Miscellaneous: How do I research?

[nilbog]

After many, many questions in regard to the best way of researching classic information, I'll show you how I do it.

Some of this tutorial will be basic google searching skills. The first thing to remember is the fact that most of what you are looking for no longer exists in a current google search.

For example.. if I was wanting to find the npc "body guard" that used to exist in high hold keep, how can I find this? I know it used to exist, but I can't prove it. I'll be looking for it's race, class, hp, locs and any comments about its unique characteristics.

Most people's first instinct would be .. a google search. If I want to find only text in the order of "body guard", and I want to guarantee that highkeep is mentioned. The quotes indicate what order something should be in, and the + guarantees it will be included in your search.

+"body guard" +highkeep

First link is Illia's Bestiary. Cool. Now let's look at its entry. The oldest entry is someone spamming dick in 2001, to continued conversations in 2005. So it shows it existed at some point, but not much else. This is not helpful to me. Obviously you could replace +highkeep with variations of the zone name.. like "high keep", or "high hold keep", or "highhold keep", or "highpass keep", ad nauseam. Another example would be your google search looking similiar to the above, i.e.

 +"body guard" +"high hold keep"

Reviewing the rest of the google hits, there isn't a lot of information gained that I didn't already know.

Next stop.. the way back machine. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

It's continuing mission.. to archive webpages. Since 1996, if a certain website was public, and it was archived, this is the place to find it.

If you like allakhazams, then you can do a search for an Illias bestiary that was archived. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/ is the address that we will be looking for. After entering it in the waybackmachine, it should produce a page similiar to this

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...allakhazam.com

So this shows the dates between May 11, 2000 and and August 22, 2008. Not all links within the archived pages will be archived, so its hit-and-miss on what was gathered. So let's try the first entry, May, 11, 2000.

Clicking on the link, if I then try the archived Bestiary and scroll down to Highpass Keep, choosing it results in an error that it wasn't saved in the archive. Ok, that's fine. Moving on. If I return to the original archived allakhazam's page, if I were to choose.. Antonica, under Zones, then choose Highpass Keep, then Highkeep bestiary list, it displays properly. After that effort, there was still no valuable information on the page. This is the hit-and-miss I referred to earlier.

Moving on.. There are saved showeq spawn logs on various places on the internet. In this example, I'll be using a german-made one accessible via browser. Doing some random searches for "body guard" and variations of highkeep eventually produced this. http://www.adminpage.net/eq.nsf/NPC%...enPage&Start=1

So, that page listed all types of npcs and their zones, wuwu. It provided this information:


body guard, a45[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]4540[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]Rogue(-89,-305)
So.. if I went back to a google search, using their address.. I could do a search for +"body guard" and only use their site. quotes and + to make sure its listed and in the right order, and whatever follows site: will be where it looks.

+"body guard" site:www.adminpage.net/

Okay, now we have the correct name, "a body guard", its level (45), its hitpoints (4540), class (rogue), and a Y/X loc in highkeep.

Lets take 1 more trip.. over to Everlore.com. It used to be great for information... prior to 2002 or so? Don't remember exactly, but now its just adspace.

waybackmachine search for. http://everlore.com

Let's try.. August 15th, 2000.

Using the same methods we used to find the old allakhazam page, let's search for the body guard. :P

Bestiary, High Hold Keep. And there we go, a body guard, with comments and general loot information

There is plenty of information available online; you just have to find it. Using those methods for the common npc research is generally fruitful.

Hope this helps someone!