When was your first experience with Everquest?

[Vandil]

I got started just after Velious came out. My experience is different from most P99ers, because I never really played on the Live servers. My circle of friends perferred to play on the Test Server. This was back when there was no /testcopy -- you actually rolled your toon there and played there.

Life on Test was a small town. Probably a population of 1000-1200 players at peak. The server went down every couple of days as Verant rolled out new patches and tested new things that sometimes never made it to Live.

When Test went down, my friends would roll toons on a Live server and play for a few hours until Test came back up. One time Test was down for 3 days and we wound up rolling Iksar versions of our characters on a Live server and had a ball.

I left EQ about a month after LDoN came out. My group of friends was splintering between EQ, Guild Wars, and Anarchy Online. I was pretty much left to 2-box if I wanted to do anything fun (no mercenaries then) and that's when I ended it.

P99 reminds me of the Velious era, although EC prices are pretty crazy. The low population reminds me of Test, which adds to my own nostalgia.

I first played Project 1999 5 years ago. Since 2-boxing isn't allowed, I pretty much rolled the two "main" toons I had on Test and played them to a point where I got bored and parked them.

This year, the nostalgia kicked back on and I logged on for a few months, leveling my Shadowknight to 30 and getting bored again, so I logged out.

I haven't logged on in 3 months, but it's nice to know my two toons are there should the nostalgia fire up again.