From the EQ2 Forums:

Looking for an experience boost or maybe another character slot? Move that alt you’ve been sitting on to another server. Get a discount for a short time only beginning September 11th and ending September 15th!

As a result of the recent SOE layoffs which saw the departure of long-time Community Managers Virrago and Zatozia, there has been some reshuffling of responsibilities. Among these changes, Tony “RadarX“ assumes the role of EQ2 Community Manager. Here’s his introductory post on the EQ2 Forums:

The position of Community Manager for EverQuest II has a proud tradition with some great folks who have the opportunity to interact with a passionate community. This week marks the “changing of the guard” for a few communities and I’ll be replacing Dexella here on EQII. No she isn’t gone or critically injured, although if she keeps drawing on my whiteboard I can’t guarantee that. Amnerys will also be working with some of our other communities from here on out. And she hasn’t drawn on my whiteboard yet, so she’s probably safer than Dex…

So, who am I? I’ve been with the SOE Community Team for a little more than 4 years. In that time, I worked on the launch of DC Universe Online, PlanetSide 2, and half a dozen other various game titles. Before that I spent a number of years writing for MMO games media. Before that, believe it or not, I was an EverQuest II player. This is the game that drove me into this industry, so it’s got a special place in my heart.

It’s a pretty exciting time for the game right now with Tears of Veeshan coming soon, and I look forward to sharing that experience with all of you. I’ll be around asking questions and providing what answers I can, so I look forward to talking with all of you in the near future.

Players trying to login to EQ2 for the last 3 hours are receiving this error:

Login rejected: The client’s version does not match the server’s. Please re-run the patcher.

This is being discussed in these threads:

• https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/index.php?threads/server-downtime-notice-tuesday-september-10-2013.539333/
• https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/index.php?threads/login-rejected.539348/
  
• https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/index.php?threads/login-servers-down.539342/

From Piestro at 9:45am PDT:

We’re currently involved in investigating the causes of this issue, and will do our best to update you when we have more information.

From RadarX at 10:13am PDT:

We are currently looking into an issue with the patch and will update this thread as we have more information. Thanks for your patience!

and:

We understand the frustration and folks are working on it as quickly as possible but let’s keep it constructive please.

as of 10:48Am PDT:

The issue should be resolved and players able to download the update. Please let us know if you continue to see issues.

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Siren’s Grotto: Dissension

• Pysllon’Ris’ abyssal titan and kelp fiend adds have had their health reduced by 30%.
• Pysllon’Ris’ abyssal titan and kelp fiend adds should no longer automatically kill certain classes.

ABILITIES / ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENT

• It is now possible to cast abilities whose mana costs have been reduced to zero (either via AAs, the Enchanter ability “Channeled Focus”, or similar modifications) when the caster has zero mana.

ITEMS

• [eq2u]Swallowed Helmsman’s Compass Needle[/eq2u] has been returned to its correct stats.
• The potency on Perpetual Lamentation now properly stacks with other effects.
• The potency on Enduring Temperance now properly stacks with other effects.
• The crit bonus and health on Scrutiny of the Hounds now stacks with other effects.

PLAYER HOUSING

• Players should no longer incorrectly receive messages when paying upkeep on houses with personal housing depots.

DEPOTS

• Hide Unusable functionality has been added to the Lore & Legend Depot window.

From the EQ2 Forums (emphasis added by me):

Mighty Norrathians!

Since SOE Live and Game Update 67: Darkness Dawns there’s been a lot of focus and excitement here about Heroic Characters and this year’s expansion, Tears of Veeshan. We’re well on our way and working hard!

To begin with, we have some date adjustments. Our expansion launch date has moved out a bit to mid-November and our Level 85 Heroic Characters are likely coming in the first week of October.

We got some great feedback on Heroic Characters and we wanted to polish it up to make it more user-friendly before we launch! We are still working on fine-tuning the details and I will have more info soon, I promise. Until we nail it down, I don’t want to throw misinformation about.

The introduction of Heroic Characters also made us change a few other things, like including EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious zones into the Free and Silver account access so Heroic Characters have a place to play! And while we are still going to offer theEverQuest II: Age of Discovery expansion, we will also sell the features individually, including the Beastlord class, Mercenaries, Dungeon Maker, Reforging, and Tradeskill Apprentices. We’re still working on pricing and have some other cool things in progress we’ll announce shortly.

Our 10th expansion, EverQuest II: Tears of Veeshan, is getting closer to Beta. This team is putting together an expansion that will be something special! The overland — Vesspyr Isles, the Eternal Broodlands — is really amazing. Flying through it is incredible with more and more variety and flavor every day. The dungeons are coming together beautifully and the content is too! We appreciate all the feedback we got during SOE Live and are grateful for all the playtests of the Channeler class. We are putting final touches on that too.

When Beta opens on Oct. 15, we hope you’ll come take a look at Tears of Veeshan and give us feedback!

There will be lots more to come so you’ll be hearing from me sooner ™ rather than later!

Holly Longdale
Senior Producer
EverQuest II

From the EQ2 Forums:

TRADESKILLS

• When commission crafting helms of Psionic Shielding the crafter should no longer be able to use their components in place of the commissioner’s materials.

QUESTS

• Corrected an issue where the visual and audio notifications for quest updates would not trigger.

There could be a hidden danger lurking on your character…

A tragic mistake that could be costing your character dearly…

CONFLICTING PROCS !

Many Procs/Effects in EQ2 will not stack with other procs of the same name (or same type) on other items or adornments. In the past, it has been difficult to find out if you have two or more of these overlapping procs/effects which aren’t giving you any additional benefit.

EQ2U‘s new Procs & Adornments Report feature lets you see at-a-glance, which Procs you have (both on items and adornments), as well browse your complete Adornments list. In both views, the columns are clickable, allowing you to sort by different data points.

NOTE: Sometimes procs can conflict even though they have entirely different names. This is something that is intended to be cleaned up in the expansion, with all procs of the same “family” being labeled the same name, with roman numerals indicating power.

after the jump, a few words about the future…

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale‘s twitter:

Double XP Weekend starts tonight at 5pm through Monday at midnight PDT! #EQ2

— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) August 29, 2013

Time Zone Conversions

• PDT: Thu Aug 29 @ 5:00pm ~ Mon, Sep 2 @ 11:59pm
• EDT: Thu Aug 29 @ 8:00pm ~ Tue, Sep 3 @ 2:59am
• BST: Fri Aug 29 @ 1:00 ~ Tue, Sep 3 @ 7:59
• CET: Fri Aug 30 @ 2:00 ~ Tue, Sep 3 @ 8:59
• AEST: Fri Aug 29 @ 10:00am ~ Tue, Sep 3 @ 4:59pm

Update with official announcement:

In EverQuest, enjoy Double XP beginning at 5:00pm PDT on Thursday, August 29, through 11:59pm PDT on Monday, September 2, 2013.

EverQuest II players can take advantage of Double Adventure, Tradeskill, AA, and Guild XP from 5:00pm Thursday, August 29, through 11:59pm PDT on Monday, September 2, 2013.

Legends of Norrath will also offer Double XP, from Friday, August 30th at 10am through Tuesday, Sept. 3rd at 10am. Look for the achievements shown in blue in the Loremaster listing on your Profile page to see which ones qualify.

From Polygon.com:

In a company-wide email that was forwarded to Polygon, Sony Online president John Smedley expressed intense distaste for having to lay off employees, calling it a “horrible, sickening experience.” According to Smedley, while many of the company’s games are performing well, layoffs were necessary to bring expenses in line with revenue.

“For the past year we’ve done everything possible to avoid this situation,” said Smedley. “We rightfully should have done this nearly a year ago but we have been fighting very hard to keep this from happening.”

“I know most of the people we’re laying off today. Some of them have been with us here since the beginning. None of them deserved this,” he said. “Our goal as a company needs to be to make incredible games and grow again so we can bring our friends back.”

After a hard-fought public relations battle, players in France, Germany, and other European countries were allowed to continue playing EverQuest II with their SOE/Station accounts. However that may be a Pyrrhic victory, as it has always been SOE’s intention to hand off support in these other languages to ProSiebenSat.1.

Today comes the announcement that the French, German, and Japanese EQ2 official forums are being shut down. Players needing support in French or German will need to reach out to other players, seek help on Wikis or other forums, or attempt to find help on the Pro7Sat.1 forums. As for Japan, I’m not aware of an official SOE partner there.

That these announcements are in English tells you all you really need to know:

Greetings,

Due to very low volume of usage we have made the decision to close down the International Forums. Please feel free to join us on the English language forums.

Respectfully,
Eric “Piestro” Cleaver

From Linda “Brasse” Carlson on the EQ2 Forums:

Today we announced a reduction in our workforce at SOE. As a company, our goal is to focus on our core expertise of MMO games and as part of these efforts, we had to make the difficult decision to eliminate positions to help reduce costs, streamline our employee base and strategically align resources towards our current portfolio of games and upcoming slate of MMOs, including EverQuest Next Landmark and EverQuest Next. We deeply value our employees and are grateful for all they’ve contributed to our company and games. They will be missed by colleagues and friends, and we wish them well in the future.

Out of respect for our employees, we request that you do not discuss personnel matters on our forums. Thank you for your understanding.

UPDATE

Carlos “Gninja” Mora confirmed on his Facebook page that he is no longer employed at SOE.

Thank you everyone for the kind words. Everyone who knows me knows how much I loved EQ2 as a game and as a passion. I wish everyone there good luck and I hope it keeps going for many many years to come. Love you guys!

UPDATE from John Smedley

🙁 sorry to say that we did have layoffs. We’re still moving forward with all our current games and games in development

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 28, 2013

including Everquest Next and other unannounced titles. The people who got laid off are very good people. Very sorry this happened 🙁

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 28, 2013

layoffs suck. these are really, really good people who don’t deserve this.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 28, 2013

UPDATE

We’re still here… so many others are now not.

— Aaron Bisnett (@Gnobrin) August 28, 2013

UPDATE

From GamesRadar.com:

SOE confirmed to Gamasutra that positions in both its San Diego and Austin offices were eliminated. Smedley later tweeted that the development of PlanetSide 2 won’t be affected. That means SOE’s slate of older titles–such as Everquest 2 and Free Realms–may be left to feel the cuts.

Numbers

We now have 3 separate sources confirming that the total number of SOE employess affected by today’s layoffs is at least 70 and could top out at 90.

UPDATE from Brasse

Late last night, Linda “Brasse” Carlson added this to her Facebook:

Players are our extended family. This means today’s layoffs have hit a LOT of people hard.

While I cannot answer all your questions, John Smedley has posted a fair bit to reddit on the topic today and he CAN give more info than I. Who better to make comments than the man we follow? He is one of the most honest execs in gaming and that is one of the reasons why I wanted to join SOE in the first place. Go ahead, give his comments a read.

http://www.reddit.com/user/j_smedley

Let us give our departed colleagues some space, and the long weekend to reflect and look ahead. Believe me, we are ALL doing everything we can to help them, from the top down.
Thank you for all the employment links you’ve forwarded today. New beginnings are scary as hell, but often lead to amazing futures. We live in a very fortunate country.

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Siren’s Grotto: Dissension [Raid]

• During the Hydra fight mages & priests can now damage the kelp fiend adds, while fighters/priests and scouts can damage the abyssal titan adds.

The Fabled Djinn Master’s Prism

• The Djinn Master now allows multiple scepters to be active during his fight. He will no longer ignore scepter effect when it is on more than one player.

ITEMS

• Level 90+ regenerating ward adornments will now disable if the owner mentors below level 90.

A curious tweet from Holly “Windstalker” Longdale last night has us wondering…

@diverscuba23 details coming this week! We are working out those things. Trying an 85 will definitely be free.

— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) August 26, 2013

You’ve likely heard whispers of just how powerful Refined and Experimented items can be, but until you’ve seen the final “as delivered” stats on the best examples of said items, either in a screenshot, or by examining another player in-game, it’s hard to know just how awesome these processes are.

A Refining/Experimentation Primer

If you grasped everything in Niami‘s EQ2Traders primer on the subject back when the Chains of Eternity expansion was new, then you already know the how-to and formulas at work here, but if not…

• A Refined item is a Mastercrafted weapon, armor, or piece of jewelry which has been created using a Purified rare. Instead of just crafting an item with an [eq2u]osmium cluster[/eq2u], if you first refine that rare into a [eq2u]purified osmium cluster[/eq2u]. When you then craft the item with this improved rare, nearly all of the item’s stats will be increased by 10%. A few stats are only improved by 5%, and others aren’t impacted at all. View a complete list of Refined stats.

• Meanwhile, Experimentation allows a skilled crafter to “boost” or increase a chosen stat on a crafted item. Experimented items gain a name “prefix” which changes with each experiment, with 5 successful experiments granting a prefix of “Visionary”. Boosting a single stat once increases it by 10%, but if you boost the same stat multiple times, you receive diminishing returns. Boosting the same stat sees an increase of 10%, 15%, 17.5%, 18.5%, and, at the max, 19% (10+5+2.5+1+0.5). Suffice it to say, most people spread their boosts around rather than stacking them all into a single stat.

To know just how powerful Refining, Reforging, and Experimentation can be, one need look no further than top tier raid guilds who, until they acquire their Plane of War mythical cloaks, often wear these Experimented/Refined/Reforged crafted cloaks to the exclusion of most other dropped cloaks.

From Holly Windstalker Longdale‘s twitter:

Doing some usability testing on heroic characters tomorrow to help define some features. More news to come soon! I promise! #EQ2

— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) August 23, 2013

We’ll be using a snowy pegasus flying mount for the Heroic Characters! #EQ2 pic.twitter.com/NOg7sOTDTw

— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) August 23, 2013

What we know about Heroic Characters or Insta-85’s:

• Create a Character at level 85
• Free (not StationCash)
• An AA profile will be pre-selected for the character
• Hotbars will be pre-arranged/setup
• Exclusive Class-Specific armor set
• You will get a flying mount (as shown above)
• This is primarily a Winback program to attract veteran players.

What we don’t know:

• How many AAs you will start with.
• If anyone can create a Heroic character, and how many can be created.

Join members of the EverQuest II Art & Animation team including Tim “Haohmaru” Heydelaar, Tom Tobey, Dave “Covic” Brown, and Aaron “Gnobrin” Bisnett as they talk about what it takes to create new zones, characters, and weapons for EverQuest II, as well as previews of upcoming zones and artwork!

This video includes:

• a detailed reveal of the reimagined Bixie characters
• a behind-the-scenes look as the team at first worked towards a different visual approach for Siren’s Grotto before building what was eventually delivered
• flythroughs of upcoming Highkeep, Temple of Veeshan, and Nexus zones in EverQuest II’s 10th expansion: Tears of Veeshan
• a zany Fun with Art segment with Tom Tobey showcaseing some of the key animations we’ve gotten in EQ2 this year
• a sneak peek at content for 2014 (dinosaurs!)
• the exciting new Terrain Editor!

NOTE: Silence in the first 1-2 minutes of the video, followed by frantic tripod setup noise for another minute is perfectly normal.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Dethdlr and I are thrilled to introduce support for Alternate Advancement Profiles to EQ2U. The new row of buttons just above your AA tabs let you view your Current AA Spec or view the contents of one of your three Stored profiles:

It’s important to note that your Current AA Spec can either be one of your Stored AA profiles, or a Server-defined Template. It is our intention in a future update (once we get the right data) to light up your currently active Stored profile once we can determine it.

From the EQ2 Forums:

In this Marketplace update, we have a couple terrific new Nightborne weapons designed by Player Studio artist Albert Soto Jr.

In addition to the new Player Studio items added to the Marketplace today, we are reintroducing the Equipment Unlocker Pack to the Marketplace for 150 Station Cash. Each Equipment Unlocker Pack can unlock five pieces of equipment that normally cannot be equipped due to account level restrictions. The goal of reintroducing this item to the Marketplace is to make things easier for our players that want to unlock specific pieces of equipment for their characters, or players that want to gift Equipment Unlockers to their friends!

Players can also get individual Unlock Equipment Items from the Marketplace for 40 SC each.

  

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION

Cobalt Scar

• Yeppa’s Last Stand: The othmir have moved their tradeskill forge to a less exposed location.

CHARACTER ACHIEVEMENT TEMPLATES

• Auto-consume items will now auto-consume after the AA Template is committed.

PLAYER HOUSING

• Mannequins: Resolved an issue where a player would be unable to select an outfit for a hireling after moving items between houses.

TRADESKILLS

• The Hydra Helm recipes can no longer benefit from material conservation effects.

ITEMS

• Dawnbreak should proc much more reliably.

Join lead artists from Sony Online Entertainment including Tim “Haohmaru” Heydelaar (EQ2), David “Covic” Brown (EQ2), Kevin Lydy (EQ), and Tramell “T.Ray” Isaac (PS2) as they talk about the Player Studio program with Director of Artistic Development Joe “Rystall” Shoopack and Player Studio head Rick “Storn” Reynolds.

They walk through the item submission and approval process, including iterations and common choke points as first drafts become fantastic items that are successful and profitable for players and SOE alike.

NOTE: This video does not include the brief Powerpoint presentation shown at the beginning of the panel, which highlighted the winner of the Dark Elf Player Studio competition.

UPDATE: We are sorry to report that, due to some detective work and communication with Ms. Masson’s parents, her disappearance fits a known pattern of behavior and illness. At this time, the chances that she is “missing” are extremely remote. It’s very disappointing to hear just how much time was wasted by police, her guildmates, and friends trying to find someone who, it turns out, didn’t want to be found. Read more here.

Join members of the EverQuest II team including Michael “Xelgad” Ganz, Brian “Omougi” Ferguson, Nandy “Zoltaroth” Szots, and Kyle “Kander” Vallée as they talk about their comprehensive plan to make Itemization awesome again in EQ2.

Watch the EverQuest II: Itemization Evolves panel recorded on Friday, August 2nd at SOE Live 2013!

From the EQ2 Forums:

ABILITIES / ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENT

• Fixed an issue related to Wards.

Why do I get the impression this is a fix for unintended behavior?

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale‘s twitter:

We are doing another hotfix tomorrow morning (sorry all!) to fix an issue. 🙁 #eq2

— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) August 8, 2013