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Context for those who need it

"If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW."

People say this all the time like its some kind mantra, but the fact is, on most servers you will spend those 30 minutes (if not more)just trying to log in! See here and here for just two quick examples.

Smedley defines incomplete... here: http://www.fohguild.org/forums/showthread.php?p=43 6395#post436395

He actually admits he was wrong..... http://www.fohguild.org/forums/showthread.php?t=18 243&page=42

yeah but can a light saber cut through captain americas shield?!

Well for starters in WoW you're put in a place with a whole pile of quests to start. You even have a note in your inventory telling you who to talk to. Secondly, EQ2 will not attract all of the seasoned gamers you think it will. A lot of the high end guilds are heading over to WoW (including the high end guild .)

EverQuest. Is it by chance that NVIDIA and Gateway are funneling money into SoE? I don't think so. There is no other way to explain why my GeForce2MX 200 32 MB runs better than my Radeon 8500 64 MB *only* in EverQuest.

a student's response:

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/attachment.php?s= 6a 397c073311a4f8278e0e6e0a510e32&postid=63089

Here is the above story in "english", i.e. for those of you who aren't scientists ;)

This is not new news, but it's interesting...!

I hacked something like this together myself but it didnt use bluetooth.. just regular RF:
here

I think any 2nd year EE student can do this + dev kit.

Like Blizzard and Diablo, pretty much the entire original design team of the game has already left, and this version will be designed and balanced by the people that did such an excellent job on the last two expansions.

Background : The newest expansion was released in December last year. The two big selling points, the special Trade Zone, and the new user interface *still* haven't been added to the game after 5 months, yet they have already announced the next expansion due this December, along with EQ2, EQ for Playstation and the special $40/month "Legends" servers.

The entire live development team was layed off, leaving zones from the expansion before that one still screwed up - the "Plane of Mischief" and "Sleepers Tomb" which have been written off by Verant and won't have any further resources devoted to them, despite long and detailed archives of what is wrong with then

Apart from the Interface and the Bazaar zone, high end guilds are finding that the content in this game is designed for you to spend 2 months equipping 80+ members of your guild with special weapons so you can attack one mob to get one item, which you then use to spend 2 months getting 10 more components to get a key so you can enter the *NEXT* zone, where the cycle will begin again.

Meanwhile, the people who wrote EQ1 have formed their own company and are busy hiring all the talent from Verant, who never signed non-compete clauses.

So Verant is left with under-talented artists who (due to contracts sorted out at the peak of their success) are on $80,000 - $120,000 /year to produce third rate high-poly models that bog down the highest end system any time you get more then 5 of them on the screen.

Meanwhile, their design team is designing encounters that need *70 to 90* people to work in precise co-ordination for 30 minutes, and then act suprised when people start complaining.

To top all this off, they announced that any existing customer from EQ1 who wants to join EQ2 will have to start all over from scratch, and the end result of this is a widespread "Well, when EQ2 comes out, I guess I can finally quit and get this damn monkey off my back"

The sad thing is, they'll probably still sell about 200,000 copies.

I usually stop playing such a game when vision of said game appear in my sleep... that's just too freaky for me.

Unfortuneately, many people don't. Check out this application for one of the 'Uber' EQ guilds.

http://www.fohguild.org/html/recruit.php

Note some of the downright anti-social requirements, such as a level 60 avatar, and the 'right' class. Most damning of the lot is this, which is a direct quote from the page:

- We raid generally 6 days a week. Attendance to at LEAST 5 days is required. If you are busy with work or school or any other outside responsibility and do not feel you can make it 5 times a week, this is not the right guild for you. Raid times vary on the weekends, but generally our weekday schedule is from 4pm PST until 10pm PST.

There are people with too much time on their hands out there. There are also people like this, who have abandoned real life in favor of the alternative.