Gnomes, Pandas And Flying Sharks - It Can Only Be Summer At Daybreak

I've been out and about doing stuff today so this is a bit of a cobbled together at the last minute post. It's also one of those "Here are some things I'm going to do that I haven't actually done yet" affair, by which I mean I've taken a few press releases and made a post out of them.

Which, yes I know, is cheap. So sue me. You think I get paid for this?

In all cases it's Daybreak I'm talking about. We're just about to hit the big summer festival season in EverQuest II and Niami Denmother has a couple of articles up at EQ2 Traders about it. The first is about Tinkerfest, which she describes as the "annual gnomish (including honorary gnomes) celebration".  Ratongas like to tinker, too, but gnomes don't like to talk about that much. Don't like the competition.

I used to take this one quite seriously. Well, as seriously as you can take anything involving gnomes. I played a few of them (And Ratongas, too.) and at least one of my gnomes had a suitably gnomish residence (See how I resisted saying gnome-home there?) full of the kind of widgets and cogs that make any self-respecting gnome happy.

And, let's face it, all gnomes are self-respecting. A bit too much so for some people. Have you ever met a gnome with an inferiority complex? Or a gnome suffering from imposter syndrome? No, they're all hyper-confident megalomaniacs with delusions of grandeur. It's compensation for their obvious deficiencies in other departments, I imagine, although I'm no expert in gnomish psychology. Thankfully.

But they sure can tinker. If you want something bolted onto something else, these are your guys. Tinkerfest is one of Norrath's  bigger festivals so after a couple of decades it's acquired a lot of cruft. EQ2 Traders has a neat overview and I'm going to steal it, just to fill the post out a bit:

Is this your first time celebrating this event? Or is your memory fuzzy enough that you need a refresher?

• Gnomeland Security in the Steamfont Mountains is the main hub for this event, with portals from all "celebration" areas sending you back to the main hub in Gnomeland. (Celebrating gnomes, surrounded by harvestable cogs and purple shinies, can be found in all home cities as well as the docks of Thurgadin, the gnome area in Solusek's Eye, and Dropship Landing in the Moors)
• The shiny tinkerfest cogs, used for shopping and for crafting, are harvestable "!" items in all celebration areas. They can also be brought back by an upgraded pack pony (100 per 2-hour run).
• The second purple shiny collection (added in 2016) requires that you have completed (and handed in) the first purple shiny collection. Once you have done so, half of the collection can then be found in the Gnomeland Security area; the other half of the collection will be found in Qeynos and Freeport in the celebration areas.
• You will need to know the gnomish language (from a language trainer if you're not a gnome) in order to obtain some of the quests.
• Vendor Tarly in Gnomeland Security will sell all of the past Tinkerfest recipes and items for you while vendor Myron will sell the current year's recipes and items. You will need some shiny tinkerfest cogs before you can buy the books, so scrounge up a few before you go shopping.
• The quest tracker included in a section below will be a godsend if you are trying to run more than one alt through the event. Quest details for all quests can be found on the wiki's Tinkerfest article.
• During the event, there will be a markable sign in several of the Tinkerfest areas, for the Party Sign! Excellent! achievement for those who missed getting the Tinkerfest update for it last year.
• Protip: if you see an item sold on either Myron or Tarly that costs 2 Shiny Tinkerfest Cog, it usually means that it can also be crafted. (Or is a special achievement unlock.)

That quest breakdown, linked in Niami's piece, is huuuuuge. I'm reasonably confident I've done everything on there at least once, some things many times. and by this stage, I'm pretty much tinkered out so I have no plans on doing any of it again. 

I do generally try to do any new quests that get added, just for the sake of being able to say I've done them all, but by now there's really no need for any more activities in most of the festivals. There's literally more than enough to do already. Technically, there is one new Tinkerfest quest this year but it looks to be nothing more than a repeatable option added to an existing quest. If so, I'll pass, thanks.

Even if you're done with the event itself, though, it's still worth noting down the dates because the special Summer Jubilee dungeon, Triad of Elements, only opens during the big three. 

The three tent-pole attractions are:

Tinkerfest — June 6, 2024 to June 19, 2024

Scorched Sky Celebration — June 28, 2024 to July 11, 2024

Oceansfull Festival — August 8, 2024 to August 21, 2024 

Running Triad of Elements multiple times is the only way to get this year's Plume for your Plume slot. I don't think there are details on stats for those yet but if things follow the usual pattern, it will be better than any of the inferior Plumes crafters can make. 
 
As to how essential Plumes actually are, I'll leave that to someone who does the harder content. I got mine the first year they added them and I haven't bothered since. I'm not a fan of running the same dungeon over and over.

The Summer Jubilee currency, Platinum Medals, can also be earned while the other summer festivals are running, the regularly-scheduled minor festivals that sprawl across the summer months, things like the Moonlit Enchantments and the City Festivals. The full, official write-up for the Jubilee is on the EQII website and EQ2 Traders version is here.

And that's it for EQII for the moment. I am still playing most days, by the way, although by playing I mostly mean logging in to set and collect my Overseer rewards. We'll see if the summer splurge of festive activities draws me back in. I do like me a good festival.

On, then, to DCUO, which I am very much not playing. I'm not playing it to the extent that I haven't even installed it on the "new" PC. It wasn't on the SDD I transferred across so it's languishing on the old machine. 

I am contemplating setting the old one up to be permanently available. The issue is where to put it. Until then, though, if I wanted to play DCUO, I'd have to re-install it. And why would I want to do that?

That's why! Come on! Wouldn't you re-install for that shark? I want that thing!

Daybreak has a very solid record on supporting Pride Month. I haven't mentioned EQII's contribution to the cause yet because I'm incompetent and disorganized but it's moar pandas!

I actually have more multicolored rabbits and red pandas than I know what to do with, which won't stop me collecting these, too. I might hold back on getting them for every character this time, though. It's a lot of bag space. 

That shark, though... with the flag! Gotta have it!

Just to round out the Daybreak news, there's a limited time promo on subscriptions happening. Wilhelm wrote an excellent piece comparing MMORPG subs, in which I thought Daybreak's All Access came out clearly on top. It's going to be an even better deal for a while because they've added some extras. 

100 slot Broker boxes and a 25% boost to what is now arguably the game's primary currency, Status, are  not to be missed. And while they're limited-time offers, the limits are pretty generous - the end of August for quarterly subs and the end of November for six and twelve months. If you were vaguely thinking of subbing, that might swing it for you.

And that's all I have from the Daybreak News Desk for now. I'm off to download DCUO and get my flying shark!  

Has Anybody Seen My Invisible Plane?

 

DCUO is very much a drop-in game for me these days . Not that it ever was anything much more but there was a time when I did at least make new characters and level up in open world content once in a while.

Now just about all I do is log in to claim my freebies, clear the clutter that inevitably creates, then visit my Lair to put up the pick of the new posters and pets. If there are any nice style choices I might also play around with those for a few minutes before logging out and forgetting about the game until next time.

There are any number of mmorpgs where I could be doing the same but as the posting history on this blog amply demonstrates, after a brief infatuation my loyalty tends to fade. Time between visits gets longer, the visits themselves get shorter. Eventually everything folds neatly away into the forgotten stack at the back of my mind, to resurface, if at all, only as a footnote, brought out to shed light on some new infatuation as the cycle begins again.

While we're on the topic of new mmorpgs, there do seem to be a lot of them this year. Almost a glut. So many, indeed, I think this may be the first time I can remember not having time to sample them all, even to get a few posts out of the experience. 

I mentioned Gloria Victis recently, which admitedly is new only to me, not the genre, but there's also Elyon, which launched on Steam this week and today I got an email from NCSoft inviting me to the closed beta for Lineage2M. Not a very exclusive invite since you can sign up on the website but I'm not bothered. I don't have time to try it right now, anyway.

Amongst all this competition DCUO keeps itself, if not at the forefront of my thoughts then at least somewhere I can see it, by dint of two things: an emotional connection to my lifelong history with DC Comics and the pragmatic fact that it's part of Daybreak Games' All Access membership plan. That the stuff  Dimensional Ink gives away for free can often be really good doesn't hurt, either.

Just knowing I'm notionally paying for premium access wouldn't be enough. Planetside 2 is also included but I never log in to that one. I've tried it and it doesn't really do anything for me. It's unlikely anything they could offer in the way of pets or costumes or housing (not that I believe PS2 has any of those things, currently) would be likely to change my mind, either.

Conversely, even though EverQuest does have housing and pets and costume gear (of a kind), the nature of the game and especially its elderly appearance make those kind of incentives considerably less of an inducement. For EQ, the draw is the meat not the sauce (Weird metaphor from a vegetarian...) I keep coming back for the content and the gameplay, not the fluff.

Really, though, I pay my All Access subscription for EverQuest II. That's where the membership benefits really make a big difference. For the rest, all the games are Free to Play anyway and I actually play EverQuest on a free account most of the time, not on my AA. And when it comes to those attractive freebies in DCUO, Dimensional Ink are very generous about handing them out to all players, not just the paying members. 

This month it's all about Wonder Woman. Even as a lifelong fan of the DC extended universe (That should really be universes or better yet multiverses.) I can't pretend Diana Prince has been central to my affection for the franchise over the years. 

I own many thousands of DC comic books but I'd be surprised if more than twenty or thirty are Wonder Woman titles. I do have something of a soft spot for the Mike Sekowsky era "Mod" Wonder Woman, when she fought crime in a bell-bottomed jumpsuit. 

She was always there in the Justice League's classic line-up, of course, twirling her golden lasso to get the truth out of some super-villain or ferrying the non-flyers to the fight in her invisble plane. Ah, the invisible plane. I hear it makes an appearance in the second movie, which I have yet to see. If an invisible plane can make an appearance, that is. Bit of a koan, that, eh?

I have one, you know. An invisible plane. I got it this morning. It's one of those freebies I mentioned. The only one you have to be an All Access member to claim. I thought it was going to be a house item so after I claimed it I went to my Lair and tried to place it but it was nowhere to be seen. Yes, thank you. I get the irony.

Turns out it's not a house pet but an "Accessory", which seems to be what DCUO calls vanity pets. I had to go look it up. I also had to look up how to apply the "Chroma" I'd just been given, too. I had no idea how to do that although it appears I've done it before. 

There are far more things in DCUO I don't understand than things I do. I may have been "playing" since beta but there's playing and playing, isn't there? I've been playing at playing at best.

Another thing I don't know how to do, as I've explained before, is how to have more than one Base. Or Lair. Or Hideout. They're all the same thing except they're not. 

I did some more reading on that today and I think I have the hang of it now. "Base" is the generic term for "Housing" and "Lair" and "Hideout" are sub-types. A Lair is bigger than a Hideout and a Lair can have practical advantages a Hideout can't. Just don't ask me what they are.

The reason I was thinking about it was that there was a free Hideout in my Claims. Nothing to do with Wonder Woman as far as I know. She definitely doesn't have a space home in any of the comics I ever read. I haven't been able to check it out yet because although I've worked out how to swap bases now, if I swap from a larger one to a smaller one I'll lose most of my placements and I have everything set up how I like it.

The Space Base was one of many freebies from another event, one I'd completely missed, the 2021 charity livestream for Extra Life. I think it might still be going on. The web page says "The next stream is on Friday at 23:00 BST", by which time I hope to be asleep, since I'm working tomorrow and I have to be up around 6 am. 

The Space Base came from there, anyway, along with a load of other goodies like more Chroma color skins and a whole load of postcards. I do like the postcards but I'm running out of room to display them.

There's a really striking poster included in the Wonder Woman collection. It's the 80th anniversary of the creation of the character we're celebrating, by the way and she's probably more popular now than she's ever been. The power of these archetypal characters is astonishing. It's hard to imagine them ever fading.

It took me a few minutes to find a spot for the larger of the two posters and even then it wasn't ideal. I might have to move a few things around because it's too good to hide halfway down the stairwell on the way to the basement. Maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and pay for a second base.

I'm just rambling now. I'll stop. Oh, except to mention the Wonder Woman Chroma skin is really nice but I wish it didn't include my character's hair. That's just weird. 

Or maybe I just don't know how to use it. Seems likely.

The Perks Of The Game - EverQuest Style

I woke up this morning to an email from Wilhelm of The Ancient Gaming Noob advising me of a curious development over at Darkpaw Towers. I like to think of the EverQuest devs there, all safely ensconced in their monk-like cells, draped in hessian robes, cowls pushed back, hammering away at the keys by the flickering light of tallow candles.

What might they have come up with this time, I wondered. I clicked through the link to find a list of "New EverQuest Perks", three new ways for loyal customers to give the company more money. There was even a joking explanation in the language of lore to frame the pitch:

"The Nameless created these Perks during the time of the Dragons and we just found them! (We've been busy . . . really, really busy!)"

Aw, cute!

So, just what are these "perks", anyway?

It seems there are three to be had, one for Adventurers, one for Challengers and one for Merchants. Let's run through them, one by one:

A 5% permanent xp bonus is not a trivial thing in Norrath, even nowadays. When it says it "multiplies with other experience bonuses" I wonder if that's really what they mean? Do they mean it stacks? Anyone who knows math care to explain what would happen if you multiplied cumulative xp bonuses by a fixed percentage?

10% more "coin" is nice but I wouldn't have thought most people make bank on coin drops these days. I make my millions in the Bazaar as I imagine do most people. 

"Alternate currency from modern raids" is a
little outside my realm of experience. Okay, a
lot. I imagine it's important to raiders but how
important is anyone's guess.

I have a vast amount of the "Loyalty" currency, Crowns, which piles up all the time just from having a sub. I have yet to find anything I want to spend it on so a 10% discount is no incentive at all.

Levelling up my mercenaries is something I've never even begun to work on. I probably should. I can wait for a bonus for that, probably forever.

The last perk puzzles me. I was under the impression the possibility of losing a level when you died was removed from the game about a decade and a half ago. Did they put it back?

This is the perk that most appeals to me. Twelve-slot trader's satchels means an additional 20% sales space on your Bazaar trader, although I note it only gives "access" to the bigger bags. How you get the bags themselves is another question.

An additional inventory slot is a huge deal in most games. People buy expensive collector's editions just to get those.

It's a long time since I crafted in EQ but I seem to remember it being very rng-based. Could be useful.

 

At this point I should mention that none of these perks come free. They don't even come as part of the current All Access Membership. In a very important way, a way that speaks directly to the use of language as we know it, these are not "perks" at all. 

Here's the definition of "perk" from the Collins dictionary website:

"Perks are special benefits that are given to people who have a particular job or belong to a particular group."

Note the word "given". The whole point of a "perk" is that it's incuded, for free, as a side-benefit of something else. If you have to pay for it separately it is not a perk.

These "perks", if that's what we have to call them, you do have to pay for. Here's what they'll cost you:

 

I don't have a problem with the pricing. It seems reasonable for the services on offer. I certainly don't have any issues over any so-called "pay to win" elements that could, arguably, be involved. Firstly, all mmorpgs are inherently "pay to win" to some degree. People just like to draw their personal lines in different places so they can fight over them and claim some spurious moral high ground. 

Secondly you can't "win" at EverQuest. Good luck trying.

What this seems to me to be is a very clever way of getting around a problem that's been much discussed in this part of the blogosphere, namely how to increase subscription charges to reflect growing costs in a market that's been trained to be extremely resistant to paying for anything much at all.

Had Darkpaw chosen to hike the All Access Membership by $4.99 there would have been outrage. Even if it had been grudgingly accepted by most Members, the PR hit would have been severe and at the end of it Darkpaw would presumably only have received a percentage of the increase, since it would have been split three ways between them, Dimensional Ink and Rogue Planet.

You might think that it wouldn't matter all that much. It would be splitting hairs, since all three are owned by Daybreak Games and Daybreak Games is owned by EG7 (let's go with that for now). I can attest from decades of working for companies who've chosen to set divisions and branches against each other in competition for resources as individual "profit centers", for the people running each of those divisions it most definitely will matter. A lot.

By doing it this way, Darkpaw stand to up the cost of a monthly subscription for a good proportion of their core customers while being able to claim with good reason that the price of the sub hasn't changed at all. It's a conjuring trick and it's a good one.

My All Access subscription, which I pay annually, renews later this month. Even though I'm not currently playing any of Daybreak's games regularly (blame Bless Unleashed for that) I know I will be soon enough so I'll gladly take another year. I won't be adding any of these EverQuest-specific perks but I'll be watching to see whether the other games and studios follow suit. 

I'll be quite interested to see what Darkpaw comes up with for EverQuest II. I would say it's all but certain the perk system will cross to the younger game; virtually every similar innovation added to one EQ title has eventually made it into the other.

Whether I'll want to pay money for anything the EQII team come up with is a lot less certain. I'd guess not but we'll see. It would certainly have to be some quite different "perks" to most of those on offer here, few of which would make much difference to my gameplay in new Norrath. 

Whatever they come up with, I hope it does well for them. These games have to be paid for somehow, by someone, and this seems like a pretty harmless way of bringing in a few more dollars to me.

A Little Something On Account

Between us, Mrs Bhagpuss and I have seven Daybreak accounts. I made the first when I bought EverQuest in 1999. As soon as Mrs Bhagpuss watched me playing she wanted a go so we shared that account for a couple of months, in flagrant breach of the EULA.

We didn't really need Sony Online Entertainment's contract enforcement team to tell us that was a bad idea. As our desire to play expanded to fill most of the available hours it soon became clear we didn't just need separate accounts, we needed separate PCs.

An account each was fine for the first few years. Our shared origins made for a few problems now and then but mostly we settled down to me using the original and Mrs Bhagpuss using the newer one.

That arrangement didn't last as long as you might imagine. Somewhere along the line, for reasons I can no longer remember, we swapped. In short order each of us ended up with yet more characters on both accounts. Don't ask me why. I'm sure it made sense at the time.

The 66-slot backpack as it looks from the outside.

Fortunately for both of us, all of that only ever really applied to EverQuest. We managed, by and large, to keep our characters and accounts seperate in EverQuest II and only I ever played any of the other All Access titles.

We'd probably still have just the two accounts if it hadn't been for one of John "Smed" Smedley's brilliant wheezes. He experienced a damascene conversion to the free to play model and, despite a determined rearguard action by a substantial cadre of veteran players, managed to drag the entire business around to his "free to play - your way" of thinking.

The transition began cautiously with a new f2p server, Freeport. I can't now recall exactly how the whole thing worked but I seem to remember that to play there you needed a new account unsullied by subscription payments. Or possibly we just thought it would be tidier that way. Better late than never, I guess.

Whatever the reason, Mrs Bhagpuss and I made new accounts and  started over. Freeport was a great success and we were very happy there for several years. It remains one of my favorite servers in any game although sadly, like most of the really good ones, it no longer exists. It was merged and merged again until all that remains is a legacy title that I proudly display above the heads of my Old Freeportians.

We'd have stopped at four accounts if it hadn't been for another of SOE's half-baked fancies. EQII had muddled along perfectly happily for many years with the best housing offer in MMORPGs. It could have gone on like that indefinitely but there always has to be someone who thinks they can do better, doesn't there?

Apparently what decorators had been missing all these years was competition! Cut-throat competition. A whole set of league tables was created, with awards and prizes and titles and guess what? All hell broke loose.

Smed's always been strong on PvP, even when it's seemed a bad fit for some of the games under his watch but I don't think even he could have imagined the mayhem his little sideshow would unleash. Housemakers couldn't actually beat each other to death with ulthork's foot umbrella stands but they found plenty of ways to turn what had been a polite mutual appreciation society into a self-declared celebrity death match.

No-one cares about the mechanics any more so I won't attempt to recount them. Suffice to say we made another three accounts because if you want to win a popularity contest the more votes you can keep in your pocket the better.

Born too late.

All of which is a very long preamble to explain how it was that I came to be logging in seven accounts this morning, five of which haven't seen daylight for several years. My goal was to secure for each of them the very excellent Great Escape Crate that I mentioned a couple of days ago. I'm not sure if the offer is time-limited but better safe than sorry. Wouldn't want to miss out on something I'm never going to use on characters I'm never going to play. Forget the irony, just give me the stuff!

It's not as though it was the first time, after all. All the accounts have Heroic characters on them from previous giveaways, including Mrs. Bhagpuss's. She hasn't even logged in to EQII since before Heroic characters existed but I always log in her accounts to grab a free Heroic if there's one going.

Across my own accounts and the "neutral" ones I appear to have boosted have no fewer than three Ratonga shadowknights as well as an Iksar warlock and a Ratonga bruiser, who even has the same name as the one I'm playing on my regular account. I don't remember making any of them, although a couple seem to have been played, at least a little. I still have plenty of Heroic tokens left, too, if I feel like making some more.

Why, yes, thank you. I would like another ratonga.

As I was searching through the Claim window for the current promotion I noticed a number of other freebies I seem to have missed. One of Mrs Bhagpuss's accounts had something that particularly struck my eye, an unlock for the Freeblood vampire race, normally available only through the cash shop.

That unlock came with something called the Velious Winter Rewards, which I vaguely remember. It was part of a promotion back in the winter of 2010/11. It happened back before my current account even existed, which explains why I don't have one. Or at least not on that account. I checked my old main account, though, and not only do I have the unlock there, I've already claimed it!

So I could have made a Freeblood any time in the last decade. Why didn't I? I have no explanation. I even have a free character slot on that account. Maybe I'll go make one now.

In fact, if I wanted, I could go on a character-making spree. I discovered this morning all the free accounts and one of the formerly-subbed ones had something called the EverQuest II Adventurer's Pack waiting to be claimed. It contains a couple of two-hour 100% xp potions and a character slot unlock.

Where did that come from? Google couldn't tell me and neither could the forums, although I did find this useful link that gives you a complete list of every flag on your account. You can also use the in-game command /show_account_features although it only gives you the highlights.

From that I can see that my main account doesn't own the Adventurer's Pack and never did.Why? No clue. It's a pity, though. I could have done with another character slot on the account I actually play rather than on all the ones I don't. I guess I could start multi-boxing...

I was so sure I'd used all of these...

There are so many more things waiting in Claim for me to either get around to using or deciding who should have them. Every account gets Veteran Rewards these days and even the free accounts are up to Year 10. There's only one more to come after that before Daybreak stopped counting. They went to loyalty points from Year Twelve onwards. You get those from doing dailies. I have about twelve hundred of them.

I also used all my Legends of Norrath packs just as the card game was about to sunset so I have a bunch of prizes from there, scattered across several accounts. Some of those are very nice. The only problem is I can't decide who should get them so they just sit there in /claim. I look at them once in awhile and it makes me happy.

Then there's all the Goblin Games tickets. That was a quasi-cash shop thing that got discontinued years ago. I thought I'd used all mine but at some point there must have been a giveaway because all the accounts have stacks of fifteen.

I did a few goblin games this morning. The prizes are pretty good but because SOE was trying to get around the lottery laws you have to play an actual game to make it "game of skill" not a "lottery", even though it's a game a blindfolded monkey would win every time.

Plus some bright spark thought it would be nifty to have an actual goblin that spawns and invites you to an actual goblin cave, meaning you have to have a conversation and zone in and out every time you use a ticket. I run out of patience after about five goes.

None of this would be a problem if EQII hadn't always been so extraordinarily generous with the free gifts. It's not just a load of old tat. It's quality stuff. Stuff you want to have. And there's a lot of it.

Maybe I'll take this opportunity to go through the whole shebang and hand things out to whoever needs, wants, will use. Wouldn't that be lovely?

Only I'd probably need to be on lockdown until this time next year to get through it all.

Best not tempt fate. I guess it's safe enough where it is.

Long Summer Days : EQ2

Just a short note to give any EQ2 players a heads-up that the excellent and essential Days of Summer event is back. Since I've been neglecting EQ2 in favor of Bless, I would have missed it myself, had it not been for a line in Kaozz's recent post.

EQTraders had already flagged the event when it began on August 21st - Naimi Denmother makes a point of drawing our attention to anything with even the most tangential connection to tradeskills and Days of Summer comes with a lot of items for decorating houses - but somehow I missed it. She has a page with all the details we know so far.

Fortunately, although the event began as a limited-time affair last year, it proved so popular it now stays in game as a permanent fixture. Yun Zi spends his entire life standing around in Sundered Frontier, making inane small-talk and handing out amazingly good items no casual player can afford to ignore.

He's acquired a tiny companion called Pas Yu this year, a panda of extremely restricted stature, who acts as his bag holder. I nearly missed him after I'd finished the first quest. He has all the sweet loot and it is sweet indeed.

To do the quests you need to have at least one max level character and the gear you get is Level 110 (making a lot of it upgrades for me even after the expansion has been out for almost a year). The housing items work for any level and some of the upgrades are suitable for level 100 and up. Once you complete the quest on a single character, any character on the account can shop at Yun Zi's for the low price of no money at all.

Like last year, there will be eight weeks of quests. The new quest comes with the weekly patch/server restart on Tuesdays. You have to have completed all of last year's quests before you can do this year's but if you're just getting started you can do both sets.

Using a guide, like the one on EQ2Traders or the wiki, each quest only takes a few minutes, especially if you use the wonderful and essential Fast Travel option from the Map window. If you're an All Access member you get that for free (and it's worth the monthly sub on its own in my opinion) but since you also have to be a Member to do the quests in the first place that's not a problem.

I raced around Antonica last night on the first of this year's quests and it was really good fun and very nostalgic. I found I could remember the exact location of every stop without having to check. I've spent so many hours in Antonica I know it as well as I know the countryside around my own home.

I was also lucky enough to arrive there at gametime sunset. Antonica has some absolutely spectacular skies at dawn and dusk. The graphics in the older part of the game are showing their age but the skyboxes are still as breathtaking as ever.

Like last year, Days of Summer is going to prep casual players for the Autumn expansion, although if DBG follow last year's model the expansion itself will start with free gear that's even better. This kind of thing is why I rate the current DBG team so highly. I've never felt so well looked after as a casual player. Long may it continue.

Travel Across Norrath Fast And For Free! (Conditions May Apply) : EQ2

All MMORPGs are fiendishly complicated. Even the newest and freshest can be confusing and overwhelming but once you're a few years in and a few expansions up you don't just need an instruction manual - you need an encyclopedia.

Fortunately, most MMOs that generate even the smallest degree of traction with an audience soon develop just that: a wiki. Wikis are great. I rely on them. They have one big shortcoming though: you can only look something up on the wiki if you know - or at least suspect - it exists.

As the responses to my post about GW2's LFG tool demonstrated, you can be a very experienced and knowledgeable player with high level characters and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours played yet  still be unaware of significant mechanics and systems in the MMO you're playing. I seem to find some new thing I didn't know about, but which has apparently been around for months or even years, every week or two.

My latest revelation comes from EQ2 and since I know there are a few people reading this blog who play I thought I'd share it. It was a big surprise to me and it's something that's going to come in very handy indeed.

With EQ2 Wire going into retirement and the Zam network having mothballed its EQ2 site, one of the few news sources still up and running is Niami Denmother's venerable and invaluable EQ2 Traders. It's always been the go-to for information and news on everything to do with tradeskills and decorating but it often pops up nuggets of more general interest.

One such is yesterday's post on Fast Travel. Now, I did know that EQ2 has a form of fast travel that's almost identical to GW2's waypoint system but I'm guessing that even that may be a surprise to some regular players. For a while now, since 2013 I believe, it's been possible to open your map, click an icon on the map and be transported there instantly - or as instantly as loading times allow, anyway.

Even though it's the exact same system I use every day in Tyria I've never used it in Norrath for one simple reason: it costs Station Cash each time. Not much SC, just a smidge, but still. It's always seemed like a bit of a waste, although given that I acquire SC far faster than I ever spend it I'm not quite sure in what context it would be "wasteful" to use it even on such a minor convenience.

Well, as of this evening, when I read the EQ2 Traders post, that concern is flipped on its head. It seems that unlimited, free use of the Fast Travel system has for some time been one of the perks of  All Access membership. Which I have.

I just logged in to try it and it works just fine. Simply open the map and click the rightmost icon at the top of the screen, the odd thing that looks a bit like a feathered head-dress but which reveals itself on mouseover as "Quick Access Teleport". From there you get another map to select the zone you want.

Next the zone map appears with the same orange feather thing marking every available travel point - bells, spires, druid rings and so on. Click the location you desire and confirm you really want to travel and off you go!

Couldn't be simpler. Except apparently it could, because according to EQ2 Traders there's a command you can macro. Only I tried it and I can't get it to work. And even if I could, then I'd probably need to explain how to make Macros in EQ2, which is a whole other post entirely...

Anyway, there it is for what it's worth: free Fast Travel for subscribers Members. No more using my Anchor of Wanderer's Dock to get to a bell, then using that bell to go Dropship Landing in Moors of Ykesha if the final destination is somewhere you can only get to by Spire or Ring.

Wish I'd known that before I did all nine of Yun Zi's quests!

Here Comes The New Boss...

I was pretty cross back in February, when SOE's whole "sell your customers" thing blew up. A lot of people were. Then the weeks rolled on and, as is the way of things, it all slipped to the back of my mind. No news is good news, right?

Well, not always, or so it seems from the inordinately long and complicated new FAQ that surfaced at the weekend, found at its most readable over at EQ2Wire. Plow your way through that if you've nothing better to do for an hour, then spend the rest of the evening picking through SOE Community Director, Global Community Relations Brasse's many forum clarifications in this thread.

Wait, I'll save you the time. SOE listened to the concerns of their players as expressed in a 231 page-long thread on their forums, took it all on board, went away and talked to their German partner PSS1 for a month and a half and came back with a worse deal than they'd started with.

Under the original deal that we all kicked off about, existing SOE customers would have been grandfathered in on their US servers and SOE accounts. Under the new deal we gain the ability to play on any server worldwide but at the cost of a mandatory PSS1 account for anyone logging in from an IP in any of the forty countries for which they now handle SoE's MMO stable.

Mine! Hands off!

And if only it were that simple. PSS1 didn't want all of SOE's MMOs. They turned their noses up at the "it's how old?" Everquest and the "where are the players?" Vanguard. So those two wonderful worlds remain with SOE and everyone in PSS1-Land will still need to log in with their SOE account through their SOE launcher to play them.

Oh, didn't I mention? We get new launchers for PSS1-run games. Yes, we did just get new launchers for all SOE games. Now we get new new launchers. Can't have too many launchers, amiright? Oh, and we keep our existing account names for both PSS1 and SOE, but since SOE can't legally transfer any personal data so PSS1 don't get the passwords. We have to come up with new ones. That's always fun.

So, that's the practical side. Two sets of accounts, passwords and launchers. Messy, incoherent and irritating. Then there's the financial side. We're still waiting to hear if we also have to make two sets of payments. Want to bet?

Don't ask for credit as a bitten-off head often offends

 Then there's the cash shop. Leaving aside what it might sell and for how much, both hotbutton issues, PSS1 won't be using Station Cash. They have their own funny money to which our SC balances will be mirrored. They don't issue game cards, so if we want to add any PSS1 toy money at any time, say to buy an expansion, we'll need to give them some payment details. A lot of people aren't happy about that.

There's a lot more but frankly, who cares? It's a done deal. Live with it or stop playing is the offer on the table. Some people are talking about using proxies and VPNs. Feldon's promised to put up a list on EQ2Wire as and when necessary but I won't be trying to tunnel under the fence like that.

I'll make a PSS1 account providing it's possible to do so without entering payment details. If I want to buy anything from them I'll use PayPal, if they take it, which I believe they do, or game cards if they ever issue them. If they don't, I'll stop playing as Gold under my (now defunct but that's another kettle of worms I don't want to let the cat out of) All Access Pass. We get 30 days notice before any transition so when it comes I'll buy a shedload of unlockers with my hoard of SC and just play Silver. I like Silver better anyway.


Probably be playing GW2 anyway...