Into The Unknown -or- Blimey, These Bags Are Heavy! What Have You Got In There?

That post title would work better if you were, in fact, looking into The Unknown in the screenshot above. You're not. That's the Oogothl Sprawl. Only, "Into The Oogothl Sprawl" doesn't have the same ring about it, does it?

And anyway, I haven't really been "Into" either of them, not in the sense of having gone somewhere and done something. What I have done is finish the first stage of the Signature Questline (MSQ if you prefer.) thereby gaining the Account flag that lets all my characters use the Spire to teleport you from the opening zone, Yon Gorroth, to the other two explorable zones, Oogothl Sprawl and The Unknown.

Getting that far has taken me around six hours although maybe an hour of that was spent giving my Necromancer's bags a serious clear-out, including swapping the bank boxes she was using for proper backpacks. 

That was something I wasn't expecting to need to do. Ever. I've been using the two kinds of containers indiscriminately for as long as I can remember. The only difference was what the icon looked like and which crafters made them. Tailors make bags, Carpenters make boxes.

Only very recently, in July this year, Darkpaw decided to get serious about the supposed weight difference between wooden boxes intended for vault storage and leather backpacks used to carry stuff on your character. I'm not about to do a full research project on it but as I vaguely remember it was that way when the game began but fairly quickly got changed so both sorts were effectively weightless. I think maybe weight itself was was removed from the game and boxes and bags just went along for the ride.

Then in July this happened:

Strong Boxes in inventory will now slow characters unless the character is in The City of Freeport, the Qeynos Capitol District, the Qeynos Province District, Neriak, City of Hate, or any house or guildhall.

It's an interesting change in a couple of ways. Firstly, there's still no weight to the boxes as such. Instead, there's a debuff to movement speed. Secondly, only some starting cities are exempt. In Halas, Kelethin and the Sarnak starting town, the name of which I can never remember (It's Gorowyn. Had to look it up.) new players will need to make sure they only use bags right from the get-go.

There is a reason for that, as pointed out by someone in the eight-page complaint thread on the forums this apparently minor change generated. The exempted areas are all discrete instances, whereas the other cities are areas in much larger, open zones. The "slow walking" code is obviously being applied zone-wide and there was presumably no easy or quick way to limit it to certain spots.

As many commenters also pointed out, no-one appeared to be asking for this change. EQII doesn't have exactly the split World of Warcraft does between "Retail" and "Classic" but it does have "Live" servers running the most recent iteration of the game and a whole bunch of Time Limited Expansion and Special Ruleset servers, on which different rules apply, including an "Origins" server that's probably the closest to the "Classic" concept.

With that amount of choice, it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who hankers after the good old days of 2005, when dwarves were dwarves and anyone seen walking the streets carrying half a dozen wooden boxes would rightly be pinned to the ground by the sheer weight of public disapproval and could jolly well pack their artisan-crafted traditional bear-skin backpacks and bugger off to Origins.

Even Origins, it seems, had to have a think about it first. The change was introduced there only after a period of anarchy, when sprightly Elves could be seen tripping merrily across the high walkways of Kelethin with half a dozen bank boxes bound around their waists as if they were made of thistledown. Although, given they were Elves, I guess they very well could have been.

Conspiracy theories were raised in the thread about the move being forced on Live by the need to service Origins or its having something to do with boosting sales of large bags in the Cash Shop. Unfortunately for the conspiracists, Origins has a completely separate code base that doesn't rely on compliance with the Live game and at the time of the change there didn't happen to be any large bags for sale in the Cash Shop at all.

A much more cogent complaint was that "no-one asked for this". It certainly wasn't a hot topic of conversation on the forums before the change was made. There is an in-game Feedback system that's invisible to all but the sender and whoever at Darkpaw has the unenviable task of reading it but it stretches credulity a little too far to believe there could have been a flurry of private requests for really heavy bank boxes.

Apparently the given reason for the change was so that larger vault boxes could be offered in the future. We used to get bigger boxes with every expansion that also came with a level cap raise. New recipes were added to Tailors and Carpenters books and everyone changed out their old boxes and bags for the more generous sizes. That stopped a long time ago for the very sound reason that the servers just couldn't handle the increase in the number of items they had to track as players moved around the world with the equivalent of a pick-up truck full of miscellaneous goods trailing behind them.

I suppose the idea is that boxes in banks won't need to be tracked in real-time to anything like the same extent, bank vaults tending by tradition to stay in one place most of the time, so it might be possible to make them larger. So far we haven't, as far as I know, seen any recipes for bigger boxes but then I haven't started leveling my Carpenter to 135 yet. Maybe she'll get a pleasant surprise. 

I doubt it. It might be in the long-term plans but what seems much more likely to me in the short term is that there's a faction within the development team at Darkpaw that just doesn't like seeing players "getting away" with things. They're always tightening up on imagined infractions for what often looks, from the outside, like loopholes being closed for the sake of it. 

For example, the recent changes to utilities. The patch that came along with the launch of the current expansion had a few unpleasant surprises for slackers who weren't keeping up to date with the latest nutritional advice:

Expendable item effects such as food that grant Crit Bonus, DPS, Fervor, Flurry, Flurry Multiplier, Haste, Melee Multiplier, Multi Attack, or Weapon Damage will no longer grant that stat bonus in expansion zones released after their intended expansion. For example food from Ballads of Zimara will not grant these stats in Scars of Destruction or later expansion zones.

Non-expendable item effects such as food that grant Crit Bonus, DPS, Fervor, Flurry, Flurry Multiplier, Haste, Melee Multiplier, Multi Attack, or Weapon Damage will no longer grant that stat bonus in the second expansion released after their intended expansion. For example triggered or passive permanent effects from Ballads of Zimara will grant these stats in Scars of Destruction zones, but will not grant these stats in Rage of Cthurath or later expansion zones.

I guess Provisioners will be happy about that. Personally, I rarely even remember to use food or drink at at all so its a bit of a moot point. Given that older food will inevitably provide lower benefits, though, it's hard to see this as a necessary change to maintain some kind of even playing field or to ensure the game runs more smoothly. I guess Provisioners will be happy...

And then there was this:

Many triggered item effects from equippable gear must now be worn to maintain the effect.

That, at least, could be argued to have some relevance to gameplay, if fights have to be tuned with every possible unequipped clicky in mind. There was a time when I would drag the icon of an equippable item in my bags to a hotbar so I could trigger it without having to either open the bags or, Tunare forfend, actually put it on! But that was a long time ago. I'm not going to miss it now.

I did expect a lot of complaints on the forum about both changes but I just had a look and I couldn't find any so either no-one cares or no-one's noticed yet. Which is possible. I only noticed the box thing because a bloody great red warning notice popped up when I ported my Necromancer out of her home into Antonica on the first day of the expansion. 

Even then, I ignored it because she was riding her broomstick and the speed debuff is either mitigated or completely annulled when you're on a  mount. It was only when she had to get off the broom for some reason and I saw she was hobbling along like a cartoon witch that I thought to take a look at her inventory.

She was using three bank boxes and had a couple more in her bags. The weight restriction counts for unequipped boxes as well. Carpenters, who have to make and move the things, aren't happy about that.

Once I'd decided to replace the three boxes she was using with bags, my first thought was to grab some off the Broker. I was only saying the other day how it's usually faster and nearly as cheap to buy crafted items as it is to make them yourself. 

I'd be grateful if you'd forget I said anything so dumb. It's nonsense. Some things are very cheap and very widely available but many are not. Big bags, for one. Unless you want pay half a billion plat for a 48-slot bag, I suggest that, if you have a Tailor on staff, you get them to make it instead.

Which is what I did. Eventually. First I had to figure out why Mordita didn't have the recipe. That was easy enough. She doesn't have most recipes. I boosted her to 130 Tailoring with a Cash Shop token and crafting boosts don't come with a fully up-to-date set of recipe books. The only recipes she had were ones she'd picked up from holidays and quests. 

Luckily, most of the books are on the NPC vendors in the craft halls these days, where they cost silver and gold, which isn't even pocket lint these days. I bought the lot. Over two hundred books and scrolls. Every one of which I had to purchase separately. 

And then I scribed them all. One. At. A. Time.  

That took a while. It also filled all the available slots in my bags when I was only half-way through so I had to do it in two goes and then my mouse finger got cramp from all the clicking. I got it done in the end. Then it was time to swap everything over. 

Fortunately, I remembered that there's an easy way. Couldn't remember what it was, of course. I had to google it. It's simple when you know how. Just drag the icon of the bag you want to empty into an open slot of the bag you want to fill and the contents transfer themselves automagically. Leftovers stay in the original bag so just keep decanting into another new bag until you're done.

It was weirdly satisfying. I was almost sorry I didn't have more bags to swap. I might do it on a  few more characters now I know the trick.

All that took an hour or so out of my steady progress through the Signature Quest and now writing about it has taken up almost all of this post. Funny how these things keep happening, isn't it?

Maybe next time I'll actually get to post something about the Unknown. Or Oogothl Sprawl. 

I bet you can't wait.