Yeah, we used EQEmu forums during beta.

We left to our own forums right before official release I think, and forked completely from EQEmu sometime during Kunark iirc. Which turned out to be a very bad idea, as EQEmu went on to get some amazing Devs and right now the stock EQEmu code is more Classic than p99 codebase in many areas (combat, charm, channeling, loot tables, so on).

Not trolling. I haven't played any non-live version of EQ other than p99 in a long long time...is EQEmu actually this good now?

yea was emulator forums. nilbog posted about his vision for a new "classic" server. not many cared or believed in it. there was something like 40-50 players online on night 1.

I recall the early days being a few hundred ppl from eqemu and eqclassic communities but maybe I'm being too generous. Global chat probably made it seems like there was more going on then there was.

Indeed it is. This is largely because Torven joined the EQEmu staff.

Some Torven highlights

Charm, Lull

NPC Double Attack / Dual Wield (big one)

Melee Combat routines

Basically, if you log on stock EQEmu now, it's like a slap across the face how classic it feels compared to p99. Holy crap, NPCs equip their dropped items. Whoa, mobs have different delay per hand and don't quad every round. Statue doesn't quad at ALL unless he has two weapons. (due to his low level).

Sontalak with Exquisite fast weapons can quad, each weapon swings individually. Feshlak with his Staff can proc it. On and on.

Oh, and don't even get me started on Channeling. On p99 we've just come to accept casting with mobs beating us in the face. Yeah, no. Back to kiting and helping your groupmates.

It's fun.

I would say the biggest difference is probably the lack of stamina being calculated per melee swing honestly. Early days the server had less than 20 melee characters online at any given time, 3 swings and you were out of stamina. Shame the weapon weight/stamina drain per swing was never able to be corrected, and instead was just dropped. I feel that is the biggest early change that signaled the direction the server was going.

To be clear though, I enjoyed playing here as it was, and appreciate all the work that has gone into the server.

It did build quickly, but it didn't reach over 100 for at least a month if memory serves. JD is right in that it had like 40-50 opening night and most of the first week.

Once it started hitting those 100's numbers the server was having trouble sustaining the load, probably because it was being run off a box in nilbogs garage or something, at which point hardware ownership was basically handed off to Rogean where he had the project housed on a server at an actual data center. There was also many rough patches of being DDoS'd by mad kids being banned for cheating and abusing unfixed exploits and dupes.

How many people remember gettin the EQ itch and not being able to login for hours sometimes days at a time? I think I even remember it being down for nearly a whole week at one point as Rogean was trying to get DDoS protection for the server.

How far its come. For better or for worse.

I'm 10/21/09

10-19-2009 here

not quite as long as the 09 people here. I stumbled on this project through the forums of another EQ Progression server i was following called EQClassic. It had a really lively forum since the game had not been released. They had a roadmap for their progression on the build, but having just checked the site again, it looks like it may have fizzed out at the end of 2020 or early 2021. I remember the forums dying down pretty quickly once P99 started to catch on.

The most recent dev post in that forum mentions another project called Project Lantern, so who knows if they're even still working on EQC