Weekend Update, Dec. 12th, 2011 Egg Nog Season!Follow

Most of this weekend was various family things. Spent Saturday afternoon shopping with my father for a killer gift for my one brother (It was a music store we spent hours in). My brother is going to love it :)

EQ-wise my trader did lots of minor sales (I put a lot of junk lowbie gear on at 1-9plat and it moves). Logged in the necro long enough to kill 1.5 cycles of juggs in Seb (someone had part cleared them and left). Undead Bard was up so handy for selling loot and letting me stay camped there a bit longer. I find Seb is a long enough trip that I want to get max value out of it. For my level, it's a fun farm & minor AA xp dabbling zone.

I made two levels on the mage to hit 62 yesterday. Air pet with summoner's boon focus helped me solo trash by the hedge pretty efficiently in planes of nightmare. It was nice to get xp at a decent pace solo and give the healer merc a break.

Gratz to everyone who dinged levels. That's always fun. Except for the frustration, for me at least, in the 60's levels where I had to get parchments and runes from places I couldn't solo to hand in to an NPC in the library. A group of guildies took me out one day and helped me get some of these items, others gave some to me that they had and others I purchased in the Bazaar. The frustration set in with a handful of low 60's spells that the NPC hands out randomly. I got about 5 copies of a couple of spells and never did get some of the others. /rude NPC

Fri I spent quite a bit of time trying to correct the issue I'm having where I relabel a hot key and when I zone it reverts back to its original name. The resizing and placement of the keys stays how I change it, but the names won't stick. In an effort to troubleshoot this, a kind Shaman who *can* get the hot key relabeling to work properly gave a copy of his UI_character_FirionaVie.ini file to me. I revamped my UI file to get it to look as close to his as possible. Gah, didn't realize how long that file is. Saved my update...logged into EQ....didn't help.

Sat My game card had expired so wasn't in EQ. I can't remember Saturday that much. (No, I don't do drugs or drink. ) Must not have been anything overly constructive. It has been raining here the last few days. The overcast skies make for a great napping environment.

Sun Went to bed early Saturday night so was wide awake very early (for me) Sunday morning. Decided to head to Walmart to get the Station Pass Game Card with the 500 bonus SC that GreenShag mentioned in another thread, plus I had some other items I needed for my PC as well as new apartment.

My printer had been out of ink forever. The cartridges are ridiculously expensive so the last few times I've been having the black ink refilled at Walgreen's for $15.00. They really do a great job! However, it was now time for a fresh cartridge, especially since the one in the printer had been sitting there, probably drying up, for months. A single black cartridge for my Lexmark printer/copier/scanner - an older one - was $45.00!!!!!! A combo pack with the color cartridge was also $45.00. Weird. Decided to check out the new all-in-one printers and found an HP Deskjet for $49.00. Hmmmmmm...cartridges for an old printer $45.00 vs new printer that includes ink for $49.00. A no-brainer. Picked up another optical mouse as my current one is starting to flake out. Found some basic household items, headed to the checkout and *facepalm.* I saw the carousel with all the various gift cards and realized I had neglected the item I had primarily come to purchase in the first place. lol Since the EQ game pass wasn't with the other gift cards I headed back to the computer department. After going up and down a couple of aisles I asked one of the employees where the Everquest Game Passes were. She said they didn't carry Everquest game passes. Errrrrr.... She continued that they had Everquest passes for the Playstation, then waved her hand in some vague direction and said all the game passes they carried were "over there." I went in the general direction of "over there" and lo and behold, found the identical Station Pass I've been getting at Game Stop WITH the Walmart bonus 500 SC included! I took the pass over to the employee to let her know they did indeed have EQ/SoE Game Pass cards but she was too busy chatting with a co-worker and basically kept her back turned to me. I was happy to have the card, bad customer service notwithstanding.

That evening I returned to Norrath and took my 55 Pally back to Veksar to gain more AAs. Have been enjoying duoing the undead in Maiden's Eye, but when I went back there solo, a yellow con snuck up on me and even with my merc I had to use both Staunch Recovery (think that's the one) AND LoH...but I did kill it, with about 5% health remaining. I was casting heal on myself when a mob appeared out of nowhere and smacked me back to my spawn point. Oh well...AA exp. isn't lost and it saved having to use one of my gate pots.

So, back in Veksar - getting some decent AA exp and I see someone in general chat saying he had just returned to EQ and was looking for a friendly, non-heavy raiding guild. I watched the screen for awhile as crickets chirped. The guy said, "So no guilds that fit that profile?" which garnered a few less-than-helpful comments. Currently our guild is set up that any member can invite another, so I IM'd this person and got a response in a different language that looked like it said he couldn't understand me. I've had this issue with the tell window and, thanks to the great help here on the ZAM forums, knew exactly how to correct that. Except this guy was obviously new to the FV server and kept going on about having to increase his Elvish language skill, with me trying to tell him (now using the ;t workaround) that it wasn't an issue provided he had his chat window set to Elvish. I was trying to help him be able to set the tell window to Elvish also, but that began getting convoluted so I gave up on that. Chatted with him awhile, told him about our guild, said I could log on my main (wanted to leave my Pally parked where she was) and invite him to guild, gave the names of our guild leader and officers to him if he preferred to chat with them when they were on, told him he was welcome to add me to friends and IM anytime with any questions...then he said he'd like to join the guild.

Logged on my druid, met him in PoK. He is a level 85 DE chanter, so can't have been out of game too long, but said mercs were new to him and that he felt so lost with all the new changes. Brought him into guild then took him on a tour of the guild hall, including the guild bank as he needs some upgrades, showed him the areas in guild lobby where he can have his corpse rezzed if he wishes, and included our guild's housing village in case that might interest him. He seemed very happy and was immediately friendly and active in guild chat. When I logged in this morning I saw he was with a couple guildies out grouping. Honestly, I enjoy doing things like that almost more than actually playing.

Did a bit more AA grinding back on the Pally then finished a book I'd started awhile ago.

I started a new mage, she's um.. I think level 10. Somewhere around there. Finals are coming up next week, so in between reading for school.. I've been taking EQ breaks. I cannot wait until next Tuesday. As soon as I get home, it's a month long vacation for me. I'll probably be sleeping until 1PM and then slowly rolling out of bed to be lazy and play EQ. This semester was particularly hard for my mooshy brain. Hehe. Some well deserved sleep and game time would be nice.

I didn't connect the two factors (been gone a long time + level 85 toon) until I was talking to a friend the next day. Now I can't recall if the guy said exactly how long he'd been gone but it was apparently long enough that he didn't know what mercs were, or as you said perhaps a purchased toon. I'll have to check which expac introduced the mercs and which expac raised the level to at least 85.

I have no idea of the retail value of buying EQ characters, but I do see people regularly asking to purchase/sell toons quite regularly on the general chat channel. I thought it was against the ToS, but if it's discussed that openly, apparently not.

Where would I go to check about the name change, please?

The name change listing was discontinued years ago due to stalking.