Player-made Dungeons, Round Two #EQ2 #EverQuestII

My first attempt at a player made dungeon didn’t go that well. Sure it was fun, but I found it VERY difficult to solo and it threw me off the system completely. Last night I decided to give it another go, this time teaming up with Ibeogur from guild (who I dragged back into game specifically for this experiment). The dungeon went MUCH better, in fact it was just too easy for the two of us. The design was amazing though (the dungeon layout was Chardok) and I still had a lot of fun. I also ended up with roughly the same number of dungeon marks as I did in the first dungeon I attempted.

What I’m confused about is whether there is any other loot in these dungeons aside from the dungeon marks. From what I hear on channels some people actually get dungeon creation components to drop, but I’ve never seen anything like that. Is it only particular types of encounters that will have a chance for these drops? Am I missing something? Must you be in a 5 person group in order for this to happen?

Also, can players of any level team up to complete these together? What I’m wondering is if I can join lower level channels and see if anyone is looking for people to complete these dungeons with, and team up to do them. Obviously I’ve been away from game a bit, so I’m rusty on the mechanics. I was pleased to see the defiler spell that fills your inventory with crystallized essences has been fixed since my last run.

Before heading off to the dungeons Ibeogur and I went to Protector’s Realm and duo’d it (once again) for pocket change. I brought along a bard mercenary just to see how they were in combat, and was quite impressed. Since I play a defiler and Ibeogur plays a berzerker this was a perfect combination group for us. We each ended up with 50-70 plat, and a lot of items to transmute.

My bestlord is still only level 10, but I’m thinking of leveling her up. I have a steady 200% bonus to experience due to max level characters, which is nice, it’s like having vitality running constantly even when it has run out. I also have my ranger still comfortably sitting at level 35, she’s locked to that level while I obtain AA for her. I think I’d like to get her a nice set of gear, at the moment she’s not wearing anything special.

I’m also wondering how you get the new components found to craft the items on the new crafting apprentices. I know a quick google search will answer that for me, I just haven’t gotten around to it. I logged into WoW briefly to complete some Darkmoon Faire quests, and I managed a few achievements for cooking and fishing (finishing up the Ironforge series, finally). I also briefly logged in to SWTOR, but wasn’t really interested in playing, so I logged out.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Inspirational Girl Gamer for January – Domino

I am so incredibly happy to announce this months ‘Inspirational Girl Gamer’ – Emily (aka Domino). You may not recognize her in her Dalek form pictured above, but Emily has played an important role over the years in the development of EverQuest II, especially concerning tradeskills. Not only that, but this girl gamer has inspired many with her fantastic minecraft creations, book suggestions, and is just a plain ‘ol wonderful person. Of course I’m slightly bias since she’s also Canadian and we have to stick together. *grins* A huge thank you to Emily for taking time out of her busy schedule to answer some questions for me, I hope everyone enjoys reading them as much as I did.  Without further wait here they are:

1. What was your first gaming experience, and how old were you?

I don’t even remember how old I was. I remember loading “Frogger” from a cassette tape at my aunt and uncle’s house; that’s got to be pretty long ago. But I’m not 100% sure if that was the earliest. I remember Pong, vaguely, but I don’t remember if it was the original arcade game or a later personal computer version. I do know I was absolutely fascinated by arcades when they appeared, and I’d spend hours (if allowed) just watching the bigger kids play things like Pac Man. The local laundromat had a game called Tutankhamun, and later Elevator Action, and I spent a LOT of quarters playing those.

2. How many hours did it take you to complete your Halloween costume for this year, and by the way, WOW what a costume
I didn’t keep track of the hours, but it was an ongoing project for several months. The most time-consuming part was spray-painting all the foam hemispheres and then gluing them on. I did save a lot of time by starting with a dress I found at the Salvation Army and converted into the skirt, rather than sewing one from scratch. The top was likewise a corset purchased on ebay which I just sewed some silver ribbon onto. The headpiece was a bit fiddly too, as I actually did some soldering to get the central blue light to work.

3. What are your favorite types of video games to play?

I tend to prefer strategy and sim type games, although I do play others. Currently I’m obsessed with Minecraft, I also got almost all the remaining achievements in “Plants vs. Zombies” over the holidays. Alpha Centauri is also one of my favorite games ever (and IMO the best in the Civ series) and of course I played lots of Sim City and Populous way back in the day. I don’t like feeling forced down a particular plot track or into a particular gameplay style, and I love to explore and find new ways to entertain myself, so sandbox type games appeal to me quite strongly, as well as MMOs of course, which is why EverQuest and EverQuest II have drawn me in for years. That said, I was one of the Tetris champs in my college dorm; I actually used to be able to play left-handed or even play with my feet and still beat my boyfriend of the time (this didn’t go over too well).

4. How do you find balance in your day between all of the activities that you do?

To be honest, I’m not sure I do. It’s an ongoing effort. I guess it’s a hazard of loving what you do for work; it’s difficult to remember not to work way too much, and take time to do other things. My friends help to remind me of this, and playing things like Minecraft rather than the game I work on helps also. (Although I do also play the game I work on, these days I find it’s almost impossible to relax while doing so, and I usually end up with an email full of notes on things to improve or fix at the end of a play session, unfortunately.)

5. What is one of the most emotional moments in gaming you’ve ever experienced?

This is more of a moment in game development than pure gaming itself, but as tradeskill developer during EQII’s Destiny of Velious expansion, I created a new present-day version of the Coldain Prayer Shawl quest for tradeskill players. The original quest was a huge mark of crafting accomplishment in the original EQ, and I wanted the EQII version to make the player feel epic, and as if they had really affected the world. I did a ton of research and the new quest was tied very closely into the lore behind the original quests; to make a long story short, in the original EQ, after the events of the original quest, the ring wars between the coldain dwarves and the giants drew to a close with the giants advancing on the dwarven city of Thurgadin. Defenses crumbling, the desperate dwarves had only one last option remaining to them, their absolute last-ditch plan of last resort: they set explosives beside the waterfall above Thurgadin, blowing away the top of the mountain and unleashing the icy waters onto the battlefield. The floods of frigid waters and their cryomancers’ spells froze the torrents solid, encasing both giants and dwarves below in an icy tomb. This ended the ring wars for good and saved Thurgadin from the giant invasion, but it also meant the death of all the brave coldain warriors who were fighting on the battlefield that day. For hundreds of years thereafter the coldain in Thurgadin have had to live with the knowledge that they knowingly murdered their most brave defenders to save themselves; and worse still, the spirits of the dwarves (and giants) killed in that final battle have been somehow trapped, re-enacting the final battle over and over again as ghosts instead of proceeding the afterlife of feasting halls and dwarven revelry which all dwarves look forward to. The coldain have spent the years in fear and guilt that their ancestors have been trapped in this endless undead hell because they were killed by the hand of their own kin, and the dwarven god Brell Serilis has therefore rejected them from proceeding to the afterlife. In the new coldain prayer shawl quest, the player gradually learns this history and learns of the horrific burden of guilt that the coldain are suffering, and struggles to make contact with the ghostly warriors and the god Brell Serilis to try and free the trapped spirits. Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that the player manages to gain the assurance from Brell that the warriors are serving an essential purpose and will indeed proceed to their just rewards when that is completed, and to take this news back to the coldain dwarves of Thurgadin to at last relieve them of their incredible burden of centuries-old guilt. It’s a pretty epic story and I really hope the players who complete it feel their actions have had a real and fundamental effect on all of Thurgadin. I confess to tearing up a little while writing some of the dialog for the guilt-wracked, and then unimaginably relieved, coldain dwarves and imagining what extreme depths of emotion they must be feeling.

6. What is your favorite book?

Oh, very tough question – so hard to pick just one! You could ask me this question every day for a week and I could probably give you a different answer each day depending on my mood, but today I think I’ll nominate the novella “True Names And Other Dangers” by Vernor Vinge. This was written in 1981, pre-world-wide-web, pre-virtual reality, before William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and before Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”. It’s probably the first recognizable description of cyberspace written, and when I read it in the early 90s it just blew my mind. When you consider that the internet as we know it was still well over a decade away from existence it’s simply amazing that he wrote this in 1981. I recommend it to anybody interested in cyberspace, cyberpunk, and SF in general (it’s currently available in the collection of essays “True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier”). Vinge’s later novel “Across Realtime” is also highly recommended! Other favorite authors include Pratchett, Bujold, Austen, Tepper, and Gaiman.

7. Any words of wisdom for people looking to get into the video game industry?

I joined the industry in a rather nonstandard way, so I don’t know if the specifics of my particular experience would be a lot of use to others. But in general I will say the following: learn Excel. Learn everything about it. Learn how to do vlookups and concatenations and substitution formulas and match formulas and nested if statements. Use it to write your Christmas cards and organize your book collection and calculate your D&D stats and anything else you can think of. Excel is a game designer’s best friend. Also, learn to write and communicate clearly and effectively. It doesn’t matter if you have the best ideas in the world if you can’t communicate them to other people (be they players or co-workers) both in words or in writing. And finally, be positive. Never criticize anything without also offering a solution to fix it; and preferably compliment a good point at the same time. This is true whether you’re a game player or a game designer; in fact it’s worth trying in all aspects of life both personal and professional, regardless of where you work or play.

8. What has been your geekiest moment to date?

Another question to which there are many, many possible answers! I could pick any number of occasions, but the first one that springs to mind this evening is spending Valentine’s day in 1996 sitting alone in the university computer lab learning how to make my first web page on the ancient unix-based mainframes. That was a pretty exciting evening, in terms of learning new stuff. But okay, maybe just a little bit geeky. In fact, one of the features of my brand new web page was a small stick figure comic called “geek girl”. I drew about 20 of them, I think, before retiring Geek Girl somewhere around 1997.

A Sith Corruptor’s Cape, Balmorra, and Crafting #SWTOR

First of all, a VERY happy new years from me here at MmoQuests. I spent my evening sleeping which was probably the best present ever, teehee. I didn’t make it past 10pm but I did get 8 full hours of sleep and that’s something I treasure a whole lot these days.

I also got a lot of gaming done yesterday, my little operative is level 23, almost 24. I’m still on Balmorra, finishing off the bonus quests. I saw some players advertising in channels looking for a Sith Corruptor’s Cape and paying 20,000 credits for one so I decided to try and farm one. If you play on the Empire side you may have seen this object, it’s a long black cloak that players can mod (which means it’s basically appearance gear you can always keep and have useful stats on). I didn’t get one to drop, but maybe I’ll have some better luck today. One can always wish.

My crafting is going well but I’m learning the pitfalls very quickly. Due to orange gear there’s very little need for some crafting classes. There’s a high demand for cybertech created items because you only need to mod the gear you’re wearing, you never have to replace it. If a piece of looted gear looks like it will be better than your orange gear, chances are you can upgrade a mod and ta da the orange gear is better again. Biochem is another largely popular craft spec, as is the class that makes lightsaber hilts and crystals. The ‘core’ professions that we’re used to (weapons and armor) are not needed as much especially with the amount of gear players can find from questing and turning in tokens. They’re nice classes to make temporary upgrades, but not the huge money makers that I find the other crafting classes to be.

I made one last ‘splurge’ for 2011 last night and upgraded my account to the digital collector’s edition. With it came one of the most useful items I’ve seen so far, it’s a clicky item that will take a screen shot of the area directly in front of your character. It even removes the UI hub, so basically it’s a one click screen shot button where I don’t have to alt+z to remove the hub. Great for when I’m in combat, although I do wish it included my character (which wouldn’t really make sense for the item, it basically acts as a camera). I also got a mount, so that will save me a little money when I am able to use it at 25 – although at this point in time I doubt very much that I’ll be able to afford the 40,000 credits required. Leveling cybertech is expensive. Especially when you’re unable to farm the components required by hand due to your low level and have to rely on your companions failed missions.

How is everyone else getting along in game? What’s your favorite zones so far? Least favorite? I must admit, I really dislike Balmorra. The lifts complicate everything and more often than not I have no idea how to get to a particular section without running in long awkward circles around giant mountains. The next zone I’m headed to is apparently the ‘Vegas of SWTOR’ so we’ll see how that goes.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

The Good and The Bad of Player Made Dungeons #EQ2 #EverQuest2

Even though there has been a significant decrease in the number of EQ2 posts I make, I do still find myself logging in once or twice a week like some poor addict. It’s hard to go cold turkey when you’ve spent practically every day for the last 7 years playing. So it was that I found myself staring at the dungeon maker tool that came out with Age of Discovery. I had yet to explore my way through any dungeons at all, and a friend suggested that I take a peek at theirs, so I did. Here are some very basic opinions about the new tool, starting with the bad points. Keep in mind these are personal to me and my experiences, and you may not have these issues.

  • If you crash and are in a dungeon alone, you get kicked out and have to start over, without any rewards, no matter how far into the dungeon you were.
  • There’s no indication at all whether a dungeon is made for solo play or group play unless the publisher mentions it in the title
  • Some classes are significantly ‘better’ than other classes if you choose to solo. I was unable to complete this group dungeon as a level 50 guardian, but I did manage to solo it as a level 50 healer (remember, you do these in a pre-created character template, not your own character for now)
  • If you’re a defiler there’s a very annoying bug with your crystallized essence spell. Your inventory will be absolutely full of the items unless you remove the spell before you use the character template
  • What you actually DO with the dungeon marks you receive at the end is confusing. I would like to see vendors set up some place for everything you can purchase instead of the confusing maze of station cash sections. I saw gear you can purchase but it’s in no order at all and very annoying to search for in the station marketplace. You can also purchase dungeon bits, this was a little less difficult to figure out.
  • Pathing and pulling. Unless you’re in a group and are able to handle large encounters, or you are VERY careful about pulling, you’ll probably always end up with entire room pulls. The pathing and agro radius of mobs in dungeons is very poorly done.

Those were my major issues. Had I done the dungeon with a group I may have felt a little different, but I feel that there should be a way for dungeon creators to ‘rank’ them as either solo play or group play. As an adventurer you should assume all dungeons are made for groups unless it is specified in the title by the creator. The mobs are not technically meant to be solo friendly. I suppose this makes sense, as dungeons have been group content in the past, but AoD needs to add solo content as well as group content. Now for the good points.

  • Creativity. This specific dungeon I chose to do was great, they had a large selection of player-written books filled with their own stories scattered throughout. I took the time to read them all, and it was just amazing to see the amount of thought put into a creation like this. The dungeon maker decides what mobs will say, and can develop a theme accordingly. I loved it. Of course anyone who reads this site will already know that I’ve been a long time advocate of user generated content.
  • Fun. It was a lot of fun because I had no idea what I was going to be up against. In one section of this specific dungeon the encounter I reached consisted of enchanters who mesmerized and stunned me. I had been making my way along easily enough but this encounter was not friendly for a priest template at all. I died after defeating a few of them. I love not knowing what is going to happen next.
  • I think the idea behind the dungeon marks is a great idea. I love that you can not only purchase gear with them, but purchase other bits for your own dungeons.
  • Promoting group play. I think if you’re playing with a steady group of friends player made dungeons are fantastic. It’s an evening of doing something new, in a zone none of you have been to before. It’s a new dungeon every day, which is nice because you (the developer) help stave off the “we’ve been there before” feeling that players get after they’ve run the same dungeon a million times.

Overall I feel that the player made dungeons are an amazing concept but still have a lot of glitches and bugs that need to be worked out. A lot of how you may ‘feel’ about them also depends on the creator, I saw a lot of dungeons simply titled “solo token grind” which doesn’t leave me feeling that they’ve invested any creativity into them at all. BUT. You do always have the choice to simply not go there.

I’d love to see a LFG tool that also involved the player-made dungeons (to my knowledge EQ2 doesn’t employ a feature like this yet). It would pick a random dungeon, and since you’re using a template it doesn’t matter who gets put together for a group. I think it would be a great way to promote the dungeons randomly without players selecting one, and a fantastic way to promote a grouping feature since it technically does not matter what anyone has for gear or what they play as a class. They can simply select one of the templates.

Have you been using the dungeon maker at all? What are your thoughts about it? What would you like to see changed/added/fixed in the future? Let me know in comments! As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Taking Care of my Bruises – Wurm Online (Day 1) #WurmOnline

Ouch! That hurt! Ouch! That Hurt!

That was my introduction to Wurm Online, once I had completed the tutorial. I’ve been meaning to play Wurm for a really long time but hadn’t actually gotten around to it until.. well, tonight. I’m a huge fan of games where I don’t have to spend all of my time attacking things and being violent. I enjoy creating items to use, exploration, and puzzles. I love taking in views, doing quests and everything else. That’s not to say I don’t also enjoy a good hack and slash filled evening, but I just don’t like how ALL of my time is dedicated towards that while playing. That’s why games like A Tale in the Desert and Wurm Online really appeal to me. Sure, they’ll never be your AAA title, but they’ll always have a niche market.

Once I had learned about different types of terrain, collected some peat, dug in a cave, hacked down a tree and collected logs in order to make a mallet (failed the creation twice, the game took pity on me and gave me the materials for my third attempt) I was plopped down in the middle of a village with a backpack of goods and sent on my way. To do what exactly? I’ve got no idea, I haven’t decided that far ahead yet. I decided to explore and found myself falling down mountain sides before too long. That’s where I got the bruises pictured above from.

Then I spotted an “Aged Fat Clipwalking” in the distance. I believe that’s a type of horse. I armed myself with an iron sword and – completely failed at attacking it. You would think that the first thing I’d want to do in my non-violent game would be to plant a tree or see about fishing for food, but nope, my little avatar tried to hack and slash her way into a meal. I tried to kill some wolves that I saw first, but they were all already dead and I was unable to do anything with their corpses. So I decided to rest up against a tree, mend my poor wounds, and leave the horse for another time.

I’m excited about exploring, and perhaps even setting up a little place of my own in the future. I know a few friends of mine who are playing and hopefully I can join up with them eventually. If I can find my way to them, we’ll just have to see. More posts coming about my attempts at building things when I am not leaning against a tree half dead (hence the cloudy red vision posted above).

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!