Old School bay-bee. Frenzy Camped. No list.

[WayAbvPar]

The Progression Server simply treats every player as though they didn't play.

It's already treating me like that, since I wouldn't play this shit if you paid me.

I loved EQ1 at the time, but I'm not going back. The old bitch is crazy, has syphilis and a latex allergy.

Not to mention a predeliction for beating your genitalia into a foamy mousse with a tack hammer.

[Azazel]

EQ1 never updated the old world graphics did they? Those have to be complete and utter ass still - especially considering what other games have done since. Yes, the player models were updated but the tunnels of Guk must look horrible relative to modern games.

They gave them a texture upgrade with Luclin. A year or so ago they replaced Neriak Forest and Lavastorn with new versions of the zones. I had a brief run around with a "please come back" 2-week freebie. The LS one seemed ok, but the Neriak one was truly an excersise in shitty zone design (that mobhunter article says they might be redoing it yet again). Oh, and that article also goes on and on about the "new" deserts of Ro. So I guess they'll probably revamp NRo, SRo and Oasis.

OTOH, pretty much the entirety of the zones from Gates of Discord and Omens of War are far shittier looking than East Commons.. so, you know. They're not exactly consistent..

[shiznitz]

I was still playing for Luclin. quitting a few months after LDoN. The "texture revamp" was imperceptible to me.

[Trippy]

I was still playing for Luclin. quitting a few months after LDoN. The "texture revamp" was imperceptible to me.

Did you actually go into the "old world" dungeons? That's where they were the most noticable -- like in Guk.

[shiznitz]

I was still playing for Luclin. quitting a few months after LDoN. The "texture revamp" was imperceptible to me.

Did you actually go into the "old world" dungeons? That's where they were the most noticable -- like in Guk.

I know I went to Guk several times in my character's late 50s which was around the same time LDoN was released so I must have. I should reinstall EQ1 and go look since I have the Staion Pass.

No. I shouldn't. The whole game will only look like total ass compared to EQ2 so it wouldn't be a fair comparison within EQ1.

[El Gallo]

It'll look like ass with character, at least.


You know, I'd probably play UO on a fresh server too, at least for a little bit.  I'm pretty fucking broken.

[Xilren's Twin]

It'll look like ass with character, at least.


You know, I'd probably play UO on a fresh server too, at least for a little bit.  I'm pretty fucking broken.

You think YOU"RE broken... I'm still playing Shadowbane since it went free.  I think I qualify for some sort of mental disability...

Xilren

[bhodi]

I played UO on one of those modified hosted servers for a while, it was actually pretty fun... the small community was a lot of it, and some of it was nostagia, but I'd go back there before I went back to "real" UO.

[Azazel]

I was still playing for Luclin. quitting a few months after LDoN. The "texture revamp" was imperceptible to me.

The texture revamp was an optional install from the Luclin discs. It's entirely possible that you never installed them. I know I only did when I changed PCs and did the complete reinstall of EQ.

[Strazos]

I perferred the old Ogre and Troll models, so I downgraded those.

[Tale]

I uploaded some old EQ screenshots the other day and you do really notice the textures:

Scored pic of the day on EQ Stratics with this.

Ding 50. Check out those Sol B textures!

Good sex, bad textures.

Old School bay-bee. Ghoul Lord Camped. No list.

Up close and personal with Najena textures.

[Azazel]

Southern Legion?

God damned Tribunal Aussies!

[Tale]

Southern Legion?

God damned Tribunal Aussies!

I was on the EQOz mailing list in 1999 (before widespread use of web message boards) which started the guild. Matter of fact, The Tribunal was my idea   I suggested restarting there because people were voting for servers where they already had a 30something character, and Tribunal had just gone live.

I was probably the best known officer at first, when we boomed to 200 members by Christmas. I got our level 50s into the first raiding alliance, but we were utterly screwed on loot. I left EQ for a few months, SL began raiding on its own, and I returned for the start of Aurora Noctum in 2000 (a spin-off hardcore raiding guild still around today). I wrote the announcement of the AN split and was an officer, but quit at the launch of PoP.

There's a diaspora of SL-related guilds in WoW, most of which have forgotten the connection. Southern Armada was meant to be a Southern Legion chapter on Prexus (I was in EQ chat to help create the guild) but the leader screwed up his first charter submission and put in a "temporary" charter as Southern Armada :) Now they're a horde raiding guild on Proudmoore. On the same server, Southern Wardens used to be AN-SWG. Winds of Fury is people who stayed in SL at the time of the AN split. Similar connections with Aussie EQ2 guilds.

[Azazel]

Yeah I know AN as well, some former guildies transferred there a few years ago, though I last saw them on evil side in EQ2-Najena.

My last EQ1 guild is similar, they're now in DAOC, 3 WoW guilds I know of, and EQ2, and still in EQ1..

[Merusk]

Southern Legion?

God damned Tribunal Aussies!

Heh.. i was about to say the same thing.  MHB/ Ebon Council here.  Yay Trib.

[Tale]

MHB rocked. Thistleburr and Pikel (original MHB leaders) were two of the best people I ever met in EQ. They had the best combination of raiding and roleplaying on any server.

And our Aurora Noctum diaspora congregates here:

What is *this* Aurora Noctum?
This isn't the EQ1 AN guild, they are over here http://www.glass-cube.com/forums/

We are the has-beens. We are the legends of the original Everquest game! Something like that anyway....

This board is populated by the former leaders and officers of Southern Legion from 1999, who then split off from SL and created Aurora Noctum in Everquest on 11th November, 2000. Along the way we have played many games, including Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Asherons Call 1 & 2, Star Wars Galaxies and a few other things that we're too ashamed to mention. There have been good times, but most of the games since Everquest have been crap.

So what are we now? Nothing really. We just come here and talk about games and bitch about how shitty MMO's are becoming.

The shining light on the horizon might be Vanguard but don't be surprised if that ends on the pile of crap that is MMO-2006. After all, it's being created by core of the team who did eq1, and we all remember how crappy that was when it was released. But their ideas are good so we'll give them a chance. Shame it's being published by Microsoft though, if anyone can turn something good into crap it's Bill Gates.

[WindupAtheist]

You know, I'd probably play UO on a fresh server too, at least for a little bit.  I'm pretty fucking broken.

It's fun, if you hate structured content and good graphics.  Pity this isn't last year, or I'd have made you come play when they opened up the Origin shard.

[Merusk]

MHB rocked. Thistleburr and Pikel (original MHB leaders) were two of the best people I ever met in EQ. They had the best combination of raiding and roleplaying on any server.

Yeah one of my earliest EQ memories is being a lowbie DE war dying in Highpass and wondering how the hell I'd get past that aggro guard to loot my corpse while naked.  Pikel came by, rezzed me and buffed me up so I wouldn't die again.

 He had retired and Thistle had moved on to join The Elitists by the time I made it into MHB, but it was still a great guild.  (Oddly enough out of sheer coinicence I picked Alleria in WoW.. and so did The Elitists. Very strange seeing Krush running around in yet another game.)

[raydeen]

EQ1 never updated the old world graphics did they? Those have to be complete and utter ass still - especially considering what other games have done since. Yes, the player models were updated but the tunnels of Guk must look horrible relative to modern games.

They gave them a texture upgrade with Luclin. A year or so ago they replaced Neriak Forest and Lavastorn with new versions of the zones. I had a brief run around with a "please come back" 2-week freebie. The LS one seemed ok, but the Neriak one was truly an excersise in shitty zone design (that mobhunter article says they might be redoing it yet again). Oh, and that article also goes on and on about the "new" deserts of Ro. So I guess they'll probably revamp NRo, SRo and Oasis.

OTOH, pretty much the entirety of the zones from Gates of Discord and Omens of War are far shittier looking than East Commons.. so, you know. They're not exactly consistent..

Oasis was pretty much sucked into the new SRo zone. You just zone from NRo to SRo now. Most of the landmarks are still there, just better looking. There's a new dungeon in SRo that has stuff that wiill eat your face off. This is my one big gripe with EQ1. If I con something and it's 'blue', I should have a chance to kill it. I zoned into the new area (Takish Iz or sometihing) and saw a mob that was blue. I sent my warder in and Snoopy went down in like 5 seconds even with me healing him. I went down in 2 trying to click on the ZO rope. Never going back there alone.

I'm actually looking forward to the new server. I've been playing since '99 and it will be refreshing to experience the game again from the beginning. It was a good old game when it started, and it's been soooo long since I've been smacked down by Fippy.

[El Gallo]

If they could introduce some sort of pseudo-instancing (or, even better, the actual thing) to EQ1's raid content, I'd seriously consider going back.  I may not even have left.  Have bosses insta-spawn (or close to it) but give a character some sort of flag so you can only be on its aggro list once per x days or you get banished a la 53+ characters on vox/naggy.  You'd have to figure out some way to deal with trash and whatnot though.

Real instancing would obviously be better, but I presume that's even less possible.  For all its many faults, I think the one thing that killed EQ for me was logging in week after week (month after month) and finding that everything my guild wanted to kill had been killed by Europeans or guilds full of students/unemployed/whatevers who got 60 people online at 11 am when it spawned.  The AA grind also sucked pretty badly, but the racing was the main thing.  After WoW, I couldn't imagine playing a game where we couldn't say "OK, at 9:30 on next Wednesday, it will be time to slay the dragon."

[Toast]

For what it's worth, the scarcity of the boss mobs helped enhance the guild versus guild metagame. It was a "soft pvp" that created mucho drama and hate between competing guilds.

This us versus them dynamic got people to stick around in stable guilds for years trying to gear up and beat those a-holes from Riders of the Conquesting Blood Elves.

It's really fun when you are doing ok in that system, but when you are constantly denied the content, it's infuriating.

The catasses probably lust for this system again. Griefing is definitely not confined to pvp games.

[shiznitz]

I was still playing for Luclin. quitting a few months after LDoN. The "texture revamp" was imperceptible to me.

The texture revamp was an optional install from the Luclin discs. It's entirely possible that you never installed them. I know I only did when I changed PCs and did the complete reinstall of EQ.

I am confused. I thought we were talking about zone re-texturing, not player textures. I definitely used the new player textures and enjoyed them. My original comment was that the old EQ1 zones on this "classic" server would look like total crap compared not only to current games but also to any EQ1 zone after Luclin.

[Tale]

He was talking about zone textures. There was a zone texture revamp on the Luclin discs. However, to my eyes it only provided a minor increase in the resolution of the walls/ground. You might not have installed or noticed it.

[shiznitz]

He was talking about zone textures. There was a zone texture revamp on the Luclin discs. However, to my eyes it only provided a minor increase in the resolution of the walls/ground. You might not have installed or noticed it.

There is no reason I wouldn't have installed it. I bought a new machine right before Luclin just so I could turn on all the goodness - and then had to scale it back even then.

[Merusk]

The texture updates were most noticible on things like signs in cities.  In Freeport, for example, you could tell that the signs were supposed to say /something/ but you couldn't actually tell what it was until they redid the textures.

[raydeen]

Anyone remember the bulletin boards in the inns? I thought that was a pretty cool touch back in the day. Not sure when they got removed, but like the bazaar moving out of the commonlands, I thought the game lost a little piece of soul.

[HaemishM]

Anyone remember the bulletin boards in the inns? I thought that was a pretty cool touch back in the day. Not sure when they got removed, but like the bazaar moving out of the commonlands, I thought the game lost a little piece of soul.

Probably about the time they realized no one used them. It was a good idea, but the implementation blew.

[Azazel]

If they could introduce some sort of pseudo-instancing (or, even better, the actual thing) to EQ1's raid content, I'd seriously consider going back.  I may not even have left. 

I've got no idea where in the progression stage you or your old guild were at. But one thing that EQ1's not hurting for is more stuff to kill, unless you're on the bleeding edge of the content.

I'm pretty sure that all (or many of) the bosses in OOW and maybe the next expansion as well are pretty much triggered spawns. There are still world mobs, but they'll always have some of them.

The AA grind would be incredibly painful though, especially after any kind of significant break from the game. Funny, as much as I have a dislike for SoE and even Sigil, I still think of EQ1 fondly.

The texture upgrades were no great shakes. As Merusk said, they were most noticable on things like signs which magically became readable. But you know, a shitty brown texture being replaced by a slightly more detailed shitty brown texture doesn't do that much when the zone geometry remains the same. I did like their water upgrade, though.

[El Gallo]

Luclin-early PoP era.  We had everything we wanted from NToV, but Ssra & VT were kept on lockdown.  It was pretty demoralizing.  Good to hear that they've gone mostly with triggered mobs in the recent expansions.  But this new server will be cockblock heaven for a long time.

[Xilren's Twin]

Funny, as much as I have a dislike for SoE and even Sigil, I still think of EQ1 fondly.

It's human nature.  You remember the good parts and generally, you forget the pain.  Or you realize there was pain but you don't keep that same visceral feeling about it anymore.  So you can say "yeah, staring at my spell book for 10 mins in between 30 seconds of battle was no fun", but it doesnt make you go postal whereas remembering when you and your friends first scored a piece of Rubicite still brings a warm fuzzy feeling.

I am not fooled.  Despite my fond memories, trying to play eq1 now would be more painful than elective dental surgery without anesthesia.

Xilren

[Simond]

{Conspiracy Theory}That's why SOE is doing it, so when Sigil market Vanguard as "Just like old EQ" quite a few of their potential customers have a fresh reminder of what old EQ was really like.{/CT}

[Azazel]

Uh, yeah. I said that. On the first page. Twice.