Feldon
SOE’s on-again-off-again with it’s international community seems to be on the skids again, at least as far as for EverQuest II customers. After 2012’s disastrous forced migration of its French, German, and other European customers to ProSiebenSat.1/Alaplaya, it was an open question how many players would come back. After two years of drama, SOE relented and brought its remaining European customers back into the fold. SOE resurrected EQ2 support forums in French, German, and Spanish and hired staff to maintain them. However it seems the damage had been done and the daily traffic was insufficient to continue translating notes...
Month: January 2015
Massively‘s Editor-in-Chief Brianna Royce has posted an extremely candid response about the closure of Massively after 10 years in operation, and despite 40% growth in readership last year. The number of sites that critically review MMORPGs in an unbiased way could already be counted on one hand and now we’ve lost the biggest and the best. It’s the end of an institution as they say, and once again AOL, the company that shouldn’t even exist anymore, continues to be a cancer on the internet community, destroying everything in its path. I have sad news for the Massively staff and...
UPDATE as of 9:00am PST, SOE’s 1/2 hour 2 hour 3 hour unscheduled (or at least unannounced) company-wide maintenance is over: “@thegreatmutato: Today's SOE-wide maintenance is now FINISHED. Issues with logins & other general weirdness should be over.” What he said! — SOEHelp (@SOEHelp) January 29, 2015 Original article after the jump…
From the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday January 29, 2015 at approximately 7:00AM PST. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, January 29, 2015 at approximately 9:00PM PST. (Approx. 5:00AM London Time on January 30, 2015). Estimated downtime is 1 hour. and: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION General Shady Swashbuckler XVIII in Nektulos now offers “Anchor of Wanderer’s Dock” for those that have completed “Shattered Seas: Dark Threats on Dshinn.” Phantom Sea Adventurer’s who have earned Anchor of Wanderer’s Dock will now have access to a new bell located on...
If you’re at all into cosplay, or just a fan of the Aerakyn race, you’ll want to check out this video of @Strawburry17 slipping into the role of an Aerakyn. It’s a bit of a marketing piece, and we’re not quite sure why she titled the video “Dragon Elf”, but hey, how often do we get to see the EQ2 team on video? Watch as @Strawburry17 brings the Aerakyn to life in this amazing cosplay video! — EverQuest II (@everquestii) January 27, 2015
When you’ve got one Animator and one Character Artist for a game the size of EverQuest II, development time is ever-precious. Most of Tom and Chris’ efforts go towards the annual Expansion, plus the creation of a few StationCash mounts per year. It’s just the nature of the beast that their time for fun projects is limited. It doesn’t help that not everyone was a fan of the less serious, frivolous, or “silly” mounts which push the limits of a medieval setting. But the party might be over. After 43 pages of hilarity from Errrorr‘s “The Official Duck Mount Request thread“,...
Currently on Test is the popular Erollisi Day event, as well as an upgrade for the popular Level Agnostic Dungeons. First up, Erollisi Day returns with new 3 quests, a new recipe book, new items, and rewards. We understand that EQ2 ZAM and EQ2Traders are already working on updating their event guides. Further Reading: Testing Feedback about Erollisi Day 2015 As for Level Agnostic Dungeons, which have quickly become an enjoyable and rewarding way to gain levels between 20 and 89 in between solo questing sessions, we’ll see a number of fixes to particularly tricky zones and unbalanced situations, and an...
If you’ve grown tired of media conglomerates buying out smaller sites that cover the Products and News that you care about then shuttering them shortly thereafter, you may want to look away. The folks running MMO powerhouse Massively and its parent company Joystiq, found out today through sites like Re/Code and Kotaku that AOL plans to shutter their sites in the near future. Editor Alexander Sliwinski was put in the extraordinary position of posting a “no comment” in reaction to the news. To some, the most shocking news out of all this may be that AOL still exists, but for most of...
Sony Online Entertainment, Playstation Network, and Qriocity customers located in the USA who had an account before May 15, 2011 have begun receiving e-mails notifying them of the settlement of a Class Action Lawsuit. The e-mails have been confirmed as legitimate provided they come from email-sonyonline.com. If You Had a PlayStation Network, Qriocity, or Sony Online Entertainment Account Before May 15, 2011, You Could Get Benefits from a Class Action Settlement. Benefits you could get (if you qualify) include: Payment equal to paid wallet balances (if $2 or more) in PSN or SOE accounts that have been inactive since the Intrusions,...
From the EQ2 Forums: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION General Raid encounters that dropped 2 armor patterns and 1 accessory or 1 armor patterns and 2 accessories will now always grant 2 armor patterns and 1 accessory. Ossuary: Cathedral of Bones [Raid] Sacrificer should once again react to players who have the “Sanguine Spray” effect on them. The Marrow Sapper has had its health decreased. Ossuary: Choir of T’Vyl [Event Heroic] Legion of Many should no longer retain his increased damage when he resets.
Six days after the paid Alpha test for H1Z1 began the various SOE forums (including EQ2) are still throwing numerous errors such as this one: An unexpected database error occurred. Please try again later. <!– Host ‘lvs-msgw2.station.sony.com’ is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’ –> The error above indicates that Platform/Ops have set a rule on the MySQL server that blocks connections if a flood is detected. The problem is, they did not exclude or “white list” the forum server from this rule. In other words, the forums are literally blocking themselves when they get too busy....
With just 10 minutes notice, all SOE games went offline this afternoon after this posting on Twitter: We will perform maintenance on all SOE games at 3:00PM PST. All players will be kicked from game at this time, and will need to log back in. — EverQuest II (@everquestii) January 16, 2015 Planetside 2 Producer David Carey provided a bit more detail: Restarting our login servers, players will be required to re-log #planetside2 — David Carey (@dcarey7761) January 16, 2015 One hopes that whatever this fix is will resolve the lingering login and access issues with SOE games and...
From Afista on the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Friday January 16, 2015 at approximately 5:00AM PST. Estimated downtime is 1 hour. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Friday, January 16, 2015 at approximately 5:00AM PST. (Approx. 1:00PM London Time on January 16, 2015) Estimated downtime is 2 hours. No update notes have been posted as of yet.
UPDATE: 11 hours after the intended launch of H1Z1, SOE president John Smedley declared the login server issue “fixed“. However even now, SOE login servers, EQ2 game servers, EQ2 forums are all groaning under the load and experiencing performance issues. More often than not, the EQ2 forums throw “403 Forbidden” errors rather than displaying the page. This suggests a type of throttling normally seen as a management of DDoS attacks. From RadarX last night at 10pm PST: We are continuing to investigate outstanding issues which may prevent players from logging in to EverQuest 2. We hope to have this resolved...
From the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday January 15, 2015 at approximately 7:00AM PST. Estimated downtime is 1 hour. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, January 15, 2015 at approximately 7:00AM PST. (Approx. 3:00PM London Time on January 15, 2015) Estimated downtime is 2 hours. and: HEROIC CHARACTERS Heroic characters now start at level 90 with 320 AAs! For more information: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/index.php?threads/heroic-characters-level-up-to-90.556133/
From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums: Greetings Norrath! With our Level 90 Heroic Characters release tomorrow, I’ve seen a few questions/comments around Level Agnostic Dungeons in various places so I thought I’d give a quick update on a couple of things. First, on Level Agnostic dungeons: We’re working on updating existing Level Agnostic Dungeons to accommodate up to level 94. We expect to launch this in the next few weeks. We’ll give you more information and a date when we have it all done and tested and are confident in the launch. Later this year we plan...
Update as of 2pm pacific: The login issues have been resolved, and commerce is now available. Please let us know if you see further issues. Thanks! Update from 10 minutes ago: A quick heads up: Caith confirmed that the platform maintenance also affects the Daily Objective, so it may not show up in your Quest Helper or the Journal tab right now. Update from 39 minutes ago: This morning's SOE-wide maintenance is still in process. Commerce & game and forum logins continue to be impacted. Thanks for your patience. — Sony Online Ent. (@SonyOnline) January 12, 2015 From...
If you listened to our EQ2Wire Podcast with Kander or have been reading EQ2’s Update Notes lately, you know that last year’s “Weekly Updates” are out and bigger less frequent updates are back in. The “weekly feature” idea ended up being a drain on the dev team and we might have gotten an even bigger expansion were it not for the requisite deadlines of such a schedule. We’re glad to see this idea go away and to see the dev team able to once again release things on a schedule that maximizes their capability to give us great content. This...
Here are our recent updates to our EQ2U Players site which are all about keeping up with the Joneses!! Gemmed Gear Gadget The Altar of Malice expansion builds upon the itemization changes begun with Tears of Veeshan. The number of “stat packages” gives players more choices in their gear selections, especially for fighters and certain priest classes. Also with the introduction of upgrade gems, it’s more important than ever to keep all the sets of gear straight! To respond to this need, we’ve introduced a “Gemmed Gear Gadget” page to EQ2U. This new Gemmed Gear Gadget page lets you...
From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums: Hidey-Ho Norrathians! We’re excited to announce that we will soon be updating our Heroic Characters to start at level 90! We feel this change will help players keep up with our growth in free content and with the pace of the game due to our new level increase included in the Altar of Malice expansion. The price for the upgraded characters remains at 3500SC per Heroic Character, but we’ve made some improvements! What’s the difference? Purchased Level 90 Heroic Characters will come with Level 90 (Adventure only), 320AAs, a full set...
While Legends of Norrath may not be receiving much developer attention these days, it still has a playerbase, with people logging in to open loot cards for in-game items in their native games (EQ and EQ2), and people running the in-game scenarios for rewards or just the enjoyment of it. Over the past few days, players have been experiencing “synchronization” issues with their cards disappearing from their inventory. Some quotes: When I check my collection tab it shows that I have 0 cards. I tried to validate game files, open and close the LoN window, delete and reinstall.. It’s...
From EverQuest2.com: Are you still working on leveling an army of characters to 100? Want to see that XP bar move a little quicker? Well, we’ve got some great news! We’re starting the New Year off right with a BIG bonus experience weekend! What’s better than a 100% (double) bonus XP weekend? That’s right, a 150% bonusXP weekend! Beginning Friday, Jan 9 at 12:00(noon) PST until Sunday, Jan. 11 at 11:59pm PST, All Access Members will receive 150% bonus Adventure and Tradeskill experience! What characters will you level this weekend? We’d love to see some images from your adventures around Norrath, so please share them with...
The recent Altar of Malice expansion includes several Named enemies in the overland Tranquil Sea and Phantom Sea zones. These names not only complete weekly Missions and Achievements, but also grant Ferrin (expansion currency), AoM armor gems, and personal status. These tantalizing rewards have led enterprising players to park their characters at the spawn locations with Mercenaries and/or Pets set to defend them. The mobs are therefore engaged within seconds of spawning, preventing others from even trying. There really is no contest. EQ2 Lead Designer Kander has already applied one change to mitigate this AFK camping, and in a forum post he describes...
After 7 years in operation, we’re getting our moment in the sun! EQ2 Community maven Racheal “Afista“ has posted our very own Norrathian Spotlight on the EQ2 Forums: There are many amazing players in the EverQuest 2 community that spend time making the game more enjoyable for their fellow players. These players host events, create guides, run fan sites, provide feedback, answer questions, and/or design items and houses for everyone to enjoy. In the Norrathian Spotlight, we want to highlight some of these amazing individuals that make our community a fabulous place to be! We asked for players to...
Caela
From the forums: GENERAL Loyalty Merchants now have new armor, weapons, house items and a pack of random Harvestables for sale. Resolved an issue where particle effects would play twice on Aerakyn. POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Tranquil / Phantom Seas Players who kill a named NPC in either Tranquil Sea or Phantom Sea will no longer be able to see or kill the same named for 2 hours. Precipice of Power [Raid] Dread Armoloch of Blight and Dread Armoloch of Corruption should now allow reactives and wards to counter their damage over time spells. Dread Armoloch of Blight and...