Crisis? What Crisis?

A couple of days ago, I logged into Once Human and opened the map to see if I could teleport from my house to Deadville. I was out of food, a very common occurence, and I was wondering whether any of the vendors there sold anything I could eat.

Next time I complete one of those surveys and get to the part where they ask whether there's anything I don't like abut the game and if I have any suggestions on how it could be improved, I must remember say something about the Survival mechanics; specifically, eating and drinking. 

I'm generally fine with survival gameplay. I don't mind having to eat and drink and sleep and make sure I have ammunition and all the other background, housekeeping tasks that serve to make a gameworld feel a little less artificial, a little more organic. The key word in that last sentence, though, is "background".

So long as it's a minor element, something that adds texture but doesn't get in my way, then I'm broadly in favor. When finding something to eat and drink starts to become the focus of every play session, though, I'd say the dial's drifted too far towards simulation and too far from fun.

That said, the survival mechanics in Once Human aren't even all that consistent or convincing. You get hungry and thirsty much faster than I would consider realistic and yet you never seem to get cold, even when you're running around in your underwear. You can stand out in the rain as long as you like without seeming to get wet. There's not even any requirement to put a roof over your crafting stations, as there is in  both Valheim and Dawnlands. You can whip up a batch of roasted hawthorn berries on your stove, outside on the patio, in a raging thunderstorm. I know. I did it last night.

Fine night for a cook-out.

I was reduced to dry-roasting berries to eat because I've been finding it extremely challenging to keep myself fed. I've managed to solve my hydration problems by building a raincatcher next to my front door, along with a water barrel to hold the overflow, but my attempts to dry and cure all the meat from the many deer I've slaughtered have so far been unsuccessful, due to a severe lack of salt.

Salt, apparently, comes from the sea. You heat the sea-water on the stove and once the liquid boils away you're left with a salty residue. Sounds simple, only I don't know where the ocean is. I seem to be right in the middle of a swamp and the water there, foul as it may be, remains resolutely fresh, at least in the context of salinity.

Even if I did have some salt, I still wouldn't be able to cure my meat. I know that much because I had a little salt once. I have no idea how I got it. It was just there in my pack. I don't remember picking it up but I guess I must have. 

I put the salt and the meat in the drier but I couldn't get it to dry the meat. Then I lost the salt somehow, fiddling around, trying to make something happen. Now I just have raw meat.

You can eat your meat raw if you want. You can eat raw berries too. I've been doing both but it sends you crazy. 

Being crazy, as I discussed in another post, isn't that bad but it's generally not ideal and beyond a certain point it does become problematic. Still, it's easy to get sane again - a good nap will do it every time - or, if you're far from your bed, just pop a handful of sanity gummies. Best of all, a nice bottle of beer will have you thinking straight in a moment.

The only game I've played where I'm positively happy to see it start raining.

(It's endearing, isn't it, that someone would think drinking beer was the high road to good mental health. I laughed a lot when I read that tool-tip.)

The real problem, though, the single survival mechanic I would pick out as one that has to go before this game goes live, is the insanely fast rate at which good food spoils. Both raw ingredients and cooked food, or at least the few examples I've been able to get my hands on so far, go from fresh to spoiled in just twenty-four hours. That is ridiculous.

It means you pretty much have to find and eat the food as you need it. Every single day, when I log back in, any food I had from the day before has gone off. Strictly speaking you can still eat it spoiled food and I have, when it was that or starve, but just a couple of pieces give you gut-ache and more than that pretty much finishes you off for anything more than lying in bed, groaning.

Just give me the snacks!

Fortunately, canned and bottled food doesn't spoil. I've had access to some of that from login rewards and, I think, as loot from storage chests. Unfortunately, the rate at which you become hungry and thirsty is also overtuned, so I go through tinned Spam like an unsupervised toddler with a packet of Haribo.

All things considered, eating and drinking is a royal pain, at least at low level. I'm hoping it gets better as you level up. That's how it works in most games. 

Leveling in OH is a lot slower than I'm used to in modern games, though. It's a design choice of which, once again, I'm broadly supportive but it does mean that the subsistence lifestyle seems to go on forever.

I'm hoping all of this will get tuned in future updates to be less frustrating and more entertaining. I can only assume the feedback they're getting will be pretty negative, where some of the harsher survival mechanics are concerned, unless I'm completely out of tune with contemporary tolerance for this kind of fiddle-faddle. Maybe survival specialists demand this level of micro-management but I bet no-one else does and I think NetEase are going for as mass-market an audience as they can get, so I feel reasonably confident it won't be this way forever.

Anyway, getting back to the point of the post, which I realise I haven't even gotten around to mentioning yet...

While I had the map open I noticed a big, red icon I hadn't seen before. I clicked on it for information and it opened a tool-tip that told me there was some kind of public event happening at the indicated location. It was enticingly entitled something along the lines of "The Return of Disco", which immediately made me want to go see what what was happening. There was an option to click on the icon and teleport directly to where the action was. So I did.

I had no idea what to expect but luckily, when I arrived, some instructions appeared in the Mission tracker at the top of the screen. Unfortunately, I don't speak Chinese so I couldn't read them. There are still elements of the game that have yet to be translated and this turned out to be one of them.

It's Studio 54 all over again.

There were a couple of things I could understand: a counter that currently stood at 0/40 and a timer that had just under half an hour to run. I knew how long I had and how much I needed to do in the time. I just didn't know what that was.

Accepted strategy at this point would usually be to watch everyone else and try to copy them. Only there wasn't anyone. I was the only one there. I was in a sprawling complex of quonset huts, portakabins and bizarre, makeshift wooden towers with various zombies, Deviants and floating monstrosities milling about all over the place. Right in the center, beneath a huge mirror-ball, stood the thirty-foot tall, ghostly figure of the same boss I'd fought in the tutorial.

With no better idea in mind, I tried attacking the ghost but predictably my bullets went straight through him so I gave up on that and started investigating. Ok, looting. I spent a very enjoyable twenty-five minutes or so, as the timer inexorably ticked away, exploring every building, climbing all the towers, killing all the creatures and taking everything that wasn't nailed down. It was hella fun.

In all that time I never saw another player but somehow the item count for the event went from 0/40 to 2/40 so I guess I did the thing I was meant to be doing at least twice. I still have no idea what it was.

If I could figure out how to drop that disco ball on his head we might get somewhere...

Then, five minutes before the end, two players showed up. They clearly had a plan. They zipped around all over the place and the counter began to tick over. I'd have helped if I could have figured out what they were doing but I was still none the wiser so I concentrated on keeping the Deviants busy.

As the count increased I noticed the ghostly figure beginning to fill out and take on material form. I figured whatever we were up to was meant to bring the creature to a sufficiently physical state so we could take it on and that turned out to be the case. The only problem was, by the time we could hit the thing, there wasn't much more than a minute left on the clock.

The three of us gave it everything we had. The towering monstrosity soaked up our fire and occasionally let loose with a powerful AE attack that sent a wave of energy rippling out around in all directions. I failed to get out of the way of one of those and it took me to about ten per cent health so it was just as well it didn't happen too often.

I was using my pistol, for which I had plenty of ammunition for a change, having found a stash in one of the storage crates, but I also picked up a few oil barrels and lobbed them for good measure. They explode on impact and do considerable damage. 

I was too busy fighting to take a picture of the boss so here's one of a creepy cult den I found while I was looting exploring instead.

Like many games, Once Human lets you pick up objects from the environment and use them as weapons but unlike most such games I've played, it's actually worth the bother. At these levels, some of the ad hoc options do better damage than my own arsenal and they don't need to be crafted, repaired or reloaded, either.

The seconds ticked down. It looked like we might make it. The boss was big but he didn't have a ridiculous health pool. Continuous fire from three handguns was more than enough to finish him.

Or it would have been, if we'd had another five seconds. When the timer hit zero the boss was on less than 2% health but that was all he needed for the win. I was optimistic there might be some kind of consolation prize for paricipating but no, it seems the test was Pass/Fail. At zero on the clock the boss just vanished, along with the event instructions, the circle around the settlement that marked the limit of the event area and the icon on the map. All was as it once was. The event might never have happened.

The two players ran off to do whatever they were going to do next. I stopped to look in my bags and see what I'd looted, which was when I realised that, for me at least, there was a consolation prize after all. The whole time I'd been there, the event instructions had been taking up the space where the regular Stronghold details would be. There were three sets of things I needed to do to complete the Stronghold and I'd unwittingly done all of them. So that was nice.

Nicest of all, though, was the drop I got at some point. I'm not sure if it came from a mob or if I looted it from a storage chest but either way it set a precedent I found exciting. Somehow, I'd found myself a sign-board.

Just don't ask me to check your tires.

I love it when games include house items as drops. It always makes for a pleasant surprise when I get one unexpectedly and I'll go out of my way for one if I know it's there. It makes sense to put in the effort. I frequently get more use and pleasure from furniture than I do from gear. I mean, you never level out of an oil painting like you do a pair of pants, do you? 

The sign I got comes from a gas station. It shows the price of gasoline and diesel in an unspecified currency. Diesel is cheaper than petrol, which is the opposite of where I live, these days, although it would have been true a few years ago. 

I hung it up on the outside wall of my house and it looks great. I just hope I don't get any customers. They're going to be mighty disappointed.

As a first experience, I was very impressed with the event. It seemed to run smoothly and it was nicely tuned for a handful of players of the appropriate level for the area. I suspect, had I known what to do, it might even have been soloable. It felt like it might have been scaling. 

All it really lacked was instructions in English and I'm sure those'll come soon enough. It certainly made me keen to keep my eye out for more such "Randomly Triggered Public Crisis Events". Maybe next time I run across one I'll be able to beat it and find out if the rewards are any good. 

When it comes to public events, though, it's not the rewards. It's the taking part that matters, isn't it? At least that's what I learned from a decade playing Guild Wars 2...

When You Hear The Call

I've kind of fallen of the EverQuest II wagon these last few thanks to Valheim shouldering everything else to one side. It's niggling away at the back of my mind because I had a very loose plan of action for the winter and spring involving filling out the gaps in my Berserker's gear with drops from PQs and getting all the adornment slots filled and upgraded through crafting.

That's what I did last year and it was steady, satisfying gameplay. Nothing spectaular but gently enjoyable, a background hum of pleasure in the gaming day. 

It helped a lot that at the time I was regularly getting very nice upgrades from the Overseer system. Over the lifetime of the two EverQuest games there have been too many innovations and additions to remember, but only a handful of systemic changes that I'd consider to be fundamentally game-changing - AAs, mercenaries, flying mounts...

The Overseer mechanic is one of those. It made me in-game rich (by any previous standards I'd known, anyway) and better-equipped than I'd ever been before, in both games. I was really hoping the same would happen this year with a post-expansion new season but as yet we haven't had one. 

The good news is that one is definitely planned. Until it arrives there's not much incentive for me to keep up my previous routine, bashing out Overseer quests as though they were dailies. Which, I guess, they are.

Oh, I remember this one!

By dipping out to go play viking I've also missed the bus for this year's PQs. They'll still happen, of course, and people will still do them, but the feeding frenzy that was so compulsive back in January will have abated to a desultory trickle by now as most people who care will have found the drops they wanted.

I really love public quests in mmorpgs. I think they embody the spirit of what the genre was probably always meant to be better than just about anything. Certainly much more so than instanced dungeons or raids. 

To my way of thinking, the true meaning of "massively multiple" is scores of people, hundreds if the infrastructure can stand it, all engaged in the same activity at the same time in the same shared space. And it needs to be an open space into which anyone can wander by accident, not some by-appointment, only if your name is on the list instance.

Without a doubt that's the primary reason I've stuck with Guild Wars 2 all these years, even though at times it frustrates and annoys me as much as it entertains. The original vision, overhyped and oversold as it was, still comes closest to my idea of an ideal mmorpg. 

ArenaNet never managed to close the deal on the promises they made but luckily for all of us mmorpgs are so ferociously complex in their construction, so iceberg-weighted with unseen engines and ballast, that even when those who seek to control them want to make changes there's only so much they can do. You can put a hat on the cat but its still a cat for all that.

Not so sure about this, though...

 

For all the time and effort the developers invested in fractals and raids, GW2 remains at heart a sprawling, open-world game, where things happen and everyone joins in. Yes, your character has to be level 80 for a lot of them and yes you have to have bought the Path of Fire expansion, but even allowing for that there's a never-ending firework display of "events" in the parts of the game anyone can visit for free.

EQ2 doesn't have the advantage of being built that way but it has a good track record of inclusivity all the same. The mentoring system and the agnostic dungeons are both intentional attempts to get everyone playing together regardless of awkward barriers like levels. They're shaky in implementation but the ideas behind them are sound.

The team has stuck doggedly with Public Quests for many years now, even though they cause all kinds of problems. It's tempting to say the game was never built for that number of people to come together and fight giant monsters except apparently it was because I have screenshots of my characters doing it a decade and a half ago. We had dragon attacks when we put the wizard portals back up after the cataclysm and I'm pretty sure that was in the first year after the game came out.

I just bet you would.

No-one called them "Public Quests" back then. I think we called them "World Events". They didn't have the semi-formal structure that came later. You just heard something was happening and you turned up to see what it was. Now you get quests and achievements and guaranteed, personalized drops but it's really the same thing.

Over the years, EQ2 has bundled dozens, maybe hundreds of these things together to make a living world. Some, like the raising of the portals, happen only once. Others come around time after time, like old friends.

Norrath's calendar of holiday events, as I've often said, is second to none in the genre. This month sees one of the year's biggest flurries of activity on that front. Brew Day is winding down but even before it goes we'll have another event to enjoy. The Chronoportals open today.

As well as some very nice-looking new house items, including some excellent paintings, the drops from the Ancient Cyclops instance (the one that's a PQ in all but name) have been updated to make them useful for max levels. Another chance to upgrade some of those slots for a casual like me. There's also a new Overseer quest, something I'm very happy to see.

The chronoevent is a short one by Norrathian standards. It's only here for just over a week. It's just as well because two more are coming along right behind. The Beast'r Eggstravaganza and Bristlebane Day are both active on the Test Server right now.

I read the patch notes for both and they look great. Beast'r has five more egg pets to find and a title for finding them. And there's another new Overseer quest for Bristlebane. 

The trickster's feast also brings a new patchwork fight (yet another kind of unofficial PQ) to the dark side of Luclin. I haven't seen the loot table for that but historically the patchworks have been very generous when done at level so I'm hopeful my Berserker might get something he needs when he goes to try his luck. 

Everyone loves an egg pun.

There are also the inevitable new crafting books that I'll buy and never use and of course all the old quests and features from every other year are up again. 

I've spoken before about the misleading naming convention in Norrath that has events known as Brew or Bristlebane Day lasting for weeks but there is actually a proper Bristlebane Day. It is, of course, April the first and that's the one and only chance you'll have (this year) to match wits with a new riddle-setter. 

We already have the Sphinx but rumor is (if you can call something a rumor when its already happening on Test) they'll be joined this year by another question-setting entity for just that one day. That's definitely appointment gaming.

As well as the returning holidays, there's a major game update brewing. I'd say more about it but I don't know much. Or indeed anything. 

Well, I know what's in this thread. It's called Whispers of Tyranny and most of it probably isn't going to be for me, being raids and heroics. There's some solo content, though, and some quests but no mention of a new Overseer Season. 

There's a beta starting today but I won't be joining in with that. My days of beta-testing content for live games where I'm going to be playing that content just weeks later are over.

All of the above is also motivation for me to get myself organized and get back to logging in to EverQuest II at least often enough to see all that new stuff. Maybe to stick around and farm the drops I need if there really are some good ones I could use. 

And I need the push. It's getting to be all Valheim all the time around here and I'ma  little uncomfortable about it. Much though I've enjoyed being a viking these last few weeks it's good to be reminded other pantheons are available.

Two Weeks Later

 

Time for a very quick update on how things are going in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Reign of Shadows. Really well.

Okay, that was too quick, wasn't it? Just a little more detail, then.

I finished the signature adventure questline on my Berserker. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt well-paced and entertaining until the very end, when I came to the final instance expecting an epic battle, or at least some relatively tough bosses, only to find everything had dropped an order of magnitude in difficulty. For the first and only time I can remember in at least two years everything was actually flagged "solo", not Heroic. It felt strange at first but then I fell back into it just like the old days. It was nice not to have to do any boss dances. Didn't miss 'em at all.

After I knocked that off it was back to meet up with the Duality again for what has to go down in the annals of Norrath as the most anticlimactic debriefing session ever. I'm guessing we're either finishing this up in one of 2021's big updates or there's a third Luclin expansion on the cards. Whatever, I loved it! I'm on board with wherever the writers want to take us next. Great storyline.

Come again?

Of course, when I say "great" I mean EQII-great. The writing is often funny in the hamfisted, amateurish style that's so much a part of what makes EQII the game it is, while elsewhere it's so cod-serious as to verge on self-parody. There are speeches where it seems as though more than half the words are pure gibberish. God alone knows what anyone who hadn't been following the plot for a decade or so makes of it, but then no-one who hasn't is ever going to come within a mile of any of it in the first place so I guess it doesn't matter.

As is often the case in expansions with no level cap increase, the final reward for completing the signature line was a bit of a grab-bag. There was a title, because there's always a title, and there was a prestige point for the newly revamped AA system.

I suppose I should write something about that at some point but first I'm going to have to understand it, which I don't, yet. I tried to spend my new points and couldn't. There's been something about that in the Message of the Day for weeks but I've been ignoring it because until now I didn't have any points to spend. It suggested I should clear my AA profile and re-commit, which is a thing you can do, so I did and it let me spend my points. I still didn't really follow how the new version works or indeed why it's supposed to be different to the old one. It just looked like some new AAs to me.

I do know a bit more about how the revamped guild system works, although not much. The new perks don't seem to start until your guild hits a very high level. It might be 200. Before then it all carries on as it was so at least Daybreak appear to have avoided the traumatic deconstruction of small guilds ANet inflicted on Guild Wars 2 a few years back.

The weird part is that you now get absolutely huge injections of guild status, the fuel that levels your guild, from the occasional quest. My guild jumped about twenty levels on one hand-in when I finished the Sig line. At that rate I'll get to the new benchmark sooner rather than later. I think I'll save any detailed discussion of the new system until that happens, in the hope that by then I might have some vague idea what's going on.

With the adventure questline finished I started on the tradeskill signature storyline next. I've only done the first couple of parts and so far it's excellent. Very funny and also mechanically quite interesting. I like making things and then using them for purposes that make sense in the context of the narrative. EQII has always been good at that where crafting quests are concerned.

There are gnomes involved so naturally everything's a little haphazard and over-confident. Some of the contraptions are impressive. You get the little one-seater dirigible as a house pet, which is nice. 

Actually, you get a lot of house items as rewards from both the adventure and tradeskill quests, which suits me very well, although I'm not sure what hardcore raiders must think about it. Then again, what else are you going to give them? It's not like they're going to use the gear from solo quests. 

I made that! Not exactly sure what it does...

Since there are no new levels I was a bit puzzled about what would be in all the new recipe books, of which there are a complete set for all crafting classes. I looked it up on EQ2 Traders and it seems the major complaint of last year's Blood of Luclin, that no-one other than spellcrafters could make anything anyone wanted, has been addressed. Mastercrafted gear has a purpose again. 

Some of the books you can buy immediately, some you need to have completed parts of the crafting questline and some come from the new set of public crafting quests, which also tie into the signature line. I like that a lot. I'd do the signature questline just for the story but the rewards give it a nice structure and meaning as well.

Speaking of public quests, I've been doing some of the adventuring ones. They're all out in open world zones this year, which is much better than sticking them away in instances. They're also very well-attended right now, with certain public-spirited individuals taking it upon themselves to orchestrate pick-up raids and keep everyone informed.

Some evenings there have even been enough people interested for there to be organized attempts to force multiple iterations of the zones to open so we can move from one to another as the PQs pop, farming them. I did about half a dozen in a row like that the other night and the atmosphere was excellent. It's exactly the kind of self-generating, broadly social activity I feel mmorpgs were made to support so it's great to see it happening.

There's been so much to do I haven't really had time for Frostfell other than to pop in when I remember to pick up my daily present from Santa Glugg. Some of those have been nice enough that I'm hoping to make the effort before the holiday ends and cycle all my characters through once or twice. Plus there's double xp on Kaladim until the New Year, which is why I was over there last night putting another level on my Dirge.

Next on my EQII to-do list is to make a Vah Shir, the new race that was added with RoS. All my character slots were full so I bought another with my Daybreak Cash stash but then I couldn't decide what class to pick. I'm thinking either Conjuror or Dirge, neither of which I have on the account and Live server where I spend most of my time. Maybe I'll get on that later today. 

Two weeks in and I'm almost ready to say I like Reign of Shadows even better than Blood of Luclin. I'll have to wait and see how long its legs are but suffice it to say I'm a very happy customer right now.

Underpromise, Overdeliver: EverQuest II

When I first read the official announcement  outlining the events Daybreak had scheduled for EverQuest II's fifteenth anniversary celebrations I was underwhelmed. Granted, anniversaries that end in five generally carry less significance than those that end with a zero - and fifteen is definitely neither ten nor twenty. Still, fifteen years of continual operation is a notable achievement for an MMORPG. It deserves recognition and respect.

For what was described as "our big 15th Anniversary event" we were promised something called "Dragon Attack": dragons were scheduled to attack the Ulteran Spires in four zones, Thundering Steppes, Everfrost, Loping Plains, and Nektulos Forest. Backing this up came a tradeskill event, in which we would be tasked with "constructing permanent, impressive statues commemorating the 15 years that have passed since the Age of Destiny".

Is he looking at me? He's not, is he?

The list of rewards from the crafting quest looked a tad thin and there was no mention of the pay-off for protecting the spires from dragons. The press release also tied the annual Heroes Festival, which falls at this time each year, into the anniversary celebrations as if it was part of them. That seemed a bit cheeky to me.

It didn't help that there was a 15th Aniversary Celebration Bundle in the store, stuffed to bursting with really tempting treats including a crafting table that works for any tradeskill, a 66-slot bag, a 100% fee-reducing, 100 slot broker crate, speed-enhancing boots, a mount and lots more. Very good value at $34.99 but perhaps a little galling when compared with what I thought were rather lackluster in-game rewards.

And then I logged in and discovered I was wrong on every count. The event is excellent and so are the rewards. I spent most of yesterday killing dragons and having a rare old time. As I sit here now I'm alternating between writing this post and killing more. Whether by good fortune or good design, EQII's fifteenth birthday party is turning out to be one of the most enjoyable I've attended for quite a while.

Note bunny and shovel from previous events. Cloak too, probably.

Dragon Attack and Heroes Festival mesh a little chaotically but work well together. Structurally very similar, they each consist of a series of public quests in which very large creatures with quadrillions of hit points appear at easy-to-access locations on a fairly predictable schedule.

All the mobs are raid-level so it relies on a good turnout if things are going to go smoothly. We certainly have that for now. Heroes Festival is a little more forgiving on numbers, although not by much.

It features "clothwork" puppets representing famous villains from the lore. They're notionally operated by a theater troupe of NPCS and are nothing more than giant pinatas. I'm not sure if they even fight back. Dragon Attack features guess what? Dragons. They do fight and there are even some tactics required, as outlined in the wiki.

You can't fool me. You're not a real dragon!

All of the dragons and most of the puppets appear right next to a wizard spire, meaning anyone can get to them with the minimal of travel time. There's a ten minute warning before they arrive and once they're in place there's a nominal timeframe in which they have to be killed, something like 90 minutes.

Each dragon has a one-hour respawn time and right now they're taking five or ten minutes to die. With people doing them in a fairly strict rotation that means the next is along in about the same time it takes to kill one, if not sooner.

Indeed, because the two events are on different schedules, there's frequently a dragon and a puppet up at the same time. It's possible to chain-kill with no more than a few five or ten minute intervals now and again. I did that for about four hours at a stretch yesterday and it was a lot of fun.

Everyone lines up along the crater rim for this one. People are weird.

There's a real carnival atmosphere at the moment, on this first weekend. Every dragon and puppet draws a crowd, even on my low-pop server, Skyfire. Yesterday afternoon and evening there were sometimes enough people to spawn second instances of the zones. I crashed twice because of the strain a hundred players, their pets and minions put on my graphics card.

General chat is busy with people asking which dragons or puppets are up and with people who are killing them reporting the progress. We even had someone roleplaying a TV reporter for a while. I've heard no complaints save one - someone was moaning that having these two events plus the expansion beta all at once meant there was too much to do!

My haul from Saturday,
not including the stuff I equipped.

As for the rewards, which I turned my nose up at when I read about them, I was completely wrong. They're great! Very generous and sufficiently desirable to bring people out of their usual instances to get them.

The Dragons drop very good gear for Mercenaries (every piece I've had has been a major upgrade), Illegible Spell Scrolls (needed for spell upgrades and something I virtually never see drop as a solo player), and Infusers for gear (which I'm saving to use on the inevitable upgrades from questlines in the upcoming expansion).

The most important drop for me, though, is Mount equipment. Levels and gear for mounts was a keynote feature of last year's expansion, Chaos Descending, but it was one that I spent most of the year ignoring. Until this weekend none of my mounts had a single piece. Now I have a saddle and some barding equipped and more than a dozen more mount items in my bags.

Last, and very much not least, there's an Achievement for killing all four dragons. I'm not much for Achievements in general but it's different when they come with one of the best "mounts" I've ever seen in the game.

It may seem odd that I'm sounding so enthusiastic about a mount when only a few weeks ago I was bemoaning their very existence but the name of the mount in question should go some way to explaining why that is: Reveal Inner Dragon.

Technically an actual mount, this is really an illusion. You place it in your Mount Appearance slot (you can put it in the main Mount slot if you want but it doesn't have very good stats) and you become a dragon. A really good-looking dragon at that.

Look at me! I'm a dragon!

I want one for all my Level 110s. The Berserker has one and the Warlock will before I finish this post. That leaves four more. I may well get it for the lower level characters on other servers too. While the dragons are Level 110 Epic X3 raid mobs, you get credit for just being there when the kill happens so any level can complete the achievement provided they don't mind dying now and again.

That's the adventurer side of Dragon Attack. To keep this post to a manageable length for once I'll cover the crafter's version separately. Suffice to say it's pretty good, too.

As for the returning Heroes Festival, which I so glibly dismissed on sight as "more of the same", I'd completely missed the part of the press release that mentions the five new collections added this year. Even if I'd seen it, I wouldn't have known that the rewards for those include three new mounts.

Not really! Don't kill me!

As for the new items added to the Heroes Festival vendors to be bought with the currency you get for doing the event, if it wasn't for the invaluable EQ2 Traders I wouldn't have known there were some wonderful old school paintings (the ones without the horrible new frames) and one of the best sets of appearance armor I've seen in the game for years. The PR team might have mentioned that...

Dragon Attack runs until December 6th and Heroes Festival to November 19 so there's plenty of time to get everything done. At the moment everything is buzzing and it's easy and fun but as people run their alts through the cycles and get all the rewards they want I imagine it will quieten down considerably.

I wouldn't leave it too long - all the targets are raid mobs and I can tell you from experience that even with the puppets that don't fight back it takes a handful of players an awfully long time to whittle one down. I imagine that's why the event allows an hour and a half for the kill.

All in all I give this anniversary celebration a hearty cheer. So much better than I thought it was going to be. Thanks and congratulations to the dev team once again. Maybe someone needs to pop round to the PR department and have a quiet word...



(IntPiPoMo count 55)

This Day's Portion : EQ2

What with all the ballyhoo over EverQuest's twentieth anniversary and the simultaneous launch of four new special ruleset servers it would be very easy to overlook the fact that EverQuest II just got a major content drop. Mischief and Mayhem, aka Game Update 109, added a new Fabled dungeon, a new Raid zone, a new Public Quest for crafters and a completely new community tradeskill system.

The Fabled dungeon this time round is Runnyeye. It's a revamped version of a revamped version. First there was Runnyeye, the open dungeon in Enchanted Lands, intended for groups in the 30s and part of the game from launch. Then, four years later, the Runnyeye goblins acted as hosts for a gathering of goblin clans from all across Norrath in Runnyeye: The Gathering, an instanced dungeon for players around level 80.

The new version, available in both Solo and Heroic (Group) flavors, requires players to be Level 110 and, since the zone-in is in Myrist, the Great Library, to own last year's Chaos Descending expansion. As is evident from Holly Longdale's recent interview with PCGamer, Daybreak are getting better and better at managing their properties in ways that monetize them effectively without infuriating their core players - the ones who actually give them money.

Porcugoblins!

I ran the solo version this morning. For the most part I found it a lot easier than I was expecting. When Fabled Plane of Hate, the first level 110 Fabled Dungeon, appeared I could barely do anything there. Then came Fabled Guk, which was pretty tough at first although now I have it on farm. I was imagining another steep curve, with mobs tougher than those in Guk, but it turned out to be something of a cakewalk.

Until I ran into Chief Kanar, that is. The Chief has an extremely unsavory habit of releasing gas. Let's not enquire too closely into where he releases it from. As soon as you pull him the entire floor of the room fills with a noxious cloud that does around 20 million points a tick in poison damage. Even with close on 140 million hit points my Berserker can't take that sort of punishment.

The strat for beating him is simple: fight him above ground level. He has a throne atop a ricketty scaffold and if you jump up and attack him there the gas doesn't touch you. Not until he fears you into it, anyway.

Here's one in the eye for you, Sonny Jim!

Ah, but my Berserker has a very handy augment in one of his accessories that completely prevents all fear effects. That'll fix his wagon! Or not, as it turns out. Unfortunately, if the Chief can't fear you he just barges you off the platform by brute force. He has a huge knockback attack and I couldn't block or avoid it.

I tried five times and died on each attempt. The final two nameds won't spawn until Kanar dies so I had to quit without clearing the zone. I probably need someone to post a strat that works or else I'm going to have to die until I figure it out. Since none of the loot any of the other Nameds dropped was an upgrade I think I'll let someone else do the donkey work.

My Berserker is also a max level weaponsmith who's completed the Chaos Descending Signature Tradeskill questline so I thought I'd take a look at that instead. It starts in Cobalt Scar, which is where the permanent Public Quest will be - when you clear out the old mine that Wilhelm Nam'Terin has marked out as the place to set up his new enterprise.

Not that Wilhelm.

EQ2 Traders has a partial walkthrough. The devs kept their cards close to their chests on this one so some of the fine details are still to be revealed but there was more than enough to get me started. I talked to Wilhelm then I mapped back to my Mara storehouse to stock up on materials. And fuel. Nothing worse than getting halfway through a questline only to find yourself ten coals short of a combine.

I made the four pickaxes the quest required but I only needed two of them to tunnel through the rock and open up the hidden cavern. There I found a strange, rather cute "beast". I would have let it be since it seemed harmless enough but my instructions were to craft a net, catch it and cage it outside the entrance so that's what I did.

You can't just stick a beastie in a cage and leave it to starve, although if you happened to be "evil" like, oh, let's say an Iksar Necromancer, I'm thinking it really shouldn't be that much of a problem. Well, tough. If you want access to the new tradeskill instance (and get the creature as a very useful Tradeskill Familiar) better just suck it up, craft ten traps and set them out for kitty snacks. Faction in EQII really is completely meaningless nowadays.

The horror! The horror!

The traps have to sit for a full Norrathian day, which is forty-two Earth minutes long. I started this post while I waited. The next step, travelling to Butcherblock, Kelethin, Steamfont and Rivervale to convince some semi-reclusive crafters to up sticks and move to a god-forsaken cave in the back of beyond, also has some interesting time-gating, should you happen to fluff your lines as you try to talk them into it.

As I write this I've managed to get the Dwarven blacksmith on board - at the second attempt - and I'm waiting for the Elven seamstress to calm down so I can try again. If you annoy any of these divas too much they refuse to talk to you, which means a wait of a few minutes before you can try again.

Was it something I said?

I like these imposed delays. I'm sure plenty of people rage at the inconvenience but it makes me feel like something's actually happening beyond me clicking a few buttons. Intellectually I know it isn't but emotionally it works for me. Plus I always find it funny when one of my characters makes a prat of themselves.

There's a known bug in the questline around this point. It's scheduled to be fixed after tomorrow's weekly downtime, but thanks to a warning from Niami Denmother and an in-game message from Gninja I have already safely worked around it. In finishing the questline I opened access for all characters on my account. They can now enter the new instance and start grinding working on the hourly quests, which will incrementally lead to the acquisition of new crafting recipes for the whole server.

I was hoping for the return of Gnome Kabobs but its just a house item.

More about that when (or if) it happens.

File It Under Fun From The Past : EverQuest, EQ2

Last night I was working on getting my EverQuest II Warlock to the level cap. He was a few bubbles into 108 when I finished Plane of Innovation, the first of the solo dungeons from 2017's Planes of Prophecy expansion. I exited into the lobby zone, Coliseum of Valor, and handed in my completed quest to the Goddess Druzzil Ro. Ding! 110.

It's a very positive indication of the quality of that expansion that I've now run four characters through all or most of the Signature questline and it still feels fresh and enjoyable. Counting the one character I bumped straight to 110 via the boost that came with last year's Chaos Descending, I now have five max level characters. It's the most I have ever had at one time in either EverQuest.

One of the benefits of having multiple characters at the cap in EQ2 is that the whole account gains a 20% xp boost for each, up to a maximum of 200%. My All Access account now has a "permanent" 100% xp bonus. That encourages me to carry on and level up even more characters. The faster and easier it gets, the more I enjoy it.

I put quotation marks around "permanent" just now because you get the bonus for having max level characters, not specifically level 110s. If and when the cap goes up the entire bonus will go away until I can level up all over again. Still, it's here now and for the rest of the year, at least, and I plan to make some use of it.

While I was dismantling clockworks and foiling Meldrath's schemes for the umpteenth time I was half following a conversation on the Test channel. For the longest time, one of the least-celebrated pleasures of playing Daybreak MMORPGs has been the wealth and depth of chat options available. Not only can you make custom channels, you can invite people to join them from any server and even from other games.

It's a great way to keep in touch with people you once played alongside, long after you may all have gone your separate ways. It's been many years since I played regularly on EverQuest II's Test server but all my accounts are registered with the Test channel and I regularly see and occasionally chat with familiar names from years ago.

This time they were talking about a new Public Quest that had just appeared for testing. In recent years, Public Quests - PQs as everyone calls them - have proliferated across Norrath. From their humble beginnings in Antonica and The Commonlands PQs have spread to Velious, Kunark and even The Planes. They feature increasingly heavily in recent expansions and public questing is becoming almost de rigeur for the holidays.

I've been running the new Erollisi Day PQ several times a day, most days, since it appeared a couple of weeks ago. I've hatched two eggs and the extraordinarlily cute familiars that popped out are bouncing along behind my Berserker and my Warlock in the least appropriate manner imaginable.

According to what I was hearing, the Test server was struggling to muster enough people to give the new PQ a good airing so I logged out and swapped accounts to throw one of my characters behind the team effort. The best I could do was either a Bruiser or a Necromancer at Level 90 but the PQ was supposed to be "for all levels" so I was hoping my lack of a maxed character on Test wouldn't matter.

It didn't, but my lack of the latest expansion on that account did. I asked where the PQ was and someone told me to go to Sinking Sands and use the portal there. That took me to an ethereal, unworldly lobby-zone where the portals for the Chronoportal event hung in space, drawn from all across Norrath.

I'm a bit vague on whether that's new for this year or I just missed it last time around. Later in the evening I found the portal to the Qeynos Hills instance next to the Antonican lighthouse, so you can still travel to the past from the specific locations as well. Although didn't that one used to be over by The Tower of the Oracles?

Whatever the story, I couldn't get in to see the new PQ, despite being in a raid group with the eight or nine people who could. I went to the Test board on the official forums and recounted my experience in case it might be considered a bug, then I wandered off to do some Chronoquesting on my own.

Fittingly, since all the quests celebrate events or tropes from the older game, EQ2 is once again planning on making some play of the Chronoportal "holiday" to help EverQuest celebrate its twentieth birthday. The event, which is always in March, dates back to 2011. I wrote about it the following year.

It's too early to say what the rewards might be. Usually there are some nostalgic paintings to hang on your wall. This year you get one of those just for logging in. Unfortunately the art assets haven't yet be linked so I can't reproduce or even describe it, only confirm that it's called Rise of Kunark.

What with yesterday's digression on casual play and last night's foray, I have been thinking - and researching - the current state of play on the Test servers for both EverQuest and EQ2.

It seems that, since last August, you have been able to create a Level 100 character on EQ2 Test for free. What's more, you can also bump a tradeskill to 100 for nothing. That's a very good deal. I do already have two Level 90s there, though, both of whom are also high-level crafters. Leveling through the 90s is good fun so I probably wouldn't bump them. I might add another class, though.

What's considerably more attractive is the deal available on EverQuest's Test server. I had completely forgotten that the long-running battle to keep Test free from copied characters was lost over a decade ago. 

Back when I played there was a strong feeling among many Test regulars that allowing characters to be cut and pasted across from Live would somehow damage the soul of the server. At the time I kind of agreed, but then again the practical advantages were so compelling it seemed churlishly selfish to insist on such a self-abnegating standard of purity.

Anyway, SOE enabled copying and it still pertains. This morning I copied my Level 93 Magician from Luclin/Stromm to Test and her clone is standing in the Guild Lobby, hoping for buffage, as I type this. To my considerable surprise there are forty other characters idling along with her, which is a Woodstock-sized turnout by Test standards.

There are major disadvantages to playing on Test but also some huge benefits, double xp all the time being the biggest. You can also re-copy characters as often as you want and all their gear and money comes with them so you have an endless money machine at your disposal. Which would be amazing if Test had an economy. Which it really doesn't.

How far any of this goes remains to be seen. I would love to hit three figures in EQ but I also know that it won't feel quite "real" on a copied character. Then again, since I swapped my All Access accounts around I haven't been playing the original mage much, anyway...

One way or another, all things Norrath seem to be heartily back on the agenda. I guess anniversaries do have weight. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what the official celebrations bring but in the meantime maybe I'll light a few candles to my own past glories, such as they ever were, and take a few turns around the Test servers, where I once had some of the funnest times ever.

That Old Familiar Feeling : EQ2

If it's Valentine's Day on Earth it must be Erollisi Day in Norrath. Call it a day? More like two weeks. The celebrations started yesterday and run until Tuesday the 19th.

I never really thought of Erollisi Day as one of the big dates on the calendar but looking at the schedule it's really grown over the years. There are half a dozen one-off quests and almost a dozen repeatables, as well as a race, two collections and getting on for twenty achievements.

When you consider that most of those can be done per character, not just per account, that's almost too much to cram into just under a fortnight. And that's not even considering the dozen recipe books of craftable items or the event currency you can farm to spend at a special vendor.

There's a new collection this year, which I did right away, but the highlight of 2019's holiday is a new Public Quest. I love PQs. They're often chaotic and I generally have no idea what I'm doing. I just follow everyone else, attack anything that's aggro, click on anything that's not and have a rare old time.

My team on the right, waiting for the slowcoaches coming down the hill to meet us. All those colored lights are flowers.

The new PQ is called "Love Will Lead You Back". It's beautifully designed; easy to understand, simple to run, fun to do and thematically appropriate.

The idea is to re-unite two lovers, separated by death. Literally. One's a zombie, the other a skeleton. I think. It was hard to see with all the mounts, mercs and familiars milling about.

The two lost souls begin on opposite sides of the zone and you have to guide them towards a re-union in the middle. To do this you pick various colored flowers as they spawn. The yellow and red ones urge the lover on (his or her outline glows the color of the one you're supposed to hand over) while the purple and black ones spawn aggressive undead out to spoil love's union.

The first time I  ran the PQ (I've only done it twice so far) I followed my regular method outlined above and attacked/clicked on anything I could see. This turned out to be a sound strategy. When our group came in range of the other coming towards us, the two lovers sprinted into each others' decaying embrace, together for eternity.

Mount training is a big deal these days. So they tell me.

As well as a warm glow (someone did actually say "Awww, that's so sweet!" in chat) I got eight Erollisi coins, a five-day Mount Training accelerator token and a Heart Shaped Egg. I examined the egg. It seemed to be a Familiar but there was no obvious way to hatch it.

I would have looked it up but at the time no-one had written the new PQ up in detail. Fortunately the Test chat channel, which I have been in since the game began, even though I haven't played on Test regularly for nearly ten years, was buzzing with people talking about the new content.

I learned that this PQ has a couple of clever mechanics. Firstly, as is often the case with Public Quests, your participation is graded. This time, however, you can be rated Passive, Active or ProActive.

For "Passive" you just have to be there. It's a reward for bothering to turn up. "Active" means hitting stuff when it spawns and registering sufficient damage. Probably. No-one seemed entirely sure. ProActive, the one you want, means not only hitting the mobs but also handing the flowers to the lover and, crucially, clearing the black and purple flowers before they have a chance to spawn baddies. 

To hatch your egg you need to be graded "ProActive" a number of times. No-one seems quite sure exactly how many - there's probably a random factor - but the consensus is somewhere between six and ten. Most of this is subject to revision as more information comes in.

I can see that this is going to annoy some people but I think it's rather clever. The familiar, a patchwork baby dragon named Carina Cuddleblaze, is exceptionally cute. It also has decent stats. Quite a few people are going to want that egg to hatch and some are going to want it on more than one character. I can see the PQ staying busy for the whole of the holiday.

Less welcome is the cadence for the Public Quests themselves. Yet again, facts are hard to come by, but it seems the PQ happens about once an hour, alternating between The Commonlands and Antonica. It takes about five or ten minutes and there's no global or even zone-wide broadcast. This is not ideal.

I spent a lot of time just sitting around waiting for the Antonica one to start last night and it never did. It would, however, have been easy for me to have missed it because I kept tabbing out to look at stuff on the web. In the time I was waiting, I also missed one in The Commonlands, which by my reckoning shouldn't have been up at all.

It would be nice either to have these things on a known, set schedule or for there to be a global Broadcast. The PQ is tons of fun but waiting for it, not so much.

Anyway, that's a very minor complaint. Once again EQ2's small but dedicated development team has done us proud. I will be making every effort to hatch my egg so that Carina can join me on me travels. Everyone needs a patchwork baby dragon with Group Hug!