Feldon 
In response to a Change.org Petition which has been making the rounds, and whose 600 signatures were sent to SOE President John Smedley and Mr. Büchtmann at ProSiebenSat.1.
In response, SOE President John Smedley had this to say:
I think we’ve got it figured out and will announce our plan Monday.
His plan had better
1. Include no region locking, and no grandfathering in just existing characters effectively freezing accounts or any other scheme that just dooms games to a slow decline.
2. Involve players going through an SOE launcher to the game, SOE can customise their launcher for Prosieben, but I want all the security to be handled by SOE.
3. Keep the current inter-server gameplay going and support new gameplay when needed, thinking here of battlegrounds.
4. Stop anything extra going into the store, I’m guessing “not power” could include items that increase levels, award AA points etc.
#1 Could even be something that they make money from, e.g. allow all current accounts to start characters in US and EU, but make it a $10 token to unlock the other region and 7 extra character slots for new accounts, I doubt that would be seen as a problem.
Seems way to fast for anything constructive.
Best guess for me is :
– existing running subs will be converted to SC and the converted to alaplaya points
– discount on char transfers
– Future EU players may go to US servers IF they pay another sub to SoE
– Future US players may go to EU servers IF they pay another sub to Pro7
that way, no IP lock but twice more subs
I will guess they solved region locking, but not having to register and give details to Alaplaya in order to access your Euro account.
If I can’t ‘bank’ with the known quantity of Sony, I won’t at all.
8 years is a long time for an MMO, so much to think about when you change anything: Playerbase is international (everybody is everywhere), station cash, LON, account security/payment, subscriptions payed in advance, vet rewards etc etc… Yeah, must have been hard to go through all that, while planning this deal… oh, wait a minute? Nobody did that?
My guess too is that they simply are looking at the US players perspective here, which is only effected by region locking.
Anyway, Johnny Ball will reveal all Monday!
Is is exiting times that awaits… says SOE. Wonder what the mean by that, and who they’re talking to? Hehe… (at least they don’t spam with posts in their forums).
Can you imagine the following conversation.
President of SONY: John you got a major mess on your hands.
Smedley: It is not that bad. We can take care of it.
President of SONY: You had better, We don’t want to hear the words segregation, lost sales, and low profits at our next meeting.
Smedley: We will fix it immediatly.
Hmm personally my guess is it went along these lines…
President of SONY: We have a gaming division?
PA: Yeah it is run by John Smedley.
President of SONY: Wasn’t he Monty Burns assistant on the Simpsons?
PA: No that was Smithers.
President of SONY: I see, whats next on the agenda?
Smithers for CEO!
Been awhile since i’ve seen a picture of Smedley but dear god he looks like Davros’s younger brother (and about as bright too)
First: i dont even have a clue on what server i play on, i’m in Northern Europe and i speak with US, Canadian and German people all the time. I’m currently in a cool guild with people from all over the world – there is always someone online and the guild is old, stable and has been around since almost the start of EQ2.
If SOE takes that away and stick me in on some euro-only-cannot-even-speak-english server, then say GOODBYE to any more Station Cash purchases from me. I do not even care if the game is free to play, you are screwing up mine and others gaming experience.
As i see it, we have one market/region – it is called PLANET EARTH – stop thinking like some old record company executive and join the 21’st century!
The could avoid this, but from what I read we have a plan, that means we are going ahead with this anyway we come up with something we think folks will like.
I can hear the words exterminate rofl. Honestly hes lost a lot of hair since 2006 when I saw him last.
If Smedley was Smithers then wouldn’t that make SJ Homer Simpson?
@Lempo. That is an insult to Homer. =( I want to see how they are going to weasel out of this one though
The mods are deleting any reference to this left, right, and center on the forums. An hour’s worth of posts just went away.
There must be some way to rein these SOBs in. This is beyond infuriating now.
I tried to post this at the SOE Forums, since some people were wondering how legit this was. But the posts got removed (including all posts that were made within the last hour)
Saturday we sent a letter (an email) to SOE and ProSiebenSat1 with the petition and within about 10 minutes we received an email reply from John Smedley saying: I think we’ve got it figured out and will announce our plan Monday.
I thought the mods had had their smarties and had quietened down,seems i was wrong
There was a mode number 16 on earlier. Looks like they brought in more to continue the beatings until morale improves.
You guys check out the facebook posts im like well hmmm sound like they dont get it
EverQuest 2 Leslie Bauchman, Privacy and security are very important topics for SOE and ProSiebenSat.1 Games. SOE and ProSiebenSat.1 Games have invested substantial energy and effort into establishing and maintaining a secure and reliable infrastructure with effective and proven technology to prevent any security breaches or issues. [Ashlanne]
2 hours ago · Like.
EverQuest 2 Gareth Warren, SOE will continue to provide 100% of the development, patches, updates and content. SOE will continue to maintain ALL servers, including those in the EU. I hope this helps with your concerns. [Ashlanne]
2 hours ago · Like
The only other solution I would accept other than no region locking is if they plan on getting rid of separate shards outright and everyone in euro and NA play on the same ‘server.’ PvP people can simply ‘phase’ in and out of a PvP server type shard. They already figured all this out with DCUO so it’s not like its impossible.
I imagine the announcement will be lots of reassurances and maybe one ‘real’ change.
Personally I think the announcement will be a reworded version of what they have already told us, they will just replace words like “region locked” with generic open ended comments that are less inflammatory in the hopes people get sick of the fight.
@Zapphos i think you’re right tbh,they just havent been at it long enough for any real change
I hate to say it but i think the announcement will be, “We are still working on it”. All I got to do is point at Piesto post in the forums that a lot of folks are working on it and Monday might be too early.
Piestro wrote:
So that tells me later this week, I could be wrong, but all this misinformation from sony is a delaying tactic at best.
Oh thats on page 171, the page that magicly went poof last night, and was deleted, now its back this morning.
First, Smedley’s comment precluded with “I think” leaves ALOT open. There is no good “hard action verb” saying the issue is resolved. He does not say, “We fixed the segregation issue” or “We have corrected the issue”. Bottom line, ProSiebenSAT1 paid SoE for the rights to Euro servers. SoE only has to develop content, then send it to ProSieben for translation (for lack of a better term) to the Euro Markets. If it doesn’t work, or there is something wrong, SoE can walk away and say “It’s not my job”, please contact your provider, ProSiebenSAT1. No support for Euro servers means employing fewer people to offset any loss of income from the game. While it is a corporate win for SoE, it is a HUGE loss for the gaming community, and a sad testatement on how SoE feels about the importance of the community.
I would like to know what exactly they are working on that they have “figured out.” The region locking? Security issues? The fact that people are worried about Alaplaya doing pay to win with the marketplace, along with the fact that they have never run a AAA game, and have a poor track record of running the ones they do publish? Those are all different concerns.
Alaplaya has stated they do want to change things in the game for Euro players, such as adding player events or unique marketplace items. Whether that was just wishful thinking, or a reality, they aren’t going to just leave the game alone unless SOE makes sure they don’t have the ability to change it.
Fixxing the region locking, at least, is a step in the right direction to address the biggest concern of destroying the community.
I don’t have much faith that today’s annoucement, if there even is one, will result in a collective sigh of relief. I hope I am wrong.
The forums get messed up when posts are deleted my mods.
There are 2 ways they can delete them, one is the way we are most familiar with where they inform you that Kim Jong Il does not approve that message, the other is when they have a lot to delete and want to take the quick route and delete a block of messages where it leaves no visible trace in the forums.
In the link below, when it appears that posts have stopped but you know there are more increasing the 2600 value will make them appear.
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=2600&topic_id=515195
That they’ve been locking then unlocking threads hours later, shows that they’re just being arbitrary anyway. If a thread was against a rule, it would still be hours later and yet… Does it still count for their quotas?
… and some posts never come back. All my recent posts that mentioned the word petition … or anything about Smed’s mail magically poofed without a trace.
@Lili your post is on page should have been on page 171 that’s the page that went by by last night. some of the post returned. Yours is still missing however on page 171 and 172 there are some heavily edited replies to your initial post, and I mean heavily edited, and all of them have the words petition in yellow. They were edited by soemod4. That page got reamed hard before it came back to life. There have been other pages after that that have received the treatment. In fact it sat at page 174 for 3 hours this morning. So the mods have been up to their very draconian ways on that thread, who knows what the actual post/page count should be at this point, and what was said that we all missed.
When Germany reformed the East German Stassi went to work as SoE mods … they are good at making things go “poof”.
It is 6:32 Pm In Berlin, and we not heard anything, I bet 10 bucks we get the were still working on it message.
Ok, so i read that us Europeans who are on the US servers can choose to stay, but what about payment options? Will the very fast and safe way of mobile payment remain or do i have to get a creditcard? With a mobile phone, i can control what to pay with the “enter this code” mechanism, but if i give out my creditcard number, it risks becomming part of a very big list of CC numbers SQLinjected by some 15 year old because most companies SAVE the CC numbers (for no good reason whatsoever).
Can we get a word on the payment possibilities for those who remain – will they remain or will we be b0rked unless we fill up with 40K SC right now to pay for the next years?
I don’t think everything will be perfect … there’s no solution that will satisfy everyone, but I hope what you heard is correct. What about US players on Euro servers, though?
Is this new info?