That'd explain his defensive posture the last few days. When people resort to personal attacks it usually means one of two things. They're argument isn't sound, and they know it. Or they've got some skeletons in the closet that they're being jittery about.
Here's some facts for you to consider with this quest. I just sent over 5 bags of fire beetle eyes to my level 14 mage to test the quest at that level range. Dark Elf Mage NPC: Xelha in Freeport (evil side) Amiable faction with her Started with level 14 and 8% in level Turned in 937 Fire Beetle Eyes Ended with level 15 and 84% in level That's almost 6 bags (8 slot bags) full of fire beetle eyes, and it gained me almost 2 levels in the teens. It literally would take you hundreds of trips back and forth filling your bags to level a character up to max. Anybody that levels a character this way to max level... well /clap. That's more work then getting in a group, popping experience pots and killing mobs. What this quest IS good for is getting past the first 10 levels. From my personal tests: level 1 to 7 (with 79% in level) = 360 fire beetle eyes level 1 to 12 (with 35% in level) = 1,440 fire beetle eyes So, yes. This is the fastest way to get past the first ten levels of the game, and gets you in to the range where you can start grouping with other players. Considering you can get 2,000 plat in game for 1 Krono, a new player with no plat in game, can buy 1 Krono from DBG, sell it in game for 2k plat, buy 1400 fire beetle eyes (~1p per) and have 600 plat left to buy some starter gear for grouping in Unrest. That's my 2cp on the quest.
That's an expensive way to get to 10. I mean more power to those that want to. What'd I do is start with the 2000 plat, group to 10 at orc hill and crushbone, and still have 2000pp in my pocket. Plus the belts and pads. Non-elves can make even more cash by selling the deathfist belts on their way to 10 from the orc camps in Commons and Nektulos. Is it not as fast? Sure.. but a little longer gets you money in the bank. But to each their own.
6k Eyes takes you from 11 to 21. Its a quick way to level to 33, but after that grouping with 50's is going to be WAY quicker.
The very fact that so many people on this server have experience with the result of turning in literally thousands of beetle eyes should tell everyone all they need to know about how those eyes are being farmed. Does anyone really think for an instant someone is sitting there manually queueing all those /pet attack commands? And how long would it take for a single GM to resolve? 10 minutes or so? I know DBG is stretched thin, but c'mon.. And yeah, I don't care how non-disruptive it is. The simple fact is that AFK actions of any kind have been explicitly described as not allowed on Phinny and if DBG isn't even going to take the most cursory effort to enforce their own rules now that the server is up and running, what's to stop the abuse from becoming more widespread? I mean, I haven't heard anyone start talking about the automated groups in Hate yet...
Here's the thing Regular Guy. It's a sixteen year old game. Nobody including the owners care that much. The ONLY reason any of us are here is because there are no EQ clones out there to play right now. The only thing that ever came close was Vanguard, and it's gone. The point is, feel lucky that they even keep the servers on for us to play. The game has been on life support for ever. Don't expect much and you won't be disappointed.
Well i autoforage with forage linked to my rightarrow key, so you can farm eyes simply running around in paineel with a macrp target firebeetle, pet attack or anything more sophisticated.
You're partially right with this. Feb of last year they laid off alot of people. Downsized even producers. Even PS2 and DCUO currently do not even have producers when they had multiple. What really got hit was the GM and CM teams. Have you all noticed that SOE-Mod XX are all gone across all the forums? Now we have Roshen and RadarX. That's it. They are two mods for all the game forums. That's EQ, EQ2, PS2, DCUO, H1Z1, Landmark, and EQNext. Doesn't mean the game is dying though. I mean look at the progression servers. They fill up when they release. Of course they don't grow as people get bored with them. But they each get queues on opening day. That's not too bad to be honest. Krono sales do well as you can see ingame across all the servers. Those things are 17.99 a piece. I'm just wondering when they'll allow them to be traded in other games.
ive spent an hour or so on a couple different occasions farming fire beetle eyes with my monk. i can easily see people spending hours doing it if all they have to do is hit 1 button occasionally on a pet class.with the in game macro system it doesnt even need to be a constant mash. could easily do that reading a book or something. especially if they are selling at 1plat per, its going to be the quickest way to farm plat. im not saying it isnt possible there is some automation going on, but people jump to that conclusion an awful lot in some cases where it isnt true.
If you watch Paineel, the fire beetles usually die before they can finish dropping out of the sky, with 1-2 people parked on each spawn point.
Yeah because it's hard to hit 1 button as soon as you see a beetle spawn. Take the tin foil hat off. There's no magic here. People are just hitting a button.
Who said anything about magic? There's no magic. You spend 30 seconds googling and installing a program that just auto-clicks the mouse. Then you go to the movies. And again. I'm not talking about seeing them spawn. I'm talking about pets hitting them instantly, within hundredths of a second of the mob spawning.
You can believe what you want. I know I am out there competing with them, and I'm just hitting a button when I see them spawn. If they are using a cheat to get the mobs a micro second after they spawn, then explain how come I am getting some of the spawns.
Depends where you're doing it and who you're competing with. Some of the automated accounts doing it aren't really that high level and it takes the pets a few hits to kill the fire beetles. If you're doing it in Paineel, three beetles spawn simultaneously at each point. Then they start walking in opposite directions. Even if a level 8 Nec pet starts attacking the instant it spawns, it'll take ~30 seconds to kill the beetle, then ~5 to walk to the next. If a competitor is higher leveled or has a better initial position, it's not that hard to get one or two of the three. The problem comes when the account doing the farming has the max level pet and kills them instantly. I don't really care that much. I find it a bit odd, but with /advloot this kind of thing was inevitable.
Leave advance loot out of this. /loot has been around for ever. If you can automate the attack, you can automate the looting of the corpse, too. I had a buddy that was running 24 accounts back in 2006ish. He didn't run a mage army, he had at least one of every class. He had a webpage and database set up for which toon had which loot. Certain toons would get certain tradeskill items and then the tradeskilling would be automated. He didn't run the 24 accounts on a live server, but an one, because who wants to pay for 24 accounts with cash money, but he could have. Scripts are what computers do. Applying them to a game isn't hard, and it isn't stoppable. Just be happy most EQ script writers aren't that clever, and have to use their leet gaming skills on fire beetles, because Nagy and Vox can and have been killed by scripted armies.
