Change My Gamma : EverQuest

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

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

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

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

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

Can we get a spot on this guy?

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

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

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

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

Cogs for cash.

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

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

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

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

Did you remember to bring the torch?

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

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

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

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

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

I should probably look at all these settings one day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing To Fear: EverQuest

Today I played EverQuest almost the whole day. I logged in around ten in the morning to collect and set my Overseer quests as usual and then I thought about the bonus xp and how it's only going to be around for a little while and how if I went somewhere easy, somewhere I knew, a Hot Zone ten levels below me, say, and I popped my Lesson, I could just do half an hour and maybe make another five per cent. What could go wrong?

Eight hours later I'd been to half a dozen zones I'd never seen before, died once, spent about a quarter of my money and made less than two per cent of level 101. I'd been on an adventure. God knows it's about time.

After a false start, about which the less said the better, I took the level 90 daily task from Franklin Teek. I already had the 80 and the 85 but they're all but worthless to me now.

Teek wanted me to kill five Samhains in Fear Itself. I had no idea what they were or where that was. I had a vague feeling it must be somewhere in the House of Thule expansion but that was about it. EQ's in-game map has a pathfinding function that will set a route between any two zones but what it comes up with isn't always the most sensible, let alone the safest, so off to Google DuckDuckGo I went to look it up.

As I suspected , Fear Itself is some way on from the only zone I really know in that expansion, Feerrott: The Dream. You can use the Oggok stone in Plane of Knowledge to get to The Dream, then you cross that zone to the gates of the House of Thule itself. Once inside, you head for the Upper Floors and, finally, into to Fear Itself.

By EQ standards it's straightforward. A simple, four-zone trip. Also bloody terrifying, especially the bit where you have to go down a series of long, dark corridors filled with scores of writhing snakes and spiders, not to mention demons from hell. I'd love to show you my screenshots of that part but I was too petrified to take any.

The journey took me an hour or so. I haven't played my Magician for months, not in any meaningful sense, so I thought I ought to warm up on some easy stuff along the way. Most of the mobs in The Dream conned green, which seemed perfect for getting back into the swing of things.

Just as well I didn't go for anything more ambitious. My pulling and positioning skills were horrifically rusty. The little snakes were simple enough but it wasn't long before I had more lizardmen than I know what to do with. Literally.

As I dithered and tried to remember which spell icon was which, my uber-buffed air elemental and healer mercenary handled everything beautifully. A couple more very bad pulls and I had myself sorted out enough to give them the dps support they didn't exactly seem to need.

Near the zone line into the House I happened on Patches, a named that might have been a dog, once. He conned light blue, which is supposed to be standard fodder for soloists these days. I thought he'd make a good test so I pulled him and down he went, along with an add or two because I still hadn't remembered you're supposed to pull mobs to a safe spot.

Emboldened by that I found the entry point and zoned into House of Thule, Lower Floors. And to my surprise I recognized it. My magician hadn't been there before but I had. I took my necromancer there on the Test server last year for some reason I can't recall. I think I was trying out the entry area, known, I believe, as "The Garden", to see if it would be a good hunting ground for the Mage, on the assumption that if it wasn't it wouldn't much matter if a character I never play any more got herself killed.

Five levels ago it would have been ideal. Then, everything would have been light blue and the xp would have been worth having. At 101, though, most of the snakes and dogs were green and even the repeatable quest experience for culling them didn't add up to much.

They were more good practice, though, and even better were the light blue named mobs I kept finding. I can't remember bumping into so many nameds in such short order and close proximity. I killed a named spider, then a snake, then a dog, all outside in the garden. After that I felt properly warmed up, so I pushed on into the house itself, where I killed a named suit of armor called Old Rusty. You and me both, pal.

I'd read up the next bit, which was just as well, because that's where it started to get scary. I had permanent invisibility on and the mobs were still conning green but once I climbed the stairs and zoned into the Upper Floors things became extremely claustrophobic.

I conned everything as it loomed out of the darkness in case it could see me. Nothing did. I ran through the snake pit and down the spider tunnel feeling grateful not to be overly phobic about such things. The room filled with flaming demons almost came as a relief. At least with all that fire I could see where I was going, for once.

The end of the corridor brought me into a room in the center of which was a statue of the god of fear, Cazic Thule, lying dead on a slab. At least I hope it was a statue. Once again I was forewarned by my research, which advised against clicking on him. I don't know what happens if you do and I'd like to keep it that way.

I stepped over him, wondering where the zone line might be and discovered I was standing on it. In a moment I found myself in Fear Itself. Which turned out to be perfect!

The mobs I could see were all light blue. I was at the edge of the zone with a great pull spot next to me, through which nothing seemed to path. As is common with newer expansions (by which I mean ones from the last decade or so) there was someone right at the entrance waiting to give me quests. I took those and set up to kill.

Being a Hot Zone and the mobs being light blue, the xp was much better, even though the fights were still easy enough. I got adds and handled them safely. I saw a named, pulled it and killed it without much risk. Another named wandered up in the middle of the next fight and we killed that one, too.

I'd have settled in for a session only, of course, my bags were full. Aren't they always? I spent a few minutes going through them, trying to make space, but there was nowhere to sell or bank and I didn't even know what most of the stuff I was carrying was for, so I couldn't just throw it away.


It was frustrating, having taken all that effort to get there and then having to leave when I'd just got started. In the old days, being a caster, I'd just have bound myself there, so I could skip the journey back, but it's been years since I've been able to bind anywhere remotely as useful as next to a hunting spot.

Still, I thought I'd give it a try. You never know. It's only mana, after all. I cast Bind Affinity on myself.

I didn't get the usual "You can't bind here, find a city" error message. Had it worked? I wasn't sure. It's been so long I couldn't remember how it was supposed to go. Simple enough to test. I ran a hundred yards or so along the ridge, cast Gate and instantly reappeared back where I'd started. It had worked!

I was exultant. These days there are multiple ways to get home, which makes it all the more galling when you can't bind where you'd like, out in the field. I cast the AA Throne of Heroes and I was back in the Guild Lobby.

Now I had an invisible elastic band stretched between my hunting spot and my resting place, somewhere buffs don't fade and kind players constantly refresh them and there's a bank and a vendor to clear your bags. Things couldn't be better!

So, did I spend the rest of the day flicking back and forth between the two, racking up the xp and the loot? Well... not exactly. It occured to me life would be even sweeter if only I had some bigger bags. All I needed to do was buy some before I gated back.

I mean, how hard could that be?