What Made EQ Great? Tell your stories to a filthy casual

Screenshots or it didn't happen.

It was the first that used an immersive, 3D world to good effect?

Also: Server drama.

Just playing a necro with a pre ner Cos and Giant Beed Necklace, the fun I had with them 2 items would never be aloud in a MMO now days. If you was good on a necro you could solo most raid bosses, soloing drakes in VP , soloing VS when lower end guilds still used him as a raid target, had it twice where I kept him tagged for guilds and soled him for like 10 minutes while they regrouped from a wipe and took over again. Outside of raids I soloed 98% of the time and loved it

Everyone keeps saying server drama, but what you have to realize is that the fundamental game mechanics are what fueled it.

Open agro mechanics and mobs that chased you forever, the ability to KS named mobs from groups, shared (no instancing) dungeons/content along with scarcity of resources, 12 of the 16 classes relying on groups to do much of anything, etc...

Interaction was forced upon the community, and let's face it, a lot of people are shitheads. It was the wild west a lot of times and the game mechanics allowed people to "take matters into their own hands". The EQ official "Play nice policies" are the reason WoW was so dumbed down and streamlined. People just couldn't play nice, so WoW hard-coded their system to make the game world the opponent, rather than the other players.

My buddy and I hustling people out of millions of plat at the nfp auction. I once convinced a guy that I had a 50 necro on another server that I was trying to trade and that we could talk about it over the phone if he gave me 5k. All he got was a fake number.


I was a real bastard when it came to economics at 15.

Fight_sl said:

Everyone keeps saying server drama, but what you have to realize is that the fundamental game mechanics are what fueled it.

Open agro mechanics and mobs that chased you forever, the ability to KS named mobs from groups, shared (no instancing) dungeons/content along with scarcity of resources, 12 of the 16 classes relying on groups to do much of anything, etc...

Interaction was forced upon the community, and let's face it, a lot of people are shitheads. It was the wild west a lot of times and the game mechanics allowed people to "take matters into their own hands". The EQ official "Play nice policies" are the reason WoW was so dumbed down and streamlined. People just couldn't play nice, so WoW hard-coded their system to make the game world the opponent, rather than the other players.

Click to expand...

EQ's self-policing community had a way of alienating griefers and shitheads.

My favorite/only scam was on where me and a buddy would auction to buy/trade for a robe from one of the mage guilds called Rohim's Robe. Then one of us would do the same trying to sell it. My only suspension in EQ was when we pulled off a major steal and got something like a cobalt breastplate and a few high end weapons for that shitty robe. That's another thing that was sweet about EQ, being young and lacking empathy.

It was (at least at release) an unforgiving harsh world that punished mistakes and auto-weeded out dumbfuck idiots that couldn't play. There was nothing more terrifying than getting jumped by a yellow mob alone knowing that if you die you have a long ass corpse retrieval run along with 4 hours of grind XP lost unless you could find a high level cleric.

IMHO, EQ was killed for me once they removed the tension/risk and made travel, rezzing, and XP loss trivial.

Fight_sl said:

Everyone keeps saying server drama, but what you have to realize is that the fundamental game mechanics are what fueled it.

Open agro mechanics and mobs that chased you forever, the ability to KS named mobs from groups, shared (no instancing) dungeons/content along with scarcity of resources, 12 of the 16 classes relying on groups to do much of anything, etc...

Interaction was forced upon the community, and let's face it, a lot of people are shitheads. It was the wild west a lot of times and the game mechanics allowed people to "take matters into their own hands". The EQ official "Play nice policies" are the reason WoW was so dumbed down and streamlined. People just couldn't play nice, so WoW hard-coded their system to make the game world the opponent, rather than the other players.

Click to expand...

I think what often gets lost in the nostalgia clouded retelling of EQ's past is how a very large majority of the playerbase was done with EQ shortly after PoP. They were tired of all the frustrations that came with the game. Fighting in Oasis and a sand giant steps on your head because he got trained, too bad, get your ass back on the boat from across the world. Hand in a quest and AI eats your item with no reward, too fucking bad, do it (camp it) again. It's one of the primary reasons why WoW blew up the way it did. It was specifically designed early to reduce or outright remove those timesinks and by 2004 everyone had enough.

The one thing that EQ did have that to this day can't (and probably never will) be replicated was the fear of walking in the world. There was something to be said of being low level and having to run for your life across Kithicor. Or when you were in Crushbone killing mobs near the moat and some moron trains Dvinn (and the rest of the zone) to the entrance and knowing there was nowhere to hide because you weren't sure if the mobs where going to path back to where you were. No gameworld since has replicated that 'run your ass off or die and go back to your bound spot across the world' feeling.

bixxby_sl said:

My favorite/only scam was on where me and a buddy would auction to buy/trade for a robe from one of the mage guilds called Rohim's Robe. Then one of us would do the same trying to sell it. My only suspension in EQ was when we pulled off a major steal and got something like a cobalt breastplate and a few high end weapons for that shitty robe. That's another thing that was sweet about EQ, being young and lacking empathy.

Click to expand...

Did the robe look like a FBR or SMR or something?

Mine is pretty simple. The boat at Freeport dock showing up was just cool as hell to me when it 1st happened. Entering the commons out of Nek forest and seeing all these other players fighting this giant beetle was cool as fuck. It just made the world so immersive.

I was also on Veeshan. Oh god the drama on that server was awesome.

Cybsled_sl said:

Fine. Falling asleep mid pull during flurry drakes in NToV (btw, I was the puller). I woke up like 4 hours later surrounded by various player corpses and no one in the zone. Somehow I had FD in my sleep and survived the (what I assume) was a multidrake pull.

It helped cement my nickname of "Cybsleep" ;/

Click to expand...

I was solo exping on SZ with my 50-something Shaman in Traks Teeth when my gf at the time seriously cut her hand. I /q'ed out and took her to the Emergency room. I didn't get back to the game for like 3 hours. Turns out I didn't actually /q out at all and just left my char sitting there. Some guys from another team found me, killed me, then tracked me to my bind point in that zone. They killed me over and over, deleveling me (on sz you lose exp to pvp death). When I finally got back to my computer I found myself standing at my bind point, surrounded by a group of guildies. Somehow they figured out what was happening while I was gone (I didn't say a word before I left for the e-room), dropped what they were doing, ported to TT, found me and stood guard over me while I was afk. When I got back the cleric in the group rezzed most of my corpses. I still lost a level or so, but without those guys I would have lost way more.

I don't know what that says about EQ per say, but I know that I forged some pretty tight bonds on SZ that I never was able to replicate on non-pvp servers.

Frenzied Wombat_sl said:

It was (at least at release) an unforgiving harsh world that punished mistakes and auto-weeded out dumbfuck idiots that couldn't play. There was nothing more terrifying than getting jumped by a yellow mob alone knowing that if you die you have a long ass corpse retrieval run along with 4 hours of grind XP lost unless you could find a high level cleric.

IMHO, EQ was killed for me once they removed the tension/risk and made travel, rezzing, and XP loss trivial.

Click to expand...

To expound upon this and sort of tie it in with what Ponytail has been trying to say about SB.....it was a world of consequence.

Befallen was a newbie zone that could be an absolute nightmare if you didn't know what you were doing. Oh, what's this well doing here on the first floor? I'll jump down and see what's at the bottom. Insta-death. Good luck getting your corpse without help from a higher level.

There were so many instances of that type of risk at every level range across the entire game world. There was no pussyfooting, no hand-holding, no in-game maps. It was, as mentioned above, harsh and unforgiving. And it was that harsh and unforgiving nature that gave you a sense of accomplishment when you were finally able to level up after a miserable few deaths, or when those jboots finally dropped after a will-breaking 24 hour camp. And with that, there was a sense of accomplishment you could visibly display to the other players around you. People could instantly recognize your accomplishments because items were unique, meaningful, and people eventually knew what you had to do to get them.

There were no train tracks ushering you from one quest hub to the other. You had to talk to other players or figure shit out on your own or you just weren't going to make it. Early EQ chewed up newbies and spit them out. That's what I loved most about it.

Also, the players HAD to be able to play to some degree, or they would quit. The worst players in EQ are still better than a huge portion of WoW's player base. I remember when WoW first started. You could see as easy as night and day, who came from EQ and who just started because it was a new Blizzard game.

If you were slightly skilled in EQ, you could do miracles in WoW. It was much easier in almost every aspect.

EQ was a ruthless world. I've never met a single player from any of my guilds in WoW, yet I've met over 100 (not counting Fan Faire), just from being local to people from EQ.
The community was EVERYTHING. If you couldn't pull your own weight, you were in for a very lonely ride.

I still remember seeing the first guy on my server with a SMR. It was the most beautiful robe I had ever seen.
I also remember watching our server's first level 50 (Necro), showing off by soloing Griffins in EC just for shits and giggles. The newbs were amazed. The level 30's were amazed also.

EQ was a game of memories.

waiting for an indie developer to make something similar to EQ. How difficult can it be?

EQ definitely felt epic in a way that no MMO probably ever will again. As an RPG fanatic, I definitely appreciated a lot of the subtle details and racial differences. I was a troll, I was hated by most other races and I was isolated out in the swamp, but I didn't care because I looked badass. Exploration was definitely the funnest part about EQ. The zones really were pretty diverse and walking into one you had never been in before definitely put you on edge. It really all boiled down to, lack of knowledge and expectation that contributed to a lot of the awe and wonder one felt while playing EQ. It wasn't like you logged in as a newb created your first character and expected to be able to do A. B. and C. and know that you're class is best with Weapon type A and to stack this stat, etc. etc. As a game I thought it was pretty top notch.

The social aspect of it though, which everyone keeps raving about, was pretty AOL chatroom-esque I thought. People sort of publicly adhered to these set of rules and were complete ass-hats most of the time in the out-of-game forums. I found the population by and large obnoxious, obssesive and completely lacking in real social skill. Guilds were no better. Everyone had their in guild click and for the most part you tried to ignore the people in your guild who you thought were completely retarded - and yes, I was in an uber guild that was top tier on our server for the Kunark - PoP period. We, as the trend was, put up this we are so awesome and exclusive front to the public and posted all the snippets of our dick and fart jokes in guild chat to the front page of our website and so on, but in reality there were at least 5 seperate sub-groups of us that really fucking hated each other. Not to mention the in-game affairs and what not - that shit was god awful.

I think the EQ community was generally mature, but due to the status bestowed on them, many members of "elite" guilds turned into assholes.

I was hooked after completing the Stein of Moggok quest. Shit was fun.

I think to a certain extent the static camps during the leveling process helped people form a sense of community initially. Logging in and seeing the same folks on a regular basis at the Aviak House in SK, the dock in the Oasis, Befallen, regular trains in Unrest... etc. Everyone was sharing similar experiences on a more long term basis pretty much the moment they logged into the world.

My first experience in the game was with a wood elf character that I played for all of 5 minutes, falling out of Kelethin twice at night, then said screw that place and rolled a dark elf. I ended up lost as hell in Neriak/Nektulos for a while but at least I wasn't falling out of trees to my death. Eventually I figured out the log camp and found other people with their own stories of being lost as fuck.