All Access Downtime Notice: Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Attention players: in order to roll out the new All Access Membership Plan, we will perform a maintenance beginning at 12:01 AM PDT* on Tuesday, April 29, 2014. The downtime for this maintenance will be extensive and we will update you as each individual service becomes available. This will impact the following SOE services:

• All SOE Games
• All Official Forums
• Account management
• Commerce functions, including purchases

Thank you for your patience!

*Convert to your local time

Thanks for the heads up Roshen.

Can you just confirm the server won't need to come down on the 30th April for the other 2 player missions to go active.

I imagine all of that + PoWar mission and raid will be patched in on the 29th downtime

Not one to mince words, eh?

I like that.

Confirmed!

The EQ team is going to work in the 15th Anniversary Player Missions into the All Access Patch (since we'll be offline anyways).

The first NPCs will go live once All Access is done patching. The second set will come online once the servers know it's Wednesday, April 30th.

I think this is one of the biggest changes for SOE gaming ever. It's squarely fixed on how their bottom line is effected, and any mistakes could lead to thousands of repeated exploits that would need to be done on everything from characters built to items purchased without money deducted in the marketplace.

In short, when you're messing with real money, and a huge change such as this, they absolutely need to get it right, or the legal consequences afterwards could be damaging, or, the damage to games could be nearly irreparable without major resources invested in fixes.

IMO (and I'm sure they are) they need to take as much time as needed to get the implementation right, because anything done halfway or with a security exploit would damage them, damage the games, and the gaming experience, not to mention all sorts of problems across billing, managing accounts that took advantage of different promotions over the years, and all the things connected to station cash including the 500 a month for logging in (which if done wrong - for example - could lead to you getting 500 for logging in...or 500 for logging into each game).

Lots of things could go wrong with this...imo given the size of the change and what it can do both positively and negatively, any downtime needed to make sure the system is rock solid should be taken.

I noticed you took recruitment offline as well -- any word on when that will be back up?

Question: How will it work if you have one billing date for EQ2 and a later one for EQ1? (This is due to running on free play time for EQ1 for a couple days before renewing All Access a few months ago.)

Thank you for the heads up Roshen, much appreciated. However, could you be slightly more to the point of approximately how long is *extensive, roughly? 10hrs - 15hrs - longer? Just so I can plan my morning/day accordingly. With 3 kids to get ready for school in the morning etc. I just try to line my ducks up as much as possible =)

LONG LIVE EVERQUEST!!

Plan on it being down all day, and then have a nice surprise when you can play.

I'm pleased they haven't put a time on it, it means they can take their time and get it right.

The 30th is reserved for the usual emergency patch.

By extensive do you mean 12 hours, or more like 24 hours or perhaps 2 or 3 days? I know you dont know exactly, I only wanted an unoffical guess at a ballpark idea of the time. I was asking because I have not played in a couple days because its time to do epic quests on a couple of toons and I wont start untill after I know I wont be signifacantly innterupted. I'm waiting for this downtime to come and be over to play.

my best guess would be 0001 on the 29th pst. To about 0001 on the 29th 2020. Give or take a couple years

This is answered in the FAQ: https://forums.station.sony.com/soe...vised-soe-all-access-program-faq.11500063040/

Currently this looks like it'll be a long maintenance. It's super important that the team gets this right and every game team has a part to play in the roll out of the All Access Membership.


Once I'm given more information on this, I'll update players on the forums, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Reddit.

Thank you Roshen for keeping us updated this issue. Honestly, I feel the Sony team has been doing an excellent job with maintenance throughout the years I've been playing (going on over 12 now). Getting things right is most important and I understand that if downtime takes a while, so be it. Being a vet. this long I commend SoE for keeping EQ 1 alive and running for as long as it has. I have never come across an MMO being up and running as long as this game has. Not kissing anyone's butt here, just being honest of how I feel about how well things have been going with Sony and the EQ team. Much appreciated Roshen.

Where/what is the pricing for the 3/6/12-month subscriptions? The FAQ just says a discount.

Greetings SOE;

This message is about video quality and updates; player computer and server relationships. Most people understand the layers of code that compile the game we see; the code is translated into many different video screen ratios.

Just want to ask you to post a technical notice to double check video screen settings after the update. I still run a computer with an old SONY CRT and notice this kind of code and drawing aspect ratio differential in EverQuest daily.

The video relationship between the player computer and the server should not adversely effect game play or log in; although players should be reminded that a software re-set of a video cards screen settings may also be needed after a major server update.

Thank You; Good Hunting.

So you're adding all the stuff from the most recent test patches into the SoE All Access launch as well? I thought it was going to be All Access + player missions, then at a later time the actual content patch?

What kind of company doesnt have an ETA on a server maintenance? And you wonder why Sony has less and less subscribers to its games as a whole company. JFC. . .