Remember my rant the other day about quitting World of Warcraft because of the treadmill and virus feeling? Well, ever since I've reactivated my Station Pass, the same feeling is growing for EverQuest II. But compared to World of Warcraft, EverQuest II offers a lot more than just the treadmill and virus feeling. Lets take a closer look... First off, EverQuest II is clearly made with the RPG part of MMORPG in mind. Aside from doing quests only, there are numerous additions to the game compared to World of Warcraft. Just look at things as learning NPC languages, gathering collections and not to forget the whole alternate advancement system. The gameplay of EverQuest II is actually extremely deep compared to most themepark MMORPGs out there. My problem though is that the questing (which still holds the major part of the gameplay) is just to generic. Most of the quests out there are the regular 'Kill 10 rats' packed in different ways, and this kinda makes me sad. I know, it's called EverQuest for a reason, but the questing part should be more than just killing rats The treadmill feeling is somewhat less there in EverQuest II. As said before, it's called EverQuest for a reason, and it holds a couple of areas for every level range to play in. So if you're fed up with one area, you can just hop to the other one. That is, if you're still in need of XP to level. The need of XP to level (which includes the alternate advancement system) are the two things that make EverQuest II so unique. You can set your own leveling speed from fast (and gain little to no AA) to extremely slow (and gain a lot of AA). I always set my AA rate somewhere between 50% and 75% so that my characters do not level too fast. After all, I've paid for a lot of content in EverQuest II and I do want to play it Anyways, back to the hamster-problem... Because of the AA system you can set your need for new content and the need to keep playing the same. If you've set your AA gain very low, you'll be faster at the maximum level (as far as leveling speed is fast in EverQuest II). This way you do not have the need of staying in the same area and do repeatable quests over and over again, as well as constantly killing the same monsters. But, when you're faster at the level cap, you'll be in the raiding 'end-game' earlier and thus have your treadmill there quicker. On the other hand, if you've set your AA high, you can play a lot of content and have the content and monster treadmill active. With the lack of different kind of quests in the game, you'll be killing the 10 rats as your slowly progressing treadmill... Then of course, there are the other activities in EverQuest II which help you break the treadmill feeling. Some do need you to enter the treadmill a bit (like learning the NPC languages), while others will drop you in a different treadmill (like progressing your crafting skills). But all these other activities do have the need to go out in the world and acquire the needed stuff to do these activities. I think it's clear for me that EverQuest II is too generic in general for me. I like it how deep the game is at most points, but it all comes down to the same. Is it just me, or am I too picky about the MMORPGs I play after all this time..?

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I understand that when a MMORPG goes on through time, certain aspects of the game will change. With the latest expansion of EverQuest II this is the case as well. The way Alternate advancement is handled has changed dramatically all AA points have been refunded. This means I have to re-spec (again...). One of the biggest changes is that now you can't dump all of your AA points into just one part of your tree. Instead the partial trees appear to be limited (probably linked to your level). Right now on my Beastlord (level 30) I have 52 AA in total available, but the two trees (Animalist and Beastlord) both allow me only to drop 50 AA in it, while my Troubador (level 35) had a total of 65 AA available (damn, I've been busy collecting AA on her) but also has the same 50 AA point limit per tree and the same goes for my Necromancer (level 20) who has only 22 AA points so far Anyhow, with the AA points re-spec'd (for all 3 characters) it's time for me to head out into the world of Norrath again. For now I'll play the Beastlord alone and might pick up the Troubarod later on as well. But with the Beastlord I saw that I have 2 dozen quests or so waiting to be done, and I have no clue anymore where I have to complete them. More over, I also need to 'learn to play' EverQuest 2 again in general as well, with the most important 'learning point' being the skills and which chains to which. Last but not least, I have to find a guild again. I appear to have been kicked from my old one (or I left telling not to return to EverQuest 2 ) and I saw 3 of the members are still on my friendlist. Lets hope they're still playing and that I'm welcome to return...

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Starting Monday, August 27th, 2012, we will no longer accept Station Cash as a payment method for Expansions and DLC Packs. Real-world currency will be the only way to purchase these products. The reason for this is simply that these products require a high level of development resource and are therefore a substantial cost. We want to continue to run aggressive Station Cash promotions, which we know our customers love, but cannot continue to do this and protect the revenue that we need to offset these costs. In consideration of our players who would like the opportunity to purchase current Expansion and DLC Packs with Station Cash, we are running a 50% discount on them from Friday August 10th until Sunday August 12th*. As always, if you have questions about your Station Account or Station Cash Balance, please contact customer service at http://www.soe.com/support. Source: EverQuest II website What does this message mean exactly? Like with Turbine's Lord of the Rings online, you get a 500 cash-shop tokens (SC for $O€ games and TP for Turbine games - I will speak of SC in this article since it concerns $O€ games here) when you are a subscriber. These SC can be exchanged for (mostly) fluff-items in the cash shop. Really, when you're a subscriber you don't actually need the items from the cash shop, so the SC will stock up. Just look at my Lord of the Rings online account, I have over 10K TP there already and I don't really use them at all - I only use them to purchase the latest expansions (though I did pre-order Riders of Rohan since I'd get a 6th bag on every character on my account). With EveryQuest II you used to be able to buy a month's subscription from SC (1500 SC for a month, much like the physical cards would give), but this was removed earlier this year already. And in the past you also were able to buy expansions from the SC (I bought one this way for EQ2). But this is no longer possible now. $O€ now rewards their loyal subscribers with a 500SC (they most likely used to stock up to buy the next expansion) and forces them to buy fluff-items they don't really need. On top of that, $O€ now also forces their loyal subscribers to purchase the expansions as well for €50 (regular edition) or €80 (deluxe edition). This while $O€ claims that EverQuest II (and all their other titles) is a FREE2PLAY game these days. I don't know about you, but for a FREE2PLAY game, $O€ really knows how to milk their customers

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I know I've bashed that upcoming transition when I heard of it. But looking at things now, it's not all that bad for several reasons... The most important reason that it's not bad, is that I am able to change my account name. Though this might sound odd, after the April 2011 hacks of the PSN & SOE networks, hackers knew my logon name. To get extra security for my SOE account, I was somewhat forced to buy an authenticator (for €17 incl. s&h), but that still didn't give me a save feeling. But now with the transition to ProSiebenSat.1 I picked a new (and for the hackers unknown) account name. Then there's the price of the SC (SOE sells Station Cash, and  ProSiebenSat.1 sells SevenCoins - I'll talk about SC in general). At first glance the prices seem the same, or even those of ProSebenSat.1 a bit higher. But when you recalculate to equal numbers of SC bought, SOE is about 10% more expensive than ProSebenSat.1. And then of course is the way of payment. With SOE you didn't have much choice to pay for your SC. It was either cradircard, PayPal or SMS (not whown on the SOE screenshot). With ProSebenSat.1 you have a lot of options to pay, aking it possible for the majority of the European players to obtain SC. One note though, using SMS is cheaper with SOE Then there is the customer support thing. I know how SOE handles tickets - rather well, but pretty slow on average when things get complicated. It took them months to correct problems with my account, a problem that occurred twice. Now that DC Universe online has been transited already, things didn't go well with my account (I'm not surprised...). I aught to have a Premium status, but somehow that's not transited, or it was not right flagged on my SOE account. I made a ticket with ProSebenSat.1 and got a default answer at first, explaining how to transit my account *WTF???* Replying on that one (quite harsh, because how could I know I'm not Premium now if I didn't transit yet?), made them dive deeper into my account, asking SOE about the payments I made for DCUO in the past. I keep my hopes up for ProSebenSat.1 customer service There is a possible bad thing though about the transition... Logging on to the SOE MMORPG's goes through ProSebenSat.1. So far it's now known how the 'forward' to the SOE servers is done. Will it be done through a proxy on ProSebenSat.1, or will we connect directly? I mean, will be get extra servers in between (and possebly lag) or will we keep the old (lack of) performance we were used to..?

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I'm not sure what kind of accounting software $O€ uses, but I can tell you that it is bugged like hell! As I said 2 days ago, my account is unbanned and my 3-month subscription started on June 20. That would mean that it'd end on September 19. And when I looked at it 2 days ago, that day indeed was set as ending date for my subscription. To keep the right for the monthly 500SC, I've setup a monthly subscription which would start on September 20 (once again, I checked that as well 2 days ago). I don't know why, but this morning I checked my $O€ account again, and saw to my surprise that the 1st monthly subscription date was changed. Don't ask me how, but this time I have no clue why my account is screwed. Last time I know what I did (not telling you though ), but this time I really didn't do a thing at all! There is one thing though. I'm afraid to make this a support ticket because my name has come up with $O€ account problems twice already, and I fear if I tell $O€ about this but that I might bet a permanent ban. So right now I'll keep things quiet (ahum, blogging here and linking to twitter ) and see where things will go from here. Not to mention, with the upcoming transition to ProSevenSat.1 this error might even go down into the books, where ProSevenSat.1 pays the remaining months from the moment the transition will happen till the ending date 10 months from now. ...lets just wait and see what will happen

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Guild-hoppers, don't you hate them? I did hate them in Lineage II, where certain players hopped from one 'top-clan' to the other. Of one I even made the comment that he hopped clan more than I changed underwear Well, in EverQuest II it's my turn to hop guilds. Since I started to play again last month, I've left my 2nd guild and went for the 3rd one already. Why..? It has nothing to do with PvP for that matter, but more about the guild activity... The 1st guild I left was an old level 90 guild but had only 1 other active player at my playing hours (mostly my mornings, thus just past midnight in Eastern US). I guess that guild was more an Western US guild than it was an East-coast one... The 2nd guild I stayed with for a week or 3 (and then my account got banned ), but wasn't very active. I stayed because it was a 'low level' guild (22 when I entered) and wanted to see how guild-growth went in EverQuest II. But when I returned this morning, I was alone online, and checking the recent activity (a very good option in EverQuest II, showing it for the last day, week or month), and I saw that with me only 4 players were active lately and the last one to have logged on was 5 days ago More importantly, one girl (well, she claims to be girl RL, and after a chit-chat I do beleave her to be a her ) wasn't even one of the 4 of that last week. So time to leave them as well (too bad, can't see guild-growth now in EverQuest II). Now my new guild is one I picked for the name: OldSchool. Yeah, that's right, the same name as one of my 1st clans in Lineage II on that private server I played on. One of the demands to join is to be at least 30 years old (no problem there with me being 43 already ). And with that rather high age requirement (normally it's 18 or 21) I figured that they might be a good bunch to stay along with. Right after I joined, I looked at the current number of players on, and that was good - 9 (claiming it was not even peak-hours for them). The chat in the guild felt good (not only the 'gratz' on drops / achievements), and from the looks of the chat, they higher levels are quite helpful. There's only one bad thing about this guild. They're level 90 already, so I can't 'help' to let the guild grow anymore...

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Yesterday late my account was finally unbanned again, but it didn't go that easy, nor did things really go right... Lets start with (not) easy... As I've said, I made my (re)payment directly to Global Collect for the 3-month subscription on June 30, the moment I received the eMail that the other payment had been recharged by the bank. Yeah, I know, old account number, shit happens, and $O€ bans me AFTER I've notified them of my mistake If all things were right, then $O€ would have notified Global Collect about my upcoming payment (or request a new ID for it, whatever), and computers will do the rest automated. But nooo... $O€ are a bunch of @sses and only ask me to depisit my €34,47 directly into Global Collect's bank-account under some ID, and as expected, things don't go as they should... On July 4 I call Global Collect (thank God it's am free 0800-number) and explain the things. The service representative I spoke can't check the bank-statements, but will make it a ticket. Two days later I receive an eMail that all is well and my €34,47 is forwarded to $O€ and I should be able to play again shortly. Again: Noooo.... Two days later, my $O€ support ticket about my account is still open (even after an update I made) and my account still banned, so I reply to the Global Collect eMail telling them that I still can't play and asking them to contact $O€ for me. That they did (by exception BTW). Again 2 days pass, but I finally get an extremely short eMail from $O€ support that my account has been released (and the ticket closed). Indeed, all but easy and it took over 2 weeks for $O€ to get my account unbanned, while things could have been a lot easier since I was the one offering to settle the error I made an easy way... Aside from 2 weeks not being able to play EverQuest II, there are a couple things that went wrong. For starters, the moment my account was banned, I lost around 300SC, which have not been refunded yet. But since I've been playing for free for such a long time, I won't bug them about that at all Then there's still the 1 month PlanetSide subscription that's running. An other thing I won't bug them about since I'm totally not interested in that crappy game. And lastly the (new) starting date of my 3-month subscription. That's been set to June 20, 11 days after I originally started playing EverQuest II again. Basically I've 'lost' 3 days of subscription because of this whole fuzz. Again, not bothering about it because I've played for free for such a long time And how further now..? I do like EverQuest II, but I most certainly dislike $O€ even more than I already did. Luckily the European services will be handed over to ProSevenSat.1 Games in about 30 days. Though I have little fate in them (they have 7Games), I will be able to keep playing on the US servers, so only the way to logon will be a bit different I guess. I do hope that their customer service will be better than $O€'s and their subscription as good as that what $O€ offers. On the other hand, why bother About EverQuest II that much? I mean, Late August, Guild Wars 2 will be released, I still have to play some Guild Wars for the nice (cosmetic) rewards and in September/October Lord of the Rings online's expansion Riders of Rohan will be released (which I will certainly play). By the looks of it, I just don't have enough time to play EverQuest II after next month

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It looks like $O€ is in no hurry to take any action for my account. After the ban I received on it, I made the payment ASAP as $O€ instructed me, but that didn't really help much... The payment I had to make was directly into GlobalCollect's account under a specific reference. But after a couple of days when I tried to trace that payment on GlobalCollect's website (with the reference ID used), the payment was totally unknown. Calling GlobalCollect myself didn't fix the problem either, but they did make a ticket to resolve my problem. Last Friday at 9.10am I received an eMail from GlobalCollect confirming that they did forward my payment to $O€ and that $O€ should now be able to reinstate my account. Yet later that evening (early day for the US where $O€ resides) my account was still banned So I decided to update my ticket yet again... Well, it looks like $O€ doesn't hold any interest in my account anymore since June 29th when they lastly updated the status of my 'Customer Service support' ticket. Where they used to respond within 48 hours, things seem to go back to the previous account problems that I had and (as predicted), $O€ has lost track of my ticket and it's not looked at anymore. But as I've said twice already in my 'Customer Service support' ticket, I will cancel ALL PAYMENTS I've made for $O€ the last 6 months by creditcard and they can shove their games. Though I hope it won't come to it, it's getting awfully close to the creditcard payment day, and if by that time $O€ hasn't solved my account problems by both lifting the ban of my EverQuest II account as well enabling to resubscribe again (as if I will EVERY resubscribe to $O€ games again...), payments will be revoked by me. Oh yeah, and in my last ticket update I did warn them to SPAM social media with warnings to other players about $O€'s 'great Customer Service'. My advice: DO NOT PLAY $O€ GAMES EVER AGAIN, OR AT LEAST DO NOT PAY THEM A DIME!

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At times I wonder how SOE works with their customer service and management. Having trouble with my account for the last few days, today I received the message that my account was (temp) banned due to the charge back that happened. Wel, DUHUH! I informed them of the wrong bank-account used 4 days ago asking them that I could correct it, and ever since I was not able to do a thing with the account, other than logon and see my account was set to FREE again. This while I bought a SILVER status in September 2010. This also makes me wonder why I wasn't able to make any payments and only got banned the moment that customer service had time to look at my support ticket. I'm wondering if I didn't make a ticket, if I could still be playing EverQuest II or not Well, at least I'm given a chance to correct the charge back (which I already did, I did make the payment of € 34.47 the moment I received the eMail this morning) and I hope that my account will be reinstated ASAP. But there are 3 other things as well that SOE does need to look into as well though:   1. I'm still missing my SILVER status for EverQuest II (I guess it'll be 'given back' when my account is 'unbanned')   2. I am missing about 250SC since June 26th, the moment that the problems with my account started. I'm also hoping to get 500SC twice for July & August's subscription (it's not on auto-renew atm)   3. Why on earth is my account set with a PlanetSide subscription for 1 month (could not care less about that game Lets hope SOE will solve this ticket quickly, so that I can play EverQuest II again. But knowing SOE's customer support with my previous account problems, it might take them some time (4 months at the time) to correct any errors on my account. I'll keep you informed...

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Sometimes I wonder why I keep returning to SOE games, when their systems are bugged like hell. Remember last year when my SOE account was screwed (in a positive manner for me though)? Well, SOE is at it again, but this time it's in a negative way (and partly my fault, I admit...) What happened..? Well, I took a 3-month EQ2 subscription and by accident I used an old account-number for the direct debit (this also might explain the weird password errors I had lately). When I found out about my error, I made it a support ticket, telling them of my mistake, and asking them to correct it so that I can resubscribe with the right account-number. Well, SOE did to part of my request of the support ticket. The subscription has been removed, but the error I get when trying to make a purchase is still there. No matter what I do or try, I'll end up with the above error. Trying to subscribe to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (which I wanted to try for an other month) gives it, and renewing my subscription for EverQuest II (I want to add a year's subscription this time) gives it as well. Oddly enough, all of a sudden I do have a running subscription for Planetside for which I've never taken a subscription. I do hope SOE will fix this account problem ASAP, but knowing them from the last time, it'll take them forever to fix it. If indeed SOE is not able to fix this problem, I will withdraw my recent creditcard payments (Age of Discovery expansion and 2500SC), but I hope it doesn't have to get this far...

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