Hey keep your numbers out of my game.

Saturday night I finally grew tried of my Vista machine not playing nice with 8800gts drivers and Vanguard. I am still staying through the server merge. Sunday I woke up and I guess I rolled out on the weird side of the bed and I reinstalled EQ2.

Now I haven’t logged in, in months. So getting to grips with the UI again and the controls only took a few minutes after I had installed Profit UI again. Once I was all setup I took off to Lavastorm for a few quests. Being 48 I am a little high for them but damn it was fun. Stepping back into my old Warden shoes. I have started towards the melee spec warden. I did look at betraying to fury for the higher dps but i have no urge to play the root nuke role I want to get in there and bash some skulls with some nature based goodness. Since the appearance of EOF (Echos of Faydwer) expansion with the addition of Class based AA’s the game has really turned around and has become the adventure it always should have been. Having more control over what kinda character you become is always nice.

Here is what I don’t like though and ties into the title for my post. On every single forum thanks to raiders who run parses you have to deal with the perfect build thread. This to me was one of the great things that Square did with Final Fantasy 11. They did not allow outside programs to be run on the game itself. Players had to spend MONTHS to find that perfect build*. The two classes that would make sweet sweet dps or utility love.*(To this day if you look at forums for certain classes; Paladin comes to mind they are still having major discussions about what works as a second class)

I wish every MMO game company would take that hard stance with there games. Knowing almost instantly after a raid is run what worked and what didn’t is not fun. Having irrefutable data evidence to back every ounce of spells and combat is boring. It is work. Let’s take the analytical nature out of the game and make it fun again. You want to push numbers on your off time do a Sudoku puzzle.

The worst part about it is, I read these threads and go “Psshhh boring.” then I end up going back for more info as I creep higher and higher cause I don’t want to suck. Ok, ok I am being selfish. Admit it can you think of one time where you didn’t go “Hmm should I put 4 points into agi. Nope Mr. Raidparser says I should put 4 into strength. So I can kick ass in Labs.” It doesn’t matter we are built with the need to be uber whether it is Eq2, WoW or COH.

Who knows in the end I could just be speaking to a small audience and I am sure if parsers were banned from EQ2 or WoW we would have a riot. Would be like taking away heals from a druid.

I can see one area where this parsing data could become helpful and that is on test servers to let devs have a better idea of how they are messing up the game balance.

When I first logged on this weekend to play the first thing I did was run to the forums to see if my monk was any good or not. I was greeted with constant negativity about how monks were now gimped mostly due to raid testing and bloody parsing data. So I logged onto my warden right away. Forgot about the data and just played and enjoyed myself.

After this weekend the only thing I really miss from Vanguard is the walking while casting. IF they added that to EQ2 (Which I can see them doing) then we would be looking at my close to perfect game.

I want to thank my old guild The Blackhawks on the AB server for welcoming me back. You all rock.

So if you see a little Halfling druid on Antonia Bayle named Vivie please say hello.

Hailin signing out, peace and game hard.