Aradune has returned to the endless queue strategy, which is a huge upgrade, I guess, from the “let everyone in and watch the server die” strategy they’d been trying for a couple weeks prior.
This actually isn’t a big deal, for me. I work at home due to the pandemic, so about three or four hours before I think I’ll be ready to play EverQuest, I just get in the queue and go back to work. Several hours later, as easy as that, I’m in EverQuest.
For Kasul, though, it’s a different story. He does not work at home (though he’d like to). When he gets home, even if he gets in the queue immediately, he won’t be logged in before 9 or 10pm. The game is nearly impossible for him to play during the week.
Since we intended to play Nashuya and Kanad (his shaman) as a duo, this leaves me without a character to play — aside from working on trade skills (just hit skill 70 baking), I can’t actually play my main character if I want to keep the same level.
The answer is to just play on my “box” character, Dunkela. The past week I’ve been looking for and finding groups on my mage, and she’s gone from level 6 to level 27 by grouping in the Desert of Ro, Unrest and Solusek’s Eye, as well as some soloing in Upper Guk. I started working on her Temple of Solusek Ro quest armor as well.
It’s not the best solution. I doubt Kasul will want to continue playing a game he can only play on weekends, when we usually have so much other stuff to do on weekends as well. We both keep hoping the server will become traditionally playable at some point, but it’s hard to see how that will happen before we just give up. The impending release of the Kunark expansion in a few weeks will almost certainly clog things up again.
Surnames.
Now that both my characters are twenty, I had the opportunity to choose surnames for them both.
When I created my first dark elf shadow knight on my original server, Erollisi Marr, I let the game generate me a random name for her. It generated “Nashuya”. I thought that was clever, as I’m from New Hampshire, and Nashua is one of our largest cities (though small by anyone else’s standards). So I kept it, and when she hit 20, I chose “N’Hamsha” as her surname. It fit the dark elf naming pattern, and was a pun that would only make sense to fellow Yankees.
Come to Aradune, I figured I’d just keep the same pattern and name them both “N’Hamsha”. No dice — the surname was ejected out of hand. I petitioned and the CSR claimed they had no power to overrule the in-game tool and I would just have to choose another name.
Made no sense. I can’t think of any objectionable part to the name, even to people who were in on the pun. Certainly compared to the immersion-breaking names already rampant on the server (last night I noticed “Fhuqthepolice” in general chat), how was mine against the rules? The CSRs could not point to a rule I had broken.
So, since I’m studying German as one of my “trapped at home” activities, I named Dunkela (German: “Dark”) with the last name “Feuersturm”. I was going to go with “Dunkela D’elve” — dark elf — but didn’t have the nerve. For Nashuya, I chose “Todesstrand” — death beach — as a nod to my favorite game of last year, Death Stranding.
How long we continue with EQ depends entirely on how long it takes Darkpaw Games to get their scheiss together. I hope they figure it out soon.
I do think the problems Darkpaw is having with the Aradune server are odd. It’s not like they haven’t done this many times before and while there are always some problems around population I can’t remember anyything being this awkward for a long time. I guess that if you’re a fairly small company running nothing but two very old, legacy MMMORPGs, having a new server that’s still so popular after several weeks that it needs a queue isn’t the worst problem to have but still.
I know they don’t want to add a server that’s going to be empty in a few weeks – they’ve done that before and presumably regretted it – but as you point out, on a three-month unlock they’re likely to have this problem again with Kunark and then again with Luclin, if not with Velious. That’s going to mean a year before things really settle down.
The naming thing is weird, too. How would an automated tool recognize something as off the wall as N’Hamsha? It’s hardly likely to be a word anyone fed into the database proactively. I can only think it either violates some grammatical/technical rule relating to the apostrophe or the capitalization, or someone in the past reported that specific name and the report resulted in action being taken and the name being added to the prohibited list.
Either of those explanations seem unlikely but I wonder what punctuation mark you used for the apostrophe? Was it ` or ‘ ? Maybe only one of those is allowed? The policy does say “cannot include numeric characters (0 – 9) or special characters” – maybe the apostrophe-type you used is counted as a “special character”? Of course, if it’s the same as the one you used on the server where it was allowed, that doesn’t make sense either…
I seem to remember from my Velious days that an apostrophe in the last name would require a GM over ride.
Well, I don’t recall doing that for my live server SK (this may have been before Velious), but I did petition for the name and the CSR did refuse to help me with it.