f13.net

Announcement (http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/news_article.vm?id=524183&month=012012)


Only giving warrior, cleric, wizard, rogue as free classes? Guess freeps don't need no stinkin' cc.

I'm sure there will be blood over on the EQ forums.

This could turn it around for EQ.

/joke. Everquest is too old and brutal I'd think, and as the number of f2p titles increases the novelty dwindles and the pool of possible players is divided. And the old Everquest being perceived as obsoleted by Everquest 2 naming snafu continues to haunt them.

It's somewhat tempting to re-visit my old characters, but it might be better to leave them as fond memories I think.

Does that include all 52 expansions?

A number I'm not actually certain I just made up.

Again, SOE.  I'd really like to take that romp back through time, but they put so many cockblocks on the process, it just makes it easier to not play. 

I didn't really like their zone revamps, anyways.  I loved old Freeport, but the new wasn't as fun.  I actually like the old graphics. 

I still contend that if they made a closed server of ONLY Classic, Kunark and Velious I'd pay them $20/mo.  But they would have to be like they were at release, same UI, old zone graphics, all that jazz.  Oh well.  Wishes and fishes, I suppose.

Amusingly, the only possible reason I could think of to play EQ1 in 2012 -- the progression servers -- is for subscribers only.

I remember when LDoN came out and they "updated" Nektulos Forest as the first zone changed from the classic map, saying they needed to do so for the LDoN camps.

Hard to believe anyone who played in classic would like any of the classic zone changes of today, they are awful and pointless. The game hangs it hat on nostalgia, and its never going to have more than a poor cosmetic update to the classic zones, so why partially fuck it up like they have? The older audience was faithful to those zones, and newer folks don't care anyway.

It wasn't broke, but they fixed it.

Cities have been dead space since PoK was introduced in PoP, so the revamps don't even have the memories of a bygone populous era to remember.


Worst for me, they fucking changed the awesome Jay Barbeau soundtrack for Freeport, are they serious?

They revamped Nektulos again because the first attempt was so fucking bad. How terrible at zone design do you have to be for SOE to turn around and go "No, this is unacceptable".

They should be turning Vanguard F2P, not EQ.

Unless EQ Next is further away than they've been letting on and SOE is really desperate for cash.

This.

When I saw the announcement, I thought that perhaps it'd be nice to play around with my old characters again. Then I saw that SK and Druid (my 2 mains - 2 accounts) aren't included. Not that I'd do much more than take the tour before going back to WoW/LotRO.

I dunno it seems like your existing characters won't be locked.. If you get a gold membership and let it lapse.

From the Free Play/Silver Gold Details and FAQ page (http://www.everquest.com/free/) (Spoilered non-relevant information)

From the Membership section:

And also this from the account section:

So basically anyone who was a previous subscriber (which probably includes all accounts), will have a Silver membership (with 4 characters unlocked) and should conceivably be able to use their characters, although it'll require a single Gold membership billing (that's if I'm reading this right).

The things I'm seeing being the bigger issue, is them changing the number of backpack/bank slots which will have a huge impact, and the method they're using is going to be sending them via in game mail. The removal of ranks of spells also could equal screwed as well.

Actually it looks like they're giving ALL the expansions (17 not 52) up to the previous one to players for free and this includes the one with Mercenaries, as well as everything up and until House of Thule. The newest expansion, (#18) The Veil of Alaris, seems like the only one that needs to be purchased.

Having watched EQ2's conversion to "free to PAY" I'm sure there's a poison pill hidden in there that will make it impossible to play the game for real without going to a subscription.

It seems they had some kind of Refer-A-Friend program only 6 months ago that gave you bonus exp "forever"* which prompted many people to open multiple accounts, Transfer characters, all that jazz which all costs $$

Naturally, they're ending it, fucking over lots of people. With a single sentence.


Cue "WTF Baif-and-switch??" vs "EULA says they can change anything anytime" fight on forums.
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=182872


It really won't matter. I have no intentions of ever playing EQ again, and I'm not paying for 2 months just to look at my old characters. OTOH, if I could play with them, I might (theoretically) be tempted to keep playing (although I wouldn't).

Everytime I feel nostalgic about EQ1 I perform the RL simulation of going to the kitchen and smacking myself in the face with a heavy pan.  Works every time

Seriously, I would think they'd be doing the genre a service by retiring, not by going F2P.

Not that I'd be interested, but the emu folks would.

But really, any money they're pulling in has to be gravy and it's probably a good place to train up the newb devs.

Good god, why?  Why not just wind up the old Meridian 59 client if you wanna get your ancient-school rocks off?

Is Vanguard still going?

Apparently so.

Yeah, it's still clinging to life.  They're down to one server, maybe two. 

I'll be checking it out again. The highest I ever got was a 56 beastlord and the last expansion I bought was the one with the dragon race. With the mercenary expansion it might be slightly more viable for solo play (the last few times I logged in it was pitiful. No one, and I mean no one anywhere near my level range so no hope of really doing anything fun). I used to rail that all they needed to do was reduce the downtime (healing, mana) and more equally balance the enemies level wise. Used to piss me off that something that conned green could still eat both me and my puppy's faces without breaking a sweat. If they had just made those changes I might not have left EQ completely for WoW. I was subscribed for ten years before finally pulling the plug. It'll be nice to run around the old digs again even if it's only for a day or two.

I'll give this a try, making a Rogue to have fun stealthing around things I can't kill.  Will probably quit as soon as I'm cockblocked from exploring the world because I haven't Killed 10 Rats enough.

One server and no dedicated dev team until SWG was shut down and SOE needed to keep people employed.

So about level 5, then?  :awesome_for_real:

Bah he'll give up before level 5... Being a rogue in EQ and using sneak/hide means moving at snail like speed. That combined with needing to somehow find a Spirit of Wolf (run buff) I figure his sneaking adventure will last an hour at most.

I can't see f2p working for EQ.

In Aug 2010, I went back with 25 others for an organized progression on Stromm, and we lasted about 8 months (through demiplane). And this was with players who knew the content, 2-4 boxed as needed to have 40-ish raid sizes.


It is a grind-based game with raid content for organized guilds with the numbers to run them. They made leveing via mob grind very fast now (40+ levels in one day with XP pots + mercs + knowing what to do), but its the goal of doing end-game raiding that keeps you going.

New blood will not last long, as there is no real destination for them other than just grinding mobs alone with their merc. No questlines == no breadcrumbs == no way. You won't see active grouping until 80s-90, if you can last that long and if you can meld with all the vets who have been playing for over a decade. No way will people who really never played EQ before last.

And returning blood won't last long either since the game is nothing like what you fondly remember and left behind. Every zone you used to know and love is likely completely empty now, except the occasional other nostalgia lover you might see. The drastic changes to old overland zones will give old-timers a coronary (some are outright gone, others almost unrecognizable). At least all older dungeon zones seem intact.


Oh, and mercs are great for getting up thru Luclin, and grinding the Planes like Disease, Nightmare or Fire. But they start sucking without the upgrade themes that come much later in SoD. SOE has stated in the past that mercs were intended to accelerate players only so far then taper off. You really feel it as you start in on GoD and esp. OoW content. One werewolf in DoDH will rip you and your merc's face off with one hand. So you are back to needing a real group past 60s.

Bottom line: I would only return to solo (maybe with a RL friend or two), everyone grab mercs, go through the Holy trinity of Classic, Kunark and Velious, then Lucin and some Planes then STOP and reroll again. But add in the additional cockblocking that f2p always lathers on to ensure you spend some money, and it sounds bad all around.

You don't know much about EQ1 do you.

He shouldn't have to if SOE wants fresh blood to spend $ on playing it.

This far into the game's life, I assume I'm not reliant on other players for run buffs?  Or at the very least, people have set up bots in the towns to run-buff everyone who comes by?

Why do you say 'no questlines'?  Are there really no quests to drive your exploration/progression in EQ, even at this late date?

Not in EQ1.  All monster slaughter grinding.

There are more quests, and quests required for progression, in the later content.  They're implemented far more awkwardly than other games--while there are now NPCs that indicate that they give single-player or group quests, there's often no clear indicator of when they'll actually *give* you those quests, since many of them are gated by faction or unrelated prerequisites.  There may also be no easy indicator of which ones are actually necessary to complete to open the next tier of progression.  Expect to spend a lot of time on external websites doing your research if you want to bother with them.

Fortunately, you can skip most of that on the way up if you want.  The only more-or-less mandatory ones anymore are the two-year old ones to unlock the higher-tier mercenaries at level 75+.  Some of those won't be soloable until 90-95, and some of them require at least you, your merc, and one other person in group to be allowed to even get the quests.  There may be others to get certain spells that can't be obtained anywhere else, but that varies by class and playstyle.

Wait, so if I'm playing for the "classic" content of vanilla/Kunark/Velious/Luclin/PoP, what am I doing exactly?  Camping monsters in one place until I get to go camp monsters in another place?

Up until Luclin, more or less.  With Luclin, it adds "kill monsters in one place to get the stuff to make the weapons to kill monsters in another place", with a little bit of story on why the monsters are bad, m'kay? 

PoP is really where they start adding storylines about why you're killing monsters in one place so you can get to the next place to kill the next batch of monsters etc.  Which is more or less what you're doing in a lot of MMOs, except more confusing.  They actually had to implement an NPC in PoP who would clue you in to what bits and pieces of the convoluted storyline you'd missed along the way, so you could go figure out what was screwing up your character flagging. 

(Or wait to hit the minimum level to skip it.)

There's a reason we make fun of people who want to roll back the clock.

And probably forget the rogue and roll a druid or necro.

Can't do that without paying to unlock them  :oh_i_see:

Just when I thought it might be kind of cool to go back to EQ, I remember that in order to get quests, I had to go talk to every idiotic NPC on the fucking planet and hope I could type the exact right phrase in brackets that triggered the next bit of quest text. And the idea of going back to EQ1 promptly went right the fuck out the window.

There were quite a lot of quests in classic EQ, Kunark and Velious, they just weren't given out by npcs with exclamation marks over their heads and they didn't give much exp.  Stein of Moggok, Burning Rapier Quest, the Temple of Sol Ro quests, the epic weapon quests, key quests all over the place, the shawl and ring quests in Velious, etc; those are all examples.

Also, there were storylines before PoP.  Kunark and Velious both had pretty big storylines that led to either a final raid zone (Veeshan's Peak) or several raid zones (Kael/Sleeper's Tomb/Temple of Veeshan).  Kunark's required a lot of camping, but there was a story and it resulted in an ending, of a sort.  PoP did a lot to add story to the game, but it was there all along if you wanted to explore it.  PoP just made it more obvious, and restricted a lot of your access to zones until you completed a part of the story, which was both good and bad, because average players never really got into the elemental planes at the time.

I actually liked having to have a conversation with the people, and not a pre-scripted bullshit one.  From a gameplay perspective it was clunky as hell so I can see why it was quickly replaced, but I still liked it.

Most "conversations" consieted of "What [keyword]?"

Over and over.

Yes.

If I wanted to play EQ1 I'd buy the client and try the emulator of original EQ I've seen around. The main interest in the title is it's historical position in the "age of innocence" where just being a citizen in an online world was pretty much enough. Something that was lost when the novelty wore off, the gameplay became structured and the end-game all about providing challenge and progression. A sequence which can be pretty much seen as evolving in EQ and perfected in WoW.

Watching SOE try to infinitely extend the lifetime of the title has probably removed that original environment and created something not terribly interesting in its place.

Seriously, just go here for your nostalgia fix: http://www.project1999.org/

I'm just gonna go camp Ice Giants and then when I get bored of that I'm gonna decimate the Warrens and steal all the kobolds booze. Then I'm gonna get drunk and go out into Stonebrunt and see if that cave with the spinning boulders goes anywhere now.

You'd be better off just going out and getting drunk IRL, surely?  :awesome_for_real:

In my younger days.  :oh_i_see: Now I prefer to sit in my basement and drive drunk on the information superhighway.

I played last year's progression and actually liked it a lot. It got four paying months out of me before I got bored of grinding Plane of Hate.

I honestly think that there's more to EQ than just nostalgia. I really enjoyed being constantly challenged, and to give an example, I can recall with perfect clarity certain epic moments and groups that I had in EQ - five glorious hours for four levels in Splitpaw with an amazing, synergistic group - and that was on Progression! - ; breaking Fear for the first time, others - whereas the years+ that I've spent playing WoW? I can't remember, really, anything that sticks out as a great memory.

I think the fact that Project1999 and other EMUs do so well is proof in the pudding that EQ's recipe, a strong challenge requiring a holy trinity of role balance, skill and coordination, is not so irrelevant as a lot of people think.

If my goal is only to see Vanilla/Kunark/Velious and I don't care about the rest, what would be the advantage/disadvantage of P1999 vs newly-F2P EverQuest?  (I know they haven't added Velious yet, but apparently that's coming soon?)

To the extent I'm going to have to grind at all, I want that grind as to be as accelerated as possible. My goal is to explore the classic areas, and I don't care if the 'achievement' value is cheapened.  Or are there other, more easy-mode EQ private servers I should be looking into? (I'm also wondering if the lack of sturdy solo classes will hinder exploration as well if I play on Live.)

I have fond memories of EQ, but it's hard to separate out how much of that is the fact it was a more innocent age and my first MMO. If a game came out these days that said "camp a room for hours!" I'm not sure I would leap at it. The amount of time I'm willing to devote to the game simply isn't the same. I mean I spent 16-20+ hours camping one spawn in a dungeon (drop for monk epic quest) and it was an awesome feeling when I finally got it, with an intensity I still treasure, but whether that time investment justified that pay off, or it would have been better to have 20 hours of fun gameplay, is a good one.

I'd love to see someone try an uncompromising "you are a citizen of this world" approach, and the slow/boring gameplay that gave you time to chat, in order to find out what pull it still has but I don't think I have to worry too much about it. They'd never get the funding to make the game. A current game needs to have gameplay big budget and flashy enough to attract the console generation, probably a licensed IP and aimed at the gaming mainstream to try and make enough money to pay for the first two (see SWTOR).

Camping lower guk with my necro, my buddy's wizard and our druid friend was one of the better gaming memories. But that was when we'd LAN over at his apartment, order a pizza, crack a twelve pack and smoke a ton of ganja; play for the whole day.

I don't do that kid shit anymore. Nostalgia is easily torpedoed when your lifestyle changes.

Even something like TOR is way too much of a timesink for me, really. I can't imagine going back to something like EQ1 or UO.

Tank merc.  They're deliberately overpowered up to around level 60 to help accelerate people through the low-level content.  Just get a feel for how many blue/white/yellow/red mobs you can pull before the merc chickens out and runs.

I take it P1999 wouldn't have this option, so Vanilla EQ is probably the way to go for me?

For an explorer who wants to see Vanilla/Kunark/Velious, is there a specific class I should be paying to unlock? Something with a run buff, perhaps?

Druid best overall explorer class, by far.  Decent soloing potential, heals, run buff, levitate (closest thing to flying) and teleports.  I also recommend a halfling since their racial ability Hide (a ghetto invis) can save your butt.

sow plz

So, Halfling Druid?  Or do they not synergize well?

Halfling and wood elf are the two best druid races.  All you care about is Wisdom stat.

Aren't assling  and wood elf the only two Druid races?

Halfling druid used to be the munch-kin / power-gamer choice to the point they were stupidly common. There was even a lot of Jealousy over the ability to solo (via quad kiting), though I used to enjoy watching it.

Sounds like a plan. Now they just have to offer me race and class unlocks for under $5 a piece for me not to feel like I'm getting screwed, which shouldn't be a problem since it's a game that was shit a decade ago and is in a coma today. Let the good times roll!

Um, humans? And half-elves?

And probably those silly dragon-blooded whatsits they added not long after I quit, as well.

Iksar? No.. races were split into druidic, shamanic or priestly races pretty much (apart from a couple of races that could do two). It did add something to the sense of racial identity and didn't screw up balance too much since there were no factions.

They were stupidly common because druids were the only class that could solo to the initial cap* without dying and halflings had an EXP bonus and druids had no class exp penalty.  

How quickly we forget.  Yes, races & classes both had penalties to exp that stacked. Ogre Shadowknight was one of the longest grinds you'd find.  I think only Trolls had it worse.  

Halflings were the only race to get a bonus.

Fakeed: Yes, trolls SKs had the longest grind in the game.   40% hybrid penalty on top of 10% 20% race penalty.  So a halfling druid would be level 50 in the same number of kills a troll sk would take to hit ~35.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/editorial/011401_EQ_Producers_letter.html

Ed: Math Fail - This is why I do shit in spreadsheets and not in my head.  The SK would be ~2.5 levels behind at all times.  So the druid would hit 50 when the Sk was about halfway through level 47.

I had forgotten that piece of designer retardation. My favorite was wanting the spell that made my class first class godly (Torpor) but it being insanely rare and expensive... to the point I never got it. There were quite a lot of dumb decisions in EQ1.

Of course I believe EQ1 now has NPC mercenaries that will basically speed your solo leveling up to something like 65.

No, these chaps: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/eq:Drakkin

On our server most of the folks first to 30/Cazic were from our two beta groups, who spent a ton of time camping Unrest competitively and got to know each other pretty well....by release we actually cross-pollinated a little.

This necro shows up and just starts going nuts soloing stuff. I'm not sure if he hit CT before us, but it was basically our two groups and him soloing.

I quit at 32, because lolwizsoloing, even though back then I mostly grouped. I almost lost two levels (add another bullet point to bad design decisions) from death penalties and sold my account.

Ahh, selling accounts. I cannot believe some ass paid over $500 for my mid-40s ranger.

Yantis bought my lvl 27 druid when I quit for the first time.  That druid probably made a lot more than the $300+ I sold him for.   Pretty sure it was the actual guy, since I remember leveling with him some (had an Erudite wizard named Yantis). 

I may have helped kick start one of the biggest plat/account sellers.   :ye_gods:

I not only sold my EQ account, I sold it for trade+$ to the kid who had bought my UO account and went back to UO.

I made a lot of money from EQ and UO.

I bought a UO account in 2000 after I left EQ, played for a few months and then re-sold it.  It was a convenient way to get a character up to playable level, but UO accounts were much more economical and there was no other way to have a house in those days.

I just installed it today, because why wait for F2P if they have a 14 day free trial?  I just received my very first quest in the tutorial (kill 8 rats and 4 beetles or something), and I'm already about to quit.  Jesus christ this is terrible.

Compared to today's MMOs, yeah, it's pretty bad. But a decade ago it was  :drill: because it was the only game in town. Looking back I think I enjoyed it more for the social aspect than the actual gameplay. There were also a lot less fucktards back in the day so gaming with others didn't make you want to stab yourself. The guild I played in were basically the Boy Scouts of the server (Lords of Drakova on Cazic Thule). Pretty much our whole goal was just generally to to be there to help anyone and everyone else out in the game and have fun doing it. Just sitting around talking before, during and after a dungeon romp was as much fun as doing the dungeon. There was a real sense of camaraderie. I don't get that from today's MMOs. It's all anonymous/insignificant/every man for himself. I love playing WoW but I don't really have the desire to be part of something bigger in it because I really don't have to to have fun. You had to form some bonds in EQ if you wanted to get anything worthwhile done.

It was the closest I've ever felt to being part of an epic grand adventure. Even if it only was killing 10 rats.

I downloaded it again but was shocked they still had the same butt-ugly user-hostile interface. 

They must have been spending their dev time on new encounters because it sure wasn't the interface.

Was your Druid on Luclin? Maybe I bought your character :awesome_for_real:

Nope, I was on The Nameless. Home of Legacy of Steel and just about every Malaysian and Taiwanese player in the game.

Damn, $300 for a lvl 27 druid? Maybe I should have asked for a lot more than $75 when I sold my cleric at 34. I shudder when I think about how much time it took to level characters.

Heh. I recall it taking 2 to 3 months of solid play to get my BL up into the 50's and that was 6 to 8 hours a day minimum and knowing where all the 'hot' zones were at any given time (some zones would give more exp than others for a period of time and then go back to normal while other zones would then become the main hunt spots).

When I was playing EQ, we didn't have no goddamned BLs.

I always played the pet classes. First character was a human mage. If/when I get back in I'm going to have to check her birthdate. I know it was really close to the start of retail. Mages, druids, necros and beastlords were my preferred picks.

Beastlords were added with Luclin, the third (?) expansion.

Jesus Christ I spent 63 days of my life playing Everquest.

http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/character_profile.vm?characterId=468151594693

Urgh. 21 days on my shaman, 29 days on my monk, 18 on my cleric, 50 days on my necro ...  That's terrifying. I wonder if I can get a time refund?

81 days on my Druid alone.  :awesome_for_real:

Though, in fairness, that counts a lot of time sitting in the Nexus as a vendor bot.

Ed: I find it odd my last day online was in 2005. I take it that's the first time they updated that service, because I quit just before COH was released in '04.

Yeah a lot of characters have dates of November 16 2005, so it must be some sort of server update date rather than the real last-played date.

Or levels above 50 (the other thing mentioned about levelling the BL).

I enjoyed the first round of progression servers for a few months and was looking forward to the second.  Then I logged in to find out that they have altered the XP curves to brutally penalize soloing.  What fucking retard at Sony thought "Hey, you know what the problem with EQ1 was?  It rewarded soloing too much?"  Assclowns.

The character profile site has that information under the Rankings link. My lvl 16 ogre shaman was the 24,967th character created when I made him March 28, 1999. I can still remember the visceral feel of getting lost in the dark in Feerrott (because why not have three double letters?) at level 2.

Creation:    Mar 17, 1999    
Server: 76
Worldwide: 784

 :drill:

You obviously spent too much time deciding on which hairstyle and skin tone to use.

SK - 152 days 10 hours 36 minutes
Druid - 161 days 6 hours 54 minutes

Granted, a lot of that was 2-boxed once I started the second account and moved the druid across, but.. ouch.  :uhrr:
And I had other toons I used as merchant bots..

167 days on shaman + 41 on necro.  A lot of bazaar time, but still  :ye_gods:

http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/character_profile.vm?characterId=532576020133

Creation    Mar 16, 1999                  24                176

My creation dates weren't until June, and surprisingly the amount played for my 60+ characters seems relatively tame.

Rogue = 39 days 0 hours 41 minutes
Shaman = 30 days 17 hours 29 minutes
Cleric = 36 days 13 hours 9 minutes

None of them over 65, and I also don't think any of them were ever used as mules for the bazaar. Our guild did that for me.

Have a 61 Shaman I played up until the WoW launch.  I'll probably check it out.  Once I'm done exploring a few zones I doubt the nostalgia will keep me around for very long.

I was really late to EQ avoided it for so long but went into PoK raiding on my Mage

Creation    Apr 2, 2003
Total Time Played 100 days 15 hours 45 minutes

"Planes of Power - Access to Plane of Time granted". Pretty much quit after downing Quarm, it was a bookend for my time in the game. Pretty much never touched again after WoW as the guild moved to raiding there.

Likewise... The whole planes of power progression was a perfect end for the story, the content after that was remarkably ugly with no reason to care, and WoW was just doing everything better.

I couldn't do Planes of Power due to the grind. I hated levelling and grinding AAs. I'd had all I could take getting to 60 and earning a few AAs to play through the pre-PoP expansions. We all had a good run of adventures at level 60, particularly Kunark and Velious. Luclin was just weird and unfinished, PoP was big and beautiful but the grind went up exponentially.

I started in June 1999 and the bookend of EQ in my mind is the Velious endgame in 2001/2002, much like the Project 1999 people think, even though I actually stayed till 2003.

By that point it had pretty much become a raid-centric game. Soloing and exploring the old-world was heaps of fun when they didn't know what they were doing. Intricate and random dungeons just strewn around the map and only the vaguest progression. But Luclin really only made any sense in terms of raid targets and a rough progression (still half-baked though), and Planes of Power was basically raid progression with a little bit of game built around it. So the people who count PoP as the end are probably raiders, for explorers and casuals it was probably much earlier, most likely Velious. And of course the WoW developers took that raid game and moved it to the next level, which sort of overshadowed luclin and PoP even more.

The original EQ was still something broken and special. Kicking you out into the world and telling you, "try not to die, it's dangerous out there". Which probably happened due to low expectations and absent management. Nowadays it would be planned and scripted carefully enough that you'd never go off the rails. And the paradox of the extremely punitive game-play strongly encouraging groups and downtime made it both boring and social.

But yeah, I'd play the emulator over EQ f2p.

Hmm. In the guild I was in, it felt like a raid centric game non-stop from 1999, for three and a half years before PoP launched.

It was always about progression. Vox and Nagafen, then PoF, then PoH, then the Kunark raiding game (Venril, Trakanon, outdoor dragons, Veeshan's Peak). Then the Velious raiding game (dwarf, giant and dragon factions, into Sleeper's Tomb). Then some stupid crap called Luclin, then PoP.

We lost geared corpses in PoF, we CR'd around Trakanon's stupid aggro, we looped Halls of Testing eleventy-one times to do Ring of Scale. It means nothing now, but it happened.

WoW was made by people who went through all that, before anyone ever heard of PoP's pansy teleport books and graveyard respawns.

Leading a guild from being a friendly casual guild to raiding was what absolutely burned me out on both EQ and leading guilds. We made it through the Vox/Nagafen progression through to Plane of Hate and were just starting on the Venril Sathir raid in Kunark while also using Velious Giant fights to build up when I couldn't take any more. I think part of the problem really started with the introduction of the epic class weapon quests. The sheer selfish greed that sort of shit spawned, along with the absolute necessity for getting gear like the Cleric's resurrection mace, made leading people through a game VERY VERY UNFUN. People turned from friendly, helpful human beings to slobbering, gibbering cockgobblers in the span of seconds.

Both times I quit EQ1 were due to this. First my wizard with Cazic and rubicite nonsense, greed overtook many former friends. Then later our cool little casual guild got swallowed by another guild of absolute douchebags so we could be a raid guild. Our small guild actually formed the nucleus of the active raiders and my friend (guy I used to talk about I called the eqholic a few years back) was in their 'inner circle'...that's what they actually called it. So I was privy to all their douchey inner workings because I'd LAN the game with eqholic.

The crowning douche moment was when they gave some epic drop thingy to their inner circle necro who never showed up to any regular raids and sklipped me over, despite saving their bacon after so many wipes. Like I would feign when I saw a wipe coming on Hate, we got the clerics logged out, and I could relay to them when to log back in and start ressing, summoning the corpses to a safe spot. We pretty much never lost geared corpses mostly due to me. Then they give the best necro drop we saw to this kid they knew irl despite the fact he never (ever) showed for raids, I had never actually seen his character in game before that. Quit on the spot and never went back. Should probably thank him.

Yeah. Why don't I get involved with people in online games? Can't knock their teeth in if they get douchey.

I was lucky to be in a really good casual guild.  People were really good to each other and I had to deal with very little cocknobery.  They just didn't really fit the culture and moved on to one of the uberguilds.  Helped a lot probably that we were pretty far behind the curve.


Pretty much the right time.  I don't think the next couple expansions were remembered very fondly.

I remember reading (fuzzily, and finding the sources is too hard at this point) that the original game did not intend for Vox to really be raided. She was more an "iconic character" (like Kerafyrm). She retro-actively morphed into a raid when huge groups started zerging her down. I also remember older players saying Sol B and such were the launch end game and PoH/PoF came later. I like the narrative of the raid game emerging organically from within EQ. Since there are some people here who were gaming in that period (I started a bit later) is there any potential truth to that view?

Certainly I did feel that the "world to explore" aspect dwindled as the expansions became more about presenting a raiding progression. Velious and Kunark had a lot of zones just for exploring (or no use at all) and one mega-dungeon for the uber, with the Velious one being quite exclusive at the time. Whereas PoP and GoW were pretty much just support for a raid progression with a couple of boring XP zones (or even just areas at the zone in).

Certainly my fondest experience was forming a group of friends and levelling together almost entirely in dungeons. The original had so many hidden away dungeons. Some of them off the beaten path, intricate and threatening enough they were rarely used, which just seemed like some designer having fun. Places like befallen, the town sewers, and the dungeon off the field of bone (Kaesora, Dalnir?, in which the entire group needed rescue due to the boss constantly proccing charm, didn't even have the option to die).

It wasn't so much that she (and he) wasn't meant to be raided as Verant didn't anticipate that more than one group would attempt the encounter together.

Not sure about the history of the initial Planes -- I quit a few months after the launch cause Magicians were broken (runes weren't dropping properly) and rejoined during Kunark so those Planes were there and being raided when I came back.

As I recall the planes (fear, hate, and air) were not open for the first 3 months or so after launch.  When they did open, they went through significant retuning until things stabilized.  

There had been a long beta. Some people were all organised to gear up and go hardcore from the start. But there hadn't been a successful 3D diku before. Accelerated 3D graphics was a newfangled technology for which you had to buy an add-on card so you could play, while running internet servers for something on this scale was also new and different. It was far more popular than anticipated and the first few months were rough and unstable. The person above who said they played on The Nameless probably doesn't even remember it was nicknamed The Gameless at first, as it keeled over and died for days.

Yes, most players did fumble around, falling off Kelathin or dying in level 20 dungeons and poking at gnolls with sticks, fascinated by their first experiences in a live, threatening 3D fantasy world. But within a few months from launch, every server had serious raiding forces doing PoF and PoH and the dragons. And yes, raiding emerged organically from the fact we needed large forces to take down those targets. By the end of 1999, people were talking about raiding as if it had always existed, as if it was an entitlement for every MMORPG player.

Yes, they intended Vox and Naggy to last longer than they did, but that was the case with most raids designed in EQ. And raiding was always tuned to the maximum level and the uber gear of the time, so it was always just as tough with a brutal learning curve, no matter which era you played in. A piece of high level warrior armour in 1999-2001 had an AC value in the tens, +7 or +10 to a couple of stats, and the occasional click effect, and raiders were level 47-50 with no AA system. Often we had to remove our armour in favour of anything that functioned as resist gear when we fought, meaning the raid targets could swat us like flies if we didn't kill them fast enough. There was no "summon corpse" yet and there was an unrecoverable corpse rot timer (you lost all your gear permanently if you couldn't reach your corpse in 7 days), so you consented some poor rogue/monk to drag your corpse from under the dragon's feet, or to the wall in a fully populated Plane of Fear.

On my eventual server (The Tribunal) there were two raid alliances by late 1999: The Elitists and The Vagrants (EV), brutally efficient hardcore guilds who eventually combined into one guild, and The Alliance (TA), a dysfunctional group of about six guilds I was part of. By the middle of 2000, our guild was strong enough to raid on its own, which was a revelation. That formed the path for our guild and others for the rest of EQ.


Not really. Most were useful when they launched. The Iksar race was added with Kunark and travel from such a big continent was difficult, so some of the big empty Kunark zones you saw were used for low levelling at the time. Others were where we levelled 51-60 (the levels added with Kunark) because there was nowhere else at that time. Many of the zones you experienced as non-challenging later on were actually quite challenging even in PoF/PoH gear as a level 51-60 group. The mobs in Kunark had way more hitpoints than in the old world. Velious had some less useful zones as it didn't introduce a new race or levels, but it was FULL of things to do for people around level 60.

There was a progression of many raiding targets, repeated to equip your guild over many months in each of Kunark and Velious before it became possible to raid the zones you're describing as the "one mega-dungeon" (Veeshan's Peak and Sleepers Tomb). Much like the progression through PoP, though not as linear.

Ours too. Solusek A was full of good times, where my levelling group for the 30s and 40s formed. But we were levelling up with dreams of seeing Naggy, Vox, PoF, PoH, Phinigel Autropos (Kedge), etc.


Befallen was one of the busiest low level dungeons in 1999 - many people's first experience of a dungeon. The town sewers under Qeynos were too far away for everyone except people who started in that city, and neglected because Blackburrow was a better levelling dungeon nearby.


Those were added with Kunark and not part of the original. There were still a lot of people levelling up through the 30s and 40s around that time, when the only options were original or Kunark, so these got some use in their era (but not heaps).

I was on the same server as Tale and remember it the same way he's relating. (People's Front of Norrath/  Mithril Heart Brigade, here.)  MHB wasn't one of the 'cutting edge' guilds.  We came in after everyone had moved on and were doing old content because it was finally available. (World spawns, remember)   

When I joined around the end of the Luclin era they were just getting in to VP and the Ice Giant bosses because Elitists/ Vagrants and the others had moved-on and we were able to kill them during our weekend raid times because they were finally around at those times.   As Planes opened-up we were able to move on to Luclin and as they moved on to the higher planes, we were able to get in to the lower ones like POI and we went back and did the Ssra temple grind as well.

(Hey, think it sucks grinding rep in WoW?  Imagine having to grind faction at 1-3 points per mob just to be able to raid a zone.  Each aggressiveness level was at least as long as Revered->exalted in WOW and the mobs that gave it spawned less frequently.  I remember spending about 4 weeks of 4+ hours a night just killing the same room of mobs.  :ye_gods:)(

Why did we do this? Because we had to progress that way.  Even though we had the new expansions and were at the new level caps, gear was still the master.  Well.. gear and ability to field a large raid, levels made up for the last one but not the first.   You HAD to do VP->Luclin->PoP, there was no "gear reset"  WoW introduced that, along with instanced raiding. (Which is yet another reason to laugh when people say WoW didn't innovate or move the genre forward.)

I also remember going back to my warrior for a few days some time around PoP and laughing that she had what had been an awesome weapon when I last played her, towards the release of Kunark.. doing a massive 7.7 dps; the Short Sword of Ykesha.  I replaced it with some common world drop that did only 2x the damage.  Yes, it took the release of 4 expansions to be able to replace a group-only (Blue/ low purple) drop in EQ with a common world drop akin to the greens of WoW.

Reading this makes me very glad I played UO instead of EQ.  That's a lot of free time down the drain over a period of years.  (update, btw: glad I did the 14 day free trial instead of the f2p, I was able to roll my halfling druid and promptly quit and uninstall after the first kill-ten-rats quest)

As I remember, Vox was the first dragon downed and it was much much earlier than Brad McQuaid expected. Plane of Fear was not initially open on release. It was a few weeks or a month or so after release that it opened up. I remember it because it was a really big deal, with my wife and my friends all making level 1 ogres because they were the closest starting race point to the zone-in point. We'd try to run through the Feerott and survive the mobs who were 10-15 levels above us, then make it through the level 30-40's Spectres guarding the hidden tunnel to get to the actual portal, then RUN into the portal to zone into Fear. There were dozens of naked ogre corpses littering the place. My wife actually made it inside the zone and died at the portal. It was a day or so after that that McQuaid announced they'd level-gated the zone so only level 46 and up players could zone in, bending knee to mass of whining douchebag l33t raider types whose cocks he would slobber throughout the remainder of his reign in EQ.

The Plane of Hate opened months later, and Sky after that, each one progressively harder to get into, much less survive. I will say that clearing one of the planes or beating one of the dragons was a really amazing experience, and at first, I LOVED leading raids. My first Vox kill, I lead a multi-guild non-allied set of raiders (had members from something like 15 different guilds) and I was only 37 at the time (level 40 was considered the minimum level to take down Vox). This was in the days when there were NO custom chat channels. If you weren't all in the same guild, you had to do what I did - use a zone-wide chat channel like /shout or /ooc to coordinate the raid, with rosters written on paper, no voice chat programs, nothing.

You young whippersnappers got it easy these days.  :geezer:

Well luckily you didn't HAVE to do Luclin.  Outside some of the easier targets, my guild pretty much skipped the dick-punching grindy stuff and were able to go on to PoP on mostly Velious gear.  But Pre-pop, yeah that was the top-end content, and yeeech.

Played a Mage so I remember the faction grind so much. Grind those stupid giants for an insane time to be able to CoH behind Klandicar. That and constantly /logout at 10% health left not to take a faction hit.

After grinding factions I could CoH to a lot of epic spawns and got paid handsomely by others :awesome_for_real:

Plane of Sky was the worst, getting a raid up there to the 7th island for Mage epic was payback for all the grinding.

It was a different time. Finding an area with level appropriate mobs and killing thousands of them was considered prime game-play. If they gave interesting faction or drops that was a bonus. It's partly why WoW with its rich quest directed leveling was just so much more accessible and why players would probably never put up with it again.

... UO was that much less grindy? I messed with it a little bit when it was well and dead and getting skills to mastery wasn't exactly fast either. And of course it was considered a PK haven so was happy to be in EQ. Plus 3D beat isometric.

Yes it was though that place had one of my favorite moments in the game. My guild had a full raid going doing the various quests and we just about wiped on the fricking Bzzazzts. I can't remember the details of how things got screwed up (somebody probably broke the Enchanters' mezzes) but somehow my Bard was the only one left standing with a mez and I managed to keep the two remaining Bzzazzts mezzed until the rest of the raid was able to rez and regroup which took quite a while. Our guild's main Shammy was also there keeping me healed so I didn't have to try to twist in my regen when my mez would fail and a Bzzazzts would break free and beat on me until I was able to get a mez to stick.

From what I've read UO was no less grindy if you actually played it the way you had to play EQ.  The thing is nobody actually PLAYED UO.. they macro'd skills until endgame status then played.

UO wasn't bad except for the few instances it was horribad, when it came to raising skills.

I really enjoyed Siege Perilous, though. 7x GM without macroing, and it all came from regular gameplay. And no combat skills (stealth/thief).

Ya it was totally cool training the ubers with throwaway alts while they tried to break Fear. And even better, if you died you just left your corpse there, cause there was no /hidecorpse so people zoning in would crash from all the corpses they tried to load. Good times. Fuck that turd McQuaid for ruining it.

Awesome! It's like the old days repeating themselves.  :popcorn:

I really liked MHB - you were a great guild, the principled kind that tried to combine fun and roleplaying with the raiding stuff. I remember the first leader - a female dwarf cleric, can't remember the name, sometimes grouped with her. The pain of trying to lead an organically grown guild on raids led her to join The Elitists, but she was still cool.

I played a troll warrior called Grozzer, an officer of Southern Legion, the biggest Aussie/NZ guild in the first year of EQ. We began as a gathering point for the sparse population in our time zone, but EQ boomed and we soon had 200+ members and chaotic guildchat. I got us into The Alliance, but politics between low-level and raid-level players caused a split that formed Aurora Noctum, the first Aussie hardcore raiding guild, and I went to AN. SL continued as a social guild and had raiding struggles similar to MHB. AN was more disciplined, lasted many years in EQ and has been through AO, DAoC, SWG, several stints in WoW and EQ2, LotRO, Rift and currently SWTOR. I haven't really played anything since WoW.

Thistleburr.

edit: fixed quote fail

That's her!

She was gone by the time I'd joined the guild, but yes they were a great group of folks.  They didn't hold together in WoW, from what I understand.  None of the really strong personalities switched over to take-on a leadership role, so that's probably why.    I'd gone on to do an CST server instead of the PST they planned on rolling and by pure coincidence wound-up on the same one that Eli/Vags chose (Alleria).  I still remember seeing Crush running around Ironforge, though he burnt-out before ever becoming anything of note on the server.   Ha, old man memories.

PoFear WTF moments:

When they "fixed" the mobs damage output without telling anyone, very shortly after opening the zone.  That's when the impressive wipe-fests started happening.

Also, my buddy wound up with E'ci's only cryosilk robe (they removed it from the loot table before any more dropped) and he wasn't even high enough level to enter the zone after the level restriction went into effect  :uhrr:

And don't forget the clusterfuck of moving the class gear for the best tanks, two of the three healing classes (including the best ones), and all of the slowing/crowd control classes to Plane of Hate instead.  We wound up having to camp the zone for the week after a successful break, because it was usually too hard to get any of those classes to help break into the zone after that.  I spent a lot of 4am nights as the puller on those camps...

One of my favorite things about Plane of Hate were those little imps that would spawn every once in a while at random to hit the party whereever they were. I forget what they were called, but they were little mini demons almost too hard to target because they were cursor sized and they all screamed "BLEARG!" when they died. Which quickly became our guild mantra.

I find it funny that all the 13-years ago detailed memories and nostalgic posts in this thread would never have happened if EQ had been like the over-instanced, insta-travel, queue-ridden, immersion-breaking messes of modern games.

Or does someone have a great much more recent story about how they were once in this 10-minute awesome Flashpoint!, or how they were the top line in the high-score list after a Capture The Flag run! Wheee, how complex! Please share.


I understand the business models and motivations for why games today are built like they are, but that doesn't make them more fun for player interaction or memorable history-building. I didn't use the word 'evolution' on purpose here.

Everquest was historic, and this thread shows part of the reason why.

Humans evolved to remember painful and hurtful things in detail to better avoid them later.

Granted, but you also seem to have 13-year memories with astounding detail. That does count.

MahrinSkel's doing it about Tribes in the other thread. As one example... (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19989.msg1044960#msg1044960)

Or I could reminisce about City of Heroes beta, or something. The first time is always pretty memorable, as are the extreme highs and lows.

A lot - A LOT - of EQ sucked. That it was the first for a lot of people (as WoW was also the first for a lot of people) makes it stand out.

It stands out because there had never been a huge 3D accelerated MUD before. It was the first thing of its type, not just the first for a lot of people.

I remember following EQ up to it's release thinking it was going to flop because no one had 3d accelerators in their PC's and it was insane to require one.

When it came out I had my 3rd 3d accelerator (and the first good one, the 3dfx Voodoo).

My fond memories were almost due to being young with copious amounts of free time and weed, playing on a LAN with friends. EQ was entirely incidental.

http://www.eqmagetower.com/wiki/ReturningtoEQFAQ

(http://i.imgur.com/t7wDD.gif)

All I remember after the years are the people.  I spent over year in game with them.  It is where I found my wife.

After being married for 14 years, I fail to see how that in any way invalidates my point.

I checked it out for a few minutes. 

The upside is that it feels better put together than it did years ago.  It seems to load faster and cleaner. 

But the downside is that there are 'upgrade to gold' ads all over everything.  They pop up all the time. 

I can't see myself putting too much time into this anymore.

Absolutely. I was a hardcore EQ raider through Velios, Luclin and PoP and have some amazing memories, particulary of PoP. We got our first Rallos Zek kill because I screwed up on the final phase and got smacked down to 15% health just as the mobs started to spawn. As a bard I was on every mobs aggro list in the field, and they all instantly turned to kill me. Kited as long as I could, then ran to a corner and hit fading memories to wipe aggro. Rinsed and repeated whilst we burnt rallos down.

Wasn't intentional - we only worked out what had happened after he died because all our enchanters and rangers who were also supposed to be kiting were being completely ignored by the mobs who appeared to be running in wierd circles constantly.

Same thing in the plane of air mini-bosses before xegony. On the spider island we wiped, which normally meant you had to restart a few days later. I survived though, and kited the entire packs of spiders around the top island for 45 minutes whilst the raid resized up, wiped, razzed up, wiped and eventually fought their way back up. My wrists were sore for days afterwards.

I remember learning to swarm kite, grouping for the first time in dungeons - fantastic memories.

Bu I have the same quality of memory from Wow. I was in the first group on our server that completed the quest to kill baron rivendare in Stratholme when everyone raided the place at the time. I remember fighting Ragnaros for the first time and bein amazed - and getting a nickname that stuck with me for 6 years thanks to me saying 'if we last until the sons of ragnaros spawn I'm the pope'.  Damn shamans and their self rezzes!

You can absolutely guarantee there are millions of WoW players out there who have memories of that game just as vivid and important to them as yours are of EQ. It's how people work.

Here, something else useful: http://almarsguides.com/eq/

I agree. Though possibly a little less because there's lots of old veterans and spoiler sites happy to reduce the game to a mechanical process and online gaming is a bit ho-hum now. Combined with the current trend towards a "directed" experience so that you come out of the tutorial with a line of quests you can follow to end-game and challenges carefully balanced to not be too threatening. You really have to go out of your way to have a learning experience.

I was cleaning up some old files and found the "Copic and Etta" series of comics by some Japanese player. And the first panel is managing to drown while exploring the city in the darkness, the second getting lost and the third getting cleaned up by a gnoll immediately outside of the town gates. Not to mention a later panel with a character realizing the cool sounding god "Bertoxxulous" means there's lots of normally friendly NPC's who want to kill you and can easily do so.

Oh well, can't recapture more innocent times. And certainly not by going back to whatever they've turned EQ into now.

Would any developer ever dare to design the well in Blackburrow again?  The sheer hilarity of having a hole into which a new player could fall and see nothing but black while getting swarmed by gnolls, corpse lost in the first hour and exp debt too!

l2pf2p

      "Choice. The problem is choice." ―Neo.

I had a thought that explaining the difference of original EQ (and Eve to an extent) works much better if you split "Fun" and "memorable" into two categories. Because I'm not sure an MMO or game can actually hit both at once.

WoW gameplay in the Cataclysm expansion was miles ahead of EQ. The player has a rich sequence of quests with a lot of variation in interaction (such as controlling vehicles or changing forms / powers) and scripting (such as hero cameos). It was fun in a way that EQ very rarely was because it gives constant direction and rewards for executing. There's relatively few "dead" periods and those are short. But at the same time you have zero investment in the process because it quickly becomes obvious you are following a carefully laid path and there is never any reason not to follow it. As a result it is fun but not memorable because you didn't really make a plan of your own, select a strategy and work towards executing it so no achievement particularly resonates. You can kill demon lords (convenient powered down to become soloable) but that just makes them into a generic mob with an excessive model. Same in the new CoH tutorial where you solo kill a carefully neutered raid mob at level 2 but there's no sense of achievement in doing so and it is instantly forgotten.

EQ basically booted you out into the world after a short tutorial. The only real track is that as a newbie there were vast areas of the game world where the mobs will obliterate you. The main goal was to kill challenging mobs as determined by their level (which gave a forward progression) and drops (which encouraged visiting riskier areas). The gameplay often wasn't fun, lots of grinding, LFG, traveling (since the next set of rewarding mobs to kill might be far away) and waiting for re-spawn or resource recovery. Much of the game was trying to find the fun and for the vast majority of gamers WoW was a massive upgrade. But it did encourage you to make plans for your character, both short and long, and try to carry them out. And if it worked well there was a feeling of achievement because you had invested thought and effort in getting there. It was memorable because in some ways it was your own little story you made. Also the combination of sharing plans, lots of places with mobs too tough or numerous for a solo player and relatively slow gameplay encouraged social interaction (same in Eve fleet chat), whereas most modern instance runs are all speed runs because the optimal path to the goal is known.

Eve is somewhat the same. Insanely boring gameplay but the ability of the players to be part of a larger plan invented by players.

Maybe it even explained why CoH had relatively limited appeal. The instanced missions remove player choice and so quickly become grindy (especially because there's so few maps). EQ LDoN was pretty much the same now I think about it, DDO as well I think.

As the games becomes more guided that freedom inherently vanishes in proportion. So modern WoW quests and MMO raiding in general have a clear progression, expected execution and the challenge is tuned to the point where the execution must be fairly efficient. Which inherently disallows most alternatives as being impractical (or possibly exploits if the designers didn't see it).

I do wonder if it is possible to have a game with the freedom to explore and make your own plans without the "boring" that makes it impossible to compete for the mass market share needed to fund the current development costs.  Also people inherently optimize away that freedom with leveling guides and quest trackers so they can race to end-game. Maybe GW2 will provide some interesting responses to these challenges.

I think it also explains why some of the Asian grinders fail. They generally don't have that much of a guided path but they also don't tend to have a very rich or differentiated world. You can't really make plans or goals if all the zones are just endless plains full of generic mobs. There need to be things you can base plans around like diverse regions or points of interest (like blackburrow was). Which they don't generally bother with because it is understood that the goal is getting to level cap so you can kill other players.

I think the problem is that the exploration and plan making *is* the "boring" to most people.   Sure, maybe you can minimize the farming materials or something which usually comes with the Sandbox games, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of gamers just want an hour of entertainment.  If they have to explore and make plans, the hour is up before they've actually "played."

The catch is that for someone like me the exploration and the planning is part of the "playing" whereas for many people it is seen as an obstacle to the "playing."  I'm not sure these two play styles can be reconciled.  World War 2 Online did it maybe as well as I can think of off hand by empowering the most dedicated players with the ability to dictate the over arching strategy which involved lots of planning, logistics, etc.  Meanwhile, the other players could log in, see where the action was (without needing to even know about the High Command folks or why they were making the decisions) and just fight over a town or two.

Granted, this was the overhauled version, it wasn't like this at launch.  Not to mention it isn't like WW2O is a poster child for financial success.  Loved the game, but it isn't for everyone.   

Yeah, but I really wonder if it is possible for people to feel the "memorable sense of achievement" in an MMO without the boring bits. It partly comes from me wondering why some of the ball-breakingly grindy shit I did in EQ has left me with good memories of the game, whereas much more directed stuff like Cataclysm leveling faded into blandness even while I was doing it. Something about humans being broken and "no pain, no gain" come to mind :/

Time investment is certainly part of it. I remember long gaming sessions in EQ because once you'd finally found a group, or started a clear, you were committed. Which I guess the negative side of being "invested" in the game. Eve had this even worse where you would start playing and how long you'd be expected to continue playing was at the convenience of other people with little opportunity to hop-in / hop-out. And if you can only play for an hour you expect to be immediately in the action.

There are certainly ways to get some instant action but I'm not sure they really suit an MMO game. You don't need a "persistent world" if you are just going to log in and kill some shit for 30 minutes. A single player or match based game (with many match based games now offering character persistence) is just much better suited to providing that. With MMO battlegrounds generally being hampered in comparison due to gear and mechanics leaking over from or into PvE and damaging both of them and more problems with ping / server responsiveness. Maybe you could make a hybrid like you say where some do the planning and others are the zerg, and it seems to be what GW2 is after with the zone events, but getting that to provide freedom and challenge so that beating it is rewarding and memorable will not be easy. In general I suspect game and world depth comes at a cost of overhead and efforts to make an action-MMO or story based MMO haven't convinced me there's an easy solution to that conflict.

That said I would consider playing Eve again if I could log in and launch my personal fighter from someone's super-carrier to join in a battle in progress. But 30 gates listening to DBRB dribble on for a fight that might happen and might be balanced isn't worth it. And thanks to the wonders of open-world PvP that's probably happening at the extremes of my timezone anyway... damn, now I want to fly my frigates again :/

I'm actually enjoying LotRO because the "deeds" are probably the closest I've seen to a "go exploring, find stuff" game. I can go wandering around the old forest which was built partly to represent a fictional place rather than just a leveling zone and possibly find hidden things (like the flowers of the entwives, or a hidden spider nest). But even then I'm not sure I could argue the time invested is giving massively rewarding gameplay.

(edit)

I can also understand my MMO malaise. I want the emotional payoff I got in EQ but I don't want to invest that much time, have to invest as much time in finding a guild and meeting their time and effort demands and put up with the boring bits. Which currently is destined to be unsatisfied.

Well, I logged into one of my old characters and ran around for about an hour trying to remember the geography. It's been so long I have no idea whet I'm doing. So I just loaded up some buffs and heals and babysat a young Iksar in Crushbane for about an hour.

I think I can safely say I will never pay to play this game ever again. Norrath is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

Has it been mentioned that Everquest Adventures is shutting down at the end of March (http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/29/everquest-online-adventures-sunsetting-march-29th/)?

The thing I remember most fondly (and not knowing any better liked the least) about EQ was the pains inflicted upon me while playing were mostly caused by rules of the game (corpse runs, collision detection, faction grinding, locked content).  Now I realize that it was all hazing and misery loves company, this added an unhealthy level of depth and commitment to EQ.

In UO ALL of my pain came from other players.  

In WoW, which was mostly painless, the most pain I felt was inflicted upon me by the devs changing shit.  Having my entire gear set made irrelevant by a change in mechanics and stats was infuriating.  Then later having my warrior take a back seat to druid and paladin tanks pretty much made me lose interest in the game completely.  

Not that the other games don't have nerfs but both of these seemed particularly pointless (ie your class set didn't properly fit the theme so we did a stat switch with all your hand picked gear and after 3 years we feel that warriors shouldn't be the best all around tanks after all).

Few things in any other MMOG compare to one's first Freeport to Qeynos cross-continent run.  The lack of in-game maps, item loss on death, and the presence of some truly terrifying (to a level 12) stuff on the way led to a very memorable experience.  But I definitely felt like I'd accomplished something!

Yep.. I remember studying maps, reading guides and setting aside a whole evening to running. It was cool when a bard in highpass-hold ran me part of the way, some other veteran gave me a sword, and I chatted with some people while waiting for Kithikor to change to daylight.

Very memorable.... but at the same time if you break down the gameplay it makes no sense at all.

But it did mean that when I eventually got to Halas so I could level up with my friends Barb the zone had a sense of community because it was really isolated.

Having to do ALL that traveling meant you would have to "base" yourself for weeks at a time at one place, especially if you were a melee character who couldn't change their bind point. As a barb warrior, I'd have to spend at least an hour or more running to the place I expected to be the next night unless I was lucky enough to get some druid or wizard teleport. If I was running raids the next night, I'd have to run from wherever I'd been leveling the previous night to some place within about a 15-minute jog of the next night's raid. It did serve to give me the sense of "an adventurer based out of X" instead of just running through tailored linear tracks of mobs to bash for xp, gold and items.

On the other hand, it was a goddamn pain in my fucking ass that meant I'd lose an hour of sleep doing nothing but waiting on boats, shouting for teleports over zone-wide chats and avoiding mobs I couldn't kill in zones I wouldn't be hunting in for another 10 levels. I lost the sense that there was a WORLD going on out there, but fuck, I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT SHIT ANYMORE. I didn't have time for it then, but at least I could handle the lost sleep better. Fuck a bunch of that now. I firmly believe there's a way to maintain that worldliness without also making it a complete goddamn pain in the ass to get around. Allowing all characters to bind in certain quest hubs regardless of class, allowing all groups to teleport to each other's location regardless of class, providing fast travel options to places you've already been, these are all things that could have helped EQ tremendously.

Or just include a "summon buddy" ability on a 1 hour timer.  My god the time that would have been saved...

I did the Freeport to Qeynos run as a noob, but nothing compares to the experience I had running Grobb to Qeynos as a level 6 troll to join my guild on a new server.

That's innothule - feerott - rathe mtns - lake rathe - south karana - north karana - west karana - Qeynos hills - as a KOS race with everything fully spawned and nobody killing it. I managed to get a bind at The Arena from some level 20 power gamers doing aviaks, but hell I was even KOS to aviaks from the start. And KOS to the Qeynos guards when I got there and found a level 12 person to bind me at the sewers.

My boss from about 5 jobs ago got me into EQ in 2002.  Both of us played very casually and when I shifted into WoW at launch, he just stopped playing online games completely.

He recently posted on FB about trying P1999.  When I mentioned EQ going F2P he said he had tried it, but it was full of idiots and had too much content to try to learn.  So then he found P1999 and pretty much fell in love.  I wonder how many other people would pay to play EQ as it was?  I always see posts about wanting an EQ classic server, but there are legitimately people out there who want it. 

For all SOE's statements that they can't get the old code back and can't make a classic server work, then P1999 comes along and kinda does it for them. 

I got a new email from them today - promising all kinds of cool stuff if only I will please come back and subscribe to a recurring gold membership!

Look at the exciting things we can all get!


Upgrade to a 3, 6 or 12-month recurring Gold Membership and get:

Animated Armor Mercenary Contract
24 Slot Bag
Bottle of Adventure III (5)
Stack of Food (20)
Perfected Augmentation Distiller (5)
Bottle of Speed (5)
Consigned Complete Armor Bundle
Stack of Drink (20)


Upgrade to a 1-month recurring Gold Membership and get:
Stack of Food (20)
18-Slot Bag
Stack of Drink (20)



I know for people like myself who were on the fence about resubbing to EQ will find this is what just pushes us over the edge. I mean, look at that! A stack of food and a stack of drink!  :why_so_serious:

My magician farts in that general direction. 

I got that email, too.  It's bonkers.  It's like going to buy a cell phone and they try to upsell you a rock, too.

(http://i.imgur.com/Isbnw.jpg)

Triple station cash, today only. (28/04)

Sony cries "Uncle!", relaxes F2P restrictions to compete with other F2P titles, and start boosting EQ Next hype. (http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/07/everquest-everquest-ii-repeal-f2p-restrictions-on-class-race/)

 :roflcopter:

Too bad they can't even lie well anymore over there.


Really?  REALLY?!  You were just too busy?  :oh_i_see:

Depends on their development method and cycles.  I get the impression there aren't a ton of people left in dev on these projects. 

Regardless, I've had that spring-time itch to play EQ again, I'm trying my best to remember the good without reliving the reality. 

I need a new EQ Classic-esque world.  Not p1999, please.

Heh, I totally remember this nonsense now. I hid in a cabin as a newb in Kithicor, before a skeleton walked through a wall and wrecked my shit. For a while I hunted at that temple complex near Innothule. I just kept myself bound in Freeport, but I would inevitably need to sell junk every now and then...so as I rogue I would just go to the Ogre town and sell from hiding. This made things very convenient for my groups as they didn't have to run all the way back...though I guess they never noticed I was taking an extra cut for myself...

Loved that game for a while but holy crap did the solo experience for a rogue suck - no group, no xp.

A friend went back to EQ1 recently and was talking to me about it while I was playing Tera which highlighted the very worst parts of Tera and the very best parts of EQ in my mind. And all I ended up wanting to do was play FF11. Really wish they had not ruined that game with the epic only possible while grouped grind.

I played for a couple of weeks recently.  With the addition of mercs you can solo very effectively - I even ran some dungeons solo for shits and giggles.  In the end though my crappy shaman at level 30 something was hitting for 15-20 while the merc was basically doing 90-95% of the killing.  Kind of takes all the fun out of it if your pet kills everything and the player alt+tabs to read teh internet.

That's awesome. Proper rogue.

Did the same thing in LDoN too:

"Hey, let me do master loot - I have 2 Steins of Moggok, with CHA gems on them!"

*Pickpocket reasonably throughout entire dungeon run*
*Sell all loots, keep a minor extra cut for myself*

Though to be fair, I was mostly doing this because I was broke and could never earn money worth a damn in that game - the best I was ever able to do was solo-farm Velium in Crystal Caverns in Velius...had to do a lot of risky pulling.

Logged into EQ2 and remembered why I didn't play despite it probably being my favorite game of all time. I'm stark naked, all my equipment is both out of date with two new expansions, but is still locked. Looked at the boards, those locks aren't going away. Uninstalled. Looks to me like they still want to keep it a glorified trial. It's a slightly better glorified trial, but they still don't "get it."

So was your equip locked because it was "too good" for a free account?  I forget how EQ2 locks work..

Correct, you're unable to equip gear above a certain quality level; I can't remember where they set the bar but raid-geared toons are always screwed.

I haven't logged into EQ1 since around 2003ish. Any chance my chars are still around?  :why_so_serious:

Quite probably but you'll have to find them if you weren't on one of the legacy servers that they dumped everyone on. And it's not as simple as it would seem as my server was Tarew Marr a beta server which got folded into Drinal which was a second or third wave server iirc.

Edit: wrong Everquest  :oops:

Wouldn't even be worth trying to go back to EQ1 for me.  I destroyed or gave-away all the gear on all my characters and gave away the platinum to make sure I wouldn't go back.  Naked characters have no chance in that game.

the bigger problem is remembering my user/pass lol.

I played for a couple months last year.  I ended up 3 boxing and plopping some money on SC when it was triple points.  It was fun for while it lasted, but the social aspect was really the biggest draw of the game for me, and I'm an antisocial bastard.

So when are those race/class restriction removals supposed to go into effect? 'Cause as of right now, they're still in.

Brad McQuaid back working on EverQuest (http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/12-years-i-feel-so-old.4319/) :awesome_for_real:

It's like having two pics of Picard double facepalming.

He had to go. His people needed him.   :why_so_serious:

Better there than elsewhere, IMO.

I was hoping for a Kickstarter MMORPG from him, personally :why_so_serious:

Hell I'd plop 10 bucks on that if the reward was getting to kick him in the balls.

I installed it and am having trouble getting a widescreen 16x10 resolution out of it. For some reason the config program only recognizes old crt style resolutions. Anyone know a fix?

 

Play a game made THIS century?  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, the engine is at least 16 years old.  These fancy HD resolutions didn't exist when it was created (just ask Sky about his headaches!)  and I'd wager most people playing EQ don't have monitors that support them anyway.

Because the game can probably run on a toaster at this point.

A few years back I got it up and running in some distored 4:3 ratio on my widescreen, but for whatever reason, my toon would run SUPER fast. I had the nightmare horse for my SK and the thing would spaz the fuck out and the gallop animation was x10 normal speed. It was like running EQ in Benny Hill mode. Never bothered to troubleshoot it and besides, the old server was a wasteland.

I'm looking forward to him rounding the EQ2 base and sliding into EQ Next home. That way Brad will have touched all the EQ titles.

Actually it must have been a glitch cause today it booted up and ran in 1680x1050 just fine. Still looks like shit though. Dunno why they have such a terrible problem with fonts and why they want to make every item in the ui faded by default. Looks terrible and the new models are still total shit :(

The good news is customer service was able to retrieve my user name and I reset my password and got in. It was really cool to see my old chars (my first mmo chars ever!) again after at least 10 years. The bad news is that I forgot I gave away most of my gold/equipment on my paladin so he's mostly naked lol. I got some valorium gear which I assume is from Fear raids.

I was on Brell Serrilis (sp) which is now Cazic.

I had that happen a few years ago. I believe the solution was to force the game to only use one processor (if you had a multicore system which probably everyone does now). It was either that or run it in XP compatibility mode. I think the client now compensates for it. I started playing around with the Mac client a couple of months back and it was a nice bit of nostalgia. I think the Mac client only goes up to either Kunark or the next expansion after that. Rolled a barb beastlord and spent about 20 minutes trying to remember how to navigate the barb village to get to the zone line. It's amazing how turned around you could get in that game due to it's persepective. I never got the hang of Neriak.

Especially because you have to level up your compass :)

I still have my collection of maps from back in the day. It was a tribute to the designers making complex twisty maps like their favourite PnP dungeons, and the amount of effort people invested, that going out and mapping the world was considered an important community service.

I do feel the slightest nostalgia for my folder of maps. But I'm a map ho.

I was always a really spatially oriented guy so I never needed maps beyond the first day or so in a zone.

That said, fuck Paludal Caverns.  That place gave me a brain twist so many times before I learned it.

I loved making maps.  Wizardry, M&M, Mozart MUD, Zork.  If I could map it, I'd do so.

I am with you Lant, and another reason I like Wizardry Online (although you can loot scraps of maps if you are lucky).