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.


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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..."

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.

It's beta time again, beta time again...

January, and it's that time of year again ... beta time for the upcoming EQII expansion, due to release in February!  This year's expansion is called Destiny of Velious.  If you haven't seen the teaser trailer we showed at Fan Faire yet, here it is.  I love the music, which sounds both epic and somehow nostalgic, and the video itself gives you a little teaser of what some of the zones will look like.  Can you guess which bits of the video are inside Thurgadin?  Did you spot the Tower of Frozen Shadow?  If you remember Velious fondly from EQ1, then you're probably looking forward to this expansion very much, as I am.

While many players are rushing to sign up for beta (secure link here) and impatiently saying they can't wait till it launches, the dev team of course are running around madly trying to make sure everything is as good as it can possibly be, and unable to believe how fast time is flying past.  As always, we tried to get everything done and ready before beta starts, but there are always a few things that don't get done quite on time, and other issues that may not become obvious until large numbers of people are running through the content.  So now is a time of much bug fixing and polish: polish being a catch-all term that means anything from "making it look prettier" to "explaining it better" to "improving the fun of it" and more.

Normally we all receive copies of nightly compilation reports from players on all our live servers who have used the in game /bug or /feedback commands to submit their comments.  If you've skimmed this blog in the past you may have seen some excerpts of the feedback reports that have caught my eye for one reason or another.  We also get regular reports from the customer service team highlighting problems they've come across through the live petition interactions, and of course there is always plenty of feedback posted on the official forums too.  All this is could be enough to keep a person busy all day just reading it; but during beta we add yet more reports on top of this.

During beta we compile and report the beta /feedback and /bug reports separately, so that they can be tracked separately, and these reports get the top priority for our attention.  We also have separate beta forums where people can leave feedback, and where we developers can post answers and information, or ask for specific feedback on areas we may want to get more information on.  Many of us log into the beta server itself as time permits, and either talk to people there, or perhaps just listen to the talk in the chat channels to see what people are talking about and whether there are any common themes.  We also get an additional report that we don't normally receive, which reports quests not completed.  This is a list of all quests that have been accepted by at least one player on the beta server but which have never been completed by anybody.  It's a good way of quickly highlighting a quest that might be broken: if 300 people accepted a quest but not a single person has managed to complete it, then chances are there's an issue that needs to be looked at.  Sometimes it's an easy reason - for example, maybe the quest requires entering a zone that isn't available yet on the beta server, or which is too hard thus far for anybody to have completed, or maybe there's a timing element that means you can't actually finish it for a couple of days.  But other times it may be that an NPC isn't spawning properly, or there's a bug in the quest causing it to actually not update, or similar.  We turned on these new reports about a week ago and they'll run till beta ends and the expansion launches, by which time of course we hope they will be completely empty.  So far no quests of mine are in the list, which makes me happy - but there are still several weeks of beta to go, and at least one rather important quest of mine that hasn't been tested yet, so neither I nor anyone else will truly relax until the last bug is closed and the launch date arrives.

Mighty Mugg

Meet Qho Augren!  Qho is a young boy from the Village of Shin in EverQuest II.  He gives a small questline called "A Gathering Obsession", in which he explains his fascination with harvesting and his intention to be a harvester when he grows up.  However, since his parents say he's too young to go out harvesting yet, he asks your help to bring him back samples from all over Norrath so he can study them.

Lots of samples.  

From ALL over Norrath.

Did I mention lots of samples?

The quest is actually quite painless if you start it at a very low level and just slowly update it as you level up your harvesting skill.  Going back on a high level character and trying to do it all at once though is rather painful.  So poor Qho is one of Norrath's most-often-wished-dead questgivers.

What Qho has to do with a Mighty Mugg (and if you don't know what a Mighty Mugg is, wikipedia explanation here) is related to the SOE Fan Faire coming up this weekend.  Apparently the Community team got a bunch of the blank Muggs, and they asked SOE staff members if we were interested in painting one for a "silent auction" to be held at Fan Faire.  So, I offered to try one if there were any left over, and there were, so I got one.

I debated what character to paint and toyed with the idea of a Billy doll, but then I thought of everyone's favorite target of death threats Qho.  Since Qho's quest is actually my fault it seemed more appropriate than Billy (who was Ilucide's fault).

First I had to get a good screenshot of Qho.  This is a bit tricky since he spends all his time swimming around underwater in a small pond, which doesn't help get the detail.  So I also took a picture of Spark Augren, who looks very similar to Qho but with different hair.  (Yes, I could have logged in as a GM and forced Qho out of the water, but I was at home and lazy so I just grabbed what my regular play account characters could get.)

Here's the blank Mugg, lightly sprayed with primer, holding my paintbrush and awaiting its fate!

First step, skin tone:

Next, Qho's clothing, which appears to be dark blue trousers and a pink tunic.  Here he is standing on my laptop beside his own picture, for comparison.

And then the hard part, which is the face.  I had a lot of trouble with this, not being an artist in even the most remote sense!  But here is the finished Mugg, ready for shipping to Fan Faire:

I am sure it will look like the work of a 10 year old beside the marvels that our artists are creating, but it was fun to make, and perhaps someone will want it, if only to use for target practice!  =)

Edit to add: check out Greg (Rothgar's) Mighty Mugg on his blog!  Wow - puts mine to shame!

Another update to add:  Qho was won at the auction by Niami Denmother of EQ/EQ2 Traders. She has a suggestion thread up on her forums to get opinions on what his fate should be!

I also hear that Greg's Mugg, and I believe Aaron (Gnobrin's) Mugg (an awesome looking clockwork), which were definitely the two most popular Muggs, were won by the producer of the Jace Hall show (Jace was a co-host of Fan Faire for us).

Advanced Journeyman Tasks

Since joining the EQII design team I've been steadily adding more and more tradeskill quest content into the game (prior to my hiring there were next to no tradeskill quests at all).  After revamping the tradeskill tutorial series I started adding a one-every-ten-levels series given out by a Grandmaster crafter in each home city.

The quests were a learning process for me as much as anything; quest writing was not the primary focus of my time, and so I had to pick things up here and there as opportunity permitted.  Accordingly, both the quests and the writing solidified as the quest line progressed and I learned more.  By the time I created the fourth quest in the grandmaster quest series I had worked on various other quests also and was getting more confident in the process.  I was also in a slightly odd mood.  And accordingly, "Advanced Journeyman Tasks" was created with a rather peculiar sense of humour.

The general outline of the quest:

• The grandmaster in your home city asks if you could check up on one of their trading liaisons.  The liaison was sent to the Sinking Sands and was supposed to have checked in by now, but has not been heard from, and the crafting society is worried.  
• Off you go to locate her and, if needed, offer your help. You travel to the Sinking Sands and soon find Vanesta, the trade liaison, a little way up the beach, looking very ill.  She is retching into a bush, in fact.  You ask if you can help at all.  She complains of the terrible heat.
• You borrow a recipe from Vanesta and assemble a functional tent to keep her out of the sun.  She's grateful, though still very ill, so you ask if you can do anything else to help.  
• The trade liaison is too ill to suggest much, however, so off you go to look around the local merchants and see if any of them have anything that might help poor Vanesta recover.  What luck!  A shady merchant down near the crocodile hunter camp does seem to have a recipe book called "Bert's Big Book of Health".
• You're not sure what's wrong with Vanesta but she did mention she'd recently been exposed to a mushroom infestation in Darklight Woods, so you figure you'll try making the "fungus potion" in the recipe book you just bought.
• The trade liaison gratefully tries the potion, but unfortunately feels worse than before... in fact, she passes flat out in front of you.  Hastily, you craft up the energy drink listed in the same recipe book, and pour it into the liaison's mouth.
• Well!  She certainly wakes up - it looks as if lightning strikes her.  Furthermore, she seems to inexplicably now be surrounded by teeny little mushrooms.  As poor Vanesta crackles with electricity and asks if you're trying to kill her, you rush off to try the next recipe in the book instead: a plague remedy.
• Despite Vanesta's misgivings, you manage to persuade her to try the potion.  Unfortunately, it seems to GIVE her the plague, rather than cure it.  Now she is not only surrounded by fungi and crackling with electricity, but she's also covered with rather unattractive green plague pustules.
• In desperation you try the only recipe left in the book, described as an "acupuncture kit", which you bring back to Vanesta and put down on the ground beside her, only to discover it looks like an iron maiden.
• "Are you trying to kill me?" she demands, and snatches the book from your grasp.  Reading the book more closely than you had, she points out that the "Bert" of the title is most likely "Bertoxxulous," god of disease and decay.  One stern lecture about the importance of understanding what it is you're crafting, and she sends you packing with the desire to never see your face ever again.
• Returning to the Grandmaster who sent you out, you omit a few of the details when you report that the trade liaison is indeed still alive and you had tried your best to help her.

I had quite a bit of fun both playing with the various alarming effects that get applied to poor Vanesta, and also writing her dialog which goes from sick and cranky to insulting to downright rude.  Of all the crafting quests I've done so far (and there have been quite a lot now), with the possible exception of the tradeskill epic quest this quest is the one that gets mentioned the most as everybody's favorite.  Either a little humour goes a long way, or our tradeskilling players are harboring a bigger streak of sadism than we had hitherto expected ... or possibly both.

The happiest moment for me though was when I happened to look up the quest on wikia, one of our fan-run information sites which is a wiki-style format that can be updated by anybody.  And I discovered the very first line of the "Steps" section says:  "This is actually a very funny quest so read everything that she says to you."

That's got to be about the best thing that a quest designer could ever read in a fan write-up.  =)

It's a guide's life

EverQuest and EverQuest II have a volunteer guide program, where players who enjoy interacting and roleplaying with others can volunteer a few hours per week and are given the tools to run little unique quests and events.  (Guide FAQ for more info).  I like to think of guides as the fairytale characters of EverQuest - the scruffy beggars or scary crones or ugly toads that the hero/heroine meets and offers to help out of the goodness of his or her heart, who then turns out to be a fairy in disguise who gives them a reward.

I was a guide towards the end of my time playing the original EverQuest, and then when I changed over to EverQuest II, I was a guide there also.  I am not a guide any longer of course, but I remember well some of the rewards as well as frustrations of being a volunteer in the program.

The most surreal moment in my guide experience was in EQLive, when I was still a wee apprentice guide brand new to the program and with no powers to do anything except chat with people and hand out cookies and milk.  I logged in and zoned to the Plane of Knowledge, a central gathering hub for players at leisure.  I approached a couple of players and greeted them, planning to offer cookies and milk; immediately one of them responded with an enthusiastic "hello!  I want to be an otter!"

Puzzled, I asked him if he'd felt this way for long?  He remained insistent that he wanted to be an otter.  I tried to make conversation back, but he wasn't making a lot of sense and wouldn't talk about anything except otters.  Eventually I gave him some cookies and milk and backed away slowly.  It was only afterwards that I learned that not long before I'd logged in, one of the SOE GMs had been sitting in the Plane of Knowledge having a bit of fun by turning people into Othmirs (an otter-like race from the continent of Velious) - certainly nothing that an apprentice guide would ever have the power to do.

When I joined the EQII team, because I'd been in the guide program previously I seemed a natural to help out the guide team in EQII.  It's a secondary responsibility, but as time permits I try to add in new quest tools and goodies for them here and there.  I recently added a new quest that guides are able to give out as a little prelude quest to the upcoming addition of New Halas and today at lunch time I decided to log in and try offering it to a few players myself to ensure all is well.

What always amazes me, both as a developer and as a player of MMOs, is how many players just seem totally uninterested in custom content.  When I play, if I notice an NPC out of place or a strange person standing around apparently offering a quest, I am always ready and eager to go and investigate.  Heck, I strike up conversations with random people I bump into in game, even if they're clearly just other players.  But many people don't seem to do this.  I wonder what goes through their thoughts?

Today I logged into a random server which turned out to be Lucan de Lere (one of our roleplay-preferred servers) and wandered around various lower level zones looking for people.  I found about half a dozen in The Caves, a small adventure zone off the city of Qeynos, so I put a quest feather over my head and stood around saying things aloud such as "Lately I've been having such strange dreams and visions!  What can they mean?", "I dreamed Mithaniel Marr was walking the lands of Norrath once again," and "I keep having visions of Halas reborn!  What can it mean?  Can't anybody help me?"

The first two players who saw me came up, and I hailed them, and directly told them I had been having strange visions, and would they help me to learn more?  Both of them stopped, hailed me back, and then said "sorry, I cannot" or "no, I'm not interested", and ran off again.  At least one other just ignored me completely and ran right past.  And keep in mind, I was a large barbarian woman with a big sparkling quest feather spell effect hovering over my head, it should have been pretty obvious I was something not usually found in The Caves.  (I even did a zonewide /shout asking if anybody would help me.)

I got one person in The Caves to accept the quest, and a nice couple in Gorowyn, and then I did a search online ("/who halas all") to see if anyone happened to be online with a name or guild related to Halas.  And there was!  There was one person online from a guild with Halas in the name so I thought of course, they should be very interested in topics relating to Halas.  I went to the zone the player was in (Rivervale) and stood just down the path from her, where she was bound to pass by, again with a big sparkling quest feather over my head.

And she just ran straight past.

So I followed her, and wandered obviously around her (she was harvesting) saying things about what strange dreams I'd had of Halas, and asking had she been having visions too?

Nada.  Not even a hail back, I might have been invisible.  Eventually another person entered the zone from another guild, and had a little chat with me and accepted the quest, and I decided lunch time was over and camped out.

Checking the server logs now, it looks as if the nice couple from Gorowyn will be the first to complete the quest and get the server (possibly worldwide) discoveries on the quest rewards.  And good for them, they were very sweet and helpful.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with not being interested in special quests and guide events; everybody plays games differently and is interested in different things.  It's just baffling to me as it's so different from my own interests, and also because so many people complain so vocally on the forums that they never see guide quests in game, yet when you're a guide, so many people totally ignore you (or even say outright that they have no interest in helping you).

I'd love to know why the people who weren't interested were not interested.  Did they (despite the big quest feather) think I was just another fellow player, and they weren't interested in helping out a fellow player at all?  Did they simply not even see me, they were so focused on whatever their current goals were?  Did they have their UI hidden to take screenshots, and didn't even see any of my dialog?  Were they simply so concerned with powerlevelling up that quests of any type were of no interest to them?  And, if they had decided to accept my quest, would they have been glad they did, or thought it was a pointless waste of time?  (The XP is decent, the rewards are a book of lore and a house item, nothing particularly uber.)

As a designer, and particularly as a designer of quests that guides can give out, I always want to understand the answers to these questions so I can improve things.  If these players simply aren't interested no matter what, then all is well and good; but if they don't understand what's going on or actually don't see me at all, perhaps there's something I can do that would add to help make it clear to players what's going on.

Sometimes I do wish I'd done a degree in psychology rather than molecular biology; it might be more directly applicable these days to trying to get inside the mind of MMO players!  =)

Quest wrangling

This morning I am wrestling with a quest that I want to add for the coming EQ2 expansion, The Sentinel's Fate. Since the beta is still under NDA I can't talk about any details, but I can say that writing this particular quest has been giving me grief for the past few days.

I've talked a little bit about the process of writing quests before, on the official EQII blog. Here's a link to that post, and below I've quoted the bit specifically about writing tradeskill quests:

On the tradeskill side of GU47, I just finished checking in another quest for the Grandmasters in the tradeskill societies to give out, this one in the level 60-69 level range. At the same time this goes live, the city faction merchants (both adventure and tradeskill) will begin selling a black version of the blue formal dress that city merchants sell, and this new quest ties into the appearance of this new item. Naturally, the various city factions would turn to their local tradeskill society to produce large orders of any new clothing that they begin selling. And when the local tradeskill society’s harvesting team fails to return with the required resources that will be needed, who should they send to investigate but a trusted local tradeskiller who has served them well in the past? Crafters level 60 and over who have completed the other quests the Grandmasters offer will be asked to investigate the missing harvesters, and save the day once again.

I don’t create nearly as many quests as many of the design team — other designers might be asked to create quests for entire zones at a time, and some of them are amazingly fast and clever at thinking up fun new ideas and implementing them. A lot of what I do is more dry, such as the creation of recipes, balancing of stats, tweaking of drop rates.

Tradeskills being technically part of the “mechanics” team rather than the design team itself, a lot of the work is less creative and more statistical. However, quests are fun, and tradeskilling players have not had many tradeskill quests to enjoy in the past, so I’ve added quite a few since I started here and I expect more still will come in the future.

How I design a quest can vary quite a lot, depending on the quest and where it’s intended to fit into our world and our lore. The first thing to do is consider what information I already know about the quest. Do I know certain characters who must be involved? Do I know a certain story I need to reference? Or do I know what the reward will be? Many times, I begin planning a quest with a specific reward in mind. I start by knowing that I have this nice new purple robe, for example, and I think that a quest would be a fun way to give it to people, so I start planning from there.

For this type of quest where I start by knowing what the reward is, I can then start thinking about how and why a player might earn such a reward, and construct the story of the quest backwards from there, by asking and answering for myself a series of questions about the quest. Why would a player be given a robe? Maybe the tradeskill societies are starting production of a new line of robes, and players could be given one of the first ones in thanks for their help. What kind of help? Well, what if the tradeskill societies are short of supplies. Why are they short of supplies? Maybe they have teams of harvesters who go out and bring back the supplies they need, but perhaps the team has failed to return, and our players need to investigate. What will they find? Well, they might find a few clues that will lead them in the general direction, and then they will eventually find the harvesters. Where does the tradeskill part of the quest come in? Maybe the harvesters are hurt, or having problems, and players can craft something to help them out. And so on, asking more and more detailed questions until I know the general outline of where the players will have to go and what they’ll have to do. 

Once I have this outline, it’s a matter of filling in the specific details of dialog, and so my next step is to generally create all the characters for the quest who have anything to say, and then creating the dialog chain between them and the players. This fills in pretty much all the remaining details of the quest’s story, and is also where I get to have a little fun being creative. I usually try not to be too long-winded, but I do try to insert some humor into the dialog so that people who do pay attention to the text will find it worth their while and be amused. Once the dialog is taken care of, it’s just a matter of putting any characters and objects required into the world, and then hooking it all up into the actual quest file that goes into the player’s quest journal so that the game knows character A’s dialog B updates quest step 3, and so on.

For some other types of quest, we may start out with a specific event or story that we want to tell, and the reward is actually fairly irrelevant. A good example of this might be some of the seasonal quests like Frostfell or Nights of the Dead, where we know we want to tell a seasonal story, and that story is more important than the actual reward. A tradeskill example of this would be the tradeskill epic quests: I started by knowing that I just wanted to do a tradeskill epic to go out at the same time as all the adventurer epics. Then I looked through some old EQLive tradeskill quests and traditions, and decided to base the epic on the Earring of the Solstice quests from the original EQLive. Next I worked out some modern twists and details to set the story in the present time of EQ2, and also to give each crafting archetype something a little fun and different to do. The steps in this quest were all about the fun and excitement, getting tradeskillers outside, into areas they might not have been into before, and picking some of my favorite looking zones and finding an excuse to get crafters into them. To be quite honest, this was a quest line planned out to intentionally include many “oh s–t!” moments of sheer terror for the people doing the quest, and it was a lot of fun to deliberately do that. I figured out the rewards last of all; in this case the rewards were almost irrelevant, the important part was that there be a tradeskill epic at all, and that it should be fun and very different from anything any tradeskiller had done before. Once the quest outline is known, however, the remaining design steps are pretty similar: create the characters and write the details of their dialog, place the things in the world, and then hook it all up.

Those are the two main ways I have approached quest creation so far. Apart from writs, which don’t really have any story, the tradeskill quests have all just been created through variations of the above. The one quest line that came closes to being an exception to this rule was the sokokar quest line for tradeskillers; the sokokar quest line for adventurers had already been written, but was not doable by tradeskillers, so I knew that I needed to add a separate quest or quest line for them. As time was short, I decided to simply take Srukin’s entire quest line for the adventurers and mirror it as exactly as possible, making fun of the original quest throughout. So for the sokokar quests, you could say that I started off knowing BOTH the reward AND the story, and the rest was merely changing details and inserting humor. The NPC who gives out the quest, Assistant Jones, is actually named after Srukin (Ellery Jones) in order to tease him for not including tradeskillers in the first quest. And while the adventurer quest has players out collecting drolvarg fangs and other heroic things, Assistant Jones is impatiently asking the tradeskillers what on earth she’s supposed to do with all the bags of smelly drolvarg teeth the adventurers keep bringing back to her boss, and by the way those adventurers are still busy out there killing things, so perhaps you could go deliver this hawk instead like the practical tradeskiller you are.

So, the tradeskill quest for the coming game update is checked in, ready for QA to begin testing. There will be a cycle of testing and bug fixing for a while, and then Test server will have their chance to break it and comment — and they certainly do a great job testing and finding new and unexpected ways that things can break! But if all goes well and all the bugs are fixed without issue, then that’s one more tradeskill quest added to the growing list and heading to a live server near you with game update 47. Hope everyone enjoys it!

That was written back in July 2008, a whole year and a half ago. Since then I've had a lot more experience with writing quests and in fact with everything, and I've put in quite a few more tradeskill quests besides, but there are always new challenges to meet and new things to learn.

I posted a little while back about some of the things that players want to see more of in tradeskill quests, and the quest and rewards that I mentioned in that post were in fact the thing that I am now working on. Based on their feedback I want to involve a little more mainstream lore into the quest, I want to send them out around the world and into some places they might not have otherwise seen, and I don't plan to include a large amount of grindy crafting (although there will be some, this being a tradeskill quest after all). What I'm currently struggling with is a combination of the situations I mentioned in the 2008 post: I both know what the reward will be, and I also know the general points of the lore that I want to include. But sometimes this actually makes it harder to write the quest, when you know you have to make the story pass through certain points instead of letting it just go in whatever directions make sense as you write it.  Sometimes - like now - it feels that forcing the quest line through predetermined points is a bit like trying to herd cats through hoops!

One thing I really hate and try to avoid in quest design is when a quest doesn't make it clear why your character would do the things s/he is required to do. I've seen too many quests in too many different games where there's no apparent reason why your character would get from step A to step B on their own. Either the quest explicitly tells them to do step B, or the player has no hope of figuring it out on their own and has to check a spoiler site.

For example, if the quest starts with you finding a mysterious item, and your quest journal just tells you "I should find more information about the item!" then you have no idea where to go to find out this information and probably need to check a spoiler site even to figure out what zone you're supposed to go to. On the other hand, if your quest starts with you finding a mysterious item, and your quest journal then tells you "I bet the laboratory of Lord Evilpants in the Deadly Forest would have more information on this item!" that's better, since you don't need a spoiler site to know where you go next, but it still doesn't make a lot of sense to the player since there's really no obvious explanation why their character would think of going to the laboratory of Lord Evilpants if their quest hadn't told them to. I prefer quests that fill in more steps and actually make sense: for example, you find a mysterious item. You look at the item and discover it has a rune stamped on it. You go to the library to research runes and discover this rune is the insignia of Lord Evilpants, last seen in the Deadly Forest. Now it makes sense why your character would next go to visit Lord Evilpants and perhaps search his laboratory for further clues. No spoiler site required, and also no sudden deus ex machina instruction appearing in your quest journal without a good reason.

So, the very first stage of writing this quest is to write out a point form summary of each step of the quest: each point of the story generally corresponding to each time the quest will update. I know how the quest will start, what the end reward will be, and I've picked some zones they need to pass through in the middle, and some people they will meet. And then I write in the details of exactly what information they gather or what clues they find that lead them between these key points. Sometimes it's fairly obvious, but for some reason getting the exact details to come together in a way that makes sense has been surprisingly difficult for this quest. What on earth is there about item A that would lead the player's character to think of going to zone B? What kind of clues could they pick up that would point in that direction? And of course, whatever clues there are have to fit in to the world's overall story and lore. If they find information in the library pointing to zone B, does it makes sense that the library would even have that information? If they find a relic that hints that zone B might be related to the story, where would it make sense the relic is found, and why would the players think to go check that place? If they talk to person A to find out more about person C, why does person A even know about person C, and why would they tell the players about him?  So far I've rewritten these intermediate steps three times and there are probably more revisions to come.

Perhaps I'm being overly picky. I suppose there are many people who don't particularly care whether it makes sense that their character would figure out to go to zone B or whether their quest journal just tells them "go to zone B." Still, I know details like that do annoy me when playing, and I think that having those details is important to a well-written quest, so gosh darn it, I am going to be a stickler and do it right. Even if it means a few more hours sitting here on Saturday morning staring at the screen and asking the cat "but WHY would they do that?"

It may be confusing the cat at present, but I hope it will be worth it for not confusing the players who complete the quest in the end. =)

Tradeskill quests

I try to log into Test server one night a week to chat with the players there. I find it very useful, as it's a rare night that I don't come away with at least a couple things to fix or confirm. Although we designers and then QA do our best to avoid bugs, it can sometimes be a handicap already knowing how something is supposed to work. There's really no substitute for seeing how large numbers of players will react to something -- sometimes they'll try and do things that never even crossed the designer's mind (as I have described before, in a guest post on the EQII official blog).

Bugs aside, sometimes it's helpful just to hear people talking to gather feedback and get some general impressions about what people enjoy and what they don't enjoy. When I logged in this evening, one of the folks online told me they were in the middle of discussing what they wanted to see in crafting quests. Obviously this is a topic of interest to me, since I'm the one who creates those quests! And I know what I think is fun, but I always try to get feedback on what other people think is fun also, because my views aren't necessarily always going to be shared by everybody.

When I asked to hear what they were discussing they wanted to see in future crafting quests, there was initially a long list of rewards, not actual quests. While that's useful in a different way, if I were trying to figure out what to give out as rewards, it's an entirely different question from what people want to actually do during the process of a quest. As it happens, I have a number of cool rewards already ready and waiting to be awarded somewhere so I was more interested in hearing how they might like to earn such things, than what they would like to be rewarded.

However, eventually the discussion worked around to answering the actual question of what folks find fun in crafting quests. I've put in quite a few crafting quests since I joined the SOE team (all of which should be included on EQ2Traders' crafting quest list) and they've been fairly varied in nature. Many involve actually crafting items, but not all; after all, many adventure quests don't actually involve killing things, so I reckon that tasks like deliveries, exploration, and other non-combat errands are fair game for either playstyle.

The evening was unfortunately cut a bit short by an unscheduled Test server update, but before the servers went down, the general consensus on what folks would like to see more of is:

• quests that don't necessarily involve crafting items, or at least, not crafting large numbers of items that feel like a grind;
  
• quests that encourage crafters to get out and around the world a bit to see the sights;
• quests that have a bit of history or lore about the world, helping crafters to feel they are part of the story of the world;
• quests that actually change the environment, such as moving items around, building items, etc.;
  
• quests that are funny, such as accidentally torturing a poor tradeskill liaison (as in the Advanced Journeyman Tasks quest, which I wrote while in a rather peculiar mood and which people seem to be very fond of).

This is pretty much in line with what I generally consider fun myself and try to put into quests when possible, though not necessarily every point into every quest. It's good to confirm now and then that they really do enjoy this type of thing and I'm not deeply irritating them by mistake. In fact, I've recently added some new questlines into the continent of Kunark (intended for Game Update 54) which include a number of these points in simple fashion, but I'd like to do more of the same and in deeper scope for the upcoming expansion too. I got a number of ideas listening to people discussing what they like tonight, and another good idea has come to me while typing this post, so tomorrow I will start thinking about the details and see if a fun quest line can come out of this all. If so, no doubt Test server will be the first to see it, and well deserved that preview will be, too.