Everquest II Archives - Page 9 of 11 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Other MMO Wants

July 3, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is going to be pure hell on wheels for me. Not only is this my last day before our vacation… but also about 10:30 last night I got a nasty surprise when I checked work email. Apparently there is a big impromptu meeting going on today, at which I have to represent the department and speak intelligibly about everything we do. How do you cram a million things into a quick talk that doesn’t bore all the non-technical people. Also as a result I had to scramble around the house to find a pair of slacks that actually fits me. Dropping 8-10 pants sizes in a few months tends to deplete the stock of clothing you don’t wear often.

Basically this morning I need to bang out this post as soon as possible so I can get into work and prepare for the event. As a result I got up and around this morning at 5 am rather than my normal 5:30… here is hoping the time can be spent wisely. I would normally just skip posting on a morning like this… but I am afraid that if I skip a day my routine will unravel and usher in yet another one of my 4-6 month lapses in posting.

Other MMO Wants

On Monday I made my Ten MMO Must Haves post and it kind blew up… as in it seemed to get far more traction than most of my posts do. The only bad thing about it all… is as soon as I posted I thought of a few more items that I should have put on the list. Listing Beards in the final slot was maybe not the most well thought out thing I have ever done… but in reality it is a metaphor. Every player I know has one feature that they look for in the character creator. My friend for example is always hunting for actual blonde hair… instead of the orange mess that most MMOs have. That is one of the most important things to her, and just like me and beards… if it is not there she does not feel as close to the character. Here goes a quick stab at the rest of a list.

1 – Mentoring

This one is huge, and I have no clue why I left it off the list. I did the list as a whole on the fly Monday morning as I thought of things that I really want in every MMO. Essentially those who are not familiar with the term, it is the practice of allowing higher level players to drop down to the same level as lower level characters. The first game I ever experienced in was City of Heroes… and I felt it was absolutely revolutionary. Eventually Everquest 2 added it in, and now Rift and Guild Wars 2 also have similar systems that have improved upon the base concept. Essentially I want a way to be able to play with my friends… no matter how high above them I am. I have a mantra that “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.

2 – Single Server / Cross Server Architecture

Back to the mantra of “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.. the traditional server structure is way too restricting. If you have a small group of friends that all organize at exactly the same time… and pick one server ahead of time.. it is no big deal. However if you have many different pools of friends, that you feel constantly torn between.. servers are pure hell. This is the case with me… at any given point I have groups of friends playing a dozen or more games and on each roughly a half dozen different servers. I have to unfairly pick and choose between who I play with. Stop making me choose. Let players communicate and group freely with any player who is playing your game.

3 – Single Account ID

This one has been massively controversial, but I have warmed to it over time. If you scroll back far enough, there are even posts of me rallying against RealID, but again I got used to it. The thing I want is the ability to create a single account id, like the later BattleTag system that is not connected to your real world identity. Then let me choose which players to give that ID out to… and in doing so they magically get to see every character I have regardless of where I am playing. Additionally it would be amazing if the system also allowed for friending single character names… for those individuals you need to have communication with… but don’t want to give them everything. It is such a pain in the but to send your friends a long list of a dozen alts for them to add to their friends list each time someone new joins the game.

4 – Multiple Paths of Advancement / Endgame

The answer to the endgame should not always be Raid or PVP. There should be something else… something a player who does not have the time to raid, or does not have the penchant for pvp can do to constantly better their character in game. This could be something like the Alternate Advancement and Planar Advancement systems in Everquest 2 and Rift… or could be a series of epic quests that allow your character to obtain very slowly raid like gear like TSW has implemented. There needs to be a way for players to feel like they are constantly evolving their characters. It is when characters start to feel stagnant that players lose interest with a game and leave. Help me not get bored with your game, by giving me lots of things to do when I hit maximum level. Daily Quests are fine… but they are not a solution to anything.

5 – Alternate Leveling Paths

This is something that has mutated over the years, and I really wish there was a way to undo it. When Everquest launched it had a distinct leveling path for each race in the game. While some of them quickly merged together once you hit the second or third zone… they still started out as unique experiences. When World of Warcraft launched, you had roughly three leveling tracks per race… and this still ended up giving you a fresh way to level your alts. Now in games like Rift and SWTOR… there is a single track for every member of a faction… and as a result by the time you level your alts… you have nothing really to look forward to. Give us multiple ways to get to the end of your game… do not penalize players for wanting to jump around and try new content paths. I realize multiple paths of content takes more development time… but it also improves the quality of your game for players in the long run and makes alting far more sticky.

6 – No Faction Wall

This is a concept that needs die in a huge inferno. This is without a doubt probably the worst seemingly permanent lineage of World of Warcraft. The concept of setting up a red and a blue faction that are diametrically opposed and can in no way communicate is just a shitty way to create a game. Again back to the mantra of… “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”. If your friend has to sacrifice what he wants to play… for the greater good.. he will always regret at least somewhat the path not taken. Additionally it is very easy for two friends who joined the game at different times to end up on opposite sides of the battle field.

Everquest and Everquest 2 had the best faction systems in the game… in that no only could you communicate with any player freely, but if you so chose to… and with copious amounts of work.. you could raise your faction and be able to function as a member of those societies. Additionally in Everquest 2 they gave the option of betraying your faction through a serious of quests and permanently changing your allegiance. Faction Walls are just a non-creative solution to the problem of setting up PVP. Rift probably did the best decision it ever did when it released the “Faction as Fiction” patch, making it so that both Defiant and Guardian could group, communicate, and guild freely. Additionally they set up 3 new factions that were not connected to either of the original… which recruit players to fight battles for them. This gave you three way pvp without having to make life restricting to your players.

Wrapping Up

This one is going to be extra short today. I’ve spent thirty minutes digging into six more items on the cutting room floor that MMOs should have. I need to finish getting ready and get into work so I can prep for the event. I hope you all have a great day, and maybe this will jiggle loose some other ideas you have about what a “best of breed” MMO needs to have. Tomorrow I am off, so my intent is to try and finish up the second part of the “How To Rift” series.

Ten MMO Must Haves

July 1, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I got up roughly 15 minutes before the alarm went off… and decided to that rather than be groggy later… I would go ahead and get up and around. Right now I am kind of questioning that decision, since the bed seems like a really amazing idea. I had a really spastic yesterday as I never could really decide on a game to play. Since Final Fantasy beta was closed by the time I got up and around I ended up cycling through Everquest, Rift, Vanguard, and Defiance never quite sticking in any of them. As a result I don’t have much excitement to talk about… and I am nowhere near finished with my second part of How To Rift… so I am going off in a completely different direction.

Ten MMO Must Haves

Basically over the years I have noticed several features that I expect most MMOs to have, and when they are not there it greatly harms my enjoyment for the long run. I keep cycling back to the ones that do have most of the list. Granted this is in no way a complete list, as I am sure there are things I have omitted for the sake of a clean number, but these are definitely all things I would prefer to see in an upcoming title. These are not necessarily in order of importance… but more the order in which I thought of them.

1 – Random Events

Nothing breaks up the monotony of questing and killing mobs like a random army invading the countryside. I have always liked when random things happen in games, I even like random loot so long as it is not something I need to progress forwards. In the post Rift MMO world, I feel like random things happening in your world is an absolute must have. When it is missing, the game feels extremely stale to me. When it is done well, you forget what you are doing and follow along the flow of what is happening in a specific zone. This should be events chosen from a long list of potential ones… not the same event happening over and over like in Guild Wars 2. Their implementation did not serve to make the world feel alive, but instead made it feel even more like a carnival ride resetting itself every so often.

2 – Passive Grouping

I should be able to help other players out, and they help me without having to worry about whether or not I tagged the mob first. Grouping should be something you do to hang out with people, not something you feel obligated to do constantly just to get through game content. I feel as though simply touching a mob should give me credit for whatever that mob is required for. Rift and Guild Wars definitely do this extremely well… but when I go back to a game that does not have it… I become a kill stealing asshole. I just forget that mob tagging is an actual thing that is still in games. If you do not have passive mob tagging… you are bad and should feel bad.

3 – Puzzles and Collectibles

I have the tendencies in me to power level myself to the cap and then get bored feeling there is nothing left to do. If your game has little puzzles and collectible bits it helps to make me stop and smell the roses. I feel for other players this becomes a meta game all in itself. These systems all seem relatively simple to implement, but it seems like there is a greater return on investment as far as gluing a player to your game. Rift and GW2 both have amazing examples of puzzles, and EQ2 has probably the most extensive collection system I have seen in a game. I greatly prefer there to be something for me to always be on the lookout for, that offers interesting gameplay and forces me to stop quest grinding.

4 – Moveable UI Elements

This one is huge to me. Essentially I will if given the option set my UI to look the same from game to game. I like certain windows in certain locations because it helps me not have to think about where things are. When you play lots of different MMOs this becomes something extremely important. Additionally I find myself setting up all my hotbars the same… 0 is the interrupt key, 7 is my combo point dump, 5 is charge/deathgrip, etc. As a result I really hate your game when you force me to play with your idea of how the UI should look. No matter how much research you have put into your UI, it is not ideal for everyone… and as a result you should never force players into your chosen UI design box. Make the windows unlock able and moveable either through the default UI like Rift or through Addons like WoW.

5 – Map with User Defined Waypoints

This is another big one for me. Navigating your world should be easy for the players. I should be able to open my map, click a point that I want to travel to and then get some kind of directions as to how to get there. This can be as simple as an Icon on the edge of the mini-map showing you the direction of your destination, or as complex as some sort of golden path or arrow pointing the way. Additionally it would be really amazing if your system allowed player defined permanent waypoints. That way we could actively mark whenever we found something cool in your world. TSW does an amazing job of this.. and I have tons of little markers scattered through all my maps pointing to nifty things I found. This is definitely something all games should emulate.

6 – Sortable/Searchable Bank and Inventory

First off let me say.. that the concept of physical bags with limited storage is something no one should ever do again. I greatly prefer one big inventory space because usually with that comes the ability to sort, filter, and search the contents of your inventory. Rift does an interesting hybrid model, in that they still have physical bags, but they have a sort and search functionality that makes up for the fact of having to juggle multiple containers rather than just one. Trying to find things in your bags should not be considered a meta game… and you should help players out so they have to spend as little time doing this as possible. There have been times I have logged into EQ2… looked at the state of my bags and logged out immediately because I did not want to spend the next 30 minutes clearing them out. That game is the worst case scenario… but I have had similar happen in many other games as well. Make your inventory system help the player rather than hinder them.

7 – Sell All Junk Button

If your game drops junk items from mobs aka “Greys” and you do not have a sell all junk button… you are a horrible person and should be drug out into the street and shot. Nothing is more frustrating than going through your inventory and having to manually sell a bunch of trash items that have no real purpose for existing other than to give you some cash. Better yet, don’t even drop the trash items and give us additional gold instead. I think the running theme of the last two should be that Inventory Maintenance is not a fun meta game. No one enjoys it, and all it does is make the player feel like they have just completely wasted their time. I am completely fine with getting additional cash in lieu of junk, but if you do have junk… for the love of god make a sell all crap button.

8 – AOE Looting

Thank you Rift for creating this construct… and thank you modern MMO developers for having the common sense to say “damn, why didn’t we have this” and adding it to your games. Nothing is more annoying than trying to select that one corpse from a pile of corpses that still has loot on it. My OCD will not let me go without searching all the bodies… it is like I knew that if I missed one… that would be the one that dropped some rare epic item. Again this is a cousin of the whole inventory maintenance is not a fun meta game… neither is looting. Better yet… all corpse interactions should be AOE as well… where the hell is my AOE skinning. The first company to give me AOE skinning, herbing, and mining of corpses… will be a god in my eyes.

9 – Full Character Appearance System

Now when I say this… I am not talking about Transmogrification. I could go on an hour long rant about how horrible that system is and how it is a half assed version of the good appearance systems. What I am talking about is additional sets of character doll slots that allow you to directly override the appearance of an item with another item. Rift has probably the best implementation overall right now, since you can have something like 12 wardrobe slots with ready to switch to outfits on the fly. The only gotcha there is due to their own constraints they had to implement a shitty “transmog” like system for doing the weapons. Players should never have to run back to a vendor to change their appearance… stop making them do busy work. I would love to see developers emulate the way the system works in EQ2, because you can literally change your appearance to anything in the game… no class restrictions.

10 – Facial Hair

I had a few other items I considered putting on the list… but honestly to me personally this one has to be here. If your game does not have the ability for me to give my character a nice beard, especially a moustache and goatee combo… I will hate your character creator and likely not play your game. I have no clue why this is so important to me… but it is. Namely I have seen the lack of facial hair in the Asian MMOs… but I struggled to find a look I could stomach in Guild Wars 2 as well. Additionally I cannot stand the “pretty boy” appearance that some games have… but I won’t go into that right now. Please for the love of god when you design your character creator… make Facial Hair a slider… not something that is attached to another attribute like hairstyle.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… my ten must haves for a modern MMO. Like I said, I am sure that it is not a complete list at all… and as soon as I post this… I will think of another 10 things that should have been on the list. These however are the things that immediately came to mind when being frustrated with MMOs that do not have them. I would be curious to hear about what your list is, and whether or not I have hit your key frustration points. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope I manage to stay fully conscious all day long since I got up so early.

Sinking Sands

June 24, 2013 by Belghast

Morning is being a pain in the butt today… or at least the whole trying not to fall back asleep thing is. For whatever reason I really did not sleep that super well last night, and as a result I am super exhausted this morning. Seems like a pretty horrible way to begin a new work week, so here is hoping that I figure out what switch I need to flip in my brain to wake the hell up. The worst part is, that this is going to be an extremely stressful work week, so I have to get my act together.

The Sinking Sands

I spent a good chunk of yesterday roaming around in the Sinking Sands region of Everquest II. This has always been one of my favorite zones, and I try my best not to skip it on any characters. I have a deep nostalgia for the region in part because I spent so much time in the Desert of Ro / Oasis of Marr area in Everquest. This zone is like a nostalgic love song to the original zones, and there are so many points of reference and mobs that make an appearance.

The only real negative is that the sand giants and wraiths are no longer dread worthy encounters. I can remember the constant chorus of “Sand Giant to Docks!” as yet another one of these death machines came roaming through the zone. Almost as a callout to that era, there is the ghost of a sand giant that paths right along the dock region named “Hatar”. Additionally Lockjaw still exists, but this time has his own dungeon rather than being a world spawn that will decimate the masses.

I think one of my favorite things about the zone is it is completely flush with named spawns. Each of them drops a single type of item, in flavors designed for each type of class. So essentially if the mob drops a ring, then it will drop one for priest, warrior, scout and mage. It feels like they have increased the spawn rate of these champions, because I can remember being out in the zone for days without ever encountering “Dune Digger”, a armadillo that spawns near the ramp leading down to the beach. However over the last few days I have seen him up almost every single time I have passed his spawn point.

The Lesser Faydark

I had made my way through the major quest lines of Sinking Sands when I noticed I was sitting at level 51. I checked the wiki and sure enough that put me pretty much ideally leveled to start on Lesser Faydark. Even dating back to the original Everquest, this has been a zone I disliked. In that game it was mostly for the fact that it was populated with lots of things that could kill you almost instantly. In EQ2, it is mostly due to my general dislike of “elven” and “fae” zones, and that it is annoyingly three dimensional. It feels extremely difficult to traverse it because of the constant changes in elevation, and the tunnels that are used to connect things up.

Additionally this zone is populated with a lot of flying things… that often times do not want to lower to the ground into melee range. Since I play almost entirely melee characters it makes it an extreme pain in the butt. However since I have never really done the quest chain I figured I would follow the timeline guide and start with the correct NPC and follow it through until I just could not. So far it is every bit as annoying as I remembered… since you hop around the zone wildly.

Another reason why I tend to avoid Lesser Faydark is it is off what they call the “golden path”. Everquest has a really robust questing system, and so long as you say on the golden path you get these blue markers on your map showing you there region for a given quest. However for whatever reason they decided only to apply these tools to a specific number of zones that make up the golden path. So if you choose to stray at all, you are on your own… thankfully I also have EQ2Maps which lets me search for what mobs spawn in what region. I think that is probably the single best improvement they could do to the game, go back through and apply the golden path treatment to ALL zones.

At the point at which I ended my Everquest II journey yesterday I was almost ready to ding 54, which is not bad considering I started the day at 48. Leveling in EQ2 is just a relaxing experience for me, and that is precisely what I needed yesterday. I keep thinking I need to play the game more often, and while I always eventually cycle back around to it… I also spend a lot of time ignoring it. I have been kicking around the notion of trying to set up a rotation of games, in that I always play this game on this day. It sounds good in theory, but I am just not sure I can bring myself to follow a schedule.

Wrapping Up

This is going to be a relatively short post today, as I am still fighting sleep. I need to get up and around and hopefully woken up in the process. I hope you all have a great day, and that you are not nearly as drowsy as I am this morning. I am not sure what I will be doing tonight, either venturing back into the faydark or over in Rift leveling fishing. I have to say the patron gifts are an interesting carrot that ends up making me log into Rift every day. If you are a patron you receive a large loyalty gift every week, and a small loyalty gift everyday. They do not accrue over time, so you have to log in each day to receive it. I find myself being drawn to log in each and every day for the promise of free stuff. Speaking of which… I think I will check on that right now before I head on into work.

Foraging Sucks

June 23, 2013 by Belghast

Getting a super late start this morning because… reasons. Firstly the bed was super comfy this morning, and after not sleeping really well the last few nights I really did not want to leave it. Secondly I had to shower and get dressed and go acquire food. Thirdly my wife conned me into a trip to Wal-mart explaining that it would be less busy while folks were in church. While it might have been less busy, it was still far busier than I would have liked. But we are now back and it is 10 am and I am finally sitting down to blog.

Foraging Sucks

I have been in a really spastic way with my new laptop and wanting to download all the games and see how they run on it. However yesterday afternoon I finally settled into one for awhile. When the F2P conversion happened in Rift, one of the many things I did with my bonus shop currency was purchase Foraging and Weaponsmithing for Belghast my main. The end goal was that he would have the ability to harvest all the things, as well as be completely self sufficient in both Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing. The reality behind this, has not been nearly as exciting as it sounds.

Essentially over the last few weeks since the conversion I have been foraging everything I could find as well as mining all the low level ores so I could level both of the new tradeskills. One of the stark realities thus far is that Foraging Sucks. It is hands down the most painful gathering profession in rift. I have never really spent much time doing it, as I always tend to focus on the armor making professions in any game. The amount of herbs that you have to pick to get skills raises just seems unbalanced when compared with butchering and mining.

It took me roughly four hours of running around high end Storm Legion zones to be able to gather enough herbs and lumber to level from 350 to 375. The problem is not necessarily the harvesting… it is trying to find the right level of herbs that give you a skill up without running into the level of herbs that are too high to pick. Essentially the storm legion foraging spawns are really really poorly designed… or at least poorly designed for someone trying to level. I remember being max level in mining before I hit level 54, so as a contrast it was so much easier.

Grandmaster Weaponsmith

It was shortly after dinging 375 foraging that I turned my focus to all the ore and lumber I had collected in the process. Within another 30 minutes I had finished leveling weaponsmithing to 375. Now I need to spend a good deal of time doing the daily quests so I can pick up those epic weapon patterns. While this is not that useful now, I am really looking forward to seeing how self sufficient I am when it comes to the next expansion. Part of me wonders if picking up outfitting, but not leveling it… would trigger the code that causes cloth to drop faster for outfitters.

Onwards to Fishing and Survival

Now my new goal is to work on leveling my fishing and survival. This pairing is an odd one as they seem to be out of sync. At 160 survival I need materials from the scarlet gorge/scarwood reach area, however at 160 fishing the optimal waters for skilling up are in Moonshade Highlands. So essentially I will be focusing on leveling the survival skills and the fishing should take care of itself. Finding shallow and deep water in the various zones is a bit of a pain also. The pool shown in the image above is one of the few deep water spawns in Scarlet Gorge… and they are way up by the entrance to Foul Cascade.

I am not sure if the shallow/deep water thing is easier if you are doing the guardian zones or not, but at this point I guess both factions are merged together. I didn’t really run into the problem until this set of zones. I have a feeling that in Moonshade the opposite problem will occur, that most of the water you find will be deep, as it tends to have ocean and lakes. Fishing is somewhat mind numbing, but it is a good activity to do while trying to catch up on recordings from the DVR.

Gold Rush

This week the Gold Rush promotion began over in EQ2 and as a result I decided to pop over and level in my Swashbuckler a bit.

If you’re a Gold Member this summer (June 21 – September 21), you will have access to a special daily spell that provides bonus coin loot (increase of 15%), an experience bump (increase of 10%), and additional mount speed (increase of 5%)! This spell grants these benefits for four (4) hours each day, all summer long! This is in addition to all of the other perks you receive with Gold membership.

You will find this spell in your hot bar or in your spell book under abilities. Look for “Gold Rush.”

With this happy little buff I decided to take Belgrifter over to the Clefts of Rujark dungeon and run around grinding the various higher level orcs for a bit. The xp gain was actually far slower than I expected, but then I realized that I had my AA slider set to 50%. Honestly I still have one of those instant 280 aa tokens that came with Chains of Eternity expansion.. so I am considering turning the AA levels off completely for awhile to maximize the xp gain. With my magical werewolf healer mercenary I was able to pretty much wreck everything in the zone.

While I didn’t end up getting an xp level, I did manage to get 3 AAs in the time spent just from killing all the named star mobs that I had not killed before. I will have to sort through the loot I got, but I didn’t see anything that was better than what I was currently wearing. I found running around the zone killing mobs a relaxing experience… that is one of the things I like most about EQ2 is that the combat is so slow paced that you can be doing something… and still do it without raising your blood pressure. It is far less twitch and far more slow and steady… and there are certain moods where that is the perfect recipe for me.

The laptop runs the game gorgeously, probably far better than any machine I have had so far. I can crank all the things up pretty much to the highest setting and just bask in the beauty of this aging game. I don’t care what people say, it still looks absolutely amazing. They do zone design better than almost anyone else. The sheer scale makes the world feel far more real than any other online game. The scale of mountains and valleys and monuments are often lost but this game feels immense.

Daily Dose of Cute

We have had bunnies in our lawn for years. I think they end up living in the hedges in the backyard, and since we don’t have much in the way of flowers… or any sort of garden… they have been a welcome addition to our lawn. However in all this time I have never seen a baby, even though I know they must be producing several for them to survive every year. Today my neighbor’s son was mowing our lawn, and he almost hit this little guy with the mower. Thankfully he is a nature loving boy, and is always looking for wildlife… he shut down the mower, picked the stunned little bunny up and brought it around to show us.

Is that not the most precious thing you have ever seen? Apparently at this size they are fully weaned from their mother and essentially self sufficient. We didn’t spend too much time with the bunny, as we didn’t want our human scent to rub off on it too much. Additionally we placed it carefully under a bush near where it was found. The little guy hopped around happily in the shade and hopefully will stay there til our lawn is finished being mowed.

I really hope this little guy makes it through the summer. In years past I have had to fish the occasional bunny out of the pool… and it is always something that tears me up inside a little when it happens. Hopefully it will remain a relatively moist year. If it gets hotter I might have to try and figure out a way to give them a water dish they can more safely drink from. Because seriously… who cannot love something this cute?

Wrapping Up

Well I have rambled on at length for a long while this morning. I hope you all have a great day and get accomplished whatever needs to happen on your Sunday. I know we likely have to run around a bit later and continue with the whole “preparing for wife to leave” thing again. Luckily this time it is a much shorter trip, so hopefully it won’t be nearly as stressful on me.