Since I mentioned it yesterday, I suppose I ought to do something about it. Collecting all those freebies, I mean. There comes a time, though, when logging into multiple games you have no real intention of playing, to collect items you don't particularly want and are never likely to use, starts to feel a bit... crazy?
Not that any of that applies to the giveaways in EverQuest II, of course. They're all either practical or pretty and I'm sure I'll get some very good use out of each and every one of them. Definitely.
They come in two sizes - the one-size-fits-all Milestone Celebration Crate currently being handed out for free to every character under all payment plans and the deluxe Milestone Celebration Subscriber Crate that's reserved for paying customers only and which comes one per account.
I won't go through the contents in detail - there's a comprehensive breakdown on the official website complete with all items and applicable restrictions - but I will mention a couple of things.
The per-character crate is auto-gifted to each character as you log them in but the Subscriber crate has to be claimed. All the contents of the latter are Heirloom, though, so it doesn't matter much which character on the account grabs it. All the contents can be handed around as appropriate later.
The giveaway runs until September 23rd so you have a while. I'm not entirely sure I'd say it was worth logging in if you aren't subbed and aren't playing at the moment because the freebies for F2P are far from essential... although the Toyger vanity pet is very cute and probably does count as essential for cat-lovers.
The bow isn't particularly special and I don't care for the illusion much but there is an advisory to that last. I actually don't like illusions at all and have them switched off but I always forget that when the game gives me a new one, which is why I clicked this one on to take a screenshot and of course nothing happened... except something actually did.
I got smaller. A lot smaller. It seems that even with illusions toggled off, the Milestone Guardian Illusion shrinks you to the size you would be if you could see it. Since being really small is something of an obsession with some players, this might be a very welcome side-effect. I don't know if it's intended - I'd bet it isn't - so it might get nerfed but for now it's a handy way to shrink your character while keeping your original appearance.
As for the Subscriber pack, I would strongly recommend anyone who's paying for All Access at least logs in once to claim it. It's a good one.
There's a very nice set of fancy wings that also act as a flying mount. They come in a choice of light and dark but you can only have one or the other. The dark ones look a lot better in my opinion but I guess if your one of those people who have to make your character light up like a magnesium flare you might disagree.
There's a set of cosmetic armor which I didn't have the space to open (Oh, don't. Just...don't.) without shifting it through the shared bank to someone whose bags aren't completely full. There's also no illustration on the website, which seems odd. I might log back in and get a screenshot of it before I post this. [Edit - I did not.]
There are also some item unattuners, which people always seem to appreciate. I hardly ever use them but I think I'm in a minority there.
With considerable irony, the final item in the pack is a 66 slot bag. That would have solved my space issues - for about five minutes. I was very excited when I saw it because, as the name of this blog might suggest, inventory management is a bit of a thing of mine. Well, inventory, anyway. Managing it, not so much.
After the initial excitement faded I started to wonder whether 66 slots would actually be an upgrade to any of my six character inventory slots. EQII is insanely generous with storage space. I counted the available slots per character once and it goes well into four figures. Even character inventory, the stuff you lug around with you, easily passes five hundred slots.
I checked and the new bag does actually beat two of the six I have equipped, albeit one only by a couple of spaces. I have two 88 slot bags, a 72, another 66, a 64 and a bog-standard 48 slotter that is now going to go to someone else.
The new bag also doubles as an appearance item, a papoose with two "adorable" panda cubs peeping out. I don't really like those much. The pandas, that is. The bag itself is OK, especially the rolled-up umbrella down the side. It's a moot point anyway because you can either have your backpack showing or your back item, not both, and I vastly prefer those new wings to the pack.
So much for the freebies that I wasn't going to describe in detail. At least that gave Lord of the Rings Online time to patch.
The giveaway there is not all that interesting for casuals like me because the big ticket item is a new instance tuned for max level players. There's also a vanity pet and a "Portrait Frame", which is a thing I had no idea existed in LotRO. I associate those almost entirely with Eastern F2Ps. You need to use a code in game to claim all of these and the offer ends on 25 September.
Proving yet again that procrastination always pays off and a lot more interesting for occasional players is the news that the excellent mini-expansion from a while back, Before The Shadow, is now free to all. You don't have to do anything for that one. It's just there for everyone automatically.
If you don't remember it, it's the one that added two large, new starter zones, which was why I bought it when it came out. I never even got to the end of the first zone so I could have waited until it went free, as it was always, inevitably, going to do. That'll teach me.
There is, however, a free mount to go with that offer. Two actually, one for freeloaders and a second for paying customers, although free players can take the VIP mount token and stash it for the day much wished for by Standing Stone when they decide to subscribe.
Again, you have to apply a code in game for that one, something I am going to go and do right now... and it turns out the Azure Steed is the grown-up version of the Azure Pony I already have. Not sure if that's a hobbit thing. It's account-bound anyway so it can be handed on to someone who needs it.
Of course, what I really need in LotRO is that 66 slot bag...
The final update and login for me this morning was DCUO, where the freebie on offer was a crappy set of dragon horns. Oh, sorry... "Archdragon Horns". That makes all the difference. I imagine someone is going to get all excited by the chance to have a couple of ugly protuberances grow out of their head but it won't be me. Still claimed them, though.
There are some much nicer cosmetics in the same free offer but for those you actually have to play the game a bit and I wasn't up for that today. I have parked in the relevant instance so the wings and baby dragon pets may one day be mine. The stupid horns are only available until 9 September but the good stuff stays on the instance vendor indefinitely, so no rush.
The giveaways in LotRO and DCUO are part of Daybreak's Year of the Dragon, a celebration of fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons, which does seem a tad random until you remember they also publish and, I think, own Dungeons & Dragons Online through SSG, who run both that and LotRO... or something. Who knows any more?
It seemed a bit odd I hadn't heard about similar giveaways in the EverQuest titles too but it turns out that's because I hadn't been paying close enough attention. I had to ask Gemini for the details, something I do quite often these days because it is quite often actually faster than just googling, believe it or not, and reasonably reliable so long as you check the sources. It seems I was only just in time.
The free gifts in both games are less than spectacular: a dragon statue for your house. They're available for no cost in the cash shop. You just have to log in and "buy" them but you'd better get on with it because both offers end tomorrow. If you don't have time for that, never fear! It seems there will be something else for free in both games for September.
I logged back into EQII to pick up my dragon statue because I spend a lot of time in various houses there and I'm sure it will fit in somewhere. I long ago gave up trying to maintain my houses in EverQuest, though, and I don't propose to start again, so I passed on that one.
After all of that, I was pretty much done with logging into games to get free stuff. I'm sure there are lots more games on my hard drive that would like to shower me with gifts if I'd only log in but there's only so many hours in the day and I've used up all of those I'm willing to spend on it right now.
It's Friday! Why not make it Log Back In To Games You Haven't Played For A While Day? Might need a catchier title...
Seriously, though. So many games, right? Hard to keep up. Just this week I saw posts or press releases about updates or content drops or free giveaways in DCUO, Lord of the Rings Online, AdventureQuest 3D, EverQuest II, Once Human, Palworld, Blade and Soul, Bless Unleashed...
Hang on a mo... what was that last one? Bless Unleashed? Is that still going? Didn't it sunset like... years ago?
No, actually. It did not. Bless did. Which was a different game. Kind of.
Then Bless Unleashed went through some crypto/NFT nonsense that meant anyone who ever cared about it even a tiny bit wrote it off as might-as-well-be-dead, just like Riders of Icarus and some other games I can't even remember that went down the same blind alley.
But then crypto crashed and NFTs turned into just one of those things like deely-boppers and shag-pile carpets that turn up on "Weren't Your Parents' Generation Crazy? shows a couple of decades down the line and the games that jumped that bandwagon jumped right off again pretty darn smartly and carried on rolling along as though none of that ever happened.
As I may have mentioned before (Just kidding. I know I mention it all the time.) Bless Unleashed is still in the top row of my Most Played Games on Steam. It is just hanging on now at #6 , having been pushed out of the top five earlier this year when I was on a run with Nightingale (Oh, hey, another game I need to patch up...) but Steam defaults to six games per row so BU hasn't technically "dropped" yet, although Once Human is breathing down it's neck so its only a matter of time.
Okay, that was a dumb thing to say. It's a list ordered by hours played so what else could it be a matter of?
Anyways up (Is there such a thing as regional appropriation?) the point is, I somehow managed to play eighty-one hours of Bless Unleashed. I think there may be some padding in there, where I left it running while I was doing something else once or twice, but it's true I did play it a lot for a while. And enjoyed it.
No, really. I swear!
I must have because I managed to get to level 29 when the cap was 45 although now I think it might be as high as 100. And now, as of last night, I'm level 30!
Oh, yes. I did it! I not only logged in, I played! Not for long but that eighty-one hours is noweighty-one and a half. So I played for half an hour. Could just have said that. No need to be so dramatic.
Ah, but there was a bit more too it than that. Back when all that crypto crap was happening I was running short of disk space and searching for things I could do without. It seemed plain I wasn't going to play Bless Unleashed again, not now it had turned to the dark side, so I uninstalled it and moved on.
Except that I'd been playing it on Steam and Steam doesn't like you to get rid of anything. Even though I didn't have the client on my hard drive any more, I still kept getting the notices about updates. And the game still sat there in my list, looking at me and smiling enigmatically, once in a while.
For a long time all that was no more than a curiosity. I always glance at the news items that scroll past on the top of the screen when I enter The Library and I had noticed that Bless Unleashed had mostly stopped getting what you might call real updates, just server restarts and the occasional cash shop deal. I figured the crypto swerve had dealt the death blow and now the game was just waiting to expire.
Then yesterday I happened to see this. To save you the click, it's The Battle for the Western Prairies: Rise of the Harpy Queen. An actual event, albeit one that piggy-backs off an existing fight.
"The Western Prairies are in grave danger! The Harpy Queen has unleashed her minions in a massive invasion, attacking farms, capturing villagers, and disrupting trade routes. Driven by an insatiable thirst for power, she poses a significant threat to our lands.
The people cry out for help, and we must answer their call. Brave adventurers, it’s time to take up arms against the Harpy Queen's tyranny. Unite with fellow heroes, devise strategies to counter her abilities, and prepare for an epic battle that will determine the fate of the Western Prairies."
Doesn't that sound dramatic? I believe the Harpy Queen is a world boss that, back when I was playing, tended not to get beaten very often. As I read it, this is an attempt to rectify that, a one-off, live affair to which all are invited, although whether it's being organized by players or devs is unclear:
"Event Date: August 31, 2024
EU: 7:00 PM to 8:00PM CEST (UTC+2)
NA: 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM PDT (UTC-7)
Location: Navarra's Western Prairie (Harpy Queen's Nest)"
I guess it's going to be a big one because
"Victory will require skill, teamwork, and a commitment to protect our
home. Together, we can end the Harpy Queen's reign of terror. Who among
you will rise to become the heroes of the Western Prairies?"
Well, yes indeed. Who? You may well ask. As a well-known Google search term might put it, does anyone still play Bless Unleashed?
Thanks to the ever-popular Steam Charts (Popular with me, at least, for the actual, factual, undisputed population data they provide.) I can confirm that, yes they do. Not as many as a year ago, sure, but still an average concurrency somewhere around five hundred, which may not sound like a lot but is plenty better than many MMORPGs and probably enough to keep the servers up in maintenance mode for a while longer.
Being a big fan of one-time, be there or miss out, live events in MMORPGs, I thought I might at least take a look. I mean, I'm probably going to forget to log in and even if I remember I'm probably not going to be able to find the spot where it all happens and even if I somehow manage to get there on time I'm sure there won't be anything a lowly level 30 will be able to do, especially one being played by someone who can't even remember which button does what.
Still, I thought I might make the effort. That's actually about as convenient a time as I could ask for - six in the evening on a Saturday. It'd be rude not to at least think about it. I'll see what I can do.
So there we go. Another game no-one cares about and that even I don't pretend to be playing any more that I've posted about and might post about again, although if we're realistic, probably won't. As Wilhelm so cogently inquired yesterday, who even reads this stuff?
OK, it was Dog Day Morning for me but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it. And anyway, it was actually last night when I spotted that AdventureQuest 3D was celebrating something called Dog Day.
My reaction to the news was mixed. I was happy to find out there was such a thing as Dog Day but also uncomfortably aware I was going to have to do something about it. I mean, I covered Cat Day when they ran an event for that. Beryl would never forgive me if I did any less for dogs.
The problem is, I don't really play AQ3D. I haven't even been logging in to open the free daily loot chests for weeks. I was saving up the cash shop currency you get for doing that so I could buy something nice for the house I never visit but then I spent it all on my spiffy new catsuit (Which looks great, by the way.) and that pretty much killed my motivation to carry on.
Since I'd spent almost all my magic money, and assuming the dog event was likely to run along very similar lines to the one for cats, I didn't think there'd be much chance of my getting a full set of dog cosplay gear but I thought maybe there'd be something I could afford with whatever change I had left from last time. Anyway, I knew I had to write about the damn thing so after we got back from walking Beryl and feeding the crows this morning, I logged into the game to see what my options might be.
Better than I expected, as it turned out.
I know it's unlikely anyone who's going to read this will be thinking of doing the event so there's no point going into a whole lot of detail about how the event works. It is indeed basically the same as the cat one, as expected, anyway.
There's a boss fight which no-one ever seems to be doing when I log in. The new dog boss stands right next to the old cat boss because both events are running simultaneously. I was half hoping the Vicious Cat and the Big Dog (Those are their boss names. Scaary!) would start scrapping with each other but no such luck.
There's a selection of dog-themed onesies, hoods and tails on both the pet vendor and on Not Alma, who has now added Dog? to her species subscript alongside Cat? just to make her even weirder than usual. All of those were well out of my price range considering that, after my cataclysmic spending spree I only had just over a hundred Dragon Crystals left.
Luckily, before logging in, I had taken the trouble to read the notes for the event and I remembered seeing something about house items. A flip through the various tabs showed me several of those, including a kennel, a feeding bowl and several dogs, all dozing in convincingly doglike poses.
None of them were very expensive but they were on sale for a variety of currencies, some of which I had, some I didn't. I had the right ones for the dog sleeping on her back and for a feeding bowl so I bought those. I also checked the cat tab and bought a sleeping black cat as well. If my new dog is going to be home alone, she's going to want someone to play with and I am very much Team Cat and Dog these days..
On that note, one new addition that came with dog day is a voting booth where you can vote for your preferred pet - Dog or Cat. The rubric explains, somewhat unecessarily I felt, that the vote is confidential and all in fun. I'm not sure how it could have been otherwise, although I suppose some kind of flag could have appeared over your head as you cast your vote. It's happened before. Remember Evon vs Kiel?
I dithered for a while over which way to vote. Until we got Beryl I wouldn't have given it a second's thought. I was Team Cat for more than sixty years. Now, though... In the end I opted not to vote at all, which makes something of a mockery of the Just For Fun theory. I might be taking all of this a little too seriously but then I get like that with votes in video games. Real life voting is so much more straightforward.
After that, I thought about logging out. I'd done my duty to dogdom and I had enough for the post. I had a feeling there was more, though, so I looked around and found Aria the Pet Shop owner had a quest marker up.
Again, to save time I won't go through the details. The important part is that there's a quest to get a pet dog called Klaus. Pretty sure he's a German Shepherd. The quest is a six-parter, which honestly is really short for this game. Aria has another non-event quest to get a dog called Fluffy that has thirty-five stages (!)
Klaus's quest looks easy as well as short so I'm hoping to find time to finish it. It would have been nice to have done it in time for this post but we can't always get what we want.
Other than that, I think I'm probably done with both cats and dogs in AQ3D for now. It's a very time-consuming game and I'm trying not to get sucked into any of its many time-sinks. On the other hand, there is also a bonus XP event going on right now as well and I did ding doing quests for Aria this morning...
I seem to have fallen seriously off the EverQuest II wagon of late. Back in the winter and early spring I was logging in several times a week. Now I'm barely managing to remember to pick up my monthly All Access stipend of 500 DBC. I even found myself wondering this morning if it was really worth renewing my annual All Access subscription when it falls due in a few weeks.
The Summer Jubilee, a sequence of holiday events that ties Tinkerfest, Scorched Skies and Oceansfull into one coherent package, has been running for months but I think I managed one session in Oceansfull and that was about all. And now summer's almost over, it's time for the next big ticket item: Game Update 126, otherwise known as The Immeasurable Menagerie.
It was only when I saw a couple of posts about it on MMO Bomb and MassivelyOP that I realised the update had already gone live. Truth be told, I hadn't thought much about it since it was announced because the GUs are generally focused on at-cap content and for the first time in years I don't have a single max level character.
Another game you might have heard of also added some new content this week. The War Within is the latest expansion for World of Warcraft (Sorry, I'm sounding like an AI now. I'll have to start being more sarcastic.) and from what I'm reading it seems like it's going down pretty well so far. Not that you'd necessarily know it from what Blizzard are saying about their own game.
As many have pointed out, this means the people who paid for the head start got to go hog wild, while everyone coming along behind gets to pay for their exuberance. It also means leveling alts will be slower and almost certainly that newer, less well-geared characters will be at a significant disadvantage.
This feels like a faint echo of what happened in EQII when the most recent expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, dropped late last year. For quite a while, EQII players have become used to expansions that raise the level cap coming with hugely accelerated xp rewards for questing. So huge that it had become the norm for characters to hit the new cap long before reaching the end of the expansion's main questline.
BoZ changed all that. Quest xp reverted back to something not dissimilar to how it was a decade or more ago, only this time there was no alternative leveling strategy. In the good old days, anyone who didn't much fancy trudging through the new content as an under-leveled peon could go back to earlier expansions and solo some dungeons to get much faster xp.
That, apparently, was deemed to be Not Playing The Game The Right Way and a stop was put to it. Annoyingly paternalistic though that was, the effect was at least mitigated by the rapid ramping up of xp in the new expansions, so I for one was happy enough to accept the trade.
Now, however, we are left with the most unsatisfactory of compromises, where xp in new content has been scythed to the ground without any other options being offered as a sop to hurt feelings. Worse, we're being told it's all for our own good, an explanation that always goes down well with the disgruntled masses.
I find it interesting that the enhanced leveling speed in new EQII expansions began and flourished while Holly "Windstalker" Longdale was in overall control and that it's happening again, albeit to a lesser degree, now she's gotten her hands on WoW. Meanwhile, back in Norrath, almost as soon as she was out of the door (Okay, not quite that quickly.) things changed back to how they'd been before she was calling the shots. Probably just a co-incidence, right?
If that comes across a criticism of Holly, it's not. I strongly preferred the fast xp we were getting. I would much rather go through the new content with my extra levels and new spells and abilities than without.
In fact, given that questing in the latest expansion is now the only way to gain enough xp to get those last five levels, I'd as soon we all started at the new level cap because the whole concept of leveling becomes meaningless when you have no real choice other than to follow a linear storyline to do it. In the old days, when you could do any number of things and see the xp rolling in, leveling could be fun in and of itself. Now it's just a fairly obvious set of weights attached to your boots to make you go slower.
At least, that's the effect it's had on me. It's made me go so much slower that after eight months I've still only managed to do three and a half of the five levels that came with the expansion. It's looking very unlikely that I'll be level 130 when the next expansion arrives in a couple of months and I have pretty much decided not even to try. I'll just use the level boost that comes with the expansion, always assuming there is one.
That's why I wasn't all that excited about the new update. I figured it would probably be too tough for me, although now I come to think of it the last one was OK, so maybe I didn't really think that through. Either way, I wasn't planning on making the effort to log in for the update until I noticed it also included this year's Expansion Prelude.
Now, unless there's been another big change, you can generally assume the pre-expansion events are going to be very easy. No tough bosses, no long, complicated quest chains, nothing to get anyone over-excited, at least not in a bad way.
For about as long as I can remember these events have either been a carousel of public quests and world boss fights in which the rewards shower down like rain as the strong carry the weak or a short questline with some simple fights, followed by two months of optional grinding for currency to spend on trivia. This year's is the latter.
But it's fun! At least, the questline and the instances are. I did the whole thing this morning. It took me maybe a couple of hours, probably less. I wasn't timing it.
It all kicks off in Butcherblock for no reason that's ever explained. A new bunch of do-gooders and busybodies called Open Hand are recruiting adventurers to Busy Their Bodies and Do Good and they're doing it in such a ridiculously unconvincing fashion I initially thought it had to be some kind of scam and they were going to turn out to be the baddies.
I don't think that any more. Now I just think someone at Darkpaw, having written one too many of these things, is subtly taking the piss out of the whole concept. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. It's probably me that's danced this dance one time too many.
Whatever, the fighting is very satisfying because as usual, even though the instances scale to your level, everything dies in one hit. I'm aware that isn't everyone's idea of fun, let alone satisfaction (Hi, Blizzard!) but it absolutely is mine. I enjoy questing so much more when any combat is trivial. If the quest dialog is entertaining and the rewards are decent, who needs "good" fights?
There are also some intriguing hints towards the new expansion, although it's quite hard to see how any of what happens could have much to do with it. There are two apparently unrelated storylines, one involving some dark elves giving the Krulkiel bugbears magic they shouldn't have, the other featuring a crazed gnome (Is there any other kind?) who seems to believe Freeport dictator Overlord Lucan d'Lere stole his mysterious invention for unknown but almost certainly nefarious reasons.
The whole thing left me none the wiser as to where we might be going in the next expansion but it certainly did pique my curiosity, so job well done, I'd say.
For once, I'm not going to make any bold claims about how I'm going to be logging in more and doing this nice, new content over and over. I've made promises like that far too often and I never keep any of them. In this case, it's highly unlikely I'll bother to grind out any of the crafting quests
for the currency the vendor takes if only because, having looked through
what's for sale, I don't really want any of it.
I might take a look at the new update after all, though. I imagine that will require some proper fighting in which I have to pay attention so I'll need to be in the mood but it could happen.
And if anyone from Darkpaw reads this, they'll probably be pleased to hear that I have decided to renew my annual All Access sub after all. I was always going to get the expansion and, thinking about it, it hardly seems worth interrupting the process for such a short payment holiday.
Add to that, as today has proved yet again, whenever I remember to log in, I always have a good time and there really doesn't seem to be any reason not go on as always have. If nothing else, I have to find out what Lucan is up to this time!
And so we come to the first of several anomalous characters we'll be meeting on
this journey. Up to now, I've had very clear recollections of when and why I
made each character and a fairly good idea what happened to them afterwards.
Wonki, not so much.
I do remember how she got her name and it's quite embarassing. Wonki's full
name is Wonki Donki. Back around the turn of the millennium,
Ant and Dec were just entering their imperial phase as the
ruling elite of British light entertainment television, a phase that continues
a quarter of a century later and shows no sign of ever ending.
They had a show, I believe on Saturday mornings, about which I now remember
absolutely nothing except that the kids watched it and it had a segment called
Wonky Donkey. Mrs Bhagpuss and I found this highly amusing (The name,
not the show.), which is why I pinched it for my character.
Fortunately, since, as I mentioned before, at that time you needed to reach
Level 20 before you could give your character a surname, when that time came I
had come to my senses and realised that running around Norrath with a big sign
over my head that effectively proclaimed "I'm an Ant and Dec Fan"
would be a very bad idea so Wonki never got her second name.
That much I remember. Here are some things I don't:
Why I thought it would be a good idea to make a rogue.
How she managed to get to Level 36.
Why she's in The Abysmal Sea, a zone double her level.
Why she's holding two mugs instead of weapons.
As I write this, a vague memory of the answers to the last two questions comes
back to me but as to the first two...
I have never, ever gotten on with the Rogue/Thief class in any game. If I'm
soloing, those are the classes that tend to be poor at it. If I'm grouping, I
find having to get into a specific position behind or flanking the mob before
being able to use half my skills intensely irritating. I also don't
much like stealth or pickpocketing or anything at all to do with traps...
So why did I make a Rogue in EverQuest in 2000, when it was literally
the most difficult class in the game to solo and was also next to useless in
groups? Rogues back then were pretty much only ever invited into groups for
specific dungeons that had locked doors and there were almost none of
those.
Honestly, I have no idea why I made a Rogue. I think she's the only one I ever
made in EQ. I remember some desultory attempts to solo her and a few
duos with Mrs Bhagpuss that didn't go well. We had very different playstyles
for the first two or three years and it wasn't really until after we came back
to EQ after a nearly a year in Dark Age of Camelot that we began to duo
and join groups together.
By about 2002 we were in a guild together and a cross-guild chat channel, both
of which did a great deal of group content. Most people in both had multiple
characters of different levels and I did take Wonki out a few times but she
was way down my list of choices. I find it hard even to imagine how she ever
got into the mid-30s.
[Edit: reading this back after posting, I suddenly remembered it happened when Mercenaries got added to the game. Now Wonki had a tank in her pocket and could use her roguely skills without needing a group. I played her for a few sessions just for the novelty value of actually being able to backstab things at last. It got boring quite quickly though, so I stopped playing her again not long after.)
As for why she's in Abysmal Sea, dual-wielding two mugs instead of daggers,
that'll be be because there's a major trading center there, which used to be a key
place to go to buy spells among other things. As for the mugs, those would be
the +15 charisma Opal Encrusted Steins everyone used to use when they bought
and sold stuff to NPCs back then.
For a long time, EverQuest had a complex system of open and hidden factions
that affected all kinds of things, one of which being vendor prices. I became
fascinated by it at one point, to the extent of visiting every NPC in
East and West Commonlands with the same character, checking how much
they'd give me for the same items. I remember writing it all down in a
notebook to see if I could work out why apparently identical shopkeepers were
charging such different amounts. I never really got to the bottom of it. Higher Charisma always got you better prices, though.
One thing Rogues were good for was shopping. All NPCs would trade with
you if you were classed as Neutral and for some reason they treated a Rogue
who opened a shop interface from behind, while sneaking, as Neutral, even if
they normally hated that class or race or faction. Of course, they also had to
be able to See Invisible or they wouldn't know you were there at all, although if you
were careful you could sneak behind, then drop stealth and they'd still be
fooled.
Or at least that's how I remember it. I may well have gotten some of that
wrong. It was a long time ago and changes made in later years pretty much made
that kind of shenanigans pointless. There were so many easily accessible
trading hubs like Plane of Knowledge, where everyone was automatically
neutral, I rarely bothered going anywhere else to buy or sell.
And yet, despite all of the negatives, I still think quite fondly of Wonki.
Mostly, somewhat ironically, because of her name, which I still find funny,
even though it's now associated with something even more excruciatingly
embarassing than Ant and Dec's silly game. Not so fondly I'd ever play her
again, of course, but it was fun to be reminded of her and her antics once more.
Even though I work in a bookshop I almost never buy new books. Okay,
sometimes. I did buy
the new Rainbow Rowell last week but only because it was signed and she has such a nice signature. And
I didn't pay actual money for it. Just magic money I got for free because I have
some of that.
In fact, thinking about it, I doubt I've spent real, out of my pocket, in cash
or by card, out of my bank account money on a book for a decade. Maybe two
decades. And even before I worked in a bookshop I very, very rarely went into
one and if I did even more rarely came out with a book.
All my life, most of my book-buying has been done on the cheap or for free.
I've tended to avoid used book stores, or second-hand bookshops as they were
called when I was growing up, almost as much as shops selling new books
because the owners are often unpredictable and the prices wildly inflated.
I've always preferred to get my books from charity shops (Thrift stores for
the American reader.) or car boot sales (Yard sales I guess is the US
equivalent although it's not quite the same thing.) Remaindered bookstores
used to be an option, too, but you don't see those so much any more.
On the other hand, quite a few churches seem to have set aside an area where
books donated by parishioners are sold for very small sums, so that's a
relatively new source for me. Go in for the architecture, come out with a
book. Churches don't have to be all about God. Or about God at all,
apparently.
Those are all good sources of cheap books but why pay even that much when you
could pay nothing at all? I'm drowning in free books at work but even if I
wasn't a surprising number of the old, red telephone boxes have been
re-purposed into repositories for given-away books looking to be re-homed.
You're supposed to leave a book and take one although I don't think anyone's
keeping track.
Even before I worked in the trade and when phone boxes still had phones in them,
I used to get books for nothing. It's surprisingly easy to do. In the 'eighties,
a friend of mine took over the editing of a small semi-pro comiczine. Either it
already had a column reviewing Sci Fi and Fantasy books or he instituted one, I
can't remember which, but he started getting review copies from publishers and
pretty soon he had far more than he could cope with so he farmed them out to
anyone willing to write reviews. If you contact publishers even now and tell
them you write for some website or book blog they'll most likely send you stuff.
They seem almost desperate to give the things away, sometimes.
I read a lot of books that way, books I would never have read otherwise and
that's the big benefit of buying books the way I do. If you buy new you'll
most likely get the latest by authors you like or those who've been
recommended to you, either by friends or reviewers or - if they're doing their
job properly - booksellers in the stores where you shop.
You can browse, of course, but because so very, very many books are published,
even when they're still in print, outside of the obvious, you'll be lucky to
run into a copy of any particular one on the shelves of your local bookstore
Even in a big bookshop the range is limited to What's New, What Still Sells
and Classics. Books are an iceberg. Most of them are invisible, forgotten, out
of print, gone.
Anyone who's hung around here for a while will likely know I choose chance
over certainty. I prefer random drops in games to points systems where you
save up and buy what you want. By and large, I'm less bothered about missing
out on things I know I'd enjoy than I am about missing out on things I don't
know about.
If you look up to the right, you'll see the Inventory Full Mission Statement,
which I'll wager many regular readers have never noticed. After all, it's
barely readable in lilac on deep seagreen blue because I also cherish
obfuscation.
I came up with it all the way back in 2011, when I named the blog
Inventory Full and it sums up what I believe to be the Explorer's raison
d'etre: Opening boxes, looking inside. I meant it almost literally back
then but over the years it's expanded to become a mantra.
It's why this blog has come to focus more on endless First Impressions of games
I'll never stick with and long reviews of demos for games I'll never play in
full. It's why the music posts are scattershot collections of apparently
unrelated genres and artists. It's why so many posts start out seeming to be
about one thing then end up being about something else entirely.
This is one of those posts. It starts off looking like it's going to be about
books then it turns towards blogging before finally heading to where it was
always meant to end up: Marilyn Monroe, her dog and
Chappell Roan.
Marilyn Monroe is eternal. I was four years old when she died and by the time
I was at college she'd been dead for almost twenty years but she was still on
my wall along with Che Guevara and Humphrey Bogart, who were
dead as well. Forty more years and I don't know if students still put up
posters of Che and Bogie but I doubt it. Marilyn, though, shines ever on.
Because she's never far from my mind, when I saw a book in a charity shop last
week with the entrancing title "The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe" I bought it immediately. The dog, who is real, was called Maf as shorthand
for Mafia Honey, which is what Marilyn named him after
Frank Sinatra gave him to her and you may read into that what you will.
I recommend the book, which is still
in print. The author is Andrew O'Hagan and
here's an interview
he gave about it to The Paris Review in in 2011 which I also
recommend. It's a lot shorter so there's no excuse for skipping it.
At this point you might imagine I would be about to review the book but I'm
not. I will say it's funny, smart and over-written to the point of hilarity. I
very much enjoyed it for what it is but even more for what it told me.
The author very clearly did a lot of research, something I often find
off-putting but which, in this case, I found fascinating, Maf, like all dogs,
reads minds and therefore knows all that everyone he's spent time with knows,
meaning the book is stuffed full as a sausage with quotes, anecdotes and
facts, many of which I did not already know.
Of all the new stories, the most fascinating to me was the tale of the
Monroe Six. These were half a dozen adolescents in New York in the mid
'fifties, who took to following Marilyn everywhere she went. Rather than
calling the police or going to the courts for a restraining order, Marilyn,
perceiving they were different from the ordinary order of celebrity seeker,
welcomed their attention.
At the time, Marilyn was working on her stagecraft and also attending numerous
celebrity events that had her traveling about the city, providing the Six with
numerous opportunities to meet her. According to
an excellent post
at The Marilyn Report, referencing another piece in the French edition
of Vanity Fair (Issue #105
if you want the original. In French, naturally.) she "called them by their first names whenever she met them, asked about their
lives, and always agreed to pose with them".
Not only was she gracious, she was unguarded to a degree that's hard to
imagine now. Marilyn already knew from experience how grasping and greedy for
attention fans could be and yet she not only made time to chat to the six
teenagers and pose with them for pictures, she even "invited them upstairs for a soda in the apartment she had just rented with
her new boyfriend, the novelist Arthur Miller."
If you need any proof that the world was very different then, there it is. I
was struck most forcibly by the way things have changed since then by reports
I was seeing on my news feeds at the same time I was reading about the Monroe
Six concerning some things this summer's blow-up star, Chappel Roan, was
saying onTik Tok
about "creepy behavior" by so-called fans.
It's worth reading - or better yet listening to - Chappell's rant in full.
It's not even a rant. It's a considered, thoughtful, argument. She is clearly
both right in calling out the kind of intrusive behavior she's concerned about
and justified in highlighting the extent to which it has become - or at least
is becoming - normalised.
Whether she'll be able to hold back that tide is another question. It'd be
nice to think people would listen and maybe re-assess their attitude but then
if they could do that they'd probably not be a problem in the first
place.
Chappel later
expanded on her reasoning, saying "I want to love my life, be outside, giggle with my friends, go to the movie
theater, feel safe, and do all the things every single person deserves to
do."
It's hard to argue that's not a valid ambition. The chances of her being able
to achieve it in a world where millions of people know her name and her face
seem slim but I hope she can.
Marilyn Monroe in 1955 was both more famous than Chappell Roan and more
recognizeable. It's quite amazing she was able to go about with such freedom
even then although it's probably fair to say that New Yorkers might have been
too cool to freak over a movie star.
One advantage she had was that everyone who knew her knew her from how she
appeared on film. When she would go out and about she'd wear a headscarf to
cover her famous blonde hair and apparently that way she could walk right on
by without being spotted.
Marilyn was finessing the rift between public and private to her advantage.
Chappell Roan only wishes she could: "When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a
work event, when I’m doing press…I am at work. Any other circumstance, I am
not in work mode. I am clocked out." She looks as different - more different - in her regular make-up and
clothes from her stage persona than Marilyn did in her headscarf but it's not
helping.
If it was the 1950s, Chappell could walk down your street and you'd never know
it. But it isn't the 1950s. Her off-stage look is as well-documented as her
on. She's in her street clothes in the videos she's made saying the things
she's said. If you saw her, you'd know her.
Fame isn't a light you can switch on and off but then neither is recognizing a
famous person in the street a license to behave like an ass, let alone like a
sex-criminal. The Monroe Six figured that out and they were just fans in their
teens. So should anyone else who isn't a sociopath.
*** Some Notes On AI Used In This Post ***
The only AI here is the image at the head of the post. It was produced at
NightCafe using Starlight XL. The prompt was "Marilyn Monroe's (small, white, fluffy dog 1.5), Mafia Honey, with Marilyn
beside a swimming pool. (1950s line drawing 1.5)". All sliders were pushed right back to try and maximize adherence to the
prompt. The numbers in brackets are supposed to give added importance to those
elements although I may not have parsed that part properly.
Having obtained the result I wanted after several less than successful
attempts with other image genearators and settings, I then ran it through the
upscaler at NightCafe to increase the resolution. The original image had a
second, weird-looking dog on the tiles behind Marilyn so, before I upscaled
it, I used NightCafe's Selective Edit function to remove it.
I was under the impression that all the upscaler did was enhance the
definition but apparently it also makes improvements of its own choosing
because it put the second dog back, only this time much better rendered and
looking like an actual dog. Still, I didn't want Marilyn to have two Mafs so I
downloaded the upscaled image and took it to SnapEdit, where I removed
the excess canine. Image enhancement there also uses AI, by the way, so this
is one AI correcting another AI's mistakes.
While I was looking at the enlarged image there, I realised Marilyn had grown
an extra knee. It's easy to miss these things. I used the AI image remover to
clean that up and then I noticed another flesh-toned patch behind her actual
knee. That could have been her hand - it would have been a natural position
for it to be in - only it might have meant her arm was a bit longer than you'd
expect so for safety's sake I took that out as well.
Two dogs and three knees.
With all that done, I was reasonably happy with the outcome. It's not really a
1950s line drawing as I imagined it, more like a magazine illustration, but
that's close enough. The woman doesn't look exactly like Marilyn either but I'm
pretty sure if you asked ten people who it was supposed to be, eight or nine of
them would say Marilyn Monroe.
At this point you might well be wondering why I bothered with AI at all.
Couldn't I just have used an actual photograph of Marilyn and/or her dog?
There are enough of them online after all. The reason for that is a slight
nervousness over copyright. I usually don't worry about it because the
kind of images I tend to use are mostly of things or people who I wouldn't
expect to draw much attention or for the owners to be much interested if they
knew.
Photos of Marilyn Monroe are a different prospect altogether, though. People
get very touchy about that sort of thing. I did at one point have a couple of
photos taken from the session shown in the YouTube video but I took them out
for that reason and put the video in instead because as I understand it,
Google have arrangements in place to cover copyright issues on YouTube,
provided all of their protocols are followed correctly. Since I use Blogger's
internal Add Video From YouTube function I think I should be good there. They
are both owned by Google after all.
The advantage of using an AI image is that, as Wilhelm pointed out in a
reply
to my comment on his excellent
rant
about AI yesterday, (Hi, Wilhelm and congrats for making this far down the
post if you did! Perseverance rewarded!) is that under current law, at least
in the USA, AI images aren't copyrightable and in most jurisdictions the whole
legal position is utterly unclear and likely to remain so for a very long
time. At the very least, it's safer to use an AI image than to "borrow"
an existing one off the internet.
I would also say at this point that a good deal of the criticism about the
generic look and feel of AI images, something I've been guilty of endorsing
more than once, does tend to reflect a lack of interest in doing the necessary
work to improve those images and make them better. AI is just another creative
tool. You still have to do the real work.
I'm not saying the picture at the top is anything special but it is pretty
much what I was imagining when I thought of the idea and it's only good enough
for me to be reasonably satisfied with it because I spent half an hour working
on it. We are very much not yet at the "Press a button and get what you asked for" stage and maybe we never will be but to write the whole thing off as a
failure because of that is like throwing away your brushes because you can't
be bothered to mix the paint.
Nickolai was my final - and for a very short while most successful - attempt at making a truly capable and enjoyable solo character. This time I not only did my research, I was able to run the suggestions I found through the filter of three months' personal experience, most of which told me anyone who really wanted to solo was playing a Necro.
I mean, everyone knew that. Why it took me three months to come around to the idea is something I can't explain at this distance in time. I imagine I had my reasons and I imagine they were crazy.
What didn't seem to be such common knowledge was that there was one server you could play on that came with a permanent bonus to xp. I think it was 50% but it could even have been double that. In 2000 that was a huge advantage. Why would anyone even think of playing anywhere else?
I found out soon enough, after I re-rolled yet again, this time on the Test server. Yes, the xp was very obviously much better than on all the other servers I'd played on and since I'd gone there to solo it really didn't matter much that the population was very, very low. So what was the catch?
If the xp was so good - and Good XP was the driving motivation for just about every player not already at the cap - why was the population on Test so low? Two reasons, the main one being that most people just didn't believe their characters would be safe there. The first question prospective players always asked was "Are there wipes?" and even though the answer was "No", hardly anyone believed it.
As things turned out, they were right to be wary. But we'll get to that.
The other reason the population never really grew was that even those brave enough to roll there rarely stayed long. In 2000, EverQuest was in a frenzied and perpetual growth phase. The game was being changed and updated constantly amd the Test server was ground zero for development.
Developers were literally using the server as their test-bed for everything they wanted to try, meaning it was very common for there to be multiple updates in a single day. That would have been disruptive enough, especially given that some of them introduced bugs and glitches or broke content or systems but the real problem was that every update meant the server had to be taken offline, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours.
Never knowing when you'd have to log out at a moment's notice or how long it would be before you could get back in again was, to put it mildly, less than ideal in a game like EverQuest, where half a session might be taken up just by finding a hunting spot and setting up. Worse still, even if you managed to avoid being mid-fight when the server went down, meaning you didn't have to log back in at your bind spot with a corpse recovery as a welcome back gift, you could still find yourself with less xp than you used to have.
At the time, EQ saved character progress regularly but not continually. You used to see a little message in your text box every so often saying "Character Saved", showing your data had been banked. If the server went down after you'd just gained some decent xp but before the next save, you'd lose the lot.
There were workarounds. The server also saved your character every time certain details changed, one being how much money you had. When I was hunting I used to drop one copper piece on the ground every so often and epecially after anything significant had happened, in the hope doing so would force the server to save my progress. It worked, too... so long as I remembered to do it.
Dropping coin didn't do much to help when there were actual roll-backs though, and those weren't all that unusual either. All things considered, the bonus xp you got for playing on Test barely covered you for the xp you lost from playing on Test.
And yet I loved it there. It was perfect for a soloist. Hardly anything was ever camped. Nobody trained you. Everyone tended to be laid-back and philosophical because anyone who wasn't didn't last more than a few sessions. I'd probably have played there for years if it hadn't been for one thing... The Great Character Wipe Of 2000.
In 25 years, EQ's Test server has infamously only ever been wiped once and I was there when it happened. Okay I wasn't actually there. I was asleep because it happened in the middle of night, UK time. I didn't find out about it until the next day, when I tried to log in and discovered I didn't have a character any more.
The Wipe happened on June 20th 2000. Nickolai was probably in the low 20s by then. It was a devestating experience for me and a huge scandal for the game, not least when the wipe was later revealed to have been an unauthorised power move by an individual dev, related to internal politics at Sony Online Entertainment not, as was first claimed, a necessary act for the health of the game.
There was an outcry and recriminations and all kinds of hysteria until SOE caved and agreed to re-instate all the characters that had been wiped. I can't remember how long that took but it was weeks rather than days as I recall. By then, I'd already gone back to playing my Live characters and I wasn't willing to risk going back to Test.
I was far from alone in not trusting SOE to keep their promise never to wipe Test again. Fortunately, the outcry was such that there was also a one-time option to transfer your character to another server instead of going back to Test. Prior to the wipe, there had always been an absolute ban on any such transfers because of the perceived advantage the accelerated xp offered.
Fairness was a huge issue in EQ at the time and any hint of favoritism would be greeted with howls of rage. Even with the exceptional circumstances, the offer wasn't welcomed by everyone on Live. Years later, a scandal blew up in EQII over devs secretly granting transfers to Live from Test to their pals so a certain degree of cynicism may have been justified. I was playing on EQII Test in the middle of that shit-storm too.
Misgivings aside, transfers were offered and Nickolai grabbed one before someone thought better of it. I moved him to Lanys T`Vyl alongside Rachelsunday, who became his PA and gofer for a while since, as a necro, there were plenty of places he wasn't welcome. Someone else got the job later.
I carried on leveling Nickolai for a while. I remember spending some time in North Karana (Most of my characters did, eventually.) but beyond that my memory fails me. I don't quite know how he eventually made it all the way to 48. I guess I must have played him some later on but I have no recollection of when or where.
I know I always wanted to play a Necromancer to high levels but somehow it just never happened. To that end, I even remade Nickolai a few years later, in 2006, as Nickolaivitch, who we'll meet very briefly when this series gets to #20, although given I remember almost nothing about him, that's going to be a short post.
Nickolai, though, I will always remember fondly as the character who introduced me to the joys of the Test server, where Mrs Bhagpuss and I later spent many happy hours, in both EQ and EQII. There's a very different feeling to playing on a server with such a small, dedicated community. It's a lot like living in a village, with all the positives and negatives that entails.
I'm happy to confirm that neither server has ever suffered another wipe. There was only ever that one and even though it was traumatic at the time, all these years later I'm quite glad I'm able to say I was there on the one occasion it happened. It was a like being present at a historical event.
And that's sort of the point of playing these games, isn't it? To have never-to-be-repeated adventures. I thought so back then, anyway. Now I think I'd rather settle for a quiet, comfortable, safe life.
It would be tempting to say that with Rachel we come to my first successful EverQuest character. By the time she arrived I'd been playing for more than two months but as yet I still hadn't even been able to settle on a class. I'd been running through the options, looking for someone who could solo not just effectively but enjoyably and so far I'd found nothing.
I'd been reading up on the subject though and by mid-January I'd found some suggestions that seemed like they might work. At the very least they sounded less delusional than dwarven clerics or troll shamans.
I'd just about boiled the choice down to two: Druid or Necromancer. Of the two, I preferred the Druid, which sounded like it ought to be a more flexible, versatile version of the Ranger I'd been playing. I'd liked the Ranger, as far as it went. It just hadn't gone far enough and certainly not fast enough.
The Druid got all the good nature spells the Ranger did plus plenty more, including a whole raft of the same kind of teleportation spells that had been so much of the appeal of the Wizard (Not that I'd leveled my Wizard far enough to do any porting - or even scribe any of the spells into her spellbook.).
Best of all, the Druid could self-heal and pretty decently, too. I read several guides that claimed the Druid could not only solo well but was also welcome in groups, not that I was doing any grouping at the time but I was at least becoming aware of the possibilities by then.
It sounded too good be true but for the first time it turned out the guides were right; the Druid was a damn good solo class - provided you weren't in too much of a hurry. I made Rachel on another new server, Luclin, one that ended up being my home for long periods over many years.
I named her after the same character as Rachelsunday, sticking with just the first namethis time. I thought I'd add the "Sunday" when she dinged 20 but by the time it happened I'd gotten so used to her just being Rachel I never bothered. In fact, I rarely gave any of my characters surnames in all the time I played.
At first, I found the Druid something of a disappointment. At low level, soloing a Druid didn't seem all that different from soloing a Ranger, except the Druid felt slightly weaker. Rachel would hit things with her scimitar while casting the few spells she had and generally everything carried on much as it had for the previous two months.
It all began to change when Rachel started to get her real DoTs. Druids get a couple of different lines, one of which involves summoning swarms of biting insects, the other setting things on fire. The two stacked with each other and at higher levels a few of the same line could also stack (That was changed but only much later.) meaning after a while you might be able to stack five or more DoTs on the same mob at the same time.
Once I had a couple of those, just about all I did was sit.
Root-dotting or root-rotting, whichever you wanted to call it, was the kind of thing that gave EverQuest a bad name with gamers who like to, y'know, do something while they play. Here's how it went:
Find a mob near a nice, open space where nothing much else passes by.
Cast Snare on the mob to make it run incredibly slowly.
Let it "chase" you, at a crawl, to your chosen safe spot.
Cast Root on it so it can't move at all.
Cast Damage over Time spells on the mob one after another so they stack.
Sit down to meditate and regain mana while the mob stands still as its health pool slowly drains away.
Stand up only as necessary to recast each of the spells as they wear off.
Watch the mob expire, collect the tiny blip of XP and the almost non-existent loot.
Go find another mob and do it all over again.
If I did that for an hour I'd make enough XP to see the bar had moved, which felt like I'd really achieved something. I know it sounds incredibly tedious now but back then it felt like I was actually making genuine progress for the first time.
Rachel was my first character to make it into the teens. She was also the first to take gear really seriously. I went so far as to ask another player to make her a full set of Reinforced Leather Armor, the first and quite possibly only time I ever contacted a stranger in EverQuest to ask them to make something for me.
In later MMORPGs I took up crafting in a moderate way, sometimes making all my own armor or spells. For the first few years in EQ, though, I didn't just avoid tradeskills myself, I rather disapproved of their being in the game at all.
In those days, I disapproved of a lot of things. I took certain aspects of the game far too seriously. I thought the whole point of being there was to have adventures and I didn't see sewing and baking as any part of that. Worse, as a Druid, I believed far too literally in the sanctity of nature, to the point of dropping groups if anyone insisted on killing animals - even if the animal had attacked them first. It would barely have been excusable behavior in an adolescent but I was in my early forties...
As we'll hear next time, by the late teens, I'd grown impatient with the speed at which Rachel was progressing. It seems a little ironic now, given that she must have been leveling at twice the speed of any character I'd played up to then, but after not much more than a month, I benched her for a Necro.
His is a separate story but I will say now his turn didn't last long, through no fault of his own. By the time Rise of Kunark, EQ's first expansion arrived on 14 April 2000, I was already back to playing Rachel, who'd scraped into the early twenties by then.
I bought the expansion on release and on the first day I took sail from the Oasis shore to Firiona Vie, the confusingly-named Elven city in the equally confusingly-named zone. I can remember nothing about the journey but I remember vividly, two dozen years later, what happened next.
I died and lost my corpse. That's what. Yes, again.
I went exploring in the jungle, trusting to my swift speed and ability to camouflage myself until I was effectively invisible to keep me safe, which they paramountly did not. It turned out the jungle beyond the city was infested with repulsive dark elf/spider hybrids called Drachnids, who not only see through invisibility but cast all manner of spells that can snare and root and dot...
Yes, I get the irony - now.
Several people tried to help me find my corpse. The zone was busy as you'd expect and with everything new, people were understanding and eager to help. Only no-one could find it. I carried on looking, died at least once more, then finally gave up. I never did find that corpse.
Surprisingly, I wasn't all that upset about it. I mean, I wasn't happy... But I didn't feel like rage-quitting or even giving up on Kunark. I felt more like I'd had an actual adventure for once. Okay, it didn't end well but not every adventure does.
What did end well was my Kunark experience with Rachel later on. After a break I came back and this time I stuck with it. With a bit of research, once others had blazed the trail and written up their notes, I managed to find the safe route into Lake of Ill Omen, which became my hunting grounds for several happy months.
It was in LOIO that I made my first EQ friend, a relationship that did not end well. I met a Paladin, played by a French Canadian, and somehow we got talking, I can't remember - or imagine - how or why. I imagine he asked me to group. I certainly wouldn't have initiated it.
We got on very well. We ended up hunting together regularly for a few weeks, until one day I happened to say something that made it clear I wasn't a girl in real life. Pretty much never heard from him again after that.
In fact, as I think back now, that Paladin wasn't the very first friend I made in the game, although he was my first hunting partner. For a while before that, I'd been having the occasional conversation with a teenager playing a character I don't think I ever saw.
I forget exactly how we came to speak to each other in the first place - I think he sent me a tell asking me some question about the class I was playing - but for a time he'd send me tells out of the blue just to chat about things he was doing, in game and out. It was a strange time, when the sheer novelty of being able to talk to strangers on the other side of the planet sometimes seemed like reason enough to do it. Didn't last. Probably just as well.
The coming of Kunark saw my first, genuine introduction to grouping in EQ. I had grouped, sporadically, before but to no real purpose. In Lake of Ill Omen I discovered for myself exactly why so many people thought grouping was a lot more fun than soloing and to my surprise I found I agreed with them.
The first few months after the launch of the expansion was an extremely busy time and Lake of Ill Omen was one of the most popular leveling spots for characters in the twenties There were always people starting groups or looking to fill them. It took me a while but soon I was answering LFM calls for second healer spots or the general support work for which a Druid is so well-suited.
I think it was as simple as trying it once and it not being a disaster that got me started. Once I'd gained some confidence I wouldn't even wait to be asked. I used to log in on weekend mornings and start LFGing in /shout or /ooc immediately. Mostly it only took a few calls before I got a group.
My favorite camp, by far, was the Sarnak Fort, preferably at Back Wall, where we could set up camp outside and have someone go in and pull the Sarnaks out to us. I remember a few times when more adventurous groups worked their way inside and tried to hold a room. It never worked out well but it was certainly a thrill while it lasted.
It was something of a bittersweet moment when I realized I'd all but out-leveled the Fort but fortunately by then the second expansion, Scars of Velious, was almost there. It dropped in December 2000 (Yes, two of the games largest and most ambitious expansions appeared in the same year, the first within months of launch.)
Content in Velious was tuned, at the lowest end, for characters in the mid-30s and up. Rachel was, I believe, 32 or 33 at the time and I thought she'd be fine. And she was, except unlike in Kunark, no-one wanted to give a group slot to a slightly under-leveled Druid. Rachel did very well in groups outside the Tower of Frozen Shadows, when she could get one, but she couldn't get them often enough to make all the hanging around seem worthwhile.
I can't remember for certain where I took her after that but it
wasn't anywhere in either Kunark or Velious. The new continents were too dangerous alone and after a
few less than successful attempts to find new hunting spots there I moved her back to Antonica, specifically to North Karana, where I
mostly hunted Griffins.
During the rest of that year I slowly worked her all the way up to the old level cap of fifty. Of course, the new cap had been sixty for a while by then. As you can see from the portrait at the top of the post, she did make sixty eventually, mainly soloing in Scarlet Desert and other lunar zones, but by then her time as my main character was at an end. I played a few more Druids after that but mostly for the ports.
Rachel remains one of my favorite characters in any game. Not only was she fun to play but playing her taught me a lot, some of it about playing nicely with others, some about playing happily alone. When I think of EverQuest, it's often those times I remember most fondly and most clearly and Ihave Rachel to thank for showing me the way.
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