Feldon
While we were sleeping, a power outage in San Diego knocked out all SOE games and websites. Some service has been restored, but intermittent problems persist and likely will for the next few hours. From SignonSanDiego.com: An unprecedented power outage led to controlled chaos Thursday throughout San Diego County and surrounding areas as up to 5 million people coped with the sudden loss of electricity, and officials said power would be restored in waves through Saturday. The outage began at 3:38 p.m. after a 500-kilovolt high-voltage transmission line from Arizona to California failed, triggering a cascade of events that...
Month: September 2011
Dethdlr
Tank and Spank vs. Complex Scripting vs. Fun In recent years, I’ve seen numerous posts from people complaining about how the different group/raid encounters work. A lot of the complaints say that they don’t want simple “Tank and Spank” encounters. But they also don’t want encounters with complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. They want encounters that are fun and challenging without any of those things. So it got me wondering, how do you do that? How do you make an encounter without complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. without turning it into a tank and spank...
Here are your update notes for today, September 8, 2011. Of note, War Runes (red, raid-only adornments) are going Heirloom! We’re not really sure what the removal of Crit Chance from lower level items is about — maybe it’s a typo and they meant Critical Mitigation. Considering they just went through and added Crit Bonus to thousands of items (which does nothing without its sister stat Crit Chance), removing Crit Chance would make no sense. From the EQ2 Forums: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Silent City: The Delving Dead If you have completed all the collection quests for the Delving...
Here are your September 7, 2011 EQ2 Patch Notes: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Pedestal of Sky Fixed the missing geometry in this zone. Foundations of Stone [Challenge] The blink portion of Icy Snap AOE that the Statue of Rallos Zek casts will now only blink players a max of 2m, and will only affect players a certain distance away from the statue, not players close to it. Sullon’s Spire x4 raid [Challenge Mode] Aaranae Acrimae: Her debuff to max health and mana is greatly reduced. Leechweb does less mana damage on its initial hit.
EQ2 has always had a series of “flavor” items. These are loot drops which serve no purpose other than a bit of interest (a colorful description), and a fixed price at which they can be sold to a vendor. It has not always been easy to pick out these items, although in recent years most have been flagged with a statement such as “You might be able to find a merchant who would give you a few coins for this.” So it would seem the groundwork has partly been laid for a “Sell All Junk” button. Well, it looks...
Progression is a funny thing. Funnel players into too strict a progression path of gear, of levels, of dungeons, and you take away player choice and limit options. Provide too many options or no clear path, and you have player confusion about what they’re supposed to do next in the line of progression. The Shadow Odyssey had a straightforward (if restricting for developers) progression, with 3 and later 4 tiers of armor from Heroic through to x4 Raiding. This is not to mention the open-to-all Shard of Hate raid zone which had internal progression from a named encounter that...
Last week, SOE released their new server status page. I took a look at this to see if there was anything there that I might be able to use myself. There was. I’ve put together three different versions of an EQ2 server status page, two of which can be embedded into your own website.
From EverQuest2.com: Come Back to EverQuest II Free For This Weekend! This weekend, players who have quit the game between November 5, 2010 and August 2, 2011 can come back for free! It’s a great time to come back, too. It’s Bonus Experience Weekend and Back to School Bonanza for double Station Cash! If your friends haven’t heard about it yet, don’t forget to tell them! The free play time starts this evening and ends Monday evening. All players will need to do is patch their game client and log into the game!
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2X Forums: We’re aiming to put it on the Test server this weekend and then take it to Live in a week or two.
We have received several reports that EQ2Flames.com was hacked late this afternoon and had been serving malware. The account currently displays as Suspended. If the hackers were profiteering script kiddies, only able to inject malicious code but gaining no further access. then the damage may be minimal. However if the hackers gained access to eq2flames’ MySQL database then they would be able to browse everything, including hidden forums and Private Messages. vBulletin forum software does not store plaintext passwords so it is unlikely we will see identity theft. UPDATE: EQ2Flames is now back online. UPDATE #2: EQ2Flames seems to...
As we reported last week, we’re coming up on a Double XP weekend. Now the official announcement from EverQuest2.com: This coming weekend, from 12:01 AM PDT on Friday, September 2 and ending at 11:59 PM PDT on Sunday, September 5, EverQuest II will be running a Double XP promotion (+100% XP). Take advantage of these three days and watch those XP bars fill up! The bonus applies to AA, tradeskill, and adventure experience gained this weekend. Our French, German, Japanese, Test, and EQ2 Extended servers will also be enjoying the increase in XP gain. The localised times for this...
From the EQ2 Patcher: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Silent City: The Delving Dead Levels below 90 should actually have collections. TRADESKILLS Appearances on some tranquil threadbare crafted armor have been updated. The Scroll of Fire Seeds is now heirloom rather than no trade.
From EverQuest2.com: We’ve got some really great news! We now have an official SOE Server Status Page! The page includes server status information for the following games: EverQuest II Extended EverQuest II EverQuest Star Wars: Galaxies DC Universe Online Check it out here: http://www.soe.com/status. The information on this page will include up-to-date region, server name, status, and server load information. UPDATE: The Server Status page has been redone to add other games (Vanguard, EQ Mac, EQOA, FreeRealms, and PlanetSide). They’ve also added a time readout for the last time each server’s status was updated. This seems to have changed...
From EverQuest2.com: Hail and well met, fellow gamers! My name is Jennifer “Isulith” Bridges and I’m the newest addition to the SOE Community Team. I have to say, it’s truly an honor to be here.