Last night I went to the reception hosted by Verant & Sony at Gencon. It
was really fun! They reserved a big room above a popular bar/restaurant and
it was pretty much full of EQ players - I'd guess 100 ppl at least! They
had free soda, beer and food for everyone. And everyone was standing around
swapping storys and stuff.

Someone pointed out John Smedly to me - he was chatting with different
groups as were a bunch of other Verant and Sony people. I joined a group at
the bar and we talked about EQ and different other games and why we all love
EQ so much, what is the best video card, etc. etc.

So, this one guy in the group has a Verant tee-shirt on and I axe him: "hey,
do you work for Verant?" He goes you and I axe so what do you do there? "As
little as possible," he says. Hehe, but really what do you do? Now, he's
giving me a funny look and he says....

"Well, I am the vp of something and the producer of everquest."

Oh my God! You're Brad??? "Hail!" Bow! "Hail!!" He I am yapping away with
Brad McQuaid and I don't even know it.

Some guy mentioned that he liked being on the test server cuz you get to see
all the new stuff first. To which Brad says: "We are not going to even
mention pie tins tonight!!! grrrr" <guess that's kinda sore subject>

I asked what the new game will be like - and he said it will be a mega-multi
player strategy game kinda like command and conquer. You can have games
with 5 people or 500 people. He said the 500 ppl games will prolly last
weeks.

The group talked about pen and paper rpg's and how EQ relates to that. Brad
said he has played a lot of rpg's and explained to me (who has never) how
they worked. You roll dice for every swing and such. He said that they
wanted EQ to be a great experience for p&p rpger's and they want to develop
and support the same kinda experience with out the real life trouble of
having to get 7 people in the same room.

I asked him about getting support for player designed and organized events
and he said they do and will support those. He said they are really working
on fixing the quests - making broken ones work, tuning existing ones and
adding new ones. He said we should be seeing lots more dynamic quests
happening real soon now.

I asked him about the "lore" and stories of Norrath. I said we talk a lot
about how things seem to be related in different ways and we wonder if this
is by accident or on purpose. He said that the quests will tell the story of
Norrath and there is indeed a history to be discovered.

Oh yeah, he said Cazic (the God in the Fear Plane?) is gonna be "fixed" real
soon now. So, you high levs better git your killin in while the killin is
good - sounds like they are gonna un-nerf him.

Other than that we had a great chat about 'regular' stuff. What servers you
play on, what chars you got, what was your last best loot, which vid card is
best. Brad said: "when we started developing this game our pc's had 32meg
ram - sheesh - now our vid cards have 32 megs of ram." I got the feeling
that he and the rest of his team are quite dedicated to the game and the
player community. I was impressed with EQ before but now I am really
impressed!

So that is how I met Brad!

Sylly Songsynger
Bard of the 20th level
a.k.a. Robo-Bard
asleep on her feet
somewhere on Innoruuk

p.s. what does he look like? Well, if you put all the green armor on him and
equip the flaming sword - he looks exactly like Aradune! <g> but w/o the
armor he looks more like "Scruffy" from Qeynos Hills (I mean that in a nice
way Brad - really!) John Smedly would have to be a barbarian.