I'm With You - Three Hundred Per Cent!

   

 

  

Question:

What could make me download and install EverQuest on my new PC, given I haven't bothered until now?

Answer:

A 300% XP Bonus and a free Level 115 Character Boost.

I wasn't going to post today due to laziness but then I saw this news story at MassivelyOP and I thought I ought to share. EverQuest just turned 27 and in the tradition of MMORPGs that means it's the one giving out presents. 

They're good ones, too:

All players will receive the following for free:  

• Anniversary Kickoff Event 
  • 300% XP 
  • 300% Rare NPC spawn chance 
  • 245% loot 
  • 190% coin 
  • 200% alternate currency 
  • 175% Item evolution experience for all players! 
    • (The kickoff ends March 22 at 11:00 p.m. PT) 
• A Maestro's Baton Ornament for all your characters. (One per character; available until April 20, 2026, at 11:00 p.m. PT.) * 
• After the anniversary kickoff event, all players will receive 150% experience gains for all players! (Starting March 23 at 12:00 a.m. and ending on April 1, 2026, at 1:00 a.m. PT.) 

The celebrations come in two parts, it seems. There's a week with everything turned up to eleven, then a second week when everything calms the heck back down. Even then, 150% isn't chopped liver. (I'm assuming everyone hates liver...)

Of all of those bonuses, as an old school EQ Player it's the massive xp bonus that gets my attention. What we wouldn't have done for a bonus like that, back in the day, amirite? 

Of course, these days I very much doubt even a bonus as generous as that is going to be able to compete with the xp you can get just from standing around in the Guild Lobby, sending your agents out on Overseer missions every day. And since I haven't even bothered to do that for a few years now, it seems exceedingly unlikely I'll be going out hunting, no matter how big the bonus.

So why did I even bother patching up? Well, there's not much suspense to be wrung out of it, is there, seeing how I slammed the reason right up at the top there in the biggest point size available. It's the free Level 115 boost.

115's not the cap. It's ten levels shy. The cap, as of this 27th Anniversary, is 125 130. (Never trust an AI.) Tunare forfend they'd ever give out a boost to max level. If they did that, Luclin might explode!

Unlike the perks listed above, the boost is only for subscribers but that's fine. My highest character on the account I pay for is just 87. (Hmm. That means I must have done a couple of levels on him after I boosted him. I bet that was on Overseer...)

I have two Level 85s on that account, as well, both of them boosted. No-one on the account has ever really been played. All the characters I care about are on a different account, one for which I canceled the subscription long ago. Old story. Not going into all that again.

The F2P account doesn't need the boost, anyway. My Magician there already dinged 115, back when that was the cap, through a combination of going out and killing things and staying at home doing Overseer missions. She can't benefit from the boost and anyway, as I said earlier, if I really cared about leveling her up, I'd have been keeping up with those missions. There's no faster or easier way to level solo.

So, realistically, there was absolutely no point in bothering to re-install the game at all, was there? It's just... free stuff...

What would really be fun, now I come to think about it, would be to take one of my low-level characters and blitz through some zones with a merc and that 300% bonus, possibly topped up with an xp potion, if the bonuses stack and if I have any left. It'd be pointless, sure, but it would be fun and I haven't done it for a while.

I just might do that. And if you'll take my advice, if you have an old EverQuest account lying around gathering dust, now might be the time to brush it off and take it for a spin. After all, it's not going to cost you anything but time.

LotRO: Generous To A Fault

See that up there? That's my brain on LotRO, that is. Or, if you want to be literal about it, it's a collage I made from the screenshots I took in Lord of the Rings Online earlier today. I was snapshotting new things as I found them and opened them, or I was until I gave up because there were just too damned many.

There's a phenomenon known as overgifting and Standing Stone have it down to a fine art. It might be simple overenthusiasm or maybe it's some kind of passive-aggressive atonement for previous meanness. I hope it's not a tricksy way of pushing cash shop sales on inventory upgrades. I have actually spent some of my very limited supply of LotRO Points doing just that in exactly this situation the past, so I have to wonder.

It very nearly happened again today. I got as far as opening the Store window and checking the price. I was already annoyed because last time I played I spent about an hour emptying a whole bag and yet this time, the moment I logged in it was bloody well full again. And that's before I'd even started opening any of the boxes!

Before I could even think about looking at what I'd been given, I had to spend fifteen minutes sorting through the rubbish I was carrying, finding the Forochel Task Board, taking all the quests, finding the hand-in NPC, giving him all the completed sets, retaking the quests and giving handing in some more, just to clear some of the slots taken up by task items.

After all that I still only had about half a dozen empty spaces, at which point I cracked and opened the Store. When I saw all I could afford was another five slots I just thought "Sod it", went to find a vendor willing to buy the leftovers. I hate selling stuff I could use but the alternative was to go and hunt mobs to get more items more to make up the difference. That way lies madness because no matter how careful you are, you never end up with an exact hand-in. There are always leftovers.

There is a bank in Forochel although you'd have to know it to find it. It's inside a tent that's a separate instance, which makes good sense from a lore perspective but is inconvenient in terms of gameplay, something that just about sums LotRO up, if you ask me. I went there to check but I didn't have much expectation of success. 

I wasn't disappointed, or I was, depending which way you look at it. I was right. My vaults were all but full. 

There were a few empty slots, just about enough for me to clear another row of bag space. It looked like it might be enough to make a start. Start where, though?  

My original idea on patching up had been to check out the Anniversary gifts but I hadn't bargained with all the cruft that seems to have come with the opening up of most of the expansion content to all-comers. I don't remember reading that we were getting the Collector's Editions but my bags were overflowing with "Collector's Edition - Bonus Items" boxes.

About the only plan I had was to try and guess which would explode into the smallest number of things or might have items that could be immediately consumed, like mounts or pets. The corgi, which I was quite keen to see, was already there in my packs as a separate item. I consumed that first.

You get a corgi for every character. Not just the ones you have now but any you might ever make in the future. I have never been much of a fan of corgis, so strongly associated with Queen Elizabeth II as they are, but I'm pleased to say that recent exposure to Ein in both the live and anime versions of Cowboy Bebop has added some nuance to the breed for me.  

It seems I have another dog as well, a German Shepherd. Well, actually a "Shepherd Dog" but same thing. I looked it up and apparently it comes from the Minus Morgul Collector's Edition. And then there's the Mysterious Celebration Pig. That one comes from the 13 Year Giftbox, which I got for having an account that's thirteen years old, surprise, surprise. I got it today, even though this is the fifteenth anniversary. I didn't start playing LotRO until a couple of years after it launched.

I kept on opening things until I got the message that there wasn't enough room to carry on, at which point I thought I'd better take a look at what I'd gotten so far. As well as the pets, which auto-populate onto your hotbars if they can find a spare slot, something that confused the heck out of me when I was searching through my skills to add them, there were the usual slew of fireworks and boosts, the former mostly useless, the latter very useful if I ever plan on actually playing the game.

As well as pets, there are free mounts to be had. I'm not exactly sure how it works but I ended up with four of them. At least, I think that's what happened. I found one new mount on my hot bar, the Steed of Starlight. It's a very impressive warhorse, caparisoned with astonomical or astrological emblems. It also runs at a very tasty 68% above standard. 

I thought that was it for mounts until I logged back in to check something for this post and found I'd somehow acquired another three - two horses and a pig. I wouldn't normally countenance riding around on a pig but I believe you can use them in Moria, where a horse can't go, so I might make an exception for that, if I ever get there.

A swine wasn't the most surprising thing I received. There were not one, not two but three Valar Level Boosts, one going to 50, another to 105 and a third to 120. It's possible I already had the Level Fifty boost from some previous event but the other two are new, I'm sure. 

They're account bound so theoretically I could use them on three different characters. I have four and another free slot to make a fifth. (Or I did. See later in the post...) It's tempting but it's going to bear some thinking about before I decide. 

I would like to see some of the later zones. I'm not sure how it works in terms of travel, though. If you boost to 105 do you also get a free pass through Moria to an appropriate area for your level or do you have to hack and slash your way through the mines like a demigod?

Another very welcome and totally unexpected gift were three "Carry-Alls". I didn't know these things existed but I'm most happy to discover they do. They're extra storage for specific types of items - crafting mats, task items, musical instruments, house items and so on - and they come in various sizes.

There were two Small and one Large Carry-Alls and a free choice of all the kinds. I picked a ten-slot crafting bag and both a ten and fifty slot task item bag. Back when I was playing LotRO as a main game, all those thirteen years ago, I took my crafting quite seriously but that seems very unlikely to happen ever again. My bags are always full of task items, though, as I mentioned earlier. It'll be great to have somewhere to stash them.

Another box I opened contained appearance armor. At first I thought that would be fine. I could stick it in the slots on the Cosmetic Outfits tab and clear a space in inventory. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work that way. I ended up with the item registered in the Appearance tab but still in my bag. 

I went to the vault again and cleared out ten spaces by moving some crafting mats into the new carry-all. I kind of wished I'd chosen two Small crafting carry-alls then. I have a lot of mats in the bank. 

Still, ten slots is ten slots. In went the level boosts and the appearance gear and a whole bunch of stuff related to Legendary weapons, something I'm pleased to say I don't have to worry about just yet. 

By then I'd been sorting inventory for well over an hour and I'd about had enough. I might love inventory management for its own sake in other games but in LotRO it's just a pain. The tiny icons, the overcomplicated mechanics, the very miserly allotment of space... I've played plenty of F2P games with more generous capacity and much better systems.

The more I think about it, the more I'm sure I'll have to start over from scratch if I'm ever going to play LotRO for more than the odd hour here and there. Even if I can get past the inevitable inventory issues, my dwarf Guardian is quite possibly the dullest race/class combo imagineable. I could bump him up with one of the boosts but I very much doubt it would make him any more interesting to play. 

My other choices are a 27 Man Lore Master, an 8 Dwarf Minstrel and a 7 Elf Hunter. I like the Lore Master but the other two have barely begun and I'm convinced there are better options. 

Also, I'm surprised, now I think about it, to see all four of them are male characters. It's very unlike me not to have at least a 50-50 gender split. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure it was because Mrs Bhagpuss was playing too and we were duoing a lot. 

I seem to remember it getting just too confusing at one point in EverQuest II, when we started on a new server and made a bunch of new friends in a short time, having to explain that yes, we were a couple but no, we were playing different genders, which also would have been fine if we hadn't both been playing several characters and not all of those the same gender as each other, let alone the person playing them. Maybe that ought to have been less of an issue on a dedicated RP server but as I've said before, I never found Laurelin to be a particularly accomodating environment, socially, so I probably wanted to keep things simple.

One final note before I go. I'm all but certain that when I logged in this afternoon I had four characters and one more free character slot under the Premium ruleset. After I logged out and logged back in again I have four characters and three free slots. What with that and the mounts, I'm starting to wonder what else might have changed.

Maybe I'll log in the other two accounts I have access to and see what else I can blag. I mean, free stuff, right? You can't have too much. Can you?

Hurry Up And Wait

Grrrr!

Yesterday I came home from work after a long and tiring day and had tea with Mrs Bhagpuss while defining self-reflexivity by watching a five-year old episode of Pointless on YouTube before sitting down at my PC to do a few dailies. 

While I was waiting for stuff to load I checked my email and...

Grrrr!

We all played the recent open beta. There were bugs, for sure, but the general impression was very positive. A game viewed with cynical disdain two years ago, rising to grudging tolerance last year, had hauled itself all the way up to eager anticipation and widespread acceptance. It might not be perfect but consensus was New World was in better shape than most mmorpgs in recent memory and certainly ready to launch.

The expression "Take my money, already!" comes to mind. You wouldn't think it would be an issue. If there's one thing we all know about Amazon it's that Jeff Bezos likes money. 

The thing is, he also has a lot of it. The point has been made many times that if there's any would-be game developer that can afford to spend time polishing to perfection it would be Amazon. That's always been presented as a positive, not least by me, but I think we're beginning to see the dark side of deep pocket syndrome.

There's an obvious reason Amazon might be anxious about hitting the big red Launch button, of course. They've done it twice before and everything's blown up in their faces. Five years ago they announced the newly-formed studio was working on three games: Breakaway, Crucible and New World.

 

 Breakaway never made it to launch. It was cancelled while still under development in 2018. Crucible launched in May 2020 to almost complete disinterest from the game-playing public. A month later it was sent back to a closed beta status from which it never re-emerged. It was shuttered for good in the autumn of the same year.

With a record like that you can sympathize with the levels of anxiety evident in New World's repeated delays but there comes a time when you just have to commit. This is a relatively short pushback and I'm sure it will be grumpily accepted by most of the large audience that's eager to play. Any more, though, and patience is going to more than wear thin. It's going to snap.

There's also the question of what Amazon can hope to achieve in a single extra month of tweaking and furbishing. It's possible that after the busy and successful open beta they have a detailed list of specific bugs and an accurate timeframe for fixing them. And perhaps that's going to get done in the time. Let's hope so.

I wonder if there isn't also an element of adjusting the date for maximum commercial impact. As has been said, the end of August isn't the best launch window. Late September does suit me better. I'd have preferred it all along. It's just annoying to have something you want dangled in front of you and then hoiked away. Makes me feel like one of those cartoon donkeys following a carrot on a stick. Or pigs, apparently. Or dogs. (Dogs like carrots??)

After that disappointment, luckily there was some much better news from Daybreak to cheer me up. Jennifer Chan, who has, I think, just about the best tone of anyone who's written these things, issued a new Producer's Letter for EverQuest II and it was full of good things.

Last in the letter but first in importance is confirmation that the circle remains unbroken. We're getting another expansion at the end of the year. At least I think we are. Every year we all do this strange dance, where we allude to the potential of an expansion without naming it. It's as though the arcane magic of the game had somehow breached the metafictional barrier to permeate our reality.

What Jenn actually said was this:

"The thing you're all probably wondering about is our major annual end-of-the-year event. Oh look! A dinosaur!"

What is that? Coy? Cute? Cautious? Crazy? I'm taking it to mean yes, Virginia, there is an eighteenth expansion. (I think it's eighteen). 

If normal patterns pertain it'll be months yet before we find out what the damn thing's called let alone what's in it. We can start the guessing games right now, though. Or we could if that one picture meant anything to me at all. 

 

The only thing it reminded me of are those little guys in Tranquil Sea. They look like that and there are dinosaurs all over the area where they live. Why we would be going back there, though, I cannot begin to imagine.

Never mind. We'll find out soon enough. There's exciting stuff happening long before then. In less than a week we get what sounds like an excellent opportunity for solo and casual players to grab some Heroic and better upgrades, rng as always permitting. 

You have to be a Member (what the cool kids call subscribers these days) to benefit, which is appropriate, I think. That's why they call them Membership Benefits, after all.  

"Members in Reign of Shadows will have bonus loot satchels for most quests. What's in those satchels? Glad you asked! They will have anything from heroic to public quest loot in them which will be a paw-some way to get your characters quickly caught up for the new expansion."

Oh, wait, hang on! Look! She said it! She said the E word! So much for the winking and nodding. Cat/bag alert!

There's also a new... something... called Toil and Trouble. Speculation on the forum seems to be centered on it being some kind of dungeon or instance although I'm  not quite sure why. All it says is

"Whether you like to tradeskill all day, run around and complete quests, or raid with your guildmates, there is something for everyone!"

Well, that clears things up!

And there's another free level 120-character boost (one per account) for Members because you can never have too many of those. I'll add it to the pile, along with the one we'll inevitably get for buying that confirmed expansion. (Confirmed!)

All of that is coming in just five days, which makes the announced detailed reveal "coming in a post scheduled for a later date" feel somewharedundant. Why not just tell us now? Oh well, I guess I might get another post out of it!

Last and most definitely not least there's confirmation of the return of Yun Zi and his near-effortless goodie giveaways. Rebranded this year as Panda Panda Panda and officially time-shifted from Summer to Fall, the insanely rich stay-at-home bear will be handing out more priceless artefacts for traveller's tales of places he's never going to go.

I said last, didn't I? Not quite. There's some stuff for the Kaladim and Tarinax servers that people will complain about (Seriously, don't read the forums. EQII players are the most miserable ingrates in gaming.)  and then there's this:

"You'll soon be the Centaur of attention."

This cryptic sign-off is being interpreted in some quarters as confirmation that the 2021 expansion's lead feature will be Centaurs as a playable race. That would be weird. 

I mean, how will they ride mounts?

The Choices We Make

I'm playing Blade & Soul again. I didn't go back for the free Level 60 boost. That was mere serendipity. It happened much more randomly than that.

I was looking for screenshots to illustrate one of my recent non-game-specific posts and I chanced on a folder of shots from B&S. I opened it to see if anything in there might work. I'd forgotten just how good-looking a game Blade & Soul can be.

I'd also forgotten just how much I like my character there. I only have one, a Lyn Summoner, because of course it's a Lyn Summoner. I'm nothing if not predictable. 

The races in B&S are not particularly inspiring. There are only four. A big human, the Gon, a regular
human, the Jin, a race that probably kind of stands in as the elf race, the Yun, who can only be female, and the Lyn. The Lyn is the only obviously non-human race and also the smallest. Two boxes ticked already. They also have huge, fox-like tails and ears, so you can see where this is going.

Classes come with a lot more variety. There are thirteen, although some of them (all of them?) break down into specialist sub-classes at higher levels. They come handily graded for difficulty, both on the website and at character creation. It's a five star grading system and Summoner, the pet class, is rated 2* for Easy. 

The pet you get is a cat. There are five cat personalities to choose from, something that happens in game as part of an introductory quest. You can dress your cat in various costumes and change their appearance by visiting a Groomer. 

Seriously, was there ever a chance I'd play anything else?

And I did play her, too. I didn't just futz around in character creation and do the tutorial then walk away. When I logged back in a few days ago, after a five gigabyte patch and some searching through notes for login details (it had been a while) I found I'd left off last time at Level 34. As of this writing I'm Level 37.

Blade & Soul occupies an odd position in the current hierarchy of mmorpgs I hear about. It hardly gets a mention anywhere. What's more, it never did get much attention even when it was new. If anyone else in this part of the blogosphere plays it or has played I couldn't tell you who that might be. 

It's strange. B&S is a bona fide AAA game from a well-known publisher, NCSoft. The same publisher, in fact, as Guild Wars 2 and Aion, both of which get far more press here. Also, it was already a familiar franchise from a Japanese TV show even before the mmorpg arrived.

It's not what you think!

The game has been around for five years now. It gets regular content updates and by most accounts has been commercially successful. A mobile version of the same game, called Blade & Soul Revolution, was released in 2020 and a Blade & Soul 2 is in development with a launch date possibly as soon as this year.

It's fully voiced and translated in good, clear English and it also benefits from a hybrid combat system, meaning it can be played comfortably in either action or classic tab target and hot key mode, making it available to the widest of audiences. There seems no obvious reason it shouldn't be as well-known or as widely reported as, say, Black Desert Online, ArcheAge or it's own stable-mate, Aion, but it just isn't.

I like it, anyway. I keep dipping back into it and I always have a good time when I do. In typically inconsistent fashion, given my recent pontification on the inadvisablity of grafting linear storylines onto open-world mmorpgs, almost all of my time there has been spent slavishly following the main questline. I'm on chapter forty-something now.

It's quite hard to follow a story when you leave gaps of many months between visits but it's the usual tale of possession, displacement, fate and destiny. I kind of know who some of the main characters are, or at least they come back to me when I play ecah time. They all have Anglicized Korean names that don't easily stick in my memory but they also have very distinctive visual signifiers that do, so I can just about keep my scorecard marked.

Charlie's Angels - the re-re-reboot.

 

That's a polite way of saying the game is highly sexualized, by the way, or at least the female characters are. It would be tough not to remember some of these women. I'd have a lot more difficulty with the look of the thing if it wasn't so outrageously, ludicrously, cartoonishly over the top. It's like Russ Meyer made an mmo.

I guess you could also make a case for the powerfulness of the women involved. I mean, I don't think I'd want to stand behind it but it's possible, at least. There are a lot of female leads and they are all badass. They definitely don't need any males to come along and save them, although they quite often turn up and save each other. Or the opposite.

I thought the character I'd been chasing for thirty levels, an arrogant pretty boy, was the main villain until my character and her three female allies roundly thrashed him last night. Then his boss turned up to gave him a highly negative performance review. She's a very scary woman. 

She also casually murdered the other greasy, odious, devious, cheating male who'd been making life difficult for my Summoner for many levels, something I chose to interpret as some kind of broad gesture of solidarity. She's probably just a sociopath but I like to try and see the good in everyone.

Well, my character does. Thankfully, she's positively demure, at least by comparison to everyone else. And she looks great. The attention to detail is fabulous. She's one of my favorite characters in any game as far as looks go although I wouldn't say she's developed much of a personality as yet.

She does get dialog but it's very easy not to notice. The player character isn't one of those silent protagonists some people love and others complain about. There's just no voice acting for the PC and their text dialog appears off to the right, whereas all the rest of the conversation takes place center-screen and in voiceover. Sometimes I don't even notice she's spoken at all.

Of course, the real reason she hasn't made her character known to me is precisely because I've been nailed to the storyline from day one. She won't become a character in her own right without agency and that's something a pre-written storyline never offers, particularly when it doesn't include what we like to call "meaningful choices".

And yet I am sufficiently attached and invested not to want to use that Level 60 boost on her. She's made it to the high 30s on her own and I'm confident she can go all the way. Might take a while but she'll get there. 

Which leaves the question of who I should use it on. As a free player I have three character slots and two of them are still empty. I read through all the classes and races last night but I'm still not sure which way to jump. 

I'm currently favoring the Gunslinger, a ranged class rated Easy. Blade & Soul is almost certainly never going to be a game I play fervently, frequently and seriously. It's going to be one of the extensive roster of mmorpgs I keep coming back to, chipping away at, drifting away from. It makes no sense to play anything that's going to require more than the minimum effort if I'm going to have to keep re-learning everything every time I return.

I know you have a thing for wool but try to keep in check just this once.

 

That's how it's going to be, and yet I also know Blade & Soul is a game I could be playing more. It has the potential to be a focus game. Quite a few mmorpgs do. 

Why we end up playing one rather than another is a question I'd like to have answered but I suspect the motivations, if revealed, might not be all that flattering to my ego. I have a feeling that, collectively, we end up playing mostly the games we see and hear about other people playing. We are, after all, social animals, much though many of us like to deny it.

Add Blade & Soul to the big summer of mmorpgs, then. A free Level 60 and an upcoming major graphical revamp definitely count as a significant promotional move. I can't help wishing these companies would co-ordinate their schedules a bit more sensitively. It might be to their benefit as well as ours.

Much as I'd like to press on and take my Summoner all the way to sixty this summer, I imagine in a week or so there'll be virtual dust on my B&S desktop icon. The New World beta begins next week and Bless Unleashed arrives not too long after. This is Blade & Soul's moment but it won't last.

I guess I'd better get on with it, then. Choose who to use that Level 60 boost on before it goes back into the cupboard for next time. Whenever that might be.