Complete Heal

Today marks the celebration of America adopting the Declaration of Independence. On this day back in 1776, a bunch of misfits decided to declare their independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. I can’t imagine what they must have been thinking at the time and how proud they would be today of America’s position as the light of freedom in the world. I’m sure other countries are great in their own way but I’m proud to be an American on this 4th of July.

What have I been up to in game? Well, the three main SOE titles that I’m currently playing - EQ, EQ2 and Vanguard are all having bonus experience weekends. The Vanguard weekend wasn’t even announced which I find pretty funny. I found a forum post about it today from a player asking if they implemented a stealth bonus experience weekend and Ikik, one of the developers, confirmed it. Have you guys ever seen a bonus experience weekend that wasn’t announced? It boggles my mind to be honest. Leveling for me has been pretty slow in Vanguard as of late and had I known we were getting double experience I would have played more Vanguard in the last few days.

Speaking of Everquest, I’m currently level 54 with my new Enchanter on the 51/50 Mayong server. I spent some time trying to help a few friends get adjusted to Everquest on Thursday night and last night I spent about an hour trying to avoid the Junk Beast. Remember that guy? He’s a raid mob in Plane of Innovation that likes to get loose and unleash havoc on the zone. The screenshot above shows me running away as the Junk Beast tries to run me down. He was successful in clearing the zone a few times and our group never really recovered from the carnage. With the bonus experience weekend, there are a good number of players in their 60s now and I bet there are level 85 raiders in a week or two. Can you imagine that speed of progression in the old days of Everquest?

Everquest II is also having a bonus experience weekend so I decided to roll up a new character. This time I made a Dirge since they have some great abilities and are always needed in raids. I got this guy up to level 10 in no time at all and then went out on some AA runs. AA runs are basically what you want to do by locking experience once you hit level 10. You can join groups with a level 50ish player who then runs a group of newbies around POF, EL and other places killing named mobs, getting discos and racking up the AA points. I did one run tonight through EL and made 8 AA points. It was a crappy run too - so I’ll have to give it another shot later on. I’m hoping I can come out of the weekend with 30+ AAs on my newbie.

I was about to call it a night when I found out Vanguard had a bonus experience weekend going but they didn’t bother to tell anyone about it. I logged into the game and found a group grinding some big Ogres in Cragwind Ridge. I made about 2/3 of a level before everyone called it a night. I can’t wait until the Vanguard people realize they weren’t told about the bonus experience weekend. I predict more forum drama will be coming soon over this one. One final thought; why do developers always give bonus experience weekends on holidays? It seems to me like that would be a good time to log off and spend more time with family and friends. Instead, you are encouraged to ignore said family and friends and spend more time in game. Seems a bit backwards to me. Instead of bonus experience weekends, how about just give us 72 hours of in game time or whatever to use at our discretion. I don’t like being “forced” to play at certain times. Granted nobody is holding a gun to my head but when you have limited time it’s hard not to want to make the most of that time by participating in these events as much as possible.

The 51/50 Everquest server went live today at 2 pm EST.   I got off work late and then got tied up with some family stuff which prevented me from getting online until about 11:30 pm EST.  At that point, I fired up my station launcher and logged into the new Mayong server.  Once in game, I rolled an Enchanter just because it’s a class I always wanted to try out but didn’t feel like leveling in the newbie areas all by myself.  I’m usually attracted to classes that require you to think on your feet and not just spam a few buttons over and over again.  I like to have a large role and contribution in regards to whether our group lives or dies. After a quick character creation process, my Gnome Enchanter entered Crescent Reach.

Once in the city, my first reaction was that there were a ton of players just sitting there. I figured out that most of them were probably just trying to figure out what spells and abilities to load on their spell bar and how to spend their AA points because when you start a new character at level 51 with 50 AA points and you aren’t familiar with playing that class there can be quite a steep learning curve. Combine that steep curve with players who haven’t played EQ in years trying to come back and learn the user interface, controls and systems once again and you have about 75 players just idling at the newbie drop off point. Soon after, I decided to run to the Plane of Innovation and was surprised to see the mass pile of bodies shown above.

My first group was not too smooth as I was still trying to make hot keys and get the spells in the right slots. My performance was pretty bad and I was getting pretty frustrated. The group replaced me with a guild cleric (after we had a few guys go down on a multi-mob pull) and I took that as a sign that I needed to get my act together. Before I tried another group, I spent about 30 minutes just making sure I had the basics of the new class covered. For my enchanter those basics appear to be - mez, stun, root, de-aggro, mana regen buff, haste buff, a dot if i can spare it and a few macros. I have a ton of spells to choose from to fill 8 spell slots. Decisions…. Decisions…

Next up was a trip to Kunark to explore Old Sebilis. I don’t remember much about this zone from my old EQ days. I have an in game map mod and then followed some guys in the group and everything worked out pretty well. By the time we started pulling, I figured out how to buff, debuff and keep mobs locked down. I did much better in this group and got very close to level 53. It’s a bit on the late side here and I’ve got work in the morning but I thought I’d make this quick update - letting you all know how much fun I had tonight. My Old Sebilis group had no dual boxers and no mercenaries. Wow! There were also 29 players in that zone and POI was camped all night with very few live mobs wandering around. The initial server health appears strong with several would be raiding guilds forming up for conquest. If you are on the fence about trying EQ again you should give it a whirl. If you log in through station launcher and click on the EQ button, you may find that you have free game time. Also, it looks like SOE is going to have a bonus experience weekend in EQ starting on Thursday. Until next time.

The outside lights just shut off on the Paris hotel and casino outside my window so that must mean it’s time for me to get some sleep.  My writeups on the panels from today are contained in the posts below but I wanted to get a few pictures out before I called it a night.  These pictures are mostly Vanguard centric - capturing the majority of group Pantheon bosses, the raid dungeon Halls of Shattered Souls, current Stirhaad, Vanguard costumes, Vanguard players and a few other miscellaneous things.    Hope you enjoy.

Today was a good day for Vanguard.  I got to spend a good bit of time with Silius talking about a variety of topics this morning and the panels were more organized and informative.  I checked out epic weapons, Pantheon, Stirhaad, the FanFaire wyrm flying mount, Halls of the Shattered Souls, a new overland raid mob with some very interesting tactics and much more.   I started off my discussions with Silius suggesting the team speak more about what they have accomplished and where they are going rather than repeating that they have a lack of resources.  I felt like the mood was a somber one at the end of the first day of panels and a more upbeat tone was needed to get people fired up about their game once again.  I think people realize they have a lack of resources but if you keep saying that over and over again people get demoralized and some start going all doom and gloom on you.

I said something like, people just want more direct communication on issues that they feel are important.  I suggested more developer chats but he said previous ones got overly negative and non-productive.  You see, we have some responsibility when we get an avenue to talk to these guys to provide constructive criticism when needed but to keep it professional.  We don’t do ourselves any favors by getting pissed off and going crazy on the forums or dropping virtual f bombs on these guys.  He said he would consider more developer chats and a more frequently updated producers letter.

I talked about things like stuck in stairs bug or rain in vista and although both won’t get fixed anytime in the near future, it would be better for him to just address these things directly with the players so we can just deal with the answer and move on rather than continue to pound away at issues that just aren’t going to be resolved.  Silius said that new players who often post on the forums are quickly squashed by six players posting in their “VG is great” threads about how much the game sucks and that they shouldn’t waste their time.  When we are so negative it spreads like a cancer and pretty soon everyone feels bad about the game and new players decide to go elsewhere.

We talked about Pantheon, the group version and he confirmed that the pegasus mounts are rewarded by the group content vs. the upcoming raid content.  Speaking of the raid content, the raid zone called Halls of Shattered Souls will have a total of six bosses.  These bosses are bad dudes.  A group of ancients were locked inside this place and utterly destroyed by these six mobs.  There will be no trash in this area and it will be sharded.  The encounters are going to be epic in scale.   There are Ulvari impaled on spears hanging from the wall and that will tie in to Nexus one day.  Whatever did these things to the Ulvari is not something to be trifled with.  The zone was not populated but the place looks like something very bad went down in there.

I asked him about what his definition of  “on the shelf” was in regards to Nexus.  Silius said that it’s basically a year or two away due to resources and the sheer scope of the design document for that place.   As long as Vanguard is still running, we will get Nexus - it’s just going to take a while.  We talked about LiveGamer and he said that it really has no impact to my game play.  He is right.  If anything, we should look at it as SOE’s commitment to the game.  Why would they add it if they were going to shut the game down soon?  While I don’t like it personally, it’s not having an effect on me so it’s no big deal.

I asked about the Smed snub at the prior night community address.  Silius said that it wasn’t a big deal.  He said that if Smed didn’t like Vanguard then they wouldn’t have been at the Fanfaire in the first place.  He pointed to expansions in EQ and EQ2.  The 10 year and 6 year celebrations of EQ and SWG respectively and new game development of Agency and DCUO as things that merited time during that addresss.  His take on it was that they haven’t done anything new that warranted the main stage.  I said what about Pantheon, epics, level cap raise etc…  He didn’t seem to think that stuff warranted a presentation saying basically “don’t read too much into it.”  All that said, I still think they deserved 5 minutes.  I had to watch the guy in the bananna suit four times for God sakes.

Silius echoed that negativity on the forums really works against our goal of growing the game.  I think he is right.  I’ve never really thought of it that way before but to some extent we make our own bed if you know what I mean.  I think we should offer constructive criticism and have open dialogue with the developers.  On the size of the development team, they have artists, coders, CS, Q&A guys and more - in addition to the main guys you hear about all the time.  I was thinking the team might be as small as 3-4 people yesterday but now I’m thinking it’s  bigger considering those other contributors.  Granted, it’s not EQ or EQ2 big but it’s not Matrix either.  Someone else told me today that Matrix was down to 1,200 subscribers when the decision was made to shut it down.  I think we should have much more than that.  If we get down that low, we deserve to be shut down to be honest.

We saw the new wrym mounts in action.  They are pink and are going to have hearts on their hind quarters and on their head.  Hearts!?!?!   LOL.  They joked about rainbows shooting out of their asses.  At least I think that was a joke.  Their speed is the same as the reindeer.  The animations look amazing but the hearts and pink color left me scratching my head.   At least it’s better than a house statue.  It’s like a big giant pink care bear. Rawr!  With Pantheon, we will get God blessings.  These things will be able to be called upon by talking to your God through the black riftstones.  Don’t worry too much about picking the wrong God.  The God blessings will be specific to certain areas of the world.  For example, if you are fighting in Stirhaad you will be able to call on blessings that offer something for your group specific to the mobs in that area of the world.  The Chaos stuff is more offensive and destruction based while the Preservation stuff is more keep myself alive type of stuff.  Those are the two main factions you choose between in Pantheon, apparently.  Finally, the class specific armor sets are the same regardless of faction.

In the next few weeks, we will see increased bank and inventory sizes with banks from all continents accessible from one location.  On Station Voice in Vanguard, it’s probably not going to happen.  There was discussion on guild hall transition; what to do when a guild leader leaves - they are working on making this more seamless.  There is a revamp to the Salamander Caves coming in the future.  The Kamelott story line will be ending.  There is some story about giants that will get finished in next few months - something about seven brothers.  New systems such as AA’s are in the works.  They also talked about immersion and naming mobs after transformers and other pop culture references.  The consensus was that we sit behind keyboards killing fire breathing dragons with swords.  Perhaps technology and transormers isn’t that much of a stretch after all.  We should lighten up and not take ourselves or our game too seriously.  It is just a game after all.

A new overland mob is coming - I think his name was Sparkles?  He’s a little turtle that sends you off to get him some meat.  Once you get the meat, obtained from named drakes in KDQ, you feed him the meat and he gets indigestion.  Guess where this is going?  He grows in size and starts to kick your ass.  During the fight he poops adds, casts “topsy turvy” an ability which flips your screen orientation upside down, has another ability which causes your screen to go black  and at 10% makes your main tank drop his health to 1, wipes out all his armor and drops him from the hate list.  This ability is called “shatter.”  The boss will drop enhancements as loot.

A final question was asked in the panel today about 51+ content and the casual player.  Silius said that SOD experience is pretty good but he is tweaking 2 dots to make them more viable for solo players.  He said the old world mobs were too much to manage so the 51-55 progression should be done on the new stuff.  They expect the average player to reach 55 by August.   The panels today were more upbeat, used the projector and showed off lots of cool new stuff.  I had a better feeling about the game at the end of the day.  Let’s hope they can keep up some momentum.  I’ve got tons more pictures and additional thoughts on the weekend but it’s getting late and I need to get some sleep before flying back to the East coast in the morning.  Until next time…

So i went to a panel this morning that gave some insight into the business aspects of MMOs.  I wanted to toss out a few tidbits that you might find interesting from the discussion.  I missed the first 15 minutes or so but once I got in the room, the presenter was talking about buying games from box stores vs. online vendors.  He said that box stores take up to 80% of the profit that the developer would otherwise make while online purchases only take 10% of the profit.  Developers would rather you buy their products online; to save 70% of their profit margins.  That may explain why our games take up smaller amounts of space on the shelves of the box stores each year.

Microtransactions are here to stay.  We will see more and more of this going forward due to simple business principles.  The profit potentinal from mass subscriber numbers and letting people pay for their level of consumption will generally result in more profits than the old subscription model.  Microtransactions are currently a $1 billion a year business and growing.  Did you know that 80 to 90% of new games now have an online component?  That number continues to increase.

We learned a little more about gold farmers and their “fast livery.”  Most of the gold farmers operate out of China (big surprise) but India is popular as well.  The typical setup is started by a guy with some cash who brings in a bunch of young kids to work in his sweatshop.  The kids move in there and sleep on cots with computers under their beds - or within easy reach.  Their room and board is covered by the rich guy and they work 6 days a week or more with 14+ hour days farming for gold.   Their wages are ridiculously low and paying for gold just encourages more sweat shops.  It’s really the bane of the developers and something they continue to fight on a daily basis.

Did you know that the average MMO budget these days is $20 to $30 million with large AAA titles exceeding $60 million?  Finally, if you are interested in working in the gaming industry you can typically get into it in one of three ways.  First, you can get in through customer service or quality assurance.  These guys typically make $20 - $25k a year starting out but the managers usually make in the neighborhood of $50k a year.  You can also get in through the software world or the hardware world.  Did you know that a 2007 survey of game developers found that the average starting salary for a rookie game developer exceeded $75k a year?  Not too bad.

With the recent release of Pantheon of the Ancients, Vanguard epic weapons are coming. They look spectacular. Here’s the scoop. First, epic weapons will all be “enhancements” that fit in a new item slot called a “soul slot.” All new T3+ weapons will have a soul slot in them. This will allow you to keep your epic going as new weapons are released. You will basically attach, or socket your epic in the soul slot of the new weapon and your new weapon will appear like your epic item and have all the epic benefits plus the stats of the new weapon. This system will prevent you from having to put your epic in the bag when a better weapon comes down the pipe. This sounds like a great idea.

Each epic has a story. Each weapon is an old powerful fighter known as an “ancient.” Ancients were an old Telonian race responsible for building the Pantheon under the direction of the Gods. Each of the epic weapons represents one of fifteen ancient warriors - the best soldiers of that storied race. The ancients live in “soul prisions” within your weapon, which is why each weapon has that word in it’s name. The pictures shown below represent the group version of the epic weapons. The stats are not final. A few of them were bugged so I don’t have pictures of all of them. Once Pantheon is cleared, you will get your group epic and then venture to the Hall of Shattered Souls to get the raid version. The raid version will have particle effects and better stats. The raid versions will be called “shattered soul prisions” representing the ancient breaking out and giving you more power. I can’t express how bad ass these things are. Go get them!

Warrior

Sorceror

Shaman

Rogue

Ranger

Psionicist

Paladin

Necromancer (off hand)

Druid

Dreadknight

Disciple

Cleric

Blood Mage (off hander not shown)

Bard

After playing on the new 51/50 server preview last night, I got motivated to attend a few EQ panels today. The first panel was related to the new Mayong server which will be released to the public this coming Tuesday morning - June 30th. With the 51/50 server, you can start any new character at level 51 with 50 alternative advancement points. You start with zero cash and a few bags but get a full set of flawed defiant gear, max skills for your level, all of your spells and the opportunity to earn one of 33 server first titles on your way to 85. The next title up for grabs, that wasn’t taken already during the FanFaire preview, is for Trakanon. The dev team also mentioned that they will offer secondary titles starting on Tuesday for the bosses dropped during Fanfaire. Server transfers on and off the new server won’t be allowed for at least the next few months.

Also on Tuesday they are e-mailing over 1 million former players who never got a character above level 50 - offering them a chance to come back and start on the new server. These former players will get somewhere between 14 and 30 days free game time to experience the world of Norrath once again. I asked them why it took so long to release this server and they said they were holding it out for a FanFaire release. The biggest obstacle to the server going live was making sure the gear sets and spells were all taken care of. On a personal note, I’m going to be playing when the server goes live on Tuesday. I hope many of you give it a shot as well, especially if you haven’t played EQ in a while. You can try out all the character classes and find something you like. There will be a large number of people leveling up so groups should be easy to find. The best part is you don’t start 10 years behind the curve.

I also watched the world premier of the EQ documentary this morning. The room was packed, as you might imagine, and I camped on the floor in front of the screen. It was a great journey down memory lane and I found it interesting just how many people have been influenced in so many ways by the video game I’ve now played off and on for 10 years. Of particular interest was the favorable commentary by the World of Warcraft lead designers who were interviewed for segments of the show. Also, there was a bit of a teaser in there about something called “EQ Next.” I talked to a few developers later in the day and they were very tight lipped about this deal. I walked away believing that EQ Next is code for the next Everquest project. Maybe that’s not exactly an earth shattering deduction but something is underway for another Norrath based MMO.

The last thing I did today EQ wise was attend the new expansion unveiling. The next expansion is called Underfoot and is based in the plane of power for Brell’s realm. Brell is the “duke of below” and is the creator of gnomes and dwarves. In this expansion, you enter through the Hole and explore 13 cave like zones. There was a bizarre mini-game demoed where you enter an instance with 12 players and 12 npc characters and run around throwing boomerangs at each other FPS style. You will get rewards for finishing high in the leaderboard at the end of each map. This was cool I guess but seemed a bit random. The expansion is basically more killing stuff while getting gear with more hit points and mana. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it I suppose.

The second day of FanFaire is winding down and I thought I’d put up a quick recap. After getting a late start this morning, I made the Everquest 10th anniversary celebration panel. This event had about 10-12 EQ developers and was hosted by Jace Hall. It was interesting to hear from the devs, as they were introducing themselves, about how many of them have rotated around over their SOE careers working on different games such as EQ2 and Freerealms only to come back to EQ development. I guess it’s pretty common for game companies with multiple products to rotate developers but it just kinda struck me as noteworthy. Speaking of noteworthy, did you know that the 1999 release of Everquest actually brought down the internet in San Diego? SOE had to call their network team in to get San Diego rolling again - neat story. The EQ devs talked about wanting to grow the game with more subscriptions and echoed their desire to keep releasing expansions into the forseeable future. After talking for a while and answering some canned questions from the moderator they opened the floor up for questions.

They took a good bit of heat for deciding on a 51/50 server vs. a progression server. They said they might actually release two new servers - one with each rule set in the coming months so stay tuned. On the question as to how has their demographic changed over the years they said their players are 10 years older now. They are no longer college kids with 60+ hours a week to play so they take that into consideration when designing new content. The game has gradually moved away from it’s hard core heritage and they strive to strike a balance between the hard core and casual player. They acknowledged that many players like the nostalgia and they are trying to work some of that into their new expansion. We might be able to fight Vox and Naggy and others at higher level once again. They took another question on what was their biggest mistakes. Gates of Discord was cited as well as Planes of Power, especially in regards to the backflagging fiasco. Another question dealt with graphics and keeping up with more modern games. While no major graphics overhaul is planned, their newer zones are pretty competitive and they are going to continue to optimize their engine to consume less memory etc… They are concerned about scalability as a good portion of their player base is apparently on pretty old hardware.

Up next was the Vanguard live quest - which I skipped to go eat lunch, followed by time spent hanging out in the main hall. At 4 pm the Vanguard panels started and they were hosted by Silius, Tiraslee, Raijinn and Jansan (sp). The format and vibe in the Vanguard panels was identical to last year. The room was very small, there was no organized presentation (they actually had a computer and projector but never used it) and the first topic on the agenda wasn’t even discussed - lore and mythology. I was hoping they would put Pantheon up on the projector and talk about lore or preview Nexus or something. Instead, it just turned into a question and answer session on a wide variety of topics. I heard “not enough resources” no less than 20 times. I asked specifically about the relationship between their dev team size and the number of paid subscribers noting that they lost a few devs over the past 12 months yet the subs seem to be stable. Silius couldn’t talk about the numbers of course and he seemed a bit frustrated with the lack of resources.

Other Vanguard news is that Nexus is on the shelf. They are going to work on the players choice update, AAs, Shattered Souls, Panthor Zhi (sp) and Stiirhaad (sp). The later two areas are single group dungeon crawls. Silius also said that Vanguard is “very, very cumbersome when it comes to new art assets.” The recent ranger nerf was due to possible exploits with bugged mobs. Rather than fix the mob AI, which would take more developer time they opted for the 10 minute range nerf instead. That change is permanent. Another great quote was “Galleons are just a big fishing boat.” Apparently, there had been some talk about more boat functionality such as storage, recall points or even content only reachable by guilds who own that large ship. None of that stuff is on the horizon. They talked about dyeing armor and Silius said that Jeff and Brad (oriignal Sigil brain trust) were against it to avoid “high level circus clowns” running around everywhere. While they may do something one day, it’s not a high priority. On the subject of Diplomacy, Silius said “diplomacy is the red headed step child of Vanguard.” My overall Vanguard thought is that the devs are doing the best they can but it’s hard to fly to Vegas, arrive in a panel with no prepared presentation and hear how lean the team really is. The night topped off with Smedley ignoring the game in his keynote address for the second year in a row. Talk about pouring salt in the wounds. I was hoping for a more upbeat deal - maybe tomorrow.

I’m not going to talk much about the community address since it’s all over other news sites and many of you probably watched it live. I will say that EQ2 is going to add a lot of new content between now and the February 2010 expansion. Specifically, they are adding a system where you can mentor down and clear old content for exp and AA points. An achievement system is coming which features in game rewards, titles and other neat stuff. That system may not be implemented on the PVP servers. GU53 will have a new four group raid zone and it will have each encounter with a difficulty slider. In other words, if you fight 10 bosses in the zone, you can dial them in from easy to nightmare mode with difficulty and loot adjusted accordingly. The scripts will be different on each level of difficulty. Expect this for all future raids.

After the community address, the opened the new EQ 51/50 server called Mayong. The grand opening is only for players who are here in Vegas. Next week, the server will open for the general population. The bad news for the general population is that we killed a number of bosses tonight and got the titles and first time rewards that others won’t have the opportunity to compete for. I logged on and rolled up a new character, got him guilded in the Fanfaire guild and proceeded to kill Vox, Naggy and VS and more. Screenshots of the EQ server opening are shown below.

The first 51/50 players (Mayong server) FanFaire 2009

Naggy’s Lair - FanFaire guild

Dragon down

The first Mayong server raid force

Another celebrity sighting

More dead dragons

Here are a few quick notes and observations about the beginning of day 2. The panels are now underway and the live quests have begun. I got to spend some time this morning with Tiraslee as he was showing off Pantheon and the upcoming group and raid epic weapons. These things look amazing and for those of you grinding to 55 - let me say you won’t be disappointed. The Vanguard epics are in two versions with the raid version being stronger w/ more interesting particle effects etc… To get the raid version, you basically have to beat the new raid zone. There will also be various tiers of armor sets for each type of character - fighter, healer etc… that will then get more specialized as you move along. One interesting note is that the epic weapons will be able to be added to new stuff as those weapons are released as a soul slot item? Not sure exactly but the flexibility sounded cool.

I met up with a few friends for lunch and ran into James Carville at Caesar’s Palace casino. He’s an interesting cat for sure. Other random thoughts are that the next expansions are going to be unveiled tonight for EQ and EQ2. I may or may not have some scoop but I’ll leave it to the official announcement later on. Also, I’m glad I still have a mythicaled Fury on Nagafen in EQ2. Druids don’t give up hope…

I also attended an EQ 10 year celebration panel this morning which I’ll talk more about later tonight when I have more time for an update. Until then, here are a few pics from Vanguard including the group version of the cleric epics from Pantheon, several bosses from that zone and a super sized gnome. You might even see a thong wearing developer if you look closely.

The dust has settled on the first day of FanFaire 2009. This year marks my fourth trip to FanFaire - starting with the Atlanta event in 2006. I’m awake with a moderate hangover from the prior nights festivities. FanFaire kicked off yesterday afternoon at 4 pm. At about 2:45, I got in line with probably 100 or so people in front of me. Before too long, the line behind me extended as far as I could see. Several players were dressed up in costume and it was your typical crowd for one of these events. There was a bit of electricity in the air and the crowd cheered once the gates opened.

There were some SOE folks filming the opening of the event and they interviewed the guys ahead of me in line who were in costume. I spent the hour before the line started moving talking with two SWG players from Canada who were attending their first event. SWG is one game I don’t know anything about - other than second hand information about the “NGE” deal. After talking to these guys, I left thinking I’d like to give the game a shot. It’s interesting that no matter what the game is, you can run across people who are so passionate about it that you leave the conversation wanting to try it yourself.

Inside the first set of doors was a lobby / parlor area that had lots of Everquest art on display. I tried to capture most of it in my earlier post. The artwork was all roped off and you got to enjoy it as you stood in another line wrapping around the lobby to get to the registration tables. At registration, I’d guess about 15 SOE employees including Grimwell and Raijinn were there to check people in. I spent some time chatting with Grimwell and telling him hello from his old buddies at eq2-daily.com. Grimwell gave me my badge and green arm band (which lets you drink tonight on SOE’s tab) and I headed inside the main convention area.

The main convention room is similar to what they have had in the past. It’s basically a large room with various vendors, developers, bars etc.. wrapping around the sides of the room. In the middle of the room is a large area with computers (used for the EQ and EQ2 tournaments going on today) plus you can just sign up for game time to pop into your favorite game and poke fun at those who aren’t here

Before too long, I had my event t-shit and schwag bag in hand and I headed straight to the Vanguard developers. One side note, I was hoping for a t-shirt with more of a 10 year EQ anniversary theme. The design this year seems a bit random. In the back of the room I found the lead producer / designer of Vanguard - Silius and right hand man Tiraslee. Silius is the guy who used to work for Sigil and is buddies with Brad McQuaid. He’s been with the company through all it’s trials and tribulations and is the one constant from the team that actually built the game before SOE bought it up shortly after release. He’s an interesting guy to talk too that’s for sure. Both Silius and Tiraslee are cool down to earth guys who love video games and work much more than any human should be expected to work to release content, fix bugs, and give us a unique MMO to play. I know Silius takes a lot of flak but meeting these guys - plus ex. VG dev Glip and hearing their stories gives you perspective that the forum trolls don’t always have.

Here are a few highlights from discussions with the VG developers. First, the game is stable. That means it’s not headed toward a Matrix online fate. The deal with Matrix was really a simple matter of economics. There weren’t enough subs to cover the costs of running the game - mainly fees paid for the intellectual property rights. Tiraslee, who designed most of the Isle of Dawn - which is the Vanguard free trial newbie island, said that they still see lots of players coming to the game from that avenue and that the retention rate is actually quite high. Silius acknowledged that the recently released 51-55 grind was by design. He said they need to slow the pace a bit, leveling wise so that they have time to generate more content with a smaller developer team. Makes sense to me. On the subject of Live Gamer, these guys said the decision was made over their heads and they didn’t have much to say about it. While a politically correct response, you can read their faces to determine it wasn’t their idea and it’s not something they would ever suggest doing to the game. At the end of the day, Live Gamer wasn’t that big of a deal - very few people use it.

When you go to Fanfaire, you get in game items for each game that you are subscribed to. If you have station pass, you get all the in game items. The Vanguard in game item this year is a flying mount. It’s even pink! Unfortunately, Silius confirmed that you have to be level 50 to fly on the thing. If you /claim it at lower levels it’s a vanity pet that grows in size and stature as you level up. So at level 10 for example, it’s just a small dragonling. By your 30’s it’s getting bigger and by 40 it’s full size and has it’s wings. At 50, you can mount up on the thing and fly all over Telon. Flying mounts are very hard to get in the live game so this is a huge deal for those of us who don’t have one of those yet. The only bad thing is I can’t use it until 50. I do like how the thing will grow with you. I guess making it 50+ was one way to fight off the criticism of giving it to people who attended the event. Seems like a reasonable compromise to me in the end.

Other random Vanguard thoughts are that the mass Sigil firing in the parking lot that you may have heard about actually happened. They are looking for an intern right now and have an apprentice designer on board as well. The former is generally a college kid studying design or something that translates to that field while the later is generally someone who already works at SOE but might be in customer service or whatever and expresses interest in design. The devs are starting to work on the “player’s choice” update but Silius doesn’t feel like he has a good bead yet on what that project will entail. Fixing rain in Vista isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Nexus is a long way off and he hinted at the sheer scope of the place as being monumental.

Next up was a chat with the outgoing EQ2 producer Bruce Ferguson. Bruce is an interesting guy who has a background in other industries who just loved games and ended up working his way up the ladder at SOE to have a stint at being in charge of Everquest 2. Bruce is moving on to a role of product management - generally making sure all the game teams are staying on track. From talking with him, he said that SOE remains committed to it’s roots (EQ, EQ2 etc…) and will also do more stuff that has RMT and is more Free Realms like. I was glad they weren’t going to move too far in the Free Realms direction. Bruce talked about additional graphics improvements coming down the pipe in EQ2 including one day having Direct X 10 support in the game. They are currently working on new shader technology and are continuing to work on optimization and performance. EQ2 runs great these days but it can still get a bit laggy on raids or in mass pvp encounters.

At 8 pm, another room opened where SOE served up appetizers and drinks (cash bar). Lots of tables were set up in there - it’s the room where Smed will give the community address tonight and they filled up quickly. There is a huge crowd here this year. I ran into a number of people from Vanguard and EQ2 and caught up with some old friends. Brenlo, the new EQ2 producer, took the stage and mc’d the event - as SOE gave away lots of video cards, headsets, gaming glasses (bizarre, eh?), network cards and other items while making the players get up on stage and do dumb stuff to earn them. There was a oriental guy that guy up there and did a dance that words can’t describe. Brenlo and Phatthom, the new EQ producer, have a deal going where depending on who has the largest crowd attending - one of them is going to shave their head live on stage at the end of FanFaire. Sounds interesting, I guess. After the SOE event was over, they opened back up the main hall for late night trading game sessions. I bailed on that and instead went to join the Vanguard players for beers and margaritas.

We started off at a bar in the connecting Paris hotel but couldn’t find a table big enough for our raid force. We ran into some attitude from the waitresses who were trying to close down their section and went off in search of a place to gather together. We ended up at this Mexican joint and had a good time. With us was Soresha (who makes the VG map application and traveled over here from the UK), Simnir, Merd, Joodah, The Elven Possee, Dosi, an SOE code guy (can’t remember his name) and a few others. We had a blast and by the time we were done it so late I’d been awake for 24 hours and needed to crash.

The panels kick off today and the SOE community address will be tonight. You should be able to stream it live - just check out the home page of your favorite SOE game for instructions. We should hear about the next expansions for EQ and EQ2 as well as get some insight into what they might be working on. One final note, I asked one of the guys where Clint Worley went (he was the old EQ producer who went to work on an undisclosed new project). They wouldn’t tell me. EQ3 perhaps?