Shards of Dalaya

Yea the idea of coming back to SoD is generally more appealing to me than trying one of the other newer MMO's. My main holdback is I've reached the point where i need to raid to get my new spells (and it's the fastest source of new gear) but i haven't had the time to raid on a schedule. I may come back and just fart around here and there

I had played SoD for 5 years off and on and still follow up on it without playing for the past 1-2 years just to see how things have changed. Overall, I loved how they customized EQ into it's own lore/game with tomes and stances. The raid game was fantastic utilizing once nostalgic zones creating a new feel of a rpg, but from what I've read Woldaff has been butchering any aspect of what was once a good community for a raiding game. It's been abruptly dumbed down. Massive item nerfs that had been in the game for at least a year just to appease the vision of the current admin and without any notice to the players in most instances. Apparently Woldaff is afraid of higher tiered players making lower tier/older content obsolete. I wish I could find the quote on the forums, but it's pretty much his new outlook on the server. Zaela had a lot of fanastic ideas and really bended what that client version of EQ could possibly do, but once someone disagreed with him/her, they scrapped the idea altogether. Was frustrating to see what could have been.

sl4ck3r_sl said:

I had played SoD for 5 years off and on and still follow up on it without playing for the past 1-2 years just to see how things have changed. Overall, I loved how they customized EQ into it's own lore/game with tomes and stances. The raid game was fantastic utilizing once nostalgic zones creating a new feel of a rpg, but from what I've read Woldaff has been butchering any aspect of what was once a good community for a raiding game. It's been abruptly dumbed down. Massive item nerfs that had been in the game for at least a year just to appease the vision of the current admin and without any notice to the players in most instances. Apparently Woldaff is afraid of higher tiered players making lower tier/older content obsolete. I wish I could find the quote on the forums, but it's pretty much his new outlook on the server. Zaela had a lot of fanastic ideas and really bended what that client version of EQ could possibly do, but once someone disagreed with him/her, they scrapped the idea altogether. Was frustrating to see what could have been.

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Woldaff became the torch carrier once Wiz stepped away to work full time on Dawntide. I believe he covers finances if donations don't completely cover the bill for that month, which is really cool of him if that is indeed the case.

But, he has proven himself incompetent when it comes to the dev side of things. He made one halfway decent zone - Plane of Valor - which took a fuckload of work after the fact to iron out bugs; the rest of "his" content has been a fucking joke. His "vision" for the game is everchanging, and there's been two instances where he disappeared entirely for long periods of time, and upon returning immediately decided to nerf a fuckload of items and spells. Item nerfs are still occurring to this day I believe, although I don't quite check the SoD forums as regularly these days. From the way it appeared though when I was playing, he would decide to nerf items/spells/content while only telling MAYBE Slaariel that it was going to happen; I mean fuck the other devs who volunteered to make amazing content.

So yeah, SoD lost Marza aka Thizik, Eisley, Thinkmeats, and Zaela as devs in recent history. All four created amazing content, pushing what the Everquest engine could do to the max. Marza created some of the very best high end content any MMO has ever seen. I'm not sure on Thinkmeats, as I believe he just moved on without any bullshit happening (although I wasn't playing at the time, so not 100% on no BS leading to him quitting). Marza, however, was not creating content nor itemizing the content he created in a way that fit within the bullshit "vision" Woldaff apparently has for Dalaya. Except, you know, it's hard to impose your vision when you disappear for long periods of time. Honestly if Woldaff had any sense, he would have turned over the "vision" for high end content to Marza, giving him some rough guidelines lore-wise to follow. We would have gotten to witness quite possibly the very best high end content EQ, or any MMO really, could possibly offer.

Eisley was such a weird case. He wasn't a dev for long, but he quickly was churning out some very interesting content, both raid and six man stuff. And then he randomly got banned for complete bullshit reasons. Of course it was later revealed to be complete and total horse shit, and he was unbanned; but he was either not welcomed back onto the dev team, or made the decision not to go back to deving - which you can't really blame him for after the way he was treated.

So yeah, TLDR. My apologies for ranting, but shit man. SoD was once on the road to being one of the greatest emulated servers in the history of gaming, but now...well, shitty management will bring down the greatest of empires.

And yeah, the beginning of the end was Woldaff disappearing for nearly a year, coming back out of the blue, and nerfing Runic: Cataclysm, along a few other things.

Oh, what's this? A druid that has spent years poopsocking to get to Tier12 so he/she could do an extra long quest for their Runic2 can go into the easiest of 65 XP zones and slaughter 6 mobs at a time, BY THEMSELVES?!?! No sir, you cannot allow someone who has worked their ass off in a virtual world for years and years to be able to do something so dastardly as slaughtering newbie 65 zones solo. You especially can't allow a SK/Druid combo who have both poopsocked the ever loving shit out of SoD and both have their runic2's to be able to go a little faster together in high end XP zones. That's just fucking crazy you know, people actually having cool spells that they worked their ass off for.

And there lies the problem with Woldaff's "vision" - Druid Runic 2 had been in the game for nearly two years when he decided to nerf it. Only a handful of druids had been able to accomplish the feat of acquiring it before it was nerfed, but a few of them had been able to take full advantage of it for quite some time. That's how nerfs usually work on SoD. Usually just a handful of people will have whatever spell/item it is for a very long period of time - usually a year or more, and are able to take full advantage of having whatever it is. But then, more people will finally be able to acquire these powerful items/spells, and then suddenly it's decided that whatever it is - Druid runic2, Cella's, in the past other Relic spells, etc is too powerful and must be nerfed immediately!

Now, luckily I was usually one of those that would get new items/spells immediately, thus being able to take full advantage. But I always felt bad for the guys who progressed a bit slower. They're seeing cool shit and what the highest of the high end players can do with these powerful items/spells, dreaming of being able to do the same one day, and then bam. Once they either get close to acquiring or actually do acquire whatever it is, suddenly they don't get the same opportunity to crank out 10AA's an hour.

Yes. It's their sandbox, and they can do whatever they wish, but it's still a really fucking shitty way of handling nerfs. If something is too powerful it should be nerfed immediately - not after a year or two, and not after the elite got to take full advantage of it. There was always a lot of "corruption" type rants, and quite frankly it was almost ALWAYS warranted, because there was some fishy shit going on, especially when TU and later GSG was around with a lot of the staff in those guilds.

..._sl said:

Yea the idea of coming back to SoD is generally more appealing to me than trying one of the other newer MMO's. My main holdback is I've reached the point where i need to raid to get my new spells (and it's the fastest source of new gear) but i haven't had the time to raid on a schedule. I may come back and just fart around here and there

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You don't really need to "raid" to get relic spells.

Anyone interested in playing and dick around leave a message here with your name and I can help you out and we can screw around some and probably get yo some loot and spells. I have the #1 enchanter on that server and I have access to a lot of the high-end characters so we can put something together to farm some random shit for you.

I play defixio. Necro. My fomelo has most of my gear... Uhh forget where I am in the blackscale quest. I have my ancients and murk spell. no runic no relic. 1-2 archaic spell scraps.

If I take up playing more ill letcha know

I installed and patched this last night. When i get into the character selection screen the default newbie warrior is spinning very fast and i cannot select any buttons. I have tried with eqw on and off, any suggestions?

Hard to say. You can check the Tech Support forum. What install are you using? I think there were maybe some extra things you need to do to get it to work properly if you downloaded off Steam. The SoD client is even older than Titanium edition.

Kaita_sl said:

I installed and patched this last night. When i get into the character selection screen the default newbie warrior is spinning very fast and i cannot select any buttons. I have tried with eqw on and off, any suggestions?

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Try using eqplaynice fromhttp://www.shardsofdalaya.com/files.htm. Should also solve issues with people levitating too quickly and mouselook being wonky.

edit: also be sure to run EQPN as administrator

I used eqplaynice, eqwin, on top of a titanium install. when i tried to just run the regular eq patcher then drop SoD on top it broke all weird.

You don't want to use the regular patcher, just install titanium then use SOD's. Make sure to untick 'run patch program' when EWQ starts after running the SOD patcher.

othree_sl said:

Now, luckily I was usually one of those that would get new items/spells immediately, thus being able to take full advantage. But I always felt bad for the guys who progressed a bit slower. They're seeing cool shit and what the highest of the high end players can do with these powerful items/spells, dreaming of being able to do the same one day, and then bam. Once they either get close to acquiring or actually do acquire whatever it is, suddenly they don't get the same opportunity to crank out 10AA's an hour.

Yes. It's their sandbox, and they can do whatever they wish, but it's still a really fucking shitty way of handling nerfs. If something is too powerful it should be nerfed immediately - not after a year or two, and not after the elite got to take full advantage of it. There was always a lot of "corruption" type rants, and quite frankly it was almost ALWAYS warranted, because there was some fishy shit going on, especially when TU and later GSG was around with a lot of the staff in those guilds.

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As one of the officers/second guild leader of GSG, and a member of TU I can tell you that you are 100% full of shit. Being the "best" guild on that server was one of the worst experiences of my life as far as mmos go. You get nothing out of testing/fixing content, except the loot from bosses you spend 5-6 hours on helping fix taken from you or nerfed. You get shit on by power tripping neckbeards who think they're amazing because they're donating their time. Everyone scrutinizes you for zero fucking reason. We never did anything even close to shady because not only was the entire server watching us, but we frequently had some sort of gm watching our raids(when you test content a gm watches you. Always.). The whole "high-tier" raid scene is a joke for the most part. Anything that's hard gets nerfed before anyone outside of the top guild kills it. People bitch things are impossible and refuse to do them before they have strats or they get nerfed.

Aside from that, if you don't take it too seriously the leveling experience and pre-having to deal with staff scene is really enjoyable. I played on the server on and off for four years, and It really didn't start to drag till the end of the third year when woldaff showed back up and decided to be a colossal shitlord.

Lastly.

tarquinn_sl said:

You don't really need to "raid" to get relic spells.

Anyone interested in playing and dick around leave a message here with your name and I can help you out and we can screw around some and probably get yo some loot and spells. I have the #1 enchanter on that server and I have access to a lot of the high-end characters so we can put something together to farm some random shit for you.

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I hope you're still sober zorlon!

Juff_sl said:

As one of the officers/second guild leader of GSG, and a member of TU I can tell you that you are 100% full of shit. Being the "best" guild on that server was one of the worst experiences of my life as far as mmos go. You get nothing out of testing/fixing content, except the loot from bosses you spend 5-6 hours on helping fix taken from you or nerfed. You get shit on by power tripping neckbeards who think they're amazing because they're donating their time. Everyone scrutinizes you for zero fucking reason. We never did anything even close to shady because not only was the entire server watching us, but we frequently had some sort of gm watching our raids(when you test content a gm watches you. Always.). The whole "high-tier" raid scene is a joke for the most part. Anything that's hard gets nerfed before anyone outside of the top guild kills it. People bitch things are impossible and refuse to do them before they have strats or they get nerfed.

Aside from that, if you don't take it too seriously the leveling experience and pre-having to deal with staff scene is really enjoyable. I played on the server on and off for four years, and It really didn't start to drag till the end of the third year when woldaff showed back up and decided to be a colossal shitlord.

Lastly.



I hope you're still sober zorlon!

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If you say so, friend. And yes eurotrash especially is amazingly bad at doing new content. A lot of the "high end" guilds beyond whoever was #1 at the time had the same glaring issue that unless their hand was held (aka it had been done and at least some form of strat was circulated) they wouldn't even want to attempt new content. It was indeed a joke.

4 year old bump... this server is relatively dead compared to what it once was I suppose but it gets 50-100 on some evenings. I play it mostly because with my work schedule it is nice to have an MMO that I can play at my own pace, has tons of content and if I drop out for 6 months I won't come back to a new expansion that made all my old work obsolete (in fact I'm not sure there has been any new significant content since the last post in this thread). That being said, if anybody has an old toon that I could use as a buffbot lying around I could sure use it. I won't steal yo shit just want to be able to buff myself without sitting around in town looking for some uber person to bug.

@Amod probably belongs in emulator forum now. Sorry!

Me and some RL, and internet homies are playing again and having a good time. We raid a few times a week and build on the late game quests. I play defixio, necro. I don't really box much. If anyone ends up giving it a go, lemme know. Again errybody needs to realise that it's not a classic eq clone, but matches the spirit of the original more or less with tons of depth.