Bring The Jubilee

It's technically still Spring, although the weather outside is telling me it's Summer already. The EverQuest II team must think so too because they just announced their plans for this year's Summer Jubilee and they're awesome!

Okay, maybe not awesome because it's not 1992 and EQ2 doesn't have a 90210 Zip Code but summer in the Shattered Lands is looking pretty darn cool, let's just say that much. 

No, wait, no, not cool. That's just confusing. Um... fire, maybe? Okay, that's just as bad, but in the other direction.

Bitchin'? The cat's miaow? 

Erm...this isn't helping, is it?

Minus the confusing and chronologically-challenged slang, Summer Jubilee looks like it's going to be lots of fun. The event brings the three big seasonal holidays - Tinkerfest, Scorched Sky and Oceansfull - together under one, big holiday banner, stretching all the way from the beginning of  June to the end of August. 

The EQ2i wiki, once an absolute authority on just about everything that you could possibly need to know about the game, has been slipping of late. The Live Events Timeline there makes no mention of the Summer Jubilee at all. Worse, it still has Scorched Sky in June and Tinkerfest in August, whereas they actually swapped places last year.

For the most up-to-date information you're always better off looking at the in-game calendar but if you want to check out of game I'd recommend EQ2 Traders Corner, which these days has the considerable advantage of being run by the game's dedicated (In all senses.) tradeskill developer, Naomi Denmother. There, you'll find the dates neatly tabulated:

• Tinkerfest — June 5, 2023 to June 21, 2023
• Scorched Sky Celebration — June 29, 2023 to July 12, 2023
• Oceansfull Festival — August 10, 2023 to August 23, 2023

In fact, now I come to look at it closely, that's even clearer than the official Calendar, which has to cope with two events happening at the same time. So maybe go to EQ2Traders first. I don't know... I'm sure you can work it out!

The full details of what's new for the individual events are still under wraps but there's some exciting news about the new content that runs across the whole summer. First, we're getting a new equipment slot: Plume.

The Plume slot allows you to equip an item that gives you some very big bonuses to one of your choice of three key stats: Ability Doublecast, Crit Bonus or Max Health Percentage. You can obtain these by doing Summer Jubilee content but once you get one, you also get a recipe that lets you craft more. 

As the illustrations show, the stats are hefty enough to be useful even at Level 1 but of course you can level them up as the event goes on. If you're one of those strange people who actually play with others in MMORPGs, it gets even better:

 "When grouped the power of your Plume will be amplified by how many other group or raid members are also using a Plume."

Not only that but 

"The power your Plume gains is based on the tier of your Plume, so even groupmates that have not yet unlocked the best tier of Plume will contribute fully to the amplification effect of everyone in the group or raid."

It seems like a well-designed, well thought-out addition to the game to me but of course, this being EQII, the initial reaction on the forums is one of deep suspicion. One annoyingly persistent Debbie Downer (2004 says Hi!) wanted to know if this was just another way Daybreak planned to screw more money out of the players:

"Also, could you tell us if this new system will be monetized like the merc, mount familiar? Or will it be an extra item simply lootable via quests or achiev ? Basically, is this implementation only the beginning of a new cash system planned later? Like seeing op plume in crates, pushing players and raids to look into it, After a well-crafted hook? "

Naomi Denmother, employing the infinite patience for which she is so well-known, while no doubt wishing she could clout the Moaning Minnie (1942 says Hello!) with her rolling pin, explained that it was none of those things:

"No. This is an event slot, for participating in holiday events. It is 100% meant to be a fun, attainable item. Let's please not remove everyone's fun and enthusiasm with such speculations on the first day it is announced."

I very nearly signed in to alert the complainers to Wilhelm's excellent post about the current attempt by minority EG7 shareholder Alta Fox Capital Management to force the whole group, Daybreak included, into a series of moves designed to wring every last dime out of the games before they toss the empty carcasses onto the pile of corpses left by the rest of the late-capitalist leeches and move on, like the vultures they are, to the next victim. For all that EQII players think they're being screwed over now, they'll be looking back at this as some kind of Golden Age, when the bastards get their way.

Or if. Let's go with "if". If there's one thing the last decade or so has shown us, it's that Jason Epstein and whoever else is in charge over there really don't like to let too much light into the room. I'm guessing Daybreak has ended up tucked safely under the wing of the Swedish regulatory authorities through something more than pure happenstance. If the games have any protection, it's probably that.

At least we can hope so. Meanwhile, we can just play the damn games and enjoy ourselves. Well, some of us can.

Getting back to the joys and pleasures of an EQII summer, the other significant feature highlighted in the announcement is this:

 "Summer Jubilee Dungeon – Triad of Elements - Opening once Tinkerfest goes live is a new solo dungeon called, Triad of Elements. Whether you’re level 1 or 125, this dungeon is open to all and can be repeatedly completed throughout each Summer Jubilee in-game event... head in and farm to your heart’s delight... the loot that drops will be level-appropriate every time"

A new solo dungeon is always welcome, especially a scaling dungeon that you don't have to be a subscriber to access and that drops loot. Whether it's loot worth having, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Also whether running it gives decent xp below level 100 (It certainly won't after that but that's a diferent question). If it does, I have a level 60 whose going to be very interested.

The dungeon looks like it'll be the primary source of Silver Jubilee Medals, this year's summer event currency, as well as the way you'll upgrade your Plume. The medals can be spent at the appropriate Jubilee merchants, who've added twenty-two new items to their stock, including a dog pet and a mount, species unspecified.

Well, unspecified in the official forum post, that is. If you'd care to look at that EQ2 Traders post I linked earlier, however, you'll find an absolute wealth of detail, including a full list of those twenty-two new items, with pictures. The mount is a "Parade Roan Stallion" and it's an appearance ground mount , which means I probably won't use it. These days you'd pretty much have to be a dedicated roleplayer to use a ground mount, I think.

The dog, though, looks fun and I could find plenty of uses for some of those house items. EQ2 Traders has a full list of how to get the medals needed to buy them (Do all the quests, basically, then keep running that dungeon if they're not enough or if you hate doing quests, in which case boy, are you playing the wrong game...)

There's also a clear explanation of how to upgrade the Plume (Do the dungeon ten times.) and how to get an even better Plume than that (Do it ten times more so you can buy an upgrade from the in-game vendor.) Also, the crafted Plumes aren't quite as good as the quested ones, presumably for reasons.

I'm very happy with all of that. It seems like a much more egalitarian system than the Summer Ethereals it replaces and the 2023 event looks like a good iteration on the inaugaural version from last year. About the only thing I really wish was different would be for the Plume to be a display slot. It'd be so great to be able add a Plume you could actually see to your hat! 

Or maybe that's just me.

LFG? That's So Old School!

In a post about how he prefers playing ARPGs over MMORPGs these days, Belghast gave as one of the reasons the advent of "an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay". That surprised me somewhat. I'd have said the genre was still moving relentlessly in the opposite direction.

It's certainly true that there's been a proliferation of projects claiming to represent  a return to a lost golden age, a time when clearing even the smallest camp of Kobolds required a party of six, but all of those games are coming from independents, often with very small teams and limited resources. Most haven't even reached beta after years of development behind closed doors.

The last AAA MMORPG from a major games company that I can remember would be Amazon Games' New World, which I would say was very heavily focused on solo play. It has group play, of course, for both PvP and PvE, and at launch the main storyline included a fair amount of required group content, but changes patched in since have aimed to remove many of those roadblocks to soloing and open up more of the game to those with no taste for group play.

This, I would say, has been the trend for many years now and I can't say I've seen much sign of it slowing down, far less going into reverse. As Tipa reported recently, Final Fantasy XIV, or example, either the biggest or the second-biggest MMORPG in Western markets, depending who you believe, has been following a stated policy of  converting what was originally a group-required game into a group-optional MMORPG by re-working the entire core storyline to be playable with NPC henchmen instead of other players.

I rarely play Elder Scrolls Online, another of the more successful games in the West, but as I understand it from those who do, most of the content is readily soloable. Guild Wars 2's gameplay is based almost entirely on a kind of all-pile-on form of auto-grouping that effectively turns every encounter into solo-with-friends. Granted, ArenaNet did their best to retrofit a form of closed-group, instanced content into the model in the form first of Fractals, then Raids but both remain niche activities within the wider game.

About the only major mmorpg in Western markets that seems bent on forcing people into formal groups these days is World of Warcraft, a highly ironic trajectory for the game that was once seen as having opened the genre up for solo play. Given the extent to which WoW's playerbase appears to have contracted over the years, it's hard to imagine that choice being widely copied in the way the game's earlier, more accessible approach very much was.

As for the never-ending stream of imported games from China and South Korea, are there many - or any - that "force" players to group? There might be. I find it hard to say because although I regularly try these games out, I very rarely stick with them long enough to reach the level cap. What I can say with some authority is that if grouping is required there, it's not during the levelling process itself, which is pretty much universally a solo affair.

Of course, this is where my definition of soloing and Bel's may well differ. From everything I read on his blog, he consumes content orders of magnitude more quickly than I do and reaches the endgame far sooner, whereupon he runs into roadblocks to solo play I will never see. Playstyle heavily affects one's perception of how soloable an MMORPG feels.

As I've said many times, I always found EverQuest to be an excellent solo game, even back at the turn of the millennium. I'd been playing for a couple of years, very happily, before I ever really began to group as my main playstyle. I always found it very easy to set myself goals I could achieve without anyone else's help and I managed to keep myself very well-entertained for upwards of thirty hours a week just pottering around Norrath on my own.

That's not to say I never joined a group in those days. I often did but it was always my choice. I never felt the game forced me to group or even pushed me heavily in that direction. Grouping, even in EQ in 2000, was just another on a long list of interesting things you could do with your time, if and when you felt like it.

Thinking of the other immediately post-WoW mmorpgs I've played, from Star Wars: the Old Republic to Lord of the Rings Online to Rift to Wildstar, I get the feeling that the more grimly they hung on to the old concept of forced grouping, the worse they fared. What I remember from all of them is a perpetual retrenchment towards ever more accessiible content, requiring less and less commitment to any kind of formal group structure.

Even a game like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which modeled itself heavily on the original EverQuest, quickly shifted from a must-group policy to something far more lenient, although not soon enough to save itself. It remains to be seen how that game's spiritual successor, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen (Whose very name mirrors it's immediate ancestor.) will negotiate a path between the stated desire of players for group content and a commercial reality in which that often turns out to be the self-same thing that drives potential customers into the arms of less socially-demanding titles.

I'm wondering now if any of the numerous retro-revivalist mmorpgs we've seen Kickstarter campaigns or heard reports of funding rounds and capital investments for have actually launched. It's hard to be sure. I can't remember the names of many and anyway "launch" is such a flexible concept these days.

It's also quite a difficult topic to research. There's no widely-accepted term for these kinds of projects and searching for "new old-school mmorpgs" or "new retro-mmorpgs" mostly brings up lists of actual old games that are still running, of which there are many. I could comb through MMORPG.com's exhaustive list of titles or scan the Steam charts or page back through a couple of years of MassivelyOP news reports but life's too short for all that. We have AI now!

I asked the three big players, Bard, ChatGPT and Bing:

"Can you list all the in-development, early access, alpha, beta or just recently launched MMORPGS that claim to offer an "old school" or "retro" or "golden age" experience?"

The results were not particularly helpful but, at least in the first two cases, they were extensive.

Bard came up with a list of eighteen titles, conveniently alphebetized and bullet-pointed:

• Ashes of Creation
• Aura Kingdom 2
• Classic EverQuest
• Classic World of Warcraft
• Dofus Retro
• EverQuest II: Project 1999
• Lost Ark
• Mabinogi
• Old School RuneScape
• Peria Chronicles
• Project Gorgon
• RuneScape
• Ultima Online
• Valheim
• Vindictus
• Wakfu
• WoW Classic
• Zenith: The Last City

It then went on to offer a brief description of each of them, along with some of its usual, chatty commentary, signing off with "I hope this list helps you find the perfect MMORPG to scratch that old school itch." Bard really does want to be your AI pal.

Of the eighteen, I'd say only Project Gorgon really counts. It meets all the criteria in the prompt, being both an original mmorpg modelled on old-school gameplay and still being in Early Access. Old School Runescape, WoW Classic and Dofus Retro also sort of count but only because I didn't frame the prompt quite specifically enough to exclude actual revivals of older games.

The rest are either just old mmorpgs that are still running or don't seem to meet any of the criteria at all. The only one I've never heard of before is Zenith: The Last City, which isn't surprising because it's a VR game. It looks to be a standard mmorpg, not particularly retro. I'm kind of surprised we haven't heard more about it.  

ChatGPT offered me ten titles in a numbered list with brief descriptions of every game:

1. Ashes of Creation - This game is currently in development and claims to offer a unique and immersive MMORPG experience with a focus on player choice and agency.

2. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - This game is currently in development and aims to provide a classic MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on group play, challenging content, and a strong sense of community.

3. Crowfall - This game is currently in beta and offers a hybrid of MMORPG and strategy gameplay with a focus on player-driven worlds and intense PvP combat.

4. New World - This game was recently launched and offers a survival-focused MMORPG experience with a heavy emphasis on exploration, crafting, and player vs. player combat.

5. Legends of Aria - This game is currently in early access and provides a sandbox MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on player freedom and customization.

6. Gloria Victis - This game is currently in early access and offers a medieval MMORPG experience with a strong emphasis on realistic combat, crafting, and open-world exploration.

7. Fractured - This game is currently in alpha and offers a unique blend of traditional MMORPG mechanics and sandbox gameplay with a focus on player-driven content and exploration.

8. Camelot Unchained - This game is currently in development and aims to provide a traditional MMORPG experience with a heavy focus on large-scale PvP battles, player-driven economies, and deep crafting systems.

9. Starbase - This game is currently in early access and offers a sci-fi MMORPG experience with a heavy emphasis on player-driven economies, spaceship building, and exploration.

10. Project Gorgon - This game is currently in early access and offers a classic MMORPG experience with a focus on exploration, discovery, and deep crafting systems.

Crowfall is not in beta. It launched and then closed. It's in some form of undefined limbo right now. Legends of Aria was de-listed from Steam and is currently unavailable. Fractured was in Early Access but has now returned to closed development for technical reasons.

The rest seem like reasonable responses to the prompt, although I'd question whether Ashes of Creation or New World really count as "old school" or "retro". 

And finally, good old Bing. Bing really doesn't like to work up much of a sweat. Where Bard gave me eighteen possibilities and ChatGPT managed ten, Bing stopped trying after just three - but at least they weren't the most obvious three!

1. Ravendawn
2. Old School Runescape 
3. Aether Story 

Well, okay, Old School Runescape was obvious. I think literally having the words "Old School" in the name may have biased the results, so all credit to ChatGPT for not being drawn in to the easy option there.

I'd never heard of either Ravendawn or Aether Story, which turns out to be because they're both 2D, overhead perspective games and I pay no attention to those whatsoever. They do seem to match the general profile, though, and you can't get much more old school or retro than 2D top down gameplay.

All of which proves nothing much except that the current crop of AIs really don't make very good research assistants. In the absence of further evidence, I'm going to stick to my assertion that we aren't currently going through an era, or even a moment, where forced grouping is either the norm or a growing trend.

If anyone would care to offer the necessary evidence to refute that assertion, I'd be very interested to consider it.

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.

And Stay Down!

 It only took me six months but I finally did it. I killed Vorigan Mistmoore.

What? You haven't heard of him? No reason you should have, if I'm honest. He's hardly the most famous of the Mistmoore clan. That would be Mayong, the one with his own zone in both EverQuest and EverQuest II.

Vorigan is some kind of relative. There was some mention of it in the conversation after I went back to tell Tavian Faust, the vampire who sent me to kill Vorigan in the first place, but I wasn't really paying attention. 

I seem to remember some kind of warning about not going up against Mayong for a while since he might not be happy I'd just killed two of his children but I really wasn't taking much in. I was still reeling from the exhillaration of having finally gotten past the fight that's stymied me since January.

It's not as if Vorigan's even the final boss in the Visions of Vetrovia Signature questline. That is Mayong Mistmoore. Of course it is. He's up next in the final confrontation, Eyes on Vacrul Throne, the twelfth episode of a thirteen part epic, the thirteenth being a debriefing with Antonia Bayle back in Qeynos.

I know that because after I did the hand-in I read ahead on the wiki to see what came next, hoping the whole thing was nearly over. Until then I'd barely looked at it, other then to check strats on some of the bosses.

I checked Vorigan's strats a dozen times and it helped me not at all. EQII no longer attracts a lot of detailed commentary so information is hard to find. The wiki is still admirably up-to-date but if you need a second opinion, you might struggle.

 

The walkthrough for Vorigan did have plenty of detail. It just didn't help me much. Or at all, really. The full instructions for fighting him are:

• Hail the named to start fight. Interrupts can be used to stop his casting.
• Bloody Buffet - Run over the blood boils that appear to remove his incremental stoneskin.
• Vampiric Hemorrhage - Joust out of range or use an interrupt when he casts. If it hits you there is a knockback and a fast-acting trauma that will kill you if not cured very quickly.
  • Seems to be preceded by him leaping into the air. An interrupt at this point works nicely.
  • Staying near the far wall may help. However the knockback throws you in random directions, sometimes while in mid-air, so is very hard to correct for

I managed the "Hail the named" part just fine. After that things didn't go quite so smoothly. 

The first few times, back in January, I spent most of the fight being punted across the cavern, often dying before I even hit the ground. If I managed to avoid that, my Mercenary would inevitably die instead, cutting off the flow of healing but more importantly removing my main option for those essential trauma cures.

I tried bringing my own cure trauma potions. I tried putting my back to the wall. I tried jousting out of range. I tried interrupting Vorigan's casts. None of it worked. I can't remember how many times I died, back at the begining of the year, but it was a lot. 

Eventually I gave up, intending to wait until either I'd geared up sufficiently to overpower the script or someone posted a strat that worked.

Over the months I tried a couple of times with no better luck, then today, as I was swapping out several pieces of gear for upgrades from the new Scorched Skies dungeon, it occured to me my Bruiser must now be "geared up sufficiently" to give it another crack. 

So I did. And died nine times in a row. 

I know it was nine because I'd just repaired to full before I went in and I had to use a repair kit when my armor was at 10%. In the end I think it was ten or eleven deaths because I died a couple more times after that, before I finally got it right.

I also watched two YouTube videos of the fight. Yes, there are two. I was surprised as well. Neither of them really helped. 

One has no commentary at all, which is a shame because the person who made it clearly has some kind of strategy that works. He runs into the large pools of blood and stands there and nothing seems to hurt him. I tried that. I died.

The other is a guide of sorts. There's no narration but there are notes. It's helpful but unfortunately the character doing the fighting is so overgeared for solo content, Vorigan barely gets to show off his tricks.

Best loot of the day and it's from the holiday event.

After I'd watched it a couple of times, I noticed, on the one occasion the named does his emote and casts his fatal dot, the player was indeed able to joust comfortably out of range. That didn't depend on gear, just on observation and timing.

I'd tried it several times and it had gone horribly wrong but I had been panicking, running recklessly in random directions, assuming the range of the spell was large enough to reach most of the platform. Maybe it wasn't so big as all that.

I tried again and the merc died and then I died but I could see it might work. It ought to work. This isn't some super-difficult fight that everyone dreads. If it was, even given the age of the game and the corresponding lack of attention it gets, there would certainly be threads on the forum complaining about how unfair it is and demanding it be nerfed. There are none.

Clearly other people haven't been roadblocked by Vorigan the way I have. The two videos suggest there are multiple ways to beat him. My character is easily powerful enough. The sub-bosses in the rest of the instance are absolute pushovers for him now and he can comfortably handle the newer instances that have been added since, all of which are objectively tougher.

Even the issues I was having back in January, where for some reason I couldn't get the camera scrolled back far enough to read the emotes needed to judge the timing, have vanished. I could see and read them perfectly this time around.

Nope, I'm afraid to say there was only one thing getting in the way: lack of skill. The answer to that is usually "Git gud." So I did.

Well, kinda. I concentrated, used my brain, stopped panicking (as much) and took my time. I watched for the emotes, kept my eye on the boss instead of my hot keys and generally played properly for a change. 

Can't say I enjoyed it. Certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time. But it worked. Each time Vorigan went to cast his big spell I didn't waste time trying to interrupt or hit him one last time. I just jousted out of range, backpedalling so I could watch the progress of his animation. And it worked.

The up-gearing helped a lot. My Bruiser's dps is much better than it was six months ago, meaning I only had to dodge two or three casts. I also took the trouble to read all the descriptions of his combat arts, which reminded me he has a trauma cure and several self-heals that I'd completely forgotten about, although in the event the winning fight was one where my merc actually managed to keep herself alive, so I didn't need to use them.

I'm hoping the final instance won't contain any nasty surprises like Vorigan. It shouldn't. In the whole of the VoV Signature line, he's the only one who's given me any serious problems and I'm fairly sure now that most of those were of my own making.

I'm going to give it a couple of days at least before I carry on. Even if I manage to complete the Sig Line this week, that will make it the longest I've ever taken to complete one since they were made soloable a decade or so ago. Not counting the couple of years I was playing catch-up and didn't get the expansions when they came out, of course.

It'll be good to have it done before the warm-up for this year's expansion, anyway. Can't be too long before it begins. A couple of months, maybe.

Probably best not to think about that too much.

Method To Their Madness

No-one's playing New World any more, are they? I don't mean literally no-one. According to Steam's concurrency charts, just under twenty-four thousand people are playing right now. If we use the old estimate of two people logged out for every one logged in, that means New World has about as many players as EverQuest! I wonder how many will still be around in twenty-three years?

It's all too easy to rag on New World for the number of players the million-seller's lost in a just a few months but that's not what I'm here to do. When I said no-one plays it any more I was referring to us here in this corner of the blogosphere. When was the last time you read a post about New World from anyone?

It's not a reflection on the quality or success of New World as such - I could say exactly the same about Valheim, which I imagine we'd all agree is widely regarded as a more successful game. Iron Crown, though, is an indie. Different standards apply.

Valheim, as Wilhelm was saying only yesterday, has a very small team working on it. They work very slowly and carefully. As a result, all their updates work. There are very few issues or bugs with anything the team adds to the game. 

The whole thing looks quite exemplary, provided you're not in a hurry. It takes the the Valheim team many months to do anything at all and when they do add something new to the game it's usually so small or so specific it hardly seems worth patching up to check it out. 

Consequently, Valheim rests in a sort of virtuous limbo. Exactly a year ago a whole lot of us were playing almost nothing else. A year on, most of us seem either to have forgotten about it altogether or decided to wait until it's done before deciding if we're still interested enough to start over.

New World has a very much larger team behind it and they seem to work frenziedly fast. There have been plenty of updates, adding new content and changing systems and mechanics. Unlike Valheim, New World's updates have not always gone well nor been favorably received. At times it's seemed as though every new patch has created more bugs than it's fixed, mostly because it did.

I could go into detail about the changes that have already been made but why would I do that when Tyler F. M. Edwards has done it for me? What I did want to talk about, very briefly, were a few of the things in today's huge Heart of Madness update that Tyler didn't mention but which were enough, when I saw them in the extensive patch notes, to make me fire up GeForce Now and log in. Before I realised the patch was postponed until tomorrow, that is. Like that's going to make it bug free!

There's a whole lot of endgame stuff that I'm sure the game desperately needs. There's a new weapon that everyone's probably excited to try. There's a boatload of bug fixes and systems tweaks that will no doubt require their own fixes and tweaks in due course. I don't want to draw attention to any of that or at least not in this post.

No, what caught my attention were the sections headed "World Additions - Rewarding Exploration", along with a number of lines I spotted here and there in the rest of the notes. Notes which are, as I suggested, seriously long and extremely detailed.

Here are some highlights:

World Paintings - Vista Views 

Two easels can be found in each territory. Upon interacting with these easels, players will be given a painting of the view for their house. If a player loses their painting they can reacquire it by visiting the same easel again 24 hours later.

 Rafflebones the loot collector!

Rafflebones rummages around Aeternum for lost treasures and goods. He will spawn all around the map at various levels in every territory. When players encounter Rafflebones they will have 45 seconds to kill him in order to get rewards or else he’ll flee! Players will always be awarded a named weapon.

 Stinky the Hunter

Stinky the Legendary Hunter can be found wandering around the swamps of Weaver's Fen throughout the day, while at night he retreats to his humble abode. Stinky can drop three named items for level 30 players

Roadside Encounters

New random roadside encounters can be found along routes in Weaver's Fen and Restless Shores.

There's a fair bit more along those lines. The exciting thing for me is that it's new content for a range of levels, not just at the cap and it involves house items and random, roaming monsters. Two of my favorite things! Whether I think it's good content or not will have to wait until I have the chance to do it for myself but on paper I'd have to say the World Paintings sound like absolute genius.

I was also very happy to read the following:

New soloable quest options are available for the MSQ to allow players to progress without running certain expeditions. 

 Removed the level threshold requirements from Main Story Quests. 

Again,  I'm going to have to see just which expeditions have been excised from the MSQ. It doesn't sound like it's all of them, which would be my preference. It's very much a move in the right direction, though.

I also liked 

 Players will get back half of the original purchase cost when abandoning a house.

Coupled with the heavy reductions to rental costs, this makes housing even more attractive than it already was. 

Back at the start of the year, Amazon indicated that they intended to make New World more rewarding for solo play. This looks like a good start. It's enough, at least, to make me interested in logging in again, something I haven't been able to say since the early days of the Winter Convergence festival. If nothing else I want those paintings for my house!

Hope You Like Our New Direction.

Here's a question we've all heard before. Should game developers tailor their games to the wishes, desires and behaviors of players, hoping to keep everyone happy by giving them what they want or should they follow their own vision and make the games they want to make, trusting in the quality of their work to draw and hold an audience?

From the end of the original closed alpha, Amazon Games have come down very firmly in the latter camp. Five years ago they announced they were going to make a "huge open-ended sandbox game set in archaic, seventeenth century colonial America" with free-for-all PvP. They said so, right here.

By the time the finished game reached us back at the tail end of this summer it had become a sandpark mmorpg with opt-in PvP, quest hubs, a story and full deniability on the embarassing colonial thing. They kept the cool armor and that was about all.

The closed alpha, about which we are still not supposed to talk, went rather well. The game looked good, played smoothly and by and large people seemed to have a good time. The territorial PvP was particularly popular. 

What a lot of people didn't seem so keen on was the almost total lack of anything to do other than roam around the woods and fight each other over forts. In the video linked above you can hear one of the developers proudly announce "the players are our content". It turned out the players had other ideas.

Over several years the game went through several iterations, each the result of a new round of exhaustive testing and feedback. In direct contrast to many similar projects over recent years, all of New World's test phases were genuine attempts to find out what worked and what didn't, both technically and conceptually.

It's long been the complaint of players testing in-development games that developers have set ideas on how things should go, that feedback is ignored, that the whole thing is really a marketing excercise not a real development process. New World, demonstrably, was not put together that way.

 

Feedback, of course, is only one source of data available to the developers of a new mmorpg. For a very long time now developers have also had access to extensive metrics that let them know what the players are doing to an extraordinary degree of detail. As evidenced by the occasional infographic that comes out of the marketing department, they can tell you exactly how many trees were chopped, how many boars skinned, how many hours spent crafting gloves.

What they may not be able to say with anything like the same certainty is why. It's long been a topic of debate in these circles whether developers understand that just because players spend a huge proportion of their time doing a thing doesn't mean it's a thing they like to do. 

A slavish dedication to metrics has the potential to lead development into a death spiral as the game seeks to give players more and more of what it is they're already doing, not understanding the reason they're doing it is to try to get to the point where they can stop. That's how endgames get so grindy no-one wants to play any more.

Conversely, if developers just pay attention to what players say they'd like to be doing with their time, there's the huge risk that they'll find themselves catering to desires that are both unrealistic and unreal. There's a long history of players insisting they want things to be a certain way and then complaining bitterly when they get exactly what they asked for. 

At this point it might sound as though I'm suggesting developers should ignore what their players are telling them and stick to their vision regardless of the vitriol. I'm not. That's how you get WildStar or, it seems, the current version of EVE. 

It comes down, I suppose, to intelligent analysis. Metrics, feedback and all the other sources of information are just data points. Someone has to collate and correlate and then come to a conclusion.

 

Whether that's happening at Amazon Games only those inside the company can say. When specific changes get made, developers do sometimes show their working but when it's more of a general course correction explanations tend to be thin on the ground.

There were some quite detailed explanations on show to back up the deeply unpopular changes to the way farming Elite chests in endgame areas was nerfed into oblivion but the reasoning behind the latest broad assertion on the direction the game will be taking comes with some vague handwaving and that's about all.

“Our goal is to keep responding to what players ask for, and feedback from players will continue to help shape New World’s direction.”

says Scott Lane, a "game director" at AGS in a recent interview with PCGamesN. 

And what they're asking for, it seems, is more solo content. 

“We know we have some work to do to improve the experience in the early-mid game (especially for solo players) and have already begun working on content to improve that experience.”

Said improvements focus on more "story-led quests" and alternate, less social ways to complete the ones already there.

“We are also continuing to add more quests for the early and mid-game players. New quest types are being added, and they will help unfold more of the mysteries of Aeternum. We understand that some players would like to focus more on solo gameplay, and we are doing more to make that viable through alternate quest lines, and more solo-supported gameplay.”

Whether you see this as a welcome and much-needed broadening of the game's accessibility and appeal or a disappointing betrayal of what credibility the game had left will no doubt depend heavily on your personal preferences and playstyle. Personally, the more soloable the game becomes, the more I'll enjoy it. 

If they'd just remove the dungeon stages from the main questline that would be a start. I'm all for grouping but not when it suddenly pops up in what was previously solo content, landing as a roadbock to progress. 

 

Despite my preferences, I'm a little surprised at this change of emphasis. New World is already a pretty solo-friendly game, at least as I understand the concept but then I forged my conception of solo play in EverQuest around the turn of the millennium so my definition may be a little out of date. If by "solo gameplay" Amazon means equal access to equivalent content for everyone, regardless of playstyle then, yes, I suppose there is some work to be done.

The danger is, there's an extent to which all of this is starting to look more like a social experiment than a game. The disenfranchised ffa pvp players are already kicking off about dedicated PvP servers (Which aren't coming. Yet) It's fine to course-correct but how many times can you swing the wheel without everyone falling over the side? 

New World was a big hit at launch, challenging concurrency records and hitting the headlines even outside the genre press but now all the traffic seems to be going the other way. From a peak not far short of a million players online at the same time, New World now looks to have shed almost all of them, bumping along at a mere... erm... hundred thousand or so - putting it still very solidly in the top ten most-played games on Steam.

If that's a disaster I imagine it's one a lot of developers would be very happy to own. As I've said before, timescales on all of this seem extraordinarily telescoped to me. For some reason there seems to be an expectation that to be deemed successful, new mmorpgs need to both find and hold a large audience from day one. Any slippage is immediately touted as the end of the game. Get out now, while you still can!

That's not how mmorpgs work. For every Tabula Rasa, which lasted less than a year and a half, there are dozens of Flyffs, the NA version of which will celebrate its sixteenth anniversary on Christmas Day. Even Wildstar lasted nearly four and a half years.

 

Amazon's extreme willingness to respond to player feedback looks likely to make the ongoing development of New World a bumpier ride than most. We can expect any number of lurches and mis-steps as the developers try to tack into the prevailing wind of player feedback. If there's one thing you can rely on players to be it's incoherent, inconsistent and contradictory in their desires. Okay, three things.

The correct response, in my opinion, isn't to jump ship but to go along for the ride. When the ship seems to have docked at an unfriendly harbor, maybe stay in your cabin until it ups anchor and heads for somewhere more clement. When it arrives there, go ashore and make the most of it. It probably won't last.

For the most part, these games don't go away. Neither do they stay the same. Sometimes they feel welcoming and fun, sometimes they feel alienating and unpleasant. Take the smooth, leave the rough. There are lots of other games. Go play something else then come back when your sub-demographic is being pampered. It will be, eventually.

I'm still having fun in New World although I'm only feeling the need to spend a couple of hours there most days. For me, the announcement of a renewed focus on solo play means I'm likely to stay longer and play more but it will, naturally, depend on just what that new, solo content involves. 

It's not as though the lack of stuff to do on my own was ticking me off to begin with. Other things annoy me a lot more, like the lack of playable races and the non-existent character customization. There's plenty Amazon could add or change that would excite me more than some new solo quests but for now I'll take what I can get.

Hubble Bubble...

This morning I thought I'd post something about EverQuest II's Toil and Trouble update, which dropped yesterday afternoon, my time. As usual, I'd forgotten it was coming. I only realised it had arrived when I went to log in to do my Overseer dailies and spotted the announcement on the login screen.

A word about EQII's scheduling and the way new content is announced: it's exemplary. It wasn't always that way but over the past couple of years or so the timeliness and accuracy of the information handed out by what must be a very small PR team has gotten better and better. We hear about updates in good time, with a drip feed of detail that allows some anticipatory interest to build, and then the updates themselves land exactly when they should.

For Toil and Trouble we not only got  a lore-rich narrative in classic Norrathian purple prose but someone even took the trouble to shoot a short video. It's not the most scintillating viewing but for a game of EQII's age and stature it's more a case of the dog walking on its hind legs - it doesn't need to be done well to impress. Judge for yourself.

Reading through the details, I felt fairly sure I wouldn't be getting all that far in the tunnels of the Vasty Deep. As usual, there are Solo, Heroic I and II and Raid versions, so in theory, as a reasonably well-appointed soloist, I ought to be confident of making some progress but the note at the end reads "Level predicated for players 120+". 

That's a little ominous in that there are no players "120+" only the flat 120 itself, that being the cap. I don't believe it means the instances wil remain relevant once we get the next round of level increases (which should be with the upcoming expansion) because that literally never happens. If you want to see all the content at leisure, all you ever have to do in EQII is wait a few months and it will conveniently trivialize itself to suit your needs.

If you want to take it straight out of the box, though, it's a different matter. The solo instance boasts six bosses and I guessed I'd be lucky to down the first of them. In the event I was overating my ability.

To begin with I had to find the way in, which wasn't difficult. It's in the promo piece and the patch notes ("A new portal added to Somborn in Loping Plains will provide dungeon access") and you get mail in game, too. 

I popped up the Instant Travel map, ported over to the Loping Plains druid ring, flew over the werewolves and undead to the doomed village of Somborn. There I found a crowd of people clustered around Dr. Arcana, who was loitering next to something that looked uncannily like a giant, green jelly fruit.

Dr. Arcana. Now there's a name. Just who is he? I have absolutely no idea. When did he first appear? Search me. What's his agenda? Damned if I know. He's always there, though, isn't he? Ushering us into strange instances, asking odd questions then handing out gifts. Do you trust him? I don't.

I took the solo daily and weekly from him anyway, with no real expectation of completing either. I was mostly curious to see how long I'd survive. I won't attempt to build up the suspense. I got as far as the first boss, who was at the back of the first room. 

Honestly, I felt pretty pleased with myself for getting that far. All the mobs were level 127. Some were linked in pairs and each of the pairs had pets. There were also some mimics disguised as crates, one of which I bumped into unawares on the ramp down from the entrance just as a roaming werewolf was walking up to meet me.I fought a lot of mobs and although it came close a few times I never dropped.

Before I went in there'd been a conversation in map chat where someone asked plaintively what they were doing wrong in the Heroic I instance. They and their static group had gone in and taken an hour to kill the first mob, after which, unsurprisingly, they'd given up.

In the discussion that followed, to which I contributed because apparently I still haven't learned to keep my mouth shut even when I don't know what I'm talking about, details of several key stats were requested and provided, paricularly Potency and Crit Bonus. I was pleased to find that mine were very much better than those of the hapless, would-be Hero. As several people pointed out, you'd be crazy to set foot in a Heroic instance with stats like that.

Even I know that much but it's a key factor in why EQII is perhaps the most at-risk of all the games EG7 picked up with their purchase of Daybreak Games. Tipa posted a fascinating analysis of Google Trends for mmorpgs the other day and EQII barely registered a blip. Even among the Daybreak titles she tracked (DCUO, EverQuest, EQII, LotRO and DDO), EQII came flat last.

EverQuest II is a fantastic game but it's also so fantastically convoluted after fifteen years that even regular players don't really understand it any more. Most mmorpgs are resistant to new and returning players but for EQII the barriers to entry block out the sky. Someone as experienced and determined as Stargrace can, with considerable effort, force open the battleship steel doors and begin to make progress but most just bounce. Hard.

Post the EG7 purchase we've seen encouraging signs, not just of life but of fresh enthusiasm, in most of the Daybreak games. New things are being tried, some of which might even result in new players. For EQII to follow suit I feel there needs to be a more wide-ranging re-invention. 

This is a game that could appeal to a broad, casual audience if only it would play to its strengths - the best housing in the genre and very probably the best collectibles too, a deep and satisfying crafting system, a huge, well-realised open world filled with whimsy, some great holidays... all the kinds of things to appeal to a more casual, less combat-focused demographic.

Unfortunately, the installed base the game has consists primarily of jaded combat veterans whose main demands are more raids, harder dungeons and longer grinds. And it's not as though pandering to that group pays dividends. They're some of the grumpiest, least-satisfied customers out there.

That said, the current team has done wonders at making all content accessible to all abilities. As I said earlier, almost everything ends up being soloable in the end and now there are solo versions from the outset. They're just too hard to solo! 

That's a little exaggerated. I was trying the new dungeon on its first day and I did get the first boss to half health on my first (and only) attempt. I know she one-shotted me with some ability she announced before she cast it because I read it back in the combat window while I was waiting for my rez sickness to wear off. 

I also know that if there was a guide or a walkthrough to follow, where someone explained what each boss did and how to counter it, I'd be able to get further, maybe all the way through to the final boss. I could, of course, knuckle down and learn those strats from first principles but I don't want to. It's not fun for me to do that.

It's a worrying sign that as yet there's no such walkthrough available. Not too long ago I would have expected one would be ready on opening day, always assuming the content had been on the Test server beforehand. Not any more.

I'll wait a while before I try Toil and Trouble again. If someone writes it up I'll see how far I get with the instructions to hand. Otherwise I'll come back and blitz it when I'm overlevelled or overgeared, which will be as soon as the expansion drops, if not when Yun Zi opens his coffers again this autumn.

That's one of the great things about EQII. It always waits until you're ready for it. I just wish it could find a way to make more people comfortable enough to hang around long enough to find that out.

It's Elemental: EverQuest

There's not an MMORPG out there that can touch EverQuest for putting the fear into you when you're trying to do something as simple as buy your new spells. Even in 2020, when death in Norrath has long lost its sting, just the thought of having to travel to an unknown zone to trade with an unfamiliar vendor is enough to bring the casual player out in a cold sweat.

I've been parsimonious with my purchases while I've been levelling up by way of the daily Overseer quests. In the comfort and safety in the Guild Lobby experience rolls in so fast, comparatively speaking, it seems wasteful to spend money on spells or gear I'll barely use.

Now I've started spending more and more time out hunting, though, I've been feeling increasingly sensitive about my under-developed abilities and my undercooked ambition. Mobs in the zones where I feel comfortable are drifting from light blue to green to grey. It doesn't really matter since the huge bulk of my xp comes from those Overseer quests and the weaker the mobs become, the easier it gets to bully them out of their dinner money.

Outgrowing a zone is still an uncomfortable feeling all the same. Even though the xp I'm missing is all but insignificant it still seems somehow wasteful not to be getting it. If I'm ever going to take the next step, I'll have to equip myself adequately for the adventure. Can't put it off forever.

I've already bought several batches of spells as I've gone along. I like to have the latest nukes and as a soloing mage I rely entirely on my elemental pet (well, that and my cleric mercenary, of course) so keeping up to date on summoning spells is crucial.

Magicians get four elemental pets, the traditional Earth, Air, Wind and Fire. At lower levels the usual choice is Earth, a tank with high hit points and the ability to root enemies to prevent them running away but somewhere in the fifties preference shifts to something that can also put out decent damage.

The fire pet, a ranged caster, is the go-to for magicians who group but soloists go for either air or water. Water has decent hit points and survivability and puts out very good damage. A lot of guides recommend it. Air, however, almost matches it in those departments but adds a frequent and effective stun. Stunning isn't quite as effective as rooting when it comes to stopping runners but it comes close. Air has been my choice for as long as I can remember.

The four pet spells cycle round in a regular five-level pattern, with the spare level being taken up by a generally useless spell called Monster Summoning that calls up a weak pet using the model of a random creature from the zone you happen to be in at the time. It's fun to play with but you learn pretty quickly not to trust that pet to do anything more challenging than follow you around and make heads turn.

The air pet, by chance or design, happens to be first in the cycle. At level 96 I took another trip to Shard's Landing. The first time I made that journey was an adventure in itself.  This time I made sure to pay the fee and take the simple, safe port from my Guild Hall.

I picked up the pet but the timing was a little unfortunate, co-inciding with a bonus xp weekend. Overseer xp rolled in faster than ever and the new pet didn't last me as long as I'd thought it would. A week or so later, in another deja vu journey, I was off again to Katta Castellum: Deluge.

I'd made all my mistakes the first time around so those expeditions went as uneventfully as you'd wish. I bought the next air pet, along with some my key spells for several levels ahead while I was there. Then I ported  back and spent the next couple of weeks enjoying the fruits of my minimal labors.

Inbetween hunts I idled in the lobby soaking up buffs and since I had nothing better to do I spent some time researching upgrades. There seemed to be plenty to choose from. I almost bought several different sets of gear, any of which would have been a major improvement on the increasingly level-inappropriate choices my mage had been making do with for longer than I care to admit.

Several expansions in a row employed a system of upgradeable armor, the raw pieces of which dropped commonly from mobs, were tradeable and could be improved with items bought from an NPC when combined in a device purchased for the purpose. Those pieces often sell relatively cheaply in the Bazaar. All that's needed is a pocketful of platinum and yet another exciting trip to some far-flung, long-forgotten quest hub in unfamiliar zone to purchase the requisite reagent.

I was on the cusp of making a choice, mostly based on what I could afford, when it occured to me that level 106 marked something of a watershed. Whereas all the preceding sets had focus effects that decayed after five levels, built-in obsolesence to ensure their replacement with each new expansion, by the time 2017's Ring of Scale expansion rolled around the developers had tired of the process.

Conflagrant armor returns to the traditional upgrade route of having a player-crafter make gear for adventurers using items dropped by mobs. As a result it's significantly more expensive to buy in the Bazaar but it's very much worth the investment. The stats are very good for a solo player but most importantly the focus effects operate at full efficiency all the way to the current level cap of 115.

Almar's excellent, if outdated, guide says "Conflagrant Armor ... is the best non-prestige armor you can get for players 106 - 110 and the second best non-prestige armor at 110". A set of that will do you proud for a long while. All you need to do is make enough money to buy it.

106 is also the level the next air pet appears. For that I had to find my way to yet another new zone, albeit one that sounded eerily familiar: The Overthere. Ring of Scale is one of several expansions that re-uses older zones, in this case those originally introduced in the much-earlier Ruins of Kunark.

I remember The Overthere as the foothold of Norrath's evil races. Back at the turn of the millennium its only settlement was well-known to players as the Evil Outpost. Given its reputation, I was understandably nervous when I ported in, having bought my Miniature Worker's Sledge Mallet from the guild hall functionary and handed it imediately back to him to activate the portal.

The docks and the buildings beyond looked very familiar. I carefully conned every NPC I could see. I couldn't see many. It was too dark. Well, it was night-time, of course. Isn't it always?

Everyone seemed to be either apprehensive or indifferent. Safe enough. Although most of them also conned red. Not so re-assuring. I took a deep breath and headed into town.

It was fine. I found my vendor, bought my new air pet and all the other level 106 spells she had. Then I backed out, took a few quick screenshots and gated home. Didn't even hang around to scribe the spells into my book. Why take chances?

Back in the safety of the Lobby I had more decisions to make. I'd already researched pet focus items for my new level, the ones that let you summon pets at a higher level than the base spell affords. For the first time in pretty much the entire game there were none. No tradeable ones, at least. No affordable tradeable ones. There is one super-rare tradeable focus, the Golden Sage's Earring, which I've seen quoted at ten million plat. I have a hundred thousand to my name.

Lack of a suitable focus being a moot point, I saw no reason not to summon my pet there and then. No reason except that I already had a fully raid-buffed pet and it seemed a waste to dismiss it. I had a spare pet stashed in my invisble pet pocket courtesy of the Suspend Companion AA so I thought I'd swap those two over, dismiss the lower-level one, suspend the buffed one and summnon a shiny, new level 105 pet. Then we could loaf around for a few hours until he got buffed, too.

Only it turns out you can't swap current and suspended pets until you have all eight grades of the AA and I only had seven. Which is a problem, because as a free player I can't earn any more AAs.

Next time I'll explain exactly how I fixed that. Hint: it cost me. Although not as much as I expected.