I've been on an EverQuest hiatus. I servermoved from Drinal to Quellious to
join a guild there, only to have it dissolve underneath me. I joined
another guild, and saw that it, too, quickly went into ruins.
That took a lot of the wind out of my sails. Everyone was leaving in
droves, and I just couldn't find a good, stable guild. I decided to try the
Matrix Online, and currently I have a level 35 Arbalest (think Wizard).
MxO has serious game balance and content issues, but you'd expect that for a
brand-new MMO. My Arbalest has a Stun spell that seems almost completely
unresistable and renders a mob completely unable to attack of defend for ten
seconds, which is plenty of time for me to get in some very serious damage.
I routinely kill mobs that are ten levels (or more) higher than me. The
spell is so unbalancing as to make the game boring - but then again, I'd
hate to think of life without it, either. It's the Complete Heal of MxO.
I tried playing another class, a Spy. Alas, a recent change made the class
completely useless. And I do mean completely; it currently has no viable
function within the game. Think of a Rogue and taking away backstab and
SoS. The developers have acknowledged that Spies have a problem at the
moment and have promised a solution - eventually.
My biggest complaint with MxO is the clunky interface makes talking to other
people a chore. All messages - NPC emotes, /ooc messages, tells, says - go
to the same box. Quite often people will send me a tell and I'll miss it
completely. Currently there is no way to customize the UI, although that is
apparently on the horizon. Meanwhile, I feel completely isolated. I solo a
bunch of missions and have no one to talk to, ever. Yes, I could join a
"crew" - the MxO term for guild - but I have no means to discover which are
the good guilds and which are the bad ones. Someone from a guild with
alternating capitals in the name - HaCkErS oF ZiOn or something - tried to
recruit me but I wasn't interested.
It's also quite obvious that the game could have used a few more months'
beta. Oh, it's playable, but there are a ton of annoying bugs out there.
For example, when you do a mission (much like an LDoN), bodies never decay.
And if you kill several mobs in the same place, you're unable to loot any
except the "top" mob, and often mission-critical items are on a mob at the
bottom of the pile. I've had to learn to "spread out" my mob kills, but
that's the kind of bug you'd think they'd've worked out before release.
That's just one example of a list of bugs. The developers are obviously
working quite hard to fix all these; they just released a massive patch that
fixed a ton of issues, but there's still a ton more in the hopper.
A couple of days ago I got an Instant Message from my former guildleader on
Drinal, saying hi. We chatted for a bit and I asked him about the status of
the game. He said that server populations appear to have stabilized at this
point - while people still leave, it's not the flood of a couple of months
ago. He's doing well in his new guild on Povar, and they're making good
progress in the new expansion.
That encouraged me, so I logged on Monual and did a /movelog to Povar.
Playing a new MMO like MxO makes you really appreciate how well-aged EQ is.
There is a definite advantage to playing a game that's got the major kinks
straightened out and has made major balancing efforts over the years.
I tried to check the EQClerics forums to see the current state of the
cleric. Alas, those forums appear to have disappeared somewhere. Anyone
know where?
Anyway, when the movelog is complete I'll probably give EQ one last go.
I'll check the guilds out and try to join a good one. I'd love to
participate in some good high-end raiding once again. I just was strongly
discouraged by the mass exodus of a couple months back. If that is indeed
mostly done with, I'm willing to try again.
<- Index
This page is Copyright by Skaarak; Everquest (TM) is property of Sony Online Entertainment
All stories and art work are Copyright@ by the origial owner/writer.
Most, if not all stories, were taken from newsgroup alt.games.everquest (AGE), I recommend that anyone who gets a chance to read it should!