Ah heck, let's talk about EQ1

[Venkman]

Guildie posted an FoH Youtube Nostalgia video. Besides the music, which I loved, it got me thinking about EQ1 again. Yea, yea, the game pissed most of us off in some form. But in terms of where the genre is 10 years later, it either outright invented, merely popularized, or single-handedly caused the creation of a lot of the stuff newer players take for granted.

Yea, I'll be the first to say this genre has gone easy-mode. But then, what constituted as "hard" back in the day is the sort of thing we'd institutionalize people for even considering in 2008.

So let's talk about that (until this devolves into the Den )

I'll start with stuff that has since been devolved out of the popular end of the genre (the one with all the players, both in WoW and in the microtrans games that share some of the diku conventions). I'm missing a lot, so feel free to add:

• XP loss on death. Yea, ain't missing that.
• Level loss due to sufficient XP loss. I think this is the single biggest contribution to the Grind mentality. Christ, they created a Cleric Epic just due to this, and we made all the Clerics get one, poor bastards.
  
• Item loss due to really unfortunate death. This wasn't pre-Trammel UO where you just went back and got your 17th set of full GM crafted gear. This was shit you camped for 40 hours lost in the lava river you fell into due to a lag spike outside of wherever-that-was.
• Attackable NPCs. First step in the new game world is probably to turn around and take a look. You have a 50% chance of deciding to turn left. You hit A to do that, like you did in Doom before it. Except here, A is the Attack key, and you're probably standing near your Trainer or a guard. And then you respawn in from death.
  
• Actual relevant NPC factions. This is a sort of unfortunate devolution. Nowadays you pick a side at character creation and that's that. Back in the day you could (almost) choose any Race and eventually become friendly with any Faction. Imagine being able to start as an Orc but eventually gain entry to Stormwind. Even EQ2 made it more contrived with it's Betrayal quests.
• Mobs that don't give up. Nowadays mobs will mostly rubberband back to their "home". In EQ1, if you got in over your head, you had to run for a zone boundary to enter an adjacent zone. Meanwhile, the other people who did that before you are probably sitting on the side you just came from, and have just gotten wtfpounced by the mobs that followed you. If you've been there, you felt it in Crushbone, Blackburrow and particularly Unrest (which was a mess unto itself anyway). The closest analog in WoW is in Raid instances. Imagine that, in public spaces, all the time.
• Spellbook meditating. Nothing says "fun" quite like having a) a mana bar that could take a full four minutes to recharge (while being depleted in about four abilities); and, b) having to stare at your spellbook for the entire time.

Stuff that was added because of EQ1 and/or what players did there:

• Ingame maps. What? Everyone didn't like going to EQAtlas and printing out their own custom-created MS Word files? (yes Sky, this was before I started using Excel ).
• Ingame quest trackers. I'm actually having a hard time remembering in what game this first appeared. I don't remember one in early UO, AC1 nor EQ1, though this did come later in EQ1, I think in the Legacy of Ykesha expansion. Pretty sure it was in DAoC.
• Alt-tab. SOE used to do everything they could to keep you from alt-tabbing. Then they and everyone else capitulated. But at least they had zone-wide chat and dedicated guild chat. Even UO didn't have that. I still remember having AIM up all the time when playing.
• Instances. EQ1 caused the creation of these, if only to keep players from griefing each other from Vox and Naggy spawns.
• Mobs that give up
• Hotkey bars. You need more abilities. In early EQ1, you were lucky to have six accessible abilities and 8 spell slots. IIRC.

[jpark]

I have some fond memories of EQ1 - when I wasn't LFG :)

To your point about factions:  I played a troll and decided to find every quest that allowed me to build faction with the good races.  I had a hoot - I  could sit in the Elven, Dwarven and human cities, beside a guard, and watch other players boggle at the fact I strolled around unharmed by the guards.

I never did crack Halas though.

In a sense, to me, I created "my own  game".  I spent months doing low level quests, and finding the right balance of faction that allowed me to advance my standing as good.  To me my fun was not the gear (although I did raid) but this set of faction accomplishments which was a source of much amusement when I finished them.

Because of the long leveling curve in EQ - it helped build community - it was much harder to retreat to an alt if you decided to be a jerk in a particular toon.  I miss the community of EQ the most.  With the option of server transfers and name changes in many games today - I feel community has really suffered in successor games.

EQ1 was not friendly, but it allowed this open ended game play in a sense.

On a separate note - EQ was "dangerous" - and I do miss that.  There are too many safety rails today, and sometimes, that dampens that sense of exploration.

[Triforcer]

Rallos Zek was its own special little place.  It was a one item loot PvP server (could only attack +- 4 levels from you).  Several fun factors:

1)  You couldn't loot something your victim had in a bag.  When you were ganked, it was a furious exercise in bagging all your equipment.

2)  De-leveling.  I'd be impressed if anyone remembers this one.  It takes a hardcore pker to go from level 50 to level 5.

3).  Naked casters.  Every single fucking halfling and gnome was a psychotic ganker.

4)  Mob training.  At one point, a level 5 bard could go into a zone like Oasis and use his run spell to stay in front of all the sand giants.  Then, he'd run the giants through groups.  It added depth to PvP, and I wish an MMO would bring this back.

Me and my brother got bored with high level PvP, so we created eternal level five naked wizard pks and camped Faydwer forest.  Elves had naturally low hp, so we'd go around rooting and ganking level 1s fighting bats.  Everytime we killed someone, we told the zone "X has died for his crimes against the Faydark."  I kept all the level 1 robes I got as trophies.  The high point of this was when someone told me that I killed them literally five seconds after they spawned on RZ for the first time, and because of me they were never pvping again.

In 2000, they put in the Sanctuary patch (no PvP on RZ until level 20) and that was that.  It wasn't pre-Ren UO, but it was something.   

[Selby]

Yea, yea, the game pissed most of us off in some form.

Sure as hell did.  I still won't pay any money for an SOE game to this day because of how poorly EQ1 was run and handled.  Even Grimmy has almost given up on me ;-)

[Stephen Zepp]

Just in case anyone has any positive feelings of nostalgia, I was told recently that EQ now has removed all level, flagging, pre-quest, and related requirements for content more than 2 years old.

That means:

--Anyone can hit up Plane of Time (although at this point no one should want to for the loot, it is a pretty cool zone in some ways)
--Anguish, without having to do trials or sigs.
--Tacvi (while the flagging was pure hell, the zone itself was quite fun, and had some interesting raid mechanics)
--Prophecies of Ro (another with a decently mind numbing and frustrating flagging path)

[Threash]

Just in case anyone has any positive feelings of nostalgia, I was told recently that EQ now has removed all level, flagging, pre-quest, and related requirements for content more than 2 years old.

That means:

--Anyone can hit up Plane of Time (although at this point no one should want to for the loot, it is a pretty cool zone in some ways)
--Anguish, without having to do trials or sigs.
--Tacvi (while the flagging was pure hell, the zone itself was quite fun, and had some interesting raid mechanics)
--Prophecies of Ro (another with a decently mind numbing and frustrating flagging path)

The only one of those things i recognize is time :(

[Miasma]

4)  Mob training.  At one point, a level 5 bard could go into a zone like Oasis and use his run spell to stay in front of all the sand giants.  Then, he'd run the giants through groups.  It added depth to PvP, and I wish an MMO would bring this back.

Good old Fansy the bard.

Sadly The Quon's website doesn't work anymore, I loved that.

[Ratman_tf]

Yeah. I jumped from UO to DAoC, and only went back to give EQ a try for a few weeks.

The only thing good about those few weeks was the group that I hooked up with to bash mobs.

Every single part of the game I either didn't care or hated.

Never understood what other people saw in it.

[ShenMolo]

I joined Fenin Ro on day 1 because it was being advertised by beta players as the "Roleplaying Server".

I remember people being shouted down for talking OOC in General Chat. I joined an all dwarf guild and had a blast for many months. I remember stumbling around in Feydark because i couldn't actually see shit.

Later I would quit Fenin Ro and go to the Test server looking for a tighter community.

I once camped that island cyclops for 36 hours straight for the JBoots quest, then disconnected when he finally spawned  I got back in just in time to keep him from being KS'd, but I almost lost my shit on that one.

Just the memory of sitting in a group for hours camped along the outside wall of Unrest, with dozens of other groups, is so different from games nowadays.

For better or worse, EQ forced you into a community of players unlike anything around today. WoW is basically a single player game compared to EQ, at least 1-69. I hardly remember doing ANY questing in EQ, it was solo or group grinding.

[Merusk]

Ah there's something that's been removed from the genre.  Different "Sights"   Or does EQ2 carry on the torch of, "Oh hey you're a human, you're going to be fucking blind 1/3 of your gametime.  Here's a light item to always take up a bag slot for you!"

Yeah, don't miss that much.  It's most of the reason I only played Half Elves or Dark Elves.

I do miss kiting, though.  Even if it wasn't an intended mechanic, quad kiting and bard kiting were both damned fun. There was an art to keeping track of the mob spawns in an area as you ran around like a fool so you didn't pick-up additional mobs.

"Twink" buffs and in large part "twink" equipment.  The rise of BoE items and "you must be x" for spells means no more level 1 players taking-down level 10-20 mobs on damage shields with an insane number of hit points for a noob. 

Needing to stay logged-in to sell your stuff.  Ah, what a pain in the ass it was to adventure, knowing that 3k plat item was sitting in your bank, missing potential buyers.  No, I didn't have an account solely for selling stuff or dual-boxing with.

"Squishy" warriors. Everyone likes to bitch about how healers aren't effective in solo PvE or take forever to kill stuff in solo PvE.  They all forget the days when things like Warriors couldn't even solo "green" or "grey" level mobs.  The day my level 53 warrior was pwnd by a Hill giant was the day I rolled up a fucking druid.

"Dangerous" mobs in low-level areas. We've mentioned this before.  Things like the griffins in East Commons. The Hill giant in West Commons.  "SPECTER AT THE DOCK!"  "Slate to the tunnel!"  Night in Kithikore.  These were worldly bits I'd love to see even in my "games" as they added a level of teamwork and a reason for higher-levels to intermix with lowbies and help out from time to time.  (Wow did nice adding-in the Void Reaver in Hellfire, but that's it.)

That's it for now, not going to wrack my brain too hard as I'm already late for work.

[Dtrain]

I can't watch those nostalgia videos without feeling a profound loneliness that I can only compare to what a former cult member must feel. I think EQ is both a great and truly significant milestone in the evolution of online gaming, and for me there will never be another one like it. That having been said, the game itself was a total pile of shit, but it benefited as much from a lack of true competition as it did from the basic flaws in human nature to which it was ideally suited towards exploiting.

[WindupAtheist]

I think at some point I'm going to try EQ1 as a fresh never-played-before newb.  Just to see.  Fuck it.

[Nerf]

I only played EQ1 for about 20 minutes, but I spent a couple years in AC1.

Perching, actually using the terrain to your advantage, has been totally removed from everything, and it's awful.

It's not an "exploit" that my arrows can shoot the guy standing below me as I stand precariously balanced on top of some odd rock formation.

There was a spot in AC1, a few clicks out from one of the towns that will always be one of my fondest memories, the golem shrine.  Just a shrine, out in the middle of nowhere, with some golems that spawned on it, and you had to jump up/down/run around to get them stuck in places they couldn't hurt you so that you could kill them while 1/5th of their level.

Bring back npcs that get stuck on terrain, bring back letting me perch on top of a rock formation while I dodge your ranged spells/attacks.

(AC1 had dodgeable projectiles, when fired, projiles would extrapolate your position based on current vector and speed, and fire it to there, so you could strafe back and forth to dodge, great fun)

[Dren]

Stopped playing UO because all my friends left to play EQ1.  I played it for 3 months.  I have nothing good to say, sorry.

- I was able to play with all my friends in UO despite skill level differences, etc.  Now, once you fell behind by just a few levels, you just couldn't "hang out" anymore.  It was a race and if you lagged behind, you had to find a new set of friends.
- Forced grouping hooooooo!  Suckity suck suck.  Wait 20 minutes LFG so I could camp mobs for another hour before I had to log.  If I didn't die, I gained a bit of level bar.  If I died, the entire night was worthless.  More often than not, I ended up with less experience than I started that evening.
- Camping.  Seriously, this was the start of it and I absolutely hated it.  Only FFXI was able to make it even worse.  At least they had those combat combo moves that were interesting for awhile.
     "Ok, we killed everything here, let's find another group of them"
     "No Dude, just sit down and rest a bit, we'll kill the next spawn right here."
     "How long do we do this?"
     "Forever."
- Lost.  Always lost.  Always running.
- Not only lost, but scared.  Yeah, this is fun at times, but not nonstop.
     "Hey, this is a nice new area-----WHAM!"
     "What the hell is killing me?  I don't see anything.  WTF!"
       ----You were killed by a Pixie--- (They were like 3 sprites tall on your screen....I never could see those damned things.)
- That leads me into Powerless.  I always felt meek and weak.  Again, FFXI took this to a new level later (full group to kill a hare anyone?)

So basically during my time in EQ I was lonely, bored, lost, scared, and felt weak/worthless.  I know thousands felt otherwise, but from a casual player's perspective playing casually for 3 months (just to give it a chance,) that's what I came up with.

[Tmon]

I joined Fenin Ro on day 1 because it was being advertised by beta players as the "Roleplaying Server".

I remember people being shouted down for talking OOC in General Chat...

I remember seeing someone yelling in general chat OOC HELP!  It truly made me laugh outloud.  I also remember running up to an NPC and typing Hail to see if it had a quest and learning that a was the default attack key.  The other fun thing was the constant rain of newbie wood elves learning that their starter city was lethally devoid of safety rails.

[raydeen]

I logged in a couple days ago just to update and get away from WoW for a bit. I've got a lowbie mage on Combine that I had parked out in W.Karena. Fired up an air elemental and went hunting. Saw a yellow con scarecrow and figured what the hell, sicced the pet on him and started nuking. Mana went down real fast, pet died and I thought 'oh heck, here we go...run for the guards.'...but nothing happened. The mob just sauntered off into the distance. I probably could've medded up, cast another pet and taken him. I've never seen that happen in EQ1 before. I'm definately going to see if that was a fluke or if they've changed the mob code to be less aggressive.

Fondest memory of EQ1 - being one of the first to find Stonebrunt Mountains. I remember racing my lil' druid through the Hollows and desperately trying to find the new exit. Found it, and then basically lived there for 15 levels or so. Got a bitching cool set of blue wicker armour out there. Also where I learned to kite. Great fun. I wonder if they ever did anything with the hidden cave in the east....

[Nebu]

Memories.....

Walk up to the priest of discord.

Me: "WFT the guy just killed me"

Friend: "What did you do?"

Me: "I typed: hail"

...

Me: "I think I missed the H key"



I remember the j-boot quest and the paladin armor quest making me cry.  I remember spending days at the aviak tree.  I remember winning my first FBSS in L. Guk.  I remember being utterly amazed standing outside the high elf city.  I remember orc hill and crushbone making me feel anxious and excited.  I remember being in the crypt deep in Sebilis afraid that we'd wipe.  I remember playing in first person and spending hours staring at that damn spellbook.  I remember Unrest and Mistmoore in their train-filled glory. 

There were a lot of wonderful things about EQ and many equally as horrifying.  I loved that the game brought us all together.  I think that sharing pain with a group of others is a bonding experience.  I've only experienced the type of friendships in grad school, med school, and EQ... funny how that is. 

I'm always amazed that I tolerated all of the roadblocks in EQ now that I look back on it.  It was certainly a different era. 

 

[HaemishM]

The type of things EQ got away with would never work in a market that's competitive as it is now. See Vanguard for a concrete example.

Bad Memories:

Buggity bug bugs bugs: Dying to lag or bugs was a common occurrence. Things like the fall for 10,000 damage bug, the lag off a cliff bug, the shit you just looted disappeared bug. Which leads into...
Assy McAssenstein GM's and GM Policies: Worst Customer Service Ever. With the exception of one GM on Karana who later got transferred out, I never had one positive experience with SOE GM's. Not fucking one. It was always a bout of ulcer-inducing uselessness.
2 A.M. Raid failure corpse runs on a work night: Die corpse runs, die. It wasn't bad enough I could lose a level and/or all the "progress" I'd made that night, now I had to try to pry my cold, lifeless body from under a dragon to make sure I didn't lose every fucking one of my items. Yeah, Fuck You, Brad McQuaid.
Kill-stealing, raid-hopping shitheel guilds: My dragon, bitches. My dragon.
Epic weapon loot-whoring: Seeing good friends and people I thought had half a shred of decency bitching about someone else in the guild getting a tiny piece of the 50-billion step epic quests ahead of them and leaving the guild over it was rough. Everyone's inner asshole came out when the epic pieces dropped.
13-hour Plane raid camps: Once a plane was "broken into," all the fun evaporated. Pull, mez, kill, rinse and repeat and hope you win the lewtz lottery. Fuck you, Brad McQuaid.

Too many good memories to mention them all but:

The wonder of exploration: EQ1 wasn't the only MMOG that gives with the WOW I'VE NEVER SEEN THAT wonder, but it certainly was one which made you want to find out what was over that hill. There were so many little spots of interest in the world both with and without explanation that you could always find something interesting to see. Zone design was mostly fantastic, though creature spawns were sometimes badly done. Places like the chessboard in Faydwer, the tree city of Kelethin, the entire Lake Rathe zone, the mountain pass from the Karanas to Highhold, some of the ruins of Kunark, it was all very wondrous and worldly. Which led to...
Fantastic Dungeons: Let's face it, the only good thing missing from most of the dungeons in EQ1 was instancing to keep the tards to a mininum and dispense with trains. Level design was mostly great. Places like Unrest, Mistmoore, Runnyeye (a criminally underused zone), Permafrost, Solusek B, that lizard temple in Ferrot, the dark elf dungeon in Lavastorm, they were just all fantastic, with their own stories and quirks. The only game since that has gotten close in level design is some of the instances in WoW.
Factions: Though a pain in the ass, the various factions of NPC's were interesting. That went a long way to adding worldiness to a very linear, kill kill kill game. Hard-coded factions like Horde/Alliance just don't have the same OOOMPH.

[Merusk]

Looking back and remembering some of the zones, I've got to agree on the design bit, Haemish.  Some of them, like Karanas, were simply ass in terms of design - "Oooh a flat  area."  But they always had interesting little bits and features to them.  Old World WoW has this, too, but they're all hidden on flight paths so you can't ever interact with them. That's sad. Some of the mountain areas in EQ were the best. You would spend all your time running around gulleys and valleys and find whole camps of untaken mobs or little bits you simply didn't know were there before.

Ditto on the Dungeons.  So many of WoW's fail to use multiple corridors and tricky rooms with any real effect.  The BC ones in particular are guilty of this, where it's literally a "run this path, kill everything along it and then hearth out at the end."  I hated BRD for it's length, but if it were broken-up into 'wings' off of that central room it'd still be 100X better than Hellfire or the TK instances.

[Hutch]

Stuff that was in FFXI because it was in EQ1. I speak of the NA launch +6 months; I disregard everything that may have changed since I quit.

• XP loss on death. Check.
  
• Level loss due to sufficient XP loss. Check.
  
• Mobs that don't give up. Check.
  
• Spellbook meditating. No spellbook, but you had to sit, and there was no water-drinking to speed it up. Checkity check check.
  

Stuff that was also in FFXI because it was in EQ1:

• Alt-tab. Squeenix may have had the PS2 to "justify" not letting you alt tab, but f**k that. I had to disable my windows key because it would crash the game if I hit it by accident.
  

[CharlieMopps]

I tried EQ again a few months ago... it was fun. The original zones looked TERRIBLE due to their age... the newer zones were ok though. It was fun... I didn't mind all the hardcore stuff you guys were complaining about... the only real problem I had was the almost total lack of players at low levels. It's not fun to level to 70 solo. So I quit.

[krazyk]

Thanks for making this topic.

I still fire up EQ now and again and play. EQ was easily the best game I have ever played. What led me to play the game was an article in gamepro magazine, the article talked about how the game was so hard you would probably die over and over unless you could make friends and team up against the harsh world, and i remember thinking holy shit that sounds cool. I think when it comes to death penalties that a lot of people don't realize (maybe I am just old), but I can remember back in the day when I used to go to arcades, and play NES games. You had 3 lives (if the game was generous) and in the case of arcade games every death cost you another quarter (at least EQ didn't charge your credit card every time you died). I think the death penalty in EQ was an attempt to emulate the harsh penalty of death found in other games in the only way they could for a game like EQ (perma death, or 3 lives obviously wouldn't work so exp penalties were the next best thing). At any rate I never had a problem with the death penalty, and I am not trying to brag or nothing, but maybe the people I played with weren't complete tards so death was infrequent.

At any rate I still remember the first time I logged in (think it was October 99). I was a human monk in freeport, it was dark, and it was storming, all I had was a shirt and a note telling me to go talk to some guy in the monk guild. After stumbling around due to the fact I couldn't see shit I finally found the monk guild and damn if it didn't feel like a huge accomplishment, and that is when I got hooked on the game. It felt so damn immersive. I remember walking around the east commonlands and going into inns and chatting with people, and being asked to join groups to go fight in far away places. I remember my friend who was a barbarian warrior wanting to join up with me so I told him to just leave Halas and head for Freeport not knowing that the trek would be insanely difficult, but somehow I managed to help him get from Halas to Freeport at level 13 (white knuckled keyboarding ftw).

I remember my first in game friend was a dark elf enchanter named Straud. Noone back then knew jack shit about how enchanters worked so he just acted like a gimp wizard, but since he was a cool guy we brought him along anyway. Then we found out about clarity so we helped him power level to 29 so he could give people caster crack. I think he made thousands of platinum just standing around casting that on people (the stein of moggok quest was his other money maker if anyone remembers that quest).

I also remember standing around in the EC tunnel trying to trade my way to a full suit of crafted armor (minus the breastplate that thing was a bitch to get and noone would sell one back then) and a langsaxe of the wolves for my warrior buddy (we started out with our 200 platinum "life savings" and traded our way to thousands of plat worth of gear and weapons heh). I remember also doing something akin to smuggling where we would go camp gear in runnyeye and then haul it over to the faydark area and sell it for twice the price you could get in EC.

When I think back on EQ it was a game you had to immserse yourself in. If you could do that it was fun and honestly to this day I still don't understand why people have such hatred for the game, to me it was never that bad. I ran into very few bugs, I suffered maybe one death to linkdeath that I can remember, but it wasn't game breaking, and I only lost one corpse in the entirety of the game (and I used to lead Fear portal break ins, which was a very real possibility of corpse loss), when I jumped down the well in befallen to "see what was down there" (luckily it had only my noob items on it). Maybe my experience was different because I brought several friends into the game with me and made good friends in game so I was actually having fun. I never had to lfg either, probably due to my reputation, as soon as I logged in I got group invites because I could pull shit faster and safer than most people could even dream of.

[Nebu]

Perching, actually using the terrain to your advantage, has been totally removed from everything, and it's awful.

It's not an "exploit" that my arrows can shoot the guy standing below me as I stand precariously balanced on top of some odd rock formation.

If you trace the roots back to P&P gaming, experience is granted based on risk.  If you're shooting something with no risk, there should accompany no reward (beyond discovering that you can do it to begin with).  I'm surprised you didn't play AC2.  There were entire guilds that PL'ed people this way.

[Dtrain]

I think at some point I'm going to try EQ1 as a fresh never-played-before newb.  Just to see.  Fuck it.

Not worth it. If you remember the review of EQ1 that was posted on the main page about a year ago, it was a pretty accurate representation of what a new player would feel in this day and age. You just had to be there back in 1999.

One of the factors that ultimately led to the decline of the game was the fact that as time went on it became increasingly hard to crack the cutting edge of raid content (which for me was the primary source of fun in the game.) The levels weren't so hard to get, but the AAs, gear, and special quests/flagging were a chasm separating the new player from the majority of the population in the game.

Unlimited AAs as they were in EQ1 were just a plain bad idea, especially as the game became tuned for people with 100s of them. Tying the AAs to levels as WoW has done is a much more elegant solution.

And similar to removing the flagging requirements, there should have been some "fast track" to gearing up to a semi competitive level.

[Rasix]

Hmm, let me try an old fashion Pro/Con list for this to gather my thoughts on the old beast.

Pro:
-Playing the market.  First it was East Commons tunnel.  Then it was the bazaar.  Buying low and selling high was all too easy.  I turned 10k seed money into 220K + equipping my twink + friends' mains with anything we ever needed. WoW's economy is a different beast and one that isn't as appealing as EQs due to many factors.
-Selling my monk.  Selling all my plat the second time I quit.  Using this money to pay rent in college.
-Twinking.  You could make ridiculous twinks.  I had a warrior with dragon haste, near end game weapons,  and a funal tunic that soloed to 50 with little effort.
-Trains.  Humor value.   
-Dungeons that just weren't just a pathway to loot.  You just don't see anything like Sebilis or Guk anymore.   I like a series of encounters as well as the next guy, but there's nothing that resembles dungeon crawling anymore.
-The ring war. That was some cool shit.
-Epic quests.  A true sense of accomplishment, even if many of them had a lot of the annoying shit listed below.
-Memorable zones and environments.   I really wish EQs zone/environment designers could work with a game that wasn't so punitive.

Con:
-Hitting A when targetting my druid class trainer after gaining a level.  Seconds later I had to fucking run back to the Oasis for a couple hours of soloing crocodiles to get it back. 
-Non solo friendly leveling for most characters unless you were lucky enough to A) have a fungal tunic B) have a character that can equip a fungal tunic.
-Travel times. 
-Non instanced PVE.  Non instanced high level raiding.  A single dickhead uber guild could just about lock down an entire server.
-Raiding as a job.  See the above.  In order to even get table scraps you had to be on call like you were a goddamn ER doctor.
-The possibility of complete item loss. Nothing like being up until 4am when you've got class at 8am because you're trying to get your fucking corpse out a plane.
-XP loss at death.  You could lose hours.
-Camping and grinding.  If I ever have to park my ass in a dungeon and do the same 10 pulls for 4+ hours at a time.
-AA points.  Let's make leveling go to infinity!
-The spellbook.
-The motherfucking grind. Hell levels.  What fucking asshole decided a mathematical glitch should become a feature?  I remember being happy when I could bubble ding (wasn't that 1/10 of your level) in 4 hours.  I wish I could travel back in time and slap myself.
-Feign pulling.  Yah, I like watching a raid from my stomach.
-Rare mob camping.  Love/hate here, but mostly hate.  I watched my roomie camp a griphon spawn for about 14 hours straight.  I remember people camping Raster in Guk for days. (I got him in 5 minutes after some dude crashed. HAH)
-The introduction and proliferation of the ranter, celebrity guild leader. Fuck Furor, Tigole and Thott.  God, I knew Thott when he was a shitty scrub in UO.
-No ingame mapping at all. I had books of printed maps. I got lost so goddamn much. 
-A general catering to the hardcore.  Casuals and low level players got table scraps.

I put up with EQ because I was a bored college student with gobs of free time on my hand.   I suppose I should thank EQ for showing how you shouldn't do something. I will never, ever play anything that even smells like a return to the days of old.   I don't mind DIKU at all, I just like that it doesn't hurt as much to play anymore.  I'll never list this game on any best MMO list mainly that I left this game despising the fact that I played it for as long as I did. 

Viva easy mode.  Hard mode just leaves you burnt out and a bitter.

[Nerf]

Perching, actually using the terrain to your advantage, has been totally removed from everything, and it's awful.

It's not an "exploit" that my arrows can shoot the guy standing below me as I stand precariously balanced on top of some odd rock formation.

If you trace the roots back to P&P gaming, experience is granted based on risk.  If you're shooting something with no risk, there should accompany no reward (beyond discovering that you can do it to begin with).  I'm surprised you didn't play AC2.  There were entire guilds that PL'ed people this way.

Yeah they got a little silly with the turrets that autofired though.  But AC1 had some great high risk perching spots.  There was the very bottom of the olthoi dungeon, where 5 minutes of running at full speed while jumping chasms and avoiding angry things that can 2hit you eventually led you to a pit that they would fall in and you could snipe from above, assuming that you paid enough attention not to get jacked by the respawns next to you every couple minutes.

All the rock formations and whatnot around the world that you could run up on and kill the local fauna from, thing to hide on top of as shit tosses war spells at you.  It wasn't high risk, but I can't think of any zero risk spots either.

[Rasix]

AC2 had a lot of nominal risk areas.  Nothing was completely risk free, however, especially on Darktide.  Most areas had ways you could die from mobs, mostly through being an idiot or not knowing the proper way to get the mob stuck on the pixel/edge/tree/wall/invisible wall.

[Nerf]

Oh right, I suppose I should  mention I played exclusively on Darktide, so I have no idea if this shit seemed all kinds of broken on the carebear servers.

And while I agree that alot of the "get mob stuck on invisible wall stuff" is lame, there is just somthing especially awesome about running away from a 15 foot golem at level 5 and getting him stuck by running under something or through something that he's too big to fit thru, to turn around and blast it as it marches in place trying ever so hard to get you.

[Hellinar]

In rosy hindsight, I have fond memories of the bad visibility in EQ. Some of my most memorable moments as a newbie were tied to it.

a) Creeping round Nektulos Forest, hearing spiders but not able to see them. Even with Dark Elf vision, that place was dark and foggy.

b) Wandering the Commonlands on my human monk, with just a small lantern. And hoping those lions I could hear roaring weren’t too close.

c) Running across the Plains of Karana for the first time. Came upon the Wizard towers, looming out of the fog, lit my lightening, in a massive rainstorm. First ones I had seen. Epic.

Went back recently on a free trial thing. All that fog and stuff is gone now. Ran down the path from High Pass. It was terrifying on my TNT2 card with high walls and big drops and fog that started fifty feet in front of my face. On my modern graphics card, with a huge draw distance and no fog, all that stood out was the low poly count of the mountains. The artists sure did a great job on some of those zones, but they were tuned to bygone tech.

A bad memory is a great gift in life. I mostly remember the highlights, and the crap that drove me away is long forgot.

[Tale]

I don't like talking about EQ1 on F13.net because I disagree bitterly with many of the posters - the ones who think it was only successful because there was nothing else, that it wasn't really that good and that fans are looking through rose-tinted glasses.

I think EQ1 was a masterpiece. But like someone else said, you had to be there. Today, EQ1 is about as different from its original incarnation as SWG. They lost me around the Planes of Power expansion, by designing progress around artificial hubs and filling the old world with click-to-teleport stones.

So many people mention the sense of threat and wonder in travel and exploration. It was as real as a lowbie in East Commonlands as it was as a raider crossing Western Wastes. You had to keep your wits about you and learn how to survive.

No matter how "powerful" you became, the world was still threatening, full of stuff that could swat you like a fly. There were no tethered mobs, aggro lasted until cleared by magic, death or a zone line. That brought trains, fear and panic.

Death in a difficult to reach place was your worst nightmare and it was possible to lose everything permanently if you did not recover your corpse. It was intense. The group/raid dynamics were fantastic because everyone feared what would happen without good teamwork.

Places in the game were lovingly crafted, full of character and loved by players. Later, when the zones got bigger and the mobs more generic, it felt less like EQ1. It did not rain loot and there were truly rare objects that could change your gameplay (speed boots, haste items, underwater breathing, levitation, invisibility, shrink). There was a sense of wonder about people having those things.

There was also collision detection between characters. A troll or ogre could annoyingly block your path. You jostled for position around a mob. You were a physical mass in a persistent world.

[Slayerik]

What I find interesting about this thread, as a UO vet, is the number of people that say they enjoyed the 'danger' of some of the zones. Some of the same people did not like the danger of being a possible PK target in a UO dungeon.

Just saying...

[Tale]

PvP risk is not the same as PvE risk.

[Fordel]

I only played EQ1 for about 20 minutes, but I spent a couple years in AC1.

Perching, actually using the terrain to your advantage, has been totally removed from everything, and it's awful.

It's not an "exploit" that my arrows can shoot the guy standing below me as I stand precariously balanced on top of some odd rock formation.

etc...

Guild Wars has almost all of those Archery and Height mechanics. Much of the PvE and PvP revolves around the ranged people gaining the best spots while having their approaches protected and physically blocked by the front line folks. The difference is probably that the Mobs in GW are smart enough to not stick around if they can't reach the thing pummeling them from above.

Different bows have different Flight Speeds, Ranges and Arcs, you get accuracy/dmg bonuses for being high compared to the target and vice versa for being low.  You can strafe dodge shots coming from the far and high arcs, you don't dodge much from pointblank flat shots though. You can also gain cover from arrows, but if the Arc is high enough, you can shoot 'over' that cover.
 
It's really quite interesting and fairly in depth.

[Dtrain]

Something I haven't seen yet:

Advanced controls/options for groups and raids. It was a pain in the ass to lead a raid or a group because of how crude those systems were. And then there's the lack of loot messages.

My girlfriend still teases me to this day over how angry I got when some asshole in my group looted a TBB from the ghoul supplier and pretended it was that lame weight reducing bag everyone already had. And I admittedly did go a little off the deep end, following him around for a day with a /shout macro I made to expose him. But screw you Vykyng, you had it coming.

[Venkman]

What I find interesting about this thread, as a UO vet, is the number of people that say they enjoyed the 'danger' of some of the zones. Some of the same people did not like the danger of being a possible PK target in a UO dungeon.

Just saying...

PvP risk is not the same as PvE risk.

I agree with both statements. You could die more often in UO (PKs, bad choices), but you stood to lose a lot more in EQ1 (XP loss, maybe-level loss, nekkid corpse runs, impossible rezes, etc). Different types of risk.

Neither of which exist today. Not that I'm complaining of course. I'm no longer in my late 20s with a life all about me. In my late 30s, I likes me my easy-mode games. Most of my own nostalgia for EQ1 comes with the lifestyle I remember having too.