f13.net

 I logged in today at lunch and tonight no problem. For all of it I was playing in Antonica.

At the end of tonight (approx 12:40am EST), I attempted to take the boat to Nettleville Hovel. The game hung for somewhere around 10 minutes. I gave it that long because global chat in Antonica was replete with conversations about zone lag, and crashes to desktop when zoning out.

But after 10 minutes I thought the process was busted, so I hit the "Exit" button in the lower left corner of screen.

I have not been able to log in since.

Every time I do so, I get to the Character Select screen. I am listed as being in Antonica. I hit the "Play!" button, but a dialog box appears saying something about not being able to connect to Antonica (it flashes for half a second), and then I crash to desktop.

Now it says the "Offline Server (DOWN)" in my character select window, so I can only assume the server is down.

Goodnight! :)

all my toons are now on other servers

the one I leveled from Freeport to Ant. on Steamfont is now on Oasis.  Wow. 

AND as far as I can tell, the game is still level for the sake of levelling?  What am I missing?  /quit

That's the whole genre in a nutshell. It's about the fun along the way.

I haven't played in maybe 3 weeks.  Is there any hope I can get back on Steamfont?  Any suggestions?

I'll refrain from SOE bashing, but jesus this is a stupid thing to do to players.

No there's no hope because the servers were merged.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5810.0

No, everyone is on Oasis now, they merged the servers.

I'm really surprised they didn't actually email everyone about such a huge change, the only way you would have known that your world was colliding with another was if you read their official message boards or were in a guild and someone mentioned it.  I know they have our email addresses, I still get "Come back to Everquest 1" messages.

I'll be referring to Murgos as Rerun, from now on.

Is your character  in the Bat Country guild, Soln?  If not, I'll invite you (I think everyone can invite) if you give Midden a /tell. 

I miss Steamfont.  It was just right.  Now nearly everytime I check Oasis it's on heavy load... and it shows.  I'm starting to have to camp mobs and that will kill this game for me soon.  The end is nigh.

thx appreciate an invite, I'll look for Midden

I'm about to stab myself in the eye if I have to kill another Gnoll.  Weak.

Thue guild fight that spilled over into newb chat today is proof that the server merge was maybe not the new hotness it was supposed to be, other than that, fighting for spawns and other assorted symptoms of crowded servers is definitely teh suq. Considering the alternative is WoW and all the drawbacks therein, both personal and general, I'm  either sticking to BC or quitting MMOs altogether.

Currently leaning toward the former.

Quitting MMOGs isn't an option. It's a genre now. You can't very well quit action games can you? And eventually all other genres will become so entrenched in the online persistant world model that it'll become an overarching genre instead of the niche it currently is - that said....


...They should have made a new non-PVP server or a few like I said. Get rid of 4 servers or whatever and make 2 new clean ones.

What guild fight? Some histrionics from people we don't know? Or stuff involving ourselves?

And I agree there's some issues with the merge. Too much demand at certain key points. Recent example of this for me is Blackburrow. Why isn't that place instanced?!

EQ2 and WoW have a lot in common. So much so it's sorta freaky. But I really wish the EQ2 team had ripped off instantiation the right way: all good adventure content is instanced. Everything else is public space. I was there in beta when they had to make Antonica instanced because of inventory/load issues, so understand why it is now. But be that as it is, they still need to make smallish-places like BB (small in comparison to those who need access to it) instanced.

It wasn't about us, I wasn't in that channel but I think some drama occurred on the "newbie" channel involving some other guild(s).

Also in Feerrott there was a huge amount of noise in /ooc and /shout about who was going to get to kill the dragon that appeared once the spire was built.  One guild called Sovereign (who were all /anon because they are apparently despised on Oasis) was going around to all the spires stealing the dragon pop after not contributing to its construction.  The whole raid was literally just standing there while everyone else was building wood or harvesting sky essences.  I had to resize my chat window so I didn't miss any of the epeen waving idiocy and accusations.

In the end they had to use a tank and others from the Steamfont guild monolith to win, so good on our Steamfont brethren.

Edit: Hmm, seems like the sovereign people might actually be from Steamfont themselves so we all look bad.

Ah, so a density-related problem.

That sucks. I mean, sure, it goes with the territory, but the probability of it occuring is higher with more players in an area (duh). I guess it's a predictable downside of the merges. I hope it doesn't compel as many people to quit as the perceptually-dead servers were  :mrgreen:

I'm glad Monolith was able to fight back. iPvP* ftw!

* Back in the early days of design, the concept of "iPvP" was mentioned by the EQ2 team in terms of resource fights and economics between the two cities. That mirrors what you just described fairly closely

Live events are silly.  Devs go through all that trouble and maybe .01% of the player base gets to enjoy the show.   :|   Really, as silly as WoW seems with their recent live event, at least people got to partake in the turn ins and what not. 

um what? 


Here's a legitimate design question:  I as a paying member with some good will toward SOE want to play.  Is it not reasonable for them to keep me more informed about the state of my play and changes coming to it?  I mean, it's only been maybe now 3 weeks since I played.  And I knew there was an update coming.  But I didn't expect it would include a forced server merge (since I would've maybe liked the option to go to a PvP server) or that there was a Live event.  I actually would've liked for once to see a so-called Live event.  Fuck, I wasn't even at lvl 20 -- what if I hadn't decided to go the final profession I ended up "sort of" choosing? the window message was to contact CS if the proposed choice of profession in the start up screen wasn't what I wanted.  How realisitic is that?  I sent in a CS ticket about the merge and got a polite "WAD" reply which is not a friendly dialogue with a customer.  It's unfortunately the typical terse, eschewing-any-responsibility-SOE people are publically now challenging a lot more these days.  Again, I had some good will toward SOE and was sort-of willing to play -- but WTF with the communication??  There's scores of obsessive SWG people out there and in here now ranting about the same thing.

To be clear: I don't read game forums anymore -- they're not in any worth the signal/noise ratio.  Why wasn't an email sent to players?  Is the norm that players have to read the appalling official forums of games to keep up?  Why?  Here's the post I sent where CCP sent me a simple email explaining their upcoming expansion (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5391.0).  Explaining there would be down time etc.  Pardon me Raph/Smed/Hartsman/Whomever, but how hard is that?  As a reality check, I just checked all my home mail for the last two weeks and on Feb18 I got an EQ email advertising the benefits of the Prophecy of Ro, but nothing for the game I'm actually subscribed to.  Ironic Jerry.

What's my whiny point?  My point is that MMO communications consistently suck.  And since these are paid-for online services which change (downtime, live events, class changes, NGE's...)  there ought to be some better expectation of notifying people other than reading notice boards, particularly out of game.  Particularly those run by players or other companies about the game.  Disagree?  consider this: how many of us have actually tried to play an MMO without ever going to a spoiler site?  without reading the "official forums"?  I tried it for WoW then Eve, and in Eve I finally had to give up and go to player-run sites for training info and state-of-play issues.  So my cry-more-newb point is that there's something really bad on the CS/Marketing side -- MMO's just don't get they're running a live service.  They expect users to figure everything out for themselves, even if it's coming to understand how and why they're inconvenienced or just (in my case) confused.  That just pisses people off and is sooooo preventable with a little more forethought.  Thx.

Game forums may have a lot of noise, but all of SOE handles it through sticky posts at the top of forums. It's easy to jump in sorta-daily, read up on what's happening, and jump out without ever having to worry about the whining.

It's not the best solution of course. That would be ingame communication beyond the quickly-lost-in-the-spam Message of the Day stuff.

But there is only so much they can do. Until things get magically better, players have to take a certain amount of responsibility on themselves. It works well enough right now companies can do this through forums, and while it could be improved by alot, there's not a perceived huge need to do so just yet.

Yep. And it's actually gotten BETTER since the early days. During my entire time in EQ1, I don't think I ever got an email from SOE that wasn't initiated by me (i.e. a CS request on my part). Of course, now they see email as only a marketing tool for other products than the one you are subscribed to.


The biggest problem is that the PC game industry is still in the 'product-making' mode instead of 'service provider' mode. They still think they are putting out products that only have patches, without much thought to any kind of relationship with the customer.

Official game boards are not enough. You cannot and should not expect players to go to them. For things like planned downtime and server merges, the company NEEDS to let people know without expecting the players to make any effort other than checking their email. But customer service isn't job #1 in MMOG land.

I personally hate the merged server. Now everything is camped to fuck and it seems 2/3rds of the people are named liked retards (I know I'm in the minority caring about that, but still).

I want to either roll up a character named Johnnycocksmoker to fit in, or move my characters to Lucan D'Lere with my evils.

All servers are now under a Heavy load, at least when I've logged in.

Now rather than smoothly playing the game and having fun, I'm running from camped spawn to camped spawn trying to finish up one or two quests. It took me about three hours to harvest enough tin for a quest the other day. 15 tin. Newbie zones all camped to shit, you had to actually see the resource spawn and hope you beat the other 30 people to it. Ridiculous.

The trick is to get into an overload zone that is a high instance number and then hope enough people log out and that you have the zone to yourself.

Agree 100%.  I have stopped playing EQ2 because of it.  I can't see myself coming home from a 12h work day to log onto a game and stand in a cue for a mob.  It made me so frustrated last weekend that I started playing DAoC again.  That's frustrated!

I've avoided all the over-crowded nonsense by getting Splitpaw Saga.  It's awesome, I heartily recommend it to anyone, even if its the last thing you do in EQ2.

Shh! You've unearthed their strategy! :P

I haven't seen much of the overcrowding problem you guys are talking about. Maybe it's because I'm in Freeport, but I rarely see more than one other group in Wailing Caves, or a few random folks in the Commonlands.

I becomes a lot more noticable between 20 - 35 and begins to tail off after that.  Stormhold and Fallen Gates seem to have no fewer than 20 people in them at primetime.  RoV was also quite crowded.

On the low end, I did notice that Oakmyst forest was a zoo when I was leveling my guardian. 

Some of it is also probably long time players rolling alts now that they can choose the class at level one.  A bunch of bored level 60s who know all the best low level quests and are tearing through them.  I am also certain that is where the stupid names are coming from, people naming alts which they have no intention of keeping.  With the expansion today I'm willing to bet they will all go off to play in the sky and level to 70, hopefully the crowding you guys are talking about will go away.

I loathed pickup groups so much that I never even went into Stormhold or RoV in the 20s - 30s, as soon as I saw a quest mention one of them it got deleted.  That said I actually like the new server, loot sells better and there is much more available to buy from the broker.  My hatred of groups is also slowly melting as I am forced into a few to do the Heritage Quests.  I have met some nice people on the new server.  I have also been able to do some group focused quests that would have been impossible on Steamfont since you couldn't find anyone doing the same thing as you.

In Steppes 2 last night, the griffon area was cleaned out, there was a single majestic griffon nobody took on, everything else was dead seconds from spawning. I also got maybe five resource spawns total in a couple hours, so rares for Adept spells was pretty much out of the equation.

Hell, the entire "Steppes 2" thing just smacks of 'broken'. As in, many zones are now packed beyond the fire inspector's limit. Well, I guess you can find people to group with now, right? Then you can kill things 2 seconds after they spawn instead of 15 seconds after.

I do need to do Splitpaw, I guess. I went into the cave it said to explore and I remember it being full of chained encounters, but I was getting toward drunk at the time (friday night, I think).

Is SOE trying to pull out of the mmo business or something?

Me either so far.  Maybe it's the 21-35 lvls in the Steppes where the glut is.  Granted I do play some in the AM and lunchtime but thus far playing in Ant during normal primetime hours hasn't been an issue at all.  On the contrary, I hardly ever see another person, let alone group.  Course, Blackburrow and Stormhold are another matter but even so there was plenty of spawns.

The part I hate the most is travelling within Qeynos.  Ugh.  I think I have cleaned out most of my quests in there, but I generally try to only hit lagolopolis in the morning when no one is on.  Makes a huge difference.

Xilren

Sewers are an outstanding shortcut and much less laggy.

I just think more people play from Qeynos than from Freeport, which is why I'm not seeing the crowding you guys are.

Damn Qeynosians.

I had an alt that was good because I wanted to try out Rangers. 

When an NPC in Qeynos chirped, "Everyone gather around now, I'm going to sing a song.", I deleted my goodie goodie alt.  :evil:

I have a screenshot of the singing quest guy for those wishing to find him in N. Qeynos by the trees.

(http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:8YrFgUBnl5Tg-M:www.cptv.org/images/common/barney-color.jpg)

Bigtime. For those non goodie goodies, it's called 'Down Below' or 'Catacombs' on the city zone maps. Oddly enough, 14 months later, this map (http://www.darniaq.com/EQ2/Maps/Map-DownBelow.jpg) is still accurate. Come to think of it, maybe with liking EQ2 now, I should finish the rest (http://www.darniaq.com/EQ2/Maps/eq2maps.htm)

Download the EQ2Map plug-in. It is freaking amazing how nice it is. Although, purists may not like how much easier it makes everything.

I was proud to see my maps in there, particularly the Down Below one (which was the first). Used and modified by permission yadda yadda.

It's an awesome plug-in, so useful. Between the maps, the locations, and the quests they all link to, I live by it. Someone said most UI mods are mostly for aesthetics in EQ2 (whereas in WoW they fill in big gaps in Blizzard's UI). Not sure if that's true, but eq2maps is definitely worth it.

Nice work on the maps.  Cartography is a rare skill that I definitely don't have.

EQ2Map is essential. That said, it's very assy IMO. EQ2's built-in mapping system is the weakest of the weak sauce, an absolute travesty of "we put it in there because other people had a map but we didn't really try" design. Shitty shit shit shit mapping system. EQ2Map makes it bearable, but man there are a lot of tiny ass dots on there, and the cursor sometimes just can't distinguish between them.

But it is a billion times better than the built-in maps.

Not sure why this would be helpful.  It's not getting from zone to zone thats the issue, it performance within the city zones themselves and you have to go into them to talk to the quest givers and junk.

Xilren

Ah, misunderstood.

I often wish we could save templates of our settings. When I'm soloing, I can consistently use High Performance no problem. In a group, I go to Very High Performance. In a city, I go to Extreme Performance, and make sure complex shader is down to -1. Looks like ass without complex shader, but I can move at 20-25fps (feels like. Haven't found the FPS monitor yet and fraps always hits my framerate in EQ2 just enough to be annoying).