Fan Faire 2008 - Community Address

Friday evening, John Smedly gave his second annual community address.  As usual, SOE put on a great show! 

Zam.com and SOE announced a partnership to bring you some very cool updates to the Zam network including direct feeds from the EQII database to EQ2.Allakhazam.com!  I can't wait until that's all in place.  (And Allakhazam ans reportedly ditched IGN so no more worries about supporting plat sellers!)

Everquest & Everquest II expansions are coming out later this year.  Dates were announced and we got to see trailers for both expansions.  More information on the EQII expansion can be found on Ten Ton Hammer.

We got to see trailers and gameplay from Free Realms and DC Universe Online.  I think Free Realms looks adorable!!!

Video of the entire presentation is uploaded to YouTube in 8 parts.  You can watch the first part here!

Fan Faire 2008 - Day 2 afternoon - some wonderful announcements!

Guild Halls!

  After lunch and live questing it was time for Guild Halls!!!!!  I got to the room a little early, found a good spot and opened up my laptop to take notes.  I mean, it's guild halls!!!  Right behind me was the guys from Stratics.  We chatted a little bit before the session got started .. they're pretty fun. 

Most of the pictures here were taken from the projected images .. so they're not the best quality.  For a full list of details, check out the article by Nami Denmother on EQ2 Traders!!  Nami's always a great source of information! 

As for my thoughts .. ohhhhh .... this is going to be cool!!  They are incredibly expensive though!!  I got out of the panel and immediately found a spot to call my Guild Leader with details and instructions to start saving up!!!  The Guild Halls will allow us to place tradeskill stations, writ givers, brokers, bankers and more!  There's even the option of portals and a fun new tool called a Guild Strategist that allow you to place a banner in the world and your guild mates can port right to it!  How cool is that?! 

So what's the trick to guild halls?  Well .. they're EXPENSIVE!!!  And the stuff to go into it is expensive (Items are often costing plat and millions of status) and limited in how many of the guild "amenities" that you can have in the house.   At guild level 30, you can have 15 amenities, and at guild level 80 you can have 30 amenities.  The numbers approximately scale at the rate of 2 amenities for every 6 guild levels.  That's not enough to get everything, so folks will have to pick and choose.   There's also a bunch of decorations that are guild hall specific that don't take up any amenity slots but cost plat and status to get. 

FanFaire 2008 Day 2 morning – Techie stuff and more!

Day 2 started off with a semi early breakfast then I headed off to my morning seminars. Okay so I won’t bore you with too many of the details, but the Station Voice and Customer Service panels were cool …Well … if you’re a total geek like me.

Station Voice Presentation & Panel

The first session was all about Station Voice. I’ve played around with it for a little with the voice in EQII with my guild and it was pretty easy to use once I got it to recognize my mic when it was plugged in the front …Some of the cool things that are coming … voice integrated into the Station Launcher, Voice fonts (sound like an elf!), the ability to listen to multiple channels at the same time, ability to connect to chat channels via phone, direction and proximity modifiers on the sound … aka the character is standing on your left, you hear the voice on your left. All of it sounds very cool and the guys who are doing it seem really excited about it. All of it is coming Soon ™ …The biggest thing is to get people to setup their mics right!! The Record & playback was recommended to make sure you sound right …

Customer Support Panel

Customer support was my next panel … not necessarily the most exciting, but still pretty cool. SoE is starting on setting up a work-at-home GM program … very cool. They spent a fair amount of time on how they handle spammers … pretty much the same messages we’ve heard, don’t share your account and don’t use 3^rd party power-leveling or plat buying. They have a team called NUGIT (Norrathian Underground Gnomish Investigatory Team) that does a lot of in-game and out of game plat purchasing and farmer investigations. And they don’t just look at the one account, they actually dig further into the account and investigate related accounts … related by IP, credit account, address … so don’t room with a spammer!! On average, SOE bans about 2,000 accounts a day … a DAY!!!! Impressive.  Those guys really seem to be enjoying the game and have interest in what they’re doing. Very cool.

Lunch & Live Quest Photos!

I picked up a yummy pasta salad for lunch and charged up my computer in the room for a bit .. then it was off to take photos!!

The guides were running the EQII Live Quest .. all dressed up and roleplay crazy!

FanFaire 2008 - Day 1

I got to FanFaire on Thursday around lunch and discover that Vegas is all about lines. So I stood in lines to pay for the shuttle, to get on the shuttle, to check in, to get food, to …. To do just about everything. And there’s gambling machines and tables EVERYWHERE!! I can’t go from my hotel room to the convention center, or to food, without walking through or around the slots … there were even slots in the airport!

My Roommate and a bunch of other guides met up with me for lunch, not that great but expensive!! Heck a bottle of water is $3 minimum .. but then I guess it is the desert. We got all setup and checked in, I got to meet Brenlo (yay cool!). The Welcome reception was huge and really hard to hear Brenlo =/ but the little contests he did were pretty fun ….. someone can actually do a wookie roar!! He was pretty  good too!! After the reception, we were off to Quark’s for drinks. It being Quark’s, I of course had to have a have a Warp Core Breach …. Only a mini one and it was HUGE!! Of course it was equal to about four drinks … maybe 3 … but considering the prices of drinks it was actually a pretty good deal. Tasty but really sweet. Someone else at the table had the Borg Cube and it apparently was yummy!

Off to bed and get ready for a day of seminars!