Whoop Dee Doo

Second post for the day. Well if it wasn't already past 12 midnight. Oh well, but it's a nice thing to do anyways. Having about 2 posts a day on an average schooling day would be something I could do. At least when school starts in about 2 weeks. You guys ever wondered how do some people pick up typing? I picked up typing by playing countless hours of MMORPGs such as Ultima Online and Everquest. Those two were the very games that trained me to type fast enough so I can type and play at the same time. Without looking at the keyboard, ever.

You simply do not have the time to look at the keyboard while the monsters are putting the beat down on your party members. You just simply have to type and the concentrate on the action on the screen while making split second decisions that could wipe the group. Of course while I was usually the main Tank of the group, I had the arduous task of maintaining aggro. People of course say that maintaining aggro is simple. Of course maintaining aggro for ONE monster per fight is simple. But as you know EQ, the later fights required that you maintain aggro on multiple monsters while the group tries to do some crowd control such as disabling them or killing them out right.

While I was not one of the best equipped warriors in the game. My skill in holding aggro was second to none. The biggest thing was, that I was always a leader in EQ. I was a warrior and thus a tank. I had no way to save myself if the situations get ugly when the group gets more monsters per pull than they can handle. Thus I had to do the planning on the pulls and more often than not, I save the group lots of grief in down time and experience loss.

I for one, KNOW the difference between a carefully planned group pulling strategy AND a poorly planned group strategy. This is especially true in the tougher zones where your character dies faster than a blink of an eye. I know this sounds crazy but before EQ became newbiefied, it was a place of unrelenting nightmares. A single monster is usually cake. That's IF you can get just a single monster everytime. But the cold hard fact was, you tend to get at least 2-6 monsters per pull especially in the zones where the rewards are high. Thus as a group leader, I had to plan to hunt in a spot where the rewards were relatively balanced and the pulls were not unmanagable for a group that I was forming.

The biggest trick in aggro maintainance is, experience. Nothing and I mean NOTHING beats getting killed multiple times over and over again in a multitude of different ugly situations. My warrior in EQ has died more times than I can count. In the first 6 weeks probably I've gotten kill at least 200 times. After that, you learn from experience. You need to make mistakes. And usually the more mistakes you make, the faster you learn. To learn the aggro style of the new zones I ventured into, I actually strip my character naked and run there solo first. Then I check how the monsters come and beat the pulp out of me.

Sure I've lost so much exp that I drop a level sometimes. I make up for it by picking up the techniques required to successfully establish a presence in the area. By knowing how the monsters move and understanding how many monsters exactly will come everytime you grab one. Is the key to having a successful experience in the area. Over the course of 3 years in EQ, my character has probably died more than 10000 times. Most likely it should be in the 30 thousand range. But among my peers back then, I was also the one leveling up the the fastest and also the one that has picked up the hunting styles of the new zones faster than anyone around me.

It also matters that my american peers were clocking 40 hour weeks on EQ while I had only 12-14 hours a week. When I out level and out maneuver them in every zone I visit, I earned alot of respect in the guilds I've joined. My warrior would probably be known by his namesake and incidentally I named him "Reklous". Which was rather fitting because he learnt things the "hard" way. And probably because I learnt through that method, I picked things up so much quicker than my peers who were afraid of "failing". When you understand the method of learning, only 12 hours a week can bring you 80 hours worth of experience.

And when that 12 hours eventually becomes 20 hours, I leveled up so fast that it shocks even me. 5 levels a day at level 60-65 is in fact unheard of back when the level cap was first released. But I did it anyways with 3 hours of dying non-stop and another 9 hours of non-stop grinding. It's quite a feat to level up faster than others YET your playing far less hours than the others were. For those times, I was always switching around the different groups when they were looking for me and forming groups to hunt when there weren't any available.

In EQ, I believe in pro-activity. I actively seek out the challenges that laid out in the game. Constantly striving to be stronger and better. But of course when I found out at the end of the game that it will never end, it kind of reminded me of Real Life and I got too turned off to continue playing it. In EQ, I did not have a routine in grinding. I went anywhere and EVERYWHERE to learn and conquer. When I left the game, the only places I have not been too, were the ultra time intensive zones such as the Planes of Time where you had to spend alot of time gathering the pieces for the key to enter the zone. And each piece of the key would require hundreds of players to gather and accomplish the goal required.

One thing I couldn't do in EQ was join the uber raiding guilds. Sure I had friends in those guilds who used to level up with me. But as they constantly urged me to join them, I simply couldn't due to the time limitations I had. I have my own life here in Singapore and the time of their raids were simply too impossible for me to partake. The raids are not short and sweet things you often encounter as a group in EQ. An hour or two won't cut it. A raid lasts a bare minimum of 6 hours and can stretch to a mind blowing 2 weeks for the Plane of Sky. That includes gathering time, grouping distribution, buffing time, fighting time, looting distribution, honor listings and the list goes on. The honor listings were converted to a new medium as time went on. It turned into the Dragon Kill Point system or the DKP. It's widely used in most MMOrpgs with raiding systems nowadays.

I was one of the people involved in the creation of it's concept. We all felt that the loot was so hard earned of people's time and effort, that we should have a point system for those people who were constantly par-taking in the raids but had nothing to show for it. While people in the guilds resisted this change for the longest time. Everybody finally relented because they had an "unlucky" draw once too many times. Thus the DKP was born. Why Dragon you ask? Because the first raids in EQ involved killing nasty Nagafen and Vox. They were the nasty dragons that had the most uber loot in the game at the very beginning.

No one guild can be responsible for the DKP. I was in several of the raiding guilds and had absolutely nothing to show for it for 1 1/2 years so I actively suggested this medium to the various guild leaders. Eventually, the raiding guilds such as Afterlife and the eventual split off into Drinal, Cats in Hats was to be the premier raiding guild for the split server. I almost joined Afterlife before I split into Drinal and I knew the founding guild leader of Cats in Hats because we used to level up alot together. Both guilds took up the DKP system eventually and each guild had it's own version of DKP. Things such as raid time, character used and even dps were sometimes calculated to make sure that people got their fair share of credit and claim to the loot that lies at the end of the raids.

The moral of the story? I learnt so much from my time in Everquest and I am just beginning to find out that everything I've experienced and learnt in that video game, is coming to life in Reality. All the things that applied in the game in terms of human to human interaction and mechanics are actually reflecting itself in the interactions of the people around me. Now when I see an event happening, I can actually tell how people will start to react. It's because I've seen such unpredictability of situations and how people reacted to them in real time and pressure. So in project groups, real working environments where stress starts to mount, I see people reacting the same way they do in the game. Blaming the people around them, freezing up in fear, totally losing morale, standing up to the challenge, rallying those around them and so on and so forth.

Things that happened in the game are coming true right as I am living my life. Situations where I had to work in a big group such as my orientation leadership camp and my part in Voice Out 1 and 2 actually were like playbacks of raids I had in Everquest. It had too much similarity to the game to say that Everquest was just a game. It was a literal extension of how human group mechanics worked. It was better than doing actual research on people who are forced to work together. It was the experience of doing it yourself.

Things that the game had conditioned me to be attuned to are actually showing up more and more often in real life. Perhaps in life that is how I've been truly learning. Making mistake after mistake. If I've only learnt one thing from EQ, is that you should never fear to make a mistake but you should absolutely fear not learning from one. Do NOT fear failure, it is but the mother of success. If you never made a single mistake in your life, your whole life is a mistake. So instead of trying to succeed in life without first learning what is right and wrong, let's all sit down and reconsider what we truly understand about ourselves. Are we stupid? We're only stupid if we are scared to find out what is right or wrong. Make the call, take the step. If you turn out to be wrong, just admit it and learn from it. That is what life is, although I played a game that taught me all that. Alauz Out!

Idiots of today, Geniuses of tomorrow