It’s after midnight and I’m falling asleep at my desk but before I got to bed I just had to post about this fantastic night. I’ll go over it in more detail tomorrow. Tonight, Nostalgia set foot into a group crafting instance. We truely are hardcore crafters - but we are so much more. I had an absolutely amazing time. I would suggest going into these crafting instances with AT LEAST three people, and if you can, one from each of the crafting archtypes. That means an outfitter, a scholar, and a whatever the final one is that I can’t remember. You’ll find things much easier this way.

I walked away with aa experience, a Far Seas token (I just need the faction now to purchase two new craft books) and a chromatic essence for countering one of the pop ups correctly. The chest at the end also dropped a nice piece of crafter gear - but it had + fletching on it, so it went to Arysh, my woodworker (who was not in the zone, too bad it’s not smart loot). 

Anyhow, before I get some sleep. It was great. I couldn’t have met up with a more wonderful bunch of people to play EQ2 with. Tipa and Kasul, thank you both!

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

I don’t know how long this has been out, I haven’t seen it before but then again I miss a lot living under my rock here in Ottawa.  Watching this was just the funniest thing ever today. Thank you Kasul for sharing.

It felt a lot like Christmas last night when I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of TSO. Two copies, one for each of my accounts. The 2nd account I have doesn’t have many characters who can take advantage of TSO aside from the crafting bits and the mount, but maybe some day. 

As you can see by the picture I also got myself two little pewter dire bears, perfect for throwing at people as Ogrebears pointed out, or I can use them as the new tokens in my monopoly game, they’re the perfect size. 

I always wondered why Sony didn’t just get rid of the whole ‘preorder’ or ‘digital download pre order’ business (and rewards) and put out a Collectors Edition instead. I don’t think I’d buy it (it would depend on what it included) and maybe the company figures not many others would buy it either so it wouldn’t be worth the cost. 

I would have gone with a digital download this year as I have in previous years, if it were not for the bear mount that can be claimed by all characters. It means I miss out on a house item but thankfully that item can also be claimed by multiple characters, so I’m sure I’ll be getting one or two placed in my homes. 

Was it worth the wait? You betcha. Of course I got to vent my frustrations out all over this blog and that really helps, thanks for putting up with it! The only concern I have is that the mounts don’t scale down in size with the character sizes (yet) so my poor girls look like they’re hanging onto this giant mount for dear life, afraid that they’re going to get flung off of it any moment. 

There were a few things I wanted to do first before diving right into the content. Of course I went and opened the booster pack that came with the expansion (nothing there, my luck holds true) and claimed the items that I could. That includes the Ethernaught painting. I haven’t redeemed it yet because I’m not sure who to give it to, but it’s waiting. I’m still contemplating building that ‘free’ LoN house into a museum of sorts. Having heritage quests on display for each one, as well as the (now huge) collection of LoN paintings I have. My reasoning for this is also stemmed from the fact that apparently these ‘free’ LoN homes have no vault slots so you can’t actually use them to the potential that you could with a ‘regular’ home. 

Once I had claimed everything I had worth claiming it was time to head to the docks and wait for the ship to arrive. The lag was only slightly better tonight, we had 4 Moors zones up with 50-80 people in each one. Silly me didn’t bother to turn down my graphic settings for the adventure, so once I had zoned a few times and evac’d through etc, I was starting to feel like I was running through tar. 

Kasul, Shadowgeist, and I met up and waited for Albrta and Lanerian and together we did the cannon access quest, where I had a lot of fun being shot through the air, even though it took me a minute or two to figure out where the npc was that I needed to talk to. I wasn’t there to look at any of the pretties or give a glance at the other quests, but that will be on the agenda for later today (or this weekend, or when ever I have a spare few minutes to get to it!). Last night was for crafting only. The introductory quests were well written, and they introduce you to the three factions in the Moors. Each of these factions also have a craft book associated with them and very specific sets of furniture that can be made by any class. These furniture pieces look amazing. Especially the Grobb set. I’m looking forward to seeing what people can create using those ’stone’ looking pieces. I’ve already got some plans for waterfalls and my necromancer is looking forward to a house that doesn’t look quite as bright and cheerful as the ‘goodies’ homes that I have designed. 

Of course to get any of these books you need to work on faction first and I don’t have the faintest idea of how long this faction will take. I know there is both a crafter and an adventurer method of obtaining it and I’m assuming that the adventurer method will actually be quicker for me. We’ll see how it goes!

I haven’t set foot into any of the TSO instances yet, but I’ve heard people LFG for them and spamming the channels with their new ‘uber’ loot drops. Hopefully, all this excitement will last once three or four months has passed. For now? I’m liking what I see.

For the past few days I have been working on the fabled harvesters cloak while I eagerly await my copy of TSO. It got to the point yesterday that I was so close to finishing it, I decided after doing a few TSO quests (more about that later) that I would finish the new cloak first, and get back to the content later. 

This quest was by far the most difficult crafting related quest that I have ever done. Of course it made the reward all the sweeter, but I think it will be quite some time before I decide to dust off an alt and finish the cloak for them. Thankfully it’s not essential. 

It took me approximately three hours to finish my harvesting in Rivervale yesterday. The dens were exceptionally rare, and if it were not for that Gnomish Divining Rod and the ability to track them - as well as logging in right after the server had been taken down for an hour, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have even finished when I did. 

Whoever designed this cloak had a FANTASTIC sense of humor, and you can tell they are a large part of the crafting community for one specific reason. 

There is a player joke that has been around since the game released. Crafters far and wide complaining that they just about harvested a badger. From behind these little pudgy creatures look like ore nodes. This is especially apparent in the smaller zones like Antonica, and a few of the 1-9 zones. On the craft channels it was (is?) quite common especially on Antonia Bayle, to hear people moaning over the lack of ore nodes and the abundance of badger bottoms.

I quickly put my new cloak on, and transformed into the small rock pictured above. The illusion is great in itself, you roll along the ground and there are some faint sparkles that tumble off of youl. While doing the quest I managed to gather a LOT of rares. It figures that the one time I really want commons and not rares I end up getting 15+ rares in one harvesting session. The guild bank is happy at least. 

I decided to zone home from Mara, after the long (long, LONG) day of harvesting when suddenly - it was ME with the badger bottom!

That’s right, randomly (not every zone) you will turn into a badger when you’re sporting this illusion. Not only a badger, but you will turn into a 35% bigger badger then normal. What a fantastic quest reward. It’s may not be considered ‘essential’ for players out there but if you’re a hard core crafter (such things DO exist!) then you WILL want to get this cloak. The only down side I saw to the quest item itself is that you can’t mount it on your wall like other fancy cloaks. That would be a great option. I’m not sure how often I’ll actually *wear* this cloak with the surplus of other cloaks I have. It boosts harvesting skills, rather then crafting skills. 

Aside from working on the harvesting cloak for the past two days, like I mentioned earlier my copy of TSO finally arrived. Two copies in fact. So my main account and alt account are now sporting dire bear mounts. I’ll talk about that more later. One thing I wanted to get done right away is that the crafting instances require you to have worked up a little bit of faction with the new Far Seas Trading Division. This is different then the old Far Seas faction that we all have. There is a chain of 6 quests in the Moors that starts with a happy little crafter on the landing platform. The quests reward a LOT of coin and the aa was pretty nice as well. It gives you a tour of the Moors. You *may* want to look up this quest on EQ2traders first or on the EQ2Wikia once you’ve gotten it because it requires some supplies and if you carry them with you you’ll be much better off. Or at least take along a form of evac (or be a druid). 

Eyenstein, Albrta, Shadowgeist, Kasul and I all headed off to work on this quest together. Once we completed it Kasul and I told the group we would be unable to do the crafting instances quite yet. It was only fair, Tipa had been waiting to do a Nostalgia run and my late polar bears had prevented any of us from going yet. So tonight after EQ1 Nostalgia, EQ2 Nostalgia will attempt their first group crafting instance. 

Maybe by then the issue with the invisible wood working machines will be solved..

37,813 words once my writing session today ended. 

Updated my profile and I’m looking forward to the home stretch. Even know how it’s going to end! Should have a couple more write ups on my personal site next week, depends on how busy things get. Thank you for all of the motivation!

Even though there was no in game notice this morning, servers came down promptly at 10am EST for their daily hour of downtime. It was announced on the forums at least, which is a fairly safe place to check if you’re not seeing messages in game. Perhaps this will address the vendor bug that’s allowing people to sell things to a particular TSO merchant for large amounts of coin. The /motd in game says that those who are ‘taking advantage’ of this will find their coin removed by the end of it all, but that at this moment there is no ETA on when that may be (or how it will be done for that matter). 

In the mean time I’ve been working diligently away at my harvesting cloak. It’s a good thing I actually enjoy harvesting, because this is not a quest for the faint of heart. I’m up to harvesting T5 now, and it sends me to Rivervale and Ferrott to harvest 20 of each sub-type of node. (20 wyvern meat, 20 bear meat, from each zone for example). Remember how you complained in the past that dens didn’t drop anything but meat? Well now you’ll want them to. 

I’ve also come up to a slight bottleneck in this quest. Rivervale is a small zone when compared to the other ones that this quest sends you out into. There are 10+ people on Najena also at this part of the quest, and in true greedy harvester fashion they ignore any node that’s not one that they need. Since I don’t mind harvesting and since T5 requires rares for the crafter epic, I follow up behind them and harvest everything I see. I’ve gotten a good chunk of rares and supplies for my crafters. It does mean that my progress on the quest is quite a bit slower, I still require a lot of supplies from Rivervale. I’m not in a rush though. 

I typically don’t have a great deal of patience in game. It’s a fault that I admit to every so often. This quest is quite relaxing, and I’m not so gung-ho about completing it as I am just collecting harvests from every tier. With the new guild hall hirelings I find it a rare sight to see any harvesters out there. The market is flooded with rares that no one uses and aside from the elusive T6 harvests (sinking sands and PoF which are difficult zones to harvest in to begin with) they sell for 10-30g and no more. Najena is not a server for lower level characters. I miss that about Antonia Bayle, which caters to a lot of lower level characters due to their role play community (which is a fantastic one might I add). Since I have both of my accounts active, and the ability to create new characters on the second account still I may make one on AB just to relax and kick back on. I do have a level 30 guild over there after all that Calreth has been keeping warm for me. 

Harvesting gives me lots of time to think about what direction I’d like to go in the game. Taking a look at my site one year ago this month I was just getting into RoK raiding (the expansion released earlier last year) and having ups and downs with it as my guild attempted Thugga for the first time. I’ve been debating whether or not I want to get back into raiding full time. Despite having been on Najena for quite a few months now I’ve kept mostly to myself / Nostalgia and a few close friends, and I don’t have the connections I had on Antonia Bayle as far as raiding guilds go. There is also a larger diversity of raid guilds on Najena because it has a heavy aussie / EU population. The only issue with returning to raiding would be the time I would have to devote to it. While I would be able to make the time for it, I start to feel restricted and constrained having to adjust my life around a video game. I like to be able to come and go as I please, and if I’m simply not in the mood for something, I don’t log in. Partaking in a raid guild means others rely on me, and I’d feel obligated to put forth my best effort in whichever encounter we had planned for the evening. I don’t like to do things part way, and this is one of the biggest reasons I’ve avoided the raiding scene for the last year. Before RoK I raided fairly heavily, and I had a lot of fun with it. Once my guild dissolved though I had trouble finding a new ‘home’ and things just went down hill from there. 

I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes! I hope everyone else is enjoying their time in Norrath. Hopefully those polar bears will have my copy of TSO today, but I’m not holding my breath. Since Shadowgeist had raids in the new content lats night he caved and bought the digital download. Every day I’m not playing in the new expansion I tell myself I’m extending the longevity of ‘fun’ by that much. So far it’s worked.

Another evening without TSO means 35,788 words on NaNoWriMo, and a bit of art work too. Can be found in full view here. Contemplating starting up a second blog for the art bits, but I hate having multiple places to write in, I’d rather be able to mush all my interests together. I know not everyone likes that though. I tried to siphon out the non-gaming bits, but it doesn’t work for long.

Apparently those polar bears got stuck in snow, or were stopped at the boarder with their bags of video games because as of 7:30pm on the 19th there is no date or time given on when the TSO expansion (retail) may actually be for sale. EBGames claims they MAY get it by Friday, Best Buy has no idea what the game even is, and Furture Shop has none ordered at all.

I wouldn’t mind getting the digital download if it wasn’t for the bear mount with 52% (that’s 62% with aa) run speed. Why did they have to add a USEFUL /claim item to the retail box this year. Why did they have to be DIFFERENT rewards at all. 

Bitter? Sure, a little bit. I have articles about the new expansion due on the 8th with no expansion in sight and no one seems to understand what’s going on. EBGames even told me yesterday after I talked to them that they would have it today. Today they’re claiming they have no idea and I should check in Friday. Sighs. I do get to enjoy reading everyone else’ post on it though, and watching them explore the new zones and the new goodies while I work on my harvesting quest. 

Why does this have to be so complicated. LoTR’s expansion is full on the shelves and so is WoTLK. Maybe this is just a sign. 

Sorry for the rant, it’s rare that I do it but this is one of those times.

 When I first interviewed Sony Dev’s for Beckett MOG about TSO I specifically asked if there would be any incentives to get players out into the older zones. I always disliked how as soon as a new expansion was released, there was 0 reason to continue on through the old content. Their answer sort of confused me, and confused me even more when I actually took a look around TSO and the content offered. 

Quite a few of the dungeons are located in old world zones. This includes Lavastorm, and Everfrost as well as Commonlands. There’s also one huge quest line and while it’s not directly related to TSO it was implemented with GU50 on the same day. 

Of course I’m talking about the fabled cloak for harvesters. I’ve been working on this quest chain (I still don’t have TSO) off and on yesterday and today and I’m actually finding it quite challenging for a few reasons.

Number one, each tier the quest wants you to harvest more and more items and amounts of said items. You start off in T1 harvesting 5 of each item and work your way up stage by stage. I’m on T4 now (Zek and Enchanted lands) and it wants 15 of each item, in each zone. That’s a lot of harvests. 

One life saver while I have been doing this quest has been the gnomish divining rod. This is a tinker made item and it allows you to track nodes, as well as anything else that lays on the ground, shinies and book pages. If you leave the track window open (like regular track) and run around it will show the nodes in the order of proximity to you. So you can leave it up and run around and know if you are at least close to any of the nodes you need. I also used this item yesterday when I was hunting down my carpenter pages. Some liked to hide off to the side and it was getting a little frustrating. 

Aside from the sheer number of harvests you’re required to obtain there is the difficulty in the type of harvests. Don’t have your fishing up quite yet? Well you’ll want to because these quests all require amounts of harvested fish from specific zones. Remember all the times you complained about dens giving out too much meat and not enough pelts? Well now you’ll want those meats and NOT the pelts. Of course they’re no where to be seen. 

It’s nice to see a some what complicated crafter quest. Though I can see how low level adventurers may not be able to complete it since most harvesting areas are populated by aggressive mobs. That could add to the thrill though, having to dodge and duck away from the mean things trying to eat you. Me, I’m thankful that Silhouette is 80/80 already while I attempt this. 

The quest sends you into every tier, and pretty much every old world zone. Last tier I had to harvest from both Nektulos Forest and Thundering Stepps. It’s a lot of fun meandering your way through the forgotten zones and visiting things you haven’t seen in quite some time. Of course there’s still a lot more to go. This quest takes a lot of time and I’m looking forward to that, keeps me out of trouble while I wait for those polar bears to show up. 

The merchant bug from yesterday / this morning has been fixed (thankfully) so people shouldn’t be selling body drops for 3p a shot any more while being gouged on their repair bills. Apparently I was wrong. Checking the MoTD shows that the bug is still in place but is being worked on. I expect that the lag will still be there tonight when the servers fill up but that’s a population thing and I’m glad to see it. I wish there had of been a little more lowbie content to draw some new players into the game, but I can’t be picky. A few people that I know have returned for the expansion, here’s hoping they stick it out this time around.

If you read the official forums at all, you start to wonder whether anyone out there really enjoys the game they’re paying to play or if they just enjoy ranting in a public place. Wading through the forums does bring to the attention that although the servers were some what stable last night (as in, they didn’t completely crash despite the issues they had) for TSO’s launch, it’s not without it’s bugs. 

There’s one particularly large bug that in the past would have warranted the servers coming down. Such is not the case this time around which means more and more people are taking advantage of it. You may notice in game that merchants are buying your trash items off of you for a LOT less then they used to. On the flip side, some items that used to be worth 10g or so are now worth 3p depending on the merchant you use. Menders are charging anywhere from a few gold to repair your gear to upwards of 8p. 

Then of course there is the issues with lag, crashing, and instances being unavailable. There are all the characters who now live in “HOUSING UNKNOWN” when you’re trying to buy from them on the broker. 

There’s an uproar over how many void shards you need to get gear, and the grind associated with it, as well as the fact that this expansion SOE decided to not add the +90 days that every other expansion came with. Not a game breaking deal but it was something customers had grown accustomed to for the last four years and they’re a little bewildered at why it changed now. 

Channels are no better. People complaining about everything from why their dire bear looks like a warg with a different head, to out right demanding their money back and how as a two boxer they’ve been left in the cold since everything is too hard. 

Lets not forget that the character transfer service has been down for months now, and they’re transfering by hand one request at a time. The number of posts about this issue is astonishing, especially since people are still willing to pay $50 for a service that doesn’t work. 

Best bet? Avoid the forums until things calm down, and in my case, selective reading. Hopefully things get fixed. The game was pretty much unplayable for a large potion of my friends last night, and half of them decided to log early for the night and just wait the rush out. 

I have my fingers crossed that tonight is better then last night, going to be dragging Nostalgians into the craft instances (as long as the polar bears show up with my copy of TSO).

Edit: Forgot to add two more to the list. If you find you can not chat in game - right click your chat window, and set your window settings to frame: none. This will fix it. Also, if you find you’re unable to partake in your world wide class channels that is because they’ve renamed some channels and they are server only. You’ll have to check the forums and see if there’s been a new channel assigned. For example guk.coercer no longer works, it’s their server specific channel.