This Content Isn't Available

 

"As of this morning, on this account, on my desktop PC, all videos show a black screen with the message "Video Unavailable. This content isn't available". This happens when I try to run the videos directly from YouTube and also when I try to watch videos I have embedded on my blog.

I have logged the account out and back in, cleared the cache, rebooted the machine and tried a different browser. It makes no difference. 

On the same account, on my laptop, the same issue occurs when I access YouTube directly but the embedded videos on my blog still play normally. 

Please correct whatever is causing the issue or, if there is a valid reason for it, please let me know what it is and if there's anything to be done.

Thanks!"

That's the feedback I just submitted to Google in the vague hope someone might do something about it. There are several lengthy reddit threads on the problem, which seems to be fairly common. There are some workarounds that I might try at some point but those have issues of their own, but most of the commenters who report the problem being resolved say it either just went away on its own or after they submitted feedback. 

For others, it didn't  ever go away, or if it did, they didn't feel it was worth coming back to the thread to let anyone know.

I only noticed the problem this morning, after I'd written the first four paragraphs of today's post. I went to last year's Best of 2024 post to check something. I clicked on the link in that post that goes to the playlist I made to accompany it and that's when I found nothing was working. 

At the moment, my other YouTube account is working normally but comments on the reddit threads confirm others have seen the issue spread  to all their accounts. Also, I'm not sure whether the videos embedded on the blog are working for anyone else. 

I'm guessing they are because when I log into one of my many other Google accounts on Chrome I can play videos on the blog and also follow the link to last year's playlist and get that to run, too. I'm listening to it right now. 

God, it's good, too! If you want to test it, here's the link. It's a joy. 2024 was a vintage year for music. 2025 isn't going to match it. 

If anyone isn't able to access that playlist or watch videos on this blog, I'd be grateful if they'd mention it in the comments although I don't imagine there's much I can do about it. Also, if anyone's had this happen to their YouTube account, I'd be interested to hear about that, too. Especially if you figured out how to fix it.

There's a lot of speculation in the threads I read about what might be behind this loss of service. The usual conspiracy theories about Google trying to penalize people for using ad-blockers or even for watching too many videos. Those I discount. 

More credible is the explanation that there's been some security issue with the account (As recently happened to Belghast.) or some penalty applied for an infraction. That, though, would presumably lead to some kind of notification. I haven't seen anything telling me I've done something I shouldn't have.

It looks a lot more like some kind of bug to me. If so, it might get fixed. I'm cautiously optimistic. How long it would take is another matter, though. Could easily be weeks. Or months.

In the meanwhile, I can obviously just move to using another account to keep using YouTube for all my regular viewing needs (And keep making more accounts if they keep failing.). It's going to be annoying but as Wreckless Eric says, we adjust.  

The big question is whether I can work around the problem while it lasts so as to be able to go on embedding videos on the blog. It is, after all, a rather significant element in the range of content here. 

And it's a particularly bad time for it to happen, too.

Here are the four paragraphs I mentioned writing before the issue made itself known: 

Yesterday was the most musical day I've had for a long while. I spent something like five hours writing the What I've Been Listening To Lately post, then went straight into making a long-list for my Pick of the Year. That took another couple of hours and went a lot better than I thought it was going to before I started.

What I have really been listening to for most of the year is my own music. Obsessively and repeatedly. While I've been keeping up with everything else that's around, I can't honestly say I've had anything much on repeat that I didn't make myself. I was expecting to look back through the year's music posts and see a whole load of songs and names I could barely remember, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find that wasn't in the slightest bit true.

Okay, there were some titles and names I didn't recognize but that happens every year. The further I look back, the more of them there are, too. It's natural. The point is, there weren't any more this year than there usually are and better yet there were plenty where my immediate reaction was "Oh, I love that one! I want to hear it again, right now!"

Going in, I thought I might have to reduce the scope to a Top Ten this year. Last year it was a Top Twenty-One for some bizarre reason, only seventeen of which I chose to include on the YouTube playlist I completely forgot I ever made.

And then I found out about the problem. And stopped.

So, yeah, Pick of the Year post. I was looking forward to getting started on that. On hold for now.

Plus, I was just about to go on to talk about this year's musical Advent Calendar. That's more critical. I only realized yesterday there are just three weeks left until I have to start posting a Christmas tune every day. (It will be just one a day this year. That Naughty/Nice thing nearly did for me last time...)

It will still be happening, at least so long as I'm sure anything I put up on the blog will be visible and audible to anyone who cares to see and hear it. If I have to go around the houses a few times to make it happen, I'll do it.  

I'll try and make any workarounds as invisible and seamless as possible but if things look a little weird around here for a while, that might be the reason. 

And if it gets fixed I'll be sure to tell everyone. 

Second Test, Different From The First

Just a very quick post to explain why there isn't an entirely different post here today...

It's because I spent the time when I should have been writing it playing Stars Reach instead. Well, I say "playing". It was mostly trying to get into the game and then writing bug reports. The exact opposite of the first test, in fact.

I only knew the test was on at all because of a comment someone left on the last post (Thank-you, Anonymous!) I didn't see it until 6.30 PM, by which time the server had been up for half an hour. I logged in straight away and made a new character, which took about ten seconds. I had to do that because the old ones had all been wiped.

Unlike the previous test, when I had no issues getting in, this time the game crashed repeatedly on the very first screen. Other people were reporting similar issues and there were a few suggested fixes on Discord but none of them worked for me so after about half a dozen tries I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it on an SSD to see if that might help.

It did, a bit. Now the game could get past the initial loading screen but it still crashed before I could get into the world. But I persisted and on the third or fourth try I got in!

I'd been making new characters for each attempt, just in case it might have been something to do with either the specific character I was trying to play or even the race/gender combos. I mean, it's pre-alpha - it could be anything. As a result, which character I ended up with felt a little like playing musical chairs and the winner was a Human Female.

I took to her right away, which was good because it seems we might actually get to keep the same characters for the next test. I think Raph said they'd like to see a little more persistence in the world so they can observe how it's changed by players over time. We'll see, I guess.

By then there was about an hour left and I was determined to get some crafting mats and make something. Anything, pretty much. I'll defuse any potential suspense right now and say no, that didn't happen. I made nothing. Again.

I did manage to find the space portal almost immediately and blast myself into orbit to go looking for ore. I realise now, again from the comment I linked earlier, that there's ore and metal on the planetary surface but it's definitely easier to find it in space if you're in a hurry. It's everywhere there.

Of course, I'd forgotten to swap out my Terraformer before I shot myself into space but luckily some helpful person had built a camp on a nearby asteroid so I was able to change tools there. I found some iron and manganese and blasted away until my hopper was full and I was just thinking about what to do with it when some space monster attacked me for absolutely NO REASON!

Mindful of the advice about dropping your stuff when you die, I didn't try to defend myself. I jetted away, spining wildly, and made for the portal back to the planet below. I hammered "F" with the creature still spitting poison at me, expecting to die at any moment, but after a few goes and a lot of swearing the portal fired and sent me home. 

Or to desktop, anyway, because the client crashed. It took another couple of tries to get back in but I reappeared on solid ground, still with all my stuff. Which would have been fine if I hadn't then encountered my first real bug.

I went to someone's camp to see if I could make anything yet. I couldn't. Didn't have the right mats and also han't earned enough XP to buy new recipes. At that point I thought I might as well make my own camp so I swapped tools and started to put down the big, yellow ghost-rectangle that marks your claim, when I had a change of mind and decided to go do some surveying instead.

Only I couldn't let go of the camp marker. It just hung on my cursor, whatever I did. Couldn't put it down to claim a camp, couldn't swap to any other tool, couldn't do anything but wave it around like a giant, yellow fly-swatter.

In the end I stopped trying, wrote and submitted a bug report, then logged out, hoping I would be able to log back in without any more problems. 

That didn't go as well as I hoped.

This time, the game hung at the loading screen but didn't crash. It just sat there, doing nothing. Much more weirdly, after a while all the in-game sounds started to play. I could tell from what I was hearing that it was relaying activity from where I logged out. There'd been a bunch of people shooting stuff there and it was the same gun sounds, sometimes fading away or stopping, then starting up again as they slaughtered whatever it was they were after.

I wrote another bug report for that, closed the client, then logged in yet again. This time I got straight in and everything was working fine. By then there was about twenty minutes of the test left so I decided I'd carry on with the surveying. 

I'd done about a dozen points when Beryl the dog came charging in, jumping up at me and barking. I know when I'm beaten. I surveyed a couple more points, fending her off with my free hand, jumped off a small cliff to shake some owldeer that were chasing me, found a flat, safe spot and logged out for the final time.

All in all it was a chaotic but very entertaining session, at least when it wasn't frustrating and annoying. Pretty much what you expect from an alpha (Sorry, pre-alpha.) I was quite pleased that at least I'd been able to send a couple of bug reports this time and Raph mentioned in chat that the crash reports from my multiple failed attempts would be welcome.

If we do get to keep the same characters next time there's an EU-hours test, I'll make a concerted effort to get a bit further with the crafting. Not that I know what I want to make but I'd like to be able to say I made something!

Also, it could have been worse. I saw in chat that Wilhelm got turned into a pillar! But I expect he'll tell us all about that himself...

Hee! Hee! Hee! Can't Touch Me!

And now, at long last, my much-delayed post on EverQuest II's latest solo dungeon, the one that was added as part of this year's Tinkerfest holiday event. It goes by the official name of Innovation: Tinkerfest Trial and as the name suggests, it re-uses the assets from the Plane of Innovation.

PoI was originally added to the game as part of 2017's Planes of Prophecy expansion. There are arguments for and against the reuse of existing zones for new content but by and large I'm in favor of it, providing the new content is enjoyable, which this very much is.

It also helps when the ostensible reason for seeing the zone again makes sense, which it broadly does in this case. The set-up is that a Froglok called Boegie has applied to join the Ak`Anon Tinkers Guild, the first of his race ever to do so. In order to be accepted he has to pass a trial, proving both his technical skill and his innovative imagination. Where better to do that than in the metaphysical plane of existence that lies behind the very concept of tinkering itself?

The story is solid, the dialog amusing, the characters distinctive and the gameplay involving and entertaining. For any long-time EQII player it's pretty much bread and butter and meat and potatos and all the other food-based cliches you care to dish up. As I've said many times before, if you're the kind of player who likes the kind of quests normally found in EQII, this is very much the kind of quest you're going to like.

None of which would usually make it worth my time writing about it in depth, although it wouldn't be the first time I'd stretched an anecdotal account of a solo holiday dungeon to fill a whole post. In this case, however, I do have something unusual to report.

It's in the nature of a bug, or at least I think it is. I'm really not sure. If it is a bug, it's one I have so far failed to find any mention of on the official forums or the EQII Reddit or anywhere else Google can poke its algorithmical snout. 

That may mean it's not a bug at all or it may mean it's uncommon enough that no-one else has encountered it. It may also mean that this particular bug is one of those that players don't really like to draw attention to for fear it might get fixed before they've finished "testing" it.

Oh. One of those bugs, eh? Don't we have another word for that kind of thing?

I don't know. Judge for yourself. Here's what it does: it makes my Berserker completely invulnerable. 

For once I spotted it almost immediately. I have a tendency to miss things like this because I have all onscreen notifications of damage both given and received either switched off or hidden. When I'm fighting, I don't like to know any more about it what I can derive from the health bars of my character and my opponents. Anything else comes under the heading of too much information as far as I'm concerned.

When I enter a new high-level instance, though, I do excercise a modicum of caution. I pull carefully and observe the results. There are mobs in Visions of Vetrovia, supposedly intended for solo players, that some of my max-level characters don't feel fully capable of engaging yet. Not all of them bosses, either, Every time I find myself somewhere new I bear that in mind.

Consequently, I was watching carefully on the first pull to see just how much of my Berserker's health bar he'd have left after the first attack and how much healing the Merc would need to do. The answers, respectively, were "all of it" and "none whatsoever". 

The fight went on for a good while, maybe a minute or more. I had plenty of time to observe how things went. The situation remained the same: no damage taken, no healing required. I pulled a couple more mobs. Same thing.

I opened the Combat tab to see if I could figure out what was going on. "What?" turned out to be easy. "Why?" is still a mystery. As the screenshot shows, nothing the mobs could do had any impact at all. Everything they tried came back "fails to inflict any damage".

Those were just regular mobs, though. Surely the bosses would have more success? Only one way to find out.

I slowly worked my way through the instance, following the Blood, Sweat and Gears quest, occasionally referring to the wiki walkthrough for directions, since EQII Maps hadn't uploaded the new zone yet. I thought I'd have some issues with special attacks or scripted routines on some of the bosses but even though I could see the visual effects, quite spectacularly on occasion, nothing seemed to have any effect.

The only setback I encountered was when I walked into the Clockwork Shredder in the tunnels. It's a device rather than a mob and it patrols in the regular version of the zone as well as the Tinkerer's Trial so I ought to have remembered it's a scripted 100% guaranteed insta-kill. You're supposed to wait until it goes past then run along the tunnel and up another out of its way.

The Shredder's script bypassed whatever miraculous protection the bug (Or is it a feature?) was providing. My Berserker had to respawn back at the zone-in. Just an inconvenience, really. The final boss, Cogsteady Rhinocticus (A clockwork rhinoceros, as if you hadn't guessed.) also knocked me up in the air a few times but that didn't hurt in the slightest. Other than that, nothing landed a punch.

I found the whole thing delightful. Being able to run a new zone with absolutely no risk of getting hurt seems just about ideal. It wasn't like one of those super-hyper-overpowered scenarios, where everything dies to a single hit, either. Every fight took a significant amount of time, maybe a minute or two for each regular mob and anything up to six or seven for the bosses. 

I had to use all my attacks and pay attention because there were still things like power drains to manage and the bosses had huge health pools. Unlike the Berserker, the merc was taking damage, so I needed to turn the bosses and get them positioned away from him. I just didn't have to worry about scripts or jousting or jumping about and there was absolutely no chance of me dying.

It's taken me so long to get around to writing this post I had time to run the instance twice more. I thought I ought to find out if my odd experience was a one-time fluke so I took my Berserker back for a second go. Everything was just as before. No damage, no risk, no explanation. 

Things were so comfortable I did one boss with the puppy asleep on my lap, meaning I could only use the mouse. Didn't matter - I never needed to move. Then she woke up and wanted to play, so on the next boss I left my Berserker and his Merc on auto-attack and went downstairs to rough-house with her for a while.

When I came back the boss was at 80% and my Berserker and Merc were full health and full mana. It would have been very, very slow but they could have done the job without me. 

I finished off the instance and the repeatable quest. You need to do it six times before Tinkerfest ends to get the bracer that upgrades during the next two chapters of the Summer Jubilee. I hadn't been planning on doing that but now I think I might.

After that I thought I'd better check if the invulnerability bug applied to all my characters or just the Berserker. I took my Bruiser through the pre-quest and into the instance, pulled the first mob and... BAM! Normal damage.

If I was still on Test and doing my due diligence before submitting a bug report, I'd take the Berserker through a different VoV instance to see if the bug applied there, too. I did try an outdoor named with him and it definitely didn't work on that. He was lucky to get away with his life. 

I'd also take a caster through the Trial, my Necromancer probably. I might yet do that, just out of curiosity. On Live, though, I guess there's the question of whether repeatedly running the instance with unexplained full invulnerability constitutes an exploit.

Of course, I don't know for sure that it is a bug. It almost certainly is but EQII is a very complex game with a lot of variables and I can't say for sure that I don't have some buff or item or ability I've acquired at some point that's doing something it's supposed to do to make this happen. Seems unlikely but definitely not impossible.

In any case, the question of whether or not what the Berserker was doing was an exploit was rendered somewhat moot by the Bruiser's experience. Taking full, normal damage, he was easily able to clear the whole instance, bosses included, in less than half the time it took it the Berserker. At no point did he come under any serious threat, his self-healing and regeneration usually meaning the merc barely had to heal.

The Bruiser killed regular mobs in seconds and bosses in half the time his plate-wearing team-mate had needed. The whole thing felt like it was on fast-forward. Given the choice, I'd take the Bruiser without invulnerability over the Berserker with it every time, if I was thinking of running the instance half a dozen times for the event flag.

If the choice was between a slower run with no chance of failure or a faster one, where there was a significant risk of dying and having to rez or respawn, though, I'm not so sure. And if I was having to make the attempts under less than perfect circumstances, such as needing to stop suddenly or go afk at a moment's notice, then I'd definitely take the slow, safe option.

If the experiment has taught me anything, it's that I don't need any element of risk to become fully engaged with the content. It's something I've never been convinced by anyway. I feel the whole "risk vs reward" concept is a bit of a legacy artefact from a different era, if indeed it ever had any genuine validity to begin with.

I found the story engaging enough to want to see it through the first time and the rewards good enough to make me happy to do it several times more. It seems to me that's generally how things work in modern mmorpgs. I'd very much prefer to do story content at zero risk and I can't quite see how repeatable content gets more interesting or engaging by being made less certain to succeed.

Win or lose makes sense in PvP but in PvE it's just annoying. Who really wants to lose a fight with a mob? Even a boss. Especially if you know you're going to have to do it again and again. I get the appeal of group and raid PvE having failure states, the point being all that learning to work together and camaraderie but solo instanced content that no-one sees but you? It's not like your Merc or your pet's going to be impressed.

I'll be interested to know if my Berserker's invulnerability is eventually revealed to be a bug and if so what caused it. I suspect what will actually happen, though, is that Tinkerfest will end without me becoming any the wiser and if I do the instance again next year everything will be back to normal. 

Meanwhile, I'm going to swap to my Bruiser to do the other five runs I need. He may not be Superman but he's close enough and I know he's not going to be accused of cheating. Also it'll save me at least a couple of hours. Hey, my time is valuable, I'll have you know!

You Can't Get The Staff

Let me rephrase that. You can get the staff but you shouldn't. Trust me, you really shouldn't.

I'll tell you why. It turns out there's a very simple explanation for that little problem I was having in EverQuest II's new expansion, Visions of Vetrovia. The one where every mob was hitting my Berserker for billions of points of damage, something that even EQII's runaway stat inflation was never designed to handle. 

I say "explanation". I don't think we quite have one of those yet. An explanation would tell us the mechanisms involved, the how as well as the why. What we do have is a reason, a proximate cause: the Abysmal Sea Staff of Stratagem.

It's one of the free weapons you can pick up from the Tishan's Lockbox on the landing dock in Svarni Expanse, your arrival point for the start of the expansion. It's not the only weapon in the box. There are several others you could choose - an axe, a dagger, a couple of maces. 

There's even another two-hander, a great axe called the Abysmal Sea Greataxe of Insight. You're very well catered for when it comes to implements of mayhem, murder and carnage. Pick any of them you like and you'll be fine. Any of them except the staff. Don't take the staff or you'll be sorry.

I took the staff. Or, I should say, my Berserker did. It was more my choice than his, I think. I like a staff, as I'm about to explain.

Once upon a time, many years ago, he favored a sword and shield. Much of a Berserker's offensive power rests in an alternate ability (Aka AA.) called "Reversal", which does exactly what you'd expect. Every time the Berserker parries, ripostes, blocks or defends, Reversal procs a massive retaliatory strike. 

Since all those actions are autonomic in EQII, Reversal effectively provides continual, passive DPS, not dissimilar to a damage shield. Once you've spent enough points to max the AA, the difference in combat is very noticeable or at least it used to be.  

And for years you had to have a shield equipped for it to work, so naturally most Berserkers went sword-and-board. Or axe and board. Or mace and board. The board was the key factor is what I'm saying. You used a shield. I think I'm making my point clear.

I'll have that staff, thank you.

Of course, there were dissenters. I remember many debates over the alternatives. Things could become quite heated and emotional, dual wield and two-handers both being seen by many as far more appropriate to the whole "Berserker" ethos than namby-pamby, goodie-two-shoes sword and shield combos that made you look like some god-bothering Paladin. 

I wasn't all that bothered either way, especially when our characters got the option to overwrite what they were actually using with whatever they wished they were, first by way of the Appearance system and later the even more flexible Wardrobe. I forget now what order the changes came but at some point the requirement to have a shield equipped was stripped from the Reversal AA and at that point I moved over to using a two-hander, probably because one slot is easier to manage than two but also possibly because I happened to get a very nice two-hand weapon as a drop.

However it came about, my Berserker's been waving a massive axe or a sword bigger than he is for the longest time now. I barely even look at single-handed weapons any more so when it came time to swap to something from the box there were only two choices - the staff or the greataxe. 

I like staffs. I've always liked them since I was lucky enough to win Cros Treewind's during an event in EverQuest some time back in the early 2000s. For a long time that staff was my most prized virtual possession. It wasn't very powerful but it was very rare. You had to be the person who killed Cros Treewind during the event (Or at least the person who looted his corpse. I'm pretty sure I didn't kill him but I sure as hell prized that stick from his stiffening, leather-gloved hands.) and the event itself , like all the great mmorpg events, ran for a short time only and was never repeated.

For a few years that staff was something worth linking in groups or general chat but time passes and eventually few people even remembered Cros Treewind's name. It was just a low-level staff with crappy stats and no-one cared. I still have it somewhere. I never throw anything away. I might go look for it later.

It got me hot for staffs, though. I've always liked them, ever since. It helps that I've played a staff elementalist in Guild Wars 2 pretty much since launch, after a brief dalliance with playing a ranger for a few months. 

Here's the thing about staffs in mmorpgs - they're big enough to see. Staffs, greatswords, greataxes and shields are about the only weapons large enough to justify the fuss people make over cosmetics. One-handers and offhand weapons, especially symbols and similar hand-held fetishes, often look amazing in a dressing room display but once you put them on your character you can barely make out what they're meant to be. Give me six feet of timber any day.

Even with all that background, I'm still not clear on why I gave my Berserker this particular staff. I do like a greataxe on a Berserker. It's very much in keeping with the job description. A staff, on the other hand, brings to mind either a priest or a mage.

"Greataxe"

It might have been because the Abysmal Sea greataxe doesn't look like an axe. I have a particular dislike of weapons that call themselves one thing but appear as another. What it in fact looks like is a greatsword that's split at the pointy end so you can carry eggs in it. It's not so bad I'd never use it at all but I certainly don't like the look of the thing.

The Abysmal Sea staff looks fine. Nothing special but perfectly acceptable and it has a nice particle effect. I'm a complete sucker for sparkles. I don't think that's why I picked it over the greataxe, though. I think I was just in a hurry and grabbed the staff pretty much on the flip of a coin. As I said, in EQII we have not one but two very good systems for replacing the look of any displayed item with the appearance of any other so I could have made the axe into anything I fancied.

Had I chosen something else, my Vetrovian experience so far would have been completely different. I'd have had no problems taking the blows dealt by the local wildlife, no frustrating, multiple deaths,  no repair bills, no sessions spent removing and re-allocating hundreds of AA points. 

I'd have continued as I began, playing my Berserker, levelling to 125 in both Adventuring and Crafting, going through the two Signature questlines together, just as I usually do. I'd have played the 'zerker exclusively until I'd either finished most of the solo content in the expansion or reached a point where it was too hard for him, which sometimes happens in the instances.

Only then would I have turned to my Bruiser/Alchemist, run him through the tradeskill line so he could level up and make upgrades for all the Berserker's combat arts. Then it would be back to the Berserker to carry on until everythng was done.

The rest of my half dozen erstwhile max-level characters would have had to wait their turn and when
that turn came preference would go to those with a useful craft. The Sage and the Jeweller would do their five levels and as much of the crafting questline as I felt they needed for practical purposes. Only then would the other adventure classes get a chance, by which time I'd almost certainly be feeling the pull from some other game.

That's why, even though I've wanted to shift focus to my Necromancer for several years now, it never seems to happen. This year, in Visions of Vetrovia, for the first time ever, my Necromancer was the first to hit the new level cap. And what's more, my Sage, just this afternoon, became the first character in the team not only to cap out as a crafter but to complete the tradeskill Signature questline as well. (The rewards for which are excellent, by the way.)

Staff

None of that would have happened had I not picked that cursed staff out of Tishan's Lockbox. Without the Berserker being benched by a bug, any good intentions I'd had of doing things differently this time would have been just that - intentions.

I'm not going to go as far as to say I'm glad the bug exists. It was a pain when it was happening and it would be incredibly unfortunate for anyone who only had one high-level character and couldn't swap to play someone else instead. I'm very happy the general problem has been identified and even happier there's such a very simple and painless workaround, namely don't use the damned staff. 

I'm sure it won't be too long before a fix appears, although by then I'd bet my Berserker will be well past the point where the staff is anything he'd want to use anyway. Upgrades in EQII come thick and fast as winter snow and I will be levelling him quickly to 125 - it only takes a couple of hours, if that.

Thanks to the enforced hiatus, however, he won't be resuming his customary position as team leader quite yet. I've very much appreciated the opportunity to get to know some of my other characters a little better and I intend to keep at it for a while. 

I think the Necromancer might be better suited to clearing instanced content than the Berserker ever was and I definitely want to have max-level crafters who can make things the team needs before I think about someone that makes weapons no-one really wants, although with Niami Denmother at the helm, I don't imagine any crafting class is going to feel useless for long.

On that note I'll wrap this up, not least because I'm in the very priveliged position right now of having a new expansion to an mmorpg that I'm thoroughly enjoying and I want to get back to it. I've enjoyed just about all the EQII expansions there have ever been, so that's not unexpected but this one feels particularly solid. 

I wouldn't call it ambitious or original but so far it feels more coherent and cogent than we've become used to in the past few years. There seem to be no major, new systems to get to grips with, just good, thoughtful use of the ones we already have. I like learning new things but there's a lot to be said for working with what you already have, especially when what you have works better.

If the day-one database problem and the staff bug end up being the biggest issues at launch (And I can't see much sign of anything else blowing up in game or on the forums right now.) then I think we can count this expansion a win. I'm certainly having a great time so far.

The Return Of The Necromancer or How To Turn A Bug Into A Feature.

After yesterday's cheery assessment of the new EverQuest II expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, I ran smack-bang into an unfortunate glitch. A very unfortunate glitch. A glitch worthy of Amazon's New World, except that if it happened there it would probably affect everyone and make news around the world rather than just affecting me and making one tiny ripple on the EQII forums.

Remember how I said after I remembered to put on all the gear from Tishan's Lockbox, everything was fine and the only death I had was self-inflicted? Yeah, well that didn't last. When I logged back in after finishing the blog post something very strange had happened. Something much worse than the original problem I'd been having.

Somehow, instead of being better able to withstand the blows in his new armor, my Berserker had become about as brittle as one of those roses supervillains like to dunk into liquid nitrogen before shattering to let the hero what's coming next. 

He'd become the absolute definition of a glass cannon. If Ihe opened with one of the Ascension spells and blasted a mob - any mob - from a safe distance, the mob would drop to the ground, dead. If, however, he was careless enough to let the mob hit him first, it would be his turn to hit the floor, instantly.

It made for some very odd gameplay, especially for a melee character. It's possible if he'd been a wizard I might not even have noticed but the traditional Berserker pull tactic of charging up to something and spinning was working about as well as running face-first into a steel door. Hard to miss that.

I spent a while reading combat logs and checking settings. I managed to get some questing done but it wasn't enjoyable at all. In the end I posted on the forums about it and went to bed.

This morning someone had replied, suggesting I might need to reset all my AAs. He'd had the same issue and it had fixed it for him. That has actually happened to me before and it worked for me that time, too. I'd forgotten all about it. So I did that and it didn't make any difference at all.

Being me, I then decided to run a few tests and make a few notes. I wondered if it was only happening in the new expansion. Before all this happened, my Berserker had felt extremely comfortable killing stuff in the opening zones of the previous expansion and close to godlike in the one before that. Would he feel the same way now?

I went back to both, walked the Berserker up to an aggressive mob, stood there and let it hit him. 

He died. Instantly. 

Not every time. A few mobs seemed to do normal damage, but most of them were happy to one-shot him in his fancy new armor. Some of the adornments from VoV don't work in earlier content but even with those out of action, he still had over 800 million hit points. When he did some of those older zones the first time he probably didn't have a tenth of that.

I made a note of the damage he was taking. It was spectacular:

Sand Rock Lizard , Svarni Expanse - 9,293,912,700
Swamp Needler, Svarni Expanse - 4,215,656,200
Rock Growler, Echo Caverns - 5,973,298,500
Enormous Rhino Beetle, The Blinding - 2,947,716,400

Clearly, a character with 992,827,858 HP, as he has in the new expansion, is not going to get far if he's been hit for several billion hit points in a single attack. Also, just as clearly, this cannot be working as intended. 

I went back to the forums and found someone had added a comment to say they'd seen this happen in beta. They also said there'd been a thread on it in the bug forum but the explanation had been misinterpreted as the reporting player not having equipped the right gear and the thread had been marked closed.

The commenter had helpfully opened a new thread reporting the bug was not fixed after all so I added my findings to that. I also did an in-game bug report. We'll see if anything comes of it.

That still left me largely unable to play but I still wanted to play. I was also curious to test whether the problem affected my whole account or just that one character. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to throw a rock at a couple of birds and see if I could knock them both out of their tree. 

It's at times like this that having multiple characters at the cap begins to feel like an insurance policy rather than an indulgence. I've been aware for some time that a Berserker isn't the best class to take through new content and I've been wanting to transition to using my necromancer instead. Well, here was my opportunity. 

Luckily, I'd already tidied her up and got her ready in anticipation of playing her in VoV. All I had to do was port her over and swap out all her panda gear for the stuff in the box. 

I was more than a little anxious that the same thing would happen to her as had happened to the Berserker but I'm very happy to say it didn't. I wheeled her through all the quests the Berserker had done at breakneck speed, not needing to read any of the dialog since I could still remember most of it from last night. 

Her pet could tank everything without seeming to take any damage at all and when I deliberately let things hit the Necro to see what kind of damage they were doing, the numbers in the combat log were as you'd expect - nothing much over 20-40 million hit points. With a health pool of almost 200 million that's barely going to raise a bruise.

I ended up taking her into the first instance, where she acquitted herself well against the regular mobs. The first boss proved to much for her but mostly because of the really awkward positioning. He's an archer who stands on a high rock and also teleports. She died but not for any weird reasons. 

All of which leaves me in a slightly odd position. I'm a little annoyed that I can't play my Berserker, especially since he's by far my most prepared character out of combat, being a maxed Weaponsmith and Adorner among other things, but it's past time I transferred my attention to the Necromancer and this is a nudge in the right direction.

I also ought to take my Warlock, who's a max level Sage and can make the upgrades for the Necro's spells, through the tradeskill signature line rather than the Berserker, because who needs a weaponsmith? No-one! Certainly not me.

There's absolutely no doubt that a Necromancer in EQII is much better suited to my solo playstyle. The Berserker is enormous fun to play in combat with all his AEs and death saves but the Necro is the Swiss Army Knife of classes, able to pop out the right tool for any occasion. She kills everything much faster than he does and she can do all kinds of other things, too. Not to mention she can always drop and feign dead if I need to go answer the door. That's incredibly handy.

I very much hope someone at Darkpaw takes note of the report and fixes the bug sooner rather than later because I do want to keep my Berserker up to speed but I can't say I'm unhappy at the turn of events. This could and indeed should mark a turning point, where I return to my EQII roots and go back to playing the class I played so happily for years, before I was lured away by the knockabout fun of first the Bruiser and then the Berserker.

Buggin' Out

This morning I spent a happy hour or so writing a bug report for EverQuest 2. Okay, that's a little misleading. I probably spent about ten or fifteen minutes on the report and the other forty-five trying to work out how to add a screenshot to my post on the forums.

Daybreak recently made some changes to the bug reporting process. There was an item about it in the News and Announcements section. The main change seems to be a prompt to copy the report to the forums, which seems like a peculiarly redundant process to me. 

I guess the idea is that added value is going to accrue from other players reading the forum posts and adding their information to the pile. The in-game reporting process is inevitably invisible to everyone other than the person making the report and whoever receives it at DBG but I'd always hoped that it was someone's job to read them all. I certainly never assumed anyone would read through all the comments on every post on the forums - even the bug section. I can't believe Daybreak could afford to pay anyone enough for that.

As I read the gloss now, I realize the new reporting feature copies the bug report text to your clipboard automatically so all you have to do is paste it and give it a title. I missed that part, naturally, and re-wrote mine from scratch.  

Then I tried to add a screenshot of the problem. Luckily I'd taken one when it happened. Not because I'd realized anything was wrong. I didn't notice until much later. No, I took the screenshot for a blog post I was thinking of writing. This one, I guess, although it's turning out quite differently from what I had planned.

There is a function on the EQII forums to add images to a thread. It requires you to insert a URL. I've done it before but it was a while ago and I'd forgotten how it worked. I tried to dodge the issue by just copying and pasting the jpg file directly into my post. It seemed to work until I went to upload the whole thing and got the message it was too long.

Much fiddling and experimenting later I decided that wasn't going to work so I had to go and re-learn how to give images URLs. It's fiddly. I got it in the end, after about a dozen tries. It does seem to me, not infrequently, that people who play mmorpgs are assumed to have a surprising level of technical facility. I bet you don't need to know this sort of thing to post on the Candy Crush forums.

The issue I was trying to report may not even be a bug, although I did have an actual bug I was going to report. For the last week or so, every time I log out of EQII, instead of getting a chat message every five seconds telling me I'll be logged in 20, 15, 10, 5, I get all of the messages at once, right at the start. 

That's a proper bug, no doubt about it. It also has zero effect on gameplay and I don't find it particularly annoying so I wasn't rushing to report it. Since I was doing another anyway, I thought I might as well do that one too, but then I saw there was already a whole thread on it so I didn't bother. I guess it annoys some people more than it annoys me. 

The thing I did report? That does annoy me. I really hope it is a bug because if it's a feature it's a very irritating one indeed. 

I've been plugging away at Overseer Season 3 and I now have more than enough quests to set the ten I'm allowed as soon as I log in each day. Most of them are still the basic, blue ones but I have three yellows and, as of this morning, two greens. 

Green (aka Celestial) is the top tier of quality. There should be some Purple (Fabled) ones just below that but so far I don't have any. For Season 3 the timer on Celestial quests has doubled from fifteen hours to thirty and the number of agents required has increased from three to five. 

My only agent with a Season 3 trait so far.
And the most boring name.

That's some inflation. You'd want a good reward for all that extra effort. I mean, it's two extra clicks with the mouse, at least. And you have to wait longer. I mean, come on, we pay a sub for this? (Sorry, just practising for the forum. You want to fit in, don't you?).

So far I've only done the first 30 hour quest twice. The second one is running as we speak. For a miracle I actually have agents with most of the specified traits but only because some of them are the old ones. So far my drop rate on agents with the Season 3 traits has been abysmal. I've had several new agents but only one has any traits at all.

Not to derail my own post but at this stage of the game, what exactly is the point of agents with no traits? I understood it when the Overseer system was new. At that point we were just happy to have any agents at all. Now, though? Why are we still employing people with no discernable skills?

I can answer that! Because they're really good fun to collect. And to look at. I only discovered today that if you open the Agent Collection tab in the Overseer interface it goes to a really impressive, large, well-framed portrait of the Agent in question. Instead of that tiny little icon where you can't even make out what race they are, you get a full-size, hang-it-on-the-wall oil painting.

That's a feature EverQuest has had since the start and I use it there all the time, or I did until I stopped getting new agents. I don't know if EQII always had it and I just missed it or if it was added some time along the way but I'm very happy to have found it. Some of the illustrations are glorious. And some of the descriptions are quite amusing, too.

The thing I was finding neither glorious nor amusing was the flag on the fabled quality (235 resolve!) cloth shoulder item I got from the bonus chest the second time my agents came back with Tarinax's head in a sack. The first time, the bonus chest didn't drop and all I got from the regular one was a forcelink, but this time my 70% success chance triggered and I got a very nice - very nice - upgrade for my necromancer.

Or it would have been if I could have given it to her. I didn't notice until I went to put it in the shared bank that it was flagged No Trade. And I'd received it on my Berserker. Who couldn't wear it even if he wanted to because it was also flagged "All Mages" or, as I'd put it, "Mages Only".

As far as I can remember there has never been any reward for regular Overseer quests that wasn't flagged Heirloom so it could be passed around the account. I think some of the holiday quests may have had No Trade items attached but those are all fluff items, not proper fighting gear. At least anyone can use them.

I'm very much hoping it is a mistake. If not, it's going to be something of a shot in the foot for a system that could better use a shot in the arm. I love the Overseer feature but it has its haters. Handing out No Trade items with class restrictions as the rewards for the most time-consuming content in the system, when players have no effective means of controlling which class gets them, well it's practically trolling us.

So I reported it. We'll see if anything comes of it. 

Meanwhile I'll keep plugging away at the blue and yellow quests. Maybe I'll even get some capable new agents. They must be in there, somewhere.