The Magician's Tower

Chick on the far right! It is Tunare!

Attended Key Note address part one which was tonite - Smed and pals speaking about all of the games. Most of the time was dedicated to Planetside 2!

Not too much discussion about Everquest in any detail yet.

- Rain of Fear launch date is 11/28/12
- Player studio getting fantastic designs from the players.
- F2P business model working well for the game. Tracking numbers have 150% more unique subscribers logging in versus old business model and those numbers remain consistant.
- Smed in his keynote as well as all of the developers I personally spoke with have said that EQ and EQ2 will be having more expansions, and they will for years to come, which proves the new F2P model is working well.
- SoE live attendee goodies include an ingame vampire merc, and a Everquest world tour t-shirt with a Fronia Vie (the sexy model) on the back with the tour dates (launch and expansion names and launch dates listed - woot! it looks cool. I will get mine tomorrow and post some photos incase anyone wants to buy one. I think they are 13 bucks after I get my first one for free.
- One last point about EQ...there are artistic developers already working on the next expansion AFTER Rain of Fear the timing of which is as the normal development cycle dictates. Player levels 101+ are to be expected.

Minor information about EQNext:
- Basicly they scrapped all the work they had put into it last year, and now have a new MMO that is totally different than any game out there, but made a big deal about how Norrath will not just be an evolution of EQ and EQ2, but a break the mold type world.
- EcoSystem is the term for the game design for both Planetside2 and EQNext a melding PC, gaming systems, Youtube, social networks, player studio tools to play the games, make ingame items, gear, housing, just about anything you want. - Gamers will actually create and own and sell their own designs across many or the games in develoopment.
Zero truth in the rumor that EQNext will be a facebook game. - they are going in the opposite direction - ground breaking highend for the masses versus dumbdown silly for the masses. I spoke with Thom at length prior to the keynote. EQNext is just too too confidential for them to share too much at this time.

The panels start tomorrow which is when they typically reveal what they can share about EQLive - the schedule for EQ subject matter tomorrow will be:

10:00 AM - SOE Player Studio - bringing your dreams to life
11:00 AM - Wikia - A collaborative revolution for SOE - official wikia's for each game - amazing!
5:00 pm - EQ Questionable Content - all player questions answered for 50 minutes
6:30 PM - SOE Keynote Part 2

On Saturday, the full review of the RoF expansion is covered on a few panels and a whole bunch of things to report from what I hear.

Some photos:














2nd half of keynote speech tonite:

Next big round of beta invites going out tomorrow.
rehashed the new expansion top like features:

level 100
aggro meter
collection system
slayer system
broker system
-offline selling
-can search bazaar from any location in norrath
-can pick up items from any location in norrath

they had a collector's edition EQ and EQ2 giveaway tonite and I had a gold ticket under my chair!

Rain of Fear Zones

Shard's Landing

Evantil, The Vile Oak

Grelleth's Palace,The Chateau of Faith

Chapterhouse of the Fallen

The Breeding Grounds

Valley of King Xorbb

(New Level 100 "shard embued" content)

East Wastes: Keixshi-Kar's Awakening

The Crystal Caverns: Fragment of Fear

Kael Drakkel: The King's Madness

Temple of Veeshan

I attended various panels and the Dev brunch this morning and talked with JChan, Aristo, and Chandrok (didn't catch Elidroth). Anyway, here are a couple of things I at least spoke with them about that I will be following up with via PMs.

pet procs not showing up on others parses - not intentional and she (JChan) didn't even know it was like that. without knowing why it doesn't she couldn't say how difficult a fix it would be

cultural - will still be aoaa's for this expansion, maybe next but they are "looking at something to make them not so ridiculous". similar to HoT -> VoA the augs are not going to be interchangeable, so will need a whole new set of gear if you go that route

SD/stats - confirmed that there won't be any going backwards for any stats. even with the all/all non-vis every higher tier piece of gear will increase or stay the same for every stat/mod

pet da - didn't sound good for a weapon shield type ability or other

push - won't remove it, "looking into" reducing it

shawl - got basically a nothing answer as to making the shawl into an aug. they are concerned at its power, and said 'yeah, its being talked about'

focus degradation - gonna happen. chandrok seemed downright giddy at doing something of the same for melee. but who knows

plenty of other gamewide bits and pieces that were floated out there in regards to the next expansion, future of the marketplace and all that but there's some of the more magey type stuff i picked up.

Littlelegs wrote:focus degradation - gonna happen.

What do you mean?

Focus degradation has been happening for years now. Were they considering removing it?

I doubt they were considering removing it. Over at the eq boards it is a point of contention that Casters suffer from focus degredation while our melee counterparts don't have to. There had been calls from folks asking for it to be removed, Littlelegs just went to the source.

I do find it interesting that they may be looking at melee focus degredation.

Ah, that makes sense.

Potawatomi wrote:I doubt they were considering removing it. Over at the eq boards it is a point of contention that Casters suffer from focus degredation while our melee counterparts don't have to. There had been calls from folks asking for it to be removed, Littlelegs just went to the source.

I do find it interesting that they may be looking at melee focus degredation.

Correct. One of the big selling points the devs tried to highlight was that group gear wouldn't better than VoA raid gear, which can be mathematically shown to be false with the existence of focus degradation. When it was mentioned/shouted that we'd go after the gear for the stats even if there was no focus degradation, the response was rather curt: "You say you will, but you won't".

I was briefly entertaining the hope that there would be something like the Convo gear available at 85 but focused up to 90. It prevents flopping from full VoA raid gear, to group gear, and back to raid gear to max damage like we've had to do. Other solutions exist for the TS/cultural savvy and now I can prepare.