Feldon
We are thrilled to announce the introduction of Collections support to EQ2U! Players may now peruse over 850 shiny Collections by accessing the feature from our Search menu.
At the risk of dwelling on bad news, we now have some solid verifiable numbers on last month’s layoffs at Daybreak Games. This news is also up on MassivelyOP. Some excerpts from the San Diego Union-Tribune article: The new owners of the former Sony Online Entertainment video game studio have laid off 140 workers from its San Diego operation. New York investment firm Columbus Nova acquired Sony Online Entertainment – the maker of EverQuest, PlanetSide 2 and other multiplayer online computer games – in early February for an undisclosed price. The studio was renamed Daybreak Game Co. and now operates as...
From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale, here is an update about instability and lag spikes on the EQ2 game servers over the last few weeks: Howdy Norrathians, We are digging into the server performance issues that you are reporting which devs are also seeing during play times. We will be adding new logs in addition to ones we are reviewing now to track some specific server issues based on your feedback. (We’re kinda digging into everything, really.) This is a high priority. Holly “Windstalker” Longdale Executive Producer, EQ & EQ2
The EverQuest II forums have undergone streamlining today, with the archiving of the following forums: Fan Site News and Announcements History and Lore Guides & Player Events Roleplaying PVP & Battlegrounds Off-Topic The PvP & Battlegrounds forums going away is not a surprise, as EQ2 lost our last dedicated PvP developer with the August 2013 layoffs. Although I’ll receive much rage and hate for saying it, I believe that at this point, further PvP/Battlegrounds development is an unaffordable luxury. The EQ2 team is down from 60 staff in the Kunark days to a quarter of that now and it’s just...
NOTE: EU servers do not seem to have had the event turned on, possibly due to emergency maintenance on Valor and Splitpaw servers yesterday afternoon. From the EQ2 Forums: Celebrate Brewday with both new and familiar holiday themed rewards, crafts, and adventures. Brewday 2015 starts on Thursday, March 5 at 12:01AM Pacific and runs until Monday, March 16, 2015 at 11:59PM Pacific. New Features for Brewday 2015! Seven New Merchant Items sold by Balin Copperfoot in Bar of Brell
UPDATE: We’ve received notification from a few players in-game that this issue has been resolved.
In August 2013, SOE made some drastic layoffs to try to manage costs. The game teams undoubtedly took a hit, but by far the deepest cuts were felt in the Customer Service and Quality Assurance divisions. As I walked past the empty desks when I visited SOE last summer, it confirmed that these teams were hard hit. Still, the quality of Customer Service from SOE has remained almost universally high over the last 18 months, with staff going above-and-beyond to restore hacked characters, update broken quests and content, restore items which have been accidentally lost or destroyed, as well as...
NOTE: No news specific to EverQuest II in this article… After trying to launch their own RPG on Kickstarter, Storybricks evolved into a middleware/tools developer for game studios such as Sony Online Entertainment. Chief among those tools was a powerful user-generated content system that would allow players to build dungeons, populate enemies, and then give those enemies behaviors, desires, and drives that would make a completely dynamic simulation that would be different every time. For EverQuest Next, Dave Georgeson and John Smedley each talked about how expensive content design for MMORPGs is and how no company, no matter how...
From Roshen on the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 7:00AM PST for an update. Estimated downtime is one hour. There will be extended maintenance for European servers. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at approximately 9:00PM PST for an update. (Approx. 5:00AM London Time on February 27, 2015). Estimated downtime is 4 hours. Alle deutschsprachigen Server werden um 6:00 CET am 04.03.2015 zwecks einer Serveraktualisierung heruntergefahren. Die vorgesehene Stillstandszeit wird etwa 4 Stunde(n) betragen. Le serveur de langue française sera...
If you spent this weekend wondering whether you were either A) losing your mind or B) going blind from grinding all those Far Seas Ferrin and FSSD Tokens, you’re not alone. I personally experienced a bizarre bug affecting font sizes, specifically an issue where almost all the in-game fonts began to shrink by about 40%. On a 1920×1080 display, EQ2’s fonts are already a little on the smallish side. With this bug, attempting to read quest journal text had me on the phone to my ophthalmologist. Fortunately, after discussion with other players in the Antonia_Bayle.Homeshow channel and through a little bit of testing, I think...
And here’s the official announcement as of 11:00am PST: Hey players! Do you like collecting various types of Norrathian… like Far Seas Ferrin? Well, then you’re in luck because until11:59PM PST on Sunday, March 1, 2015 you’ll earn DOUBLE alternative currency. Note: This is in addition to the bonuses to alternative currency that All Access members get every day when they play EverQuest 2. That means that All Access members will get double DOUBLE tokens during this promotion. This is a great opportunity to stock up on [eq2u]Far Seas Ferrin[/eq2u] or any other alternative currency you’ve been collecting in-game. We’re excited to...
We’re waiting for an official announcement, but we know from a forum post by EQ2 Lead Designer Kander that this weekend will be a Double Currency weekend to make up for the AoM Mission Givers going absent this week. We’ve confirmed in-game that the event is currently running a wee bit early! As of now, all players will receive double the normal amount of currency for completing quests or doing in-game content that returns a token or currency of some kind. And yes this stacks with the Double Currency that All Access subscribers already receive, so any quest that rewards...
From Gninja on the EQ2 Forums: Mission givers have returned in AoM zones. Enjoy! Further clarification from Kander: Mission givers are back up. We will be running a double Ferrin weekend this weekend for all. Sorry guys, the back end stuff we have been doing for the DB changes coming, messed with the OS time and caused a few problems. We are glad we caught it quickly too. Also from Holly “Windstalker” Longdale’s twitter yesterday, we might see a Double Ferrin event this weekend! Still looking at some funk with the missions givers for #eq2. We're planning a Double...
We’re still dead in the water as far as Altar of Malice daily and weekly missions for Overland, Solo, Adv Solo, Heroic, Event Heroic, and Raid content, however there are some other updates happening tomorrow which will be great when we get our NPCs back. Update from Gninja last night: This update does include the fix to the missions but they will not immediately be turned on after the servers come back up. The mission givers should return shortly after all the servers are back up and we have double checked them on live servers. From the EQ2 Forums:...
From the EQ2 Forums: US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at approximately 4:00AM PST for an update. Estimated downtime is one hour. Both the Antonia Bayle and Oasis servers will be unavailable for approximately four hours for additional maintenance. EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at approximately 9:00PM PST for an update. (Approx. 5:00AM London Time on February 27, 2015). Estimated downtime is 1 hour. Alle deutschsprachigen Server werden um 6:00 CET am 27.02.2015 zwecks einer Serveraktualisierung heruntergefahren. Die vorgesehene Stillstandszeit wird etwa 1...
We are anxiously awaiting a fix and a return of the Altar of Malice mission givers. Until that time, it is not possible to pickup Solo, Adv Solo, Heroic, Event Heroic, Contested, or Raid missions on either a Daily or Weekly basis, not to mention timed overland Solo Missions. A fix seems unlikely today, but we’ll keep hanging on until the solution is found and applied. Here’s Gninja with a couple of updates to say the team are working on it: It is getting fixed and it is getting fixed right. We would rather get it right the first...
NOTE: No EQ2-specific news/commentary in this article. Kotaku has an interesting article from Anthony Burch who used to write for Destructoid and then at Gearbox Software. He reflects on the perception of game design from the outside vs. the reality of being on the inside and why there is such a gulf between the two. I know as I’ve learned more about game development and the maddening complexity of it, I’ve tried to dial back my own vitriol to something a bit more reasonable. Before I joined Gearbox Software, I worked at Destructoid as a features editor. I worked there from 2006...
Out of an abundance of caution, all Altar of Malice mission quest givers have been despawned on all EQ2 servers. This started earlier this evening with Skrit, the Tradeskill daily mission giver but is now affecting all mission givers of all gameplay styles. Update: The in-game MOTD has been updated with this message: A bug has caused an issue with mission givers in Altar of Malice. All mission givers have been removed from the game. We will have them back as soon as possible. More as we have it…
Remember last July when SOE didn’t pay a domain registration bill? It was funny for a few minutes, but then we put together an article helping people Manually Map their DNS to access SOE Games, Websites, and Forums. When we posted this article, we asked everyone to PLEASE REVERT THE CHANGES AFTER 3-4 DAYS. Alas, people didn’t do that and have been experiencing trouble connecting to Daybreak servers lately. If you made changes to your Hosts file last July, please follow these instructions: Open your c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ folder. Drag the “hosts” file to your desktop. Open the “hosts” file with Notepad, and...
Login Maintenance Continues; Don’t Get Too Excited About Double White Adorn Slots on New Heroic Gear
Login Maintenance Continues; Don’t Get Too Excited About Double White Adorn Slots on New Heroic Gear
First up, this morning’s login server maintenance just passed hour four of its scheduled three hour window. The latest tweet indicates that there is no new ETA predicted… The general maintenance impacting logins is still in process. We do not have a new ETA for completion. Thanks for your patience. — EverQuest II (@everquestii) February 24, 2015 Also, those fancy new weapons we got with today’s update seem to have a few surprises. First, at least two of the spell autoattack Wand items lost their green stats somewhere along the way. Second, the new weapons have two white adornment...
If you’ve done the Shattered Seas signature quest line on a character or two and just don’t see yourself repeating it again, but yet you really want the ability to pop off adornments on your alt characters with the [eq2u]Adornment Reclamation[/eq2u] spell, you’re in luck. Three months after the launch of the Altar of Malice expansion, it’s now possible for a character who has completed the Shattered Seas signature questline (you must have earned the related achievement) to buy an HEIRLOOM version of this spell for their alts from the Ferrin Merchant in the tower near the Phantom Seas...
Today’s EQ2 Update Notes were posted yesterday afternoon, however a specific downtime notice for EQ2 was never provided. Meanwhile, a Daybreak-wide three hour maintenance notice was posted for 7-10am PST. Apparently we were assuming when we figured that US-based EQ2 servers would go down during the same time window as the Daybreak-wide maintenance. It’s possible that if you remain logged into EQ2 before 7:00am PST, you can stay logged in during the maintenance. PST: US-based EQ2 servers downtime — 4:00 ~ 5:25am Daybreak-wide login/account maintenance — 7:00 ~ 10:00am 10:30am ? EST: US-based EQ2 servers downtime — 7:00 ~...
From the EQ2 Forums: Attention players: we will perform a general maintenance beginning at 7:00AM Pacific* on Tuesday, February 24th. The current estimated downtime for this maintenance is up to three hours. This maintenance may impact the following Daybreak services across all games: Commerce functions, including purchases, for all games Game logins Web and forum logins for all Daybreak sites, including account creation Time Zone Conversions PST: 7:00am ~ 10:00am EST: 10:00am ~ 1:00pm GMT: 15:00 ~ 18:00 CET: 16:00 ~ 19:00 and from the EQ2 Forums: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION General Altar of Malice [Heroic] Dungeons now have a chance...
EQ2 Senior Designer Kaitheel has posted an update explaining today’s delayed start to the Moonlight Enchantments event: Unrest was not the only server affected. It turns out that the server maintenance that occurred this week for Butcherblock, Everfrost, Freeport, Nagafen, and Unrest removed all scheduled activations and deactivations. The affected servers have had the following events rescheduled: Erollisi Day now concludes on 2/20/15 at 11:59pm Pac. Moonlight Enchantments began on 2/20/15 at 9:45am and will last through 2/22/15 at 11:59pm Pac.