The Time-Locked Expansion servers Deathtoll and Stormhold will come down tomorrow morning in order to merge Deathtoll with it’s PvE-only sister server Stormhold.

Time Zone Conversions

• PDT: April 5 @ 2:00am – 2:00pm
• EDT: April 5 @ 5:00am – 5:00pm
• BST: April 5 @ 10:00 – 22:00
• CEST: April 5 @ 11:00 – 23:00

Here’s the official announcement from the EQ2 Forums:

Both Splitpaw and Deathtoll servers will come down for maintenance beginning at 2:00 AM PT (9:00 AM GMT) for an update to merge servers as mentioned here. Downtime is anticipated to be at least 12 hours to perform this operation.

Commentary

After today, EverQuest II will have no more Player-vs-Player servers other than the Battlegrounds server.

NOTE: Contains no EverQuest II content.

If you just can’t get enough lore and you’ve never read the EverQuest Next stories, we’re providing links to them below. These are in chronogical order from and after the Age of Empire and during the Age of Exile. Also included is the Lords of EverQuest comic by Michael Turner. The comic was presumably created for the single-player game of the same name released in 2003.

From Carlos “Gninja” Mora on the EQ2 Forums:

Remember going into Ruins of Varsoon and making that leap into one of the side tunnels? Lace up your boots, as this is one of the zones we are giving the “Fabled” treatment this time around. The dungeon will be leveled up to current content of level 95+ and given new and exciting loot to chase. Chamber of Immortality, Temple of Cazic-Thule, and Sanctum of Fear are also being made available as “Fabled” versions.

This new content should have some of your favorite parts of the dungeons made appropriate for the most seasoned adventurers. Even Venekor himself is rumored to make an appearance within the Fabled Temple. Ruins of Varsoon and Temple of Cazic-Thule will both be contested dungeons set to low minimum limits to spin up new instances, so that if the zone gets too crowded you can enter a new one where you might have more luck hunting down those specific named creatures you are looking for. Chamber of Immortality and Sanctum of Fear will also have interesting new boss loot waiting to be discovered. All of these zones will be available to subscribers with the upcoming GU100 release.

All Servers: 5:00~9:00am PDT | 8:00am~Noon EDT | 14:00~18:00 BST | 15:00~19:00 CEDT

From the EQ2 Forums:

Attention players: we will perform a general maintenance beginning at 5:00AM PDT* on Thursday, March 31st. The amount of downtime may vary, depending on the service. If the downtime extends beyond four hours, we will update this thread. This maintenance may impact the following Daybreak services across all games:

• Game logins for all Daybreak games
• Forum & Web logins for all Daybreak games
• Commerce and account management for all Daybreak games

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a game-specific maintenance. There will be no update or patch notes.

Thank you for your patience as we complete this maintenance.

~The Team at Daybreak

The Amsterdam-based Splitpaw server will come down this afternoon in order to merge with the Russian servers Barren Sky (PvE) and Harla Dar (PvP).

Time Zone Conversions

• PDT: March 30 @ 2:00pm – March 31 @ 2:00am
• BST: March 30 @ 22:00 – March 31 @ 12:00
• CEDT: March 30 @ 23:00 – March 31 @ 13:00
• MSK: March 31 @ 0:00 – March 31 @ 12:00

Here’s the official announcement from the EQ2 Forums:

The Splitpaw server will come down for maintenance beginning at 2:00 PM PT (9:00 PM GMT) for an update to merge servers as mentioned here. Downtime is anticipated to be at least 12 hours to perform this operation.

Commentary

After today, all Russian translations of EverQuest II become inaccessible and the game can only be played in English. Characters and Guilds will need to be renamed. In-game chat can still be performed in Russian once players make the necessary changes to their Game Settings. Also, Subscriptions and Expansions must now be purchased at full US Dollar prices. Due to cost-of-living adjustments and exchange rates, US goods and services are typically sold in Russia at for 60-70% less. These changes have been elucidated in the Russian EQ2 FAQ  (Росси́я) prepared by Akella Online, EQ2’s publisher in Russia for many years.

The merger of Russian servers with Splitpaw was announced on 29 February of this year and the discussion thread on the Russian EQ2 forums (Росси́я) has reached 61 pages. If Google Translate is not your cup of tea, the EU Server Consolidation FAQ is in English although it lacks much of the humor and pointed discussion being made on the Akella forums.

Anyway, looking at cost-of-living and exchange rates, here’s how the numbers break out:

US Servers: 7:00~9:00am PDT | 10:00am~Noon EDT | 15:00~17:00 BST | 16:00~18:00 CET

EU Servers: 9:00~10:00pm PDT | 12:00~1:00am EDT | 05:00~06:00 BST | 06:00~07:00 CET

From the EQ2 Forums:

The Norrathian Spotlight is an opportunity for the EQ2 Community to recognize one player per month who contributes to the player community in some measurable way. The last official nomination was in January 2015 when I was featured. I’m overjoyed to announce that fellow EQ2 players take up the mantle of identifying one player per month and interviewing them about how they make Norrath just a little bit better for everyone else.

From Suka on the EQ2 Forums:

Hi everyone.

Starting this month, we will try to spotlight one person a month who contributes to our experience in Norrath. You can nominate people for us to spotlight in this thread.

This month, we have chosen Jerry Dechant for our spotlight. A talented designer, he has made a lot of wonderful items for Player Studio. He is also no slouch when it comes to decorating houses. We will give a few sneak peaks at some of his items that have been submitted recently and in the reply, we will also show some screenshots of his houses. As usual, we are limited to 10000 words so if we go over it, we will use the reply feature to get it all in.

Suka:How did you get started in designing?

Jerry: When I was very young, I wanted to be an artist and/or teacher, but my parents didn’t encourage me to follow that path in life. Even so, I’ve always enjoyed art while in school and beyond, I’ve been being creative in various ways throughout my life. I had downloaded Blender quite some time before SoE announced the Player Studio Program, but I hadn’t really done much with it before then. So when I started making stuff for Player Studio, I was really a total newbie to 3D art. I continue to learn as I go.

Suka: Where do you get inspiration from?

Jerry: Initially, I wanted to make stuff that I wanted to use in my own decorating efforts, but eventually, I turned to the other decorators via in game chat and the Homeshow Forum and Facebook Page for suggestions for things they’d like. Most of the stuff I make now is by someone’s suggestion. I look around on the web for ideas on how stuff looks, them make my own version(s) of that.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Hey all,

We’ve combined the results from Stormhold and Deathtoll for the March TLE vote, and players have chosen to unlock Echoes of Faydwer content on our Time-Locked Expansion server!

Echoes of Faydwer content is scheduled to unlock on Stormhold on Thursday, April 7, 2016 at 12PM (NOON) PDT.

According to a Friday Press Release from Daybreak Games, the company has hired Larry LaPierre, a 14-year veteran of Electronic Arts and former Zynga general manager as well as Chris Wynn, senior director at BioWare, EA Sports, and a lead producer of Microsoft‘s Gears of War series. Both referred to H1Z1 as Daybreak’s “newest franchise” but did not reference other Daybreak games.

The gaming industry is small and its people tend to hop from company to company. As anyone familiar with the gaming industry knows, EA and Zynga both have a tarnished reputation. EA was nominated Worst Company in America in 2012, while Zynga has been accused of wholesale copying of competing games. However the profitability of EA and Microsoft’s Gears of War series cannot be argued. Daybreak has always been great at announcing things, but then struggled to execute and deliver. If I have a hope, it’s that these two hires will bring Execution and Delivery to Daybreak.

EverQuest and EverQuest II have kept the lights on at Daybreak for 17 and 12 years and I hope that these will get more attention and appreciation as well. This is being discussed on the EQ2 Forums.

We have received reports that Daybreak Customer Service is in the process of migrating from SOE’s rickety ticket system to a modern off-the-shelf solution called Zendesk. On the surface this appears to be good news, however there have been some growing pains in the process. Players have reported being unable to check the status of their own tickets, instead receiving a “Ooops, that page does not seem to exist” error. Others have been locked out of the site with automatic IP bans due to some kind of false positive. Also we’ve received reports that customer tickets have been automatically closed with automated responses based on key words in the ticket. For instance if the word “refund” is used anywhere in the inquiry, the ticket is closed and the customer is linked to Daybreak’s NO REFUNDS policy posting. It is also impossible to open a ticket from within Daybreak’s games. All tickets must now be opened at Help.DaybreakGames.com.

Daybreak’s short-staffed support team have been trying to make do and I’m cautiously hopeful that this new software will allow for a little bit more of that personal touch and care that SOE customers were lucky enough to experience for over 15 years.

Community Manager Tony “RadarX” Jones  responded on the lightly used Landmark subreddit:

We’re currently migrating our ticketing system to something much better which yes is ZenDesk. The migration shouldn’t impact anyone’s ability to contact support but if it is please let us know.

From Content & Social Media Manager Dexella:

On Thursday, April 28, EverQuest II will be launching GU 100! This members-only content, designed for highest-level players, will include new zones, content, features, and items. Today, we’re going to journey into the first new zone: Zek, the Scourge Wastes!

From EQ2 Senior Designer Nathan “Kaitheel” McCall on EverQuest2.com and the EQ2 Forums:

Ravaged by the horrors of war, the vast majority of the island of Zek has been unsuitable for habitation by anyone, ever since the Deathfist clan of orcs took control of the entirety of the island. They reduced the once-sprawling Jaggedpine Forest to a mere husk of its former glory, stripping much of the forest down to barren, charred earth, while pillaging the land deep below the surface through their ravaging mining operations. What little landscape remained lush and green was guarded by a band of woodland defenders known as the Green Hoods. Their numbers surged during the Age of Destiny, providing them the manpower necessary to begin striking back at the Deathfist Empire, but their successes would be short lived.

US Servers: 7:00~8:00am PDT | 10:00am~11:00am EDT | 14:00~15:00 GMT | 15:00~16:00 CEST
EU Servers: 7:00~8:00am PDT | 10:00am~11:00am EDT | 14:00~15:00 GMT | 15:00~16:00 CEST

It seems the difference in Daylight Savings Time between the US (which started DST on March 13) and the rest of the Western World (which starts on March 27) has thrown off the calculations in the official announcement, but we’ve got the correct times above.

We have update notes as of 8:37am PDT:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Maldura: Forge of Ashes [Raid]

• Adds in the Captains encounter should now despawn when the respective captain is defeated.

ITEMS

• Animate Core, Obsidian Earrings, Magma Rune and Molten Shard will now correctly add to the Terror of Thalumbra item set.

• Corrected a bug with Understanding the Weak Spots that allowed it to cause Master’s strikes to hit twice.

Yesterday’s EverQuest II Spring Update Livestream is now viewable on YouTube. You can learn about Zek, The Scourged Wastes, the new Signature quest, the three heroic instances, and the x4 raid zone all coming on April 28th.

From the EverQuest II YouTube channel:

From the EQ2 Forums:

We liveblogged today’s EverQuest II Spring Update Livestream on Twitch…

EQ/EQ2/Landmark Executive Producer Holly “Windstalker” Longdale, Lead Designer Kyle “Kander” Vallee, Senior Designer Carlos “Gninja” Mora, Senior Designer Chris “Chrol” Garlick, Designer/Systems Robert “Caith” Fouts, and Community Manager Ry “Roshen” Schuller presented a livestream today.

The new Spring Update — Game Update 100 (what happened to GU72?), becomes available to All Access subscribers on Thursday, April 28th. You’ll need membership to play any of the content and to use the items. Beta starts April 4th.

The content starts in a version of the overland Zek known as Zek — the Scourged Wastes. In addition to Zek-based fabled zones (Advanced Solo, Heroic, and Raid zones), the EQ2 team wanted to tell a story by redoing the overland Zek, the Orcish Wastes zone. The overland zone is available in both Advanced Solo and Heroic versions and both versions have good-sized Signature quest lines. The Scourged version of the zone has been completely repopulated with newly modeled orcs. The old “Zek — the Orcish Wastes” is still accessible of course for level 30ish characters.

• In this version, Deathfist Citadel has become Scourge Keep. Based on the same zone but revamped. There’s a new courtyard.
• Level 100 content
• New Cyan adornments and Cloak Gems (purple adornments for cloaks that aren’t War Runes)
• Gear will complement Terrors of Thalumbra gear, mostly slots and things that weren’t upgraded in ToT.
• There are 16 heroic nameds in the heroic zone but you can only kill 6 per dungeon run. Each boss has their own loot table and they require special tricks to spawn like clicking on something. Also a challenge boss.
• “Arena” event you can trigger to kill as many orcs before you die.

EverQuest II has tweeted a reminder that the Spring Update Livestream will be going live in about 45 minutes. We will be liveblogging the event.

Our spring update livestream starts in about an hour! Will YOU join us at 11AM PDT today? https://t.co/KcDFNmI39b

— EverQuest II (@everquestii) March 15, 2016

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Thalumbra

• All collectibles within the Glittervein Mines should be reachable now.

Icy Keep Retribution

• The Icy Sledge is no longer Appearance only, and can once again break past the ice barrier.

ABILITIES / ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENT

• Reduced the damage Devastation of War deals to named heroic encounters.

ITEMS

• “Aura of Immolation” no longer resets the ability “Transfer Contagion” or “Divert Breach”.
• Spiked Dragonscale Aegis and Draconic Deflector shields have had block chance added to them.
• Corrected stats on the Dwarven ringmail Tunic.

As you have by now heard, EverQuest Next has been cancelled, and the great purge is underway to remove all trace of the product from Daybreak’s official channels and websites. EverQuestNext.com and the EQNext YouTube channel have been cleared out. Next up is the EQ Worlds App for iOS and Android.

The EQ Worlds app is not something I ever featured or talked about here on EQ2Wire, and perhaps that was an error on my part. I objected to the glitchiness that players reported when they first used the app at SOE Live 2013, and I was less than enthusiastic about an app that requires you to Share things on Facebook to access content. However in exchange for Facebook sharing, players of EverQuest and EverQuest II received in-game rewards, as well as bits of the EverQuest Next story. Maybe it wasn’t a bad deal at all for those who got the app to work.

From Laylaih, Communications Coordinator at Daybreak Games* on the EQ2 Forums:

*a name I have not heard before.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Our next stream is Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 11AM Pacific Time* and we would like to invite YOU to join us at twitch.tv/everquest2

During this stream, the EQ2 team will share highlights from the spring game update that Holly mentioned in her producer’s letter here.

We look forward to hanging out with you on Tuesday, March 15, 2016, and sharing the details from our big game update with you!

It seems that after a decade of development effort (2006-2016), including four separate reboots, all financed largely by the success of EverQuest and EverQuest II, which had been increasingly strangled for resources, development on EverQuest Next has once and for all been cancelled. This comes as little shock to us at EQ2Wire as there has been almost nothing revealed about the game since the smoke-and-mirrors PvP presentation at SOE Live 2014. Further, all discussion of EverQuest Next had been banned from the official EQN forums for almost a year now (as RadarX pointed out to me, it’s now allowed with the game’s cancellation). A game in active, transparent development would not see these two things happen.

From Daybreak Games President Russell Shanks:

To Our Daybreak Community,

I’m writing today to let you know that, after much review and consideration, Daybreak is discontinuing development of EverQuest Next.

For the past 20 years EverQuest has been a labor of love. What started as a deep passion of ours, as game creators, grew into a much larger passion shared by you, millions of players and Daybreakers alike. Watching EverQuest’s ability to entertain and bring people together has inspired and humbled us. It’s shaped our culture and has emboldened us to take aggressive risks with our game ideas and products. When we decided to create the next chapter in the EverQuest journey, we didn’t aim low. We set out to make something revolutionary.

For those familiar with the internals of game development, you know that cancellations are a reality we must face from time to time. Inherent to the creative process are dreaming big, pushing hard and being brutally honest with where you land. In the case of EverQuest Next, we accomplished incredible feats that astonished industry insiders. Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun. We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too. In final review, we had to face the fact that EverQuest Nextwould not meet the expectations we – and all of you – have for the worlds of Norrath.

The future of the EverQuest franchise as a whole is important to us here at Daybreak. EverQuest in all its forms is near and dear to our hearts. EverQuest and EverQuest II are going strong. Rest assured that our passion to grow the world of EverQuest remains undiminished.

Yours truly,

Russell Shanks
President, Daybreak Games

MMORPG has been granted an interview with Russell Shanks which you can read here.

Meanwhile, Landmark will officially launch as a live game in Spring 2016 according to EverQuest, EverQuest II, and now Landmark Executive Producer Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the Landmark forums:

To Our Loyal Landmark Community,

You read the title right: Landmark is LAUNCHING this spring and I’m thrilled to be on this adventure with you!

Introduced as an addon feature fourteen months after the game’s launch, Player vs Player combat in EverQuest II has always had an identity crisis.

In spring 2006, open-world PvP was bolted onto EverQuest II’s core game through the introduction of several open world PvP or “red” servers — Darathar (UK), Talendor (DE), Gorenaire (FR), Venekor (US RP), Vox (US), and of course Nagafen (US). In 2009, the population of Venekor, a RP PvP server, was merged with Nagafen. With the collapse of LiveGamer player auctions in 2011, Nagafen absorbed the Vox population.

Despite significant and later sporadic development effort to keep PvP relevant, Nagafen’s population gradually dwindled to a point last year where just a handful of daily logins were being reported. Last fall, the difficult decision was made to migrate those remaining Nagafen players to the decidedly non-PvP world of Antonia Bayle. All did not seem lost for PvP diehards though…

With last summer’s launch of Deathtoll, a Time Locked Expansion PvP server with travel restrictions, limited escape options, and access to Battlegrounds almost completely blocked, things were looking up for open world PvP. Thousands of TLE PvP characters were created within hours of the server’s launch. It briefly seemed like a second TLE PvP server would be needed, and indeed the name Bonemire was reserved, later depriving the consolidated Butcherblock/Crushbone/Oasis server from a non-punctuated name choice.

Yet despite massive early enthusiasm, the underlying problems of a bolted-on system remained. EQ2 was never designed for PvP and despite sometimes Herculean efforts over the years to maintain a semblance of balance, skilled players always find the right combinations of class, gear, and abilities to make them unbeatable, frustrating others until they leave. With the departure of more and more well-meaning but outmatched cannon fodder, the remaining kings of the mountain squabble over titles and wonder why their easy prey has permaquit.

PvP’s shrinking audience may ironically be attributable to listening to player feedback by EQ2’s developers. On more than one occasion, an extremely vocal minority has dictated forum discussions which led to hefty PvP patches that only relocated PvP lopsidedness rather than stamping it out. Regardless of who or what is to blame, PvP’s 10 year run in Norrath seems to be at it’s end.

On April 9th, Deathtoll will merge with Stormhold (the TLE PvE server currently unlocked up to the Kingdom of Sky expansion). Harla Dar, the Akella Online-managed Russian PvP server, will be folded into Splitpaw on March 30th. Cross-Server Battlegrounds will remain for those who need their PvP fix.

US Servers: 7:00~8:00am PST | 10:00am~11:00am EST | 15:00~16:00 GMT | 16:00~17:00 CEST
EU Servers: 7:00~8:00am PST | 10:00am~11:00am EST | 15:00~16:00 GMT | 16:00~17:00 CEST

From the EQ2 Forums:

US  & EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Wednesday, March 9, 2016 at 7:00AM PST* for an update. Estimated downtime is approximately one hour.

From Caith on the EQ2 Forums:

From the EQ2 Forums:

Attention players: we will perform a general maintenance beginning at 5:00AM PST* on Tuesday, March 8th. The amount of downtime may vary, depending on the service. If the downtime extends beyond four hours, we will update this thread.

This maintenance may impact the following Daybreak services across all games:

• Game logins for all Daybreak games
• Forum & Web logins for all Daybreak games
• Commerce and account management for all Daybreak games

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a game-specific maintenance. There will be no update or patch notes.

Thank you for your patience as we complete this maintenance.

~The Team at Daybreak

From EQ2 Lead Designer Kyle “Kander” Vallee on the EQ2 Forums:

Hello everyone,

I wanted to take a moment to tell you exactly what is going on with the TLE servers.

Itemization

We’re done with global adjustments to Kingdom of Sky loot. We know that some items simply do not measure up, and we are absolutely fixing/adjusting these on a case by case basis as we find them (such as the Gnorble earring brought to our attention today).

In this time, we have done a thorough pass on Echoes of Faydwer loot to assure the progression is significantly better than KoS and to make sure raid loot is absolutely better than heroic, heroic is better than quest, etc.

From the EQ2 Forums: