Blast from the past: an interview with me from 2006!

While googling for something else entirely, I discovered this TenTonHammer interview with me from back in February 2006.  "Adeste" is the name of the main EverQuest II character I played at the time, primarily a carpenter.  I didn't even remember that this interview existed.

To put this into perspective, in February 2006 I was still working as an IT manager in Australia. EQ2 was about a year and a half old, had launched its first expansion about 6 months prior to the interview, and was looking forward to the second expansion Kingdom of Sky.  I had no idea at this time that I would be hired by SOE to fix the very tradeskill system I was complaining about in this interview; that didn't happen till April 2007. (Coincidentally my interviewer, Tony Jones, also later ended up working for SOE!) Carpentry (and tradeskills in general) back then were in a very sad and neglected state, and I was just a passionate forum poster trying to highlight ways they could be improved.  The dev team didn't have anybody who really understood what the players in this niche wanted, and they were actually starting to debate whether to change tradeskills to require adventuring, like many MMOs do these days, instead of continuing to support the ability for tradeskillers to be independent of adventuring.  And of all the tradeskill classes, carpentry was the least understood because it had absolutely nothing to do with adventuring at all. Housing was basic but also sadly neglected.  But I believed in its potential!

It's fascinating to read now what I wrote back then and see how much of it I actually did fix once I was hired.  Most of the statements I made back then are beliefs I still hold true, and which I spent almost 5 years on the EQ2 team working to support and improve.  The tradeskill system in EQ2 is now unique among MMOs in providing a broad, robust, and adventuring-level-independent playstyle.  The housing system in EQ2 is the best housing system in any MMO (though Rift's new dimension system and EQ1's new housing have done a good job too, albeit both by mirroring EQ2's extremely closely and both of which I was asked for advice on).  Prestige houses, which I'd been championing since 2007, finally came into existence and are extremely popular. Furniture items went from a neglected "here are 30 types of barrels and 20 tables" which none of the designers understood what to do with, to highly desirable rewards that are now both given out by quests and sold for real $ on the marketplace, as well as being a mainstay of carpenters.  I'm very proud of the part I played in transforming tradeskills and housing, and really believe it had a fundamental impact on the continued longevity of the game. And huge gratitude is due as always to Scott Hartsman, who took a chance and hired me to replace Beghn, changing the EQ2 tradeskilling/housing game forever, for better or for worse (the former I hope)!

Anyway, I was tickled pink to find this interview just now, so I'm reposting it below to preserve it for posterity.

[Also: editing the original post to add, as a friend pointed out on Facebook, it's pretty hard core to give an interview about a job that you won't be hired to do for another ~year and a half. I should be a time traveler!]

Crafting with the Carpenters

An Interview with One of EverQuest 2's Premier Carpenters

by: Tony "RadarX" Jones


Ask anyone who knows me if I craft. Go ahead. You'll probably get "Radar? Ha!" or "Radar? Who is that? Oh, that Templar who keeps getting us killed?" I claim to know just enough about crafting to be destructive and hazardous. Crafting in my mind, is taking a rare harvest to the crafter, and waiting very impatiently for my Adept III spell.

Over the course of a few months, I've read post after post about Carpenter issues. Statements like, "Where are the Tier 6 recipes?", and "Why don't we get cooler furniture?", etc... I'll admit I was quick to judge them as complaints, but even recently I've still been in the dark about what was going on. Adeste was gracious and kind enough to enlighten me on what it's like to be a Carpenter, and what a few of their issues are.

Adeste, thanks again for answering a few questions about this. First, tell us a little bit about your MMO experience. What have you played?

I was first introduced to graphical MMO's when I started playing the original EverQuest back in 2001, around the time of the Kunark expansion. Prior to that I'd dabbled a bit in multiplayer text games via local BBS systems, but the graphics of EverQuest brought a whole new dimension to MMO's for me and I played it until EverQuest 2 was released.  I took a brief look at Star Wars Galaxies and some others, but I work full time and don't have time to play more than one MMO at once, so I've remained pretty loyal to the EverQuest genre.  I have City of Villains sitting on my desk waiting to be installed though - at the moment I'm enjoying EverQuest 2 too much to try it out, but if my interest wanes, that will be the next in line.

EQ2's crafting system takes a special type of patience according to most people. What is your motivation to craft?

I get a lot of enjoyment out of other people's enjoyment, if that makes sense. It's something I have noticed since the original EverQuest - although so many people like to say it's "just a computer game", it isn't. The people on the other end of the pixels are real people, and you can really touch their lives with your actions. A week from now, you won't remember who you grouped with; a month from now, you won't remember the item you just looted from that named monster; and a year from now, whatever money you've saved up so far will seem completely trivial, if you remember at all. But years after the fact, you'll still remember a kind turn done for you by a complete stranger and the pleasure that you got from someone doing something nice for you. More than two years after the fact (and over a year since I've even logged into the first EverQuest) I've had a player that I thought was a total stranger, find out the name of one of my EQ1 characters and suddenly start gushing in vivid detail about how I met her young EQ1 druid in PoK one day and gave her some help and some equipment. I have no memory at all of the event, but I was floored what a huge impact it apparently had on the player. This is the real reward from the game that we'll take away years from now, not the number of heritage quests or the amount of platinum we have, but the real people's lives we've touched, and the real people we've made smile.

So what's this got to do with my motivation to craft? I craft because it's a way of helping other people and improving their game experience. As a carpenter, I give away a lot of furniture for prizes in roleplay events, and I donate furniture to houses set up as roleplay taverns, to encourage the community on my server. I give away beds to newbies arriving in my home village, to welcome them to the village and sometimes to the game. Playing my jeweller, I always keep a few items I've made in my bags when I go out hunting, and if I get in a pickup group, my groupmates get any upgrades they need. Crafting just to make a profit is as mindlessly dull to me as farming a named monster over and over. Boring! But crafting with the goal of helping someone or doing something creative with the result is much more interesting, as you keep your mind on the final outcome and know that it will be making someone else's day, not just your own.

What drew you to this class? Why Carpentry over some of the more popular classes like Sage?

What drew me to carpentry is the tangible outcome of my work. In all the other tradeskill classes, you don't end up with something you can place and see and touch and admire. Nothing else results in a physical object added to the world. Classes that make consumables - like spells, poisons, and food - seem very ephemeral to me. Even classes that make equipment for others, such as weapons and armour, aren't as satisfying. An adventurer will wear the item for 10 levels, then sell it to a vendor, and it'll be gone as if it never existed. But furniture is forever, and can be enjoyed by everyone who sees it, not just the wearer. 

EverQuest 2 does seem to have some interesting furniture. Do you think tradeskilling is done more for the money or the creative aspect?

I think it depends entirely on the player. Tradeskilling CAN certainly be done to make money, as can adventuring. Tradeskilling can also be done for fun, as can adventuring. There does seem to be a perception out there among adventurers that you make tons of money by tradeskilling, and maybe even that you NEED to tradeskill to make money. That's rubbish. Nobody who actually tradeskills to any extent would agree with that. You can make money by tradeskilling; you can make money by adventuring. You can make money by doing neither, and playing the market. If you want to make money, you will, and you don't need to tradeskill to do it. Personally, I earn very little money from tradeskilling and support my habit of giving furniture away with my non- tradeskill income. I tradeskill for the creative and social aspect. But that's a decision that's different for every player.

Carpenters have the unusual distinction of being the only crafting class that doesn't affect adventuring. What niche do you feel your tradeskill fits?

What I like most about carpentry is that it is the one and only class that can actually affect the physical environment of Norrath. And that's pretty cool. Carpenters, in our small way, actually add content to the game. Perhaps it's the aspiring game designer in me, but I find it very enjoyable to start with an empty "zone" - ie, a bare room - and create content. Through furniture items I can entirely change the look of the room, I can create a cheerful or a dark or a scary atmosphere, I can even add "mobs" to my "zone" with the use of house pets and arena champions. And whatever I create, others can enter and appreciate, and be influenced by it. I think that's an amazing ability for any class to have, tradeskill or adventurer. And there's nothing like decorating someone's room while they're out, then watching them enter for the first time and just stand there stunned, saying "holy $#!%!" That's something no other class can do, ever.

So no, carpentry doesn't affect adventuring directly, but it has the potential to affect everybody, adventurer or not. I feel carpentry has the potential to enhance the immersion of the game, and to enhance the roleplay aspect of the game also. And that even goes as far as to help keep people in the game, when they might otherwise have left. There are some people whose rooms I've decorated who barely play any more, but they still log in every now and then and go pay their rent, just to spend some time in their rooms! It's remarkable what the perception of having a "home" means to people, and how it enhances their enjoyment of the game and keeps them coming back. It may seem odd to those who aren't carpenters, but there is something very compelling about having a little corner of Norrath that is yours alone, and customized to your tastes. It's the difference between EQ2 being "a game", and being "a home". Even the least roleplay-interested players can be utterly blown away by a nice home decoration and completely converted to being house-proud. It's very hard to quantify the value carpentry adds to the game environment, but I think it is very important, and very underestimated.

What is the biggest outstanding issue you feel the Carpenters have right now?

Missing furniture. Months and months ago - nearly a year now - NPC vendors sold furniture. There are still furniture stores in North Qeynos and East Freeport, though they no longer sell much. Many of their items looked identical to carpenter-made items but were much cheaper than we could make those items, so of course carpenters protested and asked that the identical items be removed. What actually happened though was that EVERY item they sold was removed, whether or not carpenters could make it. Some of those items were then given to carpenters, but although it was Frizznik's intention to give us all the recipes, many of the very nicest items were never added to our books. These items are now unavailable in game, neither from NPCs nor from carpenters. They include items like bookcases with books on them, wardrobes, stoves, urns, beds, and counters. As a carpenter, the three most-requested items that people ask from me are: ornate counters, bookcases with books, and chess boards. And there is nothing at all I can give them for any of these. Carpenters have been begging for these recipes for longer than I care to remember, with no response. It's very disheartening.

A more recent peeve, and a big one, is the fact that it's nearly half a year since tier 6 was added and carpenters still don't have advanced crafting books. If it were any other crafting or adventuring class overlooked in this way, all hell would have broken loose long ago. Carpenters are a pretty mature and realistic bunch, and realized that there were a lot of other more pressing issues after the DoF release that needed fixing before advanced furniture recipes. However, half a year is definitely too long to keep any class waiting for a fix, and the discontent levels in the carpentry forum are rapidly rising. 

I have a compiled list of outstanding bugs and wish lists related to the class here.

How pleased are the Carpenters, in your opinion, with the craftable items in the game now before Kingdom of Sky?

I'd say it's a very mixed situation. As mentioned above, the three items we're asked for most, we can't make, so that's pretty discouraging. We do have many very nice items though, the rough linen rug and the halasian bearskin rug being two of my favorites. We have odd gaps in some areas though that really need filling -- for example, there are no non-rare large dining tables that have a nice polished surface, and no wardrobes at all. Tier 6 furniture was a mix of very nice items and really awful items, but didn't give us any new tables or chairs at all, and most of it is too large to put in a 1-room home. There is an excellent post in the carpentry forum ( here) providing screenshots and suggested recipes for many items that we would love to see in game. I'm really hoping that someone is listening and that many of these will show up in tier 7, and be added retrospectively to some of the lower tier books too. But at present, we're in an odd situation where about 70% of our items we will almost never make, and only 30% are actually desirable to most players. So ... not very happy, is the answer. We're getting by, but there's a LOT of room for improvement.

What type of items are you hoping to see the Kingdom of Sky bring?

Ornate counters. Bookcases with nice colourful books and objects built in. Wardrobes. Nice non-rare tables with a professional, polished wood look texture, not the horrible crude rough greys of lower tiers. Those sconces from Stormhold that look like a flaming sword. More carpets, preferably with more intricate texture than the tier 6 ones (more like the tier 5 rough linen). Wall hangings. Chess boards. Smaller items than the gigantic tier 6 ones -- items that will reasonably fit in a 1-room home. Room divider screens, like the ones in Maj'dul. Nicer beds, like the ones in Poets Palace and Deathfist Citadel. Display cases and counters. Pool tables, like the ones in Nektropos Castle. And, tier 6 rare recipes. Basically, everything in this thread: here.

Beghn has been on the job with revamping Tradeskills for only a few months. Has he made progress? Do you think SOE is heading in the right direction?

It's hard for me to say that, because I don't have visibility of everything that he has been working on. I know he's been very busy fixing a number of the bugs that were introduced with tier 6 tradeskills, and I know that people in the affected tradeskills have been happy with his solutions, so that's good work. From a carpenter point of view, I have to say there hasn't been much sign of progress in our craft, but Beghn is only one man covering a huge area -- what I would really like to see is a whole team of tradeskill devs, not just one. It would be completely unrealistic to have just one dev handle all the adventuring development -- I feel it's equally unrealistic to have just one dev handling all the tradeskill development. SOE will be heading in the right direction when they hire more tradeskill devs to help Beghn, make some clear vision statements clarifying where they want to see crafting going over the next few years, and interact more with the crafting community for feedback into that process.

I couldn't speak to the popularity of Adventuring versus Tradeskilling, but I can see your point. If you could be guaranteed a fix on one Carpenter bug what would you choose and why?

Does missing furniture count as a bug? If so, I want my missing furniture! It's really challenging to decorate a room without access to some of the nicest items in game, and it's really painful to see the few remaining leftovers from the NPCs being sold on the broker for 10p and more because of their rarity.

If you mean an actual technical bug, I'd want to see the furniture placement issues fixed. Many of our bookcases are bugged so you can't actually place any books in them. The briarwood bookcase is the worst offender here, but most of the bookcases have the same issue at least to some extent. Given that we still haven't been given the recipe for bookcases with books in them, it's rather adding insult to injury that they haven't even fixed the empty bookcases we do make so you can place quested books in them!

If you could change something about the Tradeskill system as a whole, what would you change?

I would change the way that experience is earned across the crafting levels. It doesn't make sense for crafters to level up so fast through teir 1 that they can't even make half the items in their recipe books, yet have to make piles of finished product to get through the upper levels. There is a chronic shortage of crafted stuff in tier 1-3, and a vast glut on the market in upper tiers, because crafters have to make more and more of the products as they rise in level. Yet, when you look at the actual player market, there should logically be the same number of tier 2 players that need a sword as there are tier 5 players -- if anything, there are more in tier 2. It benefits no-one that the crafters are forced to make hundreds of unwanted tier 5 swords just to gain experience, when all the demand is in a lower tier. I'd like to see crafters level up slower in the lower tiers, and faster in the upper tiers, than currently happens. I'd also like to see higher level crafters still get some kind of benefit from making the lower tier items - perhaps not full experience, but why not the same type of experience as an adventurer would get by mentoring? Both of these changes would result in more items available in lower tiers, and less of a market overload in the upper tiers.

The server merges cometh! How do you think the they will affect tradeskilling and the market?

A higher population on merged servers will mean both more crafters and more customers. It will probably put more life back into the crafting communities on those servers, and give the economy a general boost overall. The economy of a well-populated server such as Antonia Bayle can probably be used as a rough model for what other server economies will develop into, if they reach the same population level.

Is there anything you'd like to add or say to SOE?

Carpenters are some of your most mature, understanding, and loyal customers, and we also help keep people interested in the game and enhance the experience for many players. Please help us to do this, give us the missing recipes, and add those recipes we are asking for!

Thanks so much again for your time and happy crafting. I hope the Carpenters can get some love.

Video game fan videos

Over the years playing various games I've created a few random videos, all just for fun, when inspiration struck.  I'm certainly not a master of video creation, lacking both talent and time, but occasionally I get an idea that amuses me.  And if you don't spend your life doing things that amuse you, then what's the point of your life, right?

I was looking at the stats on my YouTube channel today and I noticed I have some pretty impressive view numbers for some of them (considering they're just random things I did for fun).  And I realized I haven't ever linked any of them on my blog, or at least not that I recall.

So here's a blog post about some of the videos I've made.  For the very first one, flash back to October 2006.  I was living in Australia, playing a lot of EverQuest II, and trying to convince them to hire me too.  Back then I was part of a wonderful family type roleplay guild called Saga, which had carried over from the original EverQuest. We hosted a tavern night on a semi-regular basis which included a quiz game for prizes and well as chat and entertainment. One night, a trio of male halflings stopped in and offered their dancing skills to entertain us: they jumped up on the bar and did a fantastic synchronized dance in perfect time, using various emotes to coordinate their movements.  It was hysterically funny and they showed up for a number of subsequent tavern nights to repeat the performance.  I assume the trio were probably the same player running three accounts and with macros set up to coordinate the movements perfectly, and the enjoyment from those performances inspired me to create this video using my halfling and an alt of my then-boyfriend's; with the computers side by side and some macros set up, I could also coordinate the dancing to create the same effect.

And thus was created: The Secret Life of Halflings.  I sent it to the EQ2 dev team to give them a good laugh, as they were hard at work crunching away on the upcoming Echoes of Faydwer expansion.  Over 4000 views as I write this.  Maybe not even all halflings.

A month or two later I created a video tribute to the EQ2 Echoes of Faydwer expansion, set to Van Halen's "Jump", which featured the fae jumping and flying around (and at the end, a halfling also trying to jump and plummeting off Kelethin to her death).  It reached over 7100 views before YouTube said I had to remove it due to unlicensed use of the Van Halen song, so alas, it is no longer viewable.

In April of the following year, 2007, I was actually hired by SOE to work on EverQuest II as the tradeskill developer. I had very little time for making fan videos during those years, though I greatly enjoyed a lot of the ones that other fans created.  (One of my favorites is still the "Pirates of the Saskatchewan" video created by user Monkeydarren.  The Arrogant Worms, who sing the song, are actually a Canadian band from my own home town of Kingston, and in case you're not familiar with the geography of Canada, Saskatchewan is an entirely land-locked province.  Ok, I might be a little biased by the awesomeness of the song, but it's catchy!)

In 2011 as I started playing a lot of Minecraft on a multiplayer server and having tons of fun creating (and destroying) things, I started playing around with some videos again.  A friend and I built an amazing snow castle for Christmas 2011, complete with an aerial powered mine cart track that played "we wish you a merry Christmas" on musical note blocks as you circled the castle. We invited everyone on the server to join us one weekend before Christmas, build stacks of snow golems, and let them loose at night to battle skeletons and zombies in a huge snowball fight. It was epic and wonderful and I filmed parts of it, and although sadly the details of the snowball fight didn't film very well (since it had to be at night to get the monster spawns) I incorporated parts of that into an overall video that I set to the same music the mine cart plays, to show off the details of the castle.  I finished this video very late at night on Christmas eve, hunched over my laptop desperately trying to get it finished in time to give it to my co-builder as a Christmas present (via an in-game treasure hunt leading to the URL written on an in-game sign).  The ending of the video is footage from the snowball fight, and for days afterwards as the snow golems escaped across the landscape, you'd hear random "KABOOM!"s as they encountered annoyed creepers.

A month later, a server upgrade mysteriously changed the world biomes around, causing snow to fall in areas that previously weren't snow biomes, including the snow castle (which wasn't actually originally in a snow biome), my original tower, and several other people's home bases too.  A second video set to Frank Sinatra's "Let It Snow" was inspired:

For several years while working on EQ2 I'd been wanting to make more EQ2 videos, but time and inspiration didn't hit until after I'd left the EQ2 team. In August 2012 the "SOEmote" feature was added to EQ2, which allows players to use their webcam to capture their facial expressions and mirror it with their character's face.  Having worked on the team I knew this was coming many months in advance, and had been impatiently awaiting its arrival to create a masterpiece of pop culture, "EverQuest II Numa Numa".  In case you're not familiar with the meme, the "Numa numa guy" posted a short video of himself lipsyncing to the strange Romanian song "Dragostea Din Tei" by O-Zone.  It went viral and many parodies and some new versions were made, including a WoW video which misinterpreted the Romanian words into similar sounding English phrases.  I chose to use the English translation of the song, and picked a male halfling to sing it, and the result has had almost 4000 hits since August:

The video I most wanted to make, however, I'd been contemplating for at least three years but had never found the time or enough motivation to coordinate it, since I knew it would take a lot of help from other people to create.  Basically, I wanted to recreate in EQ2 the beautiful 2008 video "Where the Hell is Matt", created by Matt Harding as he traveled through the world and recorded himself dancing with people of all nationalities and backgrounds.  Matt's video not only went viral but also made the news in Time magazine and many other press outlets.  If you haven't seen the original, click through now and watch it; it's beautiful.

Anyway, I had been contemplating how to recreate this video in EverQuest II for years, but hadn't figured out the best way to do it. It was the revamp of the old Qeynos city zones that finally spurred me into action in September, long after I left the EQ2 team: with the city revamp, the old racial villages were being removed from game and would no longer be accessible except in quests. Hastily, a few days before their final removal, I logged into game and put out a call for players of the appropriate races to come dance with me in each zone to record them for posterity.  A wonderful, helpful bunch of tradeskillers, decorators, test server players, and random others spent a couple of hours following me around the world and dancing on queue in all sorts of zones, which I compiled and then assembled into the following tribute to "Where the Hell is Matt".  The main character in this one is Domino, the character I created to represent myself when I was a game developer, and she's wearing many of the tradeskilled items that I'd created over the years for various tradeskill quests.

The video includes scenes from many zones now retired from the game, as well as featuring a couple of cameo appearances from some of the well-known players of EQ2 including Jethal Silverwing, author and singer of many wonderful filk songs themed to EverQuest and EverQuest II.  My main regret with this video is the haste I had to film the disappearing zones meant I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to round up other EQ2 devs and players that I'd have liked to include.  But it still makes me smile to watch it. Favorite scene: the section of the Matt video where he mimics the indian dancers in saris is mirrored by me mimicking the goblin in the Isle of Refuge treehouse.  The video is now up to 1300+ views, clearly not as catchy as dancing Numa Numa halflings, but still pretty respectable!

Alas, my video editing skillz are pretty basic and I've been using freeware programs so haven't had the ability to do anything sophisticated. Still, they amuse me and that's the important thing, and hopefully the view counts mean they amused a few other people too!

I can't create videos yet for the game I'm currently working on - it's not yet released and still very much under NDA - but who knows.  Come April, maybe inspiration will strike again. We'll see!

Two Months Later...

This weekend marks 2 months since my last day on the EQ2 team. As I posted on Facebook that day:

They don't warn you when you get hired to work on an awesome MMO like EQ2 that leaving the job isn't like quitting McDonald's; it's like ripping out your heart and stomping on it! But today is my last day on the EQ2 team and it's been nothing but the best times, the best of co-workers, and the best of players, all of whom I'll miss ridiculously much.

On the day I wrote my resignation letter, I ended up bawling my eyes out on the shoulder of my long-suffering ex-boyfriend, to the extent that a lady who passed by as I was crying into my lunch saw my tears and misheard something I said and thought my pet dog had died.  When I explained that no, I quit my job, she looked at me as if I was a bit crazy; but my ex (also being a game dev) understood.  On my last day at SOE I was so sad, I couldn't even manage to stop by and say goodbye to Smed or Smokejumper or several others because I knew I'd just dissolve in tears and be unable to stop.

As most know, I was an EQ and then EQ2 player before being a developer; now I'm back to being a player again, and still logging in regularly to check out the new content and chat with friends both old and new.  Of course I never stopped playing while I was working on the game, but now folks know I'm the former dev known as Domino, whereas before I was just another person in the crafting and homeshow channels.  So I've spent the last 2 months trying -- and I think succeeding -- to reassure the crafters and the home decorators that the world is not in fact ending with my departure, that the game is in excellent hands under Windstalker and Smokejumper, and that EQ2 is still the best, most content-rich MMO out there and will continue to be for a long, long time.  (I am clearly a little bit biased on that last point of course, but I think you can make a pretty good objective argument nonetheless when you look at the wide variety of gameplay options, the independently leveled crafting system, the amazing house decoration options, and just plain 7+ years worth of content!  And did I mention the tradeskill questlines and the house items?  Two of my personal pet projects of course so they must be awesome.)

Despite being sad, I don't regret my decision to go learn new things; it's a fact of life that doing the right thing isn't always the easy path.  But my new co-workers are also a great bunch of folks, and my new project, "Defiance", is very interesting and will present a lot of unique challenges in terms of platform as well as game/TV coordination, and I'm already learning a ton of stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have had the chance to. It's a very different type of game from EQ2 and I think it will appeal to a completely different audience, but it's fascinating to work on so far, and will definitely help me to continue to grow my skills, experience, and knowledge to become the best industry professional I can be.  If you haven't been keeping up with the press releases, Defiance is both a shooter style MMO and a TV show in collaboration with the SyFy network, and I'll be doing everything in my small power to make it as good a game as I can also. Some links:  TV show info, interview talking about the transmedia collaboration, and latest gameplay trailer:

Still, despite 2 months passing, it does still feel like there's an aching EQ2-shaped hole in my heart.  (My friends laugh that I still keep saying "us" and "we" by mistake when talking about the EQ2 team.)  I suppose when you put that much of your heart and soul into a game for so many years, a bit of you just stays there forever, even as you look ahead to what's in the future.  And I guess that's okay; if I have to leave a piece of my heart somewhere, I can't think of a nicer place to leave it than in the magic lands of Norrath.

However, to end this post on a lighter note before I start sniffling again, here's the very first fan video I made, long before I was ever hired to work on the EQ2 team; I think this was made in the lead up to EQ2's expansion 3, and sent over to the dev team (who I had met at the previous fan faire) to give them a smile while they were hard at work crunching.  Enjoy!

The Path of the Beastlord

My Beastlord lore article is now officially posted, so here it is also. This was an interesting story to write and I had to do a bit of research, since the first precursors to the return of the beastlord class actually happened during the mystic epic weapon quest several years ago, although players did not realize that then. But since I don't play a mystic, I hadn't done the epic quest, so write-ups on fan sites were a big help. I ended up using thebrasse.com's write-up most heavily since it contained helpful dialog details too.

I spent quite a while before even starting to write debating how to tell the story - what person should tell it, from what perspective. I considered telling it from the point of view of a player character doing the prelude quests, or a mystic doing the epic quest but in the end I decided it might be a more interesting story if I told it from the "bad guys" side, especially as we know very little about the Cult of Sellok from the in-game content. I think it turned out well in the end, hope you do too.


---

Have you ever had a leader so self-assured, so charismatic, so confident that it seems somehow unthinkable to pursue any goals but his? That's how it was with Sellok.

To be honest, I was just in it for the money at first. Work was short that winter, but I'd left home only that summer, and I was determined to earn my own way in the world. I'd rather have starved than return home to admit defeat and face the mockery of my brothers. So, when the hooded figure approached me on the Nektulos docks with an offer of steady income, I wasn't inclined to look too closely at the details.

I'd always been quick on my feet and good with a blade, so it hardly seemed like work at all when they asked me to infiltrate myself into adventuring parties exploring the recently rediscovered continent of Kunark. I was to look for an ancient scroll or tome containing the writings of an ancient sage. I would know it by the age and the language it was written in; they showed me samples of the ancient script known as Death's Whisper so I would be able to recognize the angular runes when I saw it.

Several months passed while I offered my services to this or that group of adventurers exploring in one dungeon or another. I had grown almost complacent with this lifestyle, content even; and then I found the tome.

I had joined a group exploring the ancient Iksar tomb known as Charasis. We found ourselves in an area I was later to hear called the Vault of Eternal Sleep, but at the time we just called it a deathtrap and other names that were less polite. The halls were riddled with pit traps and other hazards, and after the umpteenth time we had to get ourselves out of one, I was long past ready to leave. I was prowling around the final room when a massive and weighty tome caught my eye. Glancing at the others to make sure their attention was still focused on dividing up the loot, I cautiously opened the book to the first page and immediately recognized the spiky runes I'd been taught were Death's Whisper. Unfortunately, the tome was far too heavy to take with me, so I copied the first few phrases into my journal and returned to the adventuring party to find our way back to the safety of daylight.

When I showed the runes in my journal to my hooded contacts, there was an immediate rush of activity. In no time at all I was taken to their encampment in a hidden vale, and brought before their leader. Introducing himself as Sellok, he demanded to hear every detail of my expedition and the location of the tome, and then there was no option but to immediately assemble a party to return.

Eventually we reached the tome, and Sellok's disciples set up a makeshift camp and scribing table, while Sellok spent several days studying it and making copious notes before we were allowed to leave again. I should have taken my payment then and left; I could have returned home with enough gold to buy a modest farm of my own. But while we were holed up in that vault with no one else to talk to but the skeletons, Sellok took an interest in me. He said that he was impressed by my initiative. I'd succeeded where dozens of other hirelings had failed. During the short breaks he took from studying the tome, he explained a little - a very little - about his research.

He told me of the Truespirit, beings locked in a plane between planes, a world of spiritual power and energies that lay parallel to ours. In the past, he said these spirits had found their way into our world, possessing and corrupting animals into what he called "spirit guides," and using them to lead innocent mortals into evil ways. The root of this corruption was in the city of Shar Vahl on the moon Luclin, where the resident Vah Shir kept what they called a sacred glade filled with these corrupted animals. Sellok said their evil influence grew over the city to such an extent that the gods themselves were eventually forced to destroy Luclin entirely to free the world from these Truespirits. He added that since the destruction of Norrath's moon, we have been free of their control, but they are ever trying to return, looking for more more mortals to enslave. He hoped to use the knowledge in the tome I found to be able to control these spirits and prevent their return to Norrath. And I, naive farmer that I was, didn't think to question what he told me, nor think that the kind of knowledge that is likely to be found locked away in a sealed forbidden tomb is unlikely to be wholesome.

You'd think that growing up with three elder brothers I should have known better than to accept any story unquestioningly. But as I said, Sellok was a man of great charisma and conviction. When he spoke, we all felt like lowly insects crawling in the presence of greatness. When he asked for something, we all leaped to earn a precious word of his praise. And so, when we left Charasis I too donned the hooded robes of his disciples, and joined the cult of Sellok.

The following months were a blur. I worked harder than I'd ever worked on my parents' farm, and that is no easy life even with three brothers to share the load. Some of the demands from Sellok seemed odd, but we followed unquestioningly. We traveled the length and breadth of Kunark, rounding up the skeletons of long dead Iksar warriors so that he could test his theories. He constructed a strange altar in the hidden vale, and told us it was to trap the spirits into the old bones as they tried to enter our world.

The agonized wailing and shrieking of the spirits as Sellok caused the skeletons to become animated were dismaying at first, but he assured us it was merely the Truespirit fighting to escape him, and that we were protecting Norrath by entrapping them into these old bones. Most learned to ignore the sounds; some, like me, preferred to leave the area entirely when the wailing started. When it got too hard to listen at these times I would visit the plains of Antonica. Walking through the farmland there never failed to remind me of home and calm my mind as I assured myself it was lands like these that I was now protecting.

It was on one of these excursions that I encountered the wolf. It was sitting in a quiet glade and seemed to watch me with almost human intelligence. I knelt slowly on the soft grass nearby so as not to startle the wolf, and enjoyed the scents of life all around me. As I knelt there, I felt strength returning that I didn't even realize I had lost. The bees buzzed in the background, the birds sang in the distance, and a small badger waddled out of the bushes nearby and stuck a cold wet nose on my arm.

"Your spirit seems remarkably untroubled for one who has helped create so much pain," said the wolf suddenly. His voice sounded as old as the hills themselves.

"Your pardon?" I almost replied in surprise. I looked hastily around, half thinking someone was playing a trick on me. Norrath can be a strange place at times, but talking wolves are not something you encounter every day.

"You work for the necromancer," said the wolf and his pelt twitched inadvertently as if flinching in revulsion at the very mention of Sellok. "You bring him skeletons, corpses, and dead husks in which he traps the living spirits as they attempt to enter this world to bring help and life. Surely you cannot be deaf to their cries of agony. I hear them day and night now, trapped in their dead prisons, unable to escape."

"That is necessary!" I shouted, standing up in anger. "They would corrupt Norrath! Just as they did to Luclin, which is why it was destroyed!"

"Young one, the tragedy of Luclin had nothing to do with the spirit realm. And as for the Truespirit, we only wish to help. Our role in Shar Vahl was as friends, advisors, and guides. We took animal form to best travel in this realm and partner with mortals, but we have only ever gone where we were freely invited."

"'We?'" I repeated, more confused now than anything, but stubbornly holding on to my anger as the one thing I could be sure of. The wolf certainly didn't seem like an evil, corrupting influence, but if I believed his words then it meant my master had deliberately led us all astray, and I had been unwittingly aiding in the most terrible of deeds. "Don't you touch me!"

The wolf gave me a long, sorrowful gaze. "Listen to your instincts, young one," was his only reply before twitching his whiskers and vanishing from sight in a few powerful leaps.

I tried to return to life as normal, but the wolf's words haunted me. What did I really know about the Truespirit? Was there any evidence to support what Sellok had told me? The questions plagued me, and the next time Sellok tried to trap the spirits in the skeletons of the dead, I didn't leave but instead crept close and watched. The look on his face was not that of a man selflessly saving the world. It was a self-absorbed, power-hungry look that made me feel unclean. Watching one of the undead Iksar shambling around afterwards, I seemed to feel the agony they were in, and couldn't bear it any more. I swung my blade and ended the abomination there and then, feeling its gratitude like a whisper in passing as the spirit escaped its prison.

My life was only saved at that point by the coincidence of a group of adventurers entering the hidden vale at that moment. As Sellok and the cultists fought for their lives, I slipped out of the vale, arranging it to look as if I had died in the battle.

Since then, I've dedicated myself to finding the spirits Sellok had trapped in the undead bodies and ending their suffering. Nowadays I seem able to see an almost visible spirit essence escaping, and sometimes it seems to whisper something to me as it passes by. I heard Sellok himself had been killed by a group of adventurers, possibly those whose arrival allowed my escape. I hear his followers scattered but I have lost track of them as I continue to travel the lands of Kunark, seeking to free the trapped spirits. I don't know if I can ever atone for the pain I helped to cause, but I can at least free those I helped to harm, and in doing so I am learning to see the signs of the spirit realm where it touches Norrath.

Despite Sellok's best efforts, it seems the Truespirit are touching our world more frequently now. I have not seen the wolf again, but something tells me that once I have finished undoing the damage I wrought, we will meet again. And when we do, I intend to ask him more about the secrets of Shar Vahl. I want to learn how the spirit guides and chosen mortals formed a bond as strong as life itself. I want to learn to work with the Truespirit to truly protect Norrath, as I had misguidedly thought I was doing long ago. I want to discover the joy of facing the world with my spirit warder by my side. I want to learn to become a beastlord.

(The events in this story make reference to the Mystic epic weapon quest, "A Sleeping Stone." The beastlord prelude quests are currently available from Caalina in Antonica, or Elmin in Commonlands. The beastlord class is coming in winter 2011 with the EverQuest II expansion: Age of Discovery!)

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Final note: did you think the story's speaker was male, or female? I deliberately left it completely unmentioned and I've been interested to talk to people who've read the story and come away with completely different opinions.

Elements of Lore

Game teams can be very different in their organization from one company to another. I've got some friends working at other companies who tell me their team is very compartmentalized: one player writes the quest outline and dialog, another one puts it in the game, a third one does things like choose what the quest NPCs and items look like, a fourth creates the reward items, etc. Other companies have broader roles, so that just one or two people might do all of the above. On the EQ2 team we tend more towards the latter. Although everyone has areas of specialty, and there are certainly some things (like spell balance) that need a dedicated specialist, many things can be done by many people which does allow for more flexibility of assigning tasks when needed.

As tradeskill designer for many years I was particularly fortunate, because tradeskills is an area that touches almost every other aspect of the game, at least in EQ2. So while you might think "making recipes" when you hear the word tradeskills, I also had to learn how to make items themselves (the final itemization balance was approved by our main itemization guy of course), create or request appearances for items and NPCs, make quests, which included making quest instances, populating said instances, house items, harvest nodes, zone decorations (such as when I created the central crafting areas in West Freeport and North Qeynos) and even occasional tradeskill-specific spells (such as revamping the reaction arts). Short of actual scripted group or raid encounters I probably learned at least a little of almost everything the design team did, which was really great for me since it wasn't long before I was able to fill in if the team was short handed in one area or another. For example, when we revamped Lavastorm I helped out with adding some quests, and not just the tradeskill line; I'm the one who redecorated the Temple of Thunder, and I added the new mount paths and teleporters around the zone (yes, I'm the reason those lava horses run IN the lava streams just to give you a little fright and a nice view). I count myself very lucky to have had that opportunity, since I like to learn things and I like to help also!

One of the things that I also do from time to time is writing. Obviously, when writing quests there is some writing skill involved, and in fact I know a number of game designers in the industry who do come from a purely creative writing background. Some quests need more storytelling skill than others of course; a kill-ten-rats type quest doesn't need much fine dialog. On the other hand, other quest lines are an opportunity to entertain the player (such as Advanced Journeyman Tasks - poor Vanesta!) or pass some lore to the player as in Shadows of the Betrayed, or the coldain prayer shawl. I actually sniffled a bit writing the dialog for that last one, I made myself so sad about the guilt the Coldain had born all this time!

I used to enjoy writing short stories about EverQuest; I did it quite regularly in EQ1 just for the entertainment of my guild and server, and when the print magazine EQuinox came out for EQ2 I contributed at least half a dozen articles between the two issues. These days I don't get a huge amount of time for writing, but I do occasionally have the chance to step in when our more regular writers are busy with other things, and last weekend I got to write a little lore article about the beastlords that are coming up with the Age of Discovery expansion.

That story hasn't been officially posted yet, so I'll refrain from further details until it is, but here's an older lore story that I wrote in 2009 for Game Update 51, Elements of Corruption. We were releasing a new zone in which the dark elf mage Najena finds herself fighting for her survival against the infiltration of the void forces of Roehn Theer. (In the actual zone, she will contact adventurers and agree to an uneasy truce provided they help her against the void invaders, who are trying to obtain artifacts that are key to the Ages End prophecy.)

Elements of Corruption

…And the Nameless created the Gods and the Gods created all the races of Norrath to worship them and bring them honor and for many years all was well. But soon the Gods grew jealous and each coveted the worship of all mortals, that each might grow more powerful than the others. And the Gods of the Light and the Gods of the Dark made common cause against each other and mighty were the battles between them and all Norrath trembled.

Then came the Nameless, He who created all things and He who shall end all things, and He sent forth His avatar into the world saying "Keep thou the balance, that no lesser God shall rise all powerful, and that neither Light nor Dark shall reign supreme." And thus did Roehn Theer the Godslayer come to Norrath and so did the Gods come to fear one who was both less and more than a God and for a short time peace returned to Norrath.

But the Gods wished not for balance and together they caught the Godslayer unawares and threw him into the Void and bound him there, that they might advance their own ends in Norrath without fear of reprisal. And once more did Norrath tremble and all the races of Norrath bowed down before the Gods and the Gods strode without fear among men and we were much afraid...


~ fragment of text attributed to Zebuxoruk, translated by Eylee Zephyrswell


The shadowy figure bowed its head, eyes closed, concentrating deeply. Had an observer been present in the room, they would have heard nothing and seen no more than the figure of a powerful void being floating in the air, apparently deep in meditation. However, in the reverent silence with which a worshipper communes with his god, an internal conversation was occurring.

"What progress can you report? Have you located the artifacts we sensed?"

A frown crossed the void man's face. "We have confirmed that the artifacts do, indeed, appear to have been created by the mage Najena, as we suspected. Unfortunately, she was alerted by our probing and discovered the presence of the void anchor in Lavastorm much more quickly than we had expected."

"Has the anchor been damaged?"

"Fortunately, no. Once the mage detected our presence, she interfered somehow with the concealment illusion, stripping it off completely. She then attempted to close the anchor, but we were able to turn back her attempts and it remains open. We are currently working to restore it."

"No. The element of surprise is clearly lost; we must simply press forward. The mage is attempting to create artifacts that can counter my powers and stopping her must be your first priority; anything else is secondary."

"Yes, Master. The beach has already been secured and the forces are even now advancing on Najena's tower. We shall have the artifacts within the week, if all goes well."

"See that you do, Munzok. Since Anashti revealed our presence prematurely, our only option is a rapid advance before they can find a new way to prevent my return to Norrath. Get those artifacts by any means possible, and do it now. Fail in this and there will be no corner of Norrath or the Void in which you can escape me."

Moosh panted, his breath coming in gasps as his powerful legs pounded down the stairs to his mistress's inner stronghold. Behind him, the sounds of approaching battle followed swiftly; more swiftly than even their worst fears could have predicted.

"Mauls! To me!" he barked. As they approached the entryway, the ogre troop fell efficiently into their accustomed formation behind him. Heavily armored and in peak fighting condition, the Mauls were Najena's most trusted defenders. Moosh felt a fierce pride as he surveyed the troop: veterans of many a battle and like himself, descended from the original ogres who had been Najena's sole defenders when she left Neriak so many years ago to begin her lone research. Every one among them was fiercely loyal to Moosh and to their mistress, and they would not fail her now.

He nodded, drawing his sword and gesturing towards the sounds of approaching combat. "We make our stand here. They must pass no further. We will prevail."

The Mauls drew their weapons, settling into an alert guarding stance, ready for the enemy's approach. Within moments, a bolt of fiery magic splashed against Moosh's shield, singeing his eyebrows. Around the corner came a wave of elemental constructs and soon the Mauls were fully occupied defending themselves. Balls of fire and blasts of frost flew from side to side and the smell of scorched hair and burned flesh filled the air.

Moosh shattered an ice elemental with his sharp blade and then dodged a blow from an earth golem. Stepping backward to evade the blow, his foot slipped in an unexpected patch of ice and he found himself suddenly on his back, with the golem towering over him. The golem's massive foot stamped down to crush his skull... and was deflected at the last moment as Drash's massive spear pinned the golem to the nearby wall as if it were as insubstantial as a butterfly. Moosh scrambled to his feet, nodding thanks to his comrade.

"Where is the mistress?" grunted Drash as he dispatched the earth golem and retrieved his spear. "Why has she not dispelled these pests?" He ducked to avoid a fireball and then charged forward to attack the fireball's creator before Moosh could reply.

Moosh turned to deflect a sword blow with his shield and pondered this question himself. Najena's mastery over elements was as close to absolute as any being could achieve after hundreds of years to perfect it. For an enemy to attack her using elemental minions was beyond foolhardy, it was bordering on suicidal. She should have either dispelled or assumed control of these elementals as easily as an ogre might swat a fly, and yet the Mauls were still occupied defending themselves. Could she be injured? She should be safe in the Ward of Elements and the Mauls were guarding the only entrance. Could the enemy somehow be interfering with her ability to see what was passing outside?

Parrying another blow, Moosh focused on the weapon attacking him for the first time, and was surprised to find he recognized the massive sword. Hand-chipped from a single massive block of stone, this sword could as easily be used to bludgeon the enemy to death as to slash flesh. Indeed, he had seen this sword many times before and listened to many ale-fueled tales describing the arduous process of handcrafting a traditional weapon like this one. Moosh looked past the sword to his attacker's face and a chill grasped his spine as he recognized his long-time acquaintance and comrade, the master of Najena's jails.

"Ca'iluer!" he shouted. "What are you doing? It's me! Drop your weapon, old man, before I have to hurt you!" Moosh fell back a few steps, defending himself, but hesitant to press his attack. The old man was full of stories and boasts, but no match for the strength of an ogre in the prime of life.

"We are everywhere, Maul." The words came from Ca'iluer's mouth, but were not spoken as he normally would. As the jailor swung the huge stone sword at Moosh once again, a purplish flicker seemed to pass over his body. For a second, it seemed to Moosh that the man became transparent and he could see through Ca'iluer's body to note that the fighting around them seemed to have died down; then with another flicker the man's solidity returned and the sword connected with Moosh's pauldron. Unbalanced by surprise and the sheer weight of the weapon, Moosh stumbled, but found himself steadied by a strong ogre hand grasping his arm as Drash appeared beside him once again.

"Drash, it's Ca'iluer! Help me hold him..." Moosh's voice trailed off as the firm grasp on his arm was not relinquished and in fact became tighter. "Let me go!"

A dread foreboding grasped him, and he turned to look into the eyes of his most trusted fighting companion and friend since youth. Drash smiled back and a purplish flicker seemed to pass momentarily across his face.

"So glad you could join us..."

What Do Players Want?

A selection of quotes from nightly /feedback reports that amused me, interested me, or made me think. Sometimes I sure wish I the feedback reports could tell me the context behind the report; particularly for that first one. I wonder what was happening!

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Text: confine gnomes.

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Text: I've actually become bored with typing this but we **NEED** more hotbars... My warden is overwhelmed with not being able to organize herself/her abilities because of this. And to answer the question some GM's have asked, NO... it will not be a screen full of hotbars... My monitor is HUGE and you have so kindly added the ability to make the hotbars smaller in size. Please add more hotbars, it is making the game unplayable.

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Text: All I want for Christmas is to be able to throw snowballs while flying. No, seriously, snowball fights in the air would be amazing, please.

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Text: stop cursing me!

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Text: It would be cool if you guys could design a "Dressing Room" for the mounts. for example, the horses have like 10 different types of armors that you can get, but given that you can custonize your character's armor and weapons to be he exact way that you want it, its insanly hard to find a mount whos colors / armors match.

You could set up a series of colored plates that have the graphics that already exist, but let us pick and choose what goes where to add personalization to our various mounts.

Thank you for your time.

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Text: We need Dragon Flying Mounts. Preferably actual dragons like Woushi or the ones in Vanguard.

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Text: Scouts get an unfair advantage over casters, Nerf Them ffs

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Text: a second thought that just passed my head is i think this rating system is dumb. it is just another outlet for angsty people to put others down anonymously and hurt their feelings when someone has worked extremely hard on their home. I think its cool that you can visit other peoples houses with the click of a button but i believe that rating system has to go before someone ends up getting hurt emotionally too much from jackasses on the game.

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Text: Exorcise is cool. Thanks! It's kinda like a half-infusion, only with added penalty. Kinda what I've been wanting - so thanks!

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Text: I would like to suggest adding a few new recipies for Carpenters. Specifically, new trees! :)

Currently, Carpenters can make only one standalone tree -- the Nektulos Pine. It's a very well liked and well-used tree among decorators. Unfortunately, for everything else we must rely upon Grottos and faction merchants, while our crafters are left with the same old recipies.

There are so many wonderful trees ingame already that would make perfect Carpenter-crafted items. Just a few that come to mind are: the beautiful fruit trees in Conservatory, the lightly snow-frosted pines in Eastern Wastes, the stately green and blue-flowered ornamentals in the new Felwithe Mansion, the massive sweeping canopies of the Kunzar Jungle trees, the dark pines of Darklight Woods, the twisted frozen trunks of the Great Divide pines, the tall swaying palms of Kerra Isle, the Void-twisted trees of Toxxulia Forest, or even that cute little decorative palm from Toxx (that is now the "Warden tree").

I do hope you will consider adding some, if not all, of these to our recipies! There are more than enough trees, plants, and shrubs in this game already to keep Carpenters, vendors, and grottos busy for quite some time -- and EQ2 has an amazingly creative team of designers to add even more :)

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Text: you need to change the loggin music back to the original. i like to logg in to pleasant music and the new music is so annoying and depressing that sometimes i just exit right back out of the game without playing because it bugs me so much.

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Text: The two new dynamic dungeons are AWESOME! I'm having loads of fun with these. I can play the level 90 versions in a full group with my friends, and I can mentor and play a lower-level version in a duo or trio, so it's perfect. I really love that you can get shinies in the mentored versions, too. More like this please!!!! :D

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Text: bring back /gems from eq1 :P its way overdue.

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Text: loving the new sign house items! any chance we could get something similar with paper notes we could leave for people - maybe vertical ones pinned to walls, or horizontal ones for placing on desks? am massively into organising treasure hunts in my houses, and at the mo i've been having to use books, but they're not always appropriate!

ta muchly! :)

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Text: Need more solo content

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Text: I would like to see a new quest in runny eye the gathering to save the hobbits that the goblins are cooking

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Text: Beetle Herding ... the ENTIRE quest line should be changed so you DONT need the wait for the spiders to get in JUST the RIGHT spot.

There should be a trap-door spider that kills them as soon as they get to the ROCK !!!

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Text: We need pink wings in the game, maybe some can be made for Erollisi Day this year. Or sooner. A multitude of colors for Frostfell time.

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Text: it would be neat if when you destroyed some item, no matter what it was, your character would actually animate and throw an item into the nothing.

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What do game designers do anyway?

We recently posted a job opening on the EverQuest 2 team for a game designer to fill my old role managing tradeskills. As most people know, I was hired directly from the player community, without any game design experience; in fact for many years I was an I.T. manager responsible for all things I.T. related in the Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and New Zealand offices of my previous company. So, some general business/I.T. knowledge but not related to gaming. And my hiring worked out very well, so the company is once again considering applications from the player community to fill the role.

I've noticed two interesting things from the comments made on various discussion forums about the job.

First, seemed like 90% of the comments took the form of "Wow, I'd love to do this BUT I can't because... ", where "reason" was generally "too far away/can't move/don't know how to program/not qualified/health reasons". These comments made me very sad, to think that so many people see this as a job they would love, but feel prevented by so many reasons from actually trying it. I certainly understand that people have many different things that might prevent them, and health issues are hard to argue with in particular. But most other issues are surmountable if a person really, truly, passionately wants to do something. Heck, I sold a condo, moved from Australia, and took a fairly significant pay cut from an IT manager's salary to take the job in the first place, because it was what I genuinely wanted to do and an opportunity that might not have come again. I've never regretted that. I hate to imagine that any of these posters WILL regret not doing the same. As I wrote in one thread, you might not get the job if you apply, but you're GUARANTEED not to get the job if you don't apply.

Second thing I noticed is that a large number of players don't seem to understand at all what a game designer even does. Several people mentioned that they can't program, when nowhere in the job description did it even mention programming as a requirement. Game designers don't program. NONE of the game designers on EQ2 program. Some of us have done some basic programming in the past (including me) but others haven't and none of us NEED to do it as a job requirement. The most we ever do (and not all of us) is some basic scripting language stuff, and that's only on rare occasions for most of us. For the most part, game designers work with the tools that the actual programmers - the code team - provide for us. We do most of the creative work. We come up with the ideas for the stories, we write the text of the quests, we name the items you get, we decide what the zones and monsters should look like, we assign what stats are on equipment, what your spells do, what components are going to be required to make which recipes, we name the NPCs and dress them up.

Here's an older post that Josh "Autenil" Kriegshauser made on the SOE blog describing some of the different job titles that work on a game. In particular, about designers:

Designers breathe the lifeblood into the game. They write quests, set up NPCs, populate the world, create items and scribe spells. Some designers focus on Mechanics (spells, balance, achievements, etc) while others focus on Content (NPCs, Quests, Lore). Tradeskills are also an important part of our world and some designers work exclusively on Raid Encounters. While most of designers’ work is done in tools written by Programmers, designers may learn skills such as scripting as they level up.

As a tradeskill designer I did a lot of work with Excel spreadsheets, working out the details of massive numbers of recipes which I either created from new or revised. By the time I was hired, sub-combines had been removed from the recipes but there was still a lot of cleaning up needed for consistency's sake, not to mention all the new recipes for Kunark that I joined just in time to work lots of overtime creating. I also spent many, many long evenings at home watching DVDs while updating the stats on older crafted gear that had gotten out of date, a slow and painful process. (Nowdays our itemization designer Silius has a tool - which a programmer made for him - that allows him to update stats more easily so he can maintain the tradeskilled item stats, but back when I joined the team I had to do it all by hand myself ... uphill barefoot in the snow ... you get the idea!) I also added lots of tradeskill quests, which I consider an important part of the changes I made to tradeskills. Learning to write quests well takes some time, and my first ones were not exactly brilliant, but I soon figured out what worked well and what didn't and what was fun. It didn't take long till I was helping out with non-tradeskill quests too as needed, and helping new apprentices learn the tricks. As tradeskill designer I also kind of inherited housing and furniture, since the carpenter class makes furniture and nobody else was very interested in it, so it ended up falling mainly to me to request/repurpose/make various new house items for all the other designers who needed an extra quest reward or faction item here or there. During the course of all this I did learn a little scripting and write a few perl scripts, but it's nothing I couldn't have lived without. I don't like to ask people for help so I usually figure stuff out on my own, but as a team we're always happy to help each other out when needed and we all give and take pretty evenly. One of the best things about being the tradeskill designer was that I had a chance to learn a little bit of almost everything, because tradeskills is a pretty broad area when you think about it. Itemization, quest writing, collections, house items, even making and populating new zones for some of the quests; I became a bit of a generalist and jack-of-all-trades which was great in my opinion since it meant I could help out with almost anything as needed. Pretty much the only thing I didn't ever get into was raids and boss fight design, but we've had some great designers doing those very well for as long as I've been on the team so there was never any need (though I imagine if I'd really wanted to get involved, I could have asked to help; I always had other things I wanted to do first for tradeskills though). So anyway, yes - a very broad opportunity to learn some very diverse things, and for someone looking to join the industry for the first time I think it's going to be a great position to start in for this very reason. And no, no programming required.

Nowdays I'm on the production side, which Autenil's blog also describes briefly. My role so far is fairly diverse and hard to describe in detail but basically boils down to keeping everything running and making sure nothing important gets missed. I don't tell designer A to make this raid and designer B to make that raid, but I might notice that the lead designer hasn't planned any raids for the next game update and check if that was intentional or an oversight. It's definitely a change from the tradeskill designer role but so far I'm not regretting the promotion; I love tradeskills and I loved working on them but after four years I was starting to feel a little tired, as if there wasn't a lot more new to learn there. And I firmly believe the tradeskill system will benefit from someone with fresh eyes taking a new look from a new perspective and possibly seeing things that I wasn't seeing. So now I'm learning new skills which always makes me happy, and able to help the team in new ways too which also makes me happy. :) The last associate producer we had on EQ2 has just taken over as producer on the FreeRealms team, and the one before that has recently gone off to be a producer at Zynga. I'm not sure if I want to be a producer one day; there still seems to be a daunting amount to learn just as an associate producer, so for now I'm just happy learning that. And who knows what other opportunities will come along while I'm busy learning? There always seems to be something new.

I haven't seen all the applications coming in for the tradeskill designer position yet - HR and our fearless leader the producer are handling all that so far, and besides I'm on holiday this week - but I know we've received quite a lot and I'm looking forward to meeting my new replacement once the process is complete. Good luck to whoever you are - and well done for going ahead and applying without adding a "BUT I can't because ..." clause! I'm sure you won't regret taking the job, I certainly haven't.

New position! aka, WWSJD?

So, apparently it's been far too long since I updated this blog; and the reason for that is that just when I thought work was already flat out busy, I accepted a new position, and it got suddenly EVEN BUSIER.

So here's a quick catch up.

If you're even bothering to read this blog then you probably already know that since May 2007 I've been a game designer on the EQII team, in charge of the tradeskill system among other things.  The "other things" have varied and slowly grown over time, but tradeskills has been my consistent main focus.  As tradeskill designer for EQII I've shipped 4 expansions (Rise of Kunark, The Shadow Odyssey, The Sentinel's Fate, and Destiny of Velious, plus EQII Extended); and during this time I've worked under four Producers for the EQII team: Gallenite, Froesch, Brenlo, and now SmokeJumper.

However, work is about learning and growing, and four years doing pretty much the same thing is a long time, for me at least! Not that I don't love the tradeskill system in EQII, because I certainly still do; but the tradeskill system itself (or any game system really) benefits from different perspectives and different opinions, and having the same person making all the decisions forever and ever would not be a good thing, ultimately, either for the game or for the person.

So, when I was offered the opportunity back in April to try a new role, I decided that both I and the tradeskill system would benefit from fresh perspectives and challenges.  The new role is Associate Producer, still on the EQII team, and it was announced in this interview with Paul "Frizznik" Carrico, who's taking over the tradeskill duties in my place. Frizznik certainly won't think about tradeskills in the exact same way I do, and he'll see different priorities than I did, but I think that overall that can only be a good change to keep the tradeskill system from getting stale.

During the years I've been on the EQII team we've had a number of wonderful Associate Producers helping the various Producers, but during Brenlo's time the last of them left the team for various reasons (one to become the new producer for FreeRealms, in fact) so for the past year we've had none: just SmokeJumper handling it all on his own.

As was also announced recently, Dave "SmokeJumper" Georgeson is now stepping into a more senior role as Executive Producer overseeing the entire EverQuest franchise, not just EQII as before.  To quote from that link:

Smokejumper: I'm still very much attached to EQII and work closely with the leads on that project. We recently promoted Emily "Domino" Taylor to become the Associate Producer on EQII, specifically to shore up the fact that I would have less time in each day to spend on EQII. So far, it's been working very well. The team didn't skip a beat during the transition, and in fact, things are probably better now than they were previously because we're able to split up the tasks and I can focus more on the game's quality and business direction.

So, that's me now: mini-SmokeJumper, and keeping remarkably busy because of it. I'd already been working fairly closely with him on a number of projects, but since the official changeover in April, it's been pretty much non-stop. I don't know how he was managing on his own.

I also recently joined the EQ2talk podcast to talk with Dellmon and Aliscious about my new role, the future of tradeskills, EQ2, and everything related. You can have a listen here.  I'm a terrible public speaker, alas.

So, that pretty much catches up to the present time, and doesn't really excuse the lack of posts, but possibly helps explain the busy-ness lately that's been keeping me from posting much. As I think I mentioned in the EQ2talk podcast, I'm enjoying working with SmokeJumper so far; he's a good guy to work for and there's clearly such a lot I can learn from him that I'm trying to figure out some way to arrange some kind of mind meld machine to download it all!

In more general EQII news, we recently had another Game Update, and I helped (in a small way) our AV team to make a pretty cool video, which you can see here:

This week while I man (or possibly woman) the fort back here in San Diego, SmokeJumper is up in LA showing off EverQuest II at E3: if you're going to be there, definitely check out the Sony booth, where they're demonstrating their new 3D laptops with EverQuest II's spectacular 3D aerial races.  I'd never seen EQII in 3D before and I'm really not a fan of 3D technology, but I have to say I was just blown away by how good it looks.  Wow.  It really is pretty amazing looking.

Also coming up soon is SOE's own Fan Faire event. Preliminary schedule and details can be found on the official fan faire site.  Just a month to go now!  I'll be there, and I'll be looking forward to seeing some of the "regulars" again as well as meeting new faces. Fan Faire is always such a lot of fun.

And I think that pretty much catches me up to date with the news; I'll try to think of some more interesting things to post in the future.  I expect to continue to post on this blog as I think of interesting things to say, but possibly not so much about EQ2 tradeskills specifically. In the mean time, happy June, and happy tradeskilling!

What Do Players Want?

A selection of assorted feedback from the past week:

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Text: Guys i am dying for more hotbars. This game is incredible, but ten hotbars isnt enough! =)

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Text: i think there should be more guards patroling new halas just for protection and to make the city feel alive

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Text: please make key mobs un-despanwable for idiots like me

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Text: thanks for yet more crap loot from the PQ chest. I hope your hair falls out in patches.

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Text: Fighters should heal crit! :(

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Text: I must say that I really love the number of easter eggs the quest designers put in - npcs that give lore when hailed afterwards, or as additional dialogue options, or even giving hints if you hail them after. This is the first expansion in which I've genuinely been interested in what npcs have to say. Great job!

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Text: No difficulty nerfing please!!!!!


the game has only been out a couple weeks - it should not all be beatable right way.

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Text: make an instance where each named is a froglok clone of a group member and at the end all the shadows unite and turn into a massive froglok that squashing people with his feet!

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Text: screw you and the ice in the hold of rime ascent thats the stupidest bullshit you morons ever put in the damn game RETQARDS

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Text: OK! I love the expansion. Love the flying mounts!! Just amazing how beautiful this game is.....can't wait to see if this post makes Dommino's blog lol.... Please can we have a "tinkered flying baloon ship" and can you also offer it as a historical Guide Quest!! Those have been so fun! This would be awsome for tinkerfest coming up.

(Hi! But I don't plan to post any other comments that say this, otherwise everyone will start to do it.)
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Text: love the Guillermo Del Toro/Neil Gaiman feel of Pools in Velious :)

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Text: DELETE ALL MAIL BUTTON NOW!

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Text: Suggestion: Possibly a yearly event:

Camel and Flying Carpet Races in Sinking Sands where prizes are camel mounts, run speed 75 for the land bound (those who are too low a level to get the flying mounts). But there could also be sky races for prizes and for new flying carpets (really vivid color styles), that when the flying gryphon quests are completed, they can be a true flying mount (much like the Gnome aero race mounts...love those btw). Race courses would be in SS and PoF for these.

There could be an Arabian Nights type of event in conjuction with it where we can get outfits like 'I dream of Jeannie' and jeweled bottles that, when placed in house and rubbed once a day will give us some special (time limited) boost for battling.

Also, awesome bejeweled scimitars could be available for our appearance slots, and turbans for the guys heads, and for the girls, a shear veil for across her face that would mysteriously enhance her make-up around her eyes and make her eyes sparkle. There could be silly silk slippers (where the toe part curls up) in various vivid colors.

Your imagination could go wild with this...perhaps an Aladdin's Cave and a sleeping dragon where a number of stashed treasure items need be be stolen from the dragon successfully to win a prize.


Thanks for considering this,

( I thought of it while here in SS and saw the Camels running by)

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Text: So very cool.... these Public Quests are AWESOME and so much social time spent with many players :)

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Text: I find your lack of Sundered Frontier Wisdom-based quest rewards disturbing.

I mean, a Shaman can only take so much Str/Sta/Agi gear before he goes insane. >_<

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Text: I adore the developer that wrote the quests for the Othmir. Never before have I felt so involved in a developing storyline that phyiscally changed the enviroment of the people I was doing quests for. Thank you, you are a wonderful game designer and deserve a promotion to lead designer.

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Text: Some new hair styles would be nice. Something between super fancy frilly and just out of the shower would be nice.

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Text: Now that we have flying griffens we can ride all over the place, you guys should make some flying pig mounts!

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Text: Must we really take a furniture item from each repeatable faction quest from othmir & snowfang EVERY SINGLE DAY? How many othmir hammock's does one need? Could we have an option to perhaps say 'No thanks, I don't need furniture'.


The entire forest will surely be cut down for this multitude of wasted furniture that is forced upon us. The poor Othmir must do nothing but harvest wood and craft furniture for us like sweatshop workers. And the poor Snowfang gnolls have enough problems without taking up half their day making chairs for us.

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Text: Did you know: shadowknights do not resuscitate little otter pups. nor do they rescue kittens from trees. make them into handbags, maybe. make them into shoes or slippers, yes.

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Why gnomes are great

(This will be a rather short post as there is a cat fast asleep on one of my arms so I'm typing slow and one-handed.)

As I mentioned in my last post, the final day of the Destiny of Velious launch events is today, and it's a series of flying races run by those mechanically-minded tinkerers, the gnomes.  Check out this video of the races!  And here's a great screenshot taken by Gnobrin, one of our art team:

This morning when the event started and people started talking about it, I got a message from a friend asking what it was all about. When I explained, he expressed his regret that the game he's currently playing doesn't have gnomes in. And this led to a discussion that's the title of this post: why gnomes are great.

Gnomes are great for many reasons, really; I used to play one myself in the original EQ. From a game designer's perspective though they are great because they are so crazy and random and inclined to catastrophically break or change things that they can be used as an explanation for almost anything.

For example, we want to create an event that lets people try out the new flying mounts but only on a temporary basis? Gnomes can build a test course and an unstable, prone-to-disintegration mechanical flying mount! No further explanation needed. Gnomes just do things like that.

This principle can be applied to almost anything. Why did the sun explode? Gnomes! Why did sharks develop the ability to swim on dry land? Gnomes! Why did the gods abandon the world? Gnomes! Why did everyone's underwear turn purple? Gnomes! "Gnomes" is an explanation that can answer almost any question; and as such they are a wonderful excuse for a game designer to use when all else fails. And the beauty of gnomes is that it quite likely really IS their fault anyway.

Some (ie: gnomes) may call this a blog about blaming gnomes, and not about why gnomes are great, but this is clearly a nit-picky point of semantics that I will ignore. All MMOs should have gnomes, or a gnome-equivalent. Gnomes are great.  =)

Velious is here!

(Warning: may contains some small spoilers.)

It's been too long since I last posted, in my defense I can only point to our fantastic new expansion Destiny of Velious which shipped last week to huge success! It kept us very busy making it, but I've seen almost nothing but positive comments about pretty much all aspects of the expansion, and everybody with fond memories of Velious from EQ1 days has been both eager and excited to see what's happened to the continent some 500 or so years later.

What's happened is a lot! While Velious has been isolated from the rest of Norrath its inhabitants continued their battles; in particular the centuries-long cycle of battles (known to some as the Ring Wars) between the giants of Kael Drakkel and the dwarves of Thurgadin continued for some time, finally coming to an abrupt and icy end when the coldain defenders used their last-ditch defense of desperation and set loose the waterfall that concealed the entrance to Thurgadin, flooding the battle plain including those fighting on it. Suffering terrible losses and believing that Thurgadin had been destroyed, the giants withdrew and turned their attention elsewhere, and the dwarves have been steadily rebuilding Thurgadin since then.  Unfortunately, a new enemy has also appeared on the horizon in the form of Kraytoc's forces of the Rime, who are now attacking Thurgadin from within Storm Gorge...

Meanwhile the events of the past centuries and the shattering of Luclin resulted in some areas of Velious melting and shifting around. A great wall of ice now divides the continent in two, cutting off the region formerly known as the Western Wastes from the eastern side. The cliff seems impassable, so it's not clear what has happened to those who were left on the far side, if indeed anything remains alive.

The othmir, those peaceful otter-like inhabitants of the western side of the continent, managed to flee just in time and have established a new home on the ice floes where the gnomish pirates of iceclad used to have their igloo camp. The gnomes, meanwhile, had allied with the dwarves to fight against the giants and relocated closer to Thurgadin, where they have lately started to take advantage of the harbour to reconstruct their mechanical ships. As for the giants ... they've been keeping busy also, needless to say, and Kael Drakkel is an area adventurers will be exploring to learn more.  Tradeskillers will find quests to help the othmir, the gnome pirates, and the coldain; not to mention a reclusive group of goahmari whose hidden home high in the mountains has only recently become accessible to the casual traveler.

The Tower of Frozen Shadows is still standing, although as the ice has melted and shifted the tower's foundations have settled and the tower is now leaning at a distinct angle. Personally, I'm very excited to visit the tower again, as it was one of the zones and stories that interested me most in EQ1 and I still have strong memories of guild adventures running through it.  I haven't had time to get a group in there yet but what I've seen of the tower looks like a great rendition of the tower I remember.

There are so many great stories to learn in the new Velious that I certainly won't try to describe them here, I can only say that if you have fond memories of Velious in EQ1 you won't be disappointed about how much information there is to be gathered about what's happened since then until now. And there are lots of people to see and places to visit, from Thurgadin and the coldain to the gnome pirates and othmir, what's become of Tserrina's frozen tower and Velketor's Labyrinth and Kael Drakkel, and much more.

This was my fourth expansion working on EQ2, which seems hard to believe; I'm not sure where those years have vanished to. Time seems to have flown by and I'm always learning new things, so there hasn't been a dull moment. As always I've been putting everything I have learned towards making tradeskills fun in this expansion, and I think there are more than a few very nice rewards that tradeskillers will enjoy.  In this expansion the part that stands out in my mind as the most significant piece I worked on was the Coldain Prayer Shawl heritage quest.  For those who don't play EQ2 or have forgotten, a heritage quest is our term for a special type of quest that specifically rewards an item that was famous from the original EQ1. These quests are often quite lore-heavy and have unusually nice rewards.  So, heritage quests include rewards such as the journeyman's boots, the bone-bladed claymore, the paw of opolla, the greater light stone, the flowing black silk sash, and many more.  The Coldain Prayer Shawl heritage quest is slightly different from previous ones however, as it's the first purely tradeskill heritage quest we have done. (Many have a small crafting component, but none require high level tradeskilling and give tradeskill rewards until now.)

To create this quest I relied heavily on the story and requirements of the EQ1 version (and as always the detailed notes and accessible organization of the information on Niami's EQTraders fan site made this so much easier for me than it would have been otherwise).  While creating the new quest, I accepted that neither the mechanics of the EQ1 version nor the requirements would translate directly into EQ2, which is a very different game. Also, many centuries have passed since players first assisted the coldain and learned how to obtain the blessed coldain prayer shawl, so many things might have changed since then.  Rather than try to duplicate the original quest, I used it as an opportunity to allow players to learn what had happened to the coldain (and the shawl) from then until now; and most importantly, to put them in the position of being the main character in the quest, the protagonist of the story. Nobody has progressed far on the quest yet - it has a fairly lengthy faction requirement - but I certainly hope that when people finally do finish it, they'll be left with the feeling that they were the hero, they did a great thing, and they have done a great service to the coldain.

So, Velious is back!  Hurray!  If you haven't seen it yet, check out our launch video:

And also watch out for the fun launch week events which will be wrapping up next week.  In particular, the gnome flying races on March 1st are great (we've been having lots of fun testing them internally already) and will be accessible to all players of all levels whether or not you've bought the expansion.  You don't even need to subscribe or pay a penny, now we have a free to play option, so there's no excuse not to check out the crazy gnome fun.  Designer Windslasher did a a fabulous job on these and I couldn't be more impressed; you will be too!

Anyway, I'd keep on writing about all the things I'm excited for in this new expansion, but that would be more time away from actually logging in and playing it myself, so that's all from me for now! Come check it out, if you aren't already; maybe I'll see you there.