Feldon
Last night, the Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge concluded. Here are some things you should know from Rothgar: Issues with Character Names are being addressed via scripts and Customer Service, so give them 24 hours before petitioning if you have character names with x or xx after the name. Titles are being worked on and so will become available in the next few days. Players from the Blackburrow server will be able to have a title of “of Blackburrow“. Some characters are reporting issues with Chat Channels and may need to rebuild their chat channel setup.
Month: December 2010
Players are reporting in the chatroom that Splitpaw has been down for approximately 30 minutes.
Keeping in mind that dates and servers listed are ASSUMING nothing goes wrong, check out the preliminary list of server merges from Rothgar: We should be able to give more notice for the upcoming mergers. This first one was a special situation where we wanted to start it ASAP and just got the final green light from QA yesterday. If we had then given 48 hours notice and delayed the merger, we wouldn’t have been able to do it Thursday due to a conflicting network maintenance so the next opportunity would have been the following Tuesday, putting us a...
From Rothgar: The merge process is still truckin’ along on schedule with no major issues. I hope that we will be able to have the servers up earlier than planned but that will depend on whether or not we find any merge problems after all the data has been moved. We’ll update you again in a few hours.
Beyond the initial announcement that cross-server chat channels and in-game mail would be affected during the 24-hour long Server Merger process, players are reporting problems with all public chat channels, even server-specific ones like 1-9 and 80-90 (some would insist it’s a feature that these channels are rendered inaccessible), and Friends lists. We’ll try to find out if we can expect this behavior on all servers during each of these Server Merges.
We’re a bit late on this, but the last update from SOE Headquarters in San Diego on the Blackburrow -> Everfrost Merge was as follows from Rothgar: It’s 4am and the merge process is going smoothly so far with no surprises. A few steps are running faster than expected, so that’s good news. and: I haven’t been to sleep yet, but going to try to catch a cat nap in the next few hours so I can deal with any post-merge issues. We have a group of very dedicated people from different departments all working together to make sure...
Originally announced as a 2 hour update, then revised to an 8 hour update, Splitpaw and Runnyeye are finally coming up after 11 hours, 30 minutes of downtime. Apparently the TSA wanted to pat down McScroogle himself before allowing this export of Frostfell goodness to Europe. Rothgar‘s comments when queried about the long update: I’m not sure why the downtime estimate was 8h. It should be publishing the hotfix which shouldn’t take nearly that long. I just checked with our operations department and apparently there were some networking issues that caused the file transfers to take much longer than...
Latest update on the Server Merge from Amnerys: Good morning (or afternoon)! Hope everyone’s finding something to keep you busy during the downtime. 🙂 I also wanted to remind you that you can always log in to Test server if you start twitching too much. If all goes according to plan, you probably won’t be hearing too much from us today, so don’t worry if you don’t see red names for a while. Back-end teams are hard at work on the merge, and the dev team is still doing all the pre-expansion launch stuff, so they have a full...
The Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge has commenced. From the EQ2 Forums: The Blackburrow and Everfrost servers will be merging on Wednesday, December 8, 2010. Both servers will be offline for an estimated 24 hours, beginning at 12:00 am on Wednesday, December 8. The merged Everfrost server is scheduled to come back online around 12:00 am on Thursday, December 9. The following services will be affected for all EQII servers during this downtime and may experience interruptions: Cross-server chat In-game mail Friends Lists Please feel free to join in the discussion in the Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge Discussion...
Niami Denmother over at EQTraders has posted a new article about new Hua Mein furniture added with yesterday’s Hotfix. Today, one new furniture item was added to the hua’mein faction vendor in the Sundered Frontier (the hua mein artisan). In addition, however, 12 furniture items were added to the Stonebrunt Mountains pandas, the Disciples of Circling Destiny. Check out the screenshots and faction details on them here! images courtesy EQTraders
It looks like Frostfell was patched in early today, instead of the expected December 9th. EQ2 ZAM has their updated guide ready to go for Frostfell 2010 if you need a refresher, as well as info about the new quests and events. If you’d like to browse the complete catalogue of Frostfell-related items, look no further than the comprehensive EverSeek which documents an astounding 285 Frostfell items and exactly how to get them. Don’t forget to check out Niami Denmother’s EQTraders tomorrow with news about that new Hua Mein (panda) furniture as well as coverage of Frostfell 2010.
If you purchased a Research Assistant for your Guild Hall, you may have noticed that after today’s patch, he or she seems befuddled as exactly what to do now that players can tackle their own Spell Research from within their Knowledge window. Some have reported these despondent Research Assistants taking up crochet and browsing the want ads. Since the Research Asssistant Guild Hall Amenity has both a recurring and up-front cost, some players have expressed their concern that choosing to Refund the amenity only returns 50% of the value of the amenity. Since a change in the game has...
Karen Bryan, known to us for her involvement in the A View from the Top and Shut Up We’re Talking podcasts, has been providing interviews and in-depth coverage for Massively for several months now, and today she weighs in with an exclusive interview with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson regarding the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion. The Tattered Notebook @ Massively — Interview with Dave Georgeson
Today’s hotfix adds house items (furniture) to a merchant in Hua Mein, moves Research Assistants into the UI, fixes an exploit in StationCash Item Gifting, and offers additional tweaks to PvP and PvP Warfields. After the jump, your Hotfix Notes for December 7, 2010.
From the EQ2 Forums: From 1:00 am PST (09:00 GMT) until 1:00 pm PST (21:00GMT) on Tuesday, December 7, SOE account services, commerce flow, and the Station Store may be unavailable during maintenance. Session servers (the ability to log into games) may also have interrupted service during this time. All Battlegrounds servers will be locked during this maintenance. We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.
Earlier this week, we commented on a change to Research Assistants which would have an effect on Scholars (Sage, Jeweler, and Alchemist). Namely, it allowed players to Research a spell all the way from Adept to Master without needing the assistance of a crafter to make the Expert first. Some players have downplayed the ramifications of this change, pointing out that most players will not want to wait for the Adept -> Expert upgrade, as with a 28~30 day Master, it adds another 13~15 days wait. After the jump, SmokeJumper has posted his own thoughts on this change and...
As has been widely reported, when StationCash Item Gifting was added to SOE games, players realized that they could create new accounts and sign up for trials of SWG, EQ2, and other games and receive free StationCash in each game. With the ability to Gift items, players were able to gift hundreds of StationCash items to themselves without spending a penny. Item Gifting will be coming back sometime this week, with suitable controls to prevent further exploits. More details after the jump…
First mentioned just after the introduction of Guild Halls, many players have been hoping to place tapestries in their guild halls which display the guild’s chosen heraldry. At Fan Faire, we were told that the artwork was essentially done. Domino on the EQ2 Forums has indicated: If all goes well, you can expect to see this around February… Also, apparently merchant Nin Yung in the Stonebrunt Highlands was supposed to offer furniture items for players with Ally faction. Domino informs us: Seems that at some point between Sentinel’s Fate beta and launch, a shipment of Hua Mein furniture intended...
Usually, people want to know the story behind the music. But in this case, it may be the music itself which has more to reveal about the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion. As first reported on the EQ2 forums, last night’s Test Update patch included music files tied in to EverQuest II’s seventh expansion. The following zones were represented (categories are mine amd subject to change): Dungeons/Raid: Kael Drakkel Fortress of Drunder Tower Tower of Frozen Shadow Velkator’s Labyrinth Velkator’s Labyrinth: Kraytok’s Fortress Overland: Deep Gorge Iceclad Ocean Othmir Camp Rygorr Fortress South Velious The Great Wastes City: Thurgadin...
While it was never officially announced, you may recall that Game Updates shifted from monthly to a 3 month cycle in the beginning of 2009. The game-breaking Fighter Revamp was stripped from Game Update 51, which was eventually cancelled. Its features were released as two small hotfixes. So it was up to the massive Game Update 52: Monument and Might to finally kick off the current 3-month release schedule in May 2009 with 3 new dungeons, 80 new quests, player-written books, Research Assistants, and a rework of Spell Naming. It was hoped that a 90 day release cycle for...
We first heard about Server Mergers in an initial announcement in October. The first possible date for the merges was put forth as November 16th. As revealed by SOE’s answers to some questions about Server Merges by EQ2 ZAM on November 8th, 2010, SOE aren’t simply using the same old Server Merge scripts which have been used in the past. It seems more attention is being paid to make sure there is less work for players, and less issues for Customer Service as well.
image courtesy Kotaku.com Kotaku.com landed an exclusive interview with SOE President John Smedley and got some of his reactions to World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm update. Some selected quotes: Next week’s world-changing expansion for World of Warcraft may not be the only cataclysm to hit a major massively multiplayer online game soon.John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, tells Kotaku that the publisher has been considering a similar game-wide reset for EverQuest II. “We are looking at it closely, we have been for a number of years now,” he said during a visit to Sony Online Entertainment Denver. “Is it...
If you’ve been hoping for any hint of class tweaks we’ll see in Velious, Xelgad has posted an early preview. Naturally this does not include any mention of new AA lines or other abilities we may gain. We’re still three months from the Destiny of Velious launch, and more sweeping changes than the ones listed below were made in less time, so take this as an early teaser, subject to change. In short, there is great news for Illusonists and Summoners, and some news for other classes as well.
A thread was created on the EQ2 Forums a couple of weeks ago entitled “Why is there no hype about Velious?” which elicited responses from Amnerys and Rothgar indicating that we’re still 3 months away and not everything is nailed down. This thread raged on. However the real discussion about the EverQuest II expansion Destiny of Velious and future of Norrath beyond its release has been happening in the elephantine Server Merges Announced by Email thread, which has become sort of an omnibus discussion between SmokeJumper, Rothgar, and the players.
EQ2Players received an incomplete revamp last December, leaving the site graphically refreshed, but with significant issues including problematic content updates, buggy Javascript, and various statistical oversights. The site was also re-branded as EverQuest2.com and became a free service, instead a paid feature. The SOE Platform Team were initially responsive to the issues brought up and some of them were fixed, but it seems there was some personnel shuffling and as a result, little else has been done to the revamped EverQuest2.com since the release of Sentinel’s Fate. Players have been trying to nail down some kind of response from...