The Missing Entry

I made a post earlier that I called Aches and Pains.  I later took it down.  For anyone who read it or for anyone who happened to see it and then saw it gone, I basically took it down because… I don’t really know why.  After re-reading it, I just didn’t really like it.

What it said in a nutshell:

The weather is changing.  I view this as both good and bad.  Due to many years spent working under very hot conditions during the summer, I have become much more of a fall/winter person.  The bad part is that various injuries acquired through years of sports, martial arts, and automobile accidents have turned me into one of those people who groans over aching body parts when the weather changes.

With the onset of October, we are entering the holiday season with Halloween this month, Thanksgiving next month, Christmas in December and New Years in January.  I know many people who hate this time of year… either because of how commercial it has become or because they find the whole holiday season depressing.  Most people I know who are parents dread all that leads up to the holidays but love Christmas Day because of the reactions of their children.

I am something of an oddball.  Despite the fact that I spend the holidays alone, I generally enjoy them.  I am not a Thanksgiving person, but I appreciate the day off of work.  I absolutely LOVE Christmas.

I actually got into online gaming because of the holidays.  The first year that I knew that I would be spending the holidays alone, I approached the coming season with a sense of dread.  I honestly didn’t know how I would feel about it.  So, I went and picked up EQ with the thought of just playing it through the holidays to occupy my time.  The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ll never forget my first Christmas in EQ.  I was off in Iceclad soloing my bard on the evening of Christmas Eve.  In those days, Iceclad was always jammed packed with people, but on this night, I was the only person there.

In the middle of my mindless slaughter of hapless snow cougars, Stormfeather spawned… that oh-so coveted snow griffon that people needed for the Eyepatch of Plunder.  I had met many people camping him over the weeks… some who spent days there non-stop hoping for a chance at him… a chance that never came.

And there he was.

He was red to me and I didn’t figure I had a chance in hell of killing him, but I also knew that never again would I get the chance.  It was my first experience kiting with a bard.  I only had 1 DoT and 1 DD song, so I twisted those with Selos.

My DoT and DD songs got resisted more often than not, so this kite took me damn near an hour.  When his health got low enough for him to run, I thought I was going to lose him.  He took off over the water and I followed behind futily swinging my weapons and twisting for all I was worth.  When he finally died, I was in the middle of no where and couldn’t find my way back.

After what seemed like forever of swimming around looking for land, I was suddenly summoned.  It seemed that a GM was pulling duty that night and couldn’t find anything to do.  He had arrived in the zone simply because he was going to see what I was up to and chat with me a while, but he saw me kiting Stormfeather and left me alone.  He had secretly watched the entire fight in amazement expecting me to die at any moment.  When I finally won but was hopelessly lost, he summoned me back to dry land with a smile and a “Merry Christmas.”

We then spent some time sitting by one of the fire camps chatting and exchanging EQ stories late into the night.  Finally, around 3 AM, he took off to go home and I logged for the night.  I never saw that GM again and, for the life of me, I can’t remember his name.

But that is an EQ experience that I will remember forever… and it is that experience that causes me to almost look forward to the holidays.  I don’t expect anything like that to ever happen again, but it was such a uniquely wonderful experience that it has forever etched playing MMO’s in my mind as a joyful thing to do during the holidays. 

I might spend the holidays alone, but as long as I am an MMO player, I will never truly spend them “alone.”

Burning Questions

There are certain questions that tend to burn into most people and stick with them throughout their lives.  Is there really a god?  If so and if he did indeed create all things, who or what created him?  If there isn’t a god, what began the whole process?  If time is linear as we understand things, at what point did time spring into existance and what caused it?

Many of these questions cannot be answered.  However, others can… and I am happy to say that through strict and exhausting research over the weekend, I can put a period to some of these burning questions.

1)  We all knew it in theory really, but we can now move it over into the fact column… a level 31 dirge cannot solo Grimfeather… even if he tries really, really hard.

2) If you attempt to stealth past a see invis mob, that mob is not impressed with claims of, “Whoops!  I didn’t see you there.  I’ll just be on my way.”  Said mob will still kick your ass.

3) Even if a mob is gray, if he is a heroic with trips and friends, he can still put the hurt on you seriously.

4) If you take a quest that requires you to fish in order to complete, fishing in that zone requires a minimum skill of 90 and you have a skill of 5, you need to leave the zone and head for one of the lowbie zones to work up the skill.  Trust me… the NPC doesn’t care that you never thought about working on fishing.

And, there is 1 question that I am closer to being able to provide the answer to, but I am not there yet.

Back in EQ1, it always bothered me a bit that if you jumped from somewhere really high up but just happened to do so over water, nothing bad happened to you.  Of course, in reality, once your body reaches a certain level of velocity, it doesn’t matter if you land in the water or on a porn star’s implants… nothing is soft enough to save you and you are going to be splattered.

I realize, of course, that certain mechanics are left out of MMO’s and we pretty much accept them without a thought because we have already suspended our reality to a certain degree just by playing them.

In EQ1, there existed a friendly competition among the bard community.  In one part, bards took great pride in figuring out how to climb structures in the game… the statue in the Firiona Vie Outpost, the Tower of Frozen Shadow, the dragon bridge in Iceclad, the windmill in the Lake of Ill Omen, and so on.  The second part of that little competition was to see how close to the ground you could time hitting levitate after jumping off those various structures.

Part of me might have been a throwback to being a bard in EQ1, but I just had to know.

I slowly fought my way up to the top of the Krag roost in Butcherblock Mountains.  As I stood looking over the edge, I wondered if EQ2 put the mechanics in to cause you to die, even if you jumped into water, if you were a certain degree of height off the ground.

Scientific endeavors such as this one, I feel I should point out, are failures if you have too much forward momentum and end up smacking down on one of the islands below.

Follow-up experiments are also considered failures if, upon a second attempt and by freak happenstance, a boat happens to run right underneath you just before splash-down.

So, although I cannot yet answer the question on if you will die or not after jumping from that height, I can provide some small insight into the matter… that being that witnesses to your doomed scientific expedition will laugh themselves silly at your failure.