Multi-housing Going Live Today

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing, Game Updates & Maintenance

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).

   

Instant Level 90? Fuggedaboutit

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Commentary

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 months, why not provide a way for players who already have a a level 90 character to ding another from, say, 50 to 85? Already, many of us earn our AAs from level 15-65 when it’s most easily obtained, and then close our eyes, grit our teeth, and push through the mind-numbing errand quests from 70-85.

GU60: Rearranging Hotbars Made Easier?

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance

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 the SHIFT key, the icons will become draggable, even if you have dragging disabled for that window, allowing you to reposition the icons.

Domino Moves Up to Associate Producer, Frizznik to Navigate Tradeskills

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Tradeskill

If you have been following the posts (and tweets) of EmilyDominoTaylor, 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 copy-paste operation) to producing complex quests and designing entire events. We’ve seen the introduction of elaborate Heritage quests, the first ever Signature tradeskill quest (the Coldain Prayer Shawl), as well as Tradeskill Epics, and a large variety of content for tradeskillers, all while more than doubling the number of recipes available to Carpenters and other classes.

And all along, Domino has made a point of communicating with players moreso than many other developers, and rapidly correcting the numerous shortcomings and frustrations of the EQ2 tradeskill system as it existed when she took over. I think one could safely say that, with the exclusion of the actual “mechanics” of crafting (the dull 1-2-3-1-2-3 four second crafting cycle), Tradeskills are one of the most polished parts of EQ2.

So with today’s announcement that Domino will be taking more of a “big picture” vantage point on the EQ2 development process, who will pick up the Tradeskill banner? As it turns out, someone who is no stranger to the task: Paul “Frizznik” Carrico. I’m hopeful that with his background in game mechanics and content design, he’ll be able to lend a hand to continuing to shepherd tradeskills, while addressing some of the mechanical shortcomings of the actual crafting process (the aforementioned 4 second crafting cycle having proven to be a more effective sleep aid than Diprivan), as well as the niggling bugs and caps that have largely hampered the draw of Crafting and Harvesting skill buffs. As we saw last week, Frizznik has wasted no time and already put through some changes in Harvesting speeds for lower level characters.

After the break, the full announcement…

New EQ2 Server Hardware Announced, Timetable Unknown

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance

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!

Create a Level 90 Character? SmokeJumper Asks ‘What If?’, Opens the Floor for Debate

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Commentary, Daybreak Cash, DGC Wants Feedback

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 to you and see how you feel about it.

Ready? Try not to judge until you’ve read it all. It’s definitely going to make a few of you think about wearing a troll costume, but if so, please keep in mind that this is just an idea. It’s a discussion. That’s all. I am serious that I’m asking for feedback.

GU60: Harvesting Tool Changes

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Tradeskill

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 Harvest, .1 second reduction in all harvesting times.
  • 30: Briarwood Harvesting Kit: 4% Double Harvest, .2 second reduction in all harvesting times.
  • 40: Teak Harvesting Kit: 6% Double Harvest, .3 second reduction in all harvesting times.
  • 50: Sandalwood Harvesting Kit: 8% Double Harvest, .4 second reduction in all harvesting times.
  • 70: Redwood Harvesting Kit: 10% Double Harvest, .5 second reduction in all harvesting times.
  • 80: Compact Redwood Harvesting Kit: 13% Double Harvest, .5 second reduction in all harvesting times.

If you have any of these tools, when you log on after this goes live, those tools will auto convert into the new Harvesting Kit.  Woodworkers now only have one recipe to make the Kits rather than skill specific tools.  The only writ to make tools was in the 70-79 range and I changed it to only ask for Kits rather than single tools.

Update Notes for April 19, 2011 — Stockpiling Gryphons is Futile

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance

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.

GU60: Tradeskill Writs for Levels 15-20, Harvesting Speed Bump

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Tradeskill

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, have no fear. Deity buffs, racial traits, tinkered tools, and crafted tools are all being nerfed adjusted to make sure the maximum harvesting speed is still around 2 seconds.

End-of-the-Weekenditus

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing, Game Updates & Maintenance, Itemization

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 housing code demons and responding quickly to the bug reports.

Prestige Houses

Those prestige houses we’ve been hearing about have been unveiled, leaving no surprises. The Qeynos Dojo from Elddar Grove makes an appearance. It’s cozy, which is real-estate lingo for TINY. Hopefully in a later update, some kind of outdoor area can be added. The Neriak Opera House is much bigger, although again there’s no outdoor area, as these prestige houses were actually produced in 2007 before houses were opened up to ‘outside’ areas. Rounding out the new Prestige houses are the Maj’dul Library which will be awfully familiar for those who have completed their Tradeskill Epic (no sign of weighty tomes or menacing djinn librarians though). We haven’t seen the Maj’dul Bottle house just yet, although we’re guessing that it’s not unlike the bottle found on the shores of the Sinking Sands.

GU60: Berserker Fixes, Persistent Buffs, Manaburn/Lifeburn Immunities

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, Grouping

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.

   

Shaders 3.0 and Renewed Dedication

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing, Game Updates & Maintenance

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 holiday events, or for the subsequent expansion.

In any programming, scope creep will kill ya, and as we’ve discussed in the past the original plan for Shaders (a graphical bump for high-end cards) evolved into something entirely different (a rewrite of the entire shader pipeline to revamp Shader 1 AND add Shader 3). It did not help that art assets continued to be turned in long after Shaders 3 had been adopted which were only Shader 1-ready, leading to hours of chasing bugs and very public hotfixes. Time that could have been spent polishing up Shaders 3 in older zones, including numerous house items which displayed poorly. Shader 3 has many advantages when it works well, but there are just too many problems for it to be a realistic option for many players.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

The passion to develop this game and make it even better is at an all-time high right now and SOE is supporting this game strongly. We have one of the largest dev teams in the company, and our product slate for the year is going to be tremendous. I know it’s easy to be negative, because that way you can never be disappointed, but sheesh folks, really. You’ve got a really solid dev team here and every single one of us wants the game to get better and better.

Regarding Shader 3.0, we’re shifting some resources around to start tackling it again, but there are many issues still left to address. It’s going to take some time. Just a warning that it won’t get fixed tomorrow or anything.

Multiple House Ownership Questions Answered

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing

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.

Multiple House Ownership & Prestige Homes FAQ

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing, DGC Wants Feedback, Game Updates & Maintenance

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 have 1 of each house type per character.

Players can now link their regular houses to prestige houses, and port directly to friend’s houses from their own house or even guild hall. This brings us a step closer to Guild Alliances, linking guild halls to facilitate grouping and raiding, but will still require an intermediate step of zoning to a regular or prestige home.

We provide the entire Multi-housing FAQ here for reference purposes:

Multi-housing Coming to Test Today…

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing, DGC Wants Feedback, Game Updates & Maintenance

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 character on Live to the Test Copy server, your house will not be copied over. Fortunately, vendors are being added to inexpensively buy houses just to allow testing.

Multihousing Feedback @ EQ2 Forums | Multihousing Bug Reports @ EQ2 Forums

From Zoltaroth:

Test-Copy will get the code the same time as test. However copied characters will not retain their houses from live. You will be free to purchase as many hosues as you want and play with the feature on Test-Copy though.

All of the underlying DB data has changed so there is no way for the houses to copy over when Live and Test are out of sync on the housing code. Once Live is updated the copy script will again copy houses (after some updates).

When exactly?

We are shooting to update test around 3-4pm pacific.

erm…

Some parts of the process are taking longer than anticipated. This will likely cause the update to be closer to 6pm than 4pm.

GU60: Cross-Faction Communication Coming to Nagafen & Vox (PvP)

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance, PvP/BG/Proving Grounds

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.

Dethdlr’s Adornment Calculator

Written by Dethdlr on . Posted in Dethdlr's Dungeon, Itemization

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 CalculatorDetails after the break.

Multi-Housing To Be ‘Out-of-Band’

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing, Game Updates & Maintenance

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 not tied to Game Update 60. It could appear on Test as soon as this week!

I think people are misreading what I am saying. It is not part of a GU. If it is ready before GU-60 it will go before GU-60. Right now we are in the final internal testing stages and are hoping to get it to test this week. If any critical bugs are found then it obviously will not be pushed.

GU60 Notes Today?

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Game Updates & Maintenance

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 be posted:

Today.

We’ll have reactions to these notes in the morning.

Grabbing Flying Mounts by the Reins

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Art, Appearance, Housing

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 tinkered C.R.A.S.H. pad available in the Velious launch days event and subsequently available during City Festivals in the first week of each month.

What a lot of players would like to know is:

  • When will we see other flying mounts introduced?
  • Will existing flying type mounts be upgradeable for use as appearance flying mounts?


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