Read The Fine Print: EverQuest

I guess I should have known. When I posted a Promptapalooza love letter to the room in which I've written every post on this blog since it started, it was inevitable I'd soon find myself moving out. I spent the last couple of weeks returning the first of our two previously unuseable rooms to a state, if not of grace then at least of decorum, whereupon Mrs Bhagpuss surprised me by asking if I'd like to have it as my "study".

I'd been thinking she'd want it to store her ever-growing supply of crafting materials, especially since I already have one large room downstairs filled with my stuff, but apparently she fancies having the room I'm in now for storage, because it's very dry. Well, it is.

Consequently, I spent most of the day moving the contents of one shelving unit from my current lair to my new one and I'm knackered. The sheer amount of stuff that can be crammed into one corner of a small room is unbelievable - almost as unbelievable as some of the things I've apparently thought worth keeping for the last fifteen years.

Anyway, the upshot of all that effort (only about a third done but the hardest) is that I now have neither the time nor the energy to finish the post on Stargirl that I was planning for today. Instead I offer a brief, cautionary tale on chicken counting.

Just a few days ago I was eagerly anticipating my EverQuest magician's imminent arrival at the foothills of EQ's current content. Even before the announcement of Labor Day's double xp extravaganza I was expecting to ding 111 this weekend, at which point I would whisk the mage away to The Overthere to buy her final air pet spell until such time as Daybreak see fit to raise the cap once again.

With the benefit of double xp, which I can confirm does apply to both Overseer quests and unsubscribed accounts, the ding came sooner rather than later. And also later rather than sooner.

This morning, when I accepted the reward that would tip her over the edge, I braced myself for the deafening DING! and... nothing happened. I looked at the xp and laughed. I'd stalled at 99.999% of level 110! What are the chances, eh?

I was so amused I took a screenshot. Then I accepted the reward for the next quest in the absolute certainty it would bring the noise and... nothing. Again! Still holding at 99.999%.

To my credit I did immediately, if belatedly, twig what was going on. Of course, given all the things I've written up 'til now, that's like giving myself credit for noticing the stable door is banging in the wind while the stalls remain notably horse-free, but at least I got there in the end.

As I believe I have mentioned really quite a lot of times, the level cap was raised to 115 with last year's expansion, Torment of Velious. I do not own Torment of Velious. See the problem?

Actually, I do own Torment of Velious. Now I do. As soon as it dawned on me that the reason I wasn't dinging was because I didn't have the expansion I went straight to the Daybreak website and bought it. I did have the very briefest tussle with my sensible side over whether I really needed an expansion almost all of whose content I would almost certainly never get around to using until it was already included among the ones you get for free, but I told my sensible self where to get off. I've been looking forward to getting that pet for weeks!

Luckily for me ToV is on sale right now. Yes, that's because in two or three months this year's expansion will come out and if you buy that you'll get all the previous ones for free, so if I had the patience you might expect of someone my age I could wait until then and get both. Given that I'm planning on re-subbing to World of Warcraft for the pre-Shadowlands patch, the one with the level squish and the removal of the rep requirements to play a Vulpera, this does seem like a particularly inopportune moment to be buying last year's EverQuest expansion.

Well, stuff logic. I wanted it, I got it. And it was on sale so we all know that means I actually saved money! And by the time the next one comes out I'll be playing the EverQuest II one so I wouldn't have time to play the EQ one anyway. And this year's expansion will be full price so if I only want to play last year's and it's on offer...

Anyway, I bought it. And I'm glad I did!

I logged in and out to make sure my account was flagged, then I accepted the reward for one of my two remaining completed Overseer quests and this time I did ding 111. Phew. Now for the pet!

I went into the Guild Hall (very handy for me that I joined that guild that Mrs Bhagpuss was in all those years ago. Now I'm the only one left who plays and I have the Guild Hall all to myself), gave the gnome a few hundred plat for the Miniature Worker Sledgemallet, gave it back to him so he'd switch the portal to The Overthere, zoned, ran over to the vendor and...

Didn't buy my pet spell. Because she wasn't selling it. She wouldn't be, would she? She's the spell vendor from 2017's Ring of Scale expansion. The one that raised the level cap to 110. Why the hell would she be selling Level 111 spells?

 A quick trip to Allakhazam informed me that for Torment of Velious spells I'd need to go to Eastern Wastes (the new version, naturally). And apparently I could get there for free by talking to Belinda in North Ro. At least that would save me giving any more money to that grifting guild Hall gnome.

I cast Throne of Heroes to take me back to the Guild Lobby. There I spoke to the Magus and asked her to teleport me to North Ro. She's been working that route since Lost Dungeons of Norrath back in 2003. Never say there's no use for old content.

Using the Find function on the map (can't remember when that was added but I'm very glad it was) I was with Belinda in no time. She was waiting with a couple of griffins wich, as she explained, she'd only just discovered how to tame and train. There's a surprising amount of lore continuity between EQ and EQII these days.

Belinda cast a spell, worryingly called Barely Tamed Griffon, and off I went. Landing on what looked like the edge of a precipice in Eastern Wastes I quickly located the appropriate vendor, bought all my Level 111 spells and gated. No point hanging around. Not going to be killing anything there.

Back in Plane of Knowledge the mage summoned her new pet. It conned dark blue at 110, one level below her. The old one was 106, because I finally managed to get a focus that works for that level range. I did check whether there was any chance of getting an upgrade that would work on the new pet but not a hope in hell.

Never mind! Her new pet is going to be plenty tough enough at 110 for the places I plan on taking it. The old one was managing pretty well and I don't intend on going anywhere tougher just yet.

I don't know for sure how much better the new one is because I haven't been able to give it a test run.
All of the above I did first thing this morning, before spending the whole day moving stuff from one room to another. Tomorrow I have to visit my mother for her birthday (she's 88, thanks for asking) so I don't suppose I'll get much of a chance to try the pet out then, either.

The strange thing is, having bought the expansion and the pet, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with either of them. Getting 111 and the pet felt more like the end of something than the start. But now I've bought the expansion I feel obligated to carry on for a while just to make the puchase worth it.

On to 115, I guess.

More Than One Membership : EverQuest

In retrospect it seems like a strange decision but I'll say up front I'm very glad I made it. There I was in the Guild Lobby, looking at my raid-buffed pet, feeling like it was a waste to dismiss him just because he was a few levels off his game and I had a better option waiting on the bench. I mean, in the context of conservation of resources, one outgrown pet with a few replaceable buffs scarcely signifies. If I canned him, who'd care?

Well, I would, apparently. Last time I got to this point I'd been able to pocket the pet, pop out the new one and carry on. It miffed me that I couldn't do it again. I still had the old-old one, even though I really didn't want him any more, but the problem was, I couldn't call him to tell him his services were no longer required without first sacking the new-old pet that I wanted to keep because the game wouldn't let me have two pets at once even for that nano-second of transition. So, until I got past that impasse, I couldn't summon the new-new pet, the one I was actually going to use unless I was willing to destroy the one standing next to me.

Catch 22 and then some.

Here's how it breaks down. You might need to take notes. The ability to pack a pet away for a rainy day is an Alternative Advancement ability (henceforth referred to as an "AA"). The specific AA in question is called Companion's Suspension and it comes in eight grades. I had seven of them, which meant I could suspend a pet with full buffs then log out and still have it available to recall at some future time, most likely during some dire emergency my active pet had failed to contain.

I could then summon a second pet to have with me in the world. What I couldn't do was swap the suspended pet for the active pet. To do that I needed to spend that final point. (Actually, from memory I think it cost five points for the final grade).

I had the points. I had over two hundred and fifty, unspent, just waiting to be assigned. Unfortunately, assigning AA points is one of the key perks of All Access Membership.

As a free player in EverQuest, each of your characters is capped at 250AA points. To give that some context, filling out all the AAs available to a single character costs tens of thousands of points. I've heard it said, more than once, that an end-game player, particularly a melee class, should expect to spend over 30,000 AA points to become viable in capped content.

As a "Silver" account, a type of account that no longer exists but to which I was fortunate enough to be grandfathered in, I'm entitled to a thousand AA points per character. Since accounts that unsubscribe also get to keep whatever AAs they bought before they cancelled, my counter read something like 4900/1000.

I didn't grind those out, or not all of them. Another huge benefit of membership is something called Auto-Grant. It's a feature on a toggle. If you switch it on, every time that character levels the game will automagically grant whatever AA points as a character of that level "should" have and also spend them on the appropriate AAs.

That carries on until the character reaches the level cap from a specified previous expansion that runs a fair way behind the current one. Currently it's 2015's The Broken Mirror, for which the level cap was 105. All of which is fine and dandy and a great benefit for subscribers but I just wanted to spend one frickin' point! Okay, five points, but let's not split hairs.

So I sat around and thought about it for a while longer. Did I seriously want to subscribe for a month just to buy one grade of one AA, just so I could swap out two pets, just so I could keep a bunch of buffs, buffs I could most likely replace by letting the game idle in the background for a few hours while I played something else? Is that the action of a rational adult?

Maybe there was another way. I have a lot of Daybreak Cash, after all. Could I maybe buy some kind of extension to my AA cap on the Marketplace? That way I at least wouldn't be spending real money.

I looked in the store. There was indeed something there that looked like it might do the job. I'd tell you what it was called but I didn't take a screenshot and now I can't see it any more. (Can you guess why? There's a clue there, somewhere). Whatever it was, it cost 250DBC, it applied per character (not per account) and it increased the cap on AAs by one hundred.

It didn't look like such a great deal but I wasn't bothered about that. What concerned me was whether it would work. Reading the small print I was pretty sure it wouldn't. What I reckoned it would do would be to change my cap of 1000 points to a cap of 1100. Since I was already the best part of four thousand points over my cap anyway, what good would that do me?

Still, I had all that DBC just sitting there and I was curious to see if I was right. Curious enough to pay 250DBC to find out? You betcha! And guess what? I was right!

So that was 250DBC down the imaginary drain and there I was, back where I started. I had another think.

I've been incredibly impressed with the speed of levelling via Overseer quests. Sticking at them diligently, I've been making a guaranteed ten per cent of a level a day, for weeks. If I get critical successes, and especially if there's a server xp bonus, that can go to fifteen per cent or even twenty. By contrast, if I can get one per cent of a level in an hour's hunting I think things are going pretty well.

When I dinged 106, though, that changed. Overseer xp per quest dropped by about half. That's clearly intentional. At 106 a character is becoming very viable for groups (albeit as a junior partner) in something approximating current content and Daybreak are very canny about protecting the integrity of the population bubble.

That said, even at five to ten per cent a day rather than ten to twenty, Overseer quests are an excellent addition to solo levelling rates. It does make the prospect of hunting more attractive than it might have been, though. But not as attractive as the prospect of grinding AAXP!

Where it takes days, or more likely weeks, of soloing to grind one level in the hundreds, AAs take no more than a few minutes. Killing comfortable, safe, light blue mobs in a Hot Zone nets five to seven per cent of an AA point per kill. I can rack up a couple of AAs in an hour that way. And quests reward several AAs at a go.

And how do I know that? It's obvious, isn't it? I subbed, didn't I? Yes, on my second account, because my main account is already frickin' subbed, isn't it? Because I play EverQuest II on that one! If I could only stop and start again...

Ah, I'm just play-acting. I'm fine with subbing two accounts for a while. And it's cheaper than I expected. When I went to check how much it would be for a single month the on-screen information said $14.99. With the pound sterling currently tanking in preparation for the UK's grim walk into the north Atlantic's cold and lonely embrace next January, $14.99 is worth £11.63 but, much like our own dear government, Daybreak don't seem to have caught up to economic reality. They're still charging UK customers just £8.99.

Which I happily paid. I'm subbed until late August, which should give me plenty of time to grind some AA points. I made more than twenty yesterday. I also spent most of what I had banked, which may have been a mistake, because when I zoned Auto-Grant kicked in and the game funded me at least as many again. If I'd not just bought a bunch of AAs, I'd most likely have been given those, too.

Even with a few minor errors of judgment it's feeling like a very good decision. I was decorating the kitchen last week and I spent more than the cost of a month's sub on a tin of wax to seal the surfaces. I know which I'm going to get the most pleasure from, that's for sure. You have to keep these things in perspective. Although I do like my wax...

With the added incentive of being able to see my xp (okay, my AAxp) move without the aid of an electron microscope, I spent most of yesterday hunting. I travelled to a bunch of zones I'd never even seen before, found a great spot with good light and plenty of space, killed a bunch of new-to-me mobs and had a great time.

Money well spent, I think. Now I just have to make some in-game money so I can upgrade all my gear and kill things even faster for even more AAXP so I can kill things faster still....

I could be at this a while.

Always Read The Instructions: EverQuest

Before I even begin I need to make a correction to yesterday's post. When I claimed with (unfortunate) confidence that "I'd already researched pet focus items for my new level" and found that "there were none. No tradeable ones, at least. No affordable tradeable ones", it transpires I was talking through my hat.

It's true, I had done my research. I just hadn't done it thoroughly enough. I'd checked several usually reliable guides, ones I've been using for years, ones I've always found to be accurate. Sadly, I fell into the trap of assuming they'd been updated to include the most recent information. As any MMORPG player ought to know, that's never a safe assumption to make.

The excellent EQMagicians has a comprehensive list of pet focus items that, at first glance, appears to be entirely up to date. I mean, it includes items that focus pets all the way up to level 120, five levels above the current cap. If you look more closely, however, you'll see a clue buried in the body of the text that suggests all is not as it seems: "As of the (final) Call of the Forsaken expansion..."


The Call of the Forsaken expansion is very far from being the "final" anything. It actually came out seven years ago. The reason the effects on the focuses on the list go so much higher than the then-cap of 100 is that they come from what was top-end group content, endgame questlines and raids - in 2013!

If you look at the level required to equip them, rather than what level pets they affect, you'll see it tops out at 101. Whoever was running EQMagicians back then clearly intended to carry on into the following expansion, The Darkened Sea, with its raised cap of 105, because they added entries for focus items with the next two numbered effects. Those have a Required level to equip of 101.

And that was where they stopped. Like so many legacy resources for so many MMORPGs, the information sits there, looking pristine but rusting at the core. And rust spreads.

Allakhazam, still the most reliable information source for EverQuest, doesn't have a focus list of its own. Instead it links to the EQMagician page and also to a discussion thread at Necrotalk.com, a forum for people who play Necromancers in EQ (what else did you expect?).

Since I'm playing a mage I didn't think to click that link. If I had, I'd have discovered that the Enhanced Minion line goes way beyond EQMagician's ceiling of XXIII. All the way to XXX in fact, as Allakhazam knows full well.

All of which amply demonstrates that half-assed research is worse than no research at all. I could have dug the truth out - if I'd just kept digging. Instead I stopped with the surface barely scraped.

All of this began to become clear to me only by chance. I was standing in the Guild Lobby, fiddling around with the search function on the Bazaar window. I'd been trying to decide which pieces of Conflagrant armor to buy first when it occured to me for some reason I can't quite recall, even though it was less than twenty-four hours ago, to remove the qualifier "armor" from the search.

In EverQuest the term "armor" tends to refer to what are known as the "visible" slots. The ones where what you equip shows up not just on your paper doll but on your in-game character as seen by everyone else. Unlike more modern games, jewellery and accessories aren't visible in EQ, so when I took that limiter out, a whole load of earrings, belts, rings and so on popped up.

And one of the earrings was called a Summoner's Conflagrant Earring. In Norrath, "summoner" is a synonym for "pet class". A magician is a summoner. Clue!

I examined the earring and sure enough, there it was in hyperlink purple: Enhanced Minion XVIII. A quick run to the actual Bazaar itself and there I was, forty thousand platinum pieces lighter and the proud - if somewhat red-faced - possessor of a pet focus item fit for my exalted level of one hundred and six.

The moral of this cautionary tale is that you can't always believe everything you read, especially if you don't take the trouble to read it properly. It also means I've gone on so long about my mistake that I probably ought to leave the real second part of the story for next time.

Not that it's much of a story. It's mostly about how I wasted a small amount of imaginary money and then saved a small amount of real money, doing something I was fairly sure I'd never do again. Still, it's something to post about, isn't it?

Just don't hold your breath or anything. I wouldn't want to over-sell it. And I don't give refunds.

It's Elemental: EverQuest

There's not an MMORPG out there that can touch EverQuest for putting the fear into you when you're trying to do something as simple as buy your new spells. Even in 2020, when death in Norrath has long lost its sting, just the thought of having to travel to an unknown zone to trade with an unfamiliar vendor is enough to bring the casual player out in a cold sweat.

I've been parsimonious with my purchases while I've been levelling up by way of the daily Overseer quests. In the comfort and safety in the Guild Lobby experience rolls in so fast, comparatively speaking, it seems wasteful to spend money on spells or gear I'll barely use.

Now I've started spending more and more time out hunting, though, I've been feeling increasingly sensitive about my under-developed abilities and my undercooked ambition. Mobs in the zones where I feel comfortable are drifting from light blue to green to grey. It doesn't really matter since the huge bulk of my xp comes from those Overseer quests and the weaker the mobs become, the easier it gets to bully them out of their dinner money.

Outgrowing a zone is still an uncomfortable feeling all the same. Even though the xp I'm missing is all but insignificant it still seems somehow wasteful not to be getting it. If I'm ever going to take the next step, I'll have to equip myself adequately for the adventure. Can't put it off forever.

I've already bought several batches of spells as I've gone along. I like to have the latest nukes and as a soloing mage I rely entirely on my elemental pet (well, that and my cleric mercenary, of course) so keeping up to date on summoning spells is crucial.

Magicians get four elemental pets, the traditional Earth, Air, Wind and Fire. At lower levels the usual choice is Earth, a tank with high hit points and the ability to root enemies to prevent them running away but somewhere in the fifties preference shifts to something that can also put out decent damage.

The fire pet, a ranged caster, is the go-to for magicians who group but soloists go for either air or water. Water has decent hit points and survivability and puts out very good damage. A lot of guides recommend it. Air, however, almost matches it in those departments but adds a frequent and effective stun. Stunning isn't quite as effective as rooting when it comes to stopping runners but it comes close. Air has been my choice for as long as I can remember.

The four pet spells cycle round in a regular five-level pattern, with the spare level being taken up by a generally useless spell called Monster Summoning that calls up a weak pet using the model of a random creature from the zone you happen to be in at the time. It's fun to play with but you learn pretty quickly not to trust that pet to do anything more challenging than follow you around and make heads turn.

The air pet, by chance or design, happens to be first in the cycle. At level 96 I took another trip to Shard's Landing. The first time I made that journey was an adventure in itself.  This time I made sure to pay the fee and take the simple, safe port from my Guild Hall.

I picked up the pet but the timing was a little unfortunate, co-inciding with a bonus xp weekend. Overseer xp rolled in faster than ever and the new pet didn't last me as long as I'd thought it would. A week or so later, in another deja vu journey, I was off again to Katta Castellum: Deluge.

I'd made all my mistakes the first time around so those expeditions went as uneventfully as you'd wish. I bought the next air pet, along with some my key spells for several levels ahead while I was there. Then I ported  back and spent the next couple of weeks enjoying the fruits of my minimal labors.

Inbetween hunts I idled in the lobby soaking up buffs and since I had nothing better to do I spent some time researching upgrades. There seemed to be plenty to choose from. I almost bought several different sets of gear, any of which would have been a major improvement on the increasingly level-inappropriate choices my mage had been making do with for longer than I care to admit.

Several expansions in a row employed a system of upgradeable armor, the raw pieces of which dropped commonly from mobs, were tradeable and could be improved with items bought from an NPC when combined in a device purchased for the purpose. Those pieces often sell relatively cheaply in the Bazaar. All that's needed is a pocketful of platinum and yet another exciting trip to some far-flung, long-forgotten quest hub in unfamiliar zone to purchase the requisite reagent.

I was on the cusp of making a choice, mostly based on what I could afford, when it occured to me that level 106 marked something of a watershed. Whereas all the preceding sets had focus effects that decayed after five levels, built-in obsolesence to ensure their replacement with each new expansion, by the time 2017's Ring of Scale expansion rolled around the developers had tired of the process.

Conflagrant armor returns to the traditional upgrade route of having a player-crafter make gear for adventurers using items dropped by mobs. As a result it's significantly more expensive to buy in the Bazaar but it's very much worth the investment. The stats are very good for a solo player but most importantly the focus effects operate at full efficiency all the way to the current level cap of 115.

Almar's excellent, if outdated, guide says "Conflagrant Armor ... is the best non-prestige armor you can get for players 106 - 110 and the second best non-prestige armor at 110". A set of that will do you proud for a long while. All you need to do is make enough money to buy it.

106 is also the level the next air pet appears. For that I had to find my way to yet another new zone, albeit one that sounded eerily familiar: The Overthere. Ring of Scale is one of several expansions that re-uses older zones, in this case those originally introduced in the much-earlier Ruins of Kunark.

I remember The Overthere as the foothold of Norrath's evil races. Back at the turn of the millennium its only settlement was well-known to players as the Evil Outpost. Given its reputation, I was understandably nervous when I ported in, having bought my Miniature Worker's Sledge Mallet from the guild hall functionary and handed it imediately back to him to activate the portal.

The docks and the buildings beyond looked very familiar. I carefully conned every NPC I could see. I couldn't see many. It was too dark. Well, it was night-time, of course. Isn't it always?

Everyone seemed to be either apprehensive or indifferent. Safe enough. Although most of them also conned red. Not so re-assuring. I took a deep breath and headed into town.

It was fine. I found my vendor, bought my new air pet and all the other level 106 spells she had. Then I backed out, took a few quick screenshots and gated home. Didn't even hang around to scribe the spells into my book. Why take chances?

Back in the safety of the Lobby I had more decisions to make. I'd already researched pet focus items for my new level, the ones that let you summon pets at a higher level than the base spell affords. For the first time in pretty much the entire game there were none. No tradeable ones, at least. No affordable tradeable ones. There is one super-rare tradeable focus, the Golden Sage's Earring, which I've seen quoted at ten million plat. I have a hundred thousand to my name.

Lack of a suitable focus being a moot point, I saw no reason not to summon my pet there and then. No reason except that I already had a fully raid-buffed pet and it seemed a waste to dismiss it. I had a spare pet stashed in my invisble pet pocket courtesy of the Suspend Companion AA so I thought I'd swap those two over, dismiss the lower-level one, suspend the buffed one and summnon a shiny, new level 105 pet. Then we could loaf around for a few hours until he got buffed, too.

Only it turns out you can't swap current and suspended pets until you have all eight grades of the AA and I only had seven. Which is a problem, because as a free player I can't earn any more AAs.

Next time I'll explain exactly how I fixed that. Hint: it cost me. Although not as much as I expected.

Waking A Tiger: GW2, WoW

Over the past few years there's been a significant change in tone from both developers and players in regard to what we might call the innate difficulty setting of the MMORPG genre. For a long time the wind was squarely in the sails of players, like me, who prefer the game itself to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to tedious things like targeting and positioning. These days there's almost an obsession with bringing the modes and means of regular video games into the previously staid and stately world of MMORPG combat to make it more "challenging".

That's something I abhor pretty much without reservation. If I wanted to play those kind of video games I'd be playing them. I don't. That's why I started playing these ones instead.

I take a much more nuanced view on the current trend towards recovering what was supposedly lost in the long march towards mass market acceptance. Call it the heart or the soul of the thing, whatever it was there are plenty who believe it's not there any more. It's a situation whose underlying causes and present complaints are neatly articulated by Marc Jacobs in the third of his Foundational Principles.

While I have some sympathy with the movement, my general feeling is that I was there, I did pay my dues and I've earned my easy ride. I don't hanker after the days when it felt like it took you half a play-session to get to the place you were going to hunt or when getting six people to the same spot on the map meant four of them dying and two of them rage-quitting before anyone even saw each other.

Neither do I look back with nostalgia to Sunday afternoons spent sending tells to crafters in the hope of finding one who wasn't too busy doing a corpse run or sitting in a guild meeting or attending an in-game wedding to travel five zones to a city with a bank where the guards would tolerate both of us, all so he or she could make me a set of level 15 armor for which I'd hand over all the money I'd managed to scrape together since I last bankrupted myself for the level 10 set two weeks ago.

I could literally tell dozens of stories like that, mostly drawn from memories of things that happened while I was playing EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard and EverQuest 2. Marc and countless others would point to the mere fact that not only do I have all those stories but that I can still remember them in detail a decade and change later as offering the strongest evidence in support of their case. It's the argument that says it has to hurt a little if you're going to care.

It's true. The reason those experiences live with me still is because they were painful and in being so the memories associated with them were laid down in accordance with the mechanisms associated with strong emotional reactions. What's questionable, in my opinion, is whether that's a desirable outcome for an activity that is, essentially, artificial and meaningless.

It would be a lot harder for me to come up with an after-dinner speech's worth of anecdotes based on the last five years of playing MMOs. Not because I've played fewer hours or paid less attention but because many of the sharp edges and rough corners have been sanded down and smoothed out. I have fewer scars.

The memories of the elation at last-second wins in boss fights or the sense of satisfaction at the completion of  lengthy questlines don't seem to be laid down to last in the same way as the recollection of the anxious hours spent waiting to see if the guy who promised to build my sloop in Vanguard would ever log in again let alone the traumatic loss of my level six corpse down the hollow tree in Blackburrow (and no, I am not ever going to get over that, thanks for asking). It seems that, when it comes to what we might call regular MMO gameplay, no matter how intense the fight feels at the time, the underlying understanding that it can be repeated ad nauseam until the right result pops out undercuts the brain's sense that anything worth recording for posterity is going on. It probably gets the same priority as your daily commute.

Or perhaps it's the lack of agency that matters. The key part of almost every one of my "MMO war stories" is that I was doing something I'd decided to do, something that required me to make choices and decisions. Bonus memory points if some of those choices were dependent on the choices of others.

It's here that I believe we might find a way in to what was actually lost rather than what we imagine has been lost. In attempting to pave all the roads and open all the gates to allow the smoothest of journeys MMO developers also closed down every side-road and took over the steering wheel. Instead of being the drivers of our own destinies we have increasingly taken on the role of passengers.

When I finally got around to playing WoW  some five years after it began my first character was a Hunter. One of the things that most interested me about the class was the relatively complex and demanding process of finding, catching and taming pets, which I'd read about in some detail on one of the many websites devoted to all things Azeroth. Of course, by the time I got there, all that had been re-assessed and re-evaluated as arduous busywork. I forget what you did have to do to tame a pet but I know there was nothing about it worth remembering.

Three years ago in GW2 my first character was a ranger. I was, once again, looking forward to the process of acquiring pets. It turned out that to charm a pet in GW2 you have to stand next to a juvenile of the species and press a button on a window that pops up on screen automatically. That's it.

Well, the wheel turns. That process hasn't changed a jot in Heart of Thorns and yet gaining the new pets for the first of my rangers has been one of the highlights of the expansion. The pets, which are both powerful and visually appealing and hence very covetable, have been placed in comparatively awkward to reach locations, where you would be unlikely to run into them other than by sheer good luck. Moreover, a couple are soft-gated behind the completion of the Dragon Stand meta-event, which offers only a tight fifteen minute window on success before the whole map resets.

Running across the blighted landscape after Mordremoth's defeat, trying to avoid mordrem snipers and not fall down gaping holes filled with poison gas, while attempting to follow map directions from Reddit and instructions in party chat from Mrs Bhagpuss, who'd done it before, all in the hope of finding my Tiger before being unceremoniously booted back to the Pact base camp on a map reset that loomed ever-nearer, stands a good chance of becoming a story I'll still be telling years from now. If I'd failed to find the little striper that memory would come with a lifetime guarantee.

There's a passing fair chance I'll buy WoW's Legion expansion next year. I was already minded to give it a try but the odds improved markedly when I saw this. "Most Mechanical pets will be challenging to tame, requiring you to first locate them and then use your Hunter abilities in unusual ways" they say. Well, that's the kind of challenge I can appreciate. In fact you might say it's what I came here looking for in the first place.

The idea that MMOs need to return to the levels of social interdependence that were the norm before Blizzard overturned the tables makes my blood run cold. The numerous pragmatic changes that a succession of developers has brought to the genre seem to me to have made both for better games and better entertainment. Somehow, though, complexity, nuance and, most especially, agency got tangled up with awkwardness, frustration and inaccessibility. Somewhere along the way a few babies got thrown out with a lot of dirty bathwater.

It seems ridiculous but there's just an outside chance that Gnome Hunters could help, just a little, in bringing back a taste of what was lost. Some variety, some choice, some agency. And, yes, even some challenge. It's asking a lot from something so small but who could be  better placed to herald the return of over-engineered design than a gnome?

Gotta Keep 'Em All: GW2, EQ2, WoW

Y'know one thing that always annoyed me when I was playing WoW?  The Stable. That place you stash your spare pets. It just never seemed right.

Pet taming was the class-defining feature for Hunters, the class I spent most time with during my three-month visit to Azeroth. Also my favorite. Blizzard had clearly looked at everything that was wrong with the Everquest Ranger and thought "Surely we can do a bit better than that". So they did.
               
Then after a while they decided, what with Hunters famously being adventurers of very little brain and even less patience, they might have gone a tad too far with the whole full-feature pet-taming mini-game, so that had to go. By the time I arrived, fashionably late by about five years, Pet Taming was down to the bare bones but those bones still looked tasty to me. I set out to make the most of what was left, only to run slap-bang into the Stable door.

You want me to swap you for the Jungle Cat? He's not scared of heights.

I'm loyal to my pets in MMOs. I like to give them a name, watch them develop a personality and then create a shared history of adventure with them. On the other hand, I want to collect as many as I can because collecting is fun and pets are fun so collecting pets is funfun.

At first the Stable didn't sound so bad. Tame a pet, train him up then park him in a nice, safe Stable where I can convince myself he'll be well looked-after while I swan around having adventures with my New Best Friend? Sounds just dandy. Until I found out the size of the Stable, that was.

Twenty pets? Plus, if I work up the Call Pets skill, another five? So, twenty-five? When there are in excess of 300 possible pets? (I'm getting all this information from Petopia, by the way, which was my go-to for Pet info back when I was playing. I haven't played WoW in three years so about all I can remember is Not Enough Pets!!!).

Like I'm taking advice from a Necromancer on responsible pet ownership

Twenty-five wasn't just not enough pets. It was insultingly, tauntingly, derisorily not enough pets. It took all the fun out of pet collecting. Well, some of the fun. Not possible to take ALL the fun, there's just too much fun there. But still...

I read recently at That Was An Accident, one of my very favorite blogs and one I rarely get a chance to link to because it's the only WoW blog I read and, well, I don't play WoW (I think I mentioned that earlier...) that the Stable is going to double in size. Confirmed here. So, fifty pets.

Still not enough. Tempting though. I have been getting a weird, almost subliminal urge, not strong enough to call a desire or even a whim, more a background hum, to take another look at WoW. Purely as a tourist. Just for an evening. People keep going on about it and three years may be just long enough to ripen nostalgia even in someone who didn't think they'd had that much of an emotional engagement with the damn game in the first place. (Me, in other words.)

A Reindeer is for life, not just for Frostfell

Anyway, annoying though the Stable is, it's one hell of a lot better than EQ2's infuriating Beastlord bait&switch. In EQ2 you can have all kinds of pets, just so long as you stick to one of each kind at a time. For example, my Beastlord picked up the red-nosed Reindeer at Frostfell. Deer are members of the Bovine Family in Norrath's anarchic biosystem along with cows, sheep and camels. If I ever tame a sheep, bang goes Rudolph. Not that I call him Rudolph. That would be a daft name for a deer. And not that I want to tame a sheep...

EQ2's strict one in, one out policy on Pet Families pretty much put paid to any interest I had in collecting pets there at all. I just got one decent exemplar of each kind and that was that. What a waste.

They understand every word you say, you know

And what a joy, what a relief then to come at last to Tyria. In Guild Wars 2 you really can collect them all. There just aren't as many. Where WoW has 300 and EQ2 170, GW2 can muster only around 50 pets so far, but once you get those 50 they are yours to keep. They're not on loan. When you get a new cat you don't have to give the old one back. You don't have to park your polar bear in a Stable, worry whether she's getting enough seal-meat, if she's missing you, pawing at the straw and whimpering herself to sleep...

 Ahem...

So, pets. Yes, I want to collect them. Lots of them. And once I've got them I want to keep them. I will feed them and walk them and take care of them. All of them. I promise. Trust me. Now, please let me keep them.

Never Coming Back: Beastlords in EQ2

I know the Very Thing to go here. And no, they're never coming back.

According to Smokejumper's somewhat garbled interview, helpfully summarized by Feldon at EQ2Wire, both the expansion that brings back Beastlords and the Game Update that ruins revamps Freeport will go to closed Beta (from Friends and Family Beta presumably) on Tuesday November 8th. I'm as excited about one as I'm nervous about the other.

I have an affinity for pet classes that long pre-dates MMOs. The first time I ran into the idea was back in the very early '80s in a tabletop RPG called Dragonquest, a quirky ruleset that offered an unusual choice of career paths. I didn't much fancy Military Scientist, Astrologer or Courtesan but I liked the sound of Beast Master. It reminded me of Daniel P Mannix with attitude (if Mannix didn't already have more than enough attitude to be going on with).

Oh sorry! Was he yours?

I loved the catching and taming part but almost immediately I ran into a fundamental design flaw. Should have spotted it earlier, really, given that it was quite literally part of the Beast Master's job description: "A Beast Master will, in almost all cases, become very fond of animals". All too true as I found out when I was repeatedly required to bury the dead after ordering my furry friends to fight monsters much bigger and tougher than they were.


Several dead pets into our group's campaign it became apparent that a Beast Master who was a) rapidly running out of beasts that took months to train and b) increasingly reluctant to allow any of the few he had left to take any risks whatsoever in case "something bad" happened to them, was going to be of limited use outside of a petting zoo. I re-rolled as something less emo and that was about the last I thought of pet classes until I stepped into Norrath some fifteen years later.

We don't do "cute"

For a good while "pet class" in Everquest meant someone who raised the dead or animated rocks. This had two big advantages over the Beast Master, namely that skeletons and earth elementals cannot strictly be called "cuddly" and that if they "die" you just raise or animate a new one. Nothing to bury, nothing to mourn.


Shamans did have a pet that looked like a wolf, but it turned out to be a spirit. It looked cuddly but your hand would just go right through. You couldn't rest a pint on his back like I used to do with the landlord's labrador in a pub where I used to drink. We were close, but we weren't quite there. We'd dealt with the downside but something was still missing. Then came the beastlord.

I arrived late on Luclin, Norrath's doomed moon. We were off playing something else at the time, Dark Age of Camelot probably, so I missed the birth of the Beastlord. When we returned, though, I made a Vah Shir Beastlord immediately. A tiger-girl with a tiger pet? Come on!

I took to the class right away. It had all the things I'd always wanted in a pet class: a really powerful pet that would fight beside me, not a weak creature I'd need to protect nor a living wall I'd hide behind. My warder and I stood hip to shoulder as we fought, falling back or surging forward to support and sustain each other as Shissars hissed or Akhevans made that weird chittering noise they make before they fell to our claws.

What have I told you about claws in town?

My beastlord ended up being the Everquest character I played most over the years. She's my highest level still, beached at 84th. I could understand, though, why Beastlords were lost when Luclin exploded. In many ways they were too powerful, too versatile. Just too damn good. Once you've played a beastlord it's hard to settle for less. The balancing issues that beastlords brought had ripped through Everquest for years and since EQ2 seemed to have "avoiding anything that gave us trouble in EQ1" as its core design brief it must have been an opportunity too tempting to resist. Although Blizzard seemed willing to take the risk when they added the Hunter class to WoW. Wonder how that worked out for them...

For many years Beastlord became the class that dare not say its name. They all died on Luclin. Every last one. They're never coming back. Except they are. Next Tuesday in beta and, with luck and a following wind, by the end of the month for the rest of us. There'll probably be five thousand new beastlords in Freeport on the first day and I'll be one of them. And I'll be keeping a diary.