Is stupid loud - much louder than all other sounds in the game. I have to turn sound so far down that I can barely hear other sound effects at a level this doesn't bother my ears. Can we get an option to turn this down or shut it off entirely? It is the most annoying thing to me in the game. I've been pinged 20,000 times now over the years and would like to be able to hear the game without worrying about this stupid sound ringing my eardrums constantly - this is especially bad when playing with earbuds.
It disturbs my family too. Level dings are cool. Thousands of AA dings keeping my family awake at night or forcing me to use headphones/turn off sound isn't cool.
Agreed x 100. I've been looking for the place to lower AA ding sound recently because I know it's disturbing to stream it too. Same with raid sound audio/environmental effects, very loud or nothing at all it seems.
I was actually having a similar conversation with some guildies about this yesterday. It is much more than just the AA ding. For me, sounds like the AA ding, looting coin, audio triggers, and some other things are 10X as loud as my spell casting or getting hit for example. There really should be some type of function to adjust the volume level or turn certain stuff on/off. If anything, all the sounds should at least be of a relatively similar intensity level. I utilize casting and environmental sounds as cues to help play so I can't just turn my sound off, but I also don't want to go deaf from dinging AAs
I heard that sound from doing so many Tumpy Tonics that it just doesn't register in my brain anymore.
I mainly play with sound off on account of:the repetitive screams upon attack/swing that don't appear to have any balance/compensation in place to keep them from sounding ridiculous. The fanfare sound is indeed very loud. In a perfect world I'd also like a custom music folder (an alternative place to load .mp3 files from so that we can replace files we don't like with ones we do, without having to overwrite mp3 files in the main EverQuest folder after every patch).
Is it possible to replace the local sound file in your eq directory with a modified/different one? Not sure if the sound files are exposed as standalone files or not, but I imagine so.
no - the replaced files won't work if EQ is already loaded, and EQ will repatch the sound files when you run the launcher, even if you rename a different sound file to a name EQ recognizes.
My friends make fun of me every time they hear the AA ding sound when we are all grouping and on Skype. I think I am the only one that plays with sound.
Lame. You used to be able to change sound files. I remember people changing all the zone music to mp3 rips way back when. I guess I wouldn't notice though, I was one of the huge % of players that had to add the "nosound.txt" file to the eq folder to prevent all sounds from loading during and after the Luclin release in order to make eq actually work. Never bothered turning sound back on a year or two later when that particular issue was fixed.
You still can do the alternate music thing if you use a shortcut with the "no patch" modifier in the file path. The shortcut I run EQ with on Windows 7 looks like this: "C:\Users\Public\Sony Online Entertainment\Installed Games\EverQuest\eqgame.exe" patchme The "patchme" at the end tells the client not to patch, and as long as you're up to date on other files, having a modded .mp3 file won't break the server's patch version detection (and it most definitely shouldn't, as it doesn't affect gameplay one bit). I mod my mp3 files on a regular basis to make the game's music enjoyable enough to want it turned on. One of the biggest changes I make is that I change my deaththeme.mp3 to a copy of Electric Funstuff's "Has Anybody Here Seen My Corpse?" (which I rename to deaththeme.mp3). Because the default deaththeme loops way too fast, sounds far too dire, and gets on my nerves (badly)... but listening to the first few harmonica-laden measures of "Has Anybody Here Seen My Corpse?" helps soften the blow of having just died and makes the game noticeably less irritating to play regarding death. Also the song is long enough that it stays entertaining while waiting for a rez. I also outright delete combattheme1.mp3 and combattheme2.mp3 in order to force the game to use one of the original MIDI combat themes, and do the same to eqtheme.mp3, which forces the game to use the classic EQ theme MIDI on loadup and the classic character select MIDI at charselect. I cannot stand the modern combattheme1.mp3 (just sounds way too dire and loud to fit most environments in the game). Combattheme2.mp3 isn't too bad, though it only sounds good to me in specific kinds of underground places like Gloomingdeep. I like the modern EQtheme.mp3 as a musical composition but find it too perky and not appropriately mood-setting a loading theme. But all of that will break on every patch day, since at that point the game will force you to run the patcher before it will permit you to actually play, and the patcher will dutifully patch the mp3 files in question back to their normal states. I get around this by maintaining a backup folder of renamed mp3 files that I just copy over en masse into the EQ directory after every patch, but it would be much less clunky from the user's end to just have an alternate music directory option (or else have an option in the patcher that ignores updating music files). Incidentally, some of EQ's zone mp3 themes are really great and are things I have used in on-the-road playlists before. I love tak.mp3 (Takish-Hiz LDoN theme) and mountainpass.mp3 (I think it's meant for Vxed and Tipt but I'm not sure, as I've never run my music in those zones and only stumbled on the awesome MP3 by chance a week ago). I'm fond of oceangreenhills.mp3 too - ambient and sorrowful, yet not too in-your-face.
Berserkers are a very support-dependent class. Always provide a bard for your zerkers, friends, and play it LOUD!
Going from memory here, but I believe the audio track is fanfare.wav. As it is packaged inside one of the .pfs bundles, you won't find it via a standard file search. You'll need to crack open the bundles and peer inside. Very likely to be in one of the lower-numbered bundles, as its a sound from original release.
The original purpose was so that you'd crank your sound up so you could hear, and then when you dinged, it was awesome! Great idea when there were 50 levels and each one was an exciting, hard-won achievement. Not so much with thousands of AAs.
Every time we see level increases, the first time I jump a new level that BRRWWWAAAAAAANG!!!!!! scares the crap out of me. I hear that sound so infrequently, I forget just how intense it is. One year, it startled me so bad I dropped a full glass of orange juice onto my keyboard. Talk about a damn mess to clean up. Damn SOE. /shakesfist
