Feldon
Fastidious crafters took advantage of yesterday’s update and trundled back to the daily Tradeskill Group instances for a chance to loot one of the two volumes of the new Far Seas Strategic Pricing 3rd Edition. As with past editions, these recipe books allow crafters to create shard armor and jewelry for players with a reduced number of tokens/shards. Interestingly, neither players nor crafters must have faction with the Ry’Gorr to make or receive this armor or jewelry. They do however require the designated dungeon-dropped crystals. With yesterday’s Test Update Notes, we found out that the current Velious shard armor...
Feldon
Several of us have bugged out Blor Greatbasher‘s repeatable quests in such a way that he won’t offer quests anymore. This is rather frustrating as there are few ways to earn faction with the ever-important Ry’Gorr, who hold the best adornments and shard armor in Velious. Today brings an update from Kaitheel about Blor’s quests: Good news! I had seen a few reports about issues with Blor Greatbasher’s quest line at the Ry’Gorr Keep, like this thread, but was never able to find a cause or to even reproduce the issue, myself. Thankfully though, with the help of a...
From Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson on the EQ2 Forums: So, you’re probably curious how EQII will be growing and changing in 2011, right? Well, it’s finally time to share. This year is all about content and entertainment and we intend to give you plenty of both. The following outlines some of the broad strokes to get you thinking about what’s coming…and possibly just a little excited, as well. First of all, if you’re a “Destiny of Velious” owner, you’re going to be *extremely* happy that you made that purchase. Why? Because DoV is going to be the biggest, best expansion...
As we first officially heard in December, plans are afoot at SOE to reduce the number of “launchers” currently being supported and move everyone to a single codebase for their patcher. From Amnerys: Sometime after the launch of DoV, we will be discontinuing Launchpad 1 and moving everyone to Launcher 3. But don’t worry, it’s not the Streaming Client so you won’t be forced to do the streaming thing. Our support teams (the dev team doesn’t make the launcher clients, it’s another team) can’t keep supporting so many versions of launchers…they also support all the launchers for the entire...
A couple of interesting items appeared in today’s Test Update Notes: The amount of Velium Shards required for Shard Armor has been reduced. Several Yellow, Red, and War Rune adornment procs will now trigger on both spell and melee hits. These changes do not appear in today’s Live Update Notes, so if you have had your eye on certain Adornments or Shard Armor, you might want to wait to see when this change goes live. Also, in case you missed it in today’s live update notes, players who participate in Tradeskill Group Instances (granted these days, most people choose...
Today’s update includes tweaks across the board of grouping, raiding, and itemization. Chronoportal vendors are back until April 10th. They have several paintings, furniture, and replicas of the enemies fought in the 12th anniversary EverQuest event. After the jump, your Update Notes for April 5, 2011.
Anobabylon from Oasis posted some questions about multi-housing coming in Game Update 60 and SmokeJumper provided some answers: Q: While you are putting in the ability to own more than one home, could you please also add in the ability to share homes with other characters? A: Prestige Homes allow this already. Add each character to the others’ trustee lists, then link the homes together via portals. Voila! Now your homes are linked and you can edit them freely. Q: Change *Guild Port Doors* to be heirloom/attunable (heirloom selfishly because my main character buys all the doors for my...
As always, this is subject to change based on any number of code issues, delays, etc. but we now have a soft timeframe for when Game Update 60, or at least the Multi-housing (the ability of 1 character to have multiple houses) will be hitting the Test server. It sounds like it may be on Test for several weeks for players to test everything out and make sure there are no problems with houses and guild halls. Undoubtedly a change like this requires major alterations to the database. We haven’t got anything concrete how what changes will be made...
At last year’s Fan Faire, I found out that work was being done on a program/script/tool to help the developers create items for EQ2. As with any game development, any number of little tools and scripts are created and passed around the office to help take some of the tedium out of certain repetitive tasks. At the time, it was explained to me as a tool that could be used to whip out a bunch of Treasured and low level Legendary gear. Why? So that more time and attention could be spent creating unique higher level Legendary and Fabled...
From SmokeJumper regarding new mounts: We have some really interesting kinds of mounts coming in the next couple of GUs that will become available to players at different levels throughout the game. Things will keep changing and we intend the fun factor of them to increase as well. But true fliers? They’re a level 86+ perk, and they’ll end up staying that way. (Consider it a lure to get to 90. We are still hopeful that existing flying-type mounts will be usable as appearance flying mounts, such as carpets, clouds, and hover discs.
I hear this a lot: Most of the people I know in game never visit the forums, and the “majority” opinions you see here rarely represent their opinions. It’s often used as a reason to belittle, dismiss, or outright ignore player feedback on the EQ2 forums. SmokeJumper responded: And that’s the tricky part for developers also. The loudest voices are always here on these forums, but there are many opinions. That’s one of the reasons that I spend so much time playing the game. Talking to players within the game as I play is always interesting and educational, even...
From Silius on the EQ2 Forums: Greetings All, I want to take the time to explain the reasoning behind some of the recent multi attack adjustments. Multi attack like any other stat is meant to grow base on item tier. In the creation of these items some of them were given a generous amount of multi attack unintentionally making the progression look odd. In the process of increasing loot power we rebalanced some of these items so they would fall within the guidelines we desired. That said there still exists some items we are ok with having a bit...
For those who didn’t get to spend all their Platinum Coins from the Chronoportals event at the vendor located in Antonica, the vendor will be returning on Tuesday and sticking around for 5 days. From Amnerys: Got a note from the team that they will be bringing the merchants back after the next hotfix and they will be available until Sunday, 4/10. Next hotfix should be on Tuesday!
After today’s update, players have been checking out the re-structured Storm Gorge to see how the fights have changed, and how server lag has been reduced. Players generally reported improvements in lag, and also shared their strategies on dealing with the changes in the fight, which in some cases make it more challenging and interesting. Windslasher‘s response: It’s great to hear that the latest lag fixes worked! With that game-breaking issue mostly solved, I can now turn more my attention to other important issues. For example: Goredeth Maulhammer has always had the ability to heal himself while enraged. His...
From SmokeJumper: I’m only going to speak about “EverQuest II” because that’s the project I’m authorized to speak about. We were impacted also today. We lost two people from the team that we’ll miss. I’m not going to mention who they are because I think privacy is important. However, we still have a large team on this project, in fact, one of the largest in the company. SOE fully supports not only EQII and EQ2X, but also EverQuest and EQ Next as well. The “EverQuest” franchise is the backbone of this company and we’ll do what it takes to...
From the EQ2 Forums: Fellow Adventurers, We wanted to share this information with you here, rather than having you read about it on another site. The EQII community is a large part of the ongoing success of SOE, and the game is in a strong position to succeed. Development continues unabated on EverQuest II, and you can look forward to a Producer’s Letter next week with more information about what lies ahead for the game’s development in 2011. For those who wish to comment, please use THIS thread. It will remain unlocked as long as conversation remains constructive and...
As first reported by Kotaku.com: Sony Online Entertainment, makers of D.C. Universe Online and Free Realms, closed three studios and will lay off nearly a third of its workforce, Kotaku has learned. Word began spreading when George Broussard, best known as the co-creator of Duke Nukem Forever, tweeted earlier this evening that SOE was seeing layoffs and “studio closure is possible.” Kotaku has confirmed through a source familiar with the matter that the closures affect SOE’s studios in Seattle, Tucson, Ariz. and Denver. Half of the workforce at SOE offices in Austin, Texas were pink slipped along with a...
Today’s Update Notes for March 31, 2011 bring those Itemization changes we’ve been hearing about, a redesign of the Storm Gorge Public Quest, and the Aether Races flying event has now been folded into City Festivals, starting with Antonica. From SmokeJumper: There will be a new track for each city until we start looping around again. Each city’s track will only be available during the City Festival and you can earn festival coins and titles when you race. We might trot them all out at once at Tinkerfest or something, but they’ll usually be linked individually to the City...
Raid Zone Lag can add randomness to an already challenging fight. There are many causes such as how an encounter is designed, unintended interactions in the zone code itself, etc. This issue is of particular importance in Velious because the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone drops a Clicky item which is required to take on most of the Velious x4 raid content. Players receive an item which must be clicked by certain classes at certain times in certain named fights in Velious hard mode raid zones in order to make them defeatable. Although some guilds have been...
So, you’ve heard all the hullabaloo about Itemization changes. Well ‘big deal’ you think to yourself. There will always be adjustments and shuffling around of things missed in Beta. The last 2 years have seen big changes to itemization after the expansion comes out. Why is this news? Well never mind the confusion and inconvenience for players, but there’s the feeling that players have wasted their time defeating a much more difficult mob only to receive an item that is only a minor upgrade or in many cases with Velious, a downgrade in quality. Quite a few players have...
If you thought the Itemization threads on the EQ2 Forums have been harsh, they really took a turn for the worse after players took Silius‘ advice and checked out the changes on Test and Test Copy, only to find that several items had lost upwards of 75% of their MultiAttack, 4.0 weapons received additional boosts (leaving out 6.0 weapons), and most of the ‘boosts’ were upwards of 0.6% increases on just a handful of stats. SmokeJumper came to Silius‘ defense: Silius has made huge strides into setting things up so that the completely haphazard systems of yore, where half...
Players have expressed concerns that the changes in the difficulty of dungeons this week will make Kael Drakkel far too easy. However SmokeJumper seems to be backing up the designers on wanting to keep the contested Kael Drakkel sufficiently difficult: (Making the zone super easy is) not our intent at all. And I’m glad that your group is able to play through those areas. But it must have been verrry lonely in Kael, because we know how many people were playing it…and it’s not many.
SmokeJumper has assured players in a thread “Where did my adventure go?!” that not only does EQ2 have a long-term plan besides the standard game updates and expansions, but that much will be revealed soon. If you have taken for granted that next year’s expansion will be Velious Part 2, raising the level cap to 100, you may want to read on! Watch this space. I’ll be posting stuff soon to describe this year’s slate. Probably next week sometime, maybe the week after. We’re going to be doing some VERY cool stuff this year and I think you’ll start...
There have been many reasons in the past not to allow PvP to PvE or PvE to PvP server transfers. Over the years, with itemization changes and server merges, some of those reasons have become less important. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: We’ve created a poll and asked for feedback related to PvP and PvE transfers over in the PvP forums. Since many players may not watch that forum, I wanted to make a post here because this decision can impact PvE servers as well. Please feel free to vote and post your feedback/opinions in this thread. PvP...
SOE is looking for your feedback on two recent changes that went in on Tuesday. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: Today’s hotfix introduced a couple of fixes and I’d be interested to hear how it has affected you. First, we’ve made some changes to improve the performance for public quests. We still expect them to contribute towards a higher level of lag than other types of content due to the sheer number of people that participate, and we are working to make them even better. However, you should hopefully notice an improvement after today’s hotfix.