Fippy Darkpaw – Pirates on the Horizon

I gave up trying to track the status of the EverQuest time-locked progression server Fippy Darkpaw about a year back.  Basically, I had long stopped playing on the server and keeping track of how things were moving along became increasingly difficult.  The server timeline, still linked on the EverQuest web site, has been broken since the game went free to play on its 13th birthday.  And SOE has shown no interest in promoting the server since the run up to its launch, so they never mention any change on the server ever.  I speak as someone who has subscribed to every SOE new channel he can find.

I was depending mostly on the forums, since each unlock appeared to have problems and would, thus, generate forum posts.  But SOE eventually fixed that as well, reducing forum content to bug complaints, demands for new classic and/or progression servers, and requests to merge/not merge the Vulak server, which is dead/just fine, with Fippy Darkpaw.  The dearth of timely news made me give up my quest to actively cover all updates and expansion unlocks.

However, once in a while a nugget of information still shows up unbidden.  For example, the good people at FippyDarkpaw.com, an external site devoted to the server, recently posted this update.

[Tue Sep 17 22:56:41 2013] <SYSTEMWIDE_MESSAGE>:The barrier to The Buried Sea begins to shimmer. The Priests of Discord have news for you.

Expect the vote to open on Monday.

That means that The Serpent’s Spine is on its way out and the EverQuest pirate expansion, The Buried Sea, will likely be unlocked very soon, featuring a meaner, more scantily clad Firiona Vie.

Pirate Firiona

The Fippy Darkpaw server is now returning to a time when I was actually playing EverQuest again, during what I guess I would call the age of Norrathian nostalgia.  I came back for The Serpent’s Spine, which was new so not really nostalgia I guess.  But it was a return to the old world.  And in the classic nostalgia pattern for me, I played for a bit and then went back to greener pastures.  So by the time The Buried Sea came out… which sounded suspiciously like Pirates of the Burning Sea… we were playing Lord of the Rings Online.  But we were talking about Pirates of the Burning Sea.  And The Buried Sea sounded nothing like that.

Not the EverQuest version

The Buried Sea came out during the end of the “twice a year” frantic EverQuest expansion cycle and was aimed primarily at those who were already high level and invested in the game.  It featured, if I recall right, a lot of faction work along with some new currencies and represented something of a “things to do” side path opposed to an evolution of the game.

With that, and a couple other updates I gleaned from the site, I was able to update my list of events for the Fippy Darkpaw server.

• Fippy Darkpaw server goes live with classic EQ content, February 15, 2011
• 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
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, May 7, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, May 21, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlock vote fails, June 4, 2012
• Gates of Discord unlocked at last, June 18, 2012
• Omens of War unlocked, September 10, 2012
• Omens of War complete, September 12, 2012
• Dragons of Norrath unlocked without a vote, November 13, 2012
• Prophecy of Ro completed, April 26, 2013
• The Serpent’s Spine unlocked, July 16, 2013
• The Serpent’s Spine complete, July 19, 2013

After The Buried Sea, there are only four more expansions on the list, as the timeline graphic only showed things going out to the House of Thule expansion.

Expansion List

And what will happen after that?  Will the server be merged into one of the standard servers, which was what happened with the original progression servers?  Will we see another round of progression servers?  Will we get that “classic” server that so many people want, but which nobody can quite define?

We shall see.  Updates here when and if they become available.

Great Moments in Exploits – The Ressurection

There were corpses all around the great fountain in Waterdeep.

Not that there aren’t usually a corpse or three sitting around there, preserved and waiting for a resurrection.  There was one there even as I started to write this.

Another day in Waterdeep

But this different.  This was a lot of corpses.  And they were all from the same player who, I recalled, was a high level barbarian warrior.

Even as I stood there pondering the corpses the warrior, whose name I cannot recall all these years later, entered the room and attacked the elite guard.  He was killed almost immediately and another corpse joined the pile.

This went on for a while, the corpse count growing, while several of us pondered what he was up to.  Was this an attempt at an epic rage quit?  Was he working on some sort of corpse based art project?  Was this some sort of science project?

After a while, with many corpses on the ground, he gave up and went away.  Somebody was casting preserve on the corpses so that they would not rot and disappear as quickly, but otherwise we had a bunch of empty player corpses and some speculation about what had just happened.

As it turned out, of our possible answer, the last one turned out to be correct.  It was MUD science in action.

The player in question had apparently discovered that, in the character database, the key unique value for any character was the character’s name, as opposed to some unique never-seen number.  And why not?  Names were supposed to be unique in the world.  So what linked anything in the world to your character… equipment, corpses, money… was your character’s name.

The player had also discovered that when you die, part of the information saved with the corpse was how much experience it should restore to you if you received a resurrection.  When you died, you lost 25% of the experience of your current level.  If you got a successful ress, about 80% of that lost experience was returned to you.

And, finally, the player had noticed that when you deleted a character, any corpses that character left behind remained in the game.  The corpses were not tied to the character but were just objects in the world related to the character only because they were flagged with the character name.

Do you see where I am going with this?

So the player had taken his level 50 barbarian warrior, a somewhat common sort of character in the game and one of the easier classes to get up to level 50, and turned it into a pile of experience laden corpses strewn about the streets of Waterdeep.

The player then deleted what remained of that character, leaving the corpses behind.

The player then rolled up a new character, an enchanter, one of the most in-demand and difficult to level classes in the game.  He gave this character the same name as the warrior he had just deleted.  This character and name was approved by the admins… the naming rules were rigorously enforced by the people who ran TorilMUD… sort of… and this fresh level 1 enchanter entered the world.

This newly minted magic user made his way to Waterdeep, where a friendly cleric began resurrecting the corpses left behind by the old character.  And it worked.  The enchanter leveled up rapidly with each resurrection.  The enchanter did not make it to level 50, or even level 40 if I recall right, but he got far enough into the level curve to get past the awkward “got no spells” and “got no useful spells” points in his career and straight into the “I have key spells that make me useful to a group” zone, wherein he could expect to find experience groups easily and be able to make his way to the level cap with some diligence.

Experiment success!

Except, of course, for the whole part where he got caught almost immediately by the game admins.

The admins get a little message every time somebody levels up if they have the right feed turned on.  So while I understand that the player in question waited until no admins were visible online, there were a couple on that were hidden.  And they swooped down on him right away.

Now, this did not happen in the bad old days, when he likely would have been banned for life from ever playing TorilMUD.  There was a time when the admins would ban whole blocks of IP addresses just to rid themselves of one person, occasionally screwing over somebody else in the process.  But he had still be caught red-handed using an exploit to his own advantage.  He lost his new enchanter, all his experience, and probably some equipment along the way.  He was no doubt put on probation and might have even been given a temporary ban.  But if I recall right, they did not actively seek to ban him for life or burn down his house or anything that might have happened if he had tried this in the early to mid 90s.

And, shortly thereafter, a fix went in that wiped out any corpses remaining in the world when you deleted a character.

Or so I recall.

That is the rub here.  This happened nearly a decade ago.  I was not directly involved.  Everything I heard at the time was second or third hand and might have included a fair amount of speculation being passed off as fact.  And, of course, my own memory might have enhanced the tale as well.  The details might be totally out of alignment with what actually happened, and if you know something, feel free to correct me in the comments.

The essence of the tale is true though.  Somebody got their character killed repeatedly, saved the corpses, deleted the character, created a new character with the same name, and received repeated resurrections that rapidly leveled up the new character.  And I was around for bits of the whole thing.  Well, at least the killing and corpses bit.

And the whole event certainly does say something about players.  I am sure that this is covered somewhere in Raph Koster’s list of Laws of Online World Design.

I had actually forgotten about this event in TorilMUD history.  I was only reminded of it when I read Psychodhild’s post about the reincarnation game mechanic in Dungeons & Dragons Online.  That trigger the memory of somebody really attempting to recycle a character in order to bring it back as something new.

Which brings up the question if players ought to be allowed to do something with level cap characters that they do not play any more.  Could you use that as a re-roll mechanism that bestowed some benefit or which acted as a gate to new content for another run to level cap?