Welcome EQ2 F2P Changes Incoming

Toady’s EQ2 game update will roll some significant changes into the game. In addition to a smattering of fixes and tweaks, the big changes are the recently announced changes to the game’s money model.

These boil down to the removal of a bunch of restrictions on Free and Silver players. All classes (except Beastlord) and all races (except Freeblood) will be available to all players with no additional restrictions or costs. To get the excluded races you’ll need either the Age of Discovery expansion for the former or the one-time unlock for the latter. The patch will also unlock all bag slots for all characters.

While nice, this is stuff you could have paid Station Cash to unlock before. I do still have a few characters who are locked due to these restrictions, so it’ll be nice to have access to them again… but then, I’d have paid for the races, classes and slots when it became important to me; I have plenty of characters already and the amount of time I have to play them is damn close to zero, even though EQ2 is one of the games I consider myself committed to in the long term.

On the other hand, the structure of EQ2′s money model up to now has posed a problem stemming from this exact issue. It happens to be spring break, so I have about a week to play games, after which it’s back to the grindstone until the end of the semester. Do I really want to pony up a month’s sub for five days worth of play to avoid the onerous hard limits of free and silver accounts in EQ2?

The answer is no, I do not. EQ2 has been my primary summer game for the last three years, because over the summer I can buy a three month sub and feel like I’m getting my money’s worth out of it. But if I’m not subbed, I find the quest cap limit, which you can’t buy your way out of, to be a big hassle in a game that tends to throw huge numbers of quests at you. I also find the unavoidable shared bank limits to be stifling; I use the shared bank to manage cross-character tradeskill and harvesting inventory (I run multiple tradeskill characters, and my array of alts are much more crafters than adventurers,) and having only two shared bank slots screws up my system for doing that. For some people these two limits are probably trivial but for me the one is a significant inconvenience and the other is close to a gamebuster.

Thankfully, both limits will be gone completely as of later today. I personally would have been happy to be able to buy back the shared bank slots or a bigger quest journal, had that opportunity been offered, but lifting them gratis is perfectly cool by me. Some other limitations, most notably the locked AA silder and the requirement to buy tokens to equip some abilities and gear and to be able to sell stuff on the broker remain in place. These are things some people have squawked loudly about, but for me, with my playstyle, they’re relatively trivial.

So good on SOE for making this change, which makes it viable to me to play during the periods of a week or two during the school year when I have the time but don’t want to subscribe.

Well, That Only Took Like Five Years

So it appears, with some encouragement from the massive Triple Station Cash sale from a couple of weekends ago and the fact that I am in fact still subscribed, I’ve been spending my limited free time in EverQuest II, working my way up in the levels, finally getting my glider mount (which takes some getting used to, lemme tell you,) and settling into new digs in Freeport. I have not felt terribly motivated to blog about any of this stuff, partly because it’s all old hat, but also because of the limited time available.

While I’m at it, though, I may as well pimp the latest Ardwulf Presents, which has been up for a couple of days now. I do have some plans for more videos and over the holiday break may actually get time to make them. Enjoy!

Under F2P, Whither Goes Diplomacy?

While watching the SOE Vanguard vidcast today… well, let me first just emphasize that SOE did a Vanguard vidcast. But anyway. While watching it some mention was made of the unique features of Vanguard that make it more than just a cookie-cutter MMO. Brought up were the big open world, the rich crafting, and of course Diplomacy, which no other game has anything like.

But that’s not true, exactly. EQ2, for those who don’t know, has a built-in virtual collectable card game called Legends of Norrath, which you can play right from within the EQ2 client or from a standalone client that you can download by itself. LoN (which I have never managed to succeed at getting into despite two attempts) exists outside the world of the MMO, although some cards that you can get can be redeemed for loot in the game, mostly (if not entirely) vanity stuff like house items and titles and whatnot. You can buy packs and decks of the cards and amass a considerable library of them over time. There’s no way to know how much revenue this generates from the outside, but SOE is still doing expansions for it, so I would presume that it’s at least somewhat profitable.

But what if it was tied directly to the actual MMO world? And formed a part of that MMO’s suite of gameplay features? Like Vanguard’s Diplomacy does. This, then, is the great hidden opportunity in a cash shop-driven model for Vanguard. It could be the game’s sleeping giant made of money, if it were to me monetized in a similar way to how LoN is now. You’d get Diplomacy cards through play just as you do now (at one point LoN packs dropped in-game from mobs, but as far as I can tell that doesn’t happen anymore,) but you could also buy packs of them in the cash shop. It would require something of a retooling of the existing system, but you could probably keep all the current cards (and thus not take anybody’s cards away,) while adding new ones. Even people not otherwise bothering with Diplomacy might buy packs, as I suspect happens with LoN now, just on the chance of getting the loot cards.

Of course, this kind of arrangement might well sour Diplomacy for a lot of people. But it also has the potential to become a major revenue stream for the game — maybe even the primary one, considering how addictive collectible cards can get. In such a scenario we would have something very interesting: an online collectable card game with a full-featured MMO on the side.

What such a thing would do to the MMO could of course be argued over, much less what it could do to the Diplomacy system itself. I suspect that some would find the very idea unpalatable, although I also think it could be done without necessarily destroying the flavor of the MMO, or even Diplomacy, which I think is very approachable and robust as such things go. But it’s also potentially an important source of revenue for a game that appeared not very long ago to be dead weight on SOE’s roster.

A Video Double Feature, and More Vanguard F2P Commentary

I have two new videos up this week. First up is this week’s Norrathian Odyssey, in which we delve into customizing the EQ2 User Interface. Not with UI mods, but with the relatively powerful tools built right into the client. The vid’s been up for a couple of days but I haven’t gotten around to posting about it until now.

Next up is the new Ardwulf Presents, the first in a couple of weeks. Here I talk in a very rambly fashion about the Vanguard f2p model, and explain a bit about why it doesn’t bother me very much. You may want to either watch the video for my opinion on the matter, or read the borderline rant below.

There seems to be a lot of anger about the details of Vanguard’s freemium model, which I find both disappointing and a bit strange, since it’s a mild variation of SOE’s established and well-understood EQ2/EQ f2p model. So I wonder what folks expected out of it, and the way I keep reading a lot of the comments is that people are unhappy with not getting the whole game for free. That’s not a terribly fair interpretation, but the Vanguard model doesn’t differ very much from what we’ve seen in the past from SOE, which is presumably working very well for them since they’re leaving the subscription model that they help pioneer in favor of the new thing.

The way I see it, as with EQ2, you’re either going to play casually, in which case the free limitations don’t offer any very serious restrictions, or you’re going to be a serious player, in which case you ought to have no problem subscribing, since $15 a month in general offers very good value to people playing, say, more then ten hours a week. Where the model falls down somewhat is, as I have pointed out before, for players who fall somewhere between the two extremes, or who (like myself) oscillate between periods of heavy play and periods of minimal investment. But there are tradeoffs. Namely, that the SOE model that will soon be in use with most of their titles with relatively minor variations offers basically unlimited access to actual content, or at least to the vast majority of it.

The standard retort to this is to compare the SOE model to Turbine’s, usually noting that while you have to pay for content above about level 25 in LotRO, you can earn the store points through play. Which is true, but doing so beyond about that point is a gigantic pain in the ass, such that buying more than about one zone takes a massive amount of grinding in a game that is very grindy in other respects as well. I’m not dissing LotRO, here — it’s on my short list of games worth playing, and I’m still doing so (though only dabbling at the moment.) My point is that while the SOE model is neither perfect nor necessarily my own ideal choice for this kind of thing, it’s far less clear to me than it is to many other commentators that SOE’s approach is obviously inferior to anybody else’s. You can get at least as much quality play out of (for example) EQ2 while paying a similarly nonexistent amount of money. The points-for-play in the Turbine model is not relevant to this argument, since if you’re playing enough to get the points to unlock even just the content you need to level, you’re playing far more than enough to make that subscription a phenomenal value.

SOE is not a charity. While I would like them to make the Vanguard free package as attractive as possible for obvious reasons, they have absolutely no obligation to provide anything for free, much less basically unrestricted access to all the content in a game that’s content rich even without any updates for the better part of two years. Nor need they, or even should they, make it easy to access absolutely everything in the game without paying a cent. I’ve been over the ins and outs of their model several times already so I’m disinclined to do so in depth again, but I’ve hit on the highlights in this post.

The bottom line is that if the thoroughly anticipated details of the f2p model has unsold you on playing Vanguard, you were unlikely to come back anyway for anything other than a look around. That’s totally a fair call for anybody to make, but let’s not lay out some bullshit line of “I love Vanguard, but SOE’s model is so terribad that I will never return” in so doing. Because either it is bullshit or you’re just a fucking cheapskate.

Personal Best and the AA Slider

For something like 2 years my highest level character in EverQuest II has been Friyja, my Berserker. I’ve played a fair amount of EQ2 since reaching that point, but almost entirely on other characters, or on the EQ2X service when that was something running in parallel to the rest of the game. Last summer I played quite a bit but most of my play was done with my Warlock and Brigand, or was Tradeskilling work. So that level 50, though a level cap increase and a lot of changes to the game and to progression, remained my personal milestone in EQ2.

Over the weekend Iskaaron hit level 51 in Everfrost, finally besting that personal high. One significant factor has been the presence of the AA slider. When I first leveled to 50 it was in the days before the slider, when your option for maximizing AAs was to lock and unlock your adventuring level as you played, something I didn’t really have the patience for at the time. With the slider it’s much easier to manage, but you still have to find the sweet spot for the slider to be, something that’s dependent on both personal preference and personal playstyle. The default setting of 50/50 that free and Silver players are stuck with is not terribly suboptimal, but in a way it’s kind of the worst of all possible worlds for a certain kind of player. You’ll do fine with it as far as AAs go, but you’ll also find that enough of your XP is being diverted into AAs that you won’t level all the way through the “Golden Path” zones before completing the content there. There is more than enough other content, mind, but you’ll find that the questing in, say, Nektulos Forest is very different from the more direct way that it’s constructed in Butcherblock, for example. I personally rather like the variety and the less linear questing in the older zones, and with a Merc in tow there is very little that you can’t complete even solo.

The stock answer as to where you should set the AA slider is that if you’re going to be doing lots of quests (the completion of which gives you lots of AA XP,) you should set it at 33%, whereas if you’re going to be doing lots of grinding you should set it at 66%. This is a very decent rule of thumb, but even so you’ll want to tweak those numbers a bit based on your own preference and playstyle — and you may find that you want to vary it character by character. For Iskaaron, walking the Golden Path but also doing the other zones in those level ranges, I am finding that the 75% AA setting that I’d mentioned I was trying out before is pretty close to optimal. Leveling is slow but not too slow, and AA gain is fairly rapid, with about 2-3 AAs coming per level.

Here’s the big reason this is important, though: the current level cap is 92. The current AA cap is, I think, 320. But you need to have at least 280 AAs in order to advance past level 90, and in any event you don’t want to be stuck at 90 with 75 AAs or something like that. Assuming my current rate holds up, I should hit 90 with around 210 AA, which isn’t bad at all. And I might kick the AA slider up to 80% at some point after hitting 60.

This Week on Norrathian Odyssey: Basic Gameplay

This week on Norrathian Odyssey we tackle the very basics of EverQuest II gameplay: quests, the UI and the general look and feel of the starter zones (Timorous Deep in this case.) With this out of the way we’ll be able to dig deeper in further episodes.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to subscribe!

Leveling the Slightly Slower Way (But Still Kind of Fast)

Since the last play report I have been playing EverQuest II pretty steadily. I have done housekeeping on a bunch of characters, mostly to soak up excess collectables and ability tomes, and put five new levels on my Carpenter, leveling him to 35. Fairly soon we’ll be hitting that point where I’ll want to push all my primary tradeskillers out of Tier 3 and into Tier 4: that’s the aforementioned Carpenter, a Provisioner, Tailor, Weaponcrafter and Armorer. A fair amount of work, but it really shouldn’t soak up that much time; advancing through Tier 2 via tradeskilling writs is pretty fast and doesn’t consume a ridiculous amount of materials.

Most of my time, though, has gone into Iskaaron, with the broad goal of getting him to level 60 in some reasonable amount of time. I am now taking a different strategy, since I seemed to be outleveling zones pretty quickly with the AA slider set to 55%. So right around level 45, after finishing the first few rounds of quests in Lavastorm, I set the AA slider to 75% and went back to a couple of zones I’d finished up with, including Zek, the Enchanted Lands and Rivervale, and finally back to the Feerott. Employing a mercenary lets you readily solo any non-dungeon quests in these zones, and a leaper mount lets you get around them with negligible hassle, so I managed to wipe out just about every available quest.

I’m up to 80 AA now and am at level 48, and still working the Feerott, with no real end in sight. Instead of working a ton of quests in parallel at this point I’m working my way down a few notable chains. There’s a chance I’ll hit 49 by the time I’m finished, at which point it will be time to stray from the Golden Path yet again, this time to Everfrost — although I believe that got revamped a while back, so I’m not sure it’ll be level-suitable anymore. But it doesn’t really matter — even at 75% AA there’s more than I can do before I outlevel areas, even ignoring dunegons.

EQNext, Not Next Year

Massively reports, and Wilhelm remarks, that we shan’t be seeing any information on EverQuest Next any time soon. The relevant SmokeJumper quote courtesy of EQ2Wire:

EQ Next is still being built within a black box. The *earliest* we are currently considering that we *might* reveal info is late this year. We’re being very particular about what needs to be in the game before revealing it to folks, so until that stuff is ready, we won’t be showing anything. (Screens you saw from a couple years ago are completely obsolete now and are not pertinent to the current game at all.)

SOE is actually pretty good at trickling information out to the public, if you are paying very close attention. Naturally some individuals took the mention of the project as a sign that release was imminent, leading to the idea in some quarters by 2012 that it was vaporware. Of course, I don’t have to tell my readers these things take a long time to develop and that SOE isn’t the biggest or the richest development house out there. It’s gonna take a while. If we assume that serious discussions started happening in 2009 (as seems reasonable) then given a typical five-year development cycle we should expect to see a launch in 2014.

When SOE said that a new chapter in the EverQuest franchise was being planned back in 2009, it was clearly only in the thinking stages at the time, and when they started to talk about it at FanFaire in 2010, it was still obviously very early in development. So not hearing any details soon is not a surprise. 2013 is clearly going to be the year of Planetside 2 for SOE. They are mounting a big push for it and it’s drawing a lot of very positive buzz. My guess would be that we will not, in fact, see anything substantial on EQNext this year, as Creative Director Dave Georgeson implies is possible in the quote above. By the end of the year, of course, the narrative in certain quarters will be that more info was in fact promised, and that SOE is again the House of Lies. But you can’t unlearn stupid.

We may hear something at FanFaire… er, SOELive this year, or possibly afterward. Maybe even a screenshot or two. But I think we won’t start to see serious information until 2013, and possibly not before SOELive 2013. As for release, I think 2014 is possible, but I’m not holding my breath. I’d say 2015, possibly even 2016 are more likely.

Introducing Norrathian Odyssey

The debut of Norrathian Odyssey, my new vidcast series focusing on EQ2, is now available on YouTube. It will, over the course of multiple episodes, present the game in detail, but aimed at the novice and at those with modest experience with EQ2. So check that out and enjoy, and don’t forget to subscribe!

EDIT: The following play report has nothing to do with the video other than happening in the same game. The video is about character creation.

In-game, I had a nice leveling target and was moving right along with it. Then SOE had to have a 50% off fire sale on everything in the cash shop in every game of theirs that has one. Vanguard doesn’t, yet, so that left EQ2 (I do have EQ installed but I’m not the kind of fan of it that would spend money there.) I also happen to be subscribed as well.

So I bought two new character slots. And made a Necromancer. Even though I already have a Conjurer… but High Elves look silly in black. And of course, right when you start there’s a quest to hit level 20 in 14 days. Normally not much of a problem at all, but I figure there’s no telling when my ability to play will be curtailed, so I’d better rush.

And there’s a minor issue. EQ2 now has a slider that lets you allocate part of your regular (Adventuring XP) to AA XP. This is normally a great thing, since not enough AAs can indeed gimp you. AA XP becomes available at level 10 and something like a 50/50 split is normally a solid strategy. So I went straight to 55% as soon as I hit level 10.

The small issue is that if you do this right away at level 10, like I did, there’s really not enough questing content in Darklight Wood and adjoining Neriak to get you to 20 smoothly. Someplace around level 16 you’ll find yourself fighting uncomfortable level 19 and 20 mobs, some of them with an up arrow. Add a mercenary and the fights are tough but beatable unless there are a lot of adds because you’re playing sloppy (which mercenaries encourage.) But there’s still not enough XP.

So I’m sitting at level 18, doing the last couple of level 20 quests, I have my mount and am about out of stuff to do. Not a huge problem in EQ2; I can always grind (which I don’t mind in moderation) and there are other zones I could go to to do quests. I could probably manage the first round of level 20 quests in Nek Forest now.

Now, while the progression in Darklight Wood could be tweaked, this is really my fault because I knew this happens from running two other characters through that zone. I should have caught it; about 20% on the AA slider is about right. Don’t let this happen to you; wait until 20 to start seriously pounding AA.

I also bought a ton of other stuff, by the way: mounts, cosmetic gear and the Arcane Academy prestige house for Iskaaron, which will eventually be used as a guild hall for our little family (me and Mrs. Ardwulf) guild. After everything I still have 8K+ Station Cash left. I did consider the 12-month non-recurring Gold membership, but passed on that as it would have eaten most of my banked points, and I’m saving a bunch for Vanguard.

A Full Resumption

The MMO of choice at the moment is EverQuest II. It’s another of those games that I have spent a substantial amount of time on but have never managed to get to the level cap. Or even close, really — my highest-level character in the game is a 50 Berserker (the current level cap is 90.)

There are several reasons for this. For one, I have a lot of characters: eleven on my main account, plus another (free) account just to fool around with on the side. For another, I have spent a substantial amount of time working on tradeskills — a major part of the reason I have so many characters in the first place. Given that tradeskills in EQ2 have their own levels on top of what you do as an adventurer, I’ve accumulated a staggering 544 total levels in the game!

Despite that, once all these characters were established (defined by me as reaching level 20 in tradeskill or adventuring class) I have generally managed to keep a single adventuring main. Right now that is my Warlock Iskaaron, who is progressing nicely. You can cheese the system in EQ2 to powerlevel very rapidly, but I’m not doing that, and I’m saving my XP potions for tradeskilling. Even so, I’m racking on the levels every hour or two just doing random adventuring stuff, and I’m not sticking to the so-called “Golden Path,” by which method I would have spent level 32-42 in the Steamfont Mountains, a zone I don’t really like all that much. So while I did visit Steamfont I also adventured in the Enchanted Lands, Rivervale and Feerott, and moved on to Lavastorm at level 44, two levels later than the “Golden Path” would suggest.

I have not done anything with tradeskilling since my full-time return; my highest crafter is a level 41 tailor, to whom I will probably try to add some levels soon, so I can make a set of tier 5 crafted gear for Iskaaron, plus bigger bags for assorted characters. You can buy much bigger bags than I can currently make pretty cheap on the Broker; I have a decent stockpile of 20+ plat set aside for such things, but I like to make my own stuff where possible. I’d also like to boost my Provisioner, currently level 35 (and only 12 adventuring, largely from exploration XP while doing tradeskill quests,) into tier 5… and it’s always nice to have a carpenter for house items and strongboxes.

At the current pace it should only take another week or so to reach level 60. That’ll let me claim my glider at long last and see zones like Lesser Faydark and Tenebrous Tangle for the first time. In fairness, I have stuck my head into both zones, but I have never really explored either place. And then we shall see; EQ2 is not a difficult game to level in these days, but I’ve chosen to stray substantially from the optimal path when I think there’s more interesting things to do elsewhere.