Category: EverQuest

I’ve written before about how disheartening EverQuest has become lately, and it looks like there’s finally some acknowledgement from Sony themselves that there’s something fundamentally wrong going on. They recently invited a bunch of high-profile players from the community (high-end guild leaders, experts in particular classes, etc.) to visit them at a summit to try and work out just what’s wrong with EQ nowadays and what can be done to try and fix it.

Here’s one report of the summit from the perspective a community leader of enchanters, the class I play. Some smaller improvements are coming soon, though nothing really substantial yet about the ‘big picture’, but at least they’re listening and acknowledging that things could be improved…

I want to continue playing EverQuest. However, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to do so.

(Yes, it’s yet another boring EQ article. Warning: whiny ranting and self-pity ahead)
Continue reading “A Slip In Time”

Sony has taken a bit of a different direction with its most recent expansions, and Omens of War, the next one, looks to continue the trend. Specifically, instead of releasing big expansions with a ton of new content for everyone, they are now focusing on smaller expansions focused on specific types of players, released more often. It makes sense from certain points of view (sustains interest, adapts to player demands more quickly), but it’s hard to shake the feeling that they’re just trying to milk as much money as they can out of the players…

So what does this one offer and do I even care? Well..
Continue reading “Oh Yay, Another Expansion”

Despite all of my previous complaining, I have bought and am now installing Gates of Discord.

Why? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. Because of those previously mentioned troubles, getting a group nowadays can be fairly tough. When the opportunity to get into a good group does arise though, I don’t want “oh, but you don’t have the latest expansion pack…” to be yet another factor that could possibly keep me from joining up.

Damn, Sony’s got a good racket running here…

Well the newest EQ expansion pack, Gates of Discord, has been out for three days now. What do I think? Well, uh, I haven’t actually bought it yet. I haven’t even really wanted to…
Continue reading “Gates Of Something Or Other”

There is, of course, another EQ expansion on the way. I can almost remember back after the first one had been released around three and a half years ago, and Verant’s attitude was “Eh, we *might* make another one…” Of course if I had a cash cow like that I’d milk the hell out of it too.

There hasn’t been an official announcement, so for now there’s just rumour, speculation, and a few tidbits discovered in the test code. There will be new zones and spells, as always, some new alternate advancement skills, and the addition of a new class: the Berserker.

Managing classes is a tricky business. The things players do in these games really boils down to one of three areas: Healing, Hurting, and Helping. Thus all you really need are three classes, one to handle each area. That’s a little boring though, so to add some variety you can subdivide and overlap the areas a bit. Hurting can be done through toe-to-toe melee, spells, or minions, which can be separated out into the Warrior, Wizard, and Mage. Take a Warrior and reduce his ‘hurting’ ability a bit, but add a bit of ‘healing,’ and you’ve got a Paladin. Or mix the melee and spell ‘hurting’ abilities and you’ve got a Shadow Knight. The problems are, you have to make each class sufficiently different that they’re not copying each other too much, each class has to be useful for something so that people want to play them, and they have to be relatively equal in power (‘balanced’) so that people aren’t too jealous of each others’ power. There wouldn’t be much point to playing a Warrior if a Paladin could do everything the warrior could do and more.

It’s not clear yet what kind of class the Berserker will be, but just from the sounds of it it’ll probably be a melee damager primarily, maybe with some special skills of some kind. They have to do something to make it different enough from the other classes to make it interesting, though.

One of the more annoying things about EverQuest is managing all the little trinkets you pick up. There are quest pieces and spell research components and blacksmithing/armouring materials and loads of other crap, and often it’s hard to keep track of them all. With hundreds of different items and combinations, it’s nearly impossible to even remember if you have certain pieces.

Have I got all the pages to put together to make the Potent Pants of Perniciousness spell? Um, maybe, hold on while I go check all 16 backpacks in the banks of all eight of my characters… And even if I don’t, someone else in the guild might. When combined together we might have enough parts to make a lot of things, but not even know it. It’s hard enough to keep track of your own stuff let alone the rest of the guild.

So, I’ve been working on this. Basically all I have to do is update a text file listing what parts I have, and this script will automatically calculate what I can make from those parts, and also tell me what parts are still missing for other possible combinations. If, say, a beastlord wants some Play Teatime With Animals spell, she can check here and see that I’ve got page 7 for it, Joebob has page 35, and she’ll just have to go and find or buy page 142 to finish it.

Of course that’s being somewhat idealistic. People are lazy after all, so who knows, a week from now I may have completely given up on keeping the lists up-to-date. In fact I’m so lazy tha

One feature players had asked for ever since EverQuest launched was the ability to transfer your character to another server. Maybe you discovered too late that your friends were on a different one, or you didn’t get along on your current one, or it was too overcrowded, or something. However, all such requests were instantly denied; Verant didn’t want people hopping fom server to server because the designers behind EQ had a specific ‘Vision’ in mind, a set of principles and ideals about the nature of the EQ world. To them it was more than just a game, they were building virtual communities of people, and to allow such transfers would dilute the community. It would be harder to make groups of friends and keep them together if people were coming and going from the server at will, and it would allow unscrupulous people to dodge their bad reputation too easily. Similar reasoning was behind the decision not to allow your character’s name to be changed — if that character had a reputation, he was supposed to be stuck with it.

Fine, fair enough, it’s their game so they make the rules. The often-mocked slogan of EQ is “You’re in our world now,” after all.

Money talks though, and a few years later they caved in and introduced a character transfer service and a name change service. The catch? Well, there was a price to pay, starting at $50 per request to be exact. A rather excessive amount for what is essentially just fiddling with a few database entries, but a lot of players were apparently desperate for services like this. A fair price is whatever someone’s willing to pay, after all… The other catch is that when your character is transferred from one server to another, he loses *all* of his equipment. You arrive on the other server without even a basic weapon of any kind. This was part of their attempt to hold on to the last shreds of The Vision — sure you could transfer, but you’d have to suffer for it.

Well, the EQ team must have failed their save vs. temptation, because lo and behold, now you can buy a character transfer with items service. For a mere $75 you can move to another server and keep all your stuff, as if you’d played there all along. The Vision is dead and buried, finally. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable; people’s opinions on the Vision varied wildly.)

Those people who bought the previous transfer service and lost all of their equipment in the move must be mightily pissed-off now…

Well, Lost Dungeons of Norrath, the latest EverQuest expansion, is out and it seems to be a smash hit. Among most people, anyway. I’m not so sure yet…
Continue reading “Lost: Dungeon. Last Seen On Endtable In Foyer”

I’ve written before about just what a PITA the latest EQ expansion is, and on two servers they’ve finally managed to jump through all the hoops and complete it.

The goal of the expansion was to free some guy called Zebuxoruk, a mortal who had learned the secrets of the gods and was imprisoned by them in the Plane of Time before he could spread his knowledge. To get to him, you had to work through five tiers of planes, or roughly:

1. Kill various ‘boss’ monsters to gain access to the second and third tier planes.
2. Kill Rallos Zek and Solusek Ro to gain access to the elemental planes.
3. Kill the ‘boss’ of each elemental type to gain access to the Plane of Time.
4. Once in Time, work your way through:
4a. Five trials which have to be completed in around fifty minutes or less.
4b. Fight through five waves where you have to defeat most of the gods you killed to get here all over again, with a couple hours to do each wave.
4c. Fight Quarm, a four-headed dragon that is the combined essence of the remaining gods.

And what happens after you complete all that?
Continue reading “More Half-Elf Than Half-Elf”

Okay, I admit it. I am an EverQuest player. Have been for over four years now, in fact, since shortly after the game was released. I hadn’t even heard about it at the time; I was just bored and looking for something new to play, picked up the box while browsing at Future Shop, and thought “Huh, might be worth a try…”

Now, four years layer, I have a highest-level character, a guild full of long-time (gamewise) friends, decent gear, and an obscenely large amount of total time spent in-game. And yet I haven’t been in EQ for more than an hour in the last three weeks.

What the hell happened?
Continue reading “So, who haven’t we beat up yet?”