TITLE: Shards of Dalaya AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard DATE: 12/29/2005 06:19:00 ip. ----- BODY:

A shard is a fan-run server for a MMO. Usually free. The first instances of these came about with Ultima Online. This one is for EverQuest. I knew free EQ servers were being worked on a while back, but I had no idea they'd finished one. They have. It's not bad. And completely free. Here's an indepth look at it. You don't even need to own the cds to play it. This raises legal concerns in my mind. But then again, Sony is indeed making the patcher available for free. Just go to the official EverQuest website and download the game. Then you just follow the instructions on the SoD website. It's all quite simple. They are quite a few changes from EQ Live (that's what SoD players call the normal, original EQ). Your new characters start their existance in a dream sequence. It's kind of neat. I'm not going to tell you what occurs exactly. I don't want to spoil it. But it seems to mainly be a creative way of giving your character their newbie starting equipment. It's much better than the way EQ Live does things now. I tried EverQuest again recently. I got an email saying they'd reactivated my old account for free, for 21 days. When I reactivated my account and made a new character, it started off in a newbie dungeon. Why? I hated it. I played the game for about 10 minutes before quitting. A fair number of the cities are pretty much unoccupied. Well, not exactly unoccupied (with the exception of Felwithe, which seems completely deserted), just lacking NPCs, guild trainers, etc. Freeport has been overun with zombies. Appearently the only way to make it safely through the city now is to use the tunnels underground like thieves and evil characters had to use in EQ Live. The Dwarf starting city, Kaladim, has been overun by goblins, I think. Most of Butcherblock Mountains too. Kelethin, and Greater Faydark are pretty much monster-only zones now as well. Some of them have different names now though. A lot of the zones do. Usually names that reflect what that zone has become. For instance, ButcherBlock Mountains now has the name Goblinskull Mountains, and with good reason. The Dwarves now start in the same city as the gnomes. A city I always hated. I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet high elves start there too. Iksar (the lizards), now start in Grobb (the Troll city). At least my monk did. It's possible some start in Oggok, as I've heard that city is still running fairly normally as well. I don't know about the Dark Elf city. I saw a low level Dark Elf in Grobb, so I'm going to assume they start there now as well. My Erudite necromancer started in Newport (new name for Qeynos). I think that was an option in EQ, so maybe that one isn't so weird. I don't know if all Erudites start in Newport now or not. I'm going to try making a magician or something to find out. Erudin seems to be still functioning to an extent, so it's possible you can still start there. There are reasons for these changes. One of which, for the Iksar, is that their city and most of their continent are not implemented in SoD yet. That disappoints me a little. I loved leveling my newbie lizards in the Boneyard. My favorite newbie area from EQ Live. I have two theories as to why other races, whose zones are implimented, no longer live in their city. One reason, and the most likely, is that the SoD guys probably had to redo all of the NPC dialog in the game. That's a LOT of dialog to write for such a small team. A second reason it could be, which I don't even know if it's true, is that maybe NPCs take up more CPU power than normal monsters or monster-ish NPCs and they combined the races into a few cities so that the server costs wouldn't go through the roof. I don't know if that's true or not. NPCs might take the same amount of processing power as normal monsters for all I know. There's a backstory to explain a lot of the changes and things in SoD. You get two books at the end of your dream sequence. I started reading them and found I didn't care whatsoever what they had to say. A third item you get in your dream is a note from some one asking you to meet them at some point. It seems there is a main quest in SoD. I like that idea. I don't know what sort of reward you get for it. I suppose if I keep playing, I'll try to complete it eventually. In the 10 minutes played EQ Live recently, I noticed how poorly the game ran on this computer. SoD, on the other hand, runs extremely well. It probably is partially due to EQPlayNice, a program you can download on the SoD website, "A program that makes EQ hog up less CPU power." It's a much older version than the current version of EQPlayNice, but I'm not sure if the newer one will work with SoD. I might try playing EQ Live with EQPlayNice and see if it runs better as well. Since EQPlayNice makes SoD take less CPU power, I can use AOL Instant Messenger and IRC, or browse websites while playing the game with little to no slowdown. SoD also comes EQW, a program that allows you to run SoD (or EQ Live) in a window, rather than fullscreen. A lot of people use it to run more than one character at a time, on one computer. I remember trying that a few years ago when it first came out. SoD has a rule that says you can only play 2 characters at any one time. Either two on one PC, or on separate PCs, it doesn't matter. A lot of people make a bot character. Like, say they play both a cleric and a warrior. They'd start the fight with the warrior, then switch to the cleric and heal the warrior. It's also possible there are bot programs that these people are using to run their other character. The fact that they call them bots makes me think this could be the case. I haven't looked into it yet. I doubt this computer could handle two accounts at once anyways. Speaking of rules, SoD has quite a few. They are all perfectly reasonable. They are strictly adhered to, though, so I suggest you not break them. With fewer people on the server (I have yet to see it hit 300 at one time, yet), people have to work for their equipment. What I mean is, you see much less twinking of characters. Twinking is where you give high-end equipment (armor, weapons, etc) and/or money to lower level characters who normally wouldn't have them. I usually disliked twinking back when I played EQ Live, and always tried to have each of my characters earn their own equipment. So this fits me nicely. There are 20-some guilds in the game. Like in EQ Live, you need 10 people to form a guild (10 separate people, not just 10 separate characters/accounts). Perhaps it's only me, but I'd prefer it if they'd change it to 5 people or so. With so few players on the server, I don't see why not. I'd like to be able to get some of my friends to play SoD and form a guild so we have our own guildchat and won't bother other people. But I don't think I could get 10. I guess we could make an IRC channel and just flip back and forth if we had to. Either that, or ask some other random people to help us meet the 10 people requirement, and then they could leave the guild. I recall people doing that in EQ Live. I don't know if they allow it in SoD. Oh well, I'm not going to make a fuss about guilds on their forums or their IRC channel or anything. It's not a big deal, really. Just thought I'd bring it up. When you first make a new character, you're automatically in a newbie guild. It's there for the purpose of asking questions about the game, and answering other people's questions. I like it. It's an awesome idea. With so few people on the server, the Out of Character chat and the auction chat is all server-wide. That way, even if there aren't many people in your zone (or if you're completely alone in it), you still get the feeling of playing a MMO. I remember playing EQ at certain hours and there'd be pretty much no one in my zones to talk to, and it'd feel pretty lonely, boring and pointless. As far as I know, most of the tradeskills are functional in the game, except smithing, I think. There's talk of revamping Fletching on the forum, and I look forward to that. If it turns out to make Fletching much more worthwhile, I may have to start a Ranger. This brings up possibly the best feature of the game. You can communicate directly with the guys working on it. They often ask for suggestions, and many times impliment those suggestions. You can post on the forums, or chat in the IRC chatroom. It's really really great. They do patches all the time (this is a good thing). And they usually don't take very long to patch, unlike Sony. I suppose it's because they only have one server to patch, while Sony has a bunch. If the server is down for a patch, most people hop into IRC while they wait. The IRC channel is updated with the server status whenever it goes down, or comes back up. So you can go there and chat with the other players while also knowing exactly when the server is back up. It's cool. There's a lot of things I'm probably forgetting, and a lot of things I haven't discovered yet. But I think what I've said should give you a good idea of what the Shards of Dalaya is like. I hope I've been helpful. If you want to contact me in the game, look for Cresia. A human wizard. I think she's going to be my main character. Generally I never like playing female characters, but males look a little too homosexual in those EQ caster robes for my liking. Heh. Oh, and here's a little parting tip: If you plan on starting a dwarf, or gnome (or a high elf?), try and get them to Newport (Qeynos). That's the main city that most of the good characters are always at. It can be a bit lonely over on the continent of Faydwer. I sucessfully navigated my level 1 dwarf Cleric to the docks in Goblinskull Mountains. If you've played EQ long enough, you probably know how to avoid enemies and such. By climbing high on the mountains and walls of the zone, mainly. Once you ride the boat to Freeport, I guess go through the tunnels. Then.. make the big trek to Newport. I'm going to guess it's just as dangerous a journey for low level characters as it was in EQ Live. Probably even moreso. But I know it's doable. If not, see if you can get a wizard or druid to transport you. I believe transporting is still in the game, but I haven't seen anyone do it yet (haven't exactly wandered very far from newbie areas). Addendum: There were a few things I was incorrect about, and was informed of these things by Liam, who I believe is a GM in SoD. Here's a list: *"Starting locations are all deep rooted in the lore of the server. Iksars start in Grobb, because Kaezul, the menace of the entire world, drove the entire population to this new land. Kaezul, being an Iksar, created a bit of a bias against the Iksar survivors of the Fall, thus the only place they could find solace was in Grobb with the Blackscale." He had this to add: "My very quick synopsis on starting location lore shouldn't be taken as gospel as I'm super paraphrasing." *"Basically the most important thing to note when you're starting SoD is that we're genuinely very different from EQlive. I know it's often cited and quoted, but there's a reason for it." *"Yes, there is a main quest and it's actually well worth doing. It's a progression quest that teaches you the lore of the world while allowing you to make decisions and influence your alignment. The reward is an augmentation item that progresses in quality" *Kaladim is full undead dwarf ghosts, not goblins. (Thanks Yally) *Smithing is in. It's baking and tinkering that's not. *There's a boat that goes from Freeport to Newport, so that trek across the continent I mentioned is not necessary. *Druids and Wizards do indeed have zone specific self/group teleports, as they did on live, to some of the locations in the world. *There's 5 obtainable transporting items and there are also translocators in the various cities allow you to port to Newport, Greenmist, and Sadri Malath..

----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  KyoshoBallard EMAIL: URL: DATE: 19:27 If you're used to WoW, there is a WoW-style User Interface you can get for it. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  KyoshoBallard EMAIL: URL: DATE: 19:38 Whoops. Accidently hit enter before giving you the link! ----- --------