Yo everyone. So ya, this update should’ve been done a week ago or so. I slacked a bit. If this is your first time reading our site, that sort of thing doesn’t happen often – scout’s honor. Typically, I’m so punctually on top of things that I stream our raids on real-time video feeds with live commentary provided by some of the internet’s most esteemed MMO talking heads and the day’s hottest celebs.

Before we get into the hot new action, we are recruiting! Keep a look back here, this list will change depending on our needs.

Bard: 2
Berserker: 1
Cleric: 2
Enchanter: 1
Magician: 1
Paladin: 1
Wizard: 1

Updated Feb 17, 2006

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

So, according to the last update, we had beaten Emperor Draygun, the Lich King and Sendaii, the Hive Queen, which were the last 2 raids we needed for the big 5 out of 5 in the cursed blood department. No, I’m not talking about super AIDS. I’m talking about the convoluted plot device that leads us closer and closer to the end-game of Darkhollow. Now that we had the 5/5 locked down, there was one last thing we needed to do in order to be able to get into The Demi-Plane of Blood. That last thing was kicking the tears off that weepy vampire bitch Master Vule the Silent Tear. We hadn’t really been putting time into killing Vule yet. We were really focused on juicing our curse counter up to a full 5 first. Even still, we ran up through Dreadspire and quickly gave Master Vule a dramatic death that any goth would be proud to receive.

And with Master Vule’s death, we were ready to bring The Big Orange Machine into The Demi-Plane of Blood.

The first fight we have in front of us is Zi-Thuuli of the Granite Claw. This fight consists of sitting at the zone in and pulling trash until he randomly pops. Then you fight him and he depops. Do that 4 times and, hooray, you move onto bigger and better things. Am I talking shit about this event? Not really. If I made it sound boring and brainless then that’s not my fault. That’s just exactly what happens; a perfect description of the fight. I didn’t even mock it with witty hilarious one-liners or clever color commentary. I personally think it’s boring, but it’s not a big deal. It’s the first fight in the zone and usually things get better the deeper in you get. Like a butthole.

So, with The Notorious Zi-T dead, what’s next? We stroll upstairs for some more of this hot Dreadspire, erm I mean, Demi-Plane action and Drama queen alert: We’ve rolled up on three sister’s who are all fighting over The Master’s dick piece. For some reason, we gotta help one of these strangers succeed in getting laid. I just sat here for 5 minutes, half a glass of diet coke and 2 cigarettes trying to figure out a way to tell the tale of this splendiferic event and I got nothin’. This event sucks. It’s all about talking to NPCs, killing trash that repops and that’s it. The entire raid sits there while a few people HAIL NPCs. Don’t believe me? Let’s have Fishlip explain this event to you:

For true. This event would be cool if it was a 1 group instance that was optional. Basically, so nobody would ever have to do it. Because nobody would. Ever. Because hailing NPCs isn’t fun. Whatever though, we beat it. Here’s the loots:

• Carmine Loop of Loathing
• Sister’s Opulent Backstabber
• Forgotten Artist’s Mesh Gloves

We’re pretty close to beating the next fight up in Demi-Plane. So come back soon and I’ll spin you a tale all about it.

So, this update should’ve been done 3 or 4 days ago, maybe more. I just couldn’t gather the stamina to do it because, frankly, I wasn’t excited about any of the fights. There’s nothing to write about them – they suck. We got into this new zone and it sucks. The Hatchet the Torturer fight we’re working on now seems fun. I dig it. And the fights we haven’t seen could very well be awesome and shit. So, I may be out of line right now because I’m ignorant to what the rest of the zone contains but whatever, I’ll say it anyway.

How the fuck do you get away with making the end zone an exact replica of a previous zone? How? That shit wouldn’t fly a few years ago. Remember? A Few years ago? When you actually drew in new players so you had to keep the good shit coming? The end zone was something you always looked forward to, something that made you go, “shit, that’s dope” when you zoned in. Something unique looking. You made the end zone of this expansion an exact replica of Dreadspire Keep. Are you guys that lazy? The couple of weeks after Depths of Darkhollow was released, I was really digging the geography of it all. A few friends, who are retired, logged on to ask about it. I kept saying how neat all the zones were. They are pretty creative zones; a lot of vertical space, which is a relatively new design style. It gave this expansion a different feel to the others. So why the fuck did you drop the ball when it comes to the end-zone? Shit doesn’t make any sense. I can’t tell you how much of a let down it is.

I personally think it’s because the majority of the player base today is never going to see it. So you spend all your time cooking up these cool looking experience zones anyone can get into. But when it comes to the small portion of the player base that is going to spend the time working their asses off to get into the one exclusive zone, you just fuck it all up. You know we, the hardcore players, are going to be here tomorrow. We’ll raid whatever you throw at us. We’ll beat it no mater how shitty it is. And you know this. So, why bother making it all snazzy and cool? Why bother putting any effort into making a hot looking end-zone? Right? Ya, that’s right.

There aren’t enough popular guild site’s that criticize your mistakes. Which is a shame because it used to keep you on your toes. You’d listen to the feedback, make some changes etc… Now it’s like, all those popular sites people trafficked went to World of Warcraft and you finally can sit back and slack, pumping out bullshit without the player scrutiny. Whatever. I’ve spent 5+ years of steady playing, keeping at the top of this game, because I enjoy it. So excuse me if I get offended when you make a zone that is a total crock of fucking bullshit. So excuse me when I gotta honk the ‘You done fucked up’ alarm while I sit through some piece of shit encounter you obviously put no effort into making. If there weren’t people telling you your fuck ups, you’d just continue to fuck up either because you 1.) Are ignorant to how people feel or 2.) You just don’t give a shit.

There’s no rational explanation. People who design this game, who designed this expansion, got together and shared ideas with what the zones should contain, what they should look like, who they are designed to be played by, etc.. So when Dev1 said, “Hey, let’s save some time and money, we can copy/paste the Dreadspire Keep file and call it Demi-Plane” – why didn’t anyone slap the skin off him? I’m seriously asking.

Enough of that Serious Man™ talk – let’s giggle.

Originally posted by qxx • Jan 16, 2006 11:37

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.

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.

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 5^th Blood raid and strolled out with our 5^th 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