As some of you might know, EverQuest II allows you to Tweet and post updates to Facebook via its EQII Share interface. The problem is, if your tweet message is too long, it will fail with some cryptic error in your chat window. While the EQII Share dialog window shows a character count, it does not take everything into account. Here are some additional things to consider:

• Every tweet contains the automatically added #EQ2 hashtag. Along with the additional space character to make ” #EQ2″ that’s 5 characters added to the tweet.
• If you have your character’s name set as a prefix in the EQII Share options, this needs to be counted as well. For example, if I use the name Krysstie as a prefix (8 characters) then a total of 10 characters will be added to the tweet as “Krysstie: “. You must count the added colon and space that comes after the name.
• If you include a screenshot with your tweet, this is another 21 characters taken away from your message. 20 for the URL itself and 1 character for an additional space. The URLs will be something like: http://t.co/OTgeCCFg which happens to be a screenshot one of my characters took.

So, in the case of Krysstie, my message in the dialog can not be more than 104 characters if I include a screenshot. 10(name) + 104(message) + 5(#EQ2 hashtag) + 21(screenshot URL) = 140 characters. If I don’t included a screenshot, then my message can be 125 characters.

I’ve sent feedback from within the game to improve the dialog to take these things into consideration when calculating the character count; however, with the Chains of Eternity expansion just about to be released, I’m pretty sure it will be way down on their list of priorities. 🙂 Anyway, hope someone finds this tidbit of information useful.