:)

[Lohagen Elamadri]

Hey guys,

just thought i'd say hi :)

Hope everyone is well

Loh

[Zaxboan]

Heya Loh, not much traffic thru here anymore. It's kinda like snail mail now. Send a message, wait a few weeks for someone to see it, then maybe get a reply. Very good to hear from you again.

I like the fact that Ching has kept this up so long, very kind of him.

For those that knew, my brother (the original Colmir, and Gardann) has been in Iraq the last year or so, and has just returned from his tour. Chances are good he's back online on whatever server Saryrn morfed into.

Happy Holidays to everyone, all the best!

Zax

[Leiyah]

/wink Loh!

That's awesome to hear Zax about Col returning home safe.  It's great to see you two!

[chingerz]

I like the fact that Ching has kept this up so long, very kind of him.

I can keep this site running indefinitely.  I've thought about sending an email to everyone with a pointer back here, but i'm not sure if that's rude or not.  I suspect there are people who lost track when the eqkeepers.net domain was let go.

We may all be in different games by now, but this site will always be a common ground where we can check in, say hello, and reminisce about entire saturdays spent raiding the plane of hate.

[chingerz]

in the admin interface, looking at the login names sorted by last activity going back nearly 5 years is a wacky trip in a time machine.

[Zaxboan]

I like the Holiday look.

I was just in Best Buy grabbing my bi-annual upgrade to Quicken and this years Turbo-Tax, and I strolled through the games section purely by habit. I gave up on WoW (great game, too many fuggin kids though) and I never bothered with EQ 2, Guild Wars or NWN. I did see the advance copies of Vanguard though, and it looked interesting.

Ching, if anyone could possibly know the word on the street about this game (from Beta players) it would be you. Is this going to be worth buying?

I hope everyone had a great Holiday season.

Zax

[chingerz]

vanguard needs a sturdy computer. that's about all i know so far from first hand experience. they've definitely made a game that will look good in a few years, once people have hardware that can display it at the highest settings.  this is different from eq, which looked poor when compared to other games at release, and for the years after. can you believe they still haven't addressed the horrible luclin models?

everything else in vanguard is just going to be brad compromising on his crazy ideals. just browsing on forums shows that he's caved in on some of his "vision" ideas.  these things just aren't fun, so it's glad that they go away.

i think beta is about to go fully open, so everyone will be able to play it in the next few weeks.  like all games, some of it will be garbage, some will be fun, but if you have some friends along the way, the game will be tolerable.

playing warcraft certainly didn't foster much community spirit in me. the game was solo for the most part, and people only grouped to finish off the elite dungeon parts of their solo quest arcs.

i'm rambling, but i'll start a vanguard thread here once i get outta the newbie area and get an understanding of what's going on.

[Zaxboan]

After my last post, I went and did some digging myself through the forums. It seems to be exactly as you say. I'm looking at $300 of upgrades, so I can pay x-amount/month. If I knew ahead of time that there would be the same or better community as EQ1 I'd really have to think about it.

I really enjoyed WoW, mainly as a solo break away from EQ (not that I didn't do my share of soloing there as well). But the overwhelming majority of immature players, whether just plain kids, or adults reliving their childhood, drove me away. Wow is fun from the point of view, that it's not as much as a challenge as EQ was. Kinda like the easy reading you take to the beach or pool. It was fun, but it didn't last a year.

There are a lot of aspects of EQ1 that I miss, and it would be nice if Vanguard could replace that.

FWIW the Open Beta did start, and most folks can get their prepaid copy at Best Buy or EB games. After reading the forums, I'm going to wait at least a week, maybe 2 to see how aggressively they attack the bugs. If SoE is running it, then I'd rather wait on the sideline to see if they fall on their face. If Sigil is truly calling the shots, maybe it will work out.

I'd love to see ya in game Ching (and any of Keepers) if it does work out.

[Airelyn]

Holy crap the board is still alive! Awesome!  Glad to hear Colmir is back from the war and is ok.

Ok I gave up on games for a while, went to EQ2 with some other Keepers briefly but my computer hated it.  Couple months later got upgrades and dove back in to EQ2 levelled up to around 50 on one of my chars, was an officer in the guild I joined.  Got busy with family and work like usual so I quit yet again, then recently I decided to finally try WoW... pretty cool, nice for soloing (you are right though.. lots of kids) all the games are really lacking the umph we used to have in the old days... I don't know maybe we are just getting old :)

Miss you all, glad to hear you doing well.  Thanks Ching for keeping this site alive, that is awesome.

Happy Holidays everyone from your old Queen Nerd.

[Zaxboan]

Nice to hear from you Aire. Even better to hear things are going well. Did you try PvP in WoW? I took the plunge and went to a PvP server when I started WoW, and surprisingly loved it. Aside from the battlefields, always having to watch for the enemy, or setting up ambushes for them was a new source of giggles on my end.

Well with any luck, we'll find a game we can enjoy as much as early EQ.

Zax

[Airelyn]

You know I tried a PVP character on EQ2 and actually found it very exciting at times.  On WoW I haven't gone that route yet... we'll see :)

[Zaxboan]

Ok, I'm slow. The board went plain graphics again, and no promo trailer. Actually it's been like that the last few times I checked by, and I just now figured it out.

So now Vanguard has been out a few days. I read quite a bit on some of the various forums, but I haven't read any of them since launch. How did it go?

I upgraded my video card and RAM, so in theory, I should be able to run it now, just waiting to see if I should bother.

[chingerz]

i bought the wow expansion and decided to skip vanguard.

[Zaxboan]

Wow, yeah I know, bad pun, but even still.

I respect your opinion quite a bit Ching, and that's a pretty damning indictment of Vanguard. I've dug around some more on the Ten Ton Hammer website, and it seemed like they had made significant progress in making Vanguard playable. That and you get non stop bashing of WoW there as well (on the Vanguard forums). I really enjoyed playing WoW, I just got to the point that I couldn't stand the dominance of a bunch of prepubescent teens.

Well, I'm going to keep an eye on Vanguard, although it will be an even more cynical eye than usual.

Let us ( all 4 of us) know how the WoW expansion goes.

Zax

[chingerz]

started a staggering rant here.