WARNING: DO NOT PUSH BUTTON!

Some days I'm just in an odd mood.  As poor Vanesta found out.  A few months ago when we were planning out the in-game loot items for the upcoming Legends of Norrath set (the online trading card game that ties in with EQ and EQII) I had another of those moments.  I'd been working on Tinkerfest quests at the time (a gnomish festival of all things clockwork that comes around once a year) and so I suggested something along those lines.

I think my exact suggestion may have been something close to: "how about a box with a big red button on it that you can put in your house.  And if you push the button, it kills you." {followed by evil snickering}  And I asked some random people on the team, "would you find this funny?" and the general consensus was yes, so we decided to make it.

And so, one of our wonderful EQII artists, Jeff Jonas, made a very pretty little clockwork box with a big red button on top.  Little cogs spin and turn, and you see the button depress when you click it.  It looks great.  We called it an "Overclocked Tinkered Control Button", and put a big warning label on mouse-over that pops up text saying "WARNING: DO NOT PUSH BUTTON", and added a huge and lethal fireball effect if you do press it.

And I tested it, and laughed my head off.  And we sent it to QA, who tested it and laughed their heads off.  But sometimes, things that designers (and QA) think are funny don't always seem as funny when they make it into the live game, so I was curious whether people would like it or not.  This past week it went live, and the first people playing LoN started to get the loot cards and get their own tinkered control buttons.  While I was logged into Test server checking out the Tinkerfest event there, the item was mentioned in the test server chat channel.  As follows from my logs:

Everfrost.Aeryal tells test (3), "oK [Overclocked Tinkered Control Button] who thought this up?????????????"

You tell test (3), "erm, that may be my fault, Aeryal."

Everfrost.Aeryal tells test (3), "it blew me up and killed me it said i would revive outside"

Daithe tells test (3), "Aye, it is fun!"

Dwargo tells test (3), "Good God, Daithe!  Are you out of your Half Elf mind?"

Everfrost.Aeryal:Everfrost.Aeryal tells test (3), "seriously  you made a house items that acctually kills people?  "

You tell test (3), "yes"

Everfrost.Aeryal tells test (3), "does it kill you everytime?"

You tell test (3), "and yes"

The_Bazaar.Faeurelis tells test (3), "*giggle*"

Elana:Elana tells test (3), "ohdear"

Tock:Tock tells test (3), "that's fantastic!"

The_Bazaar.Seecret tells test (3), "which item kills????"

Everfrost.Aeryal tells test (3), "[Overclocked Tinkered Control Button]"

You tell test (3), "yes, that one.  It says very clearly DO NOT PUSH BUTTON!"

Tock:Tock tells test (3), "lol"

Elana:Elana tells test (3), "{falls over laughing}"

Splitpaw.Chlorr tells test (3), "does it only do that if you press the button or is it random?"

Dwargo tells test (3), "oh, i LOVE the Babbage Engine wheels"

Everfrost.Aeryal tells test (3), "well be a good item for a party drunki can get easily sobered"

You tell test (3), "it only kills you if you press the button marked DO NOT PRESS BUTTON."

Daithe tells test (3), "*snickerfits*"

Splitpaw.Chlorr tells test (3), "oh good, thank you"

Butcherblock.Lohkee tells test (3), "The effects of prolonged exposure to the 1500 megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Super-colliding [Overclocked Tinkered Control Button] are not part of this test."

The_Bazaar.Seecret tells test (3), "wait, the button is from LoN, not tinkerfest?"

You tell test (3), "yes, the button is from the LoN set that went live today."

Slybones tells test (3), "WTS  recipe for BBQ gnome buffet"

The_Bazaar.Seecret tells test (3), "*gets to work thinking of trades to make for it*"

It's good to know I'm not the only one who thinks sudden, explosive death can be funny.  =)  It's also a good example of how an in-game loot item with absolutely no gameplay functionality or stats whatsoever can still be desirable!

Now I just gotta get one for myself...  boom!

(If you play EQII and want to check out the button for yourself, or any of the other in-game loot from the current LoN set, it should be on display in the LoN Showroom in game, which can be accessed via a portal in the Lion's Mane Inn in South Qeynos, or the Blood Haze Inn in West Freeport.  The showroom should be displaying the current LoN set "Doom of the Ancient Ones" from next week until the following set is released - date not yet finalized, but that won't be for several more months.)

It's good to be home again

After a lovely Christmas vacation in the United Kingdom, I'm back home in San Diego getting used once again to warm weather, sunshine, and my adorable cats.

I'm still getting over a cold, but the sunny San Diego weather should soon cure me, I hope.

In the mean time, the first order of business (after unpacking and greeting the cats) was to log in to EverQuest II, where a number of seasonal live events are under way!

Most exciting to residents of Freeport was the sight that met their eyes when "Update 54: Will of a Tyrant" arrived.  The floating Dethknell citadel has crashed into West Freeport and Overlord Lucan de Lere is missing, and chaos reins in Freeport as various factions fight to take over power in his absence.

I had a chance to log in briefly just a few hours after the patch, and it was great to see the huge crowds of players standing around stunned, investigating the scene and trying to understand what had happened.  Dynamic events like this that really change the landscape in the world are just fantastic for keeping an MMO world feeling exciting and real.  This change is particularly shocking as the floating citadel has been a permanent fixture in Freeport since the game launched, and we don't generally make big changes to the main cities, so the occurance of a change this big and this dramatic has an extra impact.

I'm also personally rather pleased that in this particular event, it was the (male) Overlord of Freeport who was kidnapped, not the (female) queen of Qeynos; her kidnappers were foiled (through the heroic efforts of the players) and she is left to keep order in Qeynos and encourage efforts to rescue the Overlord.  It would have been so easy to have the pretty girl get kidnapped, and I was one of those making the argument that we should buck stereotypes and avoid that.  And I think it's worked out very well; looking forward to seeing this story continue to unfold!  Unfortunately I didn't have time to actually run through the quests related to the kidnapping events until returning from my vacation, so I've spent some time this weekend doing just that.

Also since I left, the EQII winter holiday event "Frostfell" has arrived, with more quests to do and more items to craft, in addition to many of the old familiar ones from previous years, and I played some catch up on these this weekend also.  It's interesting to watch how Frostfell has evolved over time.  A couple of years ago one of the daily presents that you could get by talking to one of the holiday NPCs was a collection of snowglobes: visit the NPC each day, and you could eventually collect a whole set of snow globes with different scenes inside them from around the world.  The first year they were introduced there were just two: Freeport and Qeynos.  The year after that a whole bunch more were added, and since you could collect the entire set of them on every alt, it became a bit problematic where to put them all.

When players started posting screenshots on the housing forum showing how they'd built entire rooms within their homes using nothing but snow globes, we started to think that perhaps we'd given out enough snow globes, so the following Frostfell season there were no more snowglobes offered.  The NPC who'd formerly given them out was changed so he would just say sadly that someone had beaten him up and taken all his snowglobes away, and a different NPC gave out the presents that year.  But players started asking what happened to the original NPC, why were his snowglobes taken away, who did it?  This led our live events guru, Kaitheel, to introduce a new quest line this year allowing players to help the snowglobe NPC and find out the answer to who took his snow globes and why.  I love watching this kind of growth and interactive development of content within our game.

Another exciting thing for me in EQII this week was the start of the city festivals!  This is a small monthly live event that for now is a simple merchant fair that will be visiting each of our player starting cities for one week each month, one city per month. The original idea wasn't mine, and the early implementation was started by devs Kaitheel and Windslasher, but when they both got called onto other more urgent projects, I found a little time to implement the base version that will, with luck, be built upon by others over time.

The Far Seas Trading Company, a ubiquitous presence anywhere in Norrath there's profit to be made, rolls up a little caravan to the city of Kelethin (this month) and sets up a small market row selling food, drink, festival clothing, and fine furnishings they think may be of interest to the city's residents.  (There are specialized items tailored to each city, as well as some common items shared by all.)  There are also some basic quests to do, as well as "flavor" NPCs to add interest to the setting.  EQ2 Traders has some great write ups as usual, even though the festival isn't particularly tradeskill-related.

I've learned that the little touches of flavor are hugely effective in making a quest or event seem "real" and "fun" or not, so I had some fun adding in a few characters that I thought might be drawn to fairs like this.  There are workers, of course, who generally just stand around chatting amongst themselves and making comments on the profitability of the venture.  One nearby (not shown) offers some quests, and the crier (above) wanders around announcing the fair has arrived and gathering attention.

There's a fortune teller who'll charge you gold and tell your fortune for the month.  She'll only give you one fortune per month, but it's different for each character.  I had a lot of fun thinking up some Onion-esque horoscope type fortunes for her, and I hope players will enjoy discovering them all as the months pass.

And some fire breathers to put on an entertaining show, and occasionally some terrible comments:

The festival layout is similar but slightly different in each city depending on the location, of course.  Mostly the Far Seas traders travel by caravan, but of course, when they head for Gorowyn, it's an island, so they may need a boat instead... I tried to suit the layout to the city in each case.  Here's a section of the market row from the festival in Qeynos, which was on Test server prior to the update.  They too have random call-outs (on a timer, so it's not too spammy) and emotes to make them feel more alive and real.

As always, one of my biggest challenges was coming up with names for the characters.  In this particular case, if you're curious for more details, I talked briefly about how I picked some of these names on the G.I.R.L. blog back in October.

All in all, it's just a little event without a huge significance to the game's overall story.  But it's one more thing of many intended to make the world feel more alive and dynamic, give people something to look forward to each month, and keep things interesting.  I'm glad I had the chance to lend a hand to the live event team, on a number of events this year, since live events are something that I really enjoy and value in the games I play, and I feel they're very important to a game like ours.  I'm looking forward to seeing how the city festivals develop over the coming years, whether it's done by me or by the normal live events team!

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.

Beware of Flying Halflings

Not really tradeskill related, but I was on EQ2's Test Server tonight while another developer, Gninja, was asking for volunteers to test out a new fight that's going into the game soon. So I joined the raid as they were short some people. Unfortunately I was a little overzealous about equipping myself well enough, put on some of the best items in the game, stole aggro from the tank, and discovered that halflings can in fact fly. Way, way up in the air.

Here's me rapidly gaining distance from the long-suffering tank (Oggiee) and about to come into close contact with a treetop.


The handy little hate-meter on the right shows that yes, I do in fact have 100% of the target's hate focused on me at the moment, thank you very much. =)

(And if you're wondering why there's a huge heal going off on me as I fly, it's because this was the last try at the fight and Gninja was trying to stop me from dying.)

Happily, the fight is still in the process of being tuned up before it will see the light of live servers, and I also proved that halflings are still quite aerodynamic despite what certain unenlightened people may say about our fondness for pies!