They say a picture is worth a thousand words....

I'm the Dark Elf mage group on the right of the picture. You may know me as Lenolan the bard, Drathus the warrior, or Silvas the mage. I also don't run alone. I have two friends that often join me.

I guess the only reason I'm even responding to this thread is because you took a picture of me, then proceeded to make assumptions about the characters in the picture.

So let me clarify a few things for you.

Most of the gear WE have, was attained starting on the 5th day the server went live. Hate was completely empty and, with no competition, it was very easy to gear up our mages. Also, during that time I made friends with a wizard in Faceless named Frosin. When we killed an NPC with something we didn't need, we would send a tell to Frosin who would port people up to Hate who were high enough level to enter the zone. Frosin was constantly porting people up. It got to the point we were giving out hundreds of drops.

Did we ever once charge any any pp or Kronos for anything we gave away?

Well? Did we?

According to you we apparently did, right? Because our only motivation for doing this is to make PP and Kronos? . . . and destroy the game?

Wrong. We have NEVER taken any pp or even a single krono for anything we have given away on this server from the day it launched.

You say Hate was empty because we - Besteva (the other mage box crew in the picture) and I kill all the NPCs in hate?

For the past 4 days my box crew has pretty much been sitting in hate doing nothing - hoping a Magi P`Tasa would spawn. Killed a few non-armor dropping trash NPCs and finally last night - decided to go up into the northern part of the zone and killed about 10 armor dropping mobs. Got an enchanter robe and enchanter legs which we given out to a very thankful enchanter who was sitting at the zone in. Helped Wiluvin with a double pull - which he could have handled, but asked us to take the lich or he would be there all day killing. No NPCs were tagged that were already aggro and everyone got alone just fine.

After about an hour of doing that we left the area.

This weekend the AD guild came up to hate, killed six minis. They came back the next morning Killed Inny and about five more minis. Yesterday, the FI guild came up to hate to kill Inny and then proceeded to kill eight minis.

Fun had by all.

So, I sit here trying to figure out exactly why you are so upset? Why you would be 'so broken hearted' and 'nauseated almost to the point of just never logging back in again?'

There are about 100 T1 armor droppers in Hate on a long respawn. When you have 50 - 100 people killing them, the zone will always be devoid of NPCs.

There is no rule saying you HAVE to take rots. Getting a full set of armor can be difficult, especially when you get down to your last piece. /OOCing rots and taking rots is part of the Hate culture - no play on words =P However, you don't have to lessen your experience by taking a rot if you don't want to. Although, I must say, it seems rather hypocritical of you to say people's experience is lessened by not killing the NPCs themselves and earning their armor, and your being given a BP that you obviously looted? Or am I now making an assumption of my own?

I'm curious to see what happens in a couple of expansions when mages and their pets start to suck.

We will replace the mages with wizards.

Then DB can nerf wizards on the TLP too.

i would pick rangers .. Boom! Headshot!

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People are already switching to wizards. Faceless was paying people to level them at one point...I think they have 25+ wizards on raids now.

The picture speaks volumes for the state of the modern game. I am just getting up to a level where I am shopping loot camps, and the majority are mage box or bot camped. I don't know what the solution is, but I can't compete with mage mult-boxers, and so won't even try, but neither will I forfeit kronos or piles of plat to the architects of these rackets. Better to turn away, remember EQ for what it once was, rather than the debacle it has become.

Ill try again on the one box server; that failing Ill wait a few months and let everyone get spread out a bit more. I do find that lagging an expansion or two behind doesn't really detract much from the eq experience, but right now, I am running up on these guys...so until then, /camp.

For three years OTHER PEOPLE have paid $2160 per year for you to box 35 accounts.

On Ragefire and Lockjaw, if a boxed mage crew wants a camp and takes the camp, there is absolutely no recourse that an individual non-boxing player, or group of players has to retain the camp. When the army locks down access to loot and then makes the only reasonable way for a non-boxer to get it is by paying for it with Kronos, then yes, you did force players into a corner. From that corner they had two choices, whip out their credit card to fund YOUR army, or refuse to do that and unsub instead.

You say I depressed you. I'd say I'm sorry except I'm not. You've made a business out of gaming the system and the corrupt cycle of overpowering a server with box crews and then getting others to fund your business by extorting Kronos for items the box crews lock down doesn't just depress me, it sickens me.

What are you talking about? I'm sure this person is alt tabing through each toon! I'm hoping for kunark so maybe I can get a camp some day. If they stay on all classic named as well as kunark I will eventually move on.

A mega-boxer is basically saying "I don't care about your immersion. You want to be able to adventure and quest and kill this stuff on your own. But I want you to instead buy the drops from me. So what I am going to do is lock this content down. I will be the new vending machine for this particular item drop. No longer are you going to form your own group and go off on an adventure to kill mobs for awesome loots. Instead, you can picture me as an NPC vendor, named "vending machine", and you buy your loots from me. I don't want you to have an easy time acquiring thrm on your own, because that's bad for my loot vending machine business"

It destroys the immersion of this game. You guys have long since forgot this is a massively multiplayer ROLE PLAYING GAME. It's meant as an escape, an adventure, not your sh.it.ty small business venture

I think a lot of you need to just stop going to the Plane of Hate; because its like resonating all the way onto the forums.

Who wants candy?

people have to remember lots of people are playing on these servers for nostalgia, there is zero nostalgia in seeing every mob perma killed in the plane of hate and or fear.

Those were hard zones you only went into with a raid in 99, back then wipes were plentyfull even just clearing the trash.

Now to go up there and see it as "just another zone" is very disappointing to many people.

see now that is why i do not understand people camping days and days for epic mage drops when they are going to swap out to wizards or whatever..

for that matter I can never understand why anyone needs BIS things in classic.. unless you are the MA tank going from common drops to BIS makes about a .00001% difference in how your character performs in classic EQ.

Exactly. There is such a thing as immersion. And I know the graphics are terrible, but if people didn't care about making believe that they really are a sword swinging half-elf fighting demons on another plane, this game would be just a text-based MUD. And seeing 30 mage pets stacked on top of each other all casting the exact same spell at the exact same second completely destroys game immersion. And soon seeing epics multi-quest vendored like we're playing Digital Everquest Craigslist will too. But whatever

So my conspiracy theory that the 3rd party programs are really soe/dbg devs and the the mage bot armies are the cs department is potentially not that far off eh?

lol

I just wanted to add to the mage pet army pictures!

Errbody playing with bad UIs =(

I feel like you're REALLY trying to troll with these pics.

make old school stuff have emotes = win

As Rune00 is so fond of pointing out, one of those two is open source. The developers can do whatever they want, there will be plenty of financial incentive for one of the popular easy version sites to modify it so that it works again.

LOL

just adding in my 2 cents.

Boxers = okay/good
1box = I hope you can at least handle 1 account
2box = if you can play both accounts like they are both played individually, then you are the man!
3box = if you can play 3 accounts, like separate people, then you are the Bomb!

If you box, and have to use scripts in order to do so... it just proves that:
1. your not capable of playing the game without cheating
2. your too uncoordinated to do be of any use to anyone else
3. Your only life and joy in this game is try to become "Lord of the krono"

You don't play 6-12 mages because it's somehow enjoyable. You play 12 mages for some sort of gain. Usually it's related to loot drops.

Kill the script-kiddies/ botters. Don't mind me and my 1 other box.