December 21, 2001: As my good buddy just sent me in email the other day DUDE! Verant has finally implemented a way for melee characters to not have to beg or buy binds from magic users. I guess the competition from Dark Ages of Camelot must be getting to them. In my opinion this is the greatest thing that has ever happened in Everquest. Now I can actually attempt to be self-sufficient with my rogues and ranger and not have to worry about dying 10 zones from where I'm bound. Players have been clamoring for this since the game was released 2 years 8 months ago. I know I've been wanting it for that long.

I even have toyed with buying a second account and leveling up a magic user to 12th level just so I could have someone to bind me. I was seriously thinking about this after spending 3 hours looking for a bind up on Luclin. There were plenty of level 50+ magic users about but I couldn't get any of them to bind me. When you are level 25 with 30pp to your name, money doesn't talk very loud. I was royally pissed that night since I couldn't even get a response to my requests. If it hadn't been for my friend logging on and binding me I probably wouldn't have logged in for a few weeks after that.

I have never understood the whole thing of giving magic users all of the goodies like teleports, binding anywhere, and soloing ability while meleers get stuck with inferior to nearly useless skills like poison, instill doubt, pick lock, detect traps, and disarm traps. Oh wait, those are all nearly useless rogue skills. Well, I guess we are at least a little more interesting than warriors who pretty much don't get any skills to play with. It seems like Verant just wants to punish pure meleers by making them totally dependant on magic users or twinking in order to be successful.

Oops, got side-tracked there on my favorite rant. This post was actually supposed to be about how much better Verant has been the last few months in listening to what the players want. It it patently obvious that this is a direct result of Mythic Entertainment's amazing reputation for paying attention to its customers. However, I am not going to complain about that because it seems to be making Everquest more enjoyable while Dark Ages of Camelot remains a totally enjoyable game too. My main complaint is not having the time to really play one of them, let alone both.