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, 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.

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.

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 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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today’s Update for Tuesday, April 12, 2011 brings PvP Character Transfers to and from PvP servers, fixes for the Storm Gorge PQ, fixes bugs in instances and raid zones including Tower of Frozen Shadow which has been broken since a week ago Thursday preventing raid progression, and eliminates harassment of other server’s chat channels (players were able to join the 1-9 and other numbered chat channels of other servers).

After many years of requests, it is now possible to transfer characters from PvP to PvE and vice-versa on both regular and exchange-enabled servers (exchange-to-regular is still not allowed).

Good news if you play on Test or Test Copy! Several crucial fixes to Public Quests and the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid, as well as the wayward Research button in the Knowledge window  made their way to the Test Servers yesterday.

Normally, we only glance at Test Update Notes to check for new features. No doubt many players on Live will be wishing that this is how the Live Update Notes for yesterday looked. It would have been great to go into the weekend with a lot of these issues tackled.

Here are the Test Update Notes for yesterday, Thursday April 7th. It’s unclear when these will go live, but possibly next Tuesday.

Here are your update notes for Thursday, April 7, 2011…

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION

Crystalline Breaks

• Geonids in Crystalline Breaks will now be correctly classified as living.

Kraytoc’s Fortress

• Fixed an issue causing the Eirreen encounter to continually reset.

TRADESKILLS

• The amount of Velium Shards required for Shard Armor has been reduced.

So we’ve been thinking about last night’s Producer’s Letter which lays out a little bit of the future of EQ2. Our thoughts:

Think about every quest, NPC, and clicky item in Freeport’s 10 subzones (North Freeport, South Freeport, East Freeport, West Freeport, Beggar’s Court, Stonestair Byway, Temple Street, Longshadow Alley, Big Bend, Scale Yard). Now imagine having to relocate them to a new zone/map/artwork, test them all, and make sure they all still work.

Now revamp any flavor or quest text which is long since obsolete such as NPCs wondering when Kunark, Velious, Odus, etc. are going to be discovered. Now revamp the instances linking off Freeport to be new style level 1-30 content with quest hubs, etc.

That sounds like almost as much work as an expansion.

A careful reading of the Producer’s Letter would suggest that we will receive most or all of the rest of Velious through Game Updates, rather than buying another expansion in November, or next February. Morghus asked if we will see the continuation/completion of Velious:

Sounds interesting, does that imply that we will be getting the “rest” of Velious, in regards to new raids/cities/overland quest areas and dungeons dealing with the dragon half of the continent in the future?

SmokeJumper replied with an affirmative “Yes“.

Fastidious crafters took advantage of yesterday’s update and trundled back to the daily Tradeskill Group instances for a chance to loot one of the two volumes of the new Far Seas Strategic Pricing 3rd Edition. As with past editions, these recipe books allow crafters to create shard armor and jewelry for players with a reduced number of tokens/shards. Interestingly, neither players nor crafters must have faction with the Ry’Gorr to make or receive this armor or jewelry. They do however require the designated dungeon-dropped crystals.

With yesterday’s Test Update Notes, we found out that the current Velious shard armor will be dropping from 70 to 52 Primal Velium Shards per piece.

However it seems the recipe book to craft shard armor has been partially updated to reflect the new shard prices. Assassins, Berserkers, Brigands, Bruisers, Coercers, and Conjurors (all classes starting with A, B, or C) are asked to pony up 63 shards per piece, while all other classes pay 40 shards per piece. Nindaene, the player who brought up this issue, also noticed that crafted armor has more mitigation than Ry’Gorr purchased armor.

Domino posted on the issue:

As you may have noticed from the Test server update notes today, we are in the process of lowering the shard costs of the armor. However, it looks like some of the recipes were pushed live with a lower cost than they should have been set to yet. So yes, these prices are an error and will likely change again as we are still in the process of adjusting the prices based on feedback. We’ll get that corrected as soon as possible (hopefully Thursday) but in the mean time it might be safest to hold off on crafting the items, since the final shard cost is not yet finalized. Apologies for the error, and thanks for pointing it out!

Several of us have bugged out Blor Greatbasher‘s repeatable quests in such a way that he won’t offer quests anymore. This is rather frustrating as there are few ways to earn faction with the ever-important Ry’Gorr, who hold the best adornments and shard armor in Velious.

Today brings an update from Kaitheel about Blor’s quests:

Good news!

I had seen a few reports about issues with Blor Greatbasher’s quest line at the Ry’Gorr Keep, like this thread, but was never able to find a cause or to even reproduce the issue, myself. Thankfully though, with the help of a more detailed report, I finally was!

From Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson on the EQ2 Forums:

So, you’re probably curious how EQII will be growing and changing in 2011, right?

Well, it’s finally time to share. This year is all about content and entertainment and we intend to give you plenty of both. The following outlines some of the broad strokes to get you thinking about what’s coming…and possibly just a little excited, as well.

First of all, if you’re a “Destiny of Velious” owner, you’re going to be *extremely* happy that you made that purchase. Why? Because DoV is going to be the biggest, best expansion that has ever been made. We’ll be releasing content on a regular basis that continues to tell the “Age’s End Prophecy” saga, and the only price of admission is that you own DoV. The Age’s End story gets really big before it’s done and it’s going to take us a good chunk of time to tell it all, but we’ll do so by releasing chapters of it every few months and building the story a bit at a time. Velious is a big place, and so is this story. It’ll be a good ride.

Secondly, we’re going to revamp Freeport and make Evil an exciting place to be. Freeport (and next year, Qeynos) will become multi-level adventure hubs with instanced content at many levels. The city itself is also getting a facelift as Freeport reorganizes itself to retake its place as a driving power of the world. Additionally, it’s becoming a single zone (instead of many sub-divisions) and flyable. When we upgrade Qeynos, it will get the same visual upgrade and zone treatment, and will bring back the “Greater Good”.

The Gods of Norrath will be returning to once again directly muck about with the lives of mortals. Too long has the world of Norrath spun along on its own axis. It’s time again for it to feel the touch of the divine.

On the non-content side of things, we’re going to be working on a lot of stuff “under the hood” to make your gameplay better. We’re looking into ways to increase the speed of our game and graphics engine, some of which could be very significant, which would obviously make raids and public quests a lot more fun, as well as boosting smoothness of gameplay for everyone. We’re revamping the way that our terrain is created so that we can bring you content more quickly, but still with high quality, thus increasing how big the world can become.

And last but not least, we’re crafting a host of new features and fun ways to play the game. Some of our current ideas are way outside the box for an MMO and we’re pushing hard to bring you new experiences (more on these later!).

We’re already one of the best MMOs out there. This year we’re going to become even more unique and exciting. 2011 is a good year to be Norrathian.

— Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson

P.S., A detailed feature list of the upcoming GU 60 will be announced soon, and more elements of the longer-ranged features will roll out in successive months. This letter is just to let you know the general direction of where we’re going and what to expect.

As we first officially heard in December, plans are afoot at SOE to reduce the number of “launchers” currently being supported and move everyone to a single codebase for their patcher. From Amnerys:

Sometime after the launch of DoV, we will be discontinuing Launchpad 1 and moving everyone to Launcher 3. But don’t worry, it’s not the Streaming Client so you won’t be forced to do the streaming thing.

Our support teams (the dev team doesn’t make the launcher clients, it’s another team) can’t keep supporting so many versions of launchers…they also support all the launchers for the entire SOE portfolio of games. So in the interest of saving everyone some time and eliminating outdated elements that they can’t keep running at 100%, we’ll be moving all games to the Launcher 3 launchers.

A couple of interesting items appeared in today’s Test Update Notes:

• The amount of Velium Shards required for Shard Armor has been reduced.
• Several Yellow, Red, and War Rune adornment procs will now trigger on both spell and melee hits.

These changes do not appear in today’s Live Update Notes, so if you have had your eye on certain Adornments or Shard Armor, you might want to wait to see when this change goes live.

Also, in case you missed it in today’s live update notes, players who participate in Tradeskill Group Instances (granted these days, most people choose to solo them for 3 grueling hours ) now have a chance to receive 2 recipe books to make Velious armor/jewelry.

Today’s update includes tweaks across the board of grouping, raiding, and itemization.

Chronoportal vendors are back until April 10th. They have several paintings, furniture, and replicas of the enemies fought in the 12th anniversary EverQuest event.

After the jump, your Update Notes for April 5, 2011.

Anobabylon from Oasis posted some questions about multi-housing coming in Game Update 60 and SmokeJumper provided some answers:

Q: While you are putting in the ability to own more than one home, could you please also add in the ability to share homes with other characters?

A: Prestige Homes allow this already. Add each character to the others’ trustee lists, then link the homes together via portals. Voila! Now your homes are linked and you can edit them freely.

Q: Change *Guild Port Doors* to be heirloom/attunable (heirloom selfishly because my main character buys all the doors for my other girls) rather than no-trade and let the location of our attuned guild port door be where the “Guild Portal to Player Housing” sends us to. This would allow us to use the “Guild Portal to Player Housing” to load in to whichever of our multiple housings we choose, or even into a home where we are trustee if that is what we desire.

A: More good news. This already works! You can place your Prestige Home portals in your Guild Hall directly, *and* the current “Member Housing” amenity now allows you to travel to any house that is linked in your home network. This can be a large amount of houses if you have lots of links and friends.

As always, this is subject to change based on any number of code issues, delays, etc. but we now have a soft timeframe for when Game Update 60, or at least the Multi-housing (the ability of 1 character to have multiple houses) will be hitting the Test server. It sounds like it may be on Test for several weeks for players to test everything out and make sure there are no problems with houses and guild halls. Undoubtedly a change like this requires major alterations to the database.  We haven’t got anything concrete how what changes will be made Teleport to Player House guild hall amenity, but we’ve heard good things.

From SmokeJumper:

It’ll probably hit testing next week or the week after. It’s a LOT of code changes, so we’ll probably let it stew on the Test server for a while until we’re confident we kill all the major issues and then release it thereafter.

Soon!

At last year’s Fan Faire, I found out that work was being done on a program/script/tool to help the developers create items for EQ2. As with any game development, any number of little tools and scripts are created and passed around the office to help take some of the tedium out of certain repetitive tasks.

At the time, it was explained to me as a tool that could be used to whip out a bunch of Treasured and low level Legendary gear. Why? So that more time and attention could be spent creating unique higher level Legendary and Fabled gear with unique effects. It was hoped that we could see items with interesting procs and effects like those popular items from Shard of Hate, as well as the better raid drops from Shadow Odyssey, and even drawing some inspiration from Avatar Gear (although maybe not THAT powerful).

However with the cookie cutter, cut-and-paste itemization of Velious which seems to pigeonhole players into the 4 main archetypes with few exceptions, players are looking for answers and latched onto a post by SmokeJumper confirming the existence of said “itemization tool”.

From SmokeJumper regarding new mounts:

We have some really interesting kinds of mounts coming in the next couple of GUs that will become available to players at different levels throughout the game. Things will keep changing and we intend the fun factor of them to increase as well. But true fliers? They’re a level 86+ perk, and they’ll end up staying that way. (Consider it a lure to get to 90.

We are still hopeful that existing flying-type mounts will be usable as appearance flying mounts, such as carpets, clouds, and hover discs.