Rob

I played EQ for a bit 3ish years ago. I *absolutely* hated it. I finally quit when I was griefed to no end by a teenager. Remember those days where your body was stuck somewhere completely inaccessible? Yeah, no thanks. WoW is *so* much better. WoW is playable, I don't know how people got to love EQ; the graphics were terrible, the gameplay stupid, etc. Or maybe I didn't know how to play. Whatever. WoW is what EQ could never be; easyish to play, hard to master, lots of stuff to do with people who are nice and friendly. Didn't find that much at all on EQ. So, yeah, I don't know what Robin is smoking here, but my EQ experience was completely opposite.

I play on a RP server, and it is annoying that the chat is never in RP (never ever, really), nobody does RP, nobody even tries. I went there to escape the kids, I mostly succeeded I thinkk. My server is full of very nice, very kind people (there are some asshats but few and far between). Especially at 70, you don't get to that level, generally speaking, by being an ass hat (but I know a few...). I think once you get out of the starting areas and the 10-20 areas, the inanity dies out.

I wish there was more RP too, but what can you do if the community doesn't want to enforce it? You can't realisitically expect Blizz to have any sort of interest in protecting RP, its like trying to bail a sinking boat with a spoon. GMs have been very helpful to me every time I needed it though, so koodoos to the WoW GMs! (sooooo much better that EQ GMs, which were non-existent, not to mention the support, non-existent)

Ah ranks. The wet-dream of the guild leader. But really, the ranks only work to separate the haves and the have-nots. Its absolutely amazing what people will do for officer positions, a position that, in fact, means absolutely nothing but more work. I'm an officer but I don't think i do much now. I do runs with my friends, but I'm often so busy doing those runs, playing my alts, playing with RL friends, i have no time to do officer duties, nor is it clear as to what duties being an officer entails.

My current guild uses a ranking system as a sort of e-pen thing without using officer ranks (GL doesnt want officer corps to get bloated). So basically if you do more stuff for guildies, you get a higher rank. Which is again, an absolute worthless thing, but you'll be amazed what some people will do. I guess in a game where people would spend days and months of their time to get epic loot, nothing should surprise me. But this is the same sort of thing that GLs can exploit for the good of the guild. Want the higher rank? Do this and that. It works well.

68 hunter main here. I'm pretty good, but not BRK (but who is?). Deadzone, yeah I rejoice. But I also just got through a teaching a training session explaining how our entire reason for being is making sure mobs are at range. So now no deadzone somewhat nerfs this. But I also thought, while doing the training session in ZF, that most instances are pretty hard for hunters, with LOS and deadzone issues. Almost impossible to kite like you do out in the open (by kite i mean move around in a circle, not run away like in UBRS). So this will mean kiting is so much easier in instances now. What most people don't realize is that we still have huge issues:

1) Line of Sight (nuf said).
2) You must be standing still to place shots.
3) Our best shot, steady shot, has a 2 sec cast time. Means it can and will be interrupted easily by PVP people or mobs.
4) We still won't be able to use ranged weapons in melee. We'll still get our butts kicked by warriors in melee, most likely.

Finally, yes this will make hunters easier to play, but its also very easy to distinguish good from bad hunters. Really, you can do it in 10 seconds. Do they break CC? Can they kite? Can they trap? What's their shot rotation? Are the serpent stinging trash mobs? Pretty dang easy.

I think it depends on the character of the GLs merging. I was second in command of a small guild in Blackwater Raiders, and our GL never displayed much enthusiasm for running the guild; probably because all he did was referee intra-guild fights. Not much fun there. Eventually he decided he would step down as GL, and someone proposed a merger with another guild. It's been a week and so far it's a really good situation. We now have enough people to do 5mans of whatever level, and the new GL is very active in the guild (this is key, if your GL doesn't play much, it will be a problem!). So far so good, but now the new GL has twice as many people to manage. But anyway mergers can be greater than the sum of their parts.

What was the angry scred about? That's my server :)

I totally agree with you Robin. Last night, for example, our guild leader was trying to tell us how he wanted to quit the game because it was boring and wasn't fun (being GL isn't fun I think). Another guildie ranted on him about how he was a terrible GL and so forth. That'd make me want to quit the game right there, or at least move to a dift server. The game is really about fun. If you aren't having fun, then stop playing, or do something different. I'm not going to play if i'm not having fun. I probably won't do raids because its a ton of work (40 hours of gaming per week? No thanks). I can't imagine doing anything for 40 hours a week and consider it fun.

Great idea, will never happen. Blizz is too busy swimming in our money. What is more realistic is to have quests associated with major milestones, or even have the trainer actually telling you want the new skills mean and how to use them. The game would be so much better if they had something, anything, to teach us how to actually play our classes better.

My spec is a athelon 3200, GeForce 6600GT, 1.5 gig of RAM. Game runs fine, usually 40-60 fps, latency is low 100s. Even with wife playing alongside, latency is still great.

I think some huge points are missing, to the guy who's running the SLI, something is wrong. Probably the game doesn't support SLI or something, but you at least should be getting 60 fps.

Further, look at all the crap you have loaded in windows. Antiviral like nortons will suck done at least 30% of your computer's speed, in terms of hard drive access and overall program running speed. Get a good antiviral program like Kaspersky or NOD, they are very good, low overhead programs. Further, don't use winxp32, win vista; these OSs are plagued by viruses. Simply by switching the OS to x64 to me has been a huge savings, viral attacks are almost non-existent.

Wow, great article. Should I say, *another* great article. BRK is the god of hunters, I say it again. Anyway my thought was that we know there are a ton and a half of hunter players out there (30% of surveys), why don't the devs see this and add in more content for the hunters? That only makes sense to me.

Not to be crass, but the game will always be there, your sperm won't. Literally what i mean to say is enjoy your life first, game second. Your clock is ticking, you can't afford to screw up years (sometimes the best years) of your life doing WoW or whatever. If you are retired and have nothing else to do, dift story.