Turbine announced today that it will be expanding its global operations and will assume full control of The Lord of the Rings Online™ (LOTRO) in Europe beginning June 1, 2011. As part of this transition, Codemasters Online will continue to operate the European LOTRO service until June 1st when the existing European players will begin the migration to Turbine’s global service. For more information on the transition, please visit http://www.lotro.com/news/latestnews/1157.
“We are working very closely with our partner Codemasters Online to facilitate a smooth transition to our new global service. We will be providing free account transfers to our new global service and players will be notified when the transfer utility is available,†said Kate Paiz, Executive Producer of The Lord of the Rings Online. “We thank Codemasters for the outstanding job they have done publishing and operating LOTRO and we look forward to continuing to deliver one of the world’s best online entertainment experiences to the gamers of Europe.â€
“After 4 years of successful publishing and operations we are proud to be handing over a vibrant and healthy service to Turbine,†said David Solari, Vice President and General Manager of Codemasters Online. â€I’d like to thank our many customers over the years for their commitment and look forward to bringing more service-based entertainment to them in the future.â€
It’s a shock because when the DDO server merger announcement was made, LotRO players were understandably concerned the same might be happening to them. The impression that we got was that this was not going to be happening any time soon, if ever, and that Codemaster’s contract still had many years yet to run. Perhaps both parties came to an agreement to cut it short.
I spend a lot of time wondering what’s going on in the minds of EQ2 producers. They are beings of awesome power, but frequently indecipherable motives. But what if a common player could get a taste of that power, just for one day? What wonders might be wrought upon the world?
There’s a limit to what you can get done in a day, even with the might of the EQ2 Dev team behind you, so I’m going to limit myself to what I think would be reasonably quick jobs that someone could do in a day or less.
1. Fix Heritage Quest rewards.
This should be a pretty quick one, seeing as there’s really not that many items to worry about. Heritage quest rewards are supposed to be amongst the best gear for their level, but the older ones have fallen behind further with each update. Not only that, but stat-simplification has rendered some of them utterly useless other than as furniture.
Take the Dwarven Ringmail Tunic. This is the lowest level HQ, and gives a quite nice chainmail top, with strength and stamina. However, strength is entirely useless to any chainwearing class now, who want either wisdom or agility. That’s not putting our best foot forward for new players on their first HQ. So, I’d go through all the rewards and make sure that their stats make sense under the new regime, increasing their power where appropriate, to at least bring them in to line with modern Legendary gear.
For extra credit, make sure that the level 20 Qeynos and Freeport class armour quests, and the Blood Iron class-set recipes from Deathfist are also suitable for their intended classes. Currently they are frequently not.
2. Restore Removed Quests
At some point in the first year, as my memory serves, a large number of quests were removed from Qeynos and Freeport. These were high quality content, complete with voice-overs. Apparently players were “confused” by having so many options. Pffft. Any that would work correctly out of the box should just be turned back on. The NPCs are still hanging around for the most part anyway. Some might require a little bit of tweaking to work with the current zone populations. We’ve got a day. Get done what you can, going for the easy ones first. Update any item rewards if needed, or maybe see if the crafting team have any spare furniture items that could be used for that purpose. Change the level of the quest if necessary, or if it would fill a gap somewhere.
There have been a great number of quests removed elsewhere for often impenetrable reasons, which I’d also like back, but restoring the city ones would be my priority. Bring them back with a triumphant fanfare, as for most people they would be all new content.
3. Turn the Isles of Refuge back on
Same as the previous entry. No good reason why they needed to be removed. Give ’em a polish if they need it. I’ve ranted enough about this in the past, and won’t bore you with it again!
If we could get just two of those tasks accomplished, I’d consider that a good day’s work, and I think the lower end game would be much stronger for it
The Coming of the Cloakbearer, by Maltheas Shadowsqueak.
From the Crafting Channel!
I thought I’d ask the good folks of the crafting channel what they would do with a few hours dev time.
4. Mara Housing
Doesn’t have to be fancy. One of the Qeynos inn room type instances would do for now, but we’d love to see player housing on the Isle of Mara. Failing that, maybe the entrances to the prestige homes that are currently only found in Qeynos and Freeport could be put there. An actual Mara style house would be fantastic, but would take longer than we have here.
5. Collectables filter
Currently, when searching for collectables on the broker, any that you no longer need are greyed out. It would be very nice to be able to tick a box to have them not appear at all.
I kept the list deliberately short, as we only have one day, after all, and I might do another post in the same vein soon. What small change or fix would you do, if you had just a few hours of dev time to play with?
An increasing number of WordPress sites around the internet appear to be getting hacked, and having invisible links placed within them that bring visitors to medicine related posts on this site. Posts that do not exist. Visitors I would rather do without. It started with the Infendo site. If you look in its source code, you’ll see a load of links here, but I’m seeing more sites doing this every day, and it is wigging me out big time.
I have no idea why this would be happening. It is bringing in a bit of traffic, even though for the life of me I can’t figure out how anyone is even clicking on them. But why would someone be doing this? I thought perhaps I’d been hacked too, but I can’t find anything amiss, and the post addresses they’re being sent to just get my generic “page not found” page. The only thing I can think of is that it is to somehow trash my ranking with Google. But this is a tiny little site in the general scheme of things, and I can’t imagine why anyone would go to such trouble. Did Lordcraft finally get fed up with me making fun of them? Has Lord Everling finally figured out how to use the internet? I don’t know, and if you’ve got any ideas then please share them in the comments.
Anyways, this post is largely to get my defence in first, because at some point somebody is going to see that their site has been hacked, and they’ll come over to yell at me.
Update: Infendo seems to have rectified the situation after I posted in their comments, though they haven’t actually answered me. I’m trying to find out from them exactly what was causing the issue.
We’ve just had a Press Release regarding the near future of Everquest 2. GU 60 will be concentrating on expanding Velious, and also improving the Battleground system.
The Fortress of Drunder
The plans of Rallos Zek are beginning to come to fruition and the mighty Fortress of Drunder, which once sat within the Plane of War itself, has appeared on Norrath, and now rests high above the Kromzek city of Kael Drakkel. From Drunder, Rallos Zek plans to rally his war parties, scale the massive sheer cliffs leading to the Western Wastes, and execute his plan to steal the power of Roehn Theer. It will take bold and daring adventurers to enter the fortress itself, unlock the secrets to the salvation of Norrath, and thwart the destructive agenda of the God of War.
PvP & Battlegrounds improvements, including but not limited to:
Lobby system so players can hang together between matches with PvP merchants available locally
New Velious battleground map (“The Frozen Tundraâ€)
New Battleground game type! (“Vanquish!â€)
PvP and Battlegrounds rule modifications for better balance and fun factor
Fame system improvements
New PvP armor
Itemization:
New Adornments interface to make this system easier to understand
Continued honing of the itemization system
Drunder!
Three new instanced dungeons
Three new raids with all new bosses
New daily missions
Crystal Caverns
Solo shard quest
Two new heritage quests
Additional signature quest line
NOTE: Drunder content is locked to DoV expansion owners only. All other GU content affects all players.
Sounds like a decent lump of content for the high end. Not quite so sure about concentrating efforts on the Battlegrounds, but some people enjoy them, and perhaps more will after the changes.
There’s also a free week for all inactive accounts starting from this Thursday:
From April 14 to April 21, 2011, former players are also invited to log back in and experience the unparalleled depth and adventure that can only be found in EQII with the Take Flight Winback promotion. Eligible inactive accounts can log back in for free for 7 days, claim their free flying mount and reunite with friends and enemies alike for 7 days!
And they’re getting flying mounts! How is that going to work? Will be a bit of a swizz if its a unique one and folks who have stuck around can’t get their hands on it. And will it require high level? Much is yet to be revealed about this promotion!
Update: The flying mounts will only last for 12 hours. You can go claim another one when your current one runs out, but they will only be available for that week. So returning players get to have some fun with them, without cheapening the effort everybody else has to go through to attain them.
It has been a mere 20 days since last we had a look at the Extreme Quester Leaderboard, but Maltheas has been a busy bee during that time. So much so that the moment has come to include the level 70-79 tier in the calculations.
The good news is that that means that my friends Annyya and Kirskax are back at the top! Ahoy up there! Since the server merge, we’ve even found common cause against a few particularly insidious quests, and I’m sure we’ll continue to work together! With the addition of the 70s Maltheas has plummeted back down to 13th, but he’s by far the lowest level there. He’ll begin his mysteriously both painful and fun struggle back up with his eyes wide open about what needs to be done!
The majority of Maltheas’ new quests in the past weeks have been from getting back up to Master Carpenter, and devouring the delicious new Velious crafting quest lines. This has had some material benefits for his adventuring. Meet Snowberry the Gryphon!
The Isle of Mara from the sky.
For a low level adventurer to be able to get a flying mount through crafting is wonderful, though I miss having the gryphon as a little pet that followed you about as you care for it over the course of a few days, until it grows big enough to fly on! I got rather used to it! It has been great to visit all my favourite old zones and have a fly around. I must be careful to not get too used to it though for general adventuring though. It’s only when you’re down in the muck that you learn what makes a zone tick.
I decided it was time for an update because this is a special day for Maltheas. I’m going to let him level to 43, and he’s terribly excited about it. Mostly because he’s going to be able to use all the jars of mechanical spiders that he stashed away when levelling tinkering. Before he unleashes his spiderbot army, to Cheeves’ dismay, let us have one final look at his current quest journal.
Maltheas' Quest Journal, April 8th 2011
Theoretically, he should be able to polish off the two Bloodline Chronicles (Marked as Nektulos Forest above) quests he has left, but they don’t seem to be working properly, with the necessary items that need to be clicked not spawning after many attempts. Apart from those two, I’m pretty happy with taking a level. There’s a few I could probably accomplish with sufficient gruntwork, but what the heck. It’s been at least 6 months since he last levelled, and the little fellow needs a bit of cheese from time to time to keep going.
I’m really excited. I’ve been living here three years, and for the first time, it looks like I have some birds nesting in the nesting box at the bottom of my garden. I only have one decent tree, and it is the same one I had the flock of Bohemian Waxwings in in January.
I think it’s a pair of blue tits. They spent a few days in March clearing out what was probably a bit of a mess in there, but seem to have settled down now. They probably don’t have chicks on their wings yet, or I’d expect there to be a lot more activity, but I suspect the big day won’t be too far off!
It’s a cloudy day here, and it was tricky to persuade my camera to focus properly with all the twigs between me and the box, but here are the best pictures I managed to get of my uncooperative new friends!
It’s been slow posting here of late. I’ve not been feeling too well to be honest, but being able to watch these little chaps from my desk is cheering me right up!
