Hey all,
We’re grateful for the continued support for progression servers like Ragefire, Lockjaw, and Phinigel. We’re always working to improve and update EverQuest for all of our players, and we’ve got some updates that we’re rolling out for progression servers this year. Since things will be different than what some players on Ragefire, Lockjaw, and Phinigel are expecting, we wanted to get this conversation started early and explain why the team has decided to make these changes.
Our goal is to improve the overall player experience. In order to do so, we're going to change up how some expansions unlock on progression servers, compared to how we’ve handled this on TLP servers in the past. We’re also adding additional time between unlocks for some content on Phinigel to give us more time to build instancing for Planes of Power content.
Phinigel Server Unlock Updates
As many of you are aware, The Scars of Velious is scheduled to unlock on the Phinigel progression server on Wednesday, May 25, 2016.
Normally, content unlocks every twelve weeks on Phinigel. However, it’s important for us to do Planes of Power instancing the RIGHT way on this server and build it correctly, not just for Phinigel, but for any future server that will use the same systems. Unfortunately, after scoping this out with the team, it’s become clear to us that doing this on our current schedule would negatively impact our timeline for our 2016 expansion and other updates the EverQuest team is working on this year.
To give the team more time to build proper Planes of Power instancing, we’ll be adding time to the unlock schedule for The Shadows of Luclin and Planes of Power/Legacy of Ykesha. The period of time for each of these unlocks will be six weeks longer.
With these changes, the updated schedule of content unlocks on Phinigel after Velious now looks like:
- Shadows of Luclin is scheduled to unlock on Wednesday, September 28, 2016.
- Planes of Power & Legacy of Ykesha are scheduled to unlock on Wednesday, February 1, 2017.
Planes of Power, Legacy of Ykesha, and Lost Dungeons of Norrath Unlocks
Once it’s time for Planes of Power to unlock on your server, Legacy of Ykesha content will unlock with it at the same time.
On Ragefire and Lockjaw, three months after Planes of Power & Legacy of Ykesha unlocks, we’ll open up Lost Dungeons of Norrath automatically (no voting required).
On Phinigel, twelve weeks after Planes of Power & Legacy of Ykesha unlocks, Lost Dungeons of Norrath will open to players. Gates of Discord and Omens of War will be twelve weeks after Lost Dungeons of Norrath.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War Unlocks
Gates of Discord is, charitably, a difficult expansion at level 65. To make this launch smoother, we’re mitigating the difficulty jump by opening Omens of War at the same time Gates of Discord unlocks on your server. By both increasing the level cap and opening more areas for players to spread out, our goal is to provide a better player experience in that era of content.
Expansions after Omens of War
We've been having discussions internally regarding the length of time players spend at various level caps. For example, if Dragons of Norrath, Depths of Darkhollow, and Prophecy of Ro unlock on their current schedule, players would spend a considerable period of time without a level cap increase. At the same time, we don’t want to confuse players by making too many changes to unlock dates for expansion content.
While there’s no information to share with players at this time about unlock dates for expansions after Omens, we want to set expectations for the future of progression servers as clearly as possible. We’ll be looking at what players do in game and evaluating feedback before making additional changes to content for progression servers after Omens of War, and we’re leaning towards solutions that would result in shorter periods of time on progression servers without a level cap increase.
We appreciate the continued support of our players for progression servers, and our team continues to work towards making these servers an awesome place to experience different eras of EverQuest’s history.
Want to talk about Time-Locked Progression servers? Talk with other players on our forums here.