It's Déjà Vu All Over Again

And here it is: the obligatory EverQuest II Origins Anashti Sul - Day One post. It's would be neat if it was also the first one I'd written about the new server since it opened for business at eight in the evening last night but of course it's not. I had a few minutes to kill while I was waiting in the queue, which I joined about three-quarters of an hour after the Noon Pacific launch, so I pre-empted myself with a quick squib about the general implications of the whole deal. Now we get to the specifics.

I'm guessing the long beta paid off because it seems the launch went smoothly enough. At least, I haven't seen any headlines to the contrary this morning and I've had no issues getting in and playing. It seems pretty popular, too. I noted the astonishing 45 instances of the Outpost of the Overlord last night and even today, deep in the small hours in the US and the middle of a workday morning in Europe, there were still eight instances running when I logged in. The server is listed at Character Creation as "Heavy Load".

I did see one bizarre glitch, which I suspect is an artefact of the instancing system. I was in the middle of a conversation with an NPC when she suddenly flicked out of existence. I looked around, puzzled, but there was no sign of her. Then, a few seconds later, there was a shudder and she re-appeared, only this time there were three of her and all of them yelling at me.

The triplets were still there by the time I'd finished her quest and come back to do the hand-in. For all I know, they're still there now, although I suspect once the instance goes away, so will the bonus Field Investigators.

That's literally the only non-standard occurence I've witnessed so far. In fact, I'm struggling somewhat to come up with anything to say about this new/old version of the game that I couldn't just as well have said about levelling the equivalent character on a regular, Live ruleset server.

I was considering doing just that so I could make a note of the differences. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't take me two and three-quarter hours to get to Level Five on a Live server, which is how long it's taken me on Anashti Sul. However long it might have taken though, it seemed like it'd be too long just to satisfy such mild curiosity, so I shelved that plan. For now...

In any case, there's a bigger problem to consider: an existential conflict between the underlying concept of Anashti Sul and the way it introduces itself at the very earliest stage of the game. The whole point and purpose of the server is to come as close as possible to recreating the look and feel of the game as it was almost two decades ago, back in 2006, allowing us to contrast the game as it was then with how it looks and plays today. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to the first five levels or so, Daybreak already did that, nearly ten years ago. I wrote about it here and here. I'm not sure exactly how long the Far Journey/Isle of Refuge sequence was unavailable but however long it was gone, it's been back for longer - the last nine years -and I've played through it several times since it returned.

As I said earlier, I haven't checked whether the version of IoR on Live is identical to the one on Anashti Sul but it seems very much as I remember it and those memories are almost certainly no older than last time I played through the content on a current Live server. As I said in the second of the linked posts, the version re-added to the game in 2015 wasn't the original and now neither is this one.

Worse, any nostalgic thrill I might have had at seeing the old place again has been more than sated by the several trips I've taken through it relatively recent times. I remember getting a genuine frisson of excitement the first time I got to sail on the Far Journey again, back in 2015. Now I just think "Here we go again...".

I could and probably should have skipped most of it this time. The short but eventful trip on the Far Journey is non-negotiable but you can opt out of of the Isle altogether and get Captain Varlos to take you straight on to Freeport. I probably should either have done that or else picked a race and class that starts in Qeynos. Then I could have gone through the "good" island questline with a little more enthusiasm. I haven't levelled up in the Queens's Colony anything like as often as I've done it in the Outpost of the Overlord.

I didn't, though. Instead, I slogged all the way through the main questline to the instanced finale in the cave. I was a little wary of going in alone. I remember when most people waited for a group for that one although I'm pretty sure even back in 2006 pet classes and other strong soloists were scurrying past the rest of us as we we waited outside for a group.

By the time I got there today, though, I was already Level Five and I'd managed to solo two Named mobs and kill the guy at the top of the treehouse, a very awkward fight, when I was just Level Three, so I thought I might as well give it a go. That turned out to be the right decision. It was a tough fight but I won first time. 

Altogether, I died just twice on the way to Level Five, both times entirely my own fault, carrying on fighting when I could easily have run to safety. On the whole, though, I didn't feel much sense of risk, let alone danger, not least because there's no death penalty at those levels, distances are small and respawns are fast. Death feels like a brief interruption at worst.

Was it like that back in 2006? I tend to think not but honestly have no real idea and that's the problem. My nightmare memories of EQII - and I have a few - come from well before then. The game was horrifiically unwelcoming in so many ways at launch and for much of the first year but Anashti Sul takes its starting point from the time most of those issues had been fixed.

By picking this specific snapshot for Anashti Sul, Darkpaw has neatly avoided most of the worst of the original experience, while still making it feel, at least for returning players who quit at various points after that, when the game changed out of all recognition, like a huge rollback to better days. From the perspective of someone who's stuck around through most of those changes, though, it all feels remarkably familiar, still. On the Isle, anyway.

Then again, I know this particular slice of content very well indeed. It is possible to get to Level Nine or Ten on the Isles and I've done it more than once. I had one character who lived on the Isle of Refuge for years, refusing to leave. 

Not this time. As soon as I finished the main quest I was straight down to the Far Journey, asking for passage to Freeport. When the ship docked, I logged out, leaving my Ratonga Necromancer on the docks in Temple Street, the neighborhood Ratongas share with Gnomes. Next session I'll see what the old place looks like. That at least should feel like something fresh.

Or maybe not. The 'hoods (Or 'burbs as they were once called.) also haven't been gone as long as some veterans like to claim. The originals were removed and replaced in 2011, something I wrote about at the time. but they were partially restored three years ago for the launch of the Kaladim server, as I recorded in a post when it happened.

That revival didn't include most of the quests but I'm not sure how much of a disappointment that ought to have been. I'd have said I missed them but according to what I wrote when they went away, it seems as though I might even have been glad to see them go.

Even if I didn't wholly welcome the change, I was certainly full of compliments about the new content:

 "... if I had in mind that the villages might be ruined, or just wasted, I needn't have worried...What's really changed is that the villages have come alive...There's more going on than I ever knew and much more than I expected." 

I am curious to see the fully-restored versions again. Quite honestly, I can't remember all that much about them, although apparently, just before they were changed, I "went round my favorites (Temple Street, Beggars Court, Big Bend) using EQ2's spiffy newish in-game video option to make my own documentary on the Way We Lived." 

My reason for doing so was apparently that I thought it might "be nice in a few years to look back at the good old days." It wasn't. As far as I can recall, I have never looked at that video since the day it was made. In fact, until I re-read the post today I'd completely forgotten it existed.

So much for nostalgia, eh? We'll have to see how the returned reality stacks up. At least I can rely on not having done any of the quests for the best part of fifteen years, although I suspect that may turn out to have been a blessing. I don't remember most of them being all that great.

Further reports may follow, although I suspect not many and not for much longer, especially with Tarisland about to launch.

If You Want Something Done...

Tempting though it is to make every day at Inventory Full an AI or a music day - and believe me, I could - it's probably about time I got back to what both Bard and ChatGPT know me for, namely writing about video games. 

One day I'm going to sit back and ask myself how it came to this. It certainly would surprise my adolescent, twenty- and thirty-something selves to find me here, spending two or three hours every day spouting off about computer games but I guess I've been playing, talking and writing about the things for long enough now I'd look a bit precious pretending I'm better suited to doing anything else.

It's all about the games, then. And the game I'm mostly playing right now is EverQuest II. Again. How did that happen? Admittedly, getting into the beta for EQII back in 2004 was one of the more exciting things that had happened to me up to then but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been expecting still to playing the same damn game twenty years later.

Eliot at Massively OP wrote an opinion piece earlier this week about how, as gamers - and particularly as mmorpg gamers - we're all getting older and yet we don't talk about it. I dropped a comment to say I disagreed. Not that we're getting older. I'm not that disassociated from reality... yet. I just don't agree that it's something we don't talk about. 

On the contrary, it seems like we talk about it a lot around here. It's hardly surprising. Most of us have been playing mmorpgs for a decade or two and computer games for longer than that. Age is going to come up in conversation whether we want it to or not, if not about us then about the games we're playing. Which is aging more badly - the games or the players - is another question.

Eithr way, we still keep on playing them, some of us probably more than we should. It's like experience has taught us nothing. I'd like to be able to say I've gained enough wisdom over the years not to see a morning spent organizing storage in a video game as time well spent but I'd have too much trouble keeping a straight face to pull it off convincingly.  

That, of course, is what I spent several hours doing yesterday: moving little icons from one slot to another so I could hoard even more imaginary bric-a-brac I'll never use, in a game I've been playing, on and off, for more than a third of my life. And I enjoyed myself doing it, dammit!

EQII probably has the most storage of any mmoprg ever created but even that brings its own problems. It's just like what happens where I work - as soon as someone tidies up a corner somewhere and creates some space, next day someone else has come along and dumped something in it. Clutter expands to fill the space available, which I'm sure is somebody or other's Law.

Darkpaw haven't been making things any easier lately. After that peculiar debacle earlier this year, where they changed something about how boss drops are handled and everyone threatened to quit so they rolled it back (I wasn't paying attention at the time so I can't give details.) the devs said fine but we have to do something. Probably as a result, a whole lot of items that used to be treadeable now seem to be Heirloom and some stackables now have this weird timer attached to them, meaning the game identifies them as unique, so they don't stack until the timer runs down to zero.

According to today's patch notes, at least some of the problems are unintentional: "Corrected a bug that prevented Di'Zok Minion's Runes from being stackable". Those aren't the ones with the timers, though, so I don't know what's going on.

Anyway, as I said, if there's one thing I'm not short of in EQII it's storage. The only drawback to hoarding stuff there is remembering where I put it. Yesterday I was reduced to taking notes. I may have to go so far as to craft an in-game book where I can record the details of who's looking after what, which is one of the more amazing things you can do in the game.

That Artificing score tells you I haven't
actually been making much lately.

All of this is on Skyfire. On Isle of Refuge, where I'm spending most of my time at the moment, I have no such problems. When you only have one character, it's easy to remember where you put your stuff. If there's a problem with stuff there it's getting some.

Seriously, it's somewhere on the far side of ironic now. Let me give you an example.

When I renamed Lana "Mitsu" and transferred her to IoR, I decided she'd focus on crafting over adventuring. I've been steadily working on both her main tradeskill, Jewellerycraft, ever since and also diligently completing each of the three dailies for Transmuting, Tinkering and Adorning, all of which has turned this once-minor character into one of my most rounded crafters ever.

As a tip for anyone wanting to level a crafter in EQII but who's not in a tearing rush to get it done, just doing those three quests as often as they become available will not just give you decent skills in the three minor disciplines but also get you several levels of your main crafting profession every day, too. 

All three give a hefty chunk of tradeskill xp on hand in, enough to ding a couple of times, always assuming, that is, that you have full tradeskill vitality as often as possible (Don't forget the weekly Veteran refresh.) and keep an xp potion running. Given that all three together take less than five minutes to do and the questgiver provides all of the mats, it's the slacker's way to level crafting. 

Until you hit Level 100, that is. As with adventuring, that's when everything changes. From getting most of a level for every hand-in, you'll suddenly find yourself getting so little xp for all three dailies you'll struggle to see your xp bar move at all. I'm not going to go over the whole thing again but the short of it is that from 100 onwards the only viable way to level either your combat or your crafting class is to do the appropriate Signature questlines from the Planes of Prophecy and later expansions.

Okay, there are other ways but I'm not here to talk about those. They're all slower and more tedious, anyway. You'd be ill-advised to try and avoid doing the Sigs, which will net you multiple levels at each stage. I'm currently waiting for full vitality to return before doing the first, which I'm hoping will jump me from 100 to 110 in a session.

How much?!

While I was focused on crafting, I was planning on ignoring adventuring for the time being. Mitsu drifted from the twenties to the fifties just on exploration and killing mobs while doing Qho Augren's harvesting quests and I was content to leave her there for now. Playing a high level crafter who isn't also a high level adventurer is a new experience for me and I was finding it quite exciting, all the sneaking and hiding and having to pay attention so as to avoid the many, aggressive, deep red-con mobs as I tried to harvest mats in zones supposedly far too dangerous for me to be in at all.

Unfortunately, that kind of laissez-faire attitude just won't wash on Isle of Refuge and I'll tell you why.

If Mitsu is going to be a proper crafter she's going to need personal storage depots for her home. On Skyfire, when I decided to set those up, all I had to do was go to the Broker and buy them. They weren't even all that expensive.

On IoR, the server where you can trade almost anything, that's not an option. For a start, they're not easy to come by at all. On the Broker there are just two pages of Depots on offer. And even if you can find the ones you want, there's the cost. Apart from a couple of not-so-useful ones like ammo and fuel, prices start at seven figures. Five million plat seems to be the going rate for the good ones.

On Skyfire, with its regular ruleset, there are six pages of Depots and prices begin around 20k. Even the biggest, the Personal Harvest Depot (Large), will only run you 500k, a tenth what you'd have to pay on IoR.

Buying what I needed was out of the question but all the depots are made with the Tinkering skill so, since Mitsu's Tinkering is coming along, I thought maybe I could make my own. All the recipes for Depots are in a single Blueprint and you can make them with a Tinkering skil of 445. Mitsu's skill is 378. She could easily raise it in an hour or less of grinding or just do the dailies for another couple of weeks and let it tick up to where it needs to be.

First, though, she'd need the recipes. Maybe she could buy them. 

1Kpp if you collect.

I checked the IoR broker, expecting the Blueprint to be out of my price range. It wasn't but only because it wasn't on sale at all. There were only a couple of pages of Blueprints of any kind. Granted, the few there were didn;t seem all that expensive, which was a surprise, but it didn't mean much since they also weren't any use to me.

On Skyfire, by contrast, there are seventeen pages of Blueprints for sale on the Broker right now. Prices
start at less than one platinum piece. The Personal Depot Blueprint can be had there for 1200 Plat. Even Mitsu could easily afford to pay that much. Pity she's on a different server.

This is the joy of low-pop. If you want something you pretty much have to go get it yourself. Even if you're willing and able to craft it, you have to go get the mats and the recipes. You can't rely on someone else doing the hard work for you.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can lead to adventures you weren't expecting.

I had no idea where the Blueprint for the Personal Depots might come from, so I looked it up. It's a drop, fairly common, from a lot of different mobs. Getting hold of one is a straightforward farming job. The only problem is the mobs that drop it are all around Level 85-90. Before Mitsu can even begin trying for one, she'll need to get another twenty-five or thirty Adventure levels. 

And that's not hard, either. Levelling in EQII is easy enough. But it does mean I'll have to change my plans. If you play on a low-pop server, you end up doing a lot of that. 

There are shortcuts I could take. I could have her use one of my many Level Boosts. I have at least seven of them stashed away, ranging from Level 100 to 120. I'm very tempted to use the 100 on her. It would make farming the blueprint easy and also take a lot of the danger out of running around looking for mats in higher-level zones.

Then again, didn't I just say that was fun? And wouldn't it be more satisfying to get good xp from all those mobs I'll have to kill to get the blueprint to drop?

Such are the choices you have to make if you play on a low-pop server. Personally, I find it all adds a layer of complexity that makes the whole soloing-in-mmorpgs experience richer and more satisfying. It's obviously not for everyone, though.

As with many things we find ourselves doing in mmorpgs, it's fun until it's not. If wisdom comes from experience it shows itself in knowing when to stop. 

I haven't stopped yet.

Fresh Starts And Second Chances

As I write, all EQII servers are down for the regular Tuesday re-start. When they come up there will be one more: Rivervale.

First announced in the Producer's Letter last month, Rivervale is a "fresh start" server. It will have all expansions available ("no gated content") and everyone will get a free Heroic Character boost to Level 90 (current cap is 110, soon to be 120).

There's more that wasn't revealed in the original announcement. The new server will follow the same "Free Trade" rules as 2016's Isle of Refuge server, meaning "almost all items can be traded freely between players". Rivervale will also have "comparable" xp rates,, according to the FAQ, which is an odd way of putting it. Are they the same or not? If not, what's the difference?

I never paid much (or indeed any) attention to the IoR server. I can't remember hearing much about it since the original launch. Looking into it now, I see that although it was originally stated that "There are no plans to EVER allow transfers off the Isle of Refuge server", "ever" turned out to be just over a year.

Return to the moon.

In a dev post from August 2017 Kander confirms that "Character transfer tokens are being made available to players on Isle of Refuge who have been on the server for more then 30 days". The same post confirmed that "status applied towards leveling your guild has been permanently set to five times the normal value".

I can't see any mention of either transfers off the server or guild status in the Rivervale FAQ, although it does state that no transfers to the server will be allowed, so as to "keep the economy new and fresh". In a couple of comments following the FAQ, Community Rep Dreamweaver gave an informative reading of Daybreak's reasons for choosing this particular ruleset:

"With new servers, we’ve learned a lot from progression servers in the past several years because that’s primarily what we’ve done. We also realized we haven’t tried a “live” or different server that celebrates content we’ve done in more recent years. Most importantly, we’ve learned that the energy created by an excited group of people creating a new home and community on a server with an identity all its own is a real joy for a lot of players who choose it. There’s something really great – and devs have experienced this through progression ourselves – about a community that’s fresh and new and how that server’s own culture and character evolves. Building a life online is what we’re all about. That in mind, we want to give enough variety and opportunity for players to choose what feels right for them. Progression isn’t for everyone, so we wanted to try this. We are always looking to try new things and deliver options for our players that can offer a flavor that’s tasty to some and might not be to others. This isn’t about leveling. It’s about living in Norrath with friends."

I nodded in agreement when I read that, although I was surprised to find that it has in fact only been just over three years since the last non-progression fresh start - Isle of Refuge. Still, three years is quite a while in the life of an MMORPG, so maybe we are ready for another go round.

Easy-to-see nodes make harvesting a pleasure.

The specific timing is interesting and rather clever. Launching a month or so before the new expansion gives the server time to bed in and find an audience, with the enticing prospect of having a clean slate (and a clean economy) all set up nicely for the upcoming content.

Whether that will appeal to people whose characters are already raid-geared I'm not sure but it might look very atractive to those who feel they're a little behind the curve. Starting at Level 90, determined guilds could easily be ready for the new stuff when it arrives, putting them in prime position to to rule the Rivervale roost instead of fluttering around in the dust kicked up by the current cocks of the walk on their old servers.

I don't think I'm quite in the market for another by-my-bootstraps trip through Norrath just now. Starting at 90 would also put me squarely into some of the content I've done most often, most recently.

While the servers remain down, however, character creation is still available and I did take the opportunity to make a Dark Elf Shadowknight so I can pop in and enjoy that new server smell for a while. In fifteen years of EQII I don't believe I've ever played a Dark Elf, so that will be a novelty, at least.

Before the servers came down I spent a very pleasant hour or so completing the pre-expansion tradeskill quest Piercing the Darkness: Carving a Legacy. I read only a few days ago, at EQ2 Traders, that completing this quest is a pre-requisite for starting the signature tradeskill questline in Blood of Luclin, so I thought I'd better get on with it.

I don't believe I even wore the Sash for a single, meaningful fight.

The quest, like the Adventure version, which I also should do something about, is a permanent addition to the game but it would be quite annoying to embark on the expansion only to find out you didn't qualify for some of the opening content. Better to get the prep done ahead of time.

It's a fun quest, if you like gathering. I love gathering so I was in my element. Even if you're not so keen, the whole thing only takes about an hour, hour and a half, a blink of an eye in MMORPG time. And the rewards are excellent.

I recently completed all of Yun Zi's Days of Summer 2019 quests which let me kit my Berserker out with a full set of Bold Crusade and Daring Adventure gear. Even though I consider him to be well-geared for a solo character, I ended up swapping out almost every slot apart from one Mythical and two Relics.

The adventuring belt I got from doing the tradeskill quest was a very significant upgrade to the Panda item I'd slotted only last week. Assuming it represents the standard for entry-level gear in the new expansion I doubt my Berserker will be wearing Crusade/Adventure gear for long. And you also get a tradeskill belt that gives a 5% bonus to your chance of finding rares when you harvest.

Now all I need is for Daybreak to open pre-orders. That's supposed to happen today but as yet... nothing. For alleged greedmongers they seem astonishingly slow to take my money!

Set Adrift : EQ2

Returning to The Isle of Refuge has given me a timely reminder of one of my personal touchstones for life: the unreliability of memory.  These days it's reasonably widely known and even grudgingly accepted by the set of people who browse the "Smart Thinking" section in bookshops and watch TED lectures on their iPads that memory is in great part a fictionalized, narrative construct. Knowing that you don't know what you know doesn't always help you to know what you do know, though.

Trying to remember the past with any accuracy at all, even the past you experienced personally, directly and physically, is already next-to-impossible. When it comes to the return of the Isle, add another layer of diffusion for virtual experiences. And another for the post-hoc recreation of the intangible environment in which they took place. Oh, and another for an admittedly inaccurate and approximate recreation, at that. It's a wonder anybody can recognize the place at all.

I used to remember things clearly. Then I took an arrow in the head.

Many of the players stepping down from The Far Journey onto the dock at The Overlord's Outpost or The Queen's Colony haven't seen those wooden planks for a decade or so. In a way you might think I have the advantage of them there, in that I saw the EQ2 starting experience through a number of iterations, probably all of them, from beta in September 2004 to earlier this year.

It turns out that having a deeper, more nuanced relationship with the Isle of Refuge is far from an advantage when it comes to trying to remember what happened when. I can't even recall the basic structure of the starting experience with any accuracy. For example, as Wilhelm reminded me, there was always a shared bank on the island. I could have sworn it was added later but no, it was there from the start. In the very month the game launched people were even complaining it was an exploit.

Wait, do I know you?

As my ratonga SK slashed and clubbed his way to level eight last night I was repeatedly surprised. Sometimes it was wonderment at things that appeared to me to be completely new, like the named ranger and his two named hawks I couldn't recall ever seeing before (although the more I think about it the more I seem to remember camping him in a group once upon a time...) More often it was nagging memories, things turning out to be different from how I remembered them, or going missing altogether.

In the way these things do, recollections began to reassemble, pieces began to fall into place. A picture began to appear of how things might have been. But how closely does that picture represent reality? To establish that I'd have to do some research. Do I really have time for that?

Now That's What I Call An Upgrade Vol 1.

I didn't think so. For the while I believed I was content enough to let a fuzzy image of the past coalesce. It would be interesting, to me at least, to compare it one day to the recorded history, available from many sources but probably most coherently and comprehensively here at the EQ2 Wiki but do I want to do that when I could be playing?

Well, apparently so, because here I am on a Saturday morning, doing it.

My first thought was that my personal version of the Isle of Refuge, the one I've been carrying around in my head, must be a later version. I'd forgotten there were ever two islands, one for Good characters and one for Evil. The one I remember was a single island where two Ambassadors, one representing Freeport, one Qeynos, competed for your character's attention.

There was a sequence of quests to perform for each of them that gave you an idea of the philosophy and culture of the two competing city-states. When you had made your decision and wished to leave you would give your decision to one of the Ambassadors and he would authorize your passage.

Here's a Ring Event I'd forgotten all about.

According to a comment from 2008 on this EQ2Wire thread, however, that version was the original: "There is no more Isle of Refuge. Today there are two islands, the Queen's Colony (13 quests) and the Outpost of the Overlord (13 quests)" The two islands we have back on the TLE servers would seem to be a later refinement after all.

I'm so confused. I probably need to make a Good character and run through the Queen's Colony questline to see how much of what appears to be missing is in fact over there. Perhaps the original content was largely split into two and parceled out accordingly? There's one quest I was never able to complete that I'd like to finish some day. Oh, hang on...didn't I finally complete that one with Milo?

And with that it occurred to me to log Milo in and check the Completed Quest list in his journal. He's the King of the Isle, after all. He even bought his own Isle and set up home there, although he still hasn't decorated. But looking at his Journal really doesn't help much at all.

Milo was born on February 11 2005. I wanted some peace and quiet from the guild I was in at the time so I made a new character on a different server and played him for one session on a Sunday. In that session he completed several quests, most of which appear in the Isle Of Refuge category when the Journal is sorted by zone (the rest, including the start of the old Archetype Selection series, are recorded under Hallmark Quests).

He was woken up again March, then again almost a year later in February 2006, by which time the quests appear under a different zone, Outpost of the Overlord. Milo then took a very long nap, not re-appearing until 2012, when he completed the sequence and retired until his unexpected resurrection at the gates of Freeport in 2013. (This, by the by, is a very representative example of how I play many of my characters -  I may not log them in often but they are always "in play").

All of which would seem like conclusive evidence that the original IoR disappeared sometime between 2005-2006, if it wasn't for the fact that Milo's journal shows one quest in the Outpost zone record on the same day as it shows another in the Isle of Refuge! In the end I just gave up trying to make sense of it and looked at the wiki, where it's all explained neatly and succinctly thus:

"Originally, all new players started on the same island, Isle of Refuge, but depending on which city you chose to start in the Isle would appear differently. Later they made two distinct islands...The original starting quests remain in the completed section of the journal for players who completed them. Those quests which were moved to Queen's Colony or Outpost of the Overlord also moved journal sections, and are listed on those pages".

I swear this used to be a longer sequence, not just the one quest.

So I could have saved myself the bother all along and just googled it, but then what would I have learned? Just the bare facts. Nothing about how memory and perception of memory warps and flows, adapting itself to new information without reference to any objective verification, creating a whole skein of inaccurate, misleading supposed personal experiences that are as subjectively real as, well, anything we can know.

The version of The Isle of Refuge that remains most firmly embedded in my mind seems to be the true original, the one where all the refugees arrived together and were sent on varying quests according to their alignment. Although I must have played through the later, discrete versions more often and certainly more recently it's the original that pertains.

What that means, if it means anything, I couldn't say. Other than never trust your memory even if your absolutely certain it's right. It won't be. But I knew that already.

I'm On A Boat! : EQ2

In a surprise move, expected by absolutely no-one, the new EQ2 Timelocked Expansion servers, Deathtoll (PvP) and Stormhold (PvE) launched smoothly, slightly ahead of schedule and without issue today.

Oh, wait, no...that wasn't the surprise...well, yes it was, but...

THIS was the surprise :

Having spent years telling us it was impossible, it turns out the devs have been playing a game of Chinese whispers all along, telling each other the code for the Isle of Refuge had been knitted into socks and could never be unravelled. Finally one of them decided to go and have a look down the back of the sofa and lo and behold, what did he find? A fully working Isle of Refuge complete with all the original quests!

Actually I'm far from sure which "original" version this is. I know it was changed several times but beyond that it's gone all fuzzy. It was a long time ago. I do remember this version, where the wyvern drifts past, sets the ship on fire and incidentally frees the caged goblin but I could swear there was a version with a much longer fight.

One thing that definitely was there right from the start is the execrable voice acting. It really is some of the worst I have ever heard. What those accents are supposed to be Mel Gibson only knows. Whoever's playing Captain Varlos even gets a line reading totally wrong - the seafaring term "swinging the lead" is clearly new to him and presumably to the director. He pronounces "lead" as if it rhymes with "deed" not "dead".  Some sea captain he is. And why does the dwarf refer to himself as "me" all the time, like Superbaby in a 1960s Bob Haney script?

Never mind, they might be the least convincing jolly jack tars on Norrath but somehow they muddle through. My little ratonga shadowknight  is safely ashore, literally and metaphorically wet behind the ears, ready to be indoctrinated in the ways of Lord Lucan D'Lere and introduced to the "culture" of Freeport.

I wonder what the weather's like this time of year?

The Far Seas Trading Company: Preliminary Findings: EQ2

Several years have passed since The Far Seas Trading Company made a sudden decision to end their contracts with Qeynos and Freeport, stopped ferrying refugees to the great cities and closed the sea-lanes to the Isle of Refuge. We never got much in the way of an explanation. Just a few rumors from some drunken sailors hanging around the East Freeport docks.

The marinated mariners are still swaying there on the corner, retailing their long-stale news, but Lord Lucan D'Lere isn't listening. He's had other things on his mind until now, what with being kidnapped, having to put down an attempted coup and organizing the defense of Freeport against a bunch of dragons, but he's finally managed to clear his diary and he's commissioned a full investigation.

Turns out he's no more convinced by the shaky cover story than the rest of us. He wants to know what's really going on and what do you guess but he knows just the ratonga for the job. When The Overlord sends for you it's best not to dicker, I find. There's an execution every hour in the plaza and those traitors have to come from somewhere.

So it was that I found myself stepping off the dock into an oddly familiar landscape. The old place has looked better, I'll say that. My heart sank a little in the blued gloom. Are we really destined to spent the rest of our adventuring lives under nightclub conditions? Can't we have some natural light for once?

Well, yes we can! Imagine my relief when, early on in my fact-finding investigation, I discover the Etherneresque aethers to be a purely local phenomena. Take a few bloodied steps through the knee-high forest of grimlings and daylight returns.

The blue hue emanates from Malvonicus's tower, which has suffered the inevitable fate of all Mage Towers, namely having been exploded and frozen in space/time like some final year art project for Surrealism 101. Someone Tampered With Things They Wot Not Of and this is the highly predictable result:

 The place is crawling with befuddled and highly aggressive Far Seas Traders plus a horde of the aforementioned freakish midgets, something you really don't want to look at too closely or you'll wake up screaming. My first altercation with one of the twisted traders came altogether too close for comfort so I called for back-up after which I had few problems. A metal suitcase upside the head quietens even the feistiest freak as the saying goes.

From then on it's business as usual. Everyone has something they want doing. Tok and I wander around collecting planks and rubble for barricades, retrieving research papers, rescuing the innocent and subduing the rest. As we do a fascinating story begins to emerge.

It seems a while back the Far Seas Co. discovered a horde of supposed Shissar artifacts, which they naturally decided to exploit examine. With commendable, if surprising, concern for public safety they chose to conduct their experiments in secret, hence the closure of both the refugee operation and the sea lanes. The possible exclusive commercial advantage they might theoretically have obtained by doing so was, I'm sure, no more than a fortunate co-incidence.

No-one pulls the wool over Lord Lucan's eyes for long, though, (or twice for that matter) and that cat is now very much out of its bag. The Far Seas Trading Co.'s cosy little operation in the ironically-named Tranquil Sea is now firmly, and quite literally, on the map.

Getting there was simple but for a while I was worried that getting around might not be. One odd effect of the catastrophe at the tower was the grounding of all flying mounts. A portentous message to this effect was being broadcast as I arrived.

I was concerned at the prospect of being forced to ride everywhere at the dizzying breakneck pace most Norrathian mounts consider a gentle canter but fortunately the embargo proved to be only temporary. A gnome I rescued from the cellar under the tower whipped me up a little something that gave me back my wings around the fallout zone but in any case they worked just fine as soon as I got clear of the miasma.

I was thus able to fly around sightseeing and spotting landmarks from the good old days, when I myself was a refugee, freshly salt-crusted. The old place really hasn't changed all that much apart from being overrun with grimlings.

Most of the old crew are long-gone of course but I did run into one familiar face. Waulon Highpebble gave me a recap of his history and the times our paths have crossed. I just nodded when he told me about Captain Varlos's deception. Came as a complete surprise to me. I think I must have been in a meeting that day.

For a first day I felt the investigation went splendidly. I'm confident The Overlord will be pleased with my report when I finally get back to Freeport to present it to him, although I have the feeling that day might still be quite some way off. It looks as though there's an awful lot of digging to do before the full story comes to light.

And who better to dig for it than a ratonga?

Nothing Is Forever. Not Even Goodbye.

It seems like every week there's another news story on Massively where some long-gone MMO comes back from the dead. One company's dead duck becomes another's dish of the day. Even the curators and legislators are beginning to wake from their long torpor to face their responsibilities.

Of course for every recovery there's a relapse. Not all that long ago I waxed hysterical about the return of Argo Online, an old favorite of mine that I never actually bothered to play much while it was around. I didn't bother to play it much after it came back either and now it appears I may have missed my chance second time around because every time I try to log in all I get is a "Server Maintenance" message.

There are a lot of MMOs I'd love to see make a comeback. Lost loves that I miss like Rubies of Eventide and missed opportunities I never tried like EQOA. Maybe one day.

It's not only whole MMOs that rise from the grave. Sometimes lost limbs float up to the surface too. (Lovely image...) I logged into EQ2 this week and spotted this tantalizing offer:

The Isle of Refuge, long-lost and much lamented home of Milo, returns as the 11th Anniversary Veterans Award (11th Anniversary for a 10 year old MMO - it's magic!) and I'll be entitled to one for free - next year. We foolishly unsubscribed for six months around the time we played WoW (something Blizzard denies I ever did according to the reply to the ticket I just opened when my  "come back for a free week" email led nowhere, but I digress...).

Poor Milo shouldn't have to wait that long just because of my poor judgment and parsimony and since I have over 18k Station Cash doing absolutely nothing right now he doesn't have to. I bought him an early Frostfell present. Best 1350 SC I ever spent - even better with the 10% subscriber discount. I even grabbed a pack of five goblins so Milo would have some company other than his mercenary. Company you have to pay doesn't really feel the same.


Milo only had time for a quick lope around the old place on his fearsome white wolf before I had to log. No mounts on the island back in the day of course - now he'll even be able to fly there when he's a little bigger. When I get time I hope to pick up a few more of the old faces from the Store. Say what you like about SOE and their cash shop ways but they do at least come up with the occasional thing I really want to buy. Not many MMOs can make that claim.

So there it is: another decorating project I probably won't find time to finish. Very nice to have the option all the same. And talking of refurbishment projects, there's another one that's coming on very well indeed, thanks for asking. It's kind of hush hush (although not so hush hush as it was - we have NPC audio now!) so I'll just say it in pictures. All taken this week.

I think I prefer it without mobs.

Happy fox dance!

We have vendors! Now all we need is stock.

Hello old friend. What are they feeding you?

Now that's what I call a sunset.