Why am I excited about finding an infested mine?  because there is no gear advancement in the Mistlands without finding one.  Or several, more likely.

Valheim has always gated its gear progression behind some level of resource harvesting progression that is generally unlocked by slaying the boss of the previous biome.  You can’t mine any metal until you slay Eikthyr, for example, or unlock sunken crypts without besting The Elder.

It changes up a bit.  For example black metal in the plains just drops off of mobs, so the gate is the is the items from Bonemass that allow one to construct the blast furnace needed to refine black metal.  Either way, you could start upgrading gear before going too deep into previous biomes.

And then we get to the Mistlands which, as noted multiple times, is the first wholly new, post-early access launch, biome to be added into the game in its three years.  That took a while, though I don’t blame Iron Gate all that much.  They spent the initial period of early access just trying to cope with their success and improve the game.  Then Microsoft threw some money at them to do a version on XBox.  Game Pass gives them some small, but regular incomes.  And then, finally, they got around to the Mistlands.

It was at that point that they clearly thought “this game is too damn easy, we need to crank this up A LOT!” apparently not noticing that part of the enjoyment of the game for many was that it wasn’t completely brutal.  But Elden Ring infected a lot of game dev minds and this is what results.

Anyway, to get to my point, the drops from the plains boss, Yagluth, basically enable you to make some cute little things that stir the mist up a bit, but to actually upgrade your gear you need to dive into the mist, fight your way through as you explore, find an infested mine, the battle through that mine, in order to bring out some dark cores.  Those then allow one to make the black forge, the Galdr table, and the Eitr refinery, which are required to start in on the Mistlands level gear.

So finding an infested mine is pretty much a major gate on gear progression and you have to get there without any gear upgrades and through the infernal mist that plagues the biome.

As mentioned in my previous Valheim post, I finally decided to banish the mist with a mod.

The first side effect of that was to discover that the Mistlands are kind of a pretty biome, something very much hidden by the mist.

The second was to up my survivability in the Mistlands, because you can see hostile mobs before they have detected you and are attacking.

The third was to make navigation much easier.  The zone still has walls that channel you down open paths, but you can now at least navigate by picking an object in the distance and working your ways towards it, rather than just bumbling through the mist and ending up turned around half the time.

All good so far.  But the next item on the list was to find an infested mine.  And I am going to say right here that removing the mists made this, if not completely possible, at least considerably easier.

After another scouting expedition to the Mistlands I was headed back to where I had setup a portal close by a Dverger camp I had put on the map a while back, before I had removed the mist.  This time I saw something up on one of the hills that made up the walls of the valley that camp was in, and sure enough, there was an infested mine up there.

Just to emphasize how close to where I had passed multiple times in the mist that this was, here is the Dvergr encampment, the screen shot take by just turning around from where I am standing above.

Basically, the spikes around the structure became just visible without the mist, so I went to investigate.

The place was crawling with seekers, and I had to go clear them out.  That included getting some off the roof, which meant building a workbench and then some step to get up there, which you can just see in the picture.

Munin and Hugin, now acting as a comedy duo, had things to say once I had cleared things out.

Okay… some hints in there, dangerous place and all.

That was less helpful I suppose.

The first thing I did once the local area was clear was run down and deconstruct the portal I had set up in the area and move it right into the structure above the infested mine.  Might as well have it close to hand when I get in over my head and have to run back naked.

Then, with things set, I waited for a new day to start, ate some fresh food, and dove on in.

Generally speaking, infested mines look pretty darn good.  Easily the best dungeon look so far in the game I would say.

There are blocked passages that you need to break through which, among other things, hold back the seekers that are the main guardians.

By this point I have developed a strategy for dealing with multiple seekers attacking, which involves invoking the Bonemass buff, having health potions handy, and flailing like mad until either I or they are dead.  So far it has worked.  I haven’t had to get a corpse out of the one mine I have found so far.

The downside is that once the buff wears off, there is a 20 minute cool down until I can do it again.  So I tend to do some light exploring or head back to base to drop stuff off before I dive into another unexplored and guarded section of the mine.

Of course, what I was here to find were black cores, which are expertly secreted behind doors with glowing neon inlays that say “hidden door” in Dvergr and which reveal themselves the second you mouse over them.

Yeah, that wasn’t so tricky.  Inside there are chests with, so far, some pretty mundane items, like potions I already have upgrades to and food from the swamp biome tier.  But there were some black cores to be found.

Fortunately one of the settings we started with when we set out on this run was to double resources when harvested, so that was, in fact, TWO black cores.  And a good thing too, because I only found three of those to harvest so far.

Poking around I also found the rune that shows where Vegvisir the Queen, the Mistlands boss, is located.

Isn’t Vegvisir some store brand version of Vegemite?

Anyway, having delved in a bit, found six black cores, and with my Biomass buff on cool down, I headed back to base to see what I could build.  The Black Forge was all that was in my options.  But I found a spot to squeeze it into our work room.

I was somewhat bemused to find that I could not begin to craft any armor, with only the crossbow and special bolts, along with a Dvergr lantern, being available from the new station.

So I dug around on the wiki and found that, for armor, I need refined Eitr, which requires the Eitr refinery, but to build that I need sap from ancient roots in the Mistlands, which requires a sap extractor, which requires a Dvergr extractor to make.

I have two Dvergr extractors at one of our Mistlands bases, but the cannot go through portals so I will have to sail them back to base, make the extractors, take them out to the Mistlands, harvest some sap, get some more black cores, and then build the refinery.

Then I will be able to craft armor and build the Galdr table, the other crafting station, at which you can craft the light armor that goes with the spell casting ability that I have yet to get to in the Mistlands.

All of which seems like a lot, but the fact that I can even see the path forwards now means that I am many steps ahead of where I was a week ago… all mostly because I got rid of the mist.

Capsuleer Day, the annual celebration of the launch of EVE Online, has returned once more.  And for Capsuleer Day XXI CCP has decided to go for a full 30 day celebration, running from yesterday, April 30th, through until downtime on May 30th.

The thing most players will see will be the return of login rewards.  This year the rewards run all 30 days, but the last seven of them are just repeat boosters, so if you miss a day or three you won’t lose out on the good stuff.

The good stuff, for Omega subscribers, include:

• 650,000 skill points
• 26,500 EverMarks
• Capsuleer Day Fireworks
• SKINs
• Boosters
• SOCT ship hulls

If you are an Alpha subscriber, you only get the items in the top row, which still includes some skill points, SKINS, and boosters, but no ships for you.  However, if you subscribe to Omega at any point during the event, you can go back and collect any Omega rewards you missed.

In addition to login rewards, there are also special events in The Agency and upgraded rewards when running Abyssal deadspace filaments.

Outside of the game there will be Twitch drops for watching EVE Online content from specific channels over the course of the month.  Look for somebody who has !DROPS in their channel description.

And naturally CCP will have some special items in the cash shop.

So there it is, capsuleer day has returned once more, this time as a month long event.

Related:

• CCP – Capsuleer Day Celebrations Begin
• CCP – Capsuleer Day 2024
• TNG – EVE Online’s Capsuleer Day Now A Month-Long Event

 

My addons need to be updated and my joyous journeys xp buff is gone, the Dalaran portals are all gone save one, and I have to figure out how to spec into six character at or close to level cap. Wrath Classic is now waning, but at least we’re on the road to the next thing.

I can now fly around Stormwind and Ironforge… for just a couple hundred gold no less.  That is not nothing, even if the city is a shambles and the old world has been redone and every good old dungeon has been sliced up into easy to digest bits.  But I wasn’t going to go re-run those anyway, I am moving forward.

We have all sorts of things, from new races to guild perks to archeology, to reforging to transmog to account-wide achievements.

Some of them are a little odd… not like I remembered them or straight up different than they were back in the day and called out in the patch notes.

There have long been complaints about WoW Classic not being pure in one way or another, not being a true return to the old game.  Often that has been about details that only the diehards would likely notice, though there have been the occasional dumb call outs for things that never were.  Some days it boggles the mind.

But getting into Cataclysm Classic it feels like not only have we passed out of the true “classic” era, but even Blizz is now willing to make some changes from the strict retro path.  Probably for the better, and we are talking about Cataclysm, one of the most controversial expansions in the history of the game and not one that many people get choked up with nostalgia about.

I have one last character to get to level 80 before the whole thing goes live… though I have three weeks to get from mid-79 to 80, so I am not exactly stressed.  And I have five other characters at level cap, so I’m covered no matter what.

I’ll get around to summing up how Wrath Classic felt at some point soon.  But the change is upon us.  Time to move forward.

Addendum:  Also, a bunch of things seem broken or wrong.  I am told a bunch of issues from the beta that were reported were clearly not yet fixed.

For example, after my first visit to the ink vendor with my inscription character, the currency changed to the Cataclysm ink, which you cannot yet make, which means I have to go whip up inks for the updated glyphs the old fashioned way.

Also, didn’t Cataclysm have launch events back in the day?

Related:

• Blizzard – Cataclsym Classic pre-patch notes

The Site

A while back WP.com introduced Blaze, a paid ad program that allows you to promote your blog.  Back when it first showed up they gave me a $50 credit and I tried it… and it was not worth the cash.  65 clicks into my promoted post seemed like a joke for that much money.

Then they sent out surveys and talked about how they were making it better.  So when they gave me another $50 credit this month I decided to try it again.  This time I chose my post about Balatro, which I though was maybe a bit more mainstream for a video game ad.

And this time they are telling me the ad pulled in almost 500 clicks.  A serious improvement… if it is true.  The problem is that if I go into the WP.com stats and look at how many clicks that post received during the run of the ad, it is actually closer to 250.

Still an improvement… but the stats on my admin page show clicks from all sources, just not the ad, and while traffic often dies off after a day or two, it can still carry on for weeks in little drips and drabs.  So there is no saying that all of those 250 were from the ad.

In the end, even if it was a great improvement and added another 25 to 50 views a day over a ten day campaign, would you spend $50 of your own money for that result?  I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, just because I need an excuse to put an image in here somewhere, the surges of direct traffic continue to pop up now and again.

However, these surges are a lot less regular than they were back in November and December.  Search engine traffic… which means Google 99% of the time, remain steady.

Also, WTF is going on with the Google Analytics site?  Have they just broken it on Firefox to be dicks?

Finally, the Flag Counter widget informs me that somebody from a new country visited the blog in April.  Welcome random person from Palau!  I hope you found something interesting!

Palau, a trust territory of the United States in the wake of the second world war, is an independent island nation, but has two ZIP codes assigned to it and is still served by the US Postal Service.

One Year Ago

I did what I believed to be my final post specifically covering April Fools at Blizzard, Blizz having gone pretty cool on the whole thing since around 2017. We’ll see if this pans out.

The Fellowship and Fire update came to New World, bringing with is seasons and season passes.

LOTRO offered a limited time level 140 boost, which was the cap at the time.  I bought one and went through the process of using it.

Niantic was going after remote raiding in Pokemon Go.

Honest Game Trailers took on the Civilization Series, which aligned nicely with my own brief retrospective on the games.  I did my own round up of the series, with some ranking.  All versions I looked at were playable in some form.  I even went and played Civilization VI.  I am still not a fan.

In Wrath Classic the group was culling Stratholme with Arthas.  I also had some minor gripes about Wrath Classic.  We also had the Activision Blizzard Q1 2023 financials.

I wrote about five EVE Online maps that were better than the two in-game maps the game offers.  Spoiler: fifth place was a multi-way tie, so it was way more than five.  Meanwhile, somebody did a video of the 2007 to 2022 null sec influence map… which was one of the maps on my list.

Meanwhile, as we drew closer to the EVE 20th anniversary, CCP was refurbing the EVE monument, which included the ability to get your character name on the plaques if you missed that at the ten year anniversary.  They also outlined the road to Alliance Tournament XIX.

I also did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the new launcher beta, another in-game theft, a reminder about the monument thing, Fraternity Keepstars, and the MER.  Oh, and they also announced that EVE Anywhere was going away.  Cloud Computing was sooo 2016.

In the game, the Imperium and B2 coalitions managed to win the armor time against Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47L-Q, a battle than ran through down time, so we all got kicked and had to log back in again to resume the fight.  Having lost the armor timer, Fraternity and its allies did not contest the final timer and the Keepstar was destroyed.  The Imperium then dialed-back operations in Pure Blind.

I also looked into March 2023 destruction in the game.

Then there was the a16z Project Awakening that CCP was going on about.  I was not a fan.  Since Pearl Abyss was all in on this blockchain scam nonsense, I wondered who should have bought CCP back in 2018.

I was wondering what Atari… or the company that owned the Atari name… was actually in the business of doing.

I was also kind of wondering what the Metaverse Standards Forum was doing… another working group for a nonsense idea.

I did another Friday Bullet Points post, this time about the Worldle-verse, where Wordle itself hit puzzle 666, Spotify was shutting down Heardle, a DOS version of Wordle, a WoW focused version of Wordle, and Digits from the NYT which they have since shut down.

I was fiddling with AI bots, asking what the difference between an MMO and an MMORPG was, why there were so many fantasy MMORPS, and how to find a warm ocean in Minecraft.

And over on Twitter, which was still Twitter then, Elon’s threat to take away blue checkmarks for verified users and make them only available for sale failed to appear on the appointed day… except for the New York Times, which Elon felt was spreading the “woke mind virus” or some BS.  “Woke” quickly came to mean “something I don’t like” when used by Elon.  The unpaid for blue checks eventually were taken away in the back half of the month.  The blue check mark went from “this celeb or whoever is who they say they are” to “This bozo paid $8.”

Five Years Ago

April Fools, once a grand tradition at Blizzard, was pretty sparse.

Google Plus went away.

The Minecraft Village & Pillage update landed.

CCP loudly announced the removal and banning of CSM13 member Brisc Rubal.  And then in what I described as the “nightmare scenario,” CCP hedged, promising to investigate further.  And then they exonerated Brisc and restored him apologizing for all the trouble. A disastrous example of “measure once, cut twice” by CCP.  And Brisc didn’t get his reputation back.  I still see people who think he must have been guilty and somehow worked a deal or threatened to sue in order to get CCP to back down.

CCP also announced the CSM14 election timeline.  Brisc opted to stay away from that.  And the April update brought capital nerfs, especially for the Rorqual.  Hilmar was starting on something about player retention.  And CCP unveiled the Katia Sai monument in Saisio.

Actually out in space myself in EVE Online, I was flying with Liberty Squad as we visited The Spire for a fight over a Sotiyo as well as busting some other structures and setting some timers.  There was also an op from Delve to Lonetrek and another Reavers Race.

NantWorks handed H1Z1… or Z1 Battle Royale… back to Daybreak, having failed to make a go of the challenge of reviving the game.

I reviewed a bit of the coverage the EverQuest 20th anniversary got.  There was also some changes to the Selo progression server, which reflected on what players wanted versus what Daybreak was offering.

I was also playing World of Warcraft, binging on pet battles and catching some new pets.  We got some news about the approaching update, which would unlock flying in Battle for Azeroth.  That promoted me to get the first part of the pathfinder achievement done.  I also got my first alt to level 120, though he hadn’t even been to Zandalar or Kul’Tiras.  Pet battles will do ya.

And I came up with a guide to criticizing games you do not like.

Ten Years Ago

Spacewar! for the PDP-1 was up via emulation on the internet archive.

The Elder Scrolls Online launched, hitting its planned April 4th date.  I did not play.

I was diving in to Pokemon X & Y, having returned to Pokemon at last.

The strategy group played a game of Civilization V that ended with a win via nuclear terror.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online kicked off.  We were also watching Pantheon: Rise of the Something was splutter along after failing its Kickstarter campaign.

In EVE Online proper there was Burn Jita 3, which seemed like less of a thing the third time out.  There was a video.  Then there was the CSM9 vote.  At least there were only 36 candidates on the ballot.

In null sec we were shooting Black Legion things, because that is what we did in the CFC.  I was just happy to be using lasers, those skills having been trained up amongst my 120 million skill points.  There were also some posts about being space famous and an attempt at in-game blackmail.

But on the broader CCP front, World of Darkness was officially cancelled.

On the iPad I was playing Hearthstone and QuizUp… for about a week.

Turbine announced that Beornings were coming to Lord of the Rings Online.

SOE gave me a key for seven days of Landmark, so I went and tried it out.  SOE also announced H1Z1 and began their love affair with Reddit and got their new All Access plan running.  While on the old school front, Dave Georgeson said SOE never plans to shut down EverQuest.

Warlords of Draenor was still a long ways away.  But Blizzard was doing well on other fronts.  The instance group finished up Zul’gurub.  And there was the usual April Fools stuff.

Over at GamesIndustry.biz they have a round up of what was going in April of 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

Dave Arneson passed away.  He was, with Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, that so-influential gaming system that has shaped how we view fantasy swords and sorcery games for over 30 years now.  There would be no World of Warcraft as it is today without Dungeons & Dragons.

We also saw the launch of SOE’s Free Realms, which stuttered a bit on day one.  Soon though they had millions of people signed up for the game, but since it was free to play, not a common thing at the time, that was no indication of revenue.  My daughter tried to sign up four times, so that was at least four out of the millions.  SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network.  But FR did not run on MacOS, and my daughter was running on an iMac at the time.  I knew she has signed up because her email used to get routed to me.

In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner.  I was also doing invention to make tech II missiles, which meant data cores and research agents and such, and pondering the idea that maybe using your skills should increase your skill points or something.

As usual, there was much ado about World of Warcraft.

• PETA was planning some event in WoW.  I had trouble believing it wasn’t a joke.
• In a blinding flash of the obvious, Nielsen reported that a lot of guys play WoW.
• There was Noblegarden, or Blizzard Easter, and its egg collecting frenzy.
• There was my daughter and I trying to swim to Silvermoon to find a pet for her hunter.
• I couldn’t find a copy of The Burning Crusade at Fry’s.
• After hitting level 30 my daughter, my mom, and I were all riding around together on our night elf cat mounts.
• And the instance group, after a hiatus, got back together, did a warm up run in the Shadow Labyrinth, then went on to finally collect the head of Ingvar the Plunderer.  After that it was on to The Nexus.

I was sniggering like a pre-teen about Cornhole.  Also, there was something about Honest Scrap that was a meme, back when memes weren’t just pop culture references.

I was looking back on two years of the Wii and the games we played on it.

On the TV we were apparently watching Castle and Dollhouse.

And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.

Twenty Years Ago

City of Heroes launched in the US.  Closed down by NCsoft in 2012, the game lives on with a privately run server called City of Heroes Rebirth, built on the original code base.

Lineage II launched in North America.  This successor to the Lineage never reached the original’s popularity, but hung on to its own user base.

Thirty Five Years Ago

The Nintendo Game Boy launched in Japan.  Perhaps the definitive hand held console for a generation, it lasted from the Tetris era into the original Pokemon series of games.

Most Viewed Posts in April

1. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
2. WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3 Kicks Off
3. Wake up sweetie, Cataclysm Classic is Almost Home…
4. Now Playing – Balatro
5. Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline
6. Ahbazon Fight Sees 100+ Dreads Destroyed over Fortizar Hull Timer
7. The Contested Seat – Every Vote Counts
8. Pokemon Go Now Lets You Use a Lucky Egg at Friendship Milestones
9. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
10. Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft
11. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
12. EverQuest Starting Points – West Karana Where the Scope of the World Begins

Search Terms of the Month

eve origin of the northern coalition
[Pretty sure it started in the north…]

zombie heat gay game
[Look man, just leave me out of this…]

“ttc-collective-agreement-2020”
[Widely criticized, now just a PanFam thing]

is jetpack replaced wordpress app
[Sort of…]

valheim how much iron do i need for the entire game
[All of it. Seriously, later biomes use it.]

how to get edencom lp
[Run Edencom missions?]

Game Time from ManicTime

In the end, April was pretty evenly divided.  I came in on Conan Exiles and out on Wrath Classic really.

• Conan Exiles – 29.56%
• WoW Classic – 23.75%
• Balatro – 21.81%
• Valheim – 13.00%
• EVE Online – 5.50%
• EverQuest – 6.39%

Balatro

A deck building rogue-like poker based card game.  That ate up some time.  I’ve kind of hit a wall on getting past 80K points in a single hand to be a boss blind.  The cards have failed me there a few times.

Conan Exiles

We were all-in on this at the start of the month.  Many hours were invested.  We explored, found horses, did our first dungeon… then it kind of faded.  It didn’t help that GPortal’s LA data center, where our server is hosted, was down for a full weekend this month.  That’ll break your stride.

EVE Online

I did undock and go on a couple of fleets this month.  I left my mark on zKillboard to at least provide proof of life.  But I haven’t been all that invested.  The interesting ops have been running in early EU time, which is the only time PanFam and Fraternity will show up.

EverQuest

I continue to explore some of the old places still there in Norrath, with erratic tales of the old days based on foggy memories and rose colored glasses.  Not done with this yet.

Pokemon Go

Just a few more Team Rocket leaders to go to unlock level 45 for my with and I.  At least we still earn xp as we try to knock down that one final objective, so we’ll be a few million points into that level once we finish the task.

• Level: 44 (138% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 822 (+1) caught, 836 (+2) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Zygarde

Valheim

We had a slow down in Valheim as Conan Exiles became a focus for several weeks.  Also, the Mistlands were a bit too oppressive.  Now that I have banished the mist… at least on my client… I am going to see if we can unlock some of the resources of the biome as the Ashlands loom.

WoW Classic

We started off the month having spent weeks away from the game.  But the coming of Cataclysm Classic awakened the desire to carry on… at least in Potshot and I.  I spent time working on one last alt who is already level 79 as I write this.  I will have some options going into a revamped Azeroth late in May.

Zwift

Zwift gave up on its bonus experience for weekly usage streaks, so my unearned advancement up the level path has slowed down.  Not that levels mean much, aside from cosmetic unlocks, and I am many levels from anything interesting.  But still I get on and ride.

• Level – 27 (+1)
• Distanced cycled – 1,973 miles (+35 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 72,198 (+1,457 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 59,692 (+1,075)

Coming Up

I wrote a post about a number of things coming up on the WoW front in May.  Probably the most on point is the coming of Cataclysm Classic.  The pre-patch lands today and the expansion on May 20th.  The will no doubt generate some sort of assessment of Wrath Classic and a bit of history about Cata.

It is also the Capsuleer Day celebration in EVE Online.  I’ll get to that, but it looks like that day, the game’s 21st anniversary this year, will be celebrated all month long.

I also strongly suspect that we’ll get the Ashlands update for Valheim in May.  They are close.

I have to travel quite a bit more than usual in May, so my posting streak is at risk of being broken… not that such a streak has any real meaning.  But it is a thing.

In this “Year of Darkpaw” and all things Norrath, I haven’t spent much time writing about EverQuest II, the younger sibling of the EverQuest duo.  But it is part of the year with its 20th anniversary landing in November.

As part of the celebration on the EQII side of the house, there has been a planned special server on the roadmap since the start of the year, with June as a launch target.  We got a bit more info about the server in the April Producer’s Letter, which said it was going to take us back to 2006.

And while just being told that doesn’t feel like much, it is actually kind of a big statement.  Also, you might note, 2006 isn’t “20 years ago” so they are jumping ahead a bit in the life of the game.  As I noted at the time on the post over at Massively OP, 2006 means no going back to the original crafting and some of the other ideas that did not pan out very well at launch.

I am sure there are still a few purists out there who will bemoan the fact that we won’t be going back to four level combines to produce finished items and having to get crafting materials from two or three other professions to get anything done.  Having lived through it, I know the highs and the lows of that system.  In the end though, the reason cooking was so popular was you didn’t need to depend on anybody else.  As like as not trying to go back to that with the current client would be prohibitively expensive… and for a very short term benefit.

This server will unlock expansions fast enough that the first two years out of a 20 year progression will go by fast and we’d be to the current crafting system in no time.  So best not to bother if it is going away in any case.

As Bhagpuss said at one point, we’re going back to the era when Scott Hartsman was directing the show and the game went from trying to have a split personality that both acknowledged the old game and pretended it had nothing to do with it as it tried to forge a completely independent lore path.  But with the 2006 Echoes of Faydwer expansion the game got back on board and embraced its Norrath identity and sought to build on it, returning to old locations time and again.

And it was good.  Echoes of Faydwer was a big freaking deal, a welcome change in direction for the game that helped it find its place in the SOE ecosystem and probably got some early players to come back and commit to it.  This blog is just old enough that I was writing about Echoes of Faydwer at launch.

See, just that little tidbit of information got me going on about it as a choice even though we hadn’t been told anything about the server rules itself.  But last week we got some actual meat, including the server name, Anashti Sul, which hearkens back to the Desert of Flames, the first EQII expansion… that is her picture up at the top of the post… and one of those that sought to blaze a new trail on the lore front.

So what have we been told?  Here is what we have so far:

• There will be no spell research.
• Krono will not be able to be consumed, traded, or sold on an Origins server.
• There will be a 6-week Beta to ensure we cover a wide breadth of testing.
• Attributes have restored secondary functionality, agility will help avoid melee attacks, intelligence will increase ability potency, strength will increase melee damage, and wisdom will grant extra resistance.
• All bosses will be original stat/buff packages.
• No weight. It could not be restored.
• Unlocks have not been decided yet, however we do have new forums, and we will be able to poll and discuss unlocks before we launch.
• No holiday events.
• There will be a marketplace, but it will be very limited.
• It will not be free trade.
• This server is on its own design depot.
  • This is the first time for this type of separation for EverQuest II.
  • It cannot be affected by Live design updates, and vice versa.
  • Code and Art are still across all server types, for a variety of reasons. For example, connections to external or shared resources such as Database, Authentication, etc. have completely changed over the years.
• Freeport and Qeynos are back to old school, in both appearance and functionality.
  • Livable neighborhoods, and their quests, are back! With the scope of the changes, these will need a lot of testing.
• No persistent instances.
• No tradeskill subcombines.
  • The current build is right after subcombines for crafting were removed.

That this is an “origins” server, a new type of special server, seems to say that the team is committing to the special nostalgia server concept more so than previously.  It is quartered off in its own “design depot” so likely doesn’t have to get updates in lock step with the live servers.

That means that they can go back to some old stuff.  Yes, we had the Isle of Refuge previously, but now we’re going to get original, old school Qeynos and Freeport, complete with the racial neighborhood ghettos… though I still feel that barbarians and dwarves got the short end of the stick being lumped together in one generic area while gnomes got a sprocket theme park.

No free trade, so there will be bind on pickup items from bosses, no holiday events, which would probably break with the older version of the cities, and a limited marketplace, which is the Darkpaw term for the cash shop.  I will be interested to see what is in that cash shop.

Krono, the Norrathian PLEX substitute, won’t be available on the server either.  You will have to grind mobs for you copper like everybody else.

Which reminds me, did mobs drop coins by 2006?  At launch SOE was extremely paranoid about the economy and inflation so mobs dropped no coins, only things that you might sell to a vendor later.  Will we start past that?

It is interesting that they couldn’t restore item (and coin) weight to the game.  But, like the old crafting system, it has ceased to be relevant by 2006.  Every time a new expansion lands everybody got big stat increases from gear, so strength stopped being much of a gate.  I was carrying around storage crates at one point, something that would drag your mobility down to nearly nil at launch, by the time Kunark hit in EQII.  It became something that merely punished low level players without being at all a limit at level cap, so I am not sad to see it is being left out.

The one thing left out is what the expansion unlock cadence will be.  I am sure it will move lickety split when compared to WoW progression servers, which are four and a half years in and only three expansions have dropped.  But will they move too fast?  It is a hard balance.

It all sounds interesting.  I am just not sure at this point whether it will be something I can commit to.  The game was solo friendly by 2006… another thing about 2004 is that beyond a certain point overland zones were balanced around group play… but it could also be pretty grindy.  I might find some time to peek in and look at the old versions on Qeynos and Freeport.

Related:

• Darkpaw – April 2024 Producer’s Letter
• Darkpaw – Anashti Sul Beta Announcement
• Darkpaw – How to Participate in Beta
• Inventory Full – Anashti Sul or She Who Could Not Be Destroyed