Feldon
In an unusual move, Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, Senior Producer of EverQuest II, has posted some high level updates on what we can expect from Game Update 56 coming in May. As many of you know, several items planned for the expansion and corresponding Game Update 55 slipped: New Halas, Shaders 3.0, New Spell Animations, Thundering Steppes revamp, etc. Also, there have been major performance problems with many of the live servers, which have been alternately attributed to Battlegrounds, Database Issues, or the expansion itself. After the jump, you can read Brenlo‘s response to these issues, copied from the EQ2...
Game Updates & Maintenance
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...
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...
Your Hotfix notes for March 18th include tweaks to Tier 3 (raid armor). NOTE: Make sure your EQ2 client patches before trying to log into EQ2. Due to an oversight, EQ2 servers are allowing out-of-date clients to login, resulting in bugs with the Broker, Group window, etc. After the jump…
Today’s Hotfix notes for March 16th, 2010. Yellow Adornments also made it in, but they’re not in the notes… GENERALMost of the guards in Freeport, Qeynos and Kelethin have had their levels reduced to what they had previously. Exceptions to this include palace guards and patrolling knights. ITEMS All jewelry from the Vigilant: Final Destruction (x2) has had resists added. Summoning the mount from the Ykeshan Warbear whistle will now work if you are level 80 in either adventuring or tradeskilling. The valuable, Onayan staff of the waves, should now be on the Vasty Deep collection tables. QUESTS The...
Most of the Sentinel’s Fate raid and heroic gear has had no Resists (vs. Arcane, vs. Elemental, vs. Noxious), presumably with the intention that players would have to wear 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry. Also, all but the highest level raid gear in Sentinel’s Fate has lacked Red Adornment Slots. This made most of this gear a poor upgrade over TSO raid gear. If you’ve been following the Equipment Adjustments thread on the EQ2 Forums, as well as yesterday’s Hotfix notes, you know that Resists and Red Slots have now started to appear on Fabled and Legendary gear. However...
Brewday has arrived in Norrath! This celebration of Brell and brew will run from March 11 to the 22nd. For a guide to the updated events, collections, tradeskill recipes, and quests for this year’s Brew Day event, check out these sites: Brew Day Events at EQ2 Wiki Updated Brew Day Guide at EQ2 ZAM Brew Day Preview at EQ2 Traders Although the event is now available on live servers, Brell’s Bar remains closed until 10:30am PST according to an announcement I read in-game. For further discussion on Brell’s Bar, check out the EQ2 Forums.
If you’ve been thinking that the pieces of the Sentinel’s Fate itemization puzzle just have not fit well together, you are not alone. While we have not spent a lot of time covering itemization in SF, it is because things have continued to be in such a state of flux during, and after the Beta. The smooth progression of TSO gear was seemingly replaced by a scattershot approach, with some of the x2 raid items being the best in the game, the x4 Hard Mode gear being only 1-2% better than the x2 Easy Mode gear, and Battlegrounds gear...
Posted by Kiara: We’ll be having our usual Tuesday hotfix starting at 6am for the US servers and at 9pm (5am GMT Wednesday March 10) for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.The downtime will be the usual hour or so. and your March 9 Hotfix Notes after the jump…
Xelgad has posted that bugs with the AA abilities Luck of the Dirge, Cleansing of the Soul (Templar), Poison Mastery (Assassin), Killing Fury (Assassin), Shadow Step (Assassin), have been fixed internally and should be hotfixed on March 4th.
There were some additional issues with the EQ2 servers today. The servers were set to come down for a hotfix, then that hotfix was delayed, but the automated scripts in place to prepare for a Hotfix continued. This resulted in there being no way to create new instances (visit dungeons, guild halls, cities, etc.). From Rothgar: Due to an unrelated network issue this morning, the hotfix was not able to happen at the normal time. Since the servers were scheduled to come down but never did, this caused new instances to not be created. This is normal procedure for...
Battlegrounds Issues Battlegrounds were taken offline last night due to zoning problems they seemed to be causing on other servers. I want to reiterate that in thousands of Battlegrounds transactions, only a handful of players experienced corruption of their characters, and those are being resolved quickly by Customer Service. Battlegrounds should be brought back online today with Rothgar and other devs closely watching their performance. EQ2Wire On the Road EQ2Wire will be on the road today and tomorrow so updates may be a bit slower than usual. Here are your March 2, 2010 Hotfix notes (after the jump)
It seems there were some instability issues with the Login servers this morning. Players currently logged into their various servers are able to stay logged in, but players wanting to login cannot. No servers are reported as down according to the Network Status page. We do not yet have today’s Hotfix notes, however players are reporting that Marks of Manaar (the new SF heroic gear shards) are dropping again from enemies in SF dungeons. We’ve now heard word (EQ2 Forums) about the the repeatable faction quests in The Hole not granting any XP. The XP these quests produce has...
From Rothgar on EQ2 Forums: Customer Service has made these petitions their highest priority and they are restoring players as fast as they can. In the meantime, Battlegrounds is working fine now. It only took a few minutes this morning to bring them down after the problem, fix the configs and bring them back up. CS is also manually restoring your XP and AA’s rather than doing a rollback of your character. So you should be safe to continue playing while you wait for them to answer your petition.
When the expansion launched, tinkerers (and others) noticed that Tinkering Blueprints for the expansion were not dropping. This has now been resolved with today’s hotfix.
As of 12:40pm PST From Kiara: EU servers are now up. The BG’s have not been enabled for any of the international servers, due to the database issue. We’ll let you know when they will be available. Thank you for your patience today, we appreciate it.
US Servers are unlocked and Battlegrounds are now live. EU Servers still have approximately 1 hour of downtime remaining. For more info on Battlegrounds: EQ2Wire Battlegrounds Strategy Guide and Battlegrounds @ EQ2Players
Here are your Hotfix Notes for February 25th, after the jump..
If you read our coverage of Game Update 55 including Consolidated Stats and Primary Stat Changes and have checked out the EQ2Wire Mega-FAQ, you’re probably fully up to speed on the changes to Stats, Stat Consolidation, etc. But if not, or you want to hear it from the source, timetravelling has posted a thread which covers these topics. He’s received several questions after the fact, so it’s likely that his writeup will continue to evolve.
Rothgar is looking for your feedback on some planned changes for Macros to improve server performance.
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...
Server downtimes have been announced for both Wednesday, February 24th, and Thursday, February 25th.
Players who do all of their gameplay on Test (and work hard to find and report any bugs they find) were rather concerned about the idea that Test would be down for “a couple of days”. Fortunately, Windslasher has reported in: Test is now unlocked. Thanks for waiting! Glip the Gnome also chimed in: The Test Server is open and ready for business. We just wanted to be super careful that the potential corruption issue relating to battlegrounds affected as few characters as possible. Antonia Bayle, Bazaar, and Sebilis came up after approximately 3 1/2 hours. We’ll see a...
All EQ2 servers are back up after today’s hotfix, with the exception of Antonia Bayle, Bazaar and Sebilis which will remain down for some additional maintenance as announced yesterday. Test came down for a few hours as well.
Here are you February 23 Hotfix Notes: GENERAL Ole’ Man Silvers should be willing to talk to you now. Players who have lost or dropped their Huge Tiger Claws for the quest “Justice for Jojo” can loot another pair. TRADESKILLS The rare 10 quicksilver +1 rare harvest from gem nodes in Odus is now awarding kaborite instead of ulteran diamond as the rare.