The flying carpet has long been my least favorite mount in EverQuest II. I have disliked it since it showed up as part of the Desert of Flames expansion nearly 6 years ago.
While I was not very enthusiastic about the whole “Arabian Nights” theme of the expansion, at least the desert and the city of Maj’Dul stayed put. I could sit in Qeynos or wherever and ignore the whole thing if I so desired.
But the flying carpets, they ended up everywhere. A rare novelty at first, they soon seemed to reproduce beyond all reason. Their eventual ubiquity and theme breaking nature kept the embers of my grudge against them going for years. I still groan when I see something like this, which is all too often:
Horrible Fantasy Mash Up!
This picture should be hung up as a warning.
First we have a dwarf, in his pajamas I think, wearing something like a coolie hat, on a flying carpet, in the frozen city of New Halas. And then, just to cap it off, there is a half-dressed woman riding a unicorn in the background. The full effect of this scene could only be increased if it were painted on black velvet… or on the side of a van with custom rims.
And that the flying carpet has remained the subject of my ire for so long is actually quite remarkable when you have seen some of the truly ugly mounts SOE sells in the Station Cash Marketplace. There are mounts in there that I would be embarrassed to ever ride in public.
But those eyesores remain rare, while I still run into flying carpets quite frequently.
However, a different mount has begun to annoy me more that the flying carpets. It is both equally ubiquitous and an serious eyesore to boot.
The mount of which I speak is the gnomish hover-disk things with the propellers.
Frog on a Blender
These make the flying carpets look good. (And nice fae on a dinosaur in the background, yet another picture/warning comb I think.)
I mean, the flying carpet just explains its existence with magic. Speed, hovering, the inability to fly more than a foot off the ground, all aspects of the magic that makes them go.
The hover disk thing… and I really do not know what they are officially called… explains itself through gnomish technology. I guess the hover is then some sort of repulser field or gravity polarization or some such. Fine, go see Arthur Clarke’s third law for that one.
But then there are the propellers on the back, which imply that they are the source or propulsion. Only they move at a constant and relatively slow speed. It just makes the whole thing look goofy, not to mention raising the question, “If you can press against gravity to lift, why can you press against it to move forward?”
And they just look like crap in my opinion, which is probably the key item for me.
So a new “worst mount in EQ2” for me.
But maybe I will see less of them. One of the reasons to upgrade to some of the awful mounts in the game is to get a faster run speed. However, SOE recently chose to change that, and now all ground mounts move at the same speed, giving a 130% speed boost over base character run speed.
Which is freaking fast, given that before this an expensive mount from the Marketplace used to provide an unmatched 65% speed boost. Everything is now twice as fast, which seems like a pretty random change to more than just me it seems.
The idea seems to be to make the key difference in mounts appearance rather than run speed, which is really odd, since EQ2 has a mount appearance slot. You can equip one mount and then have it look like another. (So those flying disk people want to look like that on purpose!)
Anyway, maybe this will lead to fewer ugly mounts out and about. Of course ugly is subjective. I am sure there are people out there who love their flying disk.
But for now you first quest mount is as fast on the ground as anything you can buy.
Speed - We Haz It!
Of course there are now new leaping, gliding, and flying mounts with which to contend. I haven’t even started to form an opinion on that.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 