EQ2 Players April Update

This morning we released an update to our Authentication system, and along with this change we resolved several outstanding issues on the site. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. We have made a Change to the links on the Launchpad. As part of our new security system, passing authentication from the launchpad into eq2players has been removed. Because of this, we removed the links to paid features to prevent people from being prompted to pay for a service they are actually paying for. The exception to this is Guild Chat – because so many people use this link from Launchpad, we have decided to keep the link there and have it prompt you to log in again in order to use it.
2. Kill vs Death Ratio on PVP Leaderboards has been removed – to return when it is functional.
3. Guilds with Custom Domain websites will no longer display as N/A on the profile, search, and leaderboard pages.
4. XML for the Guild Roster should now be properly formatted.
5. Users with no characters will be less likely to see broken links in the left nav
6. Media Gallery should no longer prompt users to log in
7. Server and Game wide discoveries are no longer reversed on the Character Rankings page. (Sigs coming soon)
8. Login Errors should now correctly explain what the error was.
9. Artisan Level History should now display the date you gained a level.
10. Item Search results will now correctly display slots, instead of class.
11. Lots of tweaks to improve flow and usability, especially in the leaderboards area.
12. Lots of localization tweaks, especially for the germans.
13. Lots of changes to prevent users from seeing pages prompting them to pay if they already have.

Known Issues:

1. The Level History is showing an error for people from merged servers.
2. Most Status Leaderboard shows guild level, not guild status.
3. Localization issues from some locales prevent page from loading.
4. Fae show as Qeynos faction.
5. Guild Search always shows LFM as True and Alignment as Exile.
6. Game-Wide and Server-Wide Discoveries are switched in Signatures, and may be switched in other places.
7. Servers which don't exist anymore show up as "No row" errors in Level History and Item Discoveries.
8. Some EOF Factions Missing.
9. Some links to the My Leaderboards section do not maintain character Id.
10. Character Skills are off in several ways, particularly Tradeskills.
11. Secondary Tradeskills do not update when you switch.
12. Most Master Abilities leaderboard returns no results.
13. The Rares Harvested rankings do not match the various leaderboards.
14. Unique Guild Members column is sometimes inaccurate. Should be resolved.
15. Some titles contain meaningless strings. Should be resolved. If you log in and play the character, the correct title should be displayed.
16. The Website for guilds with Custom Domains show up as N/A. Should be resolved.
17. Lithium Guild Forums not recognizing ranks. Lithium Guild Forums are gone.
18. Date field missing on tradeskill history page. Should be resolved.
19. Guild Roster XML is in invalid XML format Should be resolved.

We are considering the following enhancement requests for future patches:

1. Guild Roster should allow sorting by level.
2. Guild Roster should include "By Tradeskill Class".
3. Character Id in Guild XML roster.
4. Internal Guild Rankings.
5. NPC with the Most Kills.
6. Achievements currently only shows Kingdom of Sky achievements.

[p]Thanks for the update, Jabru! [/p][p]Great news about the guild XML feed...I can hear the various Roster Master developers squealing in joy from here. LOL Putting the character ID back in will also help immensely. (And if we could get the quest count back (in the XML feed, at least), I'd be your best friend...)[/p][p]I'm curious as to what you mean by "internal guild rankings," exactly. Is that something like the way the roster could be sorted before, or is it a separate leaderboard-type thing?[/p][p]I remember back when "Forge" was the NPC with the most kills...ah, those were the days! [/p]

So when is EQ2Player going to be backup? And did someone forget to announce that it would be going down? Took awhile to find a backdoor to login to the forums to post this.

[p]No back door necessary...the forum URL will always work, unless of course the forums are down. [/p][p]http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/[/p][p]I almost never go through EQ2 Players to get to the forums; it's usually the other way around.[/p]

Getting to forums was not the problem. Logging in was the problem. " SIGN IN/CHANGE USER" would bring up the login dialog and then when you click to submit, it would do nothing (waited 5 min).

Ah, I see...I didn't have a problem getting to the login page, so assumed there wasn't a problem with the process itself. Mea culpa.

well, the EQ2Players is back up, but I can't get the guild chat working. Keeps telling me I'm not logged in but I am. Is there anything I can do to log into the chat?

[p]makes me sad that a service we pay for is yet again broken .. every few weeks something happens whether its from "fixes" or updates it breaks the guild chat. please fix this.. I get the same error has the above poster.. 401-2.. telling me im not logged in , when i am most defiantly logged in[/p][p] [/p][p]edited to fix the error code[/p]

Glad to know it's not just me.

Same here. Looks like fix #1 broke the login to guild chat. Anybody able to login to guild chat from the game launch pad, since that is what they were changing?

There is currently an issue with Guild Chat. We know what it is, and the code is in testing with QA. We will push it once we have signoff, it will probably be tomorrow. Included in that push should be an additional change we have made which will hopefully resolve the issue some people have had where Guild Chat never works for them. We are sorry for the inconvenience of the service being down today, and appreciate your patience.

thank you for the update must be hard dealing with all our personalites all the time!! haha

Thanks for the update, especially with the broken XML feed. However, as the author of one of the guild roster parsing tools, this XML feed is still of no use to me, due to the missing data: - CharacterID (right now we are forced to parse the HTML code itself to retrieve it, and pray this HTML layout doesn't change) (we need this to generate an URL that points back to the character complete bio on the EQ2Players site, and it also guarantees an unique ID) - Lastname (this is available in the old XML feed) - Number of Completed Quests (also available in the old XML feed) Is there any technical reason why you can't just take the old XML generator and use it on EQ2players? I understand that would also require updating the CSV generator to match the available data, but better to have one of the two than neither of them for the time being By old XML feed, I refer to this link, as an example: http://eq2players.station.sony.com/en/guild_roster_xml.vm?guildId=783104 Right now, we (the authors of the various RosterMaster variants) are forced to rely on hand-crafted HTML parsing to retrieve some of the missing info. In fact, if we want to obtain all the available info, we have to parse all three sources: - The old XML parser (for lastname and number of quests) - The HTML page (for characterID) - EIther the new XML feed or the CSV feed (for the Joined date) It would make our job a lot easier (and our code much more robust) if you could aggregate all this (already available in various places) data into the two official feeds (XML and CSV). Thanks

Changes to the XML are on the list, but we wanted to get it into the right format before we made any enhancements to it.

That makes perfect sense.

[p] Guild chat still not working for me. Used to work faultlessly over a year ago....no changes to MY hardware/softweare/settings since then. Now getting a 401-2 error message (not logged in etc)...could just be the system is still not back up yet I suppose. :hunf:[/p][p][strike]Meaningless text strings seem to be tidied up however still getting the xml code showing up when hovering over gear rather than the stat details and gear name. [/strike][strike]Seems to be working ok now![/strike] Hmmm....different computer and no it isn't again.....frustrating :hunf:[/p][p]Hooray on getting the custom guild website addresses to finally show up once again!! :thumbup:[/p][p][strike]Hooray on getting the guild roster to report by class once again too!! [/strike]Hmmm... different computer and no it isn't again.... this is VERY frustrating! :evil:[/p][p]And now they all are again! ARRGGHHH![/p][p]It seems that the first time I access the site the xml issues occur but by the time I link back to the forums and back again it all works........wooooooo......weird!![/p][p] [/p]

It's good to finally be able to see some progress. The news about XML feeds is excellent. It's even better to see this level of feedback from you, Jabru. Thank you.

In prior versions of the EQ2Players site, when you logged in and looked at your guild page, you could click "Most quests completed". You would get a list of everyone in your guild, how many quests they had completed, and where they stood relative to each other. Four or five other stats resulted in leaderboards with internal guild rankings for those stats. My hope is that SOE restores the lost functionality (and soon).

The meaningless strings are gone. /cheer The date field for tradeskills has arrived. /dance There are still missing levels (1-12) on my main toon. See here for example: http://eq2players.station.sony.com/characters/character_tradeskills.vm?characterId=125589101 There are also missing levels for another character. He is level 11 and only lists level 2. Here is the URL: http://eq2players.station.sony.com/characters/character_tradeskills.vm?characterId=505353101 The Rares Harvested rankings do not match at all. /raspberry To reproduce the problem, follow these steps: 1. Login to EQ2Players. 2. Go to Leaderboards. 3. Under "Custom leaderboards", select Guk, Swashbucker, and Most rares harvested. 4. Find Janthia (at the time of this writing, she is #35 with 212 rares). 5. Now look at her stats: http://eq2players.station.sony.com/characters/character_rankings.vm?characterId=125589101 The 212 rares matches, but the Guk/Swashbuckler ranking is #502. Furthermore, I find it extremely difficult to believe she ranks #612,599th worldwide. Thanks for all of the recent updates (both to the site and informing the playerbase what is going on).