Everquest Mysteries

I remember having to walk backwards through the tunnel from everfrost to blackburrow so I could judge if I was still making progress or was running into a wall and needed to turn

Dude p99 turned on "real classic" vision and my human is fucking blind as a bat...but getting portaled into commons at night, being blind AF...omg the feels...

I had a Starfighter video card...my drivers were haxxored to even work in DX7? and i had all sorts of fun graphical issues until I got my hands on a voodoo 2...

There was human/barbarian I have no night vision dark, but there was also "I own a nvidia/ati card and the brightness/gamma settings in the game don't do anything" dark. That was a problem in the quake series and lots of other games released in that era. I think it was because the 3dfx voodoo cards were still widely used in the late 90s and games were written to use Glide as a renderer and implemented OpenGL and Direct3d(DX) as an afterthought.

Alasliasolonik said:

Yes but those deep questions would be better suited to non dev pretty much, they just dont remember most the time.

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Indeed, or they never knew in the first place. I think people generally overestimate the average developer's knowledge of the mechanics (not just EQ here, I would think it's applicable to almost any large rpg). I'd guess that the theorycrafters at Steel Warrior and similar sites knew far more about the game mechanics than most of the devs. There may be some devs that had all the answers (probably the initial system designers), but most of them never really touched real mechanic design/implementation and were also unlikely to have played the game at a competitive level. Even for the people who 'should' have known, there are problems where the implementation didn't match the design due to bugs or miscommunication, and all issues are compounded on long projects (all mmo's) due to turnover. Once something's in its 3rd expansion and seperated from its initial devs by at least a couple of rounds of turnover, who knows how the fuck anything works or has any clue if works how it's supposed to work.

Some things, like the dumb stats, could just be ticking the wrong dropdown or filling in the wrong row, but others, like the Mosscovered Twig or the Donals BP, just point to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the combat system works. What's worse is when things like the BP need multiple rounds of nerfs. It's one thing when a noob dev does something noob. It's another when (presumably) multiple devs looked at the problem the noob dev caused, and then came up with a solution that didn't really address the issue at all. Of course, we also shoudn't underestimate how bad decisions can creep in and compound after months or years of 100 hour weeks fueled by nothing more than Mt Dew, Doritos, and opiates.

More modern games likely have more structured content creation tools that let things be created or generated within acceptable bounds to prevent similar things. That also makes everything feel bland and worthless though, so there are ups and downs here. I sound negative about it, but In retrospect, I prefer the occasional brokenass itemization to bliz stat incrementers.

Control said:

More modern games likely have more structured content creation tools that let things be created or generated within acceptable bounds to prevent similar things. That also makes everything feel bland and worthless though, so there are ups and downs here. I sound negative about it, but In retrospect, I prefer the occasional brokenass itemization to bliz stat incrementers.

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Yeah, current era EQ and WoW create their items from formula's and spreadsheets. It fucking mind numbing.

Control said:

Indeed, or they never knew in the first place. I think people generally overestimate the average developer's knowledge of the mechanics (not just EQ here, I would think it's applicable to almost any large rpg). I'd guess that the theorycrafters at Steel Warrior and similar sites knew far more about the game mechanics than most of the devs. There may be some devs that had all the answers (probably the initial system designers), but most of them never really touched real mechanic design/implementation and were also unlikely to have played the game at a competitive level. Even for the people who 'should' have known, there are problems where the implementation didn't match the design due to bugs or miscommunication, and all issues are compounded on long projects (all mmo's) due to turnover. Once something's in its 3rd expansion and seperated from its initial devs by at least a couple of rounds of turnover, who knows how the fuck anything works or has any clue if works how it's supposed to work.

Some things, like the dumb stats, could just be ticking the wrong dropdown or filling in the wrong row, but others, like the Mosscovered Twig or the Donals BP, just point to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the combat system works. What's worse is when things like the BP need multiple rounds of nerfs. It's one thing when a noob dev does something noob. It's another when (presumably) multiple devs looked at the problem the noob dev caused, and then came up with a solution that didn't really address the issue at all. Of course, we also shoudn't underestimate how bad decisions can creep in and compound after months or years of 100 hour weeks fueled by nothing more than Mt Dew, Doritos, and opiates.

More modern games likely have more structured content creation tools that let things be created or generated within acceptable bounds to prevent similar things. That also makes everything feel bland and worthless though, so there are ups and downs here. I sound negative about it, but In retrospect, I prefer the occasional brokenass itemization to bliz stat incrementers.

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I just think of games that come from Indie companies as Hand Made, and ones that come from companies as big as Blizzard as Factory Made. EverQuest Classic vs WoW being the obvious example.

Daidraco said:

I just think of games that come from Indie companies as Hand Made, and ones that come from companies as big as Blizzard as Factory Made. EverQuest Classic vs WoW being the obvious example.

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Ya, even classic WoW felt wonderfully hand crafted compared to the thing it turned into. Too lazy to try and dig it up, but BRD/BRS for example, was almost certainly designed by someone who spent a lot of time in Guk. Vanilla WoW was built by people who loved EQ. As time went on, they were replaced by, well, other people. And it shows.

as was said, i think the devs saw huge waiting lists for certain drops in a few zones and they were ignoring other content in other zones so it was creating a bottleneck. so they introduced crafted armor and just removed the bottleneck by taking those mega camped items out of the game. kunark was probably similar. introduce a bunch of jacked items to get people into the kunark zones and explore. then when everyone was starting to permacamp those l33t items, they nerfed or removed them and introduced epics and such.

Falxy-US said:

I remember some zone in EQ. I think it was somewhere off the barbarian area. There was some mob in a small little room that would spawn and drop some circlet headpiece thing that I think I wanted to sell. I spent 16 hours sitting there, killing mob after mob, until finally the right one spawned that drop the piece. Fucking waste of my life!!!

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thats the king area by the IGs in Permafrost?

i camped that area most of the winter during vanilla. nobody ever went there, so i learned the entire place. i was able to bundle all that stuff in trades for some nice items. by themselves they werent worth much of anything.

Muddites for the win.

Falxy-US said:

Thats it! Holy hell!

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Haha, and I remember people mistakenly calling it the "Ruined" Circlet.

That's one of those strange MMOisms. Like tomb instead of tome. Yes I'm carrying the crypt of a dead person in my off hand.

Or Halbred instead of Halberd.

Probably stems more from most of us being dumb ass kids in the late 90's, early 2000's. Hell, to this day you can still ask people how to say "Luclin" "Cazic Thule" etc. and they'll pronounce it some weird fked up way.

Kharzette said:

That's one of those strange MMOisms. Like tomb instead of tome. Yes I'm carrying the crypt of a dead person in my off hand.

Or Halbred instead of Halberd.

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in EQ i learned, rogue is spelled ROUGE, frog is spelled FORG, shaman pet is called a dogdog. expensive items are referred to as "spendy", very is "hella". as in, "that ruined circlet is hella spendy!"

Falxy-US said:

Luck-lin

Cahzic Thool

Have I been wrong????

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Was there any advantage to being a human?

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What, you've never heard...
Loose-lin?
Sayzick-thool?

As far as Humans - Classic had some really nice items that were race specific to Human. I cant for the life of me remember what they are (I never played a Human), but I recall people bragging that they had this or that in a certain level range and it being Human only. To me, not only was the jack of all trades stats, and poor vision enough reason not to play - but I absolutely hated the way a human in Plate looked in classic.

Falxy-US said:

Luck-lin

Cahzic Thool

Have I been wrong????

-

Was there any advantage to being a human?

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you played human for none of the racial exp penalties and the ability to bank in most areas. with a little factioning, you can get yourself banking in Neriak too.

At some point in early EQ the idiotic trend of appending PST to the end of all your sales announcements started. It wasn't around at first, and I quit for a while (maybe just pre-Kunark or just after?) and when I came back a few months later it was PST all over the fucking place.

No shit if I'm interested I'll send you a tell. You don't need a stupid acronym to explain that. And at a certain point I think people stopped even realizing what it meant because you'd occasionally see stuff like "PST tell."