SPECIAL BENEFITS [Author: Buur]

It appears that a small group of players on Terris-Thule got some pretty special treatment from someone at Verant. Special treatment in the form of high level VP and Plane of Air items. You can read the whole thread right here.

All of the problems center around the player of the characters Hathorne (L60 shaman), Langley (L60 magician), and Hath (L60 warrior), all reportedly leveled to 60 in the same manner it is done on the Test Server. This player, who has been described as a “non-paying account”, seems to have some special tie with Verant Interactive, perhaps an employee or relative of an employee (he has told his guildmates he is the son of a Verant employee). The problem this player brings to the game environment has been to in some manner, repeatedly, *create* high-level items and introduce them into the game environment. On our server, Venril Sathir has been killed many times. However, we are a social community, and everytime it dies, everyone can easily find out who killed it, what it had, and who got the drops. At the time Hathorne began wearing his pair of JB Greaves, they had only dropped 3 times on the server, and all 3 shamans with them were public knowledge. Now, at this time, Hathorne had also never attended a VS raid with anyone that was successful, and neither has his guild. These greaves did not come from Venril, so where did they come from? Over the winter holdiay, Hathorne mircaulously began wearing a Jaundiced Bone Breastplate, again without ever attending a Trakanon raid. All shaman BPs dropped by Trakanon are well known, and none of them was ever traded or received by Hathorne. In the same manner, his warrior now has a cobalt breastplate, and this weekend, Hath began wielding the warrior epic weapon, even though his guild cannot get to Spiroc Island in PoA, he hasn’t been there with any guild on TT that can, and he’s never killed the Chardok Queen.

The item creation issue has been strongly contested by many players in the higher level community. To see this player and his group of friends run around in high-level, often VP or PoA equipment, is absurd, and cheapens what others work for and earn with skill and teamwork. The issues of why this is a severe game-inbalance should be obvious. For example, in an experience group with Hathorne, he told the group that a cleric was not needed. While a shaman can heal certain groups without a cleric, no other shaman possesses a 1-Handed Blunt Weapon with infinite charges of instant-cast Complete Heal, as Hathorne did that night. I have never even seen such an item located in EverQuest, and yet this and other items regularly appear in this player’s arsenal.

Despite many players asking for some sort of explanation, Verant has remained silent on the issue thus far. Surprise, surprise. If this is true then it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that some players got special benefits for knowing people at Verant. The problem is that players who work hard, very hard, for their loot don’t really appreciate it when they see others running around with high level items that they didn’t have to work for. When you make it so exceptionally hard to get these items and then just start handing them out to friends, someone is going to notice.

Hopefully we see some sort of statement from Verant about all this soon.