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As promised several blog posts ago, a list of International Holidays EQII Should Add To Its In-Game Events <applause>…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day – September 19th
A no-brainer for most, this is perhaps the most widely celebrated geek festival outside Sarah Michelle Gellar’s birthday. Simple server-side scripts add ‘Yarr!’ to the front of everything typed into the chat window, and replaces every occurrence of ‘you’ with ‘ye’ in the game. All class pets are replaced with parrots for the day (and a special quest line rewards participants with an in-house parrot), and quest rewards are paid in doubloons. Ironically, anyone playing Pirates Of The Burning Sea today will be able to celebrate International Talk Like A Faux-Medieval Knight day instead.
International Civil Aviation Day – December 7th
Griffon races, Freestyle Levitation exhibitions, and a temporary loan of that giant airship that floats around Atlas Park in City of Heroes to give people tourist rides around popular raid zones. Fun for all the family!
No Pants Day – First Friday in May
This one has a precedent as in 2008 the first virtual No Pants Day was held in the online golf game, Shot-Online (you’re all big fans of Korean Virtual Golf role-playing games, right?). Utilising the Emperor’s New Clothes armour set on offer from the current Portal Storms quest reward giver, this is a mandatory day of walking around sans pantaloons, in order to level the playing fields, put night elf males into catatonic shock around their home towns as the lady elves shake their thang, and will help to find out just which mighty Guardians and Paladins are overcompensating with their talk of impressive DPS parsers. Additional bonus: Queen Antonia doesn’t have to change from her normal wardrobe!
International Day of Non-Violence – October 2nd
Can you imagine that one? I realise PvP servers might suddenly become like ghost towns (more so), but imagine a day where not a single creature is killed, all auto-aggro is removed, weapons are rendered powerless (but retain the fancy visual effects for the hell of it) and crafting actually becomes a valid pastime (just kidding, just kidding).
World Dance Day – April 29th
Ho yes! Bring. It. On. City streets filled with /emoting NPCs getting on up, getting on down again, moving to the grooving and serving notice on the funk. Adapting the ‘dance moves’ puzzle from the Halloween house last year, quest lines see you having to impress judges with your rhythm action prowess in exchange for boots filled with magical goldfish and ermine-lined cloaks. Blackburrow is temporarily neutralised and turned into a giant goblin rave zone, and PvP fighting is replaced with guild ‘dance-offs’. You like that? Cos that’s the way it is. Healing Word to your mother!
Oh lordy, he’s off again…
So E3’s been and gone once more, like the annual visit of a creepy uncle of whom no one in your family can quite remember who he’s actually related to. I’d been to several E3s during my previous incarnation as one of Britain’s Leading PC Gaming Journalists™, all pre-razzmatazz reduction affairs and during its period as the world’s foremost gathering place for 12-15 year old “company directors” and pre-pubescant so-called “web journalists” (i.e. they post on the Something Awful forums). Heady days indeed.
One of the reasons I rolled a healer class on this restart in EQII was that I wanted to make myself useful for grouping situations without having to go through the intimidating process of working out how best to hit things to stop them biting me dead. Everyone loves a healer, right? We don’t get in the way, just sort of mill around at the back, tossing out band-aids and soothing words, eschewing the glory (and, usually, the loot) in favour of keeping YOU alive and in tip-top condition for beastie eradication duties.
Sure, as a Templar I’m pretty handy with a mace and can throw down the occasional Lightning Storm From Hell™, but mostly when danger rears its ugly head I bravely turn my tail and, uh, fled. Flee. Beat a hasty tactical withdrawal from the combat arena. While other classes boast of chat log files filled with impressive DPS scores and the like, mine tend to hold the virtual world record for most number of “This encounter is no longer worth any experience” appearances. I’m sure once it actually said: “Dude, it’s a grobin. You can’t even beat a frigging grobin? Jeez, let me show you where the safe harvesting nodes are.” Although I may have been hallucinating from a lack of sleep.
Anyway, I’ve had some success with pick-up grouping since hitting level 15. A few incursions into the orc-held territory east of Kelethin saw me providing healing words left, right and centre for a crazed killing machine on a seemingly unstoppable mission to eradicate the whole of orc-kind. Seemingly, I say, as it eventually did stop when the other member of our team (a guy so ineffectual I’m actually having trouble remembering what class he was) decided to go for dinner rather than stay and do his duty (whatever it was).
Dinged through about two levels in that time though, so can’t complain, and even managed to do a bit of hotbar re-ordering, neatly organising all my heals into one area, offensive spells in another, debuffs just over there, rezzes in that top part and miscellaneous junk (summon food and water, anyone?) tidily in the part of the third bar that rarely gets troubled by hot mouse lovin’. I then promptly tested it out on a nearby Orc Footsoldier, forgot where everything was now that I’d moved them from the disorganised, yet familiar place they had been, and died.
A final note, I improv’d through one round of the Portal Storms quests shortly after that (after spending a good half hour getting lost in Kelethin while looking for the Qeynos teleporter. Seriously, would some colour-coding on the acorns go amiss?) and after dispensing with the Portal Void schlong-on-legs beasts by running away until they lost interest each time, eventually plumped for the misty blue lighting orb thing as a reward thinking I’d be emitting a cool, pulsing glow that radiated off everything around me. Nope. It barely has enough oomph to emit a fart. My advice, save up for the cooler-looking armour instead.
Incidentally, are those void-dildos supposed to be that hard to beat, or is it just because I’m a Templar and so by definition less effective in combat than a melted plastic spoon?
Only a quick interim update, but having just viewed the exciting happenings shown at Allakhazam I’d just like to say “Kudos, sir. Kudos.” to whoever made the design decision at SOE to put the little dock workers into the game, furthering that whole ‘immersion’ factor that I alluded to back in this post. I’m not going to speculate on how the guild halls themselves are going to work, although I’ll be disappointed if we don’t get snooty guild butlers that open the main doors to visitors and treat your guests with barely disguised contempt.
Also, many congratulations to Kiara on the new job as Community Manager. I’ve only had the briefest of encounters with her when commissioning articles for EQuinox, but she seems like a great choice – always helpful and friendly, extremely knowledgeable about the game and defintiely, as in keeping with a lot of SOE’s recent EQII hirings, a fan favourite having been a favourite fan. If that makes sense. All power to you!
Lots of mission running over the weekend, exploring Kelethin and Greater Faydark and clearing most of the quest lines on offer. Grender’s Lair was pretty well constructed, and I did enjoy the idea of searching outwards only to fight the climax right under the heart of the city itself, nice pacing overall and it didn’t outstay its welcome. Although I have to question the notion of the black market dude setting up shop just outside his lair. Plus, the Grender himself could have done with a little bit more of a dramatic payoff rather than just rushing into a fight and dieing without so much as a by your leave. A few mocking conversation paths first or something – the typical Bond-Main Villain verbal sparring before the rabid badgers with machine guns are let loose and everything a’splodes.
We’re going to try an experiment today. Blogs are all well and good for mouthing off about your favourite MMO and patiently, maturely and rationally explaining in minutely constructive detail why certain aspects of the game could do with improvement and enhancement. You’ve seen the ones: “This game isn’t WOW so it obviously SUCKSZ!!!!”, “My healer class is TOTALLY underpowered because I can’t nuke an entire zone in two seconds. I’m cancelling my sub!!!”, “Yor 18th century pirate game is a COMPLETE RIP-OFF because it isn’t set in space with ninjas which is totally what I was expecting it to be based on a mis-assumption on my part after looking at a single pre-alpha screenshot, so youre company SUCKS BALLS and has BETRAYED it’s customers!!!!!!!” Fume, pant, rage, stomp.
Finally, after a couple of weeks on the AB role-playing server, an actual moment of gen-yoo-wine role-playing took place. A rare late night, well 2am, here in the UK must have coincided with peak US hours and just as I was preparing to wind things up for the evening (morning) after a solid few hours killing orcs around Kelethin and clearing a few questlines…
… (Quick aside: the learning to speak Faelish/Faelian/Faelenese/whatever quest with you running around the nearby pub speaking gibberish to everyone inside, while brief, showed some lovely comic writing and dialogue and was a great little diversion from what is either a far too serious nature to the game, or is the kind of comedy that really died out with early 80’s sitcom writing. Memo to SOE: let your quest designers go crazy like this a lot more often and it’ll do everyone a world of good. If you’re going to go comedy, go Seinfeld, The Office, or dare I say it, Monty Python, rather than Leave It To Beaver or Mr. Ed. Although maybe that’s just my cynical British sense of humoUr coming through) …
… when what looked like an NPC with a quest feather above his head stepped out of the descending acorn elevator, hailed me by name and started telling me about his love life. A live event, of course, which I quickly cottoned on to by the NPC having a green name instead fo the usual white, the slowly gathering crowd of players settling down to listen to our hero’s tale of ardour, and the fact the NPC was answering my typed questions directly. Cool, I’d not done something like this before and settled in for the fun ride ahead.
I gather that America recently celebrated International Thank God You’re Not British Day or something (which, given our truly, truly words-fail-me godawful public transport systems, rampant knife-crime culture stretching even into our nurseries and day cares, dependence on reality/freak TV shows for any sense of self-worth, and inexplicable addiction to publically insisting we’re any good at various ball sports that all possible evidence indicates to the contrary, I can fully understand, if not exactly patriotically get behind). It was also Malawian and Venezuelan Independence Day (whatever else you may think of him, Chavez throws one hell of a good party), Filipino-American Friendship Day (play nice), and tomorrow sees Tanabata, the Japanese Star Festival in which two astral lovers kept apart for the whole year by the Milky Way are allowed one day to be together… bow-chikka-wow-wow…
Meanwhile, Norrath is celebrating what I can only assume is an upcoming crossover with the Half-Life universe thanks to all these portal storms and I for one am already prepping myself for my epic crowbar weapon questline. Truthfully though, I love these so-called ‘live events’ in-game, another sign that there’s plenty of life and ongoing dedication for the game (do I really sound that much of a cheerleader? Oh well…) and constant freshness in the game is always something to be applauded. One of the guys on the Massively podcast said it best recently in a comment about how workers and scaffolding have suddenly appeared in one of WOW’s areas (I don’t honestly know the game that well so forgive the lack of details), indicating that an upcoming game patch will introduce a new dockside area. Rather than just springing a whole city expansion on you, you lead into it by showing it being built – all helping to keep the immersion factor alive and strong. The whole thing with the Plane of Fear in a previous EQII update – with the gates being unearthed prior to going live – was another good example.
I think it’s that ‘immersion factor’ that led me to starting Prezzlewick on the AB server rather than elsewhere. I’d like to have the option to dip into being ‘in character’ now and then, to really get into the world and its story, and AB seemed the best place to do that without being pointed at by people and chased out of town with sticks for being strange.
I also love the fact that the players themselves on AB (and LdL) organise and run ‘events’ of their own, be it a simple tavern night to a full-on ‘adventure’. As mentioned in a previous post, I’m hankering towards the fourth edition D&D books for an upcoming gaming night, the first time I’ll have DM’d a pen-and-paper game in about ten to fifteen years and the whole idea of ‘creating’ and ‘character’ is very strong with me right now and to see it working online is immensely appealing.
Anyway, not much point to the above. I was going to go into a whole routine about ‘In-Game Holidays I’d Like To See’, but after a Freeportian version of Pamplona’s running of the bulls (using hungry wargs and a generous helping of barbeque sauce), I got hungry and started to think about other things instead. Maybe another post down the line.
New characters come and new characters go, but those that get blogged about at least have a vague chance at a state of semi-permanence around here. So with that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Dr. Prezzlewick M.D. (Many Deaths):
“Take two of these every hour and if you’re still alive in the morning we’ll try something else.”
Not much to report on as yet, other than a nice and speedy progress through the early ranks and the starter chain of quests in the Kelethin area being explored. I’m liking the healing powers a lot and there definitely seems to be a lot more in the way of ‘decent’ loot being dropped by low-level mobs these days (three orcs in a row dropped stat-filled helms, for instance).
I’m going to try and rush him up to 30 as I’ve yet to take a character past there. I’m also going to go all-out in pursuit of guild membership and pick-up grouping. I don’t take up much room, won’t get in the way, am fully-house trained and are quite content to just sit at the back and fling out healing spikes as needed.
Gosh, what are you doing here? Thought this place was boarded up ages ago. Could do with a bit of a clean, couldn’t it? Dust and cobwebs everywhere. Blimey…
Yeah sorry, I kind of let this place go to pot a bit didn’t I? ‘Nuts’ was actually created with a specific intention – although I never quite made it clear on the site previously, I am/was actually the editor of EQuinox, the official EQII magazine that you may or may not have heard about elsewhere – and this site was initially started in order to explore the world of EQII bloggers for a feature in a future issue. I never expected to carry on with it for more than about a month or so. Except that I started to really enjoy the daily chronicling of my Norrathian exploits, and even if the viewing figures barely peaked double figures on a good day, it was fun to keep it up. In fact, that one day when the WordPress dashboard indicated over 70 people had logged on and read the story of my ship-boarding calamities, I nearly had a heart attack. 
The pressures of magazine production take their toll however, and with each issue’s print deadlines looming, the site naturally took a breather as I concentrated my daily efforts into making the final pages as good as possible instead. Then with the currently extended hiatus for what was going to be a frankly stunning issue 3 (if I do say so myself) and a doubtful future to work out, I sadly let my EQII playing slide a bit. Plus I started getting into Pirates of the Burning Sea, a bit of EVE Online (I also work on the official magazine for that one, E-ON), PKR.com (poker’s an old passion and I’m trying to win enough money to buy the fourth edition D&D gamebooks!) and, oddly, Crysis (almost finished it now). So my attention to the site waned as I didn’t think I could really keep it up and/or contribute anything useful to the already-crowded bloggysphere.
But then something unusual happened. A couple of nights ago I casually logged back on, purely out of a sense of havingnothingbettertodoness, joined the AB server and rolled a brand new healer, a Templar (a class genre I’ve never really explored much before), started out in Kelethin, went through ten levels in one session and suddenly it hit me:
I F*****G LOVE THIS GAME!
Seriously, why did I ever stop? The Living Legacy promotion certainly seems to be having the desired effect of bringing players back to the game – the zone was as packed with new toons as I could ever remember an EQII zone being, the chat channels more active with friendly discourse and idle musings than at any time in memory, and the overall sense was one of a world on the up, an MMO with an actual future ahead of it – something that I think we EQII veterans have all, in our heartiest of hearts, started to think nervously about just lately.
So, I’m going to stick with it again, that goes for the blog too. I can’t guarantee to update it daily, or to fill it with the pretty pictures I used to (I always used to keep forgetting to take screenshots at appropriate moments and ended up having to try my best to recreate the situations to illustrate my tales in the past – I know, I know. Don’t let daylight in on magic and all that…), but I’ll do my best to let you know how I get on with young Dr. Prezzlewick, old dwarf vet Prezzer or any of the other two dozen alts I have running around the various servers using names that have some variation of Prezzer in them (it’s an old habit I can’t shake, that and giving all of my characters ginger hair), and bring you whatever thoughts I can as they occur to me. I may throw in other game references here and there, but this is mainly an EQII blog and I’ll do my best to stick to the topic at hand. I owe you, my audience, that much at least.
All seven of you. Ahem…
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