Today we have a treat! Glopp, one of the rare Froglok Ninja of Marr, will be taking us along as he moves to New Halas. Ordinarily this sort of thing is Maltheas’ job, but he refuses to leave, and seems to be building some sort of blockade in case someone starts trying to bulldoze Qeynos, so Glopp has kindly offered to fill the gap. Ninja of Marr are quite a lot like ordinary ninja, except that they are much louder, quite incapable of stealth, always politely inform their target that they are considering stabbing them, and give them a few minutes to put their armour on.
 Glopp, Froglok Ninja of Marr, is a very odd being. Have no fear for your current home. Everything will be moved automatically when you buy a house in New Halas. First, you must find the ambassador of your current city. For Qeynos, he is Ambassador Duryo Valstath in Qeynos Harbour, near the entrance to South Qeynos. He will ask you where it is you wish to move to, and grant you a quest. In this case, it will be “Moving To New Halas”.
 Ambassador! With all these choices you are spoiling us! For citizens of Kelethin, you can find your ambassador over in Green Knoll, down a North-West ramp from the city proper to the forest floor, quite close to the road to Butcherblock. Those who are citizens of other cities will first have to betray, and your local ambassador will grudgingly help with that too.
 Gibrien Marsden, Ambassador of Kelethin, wondering who Glopp is talking to. Next, we simply sail to New Halas, in search of the Halasian ambassador, the fair Brynhilde Maersdottr. She can be found in the North-western corner of Halas. You hand her the documents you were given in your old city, and that is it. Your Call to Qeynos or Call to Kelethin ability will be replaced by Call to New Halas, and you are free to go buy your new home.
 Glopp becomes a citizen of New Halas. Houses in New Halas are in an area called Raven’s Roost, up a passage in the North-Eastern part of the city, in sizes to fit all budgets. A tier one guildhouse, sharing the layout of the 5 room manor, is also available.
 It's a good thing monks don't feel the cold. I was going to also do a little guide to the New Halas housing, but it turns out Ysharros already made one! Go look!
With GU56 came a few fixes that I’d been waiting for. When Kaladim was relevelled down to Tier 4 a few months ago, many of the old quests were missed, so a T4 character could not pick them up. That now seems to have been rectified, opening up one of the most handy Signature quests around for an adventuring Templar. Such as, for instance, Maltheas!
 Maltheas is granted the Legendary Stormhammer! Once wielded by King Kazon Stormhammer and said to have been crafted by Brell himself, it has had a complicated history, some of which you may learn if you follow in Maltheas’ footsteps. It’s a fairly epic quest that you won’t get done in a single day, if only because of lockouts on a necessary instance, but Maltheas just about managed to solo it at 40, and a tier 4 group should have no problem whatsoever. Stormhammers for everyone! You can find out how to get started over at EQ2i’s handy guide to the Stormhammer Timeline.
 Maltheas shows off The Stormhammer on the docks of Nektulos Forest.  I concur with my colleague. Ooohs. That is one nice hammer. Probably the best weapon he’s likely to get his paws on at his level, especially after sticking a fiery adornment on it. I suspect Maltheas will be wielding The Stormhammer of Legend for a rather long time.
Just a few snaps of the sights in GU56’s New Halas in Everquest 2. It’s a pretty place, but not terribly colourful! You can click the picture to see a larger version.
 Frostfang Docks. The first point of arrival for existing characters.  A view of New Halas  The Shrine of Erollisi Marr in New Halas. It’s a pleasant little village, with all the facilities you’d expect. The housing is particularly lovely, and Maltheas is rather dismayed he can’t take one of those 5-room mansions back to Qeynos with him.
With Halas, and a bunch of probably rather easy new quests imminent, now would be a good time to take a look at the Extreme Questing Leaderboard! When we last checked in back in February, it looked like this:
Maltheas was on 8th, with stiff competition coming from all directions. I’ve not been playing too heavily since then, but Maltheas has put on another 170 quests, and also had the unexpected horror of accidentally levelling twice in a day. He has also respecced to Carpenter, mostly for reasons other than quests, but has yet to actually do much with that.
Lets have a peek at the new table. Like last time, we’re only looking at characters of level 59 and below, because this is primarily about me seeing how Maltheas compares with folks of a similar level, and a table filled with level-capped folks would not do much for that!
The 30-somethings have failed to get onto the table, even with me extending its size a bit, with Maltheas being the lowest level representative, at 40. There seems to be a lot more people trying this playstyle these days, or other quest-count related ones, putting the squeeze on. He’s still lurking at 8th, but given that he’s the lowest level, I’m pretty satisfied with that. The Extreme Team of Annyya and Kirskax, his nearest in level, are still a sizeable distance ahead, as ever inspiring Maltheas to greater effort!
Halas will certainly give a little boost to all currently active extreme questers and other quest-chasers. Maltheas will be chronomancing down to level 5, and will try to get as much done like that as he can. Extreme questing is not just about quest-count. It’s about trying to do quests at the very lowest level you can. I’ll try to check in again in a couple of weeks once the tables have been updated with the results of the Halasian questing frenzy.
 We asked for it. Apparently. Ugh. “You like, you buy, you ride”.
I have dubbed these the Copykats, on account of them turning up almost exactly a month after WoW brought in RMT mounts, for the exact same price. It may seem, to the ignorant, that this is a flagrant attempt to repeat Blizzards success with the Sparkle Pony. It turns out it’s just a spooky coincidence!
Corvic:
1. I actually concepted this mount a year ago and have been waiting to make it, just have not had the time due to making all the cool stuff we make for the game allready that is not station cash. So we are not following anybody on this one.
2. Price is a tough one to decide, I think the price is good because it gives some exclusivity to the mount. At 5 bucks everyone would have it and it would no longer be special.
Anyhows, I find the idea that the reason the mount is priced at $25 instead of $5 to make it “exclusive” to be highly objectionable. To deliberately exclude players based on their disposable income does not seem right to me. If it would have worked at $5, they should have gone with that to maximise the number of people that could enjoy it. Naturally, being the unpleasantly cynical creature that I am, I am far more inclined to think that the real reason they’re charging $25 is that WoW has shown them that they can get away with it, and it will maximise profits.
These three mounts will be around for about a month, we are told, before being replaced on the market by new mounts. A sort of Mount-of-the-month club. Could get rather expensive. Things like this must be so difficult for parents who have multiple children who play.
Honestly I’m tired about raging about RMT in EQ2. There has been a long pattern of SOE saying they’ve gone as far as they want *, and will not go further. Some segments of the playerbase, and the popular EQ2 bloggers, accept it and shout down those of us who see where it is leading, and then once folks are used to it, the boundaries are pushed further again. We get the MMOs we deserve, and if the players are not willing to stand up to being treated as an exploitable resource, that’s how it’ll be. It’s tiring and probably pointless, shouting like Canute against the unstoppable tide of corporate greed. I love EQ2, and I am not angry with it. Just disappointed. And I do not think EQ2 loves me; just my money. It is not a relationship that will end well.
So here’s some old posts on it:
The launch of Station Cash.
Profits and Prophecies: DDO and EQ2, and their money-making schemes.
* For instance, when the Exchange servers (which allow players to buy and sell items and characters with real money) were implemented, players were concerned it was another slidey step down a slippery slope. This is what we were told:
22nd of December, 2007.
We aren’t going to be allowing RMT in any way, shape or form on the non-exchange enabled EQ II servers. Period. End of statement. If we catch people, we ban them and have been for a long time now. The truth of the matter is it’s very difficult to combat them, but we have people at SOE who fight the good fight each and every day. In the near future you’re going to see us becoming a lot more public about this then we ever have been. I think we’ve done a bad job at communicating just how seriously we take this fight.
We’re interested in working with LiveGamer because they are unique in the RMT world due to the fact that they are pledging (and are putting technology behind it) to not buy from farmers. Farmers are the bane of our existence at SOE. They cause us endless amounts of grief and do real financial damage in a meaningful way.
What do I mean by that?
Many of them use stolen credit cards, obtained by unsuspecting users who give them credit card #’s to purchase in-game gold. I’m not saying all of the RMT shops out there use stolen credit cards, but a LOT of them do. Your credit card is absolutely not safe in their hands.
In addition we recieve large scale (over $500k so far) fines for chargebacks that these scumbag farmers routinely do. They purchase a new account.. use it for a month and then call the credit card company to say “I never paid for this”. Over time, as the # of these incidents rise we get fined by the credit card companies. And it’s not just us, other large MMO companies are seeing exactly the same problem.
In any event, I wanted to stop in and at least set the record straight – you aren’t going to be seeing RMT allowed on the non-exchange enabled servers.
John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment
Maltheas’ sleep had been troubled of late. In his dreams he flew across icy vista, as if in search for something, but what? At first, he chose to believe it was just his tail telling him he needed to stop buying gnome-sized blankets for the cool cog designs on them. Yes, every tinker loves cogs, but every priest of Nife knows the importance of wrapping up snug and warm! However, even after investing in a rather more sensible dwarf-sized quilt (with hammers on, so bedtime tinker-cred was still assured) he awoke shivering and perplexed.
“Bahs!”, he squeaked, knowing full well that it was clearly a vision. Maltheas is no stranger to visions. Indeed, he owes his very sanity, if not life, to the one that brought him to Qeynos, where Seeress Ealaynya Ithis was waiting for him. This, though, was an altogether less useful sort of vision that just made his toes cold without giving him any sort of instructions. Still chilled to the bone, he decided to pop down to the kitchen for a hot drink. But he was not the first one there. There was a small meeting already in progress, and they were a sorry and miserable sight indeed. Zoltoon had somehow managed to put every single one of his robes on at once, and Muldoon the Lurikeen was sitting on top of a hot-water bottle almost as big as himself. As Maltheas entered they looked at him glumly, and handed him a steaming mug of cocoa.
“It won’t help much, me furry pal, but it’s better than nothing. We’ll be catching our deaths o’ cold if we don’t get this fixed! Be telling him yon theory, Zolt.”
“It would appear, after discussion with our colleagues, that rather than being a vision for a specific person, like all experienced adventurers are used to, it is in fact some sort of psychic leakage. I would surmise that a being of great power, probably a god, is looking for something, somewhere rather cold, and getting overly emotional about it. Quite inconsiderately, I might add. From what you’ve told us about your dealings with him, I believe the culpable entity to be Mithaniel Marr.”
“Oohs! I hopes he findings it soons!”
“If only we knew an expert on gods, and getting them to behave properly.”, Zoltoon remarked, giving Maltheas an extremely hard stare.
And so it was that Maltheas was sent out into the Qeynosian morning, with a heatstone in each pocket, and a determination to ensure that the toes of Norrath would be safe from overnight frosting.
You too can investigate this perilous event! From now until the launch of GU56 there is a special prelude quest, Vision of Valor, which you can pick up from a Priest of Marr at the Temple of Life in Qeynos, or any of these other locations. It is the continuation of the Marr plotline that has been going on for a couple of years now, and shouldn’t be missed by any lover of Norrathian lore.
Maltheas has been in the presence of Mithaniel Marr before, during the investigation into the vanishing of Erollisi Marr, but never his manifested avatar. He is one of the better behaved of the gods Maltheas has met, neither asking to be brought booze, or playing childish pranks.
 Maltheas learns of the coming of New Halas from Mithaniel Marr Though players have known it was coming for a while, this is the first that the folks of Norrath have heard about the coming of New Halas. Sales of warm clothing, already high from the chilly dreams, are likely to skyrocket as adventurers prepare to investigate this new land unveiled to us by Mithaniel Marr. Maltheas will meet you there!
Update: I forgot to show the quest rewards! You receive a book called “Journal of a Disciple of Marr” which recaps some of the Marr plotline, and a Valorian Bloom. The book is sitting on the table in front of Maltheas.
 Maltheas likes sparkly things, and books.
A Casual Stroll to Mordor has some interesting news regarding Lord of the Rings Online’s next expansion.
Adam Mersky is shown, in an until now overlooked video, to have said “… our next big region will be Enedwaith later this year.â€.
There is speculation around the web that this is the next paid expansion, but I have my doubts.
For a paid expansion you’d want somewhere that people have heard of. I’d never heard of Enedwaith, for the excellent reason that very little happens there in the books. So I think that what Enedwaith will be is an area added by one of LotRO’s free updates. Interestingly though, Enedwaith would lead us right up to the Gap of Rohan.
The Mirkwood expansion has already brought us near to the Northern border of Rohan , but how much better to enter through the Gap of Rohan!
 Enedwaith: The Road to Rohan? My best guess, then, would be that the next full expansion will cover Rohan, Isengard, Fangorn Forest, the lands along Anduin the Great River (where Boromir will have his unfortunate accident), and perhaps beyond, whereas Enedwaith will be a free update this year.
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