Patch Scheduled June 29, 2011

From SOE forums:

All EverQuest Live Servers will be coming down on Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 4:00 am US Pacific (US Pacifc-PST is -8 GMT: 5:00 am MST, 6:00 am CST, 7:00 am EST, 12:00 pm GMT, 13:00 CET) for a game update. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 4 hours. Keep an eye on the EQ Players website and the forums for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.

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Double XP Weekend July 1 to 4. Oh, also some Marketplace deals

From Piestro, EverQuest Community Manager:

It’s a long weekend coming up for those of us in the U.S.A. and we thought we’d add a little more fun and levity for all of you whether you are celebrating or not!

To start things off we’ll be having daily deals on the Marketplace starting Tuesday, June 28, 2011, and continuing on through Thursday, June 30, 2011, with items announced each day on the EQplayers website and in game in the Marketplace. Make sure to check back every day to see if that item that you want is on sale. You might see something that will catch your eye!

We didn’t want to leave the weekend out though, so starting Friday, July 1, 2011, and going through Monday, July 4, we’ll be having a fabulous weekend sale and Double Experience! Details on the sale will be available Friday, so make sure to take a look!

[Bold added]
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SOE Reduces Prices Across the Board, Announces the End of Star Wars Galaxies

From this Star Wars Galaxies forum post:

We write to you today to inform you that on December 15, 2011, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and LucasArts will end all services (MMO and Trading Card Game) for Star Wars Galaxies (SWG).

In addition, with the loss of one of their games in the Station Access "all you can eat" subscription, they are renaming it the "SOE All Access Game Pass".

Prices for the All Access Game Pass are reduced to $14.99 per month with a 12 month subscription. Other subscription lengths are also reduced in price.

Of more interest to EQ only player, an EQ only subscription is also dropping in price. The cost has gone from $11.99 a month for 12 months to $9.99. Other subscription lengths are also reduced in price.

Note that these prices are for U.S. customers, in U.S. dollars, and do not include possible taxes.

Check out their prices here.
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Safe Passage Mission To Be Investigated

If you can remember back to the days of the Seeds of Destruction expansion, you will remember the mission Safe Passage. Annoying and buggy, most people finally just did it by using pets, which seems like an exploit but is about the only way to do it.

Chandrok, EQ Developer, announced that he is going to investigate the mission. Hopefully it will be finally fixed, 500 bug reporting posts and three and a half years after it went live, but better late then never.

I'm going to try to find some time to look a bit deeper into the problem with this mission. After a quick look I found it's a fair bit more complex to diagnose than a normal mission, which is probably why a fix has been so elusive.

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Fellowship Experience Sharing On Test

The Test Server now has Fellowship Experience Sharing. I'll let SKlug (Steven S. Klug, EverQuest Lead Programmer) explain it:

*** Fellowship Experience Sharing ***
- Ever had a friend or friends that fell behind the rest of your group because they could not play as much as the rest of you? Now you can invite them to your fellowship and enable experience sharing. This allows your combat experience to be shared with them even if they are offline!
- The new system requires fellowship members to-opt in from the fellowship window using the new toggle XP button. There is also a new column in the list that displays the XP sharing status of all members. The fellowship leader can toggle XP sharing for anyone, or each member can toggle their own.
- If you have fellowship XP sharing enabled, you both share and receive combat experience with other fellowship members that also have it enabled.

He also explains more and answers some questions in that thread.

Note that everything on the Test Server is subject to change before going live. The final version of this (if it even makes it past the testing stage) could be very different.

No word on when this might go live.
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Escape to Norrath EQ Trial Secretly Ends

Despite it still being advertised on the everquest.com page and being available for download, apparently it has been discontinued.

TSR Joshua M., Technical Support Representative, SOE, posted this in the SOE forums:

The Escape to Norrath trial has ended. I do believe a new trial is in the works on the live servers but I do not have any official information to post about it. In any case, it shouldn't be too far away.

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Server Lag Issues To Be Investigated

Players all over Norrath are reporting increased and annoying server lag. Most reports involve instances, but some are happening in the normal zones.

SKlug (Steven S. Klug), EverQuest Lead Programmer, posted June 22 on SOE forums:

The server side issues are still being investigated as I posted a week or two ago. The cause of the congestion is not obvious so we're adding a bunch more diagnostics. Those can't go out without a patch though, so we have to wait for the next patch to look at the data. But we're actively looking into it.

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Patch Scheduled June 15, 2011

UPDATE:

All EverQuest Live Servers will be coming down on Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 3:00 am US Pacific (US Pacifc-PST is -8 GMT: 4:00 am MST, 5:00 am CST, 6:00 am EST, 11:00 am GMT, 12:00 am CET) for maintenance. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 5 hours. Keep an eye on the EQ Players website and the forums for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.

Nothing official yet but it looks tentatively scheduled for June 15 based on this SOE forum post:

Just wanted to mention in here (I'm sure Piestro will update it more officially tomorrow) that we are delaying the transfers off until the next live update (which is currently scheduled for 6/15) so we can get code out to live servers that allows us to not destroy epics that are flagged as copied. There were a lot of people that were concerned about that so we implemented a solution. Unfortunately it requires code be pushed live.

-- Steven S. Klug, EverQuest Lead Programmer

[Bold added]

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