Has it really been another year? Next week, EQ2Wire will be (where else?) in Las Vegas for our seventh SOE Live covering EverQuest II. This looks to be a light year for EQ2, with only 5 events to cover and no Tradeskill, Lore, or Itemization panels this time around.

You can read the official SOE Live 2014 Schedule here, but scroll down to see the list of panels I will be attending, with notations of which panels I will be Liveblogging and Filming. Blogging an accurate transcription of a Q&A panel in realtime is almost impossible, so this year I will be focusing on getting a good 720p HD video recording of as many panels as possible and will then post them in the week after SOE Live. Please note that all times are Pacific Daylight Time.

Dethdlr and I will also be on hand to talk about EQ2Wire and EQ2U on the show floor as well as at our own panel alongside Dedith of Dragon’s Armory. This year, we’ll be talking less about the history of our websites and more about how players can improve their characters using all the tools we provide. We’ll also be going over our new Quest Journal and Checklist features which are currently in public beta.

Dethdlr and I are happy to announce that Quests are now available as an Open Beta on EQ2U! Here’s what we’ve added:

• Quests now appears under the Search menu
• A Quests tab has been added to the EQ2U Quick Search box on the homepage
• View your Active Quest Journal for any of your EQ2 characters
• View a Checklist of all 11,564 quests in EQ2 and see your character’s progress on those quests (Active, Complete, or Never Started)
• Items which offer a quest when examined now show the quest name and link to it
• Items which are required by a quest show the quest name and link to it

How do I access Beta? Do I have to sign up?

All you have to do is load up the EQ2U Dev site. You do not need to sign up or apply for beta as everyone will have access this weekend.

Known Issues

There are over 5,000 “duplicate” quests which have the same names but different details. For now, we are hiding these, but for quest completionists, we provide a button “Show Duplicate Quests”. We will be working to try to pare down some of these dupes.

There is no way for the EQ2 team to provide us data on which quests have been “removed from the game” because of how many different places you can get quests from (an NPC, a spawncamp, an item, just walking into an area, etc.). We will be looking at ways to crowdsource this data from the EQ2 player community.

What happened to Collection (shinies) data?

The EQ2 team is always looking at game performance both at the server and client end. Most of the work on Collections is done, but it’s on hold until later this year. Here’s Endymion‘s comment on the subject:

Collection data will be made available at some point, but the next major census task will be to resolve some inefficiencies in the export process. I can’t give an estimate on when that will be unfortunately, as I have a lot of non-census tasks that require my attention.

Special Thanks

Thanks to EQ2 Developer Endymion at SOE for working tirelessly on adding Quest data and making sure it exports all the goodies we asked for. Thanks to Dellmon (Unrest), Jeehi (Everfrost), Faelen (Butcherblock) and Leaha (Permafrost) for their feedback and bug reports!

Thought I’d post a preview screenshot of something we’ve been working on for EQ2U for the last little while…

This shows my Active Quest Journal side-by-side with an in-progress quest, which just shows how much of a slacker I am on getting quests done!

Come back later today and I’ll have a screenshot of Quest Search as well as the Quest Checklist which shows EVERY quest in a Category (there are over 200) and then shows the progress of your character on all those quests.

Oh and I’m really dating myself with this but…

From the EQ2 Forums:

WEEKLY FEATURE

• The first round of Battlegrounds matchmaker fixes is live!
• Teams will now be more fair numbers wise. No more 24 reds against 3 blues!
• NOTE: teams could be a little off if not everyone picked to be on your team accepts the match. However, backfills will go to the lowest team first so as more people queue to fill in the backfills it will work to even up the teams.
• The getting dropped into Champion’s Respite instead of going straight to your match from your home server is still not fixed.
• If you are chronomentoring on your home server when you accept a battlegrounds match, you will have your chronomentor session restored to you when you return at no cost.
• When you enter a battlegrounds match you will get put into your team’s respawn instead of being dropped in the middle of the map.
• Backfilled players will be put on the team with the fewest total number of players.
• Players who queue as a group will all be placed on the same team. However, the order in the group/raid window will not be maintained.

On December 18th, I announced our Forum Signature Design Contest which would allow players to submit artwork and designs for EQ2U-driven signatures which players can post on the EQ2 forums, guild forums, and anywhere else they choose. Here we are 4 weeks later, and I’m happy to announce the winners of the contest.

First up, Ainaree of Antonia Bayle submitted the winning entry which you can view below:

I really liked how clean and easy it is to read, with great use of the headshot imagery, and good display of both adventure and crafter classes and levels.

Next up, Ajiope submitted these two dramatic entries:

I found these to be visually interesting, and a nice break from the current signature style, while providing players with some nice new options.

Last but certainly not least, Basel Noire of the Underground Decorating Society on Antonia Bayle submitted this entry:

Basel Noire put a stylized flair on her entry which I think will prove irresistible for some readers.

A heartfelt congratulations to all the winners! Basel and Ajiope receive 1,000SC each, while Ainaree will receive an EQ2Wire polo shirt and 2,000SC! I’ll be working with our three winners to get these into new Signature choices for EQ2U!

Timing is Everything

If you wanted to enter the contest and ran out of time, or just wanted to submit an idea for a signature graphic, please feel free to e-mail me at morgan (at) eq2wire.com with your artwork and I’ll be happy to look at it!

Last month, we introduced a Known Recipes and Recipe Books feature, however it was lacking the some optimization and was affecting the overall performance of the site, so we temporarily took the feature offline.

I’m thrilled to announce that not only have we completed the optimization and restored these features, but we have also added full support for Recipes throughout EQ2U, including Recipe Search and Recipe Details!

Search for Recipes at EQ2U!

If you have not read it, please read our past article:
Crack the Books with Recipes on EQ2U

after the jump, our EQ2U Recipes FAQ…

EQ2Wire and EQ2U will be undergoing server maintenance over the next few hours, so these websites will be unavailable during this time.

From the moment we added a Forum Signature feature to EQ2U, we always intended to add additional looks and styles. However to date, all our signatures still look like this:

In the last months, we have refactored our Signature code, and we can now support signatures that look a whole lot better. But to really go all-out on the look and style of these signatures, we need your help as we are not graphic artists!

What Are We Looking For?

• We are looking for player-submitted signature designs that are visually appealing, and language-appropriate, which provide a clear space where the character’s Name, Server, Guild, and Stats can be overlaid legibly.

• The graphical “style” or genre is up to the artist, and may be classical, architectural, modern, comic (Cheesepirate!) or whatever suits the design.

• Contest participants may enter as many designs, themes, and variations as they wish. Judging is based on the cumulative entries of a player. This means you may submit a single exemplary design, or take a chance and submit several different great ideas which either make a “set” or are just unrelated concepts.

We are proud to announce that EQ2U has been updated with a new “Recipes” tab which allows you view Known Recipes and Known Recipe Books for EQ2 Characters!

When viewing Recipes, the Item, Book, and Level columns can sorted or reverse sorted by clicking the column headers or spinner ().  To keep web browsers from exploding when trying to display 6,500 recipes, we’ve broken this data out into Tiers (0, 1-9, 10-19, 20-29, up to 90-95). Recipes can also be quickly filtered from the Category menu.

Dethdlr and I updated EQ2U this afternoon as new information rolled in from the Census data feeds. Here’s what’s been updated:

• Alternate Advancement data – Completely updated with new spell data.
• AA: Dragon tab – new Dragon AAs for all 4 archetypes.
• Channeler class Spells
• Support for Purple adornments on Character pages.
• Tears of Veeshan armor now shows gems.

Things we are still working on:

• Tears of Veeshan armor with upgradeable gem slots is not exporting in a way that we can display the number of gems installed.
• Heroic Endlines
  • Buying a 2nd Heroic endline costs 20 AA points.
  • A 3rd Heroic endline costs 30 AA points.
  • We need to display this correctly, assuming data is available.
• Channeler Pet page — if there is enough desire for this, we could add a page for this data. Although then the Summoners and Enchanters will be quite jealous. 😉

A New Design

It is 21 months to the day since we launched our EQ2U Character, Item, and Guild armory site. In that time, a staggering 840,000 characters in 30,000 guilds have been looked up. We have over 8,500 registered users, and we’ve generated over 8.5 million forum signatures. In that time, Dethdlr and I have never forgotten how we got here, and why so many players call EQ2U their home for keeping track of their characters, researching upgrades, and learning lessons from others.

Believe it or not, when we launched EQ2U, the original style of the site was only ever intended as a placeholder, to be replaced within just a few months. Yet whenever time has come available to work on the site, Dethdlr and I have focused on adding new features and functionality rather than tweaking the look-and-feel. But in the past few months, the time finally came for us to get serious about a restyle.

Over the last year and a half that EQ2U has been in operation, we’ve always kept the functionality and usability of EQ2U at the forefront. However the look-and-feel of EQ2U has been gotten a bit long in the tooth. After seeing Google’s disastrous revamp of Gmail, and Apple’s controversial flattening of iOS7, we’ve thought “Let’s not go drastic, let’s not remove functionality, and let’s not change things for the sake of changing things!”

With those thoughts in mind, I’m happy to unveil the new style for EQ2U. We are opening up the EQ2U Dev (beta) site to the public so that you can check out the new look-and-feel. I hope you will find it instantly familiar, but improved across-the-board.

IMPORTANT! Please report any bugs or issues you find, as well as any feedback you have about the new site at our Contact Form!

NOTE: If you have an EQ2U account, just login again on the Dev site and you’ll see all your characters.

There could be a hidden danger lurking on your character…

A tragic mistake that could be costing your character dearly…

CONFLICTING PROCS !

Many Procs/Effects in EQ2 will not stack with other procs of the same name (or same type) on other items or adornments. In the past, it has been difficult to find out if you have two or more of these overlapping procs/effects which aren’t giving you any additional benefit.

EQ2U‘s new Procs & Adornments Report feature lets you see at-a-glance, which Procs you have (both on items and adornments), as well browse your complete Adornments list. In both views, the columns are clickable, allowing you to sort by different data points.

NOTE: Sometimes procs can conflict even though they have entirely different names. This is something that is intended to be cleaned up in the expansion, with all procs of the same “family” being labeled the same name, with roman numerals indicating power.

after the jump, a few words about the future…

You’ve likely heard whispers of just how powerful Refined and Experimented items can be, but until you’ve seen the final “as delivered” stats on the best examples of said items, either in a screenshot, or by examining another player in-game, it’s hard to know just how awesome these processes are.

A Refining/Experimentation Primer

If you grasped everything in Niami‘s EQ2Traders primer on the subject back when the Chains of Eternity expansion was new, then you already know the how-to and formulas at work here, but if not…

• A Refined item is a Mastercrafted weapon, armor, or piece of jewelry which has been created using a Purified rare. Instead of just crafting an item with an [eq2u]osmium cluster[/eq2u], if you first refine that rare into a [eq2u]purified osmium cluster[/eq2u]. When you then craft the item with this improved rare, nearly all of the item’s stats will be increased by 10%. A few stats are only improved by 5%, and others aren’t impacted at all. View a complete list of Refined stats.

• Meanwhile, Experimentation allows a skilled crafter to “boost” or increase a chosen stat on a crafted item. Experimented items gain a name “prefix” which changes with each experiment, with 5 successful experiments granting a prefix of “Visionary”. Boosting a single stat once increases it by 10%, but if you boost the same stat multiple times, you receive diminishing returns. Boosting the same stat sees an increase of 10%, 15%, 17.5%, 18.5%, and, at the max, 19% (10+5+2.5+1+0.5). Suffice it to say, most people spread their boosts around rather than stacking them all into a single stat.

To know just how powerful Refining, Reforging, and Experimentation can be, one need look no further than top tier raid guilds who, until they acquire their Plane of War mythical cloaks, often wear these Experimented/Refined/Reforged crafted cloaks to the exclusion of most other dropped cloaks.

Dethdlr and I are thrilled to introduce support for Alternate Advancement Profiles to EQ2U. The new row of buttons just above your AA tabs let you view your Current AA Spec or view the contents of one of your three Stored profiles:

It’s important to note that your Current AA Spec can either be one of your Stored AA profiles, or a Server-defined Template. It is our intention in a future update (once we get the right data) to light up your currently active Stored profile once we can determine it.

The Public Beta for the overhauled Dragon’s Armory has now begun! The new site has numerous improvements and features, from better font choices, the ability to link directly to a Character, and more importantly, a completely overhauled Upgrades page which lets you shop for item and adornment upgrades in a visual, meaningful way which always keeps you informed on how your stats will increase or decrease based on different item choices.

Check out the Dragon’s Armory Beta!

Dedith will also be presenting a talk at SOE Live 2013 from 2-3:00pm PDT alongside me (I’ll be talking about EQ2U). We’ll both be taking feedback — I know I’ll be asking about that Comic Sans font… We’ll also be recording an HD video of this panel in case you can’t be at SOE Live.

This morning, I received an e-mail from one Thomas Freyer of Freyer Consulting in Frankfurt, Germany:

From: Thomas Freyer
Subject: Deleting of Profile
URL: http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/446677832604

We demand by law the deleting of this profile as the owner of the trademark “Malshandir” we gave you no permission to use is.
If this profile is deleted within the next 6 hours we will not take further legal actions against you.

As I was still a little sleepy, and since I receive threatening e-mails about once a month demanding that I remove characters from EQ2U, I replied informing Mr. Freyer that Sony Online Entertainment retains ownership over characters and thus he has no grounds to sue, but if he would avail himself of the Help section on EQ2U, he could remove his character in approximately 5 minutes.

When the SOE Live 2013 schedule was released, I started reading. And reading. Before long, shock set in. Two hours later, I was discovered in the fetal position, mumbling something about sleep and time paradoxes. Despite consultation with a number of scholars, including Dr. Samuel Beckett, Dr. Emmett L. Brown, and the Doctor, as well as consulting the writings of Ray Bradbury, Mrs. Helena Wells, and so forth, I am no closer to a solution to attend ALL of the EverQuest II and EverQuest Next panels. However, I will make every effort.

One panel I certainly won’t miss is the “EQ2U & Dragon’s Armory – Leveraging EQII Data Feeds” panel hosted by Dedith of Dragon’s Armory and myself. I’m proud to say that our little panel was called out not only on the SOE Live Blog, but on the EQ2 Forums!

Gather your guildmates, divide up the roles, and get ready for a seriously epic encounter. No, it’s not a raid: it’s the sheer volume of awesome panels just announced for SOE Live 2013. With this much must-see content, you’re going to have to divide and conquer to make sure you get all the juicy details!

Full panel descriptions are still in the works, but based on these titles, there’s something for everyone. Here are just a few of your options:

For the Norrathians: Players of EverQuest and EverQuest 2 have a lot of enticing choices this year. Be the first to learn about the newest content at the EverQuest and EverQuest II: Expansion panels happening on Friday. For those interested in game mechanics, EverQuest II Tradeskills & PvP and the EQ2U & Dragon’s Armory – Leveraging EQII Data Feeds player panel both sound intriguing. For the crafters, there’s the EQ/EQII Crafting & the SC Marketplace player panel. Those who want to boost their RL crafting skills should pre-register for Metal Embossing with Brasse: So Easy an Elfink Can Do It.

For everyone: Admit it, you’re curious about EverQuest Next. No matter which SOE game you call home, get a front row seat to gaming history at the EverQuest Franchise Keynote Address on Friday morning. Various EQN panels are scheduled throughout the weekend, but SOE is keeping the topics secret for now, so keep an eye out for updates after the big reveal.

For a complete list of panels, check out the SOE Live Lineup page and start making your schedule today!

EQ2U Gear Report V1.1

I’m happy to report that the next version of the EQ2U Gear Report has just been pushed live and we have some new features that hopefully folks will appreciate!

First up is Crit Bonus and Potency have had an amicable breakup and are now just going to be friends in their own separate columns. This should help melee-focused Priests and Mages going forward. Previously, only one of these stats was shown, biased towards certain Archetypes.

Second, we’ve got a new Tooltip when you mouseover the White, Yellow, Red, and Green adornment summaries which shows you exactly which equipment slots are missing adornments. This feature required a new Javascript file, so you may need to hold down Ctrl and press the F5 key a couple of times to get it to load the new file.

Third, it’s been suggested that we show, at-a-glance, which equipment has yellow or red slots. This can be helpful to distinguish between two 183 stat items, one of which might be an old HM drop vs. a brand new heroic item. I hope to add a simple checkbox on the page to hide/show these dots as they can be a bit distracting if you are wanting to look at just the numbers.

When EverQuest II added the StationCash Marketplace, beside all the discussion and debate about the merits of Subscriptions vs. Pay-as-you-Go gaming, slippery slopes, and so forth, I had another question on my mind:

If SOE is betting the future on microtransactions in the Marketplace, shouldn’t EverQuest2.com’s flagship feature be an online catalogue of every item up for offer?

But year after year, we have yet to see any such website materialize, likely due to the work required to build and then maintain such a site.

Dethdlr and I have been very fortunate to be involved in Census right from the beginning, both in giving reams of feedback and suggestions to improve the service for all fansites, as well as using it to build our own EQ2U site. Over the last 18 months, the EQ2 team have continued to add more data to Census which allows us to make EQ2U even more complete, but in any business, resources have to be justified. So what better way to reinvigorate interest in Census within SOE than to add a highly visible feature like the EQ2 Marketplace?

Start Browsing the EQ2 Marketplace @ EQ2U

Imagine the ability to view a spreadsheet of your characters, your friends’ characters, your guild, or your guild alliance, all with their most valuable stats and gear scores (Stamina). Now imagine being able to sort this view by columns, add characters, hide certain guild ranks based on participation or perhaps if you have a main or alt raid force. Or imagine you’ve just joined a group and want to see what gear they’ve got, what upgrades they’ll be rolling for, or what areas you could help them improve on.

Today, EQ2U is happy to announce the introduction of the Gear Report!

We’ve heard from a number of guilds that hand-maintain such a spreadsheet, but there has been a growing desire to be able to automate such a view. Errrorr was the catalyst for this feature as he showed me a screenshot of the stats that their guild tracks for each character. Then I stumbled upon Soresha‘s EQ2 Data site where she has built quite a bit of this functionality for her guild. But we wanted to expand this idea outside of Guilds and allow any group of characters, even Guild Alliances, to build lists of characters and view their stats at a glance.

So how do you access this Gear Report feature?

Today we’re happy to add Class Focuses and Racial Traits to EQ2U. This is something we’ve wanted to add for a while, but it took a little while longer to do as the spells and icon positions for each class and race required data entry. Please let us know if you find any stray icons or missing info.

EQ2Wire sits down with Dedith to talk about his new Data-driven EQ2 site which he launched over the weekend.

Q: What made you want to create Dragons Armory? Is there a history to the name?

Dedith: The reason behind the site was to help those players who may not know or not have the time to find the finer points of optimizing their characters.  *grin*  My wife insists that I wrote it for her.  I did realize while researching the design of this site that everyone plays their characters differently, so I concentrated on making the tools so no matter your play style this would be useful.  Even the min-maxer types will find use in the features as it just makes things much clearer and easier to find.

Q: What’s unique about the site? What’s your favorite part of the site?

D: While the site is somewhat similar to your own EQ2U site, it specializes in analyzing the character and making the player aware of points that could be optimized on the character.  Some examples of optimizations are warning about missing items, missing adornments, low level gear, sub-expert rank spells, stats over the cap, uncompleted epic quest, etc.  My favorite features are the item and adornment upgrade search options.  These let one easily look for items and adornments for the class, level, slot, and socket color in question.

We are thrilled to officially release Guild Achievements on EQ2U as well as an improved Guild Detail page with Guild Recruiting info including Cloak Heraldry!

NOTE: The rounded corner blue style is temporary and we intend to replace it with something more becoming in the future!

From the EQ2 Forums:

The update on February 26th was discussed in Podcast #143, as well as in articles about the PvP Updates and Bag Sorting Abilities. Now, it’s time to take a look at two more major features that round out the update: new raid content and guild achievements!

X2 and X4 Raids