Feldon
Last night, a new video of the Ice Wolf Mount reward as part of the Velious Winter Rewards coming in February was posted. For some reason, the video is hosted by Facebook and initially required a Facebook account to view it, but this has been remedied. Remember, the Ice Wolf Mount will be one per account and requires an active subscription for December 14, January 17, and February 8, and that you purchase Destiny of Velious sometime between when it becomes available and December 31, 2011. Fan Faire Update: Those who went to Fan Faire and get the expansions...
Rothgar has been providing updates on the EQ2 Forums: Aaaaaand, we’re off!
So you may remember that Racial Traits/Traditions were nerfed adjusted in Game Update 53 to remove all uniqueness, including all offensive buffs and abilities such as Ratonga bite and Sarnak fire breathing. From Frizznik: Offensive buffs have been removed. We did this to help balance races better against each other. It seems this ‘balance’ applies to only free races. Left out of the initial version of the The Freeblood: More Information and Images announcement on EverQuest2.com was this Racial Trait: Another Racial Trait, “Bloodletting,” grants a minor Lifetap spell to occasionally drain health from targeted enemies. Do you think...
This breaking news comes from an SOE GM (we are withholding the name): As part of having an actual subscription through us is the fact that you get to use the bonus items unlike if you use a prepaid card. They get the special perks because they use us direct rather than going through a third type payment option. So yes, there is a benefit to have an account through us rather than a pre paid monthly gaming card. It may not seem fair that a player may have been playing for years with prepaid cards and feels they...
Things are moving fast in the Server Merge process, and even we are having trouble keeping up. From Rothgar: We plan to have all U.S merges done by Monday night, the 20th. International merges will come after the first of the year due to database maintenance that must be performed before we can start the merges. Wednesday night at midnight we will perform two more mergers. Then Sunday night at midnight we will perform the final two U.S. mergers. I’ll post the server names sometime tomorrow with the corresponding day that we are planning to do the merge.
Rothgar has given us the all clear on those AA Reset issues: It looks like we’ve found the issue related to the AA reset and coming up with a plan to fix it as soon as possible. Even though we’ve seen a few posts of people mentioning this happening prior to the merge and on other servers, we are currently only aware of a merge-related issue. There may be something more obscure happening to cause this problem elsewhere, and if it comes up we will look into it as well.
So it looks like Research Assistants weren’t so ready and willing to depart Guild Halls, despite yesterday’s hotfix. It looks like guilds did receive a refund, but the NPC is still on he list of Amenities and now counts against the number of amenities any guild can have. Fortunately, Rothgar has fixed the fix and we should expect it in the next scheduled hotfix.
Dethdlr
Today’s hotfix refunds the purchase cost of Research Assistants, adds 200 house item slots to The Mistmoore Crags Estate and a few other things. Read the full hotfix notes after the jump.
Rothgar checked in with this announcement on the EQ2 Forums: Monday morning will be a short maintenance in order to prepare for more upcoming mergers. The offical announcement should follow soon, but this should be a typical 7am downtime with 30-60 minute ETA. Monday night at midnight we will begin our next merger with Unrest and Najena. Estimated downtime as with the last merger will be 24 hours but we hope to have servers up earlier. Several minor issues with the last merger have been fixed so we expect this one to go smoothly. We will do our best...
After the launch of Sentinel’s Fate, players quickly noticed that a huge percentage of the level 81-90 gear had armor appearances from either the newbie islands, or level 40-49 armor sets, just recolored. It turned out that new armor appearances had been built, but very few had been wired up, so most of the armor had placeholder appearances. It took at least a couple of months for another art build, and much work behind the scenes to get the situation resolved. Even still, there are considerable swaths of armor appearance choices which have remained limited. Covic does not want...
Ok, that was bad even by our standards… 😉 Anywho, Cronyn has put his two cents in on the Vampire Lore, to try to reaffirm that this isn’t just an afterthought to leverage other popular vampire franchises: Heya folks! I thought I’d pop in here to help a bit. So, I wanted to assure you that the lore for the vampires is indeed tied to bigger events and characters. The piece that was posted was mostly intended to be more of an overview, and was intentially more vague. I was hoping to get you all talking, and they start...
Since the most recent hotfix (and believed to be unrelated to the Server Merges), some players are reporting complete resets of their AA (Alternate Advancement) points each time they Log Out or Spend an AA point. AA Mirrors to the Rescue A workaround that some players have discovered is to use your AA mirror once and that apparently stabilizes the resets. If you don’t have an AA Mirror, you’ll need: a reflective smoldering shard — drops off trash mobs in Sebilis; since few people rae farming Sebilis, these shards have skyrocketed from 1p each to 5-7p each on some...
While there were some interesting changes to how disputes over Character Names were handled in the first of these new Server Merges, Guild Names stuck with the original rules established long ago. During a Merge, if both servers have a guild of the same name, the one created first keeps its name, while the other receives an unceremonious “x” suffix. While it has been a relatively smooth Server Merge between Blackburrow and Everfrost, it has been marred by some Guild and Player Name issues, other scheduled server downtime and maintenance, and some niggling issues with Mail. More after the...
Ever wonder what programmers do in their off time? Sometimes, we program. I write programs for my own use, apps for my guild’s website, even wrote an editor for the raid abilities for Fetish Nightfall a while back. If you’re Greg “Rothgar” Spence, the Lead Programmer for EQ2, you wire up over 30,000 Christmas lights and program them to go on and off synchronized to Christmas music!
Covic and Gninja have had their share of the hotseat lately over the appearance and lore of the new Freeblood vampire race. After the jump, their insight and responses to questions on these subjects, including some further revelations about the fate of Marcus Thex and the Evernight Abbey fight.
From EverQuest2.com: We’ve got more info today about the new Freeblood playable vampire race that’s coming to EverQuest II! Read the initial lore story we shared yesterday at this link, then be sure to check back next week when we’ll have additional details and a new lore story that explains even more about this new race and its place in Norrath. We also have some new screenshots to share, showing a variety of looks, and some of the special features available with the Freeblood. Because the nature of an MMO is ever-changing, we’re not necessarily done with the appearance...
Everfrost players have reported that they are not receiving Battlegrounds tokens for either winning or losing Battlegrounds events, and also not receiving any updates on Battlegrounds Daily Quests. Rothgar has been made aware of the issue and it’s being looked into. From the EQ2 Forums. From Rothgar: Ok, thank you for the info. It’s almost 11pm here tonight and there’s nothing we could do to fix it this late but I promise we will be on it first thing in the morning to determine the problem. Unfortunately its too early to tell if a fix will require a new...
Covic (Dave) on the EQ2 Forums, designer of the new Freebloods vampire race gives some insight into the design and issues: I agree that most of our players want to have some freedom in customizing there characters. With the vampires I want there to be enough color options with eyes, hair and skin that players can get the unique look they want. When I make the color wheels for the custom colors I will have most of the color combos pointing to more of a dead look with greens and blues. But I dont want to take options from...
It looks like those EverQuest2.com Freeblood vampire screen shots we saw weren’t ready for prime time. SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: The screenshots that were released were not intended to be public-facing. Those have been taken down from the EQ2Players site and will be replaced with real shots soon. Those screenshots were not approved. Real ones are coming later today that will hopefully reassure you that they’re cool. He even went this far when asked why such awful screen shots saw the light of day: I cannot disagree. Those shots should never have been published.
From the EQ2 Forums, when asked if we might see a bonus XP weekend, SmokeJumper dropped this hint: Yes…but I have to stay mum about details until the announcement is ready. Looks like the best way to find out is to ask. 🙂
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: The Mistmoore Crag Estate item limit should not have been less than the other large houses already available. We’ve decided to up the limit from 600 to 800. This change should be going out in the next hotfix.
Some characters still have x or xx after their name, despite meeting the qualifications necessary to NOT have those extra characters. Namely having the character with that name, with the longest playtime. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: Our rename script was interrupted by the server maintenance last night, so every name conflict has not been resolved yet. We’ve restarted the script and the remaining name conflicts should be resolved in a couple of hours. UPDATE:Â the Character/Guild Name Cleanup Script has completed running. If you still have an issue or wish to dispute the name that was chosen...
SmokeJumper and Rothgar have been weathering the storm of the Blackburrow -> Everfrost server merge, which knocked out in-game chat channels such as 1-9, 70-79, and cross-server chats on ALL servers for 24 hours, followed by 12 hours of an even deeper chat blackout on ALL servers, with guild chat, group chat, public channels, cross-server chat, login to SOE games, and even access to the SOE forums all intermittently interrupted.
So it was put forward that the Big Marketing Push for EQ2X that was promised for late summer never materialized. SmokeJumper tackled this one: The decision was made to delay the marketing spend until January after the Christmas cage fights over banner slots and other advertising have died down a bit. So…January now.
SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums perhaps being too truthful: It was basically the other way around and our announcement wasn’t very smooth. The [vampire] race was originally intended as a marketplace-only offering and then we decided to also create a way for players to get it as a promotion also. The marketplace offering comes out sometime this month (it’s not done yet, so dates aren’t exact), but the winter promotion doesn’t end until Velious comes out, so that’s when we’ll give it away to those that want to wait for it. Lemin summarized it thusly: Frankly I don’t know...