Feldon
From Zoltaroth on the EQ2 Forums: We are working on the memory issues, though they are not memory leaks. There was actually a change that went live on Tuesday that should help with the memory footprint increase we saw with AoD. There are some other fixes as well still in the pipeline. Pathing should be coming to live fairly soon. It was enabled on test for certain zones but not all zones had the new pathing built for them yet. There were also some issues we found on test that we want to fix before it goes live. They...
EQ2
While the EQ2 team continues to test allowing players to use their regular characters in Dungeon Maker dungeons, additional changes are planned to make Avatars (nee Adventurers) more interesting and dynamic. Recently, a new mechanic for Avatars went to Test, namely a “power” bar which can be built up to unlock more powerful abilities. At first, we compared it to the Beastlord Savagery bar, but Testers universally knocked this analogy, with less favorable comparisons. In light of this reaction, Lyndro has indicated that existing Avatars won’t be changed to the new system — instead, a new line of Avatars...
Several months ago, Dethdlr and I were put in touch with SOE’s Platform and Game teams (including Dan Kinney and Nandor “Zoltaroth” Szots) about a new Data Feeds API that would allow websites to access the same kind of Character, Guild, and Item data which has traditionally been available on EQ2Players. We have been testing, giving feedback, and developing on this new API since the moment it was available. It’s been a long haul to say the least, but Dethdlr and I have been blown away by how receptive and motivated the folks at SOE have been towards allowing...
From the EQ2 Forums: The Beta version of the new and improved EQ2 Players site is nearly ready to launch! Join host Linda “Brasse” Carlson as she sits down with SOE’s Clif Bate (Director of Commerce Services & Web Presence) and Abby Watt (Associate Web Producer) to get a sneak peek at what we’ve been working on. Join us on Thursday, February 9, 2012, at 4:30 p.m. US Pacific Time* on Twitch TV! The webcast is expected to last about 20 minutes. If you have questions you’d like to see answered, Brasse will be collecting them from this thread....
As we reported last night, Dungeon Maker Avatars (the limited NPCs we’re supposed to ‘drive’ through player-made dungeons) will be getting a new mechanic where combat builds power, which unlocks more powerful abilities, akin to the Savagery and Primal abilities introduced with Beastlords. From Bunji on the EQ2 Forums: Hello Testers! Changes to the Dungeon Maker Avatars are headed to test and we definitely want your feedback! Please feel free to post bug reports and feedback in this thread, though remember that you can also /feedback and /bug. As for the changes, our goal has been to improve the...
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: Hey folks, Lots of you know Rothgar (Greg Spence) who has been the Lead Programmer for the last few years on EQII. Well, he’s moving over to “EverQuest Next” now to help us move that game along, and Zoltaroth (Nandor Szots) is taking the reins. Zoltaroth has been a Sr. Programmer on EQII for years now also and the transition has been completely seamless, mostly because Nandy and Greg have been a team for a long time now and they both know everything there is to know about the code base. We’re looking...
From EverQuest2.com: We will perform maintenance that will affect account management and commerce transactions beginning at 7:00 AM Pacific* on February 8, 2012.
After getting called to the carpet for a revised Game Update schedule that won’t see new level 90 content coming to EQ2 until April, nearly 9 months since last year’s Game Update 61, SOE has laid out a gameplan for February events. From EverQuest2.com: February Publish Plans – More to Play, Your Way! February is here already, and the team is hard at work on Game Update 63! We’ll have some “behind the scenes” videos for you in the coming weeks to give you a sneak peek at the art of some of the exciting new zones coming up,...
From EverQuest2.com: GENERAL You can now access your mail without a mailbox! You can either click the mail buff in your buff window, select mail from the EQ2 menu, or use the /start_mail command! (NOTE: You will only be able to send and receive items and coin by actually clicking on a mailbox in the world.) ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Tallon’s Stronghold [Challenge] Players have more time to defeat Decorin Deathbringer in the Tallon Zek fight before Tallon empowers him. Vallon’s Tower [Challenge] Players have more time to defeat Kulaxis in the Vallon Zek fight before Vallon empowers him.
We’re not sure what’s going on, but the DNS servers that drive everything under station.sony.com seem to have forgotten that they’re supposed to be doing something. A post has just appeared on Twitter/Facebook which suggests maintenance tomorrow: Account management, Commerce transactions, In-game marketplaces, forums and login will be impacted on Feb 8 from 7-8:30 Pacific Time [Ashlanne] Maintenance Notice: Wednesday, February 8, 2012 forums.station.sony.com Important: We will perform maintenance beginning at 7:00 AM Pacific* on February 8, 2012. This will impact the following services: UPDATE: [SOE-MOD 02] Todays issue is something different then the planned downtime for tomorrow. It...
From EverQuest2.com: Oasis will be undergoing maintenance beginning at 12:00 AM Pacific* on February 7, 2012. We expect this downtime to last for approximately 18 hours. (Updated to extend by 6 hours, due to unexpected delays.)Chat will also be down for the Freeport server during this time. We apologize for this interruption and will bring the servers back online as soon as the maintenance is completed. Also, we have noticed some problems with forum logins which may be related.
Last week the news broke that Holly Longdale, who previously developed for the original EverQuest was returning to SOE to take the role of Senior Producer of EverQuest II. We were, of course, curious what her background and approach to game design might be. Fortunately the answer to some of those questions fell into our lap when we discovered Kwill, occasional EQ2Wire scribe, had interviewed her in 2006. The interview focuses almost entirely on the design and development of specific zones and dungeons, so it will be interesting to see what her high level outlook on the game and...
At last year’s Fan Faire, Leko, champion of PvP balance, stood up after Mercenaries were announced and asked “Will Mercenaries work in PvP?” and then a series of questions about how they would be balanced, tested, etc. Well…better late than never. 🙂 From Gninja: While I can’t really address everything being said in this post right now I can say we have been taking a look and we have a plan on how to make mercs not quite as overpowered in PVP combat as they are currently. Once we get the fix in place and we can accurately test...
The announced removal of Critical Mitigation will coincide with the conversion of Yellow and Red Crit Mit adornments into Health adornments. So why will the replacement adornments have less Health (less than 250 points each) than White health adornments? According to Omougi, it’s because the EQ2 team thinks we should have other viable choices, like DPS. Adornments should be about choice! From Omougi on the EQ2 Forums: Our goal with these adornment and spell conversions is to give you guys something in the place of nothing essentially. Before, you were playing a zero-sum game if you had enough crit...
From Silius on the EQ2 Forums: Just to clarify some confusion. Crit mit as a mechanic is being removed. NPC crit bonus was countered by crit mit and we are reducing crit bonus to 0 across the board. Critical avoidance is staying around. Critical avoidance is an NPCs way of contesting your chance to critically hit them. Replacing the adornments with HP is not to compensate for anything. Since the critical mitgiation stat is no longer useful we are converting to a stat that benefits all players. The goal is for this change to not change the difficulty of...
A funny thing happened when I was chatting with some folks about today’s news of Critical Mitigation being completely removed from EQ2. A few of them were surprised when I reminded them that Crit Mit has been part of EQ2 for over 3 years. Critical Mitigation was introduced in November 2008 with The Shadow Odyssey expansion. At first, it played no part in solo quests or group zones, thus many people weren’t even aware of it at the time. But anyone who was into raiding x4 (24 person) zones, and later, Ward of Elements x2 raids, has been collecting...
In what may go down as the best decision in EQ2 history, or a total overreaction to a problem that could have been solved with a 15-20% reduction across the board, Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has announced that in the very near future, the Critical Mitigation stat will be COMPLETELY GOING AWAY. First introduced in The Shadow Odyssey, greatly expanded in Sentinel’s Fate, and then becoming the most important stat within Destiny of Velious as an alternative form of progression to raising the level cap (which is technologically challenging), here’s the announcement of this revelation from the EQ2 Forums: We’ve...
A selection of Velious raid mobs have been doubling up on Area-of-Effect attacks since the expansion’s launch nearly one year ago. Atan (of Unrest) summed up the issues: Condition 1: Modifieable timers line up such that a mob casts 2 different abilities simultaneously. Condition 2: Ability that normally comes ever 40 seconds comes twice in a row with no delay. Seems they are both bugs to me, but condition 1 is probably just a result of your design. Maevianiu is getting serious about addressing the AoE double-casting by raid mobs in Velious raid zones and had these responses: I...
Here are your Update Notes for January 31, 2012: GENERAL Fixed a bug where some characters wouldn’t show on character select. ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Tower of Frozen Shadow (Raid) Tserrina’s spell “Wing Buffet” should no longer cause priests to become knocked back. Adds spawned from shadow doors should no longer spawn quite as quickly. The number of adds that spawn from shadow doors has been slightly reduced. Tower of Frozen Shadow: Umbral Halls Demanti Sheda should no longer have issues resetting his encounter. Demanti Sheda’s spell “Paralyzing Fear” should now stun instead of fearing and has been reduced...
We reported last week on the double-casting of AoEs by Destiny of Velious HM (hard mode) raid targets, making many fights either nearly impossible, or requiring exceptional luck. According to Kander, this is now being looked at: It is definitely a bug and we definitely intend to fix it. We have code looking at it right now. Meanwhile, Gninja remains our point man on all things Mercenaries. At the prodding of players, he has nailed down some issues, first with Defiler mercs not taking advantage of wards: Took a look at this. It seems they are still warding but...
From EverQuest2.com: Crushbone and Permafrost will be undergoing maintenance beginning at 4:00 AM Pacific* on January 31, 2012. We expect this downtime to last for approximately 8 hours.Chat will also be down for the Freeport and Oasis servers during this time. We apologize for this interruption and will bring the servers back online as soon as the maintenance is completed. Time Zone Conversions PST: 4:00am-noon EST: 7:00am-3:00pm GMT: 12:00-20:00 CET: 13:00-21:00
Last week, MMORPG posted an interview with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson. The article is a bit light on revelations and threw a few softballs like “The Dungeon Maker is a brilliant addition to the game. Can we expect more functionality now that it seems like the community loves the feature so much?” , it could still be an interesting read, especially players looking for any scrap of information about the upcoming fourth game in the EverQuest franchise (you didn’t think we forgot about EQOA, did you?). Great ideas only really shine if you’re first to market with them. So we’re...
It is now two weeks since the announcement that ProSiebenSat, a TV and radio broadcast firm based in Germany, will become SOE’s ‘Exclusive Partner’ in Europe. ProSiebenSat’s gaming division, Alaplaya, is mostly known for poorly supported region-locked free-to-play browser games. The announcement immediately raised fears which, to date, have received no official (or unofficial) response from SOE beyond two posts from SmokeJumper asking for more patience: I can’t give you the official answer yet. I’ve been specifically asked to wait until the full FAQ and everything is created for this. However, this should be really big for EQII in...
Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has posted a bit of a Twitter followup after his rather abrupt pronouncement that we should only expect three Game Updates this year, with the next one not arriving until sometime in April: Funny how when you come back from relaxing, you always run real hard to catch up. Does this make sense? Really? Humanz iz odd. DoV, Book 2, Chapter 1! (GU 63) : Withered Lands and Skyshrine. A big new overland, group instances, a contested dungeon, raids, and more! Sometimes things go right. And then because of that, they keep going right because that...