I had some good times here, thank you.

TL;DR:  It stopped being fun.

The long version:

<* this portion edited out because it really does not matter *>

In closing:
For those that asked as I was camping out, I do not expect to sell my characters:  My asking price would be based on their value to me, not to the market in general. 

Best of luck all.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

I agree Nocca, and like the idea that you gift the books.  I give away most loot instead of selling it because folks gifted me when I arrived and these things get paid forward and because it slows me down to sell stuff I down need, and because I do not like being a top level player tying up public zones when I can easily afford private instances that lower levels cannot, and I have a preference for collecting money from NPCs and not PCs.  I spill a lot of loot and would not accomplish near as much if I bothered to stop work to sell everything.

T5 and its need of a UC tank is not diminished by keying an unprepared player.  The spoilers are up and if folks want to rebuff a lot, why I say let them die and learn just how much more than a 4.0 is needed for success in the zone. 

Skeezy Ratty Troll

Sorry, I was not clear in my statement.

I have a budget line with Comcast that permits 1 and only 1 connection.  The terms and conditions of service clearly state that it is not permitted to use any device to enable more than the one approved device through their network.  If my desktop were to die now I could get back on the internet with my laptop AFTER I call Comcast and have them update their permitted MAC address list.(1) (2)

They offer a higher priced service which does not have the one computer restriction.

I had unlimited tethering with Sprint for a while at about $25-$30/month. (Was pleased, wasn't using it enough to justify the cost.)  Their terms of service are also very explicit: Pay the fee and tether away, let us catch you using a 3rd party app and we will react to it.

Both firms, and every other player in the game, will have their lawyers and the local constabulary jumping all over you with both feet for a crime generally called "Theft of Service" or similar.  If you doubt this statement then go read your terms of service carefully; it's in there.  This typically results in you paying them a LOT more for the service than if you had paid for it.  Like most business operations in a capitalist economic model they use the "Mafia Model" of operation to guarantee thier income stream:  They make it too painful to NOT do business their way. 

Please be sure I am NOT telling you not to use a 3rd party app to get free tethering.(3)  All I'm aiming at here is raising your awareness that the power structures in place have declared this to be a penalty-bearing course of action.

Skeezy Ratty Troll


(1) For the non-techies, that is a Media Address Control identifier that is ALWAYS unique across a network and is normally unique across the Internet.  This is the physical address that the logical address we call an IP address maps back to.

(2) I'm 99% confident I can snarf Comcast's box into allowing multiple connections through it.  My confidence level for hiding evidence of the snarfing drops below 50% when I factor in the Narus boxes they have sitting in the main fiber hubs.

(3) As an aside on the subject, these folks are not raising their prices merely because they can, though that is always a factor.  The main reason the telcos are raising the cost is they have to do so in order to maintain their stock profitability and dividends to their investors.  This is becoming an issue now because so many of us have dropped land line service.  Telcos are still required to maintain that huge copper infrastructure despite its dropping usage level.  To gain and maintain new customers they must grow the new network while continuing to pay for the old.

VETO SIR

Just giving Hunter busy work..There's nothing wrong with that system,
besides when you give away MCP kills all day like me, you run short of MCP tokens pretty fast..

So in short I think everyone should give away MCP kills to use up the tokens instead 

hahahahahahaha

I will give away 4.0 books under the exact same conditions that I give away any other piece of armor / gear:  If it is
   A) loot that comes from a kill I made AND
   B) loot that I or another other player assisting in the kill do not need AND
   C) loot that no one in my guild or my support list (1) needs.

Unfortunately, MCP fails before C as he has no significant loot other than the 4.0 book.  Give the Master some loot worth killing him over and people will kill him and charge less or give away the book.  Maybe accessorize him and give him the same chance to drop off-slot items as the other T3-T4 spawn have, or a chance to drop one or the other (or both) God essences, or even special cash loot items (in the 500pp to 5kpp sale range) like Hollerith Cards, Magnetic Tapes, Floppy Disks, etc.  Shucks, go whole hog and give him trick items with useful variants on common buffs like a Conviction with double the HP component.

Do that and I betcha by golly you'll see a lot more free 4.0 books floating in the /ooc channel! 

Skeezy Ratty Troll


(1) I cannot afford to drop cash into the collection basket.  Until I can do so the best way I can say thanks to Hunter for running this show is by indirectly supporting and motivating the players I see going out of their way to make EZ an even better place to waste my retirement!  So yeah, I have a list of players beside the keyboard who will see me (or an alt) appear when I hear they need a hand.

I don't mean being able to handle things easier, talking "lolafkGG" easy.

-Hate

Wait.... you're talking about removing the Ultimate Charm here?  Cause that sucker sure as all get-out makes things "lolafkGG" easy.  Just saying....

/em grins and giggles and ducks and hides.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

Most people have decent phones with unlimited plans. Can use one of the apps and tether your phone for free and play that way.
I have pretty good connection on mine when I use it.

Most providers require you to pay extra to do this the last I checked.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

Better dps, utility, better snap agro than any other class. They can stay up without a healer longer than any other class....and when the caca hits the rotating aluminum they can stop drop n roll and rez if need be. Also, here anyway, they may be the best class at mob splitting (not that many here do that).

SK are for people who prefer to not be tied to a dedicated healer, as a warrior has to be, but who have greater defenses and DPS than a paladin. However, may SK would rather have better heals than a paladin and have better defenses than a warrior (or the same as both, which amounts to the same thing). I, and many others, would rather that did not happen.

What he said....

Class balance brings a lot of negative baggage from history.  Think more in lines or role balance.  The SK already fills a lot of roles.  He's a darn good fake monk, and in some situations better than a monk.  He's a darn good warrior and in a lot of tanking situations he is better than a warrior.  He is better at being a cleric/paladin to himself than clerics and paladins are to themselves.

In terms of functionality a UC'd SK with 50% t4 / 50% T5 gear and a 4.5 epic with FS-V augs can solo anything in T5 90% of the time.  Only a paladin can come close to doing that and my experiments show them having a bit lower success rate.  Give them a heal boost and they'll be soloing the "Valley of Death" (triple spawn of green coral in a crevasse... nasty nut to crack).

If anyone needs a small boost in healling I'd say the warrior could benefit nicely from a 10-50 HP heal effect on nerd augs.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

I work hard for my plat.  "Comparative time" speaking I think if I sold p99 plat for EZ plat I's want at least 1:1500.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

+1

nah,  +10 

Skeezy Ratty Troll

Mac:  It has to be about balance.  In EQ you have 3 fundamental things that have to exist to succeed in encounters: 

You must be able to take damage, AND you must be able to inflict damage AND you must be able remove damage.

For small encounters, especially so on EZ, any class can succeed in all 3 roles.  When things get harsher then you must have more functional specialization, and by the time you are engaging in the highest level encounters you must have near total functional specialization.

Any time any one class can fill two or more of these core requirements AND that class has no counter-balancing negative qualities then you see a pronounced increase in the number of players of that class.  (If you doubt this assertion then ask yourself:  How many people do I know on EZ that do NOT play a paladin or have a paladin in their crew?)

Boosting the SK epic as you suggest would be fun, but it would be a step toward creating a 2nd superclass on EZ.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

Amazing amount of work there, thank you for doing that on our behalf.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

Give us something fun, like combine 2 MCP tokens to proc a server wide Death Touch

Or maybe a Super MCP with double the hit points and decreased timers on the adds and Death Touch?  Let him drop a fat bag of plat and 3 books so a ranger can epic up in one fight and a farmer can turn a profit.

Although a server wide death touch that could be triggered twice a day would be a hoot. 

What you get when a server has no enforcer around.

heh, keep thinking there is no enforcer around.  You might be surprised to find how many folks can reach over and tap that numpad - key in under a second.

Most higher level players have and use FRAPs, typically capturing video evidence of the infraction and discussing the problem with the person creating it.  That almost always results in a better understanding and problem resolution.  If it doesn't and the behavior continues then there are two film clips to bother Hunter with viewing and reacting to, typically with the Ban Hammer(tm)

No one wants to bust chops, they want to get their game on and don't care about your game as long as it doesn't impact theirs.  With instances so cheap there really is no excuse for being a jerkface in a public zone.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

This is something we've discussed within Fear Mongers since before I finished my first stack of the MCP tokens.... It would be very handy if not a huge amount of work to add the recipes.

Skeezy Ratty Troll

I don't generally watch the pally spam but I have noticed low heal numbers there on occasion.  T4/T5 geared UC'd 4.5 pallys (2 different ones) as well as on the 4.0 UC'd pally.

Sometimes ArrEnGee gives you craptastic rolls back to back instead of one at a time. 

Skeezy Ratty Troll