Holly Longdale – MMO Fallout

Daybreak Offers Cheaters A World of Their Own

Daybreak Game Company will be opening up a new server later this week, Drunder, with a bit of a twist on the normal server rules. You can’t join Drunder in the normal fashion, at least not without petitioning customer service and signing your life away. Drunder is a prison server, the likes of which house Everquest 2’s greatest cheaters from gold farmer #52982523 to that guy who scammed your friend for his platinum and then shouted racial epithets in regional chat.

Drunder will act as a Hotel California for disruptive players, you can check out but you can never leave. Once determined as a suitable candidate, players will have all of their characters moved over to Drunder and will no longer receive customer support.

Drunder will get no customer service support and it will require a maintained membership to access and play. Rather than disrupt live servers in an attempt to join the “prison server,” players can use our /petition system and ask to join Drunder. To be clear: You won’t be able to move individual characters to this server, while maintaining characters from the same account on another server. This is a ONE-WAY trip for an entire account forever.

According to Holly Longdale, the Drunder server comes in response to repeated requests from Daybreak customer service representatives, who will also be making the decision on who gets a free, non-refundable, compulsory, one way pass.

(Source: Everquest II)

Daybreak Game Company Discussing EQ2 Server Consolidation

Daybreak Game Company has expanded upon an earlier announcement that Everquest II servers will be merged. The term that executive producer Holly Longdale is going for is “consolidation,” meaning that the servers will be closed completely with players shuffled over to new servers, rather than simply merging a lower population server into another.

Those players moving will get a title naming their original server that can be worn with pride! And we will run a vote for the servers being consolidated to choose a new name for the new server based on the recent submissions we’ve had. We don’t know which servers yet, but that’s our next task.

The technology to implement server consolidation isn’t quite done, however the team plans on testing to begin later this month. Server consolidation for other regions will take place after, and more information overall should be coming within the next few weeks.

(Source: EQ2)

Daybreak Ignores Everquest Ragefire Vote

When it comes to Everquest and time-locked servers, polls ensure that the servers only progress as fast at the community wants them to. For Ragefire/Lockjaw, the latest set of progression servers, players voted by a very large percentage in order to keep the servers as they are for another six months, with the second most popular option being ASAP on Ragefire and 3 months on Lockjaw.

In an announcement posted on the official forums, however, Daybreak developer Aristo announced that the company will react to player votes by ignoring them, bending the rules and combining answers from two categories (ASAP and 3 months) and calling it the majority opinion. Instead of going with the top voted option (six months), Daybreak will instead open up voting for the Kunark expansion after three months.

Players stuck on Ragefire might have the option to transfer to Lockjaw, perhaps. It’s a possibility that Daybreak is investigating with no details or confirmation that it would be possible, also noting that the transfer wouldn’t be possible until after the servers fell out of sync.

Once Ragefire is settled into Kunark we’ll have to explore whether they want to return to the 6-month schedule or adjust it to a faster track. Likewise, although Lockjaw will hopefully be full of people who want to stick around in an era for a long time, we’ll check to make sure that remains the case as time goes by.

Daybreak Game Company seems to be suffering from a case of foot in mouth disease, as earlier today community manager Holly Longdale ruffled some feathers by stating that “casual players shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen,” a rather out of touch comment considering that much of the content and competition is currently being nullified by large groups of players multi-boxing and botting.

“What we don’t want to do is instance raids, which is what casuals want us to do because they want to fight Nagafen. Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen… that diminishes the achievement of others. That’s part of the challenge: You have to be better than the other guy; you have to be more strategic that the other guy.”

As for multi-boxing, Longdale assures us that they are “looking into it.”

(Source: Everquest)

Everquest 2 To Merge Servers

Daybreak Game Company has announced that servers for Everquest II will be merged at some point in the near future. In the latest producer letter, Holly Longdale announced that servers will be merged ahead of upcoming cross-server dungeon tech, with more details to follow in the coming months.

We’ll give you specific dates as we get closer. This is very challenging work that will branch off from our Cross-Server Dungeon work. Luckily, what we plan to do for true Cross-Server Dungeons & Battlegrounds logically helps us merge characters to new servers. We’ve already had our incredible coders working on the foundation of cross-server processes for a few months already. Our database changes earlier this year were the first step.

Everquest 2 players can also look forward to time-locked progression servers.

(Source: Everquest 2)