Sometimes it pays to wait a bit after Daybreak announces something as they are a company that is willing to change their mind in front of a live studio audience.
That can be a good thing. As I said back in the SOE days, they do try to get to the right answer. The problem is that their starting point does seem oddly wrong at times. I don’t think this was necessarily one of those times, but feedback did seem to change their minds.
This all has to do with the Rizlona and Aradune time locked progression servers that were announced as part of the ramp up to the EverQuest 21st anniversary celebration. This week we got a target date and some more information about the plans for those servers.
Coming this month
The rules were posted and seemed both restrictive and a bit confused.
The restrictive aspect was the plan to stop both servers at the Planes of Power expansion after unlocking an expansion every three months. That was a plan similar to the Agnarr server that launched back in 2017, which was advertised as a “PoP Locked” server, and which hit that end point back in 2018.
That seemed like a reasonable idea back then, an attempt to recreate something like the locked in time spirit that rose up around the now seven years gone Al’Kabor server that hosted the EverQuest for Macintosh community. But I am not sure they need to reboot that idea every few years, and not with two servers.
But they changed their mind on that and now neither server will be “PoP Locked.”
They also announced that both servers were to be “GM Dedicated” servers, the meaning of which I’ll just quote:
Rizlona and Aradune are GM dedicated servers, this means they will be more visible on your server and petition queues will go direct to them. It is possible that there will be instances where other GMs may assist when available but most will go to your specific GMs. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more about your server’s GMs!
I remember a time when GMs were pretty visible in EQ, so maybe they are trying to revive that era again.
And then there is the confusing bit… or at least the bit that is confusing to me. The full titles of the two new servers are:
- Aradune Truebox Dedicated Progression
- Rizlona Boxed Dedicated Progression
In the parlance of past severs, “truebox” means no multi-boxing at all, while “boxed” is a new one on me, but at least implies that they will allow some for of multi-boxing. But then there are the rule sets described for the two:
Aradune Ruleset:
- Mangler XP Progression
- Agents of Change Enabled
- Pick Zones Enabled
By playing on Aradune you agree to:
- Absolutely No Automated/Unintended Game-play, any incident of automated gameplay is immediate suspension, second offence is ban including Aradune associated accounts.
- Boxing any more than 2 characters will result in the following actions taken against your account. First Offence: A written warning from the GM. Second Offence: A 7 day suspension of account privileges on all Aradune related accounts. Third Offence: Permanent ban on all Aradune associated accounts.
Rizlona Ruleset:
- Mangler XP Progression
- Agents of Change Enabled
- Pick Zones Enabled
By playing on Rizlona you agree to:
- Absolutely No Automated/Unintended Game-play, any incident of automated gameplay is immediate suspension, second offence is ban including Rizlona associated accounts.
Does that mean you can dual-box on Aradune and multi-box to your hearts content on Rizlona? Did the meaning of “truebox” change at Darkpaw? It is possible. I don’t keep up that closely.
And I can imagine why Darkpaw might want to give multi-boxers a fresh server to play on. While the practice is often decried by the forum warriors, it has been a thing for most of the life of the game and… of course… you have to have to have a subscription for each account in order to indulge in the practice on these special servers. No free to play allowed. So if you want to box a fill party to level cap, Darkpaw will be happy to take your money and direct you to a special rules server just for you.
I don’t know that I will opt to play on either server, but my Daybreak All Access subscription will still be running when they launch, so I might log in for a peek.
In advance of these new servers, there is also the planned server merge coming a week earlier. On May 20th the following which will see the following servers merged:
- Lockjaw into Ragefire
- Trakanon into Vox
- Fippy Darkpaw into Vox
- Brekt into Firiona Vie
I covered the origins of the soon-to-be merged servers in a previous post, so won’t repeat it here, but there are some good reasons for these merges. Details on naming conflicts and character slots and the like are available in a Darkpaw post.
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