A little while ago Sony announced that EQ2 will have an integrated voice chat system. In the most recent game update (47)- it went live.

The Setup

The first thing I noticed when I logged in after the patch was the voice wizard that took me through how to setup everything. To my surprise, EQ2 handled my Logitech headset (use an amazon link to the side to support eqjunkies.com!) without any problems.

The Interface

The voice interface within the game was fairly nice. It has everything you need at your finger tips. It has the channel window, so you know what channels are available to you, and who is in them. This something that is really nice to have in game instead of in Ventrilo/Teamspeak; when you are grouping with people for the first time you can figure out who is who.

The Quality

The quality is on par with Ventrilo (which has better quality than TS in my opinion). I didn’t notice anything about the quality that was a drop off to me.

Troubleshooting

There were a few Mic/speaker settings that I had to tweak, but the “FIX” button seemed to do all the fixing automatically, which…is amazing. Maybe they should create a “FIX” button for other things too.

Final Thoughts

I am very impressed with the initial release of voice chat. This is a great baseline that they are starting from; I look forward to seeing what they do in the future with this.

Last night Myclawz and myself hopped online to get into some long awaited playtime.  Since he was only level 8, I traveled over to DLW to help him quest a little.  As I zoned in I turned on mentoring so he could continue to earn exp as we did things.  I met him just a little outside of the city gates and we immediately moved over to a hut to get a bunch of quests.

This was about the time that I remembered one important fact: I am not an evil race.  A level 25 heroic guard came over and killed me.  Great - I think I deserved that for being stupid.  The really sad thing is that it gave me a few options of where to spawn, one of which was 0.0 meters away.

Without putting much thought into it I clicked revive; I spawned in the center of the huts.  The guard ran over and immediately killed me again.  Being stubborn I kept spawning in this spot until I was able to run away from the guard…it took me about 3 trys.

This reminded me of back in the EQ1 days where you could literally bind yourself anywhere (including over lava).  I had a few friends who decided to keep killing themselves until they were low level again (but with awesome weapons).  I also had a few friends who found themselves on PoFear corpse runs which never ended well.

What is your best corpse recovery/death loop story?

I received an email this morning regarding Blizzard’s new recruiting program.  The system they had in place before seemed reasonable - a veteran player received a month of free play time for each recruit they referred.  Blizzard just stepped things up to make it ridiculous; veteran players now receive the following benefits:

Free Mount

For each recruit a veteran player recruits they gain a free in game mount.

This is slightly unfair, but definitely the least offensive part of this promotion.  Mounts are so easy to come by these days I don’t think this will get to many people upset.

Summoning Ability (for 90 days):

The veteran player and their recruit will have the ability to summon each other anywhere in Azeroth (below level 60).  It seems this ability will be similar to hearthstones, carrying a one hour cooldown.

This seems like a distinct advantage over ‘normal’ players; if I were still playing I would become upset over this.  There are lots of times that having this ability would have come in handy.  I don’t think it is fair that this ability is only available to those that give Blizzard more money through referrals - as though their 15/month isn’t enough for them already.

Triple Experience (90 days)

While experiencing with your recruit both of you will receive triple experience for both quests and monster kills.  This triple experience can not be stacked with rest exp, or with multiple recruits in the group.

This is an obvious advantage over other players (who don’t recruit people).  Imagine if you were new to WoW and did not recruit anyone.  Even if you played 24/7, you could group with someone one day and they could be 3x your level the next just because they were a recruit.  This would turn me off quickly.

Free Levels (90 days to give)

Literally.  Every two levels the recruit gets, they have the ability to grant a lower level character on the veteran’s account a level.

They literally don’t have to do anything!  It is feasible with this model that a veteran could level up a character to 60 without even leaving their home city.  This is ridiculous!  I don’t know why Blizzard thought this would be a good idea, but it is not.  This will strike up a lot of animosity between ‘normal’ players and people who recruit like crazy.

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I can say one thing for certain - I am happy I quit WoW to return to EQ2 back in early June.  It seems that Blizzard is dead set on making WoW as easy as possible for people. Unfortanetly for them, I think they missed the mark on this one.  I believe this is going to create more ill will between the player base & Blizzard than it will do good.

Why is Blizzard doing this?  Are they sensing that their reign on top of the MMO mountain is coming to an end?  Are they feeling the pressure from the release of WarHammer?  Are they just plan losing it?

I don’t know - but they need to do something to fix this soon.  I will leave you with this thought:

In America each person is created equal, apparently in Azeroth this isn’t the case.  Some people are 3x better off…

Fear the rock

So here’s a lulzy little bug: after dishing out some voice chat loving in LU47, it appears that Sony has made a slight error in the way that npc’s are handled by the new voice chat UI.

Players are reporting that in some instances, normal NPC’s and even harvesting nodes are appearing with voice chat bubbles over their heads, as though they were using voice chat to speak to the player.

Now, we all know that Sony shelled out big bucks to implement voiceovers for most quest NPC’s in the game, but I’m guessing that those schools of fish over there are not on the payroll.

Apparently this bug has already been fixed on test, but until a hotfix rolls around, enjoy the serious trippiness in game as the animal dens attempt to talk to you.

The patch notes are out (EQ2 Flames)!  They have outlined some of the big changes:

• Station Voice is now available!
• Equipment changes have been introduced to improve item progression from levels 1 – 59 worldwide.
• Check out the sections below for details on these highlights and other details of “Storm Break” (GU47).

LIVE EVENTS

• “Storm Break” (GU47): Librarian Feldarn of Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science and Librarian Dungil of Qeynos’ Concordium are looking for volunteers to help battle the onslaught of darkness from beyond.
• Qeynos and Freeport have broken ground on major construction projects just off of the coast of Antonica and Commonlands respectively. Visit the docks to see the new activity!

STATION VOICE

• A new Voice Bar will appear that provides options and indicates who is currently speaking and when you’re talking. It can be docked with any chat windows.
• A new Voice Users window will show all users in the current channel. This window can be changed to be transparent and show only active speakers if you’d like.
• Group and Raid windows have speaking indicators to show who is currently speaking.
• Voice options are available in the Options Menu under the “Voice Chat” tab.
• If you’re not currently in a voice channel, you will be placed in the first channel that becomes available. Subsequent channels that become available can be selected through a drop down on the Voice Users window, a button on the Voice Bar, or a link that appears in text chat.
• Left Control is the default push-to-talk key. You can change the key in the “Voice Chat” tab of the Options Menu.
• If you need more info, do “/help vchat” in game.

I am excited to log in tonight and see if any of my 1-59 items have increased in value and also to check out the voice chat.  I’ll make a post soon with a review of the voice chat system.

Last night Xailia, Landuran, Myclawz, Greldor, and a random 6th (alt of a retired player) created a new guild: “Eqjunkiies” on the Oasis server.  We tried to create “EQjunkies”, but SOE doesn’t allow the word “junkie” in the naming policy.  Anyways, we plan on having a casual guild for now - working up the guild level and populating our guild bank.

If you are a follower of eqjunkies.com and have an active EQ2 account look us up in game.   Are play time is kind of sporadic, so if you don’t see us online, just leave us a comment here.