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From my notes:

Odus is continuing the void storyline, and bringing it to a close.  It will tell us what happened to change the Erudites to how they are now, and give more lore/backstory about both the Kerra and the Ratonga (apparently there have been a LOT of requests for more Ratonga lore), as well as Al’Kabor and Al’Rod — backstory for Paineel too.   Hinted that the Rime are somehow involved?   There will be a ‘new’ villian — hinted at both the Rime and Sathir, so not sure.   They said that Odus is part of an overarching storyline that has yet to be told, and that what happened in the past will be reflected upon the future. 

They plan to bring back forum quests around the lore, and interweave those with in-game lore events.   They indicated that Kerafym is not gone.   Also, that dragon from Icy Keep will be back, all grown up, before the expansion — a two group raid, that they indicated was not intended to be particularly difficult, and is not tied directly to Halas.

The Erollisi storyline begun in February continues, they reminded us of the Innoruk quest line stating that ‘The daughter of hate, crowned in treachery, sealed the fate of Valor’s twin’ and thus the opening of the Shard of Hate leads to the opening of the Shard of Love.

Other odds and ends:  Kaitheel was surprised at how upset people were at Gardy Giftgiver having been beaten up, and we can expect a quest line around him this forthcoming Frostfell.  There are no new deities being added with Sentinal’s Fate, but that does not preclude more arriving before or after.  Minor deities may also return to the world, though not necessarily able to be worshiped (also, they aren’t extending the deity quest lines another tier).   Currently the LoN dev team is entirely separate from those of EQ and EQ2, and the lore does not tie well; they would like better integration.  Considering adding some small quest lines such that one is challenged to a card game in a tavern, which will trigger a LoN scenario.

A couple things I noticed — the dev team (influenced by Brenlo) are definitely making changes to encourage the less-hardcore amongst their audience. Someone complained about the research assistants, and specifically complained that it reduced what he could sells Masters at. Brenlo’s response? ‘As a 76 ranger with 30pp to my name, I don’t consider that a bad thing’. I’ll point out as well that when the research assistants were mentioned at the opening night kickoff, there were a cluster of young men who loudly booed; the rest of the crowd cheered. It appears that even amongst those hardcore enough to pay for Fan Faire, that it was in general a popular move.

During the session in which the change to all raids going forward was discussed, such that at each pull of a boss mob one can, through lore, set the difficulty level, a top-tier raider complained that this reduced his guild’s sense of accomplishment. This elicited a handful of responses: From the devs, they pointed out that since it IS handled through lore, the entire encounter changes based on the difficulty level, such that one might not even face the final boss on ‘easy mode’, and Rothgar pointed out the likelihood of achievements that indicate the mode/boss killed. Brenlo’s response was a bit more pointed — this is one of the few times I’ve heard a producer of any MMO state outright that it is a business decision. It is not cost-effective to produce raid zones that only 5% of the population ever sees (Brenlo’s stated percentage), and this change is in part to greatly increase the number of guilds that can work their way through the zones, and both see them and experience the lore.

FINALLY!

Almost 4 1/2 years after launch and I’ve got my first max level character. In fact this is my first max level character in 10 years of playing MMO’s.

Even scarier is that the next day:

Acsis only took me almost 3 years to cap.

Shortly after that Lore also managed to ding 80, I’m not sure what her played time is but I did manage to snag a screen shot of her ding

I also managed to get Sisca to 80 in Alchemy over the weekend so now I just need to get Acsis 10 more levels of Tailoring and I’ll go from 10 years of no characters at any level cap to 2 characters with both tradeskills and adventuring levels capped.

We also started doing the daily quest for Void Shards and managed to get the first 2 pieces and by the end of the week we’ll have the third. I think our next goal is to get Lore’s mage caught up and I wouldn’t mind getting my ranger leveled so we have a scout class to give us some versatility. I’d also like to spend some time mentoring guildies to see if we can put together a group and maybe start in on some of the TSO instances. I also want to get the crafting epic done with Sisca and Acsis is about halfway through the harvesting cloak so he’d like to finish that off as well.

So still plenty left to do and I haven’t even started in on my other 12 alts

Friday night Lore had to babysit a server upgrade so she wasn’t really going to be able to devote her full attention to gaming but she did want to get some play time in. We decided this would be a perfect opportunity to check out the new tradeskill instances from TSO. She could craft and if something needed her attention it wouldn’t be a big deal for her to stop for a few minutes.

Since she hadn’t really gotten any of her other tradeskillers through the introductory quest line in the Moors she brought along Serrenial, her 80 Provisioner. This matched up well with Sisca, 67 Alchemist (Sage line), and Acsis, 52 Tailor (Outfitter line), giving us coverage of all 3 of the base skill lines. So off we went to isle of Mara.

Apparently the Gnomes in Steamfont were having an issue and could use the help of some skilled crafters so Acsis fired up a portal and we headed off to see what we could do to help. When we arrived at Gnomeland Security we spent several minutes running around looking for someone to direct us before we realized that there was a new doorway that led to an underground research workshop. Zoning in there we saw this giant dragonbot on a rampage tearing up the place. Talking to the foreman revealed that they had built the dragonbot to help defeat the bot that had gone haywire and driven them out of Ak’Anon all those years ago but, again, something had gone wrong and he was malfunctioning. Not to worry though, they had a cunning plan! They would just build a bigger and more powerful bot to beat up the bot that they had built to beat up the first bot. Gnomish logic. Oh well they were willing pay good money, they were providing all the raws and I had a druid to get me the hell out if it all went horribly pear shaped.

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Fair warning, this is likely to ramble a bit.

Tuesday saw the release of the fifth EQ2 expansion – yes kids there are other MMO’s out there that don’t have War in the title anywhere and they’re still going strong. From all accounts the launch went pretty smooth, to be honest this has become expected from the EQ2 dev team so hats off to them for raising the bar.

Some initial impressions:

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Despite the title this isn’t a political post.

Since Lore had to work almost every night last week I started out the week doing the D.I.R.T.Y. quests to pick up some more of the furniture available from the vendor. Since I was going to Loping Plains anyway I swung by Kelethin and picked up the writs with both Sisca and Acsis because, with the guild halls, we can use all the status we can get. I also really want to get the harvest chest amenity, which is 5 million status up front.

After doing the first round of writs I realized that Acsis had almost 1.5 million status and Sisca had another 600,000 so with the 2 million we already had in escrow we were getting close. I became very focused on getting to 5 million and spent most of the week doing the D.I.R.T.Y. quests and a round or two of writs every night.

On Friday I realized that I was halfway through 67 and 70 was within reach so I became focused on reaching 70 before the release of The Shadow Odyssey. Either Lore or I have said in the past that we wanted to push to level X but we always managed to get side tracked by something – finishing off some gray quests just to get them out of the book so we could start, grinding up tradeskills so that we could catch up our spells and gear to make easier etc. – but for some reason this time I decided to force myself to stay focused.

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The Halloween event has started in EQ2 and Sisca, Lore, and Acis decided to kill things that go bump in the night. We first met up with goblin illusionists who made us look creepy; the fun part was, our look changed every time we zoned. His goblin friend suggested we pay a visit to Loping Plains, as a friend needed a meal, so off we went!

Here Acis and Lore as Vampire Twins — this one amused me greatly, since normally it is Sisca and Acsis who are mirror-twins.

The look changed again as we arrive in LP:

We grabbed the Nightmare rides to Sonborn cemetary


and headed in to meet this friend. We were accosted as we arrived — something bit my neck, and everything went black! I woke in the merchant shop, and went out to see if I could find out what was going on. I found a man in mourning and a priest dithering about trying to cleanse the man’s home — we agreed to go in and find the ritual book (the previous volunteer, with book, never returned) and perform the ceremony.

Sadly, I left my camera behind, so we’ll have to do without pictures from here-on unless Sisca remembered his.

The haunted house was actually pretty entertaining: get jumped by vampires, find a key; retrieve items for the ritual; get jumped by vampires and find another key. Repeat until all ghosts are seen (mom, 2 kids, baby), vampire-filled coffins are torched, and so on. When we were finally ready to perform the ceremony, the ghosts were successfully sent home, but we were accosted by the vampire sire. After chasing him from room to room we found ourselves in the basement. As he died, he mocked us, saying that he was not the source of the evil, and perhaps we should look in the mirror! Doing so, we were accosted by someone who looked remarkably like Sisca! Once he was properly put to rest, we explored again — the ghostly family had departed, but they left behind a toy chest containing a mask, which Sisca claimed (and taking the mask was itself a quest btw). We then went out to reassure the priest that the house was cleansed.

We actually ended up cleansing the house twice more, so that each of us could acquire a mask; we also discovered that starting with the 2nd time through, L&L books were scattered throughout the house, allowing us to pick up some of our missing ones. Each time we zoned in we acquired the cleansing quest anew, so we were able to get both quest rewards, as well as quest exp each time (though the AA was only for the first time). Still, there were enough named on the first round to get a fair bit of AA, and Sisca and Loredena both leveled during the runs through.  /edit to add:  The funniest part to me was that Sisca was the doppleganger all 3 times!

Since the last EQ2 update I’ve been pulled by competing desires.   Guild Halls our coming next update (probably today!), so we want to get the guild to 30 – as of Sunday, we’re 70% through 29!  Considering our size (4 active members) I’m really happy with how far we’ve come!    At first I was running all of my avatars through the harvesting quests – the first time with each, you receive AA, and you get guild status.  Also, 10 gives a scroll for one’s house, 20 a statue, and 30 a title.  I think Loredena, Serrenial, and Fellbrood made it to the title – Serr can harvest tier 8, so she actually did all harvesting quests, while I actually pushed Fellbrood’s armorcrafting to 40 just to open up another harvesting tier.   I like the evil side statue (a dragon) better then good’s ( a knight) but don’t really have the energy to grind out that many more harvest runs with my other evils.  Taking my lower level avatars harvesting in higher-level tiers was pretty good guild status (at 30 Lemi got 16K for tier 7, which is better then Serr gets doing a level 80 writ!) but rather slow and death-prone.  I did do all the levels of the crafting journeyman series with each as I went though, as well as Duggin’s Hungry Halfling quests where available.

This last update also added a murder mystery – the Seeress of the Temple of Life (Rodcet Nife’s prophet) was killed.   Everyone ran some of the (rather boring) bone chip quests to get the orb to 100%, and then we spent time solving the mystery on both sides.   I really enjoyed the first time through on either end, though it most definitely is time consuming!  But, the evil and good sides are of course close parallels, so not quite as entertaining the second time, and the third and fourth was rather boring.   The quest rewards are exceedingly good, so I’m glad I ran it with my main avatars, but it was a bit tedious towards the last.   One thing about the rewards is quite nifty – two of them grow with you!   They are at the x5 level, and they can be mounted to display in your room.   Mounting and then unmounting them (making them usable again) will set them at the closest x5 level.  Thus, should you acquire them at 25, you can level them to 35 and so on to 75.  This makes them exceedingly good rewards all told.

When I was a kid my parents were involved with a wide variety of groups from garden club to bridge groups to bowling leagues while I was involved in scouting and church groups. As an adult, back before the spread of the Internet, I was in my share of bowling leagues or softball teams. I also was a member of HAL-PC (the Houston Area League of PC Users) back in the early 90’s and not only participated in the BBS message boards but also attended the monthly meetings and other social gatherings. All of these things were really about finding a group of people that you enjoyed hanging out with and creating an excuse to hang out, laugh, joke and talk about the things you had in common.

While listening to a recent Van Hemlock podcast [27 August 2008]  I came to realize that, for me at least, MMO’s in general and specifically the guilds or groups of friends that I play them with take the place of those social gatherings. They are primarily an excuse to get together and laugh, joke and talk about our common interests and maybe pick up some new interest.

Even the hardcore raiding guilds could be considered the natural evolution of those social structures. If you’ve ever been around a bowling alley on league night you’ll realize that while many of the leagues are an excuse to get together and drink beer, some of them are actually very intense and competitive with their members spending a lot of their time perfecting their game. (Hmmm…there’s a whole other post in this.)

Since Lore and I are hoping to grow our guild, The Revellers on Permafrost, I think I’m going to try and use this realization to craft our recruiting message to be something other than the standard “friendly, casual, group of friends” message that most casual guilds such as ours end up with.

So if you’re looking for a guild on Permafrost that’s more like popping in to your local pub than clocking in to your second job. Where you can find someone that can help you with your tradeskill questions or put together a group to help you finish off that heritage quest that’s been in your journal for months or just find someone to chat with while you run around harvesting/soloing. In short a place “Where everybody knows your name…” (NORM! – and if you get that you’re probably around the average age of the guild). Check out The Revellers either at our website or in game.

Last night we had originally planned to spend a leisurely evening killing some storms but Lore’s new Mystic, Crystalshade, was still in Sundered Splitpaw and she needed one more quest to get the glowing shard that would allow her to teleport back. So I started the storm killing with Klubya while she headed in to try and complete the solo quest in the Arena. Unfortunately, she’s never been a great soloer and hasn’t really gotten a handle on the Mystic yet so she was unable to take down the multiple encounter.

After killing off one last storm Klubya gated back and we decided to tackle the hideout mission again since it was the quickest that we had done. This basically involves going into an instance, slaughtering gnolls – any day you can slaughter gnolls is a good day as for as Klubya is concerned – then using the ever present explosive barrels to blow up their supplies. 30 minutes later we had blown up the last of their supply crates, woot, done lets get out of here…oh wait, it didn’t count for her shard?!?.

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