Boost Me Up

By way of a public service announcement here's a paragraph from today's update notes for EverQuest II :

Destiny of Velious – New Heroic Character

Start your adventures in Destiny of Velious with a free limited 85 heroic character! With the launch of Destiny of Velious, each account will earn a single Level 85 character boost upon logging into the Kaladim server.

This boost is granted once per account and grants gear appropriate for starting adventuring in Destiny of Velious overland content, and may be placed in the shared bank.

Yep! Another one. 

As you might guess from the headline, this particular boost is in honor of the opening of the Destiny of Velious expansion on the Time Limited Expansion server Kaladim. It's kind of a big deal for several reasons, not least that a lot of people have been waiting none too patiently for it to get here.

DoV is one of the larger and more favored expansions. It added the hub city of Thurgadin, consolidated Public Quests as a central feature and it was also the expansion that introduced flying mounts, something that, as we all know, can often be a literal game-changer. I believe the raiding was well-received, too, although that's a long way out of my remit.

For once, the basic Level 85 boost is entirely appropriate. DoV shifts the cap to 90 so 85 is the starting line for what will be end-game content for a good while to come. If anyone had been thinking about playing on Kaladim, this would definitely be the time to do it.

You would, of course, need a subscription. Sorry! A membership. EQII's free to play offer, while still generous, is no longer anything like as inclusive as it was back when Smed was trying to convince everyone F2P Your Way was the future.

I do have All Access membership. And it's the account where I made my character on Kaladim back when the server started. I would not be averse to starting a new level 85 there and running around with the leveling crowd for a week or two.

Shame I don't have a free character slot.

I did consider buying (yet) another one. It's not like I don't have the Daybreak Cash. Thing is, I just did that a few months ago when I made my Vah Shir and I haven't even finished levelling her yet. It seems a bit of a stretch to imagine if I made a fresh 85 on Kaladim that I'd actually play them.

There is another option. It's not a free level 85 character Darkpaw's giving away. It's a free level 85 boost. And as I said I have a character on Kaladim already. I could bump her up to 85. 

I considered that too. The thing is, I really like her. I haven't played her much recently but I did get her all the way to level twenty back when Kaladim launched and that certainly wasn't nothing. She's wearing all her starting armor in her appearance slots and she looks great in it. And I named her Lana. That pretty much sealed it. We bonded, she and I.

Any excuse, eh?

From experience, jumping an existing character sixty levels makes for a disconnect. I've done it a couple of times and it tends to derail the process. It would probably be okay if I went straight from boosting to levelling up to that 90 cap. That would give some context and continuity. 

I'm not going to do that, though. Partly because I have too much else going on at the moment and partly because I've done those levels in Velious a few times too often. I enjoyed it the first two or three times but I'm not keen to see it all again just now.

So that'll be yet another character level boost in the bank. At least it's a bit different from the rest in that I can only use it on one server. Is that an improvement?

The level boost is a freebie but naturally Darkpaw would also like to sell you something. Normally I don't even bother to mention the packs that they put together for occasions like this but I have to say the Destiny of Velious Crate is pretty darn good for the price.

It costs $34.99, which is a lot, but there's a lot inside. There's a flying mount, appropriately, although perhaps less-appropriately it's a dinosaur. Now that's new. Then there's a Velium Multi-forge you can place in your house that acts as any craft station. Incredibly useful. 

There's a 66 slot bag, always very welcome, but this one "includes a friendly (antagonistic) goblin that will jump out and make faces at people behind you. " Seriously, who doesn't want one of those? And there's an NPC who'll port you "right outside all of the critical Velious dungeons". I might want to see a list of which ones count as "critical" but that sounds spiffy, doesn't it?

There's a load more in the crate and it's all good, useful stuff. I'm not going to go through the whole lot. Just go check the link if you want to know. If I go on much longer about it here someone's going to start wondering if I'm being paid to plug the thing. Which, sadly, I'm not. I just know a bargain when I see one.

All the stuff can be used on any server and frankly if this was at a different point in the expansion cycle I'd be seriously thinking about buying one. It's that good. Yet again, though, it's not a good time to invest in EQII because I have too much else going on and it wouldn't get the use it deserves.

Wilhelm had a post up recently about some unusually timely and relevant advertising Daybreak had been doing. I do think this pack looks better targeted and better priced than some we've seen before. I wonder if EG7's influence is beginning to make itself felt?

There's stuff going on in EQII that doesn't require either membership, real money or much of a time commitment, too. I ought to mention that while I'm here.

The Oceansfull festival is back with some nice, new rewards and a new three-part Overseer mission. That will get you a house pet, a permanent illusion and a title. I'm going to run it on several characters. It doesn't take long. Oceansfull runs 'til the 18th and then Scorched Sky begins a week later on the 25th.

I think that's about it for now. Oh, except to honk my own horn a little. I put in a bug report back at the beginning of April and today's patch notes confirmed it had been fixed. Always nice to know someone's listening.

I'll leave you with this mysterious message, also from today's patch notes:

Names

• All servers, except Thurgadin, will now enforce English character names.

Really? We all have to call ourselves things like Nigel or Hilary? 

Bags me Arbuthnot!

What Are All These People Doing Here? EQ2

The EQ2 wiki is surprisingly vague on Public Quests, something I only discovered when I was doing a little research for this post. I thought I'd better check a few facts before setting finger to keyboard because, even as I was framing an opening paragraph about the oldest PQs in Norrath, the ones in The Commonlands and Antonica, it occurred to me that I wasn't sure whether they really were the oldest. Didn't the PQs in Great Divide that arrived along with the Velious expansion pre-date them?

As it turns out, yes they did. Public Quests arrived on Norrath as a highlighted feature of Destiny of Velious. So much for my memory.

I do remember doing Echoes of The Ring War in Great Divide many times. Many, many times. Sometimes I'd run it several times in one day, particularly on a Sunday. It was fun and profitable. Also well-attended.

Almost from the day they appeared Public Quests were a popular success. They added a new element to the game, something that felt rather like ad hoc raids. PQ's offered something different, something we hadn't seen before - or not in EQ2, at least.

Bertoxxulous, taking the form of a giant, rotting ratman.
He wanders around talking to himself and one-shotting people. Wouldn't you?

Here, once again, I find my memory playing tricks on me. For this paragraph I first wrote "Newer MMOs like Warhammer Online and Rift had been making hay with this kind of all-pile-on semi-casual content for a while by the time the idea filtered down to Norrath" and then I wondered if they really had. So I checked .

Wrong again! Although WAR, where Public Quests began, had been around for three years by the time EQ2 got its own version, Rift had yet to launch. The first Public Quests in EQ2 opened for business in February 2011; Rift didn't officially go live until the following month.

Despite having stolen a march on the competition, EQ2 remained diffident about its achievement. Where Rift and, eighteen months later, GW2 put their signature large-scale, hot-join events squarely front and center, both in the design of the games themselves and their marketing campaigns, PQs in EQ2 remained something of a supporting feature, at best.

Nevertheless, development of the format continued. And continues to continue. I think every expansion since has had some kind of Public Quest attached and today I did my first PQ in Planes of Prophecy.

I guess this must be the place...

I'm keen on Public Quests. I liked them in WAR, loved them in Rift. I've spent the last half-decade doing little else in GW2. My experience with PQs in EQ2, however, has been somewhat sporadic.

As I said, I started out doing one of the Great Divide PQs with some frequency. The other GDPQ was less popular and less enjoyable. I did that one quite a few times but it was harder to find enough people who knew the mechanics and it often failed.

In the intervening years I've done The Commonlands PQ maybe a dozen times or more but the Antonican one I may only have done twice. Coming up to date, during the last year I did all of the Kunark Ascending PQs multiple times each.

Looking at the wiki page, though, I can see there are plenty more that I've never done at all. Most of them I didn't even know existed. In total there are nearly two dozen listed but that's clearly incomplete because neither Antonica nor Great Divide is included and nor are the various holiday-related PQs.

I'm just going to stand here and watch this round, if that's okay with everyone.

Some of the others I've never even heard of let alone seen and it's more than likely I never will. The idea that a full PUG raid will assemble in Lesser Feydark or Steamfont Mountains to do content from several years ago seems fanciful.

In EQ2 Public Quests seem destined to remain tied to current content. While the old PQs lie forgotten, the Kunark Ascending set have been consistently called in General chat for the whole of the active lifetime of that expansion, with multiple copies of the relevant zones spawning to accommodate demand.

They're still being called, sporadically, even now, so someone's still doing them, at least for the time being. It's a long time since I heard anyone call a Terrors of Thalumbra PQ though and that's only looking two expansions back.

Planes of Prophecy brings a big change to the system in that, for the first time, the new Public Quests take place in their own instances. They're "public" in the sense that anyone can join but no longer in the sense that you could run into one by accident while roaming the open world.

The screen splatters are very clever and all but they do kind of draw attention to the fact that I'm looking at a screen.

The reasons are two-fold. Firstly, recent expansions with reduced development resources don't have a wealth of wide-open, above-world areas where PQs could just happen. Space is limited and a huge event spawning raid mobs would be problematic.

Kunark Ascending dealt with that by having one very localized PQ that was tied to the signature questline and several more in the thematically and geographically associated, but very much larger zones from the original Rise of Kunark expansion. That wasn't really an option for PoP - almost by definition all Planar zones, old and new, are instances anyway.

The second reason is cheating. By their very nature, Public Quests allow for rewards to be obtained for minimal effort. They are large, sprawling , chaotic events for which no-one is required to group or raid.

Although raids always form and everyone is always desperate to get an invite, anyone who participates gets credit. That's very fair for the soloists taking their chances but less so for the afkers sitting safely out of range, letting everyone else do the work.

Is that it?
Er, I mean, "Phew! That was a close one! And just look at all this ichor on my armor. I'll never get the stains out!"

DBG tried some preventive measures in previous PQs. They made the reward chest spawn at random locations, well clear of the battle and they even added a massive knockback to the end of the event that threw everyone into the air. People still found ways to get the goodies without making much of an effort.

With the new PQs you don't only have to click on a portal in Colosseum of Valor to get in. You also have to go back to CoV and hand in a token to the wonderfully named Dr. Arcana, an NPC who looks as though he's walked straight out of a 1930s Saturday Morning Pictures serial.

Still, none of that means you have to know what you're doing or indeed have to do anything particularly effective, as I discovered in my first run today. I happened to see the PQ was up as I was passing the Plane of Disease alcove, so I zoned in out of curiosity. Once inside, I couldn't see anything happening so I just followed the first person who ran by.

I ended up with a bunch of people at a lake. Someone invited me to join a raid so I did. I said hello and announced that I hadn't done it before. I asked for anyone to let me know if I was doing something wrong, whereupon some wit observed that it wouldn't matter if I was because all I'd need to do would be blame the healer like everyone else.

Dr. Arcana, I presume?

Someone offered a more useful thumbnail of what to do - pull the mobs and kill them under the seeds. I waited. The PQ began. Someone pulled mobs. I helped kill them under the seeds.

After a while of that I noticed there weren't many of us left. Everyone had gone somewhere else. So I went too. Then I cam back because I couldn't find them. Someone ran past me and jumped on a rideable bat so I got on one too. It flew me around for what seemed like quite a long time then, just as it landed and while I was still figuring out what to do next, the PQ ended.

Apparently we'd killed the two Queens of Disease. I never even saw them. All the same, I got full credit and my proof of participation item, so I zoned back to the Colosseum and handed it in for my reward.

That'll do nicely.

About par for the course on a new PQ. It usually takes a few goes to figure out what's going on, then a few more to figure out what you're supposed to do about it. Then there's a few runs where it's all very exciting as you feel like you're really getting the hang of things, followed by a stretch when it starts  to feel like just another day at the office.

Eventually, you reach the penultimate stage, when you turn up and do the minimum you can get away with to get  participation credit, so you can bugger off as quickly as possible to do something more interesting instead. And the final stage? That's when you no longer need anything the PQ has to offer so you never do it again. Until you're leveling up the next character, that is...

All in all, though, I think Public Quests are a Jolly Good Thing in any MMORPG. They may have been Warhammer's only lasting contribution to the genre but it was a good one. Not many developers have come up with anything as successful or as fundamental since then, so thanks for that, Mark Jacobs or Paul Barnett or whoever thought of the idea in the first place.

Meanwhile, EQ2's PQs may not be the most sophisticated around but they're pretty darn fun. I'm going to keep on doing them whenever I get the chance. With a bit of luck and plenty of patience, one day I may even find out what I'm supposed to be doing!

Can't Judge a Book

Sometimes even Bo gets it wrong. Every novel has an author. There's the name on the spine. Movies have credits that seem to last longer than the film. Even journalists get a byline. Most of us pay at least some attention to who wrote, directed or performed what we read and watch. It helps us decide how to spend our time and money in the future.

I've done a lot of questing this week. Last weekend was double everything in EQ2 and I popped in to visit and ended up staying. I bought the Destiny of Velious expansion pack and asked the Othmirs to let me ride their giant turtle to the land of ice and snow.

We're going to need a bigger tureen!

 
I'm playing on EQ2X's Freeport server and my highest character there is a level 80 berserker. There is pretty much nothing you can do in Velious until your level hits 85, so after I'd looked around the docks and chatted to some more Othmirs I was stumped for a moment.

Then I remembered my Berserker was also a level 82 weaponsmith. And I recalled reading that there's a whole line of crafting quests in Velious that leads to you getting your very own flying griffin mount. And it's much, much faster to raise your crafting level in EQ2 than your adventure level. With double xp and full vitality it took me no time to make 85 and begin making myself useful to the Far Seas Supply Division and sundry indigenous othmir, coldain and snowfang gnolls.

Oh Ruffin, if only the other gnolls were as clever as you!

The quests came thick and fast and were a joy both to do and to read. The prose was crisp and clean, the dialog sharp and witty, the plots were amusing and engaging, the tasks were interesting and absorbing. Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent most of Sunday and Monday doing the entire flying mount quest-line, and the pack pony quest-line.  The whole experience was exemplary. Everything that's good about questing was here and there was little or nothing of the old nonsense that's given MMO questing such bad press of late.

With my young griffin trailing along behind, still growing to the size needed to carry the weight of a ratonga in full plate armor, I returned somewhat reluctantly to Paineel and the previous expansion to resume the long, slow journey to level 85 in adventuring. And trust me, on a silver account with the xp/aaxp pegged at 50/50 it really is a plod.

By last night I was halfway through 84th, my griffin was ready to fly and I really wanted a break from the perpetual yellow palette  of Odus. It occurred to me that I'd not yet done the newish beastlord prequel questline, so I took the spires back to The Commonlands and picked up the starter quest.

Does the marketing department know about this?

What a contrast. Everything I'd enjoyed about the griffin and pony quests, all vanished. Instead I plowed through speech after speech of overblown, overwritten, pompous twaddle. Terrible leaden prose, complete absence of any form of wit, elan, spark or interest. An incomprehensible "plot" utterly devoid of amusement or entertainment. Utter rubbish, in fact. The only saving grace of this horrible farrago of amateurish drivel was that it was soon over.

Don't know. Don't care.

Now I understand that people have different tastes. Some people probably like this sort of thing. I also understand that you can't have your best people on every part of every project all the time. I've read enough Gerry Conway fill-ins, after all. No, the problem with quests in MMOs is you have no way of knowing before you begin whether the new line was written by the person who wrote that great quest you did last week, the one that had you laughing so hard you snorted coffee all over your keyboard, or by the twerp who wrote that numbingly tedious, po-faced saga you ended up tabbing through the month before.

Credits. Let's have credits. I want to know who to follow and who to avoid. Whose work to look forward to and whose to dread. Mrs Bhagpuss had a great idea. Let's have an in-game review system for quests, like the new Housing Leaderboard. I'd give five stars to those Velious craft quests and half a star to the beastlord one. And really it doesn't deserve half.