The Al`kabor Project (EQMac) - PoP 1/5

The_Black_Log Foler

Stock Pals Senior Vice President
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Unless you're black, it's cultural appropriation.

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I am black you fucking bigot
 
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Lenas

Trump's Staff
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PoTime P4 is kinda wrecking our shit but everything up until then went smoothly.
 

Lenas

Trump's Staff
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From my understanding he should be killable but we still have 5 god kills to go until we see how hard he is.
 

Zaide

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What was the original Quarm like back in the day? Is there a record of how he was nerfed or “balanced” over the years?
 

Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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The only thing I can remember is fighting him in the open a few times and getting beaten badly. Then one fight the AE didn't hit me and I couldn't really figure out why.

Turned out his AE was blocked by geometry and I think I was standing behind a tiny ledge from a square symbol that was embossed on the floor maybe? I don't think we figured it out right away as all the other AE in the place went through walls.

I'm not sure if that was a mistake or if they fixed it later?
 

Leon

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What was the original Quarm like back in the day? Is there a record of how he was nerfed or “balanced” over the years?
Walls not blocking aoes.

aoes getting stronger as heads pop.

some insane aoe like 3k dot non resistance, 24 sec stun non resistible etc etc.

4k melee quad unslowable.

I don’t think anyone got to experience quarm 1.0 on pc, this was his state on AK.
 
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Lenas

Trump's Staff
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What was the original Quarm like back in the day? Is there a record of how he was nerfed or “balanced” over the years?

1.0 - Absolute monstrosity, wild west
2.0 - Made slowable
3.0 - Walls block AOE

The most problematic part of 1.0 was the unresistable 6 second stun going off every 30 seconds. There were even worse versions of the stun that went up to 12 and 18 second stuns with the same recast, presumably getting worse throughout the fight. Never found out.

At some point the stun was removed completely and they revamped his other AOE's, mostly to be more front-loaded DD damage.
 
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Torrid

Molten Core Raider
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Al'Kabor's Plane of Time was the result of Hobart cobbling together mid-2003 era data and mixing it with AK's older data. AK's Quarm was casting spells that were largely unfinished and placeholder. The encounter wasn't even close to complete. Its AI logic probably didn't work correctly either. Many of these spells didn't even have a recast delay on them, so Quarm would just endlessly spam them, like this:

[Tue Apr 23 23:50:19 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:19 2013] Putrid earth engulfs your body. You have taken 500 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:22 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:22 2013] Time and reality begin to tear around you.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:24 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:24 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:26 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:27 2013] The force of air surrounds your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:28 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:28 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:30 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:31 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:32 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:32 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:34 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:34 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:40 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:40 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:42 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:43 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:44 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:45 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:47 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:47 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:50 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:50 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:53 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:54 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:55 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:56 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:57 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:50:57 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:00 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:00 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:06 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:07 2013] Eternal flames assault you. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:23 2013] Reality snaps back into focus.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:24 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:24 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:31 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:31 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:40 2013] Quarm begins to cast a spell.
[Tue Apr 23 23:51:40 2013] A massive wave assaults your body. You have taken 250 points of damage.

Looking at Lucy spell history, Quarm's spells were updated on July 10th. AL got to phase 6 first on July 3rd. First Quarm kill July 16th.

I can say that AK's Quarm was not the version AL saw for that week, because spell ID 3767 is one of the Epoch Convictions in AK's data (and even AK's isn't the same as the final version of it), but in that week from July 3 to July 10 it was called Corporeal Timeblast I with different spell effects and he was casting this at the time. So for that one week Quarm was seemingly doing all kinds of different stuff that AK didn't have and only a few PC guilds saw.
 
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Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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Township might have gotten there before us. We got one clear a week and theirs reset every 2 days so they got alot more tries. Pretty sure they killed it before we did, mainly because I was dumb and didn't realize I blocked the AE.
 

Lenas

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Quarm dead June 20, just over six years after the server was created.
 
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your_mum

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Think they said like 1-2 years after pop was finished... hopefully they follow through. Personally though, if I was Torven and Rob I'd feel a little iffy. They, and another guy cavedude, made that promise a longgg time ago. Probably didn't realize how many thousands of hours they'd put in.

On the contrary though they will be the greatest contribution to eqemu ever imo. The code mechanics and database quality are just way ahead of eqemu (and p99 imo). If someone can take their work and have it work off Titanium client (so all the cry babies looking for mouse wheel are happy), this would easily be the p99 killer.
 
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Torrid

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Well I am Torven so I can speak to this. The source will very likely open sometime this year and the fork has already been made and is being prepared. There is a small handful of things we don't want visible -- anti cheats and CSR messages -- that won't be made available, so we'll still have a private TAKP fork. Much of our project has already been leaked to some people anyway against our wishes because we've been generous with access to it and somebody took advantage of that, so if we broke our promise they would just make a public fork to spite us regardless. (minus recent commits) Although we never had any intention of breaking the 1-2 year promise anyway, so the threat is not the reason we will. I wouldn't have joined the team if it were closed source to begin with.

We were open source for about a year after we launched Classic era then closed because some disgruntled banned users took our project and created a server with it overnight and did everything they could to get our users to switch over to their server, which included a lot of plagiarism because they couldn't have openly stated that they relied on our work to operate. This was very demoralizing as you can imagine, so it was either close the source or shut down. For awhile in Kunark era we had like 30 accounts logged in during prime time every night on a 3 box server. Even if you don't have hostile servers trying to attack your project, splitting the userbase of a very small community of classic EQ enthusiasts is detrimental because you need a critical mass number of users in a game that requires grouping to advance, so it can be undesirable to have randos starting new servers all the time and splitting everybody up. Users do not vet the servers they start up on so it's false to assume that they will gravitate to the most well-ran server, and most of these servers will just end up dying in a year or two so they're not doing much good.

Another reason for the delay is because we don't want players digging through the code and database for spoilers. The argument that "everybody knows everything about the game already and spoilers for it all are already available" is not true and frankly a little insulting to me because if it were true I wouldn't have to do so much work. Years back we had users looking through our database and scripts for bugged drops and spawns then taking advantage of them instead of reporting them. Our Quarm is also very custom because our clients lack the final Quarm's spells, so I had to cobble together a frankenquarm using our spell data and some custom behavior, plus I took the opportunity to make him not a pussy so users could enjoy it more. We wanted guilds to figure him out before opening back up.

It's flattering to be called a potential p99 killer but I don't think that's true. Users don't really care about accuracy that much. P99 is simply accurate enough that other things matter far more, like their box rule and administration. P99 probably has better accuracy than us in some areas anyway. (our classic era zones could use work) People REALLY underestimate the value of p99's administration. Policing a one box server is a shitty job that nobody wants to do. P99 has that plus effective anti-cheats plus massive name recognition and mindshare that is very unlikely to be overcome. Also a non-trivial amount of work would be required to make a Velious era fork of TAKP's backend, so it's not just a client swap. (which also requires significant work)
 
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Secrets

ResetEra Staff Member
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On the contrary though they will be the greatest contribution to eqemu ever imo. The code mechanics and database quality are just way ahead of eqemu (and p99 imo). If someone can take their work and have it work off Titanium client (so all the cry babies looking for mouse wheel are happy), this would easily be the p99 killer.

My new project (Hjonk) will be a 1-Box, PoP-era server utilizing TAKP's DB as a base. I've been spending time converting the important bits over to the Rain of Fear client, utilizing some of classless's code to make era-appropriate stats display properly.

It's still a few months out, and has some twists to it that some may find silly, but it will be easier to do a more modern client TAKP beyond my project when the general public has access to their work. It's fairly trivial to do, well, maybe for me.
 
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