Feldon
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: Hi, folks, Today’s housing feature has to do a lot of massaging of the house database elements. This takes a considerable amount of time (a bit like a world merge, actually). This means that when we take servers down, they will be down for 2 or 3 hours while we do that process. We should have all the servers up by mid-afternoon sometime (Pacific time).
EQ2
Our most commented post here on EQ2Wire so far has been the “What if?” discussion started by SmokeJumper pondering whether EQ2 should offer some sort of shortcut to level 90. Many players expressed their opinions from one extreme to the other and everything in between. Some players demanded that this take place on another server. Others made the fair point that many players would find themselves at 90 with utterly no idea how to play their class. I fell along the line that since 1-85 has *already* been trivialized due to itemization changes and neglect in the last ~18...
In a thread about the new Character Sheet coming with Game Update 60, Rothgar got a bit sidetracked by players asking for a bit easier time when rearranging hotbars and the icons on those hotbars. These changes will take effect when you are in Window Rearranging Mode (press F10): I’m going to make the opacity of the windows 90% when arranging windows so its a little easier to see through them. As far as hotbars go, the icons will be visible but disabled so clicking anywhere on the window will allow you to position the window. If you hold...
If you have been following the posts (and tweets) of Emily “Domino” Taylor, Tradeskill lead for EQ2, over the past few months, you’ve probably picked up on her increased involvement and interaction with the other parts of the EQ2 team. Today’s news that she has stepped up from Tradeskill Lead to Associate Producer then is not too surprising, as she has already produced and contributed to several live events and had a hand in creating increasingly elaborate content beyond that of Tradeskills. Domino has quickly grown from creating new tiers of tradeskill content (for most tradeskill classes, a mostly...
From the EQ2 Forums: All U.S. servers will come down for a hotfix at 7am PDT [15:00~18:00 GMT] on Thursday, April 28, 2011. The Splitpaw server will have its also have its hotfix the same day at 3pm London Time. The expected downtime for all affected servers is three hours. Update Notes are not yet available.
Dethdlr
For me, since DoV came out, the “hot zone” hasn’t seemed to be very “hot”. I’ve said this in a few threads and have seen others chime in with different theories on why they seem that way. There may be fixes to this coming our way in GU60. Details after the break.
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: I don’t have the ETA yet, but we are making the purchases and we’ll get the hardware replaced on the servers that have not yet been upgraded (Guk, Everfrost, Unrest, Butcherblock, Permafrost, Oasis, and Splitpaw). It’ll take some time to get these changes implemented (takes a while to order them, get them delivered, and then installed at the various data centers), but we’ll update you with details when we know more. They’re coming!
In a thread from a returning player who demanded a flying mount before he’d commit to coming back to EQ2 as a full-time player, SmokeJumper posited a rather interesting thought regarding flying mounts, Velious content, and the fact that both require level 86+. What would you think about being able to start a character at level 90? Read on… Hey folks, the OPs comment about not wanting to level up to play in Velious and get a cool mount is a reasonable discussion. At the risk of laying foundation for a flamewar here, I’d like to propose an idea...
Continuing last week’s news that Harvesting is being changed to have a faster speed, Frizznik has posted a new thread with a summary of the changes coming to Harvesting Tools: The other thread was getting long, so I wanted to create a new one so folks could easily find the changes to them, and to let you know some new developments. Woodworker made tools are changing. There are no longer seperate tools for each harvesting type. There is now one tool at each tier that gives harvest time reduction and double harvest chance. 20: Ash Harvesting Kit: 2% Double...
Dethdlr’s Adornment Calculator now has the non-class specific, non-raid dropped red adornments up as beta. Let me know if I got any of the numbers wrong and I’ll see about getting them fixed. I believe I’m going to wait until after GU60 to do the rest since there may be changes headed our way from SOE. Hope you like it. 🙂
SOE Games, Sites, and Forums have been down for at least 4 hours now. Ashlanne posted on the SOE Facebook page: All SOE Games, Sites, and Forums are down due to emergency maintenance. We will have them back up as soon we can. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Today’s update notes remind us that no matter how many temporary flying mounts you buy from the Marketplace for 0,SC, they’re still temporary. Such mounts will all go away when the Take Flight promotion ends. TAKE FLIGHT PROMOTION The Enchanted Gryphon Call is only available during the Take Flight promotion. Be aware that any extras that you have stockpiled are not going to last, and will be removed the next time you use an Enchanted Gryphon Call. POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Throne of Storms (Heroic) Tribunus-Prime Hagandr will once again cast Decimation at a certain time during the battle.
Frizznik is putting forth some changes to crafting in Game Update 60. Due to the loss of pristine bonuses when crafting new items that came with Velious, players have discovered a range of levels from 17-20 where there are no tradeskill quests to do, and XP has become a slow grind. So new tradeskill writs are being added from level 15-20 to resolve this issue. Meanwhile, harvesting speed is getting a boost for low levels, with the base harvesting time dropping from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. If you’re concerned that harvesting will be too fast at high levels,...
Let’s see… ReItemization It seems we’ve finally made our voices heard on the problems introduced by the extreme stat consolidation with the introduction of Velious, namely that not only all dungeon-dropped (Legendary, Fabled) gear from level 1-89 has completely ineffective stats, but that even the Mastercrafted gear from 22, 32, 42, 52, 62, 72, 77, and 82 are almost nonsensical in their setups given the changes. Multihousing Multihousing has been on Test and Test Copy for a couple of days now and feedback has been flooding in from players who are testing it out. Zoltaroth has been slaying the...
According to Xelgad, we can look forward to some class improvements/tweaks with Game Update 60. Here’s what we know so far: Re: the Berserker class issues thread post Velious thread: These changes should hit Test with GU60. There should be plenty of time to give feedback on them while they’re on the Test Servers. Re: Persistent Buffs- Post-DoV Abilities thread: Unfortunately, we won’t be able to push these changes through until GU60 Re: Manaburn / Lifeburn Immunities thread: These have been removed for GU60.
If there’s one thing that SmokeJumper wants us to know about the EQ2 team right now, it’s that they are more motivated and focused than they have been for some time now. There are some truly ambitious plans (public and rumored) to bring us new raid and group content in the next two major Game Updates. If they launch in a solid condition it could go a long way to working on the sustainability of the playerbase who have traditionally moved on to other things a few months after each expansion, only to return when raids are added, for...
Such an involved change as rewriting the underlying housing code of EQ2 will no doubt lead to many questions about what has changed, what hasn’t changed, and what additional functionality we might first see in the future. In any programming project, just recreating existing functionality can often eat up most of your time, leaving little left to add new features.
An extensive Multiple House Ownership & Prestige Homes FAQ has been posted on the EQ2 Forums by SmokeJumper yesterday. In brief, each character can have up to 10 houses. This can be any combination of regular houses within the cities (betrayal and citizenship quests, which will be streamlined at a future date, will allow simultaneously owning houses in multiple cities), as well as ‘prestige houses’. Some of these prestige houses have been revealed (Freeblood manor, Everfrost summer house) and others have been hinted (Neriak Opera House, Qeynos Dojo, Maj’dul Library, Maj’dul Bottle). Within your 10 house limit, you may...
Test and Test Copy will be brought down shortly in order to receive the new Multi-housing code which EQ2 code guru Zoltaroth has been beating on for the last several months. This is a substantial rewrite of the underlying housing code which will allow players to own up to 10 homes in different cities, jump from house to house, and also port to houses where they have been explicitly granted friend or trustee access. Because there would be no way to reconcile the Live house data vs. the reorganized Test Copy house data, when doing a /testcopy of a...
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: Just a heads up on the change coming with GU60. You will now be able to change your spoken language on Nagafen (and Vox). This will enable you to communicate to the other team via /shout and /say commands. By default, your language will continue to be Lucanic (evil) or Antonican (good). If you don’t change your language, the other team will not understand you.
Here are your Game Update Notes for Thursday, April 14, 2011. The vast majority of the changes are fixes to dungeon progression.
I recently spent several hours researching what adornments I wanted to put on my new gear. This required going to multiple pages on multiple sites and manually calculating all the information I needed to know about adornments. This led me to think, there has to be a better way. What resulted from that thought was Dethdlr’s Adornment Calculator. Details after the break.
A lot of us have been putting 2 and 2 together and getting that Multi-housing would be included in the forthcoming Game Update 60. So many of us were sent into a tizzy when the Game Update 60 preview omitted multi-housing and today when Zoltaroth, wrangler of multi-housing code, posted this: Housing will likely not be released as part of a GU. It will be a seperate update with its own set of notes etc. Fortunately, our interpretations that multi-housing was now far off in the distance were unfounded. Multi-housing is something we’ll get when it’s ready, and it’s...
You’ll recall SmokeJumper‘s posting on April 5th about the notes/plans/announcement for Game Update 60…. The GU 60 notes we post later this week should set the pace a bit. Amnerys updated us today with the explanation for the hangup: The press release is going out today and I’ll have an article for you this afternoon with more info. Yay! It was originally planned to go out on 4/5 but Marketing requested a small delay to align the timing with other things going on. and just to confirm, SmokeJumper had a 1 word answer when asked when the notes will...
For level 86~90 characters, the introduction of Flying Mounts had a not unexpected result — the vast majority of ground-based mounts have been retired to player stables. Even mounts that grant persistent buffs have been eschewed in favor of the convenience and freedom of flight. While some players have hotbarred different mounts to be able to choose from their desired mounts on the ground, airborne players have limited options. We can choose one of the 8 gryphon mounts available from adventuring, crafting, the collector’s edition, or raiding. At this time, the only other option for flight is the Enterprise-like...