Why must we donate to be able to access the plugins? You didn't write most of them you just found them across the net. This is for EMU afterall and as I am a lifetime member at RG/Mq2Vip/Mmobugs I don't see the point in another site with limited content. The only plugin I am actually interested in here is MQ2Cast.

Welcome, and first off thanks for visiting my site. Also thanks for giving me the opportunity to answer this question. The short and simple answer is.

For the same reason RG/Mq2Vip/Mmobugs exists.

The somewhat longer answer consists of several parts. Community, Reinbursement, Work, Specicifity, and Support.

You must keep in mind that the primary functions of this site are free. There are many many functions on this site that lend people the ability to enhance their game play. The knowledge base is huge, and more accurate to PEQ The Grand Creation than ANY site out. Our search pages, while base on the prepackaged alla browser, are significantly more accurate. Many errors have been corrected, and new features added. A registration is the only thing standing between a user and a basic build of MQ. The Registration doesnt event require an email address, it can be done literally in about 15 seconds. I've brought in every tool I could think of to make this a one stop EQEmu Community. Load up the free MQ build from the registered forum. Start it up, target any NPC and type /info target. You will be brought directly to that NPC's page and be able to see everything they drop, everywhere they spawn, and all their stats, you can even click their vNPC link and virtually chat with them, and complete quests without the risk of doing it in game, or the time requried to gather resources.

I'm a stay at home dad, a disabled veteran that lives off of disability for a brain condition that is similar to chiari malformation. I say this not to get pitty, but to illustrate that while paying for hosting to help other people out with their gameplay does make me feel accomplished, and usefull it isn't at the top of the financial priorities. I'm not expecting every member of the EQEmu community to come and give me money. I'm hopefull of a handfull that can come and offset the costs of hosting this project.

All the pages of this site haven't just appeared. And while the bulk of the site is based off of COTS software it has required a great deal of coding and preparation, in the neighborhood of 100's of hours. There are many features not yet coded, take a look at a spell scroll, or a bag in the item search area. Correcting the display of those to look just like EQ will take an hour or two. The virtual NPC Center can't handle about 5% of the quest NPC's out there because their scripts make obscure function calls that aren't handled by the parser yet. To get it completely up to speed will be in the neighborhood of about 15 hours of coding.

This is the meat, specicifity. Nowhere on the internet can you get support specialized to specifically EQ Emu, I wanted to fill that void with this site. Not just a place to chat, not just a place to DL basic MQ, not just a place to look up NPCs that is 99.999% accurate, not just a development community for custom MQ plugins, but something that everyone who plays on an Emu server could come to appreciate as services built specifically for them. Instead of an afterthought on a forum built around servicing EQ Live.

As you said most of these plugins have been authored by other people, for the current EQ though. I'm maintaining a library of plugins backported specifically for use with EQEmu. This isn't just a place to download MQ2Cast, its a place to request that MQ2Cast be modified to take advantage of a unique EQEmu differance. For example the EmuWarp is simple MQ2Warp that has been altered to better performance on Emu. /warpsave <location> has been added, and it allowes you say stand at yelinaks feet and save your location. The next day you can zone into skyshrine and /warpto yelinak. I have coded on about 75% of the plugins available in the pay forums, and that isnt counting anything required for the backporting. If that is considered i've codedon 100%. If you where to go download MQ2Warp from fry or unknown405 or any of those guys out there you would very likely, and very fast accidently set off warp detection. Thats because that software isn't written for us... This software is. With MQ2EmuWarp you can set a warp throttle, /warpthrottle 100. Then if you target an npc, and /warp target, and itis 101 away you will get an error message. This will prevent you from setting of the unique emu warp detection.

In summation it is also important to understand that this is purely voluntary, and if you are not comfortable with paying then please just use the free portions of the site. I must say that I found your post interesting in that it felt as though you questioned the validity of our site. You also questioned the availability of our plugins "across the net", yet your are a paying member at the top 3 MQ sites on the internet and they can't provide you with a MQ2Cast curtailed to EQEmu servers/software. I've noticed that void too.

Again, thank you for your question, i truely do appreciate the opportunity to convey that message to someone who wants it, and welcome to MQEmulator. I hope you find some of the services usefull.

TheConquistador

Well, first off I am not a paying member of any of the sites. I listed that I was a Lifetime member. I've never once paid for a membership as I generally provide Plugins, Macros, and other helpful tidbits. I've been in the MQ Community for a very long time and just recently returned as I'm currently over in Egypt on a work contract. Being back to EQ only a week now I've been slowly backporting all the current plugins from live I need. Also, serveral days ago I started working on making MQ2 updated to the most current release. This in itself is quite a bit of work and if I had seen that I would of given you more credit.

You've also stated that your site is built around PEQ which I do not play on. I am not knocking you for charging for access to your site as I understand it requires money to host and maintain as well as your time. From what I saw so far I felt as if you were just taking other peoples work and combining it in one place with all the credit.

Are you playing on one of the custom servers? I picked PEQ because it has one of the largest populations, obviously their database is public, and a large majority of the other servers run some form of PEQ's database. I had hoped that it would be close enough for most to still be able to use, even alot of the custom servers still maintain alot of the NPCs records, they just move em around. Aparently its cooler if Cazic thule spawns in nexus and sells epic weapons =P

Lol, thank post made me laugh. I am currently playing on the Scars of Amerous server. Its an interesting change after playing Shards of Dalaya for a couple months. So, here is a question for you. Will you have a public forum where others can post their plugins/macros. If so I'll gladly post alot of my work once its completed.