Everquest Mysteries

Fight said:

Yeah, that guy back in 2000 wasn't really cheating either. He just found a quest, put together a group of folks to assembly line that shit, and eventually got the quest(s) removed/nerfed because of his mass production & efficiency in completing it.

If you wanted to "Hire the criminal to catch the other criminals", it sounds like we had a lot more qualified folks in our "How Much Have MMO's Made You?" thread right on this message board.

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He ended up being a producer on EQ2 I think briefly.
To be fair we're still finding shit like this from 1999 in EQ. Remember Fire Beetle Eyes on Agnarr? Or Rat Ears / Red Wine? That was an identical quest setup.

"Cheat" is a broad word. He wasn't making HWID lock bypasses like some of us are for money, he's using the means of the game to prevent in-world exploits that are possible without external programs. Him working on New World was likely preventing economy exploits and such.

EQ was plagued with items through tradeskills that sold for more than their vendor cost when tradeskilled for a long-ass time. They're grossly nerfed now, but back in the day when you could just send inventory requests through MacroQuest and then instantly combine and then generate millions of plat instantly, it was a pretty big deal and a case study for future MMOs.

Steve Bannon / Jonathan Yantis exploited this early on with the fletching exploit that involved standing in front of a single merchant and repeatedly buying tradeskill mats and vendoring the product (arrows, iirc)
Someone else caught onto it, though, and they posted it on rpg-exploiters (their 'get this shit nerfed' website that also sold a membership) to get it nerfed quickly after they cashed out.

Technologically savvy exploits are something else entirely, though. That's a very specialized engineering role, and less and less of us exist each day as we get scooped up by big name companies. Riot Games' anticheat team has several old GunZ: The Duel hackers on it.

"maxing people's combat skills by exploiting duels with charmed pets, and no shortage of other shenanigans were hotfixed by the watchful developers."

Nerfing charm that way and neglecting summoned pets able to raise combat skills, which is actually far more convenient, is such a Sony thing to do. Not sure I would call leaving in Tumpy's quest in for 'two months', which even I knew about back then, 'watchful'.

As much as I appreciate them for having made the game, often I find myself facepalming over things they failed to fix, because as an emu dev my hands are usually tied when it comes to fixing them. Generally I think the game would have been better if they had fixed these kinds of issues, but changing them now would make the game feel too different and so would not be well received by the emu community, minus a handful of egregious exploits.

Often I get back from people that Sony intended for X Y or Z to be in the game, but it's obvious from reading old accounts that Sony was nerf happy and simply was not aware of what was going on.

Secrets said:

He ended up being a producer on EQ2 I think briefly.
To be fair we're still finding shit like this from 1999 in EQ. Remember Fire Beetle Eyes on Agnarr? Or Rat Ears / Red Wine? That was an identical quest setup.

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Fire beetle eyes was Phinny it wasn't something that's been in the game since 99. I'm the one that discovered this "exploit" and really i was just copying what Frenzic did on Ragefire. Phinny XP was really really fucking bad on launch, but i noticed quest XP was giving the same amount of XP as live servers. So the obvious solution was for me buy thousands Fire beetles eyes from vendors for like 10 plat. Then obviously a few people just copied what Frenzic did on RF.

Red Wine and Rat ears were just because stack size got increased to 1000. People been doing red wine 20 stacked since before i started playing the game in SoV.

Red wine and rat ears was legit great after the krono price rose super fast on Mischief. Less than a krono to get into grouping range.

Torrid said:

Often I get back from people that Sony intended for X Y or Z to be in the game, but it's obvious from reading old accounts that Sony was nerf happy and simply was not aware of what was going on.

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At least they were aware that fixing archery's collision issues would buff it.

Torrid said:

"maxing people's combat skills by exploiting duels with charmed pets, and no shortage of other shenanigans were hotfixed by the watchful developers."

Nerfing charm that way and neglecting summoned pets able to raise combat skills, which is actually far more convenient, is such a Sony thing to do. Not sure I would call leaving in Tumpy's quest in for 'two months', which even I knew about back then, 'watchful'.

As much as I appreciate them for having made the game, often I find myself facepalming over things they failed to fix, because as an emu dev my hands are usually tied when it comes to fixing them. Generally I think the game would have been better if they had fixed these kinds of issues, but changing them now would make the game feel too different and so would not be well received by the emu community, minus a handful of egregious exploits.

Often I get back from people that Sony intended for X Y or Z to be in the game, but it's obvious from reading old accounts that Sony was nerf happy and simply was not aware of what was going on.

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i really liked some of their bugs. the warp spot in West Karanas was completely harmless. it saved you 5 minutes of running time on your way back to Qeynos/Surefall/Halas which is a long fucking run to make every night if you're a shaman/caster bound at Lavastorm Sol B entrance. i could bank all my stuff and then gate back to LS to get a group. it got much much easier after i did the red wine quest and just used Guise of Deceiver to bank in Neriak. just gotta watch out for the wandering troll. then during Kunark or Velius they "fixed" the bug. was fucking annoying. was no need to fix that. i can understand them removing the safe spot in Highpass Keep basement because we were pulling trains to it and killing mass mobs late at night with no risk. of course they never discovered the other safespot on the upper floors that my friend used to become the first 60 on the server in just a few weeks.

My first character was an Iksar warrior and I played exclusively in Kunark. Running through LOIO to get to FM/KC or anywhere else worthwhile took fucking forever. At a high enough level I remember just aligning myself with the compass, looking up and auto running for 15 minutes while I went and did something else. That was just the stretch to get from Cabilis to the water.

I think at the time there was a risk of drowning if you ran out of stamina so you had to babysit it a bit still anyway. Oh and there was fall damage from the little hills too lol.

Sanrith Descartes said:

Overthere I remember being large also because unless the mobs were gray to you, you had to run the walls.

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Yes and the Dragoons and the people training the Dragoons to FM constantly lol.

The insidious nature of exploitable bugs is players like them and revolt when they're fixed, even if they're bad for the game. Players HATE having anything taken away from them, and they're not entirely wrong to feel that way, particularly after other players have taken advantage of them before you could. This is why QA is extremely important.

I don't think people realize the consequences of some of these bugs either. For example EQMac/TAKP basically has a completely dead early game largely because high level buffs could land on lower level characters when using group versions as Sony was highly negligent when attempting to restrict them. Everybody loves MGB buff gatherings though, but a consequence is that newbies sign up and cannot get a group to save their lives then log off in frustration because everybody hits level 50 inside a week using god mode. And If nobody MGBs recently then they won't even attempt to level; or they are forced to level near a book. EQ in particular is more about the journey and not the destination (i.e. the raid game) than other MMOGs so this exploit is far more destructive than people consider.

Torrid said:

The insidious nature of exploitable bugs is players like them and revolt when they're fixed, even if they're bad for the game. Players HATE having anything taken away from them, and they're not entirely wrong to feel that way, particularly after other players have taken advantage of them before you could. This is why QA is extremely important.

I don't think people realize the consequences of some of these bugs either. For example EQMac/TAKP basically has a completely dead early game largely because high level buffs could land on lower level characters when using group versions as Sony was highly negligent when attempting to restrict them. Everybody loves MGB buff gatherings though, but a consequence is that newbies sign up and cannot get a group to save their lives then log off in frustration because everybody hits level 50 inside a week using god mode. And If nobody MGBs recently then they won't even attempt to level; or they are forced to level near a book. EQ in particular is more about the journey and not the destination (i.e. the raid game) than other MMOGs so this exploit is far more destructive than people consider.

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up until a year ago i would roll twinks and level the same way i did back in 2000. you can get haste, hp regen, mana regen potions from a vendor at the damned bank and become invincible to vanilla encounters with all appropriate twink gear, i hit 50 very fast soloing. 50 to 60 is a little slower, but my grind spot was Gorangas in Maiden's eye and those things go down fast.

Masakari said:

Was LOIO the biggest zone in Kunark? I know Dreadlands and Overthere were pretty big too.

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Timorous Deep from Kunark is still the second largest zone in Everquest to date i believe.

Apparently Iceclad is the largest zone in game followed by TD. Seems cheap since the majority of Iceclad is an empty ocean with no points of interest or features. It’s just a gap of water between the real “zone” and where the gnome boat is.

Zaide said:

Apparently Iceclad is the largest zone in game followed by TD. Seems cheap since the majority of Iceclad is an empty ocean with no points of interest or features. It’s just a gap of water between the real “zone” and where the gnome boat is.

How big is EverQuest? – Brewall's EverQuest Maps

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if i had to guess which is the biggest most populated zone, probably Dreadlands. that place is monstrous with mobs everywhere.

Zaide said:

Apparently Iceclad is the largest zone in game followed by TD. Seems cheap since the majority of Iceclad is an empty ocean with no points of interest or features. It’s just a gap of water between the real “zone” and where the gnome boat is.

How big is EverQuest? – Brewall's EverQuest Maps

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You can actually get out of CotH range in iceclad, I ran out to the edge one day and a mage buddy tried to CotH me back, he got an out of range error.

Pyratec said:

You can actually get out of CotH range in iceclad, I ran out to the edge one day and a mage buddy tried to CotH me back, he got an out of range error.

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that may be a "feature". they tried to stop people from skipping content.

Zaide said:

Apparently Iceclad is the largest zone in game followed by TD. Seems cheap since the majority of Iceclad is an empty ocean with no points of interest or features. It’s just a gap of water between the real “zone” and where the gnome boat is.

How big is EverQuest? – Brewall's EverQuest Maps

Click to expand...

Iceclad is so big it has it's own IN ZONE translocator.