UPDATE.

It's the word I hear 1000 times a day, usually appended with the word "asshole" or similar - and that's just from my guild. A bit of explanation is in order, certainly. To be clear, LoS isn't in decline,

We're not movelogging, and no, the last time I checked, we hadn't been suspended or banned - but I'll check with Blixtev tomorrow and make sure.

No, the reason you've been greeted with a startling lack of updates was collateral damage, falling victim to my hubris, now punctured.

For those not familiar with running a popular website, it's not cheap - hosting fees, bandwidth, administration and registration all cost money, and that's before the human costs of providing the content. LoS was very fortunate - Tigole and Draed have been huge sugerdaddies, but the time came for the members to step up and assume responsibility for what is a showcase of our accomplishments (and luckily for you, my penis stories).

So, as I tell the teeming stalkers, I was holding my guild hostage to kick in their fair share of the expenses. It's simply not fair to those that did and do contribute so much to the guild to get further taken advantage of others who are content to ride on storied coat tails. LoS might only be an EQ guild, but the people behind the characters are real, the time commitment, the trust and camaraderie are real - and so should be the respect.

No justice, no peace; no dues, no updates - this was a matter of principle beyond the simple, almost laughable, sum of individual money. Principle - I am a slave of duty and my duty is only to clear. I abhor your infamous calling; I shudder at the thought that I have ever been mixed up with it; but duty is before all - at any price I will do my duty. At some point, however, I must admit even I became embarrassed with no updates, and plus that fucker Bender was getting way too much face time.

So, now, for nothing more than personal enjoyment I will commence with the updates once more - I'm not asking anyone to agree with the choice I made - at best, I would hope you the readers and my guild would respect the motive and morals behind it. It was never once about the money. More than anything, thought, I am disappointed - not that this tactic failed to elicit any sense of similar duty amongst the slackers in the face of a waxing din, but of the base lack of respect it of which it speaks. Your comments, concerns and questions are always welcome - tork@legacyofsteel.net or send me a tell in-game.

And Now For Something Completely Different

So anyhow - LoS certainly has been busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest, but I can't tell you the number of times we've all yelled, 'FUCK EARTH' in frustration - you name a way to fuck us in the ass and that zone's done it, without even the courtesy of a decent reach around. The shit of it all is that the rings aren't difficult, they are simply long, tedious and buggy - I think some of the dev weren't paying attention during Game Design 101: Making The Game Fun.

Even when a ring did reset properly, or a griefer wasn't setting off the Dust Devotees, or all the Triumvs actually spawned, the Arbiter was spawning under the world, or getting stuck in a wall or a GM was blowing us off when reporting these things. Finally, though, the sun and moon fell into perfect alignment and a right proper beat down was administered,

/bard jiz

The only good thing about doing earth so damn much the past month - Peregrin. I'll be optimistic and say we've only done him triple the number of times your average guild will - once you have your keys, piss on going back for that train wreck of an event if at all possible, and who can blame the guild and its officers - doing such a time intensive event for one piece of only "decent" loot is gay. I'm not here to bitch about that, that's been stated many times - no... it's time for everyone's favorite section...

Tork Bitches About Bards (Again)

Zaar, you knew it was coming, so why fight it, baby?

See, Peregrin Rockskull drops Drums of the Rathe - the first real percussion upgrade for bards since SoV, and no I don't want to settle for those BoT ones - it's upside down when an exp group can more easily obtain very high quality items than a raid guild... almost as upside down as killing the big dragon and then having to "get more experienced" from killing the pussy yard trash, but I digress. Anyhow, as it (of course) turns out, the drums are not just rare, they are homogay rare - check across the servers and I'll be shocked if there are 10. Total. If the drums/Peregrin are wretchedly gay, then words are really lacking for the Rune Stamped Blade off Avatar of Dust, an encounter no guild in their right mind is going to be doing much if at all once they are keyed up for Xegony - and again, who can blame them, clearing up to spider island alone is a chore, and then the Sigi event itself is easily one of the most painful in PoP to date. Oh yah, and then you go kill the Avatar of Dust for, you guessed it, another exceptionally rare piece of bard gear in a sea of shit.

Can do - I'm going to be positive and assume the devs just overlooked little things like that, and will work towards correcting them. Part and parcel with that is the hope VI will remember to add in bard song mods to the high end PoTime gear - I've mentioned it before, but by way of example (again), although the Hydro mask is pure own, it's the Singing Mod that's really attractive for a bard. What happens when a vastly superior all/all 225 hp/mana FT X mask drops - I'd sure love to upgrade to it, but I'm trapped again by the singing mod on the mask a la epic all over again... except now I'm not slaved to just the off hand, but to multiple inventory slots. I still think giving us another set of AA's, 3 pts each, for the various song skills to bring the mod in line with the current expansion and then letting gear balance itself out normally for all players would be a much cleaner and clearer alternative solution. As it is under the current state of affairs, you're always going to have either (1) special case bard gear or (2) instrument mods on all/all gear - both of which have huge potential for omission given past itemization.

Moo

Jesus - I really have no idea what happened here. Things are normal (as normal as they ever get) and then this mysterious Moo'ing was heard... and it got louder, and louder, a crescendo of bovine might which knew no limit!

Quickly the forces of the Evil Empire were dispatched to crush this little rebellion of beef,

Let this be a lesson - the Gnome Liberation Front has been warned.

Mezbreaker Parser v1.0!

Courtesy of Veneficus Noriega, Cartel Master of Neriak,

Ever wonder just how many mez breaks we get in one night and don't feel like counting all that "has been awoken by *asshole mez breaker*" messages on your screen? Well now all you need do is just run those log files through Mezbreaker Parser and it'll do the work for you!

Features include:

• Total Mez Breaks in One Evening
• Names of Asshole Mez Breakers and their contributions
• Ouput into Excel for those snazzy statistical graphs

Right-click here and Save Target As...

Desp Sux

Oh, Desp, what would we do without you, you tard? Now, we've done Xuzl a ton of times, and it's not like it should be any big secret what's supposed to happen, but sometimes when you wish upon a star, magic happens,

Caption Contest

Post your best (or worst) under this thread - the winner may even get the vaunted Stallion Nuts board title for creativity.

Good Luck!

Stalkers, Wanna-be's and Unoriginal Bastards

Quotes of the Day

We're gonna get totally jablowned on bandwith as it is, so I'll post Quotes (and more loot!) tomorrow in a ninja update - trust me, there are some good ones~

So 12 of us were in PoFire doing a little xp and we noticed Fennin Ro was up and needed to die (again) - we cleared a few mobs, asked a couple clerics to come, cleared a few more mobs and it was go time, baby! Three hours of kiting later, Fennin Ro died and the obligatory asshole of necrii pets spawned, who then summarily AE'd, aggro'd a shitload of guards and killed us before I could get a good screenshot of the carnage and drama.

Asshole'sBender's pet in case you can't tell

We've also been quite busy with the looting and plundering,

/jiz~

All in a day's work for the Evil Empire.

PS: Fuck pets.

And as some of you heard about, I woke up late here recently, and instead of using the trusty Mach3 (yes, I have two) to shave my pubes, I thought, "What the fuck?", grabbed clippers instead and went to work.

In a bit of pube shaving etiquette for you tomentose knuckle draggers, you shave the pubes before a shower, so you can wash away any traces left behind, but of course, before my shower I wasn't fully awake. This may or may not have contributed to the attendant risks placing the equivlate to a gasoline powered set of hedge clippers near my pride and joy were somehow acceptable for the admittedly modest increase in speed, but that's for historians to decide - I'm a doer, blazing new trails in the field of personal hygine and grooming. Regardless, things are going great and I'm giving serious consideration to the thought of switching to the clippers full time, not to mention the bonus buzzing/vibrating aspect and all at 6AM...

But I played with fire - on an errant pass to clean things up, I got too close to the sack, and I found out suddenly that no matter how well clippers might perform on smooth skin, the wrinkled bean bag is a different story. Just as groin transitions to sack, the clippers gobbled it up like a thousand tiny teeth, rolling the meat up like an angry peice of salt water taffy - I yelped like some wounded animal and jerked back the whirling dervish instantly, but the damage had been done: tiny nick perforations along a 1 inch section of sack welled up and started to bleed, weeping blood to match my tears as I struggled to quickly invent some half assed plausible story to tell the 911 operator.

I quickly grabbed some toilet paper and a styptic pencil, but when I applied the chalk-like tip, it was like a white hot poker, and I doubled over and squatted baseball style, bouncing involuntarily as my testicles dangled and dribbled - bleeding, burning, above the cold unyielding tile, as a fuzzy blue rug near the toilet taunting me in unshorn glory. That's okay asshole, I'll be pissing on you later.

I was able to recover, and carefully mummified my balls to staunch the bleeding, and mummified my cack while I was down there - if I had a marker I could have written  U S A  down the shaft to have my own pocket rocket complete with armed warhead. Again, I must stress in my own defense, I hadn't even had a shower yet - it all seemed like a good idea.

After an interminable few minutes the fire raging downstairs cooled, and I gently unwrapped to perform a damage assessment - a long row of pin pricks with twin groves formed from the blades gobbling up the unsuspecting loose skin. I looked around for a band-aid or anything to cover my junks up, but of course the only thing I could find were the butterfly types used for finger joints. Undeterred, I slapped a pair on - only then did it hit me I still needed a shower. To give credit where credit is due, I must say the Johnson & Johnson folks really do make a fine waterproof skin adhesive which I have no doubt has its uses, but this was the last thing I needed on my still-unshaven sack.

Enter wounded animal yelping sound number two, a quick shower and a Telfa pad with tape to wrap up my morning - literally - but I was worried about that shit all day long as I got the thinking about it - I didn't want to accidentally sit down wrong on my sack and eject a ball. I could just imagine a sound something akin to ripping a vinyl seat cover as the little perforations let go and the distictive cartoon *pop* of major injury and I'd be huddled in a corner trying to tucking things back in after a blow out -while JB Weld is pretty good stuff, I don't think it's approved for scrotal repair (yet).

Moral of the story: You can't rush greatness.

Mezbreaker Parser v0.1 Alpha!

Courtesy of Veneficus Noriega, Cartel Master of Neriak,

Ever wonder just how many mez breaks we get in one night and don't feel like counting all that "has been awoken by *asshole mez breaker*" messages on your screen? Well now all you need do is just run those log files through Mezbreaker Parser and it'll do the work for you!

Features will include:

• Total Mez Breaks in One Evening
• Names of Asshole Mez Breakers and their contributions
• Ouput into Excel for those snazzy statistical graphs

Future enhancements:

• "Hangman" style graphics. The more your break, watch your little toon slowly get the noose tied around his neck.
• Statiscal Analysis of which classes break the most mez's
• Running "Asshole Mez Breaker of the Week" award

Coming soon to an FTP near you...

Stalkers, Wanna-be's and Unoriginal Bastards

Quotes of the Day

Fucking finally - after a kick ass recovery from a week of failed attempts and ½ a bottle of THE Glenlivet, THE Evil Empire dropped Rallos Zek in flawless fashion Thursday - well, Reynaldo died, but dead rangers don't count... in fact we kinda encourage it~

The only thing that kinda sucked, besides me getting writer's block yesterday, was the ignominious necro kill shot:

Fuckin' Necrii

We've been using the our time wisely, feeling out the Elemental Planes,

My WW2 Tigershark Tattoo!

and I was really looking forward to a whole week worth of exploration - that's the best time in EQ, the uncertainty and the fun of not knowing what all is next and full well expecting the eventual wipe out, but some cacks crashed PoTactics just to XP in the pit. I'm not hallucinating black helicopters, these assholes freely admitted doing it, and not just in PoTact - they know just as well as we do the GM's won't respond to petitions, /reports, &c. I guess I'm glad RZ is back up, since some people got fucked out of legit flags and I want to help them get on with PoP, but it still sucks ass this rampant zone crashing continues - TEE HEE!

All said, though, I'm impressed LoS was able to turn the corner on a night when we had every reason to just say piss on it and log - I'll admit it's been fucking frustrating to lose in nearly every conceivable suck dick way, but it's also an opportunity to further my research.

Let me explain: Have you ever found an experience that left you physically and mentally drained in a bad way, such as arguing with the return desk at Wal Mart? Have you listened to a TV infomercial and thought, 'I am getting fucking dumber by the minute' before unconsciously drooling on yourself as you reached for the phone to order? Well, bad news: it's not just your imagination, it's a real, and most cases, permanent, loss of intelligence. I don't mean to alarm anyone, but if some of you lose a few more brain cells to this infectious stupidity, you're at risk of becoming talking chimps. In fact, this applies to a troublingly large segment of the population, which is why I am trying to quantify the effects of stupidity, known clinically as "fucking retarded" - especially mass stupidity writ large.

I feel this is going to be some ground breaking work, and while there is no cure, perhaps this will be the watershed event eventually spawning treatment (such as self-sterilization). I'll share some of my preliminary findings at this time, and continue to collect data from my band of retards in the mist.

• Retardation seems to require a specific activation energy.
  Saving a lecture in chemistry, in some cases extremely favorable reagents may be mixed together, but reaction not immediately take place due to a lack of energy to initiate the process - for example gasoline and oxygen will not combust without the spark. That added heat is known as the activation energy, and a rough analog exists in retardation. Individually, any one action of retardation can be tolerated by its surrounds reasonably well and without infecting others. These actions go by many names: a joke, horseplay, slacking, attentionboss, a joke, testing, false claims of literacy, but once those individual occurrences being to stack up, an activated complex stirs, building and growing; a precipitous foreplay for the stupid which cannot be rushed, but yet not fully realizing its own potential until the activation energy, E_aRETARDATION, is achieved. Once, however, sufficient energy, has been added to reaction, things been to inexorably proceed:
  
  Figure 1: Clusterfuck Potential Vs Time, E_aRETARDATION noted
• Retardation varies with distance to next closest retard.
  Closely related to attraction in electricity and magnetism, retardation grows stronger as subjects draw nearer to one another, often subconsciously seeking one another out in a slow but accelerating dance, perhaps drawn in by mouth breathing signals, circling with a steady spiral of increasing retardation which ultimately leads to the first seed of active stupidity. As noted in Figure 2, even a relatively small degree of separation can stave off otherwise sufficient E_aRETARDATION, which would explain the natural flocking retards exhibit, and an affinity for unnecessarily hugging nuts. The most pronounced increase appears to be due to self explanatory Intrazone Tidal Retard Effect (ITRE).
  
  Figure 2: Retardation Vs Distance, ITRE noted
• Retardation increases with population size.
  Yes, this sounds intuitive, but there's something deeper, insidious, at work here in a non-obvious manner. Stupidity can exist individually, but in its purest form - the committee - its power shines with the brilliance of the sun, and that light of warms the faces of the masses, awaking the inner retard. In a vicious cycle, the collective intelligence of Legac people steadily declines with population size once E_aRETARDATION has been achieved and the critical mass formed, quickly sucking in and enveloping the herd, until doing something like Vex Thal seems a good idea.
  
  Figure 3: Retardation Vs Population Size
• Retardation often spawns drama.
  Duh - and by "Duh" I mean there's a really witty paragraph which should go here, but I fucked up and hit Ctrl+C instead of Ctrl+V when editing and don't feel like rewriting it. See also Figure 1.
  
  Figure 4: Retardation Reaction, notionally balanced

Anyhow, special thanks to my research assistants (you know who you are) - once more into the breech, dear friends; once more...

Jangos, Beatnik

Stalkers, Wanna-be's and Unoriginal Bastards

Quotes of the Day

Voro..................................