We're On A Roadmap To Nowhere

Since it seems to have been the roadmap thing that caught the most attention yesterday, I'll go with it. It's a nuanced story with potentially worrisome implications and it also has the merit of relating directly to the main MMORPG I play these days, if and when I'm playing any, so it makes sense to give it some air.

Here's the background. Angeliana, the Senior Community Manager for both EverQuest titles, took to the forums over a week ago to clear up some concerns that had been expressed in Discord over the non-appearance of a 2026 Roadmap for either game:

"We have seen some people asking across forums and Discord about the status of a Roadmap for 2026. This is to inform everyone that we have chosen to forgo a roadmap this year. Our reason for this is simple: we would like to knock out the redundancy in posting the same information repeatedly and would much prefer to post articles closer to when things will be occurring, such as events and important news."

She later followed that bald statement with a gloss:

"The sole reason for this decision was the consensus in our forum threads, Discord, and social media post with the roadmap of it being the same things (such as yearly events) every year, so the roadmap was redundant information. We've decided to not post the roadmap and just post the important events and information closer to when they are happening instead of a roadmap. This does not mean the game is going into maintenance mode, or that it is closing down. It simply means we are attempting to remove redundant posts which we were told were unnecessary in years past.

Seasonal events and such can still be found in the in-game event calendar as well."

EverQuest players, who are by far the more sanguine and reasonable of the two tribes, seem largely to have agreed with the decision:

"Honestly, putting a document that was 90% events that happen every year and then trying to convince people that they were "accomplishments" was a bit of a con on the players. It was a good decision to stop doing it."

"I actually think the lack of a public roadmap makes sense when you compare EverQuest to other long‑running franchise"

"Yeah, the roadmap was just an event calendar, which we have in game... we love the new direction!"

Others were more concerned with the presentation of the change than the change itself:

"Redundancy or not it’s not a good look"

Most of that was on the first page of the thread. The other four spin off into minutiae about specific changes people are hoping for or dreading and the whole roadmap issue seems to get forgotten.

Over on the EverQuest II forums,  the temperature, as always, was higher:

"So, the answer to the lack of clear communication is to have less communication. Got it."

"It sounds like they have no clue what they're going to do and couldn't deliver on any promise they may have made."

"Doesn't bode well for the future of EQ2."

The EQII thread grumbles on for ten pages. I stopped reading after three. You can always rely on EQII players to find a way to spin anything into a guarantee the game is either about to go into maintenance mode or close down altogether. EQ players tend to take a longer view.

The kerfuffle went on so long Jenn Chan, Producer of both titles, had to step in and calm everyone down:

"Hey all, we've been reading your concerns with the dropping of a formal public roadmap this year. Just wanted to drop a quick non-fancy non-formal note in here for you all that made it to this page in the threads.

We're planning on putting out two Game Updates this year has we have for many-many years and there is a new expansion slated for the end of the year as has been the tradition. For those of you on Origins servers, Anashti Sul and Dozekar will be getting Rise of Kunark. Additionally, there will be a new Time-Locked Expansion server coming this year as well. This on top of all the numerous things we're regularly updating, improving, and fixing throughout the year.

No one can predict the future, but I can tell you we're expecting to keep putting out new things for you through the year and hopefully for many-many more years in the future."

That's basically a Roadmap without the fancy graphics. Or a Producer's Letter without the endless recaps and back-slapping. She's basically admitting that very, very little changes, year-on-year, in either game. There's a long-established rhythm that rarely varies and everyone who plays knows perfectly well what it is.

So what does the Roadmap do? Well, I guess it's primarily a PR device. It's a nice graphic that gaming sites can use as filler, which at least gets the names of the games out there again. It's also, theoretically, an enticement for people who've never played or who haven't played for a while to see what's coming and maybe decide to join in.

On that basis, it seems like it would generally be worth a day of someone's time to put one together, even if it didn't say anything very new. On the other hand, after a few years, it's going to start looking a bit obvious to everyone that these games just do the same things, year after year, so maybe there are better ways to promote the titles.

The nominal reason for dropping Roadmaps is that players have been complaining Roadmaps don't tell them anything they didn't already know, which is almost certainly true. As a lot of commenters point out, though, what those complainants were hoping for were more relevant, useful Roadmaps that did tell them something, not the complete removal of Roadmaps altogether.

My feeling is that those sorts of Roadmaps aren't possible. The precise, technical gameplay detail people are asking for is not going to be amenable to being locked down months in advance. That's like asking for July's Patch Notes in February. 

As for macro changes and events, there pretty much are none that we don't already know about - two Game Updates and One Expansion per year has been the pattern for a decade now. Every so often there's a major technical development or a big UI switch but those often get delayed so it makes good sense to announce them separately, when they're imminent.

Even if it may be perfectly sensible to stop doing Roadmaps, you do have to wonder why a developer would take the risk once the tradition has been established. Yes, players are going to complain it's more of the same old, same old but it's a fair bet there's going to be a bigger hoohah if the Roadmaps just vanish. Surely the really safe, lazy option would be to keep banging out the old copperplate versions, taking the mild flack for not saying anything new and carrying on?

I have no idea why they didn't do that but I can speculate with the best of them:

• Literally no-one at Darkpaw was keen to do a Roadmap this year so rather than draft someone to do it they decided not to bother.
• They were all so deluded they really believed players would be happy to see the back of Roadmaps.
• Someone looked at how much it cost to produce the Roadmaps and decided axing them could pay for a new coffee-maker.
• Someone realized the games were already in a weird kind of de facto Maintenance Mode, albeit one that includes two big, free updates and a paid expansion a year, and it seemed like a good idea to acknowledge the situation, without actually admitting to it.
• Management knew EG7 was going to make some genuinely major change in 2026 (Could be good, could be bad...) and since there was no way that could be included in a Roadmap, it was either lie about it or don't do one.

Or, more realistically and more depressingly, the Darkpaw team genuinely doesn't know what this year holds and isn't willing to commit to any kind of timetable. We know the games are in more trouble than usual. The last EQ TLE server didn't do all that well and then there was the Heroes Journey, peeling loyal players off and turning them so now they'll most likely never come back. 

As for EQII, it's always a little surprising it keeps going. The players always seem to hate most of the changes that get made, most of which only happen because the devs are desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the game going. Unfortunately, every change seems to drive a few more players away and the population keeps getting smaller and smaller...

I don't read too much into just the abandonment of Roadmaps. The games do both have a really excellent in-game calendar that covers about 75% of what was in the Roadmaps, while the other 25% is mostly the two GUs and the XPack, all of which turn up as regularly as any Holiday Event. No-one who plays the games needs a Roadmap.

On the other hand, abandoning them is undeniably a Bad Look. I really don't see why they wouldn't just do the minimum, knock out the usual, boring, predictable graphic, send out the press release and let it go. I don't think it's a portent of doom per se but it's certainly an odd choice.

I guess now we'll have to wait and see if Jenn Chan carries on with her Producer's Letters. Those are even more redundant than the Roadmaps, much of the time, what with half of everything she says referring to things that have already happened. Logic says if Roadmaps go, Producer's Letters should, too. Common sense, self-preservation and, let's hope, any self-respecting Marketing Department, says the opposite.

Just one, final, unsettling observation. I'm always alert to qualifiers and I noticed immediately just how many Jenn dropped in her supposedly re-assuring statement: "planning", "expecting", "hopefully" and, most chilling of all, "No one can predict the future". 

Maybe not but I suspect she might have had a premonition...

 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

That ugly second illustration. As opposed to the ugly first illustration. Honestly, they're both pretty horrible. It took me about the same amount of time to find, copy and deface the original 2025 EQII Roadmap as it did to draft a prompt and run four versions at NightCafe, of which the one I used was the first, so the other three don't really factor in, timewise. I just thought surely I could get something better but noooo....

The model I used was Z-Image Turbo and the prompt was "A Roadmap Graphic for the MMORPG EverQuest II for the year 2026, with "CANCELLED" stencilled across it in huge letters. Visual style to resemble an infographic to be used in a slide projection." It did the job - I asked for something dull and boring and that's exactly what I got.

It handled the title perfectly for a change so I guess if I'd specified some headings I could have gotten something that looked a lot more convincing instead of the nonsense it came up with on its own. Then again, maybe that's Koada`Dal or something. I mean, it could be...

 

Every Picture Tells A Story - If You Know How To Read It

I was going to give posting a miss today, after I spent all morning filling out my stupid performance review form. You'd think I wouldn't need one with my retirement date less than a year away but no...

Anyway, as I was about to log in to EverQuest II I noticed they'd published a readable version of the roadmap on the forums. I'm not going to talk about that, either, or at least not right now, except to say it looks a lot more like a list of things that always happen than things we need to know about.

No, what moved me to come here and post after all was the big Year of Darkpaw picture you see at the top of the page. You can get it in poster form if you want although it's a pretty small poster by the way I reckon these things.

I think it would also be really weird to have hanging on your wall. Take a good look at those characters. Leave aside the peculiarly goofy poses - is that Dark Elf skipping? - and concentrate on the faces. 

I haven't seen it confirmed anywhere in the PR I've read but surely those are all the faces of actual people? Well, okay, not the Froglok, the Sarnak or the Vah Shir (Or is it a Kerran?) I'll give you that, but all the rest. I mean, that gnome is not any kind of gnome I ever saw in game. 

There's supposed to be an Easter Egg hidden in the picture. It can't be that those are all portraits of the devs, can it?

A picture I like a lot more is this splash screen from EverQuest's most recent expansion, Laurion's Song. I'm not saying I'd actually want it on my wall but I'd have it there a lot soooner than the other one.

I hadn't looked at it closely until I was logging in to EQ yesterday, when it was right there in front of me. As I studied it, one thing particularly jumped - that cat, sitting on the barrel.

Now, as I intimated above, I've never been all that clear on the precise, physical differences between Norrath's two, playable feline races, the Vah Shir and the Kerrans, but I can tell you that is neither.

I mean, I wish it was. Just look at it. That's a proper cat, by which I mean a house cat. It doesn't have the extended muzzle of the big cats we're used to seeing, walking on their hind legs, wearing armor and sitting on thrones in the game.

I would love to be able to make a character of whatever sub-species of Kerran or Vah Shir that's supposed to be. I'd buy a Race Pack in the store to get one.

Add that to the Roadmap, Darkpaw!

A Towering Presence Above The Sands

Wilhelm was kind enough to draw my attention, both to the appearance of a strange, new tower, floating above the sands of the Desert of Ro in EverQuest and also to the release of some extremely detailed, year-long roadmaps for both the elder game and its sequel, EverQuest II, as they each approach their respective, significant anniversaries. Somewhat unexpectedly, Darkpaw have given PCGamer the exclusive on the roadmaps, about which more later, but anyone with an active account can log in and check out the tower, which is just what I did this morning.

It was an exceptionally easy and very enjoyable visit. As has been mentioned countless times, both here and on many other blogs, returning to an MMORPG you haven't played in a while can be a disorienting, frustrating experience. It hasn't been an age since I last played EQ but it has been over a year. 

I've posted about the game a few times since but the last time I actually played EQ was about eighteen months ago, when I got my mid-60s druid out to take a look at a holiday event in Lavastorm. She's my go-to character for checking out new event or holiday content simply because she has the ports to get  to wherever something might be happening in a matter of minutes rather than what can often feel like several hours. 

The druid got the call this morning to go see what was happening over in the desert. I logged in, expecting a lengthy wait as my client caught up with all those patches from the last year and a half but amazingly the whole thing took less than a minute to update. EG7 really should send someone from the Darkpaw team over to Standing Stone to show them how to do it.

My druid was still idling where I'd left her in Lavastorm. I cleared a spell slot, loaded Circle of Ro, cast it and arrived in the very southernmost tip of the Ro desert in a matter of seconds. Naturally, the tower was in the far north but I had Spirit of Wolf and Levitate up so it only took me a couple of minutes to get there. Druid is the way to go, when you need to travel. 

Unlike some MMORPGs I've gone back to after even shorter breaks, I had no immediate issues with remembering how thinks worked. I'm sure if I was going to play seriously, as in fight things that can fight back, I'd need a refresher course but outside of combat, returning to EverQuest feels like slipping on a comfortable pair of slippers.

I was also very favorably impressed by how things looked. The whole of the eastern side of Antonica, including all of the Desert of Ro got a visual revamp, back when Sony Online Entertainment was running the show and there was money for that kind of thing, so the graphics aren't quite as ancient as they would be on the other side of the continent but even that "updating" was more than a decade and a half ago. For a game about to celebrate a quarter of a century of continuous operation, it looks amazing.

It didn't take me long to find the tower. It was exactly where I imagined it would be from the screenshot Wilhelm imcluded in his post. There were a couple of other unfamiliar structures close by, which may or may not be connected, but I went straight to the stone platform with the eerie, ethereal blue glow and clicked on it.

Next thing I knew I was inside the tower, looking around a large room filled with boxes, paintings and other players. There was a vendor by the name of Miacallie Herlsas, currently selling nothing but a silver-plated roboboar mount, for which she only accepts a currency called "Timeless Tokens". You can earn those by exploring the eleven floors of the tower and defeating the monsters hiding behind the huge, armored doors.

From what I gather by reading the comments following the announcement on the forums, the event involves both a scavenger hunt around Norrath to find the key to each floor and a dungeon crawl to explore what you find behind each door the keys open. The floors will become available month by month and Miacallie will increase her stock as the year turns. 

It looks as though the floors will scale to your level, will be soloable (Possibly requiring the aid of a mercenary for the less solo-capable classes, if there still are any left in modern EQ.) and, at least according to reports from the Test Server, won't be all that challenging. I'm already intrigued. If it's as easy as reported, I'll definitely give it a go.

For now, though, I'm more than happy to have had the chance to explore the whole tower from outside the doors. It's beautifully designed and decorated, with a wide, spral staircase that's easy to navigate and a central shaft with a teleport system that allows you to move upwards three floors at a time if you're in a hurry.

At the top, the tower opens onto a flat roof, with a dragon statue and a book on a pedestal in the middle and a high wall all around. I was hoping to be able to get up onto the parapet and look down on the desert below but that doesn't seem possible. By turning the camera I was able to peer over the edge but all I could see was grey mist so I suspect the tower doesn't exist in the same dimensional space as the rest of Ro. Well, it wouldn't. It's in an instance.

The very best part about the whole thing, though, is the art on the walls. The press release talks about it being "resplendent with artwork from around Norrath" and they are not kidding. There's a different painting on every wall in the atrium and two paintings on each landing all the way up the tower. I make it twenty-eight in all but I wasn't actually counting as I took screenshots of them all. 

The standard of the illustration is extremely high. Almost every picture would look great as a poster, not just in my in-game house but in my actual house, where I'm sitting typing this. I can just about make out in the extremely small print of those 2024 roadmaps something about "Swag Stores", the virtual storefronts Darkpaw recently introduced for both games to sell physical merchandise to the faithful. I hope some of the new swag involves these paintings.

And that brings me neatly back to the PC Gamer exclusive I mentioned at the top of the post. I was a little surprised to find a) that Darkpaw would offer an exclusive to a specific third-party website and b) that a general gaming site like PCGamer would be interested enoough in couple of ancient MMORPGs to take them up on it but, having looked at the post, I think I can see what's going on here.

The article was penned by Russell Adderson, who seems not just to be generally enthusiastic about the anniiversaries but to have considerable form as a player and a fan of the franchise. I clicked through his name to see what else he'd written and found he'd authored a lengthy piece back in October of last year in which he introduced the PCGamer readership to the murky world of EQ Private Servers outside of the legally-sanctioned Project 1999.

As well as discussing the new Quarm server, a private Progression server aiming to cap out at the Planes of Power expansion, reckoned by some metathesiaphobes to be the high-water mark of EverQuest's twenty-five year run, Adderson also makes his case for "the original, 1999 version" being one of the best MMORPGs to play today. On the face of it, you might think that would be an invitation for Jenn Chan to call Legal but instead she seems to have chosen to treat it as an opportunity to get this evident super-fan inside the tent, facing out.

What with NCSoft's recent about-face on the City of Heroes rogue-no-more server, Homecoming, it does seem like a spirit of pragmatism may finally have reached the corporate offices - and not before time! 

Anyway, if nothing else, it seems the Anniversary Event and the publicity around it have prompted both Wilhelm and myself to log back into EverQuest once again. We'll see how many more times it happens this year.

A Question Of Pride

I feel like this is the same post I wrote the same time last year but what the hey. Life moves in clades as Bruce Stirling once said. Or maybe he didn't. And even if he did, it's hardly the same thing. I don't know why I brought it up.

Life is one big circle, maybe that's what I mean. Oh, wait, now I sound like I'm in The Lion King. Which could totally work, if could come up with some smart way of connecting Pride Month with a pride of lions.

And why not? It's just what Darkpaw did, when they ran out of rabbits to drape in the rainbow flags of all orientations. They just moved on to lions and started working through the list all over again, three at a time.

This year's trio is Aceheart, Openheart and Freeheart, which I'm reliably informed "represent asexual, non-binary, and pansexual orientations". I think that's in respective order, although it's not always obvious which colors match up with which flags. The names can be a little vague, too, although Aceheart is clear enough. 

The lions, which are Familiars in the game, and therefore functional as well as meaningful, are all free for the asking in the EverQuest and EverQuest II cash shops, as are all those from previous years. Since Familiars are character-bound rather than account bound, you'd need to claim them all separately for each character you'd like to have them, but you have the whole month to do it and indeed a bit longer than that; they'll be in the cash shop until the 9th of July.

I've already picked mine up for my two most-played EQII characters and I'll be collecting them for all the others as and when I log them in. It's been a while since I last logged into EQ and even longer since I actually played but I'll probably make time to get the latest lions for at least a couple of characters before they disappear.

As I said, though, it's no big deal if you miss the opportunity this time around. The whole, rolling carnival will be back next year, I'm sure.

Which is both wonderful and also slightly worrisome, in a way. If you wanted a textbook example of how mmorpg culture has changed for the better in the twentysomething years I've been playing, you couldn't ask for anything more than the widespread acceptance and acknowledgment of difference that comes with incorporating Pride Month into the official event seasons of the games themselves.

It's a very far cry indeed from the genre's origins, when only the bravest of souls would dare to mention the possibility that anyone playing might be anything other than a straight, white male. Back then, you could easily find yourself on the wrong side of a vocally violent in-game mob, just for raising the possibility that anyone might want to express themselves as anything other than that expected norm. Even more disturbingly, you could sometimes find yourself on the wrong side of the moderators or GMs too, especially if you had the temerity to stand your ground.

It wasn't always that bad by any means but it was a time when many, quite possibly most, players seriously did not believe anyone played the games they liked other than people they considered to be exactly like themselves. Anyone playing a female character was assumed to be male because girls didn't play mmorpgs (Or any video games, really.) and any male who played a female character was deemed to have some nefarious motivation probably best not revealed.

Without getting all Polyanna about it, things are demonstrably better now. I'm just not entirely convinced that the best way of expressing, consolidating and cementing that positive change is to keep giving away free stuff. It seems a little odd, that's all.

But, hey, free stuff, right? I'm not gonna say no...

In fact, I'm so much not going to say no that over the weekend I logged into two games I'm not currently playing just to grab the Pride freebies I'd heard they were giving away. I have no shame when it comes to freebies. Plus, I do like to represent, at least in small ways.

I guess that's a cue for a quick aside before I get to talking about the loot I got. As one of those supposedly stereotypical straight, white males, I haven't had to spend a whole lot of time reflecting on either my gender or my ethnicity. Or so you'd think. Except, of course, I have.

I'll put the ethnicity angle to one side for now and try to concentrate on one thing at a time for a change. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few years. It's something Mrs Bhagpuss and I talk about quite often, too. I'm about as sure as it's possible to be from the precarious vantages of hindsight and hypothesis that, had the cultural framework to support it been in place when I was an adolescent, I would have identified differently to the way I did.

How I would have identified is another matter altogether. Adolescence is a contradictory time of both radical confusion and rabid certainty. I might well have picked a flag and waved it proudly. I might also have found the fence a very comfortable place to sit. 

Now, at my advanced age and with my immense and hard-won wisdom (I don't need to insert an irony emoji here, do I?) I'm starting to realise the Q in LGBTQ+ could have some connection to me. It would be tantamount to cultural appropriation for me to lay claim to Q for Queer but I feel quite comfortable in adopting its alternate meaning - Questioning. 

Next time I have to fill out one of those government forms with a box to tick for gender and/or orientation I'm going to give it a bit more thought. You're never too old to learn new things about yourself - or I hope not, anyway.

While I figure out what questions I ought to be asking, let alone what the answers might be, let's get back to the plunder! ArenaNet is giving away a nice pair of wings in Guild Wars 2 for this year's Pride although unlike Daybreak they don't seem to be making much of a noise about it. I heard about it from MassivelyOP but I didn't get any emails from ANet and there's no mention of it on the news feed on the official website.

The wings are supposed to make you look like a macaw. What does that have to do with Pride? I had no idea, so I asked Bard, Bing and ChatGPT. Unfortunately, the rabbit-hole that led me down would trip the entire post and send it cartwheeling into a thicket of unsubstantiated assertation, so let's just say I was not able to confirm a relationship between macaws and Pride, assume ANet knows something I don't and take it there must be more to it than a mere coincidence of coloration.

The wings, which you can claim for free from the Gem Store under the Promotions tab, are account-bound and work either as a glider skin or a backpack, which makes it odd that you have to have at least Heart of Thorns enabled on the account to claim them. I tried to get them for my Core account but they don't even show up in the shop. 

There's a thread about it on the forums. It appears to be an issue with the Gem Store itself because there's a workaround in which you can get another account to gift the wings to a Core account and the receiving account is able to accept and use the item, which they can then equip as a backpack but not as a glider. Whether ANet will fix this before the offer ends I guess we'll just have to wait and see but it does seem a bit shortsighted of them to have allowed it to happen in the first place.

I've left the best 'til last, although since I led with it as the picture at the head of the post, I kind of blew any element of surprise right at the start.

For Pride '23, DCUO is giving away all ten orientation flags along with a really strong set of posters for your base. The posters feature various DC characters kissing, including Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy and Superman and... y'know, I'm not sure who that is. I really need to find out.

I took everything I could get my hands on and then realized my base is so overdecorated now there's barely any wall space left to hang new art. I eventually found an alcove I hadn't used yet so I put the posters up there but I may need to move them to somewhere more prominent later.

There are also some spectacularly colorful costumes that I haven't quite worked out how to get. I can't quite see myself wearing them so I can't pretend I made all that much of an effort. It's nice to have the option, all the same.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any more freebies that might turn up in other games I play, even if they're games I don't happen to be playing at the moment. I'm always willing to patch up for a good freebie. Pride lasts all month so there's plenty of time for more to show up.

Not that I'm suggesting free stuff is the point of Pride. No, not at all. I didn't even think it. 

It's just it'd be rude to say no when saying yes says so much more.

The Perks Of The Game - EverQuest Style

I woke up this morning to an email from Wilhelm of The Ancient Gaming Noob advising me of a curious development over at Darkpaw Towers. I like to think of the EverQuest devs there, all safely ensconced in their monk-like cells, draped in hessian robes, cowls pushed back, hammering away at the keys by the flickering light of tallow candles.

What might they have come up with this time, I wondered. I clicked through the link to find a list of "New EverQuest Perks", three new ways for loyal customers to give the company more money. There was even a joking explanation in the language of lore to frame the pitch:

"The Nameless created these Perks during the time of the Dragons and we just found them! (We've been busy . . . really, really busy!)"

Aw, cute!

So, just what are these "perks", anyway?

It seems there are three to be had, one for Adventurers, one for Challengers and one for Merchants. Let's run through them, one by one:

A 5% permanent xp bonus is not a trivial thing in Norrath, even nowadays. When it says it "multiplies with other experience bonuses" I wonder if that's really what they mean? Do they mean it stacks? Anyone who knows math care to explain what would happen if you multiplied cumulative xp bonuses by a fixed percentage?

10% more "coin" is nice but I wouldn't have thought most people make bank on coin drops these days. I make my millions in the Bazaar as I imagine do most people. 

"Alternate currency from modern raids" is a
little outside my realm of experience. Okay, a
lot. I imagine it's important to raiders but how
important is anyone's guess.

I have a vast amount of the "Loyalty" currency, Crowns, which piles up all the time just from having a sub. I have yet to find anything I want to spend it on so a 10% discount is no incentive at all.

Levelling up my mercenaries is something I've never even begun to work on. I probably should. I can wait for a bonus for that, probably forever.

The last perk puzzles me. I was under the impression the possibility of losing a level when you died was removed from the game about a decade and a half ago. Did they put it back?

This is the perk that most appeals to me. Twelve-slot trader's satchels means an additional 20% sales space on your Bazaar trader, although I note it only gives "access" to the bigger bags. How you get the bags themselves is another question.

An additional inventory slot is a huge deal in most games. People buy expensive collector's editions just to get those.

It's a long time since I crafted in EQ but I seem to remember it being very rng-based. Could be useful.

 

At this point I should mention that none of these perks come free. They don't even come as part of the current All Access Membership. In a very important way, a way that speaks directly to the use of language as we know it, these are not "perks" at all. 

Here's the definition of "perk" from the Collins dictionary website:

"Perks are special benefits that are given to people who have a particular job or belong to a particular group."

Note the word "given". The whole point of a "perk" is that it's incuded, for free, as a side-benefit of something else. If you have to pay for it separately it is not a perk.

These "perks", if that's what we have to call them, you do have to pay for. Here's what they'll cost you:

 

I don't have a problem with the pricing. It seems reasonable for the services on offer. I certainly don't have any issues over any so-called "pay to win" elements that could, arguably, be involved. Firstly, all mmorpgs are inherently "pay to win" to some degree. People just like to draw their personal lines in different places so they can fight over them and claim some spurious moral high ground. 

Secondly you can't "win" at EverQuest. Good luck trying.

What this seems to me to be is a very clever way of getting around a problem that's been much discussed in this part of the blogosphere, namely how to increase subscription charges to reflect growing costs in a market that's been trained to be extremely resistant to paying for anything much at all.

Had Darkpaw chosen to hike the All Access Membership by $4.99 there would have been outrage. Even if it had been grudgingly accepted by most Members, the PR hit would have been severe and at the end of it Darkpaw would presumably only have received a percentage of the increase, since it would have been split three ways between them, Dimensional Ink and Rogue Planet.

You might think that it wouldn't matter all that much. It would be splitting hairs, since all three are owned by Daybreak Games and Daybreak Games is owned by EG7 (let's go with that for now). I can attest from decades of working for companies who've chosen to set divisions and branches against each other in competition for resources as individual "profit centers", for the people running each of those divisions it most definitely will matter. A lot.

By doing it this way, Darkpaw stand to up the cost of a monthly subscription for a good proportion of their core customers while being able to claim with good reason that the price of the sub hasn't changed at all. It's a conjuring trick and it's a good one.

My All Access subscription, which I pay annually, renews later this month. Even though I'm not currently playing any of Daybreak's games regularly (blame Bless Unleashed for that) I know I will be soon enough so I'll gladly take another year. I won't be adding any of these EverQuest-specific perks but I'll be watching to see whether the other games and studios follow suit. 

I'll be quite interested to see what Darkpaw comes up with for EverQuest II. I would say it's all but certain the perk system will cross to the younger game; virtually every similar innovation added to one EQ title has eventually made it into the other.

Whether I'll want to pay money for anything the EQII team come up with is a lot less certain. I'd guess not but we'll see. It would certainly have to be some quite different "perks" to most of those on offer here, few of which would make much difference to my gameplay in new Norrath. 

Whatever they come up with, I hope it does well for them. These games have to be paid for somehow, by someone, and this seems like a pretty harmless way of bringing in a few more dollars to me.

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.

Get A Job: EverQuest

I had a longish trip to make this morning. It took me out of the house for most of the day. Before I set out, I still managed to make time  to log in to EverQuest and set my Overseer dailies. I'm that keen.

Just as I was about to hit "Play" I noticed a new item in Latest News. It was short and strange: "The Nameless are searching for new blood" is all it said.

An event of some kind, perhaps? Possibly some kind of invasion? I hoped so. I like those. And I knew who The Nameless was. Or I thought I did., although the plural verb threw me a bit.

As well as being the name of a server, "The Nameless" is the name of an elder god in the Norrathian pantheon. Kind of. I think. Actually, I've never quite known exactly what The Nameless is. Allakhazam's entry doesn't exactly make it any clearer, either:

Even though I was in a bit of a rush I clicked through to see what it was all about. And it turned out to be... a job. Three jobs, to be precise. I definitely wasn't expecting that.

At first I thought the whole "Nameless" gag was just Dreamweaver being cute. Judging by the way he can't stop giggling when he hosts the Kander's Candor podcasts I would guess he's quite prone to fits of cuteness.

After I thought about it for a moment, though, it occured to me that perhaps what he was doing was obliquely explaining the underlying mystery of The Nameless as may always been understood within the company itself.

It seems no-one at Verant (or SISA or 989 Studios or SoE or whatever the hell they were calling themselves back then. You think Daybreak/Darkpaw is confusing? Nameless is clearly the last thing that company has ever been.) was expecting anyone to take the game they were making seriously. Half the Norrathian gods have anagrams for names that roughly describe their sphere of influence. Tunare/Nature, Ec'i/Ice and so on.

Even the less blatant - Solusek Ro, the sun god, for example - are punny. Sol Ro, as it's almost always shortened by players, concatenates the name of our own sun with that of the star around which Superman's home planet, Krypton, spins. Span. Is Krypton gone these days or back? I lose track...

The idea that the most mysterious and powerful of all the godlike beings, the one that "causes universes to exist" but "is unknown to most of Norrath" would be the developers behind the game fits very well with the general naming convention they appear to have been making up as they went along. If it isn't the explanation it should be.

I didn't have time to click through the hyperlinks to the job descriptions this morning but when I got back this evening and logged in to collect my Overseer xp, I popped onto the forums again to take another look. The links go to a page I really should remember to check more often: Careers at Daybreak.

If anyone's got a hankering to work there, now would seem to be a good time to apply. The three roles picked out in the forum post all involve working on EverQuest specifically but there are twenty-one jobs available in total. As I say, it's been a long time since I last looked so I don't know if that's typical or exceptional.

The thing I found most interesting were the nine openings for work on an "unnanounced project" at the Austin, Texas studios. I really can't keep track of this stuff (who can?) but I did remember that the DCUO team is based in Austin. I seemed to remember Jack Emmett saying something about it when DBG did the three-way shimmy earlier this year.

Not entirely sure what that means. (Particularly the bit about carving themselves out, which sounds unconfortable to say the least). Does Dimensional Ink "own" the whole Austin operation now, in which case the unnanounced project would presumably be theirs, too. Or are they sharing office space with some other, as yet unknown, Daybreak affiliate? Maybe, oh, I dunno, Nameless Games?

Whatever, it is a little bit intriguing, even if I don't think it's news, as such. I'm fairly sure we already heard about the unnamed project at some point. It's just that things that don't have names are easily forgotten. It's worth reminding ourselves now and again that something might be going on behind closed doors, just so we don't all hurt ourselves falling off our chairs in surprise when something playable finally appears.

As if that would ever happen.

Take The Cash: EQ, EQII

Back when Sony was running the show, someone there came up with the less-than-stellar idea of holding frequent double Station Cash sales. Towards the end of that age of decadence SOE even threw a few triple SC beanos. For a weekend or even longer you could get two or three times the imaginary money for the same price. There was even an insane moment when you could buy expansions and pay your subscription with it.

I imagine it brought in a useful chunk of revenue at a convenient time for someone. Shifted a few needles on some dials in a direction they needed to go. In terms of the long-term health of the game, though, it was a kind of slow suicide.

The moment the company changed hands that was the end of any such nonsense but the damage had already been done. Even I, who never really bothered much with the cash shop, hadn't been able to resist the lure of seeing dollars go on sale for not much more than thirty cents apiece. What with a few weekends like that plus the dripfeed of five hundred a month that came with the sub, by the time Daybreak took over I already had close to twenty thousand DBC stashed away on each of my two main accounts.

The problem was finding something to spend it on. I'm terrible at buying things in cash shops. They never seem to have anything I want.

Housing was good for an occasional splurge. I bought a couple of Prestige homes. The problem with that was, once I'd bought them I needed to do something with them, and that takes time and effort. Not to mention that I already had more than enough imaginary homes already. I'm not going to be buying any more in a hurry.

I can't remember what else I bought. I know I have a couple of thousand less than I did at the start of the year (I can see the figures in screenshots) but I have no recollection of what I spent the money on.

Whatever it was, it was about time. In recent years I've rarely managed to get through my monthly 500DBC stipend before the next rolled in. I'm guessing that's a common problem because a while ago Daybreak started offering heavily marked-down mercenary and familiar crates as an alternative. I took one, once, but generally I prefer the cash, even if I don't end up using it.

About the only thing I spend DBC on regularly are the scrolls that give any class the ability to track mobs for five hours. Those come in stacks of five for 50DB and as a Member I get a ten per cent discount on that. At 45DB for twenty-five online hours of tracking I rarely get through a single stack in a calendar month so that's not making much of a dent.

When we got the Overseer system earlier this year I finally found something to spend my imaginary money on. Not in EverQuest II, where the feature plugs along perfectly without any intervention from my wallet, but in the original EverQuest, which until that point I wasn't playing any more and which I honestly never expected to play seriously again.

Whereas EQII's Overseer is good for gear, EQ's is fantastic for levelling. I've added ten levels to my Magician since it started, something that would have taken me years if I'd tried to solo it the regular way. Not only have I been logging in every day, in the last week or so I've actually started to go out and kill things again!

To get the best out of the Overseer feature in EQ is a trickier proposition than it is in EQII. Not only is it a deeper mini-game in its own right, requiring closer attention when setting the missions, but the timers it uses are significantly less forgiving.

You're allowed ten missions a day but only five at any one time. All missions run for a multiple of six hours. I've seen six, twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six and forty-eight hour missions so far.

Here I am, jumping on Meldrath's bed. I owe it all to Overseer quests!

The ones that work best for me are the twelve-hours. If I remember to set my first quintet after breakfast I have time to collect the rewards and set the next five before I close my computer down for the evening. If, that is, I don't forget.

But sometimes I do forget. It's half an hour after the time I meant to stop for the evening and I'm logging out of My Time At Portia or Elder Scrolls Online and I suddenly remember I haven't set my Overseer missions in EQ.

On the face of it, that's easily solved. Log in quickly, grab the rewards, take five or ten minutes to get the next set rolling, log off, job done. Except all that does is push the problem into tomorrow.

Next day, when I log in at the usual time, instead of last night's missions sitting there finished, waiting to be cashed out, they'll still have an hour or more to run. I could just wait, but then the next lot won't be ready until later in the evening than I want to be playing. And if I make another mistake and forget again I'll be into some kind of fail cascade I can only fix by skipping a set altogether.

Luckily there's a very simple solution. Daybreak, who love to monetize every possible interaction in the game, much to the chagrin of those players who haven't noticed the world moving on since 1999, have implemented a handy Finish Now! button. Press that and all your time-shifting problems are over.

Yeah, sure. When I first saw that button I assumed the cost would be eye-watering. It certainly is if you want to buy more Agents to send on Missions, which seem to be priced to catch whales. Dim whales at that, since you get more Agents for free in game than you're ever going to be able to use. It costs nothing to look, though, so I pressed it and prepared to be outraged.

I know there are people who can work themslves into a state of righteous hysteria over a misplaced apostrophe in a pizza delivery flyer but I challenge anyone to get up a head of steam over this one. To complete a twelve-hour mission that has an hour or so left to run costs around four Daybreak coins. It varies a little according to the quality of the mission. I think I payed as much as seven, once.

The current rate of exchange, at its least favorable, is one cent to one DB. Four cents definitely counts as a genuine microtransaction in my book. Most of my missions are the regular sort so for my monthly 500DB I could clear over a hundred mistimed quests. If I messed up my timing that often I'd deserve to pay a penalty charge.

As I've mentioned before, despite having a perfectly good All Access subscription, in good standing and fully paid in advance for a year, on which I play EQII, I'm not playing EverQuest on it. Don't ask. It's too tedious to explain.

That might be an issue - or at least it might mean spending a little real-life money - if it wasn't for the situation I outlined at the start of the post. This account, the one I'm using for EQ, is Silver (grandfathered-in slightly better than F2P) but it used to be my main account, back when SOE was in charge (Hah! Irony! "In charge"!). My pockets there are stuffed with barrel-loads of double and triple sale SC from when that was a thing, not to mention all the years of unused monthly pocket-money.

At time of writing I have fifteen thousand two hundred and twenty DB on that account. I think I've spent a few  hundred correcting timers since this whole thing started. Some days I did shift more than just the odd hour. I seem to remember paying about 24DB one time. Crazy, I know!

My magician is Level 103 now. She makes about 10% of a level most days. A lot more when there's a server bonus like last weekend. I fully expect her to hit the current level cap before the end of the year, provided I remain sufficiently interested in getting there. At the rate I'm going I'd have enough Daybreak cash to last me more than a year and a half, even if I messed up my timing every single day.

Since I have no intention of levelling any other characters the same way, that's way more than I need. I would seem to be well set. And in practice I make my timers most days, anyway. I probably only buy my way out of trouble a couple of times a week.

Looks like I'm going to have find something else to spend my imaginary money on.

Because I Said So!

It was never my plan to turn every Kander's Candor into an excuse for a post but it does consistently flag up points of discussion. The podcast is certainly well-named. Occasionally you can almost hear the "should I have said that?" catch in Kander's voice. Since it's not going out live it's probably safe to assume everything's been stamped for public consumption but there is that occasional delicious frisson of listening in to something you probably shouldn't be hearing.

Episode Six is available now and once again it's a very interesting listen. Particularly if you've ever wondered what the weather's like in southern California.

One thing that's been mentioned three times now is the way that, in the past, the developers who do the actual design and coding work were instructed, sometimes at very short notice, to add features to the game that they otherwise would not have been interested in doing. It comes up again in this episode in relation to "set bonuses", the extra stats or effects a character gains from wearing more pieces of a particular armor set.

These bonuses, which Kander describes as "horrible and terrible" and blames for all kinds of balance issues, were apparently added to EverQuest II in a hurry because "things happened elsewhere", by which he means similar things were implemented in other MMORPGs and the EQII team were ordered to replicate them. In previous episodes he says the same happened with both pvp battlegrounds and the automated dungeon finder. The clear implication is that this was done at the behest of upper management for purely commercial reasons with little or no regard to how it might affect the health of the game.

All of these features were added in the Sony Online Entertainment era, before control of the game moved to Daybreak. Listening to what Kander says, and especially the way he expresses himself as he remembers a sequence of events from many years ago, a picture begins to take shape of a top-down command structure under SOE, in which arbitrary diktats had to be carried out to exacting timescales by less-than enthusiastic workers, who then had to try to order and maintain other, more crucial systems around the unwanted intrusions.

A strong impression also appears of a current team that, while very under-resourced and overworked, has taken back some measure of control. It's very apparent that some of the features that have either been removed completely or allowed to gather virtual dust under Daybreak have been those that were imposed from the top to begin with and for which the people doing the actual work have little affection.

As a long-time player I was always aware of what seemed to be the whim-based nature of many of the half-baked ideas we had to put up with but until I started listening to these podcasts I had no idea how many aspects of the game were being shoe-horned in on the instructions of people with an agenda very different to "what's best for the game".

Again, as a player, I have felt for several years that I can feel a difference. Lots of things still happen that don't work out well but the reasons why someone would want to try to move in those directions aren't hard to fathom. As has become all too clear from listening to Kander describe the circumstances under which expansions, game updates and other content get made in the Daybreak/Darkpaw era, it seems unnecessary to look much further for an explanation why something hasn't gelled than "not enough time, not enough people".

At one point Kander is asked whether the EverQuest and EQII teams work together and if some of the systems that works so well in one game could be adapted for the other. Given the recent introduction of very different versions of the Overseer feature in both games, it's a timely question, although the systems the questioner would like to see moved across are much older ones such as EQ's best-in-genre loot interface.

In answering, Kander tellingly refers to the original EverQuest as the "jewel in the crown" and makes a point of saying that the team go out of their way to protect the integrity of the older game. He suggests that there are things they'd try in EQII that they would never do in EverQuest, the implication clearly being that they know where their bread is buttered. Judging by the rising populations, evident in both games but especially in the older, it's an approach that seems to be paying off.

Even with the company's fortunes tentatively on the up, it's painfully clear that there's little fat to spare. Towards the end of the podcast there's a brief discussion of questing. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that a single developer, Kaitheel, writes and implements almost all the new quests we see. No wonder they're so tonally consistent.

It also takes him about three quarters of his time doing that, which is why the team seem so excited about the Overseer feature. Considerably more excited than the players, I'd have to say. I think I'm probably in quite a small minority in seeing the Overseer system as one of the most engaging, rewarding and addictive that's been added in many years.

I like it primarily because of the rewards. Wilhelm describes EQII's Overseer as "more of a magic prize machine rather than a game" and I agree. I just think the prizes are really, really good.

The developers, though, if Kander is any indication, seem to view Overseer as a genuine alternative to questing, with lore and narrative and characters and story. I don't think a lot of players are going to buy that. Overseer missions bear about the same relationship to quests as the blurb on the back cover of a fantasy blockbuster does to the six-hundred pages inside.

It's something that the podcasts make much more obvious than conversations on the forums. The way developers see a game is quite different from the way players see it. In the past, things may have been added out of hubris and greed; now they're being added out of necessity. Neither is necessarily going to make players happy.

In the previous podcast there was a question about crafting in Blood of Luclin, widely believed by players who craft to be the worst implementation in many years. While Dreamweaver and Kander gave a very clear and honest acknowledgment and explanation ("not enough time, not enough people") it was impossible not to notice that neither of them seemed to understand why crafters were so disatisfied with what they had been given.

The main reason is simple. Tre's a particular problem where the step from the top rung of the solo content ladder to the bottom rung of heroic is too big for many players to manage. In the past the leg-up they need has been provided by Mastercrafted gear. In BoL, the best gear players can make is worse than the rewards from the Signature solo line.

That seems fairly easy to understand but it was evident that the point was being missed. Or, since Kander was adamant that a smooth transition from solo to heroic content already exists in the standard progression of the game, maybe it's the players who are missing something. Either way, the two sides are still talking past each other.

Things have definitely been looking up on the communication front, though. There has been a noticeable change in atmosphere since Daybreak spun the two Norrathian titles off to Darkpaw. The podcast is helping to clear the air and let's hope the player council, whatever it ends up being called, leads to a meeting of the minds between players and developers.

If relations continue to improve, since the Darkpaw split co-incided so closely with the departure of Holly Longdale, it's going to be difficult to unravel exactly what the catalyst for change was. I did notice Kander mentioning that upper management were being supportive of an initiative to get more input on the questing workload, though.

I'll end on that optimistic note.