Mr. Barnabus Builds His Dream House - #3 In The Series No-One Asked For!

There very nearly wasn't a post at all today thanks to the insidiously addictive nature of building houses in video games. I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to build some stairs and very nearly getting somewhere when Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if Beryl had been fed, which led to me asking what the time was and finding out it was an hour later than I thought because time just evaporates when you get into the fiddly detail of a build.

Or it does for me, which is why I'm always extremely wary of any game that has base building, as it seems to be called these days, as a feature. It's the most "just another ten minutes..." of all game activities as far as I'm concerned. I don't relish the loss of control. Especially when those ten minutes turn into two hours as they inevitably will.

To pick up where we left off last time, having cobbled together what has to be the smallest, ugliest, most pathetic shack I have ever built in any game, I moved on to something better. A big, ugly shack.

Okay, not quite that bad. The next build was more of a wonky bunker. The important thing wasn't what it looked like, though, It was the size of it. The first, my Ratonga Warlock could barely fit inside. The next had ceilings three times his height.

What happened was that I suddenly remembered that one of the most useful features of housing items in EverQuest II: scalability. You can blow anything up or shrink it down to quite a significant degree. With that in mind, it occurred to me it would be a lot easier to make a big house if I used big blocks. 

So I tried it and it really wasn't. I'd forgotten how thick it would make the walls. As thick as the actual walls of a real medieval castle and then some.   

Luckily, I'd also thought of an alternative to building with blocks like a five year-old giant. How about walls? There was a whole set of walls in my Carpenter's books. The set is called Seru's Duplicitous Tileset and I have no clue how she got it but among other things it makes sections of wall with frames for windows and doors. Just what I needed.

I got her to make twenty or so of each, went through the rigmarole of passing them across via the shared bank and then got on with building something out of them. It was not as easy as it could have been, mostly because I hadn't considered the flatness of the surface when I picked my plot. It's hard to line up walls when the ground slopes down to the sea.

Once again, EQII's wide-ranging options for placement and alignment came to my rescue. Well, almost. You can swivel and rotate objects and also raise and lower them. Most importantly, you can sink walls down through the earth and into each other which makes it easy to line them up so there aren't any gaps at the joins or at the bottom on sloping ground.

Sadly, the same can't always be said of the top. Still, I muddled through, eventually. There were a lot of small gaps here and there, some of the walls were far from straight and the top edges were a bit jagged but it was better than my first attempt.

Of course, it didn't have a roof. There are, as far as I can tell, no roofing items you can make or buy, let alone any prefabricated roofs. There are also no ceilings per se. For those you need to use floor tiles. I guess one person's ceiling is always another one's floor. 

I had my Carpenter knock out fifty floor tiles from the Seru set and with some of those I put a flat roof on top. Oh, how simple that makes it sound. It took me ages and it looked terrible. I had to overlap tiles to cover all the gaps because not only is there no snap-to-fit, the area I was trying to cover wasn't even a regular shape, thanks to the walls not being straight.

I got it done somehow. It looked awful. But it was late and I had to stop so I left it at that. I had, at least, learned something and also I was starting to find placing things and lining them up a little easier.

When I came back to it today, really I should have torn the whole thing down and started again. But I didn't. I had some walls left so I thought I'd add a second story. And when I'd done that, I thought I might have a bash at a roof. A sloping roof.

That was fun. I worked out how to place the tiles on the floor, raise them up and swivel them. You have to do it that way because if you try to put them on the walls themselves they insist on sitting half on one side and half on the other. Nothing ever wants to go where you want to put it. It's infuriating.

There are ways around it, though. All of which make the end result look like a barn that's barely survived a tornado going through. But it's a roof. And it slopes!

That took an hour or two. Shame I didn't think about the trees when I started. In some games, if foliage gets in the way you can chop it down. Here, it just has to stick through the walls. Maybe I'll put a wardrobe over the branches. It'll be like Narnia.

The main lesson I'd learned by this point was to take a very great deal more care about where to put the damn house in the first place. The second was to build on a firm foundation. I see what those blocks are for now.

For the time being, though, I had a two-story building with a roof. Good start! No windows or doors, of course, but you can't have everything. 

Except I wanted some windows and doors. I know you can have doors, at least. I remember making some before, when I was building a Gnome Trap (Don't ask...) I got the Carpenter out again and had a more careful look through her recipe books and yes, she can make doors. Quite a lot of different doors. Wood, metal, stone, jail. All sorts of doors.

She made a couple of wooden ones and I played around with those for a bit. It was surprisingly easy to scale them up, fit them into the frames and get them opening and closing. Very much the wrong sort of doors for the rest of the build but with proof of concept established, I'll make some more suitable ones later.

Windows, though... Windows were a lot harder. I couldn't figure it out. I had to go look it up out of game in the end.

It transpires the main reason I couldn't find any recipes for windows in my Carpenter's books is that Carpenters don't make windows. Makes sense. Windows aren't made of wood, are they? 

So who does? Tinkerers, mostly. Also there are some holiday-themed windows that anyone can make. I had a look at what was available and settled on the Frostfell ones. They have a snow effect that seemed ideal for the setting. Most windows seem to come with a visual effect of some kind. What you can't have is a good, old-fashioned, plain glass window you can see through.

Getting my hands on the Frostfell windows was a bit of a performance. There were some comical misadventures in the Frostfell Winter Village, where I thought I might be able to buy them, ready-made, off the elves and goblins (They don't sell them.) Then I thought I'd need to use the workbenches in the Village to craft them only I couldn't find where they were. (Didn't even need them anyway. I'd forgotten I have my own set of all-year-round Frostfell crafting stations in the Mara home.) 

Eventually I got it all figured out, made myself half a dozen of the two types of window, vertical and horizontal, and went to fit them into the frames. And guess what? They don't fit.

Not even close. Neither of them. This is the part I don't get. Why even have tile sets with window-frames if none of your windows fit the holes?

I'm convinced I must have missed something. It makes no sense otherwise. Maybe I need to do a bit more research, although it won't be easy. Information on any of this seems hard to find. 

For now, though, I have a reasonably effective workaround involving scaling the windows up and sinking them into the walls. The end result doesn't look too bad. Not compared to the rest of the shoddiness, anyway.

All of that took much longer than I thought because time moves at an entirely different pace when you're building. When I finally had to stop, I was in the middle of figuring out how to build those stairs. I think I have it but if I'm right it's going to take a lot longer than I want to spend doing it. 

Who needs stairs when you can fly, anyway? Do birds have stairs? No, they do not!

And that is as far as I've gotten so far. This post ended up a lot shorter than I was planning, thanks to the building itself taking much longer so I guess we all dodged a bullet there. I strongly suspect this will not be the last in this series,either, but I have to go to work tomorrow so at least we can all have a day off before the next not-so-thrilling installment. 

I don't know about anyone else but I bloody well need one. Building is fun but it's hard work.

The Baubbleshire Village Green Preservation Society: EQ2

Daybreak Games have been grabbing their share of headlines recently, what with the announcement of a new game (Planetside Arena) and a limited-availabilty Lifetime Subscription (selling like hotcakes, reportedly). Then there's the mildly controversial cash-shop related holiday offer that made me stop and think about whether to break into my own extensive savings.

On that last one, well, I'm very glad I didn't. And not because I changed my mind on how good the offer is - I still think it's pricey but fair - but because when I logged into EverQuest II a couple of nights back I found there was something much better available - and no-one's even talking about it!

To backtrack a little, when I was replying to Wilhelm's post, linked above, I mistakenly commented that DBG were offering a package of eight premium houses for 3000DBC. That would have been a fantastic deal, if it existed. I was all set to cash in until I got into the game and found I'd misread the offer on the website and the houses were in fact 3000DBC each.

At that price I probably wasn't going to be buying any of them but I was still interested in taking a look. EQII has a great feature whereby you can "tour" any house before you buy it so I travelled to the Prestige Housing Portal in Qeynos to see what I could have bought if I wasn't such a cheapskate.

Some of the new houses are spectacular. Some I'm not convinced are as prestige as all that. None of them appealed to me to the tune of 3000DBC. As I was scrolling through the list, however, I happened to notice an unexpected entry: The Baubbleshire.

Whoa, Betty! The whole reason I'd considered buying five thousand Daybreak Bucks' worth of items and services to get ten chocolate coins to buy Santa Glug's Cheerful Holiday Home in the first place was so I could then break out of it and maybe - just maybe - gain access to my own personal instance of the old gnome and halfling starting village.

Now here it was, openly available as a Prestige Housing Instance all of its own. What the...?

Naturally, I took the tour. And there it was, the whole of the original Baubbleshire zone, just as I remembered it. All the buildings that had been accessible back then were ready to move into and several of the halfling burrows that I don't remember ever being able to go inside were standing open, available for immediate occupation. You could even go down to the docks and swim in the sea!

At this point I was a tad confused. I hadn't heard or seen anything about Baubbleshire coming on the market. I popped up the Store window and looked in Housing. Nothing. Hmm.

Figuring it was new to me, at least, I looked in the (somewhat crassly-named) Limited-Time Lewtz tab and there it was, The Baubbleshire Deed of Ownership Holiday Bundle, along with all the other new 3000DBC Prestige Homes. Only Baubbleshire doesn't cost three thousand, nothing like.

It comes with three chocolate coins and it costs just 1350 DBC !! What's going on?? Who cares! Grab it now!

So I bought it and spent the next half hour wandering around, imagining it as it was. And once the shock of having bought, for 1350DBC, the exact thing I'd almost paid 5000DBC for the mere chance of getting, I started to wonder what else I'd missed. Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Somehow, when I'd scanned down the (only slightly less crassly titled) Come Get Yer Loot promo on the official web page, I'd skated over the entries on "Marketplace Bundles" without registering what they were. There are two of them: The Pack of the Collector and The Premium Pack of the Collector. These each collate several extremely desirable items from the Collector's and Premium Editions of recent expansions.

The regular version, priced at 3000DBC, contains your choice of mercenary from either the Tears of Veeshan expansion or Terrors of Thalumbra. More excitingly, to me at least, it also contains both the 88-slot Bag of Dirty Tricks from ToT and the 100-slot, 100% broker fee reduction Cae'Dal Merchant Crate, which is actually from the Premium edition of Rise of Kunark, so you'd think it would be in the Premium pack.

Said Premium pack, double the price at 6000DBC, has a choice of mercenaries from Age of Malice or RoK, a different 100 slot/100% fee reduction broker box (the Atomizing Merchant Crate), a different 88-slot bag (the Bag of 88 Wonders, previously only available on the TLE servers) plus the Altar of the Ancients and Arcanna'se: Effigy of Rebirth pre-order house items from ToT and RoK respectively, and finally the Clockwork Calamity pre-order illusion from Planes of Prophecy.

Both packs are only available for the duration of the Winter Extravaganza promotion, which ends on December 31st. I will be buying the 3000DBC version for my All Access account (which already has all the pre-order items) and I'm considering getting the 6000DBC one for my lapsed AA account, which has none.

The immense practical value of all these items seems to me to make these packs both highly desirable and excellent value. No doubt there will be some grumbling and head-shaking from the people who shelled out anything up to $140 for some of the Premium Editions but I have always been of the opinion that anything from a prior expansion is fair game once that expansion is no longer current.

I do wonder, though, whether this isn't another straw in the wind that's blowing us towards the end of expansions for EQII (and EverQuest as well). As a developer, you might well think long and hard before putting items from premiums past up for sale at attractive prices, especially in cash shop coin.

You might well be thinking that opening that door risks closing another on any future sales of overpriced expansions as you train canny consumers to wait for a better offer down the line. But if you know you've already sold the last expansion you're ever going to make, that does rather cease to be an issue, doesn't it?

Well, let's not think too hard about that. For now, let's celebrate our good fortune and grab the goodies while we can. I'd recommend anyone reading this, who's also sitting on a pile of DBC, to splurge while the offer's there.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a village to decorate.

Special Snowflakes : EQ2

As Wilhelm reported, Standing Stone Games have some very pricy pre-Christmas deals going for Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings Online. Daybreak, SSG's publisher, is also running a limited-duration holiday offer for EverQuest II but it's a different beast altogether.

The SSG packages both rely on long-term commitment. The DDO package includes two years of premium membership; for LotRO you get one year. In both cases you also get access to a very large amount of content that would take months to play through.

The EQII offer is called 12 Days of Frostfell. It does indeed last for twelve days, running from Tuesday, December 4, when this year's in-game winter holiday season began, until just before midnight on Wednesday, December 16, and it's much more about instant gratification.

It's also a somewhat convoluted affair, requiring nested purchases in both the cash shop and from an in-game NPC. It took me a couple of read-throughs and a bit of digging around in game to figure it out. The short version goes like this: if you buy specific packs (all labeled "Holiday") in the DBG Store during the promotion they come with a new currency called Glug's Chocolate Coins. You can then spend that currency at a vendor who lurks in the shadows near the wardrobe that zones you into the Frostfell Wonderland Village.

It might seem like an odd way to go about things but I guess you could argue that it turns a marketplace transaction into something more lore-appropriate. In doing so, it also connects what you're doing more strongly to your character, since it's they, not you, who makes the final purchase.

I would argue that, as it happens. Yes, it would be simpler and more convenient just to buy the items directly from the store but simplicity and convenience aren't everything.

Those are the means. How about the ends? What can you buy, how much does it cost, and is it worth it?

The "what" is simple enough. As is usually the case in EQ2 these days, what you can buy with your chocolate money is Mercenaries, Familiars and a Prestige Home. Mercs and Fams (No-one calls them Fams. Let's not start.) are mostly sold in the cash shop via randomized packs but the in-game vendor sells them directly, so you can get exactly the ones you want, first time.


(As an aside, DBG have managed to finesse lockboxes through the store in such a way that I see very few complaints. In fact, in a game where complaints are commonplace and the playerbase is frequently grumpy, lockboxes rarely get a mention, although this particular promotion has raised a few hackles. I believe the lockboxes are broadly accepted because the items inside are both tradeable and convertible to Status, the currency all high-end players crave and can't get enough of. I'm guessing people are more than happy to sell or salvage their spares. Probably some even buy them for that very purpose).

Getting back to the current promotion, while it's quite expensive, it does seem to offer decent value. The various bundles in the cash shop give coins in various quantities. Things like the unattuners that cost a few hundred DBC come with a single chocolate coin and the number you get scales according to cost all the way up to ten coins with the 4999DBC Mindbender Merc seven-pack.

Santa Glug's Curious Clerk, the in-game vendor, charges three, five and seven chocolate coins for the different Mercenaries. The Familiars are all three coins each except for the Blush Gumdrop, which is top of the shop at ten coins. That's because the Blush is Ethereal quality while the rest are merely Legendary.

The Prestige House, which the promo calls "Santa Glug’s Snowglobe Home" but which is known in game as Santa Glug's Cheerful Holiday Home, also runs to ten chocolate coins. The blurb says "This amazingly cozy winter home really has to be seen to be believed! " and fortunately you can do that without buying it if you go to the Prestige Home portal in game and take the tour.

Naimi Denmother did just that and posted a video but it only shows one of the three globes.
Denmum must have been tired that day (she works harder than Dulfy on this stuff and for a lot less reward, I bet) because you can visit all three globes on the tour. I just did.

As well as the one on the counter-top there's another on the mantlepiece and a third on the table. You just have to click on the tiny globe at the edge to swap from one to another. Snow falls constantly inside the globe and flying is enabled, making for some spectacular views.

The breakout zone for the new home (and it's been cofirmed there is one) would seem to be either the Baubleshire Inn itself or, just possibly, the whole of Baubleshire. Only on a Land of the Giants scale, since your character has been shrunk to a suitable size to fit inside a snowglobe.

I find this an immensely appealing prospect. I'm not particularly interested in the Familiars and Mercs (although having Santa Glug as a healer has a certain appeal) but I'd love to break out of the snowglobe and go exploring in the old, no longer accessible, pre-invasion Baubleshire.

(Another aside: one of the less well-known reasons that EQ2's housing is best in genre is the ability to "break out" of the homes into the surrounding area. This used to be a somewhat clandestine activity but is now fully sanctioned, albeit on an "at your own risk" basis. By breaking out you can effectively gain access to an entire zone, which you can decorate (and in EQ2 "decorate is a synonym for "build") just as though you were in the core home instance. The snow globe home has apparently been designed with breakouts in mind and the breakout zone covers an area larger than Antonica!)

To get ten chocolate coins is no small undertaking. Well, okay, it is a small undertaking in that it doesn't ask much more of you than a few mouse-clicks. What I mean is, it's quite expensive. It varies a little according to what Holiday Packages you choose, but it always comes in, near as makes no odds, around 5000DBC.

Five thousand in Daybreak Cash would cost you $45 (or £37). It's a lot less than the $200-300 SSG are asking but I'm not about to spend that kind of money on an imaginary house I most likely will never spend more than a few sessions messing around with. It's also very expensive compared to any other Prestige House, none of which breaks 2,000DBC.

And yet...

All the Holiday Bundles are genuinely useful: the Mercs and Familiars, as I mentioned, can be converted to Status and also traded on the Broker. You might even get a really good one that you'd end up using. Other bundles include things that always come in useful, like extra character slots, server transfers and item unattuners.

Even so, I still wouldn't spend $45 on a whim. Only I don't have to... As a result of SOE's notoriously idiotic policy of running regular double and even treble cash sales (sometimes cited as the reason they never made any money) plus the regular 500 stipend I get for being a member, I have over 20kDBC on my current main account and 17k on the old one.

I might as well spend it on something and five thousand isn't even going to make that much of a dent. So I'm thinking about it.

And because I'm seriously considering the offer, it also clarifies for me the reason why game companies like to put a either a time limit or a limited number on what is self-evidently an infinitely renewable resource. It makes purchasers decide.

If there was no time limit I'd tick the mental box that says "one day" and forget about it for now. And probably forever. I'm extremely good at feeling as though I've bought something just because I thought about buying it. Put a time limit on it, though, and I have to make an actual decision.

It's a wonderful house.

I really would like it.

Let's not be hasty, though.

Still got six days.

Don't rush me, I'm thinking!

Please Let Me Come Mooch Round Your House : EQ2

It was this post at MassivelyOP that started it. I was nodding away in agreement with by M.J. for once as she listed EQ2's unparalleled storage options, when I came across the section on what she calls "stashes".

I've been aware of both Personal and Guild Depots for a very long time, all the way back to when they were first introduced to the game. I have a vague memory of them once being either ferociously expensive or extremely rare or more probably both.

That hasn't been the case for a long while. Mrs. Bhagpuss had some back when she was playing, half a decade ago and I vaguely remember buying one once myself. I'm fairly sure there were some in our Guild Hall for a while, although the glory days of the Guild Hall mostly happened while I was busy in Tyria.

Similarly, I was dimly aware of the existence and usage of Prestige Home Portals. I'd even installed one or two in some my own houses, although I couldn't tell you which.

Portal to Mara

What I had never done until this weekend was to put all of this together. As I read M.J.'s effusive description of the capacity of the Depots the full potential began to sink in. I decided to do a little research and the results were more than just surprising - they were quite literally game-changing.

• The storage capacity of the Personal Harvest Depot (Large) is breathtaking. It holds one thousand unique items and each item can stack to 99,999.
• You can set permissions on the house so that anyone with "Trustee" status can use the PHD(L).
• If you place Crafting Stations the recipes will draw their required materials from the PHD(L) automagically.
• A Prestige Home requires no rent and is always open and available.
• An unlimited number of free Portals to the Prestige Home can be acquired at will and placed in any house, Prestige or Normal.
• Once placed, these portals create a network. Any home on that network can be accessed from any other by means of the portal

This means you can create what is effectively a free equivalent to a guild hall, without needing to deal with upkeep or any of the usual guild issues, which you can use just for yourself or for any subset of friends to whom you wish to allocate permissions.

Moreover, it provides immediate access via the housing system to every location with a house on the network, which is potentially more places than you can reach via the World Bell or Instant Travel. For example, due to the nominal existence of Good and Evil faction in EQ2, a Qeynosian can't use the travel system to enter Freeport - but she can arrive there by house portal and just step out of the door.

The more I thought about it, the more amazing it seemed. It occurred to me that not only could I set this up to benefit all the characters on my All Access account but that I could include every other character I have on my half a dozen unsubscribed accounts as well.

Everyone on every account could pool their resources. Instead of spending (literally) hours logging characters and accounts in and out and searching through dozens of boxes and bags on each for a specific resource I could just take anyone who needed something straight to the shared depot and there it would be!

It wouldn't just be for crafting, either. There are Depots for Collectibles, for Lore and Legend quest items, for Food, Drink, Potions... with a little effort (alright, quite a lot of effort) I could set all my characters up as a Collective, free hundreds of inventory slots and save myself countless hours of busywork. Does any other MMO have anything even remotely close to this?

I love the physicality of EQ2's storage. All those boxes are packed with stuff.

I spent a very happy and satisfying Saturday doing exactly that. I had several Prestige Homes available but I decided on The Isle Of Mara because of its long association in my mind as a crafting hub, going back to my days on Test.

First I checked the prices of the various Depots on the Broker and found them to be both plentifully available and (by modern EQ2 economic standards) very reasonably priced. I bought one of every kind there was and placed them in a convenient location.

Next I used the guild roster to set all my characters up with Trustee status. Then, with my All Access account up and running I signed into my former All Access account as well. EQ2 runs quite smoothly in multiple instances on my current PC. I spent several hours logging in every character on my two main accounts, going through all of their storage, stripping out every item that the depots would hold and piling them all in.

As I went along I placed House Portals in some of my homes to form the beginning of a travel network. That requires the owner of the Prestige Home to visit the other character's house to place the portal, which is a fun little project in itself.

These portals are annoyingly difficult to place and when you try and move them you often fall in.

It was only right at the end that I realized I could have saved myself a lot of running by paying a week's upkeep on our long-abandoned Guild Hall, slapping a portal in there and using it as a hub to get everyone to the new place.

I suppose I could just have revived the Guild Hall and run it for myself but there's something depressing about being in a once-bustling Guild Hall all on your own. Personal housing is somewhere that feels entirely natural to use solo - and as I said, if you use the Prestige version it's free, too!

I could do a whole post about how great EQ2's sort options are.

This is going to be a big project and for all its very obvious advantages there may be a few worrying downsides. Everything comes at a cost.

This morning I visited the City Merchant in Freeport and bought an Elegant Forge and Desk for status points, something I could have done years ago. The reason I never did is that I love crafting in areas where I can see and hear lots of other people crafting alongside me. I always try to find the busiest place to do my writs or make upgrades.

Crafting alone, in my own, personal crafting hub, risks missing out on that sense of community. I won't hear someone beside me ding loudly as they level or hear the rattle and scrape of the machines. It will be less like playing an MMO than I'd prefer.

And then there are my established houses. I've been in the habit of returning to at least two of them at the end of every session, my Berserker's and my Warlock's, because they have the plant from the Kunark Ascending questline that gives a daily rare and a bushel of mats.

Yesterday I moved both of those plants to the Mara Estate. It seems probable that, if the new hub establishes itself as I imagine it will, I'll gradually move all my housing amenities there so everyone can use them.

That will be a major increase in utility because currently and historically I haven't made much use of anything like that. I've tended to place the item in someone's house and forget about it. With all of those things in a readily accessible central location they will see far more use but will I end up with everyone living in the Mara Estate while their own homes go unvisited for months or even years on end?

I'm going to try and minimize that risk by getting every single one of my homes onto the new network. With a bit of luck that added convenience will act as a counterweight to the gravitational pull of the hub itself.

Either way, the decision's made now and with the Planes of Prophecy signature crafting line due sometime this month it couldn't have come at a better time.

Back To The Old House : EQ2

Remember, remember the fifth of November, pumpkins and ghosties and ghouls. Ah, good old Halloween. It should have vanished in a puff of evil black smoke sometime last week but here it is yet, persistent as the grave.

Each year in each MMO we go through the old routine. As Wilhelm observes, after a while it gets hard to summon up quite the same level of enthusiasm. Even when there's something new it doesn't always live up to expectations. To quote Syp "Oh, I have a candy corn elemental (?) that will put him back in his coffin.  Oh, that’s it.  Seriously, that’s story?"

So this year, although I did do the GW2 meta-event and quite enjoyed it, thanks very much, when it came to EQ2 I thought I'd skip the usual Halloween collecting, gathering, instance-running and crafting and cut straight to the chase. I bought my own Haunted House.

If I slide down this bannister I'm going to get splinters

Housing. It's the new black. Or something. Keen's had about all the shooting, stabbing and jumping he can stand. He's got a yen to build and EQLandmark can't come soon enough, even if it has to be beta, where all foundations are made of sand. J3w3l, Jeromai and Stargrace are off in Terraria proving you don't need to build the whole world, you can just hang the blueprint on the wall. Who needs a third dimension anyway?

FFXIV flatters to deceive, announcing housing for the soon-come first major update then rowing back with a lot of ifs buts and maybes. After this gloss on the recent two-and-a-half hour Letter from the Producer Video (life is literally too short to watch over 200 minutes of game developers talking to each other in Japanese with no subtitles) FFXIV's  off the table for me, at least as far as housing is concerned. Come back in a year or two. Maybe it'll be ready by then.

Hmm. It has potential.

Richard Garriott does a much better job of piquing interest with his chatty run through what looks like some very impressive housing options in Kickstarter darling Shroud of the Avatar. I hadn't really been paying much attention to this one. Now I am.

With the exception of the die-hard housing refuseniks at Blizzard and ArenaNet it seems every developer wants a share of those decorator dollars and last night SOE got some of mine. Well, they got some of the huge heap of Station Cash I've been sitting on for years. They had the actual dollars long ago.

Ok, the bait looks good. Now I just have to set the trap.

I can't actually recall where I first heard about the new Fright Manor Prestige Home but I do remember thinking "I'll have one of those!". I've always loved haunted houses in MMOs, from Everquest's Estate of Unrest through Vanguard's Hilsbury Mansion to FFXIV's Haukke Manor, there's no better setting for a really intense dungeon experience than a big ol' house full of spooks. How much better yet to have one all of your own to explore and decorate without all that tedious fighting and questing?

They say if you look in the pool at midnight, under a full moon,
you'll see the reflection of the one you're going to murder.

When it comes to "housing" in MMOs, I'm much more of a decorator than an architect. Building the whole damn place from the ground up doesn't appeal to me all that much. I like to move in after the builders have left with my crates full of bric-a-brac and set right to making the place look lived in. Or, in the case of Fright Manor, possibly Un-Lived In.

The deed went to my ratonga necromancer. It seemed appropriate. Okay, she already has her Research Sanctum, an underwater lair worthy of a supervillain, but to be honest those incredible high ceilings and vast plate-glass windows were always a little intimidating. She felt more like a scared little mouse in there than the scary Queen of the Undead she is inside her head.

Eye of frog, toe of newt... oh noes, that is not right!

No, the small rooms of the faded clapperboard two-story walk-up looked much more manageable. Set in its own grounds that come complete with graveyard (of course) and a pond deep enough to swim in, Fright Manor seems to have its own micro-climate. A perpetual thunderstorm rumbles away almost overhead yet the hammering rain that varies only in intensity can't put out the fires the lightning strikes have started in the surrounding forest of dead and dying trees. It's perfect.

As it so happens, after a hard day summoning the undead to do her bidding, there's nothing she likes better than a little carpentry. As a level 51 carpenter she may be a bit off the pace but she can still hammer up a bed or a kitchen range when the need arises. Crafting is a painstaking process in EQ2, though, so it was a happy moment when I remembered that somewhere on the team was a Coercer who dabbled in woodwork and who'd once done about a dozen levels making nothing but Day of the Dead items. And because I'm a packrat she still has them all.

I'm going to need some drapes. Or a firehose.

A quick shuffle through the shared bank and half an hour squinting at things to get them lined up and the new place was, if not fully furnished, at least fit to live in while the fixing up continues. All the old Halloween furniture that looked so out of place in every other house looks right at home here. As does my Necromancer.

And now you'll have to excuse me while I pop out to buy some bats and cats. What kind of a haunted house would it be without a few of those roaming around, after all?

Are You Going To Be In There All Day?

Our little guild on Freeport now has a Guild House. We've been of a level to take a Guild Hall for quite a while now and the idea gets booted around every so often but there's never been sufficient enthusiasm to take it any further. Mrs Bhagpuss and I are wary of taking on any virtual responsibility and the thought of having to farm even the small amount of Status a basic Guild Hall requires is enough to ensure we never make a purchase.

We have some people who aren't us in the guild now, though and it would be nice to have a place to hang out sometimes, so when we were having our discussion this time I suggested a compromise. We're each entitled to a free Mistmoore Crags Estate Prestige House as a Seven-Year Veteran Award. Actually, we're entitled to lots of them since they come "one per character". It's unaccountably generous and yet strangely unexciting offer and until yesterday we'd never claimed a single Vampire Castle. I thought we could grab one and use it as a Guild House.

Dear Auntie Enid, The weather isn't all we'd hoped...

So that's what we did and we'll see how it works out. There's an awful lot of decorating to do, not least since the first thing we did was break out and plant our metaphorical Guild Banner in Loping Plains. We really should get a Guild Banner, come to think of it...

But before we made the final decision I went off and read up on just what you get if you have a real Guild Hall in EQ2. I was appalled! There have been guild halls since EQ2 started but if I've ever been in a guild that had one I can't recall it. I've rarely been inside one. I knew they'd been tarted up over the years and now have a whole raft of "amenities" but I had only the vaguest understanding of what those amenities were. They are these. (Or is that "these are they"? I can never remember how that goes).

That's pretty much every reason you'd ever want to go into a city. Is it any wonder the cities died? Is it any wonder it's taken a full revamp and a ton of additional content to draw a scattering of players back to add some life to the streets, squares and docksides of Freeport? It's one thing to offer guilds a nice big meeting hall where they can hold disciplinary hearings and dinner-dances among the tastefully plinthed and polished skulls of the many dragons they've slain but who ever thought it was a good idea to add in every other facility that might induce any of them to set foot in the shared part of the world ever again?

This is just part of the perennial, long-debated problem of instancing. WoW, which has no housing Guild or otherwise, has cities full to bursting with people. That the cities have the ambience of a metropolitan bus-station just after the pubs have closed is by-the-by. At least they're busy. Thinking about it, maybe that's not such a great argument.

Don't you hate it when mothers dress them all the same?

As ever there's a balance to be struck. The cities need to bustle. New players need to see crowds of other people around them, doing mysterious things they don't yet understand with objects they don't yet recognize, racing past in their fancy gear on their sparkling unicorns and clockwork chickens, trailing a comet's tail of unfeasibly cute and terrifying pets as they race who knows where on who knows what Important Mission.

Established players need a place of their own to get away from all of that.

It's a difficult balance, yes, but it has to be found. I hope we're doing our bit for the Greater Good of Norrath by resisting the temptation to set up our own City-State and settling instead for a nice big house where we can throw fruitcake at each other occasionally while we dance on the patio to the sound of our Snow Globes.