f13.net

https://twitter.com/PantheonMMO/status/1196943965028802561?s=19

Bummer. I hope it wasn't the obvious.

Sad day.  I've been following Pantheon pretty closely.  Recently, he started posting bizarre, lengthy, stream of consciousness-style posts on the forums.  The first thing I thought after "what a shame" is that I fear it was an overdose.  What a targedy for his family.

Spent far too much of my life in EQ back in the early days.  Lots of good memories (along with some bad).  Sorry to hear he passed

St Peter wondering what a camp check is all of a sudden

As one of those who loved EQ and also Vanguard, this makes me especially sad.

I have conflicting feelings about my time in EQ. There were a lot of great moments in EQ with a lot of gameplay that was completely new. It could instill sense of awe that has never been duplicated. It also was a complete time sucker, and the amount of personal misery that game could inflict was intense. My roomie almost lost what the relationship that would be his eventual marriage due to his inability to stop playing EQ.

Sucks that he could never recapture the magic.

EQ was special.

All the hours I logged in DAoC, Shadowbane, AO, SWG (actually not much here), WoW (by far, probably most played), I vaguely remember only small bits of those but I still have vivid memories of Qeynos, Freeport, Highhold Keep/Pass, N/W/E/S Karanas, etc... ...of PvP server, race war (or whatever it was called) server.

That's like 20 years ago.

I met my wife playing EQ.

While it was an addiction at times it was healthier than some others I could have pursued.  The scale of the game has yet to be recreated.

EQ is second only to UO for memorable moments. If there were an offline version that wasn't too mangled, I'd probably jump in from time to time...until the time sink eventually wore me out. Then again, if you could tweak the xp progression higher than 'cat ass', it still might warm the cockles to grab a spider eye and rp a human monk in the Karanas again.

That sounds about right, with a few Shadowbane memories in a close third (House Daenyr represent!). I still remember individual groups I played in for a night in EQ when I was leveling my enchanter. I miss gameplay that actually rewarded people who didn't have their heads in their asses. A good enchanter or a twisting bard could make groups just cruise.

I will always recall Everquest's customer service when he was at the head of it.

The stories were horrifying and right up there with reading about Centrelink.

I never dived deep into EQ. I played at release but I went back to the MUDs that I had played for years and years after. I think I was playing the one that Brad had played quite a bit before EQ. As much as Brad was a whack job and he moved a genre forward a birthed a game genre and I can respect him for that.

I know a guy who lost his job because of EQ. As a player, not in the parking lot.

I was making some side cash selling EQ sashes and swords and crap on ebay. Had a bunch of spawns on lockdown on my server, it was steady income. A buddy of mine was going through hard times, so I showed him how to farm successfully and sell it on ebay. A couple weeks later, his wife is super pissed at me for showing him that. I was confused, as I figured they could use a few extra hundred bucks a week.

Turns out the kid did the exact opposite and was buying items on ebay. And he dropped $400 for a manastone....and got stiffed.  :oh_i_see:

Poor decision making isn't limited to the physical world.

EQ sucked me in further than any other game and my fondness for it is only surpassed by Diablo 1.  All the turmoil and drama surrounding McQuaid aside he gave many of the people in this world a cherished experience.

EQ wasn't my first or last foray into MMOs, but it was the one that was most memorable and left the most lasting impressions.

Through the cat-assing and shitty grind were some amazing times.

- The long walk from Qeynos to Freeport with my half-elf ranger at level 12. Harrowing as fuck.
- Opening all the new zones, from Velious to LDON.
- Falling asleep during a City of Mist raid while auto-following the CC enchanter and waking up being one of the only two survivors after a massive wipe and still getting my component for my ranger epic.  :awesome_for_real:
- Spamming the chat with the "Gozer the Traveller" speech from Ghostbusters whenever I logged on and getting greeted with cheers.
- Blaming Meemers every time Prexus went down.

I'll pour out a bit of my next martini for Brad.

Kinda sad that I missed Everquest and only got to know of Brad when he had entered his nuts phase. Still, even I have to recognise his legacy. Rest in Peace.

As much as I hated the grind, mudflation, and the asymmetrical ability to solo and generate money among classes (rogues were...tough), the game still produced plenty of memories.

 - forced grouping was new, and rather welcome at first. Getting orc belts and trading them with a player for banded gear was fun. *Stealing* the belts as a rogue was better.
 - A few items were memorable - that dirk from the Freeport desert, the haste sash, the first rogue epic.
 - The first open raids to Plane of Hate really did feel pretty epic.
 - Some later raid in which the entire 40-man group or whatever wiped...except for my rogue. I did the corpse retrieval.
 - Exploring places I had no business being, while being far underleveled. The first foray into Kiticor Forest was nerve-wracking. General stealth shenanigans.
 - While forced grouping for a rogue could be a pain, when you had a good group, it felt *good*.

I'm sure there are others, but these are what immediately comes to mind.

That one rogue that broke into Plane of Hate to get a foothold for his guild and then got chain killed so much that he lost like three levels.

Epic because it wasn’t me.

Deleveling so much that you couldn't get back in and get your corpse was the worst! :awesome_for_real:

Didn't you use monks for the Hate break-in? It's been a long time since I ran one and I only think I did 3 or 4 of them.

My guild usually went in with a couple of small groups to do the break-in and also camped out a rez-stick cleric and monk if there was a wipe. Even after the break-in, though, inevitably somebody would sit too close to one of the walls and aggro mobs through there which would lead to some desperate fights in the break-in room. Good times...

It scared the shit out of me to have a 7-day corpse rot timer ticking on my warrior and all his gear in Plane of Fear, hoping some poor monk can drag my corpse out of danger... until suddenly the relief of a "do you accept this rez", clicking Yes and "loading please wait", then dragging my corpse up the zone wall naked, as a fully-spawned set of creatures that could wipe you all in an instant follows its patrol paths nearby. There was nothing like it. Loot dispenser games that "listen to the players" are not the same. I don't want what I would say I want in a survey. Give me my money's worth in adrenaline.

Even when that rogue on our server lost his corpse twice over, the fun and fulfilment was in re-equipping him, and the times we had grouping with him to get him new stuff.


I first experienced that as a human monk of about that level, but from Freeport to Qeynos. It blew my mind; the fear of having to cross the Karanas without aggroing a giant. And it was pitch black at night because I was human!

But the most memorable trip was when we started a massive new Australian guild (catering to our time zone) on the newest server, meaning everything was fully spawned. I rerolled as a troll warrior and levelled up fast due to the innate regen, but as a troll you're KOS to just about everything. I was needed by the new guild who were based at Qeynos so I had to get through Innothule Swamp, Rathe Mountains, swim Lake Rathetear, cross the Karanas (trolls are KOS to aviaks), Butcherblock mountains and into Qeynos, avoiding all the patrolling human guards.

A bind out of range of the guards from the only level 12 caster, and then into Qeynos sewers, the only safe place for a troll, where it said on the wall "ARADUNE IS STINKY".

I've been watching and reflecting on this thread and Brad's death, and it seems to me he is perhaps the flawed genius who had the biggest impact on my adult life, for better (these experiences) or worse (I was so addicted to MMOs I threw up on the floor in revulsion at myself). I've spent so much time trying to recapture the things I had in EverQuest. I'll never have them again, and as a new father now I can't even commit the time and I'm not sure I'd want to lead my kid down this path, but in every new game I become an explorer, searching out the frontiers that will fill me with awe before they become a mechanical, underappreciated part of someone's grind to level 90. Brad McQuaid and his dev teams made fantasy experiences real to me.

hol up

For years I would always drive home from work intending to get some exercise, make a good meal, get some sleep... but always log on "just to check my messages/character/auctions/whatever" and not log off until 4am, then go to work again. Every day. Quit my job "to go freelance" but spend all day gaming instead. Started running out of money and need a job again, but failed to apply for jobs because sitting at a computer meant I eventually loaded the game. I would miss real life events with family and friends with lame excuses. Sixteen years on, my sister still worries I'm going to arrive two hours late (hasn't happened that whole time).

One day after sitting at the PC all day I just felt such despair about what I had become that I slid off my chair onto the floor, wept, and then suddenly I threw up on the cheap fake floorboards of my crappy apartment. I consider that the point where I started looking for a job again for real, getting out on my bicycle every evening, renewing my life outside MMOs. But I was also having a great time in the games I played and I can separate that from the lack of balance in my life in those days. There's more balance now (a decade in my job, a house, a wife, a son, a gaming PC on a 4K TV and many posts on f13) but like any form of addict I always feel it pulling me back. I want to be in the EverQuest that was. My brain likes it there.

I'm not the only one who could tell a ridiculous story of letting MMOs take over your life and struggling to change it. Effects on jobs and relationships have already been mentioned. We're mourning a guy who reputedly struggled with drug addiction while creating these addictive, escapist games, and I wonder if these things have something in common.

That's legit wild to me. I want to hear more. Where are you people. Surely we have more here.

Edit: And yeah, drug addict makes virtual drug is a straight line.

It is a miracle my wife put up with my unemployed MMO playing ass, the dot com bust coinciding with EQ addiction was not a pretty sight.  I think I was playing 80 hours a week or more, chain smoking and drinking 15 diet sodas a day I must have looked like a complete junky.  This period lasted for just short of 2 years.

Sure, I'll bite. I missed the boat on EQ1 (PC couldn't handle it) but was always fascinated with the stories my friends told. When EQ2 and WoW were about to come out, my friend group was split between the two. I went with EQ2 and catassed it like crazy; after the first few days of prelaunch and into launch, I saw that I was at the head of the pack level-wise. My friend and I realized that we could potentially be server-first to 50 of our classes so we decided to go for it. We were ordering Bawls energy drinks by the case, playing into the early hours of the morning, falling asleep at the keyboard sometimes. I was like 7th overall to 50 on my server, first of my class (Warlock, Blackburrow). We did a little bit of raiding but the itemization was always fucked and there wasn't that much content at launch, so we hopped to WoW.

After slogging through the painfully slow level grind, I realized I liked the battlegrounds a lot since I'd never really played anything like them. So, I catassed my way to rank 14 which was a much worse grind than anything I've ever done before or since. The importance of time played over any other factor (honorable kills, BG wins) and the fact that you weren't competing against your enemies but your allies really made it suck. PVP rank back then was determined solely by honor earned per week, compared to everyone else on your faction (horde/alliance) on your server. To hit Rank 14 you needed to be in the top 5 for like 10 weeks, then #1 for 3 more weeks after that (numbers may be off because it's been forever but the point is made). This meant that in the hours before server reset, you were running around inspecting all the other hardcore PVPers on your server and comparing your honor to theirs; if you had a good lead, you could go to sleep. If you didn't, you had to requeue and hope they went to bed. It was easily the most stressful thing I've ever been through in a video game, and has basically ruined battlegrounds and other organized PVP for me in any MMO since.

The only saving grace at the time was that I always had RL friends playing with me, so whenever we got burnt out we still had each other to hang out with. I was living at home the whole time, working a shitty night shift security job. My diet was almost exclusively frozen pizza or fast food, usually only one or maybe two meals a day; any more would cut into grinding time.

Years later when WotLK came out, I dove back in hard because my now-ex girlfriend got into it too. Ended up with a pretty decent raiding guild and raided 3-6 nights a week for the latter half of WotLK and all of Cataclysm. By then, WoW was basically the only thing our relationship had, we didn't do much else. The guild had 3 10-man raid crews, 2 of which I ran, and a 25 man, so it was constant cat-herding. I was still working nights mostly, so we raided from 11p-3a. When the final raid of Cataclysm came out, we killed the final boss on the first week before a single reset, and I was just done. I couldn't imagine banging my head against a wall to clear hardmodes again, just to have it all replaced by greens in the next expansion. I told the guild we wouldn't be raiding anymore, everyone either quit the game too or moved on to guilds that were still raiding (one RL friend who was in my guild continued his own raiding guild from then until Classic came out). Gf and I broke up about a month later.

I resubbed for a few weeks when Pandaria came out, but didn't let myself get sucked back in. I haven't been back since. I've learned to watch when MMOs get their hooks in, and as a result I mostly play solo when I do play them.

That was me from 23 to 27 or so

because  you know

i was ~25 years old the fuck else am I gonna do? drink? yeah did that when I wasn't playing games

Sounds like me with Planetside.

First got into EQ senior year of high school, after tearing through BG2. Almost failed AP biology because I couldn't be bothered with the work, but in retrospect it was a good escape from a shit home life. I remember I was playing EQ (doing market stuff in Freeport) in the middle of the day when 9/11 hit and saw the chatter start in game before turning the news on. I stopped for a bit, then got back into it later. Grades suffered a bit again. Later got into EQ2 and WoW, but then didn't have quite the same effect.

At this point I just cannot be bothered with such games. At this point, on average I play something maybe 1 or 2 nights a week.

The Jedi grind in SWG cost me a relationship, but in the end that was probably a good thing.

I was definitely addicted to EQ. I used to drive home 20 minutes from work for my lunch break to play 20 minutes then drive back. Quit several times but kept getting sucked back in.  Managed not to lose my job over it, dot-com bust took care of that for me. SWG was almost as bad, but it was broken enough that I managed to escape that addiction even before the NGE.  I've played a lot of other MMOs and other games, and put way too much time into most of them, but none ever got their hooks in me to the same extent as those two. And now the thought of playing EQ again makes me physically nauseous. I think it's my body's defense against getting re-addicted. I do dabble with EQ2 and TSW or WoW for a bit every couple of years, but as soon as I hit any grind at all I'll lose interest and drop it.

This is the best possible thing this thread could have turned into. I'm proud of all of you.

Not because you kicked some random addiction though.

I played pretty hard for 2 months, but I never got addicted to the game. I got all my catassing out in SojournMUD where most of the EQ design/mechanics were taken from except it was an awesome 3D world. By the time EQ came out I had done 3-5 years of forced grouping and grinding.

I'll be a little bit of a counterpoint. I don't think I've ever been addicted to MMOs, either that or I am that guy who has been a functional addict all my life.

I still enjoy them, and maintain an active account in several -- but I usually only play one at a time. Catch up, get tired of the setting, and switch to something else. I've always been pretty good at compartmentalizing, so I will say MMOs haven't taken over my professional or even personal life, but what they have done is sometimes completely engulf my entertainment time. There are popular shows I'd sorta like to watch, books I'd like to read, but my first choice when I sit down in the evening is to fire up LOTRO or some such.

I think the closest I ever came to feeling I *had* to log in every day was World War II Online (yeah, have a laugh). But the reason for that obsession was that I was playing with real people against other real people, and if you skip time in a team sport/game you always feel you are letting everybody else down. Eventually my Squad became mostly inactive and I took the opportunity to bail out.

As for EQ, sidestepped that one entirely for playing Acheron's Call or Anarchy Online or whatever. Still have friends that play it right now though, maybe I should give it a try...

Not as bad as some of you here but I remember looking at my /played in EQ and discovered that an average 24h day though my last two years of university had to be split 8/8/8 for school, sleep, and EQ.

Never got the bug quite as bad as that again but several games held me for longer than two years.

This was me during EQ. It helped that less than a year into my playtime, I started running a guild. Not only did that require a lot of time, it forced me to learn things like how to market the guild so we got recruits, get multiple guilds together to do things like raids and events that only uber guilds could do at the time as well as learn a little bit about leadership and how shitty people can be over the most trivial of things. The fact that the game itself missed a whole shitload of chances to enrich the experience for everyone and instead focused on making more of the same content only harder really made me resent McQuaid a lot. His attitude toward customer service and the shitgoblins he had doing that (Fuck you Abashi) really helped sour me on the whole experience and contributed to the burnout which eventually led me to quit for Dark Age of Camelot. Of course, that game only exacerbated the burnout because of the same goddamn issues.

I find it evilly fitting that in a thread talking about a dude who likely died due to addiction that we're all sort of measuring our addictions to his fucking game.

That whole playing with other people *is* the hook of MMOs. And why the later iterations are much less addicting.

edit to add: I mean the team sport aspect of it mostly.

Yeah, but it is a subtly different psychology when you are playing with friends against friends (or strangers), especially for virtual territory or rankings. For instance, I largely play MMOs right now with RL friends, and it is not a problem at all for one or more of us to give an excuse and drop out of a planned group instance. But back in WWII Online I knew that the enemy wouldn't respect that absence by not pushing hard right when I wasn't there, so, like I said, different psychology.

On another tangent, I realize that I must have really been out of the EQ circuit, since I never even knew that McQuaid had an addiction problem. Kinda surprises me, since that is the sort of thing you would expect anti-gamers to latch on to and publicize -- "game creator who is an addict makes game leveraging addictive behavior in gamers" sort of thing.

The best thing we are missing here is Schild's interview to McQuaid. That is gone forever I think, but it was a wonderful and intense read at the time. I suppose now it would be even more heartbreaking though.

Nah I've got it.

Easy enough to find on the Internet Archive, but I'm not sure this is the time or place for it. "The Hub of All Blame: A Postmortem" is the thread in the News forum (sort by most replies and you'll find it quickly).