Levels And Legacies

Redbeard has a post up today about leveling in World of Warcraft Retail and how fast it is these days, so fast he wonders whether there's really any point in having it at all. I have some thoughts on that but I'll leave them over there, in the comment thread. I thought about writing a whole post but I don't play WoW regularly and I don't know enough about it. I've never even reached the level cap there so anything I say is going to be suspect.

When it comes to EverQuest II, though, I have plenty of experience, albeit mostly from the perspective of a solo player these days, so I feel quite safe giving my thoughts. And what that experience tells me is that getting your levels is the absolute least of it. Even if you have no intention of engaging in end-game content, hitting max level is just the beginning.

Of course, the significance of the number next to your character's name in an MMORPG has always been mutable. Even back at the dawn of the genre, levels were only ever a means to an end.

Back in those olden-if-not-so-golden times, when leveling in MMORPGs was such a chore people sometimes bought their characters on EBay or paid someone else to level up for them, it was widely believed it took sixty levels or whatever the cap was to just to learn how to play your class. 

If you hadn't put in the hours, no-one wanted you in a group. Even if you did have the player-skills, your character most likely didn't. Or they didn't have the equipment. They probably didn't have the flags or the languages or the faction needed because all of that takes time - a lot more time than it takes to get the levels.

In many MMORPGs and especially in EQII, not as much has changed as you'd think. It's true that, over the twenty years the game has been around, almost every aspect of the game has been streamlined, pared down and made more user-friendly but the process only goes so far.

Streamlining something may make it faster but the irony of comparatives is that making something faster still doesn't make it fast. It isn't until you settle down to compare the accrued advantages of a character that's been played for thousands of hours with one that's been played for only a few hundred that you begin to appreciate the vast gulf that lies between them, even if their level counts make an exact match.

And it isn't until you go to do something about equaling them up that you realize just what a huge task it's likely to be. I'll just give one example.

What I've mostly being doing these past few weeks in EQII has been getting my Necromancer's harvesting speed down to 1.5 seconds. I wanted to do it because harvesting is virtually impossible to avoid in the game, even if you never craft or go out looking for crafting mats. Countless quests require it so it's not a skill easily or wisely ignored.

You might just about get away with leaving it alone as a pure Adventurer but I want my Necromancer (Her name's Mordita.) to be an all-rounder. I want her to adventure, craft and harvest. My Berserker (Conkers) does, so if she's going to replace him, she needs to as well. And crafters have to harvest a lot.

If she's going to do at-cap tradeskill content, she'll need to max all the harvesting skills (Mining, Trapping, Foresting, Fishing and Gathering itself.) The cap is currently 700 (Probably. Hard information is so hard to come by for the game these days. It's a worrying sign of the end times, I think.) 

I could raise these skills just by going out and hitting nodes but I've been working my way through the lengthy gathering questline instead. Most of it still involves going out and hitting nodes but it comes with some useful rewards so why not?  

It's taken me quite a few hours and most of Mordita's skills are still less than half-way to the cap so there's plenty more to go, which was why after I got to the end of the second quest chain, I decided I needed to do something about her harvesting speed. 

The base speed to complete one harvesting action is five seconds. Each node has a potential three pulls although not all pulls are successful. With a skill well below the recommended level for the type of node, which is where she's been and will be for a good while yet, you can easily end up standing next to the same rock, picking away at it for a dozen turns or more.

With the help of crafted items you can bring that down some but it still felt glacially slow compared to what I'd been used to with Conkers for as long as I can remember. As with everything in EQII, the exact mechanics and details are obscure but in general, base gathering speed bottoms out at one and a half seconds, which is then affected by your Casting speed. Conkers casting speed is 103% so his effective gathering speed is about 0.75 seconds, which feels pretty zippy.

To get there, he needed the Gathering Goblin AA, which requires you to be at least a Level 90 crafter and some other AAs but that just for the actual goblin, who follows you around harvesting. To turn him into a buff that reduces your base harvesting time to 1.5 you have to do a quest.

It's been a few years since I last did it but I vaguely remembered it involved speaking to another goblin in Obulus Frontier, a zone that arrived with the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. Imagining it would take a few minutes, maybe half an hour at most, I trotted over to the zone to pick up the quest and of course the goblin wouldn't talk to me.

That sent me back to the Wiki to see what the problem was and it turned out to be quite a big one. I'll try to sum it up as succinctly as I can.

To get Growf the goblin to give you the first in the series of quests that concludes with you setting the gathering goblin free and receiving the harvesting speed buff, you need to have finished the whole of the Kunark Ascending crafting signature questline. Growf's bit is just a kind of coda at the end but it's dependent on the full thing.

I wasn't best pleased but it didn't sound too bad. Three or four hours, maybe, assuming I didn't read any of the quest dialog, all of which I'd seen more than once already. So I set about it, only to find you can't just start in on the KA questline out of nowhere. There's a pre-req: the entire tradeskill signature questline from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra.

This was starting to look like a much bigger project than I'd anticipated. Two complete expansion signature questlines. That was going to take a while, even if they were only crafting ones, which go a lot faster than their adventure counterparts. We're talking several full sessions for sure.

Got to be done, though. Off I went to get started on the ToA sequence, only to find I couldn't get that one either. For most expansions you get a letter inviting you to speak to someone and off you go but it seems that around this time the plan was to make sure everyone saw every part of the content  so before you can get the Thalumbra questline, you have to complete yet another pre-req, The Captain's Lament from the 2013 expansion, Tears of Veeshan. I think it was part of the pre-expansion build-up but it was a long time ago...

To release my Gathering Goblin from indentured servitude and receive, in recompense for my magnanimity, a reduction in my base harvesting speed to 1.5 seconds, I was going to have to complete the full tradeskill signatures from two expansions, plus the warm-up from the one before. 

All told, that comes to more than fifty separate quests. Fifty quests, just to upgrade one small aspect of Mordita's capabilities to bring them in line with Conkers'. And it's not even anything crucial to gameplay, just a minor quality of life improvement.

I wasn't counting but I played most evenings the last couple of weeks, generally for an hour or two each session. Even with the huge boost of instant map travel via All Access Membership, the huge advantage of being a max-level Adventurer, thereby making every mob in every required zone non-aggro, a full walk-through on hand, complete with locs to cut and paste into the game and the lack of any inclination on my part to read for the third time even a single line of quest dialog, it still took me that long to get it all done. 

And I was lucky Mordita already knew how to speak Gobblish, the Goblin language, because Growf doesn't speak anything else. If she hadn't, I'd have had to go do the quest for that as well.

Luckily for me, I enjoyed the whole thing. It had just the right level of simplicity for me not to feel the grind while I had to pay just enough attention to the instructions to make it seem like I was doing something. My sweet spot, really.

Even so, it's a hell of a long time to spend on such a small thing, while preparing one character to take over from another. If it was the only time I needed to do something like it, that would be one thing but it's just an example of a seemingly endless number of minor adjustments and calibrations that have to be made before Mordita is going to feel expansion-ready. 

Getting the levels, which used to be the barrier, is now literally the least of it. You can buy those, quite legitimately. I just had to click a button. But if anyone thinks a Max Level Boost is going to do all the work for them - or even most of it - they can think again. At least in EQII, they can. I don't know about other games. I bet it's much the same everywhere, though.

And let's not forget that all of this was mainly done as a way of speeding up another set of quests. Now that Mordita has the fast harvesting speed, it's back to the harvesting questline itself so she can use it, and that's going to take quite a few more hours to finish. 

After that, I'm going to have to take a close look at her stats and see what else she's missing. She could do with learning a whole bunch of languages, for a start.

Six months to the next expansion. I hope it's going to be enough...

W.H.O.O.'s On First?

At time of writing, a little over a week after launch, I have four max-level crafters in EverQuest II: Weaponsmith, Alchemist, Sage and Carpenter. Once I had the rhythm down, the five new levels took me around an hour, at least half of which was taken up with gathering.

There are two gathering quests in the sequence, the first about twice the length of the second. My Weaponsmith, having also been my "main" for years, was at the previous cap for all gathering skills. He had gear that gives bonuses to gathering, along with all the gathering AAs.

Most importantly, he'd done all the significant gathering questlines including, crucially,  the one to convert the Gathering Goblin into a Mercenary. That's the one that also gives the maximum, permanent, passive speed boost to all gathering skills. 

The Weaponsmith's a gathering machine but all of his advantages were somewhat negated by his having to go through the questline first. All the time he made up on the gathering sections, he more than lost having to look up where to go and what to do. He also had to buy all the fuels, which he then put in the shared bank for everyone else to use when he'd finished. He was trailblazing for the rest of them and he paid the price in time.

The Alchemist went next. By dint of having been my main for one recent expansion, when I mistakenly thought a Bruiser might get through the combat sections faster than a Berserker, his skills were also pretty close to being maxed. He hadn't swapped his Goblin over but it turned out he had done all of the pre-requisites to get the quests. Following a walkthrough, it only took a few minutes to run through the questline, after which he was able to pick stuff up off the ground very nearly as efficiently as the Weaponsmith.

The Sage went third. He's never done much adventuring but there have been times when I thought he might so he was at the previous level cap in his martial class, Warlock. That turned out to be quite significant.

I'm going to back-track a little now. 

One of the most obvious changes to the game since the arrival of Naimi Denmother as crafting dev has been the care and attention shown to high-level crafters, who may not also be high-level adventurers. It's not just reinstating something that's lapsed a little since Domino left, it's also addressing an attitude that's sometimes seemed present among some of the Darkpaw design team, who haven't always appeared to look kindly on crafters getting a helping hand.

There have been intimations in the past that crafters who don't also keep up with their adventuring may have been having too easy a ride; that it might do them some good to have to scuttle a bit, dodge the odd deep-red con mob, maybe even die a few times, just to keep them honest. One thing Naimi Denmother has done since she arrived is to take the cap off that particular jar of worms by making it very clear in her commentary when dark forces have been working against her in her attempts to secure safe passage for nervous crafters as they attempt to pick their way through high-level adventure content.

Judging from what I've seen in Ballads of Zimora so far, Naimi has been winning a few battles of her own. Not only is the crafting Signature quest much shorter than the Adventure one, crafters get to visit three of the four new zones long before Adventurers do and what's more they get to fly in them all, too. For once, I could see where pure adventurers might feel they had cause to be snippy.

That, however, is by no means all she's done to help high-level crafters whio don't relish the adrenaline rush of being jumped from behind by mobs eighty levels higher than them. A goodly portion of the Signature crafting questline revolves around the manufacture of something called the W.H.O.O.

The W.H.O.O. is a ghostly, blue hand about the size of a large dog. It's a device you can summon to let you harvest in complete safety. In game mechanics, it's an Elemental that you "possess". You craft a spell that goes in your spell-book and when you use it you're given thirty seconds to click on and effectively become the W.H.O.O.

As a disembodied, blue hand you're neutral to absolutely everything, meaning nothing pays you the least attention. You can zip around, gathering ansd mining and even fishing in the most dangerous areas at no personal risk whatsoever. The effect lasts indefinitely, until you opt to return to your true form.

It sounds great and for low-level adventurers trying to gather in the new expansion zones (Those being the only place the W.H.O.O. can be summoned.) I'm sure it is. It does, however, come with some significant disadvantages, chief of which is that certain crafting buffs don't work, including that speedy goblin one. It's safer, sure, but if you're able to handle the mobs it's also slower. Seems like a fair trade-off.

Since all my high-level crafters on my main server, Skyfire, are also high-level adventurers, even though I had to make several versions of the W.H.O.O for the questline (There's a different one for each zone.) I didn't actually use any of them until a few minutes ago, when I logged in to summon one for a screenshot. I found it much easier and more efficient just to kill anything that had the nerve to interrupt me while I was out gathering.

That in itself led to some interesting discoveries. With all four characters, I began by following the Quartermaster's guide to gearing up for the expansion, so everyone was dressed in the same gear and using the same Familiar, Mount and Mercenary. The big difference between them should have been how well-upgraded their spells and abilities were but it turned out not to be quite that simple.

The Weaponsmith is a Berserker when he's adventuring and he's by far my most rigourously maintained character. He had no trouble with any mobs and his time-to-kill was a handful of seconds. The Alchemist is a Bruiser and his short stint as combat lead left him not too far behind the Berserker. He also had no trouble defending himself but his TTK was noticeably longer. Still only a few seconds but a few more seconds.

The Sage, as I said, is also a Warlock but he hasn't done a lot of adventuring. I've used the time-gated upgrade system to keep a few of his spells at Master or above but I didn't even touch his spellbook in the last expansion, so even though he's the one who makes the upgrades for casters, most of his spells were either the lowest grade (Apprentice) from the previous cap or higher grades fthe cap before that. 

On the plus side, he did at least have the goblin-granted gathering speed buff,  proving he was at least paying attention during Kunark Ascending back in 2016.

In theory, he should have been the one to struggle but apparently no-one told him that. Far from having difficulty dispatching anything that looked at him funny, he was one-shotting some stuff and taking no more than two casts on the rest. If he attacked from range to clear a path, mobs died from the dot effects before they got to him. If he used an AE, everything just fell over. 

I shudder to think how easy he'd find it all if he'd bothered to upgrade his own spells. I'm going to have to have a word with him about that. Also, I might have to try and figure out what most of his spells do. I'm pretty sure he'd be even more bad-ass if I knew.

That just leaves the Carpenter. Her adventure class is Inquisitor, which makes her pretty much bomb-proof, especially with an Inquisitor mercenary as well, so I was surprised to find she was the one who had the most trouble. She didn't have the gathering buff or much in the way of gathering gear and she doesn't appear to have set foot in the KA expansion zones. I did take her over to see if she could get the quest but as soon as she got discovery XP for entering the area I knew it was hopeless. 

Not wanting to spend longer doing the pre-quests than it would take me to do the entire BoZ crafting timeline, I abandoned that idea and cracked on. Even with the slower gathering she still took the shortest time getting to the level cap. The 60% XP bonus from the three who went before more than made up the difference.

What slowed her down more than anything was her TTK. I know she's a cleric and you can't expect frontline DPS numbers but Inquisitors are basically battle-wizards in EQII and I've not had much problem with her ability to knock things down fast in the past. Once again, she's suffering from lack of attention over the past few expansions. I really need to pull my finger out and bring everyone's spell-books up to date.

And that is where I'm headed. Having maxed both the spell-makers, I'm covered for levels and the acquisition system for Advanced recipe books in BoZ is a straightforward, time-gated, NPC-driven process. According to Niami Denmother, it should take about ten days research to get each book, a wait you can halve by doing the relevant dailies. 

That should leave plenty of time to get the necessary Rare materials, even though it will be a lot. Some high-level Expert recipes have been using two rares for a while and even if it only takes one, there are dozens of spells and combat abilities to upgrade.

It very much looks like there's going to be a lot of gathering in my future. And in the Weaponsmith/Berserker's future because he's going to be the one doing most of it. That's what you get for being the best at something - you get to do all the work for everyone else.

Doesn't really seem fair, does it?

Deceptively Spacious

This was going to be the post where I showed off the newly-decorated interior of my house in Villagers and Heroes. Things are never as simple as you think they're going to be, are they?

Even though I posted about it back when it was announced and even tipped the news to MassivelyOP, I still managed to miss the arrival of real housing in the game by a week. The long-awaited update finally dropped on 15 May. Well, almost. Given the update's called Homestead Part One, I'm guessing it's still a work in progress, even now.

Let's not carp. It's a very substantial upgrade to the existing housing system, which was perhaps unique in the genre in that you could own a house that you couldn't enter. You had to be content with admiring it from the garden, where you were free to tend crops and raise animals. 

You can still do those things, of course, but now, when you've finished your day's work, you can open the front door and step inside for a well-earned rest, on your bed or in your fireside chair. Or you will be able to, once you've bought or crafted yourself some furniture. 

Needs updating. No mention of interior design.

And that's where this falls down. I'd forgotten I'd only just started my character on the Steam version of Villagers and Heroes. At Level 3, getting hold of any furniture at all proved a lot harder than I was expecting.

I used to have a character who was in the twenties or thereabouts. She had a house, a garden, some sheep and who knows what-all. She probably also had the skills to gather materials and craft the furniture as well, not to mention enough money to buy the recipes and maybe some vendored furnishings as well. .Sadly, I've long since lost the account details needed to log her in.  

My current character didn't have any of those advantages. Fortunately, you don't need any of that to "buy" a basic house in V&H. All you have to do is ask. 

First, you have to choose which village you want to live in. 

How is Agartha Spanish, exactly? Remind me...

 

Without reading up on it (Again.) I can't recall the exact mechanics of how Villages are created but there are lots of them, some run by some kind of player council, others by Guilds. I picked one I liked the name of - Agartha Hamlet - because it reminded me of The Agartha in The Secret World. 

It turned out to be named after the ancient ruins of the mythical Spanish city of the same name. I'm guessing it's run by a Spanish-speaking village council. That'll be handy for practicing my very basic tourist Spanish in the unlikely event I ever have to speak to anyone.

I found a decent spot and clicked on the "To Let" board. There are plenty of options for various sizes and styles of building but only one I could afford - the one that costs absolutely nothing:  the Rustic. It's a wonky-looking structure, with a crooked chimney and a bowed roof but it's by no means unattractive, especially for no money down and a monthly rent of bugger all.

That chimney's never up to code.

Even though there's no rent to pay, you can't just sign the lease and forget about it. If you don't want to come back and find yourself homeless you have to make sure to log into the game at least once a fortnight. What happens to your stuff if you don't, I have no idea. 

And for the moment I don't much care, either, because I have no stuff. The inside of my new house is delightfully minimalist right now. Nothing but bare boards and whitewash. 

When I took possession and opened the door, I found just a single, windowless room but I wasn't at all disappointed. It's a big room with a very high ceiling and some quite impressive beams. Like the TARDIS, it's bigger on the inside than the out.

Pretty sure you could put four of my house inside my house.

Once I'd taken stock of the amenities (There are none.) I thought I'd go see what the housing vendors had to offer me. I'd read in the update notes that there were two new NPCs:

• Lazy Susan - ‘Housing Expert’ located in villages
• Supellex Copia - ‘Housing Vendor’ located in villages, Ardent City, and Summer’s Hollow

The quotation marks around "Housing Expert" were a little concerning, but although Lazy Susan seemed like a bit of a smartass, she did at least know what she was talking about. She explained the various ways I could furnish my house - buy stuff from vendors in the game, find it while exploring or get a few choice pieces from the cash shop - but her recommendation was that I craft my own.

Sarcastic Susan, more like.

 

That seemed like sound advice. She even gave me a starter quest to make a very basic stool, which sounded like something I ought to be able to do. 

Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

It took me a little while to find the recipe and when I did I barely had enough cash to buy it, even though it had clearly been priced at what was meant to be an absolute giveaway price. It brought home to me just how very new and unpayed my character was and how I was almost certainly going to be in over my head very quickly indeed unless I went and did some seriousl levelling.

I bought the recipe for one silver piece. That left me with two. Then I checked the map and found the woodworking station. I went there and opened the interface, only to find I couldn't even scribe the recipe I'd bought until I had a Woodworking skill of 15. Mine was zero.

At least I was able to see what mats I needed: 240 logs. Seems like an awful lot of wood for one small stool but who am I to judge, me with a woodworking skill of zero? Off to chop trees I went!

Except I didn't have the skill to chop wood either, or not in the woods around my village, anyway. The lowest level tree in Agartha Hamlet is Level 30 and my skill was five. I chopped and chopped but not a splinter could I make. I had to go back into Summer's Hollow, the starting town, to the portal for the lowest level area I could find, which turned out to be somewhere called Gandymeade Grove.

There I found not only trees my level but trainers of all kinds, willing to give instruction on how to chop wood, mine ore and similar essentials. As I tracked down the nodes I needed I was frequently set up on by the local wildlife, wargs and the like, all of which I handily dispatched, earning myself a couple of adventure levels and pretty much a full set of Hunter's leathers in the process. 

I was having such a good time, I did the full circuit of the Grove, hunting down and slaying all the named creatures marked on the map. In V&H you get to kill each of them once a day for a big XP bonus and an enhanced chance at their good loot. It's a nice version of the traditional daily quest.

After all that, I was still only Level 10 at Plant Lore, the gathering skill that covers the cutting down of trees. As for woodworking, I hadn't even started.

At this rate it's going to be weeks before I can come here and post proud pictures of my tastefully-decorated country cottage. I did try to cheat by going into someone else's house and getting some screenshots of their furnishings but although the default setting is Open Access for All, just about everyone in Agartha Hamlet has changed that to Private. The only houses I found that were admitting visitors were as bare inside as my own.

Consider this a work in progress, then. Much like the Homestead feature itself. A good start but with more to come. If I remember to log in, that is. If not, I guess I'll find out the hard way what happens to your funiture when you don't.

Once More, With Feeling

As must be obvious to everyone by now, I'm playing EverQuest II again. Not that I ever stopped. I just hadn't been playing much of anything for a while and EQII had dropped out of what minimal rotation remained. Now it seems, without even trying, I'm very much back on the mmorpg horse and I have EQII to thank, if thanks is the appropriate response. 

To be strictly accurate, I ought to be offering up my gratitude to whomever decided it was time to merge Kaladim and Antonia Bayle. The thought of being stuffed unceremoniously into AB made my skin itch and since there was a timer counting down I couldn't just grunt and ignore it. 

Once I was back, I soon found plenty to do. I just needed a change of emphasis.

Back in January or February I'd stalled on the signature adventure questline from the current expansion but I'd never made all that much progress with it, mostly because I've found it awkward to commit to instances involving long and/or challenging boss fights ever since we got Beryl the dog. She mostly ignores what happens on screens but when it comes to dungeons, she has an almost supernatural ability to wake up and demand attention at precisely the worst moment, when I'm either trying desperately to stay alive or figure out what I need to do to get the boss down.

I think it might be the change of intensity in the audio output that triggers her attention. Boss fights are noisy and I always play with in-game sound on and turned up fairly loud. She doesn't twitch during normal gameplay but prolonged battles are a different matter. 

That, of course, only explains what might be waking her up when she's asleep in the armchair behind me. What causes her to come bounding downstairs to paw at my arm and bark just as I've gotten the boss down to ten percent is less clear. Maybe she thinks I'm battling with an intruder - not that she'd be much use if I was.

After several such incidents, I began avoiding anything I couldn't easily pause at a moment's notice. It wasn't just in EQII. I'm way behind on the main storyline in Noah's Heart for the same reason. Still, I can't in good faith offer Beryl as an excuse for backing out of more challenging content there without also acknowledging that I never much liked it anyway. If there's one thing you don't want to play Noah's Heart for, it's the combat.

I could easily organize things so I'd be able to count on an uninterrupted run at the instances but I was happy to take the opportunity to drop out of anything involving lengthy scraps in either - or indeed any - game. I'm really not much interested in that side of mmorpgs any more.

There's another factor at play, too. In both games, as in most mmorpgs, patience makes things easier. More levels and better gear turn fights that were slugfests into walkovers. So long as the game offers more than one way to make your character stronger, you can always just defer the fights you don't want to do until you're overgeared, overleveled or both.

All of that explains both why I stopped and why I started again but not why I kept on playing once I'd gone back. The main reason, I think, was the break. 

Yesterday, Syp posted a list of "6 ways to fall back in love with MMOs again", all of which were sound advice. #3 on the list was "MMOs are a game, not a marriage", under which rubric he wrote "Give your regular MMO a break from time to time". I wouldn't even say I had a single "regular MMO" these days but even so taking a break really refreshed my enthusiasm.

The other significant factor in getting me back and playing EQII daily was the unplanned reintroduction of low-level gameplay to the mix. I've always said I prefer the low to mid levels in mmorpgs but the increasing willingness of developers to blur the boundaries between low and high, whether by introducing zone scaling or offering catch-up mechanics to bring everyone to endgame, has meant that for some years, without even meaning to, I've found myself mostly at the cap in the games I've been playing. 

Mitsu (nee Lana) on Kaladim was Level 26 when I logged her in to move her to her new home. The level cap in EQII is now 125. If I made a fresh character on a standard-ruleset server, those first 26 levels would pass in a session or two but because I'd done them on Kaladim back when it launched, they'd taken me weeks. 

I just checked and I have three and a half days played on Mitsu, about 85 hours. That represents maybe thirty or forty sessions, which is a considerable investment of time. She and I have history; she feels like a real character.

It was a connection I felt as soon as I began playing her again, which is why I fell so easily into a familiar pattern of sorting out somewhere for her to live, upgrading her gear, getting her a suitable mercenary and all the other things that make playing EQII such an absorbing and entertaining experience. 

Since she re-located to the Isle of Refuge server I've been playing her for an hour or two every day. She's now Level 44 but her real progress has been as a crafter. Her Jewelcrafting stands at Level 56 but she's also made great improvements in her ancillary and secondary tradeskills - Adorning, Transmuting and Tinkering. I've been doing the daily quests for each of them diligently and she's now better at all of them than many of my max-level crafters.

What's more, she's been pursuing the infamous Gathering Obsession timeline offered by the much-reviled Qho, a child who wants to obtain samples of gathered materials from every part of the world so he can compare them. This, he's compelled to do from the comfort of the lake in which he insists, for reasons never made clear, on standing, since his Mom won't let him go adventuring, almost certainly because she suspects any party that allowed him to join would murder him within the day. He's really quite annoying.

I've done this quest several times before. It takes many, many hours and can be very frustrating. People do it because the rewards are great and it's an effective way to raise all of your gathering skills but the idea of doing it for fun might be a bit out there for most.

And yet I've been loving it. I'd forgotten just how relaxing gathering in EQII can be. I know some mmorpg players prefer active gathering, where you have to complete some kind of mini-game to pick leaves from a bush or chop up a log but I much prefer the zen calm of clicking a node and watching a progress bar fill.

As well as working on Mitsu's skills, I've been keeping up with my gathering dailies on my first maxed crafter on Skyfire. I only do one round of those most days now but a while ago I was taking the trouble to pick them up two or three times a day as the cooldowns refreshed.

Another thing I've been doing with Mitsu has been building up her portfolio of Overseer agents. Since she's alone on her server she needs to do everything herself. She can't just rely on whichever of the team happened to be around when a feature was added to provide that service for everyone, as happens on the server where I normally play.

Yesterday's patch brought Game Update 122: Empire of Antiquity to the live servers and along with it Overseer Season 5. Every character receives a boost to open up the new Overseer content but Mitsu can still access previous seasons by way of the Charged quests handed out on request by Stanley Parnem on the West Freeport dockside.

She'll have to take a back seat from now on, though. The Account's pool of Overseer missions is shared across servers and since Overseer remains one of the best ways to obtain at-cap solo gear without having to kill bosses or run instances, my max levels will demand preference. I'm now looking at a few weeks of grinding Season 5 missions until I have enough, followed by daily re-applications until everyone has more gear than they know what to do with, by which time the Panda quests will be back and most of what I got from Overseer will be out of date again. So it goes.

One thing's for sure. I'll run out of interest long before I run out of things to do. This post represents just a snapshot of the vast range that's available. When things start to feel stale, which they inevitably will, eventually, I'll take another break so I can come back and start doing it all over again.

I thought of calling this post "Stockholm Syndrome" but really it's all my own choice. Then again, I would think that, wouldn't I?

New World: The Good, The Bad And The UI

One of the paradoxes of blogging about mmorpgs is that, when you have plenty of time to write, it probably means you don't have much to say and when you have plenty to say, it probably means you don't have much time to write. That's because ideas for posts about mmorpgs come thickest and fastest when the games are fresh and exciting but mmorpg gameplay is compulsive and time-consuming, both by nature and design.

I have a ton of ideas for posts about New World but, as with Valheim (Not an mmorpg.) earlier this year I begrudge the time it takes to think them through, fact-check the details and turn them into coherent essays that make some kind of point. Instead I find myself bashing out slice-of-life diary entries or op-ed pieces because I can get them done in half the time, then get back to what I really want to do, which is play the damn game.

And they still take way too long! Which is why today I'm going even further and putting up what are basically some notes I made over the last few days with a little bit of commentary tacked on. 

I'd have liked to be able to post my considered opinion, with supporting examples, on why the narrative in New World is actually one of the game's strengths rather than, as seems to be the accepted opinion already, one of it's weaknesses. That, however, would take me most of the rest of the day and I have Standing to grind, if I want that two-storey house in Everfall, so bring on the bullet points!

Some Things I Like About New World

• Landmarks - Such a clean, intelligent way to integrate higher and lower level content within the same region. Reminds me strongly of original EverQuest design, spruced up for a modern audience. The level range of some zones is broad enough that mobs suited for the start of the spread would one-shot players at the end but the Landmark system makes it clear when you're stepping out of your comfort zone without actually telling you you can't.
  

• Mob Tethering and Animations - Falls into the sweet spot between old school mmorpgs, where the mobs hit instantly and chase you forever and what we've grown used to in recent years, where mobs take so long to wind up you're ten meters past them before they strike and if they chase you at all, they give up in seconds. In New World the animations are long enough to give you a chance to move past but not for you to dither and gawp and the tethers stretch just to that point where you start to doubt the mob will ever back off... and then it does. Very immersive when you travel cross-country.

• Distance - Which is just as well because there's a lot of cross-country travel. I've seen a number of comments about the supposed smallish size of the world and it's true the map, opened wide, doesn't look huge but just you try running across it. With only the most limited of fast travel options and just a single basic run speed, getting from one place to another becomes a large part of the gameplay. It's lucky there's so much to do along the way.

• Resources - Like gathering the endless resources that crop up everywhere. Literally everywhere, since you can break the rocks and chop down the trees. The quantity, distribution and variety of things you can gather or mine or harvest or just flat-out steal is deeply satisfying but the best thing about the whole system is how those resources present visually.

• Big Nodes- Oh, there are so many and they look so good. Those resources I just talked about - in other games they're little things, hard to see and when you find them and take them there's no sign they ever were there. In Aeternum you can see a vein of iron ore from the next mountain over. Magical plants stand shoulder high and glow with arcane light or spit like faulty neon signs. Even mundane crops like hemp stand out against sky from three fields away. It makes the tracking on the HUD almost superflous. And even when you've taken all there is to take, some residue remains so the next person passing by knows what was there and will be again.
  

• Tracking - As I level up and my skinning and gathering and mining skills rise, I learn how to spot things from very far away. In other games tracking is a separate interface but here it's just a continuation of the directional indicators I'm alreading using. The difference when I learned how to track rabbits was palpable, as good as learning a new spell might be for a magic user.

• The UI - That compass, with all that goes on along the top line, is just one exemplar of the excellent, ergonomic, intuitive interface that already feels as natural as any I've ever used. The hallmark of a great UI is that it does just what you need it to do without you noticing it's doing it and that's this one to a tee. I particularly like the positioning of all the elements. Even with what is, potentially, a slew of screen clutter (The quest journal alone is very big and bright.) it always feels as though I'm looking directly into the world with a clear, unobstructed view.

• Counters - Everyone mentions how New World makes numbers go up and why that's the reason people like it but no-one mentions another set of numbers; the tiny counter on every harvest. Of course the game tells you just how many logs you picked up when you chopped down that last tree - every mmorpg does that - but it also gives you the running total of how many you're carrying altogether. I've wished for that in so many other games. In some, when it's been possible, I've pulled the stack onto a hot key so I can follow the count there. In most games I just have to keep opening my bags to check. New World puts it there in front of me, exactly when I need it.

• Interruption Memory- File this under things I never thought I needed. When I'm hacking away at a rock in other games and a wolf chooses that exact moment to take a chunk out of my thigh, after I've broken off to break his skull and turned back to my task I have to start all over again. Even though I might have hit the rock a dozen times, now it's as though we'd never met. In New World the rocks remember. If the circle was half-turned when I stopped, it's still half-turned when I start up again. So much energy saved, so much stress removed.
  

• Mystery - At the other extreme from all this pragmatic praxis comes the ineffable. Time, history, frozen in stone, mysterious, enigmatic, unknowable. Strange, bifurcated statues, pristine obelisks, shattered acqueducts. The architecture of the arcane is everywhere. My absolute favorite thing, visually, in the all the game I've seen so far, arrives early: those gigantic stone spheres that dot the landscape around one of the first settlements. Windsward, I think it is. I can't help but stop and climb onto them whenever I pass, just to stand there and wonder. It always makes me think of Tales From The Loop. I like to be reminded of things I like.
  

• Lore - As I said, there's a much more thoughtful post than this to be written about the way New World handles narrative, story and lore. In case I never get around to writing that post, I'll just mention here how although much of the story is there in the world itself, carved in stone, it's the letters and notes and journals, scattered far and wide, that really tell the tales. They're better-written than such things in many mmorpgs and more purposeful. They don't just add color to the game, they inform and define it. In narrative terms, working out what happened before we arrived and how it might affect us in the future makes up the thrust of the gameplay. That's what the game's about and that's what driving my engagement, outside of those ever-increasing numbers. 

I could go on eulogizing but that would make it sound as though I think New World's some all-but-perfect game. Far from it. It's good but it's not that. Let's finish up with

Some Things I Don't Like About New World

• Caps - I hate them. Can't do this, can't do that, got to wait until such and such to do so and so. Why? Why give us freedom then take it away? If I'm good enough to get to the place where the quest begins then give me the quest when I get there! If I'm not good enough to finish it, let me fail. And if if I do finish a quest, give me what you promised! If you said I'd get Azoth then give me Azoth, don't flush it down the drain because I'm "At My Azoth Cap". Hold it in escrow if you must but I earned that blue stuff! Give it me!

• Counters That Don't Clear - Remember how much I liked those counters? And the tracking? I know I didn't mention it then but I also love all the quest indicators that let me know what's where and how far and how many and all the good stuff like that. And just like I loved the big gathering nodes you can see from far away, I love how quest objectives glow bright blue so you can't miss them. Only why don't they stop? When I've put poison in five barrels, why do all the other barrellight up? Can you not code it so they switch off when my quest counter hits cap? I mean, you like caps, right?

• Sprint, Lack Of - I said nice things about the distances. I said nice things about how mobs attack and chase. I'd say nicer things still if you'd just let me kick away and run for a while. I'd love to be able to gain some distance on those wolves rather than have them snapping at my heels. I'd like to be able to jog a bit faster on the slow stretches, make up a few seconds here and there. I can't remember the last mmorpg I played that had absolutely no means of increasing run speed at all. I keep thinking maybe there's something and I've missed it. If there is, someone please tell me.

• Too Much Of A Good Thing - Inventory space is generous and the ways to make it stretch are ingenious and satisfying but it would be better yet if less stuff dropped. Yes, I know, we all like a good drop but this is Guild Wars 2 all over again and that's a loot model no-one needs to copy. I don't need to come back laden down with magic weapons and armor from every last little trip. I get that all we're meant to do with most of them is salvage them for parts but if that's all they're good for then why not just have the mobs drop repair parts in the first place? Sometimes less really is more, y'know.

And that's about all I had written down. Guess I'd better stop and go play some more until I think of something else.

That's my excuse and it's the only one I've got. It'll just have to do.

Where To Look For Petalcap For New World's "Weakness of the Ego" Quest And What You Can Use Instead If You Can't Find Any.

As I've been playing New World these last few days, I've been taking notes. I was going to make today's post a list of bullet points based on things I'd jotted down. And then I started doing the Weakness of the Ego quest and I thought I might offer a quick slice of public service blogging instead.

That quest is part of the main sequence, the entirety of which is described by some commentators as "long and tedious" but by me as good fun. It's important because, amongst other things it leads to you getting your Azoth Staff. 

Why do you need one of those? Ask me when I have one. I do know you can't do Corrupted Portals and Breaches without one, though, and since most of the map on Zuvendis these days is corrupted portals and breaches, I'm guessing that's something you'll want to do.

What I can tell you is that the quest, done at level or in my case slightly below, is no stroll in the forest. Okay, it's mostly a stroll in the forest in that you end up running from one end of the map to the other but you know what I mean. 

The two easy ones. Always found together.

 

I was curious enough about just how long it was taking to get from one place to another that I took the trouble of timing my first trip this morning. To get from the questgiver to the spot recommended by every guide for one of the items she asks for is a twelve minute run. 

Twelve minutes doesn't sound that long, does it? Let me put that in context, at least for anyone old-school enough to have played EverQuest when it was the big one. It takes about twelve minutes to run the length of West Karana from the North Karana bridge to the Qeynos Hills zoneline. With Speed of the Wolf. For the rest of you, it's long enough to boil four eggs even if you only have a pan big enough for one at a time.

Every step is like that, pretty much. There is a shrine near to the original quest guy and another not too far from the woman (Or is she?) he sends you to see. Shrines, by the way, are places you can use for instant travel - if you happen to have found them. They do not make themselves obvious. Also, since you have to be in a town to open a portal to a shrine, it only helps so much. 

The step before Weakness of the Ego is pretty tough. I died once scoping it out and had to leg it far away several times to drop aggro. The whole scene was like some kind of flashmob tribute to the Benny Hill Show, with player after player haring out of the mining camp with half a dozen angry miners on their tail. 

Why does she talk about "humans" as though she's not one? Who, exactly, does she mean by "We"? So many questions. So few answers. Yet.

 

I got it done in the end. It was fun. It reminded me of breaking a camp in EQ except I didn't have any of the right tools for the job and the respawn rate was so fast there was no way to clear a path before they all re-popped. I have a tip for the second part, the Corrupted Carapaces, which is to do the ones right inside the mine entrance. I found the miners got confused when they chased me in there and most of them seemed to wander off before they could stop me popping the shells.

The real time-consumer is the next part, the aforementioned Weakness of the Ego. It's a very simple step in itself - gather three things, go to the crafting  station, make a potion. The problem is finding one of those things, Petalcaps.

The three things the quest asks for are Water, Rivercress Stems and Petalcaps. Water, obviously, is everywhere. Rivercress is common next to water but you need a harvesting skill of thirty to gather it. Thirty is not nothing but as it happens I've done more gathering than anything else. Mine is over fifty now. 

That leaves Petalcaps. When I saw the name in the quest I thought I'd never heard of it before and since, as I said, I've done a lot of gathering, I was immediately suspicious. 

So that's what they look like!

 

I haven't been looking up a lot of stuff for New World but I'm not on one of those "do it all myself" kicks so I have been checking when I'm not sure of something. I googled Petalcaps and yes, it turns out they're hard to find. 

I ended up reading several guides and watching a couple of videos. It still took me over half an hour to find the damn things. The best guide I read was this one, which does indeed show the exact location and describe it quite accurately, and yet even with that much help it wasn't easy.

Most of the guides just mumble something about the First Light/Windsward border and looking near the water, which is better than nothing but really not good enough to save much time. The important things to know about Petalcaps, in my opinion, are

1. They're fungi, not "magical plants". You can track magical plants with a foraging skill of fifty. You can't track fungi no matter how high your skill is. You have to spot them by looking.
   
2. They look nothing like fungi. Not even a little bit. They look like giant succulents that should be in a desert not a forest.
3. They have none of the useful glows or sparkles or bright colors that make most plants visible from a hundred yards away. Petalcaps are a dull green color. They blend into the background, especially at night.
4. They take about 12-15 minutes to respawn, should you feel the need to camp them.
   
5. They can yield more than one of the quest items per pull. You only need three of those items so you might get away with finding just one or two plants.
6. When you find one, you'll probably find lots. They seem to like each other's company.

I eventually found a set of three growing together with three more close by. They were at the spot on the map where I've marked it, which is just next to a massive rock escarpment beside the road that runs North to South between the main settlements in Windsward and First Light. As I ran back along that road I saw a load more of them to either side but it was the middle of night in the US at the time. I imagine those would vanish pretty fast in prime time.

 

Now, to be fair, that guide I linked tells you most of what I just told you and then some but I read that guide before I started and I still took half an hour finding the things, so I don't think a little re-iteration will go amiss. 

Also, I could have saved myself twenty-five minutes if I'd known one thing the guide doesn't mention. Which is that you don't even need the Petalcaps to make the potion for the quest.

I learned that when I got to town and opened the crafting window. I found the recipe for "Corruption Tincture" in the list and clicked on it. Up it popped, with a different set of ingredients. The water and the Rivercress Stems were the same but the Primary Ingredient wasn't Petalcap. It was Earthspine Stem.

I'd gathered some of those while I was searching for Petalcap. I gathered some of just about everything while I was searching for Petalcap because just about everything is easier to find. 

I had the Earthspine in my bags and I was curious to see if it would work to update the quest. On the crafting display that lists the possible ingredients you can use to make the tincture only Petalcap had the yellow diamond indicating it was linked to a quest in my journal but the only way to be sure was to make one and see.

If you see this, you just missed them. Someone else got yours. Wait a while. They grow back.

 

So I made a tincture using Earthspine and the quest updated. Take that, Petalcap!

Earthspine requires the same skill level to harvest as Petalcap and it is supposed to be rarer but also it is trackable whereas Petalcap is not. And there's the chance factor. I happened to run across Earthspine first. It would have been handy to know I could have stopped there.

All of which goes a good way towards explaining some of New World's elusive appeal, I think. I've read a lot of comments along the lines "I'm enjoying New World but I can't really put my finger on why". This is one of the reasons.

It's been put together with an unusual amount of care and attention. The world makes some kind of sense. It has some kind of internal logic. For a game that's only just launched it already has a lot of nuance and some complex systems that are very well-integrated. Nothing you do is pointless. No time spent is wasted.

And it feels good. There are a few obvious omissions such as the one everyone mentions, ownership of resources, but by and large most things don't just work, they work the way you wish they'd work in other games.

Substitutes are acceptable.

 

That's a whole other post and one I may get to, some day. For now, I'm sticking with this one. I don't generally do guides and this is just one step in one quest that most people won't be thinking about a week or two from now. And it already has plenty of guides written for it that are actually guides, not just a bunch of anecdotes strung together.

If anyone reading this hasn't done the quest yet, though, maybe this will save you a few minutes. Then again, in New World, what would you be saving them for? It might have taken me half an hour to find what I was looking for but in that time I found so many other things...  I hit town with my bags 99% full.

What to do with it all, now that's another question. The fun is in the finding out. I think I'll start by seeing what I can do with all that spare Petalcap.

Harvest For The World

Yesterday's post highlighted just how vague and inaccurate memories can be. I've mentioned numerous times over the years how the way memory works - or, rather, doesn't - fascinates me. I've read a fair bit on the topic. The more I learn, the lower my confidence in anything I or anyone else claims to remember.

I treat most memories as little more than fiction these days unless they come scaffolded by contemporary evidence. Often not even then, since accounts recorded within hours of an event have been shown to bear little ressemblance to objective reality, more often than not.

It's one thing to be taken by surprise. You might imagine repetitive processes, carried out thousands of times over hundreds of hours, might leave more of a groove in the mind. I would. Then again, maybe not. The brain tunes out anything it considers meaningless noise, after all. Why would it lay down records of such trivial, unimportant behavior?

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind this morning, when I read Telwyn's post on gathering. I wondered whether my memories of doing that in the same games I mentioned yesterday would be any more accurate. After all, I really enjoy gathering in almost all MMORPGs. I'd put it very high on any list of things I like about the genre and I spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. I ought to be able to remember something about it, shouldn't I?

We're about to find out. Let's see if anything's made a lasting impression.

WoW Classic -

• Should be on safe ground here. I spent a lot of time gathering in Classic just a few months ago. My memories feel fresh. 
• Gathering comes in the form of several skills. There's a limit, shared with crafting, on how many gathering skills each character can have.
• You can see nodes on the mini-map provided you have a particular level of skill.
• Nodes are relatively rare and often not in safe places. 
• Gathering is competitive. 
• Distribution follows a semi-logical pattern. 
• There are few pulls per node.
• Respawn time is substantial. 
• I believe certain nodes, specifically herbs, have some other nuances but I can't remember what they are. 
• For some whole classes of materials, e.g. cloth, "gathering" takes the form of combat. I spent a great deal of time killing mobs for various types of silk last year. 
• A lot of rare or special materials can be gathered from mobs.
• When I say "gathered from" I mean "looted from their dead and broken bodies".
• For some materials (skins come to mind) mobs are the only source and you also require the relevant gathering skill.

World of Warcraft -

• My gut feeling is that gathering in WoW Retail hasn't changed all that much. When I played during Wrath of the Lich King it was about the same as Classic is now. When I've been on the sub-20 endless free trial I haven't noticed any significant changes. What it's like at endgame levels, though, I have no clue.

EverQuest -

• Hmm. This is a poser. Let me think. Does EQ even have gathering? 
• Whether it does or not it sure has crafting materials. There are so many mats it quickly becomes overwhelming.
• I remember, right back at the beginning, there were a few what we used to call "ground spawns". Iron oxide, russet oxide, some sort of mushrooms...
• The vast majority of crafting materials were dropped by mobs, when you killed them. Our guild used to form up specifically to kill clockworks in Plane of Innovation so our resident Tinker could get mats. Does that really count as "gathering"?
• Given the way my Magician's bags fill up with crafting mats every time she goes on a killing spree, I imagine drops are still the main source of mats.
• She has special, huge bags that only take craft mats. They auto-fill with mats she loots, so there's some element of gathering gear involved. 
• And that's about all I can remember. Not much for twenty years, is it?

EverQuest II - 

• If I don't know this one I may as well put myself into sheltered accomodation right now. I've always gathered extensively in EQII and I've been spending quite literally hours every day gathering in Blood of Luclin zones for the last three or four months. 
• Gathering in EQII expanded under Domino's watch to become a full career path. She added multiple questlines, several of which could justifiably be called "Signature" if not "Epic". 
• Gathering has AAs, gear, buffs, you name it. 
• It even has companion NPCs that gather for you, something you rarely find in Western MMORPGs. 
• Any character can gather from any node regardless of class or level. There were both level and skill restrictions for many years but they were all removed, not that long ago. 
• The remaining restriction is that without the right level of skill you can only get commons. Rares still use the old skill floors.
• With sufficient skill (or maybe it's an AA) you get the ability to track nodes.
• Nodes are competitive but they're so prevalent and widespread it's almost never an issue.
• As in WoW, different types follow an approximately logical distribution so you can usually work out where to look for what, even in an unfamiliar zone. 
• What's actually inside a node can sometimes be less than logical, though, particularly in later zones. 
• There are uncommon and rare pulls from most nodes.
•  BoL introduced Shadow Nodes that can only be gathered using a special buff rewarded by the crafting Signature quest. 
• It's entirely possible to spend whole sessions gathering in EQII and I could write several posts on it with ease.

  
Guild Wars 2 - 

• Another game in which I gather every day, if only because there's a daily for it and it's one of the easiest. 
• Yet again, gathering nodes in GW2 follow a fairly logical distribution, although I would say slightly less consistently so than either WoW or EQII. 
• GW2 was possibly the first major MMORPG to introduce non-competitive gathering as the norm.
• Even if it wasn't, you definitely would think it was if you'd heard ArenaNet crowing about it.
• It may have been why the game suffered from an appalling harvest-bot problem in the first few months. 
• Nodes can be seen on the mini-map. No skill required. (That could be GW2's tag line).
• Anyone can gather anything provided they have the right gathering tool. 
• Gathering from nodes requires a range of node-specific consumables (tools) available from NPCs. A wide range of highly advantageous (and highly visually game-disrupting) non-consumable versions of these can be purchased from the Gem store for eye-watering prices.
• You can acquire gathering nodes of all kinds to place in your "Personal Instance" (aka really crappy housing) either through gameplay or via the Gem store. 
• I have never seen the point of this, given the extreme ease and simplicity of open-map gathering, but people seem to like it and often invite others in to gather from their personal node collection.
• GW2 also follows WoW in having cloth drop from mobs. The reasoning behind this (in either case) escapes me. What makes cloth so different?
•  There are other buffs and items available but I can't remember much about any of them. Crafting in GW2 ceased to be of any real interest to me sometime around 2013 and I haven't paid attention to much that's been added in the last six or seven years. 
• In common with probably 90% of players my main interest in gathering is how much money I can sell the mats for on the Trading Post.

Rift -

• Hmm. Does Rift have gathering? 
• It has crafting. When this blog was new I posted about it, saying "I like the crafting in Rift. It's generally simple, straightforward and satisfying." You'd think I'd remember how I got the mats. 
• Well, I don't.
• I do know cloth is dropped by mobs, same as in WoW and GW2. I remember farming undead in Stillmoor for some kind of silk. I have no recollection at all of any kind of gathering or any kind of nodes, though. 
• Nope... without looking this one up I have to admit defeat. Other than the cloth, no memories at all.

Neverwinter -

• Absolutely no clue. 
• Oh, wait, there was that bit where you get some NPCs to set up some kind of sweatshop. That had something to do with crafting. I think I posted about it earlier this year. I vaguely recall having to get some mats or something so the NPCs could craft but if it involved gathering anything I've completely blanked it from my mind.

Lord of the Rings Online - 

• This one I do remember, even though I haven't gathered or crafted there in years. 
• Nodes appear in the landscape in a way almost identical to WoW. 
• You can see them on the mini-map. 
• Probably need a specific level of skill, though. 
• I remember there was more to it than that but that's all I do remember.

Final Fantasy XIV - 

• I'm fairly sure FFXIV is on a par with EQII in terms of having turned gathering into a full-blown game mode. 
• I think there's gear and progression and all that sort of thing but I couldn't tell you any specifics. 
• I tried it waaaaaay back in the original release and it was so mindbendingly irritating I never even looked at it when the Realm got Reborn.  
• FFXIV has really good fishing but fishing is not gathering. Fishing is a topic all its own.

Vanguard Emulator - 

• Vanguard had the best gathering of any MMORPG I've played, bar none. It didn't count as a full game mode like Adventuring, Crafting and Diplomacy but it wasn't far behind. 
• There was gear and progression, separate tabs in the UI, all the good stuff. 
• Nodes had skill requirements and were both competitive and co-operative.
• You could gather solo but if you grouped everyone could share and the pulls were bigger and better.
• Grouping also allowed lower-skill characters to gather from nodes above their skill ceiling by sharing the skill level of their groupmates.
• There was a quality system inherant in the nodes themselves, making rare pulls more than just rng-luck or a direct function of improved gear. I only have a vague memory of how that worked, though.
•  Most mats could both be gathered both from nodes and also from the corpses of mobs, allowing you to choose between pure gathering or gathering via adventuring. 
• As an adventurer, you couldn't just kill stuff and loot the mats. You still had to have the gathering gear and skills to gather from the corpse.
• You had to think more about what you were doing while gathering in Vanguard than in any other game I've played.
• That's probably why I liked it so much.
• I hope the Emu manages to implement the full version. I'm sure it will.
  

Riders of Icarus - 

• I have literally no idea. Or memory. Maybe there isn't any. Or maybe there is but I never tried it. Or maybe there is and I did and I just can't remember. Or maybe I don't care.

Secret World Legends -

• I don't think either SWL or The Secret World before it has any kind of gathering. 
• Crafting was that weird shape-making mini-game. I think that used mob drops but I wouldn't describe anything about the process as "gathering".
• If there was more than that I remember nothing whatsoever about it.

And there we go. It must be obvious I can remember far, far more about gathering than I could about the mechanics of casting in the same games even though in most if not all I must have spent more time casting. I'm also perpared to bet that much, if not all, of what I've said is reasonably accurate. And I'm remembering more all the time, as I write.

I guess that's not too surprising. Gathering, while it may be repetitive, is a primary activity for the time you're doing it. Casting and moving are both just background things you do in combat.

There's also the distinct possibility that I like gathering as much as, if not more than fighting. Or crafting, for that matter. I can't deny that in plenty of MMORPGs I gather materials for which I have no immediate use just because I find the act of gathering amusing, entertaining, soothing, relaxing or satisfying. Sometimes all of those at once.

I'd be very interested in playing a fully-fledged triple-A MMORPG in which the core gameplay loop revolved around gathering. One in which the crafting was secondary and the combat mostly an optional extra.

Or is that Animal Crossing?