beast lord is the 25th class!

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 years. There is a ton of content, the quests are well-written, and the dungeons are a bit more interesting than in the past. Sure, the creative design of the dungeons and intricate raids have resulted in months of fixes and patches which wouldn’t have been seen in more mundane zones. But above all else, most players have found the dungeons and raids interesting. The major malfunction with Velious has been Itemization.

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 simple:

• If the website promoting EQ2/EQ2X gives the two services equal weight, and if players are given a REAL choice between the two games, then I think your best bet is to keep the 2 services separate.

Georgeson assured me and many others that both EQ2 and EQ2X would be equally marketed, with a ‘fair’ choice between the two games. On that representation, having the two services separate made sense. And yet, when EQ2X went live, this is the first thing I noticed on EverQuest2.com:

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 new items. Every month more items are added to the Moonlight Enchantments events, as we saw with last month’s rolling fog and other wall and floor tiles. As we reported last month, the Root Beer crafting quest became infinitely repeatable, so instead of shuffling all your alts around to different zones, you could grind tokens all in one place. Finally, the City Festivals continue to pick up new items as players noticed when all the City Festivals were operating simultaneously after the downtime.

Today I logged in to see that just in time for Fan Faire, a full lineup of Casino-themed items are now available on the Marketplace.  There are two sets of Gaming Tables and accessories for 450SC each ($1.50 if you got triple SC), and a set of pool balls for 50SC (16 cents). If you drop the whole 1000 SC ($3.33 if you got triple SC), you get two full sets of gaming tables and accessories, a slot machine, and a pool table including rack, cues, two sets of 9 striped and solid billiard balls.

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 of the Day (MOTD) meanwhile says this:

The Summer Fireworks Festival and the Massive Marketplace Sale have been temporarily postponed. Look for updates on their return on the /motd. Thank you for your patience!

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 ‘appearance’ basis, SmokeJumper responded:

That’s exactly what we’re thinking. There is no need for a “speed progression” because there is more than one type of mount now and [for] you the “progression” is unlocking the different mount types at different levels.

These comments don’t change my viewpoint at all. Awarding the fastest car in a racing game the moment you put in the disc removes a major purpose of the game. While EQ2 is not a racing game, tiered rewards are the bread-and-butter of MMOs. Somewhere down the road, someone is going to say “EverQuest 2 feels small, I can run across the whole world in a few minutes.” SmokeJumper seems to be banking on players being Collectors rather than playing for Progression. We’ll go to the ends of the earth to get all different mount appearances, even if they all travel at the same speed.

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 remain a mystery. If we find out what else changed, we’ll let you know! SOE rarely comments on internal mechanics changes or exploits.

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 or Frogloks wearing furs and coon-skin caps. The unique appearances of the original gear were replaced overnight with wall-to-wall New Halas looks.

The second and most publicized example of the gutting of choice has been the Destiny of Velious itemization. The items have been so formulaic that players pressed Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson for an explanation. He eventually admitted that the items originated from an item-generating script. He insisted that the generated items were supposed to be a starting point, with better items getting finessed and customized for each class. To date, we’ve seen little of this ‘finesse’.

Our third example, showing a clear and present pattern, is last week’s mount revamp. While we were excited to see 2 new mount types — Leapers and Gliders — bring more variety to an area of EQ2 that has traditionally lagged behind, we were a little puzzled at some of the runspeed numbers. But our surprise gave way to shock at seeing every ground mount in the game being set to 130% runspeed.

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 breezeway between hotels  (or anywhere else they can find them including at the Pool Party) and get their questions posed. To quote a dev, “If you see me standing at a booth or demo all by myself, please come talk to me!  I’m probably bored!”

This is a test of the Liveblog plugin.

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 to wait for me to find time to convert 221 adornment descriptions into text that will fit in the dropdowns. Once you click calculate, you can hover your cursor over the item names to see the tooltip popup of each adornment or click them to see them on Zam.

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to try and convert them or just leave them as is. I’m leaning towards leaving them as is.

Also, the in-game item links will be added as time allows for the new adornments. There are 221 of them and I can only cut and paste for so long before falling asleep. 🙂  If you click through to Zam though, they should have the in game links already.

Let me know if you find any errors/bugs. I still need to indicate the items that only work on shields, but that will most likely be another day.

Let me know if you find any errors (other than the shield/secondary slot issues, I already know about that).

Update: 96 additional adornments have been added that can be purchased in Thurgadin after completing The Fallen Swords questline.  This brings the total up to 492 T9 adornments.  Thanks to Maikeruu for emailing me the info.

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 foot.

Leapers and Gliders

So let’s take a look at the new mounts.

As previously reported, Leapers are mounts which are able to jump very high, and glide for a reasonable distance. They are available at level 30 via either an Adventure or Tradeskill quest, or via the Marketplace. Gliders are mounts which are able to not only jump a remarkable height, but then glide a great distance, possibly across entire zones. They are available at level 60, also via either Adventure or Tradeskill quests.

What’s important to note here is that unlike the 5 day “waiting period” for flying mounts, Leaper and Glider mounts can be acquired through a quest that only takes about 20 minutes.

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 be able to login with Launchpad 3 however.

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 the appropriate Archetypes. There’s also a chance that we may see a reversion of the unpopular revamp of all itemization for level 1-20 characters. Handing out coon skin caps and furs to Sarnak or Fae didn’t make a lick of sense.

We are hesitant to make any prediction about how this will all go. There are thousands of items in EQ2 with similar stats that exist mostly for appearance. We would be very disappointed to see those items washed away in favor of a single progression of items shared by all dungeon bosses and trash. We don’t know what form this revamp will take, but it seems an insurmountable amount of work to do it “right”.

No word on if we’ll see any improvement to Destiny of Velious itemization which has replaced cool items that people strive to acquire, with a stat odometer propelled by incrementally more powerful yet completely unmemorable items.

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 servers should expect a two hour downtime.

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 they promise to put countless repetitive and time consuming requirements into the game.  The accounting thugs claim the company can’t make any money unless games are made this way.  We’re still waiting for the MMORPG game which proves them wrong.