If you have run into the Launchpad problem we reported earlier today, a fix has been rushed through and rolled out today according to Bunji:

An updated EXE was pushed out to the US patchers (international patcher updates are still in progress) which should hopefully resolve the issue where you get the pop-up asking you if you want Full or Streaming, but setting you to streaming regardless of your choice.

Now if you set your install to full (under ‘Select Game Version&#39, it should stay that way and you shouldn’t receive any pop-ups when launching the client (which would previously occur if you had both a ‘PAKs’ and an ‘assetcache’ folder in your install directory).

Matt Meyer on the Launchpad team gave a bit more insight into what’s happening with the bug:

I caught wind of this last night. There is some code in the game client that is trying (incorrectly) to detect what version it thinks you should be running and making bad things happen when they try and fix it.

The original plan was to fix this issue next Tuesday with Game Update 63, but an update was prioritized and rolled out today.

This screenshot foretells the coming of Gozer, and a rather unfortunate crossing of the streams.
Image provided by Cloudrat

Starting on Wednesday, November 30th Thursday, December 1st the following launchers/launchpads/patchers will no longer update EQ2 but instead automagically update themselves to Launchpad 4:

• Original EQ2.exe (Retail Launcher)
• Station Launcher (multi-game launcher)
• EQ2 Streaming Launcher (LP3 Streaming)
• EQ2 Launchpad 3 (LP3 Full)

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

Hi folks,

As you know, there’s a ton of new stuff coming to you soon. And soon starts now!

The first step is a LaunchPad upgrade. Starting on Wednesday (November 30, 2011) Thursday December 1st, LaunchPad will be updated automatically for you when you log in. We’re doing it now so it’s out of the way and not an issue before we launch GU 62 (“Freeport Reborn”) and the new expansion, “Age of Discovery.”

As we first officially heard in December, plans are afoot at SOE to reduce the number of “launchers” currently being supported and move everyone to a single codebase for their patcher. From Amnerys:

Sometime after the launch of DoV, we will be discontinuing Launchpad 1 and moving everyone to Launcher 3. But don’t worry, it’s not the Streaming Client so you won’t be forced to do the streaming thing.

Our support teams (the dev team doesn’t make the launcher clients, it’s another team) can’t keep supporting so many versions of launchers…they also support all the launchers for the entire SOE portfolio of games. So in the interest of saving everyone some time and eliminating outdated elements that they can’t keep running at 100%, we’ll be moving all games to the Launcher 3 launchers.