IRC McQuaid Logs (EQ as originally intended)

[Ennewi]

There are a number of other interesting comments buried in the links below, from beta and post-launch, many of which detail features that didn't make it into the game or were removed for one reason or another. To avoid posting an unreadable wall of text, these stood out the most...

https://web.archive.org/web/19990220..._051998-01.htm

May 1998 EFNet #EverQuest Chat

<BlkStaff> Will Necromancers 'create' their undeads from thin air or will they need to have a corpse of a dead monster or (n)pc to make them?

<Aradune> Animate dead Necromancer spells require a corpse as a target.

<BlkStaff> Will new NPCs, monsters, continents, and buildings be added to the game world after the release? Possibly through a mandatory patch? If so, how often will they be released?

<Aradune> Absolutely -- all three. The plan is to keep the development team working away, adding on the world. This would either be done through periodic patches and/or the purchase of expansion packs at your retailer.

<BlkStaff> Question in its simplest form: Will EQ attempt to prevent the use of "mule" characters?

<Aradune> If they become abusive in our unique environment, yes. We'll find out in testing if this will be a problem in EQ.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990220..._071998-01.htm

July 1998 EFNet #EverQuest Chat

<EQV-Qs> Many people want to know more about necromancers and how they manipulate the dead or living to create undead.

<Aradune> Necromancers animate corpses of NPCs, turning them into 'pets' that will do their bidding.

<EQV-Qs> Is it at all possible that someday in an add-on to EQ you could introduce horses or dragon riding?

<Aradune> Yes, it's a possibility. We definitely plan on having expansions, which could include more features, more lands, and more playable PC races/classses. done

Unfortunately, those beta interviews cut off early and little else is accessible on the site. Here are the other IRC McQuaid interviews, post-launch...

https://web.archive.org/web/20020504...ws/eq_chat.asp
https://web.archive.org/web/20021104...adlog4-5_2.asp

Brad McQuaid IRC LOG 4/5/00

<Tsolzyob> Aradune: Any thoughts on the UPCOMING...EQ Emulator..?
<Aradune> tsol: i can't wait to see it
<Aradune> if its well done, we'll hire the guy =)

<Tsolzyob> Aradune: Think EQ server source code ever be released to the public, maybe 5 years down the line when EQ stops being profitable..?
<Aradune> tsol: i doubt it -- i dont see sony doing that

<Syruss> ARADUNE: Did you always intend/expect for the armor/wep shops to become useless after the servers had been up awhile???????
<Aradune> syruss:yes

<gentry> Aradune: what were/are your favorite MUDS out of curiosity?
<Aradune> gentry: my favorite mud was sojourn/toril

<mleko> Aradune: how big is the virtual world ? like 500 square miles etc ? or doesnt it work like that
<Aradune> mleko: eq with the expansion is like 60 square miles or something
<Aradune> its hard to calculate, because the world is zone based

<DaScott> Aradune: paineel storyline hints that the hole leads to the underfoot.. would really love to kill my god sometime ;p
<Aradune> dascott: glad some people are learning the storylines =)
<Aradune> some people say there's no backstory in EQ, and I wish they'd talk to NPCs and seek out the story
* Aradune sighs

<DaScott> Aradune: I liked the FA quest.. I was fortunate enough to stay ahead of all the spoilers until the end.. but the charming of miragul thing seemed more like a bug than a solution so we "lost" the race. Weakest part of the quest IMO..
<Aradune> dascott: really? its the part im most proud of, actually.
* Aradune wrote the FA quest, ya know

<kaiser> Aradune : one question.. if there are 2 people that are the most despised people on a server.. that continously disrupt peoples play, why are they allowed to remain (Dalover and Annabelle(shyness))
<Aradune> kaiser: if they are messing up the game for others, they should go

<Catalyst> Aradune: EQ has no means of fast travel aside from SoW and boats. Since EQ has no horse either it kinda puts a weird situation for an RPG, couldn't there be SoW stations in towns like a horse stable?
<Aradune> catalyst: i'd like to see more sow items that didnt allow you to kite
<Aradune> pure travel items

<Catalyst> Aradune: When can we expect an item that casts "SoW travel edition"?
<Aradune> catalyst: its just what we're thinking about now -- i couldn't say when
<Tsolzyob> Aradune: Any CLUE of another SoW item going into the game...? And make it all melle classes...
<Aradune> tsol: it would be as i was describing to catalyst

<Catalyst> Aradune: What are the issues with making SoW travel only? I'd like to dicuss them if possible, maybe we can come up with a solution tonight...
<Aradune> catalyst: well, the idea is to make a new item with a new sow-like spell that was cancelled if you ever engaged in combat
<Aradune> and had a recating time
<Aradune> recasting

https://web.archive.org/web/20021220...07042000.shtml

IRC: Conversation with Aradune 07/04/2000

<Strago> Aradune you should also upgrade hate. The southwest corner is totally lame. People using NO tatics can just go in and pull away. Its not even worthy of having the name "Plane of Hate", it should be "Plane of get armor for free"
<Aradune> strago: yeah, it needs an upgrade. at first these zones are really hard, but then over time they get easier as people learn

<Strago> Aradune can you describe how hard it will be to obtain level 60 ?
<Aradune> strago: pretty hard. its like a bunch of hell levels after 50
<Aradune> we upped the exp curve

<Azian> aradune: wielding anything new since FA came out to impress us all? =)
<Aradune> azian: i use karana's avenger now
<DaScott> he's wielding the version with the 250 dd proc that they nerfed
<Aradune> nah, i think it has same stats as FA, just rangerable

<ReefSmoke> aradune why doesnt dok's cigars sell cigars?? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
<Aradune> reef: they made us take that stuff out. *sigh*

<ReefSmoke> aradune did you all plan on players being able to smoke in the beginning?
<Aradune> reef: yeah. halflings with pipes..i mean, come now, it would have been cool

<Jorloja> Aradune: Why not develope a few casino games in HighPass? The dealers are there...
<Aradune> jor: we actually had originally planned for gambling there, but it never was coded

<Jorloja> Aradune: Casino games? Might be a money sink... How deadly would that be, EQ Gambling Addicts... =+D
<Aradune> jor: we'd love it

[loramin]

<Aradune> strago: yeah, it needs an upgrade. at first these zones are really hard, but then over time they get easier as people learn

Sort of prophetic; he wasn't talking about P99, but he might as well have been.

[u_lock]

Casinos are canon!

[Ooloo]

I wonder if\how many original eq devs play on p99. I know that lovingrobot dude who does the interview streams does or did. It would be pretty cool to learn the tank in your group is an og dev.

[Swish]

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[Swish]

Originally Posted by Ooloo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I wonder if\how many original eq devs play on p99. I know that lovingrobot dude who does the interview streams does or did. It would be pretty cool to learn the tank in your group is an og dev.

I'll bet some old time guides/GMs from the live servers have passed through P99.

[Ennewi]

Originally Posted by Swish [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'll bet some old time guides/GMs from the live servers have passed through P99.

Tmk there are a few.

[greatdane]

Good old Aradune! I once made a long and boring post about the origins of Everquest and these answers ring so true. To someone who was familiar with the MUD from which Brad McQuaid largely plagiarized Everquest (though through the lens of a grahical engine), it's very clear that his original vision was even closer to SojournMUD (now known as TorilMUD) than even the release version of Everquest was.

Back in the mid/late-nineties, Sojourn was one of the most popular MUDs on the internet. Aradune was one of the game's most prolific players, and one day, he decided to make a game of his own. One that had graphics. That became Everquest. There was actually quite a lot of consternation in the MUD's community at the time, because it was perceived as a threat to the game. Needless to say, EQ's popularity saw Sojourn/Toril's playerbase decline by about 75% in a handful of years, owing to the objectively superior gameplay experience of a graphical game like Everquest. There was no way for a MUD to compete, even if it was entirely free to play.

<BlkStaff> Will Necromancers 'create' their undeads from thin air or will they need to have a corpse of a dead monster or (n)pc to make them?
<Aradune> Animate dead Necromancer spells require a corpse as a target.

Yep. On SojournMUD, this spell required a corpse, and the resulting pet's power would be based on the corpse it was animated from. This was the balancing factor of the spell on the MUD that this game was based upon. A necromancer without a pet couldn't easily kill anything that would make for a powerful reanimation, so it took time to work your way up to a strong undead minion.

When Everquest decided alleviate necromancers from the need for a fresh corpse, and simply let them summon a pet anytime, it led to the class being grotesquely overpowered for the first months of the game. It was subsequently nerfed in various ways, including no longer using the delay of whatever weapons you gave to it, a change that was also spread unto other pet classes.

Before this nerf, you could give your pet fine steel daggers and it would get the same attack speed that a player would have had with speed 19 weapons, but with the damage built into their pet level. Until this was nerfed, pets (not just necromancers, although their general versatility compared to magicians made them far superior) would out-damage melee player classes by 50-100%.

On SojournMUD, there was no concept of 'attack speed' as the game was based on D&D and thus worked in turns, so there were fewer balance concerns associated with giving weapons to your pets. The original developers of Everquest did not initially account for this.

<BlkStaff> Will new NPCs, monsters, continents, and buildings be added to the game world after the release? Possibly through a mandatory patch? If so, how often will they be released?
<Aradune> Absolutely -- all three. The plan is to keep the development team working away, adding on the world. This would either be done through periodic patches and/or the purchase of expansion packs at your retailer.

Back then, the notion of paying for expansion packs in a game with a subscription fee was rather controversial. While the MMORPG genre was not invented by Everquest, there had been very few such games until then, mainly Ultima Online and niche games like some weird AoL-only thing called Neverwinter Nights that I know nothing about. By and large, the idea of paying each month to play a game *and* also having to buy expansions was controversial, to say the least.

<BlkStaff> Question in its simplest form: Will EQ attempt to prevent the use of "mule" characters?
<Aradune> If they become abusive in our unique environment, yes. We'll find out in testing if this will be a problem in EQ.

This is an interesting question for reasons that most might not expect. Throughout the first half of the 90s, it was quite common for MUDs (text-based games that are otherwise quite similar to Everquest) to not save your equipment when you logged out. You would log in, search for items to use, and then try to take on the game's challenges. If you had to log out, or if the game crashed or rebooted, you lost everything you owned.

Then some MUDs invented the concept of a bank vault where you could store things for a price (in in-game gold), and this price was based on the character's level. As such, it became logical to make a level 1 character, a 'mule character', with which to store gear. Then when you had to log out, or when the GMs announced an impending reboot, everyone would scramble to store their best shit on a mule so that they could get it back when needed.

In the mid-90s, data was insanely expensive and many MUDs did not have enough space on their sites (usually hosted by some university somewhere) to save players' equipment upon logout. While SojournMUD was big enough to have made this possible, the fact that it was not the norm is why Brad McQuaid was asked this question.

<gentry> Aradune: what were/are your favorite MUDS out of curiosity?
<Aradune> gentry: my favorite mud was sojourn/toril

Well, there you go. Aradune was his main character on Sojourn/Toril, and there was actually quite a controversy when he left the MUD to make a graphical game based upon it. Everquest was very heavily derivative of this MUD, and if both had been commercial products (MUDs were almost always non-profit in those days), Sojourn/Toril would have easily won a plagiarism lawsuit because Everquest copied like 80% of its game mechanics and area concepts wholesale and simply translated them into a graphical engine.

<mleko> Aradune: how big is the virtual world ? like 500 square miles etc ? or doesnt it work like that
<Aradune> mleko: eq with the expansion is like 60 square miles or something
<Aradune> its hard to calculate, because the world is zone based

If you're not familiar with MUDs, this question might be more important than you imagine. MUDs were wholly text-based, and the gameworld was a grid of 'rooms' where each could constitute anything from a lavatory to a square mile of forest. A zone like Unrest might have comprised only a dozen rooms: the entrance, the outer courtyard, the main room, the first floor, the upper towers, the basement, etc.

It was notoriously hard to judge space on MUDs because there was no inherent distinction between a closet and a castle's courtyard. That's probably why Brad's answer is so vague. Separating the gameworld into distinctive zones was a relatively new concept; while MUDs had zones on the builder level, there was no actual zoneline or mechanical distinction between one area and the next, nor any load screens or associated borders.

The rest of the questions quoted in OP are from after launch when Everquest had already broken free from its MUD roots, but it very much built itself upon that foundation, and as someone who played Sojourn/Toril before EQ was a thing, it bears saying that a significant portion of EQ was just straight-up stolen from that MUD.

It's only because the DIKU license is strictly non-commercial that there were no legal repercussions; and even then, there was, in fact, an investigation which concluded that while Everquest was derived very heavily from the MUD(s) that it was based upon, the fact that it had a completely different engine and game format meant that it was not liable on any legal basis. But trust me: the original version of EQ is almost wholly plagiarized from Sojourn.

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Sort of prophetic; he wasn't talking about P99, but he might as well have been.

Not only p99. The whole mmo persistent world model.

• content digestion = farm status
• content digestion ~2000: 10 months?
• content digestion ~2004: 3 months
• content digestion ~2010: 1 month
• etc.

The reasons for this are well known. And, barring dynamically generated mechanics and gameworld, unfixable.

There is no reason an AI can't be trained to be a GM *and* mechanics adjuster *and* content modifier/joker. People want to ultra-grind?

Goodbye leveling sandbox and raid farm pixel hunt. Hello Chinese finger trap.

[Vexenu]

Originally Posted by greatdane [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Good old Aradune! I once made a long and boring post about the origins of Everquest and these answers ring so true. To someone who was familiar with the MUD from which Brad McQuaid largely plagiarized Everquest (though through the lens of a grahical engine), it's very clear that his original vision was even closer to SojournMUD (now known as TorilMUD) than even the release version of Everquest was.

Kudos for these informative effort posts. Very interesting.