Overlord	E’ci
Lillaanya of Antonia Bayle	Diamante of Antonia Bayle
Culling the Infidel	The Lord and His Minions
Ainaree of Antonia Bayle	Inni of Antonia Bayle
Tunare’s First Daughter	The Mysterious Drafling
Erithe of Antonia Bayle	Hortensia of Everfrost
Antonican Battle	Amree and Saphronia: A Mentoring Session
Corisu of the Bazaar	Enna of Antonia Bayle

Xalmat from Crushbone has deduced:

On Sunday, August 22, 2010, at 4:30am Pacific, one of the authentication servers for the login server seemed to crash.

Anyone that’s experiencing massive lag, or is unable to log in, this is the reason why.

Who would be logged into EQ2 at such an ungodly hour? Well it’s mid-afternoon for me, so I am such a person. 😉

Amnerys made it official:

Around 4:30 AM (PDT) this morning, some EQII servers experienced outage and connection issues. The problems were resolved within an hour, and the team at SOE is looking deeper into the issue.

We apologize for the inconvenience. All servers appear to be running fine now.

Game Update 57 added an interesting new UI feature. As you gain adventure levels, newer spells are now supposed to replace the previous tier’s spell on your hotbar. For instance, if you have Roped Shot III and you gain the requisite level, Roped Shot IV would replace it on your hotbar.

However two things are happening.

• First, the new spells acquired from leveling are replacing random existing spells on your hotbars.

• Second, Master spells are being replaced by Apprentice spells of the next tier. This is ok in the 30’s and possibly 40’s, but beyond this level range, Apprentice spells will almost always be a downgrade over the previous tier’s Master.

Here is Gninja‘s response on this issue:

There is actually a bug currently where spells and/or abilities are replacing the wrong versions. We are looking into it. The way it should work is it should only replace it if it actually a higher quality spell of the same type.

I file this change under completely unnecessary and possibly more confusing than the old method. I’ve always sequestered new Apprentice spells into their own hotbar until such point that I can login my sage, alchemist, or jeweler to craft Expert (Adept III) versions of those spells.

There have been reports from several players that trying out EQ2X has wiped out all their entitlements on EQ2 Live with their Station Access account.  I have two Station Access accounts myself and have tried EQ2X on both of them.  One is fine, the other no longer has access to anything but the base game.  Zoltaroth wrote on the EQ2Live Forums:

We are looking into what is going on.  I am going to be in touch with the people who PMed me via PMs.

Until the account gets fixed, it’s as if you bought the base game at launch and never bought anything after that.  You can’t even get into the TSO zones because it doesn’t think you bought that expansion.

Hopefully this will be fixed soon.  Until then, if you have a Station Access account and want to try out EQ2X, be aware that you’re rolling the dice.  Everything may be fine but there is a chance that your live account will be locked out of everything once you’re done on the EQ2X server.

It seems that ever since the new Inquisitor trainer in Qeynos prematurely offered the ability to reset any class to Inquisitor, players have let their imaginations run wild with the possibilities of switching between classes without losing their AAs, completed quests, etc. Imagine a character who has completed all 24 epic weapon quests!

Just to nip this idea in the bud, EQ2 Lead Designer Rich Waters has clarified further the purpose of this quest — to aid Tradeskillers who made a hasty choice on their adventure class and have not significantly advanced that character.

Xelgad has responded to a detailed thread on Illusionist Class Issues:

Hey guys, long time no see! We got some good feedback at Fan Faire which I wanted to share.
I agree that Time Warp ended up being more annoying than it is fun or rewarding. Unfortunately, it was one of those things that looked okay on paper but didn’t work in practice. We have it changed internally so that there is no longer an immunity timer associated with the spell, and it now grants the Illusionist the buff as well as the target. This should be coming to the test servers with (or before) GU58. If you want, you can just macro the spell to a group member and spam it as a self-buff, but I envision some players being more tactical with it. You can even spam it on yourself, but you don’t get double benefit – unless, of course, you cast it on your pet. We also changed the icon so that the warning icon looks different than the actual buff, and the buff now looks like the Tsunami (Monk ability) icon, so that it shouldn’t be shared with any other mage abilities.

Some of your other issues, such as buffs providing no benefit due to being capped, will be addressed with the upcoming expansion. There are some other changes that we hope to make before the expansion, but I can’t promise anything yet.

Please feel free to continue to post constructive feedback.

In response to a detailed list of issues with the Monk Class, Xelgad has provided an unexpected commentary:

Thanks for the up to date thread!

I can’t give an ETA, but we are looking for ways to make Monks more viable in AE-oriented content, especially with heroic content in mind. If the change benefits both brawlers, all the better. In that light, Crane Twirl would seem like a great candidate for a change, but I think the advancement is, at worst, balanced compared to other alternate advancements in the slot, and forcing everyone to take that one would not be an ideal solution. We may end up bitting the bullet on that, but a class ability change similar to the changes planned for Recapture and Plant would probably be a better way to go. If you have ideas for changes like that to the monk class, we’d love to hear them.

Again, we’re very busy here with all the mechanics changes we’re trying to get live and the upcoming expansion so I can’t give an exact time frame but Monks are on our radar.

You can provide your feedback on Monk issues and Xelgad’s response in the EQ2 Forums thread entitled Monk Changes Discussion.

Xelgad has posted a flurry of responses to specific class issues today.

This one, in regards to Critical Heals which have been removed from all fighters. For some fighter classes, critical heals might have been overpowered, but for Paladins (joshingly referred to as Healadins), losing all crititical heals has had class altering effects not only in solo situations (which this nerf was intended to fix) but in group and raid setups.

We’ve been hearing about some ranger love for about 3 expansions now, but at Fan Faire, we heard the first concrete info. Xelgad has elaborated on just what we can expect in an update falling between GU57 and GU58 (hopefully 4-6 weeks from now:

Greetings, Mighty Forces!

AE Auto-Attack and Flurry are indeed on the way for bows. We’re also removing the 20% damage penalty for bows, and we’re increasing the damage rating on all 81-90 bows (along with throwing weapons) by about 10%. The intent is to allow you guys to get full benefit from buffs and gear, not to make the class entirely focused on Auto-Attack.

You know how you get more auto-attack damage from your melee weapons in many cases than from your bow? These changes should fix that, unless your melee weapons are simply of much higher quality than your bow. At most, your auto-attack may jump from ~20% of your parse up to ~30% on raids, but I’d be surprised if many people end up with it higher than that.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

You can join the discussion on this issue in the thread What’s this all about? (bow changes) on the EQ2 Forums.

Everquest2 Extended has launched into beta.  I was curious to see what a new person to Everquest2 would see.

When you first go to Everquest2, you do get two options, just as we were told:

Marks of Manaar are the heroic armor/jewelry/weapon-buying “currency” of Sentinel’s Fate. Much like the Void Shards of The Shadow Odyssey, Marks of Manaar allow players to buy baseline armor, jewelry, weapons, charms, cloaks, etc. although those players should continue to run dungeons in the hopes of finding rarer, more powerful items.

The EverQuest II Extended (Free-to-Play) website and Beta service have officially launched. Of note on the new EQ2X website is a tremendous 2 minute trailer for the game which is getting a lot of positive reaction so far on the EQ2X Forums. The cinematic trailers coming out of EQ2’s PR department are always worth a viewing.

The folks over at DreamStation.cc have posted the EQ2 Extended Trailer in 720p High Definition:

Ah… the Shadow Odyssey. The land of milk and honey… The lost dungeons of… ok I’ll stop now.

Ask players of EQ2 during the Shadow Odyssey what they thought of the expansion, and you’ll get many different responses.

Ask a developer of the Shadow Odyssey for their frank opinion, and I bet you’d get something like “Ah yes, every level 80 player fully decked out in T2 heroic gear, fabled jewelry, and all carrying bagfuls of platinum coins.”

With now 16 neutral character classes, available in both good and evil alignments, and with recent expansions rarely distinguishing between good and evil when handing out quests, it’s not a surprise that the question of Alignment and the painful (and costly) process of Class Betrayal gets revisited on the forums frequently.

However thus far, the official response as been “We have no intention to make it easier, or take away any of the consequences. Betrayal is supposed to have a cost.”