Feldon
Battlegrounds For Levels 30-79 We’ve gotten some more details on the format that Battlegrounds from levels 30-79 will take from timetravelling: After Game Update 56 the Battlegrounds tiers will be: 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, and 90 Players in each tier will be auto-mentored down to the lowest common level (30, 40, 50, etc.). Players in each tier will also have armor sets and accessories available for purchase from the existing PvP Merchants in the major cities. The BG ‘starter’ sets will be the already-existing Mastercrafted armor sets (from levels 30 -> 70). Each has had a small...
battlegrounds
Game Update 56 is coming soon to the Test and Test Copy servers, and in addition to the expected New Halas starting zone and city, which will have 2, 4, and 6 room housing as well as Tier 1 Guild Halls (unknown if it will be the same or different artwork), and in addition to a new raid zone, some substantial changes are happening to Battlegrounds and PvP combat in general. Battlegrounds in particular are being expanded from level 80-90 to level 30-90. timetravelling gave this Battlegrounds preview: Brand new 1st Campaign armor sets and accessories Many of the...
Today’s Hotfix include some anticipated tweaks to Itemization and Battlegrounds, such as resists and fixes to adornments. It also includes a cutback in the amount of damage put out by the 3-headed dog in The Vigilant: Final Destruction x2 raid zone. Even during the Beta, this particular mob was completely out of progression for the difficulty of the zone, gear players are expected to have at this point in the expansion, and intended audience of the zone. The complete April 7, 2010 Patch Notes after the jump:
During the Sentinel’s Fate beta, many of us were surprised at just how powerful the armor and jewelry available from participating in Battlegrounds were. Many of us warned SOE during beta that having Battlegrounds gear that’s better than TSO raid jewelry would make Battlegrounds an expected/required part of progression for guilds. Battlegrounds gear launched with a new stat — Toughness — which is a type of Critical Mitigation that only works in Battlegrounds. Later, the most powerful effects on Battlegrounds gear (i.e. +10% Base Damage) became PvP-only. With the March 30th Update, the Resists and Physical Mitigation on the...
As you all know, this is “season 1” of Battlegrounds. Specifically, that the EQ2 team did not get the load testing they wanted to on Test, and so now this test is going on on live servers. But as much as we have gotten reassurances that Battlegrounds are having no significant impact on live servers, this seems to be exactly what is happening. We’ve heard reports of servers rebooting, inability to open instances, and Battlegrounds have been down several days a week for adjustments, tweaking, maintenance, etc. Hopefully this will all be worth it, but Rothgar did shed some...
Rothgar has advised on the EQ2 Forums, due to the extreme database loads continuing to be caused by Battlegrounds, the EQ2 team will be throttling back the number of concurrent Battlegrounds sessions that can be running at once.
Mages have been rather effective in Battlegrounds and PvP combat of late. Moreso than perhaps was intended. Timetravelling has laid out the details of the cause of this issue, what he intends to do about it, and how it will be tested in this EQ2 Forums thread. We’ve been digging through the code to track down the inconsistencies we’ve been seeing in spell resists and spell avoidance. We have some changes incoming that I’d like to describe briefly for y’all. Based on the old formulas, extremely high resists (if capped) would give players a 75% chance to avoid a...
EQ2 servers will come down for a Hotfix on Thursday, March 11th, 2010. This hotfix takes place at 6am PST for U.S. servers and 5am GMT on March 12th for Runnyeye and Splitpaw. After the Hotfix notes, you’ll find some good news about the Guard levels in Qeynos, Freeport, and Kelethin.
As we have reported, players have been abusing an exploit which allowed them to login to Battlegrounds and consume/transmute/craft items and then get those items back upon being returned to their home servers. SOE have stepped up and shown they take this sort of thing seriously with the following announcement from Brenlo: This weekend an exploit was found on the Battlegrounds server which allowed players to transmute items, and have those items returned when leaving the Battlegrounds. This occured due to a change we made in the code to speed up the return process. While we understand that this...
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: Customer Service will be investigating reports of players making use of a duping exploit. If you’ve been found using this exploit, your character may be rolled back several days. You should always be aware that using an exploit can result in suspension or bannings regardless of what the exploit is. If you’ve stumbled across something on your own or heard of an exploit from a friend, your best bet is to petition CS about it right away and cease that behavior.
We have gone ahead and pulled an article we had posted about the possibility of transferring from a PvP to PvE server by way of using a Server Transfer Token while logged into Battlegrounds. We have not been able to substantiate reports that players had been able to perform such a transfer.
We have pulled this story until we can get further confirmation and corroboration. It seems that in the avalanche of myriad mysterious hotfixes with no hotfix notes on Thursday and Friday may have introduced some unintended consequences regarding Battlegrounds which were discovered over the weekend. It seems that Server Transfer Tokens may have been enabled on Battlegrounds servers. We already reported on the item duplication exploit, namely transmuting or consuming items on BG and then getting the items back when you are returned to your own server. But we have subsequently learned that players have successfully transferred from PvP...
Battlegrounds are currently closed due to a Transmuting exploit which has allowed players to duplicate items. In short, items which you transmuted or scribed on Battlegrounds were returned to you upon exiting Battlegrounds.
Here are some end-of-week news items which I’ve noticed on the EQ2 forums that readers may find useful… Scale of Flame Players have been having trouble advancing/completing the quest Scale of Flame. In response, Gninja has responded: I found the issue causing the spirit to not spawn and have corrected it. You should see it come to live server early next week with our next build. Breaking Combat on PvP/Battlegrounds Rothgar has made some further adjustments in how combat is broken on PvP/Battlegrounds. It has been tweaked so that you must be at least 1000m from the other player...
Players have been reporting an issue with being able to escape combat *very* quickly on both PvP servers and Battlegrounds, and then being able to join a Battlegrounds match while seemingly still in PvP combat (on Nagafen). After some discussion and diagnosis in this thread, Rothgar posted the backstory on the issue and presented a change that will be made to address the issue: Prior to battlegrounds the only way you got out of combat was for your hate to degrade over time. So the more hate you built with someone, the longer you’d stay in combat. When battleground...
From Kiara on the EQ2 Forums at 11:40am PST: The BG’s should be reopening again shortly. Please make sure to post in the exiting issue threads in the BG’s forum should you continue to encounter problems. We’ll be monitoring them on our end as well.
When you complete a Battlegrounds match, your character is whisked away back to your home server. Some players have been curious if a Battlegrounds Hub had been considered. This would be a lobby area where players can stay put on the Battlegrounds server and immediately jump into another battle if they wish. The issues here are that Battlegrounds servers have many many features turned off including global and guild chat. Adding a Battlegrounds lobby would require additional coding work. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: We talked about this idea early on in battlegrounds development but our thoughts were...
Battlegrounds vs. Oasis Battlegrounds were locked this afternoon/evening due to significant lag and zone time issues. The servers were also rebooted. However the biggest issue is that Oasis is almost unplayable for some players. This quote from the EQ2 Forums: We’re aware of the problems facing the Oasis server right now and several people are working on it. It will be addressed more fully tomorrow when everyone is back in the office and I’m sure we’ll have more information then. There is an active thread on the Oasis server forum. Character Corruption A few players are reporting sporadic issues with losing...
From Rothgar on EQ2 Forums: Customer Service has made these petitions their highest priority and they are restoring players as fast as they can. In the meantime, Battlegrounds is working fine now. It only took a few minutes this morning to bring them down after the problem, fix the configs and bring them back up. CS is also manually restoring your XP and AA’s rather than doing a rollback of your character. So you should be safe to continue playing while you wait for them to answer your petition.
As of 12:40pm PST From Kiara: EU servers are now up. The BG’s have not been enabled for any of the international servers, due to the database issue. We’ll let you know when they will be available. Thank you for your patience today, we appreciate it.
To deal with the AA/Level loss from players who jumped into Battlegrounds, we’ve heard from Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: There will be no server-wide rollback. This problem affected about 200 users and rolling each back individually will be much less intrusive than taking down every world and rolling back all of their databases. Please be sure to petition if you lost AA or XP due to battlegrounds.
Minutes after Battlegrounds went live on U.S. servers we are already hearing reports from players of numerous problems when their characters reach the Battlegrounds servers and further problems upon returning to their home servers. Reports include: Alternate Advancement (AA) points are being reset to 200 points. Any percentage gain over your level (for example level 88 with 90% to level 89) is lost. AA trees are completely reset. Macros that use AA-derived spells do not work on Battlegrounds. At this point, we are advising players to NOT touch Battlegrounds until they are fixed.
US Servers are unlocked and Battlegrounds are now live. EU Servers still have approximately 1 hour of downtime remaining. For more info on Battlegrounds: EQ2Wire Battlegrounds Strategy Guide and Battlegrounds @ EQ2Players
As we reach 5 hours of downtime, Brenlo has tweeted that servers are “Minutes…” away from being back up.
According to Brenlo on his Twitter, work continues on getting Battlegrounds up today. This is resulting in a longer than expected downtime. Maintenance is running a little long. We are working on some network settings for the Battlegrounds. UPDATE: We are restarting the servers and expect to have everything up and running about 10am PST.