Pint-Sized Perspectives

Character Tracker : Kebian

2007-01-01T16:56:00.000+10:00

Frostfell's here, and Kebian's bought himself a new house at 15 Lucie St, SQ as a present.

I've also been running about, fixing Christmas (err, Frostfell) fixings and grittles, buying furniture to try and reduce status costs. Picked myself up a cool Frostfell cloak, a not-so-cool but cute-nonetheless blue Frostfell hat and multiple snowglobes, snacks and other such items.

Have to say that Frostfell this year has been a big stepup from what I remember of it last year - and that's not saying that last year's event was poor. This one's just bursting at the scenes.

Saturday I ran around the Enchanted Lands killing threatening commoners and Runnyeye mercenaries all to get a nice Frostfell Tree from Gh'Lad Tydingz Gibblegigger in NQ. It's an amusing name and while the quest was a little confusing (wouldn't it just be simpler for him to set up a tree yard in Zek or somewhere there's plenty of logging and what's the link between dead mobs and glittery decorative trees anyway?) it reminded me I needed to finish some quests out there.

One was the Foomby's Stolen Goods HQ, which turned out to be a good time after grouping with some others who were doing it - thanks to pickups Grolor and Togar (Storm of Qeynos guild) and my own guildie Abraxxis! I dinged level 40 paladin at the same time.

The quest was enough fun that Grolor and I did it again to help Abraxxis complete it - we chomped through Chomper and bashed Baz'Tarog barely breaking a sweat.

Charged by my successes with Foomby, I hooked up with old pal Amilyn and finished off the last of the Runnyeye mercs I needed for the tree.

On the way back to NQ we stopped over in Thundering Steppes to smack down the last two mobs I needed for the Fishbone Earring HQ - an undead abomination in Ruins of Varsoon named Hrath T'Vol and the mad gnome pirate Captain Krieger who was hanging out on a beach probably just looking for some foozlebit or other.

All in all, this weekend's done more to recharge my interest in EQ2 than the last 12 months in total. I'm really looking forward to playing again and hopefully I can keep it going.

One thing I am going to do is start looking into some of the lore behind the game while questing. There's an interesting 'lore quest' which Astralmage is involved with over on EQII Lore Forums at present, which seems to have stalled momentarilly - might be worthwhile seeing if I can find anything out.

Before I go, here's a video showing folks wanting their Frostfell cloak how to get to the centre of the maze in the last step:

OOC Perspective #3: It's Alive! (?)

2006-08-16T03:20:00.000+10:00

Like most of my other attempts at blogging, this one seemed to die an early death. However, in the best traditions of necromancy I'm going to give it one (ok, possibly more than one) shot at living again. Hopefully it won't become some shambling undead beast, sucking the life from me and anyone near it. Necromancy is not without its risks, after all.

Echoes of Faydwer - Expansion #3, I say woot!
I feel compelled to say woot - even though I'm not overly excited about the prospect of new zones full of new stuff to massacre, cute frigging fae and other such fanboi droolbits being made available the level of excitement it's generated within the community is bordering on overwhelming for a relative EQ noob like me. What it has encouraged me to do is get into some of the lore behind the game, which is a good thing I suppose in that it'll keep me interested in the game longer.

So for an expansion news-in-brief, here's the quick lowdown on some of the stuff to be included in this expansion:

scheduled for Nov 06 release
new race - Fae (bleh) ... but wait, what's this? Evil is fun kids. Evil munchkins, more so.
new starting location for fae (bleh) and any race that could start in Faydwer in EQ1.
no level raise - level cap remains at 70, meaning I don't need to grind my lazy ass to justify buying this expansion (I say woot, genuinely!)
new mounts - clockwork mounts and some rideable cat-pony? Blackguard was real circumspect about what the mounts would be and even when they'd be realeased in this article.
subclass specific achievement system - yaddayaddayadda
gods are returning! Well, eight are anyway.
"I'm dead sexy" cloaks - time to upgrade RAM/graphics cards so I can check cloth animations options.
second earring slot - rumours rumours.
changes to armor - 'sets' of armor give bonuses when worn as set, 'adornments' and so on
new tradeskill classes - tinkerers and transmuters? Seems to be rumour to me.

On a minor sidenote, I want to see new and varied emotes and the ability to sit properly on furniture. Given Blackguard's piece here where he waxes on about the importance of creating social environments to attract players to MMOs, maybe it's on the cards.

OOC Perspective #2: Guilds

2006-03-29T01:06:00.000+10:00

I'm not new to online gaming. I started off with MU*-code text games - MUDs, MUSH, etc. I really got into online roleplay in these games from about 1995 onwards. It quickly became a creative outlet bordering on obsession/addiction, just as it was for a lot of people I've met since then.

From there I got into MMORPGs, starting with UO in about 1997 (I think) and continuing into games like Anarchy Online, EVE Online and - more recently - Everquest 2 and City of Villains (for one reason or another I've never played the originals that these last two are based around). There were others I think too, but I can't remember all the ones I tried for a week or two before giving up.

A big part of all these games for me has been the social interaction and I can barely think of one where I wasn't involved in some way with whatever guild or factional system they had working within them. I think that the social aspect of the games feeds that obsession I mentioned. Looking back, it's easy to see where I was in life when I started the text-based games - just started university, didn't know many people, away from friends with whom I'd played tabletop RPGs for more than a few years. I can acknowledge now that - back then - I was reasonably isolated from a social point of view.

By the time I'd re-established a social network around myself offline I was already playing about 20 hours or more of text-based games a week and the addiction effect was running at full steam. Not many of my 'new' friends played offline RPGs so I suppose it continued to fill a niche.

What I'm leading into is that now, ten years or more later it still fills that niche - despite me having a lot of other things offline to replace it. It's a fact I find both intriguing and more than a little disturbing for one reason or another. It's best demonstrated when I leave one of those guilds which remain a major part of my gaming experience.

To give a recent example:

For the last 15 months, from just a few days after I created my first character on an Everquest II server, I've been part of a guild named the Baubleguard. I've led it for just over a year. Yesterday, due to offline commitments and a declining desire to log into the game and deal with guild issues, I stepped down and quit the guild entirely.

The departure was entirely amicable, my replacement had been sorted out prior to all of this happening and I've no doubt they'll do a good job. But leading up to it and once it was done I got this subtle feeling of numbness - a nagging in my head 'well, what now' that's bugging me. One of my online friends - which are a topic in and of themselves - calls it ennui, but I don't know if that's the right word. I'm not sad or melancholy about it - quite the reverse in fact. I'm actually looking forward to getting back into the game again.

Somewhere though I can recognise that creeping obsession prodding me to seek out another guild as soon as possible, get involved in the social game again, work my way up to leadership (something I really don't want to do, at least on the surface) and go down the same game path I've been playing for a decade. Like I said, it's simultaneously an intriguing and mildly disturbing realisation to have finally made.

Anyone else encountered this kind of thing? If so, what do you figure as the driving force behind it?

OOC Perspective #1: There are no new ideas

2006-03-24T17:45:00.000+10:00

So, I'm throwing my hat in the ring. Like countless others ahead of me, I'm going to start a semi-regular blog centered on my experiences playing Everquest 2 on the Lucan d'Lere server. Some of my posts are going to be in-character (hey, I'm a roleplaying geek - deal with it) and others will be out of character.

And there'll be some screenies to try and buff the post contents out - the eye-candy worked bigtime for Baywatch so I figure it's worth a try here too.