How did people figure out quest back in the day?
 

Some seem straight forward, others... not so much. Hell, I'm trying to fathom how someone figured out the fifth ranking skullcap for iksar necros. When I read the discription of what the NPC quest giver wanted me to do, I tried thinking about which dock I should go to find Ryx. Where the quest actually wants you to go was somewhere I would have looked last.

To be fair, I guess the fact that the OT evil outpost would of made sense since there are skellys at that dock. So maybe that quest is a bad example. But I would of never figure out which drink he wants.

And, of course, their are much more complicated quest.

With no wiki, no google, and before alakazam was established, how do people figure out those crazy quest? The only thing I can think of is being friends with someone who is part of the EQ team, or, I play ARK and have met paid testers for the game who have told me that they get to know all the ins and out of the game. So maybe testers for original EQ were the same way and they slowly leaked info?

Same for how people know how to make certain items with no schematics or ingredients. How much trial and error did it take to raise research skill and figure out which words/runes make certain spells?

Boggles my little mind I tell ya...

Anyone here play on live in 1999 and completed a quest on their own with no outside help? Besides noob quest :p

For some things, it's utterly beyond me. I just did the platinum speckled powder step of the druid epic and I can't begin to comprehend how someone came to the conclusion that they should hand the wood painting to that human skeleton hiding behind the giant fort in Frontier Mountains.

Message boards. There were boards completely dedicated to solving EQ quests. Communities came together and said "Ok I turned this item in and it worked, this is the next step" and someone else might be able to figure out the next step, and so on.

Packet sniffers? There's absolutely no reason to give the wooden painting to the human skeleton in FM for the druid epic, but somehow we know to do that.

The GM's that would play back in the day would spill info to their guilds and it would slowly branch out.

And early sites like everlore

I assume there's some scripted text hinting at it, somewhere, either from idle NPC banter or a completely random NPC in a tavern somewhere responding to a hail or text prompt. Nowadays we know that most NPCs are basically just filler bodies coded to do nothing more than stand still or move between two locations but when I was young and this was a whole new kind of game, everything was alive with possibility.


Everquest, man.

those asshole guilds that had the help of GMs/devs/whatever

Trial and error, insane tinfoil discussions on various fora and of course, GMs and guides. My friend and I used to have a druid guide port us around, haha. I think my bastard friend got her to do a whole lot more as well.

This has to be the case. No way in hell people were experimenting and losing valuable quest pieces as a long shot for some of these quests with vague instructions.

Stratics. I had been already using it for a year with UO before EQ. They launched eq.stratics in late 98 and had a quest database going in 99 just after the game launched.