The 2011 SOE campaign for the Child's Play Charity has begun!

SOE is proud to sponsor the Child's Play Charity and here's how you can help!

Purchase special Child's Play items from participating games in December and SOE will donate $10 per item up to a maximum of US $50,000 to Child's Play.

Child's Play seeks to improve the lives of children in hospitals around the world through the kindness and generosity of the video game industry and the power of play.

This is a great charity, and I highly recommend you take the opportunity to put a dent in Sony's cold corporate heart and have them put some of those misplaced profits towards a very, very worthy cause.

Greetings Norrathian citizens!

Today we start rolling out our new and improved LaunchPad! The conversion will begin at 12:00 PM PST* on December 1, 2011 for our US and International players. For players who are still using LP1 or StationLauncher, you will be able to upgrade to the new LaunchPad by December 6, 2011. The new LaunchPad will offer improved connectivity for patching, will no longer require Flash, it will patch smarter, and will have an aesthetic upgrade. The upgrade should only take a few minutes and then you'll be able to start playing again.

For more information about the LaunchPad, please click here.

For our LaunchPad FAQ, please click here. [Note: there is a better FAQ discussion here.]

If you run into any issues, our Customer Service team can be reached here.

What's new? A better question is what's old that doesn't work anymore. LP4 does not support the previous LaunchPad features:

• Character Select
• Friends List and Chat
• Support for Station Voice
• Background Updating

Automatic updates? Not so fast kiddies. If you are using the launcher from the retail box (including that as recent as Sentinel's Fate), it will not autoupdate, and you must install LP4 manually from this link.

When you install the new launcher, choose wisely regarding whether you choose the Full or Streaming client. You can't switch between them except to uninstall and reinstall the other client (worse, the different clients install into different directories, so left to their own devices, they'll download the entire game again when you switch, and your game customizations won't be transferred over. Either way, I recommend the full download version.

The good news is, SoE finally figured out how to read Microsoft's application guidelines and moved the game to an installation location that no longer requires the game to have Administrator privledges. The bad news is, that's probably not where you have EQ2 installed right now. The new LaunchPad moves the install location to "C:\Users\Public\Sony Online Entertainment\Installed Games\EverQuest II" ("EverQuest II Streaming" if you're using the Streaming client). To save time downloading, once you've installed the LP below, stop the patcher and close it. Move your EQII folder from the C:\Program Files(x86)\... location over to the new install location. That should avoid the bulk of re-downloads. Don't forget to change your application folder settings for both ProfitUI and EQ2MAP (change your EQ2 directory, and under "Autolaunch EQ2" click the Browse button, then choose the location of the new LaunchPad.exe) when you do.

Lastly, do not use the "Remember me on this computer" checkbox if you are using the SOE Authenticator token. It will save your PIN + the one-time use token password, rather than the authentication token negotiated during login, so you'll get stuck with "Error! Invalid name or password. Please try again." over and over again until you select "Login to a new account" and start over. [EDIT: Apparently it will attempt to remember your password even if you don't check the box, so people with the SOE Authenticator are going to be faced with this hassle every single time they start the LaunchPad. Monkeys could have planned a better rollout, SOE.]