Tag Archives: everquest

Double Dose of Ranting

Posted on by

EverQuest released a new expansion.  Frankly I’m not really bothered and may not buy it.  However, Grete is kinda interested so I said I’d get it for her account.  This is the first time we’ve not pre-ordered, and enthusiasm is low (Grete’s pretty down at the moment, so her general EQ mojo is low anyway, hopefully she won’t beat me when she reads this), but I said it would be fine to get it for her account.

So I log on to the Sony website, go to the account management page and try and buy the expansion.  I get a dialog which asks me to fill in our post code, select a secret security question and a secret answer.  Never seen the page before, no prompts telling me why it’s showed up.  The drop down list of secret questions is empty (other than the default entry of ‘please select a secret question’).  So I try ignoring it, but it wants me to select something, I try answering a random question but it still wants me to pick a question.

I can’t pick a damn question.

I search, in vain, for some way to update it via the profile, but it’s not there.  So I go to the Sony help site which if anyone’s tried to use it, knows how terrible it is.  I finally opt for Live Chat, and get a form to fill out with 6 questions and a box to describe the problem which I fill with a couple of paragraphs of text, and then click ‘go live chat’, at which point I get a popup telling me live chat is disabled due to maintenance.  Why the hell did it let me fill the form in then, stop me before I put in the effort.

So I finally go to the e-mail help and rant about the problem and the stupid site.  Maybe they’ll fix it, maybe they won’t, but since we were already just on the edge of maybe buying it and maybe not, if they don’t fix it without a lot of hassle they just lost another sale.  This is typical, in my experience, of Sony.  They make everything as hard as they can, so you have to fight to spend your money with them and they still make you feel like it was your fault.

Gahhh.

Second rant.  I e-mailed a shop that sells miniatures and said specifically and clearly ‘are you able to order this particular miniature for us’.  The reply was waffly and didn’t answer the question, but commented on some vague notion of them not getting that mini in the last delivery and ‘maybe being able to sort it out’.  The mini in question can be purchased direct from the supplier in the US, and we said that to the folk in the shop when we were in there at the weekend (before this e-mail), but they said the supplier’s customer service was bad and it can take ages to arrive.  So, I replied to this vague e-mail saying ‘on Saturday you said it would be quicker to order through you’, and the reply to that was ‘it will be if it arrives before the end of the year’.  WTF does that mean?  Why can’t they just answer a basic and simple question.

Q: Can you order this mini for us?

A: Yes, it will take 2-8 weeks or
A: No, we don’t do specific orders, if it arrives as general stock we can let you know or
A: No, but I’m sending a full order in for re-stocking and it’s listed, should be here in 3 weeks

or anything else, other than totally vague randomness.  This is a niche hobby with low turnover and a small market, you’d think they were keen to retain any direct customers they could get.  I was polite, clear, concise.

So I bought it over the web from the US supplier, and they shipped in 24 hours after I placed the order and sent me a nice e-mail to tell me so.  I’ll pay the $16 shipping charge on a $7 purchase to get service from someone who’s clear, concise and polite (I actually bought another two mini’s, to take it up to around $12 worth of mini’s, but that’s not the point).

In this day and age, I get very frustrated when technology gets in the way of simple purchases or when people can’t, don’t or won’t answer a straight question with a straight answer.  It’s my money, they either want it, or they don’t want it, but I’m not going to fight to give it to them.

Up or Sideways redux (cross MMO communication)

Posted on by

I wrote a lengthy blog post about vertical or horizontal scaling in online roleplaying games, and Leigh wrote a just as lengthy comment.   He made some interesting points which I thought I’d address in another post, rather than writing a lengthy comment in response to his lengthy comment.

I’m going to quote bits of his comment but you should really go and read the comment as well.

I’ve often wondered what a game can do for these types of people, who are, let’s face it, just after more experience, a higher level, or a bigger pot of gold than others in their peer group. While I do like the idea of more horizontal progression I think it ultimately leads to another dead end – it just takes players longer to get there.

Perhaps.  And maybe horizontal expansion of that kind won’t interest a lot of players either, but what I think it provides is a flatter range of power which lets new players get involved quickly, without totally destroying the ability of people to progress into new things.  If it’s done correctly.

How good would it be to have a chat system that shows all the channels available, makes it easy to set up your own and invite people, and gives a wealth of topics to talk about?

Without a doubt this is something I totally agree with.  It’s certainly something I don’t think many games exploit as well as they could.  There’s an increase in the tools to build web-based communities, but I know that a lot of players are only ‘in the game’ mindset, while they’re in the game, they don’t want to spend a lot of time outside of the game working on a forum or website.  If there were easier ways to communicate on a global level within the games, it would help build community.

One of my big bugbears with WoW is that you can’t (or couldn’t when I played) talk to people if you weren’t in their alliance (i.e. horde vs alliance).  You can’t even set them as a friend and see if they log on.  Ok, so there’s some big PvP element in WoW and you don’t want alliance members tipping off the hoard about their every move – except if they wanted to they could just IM them.  It’s stupid to prevent poeple talking to each other because of some in-game alliance mechanic.

Games should be doing as much as possible to facilitate communication, to allow persistent channels to exist, allow poeple to take part in those channels even if they’re not in the game perhaps.  As you said, there should be an easy way to view all those channels and take part.

That covers another big hatred of mine, which I’ve mentioned previously, enforced geographical splits.  Splitting up friends based on where they live to allow you to make support easier reduces community, it doesn’t build it.

Second Life doesn’t have a ‘game’, it doesn’t have a goal, it doesn’t have any progression mechanic, and yet it has huge communities built up around it, friendships, relationships.  I’ve not really delved deeply into the chat side of Second Life but I know people who spend a lot of time socialising there.  Which goes to show you don’t need a game to build a good community, but you do need good communities to build good multi-player games.

We’ve recently started using XFire to keep in-touch with friends spread through a lot of games.  A persistent channel we can join and read from within just about any game, even if chatting isn’t always easy.

Here’s what we should be telling MMO producers.

  1. Give us good channels, good communication methods and no restrictions
  2. Develop a standard for MMO chat
  3. Implement cross-game MMO chat services

How cool would it be if you could log in to your favourite chat channel (say #lunatics) and chat as EQ2.Realm.Nickname with WOW.Realm.Bob and LOTRO.World.Billy and SL.Vegas.Sarah.  Each of those people could be in their own virtual game world, using the chat system and communicating with their own native tools in the chat channel and everyone could take part.

I know MMO producers want us to stay with their game for ever, but if they provided a cross-MMO communication device that was standard, people wouldn’t feel obliged to leave a game just because a bunch of their friends had, they could keep in touch.

We want cross-MMO communication tools built into our games and virtual worlds, and we want them soon.

TNF – Raids in August and Important News

Posted on by

Raids in August

There will be a TNF Raid on August 9th. Meet in PoK at the usual time (8pm UK, 9pm Europe, 3pm US Eastern). Targets have yet to be decided.

Important News

I have a penchant for melodrama, so I make no apologies for the tone of the following news.

Everything that has a beginning, has an end.

In November 2004 (the 6th to be exact) a few of us raided Overlord Ngrub in the Torgiran mines. Lessi will know the insane amount of planning that went in to that raid, I took screenshots, I planed the route, I worked out a strategy, I drew up diagrams. It was the start of a 4 year rollercoaster that none of us could imagine.

A few weeks later Siddhaya ran some raids against Luclin targets, Zelnithak, The Va`Dyn. Soon we were ‘in’ Ssra taking out legendary targets we had simply dreamt about. I remember those first raids with complete clarity. The Siddhaya & Grayhelm Saturday raids eventually turned into TNF, with a charter (too long, we never did get it short), a structure, and a solid raid team.

We achieved the impossible, truly. Casual raiding, without any significant bitching, no serious falling out, no catastrophic collapse. We progressed without being a progression force. We grew, we accepted anyone, we handled loot in an adult and relaxed manner.

And we took on and killed the mightiest in Everquest.

2005 Sat Apr 09
Target: Kael Drakkal – The Avatar of War

2005 Sat May 14th
Target: Kael Drakkal – King Tormax

2005 Sat Jul 30th
Target: Plane of Innovation – Manaetic Behemoth

2006 Sat Jan 7th
Target: Plane of Tactics – Rallos Zek the Warlord

2006 Saturday 8th April
Target: Plane of Fire – Fennin Ro the Tyrant of Fire

2006 Saturday 14th October (in conjunction with PoTM)
Target: Plane of Water – Coirnav

2006 Saturday 21st October (in conjunction with PoTM)
Target: Plane of Air – Xegony

2006 Saturday 2nd December (in conjunction with PoTM)
Target: Plane of Earth B – The Rathe Council

2007 Saturday 20th January
Target: Ikkinz, Chambers of Destruction (Ikkinz 4)

2007 Saturday 27th January
Target: Plane of Time – Complete

2007 Saturday 10th March
Target: Uqua, The Ocean God Chantry – Complete

2008 Saturday 5th January
Target: Tunat`Muram Cuu Vauax

2008 Saturday 26th January
Target: Anguish, Overlord Mata Murum

It has been an astonishing four years. Both myself and Siddhaya are honoured to have raided with you all. To have challenged at the time, some of the toughest content in EverQuest with casual players and beaten it convincingly in the right way.

However, the time has come for myself and Siddhaya to step down. There is no single reason, no single cause. Simply that it is harder to commit every single Saturday, harder to find the time to research the targets, harder to find the energy and enthusiasm that the raid force deserves.

August 9th will be our last raid together with TNF as raid leaders. We may finally go and raid Crushbone, or maybe we’ll revisit the Guardian of the Seal, or perhaps we’ll go kill some random stuff in Theatre of Blood or go and wipe to Vishimtar, who knows. Turn up and find out. We’d love to see you there.

Before deciding this, both myself and Siddhaya had already found ourselves unable to commit to raids on the last three weeks of August (due to summer holiday or work). So, we propose TNF takes a break in August.

The question for you all, is what will happen to TNF going forward after August. There are really three options.

1. Some folk volunteer to take up the leadership role and TNF remains as it is now.
2. Some people wish to start up a raid team, but want a fresh start, and start something new to replace TNF.
3. People feel that they need a break and nothing is started immediately.

All three of those options are fine options. The decision is really in your hands. Myself and Siddhaya will support you in any way we can.

It has truly been an honour, a privilege and a complete blast spending Saturdays with you guys. Well over 120 unique people have raided with TNF over the last four years, maybe more. We thank you for everything.

What makes a fun MMORPG?

Posted on by

Anyone who has known me in the last few years knows I play EverQuest. I used to play EverQuest a lot, and in recent months that amount has decreased. It’s done that before, and then I get re-interested. There’s a long standing joke that you never quit EverQuest, everyone comes back. In EverQuest I’ve been a regular player, a guild member, a guild officer (a few times), a guild leader (for a short time), a raider, a casual raider, a grouper, a hard-core raider, a raid leader. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online rolplaying game) ‘fun’, and what a game needs in order to make it as accessible as possible.

If you’ve followed the history of EverQuest or played you’ll know it had a pretty strong focus on ‘the group game’. In the early days it was tough to solo anything, impossible for some classes, challenging and slow for others. Grouping was really the only way to achieve any significant gain. This wasn’t an issue, there were many, many players also looking for groups. As the game has grown, and inevitably the player base has shrunk (and the number of low level characters shrunk and the number of places for people to go and hunt grown) that focus on the group game is causing some pain.

Competitors to EverQuest (World of Warcraft being the most famous) have taken a different slant. You can achieve significant gains without ever grouping, and even if you do need to group to complete a certain goal, you can be sure the time investment will be short, 10 minutes maybe, or 30 minutes, and you can achieve your goal and move on to other things together or alone.

In the current EverQuest many goals take hours and hours of time investment to achieve. This is both the reason it has been so successful and its biggest curse. For some people that challenge and time investment is what keeps them in the game, but for many it’s just not possible to invest four or five hours at the keyboard to achieve (and in some cases, not achieve) any significant gains. And yet there are people who claim WoW is ‘too easy’ and many who have played it and burned out quickly because there is less challenge and less content.

I’ve not played WoW to any significant level so I can’t comment on the specifics, but I have played a few MMORPG’s, and I do now, after 7 years or so, know what I want from a game. I’m not sure a single game can actually provide this, but this is what I think it would need.

  1. It should be possible to achieve something without assistance, at any level of the game, in around an hour. The question of course is what counts as ‘something’ and ‘achievement’. For me, it must progress the character, it should be possible to log on and within an hour or so have achieved something which has progressed your character in terms of power. Obviously in the early stages of the game that progress will be quite large, and in the later stages that may be quite small, but it should still feel like an achievement.

    This is necessary because people can’t and won’t commit huge amounts of time to a game, but if the game lets them achieve things in shorter time periods they will feel they are able to make progress even if they can only ‘pop in’.

  2. It should be possible to group with your friends and achieve stuff, no matter how many or few of them are on at any one time. It should be easier to achieve goal X with two people than with one, no matter what classes those players are. It should get easier with more people, regardless of class. Of course, this doesn’t preclude a good balance of classes making something which is very challenging doable against a random set of classes making it more challenging, but it should still be possible to achieve progression regardless of group make-up.

    Too many times I’ve been in a game with 2 or 3 friends, and we’re not able to achieve something or progress with just those friends because we don’t quite have the right classes, or someone has had to fall back to a less-favoured character to fill the space, or to 2-box a character to bring a required class along.

    If 12 of my friends log in, we should be able to find something that challenges 12 of us, and the tools should support that. Obviously there needs to be a limit, but fixed group sizes are restrictive. The growing concept of ‘groups’ and ‘raids (collections of groups)’ is limiting. There should be a single concept to cover a ‘collection’ of players, and if that’s 2, 6, 11, 15, then so be it. Groups should flex to cope with the number of people present, the number of people present should not be massaged to ensure they fit into the game’s group structure.

  3. People should be able to join in or drop out, within reason, regardless of where you are and what you’re doing. If someone feels they’ll be tied in to doing something for three hours, and if they leave that endeavour will fail, they may feel less inclined to help out because they may need to sort out some washing or chores in the house. However, if they know they can help out and then head out without dooming the mission, or that if they turn up late they can catch up, then the result is a more inclusive experience.
  4. I’m sure this one will be controversial. Your gaming skill should not be the biggest factor in your ability to progress. It should be a factor sure, but MMORPG’s are social games, they should be inclusive, not exclusive. They should allow people to come together, form groups, go and achieve stuff, and not have to worry about whether the person playing the Barbarian Scalp Beater is able to press keys as fast as the person playing the Gnome Invoker. Sure, players with more skill should be able to achieve things more quickly, or more efficiently, but players with less skill should not be precluded from achieving anything.
  5. There should be no exclusion to who can communicate with who. There should be no geographical barriers in-game or in the real world. I detest the current approach of restricting servers based on geographical location. The internet has destroyed the boundaries of country and continent and MMORPG developers appear to be putting them back. If I choose to play on an American server with the associated latency and in-hours-patch times, that’s my choice. If my American friends want to join us on a European server they shouldn’t have to lie about where they live and buy a different version of the game to do so. This is a high tech world, solve the technical problems if there are any, solve the billing issues, get it right. Give us back the global player base. In-game, friends lists, inter-character communication and similar features should not be restricted by in-game faction or alliances. I want to know if my friend Bob logged on, even if he’s playing the most hated of evil enemies I have in the game. And I want to be able to /tell him so.
  6. There should be content that can not be beaten alone, or even with small numbers, but that content should never be core content or required content. There should be content that can be beaten alone, or with small numbers but doing so requires many hours of time invested, not necessarily all at once, but again, it should not be core or required content. It should be luxury content, additional content, some extra for people who can find the time. The core game should be accessible to all.

Obviously, the game content should be interesting and engaging and impressive, but those are the things game developers would focus on anyway. The above 6 points are really the ones I have come to believe are critical for new non-niche MMORPGs.

The Brighton Trip

Posted on by

Last week was really stressful, but the weekend was relaxing and really enjoyable so it all worked out. We’d been planning to go to Brighton for quite a while, some friends in Everquest were having a guild meet (The Blue Dragons) and we’d said we would be going along. It’s easy for us in Brighton because we can stay with Grete’s family down there, and the only pressure at the time was whether the Mondeo would make the journey or not. We sorted out the Mondeo issue by replacing the car, so we were happy the Megane would be fine.

And then last Sunday it all went to pot! Grete’s step dad wasn’t well so we couldn’t stay with them, and we had a frantic two hours checking the web and making calls to try and book a hotel. Needless to say, it’s not easy to get a hotel room in Brighton, in Summer, with only 4 or 5 days notice, and it’s virtually impossible to get somewhere at the budget end of the market. So we sucked it up and decided to just make a holiday of it, celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary a week late. We booked into the Queens Hotel, which is right on the sea front and pier in Brighton. We knew car parking would be a nightmare, but there’s one right next to the hotel (The Lanes) which was £15 for 24 hours (map here). Sounds a lot, but in Brighton it’s not so bad, and we knew we wouldn’t be needing to move the car once we parked up.

So we had the hotel booked, and we were getting more excited. We had a friend lined up to pop in and visit the cats on Saturday, they’re fine for 3 days / 2 nights on their own, but it’s nice if someone can pop in and check on them. Then of course, Bubbles had her ‘incident‘, so now with only 2 days to go we’re faced with having to give her antibiotics and really needing someone to check her every day to make sure she’s ok and her staples are in good condition. The vet we take her too recommended someone who can visit to feed cats while you’re away, and we managed to get in touch with her and she visited on Thursday, we got a key cut, and we were set. Of course, we also had to get Bubbles into the vets on Friday morning for a checkup (8am) so our weekend started at around 6:30am.

Bubbles was fine, Grete was back at 8:30am, I spent the last hour finishing up the packing and sorting out litter trays, food and water for the cats while she was out. We set off, the sun was bright, not a cloud in the sky. Quick stop at Tesco to pick up bottled water and have a solid breakfast, and we were on the M1 before 10am. Traffic to Brighton was as to be expected, M25 was slow, A23 was really bad into Brighton itself, and we finally got to the Lanes car park at around 3:00pm.

Checked in, flaked out!

But we hadn’t spent all that money so that we could sit in a too-hot hotel room, so we showered and headed out onto the sea front. The weather forecasts had all said it would be showery and overcast, but on the Friday it was steaming hot, blue skies and 28 degrees. We had a walk up and down the pier, and then met up with some friends and walked around a bit again, had some drinks and generally relaxed. Fish and chips on the pier was excellent. We managed to get some sleep on Friday night despite the heat, and were up bright and early for our cooked breakfast!

Saturday morning was spent wandering the Lanes in Brighton with our friends, before finally meeting up with the other Everquest players at the Clock Tower. From there we headed over to Donatellos for some excellent pizza, then some beers (in the Druid’s Head), then some wandering around and a visit to the pier, and more beer, and more food, and finally a few of us settled in Horatio’s and listened to some live music while the rest went in search of more quiet beer.

As we were leaving the pier, I’d had a couple of drinks, we passed a hen party leaving as well. A woman dressed as a nurse, in a short white rubber dress, a few others in various stages of fancy dress, and a woman who was clearly dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, complete with basket and red hood. As I was passing, I said ‘my, what big ears you have’ and she gave me a stare of death! She looked very confused, you’d think that if you’re going to dress up as a sexy little red riding hood you’d at least read the source material on which your costume is based, but apparently not. Anyway, it was only a few moments later when we realised if she hasn’t read the story she’s going to be going to bed worrying that she has big ears and some ugly oaf on the pier insulted her.

Sunday morning meant more cooked breakfast!! A quick exit from the hotel, moving the car to another car park near to the China Garden (superb Dim Sum place in Brighton, I can recommend them), and then some paddling on the beach! No offense to people from Brighton, but you really need to get the government to import some sand. You can not go paddling when the beach is covered in pebbles without getting hurt. We wore some crocs but the rocks just collected in them. Anyway the water was fantastically cool, the beach was great, the sun was hot (I got burned, yeh I know, but I didn’t think we’d be out long enough). We wandered around Brighton a bit, and then met up with friends for Dim Sum, which was excellent as always.

Finally we headed out, did the family rounds (meeting up with Grete’s folks) and headed home. Got back here around midnight on the Sunday. Bubbles is fine, but grouchy. We’re knackered, but had a fantastic time.

Demiplane Progress

Posted on by

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.

We’ve been to the Demiplane of Blood a few times now, Zi-Thuuli is no problem, we just wait him out and beat him down, but the other tier 1 events have given us some grief. Sisters is going to take a while to get right, although we were really close a few weeks ago. Redfang is about execution, we know what we need to do, we just need to get used to doing it, at the right time, and having a good turnout to make it happen. We were better last night than we’ve been before. And Hatchet, well, we finally beat Hatchet last night in an epic fight and I want to thank everyone who was there for taking the deaths, getting up, and doing what needed to be done.

Every time we beat Hatchet, and he will die again, we learn a little more, get a little more confident, and it’ll go smoother and smoother.

That first kill is one of those fights I’ll never forget, looking around with 30% to go and seeing most of the raid force either dead or recovering, most people with multiple corpses, but a feeling of determination in the air.

Proud of you all, thanks for making it another memorable night.

Why does TNF Raid?

Posted on by

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website.  The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.

I wanted to write a short reminder, to myself more than anything else, about why TNF raids. With the recent changes to content in terms of flags, it’s a good time to get back to basics.

  1. We raid to have fun with our friends.
  2. We raid to see stuff you don’t get to see if you don’t raid.
  3. Sometimes we get some nice loot.

TNF was never a ‘progression’ raid force. We were forced into progression to meet the goals above. If we didn’t progress, we would never beat new stuff, if we didn’t do the flagging, we would never have gotten into more fun zones.

There is always an element of progression in raiding. If we just all stayed level 65 in level 65 gear, we’d never beat the latest content, we would never have beaten Sendaii if we hadn’t all worked together, to improve our toons through raiding and grouping. So we’re forced to progress – that’s the EQ model.

But there’s a false element of progression in raiding as well – faction, flags, keys. Those elements are added for several reasons, and we can argue their value until we’re all blue in the face, but it doesn’t matter. For anything up to and including the Prophecy of Ro, they’re gone.

Mostly gone …. some raids require bane weapons, some raids require special items, and those weapons and items are only obtained by raiding previous content (this applies to DoDh and PoR), so there’s still some element of scaling the content.

And of course, no one skips through to the final mob in an expansion and kills it without doing the earlier stuff unless they’re already overpowered.

Where am I going with this?

Well, the recent patch is very exciting for TNF. It opens up more content than we’ve had access to since we started raiding PoP. More targets are available to us now than ever before. More content to challenge us, to entertain us, and to show us a side of EQ we may never have seen.

We don’t know what it means for us yet in terms of week-to-week raids, what we’ll be killing, how we’ll structure things. But I do know, that there’s never been a more exciting time to be a casual raid force in EQ.

No more turning away friends who play rarely because they don’t have the flag. No more scratching around trying to find people to 85 us into zones. No more demands from myself and Sidd before a raid about ‘who’s keyed, who did this, who did that’.

Everything up to TSS is open before us, ripe, ready.

TNF – Raiding for Fun and looking Good while we do it.

Spider-queen Sendaii Spanked

Posted on by

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.

You can thank Siddhaya for the Title! So we did it. TNF beat the five blood raids. Of course, we’ve been farming Shyra for quite a while, but our focus was Anguish and we never really stretched beyond that. The Council of Nine fell a little while back, no problem for TNF, deal with a hard hitting mob and kill timed adds – just up our street. We steamrollered Bloodeye, in fact first time through we made it harder than it needed to be, second time we just showed it a little more disdain. Draygun gives us a little more to think about, but he’s died (or re-died) like all the rest.

But Sendaii, well, she’s not trivial. Our first encounter a couple of weeks ago got us through the first two waves, but the third wave just overwhelmed us. Honestly, we were hoping just to get further through the third wave on our second go, to get a better feel for placement and the mobs.

But TNF weren’t happy with that, you guys wanted to go all the way. First two waves were flawless, wave 3 started ok, and then Sendaii joined the fun and it got hectic, but not hectic enough! Wave 3 was down, and we played with the Queen and her fake friends, and then finally, the army of spiders descended, but you weathered it all, handled it all, and beat Sendaii into little bits of spider ick.

All five blood raids down, DSK keying well underway, Vule on the horizon, Daosheen tormenting us, Theatre of Blood keying ongoing, and more targets than ever.

It’s spring, and it’s time for TNF to step up, kick some ass and start taking names.

Daosheen the Firstborn

Posted on by

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.

Daosheen to 20% on our first visit. Sterling, amazing work from everyone. 60 minutes of fighting, over ten million hitpoints of damage dealt to him, and we just ran out of steam.

But we have his measure now. He has been tested. He will be found wanting.

Overlord Mata Muram Mutilated

Posted on by

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.

On November 29th, 2007 I said this,

We will defeat the two heads of the Muramite army. Tunat’Muram Cuu Vauax in Tacvi will fall before us, and Overlord Mata Muram in Anguish shall lie at our feet, a broken wreck. I can not say how soon these things will happen, we still have challenges in Txevu to beat, and you have seen the trouble Overlord Mata Muram has given us, but I can promise you they will happen. TNF will beat both the Gates of Discord and the Omens of War content. 

At the start of January, we killed Tunat`Muram Cuu Vauax. He’s not even really the hardest fight in Tacvi any more. However, Overlord Mata Muram is another beast entirely. He is, without doubt, the hardest fight in Anguish, and to-date still one of the toughest raid encounters in Everquest. Certainly the toughest fight TNF has ever faced, despite having beaten Zomm the Seventh Born, Porthio the Second Born, Yar`lir, Matriarch Shyra and a bunch of other encounters post-OoW.

We promised you that if we had the right turnout we’d take him on. We started Anguish late today (Hello Porthio) but we burned through the first five targets like the plague. We took on Mata Muram and we drove him down to 30%, it looked tight a few times, we had some deaths, and some sterling team work from everyone, and we took our breather.

By the time we got back to him, he was up to 86%, which was a little unexpected, and really I know many of us had doubts by then. It had hurt to get him to 30% the first time, and now we had to do it again and more. But everyone pulled out the stops, mask clickers were perfect, healing was incredible, the tank team made like a brick wall and held Mata Muram at bay, and everyone else piled on the dps until he bled from every inch of his thick ugly hide.

60% and I was feeling confident.

30% and we lost a few people.

15% and I thought we had it.

12% and I was watching the fight from my hovering soul.

6% and I was rezzed again, but it was looking troublesome. We had a dragorn loose, some Ukun were running havoc, and we were running out of enchanters and dps.

3% and I closed my eyes. So close. A wipe now would be beyond insulting.

1% and I swore in rsay.

0% Overlord Mata Muram dead, the Omens of War expansion beaten.

I’m proud to raid with you, proud to be part of the team. From myself and Siddhaya, and the rest of the raid leadership team, thank you for turning up, making it a blast, and nailing Overlord Mata Muram to the floor.