SOE has published the patch notes for EverQuest II's Game Update 49: Raising the Banner, which introduces Guild Halls, multicore support, experience point changes, and more.

GUILD HALLS

* Construction of the Guild Halls has been completed. Guilds of qualifying levels can now purchase halls in a variety of locations. Smaller halls can be found in North Qeynos, South Freeport, Kelethin, Neriak, and Gorowyn. Medium halls are found in South Qeynos and North Freeport, and large halls are found off the shores of Antonica and Commonlands. Click on the corresponding doors, or mariner bells on the docks, to access these new structures.
* With the work completed on the coastal fortresses in Antonica and Commonlands the involved parties have retired to their cities and the guards have been recalled to the barracks.

HOUSING & HALLS

* You can now pay upkeep on your house or guild hall up to 12 weeks in advance.
* Wall-placed house items now use a different method to stick to the wall that should keep them from disappearing into the world geometry.
* The payments tab has been renamed to "History" and will now display payments and credits to the escrow account.
* The deposits tab will only display contributions to the escrow account from players.

GAMEPLAY

* The experience requirements for levels have been significantly lowered primarily affecting the 20 thru 70 level range. Along with the experience changes, the drop rate for Adept I spells has been increased slightly.
 

Read more here.

Cool, be interested how the multicore support pans out.

Finally they add the guild Halls, I am curious how they turned out. I am still waiting for a crusader revamp but the voice chat they added, guild halls and a few other things they've added lately have made me contemplate resubbing for a month to check out the changes.

With multi-core support finally added hopefully they do a small graphical refresh in the future:)

Also would love to see some new classes down the line and more mid-high level content! If I can get my mac to run EQ2 I'll definitely try a re-sub for a month!

Thank god for multicore support!  I was not very happy when my old althlon 3600+ ran this game better then my current quad-core machine.

Originally posted by ZeppelinJ0

Also would love to see some new classes down the line and more mid-high level content! If I can get my mac to run EQ2 I'll definitely try a re-sub for a month!

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for new classes or content as one of the changes was to significantly increase the speed of characters leveling (adventure-wise only!):

"The experience requirements for levels have been significantly lowered primarily affecting the 20 thru 70 level range."

It appears the complaints of the players that actually like to Quest (in Everquest, surely not!) were ignored and no change was made to be able to turn experience off (the combat XP switch still works but all other xp gain has been increased significantly).  This means that there's no point in adding new low-, mid- or mid-high level content as no-one will be of a level long enough to enjoy it.

If you read between the lines of the SoE comments it looks like the game is being directed towards end-game only (i.e. "we'd love to revisit old content but ..." comments).

Personally I think that if they continue in this direction then they will lose subs as players will stop playing inbetween upgrades and expansion packs, as the end game is limited and repetitive.

Originally posted by HeavySigh

Originally posted by ZeppelinJ0

Also would love to see some new classes down the line and more mid-high level content! If I can get my mac to run EQ2 I'll definitely try a re-sub for a month!

 

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for new classes or content as one of the changes was to significantly increase the speed of characters leveling (adventure-wise only!):

"The experience requirements for levels have been significantly lowered primarily affecting the 20 thru 70 level range."

It appears the complaints of the players that actually like to Quest (in Everquest, surely not!) were ignored and no change was made to be able to turn experience off (the combat XP switch still works but all other xp gain has been increased significantly).  This means that there's no point in adding new low-, mid- or mid-high level content as no-one will be of a level long enough to enjoy it.

If you read between the lines of the SoE comments it looks like the game is being directed towards end-game only (i.e. "we'd love to revisit old content but ..." comments).

Personally I think that if they continue in this direction then they will lose subs as players will stop playing inbetween upgrades and expansion packs, as the end game is limited and repetitive.

new classes is very unlikely, there is allready 24 classes and that amount is allready very hard to balance, adding more classes will only make balancing worse.

about the increased xp gain i don't like it too, but on the other side its the point that a new player joinning often doesn't want to play for months till he can play with his friends at lvl 80 and do the "cool things" they do. i noticed it when a friend of me started earlier this year and he almost lost interest on the way to high levels. I personally think that any level based game needs to adjust leveling speeds form time to time to allow new players to enter teh game (which is also a point why i don't really like the classic class/level idea anymore).

next expansion should bring lots of group content if i remember right it ws about 20 group zones for high end content,so i think it should be not so repetitive as now rok which had only a very limited amount of group content.  they announced 4 new raidzones so the question is how they will fit in with the current rok zones and how big they are will determine how repetitive raiding will get (4 zones and 1 of it a small one looks a lot like the amount of raiding eof added). 

overall i think they are on the right path for the new expansion and the recent updates, new group content was really needed and nearly noone wanted a level increase. Also the game engine improvements and other things show that they know where the current problems are. depending on the quality of the zones next expansion might be a nice addition to the endgame, but in the end it will depend on the quality (that i cannot judge yet) of the new zones, just adding the quantity (20+ zones) will not really help them.

The new Guild Halls are fantastic. Though I think you'll see fewer people in the cities now because they'll all go to their guild hall since there's a "home to the guild" button to take you there immediately.

I hear the multi-core support is limited though.  Any details on that?  That sucks about the cities being empty.  Didn't think about that.  They are already dead enough as it is.  They may as well just consolidate the city zones.  They are a complete waste.

yeah i been playing for the last day or 2. while i noticed a slight upgrade in overall performance, nothing to write home about. multi core support or not, its not a dramatic enough change as the game still hitches, and lags framerate dealing with all the shader and texture loads in a zone, the same places are still inheritently blogged down despite the added multicore support. hopefully this will change as they add new code in to support multi core threading.

Originally posted by permster

I hear the multi-core support is limited though.  Any details on that?  That sucks about the cities being empty.  Didn't think about that.  They are already dead enough as it is.  They may as well just consolidate the city zones.  They are a complete waste.

Think its dual core support. The program will auto detect it when you log in. Its something they just added with the last gu.