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?

Count To One Hundred: EverQuest

Things I never thought I'd say in EverQuest:

Ding 100!

It is, of course, all down to the Overseer system introduced back in March. At that time my highest character was a level 93 Magician, a character I'd played the traditional way into the mid-sixties then bumped to 85 with one the many free Heroic upgrade promotions.

From there I leveled her slowly through a combination of Hot Zones, Franklin Teek's missions, Veteran lessons, xp potions and server bonuses. It was steady going for a while, if slow, but by level 93 my options were getting thin.

The hot zones and missions I could handle were giving less and less xp. The next ones up the chain were tough and needed me to learn new zones. In EQ, learning is often freighted with death. Dying, while it doesn't have the sting it once had, still applies a sharp brake to leveling.

What led to me beach at 93 wasn't so much the difficulty as the time. Almost nothing happens quickly in Norrath, other than your demise, should you foolishly try to hurry. People talk blithely about "grinding" xp. If only it were that simple.

First you have to get to the grinding place. These days EQ has ample options for fast travel but they all remind me of flying with a low-cost airline. First you have to travel to your point of departure, be that a Planes of Power "Book", a Combine Spire or the Guild Hall teleporter. Sometimes there's a wait for the device to cycle or a transaction to complete before you can travel.

When you arrive you're likely to be a long way from your final destination. You'll need to run or ride or levitate across hostile territory, avoiding hostile mobs and environmental hazards.

When you do eventually reach the general area you'll need to find the precise spot where you plan to set up camp. If it's a familiar zone it might be quick but if the area's even a little unfamiliar it won't be. You may need to check the pathing of wandering mobs. You might need to split a camp. Chances are you'll need to run or hide, more than once.

If you're doing one of Teek's Tasks, which you will be if you want to maximize your xp, you'll
usually need to move around. He tends to send you to kill mobs that don't cluster. Often he'll have chosen something you can only find deep inside a building or a cave. It will always be filled with hostile creatures you don't need to kill but must to get by.

You'll want to have your thirty minute Lesson running as you kill because it doubles your xp but you'll also want to have it up when your task completes. The big xp is in the reward and it doubles that, too. Or it used to. I vaguely recall they changed that. It often takes longer than half an hour to get the kills you need to finish the task so you have to judge the optimum time to start the clock.

If anything goes wrong.... scratch that... when something goes wrong, you'll have to handle it. If you can't you'll need to make it to a place of safety before it handles you. If you die you should get a rez from your Mercenary, assuming you brought a healer, but you'll lose some xp and a lot of time. If you don't get rezzed, for whatever reason, it's back to the Guild Lobby to get your body summoned and rezzed for a fee by the NPCs there. And then you either quit or start over.

All the time you're out there your buffs are wearing off. You'll have raid-level buffs and so will your merc and your pet, if you use one, because you live in the Guild Lobby, in the dogpile, assuming you have any sense. That's where you start and end every session, so you can keep those buffs refreshed. You have to come back to Plane of Knowledge anyway because Franklin Teek only assigns missions in person and that's where he is.

When I was leveling my Magician this way I'd allow an absolute minimum of an hour to do one thirty-minute Lesson on one of Teek's missions. If things went perfectly that was enough. If something went wrong it could be twice as long to get what I'd come for. I'd usually bail if it looked like that was going to happen, taking whatever xp I'd got and banking it before something else went sour.

If I had time and felt strong, I'd take two or even three tasks, hope to finish all of them before my buffs began to drop. Run the Lesson on the last and get the benefit on all the hand-ins. It rarely worked. I almost never managed three. They come in five level increments, all in different zones. The zones can be on different continents or in different dimensions. The travel time alone was crippling.

Franklin Teek channels Goldilocks. The mission ten levels below is cold. Easy, but it won't give much xp. Five levels below tastes just right. At level? Too hot to be worth the trouble, most times. You'll get burned. Anything above or below those, forget it.

Within that structure, some of the zones he picks will be much harder than others, for all kinds of reasons. Which expansion they're from, what class you're playing, line-of-sight issues, resistances, types of mob, runners, you name it.

The short of it is, soloing in EverQuest isn't hard, it just takes an inordinate amount of planning and concentration. And time. So much time.

Overseer doesn't. Overseer missions take maybe ten minutes to set up, tops. I could do it in five. You can stay in the Guild Lobby so your buffs never fade, not that you need them now. You're not going to be fighting anything. You don't have to move, let alone travel. There's literally no risk so the risk-reward ratio is infinite.

Once you've upgraded your agents to handle the higher quality quests, xp is better than Teek and the Lesson and you didn't have to go anywhere. Every twelve-hour quest gives somewhere between 0.8% and 1.3% of a level. The better-quality quests, more than that. Longer ones, better still.

Running the full ten would nets ten to fifteen per cent of the level, every time, if you pick the ones with the best xp. I always take the recruitment quests that give you more agents. Those don't give xp at all. I've also been taking grey, easy quests while I level up different jobs. Even so, I make 10%  for ten minutes, twice a day. When I've leveled them all and only take the best xp, I should hit 15% a day, maybe twenty.

I've been doing it every day since the feature was added. My target was level 100. I figured I might get there by October but I hadn't reckoned with the way xp ramps up on the better quality quests. At the start I couldn't do those but now I do one or two every day. As my agents improve I'll do more and xp will roll in even faster.

Which is good, because there are stil twenty more levels to go. That could take me another year. I'm not sure I'll have the discipline to keep going every single day but even if I slack off I know I'll get there, sooner or later. What was once a distant fantasy is now just a matter of time.

I guess at some point the Magician will want to try out her new power, somewhere, on something. First. I'll need to upgrade all her spells. And her pets. And her foci. And her gear. Not much point doing any of that yet, not if I'm still leveling. I guess I'll just stay where I am and carry on as I have been, for now.

Ding 100! though. Ding 100!

Don't I Know You? : EverQuest

One of the nicest things about playing EverQuest from the Guild Lobby is the view. You wouldn't think so, given it's nothing more than a vaulted hall, but it's probably the best place in Norrath to go people-watching.

The Lobby used to be the only public space where buff timers didn't count down so it's always been a very popular spot to afk for long periods. At some point it morphed into the locus for generous players to discharge their Mass Group Buffs before logging, which only made it an even more popular venue for hanging out.

I mentioned it back in the very early days of this blog. It was 2012, EverQuest had just gone Free to Play and I was wondering how that might go. Not too badly, it seems.

Before they moved to the Lobby, MGBs used to happen in Plane of Knowledge. I'm not sure when that changed. Ironically, buff timers don't decrease in PoK any more, either, so we could all go back outdoors but we don't.

Instead, we all stand around in what I've always thought of as The Dogpile. Ever since the Overseer feature was added I've been logging in twice a day to choose my permitted ten daily quests. They run on timers that vary from six hours to forty-eight, always in multiples of six for some reason.

I never know what I'm going to see when I log in. I have my view scrolled back into first person and my Magician stands in the heart of the crowd so when she opens her eyes she's often inside someone, looking out.

It's not unusual for me to do a double take on logging in. EverQuest's graphics may be scrawlings on a cave wall compared to modern games but if there's one thing they don't lack it's variety. Even so, what I saw this morning made me sit up.

As far as I can tell, the figure in the screenshots above is either a Mercenary or a Pet of some kind. His name is Ashborn but he doesn't come up in a /who under that name and /inspect returns a curt "You cannot inspect that". You can rename pets and mercs so it seems a likely explanation.

Whatever he is, he's very clearly a Beefeater. Or a Yeoman Guard, to give him his Sunday name.

Familiar from the gin bottle, these are the ceremonial guards who stand around the Tower of London, exhuding the dignity and gravitas of any village hall production of Gilbert and Sullivan. Why the hell there's one in Norrath I have absolutely no idea.

Or I didn't until I started googling it this morning. Apparently there's a mob called "an ornate guard" in a zone called "Morell's Castle" that may use this model. I found a single picture on the web of a Named called Omander the Devoted who definitely does. There's also a step in a quest called Morrell's Challenge that requires you to "Find and defeat a Champion of Morell, the beefeater".

Morrell Thule is the Lord of Dreams, a demi-god in Norrath's extensive pantheon. His castle forms part of the 2010 expansion House of Thule. To date, a decade after it arrived, I have seen maybe two of its zones. I have never seen the Beefeater model before and I have no idea why someone thought it might be a good idea to introduce it to a fantasy world with which it has absolutely no thematic connection or resonance.

Maybe the person to ask would be Senior Artist Kevin Lydy, who mentioned in an interview in 2011that he "did some work on the Beefeater". I don't recall his name, either, but he was with the game from before launch and is apparently the artist responsible for the iconic EverQuest logo.

Whover did it, and why, logging in to be faced by such a familiar image is disturbing, to say the least. How, as the saying goes, unlike the life of our own dear queen... or possibly not.

Join The Club

Belghast alerted me to an interesting post at Digital Initiative, which was also a new blog to me. I added it to the blog-roll. Then I read the post. It breaks down the typical guild membership by type and Tamrielo, the author, clearly speaks from experience.

It's been a long time since I was in an active guild that had more people in it than just Mrs Bhagpuss, myself and one or two others but I instantly recognized just about all of the personalities listed. I could put names to most of them - if I could only remember the names. Actually, I could go "Oh, that sounds just like that guy, remember him, oh what was his name? Always wore green and used to sit in Plane of Knowledge all day moaning nothing was as good as the old days..."

Reading through the list was a little disturbing. I felt like I was auditioning for the lead in one of those T.V. movies about multiple personality disorder - that's me, and that's me and, oh, wait, that's really me!

I would lay claim to being any guild's lead Things Explainer - one of the "good" ones, I'd like to think, although other opinions are no doubt available. I literally left a guild over a stand-up argument with the Raid Leader because my You Need Yours position was so unwavering. I could make a strong case for being labeled Side Projects and I have certainly played the Chill AF role to the hilt on occasion.

The sumptuous and largely forgotten interior of the Guild Initiative Office.

There's probably a smattering of several others in there from time to time. I was certainly The Positivity Canon for a while in Vanguard, when I was having the best time of my MMORPG life while all around me people were just praying they could get the game not to crash for five minutes in a row.  I've been the Backpack to Mrs Bhagpuss's Hiker in a few guilds, too.

There are a few categories I am pretty certain no-one could ever accuse me of representing. I do talk a lot in guilds but apart from that I'm no Socialite. Come to think of it, one category that's glaring in it's absence here is The Chatterbox. /em raises hand.

I'd like to think I've never been The Downer or The Griefer but sadly neither have I ever been The Ninja or Silent But Competent. (Noisy But Incompetent - now you're talking...or more likely I am, while we're wiping).

Not sure if this is decoration or fly-posting.

Although all of this seems very familiar from the increasingly distant past, I wonder how accurate it is in terms of current guild practice and experience? Do guilds even work this way any more?

My view may be colored by five and a half years in Guild Wars 2, where guild membership is a very malleable affair. Apart from my own guild, where I spend most of my time, and a bunch of "Bank Guilds" I made for storage, I'm in two fairly large guilds each numbering somewhere in the hundreds of active members. Neither of them seems remotely like any guild I was ever in outside GW2.

They seem to be relatively structureless for a start. There's a nominal hierarchy with names for the ranks but no-one seems to refer to it. If we have "officers" I have no idea who they are (and I've been in both guilds for several years now). Events, when they occur, seem to be ad hoc and while someone got us a guild hall and did a bang-up job decorating it I have no idea who that might have been or when it happened.

Despite my apparent disconnection, I remain a member in good standing and if it all seems fairly anonymous and impersonal then that's because it is. In GW2 you join guilds by your Account rather than by your character and each account can be in up to five guilds simultaneously. Since it's common to have more than one account (I have four) the number of guilds you can be in at the same time is potentially quite large.

It used to be that you had to "Represent" a guild (which means specify it as your active guild) and you could only speak in the Guild Chat of that guild. Guilds were also server-specific. Over time all that has gone. Now you can speak in the chat channel of any of your guilds and you can join guilds on any server.

The even more sumptuous interior of the even less-frequented Arena in the Windswept Haven Guild Hall.

I wonder if that dilutes the intensity, indeed the cabin fever, that used to characterize the clubhouse mentality of many guilds in the past? It must be much harder to develop and maintain the kind of obvious idiosyncratic character traits listed by Tamrielo in an environment where guild membership is so much more tangential and fractured.

Finally, a reason to visit!

It also removes that whole "I quit" drama that made guilds so enervating in the past. If you get fed up, or someone's annoying you, you can just start chatting in another guild and go play with them instead, then come back to the first when The Drill Sergeant or Ready To Go has logged out.

I certainly have never seen anything in the two large guilds I'm in that comes anywhere close to the kind of emotional hothousing that so strongly put me off guild life back in the mid-noughties. It's a far more relaxed, casual, laissez-faire experience than anything I remember from EverQuest or EQ2.

As I do my dailies in DCUO, slipping my Qwardian coins into my wallet as I save up for Krypto, I'm still getting random drive-by guild invites. I haven't yet accepted one because it seems a bit louche to join and then never turn up for anything. At best I'd be a classic What's Going On Lately, dropping in for fresh events, grabbing the freebies, maybe staying for a week of dailies then disappearing until next time.

Even so, I am tempted. I never want to have to deal with proper Guild Drama ever again but I wouldn't mind being Things Explainer or Chill AF in a nice, quiet, steady guild somewhere. Maybe that time will come in Ashes of Creation or Pantheon, if either of them ever happen for real. Pantheon particularly strikes me as a game where a good guild would be more of a necessity than a luxury.

Meanwhile I guess I'll carry on as I have been, with the personalities I know from map and wvw chat standing in for guildmates. I could allocate a few names to categories there as well...

Are We Nearly There Yet? : Everquest

I had a mind to photograph some rats. I say photograph. As far as I know, the gnomes of Norrath have yet to invent the camera. Insufficient inherent explosive potential, I imagine. Gnomish technology notwithstanding however, I set out to take some screenshots.

The rats in question live in Dragon Necropolis. Dragon Necropolis is in Western Wastes, a part of Velious as yet unrediscovered in EQ2 and probably undiscovered by many current players of the elder game because Western Wastes is a long way from anywhere. No wizard or druid can open a portal there, the Plane of Knowledge has no Book for it and the Guild Hall vendor has no Western Wastes Focus Stone in stock.

If you want to go to Western Wastes, the nearest you can get in one move is Cobalt Scar. A druid or a wizard can port there, but my highest level of either is a level 60 druid and while she has hunted in Western Wastes I deemed her a tad fragile for photographic journalism in underground tunnels infested by rats that stab first and ask questions never, so I logged in my level 84 Beastlord. Who turned out to be in Dragonscale Hills.

Wait here Wizard, this won't take long...

An hour and a half later I hit the hot-key for Throne of Heroes, the veteran reward that allows non-gating classes to click their heels like Dorothy as casters have been doing since 1999. Had I photographed any rats? I had not. I didn't have my stop-watch out but in rough numbers it had taken me about forty-five minutes to run all the way from Dragonscale Hills to Siren's Grotto and about as long again trying to get from one side of the Grotto to the other. Unsuccessfully.

All of which entertainment got me to thinking about Everquest going Free To Play. I'm very happy about that even though I have Station Access and can already play Everquest whenever the mood takes me. I love the idea of new people flooding (alright, trickling) back into the lower-level zones and bringing them to life. I particularly relish the thought of Plane of Knowledge filling up with chattering, bustling hordes of players and pets, flapping and clumping and blocking the bank doorway so I can't get in, just like the good old days.

Negotiations with the Chetari run into difficulties

But you forget just how big Everquest is. According to Wikipedia Everquest currently has 375 zones,a suspiciously round and unbelievably huge number. Three hundred and seventy five zones, of which Western Wastes is by no means the furthest-flung or hardest to reach. It may not be like the old days, when a cross-country trip from Qeynos to Freeport demanded research, preparation and a full play session (two if you died halfway and couldn't get a rez). Still, simply getting from one place to another in Everquest is going to require a great deal more time, attention and knowledge than the modern MMO player is accustomed to bring.

I knew exactly how to get to Western Wastes. I've been there many times. I have maps. To refresh my memory I even had the Zam page up. I was going there with a character to whom nothing posed a threat. And I still gave up in frustration after the umpteenth failure to find the top of the waterfall in Siren's Grotto. It was late and I knew I could log in Mrs Bhagpuss's wizard in the morning, port my Beastlord to Cobalt Scar and then Evac across Siren's Grotto as I should have done in the first place. As indeed I did do and have the photographs of rats to prove.

There's a Plane of Pork? Who knew?

It's going to be very interesting indeed to see how Everquest fares as a Free To Play title. The sheer volume of content is far beyond overwhelming. The systems to be learned are so convoluted and arcane after thirteen years of accretive expansion that even the developers barely understand some of them. Just getting from one place to another still offers more adventure than most MMOs offer in a full dungeon-run. Yet the game was always very easy to get into at the low levels and famously addictive. An awful lot of incomers are going to bounce right off the dark star density but some will inevitably stick, caught in Norrath's inexorable gravity well.

And welcome as the new blood will be, Everquest is hardly languishing. After thirteen years the game still has sixteen servers up and running. As I write this, deep in the night on the U.S. server where my Beastlord lives, there are too many players to count in the Guild Lobby and in the Bazaar, where more than 180 traders stand idling. Not everyone's hanging around afk in the Lobby and Bazaar either. Many more can be seen out in hunting zones, especially at the highest levels. I'd bet that a lot of much younger MMOs would be delighted to have a population like that during off-off-peak hours after a year or two, let alone a decade and a half.