Twinked?

I’m Twinked

There has been some discussion on whether or not to allow twinking in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It is one of those issues, much like Trivial Loot Code (TLC), that really fires people up quickly. Passions flare, and the next thing you know, you have Jim Ross and the WWE officiating a thread over twinking. The fact of the matter is, twinking is in Vanguard. The problem is, no one knows exactly how it will be handled. Lets take a historical look at twinking and what Vanguard might bring to the table.

Back in the day

When Everquest first came out, twinking really was not an issue. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was a newbie. We all ran off to Guk to camp loots for our mains and we began to build our “mains” up in stature and capability. Somewhere between Ruins of Kunark (RoK) and Scars of Velious (SoV) it happened. “It” was an “Alt”. More and more people began to “two box” characters while they played EQ to reduce the amount of downtime they had to deal with. Whether a person two boxed out of necessity or because they were bored is inconsequential, what matters is more and more people started doing it.

While two boxing grew more popular, people needed to get acceptable gear for their alt. One way of gearing up your alt was to head over to North Freeport and throw down some plat. Depending on your cash flow, you could really trick out an alt pretty nicely. I am dating myself here but for about 20k pp your alt was in very good shape. Something to note, in EQ, most alts were clerics and tanks. I personally had a cleric, as did most of my friends. Usually, most groups were looking for one of the “Holy Trinity” and clerics were the hardest to find and arguably the most important of the three.

Now here is where it started getting sticky. Alts started getting better gear than other people’s main characters. I will never forget the day a cleric sent me a tell on my alt cleric about the epic quest. I had an /afk up that said to talk to my main. Within 30 seconds I received a diatribe of how he had been playing EQ for 2 years with crappy gear and my cleric of 3 months had full Kael armour and his epic. He went on to tell me that what I was doing was not fair and that I had somehow cheated.

I tried to relay to this fine upstanding individual that my guild asked me to create a cleric and he was my main for about 3 weeks while I leveled him up. The guild then took care of him by making sure he got his epic and after a few runs through Temple of Veeshan (ToV) he was twinked out (thank you multi-quest). In fact, he was fully twinked. If my memory serves me he was fully able to raid at about 2 months.

As Luclin and Planes of Power came out my cleric continued to get upgraded. However, this was only after the guild’s main clerics were well taken care of. So I had a lot of help from an end game guild. Not only did I get a boxed cleric, but he got some excellent loot, much to the chagrin of many of the clerics on my server.

But it wasn’t just my guild who helped me twink my cleric, I had to do a lot of work myself. I spent tons of plat on my alt, getting him spells, buying mid-grade armour while I waited for my next ToV run. I also made bucks by running to zones with my enchanter/cleric duo rezzing people, and sometimes lower level guilds for some plat. This helped fund my alts rapidly expanding hit point and mana pool.

So what

Twinking to the extent above causes the more casual player problems. They feel like they are being denied access to certain loots when an alt has what they are camping for. Camping Ragefire for my alt was hilarious as there were 3 other clerics in the zone hoping to take him down. The sad thing was I would have let them attempt Ragefire but they did not have the force to take down the red beast, so after 30 minutes we engaged; 7 minutes later I had the most valued item in the cleric epic quest chain, hauling tail to do the final combine and turn in.

Twinking can cause mains to have to wait to get certain items. I invested 8 hours a day for 3 weeks leveling up my cleric) So the question then becomes, is this bad? What if a guild decides to take a level 1 cleric and work the faction correctly so that by level 20 he has a full set of Kael armour? Does this hurt the game?

I say no.

Everyone in that particular guild knew and agreed that an alt that would help the guild would get some nice loot. Players took the time to faction the cleric so he could run through Kael without being stomped into a red mist. It was a total team effort that furthered the guilds ambitions.

Most of the people who complained about the twinking never saw Kael drops because they didn’t belong to a guild that could take down the mobs in ToV. However, even though these poor souls couldn’t camp in ToV, they still could get Kael armour via a multi-quest and some plat. This ended up happening quite a bit. While we never sold Kael armour, we frequently gave it to alts and many other guilds did sell their extras to people.

The real problem here lies with IGErs. Will the IGErs block spawns only to sell the loot later? Farming will always cause problems. See my article on camping for examples. Would making everything “no-drop” resolve the IGE problem? Is it fair that I had to work my rear off in high-school for my 1968 Mustang while my next door neighbor had his dad buy him a Porsche 911? Nope, but it happened. No two people start off in life the same. Some have it easy while others will never drink from the golden cup or lick the silver spoon.

All the TLC / anti-twink code in the world will not help if IGErs are not dealt with severely. Twinking will be restricted in Vanguard. Brad McQuaid has spoken about it at length. The exact way twinking will be restricted is TBD (To Be Determined), however, twinking like we twinked in EQ will not be possible. So we need to get over it. We do know that items are likely to have diminishing returns. For example, as the level of a character drops, the number of bonuses on the item will as well.

When it comes right down to it, we may not even be able to two box. Vanguard is said to be so focused on making combat complex and involved, people may not be able to effectively run two characters at once. This is somewhat of a shame. I had a heck of a good time twinking and two boxing my cleric. It was a blast. I never played him without my main and in fact, I still claim I really only had one character, my enchanter. My cleric was just there to make the raids easier.

The Sidebar

This is the first time I am not happy to report the sidebar.

With the events of Hurricane Katrina, it makes most of us realize how inconsequential Vanguard really is when it comes to RL (Real Life). Many of us have friends or relatives who live in Mississippi or Louisiana. While I complain about lag or graphic models, someone is complaining about getting a bottle of water. I have several MMORPG friends I have not heard from yet. Cell towers are down, who knows if they made it. I hope and pray they are all ok.

I had a friend of mine call me on her cell, in tears, completely devastated. She is a vet in New Orleans. While she made it out fine and is in a safe place, she is a mess. She has her own practice. She had to euthanize 37 animals as she could not evacuate them herself and the owners had already evacuated. If she had not euthanized these animals they would have drown. What a decision to make. Kind of makes you realize how nice it is to escape reality in an MMORPG.

While we all anxiously await beta one and the eventual release of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes in 2006, lets not forget we live in a reality that is sometimes cruel, unkind, and unforgiving. I cannot speak for anyone else on this subject, but my hopes and prayers, as well as some cash, go out to all of those who were affected by the hurricane.

PS Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is still NOT in development for the XBOX-360, but if you think so, can I get some pictures of your black helicopter?