Everquest - Live Servers

Got this up and running on (another) new lower-cost ($1k) laptop for the 25th servers, and finally found one that works well. Kind of shocked I had to go up to over $1k to run EQ of all things, as the previous two I tried were $800 and $850 and neither ran it well. This one's a Lenovo Legion with RTX 4060, 16 GB RAM, Ryzen 7. It has a high framerate and smooth controls in any normal zones without too many people in them.

However, going to Firiona Vie's PoK and Guildlobby and being around 100 people (to stress test it for a raid), it slows down quite a bit, probably to about 20 FPS. Even running around PoK's less-populated areas it's about 30 at best. Mouselook is a little jerky as a result. It isn't optimal.

I can get by with this the way it is, but I'll take any suggestions for setting changes that might up the performance.

I turned far clip plane down to 30 and that helps a bit without sacrificing any real noticeable line of sight. Only a bit, though. Turning the resolution down to 720 didn't help, so leaving it on 1080. Cranking it up to 1440 didn't hurt either, weirdly enough, but it made the text too small. Wondering about that Memory Mode setting that's on Balanced. Turning that up to "most memory usage" didn't seem to affect performance at all, but maybe it requires a restart.

DickTrickle said:

What the fuck are you doing that you need a laptop 4060, ryzen 7 to run EQ? I was playing this shit on 8-year-old laptops 3 years ago.

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Cross-posted from another thread:

Rajaah said:

Really not keen on spending more than $1k on a spare laptop to run EQ of all things. Surprised I even needed to go that high for this 25 year old game that should be smooth as butter on modern systems. EQ runs like crap on the $300 laptop I got a few years ago, and runs super-well on the $1800 laptop I got around the same time. Which was a similar power level to the one I just got for $1050, so there shouldn't have been any issue here.

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Went through several of them the last couple weeks and EQ runs like crap on all of them, though once I crossed $1k with this latest one it now runs passably (as in, I could play it like this and even raid with spell effects and names turned off, which are good policies to have regardless).

Kinda shocking how poorly EQ runs on computers that should be way beyond it in terms of specs. Especially compared to WoW which seems to be able to run well on a goddamn toaster.

This one should be good for a while at least, gonna probably make it my main computer. 14.5'' seemed really small on paper, while in practice it's a good size for portability and doesn't actually lose anything.

Daidraco said:

When we were on Mischief, I had a second account going on a laptop that was a budget laptop from 2010. It played EQ fine, even though it took 5 minutes to load into Windows 10. He talked about his problems in the Desktop thread, but that was on his first laptop and now he's on to newer ones.

I honestly dont know what problems hes got and I dont think anyone else figured it out either. I feel like there is something we're overlooking that is blatantly obvious to us, that we're just overlooking because we're not looking directly at the laptop with our own eyes. I personally think its direct x or something, like he needs to do a run command for dxdiag, and see if thats up to date, maybe?

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This thing is running DirectX 12



It should be blasting EQ out of the water and onward to much more visually-intensive things. Then again I'd be willing to bet that if I tested Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim on here in succession, each one of them would run without issue. I think it's an EQ issue rather than a computer issue.

So DirectX needs to be reverted to DX10?


Kind of comical that this is even a thing, but I'll give it a try later. Have to finish testing other things on here (so that if anything else breaks post-revert I'll know why).

Is there anyway to do old group missions solo? Been working on just doing the old Antonica stuff from SoD, and just about done with Oceangreen, save for a couple of Temple of Bertox missions, but these ones it won’t let me accept. Would be nice to finish them off, but I guess it’s not a big deal.

yerm said:

If you load a second account and invite them and then log them off, a lot of these work if you have the 3 or 6 in the group even offline. They can be 2 or 5 chars from the same 2nd account, even.

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Yeah, what I used to do if I was gonna run a bunch of instanced missions solo is log a bunch of characters on and off, adding them to the group. You can add five people from one other account if you want, they'll all stay in the group as offline. Then run as many instances as you want. Even raid instances that require six people to start should work.

For some things (DoN crystals, SoD OMM missions) I'd just advertise in general that I had 5 group spots available, however many K each. People would instantly send tells, I'd fill the group, do the mission, get a bunch of plat parceled. SK can solo certain DoN missions and OMMs I'd solo as an enchanter avatar. Got a few tricks for that that I'm pretty sure they took away because I was able to steamroll an OMM by myself at the time. If Ghoul Lord and Froglok King are no longer charmable, I'm probably one of the people who caused it. Sol B was a bit tougher, never found any particular shortcut to beating that one and the bats can go die.

In any case, tons of plat could be made in those scenarios, while also getting your own currency up, was pretty cool. For any regular run of the mill group missions that don't give currency, just use offline characters.

Been wondering what it meant when some people had color-shifting names on them. Apparently today is Koush's birthday; he's 22 (started him a while after I started playing and had remade him a few times to adjust stat points, lol)! Cute little addition.

Koushirou said:

Been wondering what it meant when some people had color-shifting names on them. Apparently today is Koush's birthday; he's 22 (started him a while after I started playing and had remade him a few times to adjust stat points, lol)! Cute little addition.

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I always thought that was an underutilized feature. It'd be interesting if they tried giving players an option to have a specific color (ex: Orange) if they got all the achievements for a given expansion (including Vanquisher), maxed out the evolving item for an expansion, etc. There's not enough prestige in EQ and there's no effective way to present that a character is a walking badass.

Tuco said:

I always thought that was an underutilized feature. It'd be interesting if they tried giving players an option to have a specific color (ex: Orange) if they got all the achievements for a given expansion (including Vanquisher), maxed out the evolving item for an expansion, etc. There's not enough prestige in EQ and there's no effective way to present that a character is a walking badass.

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Agreed. The epics were a good way to add prestige back in the day. And rare super-weapons (every expansion had a couple up to a certain point).

The dawn of ornamentations around SoD killed a lot of the prestige of items because anyone could make their weapon look bigger and flashier than an epic. And after a while you couldn't even tell what weapon people actually had because they were all using ornamentations. I remember the actual design of weapons getting really bad/dull for an expansion or two as well once ornaments were a thing.

Daidraco said:

Ive never played on retail. Does live even offer different looking armors now, or is it all cash shop?

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I think it's pretty much all cash shop at this point, with some (usually less-interesting) armor ornament sets being from ingame missions and whatnot.

Someone who plays live would know better than me. I'm drawing a blank about a lot of things EQ after almost two years of not playing.

Daidraco said:

Ive never played on retail. Does live even offer different looking armors now, or is it all cash shop?

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I use pre-Luclin models for everything, which means I can't tell any level of prestige from armor since everyone has long ago dyed what they want. Like Rajaah said ornamentations killed any prestige from weapons because even if you loot a mega weapon from a raid expansion and chose not to put an ornament into it, few people will probably know (or care tbh) what it is.

In live EQ the only source of prestige is finishing an evolved items, completing Vanquisher and maybe doing some impressive things with soloing. The evolved item is kinda dumb because it's way more sensible to ignore it and just finish it by doing normal stuff in the next expansion or by grinding AAs for glyphs between raids instead of grinding mobs for no other reason to level it. Ironically personas would be a good vehicle to level it, except they are archetype locked so you can't even use the damn things on many personas.