Magic Items Sold By Weight: EQ2

Two of my ratongas were in the West Freeport branch of the Norrathian Universal Bank this afternoon, about three hours into an intense session of inventory spring cleaning (so about 5% done then) when the server came down for a patch. Chief among the small changes was this:

All single group instances now have a lockout of 90 minutes.

Sounds so innocent at first glance, doesn't it?  Who'd complain about fewer restrictions and easier access? The standard lockout for heroic instances in EQ2 is 18 hours. Now we can do the same instance sixteen times a day. Someone will, too.

I'm in favor of the change myself. There have been a few times when I've wanted to do the same instance back to back, to get some drop that didn't or finish some quest while I still remember I have it. It'll be a boon for collects, too. But there's a downside. Loot.

If only we'd had pandas in the EC Tunnel

I have a clear, if hazy, memory of something that happened the first week I played Dark Age of Camelot, back in 2000. I was in Albion, in some starter area the name of which I've long forgotten. Some imps or demons were near a river and one of them had a name. My mercenary fought and killed it and it dropped a magic item.

I have no idea now what the item was or if I could use it. I just remember the sheer astonishment. A Named! A Magic Item! And I killed it on my own! Who knew such a thing was even possible?

Last year, when EQ2 had The Great Item Revamp, I took my Berserker on a tour of Kunark hunting overland named mobs. At first I thought I was having a great run of luck. Every named, and there are lot in Kunark, dropped a Legendary item. No treasured items at all. Sometimes, for variety, they'd drop a Fabled. Eventually it became obvious that that was all they had and they had one every time. Like the good ex-Tester I am I sent a bug report.

It wasn't a bug. Just the latest stop on the ever-ascending Loot Elevator. I should have known. I actually quit playing EQ2 the second time partly because of the changes to loot that came with the Rise of Kunark expansion, when treasured weapons, armor and jewellery started dropping more often than rat whiskers in the Qeynos newbie yard.

You get it. You have wings!

It's not so much that I mind magic items not seeming special anymore, although I do mind that. It's the storage! Every named always drops something and there are so many nameds. Where once I would return to town with my bags oozing with monster body parts for which small-town merchants, presumably backed by some secretive necromantic sect with unlimited financial resources, would shower me with gold and silver, now I come back weighed down with amazing sparkling magic weapons, gleaming enchanted armor and jewellery fit for a Djinn prince.

I can't just sell the stuff! It looks too good to vendor. I blow a lot of it up for the raw materials for Adornments. At least those stack. But lot of it looks too good even for that. So I have to store it. It might come in useful. One day I might have a level 79 Warden and this would be perfect for him. Or a level 90 Assassin, she'd love that! Of course every character I ever level will acquire his own warehouse of "useful" stuff and won't thank me for someone else's cast-offs but let's not think about that.

I really don't want to go all the way back to the "good" old days, when a whole Sunday afternoon could pass while I watched WTS messages streaming up my chat window in the East Commons Tunnel, hoping to see something I both needed and could afford, but a slight frisson of scarcity in the Magic Item market might be nice, just for a change.

Or I could just stop being a packrat.

Nah, not going to happen.

Just One More Thing...

Sunday Morning. By long tradition a time to sort through packs and bags and vaults. To wake sleepy half-elves and dozing dwarves and send them grumbling down to the mailbox or the bank. Sometimes morning runs into afternoon. Sometimes it lasts all day.

Alright, I'll come clean. Sometimes it lasts all week. An inordinate amount of my gameplay in most MMOs seems to consist of moving items from one virtual storage area to another. There's a reason this blog is called "Inventory Full".

Am I complaining? Hardly! It's one of the things I enjoy the most. It's satisfying in the same way tidying a cluttered room is satisfying, only without the dust and the endless bending over. Nothing better than sitting back after a couple of hours hard clicking to see three empty bags looking back at you. Another 120 slots to fill with Large Meaty Bones and Droag Egg Fragments.

Sunday Morning at the Bank. With Bear.

Available storage space has a big influence on how loyal I am to an MMO. A game that allows me to hoard vast quantities of junk that I'll probably never find a use for has a significantly better chance of seeing me log in regularly and keep on logging in for years than one that doesn't. I may lose interest in progressing the characters, I may never have been interested in the story, but I will always need to visit my stuff.

Spot the odd one out

 Contrarily, MMOs that are extremely stingy with storage space sort of work for me too. It's liberating to know that I can't just pick up everything that falls out of a goblin or hang onto all my no-stats starter gear in case I ever get the urge to stroll around town dressed as a dirt-poor farm-boy. Having just the one bag and a measly bank vault means I spend a lot more time actually doing the things the designers probably meant me to do, like quests and stuff. I've never once felt tempted to spend real money to get more space, though, so that part of the design doesn't seem to be working.

I rarely build up any kind of long-term connection with MMOs where space is a commodity. I find I think of myself as a wandering ronin. Oh alright then, The Littlest Hobo. I'm free to come and go as I please, and after a while I don't please all that often and finally not at all.

So, masses of storage space good, almost no storage space also good, if not for long. It's in the middle that I run into problems. I moaned about Lord of the Rings Online a while back. At the time I was complaining more about how tiny everything was rather than how much of it I had but the sheer quantity of junk that I have squashed into a middling amount of storage space does present a real barrier to entry when it comes to dropping back in.

No I am not a "beardy hobbit"

What I lack in height...

The recently-announced and somewhat controversial Premium Wallet that I read about over at KTR  isn't going to help me all that much. I don't have all that many extraneous currency items clogging up my packs and even if I did I surely wouldn't be paying any ten dollars for aggregation rights. Mostly what I have is crafting raws. And food. And potions. Something else that Zubon mentions could just make a difference to my LotRO quality of life, though, and that's the Shared Bank. I might finally have found a use for the 1045 Turbine Points I have somehow accumulated. Well, 995 of them at least.

Not quite sure what brought all that on. None of this was what I intended to write about when I started at the top of the page. That's Sunday morning for you.