First impressions of the new EQ2 Players

Glenedhel@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Welcome to the thread.
We know .

The only positive thing I see is that the live feed into my Guild Portal account for my small guild seems to still be useable, so far....... The "new and improved" EQ2 Players now requires 7 pages to display the same info that displays on one page in Guild Portal.

I just dont understand how something that is THIS poorly done, gets by the web dev team, the planning people, and of course, Brenlo. Its as if they handed it off to someone who wasnt familiar with the previous site and said "do whatever you want." So often we see people exaggerate and say "where was QA on this?" But.. well...

I would have to say that with it in this condition I'm tempted to drop the extra money. I didn't buy in just for the extra toon slots.

What the op said, and one more problem : Links from english version don't work if you're in a localized country (it defaults to player country) and changing the language often don't work.

born2bmild wrote:

Dear Valued Station Players Subscriber,
Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) is pleased to announce that beginning on December 17, 2009, SOE will no longer charge separately for access to Station Players premium features for each of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes™, EverQuest® and EverQuest® II and access to standard and premium Station Players features will be included at no additional cost for subscribers to each respective game for subscribers with active, paid subscriptions in good standing! Station Access™ subscribers with active, paid subscriptions in good standing will continue to have access to all Station Players standard and premium features.
Station Players subscribers currently in a paid billing cycle will continue to have full access to the Station Players premium features already paid for through December 16, 2009. Station Players subscribers who have prepaid subscription time that extends their subscription period past December 16, 2009 will receive a pro-rated refund for any such pre-paid excess subscription payments*. Such refunds are expected to be issued by January 17, 2010.
We appreciate your loyalty and commitment to SOE's games and look forward to bringing you more enjoyable products and game features in the future.
Thank you!
Sony Online Entertainment

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I hopped onto EQ2 players for the first time since the update today. It looks pretty and seems to have even less functionality than I had before the changes when I didn't pay for the 'special features'.
I can't sort my guild's roster anymore. That might be okay if you have a guild with 20-30 players (even then it would be annoying) but with over 300 characters in the guild yeah... sorting would be nice. Even listing more than 5 characters at a time would be nice.
Everything loads really slowly, even the dropdown menus are slow.
The guild websites through EQ2 players are still buggy and the forums via them are even buggier (as in my guild leader can't even create them, there's been a bug for years with this.) Good thing we have another site that we actually use that works.
All in all I really wish they'd have just left the site alone if they weren't going to actually improve anything. It's worse over all than it was before. Sure it a lot of it looks prettier, but the site is just this side of useless as it stands now.

Everyone, thanks for the feedback on the web site. With Station Players becoming a free service, I hope you're checking out all of the sections of the site if you've never had access to it. It's important to keep hearing this feedback so we can continue to evolve the site.
To address the browser crashing:
We're already planning on making a version of the site that is 'lighter' for the in-game browser. It has always been the plan, but we could not get that version of the site done in time for this release. We'll investigate why it's crashing, though I have heard that other sites (not just EQ2's) have crashed in the past as well so it's not something I can guarantee that will be in our control to fix before the in-game version of the site.

Re: Guild Chat visibility:
We'll improve the placement for this, we agree that we need other entry points to this beyond just the profile pages. In fact, the profile bar is planned to be accessible via the entire site.

Re: Search functionality
We're re-tooling this after much feedback to be more intuitive and accessible.

Re: Speed of loading
We'll investigate this. It loads fast on all machines we've tested, and loads relatively fast even on the iphone. This could be browser version specific so we'll have our lab here see if they can replicate this one.

A few additional comments:
Re: Alts
We're adding this back in next build of the site.

Re: Guild Roster
Agreed, 5 is too low, we're tweaking this next build.

Re: Best in Class Leaderboard
We're adding the update in the next build of the site.

Re: Login remember me
We'll speak with the teams responsible for this functionality and will hopefully have a fix in place soon.

Re: RSS Feeds/CSV functionality
We've been working on making this more accessible for folks and are looking into ways we can get you guild data for your use whether it be for web sites or not. We'll have an update soon for this.

Please keep sending the feedback, we're listening and addressing it. If you run into any problems (i.e. errors), please PM me or post it and we'll get someone looking into it.

I just tested the new Guild Chat. Took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to actually close guild chat (you have to re-click Enter Guild Chat apparently).
It would be more intuitive to have either a close button on the Flash applet, the /camp or /quit command work like in-game, or have the Enter Guild Chat text change to Leave Guild Chat.

My feedback:
Navigation:
~In the in-game browser, the game's navigation bar at the top instead loads vertically for me. Perhaps check this out?
~The "Game Updates" and "Station Cash" sections should be moved to the lefthand column, with the search and news all the way at the top.
~I can't find the "Guild Chat" feature, to be honest...
~I would re-evaluate the way that the top navigation is set up. When I visit it, I don't even know what to click to get where I want, and i've been playing the game for 5 years now.
Aesthetics:
The new website, to me, looks incredible.
Things that are STILL Broken:
The game still lists over 20 characters for me on my profile. As you can guess, 13 of these characters are ancient and long deleted. Why are they still there?
Crashing:
The thing doesn't crash for me on my laptop... but it's running minimal settings right now. The laptop, however, is a piece of garbage, so i'm surprised that it didn't crash at all. Default UI with a Melee attack bar.
Layout:
The new layout of the character profiles, to me, is very natural. I don't feel like I have to tab through all of these "Mysterious" options to get where I want to go. Good!
Alts:
I was happy that the alts sections were removed. Waiting for the players page to refresh my low level characters, remembering to hunt them down and lock down my alt section was often tedious and unnecessary. Alts are my business, not anyone elses. If I want someone to know my alts, I will tell them. If a guild wants to ensure that they don't let troublemakers in, request a screenshot of their character window. It's how we did it in EVE, it's often faster, and more reliable.

The page is loading much faster for me today than it did yesterday in all Browsers (IE, FF, Opera). Anyone else?

I also have to say that the biggest drain on the load times on the page is the goofy little popup window that loads every single time to tell me to either start a trial or pre-order the expansion. There is already a "Free trial" on the main page... maybe have the first thing on the little flash scroller be the pre-order for the expansion?
Do that and you save us a lot of loading time.

Thanks for getting back to us DarkViper. If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to give some extra feedback on the points mentioned below:
DarkViper wrote:

Hiya!
Okay, just opened up the new EQ2Players for the first time... Here is my feedback as I poke around:
Some window talking about purchasing the trial / buying EQ2 popped up on my first loading. I'm not sure what it was... I'm assuming it was a 1-time dealio since it hasn't done that again. If it was just 1-time, then whatever, but if it does plan to do that again, that was sort of annoying... but that's mostly because it blacked out the rest of the browser screen, and I hate having my screen messed with. d:
Overall, I like the look of it. Though, on my screen, all I have on the left-hand side is Lucan's arm just kind of threatening me. While sticking to the current event is a cool idea, the way the layout is, I don't think it lends itself too nicely, unless you scale down the Will of the Tyrant pic so Lucan can fit. Otherwise, all I'm seein' is just a threatening arm... even though *I* know whose arm it is. d: It's just a little odd-looking by itself.
Also, on the front page -- is there any way to put that in its own frame / scrolling DIV of some sort? The way it is, it keeps going all the way down and overlaps with some of the things at the bottom, breaking away from the snazzy background and layout. However, I like the Community News section in of itself, except... As a personal preference, I don't like all-caps fonts / titles. The smaller sections, such as "GAME UPDATES" and "FEATURED ITEMS" and even the words "COMMUNITY NEWS" themselves look fine, but the individual community news article titles in all caps is a little too much capsification.
On my profile page, it has the Community News / EQII Marketplace Catalog on there. Is that intentional?
Also, is there a way to tell my eq2players account that such-and-such character was deleted a long while ago? *lol*
Awww... The Skills section doesn't have the Investigation skill listed. d: I worked hard to get that maxed!
Speaking of profiles... The "My Profile" drop-down menu. Would it instead be possible to organize it like... "Aurelis - The Bazaar" or "The Bazaar - Aurelis" instead of it saying "Aurelis Profile"?
Everything looks really nice, but I wonder if the "looking nice" is coming at a cost of very slow loading. Flashier and fancier isn't always better, even if it looks really darn nice!
However, I want to say -- YAY!!! I can see server-by-server item discoveries now! This makes me VERY happy. I can stop harassing random people to look up items for me now.

Dreyco wrote:

Requesting a screenshot is probably more work overall than anyone who cares just turning their alt listings off. Especially for massive guilds.
Know what would be better? If there was the option to "Disable my alt listing for all current and future characters" / "Disable my alt listing from everyone but guildmates for all current and future characters". Both of these options would be great. There you go, problem solved! That's thinking outside of the box, eh?
EDIT: I also don't understand why you think requesting a screenshot, uploading it somewhere and looking it over is more reliable than getting the data direct from the server? How is it faster as well? Some people would have to be guided through the process. You'd almost certainly have to have a forum or something where it could be uploaded after signing up. Long links from image sites would be a chore to copy from the game (no copy / pasting from the game?). Having a universal "shut off" for your alts would make it quick and easy for the minority that wish to keep their alts private, instead of every sensible guild ever having to go through this screenshot process you're suggesting.

0naoko0 wrote:

I've tried to walk people through disabling/enabling their alt features on the station player's page and it's like driving miss daisy sometimes. But to each their own. It would have been faster for me to say, "Go to character select, hit the print screen button, send to this email."
I do like the option to enable/disable alts for everyone on the account though. Problem indeed solved.

I do love the new look of the Web site and i always appreciate updated and improved functions but my main thing other than the LAG is the Character ALTS
this is a Very nessesary feature for a perfect example i have a toon that i am looking to transfer but my name is taken so i look up the name and find that it is a level 2 bruiser that has not been played in three months and was only played for 11 mins. now before i had a chance to find that ALTS MAIN and talk with them and see if they where dead set on keeping that name or if they would consider a deal to where he would delete and alow me to have that name considering my toon has had the name since day one and is very well known by that name.
Just an example

Someone mentioned trouble makers, that is so true.
For some time there has been someone who just randomly sends tells asking for rares for no specific reasons, or asking folks to power level, or any sort of thing.. Random tells, I'd put him on ignore and a couple days later he'd be bothering me with another toon. The way I knew it was another toon? I'd use the players site to look up people who beg. One day he wanted to join our guild. I asked a few standard questions and got suspicious and looked him up.. IT WAS THE SAME PERSON. Definately NOT someone I wanted to invite to our guild.
Lately, there has been someone selling lower level AA runs for 50g each on our server. I wish I had looked at the time, but I almost think it might be the same fellow. Now I can't look it up. The reason I was wondering is I was standing near where there were meeting and they were /saying things like "if we don't have enough do we get our money back" and then someone indicated that the fellow selling the run wasn't responding.
It's people like this (whether it is the same person or two) I would like to look up - to make sure they are not a member of my guild or any of my friend's guilds.

My guild is not recruting at all till this is returned and fixed. I encourage other guild leaders to do the same to get this issue fixed fast. This is not acceptable as a guild we NEED to have the right to know who we are allowing in our guild. There are people out there that steal and cause problems in guilds and we do not want them coming in on an alt and destroying our beautiful guild.

Dreyco wrote:

In many of the guilds I have been in, if you didn't make the alts section available to at least the guild members or leave it unlocked long enough for the guild leaders to read it, you were not invited and/or allowed to stay. They all had different reasons for it - from making sure you didn't have op-fac characters to weeding out deadbeats. Many of the most desired guilds on the server had this requirement.
I'm on a PvP server, not a blue server. For folks this means war, being able to research alts was part of how they do things.