Hello Norrathians,
Because FashionQuest has always been my thing I dumped dozen of hours and tons of plat into Blacksmithing, tailoring, and brewing to get to make my own set of Adamantite plate. Now that I have the skill to try the combines I get the horrible “this does not combine” message when trying to make the Shadow Temper needed for the plate pieces.

It seems in live and p99 the mats for Shadow Temper are:
2x Essence of Shadow
1x Neriak Nectar
1x Elven blood
in a brewing barrel

After farming Nektulos Shadowed Men for days I have over 25 Shadowed Essence and no Essence of Shadow.

Look, as much I enjoyed banishing those void beings back to the ether, clearing Sister Island in the Ocean of Tears of loathsome Feir’dal, as well as producing enough small fine plate to arm The Fourth Gate, I’d love a set of fine hues to show for it.

Has anyone had success producing Teir’dal Adamantite plate?

P.S. Customer support says the cultural armors are in game and they can’t help with in game items. I’d like to think that maybe they are fallible. Please prove me wrong.

I played a level 52 Wizard around 2000–2003. Despite an embarrassing number of hours in EverQuest, I never made it to 60. Part of that was because I spent what felt like an entire summer in Lake of Ill Omen caught in an endless cycle of gaining XP, dying, losing it, getting it back, and dying again.

But mostly it was because somewhere along the way I stopped caring as much about leveling.

I had found another game inside EverQuest.

The East Commonlands Tunnel.

Before the Bazaar, the Tunnel was the economy. You stood there watching WTS, WTB and WTT messages scroll endlessly through /auc. You learned who was selling what, who needed platinum badly, what a Fungi was actually worth that night, and how long you could sit on something before finding the right buyer.

And EQL players: please start using /auc again. /1 is not the same. Seeing that auction spam flying past while people stood packed into the Tunnel was part of EverQuest.

I loved that economy more than leveling. Buy low. Sell high. Find someone unloading something cheaply, buy it, move twenty feet, sell it again. I knew the prices and I knew the people.

Eventually I figured out the most valuable currency in the Tunnel wasn't platinum. It was trust.

One of the biggest guilds on Morell-Thule at the time was <THUNDERWALKERS>. Even if you weren't in the guild, you recognized some of the names. One of them was Dolcemorte Baconeater.

So I made a level-one Human with a name similar enough to Baconeater.

I'd stand near the Tunnel and type:

/who all dolcemorte

If Dolcemorte was online, I waited.

If he wasn't:

/who thunderwalkers

Now I knew which Thunderwalkers members were in the Tunnel.

I'd find somebody selling something worth taking. Let's say a Fungus Covered Scale Tunic.

Then came the tell.

>Hey, it's Dolcemorte. I want the Fungi for my twink.

They knew Dolcemorte. They knew the guild or they were in the guild. That got me through the door.

But I learned something pretty quickly: you don't gain someone's trust by making the deal easy.

You negotiate.

If the Fungi was 35,000pp, I'd haggle. Come on, guild price. Too high. Knock a little more off. We'd go back and forth until eventually we had a deal.

Fun fact: negotiating hard actually made the scam work better.

By the end, the other guy wasn't thinking, Is this really Dolcemorte?

He was thinking, Jesus Christ, Dolcemorte is really busting my balls over this price.

That was exactly where I wanted him.

We'd meet at the front of the Tunnel. He'd put the Fungi in the trade window. I'd hit Accept.

Then I'd see his side turn green.

That little green button is probably the thing I remember most.

Because now everything came down to a few seconds.

Right before he accepted, I'd say:

>My main is camped here. I'll log over right after and give you the plat.

Which made perfect sense.

Of course Dolcemorte didn't have 30,000-plus platinum sitting on a level-one alt.

Click.

Trade complete.

Logout.

There was no main coming.

Sometimes I'd have four or five people waiting on the same character.

>Logging over in a sec.

>One second, buying something else first.

>BRB.

I'd keep everyone warm while trying to squeeze in one more item before the whole thing collapsed.

Eventually I got the message I knew was coming. It just took a lot longer than I expected a few weeks in fact.

YOU'RE NOT DOLCEMORTE.

Then the real Dolcemorte found me.

The scam became enough of a problem that Thunderwalkers put a warning in their guild MOTD explaining what was happening and telling people not to fall for it.

That was basically the end of the Thunderwalkers operation.

Fortunately, Morell-Thule had other guilds.

So I moved on. And even went as far as finding out who the officers were of the guild I was targeting and telling them I was so and so twink and to send me an invite to the guild. So now I even had the guild name below my char name to collaborate my story.

At that point the scam itself had become as much fun as whatever I was stealing. There was a rush to watching that trade window turn green and waiting to see if the person would actually click.

Sometimes I wanted the item.

Sometimes I wanted the platinum.

Sometimes I didn't even care what they had.

I just wanted to see if I could get them to hand it over.

The problem was that eventually all of this stuff had to make its way back to Blux.

And I wasn't dumb enough to have a level-one character steal a Fungi Tunic and immediately trade it to my main.

So now I had a second game to play.

EverQuest Gold Laundering

Back then I could go to Best Buy, get another serial number with a free month included, and I had another disposable EverQuest account. How I got all of those cards is a whole other story.

Those were the scam accounts.

Blux stayed clean.

At the time, EverQuest let you physically drop platinum on the ground. So one of my favorite methods was beautifully simple.

Take a dirty account somewhere secluded.

Drop 100,000 platinum in some bushes.

Log out.

Log into Blux.

Walk over.

Pick it up.

No trade between the accounts. No obvious transfer. Blux had simply happened upon a very generous shrub.

I started doing variations of the same thing with items, but eventually I wanted more layers.

I'd create transactions that looked real.

I'd move platinum through different characters.

I'd manufacture conversations.

I'd take a Fungi worth 35,000pp and have one of the dirty characters suddenly announce:

>WTS FUNGI 5K

Then Blux would “buy” it.

Now there had been a sale.

Sure, it was the worst Fungi sale in the history of Morell-Thule, but on paper Blux had paid for it.

Sometimes I'd steal an item I didn't even want. I had no use for it; stealing it had simply been the game.

Those were useful too.

I'd sell them dirt cheap or give them to some completely unsuspecting newbie.

The newbie thought somebody had just made his year.

I was thinking: Great. Now the item is on someone who has absolutely nothing to do with me.

Every extra trade, gift, sale and account added another turn to the trail.

And it worked.

Blux had the gear I wanted. My Monk twink had everything I could possibly want. I had platinum. I could still log onto my Wizard and play normally while completely separate characters were running the scams.

Then Sony made a change that I noticed immediately.

In November 2001, EverQuest removed the ability to drop coins on the ground.

The patch notes specifically referenced preventing losses caused by “accident or scam.”

The sheer amount of stolen platinum I was moving around Morell-Thule helped contribute to the problem that eventually made Sony remove the mechanic**.**

Things escalated from there.

A friend and I found a vulnerability connected to the Morell-Thule message board system that gave us access to the email addresses of people using it. We used those addresses to send fake Sony/EverQuest account messages to their email leading to a fake login page.

People entered their account information.

And suddenly this wasn't limited to Morell-Thule anymore.

I had access to accounts on servers I'd never even played on.

I'd log in and look around.

Sometimes I'd take something good.

Sometimes, instead of cleaning the account out, I'd take one item.

Partly because it created less noise.

Partly because I found it funny at the time imagining the owner spending the next week wondering what happened.

Didn't I have a…?

Check every bag.

Check the bank.

Check another character.

Maybe I destroyed it.

Maybe I traded it.

Where the hell did it go?

Looking back now, that's where the line obviously changed. Talking someone into clicking Trade inside EverQuest was one thing. Getting into someone's actual account was another.

I was a teenager and, at the time, I treated the whole thing like it was still part of the game.

Sony did not.

Eventually I started getting serious about leveling again. I was level 52 after what felt like an entire summer and had decided I was finally going to make 60.

I was raiding with a guild whose name I remember as something like Power Friends — someone from old Morell-Thule may have to help me on that one.

We were in the middle of a raid when suddenly Lirus appeared.

If you played Morell-Thule then, you probably remember Lirus.

He was one of the server GMs.

He talked to my guild leader and basically told him he needed to take me away for some questions.

Not ideal.

I was teleported out of the raid.

My memory is that I ended up locked inside some kind of inaccessible prison cell around the Qeynos Aqueducts.

Just Blux and Lirus.

Then the questions started.

They had traced stolen items back to me.

They knew about the accounts.

They knew considerably more than I thought they could know.

And eventually I learned why my laundering operation hadn't saved me.

EverQuest items had internal identifiers.

I had been concentrating on hiding the transactions.

Sony could follow the items.

Dropping something on the ground didn't magically turn it into a new Fungi Tunic. Passing it through another player didn't change what it was. My laundering hadn't erased the trail.

It had made the trail longer.

From what I later understood, they initially looked at the normal trades. When those didn't explain how stolen items kept arriving where they did, somebody dug deeper.

Eventually all those roads led to Blux.

Then Lirus wanted to know why I had so many EverQuest accounts.

Ten-plus accounts.

Same IP address.

Same place.

Same ecosystem.

I denied it at first.

We went back and forth.

And then:

YOU HAVE BEEN DISCONNECTED.

That was it.

Blux was banned.

The mule accounts were banned.

The burner accounts were banned.

Everything was gone.

I responded to this setback with the maturity you would expect from a teenager who had just had his EverQuest criminal empire dismantled.

I went back to Best Buy.

Made another account.

Created:

BLUXBLUX.

I played, scammed some more, got into the 20s.

Banned.

New account.

BLUXBLUXBLUX.

Banned.

At some point I believe I simply made:

SCAMMER.

And then, realizing I needed a truly discreet identity that nobody at Sony could ever trace back to me, I came up with my masterpiece:

XULB.

Blux backwards.

Somehow they cracked the code.

And that was basically the end of Blux.

Twenty-five years later, I'm playing EverQuest Legends.

Except now I'm trying to balance the books a little.

The same kinds of items I used to steal, I give away.

But every time I make a transaction in EQL, there is still this tiny part of my brain that immediately sees how easy it would be. Someone wants to sell me something and for half a second I think:

I could just tell him to parcel me the item and I'll send the platinum afterward.

And then simply never send it.

The opening is still obvious to me.

I still see all the angles.

But those days are gone.

A lot of the old Morell-Thule message-board history seems to have disappeared, so I'm also genuinely curious who is still around from those days. If you played Morell-Thule around 2000–2003, you may remember Blux. If you were in Thunderwalkers, you may remember the Baconeater scam.

If you were scammed in Everquest send me a message and ask for restitution