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I just started on P99 in earnest. I goofed around for a week or so in 2010 but made it only to level 15. I heard someone reference the upcoming Green server and decided to return for it (though I am well aware it'll be a mess of drama and poopsocking). To get back into EQ in the meantime, I'm playing a Halfling cleric on Blue, now in my mid 20s, and I've been having a great time. I played EQ obsessively from roughly '99-'03, so I'm not new to the game in general, but I don't have much of a handle on this server's community or economy. Accordingly, I wanted to post here with a couple questions. Where am I likely to be able to find groups in my mid to late 20s? I've been living in Unrest since 15, which is fun, but I wouldn't mind a change. Am I too low for Mistmoore? Do people still group in SK? Cazic Thule? Warsliks? Lake of Ill Omen? I don't know what's actually populated on Blue nowadays and don't want to spend an hour or more traveling to an empty zone. I'd particularly welcome a place where I can pull in a bit of money to expand my mana pool, though I understand that'll come on its own eventually (and it's even kind of a fun nostalgia kick to be wearing mostly bronze again). Could anyone recommend a sociable guild for while I level? This thread suggests the primary Goon guild isn't active much anymore. It does seem like the community is quite friendly so far, sort of like the best parts I remember of it from original EQ; I guess that's likely since it naturally skews older than most online games as we dumb aggressive teenagers aged into mellower thirty-somethings. I imagine there's probably a lot more acrimony at the endgame raiding level, but that's a long way away for me. If anyone wants to say hi or group with a mid/upper 20s cleric, my character's name is Melba, and I've joined the Discord chat under the handle Zelbor.
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Sep 11, 2019 18:04
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retpocileh posted:Best place in the game for you between 24-34 is HHK goblins. There’s a group there about 24/7. Usually a list, but I’ve never personally had to wait more than 20 mins to get in. Thanks for this suggestion! HHK was so completely camped with an endless waitlist (or guild groups that took only their own) on my server back in the day that I'd forgotten to even consider going there. I've made two levels (30 now!) and a decent amount of cash since arriving in High Keep yesterday evening.
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Sep 12, 2019 17:30
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DizzyBum posted:EQ's got some gnarly graphics and the old-world zones are pretty gross, but there's definitely a nostalgic charm about them. It's telling that so many players seem to prefer the classic models to the Luclin ones. The original models had personality and character. They had all kinds of flaws (such as dyed armor coloring exposed skin as well as the armor itself) and mistakes (e.g., Erudite helms, Halfling female feet). It would've been nice to have more customization options for things like body size and type, skin and hair color, etc., and it would've been nice if armor weren't all effectively painted onto the body rather than 3D modeled. But there was a clear artistry and attention to detail behind every model and its armors (especially the Velious ones). The Luclin models looked like someone whipped them up in Poser in 30 minutes. Every model looked like a differently sized version of the Human one with a few cosmetic tweaks. The animations were beyond terrible and were barely half finished at release. Trolls and Ogres looked radically different from their original state; even if you liked the new Trolls and Ogres better, it's impossible to argue that the change from classic to Luclin models was contiguous. After the artists spent the time to create six new armors for each race with Velious, Luclin bafflingly returned to only three per race. There was a setting you could change in an .ini file that would awkwardly stretch the Velious textures onto the new models, but it was like a bad joke. It's natural for players in an MMO to develop a certain attachment to their characters, especially when those characters require as much time as EQ's to develop. The Luclin models took everything that was unique and cool about the character models and threw it out the window in a rushed hack job for the sake of being able to advertise "Look! Higher polygon counts!" I didn't hate the Luclin models because I have a special fondness for low-poly 90s 3D; I hated the Luclin models because they're loving rancid garbage. I would've been happy to see new models that preserved the artistic integrity of the originals, but it's saddening that even now, 20 years later, current EQ continues to use the Luclin abominations. Hic Sunt Dracones fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Oct 1, 2019 02:38
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suuma posted:In screenshots they're probably fine but the animations are pretty horrible all-around. A few Luclin model animation highlights I remember: When I sat down on my Gnome male, my robe didn't conform to my body, so the bottom half of the robe remained vertical and rigid and clipped straight into the ground, while my character's knees clipped through the front of the robe. There was one emote - I think it was /point but am not sure - where my character's head would move forward, but somehow they screwed it up, and my eyes and mouth/teeth would remain in their original position. The result was some ghastly nightmare fuel as my eyes and mouth receded into the back of my skull, leaving grotesque voids. I used to kind of enjoy this one, especially in telling friends and guildmates "position your camera to focus on my face... now wait for it..." I don't recall exactly how, but there was something Halfling males could do (maybe /cheer?) that had the opposite effect of causing their eyes and mouth to fly forward out of their faces. These were all fixed within about 6 months, but holy poo poo were the Luclin models obviously released without any meaningful amount of testing or quality control. Hic Sunt Dracones fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Oct 1, 2019 22:06
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Is anyone else playing on Teal? I made the swap from Green pretty early one night when there were 70 people in Oasis fighting over everything the second it popped, and I've been happy with the switch. I know everyone loves to complain about the community being a bunch of unemployed, drug-addicted poopsockers, but my experience has been overwhelmingly positive; I can recall maybe three incidents of witnessing irrational manchild freakouts since I started up in October. The forums suggest that Green's main raiding guild is a much bigger pain for the server (controlling all good farm camps, insane rules for raiders, etc.) than is Teal's, but of course I haven't been on Green to experience that and acknowledge it may just be typical forums whining. Most people on Teal seem chill and sociable, whether soloing or in groups. I do wish the devs would take a serious critical look at the ZEMs, because there's solid evidence that they aren't truly classic, anyway, and regardless the result is that most people seem to feel locked into a small handful of zones like Upper Guk, Unrest, and High Keep. Even so, I did most of my leveling soloing guards in various outdoor and city zones without those favorable ZEMs, and I didn't find it intolerably slow. There remains something weirdly compelling about the EQ grind. I'm having a little bit of a "now what?" feeling after getting my main character (a troll shaman) into a good place in terms of gear and financial stability. An alt is probably the answer; I'm leaning toward one of the hybrids but haven't decided.
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Dec 20, 2019 17:23
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Meatgrinder posted:You can't really vet things for not being classic; poo poo will never be fully classic, it can't be. It is fun starting over, though. Oh I understand. This is a free server run by volunteers, and it does a marvelous job recreating the overall experience of classic EQ to the extent that it's possible, and I'm grateful for all of that. I'm certainly not going to go post thousand-word "Well, technically..." screeds on the P99 forums. It's just that sometimes I do find it odd the things the P99 devs consider, "the design and timeline of classic" vs. "obvious bugs and mistakes" vs. "non-classic features that are implemented for other reasons." For example, Kedge Keep should be completely empty right now (save, I think, some random low level fish for ambiance?), and that's very easy to confirm via the patch notes about a year after release in which the Verant devs say they stuck mobs and loot into Kedge. But on Green/Teal, the servers launched with Kedge in this later fully populated state. And yet, just because some jackass on the forums proved that mages were released with unintentionally broken research combines for all pets after level 34, the devs carefully went through and removed all high-level pet spells to ensure mages would get the classic experience of being released broken, even though I can't imagine anyone arguing that it was ever an "intended" part of the game design that one class should be missing its defining feature after mid-levels. The non-classic ZEMs are even odder: they're both not classic and demonstrably bad for the game, yet they're left unchanged with an ambivalent shrug. (Again, I'll disclaim that I quite like P99, and I don't think I could do a better job overall, etc.)
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Dec 20, 2019 20:21
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SilvergunSuperman posted:I loving love that you can buy gate potions for over a thousand plat, and they can still collapse. I have a strange fondness for this kind of thing, too. I guess it's the commitment to (harsh) world-building first and gameplay second. In this world, gate is sometimes unreliable, regardless of what you have to spend to cast it. It's like how the effects of invis and invis. vs undead potions can randomly drop (sometimes in the first couple seconds) just like the casted versions.
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Dec 22, 2019 15:58
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I've done two /list camps to completion on Teal: Guise and Rubicite Breastplate. Guise wasn't too bad, in that rear end/sup is a solid XP and loot camp, so you stay busy and have chances at some nice extra loot while you wait, making it just like most other dungeon camps but with occasional AFK checks and a fun cosmetic trinket at the end. It was boring when our group shrank to the point that it was too small to safely pull from outside the room, but during those times I just set the AFK warning window to bright red for visibility and stuck it to the side of the browser and VLC windows in which I could watch/read stuff while I 'played.' I guess it was worth it (as much as anything one does in a silly, ancient timesink MMO can be?), because it scratched whatever lingering psychological itch I felt from having barely missed out on a Guise back in '99. The Rubi BP /list was loving terrible. It took almost three times as long as the Guise, and the Avatar of Fear is a painfully boring camp even if you chain pull because it's just a bunch of alligators and healers for bad loot and middling XP. I can't fully explain why I tolerated it given that it was such a deeply unpleasant slog, and I don't like what it says about my innate addictive tendencies that I did it. I would absolutely not repeat the experience, and it successfully dissuaded me from even considering the Manastone or JBoots camps (not that a shaman needs either item). I don't see myself doing any of the future Kunark or Velious/lists, either, with the possible exception of a pre-nerf Circlet of Shadow for an Iksar necro alt.
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Dec 31, 2019 15:15
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Xerophyte posted:Yeah, I realized all that later, see the next post This feels premature to me. I was hoping they'd wait, if not all the way till Kunark (my preference), at least another month to see how the Plane of Fear's release would affect each server's population, because I'm pretty sure at least some of the recent population dip came from people taking a break after hitting 50 but before Fear. Oh well. I'm hopeful this should make lower-level grouping more flexible and varied for my alt, but I'm very glad I got most of the item farming I'd planned to do (e.g., Rubicite) out of the way before the population suddenly doubled without notice.
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Jan 19, 2020 23:31
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Arven posted:Green server goes Kunark next month. Oh yeah - thanks for the reminder. I’ll probably hop on at least long enough to bind myself at the firepots for future utility. I haven’t touched Green in a good six months. The Teal/Green merger followed soon after by the quarantine caused such a population explosion that I stopped finding it fun to log on. I was reminded that I like the idea of endgame EQ a hell of a lot more than I enjoy the actual experience of competitive raiding.
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Oct 28, 2020 05:25
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retpocileh posted:I got into P99 back in 2018, and went from playing video games maybe 0-2 hours a week to being logged in every free moment I had for like 16 of the next 24 months. I had way more days than I care to recall where I was basically logged in 16 hours from the moment I woke up until I went to bed. I had a similar experience with P99. I very briefly toyed with it around 2011 but was far too busy to really get into it, and then I completely forgot about it until I saw someone in a thread here mention that Green was coming up soon. I then played a completely ridiculous amount of Green from the time it launched until March 2020 or so. Oddly, I credit the pandemic with helping me step away; I found nothing fun about the sudden massive influx of players and resulting overcrowding from the lockdown, which came soon after the premature re-merging of Teal and Green. Classic simply wasn’t designed to handle that many players who all know exactly where to find the best loot and XP. I debated playing again with the release of Kunark and again with Velious, but I know that if I start it up again I will get sucked in and find myself sitting in another 20+ hour /list camp, trying to stay awake while asking myself why on earth I decided this was a good way to spend my time.
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Aug 7, 2021 20:07
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