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 Wednesday SoE surprised everyone with the rollout of GU48 in EQ2. We knew it was coming but everyone figured it would either be later in the week what with Fan Faire taking everyone’s time and energy the previous weekend. This update added a ton of content that Lore and I were looking forward to so Comcast deciding to help us celebrate the release by having our internet connection drop off was NOT appreciated.
Spore is one of those games I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. It has a ‘god game’ aspect with initially creating your creature and having it evolve. Eventually it will hit the city builder stage (a gamestyle I enjoy) and then the Civ-game, which is also a gamestyle I enjoy. Finally your creations venture off into space, in what I assume will be Gal Civ-like 4X game.
What makes it unique is that, while a single-player game, it will populate your world with the creatures of others, lending it a multiplayer aspect. The creature creator itself was released earlier this summer, and I spent some time playing with it. I don’t know how practical in-game any of my critters will prove, nor do I know how any of the ones I downloaded to my creator will be. It’s nifty though how easily you can take someone else’s creature into your game. The intent is to have creature-casts as well as buddy (and ignore) lists. It launches in one week, and I’m excited to see how it plays out!
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?!?.
If I’m going to start posting more about my adventures in the various games I guess I should give a quick rundown of my various characters.
Everquest 1:
Bjoern - Level 30ish Dwarven Berserker created to play with the Tuesday night Nostagia group. No last name yet but I’m thinking of something like Ta’Rock.
Soaridor - Level 53 Drakin Mage created to check out the new race and, due to the increased speed of leveling, ended up joining the Friday night Nostalgia group. Currently replaced by Sisca but I may start alternating depending on the needs of the group.
Sisca Mainacier - Level 56 Human Monk, this was my original character in EQ, created back in October of 1999. I recently moved him over from The Tribunal when Nostalgia was working on Vox/Naggy. While I thought the tactic we came up with for Mage pulling Naggy was cool - basically the druid would cast her translocate spell on Soaridor and I’d run in and aggro the lair and get them to just outside then accept the TL to clear agro then gate back to the where I had bound just outside the throne room - I thought having a monk around would be more efficient. Besides, Sisca was still 51 since I’d held him there for the express purpose of pulling Vox. Got him to 56 so far but after the trip to Old Sebilis last week I’m thinking that depending on who’s available and where we go Soaridor’s DPS might be more beneficial at times so I may start platooning them.
I rolled my warrior, Loredena, on the Tribunal on 9/1/99. A coworker had convinced me to play EQ by telling me ‘it’s D&D online!’. Despite a confusing UI, corpse-runs, blind Barbarian in Halas and everything else that went with a new online game, I was immediately enthralled. While Lore was my much-loved main, played most days, I rolled up other avatars to play with friends. With Traveller (my coworker) and his friend Nine, I played a dwarven cleric named Serenya on Sunday afternoons, eventually joined by Sisca with his wizard.With Traveller, Nine’s sister Bobaloo, and their friend Hammey, I rolled a different dwarven cleric named Velma (on Fennin Ro) to play one night a week as part of the Scooby group (we had Daphyne, HE enchanter; Scrapy, dwarf warrior; Scooby, WE druid; Shaggey, barb shaman; and Phreadd, human paladin)
By the time we stopped playing six years later, Serenya was 65, Loredena was 55, and Velma was 52 – we had moved Scooby group to the Trib, and I switched to playing Serenya with them. While Lore wasn’t played as much, those two once-a-week groups were still going strong, right up until the end.
In the years since, I would occasionally log in just to look around, but I never tried to play. Until this spring.I have been reading the blogs of Tipa and Stargrace for awhile, and they began writing about EQ Nostalgia.From their posts and the ensuing wave of nostalgia a new guild was born, Nostalgia on the Luclin server, and Sisca and I decided we wanted to be a part of that.
Last night I spent some time making sure all of my various alt’s in WoW have emptied their mailboxes in preparation for canceling my account.
Around May I started to get bored, as did Lore I think, and we sort of put the group on hold for awhile. Both Lore and I have hunters that are at 67 and the temptation is there to make that last push to 70 but she said she just couldn’t muster the energy and she has a much higher tolerance for these things than I do - every time I consider it my head starts hurting.
So today it ends.
I may be back at some point but I have to say that nothing I’ve seen coming out of WotLK is making me think that will be what brings me back.
I’ve been planning for weeks now to start posting more I’ve just been trying to figure out what direction I wanted to take the site.
I think that I’ve finally decided that I’m mainly going to use it to post on my current experiences in my various MMO’s along with the occasional opinion piece. I’ll probably be changing the categories to reflect this over the next several days.
I’ve also changed the site theme because I’m no longer playing WoW (more on that later) but I’m not completely happy with the new one so there may be more updates later.
Now if I can just convince the wife to chip in with her point of view we might get something going here.
For those that don’t keep up with EQ2, especially the changes that are on Test, last week they implemented a very major change for tradeskillers. Basically they removed the tradeskill instances that had been present in each of the starting villages and moved the tradeskill stations into various shops around the major city zones (North Qeynos, South Qeynos etc.). Needless to say this has created quite the uproar in the crafting community as they feel they’re being yanked out of their comfortable instances and put on public display for no good reason. It doesn’t help that the city zones are some of the laggiest in the game, even when there are no people in them.
As you might have noticed they did a play test of the new system last night and, while it lived up - or possibly down - to the players expectations as an unmitigated disaster from a gameplay perspective I also felt it was at least beneficial. After about 30 minutes of testing Glendral, the tradeskill person, basically called a halt and gathered everyone around for a Q&A session. For the first time the reasons for wanting to make the changes were given…they want to make the tradeskill community a more intregal part of the overall EQ2 community. This sounds like a noble cause but, if you play the game, you might be a bit confused I know I was. You see I already think of our crafters as an intergal part of our community if for nothing else than their breadth of knowledge about the game in addition to their good humor and company. If what they’re actually trying to do is make the crafters a more “needed” part of the game then they’re going to have to work on making the items they produce more valued by the adventurers and that’s a whole other issue.
Personally, I think they’re worried that a new player, or worse a reviewer from some website, will log in to the game and find the two major cities all but empty. I hate to break it to them but this has been the case almost from the begining. Adventurers rarely go to the city zones except to pickup a new city writ and instead conduct all of their business in the smaller villages. The crafters spend most of their time in the tradeskill instance, also located in the village of their choice so any business conducted outside of the instance is conducted in that village. Once an adventurer decides to go off hunting he leaves directly from that village or, at higher levels, zones into the “harbor” section of the city proper and immeadiatly uses the bell to be on his way. So I think the real goal here is to use the tradeskillers to make these under-utilized zones look busy. If that’s the case I think it’s a pretty crappy way to treat some of your most loyal players.
I’ve tried to remain positive though, especially since Glendral really seemed to want to get the player feedback and I know from having met many of the dev team that they really do care about the game. I just think that sometimes they get focused on something and lose site of their players.
After the break is a copy of the posting I made in the feedback thread, I’m posting it here as kind of an open letter to the EQ2 Dev team.
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