The second EverQuest expansion, Scars of Velious is now live on the Fippy Darkpaw Time-locked Progression Server.
Original Box Art
There was no official announcement as far as I could see. Neither the forums nor the EQPlayers had anything on the subject. Of course, the forums seem to be reserved for complaining about guilds fighting over the same bosses and the lack of population on these server. Meanwhile, what passes for “news” on EQPlayers seems to be primarily focused on Station Cash and what you can buy with it.
So it was pretty much by accident that I went to check the status of Fippy Darkpaw this morning and found that Velious was now open… and two bosses down already this morning.
Aug. 29 Game Status
Two bosses down today means that it probably just went live, given how things have gone in the past.
The Ruins of Kunark went live back in early June and was “completed” in about two weeks, which started the 60 day timer for the next expansion, Velious. (I thought it was a 30 day timer initially, but it is 60 days.)
At this rate the next expansion, The Shadows of Luclin, should be available some time in November of this year. And the last expansion should be live on the server somewhere in the 2014 range.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
And yet another expansion in, and my Bard is still level 11… I guess it’s time to face the facts and label my Everquest excursion a failure.
Maybe they didn’t have time to announce Velious on Fippy because they’re all busy mopping up the latest EQ2 disaster?
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@flosch – Potshot and I have characters still sitting at ~21 and not a lot of inclination to see them further along. Still, it was fun while it lasted for us.
Yeah, I’ve been watching the GU61 news on EQ2Wire. It didn’t seem quite ready for prime time.
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I keep meaning to get back to my necro on Fippy but there always seems to be something else taking priority. Like re-attuning all my gear in EQ2. Twice.
Actually, GU61 was exactly as expected. All big EQ/EQ2 patches are inadequately tested and go live in an embarrassingly buggy state, that’s part of their charm. I played on Test for five years and personally reported plenty of bugs that nevertheless went Live, as did everyone else playing there. I can only assume that there aren’t enough resources available – all the Devs always seem to be harried and hurried and doing three jobs at once.
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@Bhagpuss – I don’t know, that “locked in the guild hall” bug that required a petition to get out seemed to be above and beyond the usual level of chaos.
Of course, their ambition this time around was pretty high… re-itemizing the whole game and un-attuning every piece of equipment. The latter seems easy in theory… there is a flag in the database that marks an item as attuned, set that flag to false globally. But there appeared to be some other code that would set items to the attuned state when certain conditions existed.
Fun fun!
[Update: Even more fun here. I guess the players are going to have to report itemization errors if they want them fixed. For me, that exceeds all low expectations. SOE can be its own worst enemy.]
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@Wilhelm: “Fun while it lasted” maybe describes it best. I really enjoyed taking a tour into a game that, for whatever reason, I never played during “its” time. I was in university for exactly the right period, so how I missed it will stay a mystery until the end of days. ;) I especially enjoyed visiting the areas that were not redone, it gave me a sort of fake nostalgia, if that makes sense: even though I had never been there before, I imagined how it would’ve been fun back then.
@Bhagpuss: I have to agree with Wilhelm there. My experience with GUs is limited, but I heard from many people that don’t generally cry wolf every patch that this one was the worst they could remember (also see Stargrace, who claims it was “the worst since GU13”, whatever that one may have been – long time ago, in any case!).
You’re lucky if you only had to redo everything twice. My AAs still kept resetting when zoning (sometimes, with not apparent rhyme or reason). I got so demotivated I stopped playing on Sunday afternoon, went and read a book, and decided not come back for another week or so. It’s one thing if stuff doesn’t work well. It’s another thing if I have to redo my preparations all the time because the game doesn’t remember them.
It really felt like it should’ve been obvious from the beginning that this update wanted to do way too much in way too little time. It’s just a huge amount of work they scheduled for it! Whoever was in charge should’ve acknowledged that a complete reitemization of thousands of items takes time, even if it is script-aided.
I went and tried out DDO with two friends instead. The game can be fun with a static group of 3, it seems. I couldn’t get them to try EQ2 anyway, so it was a good time to start the experiment.
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