Cyliena
Roshen has posted an EU server consolidation FAQ on the EQ2 forums. It also mentions the RU servers merging into Splitpaw, and Sebilis merging into Antonia Bayle. EverQuest II is best with friends! Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be bringing players from our EU servers together. We’ll be consolidating servers, as we did with the US servers last year. We want to wrap this up this spring, and this is the time frame we’re currently working towards: Russian servers (Barren Sky and Harla Dar) are scheduled to be merged with Splitpaw on Thursday, March 31,...
International
Feldon
SOE’s on-again-off-again with it’s international community seems to be on the skids again, at least as far as for EverQuest II customers. After 2012’s disastrous forced migration of its French, German, and other European customers to ProSiebenSat.1/Alaplaya, it was an open question how many players would come back. After two years of drama, SOE relented and brought its remaining European customers back into the fold. SOE resurrected EQ2 support forums in French, German, and Spanish and hired staff to maintain them. However it seems the damage had been done and the daily traffic was insufficient to continue translating notes...
From the EQ2 Forums: Starting Friday, we will be updating our billing processes and the Direct Debit option will be temporarily unavailable. This will affect some players in Germany, Austria, Spain and the Netherlands who have chosen this as their method of billing. To prevent the loss of All Access Membership status during this time, we will be granting one free week of time to all affected accounts who are signed up for Direct Debit billing for an All Access Membership plan and whose next billing date falls during this period. During this time, the ability to add funds...
Tomorrow, July 2nd, SOE’s accounting, commerce, and forum and game logins will be offline for approximately 2 hours. We’re going to assume this is part of the ProSieben migration back to SOE. From the SOE forums: Attention players: we will perform maintenance beginning at 6:00 AM PDT* on Wednesday, July 2, 2014. We expect this maintenance to take approximately two hours. This will impact the following SOE services: • Account management • Commerce functions, including purchases • Game, web and forum logins (between 6:30 and 7:00 AM) The complete service window could last as long as four hours and...
After over two years of drama, with SOE customers feeling cut off, marginalized, and second class just for living in Europe, the grand experiment of German media conglomerate ProSiebenSat.1 managing SOE customers in the EU region is finally over! When it was announced that Sony Pictures had licensed their entertainment library to PSG to try to be the Netflix of Europe, the writing was on the wall that SOE gamers might be along for the ride. While I do think Sony Online Entertainment eventually made some heroic efforts to try to make this deal work — after a few scathing...
For the last eight hours or so, players on EU servers including Storms, Valor, and Splitpaw, have been unable to login to EQ2 as they receive this message: Login Rejected:The Clients version does not match the Servers. please rerun the patcher. The issue seems to have been caused by the game Launchpad receiving updated files (via a Manifest file) hours before the Server has been patched. This Manifest file is supposed to be updated only after the game server is ready for the updated client. This has nothing to do with ProSieben and originates with Ops/Platform at SOE HQ. We...
From the EQ2 Forums: For the last several months we’ve been working hard to update the Player Studio program with a number of improvements that will simplify and expedite the overall registration process, and will allow international players from select regions and territories to participate. This work has progressed well, but it’s a complicated initiative and there are still a few outstanding components to finalize to ensure we get this 100% right. Initially, we hoped to expand Player Studio to Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom on or before May 1, but given the intricacy of the program and...
UPDATE from SOE President John Smedley: EQ2 EU folks.. please try the world channel chat now. — John Smedley (@j_smedley) February 6, 2014 Original article follows… SOE has been collectively working days, nights and weekends to get EQNext Landmark up and stable. In addition to the enviably sized EQNL team, Platform, Ops, and Customer Service have all been burning the midnight oil to provide a smooth experience for those ~20,000 players who bought into Alpha. Still, EQ2’s EU players not being able to join world channels in the US, or Test regions has been a frustrating problem and one...
For two months, players on EU servers (Splitpaw, Valor, and Storms) have been cut off from the rest of the EQ2 servers, unable to participate in world channels such as Homeshow, Test, and the multitude of Class-specific channels. Each week, there has been flickering hope that this isolation would end, yet each week, there has been no sign that the issue is a priority. First reported on the EQ2 forums on December 4th, players on EU servers noted that they were no longer able to join world chat channels from servers outside their region (Test, US, or Beta), and vice...
From the EQ2 Forums: All EU servers will be unavailable for a very important technical (database) maintenance on January 22nd beginning at 2:00 AM CET (5 PM PT January 21st). Downtime is anticipated to be approximately 12 hours. There are no gameplay changes associated with this maintenance Time Zone Conversions PST: Jan 21 @ 5:00pm ~ Jan 22 @ 5:00am CST: Jan 21 @ 8:00pm ~ Jan 22 @ 8:00am GMT: Jan 22 @ 1:00 ~ Jan 22 @ 13:00 CET: Jan 22 @ 2:00 ~ Jan 22 @ 14:00 AEST: Jan 22 @ 10:00am ~ Jan 22 @...
After a hard-fought public relations battle, players in France, Germany, and other European countries were allowed to continue playing EverQuest II with their SOE/Station accounts. However that may be a Pyrrhic victory, as it has always been SOE’s intention to hand off support in these other languages to ProSiebenSat.1. Today comes the announcement that the French, German, and Japanese EQ2 official forums are being shut down. Players needing support in French or German will need to reach out to other players, seek help on Wikis or other forums, or attempt to find help on the Pro7Sat.1 forums. As for Japan,...
According to ProSiebenSat.1’s new website for EverQuest II, this weekend will be a StationCash Marketplace Rebate weekend. We don’t have any official confirmation if the event will include the US or only apply to Europe, but the ending time for the event is certainly suggestive. 8:59am CEST just happens to be 11:59pm PDT Sunday night… This weekend the EQII Marketplace will be featuring an Instant Rebate sale where you’ll be able to get deep discounts on most items in the store. The sale runs Friday, June 28 – Monday, July 01, ending at 08:59 am CEST. The Instant Rebate Sale...
UPDATE Ok folks, we just got word from Dexella on the EQ2 Forums at 11:54am PDT that this is a BUG and will be fixed soon: Hey all, We are looking for a fix to the issue that caused the removal of the countries from the credit card list. In the meantime, you can update your account by using account management on the SOE General site (rather than EQ2-specific). On soe.com, select “My Account” from the top navigation and proceed from there. Thanks, Dexella A number of European EQ2 players who are currently “free-to-play” or otherwise do not have an active credit card...
From the EQ2 Forums: Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and ProSiebenSat.1 Games Group will be furthering their partnership with the launch of EverQuest® II on or around June 20, 2013. As we approach the transition, we want to clarify some final points. We have put together an updated FAQ that further addresses some of the most common concerns and questions from our online player community. Importantly, we want to address up front the most common concern that players have had, which is server accessibility. SOE and ProSiebenSat.1 Games have determined that it is in the best interest of the players...
A tip of the hat to Kinya who pointed out to us this morning that EverQuest II forums have appeared in English, French, and German on the Alaplaya forums.
This likely won’t affect most EQ2 players even in Europe, since last year’s repreive allowed European EQ2 players to stick with SOE, but for those who play DCUO or PlanetSide 2 in Europe, or who started playing EQ2 after the switchover, you’ll want to read this announcement from the Alaplaya forums: Dear Community, We have detected that there recently has been unauthorized third-party access to one of our systems. The possibility that your data (Email address and password) has been accessed by an unauthorized third party cannot be excluded. We were able to detect the problem promptly and took...
This one comes to us from Arkenor over at Ark’s Ark: I received the following email yesterday. SOE is increasing European prices for a variety of currencies, claiming currency fluctuations. As a result of Sony Online Entertainment LLC’s ongoing commitment to our players to review global pricing and remain in line with exchange rate fluctuations, it is necessary for us to make adjustments to Membership pricing as outlined below. In addition to Membership pricing, some Station Cash® prices will also be adjusted. We are writing to notify you that these price changes will take effect on March 14th, 2013....
Well, this should change the tone and tenor of the ProSiebenSat.1 Panel at SOE Live a bit. From SOE President John Smedley‘s twitter: [I] wanted to thank our players for continuing feedback. We’ve been listening along with our European partners at Prosieben. We’ve found a way to let existing players of our current games that are migrating over to Prosieben (EQ, EQ II, Planetside 2) keep their SOE accounts and stay with SOE. Down the road we may offer an option to move over to Prosieben. Just to be clear after these games launch on Prosieben’s service new accounts...
Linda “Brasse” Carlson has announced that based on the progress of the transition of DCUO players from SOE to ProSiebenSat.1, EverQuest II would see a delay to ensure a smoother process: Hail Denizens of Norrath in the UK and EU, I just wanted to stop in here on the EQII Forums to give you an update the current status of the transition of our EU players to ProSiebenSat.1 Games. Having recently completed the transition for DC Uiniverse Online, we’ve learned a great many valuable lessons and identified a few areas where we’d like to improve the processes. We’re currently...
As Linda “Brasse” Carlson (@Brasse), Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson (@Qixter), and presumably other SOE staff are at Gamescom this week in Cologne, Germany helping kick off the reintroduction of EverQuest II and other SOE properties to European audiences, we look at the rocky transition DC Universe Online EU players are experiencing in linking their SOE accounts with ProSiebenSat.1. Multiple Accounts One of the sticking points in the ProSiebenSat.1 terms-and-conditions which have EU EQ2 players concerned is the prohibition on multiple accounts. Indeed an earlier rendition of the ProSiebenSat.1 Terms and Conditions said this: For each person / IP only one...
Yet another finger in the pie… A press release from ProSiebenSat.1’s website: ProSiebenSat.1 and TF1 begin extensive partnership for online games in France Munich, Germany, August 2, 2012. ProSiebenSat.1 is entering into a partnership of several years with France’s biggest TV station Télévision Française 1 (TF1), covering the field of online games. The media company’s games publisher ProSiebenSat.1 Games will thus provide the French games portal www.MYTF1.fr with its portfolio in stages, starting in mid-August. The portfolio includes games from the existing licensing and content agreements with Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and 35 other partners. With more than 25...
After initially having been told: Why will this partnership not affect EverQuest 1? The original EverQuest was not included as part of the agreement between SOE and ProSiebenSat.1 Games. It appears that EverQuest, Vanguard, and 2 new games are now included in the SOE-ProSiebenSat.1 Deal. From a press release (posted at Gamasutra) at GamesCom in Germany: ProSiebenSat.1 Games expands Europe-wide exclusive cooperation with Sony Online Entertainment Munich, Germany, August 15, 2012. ProSiebenSat.1 Games and Sony Online Entertainment, LLC (SOE) are expanding their exclusive partnership with four online games for the European market. Following the successful launch of DC Universe™...
From the EQ2 Forums: To our European customers, We wanted to let you know that SOE will no longer be selling pre-paid game cards in Europe as of 07/20/12. As we begin to transition our games to our European partner, ProSiebenSat.1 Games, customers will be able to take advantage of new methods of payment including pre-paid options, such as PaySafe, via their new ProSiebenSat.1 accounts. IMPORTANT: For the few European customers who have already purchased an SOE pre-paid game card but have not yet redeemed it, please visit www.soe.com/gamecards now to redeem it! You must redeem any existing SOE...
EQ2 ZAM has reported on an e-mail correspondence which some European players have received about the upcoming changeover. Their article on the subject: Earlier this year Sony Online Entertainment announced their partnership with ProSiebenSat.1 to distribute SOE games in Europe. Today Eurpoean Everquest II players woke to an email announcing that the EQII PSS.1 transition will be starting in 30-60 days. The letter details the countries effected and the finer points of the processs for non-recurring memberships and All Access accounts. A translation of the letter can be found below. We also reccommend the ProSiebenSat.1 Games Group FAQ on...
As players learned last week in an e-mail from SOE, DC Universe Online is now 30-60 days from transitioning its European customers from SOE/Station accounts to Pro7Sat.1 accounts: An exciting time in SOE history has arrived and we are very pleased to be celebrating it with you, some of the most passionate DC Universe Online fans! As many of you know, SOE has partnered with ProSiebenSat.1 Games to provide and market eight of its games to players in Europe, including EverQuest® II, DC Universe™ Online, Free Realms®, Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™, Magic: The Gathering – Tactics, and PoxNora®,...