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 a competing site to EQ2Players — EQ2U.

We appreciate all the hard work that SOE has put into building a Data Feeds service so that EQ2Players can be just one of what will be a growing number of websites that build on EQ2 data. As Dan Kinney told me, each website will have different strengths and thus attract a different audience.

So with that, I did want to just do a brief, and what I hope is objective, review of EQ2Players.

So if you caught last Thursday night’s EQ2Players Sneak Peak Webcast, you know that the new EQ2Players site is coming very soon. If you missed it, the video has appeared on Youtube and we have produced a transcript, almost verbatim during the Q&A. Just for you!

Linda “Brasse” Carlson interviewed SOE’s Clif Bate (Director of Commerce Services & Web Presence) and Abby Watt (Associate Web Producer) about the upcoming EQ2Players site.

The transcript after the jump…

From the EQ2 Forums:

EverQuest II: Free-to-Play Webcast Recap

On Thursday, November 10, 2011, we had a very special webcast going over the big announcement: EverQuest II going free-to-play! This week’s webcast featured EverQuest II Executive Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson and EverQuest II Associate Producer Emily “Domino” Taylor. The two were interviewed by SOE’s Director of Global Communication, Linda “Brasse” Carlson. We learned about many of the specifics associated with the free-to-play conversion and a bit about the new expansion “Age of Discovery.” At the end of the video, screenshots of the Collector’s Edition items were also shown.

After the jump, our question about the new EQ2Players and Data Feeds gets answered…

EQ2Players received an incomplete revamp last December, leaving the site graphically refreshed, but with significant issues including problematic content updates, buggy Javascript, and various statistical oversights. The site was also re-branded as EverQuest2.com and became a free service, instead a paid feature.

The SOE Platform Team were initially responsive to the issues brought up and some of them were fixed, but it seems there was some personnel shuffling and as a result, little else has been done to the revamped EverQuest2.com since the release of Sentinel’s Fate. Players have been trying to nail down some kind of response from the EQ2 team about when the site will get some attention. SmokeJumper finally went on the record with:

We haven’t given up on it. It wounds our souls that it’s in that state.

But December is always the busiest month in a game company and this one is no exception. We hope to give the site love early next year sometime.

EQ2Wire would personally prefer some type of public API to this data, but we’ll take what we can get.

We’ve got reports that the following EQ2 servers are presently down:

• Befallen
• Crushbone
• Innovation
• Mistmoore
• Oasis
• Permafrost
• Runnyeye

EQ2Players Network Status Page

Luminata contacted me, hoping I would draw some attention to EQ2Players and the fact it has not been updated since the launch of Sentinel’s Fate. There was plenty of activity and postings on the EQ2Players Discussion area from the SOE Platform team around the time of the site revamp, but this renewed communication has again faded since the expansion launched.

No characters, guilds, rankings, or any other statistical data has been updated since February 16th. The EQ2Players site now seems to be at a standstill.

EQ2 Forum Discussions:

How long before SF updates start to appear on EQ2Players ?

Not Updating

If you frequently use EQ2Players especially to lookup Stats, Guilds, Characters, etc. you’d have to be blind to have missed the Site Revamp 2 weeks ago. Significant functionality was broken, the site displayed slowly on many browsers, and a lot of features were missing.

Fast forward to today and EQ2Players has a review clearly written by someone not on Platform staff because it honestly and openly identifies problems in the site, and has dates when we can expect those issues to be resolved.

Check out the EQ2Players Review… by EQ2Players

The biggest loss of functionality on EQ2Players for many viewers was the ability to lookup Alt characters. This is used by guild recruiters to weed out players with a known history of troublemaking and guild bank plundering. So we’re happy to report that this functionality has been restored to EQ2Players.

DarkViper has been reporting steadily on fixes to the site:

The team is actively working on adding in quite a few new features, they’re just not ready yet The community team will be posting a list of the features soon with when you can expect them.

Players are asked to do a hard refresh (Ctrl-F5 or Ctrl-R) to make sure they are not viewing a cached version of the page.

Players who wish to hide their alts can do this in their Settings area. Platform are looking at the possibility of adding a way to apply this setting to all your alts.

DarkViper, from SOE’s Platform (websites, forums, etc.) department has responded to widespread criticism of the EQ2Players revamp which went live last week:

Everyone, thanks for the feedback on the web site. With Station Players becoming a free service, I hope you’re checking out all of the sections of the site if you’ve never had access to it. It’s important to keep hearing this feedback so we can continue to evolve the site.

To address the browser crashing:

We’re already planning on making a version of the site that is ‘lighter’ for the in-game browser. It has always been the plan, but we could not get that version of the site done in time for this release. We’ll investigate why it’s crashing, though I have heard that other sites (not just EQ2’s) have crashed in the past as well so it’s not something I can guarantee that will be in our control to fix before the in-game version of the site.

Re: Guild Chat visibility:

We’ll improve the placement for this, we agree that we need other entry points to this beyond just the profile pages. In fact, the profile bar is planned to be accessible via the entire site.

Re: Search functionality

We’re re-tooling this after much feedback to be more intuitive and accessible.

Re: Speed of loading

We’ll investigate this. It loads fast on all machines we’ve tested, and loads relatively fast even on the iphone. This could be browser version specific so we’ll have our lab here see if they can replicate this one.

A few additional comments:

Re: Alts

We’re adding this back in next build of the site.

Re: Guild Roster

Agreed, 5 is too low, we’re tweaking this next build.

Re: Best in Class Leaderboard

We’re adding the update in the next build of the site.

Re: Login remember me

We’ll speak with the teams responsible for this functionality and will hopefully have a fix in place soon.

Re: RSS Feeds/CSV functionality

We’ve been working on making this more accessible for folks and are looking into ways we can get you guild data for your use whether it be for web sites or not. We’ll have an update soon for this.

Please keep sending the feedback, we’re listening and addressing it. If you run into any problems (i.e. errors), please PM me or post it and we’ll get someone looking into it.

EQ2Players has undergone a revamp and the results went live this morning. Actually, it’s more than just a revamp. All trace of EQ2Players has been wiped away! This is now the main EverQuest2 website.

Searching

The first thing we noticed is that to Search for Characters, Guilds, or Items, you must either be on the Home page, or click the Search link in the upper right corner. It used to be possible to search from anywhere on the site. We also noticed that simply typing a character name and pressing Enter no longer works. You must now specify Character, Guild, Item, or Forum.

Performance

We’ve also noticed that the site renders noticeably slower. Perhaps with some tweaks to the Javascript code (which is now used throughout the site) can speed up performance.

Guild Searches

• When browsing a Guild Roster, now only 5 members of that guild are displayed at a time and the viewer must page through roster.
• It is no longer possible to click on a member of a guild to view their profile page. One must backtrack to the Search page and type in a character name and perform a new search.
• There is no header table in the Guild Roster, so it is unclear what some of the numbers represent.
• The graphics indicating tradeskill and adventure class are gone, replaced with text only (Dirge, Weaponsmith, etc.).

Character Searches

• When you do a search for a Character, it shows a list of characters matching that name. However the Guild link next to each character brings you to an error page. You must click on a Character to bring up their Character Profile and then you can click the link to their Guild.

Character Profiles

• It appears all of the Paper Doll graphics have been reset, so everyone’s Character Profile image is blank. If a characters wants an image of their character on their Profile, they will need to upload a new image.
• While it’s more a design decision than a bug, we’re sad to see that the Alternate Advancements page when viewing a Character now has just about the minimum information possible.  Information about each AA is not available. No graphics are used. And it is impossible to tell at-a-glance, how many AAs are used in each tree. Hopefully this is just a placeholder until the expansion when AAs are getting tweaked and new lines.

Right now, the EQ2Players site, or I guess I should start calling it the EQ2 site, is a step backwards for usability. But hopefully with some tweaks, these nagging issues can be resolved.