Oh Happy Day

The Handy Dandy Guild Hall in Norrath

More going on about EverQuest II.

I was on about leveling up crafting in EverQuest II last, but I decided to cut out a portion of the post where I drifted off into how much having a guild hall helped out.

EQII had housing… good, game integrated, flexible housing… at launch, but it took four years for the game to get guild halls.  In 2008 Game Update #48 kicked off an event that culminated in guild halls being released into the game.

And some of the guild halls are quite impressive.  I still have a character in the Revelry & Honor guild from way back in 2009… they never kick anybody I guess… and I can recall being quite impressed with their guild hall.  I mean, it was on an island visible from the shores of Antonica.  I wrote a post about it even.

So back in 2011 when the instance group made their one attempt to adapt to Norrath, a guild hall was on the shopping list… once we made a guild.

Guilds have been around since day one as well, and were considerably more complex than the World of Warcraft guild features, which consisted mostly of a chat channel, a guild roster, and a MOTD.  EQII guilds had levels and ranks and access to special perks like subsidized housing and early mounts and such, to the extent that there was a lot of whining in the forums about how you had to be in a guild to get some of these special things.  But there is always a lot of whining in the forums about everything, so welcome to the club.

So being in a guild was very much a thing, if you could form one.

There is always a barrier and it is amusing to go back a read some of the posts from that time as they are, like my current day posts about EQII, rife with confusion as to how to get things done… like how to make a guild.

The Guild Creation Window is more promise than details

At the time, because we were in EverQuest II Extended, the free to play experiment before the whole game went that route, you needed the following to create a guild:

• A guild charter – 450 SC from the Station Store (60 silver won’t cut it)
• Guild leader/charter buyer must be a subscriber
• A full group – that means 6 people
• The whole group in the same zone with the guild registrar
• Everybody the same alignment (no mixed Qeynos and Freeport, even in New Halas)
• A guild name that hasn’t been taken and meets the filer standards

According to the wiki we’re back to just 60 silver for the guild charter, but the other items still apply, the most difficult of which, for the random individual, is probably forming a full group of six and getting them together in the zone with the guild registrar.  Still, we managed to do it back in the day.

That gets you a guild.  But for a guild hall your guild must be level 30.  Having divided up labor for crafting (to do trade skill writs) and set our eyes on some heritages quests, we went to work to level up the guild.  It took us about a month, though almost two weeks of that time SOE was offline due to the great 2011 hacking of their (our) data. (Though the post hack exp boost that SOE gave people probably helped us along.)  Anyway, the we got the guild to level 30.  We could buy a guild hall.

In hindsight it is amusing how much of a burden the cost of buying the hall and playing for the upkeep seemed to be.  Now, with the usual ongoing inflation, the sums, both in coin and status, seem laughably small.  But that is what time will do.

50 Platinum seemed like so much back in the day

We bought the standard guild hall in New Halas, which turned out to be a boon in the long term as that allows both Qeynos and Freeport players to get to it, and started setting it up.  While decor was on the list, amenities were the key item.

Amenities added to the upkeep cost… you buy the hall then have to pay for upkeep every seven days… but were essential to making the whole venture worthwhile.  We setup a whole crafting room down in the basement with all of the crafting stations. (We did have to push the guild to level 40 to unlock enough amenity slots to get all the things we wanted, and some amenities require a specific guild level.)

The crafting room

The harvest supply depot, which lets you store crafting materials that you can automatically draw from if you craft in the guild, was placed in the center of the room.  This is perhaps the most handy feature, as you don’t have to keep raw materials on your person.

The supply depot limit has expanded over the years

We also opted for a fuel merchant, as crafting requires a fuel component for each run.

Then, behind a counter are the gathering hirelings, which which can be sent out harvest common crafting materials every two hours (you get to pick which level range you want them to harvest), and which Gaff and I shepherded pretty regularly in order to build up a healthy store of materials.

Guild gatherers ready to go

Then there were the two trade skill writ NPCs, one for normal and one for rush orders, with their clipboards on the wall behind them, which is where you pick up your crafting assignments.  And, of course, a banker and a broker NPC so that stored items and the market were only a few steps away.

The names were funny at the time

As I said, all of this cost coin and status and, at the time, it was a bit of work to keep it open.

The upkeep with amenities

Fortunately, nothing goes away if you don’t pay the bill, and for a long stretch when 136K status seemed like a lot, we would let the guild hall sit idle, locked, waiting for our need.  A feature of my return to the game every year or two would be the unlocking of the guild hall to do a bit of crafting.

The years have helped out when it comes to paying for the guild hall.  back in the day that price was something I had to think about.  Now, with the usual amount of inflation that goes on between expansions, keeping it open is a no brainer.  The signature and crafting quest lines hand out an abundance of status.  While it is pegged to the pricing of status items that come with the newer expansions, older items have become quite affordable.  The status is so free flowing at times that the guild has leveled up a few times.

So with the guild hall open and the NPC gatherers filling the supply depot every two hours… at least when I remember to go speak to them, as it is not automated… I managed to build up quite a supply of raw materials to draw on.

For items that I need to craft inside of an instance I look at the wiki about the quest line, specifically the supply list, and pull the items from the supply depot.

If there are items I can craft outside of an instance, and there are a number of steps that just have you craft items that get used as part of the crafting quest lines, I use one more feature of the guild hall.

A very short cool down

The guild hall homing beacon is one of the amenities, but it is a nice one.  You got in and attune yourself to the beacon… click on it… and then you get the skill that brings you straight into the guild hall.  And to compliment that we also have a mini spire for the in-game transport system so I can finish up and head straight back to Luclin. (The Luclin spire is not on the “I’m a subscriber, teleport me at will” list of options yet.  At least not for me.  You might have to finish the signature quest line to get that.)

Anyway, the work we did back in 2011 keeps paying off for me whenever I return to play.  If nothing else, I spend a lot less time out harvesting raw material for crafting than I used to back in the day.

Friday Inaugural Bullet Points

Today we get a new president, the 10th in my lifetime and the third during the life of the blog.  The state government here in California has declared itself opposed in all ways possible to the new president, which I find mildly amusing because the last governor of the state was Arnold Schwarzenegger and in the last election we not only failed ban the death penalty, most voters actually went for the ballot initiative that promised to speed up the process of killing.  How very liberal we are.

Back on the video game front, it is a rainy Friday morning and I have a few small stories I want to mention but which are probably not worth a whole post.  None of them, to my knowledge, involve the new president.

Pokemon Billionaires

An article up over at Venture Beat gives the total 2016 revenue for Pokemon Go as $950 million.  For a game that launched on July 6th of 2016, that is a pretty impressive take.  To put that into MMO perspective, World of Warcraft was raking in over a billion dollars a year at its peak, but nowhere near double Pokemon Go’s six month total.

Now, of course, there are a lot of “buts” to that story.  The earnings were very much front loaded, with the initial $600 million coming in the first 90 days before revenues began to taper off.  This isn’t going to be a year over year Juggernaut like WoW.   And, of course, revenue isn’t cash in the pocket.  Apple takes their cut off the top, then Niantic takes theirs, after which they pay the Pokemon Company their licensing cut, from which eventually Nintendo gets some money.

But for the meager amount of effort Nintendo put in to the whole thing, it did pay mighty dividends, boosting sales of other Pokemon games and even of 3DS hardware.  Even if everybody stops playing Pokemon Go tomorrow, Nintendo, Game Freak, and the Pokemon Company have done very well out of the deal.

Hero’s Song Refund

We heard the tale of the end of Hero’s Song late last month as Smed’s first post SOE/Daybreak gaming venture had to fold up its tents and call it a day.  The game walked a troubled path, with a failed Kickstarter campaign and, later, an Indiegogo campaign that fell short of the funding target.  But with Indiegogo you get to keep the money pledged, even if you don’t make your goal, so Pixelmage got some money out of the deal.  It just wasn’t enough to carry on.

Then Pixelmage did the unexpected and said they would give people their money back.  And they did.  I got my refund via PayPal for the two licenses I bought.

Refund

Not every crowd-funded project is going to have the luxury of doing that, but it is nice to see one make the effort when they had the means.

Refund Splurge

So there I had $28 in my PayPal wallet, and I never carry a balance with PayPal, so I turned around and blew the whole lot on three games from Steam wish list.  I grabbed Orwell (plus the soundtrack), Atlantic Fleet, and Death Ray Manta.  So those, along with my Steam Winter Sale purchases, give me a small pile of games to work on.

Ruse of the Day

One of the things that Pandemic Legion does is put out invites to high profile players in other groups.  Asher reports that he has three such invites to different corps in PL.  Apparently gigX,  the leader of Circle-of-Two, took one of those invites, joined ElitistOps, (which has been part of GoonSwarm, Band of Brothers, and Pandemic Legion) and then let his mates in CO2 blow up three of his capital ships (Moros, Apostle, and Revelation) just to mess with their kill board stats before rejoining CO2.  Was it worth it?

New Eden Good News/Bad News

Elsewhere on the EVE Online front, we got a look into what is coming up in the game, which includes the ability to insure ships in citadels finally.  On the down side, the game has been experiencing rubberbanding, latency, and desync issues since the last patch.  CCP is working on that, but it isn’t fixed just yet.

So that is all I have.  Back to the rains here.  We only seem to have two settings in our part of the state; drought or deluge.  At least during the deluge I can take a nice long shower.