Sometimes It's The Little Things...

This is just a short post (No, really...) about a couple of Norrathian bits and bobs I happened to notice  yesterday. The first is a small but very significant change to the login process for EverQuest that's going to make choosing a server much more straightforward for new players. It should also make life much easier for anyone coming back after a long layoff.

EverQuest has a lot of servers for a twenty-five year-old game. More than two dozen of them and the number keeps growing. Two new ones were added just a few days ago. If you've been away for a while, it can be hard to remember where you were last time you played. I've created a lot of characters over the years and I always have trouble remembering what server half of them are on. 

Even knowing the name of the server where you were playing doesn't always help. As many servers as the game has now, over the years it's had many more. I long ago lost track of which servers merged and then re-merged. The merger process is hard to keep up to date with not least because it never ends. Next month a server called Thornblade, which I can't honestly say I knew existed, is merging with Mischief, where I think I might have made a character once.  

There have always been a few places you can go look this stuff up but as with all information on the internet, you can't always find exactly what you need and even when you do, you can't always be sure it's current or correct. Now, all you need to do is look at the Server Select screen, which has been re-tooled to be far more useful and informative than ever before.  

Every server is listed along with five topline criteria:

Status - When the server is up, this shows the current online population (Low/Medium/High). Otherwise it will say Locked or Down as appropriate. This information has always been available from the Game Server Status page on the website and it might have been on Server Select before, but never as clearly as it is now.

Ruleset - This tells you Daybreak's official name for whatever ruleset is operating on a specific server, for example Standard, Timelocked Progression or Randomized Loot. More detail about the ruleset in question appears in the description at the foot of the table.

Expansion - This lets you know exactly where each server sits in the progression chain. With thirty expansions to date, all of them adding features and many changing the level cap, knowing which one is in effect when you log into a server is crucial information.

True Box - If a server is flagged "True Box" it means each player can only play one account at a time per computer. There can be variations to the basic Yes/No binary - one server is currently listed as "Relaxed(3)", meaning you can play up to three characters per PC but no more. It's a complicated issue that needs a little background.

The game has a long tradition of multi-boxing, where one player simultaneously logs in multiple accounts and plays one character from each, often making a full group of six to do group content "solo". This used to be quite tricky and often required the use of 3rd party software that would get you banned if you were caught using it. 

These days, EQ is so undemanding of modern gaming PCs you can easily log multiple accounts in on the same machine, making swapping from character to character very straightforward even using just the regular, in-game controls. As so many of EQ's hundreds of zones are often empty and so much of the later game is instanced, multiboxing came to be seen as a legitimate activity, provided multiboxers also abided by the general "Play Nice" rules and didn't get in anyone's way. 

That attitude changed when the often much more crowded and competitive special ruleset servers came into play. There were a lot of complaints and new servers started to include rules on how much, if any, "boxing" was allowed at launch, along with how far the server had to progress before those rules were relaxed.

Even if the server is flagged Yes for True Box, theoretically you can still play more than one character but you have play each of them on a separate computer, old school. How DBG can tell is beyond my remit to explain but apparently they can and they'll ban you if they catch you, so it's good to know what the rules are in advance.

All Access - Finally and crucially, this lets you know if you need to have paid your sub to log into the server in question. Mostly it's the Standard ruleset servers that are Free To Play but there are exceptions.

All of that is great and an improvement and all but it's not worth getting excited over, let alone writing a whole post about. What got me really excited was the additional detail available in the full server description that appears at the bottom of the screen when you select a server.

This includes a full description of the ruleset with unlock schedules for expansions and notes about special features such as increased spawn rates and economic models. All stuff I can never remember, in other words.

There have been more than a few times in the past, when I've had to go digging around in old press releases to find which of EverQuest's myriad special ruleset servers is on what set of special rules. There are so many of them now and the differences between them are sometimes so arcane and abstruse, I'd be surprised if even the people who set the rules can remember them. The new Server Select screen collates all the pertinent information in one easy to find location and will make my life much easier any time I decide to write about EQ.

Even more useful to me is the inclusion of full details of the merge history of each server. Once again, this has always been available online somewhere... I just could never find it when I wanted it. Now I can just log into the game and see immediately that one of my old servers, Lanys T`Vyl, merged with Tunare in 2005, as did E`Ci. Another server I had characters on, Seventh Hammer, joined them all in 2010 and the whole crew now goes by the name Tunare - Seventh Hammer.

Since I can almost always remember the name of the server where I originally made a specific character but almost never where that character ended up after all the merges, this is going to save me a load of time and trouble. I may not play most of these characters any more and most likely never will but there have been a surprising number of occasions when I needed to find a particular character to check something or to take a screenshot for a post. This is going to make doing stuff like that a lot less annoying.

The second thing I noticed yesterday relates to EverQuest II and a vlogger I follow by the name of Borgio. Borgio used to make useful and entertaining video guides that he posted regularly to his YouTube channel. I found them very helpful in getting past a few instances and bosses in various expansions, which is why I subscribed.

Unfortunately, like many veteran players, Daybreak eventually managed to piss him off sufficiently to make him quit (I forget if it was anything specific or just the general drift of the game away from the way it used to be.) and he moved on to other games, then stopped posting much at all. 

He has sporadically popped videos up since - he briefly visited the Vanguard Emu a year or so back, which was nice - but his channel had been silent for almost a year until yesterday he posted this:

While he doesn't explicitly say so, I'm guessing Anashti Sul lured him back.The video is short and - at least for anyone who's ever visited the Isle of Refuge - quite interesting. I was surprised to find I had actually seen and killed all of the Named mobs he shows but if you'd asked me about them before I watched the video I wouldn't have remembered any of them, even though I just played through the whole main quest series on the Outpost of the Overlord just a few days ago.

It almost makes me want to go back with another character and do it again to see what else I might have forgotten.

Almost...

Welcome To Anashti Sul. Please Have Your Papers Ready.

While I'm sitting in the queue, waiting to log into the new EverQuest II Origins server, Anashti Sul, I thought I'd kill a few minutes by pointing out a couple of interesting items in the Update Notes and the Live! announcement. There's a lot of general guff about the specifics of the ruleset but these two seemed much more wide-ranging, with possible implications for the game as a whole.

Firstly, from the Update Notes:

" To patch the Origins server, you just need to set the version on the launchpad to "Origins".

An Origins server is a server set into a specific timeframe with as much rolled back to that exact timeframe as possible. In the case of Anashti Sul, the timeframe that the game exists in is early 2006."

That very much confirms Origins as a new branch of EQII, with Anashti Sul as just the first example, something that's re-inforced strongly by this, taken from the Go Live announcement:

"Origins works like EU, where characters on that server are separate from US. So, if you have 10 slots (membership + purchased), you could have 10 characters each on US, EU, and Origins."

I knew you got another set of slots if you played on Test but I didn't realise you could double your character slots by playing on both EU and US servers. Now you can triple them by adding an Origin server to your portfolio.

It seems clear now that, if Anashti Sul proves successful, we'll be seeing other Origins projects in the future. I wonder if that might include variants that deviate significantly what from what we've had in the past, as in the much wished-for but so far never-seen WoW Classic Plus? 

Only time will tell.

Addendum: I'm in the game now and I just reached the Isle of the Overlord, the Freeportian's version of the Isle of Refuge. When I stepped off the boat, I landed in the 45th instance of the zone. Even at the busiest launch of a new server, I can't recall seeing instances above the teens. I imagine there are even more for the Qeynos version, Good generally being more popular than Evil in these games. 

And most people have probably already moved on to the mainland...

All this at midday in the middle of the working week, too. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Addendum 2: Just before I logged out (It's getting late here...) I saw that General Chat had reached its cap. I didn't even realize it had one. Something else I haven't seen before.

Anashti Sul or She Who Could Not Be Destroyed

As time creeps forward and the mists begin to clear, Darkpaw's plans for the upcoming EverQuest II "Origins" server are slowly starting to take shape and they're... interesting. Yesterday, an outline schematic appeared on the official website and among the general information you might have expected for any forthcoming special rules server were some unusual and curious details.

Let's start with the beta. Daybreak has long been big on betas for everything from major updates to full expansions, so it's not particularly surprising to hear there's going to be one for the new server. The whole beta process is so routine now, there's a permanent Beta server waiting to be populated with whatever new code needs testing and a relatively straightforward process for players to participate.

What is notable in this case is the extent of the beta. At six weeks, it's edging towards the length normally reserved for annual expansions. That's a serious beta, as the bullet point list acknowledges:

• There will be a 6-week Beta to ensure we cover a wide breadth of testing.

Indeed, serious seems to be the keyword for this event. By far the most unexpected revelation in the announcement is the news that the server will operate on its own "design depot".

That didn't have much of an immediate impact on me because I have never heard the term before and had no idea what it might mean. Google was no help, pointing me towards any number of disparate businesses trading under the name. I suspect it's a piece of purely internal jargon used at Darkpaw or Daybreak or even EG7 but nowhere else.

Luckily, whoever wrote the announcement thought to include a brief but fairly clear gloss:

• It cannot be affected by Live design updates, and vice versa.

It appears a design depot isn't just an offshoot of the Live game running on a separate server with a different ruleset, the way all Time Limited Expansions and special projects have worked until now. It's almost (But crucially not quite.) a standalone game. 

• Code and Art are still across all server types, for a variety of reasons. For example, connections to external or shared resources such as Database, Authentication, etc. have completely changed over the years.

That deserves some unpacking. And a little speculation. Firstly, there's no real reason to provide that much detail in the context of this announcement, other than to try to head off the inevitable complaints that the new server isn't separate enough from the main game. 

EQII players, by and large, tend to be traditionalists but a significant and vocal minority are positively luddite. They tend to think whatever they had before was better, just because it came first. No matter how far the clock rolls back it won't be far enough for some of them, so it makes sense to get the rebuttals out there ahead of the attacks. 

For once, I do wonder if there isn't something more going on behind the upfront explanation than mere defensive positioning. There's just a slight suggestion of frustration in the phrasing, a sense that whoever set this up would have liked to go further but had to stop a little way back from where they wanted because they'd run up against technical issues they weren't able to overcome. 

It makes me wonder whether there might be a few regrets that no-one thought more about the game's past when they were framing its future. Players may not be the only ones who sometimes wish they could go back to their glory days. Assuming EQII ever had any glory days, that is...

Then there's the confirmation that this has never been done before:

• This is the first time for this type of separation for EverQuest II

Doesn't that make you wonder why it's being done now? It does me. If it wasn't deemed necessary to silo the previous TLE servers as securely as this, what's changed? Is it simply a case of the technology having moved on, making this a viable option when perhaps before it would have been too difficult or too expensive? Or is required to sustain a different pattern of development altogether, one that requires more strict segregation to minimize any risk of contamination?

When the project was first announced I somewhat flippantly described it as Darkpaw's response to the success of WoW Classic. Now I think that might actually be what they have in mind.

SOE, followed by Daybreak, pretty much invented the retro-server concept. They iterated on it until it became a major money-maker and a popular success but it took Blizzard, finally caving and copying the format, to show just how big a deal it could be. Classic's success made it clear that sailing as close as possible to the authentic past could grab the attention of literally millions of ex-players. People who used to play WoW "when it was good". 

I get the feeling Darkpaw's new server, which they've tellingly named Anashti Sul, the misunderstood goddess of death and resurrection, is intended to be something much more than just another version of the familiar format. By taking a number of extra steps to recreate as closely as they're able not just the general feel but the very specific ambience and gameplay of the original game, it looks like they're making a bid for more than just the usual suspects, the crowd who turn up for every new TLE server, play for a month or two, then leave.

What I'm suggesting is that this seems like an awful lot of extra work to take on, just for an Anniversary event. It seems a lot more like something you'd do if you were hoping to start a whole, new, separate strand of the business. Something like WoW Classic or Old School Runequest. 

Whether it'll work is another matter. I suspect the demographic that fueled the success of those two retro-spin-offs simply doesn't exist for EQII. It never had the numbers of either of those mega-successful titles and it's more than likely that most people who ever cared to come back to EQII have already done so, probably more than once. 

Even so, I'd lay odds Anashti Sul will have a bigger opening than just about any previous EQII retro-server. It does look like it's going to be genuinely different to anything we've seen before. A number of significant changes that haven't been applied to any previous Progression or TLE server are part of the package this time. 

For example, there's a return to secondary functions for base stats. I'd actually forgotten they ever had them, largely because it's not my kind of thing. Still, I instantly remembered what it used to be like when I read:

• Attributes have restored secondary functionality, agility will help avoid melee attacks, intelligence will increase ability potency, strength will increase melee damage, and wisdom will grant extra resistance.

It's not just a detail, either. It's a signifier. It's flagging up the importance to many players of the necessity for a certain kind of mindful choice in gameplay, while tacitly acknowledging that, while the current Live game may be ferociously complicated in many ways, it isn't necessarily as thoughtfully complex as it once was.

I'm not much of a one for min-maxing stats so the thought of being able to passively dodge some damage by having a few more points of Agility doesn't fire my enthusiasm a whole lot. I'm much more excited by this:

• Freeport and Qeynos are back to old school, in both appearance and functionality. Livable neighborhoods, and their quests, are back!

At one time, this would have been huge news but we already had the Neighborhoods returned to us a while ago, which does blunt a little of the impact. They didn't come with all of the quests, though, and I'm not sure we were able to live in them. That's going to be a trip.

As for the starting city revamps being rolled back, I'd completely forgotten Qeynos ever even had one. I'm curious to know what changed because I have no memory of it at all.

Freeport, though; that I do remember. I even wrote about it here, in the very early days of the blog. That was over a dozen years ago and quite honestly I can't remember what Freeport looked like back then although, reading that post, it's beginning to come back to me. I certainly remember the old Blood Haze Inn as it was in that screenshot.

On the flip side of what's coming back is what's staying the hell away, something that seemed even more important to some folks on the forums as I scanned them yesterday. It's a revealing set of negatives. 

No Krono means no way to buy influence or progress with real money, I suppose. It should also stop inflation from getting out of hand too quickly. Coupled with a "very limited" cash shop, it's probably as close as Accounting will let them get to the authentic in-game economy c. 2006.

No persistent instances means every dungeon run has to be completed in real time (Or at least that's what I think it means...). On Live you get a timer, generally three days, during which the server saves the state of the instance so you can go in and out to resupply or take a break as you feel like it. Now if you leave, all your progress will be lost and you'll have to start over from scratch. I'm a bit vague on why we want that but it's certainly how things worked back in the day.

No spell research means no offline upgrades. If you want the next quality level of a spell you'll have to make, buy or find it and scribe it in game. I hope it also means Adept and Master spell books will drop off mobs again or things could get awkward.

Those are what you might call the "Positive Negatives". Then there are the Negative Negatives, at least one of which I don't quite get.

No weight means coin and items will not cause encumbrance. The interesting thing there is that the devs apparently wanted to bring the mechanic back but weren't able to for technical reasons. It's scary sometimes to think what some people consider fun, isn't it?

No tradeskill combines is a huge positive to me but I've already seen people moaning about it on the forums. There's a borderline-sociopathic subset of EQII vets that considers the game's original crafting set-up to have been near-perfect. I just hope none of them hold office anywhere. 

Luckily, the delusion isn't held by anyone at Darkpaw with authority to make it happen so Anashti Sul will use the crafting system as it was immediately after sub-combines were removed, which was also before the addition of pretty much all the crafting quests. Get ready to spend a lot of time at the tables.

No holiday events. This is the one that puzzles me. I can absolutely see why the purebred server won't want to share current holidays with the mongrel hordes of Live and TLE but surely it's going to want the original holidays as and when they arrive? It's not as though they wouldn't be in keeping with the premise of the server. Anashti Sul is bench-marked as "reflective of the 2006 era" and the first Frostfell was in 2005. 

If we're really not going to get even the original events, I can only imagine it's because they've proved impossible restore to their original form. It's going to make for a pretty bleak experience after a while, though, if there literally aren't any holidays. After all, Norrath pretty much runs on egg nog and pumpkin pie...

There's more but those are the highlights. I confess I'm feeling quite jazzed  for this. It looks like it could be quite an event.

I may even be keen enough to make a beta character, just to see the sights a few weeks early. If so, you can count on a photo essay here, assuming there's no NDA. I'll probably hold off until the official launch in June, though. 

It's not that long to wait. Is it?

 

Note: All screenshots taken on the final day of the original EQII beta in 2004.  Complete with original letterbox framing.

If You Want Something Done...

Tempting though it is to make every day at Inventory Full an AI or a music day - and believe me, I could - it's probably about time I got back to what both Bard and ChatGPT know me for, namely writing about video games. 

One day I'm going to sit back and ask myself how it came to this. It certainly would surprise my adolescent, twenty- and thirty-something selves to find me here, spending two or three hours every day spouting off about computer games but I guess I've been playing, talking and writing about the things for long enough now I'd look a bit precious pretending I'm better suited to doing anything else.

It's all about the games, then. And the game I'm mostly playing right now is EverQuest II. Again. How did that happen? Admittedly, getting into the beta for EQII back in 2004 was one of the more exciting things that had happened to me up to then but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been expecting still to playing the same damn game twenty years later.

Eliot at Massively OP wrote an opinion piece earlier this week about how, as gamers - and particularly as mmorpg gamers - we're all getting older and yet we don't talk about it. I dropped a comment to say I disagreed. Not that we're getting older. I'm not that disassociated from reality... yet. I just don't agree that it's something we don't talk about. 

On the contrary, it seems like we talk about it a lot around here. It's hardly surprising. Most of us have been playing mmorpgs for a decade or two and computer games for longer than that. Age is going to come up in conversation whether we want it to or not, if not about us then about the games we're playing. Which is aging more badly - the games or the players - is another question.

Eithr way, we still keep on playing them, some of us probably more than we should. It's like experience has taught us nothing. I'd like to be able to say I've gained enough wisdom over the years not to see a morning spent organizing storage in a video game as time well spent but I'd have too much trouble keeping a straight face to pull it off convincingly.  

That, of course, is what I spent several hours doing yesterday: moving little icons from one slot to another so I could hoard even more imaginary bric-a-brac I'll never use, in a game I've been playing, on and off, for more than a third of my life. And I enjoyed myself doing it, dammit!

EQII probably has the most storage of any mmoprg ever created but even that brings its own problems. It's just like what happens where I work - as soon as someone tidies up a corner somewhere and creates some space, next day someone else has come along and dumped something in it. Clutter expands to fill the space available, which I'm sure is somebody or other's Law.

Darkpaw haven't been making things any easier lately. After that peculiar debacle earlier this year, where they changed something about how boss drops are handled and everyone threatened to quit so they rolled it back (I wasn't paying attention at the time so I can't give details.) the devs said fine but we have to do something. Probably as a result, a whole lot of items that used to be treadeable now seem to be Heirloom and some stackables now have this weird timer attached to them, meaning the game identifies them as unique, so they don't stack until the timer runs down to zero.

According to today's patch notes, at least some of the problems are unintentional: "Corrected a bug that prevented Di'Zok Minion's Runes from being stackable". Those aren't the ones with the timers, though, so I don't know what's going on.

Anyway, as I said, if there's one thing I'm not short of in EQII it's storage. The only drawback to hoarding stuff there is remembering where I put it. Yesterday I was reduced to taking notes. I may have to go so far as to craft an in-game book where I can record the details of who's looking after what, which is one of the more amazing things you can do in the game.

That Artificing score tells you I haven't
actually been making much lately.

All of this is on Skyfire. On Isle of Refuge, where I'm spending most of my time at the moment, I have no such problems. When you only have one character, it's easy to remember where you put your stuff. If there's a problem with stuff there it's getting some.

Seriously, it's somewhere on the far side of ironic now. Let me give you an example.

When I renamed Lana "Mitsu" and transferred her to IoR, I decided she'd focus on crafting over adventuring. I've been steadily working on both her main tradeskill, Jewellerycraft, ever since and also diligently completing each of the three dailies for Transmuting, Tinkering and Adorning, all of which has turned this once-minor character into one of my most rounded crafters ever.

As a tip for anyone wanting to level a crafter in EQII but who's not in a tearing rush to get it done, just doing those three quests as often as they become available will not just give you decent skills in the three minor disciplines but also get you several levels of your main crafting profession every day, too. 

All three give a hefty chunk of tradeskill xp on hand in, enough to ding a couple of times, always assuming, that is, that you have full tradeskill vitality as often as possible (Don't forget the weekly Veteran refresh.) and keep an xp potion running. Given that all three together take less than five minutes to do and the questgiver provides all of the mats, it's the slacker's way to level crafting. 

Until you hit Level 100, that is. As with adventuring, that's when everything changes. From getting most of a level for every hand-in, you'll suddenly find yourself getting so little xp for all three dailies you'll struggle to see your xp bar move at all. I'm not going to go over the whole thing again but the short of it is that from 100 onwards the only viable way to level either your combat or your crafting class is to do the appropriate Signature questlines from the Planes of Prophecy and later expansions.

Okay, there are other ways but I'm not here to talk about those. They're all slower and more tedious, anyway. You'd be ill-advised to try and avoid doing the Sigs, which will net you multiple levels at each stage. I'm currently waiting for full vitality to return before doing the first, which I'm hoping will jump me from 100 to 110 in a session.

How much?!

While I was focused on crafting, I was planning on ignoring adventuring for the time being. Mitsu drifted from the twenties to the fifties just on exploration and killing mobs while doing Qho Augren's harvesting quests and I was content to leave her there for now. Playing a high level crafter who isn't also a high level adventurer is a new experience for me and I was finding it quite exciting, all the sneaking and hiding and having to pay attention so as to avoid the many, aggressive, deep red-con mobs as I tried to harvest mats in zones supposedly far too dangerous for me to be in at all.

Unfortunately, that kind of laissez-faire attitude just won't wash on Isle of Refuge and I'll tell you why.

If Mitsu is going to be a proper crafter she's going to need personal storage depots for her home. On Skyfire, when I decided to set those up, all I had to do was go to the Broker and buy them. They weren't even all that expensive.

On IoR, the server where you can trade almost anything, that's not an option. For a start, they're not easy to come by at all. On the Broker there are just two pages of Depots on offer. And even if you can find the ones you want, there's the cost. Apart from a couple of not-so-useful ones like ammo and fuel, prices start at seven figures. Five million plat seems to be the going rate for the good ones.

On Skyfire, with its regular ruleset, there are six pages of Depots and prices begin around 20k. Even the biggest, the Personal Harvest Depot (Large), will only run you 500k, a tenth what you'd have to pay on IoR.

Buying what I needed was out of the question but all the depots are made with the Tinkering skill so, since Mitsu's Tinkering is coming along, I thought maybe I could make my own. All the recipes for Depots are in a single Blueprint and you can make them with a Tinkering skil of 445. Mitsu's skill is 378. She could easily raise it in an hour or less of grinding or just do the dailies for another couple of weeks and let it tick up to where it needs to be.

First, though, she'd need the recipes. Maybe she could buy them. 

1Kpp if you collect.

I checked the IoR broker, expecting the Blueprint to be out of my price range. It wasn't but only because it wasn't on sale at all. There were only a couple of pages of Blueprints of any kind. Granted, the few there were didn;t seem all that expensive, which was a surprise, but it didn't mean much since they also weren't any use to me.

On Skyfire, by contrast, there are seventeen pages of Blueprints for sale on the Broker right now. Prices
start at less than one platinum piece. The Personal Depot Blueprint can be had there for 1200 Plat. Even Mitsu could easily afford to pay that much. Pity she's on a different server.

This is the joy of low-pop. If you want something you pretty much have to go get it yourself. Even if you're willing and able to craft it, you have to go get the mats and the recipes. You can't rely on someone else doing the hard work for you.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can lead to adventures you weren't expecting.

I had no idea where the Blueprint for the Personal Depots might come from, so I looked it up. It's a drop, fairly common, from a lot of different mobs. Getting hold of one is a straightforward farming job. The only problem is the mobs that drop it are all around Level 85-90. Before Mitsu can even begin trying for one, she'll need to get another twenty-five or thirty Adventure levels. 

And that's not hard, either. Levelling in EQII is easy enough. But it does mean I'll have to change my plans. If you play on a low-pop server, you end up doing a lot of that. 

There are shortcuts I could take. I could have her use one of my many Level Boosts. I have at least seven of them stashed away, ranging from Level 100 to 120. I'm very tempted to use the 100 on her. It would make farming the blueprint easy and also take a lot of the danger out of running around looking for mats in higher-level zones.

Then again, didn't I just say that was fun? And wouldn't it be more satisfying to get good xp from all those mobs I'll have to kill to get the blueprint to drop?

Such are the choices you have to make if you play on a low-pop server. Personally, I find it all adds a layer of complexity that makes the whole soloing-in-mmorpgs experience richer and more satisfying. It's obviously not for everyone, though.

As with many things we find ourselves doing in mmorpgs, it's fun until it's not. If wisdom comes from experience it shows itself in knowing when to stop. 

I haven't stopped yet.

Relocation, Relocation, Relocation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see.

Kael Drakkel: A Legend Is Born.

It was only when Wilhelm posted to say the new EverQuest II Lore and Legend server, Kael Drakkel, was up and running that I remembered yesterday was the day it was due to go live. There was a short beta that I never even considered but it had been my intention to make a new character when the real thing arrived, just to see if I could work out what the deal was with this new and - to me, at least - somewhat unintuitive ruleset.

Experimental servers employing idiosyncratic rulesets are nothing new to Norrath, of course. Very much the opposite. I think that having EverQuest as your discovery mmorpg sets you up with different expectations for the genre in a number of ways and one of those is the idea that servers exist to have different modes of gameplay.

When I logged into EQ for the first time in late 1999, I was already looking at a choice of several rulesets. As well as the regular PvE servers there were three PvP servers, Rallos Zek, Vallon Zek and Tallon Zek, each with slightly different rules. The PvP three became four with the addition of Sullon Zek and finally, briefly, five, when Sony Online Entertainment added the first limited duration "event" server, Discord.

Over the course of a few years, servers appeared offering a variety of different play experiences from "roleplay" on Firiona Vie to the high-maintenance Stormhammer, where a subscription cost several times the going rate. When Fippy Darkpaw, the first Progression server, arrived in 2011 the floodgates crashed open and since then virtually every server that's opened, progression or not, has had a ruleset at least slightly different from what came before.

EverQuest II hasn't had quite so many flavors but it still has far more than most mmorpgs. I'm so used to different rulesets from decades of SOE and Daybreak games, I find it strange that other companies seem so set in their ways. If you have the infrastructure to provide that kind of variety for your customers, why wouldn't you?

Well, for several reasons, I guess, not least the danger of splitting an existing audience into smaller and smaller groups. If new servers with new rulesets bring back lapsed players or better yet attract new ones, that's great; if the main result is disruption and turmoil among the players you already have, that's not such a favorable outcome. 

Presumably every new server and each new ruleset comes with development costs, although given that no new developers ever seem to be needed and most of the hardware is almost certainly repurposed from what's already there, perhaps those costs are more manageable than you might imagine. Similarly, so long as existing customers don't actually leave the game it probably doesn't matter, commercially, if they jump around from server to server like sheep seeking greener pastures. It annoys guild leaders but then what doesn't?

Disruptions aside, all new rulesets are not created equal. Some are successful, pulling in the crowds and keeping the numbers up for months or years. Others enjoy a brief flurry of attention before withering away, usually without controversy or complaint. EQ players from both games are more than used to servers that don't last and rulesets that don't take by now. It's no big deal if one fails, just a shrug and on to the next.

So, what exactly is the supposed unique selling point of Kael Drakkel and its "Lore and Legend" ruleset? The F.A.Q. (Which, I'm curious to note, has for once been correctly punctuated.) explains everything in some detail but the elevator pitch appears to be an easy-mode, casual-friendly, server where most of the barriers that prevent former players from coming back or new players from getting started have been swept away.

Clearly, that's a potentially commercial proposition. All aging mmorpgs struggle with the problem of too much content and too many levels blocking the path to the current endgame. Some, like Elder Scrolls Online, have simply done away with the leveling process altogether, opting for a flat playing ground, where everyone is the same level all the time. Others, like World of Warcraft, have opted for an increasingly convoluted and arcane series of workarounds, squishing levels, adding leveling tracks and generally making sure no-one really knows where they are or what they're doing.

Kael Drakkel has a relatively simple premise: no leveling at all and only content from a much simpler era of game design. EQII took a right-angled turn about a decade ago, changing not just leveling and experience but progression as a whole in a number of significant ways. 

In my estimation, that change didn't really take hold until 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra, so Darkpaw have given themselves some room to expand should they need it, with another three potential expansions they could probably bring online without too much trouble. I suspect they stopped where they did because immediately after Velious we all went to the ethereal plans and the haunts of the dead, which is a bit of a metaphysical and thematic leap from the first nine very physical locations. 

It also marks the point at which the kind of nostalgia they're presumably hoping to play into begins to dissipate. You'd pretty much have to be a current, Live player to have much nostalgic feeling for anything after Velious.

I always planned on giving the server a try, although I definitely don't have either the time or the inclination to start over yet again just now. But of course the whole point of the Lore and Legend ruleset is that you don't have to "start over". 

You begin at Level 90 and that's where you stay. There is no leveling, not even for AAs, You start with everything.  You even get your choice of tradeskill boosted to ninety. You're given a full set of gear and a flying mount. You even come into the world fully buffed and with all the spells you're likely to need right away slotted onto your hotbars for you.

Every zone is the same level - your level. And since you also have to be a member to play, you automatically have access to the Instant Travel system. You can go wherever you want and wherever you go will be right for you to start playing immediately.

It does sound appealing. That much freedom could be overwhelming but nowhere near as intimidating as the usual late-mmo deluge of content. Looked at a certain way, it's like they turned the entire game into a starting zone.

After I read Wilhelm's post, I logged in straight away to make a character and see what all that freedom felt like. I didn't have any free character slots but I had a pile of DBG cash so I bought another. Nice to have something to spend it on.

I have a whole different post to write about making characters in EQII so I'll save most of what happened next for another time. Suffice it to say, I ended up making a human necromancer. Then I logged her in and got myself settled.

The onboarding process for Kael Drakkel is very good. Darkpaw appear to have learned lessons from earlier iterations, where you begin at high level. I've done it plenty of times and this was by far the neatest, tidiest, quickest and easiest version I've seen.

My bags, all six twenty-four slotters, were completely empty. No cruft whatsoever. That in itself deserves to win someone a bonus. I chose to import the UI settings from one of my previous necros and set up all the hot keys just as I like them but had I wanted to start adventuring right away, I could have been killing mobs just seconds after the new character loaded in.

The immediacy of the new ruleset was hard to miss. When I decided I wanted to test out the auto-mentoring that underpins the whole thing, there was no checking zone levels or travel routes. I just opened the Instant Travel map, clicked on Commonlands, pointed my winged horse at the sky and swooped down on the nearest overland Named. 

I may go into the whole gear upgrade process that's central to Kael Drakkel's ruleset in some future post. It's all set out fairly clearly in the F.A.Q. linked above, if anyone's itching to know right now how it works. The gist is that all mobs still drop whatever it was they used to drop but named mobs also drop a guaranteed "Lore and Legend Gear Crate" containing something you can use. 

I found it familiar in an unexpected way. It reminded me of the early iterations of "Fabled" creatures in EverQuest, seasonally up-leveled versions of Named bosses that drop items suitable for much higher level characters. I always liked that system, until the bosses that were being upgraded for the event started to be the same ones I couldn't solo even in their regular editions.

It also helps that EQII has a lot of overland Names. And I do mean a lot. There must be a couple of dozen or more just in Commonlands alone. And most of them seemed to be up. There were a couple of other people around and one or two Nameds weren't where they usually would be but as I flew around I was able to pick off several in a few minutes.

The difficulty seemed better tuned than regular mentoring but not by all that much so I thought I'd give it a proper test. There's an open-world raid target in Commonlands, a drake by the name of Ladon. Mentored down from 90 on a live server, Ladon would be an easy solo for a necromancer. On Kael Drakkel the "fight" lasted about two seconds. 

Ladon didn't quite one-shot me. He took two bites to kill my pet and one to finish me off. Point taken. No soloing raids here.

That was my first death in the Commonlands. My second came when I took on one of the named orc Generals and his entourage, a Heroic encounter originally intended for groups, although not a particularly tough one. 

The orcs didn't kill me. It was reasonably challenging fight but my necro was never in much danger. What killed her was picking up the loot. 

EQII has a trap mechanic on all dropped chests. There's a skill you can raise to counter it and certain
classes have innate abilities to deal with the traps. There was a time when getting poisoned or blown up as you opened the box was a regular occurence but it's been utterly trivial for every character I play for so long I'd forgotten all about it.

If I play much more on Kael Drakkel, I'm going to have to re-learn some old habits, it seems, not to mention some old skills. When I went to open the chest it exploded and killed me faster than Ladon had. Whether that's intentional or whether someone just missed chests in the scaling calculations I can't say for certain. That is how it used to work, though, so it could go either way. 

Up until then it had just been my necro and her pet but Mercenaries are, somewhat contentiously, available on Kael Drakkel, despite not having been added to the game until a few expansions later. Before I left the area I decided to pop into the East Freeport inn and hire good old Stamper Jeralf, the ratonga Inquisitor. He's not as powerful or reliable as later mercs but he gets the job done.

With Stamper in tow I felt a little more confident. At least he'd rez me if I blew myself up again. Off we went to test the scaling by zone rather than by mob tier. 

We tried Steamfont first, where we killed a few solo Nameds that would, on a Live server, be in the thirties and forties. The fights varied in difficulty but they seemed pretty well-balanced. Nothing fell over in a light breeze but I finished everything I started comfortably enough.

From there it was on to Loping Plains, a zone where I've always found the hunting good. That was where my first session on Kael Drakkel came to an end. It's a level sixty zone on Live, with a mixed ecology of solo and heroic content. I was planing on starting on the solo bosses and moving up to some Heroics but it didn't pan out that way. 

I did kill several solo Nameds but the fights were noticeably tougher than in Steamfont. Finally, I pulled a Named from an awkward position, got several adds along with him, somehow contrived to lose line of sight with both my pet and my merc, didn't notice they were both having a poor time of it and ended up face down in the dirt with no-one left to pick me up. 

All of that was entirely avoidable if I'd been paying the kind of attention a solo player ought to be paying, when attempting an at-level boss in an at-level zone. It was getting late when I revived in Somborne Cemetery so I called it for the night. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd say Darkpaw have got the scaling just about right.

They've probably also got the fun roughly where it needs to be, too. I was thinking about it a lot as I was playing. I was very curious to find out what the game would feel like with the leveling process completely stripped out, especially since I'm a leveler by preference rather than necessity. 

I'm going to need to play a few more sessions to get a real feel for whether or not I think this is a ruleset I could enjoy as anything more than a novelty. I can see there are still a number of progression ladders - spell and combat art quality tiers and gear tiers, for a start, not to mention the eighteen hundred new Achievements that come with their own leaderboard - but at the moment I'm not quite clear on what good getting more powerful actually does you. 

Rather than jump the gun and speculate, I might need to play until I see the effect of upgrading in action. At the moment, with two new mmorpgs on my slate and an expansion for a third dropping in less than a week, I can't see me finding the time to give Kael Drakkel the attention it deserves.

It won't be going anywhere for a while, though. I'm sure I'll find time to get back to it eventually. On the face of it, it looks like an interesting ruleset and a solid implementation. I just hope there are enough people around with fewer gaming commitments than I have to make the most of it.

On The Road Again With EverQuest II

What is happening over at Darkpaw? Yesterday we got full 2022 roadmaps for both EverQuest titles. This morning, before I had time to drink my coffee, there was this.

Luckily, Wilhelm dropped me an email with the link. Otherwise there's every chance you'd be reading a post in which I speculated wildly about something that had already been announced. 

When I read the EQII roadmap yesterday, the line that jumped out at me was this:

Lore and Legend Server - Every piece of content in the game is appropriate for your character.

That sounded intriguing. It was also one of the earliest items on the schedule, due to arrive in February. I was planning on making it the focus of my post today as I went through the details of Darkpaw's plans for the EQII year. At first glance, I'd picked it out as one of the few genuinely new things EQII players had to look forward to in 2022, although now I read through the whole list again I realize there's a whole lot more going on than I originally thought.

For reference, here's the whole thing:

What's that? It's a bit small? Well, you weren't going to read it all anyway, were you? I mean, if you were that interested, you'd have clicked through the link. Never mind, it's all good. Don't bother digging through the desk drawer for that magnifying glass you put away "somewhere safe". I'm going to go through all the interesting bits. 

And, as I said, there are more of those than I thought there were. It's true there's a lot of "That thing we always do" and "This thing you'd expect" but there are quite a number of oddities. Not only that; in the context of the history of EQII, there are some lines worth reading between as well.

Take the seemingly bland "Improvements to the Test Server - Recipe books from old expansions added to the bookworm and level boosts setup to scale correctly to max level" coming this very month. That's been a long-standing bone of contention with the dedicated but tiny community that plays mostly or exclusively on the Test Server.

I won't rehash the extremely convoluted and controversial history of the EverQuest and EQII Test Servers yet again - that's a whole post of its own - but suffice to say they do not operate in the same way as similar servers for other mmorpgs. They are de facto permanent servers with separate rule sets, where a small but very committed group of players treat as their "main" server. 

In recent years, EQII's Test server has been sorely neglected. This is a meaningful change and one which I would bet is happening due to the arrival of Niami Denmother on the dev team. Denmom plays on Test and fully understands the importance of the community there. I take this change as a Very Good Sign for the custodianship of the game.

Another aspect of note, easy to miss on a casual read, is the repeated use of the phrase "new dungeon" throughout the year. There's a "new throwback dungeon" with the Chronoportal event in March, "new raid dungeons, new heroic dungeons" in April's GU19 and "A new dungeon" for Tinkerfest, now relocated to mid-Spring from its usual Summer slot.

There's a "red-hot new dungeon" coming with Scorched Sky in June and another, presumably soaking wet, with Oceansfull in August. I know the dungeons in the GU will be proper "dungeons" in the sense EQII players use the term but are we really going to get actual "dungeons" for four of the annual festivals as well? 

 

If they really are adding full dungeons to four holidays then that would be absolutely unprecedented. I suspect they may mean new "instances", lighter, less combat-focused, more casual-oriented knockabouts, with no "Bosses" as such. That would be a much more usual addition to the holiday festivities but even then it would be a major advance on what we've seen most years. Very welcome, too. 

April sees a new Overseer season. That's probably the thing I'm most excited about although I'm well aware many EQII players still distrust and dislike the Overseer system and won't be at all happy to see more development time being spent on it. 

I love Overseer. I find it entertaining in itself but mostly I find it incredibly rewarding. I've had so many great upgrades from it and made so much money. It's not quite in the game-changing league of Mercenaries but it's getting up there. Of course, it does play directly into the mmorpg-as-single-player-game trope that many EQII players absolutely loathe but you can't please everyone.

The moving of Tinkerfest to May is curious. It's one of the larger, more popular holidays and it's always been in the middle of the year. I wonder if it's felt to be clashing with the other big summer event, Ethereals? 

Except... wait a moment... where is the Ethereal event on this list? Nowhere, that's where! A close reading suggests it may have been replaced by Tinkerfest, Scorched Sky and Oceansfull, all of which now share "Jubilation Medals, coins that can be earned and exchanged during the three summertime events for desirable items!" That would explain the addition of actual dungeons to each of those three, allowing the whole thing to become a full replacement for the old Ethereal event, which did indeed stretch across the whole summer and feature a currency that could be spent on major upgrades.

 

If so, I like the sound of it. Ethereals always seemed a bit of a "give the hardcore something to grind" kind of deal. I never bothered with it much. This looks a lot better - on paper...

As well as the Lore and Legend server, which I mentioned at the top of the post and still haven't gotten around to discussing, there's another Time Locked Expansion server coming in May. That does seem curious. EQII players have so far proved less interested in regular restarts than their EverQuest cousins and to have two new servers open within a few months of each other (Especially while Kaladim, the existing TLE server, is still progressing and remains fairly well-populated.) seems over-optimistic.

The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that Darkpaw expect these two servers to appeal to the same players. The L&L server looks very much as though it's aimed at the more family-oriented, casual player, a demographic that was once very well-represented in the game but which in recent years has seen short shrift.

The brief precis of how the L&L server is going to work does seem to support that interpretation: 

"We've heard over the years that sometimes when you or your friends take a break it's difficult to catch up and play with your friends. We've also heard that sometimes you want to experience older content without it being trivial, want to put together a casual raid with friends and not have to worry about leaving behind lower-level friends, or you just want to craft or decorate without worrying that you might be too "squishy" for where your quest for recipes takes you."

That really does target the group I'm describing: people who want to hang out with friends and not be too "challenged" by cutting-edge content. I'm pretty sure the most of the people I was guilded with a decade ago would have absolutely loved the concept.

The thing is, none of those people have logged in for years and I don't imagine any of them ever will again. There absolutely is an audience for this kind of gameplay but over the last seven to ten years both SOE and Daybreak seemed increasingly uninterested in serving it. 

 

It looks like that's going to change and about bloody time, too. If ever there was a game set up to serve a casual, creative, family and friends audience, who just want to kick back and have fun, EQII is that game. I just fear it might be too late. 

Still, if you don't try, you'll never know. With a ruleset and systems that put every player on an identical footing from the start, this has the potential to be a strong solution to the perennial problem of how to get new players up to speed in an old game. There is no "speed" to get up to:

"Kael Drakkel is an opportunity to get involved in EverQuest II and experience the lore and the stories without worrying too much about whether you have the right gear...On Kael Drakkel you will start at level 90 with a full set of level 90 gear. As you adventure through the lands, you will be auto-mentored down to levels appropriate for the zone that you are in, making content you normally would have been out-leveled relevant once again. Special loot drops along the way will allow you to upgrade your base gear as you progress."

To quote the name of one of the game's best-loved quests, the proof will be in the pudding. Leaving aside the question of whether it's a good idea in the first place, I'm very curious to see how all of this will work on a technical level. Mentoring in EQII is slick and effective but the current iteration, even after much tweaking over the years, leaves any character whose actual level is more than a few levels higher as overpowered as any superhero.

Of course, if the goal is to make everything feel super-comfortable and unchallenging, maybe that won't be a problem. It certainly wouldn't be a problem for me. And conversely, maybe they have worked out some way to make all content feel just challenging enough but not too challenging. That would be the ideal. 

I suspect the limitation of Kael Drakkel to just the first seven expansions has much to do with keeping the whole thing within a limited range of existing systems, which might be more amenable to harmonization than the variety of expansion-era specific mechanics that have become the norm in later years. It's also pretty much the same level range that was used for the largely-abandoned "Agnostic" dungeon mechanic, which is almost certainly not a co-incidence.

 

We'll just have to wait and see. And we won't have to wait long. Kael Drakkel opens its doors in exactly a month, on February 22nd. I had absolutely no plans to restart on yet another EQII server this year and this one could not possibly come at a more inconvenient time for me, seeing as how Guild Wars 2's End of Dragons expansion is also set to launch next month, quite possibly on the exact same day.

Oh, well. Maybe I'll be done with Chimeraland by then. That should free up some time.

Looking at the roadmap, everything does all seem to be happening in the first half of the year. Game Update 120 is listed for August. It will presumably be significant but there are no details on what might be in it. From September onwards there's nothing other than the usual pre-expansion and holiday events. Well, other than"Swag Store". I have no clue what that is.

I think that's most of the highlights. There are a couple of much-needed structural alterations, like the 64-bit client and the addition of commas to damage numbers. I can't tell you what a pain it is to try and parse those billions and trillions after a fight. 

The LGBTQIA bunnies are back in June, too. I love those. I wonder which orientation or gender communities will get representation this year? I also wonder how many EQII players have any idea what any of them mean when they see them hopping after someone in game? I know I don't pay as much attention to which flag my familiars are flying as I probably should.

And that about covers it, I think. I'm sure I missed something. It's a lot, isn't it? More than I thought, for sure. Someone seems to have faith in the old game yet. It looks like a lot of work and thought went into all of this. 

Let's hope the players appreciate it.