Firiona VieFollow

Bear in mind I do this for the fun of the mystery; the thrill of the chase. The outcome is irrelevant to me, really (though I wouldn't be upset if it turned out something cool). BUT (and with all due respect, and I'm not trying to be a contrarian here) there is no possible rational way this is not at least a component of a hidden quest, my money says this will begin the counter-insurgence to reclaim FV. Everything- and I mean everything- tells me this is absolutely withotu a doubt designed to be exactly what it is. I am even able to predict outcomes based on the patterns. Again, analogically, this is no different than all of us watching a man flip a coin 20 times and come up 20 heads results. Anyone is free to say "I think it is probably just coincidence" but I will reply "That isn't the rational conclusion- the rational conclusion is it is most likely a biased coin" now you may say then "we will test the coin- be prepared for disappointment" but I will just smile and say, "Even if the coin actually isn't biased, my conclusion is the only real conclusion that follows from the facts" <- I hope this makes sense.



Oh sure, and trust me I have covered these bases myself. For instance, I waited for a despawn. But no despawn will ever come. I have had those NPCs standing on that hill for almost a week (game time) poor Trom stood by himself through thunderstorms, snows- and some sunny days as well. But they absolutely do NOT despawn. Now someone tell me that is just another happy coincidence. No- these are not happy coincidences and forgotten errors, not by a long shot.



No man, the path they walk is specifically designed to run them through a very specific course of danger- the most perilous path in the city. And they do not despawn. Ever. Okay, I guess I can't say "ever" maybe they despawn after two weeks of game time. Now, see, read that again, and can you honestly after everything I'm telling you still go "well, okay, maybe they despawn after two games weeks" surely you can at least see why I'd reply "not bloody likely"

edit: also I looked the NPCs in the database and they have a recorded spawn rate of 10m 40s and I can quite assure anyone this is not the case anymore. So this is absolutely not "left overs still running the old routine"; keep in mind also things like, at the start of the thread I was questioning why M'Nyl was a rogue element in the otherwise normal city-spawning Dragoons. I knew there was something special about him- just didn't know why he was designed to be there. Now it just so "coincidentally" happens that he is the greatest threat of all to the NPCs because of his "unique" spawn location. All of this stuff cannot rationally be just a bunch of errors that weave together like a completely cohesive design.

Edited, Aug 7th 2013 4:13am by broonsbane

Edited, Aug 7th 2013 4:28am by broonsbane

Well... it could be several of these things you speculate at once. Think about it like this:

Omens of War expansion is coming out, right after Smed admits that Gates of Discord launch was the "worst mistake we've ever made". Player community is going nuts to the point SoE has "The Summit" with GU guy, uber guilds, etc. --one of the results of which is OoW release is pushed back while some tweaks (or the perception of tweaks) is made. SoE eating crow had to involve pressure on the devs. Meanwhile some new game is stealing uber guilds for its beta...

So basically, the FV revamp happened in a tumultuous time in EQ on the real-world side of the equation. Maybe the effort was put into the war event but the revamp of the old zone that isn't core to the xpac is just sloppy (as others have posted in this thread). Maybe the dev that wanted sublime questing to be a part of the revamp didn't get to finish it (being pulled to work on other tweaks), maybe the dev moved on knowing FV wasn't "finished" because they were angst-filled and raging...(lol)...or had a shiny new job putting silly long ears on night elves.

Human nature isn't to let a little easter egg you made sit dormant forever... I wouldn't be surprised if unsolved for anything preceding the task system in EQ is either broken or not recorded (so SOE doesn't know what the quest is either). Kerra Island seemed to have some loose ends involving a plant and a tunic which appear to have been swept into oblivion with the revamp there. How many of the EQ devs from original thru OoW still work for SoE? You'd think some unsolved things would have leaked out if it was someone's labour of love/wit.

Furthermore, if SoE had a handle on all the unsolved stuff (which some dev/community rep posts on the O-boards suggest there are unsolved quests dating back to original) why wouldn't they give out teaser-hints on the prog servers (you know... give the guides something roleplay to do) so the quests get solved in the era they might be useful. Prog servers should have given them reason to care as unsolved content = new content = monetary value. Maybe the McQuaid hint (paraphrased) that "There is way better quest gear out there than what people are farming in Lower Guk" was just a coy tease to buy them time to get Kunark out... in other words the "unsolved quests" assumption is just a myth to cover the few known broken things they didn't/don't want to bother fixing.

FV can be broke to bits as far as logical npc interactions as long as no ones epics get messed SoE isn't going to get significant feedback. The fact that we are talking about it so many years later as a "new" puzzle supports that. SoE could have known FV was messed all along and ran with the premise "players won't notice or care so just leave it" However, Broonsbane --you are raising awareness of this here. We're rooting for you! Whatever result you get, please summarize your investigation into a tight post on the official boards. Who knows... maybe it gets fixed/extended for Call of the Forsaken (good forces in FV certainly were forsaken....cough...)

You will find them here: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php

This would be so awesome! I lol at the thought that you're just trying to interest/manipulate someone here to go do your designed quest.'

Please don't mistake the intent of my last post, it was kind of a long way of saying "I want you to be right, but EQ has teased me (and others) like this before so my hunch is there is nothing more to it".

There's stuff like bugs which aren't by design but are still a part of a designed environment; but if there's no evidence of a bug we should always be understanding the interactions we're seeing as being by design- it's just a question of, "what's the purpose of the design?"



Yes, exactly. All I'm ruling out is "this is not by design- this is human error- this is an accident- etc." hypotheses. This says nothing about the purpose of the design. I'm hypothesizing the purpose of the design through the interactions of the elements of the design by way of the frame of reference of the Firiona Vie information; meaning such as, I'm looking at the interactions of M'Nyl and the Fantastic 4 and there is a correlation, a correlation I was actually able to predict through the hypothesis- and again, if we're using the axiomatic "by design" then this correlation is intended: he is here to threaten the NPCs and jeopardize end results. I note the roles of the 4: Two shieldbearers (double protection) one field surgeon (healing) woman in white (intelligence) as comprising an archetype (evacuation company/protect) which correlates again with the information; etc. etc.

Would anyone deny that it at least gives the very strong "illusion" of being a protection quest? An illusion of marvellous proportions. Recap aome of the straight-up facts:

1. The 4 roles comprise a standard protection company
2. Absurdly disproportionate levels in enemy strength
3. Follow path which leads into immediate jeopardy (instead of turn right toward open area, turn left straight into golem and dragoon)
4. Route leads outside city gate
5. Unique Dragoon will spawn to threaten final positioning
6. Axiom of designed



Again these are all possiblities; things that no one can plainly say "this is factually wrong"- this is the thing about a game like this, where we can't just look at the "Big Book of EQ Facts", the information lends itself to a specific way of evaluating- we players must discover these things, and in such a complex environment (with all the different trigger-options like factions, character types, skill types, the list is impossibly enormous) there are so many variables that if we're not working according to that specific way of evaluating, then we can go off into imaginary conjecture of monumental proportions.

For example, whenever I see a named NPC I have no doubt it has a purpose in the game. If I try to talk to it and it just stands there and does nothing, I do not in any way ever think "must be an error"; instead I think "must not be the right class/have the right flag/be on the right quest/etc." but I have no doubt it has a purpose somewhere for someone at sometime. Because it's named. Now, if it doesn't have a purpose, then that means the designers have put mechanically purposeless things into the game, and to put mechanically purposeless things into a game based on discovery can only destroy confidence in the process of discovery that the game is functioning on. In other words, people will begin to lose interest in mysteries because they'll be afraid all of their effort will be meaningless, in a wild-goose-chase kind of way. So it's harmful to their own design to do this. Now, whether or not the players understand this, I'm confident that anyone designing a game of this complexity also knows this is the case and are acting accordingly.



It would only suggest they are still on the same path. I don't know, I didn't play then so have no idea what their old paths were. But I do know that their old spawn times are documented as 10m 40s and this has completely changed. Also they no longer despawn. So they're definitely different now. Aside from what I'm saying above, out of game, the problem with "they forgot/it's an accident" is that to "forget" to remove 4 NPCs from a city is epic level error. This wouldn't be a case of "well, understandable" this would be a case of "how could you possibly be this incompetant? you are most certainly fired, and will most likely never work again, how did you even get this job to begin with?"

This would be like me saying to you, "Open that system_firiona folder and empty it of the 30 .jpg photos in there; move them, delete them, whatever- just empty the folder" and you come back "finished" and I look and there's still 4 .jpgs in the folder. If they said "Sorry I must've forgot, it was an accident" I'd only reply "All you did by saying that is go from 'suspected sabotuer' to 'confirmed sabotuer liar'" It's beyond inexcusable it's impossible. Writing/programming/scripting may be difficult (even that is relative, and I shouldn't think it difficult for the people working on this game, I should hope they are competant) but deleting a database entry is as easy as clicking a mouse button. To suggest someone forgot/accident to remove 4 NPCs is the same as suggesting someone can't read names and click a mouse button.



Wait though- how do you know this? This statement is precisely what I'm talking about, and exactly an analogue. Think about how you got to that conclusion. How did you get to that square? Just because you got no reaction from the NPC doesn't mean they have no purpose for another character, true? This is what I was saying earlier about the square one, and then we end up on different square two's and I am asking over, "Why are you over there?" "Are you even able to be over there?" As I read what you're saying, it's coming down to a position at square one that says to you that there are two squares to choose from next: squares 2a and 2b; while for me there is no choice, it's just straight to square 2 (where it may or may not stop). What I mean is, I run up to a named NPC mob thinking "what is the purpose of this named mob?" and if I get no response I go to "i cannot determine the purpose of this named mob, so I do not have the appropriate tags/flags/etc."; but would you say that when you run up to a named mob you are thinking "this named mob may or may not have a purpose in the game"? If so, that is where our divergence is coming, and it's not really about what is going on on Firiona Vie (I am confident you must agree that the information creates at the very least an illusion of purpose?) but how we're appraoching the basic design of the game itself. If there are things like meaningless named mobs in the game then what that does is create a massive counterproductivity (presuming they want their game to contain elements of genuine discovery) because it creates a frame of reference which has no real confidence.

Designing a game like this, you have to know that people are going to have to discover the purpose of things (either that or just just falt out tell them what to do at all times- in which case there is no genuine discovery, only follow orders). Now, telling the orders is good enough for most of the necessary things of the game to be revealed, but if you want genuine discovery (I am confident they do) then you cannot be introducing purposeless things, like quest items with no purpose, no-drop/trades with no purpose, purposeless named mobs- if you do this youre just hindering discovery, eroding confidence in discovery, and just all manner of bad design.



click + DEL it really is that easy.



How do you know you weren't investigating with the wrong character class? Or without a necessary flag? This is what I'm talking about. In a game like this, when faced with a "mystery" and containing all of these many variables, these questions will inevitably arise and any designer knows this. The only way it will ever be possible for us to say "there is a purpose for this" is if we know that is axiomatic. Everything has to have a purpose (even by category- which is why we will naturally have different expectations for "Plaguebringer" than for "a giant bog rat") otherwise you're just impeding discovery, and creating meaningless work for everyone on both sides of the table.

If you were paying someone big money to design a game like this for you, would you be happy if they spent their time putting counter-productive things in the game? If they were putting meaningless things into the game that means you're paying them for literally doing nothing. And they are creating work for themselves by making things that don't need to be there.



"a wandering whatever" gives the illusion of a dynamic world (while still fulfilling his purpose of 'beat me up i drop item for you and increase power for you!') "Named Mob" gives the illusion of "I'm cooler than indefinite for someone- could you be that one? Find out now!"

Okay real quick guys here's a question:

Now I fully expect (even further predict) that I get these 4 out by the gate, and when I do that, I will hail them each in turn and get nothing; I will go from one to the other and try some words and phrases that I think might be relevant and will get no response (also predict they will not despawn, but will remain at the gate until players leave and M'Nyl spawns and kills them). I know what I would conclude from this, but what about you? What would your conclusion be- why? If you really think about it (not too hard though) you'll find that in a designed environment containing items without purpose, a sort-of "infinite regression" occurs in which you can never really know "Is this with purpose and I am missing a flag? Do I continue putting any effort into this?" from "This is without purpose" and this is like a bug; a bad program setting up feedback loops- something no designer wants in their game. The only way we can cause people to always have confidence is if they know their is a purpose.

Edited, Aug 8th 2013 6:58pm by broonsbane

Well I'm not going to argue your interpretation of what I meant. We all play this game for whatever enjoyment we can get out of it, so to each their own. I will say that I do not share or understand your seemingly philosophical questions about the purpose of it all and what is our conclusion? Are you simply trying to spark conversation about this now? Let it go man, it's just a game. Everything does not have to have a purpose in a game.

"If you really think about it (not too hard though) you'll find that in a designed environment containing items without purpose, a sort-of "infinite regression" occurs in which you can never really know "Is this with purpose and I am missing a flag?"

Yes you actually know these things... you need to either have access to the code to determine what flags are required or be able to view the AI of the NPC's.


"Do I continue putting any effort into this?"

My answer to this would be... as soon as I realize that I could have achieved a dozen other goals in the time spent trying to deduce the reason behind a set of NPC's... I stop putting any effort into it. Once again, that is just personal preference and each person is more than welcome to spend their time however they feel it's best used.

Look I write code, and here is a fact: in 15 years of looking at code (and that is a lot of code) I have never once encountered code that had no intended function. I've seen messy code, tight code, redundant code, depricated code, you name it- but I have never seen purposeless code. Now, I know why that is, the reason is clear. So what you are telling me is that if I look at the EQ source code, I'm going to see for the first time in my experience, purposeless coding. Do you think that there is something on this website (designed environment) that has no purpose or intended function?

Add to this that now you're wasting your client's money because you're spending time on things that have no purpose; that's like me taking my client's money and spending some of the time putting purposeless code into their coding; and in this game environment you're actually sabotaging the game itself. People in this thread have talked about disappointing experiences with such and such- and while I would suspect it was not really "nothing" but that they were missing a flag or something; or is a different scenario than the one I'm presenting here- if these meaningless things are introduced into the game then the designers are setting players up for that disappointing wild-goose-chase which is not good business practice at all.

Bottom line being that your statement there can't possibly be true. The function of language allows you to make the statement, and no one can absolutely refute it- but it's preposterous in it's ramifications. It's the same as us watching a guy flip a coin 100 times, get 100 head results, and I say "this is clearly a biased coin" and you say "It doesn't have to be biased" it's a statement that is true but clearly not the (rational) case in this evaluation.



Yeah but it's a different kind of glory. To solve what no one before you has solved? What if this does have something to do with a Phase 3 of the war? That's a singular glory right there. This is why I'm putting this effort into this, because of the history behind this zone, and the way the information creates a war-based evac quest; the movement of the things here in this city are painting a certain picture so from my evaluation of things, there's the potential for big name here. If I were seeing this taking place in a cave in some other zone it wouldn't be as intriguing to me because the story isn't there to support the movements and such.

Edited, Aug 9th 2013 2:36pm by broonsbane

I'd argue that I'm not a contrarian, but that might be counter productive.



Or, that hill is just a convenient spot to have NPCs spawn or hang out at outside the town itself. Your argument is like saying that a given gnoll in blackburrow was selected to spawn in one particular spot for some important reason. But overwhelmingly that's just the random spot in the zone that someone designing the zone thought "this would be a good spot to have a gnoll". And that gnoll, and 100 other gnolls, all spawn at different spots within the zone. Some have names. Some don't. Some roam around. Some don't. Some have special loot on their drop tables. Some don't. Some may be quest related. Some aren't. Now the whole set of them make up a dungeon full of nasty gnolls you have to overcome. But each one? Just sorta put somewhere because it looked like a good spot. Certainly, you can't assume anything more than that. Doesn't mean that there isn't more, but it doesn't mean that there is.



It gives the illusion that these NPCs had/have a purpose. But, as I said earlier, a whole lot of the stuff in EQ is designed to do that, but only a small fraction of it is stuff that the player characters actually interact with.




There are literally thousands of named NPCs in various zones in EQ that do not do anything at all except stand or walk around. Go into any friendly town. Walk around. Every NPC is "named". Why? Because they're supposed to appear to be real townsfolk. But most of them don't have anything specific to do with regards to player characters. They're just there for color. You do understand that it would seem pretty unrealistic for every single person in the world to have some quest of importance to adventurers within that world, right? I mean, most people are just farmers, or innkeepers, or merchants, or street sweepers. Not every priest at the local temple has a special story to tell and an adventure to send the players on. Not every merchant has a tale of woe involving his lost shipment of goods and needs someone to help him.

It would be completely unrealistic if the only NPCs in the world had quests to give out. That's why there are a ton of NPCs that don't. Their "purpose" is to make the world look like a real world instead of one just created for players to interact with.



Kinda nailed it on the head there. Maybe I'm jaded, but my experience is that most NPCs involved in quests will respond to hails in some way. If they don't, then you have to have something, or do something to get a response from them, and that usually involves some other lore or information pointing you in that direction. And there are very very very few NPCs that trigger any sort of response based on wider activities around them. They just aren't programmed that way. Outside of some scripted raid events, I'm not aware of any sort of NPC action that would be triggered the way you think this needs to be (ie: You wait for all four of them to path to a spot and then they'll do something).

That's not to say something couldn't be done that way, but my experience with the game (especially the game as it was when the last FV changes were made) tells me that they aren't going to change how they react to you based on where they are, or who else is near them. The game simply didn't use those sorts of mechanics back then.



I think you're being overly optimistic. I think that the game developers weigh the time/cost for creating complex dynamic stuff like you're talking about against the cost of not doing so. There's a reason why they've shifted to task based quests. And it's not because there's more value in creating hints and subtle NPC changes that players are supposed to figure out and then spend hours and hours trying to unravel. It's because the exact opposite is true. Players don't want to have to do that. They want to walk up to an NPC, hail him. Follow his dialog, and then get assigned a task that tells them step by step what they need to do to complete the task, complete with previews of the rewards they'll get upon completion.

EQ moved in the direction because that's what the players wanted. This does not preclude the possibility of some older event based quest thingie, but I think your assumptions that all this evidence means that it must be this way is mistaken.

As someone else pointed out, Occams Razor tells us that the more likely explanation is that these were unimportant "color" NPCs, and no one bothered to move or deactivate their code when the zone was changed.



I don't know anything about their original respawn time or whether/when they despawned, so I can't comment on that.



I think you are grossly overestimating the importance of this. How is this an epic level error? No one really noticed or cared about it. It occurred at a time when most players had long since moved away from the content involved anyway, and dev focus was on other things. I also think you're not quite understanding how mangled the old EQ zone code was with regards to NPC spawns (this was one of the earlier zones). Moving a static NPC (meaning one that just stands in one place) is relatively straightforward. You change its spawn spot. It has no internal programming telling it to move, so you're done. It will continue to do whatever it did before (hand out quests, take quest items, buy/sell goods, etc), just in a new location. Moving an NPC that roams is vastly more complicated. The internal code for the NPC tells it where to go, at what pace, in what order, etc. This requires programming waypoints, pauses, etc, which in turn require some careful testing of the whole process to avoid collisions, clipping issues, interference with other NPCs, getting stuck on walls, floors, corners, bumps on the ground, etc.

If we assume that all these mobs did was spawn in one room, then path through the town, cross the bridge, and then stand on a hill just outside, it requires some pretty significant coding to make them *not* do that and/or do something different. If there was no player interaction for them to do, it's honestly easier to just leave them where they were. They're not necessary for players to play the game. You may not be aware of this, but the FV outpost was the primary (only!) source of many 51-60 level spells. It was vastly more important to make sure that the NPCs that sold/traded spells were put in place and working (and I recall they had problems getting that working properly). In the grand scheme of things, four NPCs that don't do anything but walk from place to place end out being way down on the list of things to do. So far down, that the need to *ever* do anything with them is very close to zero.



Except that's not a great analogy. It's more like "change this spreadsheet so that it shows the data we want to present to the executive accounting board", and the old version had some additional columns of data that aren't wanted. Do you go into the back end worksheet and delete data that is no longer needed? Or do you just change the front sheet so that it only displays the data that's wanted, and how it's wanted? Let's assume this spreadsheet had a number of custom written macros, which are no longer needed because the data format has changed? Do you go in and delete those macros? Or just leave them in because no one's going to use them, but it doesn't break anything for them to be there?

Now pretend you've got a huge time crunch involved. You're going to do what's needed, and not worry about the back end stuff that no one cares about. It's quite reasonable to assume that old code will just get left in if it doesn't have any negative impact on the result.




Because if 14 years after these NPCs were created, no one has found any quest involving them, it means one or both of the following is true:

1. There is no quest involving them.

2. If there is a quest involving them, the players aren't missing the fact that they haven't discovered it.



What if their purpose is purely to create the illusion of a living, breathing, dynamic world? Purpose does not mean "must give out a quest, or interact with players, or trigger an event". Purpose can be as simply as "I stand here and look like a person who lives their own life, but that life does not revolve around the actions of the players characters". And as I said before, for any realistic world, that's going to be most of the NPCs in the game.




You don't honestly believe it's that easy to remove NPCs from a zone, do you?



Because tens of thousand of other players encountered the same NPCs, and likely thought the same things, and tried to get some reaction, and all failed. Do you think that they were all the wrong character class, or were missing some flag? Let's not forget that there are tens of thousands of quests that people did discover by this precise process. Tons of people trying to talk to different NPCs. Handing them things. Interacting with them in every way they could think of. This is how those old quests were discovered and solved. Yet no one found anything with these NPCs.

This doesn't mean there's nothing to find, but at some point, if you haven't found anything, you have to entertain the possibility that there's nothing there to find.

This is what I'm talking about. In a game like this, when faced with a "mystery" and containing all of these many variables, these questions will inevitably arise and any designer knows this. The only way it will ever be possible for us to say "there is a purpose for this" is if we know that is axiomatic. Everything has to have a purpose (even by category- which is why we will naturally have different expectations for "Plaguebringer" than for "a giant bog rat") otherwise you're just impeding discovery, and creating meaningless work for everyone on both sides of the table.

I disagree. Or at least, I disagree that said "purpose" has to be what you seem to think. It's less realistic for every named NPC to have some quest, or task, or other significant interaction with the players. As I said earlier, when designing a realistic world, you should not make the mistake of assuming that everything in it revolves around the actions and desires of the player characters. You're playing an adventurer in a world. That world consists of people who have nothing to do with you.

If you were paying someone big money to design a game like this for you, would you be happy if they spent their time putting counter-productive things in the game? If they were putting meaningless things into the game that means you're paying them for literally doing nothing. And they are creating work for themselves by making things that don't need to be there.

If I'm paying them to create a believable world for my paying customers to play in, you can bet that I'd expect them to make it believable. And part of that is having tons of detail in the game that doesn't revolve around the players. Because real worlds don't only contain things for the player characters to do. It's the first rule of good world design. Sometimes that wandering merchant you encounter while traveling down the road isn't someone you need to help, or is a secret spy for the evil guys, but is just a merchant traveling down the road.

And sometimes, a group of folks go and stand outside the city gates for reasons that have nothing to do with your character. Maybe they're checking out the scenery. Maybe they're waiting for a friend. Who knows? It's not a flaw for NPCs to not be doing something that requires your interaction.

Edited, Aug 9th 2013 2:49pm by gbaji

I hesitate to post this... ...it's tongue-in-cheek to illustrate the point that we can really derail the thread with ponderings at this point...

Maybe the developer intentionally left these "good" npcs in for some goofy evil quest in the overtaken outpost of FV. Meaning they have been repurposed to die and you are disrupting (repeatedly) the ability of lower level evil characters to do said undiscovered quest.

Noting of course, that there is no lower level evil characters trying to find unknown quests in FV presently, to anyones knowledge.

I want to give you a new goal as I like your thoroughness. I think if you tackled other "mysteries" you could really solve some stuff.

Okay so here it is: I go to FV and have no problem with the shieldbearers and the fieldsurgeon. And these guys are going to be standing there for weeks of game time. The reason these NPCs don't despawn is because if they did, it would be impossible to gather them all here together without a quad-spawn, which I saw only after the server crash and suspect that's the only time you'll see a quad-spawn. But this is why they don't despawn, and this is M'Nyl's function- forcible despawn. This also lends itself to creating the motivation to get all out there, because you can't just log out and come back and continue; because it gets reset by force of Dragoon. So I spent all day here with those three. Fiasco after fiasco with Virionele though. No less than 4 trips ending in surprise disaster: the fourth time I was heading over and was supremely confident knowing I had shut down the route for a good ten minutes, and she was home free strolling down the desolate avenues. I start heading over the bridge, and by my angled appraoch I can see nothing less than Dragoon L'Sarl(sp) and a cliff golem (both of which have never been involved in this at all, being outisde the route aggro range) but there they are, hiding underneath- UNDERNEATH- the bridge; and they jump me and Virionele is gone again.

It's 4 in the am, and I'm exhausted- but I know if I log off I lose the three and start over again. Actually though for the record it seemed like a good place to grind for me; the golems drop star metal and a spell (sometimes two spells) to net some decent pp; my AAs were quickcoming (50%); and yesterday the golems started dropping intricate defiant gear much to my delight. Unfortunately I picked up pantaloons, sandals and gloves which I already had from my gift box claim; but I did pick up 2 intricate wristguard which was cool. I was really wanting to see an intricate headguard drop because I accientally destroyed my ornate headwrap (don't ask) and have been helmetless since.

Anyway so I'm like, okay I will give this one more go and then call it a night. So then this dude shows up called something like tutterkuk or tatterkuk and the complete opposite of the last encounter takes place (thanks to them whereever they are- infinite gratitude). He mentions the thread here and I go "yeah that's right, trying to get last one out" and I race off and start clearing stuff waiting for the wizard, I run and see he's handling the golems and I'm like "Awesome this is going to work like a charm" and here she comes out of the guildhouse down the avenue, and I have to kill a couple of Dragoons spawn, but everything is handled, I'm down to almost no mana and normally it would be disaster most likely from the last golems, but tatterkuk has clear them and :

http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/9687/udza.jpg

All four together again at last for the first time. Okay but quick confession (and why I brought up the intricate gear a minute ago) I may have been the greatest threat in the end, but I overcame myself; because someone tell me what Virionele is wearing in that picture? It's the first time she's had anything on her head, and when she spawned I was likes, "That looks like very much like it could be intricate head gear" and I actually thought a few times, "there could be an accident... it, it just slipped my mind, if forgot it was area effect- I was tired... " because is it isn't it? It's intricate defiant headgear isn't it?

Well, there are actually some cool fireworks, spells start going off (tatterkuk was also casting spells so I'm not sure how much was pilgrim-spell, NPC spell, tatterkuk spell); but it was definitely cool looking, and enough of a Yub Nub for me. Hailed the NPCs, tried a number of possible triggers but got no response. Tatterkuk met M'Nyl as we got them all in position after the fireworks, he turns and says something and before I can respond "Come feel the ..." M'Nyl comes barraeling into the festivities and throw it all into chaos one last time. No one is lost this time Stayed for a while to confirm no despawn, which there was not. M'Nyl showed up again and jumped both Trom and Beuller before I noticed, so I killed him one last time for old times sake; then packed up my wanderlust bag and started off. Got ready to dial the gate, turned and looked back to Virionele on the hill with what I was sure was intricate defiant headgear. It starts to rain. Dial it up. cue End Credits*

Taterkuk, as in one who cooks 'taters.

And yeah, I buffed the hell out of the 4 relevant NPC's.

Way to leave me out of the screenshot.

I did try several random phrases on all the NPC's...nothing. I'm apprehensive, though, so maybe they'd ignore me regardless.




ALSO: See? Don't engage with gbaji, he'll give you heartburn.