SOE Announces EQ New Year's Events

No details, but there will be some New Year's events.  From the December EQ Producer's Letter in the SOE forum:

 That’s next year [Hate Rising], but before this year ends, we have some exciting Quests and Missions as part of our New Years [sic] events that kickoff on December 26th and last through the middle of January. You can speak to several friends in the Plane of Knowledge to get started on the 26th!

UPDATE: Unfortunately, it appears there are no new quests or missions this year.

Call of the Forsaken Part 2 "Hate Rising" to Come in January

From the December EQ Producer's Letter in the SOE forum:

 Just around the corner in January, we will be launching Call of the Forsaken: Hate Rising. In Hate Rising, you will be able to continue your adventure with all new Heroic Adventures, new raids and missions; new equippable gear across group and raid content, and a nice set of rare items you’ll hardly believe.

Also, a big change will be coming to our Heroic Adventures. We have scaled our existing Heroic Adventures by level, so you can play this exciting content earlier. So that means if you are level 85 and you haven’t played Call of the Forsaken yet, you will now be able to receive the tasks and quests from the quest givers. A little side note on level spread for missions: stay tuned for some more information from Prathun in the very near future on what we’re hoping to accomplish!

Call of the Forsaken: Hate Rising will go into an Open Beta early January. If you participated in Beta for the expansion, you will be able to enter as soon as we launch. If you did not participate beforehand, don’t fret. We’ll have a timeframe in January that you’ll be able to apply and get in very quickly, and soon discover how an iconic EverQuest character will play a large role in Norrath over the next year.

As we learn more, the Fanra's EverQuest Wiki Hate Rising page will be updated.

SOE Live 2014 Announced

From SOE Live news:

SAN DIEGO – Dec. 12, 2013 – Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) today announced that its annual community fan event, SOE Live, will take place at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas on Aug. 14 – Aug. 17, 2014.

...

Additional information will be announced in the upcoming months.

SOE Live tickets will be available for purchase in early 2014.

What's To Come In 2014

Here are some things that SOE has announced to come in 2014. EQ Producer Thom “Phathom” Terrazas has posted his November Producer's Letter which says:

• Heroic Adventures will be opened up to lower level characters.
• Explains more about how mercenary AA experience works.
• Journeyman 5 Mercenaries: Changing some of the aspects of the quest to smooth out how you achieve them and possibly have another means of obtaining this tier.
• More content, all free, but some will require Call of the Forsaken.  Including more Call of the Forsaken storylines.
• EverQuest’s 15th Anniversary in March:
• New Race/Class combinations - Froglok Monk and one other to be announced.
• Plane of War
• Player designed missions - missions designed (well, actually, just the concept was designed by players, the nuts and bolts are being done by SOE) at SOE Live by participants there.
• Heroic Characters -  In EQ2, returning players can create a Level 85 Character.  Something similar to, but slightly different, will be coming to EQ.

Read the entire letter if you want more details.

Patch Scheduled Wednesday November 6

Lots of bug fixes in this patch.

From SOE forum:

All EverQuest Live Servers will be brought offline on Wednesday, November 6, 2013 at 5:00 am US Pacific*. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 3 hours. Keep an eye on the EverQuest website and the forums for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.



*Time Zone Converter

Patch Scheduled Thursday October 10

From the SOE EQ forum:

All EverQuest Live Servers will be brought offline on Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 6:00 am US Pacific*. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 2 hours. Keep an eye on the EverQuest website and the forums for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.
*Time Zone Converter

SK Merchant, Wizard Mercs Among Bugs To Be Fixed

From the SOE forum:

It's a bug [wizard mercenary low dps]. We've identified the cause of the bug, haven't tested the fix yet. Once we're ready we'll let you folks know when we're patching in the fix.

 Also from the SOE forum:

It's a bug [no Ethernere Tainted West Karana Shadow Knight spell / disc vendor], we have a fix incoming for this.

Patch Scheduled Monday Night for Call of the Forsaken Release

From the SOE EQ forum:

All EverQuest Live Servers will be brought offline on Monday, October 7, 2013 at 8:00 pm US Pacific* for the release of EverQuest: Call of the Forsaken! The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 14 hours. Keep an eye on the EverQuest forums for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.

*Time Zone Converter

Call of the Forsaken: October 8

SOE has announced a date for CotF:

Hello my Norrathian Friends!

Since SOE Live, the team has been cranking away at the Expansion, Call of the Forsaken. It gives me extreme pleasure to work on EverQuest right now with such a creative team, delivering to you, the 20th Expansion this Fall.

Beta for Call of the Forsaken started soon after SOE Live and we are now extending Beta through October 7th. That also means we are moving the launch of the expansion a couple weeks as well to October 8, 2013. If you haven’t jumped into the Beta yet, there is still time to adventure through some of our new zones like Bixie Warfront and Neriak Fourth Gate before they go live! We are flagging accounts daily and we welcome everyone to check out the expansion and send us feedback while we finish with polish and tuning. More information on Beta Sign Ups

If you have been following the expansion details, then you will know that one of the biggest features for Call of the Forsaken is the customization with Mercenaries with their own AAs and power-added Armor. To give everyone a taste of what to experience with the new Mercenary Armor, we are giving everyone that Pre-Orders Call of the Forsaken before October 7, an exclusive piece of Mercenary Armor. We hope you will check out the expansion on Beta and take advantage of the Pre-Order exclusive item! More information on Pre-Orders and In-Game Rewards

Our Big Bags bring all the boys to the yard! That’s right, last Friday we started a Super Sonic Sack Sales Spectacular with Big Bags back in the Marketplace. They will be available for a couple weeks so be sure to get yours before they are gone.

I want to thank all of you checking in and reading my letter. The EverQuest team is excited with much anticipation to bring you the 20th expansion in just two weeks from today. If that isn’t rewarding enough for us, we are already discussing ways we can continue the storylines in additional game updates that tie into the expansion throughout the year.

See you in game soon!

Thom Terrazas
Senior Producer, EverQuest
Sony Online Entertainment, LLC.

What we've got here...

...is failure to communicate.

Currently seen as a patch note for the Test Server, no word from SOE on the following:

 - The Hardcore Heritage events in Nagafen's Lair and Castle Mistmoore have been extended by one week. They now end on Monday, September 30th.
- Giants, Giants, Giants and Dragons, Dragons, Dragons return! They will be available from September 27th, 2013 to October 28th, 2013.

So we don't know for sure if this is going live or not.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Heart of Fear Live

From the SOE EQ forum:

Heart of Fear Launches Today!
We're excited to bring you the conclusion of stories you have been experiencing for the past three years with the Heart of Fear today!

Three years ago, new mysteries began with the House of Thule expansion. These mysteries have extended into the next two expansions, Veil of Alaris and Rain of Fear and the highest drama concludes within the Heart of Fear launch today. You can experience the final stories as you adventure deep within the Heart of Fear and discover the final questions focused around Cazic Thules remaining power.

Access to Heart of Fear
With your purchase of the Rain of Fear expansion, you recieve content released with the Rain of Fear in November 2012, the Shadow of Fear released in April 2013 and ultimately the Heart of Fear released today.

Enjoy your adventures in Norrath and thank you for checking out the Heart of Fear!

Patch Scheduled: July 16

From the SOE EQ forum:

All EverQuest Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, July 16, 2013 at 4:00 am US Pacific*. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for approximately 4 hours. Keep an eye on the EverQuest website and the forums for status updates and for news if additional downtime is needed.

*Time Zone Converter

It is expected that Heart of Fear (Rain of Fear Tier 4) will be released with this patch.

Stone Tear Changes in July Patch

In a SOE EQ forum thread about the Stone Tear evolving item, Dzarn, EQ Developer, announces some changes to make things a little easier for those working on it, as well as an increased final item.

I found some time to work on the tear.

First the bad news. The evolving item system does not function if the item is an augment. The way the system is coded requires that an evolving item be in an equipment slot for it to work. So you have my apologies that that item is still eating your ammo / charm / face slot. [Note that once it fully evolves to level 20 you can change it to a Type 3 augmentation]

Next, the less bad news. I've again dropped the experience scale required to level the tear from 1-20, somewhat dramatically. Halfway through what used to be level 17 will now be level 20...

[He posts a chart displaying the changes]

Finally I've adjusted the relative experience given by the Fragments of Legendary Alaran history so running the task is an even more rewarding endeavor than it has been...

[He posts a chart displaying the changes]

Another change I've sneaked in. Alaran and Undead Alaran NPCs in Veil of Alaris and Rain of Fear non-raid zones that are at least level 90 now have a small percent (1% in VoA and 1.5% in RoF) chance of dropping a Fragment of Legendary Alaran History.

Finally I've added some additional stats to the tear as it progresses, which is mainly moot because only the defense skill mod will benefit you if the item is equipped in the ammo slot, but it adds an extra incentive to reach level 20 for the augment version of the item.

Double XP: July 4 to July 7

From the SOE EQ forum:

It’s a Double XP Weekend! Starting at 12:01 am on Thursday, July 4th you’ll enjoy earning twice the XP as you adventure in Norrath. But don’t miss out! This bonus will go away Sunday, July 7th at 11:59 pm PDT.

Heart of Fear Beta Officially Opens

From EverQuest - Community News:

Well, that moment is now. We are opening up Beta today – Officially! If you have signed up for Beta with Rain of Fear and/or Shadow of Fear, you can get into the last saga of the Rain of Fear, the Heart of Fear.

The Heart of Fear is a story that started with the House of Thule Expansion in 2010. It continued with the Veil of Alaris in 2011 and has carried through the Rain of Fear expansion in November. We have subsequently delivered the final chapters of this plot in the Shadow of Fear Game Update in April and you discover the climactic ending within the Heart of Fear coming this July.