#11 - Poppette - Born 5 August 2000 - 6 days 10 hours #12 Coutts - Born 16 February 2001 - 9 days 4 hours

And now we come to a curious hiatus in the story. Up to now it's been nothing but a continous stream of new characters, some born from my never-ending search for a class that could solo and make it feel like fun, others so I could join in the excitement whenever a new server opened, something that seemed to happen almost every other week back then.

All of those characters stand out very clearly in my memory and the more I write about them, the more incidents and anecdotes come back to me. In a while, we'll get to my most-played characters of all, about each of whom I have far more to say than would fit into a single post.

Right now though, in the twelve months between the summers of aught and '01, I only made two new characters. They were both Enchanters and I have very little to say about either of them. 

After that, just to offer up a spoiler for the next post in the series, I made one more character for a very specific purpose, which I'll get to next time, and then there were no more new characters for over a year. The reason for that is very simple: I didn't play EverQuest for a year, from October 2001 until October 2002. 

I still had an account. I didn't unsubscribe. In those days you didn't dare in case they wiped your characters. I think the Terms & Conditions said they'd hold them for three months but I wouldn't have risked it. 

In practise, I don't believe Sony Online Entertainment or Verant or whoever was nominally running the show back then ever deleted anyone's characters. They were a bit more on the ball than that from the get-go, realizing they needed to keep the barrier to re-entry low enough to allow all those rage-quitters to have second and third thoughts and come sheepishly creeping back, as so many did.

It was very much in their interest at that stage to let people feel they might lose their characters if they didn't keep paying, though. Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen could have been the motto of most MMORPG devs in those days. All that touchy-feely, we really value your custom stuff came later.

Writing this, I find myself really surprised to see just how tenuous EQ's hold on me must have been. In the lore of my life it feels like I was a hugely committed player, verging at times on being addicted, as so many ex-EQ players claimed to have been, once they got clean. 

I'm not sure the facts entirely support that interpretation. I certainly played a lot of hours but I don't think I truly became embedded in the culture until after my return from where Mrs. Bhagpuss and I went in October 2001, which was, of course, to the newly-launched Dark Age of Camelot. 

DAOC was where I learned to play MMORPGs in the "right" way. I joined my first two guilds there, never having bothered with anything so scary in Norrath. I learned how to do PvP, both open world and in instanced battlegrounds and found that wasn't scary, either. In fact, I enjoyed it. 

I didn't quite reach max level in DAOC but I got a lot closer than I had in EQ. When I came back to EverQuest, I was a different player, ready to do things differently. And I did.

But before that, I must have been close to running out of steam with EverQuest. A lot of the things I've talked about in previous posts in this series must have happened during the period covered by the creation of the two characters in this post, when I settled down and played all those characters I'd made.

I think I pretty much just pottered about for a year or so, juggling a dozen characters across half a dozen servers, mostly soloing but grouping on weekends - always pick-up groups - slowly meandering my way acoss Norrath doing nothing much in particular.

It's no wonder I was ready for a change and yet I'm quite astonished, looking back, to see that I must have been all but burnt out on EQ after not much more than a year. To have recovered from that ennui to go on to play the game for a quarter of a century and still be writing about it now seems incredible. Of course, although I had no way of knowing it at the time, the best really was yet to come.

As for the two characters at the top of this post, I do have a couple of things to say about them, not least why they're called what they're called. One thing that also suprised me a little as I was putting this series together was how much the names told me about the characters themselves.

For the longest time, I made up new names for every character I ever made. We haven't yet reached the first character whose name I repeated and it's only in very recent times that I've taken to using variations on the same name as a matter of course. 

Back at the turn of the millennium I was still in thrall to concepts of roleplaying I'd learned at the
tabletop in the mid-eighties. It took a long time to break those chains and learn to play each new game without lugging along the baggage of the past. One of the dictates of the kind of roleplaying I indulged in then was that every character was entirely unique. Another was that my characters were never me. Of course they all had to have individual names.

Which apparently didn't mean they had to have serious names. Or sensible names. Or even roleplaying names. 

Popette is named after the sister of a friend of mine. I never knew her well although I met her plenty of times. I even went to see My Life Story in London with her once. 

She, naturally, did not go by the name of "The Poppette". That was how her brother referred to her. I don't think I ever heard him use her real name. He named her that because of her interest in popular music, something he affected to find outre, since his own schtick was dressing and acting like he was about thirty years older than he actually was.

It was also somewhat of an ironic epithet, since the music she enjoyed would hardly have been described as "pop" by anyone other than a grandparent. She was reputed to have the largest collection of Velvet Underground bootlegs in England for a start.

I wanted a light-hearted, fun character so I made an Enchanter, god forgive me. I still had no clue. I'd always found the name "The Poppette" highly amusing so I stole it. I would have loved to be able to keep the definite article but EQ didn't allow it so I settled for just "Poppette".

Coutts, on the other hand, is named for the bank long preferred by the Royal Family. There was a branch near where I lived for a while. I named my new gnome after a financial institution because he was supposed to be my banker and I made him an Enchanter because bank alts are supposed to go unplayed and after my time with Popette I was about as certain as I could be that Enchanter was a class I wanted nothng more to do with.

I don't know how things stand now but back in the day, the two classes considered to have the highest skill floor were Bards and Enchanters. The former required you learn to "twist", which meant swapping between several short-term abilities non-stop so they were all running simultaneously. It required very high dexterity and a lot of concentration and I never even began to manage it, which is why you won't be reading about any bards here, or at least not any played me.

Enchanters didn't require such manual manipulation but they were ferociously dangerous to play well because of both the Mesmerisation and Charm lines of spells. Several classes got some form of both but Enchanters got the top-end versions. 

One of the Enchanter's key roles in a group was to lock down adds using Mesmerisation spells. I was okay with mezzing. It's crowd control and that was something I both enjoyed and wasn't at all bad at. Over the years I did plenty of it as a Necro, a Cleric, a Beastmaser and others. 

The downside of doing CC as an Enchanter, though, was that people would keep breaking Mez. It happened all the time and when it did the mob generally wasn't mad at the last person who'd hit it, it was mad at the Enchanter who'd mezzed it in the first place. Being an Enchanter in a group meant constantly having angry mobs barrel through the rest of the group to get to you. I spent more time yelling for people to "get this damn thing off me!" than I did fighting, or at least it sometimes felt that way.

That, however, was nothing in terms of risk compared to charming a mob and making it act like your pet. Really good Enchanters did that all the time and made it look both easy and incredibly effecient. Mobs in EQ have far more power and strength than regular, docile player-pets, especially when buffed up, so it can be hugely advantageous to have a charmed pet on dps duties.

Until it breaks charm, that is. Then it comes straight for the Enchanter and kills them before starting on the rest of the group. Great Enchanters can deal with that so quickly and effectively the rest of the group don't even notice. Good Enchanters might require a bit of assistance before they get their slave back in the shackles. 

All the other Enchanters, which always seemed to be about ninety per cent of them when I was pugging, claimed they knew what they were doing, insisted on charming a pet even when asked not to, then lost control of it on the first pull and had no idea how to deal with the chaos they'd caused. 

When I played either of my enchanters, I was none of the above. I went to quiet areas where no-one would see me to experiment with charming mobs, something I did a few times with almost no success at all. I later spent quite a few sessions duoing with an Enchanter who charmed mobs as if there was nothing to it, so I got to see how it was done, but I never learned to do it myself and pretty soon I gave up trying.

Which, ironically, actually made me more popular in pick-up groups, because if there's one thing no-one in a PUG wants their Enchanter to do it's charm a damn pet. Just like the one thing no-one wanted the Cleric to do was melee. I pugged with plenty of both of those types, unfortunately, but I never commited any such faux pas on either class. I knew my job.

And my job was not playing an Enchanter. I wasn't confident enough with Charm to use it solo, which was how the class got a rep for being great at soloing. I just plodded along with my summoned "Animation", a sub-class of pet that only reacted when I was attacked and couldn't be given instructions. At least it never tried to kill me.

Soloing was a chore but grouping could be fun, not that I got many offers then. I got a lot more grouping in on my third Enchanter, who we'll meet later. He used to volunteer as Duty Enchanter on Babies' Day Out, a fun little event for low-level alts one of the guilds I joined on my return to EverQuest post-DAOC used to run. 

Poppette ended up taking over from Rachelsunday as Nickolai's ammanuensis and probably spent more time in the bank than Coutts ever did. Mostly, though, I left the enchanting to those who knew how to do it properly. Poppette and Coutts just bumbled along, going nowhere. And yet it seems I remember quite a bit more about the pair of them than I thought I would.

 Enough for this post, anyway.