It seems Butcherblock & Lucan D’Lere are back online. Must’ve been a minor fix if the servers were down for less than 15 minutes. Perhaps some final housekeeping from the Server Upgrade.

Abbreviated quote from Rothgar (EQ2 Forums thread):

At 7:00am this morning our export script experienced a crash.

We’ve restarted the export process as of 7:00am PST on different hardware and are monitoring it closely.  The current impact is an extended downtime for Venekor players of roughly 12 more hours.  For Nagafen players, this would mean a delayed maintenance schedule, but hopefully not an extended downtime.

Who would have thought just 5 months ago that we would see these:

Also, contrary to prior plans/rumors/hints, they are not restricted to Alignment. Any race can switch to any other race!! Just $25 ($44 in Europe).

If you live in the U.S. and play EQ2 (or FreeRealms), then even if you’ve never purchased any, you know that 1,000 SC costs $10. Furthermore, there was a promotion a few weeks back where you could redeem retail-purchased StationCash cards for double credit. 1,000 SC were just $5 for a weekend.

So you may be surprised to learn that in Europe 1,000 SC costs $17.63. That’s 10 Euro for 1,000 SC plus 17.5% VAT (VAT should be 15%). I mean exchange rates are a pain, but the U.S. Dollar has been weak for over 2 years now. Remember when the Canadian dollar was maybe 60 cents on the U.S. Dollar? Now they’re almost equal. For a few months, Canadian was more valuable.

To get around this problem, it used to be possible to pay in U.S. Dollars using a Visa or other payment technique, but SoE added an additional check to require Euro depending upon your address. What a completely unnecessary change!

If you live in Europe, or want to commiserate, you may want to check out this thread.

Follow the news of the EQ2 PvP Merge on EQ2 Forums:
Farewell to Venekor

Nagafen/Venekor Merge!

If you’ve been following the EQ2 Streaming Client announcement thread, you’ll know that Rothgar is very excited about this new feature coming to EQ2. Remember, this is an optional client which will allow players to jump into EQ2 in as little as 5 minutes rather than waiting for a 5-10 hour download.

So far, the streaming client delivers the most basic experience. It delivers content to the screen as fast as possible, sometimes before the game is even really ready for it. As soon as there is enough data to draw a zone, the zone appears. However this may mean other players, armor sets, enemies, etc. may all still need to be loaded before the character can safely move around. For example, players arriving at the Character Select screen start out with no appearance until the data is loaded.

The first grand step has been taken, now it’s time for the next step — Adjustments. First is setting some minimal limits before a zone will load. Then setting certain things to have priority to preload at certain times.

Here’s Rothgar‘s update:

We’re actually already working on this.  I’ll go ahead and fill you in on the things we are still trying to do in the next few weeks.

• The patcher will continue to download assets before you hit the “Play” button so if you walk away from the computer it will continue working.  The assets it downloads will be a prioritized list starting with character select assets, then starting zone assets.
• We will force download of the default character/race during the zoning into character select.  This way you don’t start character select with a missing model.
• During the race-selection part of character select we will fetch the other races in the background
• During the class-selection part of character select we will fetch the other class assets in the background
• While you’re in a starting zone we will prefetch assets to destination zones.

We should have another update going to test server today with a feature intended for slower connections.  Aggro mobs will render as a “red ghost” if they can’t be drawn within a certain amount of time and we’re still waiting on their textures to download.  The goal is to let you see the mobs that would attack you as soon as possible if you’re on a really slow connection.

Thanks for all the great feedback so far!  Please keep it coming.

Race Change Potions will appear on StationCash on Thursday, October 22nd for $25. Source

UPDATE: Despite contrary rumors, there will be NO alignment restriction when choosing races. You will be able to change to any race (except, naturally, the race you already are).

Here are your Hotfix Notes for October 21, 2009:

GENERAL

• Nu’roga now has plunderable loot!
• Malicious Thoughts and Icicle Explosion now trigger on ranged and melee attacks.
• Frostburn and Mutagenic Burst now correctly modify each other’s damage.
• Purifying Persistence should properly modify the caster’s heals rather than the targets.

LoN

• The Cloak of Crystal Shards, Assassin Master’s Cloak and Cloak of Runes returned from Collector Rattelis are now Heirloom.

ITEMS

• Icy Prison now has 3 shield effectiveness to match its deflection chance.
• Charm of Solusek Ro once again triggers multiple times on AE casts, however its effect is now limited to 5 targets.

Miragul’s: Crucible

• The Master’s spell reflect percentage has been greatly reduced.

Miragul’s Planar Shard

• In the final hard mode fight with Miragul, his Brilliant Adepts will no longer stun/mez players within a second of initially spawning, but will wait 3-6 secs after spawning to start casting.
• The Miragul encounter (Hard mode): Miragul will now cast Curse of Confusion on up to 2 players per cycle, rather than 3.

MISTMOORE’S INNER SANCTUM

• The Vampiric Protectors that spawn during the Mayong encounter will now respawn in the center of the room if they break, rather than rapidly spawning and despawning near the point where the encounter broke.

MUNZOK’S MATERIAL BASTION

• Certain items that drop from Munzok have become slightly more powerful.
• Overlapping unstable void protrusions should provide protection from Munzok’s edict as expected, and no longer conflict with one another.  Additionally void protrusion protection now more closely matches the sphere’s size.
• Munzok’s max health has been reduced.

NIGHTS OF THE DEAD

• Altius Volfban in the Hollow Hedge should be much easier for mage classes to handle.
• The Headless Horseman now spawns somewhere near his tree instead of just in the same spot every time. He also requires someone offer him the necklace instead of simply taking the necklace near him to activate. His respawn has also been lengthened slightly.
• The Nightmarish Ceremonial Armor has gotten a slight change to color.
• The Nightmarish Ceremonial armor should now all have an equal chance of dropping.
• Altius Volfban now has a chance to drop a piece of the Nightmarish armor when killed.
• The Blanket of Fog now comes with a remote so you can turn them on and off. In the off state it should be much easier to tell where they are!

USER INTERFACE

• The option to always show the threat window has been moved from Game Features to Options->User Interface->Game Windows.

From EQ2 Forums:

We are proud to announce the release of our new streaming client into beta!

The streaming client will allow players to get into the world of Norrath faster than ever before.  We’d like your help testing this new technology.  Please check out the announcement in the Testing forum and let us know what you think!

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/…topic_id=461076

Some of the key points of Rothgar’s posting (please go read the whole thing if you are interested):

We’ve recognized for awhile that the current size of the EverQuest II installation (about 10gb) is a pretty large barrier to entry for many people.  We’ve seen the posts on the forums where many players excited about trying the game never make it in due to the large download and sometimes unreliable patcher performance.

When the streaming client leaves beta we will not be forcing it on any existing players.  You will always have the choice of running the existing patcher and downloading all assets prior to entering the game.  The streaming client will provide a nice alternative for new installations or for computers that you don’t update often.

We’re looking for as many players as possible to download this new streaming client and give it a try.  We’re asking that you do a fresh installation into a new directory and see how fast you can get into the game.  The streaming client is currently available for the Test Server only.

Our marketing department has an aggressive campaign over the next few months leading up to the expansion with the primary goal of acquiring new players for EverQuest II.  The streaming client is an important part of this campaign and we would love your help evaluating this new technology.

Early Results

Already, some players have reported being able to start the EQ2 Streaming Client, create a character, and log into the game and start playing in as little as 5 minutes. Compare this to the existing 10GB download which even on a very fast cable or fiber connection could take 5 or more hours.

From Rothgar, Nagafen and Lucan D’Lere are now online.

From Rothgar:

We are going to begin unlocking servers as QA completes their test.  It looks like Butcherblock will be coming up in a few minutes.

Rothgar, who has been up for how many hours now? brings us this update…

The upgrade is looking good and we should have the servers up soon.  The QA department is just doing their final pass.

We have a 30 minute downtime scheduled tomorrow morning to roll out a hotfix for all servers.  Since we had to skip our normal hotfix window this morning due to the database migration, we are doing it tomorrow instead.

We’re still planning on going forward with the PvP server merge Wednesday night at midnight PST.  Initially only Venekor will be brought down to backup the database and export all of the data.  When the export is complete, Nagafen will be brought down for us to merge the data.  After the merge takes place, we have some other background tasks that could take a few hours.  This includes cleaning up universal-chat, merging shared banks and updating player names and guild names that had conflicts.  Be prepared for as much as a 24-hour downtime for Venekor players.  Nagafen players will experience around 12 hours of downtime depending on how fast the processes go.

We’re hoping that the newer hardware will help the process go faster than our test runs.

Thanks for enduring the downtime this week.  We know it’s never at a good time but the final outcome will be worth it.

Tomorrow’s hotfix is expected to include some changes to the Headless Horseman x2 encounter.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

All 3 servers are currently up and locked while our QA department goes through the normal testing process to confirm everything looks good after the upgrade.  We are specifically testing characters and guild halls on each of the three servers that had problems copying over last time.  So far those are loading fine so everything is looking great.

I’m hoping that we will be ready to bring the servers up within the hour.

and Glip the Gnome:

Hey all! We are smoketesting the servers right now before we open them back up. Right now it looks as though we’ll have them up around 7:00pm PDT. We’ll let you know if that changes.

The latest news…

Update:

The downtime for Nagafen, Butcherblock, and LDL has been extended to around 10pm PDT this evening.

We apologize for the extended downtime.  As a result of this, the team has already extended the Moonlight Enchantments event an extra day to make up for all the time that these servers will be missing.

Thank you again for your continued patience.

This makes 22 hours estimated downtime.

To compensate for the server wonkyness, server downtimes, and slow start on the event, Moonlight Enchantments is extended through 11:59pm PDT October 22nd.

Due to two mistakes in how the Server Downtime scripts were triggered last night, ALL servers must be rebooted. This will happen in a few minutes. The issue:

• All West Coast servers, not just Butcherblock, Lucan D’Lere, Nagafen, were set to stop allowing instances (dungeons) from being created starting at noon today.

Announcement by Rothgar:

I just wanted to take a moment to explain some of the broadcasts you may have seen and what is happening with the servers.

Last night, prior to the maintenance for Butcherblock, Nagafen and Lucan D’lere, we scheduled the downtime which is responsible for notifying the worlds via broadcast and also safely shutdown and lock persistent instances until the worlds come down.

There were two mistakes made.  This notice was scheduled for all west coast servers, not just the three that needed it.  We also mistakenly set the time for today at noon instead of last night at midnight.  This is why BB, LDL and Nagafen didn’t get the notice last night.

Unfortunately once the servers have gone into maintenance mode and the instances become locked, there is no way to reset it unless we reboot them.

So we are planning on taking all of the west-coast servers down in 5-10 minutes for a reboot.  This will clear them so you’ll be able to create instances once again.

The reboot shouldn’t take long, maybe 10-20 minutes at most.  We apologize for this confusion.  Unfortunately some processes still require human interaction and occasionally we can make a mistake like this.

We hope to have all servers except for BB, LDL and Nagafen back up very shortly.  The DB migration is going well.  Nagafen is the only remaining DB to be copied and we’re hoping that it will complete in a few hours.  After the DB has been moved, we will need some additional time for QA to verify the migration.  Once we have the green light from QA, the remaining 3 servers will come back up.

Thanks for your patience!

The latest news on those 64-bit Upgrades:

Things are still going well, however it is looking like it’s going to take a bit longer than we had originally anticipated.

We’re now looking at an uptime of around 4pm PDT.  If we need to adjust the time again, we will be sure to update this thread.

Thank you again for your patience.

Rothgar is posting updates regarding the downtime to a discussion thread on EQ2 Forums.

I apologize that the server downtime was not made more clear.  We discussed it a few times in other threads while the maintenance was still tentative.

We weren’t able to make a decision on the maintenance until our DB tests passed with our QA department which happened late on Monday.

The only option would have been to make an announcement and hold the DB upgrade for a couple of days to make sure everyone had ample time to plan for the maintenance.  Unfortunately this would have pushed the server merge back to next week and we wanted to avoid that since it has already moved back several times.  We’re still trying to get the database upgraded and server merge completed in as timely a manner as possible.  The compromise to this accelerated schedule is a little less notice on the maintenance.

Should the database upgrade happen successfully, we are still planning on performing the merge on Thursday of this week.  We also have a 12-hour maintenance window for the merge so please plan accordingly.

All 3 servers are definitely getting the database upgrade.

Stay tuned…

Sorry for the late post on this but Butcherblock, Nagafen, and Lucan D’Lere servers are currently down to complete the maintenance which was attempted last week. Note that ALL 3 servers are being upgraded at this time. Hopefully at noonish Pacific time, we’ll be running 64-bit and see some significant improvements to zoning time, zone lag, etc.

The announcements on the EQ2 Forums:

Greetings all!

This is to let you know that Nagafen, Butcherblock, and Lucan D’Lere will be down from Midnight PDT tonight (October 19th) until Noon PDT Tuesday October 20th, while the team migrates Nagafen (only!) [all 3 servers] to the new DB structure.

As you all know from last week, the migration process did a little wonkiness with some of the longer character files.  In order to prevent this from happening again, Nagafen [the 3 servers] will be migrated by hand.

During this downtime, bonus exp will be enabled on Venekor and our Nagafen players are encouraged to make alts over there to take advantage of the exp boost.  We’ll also look into having the mushroom rings extended on the affected servers so that no one misses out.

The plan is then for the server merge between Nagafen and Venekor to take place on Thursday (more details on that will be forthcoming).

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience!

and the followup:

Good news all!  We look to be on schedule for noon and from what I understand everything is going as planned.  Butcherblock and Lucan are being migrated as well, now, as things are going so smoothly.  So that means shiny new databases for all three servers

As previously mentioned, the Moonlight Enchantment event will be extended for these servers (and others as well because gnomes got into the works!).

Thank you again for your patience while we migrate the databases for these servers and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Note that other servers besides those affected by this upgrade are spitting out various announcements indicating that their server will be shutting down. These can be ignored. Glip the Gnome posted:

Hey all! Between now and 12:30pm PDT today (October 20th) folks across most servers may notice broadcasts saying that the server will be shutting down or restarting — you can ignore these. The only servers that will be affected and be down are Nagafen, Butcherblock and Lucan D’lere and they are still scheduled to be up again at roughly 12:00pm PDT.

So once again, players can ignore the server restart broadcasts and we apologize for any confusion it may cause.

Thanks!

In other news, Moonlight Enchantments got a late start today, so my understanding is it will be active for another full day on all servers.

After reprinting the excellent Letter to SoE written by Shianne (Spritelady), we here at EQ2Wire weren’t expecting much of a response. So today’s detailed feedback from timetravelling was a real eye-opener. As he says, there is a fine line between challenging and frustrating. Some fights in TSO are just plain annoying with the unbelievable amount of curing they require. Nobody is asking for easier fights, just ones that are not hair-pulling annoying, fights that healers are quitting over.

Here’s the refreshing quote from EQ2 Forums:

A good thread with some excellent feedback!

From the population side, we are definitely always trying to improve the ‘fun’ of fights going forward. It’s a very thin line between challenging and frustrating, but we are always looking for ways to improve y’all’s experience. As a couple of people mentioned, Miragul’s Planar Shard was a step in this direction, and one we plan to continue with Sentinel’s Fate. We would like for many guilds to be able to have the satisfaction of clearing an entire zone while preserving the very difficult fights for players to really test their limits!

You have been heard on the curing side of things. We’ve begun to move away from it already, but we’ll make sure and look at each fight to hopefully ensure that the curing required is part of the fight, or plays an important role but does not devolve into ‘spam’ curing an excessive number of debuffs.

I spoke with our lead raid designer today and we’re going to look into perhaps removing as many ‘non-essential’ debuffs from the TSO raids as we can. A number of the fights had varying amounts of spells and effects that were not necessarily an integral part of the difficulty or flow of the encounter and we’re going to re-evaluate whether or not they need to be there. The goal of this proposed change (for the devil’s advocates out there) is to reduce the # of cures required while not affecting the difficulty of the fight in any significant way.

Thanks again for all the feedback, and good luck!

If you are just about fed up with the out-of-memory crashing in EQ2 since Game Update 53 — I know I am! — you’ll be interested to know that the major causes of the issue have been identified and fixes are in the works. As soon as an updated client is available, we’ll let you know. When I start to see texture corruption, I minimize and then maximize the window every few minutes. It’s really a sad workaround.

Rothgar posted on the EQ2 Forums:

We’ve been taking a lot of snapshots of memory allocations and comparing this data to the code from different times.  We’ve gone back as far as June, rebuilt the code and compared these allocations to today’s code.  We have an understanding of what is happening and when.  Unfortunately it’s not as simple as rolling the code back to June because it would take a lot of other code with it.  So we’re working on a way to fix the problem correctly.

There are actually two issues coming into play.  There appears to be an issue with data not being cleared from the cache as aggressively as it should.  This isn’t really a memory leak, its just the client holdng on to things that it can probably get rid of, especially after zoning.  Then there is also the issue of memory becoming fragmented which eventually causes the allocation error.  Both should really be fixed if possible, but as soon as we have a fix for one or the other, we will get it out asap.  Fixing either issue should keep the client from crashing as much as it is.

I’ll let you know when I have more info.

Spoilers ahead…

Maze

If you have been struggling to complete the Nightmarish Hedge Maze as part of Nights of the Dead, especially as a mage or pet class, you may be interested in this thread on the EQ2 Forums. Of course if you’d rather be challenged to figure it out for yourself, then don’t. 🙂

Fog

Another item as part of Nights of the Dead you may not want to miss may make your head a little more Foggy than usual. Again, if you’d rather figure it out yourself, then don’t visit this forum thread on the EQ2 Forums.

Headless

If you are an aspiring raid of 12 players, or a heavily-armored confident group of 4-6 players wishing to tackle the contested Headless Horseman, there are two things to know:

• The Headless Horseman is on a 1-2 hour spawn timer.
• At least one player must have the necklace from the Hedge Maze. Note that every player who has a necklace within range when the Headless Horseman spawns will see that necklace disappear from their inventory. More Info

Have fun out there! We may see some changes to the Headless Horseman on Monday.

One of the exciting aspects of the 2009 Nights of the Dead live event is the contested x2 Headless Horseman Knight. No less exciting (and surprising) than the loot that drops from said encounter:

Hallows Gallows Bloodthirsty Choker 2.0? \aITEM 430679940 306448646:Hallow’s Gallows\/a	Soulleach \aITEM -1026839664 -1911359172:[Soulleach]\/a
Secret Sash \aITEM 71107619 -1772367845:[Secret Sash]\/a	Brainless Belt \aITEM 1534172351 1374785267:[Brainless Belt]\/a

and of course these humorous items:

an oddly empty crate \aITEM -1414756000 -2003420917:[an oddly empty crate]\/a

Frictionless Piece of Eight \aITEM -1495753407 -624402372:[Frictionless Piece of Eight]\/a

Note that some players are reporting issues with the new Hedgemaze zone (an instance of Cauldron Hollow). Not all players have been able to progress beyond the “Trick” step.

Nights of the Dead is now live! The event runs through November 9th. The zones were not available first thing this morning, but this issue has been addressed.

Lucan D’Lere is now back up on the previous hardware.

Rothgar fills us in:

Lucan up!

Sorry again for the issues this morning and those of you that lost some progress during the maintenance.  We learned a lot from the migration.  You can’t imagine how big of a step this is behind the scenes.  Well, those of you in IT probably can. 

We’ll let you know our plan for round 2 as soon as we have the migration process fixed.

Commentary

Believe me Rothgar, I do. 🙂 Having migrated FeldonCentral from shared hosting, to VPS, to a previous dedicated server, to its current hardware, yes, hardware migrations are painful and just when you think it’s going to kick over, another surprise stabs you in the heart…

Butcherblock and Nagafen are currently unlocked. They are rolled back to their state at 5am. Any quests, progress, loot, etc. you acquired after this time has unfortunately been lost.

Lucan D’Lere should be up shortly.

Another attempt will be made to upgrade EQ2 servers to 64-bit platform in the next few days.