Quarken Era (2004-2013)

We Doin’ Drive-Bys On Freestyle Bikes

Yo everyone. So I started writing this last night but I got sidetracked by a lot of real life responsibilities I’m dealing with right now (i.e., fired up the PS2 and played Star Wars Battlefront II for 16 hours). Turns out it was lucky for us that I had to extinguish the Imperial threat on Endor because I’d be doing another update tonight if I hadn’t slacked. See? It pays to be lazy and addicted to the occasional console game sometimes.

Confused? Okay, what I mean exactly is: we killed Sendaii, the Hive Queen last night for the first time and, when I should have been preparing the update for that, we went ahead and hit Emperor Draygun, the Lich King with some sweet chin music. So now it’s like, ya know, a 2-for-1. A better value per update for you and less work for me. Win/win.

Needless to say, this front page update is action packed with our magnificent adventures through the dankest, darkest Depths of Darkhollow. Why don’t you settle in and read on to see what I’m talking about, you silly little goose.

Oh, before I forget: we are recruiting! You need to read our requirements and whatnot before you apply. We’re looking for good members to fill out our ranks. Here’s an itemized list of the classes we’re looking for:

Cleric: 2
Enchanter: 1
Ranger: 1
Rogue: 2
Wizard: 1

If you feel our lovely guild is the place you want to be, send Llohannis or Grap a tell in-game before you apply.


Ok, where were we. Ah yes. Let’s start off with a list. Let’s title this list:

Things We’d Rather Do Than The Hive Queen Event

  • Have a Naked Twister competition in a colony of lepers who all have Parkinson’s disease.
  • Play a blindfolded game of ‘What’s In My Mouth?’ with an incontinent coprophiliac.
  • Build a time machine, go back about a year to celebrate Christmas on the island of Phuket.
  • Eat a shipment of laxatives and attempt to kayak across the English Channel.

Why would I and 53 other people rather do the awful[ly delightful] things on that list rather than do this event? Because this event is ri-dic-u-lous-ly long. Absurdly long. It’s not even that difficult. The only difficulty lies with how long can you not-piss-your-pants before you’re forced to ninja AFK and consequently wipe the raid, wasting 54 man hours because that’s just how life is sometimes. Wave 3 is just the most annoying shit a human could dream up because its like the world’s worst Russian nesting doll collection. Shitty mobs that die and make more shitty mobs, that die and make shittier mobs, who die and make the shittiest of mobs and so on. They’re probably still replicating their shitty selves as I type this.

Let me throw out a spoiler for anyone working on this event: Once you put in a full 9-5 shift doing Waves 1 & 2, you’ll eventually get to Wave 3. Amazing how that works out isn’t it? Anyway, in Wave 3 you gotta kill [shitty] mobs that generate more [shitty] mobs, as previously mentioned. So here’s the spoiler: First, you get 6 spiders that, when killed, make 2 spiders each. When you kill each of those spiders you get a completely bored raid that begins to develop stomach ulcers as they slowly realize we’re going to be stuck here well until the end of times and even then more [shitty] spiders will spawn.

So, we killed her and there was much cheering, wooting and piss-breaking. In total, the event took us 86 years minutes. Ya know, when it comes to judging how much fun events are, I use this rule of thumb: Any event that lasts longer than I do in the sex is an excessive waste of time especially when it’s a whole 85 minutes longer. Like I said, the event isn’t difficult it’s just a race against Attention Deficit Disorder slowly taking over until it’s running around like the Ultimate Warrior in ’89, no-selling our spells and disciplines while throwing all of us over the top rope.

4 out of 5

Despite all of that, it did feel good to be progressing through The Depths of Darkhollow again. Ahh yes, the loots. They weren’t bad considering what we could have got from her (i.e., much shit):


Now, as I was saying at the start of this update, our first time victory over Queen Sendaii was last night. Tonight we were about to get our farm on in the Asylum of Anguish again for the kagillionth time when we shifted gears and decided to take our ass kicking momentum straight over to Emperor Draygun, the Lich King and good thing we did because he went down like Emperor Draygun, the Bitch King. Get it? Ha. Ha. See what I did there? We killed him on the very first attempt tonight too, which made for a special feeling in our collective unmentionables.

5 out of 5

The loots sucked balls but whatever, that’s this expansion’s theme it seems. So I don’t think anyone was expecting anything fantastic in the loot department but here it is all the same.


Let’s take a quick minute to talk about this ‘Curse of Blood’ shit. We don’t really know all the details around it so we’ve just been slaying and praying that, at some point, it gives us more ~moar powah~ in some form, like it always seems to indicate. And make no mistake – it never fails to indicate that. Just look at the last two sentences up there when Draygun died. The word power is mentioned 3 times. And after all, it is listed in the AA window. All signs indicate that this bitch gon’ be the hookup at some stage.

So as we strolled into our 5th Blood raid and strolled out with our 5th victory and a maxed out Curse of Blood AA (now called Invitation of Blood), some people were waiting and hoping beyond hope for something, anything, to happen now that we have max rank of this shit – and guess what? *wet fart noise*

So basically Fishlip’s dick is confirmed to be bigger and indeed the rest of us are speculatively bigger in the e-peen dept. but we would have been all these things without a poorly implemented, fake-ass, expansion defining, chase non-AA? In practice, it is a complete waste and didn’t even need to exist in the game. So what the fuck is it actually? I’ll tell you what it isn’t and through the process of elimination, we’ll be left with a steaming pile of what-it-is.

I understand people will say this is a prerequisite for getting into The Demi-Plane of Blood but that is bullshit. Getting a character flag upon defeating each of those 5 raids is the prerequisite, not a misleading ‘Alternate Advancement Ability’. We’ve had plenty of character flags in the past and they weren’t in the form of a red herring AA.

Rumor has it that there are ability and stat sapping zone-wide spells in our near future and each rank of this counteracts or mitigates them. What the fuck is that bullshit? There has to be a better way to flag a character, key a character and design zone hazards that aren’t a misleading, retarded, convoluted MacGuffin in our AA window. Making people think, rightfully so, that this somehow is going to universally beef up their character and then sticking a big rubbery one up their dark hollow is shit. It’s shit. Just another shit idea, shit design implementation and an ambiguous shit bread crumb trail that makes modern day EverQuest a head scratching, overwhelming, confusing shitheap. Try explaining all of this to a new player; someone that hasn’t developed a Stockholm syndrome to modern EverQuest’s design logic. See what they think about all that and then ask yourself why subscriptions are sliding down the toilet like an Olympic shit luge. Also, shit.

I think that wraps up this little soirée, for now. We’ll probably be having another update again soon since Demi-Plane of Blood is a mere few days away. Peace in your crease, my niece.



Originally posted by qxx • Dec 03, 2005 02:22

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