A new one popped yesterday. It's thin. Let me break it down in bullet points:
- Reminder of the beta currently running for the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion on the Origins server.
- Reminder the Zarrakon PvP server will be merged into the Antonia Bayle PvE server in May.
- Details of a technical change to the Character Creation process.
- Information about the new Time Locked Expansion server coming in June.
And that's it. Two things we already knew about, each of which have had their own press releases in the last week or so, one thing no-one's likely to care about and a foretaste of another that, according to Senior Community Manager Angeliana, replying to a question on the forums, will have a full article and a FAQ next month.
If you were hoping for any longer-term outline of where the game as a whole is headed, especially now Darkpaw isn't doing roadmaps any more, you're out of luck. Whether this is because there's nothing to say or because saying anything isn't allowed, feel free to speculate.
So, working with what little we have, let me see if I can spin this up into some kind of post. There might be a couple of loose ends worth pulling on...
The Origins server is the closest thing EQII has to a Classic ruleset. It doesn't go all the way back to the beginning, like WoW Classic, because no-one in their right mind would want to suffer through the first fifteen months or so of EQII ever again. Instead, it started out trying to recreate the game as it was in 2006, before moving forward, carefully, through succeeding expansions, attempting to replicate them as accurately as possible, striving always for authenticity.
Or so the story goes. That, anyway, is why the introduction of the next expansion on the assembly line, Rise of Kunark, requires a beta. For regular TLE servers they just switch the expansions on, I think.
I don't really know, to be honest. I never play on them. I did try Origins when it started but I think I lasted about two sessions. I can see the appeal and the server has been successful but who has the time? Well, not me, obviously.
I wouldn't have bothered going into it at all if it wasn't for the fact that the existence of Origins is highly relevant to the second bullet point, the merging of Zarrakon with Antonia Bayle, which is much more interesting.
Zarrakon launched a sliver under three years ago. It used a factional PvP system of some kind, the exact details of which are unclear to me. I was under the impression most EQII PvP was faction-based: Freeport vs Qeynos or Good vs Evil, if you prefer.
Whatever the exact details of who could kill whom, Zarrakon barely had a chance to get started before the server itself was killed by much more popular rival. Just two years later, a second PvP server, Dozekar, arrived, using the already highly successful "Origins" model, tweaked for PvP.
PvP players are, if anything, even more nostalgic about the supposed good old days than PvE players. They're always hankering after some mythical ruleset that made PvP fair or balanced or satisfying, even if few of them can agree on when or where it happened.
Everyone agrees it did, though, and for many the touchstone is the much-missed original PvP server, Nagafen. For once, it seems as if Dozekar came close to replicating that experience. Or, as PCGamer put it at the time, "Nagafen's back, baby!"
With Dozekar sopping up most of the demand, there was no need for Zarrakon. It does seem strange that two PvP servers should have launched so close together but presumably the possibility of an Origins PvP server wasn't in the discussion in 2023. Just bad timing, I guess.
Antonia Bayle, the server on the receiving end of the merge, has a checkered history of its own. For a long time it was the most populated server. It was also the designated roleplaying server, which may explain the popularity.
Over time, for reasons unknown to me, Ant. Bayle fell out of fashion. The population declined until it became almost a ghost-server. There was talk about merging it into one of the others but instead Darkpaw took the opposite tack, merging failing servers into Ant. Bayle.
When I read the news that a PvP server was going to be folded into AB, my first thought was to wonder how the two populations might mix. Like oil and water, you'd think. Having done some research for this post, I'm now thinking it'll be more like dropping a pebble into the ocean. Barely even a ripple. I'm guessing there won't be enough players left on Zarrakon to make an impact and of those that remain, any still dedicated to PvP won't be logging in much after the move goes through.
So ends yet another attempt to bring PvP to Norrath. At least this time there's an alternative.
Dozekar, by most accounts I've seen, retains a small-but-active population, which, on the evidence of the last twenty years, is about the best an EQII PvP server can realistically can hope for. Not that EQII PvP players are famously realistic...
New servers have been the lifeblood of the game in one way or another for as long as I've been playing, which is to say always. The commercial model seems to consist of a core of permanent F2P servers running the "Live" ruleset, to whose players annual expansions and various cash shop specials can be sold, along with an ever-changing line-up of special rules servers, for which a subscription is required.
Perhaps ironically, it's the sub-only servers that have the shorter life expectancy. They're designed to run only for as long as enough people pay, after which they're merged either into each other or into the Live servers, depending on how compatible the rulesets might be.
There's a perpetual demand for new rulesets to hold the interest of a subset of players who find the endless variations appealing. Once in a while a particular variant will take off and become rather more than just stable, as seems to have happened with the Anashti Sul Origins server, reportedly now the most populated and popular server of all.
The latest attempt to grab attention is the upcoming Wuoshi server, which is going to have a Free Trade ruleset but also launch with all expansions up to and including Echoes of Faydwer active. EoF was the third expansion, right before RoK, which means the new server will be one expansion in arrears of Anashti Sul.
Why that would induce anyone to move across beats me although maybe I'm missing something. Someone on the forums certainly thinks so:
"Well rip Origins and it's RoK launch if this Woushi server coming out in June with EoF enabled."
I'd have though it'd be the other way around but what do I know?
I was more interested in the name of the new server, anyway. Mostly, when new servers are spun up for either of the EverQuest games, I have to go look it up to find out who they've been named after. Not this time!
Wuoshi is the extremely annoying dragon that wandered about right next to the druid ring in Wakening Lands. She was the bane of every druid's life back in the day. You'd port in and WHAM! Dead from Wuoshi's massive AoE attack.
Luckily she wasn't always up. I ran a spotter over there and camped them at the ring so I could log in as an expendable character just to check if it was safe to port. Eventually they either moved Wuoshi or changed her faction and porting to Wakening Lands stopped being Druid Russian Roulette but I have never forgotten her. I might roll a character on the server named after her, just for old times' sake.
There is one other odd thing about the new server. I'd talk about it in detail only I have no idea what it is and Jenn Chan isn't about to make it any clearer. She says
"Imagine traipsing through The Crossroads for a minute... You’re just walking along the road, weary from a long day of adventures, when you glance down and see an oddity. You pick it up and open it to find a strangely coded missive. You stare at it until the characters swim about in your view, still unable to decipher it. You feel an urgency to find someone who can decrypt the piece of intel before it’s too late. What do you do? Where do you go from here? "
Which is helpful. Not.
And even less so the image of the note itself:
I only know that much because someone on the forums had the whole thing translated in a matter of hours. The full text, in English, reads as follows.
Oh, I suppose I ought to give a spoiler warning for this...
As if anyone cares.
So there you have it. Gibberish in English, too! If anyone knows what any of that means, particularly in reference to how the Wuoshi server might differ from all the other TLE servers, do tell.
Credit for the image goes to Agarth, by the way, although I'm not sure they did the actual translation.
And that, I think, is about all the juice I can squeeze from the dry husk of Jenn Chan's latest Producer's Letter.
Hey, I got more than fifteen hundred words out of it! I'm not complaining.
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