• Up until shortly after launch, he was EQ2's live producer.  This move is more of an overdue homecoming than anything else.
• Before his production days, his background is also originally in working very closely with online communities as far back as text MUDs.  This community deserves nothing less.
• He knows that with respecting communities comes respecting the worlds they've grown to love.  He's not the kind of person who's going to come in and start re-envisioning the game wholesale.
• He has long standing relationships with all of the leads and production staff on EQ2.  In a number of cases, even longer than mine. 

One thing I want to ask is did you increase the xp for instances only or regular dungeons and instances?

• This weekend was spent trying to treat immediate symptoms while working on a more permanent plan to address the ongoing usage.  There were a number of backend optimizations and reconfigurations made which did help, but they didn't completely address the problem.  The servers did last with higher and higher load each day, but eventually did show problems this weekend as well as on Monday, as you're well aware.

• As of very early this morning we're through round #1 of increasing your server's storage hardware.  New hardware, dedicated 100% to AB.  This lets more transactions be processed, and faster.  Given the readings that we're seeing from the databases this morning, this looks like it will be quite a help on its own.

• As of late tonight we'll be through round #2 of storage hardware additions, increasing the capacity even further.

• As of a hotfix scheduled for tomorrow morning, you'll notice that historical broker events don't load until you go to look at them.  Previously, they had been loading upon login, which was causing unnecessary stress on the DBs.  We continue to look into which other informational loads can be safely deferred, to continue to reduce load here.
  

• Antonia Bayle (US)
• Befallen (US)
• Crushbone (US)
• Permafrost (US)
• Sebilis (JP)
• The Bazaar (US)

From retailers, the Burynai Seeker House Pet is only available for customers who pre-order online.  There should be disclaimers on the retailers' sites.   This is the only way that the retailers can manage the accounts to distribute the keys via email.  The store employees should be instructed to tell people this when asked, but this doesn't always occur with in-store preorders.  We try to make sure it's as clear as possible.

In short:

• Anyone who pre-orders from a retailer online should get an email from the retailer with the upgrade item key.  The game key is in the physical box.
• If you pre-order the digital download from the station store, the preorder grant is seamless.
• If you pre-ordered digitally through Direct2Drive, you should get two keys as well (upgrade and game).

You mean it's a tradeskill dev thing, not just me?  That's a relief ... Gallenite's started calling it the DominoTracker ... " />

• +15% power recovery
• 10% mana reduction cost for one minute
• Usable once per three hours

Personally I'd love to see a system where if you have x amount of message spamblocked in x minutes/hours you are disconnected and your account is deleted or disabled.

oh oh oh! mister smed.
I have a question for you.
Will we be able to play with people from non pvp servers? Since the pvp servers in eq2 are put in their own little corner and cant send tells to or from them. Which is annoying. Will we be able to play the game with other server inhabitants? And if so, how would the game be set up?

I'm here in Las Vegas a couple hours before having to fly out and appear to be wide awake and in a writing mood for no rational reason at all. 

I'm always a little sad when Fan Faire ends.  Most of us who come out here are extremely excited (some a little bit nervous) in the days leading up to it, have a blast while we're here, then end up returning home feeling both exhausted and invigorated at the same time. 

The People:  It's one of my favorite things, anywhere, to be able to wander around and talk with so many different people from all over the world.  Gamers, friends of gamers, familiar faces who've been to lots of fan faires, and the surprising number of people who came to Las Vegas this weekend for their first one.

The only thing wrong with any of it is that there are more interesting people here than anyone could possibly talk to in only three days. 

I forget whose blog I saw it on yesterday, but it's really true: When you see a fan faire badge, you know it's going to be a friendly face.  At every one that I've been to, that's undoubtedly the core of what makes Fan Faire such a great time. 

One of the most common sounds at Fan Faire, right behind "animated discussion and enthusiastic storytelling," is undoubtedly laughter. 

(Not to point fingers, but sometimes even during panels...Coyote.)

The Parties:  There is no doubt that SOE throws the best parties around.  This year the SOE event experts Jen and Lauren had to pull off ComicCon, the SOE Block Party, and Fan Faire all within the same week, and not many get to see just how much work goes into making them all happen.

The first night at the VooDoo Lounge and the second night's pool party were both excellent times.  Both places were big enough to where people could either hang out in the crowd or find a quiet spot to just relax and talk with friends. 

It was a great time. The only thing that went wrong was that they eventually had to end.

Bringing back the Karaoke band from Atlanta was a very cool touch.  Seeing Rothgar's customarily modest and quiet wife get up on stage and completely own up Sweet Child of Mine, to the utter astonishment of her coworkers, was worth it all by itself.

And while I'd never condone the unceremonious dumping of community managers into large, chlorinated bodies of water, Grimwell took it with his customary good humor and class. 

The Wedding: When I first heard about the idea of someone having an actual wedding here at Fan Faire, I was a little skeptical.  Being a big fan of anything online that brings people together, I thought it was a brilliant idea to have a wedding simultaneously online and IRL, but would it turn out cheesy? 

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/20...i_thee_wed.html

Hopefully video of it will turn up on the net somewhere. From where I sat, the crowd reaction when Vader led the procession down the immense aisle past 1600 or so people felt deafening.

John Blakely and Chris Cao, both formerly of the EQ2 team and now down at our Austin studio, summed it up the best:  "Okay.  That was really badass."

Kelly and Nathan: Congratulations to the both of you.  It was great meeting you guys.  Thanks so much for sharing that with all of us at Fan Faire.  And to your guildmates: The post-wedding snowball assault was a nice touch.  Way better than rice.  You guys cracked up at least a dozen of us EQ2 devs in the audience who realized what was happening.

Massive props to EQ2's own PR expert Taina Rodriguez for going way above and beyond the call by including the responsibilities of "Wedding Planner" into her already overloaded Fan Faire duties, and then hitting it clear out of the park.

Smed's Address: The entire video is already up on the net, so there's really nothing of substance to add here, but I do want to say that I was impressed with how well everything was received. 

Working on the inside, we see presentations like this at our own company meetings and at press events throughout the year, but bringing the extended and enhanced version of the show to Fan Faire, to lay everything out in front of the people who really matter, was a great thing to see happen.

The energy in a room like that compared to a more sedate press demo or company meeting is something you have to be there to appreciate.  I literally couldn't stop myself from grinning during the video for The Agency. 

(Although that might have been because I knew the line "What...the..." was coming, and kind of figured how everyone would react...)

I sincerely hope we do more things like that in the future.

The Costumes:  Seeing how the costume contest has grown past solely EQ costumes is really kind of sobering, in a cool way.  It's easy to forget how far things have come in the past seven years.  Pirate costumes, Matrix outfits, and even an Agency spy.

This year added the ability for everyone attending to vote for their favorite by txt message.  There's really no better way to judge this.  I don't know who at SOE thought of that or who made it happen, but that was really slick.

The Panels:  This time we decided to take a different tack with our panels and Q&A's.  Where we usually only talk about things coming out within the next couple months, this time we went way past basic Q&A and shared a lot more about future projects than we've done in the past, including a few things that are going to be worked on clear over the next year.

The reason we usually don't talk too far ahead about projects in-progress is that with the longer term ones it's hard to know exactly how or when they'll all come together and the last thing we want to do is disappoint anyone. 

This time, while we didn't entirely throw caution to the wind, we did share quite a bit about things like Guild Housing, Combat Music, the New Map System, New Character Models, and dozens of smaller things. 

We do try hard to make sure that everything we're saying is accurate, but when we're all so excited about sharing news in the completely unscripted and free-form parts of the sessions, and everyone who rushes to post is anxious to be the one to break the news, sometimes the subtle parts do get lost in translation. 

Once we get home and can see what kind of information, comments, and questions are out there we'll put together a post of clarifications and corrections and get it out there for everyone. 

Time to get moving.  Better wrap this up.

To the devs who prepared the cool stuff to show off and talk about:  Thanks for doing this on top of all of the normal, excellent work that you do each and every day.

To the Community, Marketing, PR, and especially Operations folks who turned completely empty hotel ballrooms, conference rooms, and hallways into the best party of the year in under twelve hours: Saying "thank you" barely scratches the surface.

And to everyone who attended fan faire:  Thank you all so much for coming out.  I hope you truly do understand how important you are, and how grateful we are you're all here.

Until next year,

- Scott

Gallenite wrote:

Sass:  Agree that the forest could use some love similar to what you've described, but there's unfortunately very little "simply" when it comes to large scale population changes like that.  That goes beyond the scope of this current round, but again, I think you're nearly right on the money.

Scott, at the bare minimum, can you give the Bear Cave respawn tent a clear path back to the road?

I have about 1 in 3 success rate in getting a level 10 character out of there after an 'inadvertent' death.

For those who have seen Antonica and Nektulos in their GU37 version on TEST SERVER (please do not comment on the current state of live here! This is for the test update that just went to Test Server this morning!)...

As with the Commonlands thread from last time, which generated many useful posts, let's do the same thing this time for Antonica and Nektulos.

* Any quests that have none or too-few targets?

* Non-kill quests that can't be completed?

* Anything else outright broken?

* Anything else that should be addressed?

Thanks,

- Scott

Now Im wondering somthing... when can you use the key? Is their some special Equinox session further down the road, 1 week before release? Or is it day 1 beta?

bah... one just got through the filter

 

Anyways I feal like a guinea pig.

Please guys, don't confuse reporting bugs to be a license to send spam to strangers.

Morning, folks.  I'm up in LA at E3 at the moment, but we got word that a maintenance not on the game side ended up taking down more servers than it was supposed to, hence the lack of warning.  

Apologies for the unexpected downtime.  Those doing the maintaining are in the process of making sure everything's all right, and getting them all back up. 

- Scott

1st.  Did he say he had to reach for a "Cheat Sheet"?

Yes.   

For some reason yesterday, I kept forgetting at least one thing to talk about each time I talked with someone, so I had scribbled notes nearby. 

I bet it had something to do with getting up at 6 to make it down to the hall in time.

Really, 6am is generally best viewed from the perspective of the night before.  Not the day of.

Most of the comments from this thread have been acted on -- Some of them even before they were posted!  (e.g. Rama'nai and a couple others were caught by the time the first changes went up.)

The general rule for Commonlands quests appears to have indeed been that if it was travel only, it didn't offer Achievement gain.  Most of those quests do now offer achievements, since traveling long distances in hostile areas most definitely doesn't mean "no danger."

- Scott

Is there any eta on it? i know it got to be soon with a new expansion coming up. i dont think they would make the expansion with the old system just to rewrite it too. any idea?