Fondest Memory of MMOs

I think EQ was the first to have significant Weather impact.

When it would Rain in the Karanas you couldn't see shit, and when a caster would blind you it would make your whole screen black. It was a bitch because you couldn't even alt tab.
Even in Everfrost those Snow Storms were a pain in the ass to navigate.
There was allot of stuff like that. The slime covered floors in Lower Guk were amusing.

The best thing EQ did tho was it made the leveling curve extremely tough so everyone would more ,or less level together from one zone to the next as they advanced out.
The server populations were also much smaller.

EQ just felt like Dungeons and Dragons even tho I've never played that game. That game always seemed more mature fantasy to me, and EQ fit perfectly in that bubble.

Good shit, will never happen again tho.

Jasker_sl said:

-Dungeon crawling in solb
-Being terrified of loose spectres in oasis, fucking kiting bards
-Beating a guild to statue and aow in kael and getting breastplate of eradication and feeling like a p i m p
-Me and an RL friend ninja looted a garanja idol in maidens eye from a kid we knew IRL that was a dick to us and he got wicked pissed off
-Pulling qvic, txevu, tacvi and uqua when it first came out, and sitting on allakazam drooling at tacvi and txevu loot
-Sitting in Plane of Tranquility with the music on feeling sophisticated chatting with buddies

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In a decade+ of nostalgia threads, I think you are the first I have heard reminiscing positively about the Gates of Discord expac!

Plenty of GoD was cool. It was just buggy and way too exclusive to the top 1%. Requiring the new zerker class for a class call was retarded and so were the stupid little dogs snaring everyone, but mobs dying in moments after the pull but being able to decimate you just as easily were fun. Omens of War turned the /snore back on for grind groups so necromancers were relevant again. They're talking about adding proportional amounts of HP to the next EQ xpac, The Darkened Sea, for the same reason. We're all being held hostage by one poorly designed class.

Everything before Uqua was tedious and repetitive in the same exact instance with the same exact mob and boss skins with the same exact loot. Broken Uqua was so god damn bad, but once they fixed it actually turned out to be one of the best scripted encounters to play through. Racing for set gear every 6 hours in qvic with as many bards as you could call felt like classic EQ. But then they laughed in the 1%ers faces, said none of the focuses would scale to 70 and made GoD/OoW completely negate all the good will of the game for both the 99 and 1%.

We need a Worst Memories of MMOs thread, that would probably have some better stories.

My guild (Darkwind) were part of the 1% crowd at GoD time. We were 3rd worldwide into PoTime and had some worldwide firsts along the way. GoD was the most broken buggy piece of shit released by SoE to date. I have screen shots of a lvl1 GM Dev in our raid (live server, not beta!) taking tuning notes and giving us GM rezes after wipes to speed things along. Fuck that expac. That was the end of EQ for me and many others, including most of the reputable raiding guilds that had made names for themselves. People just moved on at that point.

Column_sl said:

I think EQ was the first to have significant Weather impact.

When it would Rain in the Karanas you couldn't see shit, and when a caster would blind you it would make your whole screen black. It was a bitch because you couldn't even alt tab.
Even in Everfrost those Snow Storms were a pain in the ass to navigate.

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It's really sad that weather systems have been all but abandoned in MMO's it seems. At least none are as good as the ones that were in EQ or AC1. WoW made a big deal about adding their weather system back in 2006'ish (?) but I remember thinking it was a bit disappointing.

Tred_sl said:

It's really sad that weather systems have been all but abandoned in MMO's it seems. At least none are as good as the ones that were in EQ or AC1. WoW made a big deal about adding their weather system back in 2006'ish (?) but I remember thinking it was a bit disappointing.

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I kind of agree. Honestly, shit like that and racials were at their very core... annoying. But I really do wish that games would start going back to things that make each person different. Although everything really kind of centered around vision in EQ - Weather just added something to zones. I mean, for fucks sake... I remember getting disoriented in one of the Karanas and I had an idea of the direction to head, but wasnt sure. Then all of a sudden its raining, and I cant see anything more than 10 feet in front of me. Shit was miserable and made me level sense heading up from that very day. Or originally started a Barbarian and it getting dark and not seeing a motherfucking thing and then getting killed and losing my corpse cause I had no fucking clue where I was.

That stuff is going to instantly turn a crowd off, but it was just something about that torturous shit that made you appreciate it. Then again, I thought everyone that played EverQuest was at their heart, a very masochistic kind of person.

I agree with all that. I don't need debilitating thunderstorms but something to add more flavor to worlds would be nice.

And what about last names? I remebwr finally hitting 20 for the first time in EQ and picking your last name was a big deal. It can't possibly be that hard to add last name support to an MMO.

I like surnames. I'm peeved many new games don't have such a small feature.

Tred_sl said:

...And what about last names? I remebwr finally hitting 20 for the first time in EQ and picking your last name was a big deal. It can't possibly be that hard to add last name support to an MMO.

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My bigger beef is with titles. In EQ1, it was extremely rare to have a GM title and it had significance. Nowadays, it seems right from the start you can pick through half a dozen titles and it just bloats from there. Zero fucks are given.

Camping Ssra shards with Evanhart and Duncan/Baldabus to get into Fiends.

Tred_sl said:

And what about last names? I remebwr finally hitting 20 for the first time in EQ and picking your last name was a big deal. It can't possibly be that hard to add last name support to an MMO.

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I remember coming up with at least a couple dozen surnames for people on my server. Itwasa big deal, and I happened to be good at picking them.

I've seen a few people here or there on MMO boards that still use the names.

Killing Phinny in Kedge Keep. Was my first raid. I knew nothing about the zone.

Considering the amount of drugs smoked in those days, if you remember it, then you weren't really there.

Jysin_sl said:

In a decade+ of nostalgia threads, I think you are the first I have heard reminiscing positively about the Gates of Discord expac!

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haha you're right.. I remember it being adrenaline inducing not so positive

Malakriss_sl said:

Everything before Uqua was tedious and repetitive in the same exact instance with the same exact mob and boss skins with the same exact loot. Broken Uqua was so god damn bad, but once they fixed it actually turned out to be one of the best scripted encounters to play through. Racing for set gear every 6 hours in qvic with as many bards as you could call felt like classic EQ. But then they laughed in the 1%ers faces, said none of the focuses would scale to 70 and made GoD/OoW completely negate all the good will of the game for both the 99 and 1%.

We need a Worst Memories of MMOs thread, that would probably have some better stories.

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I have to agree here about Uqua. It was one of the last raids I did before the final switchover to WoW, but it really was an extremely fun raid once it was working properly.

Tred_sl said:

I agree with all that. I don't need debilitating thunderstorms but something to add more flavor to worlds would be nice.

And what about last names? I remebwr finally hitting 20 for the first time in EQ and picking your last name was a big deal. It can't possibly be that hard to add last name support to an MMO.

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I remember initially how a GM would come and give a person thier surname. That is something that will never be seen again. Server specific GM's were nice.

Generally, it was the novelty of it. The wonderment and exploration cannot be replicated. I very briefly played EQ in 2003 with a bunch of school mates and never got past level 20 because I opted to just explore - shit just seemed so big. I played Lineage 2 for 10 hours a day during summer 2004 and that competitive environment "taught" me how to play these MMOs. I played Wow for a month and a half after release before getting burnt out on clan management duties, and I was the first Alliance priest on my server to hit 60 and sold my account for $350 (I about made minimum wage at the time to play). These games were a lot more fun when you: 1) have the free time to play them without much consequence (as a kid), 2) You didn't know the "optimize" way to play and there was a lot of figuring it out yourself, and 3) the newness of the experience. Nostalgia, Nostalgia, Nostalgia.

Another big thing in AC was the lack of names floating above every character. You recognized people first by the items they had. And I dearly miss trying to figure out how to scale to the top of mountains and jump off. So many invisible walls in MMO's these days.