EQMac Now Free to Play

Any truth to the server being shut down for good soon?

Also willing to give a good home to any spare gear.

who knows... I doubt it since their stated reason for not shutting the server last march was that they want Mac users playing their future releases. I dont see al'kabor being shut down until EQN is live at least

I couldn't log in to give it to you if I had wanted to

Awesome, got an Earthshaker last night and I want to explode stuff still, yet have to level up first.

God damn server outages yesterday were killing me. Had one rollback, then killed Com2 (for Emp key) and made our way to Com1 for the second piece and right outside the door the server dropped for the 3rd or 4th time. I just went to bed after, but I am going to be ticked off if we had another rollback and I lost my piece.

I'm a PC mac player and this is incredibly sad for me. I only chose to play it because it was the best, not because it was free. I have high level characters on p99 and various other servers, but none are as good as EQ Mac. As soon as I saw that exploit though, I knew something would happen so I half expected this. But I did hope that someone would weed out the players who used it and spare the rest of us legit people. But it seems the few have spoiled it for the rest of us.

But I love the server too much to give up. I will either buy an old mac or learn how to install that windows version on my PC.

Lenas_sl said:

eqmule (one of the original MQ devs and the person updating Secrets' client hack) has said this morning that he made it back in game. Expect a fix soon.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the good news! That would be great. Although still worried that the hackers will eventually bring the whole server down, because SOE obviously don't care about it and would never take the effort to weed out the individuals.

Juice_sl said:

who knows... I doubt it since their stated reason for not shutting the server last march was that they want Mac users playing their future releases. I dont see al'kabor being shut down until EQN is live at least

Click to expand...

Did they really say that? I know SOE are clueless but that takes the cake.

The irony is that at least half the players on the server are only there because no other MMO even comes close to the original EQ experience, especially SOE's games. And from what I've heard about EQ Next, it is even further away from that original experience than anything done before. I would be amazed if even 1% of EQ Mac players ended up playing EQ Next, for more than a few weeks anyway.

Yeah I was bored not having EQ to play and did some googling to see what the evils were doing and found that thread. Also, they are getting MQ2 to work for eqmac's PC client; and if for some reason they can't get a PC client working, they will port it over to the mac because "the mac client is easier to work with anyway." So either way, Al'Kabor is getting it.

I'd feel shitty for using a MQ2 dev's PC client enabling hack though. (but I'll use it I guess, unless Sony threatens bans) I really fear what those fools will do to a server that barely escaped being shut down, has little GM support, and has one dev working on it in his free time. You'd think the PC servers would have some cheat detection by now that Hobart could copy over. I mean how hard is it to code some simple checks? P99 has "large warp detected" sanity checks. A list of distances to zone lines could be compiled and how long it would take to traverse at the player's current maximum velocity would be a simple thing to implement. How do the PC servers handle MQ2 anyway?

Aye, having the MQ2 devs working on the PC hack worries me that, given the source, MQ2 use on the Mac server will begin to get out of control. If the patch can remedy some
of the MQ issues, by virtue of correcting the holes which allow the exploits rather than simply by the new patch version breaking MQ temporarily, then maybe theres some hope. I'm afraid that if attempting to combat active MQ2 development becomes any conern, that the servers days will be numbered.

Why do you guys think SOE have never just made a classic server?

because then they'd be admitting defeat with EQ1?

Sony half-assed their progression servers because of the development costs to do it 'right', I assume. Maybe the growing popularity of p99 and eqmac will convince them to devote more resources to the next one.

Incidentally while I was looking at redguides, I noticed that like 90% of the RMT threads there were for P99 or EQMac; I couldn't even find any live PC threads until I scrolled to the bottom of the page. EQMac has more threads than PC EQ. If you google everquest topics now, p99 and eqmac stuff tends to show up at the top. PC EQ is SUPPOSED to have a couple hundred thousand active users, but the interest level of the average user is astonishingly higher for p99 and eqmac users. It's really quite remarkable.

I also noticed that more and more people on this board are seeing the light. I used to get negs just for saying that I would like to play a classic EQ1 clone on fohguild, and now on rerolled Dumar has 50+ internets. I can say that I wasn't nearly so anti-WoW until I played p99 largely out of nostalgia in 2010 and ended up playing it hardcore for a year. I'm guessing more and more people are having similar revelations-- and the larger our numbers become, the more motivation Sony has to make a 'legit' classic server; or better yet, with enough interest Sony or some other studio might greenlight a true EQ1 successor. P99 and eqmac are important.

I'd gladly pay a (reasonable) sub fee for an official progression server that STOPPED DEAD at LDON, as long as they removed The Bazaar entirely from the server.

Me too, I would pay even an unreasonable fee.

I don't even think it needs to be a progression server or to have any special treatment. Just make a legitimate server capped at velious, pop, or ldon, and let the players enjoy EQ as it was meant to be. I bet it would be the most popular server by a mile.

Torrid_sl said:

Incidentally while I was looking at redguides, I noticed that like 90% of the RMT threads there were for P99 or EQMac; I couldn't even find any live PC threads until I scrolled to the bottom of the page. EQMac has more threads than PC EQ. If you google everquest topics now, p99 and eqmac stuff tends to show up at the top. PC EQ is SUPPOSED to have a couple hundred thousand active users, but the interest level of the average user is astonishingly higher for p99 and eqmac users. It's really quite remarkable.

Click to expand...

that's because EQ PC Live RMT market is elsewhere (playerauctions), not at redguides
redguides is pretty much the only place for p99 and EQMac RMT, hence why 90% of the threads are related to that

Even playerauctions only lists 18 items (including WTBs) for all servers, and 81 account offers that are full of 'never been owned' powerleveled accounts. That is still FAR FAR less interest than eqmac or p99 considering the relative user base sizes.

Have you considered the ease of entry and legitimacy of sales? Playerauctions offers substantial buyer protection, and requires sellers to be verified and authenticated, whereas all Redguides requires is a forum registration. As a result Redguides has scams and charge-backs galore