Tag: EQ

Looking Back (Forward?) At Magelo

I’m a big fan of supporting the small guy. Local business? You bet. Farmers markets instead of superstores? I’m there. When it comes to video games there are LOTS of player run web sites and services offered and I love each and every one of them. One of the oldest from my own personal experiences has been Magelo. For those who are not familiar, Magelo was THE service to use when you were playing Eq1 and wanted to link your characters achievements. It came before the gaming companies started to offer profiles, and it was incredibly fun. You could (and still can) design your own themes, as well as link music to your profile.

When I was playing EQ1, I subscribed to their premium service to keep my characters updated on a regular basis. I think that it’s incredibly important to support ‘the small guy’ like this especially if you enjoy their service. Low and behold, after having not been to their site in a number of years I received a newsletter from them talking about all of the new features that they’ve added. A service now 9 years in the making.

More than 9 years of service to the Everquest community… For sure, it has been quite a long road getting to where we are and we couldn?t have made it without your support. Thank you!
We are pleased to announce that we recently expanded our Premium offer with a new Inventory tool, Media hosting service and the introduction of new subscription plans.

New Inventory Tool

The Inventory tool is a new feature that helps you locate items from all your characters bags and bank. It summarizes the inventory of all your characters without the hassle of logging into the game or requiring you to open several different profile pages.
Browse through all the bags and bank space for every character on each server and quickly locate specific items by keywords with the search tool.

You can also find the storage location and amount carried on each character for every item and view plat and various alternate currencies for every character.

New Media Manager
Store up to 50 mb of images and music to customize easily your Magelo profiles, avatars and signatures! No need any more to go looking for image and music hosts elsewhere. You get now all the media storage space you’ll ever need to make your character identity unique!

New Premium subscription plans and 10-day free trial
The Premium subscription has just become more flexible. In addition to the 1 year plan, the option to subscribe for 3 or 6-month period is now available.

Adding game slots has also been made much simpler! Whenever you purchase 5 extra game slots for your account, the cost will be based on the remaining active subscription period.

By becoming a Premium member you will enjoy the best of Magelo and will contribute to maintain the many features you love and the new ones we will develop. Check out the Premium offer and give it a try now with the new 10-day free trial! Show your support to Magelo by getting Premium!
For each character you add on Magelo, you will get an avatar and a signature in 2 different sizes:

  • The regular Signature we currently use remains the best way to highlight any character you want.
  • The new Mini-sig, half as tall as the regular sig, is really convenient to display your many alternate characters in a single post without taking up too much space.
  • The new Avatar helps others recognize your posts anywhere!

    • The avatar and signatures will give others a quick preview of your characters, a link to your profiles and you can fully customize them with all the options available. Go to My characters and have fun!
    Find the map of all zones from the game with the emplacement of vendors. You can zoom-in and out the map to see a specific location more closely. We use also the same coordinate system than in the game! Take a look at the Plane of Knowledge for example.

    All NPC pages will also feature a new map with the NPC locations highlighted. Check a Broodlands basilisk for example! Don?t forget to run Magelo Sync while playing – it stays the only way to define accurately the location of the NPCs.

    Finally you can visit the new Hot zones page available from the Tools section to view where you can quickly level up. The zones are sorted by level to let you decide easily where to go at any level range.

    30 new background images have been added to our gallery, showing various interesting sights around Norrath. We also add 3 new backgrounds and a new decorator on the Premium theme!

    With this latest addition, more than 100 background images are available to give you plenty of choice to decorate your profiles and signatures! So let’s have a look and find the one that fit the best your character!

    Go to My characters now and customize your profiles, signatures, and mini-sigs!

    Of course, now I’m going to have to subscribe for another month and see what all of the new changes are.. I do still play EQ, even if I don’t get to play nearly as often as I’d like. I’m incredibly happy to see services like these still being offered to players. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

    SOE Fan Faire Updates – 2010

    Since I’m not actually at Fan Faire this year (pout) I’ve been watching EQ2 wire for their updates.

    They released some of the concept art of “EQ Next” – be sure to take a peek.

    Here are some key points from the Community Address that happened last night:

    EverQuest: House of Thule releases on October 14th. It adds a plethora of new dungeons and content, as well as the addition of player housing.

    EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious releases February 8th and, amongst other things, will introduce flying mounts in most zones. It is unclear which zones are being configured to allow this. Say what you will about Brenlo, but this was an initiative he pushed for. Glad to see it’s coming.

    EQ2 Extended — Beta launches August 17th. New optional free adventure service. Live subscription remains unchanged. Yadda yadda.

    FreeRealms coming to Mac and PS3 in ~2 months. Currently 13 million players (unknown how many are paying)

    Clone Wars Adventures — shown at E3, targeted at FreeRealms crowd. Based closely on the Cartoon Network series and will have heavy cross-promotion.

    Magic the Gathering strategy game will be something quite different. It’s not a TCG.

    DC Universe Online – Releases November 2nd. PC and PS3, Action-based physics. Newsworthy bit: Pre-ordering will be huge and allow you to play as Batman, as well as get a basketful of free items. Shown the astonishingly good trailer from last week featuring Lex Luthor.

    Be sure to take a peek at the rest of the SOE Fan Faire info they have posted, I’ll be taking bits and pieces and mentioning them here for readers to get the information out. Am I excited? Eh. I am VERY excited about EQ player housing. EQ2 flying mounts? Not so much. Also, after browsing through the schedule for Fan Faire, I was sad to see there are 0 panels on Vanguard. There’s a 2 hour live quest, but that’s it. Figures.

    Shadowrest – What is it good for (Video)

    If you played EQ in 2004 you may remember this zone, it’s where 7 day old corpses went once they expired from the world of Norrath until their owners claimed them. Now in 2009 (almost 2010!) there’s no real use for the zone, since there is a corpse summoner in the guild lobby (for a small fee of course) as well as veteran rewards that will call your corpse, and of course the ever handy necromancer who can summon (with a reagent). I’m sure there are other methods too that I just haven’t given thought to tonight.

    My friend Ninga wanted me to see how he personally made use of Shadowrest when it first became available, and this video is that tour. Enjoy!

    I still Enjoy going Back – Do You?

    I wanted a way to relax last night, in preparation for a huge winter storm that’s hitting us today and so I decided to play EQ for a while. You know that feeling you get, where you’re restless with the characters you have and want to play someone new? Well that’s what I had. I decided to start over with a new beastlord, and was working my way through the tutorial. The early access to Underfoot began yesterday, and channels were active with everyone LFG and searching for people to gather with. It was nice to see.

    I started thinking about all those posts people make about how you can never go back to your first MMO and capture the same feeling you had the first time around. I think that’s incorrect. I think it really depends on the person, and their play style.

    I think perhaps we as writers and bloggers are more jaded then your average player who is just gaming and not telling the world about it. I know a good number of people who don’t write what so ever, game hop moderately, and still return to their first love (in this case, a game) without issue, and happily continue playing it, pondering all the while why they left to begin with. I love to see this.

    With so much competition out there between video games, we expect more and more from what we’re playing. Understandable I suppose, but I like to think that I still can just simply enjoy a game for it’s very basic offerings. I don’t need to pick a game apart and find each of its flaws before deciding if I enjoy it or not.

    Anyhow, the little beastlord made her way through the tutorial without too much issue. It wasn’t that long ago that I was doing them, so it was still fresh in my mind. I also had the pleasure of running through Plane of Mischief looking for Brisbane earlier in the evening with two friends of mine. He wasn’t up, nor was Innoruuk (disappointing!) and so we decided to go check in on Grieg in Griegs End. He wasn’t up either, sadly. I did take a LOT of video of the adventures though, which I’ll put together later on today and post. Such great memories of that zone.

    I play on the Drinal server, so if you happen to be making your way to EQ for any reason be sure to say hello! I did also check out Brell’s Rest in Underfoot, but I was starting to fall asleep, so I called it an early night.

    Happy gaming no matter where you find yourself! I’ll see you in Norrath.

    Grummus – Plane of Disease

    I’ve obviously been having a lot of fun since I installed Game cam, creating numerous videos (some good, some bad) over the past few weeks. I absolutely love doing this, and I hope to have more coming in the future. One little ‘feature’ Kanad mentioned, was that I should try to film some of the old world fights in EverQuest, and post them here to my web site. I thought that was a fantastic idea, especially since I’ve already been taking screen shots for Underfoot, the 16th EverQuest expansion that is slated to go live (early access) on the 8th of December, with the full release coming the 15th.

    Our first adventure was back to the Plane of Disease, to defeat Grummus. Back in the day Grummus was used in a quest for access to the Elemental Planes, he was needed for your Crypt of Decay flag. Today most of these flags are obsolete but you can still go back (as we did) and kill him for Nostalgia sake. Our ‘raid’ consisted of myself (minxes, 82 necromancer), Ninga (our tank, 84 monk), and Kanad (our slower / healer, 66 shaman) as well as two healer mercs, Journeyman tier II (just in case the AOE caused us issues).

    If you take a look at the bestiary for Grummus, you can get a sense of just how difficult he was at one point in time. Sure these days we hear about people soloing him but it was a real not all that long ago. The AOE used to really hurt, and people used to actually need more then one group to clear him.

    It was great to be able to defeat him again, and what do you know, my little necromancer actually needed the flag. We’ll be working our way through more old school planar progression as the days go on (and as we can find the mobs up, they’re still farmed pretty heavily) and I’ll be taking more videos of it all to post. Hope everyone enjoys this little walk down memory lane!