Today, November 8th, is officially EverQuest II’s 8th birthday. After the celebrations, long-time players want to know what presents they can expect! Specifically, they want to know — Will the EQ2 team try to outdo past unique Veteran Rewards?

Last year’s 8 year item — Veteran Revival — provided a groupwide resurrect which was a bit slow to cast but has still saved more than a few groups and raids from the jaws of death. Earlier today we talked about Call of the Veteran, or which must be known internally as the “Item From Hell”. It was a unique item, and I use it almost every day, but it does tend to bug out from time-to-time.

So you may be wondering why are we talking about a 9 year Veteran Reward when the game is just 8 years old. It so happens that the first four expansions each granted 90 days of additional accrued game time. This practice concluded with the Rise of Kunark, meaning the first four expansions credit one full extra year.

So what is it already? Sheesh!

When the EQ2 team came up with the six year Veteran Reward for loyal EQ2 customers, they likely never dreamed that its devilish complexity would haunt them years later. Call of the Veteran is both extremely popular, and frequently maligned for its maddening inconsistency. Although numerous bugs have been fixed with it over the years, the overriding need to prevent exploits has tended to expose strange glitches that take Indiana Jones-level archeology to resolve.

At this year’s SOE Live, EQ2 Lead Programmer Zoltaroth made it a point that he wanted Call of the Veteran to operate reliably. A tall order which he backed up today by posting some of the fixes he has committed, and the debugging that went into determining their cause: something nicknamed “phantom hate”.

It turns out that when you defeat an enemy, or it respawns, it may still be “mad” at you. This is usually a nonissue, but Call of the Veteran will not function unless you are completely out of Combat. I can only wish the EQ2 team the best of luck in continuing to chip away at these strange edge cases that keep Call of the Veteran from being perfect. It really does work most of the time, but as players, we naturally only remember the times it doesn’t!