Kricket, post your machine specs, including the video card, and I can give you some ideas on how to speed things up.
Well, between going on vacation for 6 days and camping the $^&@ing jboots for 2 days I’m only level 29 now. If don’t get the boots tonight I’m just going to give up and start exping again though.
Still no one else playing on Stromm?
Hee! My very first EQ character was a wood elf ranger, and I kept falling off of Kelethin.
I gave up and made a high elf paladin. Of course she didn’t have the strength to haul her armor around, but that’s another story.
All this talk of system specs reminds me of the PvP cartoon that basically talks about how hardcore gamers do extensive research and buy only the finest videocards, the most massive memory upgrades and the most expensive processors. And as soon as they install their favorite game, what’s the first thing they do? Set detail to low. Use the smallest resoultion. Turn off particle effects.
I did EQ for a long while. I was a latecomer (i think right after Velious came out) and gave up right before Planes of Power. My main was a bald wood elf druid. I played until the mid-forties. This is the point at which people only want a druid in their group if there are no avaialble clerics or shamans in the entire zone. Your biggest fans would be a desperate group of tanks who would always over pull.
Groups were harder and harder to come by and I got tired of spending month after month in the Dreadlands shouting LFG!! in the hope that I could spend several hours medding in between my mediocre heals.
I probably won’t do SW:G for the same reason: time. If I was a trust fund kid with a grotesque disfigurement that precluded me leaving my home, i’d be all over it. But I don’t have a trust fund. rimshot
Athena I will ask him tomorrow evening about specs. I will make him write them down so I don’t forget anything or botch it. Only if you promise not to laugh if I do botch it. 
All those acronyms!
LFG?
I do feel better knowing what SOW is but a few others pop up that throw me.
And you know lovelee, I even fell off the ship once? Hadn’t learned how to swim yet either. Not that I think it would have helped much way out there. Yet another reason to be happy to be under lvl 10.
I’ve heard it’s a pain trying to retrieve bodies from the ocean.
It is! Especially if you don’t as much ‘fall’ off the boat, as get pushed off by a burly dwarf and his trusty axe. sighs Those were the days…I was a new-to-the-game dark elf enchanter, excited about being able to use my enchanting skills for the first time to appear as a wood elf and determined to explore the world!
Silly NPC Dwarfs seeing through my enchantment.
My highest character was a level 32-33 (?) Wood Elf Druid, with the last name of ‘Fairheart’, as you can see, I loved the role playing aspect of it!
I hope EQ2 has more of the roleplaying and less of the power gaming, if so, I’m there. I admire people who can power game, but I could never find groups and I never seemed to have the time that other people had to level up.
For people trying to get over EQ, you might want to try Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2. It helped me. 
I agree. I’m only powergaming now because the game is 4 years old and I’ve already explored and RPed Norrath to death. Not to mention that Sony themselves have turned it into a game of numbers with custom UIs and everything having a percentage…etc.
Athena I was told it is an integrated video card, part of the mother board with 32 bytes of shared memory.
He says we do have the capability of adding another video card but lack the funds.
It’s a homemade computer. We have a friend that builds them and had one with a burnt mother board and we replaced that and started from there.
Onward and upward! Everytime I turn around he is buying more of this or that. Video cards weren’t a problem before cause we only played kids games or the SIMs.
Now I want more.
Any ideas on video cards? Something not too expensive but my game won’t look all boxy and lag?
I already have the game graphics as low as they will go.
GeForce 128MB. A steal at $73.
As for “look[ing] all boxy”, well, those are just EQ’s graphics. The best video card in the world won’t make it look any better, it’ll just make it perform better.
Yeah, the integrated video card is probably a problem, Kricket. They’re notoriously bad. Some are so bad that you can’t even upgrade them! I’d go with what Cisco said - that looks like a good one at a good price. Do you know how fast your computer is? That also might be an issue.
Other things you can try: if you’re playing with the new character animations, turn 'em off. They do look boxy when you don’t use the new ones, but it’ll run faster. Also make sure particle effects are off & the clip plane is low.
And actually, Cisco, video cards do make a difference on how the graphics look. I have my laptop set up next to me, and occasionally duo box with it. I have a lot of the graphics stuff turned down on it because it doesn’t have the greatest video card, and things do look quite a bit different on it compared to my other machine. It’s not just that the animations move slower or whatever - things are definitely sharper and less boxy on the nice computer.
- Better video card and CPU to be able to turn on more options. (Options like anti-aliasing (AA) will reduce jagged graphics whenever you have lines that aren’t going either directly up or directly horizontal.)
- More RAM for faster loading times. (128MB is considered minimum for most uses today, and >256MB if you have WinXP.)
- Better internet connection (e.g., ADSL or cable) to reduce link deaths.
So how IS EQ now, guys? I played it 2-3 years ago. Is it cool? What’s the word? I can get myself a copy of it if I want to, but I want to know what’s changed.
Pardon the EQ geekness, but here’s a list of new things I put together when the question was asked recently on my server message board:
I would check out Caster’s Realm, they keep an archive up all the patch messages so you could quickly browse through and read up on all the changes.
-
NPC Soul binders in all cities and some other zones to bind melee
-
Travel is wonderful, all cities are connected through the Plane of Knowledge.
-
No more hell levels - exp smoothed out all the way til 60
-
65 is max limit
-
AA points mean that most people will never be “done” with leveling, they definitely put the “ever” back into Everquest. At level 51, you can choose to send a percentage of your exp into “alt” exp (from 10 - 100%). Earn new skills, abilities and titles.
-
Flags - upper tier PoP zones require individuals to participate in flagging events (ie boss mob killing) or quests to enter zones
-
Monks were nerfed so their defense was less than a plate class (sorry if I didn’t explain it correctly, I just remember it was a big deal at the time)
-
Cultural smithing - players can now make very nice smithed armor
-
Stat/food drinks - really great, not too pricey player made food and drink which add to stats
-
The Bazaar - buying and selling is very easy. Set your prices for what you want to sell, go into trader mode and go to bed.
-
Vah Shir (cats) and frogloks are now player races
-
Beastlords are a new playable class
-
Tons of new zones which make leveling easy at the lower levels
-
armor dyes - hot pink troll love for everyone!
-
CT was revamped to be a high level dungeon
-
shaman/cleric now are able to use a stone to gate back to their home cities
-
Horses! Lizards!
-
Low level casters don’t have to look at the spell book to med anymore
-
If you die before level 10, you respawn with your gear
-
Gnome Shadow Knights and Paladins and Halfling Paladins and Rangers!
-
Very neat scripted quests, like the Ring War in Great Divide
-
An in game MP3 player
-
The ability to link item stats for other players
-
A permanant compass, depending on your skill (LOVE THIS)
-
Custom UIs
-
Cross server chatting!
-
EQ IM for chatting with people while not in game
I was wondering what that wobbly compass was for! I didn’t know it was a skill! How do I raise it?
It gets steadier the higher your sense heading. It’s steady as a rock at SH 200. I’m constantly lost with a poor sense of direction, so this addition has been one of my favorites.
If you go under the actions thingy there is a place that has the skills make a hot key for sense heading and click it constanly. Some people tag it to when they use the right arrow key. The maps if you have the Loy expansion are nice too. Level 59 is still sort of a hell level, but nothing like it was before. Clerics start getting reserection spells in their late teens and shaddowknights and necros get to summon corpses about the same time. They have made a conserted effort to make the game easier for the new and casual players. Druids have better heals in upper levels now, and could arguably be the best solo class.
An in-game MP3 player? It’s about frickin’ time some company got smart and did that.
All, I assume, because Brad McQuaid left. I haven’t heard the term “The Vision” since I’ve been back.
I played EQ from the start until about a month ago…constantly. I have a level 65 cleric, plus a couple other characters in their 50’s. With the lastest expansion I got bored fast and joined the biggest guild on my server. We soon were in all the planes, but it suddenly became boring to me, farming the same mobs over and over, night after night. It seemed like such a waste of time. I don’t know if I’ll go back. Now EQ2…maybe
Brad left? Where did he go?