Game Update 56 is looking to be a huge update, with many tweaks and adjustments throughout Norrath. In brief…

• a substantial Travel Revamp
• more quests in Stonebrunt Highlands to hopefully fill that level 87-90 solo questing gap
• a new Storyline feature
• a new Icy Keep x4 Raid
• Shaders 3.0 Graphical Revamp
• Research Assistants can help all your characters
• Blue PvP Adornments
• Yellow Adornments on T9 Mastercrafted gear
• Level 90 Character Traits
• PvP Warfields
• new Training Dummy options in your guild hall (solo, group, raid, and AE group)
• and of course New Halas

Also of note, is that a vendor has been added to Moonfield Hamlet selling some of the rare Heroic drops from Sentinel’s Fate zones. It will be interesting to see if this is like the vendor added late in the release of The Shadow Odyssey, where only the lesser Fabled items were available, and for a whopping 150 shards/marks each.

With the Test Server being updated nearly a month before we are estimating Game Update 56 will hit live servers, hopefully there will be plenty of time to test out all the changes.

Domino has posted some background and lore regarding the new tradeskill society, the Ravens of the North, in New Halas. From the EQ2 Forums:

The focus this week has been on new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson, and EQ2 Server Performance, which has been a persistent black cloud over EQ2 for the last 2 months.

Test Copy

Test Copy is getting some major use as it is where PvP and Battlegrounds changes are tested.

Gninja advised us:

We will be working out a schedule as to when the test_copy server will be pvp vrs pve. We are working it out now and will get back to you guys shortly.

Stuck at Character Select

An issue with being stuck at Character Select on Thursday was caused by a Configuration issue which has been corrected. EQ2 Forums

Adventure/AA/Tradeskill XP Weekend

The e-mail and EQ2Players announcements for this weekend’s Bonus XP event neglected to mention that Tradeskills will also see a bonus. We have not yet been informed what % the bonus will be, but 30% is a good guess.

Game Update 56 Goes to Test Soon

We don’t have an exact date, but Game Update 56 will be moving to Test and Test Copy soon. When we know exactly what content will appear on Test and Test Copy, we’ll let you know. It would not be surprising if New Halas is not in the first build. EQ2 Forums

Thundering Steppes Revamp Mothballed

Gninja has confirmed the news we speculated about earlier this year.

Unfortunately we will not be making drastic changes to Thundering Steppes this time around. That doesn’t mean there will be no changes but we are not considering it being revamped. GU56 will be full of cool stuff though (Including but not limited to New Halas and some new raids) you should see it hitting test servers in the not too distant future.

A revamp of Thundering Steppes seems to be completely off the development radar at this point, with Butcherblock Mountains stepping in as the “place to be” for level 20-35 content.

Although subject to change, our understanding is that, just like Timorous Deep, level 20 players will be offered a quest guiding them from New Halas to the Butcherblock docks to begin level 20-35 content.

Level 82 Mastercrafted Armor

It seems the strength of level 80 Tier 1 and Tier 2 Shard armor from The Shadow Odyssey was always destined to overshadow Level 82 Mastercrafted armor. But that doesn’t mean the EQ2 team haven’t given up on it yet! Domino has managed to land some additional upgrades to the Level 82 set:

Look for some changes coming to level 82 mastercrafted armor with GU56 (for a start, it should all be level 82 now …) including the addition of yellow adornment slots and some resists. We are also in the process of discussing the possibilities of some stat tweaks.

It now seems even less likely that any of the Tier 1 Marks of Manaar gear will be an upgrade to any player. Note that Tier 2 Marks of Manaar gear (which has Critical Mitigation and better stats) must be sought out in Moonfield Hamlet in Stonebrunt Highlands.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 forums:

We’ve located the issue that was causing the slow performance last Tuesday. This problem had ZERO to do with battlegrounds but they were taken down as a precaution anyway. I know that battlegrounds tends to get the bad rap because it’s new, but they are not always the cause of problems. In fact, we’ve got the character loading issues under control now so that there are no performance spikes as a result of characters going to and from the BG world.

We’ve been making some general performance improvements that will help lower the game server lag (exhibited as spell lag) which will be going into testing soon. When we are confident that these changes are working correctly, we will get them out to live servers.

We have several engineers working on performance issues and this is currently our top priority.

After the widespread outages of the EQ2 servers the night prior, a thread was created on the EQ2 Forums to solicit an explanation from the EQ2 Developers, and/or new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson, on the cause, and to seek reassurances that the issues are being identified and on track to be resolved.

As they tend to do, the thread branched into speculation on the origins of Dave Georgeson’s forum handle — SmokeJumper. Skywarrior posted his theory:

Hmmmm.  Smokejumpers are extremely brave (or crazy) and well-trained individuals who jump out of airplanes in order to reach remote areas involved in forest or brush fires, with the express purpose of helping extinguish the flames.  It seems to me that Dave’s handle is quite appropriate to the situation he finds himself in.

Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, the new EQ2 Senior Producer responded with:

Ding, ding, ding. You have it in one, sir.

And yes, I still answer to “Qix” or “Qixter” also. (I’ll bore you with the story of where those names came from some other time.)

Regarding the performance issues: Yes, we’re completely aware of it, and yes, it’s our highest (and only) focus for the programming team currently.

It’s a two-pronged issue that affects multiple aspects of our architecture, and neither of the issues is a “quick fix”.

In other words, we have to gather more information and study that data to find out exactly where the problems are before we can create solutions.

That’s in progress now and we’ll get solutions made ASAP. But currently, I don’t know an exact date when “ASAP” will be completed…mostly because we don’t have the solutions figured out yet.

But as I said in the other thread…we *will* kill them.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Greetings all.

An update on Battlegrounds and server issues.

Battlegrounds will be down until at least tomorrow.  While the BGs are down, we’ll be collecting data on the current server issues as an aid to tracking down what is causing the the lag and slow zoning times.

We’ll be tracking the data with the BGs both off and on.  If they appear to significantly affect the issues we’re seeing on the live servers, we’ll have them off over the weekend.

We’ll let you know any further information we can share when we have it.

We apologize for the inconvenience and greatly appreciate your patience as we try to track down the problems and iron out the bugs.

– EQII Team

With the powerful buffs and bonuses of our Mythical/Fabled Epic Weapons safely squirreled away to a separate permanent spell (thanks to the Epic Repercussions quest), we’ve been able to divert our attention towards finding other, better weapons.

While the choices are not plentiful (even with their buffs stripped, our Mythical weapons still have some formidable stats), the Sentinel’s Fate expansion is nonetheless supposed to offer us a variety of replacements for our now Enervated Weapons.

Thus far, there have been a scant few upgrade choices for healers. Fortunately Kander has responded to these concerns:

There will be some new 1 handed and 2 handed healer weapons with GU 56. In both heroic and epic content.

Battlegrounds For Levels 30-79

We’ve gotten some more details on the format that Battlegrounds from levels 30-79 will take from timetravelling:

After Game Update 56 the Battlegrounds tiers will be:

30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, and 90

Players in each tier will be auto-mentored down to the lowest common level (30, 40, 50, etc.).

Players in each tier will also have armor sets and accessories available for purchase from the existing PvP Merchants in the major cities.

The BG ‘starter’ sets will be the already-existing Mastercrafted armor sets (from levels 30 -> 70). Each has had a small amount of toughness added to its existing stats.

In other words, if you don’t already have Mastercrafted armor from levels 30-79, and want to do Battlegrounds, it’s recommended that you commission or pick up a set.

The Warfields of Antonica and Commonlands

Meanwhile we have gotten some clarification from Olihin on Antonica and Commonlands becoming PvP zones on Open PvP servers (currently Nagafen).

Warfields are restricted to PvP servers.

The writs are being changed to 6 kills for 5 tokens across all levels. A single currency regardless of the level will be used.

The new coin will be the Discord Token and I have set up a merchant to exchange the tokens for you in increments of 5 or 100. I know some will be able to gear up more of their characters quickly, but that is the point. I want you to be able to play on your account at whatever level you want and either save or spend your token when you want.

and from timetravelling:

[Warfields] is a new event that will be on PvP servers only that will give players the opportunity to fight for control of Antonica or the Commonlands.

This is clearly an effort to try to move at least some of the PvP community away from the “Token Vending Machine” that is currently the Kunark quest hub of Teren’s Grasp. Most players bent on earning Tokens live there 24/7.

If you have been poking and prodding the EQ2 forums hoping for even a brief Producer’s Letter from Dave Georgeson, you’ll be surprised to read the in-depth exclusive interview at EQ2 ZAM with new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson who replaced Alan “Brenlo” Crosby last week.

EQ2 ZAM Interviews Dave Georgeson

Gninja wanted to get the word out that the quest Tending to Toxxicology will be getting a revamp which will result in quest progress being reset by anyone still on the quest. If you are on this quest, get it completed before Game Update 56 hits (late May). Or you can just wait until the change when the quest requirements will be reset to resolve the bugs people have been facing in trying to complete it.

We are aware of the issues with the quest in Sundered Frontier “Tending to Toxxicology” becoming gated if someone summons Sherra prior to someone else zoning in. And good news! We have a fix… Now the bad news… In order to fix this issue we are going to have to remove the stage of the quest that requires you to zone into Toxxulia’s Mound. When we do this it will reset everyone back to the first stage of this quest.

I just wanted to give you guys ample warning that this will go in with GU56 (Currently scheduled for late May) so if you have progressed the quest you might want to try to finish it before GU56 or lose your progress and possibly have to get the updates for the Wyrmlord and Wyvernlord again.

Today’s Hotfix grants Research Assistants the ability to research for all of your characters at once, instead of just one per account. Also included are tweaks to the UsabilityOnPlayer macro command, some adjustments to the Labs SF raid zone, and a change to the Focus: Death March adornment so that its effects are different between PvP and PvE.

We’ve been advised that some Database maintenance will be performed at the same time, so the Hotfix and associated downtime may exceed 1 hour.

It turns out yesterday’s news on changes to the Training Dummies guild hall amenity was just the beginning.

Xelgad has updated us with news that one of the choices on the menu when summoning a Training Dummy (in addition to Solo, as well as Heroic and Epic which are new to GU56) will be an Encounter:

We’ve added a new set of dummies for GU56 that come as a linked encounter of a total of eight heroic training dummies. Enjoy!

This should provide many more options for players wanting to work on what order they cast spells and/or combat arts in for maximum DPS output.

In addition to the bigger content additions, Game Updates always include smaller, but no less desirable changes and tweaks.

Research Assistants Learn to Multitask

UPDATE: Oops! Despite appearing in the headline, this item somehow got left out!

UPDATE #2: This feature is in the April 20, 2010 Hotfix.

Bunji, member of the EQ2 QA Team, has posted this info on the EQ2 In Testing Feedback forums:

With the new Test server build, each character on an account can research a spell at the same time (this should not affect existing research).

Research times are also being tweaked (lowered).

Floating Disc Mounts

In response to a query about the floating disc mounts introduced in Sentinel’s Fate being slower, and with less stats than the Order of Rime mounts, Kander had this response:

I have upped the speed on several of the disc mounts, they now have a few stats as previous. Level 90 guild mounts are now 68%. Will be in with GU 56 or sooner.

As for the question of Appearance mounts, while we can’t expect them in GU56, Kander advised us to keep an eye out:

This is something we really want to do in the future, yes. It’s being discussed for future GU or exp07.

Kunark Blue Shinies Still Lore?

Echoes of Faydwer, the Rise of Kunark, and the Shadow Odyssey all added 20 or so collections. Each collection has historically had a rare item which could be used either to complete that collection, or to help complete separate collections. These are the Faydwer Expert Collection, Kunark Expert Collection, and Shadow Odyssey Expert Collection. The reward for completing each of these collections is a pair of goggles, or glasses, or a ring which then allows the wearer to see blue shinies (which spawn in specific locations, instead of at random) for the appropriate expansion.

The difficulty of collecting these blue shinies is that many of them have been flagged LORE, allowing only one to be picked up at a time, until it’s sold or traded.

In response to a complaint that Kunark shinies are still LORE, even in Sebilis, which at level 90 still has many green mobs, Kander had this news:

I will take a look at making these (Kunark Blues) no longer lore. I think that would be fine!

Training Dummies Go Epic

The Training Dummy Guild Hall Amenity has been very useful, however we’ve only been able to spawn a solo dummy, which has far too few hitpoints for more than 1 player to really test.

Rothgar has heard the call and will be adding Heroic and Epic versions of the Training Dummy:

I’ve already made a change to the dummy chest, it just hasn’t been released yet. You’ll get it with GU56.

You have the option to spawn a solo, heroic and epic dummy. Each will scale slightly larger in size and their hitpoints will be on par with mobs of that tier and level.

So now you can raid a training dummy if you like. These changes should be on the Test server if you want to check them out.

Training dummies don’t fight back, but they provide a useful punching bag for testing spell and combat art casting rotations. No word if we’ll be able to pick the level of the dummy. At level 80, you really want a level 87 dummy to test debuffs, etc. For now Rothgar is leaving them as they are:

The new dummies are exactly like the old ones, so they shouldn’t have any high resists or buff packages on them, just plain-ol-dummies.

EQ2Players has a new video showcasing Halas Reborn. Check it out below. And in case you missed it, here are Screenshots of Halas Reborn Housing.

Game Update 56 is coming soon to the Test and Test Copy servers, and in addition to the expected New Halas starting zone and city, which will have 2, 4, and 6 room housing as well as Tier 1 Guild Halls (unknown if it will be the same or different artwork), and in addition to a new raid zone, some substantial changes are happening to Battlegrounds and PvP combat in general. Battlegrounds in particular are being expanded from level 80-90 to level 30-90.

timetravelling gave this Battlegrounds preview:

• Brand new 1st Campaign armor sets and accessories
• Many of the accessories are based upon the currently BG-disabled RoK PvP accessories. Those adornments have had their effects adjusted and will be re-enabled for battlegrounds!
• Each armor piece will have a pvp-only Blue adornment slot!
• As such, we’ll all be introducing 20+ new Blue adornments!
• Battlegrounds at levels 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 are being activated!
• Battleground armor sets and accessories will be on sale at each of those tiers
• Brand new open-pvp server battles for control of Antonica and Commonlands!

• Additionally, we’ve internally removed the ~15% damage reduction applied to all spells in pvp combat. I’d like to once again ask for y’all to copy over to test-copy and give us feedback on the change.

Although the line item about battle for control of Antonica and Commonlands was posted in the Battlegrounds forum, it is believed that this is a PvP-server only feature.

Olihin followed up with this preview specific to the PvP (Nagafen) server:

• Level locking enabled starting at level 30.
• Removal of level restrictions for Alternate Advancement distribution.*
• 100% achievement bar settings prior to max level.
• Single Currency for Open PVP, the Discord Token.
• Warfields! Antonica and Commonlands…
• Much more!

When asked whether the change to Alternate Advancement level restrictions meant that PvP players could spend all 250 points at any level, Olihin responded with:

It’ll allow your AA expenditures on a PvP server to match those of a PvE server instead of the current restrictions.

PvP servers currently restrict the number of AA points which can be spent based on your level, beyond those restrictions of the PvE servers.

Guild halls have an amenity available that allow a person to click on a chest and recieve a training dummy in their inventory.  Right clicking and choosing “use” places the dummy in the guild hall as an attackable object.  This is useful for trying out different casting orders, AA specs, gear, etc. to see what parses better.  The problem is that the training dummies don’t have enough hit points.  If the training dummy dies in 15 seconds, it doesn’t give you much time to determine anything.  Some people have used the training wall in Kunzar Jungle instead since it has more hit points than the training dummies, but there is only one of them per server and you have to travel to KJ to use it.  It would be nice if the training dummies came in more than one flavor.  Apparently Rothgar agrees:

I’ve already made a change to the dummy chest, it just hasn’t been released yet.  You’ll get it with GU56.

You have the option to spawn a solo, heroic and epic dummy.  Each will scale slightly larger in size and their hitpoints will be on par with mobs of that tier and level.

So now you can raid a training dummy if you like.  These changes should be on the Test server if you want to check them out.

Having personally spent many hours beating on training dummies with my assassin, this is really good news.  Depending on what procs when, the parses vary by a large margin.  Having the ability to have fights that last longer should even that out and make those parse runs much more useful.

When Sentinel’s Fate was released, it introduced a change in the way the /target_previous command functions.  This change broke some cure macros.  Lets take a cure macro that did this:

/target_group_member 3

Cure spell

/target_previous

If you had group member 1 targeted and clicked the macro for group member 3, all would be fine.  The macro would target group member 3, cast the cure, then go to the previous target which would be group member 1.  All is well.

If you had group member 3 targeted and clicked the macro for group member 3, problems occured.  The macro would target group member 3 (which wouldn’t really do anything since you were already targeting group member 3).  Then it would cast the cure.  Then it would go to the previous target.  Problem is, group member 3 isn’t the previous target anymore since you never changed targets.  It would find out whoever you had targeted before and target them.  Could be anybody in the group depending on the order that you recently targeted people.

This hasn’t been a problem for the click to cure feature in custom UIs because they use a completely different method.  Back in February of 2007 a new command was added to the game: /useabilityonplayer [player] [ability].  For example:

/useabilityonplayer Feldon Cure Arcane

This works fine for custom UIs because they have access to the name of the player and can simply substitute in that name when the button is clicked.  Doesn’t work as well for those creating macros since it doesn’t allow you to specify a player Number instead of a player Name.  In the above example, you would have to edit your macros each time someone new joined your group and hard code the player’s name into the macro.  Kind of a pain.

So how do we get around this problem?  One option would be to change the /target_previous back to the way it worked before.  But the way it worked before was really a bug.  It’s now working as it should have all along.  Another option would be to code /useabilityonplayer to allow group member numbers and raid member numbers as well as player names.  This is what Rothgar is proposing as the fix:

I’m willing to change “useabilityonplayer” to take a number which should allow you to create the cure macros without changing your target at all.  This simplifies the macro and would actually be another slight optimization.

Do you guys feel this is a fair compromise?

We might have to do something like g1-g5 for group selection and r1-r24 for raid selection.

This would solve the problem and as Rothgar said, even simplify the macros.  The above macro would change to this:

/useabilityonplayer g3 Cure spell

It wouldn’t change your target at all but would cast the Cure spell on whoever is in position 3 in the group.  This could potentially even slightly speed up custom UIs that have click cure buttons.  Today, those buttons have to substitute the name of the character into the text of the command they are executing.  With this change, they could be modified to simply use the group and raid position numbers instead.  Probably a barely noticable performance boost but when your machine is struggling to keep up in a raid, every little bit counts.

This is, of course, still in the planning stages and subject to change, but it looks like it would be a nice change for everyone.

EQ2Players has a preview up about the housing in New Halas.   Andres Rodriguez is the artist responsible for designing the new houses and he took the time to answer some questions and share some pictures.  The houses will be available in two, four and six room layouts and there will also be access to T1 guildhalls.  They will include some built in bookshelves and even a fireplace.  And all the houses in New Halas will include windows with a view to the sea.

New Halas Housing @ EQ2Players

Here are your hotfix notes for today, April 13th, including adjustments to group and raid zones, as well as spell resists in PvP combat. After the jump:

In a break from the stock answer that has been given in regard to server merges for the last few years, Rothgar says server merges are something they are considering a little down the road.  The EQ2 world isn’t exactly in the best shape it’s ever been in at the moment with zoning issues, instance lag, contested named fight lag, and broker lag so the dev team has a few issues to take care of before they can move forward with this idea.  But this tells us that the idea is at least back on the table.

Rothgar writes:

We are considering server mergers but they would be a little down the road.  Before we consider any more mergers, databases need to be upgraded and general server performance needs to be addressed.  These are things we are working on and when we feel that we’ve achieved some of these goals we will seriously look at what is best for the EQII population.

And in response to someone claiming that Server merges = Dieing population, Rothgar responded with:

This is most definitely not the case.  Our subscription numbers are on the rise.

The addition of easier character transfers through the Station Marketplace has made population numbers more liquid than in the past.  We are seeing players migrate towards higher population servers like Antonia Bayle and Crushbone.  In fact I’d be willing to bet that AB currently has a higher population than it has ever had in the history of EQII.

In order to stabilize the population, we’d like to increase the numbers across all servers and the easiest way to do that would be to merge some of the lower population servers making more “super servers” like Antonia Bayle.

This would also make better use of our server resources and allow us to re-purpose some of that hardware to better serve the larger worlds.  When you think about the minimum requirements for each world, we need all static zones up and running at all times.  This includes all of the city zones and most of the overland zones.  On some worlds maybe those zones have < 20 people in them when they can easily support much more.  By combining worlds we lower the total number of zones that need to be running by putting more people in them.  So, the hardware that is freed up can be put to use servicing instanced zones which is where players are currently seeing the most server lag.

It’s a win-win for us and for players.  We just can’t do it until we can be sure that your experience will be improved by the process.

As always, EQ2Wire will stay on top of this story and let you know as new developments occur.

Since Sentinel’s Fate went live, many people have been reporting issues with Guild Events not showing properly.  Some report guild levels not showing up in the guild log and AA points from 201+ not being announced and/or logged.  Those days may be behind us.

On 4/12/2010, Bunju from Quality Assurance posted on the EQ2 Forums:

A fix for this issue went in with the last Hotfix.  Are you all seeing the 80-90 ts/adv level and 200-250 AA event notifications now?  Thanks.

Hopefully this is now fixed.

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.

Rothgar has been working closely with the Database folks trying to solve the Server Performance Issues, specifically Server-side Lag, and extremely long Zoning times which have become a major problem facing EQ2 since Game Update 55, the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, and the introduction of Battlegrounds. These Database and Server Lag issues have been so disruptive, that they have largely drowned out discussion on other issues facing EQ2.

Fortunately, Rothgar brings us an update on the situation regarding some long-needed caching being added to how character data is transmitted and stored:

Right now we are addressing the database-related issues and then we will be moving on to the game server performance issues that you’re speaking of.

We have several very positive changes in the works to improving database performance. Today’s hotfix contained a small change that should help and we have several other changes going onto the Test Server. One of the changes I’m most excited about is something that Zoltaroth just finished working on. Character data will no longer need to be loaded from the database when you move between zones. This should cut out a lot of traffic from the database and even make zoning a little faster. If we ever experience a problem with the database like we’ve had in the past, this new caching scheme should keep the database issues from affecting your zoning times.

If this round of changes makes the impact we are hoping for, we will move on to other types of performance issues.

We missed this EQ2Players post from Friday but considering the excitement leading up to New Halas, we thought we’d post it.

Nathan “Kaitheel” McCall has posted some of the Lore about what we can expect from New Halas and the twists and turns of the storyline. Meanwhile, Stacey Norman, Zone Artist, posted about her experiences in designing the city of New Halas.

New Halas Lore @ EQ2Players

By the way, this EQ2Players writeup has a thumbnail image of some of the concept art for New Halas. We wrangled up a link to a large version of this image.

Here are your update notes for March 30, 2010, after the jump: