My experience isn't exactly what you're referring to here (I don't think), but I'll share anyhow. I wasn't a part of any of the the "firsts" on P99, and have always been a super casual player here. Also this will be pretty sparse / random / sporadic, as these are now 20+ year old memories.
Back in original classic I was in Legacy of Steel on The Nameless server for about a year, mostly during the Kunark era, with a bit of overlap into Velious. We were the "uber guild" on that server so I got to be a part of a couple world firsts, and a bunch of server firsts. (Quick tangent: Nameless was an "iron fist" server where one guild held the vast majority of the content. I had a buddy that played on Karana back in classic and that server had at least some semblance of a rotation worked out for some of the content. Looking back I like how each server had it's own spin on how the game / community would play out.)
One of the world firsts I was a part of was reaching the final island of Sky. Unsurprisingly, for anyone that's been to Sky then or since, my most visceral memory from this experience was island 6. We didn't have any fancy strategies (how could we at that point), so we had tanks on all the bees on the island and were just man fighting that shit. In a way this played into LoS' strengths which were: a BUNCH of decked out warriors and clerics. But, once those bees started splitting, it was utter pandemonium. We must of wiped 50 times. I remember at the time I worked at a dial-up ISP doing tech support, and I would play EQ from work most of the time (as we had a T1) and I distinctly remember being at work playing when we were tackling sky -- I stayed there after work, played all through the evening, all through the night / morning. Never left work that night and the next morning I put loopback plugs in the inbound call lines (which gave everyone a fast busy :grimacing
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] and slept on the couch.
By my recollection, there were 3 guilds that cleared VP *before* Velious launched: Fires of Heaven, Afterlife, and us (Legacy of Steel). But we finished VP during Kunark just *barely*. The roadblock for us was honestly Trakanon, so we were way late in the game on getting keyed up. Like I alluded to earlier, Legacy was really built on a stable of warriors and clerics. The roster wasn't that big by P99's raid guild roster standards (which are honestly just absolutely insane and pretty much turns the raiding scene here into an entirely different thing altogether than what the classic scene was like, with the sheer number of 60s camped across the map), but I want to say we had *maybe* 3-4 wizards, and at the time it was the prevailing sentiment that you really wanted more wizards for some of this Kunark era content, especially Trak who would just melt our tank and spank raid. Gotta remember, there's no voice comms, the overwhelming majority of people are on dial-up with 300-400+ pings. I was playing a cleric at this time and I remember feeling like Trakanon was absolutely hopeless. People - myself included - were getting aced before I could get a single heal off. In particular I remember we had a warrior named Glubgawd who would always bite my head off for not keeping him alive lol. Cleric life was rough back then man. Probably the most excited I can remember guildchat being was when we *finally* broke through on Trak. By the time we had our first keys, FoH and AL were already a good way through VP. As far as VP itself is concerned, I think the most interesting detail I recall is in how we approached VP vs how it's done on here. Namely that, we crawled through the zone. Oh I also remember VP being a completely "GM enforcement-less" zone on The Nameless, and the entire raid erupting into obscenities and ridiculousness in /shout. We were... children lol. I've got some old screenshots on a hard drive in a closet from some of those VP raids that I should dig out sometime.
Oh another random memory from the Kunark era -- I was in a somewhat steady xp / exploration group with Ariel, Tigole, Daelomin, and a couple others that I can't remember, in HS/Charasis. We were spending our time in East trying to get a drop from Drussella that we thought was the "key" to defeating Venril Sathir. I like these kinds of memories because it highlights the unknown elements of the game. This was before we knew about using rune to combat VS' lifetap. But most interestingly from those grouping sessions was seeing the a few members of the group bantering / discussion game design and mechanics. It ultimately turned out that there was a contingent of LoS members (mostly members that were *previously* in a guild I believe called Stormreavers? I could be misremembering that. It was a guild that was led by Ariel that competed with LoS before Kunark, but ultimately ended up mostly folding into / joining LoS -- Ariel then ended up leading LoS after our original leader Draed deleted his character and stepped down -- [later returning as a regular member on an SK, named Oogtug or something, I think]) that were working at Blizzard and more specifically working on the WoW project. One of our members was an artist for Blizzard and would do these fucking incredibly guild forum avatars for members. Thorax I think? Anyways, I remember being in those groups and thinking it was odd how in depth they liked to talk about certain mechanics or design decisions.
One of my last memories was the world first Avatar of War, which I guess was a disputed claim across servers, as we used dominated giants that ended up getting patched out before the other uber guilds could use the same mechanic. Still, though, LoS ended up being one of a very small number of guilds across servers to kill the AoW *before* Luclin expac came out. I pretty much quit raiding somewhere during Velious, and then I quit playing EQ entirely when Luclin came out.
Oh one random last memory: one of our enchanters, Saldor, dominating Sirran the Lunatic in Sky and killing the OOA in like 4 seconds or something insane. Pretty sure they also patched that out
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
And to something that was mentioned earlier about how people figured stuff out... it's a combination of things. On the one hand, I definitely distinctly remember there being rumors about some of the members being devs or somehow otherwise "connected" individuals who had information about quests or encounters. That was a very real thing. But I also remember A LOT of trial and error, wiping, and being a part of explorative / suicide mission information gathering groups. I have a lot of fond memories of those sorts of things in particular. I guess the closest allegory we have to that on here is people trying to figure out new ways to "win the meta" though most of that relates to artificial circumstances in our raid scene. It's a bit of a bummer that you can't reclaim all of that early magic, but, ah well. This server and community are still fucking amazing at large. I remember logging in on P99 for the first time and it "felt" like what I remembered EQ feeling like, and you really can't hope to do better than that.
Oh and shout out to my mate Shepherd, who worked with me at that ISP, helped me get into LoS, and kept a steady supply of hot pockets (hork) and rum and pepsi's (coke was too expensive) coming while I was locked into these ridiculous 3am raiding sessions
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
04-12-2022, 12:05 PM
Linear Mode
