It's All In The Preparation

There are often rumblings in this part of the blogosphere about how tough it can be, going back to an MMORPG you haven't played in a year or so. It's true, too. And I'm here to tell you, it's not a lot better going back to one you were playing as recently as a couple of months back.

Scars of Destruction launched for EverQuest II just over a week ago and I've played quite a few sessions since then but it wasn't until a couple of hours ago I finally got as far as starting the first quest in the Adventurer Signature Timeline. Even though I had a character just a level and a half below the access requirement when I logged in eight days ago, it's taken me this long to get to the point where I could finally start in on the new content.

As I've posted already, a lot of that time was taken up figuring out how to get that last level and a half but even when I got to Level 130, I still had quite a bit of prep to do. 

The first and most important thing was to clear some bag space. I do realise this isn't entirely something the developers can do much about, what with it having more to do with my personality, psychology and playstyle than any particular flaw in game design. The name of this blog is a bit of a giveaway there. Still, I've read enough other bloggers complaining about the problem of coming back to a game only to find all their bags full of stuff they don't know whether to keep, sell or junk to know it's not just me.

The temptation is always to clear just enough space to get by and pretend the rest isn't there. I tried that. It didn't work. And even doing that little housekeeping took me an hour or more.

It left me with half a bag empty, out of six in total. Not much but I figured it might be enough to take all the free gear I knew was going to have to deal with the moment I arrived in the new lands.

It wasn't enough. Not even close.

Free stuff. It always brings the crowds.

The upside is that Darkpaw have largely perfected the onboarding process for new and returning players, at least to the extent it's possible to speed the lengthy process to a satisfactory conclusion.

Once upon a time  you were left entirely on your own when a new expansion arrived to invalidate every piece of equipment you owned. Then they moved to leaving hand-outs lying around in boxes without telling anyone where they were or what was in them, expecting players to figure it out for themselves.

Now, you get a an actual quest as soon as you become eligible for an upgrade and there's a quest-giver waiting right next to the box to talk you  through the entire process. This year, you barely even need to look in the box! The guy gives you a crate that unpacks straight into your inventory, giving you a full set of armor for your class and every piece has the correct Adornments already installed!

I optimistically opened that crate hoping for the best and it filled every available slot in my half-a-bag and carried on into Overflow. When I put the armor on, all my old gear popped off, right into the vacant bag slots, leaving me back where I'd started. So much for trying to do it the lazy way.

I gave up any idea of adventuring and ported back to Freeport, where I spent the whole of  yesterday evening working on a proper clean-out. I went to two of my mansions to place every house item I could find, put a bunch of stuff up for sale on the broker, emptied all my mats, collection items and Lore and Legend parts into the hoppers outside my crafting hall and did a few other things as well.

All of that got me one empty bag. I could have worked with it - it was sixty-six slots - but I knew I could do better so this morning, when I came back from walking the dog, I settled down for a proper clearance session. I went through five of my six bags - several hundred items - sorting everything into three piles - Keep, Sell, Trash. Then I sub-sorted the Keep pile into Bank Vault, Shared Bank, Guild Bank and so on. I have a lot of storage options.

I hung those lights, you know. The round ones. Not the lanterns.

That told me what to do with it all but before I could make any actual room I had to go check all the places I was planning to put things to make sure there was room. Of course there wasn't. So I had to sort those as well.

All that took a few hours and even when it was done I still only had two empty bags plus a few slots in the third. Everything that's left is either something I want to keep close at hand or a quest item of some kind.

Quest items are the real problem. My Berserker has a lot of them in his bags - likely more than a hundred - and hardly any of them mean anything to me. Or, presumably, to him. His Quest Journal is all but full and that's after I purged it of all repeatables and anything I hadn't actually started. I'm always very loathe to delete a quest where I've already made some progress, just in case it turns out to be needed for something later on.

It'd be easy to wipe the lot and start fresh but only this week I wrote a whole post about how useful it turned out to be to have a bunch of quests in my book from four expansions ago, so I don't see scorched earth as the best policy here. Experience tells me I tend to regret getting rid of stuff a lot more than I ever regret keeping it. That's a general principle of life, not only gaming.

Still, I know I ought to go through all those quest items, one by one, to find out what they're all for and whether I really need them. Developers in too many games I've played have not always been as diligent as they could have been about making quest items auto-delete themselves when they're no longer needed. That has gotten better but some of these go back many years, to when practice was often lax in that regard.

It wouldn't be difficult to check. The huge majority of quest items say exactly what quest they're whern you mouseover them. All I'd have to do would be cross-reference the information on the item with the quests in my Journal and the steps on the Wiki... Does that sound like a good time to anyone? 

I don't know. Maybe? I'd have to be in the mood...

Do you know who I am?

I'm not doing it now, anyway. I may only have a third of my Berserker's potential onboard storage capacity available but those are two big bags. Over a hundred and fifty slots ought to be enough, provided I clear as I go from now on.

Having leveled up and cleaned up I was finally ready to start adventuring after lunch. Well, after I sorted my new Mercenary out, that is. That's part of the process that could still do with some work. 

It's great that you get a new Merc as part of the Welcome to The Expansion quest (Not the actual quest name.) It's even better that he comes fully leveled up. It's weird you still have to dress him yourself, out of the box on the floor. How primitive!

Plus there's no specific Mercenary gear in there other than a whole bunch of Accolades. For the armor slots, Mercs can wear the same, free gear as player characters, only no-one tells you that. I nearly didn't think of it and I've done it a few times, now.

All of that and a few other things took me until mid-afternoon, at which point I was finally - finally! - ready to do some actual questing. And what did the devs have me doing, now I was all kitted out in my spiffy new gear with a new mount, merc and familiar and a bunch of special buffs? Swimming around the bay, grabbing leftover fishing floats, that's what. I could have done that in my skivvies!

There was some fighting, to be strictly fair to whoever came up with the quest. I fought some fish. Quite small fish. But feisty!

My characters routinely hob-nob with demi-gods and get called in as special consultants by the likes of Firiona Vie and the Duality but here I am, treading water, stabbing pike with a dagger so I can string up some fairy lights in the hope of getting a bunch of downtrodden orc vassals  to give me the time of day. (That's vassals of orcs, by the way, not vassals who happen to be of orcish descent.) I guess it's a living.

Anyway, I'm up and running at last. We'll see where it takes me.