If you thought the Itemization threads on the EQ2 Forums have been harsh, they really took a turn for the worse after players took Silius‘ advice and checked out the changes on Test and Test Copy, only to find that several items had lost upwards of 75% of their MultiAttack, 4.0 weapons received additional boosts (leaving out 6.0 weapons), and most of the ‘boosts’ were upwards of 0.6% increases on just a handful of stats.

SmokeJumper came to Silius‘ defense:

Silius has made huge strides into setting things up so that the completely haphazard systems of yore, where half a dozen designers just made stuff up on their own without checking anything against each other, is eliminated. Systems have been created, and like with any new systems, there were hitches in a few assumptions here.

We’re fixing those assumptions (thanks in large part to some of the feedback provided here) and the systems will keep improving. We hope to avoid the typical “expansion item debacle” in the future by providing reasoned methods to make items in the future.

So yes, there were a few glitches here, but it’s all in the interest of progress.

Silius is doing an excellent job. If you think he’s doing his job in a vacuum, then you’re incorrect. Half the design team is working with him to make things better. Please feel free to continue to hate him, because that’s your prerogative, but he’s not going anywhere.

Players have expressed concerns that the changes in the difficulty of dungeons this week will make Kael Drakkel far too easy. However SmokeJumper seems to be backing up the designers on wanting to keep the contested Kael Drakkel sufficiently difficult:

(Making the zone super easy is) not our intent at all. And I’m glad that your group is able to play through those areas. But it must have been verrry lonely in Kael, because we know how many people were playing it…and it’s not many.

SmokeJumper has assured players in a thread “Where did my adventure go?!” that not only does EQ2 have a long-term plan besides the standard game updates and expansions, but that much will be revealed soon. If you have taken for granted that next year’s expansion will be Velious Part 2, raising the level cap to 100, you may want to read on!

Watch this space. I’ll be posting stuff soon to describe this year’s slate. Probably next week sometime, maybe the week after. We’re going to be doing some VERY cool stuff this year and I think you’ll start to see more and more of the kinds of things you mention here.

We’re already one of the best. Now it’s time to get unique.

and:

We’ll be posting next year’s slate of coming attractions soon.

Considering the extremely tight leash that Marketing and PR have kept the EQ2 team on in the recent past, it just seems unlikely that all the permissions have been acquired to tell us what’s coming more than a few months out. We’ve never gotten information that far in advance (except Fan Faire), so consider us skeptical.

There have been many reasons in the past not to allow PvP to PvE or PvE to PvP server transfers. Over the years, with itemization changes and server merges, some of those reasons have become less important. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

We’ve created a poll and asked for feedback related to PvP and PvE transfers over in the PvP forums. Since many players may not watch that forum, I wanted to make a post here because this decision can impact PvE servers as well.

Please feel free to vote and post your feedback/opinions in this thread.

PvP to PvE Server Transfer PLAYER POLL

The question: How do you feel about allowing Marketplace transfers to/from PvP and PvE servers?

SOE is looking for your feedback on two recent changes that went in on Tuesday. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Today’s hotfix introduced a couple of fixes and I’d be interested to hear how it has affected you.

First, we’ve made some changes to improve the performance for public quests. We still expect them to contribute towards a higher level of lag than other types of content due to the sheer number of people that participate, and we are working to make them even better. However, you should hopefully notice an improvement after today’s hotfix.

Players logged in yesterday morning to find that their Ranged items, including bows and thrown weapons, had rejected their adornments. Those adornments ended up back in the Overflow slot.

Rothgar responded:

This appears to be a bug related to some item changes.  Our QA department is working on it now and we will have the items fixes asap.

If you just can’t wait for Thursday to see what (if any) changes you’ll see to your gear, you may be interested in these additional Test Update Notes (beyond the notes already posted on Tuesday):

ITEMS

• Dungeon dropped loot has had its power increased.
• Dungeon shard armor has had its power increased.
• Raid items have had their power increased.
• The gap in power between easy and challenge mode raid items has been increased.
• The power of a few War Runes has been increased.

Silius brought this to our attention:

Just a heads up that test server should have the biggest chunk of the item increase on it now. If you want to test copy and check it out your feedback is appreciated.

After posting a promising thread on Friday entitled “Upcoming Itemization Changes (No Nerfs)“, it seems SmokeJumper has gotten egg on his face today. Players logged in after today’s Tuesday Game Update to find sweeping nerfs and huge reductions in the effectiveness of Velious gear across the line, especially Fighter items.

In a cantankerous discussion on the EQ2 forums, players linked numerous items which underwent substantial losses in stats and desirability. SmokeJumper initially tried to defend the changes with:

Please go back and take a look at my original post. I did say that we were being “intentionally conservative” with these changes and that this we’re likely to do a second pass after judging the impact of the first changes. Hang in there.

When cornered about why today’s update included all nerfs and no buffs:

I’m the wrong guy to try to answer your questions, but I’ve forwarded this thread to those in charge of itemization and they’ll write a response soon. There weren’t supposed to be nerfs, so I’m trying to find out why that occurred.

The full explanation, and our commentary about EQ2 Itemization after the jump…

If you are a level 80+ Master Crafter who has completed the Tradeskill Epic, this post by Domino may interest you:

Epic crafters, you might want to visit the tradeskill society in your home town while Bristlebane Day is with us. The grand jester has been having some fun with red collectibles for the season…

Players immediately noticed that every red shiny was dropping just one item. It seems there’s something else you have to do to get the others.

From SmokeJumper the EQ2 Forums:

These itemization changes did *not* happen today, on Tuesday.

Instead, they will happen on Thursday morning’s hotfix. Sorry for the delay. Soon!

All U.S. servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The U.K. worlds will have their update at 5am London Time on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours.

The full reformatted patch notes are available after the jump….

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

We’re making some changes to make dungeons more attractive to players in DoV. We’re adjusting base pop and boss health so that the dungeons take less time to complete so they’re more fun for folks, as well as to allow more frequent chances at boss loot drops on revisits. We’re also making a few changes so that bosses don’t wipe parties so easily since they seem to be a bit tougher than we’d originally planned.

We’re approaching these changes conservatively so that we don’t overshoot the mark. If these changes don’t do the trick, we’ll probably do another round of small changes later. But the overall goal is to make the dungeons more attractive for everyone.

P.S., These are not the only fixes we’re making for tomorrow’s hot fixes, but we wanted to call these changes out specially because those of you that gave up on dungeons because they were too challenging for the payoffs you were getting may want to give it another go now.

Client Crashes FIX!

If you have had your fill of “EverQuest2.com has stopped responding” errors, Rothgar seems to have finally gotten to the bottom of this one:

We think we’ve finally tracked down a bug that has been happening for awhile and leading to client crashes and the “EQ2 has stopped responding” problem. I can’t guarantee that this fixes EVERY problem out there, but it certainly fixes the most common crash we’ve been seeing lately.

This should get pushed out with next week’s hotfix along with some performance improvements to public quests!

EQ2 PvP Guru Olihin has given PvPers a taste of Game Update 60:

GU60 will bring lots of changes to PvP.

• Fame is being reworked
• Fame and title gains will now have their own EXP BAR, no more trying to figure out how long or why you gain/lost a title
• New armor and adornments
• Ongoing balance changes (this will never stop and will never be perfect in any realistic way)
• New Battleground
• Enhancements to the Matchmaker for Battlegrounds
• Cross faction communication

There will be more details as we get closer to GU60.

When prodded about upgrading the graphics engine of EQ2, if not to improve the graphics, at least to address the spate of flickering graphics and shadows which seem to have plagued the game for some players (including me) since the launch of Velious.

SmokeJumper addressed this concern and others including graphical glitches and performance slowdowns in Public Quests:

We redirected our efforts yesterday to trying to resolve some of the PQ issues. We fixed one issue last night, and although I had been getting similar behavior to what you describe on my home rig, I couldn’t make that duplicate last night, so I’m hoping the improvement we made was a good one. (Admittedly, I was still turning my graphics down to High Performance when multi-raid groups were in the PQ area.) We’re not done yet and there will be more improvements next week.

Engine improvements are also on our list for this year. Those definitely take time to accomplish but there are some obvious things we should do to bring the engine up to par with other modern engines.

Server upgrades are something we want to complete also. In the last six months, we’ve upgraded Antonia Bayle, Crushbone, Nagafen, and Freeport because they were the most highly populated servers. Since the merges, it’s obvious that Splitpaw and Unrest (at least) need upgrades also, and we would like to just go ahead and upgrade all of the remaining worlds. Budget requests have been made.

Stay hopeful.

If you have run a few Destiny of Velious dungeons (and raids), compared the loot/gear to Public Quests, and said aloud “no me comprende”, this should be a good week.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

We are bumping up the power of Velious dungeon and raid items. We’re doing this to make those items more competitive when compared with Public Quest items, because instances are tougher than the PQs and deserve better rewards. This does include shard armors.

We are also going to bump up the power of hard-mode raid loot so hard modes are even more rewarding, as they require significant time and effort to beat. NOTE: This doesn’t include war runes since they are already quite powerful.

The net result of these changes makes dungeons and raids a bit more rewarding and also balances things out so that people with a full public quest set will be able to find solid item upgrades in dungeons.

These changes will occur next week sometime. If they happen sooner than that, we’ll let you know.

Let’s Be Honest…

Public Quests completed even at the highest “x4 raid” level demand neither the coordination nor the discipline of any of the raid content in the last 3 expansions. Storm Gorge requires a little more focus than Ring War, but generally speaking, 24-40 players standing in the right place, killing the right mobs, in the right order, stand to inherit a wagonload of Legendary gear with Yellow adornment slots, all without such challenges as timing AOEs, switching to an Off-Tank, agro-juggling, or any complex strategy. The biggest enemy encountered is usually Server Lag.

Public Quests offer a speedy alternate route to gearing up for players who largely skipped Sentinel’s Fate, are gearing up alts, or just aren’t interested in more solo questing (although as we found, the Othmir questline writing, structure, and payoff are all above average and keep the obvious time sinks to a minimum).

So what’s to stop players from logging in alts, parking them near the scene of a Public Quest, and going to get a coffee while their toon “earns” amazing gear? Apparently not enough. While we have taken issue with certain players who spend an awful lot of time critiquing how others play the game and all the ways in which those methods are unfair or unbalancing, even we would be foolish to defend standing around AFK in a Public Quest all while earning Legendary or Fabled gear. We believe its in everyone’s interest that your favored MMO have a long-term plan besides “More dungeons and more lootz in the next Game Update!” Gameplay that allows leapfrogging most of the content progression is disruptive for the game. Velious has got to last us the next year, and as robust as the Game Updates may end up being, the end of the treadmill should never be visible.

Today came down to a choice: Write or Play?

So tomorrow we’ll be back with lots of news about Itemization, Server Performance, and continued roadblocks in Zone progression.

Many of EverQuest 2’s most dedicated players owe their gameplay roots to the original EverQuest and still carry strong memories of the patience and community the original game required. Soloing was almost unheard of. Camping mobs for hours (or days), the difficulties and perils of travel, and contested spawns of much-needed named mobs were all experiences players would not soon forget. It sure was a different game before WoW forced all MMOs to become approachable and remove any aspect that might be considered as a “waste” of the player’s time.

When we heard about Chronoportals, a live event running on EQ2 servers that celebrates EverQuest’s 12 year anniversary by bringing players back to an earlier time to experience memorable encounters from before the Shattering, we hoped that the event might go that extra mile and include a real impression of how the world looked in EverQuest, and revisit some of the original zones.

Your updates notes for today, March 24, 2011, include several crash fixes, problems linking items in chat, Auction channel spam, and also some substantial nerfs to Critical Mitigation on Destiny of Velious gear.

If multiple updates per week have been getting on your nerves, SmokeJumper has something to say:

I’m sorry that these updates have been bothering you. We’ve made a conscious decision to be as responsive to issues from our recent release as possible, fixing any issues or exploits found as quickly as possible and then getting those out to the Live servers so that your gameplay is as great as possible.

They will be reducing in frequency after this week.

In the run up towards Game Update 60, there are several things of note regarding Player Housing and Graphics that we’ve been meaning to cover. These include House Item Limit Expanders, Prestige Houses, the Network Status Page, and also a tip of the hat to Ryan “Imago-Quem” F. who has moved on to PlanetSide 2 and incoming graphics guru Alex “GermInUSA” who continues to polish up the EQ2 graphics engine while adding new features.

Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of the launch of Destiny of Velious. Over the last month, we have seen an avalanche of bugs impacting progression with dungeons and raid zones alike throughout Velious. While these have been steadily fixed during the nearly daily updates, at least one issue remains unresolved: The series of doors in Kraytoc’s Fortress of Rime x4 raid zone. It seems that these doors can get locked due to wipes, zone resets, etc.

Discuss this on the EQ2 Forums

In response to a concise Berserker Class Issues post-Velious thread created by Bremer, Xelgad said that we should see some of these fixes hopefully before but at the latest by Game Update 60:

Hey guys, thanks for the thread!

We’ve got a bunch of quick fixes for these issues on the way. They’ll be live by GU60 at the latest.

Most of the changes are pretty straightforward and some are exactly as suggested here.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

We’re always looking at ways to improve the fun factor on PvP servers and one point that comes up occasionally is how we handle cross-faction communication. Currently each faction has their own language and there’s no way to communicate other thing minor things like pet names, etc.

We are considering opening up public channels to cross-faction chat and wanted to find out how the community would feel about that. We understand that chat in PvP can get pretty heated but also feel that taunting your opponents and being taunted is part of the PvP experience.