MAYBE THEY’RE NOT TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF, BUT THEY’RE POKING THE LEAF WITH A STICK TO SEE IF IT MOVES [Author: wirehead]

A few people have written me now wondering if I’m ever going to point out that Verant actually seems to be trying to get their act together.

First off, during the unscheduled “some doofus in MAE East kicked the router” outage the other day, Verant used the time to apply the patch they had previously scheduled for the day afterwards, thus not forcing further downtime on the hordes of EverCrack addicts.

Now, judging from various sites, Verant is actually starting to notice that there’s, like, a whole community out there and stuff. Baelish of CastersRealm seems to have a direct hotline to Geoff “Archmage Complete With My Own Homosexual Staff” Zatkin, judging from all the traffic back and forth between the two. Brad “It’s My Fiery Avenger And I’ll Cry If I Want To” McQuaid continues to be a regular poster on alt.games.everquest. QA testers are posting questions on the boards (even the less savory ones)about long-known bugs, implying that they are actually working on fixing them. And formerly seldom used zones such as Kedge Keep and Infected Paw are being reworked as high-level monster jams to cut down traffic in Lower Guk and Sol B.

Of course, the fact that Asheron’s Call just came out is merely a coincidence.