Studio Art Director Michael Daubert has posted a video tour of the SOE Austin studio on the DC Universe Online MySpace page. Daubert also posted a blog entry to coincide with the tour:

As you can see in the video, it's really cool to work in a studio that has wall-to-wall artwork from Jim Lee and his team at DC Comic's WildStorm Productions studio. As of right now, I believe we have more 1,200 concepts from Jim with more art coming in! We are going to have to move to a new studio soon just to get more wall space!

You can read the full blog entry below. Daubert further discusses the game's artwork and also gives some fun facts about the studio. For example, the design team wears Green Lantern shirts on Friday. Sure beats a suit and tie.

Ashlanne posted:

This Thursday and Friday, November 27th and 28th, Technical and Account/Billing staffing will be limited to email support. Please visit the support site to submit your inquiries.

Phone and Live Chat Support will resume on Monday, December 1st from 10am to 7pm.

source: SOE Community Forums

Dan Kinney posted on the Station Forums:

We will be deploying the next Station Launcher beta update on Monday, November 24, 2008.  This deployment is primarily focused on providing a fix for a crash bug in the application, first reported by NeillM.

This deployment will happen around 10:00 am PDT, after which you will notice your application updating the next time it starts.  There may be a short outage during the transition period, which should not last more than 30 minutes.  This topic will be updated just before and immediately after the maintenance period.

Click here for patch notes and known issues.

Kiara posteth :

Please be advised that SOE phone support and in-game support will be unavailable from 10am – 2:00pm (PST) this Friday, November 21st.  Phone support will resume at 2:00pm and available for the remainder of the day until 7pm.  In-game support will resume at 2:00pm and be available for the remainder of their normal business hours. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.

Source:  EQII Official Forums

Allakhazam has been selected as the Top Informational Site in the multi-game fansite category of the MMOFury Fansite Awards!

"There is no other site that has been so consistantly putting out helpful information on online games. There was also no other site that received more nominations from its users than Allakhazam. Their World of Warcraft database is gigantic, possibly the largest. If you need information on the biggest games out there (WoW, EQ, EQ2, EVE, Star Wars, etc.) look no further, you have found your intel source."

We'd like to thank MMOFury and everyone who voted for Allakhazam.com as their top gaming information source. You can read the announcement here and see the list of all winners here.

SOE podcast #50 is now live and contains interviews that will be of special interest to EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies fans.

This is our milestone Podcast #50! Tune in for an interview about EverQuest II: The Shadow Odyssey, and an interview with Kelly “Valara” Knox, the SWG Community Manager. Timmy tells us about his Halloween. Ashlanne gets her gamer card back and more!

The EQII interview is with designers Kander and Ilucide. You can listen to it here.

The Child's Play 2008 charity drive has officially launched, and the Web site has been updated so you can donate toys and games to children in hospitals worldwide. The charity was organized in 2003 by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade.

We ended our 2007 drive with over 1.3 million dollars in donations, thanks to gamers all over the globe. We’re welcoming ten new hospitals in Canada and the US to the Child’s Play network, so please have a look at the map to see if your local children’s hospital has come on board. Every hospital has a wish list full of gifts, and is hoping for your support.

We hope you'll visit the Child's Play site and consider purchasing some gifts. All you have to do is click on a hospital on the map and you'll be sent to the hospital's wish list on Amazon.com. It's that simple. For more information, check out Mike's recent post on the Penny Arcade site. The "thank you" letter they received from a hospital in Connecticut says it all. The full post is also below.

Dan Kinney posted on the Station Community Forums : 

There will be a system maintenance that will be happening early, early tomorrow morning (California time).  This particular maintenance may cause some of the "endless processing" issue that we saw a couple of weeks ago.  There will be no update of the Station Launcher or any of the LaunchPads during this update.  It is back-end only.

After you play late into the night (and you know that you will be), log out or exit your Station Launcher.  If you are hit with this condition, you should be able to recover with a logout/login.

Of course, if you run into any problems, post a message to this forum and we'll try to help you through.

-dan

Dan and Colleen have been very responsive to user issues with the Beta Station Launcher.  We expect great things!

On June 25, 2008, Sony Online Entertainment adjusted our billing system to lock country and currency as part of our ongoing fraud prevention measures as well as to provide a better service on a global basis. For existing accounts, the change locked the selected currency on the user’s account as of that date. For new accounts created after that date and accounts that have been modified after that date, users selecting Australia as the country are then tied to the Australian dollar currency.

Additionally, we have reviewed our current pricing and are adjusting the prices for Australia due to prevailing currency exchange rates. Therefore, on October 28, 2008 Sony Online Entertainment will be adjusting the Australian dollar subscription rates as follows:

1 Month of EverQuest for the MAC: $14.95/month (Australian dollars)

1 Month of any other SOE game: $17.95/month (AUD)

1 Month of Station Access: $35.95/month (AUD)

Fans of Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest II will definitely want to listen to the newest SOE podcast, number 49, for interviews with designers from both games. GMs also share their favorite in-game Halloween moments. It can be found on SOE's podcasts page.

Tune in for our Halloween cast! This Podcast includes an interview from Niklas "Swede" Johansson, Game Designer for Star Wars Galaxies, another interview with EQII Designer Nathan "Kaitheel" McCall and Associate Game Designer Carlos "Gninja" Mora. In Quotes from the Underground, the GMs tell us about their favorite in-game Halloween Moments, hear about what the staff at SOE is up to for Halloween and listeners share their scariest in-game moments.