Weekend Update... a year and a few days lateFollow

So it was May 2012 the last time I logged in the majority of my EQ characters, July the last time I posted/participated in a "weekend update". I've lurked on Zam here and there and am happy to see some old names back. Felicite we never met/crossed path on the forums before... but your name came up over and over in helpful necro-related posts here from years ago. I'm taking this opportunity to say thanks for all the help (necro main for about 3 years). Glad your back!

Saw Jophiel had at least peeked in. Bijou is still around :). Vinney is still making houses. Yther is still knowledge.... Not sure if Jonwin is playing much? The list goes on, what is your update folks? (alla always felt more alive to me when people did the update).. anyways:

-Gave up on my little run in WoW (I know...), I lasted much longer than my brother thought before the linear push to level cap bored me (made it to level 87 out of 90). They've done some things well in that game... the main one is stealing good ideas from every competitor (i.e., their achievement system is sort of a combo rip-off of EQII and Warhammer).

-Decided to login to EQ which took a bit of a patch. Got annoyed with the upgrade from silver reminders so I paid for a month of gold. This also let me make new characters with non Crescent reach home cities. Decided to give Sony $5 to up my station cash enough to move my abandoned ranger from Zek. She's a Mayong refugee that I barely played (hadn't even assigned the AA), after much thought and logging through all my old characters I decided ranger with a head start (mostly on skills... levels and 50 is nothing really) might hold my interest. Took her to Burning woods hotzone and Chardok and plinked around a bit.

-I want to play an SK from scratch and do greenmist, but I keep telling myself I want to do it on the Mac server (is it still up?) haven't stumbled into a cheap mac yet lol.

-I'm also interested in whether there is going to be a new prog server, I'd like another shot at starting fresh that way. I'm amazed Fippy and Vulak are still separate and still unmerged to regular rules (but then trakanon server is still up...).

-I'm hoping EQnext announcement at Soe Live makes me want to play that... maybe this time SOE will release a game that runs on a reasonable computer (EQII didn't run on most of my guild at the time computers, but WoW did). Some of the talk from sony people has got me optimistic such as the word "sandbox". If not, there is some hope that "Revival" might be the spiritual follow-up to what I have always liked best about EQ.

I look in and read now and then. Haven't played since the F2P conversion. Looking at my old characters on Magelo shows that all of my gear is "Prestige" now due to augments and I can't bring myself to bother logging in just to not play with the gear I worked to collect (including removing the augments I collected).

Thanks for the <3

I surely remember you as well. =)

Almost all my time in EQ was as a Roleplayer. There were weeks when I didn't gain a single point of experience, my friends and I just "lived" in our characters skins. When I left EQ in 2006, I ended up at the opposite side of the scale.. I raided with near perfect attendence with the same guild for nearly 5 years, never king of the hill but in the top 5%-10% worldwide of tracked guilds.

I am enjoying playing EQ sporadicly, but not having any real objectives is odd (being recently very A type). But it *is* nice to be able only play when I really feel like it. So I'm mostly dinking with alts.. and I find I enjoy just playing one at time (heresy! I boxed for years.. I had 6 paid accounts back in the day). Honestly, I'm not sure I will ever get into the end game, group or raid, in EQ.. I see the way there (A type), but lack the energy.

I still remember the old world like the back on my hand.. and getting a good handle on the new places. 'Cept Freeport.. why oh why.

This is an inauspicious start -- One of my characters is gone from my server (I know he was on this particular server because I used my high lvl folks to camp stuff for him). But, of course, as a silver member I don't get any customer service?

Edit: Oh lovely.. I can't even see my characters past #7 unless I delete characters. So I get no option of picking which characters I want as my silver accessible ones.

Edited, Aug 13th 2013 7:09pm by Jophiel

Well... if you have a character in the way that you don't want to delete, but are willing to free-move to Zek (banishment instead of erasing?) you could do that to move characters up the line without paying for gold or a character move.

If you had lots of characters on the 2 servers that must have merged on you... the one you want might be at the very bottom though.

No, I expected the ability to be able to choose which of my characters I could use in my available Silver class slots.

Sorry you were confused. I'll try to be clearer next time

Yeah, your condescension was pretty obvious. I thought my sarcasm was as well but, hey, there ya go.

...said the person dripping with contempt for the F2P peasants

Really, it's simple. So simple even you can probably understand it. I restarted with the expectation/interest in playing a few select characters. If I can't access them, I'm not going to say "Guess I'll pay $15 to access my guys and try this free to play option!". I'm just going to say "Eh, never mind then" and move on. So now SOE gets zero dollars in cash store purchases or gold memberships, etc. It's in the merchant's interests to make the 'trial' option as non-punitive as possible since their end goal is to keep the customer around and try to entice him into spending money.

I had two potential interests for reinstalling: Playing my baby paladin (who is missing) and trying the "naked character" concept in the other thread. With my paladin MIA and inaccessible, I've just lost 50% of my reason to play. More than that actually since re-equipping a naked character is a novelty thing at best and hardly a long term reason to play.

Or, you know... just not bother paying money to a company that has a poor system of character management for returning players. Because my paladin isn't "just so important"; not enough to start putting myself out or sacrificing (such as it is) to play him. If he was really, really important I'd have never stopped playing or immediately paid the $15 to access him with no questions asked. Despite being my motivation for returning, he's still just a casual goal in a game I look at casually.

But those other characters you say to delete are representative of time and effort as well and there would have been a chance I'd want to return to them at some point. Deleting them to access other characters isn't an acceptable option.

What they should have done was list your slots on the server, full or empty, and say upon your initial login to the server following a decrease in membership tier "Here's your slots; pick (2/4) of these as your active slots. Other slots will be inactive until you pay for them directly or have a gold membership".

Very probably true. For instance, I'm not stretching for ways to patronize a company with a poor returning player strategy.

To SOE's credit, I've had some support ticket response and the people who responded were very helpful in terms of trying to help locate/unbury/undelete my character. Unfortunately, neither of them could actually find a record of my character. There's no question to me that he existed -- I didn't hump a lvl 1 paladin across Luclin to camp in Umbral Plains and then forget doing so. Sadly, he seems to be lost to the ages and I'll pour a bottle of mead onto the Freeport curbs in his memory.

Edited, Aug 14th 2013 10:28am by Jophiel

I think (not certain), that there was a level 1 character purge with one of the merges once upon a time. I remember moving stuff off a baz mule in fear of it... but don't remember if it absolutely happened.


Reroll him! On a server you have character slots on...?

Fine then sit here and complain, of course it was to get you to pay again, but if you actually cared about the game you'd be happy they gave you a free option, rather than no option, to communicate with friends again, if you had friends you cared about. Plus, if you have a money making process, you needn't spend money, as Krono cost 200-240k or so.

Wow and old fashioned argument on the EQ forums. Brings back the memories. Now we just need smash to add in.
Or should I say you two get a thread on the asylum for gods sake. :)