Feldon
Have you registered for Fan Faire yet? It’s less than a month away and registration closes in two weeks. That means it’s time for Calthine’s annual Fan Faire Tips! If you are planning to attend Fan Faire, I recommend reading her survival guide. Between tracking down guildies, meeting new friends, and trying to catch all the panels and events that affect your game(s) of choice, the Fan Faire weekend becomes a blur. It’s helpful to be prepared.
Test Copy has always been a temporary server, subject to complete wipes of all characters and guilds. In fact, the Test Copy server started out as a PvP Test server, and while it has been a PvE server for over 2 years now, the PvP switch has been “flipped” a few times for testing of Battlegrounds and PvP content leading up to Sentinel’s Fate. Despite all cautions to the contrary, some players have built up characters and guilds on Test Copy, so they may be interested to know that another wipe is happening. Test Copy is currently down (we’re...
From the EQ2 Forums: The US servers will come down on July 14, 2010, at 7am PDT for a hotfix. The Update Notes will be posted in the Update Notes forum when available. Runnyeye and Splitpaw will be patched at 9pm PDT (4am GMT) on July 14, 2010.
The second opportunity for players to submit their own artwork to be turned into in-game EQ2 paintings has come and gone, and the results have been announced! From EQ2Players: Greetings, Norrathians! We are thrilled to make the highly-anticipated announcement of the winners of our Notable Norrathians Forum Challenege! 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...
So we just had a Double XP weekend over the July 4th holiday. It was heavily promoted, and featured in an e-mail and on the forums. EQ2 Senior Producer SmokeJumper posted about spending almost the entire weekend playing and how quickly he earned levels, AAs, and how many groups he got. Now, apparently, it’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way. Yesterday’s Test Server Update Notes include the following details which will eventually make it to Live servers: GENERAL Many instances from Deserts of Flame and Kingdom of Sky are now persistent. This includes Ancient’s Table, Cazel’s...
There are just two weeks left to register for Fan Faire and the number of Gold and Silver passes available is limited! Platinum passes have been sold out for some time now. You can read more at EQ2Players. Plane ticket prices are already rebounding fast, so if you are on the fence, either buy your tickets now, or roll the dice and wait another week. That’s not a bet I’d take! As we have for the last 2 years, EQ2Wire will be providing Continuing Live Coverage of EverQuest II and Fan Faire.
From EQ2Players: The choosing of a guild name is a very important rite. To help ensure that your new name is considered carefully, we are introducing Guild Name Change potions at the price of 5500 SC. We believe this price is fair for those who do want a name change, but will also serve as a deterrent to those who might want to frivolously rename their guild every time they have a kerfuffle in the lands of Norrath. There has always been the option to disband a guild and create a new one with the desired name, but think...
From EQ2Players: With just over a month left until the big event we thought it would be fun to give you a behind the scenes look at Fan Faire! What goes into planning such a big event you may ask? When do we start? Just how many pallets of stuff are shipped to the event, and how many rolls of shrink wrap does it take to keep everything together? Look no further folks—we have all of the answers right here! In our quest for insider information we looked to the experts, the Events Team! Three wonderful ladies make up...
Oh hey, we had a hotfix! The July 7, 2010 Update Notes include several fixes to raid targets and live events. After the jump…
UPDATE: Blizzard has cancelled their plans to require real names to post on their forums. Unable to handle the avalanche of trolls overloading their community support forums (with 11.5 million players and over $20 billion in revenue after 5 1/2 years, you’d think they could afford to hire a few Kiara’s), Blizzard has decided to not just touch, but grasp firmly the third rail of MMORPGs — online anonymity. The Blizzard Announcement: The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so...
From the EQ2 Forums: This weekend, from 4pm Pacific on Friday, July 2nd (23:00 GMT) until 10am Pacific on Tuesday, July 6th (17:00 GMT), we will be running BOTH a Double Station Cash promotion *and* a true Double XP (+100% XP) promotion. We’ve gotten clarification that this is: Double Adventure XP Double Tradeskill XP Double Alternate Advancement (AA) XP Double StationCash A StationCash Card Reminder: The only StationCash cards currently available for purchase are branded as FreeRealms cards with StationCash value. Do not buy EverQuest II gameplay time 30 day cards (if you can even find them), they will...
The Icy Keep (an easy x4 raid zone added in Game Update 56) seems to have taken its place as this expansion’s Ward of Elements. We’ve received reports that, with the exception of the final boss, this zone is appropriate for raid groups of as few as 11 players seeking to gear up and work their way into more difficult raiding. There have been some issues with later bosses which Gninja has just submitted some fixes for: [I’ve] just checked in a fix that cleans up the Vrewwx fight as well as fixed the respawn points. Now once you...
Today’s hotfix included some additional lag fixes. Here’s Rothgar: With this morning’s update we made a fundamental change to how our zone servers throttle their frame rate. Our hope is that this change will allow busier processes to consume more of the server resources and increase performance (reduce lag). Whether or not this change has a noticeable impact will depend on many variables that can only be observed in the live environment and under a significant load. We’ll be watching things on our end as we ramp up to primetime tonight but I’m also looking for your feedback as...
Our friend Farrel over at Epic Slant has done a great article on player expectations for the Destiny of Velious expansion. Velious is not something you do lightly. It was the defining expansion of EverQuest and to put it on such a short product cycle is dangerous. Velious was one of the largest content additions ever to hit EverQuest. The whole expansion was simply massive in scale. Three major cities were added, several open world zones, shared access dungeons and a raid zone that could support more than a single guild at a time. The EQ2 trend of “two...
From the EQ2 Forums: The US servers will come down on June 29, 2010, at 7am PDT for a hotfix. Runnyeye and Splitpaw will be patched at the usual 9pm PDT (4 am GMT on June 16, 2010, provided that Kiara’s gnomish time zone converterizer didn’t lie).
From the EQ2 Forums: Starting at 4:45am PDT on Tuesday, June 29, 2010, the Guk, Najena and Blackburrow servers will come down for an estimated 5 1/2-hour downtime, expected to be online again around 9:15am PDT. During this time the servers will be undergoing maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience. If any additional downtime is needed, we will update this post accordingly.
Breaking News: Christine “Kiara” Renzetti is hopping the fence from EverQuest II to a new role as EverQuest Community Manager. More after the jump…
Interviews with the EQ2 team have been popping up everywhere, but while interviewing Dave Georgeson (EQ2 Senior Producer) would seem the obvious choice, EQ2Wire prefers to take the road less traveled. Although never officially announced, Xelgad has been appointed the go-to guy for Class Balance and Mechanics changes, filling the position hastily vacated by Aeralik last fall. We submitted 11 questions to Xelgad and are thrilled to be able to share the results of that exchange. There have been some gameplay changes of late that haven’t had a lot of developer response on the forums, so for our first...
From EQ2 Senior Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson: We read your posts about wanting a Double XP weekend this coming 4th of July weekend. I went and discussed it with everyone concerned, and voila!, now it’s Christmas in July. This weekend, from 4pm Pacific on Friday, July 2nd until 10am Pacific on Tuesday, July 6th, we will be running BOTH a Double Station Cash promotion *and* a true Double XP (+100% XP) promotion. So go get those Station Cash cards so you can redeem them, and plan to play a ton this weekend! We’ll see you on line!
Due to the streamlining of spells and combat arts from levels 1-20, specifically several changes to fighter spells and arts, Fighter classes are finding it difficult or impossible to complete Heroic Opportunities. Game Update 57 will see some changes to fighter classes to resolve this issue. From Xelgad on the EQ2 Forums: Fighter heroic opportunities have been changed from requiring a taunt to complete them to requiring a ‘Fist’ icon to complete them. Paladins and Shadowknights should soon see that one of their primary spells is now a Fist rather than a sword (Judgment and Malice) and Berserkers will...
If you are wondering why there has been a whirlwind of changes and announcements about what new players experience from levels 1-20, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, EQ2’s Senior Producer, has been spending a lot of time creating new characters in each of the starting cities to find the rough spots and smooth them out.
On Friday June 4th, 2010, Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) made news by announcing that the entire game was going to a Free-to-Play (F2P) model. Players can maintain a subscription, and receive most of the game and game items, but they’ll need to spend real money to get access to new items which appear on their marketplace. This begged the question of whether other games such as EverQuest, EverQuest II, or World of Warcraft would move to a F2P model, and if they did so, whether it would be gamewide or if we would see the addition of...
Game Update 57 could be a big update, based on some notes already posted in the Test forum, and hints of other changes coming down the wire. The biggest change thus far is the removal of certain group spells from the various player classes from levels 1-20. Because level 1-20, and especially levels 1-10 are considered solo play, those spells which are only useful in groups are being postponed to later levels. From Rothgar: These changes are PART (notice the emphasis on the word “part”) of a bigger change that wasn’t fully rolled out to the Test Server. As...
Imago-Quem continues to work nose-to-the-grindstone on Shaders 3.0, improving not only the look, but the performance. A month’s worth of tweaks to Shaders 3.0 since Game Update 56 are now on Test. These improvements fix tons of issues with objects being too dark, too shiny, or just the wrong color. From SmokeJumper: Shader 3.0 optimizations! Shader 3.0 is now way faster than it used to be. In most cases, it will outstrip Shader 1.0 by 10 fps or more. Very cool. (Okay, we snuck this one out already, but I’m talking about it now because we never really said...
Ten Ton Hammer interviewed Dave Georgeson at E3. It’s very difficult to follow the interview, since it’s not clear whose comments are Georgeson’s and whose comments are those of the interviewer. But nonetheless, it’s worth a read. Hopefully they’ll post the video soon. Meanwhile Stratics (which recently merged with TGN) has posted a video of their own interview with Dave Georgeson.