Feldon
From Ark’s Ark: As you know by now, SOE is selling its European players to a company called ProSiebenSat.1. OK, technically, they’re selling them the exclusive rights to run the games within Europe (including the UK), but that includes all the characters on the European servers, and the details of anyone with a character there. The value of the playerbase has certainly been accounted for in the deal, and so we have been passed like chattels to a new master. So who are they, these folks that we suddenly find in control? ProSiebenSat.1 is a German media conglomerate. Their...
Believe it or not, time marches on and there are still semi-weekly updates to talk about, so… MERCENARIES Mercenaries should do much less damage in PVP combat. This should have no affect PVE combat. ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Plane of War The Enraged War Boar now stands guard near the zone entry. Vallon’s Tower [Challenge] During the final Vallon Zek fight, The Vallonite Volley Commander will limit the locations he spawns at. You may be wondering what in the world those last 2 line items are about. MMO Design Suggestion: If you are designing a raid progression zone, and...
From Jef Reahard at Massively: Sony Online Entertainment has finally responded to the ProSiebenSat.1 brouhaha. Director of Global Community Relations Linda “Brasse” Carlson gave beleaguered fans a faint glimmer of hope with a forum post last night that basically said the controversial deal isn’t quite a done deal.
From Moria on the EQ2 Forums: Dear Mr Smedley. You don’t know me, personally, and I don’t know you. However, I know your work.. and I admire it. I remember Keys to Maramon on the Amiga, I remember 989 Studios and I remember Verant software. I remember your pride in the development of Everquest, and being a beta player, you often replied to our posts on the forums and discussed mechanics, objectives hopes and fears with us. I remember how much you cared about the community and the way that the company and the players together were making waves...
ProSiebenSat.1/Alaplaya has established a temporary forum and thread to discuss the ProSiebenSat.1/Alaplaya-SOE deal. Here’s the announcement from Coldor, Alaplaya’s Community Manager: Hello fellow SOE- and Alaplaya-Gamers, with this board we just created a temporarily catch basin for all your questions regarding our new partnership between SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) and ProSiebenSat1 Games. This will not be the final billboard-solution for the upcoming SOE-Games. With the following launch of DC Universe Online all SOE-Games will get their own dedicated websites with appropriate designs and a fresh billboard for you to use. We are looking into a bright gaming future here...
From the Alaplaya Forums: What we did (long time ago): When a user made a wire transfer and put a wrong or unreadable accound id on the sheet we could not put the money on the account. We had “just” the name of the user who made the wire transfer. If this name was not existing in our DB we asked the user to contact us. It was a service which was in favour and by demand of the users. As wire transfer could take quite long from some countries this list helped the users to get a status....
A player named Trevynoae with an account going back to 2004 posted about a phone call he had with ProSiebenSat.1 on the subject of this SOE deal. Normally we do not run with single-source news, but with the dearth of information coming from SOE, we’re going to post this: – There will be no Alaplaya-accounts – but there will be a region lock. We will log in via our SOE account on the alaplaya-page. (*looks confused*) – EU Players will be able to create new SOE accounts and will be able to play on the US-servers there. – EU...
Here’s another fantastic comic from CheesePirate which has been banned from the SOE forums and SOE’s Facebook page. What other proof do you need that SOE does not want our feedback?
Even if you don’t personally use Twitter, it’s worth following people in the EQ2 community to get their instant impressions on different subjects… Arkenor: Anyone with a character on a European server has just been sold to a company they’ve never heard of, without their permission. MMOYeti: SOE have once again thrown up the finger to Europeans. Our US guild member who played on euro times can not now join us in eqnext… we now have a US guildie that (if we play) eqnext he will be unable to join us. MMOYeti: @j_smedley Ah you always give me a...
If you want to know what’s been going on at the EQ2 forums, the quickest way to sum it up is this — I have been banned for the first time ever from the EQ2 forums for “excessive negativity”. ProSiebenSat.1/Alaplaya — A Company Unfit for SOE Customers Six weeks ago, an exclusive distribution deal affecting all Europe-based SOE customers was announced with a German TV media company named ProSiebenSat.1. Within minutes of the announcement, players discovered that ProSiebenSat.1’s gaming division is called Alaplaya, a company known for IP Region Locking, publishing the personal details of customers in violation of...
The news that SOE will be dividing the EQ2 community by Region, in order to secure a lucrative distribution deal with ProSiebenSat.1’s Alaplaya gaming division, has gone over like curry-flavoured ice cream. Besides the outrage at splitting up a community whose strength has been players hailing from all over the world, SOE seems to have neglected some of the more mundane technical and historical details. We’ve collected a few: U.S. players who play EQ2 during the daytime have always had the option of grouping with players on Splitpaw (UK) where it’s afternoon/evening. European players paid upwards of 30 Euros...
The ProSieben-Sony Online Entertainment distribution deal announced over six weeks ago has finally got some Frequently Asked Questions answered: ProSieben FAQ in French ProSieben FAQ in German ProSieben FAQ in English Can players still access the U.S. servers? Under the new partnership between SOE and ProSiebenSat.1 Games, European players of the above mentioned SOE games will be able to play via ProSiebenSat.1 Games’s service and will not have access to U.S. servers. However, existing EverQuest II players in Europe that have played on U.S. servers before the transition will be allowed to continue playing on those servers through their...
Steve Merghart, EQII Senior Character Artist and Chris Myers, EQII Senior Animator, show off Honvar, a dragon who will be appearing in the upcoming Game Update 63 this April. Honvar roamed the Western Wastes in the original EverQuest. Steve and Chris are hoping that someone will make a plushie or maybe show up in costume at Fan Faire as Honvar, or as he seems to have been known internally “Lumpy”. GamesRadar Exclusive: Watch as EverQuest II’s upcoming dragon is brought to life
From the EQ2 Forums: Double XP Weekend! It’s been a love-filled week and it’s also a long weekend for us, so we thought we’d share our joy with a Double XP weekend! This weekend, from Noon PST on Friday, Feb. 17th, until 11:59 pm PST on Monday, Feb. 20th, we will be running a true Double XP (+100% XP) promotion. The bonus applies to AA, tradeskill and adventure experience this weekend.
From Windstalker‘s Twitter: Prepping for a Double XP weekend and our first Rebate sale on Saturday. TWEEEEET. 😛
From Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske on the Sony Station Blog: Each month the Community Team will highlight one of SOE’s many diverse employees in a monthly feature titled, “SOE Employee Spotlight.” Each month our spotlighted employee will also appear in some fashion on the Official SOE Podcast. In our February spotlight for 2012 you will meet Carlos Mora, EverQuest II Game Designer. Take a moment to find out about what a typical day in the office is like for him, what his favorite SOE game is, and other fun tidbits. As a special bonus, we included a screenshot from his...
From new EQ2 Senior Producer “Windstalker“: This is officially making us all weep now. Believe me when I say we are (and have been) looking into this. I’m just on my way over to chat about this with the devs. It’s one of those “OooweeeeoooooOOOo” bugs that has mysterious hamster origins. I don’t want to diminish the issue in any way, but it is bizarre. — Holly “Windstalker” Longdale, Producer, EQII
From the EQ2 Forums: GENERAL This update includes a speculative fix for the issues causing some assets, like NPC quest icons, not to appear correctly. Update: Alas, this has not resolved the problem. MERCENARIES Mercenaries using the spell “Solar Flame” should no longer cause players to not be able to cast “Solar Flare” ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Fixed a bug where an NPC could “double cast” a spell. Vallon’s Tower [Challenge] During the final Vallon Zek fight, only 2 Vallonite Aces will spawn per wave of adds. Fighters will no longer be hit with Tactical Dilema during the fight. ...
From Zoltaroth on the EQ2 Forums: We have a fix for this coming in the next hotfix. It was supposed to happen this morning but it’s either going to be tomorrow or next Tuesday depending on how things work out.
A few hours ago, Amnerys was kind enough to shoot me an e-mail with much better screenshots of the EQ2Players Sneak Peak from Thursday night. As I was poking around, I had a moment of sheer curiosity and checked what I knew to be the URL for the new EQ2Players site. To my surprise, I discovered that the site was up and running! It’s February 16th, and EQ2Players is LIVE! An Unbiased Review? These days, I’m wearing at least two hats, one as the operator of an EverQuest 2 News & Commentary site (EQ2Wire), and as the designer of...
If nobody in your guild wants to run the Tower of Frozen Shadow progression quests, especially killing Tserinna in the Haunt of Syl’Tor for your access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone, you’re not alone. The Quests If you aren’t REALLY paying attention and doing things in a certain order, it is almost a guarantee that you will get gated on pretty much EVERY quest in the 3 Tower of Frozen Shadow zones. I spent one night doing all the quest updates in sequence, and we had to repeatedly tell people “Wait don’t click that item...
A fix has been found for the AoE Double Casting that many Velious raid mobs have been guilty of. This required in-depth analysis of the logs which have been generated especially to determine why these mobs were exhibiting this behavior. From Maevianiu on the EQ2 Forums: We were finally able to reproduce this and a fix for it will be in the next hotfix. Thank you for the detailed descriptions when it happened it really helped dig into the logging to find the cause. It was related to people dying and rezzing. Accepting a rez while he is casting...
This news comes to is via EQ2 ZAM who got it from the FreeRealms forums: Sony Online Entertainment will perform maintenance beginning at 6:00 AM Pacific on February 16, 2012. This will impact the following services: Account management will be unavailable starting at 6:00 AM to approximately 7:00 AM Pacific. Commerce transactions, including purchases on our websites and in-game marketplaces will be unavailable between 6:00 AM to approximately 7:00 AM Pacific. Forums will be read-only starting at 6:00 AM to approximately 7:00 AM Pacific. Login for our games will be affected from 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM Pacific (players already...