If It Looks Too Good To Be True...

I need to correct a fundemental error in yesterday's post on the changes to EverQuest II's Kael Drakkel server so, rather than bury it as an edit no-one would ever read, I thought I might as well give it a very brief post of its own. Also, since I logged in and played there for a while this morning and have a couple of observations to make, I might as well throw those in, too. Still going to keep it very short, though. No-one's that interested; me included.

Firstly, the correction: Kael Drakkel is not going to be a free-to-play server after all. 

Well... it is, kind of, but only for three weeks. 

This goes back to the confusion over dates I alluded to when I said "The changes are somewhat mysteriously scheduled to occur "Between April 6 and April 25", although it's stressed that they are permanent once implemented". I was taking my information from the Producer's Letter, which says

 "Between April 6 and April 25, we will be kicking off these permanent changes above by making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players—even those without membership"

I thought that was a clear statement that the server would be permanently available to everyone, members and free players alike, but no, that's not how it works at all. As today's announcement clearly explains,

"Anyone can play on Kael Drakkel. No subscription required until April 26!" 

I can see now how the statement in the Producer's Letter can be parsed to read as "Between April 6 and April 25 we will be making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players - even those without membership - as a time-limited opportunity to try out the changes, which will be permanent for members" but to my mind the phrase "kicking off" doesn't really express the meaning "temporarily introducing" at all clearly, although I do admit - and indeed did observe - that the sentence as a whole doesn't make much sense without such an interpretation. 

I just took it to be a badly-written sentence. Which it is, although not for the reason I thought.

The upshot is that everyone has three weeks to give the new ruleset on Kael Drakkel a try for free but after that, and if they want to stay longer, they'll need an All Access membership. So, is it worth getting one?

Only you can decide, although I'd obviously not suggest it was ever going to be worth subscribing just to play one of the four available titles on a special rules server. All Access is a great deal anyway, though.

I'm in the happy position of being a Member already, so I don't have to choose. Based on my brief experiences this morning, I don't think I'll be making Kael Drakkel my new Norrathian home but I imagine I'll be dropping in from time to time, which is exactly what Darkpaw want to hear.

The announcement I linked above goes a long way towards clarifying what Darkpaw are expecting from the rule changes. They want it to be a server anyone (I guess I should say "any All Access Member".) can hop onto at whim, mess around for a while, then leave. It's the sort of place you can imagine someone killing half an hour before the raid starts or spending a couple of hours while their home server is down for maintenance.

As Darkpaw describe it 

"We want Kael Drakkel to be your home away from home, especially when you just want to enjoy the game without all the pressure and extra time required. Think of Kael Drakkel as “plug and play”—get in and have immediate fun. Whether you make the server your home or a place to go when you just want some quick entertainment, all are welcome!"

It reminds me slightly of when ArenaNet added Edge of the Mists to Guild Wars 2 so players in the overflow for World vs World would have something to do while they waited. That worked for a while but eventually EotM turned into a ghost zone, when ANet switched off the xp faucet.

The big inducement to play on Kael Drakkel are the things you can get there for your "real" character. I don't think even Darkpaw are imagining many players setting up to play full-time on the Legend and Lore server. The secondary attraction is the ability to solo a lot of stuff you couldn't handle on a Live server.

I took a brief look at both of those this morning. I came away quite impressed with the goodies on offer, less so with the whole soloing a raid thing.

Nimgimli commented on yesterday's post that the idea of Kael Drakkel sounded attractive enough but the plethora of skills and abilities you'd need to learn at Level 90 was offputting. I replied, somewhat glibly asserting that solo content in EQII is already so easy that knowing what your skills do is a luxury more than a requirement.

Having died four times in a row to the first raid boss I tried this morning, I'm now willing to say that may not be strictly true on the new Kael Drakkel. It wasn't even a recent raid boss, either. It was one from way back near the start of the game. By the fourth try I could see victory was definitely within my reach but it would have taken more concentration and better playing skill than I was willing to muster just for the experiment.

On the other hand, outside the raid zone there was a yellow-con, Heroic named mob that I was able to one-shot, which seemed a tad extreme in the opposite direction. I came across a couple of bugs, too, so it's not impossible things aren't working as planned just yet. I'll keep an eye on the forums to see how many complaints there are.

As for the rewards, I spent some time looking at what Lore and Legend Merchant Ronald Gleneed had to offer and came away quite impressed. Some of it is unique to the revamped server and some comes from time-expired events, presumably making it otherwise unavailable. 

There's a ton of housing stuff, a lot of which I'd like to own. There are several mounts, at least one of which I'd use for looks. Even the new appearance armor, which didn't look all that impressive in the screenshots, is pretty spiffy when you see it in game. There was a constant stream of players coming to check it out, too, which is encouraging, especially seeing it was the middle of the night in the U.S.

The currency used to buy all of it comes from doing Achievements, that being the way Kael Drakkel operates. As far as I can tell, they're just the same, regular Achievements you can do on any server, only on Kael Drakkel you get paid for them. I somehow have over three hundred Lore and Legend Tokens already, enough to buy quite a lot of the stuff that interests me, although if I buy the Arcanists Hover Platform, it'll about clean me out.

That just leaves the scaling adornments, about which I can tell you... nothing. Didn't see 'em. Looked for 'em, couldn't find 'em. If I find out where you get them, I'll add a note to the end of this post.

And here it is. 

(The end of the post, that is. Not the note. I'm still looking.)

EQII - The Solo RPG

I had other plans for today's post but late last night (My time.) Jenn Chann, Head of Studio for Darkpaw Games, dropped yet another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II and it pretty much demands attention. I don't know what I was expecting (Yes I do - I wasn't expecting anything - I wasn't even thinking about it.) but it wasn't this:

"Playing on Kael Drakkel is about to become even more friendly! Characters on Lore and Legend servers will receive a powerful enhancement that will allow them to take on heroic and many raid encounters solo!"

Excuse me? Where did that come from?

But wait... there's more!

"...we will be ... making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players—even those without membership"

Now hold on a darn minute! A Daybreak special ruleset server you don't have to be an All Access member to play on? Has such a thing ever happened before?

Yeah, I don't know either and I really don't have time to go through fifteen years of patch notes to find out. It is, at the very least, extremely unusual. I think I'm on safe ground there.

In cutting to the core for once, I've left out some of the detail. Let's curl back.

"...accounts will be able to earn a new green adornment that scales between character level 50 and 125, and unlock the Kael Drakkel appearance armor sold by Ronald Gleneed, the Lore Token Merchant."

Okay, there's something weird about that. Let me think... Oh, yes! Kael Drakkel is the server where everyone starts at Level 90 and stays there. Why would Kael Drakkel players need or want scaling adornments?

Answer? They wouldn't. But their characters on other servers might.

"The appearance armor and new adornment are unlocked account-wide and may be bought from Ronald Gleneed in both Freeport and Qeynos Province District on all servers. While on the Kael Drakkel server, you will find a whole slew of new housing items to spend Lore and Legend Tokens."

So, let's unpack this a little. As of tomorrow (The changes are somewhat mysteriously scheduled to occur "Between April 6 and April 25", although it's stressed that they are permanent once implemented.) anyone can make a character on Kael Drakkel, which will effectively become a levelless, solo playground. 

There, along with fulfilling all their power fantasies of soloing at-level raid mobs, they'll be "able to earn", through means as yet unspecified but presumably via a progression mechanic of some kind, an item of value for any and all their characters on other servers. They'll also be able to earn or unlock, again in some manner as yet undisclosed, appearance armor and housing items, also to be available to any and all characters on any server. There's even a free mount just for logging in.

Depending, naturally, on just how desirable these various rewards are deemed to be and how reasonable the effort to get them is adjudged, this looks something like a masterstroke, always assuming the intent is to turn Kael Drakkel into a high-population server for a while. It potentially ticks boxes for just about every playstyle except PvP - solo, competetive progression, decorators, fashionistas...

What's more, by effectively creating a solo version of EverQuest II and making it free-to-play for everyone, it could - with effective marketing or word-of-mouth - potentially open up the world of Norrath to a much wider audience than has previously found it of interest. I mean - it's EQII that you can play on your own - and not just the old parts but right up to the current endgame.

I made a character on Kael Drakkel when it launched just over a year ago. I posted about the experience, calling it "an interesting ruleset and a solid implementation" but not one I found sufficiently appealing to pursue. I don't believe I've logged in to Kael Drakkel since.

Well, I'll be logging in now and not just out of curiosity. It does, of course, depend on just how useful/essential/appealing the various new incentives to playing there turn out to be, but as I've been reminded most strongly of late, it's almost always worth making the effort to add account-level benefits that any and all characters, including those you make in the future, might want to use. That's how I come to be flying around Norrath at level 39 right now.

Both Kael Drakkel in its original form and the about-to-be changed version are examples of Darkpaw's willingness to experiment with the format, something that few other developers seem as willing to do. Syp was wondering only yesterday why Standing Stone Games don't seem to be as ready to take similar risks with Lord of the Rings Online, given they're ostensibly owned by the same company, but I think in this particular instance we do have to make a clear distinction between Darkpaw and Daybreak. It's only the EverQuest titles that run these kinds of experiments as standard. I don't see it happening in Planetside II or DCUO.

There's actually quite a lot more in Jenn's letter, including information about the upcoming PvP-TLE server, the fixing of a long-standing bug in character transfers, news about the forthcoming Class Balance Forums and the system they'll use to decide on future class changes. There's some teaser art for the imminent Game Update 122 "Empire of Antiquity", currently in beta and an annotated version of the roadmap issued earlier this year. There's also something about the Swag Store but that's really outside my remit.

It's a lot, frankly. Especially for a game that - and I say this with love - surely saw its best days, at least commercially, many years ago. The amount of work and effort that goes into keeping EQII not just going but growing and changing is astonishing. Plenty of much higher profile, more populated mmorpgs get nothing like this degree of attention.

The changes to Kael Drakkel could, potentially, bring a lot more players to the game. If done well, they could virtually relaunch EQII as a solo rpg, one with an absolutely mind-boggling amount of content. Honestly, that's how I already play the game these days and have done for years but doing so requires a very great deal of research and application. This could legitimize that playstyle, make it hugely more accessible to the casual player and bind it into the rest of the franchise in a way that I don't think we've seen before.

Whether you think that's a good thing or not depends on how you see the genre, I guess. I'm sure there'll be plenty of pushback from the usual suspects but that crowd would complain about literally any change to the game. The real question isn't who this might annoy - it's who it might excite.

I suspect the answer will be almost no-one who doesn't already play the game, for the simple reason that almost no-one who doesn't already play the game will ever hear about it. Getting attention for a twenty-year old mmorpg outside its own niche is all but impossible. Still, you have to try, don't you?

And Darkpaw never stop trying.

Kael Drakkel: A Legend Is Born.

It was only when Wilhelm posted to say the new EverQuest II Lore and Legend server, Kael Drakkel, was up and running that I remembered yesterday was the day it was due to go live. There was a short beta that I never even considered but it had been my intention to make a new character when the real thing arrived, just to see if I could work out what the deal was with this new and - to me, at least - somewhat unintuitive ruleset.

Experimental servers employing idiosyncratic rulesets are nothing new to Norrath, of course. Very much the opposite. I think that having EverQuest as your discovery mmorpg sets you up with different expectations for the genre in a number of ways and one of those is the idea that servers exist to have different modes of gameplay.

When I logged into EQ for the first time in late 1999, I was already looking at a choice of several rulesets. As well as the regular PvE servers there were three PvP servers, Rallos Zek, Vallon Zek and Tallon Zek, each with slightly different rules. The PvP three became four with the addition of Sullon Zek and finally, briefly, five, when Sony Online Entertainment added the first limited duration "event" server, Discord.

Over the course of a few years, servers appeared offering a variety of different play experiences from "roleplay" on Firiona Vie to the high-maintenance Stormhammer, where a subscription cost several times the going rate. When Fippy Darkpaw, the first Progression server, arrived in 2011 the floodgates crashed open and since then virtually every server that's opened, progression or not, has had a ruleset at least slightly different from what came before.

EverQuest II hasn't had quite so many flavors but it still has far more than most mmorpgs. I'm so used to different rulesets from decades of SOE and Daybreak games, I find it strange that other companies seem so set in their ways. If you have the infrastructure to provide that kind of variety for your customers, why wouldn't you?

Well, for several reasons, I guess, not least the danger of splitting an existing audience into smaller and smaller groups. If new servers with new rulesets bring back lapsed players or better yet attract new ones, that's great; if the main result is disruption and turmoil among the players you already have, that's not such a favorable outcome. 

Presumably every new server and each new ruleset comes with development costs, although given that no new developers ever seem to be needed and most of the hardware is almost certainly repurposed from what's already there, perhaps those costs are more manageable than you might imagine. Similarly, so long as existing customers don't actually leave the game it probably doesn't matter, commercially, if they jump around from server to server like sheep seeking greener pastures. It annoys guild leaders but then what doesn't?

Disruptions aside, all new rulesets are not created equal. Some are successful, pulling in the crowds and keeping the numbers up for months or years. Others enjoy a brief flurry of attention before withering away, usually without controversy or complaint. EQ players from both games are more than used to servers that don't last and rulesets that don't take by now. It's no big deal if one fails, just a shrug and on to the next.

So, what exactly is the supposed unique selling point of Kael Drakkel and its "Lore and Legend" ruleset? The F.A.Q. (Which, I'm curious to note, has for once been correctly punctuated.) explains everything in some detail but the elevator pitch appears to be an easy-mode, casual-friendly, server where most of the barriers that prevent former players from coming back or new players from getting started have been swept away.

Clearly, that's a potentially commercial proposition. All aging mmorpgs struggle with the problem of too much content and too many levels blocking the path to the current endgame. Some, like Elder Scrolls Online, have simply done away with the leveling process altogether, opting for a flat playing ground, where everyone is the same level all the time. Others, like World of Warcraft, have opted for an increasingly convoluted and arcane series of workarounds, squishing levels, adding leveling tracks and generally making sure no-one really knows where they are or what they're doing.

Kael Drakkel has a relatively simple premise: no leveling at all and only content from a much simpler era of game design. EQII took a right-angled turn about a decade ago, changing not just leveling and experience but progression as a whole in a number of significant ways. 

In my estimation, that change didn't really take hold until 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra, so Darkpaw have given themselves some room to expand should they need it, with another three potential expansions they could probably bring online without too much trouble. I suspect they stopped where they did because immediately after Velious we all went to the ethereal plans and the haunts of the dead, which is a bit of a metaphysical and thematic leap from the first nine very physical locations. 

It also marks the point at which the kind of nostalgia they're presumably hoping to play into begins to dissipate. You'd pretty much have to be a current, Live player to have much nostalgic feeling for anything after Velious.

I always planned on giving the server a try, although I definitely don't have either the time or the inclination to start over yet again just now. But of course the whole point of the Lore and Legend ruleset is that you don't have to "start over". 

You begin at Level 90 and that's where you stay. There is no leveling, not even for AAs, You start with everything.  You even get your choice of tradeskill boosted to ninety. You're given a full set of gear and a flying mount. You even come into the world fully buffed and with all the spells you're likely to need right away slotted onto your hotbars for you.

Every zone is the same level - your level. And since you also have to be a member to play, you automatically have access to the Instant Travel system. You can go wherever you want and wherever you go will be right for you to start playing immediately.

It does sound appealing. That much freedom could be overwhelming but nowhere near as intimidating as the usual late-mmo deluge of content. Looked at a certain way, it's like they turned the entire game into a starting zone.

After I read Wilhelm's post, I logged in straight away to make a character and see what all that freedom felt like. I didn't have any free character slots but I had a pile of DBG cash so I bought another. Nice to have something to spend it on.

I have a whole different post to write about making characters in EQII so I'll save most of what happened next for another time. Suffice it to say, I ended up making a human necromancer. Then I logged her in and got myself settled.

The onboarding process for Kael Drakkel is very good. Darkpaw appear to have learned lessons from earlier iterations, where you begin at high level. I've done it plenty of times and this was by far the neatest, tidiest, quickest and easiest version I've seen.

My bags, all six twenty-four slotters, were completely empty. No cruft whatsoever. That in itself deserves to win someone a bonus. I chose to import the UI settings from one of my previous necros and set up all the hot keys just as I like them but had I wanted to start adventuring right away, I could have been killing mobs just seconds after the new character loaded in.

The immediacy of the new ruleset was hard to miss. When I decided I wanted to test out the auto-mentoring that underpins the whole thing, there was no checking zone levels or travel routes. I just opened the Instant Travel map, clicked on Commonlands, pointed my winged horse at the sky and swooped down on the nearest overland Named. 

I may go into the whole gear upgrade process that's central to Kael Drakkel's ruleset in some future post. It's all set out fairly clearly in the F.A.Q. linked above, if anyone's itching to know right now how it works. The gist is that all mobs still drop whatever it was they used to drop but named mobs also drop a guaranteed "Lore and Legend Gear Crate" containing something you can use. 

I found it familiar in an unexpected way. It reminded me of the early iterations of "Fabled" creatures in EverQuest, seasonally up-leveled versions of Named bosses that drop items suitable for much higher level characters. I always liked that system, until the bosses that were being upgraded for the event started to be the same ones I couldn't solo even in their regular editions.

It also helps that EQII has a lot of overland Names. And I do mean a lot. There must be a couple of dozen or more just in Commonlands alone. And most of them seemed to be up. There were a couple of other people around and one or two Nameds weren't where they usually would be but as I flew around I was able to pick off several in a few minutes.

The difficulty seemed better tuned than regular mentoring but not by all that much so I thought I'd give it a proper test. There's an open-world raid target in Commonlands, a drake by the name of Ladon. Mentored down from 90 on a live server, Ladon would be an easy solo for a necromancer. On Kael Drakkel the "fight" lasted about two seconds. 

Ladon didn't quite one-shot me. He took two bites to kill my pet and one to finish me off. Point taken. No soloing raids here.

That was my first death in the Commonlands. My second came when I took on one of the named orc Generals and his entourage, a Heroic encounter originally intended for groups, although not a particularly tough one. 

The orcs didn't kill me. It was reasonably challenging fight but my necro was never in much danger. What killed her was picking up the loot. 

EQII has a trap mechanic on all dropped chests. There's a skill you can raise to counter it and certain
classes have innate abilities to deal with the traps. There was a time when getting poisoned or blown up as you opened the box was a regular occurence but it's been utterly trivial for every character I play for so long I'd forgotten all about it.

If I play much more on Kael Drakkel, I'm going to have to re-learn some old habits, it seems, not to mention some old skills. When I went to open the chest it exploded and killed me faster than Ladon had. Whether that's intentional or whether someone just missed chests in the scaling calculations I can't say for certain. That is how it used to work, though, so it could go either way. 

Up until then it had just been my necro and her pet but Mercenaries are, somewhat contentiously, available on Kael Drakkel, despite not having been added to the game until a few expansions later. Before I left the area I decided to pop into the East Freeport inn and hire good old Stamper Jeralf, the ratonga Inquisitor. He's not as powerful or reliable as later mercs but he gets the job done.

With Stamper in tow I felt a little more confident. At least he'd rez me if I blew myself up again. Off we went to test the scaling by zone rather than by mob tier. 

We tried Steamfont first, where we killed a few solo Nameds that would, on a Live server, be in the thirties and forties. The fights varied in difficulty but they seemed pretty well-balanced. Nothing fell over in a light breeze but I finished everything I started comfortably enough.

From there it was on to Loping Plains, a zone where I've always found the hunting good. That was where my first session on Kael Drakkel came to an end. It's a level sixty zone on Live, with a mixed ecology of solo and heroic content. I was planing on starting on the solo bosses and moving up to some Heroics but it didn't pan out that way. 

I did kill several solo Nameds but the fights were noticeably tougher than in Steamfont. Finally, I pulled a Named from an awkward position, got several adds along with him, somehow contrived to lose line of sight with both my pet and my merc, didn't notice they were both having a poor time of it and ended up face down in the dirt with no-one left to pick me up. 

All of that was entirely avoidable if I'd been paying the kind of attention a solo player ought to be paying, when attempting an at-level boss in an at-level zone. It was getting late when I revived in Somborne Cemetery so I called it for the night. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd say Darkpaw have got the scaling just about right.

They've probably also got the fun roughly where it needs to be, too. I was thinking about it a lot as I was playing. I was very curious to find out what the game would feel like with the leveling process completely stripped out, especially since I'm a leveler by preference rather than necessity. 

I'm going to need to play a few more sessions to get a real feel for whether or not I think this is a ruleset I could enjoy as anything more than a novelty. I can see there are still a number of progression ladders - spell and combat art quality tiers and gear tiers, for a start, not to mention the eighteen hundred new Achievements that come with their own leaderboard - but at the moment I'm not quite clear on what good getting more powerful actually does you. 

Rather than jump the gun and speculate, I might need to play until I see the effect of upgrading in action. At the moment, with two new mmorpgs on my slate and an expansion for a third dropping in less than a week, I can't see me finding the time to give Kael Drakkel the attention it deserves.

It won't be going anywhere for a while, though. I'm sure I'll find time to get back to it eventually. On the face of it, it looks like an interesting ruleset and a solid implementation. I just hope there are enough people around with fewer gaming commitments than I have to make the most of it.