Learning Curve: EverQuest

If there's one thing you can be sure of when playing an MMORPG it's that you never know all there is to know. It doesn't matter if you have twenty max-level characters or you've been playing since beta. Never mind whether you lead a bleeding-edge raid guild or spend your free time writing guides and correcting the wiki, there's always, always going to be something you didn't know.

EverQuest is nineteen years old this year and I've been playing for eighteen of them. Over nearly two decades I've levelled more characters than I can remember (waaaay more...). I've played on servers that have merged into servers that have merged into servers until my character limits split at the seams.

I've started over so many times I have a method. I know where to go, what to do, what to buy, what to sell to bootstrap myself into comfort. I forget details but they soon comes back when I start playing again. Or so I've always believed...

As I mentioned in my last post, the Barter system forms a crucial element in any low-level EverQuest money-making plan. Bartering was introduced with the Dragons of Norrath expansion in 2005. DoN was the expansion that followed Omens of War, which was the expansion that followed the one that almost put EverQuest out of business, Gates of Discord.

The combination of a disastrous expansion (GoD), the launch of a sequel (EQ2) and the appearance of a ferocious competitor (WoW), all in the same year, was a body-blow that staggered EQ badly but there was no knock-out blow. Omens of War, which cleaned up GoD's mess, was much better received, EQ2 stumbled out of the gate and World of Warcraft managed to gain a reputation in EQ veteran circles as an easy game for kiddies, best ignored.

Swimming from across Lake Rathetear fro m Arena to South Karana. If there's a faster route I'd like to hear about it.

By the time I came back to EQ, Dragons of Norrath was old news. Everyone was anticipating the arrival of the new expansion, Depths of Darkhollow. As I check the wiki for the dates, the cadence of these expansions is breathtaking. Between October 2002 (Planes of Power) and November 2007 (Secrets of Faydwer) SOE produced and released eleven expansions, all of which (with the exception of the mini-expansion Legacy of Ykesha) dwarf just about anything released as "expansions" for most MMOs nowadays.

Some expansions added game-changing innovations: instant transport from a central hub with PoP's Plane of Knowledge; mercenaries in Seeds of Destruction;  the Task system in OOW; instanced dungeons in Lost Dungeons of Norrath. Others sought to shift the entire direction of the game - The Serpent's Spine in 2006 claimed to render the entire first 75 levels fully soloable as well as allowing all characters to regain mana and health quickly as soon as they were out of combat.

Not every new idea worked or was taken up with enthusiasm by the players. DoD's Monster Missions had their moment in the sun purely because of an exploit. Once that was fixed did anyone ever use them again? Prophecy of Ro, my nomination for EQ's weakest-ever expansion, offered player-set traps and "spheres of influence", neither of which have I used, seen anyone else use or even heard anyone mention. And then there was the "voice macro system" from OOW... no, me neither.

I don't remember them being called "Adult Elephants". I thought they were just "Elephants".

Of all the many great additions we've enjoyed over the years, quality of life changes that make modern EQ so very much more enjoyable and satisfying to play than "Classic" ever was, Barter comes close to the top of my list. It's been so useful that I've never minded the clunky, inconvenient implementation that requires not just a visit to The Bazaar but a fiddly trip through the maze-like corridors of the Blue halls to find the player-vendor with whom your character needs to interact.

A trip to the Bazaar to type /barter and bring up the search window to see what people are buying has been a rite of passage for all my new characters for years. Many a hunting session has ended with a Gate to PoK and a run to the Bazaar.

Then last night I discovered I'd been wasting my time. Not by using the barter system - that's as essential and rewarding as ever it was. No, it's just that I never needed to leave my hunting grounds to to cash in!

I'd have known sooner if I read my own blog or took my own advice. I've recommended Almar's Guides more than once but it seems I haven't been reading them closely enough.

I linked to Almar's Bazaar Guide in the last post to save myself having to explain The Bazaar. I checked first to be sure it was relevant but I trust Almar so I didn't do much more than a skim-read. Then last night something happened in game that made me go back and read it again, properly.

You can never kill too many aviaks.

I was in South Karana, down at the birdhouse, killing Aviaks for great xp and pretty good loot, when someone in General Chat asked a question about how to make some plat at low levels. Vox, the new (as in five years old) server where I'm currently playing has excellent General chat - lively, well-mannered, helpful. Answers and suggestions were offered.

Someone was explaining Barter and I was half following the conversation when I saw something that made me exclaim out loud in surprise and disbelief. They were saying that you could check barter from anywhere in the game and then sell straight from your bags where you stood!

Could that be true? Right there, mid-fight (my pet was doing the fighting and my merc was doing the healing so my involvement was optional) I typed /barter and the window opened. It was like a miracle. I grabbed the corner and stretched the window so I could see all of it and there, next to every listed item, was a blue "SELL" button.

I searched my bag for something I could sell. Anything. I didn't have anything anyone wanted. For the rest of the session I scanned my loot obsessively as it came in, looking for an item I could use as a test. Finally a Steel Ingot dropped. They're always in demand. Only not today.

Killing lions in the vain hope of getting the elusive High Quality Lion Skin, curently trading on /barter for 10,000 plat.
In 19 years I've seen one drop.

Eventually an Aviak Rook gave me some Sivril Ore. Someone on Barter wanted a few pieces for some arcane purpose. I clicked on the SELL button... and the ore vanished! A platinum piece clinked into my purse and the whole of Norrath changed in an instant.

Being able to search and sell remotely is game-changing. It allows me to find a spot where things people want to buy drop, then stay there to farm them without having to gate to clear my bags and sell. Given the time it takes to travel and get set up to hunt in Norrath, this is a Big Deal. Yes, it only applies to the small number of items that players want to buy, but now I can check every drop to see if there's a demand and if there is I can sell immediately and clear a bag slot  for more.

This wonderful change was a feature of the Rain of Fear expansion in 2012. You have to own that expansion to use it. I have it on my lapsed All Access account, which is the one I'm currently playing. I'm not sure if I have it on my current All Access one but if I don't then I'll be buying it (or rather I'll buy the latest expansion, which will give me all the previous ones) if I start playing a character over there.

I was particularly impressed to find I could use the function even though the account I was on isn't subbed. I already knew you could search the Bazaar remotely but I thought that was a perk of All Access. According to Almar "you can open the Bazaar tab anywhere in the world and buy items from anywhere in the world (Ownership of the Rain of Fear (RoF) expansion required). The same goes for using /barter. You can sell items immediately after picking them up from a monster and have the plat instantly placed in your inventory after you sell the wares!"

I often used to check the Bazaar remotely when I was playing my Magician, back when hers was the subbed account, but my memory was that, when I tried after my subscription lapsed, the option was no longer available. Well, either my memory is faulty (likely!) or things have changed. (Or, it just occurs to me, I am confusing the usage of EQ's Bazaar with that of EQ2's Broker...the "too many Norraths" problem). Anyway, I just tested it and a F2P (Silver) account can check the Bazaar remotely.

Not only that, there's a "BUY" button for /bazaar just like there's a "SELL" button for /barter. I found a cheap pair of gloves I needed so I could test it. I pressed BUY and another window popped up. Apparently you can pay via some kind of ticket to have the item delivered straight to your bags or pay a platinum fee to have it sent to a "Parcels" NPC.

Since I didn't have any of the tickets and didn't know where or how to get them, and since I was in Plane of Knoweledge, home of every service known to Norrath, I chose "Parcels". Then  I popped "Find" (another essential quality of life feature) and followed the glowing trail to the Small Bank, where a gnome by the name of Caden Zharik had my gloves ready and waiting.

Clearly I need to read up on all this. I feel like I've been playing with blinkers on these past few years. How much more is there that I don't know? How many awkward, time-consuming aspects - "that's just how it is in EQ" - are really artefacts of my own ignorance?

I don't know but I suspect a lot. It really is no wonder new players find it heavy going. You could say it should be better explained but it would need a manual the size of an encyclopedia and who would read it? Keep adding content for two decades and that's just what happens, I guess.

Always something new to learn, though. I'd call that a feature all of its own.

Opportunities : EverQuest

Back when I used to make a character on every new EQ server that rolled by, I prided myself on being able to bootstrap from abject poverty to very comfortable thank-you in a handful of sessions. That seems like a very long time ago.

These days most servers have some form of hyper-inflation and all the real market movers count their wealth in Kronos not platinum. And anyway, I have no idea what's valuable any more. I used to make a lot of money going through the bins buying back potentially valuable items players had sold to vendors but I can't parse vendor stock for value at a glance the way I once could.

Still, there are ways. A good one is to take a look at what players are selling in The Bazaar - particularly what they're buying on the /barter system. You can set your character up as either a seller or a buyer. Almar has a guide on how to do it but you need to be an All Access member (aka subscriber), which, on the account I'm using on Vox, I am not.

Doesn't matter. I don't want to set up a vendor. I just want to know what to look out for so I can sell it to whoever's buying.

I got fed up of sitting and medding so I claimed the mount from the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. It's supposed to be a warg but it looks more like a pig with a lion's head. A green pig.

Only a fraction of the number of players buy compared to those who sell but you don't need many. Today on Vox there were 68 vendors and 13 buyers, which is actually a higher ratio than I'm used to. I spent a while perusing the buy offers. Mostly crafting materials. Always is. A few people looking to buy Defiant armor on the cheap. The odd specialist request for weird rares.

It's interesting how many things have held value and interest. I was making coin selling odd gems like Taaffeite and Harmonagate a decade ago and they're still in demand today. Even older than that, apparently you can still make money farming Iron Oxide and Permafrost Crystals, something I remember doing even before the Bazaar existed, when you had to do your trades in the EC Tunnel or by the Freeport bank.

Nothing I had on me was on the list and a trawl round the vendors in The Bazaar and Plane of knowledge only turned up a couple of pieces of Crude Silk and a Crude Animal Pelt. Still, that got me forty plat, which was a start.

A start that needed a stop. I'm very wary of getting sucked into the "must check all the vendors" cycle again. Mrs Bhagpuss and I fell so far down that rabbit hole at one time we had to quit EQ and play something else for a while. I try to keep my vendor diving casual nowadays.

You know the boats are running again, Sedina? Wait, never mind - just port me!

The player economy may have moved on but there were always a few classic ways to make money for spells and gear at low levels that didn't involve trading. One of my favorites was hunting Willowisps for their Greater Lightstones.

GLSs are extremely good low-level loot in their own right. They sell to vendors for around four platinum per. Regular Lightstones sell for just under a plat. Rather than selling them straight away, though, it always used to be worth hoofing down to the Gypsy Camp in North Karana, where Mrysla would swap you a GLS for a Concordance of Research and then buy the Concordance back for twice what she'd pay for the Greater Lightstone. It's a wonder she wasn't kicked out of the Gypsy Union years ago.

I remembered all that without having to look it up. I also remembered where wisps can best be hunted and that Level 12 pets can "hit magic" - essential since wisps are immune to normal attacks. I hunted wisps in Qeynos Hills until I needed to sell, then I went through Qeynos to the docks to take the boat to Erud's Crossing.

There was no need to wait for the boat, alhtough I later saw it pass the docks. The Translocator Gnomes, who were added as a "temporary" fix, way back when the boats first began to misbehave in the early 2000s, are still on the job, porting on request. I zapped over to the rock we used to call "Wisp Island" because it was where we'd go there to farm them.

It looks a lot nicer in daylight. Also fewer zombies then.

After a while I had as many GLSs as I could carry. I gated to PoK and went to The Nexus to catch the portal to the wizard spire. It fires up every fifteen mniutes. I checked and even in 2018 that seems to be the fastest way to get there.

I'm noticing a lot of small quality of life improvements that would have made things so much easier back in the old Luclin/PoP days. The Nexus Scions now have descriptive names that tell you where they're going to send you and all the spell vendors tell you which level spells they sell. There's loads of stuff like that. Or maybe there always was and it's just my settings that have changed. I do tend to play with all information switched off but on Vox I'm mostly still using the defaults.

One thing that has definitely changed and not for the better is Mrysla. Someone has finally clued her in to the reverse-scam she was running on herself. She now pays exactly the same for the Concordance as she does for Greater Lightstones. She may not be making anything but at least she won't go bankrupt.

I googled this to see if I could see when it changed but every reference went back a few years at least and all claimed she paid double for the Concordance.  Well, she doesn't, so it's probably not worth lugging the things all the way to the back of beyond any more. You do get some decent xp for handing them in so it might be worth the trek if you're leveling. Otherwise I'd just sell your lightstones where you get the best price and save yourself the trip.

What do you mean it's the same price?! I came all this way for nothing???

It's a dangerous journey, too, at low level. I had to avoid griffons and Hill Giants, some of which path right through the gypsy camp. Classic EverQuest. Luckily as a necro I have Gather Shadows, which, in another quality of life upgrade, no longer fades randomly but always runs its full duration.

Or maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I've used it a load and it hasn't dropped. Maybe I'm just lucky. It's very difficult these days to find accurate, current info on EQ because the signal is lost in all the noise from the game's long history and, especially, from P99.

Then, EQ was always a mystery. For years nothing was documented and now even when it is I don't always believe it. For example, we always used to believe that some wisps were massively tougher than others but we never knew which or why.

I noticed today that I could clearly see the buffs on  wisps in North Karana and some had none at all while others had Heroism and Symbol of Marsan. These are  Level 52 and 54 Cleric spells respectively.

There was one other person in the zone other than me - a Druid - and in any event as far as I know you haven't been able to buff random mobs in EQ for about fifteen years. You can charm them then buff them then break charm and I think they still keep the buffs, although I'm not even 100% sure of that, but Clerics can't charm and it seems beyond reason to imagine a Cleric/Chanter duo roaming the Karanas, charming and buffing wisps and then releasing them just on the off-chance some passing low level might get griefed. I mean, I know that was common practice back in the day but back in the day there were people in these zones...

I call Shenanigans.

Maybe there's some NPC that buffs them. I know I got charmed by one of the Gypsies in North Karana once, who then set me on some unfortunate player. NPCs have minds of their own in Norrath - or they used to. I thought it was all meant have been toned down but maybe not.

And...this is why I love Norrath. Weird stuff happens all the time. You never really know what's going on and even when you think you do, often as not you're just fooling yourself. .

Level fifty cleric buffs or not, I managed to kill my wisps. I have a pocket cleric of my own, thankfully, or I would have had to run them across the bridge to East karana. Mercenaries and Defiant armor make the low/mid level game a playground not a purgatory these days.

Back in Plane of Knowledge I spent my GLS money on a full set of Crude Defiant Jewellery from the handy vendor near the Soulbinder. Like a million other good things in EQ, you have to know it's there. No-one's going to tell you. Except, I just did...

I'm about half-dressed in Defiant now and at Level 14 I have six more levels before I need to think about upgrading. At the rate I'm going that should be sometime on Thursday or Frday.

Whether I'll carry on after that, who can say. I'm having a heap of fun right now, though, so maybe I will. If I do, I'm going to need to come up with a better money-making scheme than selling Greater Lightstones for union minimum.  Any ideas?