Tag Archives: Frostreaver

The EverQuest Frostreaver TLP Poll Results – Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

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I mentioned back in December, in a Friday Bullet Points post, that Daybreak had announced not just one, but TWO special rules servers for 2026.

The first of them, named Frostreaver, set to launch in May, was going to have its rules and parameters set by a player poll done in the forums so that interested parties could help Daybreak decide on what people really want.

This was, of course, a transparent reaction to the tepid response to last May’s Fangbreaker TLP server and the popularity of The Heroes Journey pirate server, which appeared to be eating Fangbreaker’s lunch dramatically enough that Daybreak stepped in to sue the people running the emulator in order to get it shut down.

May 2025 – Fangbreak

Now, that whole case is fraught, and I don’t necessarily believe THJ is the sole cause of Daybreak’s financial downturn, a line Ji Ham has pushed during the previous two quarters.

But it seems pretty apparent that THJ will lose due to the whole in-game cash shop thing, which makes the whole thing an obvious for profit enterprise built on the EverQuest IP using EverQuest code and EverQuest art assets.  This seems all the more likely since THJ got the binding arbitration path they were asking for, the only route that favors companies more than the courts.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation seems keen to ignore the whole money earning enterprise aspect of THJ and somehow believes that something being free to download means that you can do whatever you want with it.  This is not at all what “fair use” means, but when you have an agenda you ignore the facts I guess. However, the arbitrator who will actually decide the outcome will not be so generous and will apply the EULA and other agreements and case law to the situation.  It is unlikely to go well for THJ.

All of which leaves us with the question; can Daybreak deliver something that would appeal to the THJ audience? Despite their ire towards Daybreak, they seemed like a group with nostalgia for the game and Norrath in general, but were unwilling to put up with the hardcore “you must suffer for your enjoyment” model that EverQuest has traditionally clung to?

My guess is no, Daybreak won’t be able to deliver, largely because their hardcore mindset won’t let them color outside of a specific set of lines.  So what we got in the poll was a clear indication of what dials they were prepared to turn and how far they were willing to turn them.

Cutting to the chase a few hundred words in, these were the results they posted:

Expansion Unlocks:

  • What expansions will be available when the server opens?
    • Winning vote – Standard + Scars of Velious Launch
  • Should this server ever STOP unlocking expansions?
    • Winning vote – No, the server should continue unlocking expansions until reaching Live
  • How often should expansions unlock after Planes of Power?
    • Winning vote – Standard +: Expansions should unlock every 8 weeks
  • Should Beastlords and Berserkers be available at Launch?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should Gates of Discord unlock faster?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should Legacy of Ykesha unlock with Planes of Power?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should Prophecy of Ro unlock with Depths of Darkhollow?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should Dragons of Norrath unlock with Omens of War?
    • Winning vote – Yes 

Special Rules:

  • Should this server have Truebox?
    • Winning vote – No, clients per computer should be unrestricted
  • Should this server have Open PvP?
    • Winning vote – No
  • Should this server have Encounter Locking?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • How fast should Experience Gain be on this server?
    • Winning vote – Live (Fastest)
  • Should this server have Free Trade?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should this server have Level Locking?
    • Winning vote – No
  • Should this server have Disabled Item Level Requirements?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should this server have Early Item Focus Effects?
    • Winning vote – Yes 

Bonuses:

  • Should this server have Evolving Bonuses?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should this server have Randomized Loot?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should this server have Challenge Achievements?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should this server have Resource Hunter Bonuses?
    • Winning vote – Yes
  • Should this server have Legacy Characters?
    • Winning vote – Yes 

While there are any number of items on that list I am not sure about, the general theme was to make things progress as quickly as possible, with the highest level of xp earning, the least restrictions, the most bonuses, multi-boxing, no gear restrictions, and kicking off with the latest expansion pack that was on offer.

The audience wants to go faster than three wild women in a Porsche!

My favorite item was the repudiation of PvP, but I am always there for it when the rabid “if you just turned on PvP you would make a bazillion dollars” crowd get shouted down.  The EQ PvP servers were simply a way to quarantine the worst people in the game away from the rest of the audience.

Anyway, the response was not unexpected, and the results make the server seem mildly interesting to me.  But I don’t think it will go far enough because it still maintains the whole structure of pushing people into mandatory grouping.

My gut says that the hardcore nostalgia audience, which has gotten a fresh server catering to it annually for a decade, has been sated at this point.  The remaining, as yet unserved, nostalgia audience wants to be able to do a solo walk through of the old locations, to be able to solo overland mobs in their level range no matter what their class choices was, and not spend hours grinding bandits in West Karana or where ever in order to level up.

This is what I call the “Tour de Norrath” option, where you can wander alone and see the sights, fight the mobs, and get enough of a taste of things to sate your nostalgia without having to invest in all the things that EverQuest has traditionally required of players.  I’d subscribe for that server.

But that is, as I say, my gut talking.  I have no hard evidence, just a sense of the situation no doubt driven by my own desires, and I am not going to be like the PvP trolls and project my own views on the rest of the world and call it a majority opinion.

And I can, based on history, experience, and a bit of intuition, come up with reasons why the Norrath team would reject such an option.  There is a whole host of self imposed restrictions, the whole hardcore heritage and devaluing the achievements of past players if you don’t have to do everything in the snow, uphill both ways like E’ci intended.

There is also the open question of what a server that was easier to level on that the live servers… you’ll note that was as far as they were willing to go on the xp front… would do to the mix.  The argument will always be that you can do all that on live, the xp curve is easy for the first 50 levels or whatever, and you can have a mercenary.

True, and I have done that… but it also isn’t the same thing.  If nothing else, the broken economy on the live servers and the travel shortcut that is the Plane of Knowledge makes the whole thing less interesting that a fresh start server where you might have to walk from Qeynos to Freeport.

In my asking for easy mode and difficulty at the same time I am only highlighting that the “what should it be?” question isn’t easily answered.

Anyway, we shall see how this plays out in May.

Related:

Friday Bullet Points about Coming Attractions in the Midst of the Holidays

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It is Friday and I once again have a few items I want to cover but which I couldn’t quite bring myself to go all in on for a whole post.

That said, I am pretty sure I could have made a full post out of four of the six points, but I am also in that situation where I have more posts in progress than there are days left in the year.  So I am noting down the essence of a few topics so I have a foundation for later posts.

The EverQuest team put up an announcement about their plans for Time Locked Progression servers (TLPs) for 2026.  Business as usual in some ways, as we get some sort of special rules server out of them every year.

Fangbreaker – the 2025 server that was a bit of a snooze

Except 2026 is going to be a bit different.  They have two servers planned, Frostreaver and Lethar.  The former will launch in May and the latter later in the year.

For Frostreaver they have polls setup in the forums to allow players to decide what the rules of the server will be when it launches.  The questions include things like:

  • What expansions should be unlocked at launch
  • Should beastlords and berserkers be available at launch
  • When should the server end
  • What should the xp rate be like
  • Should it allow multi-boxing

Along with other things like should there be special bonuses, what should they be, when should they unlock.  All sorts of things.

The whole thing is illuminating as it highlights both the mindset of the team (they fall into some old patterns, like assuming that after Planes of Power it is all downhill) and giving a sense of what parameters they can adjust easily.

This seems to me to be very much a reaction to the whole debacle around The Heroes Journey, which Daybreak has alleged was hurting their business by siphoning off players, at least until they got an injunction to shut it down.

My sense is that unless they can roll a version where you can solo any class through all the content… except maybe raids… but why not raids as well… that they are not going to scratch the itch that THJ was covering.

So we shall see how that comes together.  Bhagpuss has more about it in the post I linked above.

Meanwhile, not much was said about Lethar except that it will arrive later in the year, will start at The Serpent’s Spine, and will include a “personal loot” feature.

TSS was the 2006 expansion that tried to make a new, more coherent, and quest driven path for new players in the wake of WoW shaking up the MMO meta.  It is better than the usual “there’s the world, have fun” attitude of the early game, but it is also almost 20 years old and shows its age.

I don’t know if either of these plans will work, but at least the team seems to recognize that they have to shake up the special server meta a bit if they want to keep players engaged.  As I noted i that post about nostalgia, you can’t keep serving up the same plan and expect adulation every time.

We already knew that WoW Midnight was going to land on March 2, 2026, that announcement having landed a couple weeks back.

World of Warcraft Midnight

The remaining questions were “When would the pre-patch drop?” and “How much will that shit all over the 20th anniversary classic server unlock of The Burning Crusade?”

I submit once again the meme I made last time to sum up how it looks from where I sit.

Toy Story Meme of Woody being dropped with the phrase "I don't want to play with you anymore" and TBC printed over Woody

TBC players feeling this right now

TBC Classic pre-patch lands on January 13th, then a week later all focus will be on WoW Midnight and the lands of classic will be shoved into the background as the two pre-patch events run in parallel.

Maybe I am over-reading this, but I once again regret assuming that Blizz wouldn’t crowd out one launch with another, as has been their policy in the past.  Redbeard explores this more in a post of his own.

Blizz has a whole post about what is coming, linked above, but here are the bullet points they chose to throw out:

  • New Demon Hunter Specialization—Devourer
  • New Race and Class Combination: Void Elf Demon Hunters
  • Class Combat Design Updates
  • Stat and Item Squish
  • User Interface Updates
  • Transmogrification Updates
  • Player vs. Player (PvP) Training Grounds
  • Housing Early Access
  • Pre-expansion event
  • The Winds of Mysterious Fortune Returns

That final item appears to be a catch-up event so you can get your alts… or lapsed mains if you’ve come back to retail for housing… up to the level cap in anticipation of the new expansion.

Anyway, this is all part of what Blizz chief Johanna Faries says will be their biggest year yet.

It is the holiday season in New Eden as everywhere else, and CCP has been running its usual Winter Nexus event, with a few updates, while having PLEX sales and what not to try and cash in on the consumerism that Christmas has come to mean here in late stage capitalism.

Winter Nexus 2025

One of the posts they put out, meant to remind you that you had best start collecting the daily login rewards if you want to get the big prizes, also included an interesting line.

On 5 January, the seasonal track will extend, giving you more reasons to keep active in the ice storms.

Left otherwise unexplained, it appears that CCP has plans for an… ongoing Winter Nexus?  Are we going to have space snow until Groundhog Day?  Until the equinox?  I don’t know and CCP hasn’t told us yet.

This follows on from CCP tossing in new objectives in the back half of the Crimson Harvest event earlier this year, so apparently the crew has come to believe they can’t just do business as usual on their two remaining seasonal events and expect users to remain engaged.  Good for them.

Look, there is part of me that wants to remain angry about this, an issue with the game that they have acknowledged since at least 2016.  They have mentioned it and pushed it off for a long time.

I feel you man, I am tired of this too

But when somebody actually does something you want you shouldn’t reward them with complaints about the tardiness of their delivery.  You should encourage their efforts to achieve that objective.

So I applaud this effort.  Looking through it, it does seem like they are taking pretty small steps towards the goal of a game playable on a monitor that is larger than 1920×1080, but you have to start somewhere.  Any progress is better than no progress.  I hope that next time I feel the urge to play… I already did a run to Mordor this year, so it may be a bit… that the team will have a more workable solution that involves less of me squinting and getting my face close to my 3440×1440 monitor too see what a tool tip says.

Meanwhile, I have to find a new prediction as I can’t just run with “SSG will ignore large screen monitors” for another year.  And no, I am not going to go back and give them credit for 2025 as they did not make the Dec. 15 deadline.

On the rare occasion where I write about RuneScape and/or Jagex, I am prone to bringing up the fact that RuneScape is the only successful title they have ever shipped.

This is actually not uncommon.  There are a lot of tech companies that ride on one product.  It isn’t even a matter of founders having just one good idea.  Often success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time with just the right feature, and just being lucky.

There is an alternate timeline where Orkut, Google’s first run at social media, which came out just ahead of Facebook, dominates while the Wikipedia entry for Facebook starts off with telling people it WAS a social media network.

This matter of luck and timing is part of the reason Zuck keeps pouring money into new ventures like the metaverse, because he has billionaire imposter syndrome and feels the need to prove he is smart, that this wasn’t all a fluke.  And he will never succeed in that venture.

Anyway, Jagex seems to have recognized this as well as any of us and now they have two versions of their main product, RuneScape and Old School RuneScape.

But what if there were… three versions of their main product?

Enter RuneScape: Dragonwilds, which takes the RuneScape branding, their most recognizable asset, and brings it into the co-op survival genre.

RuneScape: Dragonwilds

Part of me is totally on board for this, as the co-op small world survival genre has worked pretty well for our group since Valheim… and with Minecraft before that.  The game is described as follows:

On RuneScape’s forgotten continent of Ashenfall, dragons have awoken. Gather, build, skill and craft to survive in this co-operative (1-4) survival crafting game. Only by mastering survival and uncovering ancient secrets can they hope to slay the Dragon Queen—alone or with allies.

The 1-4 player thing fits in with our needs.  So this could be a thing for us.  But will it be a thing for Jagex in the long term?

Valheim set off a rush to mimic its indie title success and now the market it crowded with options, with more coming along.  We’ve seen a lot of minor variation, but promising titles like Nightingale have already run out of money and have been left incomplete due to lack of ongoing success.

So the question is, will Jagex be able to tap into the RuneScape installed base, or is this going to be another step outside their success zone and end up like so many “me too” titles?

Finally, an interview that popped up in my feed last night featuring Greg Street of Blizzard fame, Scott Hartsman who started with EverQuest and EverQuest II before challenging WoW with Rift, and Rich Vogel who started back on Meridian 59 and went on to Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, exploring the state of MMOs in the west and whether that is a dead genre at this point.

Unsurprisingly, three people who have spent their careers working in the genre say it isn’t dead.

I could write a long post over-analyzing each quote and putting up real world examples that support or refute their arguments, but really their answers are not going to satisfy you if you are heavily invested in the genre.

That is not to say they do not bring up good points.  Things like there not being enough content at launch… content is a pretty loose term and can mean whatever people want it to mean… to people valuing their time differently here in the third decade of the 21st century are certainly legitimate arguments.

But funding seems to play heavy on their minds, the feeling being if only the right financing package was there, then they could deliver a success, something all the more difficult to achieve in this time of downturn in the industry.

And, of course, what is an MMO anyway?  There is some nebulous set of lines drawn where if you change too much from the WoW model then you’re not an MMO and it doesn’t count.

As one of those players heavily invested in the genre, I do not spare myself of blame.  The problem with people like me is that we want another MMO that will make us feel like we did with EverQuest in 1999 or WoW in 2004 or whatever… and that is an impossible task.  If you clone the original, then it feels tired and if stray too far… well, nobody really does that because they are afraid of losing people like me.

So maybe that is the problem? A problem?

I don’t know.  I thought kids these days did everything on their phones.