Feldon
I’ve finally managed to escape Charles de Gaulle airport which completely ground to a halt due to 3 inches (7cm) of snow. Meanwhile, our SAS pilot made a perfect landing in near whiteout conditions with heavy snowfall on a runway and at an airport positively blanketed with snow. Ah… Copenhagen… 😉 Anyway, ’bout those server merges…
EQ2
Dethdlr
Here are your update notes for December 21, 2010: GENERAL This year you can support the Child’s Play charity by purchasing the new Cloak of the Snowfall from the Station Marketplace! ITEMS Auto-consumed items such as the server merge titles will now be consumed on login if they were added while the player was offline. AMENITES Research Assistant amenities can no longer be purchased in a guild hall.
The latest from Rothgar on the merge: Oasis should be unlocking now. 8 hours ahead of schedule isn’t bad!
Here’s the latest update from Rothgar: Update: Both merges are still going great, no issues so far. We hope to have the chat portion of the merge done in 2 or 3 hours. FYI, this will be the last merge of the year. Update from Rothgar as of 1:49pm PST: Update: We’re ahead of schedule on the merges today. Chat should be back up any minute now and the servers are being QA’d as we speak. Hopefully if there are no QA issues we will have the servers unlocked in an hour or two. Also, if you happen to...
Befallen/Oasis and Nektulos/Guk (BONG for short 😉 ) Server Merges are underway. From Rothgar: Everything is going great on merge 1. Set to begin merge 2 in 20 minutes. Everything is still on schedule. I’ll update again in the morning. Our updates will be spotty as I was affected by airport weather delays. Best of luck to Rothgar, Zoltaroth, and all merging players. 🙂
Those servers which have completed their merges are experiencing crowding in main chat channels, specifically 1-9 and auction. Fortunately, some adjustments are being made to resolve the matter. From Zoltaroth: We are looking into increasing the channel limits. and later: We have identified the issue and are working on a fix. Barring any other major news, we’ll be rather content-light until just prior to Sunday night’s server merges. Just got back from the Eiffel Tower. Peace. 🙂
Latest update from Zoltaroth: Update: Butcherblock should be open within the next 15 minutes. Permafrost is going into QA. Also, I can personally confirm that Butcherblock is in fact back online right this second. I’m logged in and checking out the new digs. 🙂 And this in as well from Zoltaroth: We are opening up Permafrost now. And we have confirmation from Quesera in the comments that Permafrost is up.
From the EQ2 Forums: Butcherblock looks good so far. QA is still working on it but no major issues yet. Permafrost is almost ready to come up for QA testing as well. All in all we are ahead of schedule and everything is looking good.
From Zoltaroth: We are bringing up BB shortly, once it is up QA will be doing their testing so if that goes well it should be open in a few hours. Permafrost is waiting on Chat server meges to complete we expect about 3pm for that to be done.
Here’s our latest update from Rothgar: Both merges are still on track and actually running a little ahead of schedule. However, we can’t start QA until we have the chat merge done. I’ll be out of the office soon so I’ll see if Zoltaroth can keep you guys updated.
Looking for something to do while the servers are being merged? Check out Rothgar’s Christmas Lights! Today he added “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey. Watch the new one and the original four videos in the original article posted here.
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: The merges are still going fine. The chat/mail portion of the merge is a little behind schedule unfortunately so chat may be down longer than expected. I’ll try to provide an ETA later today.
From Rothgar: Update: So far everything is still on schedule. Chat is due to come down in about an hour so we can move mail and friends lists.
The Kithicor/Butcherblock and Mistmoore/Permafrost Server Merges are now underway and you may be wondering if these mergers will lead to more zone lag when the Destiny of Velious expansion launches. Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: The existing hardware should handle it fine. The merges will actually improve the performance by consolidating zones and making the hardware more efficient. There’s still the possibility of some lag because most of the population will congregate in the new zones, but we will do our best to adjust population limits to keep lag to a minimum. With the last expansion we had issues...
If you are finding yourself at the Character Select screen with duplicate characters or characters still indicating they exist on a server which has been merged, Rothgar offers this advice: There’s a file on your hard drive that keeps a cache of your characters so the client doesn’t have to query the server each time. If you delete your “cache” and “logincache” directories, it should clean them up.
Believe it or not SmokeJumper posted a bit about Game Update 60, which will be anywhere from 1-3 months after the Destiny of Velious expansion launches. It’s expected to have some Battlegrounds and PvP tweaks. His post also talks about EQ2X marketing and EQ2X PvP servers: Answers (but you might not like them): 1) We haven’t started spending marketing cash for Extended yet. That’s slated for January. The reason I bring that up is until we bring more people into Extended, we have no plans to open up a PvP server because too many servers dilutes the population and...
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: I just wanted to post another update and post-mortem for the Unrest merge explaining a few of the issues that occurred.
If you have been paying for EQ2 with 30-day subscription cards rather than keeping a credit card on file at SOE, you were probably surprised to find that you might not get the December, January, and February rewards. Fortunately, Amnerys has jumped on this issue before it got too far out of hand and gotten this response: Hey everyone! Checking in to clear up a few questions about today’s rewards. 1. Everyone who is actively subscribed and in good standing will be getting the rewards, including folks who pay with game cards. 2. We just started running the process...
SmokeJumper has posted a message regarding Server Merges: Hey, folks, We’ve been posting information about the downtimes, and Rothgar has been pretty cool about talking about the issues and such, but we haven’t made an official posting. So here goes: 1) The pain is short-term. The merges are being done to make the EQII Live gaming experiences better. I think most folks agree that higher populations make better gaming, so we’re doing the merges for that reason. And we’re working hard to get most of them done *before* the holiday break.
Here are your hotfix notes for December 15 2010: LIVE EVENTS Frostfell Tuwasp bixies in Greater Faydark are now the target for the level 5, Kelethin version of Gh’lad Tydingz’s quest, “A Gigglegibber’s work is never done.” Grikbar scamps in Steamfont Mountains should once again advance the level 35, Kelethin version of Gh’lad Tydingz’s quest, “A Gigglegibber’s work is never done.”
From EverQuest2.com: On Wednesday, December 15, qualifying EQII and EQ2X accounts who have met the requirements for Velious Winter Rewards will find a new bag in their /claim window which contains two new items; a Coldain Butler and a Scars of Velious in-game painting. Photos and Details after the jump.
Update: Unrest is now online! Unrest is undergoing final testing after a followup 1 hour maintenance was required beyond the Server Merge to fix some broker and other issues. Once it’s back up, we hope Rothgar and Zoltaroth will drive safe and get some sleep (I recommend blackout curtains, they’re a staple here in Denmark) and we’ll see you back in a few hours for 2 more mergers. 😉
Tonight, Kithicor, Butcherblock, Mistmoore, and Permafrost all go under the Server Merge knife, so this means all servers will experience some loss of Chat functionality, in-game Mail, and Friends lists. On the Najena -> Unrest merge, this worked out to about 12 hours, so we expect that tomorrow, there will be 12-14 hours of these features being unavailable on ALL servers during the heart of the merge window.
If you are on Splitpaw or Runnyeye, Innovation or Valor, Rothgar has provided the reasoning for why your server merges are delayed until after the new year: The EU servers need database upgrades and these have to happen before we do the merge. [Further] we take holidays here in the U.S. too and many people will be gone starting next week. We have a company wide “freeze” near the end of December where we don’t do any major maintenance or hardware work so as not to risk outtages for the holiday when people are on vacation. We’re already pushing...
Rothgar has posted some issues regarding Keymapping, Guild Hall Beacons (call of Guild Hall) and housing and guild halls to be aware of once the servers come back up.