I've noticed a disturbing trend with recent patchs, that being closeing down people's methods of doing things which improve the game but aren't strictly in line with how some people think the game should work. That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing but the problem is that there is nothing being done about the actual problems with the game that people are trying to get around. I'm not talking about blatent self-profit exploits like cracking to PK people but about workarounds to game problems.

One problem we often see with the game is mobs "under the world." Western Waste is a good example of a zone with this problem, often bronthos and wolves get trapped in the water under the ground not far out from Siren's Grotto. Not a big deal. Sometimes however, Cargalia or other dragons get trapped down there, and sometimes, they can agro on you. When Cargalia is led to a low area of the landscape like one of the chasms or the ocean around the zone, she will pop out and start pathing on land normally. This leads to people completely innocently training their own raid with a dragon from under the earth. Another common example is the very well known spot in fear where a mob either quickly paths under the world or hell maybe even spawns there, typically a samheim or fright finger, and will agro on a puller, follow them to a raid and start beating on people. Now, in these cases these problems have a simple solution, these are flagged as non-dungeon zones (indoor and dungeon are distinct flags with different meanings) so it's possible to nuke mobs under the world here. You won't be able to loot the frightfinger (without exploiting) but you can at least kill it. However not all outdoor zones are flagged non-dungeon so you can't always nuke through the ground, and not all mobs that get stuck under the world are trash mobs. Mons Letalis and some other Luclin zones got made dungeon zones and have minor named get trapped under the world occasionally. Plane of Nightmare is another example in which only 1 named heart dropping mephit could be up at one time. We have in fact had one stuck under the world at one point. We were able to use an exploit to target it since it was too far down to agro on us from proximity and then agroing it with a spell and bringing it out, but only because PoN is still non-dungeon so you can nuke through walls etc. Had the group not had a tracker (me) they could have ground the caves all night long and never gotten a named not knowing the mob was up but not accessible. Had we not had an exploit to target a mob we can't normally target, we would have had no way of getting the mob out and going through petitions which is at best hit or miss and usually wastes most of a night even when answered. When PoN becomes flagged a dungeon zone like some others have been it will take some more major exploits to get to these mobs and deal with them. Targeting and seeing mobs that I normally can't has been invaluable in dealing with this problem and ones like it and prevented some major aggrivation with the game. Recently SOE has been working at preventing things like Macroquest which lets you target things more easily from working, in the past they stopped pets from being able to target mobs that weren't close, and no doubt they're working on some of the other methods of targeting things you can't directly see even when being able to target these things is a good thing. However I don't see them fixing the actual problem, that people NEED to be able to target things they "shouldn't." Plane of Fear and Western Waste are perfect examples, how long have those mobs been getting stuck down there 3 years? Why isn't effort being put into dealing with these glareing problems, problems which exploits are primarly being used to deal with, instead of on blocking these exploits?

Lets take another glareing problem, link death. People LD and 1018 and often can't get back into the game for 10+ minutes quite frequently. Instead of fixing this problem, what does SOE do? They impose a 72 flag limit on mobs, require you to be in a raid to flag, and... drumroll... make planar projects despawn in 10 minutes and nerf the ability to keep them around longer! 10 minutes, just long enough that people that 1018ed are gaurenteed to miss the flag. Dear god. One unlucky person in our alliance has now had this happen twice in a row for them. Meanwhile, they also "fix" Z-axis exploits with the intent you can't... agro mobs you can't see (my favourite way of pulling black reavers without a rogue, AE to bring them out of the building) but now you can also no longer catch people trapped, invariably due to SOE's crap code and LDing, on a different level of a dungeon in your TP to get them out (thats if, of course, you still know an exploit to target them in the first place.)

Speaking of the 72 flag limit, again, thanks for the nerf. Apparently unbeknownst to every player in the game we're only allowed to have guilds of 72 players and none of us are allowed to have alts. Being in a large alliance of casual players the 72 flag limit which was no doubt meant to stop large crowds of people flagging means that we'll have to flag a minimum of twice and we won't get to flag alts. Already this has caused us an immense headache with our last flagging and means we'll have to flag the same mob again and my cleric and wizard alts are screwed for advancing in PoP. Instead of fixing the flagging system to work per account (or frankly pitching the whole grotesque thing) and get rid of horrible problems with it they penalize their own players who are doing nothing other than trying to enjoy the game. One utterly mindblowing stupidity with the flag system comes about if you haven't killed Bertoxxulous yet but are doing Torment. You can kill The Prophet, have a sick Tylis Newleaf there but... you can't flag for him because some other evil guy who worshipped Bert needs help more. Yeah, so you're sitting there, you can save Tylis in minutes but... he won't let you because he wants you to first go kill Carprin half a dozen times then kill Bert a three times (thank you 72 flag limit and people that can't play every single day) because this other guy is in more pressing need, more pressing than apparently a couple minutes to save him would take. BUT BERTOXXULOUS IS DEAD AND WON'T RESPAWN FOR 3 DAYS BECAUSE 12 OTHER GUILDS WANT HIM TOO! So you're in Torment, with your dick in your hands thinking, holy crap, I just killed a zillion of the same damn stupid mobs to have SOE stick me with this @#%$? To top that off, the loot nerf. None of the named even dropped ethereal toilet paper let alone anything off their craptastic loot table. Fleshgrinder could rape a lot of Luclin and most Velious mobs pretty bad and him and all his red, yellow and white con buddies drop... nothing. Not a damn thing.

Call of the Hero, oh boy, mages love this one. SOE gives magicians an ability and then disable it all over the place saying it was a mistake. So what did we used to do? Corpse summon. The Deep, Airplane etc. you couldn't CoH but you could still corpse summon. A huge inconvience, a pain in the @#%$, a stupid waste of time that did nothing but sap the fun out of the game. Now what happens with PoP? Shroud of Stealth. Yep, rogues can now walk from zone entrance to raid dragging a body with no problems but magicians can't CoH. A huge inconvience, a pain in the @#%$, a stupid waste of time that does nothing but sap the fun out of the game. I can't think of a better example of the left hand beating the right hand repeatedly with a heavy object.

Recently there have been a few other nerfs. Not being able to exit an illusion if it would put you "through" an object which is used to walk through walls or leave crouch if it would do the same thing, akin to what people used to do to get across Siren's Grotto, when the seahorses actually meant something a few expansions ago, and thereby saved me having to tp to CS for the fifth time that night to succor them across. It's also what is used to get people into Aerin'Dar's lair to get flagged when they logged on 5 minutes late or they died with their corpse poofing to the GY or if they got the flag but had to leave without zoning in via the PoV entrance which is needed to activate your access. So with 72 flag limit, planar projectsion poofing in 10 minutes and you have to be in the raid to get flagged... you can't click the orb to get down and you can't get CoHed into the bowl once Aerin'Dar is dead for absolutely no valid reason... these are PROBLEMS. People exploiting shrink or illusion to get through the glass or walls is a good thing to get around these problems. FIX THE DAMN PROBLEMS SOE and not the workarounds to them!

And on to horses... The most visible nerf and one that best points out SOE's willingness to harm players instead of help them. Despite numerous bugs persisting with horses SOE chooses to instead nerf the ability of people with weak computer systems to use their horse than to fix the existing problems. Crouching which was kludged in as a mechanism to abort casting doesn't work on horses like it should, targetting in the most popular camera angle almost invariable ends up targeting yourself for no apparent reason (fixed with lizards... so apparently not an exploit but only if you own LoY), your mouse icon gets "stuck" holding spell icons, luclin models are hideous poorly implamented system hogs, horses can't jump, horses like Khan have no idea how to go down when flying, the list of horse bugs is endless. Some people to get around some of these bugs disabled models, others simply do it because they have to because they have systems that can't handle luclin models (in extreme cases low end systems present luclin models bare naked, like really naked, and really bare) but have horses. Instead of simply adding the movement of horses to players without the model (something I'd have cheered since I have a 96kpp horse and kept all models off for framerate and zonetime) they instead nerf the crap out of it. Thank you for makeing the game less fun. Thank you SOE for being the worst that you can be.

Buybacks are an ongoing nerf I've felt a couple times. Recharging things via vendor is something commonly done to recharge things like SoW potions and the like. Some nerfs, like swollen fungus beast glands are outright silly. The problem with these was that they were instant cast so allowed people to easily acquire a massive amount of agro. Instead of fixing the instant cast aspect, something they should never have been, they change the buyback price. People who put effort into getting a couple of these for the legitimate use of actually snaring things get screwed for no reason, left with a few 10 charge things that are not even close to being worth the effort of getting... except for guilds with money who can continue to use them for massive agro on tough fights because the recharge price isn't a big deal to them. Another stupid one, Crypt Master's Conjuring Stone got it's price taken from negligeable to being more than 2 stacks of coffins to recharge. Hello? SOE just implamented graveyards so then they go and nerf something whose value had already been significantly reduced. In the case of the stone they're LORE so recharging already is a hassle taking 2 people, and getting them in the first place takes a fair bit of effort or a fair bit of PP and as I said they're already not worth it most of the time because of graveyards EXCEPT... to get around problems with the game. Unsoulbound keys in BOT or to Aerin'Dar's lair... guess what, I can bank my key each time we go up or... maybe just enjoy playing the game instead of running back and forth between the bank all the time and just leaveing a conjuring stone banked in the rare case we wipe I can simply get my corpse with a stone and retrieve the key and get back to the wipe with a cleric and rez and proceed from there instead of waiting 20 mintues for the fricken GY and proceeding from the GY. A hassle, a stupid pain, a waste of time and a way to sap fun. Instead of stopping mobs from getting pushed through a wall and falling under the world and then summoning you down there (retrieving bodies under the world was a popular use for the stone in Luclin sadly), or soulbinding keys that should be soulbound, or makeing graveyards work like they should, that being simply giving you the ability to do /corpse zonewide, they go and nerf the stone recharging whose primary use is to get around annoyances and bugs with the game. People who had put effort into acquireing these and use them to make the game less of a hassle or get around bugs get their efforts rewarded by SOE screwing them with a this massive PP hit. Staff of Forbidden Rites is another one, popular to recover from wipes if a monk survived and a necro didn't, we're now wasting our time killing VoX again and stealing it from lowbie guilds with a 60+ magician pet and a 50s cleric... oops did I say that, I meant with a couple groups of non-exploiting twinks which are a pain in the @#%$ to get to Permafrost Keep. Waste of time, annoying, stupid, fun sapping for both us and the lowbie guilds deprived of what, to them, is a challenging fight. If recharging the Forbidden Rites Staff was an exploit, it's sure as hell preferable by everyone than what we have now. SOE, fix the problem, stop nerfing our solution and stop punishing people for putting effort into trying to have fun.

This got moved here from general forum. I don't read this forum. I don't know why it even exists let alone why it should be read. Whatever. Haver fun. I'll continue to not read this forum so don't bother directing replies at me.

I would like to add the monk non-death but gets a rez bug. A while ago, someone found that if you had your monk (this is from memory, so how you did it might be slightly different) die from a single huge nuke at the same time as the LD (pull plug), their body would be there and they would show up at their bind spot. Not a big deal since the body didn't have any items on it... but then someone figured out that you could Rez the new body for XP. So they had some people perfect it and raise a monk from 30 - 50 in a day.

So what do they do? Make sure the extra body isn't there? NO, they make it so you can't log back on until after the character times out. WHAT?

Now, if I LD, I die every time. But before that, since I run with autorun, many times I could get back on (even when I was using a modem) and still be running across the zone. But once I hit that wall, I was dead. Now it's just death...

Fix the bug... And stop finding a workaround hack to fix the symptoms!

wow... excellent post. I salute you.

Excellent post Lindara. I don't understand why it got moved either, but frankly, its a shame that you are too close minded to read this thread now that its moved.

I won't bother expounding anymore on this topic like I could since the thread author obviously doesn't care about the things they said.

I agree with all your points, King B.

I don't think exploiting around all the bugs is a valid long term solution. The same exploits are also used to just trivialize the game.

Good post, Lindara. I think I can sum it up though.

SOE, stop fixing the "exploits" the players are using to get around the annoying bugs in the game, unless you fix the bugs first.

And players... do yourselves a favor and stop labeling them as exploits. Use the term "workaround" instead. Why? In the software industry bugs are inevitable and often you "workaround" them with alternate means to accomplish what the software is supposed to do. Or you have a "workaround" to fix something bad the software did.

The invisible horse was a "workaround" to the bugs with visibile horses. Ways to retrive yourself or target mobs under the earth are "workarounds". SOE tries to foist the responsibility of their unfixed bugs onto players by calling them "exploits". I think players using a bug to do something that is ordinarily well outside of what they could do otherwise, in order to gain something, is an exploit. But there's a difference, a big difference, between exploiting the software and between working around bugs. SOE is bad at drawing that distinction and just labels everything an exploit, and some players are doing that too now.

SOE is also prioritizing their bug fixes badly. They're removing the workarounds and ignoring the bugs. And this really irritates the heck out of people.

Don't know who or why it was moved.

I would like to add to Panamah's points, though.

If the devs know about the bugs and 'sploits; they should be called "traps" if they are not fixed. Fixing the workarounds is misfeasance, banning players for using them is malfeasance.

The other thing SOE should do is advise players of what is a bug and what isn't. They should make advisories and post them where they will be visible over the long term.

For instance, shammies and enchanters were enraged when SOE fixed focus effects for affliction items to not include debuffs. Most of them had no idea that it was a bug. Apparently it had been announced 9 months prior to the fix that it was a bug. A lot of loot decisions and plat had been spent badly because people didn't know it was a bug.

If there were a place where you could go and look and see that something is a bug and not intended, during the 9 months or years that it takes SOE to fix them, you can not claim to be taken unawares when it finally happens.

But SOE has totally shut-down on communicating with their customers, except for marketing, so it's probably unlikely we'll see anything like this.

Very good post and hits the main problem I've had with Sony right on the head.

The flag system itself was a horrible thing, but then to limit the amount of flags to 72 made it even worse. Not every guild has only 72 people, and even ones that do will likely have alts and 2-boxed characters they'd like to get flagged as well. Believe it or not, but not everyone enjoys waiting for the same mobs over and over to be able to get everyone in the guild flagged. Perhaps this isn't a problem on some servers, but on Karana it is a huge one. Having 8-9 guilds all capable of taking out PoP mobs doesn't leave many up.

Another thing that sucks about it is the fact that I can no longer "mooch" flags from other guilds. A couple guilds on our server were willing to flag a few members of our guild/alliance as long as we would recipricate. I'm sure this is out the window now seeing as how every guild is going to try to use as many of the 72 flags for themselves that they can.

Flag system was a horrible, horrible, horrible idea and it has failed miserably. It, in itself, has generated perhaps the most problems the game has ever seen. In hand with the crappy loot in pre-elemental planes, level 63+ people don't have many options of where to play. When I log on, I get to choose from a whopping 5 zones of where to get exp. Perhaps this isn't the flag systems fault, but it definetly reinforces the issue.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> The other thing SOE should do is advise players of what is a bug and what isn't. They should make advisories and post them where they will be visible over the long term.[/quote]

Completely agree. I'm not going to go off on another CS tangent other than to say it is awful, but Sony really should keep us more aware with what they are doing. There are a lot of things in the game that I can't be sure are intentional or a bug. Like if tomorrow Ornate patterns started dropping in Nightmare, how am I supposed to know this was intentional and not a messed up loot table?

L1nd, you can't be the gumpy druid, I'm the grumpy druid! :p

Can the mod who moved this explain why it was moved?

I think the post has numerous good points which where articulated very well.

I moved it - the post is a good one and has valid points, I've never argued that. However the language and the format of the post leaves much to be desired and is much more suited to this forum rather than the base General forum.

Tis a shame, woulda been nice to give someone from SOE a chance to read it.

Anyway, good points all, totally agree.

Tia

IMO

THe thread about the patch message where everyone and their brother is slamming the horse changes is 10 times the rant that this thread is.

Of course I am not a moderator so my opinion doesnt matter much.

Personally, I think the thread was moved because of who the original poster was VS the content of the thread.

/shrug...

Wanted to go ahead and say that I have always lurked the druids grove and have always enjoyed my time here -- figured I would say that to let the mods/operators know I appreciate them before I said that moving it to rants when L1ind has many of the same thoughts that I have is a bit... strange... /shrug... Maybe some people dont like that L1ind takes an imflammatory (sp?) approach to posting, but regardless of it I always see some good points and good debate drawn from it... ah well...

Perhaps it would make better sense to start a new thread for the topic that you are discussing.

An exploit has been defined as using a "known" bug as a method for achieving what otherwise could not be done. Naturally, the problem with this is that SOE doesn't disclose what they consider to be bugs (they prefer to have us learn how things work ourselves)--one reason why spell nerfs are so nasty since it is impossible to divine what SOE "intended" the working to be. SOE is currently adding to the definition that anything they didn't "intend" to work as it does is an exploit. This is what makes everyone mad, since we aren't mindreaders--never will be--and to have things changed, later to be told that we were exploiting, is annoying and aggravating.

EQ players are inventive, and will most times find some way of working around a bug. SOE tends to call this exploiting. But, a simple test will show the difference: does the workaround give an unfair advantage? Obviously, the bug where a LD monk could be rezzed for xp and level from 30 to 50 in 1 day is an exploit. The horse situation is cloudy (since it is simple to click off the horse buff and duck to interrupt casting, though certainly it is a bug that casting can't be interrupted on a horse without moving), and is being defined by SOE as an exploit, but as a necessary workaround for low-power computers--now sadly a moot point.

Remember that a workaround is not necessarily a bug, and certainly not an exploit. Workarounds are simply an alternate way of getting from point A to point B. They are rarely easier, and most times require special circumstances. Exploits are cheats, nothing less. We all know what cheating is, and are careful to avoid it. Don't fall into the trap that any alternate way of moving forward is an exploit.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Tis a shame, woulda been nice to give someone from SOE a chance to read it.[/quote]

Who says they don't read this forum?

"Exploits are cheats. We all know what cheating is,..."

Do we?

FD was never intended to be used for pulling.
Certainly, AE nuke spells are not used as intended.
Hell, kiting itself was not intended.

Mob Pathing is set up to increase your likelyhood of getting killed. If you are resourceful enough to use that, that which is *intended* to kill you, to your advantage, is that exploiting?

I even know of safe spots. One has never been fixed and has been known for years. Another was actually brought to the attention of the devs in SF in a room filled with people; and the response was 'we don't have time to go back and fix it'.

Your black and white is not mine, nor SOE's. That is why they are traps. "Hey there cutey, wanna date?"

Working as intended is totally different than cheating. If you use a nuke on yourself to increase your Evocation skills, is that cheating? Certainly the designers wouldn't have expected people to do this, but it is not cheating. However, using a "safe spot" to prevent any harm to yourself is cheating since it removes any risk whatsoever.

If EQ was always as the designers intended, then there would be 1 way to solve each and every problem/quest and nothing else would work. Giving a game the ability to work beyond what was intended gives players more leeway, and makes the game more enjoyable. It's nice to have solutions evolve that are totally unexpected. FD pulling is an example of this.

I realize it is not black and white, but we all have a very good notion of when inventiveness becomes cheating. Kiting is disliked by SOE, but it isn't cheating since the aggro and pathing is working as intended, it's just that classes are using their speed/snares/fears/whatever in new ways to make kills. Using pathing to your advantage so that you can kill without fear of death is wrong, and cheapens the game.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>
Kiting is disliked by SOE, but it isn't cheating since the aggro and pathing is working as intended, it's just that classes are using their speed/snares/fears/whatever in new ways to make kills.
[/quote]

Kiting could be considered an exploit of aggro. You are using something that is supposed to be detrimental (the mob's hate of you) to your advantage. You know mobs that hate you will path directly towards you, forever. If those mobs are snared, they are merely targets lined up to die.

If I have a badly-hurt charm pet, I can evac and it's back to 100% in seconds. I know that when mobs lose aggro their regen shoots through the roof. Is that an exploit?

Heck, my BL uses a 1hb that procs Tash. I could care less about it's MR being reduced, but I know that mobs hate being tashed, so Clerics can heal me with impunity. Is that an exploit?

There are no hard and fast rules for what is "cheating", except what the devs *define* as cheating.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>That is why they are traps. "Hey there cutey, wanna date?"[/quote]
Anytime, sugar. /wink

"There are no hard and fast rules for what is "cheating", except what the devs *define* as cheating. "

Exactly! My only point was that some things are fairly obvious cheats and we should expect them to be removed from the game. Others are grey.

As for kiting, I chalk it up to inventiveness in the game. Everything is working as intended. Aggro is making mobs come after us. Snares are making them go slow. Nukes are dropping their health. If it was real life (perish the thought :) ) I just imagine someone running for their life and occasionally pulling the trigger to slowly kill a lion after their rear end.

Actually, to make it like real life you would have to hobble the lion first lol. Then you could run a few steps, shoot him, run a few more, sit down for a bit, then stand up, shoot, and run again! :rolleyes:

Traab "Love Machine" Fellhammer
Human Mob Compactor of the 52nd Cycle
And Almost Too Sexy To Live!

"I dont think even VERANT was so stupid as to think there would only be one use for snare, (to stop mobs from running AWAY!)"

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>
However, using a "safe spot" to prevent any harm to yourself is cheating since it removes any risk whatsoever.
[/quote]

Still don't understand this one.

So, you're a ranger, shooting a bow from a castle wall at your enemy who cannot climb the castle wall. That's cheeting? Or sound tactics?

/boggle.

If it is cheeting then why have castles? Walls? Trees? Rocks? Mountains? etc. Just make EQ one huge flat surface.

Well, EQ isn't like RL or even a Fantasy book in that regard. To the mobs in most of EQ the world is perfectly flat without terrain features or obstacles. That's why they walk through walls or attack us under the world or just warp on top of us.
It's like the castle walls are a delusion we PC's have. An illusion only we're suspectible to, but not the monsters we fight.

Theres a difference between an exploit and something that is working not as the designers intended.

An exploit is something you risk getting banned for. Finding a way to generate infinite money is an exploit. Duping corpses is an exploit. Using pathing to kill mobs without them being able to reach you is an exploit.

Something working not as intended isnt something (with a few very rare examples of overzealous GM's) you get banned for. Examples of this are horses without models, necros going FD and afk and letting their pets generate xp, manastones after healing became too easy. These were altered to bring their effectiveness down to what the designers intended without people being banned along the way.

"Using pathing to kill mobs without them being able to reach you is an exploit."

There is a canal in Crushbone. With a bridge. The orcs like to use the bridge.

I, as a baby Druid, saw that.

I did not need the bridge. I did not use the bridge.

The orcs never got to me. Because they used the bridge.

I keeled them.

Either
A) That was an intended feature, because it was hardly a secret.
B) They were too lazy to fix it, if it were a 'sploit.
C) I was 'sploitin'.
D) Pathing is used to get you killed, which leads to E.
E) I don't give a @#%$.

<strong>"Using pathing to kill mobs without them being able to reach you is an exploit."

There is a canal in Crushbone. With a bridge. The orcs like to use the bridge.

I, as a baby Druid, saw that.

I did not need the bridge. I did not use the bridge.

The orcs never got to me. Because they used the bridge.

I keeled them.</strong>

Thats kiting. If mobs path oddly, don't run directly to you for some reason, and take the long way, thats their problem. There are spots where mobs cannot go to at all however. In fact if you're standing in one of them with the mob agro on you it will simply stop moving and stand there doing nothing at all (unless you're in melee range) while you kill it. As an example, there are ways to get into the water areas of PoV. Mobs can't get there. You can stand there and nuke/kill mobs there and they'll just stand there and let you (unless they summon of course) because they can't path to you and they're nice enough not to warp there. There are also spots that mobs think they can path to so wander around a little bit, usually pacing back and forth over in a 10 foot line. Chardok has a few well known ones that were very popular for Necromancers to exploit.

Devs at last FF said the stationary mobs in SG are supposed to be like that.

And that they would not go back to fix them anyways.

Sounds like a green light to 'sploit 'em while you got 'em.

The whole Linkdead system really bugs me. I almost never die from getitng into a bind or making some kind of mistake... it's always because I've gone linkdead. It is the most frustrating thing, not being able ot control it.

I know they did that to prevent people from pulling the plug to avoid death... but I say to them "so what if someone does that?" The damage they do to their machines is their own problem... I hate being so damned dependant on clerics (who often want nothing to do with my corpse) because the game kicks me all the time. I think so many people die unfairly due to disconnections and that once yur LD mobs should not attack you. So you can pull the plug... so what? That just means less clerics will be begged to come to zone_x to rez.

Sorry if I stopped making sense somewhere, but I die several times a day by going linkdead and it's very very very frustrating.

Goozer

I would suggest you try to find places to hunt near zone lines.

I used to play on horrible dial up. If I started getting bad lag during middle of fight ( most of the times I would wind up going LD from it) I just hit the zone line. Less exp gained but less exp and frustration from dieing.

just my opinion and may not work for some.

I am all for the flag limit...I have a problem with 120 people zergs of mobs let alone flagging 30 or 40 more twinks to get in zones. If you want to raid with 200 people, kill me the mob 3 times to get every one flagged.

Yeah i hear the well we are a group of friends etc etc but the real reason people bring 140+ to the table has nothing to do with them wanting to hang with friends, it's prolly more that they cant do it with 72 or less.

No respect for the zerg, thats my 2cp flame on if you will.

Malike WolfCaller
65 Storm Warden
Reconstructed EC'I

Okay people, let me take you WAAAAY old school.

KITING IS NOT CHEATING

Open the book. The original EQ guide. The very first one sold seperate from the game. Look through it. They actually SUGGEST that people learn how to kite in there, and call fear kiting an "Advanced tactic".

Jebus, it REALLY surprises me to see people in a DRUID'S forum calling kiting cheating. Get damned ahold of yourself and read wtf Sony puts out there, because I could open the book PUT OUT BY SONY AT THE GAME'S INITIAL RELEASE, and point to you IN BLACK AND WHITE PRINT where SONY (actually Verant at the time....) TEACHES the basics of kiting.

Son't talk about something unless you know what you are talking about. What if Sony decided one day to read this board? They take kiting away from us somehow! They would think that is what players want. It is STUPIDIDTY! Kiting is where 90% of a druid's xp COMES FROM!

Then again, most druids since LoY don't know how to play their class.

Let me add that using bad pathing IS NOT KITING

Let me take you back to druid pre school.

I'll use the step by step process

1) Snare mob
2) Snare another
3) Snare another
4) Snare another
5) Run in circles around them until they are grouped up on top of eachother
6) Get some distance
7) Cast a lightning based AoE, hitting all of them at once

They chase you the whole time. If they catch up to you, you are dead. Period. Druids have NO defensive skills. If one hits you, you'll be stunned, and the other 3 will beat you to death.

Considering you ARE in danger... Actually, even MORE danger than other hunting styles, because if you get hit once, you are dead, and considering that they chase you the whole time, and you have to outrun them... HOW THE HELL IS THAT AN EXPLOIT?

An exploit is creating an ANOMOLIE in the game. If merchant A sells item 1 for 10plat and merchant B buys it for 20 plat, and you run back and forth between the two until you have a million plat, THAT is an exploit.

Using your spells in a manner which the devs intended, while placing yourself in harm's way is NOT an exploit.

The ammount of people who made druids simply as cash cows, ports, or mules sickens me. Go learn your class before you make such ignorant comments.

Let me state that I agree with the ORIGINAL message in this thread, as that the bugs mentioned in the FIRST message are real and need dealt with.

This is why Sony doesn't use the word "bug" around players though. Anytime someone says it, total stupidity ensues. This is probably why the original poster doesn't want to come back and check for replies.

As someone who has played EQ 4 years, and has played a druid the whole time, trust me. I know what I am talking about.

Anyone want to hear stories about the IRC chat channels used during Beta?

second reply to my own reply... so sorry...

That kinda came off harsher than meant... Just been having alot of problems directly related to druids who don't know their class... Guess when I thought I saw it in a post, it all came out at ya..

GaliemVaelant,

I think the "kiting is cheating" thing was just hypothetical. No one (and I believe I can say, <strong>no one</strong>) would claim that you are cheating if you snare a mob and blast it.

The point being made was that there is no hard and fast definition of cheating, since under certain definitions (i.e. cheat = something not intended) kiting could be considered cheating. Verant designers have stated that they did not anticipate kiting, yet it is allowed.

It doesn't imply that people don't understand their class, it implies that they understand their class AND it's subtleties.

Heya:

"Kiting is cheating" _wasn't_ hypothetical, way back when. I remember lots of folks claiming it was exploiting. And then lots of druids (my third character, Brillig, that made it past 20th lvl, to 50th actually was a druid) saying, "But kiting is risky! It's dangerous!" in the _exact_ same tone of voice (I imagine) that 'Chanters and others were saying a month ago, "But charming is risky! It's dangerous!". Hehe. Uh oh. Run away!

Take care,
Dreeble