When The Party's Over: EverQuest II

The fireworks have finished. The bunting is back in the box. EverQuest II's 15th Anniversary celebrations are over. Yesterday saw the end of the Dragon Attack event, leaving nothing behind to show it ever happened, except for banks and vaults stuffed with mount and mercenary gear and a hugely disrupted economy.

There should also be two giant dragon statues, one above the Freeport dock in Commonlands, the other on the wild Antonican shore, close by the cloud-scraping towers of Qeynos. Unfortunately, something seems to have gone wrong . The "permanent, impressive statues" (my emphasis) are nowhere to be seen.

I'm sure they'll be back when someone realizes they were included in the script that cleared out the build sites and sent the questgivers back to their workshops. Maybe it requires an update to push the new zone art.

Unless it was all some kind of con trick... Maybe a couple of ratongas put together a balsa-wood-and-canvas mock-up behind our backs as we crafted, then took it down under cover of darkness and legged it back to Temple Street.

As for the left-over dragon parts, of which I have thousands, I'm hanging on to them for now. They're probably useless but you never can tell. I have plenty of room in my Depot so why take the risk?

I've spent more than four hours so far today tidying up my bags. I have a lot of saddles and other sundry horsewear. I also have an incredible amount of storage space so it's just a matter of deciding where to put it all. 

It's confusing because some of it is No Trade, some Heirloom and some fully tradeable. It also comes in several qualities, from Handcrafted to Mythical. Mounts these days have almost as many gear slots as characters and there are a lot of mounts. I'm sure it will all come in handy - one day.

A few of the pieces are worth a good deal of money on the open market. I already sold a couple during the event but I held a few more back in anticipation of prices going up when the supply dried up. That's already begining to happen. I also heard on the beta grapevine that mount gear is scarce in the new expansion so I'm not rushing to sell just yet.

The other common drop from the event was Mercenary gear. Most of that is No Trade, otherwise everything I said about Mount gear applies. I got complete sets of Fabled gear for most of my six max levels' primary mercs, plus spares. Lots of spares. Some of my mercs raised their stats by two orders of magnitude over the course of the event and when they level up and open more slots that will increase even more.

Tallying up after close of play, in addition to the huge upgrades to a dozen mounts and mercenaries, I also notched up

• 800,000 Platinum from the sales of three items
• 25 levels on my Beastlord (now Level 46)
• 28 levels on my Channeler (now Level 49)
• 48 levels on my Carpenter (now Level 100)
• 83 levels on my Alchemist (now Level 110, although the final 10 levels came from quests)

It's been enormously enjoyable, particularly for the positive spirit that prevailed for the entirety of the event. I think it ran for just about the right length of time.

We have a short break to get our breath back before Frostfell arrives on Tuesday 10 December with the expansion, Blood of Luclin following just a week later. The main complaint I've heard over the past month is that there's just too much to do. There usually is in EQII.

In other "news", I discovered today that you can sort your bags by no fewer than twenty-one categories. I knew you could drop items on your character portrait and they would auto-sort onto matching stacks anywhere in your bags but I had no idea you could also set criteria at this level of detail.

By complete co-incidence, as I was looking at the sort window I'd just discovered by accident, a conversation broke out in General Chat on the exact same subject. It turns out that you can even sort the contents of your bags into alphabetical order by use of a slash command.

EQII has a plethora of such commands. Some simple ones like /stand are familiar from many MMORPGs but the arcane syntax of the coder pervades the outer regions of knowledge. What would be the chances of finding "/sort_bags 1 name a" by trial and error?

Whether I'll ever get around to setting paramaters on my hundreds of bags and boxes is another matter. Nice to have the option, either way.

Everything Is Everything Else

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours doing dragons in EverQuest II. The Dragon Attack event is drawing to a close but if anything that's only made it even more popular. There were enough people at each dragon spawn last night to spin up a second copy of the zone and it wasn't even close to prime time for the server.

The event is very well designed in terms of pacing. Each dragon respawns an hour after it's killed and it takes a crowd of fifty or so players seven or eight minutes to kill one. A rotation falls into place; the dragons spawn in a predictable order with a wait of just a few minutes between. Time to go bank or swap to an alt to gather crafting mats from the dragon corpse.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work. It was that way for the first couple of weeks. Some days it still is. At some point, though, some clever bunny came up with a short cut. Instead of the dragon taking anything up to ten minutes to die, it's dead in a couple. I've seen one burned down in less than thirty seconds.

I've been trying to find out how it's done but without much success. Google gives me nothing. I've asked in game several times but the only reply I got was "it's an exploit" without any hint of what the exploit might be.

Over the last couple of days I narrowed my investigations down to "something Necromancers can do". My theory is based on a couple of throwaway comments in general chat, where someone has made a crack about things going a lot faster if the necros "do their thing". Also, I noticed on a couple of occasions in Nektulos Forest, where the dragon summons a horde of elementals that take quite a while to kill, all the sparks suddenly died at once. The cause of death in every case was a "Vampiric Orb" attributed to an NPC Mercenary.

Vampiric orbs are created when a necromancer casts Vampirism on an ally. I have no idea if this is the proximate cause of the so-called "exploit" but it's about the only clue I have.

One reason I'm posting about it is in the hope that one of the handful of people who read this blog and also play EQII might know more about what's going on and chip in with a comment. Another is background to how I came to be looking at Chinese Post-Punk bands on YouTube.

The effect of the "exploit" or tactic or whatever you want to call it is that the elegantly calculated cadence for kills breaks down completely. What tends to happen at first is that all four dragons get killed in about twenty minutes or so and then there's a half hour wait for the first one to respawn. Sometimes the dragons end up overlapping and the order changes.

Either way, there are periods when everyone just stands around in a big gang for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes waiting for something to happen. That suited me fine last night because I had six characters running around gathering dragon mats and it gave me plenty of time to log them in and out. But even then I found myself with time on my hands.

I'd read all the new blog posts in my Feedly and blog roll so I started flipping through my bookmarks, looking for something to keep me occupied. I have a ridiculous amount of unsorted bookmarks, many of which go to things I've completely forgotten about.

One of them goes to a potentially fascinating resource called The Music Industrapedia. When I bookmarked this it was fairly new and didn't have a lot of detail but someone's clearly been hard at work since then. It varies an awful lot country by country but some of the entries under the Music Artist category are quite extensive.

I had a good browse through the Canada, Japan and France sections, which are very well-represented, and picked away at a lot of the smaller territories, which aren't. Then I took a look at China.

Chinese pop/rock music fascinates me. We've had so much discussion in the blogosphere lately about Chinese influence on Western culture and mores but it seems to me that's very much a two-way street. The Chinese government may think one thing is happening but the Chinese people seem to have different ideas. A lot of different ideas.

Glancing down the list I saw several names I rcognized from my own explorations in hyperspace: Carsick Cars, Hedgehog, New Pants, Queen Sea Big Shark... One reason I'm drawn to music and musicians from that part of the world is the amazing, evocative names of the bands. I spotted one I hadn't seen before, Streets Kill Strange Animals, and clicked the link.

There were two more links on the landing page; the band's Bandcamp and an article on Post-Punk.com, a website previously unknown to me. The article was fascinating. It told me in a few paragraphs more about the development of alternative music in China than I'd picked up anywhere else in years, although I have to admit I've never made any attempt to research the subject. I'm sure there are tons of journalistic and academic treatises out there just waiting to explain enverything if only I wasn't too lazy to look.

For the next hour or so I killed dragons to the backbeat of Snapline, Ourself Beside Me, Pet Conspiracy and more. I also watched a tremendously unexpected cover of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Massive Attack but that's by-the-by.

It struck me what a strange and wonderful world we live in. In the same moment I was sharing a virtual fantasy with a hundred strangers around the globe, learning about the aesthetics of cultures and the way they cross-pollinate, and planning a creative act to synthesize it all : this post.

And some people say video games are a waste of time...

A Monumental Success: EQII

The 15th Anniversary Event for EverQuest II has turned out to be one of the best I've enjoyed in any MMORPG. It didn't look like much on paper but in the game itself it has been popular, compelling and well-received.

Any event that runs 24/7 for a full month and can still draw a crowd just a few days before it ends has to be reckoned a major success. When those crowds are still upbeat and positive even after hundreds of repetitions that's pretty much a miracle.

The last time (quite possibly the only time) I saw an event on this scale go down as well was probably the demonic invasion in World of Warcraft that preceded the release of the Legion expansion. The two have some significant factors in common.

• The events are open to all levels and classes (The tradeskill event does require Level 20).
• They are easily accessible.
• They give excellent XP.
• They give desirable rewards.
• They are extremely alt-friendly.

The adventure events all take place right next to the Ulteran Spires, a transportation network open to everyone, meaning you can be at any event in seconds. The areas around the spires are also close to 100% safe from wanderng mobs, meaning even Level One characters can and do join in.

For any characters under Level 100 the big attraction is abundant xp. Low level characters gain multiple levels on every dragon kill and even in the 80s and 90s the xp gain is significant, as is AAXP if toggled.

Loot is good, too. Every kill gives generous rewards, sometimes as many as four items. There's a huge variety and some of the best are tradeable so there's money to be made as well.

Killing dragons caught the imagination of the playerbase from the start but the crafting event was more of a slow burn. In the opening days, progress was slow and few people seemed interested but as time went on the numbers participating increased and a real buzz developed.

Today, on Skyfire, my main server, both the monuments are complete and they look magnificent. They will be a memorable addition to the permanent landscapes of Commonlands and Antonica.

Even though the statues are finished, the quests remain until the event ends in a few days time.  I was particularly impressed that the questgiver acknowledges this and has new text explaining why help is still needed.

For players there's an obvious incentive. The rewards for crafting, which were lacklustre compared to those for dragonslaying, have improved significantly now the project is done but the real reward for tradeskillers, at least those with levels yet to hit three figures, has once again been the xp. So far I have taken my Carpenter from 50 to 100 and my Alchemist from 20 to 90.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the whole event, however, has been the great spirit in which it has been taken by the overwhelming majority of players. There has been a real community feeling  about the whole thing, both in the co-operative and helpful way people have called out the timers for the dragon attacks and in the the many expressions of support for the crafting effort.

I have spent most of my gaming time this month killing and crafting dragons and I'll be sorry to see it all end on Thursday. It's been a worthy accolade for fifteen years of EQII and best of all, there will be permanent reminders in the form of two majestic statues on the coasts of Karan.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a few more dragons to kill.

Slip Sliding Away: WoW Classic, EQII

So, I kind of stopped playing WoW Classic. How did that happen?

I certainly wasn't planning on stopping. Up until I wasn't playing any more I'd been enjoying myself. Sort of. Self-evidently, not enough.

The thing is, Classic had slowed down. A lot. In a reply to a comment I made on his post about the fifteenth anniversary of EQII, Wilhelm said:

"I think WoW was really the sequel to EQ. It was an obvious upgrade/development of EQ and even the Blizz team has recognized this up on stage at BlizzCon. It was EQ without the suck, to borrow the phrase from DAoC. It has changed a lot over the years, but WoW Classic has given us a glimpse of how it took the EQ idea and ran with it. Even things people complained about in WoW, like instanced dungeons, were lifted straight from EQ."

And that, really, is the problem. What I always enjoyed the most in EverQuest were the early and middle levels. The starting areas, Qeynos Hills, East and West Commonlands, Steamfont Mountains, Butcherblock, Oasis, The Karanas... all those amazing, atmospheric, immersive open zones, where you could roam and explore and lose yourself in another world.

The expansions managed to extend that experience, re-making it, fresh and new, keeping the impetus going for years. Rise of Kunark was almost literally another EverQuest added to the first. Shadows of Luclin was a third. They could quite easily have been released as sequels, not expansions.

By the time EQII arrived in late 2004 it might as well have been EQ4 and WoW could have been EQ5. And all of them had the same fundamental drawback, at least as far as I was concerned: the fun came in inverse proportion to the number alongside your character's name.

As was discussed at inordinate length around this corner of the blogosphere back in August and September, WoW Classic reminded us of the reasons many of us fell in love with the genre: the worldbuilding, the pacing, the immersion, the need to think and plan and consider. The satisfaction of setting and meeting achievable goals in a manageable timeframe.

At the beginning of the journey, all of those pleasures and more come thick and fast. Every session is a round of markers met; improvement is continual and ever-present.

As the levels tick by, things slow down. Plenty of people found it slow going from the start but in the forties and fifties time crawls. Also, the exhilarating freedom that so exemplified the early game begins to dissipate. The choice of zones in which you could adventure narrows just as the time you need to spend in them increases.

Meanwhile, the invisible hands of the game gods begin to pull on your puppet strings. Where once your destiny was your own, now it seems written in code. Quest after quest directs you on where to go; the slow-going travel that once seemed natural and organic when it was your choice becomes onerous and artificial, imposed from above.

Every second quest seems to involve travelling halfway around the world to speak to someone who then sends you on to the next stop on what feels like an increasingly arbitrary journey, mostly in circles. Where early on you found yourself tasked with taking messages to the next village, now everyone you need to speak to seems to have vanished into the forests or the swamps of a faraway land. Every item so vitally needed for the next step of the ill-understood errand you've foolishly agreed to run for a stranger is only to be found on another continent, in some obscure corner that they can only describe in the vaguest terms.

Meanwhile, the game gods have become increasingly impatient at your lack of interest in the tests they created for you. Quest after quest seeks to send you underground, into dungeons filled with vicious creatures far beyond your capacity to handle. Only by banding together with others can you hope to survive, let alone prosper.

As you approach the level cap, both games ramp up in similar fashion, each level requiring palpably more effort, time and patience than the last. The difference I perceive is this: in the original EverQuest and for its first several expansions the game's developers really didn't care what you did while you played. They laid out the buffet: it was entirely up to you what you chose to consume.

Some of the "suck" Blizzard endeavoured to cut from the fat of EQ was that lack of direction. WoW Classic starts out feeling wide-open but in fairly short order, certainly by the mid-30s, it becomes apparent that there are expectations. There's a path you're expected to follow and the quests you take provide the map.

It is entirely possible to side-step all of that, should you wish. Many people choose to level their characters mostly or entirely by running instanced dungeons. It's equally feasible to ignore both quests and dungeons altogether, roaming the world like a one-person Golden Horde, laying waste to all before you. Grinding mobs to level, more prosaically.

WoW Classic, though, doesn't have the infrastructure that made mob grinding such a pleasurable pastime in EverQuest. As we discussed at length, the communities of the two games, springing as they did from the same rootstock, grew in very different directions.

There are no camps in Classic. You can't roll up at a handy spot, start killing and expect to have others come join you, settling down for a full session of chat, banter and occasional thrills as new acquaintances and old friends drop in and out. Everything in WoW is much more functional.

Before I stopped playing I spent several sessions in Felwood. There are a number of quests there which require you to kill twenty or thirty mobs of specific types in specific locations. These are all quests that would go much faster if people grouped up to do them in the way it was widely reported to be happening, routinely, in the game's starting zones.

By the forties, no-one is doing that any more. Not on Hydraxian Waterlords at the hours I play, they aren't. Instead we have anything up to half a dozen individuals all competing frenziedly to tag each required mob as it spawns. Occasionally a small group might roll in, usually a trio for some reason. They will proceed to monopolize the area until all of them are satisfied, while the ungrouped players who were already there make do with any odd spawns the incomers miss. Then the mini-group will leave and we all carry on as we were.

Only once in several hours over several days did I get an invite from anyone to join them at one of those hunting grounds and that, as sod's law would have it, was when I was just running through on the way to somewhere else. And, of course, I didn't send out any invites either. We are all culpable for the culture of our servers. And it seems we're all either socially inept, bloody-mindedly stubborn or just plain lazy.

The upshot of all this is that although I was still enjoying myself when I played, I was increasingly finding my enjoyment frustrated and obstructed by the mechanics of the game, by the behavior of others and especially by my own lack of desire to engage with anything remotely uncomfortable.

Still, I would have carried on logging in every day, chipping away at the levels in pursuit of my declared intent to get my Hunter to 60 before cancelling my subscription, had it not been for EQII's fifteenth birthday and the Dragon Attack event.

I only popped over to see what it was all about and to get some background and some screenshots for a blog post. I had no intention of staying. But I played EQII all last weekend and then every night this week after work, killing dragon after dragon after dragon.

In seven days I've taken so many characters through the required four kills to get the mount/illusion I've lost count. I think it's eight but it could be more. I've logged in characters on different servers to do the event and last night I even logged in my old account, put my level 95 necromancer on follow and two-boxed my way around the spires until she, too, was able to fly as a dragon.

For the first few days I was aware I wasn't playing Classic. I'd played it almost every day since launch so I felt the lack like a chore not done. By Tuesday, though, I wasn't pretending to myself that I'd do "just one more dragon" then go level up some more in Azeroth. I was at a point that I've reached so often, where I stop playing a particular MMORPG long before I'm bored or frustrated with it, without ever really deciding to leave.

After a full week of nothing but dragons I think I might have burned out on that event for a while. But I have a huge pile of dragon parts piled up waiting to be crafted and I know that while I'm doing that I'll hear "dragon up!" in chat and the cycle will begin all overt again.

It's hard to resist a call to arms, especially when it's framed with such inclusive, dynamic urgency. Chat is buzzing with common purpose in the way Classic's was six weeks ago and isn't any more. In WoW, last week when I was playing, I regularly went the best part of an hour without seeing a single person speak in general chat.

Few people need to call out to random strangers any more. Almost three months in, social networks are established. Everyone's guilded. Everyone has a friends list. Surprisingly, I'm in a guild. Actually, I'm in two. I had loads of speculative invites, all of which I turned down until I got one from a gnome-only guild and another from one for banker-alts. I accepted both. I even talk to people in them.

Even so, I don't want to take it further. To get the most out of Classic now those wonderful early levels are done I know I'd need to move into group content and I'm just not interested at the moment. It would be the worst time.

Most of my gaming is happening after work, when I'm usually tired - sometimes very tired indeed. The prospect of locking myself into sessions where other people will be relying on me to stay for a couple of hours or more, doing things that might require real attention and care, seems deeply unattractive.

Especially when compared to a place where I can come and go at will, with no penalty and no guilt. Where my presence is welcome (every EQII public event always wants more people) but not missed. Where I can feel sufficiently active to be engaged but not so active as to be unable to relax. And, crucially, where every battle ends with a genuine chance of a worthwhile reward.

After the Dragons and the puppets (didn't mention them but they're still in play, too) comes Frostfell and the expansion. It's a lot of competition for a game where my horizons seemed to have narrowed to grinding mobs for xp and materials that my crafters can't even use unless they, too, grind more levels.

This is almost exactly what happened on my original WoW run back in the Wrath of the Lich King. era. I began to run out of steam in Un'Goro Crater, struggled through Burning Crusade and tapped out at 72 in the first or second zone of the third expansion. I lasted six months there but if it hadn't been for Battlegrounds it might have been less.

Which doesn't mean I'm done with either WoW or Classic. I am still going to get to 60. And I will certainly be back when Battlegrounds appear. Whenever that is.

For all its many merits, though, I don't think Classic is going to be a permanent home. More like somewhere I visit now and again. EQII, it seems, has triumphed once more. No matter how many times I drift away it always pulls me back.

Would That It Were So Simple: EverQuest II

The crafting quest that comes with EverQuest II's 15th Anniversary Dragon Attack event turns out to be both straightforward and confusing. I've read two walkthroughs and there's still stuff I don't get. And yet I've been happily doing the quest anyway.

The wiki version is perfunctory but the EQII Traders write-up is much more comprehensive. Even that doesn't answer all my questions, though, or smooth out some of the wrinkles.

The basics couldn't be simpler. There are two new NPC camps, one in The Commonlands, the other in Antonica. Each has an NPC that gives a repeatable quest, asking you to craft items for the construction of a monument. The materials needed come from the corpses of the dragons killed in the spire attacks and from another NPC at the camp.

All you need to do is go to the spires and gather mats from the dragon's corpse until you have enough, then back to the camp, buy the fuel and the item from the NPC, craft the finished product and hand it in. Rinse and repeat.

The problems come in the detail.

The first thing that threw me was the way the recipes are granted. EQII already has several ways of handling quest and event recipes but naturally someone had to come up with a new one.

As far as I can tell, the recipes are automagically granted when you first speak to the NPC but they are also automagically removed when you do the hand-in, so you can only see the recipes when you have the quest.

I only ever saw them on the crafting table drop-down. I'm not sure if they appear in your recipe book at any time. I went to check on the mats needed for one of the items after I'd done the quest and it had vanished. That confused me for a minute or two.

When you take the quest you get three recipes: a generic one that everyone gets, a second for your crafting archetype and a third for your specialization. Counter-intuitively, the less specialized the combine, the more progress it gives for the project. Also, although you can make all three items and hand them in together and the NPC will accept them, if you do that you only get one reward instead of three.

Each recipe uses a number of standard and rare materials from the dead dragons plus one item from the vendor in the camp and some fuel that the same vendor also sells. The purchased items and fuel are as cheap as they possibly could be at one copper piece each.

All characters on the account can harvest five times from each dragon every time one dies. There doesn't seem to be any skill requirement. There are something like a dozen possible mats that can be harvested, some rare, some normal. You get can multiples of each and "rares"  are rare in name only.

All the dragons die conveniently right next to wizard spires so crafters of any adventure level can go rummage around in the remains. That said, as I already reported, the event offers a great opportunity to grab some adventure level, so why not take advantage?

There are several crafting tables at the camps and any item from any specialization can be made at any of them. I wouldn't really call it crafting. If you want you can just stand there and counter the potential errors and the items pretty much make themselves. I couldn't really see any significant difference in success or speed between my max-level Weaponsmith with all the AAs and my 70s Carpenter with very few.

Other than the xp itself, the rewards aren't that great compared to the dragon kills. Just handcrafted or mastercrafted mount items. Useful but not very thrilling. Maybe they'll improve in later phases.

Also unlike the dragon-killing and corpse-ransacking, there do seem to be some restrictions or requirements on who can get the quest. After my Fae Conjuror, also a lowish tailor, did her eighteen adventure levels in two kills last night she flew off to Antonica to craft something with the bits of dragon in her bags.

When she got there it was night time and very, very dark. At first I couldn't even find the questgiver, which seemed odd as there should have been a big, blue, glowing feather over her head. When I eventually made out her shape in the gloom, not only was there was no feather but the NPC wouldn't even speak.

This morning I tried it with my Channeler, who has has barely any crafting levels. He's a Qeynos-based goodie but he happened to be near the Commonlands camp so I went there first. The NPC had no feather but he did ask the Channeler if he'd like to help. I was very surprised to find the only reply I could give was a flat "Not interested". I can't remember seeing that before.

Thinking it might be faction-related, I took the Channeler to Antonica. The NPC there was happy to ask for help and explain where to go to get the mats but she wouldn't actually offer the quest.

My high-70s Carpenter, however, was able to take get the quest and complete it. Each turn-in was giving her about 80% of a level, making me wonder if there's a limitation at lower levels to prevent people from raising crafting at an overly-accelerated rate. Daybreak always seem a lot more protective of tradeskill progress than they are over adventuring so that wouldn't be a surprise.

To make things even more complicated, it's possible to think you have the quest when in fact you don't. At the end of the dialog there are two options. I didn't screenshot it and the servers are down right now so I can't give the exact phrasing but one has you asking where to get the mats while the other looks like you're accepting the quest.

You need to take the option that asks about the mats. If you don't, you don't get the quest. I took the wrong one and didn't notice. I was able to make the item, which is why I'm assuming it's granted at an earlier part of the dialog, but when I came to hand it in, nothing happened except that the item disappeared and I had to re-take the quest properly and make it again.

All of this could be individual bugs I experienced, of course. Maybe after today's patch it'll all work like gnomish clockwork. Actually, that's how it's working now...

Either way, I'm good with it. When the servers come up I plan on collecting the dragon mats from all the characters who have them and letting the Carpenter level up on the construction quest. It would certainly be faster than doing writs or regular crafting quests and I could do with a high-level furniture-maker.

Progress on the monuments themselves seems to be going attritionally slowly. Usually on events like this it's common to see hordes of crafters buzzing around the crafting tables like bees around the hive, but at the moment everyone seems to be out killing dragons instead.

We've got until Thursday, December 5th to get the statues (or whatever it is we're building) up, which I am guessing also means we won't be seeing the expansion until December 10th at the earliest, since that's the first Tuesday after Dragon Attack ends and everything in Norrath begins on a Tuesday for some reason. Although now I think about it I believe expansions sometimes do begin on a Thursday...

On Skyfire the Monuments are currently somewhere around 0.3% of the way to completing Phase One. I think there are three phases, with new rewards for each. Supposedly progress speeds up in the later stages. It'll have to. At this rate we won't have the things done in time for the thirtieth anniversary, let alone December.

Not to mention that Frostfell will be arriving about then, too. It's going to be a busy old winter in Norrath.




IntPiPoMo count to date 62.

Growing Up Fast: EverQuest II

This week I have mostly been killing dragons. I've done my dailies in Guild Wars 2 but I haven't logged in to WoW Classic since Saturday. Instead I've been cycling all my max levels through the four dragons currently attacking wizard spires in EverQuest II to get the dragon mount/illusion on all of them.

This is not normal gameplay for me. I lean towards being a once-and-done player in events like this. Quite often that might stretch to twice if it's a fun event but six times? Unheard of! And that's not the end of it, either.

At the Nektulos Forest spires on Monday night, someone announced in general chat that they'd brought their fresh Level One character to the fight. When the dragon died they gleefully informed us all that the character was now Level Fourteen. And after the next dragon they were somewhere in the mid-twenties.

Now, there's a peculiar phenomenon in MMORPGs that I've discussed before. Even players who don't find levelling too slow or tedious will often jump through hoops to have that process go faster. I've read plenty of posts where people with a history of supporting slower leveling talk about jumping back into a game because there's bonus xp being handed out. I've done it myself, often.

I think it's the satisfaction of getting something for nothing. More reward for less effort and a frisson of somehow "beating the system", even though it's the system that's giving you a pass. Also, these events are always of limited duration, so it's a case of making hay while the sun shines rather than a slide into acceptance of a new normal, as happens when xp gain is raised permanently.

Dragons are big.

Also there's the perennial question of alts. Something that's fun the first time, or even the first half dozen times, may not be so much fun when you hit character number ten - or twenty. That may sound like a self-made problem (because it is) but there are reasons why a player might have a stable of characters that big.

EverQuest II has twenty-six classes and twenty-one races. Even after fifteen years of semi-continual play I have only played half of those classes to any meaningful level and there are nine races I've never even tried. And the differences aren't just cosmetic. The classes play very differently and the races have some substantial variations.

Last night, after I got the dragon mount on my fifth Level 110, I swapped to my Level Fourteen Fae Conjuror on the Antonia Bayle server. She was someone I'd levelled a few years back on one of the Progression servers which was then either rolled into Ant Bayle or we got free transfers off. I forget which.

I took her to Loping Plains, a zone intended for the level 75-80 crowd, back when there was a crowd in that range. That's where the next dragon attack was due.

Because the Dragon Attack event involves dragons attacking Ulteran Portals, one of Norrath's main transport hubs, getting there wasn't a problem. All I had to do was go to a portal in a zone in my level range and click on it. Or if that seemed like too much trouble, as an All Access Member I could just open my map and use the Fast Travel option, which is what I did.

The Nektulos Forest dragon doesn't just have a knockback. It has a knock up.

When I got there the dragon was already in play. I stood at the edge of the combat zone and started casting my kindergarten spells. The dragon lashed his tail and sent me flying (the event features some spectacular AE knockbacks). The trip didn't hurt me. The level seventy-something wolf that happened to be standing just where I landed did.

I revived in a graveyard halfway across the zone. There was no possibility of running back through a gauntlet of mobs sixty levels higher than my little Fae and since you can't Fast Travel to the same zone you're already in I took the scenic route. I opened the map, fast travelled to Moors of Ykesha, where there's a nice, safe wizard spire, used that to come back to Loping Plains and carried on where I left off.

The dragon was still fighting. The crowds are thinning a little, a few days into the event and in mid-week. There were "only" about fifty people there. More to the point, quite a lot of them were well below max level. Word on the xp has gotten out.

The reduced numbers and levels means the dragons are taking longer to kill. This fight lasted fifteen minutes or so. I positioned my conjuror with her back against the spires so she couldn't be knocked back and this time the dragon hit her with an AE and poisoned her to death.

The Everfrost dragon is kind enough to appear on a nice, open, flat ice field. Makes for easy zerging.

Another trip around the maps and back she came for round three. This time nothing killed her although it was a close thing once or twice. The dragon died and a deafening multiple DING! told me I'd levelled. Thirteen times. My conjuror was now Level 27.

I took her through the spires to the next dragon, already up in Everfrost. Everfrost isn't as high level as Loping Plains but it's still out of a Level 27's league. Even so, I managed not to die this time. I only got five levels though. Diminishing returns but then you have to factor in the increased time those five levels would have taken. Still a bargain.

At that point I stopped. I wasn't really intending to start playing on a different server, although I do have a Level 90+ character on Ant. Bayle. I was mostly just testing the waters.

Today and for the rest of the week EQII enjoys double XP (and double status) for All Access Members (and double Familiar xp for everyone) as part of this year's "Level Up Gear Up" preparations for the expansion. I'm keen to see what that does to dragon-kills. I have a few characters left to level on Skyfire including a Beastlord I might actually play one day.

And this wasn't the post I meant to write. I was going to do something on the Tradeskill side of the Dragon Attack event. Maybe I'll get that done between dragons.



IntPiPoMo count to date 59.

Underpromise, Overdeliver: EverQuest II

When I first read the official announcement  outlining the events Daybreak had scheduled for EverQuest II's fifteenth anniversary celebrations I was underwhelmed. Granted, anniversaries that end in five generally carry less significance than those that end with a zero - and fifteen is definitely neither ten nor twenty. Still, fifteen years of continual operation is a notable achievement for an MMORPG. It deserves recognition and respect.

For what was described as "our big 15th Anniversary event" we were promised something called "Dragon Attack": dragons were scheduled to attack the Ulteran Spires in four zones, Thundering Steppes, Everfrost, Loping Plains, and Nektulos Forest. Backing this up came a tradeskill event, in which we would be tasked with "constructing permanent, impressive statues commemorating the 15 years that have passed since the Age of Destiny".

Is he looking at me? He's not, is he?

The list of rewards from the crafting quest looked a tad thin and there was no mention of the pay-off for protecting the spires from dragons. The press release also tied the annual Heroes Festival, which falls at this time each year, into the anniversary celebrations as if it was part of them. That seemed a bit cheeky to me.

It didn't help that there was a 15th Aniversary Celebration Bundle in the store, stuffed to bursting with really tempting treats including a crafting table that works for any tradeskill, a 66-slot bag, a 100% fee-reducing, 100 slot broker crate, speed-enhancing boots, a mount and lots more. Very good value at $34.99 but perhaps a little galling when compared with what I thought were rather lackluster in-game rewards.

And then I logged in and discovered I was wrong on every count. The event is excellent and so are the rewards. I spent most of yesterday killing dragons and having a rare old time. As I sit here now I'm alternating between writing this post and killing more. Whether by good fortune or good design, EQII's fifteenth birthday party is turning out to be one of the most enjoyable I've attended for quite a while.

Note bunny and shovel from previous events. Cloak too, probably.

Dragon Attack and Heroes Festival mesh a little chaotically but work well together. Structurally very similar, they each consist of a series of public quests in which very large creatures with quadrillions of hit points appear at easy-to-access locations on a fairly predictable schedule.

All the mobs are raid-level so it relies on a good turnout if things are going to go smoothly. We certainly have that for now. Heroes Festival is a little more forgiving on numbers, although not by much.

It features "clothwork" puppets representing famous villains from the lore. They're notionally operated by a theater troupe of NPCS and are nothing more than giant pinatas. I'm not sure if they even fight back. Dragon Attack features guess what? Dragons. They do fight and there are even some tactics required, as outlined in the wiki.

You can't fool me. You're not a real dragon!

All of the dragons and most of the puppets appear right next to a wizard spire, meaning anyone can get to them with the minimal of travel time. There's a ten minute warning before they arrive and once they're in place there's a nominal timeframe in which they have to be killed, something like 90 minutes.

Each dragon has a one-hour respawn time and right now they're taking five or ten minutes to die. With people doing them in a fairly strict rotation that means the next is along in about the same time it takes to kill one, if not sooner.

Indeed, because the two events are on different schedules, there's frequently a dragon and a puppet up at the same time. It's possible to chain-kill with no more than a few five or ten minute intervals now and again. I did that for about four hours at a stretch yesterday and it was a lot of fun.

Everyone lines up along the crater rim for this one. People are weird.

There's a real carnival atmosphere at the moment, on this first weekend. Every dragon and puppet draws a crowd, even on my low-pop server, Skyfire. Yesterday afternoon and evening there were sometimes enough people to spawn second instances of the zones. I crashed twice because of the strain a hundred players, their pets and minions put on my graphics card.

General chat is busy with people asking which dragons or puppets are up and with people who are killing them reporting the progress. We even had someone roleplaying a TV reporter for a while. I've heard no complaints save one - someone was moaning that having these two events plus the expansion beta all at once meant there was too much to do!

My haul from Saturday,
not including the stuff I equipped.

As for the rewards, which I turned my nose up at when I read about them, I was completely wrong. They're great! Very generous and sufficiently desirable to bring people out of their usual instances to get them.

The Dragons drop very good gear for Mercenaries (every piece I've had has been a major upgrade), Illegible Spell Scrolls (needed for spell upgrades and something I virtually never see drop as a solo player), and Infusers for gear (which I'm saving to use on the inevitable upgrades from questlines in the upcoming expansion).

The most important drop for me, though, is Mount equipment. Levels and gear for mounts was a keynote feature of last year's expansion, Chaos Descending, but it was one that I spent most of the year ignoring. Until this weekend none of my mounts had a single piece. Now I have a saddle and some barding equipped and more than a dozen more mount items in my bags.

Last, and very much not least, there's an Achievement for killing all four dragons. I'm not much for Achievements in general but it's different when they come with one of the best "mounts" I've ever seen in the game.

It may seem odd that I'm sounding so enthusiastic about a mount when only a few weeks ago I was bemoaning their very existence but the name of the mount in question should go some way to explaining why that is: Reveal Inner Dragon.

Technically an actual mount, this is really an illusion. You place it in your Mount Appearance slot (you can put it in the main Mount slot if you want but it doesn't have very good stats) and you become a dragon. A really good-looking dragon at that.

Look at me! I'm a dragon!

I want one for all my Level 110s. The Berserker has one and the Warlock will before I finish this post. That leaves four more. I may well get it for the lower level characters on other servers too. While the dragons are Level 110 Epic X3 raid mobs, you get credit for just being there when the kill happens so any level can complete the achievement provided they don't mind dying now and again.

That's the adventurer side of Dragon Attack. To keep this post to a manageable length for once I'll cover the crafter's version separately. Suffice to say it's pretty good, too.

As for the returning Heroes Festival, which I so glibly dismissed on sight as "more of the same", I'd completely missed the part of the press release that mentions the five new collections added this year. Even if I'd seen it, I wouldn't have known that the rewards for those include three new mounts.

Not really! Don't kill me!

As for the new items added to the Heroes Festival vendors to be bought with the currency you get for doing the event, if it wasn't for the invaluable EQ2 Traders I wouldn't have known there were some wonderful old school paintings (the ones without the horrible new frames) and one of the best sets of appearance armor I've seen in the game for years. The PR team might have mentioned that...

Dragon Attack runs until December 6th and Heroes Festival to November 19 so there's plenty of time to get everything done. At the moment everything is buzzing and it's easy and fun but as people run their alts through the cycles and get all the rewards they want I imagine it will quieten down considerably.

I wouldn't leave it too long - all the targets are raid mobs and I can tell you from experience that even with the puppets that don't fight back it takes a handful of players an awfully long time to whittle one down. I imagine that's why the event allows an hour and a half for the kill.

All in all I give this anniversary celebration a hearty cheer. So much better than I thought it was going to be. Thanks and congratulations to the dev team once again. Maybe someone needs to pop round to the PR department and have a quiet word...



(IntPiPoMo count 55)