Everquest - Live Servers

I don't really know what to say about it without rambling too much, there was just something satisfying about the world. The servers really felt like their own communities. There was just something special about playing that game back then and there will never be another like it.

I remember going to a science class in high school where they were talking about stones. The teacher held up a black and green speckled stone, asking if anyone knew what it was. Instinctively my hand shot up. "Peridot!" I was right.

The awesome advertising!

Kind of surprised no one has mentioned that basically every NPC was attackable. It's a stark contrast from just about every game since. The amount of people who killed Sergeant Slate, a guard who would never be attackable in another game, as revenge for when he killed them when they were lower level is probably staggering.

I remember farming the shit out of the dwarves around Butcherblock as a druid. Everything in EQ was free game, as long as you were willing to take the faction hit.

Hell, one of the most successful expansions is Velious, where the premise was to pick a faction and kill the other NPC's in the cities for your raids. It also meant you could have the evil races betray their own kind by farming friendly NPC's in order to enter the good cities. It was really the epitome of sandbox.

Ravishing said:

Yup, run to hill,log out, meet in chat until all clear, log back in, res up, pull the damn imp that shadowsteps you into the dracholich, train your raid, wipe out, good luck doing naked corpse retrieval. After 3 hours you're ready to try again.

Then some lucky occasions we break in with 2 groups without even needing to log out. Was rare though

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This is kind of interesting as far as "only at that time." I remember doing PoF and it was "camp out and come back in 15 minutes" or whatever. We didn't know of any type of chat we could use to coordinate, so you just hoped you could log back in on time; and that everyone wasn't dead when you did.

Another thing that seems missing is the unique gear, which I think someone has mentioned. You could tell a warrior from a bard from a paladin, just based on their visual appearance. When they added in dyes, this kind of ruined it. But stuff like Rubicite and SSoY's left a lasting impression on people. Hell, I remember thinking it was amazing when I finally saw someone in a full set of bronze armor. Nowadays you get a free set of super awesome plate armor for completing a tutorial in just about every game.

Speaking of killing guards.... first character I made was a gnome. I remember venturing not far out of Akanon and saw a dark elf fear kiting the guards. I was so noob, I figured he dropped all the finesteel? looking armor he was wearing and was in awe. At that point it became a personal goal just to get high enough level just to kill the guards. The little things in this game were so amazing when we were so ignorant.

It was my first MMO that I ever played. Best way I can explain it. Lol

Sense of accomplishment.
This quality is underrated and has yet to be reproduced as well as with EQ.

Entitlement became the model when gamers complained about the very things that made original EQ great - epic gear for everyone and a level playing field.
Trivial loot code, anti-farming of low level dungeons, constructed "Tiers" for gear, giving into those screaming about "fair".
When everyone is super - no one will be. Thats eventually how the game ended for me.

Obtaining power was difficult and not everyone could have it. I remember having KEI and how amazing it was to be one of a handful of enchanters on the server with it. Epics were truly epic.

Grouping was required for higher level content but the replay-ability of lower level content still had value. Certain gear was so rare (FBSS) that it was worth soloing or duoing. It could only be done once you were high enough and geared well level to go back without a full group.
Gearing was more than just access to the next tier. It meant power to go places on your own or with a friend that took a solid group otherwise.
Some of my most fond memories are of a duo comped monk/shaman and myself farming chardok-b.

This was my drug, and I think deep down the same for many others.

daly said:

Speaking of killing guards.... first character I made was a gnome. I remember venturing not far out of Akanon and saw a dark elf fear kiting the guards. I was so noob, I figured he dropped all the finesteel? looking armor he was wearing and was in awe. At that point it became a personal goal just to get high enough level just to kill the guards. The little things in this game were so amazing when we were so ignorant.

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Similarly, my first awe inspiring moment in EQ was as a lowly teen barbarian in Everfrost hunting mammoths. Lo and behold I wander near Permafrost and see this tiny gnome necro fear kiting Ice Giants! Definitely my first big "oh shit" moments!

Looting FS weapons off of people killing FP guards is how I made my first 500pp I think.

I swear I spent hours and hours following some necro fear-kiting them.

Do you remember when EQ introduced chat channels? You could invite a bunch of friends into a given chat room. Then they expanded on it, making server-wide chat rooms. We had an "uber wizard" chat with people from all of the #1 alliances. It was nice to get other peoples insight on things you're also dealing with.

I was 16 when it came out and i started on Ellois Marr or whatever; got into my teens and some one gave me some really good gear for the time. I then was running i think in East Karana's (?) and fell off a huge mountain pass and couldn't find my corpse what so ever. I got so mad I quit then restarted when lanys came out in Dec 1999 if memory serves me. Also played on such a shitty computer the first charact i made was an edruite wizard and I couldn't see ANYTHING because of how bad my fucking comp was. Wasted so much time running around in the dark, then switched to a dark elf only to not be able to see anything in neriak....finally settled on that high elf wizard !

There were a lot of happy coincidences and unexpected 'emergent' gameplay in eq. It's hard to maintain that when mmos have strict rulesets now as far as tiered gear, completely tiered zones, and as a result complete separation of the high levels from low levels/newbies playing.
What I don't understand is why did just about every recent mmo get rid of killable npcs and multiple factions? Not till I toyed around with project gorgon did I remember how much I missed factions, and that was much more primitive than eq's complex faction system

A -lot- of recent mmos have (sadly) followed the PVP-faction split retardery. It wasn't cool in WoW and it hasn't been cool in any game since. Cuts playable content for one character roughly in half in most the games that do it, with the side effect of meaning that in order to keep up with content consumption the devs have to work twice as hard. Absolutely still the worse thing to happen to mmos.

The NPCs being unkillable in some games is a direct response to player griefing and petitions/CS time spent handling it. EQ didn't have enough NPCs that were just easy to kill that gave out important quests for it to have been really annoying, as well as the playerbase being much smaller than normal modern releases. But when you have 100k+ on different servers all dealing with some random NPC that is really easy for one faction (yet another reason the two faction system is the worst thing to happen to mmos) to kill and cockblocks players in a certain level range, you are almost guaranteed to get petitions/CS requests about the issue. "The NPC is missing" or "I can't fight this guy but he can kill my quest giver" and similar. Not letting your players run around killing any NPC in the world cuts down on CS costs and you don't have the sensitive flowers who rage quit a game over getting ganked or having to wait for an NPC to spawn.

Yea, running around as a lowbie and seeing high level people doing insane shit was always exciting. I remember leveling in loio and seeing guys doing the monk epic and just being blown away.

Everything about the game was great, so much nostalgia after all this time. Spent so much time early on just tooling around in gfay and crushbone. Then one day finally "getting" it and leveling up at a decent pace. That ah-ha moment when things finally clicked, that was great.

Playing with an awesome ogre shaman named Racter on EMarr who I came to find out lived like half an hour away. We became fast friends in and out of game and still talk/grab lunch to this day. I'll never forget one day he and I were duoing imps/efreeti and he had to afk to grab the mail or something. Well me being a warrior effectively solo, he ran to get back to his computer and slipped and fell, tearing his ACL. Still came crawling back to his PC so we could get out of the camp for him to go get help. The sacrifices people made!

Other things like joining my first raiding guild which happened to be predominantly Euro, so I'd be waking up at 2AM for Hate raids just to have a shot at indicolite. Taking the easy computer classes at my high school so I could get my class work done real fast and spend most of the time on Alla and the other sites just soaking up as much of the game as possible.

I'll always regret selling my account, would love nothing more than to have those characters back.