Watching NPC Story in Theramore

WoW's expansion launch non-event is live, which means that level 85 players are now free to preview the level 90 Fall of Theramore scenario five levels early for one week only.  I suppose my expectations should have been low given that Blizzard has been going out of their way to note that they did not want to spend lots of development time on an event that would be here for one week and then gone forever.  Even so, I have been disappointed, and the biggest factor has been the story.

As Rohan notes, we're effectively reduced to watching a small window into a tale that only makes sense if you have read the associated novel.  Assuming that you aren't afraid of spoilers, WoWhead's summary details what appears to be the entire contents of the book.  It is only with this additional context that the story even begins to make sense - both the motivations of the characters to upend a truce that has been in place since Warcraft III and the details, such as how the Focusing Iris (widely seen by players in the puggable raid finder version of Dragon Soul) ends up involved. 

This is a bit disappointing coming from a company that originally made the decision never to spam players with more than 250ish characters of quest text when they could instead be showing players the story in-game.  Part of the mystique of the old Alliance Onyxia attunement questline was how the players actually were the heroes who unveiled the black dragon's treachery.  Reading the synopsis of the novel, there are numerous places that could have been opportunities for players to participate in a major lore event that does not seem to have needed to happen prior to the expansion launch.  Instead, all of these things are reserved for another medium, and players in the actual game are just left to view the aftermath.

Don't get me wrong, I don't always expect my characters to be the most powerful/important characters in the lore of the game.  LOTRO somehow manages to make the player characters seem significant even though some NPC noobs named Aragorn, Gandalf, and Legolas (stereotypical Elf Hunter), et al keep stealing all of the best kills.  Blizzard just doesn't handle the presence of external story material as well, hasn't done so for a number of years now, but they seem happy with how they're doing it.

(Ironically and cleverly, author Christie Golden has written your Alliance characters - yes, yours personally - into an un-named cameo appearance.  Apparently someone failed to tell her that the scenario was 3-player instead of the customary 5, but the idea of having Jaina acknowledge the presence of un-named Alliance allies in the book is a relatively clever tie-in.) 

Other general comments:

• Scenario gameplay is a reasonable group-like experience that can be completed by three DPS players, though you can expect to spend more effort on staying alive through use of cooldowns and other class tricks that often get shelved with a real tank and healer.  There is also a focus on pulling multiple soloable mobs, such that each player can take their own share if no one player can tank all the mobs at once.  As a solo player, I think they nailed the gameplay, in that it's much more like what I actually experience when playing the game. 
• I assume there is a limit to how many instances can be up at a time, as the system displays wait times of up to an hour (though I usually wait a fraction of that).   
• The loot seems nice enough, though it's unclear what if anything determines what items you will get, how many times you can expect to run the event if you're after specific items, etc.  On the downside, it may not be worth paying for gold to gem and enchant gear the week the expansion comes out, but at least you can keep the stuff banked for future transmog/appearance use. 
• I didn't get to try the event on my Horde warrior, as he does not possess the required gearscore and I simply don't care enough to farm for this problem.  Judging from WoWhead's video, the scenario appears to be as close to mirrored as it could be given that the Horde has to win in preparing to destroy the city and the Alliance has to win in cleaning up the aftermath.

Account-wide Minipets and WoW World Events

WoW's Children's Week holiday is live once again, and I finally picked up the last of the ten minipet rewards.  (I skipped the event a few years in a row back when each pet you owned took up a slot in your bank, so ironically the final pet I needed was from Vanilla.)   I went on Warcraft Pets to update my pet collection and noticed an interesting tidbit they picked up from WoW Insider. 

With the new account-wide pet feature in Pandaria, this feat will no longer need to take multiple years, as it did for me.  Rather, players with enough eligible alts will be able to collect one pet on each alt and potentially wrap up their collection in a single year.  The same change potentially affects a number of other holidays - along with the Darkmoon Faire.

• If you previously collected minipets on more than one character, obviously your workload just went down dramatically.  
• Likewise, some events have currency token limits that make it very challenging to collect all of the rewards in a single year.  With the change, you will be able to farm the pet on an alt while saving tokens from your main for stuff that is not shared (though I'm a bit fuzzy on what will and won't be shared by the time the expansion lands - mounts? achievements?).  
• If, like myself, you only collect pets on one of your characters, this change gives you a choice of increasing the rate at which you gain pets at a cost of increased time investment.  

One thing to watch is whether the time investment for future rewards increases due to this change.  For example, the current Darkmoon Faire setup awards almost half of the tokens for a minipet for a single visit to the event each month.  Currently, it isn't a huge loophole if you can collect pets on an alt you're not even playing.  If, on the other hand, the change means that I can now clean out the Faire vendors in 2 months using a pack of alts, rather than taking 6-9 months on my main alone, that's potentially a big drop in the staying power of the event.  I don't expect them to change the prices on current items - though it won't hurt to watch the beta servers just in case - but there could definitely be a change to how this works in the future. 

Awaiting The Plague

A crowd dutifully awaits someone infecting us all.

SWTOR became the latest MMO to try a plague-themed live event over the last week, rolling out an outbreak of the Rakghoul plague. 

I'm not high enough in levels to actually do the content associated with this event, but it is interesting to see how a heavily story-based game handles additional content - the story leading up to the outbreak and its aftermath appears to be unfolding over the course of the week.

The part I am able to participate in is repeatedly killing my character for DNA.  Samples of the plague DNA are the event currency, and one of the best ways to be covered in plague DNA is to get infected and explode due to plague.  This process takes about 45 minutes all-told - a good control versus issues that other games have faced, since being involuntarily killed once every hour at worst is not much of a griefing issue.  In typical MMO fashion, players, myself included, are helpfully gathering in large crowds for the purpose of infecting each other and AFK-farming the DNA currency. 

So far, I've snagged a minipet and a pair of plagued cosmetic outfits for random companions (unfortunately, of classes I do not yet have, but these are bind-to-legacy).  It's not deep, and I probably wouldn't even bother if it weren't for the fact that I can passively accumulate this while doing other things (eating dinner, surfing the web, writing this very blogpost, and - in an irony that may amuse or horrify Trekkies and Star Wars fans alike - resetting my duty officer missions in Star Trek Online).  Still, it's not bad as first world events go, and perhaps a promising sign of things to come.

Finally, infected!

A MMO Valentine Wedding

I was vaguely aware of Trion's plans to hype their in-game marriage system for Valentine's Day, but I wasn't expecting a world event prompt.  There happened to be someone in the guild getting married, so I stuck around to "liveblog" it.

The ceremony took place outside the Hammerknell raid instance.  I assume no raid mobs are going to come charging out the gates to kill everyone, but you can never tell with an MMO.  The happy couple happens to be a male and female character, but the NPC officiant refers to them as the spouse of the Sun and Moon to get around dealing with the marriage gender issue.  Apparently it was a Dwarven ceremony, as the priest proceeded to bless a mug of ale and then instruct the couple to "forge a hammer" in the ritual of the Heart Forge.  The thing is also fully voiced, complete with harp-like wedding elevator music. 

Anyway, I received an achievement for witnessing this shindig.  Also included are booze, cake, and a wedding souvenir collection item.  No wedding guests were killed during the festivities.

Trion asks that you hold your divorce proceedings for 24 hours so they can get a count for their PR stunt.

That said, I wonder if this level of MMO-Valentine's festivities is more than your average player wants to see.  People who are actually spending the time with loved ones aren't in game.  People who are in game - especially anyone observing Involuntary Singleness Awareness Day (I-SAD) - may be there precisely because they would rather have a break from this over-commercialized holiday.  What do you all think?  There's a poll up on the sidebar of the blog if you don't feel like doing more than clicking on this question.

Triumph of the Hot Pink Flightless Bird

With a few days to spare, I've snagged one exceedingly pink mount - the Valentine's Swift Lovebird, which takes the relatively less common Strider model and turns it very pink indeed.  The latest addition to the event is not without its downsides - you can snag 30-40 tickets per day (with an extremely limited/costly approach for getting more in a hurry if you must) and the mount requires 270.  I.e. you'll have to play on most of the days of the event if you want the mount.

That said, this mount differs from past world event grinds in that almost all of the grind is earned from killing mobs that you'll be killing anyway in just about any activity that you can do in WoW.  There's a quick and easy daily to hop the portal to Uldum, and the obligatory fight against a holiday boss who may not last longer than the duration of Heroism/Bloodlust/Timewarp, but in general all you need to do is play. 

This is a much better approach than introducing some new activity, such as a minigame or a trick or treat RNG-fest.  If you're playing WoW, you are probably willing to tolerate killing mobs. 

World Events Collide

This week is an odd confluence of world events in World of Warcraft.  We are currently midway through the Lunar New Year event, which is set by the Chinese calendar and therefore does not always fall in the same window in the US.  WoW's Valentine's event has been expanded out to two full weeks to accommodate a lengthier token grind - albeit a big improvement from the original iteration of the event, which was both short and purely random number generator dependent.  On top of that, the newly revised Darkmoon Faire carnival is up and running for the first full week of the month. 

I actually am in game working on various projects during this busy stretch.  I just completed the token tour for the new lantern minipet, during which I dug up a bunch of Archeology sites.  Charm bracelets for the Valentine's event, and its new pink ostrich-ish mount, are earned through normal killing of mobs.  Effectively, these events are holding my attention because they offer additional rewards for stuff I was planning to do anyway.  The other side of the coin, however, is that I tend NOT to work on WoW when there is NOT an event going.  I suppose I'm holding out for a little more in exchange for my time in WoW, in the same way that I hold out for a little bit more in exchange for my money in non-subscription titles?

Triumph of the Second Violet Proto-Drake

I wasn't that excited about the Midsummer Fire Festival, other than the prospect of collecting my second Violet Protodrake for my Horde Warrior.  The only real change since the last time I did this achievement run is that the timer on the torch juggling achievement had its timer slashed since 2009.  At 20 seconds, catching 40 torches required players to perform four actions per second, and I was able to complete it without issues.  At 15 seconds, the attempt was physically painful.  Fortunately, there's an addon for this problem. 

The final achievement I completed was already a four for one deal, since completing the continent completed the fires of the world, which completed the Fire Festival, which completed the holiday meta.  I decided to throw in one more achievement for good measure.  

What a long strange ding it has been

Timing this was more challenging than you might think - a single mob kill in Twilight Highlands is worth 11K exp, and a flame for the festival is worth only 30K, so I had to get within two kills of level 85, but it's as good a way to hit the level cap as any, I suppose.  The level 85 achievement made five dings for one turnin and a bonus achievement for dessert - you are awarded Master/310% speed riding when you actually mount up on your new protodrake, which requires 280% riding to use, so I was correct to pay for that upgrade earlier on. This marks my fourth current level-capped character across three MMO's - I haven't had two capped characters in the same game since Wrath launched. 

Overall, the holiday achievement grind was nowhere near as bad as it was back in 2009, when it pretty much literally drove me out of Azeroth to pick up EQ2 (which I suppose has worked out well enough). I'm still not convinced that limited time holiday events are a good place to put a grind, but at least the current system is something that you can do without going too far out of your way.  Other than the torch thing that I had to cheat with an add-on, and the hunt for a female dwarf for the creepy Easter achievement, there wasn't anything this time around that was actively non-fun to complete.  If you're looking for the occasional change of pace from the daily (quest/dungeon) grind, I suppose there are worse ways to go.

Missing Midsummer Spark

WoW's Midsummer Fire Festival kicks off tomorrow, and I will be in attendance since I have an alt who is a couple dozen bonfires away from the holiday meta-drake.  This has historically been one of my favorite world events amongst all MMO's, but I'm not that excited about it this year.  

My favorite part of the event has always been the little nudge to experiment with some alts, as bonus exp abounds from bonfires around the world.  With Cataclysm's linear zone progression, this option is far less interesting - I'm already outleveling zones before I even get to see the new storylines I rolled up a new character to visit. 

It would be nice if I were pleasantly surprised - if nothing else, my mage is sufficiently undergeared that I might actually use the cool-looking Scythe staff if I can obtain it.  Guess I'll find out over the next week or so.

Children's Week Revisited

Children's Week is back and seemingly less impressive than in previous years.  On the plus side, this week is good for as many as three separate minipets (with new options added to the classic and TBC editions this year) for anyone who collects them.  

Of the six achievements, three are pretty trivial, and one requires only some pastry purchases from the AH and/or vendors.  Of the two "real" achievements, one is the dreaded PVP battleground grind, which can go very poorly if your entire PUG is ignoring the match objectives in the hopes of getting the achievement (ironically making the achievement harder to snag for all concerned). 


I made a point of not advancing my warrior from 84 to the current cap at 85, just so I could stay out of the max level PVP bracket for this achievement, and it looks like it paid off - I got all four battlegrounds done in a single match each and didn't even have to behave too badly in order to do so (excepting Eye of the Storm, there's really no sugar coating that one).  It's still a bad idea for an achievement, but at least it wasn't actively painful - the Horde even won half the matches I fought.  (Perhaps the numbers of people who still need this achievement are dropping over time?) 

Ironically, the one I had the harder time with called for the death of King Ymiron in Utgarde Keep.  This dungeon was popular and reasonably easy back in the Wrath era, but level 84 characters are too high level to queue for it, which makes it very challenging to find a group.  I tried asking in general chat for a while.  Then I tried soloing the place - I actually killed all the trash and Skadi on normal mode, but the final boss was more than I could take - perhaps with that last level and better gear I might have managed.  Fortunately, I was able to identify a group of achievement-seekers with an empty slot (not many 80+ characters in that area anymore) and got the missing achievement. 

Now my Warrior lacks only the Midsummer Fire Fest for my second Violet Proto-Drake. 

Revenge of the Creepy Bunny Ears

Taking a bow after downing yet another world event

It's Noblegarden time in Azeroth, and I've got an alt who is now most of the way to the holiday Proto-Drake, so it was off to give the holiday a whirl.  It hasn't changed much since its 2009 debut, though this time I got relatively lucky with item drops out of the eggs - don't know if drop rates were changed or what, but I looted darned near to the minimum possible after obtaining all of the required items including the minipet out of random eggs.  

The only thing that kept this from being a one night event were the seemingly low populations on US-Quel'dorei, where my horde characters live.  There's an achievement for slapping bunny ears on female characters (only level 18+ mind you) that has gotten substantially harder now that the majority of both factions aren't hanging out in the neutral city of Dalaran.  In particular, female dwarves seem to be very hard to find.  

I thought this achievement was at least somewhat creepy the first time around - there is at least a possibility that a female character is actually being played by a female player who might not appreciate a crowd of guys looking to tag them with a Playboy bunny reference.  Without a neutral city to work with, further stalking measures were necessary this year.  

I ended up camping the Stormwind auction house in ghost form for about two hours (spread over two evenings) before finally finding a female Dwarf who didn't already have a pair of ears on her head.  (Following one who already had ears until they expired was not an option because my life expectancy upon reviving was not long enough to wait out the timers.)  There's also a macro on WoWhead for determining the race and gender of characters, since you often can't tell under the armor.  Overall, I could probably have signed up for a free trial account and leveled a female dwarf alt to 18 during the time I spent looking.  

Oh well, guess it serves me right for taking part in this particular WoW holiday ritual.  Next up, the dreaded Children's Week.

Camping the AH for a female dwarf.

Attack Of The Dice

EQ2 is one of few games that has an in-game excuse for April Foolery - Bristlebane, the god of mischief and thievery comes out to play for a world event that includes killing 10 rats (multiple times), chests shaped like the Companion Cube from Portal scattered throughout the world, and the opportunity to win various Dungeons and Dragons Dice in honor of the late Gary Gygax. 

The holiday was actually one of my first serious experiences with the game back in 2009, and it's gone through only relatively minor tweaks.  Every year seems to add another quest or two - this time out, it was two additional types of dice and a literally rainbow colored horse.  It's random, light entertainment, but it's fun.  Sometimes that kind of laid back activity is a good change of pace for an achiever-oriented genre. 

Revamping WoW's Valentine Event

The WoW Valentine's Event of 2009 was so bad that I literally quit WoW to play EQ2 after spending an entire weekend "two-boxing" a free EQ2 trial on one computer while logging into WoW to fail to loot a candy heart once an hour on my backup laptop.  I declined to come back to see the 2010 revamp, so this week was my first trip through the updated holiday. 

If you failed to heed my advice to snag a bouquet from a trivial Wrath-era dungeon before they finished updating the event, you will need a level 80+ character to farm one from the new Cataclysm five-mans.  All of the other achievements are earned via daily quest tokens.  My Warrior went from zero to complete inside of five days, and the holiday now spans a full two weeks.  Some achievements, including the notorious candy hearts, are technically RNG dependent, but the threat is that you'll have to wait one more day, not that you'll fail to complete the event.  I even snagged the previously RNG-only Peedlefeet minipet on my mage, which cost less than two days' worth of tokens. 

(It's also possible to clear the event more quickly if you do a good job of getting stuff you need from other players and saving your soulbound tokens for stuff that you must buy for yourself.)  

In the aftermath of the 2009 event, I speculated that Blizzard had intended for most players who attempted the Violet Proto-drake grind to fail, in order to keep the then coveted reward rare.  Today, the pendulum has swung full circle; all the achievements I have tried so far have been quick and easy, and anyone who doesn't want to bother can simply buy the mount speed upgrade for 5000G.

Perhaps this reward should never have been attached to a holiday achievement in the first place, as it's arguably "too good" for the effort required today.  Either way, world events in WoW are now much closer to the far superior ones in EQ2; fun distractions rather than stressful grinds.  Limited time events aren't an appropriate venue for lengthy time investment with a significant chance of failure for reasons beyond the player's control. 

WoW Valentine's Bugfail

WoW's Valentine's event is up and running with a variety of bugs of moderate severity because the event apparently wasn't updated to account for the new expansion.  Most are expected to be fixed by Tuesday's patch. 

One thing that isn't on the list but might be a bug is the bouquet of roses, which only drops from a handful of 5-man instance bosses... in old Wrath era dungeons.  The easiest, the first boss of UK, can be easily soloed on normal mode by most, if not all, level 80+ characters.  Soloing this means not having to look for a group and rolling five ways to see who gets the bouquet (after which some groups will literally disband, to the chagrin of anyone who wanted to complete the dungeon).

My guess is that this was not intended, and that the bouquet drop will be moved to Cataclysm five-man dungeons as soon as Blizzard can manage.  If you're in the market for a bouquet, I'd fly to UK with all due speed before this gets fixed. 

(Re-)Visiting New And Old

I had the pleasure of spending a bit over three days without power last week thanks to five inches of snow and one incompetent local power company.  Book-ending that experience, my Warrior finished up the main quest arc of Hyjal and the achievement for WoW's Lunar festival.

I had my choice of three quests to turn in for this achievement.  I chose the outhouse for the screenshot, in Syp's honor.

Hyjal's a pretty good zone, and its plot is actually relevant to the expansion in a way that Vashj'ir doesn't seem to manage.  That said, the two are obviously from the same era of WoW quest design, with a highly linear quest path, heavy use of phasing to change the landscape as you travel along, and the occasional vehicle combat gimmick or three for a change of pace.  In any case, the reason I was working on the zone was to pick up some exp and gear for the Lunar Festival. 

WoW's Lunar Festival is one of several world events that feature globe-spanning scavenger hunts.  In this case, ancestral elders bearing coins are found scattered around the world, including some Wrath-era 5-man instances.  I'm reasonably fond of these events, since they provide an excuse to return to a variety of older content, however briefly.  (I soloed a fair number of coins, but I did eventually use the dungeon finder to get heroic dungeon groups for the last few.) 

In some ways, both the nostalgia coin hunt and the new questing zones are sightseeing tours.  Actually killing stuff happens incidentally to seeing the sights, but it doesn't necessarily feel like the point.  In Hyjal, Blizzard is telling a story, while the Lunar Festival invites veterans to recall their own tales from their past visits to these locations.  I suppose that this is a logical progression for the direction of the game in general - and pulling the staggering numbers former WoW players back in for the occasional visit - but it does seem odd that the core combat mechanics aren't really the point of the solo game anymore.  

Another world event down, these are all generally less painful than they were in 2009.

The AFK Invasion

WoW's Cataclysm launch event is up and running, including a purely cosmetic feat of strength for being present when one of each type of elemental rift is closed.  For the initial phase of the event, the rifts respawn on one-hour timers from the last time they were killed, so it's relatively hard to tell how long you would have to wait for a new one to appear. 

There are three approaches to this challenge:

1. Wait for the next phase of the invasion to start, which will no doubt increase the spawn rate to the point where you can't AVOID completing the feat of strength.
2. Fly around looking for a rift that is open.  Each zone tends to host rifts of a specific element, so you can look up which zones you need and just go roaming.  Northrend is the most crowded, so open rifts are likely to be found and killed before you can reach them.  The old world is the least crowded, but you can't use your flying mounts so it will take longer to search.  Outland theoretically sits in the middle, though I didn't have much luck when I went there.
3. Find a very well known spawn point, such as the gnoll camp outside K3.  Park your character there and alt tab out to work on your blog.  If you're lucky, there'll be dozens of players hanging out in the same place, slaughtering anything that would otherwise pose a threat to your AFK character, and then slaughtering the rift itself in seconds when it finally spawns.

The upside to approach number 3 is that it's an amusing social event, with players from both factions showing off various rare pets and mounts while they wait.  The downside is that the rift will probably die before you get back to take a screenshot.  Oh well, at least my achievement log is updated. 

  The scene while waiting for the rift to spawn, many more players actually showed up before it finally appeared. 

Missing Out On Mabar

Normally, limited time events are just about the top of my priority list, but DDO's Mabar Festival somehow failed to make the cut. 

The Mabar event appears to be as much of a tech demo for instanced public group content as an actual event.  Delara's Graveyard, which is ordinarily a public lobby devoid of anything hostile, is suddenly overrun by the undead.  Non-aggro mobs of approximately your level spawn near you when you enter the zone during the event.  They drop tokens which can be exchanged for loot.  When enough tokens are handed over to the NPC's, players can participate in a public raid encounter for more tokens used to upgrade the loot. 

On paper, it's nice enough, but the execution is a bit rough around the edges.  As a low level player, it's easy to get yourself killed because either you accidentally hit something much tougher than you (low level skeletons and high level mummies don't look all that different in the dark) or because you wandered too close to something that someone else was fighting and got one-shotted by its AOE.  Higher level characters earn "mote" currency more rapidly, and prices are set accordingly.

My guess is that this event is more fun as a max level character in a group.  Given that I had neither, I gave the event a brief try and called it a night.  For unknown reasons - perhaps related to server stability questions, as DDO has not previously had anything that puts this many players in a single combat zone - the event was very short, and ended before I got back to it.  Oh well, maybe next year. 

LOTRO Halloween Holiday Quality/Quantity

Stargrace, Zubon, and Syp (and his twitter friend), are all fans of LOTRO's new Halloween haunted cellar.  The atmosphere is really great.  Further, this content is located firmly in the free portions of the game's new business model (you will need to level to 5 to get out of the starter instance), so this event is available to just about everyone who wants to see it. 

Unfortunately, as with many things LOTRO, the quality isn't necessarily backed with quantity.  If you want the title for doing each of the quests in the cellar once, you will end up exploring most or all of the area a total of eight times.  It's really cool the first time, suitably challenging when you try to solve the two quests that have relatively short timers, and will probably have gotten old by visit number eight.  Even this may not be your last trip through the area if you're after your daily shot at the Halloween decorated horse. 

(Irritatingly, your shot at the horse is treated as a 24-hour debuff rather than a daily repeatable quest, so players who come back at the same time tomorrow will find that they must make their attempt slightly later on each evening of the event.  Still better than once an hour I suppose.)

The Wait For Content
Doc Holiday was the first I saw to notice the schedule for LOTRO's latest patch, which is due out in November.  Endgame players will have spent basically an entire year with only a single full group (6-player) dungeon and a single (12-player) raid at the level cap, supplemented only with scaling skirmishes, and, in the last few months, newly scaling versions of old leveling dungeons. 

The patch will add some variety to the dungeon game (I have not seen details of pricing or intended level range), but Turbine is also taking care to announce in advance that this is the first major patch in the game's history that will not include an update to the game's epic story.  New outdoor leveling/questing landmass is also officially off the table for the new patch, leaving a period of at least a year in which September's Enedwaith zone was the only new area added to the game. 

Perhaps the game's touted free to play success will someday lead to an increase in new content, but that clearly won't be starting with this patch.  I suppose that most players who have made it through the lean times of the last two years are probably used to the pace by now.  Quality over quantity has been the game's calling card pretty much from the beginning.  That said, the quantity is going to have to catch up eventually if Turbine is hoping to convince former subscribers to spend money on a regular basis, especially as the best of the limited content is often available for free. 

Triumph of the Headless Horse-Mount

Whatever else I say about 2010, it's been a good year for random number generator-based mounts.  Mere weeks after my Tauren snagged the Brew Kodo, he also landed the flying horse mount from the Headless Horseman.  This mount is one of only a handful flying mounts that have a ground only mode, allowing them to be used in no-fly zones (such as Dalaran, and outdoor flagged dungeons).  In principle, I guess I would rather have landed either or both on my mage, who is my actual main.  Then again, Greenwiz has his share of shiny rides, while the warrior has only a few, so they might as well be unique. 

I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do for the rest of the holiday.  There's no guarantee that I'll land the mount on my mage, even if I do the event every day from here on out, and he doesn't need anything else that I can get from the Horseman.  By contrast, the warrior might in principle want some of the loot and achievements, but he's already got the event's biggest prize.  I guess the bottom line is that I won't cry if I miss a few days. 

Otherwise, the event has not changed or improved all that significantly since the 2008 edition.  There's a vaguely amusing achievement line to visit all the Innkeepers in the world for some gold and candy, which is probably worthwhile only if you're dying to see the un-shattered landscape one last time.  There's a PVP achievement that can probably be earned most efficiently by joining a Wintergrasp battle and hiding somewhere near the combat.  There's a fire-fighting event in the newbie towns that will almost certainly be won or lost without that much intervention from you individually.  Finally, the once per real world hour trick or treat mechanic is back in full effect, with at least one achievement that can only be obtained via a lucky drop and a few others that similarly hinge on the random treat bag. 

Personally, I don't think this type of system has any place in a short seasonal event.  If Blizzard wants people to fail to complete the event due to the vagaries of the RNG, the achievement in question should be tied to a daily quest so that it does not penalize players for failing to stay up just one more hour to see if next hour's treat bag will have what you need.  Talking to an NPC is not fun, it is not challenging, and it only fosters an image of addiction that the industry is generally working pretty hard to avoid when they're not stumped to think up just one more timesink. 

Somehow, Blizzard found the time to revise a similar debacle out of the Valentine's event between 2009 and 2010.  (The 2009 version was so much fun, I literally signed up for an EQ2 trial and rolled up the character who became my main, checking back with WoW to once an hour on the old laptop to see if I'd win the candy heart lottery.)  I can only hope that the Halloween version manages to make similar progress by 2011. 

Night Of The Dead EQ2 Live Servers

EQ2's Night of the Dead event was a favorite of mine last year, so I suppose that I can't complain too much to see the event back with minimal changes this year - there's a new crafting book, and a new title to be earned from a quest that players will complete by clearing each haunted event once. 

I'm not sure that I would have been willing to pay for a month's subscription to the live service just to get the one additional title.  Fortunately, thanks to EQ2X, I don't have to make that choice; the scaling holiday content is free to play and not too difficult to complete while working with silver F2P restrictions.  Unfortunately for SOE, this shift means that I'm unlikely to resubscribe solely for a holiday event ever again, but such, I suppose is the peril of going F2P. 

Server Merges, and Servers Left For Dead
Speaking of peril and F2P, SOE finally announced plans to merge eight of the game's twenty seven servers.  Each closed server will be folded into an existing server, so, all told, sixteen servers' worth of players will have larger populations to play with when the dust settles. 

There are some complaints about how naming conflicts will be handled (current subscribers will receive priority over inactive accounts), but I haven't seen anyone from the affected servers say that they do not want a merge to happen.  Populations were low across the board, and SOE's decision not to open up the existing servers to free EQ2X players sealed the fates of these servers.  The only question remaining to be answered is whether combining these sixteen servers into eight still leaves too many. 

Of the eleven servers that will not merge, three (AB, Nagafen, and Crushbone) are not merging because they actually have sufficient populations.  The remaining eight are not being merged because there is nowhere for them to merge to because of language, ruleset, or other contractual obligation.  As a resident of Lucan D'Lere, I'm feeling somewhat uniquely hosed by this call. 

It's relatively obvious why you can't merge servers speaking Russian, French, and Japanese, and why the RMT servers need to remain separate.  LDL, on the other hand, is being kept separate because it is technically a Role Playing server.  The only other RP server is the game's most popular (AB), with no room for an additional merge.  The thing is, I don't think I ever encountered any form of actual role playing on LDL.  I know that there are some high quality events to be experienced, but these are almost always scheduled in advance via the out-of-game forums, and therefore could continue basically unaffected if LDL were to be merged with a non-RP server.  This option, though, is apparently not on the table.

End of the line for Lyriana?
Frankly, the last time I let my EQ2 Live subscription lapse, it was largely because I had trouble finding groups for the group content that was the main thing left on Lyriana's to-do list.  A merge during the current expansion cycle would almost certainly have brought me back to the game to try and complete her epic weapon questline before players move on to Velious. 

Now I have limited reason to pay for the live service for the remainder of this expansion.  I'd be happy to pay for new level 90 content in the next expansion, but the new continent will instead offer new level 86-90 leveling content that won't offer any significant challenge if I start it four levels too late. 

At this point, it's looking more and more like the smart play is to wait until next summer, when retailers will be dumping unsold Velious boxes for half price to clear shelf space.  There will presumably be a station cash sale sometime between now and then (it's been double SC for the 4th of July two years running), which I can use to save some money on copying Lyriana over to EQ2X so that I can play her in the future without paying for a subscription.  Though this would technically be a copy that would leave the original on the live service, I doubt that I would ever return once I invest time and money on the shift to EQ2X.  

If that's the way this plays out, it's a sad ending.  Unfortunately, the way that SOE has this set up is leaving me feeling like rolling on a RP server was a mistake.  If this is the only alternative they're currently prepared to offer, I guess we're both going to pay the price.

Brewfest 2010 Haul

This year's uninspiring edition of Brewfest will draw to a close tomorrow morning before daily dungeon quests reset, marking the final chance to zerg Coren Direbrew for the year.  My two characters each killed Direbrew the requisite 16 times, generally in under 30 seconds per kill.  (I'm not sure whether this year's 32 kills is more or less than last year, since last year's version had players kill Direbrew five times per run.)  This yielded 32 emblems of frost for each character, which will convert into 370.56 Justice Points, possibly as early as next Tuesday.

My mage, who owns the ram from the 2007 guaranteed ram racing event, received three of the now-worthless remote control that was previously used to teleport to Direbrew's lair (before the dungeon finder did that for you).  I saved one as a souvenir.  I also netted two of Direbrew's previously rare BOE epic maces, which I suppose I'll save in case I ever have an Alliance character high enough to use them. 

My warrior, who dinged 80 during the event, lucked out and received the coveted Brewfest Kodo mount.  On one level, this is a huge waste, as the character in question is a Tauren with access to all the other Kodos he could want.  On the other hand, the Brew Kodo looks much cooler than the other Kodos that are available, and it seems like Blizzard set player height such that a Tauren on their own racial mount is less likely to hit their head on a doorjam and have to dismount than a Tauren on, say, a giant raptor.  The warrior also netted some trinkets that he actually uses simply because his gear is not yet that impressive.

Overall, I'm not sure what to make of the haul.  Though the fight is trivially easy, none of the rewards are exactly game breaking, especially two months out from an expansion gear reset.  Guess we'll see what happens next year.