EverQuest's Broken Mirror and my 7 years of bad luck

It's been 7 years since I had a character at level cap in EQ, which was during the Secrets of Faydwer addon, on the Test server. Not exactly bad luck, but with the addon being named 'The Broken Mirror' it wouldn't do to resist that sort of post title. I'm hoping to 'catch up' this time around, although I've been ineffectually pursuing that goal for the past couple years.

EverQuest's 'The Broken Mirror' just came out, an addon which back-ports a deity written for EQ2 into EQ's lore. The level cap stays at 105, and it seems to me like it has about the same spread as previous addons of raid:group content. Solo is probably the usual setting of weird areas that you can sometimes scrape by, or tasks that you can do sometimes, or with a second account and mercenaries, or with a certain class.

As a solo player, I never really hope to see the current content, but I do know that once you get 20 or so levels on content it becomes very easy to do by yourself. If I can hustle myself up to 105, that should give me enough leeway to roll through the stuff that I want to up to the Seeds of Destruction progression, which is about as far as I'm interested in anyway.

After a quick jaunt through the safe 'town' zone of the new addon and realizing that even though you only needed to be Level 70 to port there I definitely couldn't do anything, I headed back to PoK to buff up and go to an XP area. Strangely enough, on this 'new addon just released' landscape I found myself participating in an unrelated Guide event.

Our goal was to gather a list of 30 plants(or as many as we could) in under an hour. Around 6 or 7 were vendor buyable, and the rest were forages or monster drops. I ended up in second place with 14, but it was refreshing to lose since I assumed I had an unfair advantage as a druid(max forage+forage AAs, plus the ability to teleport all over.) A Ranger had 15, I'm assuming he raided his bank for stuff he had foraged in the past.. I keep all that on another character and didn't want to relog during the event(although some 'new addon day' client instability had me involuntarily restart when zoning into Wall of Slaughter regardless.)

The 'rewards ceremony' phase of things felt really awkward to me, and I ended up running off rather than watching the not-really-bad-but-not-really-great-either Guide text. Something about those events makes me feel uncomfortable if it's clearly just a person typing in realtime and not some prepared text. It doesn't feel like you unlocked something; it feels like you're talking to Joe.

In the end it was a pretty good evening. I got the little bit of XP I needed to hit 88 and scribed my spells, and got a shield ornament and a 14 slot bag from the event(too small to bother using nowadays, but it'll go in my bank.)

In retrospect, I've tried to be picture heavy in my posts, but I didn't even think to take any screenshots during the guide event or exploring the new addon areas. Since nobody really reads this I suppose I'm just writing to feel like I wrote something so it doesn't matter too much anyway.

I wonder if my luck will change if I get to the cap and finish all the things I want to in EQ?

P.S. Was feeling sad about lack of pictures, so here's an unrelated shot of Innoruuk's corpse.

Only in EverQuest..well, maybe not

This morning before work I decided to run the Daily quests for a bit of XP on my Level 86 characters. The Level 80 daily was in Hills of Shade, to kill 5 Blackwaters.. These guys are undead that have got a huge camp in the middle of the zone, so no problem.

After I got there and killed my first pull worth of them, I see some red con guy(SK by the look of it) run by me, and it sort of looked as if he deliberately pulled all the mobs around me. Well, whatever.. I moved to another spot and killed a couple more.. only 1 left! Again the guy zips around, pulling like 10 mobs in his wake. Finally, despite almost the entire village being dead, I found a 2-pull and grabbed that, since I didn't know if I'd be able to find a single in light of the mass destruction going on.

Must have been the last straw for the guy, as he shouted 'The village is camped, Thanks.'


I guess nowadays you can go to content that's 15 levels lower than you are such that you can kill them 10 at a time, destroy everything, and then feel righteous indignation enough to yell at people for daring to pull 5 or 6 of them for their daily quest. Learning fun new things!

Modern EverQuest: Lay claim to entire zones of content and feel like it's Good Behavior(tm).

A Rough Start for EQ Ragefire

My first experience with the new Ragefire Progression server was that it was down. I had left work a bit later than I wanted to, and when I got home the server was Locked already. Apparently people were on and playing, but nobody else could get on. This went on for about 45 minutes before I eventually learned that they had left /betabuff on, and level 50 characters with full gear were being made(and currently played while others were locked out.)

People were using said characters to buff their ‘real’ characters(because obviously they knew they were doing wrong and the 50s would get wiped) – but for those unfamiliar with the low level EQ game, this short span of time with that level of buffing will cause an immediate 10-20 level gap between players who got in that door and players who didn’t.

I’m not competing for first to 50, and I’m probably not going to fight much for contested content, but it does annoy me that Type A exploiters(lets not pretend they’re anything else) are going to be the ones first to 50 and establishing the cost of goods on the server by controlling all the high level spawns and gear drops.

Daybreak posted about how they left betabuff in, how they removed the L50 characters, and how the 50s supposedly didn’t interact meaningfully with other characters and ‘it’s fine, it’s fine.’ Even though the 15 plat that L50s start with probably got traded immediately, and even though even an hour of buffs creates a huge imbalance. The low level of EverQuest understanding over there was a bit surprising to me, but I suppose they’ll get it together eventually.

The best was yet to come, however… the servers came back up and I logged in to create Vomm, my Dark Elf Wizard. Since I had elected to play in First Person mode only and not use the map/compass, it was a trial to get out of Neriak since I didn’t really know it, but I was able to follow the stream of newbie dark elves out.

After struggling against dozens of people trying to get some of the few level 1 monsters(yellow cons were beating me badly, I only had enough mana for ~2 nukes) the news surfaced that more L50s were being generated, and the server was going down in 1 minute.

That’s right, after the entire previous episode was caused by /betabuff being left in, they took some inadequate emergency cleanup actions, then proceeded to forget to remove /betabuff again. As someone who does a lot of release management, I feel like they totally winged this launch and had no plan.

Here’s hoping it gets a little bit better. I only ended up with 2 screenshots of when I was in somehow, here’s the second.

And now for something different

In this last year of lunacy I ended up spending a bunch of money and picking up a bunch of things. One of these has been my habit of long-term preorders. I generally stick to game-related stuff, but anime and manga stuff creeps in here and there. A couple boxes of things just came in today, and I feel like posting something. Above you see the hideous Excellent Model Amazon figure, from their Dragon’s Crown series. Really, I bought it for completionism’s sake, because I have the Sorceress figure, and a reprint of the Elf figure(which is probably the most amazing sculpt I’ve ever seen) on preorder. You can also see Tiki on the table there with her, but she’s not new.