The Icy Keep: Retribution x4 raid zone is still on Test and Gninja would appreciate any and all feedback on this zone. You can also contact him by PM on the EQ2 Forums and possibly arrange raids that he can monitor and get direct feedback on.

For those of you that have been most of the way thorugh Icy Keep: Retribution, How do you feel the difficulty of the encounters go? Do they fit with the order of the encounters are some fights much harder than they are currently placed in the zone or does it feel about right? Keep in mind the difficulty shouldnt jump as drastically as the TSO raids did but it should get slightly harder the further in the zone you get.

Also I am looking for feedback on the Ice Maiden D’Ina encounter if anyone has fought her. Is she too easy? Too hard? Too annoying? Anything will help.

You can read all the feedback and Gninja’s responses regarding Icy Keep: Retribution in this thread.

If you’re wanting to hear it from the horse’s (or battlecat’s) mouth, look no further than artist Covic‘s EQ2 Forums post who designed the Prowler mounts now available for 2500SC.

From EQ2Players:

Introducing the Etheral, Sinister, and Ulteran Prowlers!

Each mount comes in your choice of one of the following versions: Fierce and Arcane. The Fierce version increases Slashing, Aggression, Ranged, Piercing and Crushing of caster by 5, while the Arcane version increases Focus, Ordination, Disruption, Subjugation and Ministration of caster by 5. Both versions of the mount reduce the maximum falling speed of your character and have a 65% run speed.

The Prowlers are guaranteed to be available for at least one month and adventurers can now purchase these new mounts for 2500SC from the Marketplace. These are the first Station Cash items of their kind and are immediately available in-game, upon purchase.

UPDATED Commentary

Close inspection of these three mounts indicates they are NOT a reskin of an existing mount (such as the Highland Stalker in the SF retail box) but something unique.

For 2500 you are getting a single heirloom* 65% runspeed mount with either +5 to all mage skills or +5 to all melee skills. 2500 is $25 ($12.50 if you took advantage of a Double StationCash weekend).

It’s interesting to compare this to the Highland Stalker mount in the Sentinel’s Fate: Collector’s Edition which for $30 gives you a 65% runspeed mount for up to 12 characters on your account.

And I’m sure some of you noticed the “available for at least one month“. So after that what? They go back into the Disney vault for 20 years?

*NOTE: These Prowlers were intended to be flagged HEIRLOOM and will be after next Tuesday’s update.

This is a placeholder article.

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Game Update 56 will be imbuing flying carpets, floating discs, and cloud mounts with the power to float. If you are thinking to yourself “Wait, didn’t they already do that?” read on…

Carpets, Clouds, and Discs have allowed players to peacefully float throughout Norrath, but only over flat, even, dry surfaces. As soon as the operator of these wondrous mounts attempted to traverse a vertical distance greater than 3 feet, they were suddenly rendered about as effective as concrete shoes. In short, carpets, clouds, and disc mounts have been a virtual death trap over mountainous terrain. I guess they just don’t make flying carpets the way they used to!

But wait… Kander has some news:

Carpets, Clouds and Discs having fay fall or glide should be in with 56.

It has been brought to our attention that the EQ2 Passport program contains verbiage which could be construed as condoning the exploit of Battlegrounds:

Penny Pinching Multiboxers

Running several subscriptions might be a bit expensive these days, but not with this program! Fire up your alt accounts for a weekend raid or even a Battlegrounds match all by yourself!

I’ve just received an unexpected e-mail from the EverQuest II team regarding a new program for players on the fence, considering returning to EQ2, wanting to participate in seasonal and special events, or wanting to spin up an inactive account to do some Multiboxing.

If you’ve let your any of your EQ2 account expire, and don’t want to commit for the whole $15 to restore access, you can now play for up to 3 days access for $5 through the new EQ2 Passport program.

Commentary

While it might seem a nice gesture to offer players who are short on cash the opportunity to login infrequently at a discounted rate, the seams begin to unravel when we consider the terms and key publicity points of this program.

The SOE Marketing Team, who have a penchant for operating as if the players do not exist, seem to have been pressed into service to create another whiz-bang program to increase revenues. However the devil is in the details.

It seems unlikely that players will bite at $5 for a 3 day subscription, when $15 buys 30 days. The math simply doesn’t add up.

It stands to reason that if the SOE Marketing Team sidesteps the players, surely they must give little weight to concerns expressed by developers and designers as well, regardless of their understanding of the players. If asked, any EQ2 dev would have told Marketing straightaway that 3 days was just not a large enough carrot.

Another startling angle to the EQ2 Passport announcement is the front-and-center publicity given to Multiboxing. While we have reported both sides of this topic, ending in a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” standoff, it seems surprising that Multiboxing, which some players have genuine ethical concerns about, would have earned such a prominent space in this announcement.

One wonders what performance indicators will be used to determine the success or failure of this program, if any. With the shaky Sentinel’s Fate launch, the Marketing team showed a staggering fearlessness about their job security.

Luminata contacted me, hoping I would draw some attention to EQ2Players and the fact it has not been updated since the launch of Sentinel’s Fate. There was plenty of activity and postings on the EQ2Players Discussion area from the SOE Platform team around the time of the site revamp, but this renewed communication has again faded since the expansion launched.

No characters, guilds, rankings, or any other statistical data has been updated since February 16th. The EQ2Players site now seems to be at a standstill.

EQ2 Forum Discussions:

How long before SF updates start to appear on EQ2Players ?

Not Updating

From the EQ2 Forums:

The US servers will be down from 2am to 5am PDT on Wednesday, March 31st for some hardware maintenance.

EQ2Wire is on the road again. Sorry for the delays in part 2 of that Sentinel’s Fate Itemization Puzzle article.

If you’ve ever fancied yourself a writer for EQ2Wire, whether it’s just updates on the happenings around Norrath, including updates on Live Events, shoot us an e-mail thru Contact Us.

It seems that the Antonia Bayle EQ2 server is experiencing some kind of database corruption and is undergoing an emergency downtime at the moment. Details remain elusive at the time of this writing, but we’ll be watching this thread on the EQ2 Forums:

Antonia Bayle Emergency Downtime 2010.03.08

Brewday returns to Norrath from March 11th through the 22nd! Come on out and celebrate Brell Serilis! It may be a holiday started by dwarves, but everyone is welcome!

Today’s Hotfix addresses those players who have been Queueing up for Battlegrounds and then intentionally going AFK. Players who join a Battleground but lose still earn 1 token. But by neither fighting, or contributing to their teams, these AFK players have largely been dead weight.  The hotfix introduces an AFK Voting system:

BATTLEGROUNDS

We’ve implemented an AFK voting system into battlegrounds in order to report teammates that have gone AFK in a match. A player can only be voted AFK if they haven’t had any recent activity. If they receive 3 unique votes for AFK’ing during a match they will be removed from the match and will not receive a reward. Players removed this way will also receive the Truancy debuff. To vote a player AFK, right-click their avatar and choose “vote afk”.

The complete Patch Notes for March 3, 2010 are after the jump…

The EQ2 Developer Chat is coming up on March 4th. The day after every chat, the EQ2 forums are flooded with people complaining that no “good” questions were asked. If you would like to make sure that the ‘hard-hitting’ questions get asked, you should submit them immediately to calthine{at}allakhazam{dot}com. The more questions Calthine has in advance, the better chance of good questions being asked during the chat.

You are far more likely to get your questions asked during the session if they are phrased in the form of something that can actually be answered. “When are you going to fix Bruisers” is not nearly as useful as “the Bruiser AA ability X just doesn’t stack up against similar abilities from the other tanks. Any chance of this getting looked into?”

Of course which questions can be answered will depend largely upon which developers are present.

In previous developer chats, there has been an open ‘free-for-all’ channel alongside the ‘official’ EQ2 channel so sometimes you can get questions answered there, or insight into why certain decisions are made. No word on SOE President John Smedley being scheduled as a chatroom guest, so questions about how Battlegrounds got bumped to the front of the development line, and/or questions about the international expansion launch, will likely be unanswerable.

Also, no word on if we’ll ever see a return to the monthly Developer Q&A on the EQ2 Forums. I hope that’s not the last we’ll see of them.

As we reach 5 hours of downtime, Brenlo has tweeted that servers are “Minutes…” away from being back up.

If you’ve been playing for a a few years, you have probably accumulated several channel numbers which no longer work, yet you cannot leave. For example Good_Ranger, Good_Crafters, Level 80, etc.

One solution is to use /setchannelnumber old# new# to move the channel up to say 99 where it won’t bother you. This is what I did for a while.

It seems the fixes made to Butcherblock didn’t last as the server is down again. More as we have it.

Update: Server came up in about 30 minutes.

From Kiara:

Butcherblock experienced a hardware failure. They’re fixing it now.  We’re going to keep the server locked until it’s fixed.  ETA 10:30am PST.

UPDATE: Butcherblock is now up.

The EQ2 Servers will be coming down shortly for the Sentinel’s Fate expansion and Game Update 55 patches. Servers are expected to come back up at 9am PDT.

Also some of the people who purchased Sentinel’s Fate digitally from international websites will be getting their keys by e-mail at this time. Some people have reported that DLGamer.co.uk is now accepting orders from Australia.

While the servers are down, you can chat with us online! We will be in the EQ2 ZAM chatroom. Kiara will be joining us as well and giving status updates.

	For instructions on how to connect to the chat using mIRC, Trillian, or other chat client, check out the fantastic instructions at EQ2 ZAM.
	If you are not able to run chat software at work, or you just want to jump into the chat through your web browser, you can chat here.

See you in the chatroom!

Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, Senior Producer of EverQuest II has posted this Producer’s Letter:

Happy Valentine’s Day All!

Here we are, perched on the precipice of another big launch for our beloved game, EQII. Next week is a big week for us and for you, the players of this grand game. You will finally be able to log into the new areas of Odus and explore, level and play in the new area that the team has spent nearly a year putting together. Characters can now advance to level 90 as adventurers and tradeskillers. More items, more spells, more AA’s and we hope lots more fun.

As many have noticed, Halas is not going out with the expansion, many have asked why and the reasoning is twofold. We have three pretty decent starting areas already. Darklight, Greater Faydark and Timorous Deep. We know they are not perfect and so the team has done considerable work in reworking those areas, streamlining the progress path to make for a better experience. We believe that you will find the experience in those zones to be far better than it had been. So, we went to work on higher level content for this launch, which we have with the expansion content and the new Battlegrounds.

Additionally we really want new Halas to be something special. We want more time to polish the area and make sure the progression path is fun and smooth. We also hope to get kilts in there. Currently we are looking to have Halas out with the Halas Reborn update later in the year.

With this release, we are proud to open up the Pre-Season of EQII Battlegrounds. Three zones will be available, each with a different playstyle. They will have progression and items and we hope add a whole new element of fun to the game. Unfortunately we didn’t quite get as many players as we had hoped on the server to give it a proper test, so we are going to use this pre-season phase to iron out any kinks and tweak the balance a bit more beyond the testing phase. When we are ready, we will begin Season 1 and the mayhem will begin in earnest. You will be able to work towards the new Chaos Armor during the pre-season, which might be the best looking armor we have added to the game.

With a game like EQII, it is evergrowing and everchanging, on occasion we find the need to adjust items, spells etc. . . and some mythicals had their power reduced with the release of the expansion. With each launch, we have to look at the items released previously and decide if they are perhaps too high to encourage players to look for upgrades. EQII is, at its core, a game driven by itemization. The constant desire to get the next biggest, baddest piece of gear. So on occasion we have to make some difficult decisions. This was one of them. For those who feel their mythical was devalued, I offer my apologies.

Next Tuesday is the retail head start, so to get you all ready, we are turning on Bonus XP from now until the servers come down for the update Tuesday morning. I hope you all login and enjoy. We look forward to seeing you on the Battlegrounds and running around Odus. Mostly, we thank you for playing EQII.

Alan “Brenlo” Crosby

Senior Producer EQII

There has certainly been a lot of gnashing of teeth on EQ2Flames and the EQ2 Forums that Battlegrounds, Battlegrounds Armor, and the PvP ruleset is going to “ruin” raiding in EQ2.

And there have been plenty of naysayers saying PvP wasn’t strong enough to sustain multiple PvP servers, or that Arenas never really caught on, as proof that there is no need for Battlegrounds.

As for me, the prospect of being robbed on the way to the bank, or being unable to turn in a quest due to roaming murder squads, just isn’t why I play this game. I know it is a play style that many people love, and I respect that.

I’m no stranger to PvP in other games. I had a blast playing Rainbow Six, and Quake. Not to mention some early networked PvP games like MazeWars and NetTrek. The PvP was a controlled environment, and something I could switch on and off. It was a lot of fun!

I’ve been optimistic about Battlegrounds because I see the potential. People have downtime when forming groups or raids. Some people like the idea of PvP in EQ2, but not the implementation. Sometimes there just aren’t a lot of players online. And no doubt, some guilds will want to test their mettle against other guilds on other servers!

Tonight, I tried out the group Battlegrounds zones, and so far, I had a lot of fun!

From EQ2 Forums:

Greetings Norrathians.

Starting at 4:45am PST  Antonia Bayle, The Bazaar, and Sebilis will come  down for an estimated 5 hour downtime.  During this time, the database  software will be upgraded to address lag issues.

We will update this thread as needed should any issues arise.

Thank you for your patience!

From EQ2Players:

Greetings Norrathians! There will be a 40% bonus applied to adventure and tradeskill experience this weekend, starting at 3:00 p.m. PST on Friday, January 15th and ending at 10:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday, January 19th.

If you frequently use EQ2Players especially to lookup Stats, Guilds, Characters, etc. you’d have to be blind to have missed the Site Revamp 2 weeks ago. Significant functionality was broken, the site displayed slowly on many browsers, and a lot of features were missing.

Fast forward to today and EQ2Players has a review clearly written by someone not on Platform staff because it honestly and openly identifies problems in the site, and has dates when we can expect those issues to be resolved.

Check out the EQ2Players Review… by EQ2Players

This is not been well-known until now. I’m thrilled to announce that the large contested zone part of Sentinel’s Fate — The Hole — will be playable as both a large Contested with 3 wings and 3 entrances, and 3 individual Instances for those players who prefer an instanced gameplay style and pace.

Check out the preview of both the Contested and Instance versions of The Hole at EQ2Players, including interviews with Developers and some great screen shots and wallpapers from this epic sized (but group-targeted) zone. 😉

The difficulty and level range of the Instances by the way is:

• • Demitrik’s Bastion: 85-90 Difficulty level – Easy to Moderate
• • The Outer Vault: 88-90 Difficulty level – Moderate
• • Spirit’s Resonance: 88-90 Difficulty level – Moderate

The Hole Review @ EQ2Players