Easter Greetings

We never do Easter cards on the blogs, do we? Well, now we do.

Everything in the picture I got from the EverQuest II Beast'r vendor, along with a whole lot more. All of it together cost me less than I'd get from the cash money dropped by any random mid-level mob. A few gold in a game with an economy based on platinum. Say what you like about Daybreak's real money pricing strategy but they have always been astonishingly generous with in-game costs.

Naturally, because I had absolutely no plan to do this at all, I ended up with everything on my Bruiser, who only has a basic two-room Qeynos inn room. Two-room inn room? There must be a better way of saying that. Suite? Two room Qeynos inn suite? Two room suite in a Qeynos inn? Qeynos inn two-room? Two rooms in a Qeynos inn?

Sod it, you know what I mean. Whatever you call it, it's not ideal for a big Easter display. Don't get me wrong - it's a delightful home, very cosy, and he's done quite a bit of work getting it just how he likes it, but for great baskets of chocolate eggs and rabbits (Chocolate rabbits, that is.) you need more of a picnic setting.

As it so happens, my Inquisitor lives in the Baubleshire luxury home. She is not a halfling, let me make that quite clear from the outset. She's a gnome. As anyone who played EQII back at the begining will remember, a dozen races could start in either of the two Alignment cities, but Freeport and Qeynos both only had six "Neighborhoods". Everyone had to share and gnomes got to share with halflings.

Fortunately, there are no such enforced billetting arangements when it comes to private homes. My version of Baubleshire may look like a halfling hangout but it's strictly gnomesville. Still, that's an Easter feast that would dampen the hairy palms of any wannabe hobbit. (Yes, I know the hair's meant to be on the back of their hands. Really, though, who wants to get that close to check?)

I can't pass out Easter Eggs through the screen but I can offer you something even better then chocolate - Peanuts!

Of course, Easter's about more than just chocolate, bunnies and beagles. Take it away, Tori.

 And that's it for another year. Happy Easter Everyone!

Eggs Over Easy

Yesterday, I logged in to EverQuest II to set up my ten daily Overseer missions. There's not really anything left in the Season Two rewards that I want but I need to earn more experience to ding 21 before I can start on Season Three. 

Or so I thought.

I was surprised (Literally. The sudden, unexpected blast of sound made me jump) to see an achievement appear the moment my character loaded into the game: Season 3 Overseer. Along with it came two new missions set in the Kingdom of Sky.

 

I'm trying to remember if this is how things worked last year, when we started on Season Two. I thought I remembered having to grind out a whole level first but maybe not. Also, things were still in flux back then. When aren't they, though?

The achievement co-incided with the arrival of the very brief Beast'r festival so perhaps it was pushed with the data for that. Whatever the reason, I was glad to see it. Now I can crack on with expanding my repertoire of missions, agents and traits, then begin reeling in those juicy rewards.

It took me a moment to recalibrate. I'd become so used to having a full board of options. For much of last year, around breakfast-time I'd log in whichever character had set the missions the day before, collect the rewards, then I'd set ten more from whatever was off cooldown. 

I'd swap to another character if I ran out of agents but usually I had enough agents and missions to rotate across the two-day cycle on my Berserker. I had the whole thing down to maybe ten minutes a day. I'd forgotten that it takes quite a while to build up that kind of momentum.

With a new season it's back to square one. With just two Season 3 missions the only option is to keep repeating them as frequently as possible in the hope that more missions will drop as rewards.

The two starter missions are blue-quality. They take one hour and they have a one hour cooldown. That means no more once a day set-and-forget. Not if I want to get this whole thing moving. Either I stay and play so I can reset the missions as they come off cooldown or I have to remember to log back in time to do it every hour or so.

I'm doing both. Before I wandered off to play Valheim, I'd seen that there were five new Beast'r eggs to find this year so I spent a while hunting those down. It took a while, not least because I thought I'd remembered how the event worked but I really hadn't. After I admitted to myself that I might be wrong and went to check on EQ2 Traders things went a lot faster.

I was in Freeport asking guards for directions to the eggs and they kept sending me to the vendor instead. At first it was annoying but then I took a closer look at what he was selling and I was glad the guards hadn't really listened to me.

Kinda sinister for a fluff event, wouldn't you say?

 

The way diehard EQII players complain about the game annoys me a lot. I get the very strong impression that few of them play other mmorpgs, especially contemporary ones. If they did they'd understand how incredibly generous EQII is compared to just about every other game of its kind.

Here's what you can buy from the Beast'r Eggschanger:

• Eight decorative housing items 
• Two character illusions
• Three plushies (animated placeable creatures for your house)
• Three cosmetic pets
• One full set of appearance gear

You can also trade out eleven of the sixteen available Beast'r Eggs, which are vanity pets, for house pet versions. Since you scribe the eggs into your spellbook to use them, you can collect duplicates, swap them and have both.

What's more, the cost of buying any and all of these is extremely trivial. Most of those items cost sixty silver. The most expensive, the Sifaye Robe Clothing Crate appearance outfit costs 2g 40s. A level one character could earn enough in a matter of minutes to buy everything the vendor has to offer.

This is for a very minor holiday, one that most players probably barely even notice. You can guarantee that kind of generosity, in spades, for every EQII festival. And there are a lot of festivals.

Compare that to Guild Wars 2, where this week the very similar, minor Choya event rewarded me with a few handfuls of crafting mats. And not very useful ones, at that. 

Most modern mmorpgs do not stock holiday vendors with good quality vanity pets, character illusions and appearance gear that anyone can buy for a pittance of in-game currency without having to farm for hours or days or even weeks. Such things, when they do turn up, tend to be tied either to log-in campaigns that require you to pay with your time or cash shops that ask you to pay with real money.

The Overseer system, which I think it's probably fair to say has found no more than grudging acceptance from the playerbase in the year or so since it was introduced, is equally open-handed. Indeed, as I found myself thinking yesterday, it may even be too generous for its own good.

I was expecting upgrades from the Season 3 rewards and even at this extremely early stage I have not been disappointed. The quantity and quality of the rewards will increase markedly as I gain access to the longer and more highly-rated missions but I got an upgrade from the second mission I completed.

Using the free starter kit from Reign of Shadows as a baseline, the floor for Resolve in current content would be 195. Having completed the Signature questline, most of my Berserker's gear is somewhere between 205 and 215, with one or two outliers in either direction. 

 

The lowest level rewards from Overseer Season 3 start at 205. That's from the blue missions. The yellow missions go to 210. Above those come purple and finally green. I don't have any of those to check yet but it's reasonable to assume they go to 215 and 220. If this season follows the same pattern as the last there will be some items better than that again in the Bonus chests.

This does mean that you could, in theory, outfit your casual, solo character to a uniform level better than you could expect from completing the content intended for you in the latest expansion, without ever leaving your spawn spot. Why you'd want to is another matter but you could.

Petamorph wand. So gonna use this!

I won't be doing that but I will be outfitting my less-regularly played characters with gear that means they can, if they wish, skip the Signature questline altogether. Of course, then they wouldn't be able to fly in those zones but then again they probably won't be adventuring in them either. 

Whether this is a positve thing for the game is another question. It incentivizes me not just to log in
regularly but also to play more when I do. I feel I get the best of both worlds, playing one character through all the content normally and then having the rest cruise through it in gear better than the content itself rewards, but I can see why it might end up being a disincentive for some people.

Whether it's a good idea or a bad one, though, I don't think it can be denied that it's exceedingly generous. If you don't like it you don't have to do it but I suspect some people made that decision without really understanding the possibilities. From the comments I see, both in and out of game, my feeling is that a lot of people gave up on Overseer missions well before they began to see just how rewarding they can be.

For solo players, that is. I'm not sure how much use they are to heroic group players or raiders. The gear certainly won't be of any interest and there's not much in the blue or yellow rewards I can imagine them getting excited over, either. It's mostly temporary adorns. Although, come to think of it, that may be the kind of thing players doing more difficult content burn through fast. I wouldn't know.

In the time it's taken me to write this I've completed several missions and recieved two new ones. One of those came from the Bristlebane Day holiday special Heist Society. I almost missed that one. It's a five quest sequence with some exceptionally nice, guaranteed rewards and it also pulls from the Season 3 pool for the random stuff, meaning a chance at new missions and agents. Very well worth doing in the few days it has left to run.

And that's me back playing EQII every day again. Mission accomplished from Daybreak's perspective, I guess.

When You Hear The Call

I've kind of fallen of the EverQuest II wagon these last few thanks to Valheim shouldering everything else to one side. It's niggling away at the back of my mind because I had a very loose plan of action for the winter and spring involving filling out the gaps in my Berserker's gear with drops from PQs and getting all the adornment slots filled and upgraded through crafting.

That's what I did last year and it was steady, satisfying gameplay. Nothing spectaular but gently enjoyable, a background hum of pleasure in the gaming day. 

It helped a lot that at the time I was regularly getting very nice upgrades from the Overseer system. Over the lifetime of the two EverQuest games there have been too many innovations and additions to remember, but only a handful of systemic changes that I'd consider to be fundamentally game-changing - AAs, mercenaries, flying mounts...

The Overseer mechanic is one of those. It made me in-game rich (by any previous standards I'd known, anyway) and better-equipped than I'd ever been before, in both games. I was really hoping the same would happen this year with a post-expansion new season but as yet we haven't had one. 

The good news is that one is definitely planned. Until it arrives there's not much incentive for me to keep up my previous routine, bashing out Overseer quests as though they were dailies. Which, I guess, they are.

Oh, I remember this one!

By dipping out to go play viking I've also missed the bus for this year's PQs. They'll still happen, of course, and people will still do them, but the feeding frenzy that was so compulsive back in January will have abated to a desultory trickle by now as most people who care will have found the drops they wanted.

I really love public quests in mmorpgs. I think they embody the spirit of what the genre was probably always meant to be better than just about anything. Certainly much more so than instanced dungeons or raids. 

To my way of thinking, the true meaning of "massively multiple" is scores of people, hundreds if the infrastructure can stand it, all engaged in the same activity at the same time in the same shared space. And it needs to be an open space into which anyone can wander by accident, not some by-appointment, only if your name is on the list instance.

Without a doubt that's the primary reason I've stuck with Guild Wars 2 all these years, even though at times it frustrates and annoys me as much as it entertains. The original vision, overhyped and oversold as it was, still comes closest to my idea of an ideal mmorpg. 

ArenaNet never managed to close the deal on the promises they made but luckily for all of us mmorpgs are so ferociously complex in their construction, so iceberg-weighted with unseen engines and ballast, that even when those who seek to control them want to make changes there's only so much they can do. You can put a hat on the cat but its still a cat for all that.

Not so sure about this, though...

 

For all the time and effort the developers invested in fractals and raids, GW2 remains at heart a sprawling, open-world game, where things happen and everyone joins in. Yes, your character has to be level 80 for a lot of them and yes you have to have bought the Path of Fire expansion, but even allowing for that there's a never-ending firework display of "events" in the parts of the game anyone can visit for free.

EQ2 doesn't have the advantage of being built that way but it has a good track record of inclusivity all the same. The mentoring system and the agnostic dungeons are both intentional attempts to get everyone playing together regardless of awkward barriers like levels. They're shaky in implementation but the ideas behind them are sound.

The team has stuck doggedly with Public Quests for many years now, even though they cause all kinds of problems. It's tempting to say the game was never built for that number of people to come together and fight giant monsters except apparently it was because I have screenshots of my characters doing it a decade and a half ago. We had dragon attacks when we put the wizard portals back up after the cataclysm and I'm pretty sure that was in the first year after the game came out.

I just bet you would.

No-one called them "Public Quests" back then. I think we called them "World Events". They didn't have the semi-formal structure that came later. You just heard something was happening and you turned up to see what it was. Now you get quests and achievements and guaranteed, personalized drops but it's really the same thing.

Over the years, EQ2 has bundled dozens, maybe hundreds of these things together to make a living world. Some, like the raising of the portals, happen only once. Others come around time after time, like old friends.

Norrath's calendar of holiday events, as I've often said, is second to none in the genre. This month sees one of the year's biggest flurries of activity on that front. Brew Day is winding down but even before it goes we'll have another event to enjoy. The Chronoportals open today.

As well as some very nice-looking new house items, including some excellent paintings, the drops from the Ancient Cyclops instance (the one that's a PQ in all but name) have been updated to make them useful for max levels. Another chance to upgrade some of those slots for a casual like me. There's also a new Overseer quest, something I'm very happy to see.

The chronoevent is a short one by Norrathian standards. It's only here for just over a week. It's just as well because two more are coming along right behind. The Beast'r Eggstravaganza and Bristlebane Day are both active on the Test Server right now.

I read the patch notes for both and they look great. Beast'r has five more egg pets to find and a title for finding them. And there's another new Overseer quest for Bristlebane. 

The trickster's feast also brings a new patchwork fight (yet another kind of unofficial PQ) to the dark side of Luclin. I haven't seen the loot table for that but historically the patchworks have been very generous when done at level so I'm hopeful my Berserker might get something he needs when he goes to try his luck. 

Everyone loves an egg pun.

There are also the inevitable new crafting books that I'll buy and never use and of course all the old quests and features from every other year are up again. 

I've spoken before about the misleading naming convention in Norrath that has events known as Brew or Bristlebane Day lasting for weeks but there is actually a proper Bristlebane Day. It is, of course, April the first and that's the one and only chance you'll have (this year) to match wits with a new riddle-setter. 

We already have the Sphinx but rumor is (if you can call something a rumor when its already happening on Test) they'll be joined this year by another question-setting entity for just that one day. That's definitely appointment gaming.

As well as the returning holidays, there's a major game update brewing. I'd say more about it but I don't know much. Or indeed anything. 

Well, I know what's in this thread. It's called Whispers of Tyranny and most of it probably isn't going to be for me, being raids and heroics. There's some solo content, though, and some quests but no mention of a new Overseer Season. 

There's a beta starting today but I won't be joining in with that. My days of beta-testing content for live games where I'm going to be playing that content just weeks later are over.

All of the above is also motivation for me to get myself organized and get back to logging in to EverQuest II at least often enough to see all that new stuff. Maybe to stick around and farm the drops I need if there really are some good ones I could use. 

And I need the push. It's getting to be all Valheim all the time around here and I'ma  little uncomfortable about it. Much though I've enjoyed being a viking these last few weeks it's good to be reminded other pantheons are available.

Something To Do

Just a very quick post to mention a couple or three things going on right now that won't be around forever. I already alluded to the Beast'r holiday in EverQuest II, which only lasts for a few days. It also includes a new Overseer mission that begins in Darklight Woods.

I ran it last night and today. Well, I went there and got it, after which it's just a case of remembering to collect the rewards for each stage and trigger the next. You can do that from anywhere, on any character.

The rewards for completing the sequence of missions, apart from the regular Overseer chests, are a new agent with the verdurous talent, the Dendro Defender prefix title and a choice of really lovely butterfly plushies. Okay, flutterwasps. Same difference.

Beast'r is only with us until Tuesday so there's no time to waste if you want any of those. After that we'll be pulling on our chaps and saddling up our ponies for a Showdown at the Diaku Corral. That one comes with a lot of content and some really rather enticing freebies, as Telwyn has already noticed.

More about that here when it happens, I'm sure.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, there's another ongoing promotion in EQII right now, adding time-limited mercenary reduction potions to final boss crates in Blood of Luclin instances. If you play EQII you should know what that means and if you don't, well you really don't need to, do you?

Worth noting is that those potions also drop from the crates you get for doing the gathering quests in Recuso Tor and Sanctus Seru. Or they probably do. Last week's promo was mount reduction potions and I got two of them that way.

Over in the senior EverQuest, a game I now seem to be playing again, thanks to the Overseer feature, there's another 50% xp bonus over Easter. Always welcome, particularly now I actually have a way of levelling up my higher level characters that doesn't take forever.

Also, the evocatively named Stomples Day is happening over there. Evocative of what, though, well that's quite a question, isn't it? It's similar to Beast'r if I remember correctly. I know I did it when it was new but that was a long time ago. In the unlikely event I do it again this year I'll try and post something about it.

More interesting than repeating holiday content is the #EverQuest Together promotion which began yesterday and runs all the way until the second week of May. It's mostly a bunch of cash shop offers but it also opens all of EQ's Time Limited Progression Servers up to everyone for a month. Well, all the ones that aren't just about to be merged, at least.

Normally an All Access account (aka a subscription) is required to play on these but now any freeloading casual can join in. Why they'd want to is another matter but the option is there if anyone wants to grab it.

I might. I was thinking only yesterday that I miss levelling up from scratch. I was pondering starting in some other MMORPG (ArcheAge Unchained, which Mailvaltar often suggests as a good option, is also allowing anyone to play, no sub required, although only for the weekend). Maybe I'll make yet another EQ character, get to level ten and never play them again.

That's about all I wanted to mention but there seem to be MMORPG promotions and freebies flying in all directions just now. You don't pay your money and you take your choice, I guess.

And finally, in completely unrelated news I'm just so thrilled about I have to mention it, even though it is utterly and completely irrelevant to anything I've just written, Lana del Rey has just released the title and artwork for her upcoming spoken word album: It's called Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass and you know what it looks like because it's up there at the top of the post.

I want it now!

Do Rabbits Lay Eggs? : EverQuest

Yesterday saw the uncomfortable elision of  a couple of notable dates on the calendar - Easter Sunday and April Fools Day. It's hard to think of of two "holidays" that share less common ground; one the most grave and serious date in the Christian calendar, the other the epitome of idiocy.

I suspected the outcome for MMOs would be the least silly silly day on record and so it proved. Wilhelm, who keeps an annual tally of Blizzard's efforts, could barely find anything to post about. Reading the comments, I found it instructive that Blizzard took a lot more trouble coming up with gags and pranks for their Korean fanbase than they were willing to expend on their largely Christian North American and European markets.

GW2, which has in the past made a Big Deal of All Fool's Day, not always to everyone's amusement, ignored it completely this year. We did get the return of Super Adventure Box but that's now a  month-long event that's long outgrown its origins as an April Fool's surprise.

A shining eggsample.

Easter, of course, also has a strong, non-religious presence in the West. The moveable feast co-incides - approximately - with the coming of Spring. I guess that's where all those rabbits and eggs come in.

Telwyn reminded me that EQ2, unofficial cheerleader for the concept of MMO Holidays, added an egg-themed event last year. The awkwardly-named Beast'r is running again right now with some new content and I was planning to pop in to grab some fresh eggs for my houses but somehow I ended up in EverQuest instead.

EverQuest's main condescension to All Fool's Day seemed to be the forcible conversion of the in-game text font to the supposedly hysterical Comic Sans. I thought I'd accidentally changed something in my settings and it was only when someone mentioned it in General Chat that I realised it was supposed to be a joke.

I have no idea who these guys are but, to quote Velma Dinkley, "I smell a mystery".

Something that turned out to be far more exciting, entertaining and enjoyable was my serendipitous discovery of a brightly colored painted egg, lying on the ground in Plane of Knowledge. In the original version of Norrath you could drop anything you carried on the ground and it would lie there, waiting to be picked up. That changed long ago but there are still "ground spawns", items that appear as obsevable, interactable "physical" presences in the world.

Naturally, if I ever see one of these ground spawns, I grab it. I snatched up the egg and examined it. It was a quest item. I looked at it and puzzled for a moment. Then I stuffed it in my packs and forgot about it. If you play EQ for five minutes you'll likely find five quest items you don't have quests for. I tend to hang on to them until I need space, then sell or destroy them.

My plan was to hunt Aviaks in South Karana. I took the Stone to Arena, zoned into Lake Rathetear and started swimming. I killed a Gnoll Embalmer on my way through the gnoll camp. That got me the Skull of Jhen'Tra, a magic item people camped for back in the distant past, and an Achievement. EQ has a full Achievement system these days, which is yet another thing I have to read up.

EQ's treant is a rare case of the updated model strongly improving on the original. These guys are huge and scary.

I was happily killing Rooks and Harriers beneath the Birdhouse in SK when I noticed something shining in the darkness. I picked it up. It was another egg, painted with a different design. I carried on hunting.

I pulled a Rook just as a roaming Avocet appeared out of the gloom. Red to me. It added. I feared the Avo but couldn't land darkness to snare it. It took off like a rocket. As I was chasing it through the black, rainy Karana night, my pet beating on the Rook as I tried to get the Avo snared, I spotted yet another egg, glowing under a tree.

When the Avo and the Rook were finally dead and I was out of mana, I rode my worg back to the spot where I remembered seeing the egg. It was there. I picked it up. It was painted in yet another, different design

Now I was excited. I began to think I might be able to find them all. I wondered whether the ones I'd already found would count. Did I need the quest in my journal before I picked them up for it to update? It would be so annoying to have them all and then get the quest and have to go find them all a second time!

Centaurs don't have indoor lighting, apparently.

I quickly googled "EverQuest Crosshatched Painted Egg". The top result took me to Allakhazam, still an excellent EQ resource, where I found full details of a quest called The Origin of the Cuniculus. Reading it up I found that not only was it a quest I could do it was a quest I very much wanted to do. I mean, who doesn't want a wand that turns you into a rabbit? ("Cuniculus", by the way, is "a small conduit or burrow, as an underground drain or rabbit hole". Don't let anyone ever tell you gaming isn't educational).

When I finished my level I gated back to PoK. It was getting late but Allakhazam had the quest flagged as "Seasonal" and I was worried about what that might mean. Usually holiday quests hang around for a week at least but Bristlebane Day, as April 1st is known in Norrath, has always featured quests that last no longer than the day itself.

I found Grundle Cogwelder and ran through his dialog to get the quest in my journal. The quest instantly updated to acknowledge the three eggs I'd already found.

Obvious question: who or what is Stomples?

EQ is so much more accomodating than it once was. Not only does it retro-fit quest drops, it even has an excellent on-screen quest tracker, just like a modern MMO. With that up in game and the Allakhazam walkthrough to guide me, I set off to Qeynos.

It took about an hour to find the rest of the eggs. Some were in Qeynos Hills around Blackburrow and Surefall Glade. There were plenty at the Barbarian Village in West Karana, where I had to Gather Shadows to conceal myself from red-con necrocidal barbarians. I also killed a roaming treant and a Wandering Spirit that I remembered hunting for some long -forgotten quest a decade ago.

It took the best part of twenty minutes to ride my Worg through West and North Karana. I found the last egg I needed - Sunburst Painted - at the Centaur Village in South Karana. I memmed Gate and ported back to Plane of Knowledge for the turn-in.

Tiny rabbits. Hard to see - even harder to catch.

Grundle, clearly beginning to lose his grasp on reality, handed me a wand called Madness of Stomples. It fits in the ammo slot, where I previously had a Bookworm that gives +2 to fishing. Now I have a wand that randomly either turns me into a rabbit or summons a horde of tiny rabbits that scurry madly in all directions. I call that one heck of an upgrade.

That quest has been in EverQuest for seven years but it's the first I knew of it. Probably because it's the first time I've played EQ on Bristlebane Day. It was one of those lucky happenstances that exemplify what's so wonderful about this hobby.

A real "you had to be there" moment, all the better for coming entirely unanticipated.