EQ Classic? Not really.

vazdeline_sl said:

And this guy does not see the philosophy in what made EQ work.

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Yep. Behavior changes when people have to apply social aspects which improve their playtime. When someone can't find a group, they have options to overcome this...
a) get on the group list... most good groups will have one and usually call on people when spots open...
b) sit next to that group and ask if you can help them kill, train a melee skill, or just chat... this will improve your chance you get in the group when someone has to leave...
c) chat in shout/ooc/guild and make friends/tell stories...
d) /gems (rolf)
e) wander around or even camp lower level stuff for twink loots
f) roll a class that can kite but be prepared to die and deal with a shitty CR
g) sit in faymart or EC tunnel and auction

Most of this is very hard for people to go back to after playing 5-8 years of the current game models but if you take a little time and transition, it makes your game play all that more rewarding and not 99% based on xp gain.

vazdeline_sl said:

Boxing in any form, against anything, if done in mass, destroys the social aspect of the game.

Requiring community intervention in everything you do is what makes EQ thrive. Boxing destroys this.

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I agree with you guys and my point is as we continue to segregate our communities then that in essence is forcing people to box. You are as much part of the problem as you are looking for a solution. Honestly though, we'll never get it completely back to the strength a community requires but think of what you would have if you took Sleeper, Classic, P99, Red, and EQmac and had it on a single server. Not saying anyone is wrong or right in their choice but never the less it is what it is....

If you're in a group botting by yourself, it's just like a group in WoW!

Muligan_sl said:

I agree with you guys and my point is as we continue to segregate our communities then that in essence is forcing people to box. You are as much part of the problem as you are looking for a solution. Honestly though, we'll never get it completely back to the strength a community requires but think of what you would have if you took Sleeper, Classic, P99, Red, and EQmac and had it on a single server. Not saying anyone is wrong or right in their choice but never the less it is what it is....

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I see what you are saying. Maybe you are right? However, if a different experience truly is better, people will flock to it.

The Sleeper is not a good example. And not a better experience than p99. Development wise, The Sleeper is functionally 5 years behind p99. It is also not on any type of timeline.
Not only that, P99 isn't even done developing Velious yet.

EqMac? Has the legitimacy of a pure SOE server, but truly only supports mac. Yes you can run on PC, but overall it is not the same. Also not on a timeline, and is at the end of the road development wise.

Red99? People don't want to PVP.

Which leaves P99. People play here because of classic legitimacy(mostly), hope for a good future expansion, and a high player base.

People tend to forget that because there are 700 people online, that must be the total number of players.

That number is concurrent users.

What is the actual number of UNIQUE people that play in a week or month? Thousands.

vazdeline_sl said:

My server on live in 2000 had 1700 registered users. The concurrent user playerbase was less than what P99 is now.

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I find this hard to believe.

ya espically when it was at its peak. they had what 500,000 concurrent user online at once. 1700 is hard to believe in 2000 espically.

i remember during kunark and they displayed the number of users per server

morrell thule had like 2100 ish on average

I have no hard data but FV during PoP-LDoN-GoD couldn't have had much more than 1.5k on at once. Everyone mostly knew of each other on that server and the community felt pretty small. Also, I was in a raiding alliance and out of 150 or so players we only had 2 boxers.

Regardless, I am glad that people are finding ways to enjoy EQ. If playing EQMac has taught me anything over the last month or so is that EQ really had/has a lot to offer. Looking back, departing from Everquest was primarily due to playing it for so long and mounting frustrations. Sure, the game was going in a poor direction, and I do not like Live today, but I hope games, especially EQNext take some pages from what each of these server reveal of Everquest.

I still would like to see more of the EQ "Classic" population in a more concentrated location rather than floating to every EMU promises of classic that comes along but again, I understand and see many of the points made thus far...

cinge_sl said:

I find this hard to believe.

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My information is wrong. I was thinking about the registered players on Castersrealm of August 2001, from a waybackmachine page I looked up.

It was 1500ish in 2001, and that was just the registered users on Caster's Realm. My bad!

So I just wanted to bump this up to the top.

EQC's testing appears to be stalled out right now. I personally haven't had a lot of time to play recently, but every time I log in, even for just a few minutes, the server appears to be a ghost town. It's possible that people are just waiting for Plane of Fear and "raid content" to be released, but it just seems dead at the moment. *shrug*

PS - BUMP!

What exactly are people testing? I remember the first phase sounded totally unappealing.

Well, it's purely game mechanics. IE - How things work related to combat. It's only combat based, though. Nothing with world geography. They were trying to determine if anything they had done up until this point in the design process would have fatal errors to occur that would crash the server. Up until this point, I haven't seen the server crash a single time, so that's good.

Biggest problem/amazing thing with classic everquest is that one, 6 hour block of playtime is more effective than three, 2 hour blocks of playtime.

Xeldar_sl said:

Biggest problem/amazing thing with classic everquest is that one, 6 hour block of playtime is more effective than three, 2 hour blocks of playtime.

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That was always the case, especially if you had 5 other people of the right classes and the right camp to hang out in for the entire 6 hours.

Last I had checked in, pretty much everything had been nailed down. Notice that I said nailed down and not just reported. YL is a boss.

We're ready to go through content at a moment's notice.

Edit: When this shit's done it needs to be put in a museum.

I'm not sure what's up atm. I entered a bug at least a week ago, maybe two, and it hasn't been touched. Every other bug I entered would have YL assign it in a matter of minutes. I haven't been on much but I haven't seen a dev around in a while.

YL just minutes ago made a new post on the tester forums saying that his RL got real busy all of the sudden. The company that he owns IRL is being bought out by another company, and he's going to spend the next 6 months doing nothing but making sure that goes according to plan. Which means his "fun" project of EQC is getting back burnered.

I'm unsure of what's going on with Harakiri. I haven't seen him in some time, but I'm sure he's just lurking in the background going over the code and seeing what he can improve upon.

Time will tell, but the server is currently in suspended animation. That said, you can still log in and play if you have an account. We're just waiting for more to happen. Kind of like the end of a WoW expansion... everyone loses interest because something new will be around at some time in the future.

Someone quote Nirgon saying this isn't vaporware anymore please.