Aradune Returns to EQ aka the EQ Nostalgia thread

Ritley_sl said:

I've always wondered, did they change P1 significantly after his rant? Like could you really only zone into one P1 area at a time back then? I didn't get to time until after GoD came out so I dunno how much it changed from when he was doing it to my experience.

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It was just broken. Anywhere from 1-18 people would zone into one, and then nobody could zone into any of the others. Sometimes no one would be in TimeB at all and you still could not zone in. Many times since I've seen "Furor was wrong, it actually worked like this blah blah" and they are wrong: It was fucking broke.

It was fixed a week later but the damage was done. Our guild of 40 or so players with maybe a dozen raiding boxes had too many people quit in disgust to progress into PoT, which was tuned for 72 - a number that we had never had on our roster but was more common to other leading guilds. We had to recruit and backflag while Afterlife and TR killed Quarm. Of course one expansion later max instance size became 54 anyway.

Creslin_sl said:

I don't know why people hate the VT key that much. It really wasn't that bad. You could do the entire thing easily with a 3 or 4 man group. If you were a solo class then atleast half of them were easily soloable. It was way way less obnoxious than PoP backflagging or the original GOD progression. I've done those keys 3 times now, once back in original luclin and twice on progression servers.. never really bothered me.

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Part of the bitter memory is because originally one of the shards did not drop, because Vex Thal was not finished. Of course, there was no message popping up when you logged in informing anyone of this fact. And since everyone got stuck at that one bottleneck it was a goddamn mess when it did get put in. It was especially fucking annoying that people in guilds that were months away from even attempting Emp Ssra (if ever) would happily set up camp as well.

The person who (eventually) made VT was in FoH and admitted he populated and itemized it in his last two weeks at SOE before quitting to go make Vanguard. Obviously there was a bit of turmoil going on at SOE at the time. Kendrick I believe did many of the other Luclin zones and was already gone.

Kreugen_sl said:

It was just broken. Anywhere from 1-18 people would zone into one, and then nobody could zone into any of the others. Sometimes no one would be in TimeB at all and you still could not zone in. Many times since I've seen "Furor was wrong, it actually worked like this blah blah" and they are wrong: It was fucking broke.

It was fixed a week later but the damage was done. Our guild of 40 or so players with maybe a dozen raiding boxes had too many people quit in disgust to progress into PoT, which was tuned for 72 - a number that we had never had on our roster but was more common to other leading guilds. We had to recruit and backflag while Afterlife and TR killed Quarm. Of course one expansion later max instance size became 54 anyway.

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Don't forget the inability to enter P3 after the first two were completed successfully. In the early learning phase, we had to end raids early because of this. Not sure how widespread that bug was but happened to TMO on several occasions in early PoT.

Utnayan_sl said:

This was the artificial stop gap bug placed to slow progression in the key piece collection.

Miracously, after the "waterfall" was added to Vex Thal zone files and the zone complete (Even early itemization was hosed) this drop rate was "fixed".

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This business model was why the only other SoE products I've purchased were Planetside and... wait, no. That's the only other thing I've spent money on that SoE put out.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Think it is funny becasue imo EQ had bigger or "grander" quests compared to WoW. The only thing Vanilla WoW had up comparable to Epics/Ring War/Sleepers was the ony key chain quest but that was all single player content aside from killing drak(which wasnt anything special considering he was a regular kill for loot).

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^ Implying any part of the quest system in EQ was superior to WoW.



Fuck you. This quest was the single most retarded thing I've ever been forced to do in a video game. I'm glad the rest of my guild enjoyed having that limp dildo in the raid but having to farm that shit I will never forgive them for. Damn, more than a decade later and I still want to strangle the mother fucker who designed that quest.

double post

Utnayan_sl said:

Yeah I am not sure how the quest system in EQ was better than WoW's

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Kaubel should have escalated his ticket then. I had my coldain shawl eaten because someone who was KOS to dwarves went linkdead and killed the guy I had just given my pieces to. First two guides and then a GM told me I was shit outta luck. Fourth one apologized for the inconvenience here's your shit. While I'm sure some guides were awesome most were lazy shits. I had some stuff poof during a trade with a guildmate. The server refused to go over the logs and check. Three emails and a phone call to the head of CS later I had my stuff back. At the end of the day SoE was not some cheetoh eating nerd with a d20. It was a business and unless you had some ludicrous request or were an immense dick about it all you had to do was subtly inform them that your credit card would find something else to spend 10 bucks a month on.

I was in the guide program for like two weeks myself. Got kicked out when I promised some guild leader I'd get the GM to repop all of SSRA since his guild had planned on doing it that day but some other guild had beat them to it. I was like, "I know that feeling bro, brb I got your back." Clearly I was not cut out for that sort of work. Handed out rezes like candy as well. I had troubles saying no to people.

Anyways...

I'm not going to elaborate because this is dangerously close to turning into yet another design theory circlejerk but there's a middle ground between EQ's "stupidly broken, long and frustrating quests with typically awesome as fuck quest rewards" to WoW's "Painless and unremarkable quests with completely forgettable rewards" philosophy on quests. I think one thing we universally agreed upon is that when you do a quest and the reward is effectively the game just a handful of xp, some coin and an item you're going to vendor anyways it's hard to keep giving a shit.

Fewer quests with more personal involvement that end in a reward you give a shit about would be nice.

la~

Zehn - Vhex_sl said:

Fewer quests with more personal involvement that end in a reward you give a shit about would be nice.

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^That. Useful drops along the way would be nice, too.

Are you guys saying that getting the green boots with spirit on them isn't ideal for your rogue?!?!

Well some EQ quests didn't pull any punches.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=166

Not often you get a quest to go perform an abortion.

Sterling_sl said:

Are you guys saying that getting the green boots with spirit on them isn't ideal for your rogue?!?!

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CHA. Everyone needs CHA to make SOW faster.

selo's > sow

The problem with NPCs eating items and handing items to the wrong NPC is a UI mechanics problem and not really a gameplay problem. I doubt you would find many advocating for no safeguards to prevent this kind of thing. Some NPCs did in fact return items that weren't part of a quest they had written for them if I recall. Dunno why they didn't just make that global for all NPCs, or at least lore items or something.

Even with EQ's primitive quest system, designers could have easily written their quests to avoid Zehn's linkdead NPC problem by handing an item back immediately instead of after some period of time where NPCs are killable; or at certain stages of a long quest line a quest item is returned to the player on turn in that can be banked so the player can restart the quest from that point in case items are lost later on. (shar vahl smithing quest does this. fuck that quest btw)