Allakhazam slashes pricing for Premium service

A little surprised that no one posted a topic on this.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=36914

This is fair considering that the information for new content is lacking. It's worth the $9/year to access 19 or 20 expansions' worth of accurate content.

What does their premium give?

http://legacy.zam.com/subscribe.html

Good lord for those of you who complain about the ads this will get rid of them!

Still not worth it for me to pull the trigger due to their lack of updates. I used to be premium member for several years, the website has degraded over the years.

And even though they have volunteers now, its still pretty bad, look at their TDS & TBM info compared to the VoA/HoT info, huge difference. They failed to move with the times, so its on them to catch up.

I'll save my $9!

It's good for seeing the list of goods that a merchant sells and sometimes it has good info on tradeskill combines if you don't want to visit eqtraders.com. The advanced item search feature is really great.

I'll give Zam $9 just for the guide to the Artisan's Prize. Couldn't find it anywhere else.

Sign of the times. I can remember lo' these many years ago when there were dozens of EQ relatedfan sites, server specific message boards, guild specific, class specific, etc. Now we are down to just a few and they are struggling for resources.

EQ is an entirely difference experience when you have to solve a quest yourself, instead of looking up a write up to walk you through it.

I can't speak for those who worked for ZAM during the TDS and TBM expansions, however I know right before TBM beta I believe is when ZAM made the transition to no remote employees so they lost quite a bit of their paid help along with the only developer the site had at the time. And I think they only had 2 volunteers during that time as well that were active. This is why all that information is still lacking. I and a couple others worked on TBM quite a bit during the summer this year to at least enter some information to that expansion although it still needs lots of love. After EoK is taken care of, I personally will be going back and try to get things caught up with TDS and TBM and hopefully some of the other volunteer admins will help me. We just got a ton of TBM and TDS items entered from the item collector, thanks to all of you that have recently downloaded it and are using!

Now we have ZAM back behind us and giving us resources, we are getting bugs fixed and will be adding more features soon.

would be nice if their spell parser ever got fixed

Spell parser is 90% fixed. We're working on fixing the SPA information. All new spells should be on the site. I'm aware that the spell search isn't pulling up all of the spells right now, we're working on it.

Thanks guys. I'm almost ready to subscribe again but I'm trying to update the e-mail address associated with the account first. Sent a message to the help desk concerning that.

Its nice they are backing us there again. I was relying on that site to know what mobs were in the various zones or if I should attempt a quest there. I tried to help a bit last year by posting info I had found out on faction changes after mob kills, but I have since gotten bogged down helping relatives... retirement isn't all its cracked up to be.

I use the ZAM Tooltips on my wiki. Unfortunately, they don't work if I make my website https:

One of these years I need to ask if there is a way to fix that...

Got a human reply and the issue was fixed within a few hours. They earned my subscription. I don't get that kind of service from companies that I give thousands of dollars to.

Zam was always worth the money. In TBM it was quite sparse and news where pulled together badly. But the old information is still valid and like every other site it depends on the community to give the real vital information. EQresource is a good overview too but it lacks also on vital strats or deeper insights and misses old content. The same goes for EQTrader. It misses so many recipes for the new 350 skillups, so without a bit love from everybody these sites will not shine as bright as they could

I found AllaKhazams's site to be an incredibly useful resource 16 years ago, and now that I'm back I'm once again making very heavy use of it.

Now that the subscription price has been reduced, I've finally signed up: they've given me far more than my money's worth over the years.

The mentality of people wanting something for nothing is a mindset that never ceases to exist. The reality is the website has been vastly updated by a number of volunteers who ask for nothing throughout the summer and will continue to be updated w/ EOK content. The premium which is less than what most people spend on cigarettes in a week mostly supports the cost of simply operating the site. No one is really profiteering from this.

I signed up. Invaluable for me playing on Phinigel.

I'd pay a hefty subscription for Allakhazam if they updated their site more often, and added an up to date TLP section with spells and such. As it currently stands you just can't rely on the information there anymore.

All of this talk of Zam lately! Zam has by far the best old quest info, from the days of yore when thousands visited and sourced information to that site.

It's fantastic that the ZamOverlords finally decided to update their broken things so they'd work again. After just a few short years. And hired some Admins to actually add user submitted content for TBM and EOK! After just a couple short years of indifference.

That's all well and good. Props to Zam for finally getting those holes shored up for the game they built their information empire on. But we've had two excellent sites doing this for many years:

www.eqresource.com

and

www.raidloot.com

I don't know much about the people who run raidloot. I do know they provide excellent, accurate, and easy to read AA/Item information that's up to date with the latest patches. They also allow the creation of free raidloot profiles - similar to Magelo, but free.

EQResource is run by Riou and Rorce. Two individuals who bust to provide day 1 quest/named info at expansion launch, keep their spell and item information up-to-date (including for Test!), run contests for the community, and generally be an awesome couple of dudes for everyone who plays Everquest. Some of their information is community sourced. A lot of it is not.

They also provide hosting for the Gamparse downloads - a tool which we all use.

All of their site's features, except early Beta content, is 100% free. The item search is limited to 50 items - more than enough if you learn to work their user-friendly and highly customizable advanced search feature.

Here's my short EQResource story. I started autojoining the serverwide EQR channel a little while ago. One night I was searching for an obscure piece of information I was having trouble finding. I asked in the EQR channel on a weekday around 11pm if searching for this info on the site was possible. To my surprise, within 10 minutes, Riou had not only responded, but had put together an entire page on EQR with the information I'd asked for. This was maybe the second time I'd said anything in the EQR channel. It didn't matter that I was some random scrublet - someone needed help, and he was there to provide it. A+ customer service to someone who isn't even a customer.

For what's on offer at their site, $0.00 is a steal. They would probably prefer to not have this plug in a Zam thread. It seems like they've always been all for good information being spread among sites, and I don't think I've ever seen either of them say anything against Zam. But I couldn't care less - I think EQR deserves a mention in any post regarding Zam's premium membership. For me personally, given Zam's total disregard for the game that made them a thing on the internet, I won't ever pay them a dime.

It's awesome that you guys want to source info to Zam, some of you Zam admins are even my pals (Hi, Goosh!). That's fantastic, more sites = better for all. But all this thread has done is remind me I never did sign up for that premium EQR subscription.

Happy Thanksgiving, EQResource!

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