Kwill
One of the problems that the developers have been working on lately is to make sure that non-participants or “slackers” don’t get rewarded in Public Quests. In the original version of the Public Quests, which started out with an arbitrary threshold of acceptable spell casting or DPS, too many AFK players were getting chest drops, at least in the eyes of other players, who expressed their concerns to developers. For Dev Gninja, this was an unacceptable situation that needed to be rectified. He was mad about it. So back to the drawing board he went, increasing the threshold yet...
Feldon
When buying Heroic/Legendary shard armor with Primal Velium Shards, you now have three choices. If you’ve got the various gems that drop in different instances, and you have faction, then head to the Ry’Gorr camp in Eastern Wastes. Each piece of armor will cost you 52 shards. If you don’t have the necessary gem but want your armor anyway, and have faction, then head to Thurgadin in Great Divide. Each piece of armor has a cost ranging from 33-90 shards. And if you know a crafter who has acquired the two Far Seas recipe books to make this armor...
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...
Destiny of Velious introduced an unparalleled strict progression to both its group and raid zones. Players wanting to group up in Velious instances have discovered that there are 3 sets of group zones which each require completing the one before it in progression before being granted access. For instance, you must clear Tower of Frozen Shadow: Shadowed Corridors to gain access to ToFS: Umbral Halls, which must be cleared to gain access to ToFS: Haunt of Syl’Tor. And aspiring raiders must clear all 3 of these group zones in order to gain access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow...
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.
This year, Fan Faire has eschewed the different levels of access to Fan Faire in favor of a single All-Access ticket price of $129 with an early bird discount of $10. From EverQuest2.com: Get ready to celebrate this summer at SOE’s annual Fan Faire with your fellow gamers and the creators of your favorite SOE games! Register now and join us at Fan Faire, the prime time to meet up with old friends and make plenty of new ones while getting a behind-the-scenes look at your favorite SOE titles, participate in live game tournaments, experience live quests, attend developer...
GameInformer has landed an exclusive video EQ2 character artist Christopher Atkins. This time lapse video condenses 6 days of work down to 7 minutes of video showing Yelinak being built from the ground up to full bump map and textures. Time Lapse Video: Creating An Everquest II Boss @ GameInformer
The Storm Gorge Public Quests are currently denying eligible participants the ability to loot a chest, apparently as a result of the recent changes to weed out PQ slackers. Gninja has acknowledged today there is a problem: We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it. In the meantime, players are reporting lag and the possibility you will not get to loot a chest even if you are participating fully.
Bunji has attempted to clear up some of the confusion about EQ2 Launcher/Updaters: Seems like there is some confusion on the current patchers being offered. The two LP3 choices can be found here: http://launch.soe.com/eq2/ The “Full” version uses PAKs and behaves just like the original LP1 patcher (just has a different skin). The “Streaming” version doesn’t use PAKs (instead streams down needed content into an “assetcache” folder). Currently, if you run multiple clients on the streaming client it will create a second set of assets. What distinguishes them as LP3 patchers is the skin they use. LP1 = Original...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
I hear this a lot: Most of the people I know in game never visit the forums, and the “majority” opinions you see here rarely represent their opinions. It’s often used as a reason to belittle, dismiss, or outright ignore player feedback on the EQ2 forums. SmokeJumper responded: And that’s the tricky part for developers also. The loudest voices are always here on these forums, but there are many opinions. That’s one of the reasons that I spend so much time playing the game. Talking to players within the game as I play is always interesting and educational, even...
From Silius on the EQ2 Forums: Greetings All, I want to take the time to explain the reasoning behind some of the recent multi attack adjustments. Multi attack like any other stat is meant to grow base on item tier. In the creation of these items some of them were given a generous amount of multi attack unintentionally making the progression look odd. In the process of increasing loot power we rebalanced some of these items so they would fall within the guidelines we desired. That said there still exists some items we are ok with having a bit...
For those who didn’t get to spend all their Platinum Coins from the Chronoportals event at the vendor located in Antonica, the vendor will be returning on Tuesday and sticking around for 5 days. From Amnerys: Got a note from the team that they will be bringing the merchants back after the next hotfix and they will be available until Sunday, 4/10. Next hotfix should be on Tuesday!
SOE has sent out another mass email advertising Fortune League, their EQ2-themed Facebook game. I was curious enough to go look. They entice players to play by offering Alternate Advancement scrolls and other in-game goodies. Sounds great to me, until you click on the “Play Now” button. Up pops a screen asking you to share with SOE and other players all your basic information on Facebook — friends, personal information, and all your contacts. Whoa, hold on a sec guys. I personally appreciate an MMO where all that stuff is revealed on a purely voluntary and individual basis, like, oh,...
After today’s update, players have been checking out the re-structured Storm Gorge to see how the fights have changed, and how server lag has been reduced. Players generally reported improvements in lag, and also shared their strategies on dealing with the changes in the fight, which in some cases make it more challenging and interesting. Windslasher‘s response: It’s great to hear that the latest lag fixes worked! With that game-breaking issue mostly solved, I can now turn more my attention to other important issues. For example: Goredeth Maulhammer has always had the ability to heal himself while enraged. His...