I was straightening out my home office this week and I unearthed a pile of my old MMOG notebooks. What’s that? You don’t know what a MMOG notebook is?
OMG, noob.
There’s a lot of information in online gaming that I’ve had to sift through and, in the old days, we didn’t have your fancy shmancy quest logs and your hoity toity User Interface Quest Cheat Sheets and all that nonsense. We played MMOGs like manly men and took notes.
Yes, you can feel free to make fun of me at this point. My god, I needed therapy and no one noticed this?!?!?!
Anyways, towards the end of my EQ career, I had spent some time organizing my End Game Information System into two huge binders: one for all the zone maps with little penciled notations of zone borders, camps (no one noticed that cry for help?!?!) and the other for all my quest printouts with detailed locs, spawns, timers, assbags that might be camping the same, etc.
And, there’s a lot of good comedy material in those two binders, but the best stuff is in the little spiral notebooks from the first few months of EverQuest.
The Very First EQ Spiral Notebook contains such tidbits like this:
Kelethin merchant pricing (I guess my first character must have been a woodelf; ffs, I don’t even remember that character.)
Torch — 1 silver 3 copper (ooooo, expensive!)
Water — 1 s 3 c (hey, I figured out a shorthand method to record prices … and what the hell was I doing buying water when I could forage it?)
Fishing pole — 2 g 5 s 4 c (I recorded the weight as 1.0 also. WHY??? WHY???)
I also recorded the selling prices of mob loot. The biggest seller was the ROYAL JELLY off the wasps … 3 s 9 c. Hot damn, a noob could get rich off that.
I drew my own sketches of some noob zones and I’m not sure why. The sketch of Crushbone has a big coffee stain on it — that must have been an early morning jaunt into CB.
WTF, I recorded my bank balances each day. (No one saw THAT as a cry for help either?!?!) It looks like I kept the log for almost 3 weeks and I never got up to one platinum. God, I sucked.
The next few pages have notes about good hunting zones at the various levels. Other than the obvious comedic value of THAT, the funniest part is “Level 35 – Sol B! Sol B! Sol B!” I guess someone gave me that advice and emphasized its importance by repeating it many times, cuz I was that noob. And he was right … Sol B at level 35 was key and I was that noob.
At this point, I believe I remade the woodelf who I can’t even remember, because I started a new bank and merchant pricing log and different hunting zone recommendations.
OMG, I sketched a map of East Commonlands; I should be shot.
There’s a few pages of Asheron’s Call notes. I must have tired of the grind as a level 10 EQ character. I returned to my Dark Mistress soon, however, as there are only 5 pages of AC notes.
The second EQ spiral notebook has some notes on my first raiding guild and our planned raids, which look like this: Fear (Plane of Fear), Fear, Fear, Hate (Plane of Hate), Fear, Fear, Fear, Nag (Lord Nagafen, one of the dragons in EQ-Original), Hate, Fear, Fear. What in the hell? How did our druids talk us into doing Fear so often?
The third EQ spiral begins with the release of the first EQ expansion, The Ruins of Kunark. Good lord, I have a written draft of my guild’s refusal to follow any player-mandated scheduling system. Wow, I was a real ass too. Not a surprise, but what is shocking is that my guild put me in charge of public relations. I probably missed a guild meeting and there were no volunteers for the position, but really, they could not have made a worse choice.
I probably should pitch all this paper into the trash, but there’s something very special about a list of kill-stealing assholes players that regularly camped the jboots camp … MORE THAN FIVE YEARS AGO.
You heard me. I could name names!