Dialogue with the Denmother

An Interview with EQ2 Traders Niami Denmother

by: Tony "RadarX" Jones

If you've ever read any guides regarding tradeskills, you've probably seen the name Niami Denmother. If not, you need to read more guides. Niami's website, EQ Traders, was made famous in EverQuest for it's utility and and thoroughness. Niami now runs a EQ2 counterpart, which is provides a plethora (yes I know what a plethora is) of tips, guides, and message threads to answer questions. Personally, I try to bug her and read her site for all my tradeskilling questions, because Kiara ridicules me when I try and make armor on a woodworking table.

RadarX: Niami thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer a few questions. First and foremost, I'd like to know a little about you. How did you get into MMO's? What game started it all off?

Niami Denmother: A multiplayer text-based game called Gemstone III was my first exposure to online games, back in the 80s. I was also busy at that time doing cooperative story writing with friends on Relay (the precursor to IRC) and in AOL's Free-form gaming forum

RadarX: Really? I think I remember SOE's very own Owlchick being very active there. Did you know her back then?

Niami Denmother: She and her sister were there during my time playing, and she remembers me. {grins} In fact, at the last Fan Faire, she found out who my main was and silenced conversation at nearby tables with her excited exclamation. I'd played an empath as my main, and she was known as the Ambush Healer. During a special event, there was a pinmaker, and I got "A silvery pin depicting a woman stalking the wounded that says 'Ambush Healer.'"I used to grab wounds, tap the pin, and run off.

RadarX: I really missed out on that game, and it seems to have been very influential on some people. Alright everyone knows you're an avid tradeskiller, but what would you say is your favourite adventure class to play?

Niami Denmother: I'm an alt-a-holic, so that's a tough one. I have differing alts for different moods and styles of play. Currently, I'm really loving my warlock for solo times and my mystic for grouping with hubby's ogre paladin. However, I also enjoy my monk, warden, ranger, SK and wizzie. Need I say more? In several cases, alts that were meant "just" for tradeskills grew on me, and I started playing them

RadarX: Virtual multiple personalities is very common. Lol ...ok well for my next question, instead of "What is.." I'll go with "Do you have a favorite tradeskill class?"

Niami Denmother: {laughs} That's almost as bad! My favorites would be carpenter and provisioner, overall, but I really enjoy having that variety option again. So I also have a high end tailor, alchemist, sage, a budding woodworker, weaponsmith and jeweler. I just love furniture, and cooking has always been relaxing for me.

RadarX: I don't know how you would keep them all straight but I admire it. You run a site called EQ2 Traders which is the best site for tradeskilling I know of. Tell us a little about it, and what your goal is.

Niami Denmother: It is actually quite a different creature from the original EQ site. The original site was very needed to help figure out recipes, locate supplies, figure out which mobs dropped what tradeskill resources, etc. However, EQ2's tradeskills create a different environment and community. So, the EQ2 Traders Corner site is a different critter. The community is good for information and moral support, and the guides and the furniture gallery are quite popular, but the recipes and items database is less used than its counterpart. Given all the recent and continuing changes to tradeskills, and what they've done to outdate the data in there, this is likely a good thing! (There will be fuel changes to many recipes with the next Game Update, for example, that will have to be done manually.)

RadarX: Well the site does our community an amazing service. Looking at current events, I remember reading you've been looking at the new tradeskill writs going in with GU 27. What are you thoughts on them?

Niami Denmother: There are actually both timed and untimed tradeskill writs incoming with the update, thanks, in part, due to community feedback. The timed ones will be higher risk (loss of resources and fuel on failure) for a higher reward, while the untimed ones will allow those who prefer a more relaxed crafting environment. While the rewards will be smaller than you'll see with the timed ones, they'll still be worthwhile for many crafters. Dymus has been working very hard to tweak and tune these based on player feedback and they're really starting to shape up nicely on Test.

RadarX: It sounds like we've got plenty to look foward to. I personally will be happy with the "relaxed" (read: lazier) writs myself. Being so involved with tradeskills, what frustrations do you have, and what enhancements would you like to see? Feel free to whip out the rolling pin of doom right now.

Niami Denmother: That's a really loaded question, and a tough one to answer. It sort of frustrates me that I have to have so many alts in order to play with the tradeskills that I want to play with. The sheer number and variety of resources I have to juggle to feed all my tradeskill addictions can make harvesting an almost fulltime job. However, I'd say my biggest frustration is with the bugs and balance issues. There are just too many of both, and not enough dev time to handle it all, so we'll often see bugs sit on my list for months on end due to other priorities, and that's VERY frustrating for both me and for the community.

RadarX: Wow, was that an amazingly kind answer. I can visualize you swinging the rolling pin above your head while saying it... On to something that is actually finished, for the most part. What was your opinion of the tradeskill revamp? How do you feel the crafting community took it? Do you think it was a good move?

Niami Denmother: It had a lot of mixed reactions from the community, and the same things that one person loved about it, another person absolutely hated, and vice versa. However, we're never, ever going to see anything that everyone loves, so I expected that sort of reaction.
The old system had some pretty creative underlying flaws that made it very hard to change things, keep consistency, and so forth, and it made trying to make any sort of blanket fix or change a nightmare. This made several parts of the revamp very needed from a technical perspective, on top of the oft-requested "no subs" from the community perspective. Overall, I personally liked most of the changes, though some classes really need more loving "real soon now" for progression, and some of the outstanding bugs are starting to get irksome. However, I still flinch every time I think what it did to my poor database, which makes me glad the DB isn't as central to the site as the one for EQ is to the original EQTC.

As always, you can't please everyone, and I know a lot of folks are pretty determined in their "hate everything about the revamp and they'll scream it at the top of their lungs repeatedly" mindset, and the ones who enjoyed it tend to be a lot quieter in their appreciation. I think that's something valuable I learned from the main EQTC site along the way in the last several years. There's a pretty solid 90% rule, and it's only when that 90% rule isn't working that something is truly out of kilter. 90% of the playerbase at any given time will be pretty ambivalent about changes, or it won't ruffle them one way or the other. Then you'll have 5% who really like it (but who tend to be a lot quieter), and 5% who will REALLY hate it and say so loudly and repeatedly. It's really hard sometimes to keep that perspective when all the screaming, shouting and hissy fits are going on, but when you can take a couple steps back, it really helps you keep your cool when folks start screaming, again, that the sky is falling, again.

I had/have a great working relationship with the devs on the EQ side of things, where I'd often have them bounce ideas off me, and I'd play devil's advocate and give them not only the high points, but warn them what the 5% would be likely to complain about the most. It wasn't so much telling them that something wasn't viable, but more preparing them for the extremes in reaction so it was easier for them to get a feel for the community and be ready for the reactions. I suspect there's little more depressing, dev-wise, than thinking you have a great idea, implementing it with excitement, then getting broadsided from several directions due to having overlooked something. So, I tried to prepare them for some of the broadsiding.

RadarX: Wow, that was amazingly insightful! Ok last question because i'm sure you have brownies burning since I've kept you. MMO's seem to be trending towards more mainstream and simple tradeskills. Do you think this is the future of crafting?

Niami Denmother: I think that's a rough one to call. Every MMO goes about it a bit differently, and there's a trend towards a lot of "wiggle" in most of them- a little harder this month, a few changes to make it easier next month, some compensation the other way later on. A lot will depend, of course, not only on the dev teams involved, but what they find does/doesn't work with their specific playerbase. Definitely, in EQ2, we've seen a short-term trend towards simpler tradeskills, but while that's given us a more stable and consistent base to work from, it isn't where tradeskills in EQ2 are going to stay.
There's a lot of promise in the secondary tradeskills coming out with the next expansion, that will springboard off this newly-standardized base in order to make tradeskills, and the items created with them, have a bit more meat to them, from what I've seen.I've got a quick preview of them on my site, based on some official announcements. You can find the mini-article here.

RadarX: Thanks for the link! Well that's all the questions I had. Any other issues you'd like to see some attention drawn to?

Niami Denmother: I think that pretty well covers it for now, unless you can figure out how to make certain waills and floors in my 5-room home stop trying to eat my rugs and paintings! Seems they feel the need for a bit more fiber in their diets or something. o.O

RadarX: Yes well as soon as the carpenter comes and fixes the warped boards in the upstairs of my 3 room house....

Niami Denmother: Heh, sounds good! And when they're done with those, maybe they can figure out some housepet leashes that work in places other than Maj'Dul ... Personally, I think that durn carnivorous plant of mine is teaching my home and my pets some really bad habits. Mayhaps I need to give him another talking-to with my RPoD in hand. {wanders off, patting her rolling pin.

Niami, thanks again for taking time out of your extremely busy schedule to chat with me. If you have crafting questions, be sure to stop by her site EQ2 Traders and behold all the tradeskilling goodness!