Your Hotfix notes for March 18th include tweaks to Tier 3 (raid armor).
NOTE: Make sure your EQ2 client patches before trying to log into EQ2. Due to an oversight, EQ2 servers are allowing out-of-date clients to login, resulting in bugs with the Broker, Group window, etc.
After the jump…
Mages have been rather effective in Battlegrounds and PvP combat of late. Moreso than perhaps was intended.
Timetravelling has laid out the details of the cause of this issue, what he intends to do about it, and how it will be tested in this EQ2 Forums thread.
We’ve been digging through the code to track down the inconsistencies we’ve been seeing in spell resists and spell avoidance. We have some changes incoming that I’d like to describe briefly for y’all.
Based on the old formulas, extremely high resists (if capped) would give players a 75% chance to avoid a spell AND a 75% reduction in the damage when it landed.
At level 70+, spell avoidance chance was being multipled by 0.6 (reducing your overall chance to avoid by 40%) and spell resists were being multiplied by 0.65 (reducing the damage reduction applied to spell damage by 35%). This has been contributing to the … ah … very high combat effectiveness of spell-damage based classes. We have removed all of these mults internally.
Once internal testing has been completed, we plan on pushing these changes to Test-copy (and temporarily flagging it as PvP). Once that happens, we’ll update the thread here and ask for y’all to jump over there and help us test the crap out of the changes. We’ll leave it up there for at least a week or two to give time for balance tweaks and such before considering a push to Live.
Our intention is *not* to make any classes unbeatable or make others unable to kill opponents.
However, spell resistances and high STA should be contributing to survival as expected instead of at a greatly reduced effectiveness.
Your feedback is encouraged, and hopefully lots of people will test these changes. In case you missed it, for PvP and Battlegrounds purposes, Spell Resists are now calculated using Stamina (STA), a stat that all classes have some of, and can gain more of, rather than Wisdom (WIS), which due to Stat Consolidation, is now much harder for certain classes to get in any quantity.
EQ2 servers will come down for a Hotfix on Thursday, March 11th, 2010. This hotfix takes place at 6am PST for U.S. servers and 5am GMT on March 12th for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.
After the Hotfix notes, you’ll find some good news about the Guard levels in Qeynos, Freeport, and Kelethin.
continue reading March 11 Hotfix Notes, Guard Level Adjustments…
If you’ve been thinking that the pieces of the Sentinel’s Fate itemization puzzle just have not fit well together, you are not alone.
While we have not spent a lot of time covering itemization in SF, it is because things have continued to be in such a state of flux during, and after the Beta.
The smooth progression of TSO gear was seemingly replaced by a scattershot approach, with some of the x2 raid items being the best in the game, the x4 Hard Mode gear being only 1-2% better than the x2 Easy Mode gear, and Battlegrounds gear the red herring, providing a confusing shortcut to skip instance gear altogether. In short, the “plan” has not been clear. Until now.
After the jump, check out what Frizznik has posted regarding the EQ2 Team’s itemization plans:
continue reading A Light at the End of the Itemization Tunnel?…
As we have reported, players have been abusing an exploit which allowed them to login to Battlegrounds and consume/transmute/craft items and then get those items back upon being returned to their home servers. SOE have stepped up and shown they take this sort of thing seriously with the following announcement from Brenlo:
This weekend an exploit was found on the Battlegrounds server which allowed players to transmute items, and have those items returned when leaving the Battlegrounds. This occured due to a change we made in the code to speed up the return process. While we understand that this was a bug of our creation, some players chose to take advantage of it, knowing it was not meant to work in that fashion.
Many players took advantage of the bug, to varying degrees. Some of our community however went to great lengths to abuse the bug. For those accounts that abused this obvious bug, we have taken action. Some have been removed from the game altogether, while others are losing all of the items on their characters. All will face at least some time removed from the game as we sort through the various logs and track down their ill-gained platinum and items.
While we hate to remove anyone from our community, our family, there are times that for the good of the servers, the in-game economy and the community we do find ourselves forced to take action. Unfortunately, this was one such occasion.
Thanks all for being a part of Norrath.
This action is not just limited to Transmuters:
We tracked spells, transmutations, abuse of Mender Bots, etc. We are taking action against all who reached a specific threshhold of abuse.
The most egregious offenders, who I have learned made thousands of plat off of this exploit, will find themselves suspended from the game for several days or possibly a longer ban.
Posted by Kiara:
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.
and your March 9 Hotfix Notes after the jump…
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
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.
We have gone ahead and pulled an article we had posted about the possibility of transferring from a PvP to PvE server by way of using a Server Transfer Token while logged into Battlegrounds.
We have not been able to substantiate reports that players had been able to perform such a transfer.
Battlegrounds are currently closed due to a Transmuting exploit which has allowed players to duplicate items. In short, items which you transmuted or scribed on Battlegrounds were returned to you upon exiting Battlegrounds.
Here are some end-of-week news items which I’ve noticed on the EQ2 forums that readers may find useful…
Scale of Flame
Players have been having trouble advancing/completing the quest Scale of Flame. In response, Gninja has responded:
I found the issue causing the spirit to not spawn and have corrected it. You should see it come to live server early next week with our next build.
Breaking Combat on PvP/Battlegrounds
Rothgar has made some further adjustments in how combat is broken on PvP/Battlegrounds. It has been tweaked so that you must be at least 1000m from the other player as well as a timer based on activity.
Raid Mob Damage Calculations
There has been some wonkiness, to say the least, in how raid mobs have been putting out damage. Players have noticed these issues and been reporting in this thread on the subject. Rothgar has provided an update:
Yesterday’s patch fixed a bug that was causing many of a mob’s special abilities to not be applied correctly. So technically the code is working as it should be now and all buffs are being applied to the mob. However, this bug has only been in since the first hotfix after the 24th of February. So the mobs should be the same as they were on release, but unfortunately no one was probably raiding them that much during the first week or the people that did expected them to hit this hard.
I’ve spoken with our raid designer and he’s going to take a look at the mobs on a case-by-case basis and determine what needs to be changed. We don’t have any ETA’s on changes yet, but please continue to post your feedback on the ones that you think are way too hard.
Keep in mind we’re only a few weeks into the expansion and that mobs SHOULD be pretty tough until people get caught up on gear, levels and AA’s.
Battlegrounds Cloaks for Testers
For those folks who tested out Battlegrounds, there was an announcement that these players would be getting an appearance cloak. Kiara weighs in on the status of this item:
It hasn’t been entitled yet. Yes it will be very soon. The department that handles this particular sort of situation has been swamped under with another project.
Itemization Issues
We are continuing to follow a story about Itemization issues with the new EQ2 expansion. Players are reporting that Battlegrounds armor is far better than shard gear (Marks of Manaar), quest items are far better than Mastercrafted gear, and most notable, jewelry and charms from the Vigilant x2 raid zone have so far been far superior to the 24-person raid zones and contested x4 raid mobs introduced with Sentinel’s Fate.
We will be tracking this story to see how this all shakes out.
Players have been reporting an issue with being able to escape combat *very* quickly on both PvP servers and Battlegrounds, and then being able to join a Battlegrounds match while seemingly still in PvP combat (on Nagafen). After some discussion and diagnosis in this thread, Rothgar posted the backstory on the issue and presented a change that will be made to address the issue:
Prior to battlegrounds the only way you got out of combat was for your hate to degrade over time. So the more hate you built with someone, the longer you’d stay in combat.
When battleground development began, a new method was added to remove you from combat if you got far enough away from your attacker and hadn’t had any aggressive action with them in a period of time. (4 seconds) The aggressive action goes both ways, you attacking them or them attacking you.
This new check was enabled for all PvP, not just battlegrounds. We’re going to increase this timer from 4 to 10 seconds and see how that goes.
The old rule is still in effect. If your hate degrades to almost nothing, you’ll be removed from combat. But in addition, if you run 20 meters away and neither of you have attacked each other in 10 seconds, you’ll also be removed.
There were some additional issues with the EQ2 servers today. The servers were set to come down for a hotfix, then that hotfix was delayed, but the automated scripts in place to prepare for a Hotfix continued. This resulted in there being no way to create new instances (visit dungeons, guild halls, cities, etc.). From Rothgar:
Due to an unrelated network issue this morning, the hotfix was not able to happen at the normal time. Since the servers were scheduled to come down but never did, this caused new instances to not be created. This is normal procedure for taking down servers but its normally resolved when they come down and then start back up.
This hotfix contains some performance changes necessary for battlegrounds to be more stable as well as some major bug fixes so we decided to bring the servers down now rather than delay the hotfix an entire day.
Then later, the servers were fixed so that instances could be created.
And then Kiara announced that the Hotfix was indeed pushed back until March 4th:
Update!
The US server hotfix is being pushed back a day to the morning of Thursday, March 4.
It will go ahead as planned for Runnyeye and Splitpaw this evening at 9pm PST March 3 (5am GMT March 4).
All of this is on the EQ2 Forums.
Players have noticed a de-targeting bug in Battlegrounds and PvP open world environments were players can become difficult to target.
Thanks for all the info about the targeting issue. You guys provided enough clues to piece together reproduction steps for this sneaky little bug.
While I won’t tell you how to reproduce it (since it’s obviously exploitable in pvp) I can give you a workaround. When you have a valid target but start getting all these targeting errors, hit escape really quick and clear your target, then click your enemy again. This will clear out the bugged UI state so you can attack normally.
Unfortunately it looks like a code issue is behind all this, so I can’t fix it personally. It’s been forwarded along to Rothgar.
From Kiara on the EQ2 Forums at 11:40am PST:
The BG’s should be reopening again shortly.
Please make sure to post in the exiting issue threads in the BG’s forum should you continue to encounter problems. We’ll be monitoring them on our end as well.
When you complete a Battlegrounds match, your character is whisked away back to your home server. Some players have been curious if a Battlegrounds Hub had been considered. This would be a lobby area where players can stay put on the Battlegrounds server and immediately jump into another battle if they wish. The issues here are that Battlegrounds servers have many many features turned off including global and guild chat. Adding a Battlegrounds lobby would require additional coding work. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
We talked about this idea early on in battlegrounds development but our thoughts were that you’d want to stay connected with your existing guild and friends as much as possible. Due to the communication restrictions between the worlds, if the Battlegrounds world were more of a destination, people would seem even more cutoff from the rest of the game.
However, I’m encouraged by the fact that all of these responses seem positive to the idea and not any negative reactions. But for this to work, we would have to solve many of the communications issues and do a lot more cleanup on the BG world.
We are working on ways to improve the zoning times when you move between the worlds so hopefully that will make zoning faster. We also have plans to try to open up guild chat and some other forms of communication between the worlds but there isn’t an ETA on that yet.
Thanks again for the feedback and ideas.
Battlegrounds Issues
Battlegrounds were taken offline last night due to zoning problems they seemed to be causing on other servers. I want to reiterate that in thousands of Battlegrounds transactions, only a handful of players experienced corruption of their characters, and those are being resolved quickly by Customer Service. Battlegrounds should be brought back online today with Rothgar and other devs closely watching their performance.
EQ2Wire On the Road
EQ2Wire will be on the road today and tomorrow so updates may be a bit slower than usual.
Here are your March 2, 2010 Hotfix notes (after the jump)
continue reading March 2nd 2010 Hotfix & EQ2Wire On the Road…
Battlegrounds vs. Oasis
Battlegrounds were locked this afternoon/evening due to significant lag and zone time issues. The servers were also rebooted. However the biggest issue is that Oasis is almost unplayable for some players.
This quote from the EQ2 Forums:
We’re aware of the problems facing the Oasis server right now and several people are working on it. It will be addressed more fully tomorrow when everyone is back in the office and I’m sure we’ll have more information then. There is an active thread on the Oasis server forum.
Character Corruption
A few players are reporting sporadic issues with losing AAs, levels, gear, etc. after lagging out from playing in Battlegrounds. I and others have played Battlegrounds and not had issues, so this seems pretty random issue. Sometimes, I did have a 5-10 minute wait leaving the Battleground and being sent back to my home server, but saw no other issues.
A Word about Forum Moderation
When I started using the EQ2 Forums I remember how intolerant the moderators were towards differing opinions and constructive criticism. Any kind of useful feedback was deleted and members banned for expressing themselves. I just plain stopped posting there. I, along with thousands of other players, moved to EQ2Flames.
It is only under Kiara’s guidance that the EQ2 forums clawed their way back to being a place where constructive criticism is allowed and players are truthful about their favorite parts as well as the major issues within EQ2. She has fought at every turn to allow players to speak their mind.
Do I think Kiara is perfect? Of course not. Nobody is. But in my 9 years experience in moderating 2 other forums, I think she’s doing a damn good job.
And yet, in the past couple of months, I have noticed unbelievable hostility towards her, blaming her for EQ2 development choices, database issues, expansion launch pains, etc. I see people shooting off at the mouth about things they don’t even understand.
But what has really turned my stomach is when I heard about players gloating to their friends that they reported her to her supervisor.
You know, I manage to post on the EQ2 Forums and express EXACTLY what I feel I need to say about all of the shortcomings and problems at SOE and the EQ2 development, and I manage to do so without getting banned. And when Kiara has done something I’ve disagreed with, I’ve told her. We’ve had some pretty heavy conversations. 
But really, if someone out there is too chickenshit to resolve their issues with Kiara, why don’t you send *me* a mail here on EQ2Wire. You might learn something.
From Rothgar on EQ2 Forums:
Customer Service has made these petitions their highest priority and they are restoring players as fast as they can. In the meantime, Battlegrounds is working fine now. It only took a few minutes this morning to bring them down after the problem, fix the configs and bring them back up.
CS is also manually restoring your XP and AA’s rather than doing a rollback of your character. So you should be safe to continue playing while you wait for them to answer your petition.
As of 12:40pm PST From Kiara:
EU servers are now up.
The BG’s have not been enabled for any of the international servers, due to the database issue.
We’ll let you know when they will be available.
Thank you for your patience today, we appreciate it.
To deal with the AA/Level loss from players who jumped into Battlegrounds, we’ve heard from Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
There will be no server-wide rollback. This problem affected about 200 users and rolling each back individually will be much less intrusive than taking down every world and rolling back all of their databases.
Please be sure to petition if you lost AA or XP due to battlegrounds.
From Rothgar, who is now officially having a bad day:
The issue with AA’s being reset seems to be a server configuration error. We have locked the battlegrounds world to keep new matches from starting up while we fix the configuration.
We will have more information very soon about how to proceed if you’re missing some AA after coming back.
Minutes after Battlegrounds went live on U.S. servers we are already hearing reports from players of numerous problems when their characters reach the Battlegrounds servers and further problems upon returning to their home servers. Reports include:
At this point, we are advising players to NOT touch Battlegrounds until they are fixed.
US Servers are unlocked and Battlegrounds are now live. EU Servers still have approximately 1 hour of downtime remaining.
For more info on Battlegrounds: EQ2Wire Battlegrounds Strategy Guide and Battlegrounds @ EQ2Players
Here are your Hotfix Notes for February 25th, after the jump..
continue reading February 25 Hotfix Notes – Battlegrounds Launch…
According to Brenlo on his Twitter, work continues on getting Battlegrounds up today. This is resulting in a longer than expected downtime.
Maintenance is running a little long. We are working on some network settings for the Battlegrounds.
UPDATE:
We are restarting the servers and expect to have everything up and running about 10am PST.
