Fixer-Upper

I spent much of today in Dawnlands doing something I should have done long ago: tidying up my base. After about three hours of moving stuff around, about the best I can say is it's not as bad as it was.

Really, I ought at least to break everything down and start over. I should more probably move. I'm still operating out of the Grasslands Shelter, for the sole reason that very early on in the storyline one of the NPCs suggests you move in there and I did as I was told. It was fine for a while but it's far from convenient now. It's only the free, instant map travel that's kept me from doing something about it already.

As I posted a while ago, I have my eye on a sumptuous residence in a far more aesthetically pleasing location. It's all ready and waiting for me to move in but so far I've done absolutely nothing to make it happen. Instead, I've been squatting in a shack in a corner of the first village I washed up at, cluttering the place up with more and more crafting stations and storage boxes, giving no thought at all to what an eyesore I've created or how hard I'm making things for myself.

Something had to give and this morning it happened. I was ferreting through my dozen or so chests looking for something, when I finally snapped. I decided to clear the whole lot out and get organized for once. 

I began by making a whole load of fifteen-slot cabinets to replace my ten-slot chests. Then I made a wooden framework so I could stack them three high since you can't place them directly on top of each other.

Once I had that done, I moved everything from the chests into the cabinets, making more cabinets as I needed them. I also did something I really should have done from the beginning; sort everything into categories and put like with like. The game allows you to give each container an individual name so I labeled everything according to what was inside: Ore, Ingots, Herbs, Crystals and so on.

I invite you to imagine me, playing the game day after day, all the way back to the beginning of August, just dumping things randomly into unlabeled boxes, then having to search through all of them every time I wanted to find anything, which was all the time. 

This, of course, is what I always do. In most games I stop playing before I run out out of patience with the chaos. Not this one.

Everything was going very well until I hit an unforeseen snag. Dawnlands uses an excellent proximity search to populate a menu of all nearby storage, allowing you to select each container from a list rather than having to find its exact location. I was placing all my containers close enough to each other that the search would find everything, or so I thought.

It would have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky kids a previously unknown limit to the number of containers displayable in the menu, which weirdly seems to cap at 21. I had closer to thirty cabinets stacked tightly together before I began to notice some of them weren't appearing in the list. I'd packed them too tightly to be able to inspect them all directly so I had to split them.

Only there wasn't enough space. That's how I ended up moving all my heavy industry - kilns and smelters - out of the Shelter altogether. I got out my hoe and flattened an area just outside the perimeter. Then I moved the big crafting stations, which you can just pick up and carry, fortunately, and built a second framework for storage in the space that was left.

After a deal more fiddling I got all my inventory into the new locations. I broke down all the empty chests and then took a look around. It was better but still not good. Time for more drastic measures.

Last week, having tired, finally, of roasting meat one piece at a time over an open fire while watching the ten second timer tick down, before picking it off the spit and starting on another, I'd taken a tip from Kazeyo and stacked ten spits together over another fire, this one well away from my sleeping hut. 

That allowed me to roast ten chunks of meat in the time it had been taking me to finish one but it also meant I no longer needed the single spit. I'd just left it there out of laziness but today I broke it down for mats so I could use the space for something else.

Before I could put anything else there, though, the fire had to go too. It was still cheerily burning where the spit used to be. I knew I needed a fire close to my bed or I wouldn't be able to sleep so I couldn't just get rid of it altogether, which was how I came to have the bright idea of putting the fire inside the hut. I mean, there was plenty of room, now I'd gotten rid of all the chests.

I picked up the still-burning fire and placed it on the floor of the wood-and-thatch hut, which promptly burst into flames. As I'm slowly coming to realize, Dawnlands is much more complex than any F2P mobile port has any right to be.

I grabbed the fire and put it outside again before the whole hut went up in smoke. I got some wood and thatch out of storage and made good the damage. Then I picked up the fire and put it next to the hut, only this time on the outside. It immediately set fire to the door, which quickly burned to ash.

On my third attempt I managed to get the fire settled sufficiently far from the hut so as not to set it alight but still close enough to keep me warm and dry in bed. As I type this, though, I realize I've left the fire unprotected from the elements, meaning the first shower will put it out. When I log back in I'll either have to move it yet again or build a roof over it.

I could always put it back where it was but then I'd have to find a new home for my loom, which is now where the fire and the spit used to be. I moved it out of the hut I'd made to keep it out of the rain. A lot of things in Dawnlands don't seem to work if they get wet.

I'd put that hut up in a hurry when I realized I couldn't just plonk a loom down in the road and expect it to work in all weathers but I'd built it in a really stupid place. It blocked the path and made me have to go around it every time I left the Shelter, something I somehow just got used to doing. It's astonishing how easily you begin to treat these little inconveniences as something you just have to accept. I could have moved the damn hut any time. I just never did, until today.

With the hut gone and the windmill, also an obstacle to foot traffic, now re-located at the far end of the cotton field, the whole area looked a lot tidier. It still has the air of some kind of shanty-town, quickly thrown up after a natural disaster, but at least it's orderly and you can get from one place to another without literally going round the houses.

After all that work I find myself in something of a dilemma. I could carry on and complete the job, turning the whole place into a neat, functional base with everything just so, but that would only make it less likely that I'll ever leave. Or I could belatedly bring my Grassland Shelter era to an end and move somewhere more appropriate to my level, either the aforementioned house on the hill or perhaps some other scenic location, somewhere I can begin work on that castle I always planned to build.

I think the most important thing is not to make any hasty decisions. That's how I got myself into this mess in the first place. I'll take a while to think it over. After all, moving home is one of the most stressful things you can do. No need to make it any harder than it has to be.

Size Matters.

For once, I had a plan for today's post. It involved downloading Lost Ark, making a character, playing for an hour or two, then writing a quick rundown of my "Very First Impressions". If Lost Ark is anything like most other mmorpgs I've played  there'd be more than enough for a couple of thousand words, just talking about character creation. Sometimes I can get a couple of paragraphs just from the registration and download process.

As you can see by the lack of Lost Ark screenshots, none of that happened. There's a vey simple reason: it's a frickin' 72GB download! Steam estimates it would take about three hours. I suspect it might be rather less. I usually get considerably better download speeds than the 5Mbs they assume.

It wasn't the length of time it might take that put me off, anyway. I'm home until Sunday and I have nothing better to do than sit and watch a progress bar fill. The worst storm in thirty years is sweeping in from the West. It's a good time to stay indoors.

Seriously, it really is. Mrs Bhagpuss cancelled her work for tomorrow. She has to drive through a lot of country lanes and at best they're likely to be blocked by fallen trees. At worst one of those trees might fall on her. Even without the falling tree problem, our little car is light enough to be blown off the road altogether in the kind of winds we're expecting. Best stay home and play video games.

The Met Office has issued a Red warning ("Flying debris resulting in danger to life, damage to buildings and homes, roofs blown off...") for an area that stops short only a few miles from where we live. We're in the Amber zone, where the threat is slightly more nuanced ("A good chance that flying debris could result in a danger to life, Damage to buildings and homes is likely, with roofs blown off...") If I was a teacher I could get a whole lesson out of the way those warnings are graded by subtle use of qualifiers.

Amber or Red, I have no intention of going anywhere or doing anything for the next few days. I don't want to be hit in the head by a flying tree. I get enough of that in Chimeraland. I could happily sit in and wait for a game to download.

No, the reason I declined to press the button on Lost Ark was the sheer, bloody size of the thing. If I'd been eagerly anticipating it  the way some people have, a seventy gig download wouldn't put me off but it would still annoy me. For a game I'm not that bothered about in the first place it's enough to break the deal.

There have been several recent mmorpgs that I wanted to play a lot more than I ever wanted to play Lost Ark (Low bar, I know.) where the client clocked in around fifty or sixty gigabytes. I wasn't best pleased with them, either. Is it really necessary for these games to have such a Jurassic Park scale footprint? 

I'm pretty sure it's not. Oh, I know it's easy to make excuses, especially for games you like: the graphics are gorgeous... the world is so huge... there are so many systems... All things I've said about Chimeraland, which currently takes up less than 10% of the space Lost Ark wants to colonize, just over 7GB. 

If Chimeraland doesn't feel triple-A enough, how about the highly successful Genshin Impact, a game widely praised for its beautiful, sprawling, detailed open world? I haven't updated my copy for a while so it's probably grown some by now but currently GI takes up 25GB of my HDD real estate, about a third of what Lost Ark wants to throw a fence around.

There seems to be surprisingly little correlation between size of footprint, quantity of content, depth of gameplay or even visual sumptousness. Valheim, a surprise hit this time last year, only just creeps past a single gigabyte. New World, on the other hand, comes in at just under fifty. Having played them both for about the same amount of time, several hundred hours each, I'd have to say they feel surprisingly similar in many ways. 

I did many of the same things in both games and the many, many screenshots I took suggest that although their developers chose to employ very different graphical styles, the end results were closer than they might have expected. Each of them relies heavily on acres and acres of very natural-looking scenery, in which not an awful lot happens. Ambient wildlife, atmospheric ruins, weather and, especially, lighting effects do almost all the work. 

Valheim is procedurally generated. New World isn't but sometimes it looks like it might be. Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, has a much more hand-crafted feel. Painterly, even. Very little in the game feels random. Everything's drenched in detail, including half a dozen major cities. NPCs bustle about every map, following complex scripts. There's even a constant buzz of voiced background conversation. You'd think that would have to be more costly, not just in development time but in storage space on the client.

And yet, after almost ten years of continual development and two expansions, GW2 is only a handful of gigs larger than New World, where all the NPCs stand forever on their mark and only ever speak when spoken to.

It's about another five or six gigs larger at 51GB, to be precise. I'll be interested to see how that changes with the addition of End of Dragons later this month. I'd lay odds it still won't come close to Lost Ark's seventy-two big ones.

Lost Ark, of course, technically isn't new. It's been around for a while, having launched in Korea towards the back end of 2019. Its Wikipedia entry is remarkably sparse for such a massively successful title and I haven't been following the game in the least until these last few days, so I can't say whether there have been any "expansions" or expansion-like updates during that time. Even if there were, though, it wouldn't excuse this degree of bloat in just a couple of years.

Maybe it's because Lost Ark is viewed and played in isometric perspective. All the other games I've mentioned are 3D whereas Lost Ark is "2.5D", whatever that means. If so, it would be counter-intuitive. You'd think with half a dimension missing the footprint would be smaller, not larger.

Looking at a few comparable titles I have sitting on my hard drives that does seem to be a possibility. Divinity:Original Sin is over 50GB. Pillars of Eternity, despite the recommended spec asking for just 14GB, actually runs to almost double that on my system at 27GB. 

The real 800 pound gorilla in this room, however, isn't Lost Ark with its seventy gigabyte flex. According to Can You Run It?, Baldur's Gate 3 has a minimum requirement of 150GB, an insanely huge number confirmed by the most recent source I could find and, more to the point, by its own Steam page.

BG3, unlike Lost Ark, is a game I have wanted to play since I first heard about it. I've been patiently waiting for Larian Studios to finish writing the thing so I can jump on it when it leaves Early Access, where it is, apparently, looking very promising but far from finished.

After I balked at the size of the download, instead of playing Lost Ark this afternoon I spent the best part of two hours clearing some bag and bank space on the GW2 account I'll be using to play End of Dragons. There's bound to be a slew of new items I have no understanding of or use for but refuse to sell or destroy so I thought I'd get a head start on making room for them, so I can store them until the fourth expansion drops in a few years and delete them then.

It's a very lengthy process. I've been picking away at it for a week and I've barely managed to clear a couple of bags on a couple of characters. As for my bank vault, I think I might have freed up ten spaces out of the five hundred plus I've filled. (I already have the maximum permitted bank expansions because of course I do. Otherwise I'd just buy more, obviously.)

I'm sure it will come as no surprise to anyone to hear that my hard drives (All three of them.) are as rammed as my in-game storage. I have exactly the same tendency to throw anything and everything wherever it will fit, with no order or rationale to speak of. 

That's why I get annoyed when developers make things bigger than I think they need to be. If I'm incapable of showing any kind of restraint or responsibility, when it comes to keeping things in good order, surely it's incumbent on them to make the effort for me.

Since it seems most of them can't be bothered, I suppose I'll just have to do it myself. My new plan is to find some mmorpgs or other games I'm even less likely to want to play than Lost Ark and cull them from my computer. It would be nice if they were on Steam, not least because that makes them easier to re-install. Have to plan for regret.

Top of my hit list right now is Phantasy Star Online 2. Not only is it hogging a massive 101GB but it had the cheek today to ask me to find room for 3GB more. Not only do I never play the game, I don't even like it very much. 

The other obvious candidate is Atlas, a game I haven't played for three years and which I only ever played for about six hours, in total. I keep meaning to look at it again but I never do and I probably should admit I never will. That one's squatting on an incredible 111GB with an update pending.

Either one of those would allow Lost Ark to slip into an empty berth with room to spare. If I actually showed some self-discipline for once, I could get shot of both Atlas and PSO2 and then uninstall Lost Ark as soon as I'd had enough of it, rather than leaving it there to gather electronic dust for years.

If I did, I'd have enough room for BG3 when it finally arrives! What with that and having somehow managed to wring a two thousand word post out of not downloading a game, I'd say that would be quite the successful day.

What My Steam Achievements Tell Me About Bless Unleashed

 

Steam "achievements", unlike the ones you get inside the games themselves,  strike me as being not so much a tally of your own efforts as a commentary on those of other people. Right there on the front page, the moment you see them, they set your achievement in the context of everyone else who plays. It's an inherently competitive event.

When you play World of Warcraft or EverQuest II or Lord of the Rings Online and and an achievement message pops up, it's for you and you alone. It's congratulating you, personally. Often it's also telling you you've just earned a reward or a title or some points you can spend on something your character might be able to use. It's a progression mechanic, part of regular gameplay.

What it isn't telling you is how many other people have done what you just did. 

And now someone's going to pop into the comments to say that one or more of those games, or some other well-known mmorpg, does tell you exactly that. It's entirely possible. I freely admit to never having paid very much attention to Achievements and their equivalents in any game. I may well have missed something. Possibly a lot of somethings.

At this point, if I was going to do my due diligence, I suppose I'd log into all three of those games, look at my achievements there, such as they are and find out for myself. I'm not going to do that. This isn't the New Yorker. I'm going to carry on as if it had never occurred to me that I may have founded this post on a false premise because what the games do isn't the point. 

The point is what Steam does. 

Steam sets users up to compare their progress against everyone else who plays the same games. Or who plays those games through Steam, at least. It reminds me of when I was at school. At assembly, one Saturday each month, the Headmaster would read out the monthly form placings of each pupil, so the entire school knew where everyone stood in regard to everyone else.

All of this preamble feels like a set-up for a rant about the evils of competition but it's not. The competitive element neither excites nor angers me and anyway this is competition at its most generic. Hard to get worked up about something called "Global Gameplay Stats". You'd need something a lot more personal and I don't even know if it's possible to see other people's achievements. Maybe if you're Steam friends with them. I'm not Steam friends with anyone so I wouldn't know.

No, what interests me is what those percentages seem to tell us about the games themselves and how people play them. I started thinking about that when I got the That Tickles achievement for killing a monster far enough above my gear score to show a warning.

I figured that was something just about everyone would do as soon as they had the chance but it seems not. At the time I got it, which was at precisely 8.00 PM on the fifteenth of August (thanks Steam!) I believe only 13% or so of Bless Unleashed players had done it. As I write that figure has grown to 18.5%, which still seems extraordinarily low to me.

Steam continually updates the success rate for these Achievements in real time. Or I think it does. You can see the whole thing on a page called "Global Achievements" for each game as per the screenshot above.

I imagine everyone knows all this already. Sorry. I'm teaching myself Steam as I write, here.

Getting to the point (not before time) if you look at the numbers almost a month after a successful release and with the servers still, as I can attest, busy, bustling and full of life, only 16.8% of players have managed to level a character to 20. Only 9% to 30. Does that seem realistic?

I suppose it does. As for Level 40, still five levels short of the cap, as I write only 0.3% of players have made it that far. I think this confirms what I said the other day about leveling in Bless Unleashed being somewhat old school.

Then again, maybe the slow leveling is a function of engagement or lack thereof. Look at the stats for how many people have a mount. Just over half. 51.4% to be precise, which sounds like a lot until you remember,as I mentioned in an earlier post, the devs gave everyone a free ostrich to ride as compensation for downtime. Also, there's a free pony that turns up from somewhere, quite early on. And there was a free sheep for everyone who was in the open beta. Plus you can buy a mount for not much from an NPC.

I have four mounts already plus a double of the pony and I've done absolutely nothing, intentionally, to obtain any of them. They just keep turning up. In my experience it's would seem to be a lot harder not to have a mount than to have one in this game. If anyone's not riding by now I am guessing they're also not playing much. Unless they just started today. Or they like walking.

The one about expanding your bag by twenty slots is revealing. I didn't get that one until three days ago but I only started working on it when I was in the high teens. If I'd gone for all the chests from the start I'd probably have done it in a week or two, although the higher level you are, the more locations you can find, naturally.

To get that achievement you need to have opened eighty chests. There's one bag piece in every chest and you need to hand in four at a time for the NPC to add one slot to your bag. 

That only just over 13% of people have opened that many chests seems surprising. It's super-easy to do. There are chests everywhere, they're all marked on the map and they're unique to your character so it doesn't matter how many other people are trying to grab them at the same time. I know not everyone's a pack rat but almost 90% of players being satisfied with the storage status quo seems strange. 

But then, a lot of people don't seem to be playing very intensely, if these stats are anything to go by. Only around a third of players either leveling up combo skills or unlocking new blessings? Those are basic elements of gameplay. You'd think it would harder to avoid doing either of those things than it would be to get the achievements. 

I got both on the 9th of August, just three days after the game launched. I find it very difficult to see how anyone could be playing regularly and not have done the same. I'd guess a lot of people never were playing regularly and now they probably aren't playing at all - if it wasn't for the concurrency.

Someone's playing. A lot of someones. As I write, the Steam chart shows just under 34,000 players online in the last hour with a twenty-four hour peak of just over 50,000. That's very good sustain from a launch-week high of 76,000. 

So the game is trucking along nicely even if it seems most players aren't really doing all that much when they're logged in. Standing around in town and spamming general chat seems like a popular activity.

They don't seem to be questing, that's for sure. Less than 20% of players have completed fifty side quests, a marker I hit in just over a week. And they don't seem to be doing much exploring, either. Only around 16% have the achievement for riding 42.195km (the metric length of an Olympic marathon). I notched that one up on the same day I finished my fiftieth quest, two weeks ago.

All of which begs the question, what exactly are all these people doing if they're not doing any of that? Fewer than a fifth of players seem to be doing anything worth mentioning, according to these figures. And yet there they are, all fifty thousand of them, apparently still having some kind of secret fun. They can't all be bots, surely?

There certainly are plenty of gold sellers but scammers don't hang around if there are no customers. Someone has to be buying. There's certainly a lively economy. Judging by the scrum I see around the broker every minute of the day there probably should be some kind of achievement for economic activity. 

Then there's dungeon-running.  Going by general chat, running dungeons is just about all anyone seems to care about, that and Gear Score and Knowing the Mechs. Maybe Steam's just handing out achievements for the wrong things. As for PvP, no-one much seems to care about it. There's only one PvP achievement I can see and so far 0.1% of players have it.

I wouldn't mind seeing these kinds of stats for a few of the other games I play. It could be quite revealing. Unfortunately, Steam's still by no means the first port of call for most mmorpg players, so any stats I could find there on EQII wouldn't be worth looking at. I don't believe Guild Wars 2's even on Steam at all. Most mmorpgs aren't.

I'll be keeping an eye on Bless Unleashed's achievement profile though. I'm not naturally competitive but it's weirdly heartening to see myself apparently doing so well compared to almost everyone else. Or I suppose it would be if  it wasn't because they've all got much more important things to do than ride hundreds of miles doing quests for NPCs while picking up old bits of bags to hoard more useless crap.

Still, I'm not complaining. It keeps me busy, And it gets me badges. What more is there?

Every Convenience

Belghast posted a list of his Gaming Grievances and Telwyn followed suit. I don't have any such gripes to air, being largely willing to take games as I find them, but I did spot a trend in both their lists that I thought I might pick away at, just a little.

I think it would not be too presumptious of me to suggest that both Belghast and Telwyn are a heck of a lot more social in their gaming than I am. Based on their blog posts, Belghast knows and teams up with a whole host of people across numerous games, while Telwyn has a regular cadre of friends and family to adventure with. For both of them, the facility to play with the people they want to play with seems to trump most, if not all, other concerns.

Telwyn articulates it plainly: "It’s a golden rule in MMORPG design as far as I’m concerned – just let friends play together without any barriers to fun!". Belghast says "...we as players should be able to group freely with our friends".

I don't have any gaming friends to speak of, these days. Mostly I play on my own or alone in crowds. Even so, I think I understand what Belghast and Telwyn are up against. I did spend years grouping with various people fairly regularly and at that time there were some pretty high walls between factions in certain games I played. In Rift and Dark Age of Camelot you had to play on different servers if you wanted to have characters on opposing factions. In EverQuest II, if characters had the temerity to join guilds based in the opposite faction's city,  they couldn't even get guild writs to help the guild level up.

I played EverQuest when the entire game revolved around which character race was kill on sight to which NPC faction. Players could mingle freely but only at the risk of seeing their character's reputation dragged into the dirt by dint of their choice of friends. Scabbling to drop group because someone accidentally or intentionally aggroed something on a faction you relied on was an everyday event back then. Even in more modern times Guild Wars 2 put faction at the core of what was originally intended to be its primary end-game content, World vs World.

As the years passed and the genre widened and diffused, MMORPGs have tended towards universality. All of Belghast and Telwyn's walls and barriers have been under siege and most of them are crumbling. There's plenty of data suggesting what growth there still is within the hobby comes first and foremost from within - people who play introducing and inviting people they know. Without the extrinsic growth earlier games enjoyed it's been commercially incumbent on developers to make it as easy as possible for people who already know each other to play together without hindrance or inconvenience.

And for a good while convenience was itself the watchword. MMORPGs had an unfortunate reputation for awkwardness. Not for difficulty, a term core gamers take to themselves with pride, but for irritation and annoyance. All those pettifogging details, ineligant systems, outdated mechanics. The sheer amount of reading and learning involved before you could just play the goddam game. All the nit-picking rules you had to follow when you did.

When you looked at the barriers preventing you from playing with the people you wanted to play with and those preventing your own characters from interacting usefully and easily between each other, it all seemed like too much trouble to even begin. Surely it always made sense to sweep all that away and the silly restrictions on things like class and race along with it?

Yes, well, up to a point. I was never much convinced by some of the arguments that backed up the changes as they filtered in and I'm even less convinced now, having seen the result.

The idea that game systems prevent people playing with their friends always rang a little hollow to me. It seems that about the only genuine, insurmountable barrier to playing with your pals is region-locking, the one thing Belghast's list I'm fundementally against on a matter of principle. The internet ought to be global not local.

I might not approve of it when it happens but I recognize that the primary reason companies region-lock is commercial. Not everyone is big enough or rich enough to go it alone. Local partners have be recompensed somehow. Regional exclusivity is a way of achieving global reach at affordable cost. Doesn't explain why Blizzard does it...

Outside of IP blocking , though, I've never really bought the argument that in-game faction or server restrictions prevent people from playing with their friends, be they in other countries, other states or other rooms in the same house. Back when I used to play MMORPGs with other human beings, if I wanted to play with someone new and they weren't on my faction or my server I'd roll another character.

In-game restrictions apply to characters not players. Players can always play with whoever they want. If the problem is that the person you'd like to play with is playing a faction you'd rather not play, then it seems to me the issue is with personal taste, not outside restrictions. If playing with the other person is the priority, which faction or class or race you choose to make that happen is surely incidental.

Moving from the specifics of playing with friends to the generalities of "convenience", it would seem to be even less reasonable to object to further barriers being removed. Who wants inconvenience after all?

Well, I guess I do, sometimes. Although I suspect I don't so much want it as need it. I'm no different to anyone else when it comes to an easy life. If someone offers to make something simpler, smoother, less of a nuisance I'm not going to argue with them. I'm going to let them get on with it, take full advantage, and then complain about it.

That's very much what happened across the genre over the best part of a decade following World of Warcraft's incredible break-out success. In trying to re-bottle that lightning developers cast around for anything that might be holding their games back, even though they really had no clear idea what that might be.

It seemed for a while as if Blizzard's magic dust might be ease of access. Everything that felt like grit in the machine had to be vacuumed out. Unfortunately, as we've seen with the return of Classic, the version of WoW that got the outside world's attention wasn't really all that accessible by modern standards. In quite a lot of ways it was really bloody fiddly. And yet, somehow, people couldn't get enough of it.

Of late there've been a few tentative moves in the other direction. Daybreak stopped adding color splotches to the map to direct you to your quest destination, at least in new content. Blizzard took away the right to fly then gave it back but told you you had to earn it.

Flight and quest-markers were arguably always controversial additions to the games. Shared bank vaults and account-based flagging don't seem like obviously bad things. That's because they aren't. They're good things for games and for gamers, by and large. Heaven knows, I love my shared banks. I complain a lot when I move from a game with account-based progress to one where I have to do everything separately for each character that wants it.

If I stop and think about it, though, it's the individual characters that matter to me, not the account. I prefer games that make the characters feel like individuals and where they don't I almost unconsciously try to rectify that. In GW2, the most account-based of all the games I play regularly, I've mitigated against my own convenience by running three accounts for most of the lifetime of the game.

Three accounts, eight or nine guilds, seventeen characters, all having to swap and shift and mail and trade between each other. I'm never quite sure without checking who's done what in which event. It's frequently inconvenient but I'd give that very inconvenience a deal of the credit for keeping me interested all these years.

I'm not going to trot out the old saw about the grit and the pearl. I certainly don't endorse poor design or excuse ill-considered mechanics, on the grounds that a bit of hardship makes us better people. I'm entirely in favor of sleek, seamless, integrated systems that make playing games a stressless, satisfying experience.

What I am wary of is creating a monoculture, where every game plays the same and every character feels like a cipher. It already feels far too much like that in some MMORPGs I can think of but I'm uncomfortably aware that it could feel a lot worse.

Or, perhaps I should say, a lot less.

I began this post by claiming I tend to take games as I find them. That's largely true. Only, sometimes I find myself wondering. If it wasn't for all those inconveniences, would I even remember I'd played the games at all?

Tested By Research: EverQuest

Storage space. It's always been an issue in EverQuest, hasn't it? Not so much in your bank. These days vault space is positively generous. On your character. That's where it's a problem.

Remember all those stories from the early days? Enterprising low-levels hanging around the entrances to dungeons, offering to carry your loot back to town and sell it, for a fee? That really happened. Small bags filled up fast with stuff that didn't stack. Going to a vendor took too big a chunk out of the time you had to hunt. Worse, if you were the healer or the tank, everyone else had to stop until you got back.

Over the years things haven't got much better. Oh, there's more loot that stacks now, for sure, but plenty still that doesn't. And quest items and crafting mats, they must have grown by orders of magnitude. EQ's industry-standard loot window makes deciding what to pick up and what to leave so much easier but the old problem still remains. Those bags just fill so fast.

It's why one of the key features of every Collector's Edition these days is a capacious 100% weight reduction bag. Forty slots seems to be the current gold standard. You can buy them in the cash shop, too., although they're not cheap and there are restrictions on how many you can have.

I've never really made much of an effort to upgrade my inventory in EverQuest. Mostly I just buy the cheap ten-slot tinker's toolkits, the so-called Deluxe Toolbox, but last time I took a serious run at leveling my Magician I did try to do something to avoid that endless series of Sophie's choices between making xp or making money.

The mage was already off to a flying start with the two twenty-four slot Heroic Satchels of the Adventurer that came with the free boost to 85 she got when Heroic Characters were added to the game. I'd also invested in a couple of gigantic, player-made thirty-two slot Extraplanar Trade Satchels for her. There's always someone selling those in the Bazaar for a very reasonable price. Even though they only hold items flagged "tradeskill", there are a lot of those and some of them sell for plenty, so I like to scoop them all up as I go.

There's more in there than just the bags but face it, that's what you're paying for.

The rest of her bag slots were filled with a variety of ten-slot containers and one twelve-slotter. In total she had one hundred and seventy-four inventory slots - and they were all full. Time to do something about it.

Except, of course, in EverQuest you can't just do something as simple as buy bigger bags.

Well, okay, fine. That's exactly what you can do, if you have the money. But bags, as I've already suggested, don't come cheap, either in or out of game. And even if you have the money and are willing to spend it, it's still not that simple. Really. Nothing in Norrath ever is.

I looked at the Bazaar to see what was on offer. Various crafters can make bags of diferent sizes and there were plenty up for sale. Bottom of the line, a few 12-slots at around 4k plat. My price range but a couple of extra slots here and there weren't going to make much difference.

Then there were the tailormade expandable bags. Those were all twelve slots too but you could make them biger, somehow. I vaguely remembered it from the last time, when I decided it was all too complicated to be bothering with.

How it works is this: a tailor with very high skill makes a bag that has twelve slots. There are a whole bunch of them with fancy names - Legendary, Supreme, Flawless, Transcendent - but they all have just the twelve slots. These bags are both tradeable and expandable. Anyone, regardless of crafting skill, can buy one and combine it with a vendor-sold reagent to create a No Trade 14, 16, 18 or 20 slot bag.

This will make sense later. Maybe.

Yes, it's already sounding complicated but there's more. When I said anyone could do the combine I should have said "anyone who's bought and read the correct book on how to do it". Or scribed the necessary recipe, if you prefer to be less lore about it.

I must have spent at least an hour researching how to do it. Not nearly long enough, as it turned out. First I read a couple of guides on the general principles, Fanra's being the clearest of them. Then I had to investigate the source of all the necessary books and reagents, most of which seemed to have been introduced at different times and in different expansions.

There didn't seem to be much point buying the smaller bags. The reagent seemed to be the same for all of them. Someone was selling the Transcendent, which expands to twenty slots, for 10,500 plat each, while the rest were between six and eight thousand. Anything but the biggest seemed like a false economy.

Naturally, by the time I'd decided on the biggest bag, the person selling it for ten and a half grand had logged off, so I ended up paying twelve thousand instead. By this time I'd also realized I had an unexpanded Supreme bag in my inventory already. That goes to sixteen slots. The reagents cost more than two thousand five hundred platinum each so I was already getting close to twenty grand for two bags. I only had around 90k in total, earned over several years, and I had spells to buy, too. Two bags it was, at least for now.

Buying the reagent was easy. A vendor in Plane of Knowledge sold that one. One of the recipe books was on another vendor nearby but according to a couple of guides I'd read, for the other I'd need to go to somewhere called Shards Landing. I'd never even heard of it but some further research sugested I could get there by way of the Befallen dungeon in the Commonlands. At least I knew where that was.

Looking back, I think I was lulled into a false sense of security by the familiar names, the very low-level entry point and the knowledge that the vendor I was looking for was in the service hub of some expansion or other. The due diligence I failed to apply was which expansion, what level cap and whether the overland/underground route I was proposing to take had been the normal entry point at the time.

Had I taken the trouble to read it up, I would have discovered that Shard's Landing was introduced as part of the Rain of Fear expansion in 2012, when the level cap was raised to one hundred. It's a zone intended for levels 95 to 97. More significantly, the zone through which I meant to travel to get there, the Chapterhouse of the Fallen, was a dungeon, recommended for characters at level 100. By which, of course, they meant groups.

That looks new. Let's poke it and see what happens.

I got to Befallen and saw a great, blue stone outside the entrance. You could hardly miss it but I'd never seen it before, which strongly suggests it's been more than eight years since I last visited Befallen on a Live server. I've been there plenty of times on various Progression and TLE servers, as well as Tipa's recreation of the dungeon in Neverwinter, but evidently it's been nearly a decade since I last visited the original.

I clicked on the crystal because who wouldn't? In I zoned. It was dark. Very dark. I was so taken with just how dark it was, I stopped to take a selfie, because I have a post brewing about how infuriating dark zones are and how developers seem to be in love with them in a way I'm convinced players are not.

I took a few steps down the first corridor and spotted a couple of undead mobs of some description barrelling towards me. I just had time to con them and see they were dark blue (dark blue for danger is the motto these days) before I found myself flat on my back, dead.

It was at this point I remembered I'd suspended my cleric mercenary a couple of hours back so she wouldn't keep charging me money just for standing around. Not that I think she could have done much to keep me up but at least I might have got a rez , assuming they didn't kill her, too.

All my lovely raid buffs, gone, along with my pet and his buffs, his weapons and his armor. Once, that would have been a blow but these days it's just a matter of letting the game idle in the background while I play something else until the sleet of MGBs fills it all back up again. As for the lost xp, its just a case of paying an NPC in the Guild Lobby to summon my corpse and wait for my Merc to give me a 90% rez. One Overseer quest is going to replace that tenfold.

The lost time, though, that you never get back. Also, at 101 a summoning stone now costs over a thousand plat. Dying may not be the shock of ice water it once was but it's still something you very much want to avoid if at all possible. And that was an extremely avoidable death.

Seriously, does anyone enjoy playing in the dark?

Chastened, needing to wait to let my buffs build back up, I turned to more research. And guess what? It turns out that if I'd been paying attention I'd not only have realized the route I was planning was a suicide run but I'd have found out I didn't need to go to Shard's Landing at all!

The bloody vendor who sold me the first recipe book also sells the other one! It was there in front of me if I'd only scrolled down. And I only found that out after another unecessary, if unfatal, side-trip to the housing district, Sunset Hills, where I mistakenly thought yet another vendor might be able to hook me up. He did have a bag-expanding recipe book, just not the one I wanted. I bought it anyway. Might as well cover all the options.

Eventually I had everything I needed: the unexpanded bags, the reagents and the scribed recipes. I turned to the loom, standing handily beside the vendor, and made the first combo. It worked! Twenty slot bag!

I swapped some stuff around to empty the other unexpanded bag. I searched for the recipe, hit "Combine" and... it didn't work! No sixteen slot bag! Why? No idea. I checked everything, all the names. Just as it should be. The reagent was outlined in green, showing it was right, but the bag itself was rimmed in red, meaning it wasn't. Why? I don't frickin' know!

At this point I could have done some more research. Or I could have asked in game. People love to show how clever they are. If I'd made and obvious error someone would have been delighted to point it out to me. Instead, I noticed the loom has an "Experiment" option. It lets you put any combination of items inside and see if they make something. In the old days, if they didn't, everything you had in there would be destroyed but they'd changed that long ago. Or I hoped they had.

Clearly having learned nothing from my trip to the Chapterhouse, I manually moved the reagent and the bag into the loom and pressed Combine again, because why prep? And this time it worked. Why? No more idea than before. Don't know and, quite frankly, don't care. Sixteen slot bag, baby!

They look so lovely, empty.

So now I had eighteen more slots than I started with but I knew I could do better. In the course of my research I'd spotted that one of the options available on the loyalty vendor is a sixteen slot box.

The loyalty system is yet another thing I've never really paid much attention to in EQ. Like everything else in the game it's unfeasibly complex and confusing and I could probably fill a whole post trying to explain how it works it but for the time being let's just say I've accrued a lot of tokens and never spent any of them.

The box is about the most expensive thing on the vendor and normally I'd balk at blowing such a big chunk of my resources on something as basic as a bag that only gives me an extra four slots above what I already have, but...

The thing I never knew about the Loyalty system is, you keep getting get tokens even when you're free to play.And you get more tokens than F2P players if you're account is flagged "Silver", meaning you paid your five dollars for the upgrade, back when that was an option, which I did. So I've been building up my tokens all this time even though I didn't know it.

Except, I haven't, because the other thing I never knew about the loyalty system is that there's a cap! You can't have more than 5760 tokens no matter what your account status might be. And guess how many I had? Well, actually I had 5772. I don't know how that happened.

Never mind how! Now I have a new sixteen slot box and 4044 loyalty tokens. That'll teach me not to pay attention to the small print. I probably ought to log in all the other accounts and check those, now I come to think of it. It's like a license to spend money!

In game, they expand perfectly. On the blog, not so much.

Last of all, I went out to finish up a very long quest I had in my journal. I must have started it five years ago, when it was level-appropriate solo content and hard work but after the magician's recent growth spurt it looked like a nice, relaxing toddle to the end of the session. The final reward was a twelve-slot bag. Not much of an upgrade but twelve has always been bigger then ten.

Another half-hour and there I was, two dozen inventory slots better off than when I began. It had only taken me most of the day and cost me about twenty thousand plat.

I was in the groove, though, so I figured I might as well carry on and get the new level 101 Air pet spell, seeing as how my old one had snuffed it, along with all the buffs I'd gotten him.

I'll spare us all the painful details of how I paid for a teleport stone to the wrong Katta Castellum and spent twenty minutes running around the zone, looking for a spell vendor who wasn't there. Or the time I wasted sailing the wrong way on the wrong boat through Buried Sea, trying to find the Tempest Temple, and how eventually I had to swim there. No one died and its all a bit embarassing and we've all done it, haven't we? Let's move on...

It was around eight in the evening when I swapped over to Guild Wars 2 to do my dailies, leaving magician, new pet and merc to soak up buffage in the background. EQ plays very nicely in a closed window. You can leave it up all day and scarcely know it was there.

I'd been playing for about eight hours, on and off, all day really, mostly reading stuff and running about, the longest EQ session I can remember. It was great! I had a fantastic time. Can't wait to do it again, only this time I'm going to go somewhere very easy and make some fast money. I know some spots where the mobs carry high-value gems and my new pet will all but one-shot them.

I'll have that 30k I spent back in no time if everything goes to plan. And if there's one thing I know about EverQuest, it's that everything always goes exactly to plan...

Stuck Like A Cowboy : EQII

As Kander and Dreamweaver revealed in the recent Kander's Candor podcast, the big spring update for EverQuest II this year has a cowboy theme. And a cowboy theme tune. Several, in fact, some of them sung by cacti.

The singing succulents (that's what they're called) are in the new instance, which comes in Solo, Heroic and Challenge flavors. Don't ask me what "Challenge" dungeons are. I can't keep up with the jargon even though I'm playing every day.

I'll bet they're hard, though. I'm sure I won't be seeing many of them (for "many" read "any").  I've already tried the Solo instance and that's hard enough for me.

In fact, it's exactly hard enough, as in just right.  It's what I guess you'd call "end game Solo", if such a thing exists (and it does in EQII) because you can't even get the quest for it unless you've finished the Blood of Luclin solo adventure signature line.

I have six max level 120 adventurers but only one of them has actually bothered to complete the sig so it was had to be my Berserker who hitched up his chaps and moseyed on down to the Diaku Corral.

The questgiver is a gnome in the small camp just at the top of the hill leading from The Grey to Scarlet Desert. Yet another gnome has gone missing, something of a theme in the current expansion (okay, all expansions...) and it's your job to go look for him. Isn't it always?

It took me a little while to work out where to go although the instructions are clear enough. There's a big island out in the bay and a pier at the foot of the headland where the very scary Diaku ogres live. Once you've had a poke around there and gone back to speak to the questgiver again, you can click a rowboat next to the pier to let it take you to the new instance, out on the island.

Zoning in was a little scary. All the mobs are three-up-arrow orange-con heroics. Level 126s. A lot of them. It looks like solo suicide but the way the game works now is to use the Heroic instances as a baseline and buff solo characters up to match. My Berserker, who normally has around 130m hit points, found himself beefed up to not far short of half a billion. It's a big numbers game, alright, but that's how most EQII players seem to like it.

The ogres hit hard but die fast. Berserkers are happy to fight crowds so all the adds just made things go faster still. As per the current convention the mobs didn't really drop anything and naturally there's no xp to be had at max level but I've long since adjusted to that new normal, so I didn't get that old-fashioned "why am I doing this again?" feeling.

The ogres, all wearing chaps, ten-gallon hats and leather waistcoats, did drop one thing: single-shot crossbows. All of them. And the bows were stackable items, not equippable weapons. There's a hint. I made a hot key for them and tried shooting ogres in the hope there might be some kind of one-shot gimmick. There was. Kind of.

Shoot an ogre with one of those mini-crossbows and his hat flies off! I wish I could have got a screenshot but it happened too fast. I guess I could fire up FRAPS and video it. Or, come to think of it, doesn't EQII have built-in video?

I could go back in and do it now if it wasn't for one thing. I'm stuck.

Little did I know at the time that the key to my progress
(and the gate) lay in my hands...

Stuck as in I've killed all the available ogres and now I'm outside the locked gates of their hilltop fort and I can't get in. I've already re-started the instance and killed them all a second time in case I missed something but if I did I missed it that time, too.

I must either have missed something (Spoiler! And False Edit! Yes I had!) or I'm bugged because I know other people have finished the instance. I'd happily refer to a walkthrough only there isnt one yet.   

Darkpaw Games recently moved to a peculiar cadence of updates where the Test server gets some updates after Live. That does seem to defeat the object of having a Test server. Certainly the very disgruntled Test community thinks so. And since they are, by and large, the people who write all the walkthroughs for the wiki, when they suffer, we all suffer.

I already know how easy it is to miss stuff in the new instance because I missed the mechanic on the one one named ogre I found on on the way up to the summit. He had clear emotes and the mechanic turned out to be obvious but I still had to reset the instance and give him a second go before I tumbled it.

Based on that mistake, I hung around for a long time trying to figure out how to get the gates open. I killed everything I could find, including all the rattlesnakes. I tried interacting with the cacti. (Another Fake Edit: You didn't try hard enough, pal!). I checked the maps for alternate routes and found a possible way in underwater.

That got me two discovery points and one death by shark but it didn't get me anywhere I wanted to go. I've run out of ideas, which is why I stopped and came to write this post. My choices now are a) ask in General chat if anyone knows how to get the gate open or b) wait until a walkthrough appears on the wiki. (Yet Another Fake Edit: or c) read the forum thread properly instead of just skimming it, you muppet! Not to mention d) watch one of the playthroughs already up on YouTube). I guess it depends which is stronger, my pride or my patience.

From what I've seen so far it's an excellent update. I like the instance a lot. I got an upgrade off the named ogre, too, so it could be profitable as well as fun. (And still with the Fake Edits: all the drops so far seem to be at least 165 resolve which makes it a great choice for gearing up after the Sig line).

There's also a major upgrade to the Overseer system, which now has both levels and seasons as well as some very welcome quality of life changes. I'll probably cover all that in more detail when I've levelled it up a bit. Far enough to start the new Desert of Flames themed missions that come with Season Two. That requires your Overseer to be level eleven. Fortunately, leveling the feature seems to go quite quickly. I'd guess I'd be there sometime next week.

The update also comes with some exceptionally
good freebies. There's a very attractive mount with decent stats, a legendary quality familiar and a 66-slot bag (which can also be displayed as a really nice appearance item in the back slot) plus some item unattuners and time-reducing potions. That's a good package deal by just about anyone's standards.

It's one per account but, amazingly, every account gets one. Yes, that means free accounts as well. I logged in my old main account, currently unsubbed, to check and it's true. I'll be logging in all my f2p accounts and Mrs Bhagpuss's too. It would be rude to shun such generosity.

The update also gives some hefty boosts to some of the mage classes, particularly Warlocks and Summoners. They're calling it "Class Balance" but it seems more like a straight catch-up for some classes that were supposed to be upper tier DPS but who've slipped. I already found my mages to be plenty powerful enough in solo content but I won't complain if they become even more powerful still.

Now, if someone would just be kind enough to get started on a walkthrough, I've got cowboys to kill! (Final Fake Edit: as you were guys. I've got this!).

My Idea Of Fun: EQII

Look up. Up there, right above us. See that? That's my shared bank, that is. Why don't we take a closer look?

The first box is all potions. Partially sorted. A work in progress. I only got them all into the one box just a few minutes ago.

All of those came from Overseer missions. They're useful and I'm glad to have them only I'm terrible at using consumables. They make a very significant difference to both speed and success when soloing the harder instances but I only remember that when I'm struggling. If I'm up and killing I never think to use potions to go faster. So they pile up. Also, when do I do hard instances? More on that later, kind of.

The second box is Infusers, mostly, plus some Powerlinks, a peculiar kind of one-time buff that I've never used and don't entirely understand. "Things I don't understand in EverQuest II" could be my specialist subject on Mastermind. Also a few overspill Mount items that wouldn't fit in the third box and some old Adornments I probably could junk.

Infusers are both useful and annoying. They're used in the Infusion system (No! Really?) which is how you incrementally improve gear. There are different grades and types. The current expansion uses Empyral Infusers and that's what I'm getting from the Overseer missions but I still have Celestial and Planar Infusions from previous iterations. They all still work.

Hello. It's me again!

The problem is, I can't see the point of using any of them to upgrade gear until I'm reasonably sure I'm going to be wearing or wielding it for a while and I'm nowhere near that point yet. I don't feel like much of anything any of my characters is wearing is likely to be around for long.

I haven't even done the final instance of the Adventure Signature line on anyone yet, let alone completing any of the Achievements that give what's probably going to be the best solo gear I'm going to see. But I have now at least looked at those achievements, thanks to Topauz's suggestion, and many of them seem, erm, achievable. So I'm sitting on my Infusers for now.

Bags three and four are stuffed with saddles, reins, barding and the like. Things mounts wear. A hackamore. Don't ask me what that is. I got most of those in the Dragon Attack pre-expansion event. I have a lot more stashed on individual characters, too.

One of the boxes is mostly tradeables. The other is mostly Heirloom. A few of the tradeable items are worth a lot. Millions, if the ones on the broker are priced to sell. I'm dithering over whether to sell mine or use them. I've been dithering for weeks.

The rest are either not particularly what I need right now or can't be equipped until various mounts level up. Leveling up mounts takes months and you can only level one at a time per character. You can buy your way out of that and you can get mount time potions as drops to speed things up. I have had a couple from Overseer missions.

I don't understand how this works. It's not how you'd think.

Even so, it's going to take a lot of thought and organization to work out which mount gets what on which character. I have half a dozen max level adventurers, four max level crafters and all of them have multiple mounts. I haven't been taking this seriously until now, so some of the mounts I've leveled up are the wrong ones and I only just realized I really need to use separate mounts for crafting and adventuring . Only all my crafters are also adventurers, so they'll need one of each.

I could stash all the mount stuff  in a character's bank to free up two boxes in the shared bank. I have access to an almost unbelievable amount of storage in EQII. Quite literally many, many thousands of slots. Which is fine, only I know that if I stash things on characters I'll never see them again. Out of sight, out of mind.

On occasion I have resorted to making notes on who is keeping what in their bank vault. I had it all written in a notebook at one time but of course it's out of date now. I know there are people who would make a spreadsheet for this but the day I find myself tempted to do something like that is the day I start looking for another hobby.

Box five is full of craft books for levels 111-120. Also some spell upgrade materials and recipes and mats for making yet more mount gear. I need to run all the crafters past this lot so they can scribe whatever books they can. Then I need to decide if I'm going to level up any of the other crafts so I know whether to keep those books.

I don't understand how this works, either. Add it to the list.

I ought then to sell what's left over but due to certain anomalies of crafting in Blood of Luclin, some are valuable and some are worthless. Which means checking them all. Which takes time.

Boxes five and six are full of gear. A lot of this is from Overseer missions. The rest I either picked up as various characters went through the Signature lines or I got as drops from overland Nameds. Most of it probably isn't an upgrade for anyone but some of it will be.

To know for sure I have to have everyone look at everything they could use so I can evaluate the auto-comparison. Sometimes that can be a tad hard to parse so it takes quite a while to do even one character. I have six.

Once I've equipped all the upgrades on everyone I'll have to decide what to do with the rest. I could try and sell some of the better pieces but I never really bother to sell gear. I tend to assume everyone else also has more than they know what to do with.

The weapons all need to be converted into Planar Weapon Essences (you can see some of those in Box Eight). That's what fuels weapons upgrades in addition to Infusing. Of course, the same issue applies, namely I have yet to be sure I'm keeping the weapons I'm using. So those just get stashed for now.

The rest of the gear, I have to decide whether to Transmute or Salvage. I've been exceptionally lucky with my Overseer missions so far. I have several BoL Adornment recipes that use the mats I'd get from transmuting gear over level 111. I even have a recipe to make a Red or Blue Rune (Growth, in fact), which is a big deal right now, let me tell you.

The problem here is that I don't fully understand how the revised system works yet. Some of the recipes have "Charges" and I don't know what that implies. I need to do some research before I make anything.

It's Mythical so I suppose it's a good drop.

The last box has a few odds and ends from earlier eras of the game at the top. I haven't gotten around to sorting those out yet. They probably need to be stashed in someone's bank, after which they will almost certainly never be seen again.

In the middle are the three grades of Fragments that everyone complains bitterly about getting as
rewards. I think they have something to do with Epic Weapons but since I've never even looked at how Epic Weapon quests work in EQII I have no clue what to do with them. I just hold on to them in case I need them one day. I got all of mine from Overseer missions, naturally.

Then there are a couple of boxes. I had my Carpenter make a bunch of Swamp Ash Boxes (44 slots) for my Wizard so she could clear her bags and stuff all the unsorted stuff in her bank vault, which is the EQII equivalent of sweeping the dirt under the carpet.

While I was doing that I noticed she could make a 96 slot Jewellery Box. It says it holds "Jewelery, Baubles, Adornments,Transmuted Components and Cloaks" which sounded extremely handy. Only when I put it in the bank I found out it doesn't open like a normal box. It has a "Use" button but pressing it does nothing. So that's some more reading I have to do.

Finally we come to Agents. I get these now and again as loot from Overseer missions. They duplicate. If I get new ones I add them immediately to the Berserker or the Necromancer, my two primary Overseer operators. The spares I have to shunt around to other characters but I haven't yet found time to think about who is going to get whom.

That, in a rather sizeable nutshell, is a glimpse into my EQII gameplay right now. I'm playing the game for several hours every day and enjoying it as much as, maybe more, than I have for years. It's incredibly complex and it makes me think almost all the time, which I love. Only I'm not really doing anything, am I?

Or, rather, I'm doing an awful lot but almost all of it is preparation. But for what?

As well as all that sorting and upgrading and sending Agents out on Missions, I'm making sure to use my staff every two hours to go searching for Shadowed crafting materials, which I then use to make spell and CA upgrades for myself or to sell. And doing the public crafting quests every time the cooldown allows.

Not the best selection of spells
but the first one I made sold for 150k so I'm not complaining

On the subject of making money, the Shadowed book I got hasn't exactly made me rich but I have made more than two million plat so far, which is a lot of money by my count. I've also either been astoundingly fortunate in having three more Expert/Mastercrafted books drop (a Sage book for Level 115 Caster spells, a Jeweler book for Level 115 Scout CAs and a Level 120 Armorer book) or the rarity of these things, as frequently bemoaned on the forums, is wildly overstated.

I'm involved in a fun (for me, at least) price war with a couple of other crafters, which means I have to check my prices two or three times a day. When things sell I have to replace them and since I'm selling on a different character (because he has the 100% broker fee reduction Veteran sales display) I have to swap them over and it all takes time! So. Much. Time.

I'm still doing the Familiars Wild quest daily on three characters. That involves capturing creatures almost all of which are well below my level so I need either to mentor or to be extremely careful, since they have to be both aggroed and alive when I capture them and they all die instantly if any of my max levels even look at them with an arched eyebrow.

And why am I doing that quest? Well, mainly because I enjoy it but the nominal reason is to upgrade the familiars I'm actually using. Everything leads to upgrading the characters. "Upgrading" means making them more powerful and/or robust. Why am I doing that? So I can kill things faster or more efficiently and die less often while doing it, of course.

Only, when do I ever actually go and fight anything these days? Anything where the conclusion isn't foregone, that is? There I am, happily whiling away several hours every day, having a jolly old time trying to make all my characters fit for battle and yet I have no immediate plans to go fight anything!

In fact, I actively avoid it. The only character who's doing anything that could vaguely be called adventuring is my new Fury and she's only doing it to level up so she can stop like all the rest.

Oh well. I'm enjoying myself. And I guess I'll be ready when the time comes. If it ever does. Which doesn't seem all that likely right now...