That’s almost 19 times the total population of EverQuest at its peak when I was playing it, and even *that* felt like a huge community at the time. You’d occasionally discover that a coworker here or an acquaintance there was an EQ player, but with WoW it’s almost a given that you’ll know a good number of people who are either players or at least know of it.

It’s surreal to think about how much it’s exploded ever since it was primarily the domain of the dorkiest and nerdiest. :)

/pizza

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…

(Yes, it’s yet another boring EQ article. Warning: whiny ranting and self-pity ahead)

In particular, I want to keep playing with the friends I’ve built up over the years. The main problem there though, is that as I’ve mentioned before our guild has lost quite a few people, and once they’re gone you don’t really see them again. Sure, once every few weeks the timing might be right and you can cobble a group together briefly, but the vast majority of the time it just won’t happen due to schedule conflicts and raiding plans. There are still a handful of friends left in the guild, but recently a new problem has arisen: non-guild raiding alliances.

The raiding alliances are actually a great idea: if your guild isn’t strong enough to tackle the higher-end raiding content by itself, get a bunch of people in the same boat together and work together so that you have the combined power to defeat that content. One such alliance ran for a while on our server and I managed to get in on it often enough to get a good half-dozen PoP flags that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Eventually though, that alliance fell apart. A lot of people were using it just to get enough flags to join the high-end guild of their choice, and as soon as they got the flags they stopped going to the alliance events. The number of people willing or able to help dwindled, and eventually the alliance wasn’t strong enough to continue its raids.

There’s a new raiding alliance out now though, but unfortunately (for me, anyway) it doesn’t quite operate the same way. Whereas the previous one allowed almost anyone who was the appropriate level to come along, this one is being picky about who it lets in. It may not be a guild itself, but it has the same sort of steep entrance requirements that you expect from the high-end guilds. Two in particular though are the deal-breaker for me: members are required to be available for raiding by 5pm EST, and must raid four or five nights a week. And oh yeah, they’re not even accepting certain classes anymore, including mine.

5pm EST? I’m still at work for at least 2-3 more hours at that point. Hell, even someone on the east coast would have to get home in one heck of a hurry to make that. This kind of committment is simply impossible for me to make. 4-5 nights a week? Maybe in my earlier EQ days… Right now I could guarantee two nights a week, often make three, and sometimes four or five, but I can’t quite reach what they’re asking for.

Some other people in our guild *are* hooking up with this alliance though, and while it’s good for them, it leaves me with even fewer people to play with. They may still be in the guild, but now they’ll already be off doing these raids by the time I log in. I feel like I’ll be stuck doing pickup groups in LDoN forever from here on, and that’s what I’m trying to avoid in the first place.

I know, I know, I can’t really blame anybody. It’s great that my friends can get into this alliance, since it increases their fun and it’ll help them in the long run. The alliance has every right to set their own rules, to try and avoid the problems of the previous one. Nobody owes me a route to advancement, and many of my hangups over guild loyalty and making new friends are self-imposed. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it. :-P

The thing that bugs me most though, is that I feel like I’ve been robbed of the ability to do things in EQ, all over simple matters of time. Not everyone can put the same amount of time into the game, and those who put more time in *should* be more richly rewarded, but the way EQ currently works seems broken in that regard; right now, it heavily polarizes players into the two separate ‘raiding’ and ‘casual’ camps, with little middle ground. If I can only play 70% of the amount of time that an uberguild would require, that just means it’ll take me 30% longer to reach the same point, right? Or if I miss the raiding window start by one hour, but can stay on one hour later it all works out, right? Wrong, you may still spend a lot of time in the game, but technicalities like those will still kick you down to the ‘casual’ players camp and you’ll *never* reach Vex Thal. Or the Plane of Time. Or whatever the end of GoD is.

Almost 300 days /played time now and most of my armour is still from Velious. Fuck, I’m wasting my time…

So what does this one offer and do I even care? Well..

• Improved Graphics
  Not particularly important. Heck, I still play AC with its now-horribly-dated engine and textures.
• New zones
  New places to visit are always good, but the question is, will I ever make it to them? I still haven’t seen the very highest ends of Luclin or PoP, or *any* of GoD simply because I’m not ‘l33t’ enough. If OoW continues that trend then these zones are irrelevant to me, but then again they might be freely accessible like in LDoN. More information is needed here…
• Level cap increase to 70
  Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh… There are a few different problems here. One is that new levels greatly exacerbate mudflation. How much of a problem that is depends on whether you’re one of those who loses content or gains access to content because of it…

  The second is the matter of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. As an enchanter, the levels themselves don’t really do much for me anymore; most of my power comes through spells and AA skills. There will be new spells that will require a certain minimum level, but it’s hard to imagine them adding anything terribly crucial at this point. The new spells might be essential within new zones, but it doesn’t sound like there’s going to be very many of them so far, and as noted above they may not even be relevant to me. Existing zones are fine as-is, the new spells won’t be necessary there. Still though, there’s going to be pressure to get those new levels even if I don’t need the new spells, simply to be more attractive. If I’m vying for a spot in a group and the choice is between me at level 65 and some other level 70 enchanter, they’re more likely to take the higher level one, so I have to gain levels too just to remain competitive.

• Epic Weapons 2.0
  Double-ugh. The original epic weapons were meant to be rare and special things, held only by the uberest of uber players. It didn’t work out that way; eventually with time and mudflation, many people got their epics, but there was much time wasted and conflict generated along the way. However now that there is an absolutely huge gap in power between the raiding and the non-raiding populations, I imagine they’ll be much less common this time around, and only available to those high-end raiders. Thus, irrelevant to me.
• Guild Tribute System
  Big whoop, a small guild like ours isn’t going to generate very many points. We’ll mostly be focusing on our own personal tribute scores anyway.
• Custom PC Titles
  Fluff.
• And the miscellaneous new items, skills, recipes, etc. that are always part of every expansion. Nothing new there.

I find it very difficult to get very excited about anything in this expansion. It really does look like a desperate attempt to keep people in EQ instead of wandering off to other games that will be starting around the same time (i.e., World of Warcraft).

Will I get it? I don’t know. I’ve barely done anything with the last expansion, so yet another one along the same lines might just be a further waste of money. But, if I’ll be forced to reach for level 70 in order to remain viable in groups, then there’s not much choice but to get it. But then dilemmas like that make me start wondering whether it’s worth spending any more time in EQ at all…

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…

1) The expansion itself isn’t too appealing in what it offers. New spells? The ones for my class don’t look too interesting and don’t really give me anything new. New advanced skills? I still haven’t finished buying up all the skills I need from the previous expansions yet. The new tribute system? Sounds interesting, you can buy temporary abilities with points gained from turning in items, but I don’t have many spare items to give. Leadership experience points and abilities? I never lead groups or raids anyway. The new Berserker class? I don’t have time to start yet another new character.

The one really good thing about the expansion would be the new areas to explore, without too many of the flagging restrictions that made Planes of Power such a pain, and the new loot found therein.

But…

2) A lot of the expansion is oriented towards people who have completed Planes of Power and have all the super-uber gear. I don’t. Fully buffed up with spells I have just over 4000 hit points, but someone with enough Plane of Time gear from PoP could have over 7000, maybe even 8000. And they’ll get missed more, use less mana, regen mana faster, cast spells faster, etc… I simply wouldn’t survive in a lot of spots where they will.

And…

3) Guild attrition continues, making playing less fun. Many friends are now off in the raiding guilds and don’t have time to spend hanging out with the rest of us. I wouldn’t qualify, wouldn’t be able to put up with the raiding attitude, and don’t want to abandon SW, so simply joining them there isn’t an option either. Unfortunately, without raiding, the only real option for further advancement is to continue doing groups in the areas of the previous expansion, LDoN.

The problem withg LDoN groups is that the attrition has made it difficult to put groups of guildmates together. Five other people might be logged in, enough to form a full group, but two of them might already be busy in other groups, one might be working on tradeskills, and one might be on just to chat, leaving you with only one other person and four spots yet to fill. And who do you fill them with? Well, you pretty much have to grab random strangers and hope they don’t suck too badly, or constantly call you ‘d00d’… Playing with mostly strangers just isn’t as fun anymore.

Maybe the guild can do something to help scheduling so we’ll know what times we’ll be on so we can form groups with just us. Maybe we can attract more members, so there’s better chances of enough people being available. Maybe we can…oh, there’s lots of maybes, but little motivation. It’s a lot of effort to fix and eventually you start wondering if it’s even worth it and oh fuck it, there’s probably a dozen better things I could do with my time…

But this is nothing new really; there have been lulls like this before and things did eventually pick up again, so who knows. Maybe a month from now I will have bought Discord and be back to playing full-time.

But not right now.

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.

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

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…