Last night, Linda “Brasse” Carlson (Director, Global Community Relations), Greg “Rothgar” Spence (EQ2 Lead Programmer) and Akil “Lyndro” Hooper (EQ2 Lead Designer) hosted a Webcast about the upcoming Dungeon Maker feature (previously known as Design Your Own Dungeon) in the upcoming EverQuest II: Age of Discovery expansion.

Note: Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson was not able to make the webcast.

Note 2: For the first ~5 minutes of the webcast, Rothgar’s mic was not working at all. At this point, he and Brasse started sharing a microphone.

Note 3: Throughout the webcast, Rothgar refers to the Avatars you use to play through Dungeon Maker-designed dungeons as “adventurers”. For clarity, I have changed all these references to Avatars.

After the jump, EQ2Wire provides an exclusive transcript of this SOE Webcast…

To date, we still don’t have an exact launch date for EverQuest II: Age of Discovery.

Well, we have a date — November 30, 2011 — but then we’ve seen two other more general time windows of “early December” and “Winter” which might well invalidate it.

If Age of Discovery really hits on November 30th, then this would mean there are 11 days to go til the expansion launches and 2 of those days have become national holidays in the USA — Thanksgiving (a harvest festival) and Black Friday (a capitalism festival).

If the Age of Discovery beta is terminated 1 week before expansion launch as it so disruptively was for Destiny of Velious, then the Age of Discovery Beta could come to an end an alarming 4 days from now. With Dungeon Maker just hitting Beta last night this doesn’t seem plausible.

In other news, some Twitter updates yesterday from EQ2’s Associate Producer Domino which may be of interest:

Currently watching a progress bar increment … as 400 of the earlier registrants for #EQ2 beta get sent their invites! Exciting! =)

Typed up and printed my “to do by expansion launch” list today. Single spaced, it was 2 pages long. >_<

Your Thoughts

Do you think the expansion will be delayed?

From EverQuest2.com:

The Overlord’s Return

The city stirs under a newly revitalized sky. The clouds that once choked the horizon have parted, revealing a powerful presence, now returned. The tall, jagged towers and looming citadels, at once breathtaking and ominous, are lit up by massive, fiery braziers. The Overlord has returned and Freeport is reborn.

I too have returned to the city. I return to reclaim my rightful home. My family has lived here for generations. When violence erupted, we were forced to seek shelter elsewhere, sundered from our homes and scattered across Norrath, waiting for the Overlord’s return.

PC Gamer has been given an exclusive new trailer with the first footage of the upcoming Freeport Revamp. Here is their tongue-in-cheek description for the video:

Freeport. That’s a nice name. It conjures up warm feelings of boundless possibility – and maybe a bunny or two. It’s like a verbal hug. Now, though, it’s almost hilariously un-apt, because Freeport’s the most puppy-kickingly evil it’s ever been. I’m talking jagged spiky towers, ominous red skies, and batteries that run on souls. Seriously. The revamp’s coming to EverQuest II in Game Update 62, and you can find out all about it by watching the above video.

The video also features brief interviews with Jonathan “Prathun” Caraker, Design Lead for Freeport Revamp, Tim Heydelaar, Environment Lead for EQ2, Nathan “Kaitheel” McCall, EQ2 Designer, and Dave “Covic” Brown, Lead Character Artist.

So despite the exhaustive EQ2: Free-to-Play Frequently Asked Questions, as well as SmokeJumper‘s lengthy Producer’s Letter, there were still a few details and questions that got missed in last Thursday’s announcements.

These EQ2X items are leaving the Marketplace (some previously announced):

• ‘Wand of Obliteration’
• ‘Rune of Devastation’
• Mastercrafted Gear
• Tradeskill Rares
• Crafted Arrows
• Self-Rez Scrolls
• ‘Guild Charter’ unlocks for creating guilds

These EQ2X items are staying in the Marketplace:

• Research Reducers (for researching Adept, Expert, and Master spells faster)
• Regular Bags

Other Points of Interest:

• Free StationCash for recurring EQ2 subscriptions paid with a Credit Card.
• What do Gear/Spell/Class/Race Unlockers actually cost?
• Returning EQ2 players who are considering the Free-to-Play option are less than happy about needing to buy Class/Race Unlocks if their class/race isn’t a Free one.

On November 17, 2011 at 7am, all US servers mysteriously went offline. No patch notes were released and no announcement was made other than a “We’re working on it” until shortly before the servers came back online.

7:00am PST – Servers go offline

8:45am PST – Servers were showing as Locked

8:55am PST – Servers are back online.

UPDATE: According an EverQuestII Twitter post, tonight’s Webcast will be a Smoke-free environment:

“Smokejumper” will not be joining us for the webcast today, as was previously indicated. It’ll still be great, though [Isulith]

From EverQuest2.com:

Come check out the EverQuest II Dungeon Maker Webcast! Host Linda “Brasse” Carlson (Director, Global Community Relations) will interview Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson (EQ2 Executive Producer), Greg “Rothgar” Spence (EQ2 Lead Programmer) and Akil “Lyndro” Hooper (EQ2 Lead Designer), and learn all about one of the most anticipated features for the new EverQuest II expansion: Age of Discovery.

Join us on Thursday, November 17, 2011, at 4:30 p.m. US Pacific Time*, as we live stream this webcast on the Twitch TV! The webcast is expected to last about 20 minutes.

Come join us for the fun!

See you on Twitch TV!

Other Time Zones:

• PST: November 17 @ 4:30pm
• EST: November 17 @ 7:30pm
• GMT: 00:30
• CET: 01:30

From the EQ2 Forums:

• Fixed an issue with the 48 hour no-trade grace period.
• Fixed an animation issue with the Soga Human Female model riding on the Terrorbird mount.

With the first fix, it will, once again, be possible to simply collect all the loot during a group or raid and trade it to people at the end, or trade items within a group/raid (those who were present for the kill) in case of a looting mistake.

Network routing issues continue to plague the Splitpaw, Storms, and Valor servers, rendering raiding, grouping, and yes, even crafting neigh impossible. Although these issues aren’t within the SOE data center in Amsterdam, they still need to be addressed with the responsible parties (ISPs) to provide a playable experience for those subscribers.

After initially (and non-constructively) locking threads about Splitpaw, Storms, and Valor Routing issues and directing people to open individual /petitions, an EU Server Performance (November 2011) thread has been created in the Tech Support: Connection Support area where this issue can now be collaboratively addressed.

From Joshua M:

We are experiencing ongoing connectivity and latency issues for a great deal of players connecting to Splitpaw and Valor.  The issue itself does exist outside of our control but SOE is doing everything we can to assist in resolving the source of the problem.  I’ll do my best to provide updates as this progresses but I cannot discuss, nor do I have, specifics.

From the EQ2 Forums:

EverQuest II: Free-to-Play Webcast Recap

On Thursday, November 10, 2011, we had a very special webcast going over the big announcement: EverQuest II going free-to-play! This week’s webcast featured EverQuest II Executive Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson and EverQuest II Associate Producer Emily “Domino” Taylor. The two were interviewed by SOE’s Director of Global Communication, Linda “Brasse” Carlson. We learned about many of the specifics associated with the free-to-play conversion and a bit about the new expansion “Age of Discovery.” At the end of the video, screenshots of the Collector’s Edition items were also shown.

After the jump, our question about the new EQ2Players and Data Feeds gets answered…

So there will have been a lot of myths and “the sky is falling” posts since Thursday’s announcement of EverQuest II going Free-to-Play and eliminating the “separate but equal” EQ2X service. Let’s see if we can knock out a few…

SmokeJumper has answers for four of the biggest questions regarding the changes announced this week with EverQuest II becoming a Free-to-Play game rather than having a separate EQ2X service.

Okay, folks,

We promised you answers to four big questions that kept coming up on the forums yesterday. (We promised info by early next week, but we’re ready with the info now, so here ya go.)

You’ll likely remember last year’s EverQuest II: Extended Trailer. It had great music, good editing, and was quite attractive to watch. Now that EverQuest II is going Free-to-Play without a separate service, that trailer has been remixed with some new clips.

We provide the new trailer below with the new motto “EverQuest II Free to Play. Your Way!™”.

Traditionally, when an item has been placed in a Guild Hall, that item has been considered as “donated” by the person placing it. As there is no cash value to items acquired in-game, donation seems an appropriate paradigm.

However with the introduction of furniture and other placeable items to the StationCash Marketplace, you are entering the realm of items with cash value. The ability to place items purchased with StationCash in Guild Halls has been inconsistent at best, mostly because of the Customer Service implications of thousands of players asking for their StationCash money back (or items) if they are booted from a guild they just finished placing $30, $40, or more dollars worth of items into.

This issue has been endlessly discussed on the EQ2 forums, with players arguing both sides, either that all items placed in a Guild Hall should be considered forfeit, or that Marketplace items are special because of the inherent cash value, and some even advocating that ALL items placed in a Guild Hall should be re-claimable by the placer.

Personally, I am in the camp that when you start factoring real money into the game, then you have to be very careful about transfer of ownership, and I’m not sure that placing an item in a Guild Hall should automatically be considered transfer of ownership. This isn’t chump change either. Some of the furniture sets in the Marketplace costs in excess of $30.

So the biggest kerfuffle about today’s announcement about EverQuest II going fully free-to-play was an unexpected one for me. A larger-than-expected number of players have multiple characters on both the EQ2 and EQ2X services and they are concerned that they’ll get locked out of some of those characters when the transition completes and will be forced to buy character slots to continue playing those characters.

A player asked:

I have 12 slots on live full and 14 on eq2x.. when the merge what happens to all the characters? do I need to delete toons before hand that I don’t want?

also most of my toons have the same name on different servers. how am I going to deal with that?

Please give me a response I need to know if I need to delete the toons I don’t want..

SmokeJumper has responded thoroughly on this issue:

Don’t delete anything!

I’m chasing this answer for you now and expect to announce a resolution early next week (after many discussions in the meantime). As far as I know, this is our only unresolved question on the changeover.

From an e-mail I just received!

NOTE: For most players, you do not need to do anything, as this entitlement will automatically be added to your account, but check your SOE.com account over the next week or so to make sure this is added.

One tantalising bit of information from tonight’s AoD/F2P Webcast was that the Age of Discovery Beta may start allowing Fan Faire attendees in tonight. It’s unknown how quickly others will be brought into the beta.

Also, we were told that while Beastlords, the Freeport Revamp (a GU62 feature), Mercenaries, Tradeskill Apprentices, and Reforging would be in the Beta now (or soon), Design Your Own Dungeon won’t hit Beta until next week, to focus testing attention on the previously mentioned features.

UPDATE: We have it on good authority that Fan Faire attendees are now receiving invites to the Age of Discovery Beta. Hey! No peeking at my Inbox!

The “Very Exciting News” Webcast (which with today’s revelation of EverQuest II going fully Free-to-Play was naturally on that subject) finished a little while ago on Twitch.tv. The new webcasting service produced a MUCH more reliable video picture and better sound quality as well. The webcast included Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, Emily “Domino” Taylor, and Linda “Brasse” Carlson. Lots of questions were asked from SOE’s Facebook page, including a question I submitted  and heck I even won some StationCash for submitting a question.

In case you’re wondering, my question was: When is the new EQ2Players site being launched? and the answer was very much a “We’re REALLY close, but we don’t have a date yet”.

So here are some screenshots of items included in the Age of Discovery: Collector’s Edition, namely the exclusive flying mount, Lavastorm Prestige House, exclusive cloak, armor set, and last but not least the exclusive Beastlord Warder/pet.

UPDATE: We’ve replaced our screenshots with the High Definition images from the EverQuest2 Facebook Wall.

If you’ve been waiting to buy EverQuest II: Age of Discovery and were expecting to get Destiny of Velious included, get ready for a surprise!

Here’s the original announcement about the Age of Discovery Pre-Order:

Digital Collector’s Edition

The Digitial Collector’s Edition is a Station Exclusive and is specially priced at $59.99 for pre-order only. This version includes the base game, all seven expansions, a Cloak of the Truespirit, Dungeon Maker Unique Monster Spawner #1, Dungeon Maker Unique Monster Spawner #2, Armored Flying Pegasus Mount, Unique Beastlord Warder Pet, Lavastorm Prestige Home, Custom Dungeon Maker Map Layout, and a Robe of the True Spirit. New accounts will also receive a free 30-day subscription.

Please note that after the pre-order period ends, the price of the Digital Collector’s Edition will increase to $89.99.

and here’s what it was revised to say:

Digital Collector’s Edition

The Digitial Collector’s Edition is a Station Exclusive and is specially priced at $59.99 for pre-order only. This version includes the base game, a Cloak of the Truespirit, Dungeon Maker Unique Monster Spawner #1, Dungeon Maker Unique Monster Spawner #2, Armored Flying Pegasus Mount, Unique Beastlord Warder Pet, Lavastorm Prestige Home, Custom Dungeon Maker Map Layout, and a Robe of the True Spirit.

Please note that after the pre-order period ends, the price of the Digital Collector’s Edition will increase to $89.99.

And this info from the Pre-Order page which was not operational when today’s news first broke:

EverQuest II will transition to a “Free to Play” model concurrently with the launch of the Age of Discovery expansion pack. This means that all players will have access to EverQuest II through free and optional paid membership levels. All membership levels will provide players with access to game world content through the EverQuest II Sentinel’s Fate expansion. Platinum-level subscribers will also have access to the EverQuest II Destiny of Velious expansion. For all other players, the EverQuest II Destiny of Velious and EverQuest II Age of Discovery expansions may be purchased separately.

Here is the updated Free-to-Play Frequently Asked Questions page from EverQuest2.com. You may also go straight to the Membership Comparison Grid which compares Free, Silver, and Gold subscription levels.

1. When will I be able to play EverQuest II for free?

We do not have an exact date at this time, but we are anticipating releasing EverQuest II as Free-to-Play early December 2011.

2. How much does EverQuest II cost to play?

Basic access in EverQuest II is free! This includes access to a large portion of the game. However, there are also paid memberships that grant access to different content that are also available. Free membership gets access to seven years worth of gameplay and diverse zones released from EverQuest II‘s launch through EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate. Free members will not have access to the most recent expansion packs EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious and EverQuest II: Age of Discovery. However, both Destiny of Velious and Age of Discovery are available for purchase.

You can play all the way up to level 90, the highest level available in the game. You have access to the game’s eight character classes, and four of the most popular races in the game from which to create your character. Additional choices can be purchased both a la carte and with memberships.

3. What are the differences between Free, Silver, and Gold memberships?

The features and benefits of Free, Silver, and Gold memberships are detailed on the EverQuest II membership matrix page (click here).

From EverQuest2.com:

Pre-Order EverQuest II – Age of Discovery Today!EverQuest II – Age of Discovery is now available for pre-order! This exciting new expansion to the world of Norrath will be released on November 30, 2011.

Digital Collector’s Edition $59.99

The Digitial Collector’s Edition is a Station Exclusive and is specially priced at $59.99 for pre-order only. This version includes the base game, all seven expansions, a Cloak of the Truespirit, Dungeon Maker Unique Monster Spawner #1, Dungeon Maker Unique Monster Spawner #2, Armored Flying Pegasus Mount, Unique Beastlord Warder Pet, Lavastorm Prestige Home, Custom Dungeon Maker Map Layout, and a Robe of the True Spirit. New accounts will also receive a free 30-day subscription.

Please note that after the pre-order period ends, the price of the Digital Collector’s Edition will increase to $89.99.

Standard Digital Edition $39.99

The Standard Digitial Edition includes the base game, all seven expansions, a Cloak of the Truespirit, and a Dungeon Maker Unique Monster Spawner #1. New accounts will also receive a free 30-day subscription. The cost for the Standard Digital Edition is $39.99.

EverQuest Executive Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has unveiled the news that EverQuest II is fully going Free-to-Play on all servers, and the segregation between EverQuest II and EverQuest II Extended (F2P)  is going away (as is the ‘powerful cash shop’ and the LiveGamer service).

From EverQuest2.com:

Many of you reading this letter are long-time EverQuest and EverQuest II players. You’ve been part of the SOE family for a long time (earlier this week was EQII’s 7-year anniversary!) and our aim is to take care of you and keep you entertained for years to come.

Part of caring for our customers is listening to you and hearing what you have to say. Additionally, we need to be aware of changes in the industry, changes in player expectations, and larger economic trends in general.

We’ve listened to your concerns about the complexity of the subscription structure, how the separate forums between EQII and EQ2X divide the community unnecessarily, that the Live Gamer servers are under-populated, and that many people want more flexibility with payment options so they can better manage their personal budgets.

We believe the key to meeting your expectations is to provide more flexibility and to deliver what you want when you want it, whether it’s basic game content, full subscription access to the game, or something in-between. So in early December we’re going to change things to be “Free to Play. Your Way.” Let me explain what that means…

If you’re a Scout, a Fighter, and maybe even a Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, or Mystic in EQ2, and you push yourself to play the absolute best (even if you’re not geared the best), you’re probably already familiar with the concept of Autoattack.

Game Update 61 introduced a new type of Autoattack called Spell Autoattack for Mages and Priests. You might be tempted to jump on the DPS bandwagon, but before you run out and equip a Wand, there are some things you really ought to know!

UPDATE: This article has been updated thanks to feedback from Ferk, Anaogi, Barx!

Are you ready for some concrete info about Beastlords?

The decision to bring Beastlords to EverQuest II was made less than a month before Fan Faire according to an SOE source, and a lot of things were said at Fan Faire, including what type of armor and weapons they’d use, what class they’d be, and how Warders would work. Now that the team has been working on them for four months, there have, not surprisingly, been a few changes.

Here is EQ2’s Lead Designer Akil “Lyndro” Hooper talking about Beastlords on EverQuest2.com:

Q. What is a beastlord? What makes it different from the existing classes?

A. “Beastlords are a new class for EverQuest II, based on beastlords from the original EverQuest. In EverQuest they were loosely based on a combination of shaman and monk. In EQ II we’ve tried to keep them based loosely around a combination of these two classes. One of our goals for beastlords is to experiment with some new play styles. Beastlords have warders that they can tame, who work in combination with the beastlord to create a new style of combat tactics. Beastlords have fewer buttons to press, and a more active and reactive playstyle than our other classes as they react and interact with their warder.”

On Saturday we reported that some players had started receiving their 8 Year Veteran Rewards. Of particular note in this collection of loot was an item called “Veteran Revival” that would allow you to revive your group once every 24 hours. However when players tried it, they immediately discovered that it only worked if you (the caster) were still alive, greatly reducing the value of the item.

SmokeJumper initially posted that the item was “being fixed”, however he later responded with this:

Sorry for the confusion, but the item is currently working as intended. It cannot be used while dead to rez your whole group because that would be far too unbalancing in raid situations.

When queried with this quote from a player:

You are aware that [Clerics] have an AA that rezes the entire group and works when dead? So it wouldn’t be “that game unbalancing”.

It’s worth pointing out that the Cleric AA is instant cast, revives the group with full health and power, and does not apply Revive Sickness. The Veteran Revival is on a 24 hour timer, revives the group with 20% health and power, and applies Revive Sickness.

With the near eternity of a 10 second cast time (especially if you have a slow casting debuff on, which many DoV bosses helpfully provide), plus interrupts, the chances that you’ll get your group resurrected with this item once the tank or healer has died is infinitesimal.