Players in '01 nostalgic about beta.

[Ennewi]

https://web.archive.org/web/20010223...ML/057031.html

Topic: Memories of Beta/ Release

Iniyeni
Station Member posted 02-11-2001 07:46 PM
Ahh, yeah. Memories of beta. Going to the bank to get my whole 4pp out to buy a mino axe and dropping it on the floor where it disappeared (due to a bug now fixed) and wanting to screech with frustration because that was all my lil level 5 warrior had to her name.
People not wearing patchwork were GODS.

The lift guards at Kelethin would literally never move to help you even if you fell screaming at their feet to 10 cents. We used to joke that Crush had them on his payroll. Yet, the programmers couldn't figure out how to get the guards on the platforms to stay there, so they'd keep hopping off and roaming GFay, KSing everything. Captain Leafstalker was univerally hated. He's Lieutenant Leafstalker now, guess they demoted him for all the KSing.

Human-type chars didn't get a newbie candle. Plus, night time was MUCH darker for a human type than it is now. I remember wandering through the teleporter into Toxx forest at night with my level 1 wizzy, couldn't even see to kill a firebeetle for a light source. It was like my monitor was just off. Had to cast my level 1 fire spell on myself repeatedly to find my way back to the zone into Erudin. I swore off Erudites forever as a result.

Got burned out in beta, didn't come back to EQ till a year after commercial release. Yes, it's very different.

Grave_Robber
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 01:13 AM
You guys remember how you could jump and actually get away from mobs? And you didnt lose stamina either. heh heh
We used to get away from orcs that way. But it didnt work too well on that Faerie Guard. Someone just had to say "Hey, lets kill it." And before we could say nooooo...wham. All of us dead. heh heh As a young ranger I was actually wanted for tracking mobs in Lesser Fay. Back then the orcs in there were referred to as golden orcs because of the armor they wore. They looked like Deathfist orcs instead of Crushbone orcs. Pixie dust didnt exist and neither did orc hatchets.

The stone and steel guardians in Nektulos looked like earth elementals too.

Mr_Vandemar
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 10:28 AM
Hmm, things I remember from Beta (I started in Phase 2).
Lets see, played a Gnome Wizard (for the life of me I cant remember the name). Ak'anon didnt exist yet so my home town was Rivervale. And the awe of running around Ak'anon when it got placed. GZ did a wonderful job with it. But they never should have moved the Necro guild from the Library to the Mines of Malfunction. It was fun having the Necro's hiding out in the tower behind a false wall.

I remember when Wizards spells had damage halved. Things we could kill with half our mana were suddenly only at half life with all of our mana
(That didnt last long)

I remember when getting killed by X gave you good faction hits with X.

You have been killed by X
Faction with X has encreased by 30 (Total Faction: -1970)

They changed that REAL QUICK

I remember when bind points got bugged and you had a chance of you bind point getting reset to 30000ft in the air (32k damage fall...just imagine the loop, I was stuck in it for a few deaths )

I remember the first time in Beta that a Druid reported being able to charm a Griffon and sending it after an HG (Was a Glorious Day then I can tell you)

I remember when your pet could go Renegade and attack you (ie if you went invis).

Oh, and the glory of being a Wizard wielding a rapier

Getting new spells and casting them going "Hmm, wonder what this is going to do"

Wandering out into Tox Forrest for the first time.
Stoping after 5 minutes of running and going "Oh man, *** am I?" "/ooc Hello? Anyone out there?" doing a /who all and seeing 50 people on but nowhere near you.

AE rain spells would hit all the targets in the area of effect and could be cast thru walls. There were MANY MANY wizards who got to 50 using this in Guk. Before it got fixed.

When there was no limits on the level of mob that you could hit with a spell. Hiding out in the tunnel to Befallen slowy nuking away at the HG at the entrance to the tunnel. Wondering how long it would take a level 16 wizard to kill it.

Yes there was a lot of fun in the beta. Until half way thru phase 3 and all of phase 4. Everyone knew just about everyone else.

Johnny2by4
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 10:42 AM
Hey Mr_Vandemar do you rememeber what the Magicians pets looked like in beta 3?....i swear they looked like small Jabba the hutts ..and the Enchanters didnt even have a pet..it was invisible or worse the "human pet" where they all looked like humans

Mr_Vandemar
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 10:49 AM
I remember running around in Tox Forrest seeing all these humans but none on a /who. Target one and it would say "A Skunk". Ahh, the days before graphics were complete. "So, is that a Human over there or a viable target?"

Author Topic: Memories of Beta/ Release
Johnny2by4
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 10:54 AM
The funnist part was when you hit a pet by mistake( and you could attack them) they would start attacking you back ..i hit one once with an arrow when it was walking by by mistake and the mage tried to stop it but it was too late :P

Leik
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 11:02 AM
One thing really sticks out in my mind.
EQ did not work for the first few weeks (all servers were down a majority of the time) and the chat room became such a flame fest that Verant decided to give everyone a free month to make up for it.

/laugh
/laugh
/laugh

Ah the good old days. Now they just say too bad.

Also, for the first few months, you used to lose MORE exp than you do now.

It's true, the death penalty was nerfed a few months in. Funny how it turned into a 'divine intervention' issue.

jericca
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 12:10 PM
Remember the day all creatures were aggro?
You would be level 24 and have spiderlings swarming you. Going into south karana was a death wish cause EVERYTHING hated you. Damn that was a fun day!

Ajala
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 01:36 PM
I remember those days

EQ had horrible connection problems the first 7-10 days and everyone bashed UUnet. I remember like day 3 of release and nobody could get on. There was 200-300 people in general chat all whining and complaining and then Smedley logged into chat and first thing he did was spam "Verant SUX!!!!!!!!!!!" and the whole crowd started laughing. Now they tell you to call a 1-800 number who in turn says its your ISP's fault.

Anyone remember 90% of all melee being a ranger or a paladin? Everyone had visions of UO tank mages still I think.

There was this legendary sword called Ghoulbane in some far off place called Guk.

Lower Guk was a thing of rumor.

Unrest on the average night had around 70-80 people in it.

Cazic-Thule was where you went to get disconnected. Even in the weee hours of the night there was 100 peeps in the zone all trying to get rubicite armor. Anyone still have screenshots of monks wearing rubicite?


There were no enchanters in the beginning because nobody understood what crowd control meant. The original bread and butter spell for chanters was Whirl til you Hurl and it was nerfed a few months later.

Banded and class specific armor didnt' exist. Tanks went from patchwork to bronze to rubicite and then you were uber.

Iniyeni
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 03:01 PM
Ah, a memory got jogged. I remember in beta, after Ak'Anon was implemented. The Mines were basically a low-level mini-dungeon inside the city, lots of people would hunt in there. No uber-necro guild trainer NPCs to geek the unwary, no invulnerable skeletons.
Funny thing is, when I finally came back to EQ in commercial release, I had my 15-ish (at the time) ranger in Steamfont. Went to the bank, decided to go down and check out the ole hunting spot for nostalgia's sake. Peeked in, saw a skellie, cast Snare. WHAM WHAM WHAM as the necro guild trainer decided he didn't like that one little bit. Fortunately he feared me in a direction where I could find my corpse later. That was more of a shocker than finding out Kithicor was no longer a happy little newbie zone at night. At least I heard about that one before I went in.

Kind_Bud
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 05:10 PM
I started when the game first came out.. I remember when i was a troll warrior and me and my group got outta the swamp to sro. We spent an hours just exploring the grass part. Then we came to the desert part and were afraid to walk in the desert because we heard a rumor their was quicksand. I volunteerd to go first and it took me 2hours to cross it and my heart was pounding. When i got to oasis and saw crocs and SGs i was so scared but i made it to nro. Noone had ever seen a troll before and people actually thought i was some monster and tried to attack me damn those were the days. I still remember my first run from qeynos to freeport with my ranger. It was such an adventure going through the karana's and highpass. When it got dark and i couldn't see at all because there used to be a bug where you couldn't change the brightness. When i got to freeport i talked about my grand adventure with my friends.
I remember when you could tell if wisps had lightstones or not on them and i used to spend days on kerra island hunting wisps and filled countless backpacks full of them then i traveled to the other side of the world and sell them for 10pp a piece for GLS's. I remember when i had banded and 2combine longswords and people thought i was a god. People were so much more friendly back then and always helped and the GMs always helped everyone and won't power tripping asses like they are now. I remember when people said there were pirates and when i took a boat i was all scared and made a group on the boat incase pirates attacked. My first time in befallen was one of the most fun things. When i had my monk and grouped in befallen i was really curious and wanted to see what was down the well i jumped down and got swarmed on. I lost my corpse but i had a fun time. I still remmeber my first raid on lockjaw there was an army of level 14s and 15s attacking him lotsa of us died but we finally took him down and my monk got the LJ tunic. I thought i was a god. Other good memories i have are when my warrior first got his last name and a gm came and congratulated me and announced it to the whole server or when i first got crafted i got like 500tells that day people telling me congrats and asking how i got it. Then the big debate on how easy it was for warriors to get uber armor.. That was back when we didn't even have critical hits stuns and half as many hps and all that other stuff warriors got now. It makes me sad to think how great this game once was and how greed has made a once great game of adventure and roll playing turn into a game about phat lewt uber guilds and who is camping what.

Anpu
Station Member posted 02-12-2001 09:25 PM
Wow....
reading this I really have to wonder what happened to the game

I think we lost something in the game when we starting worrying more for items, than having fun...

Dial-an-Escort

zeddgara
Station Member posted 02-13-2001 01:21 AM
I remember when there was a guild that would as a specialization "escort" people from everfrost to freeport. Safe travels or something was the name.
It was great, get about 10 people from level 5-10ish and herd them along all the way to FP. It was scary as hell.

EvilChu
Station Member posted 02-13-2001 01:50 PM
The boat wasn't fixed until beta 2.5 or so.
We used to sit down
in the covered area
in the back

...or we'd "bounce" and die from falling damage.



My necromancer had a buckler and rapier equipped for quite a while.

And my shielding spells all stacked with each other.

Gawain_the_Stout
Station Member posted 02-13-2001 01:58 PM
I remember Tree-form was not rooted... Druids would walk around like trees (there were tree-form marathons across Antonica)
I remember everyone in the East Commons shouting "DON'T KILL THE BIXIE -- A GRIFFIN WILL SPAWN"

I remember all the shopkeepers in East Commons standing on the roofs of their houses, because they had all been fighting griffins

I remember being able to run through kithicor at night.

More than anything, I remember friends, adventures, the feeling that one day we would all be able to look back and laugh and say "remember when?"

Its_your_ISPs_fault
Station Member posted 02-13-2001 03:15 PM
I remember rather early on when mage pets were, well...they didn't have specialized spells. They all nuked. You bought a particular one for the color.
Then I remember when they actually mattered, fire would do massive damage, air dodged a helluva lot and earth would suck up damage awesome.

Verant fixed them a bit, they're all closer together except till when they added root on the earthies and stun on airs. It was cool, we were like WHOA, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PETS?!

I remember being able to summon more than one. ::grins::

Grave_Robber
Station Member posted 02-15-2001 12:55 AM
LOL I remember the total uproar over the introduction of Gynok Moltar in Befallen. He was the uber mob back then, designed to keep people from being safe and resting merrily at the zoneline. It was a major discussion over how Verant just wanted to kill everyone. LOL
The various NPCs in Innothule swamp were also another discussion along the same lines.

Nobody called anyone a newbie because we were all in a sense, newbies.

Kedge Keep existed, but there were no mobs in it at all.

Combine Longswords were every Rangers dream weapon.

Sand Giants seemed much bigger, and seemed to pop up near you more often.

There used to be "safe areas" at zonelines. So you could run from a mob up to the zoneline and stop just before zoning in, the mob would turn and go the other way.

Brad stopped by chat quite often.

Verant was then known as 989, then Red Eye, then became Verant.

I got a rez from a GM because I fell for 10,000 points of damage in OOT and couldnt find my corpse. Couldnt figure out why the sky was under me, and all the graphics seemed to trail if I looked around. heh heh Got the rez, no questions asked.

Mistmoore and Unrest were the places to be. A Mistmoore shield was a god item and people would crowd around to see anyone with one.

Ahh, the good old days.

[cd288]

This was a great post thank you. Such great memories from those days. One of the things from the post that’s been discussed on these forums to this day stood out to me:

“There were no enchanters in the beginning because nobody understood what crowd control meant.”

Some of these other comments appear to be about experiences post Beta. Wonder if we can find further evidence on those such that something would get changed for Green 2.0

[SlankyLanky]

great post, ty for digging up stuff like this its by far my favorite thing to learn about eq.

[Danth]

Times change in more ways than one. Folks might've missed the original game's beta but I'm not nostalgic at all for P1999's beta. Stuff was pretty broken and the community was tiny. P99 peaked for me during the 2012-2017 period.

Danth

[ReoDobbs]

Lol, people whining "What happened to this once great game" in 2001...

Human's are fickle as hell and always think about "the good ole days" and how much present day anything sucks comparatively.

[cd288]

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

Lol, people whining "What happened to this once great game" in 2001...

Human's are fickle as hell and always think about "the good ole days" and how much present day anything sucks comparatively.

True. I mean Velious pre-Luclin were some of the most fun days of EQ IMO.

They're complaining about the thing we complain about to this day: That the sense of wonder and exploration that you felt at the start of EQ is gone. But that was always going to happen.

[Zuranthium]

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

Lol, people whining "What happened to this once great game" in 2001...

Human's are fickle as hell and always think about "the good ole days" and how much present day anything sucks comparatively.

You’re way offbase, Everquest after its first year was a significantly different game, both from direct changes to the game and the way player behaviors were changing for the worse. 2001 is 2 years later, so yes, the game was very tainted by then. Roleplaying and other fun community interactions were mostly extinct at that point, there was less adventure, people were generally treating the game like a repetitive treadmill and only caring about trying to do the things already listed online and what would level them the fastest and get them the best gear.

Everquest is supposed to be a recluse away from the soulcrushing capitalistic world we live in, a place of wonder and intrigue and imagination and malleableness, but instead the entire MMORPG genre ended up mirroring the thing people want to get away from in the first place. Everyone in a rat race trying to climb up a fabricated ladder, feeling like being max level with the best gear is what life is about, superficial repetitive materialism becoming the dominant force of existence that all must abide by to feel the greatest sense of self worth. A lot of people thus use video games to feel a greater sense of growth than what the real world is providing them, but that kind of mechanical gameplay is far from the most fulfilling, and the sad problem is that since it’s still preferable to real life for many people, the games industry can hook people on it like a cheap drug.