I actually played day 1 of release and through Luclin, having a brief step away during Kunark but came back before Velious. Find it funny people knock ZAM comments all the time about 'no clue nerds' but then on the backhand use it for evidence. As with anything you use your judgement and find corroborating evidence of it where you can.

I think people forget the scope of all the servers that were available. Its not like P99 where there is 1 populated server farming or exploring. There were like 20? 30? 40? at the time, don't know the exact numbers. But that is a lot of data to capture.

There could be evidence out there elsewhere (one way or the other), but unfortunately nearly every EQ message board used EZ boards which don't allow wayback links.

I should have clarified the scenarios as the cords specifically being in the game as a dropped item off Kino or not. I assumed incorrectly that the discussion wasn't going to veer into the quest.

Your own post references comments about people camping vocal cords for weeks without seeing SWCs or vocal cords. You can find similar comments later on as well. In addition to this, I had posted some maths. Low% drop off low% spawn in area that is very difficult to camp (dangerous area behind locked door). Do you not find it plausible that it simply took a year for this drop to be reported somewhere?

My own anecdotal experience from live on Innoruuk is similar to Jans from the Rathe: Chardok was a pretty barren place. There'd often be a group at Castle Entrance or people exping on mobs at zone out, but that was about it. P99ers who didn't play on live dont realize that the majority of even uber raiding guilds weren't 60 until Luclin. A lot of "raiding" was bringing 2-3+ groups of 50+ to a zone like The Hole, Chardok, Sirens Grotto, Dragon Necropolis, etc. and just dungeon crawling with no specific targets in mind. That's how the majority of these zones got discovered and documented.

Even if there were 30 instances of revamped chardok the likelihood of there being farm groups holding down the royals area during live we're probably nil. The reality is that with the methods we use today nothing is really "rare" in the same sense as live. Honestly I won't be putting this item on my paladin so I really don't have a dog in the fight, but it seems wrong to claim these didn't drop in classic with 0 proof to back up the claim. Surely if they were added later there would be comments stating as much.

Nah I don't find that plausible, every other piece of Chardok loot was documented at least 6 months before that. Kino isn't a mob of Tunare difficulty where it makes sense the entire loot table wouldn't be discovered in a few month period.

If it dropped from Queen I would be more inclined to believe it came with the revamp, but a random sub-60 mob with no status as a zone "boss", no special skills, and no involvement with the quest says to me it was part of Verant's effort to make the game easier and they added it at the same time they quietly made all the other Chardok loot easier to obtain.

I can't think of a better piece of loot that's found on a non-raid mob in this era, or another high end quest that can be completely circumvented by killing an unrelated mob. The quest is specifically designed so it can't be started before level 51 but a lvl 5 can loot the final quest reward on P99. Regardless, my opinion is irrelevant.

Didn't see this before my post, loot was changed in Chardok with Luclin with no mention in patch notes. Why would this be any different?

Halfling Mask was declared a Myth and No longer dropped if not in all servers atleast on Povar until my brother camped it for a full week non stop 24/7 and got one then it started getting camped again. Of course people wont find superfarm a mob that they dont know that item drops, and who found out i doubt they were telling all people so they could compete. Pretty sure you get the memo when it dropped here and announced on forum right?

Those are all info Post Era, and lots of frustrated posts thinking it doesnt drop anymore, meaning it did drop and on live still drop, what else you need?

Pretty much this. Assling mask was a myth on bristlebane for a long time. Oh, and I sold Hammered Golden Hoops at 75k a pop. Why wasn't I in Luclin doing Luclin stuff for money?

The cords drop, let it be. They already made HGL no trade.

We have already removed these as a rare drop on p99 until there is definitive proof these dropped prior to Luclin.

It would otherwise be debatable whether developers added it as a drop months after the zone launched, or if it was always available but too rare to have been posted online (where we can still see it) during our timeline.

I'd think with this person's confirmation https://thesafehouse.org/forums/foru...347#post184347 they dropped on 2.0 release. Skimming through the rest of OP's sources lots of mentions of the rarity of it one person even going so far to say factioning/questing was easier. This makes me lean toward it always dropping just with a chance dwarfing the halfling mask.

removing them wasn't in the patch notes, why? if they're re-added in a future patch , can it be added in the patch notes please?