EQ2 Forums - News and Announcements

Greetings all!

We'll be having our usual Tuesday hotfix starting at 6am for the US servers and at 9pm (5am GMT Wednesday March 10) for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.

The downtime will be the usual hour or so.

I'll post any updates here should anything change!

Thanks and happy gaming.

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.

I have been poking around ingame and on the forums and have noticed a lot of confusion regarding the "Golden Path" and what exactly it is.  People are looking for specific NPCs or quest lines, and finding themselves stuck.  So I wanted to take a moment to clarify a little and talk about what it is currently and where it is headed. 

The golden path is the first step in a larger revamp of our new player experience.   We took a look at the starting areas, other than Qeynos and Freeport as we plan to move away from those, and reworked content so that it had a better flow.  We wanted the quests in Darklight, Timorous and Greater Fay, to give you a better progression path.  What you will find, is that if you start a new character, or jump into any of the quest hubs in those areas, is a more guided experience through content.  We have hundreds of zones and for non veteran players, it can be intimidating trying to figure out where to go next.  We wanted to remove that intimidation and give them a better play experience.  So phase one is the "Golden Path" of content.  A better progression of quests through various hubs starting in the three new player areas above.  If you go to any of the zones listed in the update notes and start questing at one of the hubs, you are now on the "Golden Path!"

Phase two, which is following in the upcoming months, will introduce the Storyteller window (which is a much better name than Golden Path) which will link quest lines together in an interface, providing the visual representation of the golden path.  We want players to understand why they may be collecting 10 oranges or killing 15 Goblin Scouts and show how that evolves into a larger story.  The Storyteller System will move players along through content that we feel will give them a fun and exciting experience.  While also engaging them in the world, the story and their character.

So that's it in a nutshell, or three paragraphs anyway. 

Thanks all!

Greetings all!

There's a rather urgent issue that requires a fix tomorrow morning (after that we will be returning to our usual Tuesday hotfixes).

The US servers will patch at the usual time of 6am PST and Runnyeye and Splitpaw will patch at 9pm PST (5am GMT Friday March 5).

We expect it to be the usual hour to hour and a half downtime.

Greetings all!

We'll be having a hotfix tomorrow morning for the US servers starting at 6am and lasting the usual hour to hour and a half.

Runnyeye and Splitpaw will be patching at their normal time of 9pm PST (5am GMT on Thursday March 4th) and not at the same time as the US servers!

We will be throttling back the battlegrounds matches temporarily to ease some of the strain on the worlds.  You might noticed some longer queue times but we hope this change will reduce some of the database lag that the home worlds are seeing until we have a permanent solution.

Beginning at 6:00 AM PST on Thursday, February 25, 2010, the Butcherblock, Lucan D'Lere and Nagafen servers will be offline for maintenance. We expect the downtime to last around 2 hours.

We apologize for this interruption and will resume all affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.

We will be performing maintenance on the Session databases and Station Account services across all games on Wednesday, February 24, 2010.  Maintenance will begin at 3:00 AM PST and is estimated to last until 12:00 PM PST.  All game worlds will be unavailable for at least the first several hours of the estimated 9-hour maintenance. The Station Store and all commerce avenues will be unavailable for the entire duration of maintenance.  This may also affect the performance of the forums and any or all accounts’ abilities to log in.

We apologize for any inconvenience and will resume the affected services as quickly as possible.

Greetings all!

We're going to be bringing down the servers in the morning for brief hotfix. Please see the post regarding additional server downtime for Antonia Bayle, The Bazaar and Sebilis.

Thank you!

Beginning at 6:00 AM PST on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, the Antonia Bayle, Bazaar and Sebilis servers will be offline for maintenance. We expect the downtime to last around 2 hours.

We apologize for this interruption and will resume all affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.

We will be bringing Battlegrounds up again in the test environment very soon.  We've made some changes to stability, matchmaking and several other areas.  We would love to get a large crowd online to help us stress the system.  So if you have availability in a couple of hours, log into the Test Copy server and play a few games with us.

Anyone that participates in today's test will get the special Battlegrounds themed cloak after it goes live.

When the server is available we will broadcast to the live servers letting you know we are ready to go.  I'll also post an updated to this thread.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Greetings all!

We're going to be bringing down the servers in the morning for brief hotfix.  The notes have been posted here already.

Runnyeye and Splitpaw will be patching at the usual time of 9pm PST (5am Feb 20th GMT).

Thank you!

Greetings all!

Some servers have been experiencing issues, such as crashes and zones not loading.

The team is aware of the issues and are working to locate the source of these problems and fix them.

I'll be updating this thread as I get more information, so please keep checking.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience!

What to Expect on Launch Day!

On February 16th, EQII's sixth expansion, Sentinel's Fate will launch the retail headstart! We're all very excited, and hope that you share our enthusiasm. We want to give a brief overview of what to expect on the 16th.

We'll be bringing the servers down at midnight on February 15th to begin patching to the live servers. Fan Faire attendees will be flagged at this time. (Looks like they already are!!!)

Starting at 6am PST and running until 8am PST, Zatozia will be running a Ustream event.

Kiara will be on the Official Forums and in Zam's IRC chat to provide updates until the servers come up.

We plan to have the servers back up and ready to go by 9am PST.

Greetings!

The Butcherblock server crashed not too long ago.  There was a hardware issue that the team is working to fix right now.

We're going to leave the server locked until it is fixed to prevent the yo-yo effect.

The ETA for it to come back up is 10:30am PST.

I'll update this thread with any new info.

Thank you for your patience!

Greetings!

Due to the President's Day Holiday in the US on February 15th, our CS support will be limited.

We apologize for any inconvenience and wish you all safe and happy adventuring!

Greetings all!

If you are online to read this, please be advised that we are conducting a playtest of the Battlegrounds feature right now on Test-Copy.

Anyone who playtests with us this evening will receive the special Battlegrounds cloak as a thank you for helping us.  This will be entitled to your accounts after the 16th.

Thank you in advance!

Happy Valentine’s Day All!

Here we are, perched on the precipice of another big launch for our beloved game, EQII.  Next week is a big week for us and for you, the players of this grand game.  You will finally be able to log into the new areas of Odus and explore, level and play in the new area that the team has spent nearly a year putting together.  Characters can now advance to level 90 as adventurers and tradeskillers.  More items, more spells, more AA’s and we hope lots more fun.

As many have noticed, Halas is not going out with the expansion, many have asked why and the reasoning is twofold.  We have three pretty decent starting areas already.  Darklight, Greater Faydark and Timorous Deep.  We know they are not perfect and so the team has done considerable work in reworking those areas, streamlining the progress path to make for a better experience.  We believe that you will find the experience in those zones to be far better than it had been.  So, we went to work on higher level content for this launch, which we have with the expansion content and the new Battlegrounds. 

Additionally we really want new Halas to be something special.  We want more time to polish the area and make sure the progression path is fun and smooth.  We also hope to get kilts in there.  Currently we are looking to have Halas out with the Halas Reborn update later in the year. 

With this release, we are proud to open up the Pre-Season of EQII Battlegrounds.  Three zones will be available, each with a different playstyle.  They will have progression and items and we hope add a whole new element of fun to the game.   Unfortunately we didn’t quite get as many players as we had hoped on the server to give it a proper test, so we are going to use this pre-season phase to iron out any kinks and tweak the balance a bit more beyond the testing phase.  When we are ready, we will begin Season 1 and the mayhem will begin in earnest.  You will be able to work towards the new Chaos Armor during the pre-season, which might be the best looking armor we have added to the game. 

With a game like EQII, it is evergrowing and everchanging, on occasion we find the need to adjust items, spells etc. . . and some mythicals had their power reduced with the release of the expansion.  With each launch, we have to look at the items released previously and decide if they are perhaps too high to encourage players to look for upgrades.  EQII is, at its core, a game driven by itemization.  The constant desire to get the next biggest, baddest piece of gear.   So on occasion we have to make some difficult decisions.  This was one of them.  For those who feel their mythical was devalued, I offer my apologies. 

Next Tuesday is the retail head start, so to get you all ready, we are turning on Bonus XP from now until the servers come down for the update Tuesday morning.   I hope you all login and enjoy.  We look forward to seeing you on the Battlegrounds and running around Odus.  Mostly, we thank you for playing EQII.

Alan “Brenlo” Crosby

Senior Producer EQII

Greetings Norrathians.

Starting at 4:45am PST  Antonia Bayle, The Bazaar, and Sebilis will come down for an estimated 5 hour downtime.  During this time, the database software will be upgraded to address lag issues.

We will update this thread as needed should any issues arise.

Thank you for your patience!

The NDA for Sentinel's Fate is officially lifted!

All of you, who have been (not so) patiently waiting can spill the beans!

Those of you who didn't wait and were breaking it all along...  Coal in your stockings.