Feldon
From EverQuest2.com: As you may have heard in Podcast #110, Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson has been promoted to Executive Producer! After the podcast, EverQuest Community Manager Eric “Piestro” Cleaver took the opportunity to sit down with Dave and find out a little more about his new role and what this means for the EverQuest franchise. Piestro: How about EverQuest II? Will you still be actively involved with that game? Smokejumper: I’m still very much attached to EQII and work closely with the leads on that project. We recently promoted Emily “Domino” Taylor to become the Associate Producer on EQII, specifically...
smokejumper
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a week and a half since EverQuest II service was restored, and harder still that EQ2 was offline for 12 days, an exceptional operational gap for a game modeled on “sticky” customers who login daily to check in on and advance their characters. During the downtime, EQ2Wire wanted to give the EQ2 team an opportunity to come out from behind the bushes and share a bit of what they’ve been working on and maybe break some of the tension. After all, the EQ2 team had only just taken the wraps off 3...
If multiple updates per week have been getting on your nerves, SmokeJumper has something to say: I’m sorry that these updates have been bothering you. We’ve made a conscious decision to be as responsive to issues from our recent release as possible, fixing any issues or exploits found as quickly as possible and then getting those out to the Live servers so that your gameplay is as great as possible. They will be reducing in frequency after this week.
Believe it or not SmokeJumper posted a bit about Game Update 60, which will be anywhere from 1-3 months after the Destiny of Velious expansion launches. It’s expected to have some Battlegrounds and PvP tweaks. His post also talks about EQ2X marketing and EQ2X PvP servers: Answers (but you might not like them): 1) We haven’t started spending marketing cash for Extended yet. That’s slated for January. The reason I bring that up is until we bring more people into Extended, we have no plans to open up a PvP server because too many servers dilutes the population and...
SmokeJumper has posted a message regarding Server Merges: Hey, folks, We’ve been posting information about the downtimes, and Rothgar has been pretty cool about talking about the issues and such, but we haven’t made an official posting. So here goes: 1) The pain is short-term. The merges are being done to make the EQII Live gaming experiences better. I think most folks agree that higher populations make better gaming, so we’re doing the merges for that reason. And we’re working hard to get most of them done *before* the holiday break.
A thread was created on the EQ2 Forums a couple of weeks ago entitled “Why is there no hype about Velious?” which elicited responses from Amnerys and Rothgar indicating that we’re still 3 months away and not everything is nailed down. This thread raged on. However the real discussion about the EverQuest II expansion Destiny of Velious and future of Norrath beyond its release has been happening in the elephantine Server Merges Announced by Email thread, which has become sort of an omnibus discussion between SmokeJumper, Rothgar, and the players.
If you’ve been following the EQ2 Dev Tracker, you know that EQ2 Senior Producer SmokeJumper has been tearing things up the past few days with much dodging, parrying, and responses to player concerns. In response to the argument that “EQ2 is dead”, EQ2 Senior Producer SmokeJumper had some words for competing MMOs out there. While he didn’t mention Rift: Planes of Telara by name — which just opened with what some people are calling the smoothest, most successful Beta Test of any MMO in history, and which will be launching head-to-head with Destiny of Velious next spring — well,...
Dethdlr
SmokeJumper just announced some changes to the bronze level chat channel restirctions on the EQ2X Forums: As of Tuesday, October 5th, the chat restrictions for Bronze players will be eased somewhat. Bronze players will now be able to *see* the chat that’s occurring in broadcast chat channels (like /auction, /Level 1-9, etc.). However, they will still be unable to *send* chat in those channels. In theory, this allows Bronze players to hear what’s going on in the world, and opens up a huge pool of potential customers for Silver and Gold players that are /auctioning items in chat. (Bronze players...
On Thursday evening, a player logged in to discover that one of their gameplay-acquired mounts, a War-Barded Black Cavalry Horse, had unattuned itself. This led to the discovery that a variety of in-game mounts had vanished from the in-game Stable Merchants, only to be found later on the StationCash Marketplace for a cost of 1250SC ($12.50). Other mounts included the Two-Toned Warg , and the black-saddled Blue Flame Nightmare.
EQ2Wire has never had the privilege (and responsibility) of covering a game whose Senior Producer posts almost as frequently as a player. And yet that is where we find ourselves today. Traditionally, EQ2Wire has sought to highlight and quote every post by the current EQ2 Senior Producer. Posts were so rare from Brenlo and Bruce Ferguson that this made sense. However it is impossible to get a clear picture of the storm facing SmokeJumper, the entire EQ2 team, and indeed Sony Online Entertainment, without reading each and every post by both SmokeJumper, and his lead man — Greg “Rothgar”...
Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has followed up today’s big news with a blog post over on the Station Blog on what we can expect at Fan Faire, the future of the EverQuest II Extended (F2P) server, and some hints about what’s coming in updates surrounding the Destiny of Velious expansion. You can read his post on the Station Blog here.
If you are wondering why there has been a whirlwind of changes and announcements about what new players experience from levels 1-20, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, EQ2’s Senior Producer, has been spending a lot of time creating new characters in each of the starting cities to find the rough spots and smooth them out.
We arrive at a topic which has garnered nary a comment from the EQ2 development team since February. I’m talking of course about class balance. While we realize it’s foolish to think that one day all the classes will be truly “balanced”, there’s no better terminology for the valid concept of making sure that all 24 classes have the tools necessary to do their jobs, and that classes that do the same basic job are able to put out similar numbers.
Seccia Ravenloft, writing for The Tattered Notebook at Massively.com, posted the results of an interview with EQ2 Senior Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson on the EQ2 Forums. In response, players expressed their opinion that the interviewers didn’t ask any hard questions. The EQ2 Senior Producer had this to say: I’ll be honest. I’m not one of those guys that creates a “mission statement”. Online games are amorphous. We have two real purposes in life: a) To entertain as many people as we possibly can, and b) make some money along the way so that we can continue to create more...
On Tuesday, 27 April 2010, this tidbit made it into the update notes for test: Mounts will now be temporarily suspended while in combat. Basically, in outside zones, mounts would disapear as soon as you enter combat and re-appear a few seconds after combat ended. This had a general negative response on the official EQ2 Forums and led to speculation on how this would effect buffs. Gninja responded with some clarification on the matter: You would not lose any stats or anything you would have normally had your character will just no longer be visually mounted during combat the...
We’ve received word that brand spanking new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson also gave an interview to Massively. It’s an interesting contrast to the EQ2 ZAM interview and worth a read. It may turn out that the only EQ2 fan site that didn’t get an interview with Dave Georgeson is EQ2Wire… The Tattered Notebook: A moment with Dave Georgeson @ Massively The Return of SmokeJumper Dave Georgeson has already taken the time to post on the EQ2 Forums and respond to some player concerns. He’s brought back his nickname “SmokeJumper” from when he was a developer on Planetside. You...