December 7, 2001: The Everquest expansion, Shadows of Luclin, was released this week. As is usual for Verant they pretty much hosed the launch. The servers took far longer than anticipated to upgrade. There wasn't nearly enough bandwidth to handle the load to the patch servers. There were so many client-side bugs that hardly anyone was able to play. Bards were totally broken. You name it, they broke it. I knew this was going to happen so I figured I'd wait until the worst of the problems got ironed out. However, I happened to be at EBX yesterday getting a cheap ethernet card and noticed that they had Luclin for $30. I decided to pick it up just to save myself a trip.

First thing I noticed is that the expansion is 3 discs long. In my opinion DVD rom drive market saturation has happened. (If you don't have a DVD drive, tough ****. It is just like buying a new videocard, or more ram. I have no sympathy for those who try to play bloated new games with outdated equipment.) It would have been more convenient to just ship it on a single DVD. It reminds me of the bad old days of swapping floppies to install something when I have to swap through 3 CDs.

Next thing is that DirectX 8.0 comes with the expansion. However, the game requires 8.1. Now there's a definition of pointless for you. That meant I got to go to the Microsoft site and ever so slowly download the latest critical updates and DirectX 8.1. Since Microsoft's download site has the throughput of an ISDN line this took more than a little while. It also took a retry because the DirectX download stalled out once. It also required a reboot after the crit update and a reboot after the DirectX install. You've added a hyperlink to your bookmarks. Please reboot your computer. Windows isn't quite this bad but it is pretty close.

Ok, now I'm ready to run EQ. Oh no, there's massive amounts of patches to download. Half an hour later I'm all patched up. I fire up EQ, click through the many pointless windows and end up at a place with an advanced button. Obviously I'm going to click it. It leads me to a new window where I can turn animations off/on, set screen res, and other stuff. I click on the screen res dropdown. EQ locks up. I kill it from the task manager and rerun it. This time I don't click any dropdowns. After a couple of false starts I figure out how to register Luclin. Everything that is a precursor to actually playing should be done now.

I finally get to the server select screen. Oh yeah, Verant now hides the number of players online so you only know how busy your server is with relationship to others, not how busy it is in absolute terms. This also means you can't count the number of types of players online at a given time to do heuristics or entertain yourself. I figure it is more of the Sony ideal of proprietary for the sake of being proprietary.

I log into Rodcet Nife, my server of choice as my main character the dark elf rogue. Hmmm, where am I? Oh yeah, Lake of Ill Omen somewhere. After a few minutes I figure out where I am in the zone and head off to a safe area to check out the new graphics on my character. How do I get to the new face selector? It isn't in options. It isn't in the F10 mode that I can see. Hey, here it is under persona. There's also another button for the post 50 advancement crowd. That just kind of irritates me because I'm still level 25 so I doubt I'll ever get high enough to use this feature. The new faces are pretty decent but most of them have really huge lips. None of the faces look nearly as foul-tempered as my rogue in DAoC. I've grown fond of the perpetually pissed off look. I end up picking a neutral, not smiling, not big-lipped, not cow-eyed face. There's also only three hairstyles. I was hoping for something like my old hairstyle, a ponytail, or something. Instead I go with the butch cut. I stick with white hair since there isn't a cool green, blue, purple option. I do get to pick purple eyes which look quite cool. (Just like my DAoC version of the rogue.) I'm pretty pleased with how I look now other than the Lieutenant's Helm looks like crap. My armor looks quite cool other than that.

While I'm doing this I check if anyone I know is on. One of my best friends is on and in a zone I've never heard of. I get some info from him on Luclin while sneaking my way from Lake of Ill Omen to the Dreadlands. This takes me like an hour since I have to sneak/hide since most everything inbetween wants to kill me and would be able to in short order. I get to the Wizard Spires in Dreadlands and head to Luclin after a 10 minute delay.

The teleport zone is pretty ehhh. On the plus side nothing wants to kill me even though I'm a dark elf. I zone into the bazaar. This zone is only about half done it appears. This is where player controlled vendors will be I assume. Hopefully it will be something like what Ultima Online has. For now though it is a pointless waste zone unless you want to duel in the arena. I finally zone into the city, Dark something I think it is. This city is big. We are talking Neriak big but not split into multiple zones. I have explored about 1/3 of the city somewhat thoroughly. It appears to me that each race in the city is on the standard factions from their respective homeland. I base this on how they con to me (a dark elf rogue who has wasted tons of time becoming not kill on sight in most of the cities in the old world.) Since I am still bound in Firiona Vie I figure that I'd best log out before get myself killed by continuing onwards.

Back at the character select screen I decide to log in as my half-elf ranger to see what that looks like. I go through more or less the same steps picking my face and decide on blonde shoulder length hair. Wow, does a banded helmet look bad on a half-elf female. Other than that the banded armor looks ok but not as cool as the banded pieces still on my dark elf. I head to the Felwithe wizard spire and teleport up to Luclin. By this time it is like 2:30am so I log out and head to bed.

So far I haven't experienced any worse bugs that I've already seen in EQ. People are complaining about load times but I've noticed that my zone times are highly random from 15 seconds to 2 minutes now. The average time is probably about the same as before but with a wider variance. In fact I had my laptop on the same hub so ran tcpdump while zoning just to see if something odd was going on. I noticed that every time you zone EQ changes which UDP port it is listening on. When that happens your machine still is being sent packets from the EQ server to the old port that has already been closed. The server ends up sending you between 5 and 50 packets of info that it doesn't need to. It could just be the lag from when your client sends the I'm leaving this zone command and when the server receives it. Or it could be that the client never sends a packet to the server about this and the server just figures it out because it is no longer receiving anything from the client on the server's allocated port. There is more lag on occasion but I think this is due to the lack of optimizations in the engine. Most of my lag is when I try to turn around quickly. I haven't tested combat yet to see what has been broken there. All in all it isn't nearly as broken as I expected it to be.