A Bard's Tale

[Dostarr]

For those of you who don't already know, I am Rojas. I am known for my brothers and I's service (though I am the face) and snare pl'n. Anyway, on to the purpose of this post.

Bear with me, I swear there's a point to this.

I just want to talk for a short about bards and the overall p1999 community here in my experience as both a non-bard and a bard. First, I leveled up as a few classes but my first real "main" was a halfling Cleric level 51 that I traded for Rojas. When I was leveling up my cleric I was generally treated warmly; I always found groups, people typically were respectful but you know not everyone is a saint :P. This left me absolutely loving p1999, it was the Everquest community from the days of old (or young in my case as I was 11 at release) nonetheless it was everything I'd missed from EQ with a few more trolls and longer expansion estimations lol.

Once I received my bard, the first thing I noticed was people wanted free pl's, to leech xp while I leveled etc, and because it was new it was fun..it was great being able to finally return part of the kindness they'd shown me while I was leveling my cleric. We remained good friends however once I got busier on Rojas, and had to start turning them down I noticed that despite my efforts to stay in contact many...stopped contacting me and starting giving me the cold shoulder. Well, maybe they are busy right?

Then I started swarming more and getting better in various zones, learning mechanics and everywhere I went, I was treated like complete trash. I have easily spent 10+ hours talking to groups, soloers, quadders, duors, etc in various zones trying to coordinate so that we could best utilize the zone, and minimize zone disruption.

The point I'm getting to primarily is that, everyone treats bards like shit by default. The reason I am writing this post is even I noticed myself doing it earlier because I am sick and tired of being blamed for low hp kiters ripping mobs off everyone in the zone because some noob bard doesn't understand his mechanics...because, they think a snipe invitation means they can follow my swarm around picking mobs off it like it's their own little pull piggybank. I am typically very very sensible, subject to logic and listening to what people have to say without simple-mindedly dismissing it, but honestly with all the bard hate even this bard right here, one of the few who IS being decent and who doesn't screw over the group you spent 2 hours putting together is starting to lose his patience.

This is just a thought, when ya see a cleric ya don't assume automatically they stole yer mob intentionally, next time a bard does it..how bout asking him if he meant to? or if you could have aggro back on your mob. (It is VERY easy to accidentally tag a mob.. npcs load faster than pcs and mob healths dont update til about half a sec before snare goes off)

I guess it really comes down to this..I understand why you dislike bards, but at least until you know its intentional, what can it hurt to give them the benefit of the doubt? If they are a douche you'll know almost immediately. At least that way SOME of the bards might end up nice...I can promise you one thing, bards typically treat you like shit, so you treat them like shit...The same is true for us bards..even if we were tolerant before, if ya treat us like shit long enough, eventually we're just going to treat everyone like shit...cause we all have a point. I'm not at mine yet, and I hope I never hit it...but sincerely, just give it a thought.

-Rojas

P.S. - Soz for wall post, just feel like it's something that needed said, and everyone else just sits around arguing about how non-bards can go to dungeons or bards could group or share blahblahblah...none of that matters...We all just wanna play EQ, the great game we fell in love with over a decade ago with an outstandingly wonderful community where you actually need people to achieve things. Deuces.