Notice Served: Three Months To Quit

It wasn't like I had plans to move anywhere. I was quite happy where I was. Then one day, out of the blue, the eviction notice comes through the door...

That's what it felt like, when Standing Stone decided they couldn't afford the upkeep on the old 32-bit servers and told everyone still hanging around there they had three months to pack up and leave. And for once, I didn't waste any time doing as I was told. I was gone in less than ten minutes.

That was the biggest surprise of the lot, really, the speed of it. And the efficiency. Two words rarely seen in any sentence that also contains the name Standing Stone Games, unless that sentence also includes the phrase "lack of".

I had been vaguely following the long-running saga of Lord of the Rings Online's transition from 32 to 64 so I was aware the worst of it was over but I still wasn't prepared for the swiftness of the operation. For a start, it only took me a couple of minutes to log in, which has to be some kind of record. I had patched up quite recently but in the past that's not always made a huge difference. This time it only took about twice as long to get to character select as it would in any other game.

Once I was there I was expecting to have to go look up how the whole move-to-another server thing works but no, it was all there in front of me in easy-to-read form. I just had to click a button and the launcher walked me through the whole thing.

I didn't think I had any other characters than the five on the EU-RP server Laurelin but it turned out I had one other - a Level 7 Hobbit Hunter named Juniperry on another EU server by the name of Withywindle. I didn't remember much (Or anything.) about her. Not surprising, considering I last saw her fifteen years ago!

The tool tip handily tells you when all your characters last logged in and Juniperry hasn't been played since November 2010. LotRO, very annoyingly, doesn't have a command to tell you the date a character was created. The best it can offer is how many hours you've played them for and when you last logged them in. 

The game launched in 2007 and I think it was at least a couple of years before Mrs Bhagpuss and I got around to playing it, so Juniperry is one of my older characters for sure. I wish I knew why I created her on a different server. I suspect it might have been back when being on the RP server was getting on my nerves but just before it became so infuriating I couldn't stick it any more. 

Back then, servers in almost all MMORPGs really were siloed, not like later when megaservers, phasing, clusters, instances and similar gimmicks made the separation mostly notional. I'd long been in the habit of creating a new character on different server, whenever I wanted to get away from some annoying person or just be assured of some peace and quiet, so I imagine that's how Juniperry got her start.

Just to add a further element of confusion, the confirmation emails I received from SSG aren't identical. I got separate emails for the two outgoing servers. The one for Laurelin lists the five characters on that server by name and includes the line "Account data transferred successfully for subscription EU subscription 06/20/2011", which would seem to suggest all my regular characters are actually newer than Juniperry, something I'm sure isn't true. 

The email for Withywindle doesn't mention an account date at all. Instead it just refers to the date of transfer: "Your World Transfer is complete! Below is the information for your transfer on 2025-06-13 12:52:14". What that all means is anyone's guess. 

For the big move, I did think about keeping Juniperry separated from the rest of my characters and moving her to a non-RP 64-bit server but in the end I decided it was so unlikely I'd play LotRO often enough in the furure for it to matter, so she might as well go live with all the others. I also decided that, for all its past faults, I probably would rather stay on the RP realm, which is at least slightly better-mannered these days. No-one's called me out for not roleplaying in a long while and I note the official SSG description of the server strongly warns that RP is neither enforced nor enforceable, the clear implication being that the roleplayers need to suck it up and play nice when they don't get their own way, just as much as the rest of us.

With that decided, I moved all of them to the new 64-bit RP world, Meriadoc. I have to say that, had I been choosing a server without all the other baggage, I wouldn't have picked one named after a really annoying Hobbit but what can you do? At least it wasn't Samwise.

The move operation itself only took a few moments but then the confirmation screen came up to warn me that my account would be temporarily uavalable while the data was being processed. I knew the move wasn't likely to take days as it had done at the beginning of the operation but I assumed it would mean I'd at least have to wait until the next day to log in and check out my new home.

Nope. The notice also said they'd email me when it was all done and it felt as though that email arrived almost immediately. It was that quick. 

It seemed like I probably should log in and see that everything had worked and naturally I picked Juniperry to be the scout. She is a Hunter, after all. 

She was standing on the road in Michel Delving in the pouring rain. Honestly, Hobbits have no sense. I went through her bags to see what she'd got and found that at Level Seven she'd already managed to fill four of them. She did have one empty bag, so I thought I might claim all the stuff she'd been gifted over the last decade and a half...

... only there wasn't any. Or hardly any. I spent about twenty minutes trying to find the mailbox in Michel Delving (Seriously, could they make the things any harder to spot?) in case her presents were in the mail but she didn't have any there either. I guess being on a different server didn't entitle her to her own anniversary presents, which I guess is fair enough, although with no cross-server trade and shared storage having so many limitations, it does seem a bit mean.

I suppose I should be grateful in a way. All those things do is clutter up your bags anyway. I mean, who actually uses all those fireworks?

With everyone safely moved, it's goodbye to the 32-bit servers but not good riddance. As I said at the top, I had no intention of moving. I was planning on staying on Laurelin as long as it was there for a couple of very good reasons. For one thing, on the rare occasions when I play LotRO, I play entirely solo, so the fewer people around to get in my way the better I like it. And for another, I never really experienced the infamous lag and even if I had it would have been a safe bet it would have improved with all those other players having left.

Still, you have to move with the times, I guess. So long as the new server wasn't overcrowded and everything there carried on as smoothly as before, there couldn't be much to complain about, right? 

Well, as far as the overcrowding goes, Michel Delving was pretty quiet although there's not much you can read into that. Logic suggests, though, that if everyone has to move and there are fewer servers in total, those servers had better be able to handle a considerably higher population. And logic also suggest that, while 64 bits may give the back-end more room, it's not going to increase the size of Middle Earth itself by one square millimeter, so all those characters are going to be standing closer together every time they go to the bank or the auction house.

Still, I spend most of my time out in the countryside when I play so maybe I won't see them. And of course, it'll be all smooth and lag-free with the new technology, won't it? 

Anyone sensing irony here? Hard to put it across without the sarcastic tone of voice.

I was in Michel Delving, pretty much on my own, and the whole time I was there it was like pushing into a strong wind. I didn't see the full rubber-banding effect but there was plenty of  stuttering and glitching and poor old Juniperry did keep flicking back a few paces as she ran all around the town looking for the mailbox. I hardly ever saw anything like that on Laurelin, not at all in recent years, so Meriadoc is certainly not feeling much like an upgrade to me right now.

As Wilhem points out, with supporting evidence, Standing Stone did more than suggest they were going to keep the 32-bit servers open as long as enough people wanted to stay on them. Either almost everyone left immediately or that plan got changed pretty fast. Possibly when they realised how many people didn't want to go. Or maybe, as a couple of people suggested in the comments, SSG is throwing out the ballast in the hope of keeping the ship afloat for a little while longer. Can things really be that bad?

As a very occasional, casual player, I can't say I feel incensed by the bait&switch tactics but it certainly doesn't give me any more confidnce in any promises SSG might make in future. And now I see they're doing the same thing with their other game, Dungeons and Dragons Online, only this time they're not making the mistake of letting anyone think they have a choice.

I do have a couple of characters over there, too, although it must be a decade since I last played the game. At the moment I feel like I'd be fine with letting them slip away into the darkness but I guess I have a while to decide for sure. The final cut-off there is also 31 August. 

I bet in the end I crack and have to move them even though it's odds-on I'll never play them. Just like I'll probably have to do something about Mrs Bhagpuss's characters in LotRO before it's too late. And don't I have another account on the NA server cluster, too?

It's like having children. The feeling of responsibility never goes away. 

Moving On...

Following some helpful advice in the comments to my last post, this morning I took advantage of the dying hours of World of Warcraft Classic's free weekend to move all my characters off their current server, Hydraxian Waterlords. 

Not that I wanted to move them anywhere. I would have been perfectly content to leave them where they were. Hydraxian Waterlords has been a very pleasant place to play. It makes little difference to me whether it's busy or quiet. I mostly play WoW as if it was a single-player game anyway.

But it wasn't my choice. Hydraxian Waterlords is scheduled to close when Cataclysm arrives. Not that I'd have known if it hadn't been for Pallais and Shintar explaining the situation. 

In fact, I still can't nail down an official confirmation from Blizzard. There are some very recent forum threads asking Blizzard not to close it and trying to rally support to keep it as the only EU-RP server but although everyone acts as if it's a done deal, no-one bothers to link to an official closure announcement.

Working on the dubious assumption that it's better to jump than be pushed, I made the decision to take my characters' fate into my own hands and move them anyway. Maybe they could just have sat tight and nothing would have happened but who knows?

The Free Transfer process is both simple and confusing. For a start, you have to somehow magically know about it already to access it. If the server really is about to close and free transfers have been offered, I would have expected either an in-game notification or an email to my account address. Then again, I have a suspicion free transfers off Hydraxian Waterlords may have been open continuously for a couple of years now, since the last time Blizzard threatened to close the server, so maybe they sent out notices then.

Once you know the option exists, you have to go through the cash shop to take advantage of it. That's how it's worked in most MMORPGs where I've done something similar in the past, although there have been cases where I was sent a token in the mail, which seems like a more elegant way of doing it. 

Blizzard gets points for not asking for banks to be cleared or guild permissions reset or auction house listings to be removed or any of the myriad other fussy housekeeping tasks I've had to fiddle about with in other games. It's a straightforward change of address with no complicated paperwork.

Unfortunately, they lose points for the all-round kludginess of the whole thing. I moved seven characters to two different servers and at no point was I ever entirely sure if the transfers had gone through correctly. The feedback from button-presses is all but non-existent. 

My confidence in the process wasn't improved when the first transfer I tried crashed fairly spectacularly, spitting out a chunk of incomprehensible code. Along with the error message there was a button to Reload UI. I pressed it and it dumped me back to character select, where the character I'd been trying to move had vanished altogether.

It was only a level 10 priest I will almost certainly never play again so I wasn't all that bothered but it made me apprehensive about moving the others. In the end, they did all transfer successfully, with no further crashes, although there was an unnerving moment when I went to log into the new server, only to find I had no characters there at all.

If in doubt, relog. I started over and there they all were, so that was fine. More worrying was the string of gibberish attached to the end of one of my characters' names.

It hadn't occured to me that someone on the destination server might have prior right to a name I was using. I rarely have much trouble with that sort of thing. I tend to pick names no-one else would be likley to think of so I'm generally safe. 

And that was how it worked out for six out of seven of them this time. The exception, naturally, was my highest level character. It bloody would be.

I renamed him and with that I was done. I now have four characters on Pyrewood Village and three on Mirage Raceway.  Those were the only available options under the free transfer system, which made me think I'd been wasting my time. 

They're both PvE servers, or "Normal" as Blizzard calls them, both with similar-size populations and similar faction balances. I can't see it makes any difference which of the two becomes my new home. I might just as well have done nothing and let the automatic relocation shunt me on to whichever it felt like, if and when Hydraxian Waterlords does finally close.

It's done now, anyway. In the not entirely likely event that I resubscribe for Cataclysm Classic, at least I know where I'll be.

Relocation, Relocation, Relocation

Meet Mitsu, aka The Ratonga Formerly Known As Lana. Last time we saw her, she was trying to make up her mind where to go to avoid being dumped onto Antonia Bayle, when Kaladim closes down.

After I wrote that post I spent a fair while considering the options but in the end I decided to send her to Isle of Refuge on the grounds that it was a relatively new server with a ruleset I hadn't explored before. Even though I thought I'd done enough research before making my choice, it's possible I should have done more.

For one thing, I didn't realise until after I arrived that it was going to be a one-way trip. As the original press release puts it 

When Isle of Refuge launches, there will be no transfers allowed on or off Isle of Refuge. This is a new Norrathian community being formed, and we want you all to have the opportunity to build relationships and a thriving player economy. There are no plans to EVER allow transfers off the Isle of Refuge server, though we may open transfers TO this server at a future date.

Dragging out that creaky old metaphor one more time, Isle of Refuge is the Hotel California of servers; you can check in but you can never leave.

The reason for the lockdown is the Free Trade ruleset. Isle of Refuge allows almost everything to be bought and sold, including all kinds of Look-at-me! Aren't-I-amazing? items, the ones that mark a certain kind of player out as a Very Big Deal indeed, at least in their own head-canon. Can't have just anyone strutting around the Freeport docks like they're someone, without knowing they've paid their dues, can we?

Which is fine, honestly. I'll take the hit, even though I'm not going to be the one wearing any of that stuff, I can't see myself wanting to buy a transfer token to move a low-level character from one EverQuest II server to another, anyway. What would be the point?

"And see you're off the streets by curfew... or else!"

There's another aspect of the relocation I'd failed to consider. One that could prove more significant. To quote from the press release once again

To play on the Free Trade Server, you must be an All Access Member.

Which I am, at the moment. And again, it's not something I have any particular plans to change. I've been paying a subscription for EQII since the day it launched. For five years before, too, if comes to that. I'll probably still be subbing as long as the Isle of Refuge server lasts, unless it outlasts me, which I guess is not that much of a leap to imagine.

Of course, while I'll most likely keep a subscription going, who's to say it'll always be on this account? I've swapped before. It could happen again. That would leave the erstwhile Lana stranded, peering hopefully from character select, waiting for a call that could never come. I do still log in characters on my unsubbed accounts from time to time, but only those on the mainline servers like Skyfire or Maj`Dul.

But then, as the poets love to tell us, 'twas ever thus. Lana on Kaladim was as partitioned as Mitsu on Isle of Refuge. You need an All Access account to play on any of the special ruleset servers. No change there. I don't know why I mentioned it.

And anyway it's done. For well or ill, Mitsu is on Isle of Refuge. She's going nowhere. Except, maybe she is. Maybe she's going forward. I haven't quite decided.

Excuse me, but do you have a room I could rent?

I was excited to play her when Kaladim began. It was a busy, bustling new server experience with everyone starting from scratch and pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. I had fun. Only my fun was much slower than everyone else's. 

By the time Lana had clawed her way to level 20 the bubble was somewhere up by the cap. I lost traction and fell away, returning briefly when the timer got to expansion #3, Echoes of Faydwer, the first with new, low-level content. Another half dozen levels and I was gone again.

Looking back, two things kept me connected to the character; firstly her look, which I'd crafted more carefully than most, keeping her in a full set of very low-level chainmail that made her look as though she'd stepped off the boat that very day, topped off with a spectacular flashy helmet from one of the summer holiday events. Secondly and perhaps more potently, there was her name: Lana.

The look she still has. The name is lost. I knew it would never survive the move to another server, any server. You can guarantee any short, familiar real-world name will have been taken years ago, let alone one freighted with import like this one. There are a lot of famous Lanas to model a character on.

I might have been miffed about that had I not had another Great Idea. I'd just finished Supercute Futures Two and written a post about how very much I'd enjoyed it. I've always been all about naming my characters after fictional favorites, even though almost every EULA strictly forbids it. Fortunately, my tastes drift so far from the median there's precious little chance of anyone noticing, far less reporting my choices.

The question was whether to go for Mitsu or Mox. Easily answered. Mox was taken. That suited me. I prefered Mitsu. Maybe some day I'll get one of those Mercenaries you can rename and call her Mox. That would be too cool. 

It's not as nice as my old place but it'll do... for now.

So there I was, with a character, a name, a server and maybe even a goal. The only thing I was missing was a home. Except, wait... didn't I say something in that last post about how Lana had a very nice room, all decorated to her taste, back on Kaladim?  

Actually, no, I didn't. Or rather I did, but in a paragraph I took out in the edit because when I logged in to take a screenshot of the place I couldn't find it. Only an empty inn room.

It took me a while to figure out why that was. I was sure I remembered placing a bunch of holiday rewards beside the furniture Lana had crafted for herself. So where was it?

I'll tell you where it was. It was in her room in Temple Street, that's where. When Kaladim launched, one of the unusual features of the server was the partial restoration of the original racial neighborhoods. For years they'd been unavailable, converted into quest-and-combat instances, only to be entered by those on one of the racial questlines. You couldn't live there any more. 

Except on Kaladim, you could and I did. That's where Lana's room was. And now she's Mitsu on Isle of Refuge that's very much where it's not. Mitsu has an almost empty inn room to keep the Freeport militia from running her in for vagrancy and that's all.

Well... the inn room and her choice of a bunch of free, Prestige homes, all available in /claim. In fact, she could have any home of her choice, if she cares to dig into the communal account slush fund. There's almost 30k in Daybreak Cash in there. 

Now she's on Isle of Refuge all the chains are broken. There's no reason for her to act like it's 2005 any more. The new server doesn't care and now neither do I. She can't share in the considerable largesse of her elders on Skyfire - shared banks aren't cross-server - but anything available on an account level is hers for the taking.

Mitsu is rich. Beyond her dreams. Will it go to her head? 

We'll see.

Dude, Where's My House?

Chimeraland is one of the many, many titles on the ever-growing list of mmorpgs I mean to go back to someday but, since I only just bought the new mini-expansion for another game on that list, Lord of the Rings Online, a couple of days ago, that day wasn't supposed to be today.

When I came to log into LotRO, though, it was down for a scheduled update. Isn't it always the way? As it happened, only a few minutes earlier I'd read a news item on MassivelyOP about the latest update to Chimeraland and it sounded intriguing so I thought I might as well go take a look at that while I waited.

There were a couple of things in the update I was curious to see, particularly the Nine-tailed Fox. My character is a fox already but she only has the one tail. I'd be up for eight more.

The "Child Beasts" sounded interesting, too, if more than a little creepy. I thought I might go have a look for some of those, always assuming I could figure out what and where they were, never a given in Chimeraland..

In the event, neither of those headline items took up much of my time after I'd patched and logged in. What did was something I'd barely noticed in the announcement, buried as it was in the small print; the merger of another pair of servers, one of which appears to be mine.

At least, I'm assuming that's the reason I found myself standing on the doorstep of a large and impressive castle when I finally got into the game. Last I remember, I logged out in my house several weeks ago, having taken the trouble to register my presence prior to the last merger round. This time I'd been unaware further contractions were planned so it looks like my claim on the plot has been gazumped by someone who actually plays the game.

Fair enough. I really can't complain. Use it or lose it, as the saying goes. And I have to admit the structure now standing where my half-built shack used to be is a lot more impressive. 

Not only that but the whole area seems to have undergone some sort of gentrification as a result of the merger. Where mine used to be one of the few homes in the area and even one of the more developed, now there are towers and mansions in all directions. I guess whichever server was merged into Moonbeam Bay had a lot more going on around the waterfall. I always thought it was an underappreciated locale.

It certainly suited me, anyway. I had no desire to move. I'm sure there are hundreds of scenic spots where I could relocate but damn it, why should I? I found this place and I plan on keeping it.

So, I just set up across the way from the castle, where a handy rocky outcrop made for a nice central feature. All my furniture and building materials had been neatly stored for me. I pulled out my Spirit Stone, plonked it down to claim the new plot, then started laying down foundations and putting up walls.

I kept on until I hit my housing point limit which, since I'd made it to Housing Level Eight or so when last I played, gave me a decent square-footage. I even remembered to leave some space around the Spirit Stone this time, so for once I won't have to try to get to it from the other side of a wall or by hanging off a staircase.

I had to cut down a couple of trees that were growing in inconvenient places but in half an hour or so I had a considerably better house than the one I'd lost. The view's the same only considerably improved by the elegant castle that stands where my old place used to be, although I can't imagine the castle's owner is going to be thinking the same when they come home and look out from the battlements at the jerry-built fixer-upper that's appeared overnight, right outside their walls.

Whether I'll find the time to do any of that fixing is another question. I'd like to but I suspect it won't happen. Even if I do return to Chimeraland for anything ressembling an extended run, I'm in two minds whether to carry on with the Steam version or go back to my higher level character on the Singaporean server. The Asian servers have had somemmergers, too. I wonder which is likely to be around the longer?

As for the Nine Tailed Fox, I couldn't figure out where it was in the shop, let alone what I needed to do to get one. I didn't have time to go looking for child beasts, either. Maybe next time.

If there is one.

Call Me By My Name

Not much more than a couple of years ago, on March 16 2019 to be precise, Daybreak popped up four new servers in celebration of EverQuest's 20th anniversary, two each for both the EQ titles. I posted about it on the day, leading with a screenshot of the login queue for one of the EverQuest servers, Selo, showing an average wait time of three-quarters of an hour.

I made characters on one of the EverQuest II servers, Kaladim, where I was cock-a-hoop over nabbing the name Lana. Flush with success, I logged in to EQ as well and snaffled two more top echelon names, Breezy (a Druid) and Buffy (a Bard). 

EQ's Selo server was so busy at launch I didn't get to log either of my newbies in until the next day. EQII's Kaladim, while popular, wasn't quite as rammed. I played there instead. And went on playing for quite a while.

Two year's later, Lana is somewhere in the mid-twenties. I took her all the way to twenty back when the server was fresh and I've logged her in quite a few times since to do this and that, most recently just a few weeks ago. 

I consider her a "real" character. She has a nice inn room that's properly decorated and I take care to make sure she gets her turn at things like holiday events so she can keep adding to her decor. As for the server, Kaladim is thriving. It's quite possibly EQII's busiest server.

Breezy and Buffy, on the other hand, haven't fared quite so well despite their impressive names. They're level three and four respectively. Buffy's total played time is just over two and a half hours. She's been standing in the bank in Shadeweaver's Thicket since March 2019. I don't know where Breezy is. Or care much, if I'm honest.

I'm in Qeynos, you dimmock! As if you care!

 

Even though I was genuinely thrilled to have both names at the time, I forgot either of the characters even existed almost immediately after I made them. Until today, when I read the following announcement on the login screen:

Upcoming Server Merge and Downtime - July 21, 2021

That got my attention. I wasn't aware any EQ servers were merging. I hope it's not one I play on! I clicked through the link to the forum post. 

"On Wednesday, July 21, 2021, Selo is being merged with Povar, and characters on Selo will be transferred over.

The announcement goes on to list a whole lot of detail about what the move entails, including this key piece of information: 

Naming Conflicts

• If, as a result of the server merge, two or more characters have the same name, the conflict will be resolved as follows:
  • The player who has logged into game within 60 days before the merge will retain the original character name. If there is still a conflict, the character with the highest number of minutes played will retain the original character name.
  • The renamed character will have additional vowels (or 'x') added to the end of their name and be flagged for a free rename. Characters who have been renamed can open the rename window to pick a new name with /changename chat command.

That got me thinking. Didn't I have a character on Selo? I kind of thought I did. And I had some vague memory of something about the name...

Long story short, I logged in and found out everything I've just recounted above. It leaves me with some decisions to make. There's plenty of time. The merger is still a month away. 

The first question is do I want to go to Povar? I don't have to because until the move happens there are free server transfers off Selo for the asking. It's in the FAQ:

Will there be free character transfers off of the servers before the merge?

• Free transfers off of Selo will continue to be active until the merge is complete. Use /servertransfer on Selo if you would like to go to a different server (or go to Povar early).

I didn't think I had any characters on Povar but I logged in just to be sure. None on my All Access account. I haven't checked my formerly-subbed account but I'm pretty certain Povar is a server I've never played on, nor Quellious, with which it's already merged.

I don't have any strong feelings about Povar one way or the other and since I have no intention of playing the characters anyway it hardly matters where they go. On the other hand, if I moved them to a server on which I have other characters, it's a lot more likely these two might also get a run out now and again. Not to mention I could twink them a little, which is always fun.

/Who all returns nineteen characters on Selo right now - and I'm betting a lot fewer than nineteen players based on those names.

But much more than that, I do want to keep those names. By logging them in I've cleared the 60 day hurdle. If I do nothing more and no-one else on Povar a) has an active character called Buffy and/or Breezy  or b) has an inactive one they care enough about to log in before July 21 so as to keep the name then I'm covered. If either of those things happen, though, I end up with Breezyx and Buffyx, a far less appealing prospect unless you happen to be one of Martin Millar's werewolves.

What I could do, if I'm being sneaky about it, is to try and make characters with those names on the various servers I do sometimes play on and see if they get rejected. If they don't, I can not make the character but instead /servertransfer there immediately in the confidence the name(s) will stick.

Of course, if I could do that I could just make the new character and log them in and I'd have the damn name(s) anyway so maybe it's not worth the trouble. Thinking about it, I probably stand a better chance of getting the slots by default on Povar due to inaction on the part of the current name-owners than lucking into a server where no-one's name-squatting them already.

Why I care is probably something best left unexamined. It's one of those wanting to be invited to a party even you have no intention of going things. 

As for Selo, it's a sad end for a server that started with a bang but was already whimpering long, long ago. Of the four 20th Anniversary servers across both EQ games, two prospered and two imploded. 

In EQII, as I mentioned, Kaladim continues on in style while Nagafen, the Seasonal PVP server, ran into the usual problems and closed a while ago. In old Norrath Mangler maintains a very healthy population while Selo has long been a virtual wasteland.

I won't go into the merits of PvP servers in the EQ games or the wisdom of launching multiple new special ruleset servers all at once except to note that history suggests there will always be PvP servers, no matter how many problems they cause and that however many PvE servers there are, there will never be enough at launch and always too many soon after.

I can't say I'll miss Selo. I never really played there. I'm glad I noticed it was going before it was too late to do something about my characters, all the same. If anyone else has people on Selo, now's the time to bail them out. 

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Hmm. I wonder if anyone's using Ferris?

Home Is Where, When You Go There, They Have To Take You In. Ha! Lies! : Riders of Icarus

I'm sure absolutely no-one is wondering why I haven't posted anything about Riders of Icarus for a while. Even if athey have, no doubt they're assuming I've forgotten all about it in the slow-time frenzy of WoW Classic.

Actually, no. I'm still keeping up with my dailies in Guild Wars 2, I found time to log into EverQuest II to do the first of Yun Zi's new quests and I would have been logging in to RoI for my daily half-hour afk session too. If I could.

So what's stopping me?

 Error 602. That's what.

A few days ago, after downtime that officially lasted eight hours, Riders of Icarus slipped it's moorings from the safe harbor of Nexon to dock at the mysterious port known as Valofe or VFun. All the passengers who'd pre-registered should have gone along for the ride but quite a lot, including me, seem to have fallen overboard somewhere along the way.

My account transferred correctly as far as I can tell. I can log in to it on the VFun website and I have a Valofe ID. I was able to download the Valofe installer as required and install the full game. (The Steam version still seems to work but it now goes to a blank account with no characters).

The launcher also works but there's a discrepancy between the version I downloaded and the current version the launcher wants to patch. This is a known problem, aknowledged and apologized for by the new publishers, who do seem to be trying to sort things out.

Unfortunately, the fix they have suggested, which involves downloading the corrupted files directly from their website, doesn't work for everybody. Including me, naturally.

The latest advice is to submit a ticket, which I have done this morning. They even put up a template telling you exactly what information they need to try and sort the problem out for you.

It includes your characters' names, something most people presumably have no difficulty in remembering. I only have two characters, one of whom I have been looking at every day for several months. Do you think I could remember either of their names?

This is the downside to making up names off the top of your head in dozens of MMORPGs. Also of getting older. Fortunately, I have a blog.

I am scrupulous about never naming my characters in anything I write and always blurring or cropping their names in any screenshots I use. I have a thing about names and privacy. It's ridiculous but there you go. No chance of finding my characters' names from a post, then.

Very much not how I'm feeling about the move.

Because I illustrate so heavily, though, I take thousands of screenshots. For most of them I hide the UI but often I need some text or a pop-up window to emphasize some point I'm making in a post. I edit the names out of the pictures you see on the blog but I save those as separate files and keep the unedited originals in another folder.

I was confident the names would show up somewhere. It turns out I took a screenshot of the first one at character creation so that was easy. The other, my Trickster, the one with all the good stuff, was harder.

I don't have any shots of her from when I made her and RoI's UI doesn't include the name of the character anywhere. I checked the chat box in some of the shots but the game always refers to the character as "you" so no joy there.

I tried the shots I had of NPC dialog but RoI didn't seem to be one of those games that includes the character name in the quest text. I was starting to think I'd just have to tell VFun her class and level and hope that was enough, when I came across a shot of the her talking to the space cat back in May or June.

For some reason the cat did use her name. Probably because he's from space and doesn't know the local customs. Yay for cultural diversity!

As soon as I saw it I thought "Oh, yes, that's what she's called!" I had an inkling I'd named her after Dora the Explorer and indeed I had, although if I said her name I very much doubt anyone would make the connection.

Anyway, it's done now. All I can do is wait.

 I hope the new publishers can sort out their mess because I'd hate to lose all that great stuff I did absolutely nothing to get and paid absolutely nothing for.

Make Mine A Double - A Public Service Announcement On Behalf Of EverQuest And EQ2

It was never my plan to stand in as a news service for Norrath but every time I post one of these alerts someone thanks me for bringing it to their attention so I feel I probably should keep sharing the love. No-one else seems to have noticed but both EQ and EQ2 are running double XP weekends right now, presumably because this is Labor Day in the States.

I didn't notice it myself until five minutes ago, when I was idly tabbing around various bookmarks as I waited for Twin Saga to update on Steam. Something I saw reminded me I hadn't done this week's Yun Zi quest so I thought I'd pop in to do that while I waited.

As I logged in, right there on the launcher I saw a news item announcing Double XP, Double Currency and a 25% Off Sale in the cash shop. SOE launchers used to be something of a joke but over the last five years or so they've refined themselves into some of the best around, reliable and informative.

Having a regularly updated news page right there at log in is very handy. Of course, you do have to be logging in to see it...

I didn't log into EQ2 yesterday so I missed the start of the event, a very long "weekend" indeed, running from 12:01AM PT on Friday, August 31, 2018 until 11:59PM PT on Thursday, September 6, 2018 according to the official website, which for some still unexplained reason always comes to me via the French Language version these days, even though the bulk of the text is in English.

These events come with the Firiona Vie Seal of Approval.

The EQ2 event is for All Access Members only, so of limited interest to casual players, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I'll be taking advantage of the accelerated xp to push my Wizard through the final level to the cap and I might even do a few levels on the Warlock, who's maxed his Sage skills but is lazing around at Level 100 in his adventuring.

I also notice that the event is extended for an exrtra day for the Antonia Bayle server only due to a server merge. This is something else I'd missed. I'm guessing that's the long-postponed merger with Stormhold.

I have a character on Stormhold who might like to do a few levels so maybe I'll take him out for a spin.

The EverQuest version is more limited, lasting a day less and not including double currency, but the xp bonus applies to all players, regardless of account status. You have to be a Member to get the 25% store discount, though.

Double XP is actually a lot more of a big deal in the older EQ. I haven't played for a long while and I'd pretty much abandoned my attempts to level my Magician further into the 90s. It is tempting, all the same, especially as she's on the account which isn't subbed and double xp events for freeloaders are relatively rare. Maybe I'll get in a session or two.

Anyway, there it is, for what it's worth. Double XP all round!

And They All Rolled Over And One Fell Out: EQ2, LotRO

The latest Producer's Letter for EQ2 makes for interesting reading. The big ticket news is the progress on server consolidation.

It's fascinating how reactions to reducing the number of servers in an MMORPG have evolved. A few years ago any hint that even one server might close was treated as a sign that the end was nigh and the game was dying. Players still clinging to the wreckage of the sinking ship would wail and rend their garments while game companies would wrangle language six ways from Sunday trying to deny anything was merging with anything at all. These days, at least in aging MMOs, players seem to demand server consolidation long before the companies consider it needs to happen and the announcement, when it comes, is greeted with roars of approval.

The trend with newer games, of course, is to design the need for merges out of the process altogether. All kinds of clever back-end smoke and mirrors come into play, megaservers and clusters and so on, but when you're running an MMO that  dates back to the dark ages of the noughties that's may not always be a viable option, economically or technically or both.

Over the years I've been through more server merges and meldings than I care to remember. For some reason we often seem to end up on lower population servers -  Hilsbury, Steamfont, Lanys T'Vyl. I'm used to logging in one day after a long lay-off to find an "X" appended to the name of my more obviously-named characters, although it's not that common for anyone else to have chosen the kind of names I tend to go for.

That's it. Everything packed and ready to go. Sunset on another home.

More of a problem than names is running out of character slots. There have been a couple of occasions when I had characters on both the giving and receiving server. The worst was when Everquest servers Luclin and Stromm joined forces - each had been my primary server for several years at different times and I had almost full rosters on both.

Fortunately game companies tend to be generous on these occasions and I was able to shuffle my pack around using free transfers to find a satisfactory home for everyone. There's a possibility something similar could happen when the EQ2 "consolidation" takes place, which apparently could begin this month, but I am hoping my primary Live server, Freeport, will be one of the ones still standing after the cull.

Freeport was the original F2P server and at one time it was pushing RP server Antonia Bayle for the "busiest server" crown. Those days are long gone but when I'm on Freeport it always seems well-populated, at least as far as it's possible tell in such a heavily-instanced environment. There are always oversized mounts blocking the East Freeport bank and other players swooping out of the sky to jack my named mobs in Phantom Sea anyway.

This inn room's been my home for ten years. I'm not moving anywhere!

Oasis, on the other hand, the server into which my first EQ2 home, Steamfont, was incorporated long, long ago, will almost certainly go dark. That shouldn't be too painful. Not only do I have little affection for Oasis but it sounds as though there will be no need for any action on my part this time, wherever the axe falls, because the plan is to move the entire population of several smaller servers onto one brand-new larger one.

I should also be spared the apparently arduous task of updating the LotRO client just to save my characters when that game undergoes its own rather brutal restructuring. The extensive list of servers facing closure there is already up and mine's not on it.  My little crew is on EU-RP server Laurelin which survives the cull. Not that I'm planning on playing LoTRO again but I would have had to have made the effort to keep my characters "alive". Now it's safe to go back to ignoring them all over again.

Although, as I said, these days server consolidation is often as much welcomed as feared it's probably something most people appreciate after it's happened rather than when it's actually happening. The planning for EQ2's transition to a leaner, more focused core looks encouraging. Let's hope it all goes off as smoothly in practice as it's looking on paper.

Wagons Roll! : Rift

I stepped back into Rift last week. I'm subscribed right up to April but I've hardly logged in since late last year. When I read that Rift's first twenty levels were going to be freely playable (Not F2P. Oh dear me, no!. We can't be having any of that kind of talk) my first thought was "Great! Now I can cancel my account and just drop in and play low-level whenever I need a Rift fix".

The thought of seeing the first twenty levels hopping with new players like they were just after launch is a very pleasing prospect. The busier the zone, the more rifts pop, the more invasions fire. Things could be just like the good old days, back in the mists of yesteryear, lo! those long ten months ago.

Then I read about the changes to the Soul Tree system (as discussed here and here among other places) and thought that if I was going to pontificate about them I probably ought at least to try them out. Not that lack of personal experience usually stops me climbing on a soapbox. Nor lack of a soapbox, for that matter.

Before I could do anything I had to move all my characters off Shadefallen. And move the guild. (Didn't need to call a Guild Meeting on that one. The entire guild membership is me and Mrs Bhagpuss and she's not playing Rift even more than I'm not playing Rift so I just took an executive decision. That's what Guild Leaders do).

Look and wonder!

As promised, moving the guild was very straightforward, as was moving each of the characters. Well, it would have been if not for two things: the guild bank and my mail. Storage has always been at a premium in Telara and I've been in the habit of using the mailbox as a kind of poor man's bank vault. The Guild Bank was completely full of crafting materials and various consumables. Since you have to have an empty mailbox and nothing in the Guild Bank before your application to move can be approved I had a happy couple of hours shifting stuff about and buying larger bags and new bank vault slots before we finally got our passports stamped for Faeblight.

Which is where the next complication arose. Faeblight was the "reserved" destination server for Shadefallen characters because it's the only remaining RP-PVE server. That reservation had expired, but I still wanted to go there because of the RP part and because we have our Guardian characters there and, hey, it's easier to remember where they are if they're all in the same place, right? Only I'd forgotten that Rift only lets you have six characters per server and I had a total of seven and Mrs Bhagpuss had eight or nine.

To cut a long story short, I ended up moving all the Guardians to Millrush, which meant another round of mailbox-emptying, although at least we'd never gotten around to making a Guardian guild so there was no guild bank to deal with. Finally, about four hours after I'd had the passing notion to try out a preset Soul build, I logged in my Rogue and hit "N".

Oh that's where they go!

First off I compared the Presets on offer for each Calling with what I was using. Apparently I'm a bit of a maverick. Or an idiot. Let's go with "maverick". Whatever, my choices look quite odd compared to the presets, which make a good deal more sense. I chose the "Huntsman" model and, after paying a large chunk of money to my trainer for nine tiers of upgrades to abilities I'd never even considered taking in all the time I've played that character, I went Warfronting.

Guess what? Trion have a better idea how a ranged DPS class should spec than I do. Who'd have thought it? I imagine having designed the game gives them some kind of an edge. That and the fact that I detest allocating points and just try to get it over with as fast as possible. Either way, the "Huntsman" build plays a lot better in Warfronts than my Ranger/Bard hybrid ever did.

I did a few Warfronts and remembered how much I like Codex. Probably my favorite instanced PvP zone out of all the ones I can remember from DAOC onwards. Even more fun now that I'm significantly more effective so thumbs up for the Preset Soul. Pretty much kicking into an open goal as far as I'm concerned since I never wanted the responsibility of creating a build in the first place.

I'm in two minds now about cancelling my subscription. Chances are I won't want to play much Rift after April. Guild Wars 2 looms. And there's the free twenty levels sitting there if I do. But I did really enjoy being back. I'll wait and see how much I play over the next six weeks and then decide, I guess. Which is in itself a win for Trion. Apparently they do know what they are doing after all. Maybe.