Feldon
EQ2Wire’s Morgan Feldon is recording an interview with Vagary TV’s A View From the Top podcast this weekend. It should appear on their website later this week. We’ll post a link as soon as we have it. A View From the Top has had a series of interviews including Kiara (EverQuest II Community Manager). They also take reader questions, such as one from Green Armadillo (writer of the Player vs Developer blog). You can catch past recordings of their podcast on their website. UPDATE: Whew! Just finished the interview. What a rush! Jaye and Adam are great folks and...
Feldon
Seccia Ravenloft, writing for The Tattered Notebook at Massively.com, posted the results of an interview with EQ2 Senior Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson on the EQ2 Forums. In response, players expressed their opinion that the interviewers didn’t ask any hard questions. The EQ2 Senior Producer had this to say: I’ll be honest. I’m not one of those guys that creates a “mission statement”. Online games are amorphous. We have two real purposes in life: a) To entertain as many people as we possibly can, and b) make some money along the way so that we can continue to create more...
When are we going to quit slacking and announce the winners of the EQ2Wire Prowler Contest? HOW ABOUT NOW? The Contest A trainer of mounted cats recently lost his head about the prospects of limitless wealth and ice (for iced tea naturally) in New Halas and so packed up overnight, leaving behind a manor full of trained battle cats — and no forwarding address. We have managed to procure five of these highly prized felines and now need to find homes for them. The Winners “Slippery Slope” “Socks” “Shadow Hunter” “Yoguart” “Twisted Mentat” for Schrödinger! The winners have been...
We are notifying the EQ2Wire Prowler Contest winners by e-mail now.
From EQ2 Players: Spring blooms, Antonica beckons! Good people of Norrath, bring your sons, your daughters, and join in a week-long celebration of life, love and friendship. The full schedule for this player-run event on the Antonia Bayle server can be found on this GuildPortal site.
Any issues yesterday regarding Forum Permissions, inability to Login, or inability to Register for Fan Faire are attributable to Account Services and Commerce undergoing a 12 hour maintenance. This maintenance has been completed, so if you had a problem with one of those issues, it should work now. Sorry we didn’t get an announcement up sooner.
Here are your hotfix notes for June 3, 2010: GENERAL Effects can once again proc on an AE autoattack. DRUID RING EVENT Tunarian supply officers will now buy items for coin, like many other merchants. The druid portal to Nektulos Forest now lands adventurers closer to the druid ring. An issue preventing players from harvesting magiliths after they died has been fixed. The bug that prevented looting A Floret of Growth with certain group loot settings has been fixed. SPELLS Ancestral Sentry can once again be cast on raid and group friends. It can no longer be cast on...
Today’s Hotfix (Patch) fixes a bug in the Druid Ring Live Event, and includes tweaks to itemization, the new PvP Warfields, and numerous bugs in the Icy Keep raid zone. We also include the hotfix notes from May 27, 2010 which somehow got left out. May 27th’s hotfix notes make mention of a change to Procs which were not working on spells. However, this change resulted in certain procs, specifically Pestilential Rain and Torrent, no longer working properly for melee. You can read more about this issue on the EQ2 Forums. Xelgad has responded: Thanks for all of the...
Olihin has checked in with some fixes and improvements for PvP and especially Warfields which will become available next week. From the EQ2 Forums:
It was hinted after Fan Faire that new Spell Effects and Animations were on the way, and at one point we were listing it for Sentinel’s Fate/Game Update 55. Timetravelling has chipped in with some more info, and actually one of these new animations is available in-game.
Believe it or not, the hard work of bolting Shaders 3 onto the antiquated EQ2 engine is done. What remains is polish and cleanup. With all the combinations of armor, weapons, and with as many zones as there are in EQ2, this final bug sweep must take place with the help of the player. Players have been diligently posting screen shots and even videos demonstrating the numerous areas of the game including guild halls, armor sets, etc. where Shaders 3 stumbles — it’s too dark, it’s washed out, there are halos on objects, or the colors are just plain...
The Contest A trainer of mounted cats recently lost his head about the prospects of limitless wealth and ice (for iced tea naturally) in New Halas and so packed up overnight, leaving behind a manor full of trained battle cats — and no forwarding address. We have managed to procure five of these highly prized felines and now need to find homes for them. It has been difficult, but we have decided on selection criteria. Those players who reply to this posting with the name they intend to give to their cat will be entered into a drawing. Five...
Inside SOE Broadcast on Ustream From EQ2Players: Join us on Wednesday, May 26, 2010, at 1:30 pm PDT, as we take a look behind the scenes in this edition of the Inside SOE Broadcast on Ustream! We’ll be in the SOE Ustream channel! The event is expected to last about 30 minutes. 1:30pm PDT | 2:30pm MDT | 3:30pm CDT | 4:30pm EDT |9:30pm GMT | 10:30pm CET Activities include: Live Chat and Q&A! – Attendees can chat live and ask questions with members of the Community and Development teams. The Agency: Covert Ops and Pox Nora – Join...
We’d like to thank everyone who has taken part in the EQ2Wire May 12th Reader Survey. If you haven’t yet filled it out, check it out here. We’ve learned quite a bit from the entries so far, and we’ll be posting the aggregated results of this survey soon. Already, your comments are helping us improve EQ2Wire’s coverage. Readers are interested in articles about issues guilds face, player stories, and some general Lore background stories. These are items which EQ2Wire has not focused on before, but which we’d like to start dabbling in. If you are interested in writing articles...
It seems that U.S. EQ2 servers are back up after today’s Game Update 56 patch. Once the thread is unlocked, you can post your feedback about GU56: Halas Reborn on the EQ2 Forums. How do I get to New Halas? New Characters: Create a new character in New Halas from the Character Select screen. Existing Characters: To travel to New Halas, take a Gryffon from the Butcherblock Mountains docks. How do I get the new Kitten? Log into EQ2 between May 25th and May 28th, 2010 and type /marketplace to open the Marketplace. The kitten is a free item...
The EQ2 Servers are now receiving the Game Update 56 patch. Servers are expected to come back up at 9am PDT. While the servers are down, you can chat with us online! We will be in the EQ2 ZAM chatroom. For instructions on how to connect to the chat using mIRC, Trillian, or other chat client, check out the fantastic instructions at EQ2 ZAM. If you are not able to run chat software at work, or you just want to jump into the chat through your web browser, you can chat here. See you in the chatroom!
It was only a matter of time. Ballads has reported in from EQ2Flames that the Reinforced Slippers of Balance ( \aITEM -1095264150 2115375301:Reinforced Slippers of Balance\/a ) have been nerfed with Game Update 56. Despite being level 70 items, these were the best foot items in the game for tanking certain encounters due to the possible number of stoneskins this item could generate. We had already heard from developers that this item would not be replaced and that the effect would not be copied to other items. Indeed, a nerf was anticipated by players in fall 2009. Current Description:...
Over two years after the introduction of Mythical weapons, Furies and Mystics logging after today’s Game Update 56 will notice a change in their mythical weapons which has neither been documented in any Update Notes, nor commented on publicly by any EQ2 developer. Previously, the Mystic and Fury mythical weapons have added 10% of the character’s Wisdom to the character’s Potency. With today’s stealth change, furies and mystics will instead receive Ability Mod from their mythical weapon. The result of this change, as per several players who have experienced the changes on Test and have thoroughly documented the results...
The Sentinel’s Fate expansion (and its associated Game Update 55) opened the door to each character becoming a master of Tinkering, Transmuting, and Adorning. At least on Butcherblock, this change promptly doubled the price of all transmutable materials on the open market. Treasured weapons and armor, as well as Adept spells are now trading at record prices. As a result, tradeskill societies of all major cities have received a visitor named Londiar Inygad who is interested in offering Adorning work to players. These are daily quests, appropriate to your Adorning level which allow you to make 10 adornments per...
After the jump, we’ve got the complete Game Update 56 Notes for May 25, 2010:
From Kiara: As you know, our game update Halas Reborn, goes live May 25, 2010. This will happen at the usual time of 7am PDT for the US servers and 9pm PDT (4am on 26 May GMT) on European servers. The update notes are available here and the feedback thread will be unlocked for feedback once the update has been completed on the US servers.
EverQuest 2 does not natively support Anti-aliasing, however determined players have managed to enable it by adding “r_aa_blit” to their EQ2 INI file. Unfortunately, players will have to wait a bit longer if they want to experience Shaders 3.0 and Anti-aliasing at the same time. Players attempting to use both will see zones which are entirely blacked out. From Imago-Quem: I just submitted a fix for this. Hopefully it passes QA and can get out to you in a hotfix here soon and you can run AA with Shader 3. And as for the prospect of using CPU Shadows...
In a recent post on the EQ2 Forums, Dave “Covic” Brown brought us news that he’s been able to bring on an apprentice to help with character design. Covic has now elaborated on what that will mean for the Destiny of Velious expansion: I have an apprentice working on wieldables right now. His stuff is awesome. We are really trying to have every drop you get from the next expansion be new geo (geometry). There will be re-textures of the new geo, but little to no use of old geo if we can help it. He has already made...
Upgrading a 9 year old game engine to support a feature it was never designed for is a daunting task. No-one knows that better than Ryan “Imago-Quem” who has been busting his butt since before Fan Faire 2009 to revamp the graphical pipeline of EverQuest 2 to support Shaders 3.0.
One of the preamble events leading up to the Destiny of Velious expansion will be the reconstruction of several dilapidated and corrupted Druid Rings. Read the article on EQ2Players. As we reported in April, we are expecting the druid rings in Nektulos Forest, Loping Plains, Zek, and Feerrott to be rebuilt. Windslasher has posted extensively about how this event will work and what participants can expect…