Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ah, I’m late on this. I meant to post it a couple of weeks back, but got distracted by laserbeams firing from the heavens. But it’s still relevant, so it’s getting a quick nod here, in time for the weekend. After all – you weren’t planning on going outside or something crazy? In short: Sony announced that anyone with an inactive account for either Everquest or Everquest 2 could play until July 31st absolutely free. Details of it here. I haven’t played either since their respective early days. Does anyone think it’s worth returning?

The MMO that spawned so many imitators has now been running for nine years. To celebrate, the EQ dev blog have produced a gigantic super-detailed timeline, recording all the major events of the game over that not-quite-decade. You can see the entire graphic here. Massively.com conducted a big old interview with EQ’s player-turned-lead designer, Travis McGeathy, to celebrate the anniversary.

Pre-empting my Rainz was a Patsy JFK/Lord British feature idea, The Escapist has an interview with Fansy the Famous Level 5 Bard, the infamous old-skool Everquest Griefer.

For those not aware of Fansy’s infamy… well, get to the page, already. In short, on the original hardcore PvP Everquest server – i.e. anything goes – he found a loophole which he abused in such a dramatic way to make the developers pretty much change the whole world just because of him. Anyone beneath level 5 was invulnerable in PvP. So he headed out into the wilderness, and dragged back enormous chains of monsters to pound on everyone else, while maintaining a faux-naif personality in all OOC chat. Which he then shared with us in the aforementioned website. In any other server, he’d be a monster. In a place devoted to beating on people… well, he’s a little like the guy who would walk into Arkham Asylum in Gotham City with a portable Nuke strapped to his chest (While laughing). Yes, crazy. But – at a distance – a kind of admirable crazy. JohnH in the Escapist Comments thread sums Fansy’s achievements succinctly: “In a world made for griefers, Fansy succeeded in becoming the Grief King, and doing it in a way that brought to them a bit of that all-too-scarce commodity, karma. The real stuff, not governed by any game-tracked variable.” Anyway – read the interview.