EQ2
Feldon
Linda “Brasse” Carlson is starting out with the sponsors and and then about GameBreaker.tv’s live cast of the event. Vivox is also broadcasting the event in-game. Talking about the panels tomorrow including Dev War Stories, also tomorrow night’s Pool Party. Introducing Backstage Bloggers using Bloggie cameras. Showing pictures of Guides in different SOE games. SOE President John Smedley coming to the stage… Prepare for big announcements…
There is a lot of psychology at work in getting a player to come back, month-after-month, year-after-year, to a single game. I wasn’t there, but I’m guessing that the designers of the original EverQuest probably didn’t have the luxury of having a behavioral psychologist on staff to tell them where to put the roadblocks, the sticks, and the carrots, let alone exactly how to balance everything to build a “sticky” audience that would still call EverQuest their ‘home’ 12 years later. The irony of Destiny of Velious is that it is one of the best expansions we’ve had in...
The announcement of EverQuest 2 Extended (EQ2X Free-to-Play) to the world was not a complete surprise to everyone. In addition to the various individuals within the EQ2 team and SOE involved in its planning and implementation, a few players were notified and their feedback solicited. What would be the community reaction? Should the services stay separate? There were many questions. At last year’s Fan Faire, once the EQ2X cat was out of the bag, I spoke to Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson about the future of EQ2 and EQ2X, and how the latter might choke off the former. My feedback was...
Today’s update notes from the EQ2 Forums have fixes for group and raid zones.
We haven’t done one of these articles in a while and with the lull before the storm, we thought we’d post about some new items. More and more, it is possible to create a house entirely from a blank slate. The choice of floor tiles, wall materials, items to make stairs, platforms, etc. it’s no wonder that more players are asking for empty lots. Next month’s Tinkerfest will add yet more deck plating options and ceiling fans. The upcoming Dragon Ring and Spires Rebuilding events will bring back the much-desired Housing Teleportation Pads as well as many familiar and...
A glitch in the Aether Flying Races put a damper on the start of today’s Gorowyn City Festival. From the earlier revelation that something was amiss, here’s Domino: It does indeed appear that one of the aether race hoops has malfunctioned catastrophically over Gorowyn. The gnomish race organizers have been put to work on repairs; in the mean time the Gorowyn aether race will be postponed. We’ll keep you updated on the rescheduling. The Gorowyn city festival remains in full swing however, and the fireworks festival and marketplace sale are expected to begin later today. On Butcherblock, the Message...
I posted my opinion about every ground-based mount in EQ2 getting increased to 130%. This change applied to everything from the 2 silver piece, level 1 horse, to 35 plat rhinos, to quested carpets, to raid-acquired war horses, to StationCash mounts. So far the responses to my Op Ed have been interesting, but we turn now to a comment by SmokeJumper. In one of the many threads on the EQ2 Forums about the 130% Runspeed change, a player (vamp548548) theorized that all mounts got the same speed in order to shift mount progression from a ‘speed’ basis to an...
And you thought yesterday’s update notes were short. Today’s Update Note (singular): Tenebrous Tangle The quest “Follow the Bot” should once again update properly. I would add that only a fool would believe that this is today’s only change. Every change the EQ2 team commits to the game is flagged with two kinds of notes. Private/Development notes, and Public notes. The Public notes are what we get on the patcher, on the forums, etc. Yet, nearly every update also contains tweaks, bugfixes, exploit closures, and other changes which aren’t publicized. Sometimes we can suss them out. Other times they...
Today’s update contains just one announced line-item fix: MARKETPLACE Fixed an issue with adding Credit Cards through the in-game interface. UPDATE: SmokeJumper provided some backstory on this change: It wasn’t a security issue. The company changed some stuff on the backend and we realized that our in-game CC registration didn’t work any longer. This is the fix for that.
Today’s update adds additional tweaks to Velious dungeons, increases the overlooked Gnomish Hoverpads to 130% runspeed, re-allows Crit Chance adornments in all the slots they were previous allowed in, a few quest glitches, and also corrects a few issues with the new Leaper and Glider mounts.
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: Just an update to let you know that maintenance is scheduled for Splitpaw tonight at 9pm PST for hardware upgrades.
When you see one occurrence of something, it’s unique. Two occurrences can be ascribed to coincidence. But three, that’s a pattern. What are we seeing? The replacement of progression. We’re seeing the abolishment of stratification and in its place, bland, uniform, one-size-fits-all rewards. It began with the starting gear acquired by new players in the four (originally six) starting cities. Rather than bringing parity to the items, which would have retained the uniqueness of items to each home city, this variety was paved over with one set of gear for everyone. The result was the absurd reality of Sarnak...
Every year at Fan Faire, we get to watch EverQuest II Designers and Developers answer some really fantastic on-topic, valid questions from the Question & Answer panels. These questions help shape the future of the game and get problems addressed that the devs may not be entirely aware of. However, every year, we also see some of the strangest, uninformed, facepalming (is that a verb?) questions that completely puzzle us (and the developers). Hey, they paid their Fan Faire admission price too, right? Over the years, fastidious players have wised up and managed to intercept EQ2 devs in the...
Dethdlr
Class-specific red adornments have been added to the EQ2Wire Adornment Calculator by Dethdlr. That’s 221 adornments added to the existing 175 for a total of 396 T9 adornments. And I still haven’t added the ones that drop from the public quests. Choose your class in the class dropdown to have that class’ adornments added to the proper dropdowns. Rather than converting the class specific red adornments from their names to what they do, I’ve just included the names in the dropdowns. For one thing, this should help with those that don’t stack. For another, it means you don’t have...
Leapers and Gliders have come to EQ2 as per Today’s Update Notes., taking advantage of a tremendous effort by the EQ2 animators and programmers to allow mounts to be more quickly added to the game. With the “killer app” of flying mounts at level 86, we’ve been wondering if something would be done about the hodgepodge array of mounts at lower levels. During the week where we could have free flying mounts on all our characters, I certainly took the opportunity to knock out a bunch of quests that would have easily taken twice as long to complete on...
Servers are now offline, and all players have been sent packing 90 minutes after today’s Game Update was scheduled to begin. Those players who stuck around (as well as those who logged in later hoping to see the new Gliders and Leapers), chatted, dueled, and a few made progress in Kael Drakkel contested. UPDATE: A post from SmokeJumper regarding the Content Distribution Network (CDN): Working on it. It’s a problem with the CDN. Fixing. Apparently, Storms players (Thanks Whilhelmina!) received an announcement that their server won’t be patched for several hours still.
We’re now 56 minutes into what is supposed to be the “Leapers and Gliders Update” yet servers from Antonia Bayle to Everfrost to Storms to Butcherblock remain online. However because of the automated scripts announcing the downtime, nobody has been able to join a dungeon, guild hall, or any other “instance”. So players continue to hang out in open areas such as Sinking Sands, Butcherblock Mountains, and ponder the meaning of life and ineptitude. We’re all dressed up with no place to go. If you are running the Original Launcher (EQ2.exe), you will be able to login. You won’t...
While we’ve heard indirectly from Silius that work on existing items from level 20-80 was being done, SmokeJumper has an official quote for us: We have a full itemization plan in place now and we’ll be unveiling much of it at Fan Faire. I’ll tell you this much though. We’re going to itemize *all* of the level 20-80 items by GU 61. When asked if this includes raid Fabled items from levels 40-80: “All” includes Raid items. We’ve already been informed that crafted gear especially Mastercrafted gear from level 22-77 are being tweaked to have the right stats for...
Today brings a substantial update with lots of fixes, tweaks, as well as the much-lauded introduction of Leaper and Glider mounts to EQ2 at levels 30 and 60. In a perplexing move, Ground, Leaper, and Glider mounts will all travel on the ground at speeds of up to 150%, making them as fast as any of the current Flying mounts, only lacking the differentiating ability of flight. All servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT (3pm BST / 4pm CET) on Friday, June 24, 2011. U.S. servers are expected to be down for one hour. International...
This information is not exactly a secret, but it’s a question that comes up often. Where is your EQ2 server located? Thanks to Rothgar for the list which we supplemented. Servers on the west coast [San Diego] include: Guk Everfrost Antonia Bayle (RP) Unrest Butcherblock Nagafen (PvP) Vox (PvP RG) The Bazaar (RG) Freeport (EQ2X) Sebilis (JP) East Coast includes: Permafrost Oasis Crushbone Our European [Amsterdam] data center includes: Valor (German) Storms (French) Splitpaw (UK) Barren Sky (Russian) Harla Dar (Russian)
Leaper and Glider mounts for levels 30 and 60 respectively are nearly here, but Testers are concerned that they are being left out. After the jump, SmokeJumper‘s announcement on the EQ2 Forums and some player reaction: We’re putting the final touches on leapers and gliders now. They’ll be Live very soon.
It seems the only differentiation we have in gear now is Adornments, so those Adornments ought to work smoothly. Well, they didn’t. Many proc effects were getting resisted or weren’t able to be stacked. Fortunately, we have good news from Xelgad after the jump…
I saw this post on the EQ2 Forums and just had to share it. Mikbove asks: I’ve heard this phrase being bantered around a lot on this forum. However not being technological minded and all that, could someone please explain to me what it means on plain English. Thanks in advance Bawango of Antonia Bayle responded: It goes like this: game designers are a creative bunch and they want to make games which, like a great movie, move the story along at an exciting pace. In come the thugs from accounting who tie them down and whip them until...