I bought the DBG spell designers each a copy of Finnegans Wake to help them out, their thesauruses were getting too worn out. EQ has been pushing my vocabulary forward for 22 years now. Every new expansion is a new opportunity to learn new obscure words like "atavism" or "crepuscular". Then there's stuff like "Telajaga" which is just random words stuck together. I think the worst is the increase in "Let's just name stuff after NPCs" like Omorden's Spiteful Lyric. I can imagine them sitting at a desk thinking, "OK, I need a bunch of new names for bard DD songs, let's just use the warrior mob who gave me Kael armor 20 years ago..."
Would love to see this. It's so confusing to returning players to see players use the different forms of the spell lines interchangeably, or to try and dig through guides that are a mere year or two old to figure out the basics of their class.
A truck loaded with thousands of copies of Roget's Thesaurus crashed as it left a New York publishing house last Thursday. According to the Associated Press, witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, punchy, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, boggled, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, and perplexed.
Roman numerals are terrible. I'm constantly amazed at the things the Roman Empire accomplished with that terrible number system. Just imagine what they could have done if they used Arabic numerals instead (0-9). © Copyright MMXXI
I know they use it for a number of things [pun not intended but I'll go with it]. I'm saying they should not use it for any number that goes over three and instead use Arabic numerals. The "joke" of my post was the "© Copyright MMXXI ". Does anyone know what number that is? You can guess it is 2021 but really, almost no one knows what the numbers mean as they get higher. MCMXII is 1912, how many people do you think know that? I didn't. I got it from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals which also mentions, "In fact, there has never been an officially binding, or universally accepted standard for Roman numerals." Much like non-metric measurement systems, Roman numerals need to die.
I never had any problems with roman numerals myself, in my junior & senior schools we even used them in some of the lessons "for fun", once you have some familiarity with using them often enough they become much easier to work with, they still operate on base 10 maths after all, so I'd say familiarity is the key to using them "fluently" and the Romans did fine with them because they used nothing else for a long time. They were after all impressivly capable engineers. Coming back to spell names/ability names etc, I think the past few expansions they were just given thematically appropriate names that fitted in with the expansion anyway. Like Axe of Derakor in ToV for example an extension of prior Axe of.... abilities with a name refective of the expansion it was from. I don't see a problem continuing that trend.
Roman numerals have, thusfar, worked out just fine for American football fans to number their annual Super Bowls out to 51. They've worked out just fine for clerics numbering their Yaulps out to 16. Folks can handle it. Folks could also handle Shock of Fire XXI this coming Dec. Or Conflagration XVIII, if one wants to start numbering from the bit-more-iconic o.g. level cap version of Wizard Single Target Fire Based Nuke. Or Conflagration XIV, if one wishes to set aside the one-off "Ancient" spells (that were really just Rk.IIIs before Rk.IIIs, but whaaaatever.)
Alternatively, " Shock of Fire (114) " or whatever is also an acceptable naming convention, as it helps players OF ALL LEVELS OF KNOWLEDGE know that they are using the most up-to-date version of a spell, unless assuming there is no update (*cough*Jonthan's*cough*) for some still-unknown reason.
Be glad they don't write out stuff in Latin longhand (like they used to on papal documents): millesimoquadragesimoquinquagesimonono (1459)
The only issue I had with Roman numerals was trying to catch the year a movie was made around the turn of the millennium. They would always fly by so fast that I rarely could do the math before it was gone. 1988=MCMLXXXVIII as an example. I still wonder why anyone would use the system. This conversion alone is more than twice as long. I guess they think it looks fancier or more official or something. /shrug
I think binary is better 1988 = 11111000100 source https://decimal.info/Decimal-to-Binary/how-to-convert-1988-to-binary.html
I look forward to caring about this in a bit less than 4000 years from now when EverQuest players get to advance our characters to level 9965
Regardless, it would still be an improvement to use the basic, original spell name combined with some progression indicator so that you can tell at a glance what era spell is being used vs unique "flavor" names that don't indicate, in and of themselves, what era it comes from.
They could really have done a number on people and used morse code: Abundant Healing .--- (1) Abundant Healing ..--- (2) Abundant Healing ...-- (3) Abundant Healing ....- (4) Abundant Healing ..--- ----. (29) Abundant Healing ..... .---- (51) etc.