Feldon From John Smedley‘s Twitter:
We’ve come up with a plan to allow ALL players to play on any servers they want. More details to follow.
UPDATE from Zatozia:
Hey there! We have a status update on this topic for you. A solution to keep the communities together is now in the works! We’ll be providing more details about the solution with an official announcement a bit later but we wanted to let everyone know that it was coming as soon as we could. Thank you all for your great feedback on this topic.
UPDATE from Piestro:
Just to elaborate a bit on what Zat said above, last week we let you know that we were working on finding a solution to the EU/US community split. This morning Smed has confirmed we have found a solution to avoid needing the split and are working to make this a full reality.
Smed wanted to let you know as speedily as possible, and tweets are an easy way to do so. It wasn’t a stretch to guess that it would quickly be reposted to the relevant communities. We’ll have more details later as we get them. I’ll clarify a bit right now and say that “All players” in Smed’s tweet specifically referred to all players potentially impacted by the ProSieben deal.
As for further concerns, yes we continue to listen to what you all have to say and are in communication about many of them. Clarification and further communication on many of these concerns is also in the works, but those are seperate issues from the EU server issue and we wanted to get communication about that as quickly as we could.
Update at 2:30pm PST from Brasse:
SOE and ProSieben worked throughout the weekend to develop a plan that will allow our players to access and play on any server regardless of where they are in the world. Our community is our top priority and rest assured, all of your concerns have been heard. We continue to work together with ProSieben and appreciate your patience as we work around the clock to work out critical technical details. We will share more information as soon as possible.
UPDATE from Brasse:
This partnership will not impact Akella customers! They will carry on as usual!
I hope they address the other concerns as well. This was a huge issue but it’s not the only thing that needs resolving
I hope this means they canceled the deal but it sure does not sound like it waiting for the new faq to come out.
First let me say great site, first time poster here and I have been following your posts for going on 6 years.
The comment here – Let’s hope that while they have found a way to allow players on any server they want that this will not become apart of the station store and you have to “buy” something in order to continue the service that was apart of the game for free now for money.
Wow no shit eh?
I read that article on massivly where they were talking about evidence that SOE is really making an attempt to listen to player feedback.
Maybe they really are.
I’m sure the deal remains, they just aren’t going to drive quite a large a wedge through the overall community as they’d planned.
One small step in the right direction. Push him harder, Feldon!
EQ2 has a cash shop = money for ProSieben. No way they’re gonna give that up, and the possibility of logging in via their launcher (where you can spend even more cash in other games too)… Hope I’m wrong 🙂
there’s only one plan that can save SOE and P7S1.
* no regionlock
* ban P7S1 to turn SOE games into Pay to Win crap (like they did with others)
and finally:
* dont forget to include LEgends of Norrath, EQ1, Pirates otbs. some people probably still play all these and wouldnt like to have 2 currencies and 2 companies to pay.
No reference at ALL about Euro’s having to register with Alaplaya.
maybe the force us Euros to register with p7s1 and will still allow us to play everywhere. while that sounds cool that still is not an option for me – i do not want to play via a new account just for eqII while i have eq on my soe account.
I still hope they share revenue of us euro-based folks with p7s1 just by where we are located and maybe allow p7s1 accounts to log into the games using their account system.
well – one can dream – right?
double-login option like they have it on sto … oh my …
This doesnt even scratch the surface for me,not by a long way
I think this was part of the plan. If you look at any major changes SOE has made to EQ2 and you can see a bit of a trend. Announcement change A to B it will be great grand next best things since sliced bread. Lots of negative feedback. We are re-evaluating, and listening to the community. Down the road the change from A to B is finished and implemented. In my conspiracy theorist mind, this is all part of the plan. The same things happened with Station Store, the free to play and now this. Anything that might cause an uproar, plan is introduce cause an uproar, say were are listening to player base (let them feel better for the feedback and breath a sigh of relief) then make the change anyways down the road.
Sensie – I think you’re right. History shows you are… sadly 🙁
Sensie is probably right. The plan all along was for Sony to get double the subscription fee’s out of all players and I believe once this deal is done – in order for European players to play on U.S. Servers they’ll have to pay a subscription fee to both ProSiebiensat.1 and SOE, and for U.S. Players to play on European servers they’ll have to pay a subscription fee to SOE and Prosiebiensat.1
Just watch.
Wonder how much this will cost the players?
That’s great, if they
1) Confirm Sony will be responsible for characters data and security.
2) Confirm that the cash shop contents will always be under control of SOE’s development team.
3) Keep the option to have one account to play everything.
And the fact that someone other then SOE is actually actively trying to get more subs in Europe and the deal starts to look promising. To be honest there are 30 or so problems with the deal and I’ve forgotten most of them although one thing could fix many, need to take a break! But also desperate for some good news.
Hmm, maybe franchising the brand…naaaaah, that would require intelligence and creative thinking!
Sounds good … as I said earlier, everything won’t be perfect but this at least keeps the community together. I don’t know about a plan to create a worse case and then take it back …to me it seems more like poor planning to begin with in most cases, then realizing what the plan actually did in the long run.
If you are looking at spreadsheets, you don’t really see the actual case of what is going on, just numbers. So, you have European customers … sell those to another company and it takes care of lots of little issues with running EQ2 overseas. Sounds simple enough. It takes someone pretty smart to see beyond the data to the actual complex situation.
As much as I agree with Murfalad, I don’t see much likelihood of that happening. They should have just sold copies of the servers to PSS then let customers choose who they want to pay. At this rate, the choice in my guild is going to be to pay neither of them. It’s reached the stage now where we just wish they’d answer the questions so we know where we stand and can make our own plans.
Adding, for instance, the situation with Station Access acounts being bugged after the switch to FTP … I doubt that was a conspiracy, it was just poor oversight in the project process. They miscoded/forgot something, and it took weeks to fix.
I dunno . . . the only way I can see them keeping P7S1 in the mix, if not region locking anyone, is to “require” (read: force) European players (Still no word on Asia, Africa, Australia, South America . . . I’ll throw the Arctic in there too in case there’s some scientist playing there . . . Do they go through P7S1 too? But I digress . . .) to log in using an Alaplaya log in then allowing them to jump to any server. If they come up with a better solution, cool. I really hope they do . . . though what they’ll do about people with the password Authenticator . . . /shrug
If its anything like the plan Murfalad outlines but i suspect it’ll be nothing like it
Nothing else has been addressed at this point only region locks, but they ‘continue to listen’
Poor Piestro don’t envy his position.
That’s a pretty large assumption after they’d been modding every post about previous Smedley tweets.
Gee, I wonder if they figured out a royalty swap agreement for players that cross regions to play…
@Sensie Not sure what they will come out with, but while I agree they have a pattern of offering a really bad deal and then patching it up a little I don’t believe its a conspiracy since each bad launch has cost us player numbers.
The recent disaster has caused players to quit for sure, which is a real shame since if the official news is true EQ2 held its own during the SWTOR launch and wasn’t doing bad at all.
(Although I would like to know where all the replacement staff are, there are a few more that have gone that we have not been told yet, the guy who was originally responsible for EQ2’s marketing in Europe got another job at Activision. From the sounds of it he was made redundant, but that’s a pure guess – Greg Aguis.
He was in some of the DoV videos they did sitting on the sofa’s and played the part of the interviewer (he mentions the move in his blog the rock of agius)).
A few more GPU programmers please, and what did happen to the big lighting update….
So instead of posting it at EQII under Community News he just posted it to Twitter and relied on OTHERS to get the news out. What about those of us without Twitter or Facebook?
EQ2Wire. Tell a friend. 😉
EQ2Wire is pretty much my first read of the day (after a few news sites). For my EQ2 news it’s where I read.
Thank you Feldon, and all the others that make this site work so wonderfully.
Now that was a rather shameless promotion… Oh wait a minute THIS is EQ2wire. Carry on 🙂
Why do I have this sinking feeling that when we do get the new faq, they once again missed the boat. I keep reading pieosto go not today folks, give them a chance. I’m like ok well then they should not be on twitter going hey we got a plan when they don’t.
By the way I read what the new company messenger say its only dealing with reagen locking, they missed the entire point of those of us who would not touch alaplay with a 10 foot barge if we had one.
Oh well
Feldon whilst I do appreciate your efforts in keeping us up to date, it should not be required of me to read the Wire or any other fansite to find out what’s happening. My contract is with SOE and the responsibility to keep me informed is theirs, not yours. The fact that I rather read the Wire to get the story in straightforward, unambiguous terms is a separate issue.
As for the communiqués by SOE people, the subsequent messages added nothing to Smedley’s original two lines.
Kinda funny, they made their own mess, kicking their own community right where it hurts… now they trying to solve some of the mess they made, and we’re supposed to think of them as our guys? Hahahaha – and may I add LOL!
Piestro:
“I’ll clarify a bit right now and say that “All players” in Smed’s tweet specifically referred to all players potentially impacted by the ProSieben deal.”
And there it is; I’ll be its a grandfather thing both ways instead of just UK to US servers. Everything else will stay the same.
Its like a point they touch on in Rum diary, not a plug, that movie sucked. Anyways, Say you wanna build 5 houses, propose the plan for 20. Then when people start bitching, you say, how bout 5 instead. Now your back to your original plan, and the masses feel better about the situation.
I think the only part of this deal that will go away is the ip locking. All the euros will still give pss1 their credit cards, and they are still going to control the marketplace.
Long day at work, maybe i am being negative.
Zerigo said: “All the euros will still give pss1 their credit cards”
Is that on the same day I give my children to the gypsies?
Pieface chap was soon in their correcting Smed’s wording eh?
Worrying.
At least they are trying. I hope.
What did I say earlier, they got no plan, I hate Smedley he is such a lire
This from Brasse
“SOE and ProSieben worked throughout the weekend to develop a plan that will allow our players to access and play on any server regardless of where they are in the world. Our community is our top priority and rest assured, all of your concerns have been heard. We continue to work together with ProSieben and appreciate your patience as we work around the clock to work out critical technical details. We will share more information as soon as possible”
So they had a plan, sounds like they did not. More lies and more delaying.
Omg mod_o4 ban that guy, hes talking about giving children away here.
Everyone should be a little happy they got what they wanted!
Even SOE got what they wanted, a community that sees them as an untrustworthy adversary. They may have thought that of the community themselves, but now that’s clearly been communicated more than anything.
Good job.
mmmh, very good point there Landiin
mmmh, for all of you deleting chars for various reasons because of this “deal”, you may want to have a look at this video, Don’t delete me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grXeU-SAxBw
Poor deleted chars 🙁
Perhaps their solution is to have all of us go to p7s1.
Deliverator said this on Massively:
Was this bad cop, bad cop?
LOL Whil, that was funny. Now I miss the old character select 😛
Have i missed something?
Or is the plan they’ve come up with a “cunning” plan,as cunning as a plate full of rats in a rat factory?
Or is it the usual SOE bs service as usual?
This sounds like they wanted to go the easy road. They wanted first no data exchange between the companies how much each character is played where. Now they need something like this to distribute the money. Or they probably thought monthly excel sheets exchange will work ;-).
And don’t rejoice if they say no IP blocking (aka IP filtering), since you don’t need that they use the account information and the billing address. Sure there are ways to bypass this. But this requires to setup an account with a fake billing address and get game time cards (from the other side of the pond). And you loose the current account.
And they also can say we never said anything from Alaplaya since it is not in the press release on their page (note: the press release in Germany was posted at 10th January, to the different financial investor pages). But they made one mistake they posted some names of games from Alaplaya. We counted one and one together.
This shows that SOE doesn’t really care they wanted the deal. They were at least clever enough to find out that P7S1 has a tainted brand (like Alaplaya). But didn’t gave this topic any further attention. If they wanted (like they say now) that the SOE stuff gets it’s own page. They should have added to the press release on their page a letter to community that says this.
This deal looks that it was only planed to the point of signing. SOE had no real plans. P7S1 should have already set up a forum to avoid any direct connection with alaplaya. But now because of the lack of
resources they need to use the alaplaya one (they had 6 weeks time to plan and setup some stuff).
Another thing are the alaplaya people, at least one of them is an EQ2 player. So he knows the bad service of SOE. That’s why they tried on Friday to calm the things form personally from their side down. The result was a bit amateurish. Maybe there is a conflict of loyalty between as EQ2 player (member of community) and publisher. Maybe they led with this themselves into a trap, SOE was searching a victim for a deal, they were too enthusiasm to get their game and change everything that they suffer themselves from SOE. I don’t see that P7S1 has enough resources to pour money down the drain to get anything up and running, to do their planed things.
I am standing by my opinion that they are too inept to be clever enough to do “good cop bad cop.” That takes some planning and foresight, something I am not seeing all that much of lately.
It’s the usual, they’ll tell you when it’s done. On one hand, that makes sense in a negotiation, they’re not an intermediary. On the other, people should be able to trust that they’d negotiate for the best terms for the community as well as themselves since they presumably share a common goal.
SOE blew that trust already, now they’re just doing damage control
They already said Europeans can still use US servers, they’re probably just trying to get a way for players outside Europe to still reach the servers they have characters on.
When asked whether this “fix” would just be a grandfathering deal, Piestro responded:
Hmm..
If the community was the top priority, then what happened 2 months ago when the original plan was set before us? Were we the top priority then? No. What could have changed to suddenly make us their top priority? Hmm.. *taps foot and looks around quizzically* What could it have been..
OH, RIGHT. How about that their subscription base fell through the floor, a steaming mountain of scorching bad press, and thousands of furious players. Not to mention there was undoubtedly a “promised” amount of intact subscriptions sliding over from SOE to PSS1, an amount whose numbers got nuked in the last week or so. In addition, someone probably threatened Smedley with a rusty trombone (he hates that) unless he squared this disaster off.
So, another line of BS followed up with the overly played out “all your concerns have been heard”. Thanks for the reach-around, Brasse. Less talky-talky, more substance.
No sever segregation is good. Its very good. However, there are many other items to look at. Top priority would be PSS1 itself and how no one wants anything to do with them. I think its grand that they are allowing players to go to whichever server they wish, but if people would still rather cancel their account than sign up with PSS1 then SOE is still failing miserably. Its going to be boatloads of fun seeing how they deal with that.
Thanks for posting that video link Mina, I was looking all over for it!
I don’t know… When SOE says they are listening, for some reason i picture a lazy middle aged man watching football on the telly, saying “uhuh” to his wife who is trying to get his attention.
Yeah, SOE listens….
Then they do want they wanted to do all along anyway in 6 months to a year.
Abused wives…that’s what SOE customers have become.
“We’ve come up with a plan to allow ALL players to play on any servers they want. More details to follow.”
Reminded me of how Server Xfers are free in Rift. I know he means EU / US players and servers, but all players any servers made me think of that right away.
hmmmm
hmmmmmmmmm
Is it only me that has seen “answer on Monday” then “huge downtime, account maintenance etc for 6 hours on Monday”……
Yep, they are going to tell us after this is all done and finished….
Still no mention for us Aussies… We had no chance in hell, all 6 of us 😉
Love your site, tyvm for everything Feldon.
x x x x
Seems that Trion (Rift) is really good at listening to their community. There’s a lot of the best from EQ and WOW in that game, or on the way (just read their CEO’s letter on their forums). Seems former EQ players have influenced them a lot. Shame I got bored in that game so quickly… Now I wish I stayed…
The problem here that I have is why does SOE need to get in bed with the PS1 Alaplay guys. We already had euro servers, we already had stuff in place. What does Ps1 do for soe that soe could not do. I just don’t understand the need to get into bed with the PS1 guys who have a very bad reputation. I have yet to understand that. If SOE could explain to me why I might not be so worried. I know they say advertising, the funny thing is soe never advertised in the US.
Oh well I am not surprised at all the stalling tactics that soe is using currently that par for the course.
@Klixe: After cancelling with EQ2 I went to try Rift again. I was there at launch a year ago and stopped a month and a half in for the same reasons you state. They’ve done a lot over that year and its really improved. For myself, I’m having fun and its a nice place to be until GW2 rolls out at the end of this summer.
Badcat, it was part of a larger deal that Sony Pictures made with PSS1, most likely. They just threw in the SOE Euro servers as part of the deal to distribute movies and content with PSS1. I think Ark’s Ark had the story on that. What PSS1 had was money, and SOE saw an opportunity to sell off a division. Sad, but probably true.
@Wanda — my problem with Rift was it disconneted me from the server every 2 minutes. Drove me batty. Have they fixed that?
I feel like a bunch of livestock being traded and sold, not for me.
To many better games out there and more coming. So good bye sony.
@Kwill: I’m playing on the busiest server, Faeblight, and I don’t have any issues at all. They have a deal now where you can play the first 20 levels for free, so it might be worth looking into to see if you like it or not.
Rift Lite (free trial) http://www.riftgame.com/en/lite/?affiliateId=googna10010&gclid=CKugpY2Nwa4CFcNrKgodIjehnA
Thanks Wanda, I noticed that… trying out SWTOR now, and having fun with some old guildies from Runnyeye/Splitpaw 🙂 But Rift would be my next choice…
I’m in the closed beta testing for Tera. It’s not to bad. You really have to get used to a different type of combat but other than that it’s descent. I haven’t decided if I’ll leave EQ2 and play another game but if I do it’ll either be GW2 or Tera.
Brasse mentioned “..a plan that will allow our players to access and play on any server regardless of where they are in the world.”
I do wish she’d say if that means Europeans can play on European servers and pay SOE, or if they then have to choose between playing on European servers and dealing with PSS or playing on US servers and paying SOE, or whether we have to deal with PSS whether we play on EU or US servers. They have a real talent for waffling reams without saying anything concrete.
No one found this possible connection?
Koch Media was once the publisher for EQ2 at RoK/TSO time.
http://www.mcvuk.com/press-releases/read/koch-media-and-sony-online-entertainment-sign-publishing-agreement-for-everquest-reg-ii-the-shadow-odyssey-trade/059554
It doesn’t match up with the time frame
http://de.linkedin.com/in/dirksteiger
But maybe we should look where the other people at P7S1 worked at that time.
P7S1, Koch Media, IDG are all in or around Munich, and are in the media business.
So in a classic defusing move SOE announced they would announce something,say nothing and carry as nothing is happening
Shhh… it’s a secret.