Persona Non Grata - The Latest EQ2 Producer's Letter

(Written on Friday, hence the present tense.)

I didn't really have anything in mind to write about today. I was thinking of skipping but then I thought maybe I could say something about the EverQuest II Producer's Letter. Or I could if I'd read it. I'll just go do that now...

Hmm. It's not very interesting, is it? Even by Jenn Chan's wonderfully low-key standards. After some of the hyperactive attention-seekers we've had shilling for the game over the years, I do genuinely appreciate her calm, reasonable approach but combined with not really having much of note to announce it can get a little "so what?" at times.

The first half is all "Here's what we've done so far. Aren't we good to you?" which is fair enough. No harm reminding people what the Romans have done for them. Then there's the usual trumpeting of special offers and things we can buy, with the crass commercialism of all that offset by the Good Works for Charity report. Again, expected and justified but really not very interesting.

There are a couple of mildly intriguing items. This Persona thing for a start. I can't remember when they first mentioned it but I feel like it was a while ago. I didn't pay much attention and I couldn't honestly say I knew exactly what it was but I think I do now. It's EQII's attempt to turn itself into FFXIV I think. 

"... this new feature will allow you to level and play alternate class 'personas' on the same character. This enables leveling from level 1 to max on each class while still playing the same character, having access to the same equipment, and credit for completing the same quests and achievements. "

The "all jobs on one character" thing was one of the aspects of Final Fantasy XIV I enjoyed the least. It was a strong factor in our decision to go back to Guild Wars 2, when there was a real possibility Mrs Bhagpuss and I might have moved to FFXIV full time because GW2 was overrun with bots to the point of unplayability (Something no-one seems to remember any more.).

It also put me off playing FFXIV much even as a side game later. I actively dislike being able to play all the classes on the same character. I like making alts.

The ability to play multiple characters, have them do different things, dress them in different gear and have different experiences with all of them is one of the things that kept me playing MMORPGs for so many years. The way that, over the last decade, many MMORPGs have moved towards an account-based rather than a character-based structure, with the more extreme examples making it illogical and counter-productive to do anything on more than one character, has been a significant influence on my declining interest in the genre as a whole. 

Rolling multiple characters used to keep me in a game a lot longer. Years longer in some cases. These days, while you can still do it, most of the practical reasons have been removed and it just doesn't feel fun any more. In fact, it feels like a waste of time and the last thing any MMORPG needs to do is remind you of how much time you're wasting, playing it. 

I suspect it may even have something to do with my growing preference for open world gacha RPGs, In those, you're actively encouraged to play lots of characters.And rewarded for it.

To me, then, adding Personas to EQII seems like a retrograde step. It's another sop to the Toon Brigade, those players who see all their characters as nothing more than interchangeable functionaries. From their perspective, being able to do everything on the same character must look like a huge benefit. 

Also, I suspect, it may have something to do with the ever-declining population of EQII. It's going to be a lot easier to get a group going if everyone can swap Personas to fill the missing roles. Then again, Rift used to work that way and it never did Trion much good...

The letter mentions the summer update, which has a name now: Revelations of Malice. It doesn't really say anything about it, though. In fact, I'm a bit unclear on whether the technical and quality of life improvements listed are part of that update or separate from it. Or maybe they are the update?

UI scaling is one of the proposed improvements although it's only going to be in testing, presumably on the Beta server, not on Live. I wonder how many people play EQII in 4K? Seems like it'd be a niche group at best. I guess when I get my gaming laptop (I was pricing them this morning.) I could hook it up to the big TV we have now and play EQII in the lounge in 4K. Not sure why I'd want to but I might try it, just out of curiosity.

More useful and attractive to me are the proposed upgrades to the number of mount slots and house item caps and especially the option to train mounts that you don't currently have equipped. I have a lot of mount xp potions stashed I'd like to get some use out of and that should help.

And that's about all there is. Not much, is it? Hardly worth sending out a letter.

Oh, there's a whole paragraph about the expansion. Ought to mention that, I guess. Only problem is it doesn't actually tell us anything. 

Here. have a read. See if you can make anything out of it. I can't.

"Cthurath, reeling from his recent defeat within Gerion, has been suppressed back into the Void. While the majority of Norrath remain unaware of the cataclysmic threat posed by the Consumer, the Overlord’s absence in Freeport has not escaped the notice of the power hungry. Encrypted messages continue flowing, and the feeling of dread seems to suffocate you as you think too hard not only on what you’ve deciphered, but other clues and gut feelings. Something big is about to happen, and you have thus far been unable to home in on what that could be. Words are power, mysticism and darkness go hand in hand, a found missive and a very vague map of islands... what could it all mean? A fair warning Adventurer: pursuing this course can only serve to open a yawning gulf of madness and machinations which will not easily be traversed. Heed the warnings, Norrathians. Beware the Descent into the darkness."

The only thing in that lot that caught my eye was the "very vague map of islands". I hope that means the expansion's set in an archipelago. I like island-hopping adventures. But then there's the ominous "Beware the Descent into the darkness" part, too. I do hope we're not going underground again. I had more than enough of that in Terrors of Thalumbra. 

Oh well. I guess we'll find out soon enough.  

Is Wuoshi Up? The Latest EQII Producer's Letter Drops.

A new Producer's Letter for EverQuest II usually gives me plenty to write about. They appear roughly quarterly (Maybe they're seasonal?) so there really ought to be some meat to them. You'd think...

A new one popped yesterday. It's thin. Let me break it down in bullet points:

• Reminder of the beta currently running for the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion on the Origins server.
• Reminder the Zarrakon PvP server will be merged into the Antonia Bayle PvE server in May.
• Details of a technical change to the Character Creation process.
• Information about the new Time Locked Expansion server coming in June.

And that's it. Two things we already knew about, each of which have had their own press releases in the last week or so, one thing no-one's likely to care about and a foretaste of another that, according to Senior Community Manager Angeliana, replying to a question on the forums, will have a full article and a FAQ next month.

If you were hoping for any longer-term outline of where the game as a whole is headed, especially now Darkpaw isn't doing roadmaps any more, you're out of luck. Whether this is because there's nothing to say or because saying anything isn't allowed, feel free to speculate.

So, working with what little we have, let me see if I can spin this up into some kind of post. There might be a couple of loose ends worth pulling on... 

The Origins server is the closest thing EQII has to a Classic ruleset. It doesn't go all the way back to the beginning, like WoW Classic, because no-one in their right mind would want to suffer through the first fifteen months or so of EQII ever again. Instead, it started out trying to recreate the game as it was in 2006, before moving forward, carefully, through succeeding expansions, attempting to replicate them as accurately as possible, striving always for authenticity. 

Or so the story goes. That, anyway, is why the introduction of the next expansion on the assembly line, Rise of Kunark, requires a beta. For regular TLE servers they just switch the expansions on, I think. 

I don't really know, to be honest. I never play on them. I did try Origins when it started but I think I lasted about two sessions. I can see the appeal and the server has been successful but who has the time? Well, not me, obviously.

I wouldn't have bothered going into it at all if it wasn't for the fact that the existence of Origins is highly relevant to the second bullet point, the merging of Zarrakon with Antonia Bayle, which is much more interesting.

Zarrakon launched a sliver under three years ago. It used a factional PvP system of some kind, the exact details of which are unclear to me. I was under the impression most EQII PvP was faction-based: Freeport vs Qeynos or Good vs Evil, if you prefer. 

Whatever the exact details of who could kill whom, Zarrakon barely had a chance to get started before the server itself was killed by much more popular rival. Just two years later, a second PvP server, Dozekar, arrived, using the already highly successful "Origins" model, tweaked for PvP.

PvP players are, if anything, even more nostalgic about the supposed good old days than PvE players. They're always hankering after some mythical ruleset that made PvP fair or balanced or satisfying, even if few of them can agree on when or where it happened. 

Everyone agrees it did, though, and for many the touchstone is the much-missed original PvP server, Nagafen. For once, it seems as if Dozekar came close to replicating that experience. Or, as PCGamer put it at the time, "Nagafen's back, baby!"

With Dozekar sopping up most of the demand, there was no need for Zarrakon. It does seem strange that two PvP servers should have launched so close together but presumably the possibility of an Origins PvP server wasn't in the discussion in 2023. Just bad timing, I guess.

Antonia Bayle, the server on the receiving end of the merge, has a checkered history of its own. For a long time it was the most populated server. It was also the designated roleplaying server, which may explain the popularity. 

Over time, for reasons unknown to me, Ant. Bayle fell out of fashion. The population declined until it became almost a ghost-server. There was talk about merging it into one of the others but instead Darkpaw took the opposite tack, merging failing servers into Ant. Bayle.

When I read the news that a PvP server was going to be folded into AB, my first thought was to wonder how the two populations might mix. Like oil and water, you'd think. Having done some research for this post, I'm now thinking it'll be more like dropping a pebble into the ocean. Barely even a ripple. I'm guessing there won't be enough players left on Zarrakon to make an impact and of those that remain, any still dedicated to PvP won't be logging in much after the move goes through.

So ends yet another attempt to bring PvP to Norrath. At least this time there's an alternative. 

Dozekar, by most accounts I've seen, retains a small-but-active population, which, on the evidence of the last twenty years, is about the best an EQII PvP server can realistically can hope for. Not that EQII PvP players are famously realistic...

New servers have been the lifeblood of the game in one way or another for as long as I've been playing, which is to say always. The commercial model seems to consist of a core of permanent F2P servers running the "Live" ruleset, to whose players annual expansions and various cash shop specials can be sold, along with an ever-changing line-up of special rules servers, for which a subscription is required. 

Perhaps ironically, it's the sub-only servers that have the shorter life expectancy. They're designed to run only for as long as enough people pay, after which they're merged either into each other or into the Live servers, depending on how compatible the rulesets might be.

There's a perpetual demand for new rulesets to hold the interest of a subset of players who find the endless variations appealing. Once in a while a particular variant will take off and become rather more than just stable, as seems to have happened with the Anashti Sul Origins server, reportedly now the most populated and popular server of all.

The latest attempt to grab attention is the upcoming Wuoshi server, which is going to have a Free Trade ruleset but also launch with all expansions up to and including Echoes of Faydwer active. EoF was the third expansion, right before RoK, which means the new server will be one expansion in arrears of Anashti Sul. 

Why that would induce anyone to move across beats me although maybe I'm missing something. Someone on the forums certainly thinks so:

"Well rip Origins and it's RoK launch if this Woushi server coming out in June with EoF enabled."

I'd have though it'd be the other way around but what do I know?

I was more interested in the name of the new server, anyway. Mostly, when new servers are spun up for either of the EverQuest games, I have to go look it up to find out who they've been named after.  Not this time!

Wuoshi is the extremely annoying dragon that wandered about right next to the druid ring in Wakening Lands. She was the bane of every druid's life back in the day. You'd port in and WHAM! Dead from Wuoshi's massive AoE attack.

Luckily she wasn't always up. I ran a spotter over there and camped them at the ring so I could log in as an expendable character just to check if it was safe to port. Eventually they either moved Wuoshi or changed her faction and porting to Wakening Lands stopped being Druid Russian Roulette but I have never forgotten her. I might roll a character on the server named after her, just for old times' sake.

There is one other thing. Not about the new server. It's a hint about the next expansion. I didn't give it a bullet point because, as anyone who read this post in the first few hours it was up will know, I didn't even spot that the following was about the expansion. I thought it was about the new server.

I've revised the post, now I've realized my mistake. I'd talk about it in more detail only I have no idea what it means and Jenn Chan isn't about to make it any clearer. She says

"Imagine traipsing through The Crossroads for a minute... You’re just walking along the road, weary from a long day of adventures, when you glance down and see an oddity. You pick it up and open it to find a strangely coded missive. You stare at it until the characters swim about in your view, still unable to decipher it. You feel an urgency to find someone who can decrypt the piece of intel before it’s too late. What do you do? Where do you go from here? "

 Which is helpful. Not.

And even less so the image of the note itself:

Looks like gibberish to me but it turns out to be in two Norrathian languages. One is Dark Elven. I'm not sure about the other.

I only know that much because someone on the forums had the whole thing translated in a matter of hours. The full text, in English, reads as follows. 

Oh, I suppose I ought to give a spoiler warning for this...

As if anyone cares.

 

So there you have it. Gibberish in English, too! If anyone knows what any of that means in reference to where we might be going or what we might be doing come December, do tell.

Credit for the image goes to Agarth, by the way, although I'm not sure they did the actual translation. 

And that, I think, is about all the juice I can squeeze from the dry husk of Jenn Chan's latest Producer's Letter.  

Hey, I got more than fifteen hundred words out of it! I'm not complaining.

When You Stare Into The Void...

Oh, look! I'm going to post something about EverQuest II again! Anyone would think I was trying to make some kind of point...

Nah, it's actually much simpler than that. I'm not really playing anything else so if I'm going to post about gaming, EQII is pretty much all I've got. And I barely even have that, since about all I'm doing most days is setting and collecting my Overseer missions, about which I am more than willing to complain yet again.

Seriously! What is this thing? I've been at it for what has to be most of the year and I'm still waaaay off the cap, which I think is currently 70, although as always it's hard to be sure. If there's one thing the game needs more than an enhanced presence on social media, it's some up-to-date, accurate, informative guides on the many, many abstruse and obfuscated systems that have been added over the years and only sporadically maintained or documented.

I have just now, as I started to do a little due diligence for this post, managed to find this wiki page, which has never turned up on any of the numerous searches I've done, this year or before. It's very helpful. In fact, it includes a lot of highly pertinent detail that I wasn't aware anyone had made available anywhere, like the exact amount of Overseer XP you get from each, individual mission.

Not that that's particularly useful in any practical sense. It mostly confirms what I already believed, that you get more XP the higher the quality of the mission and that within each quality band, longer missions give more xp than shorter ones. I could have proved that for myself by taking note of the change in XP after I hand them in, of course, but that seemed like too much effort so I'm happy someone else has done it for me.

There's not an awful lot I can do with the information now I have it, of course. All I can do is set the ten best missions available to me every day and those are exactly the ones I always thought they would be. I can - and do - stagger my picks through the day to let the better ones come off cooldown but that just tends to push my schedule off-center and lead to fewer choices the next day, so I'm not convinced it's always worth the trouble.

I'm still plugging away, as much out of stubborness as anything. At the rate it's going I'm not convinced I'll be at the cap by the time the expansion arrives, although I'll be close. I'm currently very close to the end of Overseer level 63. There's an Achievement at 65, for which you get nothing but the badge. The next tier - Tier 8 - doesn't exist yet but when it does, presumably when the expansion comes, it'll start at 71. 

That's another six levels, not counting 70 itself because the deciles always go at hyper-speed. I dinged 60 around the start of September and it's going faster now I have nearly all the missions for the tier, so I guess another two months 'til the expansion arrives might just about see it finished. I bloody hope so, anyway!

Speaking of the expansion, we know what it's called now. Jenn Chan issued a Producer's Letter yesterday. As usual, it goes hard on reviewing the past few months but only very lightly on what's coming next.

The name of EQII's twenty-second expansion is Rage of Cthurath. I'll let you have a moment to think about that one. And to go get a drink of water if you've been foolish enough to try and say it out loud.

The theme and setting of the expansion looks like it's Lovecraftian horror, which clearly explains the throat-mangling title, although when I saw it for the first time my immediate thought was "Mmmm! Churros!". 

Here's the pitch:

"Our journey begins through entering a reality outside of our own, a boundless realm of entropy and madness, where mortal lives are often treated with excessive cruelty. This is the Void, an ineffable conglomeration of paradoxical existence eked out on the edge of nothingness." 

Doesn't that sound inviting? It carries on it that vein for a while but I won't quote the whole thing. It's all there if you follow the link.

I have to say it doesn't inspire much excitement in me. The reverse, if anything. It always seems to me that these extra-planar jaunts take the game away from its well-established foundation in high fantasy. That said, the Void is an extremely well-established part of EQ lore, going all the way back to the elder game's initial phase, where Shadowed Men were a much-feared presence across the Commonlands and beyond. 

EQII's previous flirtations with the Void include some things I've really enjoyed, too. The Shadow Odyssey featured a number of Void-related instances, at least one of which occupied many happy hours as I farmed the final boss for what was, at that time, a very decent chunk of change. 

One of the best dungeons in the whole game, The Obelisk of Lost Souls, in the game since launch, is closely related to the Void and Rivervale has been over-run with invaders from that mysterious plane of existence since EQII began (Better them than halflings!) so I guess it may be about time we went to see where the pesky creatures come from.

There's not a whole lot more information available in the Letter, other than the names of what sound like a couple of open-world zones, Yon Gorroth and the Unknown. Exactly how many zones, instances or other explorable areas might be included has yet to be revealed but we do know the game is going to be getting yet another difficulty tier with the addition of Untold Heroics.

Commenters in the thread following the Producer's Letter on the Forums wasted no time in comparing UHs to World of Warcraft's Mythic Dungeons, promptly deciding that meant they wanted nothing to do with them. Since I already have nothing to do with the existing Heroics I and II, it's all a bit of a non-issue for me, just so long as we'll be getting the regular Solo versions of whatever dungeons the expansion brings.

There will also be a new batch of Public Quests. I really like PQs although it is quite true, as one disgruntled commenter points out, that in three months no-one will be doing them. That does tend to be the way it goes but honestly you could say that about most content in EQII and a good deal of content in just about every MMORPG, at least the ones that rely on vertical progression to keep people motivated. If we ruled out every new addition to the game on the grounds no-one would be using it in three months, we'd have barely any new content at all.

Finally, as everyone already must have known, the level cap will go up by five to 135. Happens every second expansion. If nothing else, that will make revisiting some of the only slightly out-of-date content from recent expansions and GUs a lot more fun, for me at least, although the merciless Resolve escalator means there's not a lot of point, other than to see stuff I haven't seen yet.

Pre-orders open up in a week, on 14 October, which is also when the Beta for the expansion begins. Pre-ordering always gets you a beta invite, which I never use because it's enough effort going through the whole thing once or maybe two or three times when there's a cap increase and I have alts to level. I certainly don't want to be doing it when everything's buggy and I'm playing a character I'll never see again.

Anyway, that's what we know so far. Oh, and the Arch-Villain of the piece is called The Consumer, which I imagine is supposed to make me think of some towering, all-devouring monster with teeth the size of cavalry sabers, but which actually gives me a mental image of someone in a housecoat, sitting on a sofa with the TV blaring as they hunch over a laptop, ordering lampshades and throw-pillows from Amazon. 

About the only other thing I have to say about Rage of Cthurath at this stage is that I'm not entirely looking forward to staring at purple and orange fungus for the next year. Other than that, bring it on! 

Heralding The Heralds

Jenn Chan, Darkpaw's "Head of Studio" dropped another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II yesterday. I imagine she posted one for the elder game, too, but I can't even pretend to be playing EverQuest any more so maybe I'll just skip that one. I wouldn't really understand what any of it was about, anyway.

Before I get started on the content, I have something to say about the nomenclature. Is Head of Studio" a new title? It's snappy. I like it. Although it kind of makes a nonsense of the whole "Producer's Letter" thing, doesn't it? Aren't they called that because the person writing them is the game's "Producer"? Shouldn't it be called the "Head's Letter" now? 

Except that sounds ridiculous. Like something your twelve year-old brings home from school to tell you the dates of the next school play and that the science block needs a new roof and would you like to help run a stall at the school fair to raise funds for repairs? 

Whatever she's calling it, Jenn Chan writes a good letter. She's affable, friendly, informative and she has a great line in what I think we're going to have to accept, much though we may not want to, are now generally known as "Dad Jokes". I'm minded to say she's the best Producer (Head of Studio.) the game's ever had although I'm not claiming I can remember all of them. She's certainly the least pretentious and most agreeable.

Her Producer's Letters are also very predictable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. She's established a form and a structure and she's clearly happy to just keep going with it indefinitely. At least half of every letter is a recap of the previous one, detailing what she said was going to happen and confirming that it did or, if it didn't, which is rarely the case, why.

At this point I do have to wonder what the substantive difference is between a Producer's Letter and a Roadmap, other than that a Roadmap looks much flashier. In terms of content, they seem very similar. I don't in the least mind getting both but there does seem to be a deal of overlap.

According to the July letter, everything that was promised did indeed come to pass. There's an overview and a month-by-month breakdown of events since April, all with hyperlinks to the relevant press release or explanatory article on the official website. It really is about as well-documented a piece of reportage as you could hope to see. I would guess either Jenn is an excellent administrator herself or else she has one in her employ.

Following the studio's uninterrupted support for Pride Month this year, it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise to see the second paragraph of the letter celebrating Darkpaw's latest donation - $5,000 to the San Diego LGBT Community Center - but in the light of certain less admirable decisions made by other gaming companies (*cough* Jagex *cough*) it's more than usually heartening. 

I did manage to remember to pick up red pandas for all my characters on my main account although I'm not sure now if I got them on any of the others. Too late to worry about it now! Speaking of things you can have for (a given value of) nothing on every character, there's an odd promotion going on right now that gives you a Fabled Mount: Zhufeng, Harbinger of Mirth for every Krono you buy. 

Why they're specifically promoting the purchase of the "in-game objects that can be redeemed for 30 days of membership time" and also traded for Platinum within the game I'm not sure. They do cost $3 more than a regular monthly sub though, so I guess that would explain it. Presumably no-one actually uses Krono to pay for their subscription, only as a way to get the vast amounts of in-game currency needed to buy anything much on the broker in the age of hyper-inflation caused by people trading Krono...

You get one of those mounts for every Krono you buy, too, and twenty-five of them if you buy a twenty-five pack of Krono, which I did not even know was a thing you could do until I read the press release. Why anyone would want to buy 25 Krono at once is beyond me but apparently you can if you want. As to what you'd then do with 25 ugly flying fire-dragons... invade Freeport, maybe?

After recapping everything that's happened since the last time she wrote and reminding us of the current cash shop campaign, Jenn Chann goes on to tell us what to expect over the summer, which pretty much means recapping the roadmap and re-iterating what we can see in the handy in-game Events Calendar. I doubt anyone playing the game needs to told that after Tinker Fest comes Scorched Sky and Oceansfull any more than they need to know that after Thanksgiving comes Christmas and then New Year.

After all of that, we eventually come to something we didn't already know. Or that I didn't know, at least. 

Firstly, there's going to be "a Content Creator program" established later this year. What exactly that means we'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out but I'm assuming it means streamers. Not that I'd bother applying even if old-school blogs counted. I'm technically a "Content Creator" for Stars Reach and all that's done is make me feel uncomfortable posting about the game at all so I'd rather remain independent.

Next, we get to the really interesting part - some information about the upcoming expansion. Well, actually about the pre-expansion event, which has a name of its own - Heralds of Oblivion. We don't know what the expansion itself is called but that at least sets the tone.

In my experience, pre-expansion events, or "Preludes" as Jen calls this one, for any MMORPG fall into one of two categories - low-key and trivial or hyperactive and essential. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. Either you're doing some busy work for a bunch of tedious NPCs who hand out rewards barely worth the bag space or the entire server is howling around in a huge gang, descending on every event like a swarm of locusts, desperate to hoover up the insane XP and/or huge upgrades.

As Jenn halfway acknowledges in the letter, we haven't had one of the good ones since 2018, when I described the rewards as "fantastic". Here's hoping this one at least matches it. It certainly seems to have some depth with "5 tradeskill quests, 5 adventure quests, 2 public quests, 2 collections". Pre-expansion PQs tend to be very popular and profitable in the first couple of weeks, until everyone has what they want, so I'm going to try and make sure I get in on the action early this year instead of leaving it to the end with all the other lazy bums.

As for what the expansion itself migh be about or where it might take us... no clue, really.  Jenn often ends with a pun that's supposed to offer a clue but this time there's just a picture of her standing in some kind of crater or hole and the tagline "No Bones about it, this is going to be good!", which I'm not even sure refers to the expansion.

It might just as easily refer to Game Update 129, also discussed in the letter and due to arrive in August. That one's called Fear of Eternity and includes Solo and Heroic versions of some of the dungeons or instances from the Chains of Eternity expansion from 2012.

I would have said I wouldn't be doing any of that, since I can't do very much of the instance that came with GU128 yet. That, however, should be fixed with the new one because it comes with a "Gear Catch-up Crate" designed to "get you straight into the GU action".

I'm probably going to do a separate post on this, for which I'll wait until I've been able to see the gear and the stats, but welcome though all this free stuff is, I can't help thinking the whole gear-ladder-catch-up thing in EQII is getting out of hand. It looks like we're going to get three complete new sets of upgrades to all our gear given to us for free in just four months - the GU Catch-Up crate in August, the Panda gear in September and then the Tishan's Box with the expansion in November. Is that overkill? Certainly starting to look like it.

The Herald's of Oblivion Catch-Up Crate is, however, only available to All Access members and the Tishan's only for those who buy the expansion, while anyone at all can get the panda gear just for the trouble of doing some very quick and easy quests, so there is an argument for all three, I guess. Best not to be inspecting the dental records of any gift horses too closely.

And that's about it. Another letter sent, received, read and discussed. Let's all meet back here in three months and we'll do it all over again.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

Friday grab-bag on Friday! Amazing! It was going to be a music post, mostly because I checked my files and found nearly sixty tunes queued up in there but that's going to take a deal of winnowing and I don't have the time right now. 

Then again, if I leave it, it's only going to get worse...

Never mind. On with the motley.

Nice Hat!

Speaking of motley, I got my jester's hat for completing the new Bristlebane instance three times. That was easy. The hard part is going to be figuring out who's going to wear it. You have to have a certain kind of personality to get away with a look like that and it's not the kind I like to promote in my characters. Still, I imagine there'll be someone.

Sticking with EverQuest II, how about that Producer's Letter, eh? It doesn't add a huge amount of new information to the last one but boy, does it slap some hefty content on the table. 

I've been flipping through some of the threads on the beta forum for the upcoming Game Update 125 aka Darkpaw Rising and the vibe is positive. Someone's done a rough guide to the content, which I won't link to because I think the beta forums are supposed to be Members Only, and it sounds like there's a lot. Apparently there are a couple of dozen quests and they can't all be completed in a single run through the new instance. There are more than thirty named mobs in there with drops, too.

Interestingly, there's also a tradeskill questline and some of the aforementioned named mobs require crafted items just to reach the locations where they hang out. The whole thing is set in the Splitpaw dungeon from the eponymous adventure pack that came out in 2005. That place was always a nightmare to navigate but it was also very popular. It'll be fun to go back and do it all over again but differently.

The Big News, though, has to be the new Time Limited Server coming in May. It looks disconcertingly like EQII's own version of WoW Classic, if you squint. When you look closely, though, you'll notice it isn't taking us right back to the start of the game because, frankly, the game when it began was a mess. I was there and unlike some I do not want to relive that difficult, exhausting, distressing experience.

Luckily for me, the new server is skipping right over all that and settling on the recovery that took place a year or so later, after Scott Hartsman had been parachuted in to save the game. As I remember it, things were still have pretty tough even in 2006 but the most unforgivable of the short-sighted design decisions had been reversed by then, or at least had their vicious spikes blunted and the roughest of the rough edges sanded down, so it was possible to imagine you were engaged in something that was at least intended to be entertaining.

We'll see how it stands up to my memories, although I note that a careful reading of the announcement indicates that "gameplay will be reflective of the 2006 era" (My emphasis.) so anyone expecting a perfect, note for note recreation had better keep working on that time machine.

Either way, it sounds like an opportunity not to be missed. I'll be there for the event if nothing else. I can guarantee it will be packed at launch, both with bitter vets looking to pick holes and with rose-tinted nostalgists seeking to regain their lost youth. How long any of them will stick around is another matter but WoW Classic did alright so it might work...

I Keep On Knocking...

I spent much of this morning first trying to log into and then working through the introduction of the third beta test for Once Human. Although I had no trouble downloading the new client, I had a heck of a job getting the new Netease launcher to play nice. I really dislike these Publisher Portals. They're never any better than a straightforward , dedicated game launcher and all too often worse.

While I was looking up old passwords and trying to work out what email address I used last time, I did at least manage to solve the issue of why no-one had bothered to tell me, a registered player in the last test, when, or even that, another beta was coming. Simple answer? They did send an email but it went into my spam folder. Why that happens to some emails, when other emails from the exact same address, covering almost the exact same topic don't, I have no idea but it's very annoying.

Not as annoying, however, as having to spend the best part of half an hour fiddling with settings and trying everything from Google to Discord to get the launcher to accept my login. In the end I got in via Discord, which probably means I'm now on a new account. 

That wouldn't matter much in a beta except that I believe there are thank-you freebies waiting for anyone who played in the previous test. I might still get those - I do apparently have mail waiting for me in game -  but Once Human takes a very old school stance on in-game mail. You have to go to an actual mail-box to collect it. Since the first one I know of is in a town you don't see until you're about Level 10, it might be a while before I collect whatever's waiting for me.

Wary of the proposed cut-off for making characters (Midnight tonight or after the first 150,000, whichever comes first.) I rushed through character creation as soon as I was able to get in, figuring I could always come back later and make someone I was happier with, if the first didn't work out. OH's character creation is pretty good, though, so I was able to get someone I liked well enough in a matter of minutes. Well, a quarter of an hour, which is lightning-fast for me...

Having logged in, I couldn't stop myself from playing through the excellent introduction, which doesn't seem to have changed much since last time, although I'll have to go back and read my First Impressions pieces so I can compare. I do know I had no trouble at all finding a place to set up home this time, something I remember being a right pain back in December.

After about an hour and a half I had to drag myself away to make lunch. I was very impressed with Once Human last time around and I fully expect to be even more so this time. I think it's likely to be pretty successful come launch, unless they get too fancy and over-complicate things.

Tempting, but...

The two games that occupied most of the first quarter of this year for me, Palworld and Nightingale, both dropped updates this week but I can't see either of them enticing me back, at least for the moment. 

Nightingale's was just a small patch with some bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements but one of those QoLs was pretty huge: 

"Removal of 'Death Chests': dying in 0.1.3 will now only cause loss of durability, food buffs and time. This should make death/respawning less frustrating for Realmwalkers"

Stripped of the jargon, that means no more corpse runs. Latterly, I haven't been dying much - or at all - so it's a moot point for me now but in earlier stages, getting my stuff back was a major pain. Not sure why any dev team ever imagines it's a mechanic players want. I think just about every game I've ever played that had it at the start either took it out pretty quickly or made it optional. They could save themselves a lot of grief by just leaving it out in the first place. And I say that as one of the minority that somewhat enjoys a good CR!

Palworld's update was a lot more substantive. I read the full patch notes yesterday and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, from numerous bug fixes, graphic and audio improvements to significant  improvements to gameplay. The headline though is the introduction of the game's first Raid Boss.

Unless it was mandatory, non-consensual PvP, I find it hard to think of an addition to the game that would appeal to me less than a Raid Boss. For one thing, when I was playing I was playing solo on a private shard so who would I raid with? For another, I already find the combat the least interesting thing about Palworld. Why would I want more of it but harder?

Luckily, I don't have to log in and try it out for myself to report back on what I don't like about it. I can just link to Tipa instead. As she found out, a "Raid" in Palworld doesn't require any other real players. Just you and a small army of Pals. It sounds about as much fun as those really irritating "base raids" I turned off after the first week, only not that much fun. 

I won't be picking Palworld back up to try it but I am a little more inclined to imagine a return when Pocketpair drops the big one this summer. 

 "We are planning a larger, more content-packed update for summer 2024.
Enjoy never-before-seen scenery and thrilling adventures on a new island, home to many new pals.
In addition, we plan to add a large amount of new content including new buildings, weapons, and tower bosses."

That does sound tempting, providing I can overcome my moral discomfiture with the game in general. I was a little surprised to hear they  were going to leave it that long but I imagine the runaway success of the game took them by surprise and now they're scrambling to come up with a forward plan.

Talking of moral quandaries, that other supposedly cozy, non-combat game, Palia, where I spent most of my time shooting deer, looks like it might be in trouble. The sheer number of cozy/twee/crafting/survival games flooding onto the market right now makes it hard to stand out but Palia did have a lot of positive hype pre-launch so if it's under-performing it's most likely down to the less-than-compulsive gameplay. There's cozy and then there's stultifying.

Well, It's Artificial, I'll Give You That Much

Survival games do look like the exact sort of thing you could train an AI to produce, don't they? Even as made by humans they do all have a very similar look and feel. Before long, I suspect we might look back on this time of glut as a trough not a peak.

Wilhelm posted an excellent rant on the current state of AI, which then generated a mighty comment thread full of essays and personal statements. I imagine everyone who comes here has already seen it but if not, you have a treat in store.

I thought I was done writing about AI at least until something new turned up and I was... but now it has so here we go again. I like to finish up these portmanteau posts with a tune. This time I'm going to throw in a couple I wrote myself although I guess "wrote" should be in quotes there.

I've tried a bunch of AI music generators over the last year or so and they've all been disappointing. This one is not. It's called Suno and it's terrifying.

Here's the first song I made with Suno. It's called Lazy Sunday in Seaside Gray, which is a name Suno made up, not me. I typed in "Twee/C86 style song about a slow Sunday at a decaying seaside town" and in about thirty seconds, here's what came out. 

Firstly, I was impressed it even knew what I meant by "Twee/C86". I bet most people reading this blog don't, unless they learned it from reading this blog. If you're not familiar with the genre, it sounds pretty much exactly like that.

Secondly, I was a lot more impressed by how convincing the AI was. I'm pretty sure I could make a quick video for that song from some old camcorder holiday footage, come up with a likely band name (The Wood Anemones, perhaps, or The Closed Wednesdays.) and slip it into one of my music posts and no-one would be any the wiser.

By far the weakest element is the lyrics, although I've seen plenty worse written by supposed human beings. That part gets farmed out to ChatGPT and comes back exactly like you'd expect. I believe if you subscribe, you can upload your own lyrics and just have Suno do the music and the singing, which is a service I might even consider paying for.

I've played around with it a bit since then and the results are disturbingly consistent. I didn't rate the attempt at hyperpop all that highly but the sixties' girl group and seventies' funk numbers sounded unnervingly authentic. 

You get enough free credits to make several songs a day and each prompt returns two options, one of which always seemed obviously better. You also get a nice little AI illustration to use on your imaginary record sleeve. I did try to find out more about how it all works but the makers are keeping unsurprisingly quiet about the precise details.

What's clear is that a process like this could flood the existing streaming platforms with ersatz music of every genre to the point that no-one would ever be able to find anything real again. I imagine there are guards in place to stop that. 

There must be. Right?

Here's another I made earlier and then I'll get out of your hair. 

No Plan Survives Contact With The Marketing Department

Do you ever get the feeling the universe exists just to make you look foolish? In the afternoon I wrote a post about going back to EverQuest II, in which I made the following confident assertion:

"... none of the other upcoming games I'm interested in are running tests right now, so it seemed like a good time to get back to what I was doing a couple of months ago - playing EQII."

Later, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I took Beryl for a walk. We had tea and watched The Chase. Then we watched half of that show about a dog rescue center in Australia before the live stream broke up and we stopped. Rain was forecast, so I took Beryl for her evening walk an hour early. 

When I got back I finished editing the post, added the tags, thought of a title and hit Publish. Then I started going through my feeds to see what had happened since I last looked and what did I find?

This. That's what.

Two questions came immediately to mind, the first being how come I didn't get an email or something? I know it's all done through Discord these days but even so, just about every other MMORPG I've ever registered an interest with sends me email every time they put a new pair of mittens in the cash shop. 

Apparently this beta was meant to start on 28 March before it got bumped to 3 April. I knew nothing about it. You'd think a beta might merit some kind of heads-up. Then again, it's entirely possible they did tell me and I've forgotten. Wouldn't be the first time.

The second question was whether I'd be able to get into the test. The instructions are a little confusing. The announcement on Twitter states 

"Please kindly note, after you pre-register, make sure to create your character before April 4, 2024, at 19:00 PDT! If you haven't created a character by then, you won't be able to participate in the test. After April 4, 2024, at 19:00 PDT, players who have not created a character need to use an activation code to enter the server."

Steam, however, says

"All returning players from the previous beta will automatically have access to the upcoming test using their existing login accounts."

That seems to be true because when I booted up my old patcher from the last test it updated itself then began downloading the new client. By the time I had to go to bed, though, the servers still hadn't opened up so the question of whether I also needed to make that character to nail down my place or whether I could just carry on with the one I had remained moot.

It was still moot on Thursday morning, when the beta ought to have been up and running. After breakfast I went to log in and instead of a "Play" button I found a notice saying "Coming on 4th April". Which is today. So, later today, I guess. At time of writing I still can't log in so the clock may be ticking. Or it may not. Who knows? *** See Footnote 1

I could do with some time to think about how I want to approach the opportunity anyway. I stopped playing the last Once Human beta a couple of weeks before it ended. These are hefty tests. The last one started in November and ran well into January. This one is scheduled to last six weeks. 

In all honesty, six weeks is longer than my total playtime in some MMORPGs where I would consider I'd had a long and successful run. The main reason I backed off from playing last time wasn't that I'd had enough of the game. It was the exact opposite. I was enjoying it so much and becoming so invested, I was concerned I'd feel I'd done everything I wanted to do in the game before it even launched.

Those concerns remain, meaning I'm excited about the prospect of playing again but also apprehensive. Based on a long experience with pre-launch builds, it's impossible to know whether these betas represent my chance to see the game at its best or if it won't all come together until it goes Live. I've seen it happen both ways.

Rift remains the poster child for better in beta but two of my favorite MMORPGs of all time struggled badly in late testing. Vanguard then was almost unplayable for me due to technical issues but because of what I learned in those tests I was able to make some changes to my set-up, so that, when the game launched, I was able to play it with very few of the problems that made it such a nightmare for others. 

EverQuest II, conversely, suffered from so much lag throughout late beta we all thought it would be unplayable at launch. The devs kept promising there would be a final patch that would sort all of that out but we'd all heard other developers claim a "miracle patch" would fix everything at launch and it had never happened so we were more then skeptical. 

As it turned out, this time there was a miracle patch. At launch, EQII still had plenty of problems with its design choices and gameplay but the lag that had made the final few weeks of beta more of a test of patience than anything else was completely gone.

While we're on the subject of the early days of EQII, I'll just shoehorn in a mention of the latest Producer's Letter, in which Jenn Chan reveals the new Time Limited Expansion server coming in May will be more of a Time Capsule, taking us all back to the heady days of 2006. I'll probably post about the letter and this server separately but I'll say now that it looks very interesting indeed. 

As Wilhelm and I commented in the thread following the story on MassivelyOP, the 2006 start puts the proposed cut-off date squarely in the post-Hartsman revamp era, when most of the really egregious design choices from the first few months had been swept away. That was EQII's real Golden Age for many, although I'm sure there will still be the usual rose-tinted, glass-half-full, sand-diving ostriches claiming it was better before.

Getting back to Once Human, though, having read a little around the current state of the game and the beta that's about to begin, I'm not sure how many of my reservations apply any more. The new build apparently includes a large number of changes from the one I played and indeed the entire structure of the game seems different from what I imagined it would be.

Among other things, the upcoming test introduces something called Eternaland. It's a permanent, instanced area in which players can free-build their own bases, hold parties, run events and so forth. So far, so good.

What's disturbing me is the reason such a zone needs to exist.

We’re hoping to offer all sorts of seasonal content and mechanics, as well as close the gap between players so more can team up and play together. So far, we’ve received lots of helpful feedback about the seasonal gameplay, such as how entering a new season could result in major item loss, how some felt disappointed when homes they’d built got destroyed, or how some felt it was too abrupt to go straight from one season to the next.  

Uh... yeah? I'd feel a darn sight more than "disappointed" if I logged in one day and found the house I'd spent the last couple of months working on had been razed to the ground! Or that all the gear I'd worked on upgrading had vanished into the void.

I was aware that Once Human is marketing itself as an MMOFPS not an MMORPG and I vaguely understand that's a genre with different practices and expectations. I'm also familiar with the concept of Seasons that reset progress, putting everyone back on a level playing field to start over.

What I hadn't realized was the anyone was suggesting the entire game would keep re-setting. That makes it sound more like the failed experiment that was Crowfall than something like Destiny, which morphed into Destiny 2 after a couple of years and made everyone begin over again. A hard restart on a schedule measured in years is probably manageable. One that happens every few months would be a lot more problematic.

The Eternalands concept looks like a decent compromise. It'd mean putting all the real effort into base building there and just living in minimal accomodation in the open world, which I can see having issues of its own, but it's certainly better than being wiped out entirely every few weeks.

The good part is that these are clearly real beta tests in which substantive changes based on both metrics and player feedback can and will be made. I'm quite excited to get in and start poking around to see what's changed since last time. I hear it's a lot.

Despite my keen curiosity, some of the same concerns over spoiling my future fun remain. I'm going to have to be careful not to go at it too hard, not only because of what over-exposure might do to my future prospects with the game but also because I would very much like to keep my seat on the EverQuest II train now I've caught up with it again.

All I need now is for the Once Human beta to finally open the doors and let me in.

I think I'll take Beryl for a walk and see if it's up when I get back.

Footnote #1 

From Discord:

1. The PC test server will go live on Friday April 5, 2024 3am.

2. The 150,000 character creation cap is removed for the first 24 hours after the server goes live. However, if this cap is exceeded on the first day, access keys will be required for new players starting from Saturday April 6, 2024 3am. This change does not affect returning players from the previous CBT2, who can access CBT3 at any time, but it does limit the total number of character creations to 150,000.

Times given are GMT, I think...

Is It That Time Already?

It's probably about time for a quick update on how things are going in EverQuest II.. Past time, really. I'd normally have put up something about this Summer's Producer's Letter when it came out a week ago but as Wilhelm suggested in his post, there wasn't all that much to say.

There was the part about rolling another three expansions into the free-to-play offer. That surprised me a bit but only because I thought the whole thing already worked on a rolling "two expansions behind the current one" plan, whereby a new-old expansion opened up for F2P every time a new-new one went on sale. 

I suppose that would be far too simple and straightforward for a F2P plan; not just EQII's - anyone's. Ever since the concept of giving the game away then clawing the cash back somehow took over the genre, there's been a drive to make the whole process as fiddly, complicated and annoying as possible, for obvious reasons.

Four legs good, six legs better. My new Familiar

It's been a while since I played EQII for free. For years I was in the peculiar position of paying a subscription for an account that I rarely used while playing full-time as a F2Per on another. I won't rehash the convoluted chain of circumstances that led to such an  idiosyncratic, not to say idiotic, choice. Suffice to say I eventually swapped the sub over to the account I was actually using and managed for once not to mess it all up again. Well, on EQII, at least. Different story when I was playing EverQuest at the same time but we'll gloss over that...

Due to the way the both the game and I have changed over the years, it seems unlikely I'd ever go back to playing multiple accounts. I do still, very occasionally, log in on my old ex-sub account or even one of the half-dozen other F2P accounts I made for... reasons. My days of logging in multiple characters on multiple accounts just to get free items or do holiday events are (Almost certainly...) over.

That kind of behavior is and always has been a significant aspect of EQII culture, though. My handful of accounts and couple of dozen regularly-played characters were evidence of restraint and self-control by the prevailing standards of the playerbase at one time and I don't believe all that much has changed. I knew people who did all the new holiday content for every festival, every year, on every character, on multiple accounts. Some people had characters on every server and worked hard to keep all of them current. 

It still goes on, although the way the levelling path was narrowed to a single track a few years ago, making it mandatory to gain all of your xp from the main questline in the latest expansions, put a crimp in many peoples' desire to run a huge stable of adventuring alts. Nothing's really changed for crafters and decorators, though, and they were always the demographic most likely to run multiple accounts and play scores of characters.

Didn't I get this letter last year?

I'd like to think I'm well past my own dabbling with such behavior. Ironically, now I'm semi-retired I seem to find a lot less time to play video games. Not sure how that's happened. Still, I have been making time to work on the Summer Jubilee content, specifically the new Plume slot. 

The Scorched Sky Celebration holiday ends today and I just ran the repeatable Summer Jubilee dungeon again, right before I started this post. I'm not sure how many times I've done it but I must be closing in on the ten runs needed for the first Plume. I'll certainly finish that off when the third and final summer holiday, Oceansfull, arrives in August but I don't think there's much chance I'll get the twenty runs needed for the upgraded version.

There were a few other things I wanted to during Scorched Sky but I haven't gotten around to doing any
of them. I started the big, centerpiece dungeon but I didn't finish it and now I'd have to start again, which was never going to happen. I've done all of it before and anyway it'll be back next year, so my motivation is not the highest.

I've blown my chance for this year, anyway. The game is down for "Extended Maintenance" today, after which Scorched Sky will have gone. EQII usually  patches or resets on a Tuesday but this week it's Wednesday and instead of the usual couple of hours, it's going to be down all day. 

The extensive patch notes mostly cover a sweeping upgrade to the Epic abilities that were a cornerstone of last year's Renewal of Ro expansion. Needless to say, I haven't even glanced at those. I have no clue how you get them let alone what they were before the patch or why they needed to be improved. 

I'm increasingly of the opinion that trying to keep up to date as a solo player in EQII is a mug's game. It's rarely necessary for anything I do and even when it is I can't ever get ahead. New rungs get added to the vertical progression ladder so frequently it makes a lot of sense to skip one or two, then clamber up over them later. 

This is the first year for a good while that I haven't finished the main expansion Adventure quest and it's clarified something I'd been wondering about for a while. Every year we get the Panda quests that reward a full set of armor, weapons, accessories and augments that upgrade the main questline rewards from the previous expansion. Then, when the new expansion drops, now only a few weeks later, since the Panda quests got moved to Autumn, we get a full set of upgrades to the Panda stuff in the Tishan's Box next to the first questgiver.

This instance has been a great source of crafting books.

It never made much sense to me until now but I finally realize it allows sluggards like me to overgear and finish the solo content from the outgoing expansion before the incoming one arrives. There are a number of reasons why you might want to do that; rewards and perks other than gear, various flags set on your character for future content etc. etc. Plus it's just tidy to finish up the last one before starting the next.

Mostly, new expansions start clean, but there's always some crossover and the leg-up right at the end allows for a smoother transition. In previous years I haven't needed to think about that but this year it seems like something I'd appreciate. That's my current theory for why it's the way it is, anyway.

The patch notes had a few amusing lines I'm going to share. I always enjoy a good, snarky patch note.

Call to home now functions correctly for those that call a dirty cave in the ground their home "city".

I think that's a dig at Betrayal, the questline that allows you to change faction from Freeport to Qeynos or vice versa. I did it once, a very long time ago, and I seem to remember that for a while you are stateless and have to skulk in a hole with minimal facilites until you re-align with your new city-state. Or it could be Gorowyn. I never liked Gorowyn.

Corrected an issue where the Replica: Wanted Poster wanted to be a guild amenity, and would vanish from homes after being placed. It now wants to be where it is wanted, instead of where it wanted to want to be.

And now I want to know how you get a Replica: Wanted Poster. Going to have to look into that.

Newly created illusionists once again have a sharp pokey thing to stick into those that annoy them. Or do they? Maybe it's all a figment of your imagination?

I've never played an Illusionist past about level 30. Maybe that's something I ought to try. I like poking things with sticks.

Oh, yeah! I was going to do this one, too! Too late now.

Looking ahead, there's another major Update in September and I haven't even started the content from the last one. It was too tough so I gave up. My spirit animal is Bart Simpson. Also, see my earlier comments about the steepness of vertical progression in this game. I probably could give the instance from the last GU another try, now I have the gear from running the Summer Jubilee dungeon, which I'm very happily cheesing using the mentoring system. Shame that doesn't work for the regular instances.

And finally, there's all the great charity work EQII and Darkpaw do, namely Extra Life and Daybreak Games' Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion initiative. I know all the big gaming companies like us to know how socially aware they are but I find Daybreak and especially Darkpaw more convincing than most. Let's hope that doesn't come back to bite me...

There's probably more that I've forgotten but as Wilhelm said at the end of his post on the same topic, the world keeps on turning. We'll be back here again soon enough, talking about the Autumn/Winter Producer's Letter, by which time I'd expect us to know the name and theme of this year's expansion.

It'll be more desert. I'm calling that now.

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.