No Service : EQII

 

I just thought I'd mention, because no-one else has, or not that I've seen, anyway, (Wrong!! Check this link for a workaround that works) that EverQuest II hasn't been playable since Wednesday. There are ongoing "service provider level networking issues", apparently, although the latest information, as of Dreamweaver's most recent post  is that "While at this time there is no ETA, the teams have a potential fix in place that is progressing well and is good news towards an overall solution to the issue".

Whatever the problem is, it's only affecting EQII, which is unusual. In my experience as a longtime player, when one online game in a company's portfolio starts having connectivity issues, they all do. But no, I've been logging into EverQuest every day this week, including a couple of hours ago, with no issues at all. 

In fact, if I hadn't suddenly remembered it was Friday yesterday and the weekly panda and ethereal quests had reset, I might never have known there was an outage at all. I tried to log in last night to get those done and saw the message on the launcher:

Launchpad issues, huh? Wonder what those are? 

I clicked through and read the thread while the game patched. Then I tabbed back to see how it was getting on and... stuck at "Loading entity resources" with the little dragon, gamely plodding along on his invisible treadmill.

What does "Loading entity resources" mean, anyway? I've always wondered. EQII has several cryptic glosses on various loading screens. The one I always remember is "Adding character to zone". For years I thought (in that way you "think" when you aren't really thinking at all) it meant making the zone intersting and unusual, the way you might "add character" to your hallway with some old movie posters and a life-size cardboard cut-out of William Shatner (Not a random example. Also not my hallway. Ye gods, no!). 

Eventually I did actually think about it and realized it must mean adding your selected character to the zone, thereby allowing you to enter the game and, y'know, play that character. Which is, right now, with EQII, something I cannot do.

Kaylriene has a post up today about how we don't own our games and what that means. It's a bit of a moot point when it comes to mmorpgs. We never did own them. We used to own the boxes and the discs and the paper manuals and the cloth maps. I still do. The games, though? Not so much.

Even leaving aside the inevitable sunsets, there's always been the issue of access. All mmos go offline sometimes, some more often than others. By and large, though, they're pretty reliable. You'd be unlucky to miss a day or two in a year. This could be more like five if, as Dreamweaver suggests, the fix could take the whole weekend. Or maybe longer.

It's not a complete lockout, though. Daybreak have a very useful Game Server Status monitor. I use it all the time to see how busy things are. All the EQII servers are currently showing "Low" population, which could mean no-one at all for all I know. The TLE server, Kaladim, however, is at "Medium".

Normally, Kaladim would be at "High". Kaladim is almost always at "High", just as the most recent TLE/Progression servers for EverQuest are always at "High". (Actually, quite a few of EQ's servers are almost always at "High". As I write this, in the dead middle of the night in the U.S. EQ has four "High" population servers. By this evening that will have doubled).

This isn't a post about how popular EQ is compared to EQII. I just mention it because I'm curious how it is that the Kaladim players have managed to log in despite the issues. Or maybe they just never logged out. The issues, as I understand it, revolve around getting into the game, not around staying there once you arrive.

It wouldn't really surprise me all that much to learn all those Kaladim players haven't logged out since before the issues started several days ago. I remember when it seemed to be easier just to leave the game logged in that to bother closing it down because, y'know, you're only gonna wake up in a few hours and want to play again, amiright? 

It's not like that for me now, not with any mmorpg. Not sure if I should feel happy about that or sad. I wouldn't even know EQII was having problems if, as I said, it wasn't for that panda and his banquet (that he doesn't yet know about so don't tell him...). And I can do that any time. It's not there are login rewards I'm missing out on. 

I was logging into EQII every day for most of this year to set my Overseer missions but I finally hit the point where there was almost nothing left they could give me that I needed or wanted so I fell back to every two or three days, when I remembered. There's an expansion coming soon and these are the dead times. It's to be expected.

Only now, of course, because I can't log in, I find I want to. Isn't it always the way? How many hours lost over the years, staring at a loading bar, closing the window, trying again? 

I wonder if we'll get any apology loot? Genshin Impact (remember that one?) gives you stuff every time they find a bug or miss a deadline or have any kind of interruption to the service. It's sweet. 

Also a bit creepy, if I'm honest. Not sure I'd want that. Too needy. A week of double status would be nice, though, before they change the entire Guild system with the expansion and it's no good any more. I'm sitting on about thirty million in hand-ins just waiting on a bonus.

Anyway, enough of this. I'm off to play World of Warcraft. My days of monogamy (mono-gamy - one game - geddit? Geddit??) are long past. And we have so much choice now, with everything being free. Although, come to think of it, these are both games I'm paying to play...

Yeah, okay. What about that free stuff, guys? Guys??