EverQuest in detail.

[Beans00]

Threads like this make me regret not being able to experience the golden age of MMOs, especially since the only multiplayer game my real-life friends knew was Fifa. Now that I'm older and have tried getting into MMOs like ESO/EQ2, I find that people ignore me when I try to talk to them, and guilds require you to have a meta build with an optimized rotation if you want to join their guild and do any kind of raids.

There was nothing golden about everquest. It was a shitty game where it took like 25,000 hours to get to max level . Half-10% of that(depending on how good you or your group was) consisted of redoing the same content(95% of which was killing mobs) because you lost shit loads of xp when you died.

People who liked it either played for 10 hours a day, or had some type of ptsd derangement syndrome.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Threads like this make me regret not being able to experience the golden age of MMOs, especially since the only multiplayer game my real-life friends knew was Fifa. Now that I'm older and have tried getting into MMOs like ESO/EQ2, I find that people ignore me when I try to talk to them, and guilds require you to have a meta build with an optimized rotation if you want to join their guild and do any kind of raids.

I stopped raiding some years ago. Since that time, I have been in numerous guilds, across a variety of MMO's that don't require any sort of meta builds. Look for guilds that are newcomer friendly, casual, and social as their tags. Within those guilds are usually decent enough folk who will run dungeons and do light raiding without any real expections, except don't be an asshole. ESO has a guild finder in their menu as well as on boards in the cities that you can tailor to different specifcations. EQ2 has a guild finder in their menus as well, where the guilds you can choose from tell you about their guilds.

 

[Cryomancer]

Is EQ too grindy? Yes. But some people like EQ due it.

About the lack of popularity from games like EQ in certain countries, if you can't understand English, RPG's are the WORST genre of games to play. Mainly in 90s. And the sub fee...

I enjoyed EQ a bit but got bored in mid 30s in p99, maybe someday I will be back, maybe not but taking minutes to kill any mob is not fun imo.

 

[Late Bloomer]

taking minutes to kill any mob is not fun imo.

Equally bad is one shotting. It's a balance that many mmo's have trouble with.

 

[Beastro]

25 years ago today, Everquest launched.

Freeport > Qeynos

But Neriak uber alles.

 

[Beastro]

Threads like this make me regret not being able to experience the golden age of MMOs, especially since the only multiplayer game my real-life friends knew was Fifa. Now that I'm older and have tried getting into MMOs like ESO/EQ2, I find that people ignore me when I try to talk to them, and guilds require you to have a meta build with an optimized rotation if you want to join their guild and do any kind of raids.

The thing wasn't just the game, but the culture around the game.

The Classic servers can do their best to recreate the Classic experience, but they can never revive the old culture.

People now are too taken with "content", the game is too well known. They want to level up and get geared rather than actually adventure.

I understand why, but so much of what made EQ fun was stuff like exping with a group until everyone got bored enough to agree when someone said something stupid like "Hey, I heard of this dungeon called Dalnir our level in the new expack, let's go check it out!", everyone spends an hour or more getting to it, you slowly work in and eventually fuck up wiping the group and spending the evening recovering your bodies happy you didn't lose that much experience.

You can play Project 1999

It's not the same, which is what fuels dehards still playing trying to recapture the magic.

Red99 or any other PvP server cannot replicate the Classic Red server situation because of how PvP culture changed.

You simply can't get the same balance of Bluebies/Pks/Anti-Pks/Guild War Guilds around. It's all Bluebies and Raid guilds.

Worse for the PvP culture it degenerated into a toxic mess where "winning" comes before server health. About the closest thing you'll get to a genuine Classic experience now with PvP is Sullon Zek PvP culture being replicated, but that's because SZ emerged when the Classic Era culture was dying out and the server had an odious reputation for good reason.

Red99 may be different now, but the PvP culture which emerged from places like VZTZ and migrated there wound up ruining PvP with how whiny and nasty so many were in their desperate attempts at dominating servers.

 

[Beastro]

Threads like this make me regret not being able to experience the golden age of MMOs, especially since the only multiplayer game my real-life friends knew was Fifa. Now that I'm older and have tried getting into MMOs like ESO/EQ2, I find that people ignore me when I try to talk to them, and guilds require you to have a meta build with an optimized rotation if you want to join their guild and do any kind of raids.

There was nothing golden about everquest. It was a shitty game where it took like 25,000 hours to get to max level . Half-10% of that(depending on how good you or your group was) consisted of redoing the same content(95% of which was killing mobs) because you lost shit loads of xp when you died.

People who liked it either played for 10 hours a day, or had some type of ptsd derangement syndrome.

Because the gameplay wasn't around consuming content, getting max level and then raiding until you were geared for the next expack. That came later and was the major marker that began EQs decline.

EQ was fun because it was an open ground for emergent gameplay as players figured out their own thing and had fun doing it.

On Rallos some RPed, others played up being evil Pks, others played up being Anti-Pks, still others built self-important guilds that pissed off others like them and went guild warring, then there was the majority who were just dicking around having fun figuring shit out.

Each of those died out one by until as the raid guild mentality took over MMOs when you leveled to get max, get into a raid guild and the consume until you gor bored.

 

[Beastro]

Is EQ too grindy? Yes. But some people like EQ due it.

About the lack of popularity from games like EQ in certain countries, if you can't understand English, RPG's are the WORST genre of games to play. Mainly in 90s. And the sub fee...

I enjoyed EQ a bit but got bored in mid 30s in p99, maybe someday I will be back, maybe not but taking minutes to kill any mob is not fun imo.

Or the best.

A major terror on Rallos was the warring guild/raid guild Peace of Formosa, an all Taiwanese guild that spoke almost no English, kept to themselves and didn't give a fuck about rotating raid targets among raid guilds and just attacked anyone who tried to go for something that was "their turn".

A major part of their contribution to RZ was being a completely foreign presence who made "uber gan la~" a server wide curse.

 

[Beastro]

Beans00 Sire, let me give you an example of what I mean:

The most fun I had on RZ was being a troll newbie PK. I roved around Nektulos and sometimes the Commonlands between level 4 and level 6 (I went up a few levels when they made it so you couldn't kill level 1s; that was a sad, sad day) equipped only with a Tower Guard's Blade and a decent player made bow with good damage and range. Besides that, I was naked and relied on pure, unrelenting troll regen and side strifing to keep me alive.

With that weapon combo, I could two shot most other newbies and one shot very low levels that were sitting. Catching people medding, I'd bow them, and before they knew what was happening, they'd be dead as I rushed up and whacked them with my sword.

Eventually, if it was a good day, I'd do it enough to enrage all Nektulos and get a posse of newbie Dark Elves at times in the dozens after me. The mob would chase me around the forest as I'd side strifed and spin around to bow down a newbie or two while I out regened them to take a few more newbs out with my sword. Slowly I'd take em down one by one despite people respawning and rushing to rejoin the fight.

If the newbies won, I gave them their victory and praised them, but often I'd be the one that would wipe them out and leave them in a mix of rage and awe. Smack talk was wonderful, and I played into being a coward who picked on weaker people than myself and accepted the insults thrown at me. It completely disarmed them and made them even madder until many came to find me endearing.

I never got much loot out of it, usually enough to sell just to restock the arrows I'd expended that day. Often, I'd spot a completely fresh newbie that had just started the game and give them some money, some of the gear I'd PKed off of people and some general tips for starting off. I also played by the rule not to Pk someone more than once or twice in an hour so not to bully them. I didn't want to drive people off the server like so many Pks would later love to do on PvP emulator servers.

In the end, months or even years later, people would be running back to Neriak to do their business level 60+ and see me there, still level 6, still sitting outside Neriak's entrance PKing newbies with my sword and bow. They'd laugh in shock seeing me still at it. They'd ask how I was and I'd see them wearing a big guild name and decked out in raid gear. Most were happy to see me and had fond memories of me beating them up as a little newbie.

Eventually, EQ changed. Looting was removed from Rallos Zek and newbie PKing thus became popular. Trolls abounded in Nektulos wearing tons of hp, resist and regen gear forcing me to do the same, though I hated it. It robbed the spirit of newbie Pking where raw trollness was what won out at the end of the day.

Eventually I moved onto other games, especially WoW and it's mockery of PvP. No smacktalk, Horde and Alliance couldn't talk to each other. No loot. Set factions and no freeform PvP, no social classes like parish PKs and heroic, noble Anti's. People still PvPed, at first, ranging out to take over Astranaar or Tarren Mill, but then Blizzard put in insta respawning guards and undefeatable windrider NPCs. They actively tried to discourage PvP.

Then Battlegrounds came in, and no one bothered to PvP anymore open world because PvP was now seen as another form of grinding for gear and was worthless outside of Battlegrounds. I'd attack people and they'd sit there waiting for me to kill them.

Others kept at it. My guild leader, Blart (I eventually joined Flowers of Happiness after waging a one-troll war against them), found work arounds and PKed in Redridge Mountains smacktalking newbies by two boxing and using a second account with an Alliance character to communicate with his victims, but the culture had shifted by then.

Anyway, I had a higher level character and did all the usual shit, but doing that troll newbie Pking was what always stuck with me and it's not something that can be replicated anymore because it does not play into the model of how people "should" play MMOs that EQ encouraged... until the raid model became set in stone and killed it.

You can now tl;dr me.

 

[Beans00]

Beans00 Sire, let me give you an example of what I mean:

The most fun I had on RZ was being a troll newbie PK. I roved around Nektulos and sometimes the Commonlands between level 4 and level 6 (I went up a few levels when they made it so you couldn't kill level 1s; that was a sad, sad day) equipped only with a Tower Guard's Blade and a decent player made bow with good damage and range. Besides that, I was naked and relied on pure, unrelenting troll regen and side strifing to keep me alive.

With that weapon combo, I could two shot most other newbies and one shot very low levels that were sitting. Catching people medding, I'd bow them, and before they knew what was happening, they'd be dead as I rushed up and whacked them with my sword.

Eventually, if it was a good day, I'd do it enough to enrage all Nektulos and get a posse of newbie Dark Elves at times in the dozens after me. The mob would chase me around the forest as I'd side strifed and spin around to bow down a newbie or two while I out regened them to take a few more newbs out with my sword. Slowly I'd take em down one by one despite people respawning and rushing to rejoin the fight.

If the newbies won, I gave them their victory and praised them, but often I'd be the one that would wipe them out and leave them in a mix of rage and awe. Smack talk was wonderful, and I played into being a coward who picked on weaker people than myself and accepted the insults thrown at me. It completely disarmed them and made them even madder until many came to find me endearing.

I never got much loot out of it, usually enough to sell just to restock the arrows I'd expended that day. Often, I'd spot a completely fresh newbie that had just started the game and give them some money, some of the gear I'd PKed off of people and some general tips for starting off. I also played by the rule not to Pk someone more than once or twice in an hour so not to bully them. I didn't want to drive people off the server like so many Pks would later love to do on PvP emulator servers.

In the end, months or even years later, people would be running back to Neriak to do their business level 60+ and see me there, still level 6, still sitting outside Neriak's entrance PKing newbies with my sword and bow. They'd laugh in shock seeing me still at it. They'd ask how I was and I'd see them wearing a big guild name and decked out in raid gear. Most were happy to see me and had fond memories of me beating them up as a little newbie.

Eventually, EQ changed. Looting was removed from Rallos Zek and newbie PKing thus became popular. Trolls abounded in Nektulos wearing tons of hp, resist and regen gear forcing me to do the same, though I hated it. It robbed the spirit of newbie Pking where raw trollness was what won out at the end of the day.

Eventually I moved onto other games, especially WoW and it's mockery of PvP. No smacktalk, Horde and Alliance couldn't talk to each other. No loot. Set factions and no freeform PvP, no social classes like parish PKs and heroic, noble Anti's. People still PvPed, at first, ranging out to take over Astranaar or Tarren Mill, but then Blizzard put in insta respawning guards and undefeatable windrider NPCs. They actively tried to discourage PvP.

Then Battlegrounds came in, and no one bothered to PvP anymore open world because PvP was now seen as another form of grinding for gear and was worthless outside of Battlegrounds. I'd attack people and they'd sit there waiting for me to kill them.

Others kept at it. My guild leader, Blart (I eventually joined Flowers of Happiness after waging a one-troll against them), found work arounds and PKed in Redridge Mountains smacktalking newbies by two boxing and using a second account with an Alliance character to communicate with his victims, but the culture had shifted by then.

Anyway, I had a higher level character and did all the usual shit, but doing that troll newbie Pking was what always stuck with me and it's not something that can be replicated anymore because it does not play into the model of how people "should" play MMOs that EQ encouraged... until the raid model became set in stone and killed it.

You can now tl;dr me.

Boring game grinding mobs for 25,000 hours. I barely played it I just think it sucks I don't even think I made it to level 10 lol.

Also I started reading your post, then got bored and only made to your 3rd or 4th line. I'm happy you had fun on EQ, nothing personal that game is just so boring it put me into a coma.

 

[Cryomancer]

Boring game grinding mobs for 25,000 hours. I barely played it I just think it sucks I don't even think I made it to level 10 lol.

When I played, I was watching netflix in a monitor while ""playing"" in another. As a necromancer, was just throw two or 3 dots on a enemy, fear, watch the series, fear again, send pet and repeat to the next mob. Honestly I wish that Ultima style mmo had become the norm and not EQ and liked a bit EQ.

Freeport > Qeynos

No quest to kill gnolls and get XP quickly in freeport.

 

[Beans00]

Boring game grinding mobs for 25,000 hours. I barely played it I just think it sucks I don't even think I made it to level 10 lol.

When I played, I was watching netflix in a monitor while ""playing"" in another. As a necromancer, was just throw two or 3 dots on a enemy, fear, watch the series, fear again, send pet and repeat to the next mob. Honestly I wish that Ultima style mmo had become the norm and not EQ and liked a bit EQ.

If you made it work I guess it's possible, but I don't think you can play EQ like that typically. I tried it in like 04 or 05 when they did a free trial and the game seemed to require too much attention span. Unlike other mmo's which are usually easy mode EQ mobs were typically dangerous. This is also what people universally told me to expect from the game. I guess that changes with knowledge/experience. I also generally hate pve grinds.

I like full loot pvp, I don't like losing xp when I die in games. I played tibia which is sort of a shitty UO clone that came out before UO did. Hated losing xp in that game and switched to runescape(mostly for the pvp and ability to afk train) instead.

 

[Poseidon00]

Original EQ has the irresistable urge of a real interactive fantasy world rather than a theme park that I can't help but fall in love with. Starting in towns for your home race, having faction friends and enemies, towns you couldn't go to but could *earn* your way into through substantial effort or trickery. A truly dangerous world with consequences.

It wasn't perfect, but it was the model for something extraordinary that could have been.

If somebody set up a P99 esque server that increased exp gains by several factors i'd rarely do anything else. As it is, I can only spend so many weeks grinding to level 7 before losing everything.

 

[Cryomancer]

Unlike other mmo's which are usually easy mode EQ mobs were typically dangerous

Not for necromancers. DoT + Fear can trivialize mobs. The unique problem is when I pulled more mobs than intended. Magicians(not Wizards) also could allow you to AfK level at low levels but at high levels, your pet becomes much weaker than enemy mobs. To have an example, at lv 4 a magician can summon a 6th level elemental. At lv 49, the maximum level of his pet is 41.

If I played till lv cap I could get a Emissary of Thule as an necro :

About full loot PvP, depends. If the game is too gear dependent or not.

Enchanter is also great for soloing >>BUT<< there is the risk of your mob breaking free from the charm.

 

[Beastro]

Unlike other mmo's which are usually easy mode EQ mobs were typically dangerous

Not for necromancers. DoT + Fear can trivialize mobs. The unique problem is when I pulled more mobs than intended.

When did you play?

I'm assuming not Classic because for Necros soloing was do able but came in very a very narrow window where it worked.

If your snare or fear resisted too much or you didn't have the highest level pet for a given pet spell, if your FD failed (and original FD failed a lot, it's why SKs rarely pulled even in exp groups) and many other factors might make an encounter turn into a death. Necro spells also costed a bunch of mana and resists could really hurt.

I watched my brother play a necro in Classic. He made it work but it was a lot of work, especially on Rallos where you needed to play naked often to avoid getting jumped by loot hungry PKs.

The greatest annoyance for him was the pet level issue. He'd have to summon quite a few pets until he got the right one, give them FS daggers and hope it didn't overaggro and die or else he might have to wait half an hour to summon the right one again.

So many things about many classes got streamlined later on that it made Necro fear kiting into a snooze fest.

I played a Druid in Classic and was much the same thing, though I had greater flexibility because of SoW to bug out of a bad quad kiting pull. Was very annoying to snare and then gather up four mobs.

 

[Cryomancer]

When did you play?

In Project 99, I got a lot of troubles at low levels since I choose freeport and you can see my posts in this thread.

After I re started in Qyeinos, I playing as an nonlifer from a weekend got close to 20 in a single day.

f your snare or fear resisted too much

Send my pet, run till he gets aggro. Then try to fear the mob again. Some times, I was running and my DoT killed the mobs. Blood boil + Vampiric curse + Dooming darkness and the mob takes a lot of damage per "tik". If I really want a burst damage, I could use the lifetap spells or "anti undead" spells against undead.

I only followed this guide in certain levels but here is a guide of someone who soloed as an necro till lv 60 in p99 : https://wiki.project1999.com/Sesserdrix's_All_in_One_Necromancer_Strategy_Guide

PKs

I would never play P99 in a PvP server.

Death is so punishing in EQ... MAinly when and after hell levels. Is like an hour grinding of punishment.

 

[anvi]

The game was supposed to be played with people, and the people had mostly gone by 2005/6. In 1999 it had 100,000+ people playing it and it grew to 450,000 within a few years. It was overcrowded, but there were groups to join everywhere you went. A group is 6 people and the game is designed mostly for that, so when people come along several years later and try to solo the game, it's going to be bad.

The fights are only long if you try to solo. In a group the mobs die in a few seconds.

Dying was less of a problem too because Clerics can bring you back to life and recover some xp and they used to be everywhere. Also there were some really good PVP servers when the game was popular. A free for all pvp server, racial pvp server, etc.

It did have a bunch of problems but it was amazing in spite of them.

 

[Beans00]

The game was supposed to be played with people, and the people had mostly gone by 2005/6. In 1999 it had 100,000+ people playing it and it grew to 450,000 within a few years. It was overcrowded, but there were groups to join everywhere you went. A group is 6 people and the game is designed mostly for that, so when people come along several years later and try to solo the game, it's going to be bad.

Well I thought the game seemed really crap and grindy for no reason other then to keep people subscribed. That's my opinion!

I also read the pvp was bad in EQ and super unbalanced and barely anyone played it. I can't comment on that personally that's just me reading information about the game years later. Generally when people discuss the mmo's with the best pvp everquest is virtually never brought up.

 

[Cryomancer]

The fights are only long if you try to solo. In a group the mobs die in a few seconds.

Yep. Retail EQ changed the game to accommodate a more "solo' friendly experience. And no, not talking about mercs in later expansions. Even if you play a "progression" server, boil blood from necromancers can dish 67 damage per tik, compared to 24 from p99 but lasts much less. Summons are also automatically raised at max level, the spellbook much simpler to organize, among many other changes.

 

[anvi]

It was super grindy and probably to keep people subscribed. But the game was amazing in other ways. The grind had upsides too, like making some things rare, and making accomplishments matter to people. Modern MMOs give everyone everything, so nothing feels important.

The downtime too, people complained about waiting to regen mana, but if regenning is fast then there is no resource management to battles. In EQ you could end up needing to retreat or something if you aren't careful with mana. It really made things like that matter which made the game exciting. Combined with the fear of dying and it was the most intense game ever.

And again it forced the grouping aspect. A lot of weak groups struggled with slow mana regen but an Enchanter or Bard can make it far faster.

 

[Beastro]

When did you play?

Send my pet, run till he gets aggro. Then try to fear the mob again.

That's where my brother's pet often died. A few too many snare resists and the pet would generate too much dps aggro that it would either die before fear landed, or it would be too high on the aggro list that when fear broke the mob would turn and beat on it.

It made using the rogue pet very risky and why many soloing necros went with the monk pet or just kept with the warrior for the greater durability. Rogue pet would only be brought out for raiding or exp groups.

If the pet died without snare landing, you now had to fire off a root, which if it resisted meant you were in trouble due to base FDs fail rate. You could Harmshield but you always wanted to kept that as a very last resort.

Things would get better with Kunark and DMF allowing you to use terrain height to get more distance, but a SoW bought from a passing Druid of Shammy was usually what was relied upon until he got Jboots.

Even cimjng back to play a Necro on VZTZ the challenge to playing a Necro simply wasn't there and EQs prog servers are even worse.

I would never play P99 in a PvP server.

My brother and I played on RZ for the PvP while not beimg good PvPers ourselves outside of newbie Pking.

The PvP environment created a whole new level of experience to the game. Sitting at a bank on a Blue server, you could idle all day and come back to being fine. On a Red server, you might come back to find that a PK group pulled the guards with a monk while the rest of the group poured in and went wild ganking people.

Everywhere hide potential danger, but like much of RL, it was too infrequent to often happen.

The climate it created was like nothing else outside of a few others MMOs, and maybe the best you could get from that today is in EVE. Even emu servers today simply lack the population to maintain that where 1 out of 100 people are the threat to keep an eye out for.

 

[Beastro]

The game was supposed to be played with people, and the people had mostly gone by 2005/6. In 1999 it had 100,000+ people playing it and it grew to 450,000 within a few years. It was overcrowded, but there were groups to join everywhere you went. A group is 6 people and the game is designed mostly for that, so when people come along several years later and try to solo the game, it's going to be bad.

Well I thought the game seemed really crap and grindy for no reason other then to keep people subscribed. That's my opinion!

I also read the pvp was bad in EQ and super unbalanced and barely anyone played it. I can't comment on that personally that's just me reading information about the game years later. Generally when people discuss the mmo's with the best pvp everquest is virtually never brought up.

The PvP being unbalanced was why it was so fun. Most Pks were wizzards, but then you'd have those that chose the underdog classes and excelled at them.

Pk Clerics and others that would totally fuck with people because their foes didn't expect them to play so well. They knew their classes to do it, but most people outside of the hardcore PKs really knew their classes to do that.

By the time emu PvP seevers csne alkng, the formula was found to mess with mass PvP, which was to makn assist one person, usually a warrior for their durability, and then have your whole guild nuke the target at once killing the enemy guild one by one rather than the crazy mess in Classic when almost no one used programs like ventrilo or teamspeak and did everything through in game chat channels.

 

[Beastro]

It was super grindy and probably to keep people subscribed. But the game was amazing in other ways. The grind had upsides too, like making some things rare, and making accomplishments matter to people. Modern MMOs give everyone everything, so nothing feels important.

The downtime too, people complained about waiting to regen mana, but if regenning is fast then there is no resource management to battles. In EQ you could end up needing to retreat or something if you aren't careful with mana. It really made things like that matter which made the game exciting. Combined with the fear of dying and it was the most intense game ever.

And again it forced the grouping aspect. A lot of weak groups struggled with slow mana regen but an Enchanter or Bard can make it far faster.

The grind was at least of the unintended kind. It was "we can't have named spawns too common because of their good loot" rather than "our team of consultant psychologists have said this ratio of named spawns will work best to get our playerbase addicted" like ee have now.

MMOs could often be terrible, and yes even the best like EQ could be, but they were made from the same old fashioned "let's make what we think is a fun game" culture and not what came with WoW.

 

[Beastro]

The fights are only long if you try to solo. In a group the mobs die in a few seconds.

Yep. Retail EQ changed the game to accommodate a more "solo' friendly experience. And no, not talking about mercs in later expansions. Even if you play a "progression" server, boil blood from necromancers can dish 67 damage per tik, compared to 24 from p99 but lasts much less. Summons are also automatically raised at max level, the spellbook much simpler to organize, among many other changes.

Did P99 ever restore needing to med with your spell book closed?

My original comp that olayed EQ couldn't handle the sound, so I played a good chunk of EQ silent. Kiting as a Druid involved involved developing a mental timer of how lon a mob took to get to me and then sitting up to move away.

Was so much better when I got a new comp with sound and could hear things walking closer and closer (especially on a PvP server).

 

[Beastro]

And again it forced the grouping aspect. A lot of weak groups struggled with slow mana regen but an Enchanter or Bard can make it far faster.

I knew a barb warrior on Rallos that got his hands on an EB earring and soloed the ent of Kedge Keep when he didn't want to bother with groups. He got beat up bad, but the zone was always empty, so he'd sit for ages regening in between fights while doing other stuff. Got 50 that way before Kunark.