Worst Tech Call Ever!

Re-enacted from just a few minutes ago.

*RING*
Me: IT Support.  This is Me.
Him: Hey.  Could you come here for a minute?
Me: Where is ‘here’ and what is the problem?
Him: I’m in the can taking a crap and I’m not getting e-mails on my Blackberry.

So sue me

With the revelation yesterday that Sony has registered what appears to be the expansion names for the next EQ and EQ2 expansions, theories and speculations are running rampant as to what those expansions will be.  I enjoy reading everyone’s ideas a great deal and am often quite impressed with how closely some people come to the reality and truth.

One of the biggest predictions for EQ2 is that this next expansion will be Luclin… or what is left of Luclin.  I have said often enough that I hope Luclin is never introduced to EQ2.  I’ve also been flamed and criticized for saying such things.

People were passionate about Luclin.  They were either passionate about loving it or passionate about hating it.  I definately fall on the “hating it” side.  But, for clarification, I will attempt to explain why as best I can.

The expansion itself was okay.  I enjoyed some of the zones.  I thought Sanctus Seru was absolutely beautiful while Katta Castellum made me feel like I had stepped into Gotham City.  Katta became one of my favorite zones.  Ssra was well constructed and interesting and The Grey that surrounded it had an ambience that the developers nailed.

There were zones that I disliked as well.  I found The Scarlet Desert difficult to look at simply because the way the sand was textured would hurt my eyes after a time.  I forget the names of all of the zones, but there were several with massive plants that I thought looked like they were drawn with a crayon by a 3 year old.

None of this has anything to do with why I have so much hatred for Luclin that it would probably carry over to EQ2 sight unseen if they reintroduced it however.

I hated Luclin because, in my opinion, it completely changed the landscape and was the precursor for shrinking the world.  No, I’m not talking about the teleport spires.  Let me see if I can explain.

I joined EQ after Kunark was released but before Velious.  I remember well what the game was like in those days.  I started my EQ life in Greater Faydark.  Most days, the zone would have 90+ people there hunting through the newbie areas.  When I transitioned into Crushbone, there were typically over 100 people in the zone.  Oasis of Marr averaged 120+ people.  Lake of Ill Omen would often break 200 people.

When Naggy and Vox popped, raids would form immediately and people anxiously maneuvered for position to be a part of the raid.  The Planes of Hate and Fear were raided constantly even after Velious was released.

The was a progression that most people went through.  They leveled up and geared up.  At 46, they started attending as many Planar and dragon raids as they could.  At 53, once they had outleveled Naggy and Vox, they started trying to get into Kael Arena raids or raids on the lesser bosses in Kunark like Venril Sathir.  Up until the day that Luclin was released, many guilds would still race to raid Trakanon, Gorenaire, and all of the other Kunark bosses when they would pop.  The Temple of Veeshan was a staple to progression and all guilds would go through their time in the Halls of Testing and then on to the North wing.

I’m not saying that spawn racing was a good thing.  In fact, it was something that I found quite annoying.  The point is that the content remained relevant.

That all changed with the release of Luclin.  From the original game to Kunark and from Kunark to Velious, there were minor jumps in gear quality.  In order to prepare for raiding in Kunark, your best chance of success was to gear up in the original content.  In order to prepare for raiding in Velious, your best bet was to gear up in Kunark.

Luclin introduced the first quantum leap forward in gear quality.  Suddenly, you had gear dropping in newbie yards that rivaled gear from Fear and Hate.  You had mid-level quest and drop gear rivaling Velious gear.  The minor bosses in Luclin dropped gear that far outstripped even the best gear from NToV except for Vulak gear.

The whole concept of the game changed.  People fled Norrath for Luclin.  Within days of Luclin being released, all of the leveling zones from the release, Kunark and Velious were ghost towns.  Zones like Palaudal Caverns were sporting populations of 300+ people screaming at each other for spawn stealing.  Mobs like Venril Sathir and Trakanon became immortal because they would spawn and stay up for weeks at a time because no one was interested.

Had Luclin followed the same path and only incrementally increased the quality of gear, things would have been different, but it was such a quantum leap forward that everything pre-Luclin became completely trivialized. 

Then, the dye was cast.  Each following expansion kept up with the massive leaps forward in gear quality.  It wasn’t long before old terrors like Gorenaire, who in the Velious days still took a full raid force and even then victory was not certain, became solo content.  The Avatar of War, who was once probably the most contested mob in the game, sat around wondering where all the love went.

My point of view is archaic and I freely admit that I’m a relic.  Many people want fast progression and fast loot.  I just preferred the old way of progressing through content rather than leap-frogging straight to the end game without experiencing all that came before.  It is not a popular belief and people like me are few and far between these days.

Still, right or wrong, I view the release of Luclin as the catalyst that began this paradigm shift and, as a result, I have nothing but ill feelings towards Luclin.

Yesterday, after expressing my hope that Luclin was not coming to EQ2, it was suggested that I was foolish if I thought an EQ2 Luclin would be exactly like EQ Luclin.  That isn’t it at all.  As I explained there, it is almost like a pavlovian response.  We associate sounds, smells, sights, and sounds with past experiences.  A particular smell can trigger a memory to a particularly bad moment in time and, regardless of how distant that memory is or what the current circumstance is, you almost can’t help slipping back when you pick up that scent again.

Luclin is similar to that for me.  It represents that I personally viewed as the absolute worst time in EQ history beyond even that Gates of Discord debacle.  For me, the very word “Luclin” will forever be associated with what I personally view as the decline in the game that I loved and a transition to a game that I played more for what it once was rather than what it had become.

It isn’t a rational chain of thought, but there it is.

However, the more I read various speculations, the more I come to believe that this next expansion will not be Luclin.  I personally favor the opinion that it might be an expansion that releases a collection of content such as Odus, The Hole, and some of the old Planes, but that is probably just because that is content that I loved in EQ.

The only truth is that we won’t know for sure until the development team tells us what it will be.

So, I guess my main curiosity right now revolves around what type of expansion will it be?  Desert of Flames was a high level expansion as was Kingdom of Sky.  The next 2 were all-level expansions.  I guess it stands to reason that, whever the expansion is that we will get this winter, it stands a good chance that it will be primarily, if not exclusively, a higher level content expansion.

I’ll just be content to wait and see.