With a fresh new system, less than a month old, I have been naturally keen to try old games as well as new.
World of Warcraft, runs like a champ.
Lord of the Rings Online, a fresh download install from Turbine runs flawlessly.
Likewise, grabbing the latest installer for EVE Online yielded a fine experience.
Heck, even Civilization V runs well on the new system. Very well indeed.
And then I decided to try EverQuest II. It is autumn after all, about time to go visit Norrath once again.
I did the digital download for the last expansion, so I decided not to drag out old CDs, but rather just let Station Launcher install it for me.
A foolish choice I suppose.
I let the install run over night earlier in the week. 10+ GB of data to download.
I went to try and run the game after that and I ended up with this.
And the Station launcher does try again… and again… and again ad infinitum probably if I let it.
Fine. Maybe something went wrong with the download and install. I let it download fresh again.
Another 10+ GB download overnight.
The next day, the same thing.
Okay, the backup plan with Station Launcher is just to launch the game executable directly. So I went and found EverQuest2.exe and tried to launch from there.
That got me a new error.
Bleh. This is because they felt they needed to build a browser into the game. And you cannot just go and borrow that DLL from Firefox because it will then just say the next DLL it is looking for is missing. And once you chase down the final DLL, it will become clear that these are not the DLLs you are looking for.
So I head off to the Station.com EQII Knowledge Base.
I search on “eq2ui_mainhud_tutorial.xml”, no matches found for my problem. There is an entry on what to do if I install customer UI elements and it screws things up, but I am not that far along.
I search on “xul.dll”, and again, no matches found at all.
This isn’t a problem SOE know about, or at least hasn’t gotten around to documenting.
Looking at general installation issues yields some information on what to do if I have a bad CD or DVD, but nothing to about my problem.
So I submitted a ticket explaining my issue, including the screen shots I have here.
That was, of course, and example of pure optimism. Over the last decade I have gotten a response to about half of such tickets. Not that I submit many, but that makes the fact that they seem to get routed to dev/null half the time more noticeable, not less. And I hesitate to guess at what the percentage would be if I only counted responses that were at all helpful.
Searching for answers via Google was not all that helpful. I ran into a couple of people who had similar issues, but there were no resolutions that I had not tried, aside from the standard response to all Windows 7 issues, which is to run the executable as the administrator.
No luck with that either.
I suppose I should learn that the idea of nostalgia is often better than the reality.
I think I’ll see if I can get ZMud to work under Windows 7. If I’m going to face failure, I might as well do it against real odds with a program that is categorically not supported under the new OS.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Simple question, but just to verify you are running all this under admin priv in Win 7 correct? I had problems not doing this at one point.
LikeLike
Yes, I have tried allowing just about everything to run as administrator to no effect.
I did find one SOE post in the forums on the subject which said that they are phasing out Station Launcher so people shouldn’t be using that.
Of course, they might think about backing that up by taking Station Launcher off their site so people can’t download it. Bleh.
LikeLike
A friend of mine had some trouble re-installing EQ2 too so he gave up as well. It’s a real shame that SOE let all of these technical issues get in the way of the game. The performance of EQ2 is something I’ve never been happy about.
LikeLike
Agree with Gordon, six years is more and an ample amount of time to get it all together.
LikeLike
I had no issue with EQ2, but my installation is from CD. The EQ2X client is incredibly buggy though, even under Windows XP. The account management portion of SOE’s website is also buggy and has been for months. My subscriptions page on station.com doesn’t render properly in any browser, and trying to figure out where to go to reactivate my EQ2 account was such a nightmare that I eventually just gave up.
Sadly, I think SOE has been losing a lot of us due to all these bugs.
LikeLike
I currently have issues with EQ2 and windows 7 – they do NOT play nice at all. Every time windows 7 has an update, the EQ2 patcher breaks. I bypass it by running the game from a different directory but this means that I can not patch the game at all.
The forum helpers suggest everyone just download the streaming client, which is also incredibly buggy on Windows 7.
It’s the only game I have issues with, even EQ1 runs better then EQ2 does. With 600 gigs of MMO’s on my system I can’t say I’m hurting too bad, but after 6 years.. this stuff should work. =/
LikeLike
Hmm, the only problem I’ve had is mixing the station launcher and the stand alone client, eventually the two of them get out of sync every so often resulting in the station launcher wanting to redownload 10+Gb.
But as long as I keep them both seperate I’ve never had a problem – with Win7 Pro, Vista premium etc, guessing here that perhaps its either the admin rights.
Or perhaps the user protection thing that vista onwards has, that one messed around with so many programs that I just disabled it, I have severe doubts it achieves anything other then user annoyance since real protection is likely to be only gained by being careful.
LikeLike
It looks like the station launcher is no longer the preferred installer. yep, they changed it again. They have gone back to an EQ2 only launcher because they also wanted to do the streaming updates thing. go to the main everquest2 site. then right in the middle of the bar under the logo you should find “get the game” at the bottom of that tab you will find “download game.” Try starting from their. It should convert you previous installation directory to the new installer, it did for me. But at worse you might need to start from scratch. Not exactly the smoothest transition between installers. Not exactly upfront about letting us know about the change.
LikeLike
SoE really are their own worst enemy. They are hands-down my favorite MMO house in terms of what they actually offer, but getting to that content can be a royal pain.
Currently both Mrs Bhagpuss and I are starting EQ2X from the application because a) SoE made a completely unecessary, unwanted and unannounced change that means you no longer have control over which character you log in from the launcher and b) you can no longer launch two iterations of EQ2X on the same machine if you use the launcher.
The intention, apparently, is that you get to choose your characters from the launcher rather than from the full-screen Character Select that has been good enough for six years. That would be all well and good, albeit unecessary, if it worked, but it doesn’t.
We’ve grown very used to this sort of nonsense over a decade of playing SoE MMOs but it clearly must be losing them a significat amount of business all the time. The main problem seems to be that they just can’t leave well alone and literally never stop changing things, apparently for the sake of it.
All that said, I would have to say that I’ve also had no end of issues with the log-in procedures of most other MMO companies, especially Blizzard, Turbine and SquareEnix. The whole lot of them should sort themselves out.
LikeLike
Eq2 now has a streaming download client, goto the website hit download and you will be playing in less than 10 mins and the game will carry on downloading what you need as you play
I had no problem infact I thought it was amazing how easy and quick it was
LikeLike
My post about the EQ2 download/patcher is the second most searched for post of all time (behind the skewed BBC-linked post), for good reason. 50+ comments of basically someone having one issue or another. Crazy.
LikeLike
Same issue. Came back after some time, and was having some UI related crashes and couldn’t log into my main. Support suggested that I delete some cache files. Now I get the “Can’t confirm file size” nonsense.
This really needs to be fixed for Win7!
LikeLike