Another zone preview from the upcoming Sentinel’s Fate expansion. This time, it’s one of the Vasty Deep dungeons. Check it out at EQ2Players.

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

Today’s hotfix notes bring news that your player appearances (including illusions) can now be set in-game using a Magic Mirror type tool. Update Notes from EQ2 Forums:

ITEMS

• Appearance customization items have been changed! This affects these items:
  • – Shave and a Cut, Makeover (combined into the same item)
  • – Nalana’s All-Natural Cosmetic Balsam

• When used, these items now open a window that allows you to customize your appearance in-game instead of returning to the character select screen.
• In addition, Shave and a Cut and Nalana’s All-Natural Cosmetic Balsam now affect your current illusion if it is that of a player race (such as Erudite or Dark Elf). If an illusion is active, then the item will affect the appearance customization settings for that race. Once done, these will be saved and activated whenever you activate that illusion! In this way, you can create customizations for each of your player-race illusions!
• You can now preview appearance backpacks in the dressing room.
• Unequiping an item with a set bonus now cancels casting.

PVP

• Signet of Devouring is now purchasable with tokens.

TRADESKILLS

• Tinkered portable workstations can now be used from level 10 up.

EQ2Players has been updated with a preview of the Vasty Deep dungeons. There are some new and familiar screen shots, and more information about these zones. Check it out!

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

A zone I have been anxious to get a look at is the contested “The Hole” which will encompass an area over twice the size of Sanctum of Scaleborn, and a level range from 82 all the way to 90. We are thrilled to present the first screen shots of this zone:

Around the web, others have posted new screen shots this evening including:

EQ2 Zam | EQ2 Traders | Ten Ton Hammer | MMOQuests | Shattered | MMORPG-Info |  kithicor.org | LoreLibrary | Archive of Ik | EQ2 Daily | TheBrasse.com | EverSeek.com

EQ2Players has been updated with a expansion zone preview covering the Northern half of Odus — the Stonebrunt Highlands. This is a level 85-90 overland zone with solo questlines.

Adam “Zaphax” Stephens was lead designer on this zone and answered some questions with his thoughts on the design of the zone. Check out the new writeup as well as some new images and wallpapers of Sentinel’s Fate at EQ2Players.

illustration by Dozer

Mount Up

EQ2 has yet to fill out its stable of player mounts with the variety available in other MMORPGs.  The hygiene-challenged Wargs and motion sickness-inducing Rhinos weren’t my up of tea. When I heard that EQ2 were getting Dire Bears, I was thrilled, until my hopes were dashed when the Sabertooth/Werewolf-like mount was revealed.

In lieu of a desirable fluffy travel companion, I’ve limited myself to running barefoot. I’ve long since outgrown the 40% speed of the venerable Carpet of El’khazi, wrangled from the ever-sarcastic flying carpet dealer in Sinking Sands, the 48% upgrade in the Mage tower, and the 55% inferno version offered in Lavastorm. I’ve flirted with the impressive Order of Rime ice mare as well as the Refer a Friend mounts but just haven’t had the persistence to get them. I really want a NEW attractive mount!

I waited with trepidation to check out the new Highland Stalker shipping with the Sentinel’s Fate expansion collector’s box. Rumors persisted that the mount was in fact a Lynx. One of the smaller cats out there, I was curious how EQ2 artists would handle this.

No matter what an artist produces, he or she will always be challenged, questioned, and criticized. Create a sculpture, painting, or 3D model based off a real creature, and you will be criticized for not making something more creative and stylized. Create something stylized, unique, and exaggerated, and you will be criticized for not making it real enough.

Having seen the Highland Stalker (Lynx), I personally feel that with some adjustments to the size of the head and perhaps the look of the eyes, we will have a very good looking mount, whether you choose the saddle-only version, or pick up your stalker fully loaded with head-to-toe armor plating.

In case you haven’t had your fill of Tiger-related controversy, check out the Highland Stalker Video and Highland Stalker Sneak Peek threads on the EQ2 Forums for further discussion. If you would like to read some developer comments about the proportions of the Highland Stalker, check out this post by covic. This may or may not be the finalized mount. Since the pictures and videos were taken, additional adjustments based on character race/size vs. mount size have been made.

Dozer Joins the Team

Speaking of the challenges of artists face, you may have noticed the illustration presented with today’s writeup. We are proud to present the first of what we hope to be a regular series of EQ2-inspired cartoons by Dozer. Some of you may have already seen his fine work around the interwebs and we are thrilled to be working with him. Look for a Portfolio section featuring Dozer’s work soon. Welcome!

City Festivals

City Festivals are now live. The first one is just outside of Kelethin near the Butcherblock Mts. ramp. City Festivals are held the first week of every month. If you have been doing city writs, tradeskill work orders, etc. you may have noticed a curious item — City Tokens — as quest rewards. City writs, tradeskill writs, and special quests only available during the City Festivals will all earn you City Tokens which can be spent to buy house items, special appearance gear, etc.

For all those folks wishing to see more activity in the cities, here’s your chance. These festivals are accessible to all alignments regardless of city due to them festival parking just outside the city gate and offering quests to all who visit.

Frostfell Ending Soon

If you haven’t run all of the Frostfell quests, including the Icy Keep: Return which requires a group, or any of the other quests, tradeskilling, etc. don’t miss out! Frostfell ends January 7th.

EQ2Wire would like to wish a Happy New Year to all of you. We’ll be back with more news about the EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate expansion and any other news in the world of Norrath soon.

Plane of War – Page 1

Calthine over at ZAM posed a challenge on the forums. Can you level a character from 1-80 in a day? The surprising response was a demonstration that a character could be leveled from 1-80 in 5-7 hours.

Check out this article over at EQ2 ZAM.

EQ2Players has as new preview available of The Sundered Frontier, which is one half of the overland area of Odus. This includes some screen shots and an interview with gninja, leader designer of this zone. You can also find some wallpaper sized screenshots which have not previously been posted. All of this after the jump:

EQ2Wire is thrilled to present some more screen shots from the upcoming Sentinel’s Fate expansion. These images are taken from the first part of Odus players will encounter, the Sundered Frontier.

It seems many things have changed, and many others have stayed the same. Odus seems to have been scooped from out of the earth and is now scattered across the Norrath sky. Visitors will likely arrive by Spire or Airship!

Check out these screen shots (Scroll down to get a clickable grid of thumbnails):

Also check out this exclusive Sundered Frontier screen shot available only on EQ2Wire:

EQ2Wire Exclusive Screenshot (Large Version)

The complete set of images available in this round of screen shots is available below:

Hope you enjoy these great snapshots!

There have been a lot of reactions to the clarification of just what types of multiboxing are permitted in SOE games and which aren’t. What most of these reactions have lacked is perspective.

A careful read of the key pards Kiara‘s post in another thread on the multiboxing subject:

That is what allows us to nuke the farmers and plat sellers that we all loathe so much.

If you’re not doing something you shouldn’t be doing, multi-boxing is fine.

People are over-reacting and troll-feeding.

Please stop trying to read into it anything that says we’re going to start nuking our legitimate players for playing more than one account at a time.

along with past history suggest to me that SOE does not see any benefit in wholesale banning of players. Players are typically banned for disruptive behavior, and typically get several warnings.

Let’s look again at some significant exploits which have happened in past expansions such as item and plat duplication, profiting from item buyback, grey void shards, and instance reuse for shard updates. Very few consequences came out of these exploits.

Also, every discussion about this multiboxing issue seems to have referenced a single petition replied to by a single GM. However one person does not make a policy. It is certainly possible that this GM was being perhaps a bit too understanding, or suggesting (and not communicating) that what matters more than anything is to not be a nuisance or a disruptive player.

• If you are dominating content that others wish to play, or are preventing other players from getting updates, then that is disruptive behavior.

• If you are using software like this to flood a server’s economy with tradeskilled goods, etc. then that is disruptive behavior.

• If you are causing server lag due to inefficient macros causing tremendous amounts of keypresses being sent to the server, then that is disruptive behavior.

If, however, you are multiboxing just to see what kind of heroic content you can tackle all by yourself, especially instanced content, I don’t think it really hurts anyone and I doubt anyone is going to go out of their way to remove you (and your additional subscriptions) from the game. In short — don’t be evil.

The biggest loss of functionality on EQ2Players for many viewers was the ability to lookup Alt characters. This is used by guild recruiters to weed out players with a known history of troublemaking and guild bank plundering. So we’re happy to report that this functionality has been restored to EQ2Players.

DarkViper has been reporting steadily on fixes to the site:

The team is actively working on adding in quite a few new features, they’re just not ready yet The community team will be posting a list of the features soon with when you can expect them.

Players are asked to do a hard refresh (Ctrl-F5 or Ctrl-R) to make sure they are not viewing a cached version of the page.

Players who wish to hide their alts can do this in their Settings area. Platform are looking at the possibility of adding a way to apply this setting to all your alts.

DarkViper, from SOE’s Platform (websites, forums, etc.) department has responded to widespread criticism of the EQ2Players revamp which went live last week:

Everyone, thanks for the feedback on the web site. With Station Players becoming a free service, I hope you’re checking out all of the sections of the site if you’ve never had access to it. It’s important to keep hearing this feedback so we can continue to evolve the site.

To address the browser crashing:

We’re already planning on making a version of the site that is ‘lighter’ for the in-game browser. It has always been the plan, but we could not get that version of the site done in time for this release. We’ll investigate why it’s crashing, though I have heard that other sites (not just EQ2’s) have crashed in the past as well so it’s not something I can guarantee that will be in our control to fix before the in-game version of the site.

Re: Guild Chat visibility:

We’ll improve the placement for this, we agree that we need other entry points to this beyond just the profile pages. In fact, the profile bar is planned to be accessible via the entire site.

Re: Search functionality

We’re re-tooling this after much feedback to be more intuitive and accessible.

Re: Speed of loading

We’ll investigate this. It loads fast on all machines we’ve tested, and loads relatively fast even on the iphone. This could be browser version specific so we’ll have our lab here see if they can replicate this one.

A few additional comments:

Re: Alts

We’re adding this back in next build of the site.

Re: Guild Roster

Agreed, 5 is too low, we’re tweaking this next build.

Re: Best in Class Leaderboard

We’re adding the update in the next build of the site.

Re: Login remember me

We’ll speak with the teams responsible for this functionality and will hopefully have a fix in place soon.

Re: RSS Feeds/CSV functionality

We’ve been working on making this more accessible for folks and are looking into ways we can get you guild data for your use whether it be for web sites or not. We’ll have an update soon for this.

Please keep sending the feedback, we’re listening and addressing it. If you run into any problems (i.e. errors), please PM me or post it and we’ll get someone looking into it.

>> Download Highland Stalker Preview HD Video [22.5MB WMV]. <<
>> Download Highland Stalker Preview SD Video [13.8MB WMV]. <<

Guarding of the Reasoned and Guarding of the Learned

The Guarding of the Reasoned (right) comes with the retail boxes
The Guarding of the Learned (left) comes with the digital downloads.

It Started with /Follow

Since the first time someone discovered the /follow command in EverQuest II, ingenuous players have been fascinated with the possibilities of building a force of players all under their control. Naturally, it started with having a healer tag along to spot heal mobs that were too challenging to solo. Then players realized they could handle 3 or even 4 toons on separate accounts playing simultaneously with multiple keyboards and strategically arranged hotbars.

Please take this Multiboxing/Dual boxing survey, even if you do not multibox/dual box. Results will be posted soon.

SOE is bringing back Double Station Cash for nearly two weeks just in time for Christmas.

Starting December 23, 2009 and lasting through January 3, 2010, redeem any StationCash card for double credit. Cards may be purchased anytime in advance, but must be redeemed successfully during the promotional period in order to receive the bonus.  These are currently branded as FreeRealms Station Cash cards but are applicable to all SOE games. Points can be redeemed at FreeRealms.com or the Station website.

Starter and Month Subscription cards do not count.

Press Release at EQ2 ZAM

Some of you may be interested in these Frostfell-themed items coming to StationCash Marketplace on December 22, 2009.

Red Baby Dragon Plushie and Merry Frostfell Backpack

Posting on EQ2Players

The phase of the moon is just right and the mushroom rings will be active again for a short time.

There are more house items and other rewards than ever for the Moonlight Enchantments event this time around.

The event will turn on at 12:01am PDT on December 20th and run until 11:59pm PDT on December 21st. These times apply directly with no time conversion to all servers.

EQ2Players has undergone a revamp and the results went live this morning. Actually, it’s more than just a revamp. All trace of EQ2Players has been wiped away! This is now the main EverQuest2 website.

Searching

The first thing we noticed is that to Search for Characters, Guilds, or Items, you must either be on the Home page, or click the Search link in the upper right corner. It used to be possible to search from anywhere on the site. We also noticed that simply typing a character name and pressing Enter no longer works. You must now specify Character, Guild, Item, or Forum.

Performance

We’ve also noticed that the site renders noticeably slower. Perhaps with some tweaks to the Javascript code (which is now used throughout the site) can speed up performance.

Guild Searches

• When browsing a Guild Roster, now only 5 members of that guild are displayed at a time and the viewer must page through roster.
• It is no longer possible to click on a member of a guild to view their profile page. One must backtrack to the Search page and type in a character name and perform a new search.
• There is no header table in the Guild Roster, so it is unclear what some of the numbers represent.
• The graphics indicating tradeskill and adventure class are gone, replaced with text only (Dirge, Weaponsmith, etc.).

Character Searches

• When you do a search for a Character, it shows a list of characters matching that name. However the Guild link next to each character brings you to an error page. You must click on a Character to bring up their Character Profile and then you can click the link to their Guild.

Character Profiles

• It appears all of the Paper Doll graphics have been reset, so everyone’s Character Profile image is blank. If a characters wants an image of their character on their Profile, they will need to upload a new image.
• While it’s more a design decision than a bug, we’re sad to see that the Alternate Advancements page when viewing a Character now has just about the minimum information possible.  Information about each AA is not available. No graphics are used. And it is impossible to tell at-a-glance, how many AAs are used in each tree. Hopefully this is just a placeholder until the expansion when AAs are getting tweaked and new lines.

Right now, the EQ2Players site, or I guess I should start calling it the EQ2 site, is a step backwards for usability. But hopefully with some tweaks, these nagging issues can be resolved.

While there is still a lot we don’t know about the PvP Battlegrounds feature first mentioned in October and slated for inclusion in the Sentinel’s Fate expansion in February, we have sussed out a few details.

Battlegrounds will be cross-server. Specifically a shared instance or instances accessible by players from different servers where you can meet in battle.

Battlegrounds will be available on both PvE and PvP servers.

It is currently unknown if these Battlegrounds will be the full PvP Ruleset (which is quite different than dueling on PvE) or a hybrid. PvP gear is quite powerful compared to the PvE gear that most players have.

It is currently unknown if these will be free-for-all or include campaigns such as capture the flag, etc.

It is currently unknown if European, Russian, and North American servers will be able to connect together, as they often have different Game Update schedules.

Brenlo reports in with this preliminary info:

This is still going through mid development so we are locking down details.  We are working on maps, rewards, gameplay styles etc. . . We will have lots of details soon. However just one quick note.  This will be for all servers, not just PVP.

Yes it will be cross server. =)

Hotfix Notes for December 15:

ACHIEVEMENTS
The Butcherblock Bloodhound achievement will now acknowledge players that had previously completed the Butcherblock quests: “Silent Beckon”, “A Dim Light”, “For the Dogs”, “A Mind Of My Own”, “Sarnak Sympathizer: Part 2”, “Dark Tides”, “Picking up the Pieces”, “Ain’t No Monkey Business”, “Simple Grunt Work”, “When You Mess With An Angry Dwarf” and “Solid Foundation”.

QUESTS

• The intended pages of “Hrath’s Journal” are now readable while on the quest “Hadden’s Earring”.
• Learning the Path quest should now update correctly when completing a PVP writ.
• Sinking Sands quests should now scale to the difficulty of the zone.
• The Freeport Emissary in Highkeep for the Qeynos Claymore quest line should now spawn in Tenebrous Tangle near the Norrath portal.

SPELLS
Call Servant spell is now instant cast.