Everquest AMA Answered!

^^ Yep. I became really good friends with one IRL.

Funniest moment for me was in Unrest back when Kunark was about 3 months in. We played in a guild called Excelsior at the time on Mith Marr and my buddy Wolvinsbane started working on his epic. So me and Dextor (Kaubel in EJ for WoW) went to Unrest to look for some special bat wing or something I forget what it was. Thinking we would get it right away (Mistake), and after about 20 minutes, we went and cleared down to Rucksif.

Now back in the day, remember all the fancy macros we did for incoming in group chat? Usually something like ---INCOMING ##---... Well... Wolv never used more than 3 letters, which were always acronyms or abbreviations.

So, as dex and I sat there we just saw a "brb" in group chat from wolv. He was gone for about 5-6 minutes and we wondered if he had to go AFK or something and didn't tell us.

All of a sudden.

"Inc"

Now imagine we are in that little cave enclosure where Rucksif spawns, and if you remember, that area where you would come flying down the spiral staircase area, jump over the gap, and head straight into the cave. Now imagine what had to be 103 flailing mummies, skeletons, hags, named, you name it chasing Wolv right into our cave and then... they kept coming. It was such a ridiculous thing to watch we could barely play we were laughing so hard. I had my necro pet up and was trying everything I could do to DOT each one with something, Dex was a druid so he was trying to heal and AE and he also threw thorns on us. For the next 2 minutes it was complete carnage. Finally everything died. And wolv got to looting. And whatever he needed didn't drop. And then while we are all almost dead, Rucksif spawns...

We didn't have any chance to reset, med up, heal... anything. And we die to Rucksif when he was at about 4% health remaining.

Wolvinsbane tells the group, "rly".

But damn good times. I wonder where some of those people went sometimes. You would join a group somewhere whether it was KC, Lguk, Unrest basement in vanilla leveling up, etc - and hung out with 5 others just sitting there getting to know whoeever was playing for 8-10 hours. Once you got a good group you didn't dare leave it, for fear of 1) Group suck. 2) You didn't want to sit at zone in on a list to go somewhere else.

People definitely made the place in that game.

Elidroth said:

In a lot of ways, Utnayan is on the money. Early EQ development was very well funded. It was pretty much around the time EQ2 was near released though that the money stopped flowing into EQ, and almost ALL of the profit we generated went to make other projects happen. In fact, most upper management at SOE thought EQ1 was going to die the moment EQ2 was released. The entire time I was at SOE, we had to fight to get resources on EQ at all. People were constantly dragged off to other programs with little regard for how we were going to survive.

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This is why I've always complained about the name and release strategy of EQ2.

They split up the EQ population, but EQ2 wasn't the same kind of (hardcore) game, so they ended up drawing EQ players into a game that didn't appeal to them for long.

Totally agree on the EQ2 front. It also ran like ass because SOE thought that CPU processing power would dominate over the GPU market at the time. We all saw how that panned out.

I still remember the online forum mockery battles of EQ2 Vs WoW. WoW was for kids - EQ2 was a serious game for serious players. Yeah, that didn't pan out well when you have stale mob placement not breathing any life into the world what so ever... Literally just standing there in groups of 6. Rinse and repeat class actions as you talked about, and didn't follow any of the lore except for a few named mobs that had no right being in the area they were in. Combine that with really bad decisions like the group XP Death penalty, Horrible itemization, limited character item progression which was also confusing as hell... At a time and place where the actual market screamed for a more accessible solo market with the option to group. At any rate, don't forget these are also the same "Experts" that thought the MMORPG genre was market capped at 500k, which honestly, only happened due to their own incompetence in knowing their market and worse, too big for their britches with egotistical managed top down dev production. Most of the time I think that was just a scapegoat to tell Sony anyhow as to why it wasn't growing.

The EOF expansion did it right, but that was Hartsman behind that one and from what I have heard, he listened to his developers. Meanwhile, WoW was at over 5 million subs and growing. They were a follower at this point, not a leader.

I always hope Daybreak sells the EQ IP entirely although I doubt it will ever happen. So many better games could be out as a result.

Fight said:

You are exactly right. They cut the legs out from under their own game (EQ1) and franchise with the purposeful strategy they took. If management had ever played either of the games, they would have know it was totally unnecessary because how different the two games were. It was a sequel only in name. There were not even trying to appeal to the same demographics.

In 2004, the compounded the WoW problem by trying to get their young, competitive male audience to move over to EQ2 hat was made for stay-at-home mom's and Soy Boys.

EQ 1 was a game that was dominated by males 14 to 35 years old. It was highly competitive, harsh, but rewarding. It required guilds with a military type structure, with leaders, officers, and grunts. It had a tremendous amount of long-game, incremental progression. It had depth, it had hidden game mechanics, it had layers of abilities and ways to go at any given encounter.

EQ 2 was a casual game that appealed to as many females as it did males. They wanted to play the game in a more alternative fashion, focusing on trade-skills, collections, and filling up a virtual house with more and more pixels. I played EQ2 for a month and I think I ran into mostly role-players that liked the fantasy environment. They were people that came from other games like Second Life or Sims Online. The biggest failing, in my mind, was the mob encounters and game mechanics were stripped down to a predictable, you can win this or you can't. Mobs come in packs, and they leash. There aren't alternate methods to go at encounters. You either have the levels at the right about of damage buttons to smash and win, or you don't. All the classes were over-balanced to the point everyone simply had 3 bars of damage abilities on rotating cool downs. Same shit, different names and sparkling pixels. The whole game was wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle.

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At this point I'm just not sure why they did it.

Didn't they understand the difference between the games, or is it one of the very first examples of a franchise being weakened because they wanted to widen the target audience?

pharmakos said:

This sounds pretty accurate.

The players believed in the possibility of One Game to Play Forever, too bad Sony didn't.

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Seems hard to understand Sony, when you had players as fanatical as a good lot of the forum posters were.

I can't understand how they didn't see the dedication / addiction / sunken cost fallacy players were experiencing.

I mean its 20 years after the fact, and people are paying rappers money to shit talk the opposing raid guild. Classic EQ really is a phenomenon.

Sadre Spinegnawer said:

If you think that eq2 was for casuals, you were not in a competitive guild. There was a lot of contested content until they got rid of the avatars. eq2 was brutal in its own way, if you went that route. So saying eq2 was baby mode is just showing you didn't really play that game competitively. Server xfers, worldwide stats, races to be in the first 10 guilds to kill an encounter ded --- I just do not agree it was ez mode.

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gtfo, casual