Wednesday, August 28, 2013

SOE Fires People, Stifles Discussion

From the SOE EQ forum:
Today we announced a reduction in our workforce at SOE. As a company, our goal is to focus on our core expertise of MMO games and as part of these efforts, we had to make the difficult decision to eliminate positions to help reduce costs, streamline our employee base and strategically align resources towards our current portfolio of games and upcoming slate of MMOs, including EverQuest Next Landmark and EverQuest Next. We deeply value our employees and are grateful for all they’ve contributed to our company and games. They will be missed by colleagues and friends, and we wish them well in the future.

Out of respect for our employees, we request that you do not discuss personnel matters on our forums. Thank you for your understanding.
What does it mean? Who knows, we are not allowed to ask.

I can understand not wanting 500 forum posts of rumors flying asking who was laid off and what it means for the future of EQ, but we are left with nothing but questions.

How will it affect EQ?   We don't know.  Only SOE knows and they aren't talking.  But it sure doesn't look good.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Hardcore Heritage Lord Nagafen Raid Due, Soon™

Posted by Prathun, EQ Developer, on the SOE EQ forum:
Hello,
The Nagafen HH raid has been taken offline temporarily until we are able to address a zone crash bug. We're sorry for the inconvenience. It should be back up early next week, and we'll extend the duration of the event to make up for the downtime.
-Prathun
UPDATE: The raid is back but it still has problems:
Here's the thing.. The event isn't crashing. In reality, the zone isn't crashing either. Something is causing the static zone AND the instance to freak out so badly that the world server disconnects the zone. It's still up, but not responding to anything because the CPU is running at 130% and is just going NUTS. It's hung, but never actually explodes.

Worse.. because the zone never actually crashes, there is no crash log, so chasing what's going on is that much harder. We've found ZERO repeatability on this. In fact, neither myself, nor QA has EVER been able to make it do this. We literally can't make it happen. I've looked over every single element of this raid, regardless of how small or big it might be. I can find nothing wrong with my event. We're still trying though. Today was obviously a rough day though all around. I wish I had a better update.

As for the duration of the event, we're going to leave it up longer. We're going to make sure you guys get plenty of time to play with it. I've also reduced the lockout timer on the event to 2.5 days (something we're eventually going to do with ALL limited duration events).

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Call of the Forsaken Beta Begins

From a SOE EQ forum post by Phathom, EQ Developer:
Hello all!

Tomorrow [August 21], we will be launching the Call of the Forsaken Beta and we will be sending out notices to let you know when you can download and help test the new expansion. Beta will last for approximately 4-6 weeks. We have a lot of people signed up ready to test things out so to keep the numbers steadily trickling in, we will be steadily flagging accounts into Beta. If you not get an invitation to join the beta tomorrow, keep on the lookout for an invitation over the next couple of days or next two weeks. Everyone that signs up for beta within this next week, will get into the beta before it ends.

Thank you for helping us test this expansion, the 20th expansion for EverQuest!

See you in Norrath!

Patch Scheduled Wednesday August 21, 2013

Still lacking details, but from a post on the SOE EQ forum by Prathun, EQ Developer:
We are updating on the 21st. The changes to the Creep Reaper toilers should be in place when the servers come back up.

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Tier 4 Progression Charms Bugged, To Be Fixed

The Rain of Fear tier 4 charms that improve as you progress are currently not giving the stats they should. Posted on the EQ forum by Chandrok, EQ Developer:
There was an error with the stat calculations of tier 4 progression charms. They will be working correctly next patch.