On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, Andy Simpson wrote:
>
> And after helping a paladin friend of mine camp for them a week or so ago, I
> think its shameful that any druid, shaman or bard ever get jboots for their
> own. The jboots camp was enough to make me not ever want to play EQ again.
>
> BTW, he ended up camping 15 hours and never got a pair...
Well, what's worse - a bard/druid/shaman getting jboots, or a
guild getting them for their second, third, or fourth
characters? As things stand, the most desirable items are
monopolized by those with higher level characters (usually too
high for the mob), almost to the exclusion of others. I have
three paladin friends, and we spent well over two weeks trying
to camp for ghoulbane. But most of the time we had to hunt
elsewhere because a bunch of level 45-50 non-paladins were
camping the spot because they'd traded away their last
ghoulbane and "needed" another. (Their excuse was that
everything else in the L40-50 areas was camped.)
When the player-to-player trade (or twink) aspect of an RPG
starts to interfere with the adventuring aspect, something is
wrong. After playing this game, I've decided a "shows up only
a few times a day" system is really stupid when a mob that's a
challenge to you is a pushover for someone else, and there's
no system to enforce taking turns. I think a better system
would be to allow each character to loot each special mob once
in a lifetime, and put lower level looting limits on the mobs
(to prevent the use of mules). No more kill stealing for nice
items, no more harvesting to trade/sell on EBay/twink, no more
camping the same place for a week (and blocking out others) so
your entire guild can be outfitted with the rare item, and no
more having to wait 3 days for a rare mob to show up. The
"rare" mob could always be there, and rarity of an item could
be determined by how frequently he drops the booby prize.
Believe me, as you get some of the nice continuous effect
songs like invisibility or levitation, you will wish you had a
pair of jboots. My friends have started poking fun at me
because I've been asking for SoW a lot lately.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...