Test Update 19A: Part 1 of a 12 Part Writeup

Kidding, kidding. I know some people thought my four part series on the press release last week was a little extreme so don't worry, I'll contain this to two posts. There is a lot of great stuff going on here. SOE continues to make my job harder by improving stuff I planned to write about before I even get the chance. They also addressed some of my previous issues.

- Raid leaders can now move a raid member to an empty slot in another existing group by dragging the character name to the desired group.
- Raid leaders can now swap raid members between groups by dragging one member's name on top of the other raid member's name.

From my wishlist post: "Can you imagine a drag and drop interface which allowed the raid leader (before combat) to pull players from one group to another or switch players in two groups?"

Well, we won't have to just imagine it for much longer because it is on the way. I'm very happy to see this. I would suggest this be made one of the "headlines" when it goes live rather than just buried at the end of the UI notes because I think it is a significant change.

- Your high level spells are now useable (at a reduced effectiveness) when you mentor a lower level player. No more messing with your hotbar when you want to help out a friend!- Most spells will no longer drop or suspend when you start mentoring a lower-level player. Instead, they now adjust themselves accordingly.

Covered this one previously: "As a comment to my wishlist post, Scott Adams made the excellent suggestion:

'I would like to see the mentoring system automatically scale spells/abilities down to whatever you have scribed in your book. No more have to shift hot bars around etc. Those spells with no precursors (like scout escape at 25) would then simply become red.'

And thankfully, it looks like this might happen in LU 19, according to this post from Moorgard. Excellent. Mentoring should not be a hassle for the person doing the mentoring."

- Citizens of Qeynos and Freeport can now mail each other items and coin.

Again, I will cite a previous comment of mine:

"In fact, the restrictions on mailing items to opposing players should be dropped on PvE servers because it's meaningless the way things currently are. You can group with someone every night but then not mail them a flask of water? Ridiculous."

The Alpha test for the new character progression changes is now on the Test server in order to ensure existing below-20 characters will function properly.

I am in favor of this system as I outlined in this post and I am glad to see it is coming along.

You can now select from a list of all writs you are eligible to embark upon when speaking to a writ giver.

From an immersion standpoint, it was more "realistic" the original way. However, I still support this change. Why? Because in reality, you want to do the same writs as your guildmates or go after a specific mob. So you click, delete, click, delete and it's just annoying. Back in the days when we used to do extended writ runs in EF this really drove us crazy. So I'm glad to see it changed.

I wonder, would it be good to extend this idea to other repeatable quests that have a "choice" of mobs? Last week, I was farming a few Aquim quests in Maj during some downtime and I fully admit I deleted and hailed until I got ghouls as the quest mob. Should this be changed too or is that going too far?

You should now be able to attack NPCs that are touching or partially inside a wall.

Yes, it would be nice if mobs were never inside the walls. But if this makes things easier until that problem is fully solved, I'm all for it. I'll have to see how effective it is in practice.

Alright, I'll cover the rest tomorrow. A lot of stuff in this update and this is only part A.