Patch Message 2 ~ 12/15/2005

[Phinneas]

December 15th, 2005

*** Headlines ***
- Updates for the launch of EQPlayers.

As I am sure you have noticed we had to do a quick update again this morning to fix the bug with NPC spell casting. Let me step back and try to give a more thorough explanation of why we ended up with the amount of downtime we had this week.

EQPlayers is a huge separate but connected system to the EverQuest game. Because of this there is a lot of messaging going on and the amount of traffic is dependent on the amount of information that is being dealt with. The consequence of this is that some bugs did not become apparent until we hooked up the system to all of the live servers. Although EQPlayers has not been available for you this week it has been running with all of the live data. Even more unfortunately, some of the leaks and crashes were not seen until the other ones were discovered - much like the layers of an onion. This is what has caused the repeated updates. Although not immediately obvious, this morning’s update dealing with the NPC spell casting bug is also EQPlayers related. As you all know EverQuest is a large and complicated system.

This being said I am not making excuses but I wanted to communicate the reasons. I do believe that EQPlayers is a great addition to the game and will be a great service to all of you. We do strive to maintain a stable and reliable service to our customers and I hope you agree that this week has been the exception and not the rule.

Once again, please accept my apologies for this week's downtime.

- The EverQuest Team
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Phinneas ~ Lord Protector ~ The Walkers of Vazaelle ~ My Magelo