A Pride Of Pandas

Based on evidence, rather than expectation, I think it's fair to say I'm no longer that guy. The one who's willing to log in every last character on every account, just to grab a freebie for each of them, even though they know it will never be used. 

I know. It surprised me, too, when I found out but the facts are had to argue with. I keep posting about this, that and the other wonderful offer I'm going to be sure not to pass up and then that's exactly what I do.

Okay, I don't miss out completely. I'm not that far-gone, yet. If I've mentioned it on the blog, I always at least log in whatever character I'm currently playing, in whichever game it  happens to be, to blag the free loot and take a few screenshots. And usually I get as far as logging in any other characters I play, at least semi-regularly, as well. But my days of going  through every last character, on every server, on every account, something I really did do more times than I'd probably want to admit, do finally seem to be over.

I was thinking about that when I logged into EverQuest II a couple of days ago to do my Overseer dailies. (There will be a post about those very soon. Probably this week. Or a paragraph in a portmanteau post at least. I'm not sure I have enough to say for a whole post.) 

Daybreak are extremely good about posting links in the patcher to whatever's new and this time they had something up about Pride Month, so while the game was loading I clicked through and had a look at that. I found it very heartwarming, particularly the subtext. The phrase "Help show your unwavering support..." seemed to me to be particularly astute and well-judged.

Anyway, politics aside, Pride Month in EQII means free stuff, specifically free familiars, and no-one wants to miss out on those. Not only do they look great, they're really useful and you can never have too many of them

I am of the opinion, however, that it is at least theoretically possible to have too many rabbit familiars, which is what the Pride ones were for quite a while. The Darkpaw devs obviously agreed because a few years back they swapped from bunnies to lions (A Pride of them - geddit?). 

I wasn't as keen on the lions if I'm honest. The bunnies were there or thereabouts real size but the lions, by necessity, were a lot smaller than lions usually are and I thought they looked a bit chintzy. Still nice but not sure if the pun was worth it. 

This year, though, the devs have really done us proud (God, now they've got me at it...) with a whole new set of familiars to collect - red pandas. What a great choice!

Red pandas (Aka firefoxes) have to be one of the cutest creatures on the planet. They look like they were designed in the Jellycat testing labs (Although weirdly the actual Jellycat red panda doesn't really look that much like the real thing...) They'll make excellent companions for posing at the bank and the great thing about familiars in EQII is that you can have a hideously ugly blob equipped for the stats while overwriting its appearance with something much cooler  and better-looking from your collection.

Based on previous Prides I think we'll have pandas for three years at least. There are nine gender identities represented in the celebration and we get three different ones each year. 

I guess that does mean that if you have a particular identity you want to acknowledge or display support for, you might have to wait a couple of years before it comes around, which isn't ideal, but all the variations are available in the Store for free for the duration of Pride Month so anyone who has to wait for the right panda to arrive can at least make do with a bunny or a lion until then.

The familiars aren't supposed to be tied inextricably to specific identities in any case. The descriptions are intentionally vague but the colors, which are taken from the Pride flag, indicate the specific alliances. The EverQuest Show produced a very handy visual guide last year. I don't know if they plan to update it but I  guess they have until 2027, by which time we'll have the full complement of pandas.

The three on offer this year are Boundless, Trueheart and Proudheart which, according to the guide, are the colors of the bisexual flag, the transexual flag and the rainbow Pride flag itself. Given the current climate, I think I'm going to be traveling with the Trueheart beside me, if only to annoy J.K. Rowling (Not that that's hard to do. A lot harder not to, really.)

I am also going to make the effort to log in all my characters in EQII for which there's a realistic chance I might actually play them once in a while, so they can claim their three pandas. That means everyone on the account I pay for, so that's fifteen times I'm going to have to do it.

And a final note - I just equipped a panda for the first time to get some screenshots and whoever designed them (Ttobey I'm guessing.) went the opposite way from the lions. The new pandas look like they have to be at least twice life-size!

And a final, final note... since it fits the theme, here's the excellent and extremely NSFW new song from the great Kate Nash. She's flagged it as Age-Restricted so I don't know if it can even be embedded.

 GERM - Kate Nash

Apparently it can but you have to go to YouTube to watch it. Which I very much hope you will. It's not  so much a song as a lecture you can dance to and all the better for it. 

Sadly, I suspect the only people who'll see it will be those who already agree with what it has to say but you have to do what you can, don't you? Thanks to Darkpaw and Daybreak for doing their bit.

Hear The Roar

It was four years ago that I first reported on the arrival of free, rainbow-rabbit familiars in EverQuest II. They arrived as part Daybreak's contribution to Pride Month. 

I think it was the first time the company officially joined in the celebrations but it's hard to be sure. Reading Holly Longdale's Summer 2019 Producer's Letter again, I notice the section on the Pride Bunny giveaway begins "This year..." as though referring to an existing tradition but I can't find any mention of anything earlier, either on this blog, the wiki or anywhere else. 

Whenever it began, it's very much a tradition now. Bunny familiars are as much a part of an EQII summer as Ethereals and Panda Quests. Only there don't seem to be any Ethereal events this year and Yun Zi has moved his scavenger hunt to the autumn. And this year's Pride Bunnies are... lions.

Respect to Accendo once again for not making any of the obvious puns. I don't think I could have resisted the temptation. I can barely resist it now. 

This year's free familiars are:

Mithaniel's Proudheart Lion
Mithaniel's Trueheart Lion
Mithaniel's Boundless Heart Lion

I'm guessing we're going to cycle through the same sequence of lions as we did bunnies. If so, it answers the question I had about just how many gender and orientation variants Daybreak was prepared to acknowledge. 

I'm not going to get into the "What gender or sexual orientation does each name and color represent?" discussion again, except to say it still comes up occasionally in general chat. Such conversations have been gratifyingly respectfully, at least in my experience, but they rarely come to any firm conclusions. 

I'm very glad the many variations are in the game to give representation to those who claim them but I've been running around for years now with different bunnies on different characters and no-one's ever called me on any of them, which is just as well because I'd be hard put to say just what flag I was flying at any given moment.

Such ignorance might seem worrisome and there may be questions of cultural appropriation to be answered but I see it somewhat differently. As I said in my post four years ago, "In the nearly twenty years I've been playing EverQuest games, attitudes in MMORPGs to what we now call the LGBTQ+ community have changed almost out of recognition. The days when a single /ooc recruiting call for a "gay and lesbian friendly" guild would result in a torrent of abuse seem like something from deep history, thank the gods." That players can be confused by the symbolism but comfortable and unthreatened in their confusion seems like progress to me.

The choice of familiars rather than cosmetic pets is also significant, I think. I might be reading too much into it but it seems to me that there's a welcome element of gravitas and commitment involved in giving away items of considerable power and status rather than something that could be dismissed as "fluff". Not that there's anything wrong with fluff!

And these are some powerful familiars. This year's trio forms an advance guard for the forthcoming Season Nine, soon to be available in the cash shop. They have very nice stats as a result. They may only be "common" quality but they came as a handy upgrade to the familiar my Bruiser was using and he got that only a few months ago, a boss drop from a Visions of Vetrovia solo dungeon.

For that reason alone, I'd recommend any EQII player, however casual and infrequent, to take the time to log in and claim at least one Pride Lion on whatever character they think might get played this year. In fact, since there's no limit to how many you can have, you might as well get all of them for all your characters. That's what I'm going to do.

I tried out all three and the one I like the look of most is the one that appears least interesting in the store. The Proudheart Lion seems like it might be the plainest but it turns out to have a lovely, rainbow particle effect, brightly-colored highlights, glowing eyes and the rainbow flag right across its nose. 

Even typing that paragraph I realise I'm running into some pronoun issues. I note that Daybreak also choose to use "it" in the in-game descriptions, which is a luxury games featuring non-human characters can enjoy. It still feels slightly uncomfortable, somehow, all the same.

And that discomfort, like the comfort with confusion I mentioned above, is a good thing. It means we're aware of the issue. That in itself is a mark of how much things have changed and how far we've come. And also of how far we still have to go.

It's been a long road but it's heading in the right direction and we've been travelling together along it for longer than we sometimes remember. The Pride movement itself stems out of the Stonewall Riots. They happened more than fifty years ago but just a handful of years later, when I was a young teenager, the culture was already beginning to open up. It's been opening like a beautiful flower ever since.

There were setbacks. It's always two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes more than one. Every advance moves us closer to another challenge. And yet there are always those who just seem to get it.

I was taken by surprise a couple of weeks ago, when I came across this:

The lyrics seem so on point for the 2020s but it's a cover of a song Paul Westerberg wrote and performed with the Replacements almost forty years ago. I know I said there was plenty of that sort of thing going on in the 1970s but not quite like this. 

I can't believe I'd never heard it before. I'm really glad I've heard it now.

Like Rabbits: EverQuest, EQII

I'm starting to feel like I'm running a news service for all things Norrath but I know from personal experience how very easy some of this stuff is to miss so I feel I probably need to mention it when it catches me out, too. I logged in this morning to collect my overnight Overseer rewards in EverQuest. I've been doing it for months, so I know what to expect, and that's certainly not almost 5% of a level from a single quest.

I checked as the others came in and they all seemed very high. I wondered if we'd had a patch overnight. There was a time when I'd read every set of patch notes from start to finish but that was years ago and even when I do read them nowadays, I often skim.

Checking the forums told me Everquest hadn't had an update since the seventeenth of June. Obviously that didn't come with an xp bonus. I'd have noticed. I mean, I noticed today, didn't I?

The first line of the patch notes gave me a start, though:

"Three new pride hares, along with the three introduced last year, will be freely claimable from the Marketplace from June 24th to July 31st"

I suppose that should have been obvious. Why would it only be EverQuest II that celebrates Pride? What really surprised me was that EverQuest even had familiars that everyone could use. I thought familiars in old Norrath were almost exclusively a wizard thing.

From a quick search it looks as if they still are. And a close reading of the note confirms it doesn't mention "familiars" at all. It just says "pride hares". Curiously uncapitalized, of which more in a moment.

The thing to do was obviously to claim them and see for myself. It turns out the hares, which are identical to the EQII six, are illusions.

Wait, let me rephrase that. The hares themselves are very much not illusions. They are six "physical" items that take up six valuable bag slots. If you click them, though, they cast an illusion that turns your pet into a bunny.

Well, it does if you have a pet. I was curious to see what would happen if you didn't, so I logged in my Cleric. He discovered that, if you don't have a pet, you get... a familiar.

So that's that sorted. The hares, familiars or illusions, are free on the Daybreak Marketplace (aka cash shop) until the end of July.

Going back to the capitalization issue I mentioned a few paragraphs back, I was curious to see that the mildly enigmatic but still evidently appropriate Pride-related descriptions we were discussing in the comments to my post on the EQII bunnies don't feature at all in the text of the EQ versions.

In EverQuest the bunnies have the same names (Errolisi's Aceheart Hare so on) but all the game tells you is that you have an "Adorable little pink, blue and white clothwork bunny" or whatever the appropriate colors happen to be.

I wrote a paragraph about how odd that seemed and then had to delete it when I loged in my Beastlord to pick up her six.  I spotted that full details, in considerably more straightforward language than EQII uses, are attached to each of the hares in their Marketplace descriptions, where it confirms that Aceheart represents asexuality, Openheart pansexuality and Freeheart non-binary.

It also explains very clearly that you either get a pet illusion or a familiar. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I'd just read the blurb when I bought the things, although I'm still not sure why they wouldn't also include the full description on the in-game "Lore" tab.

While we're on the topic of Familiars, I also ought to note that the Familiars Wild quest in EQII has been updated to give the new Season Seven familiars as rewards. These potentially have excellent stats, particularly if you're lucky enough to get one of the higher quality ones. I did the quest on my Wizard today and she got a Legendary familiar first time out.

Infuriatingly, most of my characters are still bugged on this quest, with the questgiver telling them they already have it when they don't. I've bugged this and petitioned it but with no success. I'll keep trying because the Berserker was also bugged and then one day he could magically get the quest again for no discernable reason. Best to keep at it if you have it, I'd say. It's quick and easy and the rewards are very valuable.

None of this, of course, does anything to explain why I was getting more than the usual amount of xp for my Overseer quests. Thre's a very simple explanation: it's Summer Spectacular!

No, me neither. I'm guessing this is EverQuest's equivalent of EQII's Summer Ethereals. Not being a regular EQ player, I must have missed it in previous years.

For the first week of July "All XP, faction, and rare spawns will be increased by 76%." That sounds like a strange amount but of course this weekend is the Fourth of July. As some wag on the forum suggested, perhaps we ought to get 1776% instead. If only!

EverQuest also has another summer event running, Hardcore Heritage. I was hoping to take my Magician on an outing for the first phase, which saw Blackburrow and Cazic Thule upgraded to suit "adventurers who are level 80 and above" as well as "The Ruins of Old Guk and the Estate of Unrest", for which you apparently needed to be "at least level 85". I thought that I might just about be able to handle some of that, solo, in the high nineties.

Sadly, I never managed to find time to give it a try. The caravanserai has since moved on to Crushbone, The Permafrost Caverns, The Castle of Mistmoore, and Nagafen's Lair, the first pair of which are for level ninety plus and the other two for level 100s. Technically that's me but I think I'll pass. As for the final phase, when the Ruins of Sebilis open for business to characters of level 105 and above, well maybe next year, when I'm 120.

No, I'll stick to doing my Overseer quests in the safety of the Guild Lobby, raking in my almost-doubled xp. A week of that could get me a couple of levels. And I'm hoping at least some of the Hardcore Heritage drops will be tradeable, which could make for some cheap upgrades on the broker.

It's going to be a long summer.

Familiar Feelings : EQII

Last year, when Daybreak gave away three bunny familiars as part of the Pride celebrations, I grabbed a set for all my characters. I've been running with bunnies all year. You can sometimes see one photobombing a screenshot. They do love the camera.

Each of the designs represents the colors on one of the Pride flags but I confess I haven't been paying attention to which is which. I did know what they all were once but when I came to write this post I realized I couldn't remember.

Luckily, this post at Gaminglyfe explains it nicely. Boundless Heart is the Bisexual bunny, Trueheart is Transgender and Proudheart wears the original rainbow flag of Gay Pride. Can't believe I didn't notice the bunnies' names are alphabetically matched! At least I won't forget again now I know, although really I should just be able to remember the colors.

This year's trio seem to have arrived with far less fanfare. I wouldn't have known the rabbits were back if I hadn't read Dreamweaver's forum post.

I picked up the new familiars on several characters yesterday and had a look at the descriptions. I'm guessing each of them represents something specific but I'm not sure I could say exactly what, although I kinda have some ideas. I've googled around but I haven't turned anything up.

Here are the descriptions and the rabbits. If anyone knows who each bunny is supporting, please share with the group!

Even without knowing exactly what they're about, you could hardly object to the sentiment. Unbiased, joyful, loving, these are some very friendly bunnies. Welcome anywhere, I'd very much hope. The stats aren't bad, either!

There's no rush to claim yours. They'll be hanging around the cash shop until the end of next month.

Ethereal Message : EQII

It's holiday time in Norrath once again. The brief hiatus ended with the coming of Oceansfull three weeks ago and this morning saw the start of Scorched Sky. Both of them are relatively new, having been introduced to the game in 2018 for the precise purpose of filling the long gap between the end of Bristlebane Day (and Beast'r) in mid-April and the start of Tinkerfest in late July.

I didn't get round to posting anything about Oceansfull when it was on, this year, but I did spend an afternoon beneath the waves and along the shorelines of several different zones. There were several items I wanted for the lakeside Othmir enclave in the Mara Estate home where all my characters tend to hang out these days.

I got everything I was looking for. Like most holiday events in EverQuest II there's no real obstacle to getting anyything you might want, other than time and patience. The boats look especially splendid on Mara's placid waters, I think.

There were also two new quests, both of which I did. One is in Eastern Wastes, the other in Tranquil Sea. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but now I reflect, something about those quests does strike me as a little odd. Involving no combat, with only housing items as rewards and designed to scale to all character levels, why put them in such inaccessible spots in mid-high level zones?

It's not that they're entirely unreachable by lower level characters. The areas where the quests take place are entirely safe. Getting to them could be something of an adventure at level ten, though. Then again, that's just the kind of adventure I used to relish, back in the days when I actually had low-level characters.

Scorched Sky started this morning and runs until 7 July. My Bruiser popped in to Darklight Woods to see what was new, if anything. He both was and wasn't a good choice because to him it was all new. I can't remember who I took there last time but it clearly wasn't him.

Unlike Oceansfull, whose watery theme turns up all kinds of furniture and appearance items that catch my eye and whose seaside settings appeal, Scorched Sky doesn't do all that much for me. I have a problem with armor that's permanently on fire. I can't help but imagine it burning the character who wears it.

Flaming mounts don't really light my fire, either. In fact, the whole molten look, incredibly common in many MMORPGs, makes me feel I'm looking at the cover of an eighties' metal album. Probably something by Iron Maiden or Judas Priest. Very much not the look I'm going for.

Scorched Sky this year does have something I do like - a new Overseer Quest. To get it you once again need to travel to somewhere rather inhospitable and unwelcoming, the Dragon's Breath Tunnel in the middle of Lavastorm, which I have to admit is about as appropriate place as you could possibly find for a celebration dedicated to Fennin Ro, the Tyrant of Fire and his son, Solusek Ro, the Burning Prince.

So far, no-one at all seems to have written up the new quest, Conflagrant Rites, for the wiki or anywhere else. I started it in the middle of writing this post. I'm on the first part, which takes thirty minutes. The reward for that, other than the next quest in the sequence and a regular Overseer crate, is a flaming, flying book that refuses to be photographed in the Dressing Room.

If it's like previous Overseer holiday quests I imagine it will have five parts, al lasting thirty minutes. If it comes with anything especially good I might pop back in and update this post with a screenshot or two.  
(Edit: I'm on what seems to be the final (at least, it's twice as long) of only three parts right now. The reward is a title, Flame Bearer, and a rolling cinderstone pet, which looks exactly as you might imagine.)

As well as Scorched Sky we also have the first phase of the Summer Ethereal campaign. Ethereals are a tradition in EQII to which I paid little attention for a long time. They're the exact opposite of the usual calendar holidays in that they exist almost entirely to give out top-end adventuring gear. I used to think of them as something raiders did although I think they were always also accessible to Heroic group players, too.

A year or two back, the door was nudged open for solo players to poke thier noses in and peer at the ethereal glow and I started to take a bit more of an interest. This year, seeing that I've been playing regularly and making a decent fist of upgrading several of my max-level characters, I've decided to make more than a token effort at collecting enough Peculiar Medallions, the currency in question

I'm hoping to buy at least one or two of the 200 Resolve accessories. There's a weekly quest called Ethereal Ahoy. It's auto-granted and completes as soon as you finish any of the regular Blood of Luclin weekly quests, including the solos. I finished one this morning and got two dozen Peculiar Medallions.

Summer ethereals, which come in three phases, stay around for about fifteen weeks, so if I did Ethereals Ahoy every week I'd earn exactly enough to buy three items plus three "Shard of Peculiar Allies", the adornment that allows the items to be upgraded. That makes it likely they'll stil be useful even after the inevitable stat inflation of the winter expansion, which obviously increases the appeal.

Whether I'll have the discipline to do it every week remains to be seen but I really ought to be able to manage at least enough for a couple of earrings. EQ2Traders has a detailed explanation of how the event works, if needed.

Last and very much not least there's a fresh trio of free Pride bunny familiars in the cash shop. I'll probably try and knock out a quick post on them in their own right because the whole thing's quite interesting, but just in case I don't get time, I'm mentioning them now. If you play EQII you wouldn't want to miss out on them. Aside from the cultural significance, they're decent familiars (1807 Potency, 807 Crit Bonus, 3.4% to all Attributes) and they can, naturally, be used for Overseer questing.

So much all happening at once. I can't keep up!

Stuck Like A Cowboy : EQII

As Kander and Dreamweaver revealed in the recent Kander's Candor podcast, the big spring update for EverQuest II this year has a cowboy theme. And a cowboy theme tune. Several, in fact, some of them sung by cacti.

The singing succulents (that's what they're called) are in the new instance, which comes in Solo, Heroic and Challenge flavors. Don't ask me what "Challenge" dungeons are. I can't keep up with the jargon even though I'm playing every day.

I'll bet they're hard, though. I'm sure I won't be seeing many of them (for "many" read "any").  I've already tried the Solo instance and that's hard enough for me.

In fact, it's exactly hard enough, as in just right.  It's what I guess you'd call "end game Solo", if such a thing exists (and it does in EQII) because you can't even get the quest for it unless you've finished the Blood of Luclin solo adventure signature line.

I have six max level 120 adventurers but only one of them has actually bothered to complete the sig so it was had to be my Berserker who hitched up his chaps and moseyed on down to the Diaku Corral.

The questgiver is a gnome in the small camp just at the top of the hill leading from The Grey to Scarlet Desert. Yet another gnome has gone missing, something of a theme in the current expansion (okay, all expansions...) and it's your job to go look for him. Isn't it always?

It took me a little while to work out where to go although the instructions are clear enough. There's a big island out in the bay and a pier at the foot of the headland where the very scary Diaku ogres live. Once you've had a poke around there and gone back to speak to the questgiver again, you can click a rowboat next to the pier to let it take you to the new instance, out on the island.

Zoning in was a little scary. All the mobs are three-up-arrow orange-con heroics. Level 126s. A lot of them. It looks like solo suicide but the way the game works now is to use the Heroic instances as a baseline and buff solo characters up to match. My Berserker, who normally has around 130m hit points, found himself beefed up to not far short of half a billion. It's a big numbers game, alright, but that's how most EQII players seem to like it.

The ogres hit hard but die fast. Berserkers are happy to fight crowds so all the adds just made things go faster still. As per the current convention the mobs didn't really drop anything and naturally there's no xp to be had at max level but I've long since adjusted to that new normal, so I didn't get that old-fashioned "why am I doing this again?" feeling.

The ogres, all wearing chaps, ten-gallon hats and leather waistcoats, did drop one thing: single-shot crossbows. All of them. And the bows were stackable items, not equippable weapons. There's a hint. I made a hot key for them and tried shooting ogres in the hope there might be some kind of one-shot gimmick. There was. Kind of.

Shoot an ogre with one of those mini-crossbows and his hat flies off! I wish I could have got a screenshot but it happened too fast. I guess I could fire up FRAPS and video it. Or, come to think of it, doesn't EQII have built-in video?

I could go back in and do it now if it wasn't for one thing. I'm stuck.

Little did I know at the time that the key to my progress
(and the gate) lay in my hands...

Stuck as in I've killed all the available ogres and now I'm outside the locked gates of their hilltop fort and I can't get in. I've already re-started the instance and killed them all a second time in case I missed something but if I did I missed it that time, too.

I must either have missed something (Spoiler! And False Edit! Yes I had!) or I'm bugged because I know other people have finished the instance. I'd happily refer to a walkthrough only there isnt one yet.   

Darkpaw Games recently moved to a peculiar cadence of updates where the Test server gets some updates after Live. That does seem to defeat the object of having a Test server. Certainly the very disgruntled Test community thinks so. And since they are, by and large, the people who write all the walkthroughs for the wiki, when they suffer, we all suffer.

I already know how easy it is to miss stuff in the new instance because I missed the mechanic on the one one named ogre I found on on the way up to the summit. He had clear emotes and the mechanic turned out to be obvious but I still had to reset the instance and give him a second go before I tumbled it.

Based on that mistake, I hung around for a long time trying to figure out how to get the gates open. I killed everything I could find, including all the rattlesnakes. I tried interacting with the cacti. (Another Fake Edit: You didn't try hard enough, pal!). I checked the maps for alternate routes and found a possible way in underwater.

That got me two discovery points and one death by shark but it didn't get me anywhere I wanted to go. I've run out of ideas, which is why I stopped and came to write this post. My choices now are a) ask in General chat if anyone knows how to get the gate open or b) wait until a walkthrough appears on the wiki. (Yet Another Fake Edit: or c) read the forum thread properly instead of just skimming it, you muppet! Not to mention d) watch one of the playthroughs already up on YouTube). I guess it depends which is stronger, my pride or my patience.

From what I've seen so far it's an excellent update. I like the instance a lot. I got an upgrade off the named ogre, too, so it could be profitable as well as fun. (And still with the Fake Edits: all the drops so far seem to be at least 165 resolve which makes it a great choice for gearing up after the Sig line).

There's also a major upgrade to the Overseer system, which now has both levels and seasons as well as some very welcome quality of life changes. I'll probably cover all that in more detail when I've levelled it up a bit. Far enough to start the new Desert of Flames themed missions that come with Season Two. That requires your Overseer to be level eleven. Fortunately, leveling the feature seems to go quite quickly. I'd guess I'd be there sometime next week.

The update also comes with some exceptionally
good freebies. There's a very attractive mount with decent stats, a legendary quality familiar and a 66-slot bag (which can also be displayed as a really nice appearance item in the back slot) plus some item unattuners and time-reducing potions. That's a good package deal by just about anyone's standards.

It's one per account but, amazingly, every account gets one. Yes, that means free accounts as well. I logged in my old main account, currently unsubbed, to check and it's true. I'll be logging in all my f2p accounts and Mrs Bhagpuss's too. It would be rude to shun such generosity.

The update also gives some hefty boosts to some of the mage classes, particularly Warlocks and Summoners. They're calling it "Class Balance" but it seems more like a straight catch-up for some classes that were supposed to be upper tier DPS but who've slipped. I already found my mages to be plenty powerful enough in solo content but I won't complain if they become even more powerful still.

Now, if someone would just be kind enough to get started on a walkthrough, I've got cowboys to kill! (Final Fake Edit: as you were guys. I've got this!).

Try Another Flavor: EQII

If you believe the forums, itemization is the biggest problem with EverQuest II's latest expansion, Blood of Luclin. If that's true, it wouldn't be the first time.

Itemization, like balance, is a perennial issue in all MMORPGs that rely on gear as a progression mechanic. In many cases items represent the "Reward" in the "Risk vs Reward" equation. Get it wrong and the whole game comes off the rails.

As with most things, it's not quite as simple as that. The question of how "good" crafted gear should be, compared to quested or dropped, has dogged many games that I've played. Too good and adventurers start to complain that their supremacy is being undermined; not good enough and crafters begin to wonder loudly what the point of crafting even is.

Crafting in Blood of Luclin has changed significantly, changes that aren't to everyone's taste. The new Overseer system, likewise, has come in for a significant degree of criticism. There are a couple of (conspiracy) theories floating around, purporting to explain what's going on.

One is the usual "They don't care and even if they did they don't know what they're doing" mantra that's dogged the game since beta in 2004. It may well even be true, at least in part. I don't believe the EQII team doesn't care but in the company's straightened circumstances it's easy enough to imagine that people may have found themselves taking on development and design roles with which they have yet to come to grips or for which they aren't ideally suited.

More intriguing, particularly in the light of both the recent re-alignment within Daybreak and Executive Producer Holly Longdale's assertion that "since 2015, since I came on board, breaking all the rules both games have grown. So where we had a trend of the audience trickling off, we’ve now grown and we’ve grown revenue at the same time", is the idea that Darkpaw Games is re-envisioning EverQuest II to meet the demands of a new and different audience. As one comment on the thread puts it "...they're working toward a different game design and they expect to lose customers because of it. They're just trying to extract as much money from folks they know are bound to leave along the way."

Were that to be true, it  would make some sense of another comment I read (and now can't find) which reflects on something I've noticed for myself. Conversations about the current expansion taking place in open chat within the game itself seem to be considerably more positive than those on the forums. Apparently the kind of people likely to chat ad hoc in General are having a better time of things than those who prefer a more formal approach to discussion. Change, as always, benefits some and disadvantages others.

All of this is a lengthy pre-amble giving context for something that might appear to be entirely unrelated: flavor text. Flavor text is an aspect of game design that's not just under the radar, more like under the floorboards.

Why, we might very well ask, does flavor text even exist? It fulfills no gameplay function whatsoever. It's not like the informational or instructive text that appears on a click or a mouseover to explain the use of an item or define its statistical value. Flavor text exists purely to be read and enjoyed for what it is. In a gamespace where many players don't even read quest dialog, what can that be worth?

To me, quite a lot. It's a meaningful factor in the elevated levels of satisfaction I'm experiencing in the current expansion, compared to the relative dissatisfaction felt by others.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, as a direct result of ongoing changes in game design I find myself engaging with a whole raft of daily tasks, all aimed at "progressing" my characters. Two of those, the Overseer missions and the "Familiars Wild" quest, can result in the acquisition of agents or familiars.

Each of these comes in the form of an icon, a tiny portrait of the individual in question. When examined, these pictures tell a story.

It's a peculiar irony of the genre that the less important the text is to the function of the game, the more likely it is to be well-written. I've seen exquisite thumbnail descriptions on items whose only reason for existence is to be sold to vendors for cash. Frequently the miniature illustrations are delightful, too. Even crafting mats get a line of context.

When it comes to Agents and Familiars, I'm finding the act of discovering each of these new "characters" is a reward in itself. A reward sufficient to justify the time and effort involved.

The loot tables attached to Overseer missions do indeed have some very real shortcomings: some of the items are all but useless and many of those that look appealing on a first glance prove to be inferior to equivalents rewarded by the regular quests. The Agents and the Missions themselves, dropping infrequently but repetitively as they do, are also of limited practical value.

And yet it's the appearance of a new Agent or Mission that elicits the most immediate response from me. Any frustration that might be building as a result of receiving repeated "rewards" I can't use and don't need is, for the time being at least, alleviated by the anticipation of receiving another Agent or Quest for my collection, each complete with another tiny tale.

As for the Familiars Wild quest, there I could be quite cross, were it not for two things: firstly the quest itself is a lot of fun and secondly the familiars are highly amusing. The reason I might be cross with this quest is that, as I suspected, most of my characters are bugged and can't get it at all.

After a judicious exploration of the way it's (not) working for me I have concluded that every character who did the quest on the day it first appeared in game, back in February 2018, is considered still to be doing it now. They all get the "come back tomorrow" message that appears if you've done the quest since the last daily reset. Characters I've made more recently are able to get the quest as normal.

I petitioned this, not hoping for much. I got an excellent, prompt, accurate and polite reply from Darkpaw's Customer Service team, telling me, as I knew would be the case, that there was nothing they could do. malfunctioning quests are obviously a problem outside of the scope of customer service. I was just hoping they might know of a workaround.

The impressive thing was that the person who replied had very plainly both read and understood my petition, something that has not always been the case in other MMORPGs where I've had similar interactions. I've always found DBG's (and previously SOE's) customer service to be exemplary. I'm glad to report that level of professionalism is still being maintained.

With the quest bugged on most of the characters I play regularly, it would be reasonable to expect that I'd stop doing it. The outcome has been somewhat different. I'm now doing Familiars Wild every day on those new characters that are able to get the quest normally.

There's a good chance I won't play those characters all that much, although you never know. It doesn't really matter because I'm not doing the quest to make them more powerful - I'm doing it because I look forward to seeing what new familiar I get each time. Partly that's the fun of collecting and working towards completing a set (and yes, I have been considering buying Tem Tem) but mostly it's for the fun of reading the flavor text.

To add a further layer of nuance to the meaning of "reward" (as well as hanging another question mark over my sanity), I don't even need to do the quest to read the descriptions on the creatures. Every familiar in the game is shown in the Familiar window and the full text for each is visible on mouseover. Except I find it more fun to receive them randomly as "rewards", the reward in this case being a few lines of text that bring a wry smile, often as not.

I very much doubt this is the thinking that represents the new kind of customer Darkpaw is supposedly hoping to attract, should that conspiracy theory have weight. It is hard to deny that the game is changing but why, let alone to whom those changes are intended to appeal is extremely hard to parse. Personally I always tend to suspect a combination of incompetence and unforseen outcomes in these situations, rather than any clever plan.

Whether the churning engines of change will plow the game into the ground or prepare it for the seeds of a bright, new future remains to be seen. For now, I'm enjoying losing myself in the undergrowth that springs up in the furrows.

So long as someone's being paid to write biographical entries for notional non-player characters there can't be too much wrong with the state of the game. Or, at least, that's the tale I'm choosing to tell myself.

Familiarity Breeds Confusion : EQII

You know how you can look at something every day and not really see it? Happens to me a lot. I like to think of myself as an observant sort of person but really, like most of us, I only see what I expect to see. I know we'd all like to believe we're the one who'd spot the gorilla but the whole point is that almost no-one does.

I like almost everything about EverQuest II's latest expansion, Blood of Luclin, but the thing that's really grabbed my attention is the new Overseer system. It's all the better because I never expected I'd be giving it any attention at all.

It's a fairly abstruse addition to a game that already feels gnomic. It's taken me a while to get to grips with it. I'm sure there's more to learn. I know there is.

Since I wrote about it I've been sending my Agents out on Missions every day, so I do have some practical experience. There's also a detailed entry on the wiki, which I've studied at some length.

Even so, it was only today that I got around to playing with the fine controls, the two Plus signs at the bottom of the window. One affects  Bonus, the other Mishap. You can use them to increase your chance of the former and reduce the risk of the latter, both things you'd very much like to do.

Unlike the system itself, there's a veneer of internal logic to this. To increase the chance of acquiring a bonus chest you can send one of your Mercenaries to accompany your agent. To help them avoid being captured you can lend them one of your familiars.

Okay, it's a very slim thread to hang a sense of reality on but it's something. You could imagine the Merc and the Familiar giving the Agent some kind of edge. I wouldn't say I'm feeling any immersion here but it at least has internal logic and a certain storybook charm. More pointedly, it's a mechanic with repercussions in the game proper.

To send a Mercenary to assist your Agent you must first have unlocked the "Hire Anywhere" option for that specific Merc. Some, the ones that come with expansions for example, are unlocked when you first hire them but you can unlock any by paying a small fee (currently 149 DBC which is about a dollar-fifty at the basic exchange rate).

That's a possible revenue stream for Daybreak, although I'd imagine it's more of a trickle. Most people who care probably have plenty of Mercs unlocked already. My Berserker has half a dozen on staff. Still, I'll probably spend a smidgeon of my triple-SC-sales savings on mercenary contract extensions for some other most-played characters.

Also, why are all my Mercs working pro bono now?

Although EQII may well have turned into a whaling operation at the difficulty levels above my ceiling, for me it's still nickel and dime stuff, if even that. At my level of involvement it's more a game of time-management than a wallet thrasher. As I've mentioned before, modern EQII comes with several offline training systems: mercenaries, mounts, abilities and familiars. There may well be others I've missed. I've been reasonably diligent in keeping up with the first three but I never really got going with Familiars.

That's because the only way I know to do upgrade them for free is to complete the daily Familiars Wild quest, the purpose of which is to catch a familiar to feed to one of your existing stable, thereby making that one stronger. Brutal.

I did the quest when it was introduced almost two years ago. I wrote about it at the time, praising it to the skies and saying I found it "very moreish indeed". Then I promptly forgot about it and never did it again.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I didn't blank the quest from my mind. It occured to me now and again that I should be doing it but I was well aware that if I did I'd just add every new familar to my stable rather than feeding any of them to the others. Not that I have a problem with that. It just never seemed to be the best use of my time.

Well, now things have changed. I could use a few more familiars to send out on missions. And the better quality the familiar - Legendary, Fabled, Mythical - the more it reduces the risk of the agent it accompanies getting captured.

With all that in mind, this morning I went to get the quest. I had a vague idea the NPCs were in Freeport and Qeynos but I couldn't remember where, so I went to the wiki, found the loc, cut and pasted it into my EQII Maps window in game and followed the glowing trail to... the exact spot I've passed by almost every day since the quest was added.

2019 was a good year for free familiars.

The three Conservators stand around under the gables on the street side of the East Freeport bank. That's the local branch most of my characters use. I'm in and out of there several times a day. Did I ever notice them? What do you think?

I was a bit confused as to why no-one was flying the feather to show they were open for business but my Berserker spoke to Steward Kres anyway. His reply? "I'll have more tasks for you tomorrow".

What? Why? I haven't seen you for two years! How can I still have a timer?

It occured to me that perhaps I still had the quest in my book. I have some stuff in there that goes back a lot longer than a couple of years. I opened my Journal to look but I couldn't find "Familiars Wild" anywhere. Off to the wiki to check what Category of quest it was.

"Mission", apparently, which I didn't know even was a category. But then, I could write a book on the things I don't know about EQII. If only I knew what they were...

Something else I didn't know until today is that the Quest Journal now has five tabs. If you'd asked me yesterday I'd have said there were three: Quests, Collections and Achievements. If I'm honest, I might have said two, because although Achievements have been in the game and the Journal for many years, I always forget about them.

As the most observant among you will already have noticed, this screenshot was taken nearly forty minutes after I finished writing the post. Blogging takes up a not inconsiderable portion of the day.

I had no idea there were tabs for Daily Objectives and Missions as well. When did they appear? I open that book almost every day and I swear I never saw them before. But then, I wasn't looking for them. Remember that gorilla?

It didn't help much. I found a "Familiar Daily Mission" on the astoundingly lengthy list. Seriously, there are pages and pages of Missions, almost none of which I ever do - or indeed ever have done. Every one said "No" under Completed but they still all had Reset Timers, including the Familiar. What that means I'm not entirely sure. At all sure. I don't have a clue.

To be on the safe side I logged into every character on the account and checked they didn't have the quest. No-one did. Then, because I'm nothing if not bloody-minded, I logged in the account formerly known as my main account (and even more formerly as Mrs Bhagpuss's account. Don't get me started...). My Necromancer there was also told to come back tomorrow.

I refer the author of the flavor text to Dorothy Parker's review of The House At Pooh Corner.
Also, could you please add a Merc or Familiar called Katy so I can use my "Katy On A Mission" gag? Oh, wait, I just did.

And that's where I'm at right now. Reset is in exactly five hours as I write this. That's seven in the evening where I am, midday in San Diego. I guess I'll have to wait and see what changes then, although since I haven't done the quest for two years I'm at a loss as to how the daily reset could affect things.

Always something new to learn. Always another puzzle to solve. I'm just hoping it's not some kind of bug. I could do without exploring the intricacies of Daybreak's Customer Service system. I'm all for exploration, discovery and lifelong learning but there are limits.

I'll come back and update this post when and if there's something to say. With luck, I'll have a picture of my new familiar to show off. Either that or a screenshot of my ticket number.

EDIT: Hmm. Reset made no difference at all. Steward Kres still says "Come back tomorrow". But... I made a new character and she was able to get the quest and complete it. Now Kres tells her to come back tomorrow as well. We'll see what happens then.