2024 20/25

Yesterday I forced myself to play EverQuest II. It wasn't, you understand, that I didn't want to. It's just that I wanted to play Once Human more. Really, quite a lot more.

For the reasons given in yesterday's post, however, I'm increasingly of a mind that spending every available play-hour in a beta that's going to close down and wipe in about three weeks' time (Presumably, although who knows? Hard information on the beta itself is ridiculously hard to find.) isn't the greatest idea I ever had.

Anyway, I'm starting to wean myself off the ephemeral and onto the eternal, which certainly seems like a fair description of EQII these days. The old warhorse is closing in on twenty years' service, which still leaves it lumbering along behind its better-known, more successful elder sibling, EverQuest itself. 

The original will reach a quarter of a century of continuous operation in just a few months. EQII has to wait a while longer but the two landmark (Oops! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it...) anniversaries landing in the same calendar year has prompted Daybreak Games to declare 2024 The Year of Darkpaw. 

Based on the information they've released so far, I suspect it's going to be hard for anyone other than the faithful to keep up with the details of everything happening in both games but fortunately we have The EverQuest Show to do that for us. I'm hoping I can get away with linking to their coverage, rather than doing any original research, like I just did. That's my plan, anyway.

Realistically, I'm only going to involve myself directly with the EQII celebrations, anyway. A while back I would have tried to do something in both games but these days it's as much as I can do to play one MMORPG at a time. 

The other reason is that, somewhat atypically, I suspect, I'm finding that the older I get, the more I want to see, hear and play new things rather than revisit old favorites. I swear I was more nostalgic about the pleasures of my youth when I started playing EverQuest in 1999 than I am now.

So far, Darkpaw are being understandably cagey about what they have in store for the franchise in this momentous, celebratory year. For EQII, there's a framework but not so much in the way of detail. One thing we do know is that the Gods are coming to play. 

Okay, not the actual Gods. As far as I can recall, we never get to kill the real pantheon. It's always their Avatars, those quasi-autonomous, self-aware constructs the true Gods like to send out to take a kicking for them. Or something. Honestly, who pays attention to this stuff?

Raiders, that's who. Avatar battles were a big thing for them in EQII at one time so I imagine the news that 2024 is going to be All Avatars All The Time comes as great news to a certain demographic.

It doesn't mean an awful lot to me. I read the official press release with interest but very little understanding. It seems this time we don't even get to interact with the Avatars right away. First, we have to go through the Heralds. It's a bit like talking to a receptionist to make an appointment to see a  PA, with a view to setting up a meeting with the General Manager, all while the mysterious, never-to-be-seen CEO watches the whole thing on a screen in the C-Suite, stroking a white cat and chuckling. Sinisterly.

It seems we'll be meeting and beating some godly Avatars we've fought before, along with some new ones we've yet to crush. The Norrathian pantheon is stacked with deities so there are plenty to choose from. I imagine they're lining up for the privelige.

First up is Tarew Marr, aka the Fathom Lord. He's quite senior as these things go, being "the first member of the Triumvirate of Water, the third creation of The Nameless". I could go into a lot more detail but I won't. If you're interested I recommend following the link.

Tarew Marr's Herald, a louche-looking nereid with scales in a fetching shade of blue, can be found lounging on the banks of an island at the heart of Mystic Lake, the second zone in the Fallen Dynasty, the long-forgotten Adventure Pack from 2006. It's somewhere most players probably haven't seen in a decade and change, if ever. Fortunately, I go there not that infrequently - for reasons - so I had no trouble finding her.

Since I was on my Level 126 Berserker, I got the high-level version of her quest, the one she gives to everyone over Level 125. According to The EverQuest Show's write-up "The Herald has a rotation of 6 different quests which can be completed every three hours." I got the one that asks you to "Assist in gathering energy rerserves for the avatar's summoning rituals", which seems to mean killing Named mobs in the current expansion.

That sounds like the short straw to me. Apparently there are six quests and you can do one every three hours. I might try taking them and deleting them to see what they all are, then cherry-picking whichever looks easiest. I'm pretty sure the gathering one is going to be quicker - and certainly easier - than killing a bunch of bosses.

There's no rush. The thing to remember is... this is going on all year. I'm assuming the Avatars are going to be sequential, with each new Herald replacing the previous one, but maybe they'll stack. Once they're up, perhaps they're up for good, or at least until the Miraculous Year is over. I guess we'll find out soon enough. I wasn't really planning on fighting any of them anyway, at least not if it requires a formal raid. If it turns out they're Public Quests, then I'm in.

The whole event looks to be tailored to meet the requirements of both very committed players and casuals alike. With each episode operating independently, you can obviously drop in and out as and when you find the time. On the other hand, with the whole cavalcade going on non-stop for twelve months, there should be enough to keep the hardcore logging in and grinding until they're begging for it all to end.

It's not just an event for high levels, either. If you turn up in Mystic Lake with your low-level character, the Herald will still find you something to do. There's a big "Book of Deeds" on a pedestal you can click on. It has multiple, straightforward tasks that anyone can do. 

Of course you have to get to the island first. It's in the middle of Mystic Lake, a zone in which flying doesn't work, a zone that's full of aggressive mobs, all in the mid fifties and sixties. Added to that, the the island is only accessible by way of a single path that goes directly through a disorienting maze of tunnels, filled with vivious mobs, some of them Heroics. There are even a couple of Nameds in there. Good luck doing that on your level 20.

There's no instant map travel there, either, although, if you do make it, you can at least buy a teleport ability from the vendor that means you'll never have to do it again. I should have done that last night but I forgot. Now I'll have to walk!

The main reason I forgot was that I rushed off to take a look at the other new event already in place for the celebrations. Someone was asking about it in general chat and I thought it sounded interesting. 

It's a scavenger hunt or a rather a Collection. A series of Collections, in fact. I do like a Collection in EQII, which is just as well because there are many hundreds of them by now. Thousands, probably.

The new ones they've added for the Year of Darkpaw (They get their own category in the Collection tab under that name.) are cut&pastes of old ones that have been arbitrarily ramped up to Fabled quality. I imagine that saved a lot of time although it certainly doesn't make them any quicker to do. 

I started off flying around Antonica and in a few minutes I'd picked up random examples of four out of the five available collections. It's always great at the start, when everything you find fills a slot, but pretty soon it's going to be a dozen "Gots" for every "Want".

Luckily, the shinies are tradable. I didn't check but I imagine there's already a booming market for swaps. Might be a good money-making opportunity. These things often are.

The reward for all the quests and collections is an event currency to spend at the event vendor. When I have some Year of Darkpaw Doubloons to spend, I'll go check out what I can get for them. I'm in no hurry. 

While I was on, I also checked out the new Frostfell quest. I'd heard there was one and I didn't want to miss it. I found it easily enough. Then it took me about two minutes to finish it.

Well, it was actually more like ten but nearly all of that was clearing out my bags so I'd have space to pick up all the presents. In keeping with most holiday "quests" of the last year or two, this one's actually a Collection. 

As you gather the presents that lie scattered all across Frostfell's Wonderland Village, all of them filled with crafting mats as usual, you might occasionally come across an unusual and highly unseasonal Empty Gallows Reed Basket. This is your starter.

With that duly clicked, a quest installs itself in your journal and as you carry on gathering presents, several more unpleasant artifacts appear among the ribbons and glitter. When you have them all, it's off to the Feerrott where the Ogre who the gifts are for (His name's on them.) is happy to take them and give you back the basket.

Frostfell ends a little early this year, on the 6th of January, so if you'd like a wicker basket filled with skulls and candy canes, you still have a few days. Then you have the rest of the month to collect what promises to be the first in a year-long series of cash shop giveaways. This month it's a cute vanity pet, Maxembert the Feisty, who does look a lot cuter in game than in the pictures. 

It's all in the animations, for which I imagine we have EQII's star animator Ttobey to thank. Ttobey is the GOAT as the kids probably don't say any more.

That was all I managed to get done last night but now I've re-introduced myself to the game I was happily invested in just a few weeks ago, I'll most definitely be back, hopefully every day. Novelty is great but there's a lot to be said for familiarity and this Year of Darkpaw promises to combine the two.

Fool Me Once...

April Fool's Day is far from being a favorite of mine but EverQuest II's take on the "holiday" has always been entertaining. Practical jokes sit a lot better in video games than in real life, I find.

They're very gentle jokes, too. I spent an entertaining hour or so this morning, completing the Tin Metal Protection questline, in which Norrath's Lord of Misrule, Fizzlethorpe Bristlebane, amuses himself mightily by sending you on a wild drakota chase (No actual drakota involved.)

It's a parody of a cliche with a meta-joke bundled in. It reminds me of those children's tales, where some hapless innocent tries to do someone a favor and ends up doing chores for everyone in town. Basically, every fetch quest, ever. 

The reward, the Tin Metal Helm of Protection, actually an inverted cooking pot, can't even be worn as a an appearance item. All you can do is place it in your house, where it looks like what it is - an upturned stewpot gone rusty. 

Until you activate its protective field, that is. Then it looks like this!

Did you leave the gas on again?

Given that I've done this quest at least three times before, you might think I'd have better things to do with my time but no, apparently, I do not. I put it down to the unwarranted enthusiasm that overtakes some of us when we either create a new character or, in this case, transfer an old one to a new server because, yes, it was little Mitsu who was making - and doing - all the running.

I already knew that all the NPCs who were sending me on scavenger hunts through Freeport were the god Bristlebane in disguise, so the reveal didn't come as a surprise. I had, however, forgotten that it leads on to a second quest, this time in a dungeon with proper fights and everything.

The follow-on quest is called Rescuing the Princess and I'm assuming I must have done it before, only I can't for the life of me remember when or with what character. As I was slaughtering Iksar cultists deep in a dungeon in the Emerald Jungle, with my own Iksar Shadowknight mercenary tanking them for me, I was trying recall when I might have done all of this before. Nothing came back to me at all.

The princess turns out to be none other than (Spoiler!) Firiona Vie, although at the very end (Double Spoiler!!), the elf-maiden is revealed to be one of Bristlebane's goblin flunkies in disguise. 

I told you to lay off the Elven wine, Fi.

Firiona Vie, as the Public Face of the EverQuest Franchise, turns up all over the place, of course. I've met her many times on many characters over the years. Even so, It's not something that happens so often I don't notice when it does, or fail to remember. I can be a bit of a Firiona fangirl at times so it surprises me I can't recall this particular excursion, all of which makes me wonder whether maybe I haven't done this quest before, after all.

That's one of the things about EQII and other aged mmorpgs that you either find endearing or infuriating; there's so much damn content now, it's near-impossible even to remember what you have and haven't done. Better that way than than the reverse, in my opinion, though I know not everyone agrees.

Whether I'd rescued the princess before or not, I had a good time doing it today. It gave me a chance to try out my new mercenary, Lord Valkiss Ssi`sh, the Shadowknight Freeport-aligned characters get for their ten-year Veteran award. Qeynosians and other goodie-goodies get the services of Lady Liae Croae, a Paladin, instead. I'd rather have had a pally for the buffs and healing but not so much I was going to try and sneak into Qeynos at Level 26 to claim her.

Mitsu isn't Level 26 any more, though; not after her adventures in mischief today. She's Level 30 now. Levels in EQII pass very quickly up to about the eighties or nineties. I wasn't even running any xp buffs. I'm in no hurry to level her up so I might need to think about toning the xp down a bit, not ancouraging it to flood in even faster.

Stand back, Valkiss! I think he's going to explode!

Fortunately that's something you can do very easily. You can divert some or all of your xp to AAs, which has the satisfying effect of making you more and more powerful while you stay at the same level, or you can switch xp off altogether. 

You can also mentor back down to enjoy any content you accidentally outlevelled, if you're one of those people who can't enjoy quests when they've gone grey. I'm never sure what difference it makes, really, although I do experience a spurious sense of satisfaction while one-shotting nominally at-level mobs under the influence of the auto-mentoring superhero effect. 

I'd probably enjoy most mmorpgs more if my character could one-shot everything, if I'm brutally honest. I know people say it gets boring but that's rarely been my experience. It's far more often been the long, attritional fights that have bored the chainmail pants off me. 

That might be why I've been so keen on the Overseer function ever since it was added to the game a few years ago. It offers all the interesting parts of questing (Storyline, travel, characters, rewards) without all that tedious combat. 

I like the holiday Overseer quests for another reason, too: they're very quick. Each step takes just half an hour. Sometimes the final stage might be bit longer. The whole thing can easily be done in a session or two. I'm in the middle of the Bristlebane Day Overseer questline as I put this post together and it's already updated twice as I write.

Collections are another combat-free way to progress your character in EQII. There's a new one for the Bristlebane holiday this year but it's packaged in an unusual way. 

If you're out foraging up holiday crafting mats from the Jester's Gardens, bushes that only spawn during the event, you'll pretty quickly find a discarded piece of equine equipment - or should that be bovine? If you inspect it, you'll receive the quest Saddle Up, which turns out to be not so much a quest as a collection.

The reward is a Bovoch plushie for your house. Or rather your garden. Who keeps a cow in the house?

What I have to decide now is whether I want to carry on with Mitsu or swap over to my regular characters on Skyfire. Low-mid level play is very addicting because the progress is so immediate and the rewards so frequent but having a new home to decorate is also a big attraction. I'd like Mitsu to start building a library of holiday crafting books but I need to remember to keep my archives up to date with everyone else. too.

I'm not intending to swap focus. I imagine Mitsu is set for a carefree life, pottering around her private island, doing the odd spot of decorating, popping out every so often for holidays and special events like this one. It's not practical to maintain a slew of max-level characters on multiple servers (Unless you're willing to dedicate yourself to the game like the much-missed Cloudrat) but it's eminently possible to keep multiple characters in play with a few hours here and there, now and then, so long as you set your goals appropriately.

Most importantly, it needs to be fun. And if you can't have fun on Bristlebane Day, when can you?

Graverobbing For Fun And Profit

New World continues to eat every other mmorpg's lunch but I did manage to get some time in EverQuest II this weekend, courtesy of a couple of days at work. By the time I got home I was too tired to deal with my aging and underpowered PC struggling to cope with the demands made on it by the weekend population surge, even with graphics set to Low. I didn't log into the game at all on either Saturday or Sunday.

It was a fortuitous break. I'd been meaning to check if there was anything new in this year's Nights of the Dead festival in EQII. I realize this isn't a news site but I still feel mildly uncomfortable if I miss the oportunity to report on any significant changes in the handful of games I play regularly and thanks to New World I hadn't even made time to look at the EQII Traders write-up, let alone to log in and see for myself what was happening.

As it turns out, there's quite a lot that's new. I won't get out my soap-box or my loud-hailer and bang on yet again about how Darkpaw seem to be able to add more content with a small team than other developers manage with one ten times the size, even though I'm not alone in having noticed the discrepancy, but once again I was impressed. 

There's a gigglegibber goblin who'll cast an illusion spell on you that cycles though a selection of creepy costumes. It lasts until you click it off. I particularly liked this one.

The EQII Traders article gives full chapter and verse on all the new content so I won't rehash all of it. There's a new quest (which I have done), a new crafting book (which I have bought and used - I strongly recommend the beautiful Rubicite windows.) a new collection (which I have finished) and a number of new rewards for old quests (a couple of which I have acquired.) There are also some new things to buy on the Nights of the Dead vendor, several of which are very nice. I haven't bought those yet but I will.

The new quest is fun. It's nominally a crafting quest but it requires no actual crafting skill. You trot around Freeport (or Qeynos, if you're that way inclined) gathering burial dirt, scarecrow bats and ephemeral frights to use as ingredients to make "fright conjuration powder". 

The frights are easy to spot. They're blue wispy ghosts that swirl about in a very obvious and striking manner. The burial dirt comes from mounds of earth next to the gravestones that dot the capital cities at this time of year, the same ones you dig up with the shovel to get all the various goodies, including two of the three collections, one of those being the new one that was added this year.

You might want to draw me a picture, Zintris.

 

I had a bit more trouble finding the scarecrow bats, mostly because I seem to be as blind as one. A bat, that is. It took me ages to notice there are scarecrows next to many of the pumpkin patches. After I'd run past about a dozen of them I finally realized what I was missing and clicked on one, which was how I got my first bat.

The quest, when completed, gives a very nice vanity pet in the form of a set of those whirling ephemeral frights. It also allows you to use the three fright dispensers you placed around the city for the second part of the quest. Every time you do that you get either a trick or a treat. 

The first time I did it I got swarmed by bats. The second time I got five charnel caramel bars. I ate one and next thing I knew I was surrounded by a shoal of what looked like ectoplasmic eels... or something even less savory. There are several more candies with aura effects and they're non-tradeable so it's well worth stocking up while the event is on.

Is it just me or are those bats flying upside-down?

 

There's still time for that, I'm happy to say. Even though this post comes unhelpfully late, Nights of the Dead runs for another ten days, finishing on November 4th. Plenty of time to get everything you want.

Compared to certain other Halloween holidays in games I won't mention (*cough* Guild Wars 2 *cough*) doing all that's required to fill your bags with all that's needed is a relaxing and enjoyable experience. There's still the inevitable rng to contend with, naturally, but at least if luck doesn't go your way you can sometimes buy your way out of a lengthy grind.

I spent over an hour digging up graves in the hope of completing the new collection but there was one piece that eluded me. I know it would have shown itself eventually but I already had more grave mounds, bloody toothed skeletons, snuffed candles and patchwork baby dragons than I knew what to do with so I stopped digging and checked the broker for the elusive Unholy Chains of Fear.

 

The reward is a very striking and deeply horrible plushie of something called the Dream Scorcher. I assume it's a raid boss in some raid I've never done and I would certainly not want to meet it on a dark night or even in broad daylight for that matter. 

Probably fortunately, given its looks, it can't be re-sized so it shouldn't give me the heebie-jeebies every time I use the storage chest I've set it to guard. It's too small to be scared of. So I keep telling myself.

I still have a few more things I'd like to do before the event ends. I got all three of the Phantasm Witchcraft pieces from my grave-robbing exploits but they're attuneable (aka bind on equip) and also heirloom (aka account bound) so I need to get them again for my necromancer and maybe my warlock, too. That's going to take a while.  

Which is fine by me. Digging up graves goes very well with listening to the T20 world cup on the radio and it's something to do in the evenings when New World gets too laggy to be fun. 

I also need to get a few rounds of the Public Quest in, if people are still doing it. There are Familiars to be had. New ones.

All in all, another fine holiday event from the game that does them best.

Taking Heart by Snargle Goldclaw Is Currently Out On Loan

When we talk about the writing in mmorpgs, all the attention tends to focus on two things: the overarching central narrative and the accompanying zonal, regional and miscellaneous side quests. It's the quality of the former that tends to dictate how the game is perceived in terms of overall quality. The rest at best contribute to an impression of the game's depth and range.

What generally doesn't get much of a mention at all are the in-game texts - books, scrolls, notes, journals, diaries, inscriptions, broadcasts, computer files, scraps of paper blowing on the wind. In some games these might be few and far between. In others they make up entire content streams.

There's a whole post in that. A series, perhaps. This isn't it. Not yet.

At this stage it's no more than a passing thought, inspired by a single entry in Guild Wars 2's most recent update notes:

• A new achievement, The Goldclaw Holiday Collection, has been added to encourage discovery of a hidden series of festival-themed novels, each available only during their associated festival. Progress in this achievement is not retroactive.

That sounded intriguing and since we have a festival going on right now, the Festival of the Four Winds, it seemed like a good moment to investigate.

Ironically for an achievement predicated on in-game writings, I'm not at all sure how I would have got on if I'd limited myself to the information available inside the game itself. I took it from the "not retroactive" note that the books, or some of them, had been in game for some time already but I'd never happened across any of them so there was no chance I'd be able to go back to where I'd found them and pick them up again for credit. 

I wouldn't have found the one that's currently available to collect without doing some fairly extensive research out of game. I began by googling Goldclaw Holiday Collection, which took me to this wiki entry.  

From there I learned the names of all the collectible books and at which festivals each can be found. Clicking through the links, I was able to establish that, yes, these are all books that already exist in game, albeit only quite recently. They seem to have been added at the last occurences of Wintersday, Lunar New Year, Halloween, Superadventure Box and now the Four Winds festival, during 2020 and 2021.

Even though I play every day, attend all the festivals except SAB, have map chat on the whole time (it's busy in festival maps) and generally have my eye open for this sort of thing, I had no idea any of these books existed.

What's more, as I pursued my investigations, I discovered all the books were written by Snargle Goldclaw,  a Charr NPC who was introduced in the Icebrood Saga and who already has three other achievements associated with him. I finished the whole of the Icebrood Saga and I have absolutely no memory of ever hearing of him, much less meeting him.

That may say more about my memory than the quality of the Icebrood Saga, which by and large I generally enjoyed. I do tend to remember a lot more about the beginning of it than the middle and the end, though, which suggests whatever engagement I had with the story faded as it went on.

I did eventually track Snargle down. He's in Eye of the North, the miserable, characterless hangar ANet are trying to foist on us as the new central hub for the game. I only go there if I absolutely have to so I hadn't seen him until then.

Before I found out I needed to talk to Snargle to get the whole thing started, I went to Labyrinthine Cliffs, the map where the Four Winds festival takes place, and spent half an hour running around trying to find the hidden book in an organic, naturalistic, roleplaying fashion. I looked in all the places a sentient, rational actor might reasonably be expected to hide a book and found nothing.

That turned out to be because it's actually out in the open, exposed to wind, rain and sun, on a ledge half way up a cliff out in the middle of nowhere, a location absolutely no-one would ever visit for any sensible purpose. For certain sure, no-one would go there to read a book.

I certainly wouldn't be telling you where it is if someone on YouTube hadn't told me. And even when I knew where it was I still couldn't get to it until it occured to me to go to the very highest point in the zone and glide down. 

That got me to the book but getting there wasn't enough. I couldn't interact with it in any way. Yet more research revealed that in order to begin the new collection I needed to go speak to Snargle, the snag being he'd only speak to me if I'd already completed a previous quest collection achievement called "Out of the Cold", part of the Icebbrood Saga from over a year ago.

As I can now attest, having been to talk with him on two accounts, I must have done that achievement, even though I can't recall anything about it. My Necromancer, on the account with which I do Living Story, was able to engage in a lengthy and intermittently amusing convesation with both Snargle and his long-suffering assistant, after which I was able to go back to Labyrinthine Cliffs and collect the book. My Elementalist, on the account that doesn't do Living Story, got not much more than a hello.

This speaks to the innate complexity of both GW2 and most long-running mmorpgs. There are too many optional opportunities in these games for even regular players to be fully aware of, far less take part in, all of them. At some point we all, either by choice or by default, settle for a subset of the things we have to do, the things we like to do and the things we happen to do by accident.

I like activities like this collection. It's easy (when you work out what the heck you're supposed to be doing), doesn't take too long and builds nicely over time. Having a book to find at each festival as it appears is a pleasant addition to the routine and I only need to do it once.

The problem is, had it not been flagged up in the patch notes and had I not chanced to read them in full for once, I'd not have known it existed. Going back to where this post started, think of all the hidden texts that don't have collections or achievements attached. What are the chances I'll ever read all of those, in GW2 or any mmorpg I play? 

Slim. 

Does it matter? Not really. Most of these texts, when I do discover them, aren't all that interesting. Some games pump thousands of pages of lore into the world through in-game texts that read like the dullest, driest of textbooks. Some come across like self-indulgent in-jokes, others like writing excercises by designers whose natural forte is not the written word. I don't feel I'm missing all that much.

And yet I'm happy they're there. They do fill out the world. Wilhelm has an ongoing series on immersion that's made me think about all the minor, unsung, uncelebrated touches that add to the sense of place that's so central to the immersive expreience. In-game texts are just one of those touches.

What are the others? Ah, that's another post, or even a series, as yet unwritten. If this was fifteen years ago do you know what I'd do? I'd write up that post and paste it into one of EverQuest II's player-made books. Then I'd place that book in a publicly-access house in game (maybe in Stargrace's EQII Library if it still takes submissions) and post the access details here on the blog.

That's the kind of metatextual, postmodern, self-referential, tricksy thinking I thought was pretty darn clever back then. I'm older now and wiser. I understand it's even more pretentious to theorize about how you could do these things, then not actually do them and it goes without saying, I'm sure, that maximum pretension is always the dream.

Still might do it anyway, though...

Tell Me Where To Go - DCUO's House of Legends

My plan for the morning, if you could call it a plan, was to write something about DCUO's latest update, the potentially game-changing House of Legends. I wasn't going to go into all that much detail, partly because Tipa already did that but mostly because I don't have much in the way of detail to offer. Just what I read in Tipa's post and what's in the official press release, update notes and forum post, really. There's a trailer, too. I've embedded it below.

I probably should have read the update notes before I logged in but I was in a hurry. I wanted to run around, take a few screenshots, check out the new systems and mechanics, maybe do a couple of missions to see what the xp and the rewards were like. 

I thought I'd take some screenshots, get a general impression, be out of there in a couple of hours, tops. Then I'd come here, bang out a quick thousand words or so and get back to what I really wanted to do today, namely play Bless Unleashed until my fingers bleed.

None of that happened. Okay, a some of it happened but not how I'd hoped. First, I had to get the update. I set DCUO patching, went to make a coffee, came back and it was done. That was fast. Then I logged in to character select to choose who'd get to check out the new stuff first.

I figured if I was going to do some levelling to see how the xp curve goes it ought to be a lower-level character. I have two or three of those. Of course, by DCUO standards, all my characters are low level. As is well known by now, or should be, levelling in DCUO is nothing more than an extended tutorial. 

That's a tad unfair. The levelling game in DCUO is more involving and interesting than that makes it sound but, as with Guild Wars 2, almost all of the game happens after you hit the cap. And in DCUO the cap is only level thirty.  

The character I usually play is level twenty-eight. That seemed a bit high for what I wanted. I had a feeling the update also included some kind of new New Player Experience, so I knew what I probably ought to do was make a completely new character, but I also knew that if I did I'd be an hour in character creation. Who ever got through character creation in a superhero mmorpg any faster than that?

Given I didn't want to spend much more than a couple of hours playing DCUO today anyway, that seemed a bit much. Plus, unless they've dropped the old "get off the exploding spaceship" tutorial at the start, that's another ten or fifteen minutes gone. 

I plumped for playing Cassie Praxis, level eight, ranged DPS, hero. Pretty much  all I could remember about her. I made her to test some other update ages ago and haven't played her since. 

I had no idea where I'd left her but she turned out to be idling on a rooftop in Metropolis. Par for the course for a minor hero, I'd say. Absolutely nothing related to the update popped when I logged her in. No introductory cut scene, no voice message from Oracle, nothing in the mail. If I hadn't known there was an update I wouldn't have known there was an update.

It occured to me I had not the least idea what Cassie's powers were. I had a vague idea she could fly so I ran her off the edge of the roof to see if I was right. I was. Lucky Cassie.

 

It looked like she'd been doing something in the immediate area last time she was awake so I got her to carry on with that just while I acclimatized. We took another mission from someone with a question mark hat we happened to pass. Cassie killed some killer bees. I helped by pressing left mouse button over and over. It seemed to work. They died, She didn't.

After that we followed the marker on the map to hand in a quest she'd done earlier and between those two missions she made a full level. That seemed like an awful lot from what I remembered. I was going to pursue it further but then I remembered why I was supposed to be there: House of Legends.

The House of Legends isn't just an update title. It's a new game hub for both heroes and villains. There's some backstory about how the Monitor, one of DC's numerous god-level entities, has called all heroes and villains to "train, coordinate, and prepare for a looming multiversal threat", to which end he's thrown open his own home base in somewhere called The Bleed.

The last time I was up to date with DC continuity was somewhere around 1989. I really did know my stuff for about fifteen years but by now that's on a level with having studied Classics at university. Actually, less relevant than that. I do roughly know who the Monitor is but The Bleed is a new one on me. Visually, it appears to be one of those liminal, metaversal interstices, a space between spaces. You can see it out of the windows from the House of Legends. It's red. Well, the parts that aren't green. Maybe that's why they call it The Bleed.

The HoL itself is a vast improvement on the two previous hubs, both of which, I believe, are still available should you prefer, although you'd have to be as crazy as the Joker to go there instead of the House of Legends. The new hub is, by DCUO standards, tight, organized and manageable. You can see all of it on the map without having to scroll, there are only three main rooms and they're all on roughly the same vertical plane. You can find what you're looking for in seconds not hours. It's astounding!

All the vendors are there and they're all clearly marked. Some of them have been consolidated. For possibly the first time since the game launched over a decade ago I feel I could go shopping without losing my patience or my mind. The teleports are also clearly marked and go where you'd expect, which is a huge innovation.

At this point I should probably have started to be suspicious at the complete lack of hints, nudges or basic acknowledgments from the game that anything had changed. It's very much not like DCUO to let a new update drop without having someone you're supposed to recognize pop up and lecture you about what's changed.

That didn't happen. What did was I got unreasonably involved in collecting blue exclamation points and yellow question marks from around the halls and corridors of the House of Legends. 

DCUO has always had an extensive collection system. Just about all SOE/Daybreak games have them. It's something of a trademark. For some reason I've never really bothered much with them in DCUO but this time I happened to notice when I picked up the first blue exclamation mark that it was a collection of just five items. 

Even I ought to be able to find five collects in a smallish, enclosed area like the HoL. You'd think. And you'd be right. I could and I did. After I'd gone and looked it up on YouTube.

The yellow collection needed twelve items. There were many possible spawns with a fast respwn time but the collects were not unique. You could pick up the same ones over and over. The blue ones were in five, fixed spots and each was different. All you had to do was find all five.

By the time I finally gave up and went searching for a solution I had 11/12 yellows plus a bag full of duplicates. I'd been around and around the HoL, methodically, and I'd found 3/5 blue spawns. It turned out that one of the missing ones was way up at roof level on a support beam, impossible to spot from below. The other one was behind a machine on the floor. I should have seen that one, at least.

There are several different types of collection in DCUO these days. This one seems to be a Briefing. It comes with a nice reward. I think most of them do. I don't know when that changed. One of the reasons I never really bothered with them in the past was that they mostly filled out a lot of lore, much of which, as a DC fan, I already knew. I'll be doing more of them in future, I think. I enjoyed these and it was profitable, too.

When I got the final one I stopped to have lunch. I'd already been playing about as long as I'd budgeted for but I hadn't gotten much done. I'd seen the new hub and taken some screenshots (most of which I later lost when Paint.net crashed) but as for the other features of the update I'd done nothing.

After I'd eaten I logged back in and chose a different character. I did that because although I could look at what was on all the vendors there was literally nothing on any of them my level nine could buy. I thought my regular character, who's done a few of the events and has some of the various currencies, might have more choice.

As soon as I logged her in all those things I'd been missing appeared. There were splash screens introducing the House of Legends update and some of its features. The Monitor appeared and started lecturing me about my responsibilities as a hero. Harbinger (no idea who she is although I'm fairly sure I've met her before) kept projecting herself in front of me as a hologram to tell me about all the things I could do in the new base. Someone called Tempus Fuginaut, of whom I'm sure I never heard before (I'd remember a name as bad as that) tried to explain how the new gearing system works.

Why none of this happened for Cassie Praxis I have no idea. Well, I suppose I can guess. She's too low level I imagine. Or maybe it's a bug. Something must need fixing because there was a red warning in chat telling everyone the servers were coming down in fifteen minutes for a patch.

I ran around trying to get as much done in a quarter of an hour as I could but with about eight minutes to go I disconnected and the server kicked me back to desktop. I tried to log back in but although I was able to connect what I got next was the original launch cinematic, something I haven't seen for years.

I escaped out of that and it took me to character creation. It had to because I didn't have any characters. I'm guessing someone took the account management software offline before closing the game down. Either that or Brainiac has finally managed to kill everyone and we all have to start over from scratch.

Either way, that's me done with DCUO for today. I have this week off work so with luck I'll have time to delve a bit further into the new update and report back with something a little more meaningful. It definitely looks very promising. DCUO is getting stronger and stronger, I think. Maybe people are finally beginning to notice just how solid an mmorpg it is. Clearing away some of the more confusing legacy systems can only accelerate that process.

And let's hope so. We're going to need as many heroes (and villains) as we can get if we're going to be ready for that "looming multiversal threat."

Thank You For Your Patience: EQII

 

It's most likely not going to feature too highly on anyone's agenda right now, which is just as well because I'm a day late spotting it, but following the recent connectivity issues over at Darkpaw towers there's a bonus weekend going on for EverQuest II. According to Dreamweaver's announcement 

"This special bonus will run from November 20, 2020 at 12:01 AM PST and ends November 23, 2020 at 11:59 PM PST

Live Servers during this time will see

Double XP

Double Ethereal Currency

Limited Time Familiar Drops

Limited Time Mount Drops

Bonus Jadeite Medallion Drops"

For once, Kaladim also gets to join in

"Kaladim during this time frame will see

Double XP

Double Hunters Coins

Double Expansion 5 Loot Drops"

Dreamweaver explains more and answers a number of pertinent queries in the thread, although I notice he remains annoyingly silent on the one question that interests me, namely if and when we might be getting a double status event. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent bonus event for EverQuest, which tends to support my own experience that the interruption to service there was on a much smaller scale.

Puppets! Get yer puppets! Get 'em while they're hot!

Even before this current bonus, the Heroes Festival had already been extended by a few days to compensate for the outages. I killed a couple of clothworks and found to my surprise there were apparently some associated collections I hadn't done. 

I could have sworn I finished them all last year or the year before but if I did it can't have been on my most-played character, the Berserker. Since the rewards for the easily-completable collects are all mounts (or, I should say, the two I finished before the event ended were, so I'm guessing the others are too), I'm a bit cross with myself for missing out. Just goes to show it's always worth double-checking even when you think you know.

It wasn't even that I was too late to do those collections, the items for which spawn, briefly, after each clothwork "dies". It was more that the puppets take a very, very long time to kill unless there's a good turn-out and by the time I wanted to join in almost everyone else had done their quota and moved on. Maybe next year.

It was Scholar Primarch Rais in the Archives with the Exploded Wand. (It was, in fact!).

 

I did take some advantage of the double xp to put a couple more levels on my Fury this morning, taking her from 89 to almost 92. Given that I had 450% in cumulative bonuses running you might have thought it would have been faster than that but I made the mistake of picking the agnostic version of the Library of Erudin, an excellent dungeon themed around the board game Clue (or Cluedo if you prefer). I spent far more time looking for clues to solve the murder mystery than I did killing things, which wasn't perhaps the most efficient use of the bonuses.

Some people are apparently still having problems logging in, which doesn't surprise me. As long as I've been playing online games a subset of players would have been having problems logging in to any one of them at any given time. The general issue, though, appears to be fixed. 

Until the next thing breaks, that is.

I Covet The Waterfront: EQII

Yesterday marked the first day of Frostfell in EverQuest II. The midwinter celebration is a huge event in Norrath's calendar, bringing a welter of quests and activities, several seasonal instances and a whole zone dedicated to games, crafts and gift-giving.

There are no new quests this year, which is probably just as well. There are already nearly two dozen, several of them multi-part, some repeatable. There are three new Collections, all of which I completed in a ninety minute session last night.

EQ2 Traders, as always, has full details. I found the gloss there very useful although I was familiar with the mechanic from previous holiday events. Each of the three Collects comprises nine items, three sets of three, to be found in three locations - a home city (Qeynos, Freeport or Neriak), a secondary starting city (New Halas, Kelethin, Gorowyn) and Frostfell Wonderland Village itself.

I started in Freeport for the very good reason that it was where I found myself when I logged in. There were purple sparkles scattered across the cobbled streets of Lucan's capital and I wasn't the only one trying to grab them. Track Harvestables came in handy once again.

It was while I was grubbing around down by the waterfront in North Freeport that I noticed the hole in the wall. I know Freeport pretty well after living there for a decade and a half but it still has the capacity to surprise. I must have passed the building in question a hundred times and yet somehow Id never noticed how different it looked from the rest.

The walls were grey stucco, patterned with swirls. Fancy. An archway opened into a small, featureless courtyard. Had it always been there? How had I never noticed it before?

Against the outer wall there leaned a crude ladder. Planks nailed together. Why was it there? Had it been forgotten by the plasterers? Left behind by burglars? More to the point, could I climb it?

Climbing in EQII is quite specific. It was added as a feature in the first expansion, Desert of Flames, back in 2005 and has been included in content ever after, albeit somewhat sporadically.

Climbable surfaces are usually easy to spot; the walls are marked with the tracks and handholds of previous climbers or there are ladders or nets. All you need to do is move close enough and your character will begin to scale the obstacle, hand over hand.

Freeport predates all that. When it was built there was no climbing in the game and as far as I know, no-one ever bothered to go back and add climbable surfaces to original game zones. But we never needed special skills to climb back in the old days. We just...climbed.

And the way we used to climb was by jumping, hoping to find a piece of geometry that extended, invisibly, far enough into the horizontal to allow a precarious perch. I looked at the ladder. The expression "thick as a plank" came to mind. Those were pretty thick planks.

My Berserker tried a standing jump with a little jink forward. He landed on the first cross-strut - and stuck. Good start. He tried again and there he was, on the next rung. Third jump he fell off. Luckily no-one was watching except his Mercenary and he's paid not to laugh.

The ladder turned out to be fully climbable - old school style. I'm not sure I've climbed a ladder that way in EQII before. I kind of think I have but I couldn't say where it was if I did. 

At the top was a wrought-iron railing and no roof. I stood and looked down into the courtyard of the room with the hole in the wall and I pondered. I knew now that the ladder could be climbed but I was no wiser as to why it was there in the first place.

And I'm still not. Does it have a role in some quest, possibly for a class I've never played? Did some designer place it there intending to add some feature they never got around to finishing? Is it some kind of in-joke? I have no idea although I'd bet someone does.

One thing occurred to me as I stood on the roof. I've known since almost the start of the game that there are buildings you can rent in Freeport which have outdoor views. I actually own one on some character or other. Unless it's in Qeynos. Whichever, that one's a closed rooftop with no real view but I've seen and visited a large Freeport house with a rooftop terrace and views of the harbor. Maybe this was it...

Not to undercut the tension but yes, it was. I went round the front and checked the door. I was outside 7, Compassion Road, one of the original Guild Houses. I took the tour and went upstairs. The six-room home has not one but two rooftop terraces, both with great views. And neither of them is the rooftop I climbed onto.

There was a time when I coveted that house. It seemed impossibly expensive. Not only did it cost three platinum to buy the lease but 250,000 status as well - and you had to be in a guild of at least Level 30. And if you could manage all that, weekly upkeep ran to fifteen gold and 50,000 status.

Well, that may have been a pipe dream in 2004 but fifteen years later it's trivial. I have almost a million platinum on my Berserker alone, his one-person guild dinged Level 63 two days ago and he has enough Personal Status to pay the upkeep for almost as long as the game has been running. Fourteen years-worth, in fact.

I did consider buying it. It's a fantastic property in its own right and I'm pretty sure it's breakoutable. I could have a whole section of the Freeport waterfront all to myself.

In the end I decided against it - for now, at least. I already have an astoundingly over-furnished mansion in Maj'Dul on that character, which he long ago broke out of, giving him access to much of the city. Plus he's in the process of landscaping his Mara Estate, a bona fide small town, complete with river, ocean and fields, no breakout required.

EQII is one of those games where it's all too easy to take on more than you can handle. I don't need another housing project right now - I still have my Inquisitor's Baubleshire to deal with and my Wizard just set up home in the Mistmoore Crags Estate.

I shut the door of 7, Compassion Road and went back to my shiny hunting. An hour or so later I'd finished all three collections and handed them in. My Berserker was the proud owner of a Bleachbone Faun Mask (the sunbleached skull of a deer, complete with antlers, set in a silver hood, covering the whole face and making him look like the first jump-scare in a 1970s horror movie), a Bleachbone Faun Cloak (a silver cloak, embroidered with an image of the same skull and quite  possibly made from the flayed skin of the same deer) and a Bleachbone Faun Staff (made, I'm guessing, from whatever bits of the deer were left over).

What connection those gruesome items have with Frostfell and its happy-go-lucky cheer I cannot begin to imagine. They're druidical, that's as much as I know, but what druids have to do with goblins, false beards and Dickens parodies beats me.

It's another culture. Who am I to impose my values?

On with the revels!

Only Collect

I don't suppose EverQuest II was the first MMORPG to include Collections as a form of content, although it was almost certainly where I first ran into the idea. I've seen it in a few games since, most notably Rift, where Trion appeared to have lifted the system almost wholesale from EQII. It's a staple of the genre but one that's far from universal.

If there's an MMO that's taken it further than EQ2 I'd be interested to hear about it. In Norrath collections are everywhere. Every zone has them, every game mode, every expansion and holiday event. The wiki has a comprehensive list that has to be seen to be believed.

Wilhelm was satirizing Blizzard for asset re-use among its plethora of collectible pets but think of the icons EQII artists have to come up with! It's lucky there are a lot of bones and pages in there.

I couldn't summon up the willpower to count the current total number of Collections, each comprising anything up to a couple of dozen items. I'm guessing there must be more than a thousand by now.

Looking at my Berserker, probably my most-played character, I see he's Discovered 573 Collections so far. I'm hoping that's over half of everything that's out there but the goalposts keep moving. There are three new Collects for Frostfell, which starts tomorrow. Blood of Luclin, the upcoming expansion, will doubtless bring dozens more.

Of the 573 he's started, my Berserker has completed only 167. That's not even a third. But he's close on plenty more. Of the remaining four hundred and some Collections in his journal, eighty-four need just one more shiny to complete.

I could buy those from the Broker any time I wanted because in EQ2 collection items are tangible and tradeable. When you stoop to scoop up a shiny it doesn't trigger an update automatically, it puts an object into your packs. You can set a checkbox to trigger a pop-up window inviting you to add the shiny to the relevant collection (sometimes they can go in more than one) but you get to decide whether to use it, sell it or pass it on.

For a ha'porth of tar. Hang on - I think I've got one of those in the bank...

Collect items can sell for very, very large sums on the Broker. Seven figure sums, assuming anyone buys at those prices. I know people pay five figures because they've paid me that much, on occasion.

The value comes from the hand-ins. Every Collection in EQ2 comes with a reward and some of those rewards are highly sought-after. Completed collections can also lead to meta-collections, where the reward for completing the collection is another item that can be collected as you work towards an even bigger reward. There are even house pets you can feed to produce random collectibles (probably best not to think about how that happens). The food they consume, dropped by mobs, sells for good money too.

Collecting also used to be a very popular means of leveling. Each completed collection doesn't just reward an item, it gives level-appropriate xp, as would a quest. Only, unlike most quests, anyone of any level can hand in a Collection. A level ten can buy all the items for a collection that takes place in a Level 100 zone, hand it in to a Collector in the safety of their home city and gain several levels instantly.

These days not so many people level up the old-fashioned way and those that do are likely not in any kind of hurry. Even so,collecting remains a whole game mode on its own - or something very close to it.

Over the years I have bought a few items from the Broker to round out Collections, usually to nudge a character over a line so I could get some spell or ability I wanted or go to a zone that was just out of my level range. I've also made a great deal of platinum by selling my surplus finds to other people.

One thing I never really have done in fifteen years, though, is to go to a specific zone to hunt shinies for a particular colllection. That is a thing people do and always have done, just not me. All I do is pick up every shiny I see and let serendipity do the rest. Which, I guess, is why I have completed less than a third of all the collections I've started, on a character that was created nearly ten years ago.

No Neriak Necromancer's Lair is complete without a Vampire Piano.

Before last night, I can only remember one single occasion when I went somewhere with the specific intent of not coming back until I'd completed a Collection. That was for the once-famous Mistmoore Piano.

The collection was correctly called "Candles", the name it appears under in the Journal, although at the time everyone called it "The Piano" because a piano was what you got for finishing it. Every decorator wanted a piano. As I remember, the collection in Mistmoore was one of only two ways you could get one. The other was to do the Crafter Epic questline to the point where you received the Earring of the Solstice, which lets you see red shinies (shinies are like Kryptonite- they come in all kinds of shades). There was another collect for those.

I had to wait until I was significantly over-level for Castle Mistmoore to get the candles because it's a Heroic dungeon full of vampires. I ended up doing it on the Test server with my Necromancer, when when the mobs were still very tough for a solo player but not one-shot tough. Feign death made it possible but it was still a long afternoon.

Last night's enterprise was infinitely less challenging but almost as satisfying. It all began when I was browsing the Broker looking for something to wear.

For most of his nearly ten years, as hundreds of screenshots on this blog stand witness, my Berserker has dressed either as a Gaucho or a Pirate. I don't like to change the look of my chaacters too often but when I decide to do it I can get quite excited about the possibilities.

It was the Dragon Attack event that started it. If you spend that many hours standing around in huge crowds, waiting for time to pass, you inevitably end up looking at what people are wearing. And, as we all know, that sort of behavior leads to envy and discontent.

The red version. I'll be getting that as well.

So many people looked so amazing/impressive/ridiculous I began to think my Berserker a little drab. Time for a change of outfit. I'd been clearing my bags and bank vaults and piling stuff into EQ2's excellent Wardrobe feature, so I started my search for a new look there.

As a Plate Armor wearer, though, most of what I'd acquired seemed to be variations on a theme. It's one thing to play the role of a tank, another to look like one. Especially an old water tank that's somehow on fire.

I'm not a fan of the heavy metal look in gaming at the best of times. I wanted something lighter, fluffier, funnier. I ran through some of the many craftable options I could make for myself but they're all quite bland. Also many of them make you look like a disgraced 1970s children's TV presenter. Not exactly the look I was going for.

I moved to the Broker and began going through the options there, which was when I began to notice a number of outfits with a "Vesspyr" prefix. They were all Appearance items any class could wear, and they all had a clothlike texture. They mostly reminded me of fancy silk pajamas. I tried some on. They looked pretty spiffy on a ratonga. Trust me, not everything does.

The prices weren't outrageous but even with nearly a million plat in the bank I wasn't too keen on forking over a thousand just for the chest piece. I wondered where the clothes might have come from and if I could go get my own for free. "Vesspyr" suggested the Tears of Veeshan expansion. I thought they might be drops or, more likely, quest rewards but when I checked it they turned out to be rewards from completed collections.

I discovered that by way of one of the top results from a Google search: a table of Collections, yes, from the Tears of Veeshan expansion. The source was unexpected. Bizarre, even. It seems to be an FTP file associated with a website apparently entirely unrelated to gaming - The Viking Answer Lady Webpage, a serious website devoted to real-life Viking history. There's no mention of EQ2 or gaming on the website itself - I wonder if the table was even supposed to be publicly visible? Nothing, it seems, is invisible to Google.

In its zone of origin the pajamas are distinctly blue. And plush.

Whatever the provenance, it was just what I needed to get started. I scanned the list and decided to go for the Vesspyr Citizen's Elaborate Blue Tunic, a reward from the Withered Away collection. A quick map hop to Vesspyr Isles, a short flight to the sky island of Sothshae and there I was, hoovering up shinies and pages while my Merc despatched any wildlife foolish enough to butt in.

The mobs were green, which, thanks to EQII's insane power creep (more like power-sprint) these days means one-shot kills. I left a trail of death behind me as I circumnavigated the island scanning for shinies. As a max-level Weaponsmith my Berserker has the Track Harvestables skill, meaning I could see every ? and ! that popped. It made the whole process very manageable and considerably less random than I'm used to.

It took a couple of very relaxing and enjoyable hours to get all seven items. When I arrived I'd found ten or so spots on track. Some turned out to be pages for a book, the rest either items for the Collection I was there for or any one of half a dozen others. By the time I'd finished the collect I wanted I'd also completed one of the others, made significant inroads on all the rest and acquired a dozen or so duplicates to sell or pass on to my other characters.

I flew back to the hub village, Falinpol, where they have most facilities including an NPC who takes in Collections. He gave me my new tunic and I put it on.

It looked great. Just what I wanted. It also acted as a robe, covering the Chest, Shoulder and Leg slots. With the addition of my Circlet of Frost and Withering Hopes Cloak I had pretty much the look I was going for. Only Feet, Hands and Weapon to go.

Elsewhere they take on a grey/blue tone. It's like when you look at clothes under strip-lighting.

My usual selection of comedy weapons - Shovel, Anchor, Rubber Cockatrice - didn't seem to fit the mood so I looked at the flashier end of my rack. I picked the Blessed Aethersteel Greatsword for its blueness and sparkles.

Hands were a bit more of a problem. I didn't really have anything that matched but the closest was either the Fabricator's Gloves or the Frostfell Wonderland Plate Gauntlets. Decision-making wasn't helped by the fact that, as can be seen in the screenshots, the color of the outfit changes depending on the lighting of the zone.

As for the Feet slot, there the decision was taken for me. Not one pair of shoes or boots in my wardrobe would show up at all. It's the barefoot look for now until I can get a pair of Vesspyr Citizen's Blue Boots, which I'm hoping will play nicely with the tunic.

That means another trip to Vesspyr Isles and another session picking stuff up off the ground. Which is more than fine by me. After fifteen years I feel as though I've just opened a door onto a whole new way to play.

Going out and finding the missing items for a collect - or setting out to begin a new collection entirely - is a lot more fun than buying the same things off the Broker. Not that I'm above buying the odd item, when the rng gods aren't favoring me, but I don't intend to make a habit of it.

It amazes me that I've never taken shiny hunting seriously in EQ before this2. I  took it more seriously in Rift but perhaps that says more about how much - or rather little - there is to do in Telon, compared to Norrath, than it does about any inconsistency of approach on my part.

Whatever the reason for my late arrival at the Collectors Ball, I'm ready for the dance at last. Bring on the shinies! I've got a lot of catching up to do.