Firstly, with EverQuest, helping your friends level is the same process as levelling yourself, any time, all the time.  While this makes it simple, it also makes it pretty tedious, in fact, much of EverQuest is pretty tedious (I can say this now, after not playing for a long time, although clearly at the time it was more engaging).  You go out, you kill stuff, you continue doing that until you level and then you do it some more.  So while it makes it easy to keep your friends at the same level, it doesn’t exactly provide much variability.

In line with that, although LotRO quest based XP means you might have to repeat the same quests a few times to keep your friends at the same levels, it’s essentially no different from EverQuest.  You get to run around killing stuff, while in the background your friends are completing quests and getting XP.  So the end result isn’t any different.  You might find you don’t get much XP, but the aim is to let your friends catch up, not keep the gap at the same distance so this isn’t an issue either.  Because the quests in LotRO cover a lot of locations, you’re more mobile than you would be in EverQuest and killing stuff is, after all, the same as killing stuff no matter where you are.  So it’s not as bad as it sounds.

Secondly, there is value in killing a lot of creatures in Lord of the Rings Online.  Each area has a number of deeds, those deeds give titles, XP and traits as rewards.  There are mob kill based deeds which tend to have two stages, the first gives a title, the second gives a trait.  If you only go to an area, complete the quests and move on it’s unlikely you’ll kill enough creatures to get both levels and you might not even achieve the first.  This is especially true of elite mobs (such as Trolls) or non-aggro mobs like crawlers.  However, if you keep going back to help out your friends, you will complete those deeds and end up with a more rounded character.  So there is absolutely some benefit to being in a place for longer periods killing the creatures, and helping your friends is just a bonus.

Thirdly, related to the above, there are quests from level 39 and up which require you to kill a lot of creatures to get rare pages (especially in Angmar and the Misty Mountains).  If you’re helping friends in those areas (which I am), then you’ll see your pages drop without having to go back later and just farm them.  Another bonus to being somewhere beyond completing the quests yourself.

There are numerous other things you can do, while helping friends level, which add value and which you would otherwise have to ‘farm’ or ‘grind’ out on your own.  As long as the mobs give some XP, you’ll earn skill-based deed increases (where you’re required to use the same skill over and over until you earn the trait).  Often in tough fights, you don’t get the chance to use less-useful skills but in trivial fights while helping friends you can use the same low-damage skill over and over until you complete the deed, without exposing your friends to a grisly death.  There’s always a need to collect crafting ingredients and recipes, even below your currently attained skill tier, which is why you’ll often find people helping out their friends leaving them to ‘handle’ some creatures for ‘just a moment’ while they mine an ore node or collecting some wood (before returning to revive their companions).

Turbine have added some specific rewards for repeating certain quests lines (mainly the Book based quests), since they’re fellowship quests and you always need people to repeat them unless you’re very lucky.  The rewards vary from the okay to the lacklustre but it’s still an option.

If you’ve done a lot of stuff solo, or in small groups, there’s a good chance you’ve missed a few fellowship or tougher-then-normal quests.  Going back and helping your friends while you’re slightly higher lets everyone complete these quests.  I had a perfect example of this a couple of nights ago in Angmar, there’s a bunch of elite quests inside a fort which I hadn’t done (neither had Grete or one of our other friends).  We were helping two friends level, and we went and did those quests.  With 5 of us they were fun, challenging and more interesting than the regular quests and we all got some XP.  Although the rewards weren’t really upgrades for 3 of us, it was still a good chance to do some of the harder content that we wouldn’t otherwise normally see.

Lastly of course, the real benefit, is that you get to spend time in a group with friends, having a laugh, some decent banter, and quoting nearly all of Aliens in the process.  Sure we chat in the Kin channel when we’re soloing or just mooching, but there’s something more social about being in the same fellowship, standing in the middle of Angmar cursing at the enemy and laughing when someone gets knocked off a horse on the run back to camp.

NB: All of this discussion excludes any element of swimming across Evendim.  There is never any good reason for repeating any action which involves swimming anywhere in Evendim.  Turbine need to add some swimming deeds.  Then and only then will I gleefully help out in Evendim.  Yes, adding the boat was a fantastic move, but by then I’d already spent half a lifetime swimming across that damn lake.  The boat doesn’t go to the Blue Lady’s cave does it?  Oh no.  And you still have to swim to Salamander Island don’t you?  Yes.  Too. Much. Swimming.

Related posts:

1. MMORPG / MMOG – xp from kills or quests?
2. Lord of the Rings Online – Virtues, Traits and Deeds! (part two)
3. Random MMO Frustrations: #1 – varying difficulty for class based quests

I deleted EverQuest today, from my hard disk.  I’d say ‘uninstalled’ but I haven’t installed EQ since the very first time, it was decent enough that you could just copy it anywhere and it would run (just about), so after the first time I installed it and through all my machine upgrades  I just copied it around as needed.

Today I deleted it.  Before that I logged my two main characters on one last time, and ran them to their home cities.  I even ran my dwarf along the route he used to run all the time when I first started playing, from Kelethin to Kaladim, when he was making banded armour.

I killed an orc pawn as I went by (as I always used to), and I was pleased to see my faction was still okay.

Orc pawns, one of the first things I ever killed in EverQuest, and also the last.

Good times.

I shall spend the rest of my life checking my tail for the sign of the Crushbone orcs, but I fear they’re out classed and out numbered.

Related posts:

1. Goodbye EverQuest
2. EverQuest
3. Lord of the Rings Online – Outfits

The game in my view is damned if it does now and damned if it doesn’t.  They needed to close the gap between ‘hard-core’ players and ‘casual’ players or risk totally losing one of those segments of the playerbase, however, each change to achieve that alienates another bunch of players.  While I understood the need for the changes, they didn’t enhance my game they just made me feel like it wasn’t worth trying.

The people in EQ kept me playing for longer than the game alone would have and without them it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun, so if any of them read this – thanks, it really was an honour.

I’m past devoting that much time to a single game, I play Lord of the Rings On-line casually, sometimes spending lots of time in game and sometimes not playing for ages, but I can always pick it up and drop it as required.  It suits me, and I love the lore.  So if you know me and you want to say hi, pop in to the [EN-RP] Laurelin server and look me up.

Thanks to everyone in the guilds I was in, the groups I was in, and anyone who had to put up with my control-freakery nature.

Related posts:

1. An Everquest sized hole (or, Goodbye to the Orc Pawns)
2. EverQuest
3. Lord of the Rings Online – a review – part four

So I log on to the Sony website, go to the account management page and try and buy the expansion.  I get a dialog which asks me to fill in our post code, select a secret security question and a secret answer.  Never seen the page before, no prompts telling me why it’s showed up.  The drop down list of secret questions is empty (other than the default entry of ‘please select a secret question’).  So I try ignoring it, but it wants me to select something, I try answering a random question but it still wants me to pick a question.

I can’t pick a damn question.

I search, in vain, for some way to update it via the profile, but it’s not there.  So I go to the Sony help site which if anyone’s tried to use it, knows how terrible it is.  I finally opt for Live Chat, and get a form to fill out with 6 questions and a box to describe the problem which I fill with a couple of paragraphs of text, and then click ‘go live chat’, at which point I get a popup telling me live chat is disabled due to maintenance.  Why the hell did it let me fill the form in then, stop me before I put in the effort.

So I finally go to the e-mail help and rant about the problem and the stupid site.  Maybe they’ll fix it, maybe they won’t, but since we were already just on the edge of maybe buying it and maybe not, if they don’t fix it without a lot of hassle they just lost another sale.  This is typical, in my experience, of Sony.  They make everything as hard as they can, so you have to fight to spend your money with them and they still make you feel like it was your fault.

Gahhh.

Second rant.  I e-mailed a shop that sells miniatures and said specifically and clearly ‘are you able to order this particular miniature for us’.  The reply was waffly and didn’t answer the question, but commented on some vague notion of them not getting that mini in the last delivery and ‘maybe being able to sort it out’.  The mini in question can be purchased direct from the supplier in the US, and we said that to the folk in the shop when we were in there at the weekend (before this e-mail), but they said the supplier’s customer service was bad and it can take ages to arrive.  So, I replied to this vague e-mail saying ‘on Saturday you said it would be quicker to order through you’, and the reply to that was ‘it will be if it arrives before the end of the year’.  WTF does that mean?  Why can’t they just answer a basic and simple question.

Q: Can you order this mini for us?

A: Yes, it will take 2-8 weeks or
A: No, we don’t do specific orders, if it arrives as general stock we can let you know or
A: No, but I’m sending a full order in for re-stocking and it’s listed, should be here in 3 weeks

or anything else, other than totally vague randomness.  This is a niche hobby with low turnover and a small market, you’d think they were keen to retain any direct customers they could get.  I was polite, clear, concise.

So I bought it over the web from the US supplier, and they shipped in 24 hours after I placed the order and sent me a nice e-mail to tell me so.  I’ll pay the $16 shipping charge on a $7 purchase to get service from someone who’s clear, concise and polite (I actually bought another two mini’s, to take it up to around $12 worth of mini’s, but that’s not the point).

In this day and age, I get very frustrated when technology gets in the way of simple purchases or when people can’t, don’t or won’t answer a straight question with a straight answer.  It’s my money, they either want it, or they don’t want it, but I’m not going to fight to give it to them.

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I’m going to quote bits of his comment but you should really go and read the comment as well.

I’ve often wondered what a game can do for these types of people, who are, let’s face it, just after more experience, a higher level, or a bigger pot of gold than others in their peer group. While I do like the idea of more horizontal progression I think it ultimately leads to another dead end – it just takes players longer to get there.

Perhaps.  And maybe horizontal expansion of that kind won’t interest a lot of players either, but what I think it provides is a flatter range of power which lets new players get involved quickly, without totally destroying the ability of people to progress into new things.  If it’s done correctly.

How good would it be to have a chat system that shows all the channels available, makes it easy to set up your own and invite people, and gives a wealth of topics to talk about?

Without a doubt this is something I totally agree with.  It’s certainly something I don’t think many games exploit as well as they could.  There’s an increase in the tools to build web-based communities, but I know that a lot of players are only ‘in the game’ mindset, while they’re in the game, they don’t want to spend a lot of time outside of the game working on a forum or website.  If there were easier ways to communicate on a global level within the games, it would help build community.

One of my big bugbears with WoW is that you can’t (or couldn’t when I played) talk to people if you weren’t in their alliance (i.e. horde vs alliance).  You can’t even set them as a friend and see if they log on.  Ok, so there’s some big PvP element in WoW and you don’t want alliance members tipping off the hoard about their every move – except if they wanted to they could just IM them.  It’s stupid to prevent poeple talking to each other because of some in-game alliance mechanic.

Games should be doing as much as possible to facilitate communication, to allow persistent channels to exist, allow poeple to take part in those channels even if they’re not in the game perhaps.  As you said, there should be an easy way to view all those channels and take part.

That covers another big hatred of mine, which I’ve mentioned previously, enforced geographical splits.  Splitting up friends based on where they live to allow you to make support easier reduces community, it doesn’t build it.

Second Life doesn’t have a ‘game’, it doesn’t have a goal, it doesn’t have any progression mechanic, and yet it has huge communities built up around it, friendships, relationships.  I’ve not really delved deeply into the chat side of Second Life but I know people who spend a lot of time socialising there.  Which goes to show you don’t need a game to build a good community, but you do need good communities to build good multi-player games.

We’ve recently started using XFire to keep in-touch with friends spread through a lot of games.  A persistent channel we can join and read from within just about any game, even if chatting isn’t always easy.

Here’s what we should be telling MMO producers.

1. Give us good channels, good communication methods and no restrictions
2. Develop a standard for MMO chat
3. Implement cross-game MMO chat services

How cool would it be if you could log in to your favourite chat channel (say #lunatics) and chat as EQ2.Realm.Nickname with WOW.Realm.Bob and LOTRO.World.Billy and SL.Vegas.Sarah.  Each of those people could be in their own virtual game world, using the chat system and communicating with their own native tools in the chat channel and everyone could take part.

I know MMO producers want us to stay with their game for ever, but if they provided a cross-MMO communication device that was standard, people wouldn’t feel obliged to leave a game just because a bunch of their friends had, they could keep in touch.

We want cross-MMO communication tools built into our games and virtual worlds, and we want them soon.

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1. Up or Sideways
2. Online tabletop roleplaying
3. Goodbye EverQuest

If you’ve followed the history of EverQuest or played you’ll know it had a pretty strong focus on ‘the group game’. In the early days it was tough to solo anything, impossible for some classes, challenging and slow for others. Grouping was really the only way to achieve any significant gain. This wasn’t an issue, there were many, many players also looking for groups. As the game has grown, and inevitably the player base has shrunk (and the number of low level characters shrunk and the number of places for people to go and hunt grown) that focus on the group game is causing some pain.

Competitors to EverQuest (World of Warcraft being the most famous) have taken a different slant. You can achieve significant gains without ever grouping, and even if you do need to group to complete a certain goal, you can be sure the time investment will be short, 10 minutes maybe, or 30 minutes, and you can achieve your goal and move on to other things together or alone.

In the current EverQuest many goals take hours and hours of time investment to achieve. This is both the reason it has been so successful and its biggest curse. For some people that challenge and time investment is what keeps them in the game, but for many it’s just not possible to invest four or five hours at the keyboard to achieve (and in some cases, not achieve) any significant gains. And yet there are people who claim WoW is ‘too easy’ and many who have played it and burned out quickly because there is less challenge and less content.

I’ve not played WoW to any significant level so I can’t comment on the specifics, but I have played a few MMORPG’s, and I do now, after 7 years or so, know what I want from a game. I’m not sure a single game can actually provide this, but this is what I think it would need.

1. It should be possible to achieve something without assistance, at any level of the game, in around an hour. The question of course is what counts as ‘something’ and ‘achievement’. For me, it must progress the character, it should be possible to log on and within an hour or so have achieved something which has progressed your character in terms of power. Obviously in the early stages of the game that progress will be quite large, and in the later stages that may be quite small, but it should still feel like an achievement.

   This is necessary because people can’t and won’t commit huge amounts of time to a game, but if the game lets them achieve things in shorter time periods they will feel they are able to make progress even if they can only ‘pop in’.

2. It should be possible to group with your friends and achieve stuff, no matter how many or few of them are on at any one time. It should be easier to achieve goal X with two people than with one, no matter what classes those players are. It should get easier with more people, regardless of class. Of course, this doesn’t preclude a good balance of classes making something which is very challenging doable against a random set of classes making it more challenging, but it should still be possible to achieve progression regardless of group make-up.

   Too many times I’ve been in a game with 2 or 3 friends, and we’re not able to achieve something or progress with just those friends because we don’t quite have the right classes, or someone has had to fall back to a less-favoured character to fill the space, or to 2-box a character to bring a required class along.

   If 12 of my friends log in, we should be able to find something that challenges 12 of us, and the tools should support that. Obviously there needs to be a limit, but fixed group sizes are restrictive. The growing concept of ‘groups’ and ‘raids (collections of groups)’ is limiting. There should be a single concept to cover a ‘collection’ of players, and if that’s 2, 6, 11, 15, then so be it. Groups should flex to cope with the number of people present, the number of people present should not be massaged to ensure they fit into the game’s group structure.

3. People should be able to join in or drop out, within reason, regardless of where you are and what you’re doing. If someone feels they’ll be tied in to doing something for three hours, and if they leave that endeavour will fail, they may feel less inclined to help out because they may need to sort out some washing or chores in the house. However, if they know they can help out and then head out without dooming the mission, or that if they turn up late they can catch up, then the result is a more inclusive experience.
4. I’m sure this one will be controversial. Your gaming skill should not be the biggest factor in your ability to progress. It should be a factor sure, but MMORPG’s are social games, they should be inclusive, not exclusive. They should allow people to come together, form groups, go and achieve stuff, and not have to worry about whether the person playing the Barbarian Scalp Beater is able to press keys as fast as the person playing the Gnome Invoker. Sure, players with more skill should be able to achieve things more quickly, or more efficiently, but players with less skill should not be precluded from achieving anything.
5. There should be no exclusion to who can communicate with who. There should be no geographical barriers in-game or in the real world. I detest the current approach of restricting servers based on geographical location. The internet has destroyed the boundaries of country and continent and MMORPG developers appear to be putting them back. If I choose to play on an American server with the associated latency and in-hours-patch times, that’s my choice. If my American friends want to join us on a European server they shouldn’t have to lie about where they live and buy a different version of the game to do so. This is a high tech world, solve the technical problems if there are any, solve the billing issues, get it right. Give us back the global player base. In-game, friends lists, inter-character communication and similar features should not be restricted by in-game faction or alliances. I want to know if my friend Bob logged on, even if he’s playing the most hated of evil enemies I have in the game. And I want to be able to /tell him so.
6. There should be content that can not be beaten alone, or even with small numbers, but that content should never be core content or required content. There should be content that can be beaten alone, or with small numbers but doing so requires many hours of time invested, not necessarily all at once, but again, it should not be core or required content. It should be luxury content, additional content, some extra for people who can find the time. The core game should be accessible to all.

Obviously, the game content should be interesting and engaging and impressive, but those are the things game developers would focus on anyway. The above 6 points are really the ones I have come to believe are critical for new non-niche MMORPGs.

Related posts:

1. Goodbye EverQuest
2. MMORPG / MMOG – xp from kills or quests?
3. Back to Work

And then last Sunday it all went to pot! Grete’s step dad wasn’t well so we couldn’t stay with them, and we had a frantic two hours checking the web and making calls to try and book a hotel. Needless to say, it’s not easy to get a hotel room in Brighton, in Summer, with only 4 or 5 days notice, and it’s virtually impossible to get somewhere at the budget end of the market. So we sucked it up and decided to just make a holiday of it, celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary a week late. We booked into the Queens Hotel, which is right on the sea front and pier in Brighton. We knew car parking would be a nightmare, but there’s one right next to the hotel (The Lanes) which was £15 for 24 hours (map here). Sounds a lot, but in Brighton it’s not so bad, and we knew we wouldn’t be needing to move the car once we parked up.

So we had the hotel booked, and we were getting more excited. We had a friend lined up to pop in and visit the cats on Saturday, they’re fine for 3 days / 2 nights on their own, but it’s nice if someone can pop in and check on them. Then of course, Bubbles had her ‘incident‘, so now with only 2 days to go we’re faced with having to give her antibiotics and really needing someone to check her every day to make sure she’s ok and her staples are in good condition. The vet we take her too recommended someone who can visit to feed cats while you’re away, and we managed to get in touch with her and she visited on Thursday, we got a key cut, and we were set. Of course, we also had to get Bubbles into the vets on Friday morning for a checkup (8am) so our weekend started at around 6:30am.

Bubbles was fine, Grete was back at 8:30am, I spent the last hour finishing up the packing and sorting out litter trays, food and water for the cats while she was out. We set off, the sun was bright, not a cloud in the sky. Quick stop at Tesco to pick up bottled water and have a solid breakfast, and we were on the M1 before 10am. Traffic to Brighton was as to be expected, M25 was slow, A23 was really bad into Brighton itself, and we finally got to the Lanes car park at around 3:00pm.

Checked in, flaked out!

But we hadn’t spent all that money so that we could sit in a too-hot hotel room, so we showered and headed out onto the sea front. The weather forecasts had all said it would be showery and overcast, but on the Friday it was steaming hot, blue skies and 28 degrees. We had a walk up and down the pier, and then met up with some friends and walked around a bit again, had some drinks and generally relaxed. Fish and chips on the pier was excellent. We managed to get some sleep on Friday night despite the heat, and were up bright and early for our cooked breakfast!

Saturday morning was spent wandering the Lanes in Brighton with our friends, before finally meeting up with the other Everquest players at the Clock Tower. From there we headed over to Donatellos for some excellent pizza, then some beers (in the Druid’s Head), then some wandering around and a visit to the pier, and more beer, and more food, and finally a few of us settled in Horatio’s and listened to some live music while the rest went in search of more quiet beer.

As we were leaving the pier, I’d had a couple of drinks, we passed a hen party leaving as well. A woman dressed as a nurse, in a short white rubber dress, a few others in various stages of fancy dress, and a woman who was clearly dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, complete with basket and red hood. As I was passing, I said ‘my, what big ears you have’ and she gave me a stare of death! She looked very confused, you’d think that if you’re going to dress up as a sexy little red riding hood you’d at least read the source material on which your costume is based, but apparently not. Anyway, it was only a few moments later when we realised if she hasn’t read the story she’s going to be going to bed worrying that she has big ears and some ugly oaf on the pier insulted her.

Sunday morning meant more cooked breakfast!! A quick exit from the hotel, moving the car to another car park near to the China Garden (superb Dim Sum place in Brighton, I can recommend them), and then some paddling on the beach! No offense to people from Brighton, but you really need to get the government to import some sand. You can not go paddling when the beach is covered in pebbles without getting hurt. We wore some crocs but the rocks just collected in them. Anyway the water was fantastically cool, the beach was great, the sun was hot (I got burned, yeh I know, but I didn’t think we’d be out long enough). We wandered around Brighton a bit, and then met up with friends for Dim Sum, which was excellent as always.

Finally we headed out, did the family rounds (meeting up with Grete’s folks) and headed home. Got back here around midnight on the Sunday. Bubbles is fine, but grouchy. We’re knackered, but had a fantastic time.

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Levels 1 to 7 in WoW *are* more fun than in EQ. EQ’s tutorial has come a long way to making the first few levels fun, but every race and every class plays the same tutorial, no variation, which means once you’ve done it once, you’re going to have to repeat the same steps for any other race/class combo. At least with WoW the first few levels vary based on race, although there’s little difference in the grand scheme for classes, but there is some difference at least.

And ok, it basically amounts to ‘finding the first quest giver, bringing back what they asked for and then hunting for more quest givers and killing the stuff they talk about’ for 7 levels, and in some ways EQ’s tutorial is structured better (it explains the game concepts as part of the quests). But the bottom line (look, two sentences one starting with And and one starting with But, sorry grammer) is that starting in WoW is just more fun.

It’s pacier, I never died once, and I had fun completing the quests. It looks prettier, EQ still hasn’t caught up in that regard.

You know what though? WoW *still* has less soul. You can’t talk in channels or in /shout when you’re low level, to stop spam-bots and account-sellers advertising. It also means you can’t talk to yor fellow players in the early stages. I waved at a few folk, but no response. The only time anyone interacted with me was to ask, and I quote,

“r u a mge”

To which I replied, “No my wretched undying friend, I am a warlock”. To which the reply was,

“kool”.

Ah well, so much for immersion. I’m sure it would be the same in the EQ tutorial.

There’s no real need to group for any of the early quests in WoW, where-as in the EQ tutorial unless you’re twinked to the gills some of the tasks are much easier grouped, and I think that probably goes some way to encouraging more interaction. The only time I’ve been in the tutorial recently we grouped with a random stranger to take out one of the task bosses. Other than EQ2 I’ve not played another mmorpg really, and I only played EQ2 in beta, so I can’t really compare other tutorials / new character starting processes.

I’m downloading Star Wars Galaxies at the moment, because I’ve never seen it and it has a free 10 day trial, so we’ll see how that compares.

Related posts:

1. MMORPG / MMOG – xp from kills or quests?
2. eq
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X-Men 3 was ok, better than the second, different to the first one.  Certainly darker, less ‘fluffy’ than the first two, but too many holes to be a brilliant movie.  Enjoyable although slow paced in parts, especially for those new to the franchise.

Back to work tomorrow (boo) for four days (yay) and then Live Action Roleplaying for three days (yay) and a day recovering (yay) and then back to work (boo).  So a boo-yay-yay-boo kinda time ahead.

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Grete’s taken up guitar lessons and singing lessons, which she’s really enjoying, and I know she’ll be good at. You can all come around and listen to us murdering Mull of Kintyre at some point. I’ll buy the cider with toe nail clippings for the full effect.

EverQuest is still fun – I’m going to say this even though most of you will have no clue what it means. My warrior character and the character’s of 5 friends succeeded in Tipt last night and we’re now KT flagged. It’s a huge achievement for us, and a weird feeling considering my wizard character has been flagged for ages (thanks to a raiding guild he was in) and has raided in those zones. But achieving it with friends is even more sweet.

Whether or not we’ll be able to repeat that Tipt run to get whole bunches of guild members flagged is another question. Takes about 2 hours to complete, needs a solid core of 3 or 4 players (tank, cleric, puller, cc) and 2 good dps classes to make it through, one of those classes needs to be a good backup healer, secondary rez is very useful, and good buffers essential because deaths are likely. That makes it hard to get 6 new people flagged every time.

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3. XP from Kills or Quests – follow-up