EQ2 – A Pixel Nomad

[EQII] Where do you Start? The Beginning.

Returning to a game you’ve been away from for some time is never an easy feat. You have to make some tough decisions, do you re-visit your old characters that you love but you have no idea how to play / where to go, or do you start fresh so that you can try to re-learn the game (and your class). I opted for a combination of the two.

I started off re-visiting my higher level characters. Right now I have a handful of level 120 characters, and an unused boost for 130. The rest all sit at level 100, except for a brand new Ratonga Coercer, who was created so that I could get a feel for things again. Most of my characters sit on the Antonia Bayle server, but that has grown quiet over the years, and so this time around I created on the more populated Maj’Dul. There were some events taking place and chat was lively as people were trying to figure out timers and zones to head to. I wasn’t quite ready for that, yet. Soon though.

I’m not really a fan of the ‘starting over’ method, but you’re not given a lot of choices. Games (IMO) do a very bad job of welcoming back the average returning player. In most cases you log in and you’re given zero indication as to what you were working on 10 years ago, and you have no idea where to go to progress – or if you even want to progress. A lot of update notes that you’ve never seen have probably crossed the paths of most players, and you’ll be expected to stumble your way along until eventually, finally, if you stick with it – you’ll catch up.

So where does that leave me? A level 2 coercer, who at least knows where to go and what to do – and a few level 120 characters who have no idea what is going on. In the end, I settled for some crafting.

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

[EQII] Guess Who is Joining the EverQuest II Content Creator Program

It was because of this post over at Inventory Full that I even learned about the content creator program to begin with. Now, I haven’t actively played EQII since 2021 but I do have quite a long history with the game.

Met my husband in game (we’ve been together for 15 years, married for 9, and have 2 children)
Went to San Diego to interview the team for Beckett MOG (back when magazines were a thing) some of those folks are still around!
I have more than 500 blog posts about that single game, more than any other game I’ve ever written about – plus various videos kicking around YouTube.

One of the options when you sign up for the program is that you can mark yourself as a returning player, so that’s what I did. They ask you about your current content creation (which I admitted did not currently involve EverQuestII, but did involve other MMORPG and has been done on a fairly steady basis for a large number of years) and all of the basic questions that you would expect. It did take some time to hear back, the program is just rolling out and things are still getting set up.

One question my husband asked me, was WHY I would sign up. Why did this interest me. Aside from my long history with the game, I’ve been looking for a little extra motivation & inspiration when it comes to content creation. I oftentimes talk about how easy it is to lose yourself in parenthood and just be “so and so’s wife, so and so’s mom” without an identity. I’ve always loved sharing games I’m passionate about, and I’ve kept this blog up through all of the trials and tribulations, writing about those games. I wanted a little more motivation to go beyond the blog. I think this will help.

There you have it, the latest person to join the EQII content creator program. I hope to post some great things over time. If you’re looking for me over on socials, here’s my carrd.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Keeping up With Gaming

In EverQuest 2 things have come to a bit of a standstill. I don’t have the time to LFG to do dungeons, and I’m pretty bored of running the same advanced solo dungeons every day. I log in to craft, get my loyalty tokens, and putter around, but I haven’t been keeping up with my epic 2.0 or progression in any real meaningful way. Since I have so many characters just doing the little bit of daily stuff I do is enough to keep me ‘busy’ but I’m also wondering if it wasn’t a mistake to get a year long subscription. Of course I had intended to play EverQuest with that, not EQ2, so maybe when I have a bit more time I’ll go back to my original plan.

In WoW things are moving along (even if it is at a snail’s pace). I’m able to queue for a few raids a week, I do some world quests, my characters move up the chain of progression. I’m really excited about the new pet battle dungeon coming to the game soon(tm) and I can’t wait to give it a try. I wish pet battles could be done independently of logging into the game (ie: mobile) but things are not so bad. My subscription for WoW lasts until July, so I have a few more months of that left and I’ll probably renew. It’s a good game even with my limited time.

EVE Online. I subscribed with a PLEX and then played once or twice. Truth of the matter is as much as I adore this game (and I do) I really want to play it with TWO accounts and that’s just not viable for me at this time. I probably won’t renew until I can afford to activate both my accounts, so maybe once my EQ2 subscription runs out. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game, I love playing, but I really like both accounts active so I can make full use of things.

Wurm Online / Unlimited. I currently have two active accounts in Wurm Online, Stargrace, and Blesse (a Vynora priest). I’ve got three active deeds (two on Xanadu and one on Independence) and while I haven’t been doing much to them aside from keeping up with the fields and animals, I still enjoy logging in every day. Wurm is one of those games that just really relaxes me. Plus I can leave it up and running while I putter around with my little one in real life. I also logged into Wurm Unlimited to check on my deed there. One had fallen (I re-deeded the place, my buildings and walls were all still standing) over on Sklotopolis, and over on Age of Urath – well, that server is apparently done now. It had a lock symbol by it with no users online. Should have stuck with my first choice! I also noticed a “new” server with the highest population these days, Zaneth. I’m incredibly cautious about new servers because it seems like there’s a huge overturn and you never know if the server will actually stick around but as long as I don’t go off and donate right away (like I have in the past) then I suppose there’s no real harm in checking things out.

In the meantime life is pretty busy. I get maybe an hour of gaming a day, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, and by rotating what I play I keep from getting bored. Of course it does seem that as soon as I settle in to do a dungeon or improve some weapons my little guy is waking up and begging for my attention, but hey that’s the joys of parenthood. He’s 4.5 months old right now, and while things haven’t exactly gotten easier yet, they’re constantly changing.

I hope everyone else has been having a great time despite the turmoil that seems to be enclosing around the world. Are you checking out Conan Exiles? What about ESO’s big announcement today? Did you give For Honor a try? Head to PAX South? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Holidays and Games

It’s hard for me to believe that 2016 is almost over. This year has been such a mixture of emotions that I honestly don’t know if I’m happy to be starting 2017 or if I’m sad to be leaving the year behind. Even though I haven’t been posting very frequently here on MmoQuests, I HAVE been getting some gaming in daily – in between doing the whole new Mom thing which eats up about 99.9% of my time. I’m STILL recuperating from my c-section back in September. My hematoma isn’t completely healed, and I still have home nurses coming to pack and bandage the wound. I had hoped this would be over by now but apparently my body had other ideas.

Leo is now 13 weeks old, 8 weeks adjusted (because he was 5 weeks early). He’s thriving, and growing by leaps and bounds – but it’s also a difficult time as he has pretty bad colic and suffers from gas, so he spends a lot of his days crying every time he wants to fart or poop. It makes for a very tired Mommy and Daddy but we hang in there.

This Christmas is the first where I won’t be doing many of my traditions because I’m just too tired and there simply isn’t enough hours in the day. I have no family here, so I don’t have any parties or dinners to go to, but I still have simple traditions I like to keep up. I didn’t get myself (or Leo, too young) an advent calendar, and because money is tight we only bought Leo two presents and we’re going to hold off on anything more. I did send a few gifts as a secret santa exchange with my family, but I didn’t even get around to mailing out Christmas cards this year, and I only received two cards from others where I’d normally have 15+ displayed on my walls. I did put up the Christmas tree, but after a week the lights all burnt out and I haven’t replaced them. Sounds pretty pathetic, but I’m hoping that next year when Leo is older things will slowly get back to what I consider “normal”. I’m quickly learning that parenting is hard, and as much as I love kids I may not actually be that fond of babies. I haven’t had a lot of chances to vent (or places to vent) so.. there you have it. Now, lets get on to gaming!

After attempting to play on the EverQuest progression server I decided that it just required way too much time and attention, so I swapped over to EverQuest 2 and my old characters there. I quickly fell in love as I was reminded of all the joyous occasions I’ve had in game even though it has gone through some significant changes. I purchased the latest expansion, and my little guild of three people have been playing together once again.

Things have changed since Daybreak became a thing. Antonia Bayle is no longer the most populated server, and groups are hard to come by. Since I don’t really have time to do dungeons this doesn’t bother me too much. What I’ve been doing is working on getting my characters to 100, in both adventuring and crafting, doing the Kunark Ascended timeline, and then ascending my characters into their respective classes. I also created two new characters, a troubador named Mousical (ratonga of course), and a necromancer named Quails (also a ratonga). Add that to the 9 characters I already had, and it’s a pretty full house.

I haven’t started the crafting timeline yet, but it rewards a really nice cloak and that’s next on my list of things to do. There have been plenty of in-game events with Frostfell going on, and I may have spent a day or two crafting various housing items so I could decorate the guild hall for Christmas. My guild mates have been fantastic about my need to randomly go AFK, so I spend a lot of time on autofollow as we complete various solo / advanced solo dungeons, or just play around in older raids. We attempted a few of the “new” (a few expansions old now) fabled raids, but those kicked our asses, so they’re on a wait list while we gear up.

Inflation has become a HUGE issue. A krono sells for 300,000 plat, and people are not shy about throwing that sort of money around. I have a grand total of 40,000 plat, and thought that was a large amount. I often see loot being sold on the auction channel for 100-400k which is just insane to me.

Despite all of this I’m having a lot of fun. If you happen to be in game, please don’t hesitate to look me up! You can typically find me as the two characters mentioned above, or Stargrace, or some other rendition of me. Doing a /who all torrent knights will bring up either myself or one of my two guild mates.

I’m also contemplating diving back into EVE Online as it’s something I could play without too much trouble from my laptop, and hanging out in highsec doing mining missions or some such wouldn’t be that difficult if I had to randomly AFK. I spend most of my days with twitch on the television and I’ve had an absolute blast getting to know other streamers and refining what it is I like about some streamers vs. others.

All in all, things are going. It’s not always bad, it’s certainly not always good, but the days keep passing and we all keep trying our best.

Happy holidays, from my little family to yours.

Learning How to Game

These days video games are more involved than ever before, and this has allowed for the creation and popularity of web sites that provide guides and walk throughs, no matter the game in question (chances are, if there’s a video game out there, someone has written some sort of guide for it to help others). If it wasn’t for WoWHead I’m pretty sure I’d be lost on a number of the new World of Warcraft Legion quests. They’re no longer the simple ‘Kill 10 Rats’ quests that I’ve come to know in the past. Instead they require me to figure out puzzles, learn the lore, explore, and numerous other little hints and tricks that I probably wouldn’t be able to figure out all on my own.

You can find guides and step by step help for all sorts of genres, from how to play online casino games, to deeply involved RPG walk-throughs. These can be player-run sites, professional guides, or even news sites. I like to think that there will always be room for these types of sites because no two people learn exactly the same way, using exactly the same method. Some people enjoy watching YouTube “lets play” videos to meander their way around and to learn. Others appreciate a more casual approach, and still others would rather a methodical method of learning how.

When I first created MmoQuests I had a weekly quest walk through posted, typically one of the bigger EverQuest II signature / heritage quests that were in game. Over the years I’ve slowed down talking about them because there are just so many and it was getting hard to narrow down my favourites. Still, I like to think that these guides have come in handy over the years, and the pages still get a number of hits from those looking for a bit of help.

Have you ever thought of starting up a site for guides and walk throughs? Do you use any yourself or do you prefer to keep things as a secret to figure out for yourself? Let me know below in comments and as always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.