About the data

What is collected, where it comes from, and what it does not mean.

Where it comes from

Most of what is here was read out of an EverQuest or EverQuest Legends log file by eqlparser, and uploaded as a bundle. Nothing there is inferred from data the log does not contain: a creature is listed because somebody saw it, and a drop is recorded because somebody looted it.

One thing is not a log reading, and is worth naming rather than leaving for a reader to work out.

Spells are read from the spell file the game client ships, not from logs. That is why the spell list is complete where the rest of the site is not: it is a transcription of a table, not an accumulation of sightings. Everything on a spell page — mana, cast time, effect slots, the messages it prints — is that table's own numbers. The icons are the client's artwork, used with permission for a site that carries no advertising and sells nothing.

What a drop count is

A loot line names the corpse, so a sighting is solid evidence that a creature dropped something. The denominator is not solid. Kills are counted whether or not the corpse was looted, so sightings divided by kills is a floor on the drop rate — the real rate is that or higher. Both numbers are shown and no rate is published as if it were measured.

What is kept apart

• Beta and test servers. A test server is a different game: costs, drops and tuning all move before they go live. Characters on one are excluded at export rather than blended in, because pooling them produces disagreements that look like discoveries and are really two versions of the game being averaged together.
• The two games. EverQuest and EverQuest Legends share a client and a log format, so two logs are indistinguishable line by line. The tag comes from the install being followed and can never be recovered afterwards, so data is never pooled across them — and a log parsed without one is filed as unattributed rather than guessed into a game.
• Merchants. Prices are per vendor, never averaged, because faction and location change what you pay.
• Instances. A creature in a group instance at tier 3 is a different fight from the open-world one and is recorded separately.
• Contributors. Each contributor's observations are stored under their name. Re-uploading replaces that contributor's data rather than adding to it, so nobody's counts can drift upward by exporting twice.

What is deliberately absent

• Log file paths. A log is identified by a hash; character and server names travel, since those are public in play.
• Anything typed in chat. Tells, guild chat and group chat are parsed locally for alerts and never leave the machine.
• Derived rates. Counts and their denominators travel; the division is left to whoever can say what they mean by it.

Contributions on file

Holding 15 logs.