EverQuest II Returns to PvP with the Tarinax Server

The relationship between Norrath and PvP has been fraught over the years.  The rare high points have generally been drowned out by long stretches of bad times and low participation.

There was that brief period on the Nagefan server where PvP flourished, but only with people who stayed level locked around level 20 because PvE focused skills like evacuate opened up too many escape loopholes, frustrating players.  For the most part the tale of PvP in EverQuest II has been one of dead servers and people complaining on the forums.  The last run at a PvP was the 2016 Deathtoll server which lasted less than six months before it was merged into Antonia Bayle and forgotten.

But, in the search for something to get people back into the game Daybreak has decided to try the PvP route for EQ.  And so today they launched the Tarinax PvP server.

Welcome to Tainax

Tarinax is a time locked server, which means that expansions will be opened up over time.  It is launching with the original content along with the Desert of Flames and Kingdom of Sky expansions unlocked.  It also features faction based PvP, which hearkens back to the high point of the Nagefan server of old.

Will is succeed where past attempts have failed?  We shall see.  The only thing I don’t doubt is that, should it not become popular, the forums will be alight with all the things Daybreak did wrong, many of which will be contradictory.

For more information there are today’s update notes and the forum thread announcing the server.

Otherwise the server appears to have gone live at about the time expected, which in and of itself is no small feat for Daybreak.

Tarinax is live! It's time to test your mettle against other EQ2 players now!

Find Tarinax under event servers on your server list! pic.twitter.com/MEhKrrNjZX

— EverQuest II (@everquestii) May 11, 2021

Now to see if it thrives.

The Price of a WoW Classic Clone

With the coming of Burning Crusade Classic we get to make a choice.  Anybody logging into WoW Classic after the expansion pre-patch hits on May 18th will have to decide between keeping their character in vanilla WoW or advancing it to the world of The Burning Crusade expansion.

Through the Dark Portal

While I plan to move forward, I am sure that others will want to hold back and stay in vanilla.  As with EverQuest, there is a faction who just wants to live in the early game forever.

Moving forward… or staying behind… is free, at least for specific definitions of the word.  I bought a copy of The Burning Crusade back in 2007 and I pay a subscription fee in order to play the game, but I am not being asked to pay anything additional in order to advance through the dark portal.

Likewise, staying behind in vanilla WoW incurs no additional cost.

But for people who want to do both, that is another story.

As we were told back at BlizzConline, when the expansion pre-patch hits and the choice of paths needs to be made, there will be two copies of your character, one in vanilla and one in Burning Crusade, and you get to choose which one you want to play.  However, like some sort of Star Trek teleporter malfunction, the clone that remains behind sits in suspended animation, waiting for you, waiting for all of us.

The choice is coming

If you want to release that clone and have that second Riker or whoever running around free in the timeline you did not initially choose, it is going to cost you $35.

This has made some people angry.  PC Gamer says players are furious about the price.  Massively OP says players have begun to “riot,” though can’t be bothered to do more than link to an Icy Veins thread.  Seriously, it seems a pretty considerable breach of the five Ws of journalism to not even mention the price that is responsible for these alleged riots.  An extremely lazy piece of work there.

Extreme hyperbole aside, $35 does seem a bit steep.  It is certainly enough to prove a barrier to me, though having to play characters on a third version of WoW, after retail and Outland, was already a pretty big barrier for me.  Like I have time for that.

However, when a character transfer on a live or classic server is $25, activating and already created clone… Holly said that when the split happened there would be two versions of your character… doesn’t seem like something that justifies a $35 price tag.

But that is always the problem with these sorts of services.  In the end, the actual operation to get you want you want is generally a trivial exercise.  Back in the early EverQuest days, when SOE was charging $50 for a server transfer, the price was there to be a deterrent as much anything else, because the process wasn’t automated and a dev had to go in and move your character manually.  It was still only a database operation, but somebody had to devote time to actually getting it done and the bandwidth for transfer operations was limited.

Once SOE automated the process, the price went down.  It is still not valued relative to the cost of doing the operation because there has to be a support mechanism around the whole thing.  People make mistakes.  They pick the wrong character, they pick the wrong server, they change their minds, they could have sworn they had this or that piece of gear when they hit the button.  It can be a tech support nightmare, and all the more so when people are paying the monthly subscription fee that often makes them feel the company owes them. (A subscription fee that hasn’t gone up in fifteen years by the way.)

I’ve been in guilds where people have abused the support line, calling up to undelete characters or items or whatever.  And support has generally been very accommodating to those requests.  The company would like you to stay subscribed.

So at some level the price of these services is also to fund support and limit their use.  They seem likely to be price elastic, so if you change the price from $25 to $5, use would go up, and if you raised the price use would go down.  So, it is possible that $25 for a character transfer represents an analysis of the cost to support and the number of people likely to use it.  Or somebody just thought that sounded like a good number or seemed to be the market price based on what a competitor was charging.

None of which explains why Blizz thinks $35 is the right price for activating a clone.  It seems like the support cost would be lower and that usage might be higher if the price was in the $10-20 range.  I don’t see a downside to greater usage, as the clone has already been made, so the “work” has been done.  But I am also not exactly bent out of shape at the cost.  It makes my staying behind with a main character much less likely, but the likelihood was pretty low already.

If enough people are worked up about this perhaps Blizz will tinker with the price and make it more reasonable.  I suspect, however, that the stay behind crowd was already planning to do just that and are not all that interested in going through the dark portal to Outland, while those like me looking to progress are happy enough to leave vanilla WoW behind.  I enjoyed the stay, but it is time to go.  Those left in between… those who want to do both… well, we’ll see if they make up a big enough crowd I guess.

Last Chance to Run for CSM15

The deadline to sign up to run for CSM15 was extended until 23:59 UTC on Wednesday, May 13th due to the sign up page giving a 500 error when people were trying to apply, so there is still time left.

The next round is coming

When I last looked at the CSM candidate campaign forums, where by the new rules I reported on previously, all candidates must put up a post in order to provide some basic information about themselves and why they are running, there were just 31 candidates signed up to run.

That is a new low of interest, down from the 44 candidates that ran for CSM14.

Currently only five members of CSM14 are running for CSM15, so the incumbent count is down, though there are arguably a dozen candidates from the null sec blocs who, if they all get on the various group recommended ballots, are once again likely to take at least eight of the ten spots on the council.  There are also a few past CSM members like Mike Azariah, Xenuria, and Brisc Rubal who are running for spots again.

Still, if you’re an optimist, you know you don’t have to be faster that the tiger, just faster than 21 other candidates that it is going to eat.  May the odds ever be in your favor and all that.

Candidate who make the application cut will be announced on May 18th and the election for CSM15 will run from June 1st to June 8th.

Burn Jita 2020 Seems Unlikely

We’re getting towards the end of what one might consider the Burn Jita season and there hasn’t been any word if the event would be returning this year, which seems to be a pretty solid indication that it won’t.

CCP used to put up a warning about the event

Burn Jita started off back in late April of 2012 when the then CFC decided to disrupt commerce in the main trade hub of New Eden.  It was, in its way, an extension of the ice interdiction and Hulkageddon events  The first Burn Jita only ran for a few days, but it had some impact, surprised some people, and got its share of notice outside the game.

From France’s Le Figaro

I was there on the opening night, taking screen shots and even putting together a video.

It was generally considered a rousing success, with even CCP chiming in, and somehow managed to let just about everybody involved claim victory.  CCP even did a dev blog about the event.

Things went so well that the event became something of an annual rite, a ritual of spring, and I went to watch and participate every time.  One year it went to Amarr for role play reasons, so I took screen shots there instead, but it was a regular thing.

You can click on this link for the Burn Jita blog tag and scroll down all the posts, year after year, about the event.

As an event it became more organized as those running it figured out the best way to get things done.  The first Burn Jita seemed like complete chaos compared to the well oiled machine that it became as the years went on.  As with all things Goon, it was simplified so that the average line member could log on and join in.  You could get online, get on comms, get in the fleet, be given a gank fit ship, told when to undock, be warped around to a target, told when to shoot, and get to watch yet another expensive freighter explode, followed by all the ships in the wing and CONCORD imposed their belated vengeance.

Then it was back to the station to wait out your timer then undock for the next kill.  A skilled cadre of players from MiniLuv, the high sec ganking sig of the Imperium, kept the party rolling while making it all seem smooth and easy.

The thing is, putting together Burn Jita is a lot of work.  They have to collect together and assemble tens of thousands of gank fit destroyers, get people to commit to various parts of the operation, and basically be ready to run a rolling gank op for 23.5 hours a day for four or five days straight.  It is basically a concentrated war at an operational and organizational level, which is the sort of thing that can burn people out on the game.

So I suspect that we may have hit a point where nobody is hyped up enough to put in all the work required to run it for the seventh or eighth time.

As an Imperium line member, and a lazy one at that, I am probably less privy to coalition planning than even a modestly competent spy in the organization, so the idea that nobody is interested enough to step up is just speculation on my part.

But even if that is not the case, it does seem like Burn Jita won’t be happening this year.

Speculation aside, it was announced that the Goon Expeditionary Force, the deployment SIG for people like me who get restless when there isn’t a conflict in null sec, is being spun up for a deployment soon.  While you could have a deployment AND do Burn Jita, it seems unlikely.  There would be a lot of organizational overlap between the two, so I suspect the deployment is what is happening.

Maybe a year or two off from Burn Jita will be good.  At some point somebody will miss it and get hyped up enough to take up the burden of running that show.  For now though, it seems like Jita will be spared the extra carnage this year.

Something Missing in Scarlet Gorge

Yes, I am still playing Rift Prime, though I haven’t spent much time there over the last few of weeks.  I’ve made a bit of progress, but events in New Eden and a growing sense of ennui has dominated my play time.

Tiger racing through the sticks, trumped by spaceship politics

While I was caught up in levels… or so I felt… I did linger about Stonefield for a bit longer to wrap up a few achievements.  Alas, I could not find two more quests to get the achievement for that, but I did find the torch up on the rocks above Granite Falls for the Dancing with Squirrels.

Stop… Squirrel Time

From there I headed into Scarlet Gorge, the next zone up the chain.

Looking into Scarlet Gorge

I did notice that, as I passed into the zone there was a quest giver standing off to one side who gave me passage through the portal into Iron Pine Peaks.  That was nice, and I filed that away for later, because in my head, IPP was a higher level zone and not something I would bother with at that point.

Scarlet Gorge started as I remembered and I ran through the initial quest chain and followed it northward up the valley until it sort of stopped at about the mid point.  It felt like I missed a chain or a turn somewhere.  I rode further up and ended in mobs that were four and more levels above me.  That wasn’t playing.  My brain seemed to insist that there was more to do, but wasn’t pointing me at anything viable.

I did recalled that I needed to go up the sky tram at the starting hub to an encampment up on one of the peaks.  There I found myself just within the right level range, but that quickly led me into Scarwood Reach.  I was still just level 27 so that did not bode well.

In looking at the map however, I noticed that I had another option.

Map of my area

I can still find references to Iron Pine Peak starting at level 41, but that appears to have been revamped somewhere along the way and was now right in the level range for me.  I took a side trip up there into the snow and ice.

So I headed through the local portal and went to play in the snow.

The quest chain in IPP seemed familiar in that way things do when you’re been away for five years but still have bits and pieces of bouncing around in your head.  IPP was not one of my favorite zones, but I hauled around there through level 28 and into level 29.

Level 29 in the snow

That done, I actually hit the portal at the west end of IPP and headed back to Scarwood Reach where I started in on the quest line there.  For some reason Scarwood Reach is another zone that I remember pretty well, so I have been following the chain of tasks there.

I’ve been here before… I know where the artifacts spawn

Scarwood Reach as a zone is pretty good and I have move through it well enough.

Overall however, momentum in Rift Prime has clearly slowed down.  The guild I am in, which was semi-active, with everybody playing at least a bit each week, has now pretty much dragged to a halt.  I may be the only one who has logged into the game in the last two weeks.

As I mentioned at the top of the post, activity in EVE Online has been eating up a good portion of my gaming time.  But the ennui bit is also a factor too.  I’ve probably played more Age of Empires II in the last week than Rift Prime in the last two weeks.  I also had a good game of Civilization II going over the weekend, though that has reached a bit of a “me vs. the world” stalemate… which I still played for a while rather than log into Rift.

I’m not calling it yet, but my nostalgia time here seems to be in peril.

Astrahus Brawl in GE-8JV

Monday night a ping went out from Asher Elias noting that he would be leading a fleet Tuesday evening.  I am always happy to go on an Asher fleet so I made sure I was home and ready to go at the appointed time.  I wasn’t sure what we were up to, but I was willing to  go along for the ride.

When the ping for the fleet went out on Tuesday as expected the doctrine was Cerberuses and Caracals.  We would be spewing heavy missiles.  I had a doctrine Cerberus ready, a ship I hadn’t flown since Asher took us up to Tribute for one of the battles around Circle of Two’s Keepstar in M-OEE8.  I still had the remote sensor booster fit from that fight that was used to boost Asher’s FC ship.  I mentioned that in fleet chat and he told me (and a few other pilots) to leave the remote sensor booster fit and do the same for this fleet.

Meanwhile another ping went out for CapSwarm, of which I am also a member, calling for a dreadnought form up.  The a ping for a frigate support fleet to take off the excess pilots from the Cerb fleet as it had filled to capacity very quickly.  A fight was said to be likely and the dreads seemed to indicate that a structure might be involved.

Dreads undocking from the Keepstar

It seemed to me that we might just be shepherding the capital ships to a target, where they would do the shooting while we flew cover, swooping in at the last bit to tag the target so as to get on the kill mail.  So off we went, taking a jump bridge as the caps jumped, then it was time to spread out and cover gates and the might dreadnoughts lumbered along.

Watching Naglfars take a gate

However, once there the situation was different than I had assumed.  There has been an ongoing series of battles in the Catch region around GE-8JV and V-3YG7 between the locals, made up of Brave Newbies, TEST, CO2, Drone Walkers, and FCON and a force being led by Pandemic Legion that includes their usual host of allies from the north.  PL already has a foothold in the region so fights have been coming up nightly.  SynCaine was in one of the fights the night before.

This particular fight was over the armor timer of a Brave Newbies Astrahus in GE-8JV.  Nothing to do with us in the Imperium really.  Some locals a couple regions over trying to fight off PL who has grabbed a foothold in order to farm them for fights.

But we were not there to third party.  We were actually there to help Brave Newbies, working with them and TEST to shoot Pandemic Legion and its allies.  But it was a bit complicated.  We mostly didn’t shoot at Brave, and restrained ourselves from shooting TEST too much, but their other allies, such as CO2 and FCON, enjoyed no such prohibition on our part.  At one point during the fight an FCON Svipul fleet hove into range and we shot it up with gusto.

But mostly we shot Pandemic Legion and their friends, who were out there with Machariels and some dreads of their own.

Hostiles Machs ahoy… the target is painted

Our fleet was there to kite, moving fast into range to spew missiles but never sitting still long enough to get pinned down, Asher leading us from his Phantasm.  I even remembered to take the right drugs for the op.

Some drugs are good, mkay

The flight time bonus for Antipharmakon Toxot (part of the reason few use drugs is you cannot tell what they hell they do from the name) is for missiles, effectively giving them an extended range.  Missiles take time to move from launcher to target, but they will chase things down so long as they have the range to get to them.

The fight itself was both fast and slow.  Zooming around in the fast cruiser fleet put us all around the battle.

Cerbs and Caracals zooming through bubbles

However, there was also time dilation to deal with.  It wasn’t as bad as in some fights, but it got bad enough a couple of times that I was having problems cycling my launchers on to new targets.  They would get stuck in the red flashing cool down state and I would have to hit F1 a few times to clear them.  A side effect of that is a couple of times the next target was gone before the launchers cycled, so the missiles would launch against Asher, who I had to keep targeted to run the remote sensor booster on him.  A volley now and then barely scratched him, though if he had been blown up… and a group tried to headshot him at one point… it might have been a bit awkward to be on his kill mail.  We’re not NCDot.

As it turned out the dreadnoughts, who I thought might be playing the starring role in our effort, were merely a force in being for the fight, hanging out in the vicinity as a warning to others against escalating to supers.  They just sat and waited.

Fortunately the wait wasn’t too long.  The armor timer limited the amount of time we were going to stick around, though I honestly never saw if the Brave lost the timer or if Astrahus repaired itself and reset the whole destruction process.  At one point I saw the citadel repairing, but I didn’t see the end result.  It wasn’t ours and there wasn’t a kill mail to be had on it this fight, so I wasn’t paying close attention to that.

Our fleet did well enough.  We had a few deaths, mostly due to people falling off the anchor and flying off into space on their own due to a mis-click or not having their MWD running.  The ECM frigate fleet that went with us however got roasted.  I think the FCON Svipuls were shooting them while we were shooting the Svipuls.

There is a battle report that shows the results of the fight.  Of course, results are in the eye of the beholder.  That report is laid out from our point of view, with green being us, red being the people we were trying not to shoot, and blue being those we shot early and often.

GE- Battle Report, Imperium Perspective

If you were one of the locals, you might sort the columns in a different way.  My only regret was that I did not divert off course long enough to get on Dirk MacGirk’s kill mail, though looking down the list I see at least one of the pilots in our fleet took that route.  It is always just a bit more fun to get on the kills of the space famous.

But once the object was complete… for somebody… it was time for us to rally up and then escort the dreads back home.

Cerb fleet together

That was slow, but not intolerably slow.  The dreads were willing to build up a little extra jump fatigue at the end of the night, so just about three hours after we started to form up we were back at the keepstar with the capital ship size bee floating above it.

Capital of the Imperium

And since it was at the three hour mark, we got a second participation link.  So in one fleet I got some kills, a kill mail of my own (top damage and the final blow, so another kill mark on my Cerb), and half my participation quota for the month.  5/5 – would fleet up again.

INN has a post up about the fight, which is much more high level than this.  Technically the Imperium wasn’t there to third party because we were helping one side, though we effectively third partied because I think we ended up shooting everybody at some point.  I am on one Brave and five TEST kill mails.  Oops.

Elves Unchained in TorilMUD

I have not written about TorilMUD in ages.  Honestly, I haven’t even logged in to check up on the place in a long time.

But the old world of text that I started playing more than 22 years ago lives on and gets updated from time to time.  The last time I mentioned it was when they announced the end of their harsh death penalty, which was the model that EverQuest used back in the good/bad old days.  That was about a year back.

That have had a couple of other updates posted to their Tumblr news site since then, but last night one showed up that I had to mention.

The main topic of the update was the introduction of a new class of spells called “cantrips,” which my brain immediately parsed as “can trip.”  Hrmmm…

But what caught my eye about the update was this item listed under “other changes”

Elves can now start in Baldurs Gate and Silverymoon. They can also use the Leuthilspar elfgate as early as level 1. Free the elves!

Free the elves indeed.

For those unfamiliar with the game… which is probably everybody reading this… one of the quirks of TorilMUD up until this change was that elves had a single home town in which they could start.  That was Leuthilspar, on the island of Evermeet, a location those familiar with the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting might recall.

But elves were not just required to start in Leuthilspar, they were required to stay on the island of Evermeet until they hit level 20… because… well… level 20 was a special level back in the day.  It was the “coming of age” level.   You could petition for a last name.  You were finally allowed to see your stats as numbers rather than possible ranges.

Do I take Heroic strength?

And, if you were an elf… or a half-elf that chose to start in Leuthilspar out of some sense of masochism… you were finally allowed to use the elf gate at the east end of town and leave Evermeet for the big city, Waterdeep.

This was a significant moment in the life of any elven character because, back in the day, Evermeet was a bit of a dump.  There was the town itself, where the guards would slaughter you if they caught you fighting… and remember that whole harsh death penalty thing.  So, for adventures you had to head out to Kobold Village, which was fun but contained its own perils, the Faerie Forest, a place to get lost in, and the Elemental Glades, which had its own issues.

Short of starting in one of the evil race home towns, which were designed to be a challenge for experienced players, Evermeet was the worst of the home towns.  This wasn’t because its local area was bad.  Starting as a gnome, a halfling, a dwarf, or a barbarian meant having absolute crap content to hand.  But they could all head to Waterdeep, around which there was ample content for leveling up, content with plenty of drops that groups could tackle from levels 1 through to about 40.

Leuthilspar Locations

Elves had to make do with what they had, and while the zones were not bad, they lacked in equipment drops.  You could always spot a newly arrived elf in Waterdeep because of the paucity of their gear.  They might have a bronze sword, a pearl earring, a bit of string tied around their finger, and the inevitable cloak of forest shadows.  And, of course, these elves would be gawking a the locals, amazed at all the gear they had.  Good gear.  With actual bonus stats and such.

Of course, the newly arrived elf couldn’t afford to buy any of that gear, because they had likely left Evermeet with only a few coins in their pocket and not much of value to sell or trade.  And it was always some work to get into groups because you couldn’t compete with the well geared locals.  But if you persevered, you could close the gear gap and catch up with the rest of the world.

And you were a member of a special club.  You had made it through the privations of the elf homeland.  You would, of course, help any new elf you saw standing at the gates of Waterdeep, trying to unlock them after they had closed for the night saying the word “peace” over and over. (That unlocked the gates of Leuthilspar at night, but for Waterdeep you needed the key that Lord Piergeiron carried on his person or a rogue with a high lockpick skill.)

And, as an elf, you might never go back home.  If you were a cleric or a druid, so your word of recall spell would bring you back to Leuthilspar, you might frequent the place after level 20.  But other classes had to take a ship to the Moonshaes and travel quite a ways in order to find the elf gate that would return them to their original home.  It generally wasn’t worth the effort.

Because I started most of my main characters on Evermeet, getting through those first 20 levels is very much a part of my memories of the game, much more so than any of the early zones in the main world.  I even wrote a series of posts about them under the tag Leuthilspar tales.

• Getting to Kobold Village
• Exciting Ways to Die in Kobold Village
• The Kobold Temple of the Unholy
• Lost in the Faerie Forest
• A Visit with the Tako Demon
• Fox Tails, Goblins, and Bandor’s Flagon
• The Age of the Discriminating Vendor

Over the years the lot of the elves was improved.  One of the players Xyd and I started playing with way, way back in the day, Rylandir, went on to become one of the game admins for a while and created a number of zones for Evermeet.  The first in, the Eldar Forest, was especially helpful, had some good quests, and dropped some gear.  Level 20 elves eventually stopped showing up in Waterdeep looking like beggars.

And now… well, elves can run straight to Waterdeep… which is probably a good thing.  The population of TorilMUD has dwindled over the years.  No longer can you log in on a Friday night and find more than 100 players online.  But there does seem to be 20 or more around whenever I take a moment to check in.

But there was a time, long ago, when the life of an elf of Evermeet was desperate and poor.  Somehow we survived.

Now that I look at my list of Leuthilspar Tales, I think I need to go back and finish it up by writing something about the Elemental Glades, the third… and strangest… zone of Evermeet from back in the day.

And, if all of this talk about the old days of TorilMUD has you in a nostalgia reverie, here are a few other choice posts about the good old days:

• 15 Years of TorilMUD
• How Information Access has Changed
• The Black Hole of Vendor Trash
• Dartan’s Portable Hole
• The End of a Trigger, The Expansion of Information
• The Salesman of Waterdeep
• The Way Questing Used to Be
• On Greater Challenges
• Echoes of a Crashing MUD
• Hauling Bronze Through Forgotten Realms
• Great Moments in Exploits – The Resurrection
• Nineteen Years Without Raising the Level Cap
• 20 Years of TorilMUD

Or you can just look at the whole TorilMUD category.  There are only 56 posts total.

Some of those posts are old enough at this point that I am even feeling a bit of nostalgia for the point of time when I was able to remember that much about the game.  Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

And, of course, if you are interesting in the game… because it is still up and running… you can find out more about it at their web site.