The big news yesterday about the new Prowler mounts available via StationCash in the Marketplace is being discussed in the First Ever Mount on the Marketplace thread on the EQ2 Forums.

But as part of the introduction of these SC mounts, the Highland Stalker mount which was included in the Sentinel’s Fate CE retail box has gotten some tweaks as well.

• First, the run animation created for the SC Prowler has been adapted to the Highland Stalker.

• Second, the gigantic, and I mean Sir Mix-a-lot sized rump on the Highland Stalker has undergone plastic surgery.

Some players find the new animation smoother, others find it more jarring. Go figure!

About That Featherfall

Marketing apparently unintentionally embellished one characteristic of the SC Prowler mounts. They do not, in fact, have Featherfall.

And I promise I won’t use the words apparently, unintentionally, and embellished all in 1 sentence ever again. Well, after that last one. Promise.

Previous EQ2 Senior Producers Alan “Brenlo” Crosby and Bruce Ferguson rarely responded directly to player inquiries. Thus we featured their posts here on EQ2Wire in separate posts.

However Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has been tearing up the EQ2 Forums in two threads:

• Suggestions and requests for the new Senior Producer
• First Ever Mount on the Marketplace

Check it out folks! We’ve got a new Calendar here on EQ2Wire.

I’ve put in a list of upcoming events (currently set to 45 days, I can adjust this easily) in the Sidebar, including tentative dates for certain events based on 2009, and if you click the EQ2Wire Calendar header there, you can jump to a monthly calendar of EQ2-related events.

If you have any suggestions for events that should be on this calendar, please post a Comment and we’ll see about adding it!

An interesting topic has popped up on the EQ2 Forums asking the question:

Is there Raid Progression for Small Guilds?

The Shadow Odyssey ended up offering many choices for Casual Raid Guilds. Sentinel’s Fate has not been quite so generous with such progression choices. Game Update 56 will add two raid zones, but both are intended for 24-person raids. We compare the expansions in today’s commentary.

Just prior to Sentinel’s Fate, two different web designers set out to produce an updated AA calculator. We kept our eye on a really smooth one (but which had not been updated for Sentinel’s Fate) by Beetny.

We were stoked to find out that Beetny’s AA Calculator has been fully updated for Sentinel’s Fate.

This AA Calculator lets you browse, experiment, and spend AA points in all 3 AA trees for your character class without logging into EQ2. Also, you’ll notice there is a URL at the top so you can share your suggested AA setups with other players. I predict we’ll see extensive use of these special URLs along with tinyurl.com to easily share AA setups with other players.

Also, Brett has been quick to fix bugs and correct oversights, so if you see any problems, please be sure to e-mail him!

When Brasse went to work for SOE, it was not surprising that her awesome AA Calculator (which set the gold standard) would eventually go out of date. But now we have this great functionality available to us again!

Today, we reflect on a dungeon that I had high hopes for when it was first announced, but which underwent dramatic changes within 72 hours of its launch. 3 months later, there are no clear answers on the current intended audience of this zone, whether we’ll see any rollback of those changes,  and going into the next expansion — EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious — will these lessons in design and balance be learned from?

NOTICE: No EQ2 Content

It’s hard to believe that in 3 months we will be covering our third Fan Faire event and entering our third year of wheedling news and previews of EverQuest 2 expansions and game updates. We plan to offer the most comprehensive, up-to-the-minute coverage of the 2010 Fan Faire event.

It’s challenging to come up with news on a daily basis, especially about a game that works in 3 month cycles. Last month, we officially brought a staff writer, Dethdlr, into the fold, who has so far been posting some great updates.

There are a lot of EQ2 fan sites out there that have pushed themselves to stay relevant, and post something almost every day, but there are many other EQ2 sites that have largely stopped updating. We want to stay in that first group, and to do that we need your help.

Today we present a Survey which asks some questions about how you use EQ2Wire and how you think it can be improved.

Even as EQ2Wire is trying to find an artist or artists to help us tell humorous, interesting stories about EQ2, the development of MMOs in general, and the sometimes tumultuous relations between game developers and the players, we could not help but notice the “Notable Norrathians” contest currently running on the EQ2 Forums and posted by Kiara.

UPDATE: Deadline Extended to May 28th!

The New Artists

My favorite part of EverQuest II’s fleeting 5th Anniversary  “Heroes Festival” (during last year’s American Thanksgiving week) was the 10 Player-Designed In-Game Paintings. Initially, an art conteste, the top 10 winners became available as paintings from City Merchants. Some of these paintings possessed a very high quality and added some much needed options to the previously limited choice of paintings in EQ2.

The First Prize winning “Destroyer of Ordanach” by Citadelli.

Not all of the paintings were classics. Because the contest wasn’t widely discussed outside of Non-Gameplay Discussion, and because I don’t think it was clear to players that their submissions could become in-game paintings, there weren’t a lot of entries. And in the end, the paintings sold in-game came with some very restrictive terms. They were unable to be placed in guild halls, and required both a guild level of 30 and a sizable stack of status each to buy. Still, I ran out and bought 2 of each (even that, unique Yha-lei mayhem image that came complete with targeting UI elements! 🙂 ).

This time around, I’m hopeful that all aspiring artists and fans of EQ2 will give it their best shot and submit really stunning original artwork or in-game screenshots representing in-game characters or foes of note.

I believe anything that improves the in-game selection of paintings is a good thing, and it’s really cool that players get a rare chance to put some content back into the game.

And I am cautiously optimistic that we’ll see less restrictions on guild hall vs. house, guild status, and guild level when purchasing these new paintings.

DAZ Studio?

It’s worth mentioning that quite a few players of EQ2 who like to bring that extra bit of realism to their characters appearances, biographies, and conquests have discovered a program called DAZ Studio. It is a 3D character poser-type of program which has a toolbox of thousands of armor choices, clothing, weapons, races, accessories, and appearances.

An aspiring artist could spend months experimenting with this program.

Some of the coolest-looking signatures on the EQ2 Forums are EQ2 characters which have been reimagined in DAZ Studio. And thus far, some of the best-looking entries to this contest were created in this program as well.

NOTE: I do not work for Daz 3D nor do I make any money from mentioning their products here.

Three Weeks to Go!

UPDATE: Deadline Extended to May 28th!

Notable Norrathians Contest @ EQ2 Forums

It seems we’ll be parting with two islands by May’s end. And while we’ll still be able to catch  John Locke, Jack, Hurley, Sawyer, and Kate in syndication, the Qeynos and Freeport starting islands seem destined for a more permanent fate. We are providing continuing (hopefully not excessive) coverage of the impending removal of the EQ2 starting islands.

Links to Isle of Refuge

I have done some Internet Archive and Google searches to try to find Writeups and history of the original Isle of Refuge quests. Here’s what I found:

• LISTEN to the Isle of Refuge/Queen’s Colony/Outpost of the Overlord theme music
• Read an old EQ2 Zam writeup about Isle of Refuge (on the Boat)
• Read an old writeup about Crafting on the Isle of Refuge
• Read an old writeup about Garven Tralk and the Isle of Refuge (Fighters)
• Read an old writeup about Collection Quests on the Isle of Refuge
• Read an old writeup about Other Quests on the Isle of Refuge

There seems to be some confusion in the In Testing Feedback thread regarding the removal of Qeynos and Freeport as starting choices. I stand by the original article I posted, but some clarification is worth mentioning.

Qeynos and Freeport Going Away?

Qeynos and Freeport are not being removed as cities. Furthermore to my knowledge, none of the level 6-20 quests in these city zones and surrounding suburbs are going away. Although further testing on the Test Server will be needed to confirm this.

Players wishing to experience the Qeynos and Freeport level 6-20 content would need to create a character in Kelethin or Halas, Neriak or Gorowyn and arrange travel to Qeynos or Freeport to do those quest lines.

It is also worth pointing out that changing Citizenship between Qeynos, Kelethin, and New Halas, or between Freeport, Neriak, and Gorowyn, is approximately a 15-30 minute process. It’s a single quest or short series of quests. It is nothing like Betrayal. Nor is changing your Citizenship required to play this content.

EQ2Wire would prefer if the islands are not removed, but de-emphasized from the Character Creation screen, with more options added on the Departure Boat to port the player to level 6-20 content in all 6 starting cities.

We stand by our belief that removing content is not necessary to improve the experience for new players.

In February, former EQ2 Senior Producer Alan “Brenlo” Crosby created a thread “What is the Golden Path?” It included this provocative passage:

The golden path is the first step in a larger revamp of our new player experience.   We took a look at the starting areas, other than Qeynos and Freeport as we plan to move away from those, and reworked content so that it had a better flow.  We wanted the quests in Darklight, Timorous and Greater Fay, to give you a better progression path.

When asked in the EQ2 ZAM Dev Chat to clarify this position, Brenlo responded further:

We plan to only allow new characters to start in the newer player areas. Timorous, Greater Fay, Darklight and soon Halas. The new player experience in Qeynos and Freeport are just not up to snuff anymore and do not provide as solid an experience when you enter the game for the first time.

Any hopes that this change would be canceled with the introduction of new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, were dashed with his indication that he would “not be changing anything that was short-term” (short-term plans). So it seems this change was destined to go in one way or the other. Here are today’s Test Update notes which will not apply to Live Servers until Game Update 56 in mid- to late-May:

Test Update April / 27 / 2010
GENERAL

Qeynos and Freeport have been disabled as starting cities.

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.

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. 🙂

Linda “Brasse” Carlson, Senior Community Manager for SOE has posted this update on the EQ2 Forums:

After many years of service, Alan “Brenlo” Crosby has decided to leave SOE to pursue other opportunities.  And while it is sad to see him leave, we wish him the best of luck in his new endeavors.

At this time, we’d like to take a moment to introduce EverQuest II’s new producer, Dave Georgeson.  Dave is excited to join the EQII Team and will be posting an introduction in the near future.

According to EQ2 Zam, Dave’s resume includes SOE’s Planetside and Free Realms, and his LinkedIn page says he’s been back at SOE since February.

Dave Georgeson is apparently coming back to SOE after working at MobyGames.

Dave is currently the Producer, Director and Lead Designer for the casually-oriented MMO at Gaia Online that has had over 500,000 players in the first month of Open Beta.

Dave has previously designed and produced : zOMG!, Planetside, Tribes 2, Heavy Gear II, Absolute Zero, and Crusaders of Might & Magic.

From EQ2 Zam:

Astute fans of Sony Online Entertainment noticed Alan “Brenlo” Crosby changed his job status on Facebook this afternoon.  His Recent Activity says “Alan removed his job as Senior Producer – EverQuest II at Sony.”  A query to Christine “Kiara” Renzetti, EQII Community Manager, resulted in a polite “no comment.”We will report details as they become available.  Wherever Alan is going, ZAM and the EQII Community wish him the best.

He said this to Massively:

Yeah after working together for 10 years, it was my time to move on. Was a great ride and I am going to miss my SOE family.

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.

We have been trying to get Google AdSense to display better ads, but after months of trying different settings, blacklisting hundreds of vendors our readers have no interest in (plumbing supply cos, wiring companies, really?), now all we’re getting is Plat Farmer and Account Selling ads.

It seems Google AdSense doesn’t have any ads that you guys would like to actually see. I am currently looking for a banner ad company that will show appropriate ads, such as movie banners (non-flash, no scary music!), upcoming MMOs and other games, and just cool stuff people might actually click on.

For the time being, I have disabled banner ads. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a Donation box over there on the left side. 😉

The previous Thursday and Tuesday hotfixes have brought some itemization changes, specifically with the increase in the number of items holding Red Adornment slots, the introduction of Yellow Adornments for heroic gear, and the addition of Resists to Legendary and Fabled gear (previously, players were expected to run around with 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry).

Now, we are starting to see the second prong of these changes, intended to fix the itemization mess that Sentinel’s Fate launched with. Frizznik brings us:

Thanks for your patience with us as we look at items, spells, and combat arts.  We are reading your concerns and are trying to make adjustments where we can.  This week we have been hard at work on raid item changes.  Those changes should happen in the next hotfix, so please don’t transmute those drops, you may want them after the changes hit.  After the changes next week, we are going to be looking at resistances on Legendary drops and some other things as well.

Please understand, we have a lot to think about.  The expansion, battlegrounds, and the golden path added a lot of content that we have to keep an eye on.  The content team did an excellent job with the golden path and if you haven’t tried it, you might want to talk to a chronomage or roll a new character to check it out.  Battlegrounds are a lot of fun too, even if you don’t like PVP combat you might want to give it a shot because the cooperative team play is a lot of fun.  I am not trying to make any excuses, but instead I am trying to say that there are only so many hours in the day.

Defense/Parry — Useless?

An interesting thread, which I’ve been following, on whether the +Defense and +Parry skills have any utility whatsoever.

Additional

• Frizznik and Xelgad are looking into the Crit Multiplier for Wards with regards to Shamans. They are currently falling behind Druids.
• Ward of Elements (T3) Armor may become available without the prerequisite of T2 Shard Armor. (link)

Yellow Adornments

A handful of Legendary items from level 80-83 received Yellow Adornment slots, however Yellow Adornments were all initially flagged level 84.  This has been remedied in the March 18th hotfix, as they are now level 80 adornments.

Flurry, Double Attack, and AE AutoAttack

When you Auto-attack with your mainhand weapon each of the following has their own independent chance firing off in addition to that mainhand attack (from EQ2 Forums):

• Flurry — results in 2 to 4 additional mainhand weapon swings. These swings do not proc additional procs.

• Double Attack — Auto-attack the target a second time, this can also proc (trigger) off an offhand weapon swing

• AE Auto Attack — Attacks up to 4 targets in front of the player, but cannot flurry or double attack

AE Auto-Attack is primarily an AA line that points can be spent in. Double Attack has a cap of 100% and now appears widely on gear of all kinds. Flurry is much rarer to find, and is mostly found in AA lines, but look for it on items.

Making Sense of Tier 2 & Tier 3 Raid Gear

Whether you are rewarded Tier 2 or Tier 3 raid gear is dependent upon which raid mob you are killing, and whether you are taking on the “easy” version of that mob, or the “hard mode” version of that mob. Hard mode mobs typically have more adds, more hitpoints, unique effects, stronger detrimentals, etc.

I have to tell you, even after reading this thread laid out by established raiders, I’m not clear on every single mob and Tier. 😉

Moonlight Enchantments

Don’t forget that Moonlight Enchantments start tonight!!

Itemization Puzzle Pt 2

We’re still working on part 2 of the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization Puzzle. SF Gear is still in a state of flux, and we now know that the “Tier 3” Sentinel’s Fate raid armor, which drops from the hardmode version of each mob are all being upgraded, loot tables adjusted, etc. so it’s hard to get an accurate picture of the gear at this point.

Development

Fyreflyte, itemization lead for EQ2, has been conspicuously absent from the EQ2 Forums in the last couple of weeks. Further, Xander, Frizznik, and timetravelling have all been stepping in to answer itemization-related questions. It is unclear what, if any conclusions can be drawn from this.

Meanwhile, a former EQ2 developer, Aeralik, has been posting some of his perspectives on how the Shadow Odyssey expansion played out behind-the-scenes. He still holds forth that he fought the good fight for the players against the Fighter Revamp and other sweeping, ill-considered changes. EQ2 team members I’ve spoken to on the condition of anonymity dispute this viewpoint.

Thursday night saw the first post-expansion developer chat of 2010. Hosted by ZAM, this chat had previously been scheduled for March 4th, but was postponed to March 18th as developers focused on issues with Battlegrounds.

You would have assumed, with the key issues of Battlegrounds and Itemization consuming a great deal of development effort in the month since Sentinel’s Fate launched, AND the 2 week postponement in the EQ2 Developer Chat, that Calthine at ZAM would have received an avalanche of hardball questions. Instead, we saw just a few of these critical issues raised, with the rest running the usual gamut of comfortable questions.

Today brings the first part of a two part story about how we got to the Itemization situation we are in now. Part history lesson, part recap.

Part 2 will try to sort out the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization picture as we have it so far. I assure you that Part 2 will be MUCH shorter. 🙂 After the posting of Part 2, we will be posting a survey to get your feedback on these long-form articles.

The elusive SOE Marketing Dept. took a moment today to pat itself on the back for its “successful launch” of EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate. They also made a point of thanking “our great fans have responded with overwhelming support“. It is unclear what aspect of the Sentinel’s Fate launch players give “overwhelming support” to, but no doubt this will be a key point on a Powerpoint presentation somewhere soon.

EQ2Wire does not think it is too soon to start our campaign for NO retail launch of the next EverQuest II expansion. It costs too much money, diverts too many resources, and ultimately confuses and frustrates players to have retailer exclusives, head starts, and regional lockouts on who can buy the Digital Download when and where.

Did the Retail Push Work?

Marketing will point to retail figures saying “It worked!” but the reality is, these are customers who felt forced to buy the product in a certain way, at additional cost and hassle, just to get the same customer experience they have had in past years with a Digital Download.

There is such a thing as a false economy here regarding players who would have ordinarily purchased the Digital Download over a span of the next 2-3 months, as they had completed all the content they desired to in the previous expansion converted to the new product. No doubt some of these players felt pressured into buying Sentinel’s Fate retail version on launch day, so as not to be left behind, or to get the best possible game.

It just seems to us, although we have no sales figures to back up our theories, that making loyal customers jump through hoops just to add a few boxes on retail shelves is not worth it in the long run, and we feel that a true cost-benefit analysis of how the Sentinel’s Fate retail launch played out (provided it is not merely a self-serving exercise) would bear this out.

And there is no tangible way to measure the ill will created in the European community by the Sentinel’s Fate launch lead up chaos, missteps at DLGamer and Steam, and now almost daily Hotfixes during primetime Europe hours. These players have a right to be doubtful.

I have had some very harsh words for the SOE Marketing Dept, yet I feel like I am on pretty solid ground with my opinions. So far, this department has demonstrated that it does not understand its customers, does not value their feedback, and further, has gone out of its way to insulate itself from criticism.

EQ2Wire is extending an open invitation to any member of the SOE Marketing Dept who wishes to grant an interview on these and other subjects.

Battlegrounds vs. Oasis

Battlegrounds were locked this afternoon/evening due to significant lag and zone time issues. The servers were also rebooted. However the biggest issue is that Oasis is almost unplayable for some players.

This quote from the EQ2 Forums:

We’re aware of the problems facing the Oasis server right now and several people are working on it.  It will be addressed more fully tomorrow when everyone is back in the office and I’m sure we’ll have more information then.  There is an active thread on the Oasis server forum.

Character Corruption

A few players are reporting sporadic issues with losing AAs, levels, gear, etc. after lagging out from playing in Battlegrounds. I and others have played Battlegrounds and not had issues, so this seems pretty random issue. Sometimes, I did have a 5-10 minute wait leaving the Battleground and being sent back to my home server, but saw no other issues.

A Word about Forum Moderation

When I started using the EQ2 Forums I remember how intolerant the moderators were towards differing opinions and constructive criticism. Any kind of useful feedback was deleted and members banned for expressing themselves. I just plain stopped posting there. I, along with thousands of other players, moved to EQ2Flames.

It is only under Kiara‘s guidance that the EQ2 forums clawed their way back to being a place where constructive criticism is allowed and players are truthful about their favorite parts as well as the major issues within EQ2. She has fought at every turn to allow players to speak their mind.

Do I think Kiara is perfect? Of course not. Nobody is. But in my 9 years experience in moderating 2 other forums, I think she’s doing a damn good job.

And yet, in the past couple of months, I have noticed unbelievable hostility towards her, blaming her for EQ2 development choices, database issues, expansion launch pains, etc. I see people shooting off at the mouth about things they don’t even understand.

But what has really turned my stomach is when I heard about players gloating to their friends that they reported her to her supervisor.

You know, I manage to post on the EQ2 Forums and express EXACTLY what I feel I need to say about all of the shortcomings and problems at SOE and the EQ2 development, and I manage to do so without getting banned. And when Kiara has done something I’ve disagreed with, I’ve told her. We’ve had some pretty heavy conversations. 😉

But really, if someone out there is too chickenshit to resolve their issues with Kiara, why don’t you send *me* a mail here on EQ2Wire. You might learn something.

So today marks the release of the Digital Download in North America and Canada. For those unfortunate souls who couldn’t get their hands on a retail copy, your expansion begins today.

Do you really miss anything by being a week late? Well, there are those server discoveries (which EQ2Players isn’t tracking properly). And there’s the chance of making a lot of plat being first to sell shinies, tradeskilled materials, rare items, etc.

We have received player reports but have not yet empirically confirmed ourselves that there may have been some monkeying around with how combat XP is converted to AA XP. This may be a bug, an oversight, or it may in fact be an intended change. But for now, if these player observations are true, then players joining the expansion today will not be following in their fellow player’s footsteps of briskly earning AAs and picking up levels 2 at a time. Here’s what we know…

With hardly a moment to spare, we will soon find out where the EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate expansion will be available for purchase as a Digital Download.

We will be releasing the distributors and the links to their sites tomorrow morning after 9am PST. It will be up in this thread about 9:30am PST as soon as I walk in the office. The list will be updated as more information comes in, but will be good to get everyone started. — Kiara

Current wisdom indicates that if your IP address is recognized as being outside of the United States and Canada, you will be able to play the DD on February 16th. If not, you will be waiting until February 23rd.

Commentary

I’d like to know…Are there any positions open in the SOE Marketing Dept? I’d love to be able to completely fumble the international launch of a top 10 MMORPG expansion, take late lunches, and not lose a wink of sleep at night, all while its Developers and Community team are working 14 hour days including weekends to develop and release a game that a lot of people won’t be able to play. Must be nice.