from todays patch notes

http://eq2wire.com/2012/10/15/update-notes-tuesday-october-16-2012/

ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION
Current Raid Zones

    Due to an exploit, raid zones now have a hard 2.8 day [ 2 days 20 hours] lockout timer. Timers will expire naturally and are no longer able to be reset. This will include all Velious and future Raid zones.

    Plane of War is now a hard 4.8 day [4 days 20 hours] lockout timer.

========================

player commentary on exploit

Kruzzen
October 16, 2012 @ 9:32 am

The reason they are doing this is due to an exploit. No, I don’t think this is the right solution but here is the exploit.

You log in and run a zone and set a timer.
The next night you open a new instance of the same zone, say PoW on some alts.
You clear everything you can in the first zone and when the timer is resetable you reset and open up a new zone with a 30 min lockout.
When 30 min is up you go into the zone set by the alts and get all the loot from that one.
Now you can reset again and have gained a full extra zone of loot.
This is what the raid guilds are exploiting.

EQ2 forums sounding off:

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?&topic_id=522980

commentary at EQ2Wire:

Raid Lockout Timer Lockdown — Rushed Fix for 5 Year Old Bug

http://eq2wire.com/2012/10/16/raid-lockout-timer-lockdown-rushed-fix-for-5-year-old-bug/

An Ineffective Fix

Novusod on EQ2Flames has shed some light on how this exploit works:

    There was a bugged way to reset a full clear zone every 30 minutes by having alts A, B, C, D set timers within 30 minutes of each other. Then as the timers were about to end a 24 man raid could run the full instance 3 or 4 times in single night. It was a pretty big bug exploit that needed to be closed but the way SoE is doing it is just stupid. It still might not even fix the bug completely which is why this fix is just a big joke that will hurt real raiders.

Casual Guilds and Progression

The documented fix will have have a damaging effect on Casual and Mid-Tier guilds that are currently spending 2 or more nights to progress through Underdepths or Plane of War. With all non-PoW lockouts now set to a hard deadline of 2 days, 20 hours, a guild that raids 2 nights a week will no longer be able to continue a zone on Friday that they started on Tuesday. This change could have sweeping effects on the raid schedule of hundreds of guilds.

Conclusions

With just 6 weeks prior to the expansion, and with an 8 year old bug, it seems like an announcement followed by the introduction some anti-exploit detection code and the threat of suspensions would have been far more effective while a sensible long-term fix could be developed in time for the Chains of Eternity expansion.

Several top raiders have pointed out this fix won’t actually solve the issue, as the 30 minute minimum “soft” reset remains and can still be exploited. A better fix would have been to increase the minimum “soft” reset time on raid zones from 30 minutes to 2 days 20 hours and leave the maximum at 7 or 9 days.

Originally posted by strangiato2112
wow thats pretty bad...this wont end well for EQ2 if they dont announce a reversal, or at least that they are looking into a better solution.

SOE is used to things not ending well.

seen at eq2wire

http://eq2wire.com/2012/10/16/breaking-lockout-timers-solution-forthcoming/

According to Zoltaroth, the EQ2 team are looking into alternate solutions that would allow them to return to the soft timers. This would restore the ability to do raid zones in as little as 3 days or as long as 5 (or 7 or 9 depending on the zone).

I hope they can figure out a fix an pull out this hard lockout, it really screws up the timers for us as we only run 3 days a week. 

Hey Nadia are you feldon by chance?

im not feldon

but i do read and reference his EQ2 news site often ;)