Feldon
From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums: Hello, Norrathians! As you’ve likely heard by now, there’s been some changes around here in staff. I want to assure you though that this team is still in full-time dev and operation mode, and we continue to have awesome plans for EQ2. We’re shuffling a few things about, but our goals in delivering fun stuff won’t change. For example, in a couple of weeks we’ll be releasing rare bosses for the AoM dungeons and more. We’re tinkering a bit so I apologize for the silence and certainly any concerns or worry...
Game Updates & Maintenance
Oakmiser has shared his latest Norrathian Chronicles epidoe, this one a guide on the nerve-wracking but infinitely useful tradeskill ability of Experimenting. Check it out!
What started out as a thread by players wondering why an interesting feature (Map Fogging) had been removed got a clear explanation from Gninja and Caith as the team tries to solve the crashing issues certain players have been reporting. Gninja started with: This was actually a quick change and the reason it was done was because the amount of data that had to be stored on each character was contributing negatively to individual performance. Caith added: This change directly reduces character data that is sent to the client when zoning, by a significant amount in many cases. Character...
From the EQ2 Forums: GENERAL Map Fog has been removed. ABILITIES / ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENT General Expert Spells of a higher tier will now do more damage than the same spell Master previous tier. For example: Level 91 Faith Strike (Expert) will now do more damage than level 81 Faith Strike (Master). ITEMS Bound transmutation stones purchased from the loyalty merchant may now be transmuted correctly. Corrected an issue where some pvp adornment added red gem armor lost its ability mod. QUESTS Altar of Malice and Tears of Veeshan Weekly Missions are now classified as Weekly Missions in the Quest...
From the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at approximately 4:00AM PST for an update. Estimated downtime is 1 hour. The Nagafen server will be undergoing additional maintenance during this time. Estimated downtime for Nagafen is 4 hours. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at approximately 9:00PM PST for an update. (Approx. 5:00AM London Time on February 11, 2015) Estimated downtime is 1 hour. Alle deutschsprachigen Server werden um 6:00 CET am 11.02.2015 zwecks einer Serveraktualisierung heruntergefahren. Die vorgesehene Stillstandszeit wird etwa...
In response to questions about the future of EverQuest II, Afista posted this official response: Daybreak and Columbus Nova management teams are working together closely to evaluate the situation and will make adjustments if needed This post lends credence to the trickle of rumors I’ve been hearing.
So far, at least from the in-game comments I’ve seen, Altar of Malice has been well-received. Not everyone agrees about the difficulty of the heroic zones, but there’s a clear progression that players can strive towards. With any expansion, there will always be balance tweaks needed and a bug fix or two. We saw such a fix just last night with the missing textures in Zavith’loa zones turning parts of the zone black or white. This has been addressed with a client patch. Some other fixes and features coming up soon: Scout Poisons overwriting each other Weekly Heroic/Raid Gems...
The servers are back up following the hotfix. Another update from Holly “Windstalker” Longdale: Erm…the US hotfix happened earlier than planned (i.e. 3:30pm instead of 5pm). Servers should be back up very soon. #eq2 — Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) February 5, 2015 Update from Holly “Windstalker” Longdale: We’ll be doing a very quick update about 5pm PST to take care of an icky bug. Should be a short interruption. #eq2 — Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) February 5, 2015 After much patience, here’s the Update note: LEVEL AGNOSTIC DUNGEONS Agnostic Dungeons will no longer drop level 90-100 masters.
Amongst a few other fixes, today’s update largely focuses on Level Agnostic Dungeons. While at least one confused poster thought that LADs were supposed to present a “challenge” for a stacked group, in fact LADs are specifically designed to address the lack of grouping in low levels by allowing low and high level characters to group together on somewhat of an even playing field. Stats are brought up or down as needed so that a level 20 healer can keep a level 94 tank alive. As part of today’s update, Afista has posted a featured article on the subject:...
From the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, February 3, 2015 at approximately 7:00AM PST. Estimated downtime is 1 hour. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, February 3 , 2015 at approximately 9:00PM PST. (Approx. 5:00AM London Time on February 4, 2015) Estimated downtime is 1 hour. Alle deutschsprachigen Server werden um 6:00 CET am 04.02.2015 zwecks einer Serveraktualisierung heruntergefahren. Die vorgesehene Stillstandszeit wird etwa 1 Stunde(n) betragen. Le serveur de langue française sera arrêté à 6:00 CET le 04-02-2015 pour une mise à jour du serveur. Le temps...
The announcement has been posted on all game forums including the EverQuest II forums and H1Z1’s Reddit: Dear Players, Partners and Friends, Today, we are pleased to announce that we have been acquired by Columbus Nova, an investment management firm well known for its success with its existing portfolio of technology, media and entertainment focused companies. This means that effective immediately SOE will operate as an independent game development studio where we will continue to focus on creating exceptional online games for players around the world, and now as a multi-platform gaming company. Yes, that means PlayStation and Xbox, mobile...
There’s a certain logic in most of the scout weapons coming from a land of Dinosaurs, Pterodactyls, and tar pits being clubs. However less-than-enthused players have been looking daggers at the EQ2 team and pointedly commenting about how there just aren’t enough piercing weapons to go around. Worse, the few piercing weapons available to scouts have stats like Ability Recovery Speed and Reuse Speed which scouts acquire in spades from other item slots. A quick look at Item Discoveries of scout-usable weapons on EQ2U bears out our concerns. Fortunately, the EQ2 team intend to deliver an update in February that should solve this...
UPDATE as of 9:00am PST, SOE’s 1/2 hour 2 hour 3 hour unscheduled (or at least unannounced) company-wide maintenance is over: “@thegreatmutato: Today's SOE-wide maintenance is now FINISHED. Issues with logins & other general weirdness should be over.” What he said! — SOEHelp (@SOEHelp) January 29, 2015 Original article after the jump…
Currently on Test is the popular Erollisi Day event, as well as an upgrade for the popular Level Agnostic Dungeons. First up, Erollisi Day returns with new 3 quests, a new recipe book, new items, and rewards. We understand that EQ2 ZAM and EQ2Traders are already working on updating their event guides. Further Reading: Testing Feedback about Erollisi Day 2015 As for Level Agnostic Dungeons, which have quickly become an enjoyable and rewarding way to gain levels between 20 and 89 in between solo questing sessions, we’ll see a number of fixes to particularly tricky zones and unbalanced situations, and an...
From the EQ2 Forums: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION General Raid encounters that dropped 2 armor patterns and 1 accessory or 1 armor patterns and 2 accessories will now always grant 2 armor patterns and 1 accessory. Ossuary: Cathedral of Bones [Raid] Sacrificer should once again react to players who have the “Sanguine Spray” effect on them. The Marrow Sapper has had its health decreased. Ossuary: Choir of T’Vyl [Event Heroic] Legion of Many should no longer retain his increased damage when he resets.
Six days after the paid Alpha test for H1Z1 began the various SOE forums (including EQ2) are still throwing numerous errors such as this one: An unexpected database error occurred. Please try again later. <!– Host ‘lvs-msgw2.station.sony.com’ is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’ –> The error above indicates that Platform/Ops have set a rule on the MySQL server that blocks connections if a flood is detected. The problem is, they did not exclude or “white list” the forum server from this rule. In other words, the forums are literally blocking themselves when they get too busy....
With just 10 minutes notice, all SOE games went offline this afternoon after this posting on Twitter: We will perform maintenance on all SOE games at 3:00PM PST. All players will be kicked from game at this time, and will need to log back in. — EverQuest II (@everquestii) January 16, 2015 Planetside 2 Producer David Carey provided a bit more detail: Restarting our login servers, players will be required to re-log #planetside2 — David Carey (@dcarey7761) January 16, 2015 One hopes that whatever this fix is will resolve the lingering login and access issues with SOE games and...
From Afista on the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Friday January 16, 2015 at approximately 5:00AM PST. Estimated downtime is 1 hour. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Friday, January 16, 2015 at approximately 5:00AM PST. (Approx. 1:00PM London Time on January 16, 2015) Estimated downtime is 2 hours. No update notes have been posted as of yet.
UPDATE: 11 hours after the intended launch of H1Z1, SOE president John Smedley declared the login server issue “fixed“. However even now, SOE login servers, EQ2 game servers, EQ2 forums are all groaning under the load and experiencing performance issues. More often than not, the EQ2 forums throw “403 Forbidden” errors rather than displaying the page. This suggests a type of throttling normally seen as a management of DDoS attacks. From RadarX last night at 10pm PST: We are continuing to investigate outstanding issues which may prevent players from logging in to EverQuest 2. We hope to have this resolved...
From the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday January 15, 2015 at approximately 7:00AM PST. Estimated downtime is 1 hour. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, January 15, 2015 at approximately 7:00AM PST. (Approx. 3:00PM London Time on January 15, 2015) Estimated downtime is 2 hours. and: HEROIC CHARACTERS Heroic characters now start at level 90 with 320 AAs! For more information: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/index.php?threads/heroic-characters-level-up-to-90.556133/
From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums: Greetings Norrath! With our Level 90 Heroic Characters release tomorrow, I’ve seen a few questions/comments around Level Agnostic Dungeons in various places so I thought I’d give a quick update on a couple of things. First, on Level Agnostic dungeons: We’re working on updating existing Level Agnostic Dungeons to accommodate up to level 94. We expect to launch this in the next few weeks. We’ll give you more information and a date when we have it all done and tested and are confident in the launch. Later this year we plan...
Update as of 2pm pacific: The login issues have been resolved, and commerce is now available. Please let us know if you see further issues. Thanks! Update from 10 minutes ago: A quick heads up: Caith confirmed that the platform maintenance also affects the Daily Objective, so it may not show up in your Quest Helper or the Journal tab right now. Update from 39 minutes ago: This morning's SOE-wide maintenance is still in process. Commerce & game and forum logins continue to be impacted. Thanks for your patience. — Sony Online Ent. (@SonyOnline) January 12, 2015 From...
If you listened to our EQ2Wire Podcast with Kander or have been reading EQ2’s Update Notes lately, you know that last year’s “Weekly Updates” are out and bigger less frequent updates are back in. The “weekly feature” idea ended up being a drain on the dev team and we might have gotten an even bigger expansion were it not for the requisite deadlines of such a schedule. We’re glad to see this idea go away and to see the dev team able to once again release things on a schedule that maximizes their capability to give us great content. This...
The recent Altar of Malice expansion includes several Named enemies in the overland Tranquil Sea and Phantom Sea zones. These names not only complete weekly Missions and Achievements, but also grant Ferrin (expansion currency), AoM armor gems, and personal status. These tantalizing rewards have led enterprising players to park their characters at the spawn locations with Mercenaries and/or Pets set to defend them. The mobs are therefore engaged within seconds of spawning, preventing others from even trying. There really is no contest. EQ2 Lead Designer Kander has already applied one change to mitigate this AFK camping, and in a forum post he describes...
Caela
From the forums: GENERAL Loyalty Merchants now have new armor, weapons, house items and a pack of random Harvestables for sale. Resolved an issue where particle effects would play twice on Aerakyn. POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Tranquil / Phantom Seas Players who kill a named NPC in either Tranquil Sea or Phantom Sea will no longer be able to see or kill the same named for 2 hours. Precipice of Power [Raid] Dread Armoloch of Blight and Dread Armoloch of Corruption should now allow reactives and wards to counter their damage over time spells. Dread Armoloch of Blight and...