Feldon DarkViper, from SOE’s Platform (websites, forums, etc.) department has responded to widespread criticism of the EQ2Players revamp which went live last week:
Everyone, thanks for the feedback on the web site. With Station Players becoming a free service, I hope you’re checking out all of the sections of the site if you’ve never had access to it. It’s important to keep hearing this feedback so we can continue to evolve the site.
To address the browser crashing:
We’re already planning on making a version of the site that is ‘lighter’ for the in-game browser. It has always been the plan, but we could not get that version of the site done in time for this release. We’ll investigate why it’s crashing, though I have heard that other sites (not just EQ2’s) have crashed in the past as well so it’s not something I can guarantee that will be in our control to fix before the in-game version of the site.
Re: Guild Chat visibility:
We’ll improve the placement for this, we agree that we need other entry points to this beyond just the profile pages. In fact, the profile bar is planned to be accessible via the entire site.
Re: Search functionality
We’re re-tooling this after much feedback to be more intuitive and accessible.
Re: Speed of loading
We’ll investigate this. It loads fast on all machines we’ve tested, and loads relatively fast even on the iphone. This could be browser version specific so we’ll have our lab here see if they can replicate this one.
A few additional comments:
Re: Alts
We’re adding this back in next build of the site.
Re: Guild Roster
Agreed, 5 is too low, we’re tweaking this next build.
Re: Best in Class Leaderboard
We’re adding the update in the next build of the site.
Re: Login remember me
We’ll speak with the teams responsible for this functionality and will hopefully have a fix in place soon.
Re: RSS Feeds/CSV functionality
We’ve been working on making this more accessible for folks and are looking into ways we can get you guild data for your use whether it be for web sites or not. We’ll have an update soon for this.
Please keep sending the feedback, we’re listening and addressing it. If you run into any problems (i.e. errors), please PM me or post it and we’ll get someone looking into it.
I think the speed problem is more a server/software related problem. Running the apache benchmarking tool on a Character Profile results in a (serverside)processing time of 7 to 12 seconds.
I did some deeper analysis using tcpdump and timestamping to find the section where eq2players hangs. And the result is, that there is a 4 seconds delay when it comes to the section where the AA trees are shown. However the rest is not even faster.
Yeah, we need a supercomputer to play back the Javascript on this page.
I hope they consider adding guild chat to stqation launcher. I could see how they were reluctant to do so when the service was pay to access but now that it’s free they could do it.
I think whoever designed Veeshan’s Peak also did that revamp.