The previously reported rumor of bonus XP has been officially confirmed on EQ2Players.com.  Those playing during Labor Day weekend will be enjoying Double XP:

This coming weekend, from 10:00 am PDT on Friday, September 3rd, until 10:00 am PDT on Tuesday, September 7th, we will be running a true Double XP promotion (+100% XP).

The bonus applies to AA, tradeskill and adventure experience gained this weekend. Our French, German, Japanese, Test and EQ2 Extended servers will also be enjoying the increase in XP gain.

Happy adventuring!

Hotfix notes for Tuesday, August 24, 2010 after the jump:

There have been reports from several players that trying out EQ2X has wiped out all their entitlements on EQ2 Live with their Station Access account.  I have two Station Access accounts myself and have tried EQ2X on both of them.  One is fine, the other no longer has access to anything but the base game.  Zoltaroth wrote on the EQ2Live Forums:

We are looking into what is going on.  I am going to be in touch with the people who PMed me via PMs.

Until the account gets fixed, it’s as if you bought the base game at launch and never bought anything after that.  You can’t even get into the TSO zones because it doesn’t think you bought that expansion.

Hopefully this will be fixed soon.  Until then, if you have a Station Access account and want to try out EQ2X, be aware that you’re rolling the dice.  Everything may be fine but there is a chance that your live account will be locked out of everything once you’re done on the EQ2X server.

Fan Faire is now over and one thing seems to be clear: SOE does not have a plan to balance the new players coming into the game between EQ2X and EQII Live, at least not one they are willing to share with us… 

E3 took place this year from June 15-17.  SmokeJumper was interviewed and said that the current subscription model would not change.  When asked after the announcement of EQ2 Extended about that interview, he had this to say:

Yes, at that time, we were discussing the concept. No, we were not ready to commit to it, nor did we have any details of what we might be doing.

On July 27th, EQ2 Extended was announced.  I counted up how many work days passed between the interview and the announcment.  Guess how many work days went by?

Here are your update notes for Wednesday, 28 July 2010:

UNDERFOOT DEPTHS

• Energized Taehric Construct (challenge mode): The Construct will try and cast Crippling Judgment on his main target whenever possible, rather than a random fighter.  The construct will try and cast Curse of Befuddlement on priests in separate groups, whenever possible, avoiding casting it on two priests in the same group whenever possible.

ITEMS

• The Twisted Alloy Wristlet’s proc, Torturous Paths, has had its damage increased and its proc chance raised.
• Many mage items within Underfoot Depths have received pet effects.

TINKERFEST

• The Tinkerfest quest “Great Balls of Fire” cannot be completed more than 25 times.
• The Tinkerfest titles awarded by the repeatable Tinkerfest quests can now be purchased from the Tinkerfest merchant if you have earned them but did not receive them.

Overview

Welcome to the first installment of Dethdlr’s Dungeon. This is my little place on EQ2Wire to post my commentary on EQ2. Unlike the news items, this is more for opinion based articles from my own perspective. For my first article here I’m going to tackle: How to figure out an encounter.  I’m sure some of our readers know all of this information already but there’s probably a tidbit or two in there that may help someone out.  Here goes…

Ever walk up to the teleporter in Paineel and accidentally click it instead of right click it?  Did you enjoy your trip to the Airship docks when you did?  Neither did I.  Tagwen of Mistmoore decided to post about it on the EQ2Forums:

PLEASE PLEASE.. I’m so tired of right clicking it or accidentally going to the airship.. the launchpad is used 1000% time more often than people go to the airship…

After a couple posts of support for this change, Gninja wrote this:

I will look into changing this.

Woot!  Looks like soon the default will be where people want to go most of the time when they click the teleporter!

Several people have reported on the EQ2Forums that the progress bushes aren’t spawning in the Jarsath Wastes and Sinking Sands druid rings.  Windslasher chimed in with this update:

Drat!

I goofed with the spawns in Jarsath and Sinking Sands, so the progress signs aren’t appearing in those two zones. Unfortunately it’s not a server-specific thing or a setting that I can just change on the fly, so even though I have the fix in the pipeline I can’t tell you how soon it will be on the live servers, yet. It’ll be fixed as soon as possible.

Update: According to the update notes, this should be fixed with the hotfix going in tomorrow morning.

Over on the official EQ2 Forums, Kiara writes:

Greetings all!

I wanted to let you know that we’ll be making some changes to the forums this week.

We will be removing the server forums and replacing them with the following:

• Guide Events
• Player Events
• Guild Recruitment
• Roleplaying
• Live Gamer

We will be leaving the server forums up for a little while to move some of the stickied threads that folks want to keep into the new forums.

The new forums will appear tomorrow.  If you see a thread in your server forum that you think really needs to be in one of the new forums, please report it and we’ll review it and see if it needs to be transfered or if it would just be better to start a new one.

Here are your hotfix notes for Thursday, 10 June 2010:

Sentinel’s Fate brought us The Sundered Frontier and Stonebrunt Highlands but also brought some new quests to the Kingtom of Sky zones. Many of the islands have received new quests near the cloud stations. There was also a questline added called The Lost Drednever Team. With GU56, this questline is now listed in the Storylines tab of the quest journal. EQ2 Wiki has writeups for the whole questline and we’ve got links to get you started.

In Tenebrous Tangle on the Temple Grounds there is a gnome named Bilgeron Cogsworth IV. Bilgeron is a L.O.S.T Explorer. He will explain to you what L.O.S.T. stands for.

Bilgeron will give you the quest Cogs on the Droags. This is the first in a series of 20 solo level 57-70 quests that take you through all three Kingdom of Sky zones. Through the course of the questline you are rewarded with seven class specific armor pieces. The look of these items is similar to the T7 relic armor from Kingdom of Sky, and is unique to each of the 24 classes in the game.

When you have completed the entire questline, your final reward is your very own Self Contained Cloud mount.

So you’ve got a tradeable Lore item that you’d like to pass from one of your characters to another on the same account. How do you do it?

You could hand it to a friend, change characters, and have them hand it back to you. If you’re in a guild, you could put it in the guild bank, change characters, and hope its still there for you to pull it back out. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could just put the item in your own shared bank? Well now you can!

In response to a player query about this, TimeTraveling responded:

Tis intended, and apologies for it getting missed on the release notes!

So it’s official! You can now put LORE items in your shared bank!

EQ2Players has a new Artist Highlight up for Dave “Covic” Brown. Covic is the artist behind Varsoon, Anshti Sul, Ice Mares, Rhoen Theer, and the new mounts on the marketplace. He also pops on to the official message boards from time to time.

Excerpts from the article:

What’s your favourite thing that you’ve done for EQII?

This is always changing form each new character I do. First it was Varsoon, then Anshti Sul, then Kraytok, and definitely Rhoen Theer. It seems every model I do becomes my next favorite, and I am starting to feel the same way about the model I am working on now. But I have to say that the one I will be working on next month, if done right could top them all.

Do you have any special (or just super fun) projects you’re working on now for EQII?

The project I will be working on after I finish my current model is going to be awesome. Its going to give players something they have never had in our game yet, I can’t wait to get started. Also it’s going to need a lot of QA time to get this right. So I want to get it done as soon as possible so we will have over half a year to work out the bugs.

EQ2Players has a preview up for one of the two new raid zones coming with GU #56: Icy Keep: Retribution.  This one was designed by Carlos “Gninja” Mora with help from Cyndi “Xadrian” Johnson.

From the Gninja:

Which raid zones are of a comparable difficulty?
The difficulty should be aimed at the same difficulty as Lair of the Dragon Queen or slightly tougher in the later areas.

How many named mobs are there?

There are ten normal encounters and one challenge mode encounter. However some encounters might have to be unlocked in order to gain access to them through the questlines or various puzzles in the zone.

What do you think is the most impressive part of the zone?

The Chessboard by far is the most impressive. The art team did a fantastic job really capturing what I was going for in there.

Read the entire article at EQ2Players.

After Game Update #56, you may wonder why your mount is disappearing during combat.  As reported earlier, there’s a new setting coming to the game.

In Options -> Display -> Animation, there will be a new setting called “Render Mounts”.  This has three options:

• Show mounts always
• Hide mounts during combat
• Never show mounts

Hide mounts during combat is the default which may lead to some confusion on launch day.  If you want it to work the way it used to, just set it to Show mounts always.

On Tuesday, 27 April 2010, this tidbit made it into the update notes for test:

Mounts will now be temporarily suspended while in combat.

Basically, in outside zones, mounts would disapear as soon as you enter combat and re-appear a few seconds after combat ended.  This had a general negative response on the official EQ2 Forums and led to speculation on how this would effect buffs.  Gninja responded with some clarification on the matter:

You would not lose any stats or anything you would have normally had your character will just no longer be visually mounted during combat the buff remains. Think of it like when you enter water on a mount.

This led to a few pages of responses, mostly negative, about this change.  Many people were asking for a new /hidemount command. EQ2 Senior Producer  SmokeJumper decided to chime in with some additional info:

Well, I guess it’s time to stick my head in the dragon’s mouth. Here goes nuthin’.

EQ2Players.com French Community Rep, Soffrina had a chance to interview Domino and ask a few questions.  Here are a few excerpts from the article:

How do you come up with a decision to add a new thing to the game? Do you listen to the community’s needs, is it a development decision depending on its importance or is it a combination of both? In other words, how do you initiate a project?

It is certainly a combination of things.  When I play, I’m always watching for things that might be needed or that would improve tradeskills (or indeed the game in general) and I have a list of things I want to do when time permits.  The community is also very proactive about suggesting things that they would like, and often these agree with the things I already want to do, or are appropriate to add to the list.  And sometimes there are changes “behind the scenes” that make it appropriate to include tradeskill content of a particular type.  For an example of the latter, when the Lavastorm zone was revised, it made sense to take advantage of the changes and put in a tradeskill quest line in Lavastorm at the same time.  Once I know what I want to do next, I just figure out about how long it will take and run it past the team leads to ensure they agree, then off to work I go.  It’s not a very formal process.

Will there be musical instruments coming soon to EQ2 for players housing?

There are already a reasonable number of carpenter-made musical instruments that can be placed in houses.  There aren’t any current plans to add more.

Will it be possible one day to have outdoor areas in houses so fans of decoration will finally be able to create a real garden?

It’s something that would be decided by our art team, in particular Haohmaru.  We know it’s something that many people would like, but I don’t know if there are any specific plans currently.

Are there any plans of creating brand new quests, like the epic crafting quest?

I am always hoping to add more tradeskill quests.  There are no current plans for another epic quest, but I’m sure there will be more quests of other types.

Check out EQ2Players.com for the full interview.

Today’s hotfix:

ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENTS

• Fiery Blast and Rhythmic Overture should no longer apply extra damage if cast by multiple people at the same time.

ITEMS

• Many items that had nude appearances have been corrected.

PERAH’CELSIS’ ABOMINABLE LABORATORY

• Arkatanthis’ benthic warlord adds will try and pick a more balanced group of 3 players when they spawn during the challenge mode encounter.

The nude appearance items were caused by a bug that slipped in last week which caused female characters to appear to wear nothing but pasties in the chest area.  (May want to exercise discretion when viewing that thread since it includes screen shots.)

It all started with a simple post:

“If you’ve ever fancied yourself a writer for EQ2Wire, whether it’s just updates on the happenings around Norrath, including updates on Live Events, shoot us an e-mail thru Contact Us.”

Since then, I’ve gone from e-mailing articles to Feldon to full Author, Contributor, and Editor at EQ2Wire.
You may have noticed a few of my articles over the past few weeks.  Some of you are probably wondering, who is this Dethdlr person?  Allow me to introduce myself.
I started playing EQ2 on May 15th, 2005 but it wasn’t until August of 2006 that I convinced my wife to start playing as well.  That’s when EQ2 became a part of my daily routine.  Since then, I’ve done everything from casual player to just under hard core raider (was the OT for Society of Depravity/SoD for a while during EoF and RoK).  I’ve been in every beta since EoF and currently have a 90 Assassin(Decimatr), 89 Templar(Elinore), 86 Warlock(Ryncewynd), and an 86 Berserker(Dethdlr), as well as a few other lower level characters, all on Kithicor.
A few years ago, my guild needed a weaponsmith so I leveled Dethdlr up to a level 70 Weaponsmith.  When RoK came out, he became the 26th worldwide and 1st level 80 weaponsmith on Kithicor.  Since I was one of the only weaponsmiths in my guild, guildmates would ask me which weapons they should use for their characters.  To make things easier, I created www.eq2411.com which lists the mastercrafted weapons up through level 80 broken out by class and tier.  Dethdlr is still sitting at level 80 weaponsmith today but my alchemist is level 90.
I’ve done a little bit of UI development and created the first plug-in for the Fetish Nightfall UI.  I also added the AFK button to the player window and added the click to cure with potions to the player window in the same UI.
For years now, I’ve been checking the EQ2 websites several times a day to see what the latest news was that’s going on around Norrath.  When I would find something interesting, I would tell my guild about the new news.  Now I get to post it on EQ2Wire.
Feldon does a great job of searching through the sea of information that is created about EQ2 on a daily basis and posting it here so that everyone else doesn’t have to.  I have no delusions of being able to do as good a job as Feldon does at this but I’ll do my best.
I look forward to bringing you the latest information on the happenings around Norrath.

After the widespread outages of the EQ2 servers the night prior, a thread was created on the EQ2 Forums to solicit an explanation from the EQ2 Developers, and/or new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson, on the cause, and to seek reassurances that the issues are being identified and on track to be resolved.

As they tend to do, the thread branched into speculation on the origins of Dave Georgeson’s forum handle — SmokeJumper. Skywarrior posted his theory:

Hmmmm.  Smokejumpers are extremely brave (or crazy) and well-trained individuals who jump out of airplanes in order to reach remote areas involved in forest or brush fires, with the express purpose of helping extinguish the flames.  It seems to me that Dave’s handle is quite appropriate to the situation he finds himself in.

Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, the new EQ2 Senior Producer responded with:

Ding, ding, ding. You have it in one, sir.

And yes, I still answer to “Qix” or “Qixter” also. (I’ll bore you with the story of where those names came from some other time.)

Regarding the performance issues: Yes, we’re completely aware of it, and yes, it’s our highest (and only) focus for the programming team currently.

It’s a two-pronged issue that affects multiple aspects of our architecture, and neither of the issues is a “quick fix”.

In other words, we have to gather more information and study that data to find out exactly where the problems are before we can create solutions.

That’s in progress now and we’ll get solutions made ASAP. But currently, I don’t know an exact date when “ASAP” will be completed…mostly because we don’t have the solutions figured out yet.

But as I said in the other thread…we *will* kill them.

Greetings Norrathians! Sharpen your swords and repair that armor. There will be bonus AA, Tradeskill, adventure experience (XP) this weekend starting at 3:00pm PDT on Friday, April 23rd until 11:59pm PDT Sunday, April 25th (2:59am EDT). Happy adventuring!

Did you start a guild years ago and and give it a silly name as a goof?  Did the guild manage to survive and now has lots of members but still has a silly name?  Ever wish you could change the name?  Help is on the way!  shotens recently posted a request on the EQ2 Forums:

So what I ask is for the Dev team to put out a product that we can spend our hard earned money on that allows us to change a guild name.

and got this startling response from Rothgar:

It’s done and should be available soon.

Commentary

On the one hand, I’m glad that those with silly names will be able to change them if they choose (nothing wrong with silly names btw). On the other hand, guilds that have gotten a bad name on a server will now be able to change their name and confuse the population.  On the third hand (three hands???)  it will allow guilds who have gotten a bad name to change their name if the leader who caused them to get the bad name in the first place decides to leave the guild.  Since it usually doesn’t take very long for the average person to figure out when a guild falls apart and gets re-formed under a different name, I don’t really see this as a problem.  Unless, of course, my guild decides to start taking votes on what to call our guild and “Pink Fairies of Norrath” starts leading in the polls. 🙂

Guild halls have an amenity available that allow a person to click on a chest and recieve a training dummy in their inventory.  Right clicking and choosing “use” places the dummy in the guild hall as an attackable object.  This is useful for trying out different casting orders, AA specs, gear, etc. to see what parses better.  The problem is that the training dummies don’t have enough hit points.  If the training dummy dies in 15 seconds, it doesn’t give you much time to determine anything.  Some people have used the training wall in Kunzar Jungle instead since it has more hit points than the training dummies, but there is only one of them per server and you have to travel to KJ to use it.  It would be nice if the training dummies came in more than one flavor.  Apparently Rothgar agrees:

I’ve already made a change to the dummy chest, it just hasn’t been released yet.  You’ll get it with GU56.

You have the option to spawn a solo, heroic and epic dummy.  Each will scale slightly larger in size and their hitpoints will be on par with mobs of that tier and level.

So now you can raid a training dummy if you like.  These changes should be on the Test server if you want to check them out.

Having personally spent many hours beating on training dummies with my assassin, this is really good news.  Depending on what procs when, the parses vary by a large margin.  Having the ability to have fights that last longer should even that out and make those parse runs much more useful.

When Sentinel’s Fate was released, it introduced a change in the way the /target_previous command functions.  This change broke some cure macros.  Lets take a cure macro that did this:

/target_group_member 3

Cure spell

/target_previous

If you had group member 1 targeted and clicked the macro for group member 3, all would be fine.  The macro would target group member 3, cast the cure, then go to the previous target which would be group member 1.  All is well.

If you had group member 3 targeted and clicked the macro for group member 3, problems occured.  The macro would target group member 3 (which wouldn’t really do anything since you were already targeting group member 3).  Then it would cast the cure.  Then it would go to the previous target.  Problem is, group member 3 isn’t the previous target anymore since you never changed targets.  It would find out whoever you had targeted before and target them.  Could be anybody in the group depending on the order that you recently targeted people.

This hasn’t been a problem for the click to cure feature in custom UIs because they use a completely different method.  Back in February of 2007 a new command was added to the game: /useabilityonplayer [player] [ability].  For example:

/useabilityonplayer Feldon Cure Arcane

This works fine for custom UIs because they have access to the name of the player and can simply substitute in that name when the button is clicked.  Doesn’t work as well for those creating macros since it doesn’t allow you to specify a player Number instead of a player Name.  In the above example, you would have to edit your macros each time someone new joined your group and hard code the player’s name into the macro.  Kind of a pain.

So how do we get around this problem?  One option would be to change the /target_previous back to the way it worked before.  But the way it worked before was really a bug.  It’s now working as it should have all along.  Another option would be to code /useabilityonplayer to allow group member numbers and raid member numbers as well as player names.  This is what Rothgar is proposing as the fix:

I’m willing to change “useabilityonplayer” to take a number which should allow you to create the cure macros without changing your target at all.  This simplifies the macro and would actually be another slight optimization.

Do you guys feel this is a fair compromise?

We might have to do something like g1-g5 for group selection and r1-r24 for raid selection.

This would solve the problem and as Rothgar said, even simplify the macros.  The above macro would change to this:

/useabilityonplayer g3 Cure spell

It wouldn’t change your target at all but would cast the Cure spell on whoever is in position 3 in the group.  This could potentially even slightly speed up custom UIs that have click cure buttons.  Today, those buttons have to substitute the name of the character into the text of the command they are executing.  With this change, they could be modified to simply use the group and raid position numbers instead.  Probably a barely noticable performance boost but when your machine is struggling to keep up in a raid, every little bit counts.

This is, of course, still in the planning stages and subject to change, but it looks like it would be a nice change for everyone.