Over the last few days, I've met up with some people I once knew
a long time ago and also people whom I have no recollection of ever
knowing.

Of the people I knew, I played with them in Permafrost long before
Brad made his post about 'upgrading' drops in there. Hell in beta,
I owned that place. Anyway, I started with a regular group in there
around L14. I often found myself in there alone night after night.
I could not convince people to come, some people didn't even know
where or what permafrost was. Around L19-L20, still working perma
I met a few people who are now (as of yesterday) L32. Seven or
eight months ago they were my level (L19). And now all of them call
me a 'powergamer' telling me that I 'haven't enjoyed the game as
much as they have'. This is where about 10% of my daily humor
comes from, as it's worth a /chuckle.

Then and again, I get tells from people out of the blue when I'm
in a zone about 'what does a L50 want in this zone?' I was passing
through Blackburrow the other day, and had just zoned in and I got
a tell from some L20 person asking me why I was there. I could have,
without a doubt, asked him the same thing. These same people also
are whining to me about 'how bored you must be to come into X zone
since you powerleveled to 50'. Doesn't everyone realize the only
way to the Icy North is via Blackburrow? I thought as the server
populace had become more mature in information that things like that
would leak out. Regardless this guy hounded me for being L50 in the
zone. Time to break out Screech and ride a few trains to zone ;-)

/rant

I'm bored as hell in EQ because I want some more quests or some
more challenges. I don't consider giving a mob 10k more hp or an
attack which does 900 dmg challenging. That's just frustrating.
One could argue there are new quests in the PoS, however I cannot
stroll up there anytime I want to work on them. My boredom stems
mostly from lack of new things to experience. If I wanted to talk
and chat all day, I'd irc or something. An integral part of my day
now consists of learning more mechanics. I timed mana regain on
my druid medding, standing, and sitting not medding. But that's
sorta boring too hehe.

They've pushed the expansion back a month. What in the world have
they been doing? All the excuses I hear on their behalf seem to
suggest they aren't doing much to the existing EQ, because they
are hard at work on the expansion. While polygonal streams, and
better detailed texture maps on giants is cool and all, and while
making the trees 3d (finally) is neat, Verant needs better thought
out AI and zone pathing which could drastically improve the existing
game. I'm not holding my breath for the expansion in April. It's
going to be the same AI, the same poor pathing, the same mobs with
ac/hp/atk upgrades. I'm sick of goblins, I'm sick of gnolls, the
planes are being tweaked so badly that people rarely even want to
go there anymore. The 6 hours I spent in hateplane this weekend
yielded one warrior pants and one cleric shield. Six f'ing hours
over half the zone cleared, and two items. Then the server crashes,
and the plane is reset. Before that I linkdied 2 times because
of this constant network code upgrade they've done. My SBLive
desktop crashes only add to the annoyment. Latest DirectX and
latest sbl drivers and I cast 'Ring of Desktop' every day now
it seems.

A GM once visited us in the Plane of Fear. His words stick in my mind.

-- "It's all going downhill from here" --

I've yet to see that proven wrong since then.

Harmonic, the disillusioned.