THE LATEST DUPE BUG - GET GMS TO DO IT FOR YOU! [Author: wirehead]

At Lum th’Mad, we’re equal opportunity GM-bashers, and lately we’ve been getting wind of a whole lotta EQ GM hate.

One original “intent” of Everquest was to enforce that everyone in EQ had a proper fantasy-sounding name. As anyone who actually plays EQ can tell you, this has kind of fallen by the wayside, with gnome wizards named “Poopie” (I actually saw this the other day personally) and approximately 9,000,000 variations of the name “Raistlin”. (And, as someone observed on our message base, all those Raistlins always seem to roleplay the insanely powerful wizard without roleplaying the insanely crippling asthma.)

However, as with any loosely defined and widely broken rule in ORPGs (like, say, oh, I don’t know, macroing?) the true problems occur when it is enforced, not when it isn’t. Take this tale from alt.games.everquest:

There is a paladin on the Rathe who chose ‘Angelfire’ for his last name. A beautiful and fitting name for a paladin if you ask me. Ol’ Zat [Zatozia, lead GM on the Rathe server] decided that ‘Angelfire’ was a title and changed it to ‘Anglefire,’ a pointless, silly-sounding name.

And going from making your character look like an idiot who can’t spell to truly fucking with your online experience, we have this, again from alt.games.everquest:

I was grouped w/ a 18 lvl caster named Lanceolott. He died fighting orcs in HHP [Highhold Pass] and the rest of the group had to zone. When he respawned , he found a very rude surprise — A GM HAD CHANGED HIS NAME! Because of the name change he could neither loot his corpse or access the bank. He repeatedly petitioned and was not answered. This has got to be a very black eye for Verant and Gms.

The GMs are inconsistant, as I petitioned on his behalf the GM stated his name was not conforming, but he didnt change mine, which was almost as bad.

And just in case changing your name while you’re trying to get to your corpse isn’t bad enough, we have this — a tale of GMs actually helping people on the PvP server dupe items. Word on this comes from J the Yellow, who noticed the following thread on the Shadowbane dev board:

Our guild had one of the worst nights in PvP two evenings ago. It seems EverQuest is a “You’re guiltly until proven innocent” world. One of our members logged the conversation with the GMs (Do`vassir and Yeln). Just a message to WP – this is how NOT to run a PvP game. =) (Though I’m sure you already have a good idea of what to do and not do).

This is the log from one of our guildmembers.

And, in response to a question about that note —

Jackass Andy wrote:
> I thought you’re able to loot one item, and then the
> corpse becomes unlootable…did that change? It has
> been a while.
> Jackass Andy

Yes that’s correct. The problem lay in the fact that the people who were looted /consent guildmate (which allows whoever they consented to loot their entire corpse), and once the guildmate has all their items, they scream that the killer/looter used an exploit/bug to loot their entire corpse. Thus, those that they are at war with get in trouble/banned, and they get a full duplicate (or better then they had before) set of equipment back. This is one of the reasons we started killing them in the first place – because they were lying to GMs to get equipment on the server that they could not get on their own.

Now, as a caveat, the person posting this is a member of SiN on Rallos Zek, and those of you on GL with a memory know that SiN were not exactly innocent lambs when it came to being exploiting kewldewds their own bad selves. Sedrik, the poster, had this to say when that was pointed out to him:

Kren wrote:
> That hasn’t changed, but sin has been accused of
> utilizing some exploit or cheat allowing them to
> loot all items or items in bags.
>
> If there was actuall proof to this however, I’m sure
> they’de have been booted long ago.

This isn’t an EQ whine board however – I simply want WP to know that in a PvP world, (esp one that is focused on PvP), there are many people that will try to get GMs to intervene when they can’t fight their own wars….. and that’s something I don’t want to see in Shadowbane.

So what’s it all mean? That you don’t need to use sex as a weapon to get what you want in ORPGs — sometimes just who you know is enough.