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 amount of toughness added to its existing stats.

In other words, if you don’t already have Mastercrafted armor from levels 30-79, and want to do Battlegrounds, it’s recommended that you commission or pick up a set.

The Warfields of Antonica and Commonlands

Meanwhile we have gotten some clarification from Olihin on Antonica and Commonlands becoming PvP zones on Open PvP servers (currently Nagafen).

Warfields are restricted to PvP servers.

The writs are being changed to 6 kills for 5 tokens across all levels. A single currency regardless of the level will be used.

The new coin will be the Discord Token and I have set up a merchant to exchange the tokens for you in increments of 5 or 100. I know some will be able to gear up more of their characters quickly, but that is the point. I want you to be able to play on your account at whatever level you want and either save or spend your token when you want.

and from timetravelling:

[Warfields] is a new event that will be on PvP servers only that will give players the opportunity to fight for control of Antonica or the Commonlands.

This is clearly an effort to try to move at least some of the PvP community away from the “Token Vending Machine” that is currently the Kunark quest hub of Teren’s Grasp. Most players bent on earning Tokens live there 24/7.

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 accessories are based upon the currently BG-disabled RoK PvP accessories. Those adornments have had their effects adjusted and will be re-enabled for battlegrounds!
• Each armor piece will have a pvp-only Blue adornment slot!
• As such, we’ll all be introducing 20+ new Blue adornments!
• Battlegrounds at levels 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 are being activated!
• Battleground armor sets and accessories will be on sale at each of those tiers
• Brand new open-pvp server battles for control of Antonica and Commonlands!

• Additionally, we’ve internally removed the ~15% damage reduction applied to all spells in pvp combat. I’d like to once again ask for y’all to copy over to test-copy and give us feedback on the change.

Although the line item about battle for control of Antonica and Commonlands was posted in the Battlegrounds forum, it is believed that this is a PvP-server only feature.

Olihin followed up with this preview specific to the PvP (Nagafen) server:

• Level locking enabled starting at level 30.
• Removal of level restrictions for Alternate Advancement distribution.*
• 100% achievement bar settings prior to max level.
• Single Currency for Open PVP, the Discord Token.
• Warfields! Antonica and Commonlands…
• Much more!

When asked whether the change to Alternate Advancement level restrictions meant that PvP players could spend all 250 points at any level, Olihin responded with:

It’ll allow your AA expenditures on a PvP server to match those of a PvE server instead of the current restrictions.

PvP servers currently restrict the number of AA points which can be spent based on your level, beyond those restrictions of the PvE servers.

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 Indomitable Jewelry set now only apply to PvP combat.

So, it seems we have eventually arrived at the goal put forth by players — make Battlegrounds gear only desirable for PvP and Battlegrounds. Just not before players spent dozens of hours earning hundreds of tokens in Battlegrounds. A conspiracy theorist could make the case that Battlegrounds armor launched with powerful effects to encourage players to come back and play the content, and then the items nerfed a month later to mitigate their effect on PvE gameplay.

Join the Discussion/Rant/Bitching

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 light on part of the problems that Battlegrounds is causing:

The issue isn’t really that type of character data, it’s more the large amount of inventory. EQII has more inventory slots available to a charater than any other MMO I’ve ever seen. Combine that with your bank, house vault, guild bank, harvest depot and shared bank and its just an immense amount of data. Much of this inventory does not need to go back and forth with you, like your bank and house vault, and that’s what we are working on fixing now. Unfortunately even just your inventory slots represent a large amount of data and that stuff does need to go for us to have the flexibility to give quests that use/consume items, reward items, etc.

We have several changes we’re working on to improve performance across the board as well as reduce the data that moves between worlds. We also have more DB upgrades on the way for servers that haven’t gotten them yet.

It’s clear to me that Battlegrounds started out as an extension of the Character Transfer Service. In essence, your character is completely copied to the Battlegrounds server, and then after the match, you are copied back to your home server. But a lot of redundant data is being carried back and forth.

and further from Rothgar:

Battlegrounds are still having a pretty big impact on DB performance especially during primetime and on weekends. We’ve decided to throttle back the number of BG matches that can run concurrently until we can get some additional optimizations made. This should resolve the issues with a little longer queue times instead of us needing to take them down altogether.

It is no secret that Customer Service have been swamped with issues of stuck characters, duplicate characters, etc. as a result of Battlegrounds. We continue to track these issues…

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 spell AND a 75% reduction in the damage when it landed.

At level 70+, spell avoidance chance was being multipled by 0.6 (reducing your overall chance to avoid by 40%) and spell resists were being multiplied by 0.65 (reducing the damage reduction applied to spell damage by 35%). This has been contributing to the … ah … very high combat effectiveness of spell-damage based classes. We have removed all of these mults internally.

Once internal testing has been completed, we plan on pushing these changes to Test-copy (and temporarily flagging it as PvP). Once that happens, we’ll update the thread here and ask for y’all to jump over there and help us test the crap out of the changes. We’ll leave it up there for at least a week or two to give time for balance tweaks and such before considering a push to Live.

Our intention is *not* to make any classes unbeatable or make others unable to kill opponents.

However, spell resistances and high STA should be contributing to survival as expected instead of at a greatly reduced effectiveness.

Your feedback is encouraged, and hopefully lots of people will test these changes. In case you missed it, for PvP and Battlegrounds purposes, Spell Resists are now calculated using Stamina (STA), a stat that all classes have some of, and can gain more of, rather than Wisdom (WIS), which due to Stat Consolidation, is now much harder for certain classes to get in any quantity.

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 was a bug of our creation, some players chose to take advantage of it, knowing it was not meant to work in that fashion.

Many players took advantage of the bug, to varying degrees.  Some of our community however went to great lengths to abuse the bug.  For those accounts that abused this obvious bug, we have taken action.  Some have been removed from the game altogether, while others are losing all of the items on their characters.  All will face at least some time removed from the game as we sort through the various logs and track down their ill-gained platinum and items.

While we hate to remove anyone from our community, our family, there are times that for the good of the servers, the in-game economy and the community we do find ourselves forced to take action.  Unfortunately, this was one such occasion.

Thanks all for being a part of Norrath.

This action is not just limited to Transmuters:

We tracked spells, transmutations, abuse of Mender Bots, etc. We are taking action against all who reached a specific threshhold of abuse.

The most egregious offenders, who I have learned made thousands of plat off of this exploit, will find themselves suspended from the game for several days or possibly a longer ban.

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 to PvE servers by claiming Server Transfer Tokens while logged into Battlegrounds servers.

I guess where there’s a will (or a determined enough player), a way will be found. 😉

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 as well as a timer based on activity.

Raid Mob Damage Calculations

There has been some wonkiness, to say the least, in how raid mobs have been putting out damage. Players have noticed these issues and been reporting in this thread on the subject. Rothgar has provided an update:

Yesterday’s patch fixed a bug that was causing many of a mob’s special abilities to not be applied correctly. So technically the code is working as it should be now and all buffs are being applied to the mob. However, this bug has only been in since the first hotfix after the 24th of February. So the mobs should be the same as they were on release, but unfortunately no one was probably raiding them that much during the first week or the people that did expected them to hit this hard.

I’ve spoken with our raid designer and he’s going to take a look at the mobs on a case-by-case basis and determine what needs to be changed. We don’t have any ETA’s on changes yet, but please continue to post your feedback on the ones that you think are way too hard.

Keep in mind we’re only a few weeks into the expansion and that mobs SHOULD be pretty tough until people get caught up on gear, levels and AA’s.

Battlegrounds Cloaks for Testers

For those folks who tested out Battlegrounds, there was an announcement that these players would be getting an appearance cloak. Kiara weighs in on the status of this item:

It hasn’t been entitled yet. Yes it will be very soon. The department that handles this particular sort of situation has been swamped under with another project.

Itemization Issues

We are continuing to follow a story about Itemization issues with the new EQ2 expansion. Players are reporting that Battlegrounds armor is far better than shard gear (Marks of Manaar), quest items are far better than Mastercrafted gear, and most notable, jewelry and charms from the Vigilant x2 raid zone have so far been far superior to the 24-person raid zones and contested x4 raid mobs introduced with Sentinel’s Fate.

We will be tracking this story to see how this all shakes out.

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 development began, a new method was added to remove you from combat if you got far enough away from your attacker and hadn’t had any aggressive action with them in a period of time. (4 seconds) The aggressive action goes both ways, you attacking them or them attacking you.

This new check was enabled for all PvP, not just battlegrounds. We’re going to increase this timer from 4 to 10 seconds and see how that goes.

The old rule is still in effect. If your hate degrades to almost nothing, you’ll be removed from combat. But in addition, if you run 20 meters away and neither of you have attacked each other in 10 seconds, you’ll also be removed.

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 that you’d want to stay connected with your existing guild and friends as much as possible. Due to the communication restrictions between the worlds, if the Battlegrounds world were more of a destination, people would seem even more cutoff from the rest of the game.

However, I’m encouraged by the fact that all of these responses seem positive to the idea and not any negative reactions. But for this to work, we would have to solve many of the communications issues and do a lot more cleanup on the BG world.

We are working on ways to improve the zoning times when you move between the worlds so hopefully that will make zoning faster. We also have plans to try to open up guild chat and some other forms of communication between the worlds but there isn’t an ETA on that yet.

Thanks again for the feedback and ideas.

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 AAs, levels, gear, etc. after lagging out from playing in Battlegrounds. I and others have played Battlegrounds and not had issues, so this seems pretty random issue. Sometimes, I did have a 5-10 minute wait leaving the Battleground and being sent back to my home server, but saw no other issues.

A Word about Forum Moderation

When I started using the EQ2 Forums I remember how intolerant the moderators were towards differing opinions and constructive criticism. Any kind of useful feedback was deleted and members banned for expressing themselves. I just plain stopped posting there. I, along with thousands of other players, moved to EQ2Flames.

It is only under Kiara‘s guidance that the EQ2 forums clawed their way back to being a place where constructive criticism is allowed and players are truthful about their favorite parts as well as the major issues within EQ2. She has fought at every turn to allow players to speak their mind.

Do I think Kiara is perfect? Of course not. Nobody is. But in my 9 years experience in moderating 2 other forums, I think she’s doing a damn good job.

And yet, in the past couple of months, I have noticed unbelievable hostility towards her, blaming her for EQ2 development choices, database issues, expansion launch pains, etc. I see people shooting off at the mouth about things they don’t even understand.

But what has really turned my stomach is when I heard about players gloating to their friends that they reported her to her supervisor.

You know, I manage to post on the EQ2 Forums and express EXACTLY what I feel I need to say about all of the shortcomings and problems at SOE and the EQ2 development, and I manage to do so without getting banned. And when Kiara has done something I’ve disagreed with, I’ve told her. We’ve had some pretty heavy conversations. 😉

But really, if someone out there is too chickenshit to resolve their issues with Kiara, why don’t you send *me* a mail here on EQ2Wire. You might learn something.

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.