Keep It Bottled Up

A small item buried deep within Wilhelm's March In Review post reminded me of one of SOE's many, long-forgotten bright ideas. At least, I remembered it as something SOE must have come up with. It seemed very much in keeping with the kind of half-baked, back of a napkin, lunchtime lightbulb moments I associate so strongly with the Smedley regime.

In fact, as Wilhelm explains, it was Daybreak who came up with the concept of Experience Vials. Then again, it was only a year or so after the change of ownership and Smed had not yet left the building. His influence lingered for a while.

Whoever it was, they had some help, of course. Wilhelm gave chapter and verse on how the idea had been inspired (as both our imaginary lawyers would no doubt prefer we phrased it) by the skill extractors CCP had introduced to EVE Online not too long before.

As the official press release has it, "Experience Vials will allow players to purchase empty vials off of the EverQuest 2 Marketplace for Daybreak Cash; these vials can be used to “bottle” experience points as you earn them. Once you fill up an empty vial, you will be able to claim a full vial which you can give to a friend or alt, sell on the broker, or even save for yourself for later."

 If you want to know exactly how that works, the same post describes the entire process in quite extraordinarily exhaustive detail. With illustrations. Someone certainly believed in the feature back then.

And, to be fair, it was quite exciting at the time. Five years ago the level cap was still 100. Two hundred thousand xp made a huge impact on the levelling process at the low and mid levels (still does, in fact) and even close to the then-cap it was well worth having.

I remember buying some vials to try them out. I had bushels of Daybreak cash, acquired during SOE's infamous triple-value sales, another of Smed's patented not-so-great notions and the asking price seemed cheap enough. 

What was more, I had capped characters with nothing better to do with the xp they otherwise wouldn't even have been getting. It seemed like a solid win all round. 

And it kind of was. I equipped a vial on my Berserker and siphoned his xp into it while he was out and about doing his normal duties. Then I handed the full bottle to one of my low-level characters and bingo! Twenty or thirty levels at a swig. 

This chart shows just how effective the vials can be in the leveling game. A single vial downed right after character creation would bootstrap a fresh alt into the low thirties. Four would take them within ten levels of the then-cap. They also work for gaining AAs.

I don't remember how many I bought. I know I bumped one character into the mid-high levels just trying it out. I also recall selling some of the filled vials on the broker and making a fair amount of money. 

After a while, though, I just kind of forgot about the whole thing. Partly it was the arrival of new expansions with new level caps that meant my higher level characters didn't feel like selling any of their hard-won xp , let alone giving it away. Partly it was the major changes DBG made to the way xp works after level 100.

If I'd thought about it at all in the last couple of years, which I really can't say I ever did, I'd probably have said it was a feature that had long outlived whatever usefulness it once had. Look at that chart again. To go from 100 to 101 takes 1,666,500xp. That's just over eight filled vials. To go from 101 to 102 takes 139,986,000 . That's seven hundred!

 And it just goes up from there. In EQII's brave new world of unfeasibly huge numbers it now takes almost half a billion xp to do the final level before cap. Not to mention that you can now pretty much only get that xp from quests. There doesn't seem to be any place in the ecosystem for 200k dribbles of xp any more.

And yet...

When I read Wilhelm's post it made me think. I commented "Also, EQ2 xp injectors! I forgot about them. I have some still in the bank. There was a time when I was making good money selling my own blood, so to speak. Seems bizarre now. I wonder how many thousands – or maybe millions – you’d need to do even one level over 100? If it would even be possible. Probably they wouldn’t even work. I should test that and find out."

So I did. Well, kind of.

What I did first was to take a look to see whether anyone was still trying to sell the things. It was the first time I'd visited the broker in what had to have been at least a couple of months. There was a nice surprise waiting for me. I'd sold a level 117 Master spell for three million platinum. I'd forgotten I'd put it up for sale.

I searched "Experience Vial" and it brought back four results. All in a tight range from 980k to 1m. In total there were only about twenty on sale and two of the four sellers only had a single bottle. Not much of a sample but it suggested there wasn't a lot of interest. 

One thing that always gives a strong indicator of demand is how fast people snap up bargains. And it was Saturday. Weekends are by far the busiest shopping time in mmorpgs. Seemed like a good time to test the market.

I popped a couple of my vials on at 750k. It seemed a big enough discount to bait the hook but still expensive enough to deter chancers. If they sold over the weekend - or even in the first week - it would suggest some genuine level of demand.

This morning, when I logged in to collect and set my Overseer missions, I remembered to check if there'd been any interest in the vials. There had. Both had sold.

I'd say that confirmed it... if it wasn't that the buyer was the same player who'd been selling the previously cheapest. He'd had ten for sale yesterday and now he had a dozen. He'd clearly bought mine to kill the competition and make himself a few hundred thousand profit into the bargain.

If they sell, that is. It's still too early to say what the end-user demand is. While debated with myself  whether to put some more up at a less-snipeable price, I thought it might be an idea to see just how easy it would be to re-supply. 

I bought the smallest pack of vials in the cash shop. Three for 500DBC (actually 450DBC with my 10% Membership discount). After a bit of fiddling about getting them equipped and switched on (that pictorial guide came in handy, even after all these years) I took my Berserker to The Blinding, where there's an infinitely repeatable quest to kill a dozen mobs about ten seconds from the questgiver.

At max level it takes all of thirty seconds. Killing the mobs themselves nets around 2,000xp, total. Handing in the quest gets you just over a billion. 1,054,813,997xp to be precise. Okay, I did have full vitality. And 120% veteran bonus. However you want to cut it, that's going to fill all the vials you want.

I had my three vials on auto-consume so it filled all three instantly. It opens up some intriguing possibilities. If we posit a regular market for these things at the 750k price point, that would allow me to convert my monthly stipend of 500DBC into 2.25m platinum at a time investment of less than five minutes. 

I'd feel a little more confident about those figures if I'd actually sold a vial to someone who was likely to use it.  I just put a couple more on for 850k each. If the reseller buys those I'll go to 950k for the next two. That should stop him. Then maybe we'll find out if there really is any market from people who'll use them for the purpose intended.

However it turns out, though, it certainly looks as if xp vials may have been one of the team's better ideas after all. There's clearly interest of some kind five years on. Can't ask more than that.

Are You Experienced? : EQ2

The centenary game update for EQ2 has arrived and as promised it's enormous. The content drop includes a level 100 overland zone complete with Signature quest line, new Advanced and Heroic dungeons, a new Raid and several "Fabled" dungeons.

It also adds a new stat - Resolve - which is already drawing controversy. There are new collections, some new armor to craft, something for roleplayers by way of the Heartbound system and, of course, a new kind of mount in the cash shop. Owls, in case you were wondering.

It's a lot to take in. I've bought expansions that had fewer features that interested me. And then there are Experience Vials.

The Experience Vial System appears, at first look, to be an extremely neat solution to the ever-receding end-game problem suffered by all aging MMORPGs. As the genre ages and it becomes clearer than ever that some of these games have a grip on their playerbase that would shame a bulldog with rigor mortis, developers have thrashed around trying to come up with a way to allow the trickle of new and returning players to catch up with the firmly established end-game core.

The main method so far seems to have been to sell Boosts that jump a character up to near-maximum level and/or to hand out a free level upgrade, or even a whole max level character, with new expansions. That once-controversial approach has become the industry standard. The only time a developer takes a PR hit these day is if the boost isn't deemed powerful enough or, heaven forfend, they don't provide one at all.

The XP vial system that DBG have come up with for EQ2 is more flexible and more elegant. And more profitable, both for the company and for players. From what I can gather, as someone who's never played EVE, it loosely resembles CCP's recent addition of tradeable skill injectors.

In both games the company makes real-world money by selling the empty container in the cash shop, while the player makes in-game money by selling the filled version in the virtual trading system. In EQ2 that means buying Experience Vials in the DBG Store for DBG Cash, filling them and then selling them on the Broker for platinum.

You can also, naturally, keep it within the family and eschew Mammon by trading the vials directly to friends, guildmates or your own stable of characters. It would, for example, allow a player to give a leg-up to a friend who'd never played before or a guild to bring a returning player quickly up to speed.

It also provides an excellent solution to the perennial max-level-max-AA "what do I do with all this xp that's going to waste?" problem. Turn it into a new income stream or make yourself really popular by handing it out for free. Your choice.

I have a lot of DBG cash saved up. On the account where I used to have All Access I have over 17,000 DBC. On my current All Access account I have more than 13k. Even though I find the EQ2 cash shop the most appealing and useful of any MMO I've played, I still don't spend very much there and I'm always looking for new things to buy.

The price for Experience Vials seemed quite reasonable: 500DBC for a pack of three, 800DBC for five, 1200DBC for eight. I bought a five-pack and started filling it as I began the new Signature Quest with my level 100 Berserker (of which, more another time).

I activated a flask by right-clicking it in Inventory and off we went. The Siphon function seems to be set to "On" by default. Examining the vial told me they will hold 200,000xp and that the conversion rate is 60%. That means I need to earn around 333kxp to fill one.

After an hour or two meandering through the opening few quests of the Signature storyline, taking things at a very gentle pace, the vial was almost full. That is a lot faster than I was expecting but then I was getting a boatload of discovery xp just from flying around the new zone. Still, it's apparent that filling these vials is going to be a trivial effort for a high-level character.

How will that translate for the lower level that's going to consume them? I'll tell you when I fill one. Oh alright, let's look at the numbers.

My Beastlord is Level 94. That level requires just over one million xp. I can say from mildly bitter experience that getting that one million takes a long time. Or, at least, it feels like a long time. A lot longer than it's going to feel to fill five vials derping about on my zerker at level 100, that's for sure.

Looking further down the food chain we come to my Necromancer, becalmed at level 73. One of my necromancers, I should say. I have a level 90 but she's on the Test server. Level 73 requires just over 100k xp. Hmm. So one filled vial will give a couple of levels in the 70s.

Staring down the wrong end of the telescope I see an enchanter waving at me from level 30. That level takes a mere 14k xp. Assuming the vial, when consumed, continues to fill levels until it empties, it very much looks as if one vial will see you through several tiers.

In fact, according to this chart (which hasn't been updated for a while so may not be entirely accurate) it takes a cumulative 11 million xp to get from character creation to the end of Level 95. That's 55 vials, which, at current broker prices, would run you around 440k platinum - although I doubt there are even that many for sale.

Bear in mind that you also need  AAXP. You can use the vials for that as well but I'm not sure it would be a particularly efficient way of going about it. Someone else can crunh the numbers on that!

However you cut it, there are a lot of possibilities, especially once you factor in the Level 90 boost you can buy in the cash shop. As someone who enjoys leveling for its own sake I may be more interested in selling the juices of my labor than swigging them. Then again, if I'm going to level in EQ2 just for the fun of leveling I'm most likely to go do it on the Time Limited Expansion server, where the vials are not available.

All in all, it seems like an interesting and well-designed addition. The EQ2 team may be small but the developers working on it really do seem to have a good grasp of what they can and should be doing for the long-term health of the game.

Not sure I would have been saying that a couple of years ago, even though it's largely the same individuals involved. Makes you think, doesn't it?