Lucky Number 13 : EQ2

It wasn't until I read Wilhelm's post yesterday afternoon that I realized it was Friday 13th. I'd been having a pretty good day until then. Afterwards it only got better.

I'd spent the morning sorting out my bags in EQ2. Despite the game having by far the most generous storage in all MMORPGs, all my regular characters still manage to end up stuffed to the gunwales.

My berserker has something in excess of three hundred inventory slots just on him, leave alone the twelve hundred in his bank. Counting his house vault he probably has storage for well over two thousand items and then there's four tabs of the guild bank he has all to himself, given he's the only guild member who's logged in in over two years.

There's just no excuse for it. It's out of control hoarding is what it is and I need to get a grip. Three hours of sorting, selling, transmuting, infusing, and adorning later left me with three completely empty bags and a significantly upgraded character.

I even bit down hard and attuned and equipped the Fabled breastplate I'd been dithering over for weeks. It does put me in a tizzy when I acquire gear I could use then realize it sells on the broker for more than ten times all the money I have in the bank. It was, needless to say, a massive upgrade.

EQ2 seems to be in the throws of uncontrollable inflation right now. Broker prices are spiralling up in the way I remember EverQuest's did in the mid 2000s. The gear I'm getting from soloing The Scourge of Zek outshines raid gear from the last expansion, which is barely six months old. There's a thread on the forums warning that if it goes on like this individual DPS on boss fights will soon parse in the billions.

I love it! My Berserker is a total joy to play. It feels great being this powerful. It feels great picking up spare collects and knowing they'll sell for fifty or a hundred plat each on the broker. And fast. Most of the things I put on the broker at the end of a session have sold by the next time I log in. The economy may be bloated but it moves!

After lunch I finished off the GU100 solo signature storyline. It took me an hour of killing orcs to get the final twenty-one sigils. I did the hand in, took my reward and that was that. So now what?

I went and played GW2 for a few hours. One of our smartest commanders led a golem charge around Eternal Battlegrounds while one of our loudest commanders commentated the whole thing in Team chat as if it was a sports event. It was hilarious.

After the excitement died down and Mrs Bhagpuss went to bed I logged back into EQ2. I thought I'd just have a potter. My Berserker happened to be at the dock in Phantom Sea so I picked up the weeklies and an Advanced Solo dungeon daily for good measure.

I flew around marveling at just how gorgeous the two ocean zones from the Altar of Malice expansion are, especially after the raw ugliness of Zek. All the Nameds I needed for the weeklies were up but not for long. Fights that went to the wire a few months ago now ended so quickly I barely had time to hit a button. I was one-shotting some of the level 105 mobs with the first arrow that was meant to pull them.

Weeklies done, I went to Zavith'loa. I thought I'd been there before but apparently not to this particular version, The Lost Caverns, because I got explore xp on zoning in. That was only the first surprise. I killed the two lizardmen lurking at the entrance and suddenly I was riding a dinosaur!

It reminded me of the Goblin starting area in WoW, where you're always hopping on unlikely mounts and being whisked across hostile territory. Never seen it happen before in Norrath.

Once again the fights were short, explosive and final. All the Nameds I needed to kill put up the challenge of a wet paper bag. I had a walkthrough up just in case but none of them lived long enough to get any of their tricks or traps out.

It was brilliant! It felt absolutely right. This was payback. My Berserker did the grunt work, grinding through all the quests in the expansion at level in old gear and it was fun but it was also hard going. Some of the Advanced Solo stuff back then was a real challenge. Returning, battle-hardened from tougher campaigns, being able to treat these creatures with disdain, was immensely satisfying.

It was so satisfying, in fact, that I wanted more. I thought about running another Shattered Seas Advanced Solo dungeon or maybe even trying a Heroic and seeing how that went. Then I had what turned out to be a much better Idea.

Leveling up to 95, I completed all of the excellent Cobalt Scar content plus the full Signature quest line from the Chains of Eternity expansion. When the cap shifted to 100 I did it all in the Shattered Seas or mentored down, chugging xp pots in old Kunark dungeons. I skipped the intervening level 95 expansion, Tears of Veeshan, almost entirely.

That means I have a whole unused expansion just sitting there. What's more, at my Berserker's current power level, those level 95-100 mobs might as well be level seven Antonican rats. I blew into the Vesspyr Isles late last night ready to pick up where I left off on my last, brief visit.

I vaguely remember I'd been doing something for some dragon or other. At the time it had been hard work, requiring me to pick out the mobs I needed from among scads of other hostile critters. There was either a great deal of unnecessary clearing or else sneaking and hiding and it wasn't a lot of fun, which is why, back then, I never got past the first quest hub.

This time it was different. So very different. No need to clear when you can just run into the middle of whatever's in the way and fire off every AE on your bar. Everything dies. Immediately. If there were quest mobs in there, updates chime. If not, move ten paces and repeat.

Even when I had to harvest and forage and mine it was a pleasure. I just moved from node to node and let my new best friend, Zhugrus, deal with the wildlife. He is, I must say, by far the best healer Mercenary I have had the pleasure of employing in EQ2. He's like Stamper Jeralf on steroids.

Not only does he heal me promptly and efficiently but most of the time he remembers to heal himself too, which is more than any other healer merc I've ever had has managed. Maybe it's that streak of orcish self-regard. Of course he didn't need to do much healing in Vesspyr. He barely ever had time to get a Verdict off.

The best part of returning to Vesspyr Isles, though, was finding just how staggeringly beautiful the whole zone is. The first time I really didn't notice because of having to watch my health bar but now that's no longer a concern I was able to look up and around.

It's like being inside a Yes album cover. I believe I may have mentioned this before, but someone on the EQ2 art team was clearly exposed to Fragile or Tales From Topographic Oceans at an impressionable age. I'm no Roger Dean fan but when it comes to inspiration for evocative, ethereal fantasy imagery there are worse role models.

I spent a long time just flying around taking screen shots until I realized that the entire zone is one huge, never-ending screen shot. There's pretty much nowhere you can point the camera without getting something you'd be happy to use a desktop background. And it all feels so fluffy!

I logged out with the satisfying knowledge that there's a whole new-to-me expansion just waiting to be explored. What's more, now my Berserker is a virtual demi-god in most content more than six months old, it's going to be all fun and no hard work.

What a great Friday the Thirteenth!

Pure Orc Magic : EQ2

Forget about payment models - is GU100 aka The Scourge of Zek any good? I can't speak for the Fabled Heroic Dungeons or the Raid or the Heroic Questline but as far as the solo content goes I'd say yes.

It very much follows the pattern established over the last few years: there's a lengthy and involved quest that explores the whole of the new overland zone before sending you into an Advanced Solo instance. In this case the instance is Scourge Keep, yet another refurbished version of Deathfist Citadel. It was always one of my favorite EQ2 instances so it's a welcome return in many ways. It was both nostalgic and intriguing to see how things had changed.

Advanced Solo gameplay can get quite intense. There are usually a number of Bosses with scripted mechanics that need to be clearly understood. For some arcane reason I often seem to find myself entering the zone just when I ought to be logging out to go to bed, which is exactly what happened this time. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Left a bit, left a bit, down...fire!

First I had to work my way across the blighted, burning wreckage of Zek, finding scouts, burying bones, repairing catapults and generally coming to terms with the devastation. Zek was never a pretty zone at the best of times but now it looks utterly ruined. There no longer seems to be any divide between night and day. A sullen, red glare fills the sky and it never gets much brighter than twilight.

On every hill orc fires burn. The air is full of smoke and visibility is poor. I am very much not  a fan of EQ2's latter-day trend towards giving zones a heavy tinted overlay and this is definitely one of those zones. It's a practice that doesn't encourage either sightseeing or repeated visits or not by me anyway. I'd far rather have the glorious clear skies and fresh air of Cobalt Scar or The Shattered Seas any day. Or night.

Under the miasma I've been making good progress on the Signature timeline, more so than I realized. It was quite a surprise, when I swooped in for a landing while working on a quest, and the exploration achievement for completing the zone popped. Of course, with flying mounts and hyper-accelerated movement speeds (my mount has a 200% flying speed bonus) an original zone like Zek, on which Scourge of Zek is modeled, takes a matter of seconds to cross from end to end.

Pies? What pies?

The reward for filling out the map is a very good one. Zhugrus Blightstrike is an overweight, out of condition, unpleasant-looking orc but he's possibly the best readily-available healer mercenary in the game. He's an Inquisitor and that's very welcome. I really like little Raffik for his personality and his Fury buffs and blasts, but I do miss the steadier heals and, especially, the incredibly useful "Verdict" instant kill of the inquisitor.

For such an ugly monster Zhugrus is remarkably photogenic. I took a bunch of screenshots of him for this post and he looks great in all of them. The new orc model that debuted with GU100 is very impressive. He is also, it must be said, huge. Having him trailing around behind me is a something of a culture shock after the minuscule and inoffensive Raffik. There's a thread on the forum asking for either shrink potions or petamorph wands or both to be made to work on mercs and for the first time I can see the merit in that idea.

The quests leading up to the final entry into Scourge Keep are the usual mix of kill, fetch and fiddle. Modern EQ2 is chock full of interactable objects. You're always clicking on something. The best of the bunch was when I got to lob large boulders at the orcs behind the dock wall. The Green Hood who was already doing it shared his reasons with me, the last one being "It's fun". I couldn't argue with that.

EQ2 has an extremely distinctive house style for quest dialog that's barely changed in twelve years. There can never be too much exposition, no NPC must ever miss the opportunity to give an opinion and everyone speaks in a very slightly heightened tone, as if making small-talk with potential in-laws. The plotlines for expansions and major updates are always the same; some god, godling or god-like entity is Disrupting The Natural Order, always in an incomprehensibly arcane and labyrinthine manner and if nothing is done about it the World As We Know It will Come To An End.

Can you hurry it along a little? I'm getting a crick in my neck.

I gave up trying to understand most of it years ago. There are people who follow the overarching plot, which has been looping and unfurling in some manner or another for the entire life of the game, but I'm content just knowing that there's something bad happening and if I just kill these ten orcs and click on these four monoliths then I'm Doing My Bit.

The Scourge of Zek plot has something to do with The Hounds of War, who are neither a black metal band nor actual dogs but the three children of the God of War, Rallos Zek. As someone pointed out on the forums it's a tad confusing that Rallos's two sons, Vallon and Tallon look like orcs while their sister, Sullon, is a barbarian but hey, they're gods, best not to think about it too hard.

Pretty sure Raffik is having a flashback to the last time I left him stranded without a boat...

Before you can even enter the overland Scourge of Zek zone there's a short, mandatory introduction for the first character on your account to try and find the way. You need to travel to Antonica, find a vessel and voyage to the new land, by which I mean click on a small rowing boat tethered to an obscure jetty in the middle of nowhere and be zoned into a claustrophobic cave. If there was any transition between getting on the boat and being indoors, underground, I missed it.

At the end of the short instance you get to meet all three of the Hounds, who bicker among themselves like any three siblings, all of their threats and insults passing, quite literally, above your head as you lie, stunned, on the floor. I found it quite impressive. Scary, even.

Once the gods depart, with some cryptic comment about why they haven't just stomped you into ratonga jam, you're on you're on your own. It also flags your account so you can skip the intro next time and just use the wizard spires like a normal person. Oh, except for one little thing...you do speak Druzaic, don't you?

I read the whole book. I'm none the wiser.

Druzaic is the language of magic. As long as there's been an EQ2 there's been a dreaded quest called Words of Pure Magic. It starts in the arcane libraries of Qeynos and Freeport and takes you on what was, in its day, one of the most irritating and long-winded scavenger hunts Norrath has ever seen.

A few years back it was streamlined to make it merely annoying and at that point I finally buckled down and did it. Not, of course, on the character I'm now playing. Not even on the same account.

With the massive improvements and additions to fast travel I was able to knock off the quest and learn Druzaic in not much more than an hour. That allowed me to speak to a water elemental who was sloshing around bang smack in the middle of the quest-line, washing out any other possibility of progress. I imagine someone thought that was funny. I know it won't be me laughing when I take the next character through Zek and have to do Words of Pure sodding Magic all over again.

I'm not really complaining. I like questing. I particularly like questing with the addition of fast travel and good, accurate walk-throughs. I had the wiki open throughout and I made liberal use of cut and paste and the in-game map and breadcrumb trail feature to make sure I was always where I was supposed to be.

Even then I took plenty of wrong turnings, killed the wrong mobs, found myself in entirely the wrong zone more than once. I absolutely do not hanker in any way for the old days when you had to work all this stuff out for yourself. Not that I ever did that, or not after I discovered Allakhazam and EQAtlas, now I come to think of it.

Once inside the Advanced Solo instance of Scourge Keep things went surprisingly well. All the mobs were orange-con level 105s, which would normally give me pause, but the itemization in GU100 is...odd. Apparently the previous predilection for putting procs on accessories led to massive server lag and the new mantra is for static stats instead.

Now that's what I call a hat.

Consequently the solo quest gear I'm getting has vast swathes of Potency, bringing some of it into line with the better Raid quality drops from the last expansion. Once I'd changed out my old jewellery for the new quest rewards, mobs that had been giving me a decent fight started to fall over before I barely had a chance to hit them.

Probably as a result of this unexpected upgrade I was able to breeze through most of the Advanced Solo part of the plot without having to watch any videos on YouTube or read any lengthy walk-throughs of boss fights. I could see a couple of the nameds were trying to pull off some kind of trick but I just hit them harder and faster and that seemed to be enough.

That's next year's Halloween costume sorted!

It was all very enjoyable. I got to the end of the Signature quest all except for the twenty-one  sigils i was supposed to collect. I clicked away on Tallon Zek's hat but nothing happened. Turns out I should have been clicking the altar. It wouldn't have mattered because by that point I'd already cleared the entire citadel and surrounding grounds so even if I'd been able to activate the quest there was nothing left to kill for the drops. I'll have to go back and do that part again.

Other than that my berserker comes out with an excellent new mercenary, two clickies to give himself the illusion of either a scourge orc or a lich, a complete new set of very powerful jewellery and two and a half flasks of siphoned xp. A good first run but it's far from over yet. Plenty of nameds left to kill and collects to find as well as those sigils, of course.

Fun times!

An Expansion By Any Other Name : EQ2

There seems to have been some very mild controversy over Daybreak Games' decision to tuck some of the recent Game Update 100 content behind the paywall of All Access membership. In a feature post I found confused and unconvincing, Massively OP's regular EQ2 correspondent MJ Guthrie described it as a "gaffe".

The gist of the argument against appears to be that since the new Scourge of Zek addition to the game is big enough to be an expansion it should therefore be sold as an expansion. Well, there's some merit in that, although, as we all should know from a million genre fantasy plotlines, the proper naming of things matters.

There's certainly no doubt it's large enough and sufficiently feature-complete to merit a box fee. If they'd chosen to launch it as a $30 expansion pack I'd have bought it, happily. On the other hand, I'm fully on board with the idea that it would have been more elegant to package up all the features, both severally and together, and sell them directly to non-subscribers through the Cash Shop but that's a road that SOE was always somewhat unwilling to go down and it doesn't appear that DBG is any keener to break that ground.

I think the best take on selling both content and subscriptions that I have seen is the way KingsIsle do it in Wizard 101. There they offer a range of options that include buying access to specific zones individually, then keeping that access in perpetuity, or paying a subscription that allows access to any zone at any time but only so long as you keep paying the subscription. LotRO works in much the same way.

While I would agree that a more flexible payment plan along those lines would be preferable, I don't think there's very much wrong with having content that is only available to subscribers. If you turn the current EQ2 issue on its head, rather than a slap in the face for the Free to Play crowd you might just as easily see GU100 as a hugely generous perk for subscribers. I'm a subscriber and that's definitely how I think of it.

All Access members, such as I, who were already paying our subs, had no particular right to think that we'd be getting a massive content drop like this midway between annual expansions. I certainly wasn't expecting one. This time last year DBG was trying to sell us the much smaller Rum Cellar "adventure pack" for $14.99. That didn't go down at all well so it seems a bit rich to start complaining now, when something several times larger (and better) is being handed out to subscribers for free.

The underlying issue here is not so much whether there was a better way to handle the release - there's always a better way. No, it's more a question of the underlying direction of travel. After five years and more of maneuvering and experimenting, few MMO companies have yet settled on a final strategy where payment models are concerned, but the idea of charging some kind of recurring access fee, something that, for a while, looked to be gone for good, is coming back into vogue.

Of course, there's a natural inclination to try to keep all the income streams flowing at once. Just because a game has a subscription doesn't mean it can't also have an aggressive cash shop as well. Similarly, why give up the potential advantages and synergies of combining business models? No-one wants to shut out potential customers completely, especially when they could be milling around the common areas, making the place look busy and spending some money in the cash shop while they're at it.

The drift appears to be back towards something that looks very much like the old-style subscription model, only this time front-ended by various flavors of extended, open-ended free trials - always backed up with an extensive cash shop. I really don't think any MMO from a major commercial developer is going to eschew direct sale in-game cash shops ever again. Why would you?

The water is inevitably muddied with the various "pay your sub with in-game coin" schemes like PLEX, REX, CRED, WoW Tokens or EQ2's own Krono. Who knows how people are using these, how they fund them, or even how the traded items enter the game? Yesterday when I was questing in Zek someone in the trade channel was looking to buy thousands of Kronos. It might have been tens of thousands. I forget exactly how many he wanted but he claimed to have many millions of plat ready to meet whatever offers came in.

With a plethora of purchasing plans like these I really can't see too much of a problem with gating specific content behind a subscription, not even when that content comes down to something as fundamental as access to zones or dungeons. After all, in the "good old days", if you didn't pay your sub you couldn't log in at all.

In the same way that MMORPGs are always works in progress, operating in an eternal quasi-beta state where nothing is ever final, so it seems the way we access and pay for them will go on changing. We can complain about it all we like - and we do - but in the end it's simple enough: do you want what they're selling and do you think it's worth what they're asking?

Answer "yes" to both of those questions and you're in. Answer "No" to either and you're out. As far as EQ2, GU100 and The Scourge of Zek are concerned - I'm in. For now.

Are You Experienced? : EQ2

The centenary game update for EQ2 has arrived and as promised it's enormous. The content drop includes a level 100 overland zone complete with Signature quest line, new Advanced and Heroic dungeons, a new Raid and several "Fabled" dungeons.

It also adds a new stat - Resolve - which is already drawing controversy. There are new collections, some new armor to craft, something for roleplayers by way of the Heartbound system and, of course, a new kind of mount in the cash shop. Owls, in case you were wondering.

It's a lot to take in. I've bought expansions that had fewer features that interested me. And then there are Experience Vials.

The Experience Vial System appears, at first look, to be an extremely neat solution to the ever-receding end-game problem suffered by all aging MMORPGs. As the genre ages and it becomes clearer than ever that some of these games have a grip on their playerbase that would shame a bulldog with rigor mortis, developers have thrashed around trying to come up with a way to allow the trickle of new and returning players to catch up with the firmly established end-game core.

The main method so far seems to have been to sell Boosts that jump a character up to near-maximum level and/or to hand out a free level upgrade, or even a whole max level character, with new expansions. That once-controversial approach has become the industry standard. The only time a developer takes a PR hit these day is if the boost isn't deemed powerful enough or, heaven forfend, they don't provide one at all.

The XP vial system that DBG have come up with for EQ2 is more flexible and more elegant. And more profitable, both for the company and for players. From what I can gather, as someone who's never played EVE, it loosely resembles CCP's recent addition of tradeable skill injectors.

In both games the company makes real-world money by selling the empty container in the cash shop, while the player makes in-game money by selling the filled version in the virtual trading system. In EQ2 that means buying Experience Vials in the DBG Store for DBG Cash, filling them and then selling them on the Broker for platinum.

You can also, naturally, keep it within the family and eschew Mammon by trading the vials directly to friends, guildmates or your own stable of characters. It would, for example, allow a player to give a leg-up to a friend who'd never played before or a guild to bring a returning player quickly up to speed.

It also provides an excellent solution to the perennial max-level-max-AA "what do I do with all this xp that's going to waste?" problem. Turn it into a new income stream or make yourself really popular by handing it out for free. Your choice.

I have a lot of DBG cash saved up. On the account where I used to have All Access I have over 17,000 DBC. On my current All Access account I have more than 13k. Even though I find the EQ2 cash shop the most appealing and useful of any MMO I've played, I still don't spend very much there and I'm always looking for new things to buy.

The price for Experience Vials seemed quite reasonable: 500DBC for a pack of three, 800DBC for five, 1200DBC for eight. I bought a five-pack and started filling it as I began the new Signature Quest with my level 100 Berserker (of which, more another time).

I activated a flask by right-clicking it in Inventory and off we went. The Siphon function seems to be set to "On" by default. Examining the vial told me they will hold 200,000xp and that the conversion rate is 60%. That means I need to earn around 333kxp to fill one.

After an hour or two meandering through the opening few quests of the Signature storyline, taking things at a very gentle pace, the vial was almost full. That is a lot faster than I was expecting but then I was getting a boatload of discovery xp just from flying around the new zone. Still, it's apparent that filling these vials is going to be a trivial effort for a high-level character.

How will that translate for the lower level that's going to consume them? I'll tell you when I fill one. Oh alright, let's look at the numbers.

My Beastlord is Level 94. That level requires just over one million xp. I can say from mildly bitter experience that getting that one million takes a long time. Or, at least, it feels like a long time. A lot longer than it's going to feel to fill five vials derping about on my zerker at level 100, that's for sure.

Looking further down the food chain we come to my Necromancer, becalmed at level 73. One of my necromancers, I should say. I have a level 90 but she's on the Test server. Level 73 requires just over 100k xp. Hmm. So one filled vial will give a couple of levels in the 70s.

Staring down the wrong end of the telescope I see an enchanter waving at me from level 30. That level takes a mere 14k xp. Assuming the vial, when consumed, continues to fill levels until it empties, it very much looks as if one vial will see you through several tiers.

In fact, according to this chart (which hasn't been updated for a while so may not be entirely accurate) it takes a cumulative 11 million xp to get from character creation to the end of Level 95. That's 55 vials, which, at current broker prices, would run you around 440k platinum - although I doubt there are even that many for sale.

Bear in mind that you also need  AAXP. You can use the vials for that as well but I'm not sure it would be a particularly efficient way of going about it. Someone else can crunh the numbers on that!

However you cut it, there are a lot of possibilities, especially once you factor in the Level 90 boost you can buy in the cash shop. As someone who enjoys leveling for its own sake I may be more interested in selling the juices of my labor than swigging them. Then again, if I'm going to level in EQ2 just for the fun of leveling I'm most likely to go do it on the Time Limited Expansion server, where the vials are not available.

All in all, it seems like an interesting and well-designed addition. The EQ2 team may be small but the developers working on it really do seem to have a good grasp of what they can and should be doing for the long-term health of the game.

Not sure I would have been saying that a couple of years ago, even though it's largely the same individuals involved. Makes you think, doesn't it?