[Bubbles]

As one of the few dinosaurs still around who's been with the server since beta.. I've been in the middle of IB/Trans... Fishbait vs. the world.. DA/IB.. Fusion/IB, Ascension/IB DAVD/IB, DAVD/TransatDarktheon, TRVD/The.Masses.Organized, and every flippin' butting-heads raiding situation since the dawn of p99. I've pretty much seen all the ebbs and flows.

I really applaud the fact that nilbog and rogean are not only still voluntarily running the server, but caring enough to tweak and revisit the end game raiding climate on this server. Seriously, kudos. It's a thankless task.

Only have a couple real thoughts here.

1. ) for the first time ever i randomly muttered 'Loly Taa' out loud, said 'oh!', and laughed. Jesus i'm two years behind on that joke.

2. ) I'm not surprised at all i agree with most anything Stealin says.. I am surprised that in the last week i'm starting to agree with most of what Orruar says. Consider me knocked over with a feather.

3. ) Alarti would come off as 80% less pompus and smug if he just changed his avatar.

4. ) If people employed the same skills that got them thru pre-school recess at the sand box, they could totally make VP a civil place. Seriously, the GMs have literally said 'its all up to you guys, go nuts'.. take it as an invitation to follow the golden rule and SHARE one of the coolest zones in classic EQ.. you know.. SHARE it on a server that someone was kind enough to SHARE with you.. for free. /shrug. Up to ya'll..

And don't give me that 'well we'd be willing but THEY..." bs.. No one ever reaches the cookie jar without being the bigger man and taking that step to trust in someone else and have faith there's a human being who has the same love of EQ as you do.. Hell to digress even further, whats the real point of guild tags in the first place? We may be the last 500ish people left standing that love this niche game that died out years ago. Whats the real point in dividing into warring factions and turning paradise hotel into lord of the flies? We can't all be that anti-social, can we? I wish a lot of you were here from the start, when everyone was racing for cracked staffs and backpacks and teaming up to make jewelry and smithed armor and crack into najena and cazic thule and guk and the like. Guilds kinda sprung up along the way, but most of the friendships crossed rival colors anyways. Hell so much or IB1.0 was old Transcendence I never understood how they never fully merged and ended up deciding to hate each other, like adam and eve in the garden, dooming us to the hell we are currently in as a server.

5. ) Finally... something i've never been good at doing on these boards (to my own chagrin) : Thank you Nilbog and Rogean for devoting extraordinary time and resources to a niche crowd in an ancient game and being the first in emu to really break through and bring us back in a time capsule to where we were a dozen years ago. We'll never be as naive and perky and overwhelmed at awed by Classic-Era EQ, but you managed to immerse us into an amazingly realistic emulated copy of at least the background setting of our youth. The biggest problem, of course, is we've changed as people and squander much of this gift bestowed on us with petty grievances and obssessions that will forever taint any chance we have of exploring norrath anew. You've taken a shot-in-the dark project and improved it into an amazing experience to be treasured. Sadly, no amount of coding on your end will ever improve your playerbase and make us tolerable in even the smallest doses. For that i apologize. You are saints for putting up with us.

-Bubs.