Complete Heal

With Blizzcon approaching next month, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time back in World of Warcraft. There are a few items on my to do list that need to be resolved before I head out to Anaheim in late October. First, I’ve been working on running quests in order to gather the 4,250 gold needed to purchase my epic flying skill. My priest has a bronze dragon epic flyer and I’d love to be able to fly around on him in the near future. Speaking of questing, I must say that Blizzard does an amazing job with questing. Everything just flows and they have some rather innovative ways to break up the kill 10 rats rut that many games fall back on frequently.

Another goal of mine was to experience the Burning Crusade raid content that i never got to see. Fortunately, two weeks ago I had the opportunity to join a “Tour of the Burning Crusade.” This event was predominantly filled with guild members who are working on their achievements. We started with the Black Temple and worked our way through the Sunwell Plateau, The Eye and the Battle for Mount Hyjal. Along the way, we dropped major bosses from the last expansion including Illidan Stormrage, Kil’jaeden, Kael’thas Sunstrider and Archimonde. We cleared 4 raid zones in a few hours and had a great time along the way.

Last week was pretty solid for our EQ progression guild as we took our first steps in the Plane of Air, finally downed Agnarr and opened up the Lost Dungeons of Norrath content for the guild. You may remember LDON as the expansion released in 2003 that introduced the first broad-based instance dungeons to Norrath.

After logging in last night, I was greeted by a mysterious voice in chat asking for heroes to gather up in Lavastorm for a GM event. Since returning to the game, I’ve been surprised by how many in game events are still going on each week. I don’t remember ever seeing one of these in all my time in EQ2. Anyways, the last GM event I went to in EQ was a race around the arena where I won a pretty nice item as a reward for winning my class. For this event, the task was a bit different – a scavenger hunt! Within a few minutes of the announcement, quite a crowd was gathered in Lavastorm and several guild members also arrived to join in on the fun.

We were asked to collect 10 specific items found all over Norrath within an hour and then race back to the zone to submit our treasures. Our guild had almost two full groups participating in the event and by the time the scavenger hunt got underway we decided to split up and get the items while doing a /roll to see which member would turn in the items for the reward. Congrats to Surrepo who turned in the first 10 items and won the scavenger hunt. He was awarded the item shown above plus an in game title – “The Rising Sun.”

Second place was won by a max level cleric on a flying dragon mount but we managed to collect another set of items turned in by Deuberry who was awarded a nice item as well. Too bad he can’t use it for a while as we are locked at 65 as we work our way through the Elemental planes. It was a great night and it was fun to come together as a guild to take 2 out of the top 3 positions in the contest.

After the GM event was over, we decided to head to Upper Guk to run a hard mode Lost Dungeons of Norrath instance. Its been over 5 years since I last ran a LDON instance but I had a blast going back to Guk. The experience was pretty solid as I pinged 200 AA points and scored my first LDON points on this character. Honestly, it was just fun to go cruising around a classic MMO dungeon, killing frogs while enjoying the company of a great group of players who are enjoying every moment of their return to Norrath. Raids are scheduled for Sunday night so stay tuned for more adventures of Visceral downing “big bad bosses.” Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Tonight our EQ progression guild, Visceral took our first footsteps in the Elemental Planes. Our initial foray was to the Plane of Air (also known as Eryslai, the Kingdom of Wind.) This zone is the home of Xegony, the Queen of Air. We were originally scheduled to raid at 3pm EST but due to some scheduling issues we pushed the start time back to 8pm EST. Our current raid schedule is twice a week and based on my RL commitments, I’m hoping we stick to evening raids. When I logged in tonight, I was greeted by a very full and vibrant guild hall. Of course, this is what you expect when a raid force has been building for weeks ready for the big show. We’ve been leveling up to 65 and grinding AAs getting ready for our season opener in a manner very similar to an NFL team working out through the summer and beating up on each other in anticipation of that first game.

The screenshot above shows our raid force right outside the Plane of Air. I was pretty impressed that our raid filled up to 50+ players and our average level was 64. Especially considering we have new people joining every day and we were taking anyone 60+ for this raid. What’s even more amazing is we were able to gather up that many people to attack content that is 8 years old. Sometimes I think to myself that I bet EQ keeps going longer than games like EQ2 simply because the player base is incredibly invested in the game while other more modern MMOs suffer a bit from the “WOW tourist” phenomenon where players are always looking for the next best thing. Anyways, back to the subject at hand. Once inside the zone, we started mowing through trash mobs… lots of trash mobs. Our dps and overall coordination was pretty solid and we moved quickly to our first target. I haven’t spent much time in EQ since getting back from FanFaire as my Enchanter is locked at 65 and has a pretty healthy number of AAs for his level. Nonetheless, within a few minutes of playing tonight the rust was off and I was back on my game.

The first target for the night was the Avatar of Smoke. Old Smokey was pretty tame to be honest. We used two tanks to take him down because he would drop aggro periodically but our healers were on top of their game and he fell pretty easily dropping a nice belt and some elemental armor molds. I have to say it’s quite a rush to be fighting raid targets with raids bigger than 24 players. In this case we had around 50 players for the entire raid and the sheer scope of things was just more epic. We didn’t even use Ventrilo – old school baby! I’m really enjoying every minute of this experience. Old school Everquest is something to savor – like a fine wine.

After passing out the loot, and generating our first DKP we cleared more trash (yay!) and worked our way past a few mini bosses like the big bird – Melemil Faal’Armanna shown below. He was pretty simple and really was just a bump in the road on our way to the second Avatar – the Avatar of Mist.

The Avatar of Mist was also a pretty straight forward fight but we did use some strategery (yes that’s a word) to pull him out of his room and avoid clearing even more trash. Once we got the pull down, he fell shortly thereafter dropping more molds and gear for plate wearers.

My group took a few deaths on this guy and I wasn’t even healing! I think we did great for our first official progression raid. At the end of the night, one of my dead group mates had the quote of the day. Describing his death at the hands of our final Avatar, he said “that mob 2 rounded me from behind.” Ouch.

Fan Faire 2010 has now officially come to an end. There are a number of sites that have been covering the event this year such as EQ2 Wire, so my plan is just to recap some of the conversations that I had with various developers and point out some things that I found interesting. I apologize for the wall of text and any typos that follow as I don’t have much time to proof this post before it’s time to get some sleep for the night. I’ll clean up the post and get a good number of pictures on the site once I get back in town on Tuesday.

Overall

In my opinion, this year was a bit subdued vs. prior years. The main game hall seemed to be toned down and most of the focus was on new releases including DC Universe Online, The Agency and the Clone Wars. I didn’t see any official game stations running EQ, EQ2 or Vanguard. Sure there were tournaments and game room machines in the back of the main hall but it just seemed to be a bit light on the bling factor this year – at least as far as the AAA MMO titles were concerned. I think attendance might have been down a bit this year too. On the subject of new games, I will say that DCUO looks amazing. I think that game has a great future. I also really enjoyed talking with the SOE guys this year from Smedley on down. You can tell they are passionate about making games and they enjoy getting feedback from their customers. It’s a really unique dialogue that goes on between developer and gamer at these events and it’s one that doesn’t happen in many other forms of entertainment. WIth that said, the following is a recap of my thoughts on the weekend.

EQ

The new EQ Live server will be a time locked progression server. The developer I talked to about this said that they know players want it out earlier but the team is focused on releasing the new expansion – House of Thule in October. They don’t want to take the focus away from the expansion and the new content that follows so the current thought is to wait a few months after the expansion releases before the new server is released. The current projection for the launch of the new EQ progression server is the second week of January.

The new EQ expansion will include another 5 levels as well as player housing. My understanding is the player housing will be connected to the guild lobby but it will be a separate zone with stand alone houses.

The EQ population is relatively stable and depending on which numbers you look at the game still has about as many subscribers as EQ2. The games go back and forth as far as which has the larger population. Speaking of population, the devs have considered a free to play approach (something like all servers are free to play up to level 50) but nothing like that will be coming soon. They aren’t really in favor of going the route of EQ2 Extended where the F2P model is on separate servers. They are also very aware of the overall EQ Live community feelings about paying for power vs. earning what you have and will tread lightly on this front. One last thought, one developer I talked to referenced Nike’s “Beat Adidas” campaign in regard to the EQ Live vs. EQ2 mix. In other words, when Nike came out their sole goal was to one up their rival. It sounds like internally, the EQ guys are still mixing it up and trying to compete with the newer and sexier EQ2. I really liked hearing that – a little rivalry can be good for everyone.

Vanguard

When SOE said Vanguard wasn’t on the official list of Fan Faire games – they weren’t kidding. I couldn’t find a single developer in Las Vegas this year for Vanguard. They didn’t make the bus trip. They also had a kiosk running the game last year but this year? Nope. There was a live quest on the schedule but I took my wife out to lunch instead. There was still a Vanguard banner hanging in the main hall but that was about it.

I did learn a few things about the game – even though the developers were absent. First, there are no plans to shutter the game. I spoke to John Smedley, President of SOE, directly about the game. Let me say that he was open and honest and we had a great dialogue. He was a pleasure to talk to and regardless of what people say about the guy he is a gamer at heart and cares about the games we all play – including Vanguard. I asked him if the game was in maintenance mode and he said it’s a step above maintenance mode. The truth is that the remaining developers are shared with other games (EQ2, EQ Next etc…) and they allocate time for them to work on Vanguard as the schedule permits. I basically understood it to mean that Vanguard doesn’t have any more full time developers. That was a bit of a disappointment but Smed stated that he thinks the game will stick around for a few more years. He’s also open to ideas on how to make the game more popular.

He acknowledged the chicken and egg problem with spending money on the game and I thanked him for all the effort and money they put in the game since they acquired it from Sigil. It’s truly come a long way. We also talked about doing some kind of free to play server for Vanguard but he wasn’t sure how the “core gamer” that’s left in Vanguard would respond to such a thing. Russell Shanks, EVP / COO of SOE was sitting next to him when we spoke and they both were interested in giving Vanguard a spark of life.

Another developer told me they might end up moving the Vanguard servers to the East coast. Not sure really what the point of that would be but it would be closer to me so that can’t be all bad. This same developer said VG was considering the F2P model but the recent staff reductions hit VG pretty hard and he didn’t feel like the resources were still there to invest that much time in the game. That was also a bummer. I was pitching an idea of a free to play Vanguard server to let people who bought the game come back and see how much progress had been made since release and maybe they would transfer over to the Telon server or subscribe to keep the game alive. At this point, why not do it? What’s the alternative?

EQ2 Extended

As you all know, EQ2 is coming out with a F2P service called EQ2 Extended. It’s currently in Alpha and beta begins on August 17th. The Senior Producer of EQ2, Dave Georgeson, talked about the philosophy behind this “experiment” and spent a lot of time listening to players and getting their feedback. It’s clear that he is trying to breathe new life into EQ2 and I think that’s a good thing.

EQ2 Extended is basically an attempt to get more users into the EQ2 universe and really to raise brand awareness for Everquest in general. It’s not designed to replace EQ2 Live. According to Dave, EQ2 is their most important product in their stable of games. EQ2 Extended is going to run on separate servers and will release with only one PVE server. They would like to add a PVP server under the service but it won’t come out right out of the gate. Characters transfers off EQ2 Extended won’t be allowed because of “duplication exploits” and “EQ2 Live players don’t want to play with characters who bought their way to power.” Seemed reasonable to me.

Many people lamented losing the 14 day free trial and were concerned that this would dry up the number of players coming into EQ2 Live. The devs stated that very few players convert to a paid subscription after going through the free trial so their take on it was that it wasn’t very effective at getting new players anyway. They are hoping EQ2 Extended will be more productive and cited all the good press they have gotten recently – even being in the Wall Street Journal.

The devs are prepared to offer special incentives on the EQ2 Live servers should the population start dropping such as mounts, armor sets etc… with multiple month subscriptions and they want both services to succeed. You will be able to copy your character from the Live servers to EQ2 Extended for a $35 fee. Players from both PVE and PVP servers will be able to copy characters over into the new servers.

Dave also confirmed that no new items with stats will be coming to the marketplace on EQ2 live. That was good to hear. He said the EQ2 population has been stable since the release of the SF expansion and any perceived drop in population is more a result of people transferring over to AB and Nagafen (the higher population servers.) If EQ2 Extended takes off, there will be more money for advertising an investing back in both models of the game.

EQ2

GU57 is coming soon and is all about bringing new players to the game. It features new spell effects, greater performance out of Shader 3.0 and much improved ability to render Flora without framerate hits. They eventually will be using the EQ2 Extended streaming launcher for both versions of the game and from what I hear that thing is very slick. GU58 is due in October and will feature the Guk Spire Dungeon, new items on SF bosses and a redo of Greater Faydark.

The new EQ2 expansion was announced and as expected we are going back to Velious. The official title of the new expansion is EQ2: Destiny of Velious. I think it’s interesting the expansion, due out in February, is referred to as “part 1″ of the Velious story. Will the rest of it be in future game updates or in the 2011 expansion? No decisions have been made as far as I know on that subject. The expansion will not have a level cap but there will be more AA available. The biggest news was that we will get flying mounts in all zones. The first flying mount will be questable. I bet one day we will be able to buy them with station cash – just saying

Server merge discussions are ongoing. The new expansion zones are level 86+.

EQ Next

A new Everquest game is coming and right now it’s PC only. It’s going to have the name “Everquest” in the title although right now it’s referred to as “Everquest Next.” We had two surprise panels that were not on the official schedule about this game. A few notes follow. First, there is a very senior team on this game right now – including the director Clint Worley. The game is going to use a modified version of the Free Realms Engine but the concept art and in game screenshots that they showed us didn’t look very Free Realms like to me. They are going to have PVP in this game from the beginning or as Smed said “pvp done right.”

Who else is on this team? I was told by another developer that some of the Vanguard guys have been moved to this project. I didn’t get specifics but he also said that Sillius continues to spend a good bit of time on EQ2. He’s probably working on the new expansion. There was a lot of talk about immersion and with the Free Realms engine there will be no zoning in overland zones. It will be like WOW where you can basically walk anywhere above ground without zoning. There will be instanced dungeons and solo, group and raid content.

Things will look familiar if you are a veteran of Norrath. They mentioned that they are considering “corpse run servers” or “hard core servers” to appeal to the old school core gamer. That comment got a loud round of applause. There will be fewer classes than EQ2 and classes will have more defined roles – think Enchanters and Bards from EQ Live. The team has a lot of old school EQ developers on it and they are leaning on that experience a bit more than EQ2 when it comes to vision and direction for the new game.

The new game is very colorful and vibrant. Characters have big shoulder pads – almost WOW style. The engine is very scaleable so it will run on most laptops and yet still look amazing on high end gaming rigs. The game world is up and running now internally – they can move around the world etc… It’s still going to be a while before it comes out though – probably at least a year maybe two or more.

EQ2 PVP / Battlegrounds

They are focusing on improving class balance, increasing the efficiency of the matchmaking service, dealing with AFK issues, and making daily quests funnel players into specific battlegrounds – perhaps generating greater rewards such as AA or tokens etc… They want to reward players proportionately vs. time spent so longer matches / instances should yield greater rewards in the future.

They are also considering allowing character transfers to and from the PVP servers in the near future. They are thinking about 1 vs. 1 PVP matches and ranking ladders. They also addressed giving mentored players on PVP servers the ability to fight back if attacked – this may happen one day but no guarantees. There was talk of a “Battlegrounds Hub” where players who go from their home server to the battleground server could remain on that server to form groups with people etc… This would cut down on the performance hit that battlegrounds are having on the Live game as people zone back and forth between servers. Finally, they talked about how well the new hardware has gone on the Nagafen server. That’s it for me tonight – need some sleep.

In less than 24 hours, I’ll be on my way to Las Vegas for the 2010 Sony Fan Faire. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been playing SOE games for over 10 years and that this year marks my 5th consecutive Fan Faire. I’m looking forward to spending a few days in Vegas and to getting the latest info on EQ Live, EQ2 and Vanguard. There are so many interesting things to talk about and questions to be answered this year. I’ll try to post some updates each night like I did last year and will have lots of pictures to post over the coming days.

I’ll also get to play in live tournaments, get some hands on time with the Agency and DC Universe Online and check out all the sights and sounds of Sin City. This year I’m arriving later than I would like due to my work schedule so I won’t get into Vegas until late tomorrow. Between panels and events, I’m also going to take some time out this year to get out of the host hotel and see some Cirque du Soleil shows, get some great food and just enjoy being in Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

All good things must come to an end, right? In Vanguard, that means the servers are going down for maintenance in the morning and “double experience weekend” will be over soon. These weekends draw a fair number of players out of the woodwork and the server really comes alive. I’ve had a blast over the last few days in Telon getting reacquainted with my Bloodmage while managing to get up to level 43.5 at the same time. I spent time soloing, playing with some random pick up groups and hanging out with a group of guildies who are in their 40’s as well. I even had the chance to fight Lady Gaga!

Don’t you think the mob pictured above looks like her? Too bad we had to “poker” face – LOL. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Anyways, I had the opportunity to explore a good bit of the dungeon called Graystone over the weekend. This dungeon can be spotted from what seems like miles away due to it’s trademark huge tower which looms in the distance. Once I got closer, I discovered hoards of undead mobs and great group experience. There are a number of quests associated with this dungeon and some really spectacular looking mobs to fight along with some Diablo like atmosphere with hanging corpses etc…

As an added bonus, I found a number of experience pots in my inventory and learned that experience potions stack with rest experience and double experience weekends. I made some crazy experience after popping a 1 hour 100% bonus experience potion. Too bad the refresh timer on popping another potion is 5+ hours of in game time. I seem to remember that dying wiped out any potions you had running back in the old days but the rules must have changed because I managed to die a few times tonight but kept the pot up through the deaths. I’m pretty happy with how much I was able to accomplish over the last few days and I’ve gotten the urge to creep up to 50+ to experience more end game content. I’d like to visit Ancient Port Warehouse, the original premier raiding dungeon in Vanguard, as well as get my FanFaire pet wyrm his wings so I can fly around Telon on something other than a red nosed reindeer. I’ve still got a ways to go and my time will be split between leveling up in Vanguard, beginning progression raiding with my 65 Enchanter in EQ Live and perhaps even working on AA and gear on my 90 Warden in EQ2. That’s a full agenda when combined with work and family responsibilities – there just isn’t enough time in the day! I don’t know how gamers such as Stargrace pull it all off.

As much fun as I’ve had playing Vanguard recently, I have to mention that the game has been suffering from spouts of random lag where groups just sit there frozen while mobs continue to beat on them. We haven’t wiped yet due to the lag but I know it’s caused some players to get frustrated. I’m hoping it’s something the devs can fix in short order vs. just a side effect of a higher population server that will fix itself as people get tired of it and leave the game. I’ve also found a few bugs in the last few days ranging from flying through a mountain only to fall through the world to the dreaded blue screen of death uncovered while moving around in a dungeon. In the picture below, I am in the middle of Graystone but you can only see one side of the room – bizarro. In some respects, Vanguard is like an unfinished work of art. Let’s hope people keep going to the museum.

Vanguard is down to two servers – Telon (US) and Halgar (EU). I suppose they still have a test server but for all practical purposes the population that remains in the game is split up between those two servers. As you all know, with server consolidation comes pros and cons. On the positive side, Vanguard is a huge world with no zone lines (unless you count chunk lines) and what used to feel rather empty due to low population now feels vibrant and alive. At least it was this weekend – probably due to the bonus experience which runs through Tuesday morning. If you combine one US server with a bonus experience weekend you get a glimpse of the critical mass needed to make this game shine. It’s just a shame that it isn’t that way every day. Oh what could have been!

Every time I play Vanguard, I’m just blow away by its visuals. This weekend I was also blown away with how smooth the game actually played. I guess style is a personal preference and beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but as someone who has spent a lot of time in many different online games there is something about Vanguard that just captivates me. It really feels like the true successor to Everquest.

SOE recently announced that they are offering a new F2P (free to play) service for Everquest 2. It’s called Everquest 2 Extended and it’s basically a streaming client that can be downloaded quickly that allows new players to test drive the game free of charge. Once this service goes live, new players can check out the game (with limited functionality) enough to decide whether or not it’s the game for them. If they wan’t to play casually, without all the bells and whistles, they can continue to do so. The idea however is that they will get out of the newbie areas and truly get a feel for the game. Once they get a taste of the depth of content and the game in general, they might become subscribers or buy items from the cash shop. Say what you want about cash shops and free to play games, I guarantee their new F2P server is going to feel vibrant and alive and have a high population. Perhaps that’s just what Vanguard and EQ need as well.

On the Vanguard front, SOE spent the last year or two squashing bugs and adding content while making the game more newbie friendly. It really is a great game but like so many other titles – once the game isn’t on the shelf it’s up to viral marketing and digital downloads to get new players interested in trying the game. When a game has had bad press – it’s tough to convince players to drop their current game and invest their hard earned money in a monthly subscription to “test the waters” again. What happens? Eventually the developer ends up consolidating servers as existing players get burned out and they reduce overhead to try to continue to make the game profitable. Finally, the servers get shut down. Does it have to be that way?

I think SOE is figuring out that cash shops offer a great alternative revenue stream to the standard $15 / month subscription model and I hope they see enough life and future in both EQ and Vanguard to at least put one separate F2P server up for each game. I’m thinking something similar to the EQ2 model where new players can get far enough along to decide whether or not they want to invest in the game.

I hope to track down some SOE developers at FanFaire in Vegas next weekend and see if they have any plans to go down this road. It’s clear that they are interested in the F2P model but I’m not sure they will invest the resources at this point in EQ and VG. I think separate F2P servers with a little marketing could be great for both products and would enhance the bottom line for SOE. How can that be a bad idea? Bring on the newbies! I want full servers with groups going on in all level ranges. I want the masses to be able to experience these great games. Will it happen? I guess we have to wait and see. In the meantime, I took advantage of the bonus experience this weekend to spend some time in Dargun’s Tomb and Plains of Anguish. Ding 42!