So it felt like another special server… time locked expansion server, as their called on the post-cataclysm Norrath side of the house… felt like maybe a bit of a wasted effort unless it was going to do something a little different.

But I was wrong and we’re getting a new TLE server in June.

The Wuoshi TLE Server coming June 9

I suspect that the flaw in my calculation is that the team at Daybreak has optimized their ability to spin up these sorts of servers within a specific set of parameters, so why not toss them out annually for the paying player base… because, unlike the regular live servers, you do need a subscription to play on a TLE server.

That said, Wuoshi… and I am not even sure what bit of lore the name comes from… looks like a fairly tepid entry into the mix of servers.  It will be a normal PvE server that starts with several of the early expansions unlocked.  From the post:

• This not a PvP Server, it is a standard TLE.
• This server will start with all expansions up to Echoes of Faydwer unlocked.
• The final expansion that will be unlocked will be Chaos Descending.
• This server will be Free Trade.
• Due to the Expanded Start, it will be able to participate in nearly all the live events from the start.
• Of the holiday events remaining being celebrated in 2026, only Tinkerfest will have a limited set of activities.

I like that they feel they need to specifically state that it is not PvP.  Daybreak has kept trying to make PvP a thing in EQII, fawning for that brief period back around 2007 or 2008 when the game hit a brief sweet spot where PvP mostly worked… if you stayed in the right level range and went to the right zone and the players present were not totally unbalanced… and have spent most of the last couple decades trying to find that magic again.

This won’t be that.

This will start you at Echoes of Faydwer, the rebirth point of the game after spending two expansions and three adventure packs trying to make the game viable, after which a new expansion will be opened up every three months.  That will end at the 2018 expansion, Chaos Descending, by which point I guess the team knows everybody will have gotten bored and stopped playing.

That will give Wuoshi about a three year run through a dozen expansion unlocks before it gets shut down.  I suppose that is a good thing, setting an end expansion where things will wrap up.  These sorts of servers tend to see a spike of players at launch, which then tapers off pretty steadily through the first year until you’re down to the die hards who are there for some specific content.  And even they won’t stick around forever, so it is probably best not to leave the terminal state open ended.

All of that is fine, if not exactly inspiring.  We’ve had these sort of servers before.  We will have them again.  I suspect that the 2027 server will be another run at PvP, if only because the team feels the need to try and climb back up on that dead horse hoping for one more good ride.

But it does make me wonder how to sustain this sort of thing over time.

EQII is certainly not the only title with this issue, and it has the same goal as others, which is to extract some value out of old content.  There has been at least 25 years invested in EQII, if we count pre-launch work, with the base game, 22 expansions, and 4 adventure packs.  Making use of assets already created is what they want.

This, by the way, is the downfall of a lot of visions for WoW Classic Plus, the idea that Blizz is going to invest retail WoW levels of effort into vanilla WoW.  WoW Classic worked because it was a technical problem to cash in on otherwise existing content.  Classic Plus… unless it gets appended to retail… still feels like a non-starter to me if only because Blizz has a long history of not being able to deliver new content in a reasonable time frame without screwing up, as we saw in the most recent retail update.

We’re more likely to see things like EverQuest Legends, which re-uses the old content but changes how players engage with it, reworking difficulty, classes, and such to aim for a more solo focused experience.  The content, the world, the mobs and encounters… they remain the same and it is the player’s ability to deal with them that changes.  I suspect that might be the Classic Plus path.

That said, having played through Outland in retail WoW recently, I am beginning to warm to the idea of Chromie time, the ability to set your expansion and have it scale up with you for as long as you want to invest in it.

I think that would be a desirable path for EQII.  Maybe.

Sure, you can go to a live server right now and turn off xp when you hit a specific level if you want to experience that content.  I could spend all the time I wanted exploring the Qeynos sewers, an early adventure area that had a lot of work put into it only to have people level out of it pretty quickly even back at launch.  Locking xp however turns off progress, and progression makes so many players tick.

The problem is that Daybreak likely has nothing like the resources to implement something like that, and I am not sure I would want them to commit to it even if they felt they could.  They are running with a small team and I don’t know what I would give up, if anything, to get that as a feature that would probably not work as smoothly as what we see in retail WoW.

I am not even sure there is demand enough out there for an EQII version of EverQuest Legends.  We shall see.

So this is the reality for EQII for now.  An annual expansion, a mid-year game update, and an annual special rules server that rotates between vanilla, special goals, and PvP variations.

Related:

• Daybreak – Coming Soon: Wuoshi Server!
• Daybreak – EverQuest II’s Producer’s Letter April 2026

The altar with the least useful vegvisir ever

First things first though.  I had to make sure everything was ready.  I got Frostner off of the display stand, made sure I had the right meads to hand, cleared out any excess items from my bag, and baked some more break and lox pies to sustain me for the fight.

Getting ready

I did this as night fell so as to go to bed and get up and have the whole day ahead of me for the fight.  The early worm… gets something in this analogy.  So I took the portal out to Yagluth’s altar, put the totems in the altar… and then realized I only had four totems with me and you need five to summon Yagluth.

So it was back to base to dig through chests to figure out where I was storing the extras.  I found them and by mid-morning I was back at the altar and ready with the totems to start the fight.

Five totems, all in place

The totems look like what you get if you took the Mandelorian idea and decided to make a series with Baby Yagluth as a character.

Anyway, I set them up, pressed the button and it was Yagluth time!

Yagluth… is in there somewhere

Yagluth is kind of tough to see if you’re plan is to just get in there and melee him down, dodging when you can and hiding when you need to recover.  The wiki suggests that you can endure quite a bit of punishment if you’re careful and a bit mobile and can get in there and hit hard.

And that mostly worked… though eventually you just have to get out of the way, drink a health mead, and go hide behind one of the pillars to let your health come back.

Hiding from Yagluth

I had to take two such time outs, rushing in after the second determined to just beat him down.

And I did it.

Yagluth defeated… again, tough to see what is going on at melee range

Unfortunately I had about 20 health left at the final blow… and he had a damage over time on me I guess… because I died about five seconds later.

Whoops, I’m dead too

So I made my third trip of the day out to his altar to collect his trophy and the building material enabler that lets you get to the next round of gear and upgrades.  I ended up dying three times, twice when cleaning up the nearby fuling camp and then once after Yagluth.

Four days on the plains

Now it was time to decide about the mistlands.  The fun part of the game for me tends taper off with the defeat of Yagluth.  Yet, with combat set to easy, I felt like maybe I ought to try the mistlands again.  I still had the mist removing mod, so at least that wouldn’t be an issue.

I wasn’t keen to go searching through the mistlands for the Queen however, so I went back to the map site, put in my world seed, and found the Queen closest to where I had bases and portals.  It turns out that was pretty much straight south from Yagluth.

Yagluth and the Queen located

With that bit of navigational help it was just a matter of sailing on down there.

That always sounds easier than it actually is, in part because of the perverse nature of the wind in the game, which seems to always know where you want to go and blows the opposite direction.

After some tacking back and forth and sailing through some islands, I did manage to find a shore to pull up onto.

The longboat grounded on the shore

That was on the western end of the island with the Queen in a narrow strip of plains biome, just large enough to have a fuling tower, which I managed to clear out.  I setup a portal in that, my first small base on the island.

But I needed to get somewhere, something not helped by the topology of the mistlands, which favors broken peaks and winding valleys.

It is still a bit misty, even with the mist removing mod

Climbing over the rocky peaks requires a lot of stamina, while walking through the valleys… attracts attention.

I run into some seekers

Also, the valleys never quite seem to lead where you need them to.  That and the island was also pretty broken up, with small lakes and ponds all over.  I was looking for, if not the Queen, at least an infested mine I could start in with.  I abused the zero build cost with the hammer to build boats at need to cross bits of water in my way.

Eventually I stumbled on what looked like the latter, an infested mine, on the shore of one of the lakes.

My Karve and the infested mine up the hill

Now the question is how committed I am to the mistlands.  I have been there and done the things already and… it wasn’t that much fun the first time through.

The game has, or course, changed in the last two years since I was facing the mistlands, so it might be worth perusing.

Then again, Forza Horizon 6 comes out today as well, and I am down to jump on that as well.  Will it be time for a Valheim break?  It might very well go that way.

But I think he was still training up the now long gone learning skills back then.  We wouldn’t see the end of those until late 2010.

Back then I was good if I could get in 10 million skill points in under eight months.  Now… well, as noted, CCP is just giving them away.

So here I am again.  The last post was only in January and I’ve made another ten million skill points.

The state of skill points – May 2026

I dumped a bunch of free skill points into Gallente Carrier V for Wilhelm, as much to have that screen shot show 300 million skill points as to hurry it up.  I usually like to carry about a million skill points for “just in case” scenarios, but with the current event continuing to dump skill points on us I’ll be able to build up the reserve again before we get to the next expansion.  There might be some new skills I need with that.  We’ll see.

My other characters on my main account both have plenty of unallocated skill points, but when I go in and total them all up this is what I come up with.

Wilhelm Arcturus    - 300,011,011 
Escher Alias        -  93,145,017
Percy Dovetonsiles  -  29,640,530

Total               - 422,796,045

Almost 423 million skill points across all three.  Again, that is largely due to how free CCP is with skill points.

As for me current skill point allocation on Wilhelm, it now looks like this:

Spaceship Cmd          95,622,171 (79)*
Gunnery                37,678,667 (53)*
Drones                 25,966,256 (27)*
Navigation             20,089,568 (15)*
Fleet Support          16,385,250 (16)*
Missiles               12,550,911 (22)
Electronic Sys         11,928,629 (15)*
Armor                  11,204,549 (14)
Engineering             8,939,855 (15)
Scanning                7,168,000 (07)
Neural Enhancements     6,882,275 (08)
Resc Processing         6,433,916 (13)* 
Shields                 6,074,039 (12)
Science                 5,714,282 (21)
Trade                   5,047,765 (11)
Planet Mgmt             4,352,000 (05)
Subsystems              4,096,000 (16)
Targeting               3,840,000 (08)
Rigging                 3,209,100 (10)
Sequencing              2,058,211 (10)
Production              1,922,644 (06)
Structure Mgmt          1,458,138 (06)
Social                  1,364,785 (10)
Corp Mgmt                  24,000 (02)
Unallocated                10,000 (00)

Total                ~300,011,011 (398)

The categories marked with an asterisk are the ones that have changed since the last check-in.

As usual, Spaceship Command saw growth.  There are always new ships showing up to train into.

Gunnery saw an increase as well, likely filling out some missing skills for tech II variations.

Drones includes fighters and since the coalition was getting real about using carriers as a doctrine, I invested some time in making sure I had related skills trained up.  I’ve only had my Archon since 2013.  You’d think I would have done that by now… but your would be wrong.

My Archon jumping into Geminate

I never actually got to use my fighters in a battle, the log jam at Atioth pretty much making that impossible… but I did join a fleet and undock!  That was at least a step forward towards using it in combat!

Navigation also saw a boost as I put some time in on Jump Portal Generation to allow my Archon to conduit the maximum number of subcaps, something I did actually get to do during one move op during the Geminate campaign.

Conduit jump in progress

That accounted for most of the skill points this time around.  I am not sure what I trained in fleet support, and the other two were just minor items.

So there I am, past the 300 million skill point barrier, such that it was.

Thanks to EVELens, which I wrote about previously, I am able once again to break out my skill by level without having to go into the game and manually count them.

Level 1 - 2
Level 2 - 10
Level 3 - 14
Level 4 - 79
Level 5 - 293

Lots of level V skills, which is kind of where you end up after you run out of skills to spread out with.  My training queue is basically a long list of skills that need to be trained to level V.

I am once again at a point where I feel like I could stop on my main and maybe invest some training on one of my alts.  But we will have an expansion coming out next month, which CCP is probably talking about RIGHT NOW at Fanfest, which may bring with it more skills to train.

As always, for those who want to know the history of this post… well, the series goes all the way back to 2007 when I hit ten million skill points and thought that was a thing!

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
• One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017
• One Hundred and Ninety million – February 2018
• Two Hundred million – August 2018
• Two Hundred and Ten million – November 2019
• Two Hundred and Twenty million – September 2020
• Two Hundred and Thirty million – January 2021
• Two Hundred and Forty million – April 2022
• Two Hundred and Fifty million – September 2022
• Two Hundred and Sixty million – February 2023
• Two Hundred and Seventy million – September 2024
• Two Hundred and Eighty million – August 2025
• Two Hundred and Ninety million – January 2026
• Three Hundred million – May 2026

When will I get to 310 million?  That depends a lot on what CCP does and how many skill points they hand out.

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

But I will try to keep to the usual format, so we’ll kick off with the scores from the previous week.

Week 19 scores

Having left off there we were heading into week 20 where Outbound, the cozy co-op title.

Outbound… in an obviously VW inspired van

I looked at the demo of that a while back, and it had its merits.  However, the gap between a demo and a full fledged product can be quite wide.  We saw last week that early reviews had come in somewhat weak.

• Outbound
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Now has a score of 70

As noted previously, there are not any scathing negative reviews.  Outbound doesn’t seem to be a divisive “love it or hate it” sort of title.  There are some genuinely positive reviews out there for it… but they tend to also deliver a 7/10 score.

Last week after landing at 70 it crept down to 68 before releasing this week, giving it a negative score on the board, pushing Bhagpuss down a bit.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Moved from 9th place to 8th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 23.8 to 21.8
    • Moved from 8th place to 9th place

Not great.  But Outbound was not done yet.  Shortly after launch some more reviews came in and pushed the title down some more.

• Outbound
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 68.0 to 66.4

Then, just to compound things, Mixtape saw a bit of a drop as well.

• Mixtape
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 92.1 to 89.1

Still an excellent score for Mixtape, and nobody is turning in bad reviews of it.  This looks to be more a matter of the effect sites that award 1-5 stars, full stars only, giving it a 4/5, which translates to an 80 in the land of Fantasy Critic League.  So it goes.

Then some minor shift in reviews saw Shintar and I swap places in the rankings.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)
    • Moved from 3rd place to 2nd place
  • Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)
    • Moved from 2nd place to 3rd place

We ended last week .3 points apart, so it didn’t take much to change positions.  The new gap was .04 points, so destined to change again.

Then the other release slated for week twenty started pulling in some reviews.

• Directive 8020: A Dark Pictures Game
  • [Picked by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)]
  • Now has a score of 76.0

Not a bad score… certainly not during a week when Outbound is on the board… but there are clearly some mixed reviews in the 3/5 star range.

Directive 8020: A Dark Pictures Game

That wasn’t enough to change the board… but something else got some reviews and Shintar and I swapped positions again.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)
    • Moved from 3rd place to 2nd place
  • TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)
    • Moved from 2nd place to 3rd place

And then Mixtape took another hit.

• Mixtape
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 89.1 to 87.8

That was enough to push Bhagpuss down another peg on the board.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)
    • Moved from 10th place to 9th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Moved from 9th place to 10th place

Dropping below 90 is a pretty big hit because points are doubled between 90 and 100, so having a 92 was a pretty big deal.  Now, however, Mixtape is has just… a very good score still.  We’ll all be longing for more titles landing in the high 80s.

And the hits kept on coming.

• inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 81.6 to 79.3
• Outbound
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 66.9 to 65

Things were tight enough down field that both of those drops managed to change up the board once more.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)
    • Moved from 7th place to 6th place
  • Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 29.6 to 27.2
    • Moved from 6th place to 7th place
  • Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)
    • Moved from 11th place to 10th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 13.7 to 11.9
    • Moved from 10th place to 11th place

There was starting to be a “who is this actually for” vibe in some of the reviews, including The Aftermath asking that directly about Mixtape.

Then a drop too small for the bot to announce, but large enough to change the rankings once more.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
    • Moved from 12th place to 11th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Moved from 11th place to 12th place

That swapped back shortly thereafter, but it once again suggests how close things are on the board.

And then another double dump.

• inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 79.3 to 76.1
• Outbound
  • [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 65.9 to 64.2

Outbound felt like it was trying to drop below Pokemon Champions.  That was enough for definitively drop Bhagpuss behind Arhanta on the board.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
    • Moved from 12th place to 11th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 12.7 to 10.8
    • Moved from 11th place to 12th place

All of which left us with the scoreboard looking like this mid-week.

Week 20 scores – early edition

Bhagpuss, after jumping to mid-pack last week, has fallen back down… but is at least not in last place.  The league doesn’t feel very positive about his prospects however.

I had to cut that off on Wednesday night to be sure I had time to do it.  But that includes the two releases for the week, so seems like a pretty reasonable place to make the call.

As of this writing there was a single date update, with one of our many Warhammer titles in play this year.

• Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II
  • [Picked by Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)]
    • Release date changed from ‘Spring 2026’
    • to ‘Thursday, May 21, 2026’

That makes for four titles in the queue for next week.

Week 21 Coming up

First up will be Forza Horizon 6, which was my first pick in the league draft.  I have high hopes for this pick as past games in the series have landed 90s on Metacritic.  Hoping for a strong result and maybe ending up in first place for a while.

Also on tap is Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, a Switch 2 title and the ninth in the Yoshi series of games from Nintendo.  Could be hot.  Could be not.  The Nintendo review sites can be pretty fierce about what pleases them and what makes them yawn.

Then there is LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which was a title I also wanted, but Corr got in there ahead of me.  It too is getting good buzz and has the potential for a strong score.  The only negative I have seen is that the system requirements on PC are a bit steep for a Traveller’s Tales LEGO title.  But a good game will overcome that.

And finally… Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II. Who knows?  I have no read on that, so we shall see.

Next week’s post will be back to a full week’s coverage, plus whatever fell between the cracks on Friday or Saturday that I would have otherwise covered this week.  The review embargo for FH6 and LEGO Batman will lift after I write this, so I expect to come back to some scores already boiling.

Related:

• TAGN Fantasy Critic League
• TAGN Discord Server
• Fantasy Critic Site
• Fantasy Critic How to Play
• Fantasy Critic FAQ
• Open Critic Review Site

Going back to origins, unlike MUDs, which were text based interactions where you entered commands and got responses, the Rogue genre sought to create a more visual experience by using text to build out the dungeon view as a top down view, with your character represented by the @ sign.

Hack back in the day

I mention terminal emulation both because I am old and because the ability to control the cursor and use it to draw things on a screen that was, back in the day, often restricted to 80 columns and 24 rows of character.  So back in the day you needed a terminal emulation program that supported something like the VT52 cursor controls so the game could draw, maintain, and update characters all over the screen.

Primitive by today’s standards, this was actually fairly sophisticated functionality back in the 80s which allowed a certain amount of universality in support.  I could play this on my Apple II back in the day using the CompuServe terminal program. (It would also let you play Island of Kesmai, which took the Rogue top down ASCII graphics idea to online multi-player gaming.)

By the early 90s, as computers grew in capability and dumb terminals began to fall by the wayside, NetHack migrated to a form that you would run locally.  It would still put up a window and still ran in ASCII text, but there was not need to connect to a host computer or have a terminal emulation program.

This was was prime era of playing NetHack.  I downloaded the binaries… using at FTP program likely, though it could have been Gopher… as well as the source code, which I used to tinker with… and spent quite a bit.

And then I kind of left NetHack behind in the back half of the 90s, favoring MUDs and graphical titles with online options such as Diablo, which itself was inspired by NetHack.

NetHack expanded in depth as the restrictions on size and just kept on moving along.  Then, last week, somebody mentioned the 5.0 release on Discord and I was intrigued.  What would NetHack look like in 2026?  I found the NetHack.org site, linked at the end of the post, grabbed the zipped Windows binaries, extracted them into a folder and launched the game.

Starting off in 2026

That looks like a lot of options, though I am also pretty sure most of them existed back in the 90s.  They have all evolved, but I remember playing as a tourist way back in the day.

One thing that is new a tutorial that lets you wander about a safe area with instructions etched on the ground so as you pass over them it gives you instructions.

The NetHack 5 tutorial area

This is a long way from the 90s.  Colors are important in this new era and you can see the line of sight calculations on the map where what I can see are marked in white periods while things out of my site, but other wise previously explored, are green periods on the map.

The line of sight thing was always one of the more sophisticated aspects of the game.

The tutorial is very good at giving you a sense of all the things going on in just moving about the game.  It does, however, tend to quickly overload you on the various key commands to accomplish tasks.

On leaving the tutorial and entering the main game I did not get very far, largely due to command recollection issues.  But things end pretty much the same way they did back in the day.

RIP Wilhelm

I ran out of food, then passed out while fighting a jackal, which is not the way to win a fight for sure.

Another new aspect of the game, at least to me, is that it now also comes with a graphical UI version, basically a tile set replacing the character set.  There were a couple of knock-offs of NetHack back in the 90s that did something similar.  So, for comparison, this is the tutorial area as seen in the graphical version of the game.

The tutorial area, with the tile set

The tile set is a bit teeny tiny, at least on my big monitor, and you get the sense of the difference in aspect ratio between text and graphical UI, but otherwise the game is mostly the same.

Mostly.

The graphical version is a little easier to navigate when you’ve forgotten one of the myriad key commands, giving you a list of choices which you can click on or type in.  That was a bit easier on me as I have long forgotten all of the commend conventions like q for quaffing a potion or z for zapping a wand or whatever.

I did considerably better on my run with the graphical UI, making it down into the gnomish mines.

In the gnomish mines, where the gnomes are not happy to see you

Still, it all ended in tears, as it tends to.

The graphical grave stone

At least I didn’t starve.  And that gnome had help.  But once again I failed to find the Amulet of Yendor.

So it goes.  As in the Rogue-like tradition, when you die you go back and start from scratch.  You might find some evidence of past runs now and then.  I seem to recall the ghost of your past self making an occasional appearance.  But when you’re dead your done.

I took a few more runs at it, but I am not sure, here in 2026, it is going to become the minor obsession it was for me around 1993.  But it is nice to see that it lives on and that a generation not even born when the game was started is able to experience life as the @ symbol in an ASCII dungeon.

Related:

• Nethack.org – NetHack Main Page
• Nethack.org – Version 5.0.0 Page