Feldon
Customer service Eliminated outsourced India support Focus on strengths of CS employees in San Diego Folks who actually play the game Better answers than ‘working as intended’ replies NUGIT team established to fight plat sellers 275,000 plat sellers banned, not just trial accounts
Community address starting now. Brenlo getting the crowd riled up for Smedley. SoE game montage.
Parsing Gravitas, Cures, CoB, etc. Will consider it. Determining where guild rally flag is located? Some coming has already been done for this. Auto mentoring – hail an npc and mentor to a level in 5 level increments. Old quest completion missions. Probably not on PvP. Daily double shard zone in Welcome window or MOTD? Possible. Achievements (like CoH or Xbox Live) like 500 kills, 20 heritage quests, etc. In a new tab in the quest window. Current tier upgrades are coming for bone clasped gridle. Not so much for the bloodthirsty choker. 🙂 Streamling buffing for classes. Buffing...
Some seriously funny, cool, and creative new mob designs and revamped appearances to some existing mobs. More interesting animations. * fighting pandas * displacer beasts * two headed giants * stalagmites * scarecrows Random illusion appearances driving you crazy? Looking at a possibly a Magic Mirror house item to save illusion setups. Npcs only have about 50 animations. Players have about 1,000 animations. Kelethin houses will get a transparent window. Both Kelethin and Neriak houses will have more rooms. Male ratongas with whiskers but without glasses? We’ll look into it. Illusion picker UI to switch illusions in development. Devs...
The comprehensive writeups on Fan Faire and the events and photos are always worth a read if you couldn’t make it. I admit I’m all about the details and the expansion news. I don’t try to cover the whole event as others do that better than I can… One writeup I want to mention is CompleteHeal. Calthine (great to meet her of course!) has a writeup at Zam as well. I took some pics of the event last night, some general Fan Faire pics, and of course lots of pics from the EQ2Flames gathering last night. Hope to get them up...
An interesting day indeed, talking about the game. As much as people may doubt it, most of the Devs really do listen and want folks to play the game. It would pretty dumb if they didn’t. They know the mistakes of Kunark, and the issues (to a lesser extent) in TSO. Oh and talking to Pantz, Crabbok, Atan, and more isn’t too shabby either. Record turnout for the eq2flames mashup. WTF are you Gage? 😛
A line of folks stretching out into the casino, ready to head into the main Fan Faire hall. Then at 8, the welcome by Brenlo, who couldn’t resist havimng a little fun, using every opportunity to hawk the game he is now Exec Producer for — EQ2. Prizes included Turtle Beach headsets, 3d display goggles, and PNY 8800gts video cards. Well, if you could do an emote (you’d think folks would practice by now ;)).
Getting ready to board the sorriest excuse for an airline around. First airline I’ve ever dealt with that cannot offer an exit row to a 6’9″ passenger online, at the ticket counter, at the gate, and when the gate rep made a rude comment about my height not being his fault, I notified customer service. Maybe there is some small satisfaction in getting a cocky employee of the most customer-hostile airline in trouble. But as I stand in a completely backed up jetway, because three gate attendants haven’t learned the fine art of staging an aircraft boarding, I realize...
GENERAL The Order of Rime illusion no longer has a minimum level for use. Fang the direbear has received some additional defensive bonuses. The Eggstractor should now only work on its intended target (which is, of course, eggs). There is a new EQ2VoiceService.exe from Vivox that should resolve some crash issues that players were experiencing. ACHIEVEMENTS Coercer Coercive Healing will once again apply properly to reactive heals. KURN’S TOWER A cinematic event when slaying Ione (with a quest requirement) has been turned on. Fear Kraytoc’s wrath! MUNZOK’S MATERIAL BASTION The void sapper adds associated with Ozyk in Munzok’s Material...
Moonlight Enchantments is a new recurring World Event in the forests of Norrath which will only be available the 20th of every month. I apologize for not getting this information up before June 20th, but it should be available for the 20th of every month hereafter. This event is now known as Moonlight Enchantments (formerly known as the Enchanted Grottos of Norrath). Essentially, there is a mushroom ring in each of the forests of Norrath which can be entered once per month (on the 20th) to visit five unique hidden instances. Each has purple shinies and quests to be...
If your guild has been experiencing heavy lag in Palace of the Ancient One and perhaps noticed that you are seeing combat logs from another guild that is in their own instance ‘leaking’ into your combat logs for this zone, you’re not alone. There is an amusing screen snapshot that shows partial combat logs that demonstrate this ‘cross-talk’. It seems likely this is the cause of some of the lag in this zone. There is also another issue with regards to adds continuously spawning, to the point of hundreds of adds appearing if the zone bugs out. It’s being...
EMPEROR’S ATHENAEUM The final bosses no longer ambush players. Players should get experience from each location discovery within the zone, instead of just the first. Drago’s Boar’s Eruption does less damage. Added a clue to help decipher the floor-set vault lock. Master of the Embalmers summons adds much less frequently. The Curator teleports less frequently. KURN’S TOWER Ilenee’s Betrayal and Despair no longer heal after they teleport and no longer can teleport to the same room. VOICE CHAT EQ2VoiceService.exe should now run on Windows 2000. Players should no longer show as talking intermittently when their push-to-talk key is not...
GENERAL Players experiencing problems customizing Wood Elf males should no longer have any issues. Persistent instances should no longer boot players out when they were not committed to the previous instance. EMPEROR’S ATHENAEUM The final bosses should no longer despawn if players died next to their spawn locations.
Any software update is going to bring bugs. Laryngitis I just wish SoE hadn’t tried to completely revamp the voice system on the same day as all this new content was added. Last night we spent most of time just fiddling around with voice, trying to get it clear and stable. Mostly it was choppy, stuttery, laggy, and folks had a tough time joining channels. We also had to inform a few folks running Windows Firewall that they would need to allow Eq2VoiceService.exe. This service was spun off from the EQ2 client to allow voice chat outside the game...
From Curse.com. Through a bit of internet sleuthing we’ve discovered that recently, Sony Online Entertainment decided to trademark two new titles, one each for EverQuest and EverQuest II. The trademarks in question took place on June 10th, 2009 and are EverQuest Underfoot, and EverQuest II Sentinel’s Fate. While nothing is announced yet, there’s a good chance these two titles are the names of each game’s respective expansions. So why would SOE do this? Well, they have the annual SOE Fanfaire coming up in a week, in which they’ll no doubt continue their recent tradition of announcing expansions for their...
A week without news, some of you might be getting jittery. 🙂 GU52 is still on Test, getting nipped, tucked, and tested out. I believe they are on track to get it onto live servers perhaps as early as June 16th (my estimate, arrived using my advanced degree in EQ2ology). I know they really wanted it to be on Live before Fan Faire. I’ve already documented the broad strokes of Gu52 in my earlier posts. If you haven’t seen a preview of player made Books, upgraded Hex Dolls and Ranged Weapons, or new furniture coming to EQ2, check out...
As you might be aware, EQ2 Automated Server Transfers have been down for over a year now. As a result, server transfers are something which must be done manually by a customer service rep. Server transfers have cost $50 per character, which makes it absurdly expensive to transfer all of your characters from one server to another. Hopefully good news on this front is that the EQ2 Automated Server Transfers are coming back, but rather than through the Station Store, they will be triggered in-game through Station Marketplace (StationCash). Check out the Coming Soon thread at the EQ2 forums....
One of the biggest complaints about the otherwise fantastic Ward of Elements x2 raid zone is that by upgrading a few pieces of armor to T3, fighters and mages lost huge 5-piece bonuses from their T2 armor. An undocumented fix in GU52 is that these bonuses are now distributed over the set bonuses in such a way that 3 pieces of T2 and 3 pieces of T3 will yield a similar bonus to having 5 pieces of T2. This is fantastic news, as it seemed this would be a long-term fix based on the Zam devchat. Glad they could...
For your viewing pleasure if you have not yet been able to make it over to the Test Servers, look what washed up on the northern shores of Fens of Nathsar not 500 yards from our old friend the Tangrin… It is unexpected to see humans, halflings, giants, and ratonga working so closely together. What could their mission be? Note also that this is not just a temporary event, but that it will persist into the next expansion. Whether we should read further into that is a question that I just don’t have enough information to know the answer...
That’s a lot of notes to read, so I will distill some of the key points. Procs If you read Bruce Ferguson’s parting comments, and you generate a good potion of your DPS from gear with effects like Goblin Bane, Void Bane, or Vampire Bane, or if you are an Assassin wearing Soul Lancer armor, you might want to read the relevant section again: We’ve discovered that with the items that we released with The Shadow Odyssey, that proc additional damage, the amount of damage being caused has grown considerably, and we need to adjust it. So, in the...
Here are the notes for GU52 which has now appeared on Test. It is unknown exactly when these changes will go live. FEATURED Charasis: Emperor’s Athenaeum The Order of Rime has managed to re-open this ancient vault of Venril Sathir’s. What secrets lie within? What terrible guardians? Venture in with a single group of adventurers to find out what awaits! Kunark Overland Quests A mysterious army has appeared upon the shores of Kunark and begun pillaging the land and slaughtering those that oppose them. Citizens of Dreg’s Landing in Kylong Plains, Riliss in Fens of Nathsar, the City of...
We’re hearing from EQ2’s new Senior Producer Brenlo that GU52 (Kurn’s Tower BTV, Kurn’s Tower x2, and CEA) will not hit Test and Test Copy until at least Tuesday, May 26th. It is unknown if this will push back the internal estimates of seeing GU52 on Live ‘several weeks’ before Fan Faire.
Check out this preview at EQ2Players which includes additional photos and gives more info on the difficulty of Kurn’s Tower: Breaching the Void (the group zone).