Writing an article on trade skills; would some input please.

[Sotako Yatako]

For about the past two and half months I've been doing some writing for UnknownPlayer.com. just basic patch info and developer releases. Now I'd like to take do a full blown article on the trade skill aspect of the game. But sence I didn't enter EQ untill 6 months after the velious release I have little to no knowalge on how trade skills worked, in Kunark and Pre-Kunark times.

What I'd like get is some input from the "old timers" about how the trade skills worked in Old world and Kunark times, What the trade of choice was for people. Myths about trade skilling and trade skill junkies.

Anyone that provides info that is used or gets a quote used will be acknowelged in the article.

And all this will be provided that Den mum an House Orge don't mind me asking here. And yes I will post here when I do get the article up at UP.com

Edit; Fixxed link

[Verdandi]

It was uphill both ways in the snow barefoot at four o'clock in the morning...and we liked it!!

*thinks back to the days of fleeing wooly spiders* This is all from my perspective of levels 1-27ish, June 1999 through early Kunark.

Tradeskillers have always been a little crazy in the head. Nowadays this is because it takes so much dedication to become truly proficient in a given skill, and is generally perceived as too much time to devote to anything other than exping. Originally it was because, practically speaking, they were mostly useless.

The only tradeskill that could originally allow you to turn a profit by selling a variety of items at a variety of skill ranges was jewelcraft. Jewelers were almost all enchanters and almost all filthy rich. Jewelcraft was also by far the most expensive to practice. In my impoverished newb eyes they were the snobby upper class of tradeskillers. Their wares were highly prized. My level 30ish monk friend turned down a gift of a silver black pearl ring from another friend because it was "way too valuable". Before the first Planes, black pearls and diamonds were incredibly rare. Blue diamonds either didn't exist or had no use, as blue diamond jewelry came around the time of Velious if I recall correctly.

In a distant second was smithing, with banded the top seller. The chain armor look was one thing that separated the veterans from the leather-clad newbs. (Bronze plate made you uber, and plate other than bronze made you a god. But no smithed plate was available.) The problem with being a smith is that so few places had supplies close enough together to practice with much efficiency, and reaching those places could be quite a challenge if you were not of the race that started in that city. Barbarians had to go clear to Highhold for ore! This was back when the use of spoilers was much less common, so maps and lists of recipes were not usually on hand. I can quite vividly remember trailing my warrior smith friend through the Karanas as he tried to follow the paths and the direction marker stones. If we weren't ambushed by bandits we were squished by hill giants. And then night fell and we could only barely see the path and would wind up in the middle of nowhere and have to call on the super powerful 25 wizard of the guild to come lead us to safety (Thanks, Tormie!!!)

Tailors had patchwork, studded, and reinforced armor, which had pretty nice stats for low levels but didn't have the advantage of looking spiffier than the common leather off merchants and low-ish level critters. The introduction of raw silk and cured silk was the first big boost for tailors, although I'm not sure exactly when that was. It was still a chore to make though, as the silks were not made stackable for quite some time.

Baking and brewing were the skills of choice for roleplayers. You couldn't force-feed foods in order to generate emotes, but you could give them to other players to make them drool or lose their appetites, depending on the food. This is actually one of the few ways that tradeskills remain unchanged! Urban legend held that iron rations lasted longer than other foods, so those were a popular food of choice on a daily basis. Those who didn't believe the myth ate muffins. Unfortunately, the rations only came from vendors and the muffins were cheaper off of vendors. :roll: Brews were all alcoholic, and could be given to others as well as drunk for the emotes. These were extremely popular for weddings, birthdays, and other parties, in spite of the very limited menu. Intoxication was usually the chief entertainment at a wedding, helped by the fact that you could camp out and return completely sober. On a daily basis, however, brews had very little use.

Pottery was very much a fringe skill, engaged in almost exclusively by rogues since poison vials were not yet on vendors. Even then it had a reputation for being one of the easiest and cheapest. It was only easy to people who knew much about it though. I challenge someone who knows nothing about pottery and very little about tradeskills to try figuring it out based purely on the information in the recipe books in game. I made several attempts that ended in quitting in disgust before I finally got the hang of it! The piece/brick/block thing confused me to no end, and I won't even start on firing sheets....:shock:

Tinkerers made fireworks for parties. Not even jewelers could afford the rest!

Fisherfolk were actually fairly common since bait was cheaper than rations (and free for foragers) and you could sell the daggers and sandles for some much needed pocket change. But man those broken poles could really add up! Over a gold apiece!! You had to keep hoping you'd get enough daggers and sandles between broken poles to keep you going.

I don't know much about fletching and poison making back then, mainly because I had no use for arrows (as if I had a use for small jars :P) and didn't know any rogues very well. Keep in mind that this was back when rogues were widely disdained as watered down warriors.

I didn't do alchemy in those days, in part because I didn't get the levels for it until somewhere in the early Kunark days, and in part because it was so obscenely expensive that it made jewelcraft look like a good hobby for a level 1. I very vaguely recall hearing about the revamp but wasn't yet 25 and didn't know any alchemists at all. At 27 I threw my 500pp fortune at alchemy and got a whopping skill of 8. I tore my medicine pouch to shreds and fed it to the snow dogs. Of course, that didn't last and I kept coming back as soon as I'd get enough plat saved for a few more attempts. I'd heard that I could only put 20 points of training into a tradeskill so I thought I was being clever by saving them for when the recipes got even more expensive. Imagine my dismay when the recipes got more expensive and I went to my trainer :P

Those were the days back when everyone "knew" that int controlled how fast you skilled up and wis controlled how often you succeeded. Thank goodness for Fan Faires to clear that up.

Part of the problem the was also the difficulty in finding other tradeskillers. I didn't learn about EQ Traders until quite a bit later and therefore didn't have the message boards for contacting people. The aforementioned warrior smith friend travelled clear to Freeport (on foot, without any spells to help him along) to buy the silver carnelian wedding ring that he later gave to me. Course it wasn't enchanted because he hadn't realized that they could be enchanted...but in this case it was very much the thought that counted

[Sotako Yatako]

Lol sounds like young EQ was most entertaining to be in. I defently got a few laughs from reading that. I know at the time some of the thing were not funny, but now that your what 40 levels higher and 3 years more play under your belt they are deently a good laugh.

MORE MORE need more meat muhahahahahaha!!!!

[Sotako Yatako]

sniffels no one wants to help me with the artical except for Verndi.

I'll take any info i can get on tradeskills from a personal point of veiw, after all, writeing a artical with some player input would be very dry and not a good read.

*begs* anything anyone? please.

[Ariene]

It all started with fishing. I didn't know anything about tradeskills, but I had this fishing button listed with my skills. Wandering around town, I found a place that sold bait so I invested my 2 gold and some silver for a pole and bait and started fishing. WOW! Sandals! I can wear these! Rusty dagger...hmmm I guess I can sell it. Fish scales? What are fish scales? FRESH FISH! I can eat this! Wow, almost free food! I soon figured out that I could finance my missing level one spells and some of my level 5 spells on the profits I made with fishing.

Next was tailoring. I found out all those ruined pelts could be made into armor! I made myself a full set of tattered armor and was so proud! I made it for people in the zone as well to practice. If they brought the pelt I would buy the pattern and make them armor. I had a lot of fun equipping other newbies with this wonderful tattered armor.

I made a good friend in EQ and when we got tired of hunting we would sit on the dock and just fish and talk. Then one day my friend tells me we should BAKE all these fish we are catching. Baking? What's that? She leads me over to the oven and gives me a stack of sauce and we start making fish fillets. I was a bit worried about the failures eating into my spell money but stuck with it and soon we were making fish rolls and steaks. I would pass out mammoth steaks to my groupmates who loved the +2 str they received for them.

I baked for a long time. But then I started needing utensiles. A friend gave me a pie tin but when I needed more I had to learn to make them. So I started pottery. Pots, muffin tins, mixing bowls, cookie cutters...I could bake so many more fun things now!

I was still just happily baking but then PoP came out and I needed to brew to bake as well. I needed dressing for my sandwhiches and that had to be brewed. So I spent a day at the brew barrel and made a lot of fun things there. I got a few friends drunk in the process as well. A good time was had by all.

Then I wanted to make my baking trophy. I could ask friends to help, but I really wanted to do it myself. So I started learning to make jewelry. That was FUN!

I'm still a beginner at tailoring, pottery, brewing and Jewelcraft but I enjoy them all. My true loves, however, are still baking and fishing. Someday I hope to branch out and try even more tradeskills.


Tradeskills are a great way for me to relax. It gives me something to do when I don't want to think about anything. I can just click the little buttons and ignore whatever I was worried about for a time or I can use the time to focus on a problem and think of possible solutions.

[Chenier]

"You're a druid, you should learning tailoring and make me leather backpacks." said the boyfriend, then playing his warrior.

That was a year and a half ago.

It's all *his* fault. Luckily, however, I found EQTraders fairly quickly and did everything - well, except fletching for the 7th shawl and jewelry for the 8th.

I still kick myself for not (as it turned out, temporarily, since we have Tanann Mastery AA) giving up tailoring and getting smithing up to 242 before that May patch. Although, because I didn't, I don't feel the urge to get 1750 either (no freakin' way I'm gonna do smithing now).

Chenier
204 tailoring 200 brewing 196 baking 195 pottery 185 smithing 200 fishing 200 fletching 200 jewelry

[Noni DeeCups]

I started baking because me and my husband would play together and he started an iksar monk. I just had to make lizard on a stick. From then on - it was an obsession - canablistic food all the way... Besides, I had to do something! He could always find a group and I would wander around ( no pun intended ) looking for something to do....

[Alyxia]

I’ll see if I can give you some insight as well I started around October 1999, and knew I would love the tradeskills, as I had previously spent a lot of time doing tradeskills in another game.

I didn’t really know which tradeskills were really the “trade of choice”, since I was in my own little world and did whatever I felt like.

Anyways, being a poor newb, even with good friends, tradeskilling wasn’t easy. Tailoring was the first thing I did, because “you’re a druid, you should tailor” So I did. Let’s just say I had a full set of leather given to me, so I never slaughtered wolf or bear…only the cats that hated us druids. Oh, remember when pelts didn’t stack? Ugh. I worked up two characters to about 90 tailoring as well with unstackable pelts. Oh! And unstackable steel boning and studs :?

Of course, knowing that jewelcraft could make money, shortly after creating my druid, I also created an enchanter to work on JC, but soon found out that I could no longer afford it. So it was stuck at 193. So I was happily hunting away, when someone I met at Level 24 in Lavastorm, asked me “Hey, do you bake? Did you know that you can make money baking?” So there I go. I end up running to EC (only place for certain baking supplies at that time) and back to Freeport, day in and day out, combining until my arms were sore, so that I could make money to fund other tradeskills and spells. Baking now no longer makes the kind of profit it did back then. Baking was fun. Going to Paineel and slaughtering snakes non-stop produced a ton of eggs.

My baking proceeds funded smithing to 175 for my chanter, and within 4 days of 2-3 hours auctioning in Kelethin, I made back all the money I spent on Smithing. Ah…those were the days. Why did I stop at 175? Because banded got you only that far.

Even as a druid, getting the materials to do fine plate were a major pita. Metal Sheets didn’t stack. You needed to go to WK to get stuff for fine plate. Just painful all around. And whenever I wanted to sell some banded, I would have to run to Kaladim and Freeport to get molds, then come back to Kelethin to auction. I couldn’t sell Fine plate at all. And with limited inventory and bank space, it was hard to guess what stuff you had to prepare beforehand.

Back when it wasn’t clear about wis and int, people thought Int influenced skillups, and Wis influenced successes. So I originally created the enchanter with the idea of making her the Tradeskiller Extraordinaire. However, before I reached 200 (the max at that time), they came out with the ability to have one tradeskill reach 250. Well, and since my chanter already had high JC, she was going to GM JC, and the smithing would fall to my druid. (High end tailoring at that time left something to be desired).

Soon after, I decided I wanted to increase/try the other trades. Baking was my favorite. Made myself a full set of utensils, because I had the skills to do so. Also stopped baking after a while, because I couldn’t effectively get brownie parts, and the only recipes that would get you past 135 required brownie parts. I tell ya, it was so much fun when I attended my first guild meeting, and I handed some gnome cookies to my guildie, who was also a gnome, and she said “GAK!!! Gnome cookies!” heh

Oh, and my biggest pet peeve? If you put in the wrong components, you lost everything! My friend lost a Trueshot Bow because she hit the Combine button in her fletching kit. Well, it teaches you to be careful, but still, even if you’re careful, you still make mistakes

Well, I stopped tradeskilling for a while, because I wanted to level to 50 to play with my “powerful” friends. I worked so hard at it, got 50, and burnt out. I quit.

Well, after coming back on May 2002, many things have changed, for the better. Of course, not being able to make fine plate to 242 anymore was a bad thing, but many other things about tradeskills are better. Stackable materials, no-poof when trying to combine incorrect materials or in wrong containers.

And in hindsight, I have a theory of why I burnt out and quit. Because I stopped doing tradeskills I could never burn out doing tradeskills, because since I’ve been back, I’ve been doing tradeskills almost non-stop. The only time I would do exp hunting, would be for the purpose of tradeskills Levelling chanter to 34 so she can enchant platinum. Levelling druid to 55 so that getting AA exp points would be easier. Insane? Yes. Addicted? Definitely.

[Pietre Christopher-Ryskin]

I started out in Freeport, as any other paladin of Marr. Donned the tunic, drew the Shortsword* and went to work on the local rats in the East Freeport area. At level 2, a wolf attacked me out of the blue and promptly handed my behind to me in a handy basket.

That learned, wolfs were bad, and the one that attacked me was red con. Ofcourse, while fighting some more rats (which at the most took 30% of my life) I spied a wolf that was yellow con. So, promptly in my mind the following rule formed : "Wolf killed me. Wolf was Red. This Wolf is Yellow. Yellow will kill me just as fast. Don't try Yellows". So, a bard I'd met in the area, and I, continued to fight rats until they were green.

At level 4, we took on an orc pawn. It dropped the incredible Cracked Staff, and we had half an hour of discussion whether to use it as a weapon, or try and sell it off. After all, rat ears went for 9 copper, and this, -this- sold for nearly a full platinum, a 100 times more. Riches!

We used it for a weapon, as it was rare, in our experience, and a definite upgrade. Sometime around level 5 (/played around 3 days), we got ourselves into the East Commonlands. The bard was strumming Selo, and we were out exploring the area. That is, until we stumbled into a group of very territorial Orc Centurions. So we ran for the hills, though none of us had any real idea of where those hills were. Arguments ensued as to which direction to go, but in the end, we settled on -away-.

Anyhow, we wound up in West Commons. We checked we were alive, laughed a bit, then sort of turned a bit and, uhm, there was this utterly preposterously gigantic Hill Giants scowling at us. It was like -right over there- and it was so most definately looking straight at us and so we panicked, started up selo, and began running around looking for the safety of civilization and a guard. Ok, so any guard. Or -anyone-. We spied a person off in the distance, it looked to be some sort of warrior. Seeing a person was a boon after running scared through the gauntlet of Kodiaks, Hill Giants, Snakes, Will'o'Wisps, and what else we saw. So we raced towards him, as we got near, remembering to right click to /consider, omg, he was red "Kizdean Gix scowls at you, ready to attack - What do you want your tombstone to say". Then we lost control, couldn't say anything, or move, and we found ourselves back in Freeport after a little while.

And to our astonishment, yet another Orc Pawn attacked us less than a minute after getting back, imagine our glee when we found he had yet another Cracked Staff! And we both got a couple points in Hand to Hand out of a very prolonged fight, that was a close cut.

After this, we decided that the both of us were sorely in need of some rest and relaxation. Something a bit less dangerous than being chased all over the place. We sold, yes, -sold- the second staff, and bought fishing poles. and Bait. Ofcourse it was sort of not funny discovering how expensive the bait was, I mean, really. And we got -clothes- out of the water. And a weapon! The bard was pretty miffed when he found out I'd bought beer, and hadn't shared, but I think he believed me after my repeatedly claiming I had done no such thing. The day was really looking up for us, and we found even more prizes, though there was little variation. We both agreed that some major shipment of footwear and daggers must have gone lost just outside Freeport. In our mind, that meant there was definately a wreckage out there. A ghost ship, perchance. And considering this was an adventure game, we were determined to locate it.

The bard was a little iffy about going into the water. He'd only trained one point in Swimming, and he was definately not keen on drowning, and he was sure he would at such low skill. After arguing a little back and forth, we went down the ramp, and into the low water under the docks. We never found the wreckage. But we did find a huge shark circling a chest that made Jaws seem like herring. We woved to check out the chest when we could best the beast, and ignored our three deaths to its brutal feeding frenzy. None of us was going to take the **** boat, because if there were such a beast, -this close to civilization-, there were bound to be sharks and seamonsters the size of cities out on the open ocean. But we got swimming to around 15 or so.

With this in our mind, we had no real option but to go back to East Freeport (considering that we hadn't realized there was an exit towards Oasis... none of us ever read maps, or manuals), and fight a bit there before deciding what to do next, scrounge up a few copper off the local rats. On the way there, I'm out of food. And so, a hurried search for food and its components start. After a couple merchants, we wander into a shop. And find a merchant with A Mask Pattern. And a Tunic pattern. And there was the kind of silence where you can almost see the gears turning in the head as its putting two and two together.

Three hours later, we have in our possession, 0 gold, 0 silver, one large sewing kit. And two pieces of selfmade leather armor. At level 10, the two of us had full leather. At 16, full banded, and a woman to court. From there, we went to Full Bronze, then shortly after off to hunt the two mighty dragons with the guild. And a while later, Kunark was launched, and everything changed.

I'm happy to say that out of the 30 or so toon's I've played (out of which 15 are still in active service), only a handfull haven't been tradeskillers of some magnitude or other. And my Main these days still actively tradeskills.

[mrjimorg0]

My story

My first character was a rogue halfling. I was inept and kept getting killed so after about a month I asked in /ooc what is the best class to play. Someone responded definately a cleric. So, I created a cleric back in '99 who is today my main char. When I started off I couldn't afford the nice banded armor that other people had, and definatly couldn't afford that really expensive bronze. So, I started saving up money and worked on my smithing skill so I could make that armor. I did this by killing skeletons that had weapons and selling those for big money (a gold or 2). Sometimes I was really lucky and got that rare cracked staff - ca'ching!
Before long I was a great smith. Back then the sheets of metal were not stackable so making a full suit of armor required my running from N Qeynos to Qeynos hills to buy the stuff and back to N Qeynos several times for just 1 suit. I make several pieces of armor for myself, but when people inquired about how they could get some I would sell them mine for a decent markup (which mostly paid for my failures). Since I was cheaper than the other smiths I was starting to get a lot of people asking to buy armor. Then I had a few customers who became resellers. I'd sell them banded bracers at 3pp each and they'd resell them at 6pp. My skill was going up so I was happy. But, before too long I got really bored with it. I couldn't kill stuff or group without being interrupted by requests for more armor. At that time I left EQ for a while and became a Starseige Tribes addict (I still think its much better than all of the Quake stuff out there).
When I came back to eq I tried selling more banded, but the market had completely dried up. Now people wanted Fine Steel. So, I spent all my time and money working on getting my skill up so I could make Fine Steel. The problem was that the cost of it was more than I could afford. Here I was at level 25 with banded armor, no jewelry and no cash. Thats when someone told me about pottery.
There was a time when you could make money from pottery. You could buy pie tin sketches and (nonstackable) clay for aboue 3-4 gold and sell the result for 1.2pp. So, I did this - a lot. I could make about 60pp per hour which was a lot of money! So I did this for a long time in order to pay for my fine steel training. And I got good enough that I could succeed most of the time. However, the market for FS has always been tough. If you charged 25pp for a bracer that required 23pp to make people would yell at you in long strings of profanity for being such a ripoff <sigh>. And to make matters worse Verant increased the price of pie tin sketches to 1.5pp each. As a side note, some people knew about this ahead of time and filled all 8 of their players with these sketches- bank accounts as well- and sold them back to the vendors after the patch. The 1.3pp*20*8*16 = 3.3kpp that these people make really screwed up the economy quite a bit.
Then I went to grad school for a year and stopped playing. When I came back noone even wanted FS. You couldn't give it away. So, I stopped smithing altogether and started working on leveling that lvl 20 cleric. Then the big smithing patch came, and new cultural amor was released. I wanted it so bad that I began to take up smithing again. The problem was that the patch also make Fine Steel trivial at 188. Again, those people that knew this was comming took advantage of it and got their skill up to 230? before the patch. Now, my skill is 188, thought I've made about 50 non-trivial combines since then to raise it.
-Marie Purelight, Rodcet Nife

[Liwsa]

Not sure if anyone mentioned but back in the day pelts did not stack. When I was tailoring way back when(heheh), I would farm bears till i had 20-30 Quality bear pelts. The mq and low I would make leather padding from to sell and the HQ's would make into 10 slot back packs. of course I had had my favorite zone to farm them in wayyyy off the beaten track. This of course was with my first char(rogue) so no porting and gating in and out. It was a long run.

[Sotako Yatako]

WOW, hehe thats a lot of info to digest, Thanks all, I know i have been like missing for a while, but some reason, I coudl only get EQTC msg boards to load only occinaly on my system, can't figure it out, this is one of them day /cheer.

Still feel free to post your experiances here, I'm still writeing the artical, and will be for a while, I re enrolled in school so my free time is much more limmited then it was when I first posted this.

[Niami DenMother]

I started with EQ during beta 4, and somehow got hooked on tradeskills right away. It only got worse after launch.

For the first many months, anything that listed recipes out-of-game was considered "bad" and a "cheat site". Undaunted, I took the wee halfling, as well my growing horde of alts hither and yon, seeking out tradeskill supply vendors, trying to figure out what the "best spot" was to do tradeskills for my various folks. This information, of course, was put up on a tiny little site hosted off AOL webspace that launched less than a month after the game launched.

Baking was my passion. There was just something about being able to make edible goo, and feed it to a troll that was, well, FUN! Unfortunately, this was back in the day when the baking vendor in Misty Thicket seemed to be MIA, so I'd end up out in East Commonlands a lot. This, in turn, ended up with me dead, more than once, when obtaining trade supplies.

You see, those majestic-looking griffons out there had x-ray vision, and they could sense a halfling a mile away, I swear! {throws up her tiny hands in frustration} They would swoop through the ceilings of the shops with no warning, and great glee, just to take large bites out of me while I was shopping. (The pathing issues have since been fixed, and the griffs no longer snack so much on shoppers. ;D)

My shamaness, strapping young barbarian that she was, took up smithing, and felt VERY proud of herself when she was able to make sets of banded armor for herself and the wee halfling cleric. A friend, who'd made a dwarf, also went into smithing, but found the distance from ore vendor to forge to be daunting for one with no weight-reducing bags. Many a time we'd see him run across a zone at a fast waddle, yaulping every several steps so he could move!

My lady-monk went into languages and jewelcrafting. Jewelcrafting, you say? Why on earth would anyone make a monk a jeweler?! Welll, "back in the day" we didn't know about stats and tradeskill improvements. We did, however, know that monks lost a goodly amount of AC when they got over weight 15. So, as she'd be out hunting with friends, she'd often find the nearest vendor and convert her share of the loot into any lightweight gems the vendor would have in stock. It seemed to make sense to then turn them into pretty sparklies. By the time we learned about stats affecting tradeskills, I was too durn stubborn to give up. I now have a GM jeweler monk (retired) who is master in all languages.

Let's go back to the recipes and cheat site thing for a moment. I didn't want to be known as a "cheat site". It sounded so, well, dirty, to me. So for the first several months, I didn't list recipes at all on the site! However, we found so many inaccuracies in the in-game recipe books (sandwiches, which were broken for the first couple months come to mind), that I slowly added in a /secrets directory, not linked to the main site, and started spreading the word by word-of-mouth regarding where it was hiding.

There wasn't a lot there, as this was while alchemy was still totally broken, banded armor was THE best player made armor, reinforced armor was THE best thing that could be made for monks, and it often took us weeks after a patch to find the new recipes, and sometimes months for drops and such to be found/fixed, but it was a start.

Things have changed a lot in the last 4 years with tradeskills, and this is now a "community" not a cheat site, but one thing still stays the same. I'm still addicted to tradeskills!

[Sotako Yatako]

All info upto here copyed and pasted to file on comp.
I swear one day when i get the chance i will get this artical done, with re-enrolling in school and RL getting shot to heck in a handbasket I have not had much time to get this done.
I love some of the storys in here

[Faymar]

At some point in 1999 I got an email from a friend saying "You HAVE TO play this game."

I bought the game without checking the specs and got home to find that my computer did not have anywhere near what it needed to run EQ.

Christmastime, my boyfriend and I realised we needed a new PC and I found the dusty old box and showed him the system specs. So it was in the beginning of 2000 that I finally got to play the game.

I rolled a woodelf warrior and began to look around Kelethin. With much difficulty I found person referred to in my note and promptly typed "say" without the / and saw my very first LOADING PLEASE WAIT screen.

It took me two hours to find my corpse to get my note back. I was very close to quitting the game at that point (starting a new character didn't occur to me) and I think it was only the fact that we'd bought a PC specified on EQ that made me keep at it.

Things went better after that, my boyfriend watched me play and within a week had rolled a character of his own to play with. It took about another 10 days for us to realise that one account/one EQ-capable PC was going to lead to the end of the relationship. His PC was upgraded, his character restarted on his own account, and life was good.

I'm not sure what made me realise tradeskills were in game, I know it was baking that I found first. I had no idea spoiler sites existed, I wandered without maps and certainly without recipes. Possibly I saw the oven in Kelethin and began asking people in game.

I know I bought all the cookbooks, filled a notebook with scribblings out of them for reference, excitely found the baking vendor outside of Kaladim and began travelling back and forth between Kaladim and Kelethin after every killing session.

It was much much later that I discovered that Felwithe had all the same goods available.

I learned about the different continents, I learned about boats, eventually I learned about ports. There was no way I had the money to pay for these ports though, so I learned to sell my wares.

/shout Fed-up young woodelf runnning away from home looking for a lift! Will supply sandwiches and beer for the journey!

I bought the beer ... I didn't know how to brew.

I'd hit an exciting level 15, uberness (in the form of having a last name) was within reach. Someone I knew from a usenet newsgroup sent me an email saying they'd formed a guild and would I like to join them. A guildinvite box popped up, so I just accepted. Seemed the simplest option.

A druid in the guild of an amazingly high level (probably level 35? Higher than I would ever achieve, anyway) saw me in Freeport, handed me a stack of snake scales, and took me to a brew barrel.

How exciting, I was brewing! She continued to hand me snake scales and asking my skill until I trivialed, at which point she started handing me stacks of vegetables. I remember begging her to let me stop ... this was my first powerskilling experience and I didn't like it. She finally let me off the hook when Khalish trivialed, just to take me to East Karana to help her collect silks.

Tailoring? Hadn't even occurred to me. We killed spiders (well, she did, I ran around trying to look effective) and combined them on the spot to save on space (silks didn't stack).

Meanwhile I'd had enough sense to do searches on Everquest terms and found a site that listed all the recipe book texts. I'm sure EQtraders existed then but I completely and utterly failed to find it, and continued with my notebook of successes/failures as my main reference. If you got a recipe wrong, you lost all the ingredients, so it was pretty important that you looked it up rather than tried to remember.

The woodelf warrior was retired at level 17 and replaced with a woodelf bard who got her song money by baking and busking (someone once gave me 10pp for a song, I was in heaven!). One evening after going to the pub I found I was too drunk to twist, and created a cleric, halfling only because there was a guild officer in Rivervale at the time who could invite me on the spot.

Finally, with the cleric I GM'd baking. I'd found EQtraders by then, what a godsend. Baking was still hard though...countless corpses in Lesser Fay trying to get more brownie parts, the only way up after pies. Cinnapixie sticks went into the game, and I remember glaring at Iustus, who had access to dragon meat *wail*, auctioning for cinnamon sticks at 5pp each in Greater Fay. Luclin was released and I saved centi parts for ages, before running out of space and selling them. The next patch, of course, had Centi Steaks and Stew. :P

Jagged Pine changed all that of course. I went away for a week, came back, and found that my 189 baking was no longer impressive. Three people in the guild, starting from scratch, had 191. I threw in the towel at that point, swore I would never bake again.

It was probably two weeks before I realised I was still buying up every type of meat I could find and checking EQtraders for new information and recipes. I went back to baking but on principle have never ever combined a patty melt. It's probably the only baking recipe in game that I've never tried, now.

Anyway, it's changed a lot. I'll concede that the changes were for the better in terms of getting players interested and involved in tradeskilling. But I'm glad I was around to experience it when "only the hardcore" bothered.