mmorchive

April 2001 tweety.bowlofmice.com

Tweety:

Doing the Journeyman’s Boots quest is one of those defining moments of the EQ experience. It’s a really simple quest, for those of you who have managed to play without coming across it or one of its victims. You get a ring from an Ancient Cyclops, a shadowed rapier from a Shadow Man, and a pile of gold (not 300+ plat, 3000+ gold pieces) and turn the whole mess in to a gnome named Hasten running around in Rathe Mountains. He talks a little like Yoda, and the whole thing is really pretty cute.

UNTIL IT MAKES YOU INSANE. Carrying around all that fucking gold is annoying, and lethal to say, MONKS, who lose AC for each pound they’re overweight. Until very recently, having that no-rent rapier was a nerve wracking experience - “what if I go link dead just before I turn it in?” The places where you get the stupid rapiers are many miles from Rathe Mountains, so before the half-hour no rent grace period, you could actually hear people chanting prayers as they hit the zone on the way to Rathe Mountains. “Please don’t kick me out, please don’t kick me out, I’d hate to have to send mail bombs to California.” And that gnome has placeholders. Sure, I know, officially there aren’t any placeholders, WHATEVER. There are three critters that run the exact same path, at super fast speed, that don’t appear at the same time, and one of them is Hasten. If you can kill the other ones that run the track, Hasten appears. BUT HE HAS NO PLACEHOLDERS. Anyway, if you show up with your toys to do the quest, and Hasten has just despawned, just bend over. Or annoy the people camping hill giants by soloing them. Or repeatedly spam the zone with “n e 1 seen hasten plz tell and stop that GNOME!!!!1111!!!”

But that’s not the worst. The worst is the ring off that clops. You have two choices. You can take a long ass boat ride to the Ocean of Tears, whereupon you discover that there’s a LINE for clops. Even assuming you sit there and wait for your turn, you may or may not survive long enough to actually loot the ring. It’s more likely that you will mostly kill the ancient when he pops after seventeen hours of sitting there, die, and let the gimp behind you whack it once and make off with the ring. The gimp who has been sending you tells every two seconds “u done yet” over and over and over. OR you can sit in South Ro, patiently killing everything that moves, including the merchants, just to have one of the seven thousand wizards who can smell an imminent clops spawn swoop in and KS you. Not that I necessarily object to this method, my banned monk got her jboots courtesy of one of those kill stealing bastard wizards. That wizard has outfitted most of the guild in jboots. We love her. We think she is just swell. She is the only reason we have not held up convenience stores with assault rifles.

Let’s face it, the Jboots quest is the hands down winner of the Suck Quest. Nearly everyone knows about it because the Karanas, most of Kunark, and reportedly all of Velious fucking suck without some kind of sow spell. Everyone who has a druid or shaman twink SOLELY BECAUSE OF SOW AND THE CHEAP THRILL YOU GET FROM CASTING IT ON YOURSELF, please raise your hands. My god, reapply the underarm deodorant, people.

So, after only about two years of crying, whining, moaning, and whimpering, our collective cries have been heard. “Traveler’s Boots” have appeared on the test server. For the low low price of five thousand plat, you can buy booties that do the same thing as jboots (no, the 57 level sow is a RUMOR and UNTRUE), with the sole difference being you need to hold still and cast the spell, sort of like a sow potion.

And people are pissed.

Goddammit. You know, I am a PROFESSIONAL whiner. I have an entire website solely devoted to my whining. I have fans because I whine so well I’m quotable. And I cannot find a single thing to whine about in regards to this addition. “Everyone will buy a pair!” They will not. I don’t think my monk ever had five grand in plat after forty seven levels. I’m sorry, the vast majority of players are not farming ebaying scuzzbuckets who play the game professionally. The players with that kind of cash mostly HAVE jboots already.” It will devalue sow potions!” Not. Sow potions are actually faster than either pair of boots. “It makes jboots worthless!” Bull testicles. Having an instant cast item is worth its weight in gold to dragon fighters who are constantly losing their top buff. “It’ll reduce the value of druids and shamans!” Huh? Can I have some of what you’re smoking? Shut your pie hole. When they make boots that buff me, slow and snare and root monsters, and port my sorry ass all over the globe, then you can start bitching. “It’s not fair, I camped for my boots for three hundred hours and now people can just buy them!”

NOW we’re getting somewhere. Playing a broken, unbalanced, and annoying game is a badge of pride with some people. Having four gazillion /played hours on their character because they skipped bathing, eating, working, sleeping, and oh yeah, LIVING is something to be proud of, and by god, all these people with their ten dollar copy of Everquest are NOT REAL PLAYERS because they haven’t SUFFERED for their entertainment. Being a martyr is fun, apparently.

Get off the cross, losers, I need the wood. I’m building a super sized billboard, on which I’m painting a sign. It will read: SOUR GRAPES ARE LIP SMACKIN’ GOOD.