You would have thought that Mum knew better than to trust a dark elf for a neutral review of the Erolissi Day celebrations in Norrath. Whatever her reasoning, here is a different spin on the upcoming Erollisi Day world event!

January 31, 2012 - Kelethin City Fest

SOE has announced that the Kelethin city festival, which will begin in a few short hours, will have available new city-themed building blocks. These blocks will be available for two city tokens apiece and will also be available later on the marketplace.

January 04, 2012 - Site Update

My apologies for the silence over the holidays, as I was hoping against hope that we would have a happier update, or a rough ETA, before I posted. Neither has happened, so here is all I can tell you.

As many of you were aware, we had some serious site downtimes at the beginning of December. After much gnashing of teeth, whimpering and moaning on our part, our hosting provider found the issue. We were told that it was a controller failure, and that our sites had been moved to another server.

There was just one problem.

They restored us to the last full backup, apparently from mid-October.

You can guess what my blood pressure did at that point if you think about what has happened in EQ and EQ2 since that time.

We were told that they were working recovering the rest of the data before the holidays hit.

After a couple weeks of silence due to holiday absenteeism, we were told today that the "entire blade" was shipped to a data recovery expert, and that there was no ETA, but the expectation of a full recovery.

No more gnashing of teeth - it is giving me migraines. No more whimpering, unless they're deep primal whimpers. I am just sort of watching my hope at seeing the lost data any time soon dwindle into nothingness. Keep the faith for me if you can, while I try to just push the stress from my mind for a bit?

For those who are wondering why this is so stressful, here is what that 2 months of lost data entails:

EQ

• Untold amounts of expansion-related data entry by our hard-working volunteers - recipes, items, spawn information, etc.
• Underlying database updates by the hubbyogre to fields, etc. so that said data entry could proceed. (I had to impinge on his final day of vacation on Monday to have him redo all the changes he'd done, since I had given up hope on the restore)

EQII

• The Nights of the Dead preview, story, and all associated images
• The expansion preview and story, and all supporting articles and images (other than the apprentice information, which is echoed in the undamaged forums)
• All the housing guide updates by Therendil, plus the prestige housing article
• The Frostfell preview/story, and all associated images (thankfully, we had a fabulous volunteer working on redoing my cobbled together Frostfell images, so I can run with those, when I find motivation to tackle this mess

Some things, like the item/recipe information on the EQ side, can be redone with a lot of hard work. Other things, like my previews and stories, absolutely cannot be recreated without that restore, due to my habit of composing directly into the site editor.

Anything we do on either site to articles or the EQ item/recipe/etc database since the data loss can/will be overwritten by a restore, as the database replaces those article/item/recipe/etc ids with the old data. So, we could find ourselves spending days and days replacing what we can, only to have it get all jumbled in with the old stuff in a horribly confused mess. Or we could find ourselves stalling for another couple of weeks, only to find that the expectation of a full restore was mistaken.

There is no happy choice at this point, and I know it has to be frustrating to the communities as well. Know that, if anything, we are even more frustrated than you are.

Hang in there, folks! When we know more, you will know more.

~Mum

October 17, 2011 - Closed Beta Registration Begins!

This is from the SOE forums. Please click on this link for the full post.

Closed Beta registration for "Age of Discovery" is now open! Applications are available at this link. Beta testing is vital to ensure a great product launch. We appreciate your participation and welcome any and all feedback.

Click the link above, sign in with your Station Account, complete the application process, and your application will go into the queue for approval. Please be sure to read and accept the NDA. All applicants must have accepted the NDA in order to be considered for participation. All applicants will receive an email to confirm that their application was received.

Applications will be reviewed starting on October 27th. Closed Beta will close on November 14th.

Players who are approved for Closed Beta will receive an email informing them of their acceptance, so please confirm that we have your correct email address during the registration process.

Beta acceptance emails will go out between October 27th and November 16th.

Please remember that registering for the Beta does not guarantee admittance. Approved registrants will be put into the pool from which we will randomly select participants.

Fan Faire 2011 Attendees:

If you attended Fan Faire 2011, you will be admitted into the Beta program. However, you must still register and accept the NDA. Please make sure that you click the link above and register with the account that you used to register for Fan Faire.

October 14, 2011 - Haunted Homes?

Have you already put together a haunted home in-game, or can you put one together before October 24? If so, you might want to check out the Haunted Home Forum Challenge that SOE is running over on the SOE forums. You can find more details here. (Edit: Gremlins stole the link the first time! Gremlins, I tell you!)

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