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Old 01-22-2020, 11:29 AM
Bhairava Bhairava is offline
Kobold

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Exclamation concerned about green/teal merger

Hello all,

I cant tell you how happy I am to see this project. My little brother told me about it a few months ago, as I havent looked at EQ in a long time. I'm ecstatic! ... but a little disappointed and concerned about some of the things I am reading. I hope the staff seriously considers my points.

First, I played EQ on day 1. I was the first Wizard to hit level 50 on my server, Fennin Ro, and I am the one who lost to Drakky in the arena with my wizard, and then pvp'ed him for a win with my Enchanter the next day. I was also present for the famous "Leroy Jenkins" event, I was in the raid. I was also the first person to challenge Fironia Vie, and die horribly at the gates of Felwithe while the DM controlled toon opened the new zone, Fironia Vie. Needless to say I am as old school as it gets. Forgive me, but we are talking something like 20 years ago and my memory is not perfect, going forward here. I had characters on several pve servers, I founded the guild, "Elven Royal guard." I had characters on the base pvp server, the race war pvp server and the alignment based pvp server (frakin newts!). two 50 Wizards, three 50 Enchanters, two 50 Necromancers, 50 Mage. As you can see I loved casters. I also soloed a paladin to 50 to prove a point (its not about being trained or ksed, its about being strategic, its not about spawn rates or being pl'ed, its about patience, thought, and tactics). ah, what was that awesome helm called...it had a heal spell, I cant remember, and of course a rubicite wearing 50 warrior, which they nerfed, along with all 3 of my chanters. lol. oh, and a 50 cleric. and a 50 druid. I was there when we freed the big dragon at the end, I was among the 10,000 corpses the first time we failed and she flew all over norrath killing everyone in every zone, regardless of level. Cant remember the dragons name, the sleeper? or nagafen? I think nagafen was in sol A?? I canna remember. I quit shortly after that, to many nerfs, to many whiners, game was not the same. So, my memory really fails at that point. oh lava duct crawlers! the coveted golden efreeti boots, nagafen was sol b?

Anyways, here goes....

What made original EQ awesome was not just the difficulty, it was the competition and the exploration. These 3 things played a pivotal role in the game, creating a realistic social atmosphere. But most of all, the DM interaction and events. I will give examples coming up, but first lets talk about spawn reduction. Being boxed in at the newbie zone and racial starting area was part of the game. This did a few things. You met lots of people, right off! It created a bond between the players starting in these zones. People fantasizing about being the good guy started as high elves or wood elves, they had like minds, saw the game and their role similarly, and the same went for people playing dark elves, they wanted to be evil, and had that same mentality. My favorite was Felwithe and Kelethin. The crushbone orcs and orc hill, especially on the pvp servers. I had more fun guarding orc hill with my 4th enchanter, keeping her at level 16, permanently, fighting against level 12 dark elf pk'ers, hunting newbs in crushbone on the pvp server in my guild, Royal elven guard, than anywhere else, or in any other game. You were crowded in and forced to be social, you had to either befriend people and join them, or make enemies and compete with them. Survival by natural selection, if you cant group, you will level slow and be left behind. This caused tension. Tension is social. You also memorized your zone, the spawns, the drops, etc, as you were stuck here for a bit, and it gave you time to learn before you reached higher levels, and a reason to start new characters of other races. Dying 50 times in the newb zone taught you how NOT to die in the higher level zones, where losing exp really hurt. That's why those punk snowflakes sucked so bad at level 50, they were PL'ed by wizards using ice comet, and had no idea how to use their character in a group. I had 3 enchanters BECAUSE I wanted to start in different areas, with different races. My elf Wizard was level 50 before I ever saw Paneel, I made my erudite, specifically to enjoy this area. I was a master player, and the highest level on my server (I am literally 1 of the first 10 people to ever hit level 50 in EQ), and had never seen that side of the world, it was almost like playing a new game. A loving high elf enchanter in felwithe, an evil dark elf mage in Nektolus, an arrogant erudite wizard in paneel, roleplay meant something, and is social. This also made you a guide to characters of other races, a reason to make friends as you all spread out from home, while keeping a level of loyalty to said starting zone (role- players/ remember the purple tag?). It was also part of the difficulty. Fast spawns effected how you pulled, when you pulled and where you pulled to. You could get really messed up in that forest fort with the giants, they spawned so fast. It was part of the calculation when pulling, and part of the crowding. Competing for camps was an issue, and remember every issue becomes a social event. "Train to zone" was a common occurrence, and players had to learn how to cope with it. Not standing in the middle of the road in front of the zone, thinking you were safe to med up. Fear of death ment something, it was the core of the game, dying and losing 2 days of experience was a nightmare, and made you play better. Made you think, made you work as a teammate far better. I built social bonds with many people. I became famous, because I guarded the zone entrances with my enchanter, dropping an area mesmerize, and then a mem blur on entire trains, saving countless lives. Karnors keep, the left side for zoning in the right side for zoning out, that was all me, because I guarded the entrance with mesmerization to stop trains for my guild as they held the keep. I got into so many groups and made so many friends, just because of that. The games today suck, you just respawn, no harm no foul. That is a joke to a serious EQ player back in the day. Dying was punishment, dont die! Play smart. There was no safe place. The mobs were abundant, spawning everywhere and walking around, pathing everywhere. It took sometimes hours to find what you thought was a safe pulling point. There was no safe place, the game was not designed to be a solo game. Shamans were not making SoW potions so people could run across norrath, only the poor and those who sucked did that, everyone else took a port. Shamans sold sow pots so you could navigate the wild areas, due to nonstop respawns and pathing. A way to escape death, train to zone! These are the tactics the original programmers used to force social interaction. Reducing spawn rates gives Necros and Mages complete dominance over the zone (this is exactly why everyone today thinks they are OP). Fear kiting was dangerous, you never knew when your target would walk into the path of another mob. Killing the mob fast was the mages thing, if he didnt, the mob would spawn again right on top of his rooted enemy, we called them adds, and this is why enchanters were important. You negate the purpose of the enchanter if there is no threat of nonstop adds. And then of course there are pvp players. Sneaking into your racial, or alignment enemies newb zones was fantastic fun. If you were spotted, they would be yelling your location out in the zone. What made sneaking hard was a multitude of invis seeing undead, respawning and walking everywhere. Chanters turning into trees to avoid being seen by the newb party and then having to slowly crawl away without them noticing the tree was moving, so you could invis undead before that random skele crossed your path, you see him coming!!! You cant get into the dark elf city to hunt lower level guards if you cant get pass the high level gate guards. This is WHY level 1 skeles were everywhere in newb zones. This is why they had a spawn rate of 30 seconds, and this is why they had agro toward any level. You have taken a major part of the social interaction out of the game, and lowered the difficulty bar tremendously by reducing spawn rates. Your not going to attract the original player base by pandering to the very people who couldn't handle this type of higher level game play that led to the fall of EQ and the rise of garbage like WoW. The precedent today is how easy can we make it. Original EQ was not children, it was young adults looking for a challenging environment. You cannot release something called original EQ, and right off the rip nerf the starting zones. That initial struggle MATTERS, and sets the stage for the rest of the game.

Exploration was a big deal. Slowly, advancing from zone to zone, with the tension of imminent death looming over your head while you searched for a new place to hunt in at your level was surreal. Higher level mobs, stalking you as you traversed the wild. Trying to avoid being spotted while they pathed everywhere. I dont see how you can avoid removing this, as everyone playing knows the world, and is just recreating a character, but possibly finding a way to move some things would be nice. I remember stumbling upon a cave, hidden in a forest under some brush. It was a whole zone! noone even heard of it....the place with all the giant floating sperm cells. I cant remember the name. what a laugh though.

Kill stealing..everyone hated it. but it was part of the social atmosphere. You did not want to solo as a tank when a mage could come along and one shot your kill to finish him off and grab the experience, infuriating!! but this caused warriors to find groups. Now we have a reason for the cleric. Instead of warriors sitting forever, they are looking for that cleric buddy, a big part of EQ was warriors and clerics learning how to support each other. Warriors learning to protect the cleric even if everyone else in the group dies. The cleric can res, and only he can (there were very few paladins I my time). That bond mattered at high levels, it mattered in raids, it created friends, and in the KSer's case, enemies. Everything that forced the group ... removed the solo player. If you want an easy solo play, then we have Skyrim. EQ was a group game. KSing revealed a characters personality, you knew that Gergeo375 was a bad guy, he is known for ksing. You now know that he will grab the rare loot w/o the groups consent soon as the mob falls. Bad guys matter, they are part of the real social environment. There were parties specifically designed to punk a solo mage kser. I made a Mage specifically to KS (an evil dark elf mage, so acted evil). It was my mission with that mage. I had fun searching for parties I could KS, and they had fun trying to stop me. I made enemies with that mage too. I was hated on that server, HATED. But that was part of it. My enchanter was loved, famous, and sought out by everyone. I logged in with my enchanter and immediately received 100 tells with people wanting to me join them, even begging me. I logged in with my Mage on a different server and immediately received 100s of tells with people hunting me. I had bounty's placed on my head. People trying to train me, looking for me, finding me, waiting patiently for me to engage something, and then dragging a train on me. All, more social interaction. More comradery. Better teams. More fun. The bad guys give the good guys a reason to team up, otherwise they are sitting by themselves bored. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Then that kser hits them a few times, now we have a party, a party searching for a mage in an forest infested with giant wasps, that respawn every 30 seconds, and path everywhere. They are locked in nonstop combat looking for the boss mob, that fricken ksing mage! and when they find him, the thrill of the fight is amazing. and look, they jumped 2 levels in the process of being in a group. 6 hrs went by and noone realized it. Shat man, I got to go to work! (I realize that's predominately a pvp server thing/but it was also when players chose to be pvp on pve servers, when they engaged pvp they became pvp with him, also nerfed though)but nothing beats the NICE cleric, if you run a nice cleric, not a prick who thinks you owe him, you are god in original EQ. log in, crash, log in crash, log in, only 500 tells this time. ehehe

Controlling raid zones and high level zones was part of the guild dynamic. SON, seekers of norrath, was famous for owning the outer plane zones on my main server. You either joined them (more social interaction) or you joined someone else to compete with them (more social interaction) or made some kind of treaty, or bargain with them to hunt there. or 5 smaller guilds banded together and raided SON first, then the held the zone. On the pvp server, this led to wars, which is the point of pvp. We had wars of 100 vs 100 that sometimes got so out of hand the server would crash. Wars... this also goes to the DM interaction. I cant remember the name of the forest, it was above the halfling city. It was basically a good zone, lighted nicely, and low level. The DM's held an event where they raided half the countryside with mid to high level undead, several of which were named 50+ level undead kings (DM controlled) and half of the server population participated. We were on the phones calling people to get on their character and help us!! People called out of work, or left early to get in on this giant war with the DM undead army. This is why EQ was called EVERCRACK. When it was done and said, we lost, the people of norrath lost, and that zone was forever changed to a dark forest, filled with high level undead (kithicor, yes?). It had an actual game changing effect. At that point, we never knew wth the DM's would do. Guilds really mean something now. You wanted to be part of a guild so you could deal with DM's raids against your zones. Zones started to become "yours." Bixbie invasions, giant bee things with human heads were hell, and helluva fun. DM's taking control of the festering hags in Unrest was the greatest fun. I see you guys talking about not wanting trains. Banning people for training. In the original EQ, the vanilla version that you want to simulate here, the DM's themselves deliberately created trains and ran the entire population right out of Unrest. Train to zone!!! A DM created train. We had to form up in groups and go in with a strategy to overcome being wiped from a festering hags train (high levels guarding low levels) and that fricken giant hand!! the god DM. we would bond together, 3 or 4 major guilds and come running to kill that train and reclaim Unrest. 15 hours to organize and execute. Again, social interaction. There will be nothing nostalgic about vanilla EQ w/o DM interaction. It'll be a game with poor graphics and alot of stress that holds the attention of only a few die hard players. It wont take long before they go back to their established characters, guilds, and friends, on w/e server they are currently playing on. I will not come back to play a 20 year old game with Nintendo level graphics, w/o the DM interaction, w/o the trains, and w/o the nonstop frenzy spawning and pathing. It wont be hard, it will be boring. Nostalgia will not be there, its not the same game. Anti-socializing is what killed EQ to begin with. I started a character not to long ago, to play with my little brother. Everyone is soloing with a merc, double or triple boxing multiple characters and there is very little social interaction. Lots of talk maybe, but not interaction with their toons in the fight against mobs and each other. It reminds me of an old AOL chat room. If the community is begging for original EQ then you need to give them original EQ, not just another server that completely misses the point of original EQ, which was, again, social interaction, TEAMS. These level 85 SK's I was shown, this is a whole different game now, what they call EQ now, is totally different. Guy running through a zone pulling 100 mobs and killing them all with an aoe is retarded. I mean these are blue cons, in my day it took a group to kill a single blue con, or a well armed twink and his cleric buddy, unless you wanted 5 minutes of downtime after every fight. Why not play diablo? that is not EQ, what I was shown is a far cry from original EQ. Minimizing my screen to switch characters spell or action after spell or action, the strategy being the best combo of spells, never the best teamwork. If these guys want Original EQ, then understand most of old EQ was outside. Was trains, ksing, and running for your life due to nonstop spawning. Learning, planning, and executing a strategy to pull safely to the place your team called "camp" Only necros soloed, and 50% of the time they were begging to join soemones group. They remade the necro and gave him all this mana swapping crap specifically so he could group, because even the solo class itself, couldnt really solo. and that was the first major unbalance of the game.

The horror show of difficulty WAS original EQ. Corpse running, paying a cleric 200 plat for a 90% rez. Renting a necro to grab your corpse and drag it from harm, or negotiating with a guild, yours or someone elses to fight their way to the bottom of Sol B for a corpse retrieval, a 6 hour fight, a quest, a player created quest. A guild of 30, 8 of them dying en route to your corpse, more corpse runs, everyone stressed, and then the final satisfaction of retrieval. Paying wizards for teleports to keep from running for 3 hours across the plains. Negotiations, friends, deals, enemies, all part of the social interaction. Enchanters mezzing entire parties in pvp, charming the wizard and setting him against the cleric, then re-messing, and wiping the melee one at a time (also nerfed). 1 guy takes all 6 of you out, while you rant at each other in chat about it! or you resist that mes! and the chanter is running for dear life, the exhilaration of rooting him and killing him! the REVENGE!!! nothing feels better. That heart pumping, "I'm gonna get that guy!" every class had a niche it could fill, and w/o each other we were screwed. Necros holding entire camps, Mage KSers, Wizard robberbarrons, Enchanter warmongers, Druid lifesavers, the ever elusive cleric, the struggling paladin, the sucky warrior who suddenly becomes the key to everything high level, the tricky rogue, the rich shaman, etc. You take away the bad stuff and the good stuff is meaningless.

The stress, and tension made EQ famous. The complaints of the snowflakes killed it. "why cant I spawn with my armor on?" because dying is punishment.
"why did I lose all my experience when I died" because dying is punishment
"They spawn to fast, its to hard to pull" Then practice, and learn, get innovative
"what does pulling mean?" pfft

"why do all the players suck?" because there is no consequence for being stupid.

Dont lower the spawn rates.
Create DM controlled events.
Dont punish Ksers, or trainers.
Dont block guilds from holding zones.
That is vanilla EQ.

Deepwater helm? was that it? the solo paladins dream, oh and a shiny new mithril 2hander with a hand me down fbss

that is old school EQ.

Twinks. The beloved twink in your group, who can hold that horde of bandits long enough to pull that TRAIN TO ZONE.

NOOOO! I died right as I zoned and my body collapsed on the other side of the wall!!

cry...

That is old school EQ.

Its the emotion. I can only think of 2 other games that had it in the last 30 years. Eve online, and Rust.

The new players are hearing from the old players how cool the game was. You yourself must remember it or you wouldn't be doing this project. Keep the emotion in the game. Keep the hate and the anger. Its what drives us. The frustration is what gives the feeling of satisfaction. Your newbie EQ players, and yea almost all of you are newbies to us, are already complaining about the very things that were taken out and ruined the game. It wasn't luclin that ruined EQ, it was the whiners. It got boring and then WOW stole the show. Then they did it to wow, and wow sucked and now everyone is scattered amongst 50 crap wannabee MMO's all dreaming of original EQ.

I pray you reconsider adjusting the spawn rates, that one thing will bring me back. Brad was the genius, not you. I'm sorry but that's the truth. Follow his model.
  #2  
Old 01-22-2020, 11:35 AM
Ripqozko Ripqozko is offline
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Yikes
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Old 01-22-2020, 11:37 AM
loramin loramin is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wall%20of%20text
wall of text
A massive, and terribly formatted post or write up. Your eyes might bleed from trying to read it.
I went to read that kids post but saw it was just a wall of text and gave up.
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  #4  
Old 01-22-2020, 11:37 AM
Kron Kron is offline
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He wrote this whole thing on his phone.
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Old 01-22-2020, 11:45 AM
Wallicker Wallicker is offline
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OMG TLDR,

OP is salty bc he is BAD.

Brb going to get lasic surgery.
  #6  
Old 01-22-2020, 11:52 AM
Phaezed-Reality Phaezed-Reality is offline
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id unmerge the servers just to merge them again if i was the staff just to see more of this.

Thank you staff. shake that tree.
  #7  
Old 01-22-2020, 11:55 AM
Nirgon Nirgon is offline
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Things were usually camped during the classic era.

Blue99 has poisoned you.
  #8  
Old 01-22-2020, 12:07 PM
Bhairava Bhairava is offline
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Yes, we were the original players. The first. I didn't do everything, but I did quite a bit. Friend of mine was the first to assemble the staff of the wheel. Friend of mine was the first to loot a weight reducing bag in high hold pass. Friend of mine was the first to get married in the game. Rival guild was the first to slay Lady Voxx. The first player to be pvp'ed was down the street from me. First person to kill the POD was in my guild. First person to make a guild I knew. First person to find the bone bladed claymore..

Etc.

We were original EQ, you are the guys wishing you were us.

Sorry)
  #9  
Old 01-22-2020, 12:18 PM
solleks solleks is offline
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New study shows being the first at evwrything ever in eq causes severe brain damage and subsequent drug addiction
  #10  
Old 01-22-2020, 12:26 PM
Pootle Pootle is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bhairava [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Yes, we were the original players. The first. I didn't do everything, but I did quite a bit. Friend of mine was the first to assemble the staff of the wheel. Friend of mine was the first to loot a weight reducing bag in high hold pass. Friend of mine was the first to get married in the game. Rival guild was the first to slay Lady Voxx. The first player to be pvp'ed was down the street from me. First person to kill the POD was in my guild. First person to make a guild I knew. First person to find the bone bladed claymore..

Etc.

We were original EQ, you are the guys wishing you were us.

Sorry)
BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!
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