Fippy Darkpaw – A Merger Too Late

Long has been the tale of the Fippy Darkpaw Time Locked Progression server and it has been quite some time since I last posted about it.

Fippy has been around for a while now

I started out playing on the Fippy Darkpaw server back when in launched in early 2011.  Potshot and I had our old school adventures for a time there.  And much fun was had. (You can click on the Fippy Darkpaw tag and scroll way down to read about us playing if that’s your thing.)  However the great big Sony hack that brought PSN and SOE games down for a couple of weeks killed our momentum and we fell out of the habit of playing and that was that.

But the server went on.  Such servers have their own lives.  I continued to follow major events on the server… votes and expansion unlocks… but at the time SOE was so bad at publicizing the server that I had to depend on people complaining in the forum about problems with new expansions to figure out when something changed.

I will say that Daybreak did get on board with their special servers and now broadcast updates prominently.  Good for them.

Eventually I gave up on following the server.  I made it to the Underfoot expansion in July of 2014 and that was about it.  Somewhere I said I would probably have two more posts at some future date, when Fippy Darkpaw merged with its twin the Vulak server and when the pair were eventually rolled into a live server.  That was the fate of the previous progression servers, The Sleeper and The Combine.

Now the first has come about, the Fippy Darkpaw server is slated to be merged with the Vulak’Aerr server in the latter half of October.  October 18th, to be specific.

My initial reaction was wonder that it took this long to get to a merger.

The two servers were the result of the usual unbounded enthusiasm that a new retro server tends to bring out in the EverQuest community.  That enthusiasm has a limit however.  After having two full servers for a short amount of time Daybreak/SOE tended to end up with one viable server and one sparsely populated one.  So people were calling for a Fippy Darkpaw/Vulak merger at least five years ago if not earlier.  But somehow the two marched forward on their own, probably more out of neglect than any actual plan.

Daybreak has since launched more such servers and has gone on to bring over multiple zone spawning technology from EverQuest II in order to handle the initial surge of players without having to double down on server creation.  The community split/merge problem has been reasonably addressed.

However, they still have two pairs of launch twins, Fippy Darkpaw/Vulak and Ragefire/Lockjaw.  The older pair now has a merger in their future and I expect that the newer pair will get the same treatment as well at some point.

The question, I suppose, is who will this impact?  Both sets of servers do not see much in the way of load these days.  There is a tendency to jump on the latest retro server when it shows up, and with Phinigel and Agnarr servers having shown up, a lot of people have moved on.  In my opinion the best part of any such server is everybody starting fresh.  But some community forms and sticks with servers even after the new server smell fades and the short term enthusiasts like myself wander off.

Anyway, something else to add to the tale of the Fippy Darkpaw server events.  According to the FAQ at the end of the announcement, the Fippy Darkpaw server is currently on The Darkened Sea expansion, which means it has only moved on five expansions since I last reported on it. That leaves only The Broken Mirror and Empires of Kunark to complete before catching up with the live servers.

My event list up until this point:

• 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
• The Buried Sea unlock vote goes up, September 23, 2013
• The Buried Sea unlocked, October 7, 2013
• The Buried Sea complete, October 9, 2013
• Echoes of Faydwer complete, ~end of January 2014
• Seeds of Destruction unlocked, May 1, 2014
• Seeds of Destruction complete, May 12, 2014
• Underfoot unlock vote fails, July 14, 2014
• Daybreak announces Fippy Darkpaw/Vulak merge – September 22, 2017

And so it goes.  It looks like there will be a couple more entries on this list before the server goes away.  Also, this was totally going to just be the last bullet point on the previous post until I realized that I had a tradition of over-long posts about the Fippy Darkpaw server to uphold.

Friday Bullet Points for the End of September

Another one of those round up posts to quickly cover some things I thought about working up posts around, but which never quite materialized.

CCP Closes the Gate

CCP announced that as of Wednesday the EVE Gate portal on the EVE Online site has been shut down.

You shall not log in!

The EVE Gate, for those who do not know… which is probably most people reading this… was a portal that allowed players to log in and access their in-game email and calendar.  It should not be confused with the in-game EVE Gate of lore, which is how humans first arrived in New Eden.

I’m not sure how big of a deal this really is.  I think I used it twice over the years.  I don’t get much in-game email really, as my corp, alliance, and coalition have other preferred communications methods.

Riverini returned to EN24 to write a post about the demise of EVE Gate.  As CCP notes, you can use their phone app or, if you want, you can use a third party app like Neocom.  I find the latter is much more useful overall, though it won’t let you send mail.

CCP is NOT Turning Japanese

Earlier this year CCP announced that they were cancelling their deal with Nexon for Japanese localization.  NEXON was a mixed bag for EVE in Japan, so CCP decided to carry on with a single Japanese speaking employee.  Sad for the Japanese community, but at least CCP was trying to carry on with support.

I want to hear Falcon read this in Vegas

However, things have taken a further turn as CCP has asked a lone Japanese speaking ISD member to stop translating patch notes and posting them to the forums.  The person in question was doing this on their own time, but CCP felt it was confusing as it was not officially sanctioned and there was some disagreement over the translations as converting EVE Online lore and mechanics from English to Japanese is problematic at the best of times.  The tale of this, with some translation examples, is in a Reddit thread.

Free Brittania!

Ultima Online has been celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, which I haven’t covered at all since I never played it.  I think Lord British and I parted ways at about Ultima V.

Welcome indeed

The game is still alive and rolling and trying to keep pace with the changes in the industry under Broadsword’s stewardship.  Over at Massively OP it was mentioned that, along those lines, Broadsword was looking into some sort of “free” option.  As the FAQ on the UO site indicates, free will mean giving up some options that I am sure any serious player would not want to do without.  The option is called the “Endless Journey” as is supposed to arrive in Spring 2018.

Expansions Coming to Norrath, But Not for Free

Both the EverQuest and EverQuest II sites have made it clear that we’ll be seeing the usual yearly expansions again for 2017.

For EverQuest it will be the Rings of Scale, while EverQuest II will be going old school again with the Planes of Prophecy.

We don’t know much beyond the names yet, but the usual warm up events have been kicking off and last year’s expansions are now 50% off for those late to the party.

One of the usual aspects of this phase is the addition of some past expansion to the free to play access level of the game.  Usually you can buy the latest and the previous expansion and everything before that is open for everybody.  But no longer.  As Massively OP reported (a pity Feldon isn’t around for this, he’d have done a nice full story on this), when asked when the soon to be in third place Terrors of Thalumbra expansion might be made free, the official response was:

We will not be adding anything further to the F2P line-up.

Harsh words, but perhaps the flip side of something Daybreak has said before.  The Planet Side 2 team opined in the past that there is a point of diminishing returns when piling on things for subscribers.  Now we’re seeing EverQuest II declining to remove something from the paid column.

I have not seen word as to whether the EverQuest expansion The Broken Mirror will face a similar path in not moving to the free zone, but I expect that will also be the case.

And that is it for items on my list.  I’m sure I will hate myself a year from now when I try to put these into my “One Year Ago” summary.