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Vinestalk posted:-The original Inner Acrylia was never properly explored on PC servers because most people skipped the Grimling War due to it being a huge time sink not worth the effort compared to Seru/Ssra/VT. It was also buggy as all hell because we all know Luclin was rushed. It was completely revamped during PoP at some point, making the Mac server the last place the original Inner Acrylia existed. We didn't get a chance to run many of the events in there because it was a large undertaking to get enough interest to do it, but there was a lot of interesting stuff that were clearly rough drafts of encounters. We have Inner Acrylia on TAKP! The ring events are kinda cool in general. In outer acrylia there's a fun ring war that can result in a INT-caster usable wand that procs ice comets. Hilarious to have enchanters and poo poo doing werewolf illusion and going to town on raid mobs with that wand.
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Oct 9, 2021 15:32
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I enjoyed some of the fear factor the day night cycle introduced in EQ. I think it was way ahead of it's time. The easy one to remember is Kithicor Forest. At sundown every day the zone respawned with basically an army of undead patrolling. Tough encounter considering it's bordering a starting city as well as a Human newbie zone. I remember many times sitting at the zone line waiting for sunrise with other players so we could all run through to Rivervale or High Keep. There was also some mobs in other zones that only spawned at night. West Commonlands (when the zone was separate) has the werewolf I seemed to always run into. That zone also has the Nightfall Giant. I don't know if there were others, but would love to hear some of them. I believe WOW had the town full of Humans who were werewolf's, and at night they would all transform. Right next to Shadowfang Keep which was of course full of Werewolves. I love those game mechanics.
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Oct 11, 2021 14:45
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I am surprised there haven't been any Ultima Online posts. I know quite a few Goons who ravaged that game for a long time. Surely there must be epic tales from days of old.
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Oct 11, 2021 14:55
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Floob posted:I enjoyed some of the fear factor the day night cycle introduced in EQ. I think it was way ahead of it's time. The easy one to remember is Kithicor Forest. At sundown every day the zone respawned with basically an army of undead patrolling. Tough encounter considering it's bordering a starting city as well as a Human newbie zone. I remember many times sitting at the zone line waiting for sunrise with other players so we could all run through to Rivervale or High Keep. There was also some mobs in other zones that only spawned at night. West Commonlands (when the zone was separate) has the werewolf I seemed to always run into. That zone also has the Nightfall Giant. Rathe Mountains would switch from Cyclops to Giant Skeletons in a couple areas. In WC, WK, SK, and NK werewolves could only spawn at night. Lord Grimrot in SK could only spawn at night I think? I think someone earlier in the thread also mentioned the Gnolls/Undead Gnolls at the Lake Rathe border to SK. Someone also mentioned the terrors of Qeynos Hills, Pyzjn and Varsoon, who had a weird spawn cycle that usually meant they could only spawn at night. Same deal for the Ancient cyclops in SRo. The day/night thing was a really cool mechanic, but it became utilized less frequently after original release. Like I can't think of any specific day/night stuff in Kunark or Velious. Maybe certain spawns in the Frontier Mountains named cycles or parts of the Garzicor quest? But maybe some of those ridiculously dumb rare spawns just had an unknown day/night cycle to them and nobody figured it out. The /time function didn't work while you were on Luclin but I do know there were a couple spawns that you had to ask for someone to check the /time back on Norrath for PHs. It was definitely not used at all for PoP.
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Oct 11, 2021 15:20
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Floob posted:I am surprised there haven't been any Ultima Online posts. I know quite a few Goons who ravaged that game for a long time. Surely there must be epic tales from days of old. The original black dye bug, which was IIRC caused by someone hex editing the client side controlled dye tub value, which didn't have server side validation for the allowed dye values (a theme you will notice in a few of these.) Because the client/server communication started off being unencrypted, people were able to create various out-of-game "helper" programs (we also saw this in EverQuest with ShowEQ.) These programs ranged from help-you-within-the-bounds-of-the-game like UOAssist and UO Auto-Map to nefarious "hacking" tools like UOExtreme. The latter let you do all sorts of stuff, like remove client side walk checking, allowing you to "fast walk" (aka how every other MMO since UO has implemented walking), to letting you "delete" items from bags client side, to allow you to steal house keys that people had hidden with stacks of hides or other random crap. Origin ended up creating an "approved" client side app list, which included the aforementioned UOAssist and UOAM, because they were legit useful tools. The game dev phrase "the client is in the hands of the enemy" came out of this whole period. GM Darwin, who sold castles and/or money creating the GM tools on Ebay for real cash. A big scandal at the time. DrTwIsTer, a dude who ran a website that cataloged the many and various bugs/exploits for UO. Including but not limited to: - Some special mushroom tiles having a z-index, which let you walk into peoples towers as a ghost by being under the overhanging wings, then getting ressed inside. There were a _lot_ of bugs that let you loot peoples houses, which they eventually stymied by adding house controls for locking items. - Some special water tiles being able to be picked up, letting you store them in a house so you could macro fishing indefinitely and risk free. - The item stack of doom, whereby you dropped thousands of items on a single tile, crashing anybody who walked into range of said tile. The original Lord British killing in beta, where someone realised that LB's invulnerable flag didn't work for AE spells, and proceeded to flame wall him to death. Raine was the name of the player I believe. Tons of awesome retrospective stuff from Designer Dragon himself, Raph Koster, at https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/uo/. UO was initially designed to have a whole ecology - things are born, eaten by dragons, dragons die, population is kept in balance, etc - until they worked out that a) that poo poo is hard and b) people are terrible and strip mined every resource. The best gaming comic ever, The Adventures of B0N3D00D and pLaTeDeWd: http://spla.sh/bp/oldstuff.htm OG MMO reporter Lum the Mad, who went on to work on Shroud of the Avatar (lol  ), is a forums poster.
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Oct 11, 2021 15:41
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Floob posted:I am surprised there haven't been any Ultima Online posts. I know quite a few Goons who ravaged that game for a long time. Surely there must be epic tales from days of old. I suspect it's because "let's turn the entire game world into a free fire zone" is the kind of thing that sounded cool at the time, and now everyone knows why you do not loving do that. The only story I have about Ultima Online, or at least relevant to this thread that comes swiftly to mind, is that when the server message saying "we just saved so we can take things down for maintenance, nothing you do from here actually counts" popped up, the entire world immediately went full Thunderdome, because the next five minutes would have no consequences. So one day while I was in town doing something or other, I saw that message pop up, and immediately whipped out a heavy crossbow and pasted some poor guy just running by with one shot. I only played for a month, sadly, because not long after I started, the computer I was using poo poo itself, and for reasons I never figured out, it refused to install on the next computer I got. And the extra bummer on top is I'd also paid the ten bucks for a third party tool that made the controls less poo poo by giving you quick macros for casting common spells or bandaging yourself. While I was writing this PraxxisParadoX threw in some good stories, though, although as a point of correction, the dude who ganked Lord British was named Rainz. The major thing I remember about ol' Twist is that his rationale for publishing the bugs like this was "to force the GMs to actually fix poo poo," which would've held water a lot better if this were not usually done on Friday afternoons after all the UO devs had gone home for the weekend.
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Oct 11, 2021 15:48
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Since Praxxis mentioned Lum The Mad, here's an interesting bit of drama lost to time. Back in WoW vanilla, there was a brief but unresolved issue about a guild that had been transferred to another server. This was back when developers said transfers were impossible. Turns out they were in fact working on it and they wanted a test case. The guild that was chosen claimed that they were the target of harassment and agreed that a transfer might resolve the issue (it didn't). On its face that's rather unprofessional, opting not to resolve the harassment the proper way and instead risking live accounts on unproven tech, and lying to players about a service not being possible at all. But what really got my attention? Lum The Mad's wife was an officer in that guild. Lum hosted the guild's forum on his own server until the issue came to light, then quickly deleted the whole forum. It was likely Lum or his wife used their connections to get that transfer to happen.
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Oct 11, 2021 18:00
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I have so many stories from EQ and just had to chime in here. Probably not going to fit in one post but look forwarding to seeing all the other nostalgia from that time period. I lived in a small town with literally nothing to do in it, towns population at the time was like 700 and being the only minority for a few dozen miles in any direction didn't leave me with a lot of socializing with these kids. So I turned my amount of freetime into an unhealthy obsession with Everquest and video games in general. I played EQ from day one, and was just a dumb 15 year old who talked his mom into getting a computer with ~GRAPHICS ACCELERATION~ to play this new and awesome game. Except you couldn't, we had a 33.6 connection (later upgraded to a SCREAMING FAST 56k) connection and the servers were just hammered for those first few days. SO much so that they ended up giving everyone a free month of gameplay subscription simply because you couldn't access the servers reliably for a good two weeks. I remember being so involved in the lore and the background and the classes that I had absolute analysis paralysis in deciding what to do, and I had absolutely NO understanding of gameplay mechanics or how things worked, I just wanted to make a cool half elf ranger dude. Rangers were EASILY the worst class in the game until probably Velious. They couldn't equip heavy armor, their spells were a good 2 dozen levels behind the actual druid counter parts and were watered down versions of them, and forget about archery, the skill was basically useless outside of pulling or goofing around. Looking back, it was just so, so dumb, but they really were the first to enter this space in earnest so can't be too harsh. But I wanted my first post on this to be about something I think a lot of Classic EQ players, and people to day, never did or will experience again: The PVP system, particularly the PVP system on a blue (non PVP) server. They were trying to capture the combat and world of Ultima without it leading to massive griefing, so they created a way to turn on a voluntary flag for PVP. You would talk to this guy that was in every starting area named the Priest of Discord, and if you did his little quest you could turn on your PVP flag, which would change your name from the standard blue to RED. This move was IRREVERSIBLE (at the time), you couldn't go back to the guy and turn it back off. Once a character was flagged for pvp, that was it, you're PVP now and can be engaged by any other PVP player at will. This also meant that you can't be healed, buffed, assisted by anyone that wasn't PVP which was a good 99.8% of the server at any given time. There was no level restriction, no class restriction, it was free fire all the way, the only exception being that city guards would fight you both if you engaged near them. Grouping up in a tough fight, need a heal? Out of luck. Trying to get that Spirit of Wolf (Speed increasing) buff from someone else to move faster? Out of luck (thankfully rangers actually COULD cast this......at like level 39 of 50 oof!). Someone made a PVP character specifically to gank other unaware foolish pvp characters? Out. Of. Luck. This was really, even then, seen as an incredibly stupid and backwards way of doing things. It was a way for the game to essentially grief players by tempting them into engaging in an exciting PVP experience when in reality it just made you unable to actively participate in the game with the rest of the players. So many times I died simply because my group couldn't heal me or i couldn't get that speed buff. More than a few times I ran into the same few players that clearly had made PVP characters to mess with dumb players like me, particularly necromancers that were super overpowered for PVP. They would search out folks they knew were PVP flagged and just try to ruin their day, which theoretically would be an exciting chance for some combat, but in reality just turned into folks helplessly watching their ranger being ninja killed by necromancers with no recourse. I do remember one time I did actually come out on top. There was another player on the server who was red flagged and I ended up fighting and killing her in Kithicor Forest as all those spooky guys were coming out. I did end up taking an actually pretty nice item from them. Me, being a dumb 15 year old kid , and the character I had defeated, being a roleplaying lady with her guild backing her up, badgered me about honor and roleplaying and how wrong i was to actually win a fight and take her stuff. Dang I was so dumb lol. They successfully bullied me into giving back what I had won and then them making characters to specifically try and take me down after that altercation. All because we had both been rare folks with the PVP flag on and running into each other out and about in the world. More or less how it was "supposed" to go down. I do remember the staff at EQ finally having enough of the outrage across all the servers and actually did reverse the PVP flags on some folks, but this was I think like a year or close to it into the games lifecycle. I remember going from like level 5 all the way to I want to say 40 some before it finally got taken off and I could actually play the game it was meant to be played. I was essentially a solo player for most of that since no one could heal me, and why invite a guy who you can't heal and becomes a liability, right? I would like to say it made me a "tougher" or "better" player, but nah, it just.....sucked. And I was so invested in my ranger that starting over was just unfathomable to me. Ahh Everquest, a pioneer in amazing - and absolutely pants on head stupid- gameplay. I ended up playing the game until I believe Omens of War came out and finally had had enough, went to Iraq, and became a WoW junkie after ward. I have so many more Everquest stories to share though, and most will probably find them boring or super esoteric but, I dunno I feel like this thread is for those stories, especially if you were an old school EQ player too.
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Oct 11, 2021 18:21
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Oh, but that's leaving out the "best" part about the PVP system! The quest that turned on your PVP flag was handing this priest a special book that you started with. If you died, that book was one of the few, if not the only thing, that was in your inventory. Everything about this made it seem like something you were supposed to do. It's just another quest, right? Except, no, if you turned it in, the game was loving unplayable for all the reasons mentioned. Before they let you turn off the PVP flag, one of the few concessions they made was "the book doesn't start in your inventory and you don't have one when you spawn, the only way to get this book is to specifically ask the priest for it." EverQuest was incredibly player hostile. On the Ranger subject, the big reason that Rangers sucked, and so did Paladins and Shadow Knights, is that you paid an XP penalty. As in you took more experience to level up than other classes. This was not conveyed to you in any way because you were never shown actual numbers for your XP. If you joined a group, you were also less effective than real Warriors, and your XP penalty hit everybody. And there was also what was called "Hell Levels." Because of the way the XP math worked out, starting at level 30, every multiple of five levels was disproportionately slow. You could be leveling at an okay speed (for the incredibly player-hostile EverQuest, anyway) up to 30, and then everything slowed to a crawl. If you persisted past 30, your speed would pick up again until 35, where it would slow to a crawl, then clear up at 36 and grind to a halt at 40, and so on. Both of these problems were eventually fixed, but not until well after I had given up on the game.
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Oct 11, 2021 18:56
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MechaCrash posted:Oh, but that's leaving out the "best" part about the PVP system! Wait wait, the XP penalty effected EVERYONE in the party? No way! I didn't know that. I actually didn't have a problem with the XP penalty for those dual classes. The idea is that like in D&D you pay a cost for multi classing, and those classes were considered hybrid "multi classes" so it was supposed to be tougher to level up with them with increased XP costs. The issue is that instead of getting best of both worlds with Paladins, Rangers, and Shadow Knights, you got the worst. You got less armor than warriors, and way less spells, and a bunch of restrictions on weaponry. The SK had the benefit of some fun unique abilities that could be used to sustain themselves, so they were KIND of unique and fun in that way. Paladins and Rangers though, there was no benefit to them until well into 3 expansions or so. The way the game calculated Armor Class values wasnt' the same for each class, so even if a Ranger had high AC, he would still get pummeled in a way a Warrior wouldn't. So you were just....worse and had a higher XP penalty for your troubles. The game was just so absolutely turbofucked balance wise in so many ways, which is probably a whole other post lol. Thats a good point on the book though to really drive the point of PVP home - the book was in your inventory, it specifically told you who to give it to, and the Priest of Discord was in EVERY STARTER AREA. Why wouldn't someone who was new at least try to give it to him? It absolutely was set up like a tutorial with the way the book showed up and the positioning of the starter dude- hell, the Priest of Discord even did big text blocks exhorting people to turn it in!
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Oct 11, 2021 19:13
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MechaCrash posted:Discord poo poo
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Oct 11, 2021 19:47
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Reading EQ stories like these is a treat. I've always had some curiosity over the game, but I'm also pretty glad I didn't play it. Not because of age, but because I live in another country and boy howdy getting games back then was kind of a pain. My first MMO was Vanilla WoW, and while I had my fun with it, it still has enough jank in it that was changed in later expansions, that when people talk fondly about it I can only go "Why". Oh boy, all those times flying to Blackrock Mountain after getting a group in town, only for it to disband in transit because traveling to Blackrock took forever. Especially as Horde. The only earlier MMO I played, AFTER WoW, and very briefly, was FF11, where I: a) Did a quest about advertising... hats? to NPCs in the zone. I left the zone, discovered that I didn't have the advertising option there, so I went back to turn it in. Except that leaving the zone had reset progress and the quest giver gave me no reward since I "hadn't talked to anybody". b) discovered that my level 1 warrior had one skill, and that it had a two hour cooldown, so I was expected to auto-attack everything. I stopped shortly afterwards. And that's it. Simple stuff, and I'm sure nothing compared to other horror stories I've head about FF11.
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Oct 11, 2021 20:35
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Javik the Seer posted:Except you couldn't, we had a 33.6 connection (later upgraded to a SCREAMING FAST 56k) connection and the servers were just hammered for those first few days. SO much so that they ended up giving everyone a free month of gameplay subscription simply because you couldn't access the servers reliably for a good two weeks. Not sure if anyone's posted the videos in this thread (or if I did) but there's an old dev posting interviews with other EQ devs on YouTube and the one with the guy who made the spell system talked about how they told their ISP before launch they'd need a certain amount of bandwidth and since it was such a high amount the ISP didn't believe they'd ever us that much and thus oversold their capacity. According to him the ISP went out and starting digging and laying new pipe without permits because on top of Verant they had important government contracts. MechaCrash posted:On the Ranger subject, the big reason that Rangers sucked, and so did Paladins and Shadow Knights, is that you paid an XP penalty. As in you took more experience to level up than other classes. This was not conveyed to you in any way because you were never shown actual numbers for your XP. If you joined a group, you were also less effective than real Warriors, and your XP penalty hit everybody. Paladins and shadow knights are way more effective tanks until main tanking raids because warriors didn't have an easy way to keep aggro. The penalty was still ridiculous. The other problem with XP on top of how they did the math creating hell levels is that the full group bonus wasn't good enough to make filling up a group anywhere near as efficient as working in small groups. When I started the guy I'm playing P99 a few months back I was near the Kelethin lift and saw a halfling stroll over to the Priest of Discord and his name turned red. In the ensuing two decades (it was also my first time playing in about that long) he forgot what the Priest did and thought it bound him. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 20:40
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blatman posted:-supposedly Lake Rathetear had a world boss called "The Megalodon" which was a big glitchy shark that didn't make it past one of the testing phases because it was too glitchy, this was conceptually reused in one of the Shaman epic quest chains, here's a picture I stole of the Shaman quest version (it's still glitchy as all heck): I remember reading rumors of this thing being spotted in the Ocean of Tears, too, and I was obsessed with the idea of it existing for a while. That sense of mystical "what if" from back then is something that I'm sad will never be fully reclaimed in the era of massive fan wikis and extensive datamining.
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Oct 11, 2021 22:55
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Javik the Seer posted:
For what it's worth, Paladins still had a place in exp groups, even early. Warriors were insanely gear dependent and if you couldn't field like Short Swords of Ykesha early on you may as well get hosed. Paladins could snap aggro onto themselves in a way that warriors couldn't, because spells that stunned had INSANE threat modifiers even if it did fuckall damage like the low level cleric smites that paladins had access to - and you could lock poo poo to you really effectively. It's just that for single group tanking, Shadowknights were the premier class because you got insane threat generation and survivability. Back in the day, Damage over Time spells applied all their +threat modifier UP FRONT. Remember when someone mentioned mobs having a 40 minute long DoT that did mostly insignificant damage upthread? Yeah, Shadowknights had that spell, and while it did something insignificant like 400 damage over the course of 40 minutes, all the threat hit right up front. Because SKs had other tools to help juice their health with passive lifetap procs (and actively casting the lifetap spells), as well as also having access to Feign Death to help them pull and get out of danger (and grief) they had many tools in their belt to help them function as a maintank in a group, a secondary tank/puller, or even just doing straight damage. Ranger very extremely got the short end of the hybrid stick though. They really weren't even a Warrior / Druid hybrid as much as they were a Rogue / Druid hybrid. It's just that Rangers gave up the best parts of being a rogue (namely Sneak Attack) and the best parts of being a Druid (namely the spell growth, also Druids were also kind of hot messes for a good long time too) and the result of what was left was just kind of a dumpster fire that didn't work in any situation. They didn't really have the damage of Rogues or Monks, nor was any of the druid spells they had access to at all relevant at the levels they got em (especially in comparison to Paladins and SKs) That 5 damage shield of Thorns you had at level 30 was relevant at level 9 - By level 30 it's not even going to scratch the paint of the things you were fighting. Granted, Luclin and Planes of power actually gave rangers a purpose and use *cough*after grinding out 100 AAs minimum*cough*, but even so, before that point Rangers were still *real* bad, and it could be upwards of hundreds of hours before they got to the "not bad" territory. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 23:57
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I mean with disciplines they had that duration of parrying everything so they were sometimes used as
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Oct 12, 2021 00:04
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Vermain posted:I remember reading rumors of this thing being spotted in the Ocean of Tears, too, and I was obsessed with the idea of it existing for a while. That sense of mystical "what if" from back then is something that I'm sad will never be fully reclaimed in the era of massive fan wikis and extensive datamining. I think one way to recapture the sense of mystery and potential for discovery you describe would be some sort of meaningful server-to-server variation. Imagine a game world with a bunch of different world customization switches, and then someone (or a small team) whose job is to function like a server-specific dungeonmaster. E.g., on Server A, a particular village is inhabited by halflings who are at war with the nearby gnolls, on Server B the village was destroyed and overrun by the gnolls years ago, and on Server C the halflings and gnolls forged an uneasy peace. Each scenario would bring with it a different set of loot, quests, and NPCs to meet, even if in some cases the differences are simple palate or name swaps. Each server's DM could throw in a mixture of long-term static world changes and short-term events and rare spawns. I'm not talking about entirely new assets for every server - just enough variation between them that it'd be difficult if not impossible to set up a comprehensive Allakhazam/Wowhead/wiki, which in turn would leave players always feeling like they have a real possibility of discovering something new.
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Oct 12, 2021 01:15
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For as user hostile as FFXI was, after reading some of these (awesome) EQ and Ultima Online stories it now almost seems like it was super fun happy easy times comparatively. I do really appreciate how the early online games really seemed to want to be a place you went, not simply a game you played.
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Oct 12, 2021 02:10
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The mention of hell levels stirred some memories of getting through level 45, which if I remember, at the time was the toughest one. I got into a great group in Skyfire Mountains and we stuck together and ground through it. Watching that exp bar just barely move each kill was so bad, and I think that was before the blue one was added. But you know, back then the pace of the game was different. There was no in or out of combat regen rates. If the Cleric was low on mana, we either slowed down the pulls, or let them med up while we all talked. You can bet your rear end we had a Bard, and long before Melody, that player twisted the hell out of songs and instruments even while we all rested. In those early groups it wasn't unusual for you to learn where other players were from, how old they were, what things they liked to do out of game. I didn't have the time to keep up with the same group of friends, but I met some awesome people in groups in Oasis of Mar, The Overthere, Skyfire Mountains, and even some of the dungeons like Karnors and Dalnir. It's almost like the devs and the game was so harsh it forced players to band together. Games today don't have this chemistry, everything is too spoon fed and immediate. My kids never had to know what it's like to camp a spawn for 24 hours, in line behind other's, just to have your DSL line cut out because someone picked up the phone 
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Oct 12, 2021 13:45
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I'll come in and drop another story from Old School Everquest here, and I think this really does illustrate just how different the world was as well as how really.....i guess disrespectful of the players time this game was. I think thats the best way to put it with a lot of the stories we see, the game was just straight up disrespectful of your time. So much so that it often became not who was the best player or most savvy but who simply had the time to do the things that needed to be done in order to be successful in the late game. This particular story is about an item called Journeyman's Boots, or commonly known as JBoots. In Everquest all monsters could generally run faster than players could run at base movespeed. This meant that if you were in trouble and had a bunch of monsters on you, you were going to be toast unless someone slowed the monsters for you or you had some kind of speed increasing buff on you. Most commonly this was a buff called Spirit of Wolf (SoW) which raised your move speed pretty significantly, but it could be removed by any slowing effect, any dispell effect, and could only be cast outdoors. This meant routinely folks would leave dungeons (which were considered indoors) just to recast the outdoor only buffs and then go back in, and only three classes could cast such a buff for the first few years of EQ: Rangers, Druids, and Shamans. That is it. This meant that if you were ever in trouble trying to run away from a fight, if you didn't have these three classes handing out these buffs, you were more than likely toast (especially since you were more likely to get stunned when hit in the back, which made you stop and spin around slowly for a good second or so). All of that is to say that movement is at a premium in the game because its often the difference between life and death, especially when traversing higher level areas. This remained true at level 1 all the way to the highest levels. However, there was a discovery in one of the dungeons in the game, the low-to-mid-level Najena, of an item called Journeyman's Boots. These dropped off of a relatively rare spawning NPC lady, Drelzna, and had a rare clickable effect when worn that increased the players run speed by about 35% (SoW could be as high as like 50% for context). And here is the big rub; They worked INDOORS! So it opened up an increased run speed to every single class that could grab them- provided they could: -Get to the dungeon -Not die getting there -Get to where Drelzna spawned without dying (she was behind a system of locked doors and trap doors because of course she is) -Successfully kill Drelzna -And, this is actually the hardest part of the hunt - be the person/persons that were actually able to do enough damage to get loot rights to the boots. Remember, there are no instances in old Everquest, there is one dungeon on your server, one spawn of the creature, and that is it. For the entire server. You see, this item was absolutely legendary for all the reasons above. It was to the point where this dungeon was so heavily camped out and cleared out that really low level players could walk around in it relatively unharmed a lot of the time, simply because everyone wanted these boots. High level characters would go to this location just for a shot at getting the boots for themselves. And it really was a shot, the boots dropped from Drelzna maybe 20% of the time and her chance to spawn was every 20 minutes or so, and there was I think a 50% chance of her spawn being a placeholder and not actually her. This meant that every time she spawned it would be a mad dash to damage her and kill her to earn looting rights, if she spawned at all. She would often be alive for like .05 seconds and dropped with everyone furiously right clicking her corpse to get a chance for those sweet sweet boots. In a "good" Drelzna camp, there was an honorable list of players rotating for the opportunity to kill and loot her, usually grouped up together and having folks cycle in and out over time based on the honor system and how long folks had been there. Inevitably some extremely high level player or players would often come, ignore the honor list, and just try to ninja kill her first and make off with the boots, leaving all of those who had been there before high and dry. My story comes in when I was playing EQ literally overnight on summer break, and lucky me, I got into a group and was 6th or so on the list! I was high enough level to traverse the dungeon, but not high enough to comfortably throw my weight around and just kill everything by myself if I got ganged up on, so I needed the group to be safe. I got into the group, we were all chilling in the area to kill her as she spawned and all of the things I mentioned above ended up happening. Other groups came in and stole a few pairs from us, some folks cheated in line, or sometimes the monster just straight up didn't spawn and instead, we got a place holder like 10 times in a row (This is like an HOUR at a time of just sitting around not getting anything). Anyway, I had been at this camp out for literally 6 hours. SIX HOURS, it was like 4 AM and it was finally my turn to get the boots! *boom* I hear a literal explosion some distance away outside, and all power in the house goes out. Its dark out and late so I peek my head out the window and see that the power is out on the whole street. A transformer had blown, knocking out power, and knocking me out of line for my boots. 6 hours of watching others get their boots, of sitting around, of fighting off sleep, just to get one of the rarest items in the game all flushed down the drain because right as its my turn to cash in, I lose power in the house. I end up freaking out and passing out on my bed super anxious not only about all that time wasted, but shoot, when I log back in, I'm probably going to die since they'll all be gone and i'll be left without a group. I end up waking up at like 7 or 8 AM and notice the power is back on. I hurriedly log back in and am prepared for the worst. Lo and behold a few of the party members who were after me were still there! They recognized me and I was prepared to plead and beg for my spot back since I'd helped the others for so long, but others had joined the line and obviously didn't know I had been there and weren't prepared to let me back in. The guys did end up inviting me back in, put me 2nd on the list, and funnily enough, we got the set of boots for me within the hour.I grabbed my boots, got the hell out of the dungeon, logged off and went to freakin bed for the day. Over 8 hours of gameplay, sitting and staring at some walls and chatting to folks , all so my character could move 35% faster and I could have what would become a legacy item. Imagine if I was an adult or had a job or a family, this would be simply impossible instead of just a 15 year old being irresponsible. Yet tons of people did this. This is the kind of thing that could cause those stories of folks living out of closets or ignoring their children, they just get so invested in these things. Throw in that power outage and..oof. The devs eventually saw this happening across all servers and changed this item to a quest that you would do with a few hand ins and errands across a few different zones. All it really did though was push the time sink into a few different areas instead of one out of the way dungeon, but that certainly beat the time wasting and super conflict-based fight for one monster for hours on end. Everquest
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Oct 12, 2021 15:15
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Oh man those monster camping stories hurt a lot. I never did Everquest but I played Final Fantasy 11 from NA release and boy howdy, for my first MMO it disrespected my time greatly. Unlike a lot of modern MMOs, FFXI had a very horizontal gearing scale, so poo poo you could get off low-level spawns could still be good well into the max level. You could swap gear in combat so making perfect sets for niche cases involved a lot of camping and dumb bullshit. There was stuff you could camp on your own. I was a White Mage and Summoner main, so I spent a lot of time in this ... goblin cave camping this rare spawn that popped every 2 hours for a dumb-rear end earring that I can't even remember what it did now. I'd park my rear end in this cave with mobs that could still possibly kick my butt if I got a bad spawn even at max level, wait around a bit to either mark time or get the first kill and see if my luck was good. (it never was) Then I'd log out and set a timer, do poo poo for 1 hour and 50 minutes, log back in, hopefully get a kill, then repeat. Thankfully the mob wasn't camped all that badly but I got a reputation as a "hacker" because I used the BST subjob, which had an instant claim ability. Most of the other campers were White Mages that didn't sub something useful so I beat them all the time. Getting that drop took like weeks of pretty regular camping. There was stuff you could hunt in a small group. So there was this mob in a high-level area of the game that ran around INVISIBLE until you aggroed it. It dropped some important item for Summoner, I can't remember. So every time I could beg my friends to help we'd all go run around this area spamming targeting macros to find this dumb thing. It only spawned at some weird-rear end time interval. I think I finally got that drop but boy was that a waste of time for something only one of us could use. Then there was stuff you needed an entire guild to camp. So FFXI had Notorious Monsters (which were like rares), and the HNMs which were like world bosses. Then occasionally, some of those HNM's would "upgrade" into "King" versions of themselves. The one you probably know is Behemoth > King Behemoth. These mobs spawned on timers that both lasted days, and were "windowed," as in they never spawned exactly 24 hours or any of that. No, after their spawn timer passed, there would be I think hour-long "windows" in which they could spawn. And if you were camping Behemoth, sometimes instead of regular-rear end Behemoth spawning it was King Behemoth which dropped different poo poo. So this required a lot of coordination because your camping windows were shifting throughout the day and the servers weren't regional so you got to compete with other time zones as your windows shifted. So my friend played a Monk. The most coveted item for monks at that time was the Black Belt which required drops from all three big bad world bosses - Adamantoise, Nidhogg, and Behemoth. The problem was, the regular-rear end versions of the bosses only sometimes dropped the items needed to make the belt. The King versions would always drop it. The other problem was we weren't part of any guild that did this type of camping. We knew people who were that we did other raids with, but due to our schedules we couldn't regularly do the HNM camping. So my friend managed to get the Adamanotise Egg and the Wyrm Beard by being persistent and around when no other monks in those groups needed it (and they couldn't be sold thank god), but couldn't get that goddamn Behemoth drop. My friend took to just hanging around when the Behemoth window opened just to hope to get an invite, but didn't for a long, long time. So my friend got angry. Now with FFXI, if a mob was claimed by someone, else, you could help them kill it but wouldn't be eligible for drops. The only way to lose claim on a mob was to die at that time. There were whole strategies that involved trying to get another team killed to steal claim. So next time Behemoth popped my friend had the bright idea to claim it and hold it hostage for the Black Belt drop. Monks were pretty resilient and there were a few subjobs they could take to make that easier. So it popped. And it was King Behemoth. And my friend got claim and started running it around shouting "if you give me the black belt drop I'll join your group and give claim." Yeah, there was no guarantee any group would give the drop over but it was worthless, and the idea of one person inconveniencing like 100 people from around the world made a few of the HNM group's leaders laugh, so one of them finally agreed, invited my friend and gave the drop over after it died. I of course was asleep because this was dumbass'o'clock in the morning but I woke up to LOOK WHAT I GOT and half my friends list dying over it. I have a lot more stories about FFXI, which is the only game I threatened to kill someone over. I'd love to hear other people's stories too - I think the old-school version of FFXI before a lot of the changes that made it a little more friendly would count in this thread. Edit: and I go looking up some stuff to get the correct names and I see that the mobs were eventually changed to use pop items? What the gently caress! LegionAreI fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 16:04
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The best part was classic Drelzna was confirmed to have an anticamp radius by a dev years after JBoots were removed from her loot table. She had a decreased chance of spawning if anyone was within a certain proximity of her spawn point. The joy of movespeed in old EQ... players who didn't have regular access to sow had to utilize the tried and true method of "run and jump." It was marginally faster than normal running but could only be done for a certain amount of time due to the stamina drain. Even as late as Luclin, prior to the /disc changes that changed stamina into a melee version of mana, items with clicky invigorate were considered lifesaving.
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Oct 12, 2021 16:07
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Vinestalk posted:The best part was classic Drelzna was confirmed to have an anticamp radius by a dev years after JBoots were removed from her loot table. She had a decreased chance of spawning if anyone was within a certain proximity of her spawn point. I started out my EQ adventure as a Druid, so I never fully appreciated that pain. It wasn't until much later I started leveling alts and by then AA's were in, and JBoots were much easier to acquire. Eventually all of my non sow classes had fabled Jboots, but I can imagine there was a lot of time wasted just looking for sow buffs. Luclin goes live tomorrow on Mischief, and I can't wait for AA's, focus effects, and the spells that were added in this expansion that actually helped several classes at lower levels.
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Oct 12, 2021 16:18
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Vinestalk posted:The best part was classic Drelzna was confirmed to have an anticamp radius by a dev years after JBoots were removed from her loot table. She had a decreased chance of spawning if anyone was within a certain proximity of her spawn point. I had no clue this was even a thing lol LegionAreI posted:I have a lot more stories about FFXI, which is the only game I threatened to kill someone over. I'd love to hear other people's stories too - I think the old-school version of FFXI before a lot of the changes that made it a little more friendly would count in this thread. My brother was a hardcore raider in EQ and when he quit he went to FFXI and it blew my mind that there was a game that was even grindier. A few of us jumped on a private FFXI server (with an xp rate increase) early in the pandemic and I was surprised he stuck with such a grindy game when the controls were so bad on PC - it was clearly designed for a controller. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 16:18
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Groovelord Neato posted:I had no clue this was even a thing lol Yeah, during the original beta there was a larger percentage of the named mobs that had anticamp radius, but it was drastically reduced due to player feedback. There were constant rumors about the frenzied ghoul and other random ones still being anticamp radius after release, but I think Prathun was the dev who confirmed it was only one named in Najena that still had the code built in. Some of the spawning mechanics for certain named were convoluted as gently caress with no possible way players would have known about it until after the content became obsolete and a dev decided to spill the tea. For example, this was the mechanic for Vaniki in DN (who dropped one of the few weapons that proc'd a slow for melee classes): quote:I've always been curious about the elusive Vaniki, myself. There are five spawns that can appear as Vaniki. The respawn time is 122 hours. Each spawn point has a 10% chance to spawn as Vaniki. Vaniki is unique, so there can only ever be one of them up at any given time. If the spawn is not Vaniki, it will appear as an unkillable invisible man placeholder. In either case, Vaniki or placeholder, the NPC will despawn 122 hours later. This implementation makes the Vaniki NPC rare and essentially uncampable. When these 5 spawns initially trigger (not when the zone comes up - there is a delay before they will appear) there's a ~41% chance that Vaniki will be in the zone. 122 hours later, if there is no interference, all 5 will despawn, and 122 hours later they will respawn. Each spawn location operates independently of the others, making the behavior of the system more complex if Vaniki is killed since the slain spawn will no longer occur synchronously with the other 4.
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Oct 12, 2021 16:33
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Vinestalk posted:Yeah, during the original beta there was a larger percentage of the named mobs that had anticamp radius, but it was drastically reduced due to player feedback. There were constant rumors about the frenzied ghoul and other random ones still being anticamp radius after release, but I think Prathun was the dev who confirmed it was only one named in Najena that still had the code built in. Knowing this now, I can almost guarantee this is why Drelzna took so long to camp and get. I mean really, 6+ hours for a 20 minute spawn? Definitely had the anti camp thing in. The amount of effort EQ devs spent to make things so much artificially harder is just insane looking back at it. I get the mystique of making items rare and hard to get, but that whole random spawn thing is insane. I wonder how much more money they would have made as a developer if they had a different mindset from the beginning regarding rare spawns and items. A lot of people probably would have stuck around longer if fights were just hard and not randomly rare instead of both. Also regarding move speed, I do know there was some kind of geometrical thing with the way movement worked where strafing was actually faster than running. NPC's generally had to be standing still in order to make an attack, so by moving diagonally forward with the strafe button, the monsters had to stop to hit and then move forward then to the side over and over again, which would cause them to barely go slower than the player. Over a long enough period you could maybe get a few feet of distance between a monster and yourself in a tight spot.....provided you didn't get stunned, slowed, or hit a particularly large twig on the ground. I do think this was fixed eventually, but it was the only other way to move in some cases. To drive this home though for non EQ players, Spirit of Wolf was so necessary, people would literally farm in game currency to actual wealth just standing in popular areas and casting the spell over and over again for a fee. Imagine your entire economic prospects hinged on a level 10 spell that only a few people could cast. Maybe in my next story I can talk about the teleportation economy, its in the same vein. Good game balancing.
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Oct 12, 2021 16:46
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Javik the Seer posted:Knowing this now, I can almost guarantee this is why Drelzna took so long to camp and get. I mean really, 6+ hours for a 20 minute spawn? Definitely had the anti camp thing in. I was in the zone for a different reason, but I do remember those camps. That dungeon had some nice campfire rooms we would sit around while waiting for respawns. I don't recall the specifics, but I was working on the Ghoulbane quest with my Druid... Was that sword tradeable at some point, or was I just a dumb newbie?
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Oct 12, 2021 19:43
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Ghoulbane wasn't no drop - I got both my one on live and P99 from other players.
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Oct 12, 2021 19:54
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Groovelord Neato posted:Ghoulbane wasn't no drop - I got both my one on live and P99 from other players. Ok, that's how I remember it. I don't know how many times I completed the quest, but it was more than two, and I sold them.
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Oct 12, 2021 20:06
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Javik the Seer posted:The amount of effort EQ devs spent to make things so much artificially harder is just insane looking back at it. I get the mystique of making items rare and hard to get, but that whole random spawn thing is insane. I wonder how much more money they would have made as a developer if they had a different mindset from the beginning regarding rare spawns and items. A lot of people probably would have stuck around longer if fights were just hard and not randomly rare instead of both. The whole rare spawns/rare items thing was another game system that was directly translated from the MUD McQuaid played. And I think EQ was successful because they were just attempting to make a 3D version of existing, known working mechanics and therefore in a very constrained development space. The amount of development time they saved because they could say 'we know something like this will work' has to be astronomical. There is nothing inherently wrong the rare spawn mechanic, but the design that worked when it was 'rare spawns with N players and organic spread of information via friend networks about where they are and what they drop' naturally broke spectacularly when it turned into 'rare spawns with 100xN players, and almost all of them have read on a website exactly where to get the item.'
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Oct 12, 2021 21:09
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While I think the whole "3D version of existing MUD mechanics" thing played a part in EQ doing as well as it did, I think a large part also has to be attributed to how Ultima Online handled PVP. The saying "people won't pay to be a victim" eventually came out, and while I can't remember if it was talking about early UO or the clusterfuck that Shadowbane turned out to be, the fact remains that it's kind of hard to attract and keep players when stepping out of town results in being murdered, robbed, dismembered, and if you were "lucky," had a bunch of slurs shouted at you as your corpse was sodomized. As for what EQ's numbers would've looked like if the game did not actively disrespect your time, we have an example of that: World of Warcraft. Turns out more people want to play your game when your game feels like a game and not a second job! Crazy, huh? I won't pretend like EQ being like that never created cool moments, but as the devs of FF14v1 learned, what the market will tolerate has shifted enormously and you can't put a game like that out anymore and expect it to do well.
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Oct 12, 2021 21:56
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I noticed a few of the everquest stories mentioned making money off it. was real money trade stuff a major thing then? I've only encountered bots doing money laundering in modern stuff so I'm curious about how that all went.
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Oct 12, 2021 22:32
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Wrestlepig posted:I noticed a few of the everquest stories mentioned making money off it. was real money trade stuff a major thing then? I've only encountered bots doing money laundering in modern stuff so I'm curious about how that all went. Yes. Sony got ebay to ban character/gold sales. There was also another plat seller who went around buying up class boards/forums so they could show ads on them. But this was in the day of when it was all gained by farming and exploits. Now, especially in wow, the currency and items are taken from another players account and then sold. Sometimes even from a previous customer of the gold seller. Zil fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 22:37
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Wrestlepig posted:I noticed a few of the everquest stories mentioned making money off it. was real money trade stuff a major thing then? I've only encountered bots doing money laundering in modern stuff so I'm curious about how that all went. It was enough of a thing that I remember reading a loving Archie comic back in the early 2000s where Jughead making money off of selling virtual swords is a gag.
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Oct 12, 2021 22:40
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Yeah, selling items and in-game money for real cash is a thing that happened. When it was officially forbidden, then there was a lot of transparent bullshit with "buy this pen, get a Cloak of Flaming Assholes for free" or "you're bidding on my time, as a special gift I will throw in a big pile of platinum" going on. Hell, in Ultima Online it was pretty common to see people just selling castles and poo poo on eBay because doing so was allowed, but all the games started clamping down on that once it stopped being "someone is leaving the game or just wants a little extra beer money" and turned into the bot networks and outright account theft we know and loathe today.
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Oct 12, 2021 22:41
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MechaCrash posted:Hell, in Ultima Online it was pretty common to see people just selling castles and poo poo on eBay because doing so was allowed, but all the games started clamping down on that once it stopped being "someone is leaving the game or just wants a little extra beer money" and turned into the bot networks and outright account theft we know and loathe today. There was a brief period of time where gold farming was a sweatshop operation, come to think of it. A friend of mine used to raid back in vanilla WoW, and he befriended a Chinese gold farmer who would send him all the random health/mana potions they got that otherwise couldn't be sold for much. It's all automated nowadays, but there used to be big computer labs where dudes would grind Scarlet mobs for Crusader enchant drops for 12+ hour shifts.
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Oct 12, 2021 22:47
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There was a time that the typing out the word yantis on a eq forum was pretty much an instant ban. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/IGE was the first big gold selling company.
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Oct 12, 2021 23:05
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MechaCrash posted:While I think the whole "3D version of existing MUD mechanics" thing played a part in EQ doing as well as it did, I think a large part also has to be attributed to how Ultima Online handled PVP. The saying "people won't pay to be a victim" eventually came out, and while I can't remember if it was talking about early UO or the clusterfuck that Shadowbane turned out to be, the fact remains that it's kind of hard to attract and keep players when stepping out of town results in being murdered, robbed, dismembered, and if you were "lucky," had a bunch of slurs shouted at you as your corpse was sodomized. Yeah the thing is you can't really give World of Warcraft TOO much props when comparing to Everquest. Nearly everything WoW did right, it was specifically and exactly because they saw EQ get it wrong or hosed it up in some way by refusing to adapt to the player base. Instancing is a good example of this. I remember coming up with the idea when I was playing back when I was like 16, its not like it was some galaxy brain thing that Blizzard invented. They were just in a position to see how necessary it was and built their architecture around it. EQ eventually got it, but it was super janky because, well, it was made in 1996 and WoW wasn't. See also: Linking items, tagging for LFG, quest structure, etc. For all of the crap I have been saying and will say about EQ, it genuinely was ground breaking and really did lay the foundation for nearly every online platform that came after. There was genuinely some magic there, I think, and I don't think it'll ever really be recaptured until we see a new platform of gaming i.e. some kind of full body oculus rift MMO situation ala Ready Player One. Regarding ebay and gold selling: It was actually considered a badge of shame to buy your character or buy gold, you'd get endlessly dragged for it until it really became much more common place. I do remember getting tired of my ranger sometime in like 2000 and trying to sell it since it had so much of the original gear that you couldn't' get anymore (like the aforementioned Jboots). I actually did end up selling it on ebay, but someone who was an anti-sell-online crusader last minute bid on it and refused to pay. I wasn't 18 so I couldn't really get in on the ebay bandwagon by myself, I had to use my moms ebay account that I made for her. They left me a negative review about how wrong it was to sell EQ stuff online and ruined the entire auction for me. I had a negative review on that ebay account for years because of that rear end in a top hat. I was so excited, $800 was BIG MONEY for 17 year old me and it was actually a pretty good chunk of change for a relatively weak character, but so it goes. Also question, was it common for others to see Hong Kong players all have the hk prefix before their name? It was absolutely ubiquitous on my server and I didn't figure out what the hk meant until many years later. They rarely spoke english and always seemed grouped up together, never really diverging from what they were doing. Examples would be like hkchamp or hkbetty. Was that common?
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Oct 13, 2021 02:39
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Zil posted:There was a time that the typing out the word yantis on a eq forum was pretty much an instant ban. Had I a relevant program, I would do that dominos meme with the first tiny domino being "a company is founded to facilitate the sale of in-game goods" and the big one being "America's capitol is invaded in a coup attempt on January 6." As you can see from that article, at one point Steve Bannon became the CEO of IGE. In his tenure, he noticed a lot of angry young men that he could mold to his liking. Which he used to help plant the seeds of Gamer Gate, which mutated into the alt-right, which gave us Trump, and I assume you've been awake for the last four years so I don't need to get into how that went. Javik the Seer posted:For all of the crap I have been saying and will say about EQ, it genuinely was ground breaking and really did lay the foundation for nearly every online platform that came after. There was genuinely some magic there, I think, and I don't think it'll ever really be recaptured until we see a new platform of gaming i.e. some kind of full body oculus rift MMO situation ala Ready Player One. I will second this sentiment, because EverQuest was revolutionary in a lot of ways. It was massively held back by Brad McQuaid's Vision™. The big example that comes to mind: when you died, your respawn point was determined by where you were bound. You could be bound to any location by any player of the right class casting a bind spell, which wasn't a problem if you were in a major city during good hours. Were you in some backwoods middle of nowhere city at a bad time? Ha ha, gently caress you, better hope you don't die or you'll have to run halfway across the world for a corpse run! One of the very heavily requested features was NPCs capable of binding players, and it's not a coincidence that this was one of the big QOL features added after McQuaid got ousted.
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Oct 13, 2021 03:18
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Zil posted:There was a time that the typing out the word yantis on a eq forum was pretty much an instant ban. IGE, my old (not)friend. They did sales for alllllllll the games back then, including FFXI. Fun fact, Steve Bannon was their CEO for a bit. (efb) At the time I played, farming money was torture unless you could sell drops, sell clears of content (friend of mine got rich selling clears for one of the CoP missions when you could cheese it with RDMs) or got lucky. A lot of people bought gil that you wouldn't expect just to make the hellacious grind easier, and we all learned our first chinese words messing with the farmers. Cao ni ma!
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Oct 13, 2021 03:20
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