With the ability to gift StationCash items restored to Norrath, players with thousands or even tens of thousands of platinum want to know: Am I going to get banned for trading Platinum in exchange for StationCash items?
An unexpected response from SmokeJumper after the jump…
Players have been wondering exactly how vampires are going to be sewn into the EQ2 storyline as a playable race. And some have wondered if any other medical conditions such as lycanthropy will make an appearance.
A new article has appeared on EverQuest2.com with Lore explaining the presence of the Freeblood vampire race and their place in Norrath. This article also includes teaser screen shots of the new Freeblood race.
From the EQ2 Forums:
Beginning on Thursday, December 9th, at 1:00 am PST (9:00 GMT), the following SOE Services will be unavailable or interrupted while we undergo data center maintenance.
- Chat Services
- All Star Wars Galaxies Servers
- All EQOA Servers
- All PlanetSide Servers
- All EQ servers
- All Vanguard Servers
- Session (Game Log-In)
We expect this maintenance to take approximately 11 hours, with a return to normal functionality around 12:00 pm PST. During this maintenance period, some game servers will not be accessible. During Session maintenance, some servers may remain online, but players who log out may not be able to log back in. This maintenance may also affect the ability to log into our forums.
We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.
Last night, the Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge concluded. Here are some things you should know from Rothgar:
Players are reporting in the chatroom that Splitpaw has been down for approximately 30 minutes.
Keeping in mind that dates and servers listed are ASSUMING nothing goes wrong, check out the preliminary list of server merges from Rothgar:
We should be able to give more notice for the upcoming mergers. This first one was a special situation where we wanted to start it ASAP and just got the final green light from QA yesterday. If we had then given 48 hours notice and delayed the merger, we wouldn’t have been able to do it Thursday due to a conflicting network maintenance so the next opportunity would have been the following Tuesday, putting us a week later. We just weren’t willing to wait that long since we also may need time to adjust the merge process after the first one and before we start the following merges.
The next merges will be:
Najena -> Unrest
Kithicor -> Butcherblock
Nektulos -> Guk
Mistmoore -> Permafrost
Befallen -> Oasis
Runnyeye -> Splitpaw
Innovation -> ValorEditor’s Note: This is not the final sequence of servers, but just a list of mergers.
I can’t give dates for the following mergers because they are very subject to change depending on any problems that occur or other unplanned maintenance.
I can tell you that if everything goes smoothly today that we will shoot for starting the next merge on Tuesday the 14th and possible the next one on Thursday the 16th.
These dates and even the order of mergers are subject to change if necessary.
From Rothgar:
The merge process is still truckin’ along on schedule with no major issues. I hope that we will be able to have the servers up earlier than planned but that will depend on whether or not we find any merge problems after all the data has been moved.
We’ll update you again in a few hours.
Beyond the initial announcement that cross-server chat channels and in-game mail would be affected during the 24-hour long Server Merger process, players are reporting problems with all public chat channels, even server-specific ones like 1-9 and 80-90 (some would insist it’s a feature that these channels are rendered inaccessible), and Friends lists.
We’ll try to find out if we can expect this behavior on all servers during each of these Server Merges.
We’re a bit late on this, but the last update from SOE Headquarters in San Diego on the Blackburrow -> Everfrost Merge was as follows from Rothgar:
It’s 4am and the merge process is going smoothly so far with no surprises. A few steps are running faster than expected, so that’s good news.
and:
I haven’t been to sleep yet, but going to try to catch a cat nap in the next few hours so I can deal with any post-merge issues.
We have a group of very dedicated people from different departments all working together to make sure this goes smoothly. None of them are going to get much sleep tonight and some of them have another 24-hour maintenance to do right after this merge.
More as we have it.
Originally announced as a 2 hour update, then revised to an 8 hour update, Splitpaw and Runnyeye are finally coming up after 11 hours, 30 minutes of downtime. Apparently the TSA wanted to pat down McScroogle himself before allowing this export of Frostfell goodness to Europe.
Rothgar‘s comments when queried about the long update:
I’m not sure why the downtime estimate was 8h. It should be publishing the hotfix which shouldn’t take nearly that long.
I just checked with our operations department and apparently there were some networking issues that caused the file transfers to take much longer than normal. They report that the servers are being smoke-tested right now and should hopefully be up soon.
Latest update on the Server Merge from Amnerys:
Good morning (or afternoon)! Hope everyone’s finding something to keep you busy during the downtime. 🙂 I also wanted to remind you that you can always log in to Test server if you start twitching too much.
If all goes according to plan, you probably won’t be hearing too much from us today, so don’t worry if you don’t see red names for a while. Back-end teams are hard at work on the merge, and the dev team is still doing all the pre-expansion launch stuff, so they have a full day’s work to keep them busy (or like Rothgar, they’re catching up on a few Z’s after staying up past 4am to oversee the start of the merge.)
As for me, it’s report day, and I’ve also got an article to pull together that I think everyone will be interested in reading. 🙂 Keep calm and carry on with the chat!
The Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge has commenced.
From the EQ2 Forums:
The Blackburrow and Everfrost servers will be merging on Wednesday, December 8, 2010. Both servers will be offline for an estimated 24 hours, beginning at 12:00 am on Wednesday, December 8. The merged Everfrost server is scheduled to come back online around 12:00 am on Thursday, December 9.
The following services will be affected for all EQII servers during this downtime and may experience interruptions:
- Cross-server chat
- In-game mail
- Friends Lists
Please feel free to join in the discussion in the Blackburrow to Everfrost Server Merge Discussion Thread.
Niami Denmother over at EQTraders has posted a new article about new Hua Mein furniture added with yesterday’s Hotfix.
Today, one new furniture item was added to the hua’mein faction vendor in the Sundered Frontier (the hua mein artisan).
In addition, however, 12 furniture items were added to the Stonebrunt Mountains pandas, the Disciples of Circling Destiny. Check out the screenshots and faction details on them here!
images courtesy EQTraders
It looks like Frostfell was patched in early today, instead of the expected December 9th.
EQ2 ZAM has their updated guide ready to go for Frostfell 2010 if you need a refresher, as well as info about the new quests and events.
If you’d like to browse the complete catalogue of Frostfell-related items, look no further than the comprehensive EverSeek which documents an astounding 285 Frostfell items and exactly how to get them.
Don’t forget to check out Niami Denmother’s EQTraders tomorrow with news about that new Hua Mein (panda) furniture as well as coverage of Frostfell 2010.
If you purchased a Research Assistant for your Guild Hall, you may have noticed that after today’s patch, he or she seems befuddled as exactly what to do now that players can tackle their own Spell Research from within their Knowledge window. Some have reported these despondent Research Assistants taking up crochet and browsing the want ads.
Since the Research Asssistant Guild Hall Amenity has both a recurring and up-front cost, some players have expressed their concern that choosing to Refund the amenity only returns 50% of the value of the amenity. Since a change in the game has rendered said amenity useless, should a 100% refund be due?
Rothgar is on the case, looking for an amicable solution. His quotes after the jump.
Incidentally, if you run a custom UI and are crashing whenever you open the Knowledge window, until your custom UI provider offers an update, you can temporarily delete these files from your custom UI folder:
Karen Bryan, known to us for her involvement in the A View from the Top and Shut Up We’re Talking podcasts, has been providing interviews and in-depth coverage for Massively for several months now, and today she weighs in with an exclusive interview with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson regarding the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion.
The Tattered Notebook @ Massively — Interview with Dave Georgeson
Today’s hotfix adds house items (furniture) to a merchant in Hua Mein, moves Research Assistants into the UI, fixes an exploit in StationCash Item Gifting, and offers additional tweaks to PvP and PvP Warfields. After the jump, your Hotfix Notes for December 7, 2010.
From the EQ2 Forums:
From 1:00 am PST (09:00 GMT) until 1:00 pm PST (21:00GMT) on Tuesday, December 7, SOE account services, commerce flow, and the Station Store may be unavailable during maintenance. Session servers (the ability to log into games) may also have interrupted service during this time.
All Battlegrounds servers will be locked during this maintenance.
We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.
Earlier this week, we commented on a change to Research Assistants which would have an effect on Scholars (Sage, Jeweler, and Alchemist). Namely, it allowed players to Research a spell all the way from Adept to Master without needing the assistance of a crafter to make the Expert first. Some players have downplayed the ramifications of this change, pointing out that most players will not want to wait for the Adept -> Expert upgrade, as with a 28~30 day Master, it adds another 13~15 days wait.
After the jump, SmokeJumper has posted his own thoughts on this change and what it means for crafters going forward.
As has been widely reported, when StationCash Item Gifting was added to SOE games, players realized that they could create new accounts and sign up for trials of SWG, EQ2, and other games and receive free StationCash in each game. With the ability to Gift items, players were able to gift hundreds of StationCash items to themselves without spending a penny.
Item Gifting will be coming back sometime this week, with suitable controls to prevent further exploits. More details after the jump…
First mentioned just after the introduction of Guild Halls, many players have been hoping to place tapestries in their guild halls which display the guild’s chosen heraldry. At Fan Faire, we were told that the artwork was essentially done. Domino on the EQ2 Forums has indicated:
If all goes well, you can expect to see this around February…
Also, apparently merchant Nin Yung in the Stonebrunt Highlands was supposed to offer furniture items for players with Ally faction. Domino informs us:
Seems that at some point between Sentinel’s Fate beta and launch, a shipment of Hua Mein furniture intended for merchant Nin Yung in the Stonebrunt Highlands fell off the back of the truck and went MIA.
Happily, the furniture has now been recovered, and should be showing up in Nin Yung’s merchandise in the next available hotfix, if all goes well. (At ally faction.) Merchant Radi in the Hua Mein camp in the Sundered Frontier also managed to get his hands on a new statue for the tradeskill allies of that encampment.
Usually, people want to know the story behind the music. But in this case, it may be the music itself which has more to reveal about the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion.
As first reported on the EQ2 forums, last night’s Test Update patch included music files tied in to EverQuest II’s seventh expansion. The following zones were represented (categories are mine amd subject to change):
Dungeons/Raid:
Overland:
City:
Unknown:
Add this to what we already know from Fan Faire 2010. We were informed that we could expect at least 10 Instanced Dungeons, 1 Massive Contested zone, 2 Overland zones, and 6 Raid Instances. Concept art was shown for:
Unique Housing?
We haven’t known what to make of another small batch of files found in this package. We’re talking about:
Remember at Fan Faire, we were told “We also hope to start looking at options for more unique “Prestige Housing” which would be specially themed houses you could choose instead of normal city housing.” The first of these was the Skyblade Skiff and Crag Estate. Perhaps these offer a clue to the next 3 housing options?
While it was never officially announced, you may recall that Game Updates shifted from monthly to a 3 month cycle in the beginning of 2009. The game-breaking Fighter Revamp was stripped from Game Update 51, which was eventually cancelled. Its features were released as two small hotfixes. So it was up to the massive Game Update 52: Monument and Might to finally kick off the current 3-month release schedule in May 2009 with 3 new dungeons, 80 new quests, player-written books, Research Assistants, and a rework of Spell Naming.
It was hoped that a 90 day release cycle for Game Updates would lead to more testing and larger updates, but this has not always been borne out.
SmokeJumper has suggested that we may see a return to monthly updates:
I don’t know why anyone promised you 90-day updates. That’s a rigid structure that imposes a three-month drought between updates. I’d much rather come up with a system to constantly move content out to Live on a monthly basis so that there’s always something new to look forward to…and we’re discussing implementation details for that now. (No promises that things are changing yet, but it’s the way I’d personally like to move toward.)
We first heard about Server Mergers in an initial announcement in October. The first possible date for the merges was put forth as November 16th. As revealed by SOE’s answers to some questions about Server Merges by EQ2 ZAM on November 8th, 2010, SOE aren’t simply using the same old Server Merge scripts which have been used in the past. It seems more attention is being paid to make sure there is less work for players, and less issues for Customer Service as well.
image courtesy Kotaku.com
Kotaku.com landed an exclusive interview with SOE President John Smedley and got some of his reactions to World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm update. Some selected quotes:
Next week’s world-changing expansion for World of Warcraft may not be the only cataclysm to hit a major massively multiplayer online game soon.John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, tells Kotaku that the publisher has been considering a similar game-wide reset for EverQuest II.
“We are looking at it closely, we have been for a number of years now,” he said during a visit to Sony Online Entertainment Denver. “Is it something we would do within the next expansion cycle? Probably not. But I think it’s interesting.”
…
You can read the full interview at Kotaku.com.