Would EQ2 benefit from its Lead Designer (Rich Waters) having a presence on the EQ2 Forums?

This straightforward question is the subject of a colorful new forum thread on the EQ2 Forums.

The Lead Designer is as much a gatekeeper for the development of a game as the Senior Producer, and so they need to have a good working relationship. I’m sure it’s been too short a time to know how things are gelling on the current EQ2 team, but a more accurate term for the previous setup might be “curdled”.

Recent prominent departures which have shaken the EQ2 team have likely cleared the decks for a more “well-aligned” team. But at what cost? Brenlo must surely rue the day he ever considered leading the EQ2 team. At least he’ll never have to hear the question “How does WoW implement this?” in a meeting again. Timetravelling‘s stellar raid designs will also be hard to duplicate.

Update: Rich Waters posted on the EQ2 Forums regarding a bug with XP Potions.

Rumors aside, here are some good quotes from that thread (after the jump)…

Sometimes people don’t believe it, but I know for a fact that developers at Fan Faire really do listen, or at the very least take extensive notes which they reflect upon when getting home.

Some changes are relatively easy and make a lot of sense when the context is explained interactively in a conversation with the developer. Of course big sweeping changes are unlikely while the developers are already in full press mode working on the next expansion, but it’s great when open discussion at Fan Faire can trigger a small but significant improvement. So enough of that…

Olihin (PvP and Battlegrounds dev) has posted a writeup of all the changes he is currently considering or outright planning for the future. He has already indicated that the earliest we might see some of these changes is Game Update 58, but there are no promises. Further, Olihin is requesting feedback on these changes. They are far from going live, so now is your chance for constructive conversation.

The team over at EQ2 ZAM have buckled down and delivered complete documentation to the new Tradeskill quests being added in Game Update 57. These quests now fill out the entire level 10-90 range in EQ2 with at least a few Tradeskill quests on each tier so you have some options other than discovery XP from new combines and grinding Rush Order writs.

Of course these quests provide new rewards, including a 25% runspeed mount which, for some players who have low level adventurers but high level tradeskillers, will be quite useful.

These new level 10-30 tradeskill quests will also help players who think paying over 1 plat for a level 10-30 Advanced crafting recipe book is a bit over-the-top. At the conclusion of these quests, players will be able to buy Advanced recipe books from a vendor.

To get a grapple on the details of these quests and their rewards, check out the EQ2 ZAM guide.

From Amnerys:

All U.S. EQII servers are scheduled to come down on Wednesday, August 18 at 5:00 AM PDT for Game Update 57. Servers are expected to be offline for around 4 hours, coming back online around 9:00 AM. The UK servers will be updated according to the usual schedule.

Notable Norrathians Paintings

What about those Notable Norrathians paintings? Kaisha has dropped some hints regarding how the 10 winning paintings will become available. If our interpretation is correct, it looks like they may be available from the City Festivals for 10 city tokens each.

Tribute to the Huntress and Druid Reconstruction Live Events

The Tribute to the Huntress quest has been confirmed to end with the launch of GU57, but the Druid Ring Reconstruction event has been extended to last until GU58. (from EQ2 ZAM)

Whence Update Notes?

We’ll post the Game Update notes when they become available (assuming we’re awake!).

Emily “Domino” Taylor, Tradeskill developer for EQ2 has been fielding some intense comments from players regarding the first ever Tradeskill Heritage Quest coming to EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious, specifically the Coldain Prayer Shawl quest. This was previously an adventure quest in EQ1 so some players have expressed their concerns about this being a tradeskill quest rather than for adventurers.

You can follow this discussion of the Coldain Prayer Shawl Quest on EQ2 Forums.

Gary Daughtry, graphic artist/animator on the EQ2 Team, set about to revamp the spell animations, specifically the particle effects, for Game Update 57, currently expected to go live tomorrow. The intention has been to reduce the number of “pyrotechnic”, “over-the-top” effects and create something more gradual, with larger effects based on the tier and level of the spell.

However players have been expressing their displeasure with the sometimes sweeping changes.

Here is the 4-part Destiny of Velious panel for EQ2 from Saturday at Fan Faire 2010. I cut out my own off-the-screen capture of the Destiny of Velious preview trailer because it has been released to the press in High Definition.

[EQ2Wire] EQ2 Expansion “Destiny of Velious” Panel (playlist)

Here is the 6-part Question & Answer panel for EQ2 from Saturday at Fan Faire 2010.

[EQ2Wire] Fan Faire 2010 – EQ2 Q&A Saturday Panel (playlist)

I have just posted all 6 parts of the EQ2 Mechanics / Class Balance panel from Fan Faire 2010.

[EQ2Wire] Fan Faire 2010 – EQ2 Mechanics Panel (playlist)

A View From the Top‘s Karen and Adam sat down with Paul “Frizznik” Carrico, SOE’s Lead Mechanics Designer at Fan Faire. On this episode they discuss a few different aspects of EverQuest II, the upcoming Velious expansion, and even a little about EQ2 Extended. Take a moment to listen to Frizznik’s thoughts on the game. Thanks to Kiara and Calthine for putting the meeting together.

Listen to A View From the Top Episode #15

EQ2Wire was borne out of the desire and thrilling concept of having a LIVE blog of Fan Faire. For the last 2 years, the EQ2-related panels have been about 50-50 with 50% presentations/content, and 50% Questions & Answers. This year, the panels were significantly lighter on content, with closer to 75% of each panel focused on Questions & Answers.

This put me, as the sole blogger trying to tackle 6 panels, at a genuine disadvantage. As I found out during Fan Faire, Questions & Answers are much more difficult to capture and blog live without inaccuracies and misinterpretations slipping in.

No panel has been put under more scrutiny than the EQ2 Extended panel. Hundreds of players at home were refreshing the EQ2Wire live blog for this panel, hanging on every word to see if the game they love — EverQuest II — would be changed forever. Readers have been scrambling for details on this emotional topic.

If you checked out our Fan Faire Banquet & Costume Contest, you’ll know that “Billy” was the popular winner, by far. “Billy” (played by Marlee of Mistmoore) has posted a comment to the EQ2Wire with more info:

Billy won a a $200 gift card and $10 in Station cash. It was the wickedest fun I have had in a long time and I hope I provided good entertainment. I was proud to represent my guild (Company of Wolves), server (Mistmoore), and raid alliance (Fortune Hunters of Mistmoore). And the coolest thing? I could scratch myself in public and get away with it!

Calthine over at EQ2 ZAM has just posted high resolution concept art as well as the teaser trailer for EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious.

If you are looking for the teaser trailer in High Definition, look no further than OnlineGamerPortal-DE who have posted the Destiny of Velious teaser trailer in 720p.

Although there has been no post to EQ2Players.com or the EQ2 Forums, it seems that all SOE login servers are down for up to 9 hours of maintenance, as well as several hours of downtime for the EQ2 game servers. Here is a post from the SWG Forums from their Community team:

On Monday August 9th, we will be conducting maintenance across several different systems. The work will affect customer login and authentication, and we will be bringing down the galaxies while work is ongoing. Once the intrusive part of the maintenance is complete, we will bring up the galaxies and make them available to players.

The maintenance window is scheduled from 12:30AM through 8:30AM PDT. If additional time is needed to complete the work, we’ll update this thread accordingly.

We appreciate your patience and understanding during this process, and apologize for the disruption.

and from the Vanguard forums:

We have some maintenance to do on the servers on Monday and this will unfortunately mean you won’t be able to get to the login servers during the hours of 12am to 7:30am Pacific time on Monday 9th August.

If you’re already inside the game during these times you will be fine to continue playing, but should you log out you won’t be able to get back in.

There’s a rampant discussion on the EQ2 Forums on this subject.

EQ2Wire are thrilled to announce that we have just posted all of our photos from the Fan Faire Banquet & Costume Contest, including multiple shots of every contestant, and a ton of photos of the wedding proposal you’ve been hearing about. It was a great moment and it was tremendous to be present for it.

I’ve been advised that my previous post on Comment Abuse was alarming, so I wanted to post something more detailed and lay out the situation.

EQ2Wire is starting to develop a community of loyal readers, some of whom post comments under our articles. We appreciate these comments, as it helps give us direct feedback on how we are doing at communicating ideas, summarizing information, etc. as well as give us ideas for coverage.

We currently moderate or approve the first few posts of each new user here to make sure that comments are not offensive, abusive towards other players, or containing content likely to get EQ2Wire filtered out by workplace filters and firewalls. Once a user has had a few posts approved, they are then able to post freely without waiting for their message to appear. Quite a few people read EQ2Wire because it’s the only EQ2 website that is not yet blocked at their office.

With this in mind, over the last few days, we have seen a growing number of comments which are offensive or attacking other members. Most of these have not been visible to the public, or if they were, they were deleted quickly by our crack team (oh wait, that’s just me and Dethdlr) of comment approver monkeys. We have no problem with constructive criticism, but some folks have been crossing the line, trying to turn this site into EQ2Flames.

It’s just a few people, less than a dozen, and so we are able to deal with the issue relatively quickly, but if it does become a growing problem in the future, then we may have to take some actions. These actions may include approving more posts before a user is ‘free and clear’ to post. Another possibility is to start using user registration for expedited commenting and all other posts would be moderated.

We also are retaining the right, in extreme cases of abusive posts directed towards EQ2Wire, SOE, EQ2, or other players, to gather information and report it to ISPs. This, of course, would be extremely rare, but in the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to make this information available up front.

So far we have been very lucky to have a growing community of people who are genuinely interested in posting constructive comments. We’d like to keep it that way!

Morgan

Now for the slides from the PvP/Battlegrounds panel. It’s really recap of what’s been done in the past year and then opening up the floor to questions. No big revelations but a lot of questions were asked, as you can read about in my notes from that panel.

Here are the EQ2 Tradeskill Panel slides. The last picture is folks lining up to ask questions…

Some photos from the Fan Faire floor.

Fan Faire is now over and one thing seems to be clear: SOE does not have a plan to balance the new players coming into the game between EQ2X and EQII Live, at least not one they are willing to share with us… 

While I’m working on getting my own photos posted…

Billy!

[Rystall] Costume contest winner “Billy”!!!

It has to be frustrating at home to read “We’ll look into it” or “We’ll talk about it”. Realize that my writeups of each panel are on-the-fly and I simplify and summarize questions and answers as best I can. So any answer from the devs like “That is something we can look at” or “This is something we weren’t aware of” or “We need to talk to the team about this” or “We’ll put it on our list” sometimes got distilled into the ubiquitous “We’ll look into it”.

So what questions didn’t you see get asked at Fan Faire? I sense a lot of exasperation at the questions that do get asked that we’ve heard before (Q: When can we get armor dyes? A: If you want this, EQ2 will have to add flat-shaded armor that doesn’t use any Shaders 1.0 or 3.0) instead of the hard-hitting questions. Even I was surprised at how few raid content questions were asked compared to housing, grouping, itemization, PvP, and class balance questions.

This is EQ2Wire’s second anniversary and third year covering Fan Faire. We are proud to have documented this event and provided up-to-the-minute information for thousands of players who couldn’t make it. I say thousands because our previous record — the expansion launch on February 16th generated 6,300 unique visits. Yesterday, we nearly broke 10,000 unique visits.

It was a pleasure to meet so many people in the EQ2 community at Fan Faire this year. We spent more time with devs and with players to get more on-the-ground information and reactions. I heard from so many that suggested to their guildies at home follow the live blogs here at EQ2Wire. Thanks! Even some folks in the panels were reading EQ2Wire because the speakers were so quiet.

I just wanted to give a huge shout out to Dethdlr who kept an eye on the steady stream of Comments, and also posted his reactions as the events transpired. Also, Calthine and Cyliena of EQ2 ZAM, Niami from EQ2Traders, Jaye and Ferrel of A View From the Top who invited me to join their guilds at a fantastic dinner. We spent a bunch of time with their guildies and they are just great folks.

To the EQ2 devs, I give you guys a hard time but we play this game because of its depth and quality, and we appreciate the long hours you put into making a game that works for so many different types of players. Also a shout out to Aurelis from the EQ2 ZAM chat channel who I finally got to meet. If you have a question about books in EQ2, contact the EQ2 librarian. 😉

I know I am forgetting some folks and will hear from them shortly… Sorry!!!

Thanks again all, and stay tuned in the coming days as we continue to provide the EQ2 coverage our readers look to first.

Sleep beckons…

If you have followed past Fan Faires particularly the costume contests, the big news tonight was Snickers, the froglok paladin, proposing to his long time on-again off-again girlfriend first outside EQ and then, by chance, meeting again in-game.

She said yes. 🙂

I took over 500 photos of the costume contest. The clear winner was someone dressed up as Billy!! Did I mention I am really loving my new Canon 550D / T2i? I am getting better pictures without a flash than I used to WITH a flash. I hate how flash photos look (without a large diffuser), so I made a good choice here. 😉

There is lots still to post. More photos, those videos, and commentary in the aftermath of Fan Faire 2010. I talked to more devs, and more players to try to have a perspective on the whole game, not just parts of the game.

Sorry to say the panels and live blogging are done for a bit. Although my hands are long past protesting the typing. 🙂

I filmed 5 of the panels and my computer is crunching them now to a usable state. A lot of folks had video cameras so hopefully I get to see panels I missed.

Thanks for reading and there might be another brief update later tonight.

Morgan