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Planar Protector
Join Date: Mar 2011
Posts: 1,523
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Tesahli hit on this a little earlier, but let me just give you an idea of what playing on Sullon Zek was like for the Good Team:
First, the entire world was off limits except for Everfrost. That's right, the only zone that you, as a member of the Good Team, could safely level in was Everfrost - the ass end of the freaking EQ universe. Why? Because unlike the Neutral and Evil Teams there was no Good Team home city. The Neutrals got all of the "shorty races", a bunch of humans, barbarians (iirc), some elves, and pretty much controlled 35% of the territory by sheer virtue of the fact that neutrals could be found everywhere. The Evil team controlled 64% of the rest of the world by sheer virtue that EVERYONE AND THEIR GRANDMOTHER rolled Evil so that they could be Evil. So that left the Good Team with the only zone in the entire game that no one in their right mind would ever hang out in. Of course, this meant that when the Neuts or Evils came to do their weekly Vox raid, you, as a low level member of the Good Team, were steam rolled as the Pain Train (tm) moved across the frozen tundra. Pretty much, if you played the Good Team and went ANYWHERE else in the EQ universe, you did it as either a gang or as a suicide run because the odds of you running into a higher level Neut or Evil was 95%.
Second, I want to imagine creating a character in Qeynos - a human paladin aligned with the Good Team. You begin working your way up in the newbie fields outside of Qeynos, but an odd thing happens every 5 or 10 minutes. You see, every few minutes a random character runs up to you with a bunch of mobs chasing him. He then uses whatever trick he has to convince those mobs to like you more than him. So you die. Now, keep in mind that you're not even at the level where he can actually PvP you. You're just at the level that he can train you like a huge jerkface.
Third, you finally get to the level where you can PvP and be PvP'd. At this point, as a member of the Good Team, you are a walking punching bag. Oh, you want to go to Blackburrow? Okay, good luck getting their in one piece. Don't be surprised if you eat a bunch of deaths to the level LOL's waiting at the zoneline to chase you across the Hills and kill you repeatedly for an hour while you beg to "Loot and Scoot" your corpse. So, you finally made it into Blackburrow? Okay, say hello to the Zoneline guards who kill you mercilessly because, well, they can. See, what happened was that after a while people got tired of getting ganked in the dungeons of Sullon Zek. So the tactic that evolved was that higher levels would park themselves at the entrance(s) to the zone and play Bouncer. If you were on the wrong team and you wanted to do Mistmoore tonight, but the Bouncers didn't feel generous, sorry. No Mistmoore for you tonight. And this wasn't "A bunch of level 30's versus a bunch of level 35's". This was "A bunch of level 30's versus a bunch of Holy-Crap-That-Guy-One-Shotted-Our-Whole-Group-By-Himself".
Fourth, remember corpse rotting? Remember how worried you would get in Sebillis if you were way in the back and you wiped and there wasn't anyone around to summon your corpse? Of course, you were worried despite the fact that the corpse wouldn't rot for a week or so *and* you had 2 sets of backup gear in your bank. Well, on Sullon Zek if you ticked off the wrong people then you could kiss all that gear you worked hard to get goodbye. "But no one would round the clock corpse camp someone!" you think. Oh, you have no idea.
Fifth, you could kiss any hope of higher end content goodbye. Do you know what a fight in Vox's lair looks like? I'll tell you right now, it's horrific. The lag alone makes you want to cry. The fact that the lag is being caused by a pile of Dark Elf wizards throwing down AE's on your raid makes it even worse. And let's not even pretend like Velious or Kunark existed as far as the Good Team was concerned. Kunark was almost completely offlimits because the Iksar were Evil aligned - all of them (So not only does Evil get 60+% of the population, they also got their own awesome high level *continent*!). Velious? Well, you could only get to Velious if you could put up with being chased from zone to zone by the ridiculously better geared than you Neuts and Evils. Let me tell you how much fun leveling in Old World was. Woo-To-The-Hoo.
I once described Sullon Zek as the ass-end of the EQ universe. I was being polite. Sullon Zek is more like a sink for all the maladjusted, twisted, griefing, hate filled, wretched bottom dwellers of the EQ universe. A wide swath of the player base of SZ could affectionately be described as a cesspool and more accurately described as genocide worthy. If you didn't play on SZ then you don't really know what it's like to ram your head into a wall over and over again, begging for death but, instead, continuely running back to your corpse like a well trained hamster knowing that you would be killed *yet again* by a 3 foot tall, shoeless bastard with a smirk on his character's face. What I learned from SZ was hope and tenacity in the face of absolute despair. I also learned that cruelty wells from a bottomless pit and takes a myriad of shapes online.
What Fansy did on SZ was give the Evils about 1/1,000,000 of a percent of the grief they gave to each and every member of the Good Team. Far as I was concerned, anyone run over by a Sand Giant had it coming.
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As bad as it was, it had it's great moments and it was a server like a "Fight Club". You got a guy that logged onto Sullon Zek for the first time and he was like the fat, smelly kid in high school. After he made it to level 50 on Sullon Zek that fat kid that no one wanted to be around a few months ago was a hardened, certified bada**. Sure, you could still make it to the high levels being a useless pud, but of the population of the Good Team that made it to the end-game I'd say 70% of them were the most hardcore of the hardcore PvP'ers I've ever seen.
Mentioning that you had served time in "Black Crown", "Divine Vigilance", "Bringers of Retribution", "Wolves of Legend", or "Flowers of Happiness" (There were others, but it's been a while so their names elude me. Feel free to add to the list. Even the most newbish Sullon Zek guild was pretty hardcore deep down) meant that you had been through a kind of virtual equivalent of PvP Seal Training. When folks from the Good Team talked about coining some of the most infamous people on the server, it was like saying you beat up Jesus and Satan at the same time while stomping God on the curb. In retrospect, the server was nothing but hate, piss, and vinegar, but I think everyone that played there for more than a month has to admit that no place is home quite like Sullon Zek - which is why we will all be sharing a very small and uncomfortable room in Hell.
My honest opinion of Sullon Zek is that I loved to hate it. Up to that point, I had never played a game that actively encouraged people to be as depraved or horrible to each other as the EQ-Sullon Zek experience did. It was refreshing, fun, frustrating, mind boggling, heart pounding, and abysmal all at the same time. There will probably be nothing more fun than charging into LGuk, killing and/or getting past the guards, finding the group xp'ing/looting down below, and destroying them. And there can be nothing more heartbreaking or annoying then being the group that just got destroyed.
Replace LGuk with any other dungeon, boss, dragon, quest, what have you and I think you get an idea why playing on Sullon Zek was simultaneously the most and least fun you could possibly have.
Edit: Added "Flowers of Happiness" to the Good Team guild list.
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http://www.escapistmagazine.com/foru...he-Famous-Bard
I was a Good, in Bringers of Retribution. None of you can ever know what it meant to be a top enchanter on Sullon for the Good team during that era. |
06-21-2013, 09:30 PM
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