Update 2001-05-03: Yesterday I went and blew fifty bucks getting the two Everquest expansion packs and restarted my account. Well, my characters are still there. My naked, broke, starving, thirsty level 19 dark elf rogue is still in Greater Faydark. My decently equipped level 18 wood elf ranger was still in Erudin. My test server newbie character is still screwed up from a server hiccup 18 months ago. I can't remember what server some of my other level 5-12 characters are on so I don't know how they are doing.

Looks like they've finally improved the interface a bit. Now you've got 6 pages of 10 hotkeys. Since I don't hotkey social stuff (I type around 80 wpm due to being a software engineer.) I don't know wth I'm ever going to do with 60 hotkeys. The ability to see your Persona without hitting F10 for the fugly interface is welcome also. However, the popup window frequently seems to cover up what I'm looking at in the center of the screen. Now that trade skills seem to actually work I'm really looking forward to trying out baking this evening. My rogue has been a master potter since it was first decided that vials would store poison. My ranger is also a master fletcher who has managed to fail making the Trueshot bow at least 3 times. Hopefully, I can figure out how to actually be profitable with the trade skills now. Then maybe I'll be able to re-equip my rogue.

The rogue ended up naked since the ranger lost all of her gear over in Erudin. When I logged back in 6 days later to retrieve it, it was gone. (This was a bug since the gear should have lasted 7 days.) Since the rogue was more or less worthless as a solo character at that point I gave her armor and weapons to the ranger. Within a week or two I decided that I had just had enough of the game. Poison was still hosed. Rogues were very hated by everyone due to their basic worthlessness and frequently accused of pickpocketing everything. People were way more rude than when I started. My guild had merged with another not-so-fun guild. Verant's attitude left more than a little something to be desired. Bugs I'd /bugged, emailed, and posted weren't getting fixed. Anyway, I was sick of it. Now that over a year has passed I figured it must be time to give it a try again.