The Vox and Bazaar server merges have been rescheduled. From the EQ2 Forums:

We have an update for players on Vox, Nagafen, The Bazaar and Freeport servers! Originally, we had planned to start server merges on Friday, December 16, 2011. In order to minimize complications as much as possible, we have decided to delay the merges. Below is a schedule of the planned server merges:

• Vox will be going down on December 18, 2011 at 11:59 PM PST.
• Nagafen will go down on December 19, 2011 at 5:00 AM PST.
• The Bazaar and Freeport merge is scheduled for December 21, 2011 but we do not yet have an exact time for this.

The server merges will take approximately 24 hours to complete once they have started. We will of course update you as we get any more information and updates.

**Please note: the times *may* change, I will update you when we have more information!

Paying for your EQ2 subscription has gotten more flexible over the years, leading many to migrate from providing their credit info to SOE to using 30-day game cards. But before you make the jump, realize there are a few drawbacks to consider:

• First, month-to-month players don’t get the 500SC monthly stipend which is now given to all Gold subscribers.

• Second, to use the in-game Character Transfer Tokens require an account to be on a recurring subscription.
• UPDATE: You can /petition customer service to initiate a Character Transfer.

• Third, if perchance you forget to renew your subscription at the end of the month, instead of receiving e-mails warning you that your subscription is about to run out, you might wake up to find your account at Silver. It could take some time in e-mails, petitions, or on the phone to sort out the problem. We’ve only heard this from 2 players but it’s a potential problem.

• Fourth, prior to the Destiny of Velious release, a variety of rewards were made available to recurring subscribers. Players with 30-day cards eventually won those rewards back, but it didn’t happen overnight.

So if you are on the fence about using a credit card or 30-day cards, think about whether you want the hassle of entering a card number every month, or dealing with the above limitations.

We can only speculate on why month-to-month can be a problem for SOE over the traditional recurring subscription, but spammers, scammers, and farmers are always looking for avenues to separate players and their money through fraud.

From the EQ2 Forums:

UPDATE: Although not included in the notes, some of the Scout war runes have now been flagged to support Beastlords as per this post.

GENERAL

• All Membership levels may now claim Veteran rewards.

• Fixed a bug where expertise AAs would not load properly from a mirror.

• When using an AA mirror to switch profiles you will no longer be spammed with onscreen messages or having icons autopopulate into your hotbars.

• Fixed a bug where the character tree would not show in the respec window when attempting to purchase AA respecs.

PLAYER HOUSING

• Prestige house portals should no longer disappear when placed.

A few bits and bobs we wanted to bring attention to…

Throwing Weapons

Cyliena took the lead on some random changes with Game Update 62 affecting a variety of thrown weapons (sheaths, pouches, bandoliers, and satchels) which use throwing daggers, shuriken, and other such ammo. Some items were flagged Beastlord-only, some flagged anything-but-Beastlord, and yet others flagged Fighter, Priest, and no Scouts at all.

After some communications with Rothgar and Silius, this is going to be ironed out in the next update:

Just a heads up I that I have fixed the thrown items. Should be live with the next hotfix. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We promise we’re not late on posting this! The video appeared on Youtube on December 6th but it was not promoted on EQ2’s Facebook page until last night…

Note: Contrary to the video’s implication, you cannot tame elephants.

From Omougi on the EQ2 Forums:

As Olihin stated on the AoD launch webcast, I will be taking over the development of PVP in EQ2. Now that the dust of AoD’s launch has (mostly) settled, we can start working on what’s next for EQ2 PVP.

The ultimate goal here is to give all PVPers a sick update with GU63. I’ve read through most of your feedback on these forums (including this thread, all 25 pages of it ) and we plan to act on it. We’re in the plan iteration phase now, and I hope to start implimentation of the plan later this week or early next week.

So, what’s the plan? Details change, certain ideas may be altered, improved upon, or scrapped entirely. We’re not ready to discuss details just yet.

Changes and improvements are coming. Your feedback is appreciated, and your patience will be rewarded.

From the EverQuest2 Facebook page:

The LaunchPad is not currently working! We apologize for the inconvenience and are trying to fix it as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. [Isulith]

UPDATE: The Launchpad came back up after approximately 30 minutes.

From the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug with the 48 hour grace period for trade for some no-trade and heirloom items.

• Magic Carpet guild hall amenity now has Fens of Nathsar as a destination.

• Fixed a bug where loading a profile from your Mirror of Reflected Achievements would reset your AAs instead of loading the profile.

Here are the known issues we’ve seen or heard about so far with Age of Discovery/Game Update 62.

• Beastlords cannot use War Runes.

• Players with Mercenaries cannot be switched between Raid groups. If a player joins a Raid and their Mercenary gets split up into another group, that player will be unable to dismiss the Mercenary. The only solution is to entirely disband and reform the raid.

• The “Chardok” dungeon maker layout included in the Age of Discovery Collector’s Edition isn’t added to the Dungeon Maker layout choices.

• Trying to Assign Loot by Leader Only is difficult/impossible as the scrolling list of characters resets every time there is chat activity.

• Numerous issues with accounts being flagged as Silver or Bronze which were full EQ2 subscriptions. Contact Customer Service.

• Crashes while trying to load Timorous Deep during Updating Environment Man. The workaround is to delete 3 files with timorous in the filename.

• Crashes due to Shaders 3.0.

• Mentoring is not working on Nagafen or Vox.

From Isulith:

We’ve received word that mentoring on our PvP servers (Nagafen & Vox) is not currently working. We apologize for this inconvenience and are working hard to fix this as soon as possible.

• Numerous housing issues with players who had housing in Freeport suburbs who have been moved to the Jade Tiger Inn unable to get into their room.

• Pathing has gotten even worse with GU62. Three problems I’ve seen are being turned around 180 and facing away from the mob. The only fix is to move to a different location. The second is being right on top of the mob and getting Too Far Away. Finally, during Beta, I saw my Beastlord warder pet and the mob literally running back and forth trading places with each other trying to strike a hit.

• The Character Select screen is showing sometimes only 2 characters unlocked, only showing half of a person’s characters, or missing some of the servers.

• Many Housing Portals are missing from inside houses and guild halls.

From Isulith:

Due to some of the changes to the city of Freeport and consolidating the prestige home portals, some players have experienced issues with their housing portals disappearing. We will get this fixed in an upcoming hotfix, so be sure to stay tuned to the Update Notes section. Once this is fixed, all you will need to do is get a new portal from your door and re-place it. We greatly apologize for this inconvenience.

Thursday’s Game Update 62 introduces new social media features called EQ2 Share. Players have already had the ability to post Youtube videos from inside EQ2 for several months now. With the new features, players can also post Achievements, text updates, and now screenshots directly to Facebook or Twitter from within EQ2.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

Good news!

You can now take screenshots of the game and have them posted to Facebook or Twitter without leaving the game! So show off the really cool armor you just found or the particularly evil-looking boss mob that your group just trounced!

Here’s how you do it. First of all, pull up your Character window. Look for the “EQII Share” option. Once you see that, enable whichever of the Facebook/Twitter feeds that you desire. When you toggle these on, you’ll have to log into Facebook and/or Twitter to verify your credentials, but after you do that, you’re set up!

NOTE: When you activate EQII Share, all your characters are activated, but you can turn off the share for any individual characters you want to hide from view.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

Until now, veteran rewards were only accumulated by subscribers. That seemed fair because, we, we were all subscribers back when the program was created.

But now, there are a lot more options available to folks, and it just doesn’t make sense that a Free or Silver player shouldn’t be able to accumulate veteran rewards.

So starting from today, that’s what’s going to happen. All players will get veteran rewards based on the date of their account creation.

It’s already happening now. You’re accumulating time as we speak. Enjoy!

Discuss this on the EQ2 Forums

UPDATE from SmokeJumper. This change is NOT retroactive. So if you played EQ2 at launch and were hoping to login and get 1-8 year vet rewards, sorry Charlie.

This change doesn’t do anything retro-actively *at all*.

The veteran time that you’ve accumulated to-date is still valid and is preserved.

The change mentioned is from that date going forward. So everyone is earning time now, but this changes nothing at all for the vet time accumulated to-date.

From the EQ2 Forums:

This is a reminder that if you are a player on The Bazaar or Vox servers, you will need to remove all of your items from the Live Gamer holding area. Items not claimed before December 13, 2011 will not be eligible to be reimbursed or restored. Additionally, server merges will begin around December 15, 2011.

For more information, please check out our FAQ post: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/…topic_id=509057.

Here are your Update Notes for Friday, December 9th, 2011 from the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Characters created before 12/6/2011 no longer have class or race pack restrictions.  Characters created after that date are still subject to your current membership restrictions, if applicable.

• Fixed a crash that could be caused by doing a raid with a large number of mercenaries.

• Fixed a bug that was preventing mentoring on PvP servers.

• Dungeon maker items in the marketplace that contain house items will now display previews in the paperdoll window.

• Fixed issues with Shader 3.0 causing client crashes.

The complete Update Notes after the jump…

When EQ2 went Free-to-Play two days ago, emails were sent out to people who had played in the past but were not current subscribers.  The emails mentioned the conversion to F2P and that they would be able to return and play at the Silver level for free.  But when a lot of these players made it back, they were hit with quite a surprise.

After installing 14 gigs worth of game files (for those that didn’t choose the streaming client) they headed to the character select screen.  That’s when they were kicked in the teeth.  Unless they got really lucky and picked a race/class combination that was free, they were staring at a list of locked characters.  In order to play, they would have to pay for race/class unlockers.  If they wanted to create a new character, they would have to delete all but three of their old characters since silver membership only has four slots.  The only other choice was to create a new account that wouldn’t have silver access.  This was not a good way to welcome back returning players.

SmokeJumper agreed.  Today this announcement was posted:

Hi, folks,

We’ve been listening to you since we launched the Free-to-Play service across all servers. One of the most frequent issues is from folks that used to play EQII Live and are now coming back to the Silver membership level and becoming very confused because they’ve never played under those restrictions. “Why can’t I play my characters? Why are they locked?”

Of course, the reason is because those players are returning to a Silver membership (which is free of charge) and those older characters are often locked behind the Silver membership race/class restrictions. There are two easy ways to get around those restrictions: Upgrade to Gold, or buy the race/class packs.

But, we don’t really want to force those decisions on returning players. It’s not a fun experience to come back to something that seemed exciting (F2P) and then get hit with a bill as soon as you arrive, just for the privelege of using your current characters.

Fr0m the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Gold and Platinum members can once again claim veteran rewards.
• The preorder reward Cloak of the Truespirit should now be claimable in the /claim window.
• Fixed a bug where pets would not generate aggro when fighting a locked encounter.
• You no longer get an “Edit Button” when you enter a house where you have trustee access. Instead, you get a tutorial popup the first time you enter explaining what edit mode is and to use CTRL-E to toggle.
• Guildhall hireling race and gender should now be customizable and persistent.

DUNGEON MAKER

• Fixed missing appearances on some spawners like the Frost Drolvargs when being placed in Dungeon Maker.

ITEMS

• Circlet of Valor should be equippable by Beastlords now.

SOCIAL MEDIA

• The achievement for attaining level 20 should now correctly work with social media.

Jump to EQ2Wire’s Beastlord Warders Guide >>

This Guide is would not be possible without Whilhelmina‘s fantastic Beastlord FAQ she wrote during Beta.

Introducing Beastlords

Beastlords really are a very different class, which means we get a whole new set of UI elements. This includes a Beastlord Bar, a Savagery Bar, a new tab in the Character window for keeping track of all your Warders (pets), and a large blue Weakness paw icon which comes up whenever your Warder pet is ready for you to fire off an coordinated attack.

If all of this were available at level 1, you’d be overwhelmed, so these features are unlocked as you level up. There’s also an in-game tutorial specifically for Beastlords.

At level 1, you get your first warder (based on your race). At this point, it really just acts as a basic pet and you can’t do any special abilities with it.

A few (22) hours behind schedule, EverQuest II has launched their Age of Discovery expansion, which includes the Beastlord class, Item Reforging, Tradeskill Apprentices, Mercenaries, and the Dungeon Maker. Today also marks the introduction of a revamped Freeport, with new questlines starting at level 20 and every 10-20 levels until level 80. Also, EverQuest II has now gone entirely free-to-play. The Freeport server joins the other EQ2 servers as a regular server, and players can start on any server they like, either at the Free, Silver, or Gold levels. Heck even Frostfell goes live today.

If you are an EQ2 subscriber, then NOTHING changes for you.

LAUNCHERS: If you are using any of the older launchers such as the original EQ2.exe launcher in the Retail box, the blue-grey Station Launcher, or Launchpad 3 (either regular or streaming), you must upgrade to either the regular or streaming version of Launchpad 4 before you can patch in and play EverQuest II. If you point the installation at your current EQ2 directory, you will only need to download approximately 2.4GB of data. See our Launchpad 4 Patcher article for more info.

VETERAN REWARDS: If you are not able to see Veteran Rewards in your Claim windows, this will be fixed in tomorrow’s hotfix!

GUIDES:

• If you are looking for guides to the new features in Age of Discovery, or where to find all the new quests in Freeport, check out Cyliena‘s helpful guides at EQ2 ZAM.
• Niami Denmother has posted her Age of Discovery Preview as well as her Frostfell 2011 Guide.
• If you have reached level 10 on your new Beastlord and are looking for a new pet, look no further than EQ2Wire’s Beastlord Warder Guide.
  

See you in the game!

From Rich Lawrence on the EQ2Forums:

Hi folks, this is Rich Lawrence, CTO with SOE. Some of you probably remember me from original Planetside as “Twist”. TR rules, but I digress.

I must apologize for the extended down time of EQ2 while we get everything in order for free to play. Obviously we didn’t anticipate it being this long. I know how important it is for the game to be available when you want to play, and what it means to miss a raid you were looking forward to, or check out new features. In this case the issues that are keeping you from playing are under my watch, so I need to say it: I’m sorry. I value my game time as well when I can get it, and I know how you feel.

EQ2 is a great product with a long history for us, and part of the reason we are taking so long on this update is because of that. Let me explain a bit. In order for everyone that played in the past or currently to get the best experience when logging in on the first day of free to play, there were many changes that had to be made in data to represent all of the features those players (past or present) were entitled to, plus new goodies, and the merge of what amounts to two different products in a business sense (EQ2 and EQ2X). This is a lot of accounts – millions – and a lot of ‘business rule’ complexity. While we have top of the line hardware running our databases for this kind of thing, and folks dedicated just to keeping it working well, the result of all that took quite a bit longer than we thought it would.

I hear the engineers of you out there (and yes, I know we have many very capable developers in our audience) saying, “But you should have modeled it ahead of time and known how long it would take!”. You’re absolutely right. We did. Turns out our model was just a tad less than 1:1 scale in some respects. I know, I know, Captain Obvious calling.

In the end we realized two things as the maintenance progressed – that this was going to take much longer than we thought it would, and correspondingly the results would be not as well tested as they should be before release. For instance, there was a risk that some out of those millions might not end up with the right race packs or character slots. In the end, we decided it was best to extend the maintenance through the night so we could do a better job of checking that kind of thing.

Please understand that we don’t do this casually or think that it’s a lack of dedication. Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you’d be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that.

I’m committed to changing how we do this type of operation going forward so that it has much less visible impact on you the players – we will trade more back end prep time and resources against less publish downtime, basically. I do hope everybody enjoys the massive effort the game team has put into this release. I’ll see you online tomorrow.

From the Everquest2 Facebook Page:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Trolls…

We have just evaluated the status of the current update and have come to the conclusion that we can either unlock servers and risk broken content, or ensure that we provide the best experience possible and delay the update to tomorrow morning.

We have to do it RIGHT. For all of you and for all of us.

So please, bear with us, relax overnight, and let us sortie into the new day together. Community will be in office at 7:00am PST and will immediately review status and give you all an update. We are aiming for morning and working as hard as we possibly can.

Yer faithful Dwarf,

Brasse

Update:

Friends,

A final update this evening… Smed would like us to share that with the Platform Team working all night to complete the maintenance, we expect to be up at 10:00am PST.

Again, the Community Team will be in at 7:00am and will get you a status update.

Thank you, once more, for hanging in there with us. We are honored and appreciate your support of our efforts to make Norrath more enjoyable for all!

Brasse

If you’re getting an error message saying that you need to setup a subscription, please do not be alarmed! We have not fully finished our maintenance yet. We will let you know when this is complete. Thank you! -Isulith

We have an update on the server status: we are unlikely to launch until 8:00 PM PST or later. We are terribly sorry that this maintenance has taken so long and we greatly appreciate your continued patience!  – Isulith

While EQ2 servers are down or being merged, join us in Zam’s chatroom. Click one of the buttons below to chat with us during the downtime. There’s always someone in the chatroom during US or EU-friendly times.

For instructions on how to connect to the chat using mIRC, Trillian, or other chat client, check out the detailed instructions at EQ2 ZAM.

If you are not able to run chat software at work, or you just want to jump into the chat through your web browser, you can chat here using the Java applet.

Dethdlr here. No news to report but if you’re looking for something to do during the downtime, check out the web series Journey Quest. Watch all seven episodes for free. Pretty funny stuff.

And now the Producer’s Letter promised for today.

NOTE: We can assure you, there is NOTHING in this Producer’s Letter that has not already been publicly known and widely discussed.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Hello again, Norrathians!

It gives me great pleasure to raise the curtain on a new chapter in our game’s history.

Today, we stop requiring any sort of payment. There are no upfront download costs and memberships are no longer required. Everything is voluntary now. If we’re doing a good job of entertaining you, then you can help support the game you love with purchases or memberships, spending as much or as little as you choose to spend as you play.

We have a fired-up dev team. We believe that EQII is the best MMORPG in existence and we intend to keep making it better so that everyone else has to admit it. What we’re doing today keeps us on that path.

This is your world, and we’re committed to making it more and more your world as we keep growing.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Age of Discovery is the eighth expansion of the groundbreaking EverQuest II franchise.

Age of Discovery offers never-seen-before features including user-generated content and the re-imagining of the Beastlord class from the original EverQuest release.  You can make your mark in-game by creating your very own Dungeon, hire some much needed help for your heroic battles, push tradeskilling research to new heights, customize your weapons at the forge, and of course, play as a Beastlord. There’s a lot to like about this expansion!

From Brasse on the EQ2 Forums:

For those of you concerned about your account status, character slots, etc., please don’t panic yet. Accounts migrations are still in progress while servers are down.

When servers come back up, if things are not 100% correct on your account, STILL please do not panic.  Proceed directly to our Customer Service team, who will be very happy to help sort things out for you, I promise: http://www.soe.com/support/ (no, not now – see previous paragraph about migrations still in process).

Now, let’s all go back to watching and waiting in antici…… pation.

Brasse

From the EQ2 Forums:

DOWNTIME EXTENSION:

We have encountered some unforeseen issues that we want to address before unlocking Accounts and Commerce, to ensure that we provide the best possible experience for all our customers. At this time, we expect Accounts and Commerce to come back online this afternoon. We regret that the unlock on EQII servers will also be delayed to this afternoon.

While we have no solid eta at this time, we will continue to update you as quickly as we can as more info becomes available!

I know, I know… I want to build a dungeon with my reforged Beastlord of Doom too!

;-)#  Brasse

Last week you heard that all the old Launchpads including the original EQ2.exe that came in the retail box for EQ2, as well as the Station Launcher and Launchpad 3 (both regular and Streaming) were being replaced with Launchpad 4. Well, for whatever reason that didn’t quite happen.

Today, December 6th, with the introduction of Age of Discovery and the merger of EQ2 and EQ2X, the new launcher is being rolled out to everyone, including EQ2X players. If you have any trouble, just download the appropriate launcher below and make sure to point it to your EQ2 directory.

• DOWNLOAD Launchpad 4 Full Download
• DOWNLOAD Launchpad 4 Streaming
• DOWNLOAD Launchpad 4 Test Server