When I missed a day of school, I would usually return feeling a little out of step with the rest of the class. A similar thing happens here on EQII when you miss a day of work.

Last Friday I was out of the office, and Monday feels like a whole new ballgame!

We are getting ready to roll out Game Update 45 next week, so now most of us are at least partly working on bugs being reported on the forums, the test servers or ones we come up with on our own. But since last Thursday they’re almost all new bugs!

People usually come up with shorthand for almost anything they have to say a lot, so instead of saying “bug number XXXXX where a player can have this problem in their house under these circumstances…” it just becomes “The house bug” or “the AA bug” or “the crash bug”, each with a different meaning depending on who you’re talking to and what they’re working on. The big change for me is now not only do all those phrases have different meanings based on person or group, but they all got new meanings while I was out for just one day! That old “house bug” that I ask about? We totally fixed it last week!

So how do I deal with that?  First I get a happy-glowy feeling for a minute because it means people were reporting and fixing bugs, and GU45 really does have some great stuff I’m looking forward to. But then I go back and start reading the reports in our bug tracking software called “DevTrack” and see who has what assigned to them. And then I try to talk to anyone that has a bug I don’t understand.
 
After I got to the point where one more bug report will make my eyes start to pop out of my head, or people are just really, really tired of me asking questions, I took some of my own feedback and threw it out for some reactions.

Last night while I was playing, we had need before greed chosen as our loot option. I hadn’t realized that if you’re using need before greed, each item will pop up separately. Three items had dropped off an NPC in a group instance and two of them were perfect for my class. I was looking at the first one, comparing it to all the stats on my current items and when the group asked “Do you need” I said “nope, I don’t”. I clicked on the “Greed” option for that item. Then before you could blink, the item set chest piece for my class popped up in the next loot window. I was so excited I typed “Woot chest!” to my group and went to hit the “Need” button but the lotto had timed out and the window disappeared with my mouse literally hovering over the now gone “need” button.

My group thought I had meant I didn’t need either item, and I was just stunned. And then, before my slightly watery eyes, as I was starting to scrolling back and forth to figure out what had happened, I see one of our group members turn my perfectly new and shiny chest piece into a piece of dust!

So if you happen to see the timers being increased for drops on need before greed lotto windows, you can think of me and my poor chest piece being ground to dust before my very eyes… and my Monday back at work!

Jennifer “Kirstie” Gerull
Associate Producer - EQII

 

“Pick up group” is phrase that can strike fear and terror into the heart of many a strong adventurer. I know people who swear they’ll never join a pick up group, preferring to solo, craft, or just stand around on a street corner singing for coins rather than risk the unknown. And then on the other side, there are people like me, who love them.

My play style is by preference and by necessity pretty casual - working full time and also working somewhat unpredictable hours at times, I don’t like to commit myself to any fixed play schedule. Before taking this job I used to raid once or twice a week, but now I’m in a different time zone I can’t raid with my old guild, and so I mainly solo and tradeskill and, of course, join the occasional pick up group! Pick up groups are, to me, almost always huge amounts of fun. Sometimes you get into a great group with good people and tear through a dungeon. Sometimes you end up with a bunch of people who are funny and make great conversation and you add lots of new friends to your friends list. And then, sometimes, there’s a group like the one I got into last week. The group that’s so bad, it’s funny. The group with the tank who can’t tank, the healer who can’t heal, or the warlock who can’t manage aggro. The group who provides fuel for hours of entertaining commentary to keep your guild laughing at your suffering. The group whose names will go into your friends list with notes to never, ever group with again … but who nonetheless keep you laughing and falling off your chair in amusement at their antics.

Last week it was a Halls of Fate group. I heard the call go out in channel and since I was just solo questing in Kunark, I decided a quick HoF run might be fun and a bit of XP. We ended up with a 77 shadow knight tank, a 69 berserker, a 66 fury, a 68 warlock, and me, a 72 dirge. They wanted another healer so I asked my guild if anyone was interested, and a guildmate’s 72 fury alt joined us. I wasn’t actually convinced we’d need a second healer with a 77 tank, but how wrong I was! He wiped the entire group 3 times on the first named, as he couldn’t seem to single pull — and on the rare occasions that he actually did single pull (by fluke, I assume) the berserker would get adds anyway by assisting too soon before the mob was safely back out of aggro range. He didn’t grasp the concept of turning the mobs. He didn’t grasp the concept of pulling back to the group, and would fight right in a doorway so it was impossible for me to get behind the mob to backstab without getting more aggro from inside. He couldn’t single-pull, and despite being 5 levels higher than the next closest group member, he couldn’t keep aggro even with my +35% hate song on him. He wiped the entire party by pulling the ritualists before killing all the blobs, despite my guildmate specifically telling him “don’t pull the ritualists, kill all the blobs first.” The poor lower level fury died so much that her equipment fell off and I had to give her a patch kit. He tanked the dragon (which has a knockback) with his back to the wide open cavern below. He wiped us on the last mob at the end.

I hadn’t been through HoF for probably a year or more; the last time I was there, 70 was still the level cap. But back when it was still a popular choice to do, I’ve been through it with a level 70 berserker tank, a paladin tank, a guardian tank, a shadow knight tank, even a bruiser tank, all at level 70, and all these groups completed the dungeon with fewer wipes than last week’s group with the level 77 tank. It was actually somewhat mind-boggling that a level 77 tank could actually tank that badly: at 77, in a level 70 dungeon from 2 expansion past and with two healers and a dirge, I would have thought it would actually take more skill TO wipe a group 5 times than not to. I was starting to get a little frustrated, and beginning to entertain wild thoughts about actually leveling up a tank myself just to have the satisfaction of tanking better than this guy. But then, about half way through the dungeon, after apologizing to my guildmate for getting him into this mess, I realized that I was actually having a fun time despite all this. It was, in fact, hilarious! The tank would pull multiples, and I’d be laughing out loud at the screen. The poor 66 fury would die yet again, and I’d be giggling. I’d throw off my emergency dirge heal onto the healers or the warlock, trying to keep them up long enough for a healer to save them, and chuckle to myself. My guildmate and I spent the last half of the dungeon exchanging commentary on his tactics in guild chat, to the great entertainment of the guild; and of course we reminded all our guild tanks just how much we appreciate them.

Sure, when the group finished and the berserker suggested continuing to Obelisk of Blight there was a moment of silence in group chat and then everybody but the tanks suddenly realized how late it was and how soon they had to sleep. And sure, I ended up with visible debt on my xp bar for the first time in months. But by the next time I have time to log in, that’ll be gone, and repair costs aren’t going to break the bank. I guess if I’d been looking for the maximum efficiency and fastest leveling per time spent, I would have been crankier. But this is a game, and I play games for fun, and watching this tank blunder through HoF like a bull in a china shop was slapstick entertainment on the same level as watching an old Laurel and Hardy film. If only I’d had Fraps installed, I could have converted it to black and white, set it to piano music, and made a smash hit on YouTube! So I remain a fan of the pick up group, even when it goes horribly wrong. At the very least you get quite a horror story with which to entertain your guild, and at the best, it’s hours of entertainment for all. =)

Anyone reading this far may be wondering what all of this actually has to do with tradeskills, and the answer is not much at all, it’s just what I happened to do last week when I wasn’t revamping crafted weapons and fixing bugs. However, it did start me speculating on whether the changes to weapon imbues that are coming up will have any effect on this type of terrible tank. Most likely not on this particular tank, of course, but would they have, if they’d been available back when he was still leveling up? For those who haven’t been following the weapon changes, as of Game Update 45 the imbue effect on weapons will be modified so that in addition to the direct damage component it’s always done, it now also adds a hate modifier. If you’re facing the mob, the weapon proc will add hate to you. If you’re beside or behind the mob, it will reduce hate. Ideally of course, perfect tanks in perfect worlds always pull the mob back to the group and then position it so that its back is to them and they don’t have to move at all to start attacking, and a good tank does this so smoothly that it looks effortless. There are many reasons to do this, the main ones being that if you attack from behind, you aren’t at risk of taking damage if the mob ripostes your attack, the mob can’t parry your hits so your damage will be higher, and you are protected from any frontal attacks it may have such as knockbacks or frontal AoEs. The new imbue effect on the crafted weapons will reward groups that do position themselves this way - and it now works on spell damage also, so that mages or priests casting damage spells can also get the same effect on their weapons even if they aren’t doing melee damage, and will be equally encouraged to position themselves correctly and have their tank do so as well.

Mastercrafted weapons are a reasonably popular choice at lower levels, and after this revamp improves their stats, they will probably be more so. If a reasonable proportion of people in lower level groups use weapons with this imbue effect (though there is an alternate choice available also) then tanks may get accustomed from a low level to having their group request that they pay more attention to proper positioning, and others in a group may get used to positioning themselves properly also. This was not the intention of changing the effect — we were just looking for ways to make it more useful, without being overpowered — but meeting tanks like this guy has made me wonder if it could work as a little gentle training as people level up using these effects. A halfling can hope, anyway!

Emily “Domino” Taylor

One of the most difficult jobs that I’ve had while working on EverQuest II has been the “revamping” of zones or areas. Some of these revamps have ranged from entire population replacements with quests being modified to fit, to just minor adjustments of mob difficulty in heavily trafficked areas.

Generally, the work in and of itself isn’t that hard, but the planning can be quite labor intensive. Just about everything you click, every mob you kill, and every object you see in our game is somehow connected to a quest, a story, or a character in some way. It is quite nerve wracking when you want to make something better, but risk breaking a hundred things to get to that point.

The best revamps (to me, of course!) are the ones where I get to scrap everything without worrying about what was in there before, and make an entirely new zone out of it. I was given a choice of zones to do this with a few months ago, and eventually settled on making a level 80 instance of Runnyeye.

Runnyeye itself has presented some challenges, but I think it’s coming together nicely after some much needed housecleaning. When I first went into the zone completely empty, I couldn’t help but think that the goblins really need to clean up this dump, so the first thing I did was start deleting all of the trash piles and modifying the zone art to fit my needs.

The goblins were expecting some guests after all, and it wouldn’t do to invite dignitaries into a hovel.

Steve “Saavedra” Kramer

Game Update 44 just went out the door two weeks ago.  During the time it was sitting on the Test Servers, developers were turning around fixes for bugs faster than I had ever seen before.  But there is nothing like having thousands of people try out a new zone or a new feature for a couple minutes to find the things we missed or didn’t think of faster than you can say “oops.”

So what I have learned since I’ve been working on EQII is that along with new content and a ton of little fixes and tweaks, one thing each Game Update brings along with it is a few Hotfixes.  Getting those Hotfixes from the hot little hands of the developers to the servers is where I come in, and often what I spend a decent chunk of my day doing.

Deciding what is going into a hotfix is a science in itself and could fill up several pages of a blog (foreshadowing of whats to come perhaps?) J.  But once the developers are done with their changes, I, or they, move it into a special branch just for doing Hotfixes (A branch is a full copy of the game and all the data needed, we usually have 3 branches at any given time).  I digress a little bit here, but if you’ve ever looked at the “SOEBuild” number at the top of your client window and wondered why it has a letter like “T” or “L” at the end of the number, that’s a reminder to me and others about what branch that particular build came from.

After all the data is in the correct branch of code, I push a button and it gets built by a farm of machines (I push a lot of buttons at work, kinda like George Jetson but with longer hours).   In most cases it sends me an email saying everything went well, but sometimes things go badly and I go bug someone to fix their stuff and try building it again.  If it’s a coder we have a really ugly doll named “BoB” that gets to sit on their desk until the next coder gets the “Breaker of the Build” title.

So once we have a complete build, I push another button and it gets put up onto a server.  If I’m lucky I’ll have remembered to email out to people that the server is coming down for an update.  If you’ve ever been on early in the morning and the server came down and we forgot to broadcast, that’s what it’s like in the office if I forget to send the email about the server coming down.  A few times I’ve heard people groaning and making unhappy noises from halfway across office floor just after I push the button, so I try to avoid that as much as possible.

Anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours after I pushed the first button we will have a new version of the game all ready for QA to look at.  I usually send over all the changes we made to the QA team via email and wait patiently for the results.  I say usually because sometimes something is so urgent to get out to the live servers we skip the patient email part and jump right to phone calls and nervous waiting. J

If everything goes well in QA, this is almost the end of my time with the hotfix.  I push one more button to move the files to the live environment, compile the update notes for the Launchpad and Gnobrin to post, and then submit a ticket with our GameOps group.  The GameOps group updates the network status page with the downtime and actually gets the client and server files from where I put them onto the Live Servers and Patchers, usually the next day or the next Monday if I’ve submitted the ticket late in the week.

The other thing that can happen quite often is QA sends back their findings on why the build really shouldn’t be sent live and what’s wrong with it.  Many times we’ll have four or five items that the QA group finds are working just fine but one of the things isn’t working.  The worst kind we can get back is when a change we made causes the client to crash all the time, when really the devs were trying to make it crash less often.  When this happens the whole process starts over from the beginning, even though we fixed more stuff than we broke, we still can’t put the Hotfix out to live servers until everything looks good or at least a lot better than what we had before.

Usually in the mornings I’ll start out by labeling the internal updates with the letter A and then B and so on.   A few times I’ve gotten all the way to L, M and N builds, but that is usually the exception rather than the rule on the number of iterations in one day.  By the time we get to N, its usually time to go home and try again the next day.  So far the one thing I have never run out of is fixes and tweaks that developers want to get out based on feedback or their own play sessions the night before!

 

Jennifer “Kirstie” Gerull
Associate Producer - EQII

Tuesday morning and it’s Game Update 44 day! For the design team, that means most of the work is in the past — we had checked in all our changes weeks ago, and fixed up all the bugs by last week, so we’re already well focused on GU45 content. For the engineering folks, however, today is a much busier day. MissDoomCookie and I are usually the early birds of the team and are generally in the office by 8 am most days. On Game Update days Kirstie beats us in however — and better yet, she sometimes brings in muffins and bagels for the others working on the update, which this morning means leftovers: a very yummy pumpkin muffin for me.
 

The past month has been quite full, and also full of changes in various ways. It started out on quite an exciting note: the 9th anniversary of the original launch of EverQuest, which started it all. I was working for Sony Pictures Entertainment at the time, so it wasn’t till 2001 that I was introduced to EverQuest, when one of their marketing team came to visit the office I was based in and worked out of our location for a few months marketing the Rise of Kunark in Asia Pacific. And that was the start of a beautiful relationship — not with the marketing guy, but with Norrath, and of courses with many of the friends I made in Norrath too — a relationship that ultimately led me to work on EverQuest II, 7 years later. The company put on a barbeque out in the parking lot, and there was much rejoicing, beer, and food.
 

This past month has also seen some sad changes though, as a few of the design team have decided to move on to other things. Some have just moved to other projects within SOE for a change of pace, others have accepted external offers, and in both cases the changes are an excellent opportunity for them, but it’s still a little sad to see empty desks appear. However, we are interviewing for replacements at the moment, and I hope we will soon find some great new folks to bring the team back to full size once more!

 

Most exciting for me personally this month was the approval of my visa renewal! My US work visa was due to expire at the end of this month, so I was much relieved to be told that the extension for another year has been approved by the Department of Immigration. It appears that I get to work on tradeskills for another year at least, which makes me very happy, and hopefully makes everyone else happy too - particularly weaponsmiths, as I’m working on some improvements to their weapons this month. I am, of course, still a scary immigrant; the banks still don’t trust me much, and the instructions on the visa paperwork refers to me in the friendly terms of “the alien” all over the place. “The alien must keep this portion of the card with his or her passport at all times”. Jindrack wanted to know if I have my own starship too. I wish! For now, I’ll just have to make do with visiting the Temple of Life in North Qeynos.
 

Emily “Domino” Taylor

 

I was in a meeting with our Customer Service folks recently, who gave me this statistic: Four percent of the petitions in game are taking eighty five percent of Customer Service’s time to resolve. Yes, you read that right. Four percent. Not Forty. For those of you who like numbers, like I do, that’s 4% taking up 85% of the time they have to respond to petitions for assistance.

Why is that, I hear you ask? There has been a recent increase (OK, I’ll admit I want to use the word explosion) in theft of accounts, and the subsequent stripping of the characters on those accounts. And doing the research on a hacked account is a tedious amount of work, digging through log files, matching data from here and there.

There are several ways that your account can be hacked in this fashion.

First, and easiest, is the sharing of your account information. “Hey, Bob, I can’t make the raid tonight, but if you need a tank/healer/whatever, here’s my account name and password, you can let somebody in our guild play me for tonight.” Yes, this is expressly against our Terms and Conditions. The problem is that as much as you think you can trust someone or a group of people, the fact is that often you can’t. And honestly, even if the same 25 people you’ve been guilding with for the last umpteen years are great folk (and I bet they are!), there’s always that new person, who isn’t quite as well known, and hasn’t been part of the group quite as long, or isn’t quite as careful about what runs on their computer, which is…

The second problem: Key logging applications. Call them worms, call them Trojans, call them viruses, they’re evil. And they’re everywhere. There have been several websites in the last six months that have had them embedded in their pages, or in executables that you might download, or even in images that you might look at. Some of these websites may not even know that they have them and have been spreading them! But they’re out there, and the information gleaned isn’t just the password to EQII. It could be the password to your email account, or even your online banking account. Most of the people who have this issue aren’t even aware it exists until something happens. Their character is stripped, their bank account (real life, or in game) is emptied, any of multiple things that are never good can happen. And remember that guy you just passed your account information to so that the raid could continue? They may be a great person, but they may not know that they have a key logger on their machine, and no matter how careful you have been on your PC, you just can’t know how careful they are.

So, that’s some of the bad news. But how can you protect yourself? There is a passel of free things that you can do, with only the investment of your time, and some bandwidth. And another thing that may cost you a few bucks, but is ultimately useful.

The free and easy stuff:
• Run Microsoft’s Windows Update function, and install every update labeled “security” that you can. I’d actually recommend installing everything that shows up in that process that you can, as often you’ll find some updated drivers that might help your machine speed up, or at least work better. But the security updates are the most important, as they will patch certain “holes” in Internet Explorer that these folks use to install these key logging applications on your machine.

• Don’t use Internet Explorer? Make sure your version of Firefox, Safari, Opera, whatever browser you’re using is up to date with the latest build and patches. But it is still worth running Windows update, and making sure that all the other aspects of your PC’s operating system are up to date. For better or worse, Internet Explorer is integrated with Windows in many fashions, and even if you’re running a different browser, the updates make help protect your system.

• Have a different password for the game and your email. Sure, it’s easier to have one password for everything. It also makes it that much easier once someone grabs your password to get into things you really, really don’t want them to get into.

 • Change your passwords. Frequently. And make them nonsense, or at least something that isn’t easy to guess, like your main character’s name with a 1 either before or after it. I’d be pretty foolish to use Bruce1 or 1Bruce as a password.

 • Don’t use power leveling or gold buying services. The simple fact is that these folks are unscrupulous. They’re already breaking our policies by selling plat on our servers. Just how big of a step do you think it is for them to steal back what you just purchased from them, and then hope that you’ll buy it back again since your account was hacked? And the power leveling guys….you’re already giving them the account information so that they can level the character. So they know what your password is, or what kind of style your password is in, so it’s that much easier for them to try the brute force attack against your account.

The slightly less free, but still relatively easy thing:

 • Buy and install an anti-virus program. There’s a ton of them out there. Norton and McAfee are the two most known ones, but there are others. I’m fond of two free ones in addition to the paid version I have on all my machines: Spybot - Search and Destroy, and Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware. These two, run sequentially, have been very successful in my personal life, in which I spend a lot of time cleaning up PCs that belong to friends that aren’t quite as net-savvy, and they clean up all sorts of detritus that ends up slowing down a PC. Update them with the latest information from where ever they get it, and run them!

 These are all fairly easy things, and don’t require hundreds of dollars to do, just an investment of a small amount of time, and some common sense. Just be smart about how you interact with the big world on the web, and you’ll be safe, and we won’t be adding your account to these alarming statistics.

Howdy, folks, and welcome to the brand-spanking new EverQuest II Developer’s blog. I’m Bruce “Froech” Ferguson, and I’ll be your sometimes host through the weird and wacky world of game development, along with a host of other team members who will be bringing their own perspective and comments to this blog. I’m actually quite excited about this new venture, as we’ve promised ourselves that we’ll post much more “off the cuff” than we tend to in our forums, and it will give us a chance to speak about what we want to, quickly and easily. Of course, some folks are naturally more verbose than others, and we all have our distinct writing styles which I think you’ll get to enjoy as we take this journey together.

So, this being the first post, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of our various communities for their support. It’s easy as a developer to fall into the trap of listening to only one group or another, as they “shout” louder, or post more information than other groups. In fact, we, as a team, are listening. We’re listening to the hard core raiders. We’re listening to the casual players.  We’re listening to the people who attend Fan Faires. We’re listening to the people who post on our boards, and other boards as well. We’re looking at information we gather in game to see what the vast non-vocal majority is doing. We’re constantly trying to gather as much information as we can so that we can steer the game in a direction that satisfies the majority. Sometimes, we miss the mark, and have to do a course correction further down the road. But we’re certainly trying.

 We all have pretty full plates right now, but we do appreciate your feedback in all forms, and we continue to read it in as many places as possible, even though time restraints often do not permit us to reply individually. When we do have time to respond, we’ll post here in this blog, or in the SOE boards. However, that doesn’t mean that we’re not reading! Frankly, we value the input.

 I’m looking forward to some interesting discussions here on this blog. Thanks for taking the time to read….and the time to play. We certainly appreciate your continued support, and the enjoyment you take from the game.

 Bruce “Froech” Ferguson

Senior Producer - EverQuest II