On April 14, 2009, a new Welcome Screen was added to EQ2. It was pitched to the players as an informational window with a small amount of StationCash Marketplace content. There was a lot of negative player reaction, but feedback was balanced against trying to keep the window useful.

And for those players who wanted to avoid the Welcome Screen window, a method was found to disable it. A configuration line (cl_show_welcome_screen_on_startup 0) could be added to your eq2.ini settings file. Eventually the EQ2 team relented and added a “Show this window at startup” checkbox so players could opt out of seeing this window.