#8 - Wonki - Born 29 April 2000 - 15 days 6 hours

And so we come to the first of several anomalous characters we'll be meeting on this journey. Up to now, I've had very clear recollections of when and why I made each character and a fairly good idea what happened to them afterwards. Wonki, not so much.

I do remember how she got her name and it's quite embarassing. Wonki's full name is Wonki Donki. Back around the turn of the millennium, Ant and Dec were just entering their imperial phase as the ruling elite of British light entertainment television, a phase that continues a quarter of a century later and shows no sign of ever ending.

They had a show, I believe on Saturday mornings, about which I now remember absolutely nothing except that the kids watched it and it had a segment called Wonky Donkey. Mrs Bhagpuss and I found this highly amusing (The name, not the show.), which is why I pinched it for my character. 

Fortunately, since, as I mentioned before, at that time you needed to reach Level 20 before you could give your character a surname, when that time came I had come to my senses and realised that running around Norrath with a big sign over my head that effectively proclaimed "I'm an  Ant and Dec Fan" would be a very bad idea so Wonki never got her second name.

That much I remember. Here are some things I don't:

• Why I thought it would be a good idea to make a rogue.
• How she managed to get to Level 36.
• Why she's in The Abysmal Sea, a zone double her level.
• Why she's holding two mugs instead of weapons.

As I write this, a vague memory of the answers to the last two questions comes back to me but as to the first two...

I have never, ever gotten on with the Rogue/Thief class in any game. If I'm soloing, those are the classes that tend to be poor at it. If I'm grouping, I find having to get into a specific position behind or flanking the mob before being able to use half my skills intensely irritating. I also don't much like stealth or pickpocketing or anything at all to do with traps...

So why did I make a Rogue in EverQuest in 2000, when it was literally the most difficult class in the game to solo and was also next to useless in groups? Rogues back then were pretty much only ever invited into groups for specific dungeons that had locked doors and there were almost none of those. 

Honestly, I have no idea why I made a Rogue. I think she's the only one I ever made in EQ. I remember some desultory attempts to solo her and a few duos with Mrs Bhagpuss that didn't go well. We had very different playstyles for the first two or three years and it wasn't really until after we came back to EQ after a nearly a year in Dark Age of Camelot that we began to duo and join groups together.

By about 2002 we were in a guild together and a cross-guild chat channel, both of which did a great deal of group content. Most people in both had multiple characters of different levels and I did take Wonki out a few times but she was way down my list of choices. I find it hard even to imagine how she ever got into the mid-30s. 

[Edit: reading this back after posting, I suddenly remembered it happened when Mercenaries got added to the game. Now Wonki had a tank in her pocket and could use her roguely skills without needing a group. I played her for a few sessions just for the novelty value of actually being able to backstab things at last. It got boring quite quickly though, so I stopped playing her again not long after.)

As for why she's in Abysmal Sea, dual-wielding two mugs instead of daggers, that'll be be because there's a major trading center there, which used to be a key place to go to buy spells among other things. As for the mugs, those would be the +15 charisma Opal Encrusted Steins everyone used to use when they bought and sold stuff to NPCs back then.

For a long time, EverQuest had a complex system of open and hidden factions that affected all kinds of things, one of which being vendor prices. I became fascinated by it at one point, to the extent of visiting every NPC in East and West Commonlands with the same character, checking how much they'd give me for the same items. I remember writing it all down in a notebook to see if I could work out why apparently identical shopkeepers were charging such different amounts. I never really got to the bottom of it. Higher Charisma always got you better prices, though.

One thing Rogues were good for was shopping. All NPCs would trade with you if you were classed as Neutral and for some reason they treated a Rogue who opened a shop interface from behind, while sneaking, as Neutral, even if they normally hated that class or race or faction. Of course, they also had to be able to See Invisible or they wouldn't know you were there at all, although if you were careful you could sneak behind, then drop stealth and they'd still be fooled.

Or at least that's how I remember it. I may well have gotten some of that wrong. It was a long time ago and changes made in later years pretty much made that kind of shenanigans pointless. There were so many easily accessible trading hubs like Plane of Knowledge, where everyone was automatically neutral, I rarely bothered going anywhere else to buy or sell.

And yet, despite all of the negatives, I still think quite fondly of Wonki. Mostly, somewhat ironically, because of her name, which I still find funny, even though it's now associated with something even more excruciatingly embarassing than Ant and Dec's silly game. Not so fondly I'd ever play her again, of course, but it was fun to be reminded of her and her antics once more.