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Funny - No EverQuest - A horror story (1 Viewer)

Joined
Sep 24, 2016
RedCents
3,548¢
So for some background to start - last week sucked it up for me. I was finishing my end of quarter / end of year at work which is a lot of HR tasks. Finishing up pay planning for my team, doing appraisals including a self-appraisal, request and reviewing feedback on team members and myself, just all around would rather be out in the labs than doing this kind of work and I don't even do lab work anymore. Then on Thursday I get a text from my wife, we just had a big power flicker at the house. This is pretty un-common in our area. The power infrastructure in my neighborhood is all buried, so no power poles etc. We are also pretty close to a sub-station, so even if something goes wrong on the other side we are typically shielded from it. So I don't think much of it, until I get home to discover that my battery back up is dead - and for some reason my gaming PC has no internet.

WTF is this - everything else in the house is working. The system was on the surge protect side of the back-up, so even if it didn't shut down gracefully it should not have eaten a surge right. Run diagnostics all over the system - nothing is helping. I moved the cable to a laptop to check it. Laptops works fine. Plug it back in to big gamer - nada. Change switch ports -nope. Change cable even though I already checked it - negative. Pull the cable off of my jedi box that runs SWG all the time and was unaffected - still nope. I can see an IP table, but I can get no access to the outside world. Did I fry the nic card somehow? Order a new nic just to be sure - because NO PLACE IN TOWN has them on a shelf..... seriously!?! 2 walmarts, 2 bestbuys, 1 office depot later I am ordering from Amazon and it cannot be overnighted. In the end - I waited until Saturday for the new nic - it still did not fix the issue. I had to load a fresh image onto the rig and set everything back up. Below are the "travel journals" that I texted to my play group during the days. Enjoy.

Day 1 without EQ - I tell myself It's not the end of the world. We can't play EQ live or P99, but I have a lot of other games I can play right? As it turns out - no. Since we have no access to anything we can't connect to our steam library or our blizzard library. Can't spend the evening playing on DnD Beyond theory crafting toons because we have no internet. Is this how non-gamers spend their evenings? Watching television without several screens of gaming going on? Weak! What if I just reorganize the entire desk to bring the jedi-box out of the corner and try to set it all up for gaming? Nah - that will take forever, it doesn't have anything loaded. I know! I can use my laptop and play one of my characters to at least get my fix. Can't do P99 since it's not set up, but I can roll one of my live toons. We log in - let's try to get something done. We leave PoK. We are all alone in the world for the first time in years. Where the hell are my maps? Oh right, no Brewal or MQ2. Why aren't you running to the zone like I told you on the spiffy line.... dammit - see previous statement. Im so alone. I feel so vulnerable without my team. It's cold out here. Is this really how normal people play EQ? Just one toon at a time? Peasants! This is only making it worse. Im going to bed....

Day 2 without EQ - Tried to make eq work on my linux box, it has enough power to run my whole team. Came to the conclusion of screw everything about gaming on linux. What if I just run all the laptops separately and go super old school. Desk isn't big enough, daughter screams when I try to take her school laptop. Seemed logical for a minute. Cold sweats have begun to set in. Winter is coming. Cold is the hour upon which our discontent is at it's peak. I have left multiple small brown parcels on the porch while camping the door for the FedEx man. Not much material left to forage here. May have to leave my camp in search of supplies. The wife has locked the door. May need a rogue to get back into the bosses room. This dungeon may be above my level range. Reality may be slipping away. I can't find my camp button to sleep safely. I agro'd the small one again. Loading... please wait.

Day 3 without EQ - Wife tries to distract me with family Switch time. Not my normal self in Mario Kart - missing my power slides. Haven't won a single race. This is not helping. I catch myself missing my comfy gaming chair, headphones, and the glorious sound of EQ logging in 6 toons at a time. Such a distant memory now, this new world is not my happy place. I don't fit in with these, normals. Let's just do house chores. Yeah, that will keep my mind busy while I wait for the Fed-Ex man. Sweep and mop in the kitchen. No packages. Run the vacuum in the living room and office. Still no. Hurry up man! Grab the little vacuum and do the stairs. Nothing. Help the wife reorganize the living room and hang some pictures. Knock knock.. Get outta my way! Violate every covid rule by tackling the Fed Ex man. GIVE IT TO ME!! It is mine at last, the key to my salvation. Dig up the rig from behind my wall of monitors. Deftly remove case screws and quickly install new card. Carefully place her back in her perch. Power her up. The green glow of the case fans behind the screens sends a wave of comfort down my spine. WHAT THE F*&$ !! So no! Call my network security and infrastructure friend. Spend 2 hours going over everything. It has come to this. Back up my files to the game drive. Double check everything. Dig up my USB CD-Rom, load a fresh image. Spend hours patching, downloading, putting everything back in it's place. EQ check. P99 check. Steam & Discord. Yup and yup. Blizzard loader - that bitch can wait. AVG - done. All drivers in place. Sound system is a go. All 5 screens are ready to go again. Pull down the RedGuides loader. Align all my folders. Everything seems in order. Hmm, no profiles. It's okay, let's just get the main team up and going. New profile. Launch all 6. Glorious. I feel the tension leaving my neck and spine. The world is right. Slam the start button. Nothing happens. Umm. Why aren't they in my group. Everyone is just standing around. OMG. Did I ?.... How did I not ....... I didn't back up my MQ2 folder!!!! No macros, no ini files, all of my settings and pre-fab groups. NOOOOOOOOOO! Honey its time for the superbowl - screw football! Just leave the snacks at the office door, I have 3 years of macros and teams to rebuild from scratch....

Moral of the story - always back up all of your folders gang. ALL of your folders.
 
Thanks for the tip on the backup. I would be lost if I lost my folders. Can anyone suggest what to backup? I have Dropbox - if that helps.

On a side note: surge protectors that are bought from stores do not help against near lightning strikes. They are several magnitudes off.
The same goes for large surges - though they aren't nearly on the scale of lightning. I'll try to remember where one can find out how large any given surge was - I used to know how to find that.

And notice that I put near lightning strikes, not hits. There isn't anything over the counter that will protect you if you get hit by lightning - that is what insurance of for (and backups). If your house does get "hit" get out. Even if you don't find a fire right away, it can light later due to the wires being superheated in your walls. Don't go back in your home until the FD has checked it with thermal cameras/scopes. Take some comfort in knowing that in a "hit" not everything gets fried - you're at the whims of chance. Though low voltage usually takes the brunt of the damage, which includes cable modems if you have your PC direct connected.

Kinda funny that I'm proofreading this and thinking what a dumb-shit I am for knowing all this and not thinking to backup!
 
I run MacroQuest out of One Drive. From the EQ folder, I symlink all of my ini files, (UI, Character, etc) my UI folders, my trader ini and my Advanced Loot filters back to Dropbox so they are automatically backed up.
 
This is what I'm dealing with right now. 130am, power goes off, on, flickers a bunch, then off for good. Finally find the number to report it(here, it has to be reported or they won't fix it) since it wasn't on the mail they sent us yesterday, and without power we have no cell service OR internet. 930am, it comes back on.

During the initial flickering I hear a loud pop by the stove, find out it blew an LED light strip. Go to turn ony computers, my UPS is off. Turn it on, start turning on machines...half won't come on, the other half shit off in 30 seconds: the UPS isn't getting any power to recharge, much less power 4 machines, 8 external drives, and 4 monitors.(1500w UPS). That is plugged into a surge protector because there's no other way to reach an outlet in our 130yrold house with 2 outlets in a 15x25' room. Said surge protector has a dim light on it power button, but the cordless phone charger/dock, is dead, the nightlight to see without breaking toes lol..is dark, and the other fat plugs I'm sure weren't working either,whatever they go to lol. Turn it off and back on, verify it DOES have a faint light, it's not the sun doing it..still nothing. Go to basement, flip some breakers off and on that have orange flecks in their window, though hubby the electrician has already flipped breakers twice since the outage...orange flecks disappear, and apparently lights get brighter in his sister's room, but still nothing for my entire computer area. So now, I have to go find a 7+ outlet surgeprotector with a 6-8' cord, and widely spread outlets do that the 7 fat ac-adaptors can all plug into it...locally...where we have nothing but a Walmart, GameStop,and Lowe's. If I'm lucky, the radio shack might not be closed like I think it is, bit either way...a very odd powerstrip to begin with needs replacing, and I need to move a 300lb dresser to plug it in, before I can load any of my machines up for eq.

I was about to make a post about hating powerouttages,when this one just happened to fit lol. Never had any issues with other outages, including ones with brownouts and flickering at the start...but this one...ugh. 5 breakers had been flipped off the bat according to hubby, a pita surge protector killed(no, there's no other reset button anywhere I searched) and apparently several other breakers were damaged or something and may need flipping more times, or replacing, to fix. Fun. I wish the prices on your traders we're at least saved server side so I could loaded in on a laptop long enough to put in offline mode lol, every day without my traders is .5-1.5 Kronos I lose. I've already been lazy for several days on the game, but I kept the traders stocked and whatnot lol.

So, I'm off to scour the lands for a very specific surgeprotector, likely to fail, and either buy another batter backup or come home empty handed and have to order online. If only we lived somewhere Amazon does 1hr deliveries instead of 1+ weeks...
 
I run MacroQuest out of One Drive. From the EQ folder, I symlink all of my ini files, (UI, Character, etc) my UI folders, my trader ini and my Advanced Loot filters back to Dropbox so they are automatically backed up.

WTF is symlink?! Is that a paid feature of drop box or did you have something else setup?
 
Built in Windows command mklink. It creates a symbolic link or a junction to a file or directory. It means that you can reference the file from either the symbolic location or the actual location. But everything points to a single file.

In this case, the symlinks are in the EQ directory, but the actual file sits in my One Drive. Easy way to just backup your configuration without backing up all of EQ, but it also means all of my settings are portable to multiple computers.
 
So for some background to start - last week sucked it up for me. I was finishing my end of quarter / end of year at work which is a lot of HR tasks. Finishing up pay planning for my team, doing appraisals including a self-appraisal, request and reviewing feedback on team members and myself, just all around would rather be out in the labs than doing this kind of work and I don't even do lab work anymore. Then on Thursday I get a text from my wife, we just had a big power flicker at the house. This is pretty un-common in our area. The power infrastructure in my neighborhood is all buried, so no power poles etc. We are also pretty close to a sub-station, so even if something goes wrong on the other side we are typically shielded from it. So I don't think much of it, until I get home to discover that my battery back up is dead - and for some reason my gaming PC has no internet.

WTF is this - everything else in the house is working. The system was on the surge protect side of the back-up, so even if it didn't shut down gracefully it should not have eaten a surge right. Run diagnostics all over the system - nothing is helping. I moved the cable to a laptop to check it. Laptops works fine. Plug it back in to big gamer - nada. Change switch ports -nope. Change cable even though I already checked it - negative. Pull the cable off of my jedi box that runs SWG all the time and was unaffected - still nope. I can see an IP table, but I can get no access to the outside world. Did I fry the nic card somehow? Order a new nic just to be sure - because NO PLACE IN TOWN has them on a shelf..... seriously!?! 2 walmarts, 2 bestbuys, 1 office depot later I am ordering from Amazon and it cannot be overnighted. In the end - I waited until Saturday for the new nic - it still did not fix the issue. I had to load a fresh image onto the rig and set everything back up. Below are the "travel journals" that I texted to my play group during the days. Enjoy.

Day 1 without EQ - I tell myself It's not the end of the world. We can't play EQ live or P99, but I have a lot of other games I can play right? As it turns out - no. Since we have no access to anything we can't connect to our steam library or our blizzard library. Can't spend the evening playing on DnD Beyond theory crafting toons because we have no internet. Is this how non-gamers spend their evenings? Watching television without several screens of gaming going on? Weak! What if I just reorganize the entire desk to bring the jedi-box out of the corner and try to set it all up for gaming? Nah - that will take forever, it doesn't have anything loaded. I know! I can use my laptop and play one of my characters to at least get my fix. Can't do P99 since it's not set up, but I can roll one of my live toons. We log in - let's try to get something done. We leave PoK. We are all alone in the world for the first time in years. Where the hell are my maps? Oh right, no Brewal or MQ2. Why aren't you running to the zone like I told you on the spiffy line.... dammit - see previous statement. Im so alone. I feel so vulnerable without my team. It's cold out here. Is this really how normal people play EQ? Just one toon at a time? Peasants! This is only making it worse. Im going to bed....

Day 2 without EQ - Tried to make eq work on my linux box, it has enough power to run my whole team. Came to the conclusion of screw everything about gaming on linux. What if I just run all the laptops separately and go super old school. Desk isn't big enough, daughter screams when I try to take her school laptop. Seemed logical for a minute. Cold sweats have begun to set in. Winter is coming. Cold is the hour upon which our discontent is at it's peak. I have left multiple small brown parcels on the porch while camping the door for the FedEx man. Not much material left to forage here. May have to leave my camp in search of supplies. The wife has locked the door. May need a rogue to get back into the bosses room. This dungeon may be above my level range. Reality may be slipping away. I can't find my camp button to sleep safely. I agro'd the small one again. Loading... please wait.

Day 3 without EQ - Wife tries to distract me with family Switch time. Not my normal self in Mario Kart - missing my power slides. Haven't won a single race. This is not helping. I catch myself missing my comfy gaming chair, headphones, and the glorious sound of EQ logging in 6 toons at a time. Such a distant memory now, this new world is not my happy place. I don't fit in with these, normals. Let's just do house chores. Yeah, that will keep my mind busy while I wait for the Fed-Ex man. Sweep and mop in the kitchen. No packages. Run the vacuum in the living room and office. Still no. Hurry up man! Grab the little vacuum and do the stairs. Nothing. Help the wife reorganize the living room and hang some pictures. Knock knock.. Get outta my way! Violate every covid rule by tackling the Fed Ex man. GIVE IT TO ME!! It is mine at last, the key to my salvation. Dig up the rig from behind my wall of monitors. Deftly remove case screws and quickly install new card. Carefully place her back in her perch. Power her up. The green glow of the case fans behind the screens sends a wave of comfort down my spine. WHAT THE F*&$ !! So no! Call my network security and infrastructure friend. Spend 2 hours going over everything. It has come to this. Back up my files to the game drive. Double check everything. Dig up my USB CD-Rom, load a fresh image. Spend hours patching, downloading, putting everything back in it's place. EQ check. P99 check. Steam & Discord. Yup and yup. Blizzard loader - that bitch can wait. AVG - done. All drivers in place. Sound system is a go. All 5 screens are ready to go again. Pull down the RedGuides loader. Align all my folders. Everything seems in order. Hmm, no profiles. It's okay, let's just get the main team up and going. New profile. Launch all 6. Glorious. I feel the tension leaving my neck and spine. The world is right. Slam the start button. Nothing happens. Umm. Why aren't they in my group. Everyone is just standing around. OMG. Did I ?.... How did I not ....... I didn't back up my MQ2 folder!!!! No macros, no ini files, all of my settings and pre-fab groups. NOOOOOOOOOO! Honey its time for the superbowl - screw football! Just leave the snacks at the office door, I have 3 years of macros and teams to rebuild from scratch....

Moral of the story - always back up all of your folders gang. ALL of your folders.
HAHAHA! Nice writ'n jfrazi!
SO good, it makes me ponder COULD YOU BE THE ONE?!? Are you the Aesop of Redguides? You have taught us all an important lesson!
 
I had to play eq on satellite, for a couple of months when I went to visit my brother up in couer de alene quite a few years back... that was horror!
 
I had to play eq on satellite, for a couple of months when I went to visit my brother up in couer de alene quite a few years back... that was horror!
a couple months? i didnt even play for 5 1/2 years due to satellite internet- i did try with fake 4g(it was usable but very hard to get signal) tethered to my phone on one machine that then shared to a switch that then fed the other machines lol. that didnt last long, my sweetspot for signal disappeared after 6-7weeks. 2 years later FiOS says hello and i say hell yeah.
 
Is this really how normal people play EQ? Just one toon at a time? Peasants!

This is exactly how i felt when i tried to play on a truebox when Thornblade and Mischief was released... Needless to say... It was a horrible day, 4-5 hours of my life...

I'm super happy and content on Rizlona <3
 
Funny - No EverQuest - A horror story

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