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The only good thing Triton ever did was die, and they couldn't even do that right
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Jul 12, 2019 07:01
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Yeah I was never in a big uber guild on live, but when p99 first launched I was in IB for a while and it just felt slimey. Taken was a little better but still kind of the same vibe.
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Jul 12, 2019 20:59
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One of my brother's friends was into EQ around the same time my brother and I were, which was some time after release but before kunark. He thought it would be a funny idea to pretend to be a woman and take advantage of some gullible horny nerd. He rolled a human female and bagged himself some guy in a popular raid guild, who helped power level him and gave him free stuff. He kept the charade going for months. He even had cyber sex with him on multiple occasions. For someone who thought it would be a hilarious joke, he held in there for a long time.
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Jul 13, 2019 01:38
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DeathSandwich already touched on Bards a little, but oh man, Bards were an incredible class. I'm guessing at some point in the distant past, the idea was that Bard songs were meant to be something akin to WoW's old Paladin auras where you played one to support the group while you did your mediocre damage to them, and could switch between them on the fly as needs changed. Well that's not how it wound up working in practice. You see, Bard songs would not end immediately once you stopped singing them, instead there was a period of several seconds after the song ended where its effects would linger (I want to say like ~10, but it's been so long I can't remember). What this meant was that you could actually stack multiple song effects at the same time doing a technique called "Twisting". To do this, you'd begin singing a song (they all had a short cast time), then the moment it fired, you'd press the hotkey for it again to cancel it and immediately hit the next song in your rotation. You repeated this for additional songs until the first song fell off and then you'd go back and restart the rotation. There was a very set rythm for this, and in groups/raids I'd be doing this for hours. Most bards could keep 3 songs running at once doing this, but if you were really good you could maintain 4. I'd heard of Bards being able to maintain 5, but I was never able to do it, and I'm not sure it was actually possible. Now the reason this was so powerful is that Bard songs seemed to be more or less balanced (in so far that anything in EQ was balanced) around the idea that you'd ever only be running one at a time. So like for example, I remember the Bard haste songs also giving a pretty respectable buff to group damage as well. The result is that Bards brought support to groups that no other class could match and could fill multiple support roles letting a group stack even more damage dealers. On top of that, Bards were incredibly good at pulling. Between being the fastest class in the game (more on that in a second), and being able to pacify mobs nearly as well as an Enchanter, I could run up to a pack, cherry pick what I wanted to pull, and then zoom back to the group with them and proceede to buff everybody up to the ceiling while we killed them. I personally think we were better at this than Monks, but I'm biased. Getting back to the speed thing, Spirit of the Wolf has been mentioned a few times and between that and Jboots, that's what most people think about when it comes to speed buffs. Bards had something far, far better, Selo's Accelerando. This song by itself made Bards faster than SoW did, but it really got crazy when you got a good drum. All Bard songs had a music type, like singing, percussion, etc. If you were equipped with the relevant instrument, it would boost the effects of those songs. These were (mostly) two handed items so you couldn't do damage while using them, but Bard melee damage was so bad that it was usually worth it. Selo's was a percussion song, so as you got better and better drums, you'd run faster and faster, leaving even SoW users in the dust. Later, they introduced a song called Selo's Song of Travel which made getting around even easier. It combined the speed of Selo's Accelerando with invisibility and levitation, letting you run around even dangerous areas with impunity (at least until you ran into something that saw through invisibility). It was fantastic for personal use but was incredible for getting a whole group to a camp in a dangerous area. I can't talk about instruments without talking about the Bard epic weapon, the Singing Short Sword. We've established that Bard damage wasn't great, and honestly, the SSS didn't change that despite being a good weapon. What it did do was act as ALL types of instruments. So before you got your SSS, you'd have to pick which of your songs you wanted to boost and leave the rest un-boosted. This by itself dramatically increased your power, but there was one more thing which was truly special. I'd mentioned that one of the song types was singing, and the SSS was the only thing in the game that boosted those songs. All of this would have been incredible even on an instrument, but because it was a one handed weapon, suddenly you could now fight again and not sacrifice any of your support potential, making our contribution to the group that much greater. I got my SSS in Kunark and never got rid of it, using it up through my guild killing Quarm in PoP which was when I quit. Finally I have to talk about Bard kiting. As I mentioned, Bards were very, very fast. This naturally made them good at kiting, though early on as you leveled, your tools to do so were pretty limited. The first tools you got were some DoT songs that you could twist along with Selo's to burn a mob down respectably fast at little to no risk. It wasn't as fast as what a Druid or Wizard could do, but honestly it was pretty good practice for the insanity that would come later. I cut my teeth on this soloing hill giants, and while I got splattered a few times as I learned the ropes, I got the hang of it and made some good money in the process. The next step up was charm kiting. DeathSandwich mentioned earlier that most Bard songs cost no mana but there were a few exceptions, and their charm song was one of them. Just like the Enchanter spell, our charm would control a monster for as long as we maintained the song, or until we ran out of mana. The song was also unique in that its effect ended the moment we stopped the song. This was actually a very good thing though as you'll see. What you would do is charm a monster and then have it and another (ideally identical) monster beat on each other. Chances are, you'd run out of mana before they dealt enough damage to each other, so when your charm broke, you ran around kiting them twisting Selo's and your mana regen song to top yourself up and repeat the process until the monsters were both nearly dead. Once that happened, you'd switch tactics and DoT kite them like mentioned above, finishing the job. If you haven't played EQ before, this is a great tactic because unlike most MMOs, most monsters hit far harder than players did, and considering you were whittling down two mobs at once doing this your effective damage was extremely high while still being pretty safe. However, where it was really at was swarm kiting. This is charm kiting taking to its absurd extreme. So with charm kiting we were just having a couple monsters beat themselves up and then finishing them off. However, your mana bar wound up being the biggest limiting factor since you were constantly having to replenish it, even in the same fight, since it still took a while for the monsters to beat themselves down. Swarm kiting solved this problem. Instead of pulling just a couple of monsters, with swarm kiting, you'd pull as many monsters as you could get your hands on. Like whole camps worth, and the bigger and the scarier the better (provided they didn't have ranged attacks or could CC you at all). Once you had a huge train following you, you'd charm your target and sic him on the train. Due to how agro works in EQ, the entire train would then stop and kick the crap out of their former friend. As you can imagine, your charmed mob would get torn to shreds in a matter of seconds. Now remember how I mentioned that the charm effect broke the moment you stopped singing it? This is where that's handy. Once the beatdown began, you'd sit there and watch your charmed mob's HP bar and the moment it got low enough, end the song and finish the mob off yourself. Then you'd charm the next one and repeat the process. Now, instead of needing multiple mana bars worth of charms to finish off a mob, you could kill multiple mobs with a single mana bar. I got really good at this and could keep my mana song running through this whole process and keep going pretty much non-stop. Swarm kiting made Bards solo gods. Nobody could touch our kill speeds, and if anybody tried sniping your weakened mobs, you'd just run them over with your train and get back to it. It was incredibly fun, incredibly dangerous (if you screwed up and your train caught you, you were dead, no questions asked), and incredibly lucrative both in loot and XP. So yeah, Bards were an amazing class in a game where the gameplay of a lot of classes was "poke the monster in the butt until it dies", and I don't think I've had as much fun on any other class in any MMO.
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Jul 19, 2019 17:22
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Bards were incredible and I played one on Sullon Zek until like level 35 before I got tired of being rooted by level 60 players. Bards were almost entirely dependent upon your internet connection not hiccuping, which before the days of broadband could be super lethal when you were AOE kiting 12 mobs and one little skip had you dying instantly.
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Jul 20, 2019 03:10
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Bards were unbelieveable stupid good, brokenly overpowered as absolute gently caress, but the song twisting was actual sadism on sony's part and top bards quitting the game due to irl wrist issues happened over and over to the point they had to introduce /melody and that was much better Also there isn't really any debating that bards were better pullers than monks. You might be able to debate it before bards had feign death, but once they had that, on a shorter cd, poo poo was over Most of the big swarm kiting didn't involve charming anything though, because that just adds a shitload more micromanagement when you can just have the AE dots kill them all at once much more lazily. Bards were pretty fond of things that reduced their micro.
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Jul 20, 2019 04:45
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I don't remember having a FD or AoE DoTs, were those things added after PoP? I quit the day we got our Quarm kill so I'm totally out of the loop for how Bards developed after that point. Read up on what /melody is, and that sounds incredibly nice. Between playing a Bard for years and then playing tons of Monster Hunter on the PSP I'm amazed I haven't crippled my hands.
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Jul 20, 2019 23:08
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Prophecy120 posted:I'm one of those people who had a nightmare 100+ hour camp of our friend, Raster of Guk for the monk epic. I remember going to High School, coming home at 3pm and camping him until 10 or 11pm every day for two weeks. I remember very vividly the feeling of pure shock and adrenaline that rushed through me after he finally spawned... such a feeling of relief and accomplishment that is rare to impossible to recreate in games these days. Man gently caress Everquest and gently caress my 19 year old self for getting into it. I had like a level 46 or 49 monk and decided that I was going to start for my epic and I think I ended up trying to camp Raster of Guk or some other stupid minotaur or some poo poo for the monk epic. Anyways, I was in college at the time-my first year. I had done well in high school, well enough that I received a scholarship paying half my tuition to any in-state school of my choosing, so I got accepted to college but decided to live at home my first year (mistake #1). Mistake #2 was that I kept playing Everquest. Mistake #3 was that I thought I had a chance in hell of camping things for my epic and to do so I figured that not going to class every now and then my first semester was acceptable. Mistake #4 was getting put on academic probation because my grades were poo poo the first semester because I didn't attend most of my classes during the last half of the semester. Mistake #5 was not giving a gently caress about the second semesters classes and doing horrible in them because I was camping stupid loving mobs, not giving a gently caress about school and losing my scholarship. Then I attended community college and things ended up working out ok...but not right away. I got bored of EQ just like every game, and so my friends and I decided to get my character banned from the server in an epic fashion. Me and a few of my friends were over at this guy's house and we were drinking and so we started just training all these mobs to various groups in KC or something-I can't remember, it was somewhere where Sarnaks were at. We trained and trained and trained mob after mob until a GM was there, completely pissed off for what we had done. I would run away and she ended up freezing my character so I couldn't move. Then my friend who was playing my character said something like 'If you don't unfreeze me, I'm going to kill myself.' and the GM didn't do anything in-game, for good reason, but the character wasn't unfrozen, so my friend just typed 'bang' and left it at that. Maybe 15-20 minutes later my brother calls me and asked me where the gently caress I was at and how I needed to get home right away because the cops wanted to talk to me. I wasn't going to take the hit for it alone, my friend that typed the message was underage and had been drinking, so my 21 year old friend and I went to my house and he had to explain how it was his fault and he just got really mad at the game and he didn't want to hurt himself at all. The cops left and my mom and brother were completely pissed off, understandably. gently caress EverQuest. I'm still pissed I got wrapped into it the way I did. Oh yeah, the guild I was in was led by a husband and a wife. They ended up having like some big guild get-together and then there was all this drama because the wife cheated on her husband with some other dude in the guild. I can't remember if they formed a new guild or wtf ended up happening. I just remember those lovely geocities web pages or forums that we had too. loving Lanys T'yvl. nwin fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 21, 2019 02:05
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Silvergun1000 posted:I don't remember having a FD or AoE DoTs, were those things added after PoP? I quit the day we got our Quarm kill so I'm totally out of the loop for how Bards developed after that point. Read up on what /melody is, and that sounds incredibly nice. Between playing a Bard for years and then playing tons of Monster Hunter on the PSP I'm amazed I haven't crippled my hands. Fade was new in pop, bard AEs date back much further than that. pop was really the breakout expansion for bards being overpowered (and it was the golden age of bard soloing) and they just kept on getting crazier even from there
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Jul 21, 2019 02:36
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Compared to today's MMOs, an everquest bard in 2002 would probably be two, or maybe even three, fully-fleshed out classes combined into one. This may sound overpowered already, and yeah I guess it kinda would be, but what really drives the imbalance into super-turbo mode is that you're not comparing 2002 bards to 2019 MMOs. You're comparing them to 2002 everquest. Warriors were another very strong, very important class to bring to raids. Your raid might only bring 3 bards, but it'd bring 12-15 warriors. Warriors had two buttons. Taunt (which could miss, and missed so often that you generally couldn't rely on it until a tank had been able to taunt 3 times), and Kick, which basically did no damage. A 2002 bard was a well-developed class, and it was competing with other melee classes that were doing 90-95% of their total damage just from autoattack. Bards had a lot going for them but their damage was poo poo, and a raid of 72 people didn't need many. Warriors, rogues, wizards, the classes that actually did damage, you load up on those idiots all day long.
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Jul 21, 2019 02:50
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The real bard trick was the long lasting calm song. It would never fail. We used to bypass entire zones worth of mobs to get to the named ones in the back. It made some PoP flagging trivial. Bard lulls a mob, reducing agro range to zero (inside zones too) and the whole drat raid walks on by. In some cases a good bard could pull the named to the zone line in Bastion of thunder by lulling and fading. I was never quite that good. Single pulling was trivial. I think it was lost dungeons of norrath where you could do the entire mission (on a tight 30 minute timer) in 5-10 minutes by bypassing every trash mob but the end target. That was a while ago though. Finally, bard mezzes had a push or pull effect based on if you were facing towards or away from the mob. I could put a mob anywhere you wanted it given time. Good for emp raids in luclin. Also I was one of those old time bards on Innoruuk that twisted songs for hours on end. When I came back to the game and melody came out I stopped playing bards. It didn’t feel right.
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Jul 21, 2019 03:39
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nwin posted:I got bored of EQ just like every game, and so my friends and I decided to get my character banned from the server in an epic fashion. Me and a few of my friends were over at this guy's house and we were drinking and so we started just training all these mobs to various groups in KC or something-I can't remember, it was somewhere where Sarnaks were at. We trained and trained and trained mob after mob until a GM was there, completely pissed off for what we had done. I would run away and she ended up freezing my character so I couldn't move. Then my friend who was playing my character said something like 'If you don't unfreeze me, I'm going to kill myself.' and the GM didn't do anything in-game, for good reason, but the character wasn't unfrozen, so my friend just typed 'bang' and left it at that.
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Jul 21, 2019 03:45
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Lull was made good in pop but the lull change that made it good wasn't very publicized. I played cleric and I remember shocking one of the big EQ forums by posting screenshots of how I used lulls to walk around in plane of torment solo Props to you if you were one of the rare few who knew how to take advantage of lull spells, because most people sure fuckin didnt
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Jul 21, 2019 03:47
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Ad by Khad posted:Fade was new in pop, bard AEs date back much further than that. pop was really the breakout expansion for bards being overpowered (and it was the golden age of bard soloing) and they just kept on getting crazier even from there Wow, either I just forgot about those or never really used them. I remember swarm kiting the flies at the entrance of PoD for hours and hours on end, boy would I feel silly if there had been a faster way! All this Bard talk makes me tempted to pick up EQ again, but I'm guessing it's one of those cases where it just wouldn't be the same.
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Jul 21, 2019 05:19
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Silvergun1000 posted:Wow, either I just forgot about those or never really used them. I remember swarm kiting the flies at the entrance of PoD for hours and hours on end, boy would I feel silly if there had been a faster way! AE dot kiting wasnt really faster, it just reduced a lot of the wrist strain and it was still much faster xp than any other possible method in the entire videogame, solo or grouped. Round up 200 mobs, get them all arranged together, start your dots, run around for a long while, 200 mobs die at the same moment, congrats on your dragon hoard of xp I didn't play a bard but I dated one and I had access to their account, I tried swarm kiting during the bard golden age. It sure was something. Silvergun1000 posted:
gigantic 50-foot tall NO except the O opens up and spits out a hundred thousand smaller NOs
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Jul 21, 2019 05:27
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What is EQ like at this point? I haven’t even had it installed in 15 years. Did it change drastically over the years like WoW did or are they just shoveling out more of the same old same old over at Day real?
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Jul 21, 2019 05:31
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My old raid guild is still going and has been doing so for about 19 years at this point. Once a year or so I check their roster out and several of the names on the list have been actively raiding the entire time. As in, I knew them when I raided hardcore in like 2001, and not only do they still do the same poo poo in 2019, but they have done so for the whole in-between. I get pretty ill when I spend too long thinking about that. As for the fights themselves, the EQ UI in 2019 has to be seen to be believed. Here is a video of a raid encounter from last year, note how everyone on voice chat sounds like they loving hate each other https://www.twitch.tv/videos/228766899 Also while yes the EQ UI is customizable, I've seen other EQlive raiding streams in the past year (even my old guild was streaming their raids at one point) and the UI in this video was very similar to others
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Jul 21, 2019 05:38
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Isn’t that the same UI that was rolled out a little before Luclin? Because it sure does look like it. I remember when that rolled out and we now longer has the lovely original UI where the actual game only took up a small portion of the screen. In 2001 or whatever it seemed incredible. In 2019 not so much.
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Jul 21, 2019 05:49
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It is, but in 2001 we didn't have 40 windows covering up 75% of the screen space. That guy technically doesn't have the lovely little window from 1999, but with all the screen clutter it's basically identical
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Jul 21, 2019 05:57
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Lol at this guy not making his extended target window transparent, you can still see the mob names and click them but it doesn't take 80% of your screen real estate
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Jul 21, 2019 06:40
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Wow that video. It looks so incredibly boring. Love that everyone runs at the speed of light now or something. Also I skipped to the end to see whatever die and no one sounded happy at all. You were right about them hating each other.
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Jul 21, 2019 06:55
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my favorite line from that video is the brief bit at the beginning "double taxes for overtime" they dont elaborate on what that means, but just the mention is enough to remind me of all the bullshit loot systems we used to be idiots with. DKP, DFP, open or closed bids, full decay, no decay, this list could get a lot bigger modern mmo raid guilds are just like "we're gonna actually give you a reasonable amount of loot, and you can be adults about it and make a quick decision". but not everquest!
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Jul 21, 2019 07:09
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Ad by Khad posted:gigantic 50-foot tall NO except the O opens up and spits out a hundred thousand smaller NOs That sounds like good advice if I've ever heard it!
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Jul 21, 2019 07:57
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i feel bad but i never understood the people that got so hooked on games it hurt their lives. i'm responsible for one - i told a coworker about wow (i hadn;t been playing for awhile and had only played for a short time since my brother was into it) and he just stopped showing up for work. i also got my brother into eq and while i only got to maybe level 30 after ~2.5 years of playing he was in the top raid guild on our server, did the same for wow when it came out and one time fell asleep in his chair doing some dungeon, woke up and went right to school.
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Jul 21, 2019 13:02
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Yeah I never really hardcore raided in EQ, just the occasional 2-3 hour Fear raid when some guild was desperate for a monk to pull the mobs and I was the only 50 on. I did a hardcore style raid once in WoW, 7-8 hours in MC, had fun but when I logged and realized how long I’d been on for I noped myself into never doing anything like that again.
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Jul 22, 2019 18:47
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I played EQ vanilla-velious when I was in highschool. I'd do my homework during downtime. Graduated with good grades and had my shaman epic. Note: Did not have girlfriend...
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Jul 22, 2019 19:20
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I had my life torn apart by EQ addiction, fixed it, had my life torn apart by wow addiction, fixed it, and still occasionally have game and internet addiction issues to this day The most recent one was ATLAS of all things, in which I was consistently doing 140-150 hour weeks as part of the goon guild. I am not sane. I am however retired, which is where I get all this free time. Though I've never poo poo in a sock, so I guess I have that going for me
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Jul 23, 2019 10:31
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Why would not binge on MMOs if you were in retirement???
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Jul 23, 2019 15:14
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yeah it's less bad if you aren't failing out of school or losing your job over it. i'm just lucky the only games i get hooked on are the fromsoft ones so once it's done i'm done.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:19
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Look I GOT my paw of opolla.. I did fail english even though I speak english, but I got that paw
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Jul 23, 2019 20:38
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My favorite part about that video is that they're still using the really bad Luclin models and animation that look like poo poo.
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Jul 23, 2019 20:49
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Ad by Khad posted:Though I've never poo poo in a sock, so I guess I have that going for me They say the first one's the hardest
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Jul 25, 2019 09:28
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Chomp8645 posted:Why would not binge on MMOs if you were in retirement??? Lots of retired people can't play videogames at all because of arthritis I got lucky. Will you?
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Jul 25, 2019 09:32
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 07:05 |
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Ad by Khad posted:Lots of retired people can't play videogames at all because of arthritis Video games will not require controllers by the time I retire, so my crippling arthritis will not affect my ability to waste the end of my life playing bad games.
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Jul 26, 2019 17:26
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