Another week, so another "I'm bored at work" post. I came to a realization this weekend while playing in the new Kunark content on the Agnarr server.... I love and hate the epic weapons. Let me explain. Love it I love the epic weapons themselves and the fact that they take a certain level of effort to obtain. It makes them special, and they give you that "I accomplished something!" feeling. Hate it I hate the epic weapon quests because it brings out the absolute worst in people in the game. I have personally witnessed more purposeful trains to steal camps, ooc/say/tell taunting, and out right horribly disgusting behaviours by people that HAVE TO GET THAT EPIC DROP!!!! OMG!!!11!!.!!! KK THX PLZ!@#!!! Before Kunark, you log in to the game, say hi to some friends, and create or join an experience or gear-drop group with those people. It was fun. It was relaxing. It was Everquest! After Kunark release, you log in to see that nobody is grouping together for experience because everybody is at some epic drop camp (that gives minimal experience for level 50 and in most cases no experience) while fighting other people who keep training them for their camp. As if that wasn't bad enough, you got each of the different classes in different zones camping their epic drops. It's not like all the necessary classes to make a real group have the same camps to get their epic drops. Nooooooo. Somebody 17 years ago thought it would be fun to put a bard epic drop in this camp, a warrior epic drop in that camp, a cleric epic drop in that other camp over there, monk epic drop over that-a-way, etc because reasons unknown to any intelligent human being alive. So, after getting camp after camp stolen from my group, getting wiped by train after train by "enter-random-jerk-who-wants-epic-drop-here", I finally said screw it. I logged out of my monk, and called it a day. I decided to hell with it. I will play my monk again when Velious comes out in hopes that people will have gotten the "me me me" out of their system long enough to get back to what makes playing Everquest even worth doing.... playing the game with friends. It's truly sad that some pixels in a game can make the average gamer become horrible disgusting vial beings, but if there was ever an MMORPG expansion to make that come true, Kunark is the winner. Put out an expansion that gives an amazing once in a lifetime weapon from a really, really long and annoying quest, and you will see people sale their grandmother for it. Way to go human race. You proved once again just how pathetic you really are. Tl;dr version... Humanity sucks, and Kunark makes it super obvious.
online video games bring this out in just about every game in existance. MMOs where open world battling is a thing, is the worst for this type of behavior. Any game where 1 player can determine another players experience leaves room for people to act a fool. The difference between EQ and almost all others, is the fact that the average age of EQ players is late 20s to mid 40s and most other games are 14-23. It really sucks that younger children feel the need to act like badass's in an online video, but it REALLY is sad when its people in the 30s and 40s acting that way. the only way to combat it is play single player games and games where other peoples decisions don't effect your game play, or you play at their level so you are able to progress, or if you really want just spend countless hours reporting/petitioning every person that breaks the rules. However, you won't have much time for playing said game
On a locked server the accomplishment of getting an epic 1.0 for oneself remains strong, even if it isn't a top 5 best in slot choice for your class at the PoP lock. Unlike a Black Friday sale, the epic drops remain in the game all along. So unless you must have it with the initial rush... you can avoid the initial rush and the behaviour that brings out in some.
It was even worse before they made the changes on Phinny. I'd imagine the pick one changes are rough on you guys though.
Which is probably why I won't even bother with it. Not sure if my guild will do VP (we do raid) but those guilds we won't name basically have the keys locked down. Hell, the leader of FE already got the kill on a VP dragon. Not sure how they managed to get enough keyed to do that (in 2 days).
I quit on fippy in early velious, because we were raiding so much, I couldn't even hit 60. Everytime I logged on, we were on the move to contest a raid mob. I played wizard, so I spent a good 45 minutes gathering people up, only to have us wipe or lose mob to someone half the time. At least we have instances now.
That is quite literally how I spent my time on Fennin back in the day (as a cleric though). I would get home from work, log on and be told to head to wherever to start forming for a raid. Rarely had time to do anything.
