It’s Sunday afternoon about 2 p.m. and I’m sitting on a bus heading back home from Las Vegas. Another SOE Fan Faire has come to a successful end and a bus full of tired staff are mostly dozing in the bus seats, or listening to their MP3 players.  If the traffic doesn’t get too bad, we should be home around 8 p.m. tonight, so everyone is settling in for the long haul.

The Fan Faire went really well. This was my second Fan Faire as a SOE employee, my third in total. Last year I had only been with the company for a couple of months, and although I participated in a couple of discussion panels, there wasn’t one solely dedicated to tradeskills. This year however we had a specific tradeskill discussion panel and I had the main responsibility for deciding what information to present and putting it together. That was a bit of a challenge for me as I’m terrible at public speaking, so I put together a few slides to speak for me, outlining a couple of the new things that people can expect in the upcoming game update, and then talking a bit about the main tradeskill feature of the expansion: tradeskill missions. These will be little instanced missions that tradeskillers can group up to complete, and, while they’re pretty simple in theory, should be an interesting change of scene for tradeskillers, particularly ones who don’t get out adventuring much.

In general Fan Faire is an interesting and somewhat odd experience. It’s great meeting all the people who play our games, and putting faces to the names I’ve seen in game or posting on our forums. This year I met up with two friends I’ve known since I played EQ in the very early days – we probably became acquainted around 2002 or 2003 I would guess, but we’d never actually met in person or even spoken direct voice to voice. One of them I knew would be here but the other was a complete surprise and it was great to meet both of them at last after all these years. It’s also slightly strange sometimes to meet these people you’ve only known as their in-game character and discover that, in person, they’re not actually the dark elf you’ve always pictured them as. It’s not that I actually thought they were dark elves, obviously, but lacking any other visual image for them, their character was the most familiar way to picture them in my mind. Of course, when they first met me I was an evil dark elf too, and that’s definitely not the case in real life either, so no doubt they felt a similar adjustment of mental images.

Besides these two old, old acquaintances from way back in “the good old days” I also had the opportunity to meet a lot of newer acquaintances, and meet again some of the people I had met previously from last year’s Fan Faire and similar events. Brasse, best known from www.thebrasse.com and now also working for MassiveGamer.com, dressed in her fabulous bearded dwarf costume, is practically an icon of Fan Faire and always a delight to talk to. Calthine from Allakhazam was as always an inexhaustible whirlwind of energy running around interviewing everyone she could find and taking copious notes. Niami Denmother from EQ Traders Corner, this year wearing a beautiful renaissance style costume for the closing banquet, helpfully supplied tired SOE staff with bundles of Denmother’s Trail Mix to keep our spirits up and our energy high. Rijacki from EQ2Alchemy, Tamat, Bludwyng and Autumnkiss from Allakhazam, Dellmon from the EQ2’s Day podcast, entire guilds out in force such as Tapiolan Sankarit and the Legion of the White Rose, and so many more that if I listed them all it would turn this article into an essay. There were also many new faces to meet, not just EQII players but players of our rapidly growing number of other games, and perhaps we will meet again at next year’s Fan Faire.

 

I took lots of photos and so did other people, and there are already lots of photos up on the official Fan Faire site.   One of the cleverest things I saw at the final banquet though — besides some of the costumes, which were creative and very impressive — was a gift that one guildmate had made for another in the Legion of the White Rose.  It seems that guild member Lairia is well known for being absolutely unable to resist picking up collectible “shinies” any time, any place, any type.  So her fellow guildmate Steeldragon presented her with a “real life” version of a collectible in person!  It was a handcrafted gift, you might even call it tradeskilled, so I was particularly impressed, and took a photo.  You can’t see it easily from the photo, but there is a little LED light inside too to make it really sparkle.  They informed me that their table banner was also tradeskilled, using “commission crafting” (guild member Pantheros arranged to have it, and a cloak, professionally made).

 

The main social events of the Fan Faire were the welcome reception on Thursday night, the karaoke party on Friday night, and the closing banquet on Saturday. The main excitement was of course John Smedley’s address to the community on Friday night, announcing the names and details of the upcoming EverQuest and EverQuest II expansions, and previewing some of our upcoming new games such as FreeRealms and DC Universe Online. We got to see a lot more live gameplay in both of these and they are definitely looking very exciting, and already full of much more content since the last time I had an opportunity to see a demo. During the day, the game designers such as myself either sat on discussion panels or hung around the Legends Lounge chatting with anyone who happened to come by. Many of us also had other tasks assigned, such as helping to set up the “game room” computers that were used for running some of the gaming competitions, and for people to just generally log in and catch up with their game of choice; or helping to set up and pack up the many displays and computers involved in the events. For most SOE staff it was a non-stop work weekend from the time we woke up till the time we gratefully passed out in our soft hotel beds, and we are looking forward to a well-deserved day of rest when we get home. My main regret, besides simply not having enough time in the day to spend as much time talking to all the people I’d love to have talked with at more length, is that I was so busy with the EQII-related events that I didn’t have time to sit in and listen on any of the panels I wasn’t involved with, such as the ones talking about our other games! Once we’re all back at work I’m hoping to catch up with a few of the people from the other teams to learn a little more about what I missed. Although EQII is my main game, I’m always very interested to see and hear what our other games are up to and I try and chat with the folks I know from other game teams from time to time.

The best part of the Fan Faire was as always just getting to talk to the folks who play and love our games and hear what they’re enjoying, what they’d like to see in the future, and what they think would add more fun and excitement to the game. It sounded as if all the tradeskilling players I spoke to were very excited by the concept of the tradeskill missions and related rewards, and now it’s up to me to gmake sure they’re not disappointed!

 Emily “Domino” Taylor

Fan Faire. Can you smell the excitement? This is what it really is all about, this is our opportunity to recharge the batteries, to really chat in an informal and formal way with the folks who enjoy our game without any barriers. So far, we’ve had a wonderful time, and there’s another day to go!
 
Of course, I can’t really post here without mentioning the big announcement of our upcoming expansion. Yes, it’s called EverQuest II: The Shadow Odyssey, and we’re pretty stoked. With over 20 areas to fight in, including Innothule as a central location, things are looking great for this fall. You’ll see Mistmoore, Najena, Guk, and Befallen, with many zones with content that scales from 50 to 80. We’ve got an exiting new Dungeon Delving / mission system which will allow you to do daily quests to get experience, faction, and loot. There will be a whole slew of new achievements, since we’re raising the cap to 200, and you’ll see improved critical damage, critical mitigation, and new pet buffs amongst other exciting things.  Did I hear you say Heritage Quests? Why, yes, we’ve got several of those. In addition to tons of normal quests, and even a couple of deities are returning to Norrath, in the avatars of Rodcet Nife and Anashti Sul.
 
Not so much into the Adventuring side, but fascinated by Tradeskilling? We’re going to be introducing several new Tradeskill dungeons, and provide a raid like experience for you, where you’ll group together to complete a goal of crafting in order to earn faction and purchase recipes.
 
We’re going to start talking about all of these things in tomorrow’s panels, so if you’re here at Fan Faire, start writing down your questions, and we’ll try to answer them to the best of our ability.
 
Finally, thank you, one and all, for your continued enjoyment of EverQuest II. I speak for not only the development staff, but all of SOE when I say we appreciate your participation in the exciting world of Norrath!
 
Bruce “Froech” Ferguson
Senior Producer

If you’re going to Fan Faire this year, you’re probably going to meet a lot of people who work on the games you love.  However, everyone plays a bit of a different role.  As you may have noticed from forum posts, people have different Titles that indicate what they work on.  What do these titles really mean?  Who should I be talking to about my question?  And maybe we’ll find an answer to that age-old question: “What does a Producer really do?”

You can think of the different disciplines of game development as archetypes and classes.  As you grind work you level up your career.  And like any good Raid, working on a game takes a mix of disciplines, leadership and skills.  Occasionally, developers even earn DKP in the form of bonuses.

• Designers breathe the lifeblood into the game.  They write quests, set up NPCs, populate the world, create items and scribe spells.  Some designers focus on Mechanics (spells, balance, achievements, etc) while others focus on Content (NPCs, Quests, Lore).  Tradeskills are also an important part of our world and some designers work exclusively on Raid Encounters.  While most of designers’ work is done in tools written by Programmers, designers may learn skills such as scripting as they level up.  Higher-level designers often mentor lower-level designers to increase experience gain and may go on to become supervisors or even the elusive Lead Designer.
• Programmers define the physical nature of the world and help the rest of the team see their vision.  Logically minded, programmers don’t generally do any of the creative tasks that the designers do.  Programmers construct most of the systems of the world from the high-level user interface that lets you navigate the world and experience its pleasures to the low-level systems that store characters, allow you to travel and keep everything in sync.  While programmers may govern the rules and formulae of combat, the rules themselves are often determined by the designers.  Programmers generally begin at the Intern or Associate level but may reach Senior, Lead Programmer or even Technical Director as they gain experience.
• Artists set the look of the game and are responsible for nearly everything you see, from the building blocks of the UI, inventory icons, characters and vast landscapes you explore.  Rich and complex particles are also the responsibility of artists.  Most artists form everything you see out of a structure of thousands of triangles stretched with a textured skin to give it the appearance that you know and love, and then finally animate the form to make it seem real.  Artists work closely with the designers to build the world and characters that the designers envision.
• Community Representatives spend 100% of their time interfacing with you, the players.  They take note of important issues from the players and inform the development team of them.  They are jovial entertainers and adept conversationalists and can be instructed to dance on command.  Community represents different languages, so they can also function as translators to bring issues from different regions to the dev team.
• Producers are … well… Hmm.  What do they do?  Producers have the job of tying everything together.  They work with executives at the company to give them status reports.  They work with the team to set reasonable expectations and scheduling.  They provide the clear direction of the game and communicate with the players to share that direction.  And meetings… oh, do they love meetings!  They are the head of the game.  The buck stops with them.

 

Perhaps you now understand a little bit about the different roles of the people you’ll meet at Fan Faire.  Truly, there are many other teams that work to make SOE games great including Quality Assurance, Customer Service, Internationalization, Platform, Operations, and more!  We’re looking forward to seeing you at Fan Faire!

Joshua “Autenil” Kriegshauser

Technical Director, EverQuest II

The next three weeks are probably the best time of the year so far in terms of anything that remotely qualifies as “work”. If you imagine how Christmas has a buzz and pervasiveness into your everyday senses even if you aren’t someone who celebrates it, the stuff going on at SOE right now has a buzz in the air that isn’t limited to the EQII team.

So what has me listening to all the news and gossip and following emails extra closely right now? Two things: Storm Break (Game Update 47) and Fan Faire!

Usually around here our Game Updates are a lot of work for us and several other groups, but it’s not often that we get to collaborate with other teams like Star Wars Galaxies on a single feature. This update has Station Voice in it (If you haven’t heard about it, it is voice chat built into game and really easy to use). Not only is it being integrated directly into EQII this week, but also into many of the other SOE games.

Now I can’t take any credit for the work done on Station Voice since everyone else did the hard work of implementation, but I am quite happy to bask in the extra bit of company wide energy floating around. I am also getting some great insights into how other teams work, roll out new features and learning some of their lingo.

Nearly everyone is also chatting and thinking about Fan Faire. It’s no secret that EQII has some expansion plans, but Fan Faire is the first chance we’ll have to share the details. Many of us are almost about to burst with wanting to share the news of what we have planned. There are so many rumors floating around about what is or isn’t happening, and why we haven’t spilled the beans yet that the countdown to Fan Faire is, for me, a countdown to being able to shout out a really great secret you’ve been trying to keep.

Fan Faire is a big event for me for a few other reasons too. Last year we got to show the concept drawings of Guild Halls. But this year we’ll be able to show what that concept has turned into and answer some of the detailed questions about we did with them. We even have plans to show them off in-game at one of the panels. By the time Fan Faire rolls around, the guild halls won’t be a soon ™ feature, or something we can look at down the road, but a feature I’m confident will be to Test and then to Live very soon!

Lately, in our team meetings someone will often pipe up with “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we had such and such feature” and the guild hall team responds with “That’s in Guild Halls”. It has happened so often that, if it is combined with my anticipation as any measure of success, I think a lot of players are going to be using the guild halls regularly and hopefully impressed with how they turned out (Even though we all know we can’t make everyone happy all the time , no matter how hard we try ).

Beyond that there are so many things to look forward to at Fan Faire this year. Even the very last chance to try out some drinks at Quark’s Bar. I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who doesn’t like drinks that are weird colors and giving off steam and I’m definitely not one of them.

I also have a lot of panels to look forward to which is still a fairly new experience for me. I have to admit I’m much more used to communicating via email than talking to a group. But I am looking forward to talking to people who play the game that I work on all day so much that it makes up for the nervousness that hits before and sometimes a bit after.

So more stuff that I am looking forward to at Fan Faire could go on for several pages but in a nut shell… Getting to work and not actually be at the office for a few days is a major plus. Getting to talk to people and hear what they have to say in live conversations. And one of my absolute favorites of the entire few days is the people running around in capes, robes or Storm Trooper outfits and the costume contest in the evening. That is one definite not to be missed event!

Jennifer Gerull aka Kirstie
Associate Producer for EQII

As I write this, the pubish date for game update 47 is fast approaching, and it seems like only yesterday that the last of the bugs for game update 46 were cleared out of the way and signed off by QA. This coming update isn’t a particularly big one in terms of tradeskills but it has some other exciting features, not least the new Vivox voice chat that is currently being tested out on Test server. We’ve been using it ourselves for a couple weeks during our internal play testing and we’ve been impressed from the start how smoothly integrated it is, but now after several weeks of polish and internal testing then still more feedback from those wonderful folks on Test server, it’s even smoother than ever. I’m not always a fan of voice chat, and I tend to prefer communicating in text instead, but there are definitely occasions when it’s handy and I think that having it built into our game and easily available to everyone will be a big help at times.

On the tradeskill side of GU47, I just finished checking in another quest for the Grandmasters in the tradeskill societies to give out, this one in the level 60-69 level range. At the same time this goes live, the city faction merchants (both adventure and tradeskill) will begin selling a black version of the blue formal dress that city merchants sell, and this new quest ties into the appearance of this new item. Naturally, the various city factions would turn to their local tradeskill society to produce large orders of any new clothing that they begin selling. And when the local tradeskill society’s harvesting team fails to return with the required resources that will be needed, who should they send to investigate but a trusted local tradeskiller who has served them well in the past? Crafters level 60 and over who have completed the other quests the Grandmasters offer will be asked to investigate the missing harvesters, and save the day once again.

I don’t create nearly as many quests as many of the design team — other designers might be asked to create quests for entire zones at a time, and some of them are amazingly fast and clever at thinking up fun new ideas and implementing them. A lot of what I do is more dry, such as the creation of recipes, balancing of stats, tweaking of drop rates.

Tradeskills being technically part of the “mechanics” team rather than the design team itself, a lot of the work is less creative and more statistical. However, quests are fun, and tradeskilling players have not had many tradeskill quests to enjoy in the past, so I’ve added quite a few since I started here and I expect more still will come in the future.

How I design a quest can vary quite a lot, depending on the quest and where it’s intended to fit into our world and our lore. The first thing to do is consider what information I already know about the quest. Do I know certain characters who must be involved? Do I know a certain story I need to reference? Or do I know what the reward will be? Many times, I begin planning a quest with a specific reward in mind. I start by knowing that I have this nice new purple robe, for example, and I think that a quest would be a fun way to give it to people, so I start planning from there.

For this type of quest where I start by knowing what the reward is, I can then start thinking about how and why a player might earn such a reward, and construct the story of the quest backwards from there, by asking and answering for myself a series of questions about the quest. Why would a player be given a robe? Maybe the tradeskill societies are starting production of a new line of robes, and players could be given one of the first ones in thanks for their help. What kind of help? Well, what if the tradeskill societies are short of supplies. Why are they short of supplies? Maybe they have teams of harvesters who go out and bring back the supplies they need, but perhaps the team has failed to return, and our players need to investigate. What will they find? Well, they might find a few clues that will lead them in the general direction, and then they will eventually find the harvesters. Where does the tradeskill part of the quest come in? Maybe the harvesters are hurt, or having problems, and players can craft something to help them out. And so on, asking more and more detailed questions until I know the general outline of where the players will have to go and what they’ll have to do. Once I have this outline, it’s a matter of filling in the specific details of dialog, and so my next step is to generally create all the characters for the quest who have anything to say, and then creating the dialog chain between them and the players. This fills in pretty much all the remaining details of the quest’s story, and is also where I get to have a little fun being creative. I usually try not to be too long-winded, but I do try to insert some humor into the dialog so that people who do pay attention to the text will find it worth their while and be amused. Once the dialog is taken care of, it’s just a matter of putting any characters and objects required into the world, and then hooking it all up into the actual quest file that goes into the player’s quest journal so that the game knows character A’s dialog B updates quest step 3, and so on.

For some other types of quest, we may start out with a specific event or story that we want to tell, and the reward is actually fairly irrelevant. A good example of this might be some of the seasonal quests like Frostfell or Nights of the Dead, where we know we want to tell a seasonal story, and that story is more important than the actual reward. A tradeskill example of this would be the tradeskill epic quests: I started by knowing that I just wanted to do a tradeskill epic to go out at the same time as all the adventurer epics. Then I looked through some old EQLive tradeskill quests and traditions, and decided to base the epic on the Earring of the Solstice quests from the original EQLive. Next I worked out some modern twists and details to set the story in the present time of EQ2, and also to give each crafting archetype something a little fun and different to do. The steps in this quest were all about the fun and excitement, getting tradeskillers outside, into areas they might not have been into before, and picking some of my favorite looking zones and finding an excuse to get crafters into them. To be quite honest, this was a quest line planned out to intentionally include many “oh s–t!” moments of sheer terror for the people doing the quest, and it was a lot of fun to deliberately do that. I figured out the rewards last of all; in this case the rewards were almost irrelevant, the important part was that there be a tradeskill epic at all, and that it should be fun and very different from anything any tradeskiller had done before. Once the quest outline is known, however, the remaining design steps are pretty similar: create the characters and write the details of their dialog, place the things in the world, and then hook it all up.

Those are the two main ways I have approached quest creation so far. Apart from writs, which don’t really have any story, the tradeskill quests have all just been created through variations of the above. The one quest line that came closes to being an exception to this rule was the sokokar quest line for tradeskillers; the sokokar quest line for adventurers had already been written, but was not doable by tradeskillers, so I knew that I needed to add a separate quest or quest line for them. As time was short, I decided to simply take Srukin’s entire quest line for the adventurers and mirror it as exactly as possible, making fun of the original quest throughout. So for the sokokar quests, you could say that I started off knowing BOTH the reward AND the story, and the rest was merely changing details and inserting humor. The NPC who gives out the quest, Assistant Jones, is actually named after Srukin (Ellery Jones) in order to tease him for not including tradeskillers in the first quest. And while the adventurer quest has players out collecting drolvarg fangs and other heroic things, Assistant Jones is impatiently asking the tradeskillers what on earth she’s supposed to do with all the bags of smelly drolvarg teeth the adventurers keep bringing back to her boss, and by the way those adventurers are still busy out there killing things, so perhaps you could go deliver this hawk instead like the practical tradeskiller you are.

So, the tradeskill quest for the coming game update is checked in, ready for QA to begin testing. There will be a cycle of testing and bug fixing for a while, and then Test server will have their chance to break it and comment — and they certainly do a great job testing and finding new and unexpected ways that things can break! But if all goes well and all the bugs are fixed without issue, then that’s one more tradeskill quest added to the growing list and heading to a live server near you with game update 47. Hope everyone enjoys it!

Emily “Domino” Taylor

A few months back we announced that SOE and Vivox were teaming up to bring you free in-game Voice Chat in our lineup of games.  This partnership allows us at SOE to focus on what we do best – make great games, and Vivox to focus on what they do best – voice technology.  Greg “Rothgar” Spence and I have been working hard since then to bring a quality voice experience to EverQuest II and helping some of the other teams at SOE add Voice Chat to their games.

There’s a writeup with screenshots of how EQII’s voice chat will work as well as a specific place for feedback over on the official EQII forums.  I highly suggest you check them out!  The voice chat system has been available on the Test server since Monday and it’s been exciting to see the compliments and feedback pour in!  Occasionally, Rothgar and I will hop on the Test server and chat with the players there too, answering questions and helping players get set up.

In the future we’re planning to expand the Voice Chat system with features like listening to multiple channels, proximity-based voice chat and the ability to change the way your voice sounds through “voice fonts.”  In the meantime you get automatically created voice channels for in-game Guilds, Groups and Raids and the ability to create any number of password-protected custom channels.  An amazing (and oft-praised) feature of our Voice Chat is that you can individually adjust the speaking volume of everyone you can hear.  Being integrated in-game also means that the Group and Raid windows have gained speaking indicators so you can tell at a glance who is talking without the need to divert your attention away from the game.  We’ve also added in Logitech G15 Keyboard support!

Early on in the planning process for our Voice Chat feature, we wanted to design a system that was intuitive and accessible.  We wanted to remove as many of the barriers to entry as we could.  With this in mind, we thought about all of the difficulties of setting up third-party voice chat applications and tried to make the problems go away.  With our integrated Voice Chat, you don’t have to worry about setting up, paying for and maintaining a voice server.  With our integrated Voice Chat, there’s no additional software you need to download and install; it’s just there in-game, waiting to be used.  With our integrated Voice Chat we’ve provided diagnostics to help you get your microphone set to the input device so that you don’t have to hunt around in Windows.

To make sure our system was intuitive, we did a lot of usability testing in SOE’s new Usability Lab.  This involved bringing in people ranging from those who have never seen EQII before to players who raid twenty-plus hours a week.  Based on watching their reactions, where they looked for things in the UI and the roundtable discussions at the end of the sessions, we made significant tweaks before launching to the Test center.  We’ve also had the entire EQII team using Voice Chat for internal playtests and providing Voice Chat feedback.

We’re proud of EQII’s Voice Chat feature and feel that it will be a boon to all manner of play-styles!  Hope to see (and hear) you in-game!

Joshua “Autenil” Kriegshauser

Technical Director, EverQuest II

Part of my job on EQII is to compile the update notes that attempt to lay out everything that changed in the latest Game Update or Hotfix.  Sometimes after 5 or 6 pages of trying to get everything just right I start to go cross eyed and have to restrain myself from blowing a serious fuse every time someone points out a missing comma, period or a badly turned phrase.

 

A big part of the frustration is because the update notes are meant to be for everyone who plays EQII or is curious about what’s going on, so I can’t just write like me, or use the slang or in-game jargon I’m prone to.  So I thought it would be fun to write about the update and what I thought rocked in it, jargon, slang and probably a few typos included!

 

First of all we added a new, high level group zone.  For people who are 80 or close to it this is going to provide some seriously fun loot, quests and bosses.  It even has shinies to go collect!  The zone is based on the original Runnyeye shared dungeon but each group gets their own copy of the zone and it will persist after you leave.  Even if you crash or your cat knocks out your power cord or someone else in the house tells you that you’ve been online for too long, you can come back where you left off (persistent zones FTW!) And one of my favorite things about this zone is you get to exercise your sense of humor, I love running through a zone and having a good chuckle in between slaughtering baddies.

 

One of the other things we added, for this update only, is a new live event:  The Void Storms Pt. 1.  This is a fun to do short quest that gives you a little sneak peek into some of the lore behind our expansion and a chance to get some really cool items.  And as a huge bonus you can do it at any level and get experience.  Do you want a wieldable pillow, hot poker or a wrench?  How about clothes that let you show off your skivvies?  Or maybe a few glittery sparkles for your house?  This live event offers them all.  Each time you complete the quest after the first attempt you get a ticket and you can use these tickets at a merchant nearby to buy some great stuff, but only until Game Update 47 when it all goes away (and something new comes along maybe?).

 

There was a lot of stuff in this update and I could go on for pages and pages (oh wait I did in the Update Notes *sigh*).  But if I had to pick one more thing to gush about it would have to be the new items that make your mount go faster.  There are a couple ways to get them, and one is to talk to a local tradeskiller.  I don’t want to give away the secrets of faster mounts here, but just that they’re available now is great.

 

I promised myself I’d end this at one page in my text editor and I have a tiny bit of space left so I wanted to add, don’t be timid about going to try out the new stuff we added.  The fan sites are doing a great job keeping up with walkthroughs if you’re not the explorer type and they have some really fun rewards that are worth getting while you have the chance.  And there is a lot to see!

 

Jennifer Gerull aka Kirstie

Associate Producer – EQII

As you may have seen the Living Legacy Web site – we’ve been hard at work preparing to bring back some old time players, and at the same time, bring in some new players for all of us to enjoy. Working on a far reaching marketing blitz such as this has a lot of implications, most of which can’t be discussed until after the fact So, for the past several months, we’ve been busy as beavers trying to integrate some of our previously existing plans into the larger whole of this promotion. The fact is, we are pretty pleased to have so many people enjoy our games, and we think there are some people who may have left for various reasons that have changed over time, and they deserve an opportunity to try our games again. If you were with us at launch, think back to how much the game really has changed, mostly in response to your suggestions, comments, etc, both at Fan Faires (sign up now!) or in various boards.

From new races, to new starting areas, to new zones, to exciting new play mechanics, and of course the awesome loot to be had, the game has grown substantially from where it was at launch. This team has continued to make EverQuest II the best game out there, in my humble opinion.  The game really is a new experience, both fun and engaging, and we’re excited to show it off. Of course, most of these events occurring during this promotion are targeted at everyone, not just people who may be new or returning. Even in the next update: ‘Gathering Tempest’, there will be a full new quest line, and a heroic version of Runnyeye to play in. We hope that you will find the time to come back to EQII, and be one of the true living legends!

Bruce “Froech” Ferguson, Senior Producer

Summer seems to have arrived in San Diego this weekend; the weather is sunny and hot, the beaches and pools all over San Diego are filled, and my cats are lying around the balcony in the shade, basking in the heat. 

I went to a renaissance faire up near LA yesterday with some friends; I hadn’t been to one before so I didn’t known what to expect.  It was interesting, but in the 35 C (~100F) heat, I was astounded by the number of people managing to walk around in full skirts, bodices, leather doublets, armor, and all sorts of heavy things I would probably have passed out in if I’d been wearing them.  It made me appreciate how much work it actually is to get into and to wear that kind of outfit.  I logged into EQII this afternoon – the first chance I’ve had to even play since Game Update 45 went live – and did the Rodcet Nife live event quests on one of my evil characters.  In the game, you see people jogging around in the desert in full platemail, and it somehow looks so cool and effortless.  For actual realism we should probably have everyone in metal armor pass out flat after spending more than an hour in the Sinking Sands … but I suppose that wouldn’t really be “fun” gameplay, no matter how realistic it might be.

In theory this week past I have been working on tradeskill content for the upcoming expansion.  However, there have been quite a number of interruptions in the form of meetings and bug fixes that have needed doing, and last Friday we had some issues with one of our internal servers that meant I couldn’t do all the testing I’d planned.  So instead I ended up doing some other stuff on Friday.  The next game update will be accompanied closely by the launch of our next Legends of Norrath expansion, Oathbreaker; LoN is our trading card game, which ties into both the original EverQuest as well as EQII.  The game is played in an independent client and doesn’t directly affect either of the original EQ games, but some special LoN cards can be exchanged for a small prize in EQ or EQII.  LoN is not developed by SOE in San Diego, it’s managed by an entirely separate branch up in Denver and for the most part we in San Diego are not involved.  However, these particular in-game rewards are an area where the teams overlap a bit, since we have to work together to come up with reward items that are fun and desirable, while ensuring they are not overpowering or would cause any kind of game balance problems.

Thus far the rewards have been along the lines of fluff: fun items such as fancy cloaks, illusions, mounts with unique colours or graphics, personal spell effects, house items, that sort of thing.  It is a careful balance: supporting our LoN players with cool and fun rewards, while at the same time ensuring EQII players are not neglected in any way either.  And even though house items are basically fun fluff with little game impact, there’s a portion of our player population who do care a lot about getting new and unique house items.  So, to this end I have been plotting the addition of a number of nice new house items which will be added in to EQII at the same time as LoN comes out… only the question is, exactly how to add them?  I have the house items all prepared, as they don’t take long to make, but there are a number of ways that things like this can be added.  Carpenters of course can make house items, and they will likely be getting some recipes for a number of the new things.  Carpenters have had a fair number of new recipes over the past year, however, and aren’t as desperately in need of more as they were previously.  So some of the rewards could also be put in as quest rewards, or purchased faction items, dropped from dungeons, or goodies for the Guide program to give out, or a variety of other options, each of which has pros and cons.  In addition to the furniture, weaponsmiths will also be getting a new recipe timed with the release of LoN’s Oathbreaker.  Hopefully, EQII players and LoN players alike will be excited by the new fun stuff coming up.

Overall, GU46 is going to be a fairly quiet update, for tradeskills anyway.  I’ve been focused on the upcoming expansion work for the main part, and so apart from bug fixing and a few additional tweaks to the crafted weapons, I don’t anticipate any major changes.  I do like to slip in a few surprises for the tradeskill community when it’s possible, however, and I do have a little something up my sleeve about which I will say no more at this point.  Time will tell how well that is received next month!

Emily “Domino” Taylor

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