Imago-Quem, who has long been working on the Shaders 3.0 project, has posted a new Shaders 3.0 FAQ thread summing up all the key details. Originally hatched as a graphical engine bump, and then expanded into an optimization of graphical performance, Shaders 3.0 are now slated for release with Game Update 56 in May.
Here are your update notes for March 30, 2010, after the jump:
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.
From EQ2Players:
EQ2 Artist Gary Daugherty does the effects for everything you see in-game. Everything from spell effects to the nifty mists and sparkles on epic weapons. Gary was kind enough to sit down and answer some questions!
And the news that many players have been waiting for, regarding Spell Animations…
Do you have any special (or just super fun) projects you’re working on now for EQII?
I’m currently updating, optimizing and standardizing every class spell visual in the game. My hope is that players won’t have to turn the FX off when they group or raid and will still be able to tell what is going on. It is also my goal to help better visually identify what class a player is by what spells they cast. In addition I’m setting spell visual tiers so an apprentice spell will have less bells and whistles than an adept or master spell visual. This update has not been officially announced and no release date has been chosen.
Most folks who raid must disable spell animation particle effects as they otherwise dramatically slow down the client. This is primarily due to them being tied directly to the character models and thus rendered on the CPU. Hopefully they are being decoupled and moved to the GPU, which should allow players to use spell effects even during raids.
In an unusual move, Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, Senior Producer of EverQuest II, has posted some high level updates on what we can expect from Game Update 56 coming in May.
As many of you know, several items planned for the expansion and corresponding Game Update 55 slipped: New Halas, Shaders 3.0, New Spell Animations, Thundering Steppes revamp, etc. Also, there have been major performance problems with many of the live servers, which have been alternately attributed to Battlegrounds, Database Issues, or the expansion itself.
After the jump, you can read Brenlo‘s response to these issues, copied from the EQ2 Forums:
As you all know, this is “season 1” of Battlegrounds. Specifically, that the EQ2 team did not get the load testing they wanted to on Test, and so now this test is going on on live servers. But as much as we have gotten reassurances that Battlegrounds are having no significant impact on live servers, this seems to be exactly what is happening.
We’ve heard reports of servers rebooting, inability to open instances, and Battlegrounds have been down several days a week for adjustments, tweaking, maintenance, etc.
Hopefully this will all be worth it, but Rothgar did shed some light on part of the problems that Battlegrounds is causing:
The issue isn’t really that type of character data, it’s more the large amount of inventory. EQII has more inventory slots available to a charater than any other MMO I’ve ever seen. Combine that with your bank, house vault, guild bank, harvest depot and shared bank and its just an immense amount of data. Much of this inventory does not need to go back and forth with you, like your bank and house vault, and that’s what we are working on fixing now. Unfortunately even just your inventory slots represent a large amount of data and that stuff does need to go for us to have the flexibility to give quests that use/consume items, reward items, etc.
We have several changes we’re working on to improve performance across the board as well as reduce the data that moves between worlds. We also have more DB upgrades on the way for servers that haven’t gotten them yet.
It’s clear to me that Battlegrounds started out as an extension of the Character Transfer Service. In essence, your character is completely copied to the Battlegrounds server, and then after the match, you are copied back to your home server. But a lot of redundant data is being carried back and forth.
and further from Rothgar:
Battlegrounds are still having a pretty big impact on DB performance especially during primetime and on weekends. We’ve decided to throttle back the number of BG matches that can run concurrently until we can get some additional optimizations made. This should resolve the issues with a little longer queue times instead of us needing to take them down altogether.
It is no secret that Customer Service have been swamped with issues of stuck characters, duplicate characters, etc. as a result of Battlegrounds. We continue to track these issues…
From the EQ2 Forums:
The US servers will be down from 2am to 5am PDT on Wednesday, March 31st for some hardware maintenance.
We have been trying to get Google AdSense to display better ads, but after months of trying different settings, blacklisting hundreds of vendors our readers have no interest in (plumbing supply cos, wiring companies, really?), now all we’re getting is Plat Farmer and Account Selling ads.
It seems Google AdSense doesn’t have any ads that you guys would like to actually see. I am currently looking for a banner ad company that will show appropriate ads, such as movie banners (non-flash, no scary music!), upcoming MMOs and other games, and just cool stuff people might actually click on.
For the time being, I have disabled banner ads. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a Donation box over there on the left side. 😉
EQ2Wire is on the road again. Sorry for the delays in part 2 of that Sentinel’s Fate Itemization Puzzle article.
If you’ve ever fancied yourself a writer for EQ2Wire, whether it’s just updates on the happenings around Norrath, including updates on Live Events, shoot us an e-mail thru Contact Us.
Rothgar has advised on the EQ2 Forums, due to the extreme database loads continuing to be caused by Battlegrounds, the EQ2 team will be throttling back the number of concurrent Battlegrounds sessions that can be running at once.
The previous Thursday and Tuesday hotfixes have brought some itemization changes, specifically with the increase in the number of items holding Red Adornment slots, the introduction of Yellow Adornments for heroic gear, and the addition of Resists to Legendary and Fabled gear (previously, players were expected to run around with 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry).
Now, we are starting to see the second prong of these changes, intended to fix the itemization mess that Sentinel’s Fate launched with. Frizznik brings us:
Thanks for your patience with us as we look at items, spells, and combat arts. We are reading your concerns and are trying to make adjustments where we can. This week we have been hard at work on raid item changes. Those changes should happen in the next hotfix, so please don’t transmute those drops, you may want them after the changes hit. After the changes next week, we are going to be looking at resistances on Legendary drops and some other things as well.
Please understand, we have a lot to think about. The expansion, battlegrounds, and the golden path added a lot of content that we have to keep an eye on. The content team did an excellent job with the golden path and if you haven’t tried it, you might want to talk to a chronomage or roll a new character to check it out. Battlegrounds are a lot of fun too, even if you don’t like PVP combat you might want to give it a shot because the cooperative team play is a lot of fun. I am not trying to make any excuses, but instead I am trying to say that there are only so many hours in the day.
Defense/Parry — Useless?
An interesting thread, which I’ve been following, on whether the +Defense and +Parry skills have any utility whatsoever.
Additional
Yellow Adornments
A handful of Legendary items from level 80-83 received Yellow Adornment slots, however Yellow Adornments were all initially flagged level 84. This has been remedied in the March 18th hotfix, as they are now level 80 adornments.
Flurry, Double Attack, and AE AutoAttack
When you Auto-attack with your mainhand weapon each of the following has their own independent chance firing off in addition to that mainhand attack (from EQ2 Forums):
AE Auto-Attack is primarily an AA line that points can be spent in. Double Attack has a cap of 100% and now appears widely on gear of all kinds. Flurry is much rarer to find, and is mostly found in AA lines, but look for it on items.
Making Sense of Tier 2 & Tier 3 Raid Gear
Whether you are rewarded Tier 2 or Tier 3 raid gear is dependent upon which raid mob you are killing, and whether you are taking on the “easy” version of that mob, or the “hard mode” version of that mob. Hard mode mobs typically have more adds, more hitpoints, unique effects, stronger detrimentals, etc.
I have to tell you, even after reading this thread laid out by established raiders, I’m not clear on every single mob and Tier. 😉
Moonlight Enchantments
Don’t forget that Moonlight Enchantments start tonight!!
Itemization Puzzle Pt 2
We’re still working on part 2 of the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization Puzzle. SF Gear is still in a state of flux, and we now know that the “Tier 3” Sentinel’s Fate raid armor, which drops from the hardmode version of each mob are all being upgraded, loot tables adjusted, etc. so it’s hard to get an accurate picture of the gear at this point.
Development
Fyreflyte, itemization lead for EQ2, has been conspicuously absent from the EQ2 Forums in the last couple of weeks. Further, Xander, Frizznik, and timetravelling have all been stepping in to answer itemization-related questions. It is unclear what, if any conclusions can be drawn from this.
Meanwhile, a former EQ2 developer, Aeralik, has been posting some of his perspectives on how the Shadow Odyssey expansion played out behind-the-scenes. He still holds forth that he fought the good fight for the players against the Fighter Revamp and other sweeping, ill-considered changes. EQ2 team members I’ve spoken to on the condition of anonymity dispute this viewpoint.
Thursday night saw the first post-expansion developer chat of 2010. Hosted by ZAM, this chat had previously been scheduled for March 4th, but was postponed to March 18th as developers focused on issues with Battlegrounds.
You would have assumed, with the key issues of Battlegrounds and Itemization consuming a great deal of development effort in the month since Sentinel’s Fate launched, AND the 2 week postponement in the EQ2 Developer Chat, that Calthine at ZAM would have received an avalanche of hardball questions. Instead, we saw just a few of these critical issues raised, with the rest running the usual gamut of comfortable questions.
Your Hotfix notes for March 18th include tweaks to Tier 3 (raid armor).
NOTE: Make sure your EQ2 client patches before trying to log into EQ2. Due to an oversight, EQ2 servers are allowing out-of-date clients to login, resulting in bugs with the Broker, Group window, etc.
After the jump…
Y’all are cordially invited to the next exciting EQII ZAM Developers Chat! This chat was originally scheduled for March 4th and then postponed. Members of the EverQuest II Developer and Community Teams will be there, bring your questions! If you’d like to submit questions prior to the chat, send e-mail to Calthine@allakhazam.com (subject Dev Chat).
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For instructions on how to connect to the chat using mIRC, Trillian, or other chat client, check out the EQ2 ZAM Chat Instructions @ EQ2 ZAM. |
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If you are not able to run chat software at work, or you just want to jump into the chat through your web browser, you can use the ZAMCHAT Portal here on EQ2Wire. |
Check out this Time Zone Converter to help you find what time to sign in. NOTE: Due to America being on Daylight Savings early, please double-check your time zone.
source: EQ2 Forums
Today brings the first part of a two part story about how we got to the Itemization situation we are in now. Part history lesson, part recap.
Part 2 will try to sort out the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization picture as we have it so far. I assure you that Part 2 will be MUCH shorter. 🙂 After the posting of Part 2, we will be posting a survey to get your feedback on these long-form articles.
Mages have been rather effective in Battlegrounds and PvP combat of late. Moreso than perhaps was intended.
Timetravelling has laid out the details of the cause of this issue, what he intends to do about it, and how it will be tested in this EQ2 Forums thread.
We’ve been digging through the code to track down the inconsistencies we’ve been seeing in spell resists and spell avoidance. We have some changes incoming that I’d like to describe briefly for y’all.
Based on the old formulas, extremely high resists (if capped) would give players a 75% chance to avoid a spell AND a 75% reduction in the damage when it landed.
At level 70+, spell avoidance chance was being multipled by 0.6 (reducing your overall chance to avoid by 40%) and spell resists were being multiplied by 0.65 (reducing the damage reduction applied to spell damage by 35%). This has been contributing to the … ah … very high combat effectiveness of spell-damage based classes. We have removed all of these mults internally.
Once internal testing has been completed, we plan on pushing these changes to Test-copy (and temporarily flagging it as PvP). Once that happens, we’ll update the thread here and ask for y’all to jump over there and help us test the crap out of the changes. We’ll leave it up there for at least a week or two to give time for balance tweaks and such before considering a push to Live.
Our intention is *not* to make any classes unbeatable or make others unable to kill opponents.
However, spell resistances and high STA should be contributing to survival as expected instead of at a greatly reduced effectiveness.
Your feedback is encouraged, and hopefully lots of people will test these changes. In case you missed it, for PvP and Battlegrounds purposes, Spell Resists are now calculated using Stamina (STA), a stat that all classes have some of, and can gain more of, rather than Wisdom (WIS), which due to Stat Consolidation, is now much harder for certain classes to get in any quantity.
Today’s Hotfix notes for March 16th, 2010. Yellow Adornments also made it in, but they’re not in the notes…
GENERALMost of the guards in Freeport, Qeynos and Kelethin have had their levels reduced to what they had previously. Exceptions to this include palace guards and patrolling knights.
ITEMS
All jewelry from the Vigilant: Final Destruction (x2) has had resists added.
Summoning the mount from the Ykeshan Warbear whistle will now work if you are level 80 in either adventuring or tradeskilling.
The valuable, Onayan staff of the waves, should now be on the Vasty Deep collection tables.
QUESTS
The Footsteps of Dartain: Observation – The projected erudite will no longer disappear during conversation.
In Search of Lucan – Fyr’remd Lorak should no longer disappear during conversation.
“Confronting the Godslayer” requires the raid lichform version of Perah’Celsis in order to update. The prose is now more specific about this.
Delinah now properly updates “The Footsteps of Dartain: Emergence.”
Players who delete or decline the various “Footsteps of Dartain” signature quests can now re-obtain them.
Stage 3 of “Whispers from the Past” now correctly mentions Silent City instead of Living Tombs.
PALACE OF ROEHN THEER
Kendis and Penda United now have lower maximum health.
The 3 sages in challenge mode now synchronize their use of prismatic sphere with their exchange of stones (tank switching).
SUNDERED FRONTIER
Neophyte Sairal in the Hall of Necromancy seeks adventurers 80 and higher for a special task.
VASTY DEEP: THE ABANDONED LABS
Adds on the Kadara’Mola fight in Vasty Deep: The Abandoned Labs should now de-spawn should she reset or the encounter breaks.
Most of the Sentinel’s Fate raid and heroic gear has had no Resists (vs. Arcane, vs. Elemental, vs. Noxious), presumably with the intention that players would have to wear 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry. Also, all but the highest level raid gear in Sentinel’s Fate has lacked Red Adornment Slots. This made most of this gear a poor upgrade over TSO raid gear.
If you’ve been following the Equipment Adjustments thread on the EQ2 Forums, as well as yesterday’s Hotfix notes, you know that Resists and Red Slots have now started to appear on Fabled and Legendary gear. However there are some outstanding items, specifically the x2 raid (The Vigilant) items.
We are continuing to watch the changes in Gear Itemization, including Yellow Adornments which should appear in Tuesday’s Hotfix.
Brewday has arrived in Norrath! This celebration of Brell and brew will run from March 11 to the 22nd.
For a guide to the updated events, collections, tradeskill recipes, and quests for this year’s Brew Day event, check out these sites:
Although the event is now available on live servers, Brell’s Bar remains closed until 10:30am PST according to an announcement I read in-game. For further discussion on Brell’s Bar, check out the EQ2 Forums.
EQ2 servers will come down for a Hotfix on Thursday, March 11th, 2010. This hotfix takes place at 6am PST for U.S. servers and 5am GMT on March 12th for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.
After the Hotfix notes, you’ll find some good news about the Guard levels in Qeynos, Freeport, and Kelethin.
If you’ve been thinking that the pieces of the Sentinel’s Fate itemization puzzle just have not fit well together, you are not alone.
While we have not spent a lot of time covering itemization in SF, it is because things have continued to be in such a state of flux during, and after the Beta.
The smooth progression of TSO gear was seemingly replaced by a scattershot approach, with some of the x2 raid items being the best in the game, the x4 Hard Mode gear being only 1-2% better than the x2 Easy Mode gear, and Battlegrounds gear the red herring, providing a confusing shortcut to skip instance gear altogether. In short, the “plan” has not been clear. Until now.
After the jump, check out what Frizznik has posted regarding the EQ2 Team’s itemization plans:
While not breaking news, some folks may not be aware that Sentinel’s Fate offers a Signature quest to level 85+ crafters who have completed the Quel’Ule portion of the Paineel crafting timeline.
Two weeks after you complete the final Quel’ule quest for Researcher Tahar, you will receive an item in the mail from him. He’s actually entrusting a relic to you, though it needs a bit of repair. This is the Shadows of the Betrayed signature quest.
The reward for this quest is a unique appearance weapon which matches your tradeskill class.
As always, Niami Denmother is on the case about all things crafting at EQ2Traders. 🙂
As we have reported, players have been abusing an exploit which allowed them to login to Battlegrounds and consume/transmute/craft items and then get those items back upon being returned to their home servers. SOE have stepped up and shown they take this sort of thing seriously with the following announcement from Brenlo:
This weekend an exploit was found on the Battlegrounds server which allowed players to transmute items, and have those items returned when leaving the Battlegrounds. This occured due to a change we made in the code to speed up the return process. While we understand that this was a bug of our creation, some players chose to take advantage of it, knowing it was not meant to work in that fashion.
Many players took advantage of the bug, to varying degrees. Some of our community however went to great lengths to abuse the bug. For those accounts that abused this obvious bug, we have taken action. Some have been removed from the game altogether, while others are losing all of the items on their characters. All will face at least some time removed from the game as we sort through the various logs and track down their ill-gained platinum and items.
While we hate to remove anyone from our community, our family, there are times that for the good of the servers, the in-game economy and the community we do find ourselves forced to take action. Unfortunately, this was one such occasion.
Thanks all for being a part of Norrath.
This action is not just limited to Transmuters:
We tracked spells, transmutations, abuse of Mender Bots, etc. We are taking action against all who reached a specific threshhold of abuse.
The most egregious offenders, who I have learned made thousands of plat off of this exploit, will find themselves suspended from the game for several days or possibly a longer ban.
Posted by Kiara:
We’ll be having our usual Tuesday hotfix starting at 6am for the US servers and at 9pm (5am GMT Wednesday March 10) for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.The downtime will be the usual hour or so.
and your March 9 Hotfix Notes after the jump…
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
Customer Service will be investigating reports of players making use of a duping exploit. If you’ve been found using this exploit, your character may be rolled back several days.
You should always be aware that using an exploit can result in suspension or bannings regardless of what the exploit is. If you’ve stumbled across something on your own or heard of an exploit from a friend, your best bet is to petition CS about it right away and cease that behavior.