This should now be live in game.
-Naylie, in one of the LDON forum threads
Oh, for a simple declarative sentence! Did she mean one expansion, both expansions, or something else?
Released Together?
Why couldn’t she have written, “LDON and LoY are now live in game!” Don’t they teach the value of a clarity in school any more? Her statement was in a thread that was only about LDON.
After a morning of grousing in the forums about LDON not unlocking when expected, Naylie, the EQ Community Manager, posted around 3pm Pacific Time that development was looking into the issue. Then about two hours later she posted the message quoted at the top of this post.
I mention this because, of course, the very next message in the thread was about LDON NPCs not being available yet. And nobody went to the forums with the unlock message. And, even the next morning, neither LDON or LoY are lit up as being unlocked on the progress chart, though people are clearly doing LDON content.
LDON Content
Which leaves me wondering what is unlocked and what is not.
Of course, part of the problem is that I am attempting to track and report on the progress of the Fippy Darkpaw progression server without actually being subscribed to the game. That means I cannot post to the forums nor can I log in to the game to make a few simple checks that would verify that the expansions are live.
If I could see a froglok in game, the race introduced with Legacy of Ykesha, or find the LDON NPCs (or get the message inviting me to come visit them) then I would have positive proof that both expansions were up.
Instead, I am going to take the cessation of complaints as the indicator that both expansions went live yesterday afternoon.
So that would make the timeline for the Fippy Darkpaw server something like this so far:
- Classic EverQuest competed, February 24, 2011
- Ruins of Kunark unlocked, June 6, 2011
- Ruins of Kunark completed, June 19, 2011
- Scars of Velious unlocked, August 29, 2011
- Scars of Velious completed, September 14, 2011
- Shadows of Luclin unlocked, November 21, 2011
- Shadows of Luclin completed, December 4, 2011
- Planes of Power unlocked, February 13, 2012
- Lost Dungeons of Norrath unlocked, March 12, 2012
- Legacy of Ykesah unlocked, March 12, 2012
Which leaves us looking towards the Gates of Discord, the next expansion on the list. At this point I am not sure when we should expect the vote on it to go live. Was the timer for it triggered by the completion of the Planes of Power bosses? Will it be triggered only after LDON and LoY bosses are complete?
I suppose I will just have to watch the forums and see what happens.
At least the PoP/LDON/LoY group appears to be the only exceptions to the “one expansion at a time” plan. Hopefully that will lead to a bit less confusion on my part.
Meanwhile, EverQuest is set to go free to play on Friday. Not that that will help me. The progression servers require a gold membership, which is a classic subscription.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I’ve just made a Foglok Paladin on Fippy. A /who all froglok search finds a dozen frogloks online. Three of them are level 65, which would be the current level cap.
My froglok started at the refugee camp in Rathe Mountains, which means the Progression servers must be skipping the whole trolls-kicked-out-of-Guk storyline.
I also had to remake the first froglok I made because I ended up in the Mines of Gloomingdeep. I thought the tutorial came after LoY. When did they add that back to the prog servers? Maybe it there all along and I was just more careful when I made my necro.
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@Bhagpuss – That is a good question. When did the tutorial come into the game?
When I came back to the game just before The Serpent’s Spine, it had been in for a while, as how to exit the zone had changed and the old way was listed on most sites I checked.
Over at Zam, the page about the zone has comments back to March 2005, which would put it at least in the Dragons of Norrath time frame.
But a quick pass with Google did not turn up a specific expansion. Did it get added to the game outside of the expansion cycle? The time between Planes of Power and Serpent’s Spine is something of a black hole for me.
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Well it was pretty hard to track down but I found it eventually. Here’s the incredibly patronizing patch note from May 27th 2004.
“Tutorial
– Does your significant other find EQ too hard to learn? Our new Tutorial is Live and ready to teach them to play.
Creating a new character will give you the option to go through the new tutorial. You can choose to leave the tutorial
at anytime and can return until your character reaches level 5. The tutorial will walk you through gameplay with easy
to follow instructions in text and voice. ”
That was after Gates of Discord and not all that long before Omens of War so it’s on Fippy out of sequence. The problem with the prog servers from my perspective isn’t so much that they are half-assed bodge jobs, which they are. It’s that they don’t include any of the really good stuff.
What I really want is to be able to do the Rude Individuals/Plague event again, or the invasion of Firiona Vie, or the Dark version of Lesser Faydwer. Just opening the expansions in order doesn’t really have the nostalgia factor.
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IIRC, the Gates of Discord picked up the storyline left off in Ykesha. Never finished that module; sadly the guild had pretty much dissipated by then.
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