Oh, There You Are!

This is one of those days when I wouldn't normally be posting so I don't feel too bad about popping up a few screenshots and a couple of paragraphs on something I just posted about yesterday. In fact, in normal (Read: Not Blaugust.) circumstances I'd probably just have made this an edit to Saturday's post but why waste the opportunity to carve another notch on the Blaugust tally-stick?

It probably won't surprise anyone who's ever played an MMORPG to hear that no sooner had I complained about how I couldn't find Merchant Samwe to finish a quest, or Merchant somebody-or-other to buy my missing Level 1 to 5 Magician spells, the moment I logged back into EQOA I found both of them pretty much immediately.

Samwe, it turns out, is exactly where the Prima Guide map says he is, except for one vital fact they neglected to mention: he's at the top of a tower. It seems the z-axis differential was enough to occlude his presence from showing up on Right Button targeting until I was actually in the room next to him!

I'd logged out in pretty much the spot where he was meant to be and as soon as I logged in and had another look around, I noticed a ramp going up. Ramps are really hard to navigate with a controller (Well, for me...) so I haven't been exploring the upper stories much but once I spotted that ramp I would have bet money he was going to be at the top and he was. 

He tried to sucker me into buying the wrong spring by putting a gold one in his visible inventory and making me scrol down to find the correct, copper one but I'm wise to those sorts of gnomish tricks.

I bought the spring, which was the last thing I needed for the quest, then trotted back into Klick (Which I notice I have been spelling wrong up to now. It has a "C" in it.) I did the hand in, which got me 17k XP and a new staff, a huge upgrade to the one I'd been using.

In one of the screenshots here you can see someone by the name of Starcrusher talking about the class quests. He was complaining about the inaccuracy of such online information on the class quests as he'd been able to find and also that he hadn't even wanted to do the quests in the first place but his guild had told him they were essential. Everyone agreed with both propositions - the info is hard to find but you have to do them anyway. I'm assuming that's for the gear they give, which certainly seems nice to me.

Those class quests had also given me my only spells so far, a grand total of three. And one of those was Return Home, which barely counts. I was pretty desperate for more, particularly my pet spells, without which a gnome can hardly claim to be a Magician, but I looked at all the vendors in the caster guilds the other day and the lowest-level Magician spells I found were in the thirties.

I must have missed one because after the hand-in I had another look and found the right vendor almost straight away. She also tried to play the "scroll down" trick but I wasn't having any of it. I scrolled down until I found this:

She had several new spell scrolls for me including the Earth and Water pets and the pet buff and heal. I bought everything. The good thing about having to wait so long and having to kill so many mobs for quests and XP is that I had plenty of money from selling body parts. 

I scribed all my spells and then memmed them and in doing so finally figured out how to set up my hot bars and select the spells I want to cast. No more accidentally returning home when I'm trying to kill something. 

Then I summoned my Water Elementaling, buffed him and took him out to kill stuff. The pet models are excellent. A lot better than the basic starter Mage pets in EverQuest. Or EverQuest II for that matter. The water pet is a big, floating globe of water with a skull in the middle. Makes some weird noises, too.

The spell effects are also excellent but that is something EQ got right. I'm not sure if many people who haven't played would know but EQ spell effects are ridiculously spectacular for a game of its vintage and they always have been. It's like a bunch of fireworks going off in a neon striplight factory sometimes and that's just when people are buffing.

Anyway, I now have a pet and a staff and a new Level 5 quest to go kill some Mindwhippers, whatever they are. My guildmaster says I should team up with other apprentices to do it. Which, of course, I am not going to do. If they're too tough I'll just grind levels until they're not.

It's so nice to be playing a game where that's an option again... 

Across 110th : EverQuest

Time for a very quick update on how my unexpected return to EverQuest is going. Amazingly well!

A bit more detail? Well, okay.

On Saturday morning my magician dinged 110. That, unbelievably, puts her at the start of the current expansion, Torment of Velious, at least in level range. Of course, she's not insane enough to try and go hunt there. Not yet. Maybe at 115.

Things have been moving fast. Two months ago she was getting to grips with the decade-old House of Thule. A month later she'd moved on just one expansion to 2011's Veil of Alaris. Two weeks ago it was 2013's Call of the Forsaken. And last night?

Last night she went to buy some spells in the Outpost in the uplevelled version of The Overthere that came with 2017's Ring of Scale. She'd been there before, to get her level 106 air pet, but she'd been very careful not to step outside the safety of the massive stone walls surrounding the friendly vendor area.

This time she poked her nose, very cautiously, outside. Maybe, just maybe, she might try hunting one, small creature. Something not too scary. Staying very close to the walls and the guards (not that they'd be likely to help). Ready at all times to cast Gate and book.

I knew it was taking a big risk but she was, I felt, about as prepared as she could be, short of waiting another level. At 111 she'll be able to buy, scribe and cast the spell that summons the current highest-available air elemental pet. She won't have the appropriate focus item to make it the strongest version it could be but it's the best she's going to get until the  level cap goes up again and that probably won't be for at least another  year, maybe two.

The sensible thing would be to wait for that but - dammit - I believed in her! I thought she was ready!

She ought to be, the money I've spent on her. Around the start of the month I made the hard decision to stop taking the easy way out when it came to making money. Instead of ending every hunting session by using the incredibly handy and accessible Barter system to sell whatever tradeskill mats had dropped, I set up my Bazaar trader on the other account.

Setting up and maintaining a trader in EverQuest is quite fiddly and very time-consuming. I'm not going to go into the hows and whys of it. It would take me all day. I learned the Trade trade back in the day, when Luclin was newish and every server had the maximum five hundred traders up at all times, with more waiting for someone to leave.

Most days now there are around a hundred and eighty traders on my server. Not the glory days but still a bustling marketplace. I spent a while checking the prices there against what I was getting from the buyers on barter and to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, it was obvious there was a lot more profit in selling to punters than to the trade.

That's not to say barter buyers rip players off. A few try it but most offer very fair prices for the convenience of being able to sell direct from the hunting grounds and not have to bother with all the rigmarole of trading. Nevertheless, if you can be bothered to make the effort, direct sale is where the money's at.

Over three weeks or so I made a couple of hundred thousand platinum and I plowed it all back into gear upgrades for the Mage. If I'd been planning on keeping her account subbed I could have bought better gear for less, which seems ironic, but I planned ahead  and stuck to the stuff anyone can wear.

She has Conflagrant items in sixteen slots now. That's the player-crafted gear you can equip from level 106. The  focus effects don't decay until the current cap of 115 so they're about the best Bazaar-bought kit a Silver account is going to get. I still have a couple more pieces to buy and that will be it for Conflagrant.

When she dinged I picked up several more items that required her to be 110. When I collect those last couple of player-made pieces, she'll be fully dressed in level-appropriate gear that should last her for the foreseeable future. Except for the shield slot. I just can't seem to find anything for that.

It all cost me a lot of money but I had to keep some back for spells. Apart from one or two key buffs and summons I hadn't bought her any new ones for about five levels. Time was when I would try to buy all the spells every level even if I knew she was never going to use them but at higher levels Magicians get a lot of spells and the price keeps going up and up. I'd be broke, fast, if I bought them all.

Instead I spent a good while on Allakhazam, reading them up before I took the Guild Hall portal to The Overthere to buy them. And even then it was confusing as hell. Every spell has a description plus a bunch of stats that supposedly tell you exactly how it works and yet more often than I'd like I still don't really understand what some of them do. Often the only way to be absolutely sure is to buy the blasted thing and fire it at something.

Even when I did understand what the spell itself did, I still had to correlate that with what line and/or school of spells it belonged to to see whether it would be enhanced by any of the Mage's various focus effects and AAs. It's a complicated process. But then, that's why it's fun. True, at times it makes my head hurt and I have to stop and take a break, but this degree of intellectual involvement is undoubtedly a key factor in the mysterious compulsion that keeps me coming back to this game over and over again.

It has occured to me that I could circumvent all of this, or at least all of the scrimping and saving and "can I really afford this?" and  "do I really need it?" part, simply by buying a Krono for around the price of one month's subscription and selling it in the Bazaar for several million plat. Then I could buy all the gear I need, all the spells and I'd be done.

What would be the point of that, though? For me, at least, it would be a disaster. I can easily understand why someone who wanted to get to the meat of the game, grouping at top level and maybe moving into raiding, would find it an excellent, time-saving and sensible option. For players like me, though, pootling along with just a summoned pet and an NPC who has to be paid to be my friend, how to make the money to get the gear and spells I need is the game. If I bought a Krono and sold it to gear myself I'd be putting myself out of business.

Back in The Overthere, at the spell vendor, I made my selections and slotted my new spells. I re-buffed myself with my new buffs. Very  nice. Then I looked at my new nukes and minions. What the heck, I'm here now. Why not? I can only die, right?

Back in the days of the original Kunark, The Overthere was an excellent zone to hunt. It's big, square, and flat, with excellent visibility. The low-level version also had a zone exit in the middle of each of the four sides, which made running to safety an option from just about anywhere.

I can't say if that last part is true of the high-level zone but the rest certainly is. As I stood on the ramp leading out of the Outpost all I could see stretching away on all sides was flat grass, low hills and blue sky. And a sabertooth tiger.

Just the one big cat. Nothing else in sight. I conned him. Dark blue, level 109. One level below me. Three levels above the air pet. Hmm.

I can't remember the last time I fought a mob just one level below me. Not this return to Norrath, that's for sure. Possibly not this decade. Could it be tougher than a dark blue named, though? I'd killed a few of those recently. Only one way to find out.

It was a long fight but I was always in control. The pet could take the hits, the merc could handle the heals, I could bring the pain. I remembered to check the xp when the cat finally dropped. It was about three times what I'd been getting on light blues in an expansion from four years earlier. Of course, it had probably taken me  three times as long...

But it felt good. So I did it again. And again.

In the end I spent about an hour in The Overthere, scarcely moving twenty meters from the wall, being extremely careful only to pull safe singles. I was acutely aware that one add would mean I'd need to gate.

I didn't get an add. I got one nasty surprise when I pulled a cactus and found my health dropping alarmingly even though the plant was securely stuck to the pet. My mercenary pumped out the heals and kept us all alive but it was a worrying moment.

I checked the combat log and thought I'd figured out what was going on. The next cactus I saw I pulled too and confirmed my suspicions. The walking succulents open with an AE shower of spines that has a DoT effect and a ridiculous range. I'd been hit by that even though I was fifty feet away at least.

This is why hunting in a new zone is always a huge risk. All kinds of things you weren't planning for can happen. It's also why finding new places to hunt can be such fun. Provided you don't die. That can put a crimp in the day's entertainment for sure.

This time the magician didn't die. A load of big cats did, some cacti, a small crab, a chokkidai (sort of like a dinosaur's dog). I avoided the rhinos. I remember them being a pain to hunt the first time around. Also the cockatrices; they have an incredibly irritating and often fatal stun.

I saw a couple of Sarnaks, one of Norrath's several sentient, bipedal lizard races, strutiing about importantly in the distance. I'd have like to have tried one but they were too far out and anyway they conned white and yellow. Level 110 and 111. Too high.

For now. But not when I get that final air pet. With a level 111 tanking for me I think I can handle a single sarnak the same level. I'm looking forward to trying, anyway.

All of which puts me so far ahead of anywhere I ever thought I'd be in EQ it feels unreal. I'm only two expansions behind! I'm only five levels off the cap! All thanks to the Overseer feature, which is now officially my second-favorite expansion feature ever, after Mercenaries. Both of those renewed not only my interest in playing but my ability to follow through.

My immediate plan is to drop back a few expansions and tear through some relatively easy mobs to make not experience but money. I'm going to let the Overseer quests take care of the levelling while I go hunt rich mobs for spell money. It's going to be fun.

Then, when I get 111 and that last pet, we'll see.

How To Upgrade Ascension Spells (The Easy Way) : EQII

Earlier this week I spent some considerable time trying to work out how to upgrade Ascension spells in EverQuest II. If you just want to know how to do it, scroll down to the end of the post! If you want to see how I got there, read on...

Ascension was introduced in the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. At that time it seemed like a peculiarly perverse system even by EQII's abstruse and obscure standards.

I won't re-hash the bizarre details of how it worked back then. I barely understood it at the time and most of what I once knew I've forgotten. Thankfully, the whole structure has been revised and revamped, possibly more than once, so we can all move on and pretend it never happened.

For historical accuracy, I'd normally at least try to lay out the basic timeline in a post like this but the available information is more fractured and confusing than the original system. I did spend a while reading forum posts and various guides but it made my head hurt so I had to stop.

Ascension was never a popular addition to the game, at least as far as I can make out. It was confusing, expensive, grindy and turned everyone into battle-mages. At least, those are some of the reasons people gave when they claimed to be quitting the game over it.

In retrospect it seems that the main drive behind adding it was to reduce system load, something it attempted to do in several ways.

 Ascension spells do huge damage but have very long cast times. There are also just four Ascension classes, of which you can only use one at a time.

The means of changing from one Ascension class to another is highly restrictive. You have to visit an Ascension trainer to request a change of class, meaning no hot-swapping from one line to another during raids. It's also to your great advantage to use one of your Ascension abilities to convert all your other non-Ascension abilities to do damage of the type your chosen Ascension class uses.

If you have a whole bunch of people concentrating on Ascension abilities, the server has to deal with four classes using four types of damage on a slowish cadence rather than twenty-six classes using seven types of damage in a hyperactive frenzy. You can see how that might lead to fewer calculations.

You can also see how it would lead to fewer options and to the player feeling railroaded. If the system had been slick, straightforward and intuitive that might not have mattered but it was complicated, awkward and gnomic, so it very much did.

Even as a solo player, for whom Ascension spells were really an optional extra, I found it a little annoying at times. And all I was dealing with was the basic leveling process. Until this week I'd never even considered upgrading the spells.

The reason I finally got around to it was mainly that I'd gone quite a long way down the upgrade path on almost everything else. My Berserker has all his gear at 170 Resolve, with some of it at 175 or even 180. Most of his combat arts are Expert, some are Master. He's made and fitted BoL Adornments in almost every slot and he's completed some of the sets. He has max level mercenaries and mounts, decently geared. Even his Familiar is pretty darn nice.

All of this can be improved still further, even within the paramaters of a soloist, but he's at the stage where those improvements are noticeably incremental. I was going over his stats to see if I'd missed anything obvious and it turned out I had: almost all of his Ascension spells were still the basic apprentice versions.

That led to some long and not very fruitful research sessions. I read a lot of contradictory and confusing advice. I studied explanations and discussions of how Ascension spells might be upgraded until I felt even more at sea than when I started. Eventually I worked out that although various crafters can make various subsets of the spells, Sages can now make all of them. That seemed like somewhere to start.

I went through my bank vaults and dug out all the various Illegible Pages and so on, all of which can still be used but some of which belong to different versions of the system. I gave those to my max level Sage to see what he could do with them. Not much, as it turned out.

 I checked to see if he had the recipes to use them. He didn't.

I read some more and discovered he should be able to buy the necessary recipe books from a vendor in the Myrist Library, once he had sufficient faction, for which he'd need to do the Chaos Descending signature tradeskill questline.

I thought he'd done that but he hadn't even started it. I set to and finished it over three sessions. Then I went looking for the vendor to buy the books. I couldn't find him.

Back to the internet. After several unecessary trips to various vendors around the world, because every discussion I read just said "the vendor sells them", but never gave the vendor's name or location, it finally occurred to me that maybe it meant the crafting trainer in Myrist itself.

It did. All the books were there, on sale for chump change. I bought the lot and scribed them. Now my Sage should, in theory, be able to make all levels of all ascension spells. He can't in practice, of course, because some of the levels require those special pages, which are dropped as loot from bosses and given as rewards from missions.

What he can do with just normal mats is make both Journeyman and Expert Ascension spells. So I had him make journeyman for all the ones the Berserker uses regularly. He had a couple of the pages to make Adepts so he made those too, and for those he then made the Experts.

I had to make the whole sequence for those because you can't just jump to the highest quality. A character has to have scribed each preceding level before they can scribe the next.

It's still more complicated and fiddly than regular spell upgrading but compared to how it used to be it is pretty straightforward.

To save anyone else having to work out the basics the way I did, here's my pared down, no frills bullet point guide:

• Sages can make all Ascension spells.
• All the required recipe books are for sale on the crafting trainer in Myrist, The Great Library.
• The vendor is called Elmelar Stilltree and she's in the Crafter's Gallery.
• The books you want are Sage's Primer 01 to Sage's Primer 10.
• To buy them (or even see them on the vendor) the character needs to have completed only the first three quests in The Scrivener's Tale, the tradeskill signature questline.
• That's the part called Escargot Overclocking, for which you get the fantastic 88-slot Crystal Shard Backpack as a reward. You'll probably want to do the quest just for that, anyway.
• You do not need to carry on with the rest of the very long questline, although it's easy and entertaining enough to enjoy for itself. It also has a useful final reward, a vendor selling all kinds of fuel, who you can summon, anywhere, on an hourly cooldown.
• Once your Sage has bought and scribed the books, they will be able to make all Journeyman and Expert level Ascension spells using only regular materials, including one regular rare, Planar Energy.
• The Sage can also make Grandmaster Ascension spells using regular mats, a regular rare and a Celestial Foundation or Spellshard, a kind of ultra-rare regular mat.
• All of these mats, even the ultra-rare, can be gathered from normal gathering nodes. They are all also tradeable and can be bought on the Broker, assuming anyone's selling them.
• For all other grades (Adept, Master, Ancient and Celestial) you'll need the appropriate Illegible Scroll. These are dropped by bosses or found in mission reward crates. They are also tradeable and can be bought from other players.
• Once crafted, the character who wants to use the spells must scribe them in sequence. 
• You can use offline research to upgrade all levels of Ascension, allowing you to skip over any level for which you don't have the mats.

I think that's about it. It may not be crystal clear but it's a lot clearer than anything I found!

If anyone spots any errors or omissions, let me know in the comments and I'll correct as necessary.

Ascension spells are very powerful and can be lot of fun to use once you get the hang of them. Worth the trouble they take, I'd say.

Keep Moving Don't Move

As  my Necromancer jogged past the ghost-ridden ruins east of the Oldgate waypoint this morning, throwing down marks in all directions, summoning cadavers and creatures to trail behind her like the tail of a rotting comet, it occured to me to ponder the joys of casting on the move.

Time was when the way motion locked down at the start of a spell and didn't release until the end made for one of the defining divides between casters and melee. An assumption underpinned all: magic takes concentration.

Casting could be interrupted in all kinds of ways. A spell could fizzle or fail due to lack of skill. You could be out of practise or out of luck. A smart clout with a shield, the barge of a shoulder - a caster could miss her mark, fluff a line, drop a reagent, mess up a gesture. Casting spells; a delicate business.

My introduction to MMORPGs came with EverQuest, where to this day spellcasters need to keep their feet firmly planted when casting. There are workarounds but the intent is if you want to spell and run, play a bard or a hybrid.

The first time I recall being able to move and cast at the same time as a pure magic-user was in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. There was a clever trade-off; casting made you slow. I liked it. It seemed liberating, not needing to stand in place, yet kept the urgency, the nod to concentration.

As time passed and the genre opened wide such considerations lost their power. The connection between MMOs and RPGs drifted. Casting in place was a thing our ancestors did, not us. Not any more.

Although, I wonder, is that true? And do I even know? If I listed the MMORPGs I've played in the last few years, could I say with certainty which let casters spell on the fly? Let's see...

Some games I've played in the last year.

• World of Warcraft - Erm, I think you have to stand still as a Mage and a Warlock? Not sure.
• WoW Classic - Pretty sure you have to stay still here. Wouldn't swear to it, though.
• EverQuest - My Magician has to stand still. I'm guessing all pure casters do.
• EverQuest II - Wait, I should know this one... Oh, I remember. It's complicated. See below.
• Guild Wars 2 - You pretty much get a penalty notice if you ever stop moving, so yes.
• Rift - Don't recall having to stop to do anything in Rift. Everyone's some kind of hybrid anyway.
• Neverwinter - Hmm. Free movement while casting. Probably...
• Lord of the Rings Online - Long time since I played a caster there. Not at all sure but yes?
• Final Fantasy XIV - I suspect even some melees have to stand still. Combat is very formal.
• Vanguard Emulator - As in the original, casting snares you but doesn't root you.
• Riders of Icarus - Yeah, you can cast and move in this one.
• Secret World Legends - Ditto.

How did I do? Feel free to grade me in the comments.

The very fact that I struggle to remember in most cases suggests it  can't be something that impinges all that urgently on my enjoyment. If it bugged me I'd remember. Wouldn't I?

Guild Wars 2 stands out as by far the fastest-paced, most dynamic of the games on that list. Nothing else really comes anywhere close. That's the game I've played far more than any other for the last seven years. Read much into that?

EQII is interesting for a couple of reasons. First off, I play it every day and I still couldn't bring to mind the specific mechanics. I do mainly play a melee class but I do have a couple of pure casters, a Necromancer and a Wizard, both played in combat this year if not this month. You'd think I'd know.


I would have said they could cast and move but then I remembered one of the specific benefits listed on the buff automatically applied on entering Blood of Luclin solo instances: the ability to cast spells while moving. So normally you can't.

From this I learn either that I don't pay attention to such things or that I don't have a strong preference or that I quickly acclimatize and accept the conventions of whichever game I'm playing. In fact, all of the above.

I do know that if I've been playing a game that allows casting while moving immediately before playing one that doesn't I trip over the step. But I pick myself up and carry on. 

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is about the one upcoming game (that I care about) where this might matter. They agree. It's in the FAQ:

Most spells can be cast when you are moving, however they will more often than not slow down your movement speed. Some spells will require you to stand and not move; likewise, some spells may not slow your movement speed. Additionally, while most spells are spoken, some are gestured, the latter being very handy when an area is silenced by a player or NPC. 

Makes sense. Basically, Vanguard rules. Pantheon is basically Vanguard 2. Although, probably a good decision not to call it that, even if they could have, which, I guess, legally, they couldn't.

Anyway, there is no real upshot to all this. I just happened to think about it, which I haven't for a long time, and thought it might be worth mentioning. My takeaway seems to be that I don't have a particularly strong preference but if I had to come down one side or the other I'd drop, roll, dodge and fling a fireball at whoever was asking.

All at the same time.

Ancient News : EQ2

Today is the start of Blaugust which means, among other things, a flurry of very short posts. There's no way I'm going to get one of my regular thousand-word epics up every single day for a month.

Of course, the rules are much more lax this year. I don't have to post every day. But I'm going to try .

It may mean a lot more news posts. Maybe some screenshot specials. The air may get a little thin at times.

Fortunately this August is shaping up to be extremely busy in MMOdom. The return of the Festival of the Four Winds in GW2 was an early sighting of what I am guessing will be a whole flotilla of spoiler attempts by various developers, aiming to head off the mass defections that always accompany an imminent World of Warcraft expansion.

Daybreak have gone for both a major Game Update and a long weekend of bonuses. I'm about to go look at the solo version of the new Fabled Dungeons of Guk as soon as I finish this but before I do that, here's a public service announcement, which I cribbed from the utterly essential EQ2 Traders Corner:

From 12:01 AM PT on Tuesday, July 31, 2018 until 11:59 PM PT on Monday, August 6, 2018, members throughout Norrath will receive both double status and double currency!

Plus, on live servers, all players will also earn double Planar Ethereal coins! If you're playing on a TLE server, you'll earn twice as many Hunter's Coins! Paired with the aforementioned double currency bonus, this means that members' Ethereal and Hunter's coin earnings will QUADRUPLE! This is the perfect time to work through that second wave of Ethereals!

Double status is always a big deal in Norrath. I just happen to have the Nebulous Newsies quests waiting on several characters for just such an opportunity, so that's my weekend sorted.

What's more, any and every Level 110 character that logs in between now and August 14th gets a free Ancient ability scroll. That's also big thing, trust me.

There is a slight drawback. You have to have the spell or combat ability already in your book at Grandmaster level before you can use the scroll to upgrade it. Even my best-geared character, the Berserker, doesn't have any Grandmaster abilities between level 101 and 110 yet. The rest are lucky if they even have any at Expert.

He does have one at Master though and it's his absolute favorite. It's Bloodbath IX, the one where he spins around and does huge damage to everything around him in a 360 degree circle (as if there's any other kind).

To upgrade that will take 55 days using the auto-upgrade system. It sounds like a long time but it's just a background training mechanic. The time soon passes. It means that he'll have his best (well, he loves it...) AE at Ancient by the time the next expansion arrives. Which is kind of exciting.

I have another 110 and a 109 who will be 110 well before August 10th but it's going to be a good old while before either of them can use the free Ancient. One day, though...

If you have a max level character or one that could get there before the tenth of August, don't miss out on this great deal. Free is the best price you're going to get!

(And I promise all the posts won't be as ugly as this one. All that red and black... reminds me of a GeoCities page from the 90s...).

Too Much, Too Soon : EverQuest, GW2, Pantheon

Something that was mentioned in passing during the Pantheon stream about the tendency of newer MMOs to over-reward struck a chord with me. Casting my mind back to the early days of EverQuest, two of the most motivating aspects of the pacing were the five level gaps between spell upgrades for casters and the relatively sparse, partially random chance of acquiring better armor and weapons.

Given that even the lowest levels seemed to take a very long time, waiting five levels for every new set of spells could be frustrating. The significant upside was that impact those new spells had when you did get them was immense, even game-changing.

The acquisition of a new pet could transform the gameplay of a Magician or a Necromancer out of all recognition. With the arrival of each set of spells, things that had been out of reach would become, if not easy, then entirely possible.

Your character might suddenly be able to breathe underwater or fly (okay, levitate). Leveling up didn't merely mean a percentage increase to DPS and some more hit points - it meant you could do new things, almost as though you were suddenly playing a new class.

Similarly a single, fortuitous drop from a Named mob could raise your character's game substantially. Acquiring a weapon that procced Snare or Fear might allow your character to kite mobs and thereby solo when previously she'd needed a partner or a group to do anything much at all.

A rare sight!

At the time, though, this didn't necessarily seem like such a great trade-off. Oh, it was wonderful when it happened, but for every bonanza level ending in zero or five there were several levels of increasingly arduous diminishing returns, where each session could seem like a struggle and a Ding! could end up leaving you feel weaker not stronger. For every life-changing drop there might be countless disappointments as camps dragged on, Nameds failed to spawn and rare drops eluded the RNG.

When EverQuest moved to giving new spells every level instead of every five I was initially wary. It seemed as though something would be lost. At the lower end of the level range, to some degree at least, that turned out to be true. In general, though, the pace of that particular MMO was so stately that a single level provided plenty of time to come to terms with each set of new abilities before the next appeared.

Also, casters in EQ get a lot of spells. The amount you would get all in one go after five levels could be overwhelming. Even spread out there were always enough to go around, something that never changed even when the level range eventually stretched to three figures.

When my Magician dinged 90 last week she went on a spell-buying spree. The scrolls she needed to buy ran into double figures. Of those almost none were upgrades to existing spells. Most were new abilities entirely. It was an entertaining and satisfying session.

In time I came to prefer the "every level" approach. I definitely wouldn't revert to a five level spread. It's nice to have something to look forward to every level and since levels don't exactly fly by the sense of anticipation is retained. That's not something I can say for GW2, where "Reward Tracks" were recently added to World vs World.

Reward Tracks have existed in Structured PvP for a long time as a means of providing players who don't do PvE with most of what they would get if they did. Whether it's a good idea or not to attach the rewards from one part of the game to the gameplay from another is a question I don't propose to debate right now. That decision having been made, however, I do take issue with the implementation.

Much more typical.

Rather than add any sense of excitement, anticipation or satisfaction, mostly what the coming of Reward Tracks to WvW has brought for me is irritation and inconvenience. GW2 is already infamous for showering players with an endless rain of bags and boxes to be opened, many of which contain yet  further boxes and bags. The Reward Tracks follow that pattern almost to the point of parody.

As I ran with the zerg my limited inventory space was already constantly filling up with loose pieces of white, blue and green quality weapons and armor, the main function of which is to be salvaged and sold on the Trading Post. Along with spikes and similar items intended only to be sold to NPC vendors for a few copper and the mats from the deconstruction of the said items, plus the bags filled with the salt tears of our  foes (not literally, sadly; just more mats) space runs out fast.

Now, to that monsoon of convertible currency, we have to add box after box of "Rewards" from dungeons or PvE maps that, you might imagine, were I to want, I would be doing instead of what I actually am doing. All of those have to be opened and dealt with, either in the odd hiatus as we cata down a recalcitrant fortification or enjoy a rare two-minute drinks break, or else at the end of the session.

Often it takes me fifteen or twenty minutes to clear my bags. More. An activity I used to look forward to as a treat, it long ago lost its allure and now threatens to become a chore I resent.

So, there's a balance to be achieved between a satisfying flow of meaningful rewards and an endless drip-feed of things you don't want but can't bring yourself to destroy. Modern day EverQuest still hits that balance, just about, although I notice even there that I spend more time clearing and re-clearing my bags than I used to do.

Whether contemporary players would ever be content with a "less is more" approach, though, I am not so sure. I imagine my objections to the Reward Tracks in WvW would put me in a very small minority of dissatisfied players. Most would probably want the rewards to come faster even than they do, whereas I'd rather see them removed completely.

Pantheon probably isn't attempting to reach the average contemporary player let alone the average GW2 player, so the benchmarks it will need to hit may be very different. Still, getting to that sweet spot, where satisfaction and frustration balance each other out, won't be easy. The ideal would be to make every reward welcome, even thrilling, yet still have them appear with a periodicity that isn't off-putting.

I'm not sure if that's achievable but it's definitely something worth shooting for.