Like quite a lot of MMO players, I’m currently in SWTOR-mode, but I could not help cheer this fine bit of news from Everquest 2:
Starting in the next day or two (on Test server only) you’ll be able to play any of your characters in a player-created Dungeon Maker instance.
This doesn’t invalidate playing as an Adventurer, but you can also play as your regular characters, regardless of level. (Well, okay, you still have to be at least level 20 to play a DM instance, but you can play any characters from 20-90.)
We have still code to create, but we’re excited enough about getting this to work that we’re putting it on Test over the holidays so that we can get your feedback on this cool new addition to Dungeon Maker.
Please play a bit on Test over the holidays, if you’re so inclined. We’re eager to get your feedback when we come back for 2012 so we can tear into it and make it great for you! This is going to be awesome. The creativity of this community is unparalleled, and if you can play your own characters in those dungeons, then the sky’s the limit!
Here’s a few bits of info about the feature as it is on Test:
You still have to be level 20 to play in a Dungeon Maker dungeon, but any character that’s level 20+ can be used.
You can *also* still play as an Adventurer if desired.
For this test, player parties have to be composed entirely of either all Adventurers, or all regular player characters. Mixing of Adventurers and real characters is not currently allowed in this version.
Dungeon Mark rewards are turned off while on Test. (Until we balance the feature further, we can’t reward Dungeon Marks.)
This feature is not finalized. It’s on Test because we want your feedback on it so that we can then tune it to a finalized state after the New Year.
Enjoy! This will be coming to Live servers as soon as we can finish it up after the New Year!
The avatars we were stuck with up til now were terrible. They had 4 powers, but mostly you just used auto-attack, as they lacked the mana to use their abilities much. They were simply not fun, and I still have no idea how anyone ever thought they would be. It would have been possible to make fun and interesting avatars, but these were not them.
So it is fantastic that we’re going to be able to play as our own characters. They are, after all, the characters that we’re playing the game to be. It had previously been said that it would be too difficult to balance dungeons for normal characters, but I suspect after seeing how randomly balanced player-made dungeons are anyway, that that stopped being such an issue. I also imagine that a large drop in people using your game’s flagship new feature has the power to focus the mind, and lend a sense of urgency to the search for a solution.
Anyhows, I’m glad. I’d feared that Dungeonmaker was going to be another misjudged EQ2 feature which would be quickly abandoned when it failed to catch on, rather than taking the necessary steps to improve it. It does have the potential to be amazing, but it’s going to take a lot of dev attention to get there. If we continue to see additions and improvements, then there is hope for the long term.
Update: Today’s coming hotfix has some more jolly Dungeonmaking improvements!
DUNGEON / PLAYER HOUSING RATINGS
The house and dungeon leaderboards have now been converted from the previous 5-star rating system to a new “Like” system.
When visiting a house or completing a dungeon maker zone you now have the option to “Like” the zone in either of the two categories.
The leaderboards are now based on the accumulation of likes.
Awards continue to work as before and are given to the players at the top of the leaderboard.
DUNGEON MAKER
The amount of power that Dungeon Maker Avatars have has been significantly increased.
Players may now publish a base of 3 Dungeon Maker zones. More publish slots are earned as players unlock more templates.
So that’s even more of the issues that annoyed me in my last post dealt with. Huzzah!!
It’s not going to fix the core issues with the rating system and its UI, but it’s a big improvement on what we have right now.
I’m going to keep this brief. I am considering a proper article on EQ2’s latest expansion, Age of Discovery, but frankly every time I try to write it I become filled with ennui.
So, this picture below will have to speak for me. The situation is this: I’ve just entered a dungeon that another player has made. That underdressed lady is me, as we’re not able to use our real characters in player-made dungeons. The green swirly thing is the entrance. The pack of 12 wolves already tearing me to shreds, that’s pretty much exactly what it looks like. If you look over the top of those wolves, you’ll see the whole room is lined with them. In case you’re wondering, the next room is similar, only with slugs. Maltheas; just maybe he’d have a chance, but the pre-made avatars stand nary a ghost of one. We’re using avatars rather than our own characters because of balance concerns, you see.
EQ2's dungeonmaker is packed with tools for wasting other people's time.
At least this “Dungeonmaster” had the decency to reveal his complete idiocy right away. Often you don’t get to such deathrooms until you’ve spent quite a while battling through the dungeon.
Here is the thing. As a visitor to a dungeon, you get no rewards whatsoever unless you can get to the exit. If you leave via any other means, your entire time in there was wasted. You also cannot rate the dungeon unless you get to the exit, which means that you can do nothing to warn other people away from these deathtraps. The dungeon-maker, however, can make the exit completely inaccessible, either by putting it behind an impossible fight, or just by walling it off. Some seem to be hiding the exit in such a way that you can only use it if you know where it is, allowing them to actually get some votes from their alts and accomplices, glueing them to the top of the ratings board.
I’m largely a dungeon-maker in this system, or trying to be. It is quite frustrating to be competing with this nonsense. Because of the way the rating system works, one 10 out of 10 vote from a single alt will put the dungeon ahead of any dungeon that allows normal players to rate it, as no matter how good you are, you’re never going to have the 100% rating that single vote brings. Rating matters, as it unlocks more building slots for you. Under the current system you’re far better off making sure nobody who might not give you 10/10 ever makes it to the exit.
Right now, it’s a disheartening business whether you’re a Dungeonmaster or a dungeoneer. Using the house-decoration rating system without making any modifications for the entirely different context, was incredibly short-sighted. New game systems need to work AND BE FUN from the get-go, or people will not use them beyond the first week or so. If you launch them half-baked, you might as well not bother, unless you just really needed a feature to put on the side of the virtual expansion box. That’s how most of Age of Discovery’s features feel to me right now: Distinctly undercooked.
“The Wren” is a traditional Irish wassail. Like any such song, there are a lot of variations in the lyrics from place to place. The version PotBS is using works pretty well though!
I was really running up against the limitations of Windows Movie Maker with this one. Getting the timing for the scene changes semi-decent was a bit of a nightmare. I hope you enjoy it anyway!
My best attempt at piecing together the lyrics from the different versions is after the leap, below:
I ordered Star Wars: The Old Republic today. It was a somewhat more complicated decision than it needed to be, for I was dithering over which version of it to purchase.
I often like to buy the Collector’s Edition of MMOs. My City of Villains Heroclix still have pride of place on my desk, though usually it is in-game stuff which attracts me to the CE. This is, I admit, a little ironic, considering how much I dislike RMT, but somehow it doesn’t feel quite so terrible when it’s part of the starting box.
I wasn’t interested in the statue, or even the books. At issue for me with the SWTOR CE was the special CE store, a “Unique in-game vendor with a dynamic assortment of items available only to purchasers of the Collector’s Edition.”. What wonders will he have? Will his dynamic wares continue to update for the lifetime of the game, with shiny things that nobody else can ever get?
So shiny.
I object to his very existence, but given that he somehow manages to exist over my objection, I kind of want what he’s got. Whatever that is.
What exactly is he selling anyway? If his wares were really that great, surely some examples would have been provided, to tempt us in? Perhaps the mystery is the greatest draw though, and the worry that we might me missing out on our one chance to get in on it.
I wandered into Norwich, to find out how much it cost on this side of the pond, and the price at GAME was £109. Against that is the price of the Digital Deluxe version for £60. I am, as you know, not terribly rich, so after a little bit of squirming, I’ve gone for the DD version, and registered my pre-order code this evening.
Perhaps I ought not to worry though. There has been a recent trend for games to offer perks that had originally been part of CE to players at a later date, so the merchant may not be barred to me forever. Perhaps he has nothing I’d want anyway, and I shall chuckle at my near escape.
Stopping to think about it, though, I was seriously considering paying 50 pounds to have access to an in-game merchant, who would presumably then want paying again with ingame cash. That’s madness. I could buy Skyrim for that, which would almost certainly give me far more joy than whatever bits of tat that merchant is going to have. For that matter, I could fill my refrigerator twice over. What a crazy way of valuing thing we MMOers have developed.
I was still sitting here, slightly disappointed with myself for having gotten sucked in to such materialistic ways, when I heard something that at once made me feel a little better about myself, but despairing for online gaming as a whole.
Earlier this month, on a total of four separate days, Bigpoint made it possible to buy a 10th Drone for €1,000.
They have sold over 2,000 10th Drones. At €1000. In just four days. That’s €2 million from a single virtual good.
2000 people out of 65 million (good grief) subscribers is not many. But when you’re selling an pre-existing ingame item, at no cost to yourself, for $1000, 2000 players is quite enough. Maybe those 2000 people were extremely wealthy people, who for some unfathomable reason choose to spend their time playing Dark Orbit, rather than eating at fine restaurants and snorkelling in tropical reefs. I fear it more likely that they’re caught up in an addiction, and could really use an intervention.
Last month, Blizzard was caught up in something of a backlash, after they promoted the antics of George “Corpsegrinder†Fisher, screening a rather pathetic homophobic rant at Blizzcon, and holding him up as a model player.
Suffice it to say, Blizzard were forced to apologise:
Dear members of the Blizzard community,
I have read your feedback and comments about this year’s BlizzCon, and I have also read the feedback to the apology from Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain. I’d like to respond to some of your feedback here.
As president of Blizzard, I take full responsibility for everything that occurs at BlizzCon.
It was shortsighted and insensitive to use the video at all, even in censored form. The language used in the original version, including the slurs and use of sexual orientation as an insult, is not acceptable, period. We realize now that having even an edited version at the show was counter to the standards we try to maintain in our forums and in our games. Doing so was an error in judgment, and we regret it.
The bottom line is we deeply apologize for our mistakes and for hurting or offending anyone. We want you to have fun at our events, and we want everyone to feel welcome. We’re proud to be part of a huge and diverse community, and I am proud that so many aspects of the community are represented within Blizzard itself.
As a leader of Blizzard, and a member of the band, I truly hope you will accept my humblest apology.
– Mike Morhaime President, Blizzard Entertainment
A good apology, all things considered. Blizzard understood that making a group of players feel unwelcome based on their religion, sexuality, or ethnicity is wrong, not to mention bad for the bottom line.
Then this came along:
It was nice of Siegfried and Roy to lend Chuck a tiger.
Chuck Norris, the favourite meme of the late 90’s, and top Barrens-chat topic, starring in the latest World of Warcraft commercial. I’m amazed that he agreed to do it, considering how he usually feels about any book or game that has “false gods” in it. I would guess the difference is that this one happened to offer him a heap of money.
Chuck Norris is an actor, and the subject of an undeserved craze. He also writes a weekly column in which, in 2008, he wrote this:
Lastly, I was appalled when I read the American Family Association report that on Friday, April 25, several thousand schools across the nation will be observing a “Day of Silence,” or DOS, which is a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools. (DOS is sponsored by an activist homosexual group – the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.)
Is encouraging or teaching about homosexuality what our forefathers expected for the public education they founded? Even the most liberal among them opposed it. For example, Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill concerning the criminal laws of Virginia, in which he proposed that the penalty for sexual deviance should be unique corporal punishment. Jefferson’s views were indeed representative of early America.
“Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least” (Bill 64, 1779). Can you imagine a statesman proposing such a law today?
While I’m not of course espousing such treatment, I do believe that we should equally and adamantly oppose such aberrant sexual behaviour from being condoned or commemorated in our public schools through textbooks or a so-called “Day of Silence.”
The Day of Silence is “a day of action in which students across the country take some form of a vow of silence to call attention to the silencing effect of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools.”. Young gay people are 4 times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers. That’s why the “It Gets Better” campaign was launched. But Chuck opposes young people being told that it’s OK to be gay. He’s not saying they should be castrated. Oh no, no, no. He’s just saying that being gay is equivalent to being a rapist and that we should oppose gayness with a fervour *equal* to castration and/or nose mutilation.
He’s also a supporter of the insidious and lucrative reparative therapy industry, which claims to be able to pray people straight. Then again, he also thinks that vaccination programmes are a government conspiracy. He’s Michelle Bachmann with kung-fu grip. Feel free to have a rummage through his writings, here.
I understand why Blizzard hired Chuck Norris. He is an internet icon. But he is also an extremist, and any company that is truly “proud to be part of a huge and diverse community” should have stayed the hell away from him.
I already added this to the end of the original DDO free bag post, but then I realised that most folks have probably looked at that days ago, so would miss it. It’s just a little video I knocked up to show where to find the various bag NPCs.
I’m a bit out of practise at video-making, and need to make sure I have the mic a little further away from my mouth next time!
You can find a variety of equally dubiously-crafted movies over at my YouTube channel!
Dungeons and Dragons Online likes to bombard you with things that you need to store, while simultaneously keeping your inventory space rather tight. It is not an unusual tactic for F2P games which want to gently persuade you to purchase additional storage and bags, and DDO will be very happy to sell you all manner of extra bank vaults and storage bags through the Turbine Point Store.
However, there is much we can do to delay the moment that we really need to do that, and to minimise what we do need to buy when our free options have been exhausted. (I spend plenty on Turbine points. I just prefer to save them for adventure packs.)
Inventory and Bank Slots
Dealing with inventory tabs and bank vaults first, you begin with three inventory tabs, and one bank vault. We can raise these via favor. If you’re a bit vague on how favor works, I covered it in this post a while back.
75 Coin Lords favor will score you another inventory tab. This is EASY, even if you’re pure F2P, as an awful lot of the early quests fall under their jurisdiction.
150 Coin Lords favor opens up to you the opportunity for a 5th tab, but this time you’ll first need to acquire a collapsed portable hole, either from chest loot, or through the auction house. In my experience, these are not super-rare, and you’ll find one yourself eventually. Once you acquire the hole, you then have to pay Ryo Silverbow 10,000 plat to turn it into your 5th tab. Money well spent.
Picking up the Shan-To-Kor pack ( a must have, in my opinion, if only because it’s really cheap and completing it gives you a discount in the marketplace), will let you hit the Coin Lords favor targets a bit sooner.
House Kundarak runs Stormreach’s banking system (and most of the bank services across Eberron). 75 favor with them will allow you to buy a 2nd bank vault for 2000 plat, and 150 favor will enable a third vault for 8000 plat. Getting this favor is a little trickier than for the Coin Lords, as you don’t really hit d’Kundarak quests until about level 5. There are enough free quests for a pure free player to get both bank tabs, and both inventory tabs, though it’ll take a fair bit of effort.
So that’s it for the free inventory and bank slots. Let’s look at the bags that’ll let us use them efficiently.
Bags
Mari Mosshand is the first NPC players will see upon arrival in Stormreach Harbour from Korthos. Veteran characters, who start at level 4, don’t get these bags as part of their gear package, so will want to pay her a visit too.
She will give:
Small Collectibles Bag (12 slots, bound to character)
Small Gem Bag (6 slots, bound to character).
Also in the harbour, standing at the gateway to the marketplace, is Felix d’Cannith, who will be happy to hand over:
Tiny Ingredient Bag (12 slots, bound to character).
A couple of other NPCs have the same offer, but he’s the one you’re likely to meet first.
So, we’ve gotten our full set of basic starter bags, but they’ll start to overflow almost as soon as you acquire them.
In the Marketplace, there is an exit to an area called “The Twelve”. It offers a variety of high and mid-level quests, but we can pop in there at low levels for a bit of help. Head into the central tower, and speak to Jeanselme Brucetius, and he’ll hand you a small ingredient bag. (30 slots). This is not bound, but is exclusive, so you can only have one of them in your inventory at once. You can keep multiple in your bank or shared bank though, so this does give you storage options. Until recently he handed out a tiny bag, but he seems to have upgraded his wares to one-up the newcomer in the harbour.
That’s all the free bags for now, and somebody starting out is going to find themselves with inventory issues pretty quickly. Help is at hand though, if you can scrape up about 9000 plat, depending on your haggle skill, which is not as daunting as it might feel in your first few levels.
Drudori Alzander, in House Phiarlan’s Erstwhile Emporium, sells:
Medium Collectable Bags (30 slots, Exclusive),
Medium Gem Bags (12 slots, Exclusive)
Small Ingredients Bags (30 slots, Exclusive).
Pretty handy, though I suspect that her ingredient bag is the same one that Jeanselme Brucetius is handing out, so you won’t be able to have both in your inventory at once.
Osgard's new Artificer brother goes window-shopping for bags. Later, he'll go bag-shopping for windows. and not be able to afford those either.
Of the three, I’d saying grabbing the Medium collectables bag, when you have the cash to spare, will do wonders for your sanity and bag space. Gem bags aren’t so vital, as you don’t really need to store them for any length of time. Nice to have, of course, when you can afford it.
There are 3 bags which drop as chest loot. I should say that these are far from common, but they are unbound, so can be found on the auction house, for annoyingly high prices. They’re not exclusive either, so they work perfectly as a central store in your shared bank if you have one.
Large Collectibles Bag, 80 slots
Large Gem Bag, 30 slots
Large Ingredients Bag, 80 slots
Be careful with the auction house, as a variety of jokers like to put the Phiarlan purchased ones up for sale at boosted prices, catching out folks who don’t know they can just go to the source. For the large bags, prices will vary according to your server and the moment, but you’re likely looking at several hundred thousand platinum pieces. They’re not something a new player is going to be able to pick up any time soon, but you *might* get lucky and loot one.
The large bags can also be gained by trading in 150 Planar Shards from the Subterrane. That’s a level 16 wilderness zone, mind you, and requires purchase of the Vault of Twilight adventure pack.
The large ingredient bag is also the reward for 100 favor with The Twelve, but given that their lowest level adventure is level 15, and only one of those is free, that’s not immediately helpful. Your bags are bursting with potions, wands, ingredients, and gear that you want to save “just in case”. What is the frugal adventurer to do?
Desperate Measures
Finally, there is one other option for storage, though it is rather more fiddley and metagamey. We are allowed to have multiple accounts, and it is also perfectly allowable for us to use them simultaneously. So it is that I have a second account where my good friends Potiony Pete, and Klaustein Cakewatcher look after my potion and winter festival cake supplies.
The winter festival cakes are a sore point with me. I feel that Christmas events ought to be on the generous side, and indeed, the event IS generous, in giving you multiple inventory tabs worth of different cakes and biscuits. But the cookie jar, that can be used to store them, has to be bought with Turbine Points. That offends my Christmas spirit slightly, so I feel no guilt at all in letting Klaustein Cakewatcher take up the strain.
There we go. I hope that was useful to someone. If you have any questions, or anything else you’d like me to go over, drop me a comment!
Update: I thought I’d make a little video to accompany this post. Lo, here it be:
