Feldon
It seems Butcherblock & Lucan D’Lere are back online. Must’ve been a minor fix if the servers were down for less than 15 minutes. Perhaps some final housekeeping from the Server Upgrade.
Abbreviated quote from Rothgar (EQ2 Forums thread): At 7:00am this morning our export script experienced a crash. We’ve restarted the export process as of 7:00am PST on different hardware and are monitoring it closely. The current impact is an extended downtime for Venekor players of roughly 12 more hours. For Nagafen players, this would mean a delayed maintenance schedule, but hopefully not an extended downtime.
Who would have thought just 5 months ago that we would see these: Also, contrary to prior plans/rumors/hints, they are not restricted to Alignment. Any race can switch to any other race!! Just $25 ($44 in Europe).
If you live in the U.S. and play EQ2 (or FreeRealms), then even if you’ve never purchased any, you know that 1,000 SC costs $10. Furthermore, there was a promotion a few weeks back where you could redeem retail-purchased StationCash cards for double credit. 1,000 SC were just $5 for a weekend. So you may be surprised to learn that in Europe 1,000 SC costs $17.63. That’s 10 Euro for 1,000 SC plus 17.5% VAT (VAT should be 15%). I mean exchange rates are a pain, but the U.S. Dollar has been weak for over 2 years now. Remember...
Follow the news of the EQ2 PvP Merge on EQ2 Forums: Farewell to Venekor Nagafen/Venekor Merge!
If you’ve been following the EQ2 Streaming Client announcement thread, you’ll know that Rothgar is very excited about this new feature coming to EQ2. Remember, this is an optional client which will allow players to jump into EQ2 in as little as 5 minutes rather than waiting for a 5-10 hour download. So far, the streaming client delivers the most basic experience. It delivers content to the screen as fast as possible, sometimes before the game is even really ready for it. As soon as there is enough data to draw a zone, the zone appears. However this may...
Race Change Potions will appear on StationCash on Thursday, October 22nd for $25. Source UPDATE: Despite contrary rumors, there will be NO alignment restriction when choosing races. You will be able to change to any race (except, naturally, the race you already are).
Here are your Hotfix Notes for October 21, 2009: GENERAL Nu’roga now has plunderable loot! Malicious Thoughts and Icicle Explosion now trigger on ranged and melee attacks. Frostburn and Mutagenic Burst now correctly modify each other’s damage. Purifying Persistence should properly modify the caster’s heals rather than the targets. LoN The Cloak of Crystal Shards, Assassin Master’s Cloak and Cloak of Runes returned from Collector Rattelis are now Heirloom. ITEMS Icy Prison now has 3 shield effectiveness to match its deflection chance. Charm of Solusek Ro once again triggers multiple times on AE casts, however its effect is now...
From EQ2 Forums: We are proud to announce the release of our new streaming client into beta! The streaming client will allow players to get into the world of Norrath faster than ever before. We’d like your help testing this new technology. Please check out the announcement in the Testing forum and let us know what you think! http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/…topic_id=461076 Some of the key points of Rothgar’s posting (please go read the whole thing if you are interested): We’ve recognized for awhile that the current size of the EverQuest II installation (about 10gb) is a pretty large barrier to entry...
From Rothgar, Nagafen and Lucan D’Lere are now online.
From Rothgar: We are going to begin unlocking servers as QA completes their test. It looks like Butcherblock will be coming up in a few minutes.
Rothgar, who has been up for how many hours now? brings us this update… The upgrade is looking good and we should have the servers up soon. The QA department is just doing their final pass. We have a 30 minute downtime scheduled tomorrow morning to roll out a hotfix for all servers. Since we had to skip our normal hotfix window this morning due to the database migration, we are doing it tomorrow instead. We’re still planning on going forward with the PvP server merge Wednesday night at midnight PST. Initially only Venekor will be brought down to...
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: All 3 servers are currently up and locked while our QA department goes through the normal testing process to confirm everything looks good after the upgrade. We are specifically testing characters and guild halls on each of the three servers that had problems copying over last time. So far those are loading fine so everything is looking great. I’m hoping that we will be ready to bring the servers up within the hour. and Glip the Gnome: Hey all! We are smoketesting the servers right now before we open them back up. Right...
The latest news… Update: The downtime for Nagafen, Butcherblock, and LDL has been extended to around 10pm PDT this evening. We apologize for the extended downtime. As a result of this, the team has already extended the Moonlight Enchantments event an extra day to make up for all the time that these servers will be missing. Thank you again for your continued patience. This makes 22 hours estimated downtime.
To compensate for the server wonkyness, server downtimes, and slow start on the event, Moonlight Enchantments is extended through 11:59pm PDT October 22nd.
Due to two mistakes in how the Server Downtime scripts were triggered last night, ALL servers must be rebooted. This will happen in a few minutes. The issue: All West Coast servers, not just Butcherblock, Lucan D’Lere, Nagafen, were set to stop allowing instances (dungeons) from being created starting at noon today. Announcement by Rothgar: I just wanted to take a moment to explain some of the broadcasts you may have seen and what is happening with the servers. Last night, prior to the maintenance for Butcherblock, Nagafen and Lucan D’lere, we scheduled the downtime which is responsible for...
The latest news on those 64-bit Upgrades: Things are still going well, however it is looking like it’s going to take a bit longer than we had originally anticipated. We’re now looking at an uptime of around 4pm PDT. If we need to adjust the time again, we will be sure to update this thread. Thank you again for your patience. Rothgar is posting updates regarding the downtime to a discussion thread on EQ2 Forums. I apologize that the server downtime was not made more clear. We discussed it a few times in other threads while the maintenance was...
Sorry for the late post on this but Butcherblock, Nagafen, and Lucan D’Lere servers are currently down to complete the maintenance which was attempted last week. Note that ALL 3 servers are being upgraded at this time. Hopefully at noonish Pacific time, we’ll be running 64-bit and see some significant improvements to zoning time, zone lag, etc. The announcements on the EQ2 Forums: Greetings all! This is to let you know that Nagafen, Butcherblock, and Lucan D’Lere will be down from Midnight PDT tonight (October 19th) until Noon PDT Tuesday October 20th, while the team migrates Nagafen (only!) [all...
After reprinting the excellent Letter to SoE written by Shianne (Spritelady), we here at EQ2Wire weren’t expecting much of a response. So today’s detailed feedback from timetravelling was a real eye-opener. As he says, there is a fine line between challenging and frustrating. Some fights in TSO are just plain annoying with the unbelievable amount of curing they require. Nobody is asking for easier fights, just ones that are not hair-pulling annoying, fights that healers are quitting over. Here’s the refreshing quote from EQ2 Forums: A good thread with some excellent feedback! From the population side, we are definitely...
If you are just about fed up with the out-of-memory crashing in EQ2 since Game Update 53 — I know I am! — you’ll be interested to know that the major causes of the issue have been identified and fixes are in the works. As soon as an updated client is available, we’ll let you know. When I start to see texture corruption, I minimize and then maximize the window every few minutes. It’s really a sad workaround. Rothgar posted on the EQ2 Forums: We’ve been taking a lot of snapshots of memory allocations and comparing this data to...
Spoilers ahead… Maze If you have been struggling to complete the Nightmarish Hedge Maze as part of Nights of the Dead, especially as a mage or pet class, you may be interested in this thread on the EQ2 Forums. Of course if you’d rather be challenged to figure it out for yourself, then don’t. 🙂 Fog Another item as part of Nights of the Dead you may not want to miss may make your head a little more Foggy than usual. Again, if you’d rather figure it out yourself, then don’t visit this forum thread on the EQ2 Forums....
One of the exciting aspects of the 2009 Nights of the Dead live event is the contested x2 Headless Horseman Knight. No less exciting (and surprising) than the loot that drops from said encounter: Hallows Gallows Bloodthirsty Choker 2.0? \aITEM 430679940 306448646:Hallow’s Gallows\/a Soulleach \aITEM -1026839664 -1911359172:[Soulleach]\/a Secret Sash \aITEM 71107619 -1772367845:[Secret Sash]\/a Brainless Belt \aITEM 1534172351 1374785267:[Brainless Belt]\/a and of course these humorous items: an oddly empty crate \aITEM -1414756000 -2003420917:[an oddly empty crate]\/a Frictionless Piece of Eight \aITEM -1495753407 -624402372:[Frictionless Piece of Eight]\/a Note that some players are reporting issues with the new Hedgemaze zone (an instance...
Nights of the Dead is now live! The event runs through November 9th. The zones were not available first thing this morning, but this issue has been addressed.
Lucan D’Lere is now back up on the previous hardware. Rothgar fills us in: Lucan up! Sorry again for the issues this morning and those of you that lost some progress during the maintenance. We learned a lot from the migration. You can’t imagine how big of a step this is behind the scenes. Well, those of you in IT probably can. We’ll let you know our plan for round 2 as soon as we have the migration process fixed. Commentary Believe me Rothgar, I do. 🙂 Having migrated FeldonCentral from shared hosting, to VPS, to a previous dedicated...
Butcherblock and Nagafen are currently unlocked. They are rolled back to their state at 5am. Any quests, progress, loot, etc. you acquired after this time has unfortunately been lost. Lucan D’Lere should be up shortly. Another attempt will be made to upgrade EQ2 servers to 64-bit platform in the next few days.