The LOTRO Fate of Gundabad Expansion Targets November 10th Launch

SSG has announced the date for the next Lord of the Rings Online expansion, Fate of Gundabad, which is set to go on November 10th, 2021.

The fate is per-determined by the quest chain I’m sure

The expansion boasts of the following features:

• New Brawler class
• Level cap raised from 130 to 140
• New mobs to face, new zones to explore
• New instances and raids
• A new run at the Legendary Item system

The expansion is available for pre-purchase now and comes in three different flavors:

Standard Edition – $40

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Standard Expedition Supplies

Collector’s Edition – $80

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Improved Expedition Supplies
• Brawler Gauntlet Box
• Level boost to 130
• Gundabad Cosmetics
• Gundabad Mount & War-steed
• And more bonus items!

Ultimate Fan Bundle – $130

• Fate of Gundabad Content
• Brawler Class
• Extra Character Slot
• Ultimate Expedition Supplies
• Brawler Gauntlet Box
• Level boost to 130
• Gundabad Cosmetics
• Gundabad Mount & War-steed
• Fateful Gundabad Cosmetics
• Thunder Boar & War-steed Appearance
• Dye Carry-all
• 10,000 Virtue XP
• And more bonus items!

I do find it a bit amusing that the Expedition Supplies include various accelerators, because nothing says your game is grindy like handing out XP boosters with the expansion pack.

All of which seems to be standard fare for an MMO expansion; level cap increase, more stuff to do, a new class to play, and some changes to a key system here and there.  As pointed out elsewhere, not exactly earth shattering stuff.

More interesting to me is where the game is heading.

Lord of the Rings Online is in an odd position in that it cannot just make up new content.  It cannot follow in the footsteps of its Norrathian siblings and just go to the moon for a couple of expansions or decide to go on a sea voyage to discover some new content.

SSG is stuck with the books of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  As I recall they cannot even stray into The Hobbit, which seems like it would be a nice time travel expansion, much less the lore dense Silmarillion.

And when it comes to the main story line of the trilogy, we’re kind of done.  The ring has been destroyed, Sauron has been thrown down, we’ve tidied up Mordor a bit, had a wedding, scourged the Shire, and have generally wrapped up all of the great moments of the Third Age.

So the team at SSG has been working on what I call “plundering the appendix” of the trilogy.  Dr. Tolkien, bless his soul, crammed in more than 150 pages of appendices with all sorts of bits of history, family trees, pronunciation guides and language primers, and other items of tangential interest to the main tale including a timeline of events of the world.

In that condensed history of Middle-earth you will find the tale of Gundabad in the Misty Mountains, where the dwarves first awoke when the world was young and their struggles with the orcs over it.  This has been picked up for the latest expansion.

And that makes me wonder what else is buried in the appendix that they can farm for more expansions.  Where else might they go?  I mean, technically, there is a lot of stuff mentioned in the appendix of the trilogy.  Is something being there an opening to include it in the game, because they do retell a tale of one Thorin Oakenshield and an expedition to the Lonely Mountain… I’m just saying.

WoW Classic Calms Down a Bit

We are now about five weeks into the WoW Classic experience.

I believe this past week was the first since Blizzard opened up name reservations back in mid-August that they have not had to add any further WoW Classic servers.

Classic is as classic does

They started out with 25 servers, 13 US/Oceanic and 12 European.  The count now stands at 74 servers, 36 US/Oceanic (with 1 each for Latin America and Brazil) and 38 European.  That is quite a change, enough to drive subscription revenue up by 223% in August when compared to July.

I remain interested in the mix of server types, which come out as follows:

1. PvP – 51
2. Normal – 18
3. RP-PvP – 3
4. RP – 2

I would have assumed, given the World of Warcraft care bear, theme park, easy mode, starter MMO reputation that normal rules servers would have represented a greater portion of the mix.

My own theory has been that Blizz effectively making all retails servers normal servers with Battle for Azeroth may have pushed that, though I have been told that PvP is also one thing that the private emulation server community did not do well, so WoW Classic may be the only way to scratch the open world PvP itch for a lot of Azeroth fans.

I also wonder how the success of WoW Classic will influence the industry?  Which games… among those who haven’t already gone this route… will feel pressure to jump on the bandwagon?

I remain happy with my own server choice.  The RP server is about as chills as expected.  The population has been moving up through levels, so the early zones are not as crowded as they were a week or two ago.  I even caught the Defias Messenger outside of Moonbrook.

He made it out onto the road outside of town at least

For quite a stretch there has been somebody waiting for him at his spawn point in Moonbrook, with his corpse usually present only as far as he was able to flee.  He has a drop players need in the quest chain that leads you into the Deadmines, so has been a popular attraction.

In other news, Blizzard posted another video about WoW Classic and its creators, this time featuring Alex Afrasiabi.

 

Like many other members of the team, he found his way into the game as Field Marshal Afrasiabi, who stands at the entry to Stormwind.

He doesn’t have anything to say to me save “Move along”

Blizzard also posted two more WoW Classic city tours on their site, this time for Ironforge and Undercity.  Despite their similar circular layout I have always found Undercity much more confusing to navigate.  It is probably the elevators.

And, finally, Ula put up another video.  She captured a bit of a druid bear form party event taking place around the fountain in Stormwind.

I think the reactions of passers by are pretty amusing.

Fippy Darkpaw – A Merger Too Late

Long has been the tale of the Fippy Darkpaw Time Locked Progression server and it has been quite some time since I last posted about it.

Fippy has been around for a while now

I started out playing on the Fippy Darkpaw server back when in launched in early 2011.  Potshot and I had our old school adventures for a time there.  And much fun was had. (You can click on the Fippy Darkpaw tag and scroll way down to read about us playing if that’s your thing.)  However the great big Sony hack that brought PSN and SOE games down for a couple of weeks killed our momentum and we fell out of the habit of playing and that was that.

But the server went on.  Such servers have their own lives.  I continued to follow major events on the server… votes and expansion unlocks… but at the time SOE was so bad at publicizing the server that I had to depend on people complaining in the forum about problems with new expansions to figure out when something changed.

I will say that Daybreak did get on board with their special servers and now broadcast updates prominently.  Good for them.

Eventually I gave up on following the server.  I made it to the Underfoot expansion in July of 2014 and that was about it.  Somewhere I said I would probably have two more posts at some future date, when Fippy Darkpaw merged with its twin the Vulak server and when the pair were eventually rolled into a live server.  That was the fate of the previous progression servers, The Sleeper and The Combine.

Now the first has come about, the Fippy Darkpaw server is slated to be merged with the Vulak’Aerr server in the latter half of October.  October 18th, to be specific.

My initial reaction was wonder that it took this long to get to a merger.

The two servers were the result of the usual unbounded enthusiasm that a new retro server tends to bring out in the EverQuest community.  That enthusiasm has a limit however.  After having two full servers for a short amount of time Daybreak/SOE tended to end up with one viable server and one sparsely populated one.  So people were calling for a Fippy Darkpaw/Vulak merger at least five years ago if not earlier.  But somehow the two marched forward on their own, probably more out of neglect than any actual plan.

Daybreak has since launched more such servers and has gone on to bring over multiple zone spawning technology from EverQuest II in order to handle the initial surge of players without having to double down on server creation.  The community split/merge problem has been reasonably addressed.

However, they still have two pairs of launch twins, Fippy Darkpaw/Vulak and Ragefire/Lockjaw.  The older pair now has a merger in their future and I expect that the newer pair will get the same treatment as well at some point.

The question, I suppose, is who will this impact?  Both sets of servers do not see much in the way of load these days.  There is a tendency to jump on the latest retro server when it shows up, and with Phinigel and Agnarr servers having shown up, a lot of people have moved on.  In my opinion the best part of any such server is everybody starting fresh.  But some community forms and sticks with servers even after the new server smell fades and the short term enthusiasts like myself wander off.

Anyway, something else to add to the tale of the Fippy Darkpaw server events.  According to the FAQ at the end of the announcement, the Fippy Darkpaw server is currently on The Darkened Sea expansion, which means it has only moved on five expansions since I last reported on it. That leaves only The Broken Mirror and Empires of Kunark to complete before catching up with the live servers.

My event list up until this point:

• Fippy Darkpaw server goes live with classic EQ content, February 15, 2011
• Classic EverQuest competed, February 24, 2011
• Ruins of Kunark unlocked, June 6, 2011
• Ruins of Kunark completed, June 19, 2011
• Scars of Velious unlocked, August 29, 2011
• Scars of Velious completed, September 14, 2011
• Shadows of Luclin unlocked, November 21, 2011
• Shadows of Luclin completed, December 4, 2011
• Planes of Power unlocked, February 13, 2012
• Lost Dungeons of Norrath unlocked, March 12, 2012
• Legacy of Ykesah unlocked, March 12, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, May 7, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, May 21, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, June 4, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlocked at last, June 18, 2012
• Omens of War unlocked, September 10, 2012
• Omens of War complete, September 12, 2012
• Dragons of Norrath unlocked without a vote, November 13, 2012
• Prophecy of Ro completed, April 26, 2013
• The Serpent’s Spine unlocked, July 16, 2013
• The Serpent’s Spine complete, July 19, 2013
• The Buried Sea unlock vote goes up, September 23, 2013
• The Buried Sea unlocked, October 7, 2013
• The Buried Sea complete, October 9, 2013
• Echoes of Faydwer complete, ~end of January 2014
• Seeds of Destruction unlocked, May 1, 2014
• Seeds of Destruction complete, May 12, 2014
• Underfoot unlock vote fails, July 14, 2014
• Daybreak announces Fippy Darkpaw/Vulak merge – September 22, 2017

And so it goes.  It looks like there will be a couple more entries on this list before the server goes away.  Also, this was totally going to just be the last bullet point on the previous post until I realized that I had a tradition of over-long posts about the Fippy Darkpaw server to uphold.

Friday Bullet Points for the End of September

Another one of those round up posts to quickly cover some things I thought about working up posts around, but which never quite materialized.

CCP Closes the Gate

CCP announced that as of Wednesday the EVE Gate portal on the EVE Online site has been shut down.

You shall not log in!

The EVE Gate, for those who do not know… which is probably most people reading this… was a portal that allowed players to log in and access their in-game email and calendar.  It should not be confused with the in-game EVE Gate of lore, which is how humans first arrived in New Eden.

I’m not sure how big of a deal this really is.  I think I used it twice over the years.  I don’t get much in-game email really, as my corp, alliance, and coalition have other preferred communications methods.

Riverini returned to EN24 to write a post about the demise of EVE Gate.  As CCP notes, you can use their phone app or, if you want, you can use a third party app like Neocom.  I find the latter is much more useful overall, though it won’t let you send mail.

CCP is NOT Turning Japanese

Earlier this year CCP announced that they were cancelling their deal with Nexon for Japanese localization.  NEXON was a mixed bag for EVE in Japan, so CCP decided to carry on with a single Japanese speaking employee.  Sad for the Japanese community, but at least CCP was trying to carry on with support.

I want to hear Falcon read this in Vegas

However, things have taken a further turn as CCP has asked a lone Japanese speaking ISD member to stop translating patch notes and posting them to the forums.  The person in question was doing this on their own time, but CCP felt it was confusing as it was not officially sanctioned and there was some disagreement over the translations as converting EVE Online lore and mechanics from English to Japanese is problematic at the best of times.  The tale of this, with some translation examples, is in a Reddit thread.

Free Brittania!

Ultima Online has been celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, which I haven’t covered at all since I never played it.  I think Lord British and I parted ways at about Ultima V.

Welcome indeed

The game is still alive and rolling and trying to keep pace with the changes in the industry under Broadsword’s stewardship.  Over at Massively OP it was mentioned that, along those lines, Broadsword was looking into some sort of “free” option.  As the FAQ on the UO site indicates, free will mean giving up some options that I am sure any serious player would not want to do without.  The option is called the “Endless Journey” as is supposed to arrive in Spring 2018.

Expansions Coming to Norrath, But Not for Free

Both the EverQuest and EverQuest II sites have made it clear that we’ll be seeing the usual yearly expansions again for 2017.

For EverQuest it will be the Rings of Scale, while EverQuest II will be going old school again with the Planes of Prophecy.

We don’t know much beyond the names yet, but the usual warm up events have been kicking off and last year’s expansions are now 50% off for those late to the party.

One of the usual aspects of this phase is the addition of some past expansion to the free to play access level of the game.  Usually you can buy the latest and the previous expansion and everything before that is open for everybody.  But no longer.  As Massively OP reported (a pity Feldon isn’t around for this, he’d have done a nice full story on this), when asked when the soon to be in third place Terrors of Thalumbra expansion might be made free, the official response was:

We will not be adding anything further to the F2P line-up.

Harsh words, but perhaps the flip side of something Daybreak has said before.  The Planet Side 2 team opined in the past that there is a point of diminishing returns when piling on things for subscribers.  Now we’re seeing EverQuest II declining to remove something from the paid column.

I have not seen word as to whether the EverQuest expansion The Broken Mirror will face a similar path in not moving to the free zone, but I expect that will also be the case.

And that is it for items on my list.  I’m sure I will hate myself a year from now when I try to put these into my “One Year Ago” summary.

Make My Alpha Clone

As we heard back at the end of August, free to play of a sorts is coming to EVE Online this November in the form of Alpha Clones.

For those two lazy to click the link, if your account is not subscribed to the game you will still be able to log into New Eden, but your characters will be in the Alpha Clone state, which limits them to 5 million skill points.

You still have all your skill points, but you need to be subscribed to use any beyond the 5 million cap, which the game promises to remind you of at every turn.

Can’t touch that!

And, on top of that, just because you have a lot of skill points when subscribed does not mean that when transition to the Alpha Clone state that you will have the full five million to play with, as those skills must come from a specific set of skills dictated by your choice of race.  Yes, that completely meaningless, primarily cosmetic choice of old can now come back to haunt you.

There is a post up over at The Nosy Gamer looking at the four race/faction choices.

Like a lot of other people, I started thinking about what I would do with a potentially unlimited supply of effectively disposable 5 million SP free pilots.  But even in a potentially bottomless well, there is always a first bucket of water drawn, and so I decided to start in on my first Alpha Clone in advance, so I reactivated an account.

I know, Alpha Clones are going to be free, why pay to make one?

Well, among other restrictions, Alpha Clones are going to train at half the speed of subscribed accounts, if I caught that detail correctly.  Given that it takes my main about 7 months to train 10 million skill points… his learning rate boosted slightly by spending down time in a clone with +4 implants when possible… a completely free 5 million skill point clone account looks to be about a 9 month operation by my guess.  Literally the human gestation period for a fully formed Alpha Clone.

Besides which, I already had a character, a May 2009 model named Reynaldo Fabulous (pre-dates Jay Amazingness by 4 years, and holds our old corp… anybody want to buy a 2007 corp so you can tell people how “old school” you are?), with more than 14 million SP and a set of +3 implants plugged in.  That also made my faction choice for me, since he was born Gallante back in 2009.  I figured I would have this Alpha Clone thing set in a week or two, so I subscribed him (hours before the magic date) to see what he had going on.

He had a Trisatan and a Quafe Skin for it, which I wasn’t sure how he obtained, but was out in the boonies, so I flew him off to a local NPC station that stocked skill books.

Quafe skins for all the ships

Once there I started comparing what he had trained in the past and what skills he would need to grab to get to that 5 million Gallente skill point Alpha perfection.  (The list of skills is in the dev blog, or in spreadsheet form linked from this post on Reddit.)

And herein lays the eternal struggle in EVE Online.  It isn’t so much about having skill points as it is having the right skill points.  Even my main character, 164 million skill points into training, still bumps up against the “hrmm, I guess I never trained that” scenario now and again.

So as I started going down the list, comparing what my potential Alpha Clone had trained with what he would be allowed to use as an Alpha Clone.. well, let the new skill training begin!

Get those new skills queued up!

He wasn’t totally bereft of usable skills.  But there also wasn’t a lot of overlap between the Alpha Clone world and what he could use.  Gallente Industrial was good, but he had that to level 5 when an Alpha Clone can only have level 1.  He also had Mining Barges and Exhumers trained up to 5, which are of no use at all, akin to his ability fly a Drake and shoot heavy missiles.  But he didn’t have Gallente Cruiser injected.

So skills were injected and training commenced, though I also bumped into the 50 skill limit in the training queue.  And now, of course, every time I log in… or launch EVE Mon… I am greeted by a list of skills that have trained.

Training training training

I probably do not need every skill on the list, but now there is a certain OCD aspect to this, the idea of having a “perfect” Alpha Clone.  And I am still not sure what I will even do with him once the skill queue is complete, but I think he should be done in time for the introduction of Alpha Clones.  We’ll see what happens then.