The Tarisland Devs Would Like To Tell You: They're Listening...

This morning I watched a video, brought to my attention by MMOBomb, in which Tencent, developers of upcoming, would-be WoW-beater Tarisland, addressed some of what they see as the key issues brought to their attention by the latest closed beta. As an endearingly unprofessional voice, possibly one of the developers themselves, falteringly read aloud the same words I could see for myself on screen, I found myself wondering whether I'd missed an invite to another round of testing. Or maybe never been chosen to receive one.

I was sufficiently puzzled to go check on the game's official website, where I discovered that the most recent beta had indeed been the one I played back in November. I hadn't missed out on a third opportunity to give the much-anticipated title another once-over. I can now go back to looking forward to doing that later in the year, always assuming they're kind enough to ask me.

It would certainly have been a surprise if there had been another beta since the last one, seeing that test only ended in November. Hardly time to fit in another round, what with Christmas and New Year. What made me think it might have happened were the specific questions the video attempted to answer, most of which address concerns I had no idea anyone had, over systems and mechanics I didn't realise existed. It did seem as though I must have missed a trick, somewhere.

On closer examination, it appears I just didn't happen to come into contact with most of the potential problems because they relate to things I didn't bither with during my not-insignificant time with the game. Some of that is entirely understandable, some less so. 

For example, one section of the video deals with PvP. It's no surprise I wasn't aware that players complained there weren't enough opportunities for players to beat each other up or that there were shortcomings in the matchmaking process. I vaguely knew the game had some form of PvP because there's an annoying pop-up in the never-ending Tutorial that keeps suggesting you go check it out, but I never took the trouble to find out what it was like or even where you went to do it.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't give it a go if the game was live. I've spent a lot of hours in battlegrounds in theme-parks like World of Warcraft, Rift, EverQuest II and Warhammer Online and mostly had a good time, even though I do think of instanced PvP as the candy of MMORPGs - moreish at first but too much and it makes you feel queasy. In a limited-duration beta, though, I'd have to be very short of better options to spend time running around playing digital laser-tag. It certainly wouldn't have said anything very good about the game if I had.

It's also perhaps not all that odd that I wasn't aware that in beta you could get comparable or even better gear by crafting instead of raiding. If it's unlikely that I'd experiment with PvP in a beta, it's all but impossible to imagine I'd find myself raiding. I don't do raids in live games - why would I want to test them?

I do craft, though, so I suppose I might have found out that way. Only, as Tencent themselves have acknowledged, feedback indicates not all players love to craft: "Some players find Crafting to be too complex and time-consuming", which is why the whole thing is going to be "simplified". You can call it "dumbed down" if you like. They didn't and I don't think I will, either.

I did take a brief look at crafting while I was there but I didn't make much progress. It didn't feel like it was going to be particularly complicated but it did seem as if it might be quite tedious. There weren't that many recipes, so you'd have to keep making the same things and although I was surprised how fast some of  the fireworks I made sold, there didn't seem to be an awful lot to make in the earlier levels that would be either interesting or profitable. 

Getting to the point where I could craft something genuinely exciting, like an Invincible Kitten mount, looked like it would take a lot more effort than I would have been willing to put in so I can't say I'm disappointed to hear the plan now is to make the whole thing quicker and easier. I'm increasingly of the opinion that complex crafting is a better fit for survival games than it is for narrative-driven, theme park MMORPGs, anyway.

The real reason I imagined I might have inadvertently skipped a round of testing came right at the start of the video, when the questions being asked and answered all revolve around things I either didn't remember or never knew were in the game at all. Take the "Inscribed Stone System", the vaguest of details about which are slowly starting to come back to me as I write. 

I recall it being some kind of augmentation you can add to your gear to make it more powerful or give it extra functions and features. Lots of games have something similar and I confess it didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. It seems others were a lot more concerned, particularly by the prospect of being allowed to buy and trade Inscribed Stone Energy, fearing it would lead to some sort of Pay-to-Win scenario. 

Tencent has been running scared of the "P2W" tag since the day Tarisland was announced. There have already been some skirmishes between the developers and the playerbase (Curently defined as people who shout a lot about the game on Reddit and Discord, without necessarily having played in any of the tests.) over what constitutes "Pay To Win". If they work it out, maybe they'll tell the rest of us. 

Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, Tencent is determined not to allow anyone to pin the P2W label on this particular system, so from now on the stuff won't be tradable. Moreover, in order to discourage players from "playing too long", there will be a cap on how much ISE you can get per day. 

Playing too much does seem to be something Chinese game developers worry about, although I'm going to stick my neck out and say they're only really bothered about the home market. I very much doubt they care whether Europeans or Americans spend all day, every day, in front of the screen, especially if it involves them spending more Euros and Dollars. Or maybe that's too cynical. I don't know...

I did at least manage to dredge a few details about the Inscribed Stone System up from the swamps of my memory, when prompted. The other two economic issues featured in the video I don't recall at all. One is Gold Coins, which I'm guessing is the in-game currency. I mean, I knew Tarisland was on the gold standard, like virtually every fantasy rpg ever, but I wasn't aware it had any special significance. 

According to the feedback recap in the video, players felt it was too hard to get gold, meaning when the game goes live there could be a problem with bots and gold sellers or as Tencent prefer to call them "illegal program users". It seems that in attempting to pre-empt this problem by limiting Gold Coins to "more challenging" encounters, Tencent "pushed their guard" a little too far, something they intend to remedy in future by employing "more technical means" of countering those pesky illegal program users and by making Gold Coins easier to get for everyone else.

To which I can only say - good luck with that!

The other potentially game-breaking inclusion in the last beta, at least according to the feedback Tencent received, relates to something called CBT Benefits Cards. I have absolutely no idea what these are or were. I never saw any mention of them and as far as I know I never received any, unless it's jargon for those handouts every game throws at players just for logging in. 

Whatever they were, they were tradeable through the in-game Auction House, which sent people into a tizzy. There was great concern expressed over whether CBT cards would be included in the official launch, when the game goes live. 

Now, I would have thought that was a question that answered itself. What would you you imagine CBT would stand for if not "Closed Beta Test"? Obviously, these cards were specific to the testing process, something the video confirms. Still, just in case it was keeping you up at night, be reassured: no, Closed Beta Test Benefits Cards will not be included in the official launch version of Tarisland!

The last piece of feedback addressed by the video that I want to mention is the reaction to the dungeons in the game and the way they can be accessed. I did do a couple of dungeons, albeit only because there are points in the Main Storyline Quest when you have no choice, and I thought they were pretty good, as these things go but apparently some people - inevitably - complained they were too easy.

Other people kvetched about the time restrictions. Unlike in most Western MMORPGs, you can't just chain-run dungeons in Tarisland until your eyeballs bleed. There's an energy or access mechanic, which the video just refers to as "dungeon attempts" that once again seeks to put a brake on players whose enthusiasm for the game might verge on the self-destructive. 

It seems that the combination of easy basic dungeons and limited attempts per day led players to concentrate on knocking out as many lower-difficulty Arcane Realms as they could, while swerving the more challenging Elite Dungeons. This in turn pissed off the hardcore, who couldn't get groups for the tough stuff. I'd like to say First World Problems but...

Hearing all this in the video, my own selfish concern was that Tencent would respond by making the Arcane Realms harder to appease the concerns of the hardcore. If they did, you could hardly blame them, seeing that would be the demographic most likely to pay the bills. Hearteningly, however, their reponse was much more nuanced, taking into account the requirements of both sides. 

They're going to consider separating the two kinds of dungeons so each uses its own "Dungeon Attempts". They also want to avoid making dungeon-play grindy, instead keeping it focused on being a fun way to level. Instead of making the Arcane Realm harder across the board they're going to give it a Challenge Mode with cosmetic rewards, while leaving the regular version much as it is (Although they do mention making it "more fun", which adds an ominous note to the proceedings...)

There's a fair amount more in the video, which manages to pack a lot into less than ten minutes. There's more about crafting and also an acknowledgement that they may have gone a little overboard in the "exploration" stakes, by which I think they mean PoIs and mini-events, which did indeed come thick and fast in closed beta.

All in all, I found the video largely reassuring, particularly when taken in conjunction with the earlier feedback report published in mid-December. Tate one covered many of the same points and also confirmed there'll be no gender-locking of classes in the final build. I get the feeling Tencent are attempting to rediscover that sweet spot WoW enjoyed around the time of Wrath of the Lich King, when it seemed for a brief while as if the same MMORPG could appeal equally to casual and hardcore players, without short-changing either.

That's a tough one to pull off but I hope they can do it. And even if they can't, good on them for trying.

Tarisland First Impressions: The Market or Why A Duck?

I was working all weekend so I didn't get much chance to log into the Tarisland beta. Those Noah's Heart dailies don't do themselves, you know. I mean, they almost do but you still have to be there...

I wanted to play, though, and I did manage to get a few minutes, here and there. On Saturday evening  I was fiddling about with the UI because I didn't have enough time to go adventuring, when I happened across something you'd think might have come up in the tutorial but, as far as I can remember, wasn't even mentioned - the Market.

By "Market" I don't exactly mean the cash shop. I think it probably will be the cash shop, when the game goes live, but there is no cash shop in this beta. 

I suppose it's an assumption to say the game will have a cash shop when it goes live but it seems a pretty safe one. It would be a weird free-to-play title if it didn't. Then again, now I come to think of it, I haven't actually seen any mention of the payment model. 

Hang on - I'll check... 

 

Hmm. It's surprisngly unclear. I can't see anything specific on the official website other than the much-touted "Say No to Pay to Win!" policy. A general search of the web finds most sites describing it as "A Free to Play Cross-Platform MMORPG" so I guess that's what it is. I imagine the payment model is something so obvious to the Chinese developers they don't even feel the need to mention it. Are there any MMORPGs in their home market that require a subscription?

Anyway, getting back to the point, I hadn't noticed until a couple of days ago that there even was a marketplace. I think it might get a mention at some point during the extended tutorial but I don't recall anything specifically directing me to open a window or buy anything, as happens in most games that rely on people spending money in the company store. I had to find the Market for myself.

What I found when I did surprised me a little. I knew the game had various factions with which you could raise your Reputation and that by doing so you could purchase crafting patterns and other useful items. I also knew there were tokens to collect for doing different activities such as running dungeons and other instances and that you could spend those tokens on gear upgrades. What I hadn't appreciated was just how intensive and wide-reaching those systems were.

The Market window has three tabs: Appearance, Market and Trade Assoc. 

There's next to nothing in the Market tab, just some health and mana potions, a four-slot backpack expander a name-change token, all of which you can buy for a small amount of silver, the most common in-game currency. I'm guessing (A lot of that going on here.) that this is the tab where most of the non-cosmetic Cash Shop items are going to appear, when the time comes.

The Trade Assoc. tab breaks down into half a dozen sub-tabs, each featuring a named Association. Some of those in turn open out into more tabs, around a dozen in all. That's almost certainly just the beginning of what you'll see when the game leaves beta. 

The Associations are:

• Adventurers
• Honorary
• Universal Hall
• Reputation
• Lifestyle
• Friendship.

Each of them uses a different type of token from a different type of gameplay. The Adventurers Association rewards stat gear for the tokens you get from running dungeons, whereas the Honorary Association takes tokens from PvP. Sound familiar at all?

The Universal Hall is a kind of ascending solo instance as seen in games such as Final Fantasy XIV and takes tokens earned from doing that content. Reputation is self-explanatory. So far there are only three Reps, one for each of the zones available in beta, but presumably eventually there'll be one for every zone in the game. (And again, I'm making an assumption, this time that Tarisland will launch with more than three zones...)

Lifestyle Association is for crafters. This turns out to be where you buy the kind of mats that are often vendor-sold in MMORPGs, as well as the crafting tools themselves. If that was explained in the extremely brief crafting tutorial, I must have missed it. Everything in there costs nothing but silver and in amounts that seem very reasonable, although since I have yet to do any crafting, don't take my word for it.

For the Friendship Association it looks like Tarisland has borrowed an idea from FFXIV generally reckoned to have been a good one and then expanded on it. The currency you spend in this tab is the Friendship Badge, which you earn in three ways: by doing dungeons with players who have never done them before, by completing - or in some cases just attempting - the higher difficulty Elite and Arcane instances, and by taking on the Healer or Tank role in Raids. Be a good egg and karma will reward you, in other words.

It's a wide-ranging and potentially very solid scaffold on which to build a range of platforms for character-progression. It certainly seems to back up the No Pay-to-Win claim which, of course, invites the question so what are you going to make all your money on, then?

I'm guessing that's where the third tab, Appearance, comes in.

In Appearance you can buy Mounts (Ground and Flying), Costumes, Weapon Skins and what the game calls Pendants. We'll get to Pendants later.

All of the mounts (There are only four available in the beta) have special abilities in addition to their obvious mobilities. There's a mech suit that allows you to craft a portable Warehouse, giving remote access to the storage vault to you and your "nearby allies". There's also an elegant, icy elk-like creature called a Polar Bluehorn that allows you to gather crafting materials without having to dismount. I wanted that.

I'd seen people riding the Bluehorn and wondered what you had to do to get one. You get a free mount from a quest fairly early on but it's a clunking great rhino that I found aesthetically unpleasing, not least because someone on the art team made the dubious decision to have female characters ride the thing side-saddle. 

Or maybe everyone has to. It's about as wide as a VW Microbus. You'd need some thighs to straddle one of those, gender notwithstanding.

It hadn't really occurred to me I might just be able to buy a better mount and even if the possibility had crossed my mind, I certainly hadn't entertained the idea that I might be able to afford it. When I found the mounts in the Market, it came as a very pleasant surprise to discover I could do both.

In beta, that is. I'm pretty sure it'll be different in the Live game.

It's not explained anywhere I could find it but I'm guessing everything in the Appearance tab will eventually be available only for a curency purchased with real money. Oh, I'm sure there will also be a way to earn a pittance of the same currency in-game. There always is. The main route to looking good, though, is going to be through your wallet.

For the beta, however, it seems we've all been given a stipend of three thousand... I'm going to call them Gems, because that's what they look like. Mousing over the icon for once produces nothing. 

I spent a good, long while examining all the ways I could spend my free money. I really wanted the Dauntless Explorer costume, a kind of catwalk version of something Indiana Jones' cooler, younger sister might wear. (That's younger when the first movie came out, obviously, not younger than Indie is now, when his hypothetical lil' sis would probably be even older than I am...)

Unfortunately, I couldn't run to both that and the Polar Bluehorn and the sheer utility of not having to get on and off my mount to gather from nodes won out. That still left me with a chunk of change to spend so I spent some of it on...

Well, I kind of blew the reveal with the picture at the top of the post. Yes, I bought a duck. 

And not just any duck, either. I spent 180 Gems on a bright yellow duckling that tosses a purple ball into the air then catches it, occasionally turning somersaults, all while sitting on a fluffy white cloud that floats over my character's head. The in game logic and lore-appropriate explanation for this is anyone's guess.

Weird objects that float above the player-character's head are called Pendants in the terminology of Tarisland. It's a category that also includes back items and halo-like particle effects, a couple of which I may well also spend my remainingGems on before the beta comes to an end. I am absolutely the target market for this kind of thing, always providing it's not going to cost me anything. Well, anything other than my self-respect, but that's a ship that sailed long ago.

All things considered, the mechanics underpinning this aspect of the in-game economy seem solid enough. I personally prefer the more traditional approach to gearing up that comes from beating up monsters and taking their stuff but token systems have been with us almost as long and many people seem to prefer their predictability. 

According to the website, Tarisland is also supposed to have a "Free Trading System ... committed to restoring the freedom of trade in the endgame and creating an economic system that closely resembles a real market." If that's in the beta, I haven't found any sign of it yet, but then it took me twenty levels to find the bank, so once again, don't rely on anything I tell you.

At the end of my session this morning, most of which was spent researching this post, I was asked to complete another, entirely different, lengthy survey on how I was finding things. They didn't ask me to score the Market but if they had I'd have given it an 8 out of 10, which is what I've given most aspects of the game I've been asked about so far. 

I am a very generous grader, though. Always have been.

Jogging Round The Park In New World

As I was playing New World this afternoon, I wondered what I might find to write about later. It didn't seem that a lot had happened. Certainly nothing I hadn't commented on before, in my posts on the various alphas and betas these last few years. 

I'd done a lot of gathering, of course. Fought a lot of animals and undead. I'd been shopping at the Trading Post. I'd spent a lot of skill points or mastery points, whatever they call them. Both, probably.

What I'd done more of than anything, though, was jog. I'm not a great fan of jogging, in life or in games. If you're going to run, run.  I kept trying to, but none of the usual keys made me sprint and although I kept meaning to open the Settings menu and check if there was go faster key, somehow I always forgot when I got to a safe spot.

Photobombed by a Norland Nanny as I teleported.

New World does have some form of instant transport, possibly more than one. I found one location I could reliably teleport back to but only one. Other places said I could but I couldn't seem to manage it. One quest made a big, big deal of how I'd be able to teleport back at the end but I couldn't. 

None of this had anything to do with bugs or glitches, of which I've seen remarkably few. It had a lot more to do with me not paying attention because I was squirrelling. 

As others have said, there's an awful lot to do in New World. At low levels, at least, you'll never be stuck for something to fill your time. Another thing I was thinking about as the kilometers ticked by was how I'd define a "sandpark" mmorpg, which is what New World is, probably. 

Oh, hey, that looks interesting!

 

I decided it's when there are more organized activities provided than you can reasonably expect to finish but it really doesn't much matter which of them you do or in what order. 

• A sandbox doesn't have much in the way of prepared entertainment at all. It relies on your imagination and your energy and if you don't have enough of either to keep yourself entertained then that's your problem.  
• A theme park hands you a program of set pieces and asks you to follow the signs and enjoy them all in the right order and gets awkward about it if you try to jump the lines or go round the wrong way.  
• A sandpark just shoves everything in front of you at once and says "Look at all the stuff we've got for you to do! Off you go! Have fun!" There's no right or wrong way to approach things. It's all going to be there when you get to it and you can do it in whatever order you want.

Okay, there are certain rules and barriers but the rules are vague and the barriers are low. If you want to focus on your skills or your stats or your gear you can do that. If you want to get right on with grabbing territory and having small wars you can do that. If you want to make money to buy a home you can do that.

Try not to focus on what I'm wearing. I know it's difficult but try.

 

That's something else I was thinking as I trotted across the map. Making some money to buy a house.

One thing that annoyed me in the last beta I was in was that there was housing in the game but I couldn't find any way to see what it looked like from the inside. Other mmorpgs have a "Tour" or "Visit" option. It seems like you'd need it for such a big purchase. Who'd want to buy a house sight unseen?

Of course there may have been an option and I just didn't see it. Very likely. Doesn't matter now. What does matter is whether you can look around your potential new home now the game is live and I'm happy to say you can.

I found out the way I'm finding out everything in New World at the moment. I was bumbling around and something came up on the screen and I clicked on it. Suddenly I could access a Housing Menu, which allowed me to visit friends (If I had any.) or enter an "Empty House." I tried it and there I was, inside.

The Show Home. They always look immaculate.

 

I'm happy to report that, as I'd hoped, New World's housing works much the way housing does in Black Desert Online. I think BDO has about the best mechanics I've seen for instanced housing in that you can see the outside from the inside. It removes all the problems of urban blight that arise from letting people build wherever they want. It avoids the suburbanism of instanced neighborhoods and it neatly sidesteps the issue of everyone being siloed in their own pocket housing universe.

In BDO and now as I found in New World, you can stand at the window of your instenced home and look out into the street, where you can see other players running past or using the crafting stations or standing around aimlessly. The windows in the starter home were a bit poky for a decent view but the principle's the thing. I imagine more expensive properties have a better prospect.

There's something else I liked. The price. The starter home in Windsward is only 5,000 gold. I had over a thousand gold by level ten just from quest rewards and mob drops. It makes the whole thing seem eminently affordable.

Purple and green should never be seen. Oh, look who's talking...

 

It also helps to give me at least the beginning of an idea on whare to focus my efforts, something I could definitely use after nine hours of running around semi-aimlessly, doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that and a lot of not very much in particular. As a short term goal I'm going to try and save up my five grand and get my foot on the housing ladder.

How you make money in New World is another question. One way would be to stop spending it, I guess. 

As usual, I quickly found myself engaged in quests well over my level but instead of stepping back and doing the things I was fit for I decided to buy my way out of my problems. I'd heard that the economy was currently favoring buyers rather than sellers so I took a look at the Trading Post and managed to buy myself a whole bunch of upgrades for only about a fifth of my liquid capital.

Recovering on the ledge, the only place adds wouldn't keep spawning on me.

 

I'm curious - and skeptical - about how the player-only economy is going to work long term. Are there any mmorpgs, other than EVE Online, that don't have any way whatsoever for players to make money by selling items to NPCs? It's been a staple of every game I've played for decades and I find it quite hard to imagine.

For now, though, it's working just fine. My new gear let me cruise through the roadblocks. At one point I found myself at level 11 fighting a level 16 quest mob with three level 16 adds in a confined space at the top of a tower and I killed them all. Granted I was at 2% health at the end but they were down and I was up so who cares if it was messy? A win's a win.

The downside of buying a random selection of gear off the TP is that I look like a drama student who lost a drunken bet and had to dress themselves by pulling random items from a box marked "Pantomime rejects - Do Not Use." 

There's a town crier somewhere missing his shoes and a sewer-worker looking for his rubber gloves.

 

Seriously, just look at me! What is that pink petticoat I'm wearing supposed to be? Heavy armor, apparently. It looks like something Lucille Ball might have worn in a bedroom scene with Desi (Twin beds, three feet apart, naturally.) with one of Jean-Paul Gautier's rejected designs for Madonna's bustier slapped over the top. It's beyond hideous and believe it or not someone crafted it. No wonder they were selling it at a rock-bottom price.

When I was wearing all quest drops they were both understated and thematically appropriate. Now I look like I shouldn't be allowed out on my own. If I knew how the appearance system worked, or the dyes, maybe I could do something about it. Another goal to work on, I guess.

That picture was taken in Windsward, by the way, the place where I looked at the house, is very nice. Twee, even. So much so, there are in-game jokes about it. I might settle there. I'm mostly doing stuff for Monarch Bluffs right now, though.

You say twee, I say picturesque.

 

That's another thing I like about New World, the geographical delineation. Each settlement has its own politics and social structure and there's a whole progression element attached. You could focus on one and cap everything, the way people clear or finish zones and maps in other games, or you could just wander around and do stuff for everyone and let it all fill in behind you. You can guess which way I'm going.

I do like progression, it has to be said. I don't go all that much on linear narratives or on-rails levelling but equally I'm not crazy about everything flattening out so much it never seems you're getting anywhere. I think one of the reasons New World has such traction at the early stages is that there's a continual fizz and pop of numbers getting bigger and it feels exciting. 

EverQuest used to be great at that in the old days, when skills all went up with use and every level mattered and there were hundreds of factions to work on. It's something a lot of games seem to have tried to get away from in recent years, possibly to try and avoid players getting confused or overwhelmed. New World doesn't seem to care much about that.

Does anyone know if flax is addictive? I think it might be... (This gag would have been ten times funnier if I'd remembered that plant is hemp not flax.)

 

There are going to be guides telling you the "best" or the "quickest" route through all this, soon enough. Actually, I'm sure there are already. I haven't looked. The strength of the sandpark format, especially when it's done as well as this, is that there isn't really a wrong way to do anything. In the end you're going to want to have done it all so you may as well do some of it whenever you can. Any of it.

That's my excuse, anyway. I suppose I might come to regret not having more of a focus - wouldn't be the first time - but I doubt it. For now, though, I have no particular plans.

Well, except for my house. And some decent clothes. 

Clothes first, I think. Can't keep walking around looking like that.

Change My Gamma : EverQuest

A lot of unexpected things have happened this year. Finding myself playing EverQuest again is one of them.

I really thought I was done with the old game. It wasn't that I'd never play it again but that I'd never play it seriously, again.

By "seriously" I don't, of course, mean grouping up for dungeons or anything silly like that. When was the last time I grouped for xp in EQ, I wonder? Over a decade, ago for sure. Maybe a decade and a half.

No, what I mean is focusing on a character, levelling up, finding better gear, going to new zones, upgrading spells, researching which focus items I should be using, learning new mechanics and systems. The kind of regular soloing I've been doing, on and off, now and then, for years. I really thought I was done with all that.

I've written enough about the Overseer feature Darkpaw added back in March. I won't go over it again, save to say that without it I definitely wouldn't be playing EverQuest, either "seriously" or frivolously. I don't think I'd logged in for the best part of a year before curiosity about how EQ's version compared to EverQuest II's tempted me to take a look.

Can we get a spot on this guy?

Overseeing turned out to be both entertaining and practical. It's great to see my highest character positively zipping through the levels, if a level every couple of weeks can be called zippy. I still wasn't doing anything you could really call "playing", though. Just standing around the Guild Lobby, setting quests from the UI and collecting the rewards.

Around level 97 I went shopping for spells. By late June I had a level 100 character and I'd never used any of them. It occured to me that I was going to end up buying a lot of spells I'd never use if I carried on that way.

I started browsing the Bazaar, thinking about getting some better gear but gear costs a lot more to buy than spells. You really don't want to buy it and never use it. I thought maybe I'd see how I got on with what I had, first.

By early July I was out hunting. It was going well. I spent quite a lot of money making bags so I could carry all that fat vendor loot. It was starting to feel like old times, only maybe better.

Cogs for cash.

Not having to rely on mob xp to level makes a huge difference to how much fun going hunting feels. Soloing into three figures, at least the way I do it, remains painfully slow. I can make a reliable eight or ten per cent of a level in a matter of minutes just doing Overseer quests whereas I can kill or quest for hours and barely move the needle. The standard EQ UI now displays xp to three decimal places. It has to or you'd think it was broken.

With Overseer questing making light of the heavy lifting when it comes to xp, soloing is fun again. When I take the mage out to hunt my main aim is to make money and I always loved making bank in Norrath.

Unlike EQII, which has had Weimar republic levels of inflation for years, EverQuest still seems to retain a rational relationship between in-game income and expenditure. There are plenty of upgrades for my level on sale in the Bazaar, priced in the thousands or low tens of thousands. In EQII you'd need to add several zeroes to that.

"Tens of thousands" still sounds like a lot for one piece of armor, fifteen levels below the cap, but I can net ten thousand plat in an hour just by killing mobs and selling the drops to vendors. I know several very lucrative spots no-one else seems to be using these days. With the mobs now conning green, shading to grey, I can pull  whole rooms and AE everything down at negligible risk. Every pull brings in hundreds of platinum in gems and vendor loot.

Did you remember to bring the torch?

Add to that the numerous tradeskill materials that sell to players though the Barter system and money just rolls in. And modern EverQuest has what I'd consider to be almost ironically state-of-the-art mechanics for looting and selling.

Clear a room and all the drops on all the kills appear in a window with multiple options to take or leave. Tradeskill items self-sort into separate bags. Open the Barter window anywhere in game and you can check who's buying what you have, then sell it to them and get paid instantly, emptying your bags and filling your wallet right there at your hunting spot.

If you pick a place to hunt where most things you're going to sell to vendors stack, you can pretty much kill indefinitely without ever running out of space. It makes the whole thing feel quite zen. If mass slaughter can ever be considered meditative, that is.

As I play more I gain confidence. Today I moved on from hunting in zones I'd almost completely outlevelled to ones that are still a tad low but which give marginally decent xp. The hot zone for level 90, Fear Itself, which I wrote about a little last week, is just about right for stress-free soloing at my current level of 103.

The main problem I was having there was the gloom. It was so dark I literally couldn't see where I was going. If the mobs didn't have their names in lights above their heads I wouldn't have been able to see them either, which would have made wandering around in pitch darkness tantamount to suicide.

I should probably look at all these settings one day.

Fortunately I finally remembered what we used to do to fix visibility issues in very dark zones in EQ. Ramp the gamma as high as it would go.

It's been a very long time since I changed the gamma setting in any game. I imagine most modern MMORPGs don't even have one. EQ still does, even if it took me a while to find it, hidden behind an "Advanced" button in the Display tab in Options. Once I'd found and fiddled with it the difference was like night and day. Literally.

True, everything looks washed-out now. Granted, the whole "Fear Itself" thing is considerably less terrifying with all the lights on. But I can see where I'm going and what I'm about to bump into, which is a lot more important. It's not like I'm playing EverQuest for the graphics, after all...

I've already started researching where to go next. The final set of Hot Zones (the system finishes at level 95) will take me into 2011's Veil of Alaris expansion. That's going to be completely new to me. I should think I'd be ready to give it a try when I hit 105. Ten levels seems to be a fairly reliable margin although twelve is probably safer, when trying to learn a new zone solo.

When you start reading this stuff up and making plans it means you're invested in the game, at least for the moment. I really never expected that to happen again with EQ.

Of course, it may not last past the weekend. I kind of hope it does, though.

Who'll Be Your Mercenary? : EverQuest II

I was playing EverQuest II yesterday, just pottering around in a Sundayish fashion, sorting bags and trying to keep everyone's upgrade plates spinning, when I happened to look at the Guild Bank. Since I've been the only active member for well over five years, it's really just an extension of my own bank now.

I find it particularly useful for storing Lore items, "Lore" being a tag EQII uses to mean a character can only own one. For some reason it also means you can't put two of them in the shared bank, which never made to me, but there you go. You can put as many of the same Lore item as you like into the Guild bank, though, which is why I have a whole Guild vault tab filled with Blood of Luclin Mercenary claim tokens.

I deleted a bunch of Grollas only yesterday.
I should dump the lot but it seems so... wasteful.

These tokens started to drop with the introduction of the first season Overseer missions although the mercenaries and their tokens may well have been in the game already. Most, maybe all expansions come with new Mercenaries. Some can be found and hired in game, while others only feature as perks in the higher-priced Collectors editions.

I'm somewhat vague on the details because I don't generally pay much attention to new mercs. In the past I've been more than happy with the handful I've picked up from events and holidays. I still use the clockworks from Tinkerfest on several characters.

For a long time my Berserker used the obese ogre Zhugrus Blightstrike, introduced in the 2016 update The Scourge of Zek. He was a perfectly acceptable healer but he really wasn't much of a looker. (You can take a close look at him down at the foot of the post but I wouldn't recommend it). Having his bulk looming in the background - or the foreground, due to the way mercs, pets and familiars all seem to love to huddle - made taking screenshots quite awkward.

Odd thing to make the subject of a sub, isn't it?

I was happy to replace him with the much more svelte, if somewhat intense Evania Val`Sara, the mercenary whose services become available when you have sufficient faction with the Cae`Dal in the Chaos Descending expansion. She was in turn replaced by Oqdan Blisterbringer, a fire elemental with a more pleasing appearance than Zhugrus but, unfortunately, equal bulk.

There is, luckily, an ability called Shrink Mercenary, available for a nominal fee (and 150,000 status) from your class trainer. For some inexplicable reason, even though I knew that perfectly well, my berserker had never bothered to buy it until today. Sometimes I think he's been hit in the head a few times too many.

Over the years, following their introduction in 2011's Age of Discovery, mercenaries have grown from a small band of simple hirelings to a vast, shadowy network of strange and sinister accomplices. The extremely long and dauntingly complex guide on the EQII wiki attests to the extent to which these NPCs, loved by many, reviled by some, have embedded themselves deeply into both the gameplay and the commercial model.

Various expansions have added the option to dress the mercenaries in increasingly powerful and specific armor and to raise their stats and abilities with offline training. All of these things I'd been doing, sometimes diligently, sometimes less so, right up to and including the pre-expansion events for Blood of Luclin, which dropped a lot of very good merc armor. In retrospect, that was probably something of a hint.

BoL mercenaries can't even be seen until you consume their token.

BoL added two new reasons to collect mercenaries. Firstly, they're used in the Overseer feature, as are Familiars. You have the option to send one of your mercenaries along with each team of Agents you assign to a mission. Depending on the quality of the merc (they use some of the same, color-coded qualitative ratings as gear - Treasured, Legendary, Fabled, Celestial) a mercenary increases the mission's risk of success by 2%, 3%, 5% or 10% respectively.

To send mercenaries on missions you must first have unlocked them to so they can be summoned from anywhere. This is a feature for which you have to pay 150 Daybreak Cash. It's a small amount (you get 500DBC a month as part of All Access membership) and I would always unlock any merc I planned on using, because who wants to have to go all the way back to wherever you hired them, every time you fancy swapping from one to another?

What I wouldn't have done is unlock all my mercenaries, even the ones I knew I'd never trust in a fight. They have different abilities and, as anyone knows who's tried a few of them, different temperaments. Some of them my berserker quite literally trusts with his life while others he wouldn't trust to feed the pets and water the plants in his Maj'Dul mansion.

Evania Val`Sara is my favorite healer. She's extremely reliable and not at all flaky, unlike some. Even if she does have that thousand yard stare.

With Overseer missions in mind, I unlock all my mercs. I haven't yet started making any special effort to acquire new ones and I certainly won't be buying any Mercenary crates from the cash shop but I am using the tokens that drop to grab all the BoL mercs.

Lord Seru's Fool.
Now he's mine.
More fool me.

And boy, do those tokens drop. Well, most of them. They're all Lore and they're all tradeable and the Broker is stuffed with them.

The commonest, Grolla Skullwielder, is worthless, both financially and practically. She's a Diaku Berserker, only Treasured quality. Mercenary dps has, sadly, failed miserably to keep up with recent developments. You can barely notice the damage they do on at-level mobs. If you want her, you can currently pick up her token on the brokerage for five copper.

Melban Pindleclasp, a Troubador, drops almost as frequently and is nearly as useless. His buffs are of some value but you can still snap up his token for a silver. He is, at least, Legendary. Not that you'd know it.

Rosa Dod is a Fabled Dirge. Her buffs are worth having as is her 5% bonus to Overseer missions. She's still changing hands for a hundred plat or so, which is pocket lint, not even pocket change, by current EQII economic standards. I have several of her tokens in the Guild Bank but I haven't yet found out where to go to hire her. I'll add that to the list of things I have to do.

Oor of Umbra, a mysterious black cloud of smoke with piercing blue eyes, was selling for good money for a while. It's a Fabled Fury, which makes it reasonably useful for healing, although personally I'd always rather have an inquisitor for the Verdict (a  spell, which instantly kills mobs on low health and has for me, on occasion, meant the difference between success and failure in a tough fight). Oor's value is still holding at over a thousand platinum. The drop rate is fairly generous but the spawn spot, inaccessible without Luclin flying, is probably keeping quite a few people from adding Oor to their collection on multiple characters. I only have it on two, so far.

The spooky and uncommunicative Oor. Would you trust it?

Zel`Kriaz is a Shissar Inquisitor of Celestial quality. At one point he was trading for millions but he's down to just under 40k plat now. I'm in the process of training him up. I tried him as a healer when I first acquired him and he got me killed on the first pull. I don't know if he's an idiot or if he just needs to be upgraded and equipped before he's useable. I'll find out in a few weeks. If he ends up having to stay in barracks, he's still worth 10% to Overeer missions, and I don't even have to pay him for that.

Vylkorin the Vile, yet another inquisitor is Celestial, top of the shop for BoL mercs. So far I have seen his token drop just once. It's still in the bank because I can't decide who's going to to use it so I don't even know what race or gender Vyl might be. If you want to buy the token it's going to cost you more than a million plat. It also looks completely different from all the others. I don't know if that means anything.

The final reason to build up a large collection of unlocked mercenaries is the Mercenary Battalion. This somewhat confusing and currently slightly buggy feature, also introduced with Blood of Luclin, allows your mercenaries to apply a collective buff, the strength of which depends on how far you've upgraded them through training.

I don't propose to explain it here. It took me long enough just to understand it. Here's the EQ2 Traders page, the simplest explanation I've seen so far.

All in all mercenaries are a very clever and entertaining way for Darkpaw to make some money. In common with most things added to the game in the last decade there's an element of pay to win but I'm absolutely fine with that. The company has to make money or the games won't exist. I find the way Daybreak, and now Darkpaw, balance what you can get for paying versus what you can get for playing significantly enhances my enjoyment. I quite like buying little treats for myself. And I always loved the mercenary feature. I thought it was one of the best things ever added to both EverQuest and EQII.

The more useful and versatile they make them, the more satisfying and interesting the mercenaries become. As Telwyn was saying in the post I linked earlier, talking in that case about familiars, "It’s a reminder of just how much depth the game has, and how little adaptations like this make all the difference to this daily activity".

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go look for Rosa Dod.

Up On The Roof : SW:TOR

My subscription to Star Wars: The Old Republic is due to expire in a couple of days. I'm still playing regularly, so I'd probably have renewed for another month if it wasn't that I'm going to be away for the first two weeks of June, driving around Andalusia and Extremadura, drinking wine and looking at castles.

I'll almost certainly re-sub as soon as I get back. I'll be starting a twelve-week course of chemotherapy then, a follow-up to my surgery earlier in the year, and it's very likely I'll be off work for much of that so, depending on how well I tolerate the drugs, I could find myself with quite a lot of time to play and blog about MMORPGs.

That's what I call a picture window.

It occurred to me yesterday that before any of that happened - specifically, before the sub lapsed - there was one thing I ought to do. Spend my credits.

Perhaps the most obtrusive and potentially frustrating of all the restrictions placed on Free to Play accounts in the hope of persuading tight-fisted customers to open their wallets is the currency limit. F2P players can only hold 200k. Preferred status raises it to 350k.

Is it that a lot? It sounds like a lot. Until you play you can't really be sure and even then it takes a while to judge. The income stream you see at low level tells you next to nothing about your future earning capacity..

Reckon we could fix a bungee rope here, Corso? I'll let you be the first to test it.

All MMORPGs end up feeding more cash at higher levels but the degree to which it changes varies hugely from one game to another. In Guild Wars 2, for example,the cash you get from mob drops and "quest" rewards does improve over time but any increase is functionally meaningless, going from a few copper to a few silver in a game whose economy runs on gold.

If you want to make money in GW2 you have to go out and grind for mats to sell to other players, or play the Auction House flipping game. There's no direct route to a fortune. In EverQuest, on the other hand, the monetary value of quest rewards increases very significantly as you level up and NPCs will pay hundreds of platinum pieces for commonplace, higher level drops. You can make bank doing nothing but adventuring.

TOR is very definitely at the EQ end of that scale. Last night I decided I wanted to reach one million credits on my Smuggler before my subscription ended. I'd already passed a couple of hundred grand to my Agent but that still left the Smuggler sitting on just over 600k.

Hmm. I didn't think it would actually let me jump down here...

It took me no more than a couple of hours running Heroic Missions to make the extra 400k I needed. That really puts the 350k Preferred Currency Limit in perspective. It's about one session's income at Level 50, which does seem astonishingly mean-spirited.

The reason I wanted to hit a million was housing. Of course it was. Housing is the one thing guaranteed to make me dig into my savings in any MMORPG.

TOR's housing is not at all bad. Yes, it is a hook system, automatically rendering it inherently inferior to all free placement systems, regardless of any other factor, but as hook systems go it's a good one. In this case, though, my desires had nothing to do with decoration and everything to do with living space.

First time I've ever seen anyone make a feature of lack of safety protocols.

My Smuggler has the Coruscant Stronghold and the Agent has the corresponding version in Dromund Kaas. Both begin with three rooms. Those alone would probably be enough for most casual players, were it not for the many tempting, locked doors. And the view.

OMG the view! In the Coruscant apartment, as you gaze through the huge, panoramic windows at the sky, you see the traffic streaming past, the cranes silhouetted against the horizon, the skyscrapers and the clouds. In Dromund Kaas you see the endless rain pouring down the glass, the city outside blue with possibility and longing.

And you see your balcony. Each home has a huge, curving expanse of flat plasteel just waiting for you to come outside and enjoy. There's a pad fit to land a speeder and the low walls above the fatal drop speak volumes about health and safety regulations in a galaxy where life is cheap.

Can you run inside and fetch me a cushion?

Opening each extra room in your Stronghold costs money, either Credits or Cartel Coins. Most of the unlocks are very reasonable. I'd already bought my way to the upper floors and opened most of the rooms in Coruscant even before I subbed, just as a way of staying under the miserly 200k cap.

Opening two stairways and five rooms had cost me less than 200k in total. All that was left was the Garage at 250k and the Balcony. The Balcony costs a million, twice as much as all the other rooms added together. And it's worth it.

I was in two minds whether to open Coruscant or Dromund Kaas. It would be very helpful if you could wander around an empty apartment before buying, as you can in EQ2. Maybe you can but if so I don't know how to do it.

I do know how to google though. I searched for "SWTOR Strongholds" and found a website of that exact name. And they have video tours. Here's the one for Coruscant. The part that shows the balcony begins just after the nine minute mark.

I watched it. Then I watched the Dromund Kaas one. All that rain looks better from the inside. I went for Coruscant.

Of course, had I thought of this a week ago, I could easily have earned enough credits to buy both. I still could, I guess, in the forty-eight hours before my sub ends. I will, eventually.

There's no need to hurry. That's the real joy of housing in MMORPGs. It persists more persistently than any of the supposedly persistent features upon which the genre depends. Buy a house and it holds its relevance, value and utility for the lifetime of the game. Tell that to your armor or your weapons.

You know spectacular sunsets are caused by air pollution, right?

If anything keeps me coming back to TOR for the long haul it won't be the story or the combat. It'll be the housing. I can imagine logging in after months away just to go out on that balcony and watch the sky change color.

I guess I probably should start thinking about getting some furniture if I'm going to stay. I wonder if you can buy a rooftop pool?

Pictures On My Wall: OWW

Occupy White Walls is open for business at last. It took a while. Demand so outran expectations the servers were "on fire" according to the Steam page. Not literally, I hope, although I did see that happen in an office where I worked, once.

Also open for business is my Gallery. I flung wide the doors (metaphorically - it doesn't actually have any doors yet) despite it currently looking disturbingly like the cloakroom facility in an upmarket hotel circa 1978. It's also hanging in a void but then they all do that.

It's a deeply inappropriate setting for the kind of artworks I seem compelled to purchase. The abstract expressionists don't look too out of place but the bleak scenes of rural ruin, the bright and blurry post-impressionists and the endless winter landscapes really need something warmer behind them than yards of shiny black marble.

It's a moot point at the moment, since I ran out of money after about ten minutes, having only managed to buy four artworks. For the record, they are

Silent Dawn  by Walter Launt Palmer (1919)
January: Cernay near Rambouillet  by Leon-Germain Pelouse (undated, mid-late 19c)
Rushing Brook  by John Singer Sargent (1904-1911)
Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version) by Paul Klee (1925)

All of those links go to the website of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose archive is one of OWW's many sources. Copyright is always a contentious issue but according to Stanford University's guide on Copyright and Fair Use

"All works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. Works published after 1922, but before 1978 are protected for 95 years from the date of publication. If the work was created, but not published, before 1978, the copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years"

 I guess that means I'm safe to include one of the actual paintings. The Singer Sargent is the cheeriest.

I did once have a small brush with artistic copyright, when I was working in the marketing department of an insurance company back in the mid-80s. There was a period when the company I worked for was so out-of-touch with reality they let me write the copy and choose the artwork for advertisements in national magazines and I was so young and green that I chose to use a glorious Graham Sutherland painting (it might have been this one but he did a lot of vertiginous tunnels through trees) as the butt of some idiotic pun.

I've managed to wipe the details from my mind but I do remember how difficult it was to get the rights to use the image -and how expensive. Just as well the people I had to deal with didn't also want to know what the ad was about. That would have put the tin lid on it!

I noticed during my interactions with DAISY, the A.I. in charge of acquisitions, in OWW's alpha/beta that almost every picture I chose fell into a period bracketing roughly a century and a half, from the mid-19th to the late 20th. The sweet spot seemed to be around 1890 to 1930.

If for nothing else, I would recommend playing around with OWW to let DAISY illuminate your own latent aesthetic taste. You might not think you have strong preferences but she will show you that you do. And that they may not be what you expect.

On the basis of my short visit today, the current Free to Play version of Occupy White Walls has a lot more going for it than its indisputable educational value. The building aspect, as I've mentioned every time I've written about it, is every bit as compulsive as you could expect.

My main point of comparison is Landmark, compared with which OWW is very much easy mode. It's snap-together parts rather than making your bricks out of mud but that suits me very well. My issues with Landmark were never with knowing what to build; they were always with how to get the tools to behave. OWW's toolset has its eccentricities but it's orders of magnitude simpler than even the final, "simplified" version of the astonishingly abstruse controls the SOE team deemed appropriate for popular use.

In a n notable change fom alpha, the Early Release version of OWW makes a concerted effort to give the whole thing some credence as a "game". To that end there are now levels, which you get by adding to your stock of artworks. At Level 2 my character (or "Avatar" as the jargon of the game has it) needs to buy six more paintings to level up. Is that P2W? Who cares?

Gaining levels gives you access to different collections. Judging by what seems to be a reduced choice of building materials on offer I am guessing that applies to utilities as well as art. Either that or the design and construction aspect of the game has been neutered since alpha. That seems unlikely.

As well as leveling up you also now need to pay serious attention to earning money. In alpha I never came close to running out of cash but today I was down to my last $500 in minutes. You start with $10,000, which goes nowhere.

Fortunately there's an income stream you can access almost immediately. The tutorial explains that you need to open your Gallery to the public so they can come in and leave you tips. I would add "if they like what they see" but I'm not sure it matters. They were piling money on my desk before I even had the walls in, let alone any art for them to look at.

Players visiting other players' galleries, another thing the tutorial has you doing, is intended to be a big part of the game but to make money it's NPC visitors you need. They wander around, occasionally nodding sagely or clapping their hands, then they drop a few blue blocks on your desk and leave.

The blue blocks represent their donations. You pick them up, whereupon they turn into dollars in the bank. Your Gallery stays open for half an hour, after which you have to manually re-open it, so you can't just leave it open while you go to real-life work or sleep. Other players, however, can open it for you when they visit, which allows both for social networking and random acts of altruism.

As I said, so far I can't tell whether the amount of money donated relates to what you have on display but there's clearly room for some granularity there. I can imagine some involving gameplay relating to maximizing your income as well as some interesting moral conundrums over how far to compromise your artistic principles in favor of commercial success.

Most of OWW seems very well thought out and consistent but there's one design decision I can't fathom. When the imaginary visitors arrive and leave they fling paint all over your pristine walls.

It's part of a mechanic whereby each visitor teleports in, appearing as a multicolred globule, which then explodes. They do the same when they leave. It's dramatic, for sure, and visually arresting, but the connotations of visitors effectively vandalizing the installations make it seem ill-judged, to say the least.

That's just one minor flaw in a very promising project. For a free to play MMO in early access OWW has an enormous amount to offer. Looking forward I'd hope to see a great deal more customization for your avatar - clothes would be a start - as well the introduction of some of the plastic arts to the collections and more terrain options in the building files. It would be fantastic to have outdoor areas to landscape for a sculpture park, for example, or to be able to lay art trails through a forest.

And in the time it's taken me to write this post, my finances have recovered to the point where I have over $6,000 in the bank. Time to go spend my way to the next level.