TLP Server Update: April 8

So, this is where we're at:

Server Votes: The current vote that went live on April 7 is for Seeds of Destruction. The text for this should be updated soon. Any vote you've cast is counting towards SOD.

Characters Reset to 75: This was an unintentional issue that popped up when pushing this vote along. This should be fixed for all characters now. If it isn't, go ahead and zone and it should fix things for any character affected negatively by this.

AA Auto Grant: The TLP version of this feature is now targeted to go live in the EverQuest Live May patch.

I'm grateful for all of the support from the community, including PMs on this topic so I can share good clear information with dev as they work support our players on Time Locked Progression Servers.

Thank you for this response, and for following up to make sure these issues got addressed.

What about a merge of the two servers? With EoE moving to Fippy, I don't think Vulak can progress any longer (no offense Kukgrol).

At this time there are no plans to merge these two servers.

Great news. Thank you Roshen for your hard work, and not just throwing this subject under the bus! LongLiveFippy

Thank you for the information, looking forward to SoD!

Thank you for sharing this info. Knowledge is power

thanks for the update, hate to keep pelting with questions, but..

what about expansions moving forward? will each vote need to be triggered manually? if so, are steps being taken to avoid the level cap being reset to the previous expansion?

Triggering a vote manually isn't something that feels great for us or for players. We would like this process to be automated as we move through SOD into Underfoot.

Our team is working towards this goal now. That being said, even if we don't get there by the end of SOD it's important to us to keep things moving ahead for players on progression servers, even if that means manually triggering a vote if the automated systems fail.

This is great. Three questions:

First, have you all identified what the issue was? It sounds like it was more than just a SoF/SoD specifi thing, if you are concerned that it will continue to impact future votes.

And second, can I ask if you all have plans to do any testing once you have a solution in place? The previous "solution" was apparently hotfixed without testing, didn't solve the problem, and actually broke other things (the Researcher Entharr chest is STILL broken under easily reproducible circumstances, and sooner or later some guild is going to lose their whole loot from this mob as a result.) It would be great if we as a player base could have confidence that the expansion launches would actually work as intended in the future, because the solution had been well tested this time.

While we are at it, is there any chance you could adjust the voting system to move the expansion unlocks from 12:00 AM Monday mornings to 12:00 Noon Monday afternoon? As much as I appreciate the competitive advantage that playing through the middle of the night gives us, I think everyone would be much happier to have these launches go off at a time when devs are actually in the office to fix problems that may arise. And I'm certain that most of the player base would rather have the launches happen at a reasonable hour.

Entharr chest works fine on fippy doing crystallos in one night.

While I don't have all the technical details, the team is aware of these issues and is working towards fixes.

They did test the previous update. Unfortunately there are times that things behave one way on a test environment and a different way on a live environment.

I'll pass this suggestion on.

changing when the expansion unlocks? why not just do away with voting as well while we're at it

how is changing the time an expansion unlocks after a successful vote akin to removing the voting system all together?

Moving the time of expansion unlocks by 12 hours isn't even in the same category as completely altering the way the server works.

Thanks. Any chance they can fix the Entharr issue?

why not change everything instead of leaving something that has worked perfectly fine for prior expansions, most recently SoF.

Lol. It hasn't worked perfectly fine for prior expansions. SoF is expansion 14. Of those 14, at least 6 had to be manually triggered by devs on one server or the other. And it has been more than two years since the devs have been available at midnight PST to manually trigger for us--since Velious iirc. In fact, several years back, as we were anticipating the possible GoD launch, Piestro flat out said that no customer service staff or devs would be available at midnight PST if the voting system didn't work properly (and he was right.) All of the manual unlocks in the last two years have occurred around noon PST or later.

But yeah, it's working perfectly fine. I'm sure there will be no problems at all with the SoD launch. We saw how well the manually triggered SoD vote launch went, after all.

[Sun Nov 11 20:37:26 2012] <SYSTEMWIDE_MESSAGE>:The barrier to the Dragons of Norrath has been breached. Make haste, many new and exciting adventures await you in these foreign lands!

Working as intended.

I'm sure EoE can provide a similar systemwide from TSS.

a two year old system wide message, yes i believe that would make it reasonable to completely change how expansions unlock. Do away with voting next why don't we.