Everquest AMA Answered!

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Nirgon

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If you think a "red" EQ player has any point worth listening to, you're full on retarded.

These people can't compete. They cry over who threw a javelin or touched a mob first and think they're these big competitive tough guys.

Bluebies are care bears. Weak petitionquesters with defunct motor skills.
 
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Punko

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If you think a "red" EQ player has any point worth listening to, you're full on retarded.

I was in a top 5 serverwide blue guild for about 8 years, as officer, main puller, forum moderator. I also was serverwide best geared bard for a while (after Tolpan got b&), and top 10 for at least 5 years.

Pretty sure me having played on red for a while doesn't make me a bad EQ player.

You seem pretty angry by the way. I think r99 might be the place for you.
 
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Sieger

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I didn't say you were a bad EQ player, I believe I said you were retarded.
 
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Utnayan

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If you think a "red" EQ player has any point worth listening to, you're full on retarded.

Kind of like the developers of this game currently and throughout the majority of it's history. Anyone on this shit show, and confirmed with what I saw for answers, continues to stay on the island of misfit developers.

I wish I would have asked a new question: How did the influence of SOE's completely inept management impact your career, and did anyone actually make it out to a competent game development studio?

Makes me feel bad for the one's with the stigma, which followed them throughout Austin to Bioware Austin to Bethesda Austin - and in conjunction, Daybreak. Some shit games with some shit reputations followed that trail - and this all spawned from learning the wrong way to do things.
 

Sieger

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Kind of like the developers of this game currently and throughout the majority of it's history. Anyone on this shit show, and confirmed with what I saw for answers, continues to stay on the island of misfit developers.

I wish I would have asked a new question: How did the influence of SOE's completely inept management impact your career, and did anyone actually make it out to a competent game development studio?

Makes me feel bad for the one's with the stigma, which followed them throughout Austin to Bioware Austin to Bethesda Austin - and in conjunction, Daybreak. Some shit games with some shit reputations followed that trail - and this all spawned from learning the wrong way to do things.

I mean if you actually have followed the Dev team at all there have been like 30+ people to have cycled through, some have ended up at major companies like Amazon etc afterward.

If more EQ fans actually knew how EQ was created, the limited resources it was given for its initial launch compared to typical games, and actually knew anything about the game industry of the time I think the more apt reaction is "it's shocking that anyone got this game to market, it's amazing that this dev team have basically kept the gaming equivalent of a Soviet era Yugo that they inherited and were told to keep running, moving along for 20 years."

Smedley had the idea of an online RPG, hired Brad to do it who had the vision of basically a graphical MUD, in its infancy Sony didn't give the project appropriate support (Smedley basically had to keep it from being shut down and was basically kicked out of its initial Sony studio and forced to beg other Sony subsidiaries to give them any cash they'd be willing to throw at them to try to finish it), when it became popular SOE very quickly decided it wasn't marketable to the degree they wanted and almost immediately started rolling EQ1 revenue into projects like EQOA, PlanetSide, and Star Wars Galaxies, and the EQ dev team was expected to keep on trucking with continual shifts in leadership of the game, with devs and designers regularly being cannibalized into other games like SWG and etc. Sony very clearly considered EQ's success a flash in the pan aberration, they thought the long term, big money decision for SOE was going to be SWG--an MMO attached to an extremely popular, major IP. We all know how that turned out.

The reality is EQ is a game that existed in defiance of what Sony seemed to want, and succeeded in defiance of what Sony expected, and every 3-4 years they'd look back and be like "hey this game still makes money", try to pump more short term cash out of it, then ignore it again for 3-4 years. With that level of corporate malfeasance it's a miracle EQ was ever made and a miracle it's still running, and yes--all of those concerns have made it kind of beast of a game with questionable architecture and some incoherent design decisions, but I'd love some of these forum warrior cuckolds to try working as a professional developer in a situation like I describe, and I'm sure you'd be pumping out the WoW Killer or best MMO-ever etc :rolleyes:.
 
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Utnayan

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That was all too easy.

So I still do wonder...

"How did the influence of SOE's completely inept management impact your career, and did anyone actually make it out to a competent game development studio? "

Amazon. Lol.

And believe me, 90% of this forum knows more about EQ, it's development, and history, than you do.
 
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Punko

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Amazon. Lol.

Give them some credit, amazon has pretty good CS.

From Sieger Sieger perspective that is the pinnacle of career.

The fact that Chris Roberts managed to raise nearly 300.000.000$ for his game states everything about the industry.

I'll take an indie dev that has worked on Darkest Dungeon or the likes over a big name (amazon lol) dev, any day.
 
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Utnayan

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Well, given George Scotto's muck up of customer service that paved the way for complete in game corruption, breeding Crosby's reputation as a result, I am guessing CS reps didn't land at Amazon :p
 
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Sieger

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That was all too easy.

So I still do wonder...

"How did the influence of SOE's completely inept management impact your career, and did anyone actually make it out to a competent game development studio? "

Amazon. Lol.

And believe me, 90% of this forum knows more about EQ, it's development, and history, than you do.

No, I pretty much know more than anyone about everything, nice try cuckles.

Fanra's Wiki lists all the old devs and where they ended up, I know people at Amazon making $300-400k/yr as developers. I know everyone on the internet is a millionaire with a limitless supply of young virgin wives and 14" cocks, but in the real world where I live that's doing pretty well for yourself and probably way more than most game developers make. As someone who's actually in software development and had friends of mine go into game dev work--from what I've seen game developers universally make less money and work longer hours, so to my mind a larger more traditional software firm like Amazon/Google/Microsoft would be a major step up in $ and lifestyle than working for a games company.
 
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DickTrickle

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The funny thing is Ut pretends he was a former NFL player. That's right up there with a 14 inch cock. I'll go with sieger's claims of knowledge over a known blowhard.
 

Utnayan

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No, I pretty much know more than anyone about everything, nice try cuckles.

Fanra's Wiki lists all the old devs and where they ended up, I know people at Amazon making $300-400k/yr as developers. I know everyone on the internet is a millionaire with a limitless supply of young virgin wives and 14" cocks, but in the real world where I live that's doing pretty well for yourself and probably way more than most game developers make. As someone who's actually in software development and had friends of mine go into game dev work--from what I've seen game developers universally make less money and work longer hours, so to my mind a larger more traditional software firm like Amazon/Google/Microsoft would be a major step up in $ and lifestyle than working for a games company.

Well, then you would have known that Smed properly funded EQ and it was never under funded. It was believed in during and after development. The only thing they wish they would have taken back was using Tanarus's engine (First person tank sim) as the core due to a complete lack of Z-Axis design control. Yes, Bill Trost is at Amazon. Since he is the one that actually designed EQ (Not Brad although he took the credit) I will give you one of your points. "Cuckles". (Ha love that word now) And the lore was an idea taken from one of Brad's old dungeon masters. :p

The development also took a more serious turn and was being taken seriously and that shows when they realized the team had to split from 989 and be treated as a separate division for this genre's development. Obviously you know them as Verant Interactive subsequently brought completely in house as SOE when Sony saw the success.

What happened after was a complete lucky strike of events. Game play emergence from lack of foresight but hit a triple twenty on the dart board thrown from 56 feet out none the less. (Kiting, FD pulling, Quad Kiting, Training, Multi-Questing, the list goes on) came from the players and never by design, rather an engine limitation and lack of code base memory. They even had trivial loot lined up and ready to go, but didn't pull the trigger because twinking became a game mechanic and was fun for players - hence, they stayed subscribed. (Which was the end goal obviously)

From there you always knew a naked human was an unpopulated art asset. Want to know a funny story? On server restarts at least until 2003, the reason some of them took so damn long was they had to have GM's go in and use this little command "/become_##" (with ## being the art variable) to reload an art asset on bosses since half the time they didn't pull from the database correctly. NTOV was notorious for it.

Keys for finals were instituted not as a success or accomplishment meter. It was deployed to stall advancement until they could populate and itemize, and sometimes geographically construct, the end zone in an expansion. Course everyone knows this now.

So yeah, Bill Trost is a good solid reason to follow amazon game development and a few other mentions of talent. But for the most part, SOE was a breeding ground for shit. Not because the talent couldn't have been there. But because the solid good ol boys club rang down a hap hazard style of development that turned anyone who wanted to advance into a pony tail yes man, and we all saw how great pony tail was don't we. As a result you saw the clusterfuck of SWTOR when SOE austin was let go and Vogel took his posse over to Bioware. After that we saw a fantastic showing out of "Bethesda Austin" with Fallout 76. The greatest hits of the island will continue on I am sure. Battlecry, which was a bust, shifted to Fo76 and retooled. (Low and behold, same SOE designers FYI just a brand new name (Again)

We could go on and on here, but aside from a very select few - The apples in that barrel which could have had promising careers got pissed on by the likes of George Scotto, Rich Vogel, Alan Crosby, Raph Koster, Pony tail, and many other countless dip shits who kissed ass to the select few for promotions rather than prove their worth in the development pit. Then carried that methodology with them for the future developers. Christ, those developers who worked there never stood a fucking chance, and I honestly, seriously, feel bad for some of them.

Reading that AMA reminded me a lot of that bullshit and with regards to your PvP argument, you sound just like them too. Let me clue you in since you missed the memo. World of Warcraft had more populations on the PvP servers than on PvE. And just because some jack wagons tried to throw in a PvP server in EQ and call it a day, doesn't mean they can go to a spreadsheet and make design decisions around a piss poor design and deployment. If you make A, B, and C the core of your game and turn the quality towards that design, it doesn't take a genius to know if you hap hazardly throw in option D without any thought behind new game play design decisions that no one is going to play it and your "Data" miraculously says "Boy howdy, D sure isn't popular in the throughput popularity matrix we have here"
 
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Sieger

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Trivial loot actually was implemented on FV briefly, so it wasn't just lined up. It was discontinued pretty quickly due to universal dislike.

I wouldn't agree that EQ was properly funded, both Brad and Smed have *multiple public interviews* where they explain its funding:

The game was basically kicked out of 989, and Smed secured support from SOE to keep it going, this isn't secret/arcane lore: The Inside Story of How a Major MMO Went Wrong - IGN

It's pretty clear Sony was very focused on console games in 1996-1999, and never fully bought into the PC MMO market until SWG, and likely never cared about it again after SWG failed. Sony being Sony Corp, obviously its subsidiary SOE cared more about it since it was a bigger portion of their revenue, but it's pretty obvious SOE was underfunded not just versus behemoth Blizzard, but even lesser companies like Turbine and NC Soft in the 2000s MMO space.
 
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Utnayan

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Trivial loot actually was implemented on FV briefly, so it wasn't just lined up. It was discontinued pretty quickly due to universal dislike.

I wouldn't agree that EQ was properly funded, both Brad and Smed have *multiple public interviews* where they explain its funding:

The game was basically kicked out of 989, and Smed secured support from SOE to keep it going, this isn't secret/arcane lore: The Inside Story of How a Major MMO Went Wrong - IGN

It's pretty clear Sony was very focused on console games in 1996-1999, and never fully bought into the PC MMO market until SWG, and likely never cared about it again after SWG failed. Sony being Sony Corp, obviously its subsidiary SOE cared more about it since it was a bigger portion of their revenue, but it's pretty obvious SOE was underfunded not just versus behemoth Blizzard, but even lesser companies like Turbine and NC Soft in the 2000s MMO space.

That’s the main place we will disagree. 989 didn’t kick them out. They wanted to concentrate on sports games and separate the two entities to avoid market confusion. But proper funding * was * achieved. And before the split, they already had a plan in place with Sony still funding half the Development aside from angel investors.

But as I said above. “Smed properly funded EQ”. And he did. Only argument would be it wasn’t enough funding to develop or license and engine, which definitely came to cause issues as you know. After that though the problem became ramrodding paying customers hoping time gates would buy them time to finish what they already sold (kunark, velious, Luclin, Pop... I left after pop) with artificial bugs to stall advancement. And some really shitty cover ups to protect what that management team was doing.

A long time ago I bet Smed here on this forum an all access pass that I could prove PO Time wasn’t finished on launch as well as all the other expansions. He didn’t even know quite honestly so I was shocked when he was shocked. I thought he was just playing the CEO PR card. He lost. The Russians took back the all access pass though. 😜

Fun times back then regardless and for all its angst, still was an awesome game and even made a few real life friends. Even a few from a French guild I joined when I first started playing and I couldn’t understand a damn thing they were saying so I would just throw in a few words they would say with some exclamation points. They loved it. I did learn to say I ate all the pizza. That was the bulk of my conversation with those folks.
 

keypusher

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EverQuest can’t be exactly like it was in 1999 for multiple reasons. 1. That code and data is gone. 2. The people that worked on that code and data are gone. 3. Even if we had a perfectly accurate recreation of the original game, it wouldn’t run on modern computers. 4. Even if the game would run on modern computers, this would reintroduce thousands of bugs that we’ve fixed over the past two decades.

Haha yeah it would be a truly crazy Project to try and recreate Everquest exactly the way it was in 1999. Without any access to the source code or original developers, fixing all the client issues and bugs, recreating spawn timers, pathing routes and combat formulas from dead forum threads and archived parse logs. And it’s not like you could just make it free to play, it would probably take 10 years of dev and QA time to get everything right. Nah, it would never work.
 
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Elidroth

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In a lot of ways, Utnayan is on the money. Early EQ development was very well funded. It was pretty much around the time EQ2 was near released though that the money stopped flowing into EQ, and almost ALL of the profit we generated went to make other projects happen. In fact, most upper management at SOE thought EQ1 was going to die the moment EQ2 was released. The entire time I was at SOE, we had to fight to get resources on EQ at all. People were constantly dragged off to other programs with little regard for how we were going to survive.

Free Realms was a perfect example of the problems in leadership that Utnayan describes. The people at the top on that project were an absolute disaster. Laralyn McWilliams is heralded as some female icon in game design, but jesus what a mess she actually was. I've never seen a more 'shoot from the hip' lack of planning, change direction like the wind blows "leadership" like ever. Stephen Bokkes was supposedly 'lead' designer, but all he did was use the FR design team as his personal dating pool, and was a complete shitbag, to the point of giving crappy yearly reviews to women who rejected his advances. These were people who were so new to the industry that they didn't lodge formal complaints for fear of being blackballed and thrown out. The bullshit flowing out of McWilliams' and Bokkes' office was so bad most of us just gave up even talking to them. They of course took all the credit come launch day, leaving Terrence Yee to twist in the wind. Complete bullshitery. In truth, Terrence Yee was ACTUALLY the lead designer of the game. He was awesome.

I was actually asked to come help out on FR to get it out the door.. The utter chaos I saw when I got there left me dumbfounded. I spent 6 months on that team putting in long hours and pushing the envelope of what a 'world designer' was supposed to do. Jonathan Caraker did the same. We came from EQ, where we did EVERYTHING.. They wanted us to just write documents for apprentices to implement and such. We both said, "No", and Terrence backed us up. We did almost all of the work on our respective design areas, only to ultimately have 'leadership' just delete it all on a whim because they thought they had some stroke of genius and change of direction (yet again). Shortly after launch, I was asked to stay on to help drive the live team, and told them, "No way in hell" and went back to EQ.

Shortly after I came back to EQ began the Ponytail era.. and we ALL know how well that went down. Trost exited SOE when his pet project was scrapped for no apparent reason. I don't think it was talked about much outside SOE, but let's just say it would have been WELL AHEAD of the Zombie craze, instead of 4 years later with H1Z1, arguably after the whole 'zombies' thing was already getting past its shelf life. I'm happy Trost has found footing again at Amazon. He's an incredibly talented designer.
 
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cool stuff. I hope the good will is flowing both ways. Build it, they will come, etc. My questions were about eq2 vs eq1, but I guess at this point, it really is about the IP.

How to replicate even at a smaller scale the mechanics and necessary sociality of these early mmo'rpg's? That is the question.

There are new generations of Gimli's and Legolas's and ***lightning bolt, lightning bolt!*** awaiting.

Really, this basic world is timeless. People love games they can get lost in. I really believe that is still true.
 
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Utnayan

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In a lot of ways, Utnayan is on the money. Early EQ development was very well funded. It was pretty much around the time EQ2 was near released though that the money stopped flowing into EQ, and almost ALL of the profit we generated went to make other projects happen. In fact, most upper management at SOE thought EQ1 was going to die the moment EQ2 was released. The entire time I was at SOE, we had to fight to get resources on EQ at all. People were constantly dragged off to other programs with little regard for how we were going to survive.

Free Realms was a perfect example of the problems in leadership that Utnayan describes. The people at the top on that project were an absolute disaster. Laralyn McWilliams is heralded as some female icon in game design, but jesus what a mess she actually was. I've never seen a more 'shoot from the hip' lack of planning, change direction like the wind blows "leadership" like ever. Stephen Bokkes was supposedly 'lead' designer, but all he did was use the FR design team as his personal dating pool, and was a complete shitbag, to the point of giving crappy yearly reviews to women who rejected his advances. These were people who were so new to the industry that they didn't lodge formal complaints for fear of being blackballed and thrown out. The bullshit flowing out of McWilliams' and Bokkes' office was so bad most of us just gave up even talking to them. They of course took all the credit come launch day, leaving Terrence Yee to twist in the wind. Complete bullshitery. In truth, Terrence Yee was ACTUALLY the lead designer of the game. He was awesome.

I was actually asked to come help out on FR to get it out the door.. The utter chaos I saw when I got there left me dumbfounded. I spent 6 months on that team putting in long hours and pushing the envelope of what a 'world designer' was supposed to do. Jonathan Caraker did the same. We came from EQ, where we did EVERYTHING.. They wanted us to just write documents for apprentices to implement and such. We both said, "No", and Terrence backed us up. We did almost all of the work on our respective design areas, only to ultimately have 'leadership' just delete it all on a whim because they thought they had some stroke of genius and change of direction (yet again). Shortly after launch, I was asked to stay on to help drive the live team, and told them, "No way in hell" and went back to EQ.

Shortly after I came back to EQ began the Ponytail era.. and we ALL know how well that went down. Trost exited SOE when his pet project was scrapped for no apparent reason. I don't think it was talked about much outside SOE, but let's just say it would have been WELL AHEAD of the Zombie craze, instead of 4 years later with H1Z1, arguably after the whole 'zombies' thing was already getting past its shelf life. I'm happy Trost has found footing again at Amazon. He's an incredibly talented designer.

FYI: You are one of the one's I was referring too who was one of the good ones. From everything I heard, you were a VERY solid designer and also word about that had spread across various parts of the industry as well. If you ever do decide to go back to it, I am guessing a few companies that actually don't drive down develop and actually listen to fantastic and creative ideas (And also let you take credit for them so when successful you can advance further) you would be at the top of the list. The games biz needs people like you progressing up the chain.

Also if you ever get a chance to fly an F-16 please take a pic and send it to me :p
 

Torrid

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I'm terrified of what Elid would say if somebody asked him about his time in the raid guild we were apart of
 

Torrid

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These people can't compete. They cry over who threw a javelin or touched a mob first and think they're these big competitive tough guys.

Bluebies are care bears. Weak petitionquesters with defunct motor skills.

I was in Holocaust for a short time before I quit the server. What genuinely surprised me was just how bad at PvE the good PvP players were. Holocaust would murder the rival guild on the field, then die to AI NPCs because they couldn't seem to coordinate or have the patience. It was like some sort of inverse correlation between PvP and PvE ability.
 
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