West Karana

Because the Mabinogi movie has the really annoying habit of bursting into song when all you want to do is read the article, I’ve hidden it beneath the fold. So click through to read how EQ2 could take some lessons from Mabinogi in making their world seem fun and inviting.

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While I love MMOs, the idea of playing a game where wanton killing is the only path of advancement just seems morally wrong. If anyone acted like that in the real world, they’d be shut away. Yet in MMOs, it’s meant to be heroic to kill as much as you can, until killing itself becomes so humdrum and ordinary that nobody ever talks about it. Even killing a god is just a means to an end. At least EverQuest had the decency to be shocked when players finished killing the pantheon of Norrathian gods, when Druzzil Ro reset time itself so that it never happened. The gods remembered, though, and left Norrath rather than serve as the Raid Target of the Day for a new generation of adventurers.

The dwarfs went through all this trouble of building crafting workstations and laying in supplies before they remembered they didn’t know how to craft.

In my perfect MMO, every kill mission or raid would have a peaceful way to finish it, through cleverness, or trickery, or puzzle solving, or maybe even just by crafting. In fact, kill missions would be so unusual (in my perfect MMO) that when you got one, it would be appropriately serious. Even though The Shadow Odyssey’s three crafting missions just have you craft twelve each of nine different things, one for each craft, it’s a start.

I was kind of hoping for something a little more dynamic from the crafting missions. Like, you have half an hour to equip a village to fend off a dragon attack. Will you focus on armor, weapons, or resist gear? Or will you make some special spells or abilities? Or a combination? The things you made would determine how the encounter went, and you could definitely lose if you made the wrong things or not enough of the RIGHT things.

I turn my back for ONE SECOND and Goudia swoops RIGHT IN and steals my crafting station!

There’s no urgency in current crafting missions. You can solo them. It will take you about three hours to do so, but that’s okay, no rush. Take all day!

Not to say that running the missions isn’t worthwhile — you can get crafting books as rewards that let you make and upgrade TSO gear for FAR fewer void shards than would normally be required. Plus the special crafter gear sold in the Village of Shin requires the tokens earned from running crafter missions. New, five-use recipes are sold there as well. I’m not entirely sure how recipes with uses work — I guess that means I can make five things from those recipes before I have to buy them again. It’ll be awhile before I reach level 79 so I can scribe them, though.

Too bad the dwarfs didn’t ask us to make them some decent looking armor. What are these, the Terracotta Dwarfs of Firemyst Valley, or something?

The night before last, we were all still locked out of all crafting missions, even though we’d cleared our lockout timers. That was a little disappointing. Last night, Kasul was STILL locked out. Why? Makes no sense, but there it is. Stargrace and I decided to try duoing one. She logged in her dirge alchemist for the run, because doing a crafting mission when you’re already at max level is just wasting good experience. I’ve leveled from 63 to 67 tailor purely through TSO crafting quests and missions. For most of that, I didn’t have to harvest anything or buy any fuel, because the crafting missions supply everything you will need, for free.

With me doing the outfitter items and Stargrace taking on the scholar items that Kasul would normally craft, there was a big giant gaping hole of the craftsman items in which neither of us had any but the minimal artisan skill. It must have taken me a good five minutes to make one item that just didn’t want to be made, but I eventually muddled through, and if the Heavy Shields I made weren’t quite dwarven quality (the foreman took a LONG TIME to approve my craftsmanship), they served to fend off the undead hordes that were attacking the encampment.

Don’t look at my feet. Oh no, you looked ><

Afterward, I had the faction and the tokens required to GO SHOPPING! The crafting faction merchant in the Village of Shin had these sleek armors of a kinda unique design that also boosted crafting skills, if you wore a full set. I bought the vest and pants of the Midnight set, getting server discoveries on them both. Guess they aren’t that popular.

I noticed that the new shoulder armor for the Tier 1 Sackcloth and Tranquil Sackcloth sets looked really fantastic, so I chose that for its looks. I’d love to have bare feet, but I’m not sure if you can buy the appearance-free armor from the Void Invasion merchants any more. I’ll have to check up on that. I still have three banners to spend, and I’m pretty sure the “bare feet” shoes cost only one or two.

Sackcloth Armor

Tranquil Sackcloth Armor

While it’s not exactly gi-like, the Tier 1 armor sets do have a fairly unique appearance that a young monk or bruiser might really enjoy.

Crafting missions? I’ve done all three of them now. They aren’t terribly exciting, but it’s very nice to do missions with decent rewards that don’t require killing. I’m hoping for a lot more of this type of content in the future.

Not surprisingly, the weekend continued the EQ2 fun from the week. The Shadow Odyssey is the most “different” EQ2 expansion yet, but I can’t yet say HOW. But it is. Different. If y ou play in the TSO places, you are playing in a very different kind of game than if you play elsewhere.

So kinda working backward here.

Last night, after goofing around for awhile, I went LFG and got a group for the Evernight Abbey in Loping Plains. Never been here! And it seemed, neither had anyone else in the group, so we got to be the first. Most everyone was receiving lots of advice from their guildies on how it’s done…

So what we basically figured out for the last guy, which was really the only unusual encounter in the place, was this.

The boss is surrounded by several lesser nameds. Each must be pulled to one of the rooms surrounding the central room and killed there. Their blood flows through channels in the floor, and buffs up various powers that can be claimed by the group. Each power weakens the boss in some way, so each person has to claim a power and then cast it at the right time.

The boss can cast Sun Sphere, which is a few seconds of the full power of the sun. My AE blocker could stop one of those. Then there is Holy Rain, which will instantly kill the group if not stopped using one of the powers. There is another power that removes all his buffs; one speeds up the group; the last one has something to do with pets.

After several tries, we couldn’t manage to make everything work, so we left the dungeon empty except for him. Finished three quests and we did open the void shard chest, and now I have six void shards. Out of the hundreds needed for a full set of the best armor. Something to work toward, though, right?

Earlier, we did the Shipwreck Cove crafting mission. It starts in the Commonlands, but is a copy of the Cove of Decay in Thundering Steppes. Unlike the Klak’Anon crafting mission, where you build a meaner clockwork to take out a merely mean clockwork, this one is far more sedate. Now that we know how the crafting missions work, we split up the work along general lines — me, as tailor, taking the Outfitter tasks; Kasul, as jeweler, taking the Scholar tasks; and Stargrace, as carpenter, taking on the Craftsmen tasks. Above, Stargrace wrestles with the stove as she mixes up a batch of grease.

Yum.

Kasul is making some fittings at the workbench. Kasul and Stargrace were making their two non-subclass items and finishing up with the one in their specialty. I’m not sure why, but decided to follow their lead and — still not sure why. Maybe because it’s a relief after two difficult jobs to have the third one be super easy.

And there’s Stargrace and me, waving to the boat we just built as it sails away, without the crew, who is yelling at the boat from shore, but mostly yelling at US for not making some rope to tie it to the pier.

Oops.

So we have to go back and make ANOTHER one now.

Stargrace and Kasul have both blogged about our trip into the Clockwork Menace crafting mission, so I won’t talk about it much here. It was fun :) We had NO idea what to do, but by the end, we were experts, and we had a good time watching OUR champion completely destroy that horrible, clanky, poorly constructed gnome one.

I helped!

And then our own champion killed me!

How ungrateful :(

No, really, I’m sure there are millions of puns out there about “crafting” and “tradeskills”. No laws against them. They aren’t WEA-PUNS of LAUGHS INSTRUCTION, after all.

So, yeah.

Still shocked and awed by the coolness of the Shadow Odyssey crafting quests. No killing. NO FRIGGIN KILLING. I had a quest to rebuild a cannon for some quick ballistic travel between a couple of areas, and after gathering ore, it asked me for a wire from a sweeper bot. “Okay,” thought I, “finally some killing!”

So I stealthed all up, got in position, targeted the sweeper bot, and the quest text said I yanked a wire from it and the quest updated. Didn’t have to kill it.

This is the first expansion where you really, truly, honest-to-God don’t have to kill stuff if you’re a crafter. Spent more time in front of the loom than behind a shield? NO PROBLEM. TSO’s got ya covered. These quests aren’t gonna ask you to do something you don’t want to do.

Lessee…. let’s count up the number of other popular MMOs that decouple adventuring and crafting levels. Um. Vanguard? LotRO? (I think they aren’t coupled in LotRO but don’t remember for sure). One of the things that really bugged me about WoW crafting was having to level my alt in adventuring in order to train up some other tradeskills.

Anyway, even though I had to drive all over New England to bring my son back from college for Thanksgiving (well, I didn’t mind), nothing was going to stop me from finishing the Moors of Ykesha crafting quest line in order to get enough faction to do crafting missions with my guild, who were totally wonderful about holding off on trying one until I’d finished the quests. They are so totally awesome.

Dinged 141 AAs from discovery xp and level 64 tailoring from tradeskill xp (yeah, all the quests give tradeskill xp as a reward. How cool is that?). I had to make things from several different crafting disciplines. All the recipes were 70, and yellow to me, but I didn’t have any trouble with them. Bard Power Song gives me the freedom to use the really expensive crafting arts with wild abandon, so even doing things WAY outside my comfort zone, like wood working, was no problem.

Should be fun. We’re planning to try a dungeon after our Nostalgia group in EQ tonight.

The Shadow Odyssey is like a really big book… but you only have summaries for each chapter, and you’ll be having a test on it the next morning. At 7AM.

At least, that’s how it feels to me. Way, way too much to digest at once. New dungeons all over the place, or re-imagined old ones. The whole plot that runs through the Moors of Ykesha. All new crafting! All new AAs!

One thing you have to give Rise of Kunark; the expansion masterfully gave you a few levels to get used to things before dumping the expansion on you. You get all of The Shadow Odyssey from the moment you step off the Ethernaut airship.

EverQuest did that once, with the Scars of Velious, its second expansion. A group of gnome explorers broke through the ice surrounding the lost continent of Velious with their magical ship and opened up new lands to the rest of the world. After that, the gnomes were more or less forgotten for the rest of the expansion, aside from some adventures with a lost ship of the little ones in the Western Wastes… similar to the lost Ethernaut ship of gnomes crashed somewhere in the Moors of Ykesha. Rise of Kunark was EQ2’s Ruins of Kunark — obviously. The Shadow Odyssey is EQ2’s Scars of Velious.

The expansion’s heavy emphasis on crafting set it apart from other expansions since the Fallen Dynasty adventure pack. Crafters are taken aside soon after landing in Ykesha, and told how they can help the explorers learn the hidden lore and alliances of the vast swamp by gearing them up with special recipes for which they will supply most of the ingredients. For those crafters still too low level to go traipsing about the zone on their own, a secondary quest leads them through the balloon rides which take players safely through the zone.

I haven’t done much of the quest yet, so I don’t know the eventual rewards; I imagine they lead into the various crafting missions.

Though some of us (ahem) may have jumped right into TSO, the expansion actually begins with a quest from the monarchs of Freeport and Qeynos. We now know why they were both so eager to get the guild halls constructed a couple of game updates ago; it was so they could move into them!

Overlord Lucan D’Lere’s lair is an elaborately decorated edifice to himself, complete with all the comforts and amenities you’d want if you were an immortal, self-important, ruthless dictator. I especially liked the cool aquariums. I think they’ve been peaking at Stargrace’s apartment :)

Lucan ordered me to investigate the new lands, which leads right to some easy quests in TSO, great for AAs. And you want AA experience. All you can get. Because some of the new AAs are very sweet. I couldn’t spend my way down to the super fast run speed, but I got 5% more run speed and a decent chance to double harvest, which will be nice for when I do the epic harvesting quest.

I was invited into a group to do my first TSO dungeon, Miragul’s Phylactery, which appears to be a greatly expanded version of the older dungeon, Miragul’s Menagerie. I have to admit that I was totally confused by the whole thing. Apparently there are like ten quests for the dungeon of which I had… um… one. About midway through, everyone shared their quests and that brought a little more sense to the mad dashing about.

Just seemed so… disconnected. That’s not a criticism of the zone. It was just so fast paced, and that’s likely a good thing. Half the people had done the dungeon before and were more or less dragging the rest of us from place to place. Suddenly something surprising would happen. Then we’d race around trying to make something else happen. Suddenly something else would happen.

I can’t make it any clearer than that. We’d fight for awhile, run around, something would happen, we’d fight again.

LOTS of cloaks dropped. I have the bard cloak from RE2, so I wasn’t that interested in any of them, until the very last, which had decent enough resists that I had to vote NEED on it. I remembered how my poor resists hurt me in Thuga and the Shard of Hate. Boosting my resists is a necessary step toward returning to raiding.

Fighting some Valkyrie. I don’t know what they were for. They are fairly common in Everfrost, and even have their own mini-instance, but I don’t know if their presence here means they were for Miragul or trying to kill him. They were good-aligned creatures previously. Anyway, we’re killing them here.

Here we are killing some animated hands, like the ones in EverQuest’s Lower Guk and Karnor’s Castle. Similar to the Valkyrie, I have no idea why they are here. They appear, we kill them. I do like how they clatter about, John Carpenter’s “The Thing”-like, on little insect legs.

Don’t take my confusion over what was happening in this one dungeon as an indictment against TSO. All new things are confusing, and the dungeon did have a nice mix of killing and puzzle solving. There’s definitely a plot that runs through the place that was kinda hard to follow since so many quests asked you to do so many things in there. While I was looking at my quest list trying to see the things I should be looking for, everyone else was racing about trying to do the same. And then ice spikes would impale you from the ceiling.

Best way to approach The Shadow Odyssey? I’d definitely say the thing to do is to focus on just one thing at a time. Do the crafting lines, or the exploration quests, or all the different instances of a single dungeon and all those quests. Because TSO is not the kind of expansion you can get the sense of by trying to do everything at once.

While my experiences in Miragul’s Phylactery were kinda fun and I did get a nice cloak from it, I think I would be happier, right now, doing the crafting quests and exploring the place slowly as the quest brought me through it — and THEN taking on the dungeons.

I’m looking forward to transferring my cleric over from Befallen once my second copy of the expansion makes it to my apartment and doing some of the kill quests that lead you through the swamp in a different path.

Maybe after I’ve done both of THOSE things, will I be able to tell if this is better or worse than the previous expansion, Rise of Kunark. Way too early to tell. But by this point, I’d already had enough bad experiences with RoK to sour me on the whole deal — repetitive quest grinding and very, very little experience for just killing stuff, especially given the difficulty of the very first dungeon, Karnor’s Castle — so in that respect, TSO is already a win.

What looks sillier than a very tiny fairly, with an even tinier fairy stuck to her shoulder, riding a huge, massive bear into a huge, massive bear convention with a group of gnomes in a steampunk city made out of mega-works and rusted iron?

Not much, actually. That’s pretty much as silly as it gets.

Or maybe the retailer support for EverQuest II’s latest expansion would be a little sillier. I went to Best Buy and two Gamestops last night hunting up the retail box. In between the hundreds of WotLK boxes, and many Hellgate: London boxes, the rows of Lord of the Rings Online boxes, the huge Warhammer Online displays (with collector editions!), were two copies of Rise of Kunark and one copy of Secrets of Faydwer, last year’s EverQuest expansion.

All these places seemed a little confused — they’d clearly never heard of EQ or EQ2. And these were game store employees? Stargrace said when she went looking that the people she met just assumed it was a different name for WoW’s expansion.

Finally, at the second Gamestop I tried, the girl I asked about it had no clue, but the guy standing next to her said he had some in the back. They hadn’t put them out yet, and only he knew about them. He popped into the back and brought out a copy just for me :)

I have a copy coming from Amazon sometime this month (with the pewter dire bear figurine, which I expect to be about the same size as the race car in Monopoly), but didn’t want to wait until then to get into the action.

After loading in the DVDs, I STILL had over an hour of patching to do, which only slowed down MORE when I ran Wizard 101 over the top of it. Plague Oni had to die again. And no, he didn’t drop any useful loot. And no, we got no experience from it. A big fat “0 XP” floated into the sky as we completed each subquest.

Then my UI didn’t work :/ By the time I got everything working and in shape, it was 11PM and after running around just a little — slowly because of the lag of fifty thousand people in game at the same time — it was bedtime.

But the game’s installed, both computers are patched so I can two box, I’ll probably be bringing Dera over from Befallen so I can get the Rise of Kunark band back together (no way I could have usefully soloed all those quests on Dina alone), and I spent some AAs on the new tree.

If I’m reading it right, bards can allot their new AAs to give a 30% boost in out-of-combat run speed over and beyond what they currently have. This would bring me to 86% run speed with JBoots on. Races with a inherent run speed boost could get to *91%* run speed, all the time.

YES. THIS is what bards have been asking for for four (4 4 4? hmm) years. To be the fastest things in the game. We had it in EQ. And now we have it in EQ2.

Tonight, we’re hoping to do a crafting mission finally :)

And that was my first half hour in TSO.

Just want to point out (I have a slightly longer expansion article scheduled for later so will be brief) that Kendricke has posted the Game Update 50 patch notes up on the Clockwork Gamer blog. Some nice changes. Nothing that makes the troubadour particularly more fun to play, but some nice stuff in there. Mostly just balancing, though.

The Overlord Lucan D’Lere showed up at the EverQuest II Birthday Bash last night. Awestruck? You can say that. This is the man who saved us from the Rallosian Hordes and the Green Mist. This is the man who singlehandedly defeated the Avatar of War on Lucan’s Mount in the Commonlands. This is the man who drove the orcs to their doom in Wailing Caves and sealed them there forever.

This is the man whose example and leadership convinced me to betray Qeynos and take on the long journey to Freeport, a journey that took me several days (the road was treacherous for a level 14 character in the first couple weeks EQ2 was live).

Here’s a song to our beloved immortal dictator:

The wind of freedom’s in the air
Where Lucan rules us, cruel but fair
With fearsome strength and steely glare
(his spies are watching everywhere)

Pour the wine and serve the meat!
Our enemies run in full retreat
‘Fore the force of Lucan’s heat
(jackboots stomping up the street)

Raise cups to Freeport! She’s the best!
We shall conquer all the rest
Lucan, put us to your test!
(or drag us off to vile arrest)

Polish maces, sharpen knives
Sheep will sleep where rebels thrive
For freedom’s bliss, forever strive
(Fight, my friends! Fight for your lives!)

That wasn’t actually the song I sang at the birthday bash, but since I didn’t write it down, there’s this one instead. I’d actually written a birthday song while Stargrace and Kasul and I were relaxing in the stately Nostalgia guild hall before the party, but I hadn’t written it down. Too bad I didn’t write down the second one, though. That was a lot better.

Dragons? Yeah, there were dragons. Here I am, making this one angry enough that it soon fled. You know, Halfling power. You don’t want to get in the way of Halfling power. It’s the power of PIE.

They had LOTS of pie there. And many kinds of beers, and a cool sobriety drink that I wish I could have taken home from the party. Pillows for pillow fights, ice cream you could eat and ice cream cones to cause great fun with everyone else in your raid when you attack the dread beast Drazzleflurg with them instead of your epic.

Happy 4th Birthday, EQ2!

Wizard 101, why can’t I quit you?

I spent most of the night last night working on my LittleBigPlanet level. Well, almost. I spent most of last night feeling like an idiot. A frustrated idiot.

Since LittleBigPlanet is based around a physics engine, everything you make there has to actually work to some degree. I started working on a sorta free-floating player system as is used in the hugely popular Gradius level, and got it kinda working, but I didn’t like it. Then I decided to make a game set not in space, but underwater, and the space ship becomes a submarine — or a bathysphere, really, since the thing has to be connected by chains to a hidden, remote-controlled trolley which handles the mechanism of bringing the bathysphere through the level.

First part of the level, you control only the depth of the bathysphere as you negotiate a maze of twisty passages, all different, looking for treasure and prizes. Then comes a boss fight where you’ll have to hit various buttons with the bathysphere to defeat it.

Second part, you control the speed, but not the depth. Your depth will be adjusted by lifts that will bring you up and down, ending in another boss fight. Not sure how you’ll defeat that boss.

Third will be a shooting level, along with mazes and lifts and stuff and a bigger boss battle and again, dunno anything about that because after about three hours work last night, I’d only just managed to get the bathysphere working and under player control. (I’d spent some time running levels in LBP before I got started).

Now that that’s working, making the first part of the level will be pretty easy; just drawing in the maze and placing the traps. But I bet it’s harder than it looks.

I’d love to get back to Befallen but it’s beyond my ability to make levels yet. I have to work up to it. I am hoping this will do the trick.

—

After that, I logged in to EverQuest 2 with my necromancer and grouped with Said’s conjurer in Ruins of Varsoon. That worked out amazingly poorly. Lots of death. So we decided to head over to Loping Plains and see if the Haunted House was still open, but it wasn’t (got Said some druid rings and the Butcherblock griffon towers, though), and by then, it was getting a little late.

So I thought I would just log into Wizard 101 for a COUPLE OF MINUTES to try and farm the clockwork spider from the haunted towers before their Halloween event ends today. Turns out there are three towers, and they aren’t all the same. I soloed what turned out to be the baby, easy tower about a dozen times — no pets. Maybe another tower, oh look, this one is a teensy bit harder but still no pets. What’s this? A THIRD tower with rank 4 mobs in it?

Oh, that’s the one with the pets. It was also fairly tricky. There was a level 12 wizard hanging around, so I recruited him and we ran the tower three times. We got some imp pets (I got two), but no clockwork spiders. I ran it again this morning and still, no spider.

I hope to run it a couple more times before it ends tonight. I only just found out YESTERDAY that this tower has a rare pet in it, so I’m a little late to the party.

But the takeaway lesson from all of this is that, even though I’m at the end game and there really isn’t much more I can do to progress my character (I could make an alt, I guess), I am still in love with Wizard 101.

I’m not that hard to please. If you make an MMO both fun and challenging, I’ll give it a shot. W101 is both.

Plus, out of all the MMOs I play, W101 is the one that works best on my computer (as did WoW when I played).

EverQuest 2 allows you to do amazing things with interior decorating, one of the few, if not the only, MMO, that allows you so much freedom in designing your living space and that of others. Interior decorator is one of EQ2’s unofficial professions, but nonetheless, a lucrative one.

Characters also have a somewhat more limited way of customizing their own appearance, through appearance armor. All the visible armor slots have corresponding appearance slots. Armor bits placed in the appearance slots overwrite the appearance of the actual armor.

There are a couple of issues with that. First, you can only put in your appearance armor slots what you can wear in your main armor slots. So, plate wearers can look like they are wearing caster robes, but casters can’t look like they are wearing plate. Also, low level characters can’t appear to be wearing armor above their level.

Second, there are no appearance slots for weapons. While you might keep a favorite suit of armor in your appearance slot, once you’ve upgraded a weapon, you have to bag the old one, no matter how cool it looks.

Characters should have at least the level of customization they have for the place they live. So, my suggestions:

Let any character put any armor, regardless of whether they could equip it, in their appearance slot. There may be PvP implications, but the PvPers have managed with appearance armor thus far, this isn’t that much more.

Don’t force appearance armor to be attuned. If it’s not providing them any benefit, why stop it from being sold or given away if it wasn’t NO TRADE to begin with?

Add two appearance slot items for primary and secondary hand items, with the caveat that the appearance slot items must be of the same type (one hand slashing, two hand blunt, shield, etc) as the one they are masking; if there’s a conflict, the appearance slot items don’t show.

Fix the appearance of sheathed two-handed weapons so they show on your back even if you’re wearing a cloak.

—

Along with those, why not a new secondary profession of hairdresser? Similar to SWG’s Image Maker or whatever it was called. Hairdressers would craft little coupons for appearance changes, and as they leveled, would have more options available to them than are at the character creation screen. More hairstyles and so on. Using rare components, they could do skin color changes, racial changes, gender changes… To keep its place as the MMO with the most customization when Spellborn comes out, it needs to up the game just a little more.

Loping Plains hasn’t seen THIS much action since the Freethinkers threw that Christmas party and the Pumpkin-Headed Horseman barfed seeds and pulp all over Mayong Mistmoore. Everyone was talking about that for months.

So anyway, Ettie and I head over to Loping Plains to see what’s up. Some goblin over in Freeport was talking up stuff about some “really cool” thing over there, “a lot of fun”. So I asked the gobber if, like, I was going to die or something. “No, no, no, you no die,” said the gobber. “Be fun, you. You just go graveyard there, fun time!”

“Well, fun is good. Nothing is going to come out and attack me, right?” I asked. The gobber looked kinda sly. “No, no no, it just fun. Candy maybe! Fat hobbit like candy, yes?”

Pffft. Of COURSE I like candy. But I wasn’t going to say so to the gobber. “Maybe,” I told the gobber. “Gotta go.”

I sent a tell to Ettie. “Candy.”

“OMW,” she replied. And we were off.

We headed off to the Loping Plains, ran to Somborn and its cemetery, where we were attacked by — SOMETHING — that did 5000 points of damage to Ettie’s wolf, and then everything went dark.

FRIGGIN *(&#*(&# GOBBERS! WHY did I pick HALLOWEEN to start trusting them?

Some merchant had found us — get this — CLEAR on the other side of town, and DRAGGED us to his shop on the OTHER side of town. Sure, someone dragging the bodies of two unconscious halflings may not be the most uncommon site in the Plains, but don’t you think SOMEONE would have said something?

He tried to sell us some knick-knacks, but we weren’t buying it. We hoofed back to the cemetery, ready for battle, where a smug looking Proctor informed us that what had attacked us had fled into this abandoned looking home. Obviously, he would go in himself and discover the source of the evil, but he’d stubbed his toe on the way over and it looked like rain and his arthritis was acting up, so maybe we could go in alone?

Norrath, dear readers, is a world of people who call in sick when the cat looks at them funny. So anyway, we were still hot to find out what tried to kill us, so in we went.

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The WAR bloggers are pretty united; they love scenarios, but people only appear to queue up for a couple of them out of all available. They love public quests, but if you want to do one, you pretty much have to get it started yourself. They love world RvR, but people would rather attack than defend. Mythic is hard at work balancing these things out, but, inevitably, this will lead to all new balance problems.

EQ2’s new expansion, The Shadow Odyssey, has twenty new dungeons and associated missions. Some are easier than others. Some are way easier. Some way harder.

How is SOE going to learn from WAR’s balance problems, and make it worthwhile for players to explore all the new content?

They haven’t had a great track record thus far.

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I went off to Amazon.com to pre-order The Shadow Odyssey so I could get that cool dire bear pet/mount (which will be claimed by Ettie, my 46 defiler), and halfway down the page, Amazon told me that people who pre-ordered the EQ2 expansion frequently pre-ordered Wrath of the Lich King at the same time.

I wonder how many people play both games?

I should be getting a free digital download of the expansion on my main account, since I went to Fan Faire and have gotten the Fan Faire cloak, so I’m in the system even though I attended on a press pass. I wasn’t sure about that.

Going to be a VERY busy Fall, with EQ2:TSO and Spellborn all out the same month. And I bet KingsIsle releases the fifth Wizard 101 world, Dragonspyre, by then, too… just to make sure I have no free time, EVER!

I have a dozen chairs in my houses.

Why can’t I sit in any of them?

All you let me do is kneel. Kneeling on a chair — or more usually, ABOVE a chair — is creepy.

I can sit down in City of Heroes — they have different ways to sit depending on whether I am sitting on a chair, a bench, off the side of a wall, on the ground — they “get” sitting.

If super heroes can sit once in awhile, why can’t tired, battered adventurers?

I can sit in Lord of the Rings Online. I can sit in World of Warcraft.

If there’s one thing that would make machinema as popular in EQ2 as in WoW, it would be to work a little on the animations. You know, more dances for older races than that weird drunken jig. That’s even worse than the EverQuest butter churn.

Please. Let your people sit.