April 11th End of the Weekenditis

We wrap up another week in Norrath with some posts from the EQ2 forums from developers and players alike which you may have missed. Also, although no date has yet been announced, work on Game Update 56 has likely reached a feverish pace and we’ll start hearing more about it soon.

Waiting for Zone Info

The EQ2 and SOE teams have been putting in long hours trying to resolve the database and server lag/performance issues since the expansion. Zoltaroth has weighed in with this update:

We are also internally testing some additional updates that should furthur improve zoning (specifically long wait times at “waiting for zone info”).  These changes aren’t through with internal testing yet, and they are pretty big so I can’t give an exact date but they are in the pipeline.

As we posted earlier, Rothgar is keeping us informed on the progress:

We have many more improvements on the way, this is just the first of many.

Efforts to stop Speed Hacking tagging Innocents?

For some time now, certain players have been making use of hacks and external third-party programs for EQ2 which increase the run speed of their characters beyond the maximum limits, or walk, harvest, etc. ‘under the world’, or outright teleport from one part of a zone to another.

EQ2 developers have rarely commented publicly about exploits and their ongoing efforts to curtail them, but a thread was started and followed up on by players who have experienced character or account suspensions through innocuous acts such as harvesting and using zone teleporters.

Rothgar indicated that

“We know when someone is warping or using a speed hack program and you can bet that those players will be contacted soon enough.  Something appears to be triggering false positives and it could be something as simple as the teleporters in South Odus for example.  We are looking into this and will make a fix for it.”

and wanted players to know that account bannings are taken seriously

“We’ve set a threshold high enough that normal gameplay should not trip [the detection code].  So in this instance, if you’re getting kicked, we’ve logged enough significant activity to make that decision.  Obviously the false positives are unintended and will be solved.”

and later, Rothgar indicated that this problem had been discovered and fixed:

Status Update:

I’ve found the issue triggering the false positive and some teleporter devices like those in South Odus would have triggered it.  We’ve disabled the checking for this behavior until we can hotfix the issue.

Some Old, Some New Zone Lockouts

timetravelling has changed some zone lockouts:

Munzoks Material Bastion and Shard of Hate should now both be 2day20hour lockouts once Game Update 56 hits =)

Item Appearances

covic and Kander are continuing to work on getting those Sentinel’s Fate armor/weapon/shield appearances hooked up to items. Apparently work on all those new unique appearances that Sentinel’s Fate was supposed to include continued right up to, and possibly after the release of the expansion.

It looks like a lot of the Sentinel’s Fate armor, weapons, and shields went live with placeholder graphics with the intention of replacing them. This is now happening.

Kander said:

Many of these items got missed on the appearance pass. I am unsure why or how.  We will start changing them for newer appearances ASAP. Please PM me if you have any other specific instances of gear that looks like noobie gear dropping from Sentinel’s Fate raids or even group zones, we will see what can be done.

covic followed up with:

I am seconding Kander on this. I know we made a lot of gear this expansion.  All the screens in this post look like old stuff.  I will talk to him at work on Monday to see what everyone has been sending for screens.

and after the April 7th patch, covic said:

I just talked to Kander today and he said he has been working really hard on getting new item appearance hooked up.  I hope the changes are starting to be seen.

End of the Weekenditis

That’s enough for the end-of-the-week. Hope you are having a great weekend and we’ll be back with more news.