SmokeJumper is looking for feedback on placing F2P marketplace items on the test server.  He posted this on the official forums:

Hey, folks,

We don’t have a big enough population on the Test server to run two different Test servers (one for EQII Live and one for EQ2X), and we’d like to get your feedback on whether you think it’s appropriate for us to allow the EQ2X marketplace items to show up on Test.

Since the items are optional, it shouldn’t make much of a difference in your play style, but it would allow us to test them on a real server before they go Live.

Additionally, for anyone interested, they’d probably help leveling a bit, which is always somewhat of a hurdle on this lower-population server.

What do you think?

Thanks for your feedback.

Commentary:

I personally agree with many of the other posters that have already replied who think this would work much better if done on Test Copy. Test Copy gets wiped periodically anyway and gives unlimited station cash. This would seem to be the perfect place to “test” marketplace items.

First off, my appologies for taking so long to post this information but it took me until a few hours ago to understand what was actually going on.  It’s been a bit confusing.   Here’s what’s happening.

In celebration of Oktoberfest, the EverQuest II Community Team will be hosting in-game parties in the Community Lounge. Come socialize, dance, have pillow fights, drink, and be merry. You’ll also be able to tip the barkeeps for some special trinkets!

The international servers Valor, Innovation, Storms, and Sebilis had their parties last week.  The US/UK/Extended servers are having parties, but nobody from the Everquest II Community Team is going to show up.  Instead, they are having four parties on the Test Copy server which will be attended by members of the Everquest II Community Team (one was last night): 

• Tuesday, September 28th, 6:00pm to 7:00pm PDT, Test Copy
• Tuesday, September 28th, 8:00pm to 2:00am PDT, US/UK/Extended servers (aproximate times)
• Wednesday, September 29th, 1:00pm to 2:00pm PDT, Test Copy
• Wednesday, September 29th, 3:00pm to 9:00pm PDT, US/UK/Extended servers (aproximate times)
• Thursday, September 30rd, 1:00pm to 2:00pm PDT, Test Copy
• Thursday, September 30rd, 3:00pm to 9:00pm PDT, US/UK/Extended servers (aproximate times)

When it’s time for the party to start, we’ll drop a portal near the carpet at the docks in Sinking Sands. Just look for the glowing spot, click, and you’ll be ported right to the Community Lounge.

Again, sorry this info is so late.  It didn’t become clear to me what the real details were until this post from Amnerys:

First party on Test Copy server was a lot of fun! And all the portals are up on the US servers. Just going to drop them on the UK servers here in a few, and that’ll be tonight’s festivities.

None of us will be present in the lounges this evening. To hang with us, you gotta join us on Test Copy. Once the Test Copy parties have wrapped, the lounges will be open on the US/UK servers for around 6 hours.

We decided to try it this way this time around, since there are so many servers… it takes over three weeks to visit every single server for their own party. Phew! We’ll evaluate afterward and see if it’s something we want to do again.

Remember that contest that SOE held prior to Fan Faire? The one where the winners would get a Bloggie camera to record things? Well SOE has announced the winners and uploaded their footage to YouTube. Details and links after the break.

Today marks the end of not only a very lucrative Double XP weekend for both my tradeskillers and adventurers, but also the close of the Neriak City Festival in Darklight Wood.

A selection of paintings from Notable Norrathians and the Heroes Festival.

A key addition to the City Festival were the Notable Norrathians player-submitted in-game paintings. If you have not yet looked at or bought any of these paintings, take your City Tokens to Darklight Wood (druid ring or run from Nektulos Forest). These paintings can be placed in your house or guild hall, and do not have the status cost and guild level requirements of the 5th anniversary Heroes Festival paintings.

Double XP weekend concludes at 10:00am PDT (1:00pm EDT, 19:00 GMT+1).

City Festival concludes on 2010.09.07 at Midnight PDT (2010.09.08 3:00am EDT, 2010.09.08 9:00 GMT+1).

The previously reported rumor of bonus XP has been officially confirmed on EQ2Players.com.  Those playing during Labor Day weekend will be enjoying Double XP:

This coming weekend, from 10:00 am PDT on Friday, September 3rd, until 10:00 am PDT on Tuesday, September 7th, we will be running a true Double XP promotion (+100% XP).

The bonus applies to AA, tradeskill and adventure experience gained this weekend. Our French, German, Japanese, Test and EQ2 Extended servers will also be enjoying the increase in XP gain.

Happy adventuring!

Players have been advised about The Dangers of Buying Plat and/or Power Leveling services for a couple of years now, including the consequences such as compromised accounts.

However this July, SOE became aware of a more insidious and direct attack upon the EQ2 playerbase. We’re talking about an Account Phishing Scam that encourages players to login to an official-looking website using their SOE Station credentials. Personal information including logins, passwords, e-mail addresses, account names, are logged and eventually used to strip characters and otherwise compromise accounts for plat and item distribution within the game.

In the Account Fraud panel at Fan Faire, as well as some discussions with SOE staff, we have determined some sobering data points.

SmokeJumper posted on the EQ2 Forums:

Hey, folks,

Just wanted to let you know that we recorded all the sessions at Fan Faire, transcribed all the questions, and the team leads have spent the last couple of days pouring over the lists and prioritizing them for action.

We’ll be spending several weeks making fixes and changes based on the feedback we got there and then update the game with those fixes in mid-October.

We’ll post the list of what’s changing much closer to when we launch so that we don’t accidentally overcommit, but we think you’ll be pleased with a lot of the fixes.

Thought you’d be interested to know this is happening. More later!

Players on standard EQ2 accounts with more than 7 characters in a region, or players on Station Access accounts with more than 12 characters in a region were locked out of accessing these “hidden” characters with a change in Game Update 57. Although intended to close an exploit, the primary motivation for this change has been to protect the monetization of character slots, which are for sale on EQ2 Extended servers.

Note: This change has been rolled back as of Tuesday, August 24th, to allow players to “get their house in order”. On Tuesday, August 31st, players who have more characters than are allowed by their account type will only have the option of deleting characters to access “hidden” characters. The /camp command will not load any character not visible on the character select screen, and changes to the character list INI file will be ignored.

If you have no more than 7 EQ2 characters on your EQ2 account, or no more than 12 EQ2 characters on your Station Account, you do not need to do anything.

On Thursday evening, a player logged in to discover that one of their gameplay-acquired mounts, a War-Barded Black Cavalry Horse, had unattuned itself. This led to the discovery that a variety of in-game mounts had vanished from the in-game Stable Merchants, only to be found later on the StationCash Marketplace for a cost of 1250SC ($12.50). Other mounts included the Two-Toned Warg , and the black-saddled Blue Flame Nightmare.

This is reprinted from the original EverQuest2.com article which seems to have gone missing.

Greetings, Norrathians!

We are thrilled to make the highly-anticipated announcement of the winners of our Notable Norrathians Forum Challenge!

It was not easy to choose just ten out of the amazing entries we received. The talent and creativty displayed were truly wonderful and there’s a certiain very-jealous dark elf in the office right now!

We’d like to thank everyone who submitted an entry (the dark elf made note that she’s saving a few for her own desktop wallpaper) and we invite everyone who didn’t win this time to resubmit the next time we have a similar challenge.

The following entries will be made into in-game paintings:

My Immortal	Felwithe by Moonlight
Adiene of Antonia Bayle	Shanyssa of Blackburrow
Wrath of the Overlord	E’ci
Lillaanya of Antonia Bayle	Diamante of Antonia Bayle
Culling the Infidel	The Lord and His Minions
Ainaree of Antonia Bayle	Inni of Antonia Bayle
Tunare’s First Daughter	The Mysterious Drafling
Erithe of Antonia Bayle	Hortensia of Everfrost
Antonican Battle	Amree and Saphronia: A Mentoring Session
Corisu of the Bazaar	Enna of Antonia Bayle

Xelgad has responded to a detailed thread on Illusionist Class Issues:

Hey guys, long time no see! We got some good feedback at Fan Faire which I wanted to share.
I agree that Time Warp ended up being more annoying than it is fun or rewarding. Unfortunately, it was one of those things that looked okay on paper but didn’t work in practice. We have it changed internally so that there is no longer an immunity timer associated with the spell, and it now grants the Illusionist the buff as well as the target. This should be coming to the test servers with (or before) GU58. If you want, you can just macro the spell to a group member and spam it as a self-buff, but I envision some players being more tactical with it. You can even spam it on yourself, but you don’t get double benefit – unless, of course, you cast it on your pet. We also changed the icon so that the warning icon looks different than the actual buff, and the buff now looks like the Tsunami (Monk ability) icon, so that it shouldn’t be shared with any other mage abilities.

Some of your other issues, such as buffs providing no benefit due to being capped, will be addressed with the upcoming expansion. There are some other changes that we hope to make before the expansion, but I can’t promise anything yet.

Please feel free to continue to post constructive feedback.

Xelgad has posted a flurry of responses to specific class issues today.

This one, in regards to Critical Heals which have been removed from all fighters. For some fighter classes, critical heals might have been overpowered, but for Paladins (joshingly referred to as Healadins), losing all crititical heals has had class altering effects not only in solo situations (which this nerf was intended to fix) but in group and raid setups.

We’ve been hearing about some ranger love for about 3 expansions now, but at Fan Faire, we heard the first concrete info. Xelgad has elaborated on just what we can expect in an update falling between GU57 and GU58 (hopefully 4-6 weeks from now:

Greetings, Mighty Forces!

AE Auto-Attack and Flurry are indeed on the way for bows. We’re also removing the 20% damage penalty for bows, and we’re increasing the damage rating on all 81-90 bows (along with throwing weapons) by about 10%. The intent is to allow you guys to get full benefit from buffs and gear, not to make the class entirely focused on Auto-Attack.

You know how you get more auto-attack damage from your melee weapons in many cases than from your bow? These changes should fix that, unless your melee weapons are simply of much higher quality than your bow. At most, your auto-attack may jump from ~20% of your parse up to ~30% on raids, but I’d be surprised if many people end up with it higher than that.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

You can join the discussion on this issue in the thread What’s this all about? (bow changes) on the EQ2 Forums.

On April 14, 2009, a new Welcome Screen was added to EQ2. It was pitched to the players as an informational window with a small amount of StationCash Marketplace content. There was a lot of negative player reaction, but feedback was balanced against trying to keep the window useful.

And for those players who wanted to avoid the Welcome Screen window, a method was found to disable it. A configuration line (cl_show_welcome_screen_on_startup 0) could be added to your eq2.ini settings file. Eventually the EQ2 team relented and added a “Show this window at startup” checkbox so players could opt out of seeing this window.

EQ2Wire is currently trying to get to the bottom of a rumor regarding possible changes to Adventure (Combat), Alternate Advancement (AA), and Tradeskill XP.

In the mean time, we’ve got some hard facts. An unexpected feature of today’s Game Update 57 seems to be the doubling of all Combat, AA, and Tradeskill potions. 27.5% potions became 55% potions. 55% potions became 110% potions.

Left: the 55% XP potions “Draft of the Wise” and “Draft of the Skilled” provided as veteran rewards for every year of subscription.

Right: the 1000SC ($10) 110% “Flask of Advancement III” which boosts XP for all three XP types.

We do not know what, if any, other changes this may signify, but we will keep you informed.

Due to a code bug which allowed the EQ2X Marketplace to appear on international servers, all international servers are now down for a patch. From Amnerys:

All international servers were just taken offline (earlier than planned) due to today’s patch. It was unplanned but necessary, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

We are hoping to have all international servers back online by 1PM PDT (9PM GMT). Please watch this thread for updates.

Today marks the introduction of Game Update 57 to the live servers. Key features of this update include:

• The EQ2 User Interface has received a facelift, with a new toolbar, a refresh of various windows, and a merged Character/Inventory/Profile window. The default theme is red, but easily switchable to blue by typing /loadui and choosing the Blue graphic set.
• More character classes are now neutral and may start in either good or evil cities.
• Spell animations and effects have been revamped.
• Intrazone travel now supports path linking. Travel within Kingdom of Sky has been improved.
• Erudin group instances (level 86-90) are now easier to reach.
• New tradeskill quests have been added in the level 10, 20, and 30 tiers. These quests reward a mount as well as access to what have previously been overpriced Advanced recipe books.
• Starting areas in Greater Faydark and Darklight Wood have received substantial revamps. Gorowyn has received further architectural rebuilding to improve navigation.
• All classes have had some group-specific spells postponed until later levels to reduce the number of spells new players get in the first 20 levels.
• Fighter heals will no longer critically heal.
• The “Notable Norrathian” contest winning paintings are now available within Norrath but only during the monthly City Festivals (next is Sept 1-7). They are guild hall placeable.
• Lucan D’Lere has returned to Freeport.

• Today’s update contains no new dungeons or raid zones.

EQ2X

Also going live today is the public beta for EverQuest II Extended, the Free-to-Play alternative to a monthly EQ2 subscription. Game Update 57 will arrive simultaneously on both servers. EQ2X, as it’s being abbreviated, may be discussed on the separate EQ2X Forums.

From Amnerys:

All U.S. EQII servers are scheduled to come down on Wednesday, August 18 at 5:00 AM PDT for Game Update 57. Servers are expected to be offline for around 4 hours, coming back online around 9:00 AM. The UK servers will be updated according to the usual schedule.

Notable Norrathians Paintings

What about those Notable Norrathians paintings? Kaisha has dropped some hints regarding how the 10 winning paintings will become available. If our interpretation is correct, it looks like they may be available from the City Festivals for 10 city tokens each.

Tribute to the Huntress and Druid Reconstruction Live Events

The Tribute to the Huntress quest has been confirmed to end with the launch of GU57, but the Druid Ring Reconstruction event has been extended to last until GU58. (from EQ2 ZAM)

Whence Update Notes?

We’ll post the Game Update notes when they become available (assuming we’re awake!).

Here is the 4-part Destiny of Velious panel for EQ2 from Saturday at Fan Faire 2010. I cut out my own off-the-screen capture of the Destiny of Velious preview trailer because it has been released to the press in High Definition.

[EQ2Wire] EQ2 Expansion “Destiny of Velious” Panel (playlist)

Here is the 6-part Question & Answer panel for EQ2 from Saturday at Fan Faire 2010.

[EQ2Wire] Fan Faire 2010 – EQ2 Q&A Saturday Panel (playlist)

I have just posted all 6 parts of the EQ2 Mechanics / Class Balance panel from Fan Faire 2010.

[EQ2Wire] Fan Faire 2010 – EQ2 Mechanics Panel (playlist)

A View From the Top‘s Karen and Adam sat down with Paul “Frizznik” Carrico, SOE’s Lead Mechanics Designer at Fan Faire. On this episode they discuss a few different aspects of EverQuest II, the upcoming Velious expansion, and even a little about EQ2 Extended. Take a moment to listen to Frizznik’s thoughts on the game. Thanks to Kiara and Calthine for putting the meeting together.

Listen to A View From the Top Episode #15

EQ2Wire was borne out of the desire and thrilling concept of having a LIVE blog of Fan Faire. For the last 2 years, the EQ2-related panels have been about 50-50 with 50% presentations/content, and 50% Questions & Answers. This year, the panels were significantly lighter on content, with closer to 75% of each panel focused on Questions & Answers.

This put me, as the sole blogger trying to tackle 6 panels, at a genuine disadvantage. As I found out during Fan Faire, Questions & Answers are much more difficult to capture and blog live without inaccuracies and misinterpretations slipping in.

No panel has been put under more scrutiny than the EQ2 Extended panel. Hundreds of players at home were refreshing the EQ2Wire live blog for this panel, hanging on every word to see if the game they love — EverQuest II — would be changed forever. Readers have been scrambling for details on this emotional topic.

If you checked out our Fan Faire Banquet & Costume Contest, you’ll know that “Billy” was the popular winner, by far. “Billy” (played by Marlee of Mistmoore) has posted a comment to the EQ2Wire with more info:

Billy won a a $200 gift card and $10 in Station cash. It was the wickedest fun I have had in a long time and I hope I provided good entertainment. I was proud to represent my guild (Company of Wolves), server (Mistmoore), and raid alliance (Fortune Hunters of Mistmoore). And the coolest thing? I could scratch myself in public and get away with it!

Calthine over at EQ2 ZAM has just posted high resolution concept art as well as the teaser trailer for EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious.

If you are looking for the teaser trailer in High Definition, look no further than OnlineGamerPortal-DE who have posted the Destiny of Velious teaser trailer in 720p.