EverQuest

It’s just my duty to Norrath to fight back against the Void Tempests, but when I heard a reporter with the Befallen Banner shouting about some marvelous device in Neriak, well, I just had to turn in my shards and check it out. There was a gnome with shoulderpads that would have fit someone twice as wide. when i asked him about them, he said he didn’t have a choice, that was the uniform, and the human who had worn it last had forgotten to re-adjust the shoulderpads and there just wasn’t time and … but you know, gnomes have those high, squeaky voices, so I excused myself and went inside. ...

As expected, SOE has made a whole new set of hot zones for nearly all levels. There are some old favorites, and a couple of new ones in the list. Hot zones give a substantial bonus to combat experience, and usually have some unique drops as well to encourage people to come to the zone. 20 – Lake of Ill Omen – great zone full of solo and group content ...

Just a taste of the new low level crafted outfits. They add bunches of colors for all tiers, and some real choices for leather and cloth wearers — up there are some of the choices, including some vest styles for even more options. You won’t have to be look boring if you’re a caster. Lots, lots more!

On the way to the EQ2 expansion panel, stopped by the room to upload some pics. Attended the Living Legacy feedback panel, more notes later, but it sounds like it or something like it will be coming in the future, perhaps as soon as the tenth anniversary celebration next spring. A new progression server is a possibility (for EQ). Talked with a guy from Matrox for awhile, angered some VG players, and ate lunch at Quarks.More later! ...

I’ll be seeing these live hopefully later today, but here’s my first reactions to the expansions. EQ2: The Shadow Odyssey So, we’re getting Lost Dungeons of Norrath, EQ2 style. I don’t know if this means the return of the Wayfarers, but I kind of hope it doesn’t, as the Wayfarer’s led into the ugly Gates of Discord and Omens of War expansions, which kinda broke the whole fantasy feel of EQ with their SciFi aliens from across the 8th dimension, a mistake finally corrected with Dragons of Norrath. ...

Long,LONG day. Son wakes up with an ear infection. Go to work. Do some work. Find doctor. Take son to doctor’s.Wait forever. Doc says, hey, ear infection. I /sigh. Go to pharmacy. Wait there forever. Go home, give son meds. He goes to sleep. It’s 1PM. I opt to do some laundry before we leave. Give the cat a huge bowl of water that scares her,it’s so huge she may drown. Go to airport. Remember in the security line that I brought a full sized tube of toothpaste. Expect to be arrested immediately, but they let it through. TSA, my teeth thank you. Thunderstorms in Hartford delay the flight an hour and a half. We barely make the connection in Cincinnati. Try to sleep on plane, but it is SRO. Get to Vegas Slots everywhere. Shuttle to Hotel. Registration guy wants to talk about EQ and WAR for fifteen minutes, which is weird. He’s in the WAR closed beta Lucky. ...

Yeah, it seems really hard to imagine, but we have not yet ventured into any of the alternate planes of reality as a guild. We fixed that last night as we had our way with the Plane of Hate. This isn’t your dad’s Plane of Hate. Once a viciously deadly raid zone, PoH has been gentled, and is now a fairly average place to experience. We had the guild hall portal set to PoH so people could come and go as they pleased, a huge difference from the old days where just finding a wizard to port you up was difficult, as the zone in was often a death trap. Early zoning strategy was to hope the monsters would be more interested in killing the other groups so that yours could get to the safe point, and then you could start the long, mandatory corpse recovery before you ever pulled a single mob. It could easily be an hour between zoning up and being ready to pull. Sisca, our monk, used to have the job in those elder days of zoning to Hate, feigning death immediately, then dragging the corpses once everyone was done dying. ...

Remember those spam books that you could get in the 80s that would claim to have all the genealogy of your family name and trace your roots and print your family crest and stuff? And then it would turn out to have the phone book information of everyone in the country with your last name, along with some really generic information and a totally made up crest. I’m not saying EQ’s 10th anniversary book will be anything like that. The description of the book just reminded me of it. Here’s what it includes: ...

Struggling with allergies, I collapsed into bed at about 9PM last night, so there was a potential night of gaming gone :/ When I woke up at 4AM, I figured I’d catch up on my email and do some writing and – there was a note from SOE about why my characters weren’t getting moved. It included the exact reason, and it was something I could correct. You see, it said you couldn’t have any items on the broker, and I didn’t. However, you also couldn’t have the sales crates enabled. I removed them and transferred Dorah – now Adora – over to Najena just fine. ...

The number one rule of Nostalgia the Guild is that we level together and nobody gets left behind (unless they stop showing up). Last night we had the twin goals of getting everyone up to our current cap of level 55, and to explore the sunken city of Veksar, deep beneath the waves of the Lake of Ill Omen. SOE introduced the original Veksar as a free content update in June of 2003, and are poised to do it once again in EverQuest II. ...