EverQuest And EverQuest II - To The Letter

For a while, I've been in the habit of putting a post together every time whoever happens to be holding down the Producer's chair at Darkpaw puts out a letter. That used to be Holly Longdale until she jumped ship to bring her deep knowledge of how best to milk an aging cash cow to Blizzard. Since then it's been Jenn Chan.

Jenn Chan is great. As a customer and a player, I've been very happy with her tenure. She's the epitome of a safe pair of hands. Just looking at her smiling face makes me feel the future of Norrath is secure. As a blogger, though, she doesn't give me much to work with.

It's been so long now since I last played EverQuest seriously, I can barely make sense of most of what she has to say in the letter for the elder game. There's something about making Hero's Journey quests more group-friendly. I don't know what Hero's Journey quests are. There's something else about improvements to the Resource Hunter system. I don't know what that is, either.

After that, there's a couple of paragraphs about bug fixes, class "tuning" and UI upgrades, all of which I can understand in theory but none of which have any meaning for me in practice. Then we get some notes about festivals, most of which I've never heard of (Fall Fun? Festival of Shadows?) and a brief mention of some changes to Account to Account transfers.

Account to Account transfers is a bit of a sore point with me. I would long ago have given SOE, and then Daybreak/Darkpaw, my money, if they'd been willing to let me transfer characters between the accounts Mrs Bhagpuss and I set up back in 2000. It would have been worth hundreds of dollars to us to get all of our characters on the right accounts, back in the days when we were both playing EQ.

Sadly, the Account to Account option exists solely and only for accounts registered to the same person. Both accounts have to  have the exact same name associated with them. There has never been any option to move characters between accounts owned by different people. 

It sounds very reasonable until you factor in the monthly subscription for those accounts. I always paid for both our accounts on my credit card, from the day they were created and ever afterwards. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that that the defining proof of ownership ought to be whose name is on the card that's being charged, especially when there's only ever been one source of payment, but that's not how they see it.

Not that I care any more. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played either game in a decade and a half and never will again. I have all the login details to all the accounts (I think there are at least eight of them...) and I can play any of the characters on any account whenever I like, which in most cases will be never. Even if they did change the rules, I wouldn't bother now.

 

Checking the official site, though, it appears that Account transfers are currently unavailable. I don't know how long that's been the case but I do know that for EverQuest II the process is automated whereas for EQ, you had to submit a petition to Customer Service for the transfer to be performed manually. I'm guessing EQ is going to get the same automatic option EQII enjoys.

With that little piece of technical tomfoolery out of the way, we're down to the only part anyone's really interested, namely the upcoming expansion. It's called Favors of Fortune and it involves some gods falling out about something. It would. It's an EverQuest expansion.

It also involves the return of someone or something called Scorn. I have never heard of Scorn but his/her/their/its return is emphasized in heavy, bold type: Scorn has returned. Like that. Whatever impact that's meant to have is lost on me but the effects of Scorn's return do sound intriguing:

"Across the lesser planes, chance itself twists unnaturally. Simple gambles collapse into disaster. Once‑reliable odds warp into impossibility. Victories slip away as though guided by an unseen hand. The very fabric of luck feels poisoned, bent toward failure by a force both deliberate and unseen."

I wouldn't mind an expansion that turned all the expected results into a crap shoot but I bet most people would hate it. So I don't suppose it's that. Not that I'm ever likely to find out from personal experience. Chance would have to twist a very long way out of true for me to find myself back playing EQ at all, let alone in current content.

There's a very much higher chance of me playing the upcoming expansion for EQII, though. I'd put it no lower than 90%. I've played every EQII expansion on release since 2014's Altar of Malice and I have no particular intention to stop. 

The ten per cent wiggle room I'm giving myself comes from two things: firstly the ever-increasing number of games I'm trying to play (There might be a post about that soon.) and secondly the tendency of my PC to crash when I log out of EQII. It's doing it much less than it used to but it still happens and it puts me off playing because otherwise the machine is working perfectly and I don't want to screw that up.

 

It's harder to wring anything worth talking about out of Jenn Chan's Producer's Letter for EQII  than the one for EverQuest. It starts with a whole lot of detail about all the things they've added to or fixed in the game so far this year: exciting things like "cleaner spellbooks after changing factions or possessing pets, more transparent messaging when Cleric and Guardian abilities are stifled by debuffs".

Don't believe me? Go read it for yourself. It's chock-full of minutiae like that,. The sort of detail that makes perfect sense in a set of patch notes but isn't exactly what you'd imagine would make the cut for a Producer's Letter. 

I'll spare you the excruciating specifics but I will just mention the list of upcoming holiday events. Again, we all know these are coming. They're long-established annual holidays, after all. Not to mention there's an in-game calendar that has them all listed. 

Browsing the list, though, I did notice there was no mention of the event formerly known as Days of Summer, later rebranded as  Panda Panda Panda. That would normally have started in mid-September. I might not be playing at the moment but I still get the PR emails and I hadn't heard anything about so I did a bit of googling.

Gemini, once again, seems to be operating in an alternate timeline. I asked specifically if Panda Panda Panda was going to be happening in 2026 and the AI told me "Yes, new "Panda, Panda, Panda!" content and tasks are scheduled to run in EverQuest II in September 2026". Once again, the links it gave as sources for this confident assertion not only didn't support the claim, they didn't have anything to do with pandas at all!

I had to go to the official forums for the correct answer, which is that "We are doing alternate things in place of the panda content. The Splendid Celebration Crate content has taken its place." Angeliana said that. She is not an AI. She knows what she's talking about.

I'm quite pleased they've pensioned the event off. It was a great addition to the game back in 2017, when it first appeared but it's been a while since it made much sense. What with the big summer update in August and the Expansion in December, not to mention Overseer, there are plenty of ways to get much better gear than the pandas hand out these days. 

 

And so to the only thing anyone really cares about: this year's expansion. It's called Descent to Val’Zyroth, which may be nowhere near as good a name as Favors of Fortune but does make up for in accuracy what it loses in style. Well, it might. That's assuming Val'Zyroth is somewhere in the Underfoot, which is where we're going.

The Underfoot is Brell's realm below the surface of Norrath so this is another spelunking expansion, the first since 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra. I have mixed feelings about underground expansions. One of my favorite EQ expansions at the time was Depths of Darkhollow. I had some good times down there. I also quite liked Terrors of Thalumbra. 

They do get quite claustrophobic, though. And this one is full of Dark Elves. I am not a big dark elf fan.

In DTV, which really is not a very memorable acronym, we're set to  

plunge through the treacherous tunnels of Subtunaria into the glowing, magic-soaked reaches of the Underfoot. Infiltrate the resplendent Teir'Dal city of Neriondalon, battle alongside unique subterranean allies like the resilient Tontu molemen, and breach Brell Serilis’ legendary planar workshops before dark magics swallow the realm.

The infamous ruler of Neriak, Queen Cristanos, has spotted the absence of Lucan from Freeport and fancies her chances. Having played EQII pretty consistently since launch, that does actually mean something to me and I'm mildly invested in putting a stop to her territorial ambitions. Most of my characters come from Freeport after all. The last thing any of them want is to end up living in a Tier'Dal police state. Stick with with the police state you're used to, that's my advice.

There is, as usual, a pre-expansion event. This one's called Paths of Sedition and it begins on October 6. Generally, pre-expansion events aren't all that exciting but there have been a couple of notable exceptions. The Letter doesn't give much away about how this one's likely to go.

And that's about it. I'm not convinced the whole Producer's Letter tradition shouldn't go the way of Panda Panda Panda. It seems like most of what's in both of these letters either didn't need to be repeated yet again after the numerous previous times we'd been told about it or could have simply been handled by a regular News item on the websites.

Still, it's always nice to hear from Jenn Chan. And if she enjoys writing letters, who are we to stop her?

And There Shall Come A Reckoning...

All this talk about a new EverQuest game is fine and quite possibly dandy but what about the old ones? The ones I'm already playing?

Well, my good intentions for a return to OG EQ came to not very much, as I expected they might. I did at least get the game installed on the new(ish) PC and patched up, so that's something. Better yet, I logged in and claimed my free Level 115 but then I had no clue what to do with her, so after I'd opened all the goodie bags and gotten her dressed, I logged out again.

As for leveling up a new character with the big xp bonus, that hasn't happened and now it's too late. Not that I'm bothered. If yesterday's unexpected announcement means anything at all, I'd guess it signals the end of leveling random characters on live EverQuest servers just for the hell of it. 

I mean, why would you do it the hard way, when you know there's a version of the game coming later this year that's designed specifically to make it easy? One thing I haven't seen discussed yet is what kind of impact EverQuest Legends is going to have on either the regular, "Live" game or the TLE servers but I'd bet it's going to be considerable.

The Game Jawn folks have been quite clear about how they're targeting an audience of people who either last played EQ many years ago or who've never played it at all - that's what all the quality of life improvements and UI tweaks are for - but it seems highly likely they'll also pull in a lot of people who still play. Maybe most of those will only come for a quick look-see before going back to their regular servers - sunk cost and all that - but there's still bound to be a hell of a population dip in the short term, at least. And who knows how long it'll last? 

 

Presumably all of that is factored into the agreement between GJ and Darkpaw. I guess if EG7 get a big enough cut of that sweet subscription money, they won't really mind that some of it is coming from people who might otherwise be giving it to them direct. Then again, they did sell all those thousands and thousands of Lifetime Subscriptions a few years back. I bet the Accounts Dept. will be more than happy if some of those loyal customers move over to the Game Jawn servers. At least that way they'll get something out of them again.

So much for EverQuest. What about EverQuest II? That's the game I'm actually playing, isn't it? 

Yep. It sure is. I played some EQII yesterday and some more this morning.

It's been lost in the noise of the EQL publicity blitz but EQII just got its big Spring Game Update. It's called Gerion's Reckoning and plotwise it follows directly on from the Signature Questline in the expansion. That did end somewhat abruptly. I almost expected a big To Be Continued sign to appear, only I thought we'd have to wait for the next expansion, not see it start up again just three months later.

Here's a summary of what's in the GU:

•        4 New Dungeons with Solo and Heroic Content
•        1 New Untold Heroic Dungeon 
•        4 New Tier 3 Raid Dungeons 
•        20 New missions 
•        10 New collections 
•        Shiny Critter Collections 
•        9 New Adventure Quests 
•        New Overseer Season 8  

If you want more detail, like the names of the dungeons, which won't mean anything to anyone who doesn't play (And, frankly, not a lot to most people that do.) it's all at the link above.

It occurs to me as I write this that I don't even know who Gerion is, let alone what's being reckoned. Does it matter? I doubt it. I did a whole quest yesterday where I barely understood one word in three of the extensive dialog, most of which seemed to be names of places, people and things I'd never heard of - and I've been playing this game since there was a game to play! Who can keep track of all these names? Who even tries?

Ahem. Getting back on track...

I was looking forward to the GU because I thought the new quests might be enough to get me over the line to Level 135, the expansion cap. I still have half a level to go and I was very keen to avoid having to do another couple of dozen tedious repeatable quests at 2% a pop to get there.  

Things looked bad on that front when I saw the update came with a caveat:

 "The content in Gerion’s Reckoning is for adventure level 135 characters." 

I took that to mean questgivers wouldn't even talk to me until I dinged 135, which has certainly been the case in other games I've played and probably in this one, too, although I can't actually remember for certain. Still, might as well go make sure.

My fears seemed to be confirmed when I zoned into Yon Gorroth, the opening zone of the expansion and there were no new quest-markers on the map. Luckily, I didn't give up right away. Instead, I went to check the update notes and the wiki and it was then I realized there aren't any new quests in Yon Gorroth anyway.

Button grayed-out because my Journal was full, not because I wasn't 135 yet. Phew!

I checked the wiki and got the name of a questgiver in The Unknown. Then I went to see if he'd talk to me. At first things looked bleak. He wasn't turning up on the map as a flashing feather. Bad omen. 

Luckily, once again I didn't give up. I flew over to see him in person and it turned out he'd just been too far away for the map to show he was looking for help.

I got the quest from him. He was fine with me not being 135 yet. He gave me a whole lot of verbiage about something I'd already done for him, which I'd completely forgotten, then he sent me to one of the new instances to do him some more favors.

He gave me a specific location but obviously I couldn't remember where it was was so that took some more research. Eventually I found the entrance, way off some rocky island, and in I went.

Now, here's the good part. Necromancers are awesome! I believe the class doesn't have a great reputation just now but that'll be from raiders and raiders have no clue how real people live. I can tell you that compared to playing a Berserker, soloing a Necro is EZ-Mode.

I'm glad Mord remembers because I sure don't.

Usually I like to have the wiki open when I do a new instance so I can at least check which resists I need for which bosses and whether there are any special tricks I need to look out for. It's generally possible to figure all of that out from first principles but doing it the hard way often takes a few deaths or all afternoon. Occasionally both.

Either the first instance is very easy or my Necro is at least an order of magnitude more capable than my Berserker ever was. I just treated all five bosses in the instance as Tank&Spank and all of them died in 60-90 seconds. If they had any clever tricks, I missed them.

My Necro didn't die at all although she bloody would have if she'd relied on my Mercenary to heal her. He is so slow to pull the trigger on the big heals! Fortunately, Mordita can do a pretty bang-up job of healing herself, so that's what she did. 

As for her pet, Midnight, he still seems to be almost completely indestructible. She has great heals for him, too, but since he's at 100% health about 95% of the time, she rarely needs them. On one boss I think I saw him lose about 5% health, just for a second or two, but that was about it.

The instance was fun, which was just as well because I had to do it twice. The first time, I killed the final boss before I finished one of the quests and it turned out the final step of that quest was to kill the boss I'd just killed. That's another reason I always like to read the wiki first.

I finished there yesterday and today I came back, reset the dungeon and did it again, even faster. Then I came out and went back to the questgiver and did the hand-in and guess how much xp I got? Two fucking per cent!

Yes, the same as for a repeatable quest where you just pick some grass and click on a few nests. A quest that takes maybe five minutes including travel time versus clearing an entire dungeon with five bosses. Same reward. Does that seem fair to you?

Okay, the bosses all drop gear that's an upgrade to anything I'm wearing plus a bunch of other stuff worth having so it's not like it was a total waste of time but still. 2%!

All of which means I guess I'll be grinding those repeatables after all. I need another forty per cent of Level 134 so that's twenty of the damn things. I might just do one or two a day and let it take another month. It's not like being 135 is going to make much of a difference to anything...

Oh, wait... yes it will! All that gear the bosses dropped? That I said was upgrades for Mordita? Well, it would be if she could wear it. It's all Level 135 Required. 

You can't even add the shinies you pick up in the instance to their their collections if you aren't at the cap because those are level-locked too! It makes the whole Hot Zone - Bonus Shinies thing that popped up the second time around feel like more like a prank than a perk.

Such is the life of an EQII player. I should be used to it by now. 

When's EQ Legends coming out again? 

The Legends Of EverQuest - or - Third Time's The Charm?

Has everyone seen Daybreak's Big Announcement? I feel I pretty much have to post something about it, even though I haven't really got much to say. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

 I guess we should run over what it is first. 

"EverQuest Legends™ (EQL) is a newly reimagined version of classic EverQuest from its original release in 1999. Featuring all the fun magic and nostalgia of the original game, EQL is also packed with tons of new features and quality of life enhancements."

As you would know if you clicked through the link. I'm not really adding much here, am I? That's because there's not much to add. The press release goes on to explain everything in some detail. I can't really do any better than to reproduce the full text. And then maybe I'll nitpick it after. That's kind of what I do here, after all.

 

Let's start with that name: EverQuest Legends. I wonder if anyone involved in the naming process even remembers their history? Once upon a time, in the deep, dark past, there was a server by the name of EverQuest Legends. It was the elite server, where you paid a higher subscription for full-time GM services and some other perks. 

It's extremely difficult to find detailed information on the decades-defunct Legends server today, a task very much not helped by the current frenzy of discussion on the new project that stole shares its name, but with the help of Calishat's invaluable TimeCake app and some creative googling of my own, I eventually managed to track down an interview about it with John "Smed" Smedley from GameSpot in 2002.

Then there was the much better-remembered and hugely easier to research Legends of Norrath, the virtual TCG spin-off that ran for just shy of a decade before closing down for good in 2017. With a legacy of two failed projects using the name, I'm not sure I'd have wanted to lumber the latest with the same burden but then, hey, it's not like the target market is going to be people who played EverQuest back in the day, right?

No, the target market is very clearly the people who used to play on The Hero's Journey emulator, until Daybreak took the operators to court and put them out of business. Plus, of course, the presumably orders of magnitude larger number of potential customers who might very well have played on THJ if they hadn't been too chicken to give their bank details to the people behind what was, at the most favorable interpretation, a gray-market operation. As the MassivelyOP news report suggests, the new Legends service certainly explains why that lawsuit had to happen.

In essence, EverQuest Legends is what a lot of people have been saying they wanted for almost as long as the game has existed: a solo version. Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it's taken so long although, with the current fad for ersatz mmorpgs like Erenshor, games that simulate the entire milieu, other players included, maybe the time has finally come.

Thinking of Erenshor does make me wonder why EverQuest Legends needs to be an MMORPG at all. If grouping is entirely optional and group size is limited to four, it seems like it would work equally well as  a co-op game. It wouldn't even have to be online.

That might make it harder to collect a subscription, though. And EverQuest Legends is going to be a subscription game.  I guess if the idea is to re-create the original experience to some degree, a monthly sub would be part of it. 

The first thing I thought, when I saw a sub was required, was whether it would be included in the All Access deal. That's since been clarified and the answer is no. 

It's a completely separate game, running on different servers, operated by a different company, a third-party developer by the name of Game Jawn. (Really, really bad name, by the way. It may fly in Philly but for everyone else it just makes you think "Game Yawn" Not quite the image you'd want to put into the mind of a potential customer.)  

Game Jawn (Seriously? It hurts just to type it out...) is the brainchild of several people who used to code and run EQ emulators. Poachers turned gamekeepers, I guess. Or maybe turned gatekeepers, now they have the official seal of approval. I imagine starting new emulators with hefty rules modifications is going to be a little bit riskier now.

These guys were in the emulator business in the first place because they used to play EQ and didn't like the way it was going, I guess. Now, it appears, they see merit in the progressive relaxation of restrictions that's led to the much easier version of the game that's on the live servers today. Only they're going even further, setting things up so the game can be fully experienced the way lot of people always wished it could - alone.

For once, there's not going to be a long wait to see how it all turns out. Nor will there be a prolonged purgatory of Early Access. EverQuest Legends is set to launch in July and you can send in your application for closed beta right now. 

I just did. I wasn't going to, at least not yet, because I wanted to know if there was an NDA first. I hate being in testing programs I can't talk about here on the blog. But then I clicked the button to get the link for this post and it was literally two or three more clicks to sign up, so what the hell...

That brings up the Really Big Question, namely do I even want to play EverQuest Legends in the first place? Not would I like to blog about it or would I like to check it out but would I want to play it? As in every day, for weeks or months...

Hmm. If this was ten or fifteen years ago then sure, I would. I would have loved a fully soloable version of EverQuest back then. The timing would have been perfect. Now, though? Unlike Stargrace, I'm not so sure.

For one thing, this is going to be Classic EverQuest, albeit with some massive tweaks. It's pre-Kunark, even if you will be able to play an Iksar (Or a Kerran or a Froglok.) right from the start. The thing is, I can already solo that era, on a regular server. 

Anyone can. You just need a mercenary. It's easy and it's fun. I've done it several times. I'm not sure I want to do it again with the twist being no mercenary but a souped-up, multi-classed character and a difficulty slider instead. I mean, sure, yes, I'd want to play around with that for a while but would I want to bed down and take it seriously? 

I kind of doubt it. I suspect that's more likely to appeal to all the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who haven't actually played EQ since it got easy. And even if I did want to play it for more than a minute, would I want to pay for it? 

Maybe the promo trailer will help me decide...
 

Yeah, that's not doing it for me. I'm not sure I want to play that game. It doesn't look great, compared to the other options, does it?

I guess we'll have to wait and see. And I, personally, might have to wait a bit longer, because summer really isn't a great time for gaming in my book. Not unless we get a really bad summer, anyway. I'd rather be outside than sitting indoors in front of a screen. January always seems like the best time to launch a game to me but that's an outlying opinion, based on the evidence.

If I was in the market for an old school, diku-MUD-inspired MMORPG around about then, it most likely wouldn't be a re-tread of an old one, anyway. It'd be more likely to be something like, oh, I don't know, Monsters & Memories, scheduled to go into Early Access in June.

Except, of course, they had problems of their own even before they learned about EQLegends, which must have come as a very unpleasant surprise. The two games would look to be tapping into the same pool of players but Legends clearly has the advantage of huge press coverage and a massive backwash of ex-EverQuest players, most of whom have probably never heard of M&M.

Then again, there's that group thing... Maybe that'll work in M&M's favor...

Remember how everyone always says the reason they keep playing their MMORPG of choice is the community? It's their guild, their friends, the people they've met along the way. That's been the received wisdom for decades. Monsters & Memories, like Pantheon and all the other retro-mmorpgs have been riding that horse into the ground for years. Where does this leave them?

If it really is all about the friends you make, why is everyone apparently so excited about being able to to play the game without any? Or, as several news sites, GameSpot among them, chose to phrase it "No Time Or Friends For An MMO? EverQuest Legends Has A Solution".

If nothing else, it's going to be an interesting test case. Is the gameplay of a classic MMORPG sufficient in itself to sustain long-term interest even without the social bonds that come from forced grouping? And if it is, will people want to pay a monthly fee for that, when so many very similar options exist without one?

Because, without the need for other people, what, really, is the difference between an MMORPG and any open world rpg or survival game?

Well, in EverQuest Legend's case it's immediate access to a pipeline of two and a half decades of proven, tested content, not to mention a semi-installed base running into millions and instant access to gaming news channels merely on mention of your name. More than twenty years after EQ could last claim to have been a big dog, all Daybreak needs to do is bark and the journos come running: PCGamer, Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Rock Paper Shotgun... all of them covered it yesterday, along with many more.

I hope it all pays off for Daybreak. I suspect it will. As Wilhelm pointed out the other day, the front-runner in their financials these days is Palia. It would be nice to see EverQuest back at the top. 

Even if it is on someone else's servers.

A Heroic Effort

Hey! That 300% bonus xp thing in EverQuest? And the Heroic Level 115? How's all that working out for you, then?

Yeah, not so good, as it goes. 

So, I thought about it and I decided what I'd do first was take a lowish character and have some fun moloing them up a few levels. Moloing is soloing with a mercenary, in case you didn't know, and it's very quick and easy up to maybe 70 or so, even without a big bonus.

I took a look at the characters on my regular account and the likeliest prospect seemed to be Cassis, a mid-40s druid I sometimes get out to take screenshots for posts. It'd obviously be handy if she had more teleport spells to more places plus I like her, so it wouldn't seem like time wasted, probably.

I logged her in and... she wouldn't log in. I'd left her in North Ro and now the launcher was hanging halfway through Zone Loading. 

After a few minutes the game shut itself down. I tried again. Same thing.

Well, I've seen this before. Corrupted zone file, most likely. I opened the game folder and deleted everything with Nro at the start. Tried again. Same story. Did it a few times, finding more files to delete every time. Still nothing.

Might be Cassis that was corrupted? That's happened before, too. Very annoying because it needs a GM to fix it. Before I got to petitioning I thought I'd run a couple of checks myself.

I logged in someone else to see if they could get to North Ro. Of course, everyone was either in the Guild Lobby, Plane of Knowledge or the Bazaar, so I had to run them to the Freeport portal in PoK and then through the Commonlands into the tunnel. 

Halfway down the tunnel I hit the zoneline with the desert and guess what? Now I have two characters I can't log in!

Next step: google it. I found a few threads on similar issues. They're not that uncommon. Most of the suggestions I'd already tried but one possibility was an issue with ports to the server I was trying to access. Apparently some people had had zones become inaccessible for characters on one server but had no issues with the same zone on another.

I have a lot of characters on different servers so I thought I'd test it. Now I have characters I can't log in on two servers. 

Whatever the problem is, it seems to be specific to the North Ro zone. Best advice is to wait until the next patch, when the servers will all be taken offline, and see if that magically fixes things.

That was it for Cassis for now, anyway. I thought about shifting the plan to someone else but then I remembered the free 115 Heroic. Might as well grab that and maybe do something with it.

When I posted about the Anniversary, I hadn't seen the other Daybreak press release about the Heroic Characters in the store. That tells you all the things you get for your 4,500DBC and it's quite a lot:

 50,000 Platinum  

200 Bayle Marks  

Entrusted Midnight Steed's Saddle  

Two 40-Slot Bags  

Spells  

Thousands of auto-granted Alternate Advancement abilities (AAs)  

Full set of Equipment, including Weapons, Armor, Power Source, Charm, and Augments  

Food, Drink, and Ammo 

I'm not sure 50k in platinum will get you much in the Bazaar these days but two forty slot bags is a hell of a deal. I don't think any of my characters have any that big. A full set of all gear at 115 is very appealing, too, always assuming it's any good.

I had a good think about who I'd like to bump up to 115 from the existing roster and the answer was no-one. It has to be on the account I'm paying for and there's no-one on there that I want to play. That meant making a new character and with the same logic as before, it looked like that was going to be either a Druid or a Wizard. They're the ones that get the ports.

I've never had any luck with Wizards. Can't play them. Druids, though... I know druids. I should. I have several.  

At 115 a druid has a lot of travel options. Not only the ports to all the druid rings but at some point druids got their own version of the Wizard's Translocate line, which means they can point at someone else and teleport them to another zone without having to go themselves.

That could be handy. It'd be a lot quicker to log in two accounts and have my druid on one send my Magician on the other to wherever she wanted to go than it would for the Magician to make her own way there. So much of a session in EQ can be taken up with just getting from one place to another it's enough to put you off even starting, sometimes.

So, I made a wood elf druid and called her Floradelle. Then I selected the upgrade option to make her 115 and logged her in to Greater Faydark, as I'd selected on the drop-down and she appeared in Gloomingdeep, the tutorial zone.

Well, eventually. Some time since I was last there they added an introductory slide show. You can see it, too. I took screenshots. They're all in this post. 

What I did wrong, I don't know. Probably didn't press the mouse button hard enough or something. I logged out and went back to Character Select and did it again and this time it worked. Kinda.

Floradelle was 115 alright. She had all her spells. About a hundred and thirty pages of them. She had a mercenary standing next to her. She was in Plane of Knowledge, too, so that was all good. 

Problem was, she was still in her starting gear, wielding a wooden club that looked like she'd torn the leg off a table, back in the kobold mines. 

Where was all her high-level gear? In a bag, maybe? Nope. I opened inventory and apart from an eight-slot backpack with some basic food and a note for her guildmaster there was nothing. No 40-slot bags, either.

I tried Claim in case that was how it worked, It wasn't. I tabbed out and did some googling to see if maybe freeloaders don't get the full kit. They do. So I did what everyone always does when something's not working in EQ; I logged out and logged back in again. 

And that worked. Floradelle came back fully dressed in new armor and carrying two huge bags. In them, for some reason, were her weapons. I got her to put the table-leg away and swap it for something more appropriate but by then I'd had enough. 

The whole thing had taken me more than an hour and anyway I had no real idea what to do with a Level 115 Druid, other than use her as a taxi. All I wanted to do, still, was wreck around some low-level zones with a merc and have some fun.

Maybe I'll do it today.  

I'm With You - Three Hundred Per Cent!

   

 

  

Question:

What could make me download and install EverQuest on my new PC, given I haven't bothered until now?

Answer:

A 300% XP Bonus and a free Level 115 Character Boost.

I wasn't going to post today due to laziness but then I saw this news story at MassivelyOP and I thought I ought to share. EverQuest just turned 27 and in the tradition of MMORPGs that means it's the one giving out presents. 

They're good ones, too:

All players will receive the following for free:  

• Anniversary Kickoff Event 
  • 300% XP 
  • 300% Rare NPC spawn chance 
  • 245% loot 
  • 190% coin 
  • 200% alternate currency 
  • 175% Item evolution experience for all players! 
    • (The kickoff ends March 22 at 11:00 p.m. PT) 
• A Maestro's Baton Ornament for all your characters. (One per character; available until April 20, 2026, at 11:00 p.m. PT.) * 
• After the anniversary kickoff event, all players will receive 150% experience gains for all players! (Starting March 23 at 12:00 a.m. and ending on April 1, 2026, at 1:00 a.m. PT.) 

The celebrations come in two parts, it seems. There's a week with everything turned up to eleven, then a second week when everything calms the heck back down. Even then, 150% isn't chopped liver. (I'm assuming everyone hates liver...)

Of all of those bonuses, as an old school EQ Player it's the massive xp bonus that gets my attention. What we wouldn't have done for a bonus like that, back in the day, amirite? 

Of course, these days I very much doubt even a bonus as generous as that is going to be able to compete with the xp you can get just from standing around in the Guild Lobby, sending your agents out on Overseer missions every day. And since I haven't even bothered to do that for a few years now, it seems exceedingly unlikely I'll be going out hunting, no matter how big the bonus.

So why did I even bother patching up? Well, there's not much suspense to be wrung out of it, is there, seeing how I slammed the reason right up at the top there in the biggest point size available. It's the free Level 115 boost.

115's not the cap. It's ten levels shy. The cap, as of this 27th Anniversary, is 125 130. (Never trust an AI.) Tunare forfend they'd ever give out a boost to max level. If they did that, Luclin might explode!

Unlike the perks listed above, the boost is only for subscribers but that's fine. My highest character on the account I pay for is just 87. (Hmm. That means I must have done a couple of levels on him after I boosted him. I bet that was on Overseer...)

I have two Level 85s on that account, as well, both of them boosted. No-one on the account has ever really been played. All the characters I care about are on a different account, one for which I canceled the subscription long ago. Old story. Not going into all that again.

The F2P account doesn't need the boost, anyway. My Magician there already dinged 115, back when that was the cap, through a combination of going out and killing things and staying at home doing Overseer missions. She can't benefit from the boost and anyway, as I said earlier, if I really cared about leveling her up, I'd have been keeping up with those missions. There's no faster or easier way to level solo.

So, realistically, there was absolutely no point in bothering to re-install the game at all, was there? It's just... free stuff...

What would really be fun, now I come to think about it, would be to take one of my low-level characters and blitz through some zones with a merc and that 300% bonus, possibly topped up with an xp potion, if the bonuses stack and if I have any left. It'd be pointless, sure, but it would be fun and I haven't done it for a while.

I just might do that. And if you'll take my advice, if you have an old EverQuest account lying around gathering dust, now might be the time to brush it off and take it for a spin. After all, it's not going to cost you anything but time.

Evil Is As Evil Does

It seems very old-fashioned now, but when EverQuest launched back in 1999, good vs evil was a real thing. Among a number of really quite significant choices you had to make at character selection was whether you were going to be a goodie or a baddie. Yes, Virginia, back then that sort of thing actually mattered!

If you chose to be Evil with a capital E you'd pick an Officially Evil race, Troll being the most reviled until the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, when they had to cede that honor to the Iksar. Ogres came next followed by Dark Elves, who were more your suave, sinister evil masterminds. Or you could pick a good or neutral race and be Necromancer or a Shadowknight, which would mean your career would overwrite your racial heritage, a popular choice for anyone who wanted to be a Bad Gnome.

Most races had a city of their own and there were a lot of races. For maybe the first decade, most MMORPGs came with multiple races, alignments, classes and starting cities. Extensive choice was was one of the defining principles of the genre. If you picked an evil class that had to share space with goody-goodies, you'd get your own secret hideouts within the walls, often underground or in the sewers.

And you'd better have done your homework before you started. Character creation in the early days didn't mean tweaking sliders until you had something you could bear to look at. It meant getting a character you'd be able to play for more than a few sessions before you were forced to re-roll and start over. 

It was entirely possible to gimp your character, that being the awkward term in common use back then. If you picked the wrong race/class combo you might not even know anything was wrong until you started to look for groups and found no-one willing to take you on. 

The more immediate problem, though, came when you walked past some innocuous-looking guard standing next to a tower along the roadside out in the middle of nowhere, only to find yourself back at your spawn point, when it turned out you were the evil monster he was guarding that tower from.

In EQ, all of that was fixable over time. You might start out evil (Or good.) but you didn't have to stay that way. Every race had Faction and Faction was a Stat and one of the often-forgotten aspects of EverQuest's gameplay is that it includes a whole raft of stats that go up with use. Everyone talks about leveling up in that game but no-one talks about raising skills, even though EQ is as much skills-based as it relies on levels.

Another, mostly uncelebrated, fact about EverQuest is that at the start it was much more of a sandbox than a theme-park. There was no central storyline and questing, even though it was right there in the name, mostly seemed like an afterthought. There was a great deal of setting your own goals and working towards them and one goal a lot of players who'd picked Team Evil at the start liked to set for themselves was Getting Everyone To Like Me.

I did a bit of that. Not as much as some but enough for it to be the main thing I did for a few weeks on certain characters. My Ogre Shadowknight killed scores of corrupt guards until his faction was good enough to let him hand in their helmets for extra credit, then scores more until eventually he could stroll into the bank in North Freeport and get service like a regular citizen.

I did it partly to see if I could, partly because killing guards was great xp, and mostly because otherwise banking was a fucking nightmare. I'd have had to go all the way back to Oggok in the swamps, three or four zones away, or else to the dark elf city of Neriak, a trek to get there only to end up wandering the maze-like corridors for far too long before I figured out where I was going wrong. 

Before the second expansion, Scars of Velious, which added the icebound city of Thurgadin, filled with dwarves so cut-off from civilization they'd lost most of their prejudices and would trade with anyone, Evil characters were very restricted in things like where they could bank or shop or find services of any kind. Even traveling on the roads through what looked like open countryside could be fatal. The same thing applied to Good characters in reverse, of course, but somehow it never seemed to inconvenience them nearly as much.

The difficulty was compounded by race, meaning evil humans or gnomes would get a pass in places where Ogres and especially Trolls would be killed on sight. Dark Elves flitted somewhere in the middle, their options often hugely improved by the class choices available to them. There was a very good reason why so many DEs decided to become Enchanters, a class with a whole line of spells designed to let them impersonate other races or fool people into treating them nicely.

Thurgadin was all very well but it was even more inconvenient to get to than the racial starting cities. It wasn't until the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, opened travel gates that took us to the moon, where no-one knew or cared what your alignment was, that it became practical to stay all evil, all the time. 

From then on, alignment and faction gradually lost their power and influence. Well, I say "gradually"... It was more of a landslide.

The fourth expansion, Planes of Power, didn't just add a completely neutral city, it filled that city with every conceivable service and facility, making it by far the most appealing place to set your bind spot, particularly since the expansion also came with the game's first instant, on-demand travel service. Granted, you still had to get to a physical object in the game-world, a "Book", and click on it, but there were Books outside every starting city and in plenty of other places, too, so that wasn't much of a problem.

That was, to most intents and purposes, the end of Good and Evil as a limiting factor in the game. There was and still is a residual effect - try rolling up a High Elf and strolling into Oggok and see how far it gets you - but for almost all practical purposes, it makes no difference any more. We're all murder hobos together and every newly discovered continent or plane or dimension can't tell us apart.

Planes of Power came out in 2002, a couple of years before EverQuest II appeared. You might have thought the experience the dev team had garnered by then might have led them to the understanding that, while some players quite enjoyed the challenge of a faction grind, most preferred to be able to play the game without having to prep first.

Not a bit of it. EQII launched with a hard-coded Good/Evil split that made even Classic EQ look like Hello Kitty Online. Everyone had to be either GOOD or EVIL. The big difference from the elder game was that your alignment was no longer tied to your race. You could be a good troll or an evil high elf. Unlike before, though, you couldn't be a neutral anything.

That was because in EQII your alignment was decided not by anything so crass as what you looked like. What mattered was where you lived. When you reached the end of the introduction on the Isle of Refuge, you had to choose to take ship either to Freeport or Qeynos. Going to Freeport meant you were evil. If you went to Qeynos you were good.

And don't think it wasn't going to matter much in the long run, either. Years after EverQuest had made it seamless for all races and alignments to work together, EQII decided it would be great if it wasn't only the characters who couldn't mix. How about if the players couldn't, either?

You could be in the same guild together but to form the guild everyone had to be of the same alignment and the guild hall would be in that alignment's city so good luck to anyone from the other side who joined later, trying to use the facilities. There was no mailing items to the opposition and quest credit and guild status had some sort of blocks on them, too, as I recall. Shared guild missions were supposed to be a big content driver but apparently no-one in the dev team had thought about that.

That was on a PvE server, of course. On a PvP server you couldn't even group together, let alone share a guild. In fact, screw grouping - you couldn't even talk to the other side. The two cities spoke different languages. But hey, PvP, right? Suck it up!

You didn't have to do that. In both PvP and PvE there was a long and complicated process you could undertake to switch sides. If you were really bloody-minded abut it, you could pause in the middle and become de facto neutral, but that only meant everyone hated you.

Was it popular? Maybe for PvP. On the PvE side of the divide, hell, no, it was not! Everyone hated it, surprise, surprise. Faction restrictions were some of the earliest to be revised and eventually removed. Even before the whole game was revamped by Scott Hartsman a year or so after launch, most of the alignment restrictions for PvE players had already melted away.

A residue remains, all the same. The two cities still nominally retain their alignments although these days there are plenty of other starting cities to pick if you want to be free of the worst of it. Those tend to lean towards one side or the other, even so.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of those bad, old days are the two mighty starting zones, Antonica and Commonlands, the former stretching out from the gates of Qeynos to the Thundering Steppes, the latter from Freeport to Nektulos Forest. Together with the cluster of very low-level zones attached to each city, these vast stretches of land kept most adventurers both busy and apart for the first twenty levels or so.

Back in 2004, I found the whole thing confusing and counter-intuitive. By inclination, I prefer to play neutral or good-leaning characters but Qeynos lagged so badly at launch I couldn't stand to be there. As I remember it, which may not be strictly accurate, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I started off trying to play in Qeynos but had to re-roll because it was just untenable. Freeport had its problems but at least it was a lot easier to move around. 

That we'd also both preferred Freeport to Qeynos in EQ was probably a factor. In EQ, Freeport was more like a neutral city than an evil one. Trolls and Ogres weren't tolerated but Dark Elves and evil classes could move safely through the parts of the city not controlled by the religious factions. Qeynos was a lot less sanguine about that sort of thing and felt a lot more restrictive.

That was how we ended up playing multiple characters on both side of the ideological divide, especially once the lag got sorted out and I'd upgraded my PC. It meant I got to know both Antonica and Commonlands pretty well. 

Maybe next time I'll even get around to talking about one of them.

We're On A Roadmap To Nowhere

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

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

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

She later followed that bald statement with a gloss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

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

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

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

 

Frostreaver, Lethar And You - EverQuest Goes To The Polls

Yesterday, Wilhelm tipped me to a very interesting development over at EverQuest that I might otherwise have missed. I don't really keep up with the news on the original game any more and Darkpaw's PR Dept. doesn't seem to like sending out emails every time someone changes a comma in a quest dialog, the way some of them do. 

What's happening is that they're running a poll to decide the format of the next Time Locked Progression server, which isn't even due to launch until May 2026. That's quite some lead time to start discussing how it's going to work but this isn't some box-ticking exercise designed to make it look as though players have some agency when really they don't.

For a start, there's not just one poll. There are three. And if you click through you'll find there are more than twenty questions to answer in all! The categories are Expansion Unlocks, Special Rules and Bonuses and they cover everything from what should be available right from the start to whether there should be open PvP. 

The tally on that last one is closer than I would have expected:  22% For and 78% Against. The polls have only been open for a day or so, though, and they don't close until 15 January, so there's plenty of time for that ratio to change. 

In fact, there's time for everything to change because another unusual aspect of the process is that you can change your vote as often as you want. It's an ongoing evaluation and people are encouraged to debate the details in the separate forum threads that accompany every question in the polls and thereby change hearts and minds. And votes. 

I remember ArenaNet running a very similar, albeit not as well-structured, discussion process in Guild Wars 2 concerning the never-ending, grindingly slow revamp of World vs World. They had the conversation first, as I recall, and then there was a vote at the end. It was a long drawn-out waste of everyone's time, not least because almost all the developers who were working on it either left or got moved to other areas of responsibility long before anything was decided, only no-one at ANet thought to mention it until years later.

 

This seems far more focused and purposeful, with timescales and dates that everyone knows will be kept. Whatever the conclusion, there will be a fresh TLP server next year, just in time for Summer. Actually, there are going to be two of them but I'll get to that in a minute.

After more than twenty-five years, it's no surprise that the core audience for EQ consists of hardened veterans, most of them competitive raiders. For them, the game is more like an eSport than an MMORPG and both the tone and nature of the commentary in the threads seems to substantiate that perspective. As a complete outsider to that way of looking at the game, I found it very instructive to hear people explaining, quite cogently, what they were looking for and what they wanted to avoid.

Even in 2025 I think EverQuest retains something of its reputation as a difficult, slow, unforgiving game in which grind and repetition are necessary to progress. This is very clearly not what most of the people who've taken the trouble to vote and comment in these polls so far believe. 

About the only thing they seem to find too slow is the speed at which they can get to the next expansion. Multiple commenters make the observation that the game isn't difficult now and probably never was. It's just much too slow. 

They also think the reason most, if not all, TLP servers lose their populations after a few months has nothing to do with people not liking the later expansions. Instead it's all about having to slog through artificially long periods before they can get to the next unlock and the next raid tier, thanks to the pre-set times always being far too long.

Perhaps the oddest thing to me was the way everyone seemed to want to get past the Classic/Kunark/Velious eras as fast as conceivably possible, many wishing to skip them entirely. Far from the base game and its first two expansions being revered as possibly the best opening salvo of any MMORPG, the first couple of years of EQ's life are now seen as not much more than an annoying speed-bump on the way to the good stuff.

There was a lot of support for starting at Planes of Power,  itself seen as merely an aperitif before the real Golden Age of Norrath, which now appears to begin with the opening of the Gates of Discord. To quote one commenter "So tired of early content, the game doesn't even start to be fun until Gates."

 

GoD was, of course, the expansion that did its absolute best to send most of Norrath's population scurrying for cover in Azeroth the moment World of Warcraft arrived. Its sequel, Omens of War has always been popular but it's fascinating to observe the complete rehabilitation of the once-despised Gates of Discord.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath, however, always very close to the top of any list of my own favorite expansions and certainly my peak for social gameplay, appears to be widely dismissed and occasionally derided. I'm fairly sure that's because it held little interest for raiders even at the time. It was a superb expansion for introducing diffident outdoor and solo players to the joys of dungeons and full groups, building their confidence and teaching them the techniques required to succeed. But of course no-one has the slightest need for any of that now.

When Wilhelm told me all of this was happening, he wondered if it might be a response to the success of The Heroes' Journey, the pirate server whose owners Daybreak is currently taking to court. I don't think that can be the case, given the options being polled. Even though most respondents are broadly in favor of everything happening a lot faster, what they want to speed up is the time between expansion unlocks, not the xp rate itself. 

Most seem to feel leveling is so fast already it's trivial. Their problems never revolve around the journey to the cap, only what to do when they get there. The constant complaint is that all the options being polled are too long and people will leave because they'll have weeks in the endgame of each expansion with nothing left to achieve there.

Having scanned the options and taken the temperature, I very much doubt I'll bother voting at all. I was quite keen on the idea of a THJ-style server with accelerated xp and enhanced soloability but that's very far from what's being suggested here. Frostreaver (The name's already set - no voting on that, this time.) is just another raid-centric server with no particular appeal for anyone else.

But then there's Lethar.

In August, Darkpaw plans on launching a second TLP server and they're not taking votes or inviting feedback on this one. Well, not yet, anyway. Maybe that will come although the announcement suggests otherwise. 

This other new server, Lethar, is coming in August. It will have as its USP a brand new ruleset called called Personal Loot, about which nothing more is yet known.

Lethar will also start with The Serpent's Spine and previous content unlocked, all seven years and eleven expansions of it. TSS was Sony Online Entertainment's partially successful attempt to reboot the game by adding a complete, new leveling path from creation to cap, alongside - as opposed to instead of - all the others. 

It was generally reckoned to be a good expansion and it did appear to attract quite an influx of new players for a while. My guess is that if Darkpaw is planning on mopping up any disaffected Heroes' Journey players still willing to give them the time of day, Lethar and its mysterious Personal Loot Ruleset might be the bait.

I'll await further news with interest. The notion of a fast track through old Norrath with no group required does have its appeal. That said, it has to be remembered just what "fast" means in this context. I suspect even if Darkpaw went the SWtoR route and tacked on a truly massive multiplier, progress would still feel lethargic by modern standards. 

Not to mention there are now thirty-two expansions, which is why, even at what's been the most accelerated pace seen so far, it still takes about seven years to get from one end to the other. I don't imagine ever giving even one full year to an MMORPG again, let alone more than half a dozen and if I ever did, it surely wouldn't be one I've played for many years already.

I think it's time to acknowledge publicly that my time in EverQuest, as anything other than an occasional tourist, is over. I hope these new servers do well and I wouldn't rule out dropping in on one or other to see how things go but the chances of my ever settling down on either of them is so small as to be functionally non-existent.

Unless the Personal Loot ruleset is truly revolutionary, of course. But what are the chances of that?