Dialogue with the Denmother

An Interview with EQ2 Traders Niami Denmother

by: Tony "RadarX" Jones

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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 href="http://eq2.eqtraders.com/articles/news_page.php?menustr=010000000000">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 href="http://eq2.eqtraders.com/articles/article_page.php?article=g95&menustr=070000000000">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!