Why were we so bad in 1999?

[Bihlbo]

I keep thinking about this. I remember when EQ first came out I was playing on a buddy's computer (mine couldn't run it). I finally got started in earnest 6 months later, then my brother and I played incessantly for a little over two years. Never got to 50.

We spent a lot of time dinking around, enjoying the world. We explored the Qeynos sewers until we mentally mapped the whole thing. We roleplayed a LOT (my brother liked to convert elves to Bertoxxulous). When we were fighting things we were either going for wilderness creatures, loot for tradeskills, money, faction, or just curious fun. We didn't know about zone xp bonuses for a very long time, and thought of the whole game as an adventure that ends when you reach max level. We were trying to get the most content out of every level we could. We made alts just to see what the rest of the world was like or to see what a different class was like, and we played them all to 20-30. Shoot, I played on test server just so I could find out what it was like to share the world with less than 100 people.

It wasn't until I ran into a guy in Stonebrunt Mountains who was playing a twink that rocketed from 1 to 28 in just a couple of days that I encountered a min/maxer. He ticked me off for a long time, it was like he was taking all the fun out of the game by trying to bypass it all for nothing more than bragging rights. Then I got ridiculed for not knowing how to level as fast as he did.

The whole time we played we were going for the goals we had defined for ourselves. That's what kept us coming back to it. No one told us that we were required to raid, that we were n00bs for not having at least two lvl 60s, or gave us an obvious quest track with brightly-colored exclamation points over everyone's heads. We were being creative, building a unique experience in a game world. That was the whole reason to keep playing. When it became obvious that our kind of play wasn't welcome in any guild, and the game was about high-end content alone, we lost a lot of interest.