Black Friday? More Like Bleak Friday!

Does anyone think this Black Friday thing is getting kinda out of hand? I've been getting offers and promos for at least a couple of weeks now. There are signs in most of the shop windows in town offering sales that last from the middle of November to the end of next week. Where I work, we seem positively restrained, limiting our Black Friday event to "just" four days.

It's turning into its own holiday. Some of the offers even refer to it as one. I realize that in the US there were already three major holidays very close together with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year but now the US gets four and we're up to three, with one of them just being shopping. 

Not that we didn't have a pure shopping "holiday" already. We just rolled it in with another, the way Black Friday started. For all of my childhood and well into my middle-age, the New Year Sales were a big enough deal to get national news coverage every year. 

I think that tailed off in the nineties, when people got too impatient to wait for the calendar to flip over. Now it all rolls into Christmas with shops opening for big sales on December 26. With the growth of Black Friday, that means we have two, huge, blow-out sale events in the same month. 

I get the commercial value of the post-Christmas sales, whatever day they start, so stores can shift all that surplus stock that didn't sell as well as they'd hoped, but isn't Black Friday just encouraging a customers buy the same things they were going to buy anyway but pay less for them? I mean, I'm not that organized but I know from long experience on the other side of the counter that many people are. Still, if everyone's doing it, right?

Boxing Day Sales - Richard Dawson

 But I didn't come here to talk about work. I have a Black Friday Grab Bag of my own to sell you.

The 2024 Inventory Full Advent Calendar Rulebook

Here's how it's going to go this year. 

1. There will be not one but two Advent Calendar posts every day from the first of December until Christmas Day. This is not an attempt to pad my post count for the year. That's just a happy side-effect.
   
2. One of the posts will be Naughty. The other will be Nice.
3. The music in the Nice posts will be something I think is wholesome or cheerful or uplifting or that celebrates the season unironically. Possibly all of those.
   
4. The Naughty posts will... not be that. They might be jarring or downbeat or express negative feelings about the holidays or generally just feel off in some indefinable way.
5. I decide which songs go where and even I might not be able to explain why so just go with it, alright?
6. The Nice posts will be illustrated with an image taken by me, most likely a still from some video footage I have lying around. It will be original work, untouched except for some cropping and maybe a filter once in a while.
7. The Naughty posts will be the same image after it's been given to an AI to play with. I'll use the original as the starter image, give the AI some prompts, maybe iterate on it a little and see what comes out. I may also futz around with it in post-production. 

I've already got the first week mostly done. I'd rather put it all together in real time but I had to do some in advance because I'm working three out of the first five days and on another I'm going to a funeral.

Even doubled, the calendar will use less than half the songs I'd bookmarked but if you want to subject yourself to the full experience, there's a Playlist on my YouTube channel. I have listened to everything on it multiple times but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. It's a lot in more ways than one.

All comments on the musical choices are welcome as always but I would be even more interested to hear any thoughts on the images and the use of AI, from an aesthetic, creative and ethical standpoints. If anyone even cares about this stuff any more, which I'm beginning to doubt. I'm very curious to get a feel for where people think the boundaries of creativity lie in this technology.

I Only Really Like One K-Pop Band And It Had To Be This One

That's not entirely true. I like a few others but my favorite by a long way has to be New Jeans. They've featured in a number of music posts here and I get genuinely excited every time a new song by them appears in my music feeds.

That hasn't happened for a while and may never happen again. Every time I see the band's name now, it's in a news article, another installment in the never-ending soap opera that's become the story of their lives. I haven't been keeping up with the fine details but New Jeans and their erstwhile producer Min-Hee Jin have been locked in an existential battle with their label, Ador and its corporate overlords, Hybe for...

... I'm not even sure what for, exactly. The BBC has a short catch-up that covers the basics but the intensity is such that it sometimes feels like the souls of their firstborn might be at stake rather than their future as a pop group. 

It's been uncomfortable to watch the story unfold at times. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say New Jeans are fighting for the existential right of members of a musical act to be treated as individual, thinking, feeling, human beings rather than corporate assets. It's both a disturbing vision of the future and a reminder of a past I thought we'd outgrown.

Whatever it is that's going on, at no point has anyone from Ador or Hybe come across, at least in the reporting I've seen, as anything more than an uncaring company shill. It's like reading a dystopian cyberpunk novel set in a bleak, corporate future.

The latest development is that New Jeans, who from my ignorant and uninformed perspective seem to be taking the same idiosyncratic and intelligent approach they've previously applied to making music, having presented a legal challenge to their owners record company, which went unacknowledged and unanswered until the absolute last moment, with a press conference saying they no longer work for Ador.

Ador appear frighteningly uninterested in anything the band might want or say. Their stance seems to be that they never did anything wrong and a contract is a contract and why won't you silly little girls just shut up and sing? It's like the Golden Age of Hollywood all over again. Or Tin Pan Alley. And we know how those ended. 

Selfishly, I'd just like the band to be able to work with the producer of their choice, who just happens to be the one who helped them make all those great records, so they can make some more. It'd be great to have them pop up in my feeds talking about their new music, not about contract law, bullying and corporate greed. As it is, they must be miserable and frustrated and no-one is making any music at all. 

How Much Is Too Much?

 Ride On Time - Black Box (Best-selling UK single of 1989)

Then again, maybe there's too much music already, so does any of it really matter? Apparently there's now more music being released every single day in 2024 than there was in the whole of 1989. 

That takes some processing, doesn't it? I mean, it's not like there wasn't plenty back then. 1989 was close to the apex of that long, cultural period, when pop music ruled everyone's lives in a way it very definitely doesn't any more (Pace Taylor Swift.) That the decline in pop music's cultural influence should co-incide so neatly with exponential volumetric growth and ever-increasing ease of access is almost certainly no co-incidence.

The "study" linked in the NME article above comes from Music Radar and appears on closer examination to be more like an opinion piece on the evils of the subscription model in music distribution. The author pretty much makes his position clear with the opening quote: “All subscription models are from Satan and there is a special place in hell for those people in charge that went for this business model” although since it's a quote from someone on YouTube, I'm not sure it has the authority he's assigning it.

The actual stat about music released now versus 1989 comes from a more convincing source, Will Page, former Chief Economist for Spotify, the company widely seen as the cause of the problem. Whatever the problem is, which is not exactly clear.

Leaving aside the fundamental issue of Spotify's indefensible payment model, something Kate Nash is in the process of sorting out right now, by means of pictures of her butt on the back of a truck (Go get 'em, Kate. You rock!) the big question in my mind is how is anyone supposed to find anything in all of this? I mean, I spend hours trawling the net, searching for stuff I haven't heard before and even then I keep seeing mostly the same things, over and over...

There are supposedly 75 million people uploading original music right now. By 2030 they say it'll be more like 200 million. And that's just the humans. Wait 'till the AIs get in on the act.

I recommend letting me do the hard work. I'll pick 'em. You just sit back and enjoy yourselves.

Speaking of the 1980s...

I pretty much never mention politics on the blog and I'm not going to start now but I came across something this morning and I found it so evocative I felt I really shouldn't keep it to myself. It's from one of the columns Hunter S Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner in the mid-1980s, later collected and published under the title Generation of Swine, which just happens to my bathroom book of the moment:

"A Democratic victory would not change the world, but it would at least slow the berserk white-trash momentum of the bombs-and-Jesus crowd. Those people have had their way long enough. Not even the Book of Revelations threatens a plague of vengeful yahoos. We all need a rest from this pogrom. Ronald Reagan is an old man. It will be the rest of us who will face Armageddon."

Hunter was talking about the 1986 Senate elections. I'm not sure if I find that reassuring or deeply depressing. Probably both.

And now, some music. Well, some more music, I guess.

Peace Song - Fat Dog

See? Things can turn out alright in the end!

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.

When You're In A Hole... Start Digging!

Yesterday saw a couple of two-hour tests added to the Stars Reach pre-alpha test schedule at somewhat short notice. I had said in my last post that there weren't supposed to be any more until the new build arrives at the start of December but on Tuesday I got an email saying there were going to be two on Wednesday. One was due to begin for me at 2 AM so that was out but the other, as usual, was a teatime test starting at six in the evening.

On paper that ought to be prefect. Unfortunately, in practice the two-hour early evening slot coincides neatly with Beryl's Big Playtime. She's not wholly a slave to routine but she has a tendency to sleep all afternoon and come to life in the evening. Obviously, she's in charge, so if she says it's playtime for her then it's playtime for everyone and she's not that keen on video games so I can't fob her off with an hour watching me play Stars Reach.

This time she didn't come to life until a quarter to seven so I was able to get a clean forty-five minutes in before I had to log out and go play football in the hallway. I wasn't best pleased to have to stop because I was just four Survey Points short of a completed map but that's the way it goes, when you live with a Princess dog.

Apart from the early finish, I had a great test. Probably the most fun so far. The game felt very stable. I had no problems getting in or staying in. There were no crashes and no lag worth mentioning. 

I also followed Wilhelm's example and kept Discord voice chat off for the first time. Boy, did that make a difference! Without the constant chatter in the background I became completely immersed in what I was doing, much more so than in any of the previous tests. I would never normally have voice on in a game so I had been finding it quite distracting.

When I logged in I found that not only had there been no wipe, I was still in the same place I'd logged out last time. I'm not sure that's happened before. I think previously I'd always come back at the main spawn-in point. 

It meant I was still in those deep, confusing caverns I got lost in last time so my first thought was how to get out. Before I could do much about that, though, I noticed the floor, walls and ceiling of the cave I was in seemed to have a lot of variation in color and texture. It made me wonder if there were ores or minerals I could mine. I'd heard you could find them on planets, not just in space.

Having figured out the basics now, I popped up a camp and swapped in the Terraformer to find out and something odd happened. When I switched it on, instead of one violet energy beam there were two. 

I thought at first the second might be automatically dumping the tailings but after a while I got the usual "Hopper Full" message so that wasn't it. Other than slightly getting on my nerves, I couldn't see that the second beam was doing anything so I ignored it and carried on. 

I realize now that I should have reported it as a bug but honestly it's only as I write it down that it  even occurs to me it might have been one. The downside of the tests getting smoother and me getting more immersed in what I'm doing is I forget I'm in a test at all.

I spent a good while blasting everything that looked different to see what it might be. From memory, there was sand, chert, limestone, zinc, something beginning with "M" (Manganese?), chalk and... chalky. What "chalky" might be and what the difference between it and chalk is, I have no idea. Anyway, it proves it is possible to mine metals without going into space.

Once I'd sorted that out it was time to escape. Easier said than done. I managed to find a tunnel but it split several times and I couldn't find one that went upwards. After a few minutes looking, it occured to me I could make my own tunnel and get out that way.

It kind of worked. I had no trouble blasting a huge hole through the ceiling, heading up to where I assumed the surface had to be and with the aid of my trusty Gravity Mesh and parkour abilities (There's climbing in the game already.) I was able to scramble up the jagged shaft I'd made. The problems came when it was time to empty the hopper. 

Tailings appear where you point the cursor. The first time, I pointed it back down the shaft and almost sealed myself in. Not that it mattered. I wasn't planning on going back down. The second time I wasn't so lucky. I hit "Q" without thinking about it and all the tailings appeared right next to me, crushing me against the side of the shaft.

I died. It's very easy to kill yourself in Stars Reach. Back when I had Discord on, I heard people talking about how they'd managed to kill themselves all the time. This was the first time I've done it but I'm sure it won't be the last.

At least it got me out of the caves. If I'd had any sense, I'd have cut my losses and left it at that but I could see my red gravemarker half a kilometer away so I thought I'd go back for it.

I was curious to see if I'd be able to find it from above ground and, if I could, whether I'd be able to dig down and get to it. The answer to both questions is yes, although it took a bit of triangulating and trial and error. It was very satisfying when I broke through the roof of the tunnel to where I'd died and found my remains, fortunately in the neat form of a glowing cube, not a smear of blood and flesh stuck to the walls.

After that I stayed on the surface. I swapped to the Pathfinder and set about finding the two dozen or so Survey Points I hadn't found last time. As I jet-hopped around I got the distinct impression there were either fewer mobs than last time or if not, that they'd calmed down a bit. I was able to avoid most of the packs and even when they spotted me and gave chase they seemed to give up a lot faster.

Some of the remaining Survey points were on the very edge of the map or high up on crags. I climbed a lot of rock spires. I also found a field of prickly pears but I didn't have the Harvester on my toolbelt so I couldn't check if they were pickable. I also noticed a lot of patches of color on the ground, none of which I remembered seeing in previous tests.

I gave those an experimental blast with the purple ray to see what might pop out. (I was back to a single ray at this point. Not sure when it changed.) The greenish patches seemed to be either gneiss or glass, occasionally with a smattering of quartz. 

Finding glass seemed odd. I realize it can occur naturally in some extreme situations, lightning strikes or volcanic eruptions, but I hadn't seen anything of the kind in the area where I found it. I wonder if players create it by blasting the sand with one of the devices?

If I'd been able to stay longer I'd have tried to find out what all the various materials I'd gathered were good for. I did a lot of mining. I must have earned plenty of points to spend on recipes and upgrades. Sadly, Beryl put a stop to all that and by the time the next test arrives I'm pretty sure all progress will have been wiped, along with my character. Pity. I'm starting to become fond of her.

Even so, I may roll a different race next time. Mrs Bhagpuss followed Beryl in to see what all the fuss was about and as she looked over my shoulder to see what game I was playing she saw my character from behind (It's always from behind in this game - I have trouble getting the camera to turn for a selfie.) and said "Nice bottom! Are you a boy or a girl?"

I think I'll make one of the cat people for the next test.

Going Further Back To Go Forwards Faster

I would have posted yesterday but I was too busy playing. I even had something mapped out in my mind, but I didn't want to stop to write it up.

I suppose that's a good thing. It suggests I was enjoying what I was doing enough to want to carry on, rather than just doing it long enough to gather enough material for a blog post, something I freely admit is often the case when I play games these days.

At this point it's tempting to go into a peroration about blogging and gaming and synergies and which drives what, but blogging about blogging, while very enjoyable for the blogger, can sometimes remind me uncomfortably of all those novels about being a novelist or, worse, those depressingly popular books about someone who reads books. 

Instead, how about I just get on with it and talk about what I was doing? There's an idea.

So, there I was, trying to get my Berserker in EverQuest II to Level 130 so I could start on the new expansion. I already explained the problem and outlined my plan to deal with it and how long I thought that might take. Then, when I was playing on Sunday evening, I had a bit of luck.

I logged in expecting to pick up where I left off, cleaning up all the non-story quests from the previous expansion, Ballads of Zimara, most of which come from starter items that drop off mobs. I opened my quest journal to see exactly where I was up to and because I was in Freeport at the time, instead of sorting it by the zone I was in, as I usually do, I sorted it by Quest Level instead.

That brought up far more yellow quests than I was expecting, yellow meaning just comfortably above the character's level, usually the sweet spot for the best xp. That made me curious so I took a closer look. I found something surprising.

Many of the yellow quests weren't from the last expansion ore ven the one before that. They were from Visions of Vetrovia, which came out in 2021. The level cap back then had been 125 so it seemed strange that the quests were flagged Level 130. But they were.

Since the quests in BoZ were already very easy it seemed logical the ones from the expansion before that would be easier still. Whether they'd be faster wasn't so certain. In my experience with most MMORPGs there are three things that take time when you quest:

1. Killing mobs.
2. Traveling to and/or finding the place you have to go to to kill the mobs.
3. Listening to NPCs telling you why you should go kill the mobs in the first place.

There are other factors, especially in those games where the devs seem to be involved in some kind of in-house competition to find the most obscure, awkward or annoying ways to increment a quest counter. I long ago lost track of the number of ways it's possible to interact with an object in EQII but I can tell you it's too many.

Mostly, though, it's a combination of TTK, TTT and TTR. Time to Kill, Time to Travel and Time to Read. Dropping back three expansions was always going to help with TTK. Having flying enabled in all zones, instant map travel as an All Access member and the exact locations of every update step in the Wiki was going to cut down hugely on TTT. Two out of three. Not bad. 

I wasn't sure there was much I could do about the last one, though. Many players, possibly most of them, shave a good deal off the running time of every quest by skipping the quest text but I always (Well, almost always...) read every word. I could have made an exception for the sake of expediency but it would go against the grain so I knew I would probably skim-read everything, at least.

The big question was would the xp from two expansions ago be worth bothering with? The way Darkpaw has futzed around with xp and leveling over the past few years makes it hard to be sure until you try. Since I had the quests my book already, I thought it was worth a look. 

I was hoping these older quests would move the dial enough to justify the effort because, although I
could see a path to Level 130 by way of the BoZ scraps I had left, nothing was giving me much more than 2% of the level and I still had about 60% to go. I didn't much fancy having to find all the dropped quests and then finish up on the dregs of the few repeatables. If I could find some narrative quests, at least the time might pass faster and the whole thing wouldn't feel quite so formulaic.

Naturally, I started with the quests in my journal for Forlorn Gist, the highest-level zone in VoV, on the assumption those ought to give the best xp. There's no way to travel there directly (Oh yes there is but I'd forgotten!) so I had go the long way, map-hopping to the starting zone, flying to the griffin station, riding public transport to the next zone, Karuupa Jungle, flying across that to the next station and finally arriving in Mahngavi Wastes, from where you can walk to Forlorn Gist. So much for saving on travel time.

I was about to head to the zone line when I happened to notice I also had some quests in the Wastes and what's more two of them were complete and ready to hand in. That seemed like a gimme so I took it. I flew to the questgivers, a couple of centaurs hanging around next to a graveyard, big, red books over their heads to tell me they'd been waiting three years for me to show up. I spoke to the pair of them, accepted their thanks and collected the reward.

Those quests gave easily as much xp as I'd been getting from the ones in BoZ. Maybe a little more. Great! Op success! And both centaurs had more work for me so rather than head off to Forlorn Gist I thought I might as well carry on where I was.

I worked through the two related quest sequences, all of which were either Kill or Fetch quests or a combination of the two. The mobs and objects were all in the same zone. Everything was an insta-kill. Travel distances were short. I barely even needed to refer to the wiki because I had EQMaps up with all the POIs highlighted. It was glorious!

Once again, I'm going to make the point that I prefer questing when there is absolutely no challenge to it. I love one-shotting all the mobs - better yet if I can round up a bunch and one-shot the lot with an AE - and best of all if it's all those inevitable, irelevant, infuriating adds that insist on piling on. 

I can't see how having to spend five to ten seconds killing each mob that gets in your way as you roam around looking for the ones you actually need for the quest adds to the entertainment value in any way whatsoever. If you have to interact with them at all, surely it has to be more fun fun to mow them all down like so many stalks of wheat.

It's more fun for me, anyway. I can one-shot for a long time before I get bored. I'm not sure I've ever gotten bored doing it, in fact. Usually I stop for other reasons long before the warm feeling it gives me begins to cool. Conversely, I get very tired of hacking through hordes mobs that take time and effort to kill. Even thinking about can sometimes be enough to make give up and go play something else instead. Something easier. And more fun.

All of which meant that I was having a high old time, picking up quests and knocking them out as fast as I could. After a while, though, the quests ran out so I had to stop and think again. And I found myself puzzled.

Although all these quests were new to my Berserker, they were far from new to me. I remembered all of them. It took me a while to work out why but the answer, when I found it, was simple: I'd done them on a different character. 

For Visions of Vetrovia three years ago, I ran an experiment. I swapped my regular questing character, the Berserker, for my Bruiser, who I'd heard through some research I'd done should have a better TTK. Also, Bruisers can feign death, which is always handy.

The experiment was inconclusive. I couldn't tell much difference between the two of them. They're both melee classes. They both use a lot of AEs. Plate is thicker than leather but avoidance makes up for it. Feigning death gets you out of a lot of things but so does having three death saves. Solo there doesn't seem to be a lot to choose between them. 

I went back to the Berserker for Ballads of Zimara and I'd forgotten he'd ever skipped an expansion. Thinking about it, I recalled how he'd done the crafting questline and while traveling arond the VoV zones for that, had picked up just enough loose adventure quests as and when he came across them to get his five levels, from 120 to 125. As I discovered yesterday, though, he'd never even started the Adventure Signature questline.

That turned out to be a godsend. I dropped the idea of going to Forlorn Gist and instead I went right back to the start to begin working my way through the MQ. 

Visions of Vetrovia, four expansions ago now, is part of the era when every stage of the main quest rewarded massive chunks of xp, often enough to move the bar half a level or more. Even at 129, with the required xp per level measured in the trillions, allowing for full vitality, I found almost every step of the Signature line was giving around 5% of the level.

That's more than double what I was getting for the BoZ pick-ups and repeatables and I was also getting a lot more than double the entertainment value into the bargain. I was enjoying myself so much that when I dinged 130 yesterday evening I was almost sorry there weren't any more levels left to get.

Event then, the whole process still wasn't exactly what you'd call fast. I didn't time it but I think it probably took me around four hours to do the final two-thirds of Level 129. The important thing was that it didn't feel like a grind or a chore. It felt like having fun.

There were several things that did make it all go by a bit faster. As soon as I realised I'd done the entire storyline before, I felt under no obligation to read any of the dialog. It was quite liberating to click through it all as fast it appeared. 

I also gave up looting most of the mobs after a while, after I thought about the value of what they were dropping. EQII suffers from hyper-inflation, meaning nothing any mob drops is of any value unless you can either use it yourself or sell it to another player. Cash drops that sell to vendors might as well be pocket lint.

Lastly, I was helped considerably in my progress through the MQ by the fortuitous circumstances of my Berserker's happy-go-lucky approach to questing four years ago. The quests he'd been able to get while not following the main storyline mostly turned out to be the same ones you have to do for various NPCs before they'll give you their MQ quests. Every time he got to a point where the wiki said he'd need to go do all of someone's quests to get the next MQ stage, he found he'd already done them and the NPC was happy to speak to him right away.

All things considered, it was both a very enjoyable way to get that last level and a very useful learning experience. I see now that there's a good reason to hold back on doing current content on some characters. 

While it was super-easy to level, I got into the habit of taking half a dozen of my crew to the cap every time it went up. Now it's likely to be more better - or at least a lot less trouble - to let them leap-frog each other a year or two apart and let time and power creep turn what might have been a painful slog into an enjoyable romp.

That, though, is for the future. As soon as the Berserker dinged 130 he got a letter inviting him to come to the new zones to help with the latest crisis, whatever that might be. It means going back to taking things seriously, playing properly, reading all the quest text and doing things the way they're supposed to be done. 

I can't say I'm thrilled but I suppose I'll have to. I mean, that is why I was leveling him in the first place...

Stars Reach: Third Test, Best Test

Right after I finished tea yesterday, I logged in for my third session in the Stars Reach pre-alpha. I was looking forward to it after the first two, not least because I was starting to feel as though I'd learned enough about how to do things. I felt it was about time I got down to using some of what I'd learned.

The first test was mostly about figuring out the controls and getting acclimatized to the environment. The second was all bugs and crashes. I was hoping for the third to be more of a regular play session. And guess what? It was!

I spent ninety minutes mostly running around, gathering mats, getting xp and crafting stuff to use, just like in any new game. It would have been the full two hours only Beryl the dog came crashing into the room at half past seven to tell me it was absolutely playtime and since I'd somehow managed to get myself lost inside a gigantic cave system and couldn't find my way out, I didn't try to argue with her.

I'm going to say a couple of things about Stars Reach up front. Okay, three paragraphs in, but close enough. 

Were these trophies always here? First time I spotted them.

Firstly, even in pre-alpha it already feels like a game. This was the thing I found the most unconvincing about the whole thing in all the PR and publicity I'd seen, before I was able to get into the testing program and try it for myself. 

It seemed that Stars Reach was being marketed as a game, when what it looked like was a utility.  I understood how the project was intending to simulate an environment but that made it sound more like Second Life In Space than an MMORPG. Not that there's anything wrong with making Second Life In Space. It's just not what I'd define as a game.

That, though, is a problem I have with sandboxes in general. I think of therm as spaces where gaming can happen, not as games in themselves. And I do think that's where Stars Reach may be headed, but right now, because there are only a relatively small number of things to do and those things are quite clearly signposted, it does feel like playing a more traditional, more linear video game. 

And that suits me very well. Surprisingly, to me at least, it even feels like a game I would like play. It's fun, something I wasn't necessarily expecting at this extremely early stage.

I do love me some lens flare!

The second thing I wanted to emphasize is just how good-looking Stars Reach already is. I mentioned in yesterday's post that I hadn't bothered to take any screenshots in the first zone of the new EverQuest II expansion, which said something about how unattractive the scenery had to be, given I take screenshots by the thousand in most games.

By contrast, in ninety minutes yesterday I took nearly thirty screenshots of Stars Reach, which works out at one every three minutes for the entire time I was there. I probably didn't need to do the math for anyone there, did I?  It would have been double that, too, if I hadn't made myself stop taking snaps so I could get on with what I was supposed to be doing.

These things always depend on a personal sense of aesthetics, so I imagine plenty of people will find the look of the thing not to their taste. I love it, though. It's bright, vibrant, warm and oddly kind of... snuggly. I didn't think Stars Reach was being marketed as a "cosy" game but it certainly has the look and feel of one.

So, it plays well and it looks good. What else is there to say about it? Plenty!

Here I am and it's night because of course it is. Although, since the day/night cycle seems to last around ten minutes, it's no biggie.

Yesterday's test felt much more stable than the previous one although, as it says in those legal warnings, your experience may vary. I think it very much depends on luck right now. Last time, I ran into a bunch of crashes and bugs. This time I crashed just once in an hour and a half and was able to log straight back in with no problems, meaning I came away with the impression things had gotten much better.

While I was having a fine old time though, I could hear people talking on Discord all through the test about how they were crashing or getting stuck, to the point where at least one person, sounding quite fed up, announced they were quitting the test early because they couldn't get anything done. 

There was also much discussion of the bug that saw Wilhelm turn into a pillar. It's still going on and it's frequent enough to have been given a name. It's now known as the 0,0 bug because it happens when the game spawns you at that location. So far, exactly why it's happening or how to make it stop are works in progress.

None of which is surprising. It is a pre-alpha. No-one expects it to run smoothly. It feels great when it does, though!

I think we should call it the Orchard Planet.

Wilhelm was talking about the different biomes now available in the current multi-planet test. I was very keen to see some of those but I logged in to the same, familiar temperate world I'd been on in the first two tests. I think there's some way to swap worlds but I didn't know how to do it so I just got on with things where I arrived.

Since that happened to be right next to the portal, I went straight to space to carry on gathering mats for crafting. I was pleased to find we still had our characters from last time and even more pleased to see all the mats I had then were still in my bags. 

I spent a while in space, hoovering up manganese and iron and other presumably useful materials until I made the mistake of going inside an asteroid that was already occupied by some sort of aggressive space beast. I did briefly try to blast it with my electric arc gun but I couldn't get a clear shot so I jetted off into space instead, heading for the portal and escape  to planetary safety.

If you can call it safety, that is. Which in my opinion you really can't. 

I didn't take any pictures of dangerous wildlife this time so here's one of a lake of lava instead. That'll kill you even faster.

In the current test build I would say there are far too many aggressive mobs. They're everywhere, in space and planetside. I got attacked by Ballhogs (?) and Owldeer and Panthers and Skysharks and a whole load of creatures I never got the names of. I killed a few, when they were reckless enough to come at me alone, but mostly I ran away because the percentages just aren't there when a pack of panthers comes pounding towards you.

When I spoke about the cosy feeling this game is sending out, I have to say the sheer quantity of aggressive wildlife is really harshing that vibe, man! Even if gear upgrades later make killing the critters trivial, getting constantly interrupted by something trying to gnaw on your leg while you're busy doing important stuff is always going to be annoying.

Speaking of doing important stuff, as usual I couldn't really make up my mind what that was going to be. I wanted to craft something, although I didn't have any clear idea what, so I thought maybe I'd just pile up the mats and see what they made. 

That turned out to be a pretty sound plan because the first of the recipes I bought that I was able to turn into something tangible, the Grav Mesh, was something of a game-changer. It's a device that lets you fly and flying always makes games better. 

Yes it does. Stop arguing!

We were promised jetpacks. And we got them!

In this case, it mostly lets you fly like one of those too-heavy birds that can just about clear a hedge before crashing back to earth. The Grav Mesh relies on your stamina, which depletes rapidly - far too rapidly for steady flight. Instead, the commonly accepted method is to keep flicking it on and off so you lurch about like a drunken butterfly. It's a compromise familiar from countless previous games I've played so it took no getting used to at all.

I did have a little more trouble working out how to use the Mesh in the first place. I assumed it would be a device that went on the toolbelt but in fact it's some kind of undershirt you wear, The game has three clothing tabs, which I had imagined were going to be mostly for cosmetic purposes but it seems they're much more practical.

Once I'd made the jet pack (Because that's what it is, really. You can see the exhaust fumes streaming out behind you when you fly...) my focus changed from gathering mats to exploring. 

As well as mining ore, I had also been using the Harvester quite extensively, pointing it at anything and everything to see what happened. It happily strips bananas off banana tress, which seem to be weirdly common on other planets, but it does nothing for the fruit that look like apples or oranges. Some flowers get sucked into the Harvester's maw but not many. 

Space bananas. I'm sure there's some logical explanation...

Fungi, however, give up all sorts of goodies, including ammonia and salt. Don't ask me. I just take the stuff, I don't write up papers on it. Nor can I tell you why salt crystals are accepted in recipes that ask for "gems". I'm just happy they are because otherwise I couldn't have made that Grav Mesh.

I was pleased by how much xp I was getting just by doing random stuff. I had to use the Help function to look up how to see my xp (Press "K".) but when I did I was surprised to find I had enough in several disciplines to buy skills or recipes. 

Since I was planing to do some more surveying, I spent 400 points on the mapping function that's supposed to let you see where the locations you haven't yet found are. Somehow. I'd tell you more about how it works but having bought it, I couldn't figure out how to use it. Or even where to find it.

As it happened, I didn't need a map anyway. When I came back from that one crash I mentioned earlier I found myself on a different planet, the desert biome, which meant starting a new survey from scratch. There were pink globes and pyramids everywhere. No map required.

Valley of the Pink Globules.

The desert planet was very pretty. I took a lot of pictures. I was making very good progress with the survey, too. It seemed easier to see long distances, probably because of the lack of trees, and the Grav Mesh made getting to the awkward spots much easier. 

With half an hour to go, I'd collected over forty of the sixty-four required survey points. I was feeling fairly confident about getting the lot before the test ended, until I made the mistake of going into what looked like a short tunnel through some rock.

I'd been through a couple such tunnels already so I didn't expect anything different this time but it turned out this one was the entrance to a vast, underground maze of caverns. At first I thought it was something players had made but as it went on and on I became more and more convinced it had to be natural. 

Had Beryl not put a stop to my spelunking, I believe I would, eventually, have found my way back to the surface but I was thoroughly disoriented and totally lost, so I doubt it would have been in time to complete the survey. In any case, I'd already heard on Discord that a wipe was planned for the next test, which is supposed to be at the start of December, so any extra xp I might have made wasn't going to be of any practical use.

That's lucky. A short-cut! (Ironic foreshadowing...)

The forthcoming test is scheduled to use a new build, one that includes the first draft of a proper housing system. At the moment you can make crude structures using the tailings from mining and some people have been having fun with that. I saw a long bridge over a valley that apparently needed no form of support and someone had made a tiny, cubic hut just about big enough to stand in, although I couldn't see a door. Maybe they were still inside.

Actual housing with craftable and possibly snappable parts will open things up creatively and also risk the kind of trailer-park sprawl Wilhelm always likes to bring up whenever anyone says how great Star Wars Galaxies' housing was. As I've mentioned, SWG is a clear and ever-present touchstone for no small number of testers, hardly surprising considering the provenance of the game but in some ways the other regular comparison I hear, Landmark, might be more apposite.

I'm not sure if Raph was in chat last night but Dave Georgeson was and there were several references to the supposedly much-missed Landmark. Having played Landmark, on and off, right up until the servers closed down, I'd have to say that a lot of people may genuinely miss that game but almost none of them were playing it for a very long time before it closed down. The servers were virtually empty long before the plugs got pulled.

I loved building my houses in Landmark but it was incredibly time-consuming and what I made still looked like a child had modeled it in plasticine. There were some absolutely incredible works of art constructed in that game but I'm pretty sure all of them were built by people who were either professional designers or major hobbyists. The tools just weren't accessible enough even for keen amateurs.

Is there a recipe for sunscreen?

Stars Reach does frequently give me Landmark flashbacks. The character designs are really similar and so are the landscapes. Some of the movements and animations feel reminiscent. 

Even in pre-alpha, though, the game feels far more solid and playable than Landmark ever did. I fully expect whatever housing system we get to be orders of magnitude more user-friendly and I very much look forward to trying it out next time.

I just hope the new build brings some longer play-sessions and a bit more persistence, too. Building houses takes time, yo!

Going Backwards To Go Forwards

The colorful screenshot you see above was not taken in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Scars of Destruction, for the very good reason that I haven't been playing it. It's from the previous expansions, Ballads of Zimara, which is where I spent a couple of hours earlier today.

That was because to do anything at all in the new zones you have to be Level 130. Level 128, which is as far as my highest-level character had reached when SoD launched a couple of days ago, or even level 129, as that character is today, just won't cut it. 

None of the locals will speak to you if you can't produce your Max Level I.D. Card. Nor will the bunch of neo-colonialists who've sailed across the Sea of Erud to stick their oars into the locals' business uninvited (The locals are pretty salty about it, too, I can tell you!)

Other than what I read in the press release, namely that Overlord Lucan has his eye on some prize and we all have to get to it before he does, I know nothing about what we're all doing here in the charmingly-named Sodden Archipelago. And if you're thinking that doesn't sound like a very scenic location you're not wrong.

It may well be that some of the zones in this expansion are as bright and charming as those in its visually delightful predecessor. I certainly hope so. So far all I've seen is the dock and immediate hinterland of the starting zone and you can judge how impressed I was by the fact that I didn't take a single screenshot.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I took one but only to show how far across the map I'd been able to explore without getting myself killed. 

There I am, on the far side of a bridge that's barred by locked gates you can just climb around. It's the entrance to some kind of orc fortress, I think. Orcs always make barricades you can just walk around or they do in Norrath, anyway.

Probably because this is an expansion with no level cap increase, I found I had no trouble at all with the regular mobs, wildlife, orcs or kappa (Something like that...) who are kind of like Teenage Ninja Turtles that grew up. I was able to explore quite comfortably but unfortunately there wasn't much to see. The place is damn ugly.

I was somewhat worried it would be, when the setting for the expansion was announced. The original EverQuest zones on which the expansion is predicated weren't very visually appealing and neither, so far, have been most of their EQII spin-offs. As far as I can figure it, the expansion opens in the remains of Odus and moves to the extreme west of Velious, which most likely means a lot of sand and rock followed by a lot of snow and ice.

Still, I'd have persevered with my exploring and adventuring if it had been profitable in any way other than satisfying my curiosity. Unfortunately, regular mobs no longer drop anything worth having and killing them gives infinitesimal amounts of xp. The only realistic way to progress is by way of quests and since, as I said, at my current level no was going to give me any, it seemed pointless carrying on. Clearly I needed to go away, get a couple more levels and come back when someone would talk to me.

I could have carried on with the crafting questline. My Berserker is also a Weaponsmith and he qualifies, having dinged 130 months ago. Unfortunately, I lost enthusiasm for that approach when I hit the point where you have to grind faction to get the next quest. I don't have an existential problem with the concept of faction-work but I find it a bit off-putting to have to start on it about twenty minutes into the  first session of a new expansion, even if the grind is flagged as "ironic" by the designer.

Of course, I wouldn't be having this problem if I'd just knuckled down and done my levels when I was supposed to, months ago. I was surprised to find, when I checked my quest journal, to find I have actually finished the Ballads of Zimara Adventure Signature Questline. I remember now that that was one of the reasons I stopped.

In the latest unnecessary and ill-advised change to the way things work, someone decided to make leveling "meaningful" again. For several years it had been reduced to a couple of sessions at most, meaning you generally hit the new cap before you got to the second zone in the expansion. I found that odd at first but I soon got used to it and I can say for certain I prefer it hugely to how it is now, when you get to the end of the story and still have several levels to go.

There are still quests to do, of course. There'd pretty much have to be, seeing as questing is just about the only way you can get meaningful xp these days. The problem is they're all either scattered among random NPCs in multiple zones or started by items that drop from mobs.

It sounds worse than it is. At this stage, every last detail of where and how has been codified on the wiki so it's just a case of following instructions. I wouldn't have wanted to be one of the poor sods who had to go out there and discover the information needed to write the guides I've been using, though. Some of the locations I visited today were really obscure and the mobs must have been a lot tougher back then, too.

Luckily for me, I don't have to think about it, just copy and paste and follow a glowing trail. Plus I can fly in all the zones and I'm already wearing gear better than the quests give as rewards because holiday and mid-expansion updates all raised the item level beyond the BoZ baseline. Sometimes it pays to take your time.

It's been a lot of fun actually, to the point that I can't quite work out why I stopped before. The zones are really lovely to look at, the questing is relaxing and if xp doesn't exactly zip along it does at least jog. I started the day about half way through Level 128 and finished just over ten per cent into 129.

I did go take a look at the new Panda quests, which I'd missed this year, just in case that might help. They're permanently available and I will almost certainly have to do them for the Augments, even though the panda gear will already have been made redundant by the free stuff in the Tishan's box next to the guy in Sodden Arcihpelago. When I checked the panda stuff, though, I found you have to be Level 130 to wear any of it, so I didn't pursue it any further.

Based on how long it took me today, I'd guess I'm going to need another two or three sessions to hit the cap on my Berserker. There's a slight danger that will take the edge off my interest and I won't want to move into the new content but if I was really worried about that I suppose I could use the free Level 130 boost that came with the expansion and get stuck in right away.

I did consider it but it seems like a waste to use it on the Berserker, when he's so close. I am most likely going to save it for my Necromancer, who's Level 125. I've been saying for years I want to swap to her as my "main" but it never happens because the Berserker has so many other hidden benefits from having done All The Things that I immediately start to miss his privileges whenever I play anyone else in current content.

Even if I don't play her as a main, though, I will definitely be using the boost to skip her past the five levels BoZ added. I am categorically not grinding any more characters all the way through that. It's put paid to any possibility of keeping half a dozen characters at the cap, as I had been in the habit of doing.

If I'm realistic, though, there was never any practical purpose to doing it, anyway. I only bothered because it was so easy. If it takes any effort, I don't have either the time or the interest to play through an expansion more than once. 

Or apparently even that often, if last time is anything to go by. I'll have to see how far I get with this one. I suspect it may take a while...

Scars Of Destruction - A Key Feature

When the details of the latest EverQuest II expansion, Scars of Destruction, were revealed, I was weirdly excited by one minor feature - the Petamorph Keyring. For anyone who doesn't play the game that phrase is going to require a little explaining.

EQII is and has always been a game that makes enormous play of illusions. Whatever you choose to make your character look like at creation doesn't even represent a baseline for what you'll be looking at for most of your time in the game. You can look like just about anything.

There are many, many ways to change your appearance including but not limited to your gender, species or even your kingdom. You can start out as a human and end up as a rock. This happens all the time, whether you like it or not, because quest after quest has you turn into something other than what you were when you spoke to the questgiver.

There are spells and abilities that allow you to change your form and also an enormous number of objects you can use to impersonate anything from a tiny rat to a full-size dragon. You can change size and shape until you shrink yourself so small you can barely be seen - I was at the bank last night next to someone who'd managed to make themselves both look like a mushroom and be the actual size of one.

You're looking at the highest quality, highest level Necro pet and that's what someone thought the default should be. Is it any wonder illusions are so popular?

Since this can understandably get to be a bit much after a while, you can toggle the whole thing off in Options, something I tend to do after the novelty wears off. From then on you will look like yourself no matter what illusion you're under, even though every NPC will treat you as though you're still in costume.

Something very similar also applies to Familiars, Mounts and Combat Pets. There's both an Appearance and an Equipped slot for Familiars and Mounts, allowing you to combine the best stats withthe best looks.

Combat pets, by which I mostly mean the undead summoned by Necromancers, elementals by Conjurors and warders by Beastlords, can all be switched between the different appearances provided both by the different levels of ability and the various qualities of spells. At least Necros and Mages can do it that way. I forget exactly what it is that Beastlords can do but it's something along the same lines.

That's about all I can think of without looking it up. I'm aware it's by no means all the ways the game allows or compels you to change your form - or the forms of the entourage that swirls around you, like a family of ducklings following their mother. And that's just the bodies. I haven't even mentioned what you - and they - could be wearing...

There, now! Isn't that better?

Many of those illusions are accessed either through the UI or from your spellbook, where they take up no space and get in no-one's way. Some, however, far too many in my opinion, come in the form of items you need to click to activate. These all take up bag space.

This actually isn't too much of an issue for most of my characters, who tend to have far greater issues with hoarding to worry about a few illusions. Before the expansion dropped, for example, I spent an hour clearing some space in my Berserker's bags in readiness. It was a horrific task.

EQII is insanely generous with storage space and I've made quite an effort to take advantage of every opportunity to expand my storage capacity. In just the packs he carries around with him, my Berserker has 502 slots. When I went to check on Tuesday evening fewer than a dozen of those were free. 

Even when I'd cleared out everything that didn't require a lot of thinking about, he'd only managed to empty 88, the equivalent of a single bag. The other seven (You get six regular slots plus two for specific kinds of items, not counting your quiver.) were all still stuffed with junk that "might come in useful one day".

Of the remaining four hundred and some slots, only a dozen were taken up with illusions and just one by a Petamorph Wand, which the Berserker can't actually use, not having access to any combat pets. This feature does nothing for him. 

It's different for pet classes.

When I checked in with my Necromancer this morning, she had more than twenty-five slots taken up with Petamorph Wands. And I realise now that I still haven't explained what they are, although the name pretty much explains the function.

They're clickies that change the appearance of combat pets. Yes, combat pets already have an innate ability to change form, as discussed above, but these handy doodads let you turn them into totally different creatures altogether.

According to EQ2Wire, there are more than a hundred and fifty of these things. More are being added all the time. You can buy them in the cash shop, they get given away as holiday rewards, you get them from quests...

Until now, I've been wary of collecting them because of the space they take up but I'd like to have as many as I can get. They're fun but they're practical, too. Many of the default pets are annoying in one way or another and it's often useful to be able to change them into something that crawls or flies or just doesn't make a really annoying sound in the background all the frickin' time.

That was why I was excited to hear we'd be able to add them to a Keyring. A keyring is effectively a UI element in which you can store items that would otherwise take up bag space. Originally, if I'm remembering correctly, it was added to EverQuest to store the actual keys that were needed to access certain zones, particularly Planar instances, but over the years it's become the generic term for any UI-based storage solution, no matter what you put in it.

EverQuest has made great play of the "Keyring" conceit over the years but I have a feeling this might be the first so-named in EQII. Lots of things you'd think might have used a keyring, like Mounts and Familiars, already have their own UI tabs, so I guess it hasn't been deemed necessary until now.

Almost the first thing I did when I was able to log into the expansion was to get my Necro out and start playing with the new toy. There didn't seem to be any hints or explanations so i just started clicking things and that worked nicely.

All you have to do is right-click a Petamorph Wand and the context menu now offers the option to add it to the keyring. There's a warning that it's an irreversible action but since you can only add Attuned or No Trade wands to the ring that seems like an unnecessarily cautious step. I mean, what else are you going to do with them?

I started adding all of the Necro's wands, one after another, until without warning it stopped working. There weren't any error messages so at first I thought there was something different about the wands I was trying to add. A close look didn't suggest anything but after a while I figured out the reason.

The process had stalled because the Petamorph Keyring operates on the same principle as the Wardrobe, meaning it has a limited number of slots. I'd filled them all, which was why no more wands were going in.

The basic allowance is ten slots, which shows up as five rows. You can expand that a row at a time at the cost of 50DBC per. What the upper limit might be or if there is one I don't know but I would imagine you'll be able to add enough slots for all those hundred and fifty wands and more. 

I'm sure there will be people who'll complain about the cost and claim it's some kind of money grab. For subscribers, though, who get 500DBC as a stipend every month, and who also get a 10% discount on all cash shop purchases, it seems pretty harmless to me.

In fact, as I've said many times, I'm always glad of something to spend my Daybreak Cash on. I have almost 35k on my main account now and I rarely find much I want to buy. There are only so many Prestige Homes you can decorate, after all.

I bought another twenty slots immediately and started filling them up. Unfortunately, I attuned all my wands without looking at them and only after I'd done it did I discover I had a few duplicates. The keyring helpfully tells you when you try to add a wand it's already holding but by then I'd rendered them all untradeable so I just had to destroy them.

Never mind. Plenty more where those came from. And I'll be looking out for them now. I have Mages and Beastlords who can make good use of them and they all heve keyrings of their own. Yes, the keyring is character-based, not account based. I'm sure that will annoy some people as well but I personally prefer to keep my characters cleanly separated whenever possible so it suits me just fine.

And with that out of the way, I suppose I'd better go take a look at the actual content of the expansion. I got an in-game letter from the Far Seas Traders, asking me to go help with something in the new place so I'm going to start off with the Crafting Timeline.

I pretty much have to. I still don't have a max level Adventurer to start the main quest. Although I do have a level 130 boost...