Things the original devs expected

[Pulgasari]

https://storywarren.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/here-be-dragons.png

We've heard a lot of talk over the years about game behaviors players came up with that the devs did not anticipate. I'll list them non-exhaustively for context.


Kiting
Feign Death pulling
Raiding
Camping named placeholders for loot


Feel free to add to this list but stick to the main point, which follows:

What player behaviors did the designers expect and extract all the gelt they could from by way of subscriptions?

[Trexller]

it's sounding like they expected us to only ever kill a mob with a full 6 man group, tank and spank the whole way, and to forever wonder in amazement about the high level red con mobs with special names.

[magnetaress]

You should be able to get quests from Lord Nagefen and side with the goblins against the city leaders and guards.

[Jimjam]

It seems they expected players to form raids on opposing city leaders. Some of them have quite detailed mechanics and faction hits but no loot (for comparison dragons were originally unitemised too).

I reckon they realised it was a bad idea - for a new player to log in for the first time and their city is in chaos - that would be a bad experience. I’m glad they found a way to reintroduce the idea with a less disruptive implementation in Velious.

[Toxigen]

batphoning raid mobs at 2:30am

[jolanar]

I have a hard time devs didn't anticipate some of these things, what are we basing this off of?

[Videri]

I have a hard time devs didn't anticipate some of these things, what are we basing this off of?

Somewhere is a dev quote people always refer to that states the devs thought FD was an escape ability if you think you're losing the fight, and they were surprised when players used it to split mobs, but they didn't nerf it because they thought it was cool. But I don't know where that quote can be found.

And about kiting, I don't know, but one clue is that they nerfed DOT damage when the mob was chasing someone. That indicates DOT-kiting was working out too well and had to be nerfed.

But I hope someone finds sources for these claims, because we might just be making assumptions.

[Rader]

https://storywarren.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/here-be-dragons.png

We've heard a lot of talk over the years about game behaviors players came up with that the devs did not anticipate. I'll list them non-exhaustively for context.


Kiting
Feign Death pulling
Raiding
Camping named placeholders for loot


Feel free to add to this list but stick to the main point, which follows:

What player behaviors did the designers expect and extract all the gelt they could from by way of subscriptions?

I can buy most of these, especially camping, the original devs probably were surprised by the popularity of the game and the willingness of players to stay logged on for days/weeks at a time (or account share, whatever). But raiding? I mean, what would be the point of guilds if not to get 50-100+ players on at the same time in order to zerg red cons?

[Pulgasari]

Complete Heal was an abomination but it was never intended to be chained together. The original intent of Complete Heal was to be used during downtime as an efficient way to heal the group up between pulls. They figured that a 10 second cast time would make it impractical to be used during combat. (https://www.graffes.com/forums/showthread.php?75127-EverQuest-Next/page4)

[Pulgasari]

I can buy most of these, especially camping, the original devs probably were surprised by the popularity of the game and the willingness of players to stay logged on for days/weeks at a time (or account share, whatever). But raiding? I mean, what would be the point of guilds if not to get 50-100+ players on at the same time in order to zerg red cons?

Dude, Goldshire. 😎

[Duik]

One dev was a necro fan.
Druid dot kiting was nerfed but fear kiting was left as is.
Originally root overwrote snare so druids/rangers were screwed.
Necro dot snare was not overwritten by root.
Figures.

Im sure the devs didnt predict every strat but responded in their way based on their own personal preferences (just like most of us would).

[Wakanda]

When I first started playing on P99 I remember being on Orc Hill and someone in my group nuked a mob down below and killed it before it got to our group and I was scared we might get banned. Because when I was a kid my next door neighbor found a spot in highpass or high keep (I can't remember which) where you could climb on the roofs of buildings and nuke NPCs, and they couldn't reach you. This allowed him to safely kill very high level mobs, and gain a ton of experience. He gained a lot of levels and made a decent amount of platinum, and then one day he was banned for 2 days, but he said it was still worth it and that he would do it again because of how much experience and $ he made.

I think it got patched pretty soon afterwards, but I sometimes wonder if other EQ veterans were aware of this or even remember it. It doesn't seem to be a thing on P99, but I remember always being cognizant of making sure not to nuke mobs while at a higher elevation after my friend got a ban for it.

I also remember that if you were in a duel and you disconnected your character would do way more damage than normal. It's like all of the damage caps were removed. We used to like to give low level characters on our accounts executioners axes and then challenge higher level players to duels and type /quit and then laugh hysterically when our low level character slaughtered them.

I also remember when we used to ask to see certain items in the trade window, usually Oracle robes, and whenever we saw the item disappear from their body as it was no longer equipped the player, we knew it was on the player's mouse, and that they were going to get ready to open trade. At this point we would move sporadically, usually while playing a gnome and it would cause the player to drop the item, and one of us would pick it up and keep it. They actually did a hotfix / patch over this that started asking players if they were sure they wanted to drop the item because of us (this may have been done on other servers, but I remember a group of us specifically doing this on Tunare).

I remember people using duels to disarm other players and steal their weapons too. I think they had to patch that too.

I remember when they brought Rubicite armor back briefly and made it drop in Najena (I feel like no one else remembers this, but my friends and I spent an entire weekend doing this before realizing the only piece that didn't seem to drop was the breastplate, but then again we were only killing trash mobs near the entrance due to being low level).

I remember there was this glitch in Kaladim where you could buy a certain item related to pottery and then sell it to another merchant in the same zone for way more platinum than you purchased it for. I remember being so weighted down with coins that my character could barely move, and I had some high elf following at me demanding I stop because what I was doing was cheating. This was the first time I ever really felt rich in the game. This eventually got nerfed/removed. I don't remember what the specific item was anymore, but it was related to pottery.

I feel like I'm forgetting a lot of things honestly. I remember someone telling me that there was a portal in the Karana river that could teleport you to North Freeport or something but I never saw it.

I did see the jail in Qeynos. Small room with no exits. I got summoned there after I scammed a player into giving me an item or something. I remember being so scared because I was playing the game and it suddenly just said loading, please wait, and I realized I was in the catacombs in a room I couldn't get out of and someone messaged me saying something about hello, this is GM such and such, and being a kid, I was actually freaking out like I was in an interrogation room, I ended up typing /quit and was scared to log back in, so when I finally did, I made a character on another server, thinking I was safe from justice when all of the sudden someone sent me a really hateful message cursing me out. It had to be someone who worked at Verant / SOE too because who would this random person be that's messaging a level 1 character on a random server.

I think I actually argued back in forth with the person and they told me I thought I was slick and how I was going to get in a lot of trouble etc. I went back to my server and never heard anything about it again, no warnings, no bans or anything.

As an evil gnome I also used to trick elves into following me to the necromancers guild in Ak'Anon and then convincing them to consent me so I could steal their items.

I was a toxic little kid back then, but a lot of people were. I think P99 players forget that it wasn't always a bunch of older folks just looking to help each other out and re-live nostalgia. Back in the day there was a ton of cutthroat hormonal teenage boys on this game, lol.

[cd288]

I always thought the quotes from devs about how camping in general wasn't anticipated at all. They thought people were going to group crawl through the dungeons (this was back when they had no idea EQ would be as popular as it was so dungeon crawling in a non-instanced environment would be more feasible, they never thought you'd have like 2k+ people per server).

I think it got patched pretty soon afterwards, but I sometimes wonder if other EQ veterans were aware of this or even remember it. It doesn't seem to be a thing on P99, but I remember always being cognizant of making sure not to nuke mobs while at a higher elevation after my friend got a ban for it.

Yup this was a thing for a bit. Could do it in Qeynos and other places too. Eventually it was patched so that mobs could basically teleport to you if you were in an area they couldn't path to (or otherwise made so you couldn't get yourself up there, etc.).

It had to be someone who worked at Verant / SOE too because who would this random person be that's messaging a level 1 character on a random server.

I'd be surprised if it was anyone from Verant/SOE. I was CSR and the logs on our player characters/accounts were monitored by another team. If a staff member had created an account to harass you they could've lost their job. Not saying it definitely wasn't someone from the staff, but seems low likelihood to me.

[enjchanter]

Complete Heal was an abomination but it was never intended to be chained together. The original intent of Complete Heal was to be used during downtime as an efficient way to heal the group up between pulls. They figured that a 10 second cast time would make it impractical to be used during combat. (https://www.graffes.com/forums/showthread.php?75127-EverQuest-Next/page4)

This 100% CH unironicaly Ruins the game

[jolanar]

That link about CH is pure speculation, unless that guy is an OG dev, then he has no idea what the intent was anymore than any of us.

You guys are acting like the original devs are retarded and never played videogames before. The only thing I can maybe buy that they didn't think would happen is using FD to pull.

[Ennewi]

From the same link...

May 28th, 2013 05:53 PM#75
Yttrium Yttrium is offline
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Re: EverQuest Next
Bragging time for Yttrium
The MUD I played on hadn't defined the "hard edge" before a guild I helped found. We had a "complete heal" type spell, but no one bothered to "train" it up to a reliable level of non-fizzling. I aggressively recruited clerics for the guild and required they all max it out. We then went and fought things that could not previously be beaten, based entirely on
- best-AC tank in the game
- clerics could heal him from 1 hp to (max - 1d4) every single round with 99.999% successful casting rate
- sufficient support bandwidth from other classes to keep everyone else going / energized / etc.

Essentially, it's the same idea as the CH rotation, though I never made the mental leap to EQ's Complete Heal spell. However, when I first heard of the rotations, I had an "oh, yeah, I know this" moment.

I doubt I was the first person to do this in a mechanical sense. I'm sure other MUDs had similar mechanics that were exploited. Given the original designers' backgrounds in MUDs, I'm surprised they didn't think this would be an issue. It became the final edge of what was do-able.

On a personal note (hah, like I"m not already there), my experience on that MUD was the only time I was on the hardcore bleeding edge of a community-based game. I've been in a variety of powerful raiding guilds, at various levels of accomplishment, in both EQ and WoW, but I wouldn't want to do it again, much less be able to. However, I, too, would like to see some sort of meaningful EQ recreation.
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC
-"To Serve and To Protect"

"I don't trust my government, I don't trust the people who work for my government, and I believe that the evidence suggests that it's irrational to offer such trust." - Ken White

"The first 90% of the project is done, now we're working on the remaining 90%." -SoylentNews

That said, idk how accurate that is since MUDs were before my time. But the EQ devs were aware of the possibility of chaining complete heals in one form or another, making reference to it when discussing why lay hands was capped even in the earliest rough drafts of the game, recognizing players could just line up paladins to complete heal versus raid targets. But then they went and added 5 charges of CH to the SoulFire so /shrug

[Jimjam]

From the same link...



That said, idk how accurate that is since MUDs were before my time. But the EQ devs were aware of the possibility of chaining complete heals in one form or another, making reference to it when discussing why lay hands was capped even in the earliest rough drafts of the game, recognizing players could just line up paladins to complete heal versus raid targets. But then they went and added 5 charges of CH to the SoulFire so /shrug

Different devs worked on different parts. Maybe the itemisation dev that created soulfire didn’t know nor care about the stance on spamming CH or LH.

[Videri]

You guys are acting like the original devs…never played videogames before.

EverQuest was among of the first games of its kind. Almost nobody had played video games like this before. Everything appears so obvious to us because we are looking backwards.

[Ennewi]

Different devs worked on different parts. Maybe the itemisation dev that created soulfire didnÂ’t know nor care about the stance on spamming CH or LH.

Could be, yeah. There is an awkward lasting beauty to it all maybe because of that. However dated and easily recognizable as a game, it still somewhat resembles a world, full of dysfunction and unfair bs and inconsistencies. No one dev had all the power apparently and, if they did, it was quietly undermined or ignored for personal interests and rule of cool.

[Trexller]

OG Devs absolutely never expected psycho bards running tiny circles in Velks

[WarpathEQ]

Could be, yeah. There is an awkward lasting beauty to it all maybe because of that. However dated and easily recognizable as a game, it still somewhat resembles a world, full of dysfunction and unfair bs and inconsistencies. No one dev had all the power apparently and, if they did, it was quietly undermined or ignored for personal interests and rule of cool.

If you think about it, its pretty insane how balanced the game is. So many race/class combinations and there is a need for all of them in some capacity. While some classes may be viewed as more powerful just because their utility is more aligned with the bulk of gameplay the balancing is superior to most games even being released today.

Especially when you consider that item selection was really a more key component to the balance than traditional games. Some classes were designed to be more item dependent but able to thrive more once those items were obtained where as others start stronger on the power curve but don't scale up as heavily.

[arc]

https://web.archive.org/web/20101107212636/http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/jamesvz/487-most_important_event_raiding_history.html

fun read about the early days of raiding

[Knuckle]

I can buy most of these, especially camping, the original devs probably were surprised by the popularity of the game and the willingness of players to stay logged on for days/weeks at a time (or account share, whatever). But raiding? I mean, what would be the point of guilds if not to get 50-100+ players on at the same time in order to zerg red cons?

What do you mean? Guilds existed before raiding did. Now I did not play fucking meridian 59 or UO, as those were before my time thank god. But I am fairly sure that Everquest did not anticipate large swarms of players overtaking "unkillable" mobs. It was an evolution of the 3D MMO, of which EQ was a pioneer. If you weren't playing the game back then raiding was essentially trailblazed, even in WoW, which used EQ as their model, raiding was relatively not mastered yet, they had just started getting a feel for it from observing its progress on EQ.

But to answer your original question, Guilds were social networks same as today.

[Pulgasari]

https://web.archive.org/web/20101107212636/http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/jamesvz/487-most_important_event_raiding_history.html

fun read about the early days of raiding

Something is missing in emu raiding if it took that much nonsense to beat an ST dragon.

[Pulgasari]

What is the "stacking buff" in the spoilered argument about ST?

[Tnair]

Something is missing in emu raiding if it took that much nonsense to beat an ST dragon.

the devs are missing

the stacking buff bug it says is that the warder's ae breath attack wouldnt land on players who had res effects or i think a snare of some kind?

[Tnair]

https://web.archive.org/web/20101107212636/http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/jamesvz/487-most_important_event_raiding_history.html

fun read about the early days of raiding

that was a wild ride thanks for sharing!

there were plot twists and everything

[Pulgasari]

the devs are missing

the stacking buff bug it says is that the warder's ae breath attack wouldnt land on players who had res effects or i think a snare of some kind?

Were the dragons permarooted?

It makes no sense otherwise for players to be that dumb.

[cd288]

That link about CH is pure speculation, unless that guy is an OG dev, then he has no idea what the intent was anymore than any of us.

You guys are acting like the original devs are retarded and never played videogames before. The only thing I can maybe buy that they didn't think would happen is using FD to pull.

I don't know about what the "intent" was specifically, but I know Brad has definitely said in the past that he regrets creating CH because it turned raids into something he didn't expect and basically made them have to just keep turning raids into even more tank and spank affairs to combat people using CH chains etc.

As far as non-CH things, the devs definitely didn't intend/expect many other things other than FD split pulling. They've said a ton of different things than that in the past. Hell, they didn't even anticipate the need for rules/play nice policy at launch lol.

[Tnair]

Were the dragons permarooted?

It makes no sense otherwise for players to be that dumb.

did you read the Spoilers at top of that link? thats all i know about it


seems from the email exchange there, that players were basically creating new tactics in real time as the devs in turn mostly patched out those tactics if they were considered "exploits" based somewhat on the personal feeling of the devs. in this case, they said that all mobs should be able to move to a player they want to attack. im willing to bet that some of the most common p99 raid tactics would have, in era on live, been considered exploits based possibly entirely on how consistently successful they are. multiple times Brad tells the guild leaders in this exchange: "this is the current endgame content and it being done risk free or with less than 60 players was not intended and if you managed it we will be looking at how to prevent your tactics from being usable"

so idk if the players just sucked or if it was that they werent really allowed to push the envelope on breaking the game.

[Tnair]

Hell, they didn't even anticipate the need for rules/play nice policy at launch lol.

thats downright adorable

like the Ultima Online deva creating an ecosystem for the games wildlife, only to watch the first wave of players kill every last creature across the land, immediately wrecking the intended balance of prey/predator wildlife

[Pulgasari]

did you read the Spoilers at top of that link? thats all i know about it


seems from the email exchange there, that players were basically creating new tactics in real time as the devs in turn mostly patched out those tactics if they were considered "exploits" based somewhat on the personal feeling of the devs. in this case, they said that all mobs should be able to move to a player they want to attack. im willing to bet that some of the most common p99 raid tactics would have, in era on live, been considered exploits based possibly entirely on how consistently successful they are. multiple times Brad tells the guild leaders in this exchange: "this is the current endgame content and it being done risk free or with less than 60 players was not intended and if you managed it we will be looking at how to prevent your tactics from being usable"

so idk if the players just sucked or if it was that they werent really allowed to push the envelope on breaking the game.

Sleepers is indoor zone. Can just use any wall to achieve the same thing, as far as I understand it.

[cd288]

did you read the Spoilers at top of that link? thats all i know about it


seems from the email exchange there, that players were basically creating new tactics in real time as the devs in turn mostly patched out those tactics if they were considered "exploits" based somewhat on the personal feeling of the devs. in this case, they said that all mobs should be able to move to a player they want to attack. im willing to bet that some of the most common p99 raid tactics would have, in era on live, been considered exploits based possibly entirely on how consistently successful they are. multiple times Brad tells the guild leaders in this exchange: "this is the current endgame content and it being done risk free or with less than 60 players was not intended and if you managed it we will be looking at how to prevent your tactics from being usable"

so idk if the players just sucked or if it was that they werent really allowed to push the envelope on breaking the game.

I haven't gotten through the whole exchange yet because work keeps getting in the way, but so far it seems like the overall point is they found a space where the mob couldn't get to at all (under the bridge) even if you aggroed it and therefore you were totally free from risk (other than if you were summoned, which also has a CD meaning you could hope to kill the mob before it could summon and kill enough people).

[Dolalin]

Because when I was a kid my next door neighbor found a spot in highpass or high keep (I can't remember which) where you could climb on the roofs of buildings and nuke NPCs, and they couldn't reach you. This allowed him to safely kill very high level mobs, and gain a ton of experience. He gained a lot of levels and made a decent amount of platinum, and then one day he was banned for 2 days, but he said it was still worth it and that he would do it again because of how much experience and $ he made.

I think it got patched pretty soon afterwards, but I sometimes wonder if other EQ veterans were aware of this or even remember it.

I got warned by a Guide for doing this in 1999 on my druid Nwedar on Fennin Ro :D

It was definitely worth it though.

[Ennewi]

This was common practice in Freeport, at least on Tunare server. GMs would arrive on the scene pretty quick and issue warnings/threaten players until they came down. Basically anywhere on top of the walls, the guards couldn't attack and would just run at relentlessly.

[Penish]

message boards (HHK) for reference
Z axis culling of high level mobs
ghosting (manually throttling your connection to dupe items and plat)
coin drop

ahh fun times