EverQuest

I’ve started work on tailoring again. Making my appearance clothes in the Nest got the juices running, and I was in Lavastorm farming rares for my defiler (who just made 40) anyway… so what the heck… I leveled to tier 6, and after a night of harvesting which got me about four hundred roots and a similar number of pelts, got to level 52 before I ran out of roots. At six to eight roots per combine, they go pretty quick. At 1.5% experience per combine, it takes a lot of them to get anywhere, too. Without the new tradeskill experience bonus for tradeskill writs, I doubt I could have done it at all. ...

* The sky over the Commonlands was the color of galvanized aluminum… Appearance armor: Pristine Melodic Xegonite with Nightchord hat. * Much of this weekend and the last one was spent catching up to the guild on the Swords of Destiny quest. I made a mistake with the Claymore quest; I didn’t focus on it at the time, and I ended up doing all the quests for other people and not for me because I hadn’t yet started it. Now that I’d like to do it, groups are hard to find… and so I’m still on the Sanctum of Scaleborn bits and likely will never hold my glowy saber. Especially with Kunark coming out and making older weapons obsolete. ...

The Butcherblock shuttles with the ship to Kunark waiting offshore They don’t have boats in Everquest any more. I guess it’s faster to zip around the world via the Plane of Knowledge, or the translocator gnomes now. Back in the first couple of years of Everquest, you went from place to place in boats. I was late to work the morning Kunark came out, and I was on the first boat out. ...

I didn’t really want to wear a bathrobe everywhere. What I wanted were some clothes that said – hey! I’m a bard! Let’s have a sing-a-long! I needed some clothes nobody else would wear… and they had to look distinctive. I found a couple pieces of various trash sets – ‘woven engraved’ (all lower case) looked unique, but I could only find the tunic. Being a tailor, I thought I might have something cool in my book of patterns… and the tunic from the set you get by killing the Chamberlain in the Nest jumped out at me. I’d never seen ANYONE wear it. And look, matching pants… and gloves! ...

Via Cuppy, the Rise of Kunark Beta application is now up. I’ve been waiting for this for years. Kunark turned EQ1 from a casual game to an obsession with me. Maybe that wasn’t entirely a good thing. Pre-Kunark EQ1 was a very casual game; there wasn’t a whole lot to do in the end game (Vox, Naggy, Hate, Fear and Sky… and all those were contested), and so few people really were trying that hard to level. Back then, we hadn’t yet been trained that the goal of every MMO was to level as fast as possible and then cry for more content. ...

Leave it to Bristlebane to have a favorite pet who looks designed by a committee. A drunk committee. That had just spent a sleepless night being chased by giant pink rabbits. I left off last night having pulled a prank on a goblin prophet (er, profit) of the King of Thieves. I baked him a horrible pie. The goblin had an idea for an even BETTER prank to play on the haffer what pranked him – make him a horrible pie! ...

Everquest 2 still astounds me sometimes with amazing scenes. This shot is a boarding party from Kunark trying to take on my ship with me as its lone defender (after the ship’s usual defenders fall in the first seconds of the battle). What’s happened is that pirates from Kunark have found us. We’re not the only ones rebuilding after The Shattering fifteen years back; the Iksar and the Sarnak of Kunark have been doing it better and faster, and now they’re taking that opportunity to attack our shipping and, likely, will begin striking against the mainland at any time. ...

Gosh, who are those slick looking haffers, decked in Tier 1 mastercrafted gear? Them haffers are my new characters on Nagafen, EQ2’s most popular PvP server. I level locked them at level 10 while I get some AAs, but finishing quests has bumped Tipa (the fury in the foreground) to level 11, with Tsuki (the wizard to the right) not far behind, and both with three AAs already… My guild on Befallen, the non-PvP server where my high level characters live, is dying. Summer kills guilds, but this particular one was helped along by a seven day a week raiding policy. Now we’re down to one or two raids a week, of old content, and guilds which are a troub short looking for a short troub… ...

There’s this dog. Every day he runs out of the house when his person comes home, all ready to play. His person takes out a Frisbee and tosses it onto the lawn, and the the dog runs up and grabs it, and then he brings it back. Sometimes his person pats him on his head. Sometimes its even a different color Frisbee. The dog dreams someday of meeting up with some other dogs, and being driven far away, where they can all get out of the car and their person will throw them a Frisbee. ...

That Shapeshifter game doesn’t take up all my time. It just seems like it does. Another game that doesn’t take all my time: Overlord. I downloaded it based on the giddy reviews from Cuppy and Brent, but it seemed boring to me. MMOs have raised my expectations of games beyond what single player games can satisfy. Games without other people playing seem lifeless and barren, now. Does anyone actually care about my progress in Shapeshifter? Maybe I’ll just note progress now and then in Asides. ...