Seventeen Years of Baggage in EverQuest II

Here we are again, another spin of the planet and suddenly it has been seventeen years since I first jumped into EverQuest II.

My earliest screen shot of EQ2 – Nov. 14, 2004

As sometimes happens, I am going to take a moment to reflect on a game that I played at launch and have gone back to a number of times, to the point that I am actually subscribed as I write this.  Here are some past posts on the topic:

• 2020 – Sixteen and Offline
• 2019 – Memories of Launch Hype
• 2018 – Chaos Descending and the Anniversary
• 2015 – Server Merges and Other Items
• 2008 – Four Years of EverQuest II

I am clearly not as emotionally nostalgic about EverQuest II as I am about its older sibling… I think I have written twice as many anniversary posts about it… but I am much more likely to go back and play EQII than EQ when it comes down to it.

One of the interesting things about the Panda, Panda, Panda events, which send you around old zones in something of a scavenger hunt, is how many zones I remember playing through.  I didn’t play a lot of them when they launched and I played through most of them maybe once on a single character, but it is enough to bring back memories of many places.

Meanwhile, every time I go back to EQ and have to go anywhere that wasn’t in the the first three or four expansions, it is like I am seeing a brand new world, which I often am.  My EQ memories are pretty much limited to those zones, a few from The Serpent’s Spine, and the tutorial that got put in years after I stopped playing regularly.

The characters I play these days all come from the EverQuest II Extended and free to play era of the game.  There was a fresh start with that, letting go a lot of the baggage that had built up around my 2004 characters.

But time passes.  Expansions arrive.  Quests get run.  And now I log in and got to the bank and open up all my bags and I see this:

An accumulation of things

I don’t think the primary problem is really “what is all this stuff?” though there is certainly a healthy amount of that going on here.  EQII is pretty good about not putting quest items in your bag in the first place, but once it does put them there it never comes back for them, so there aren’t a bunch of items where I am wondering if it is safe to toss them or not.

I am actually pretty diligent about things like crafting items, which get put in the box in the guild hall.  Likewise, anything that is a housing item get put in my home pretty quickly.  And I don’t fill up my bag or bank with stuff from the /claim window.  Lots of stuff still left in there.

And I am pretty sure most of this will just stay here

No, most of the items in that screen shot have some sort of purpose that isn’t too terribly mysterious.  Instead it is a matter of me not knowing if I should save them, if I need to hang on to them because I might need them some day.  Anything from adornments to some very old experience potions are hanging around in my bank.  And the accumulation continues.

I will say this though.  At least EQII gives you lots of storage space.  I haven’t even tried to find the largest possible bank boxes yet.  The ones I have are all from at least five expansions back.

Though, if I am honest, more space probably isn’t helping me.  I am not forced to jettison anything, so things just accumulate.

Anyway, it has been seventeen years, though my account clock appears to be a little bit off.

I took this screen shot yesterday

Even allowing for my taking the screen shot a day early and perhaps the game not ticking over to the current day until it reaches the very moment of my first character creation, which took place at some point in the evening of November 13th, 2004, I am pretty sure 6,205 is still two days off.  Oh well.

I’ll take solace in my bonus days, which they used to give you with each expansion purchase.  And then they got all hard core and decided they should only count the days you were actually subscribed, before letting all of that go with free to play.

The bonus time used to mean that they would have to have the next year’s veteran’s reward available with each anniversary because some of us had 360 bonus days.  But the veteran’s rewards fell by the wayside at some point.  The 12 year reward was the last one I can recall.

Now they just run the Hero’s Festival to celebrate the anniversary, which is probably for the best.  I don’t need any more stuff cluttering up my bank space.