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Welcome to the MMO Historians Anonymous Thread. This is where we can collectively reflect on our shared experience of playing these games in spite of everything inside of the game screaming at us that we shouldn't. A place where we can catalogue and laugh at the broken rear end mechanics, the convoluted design decisions, and the public outcry that resulted. I wanted to make some basic guidelines to not step into the realm of other threads (like the chat thread) while keeping this thread broad enough to include all these lovely games we play. 1.) If you have to ask if the topic you want to discuss happened too recently, it probably is. This is a historical thread. If the game in question has an active thread and the thing you want to discuss is relevant to the playerbase right now, you might as well talk about it there instead of here. 2.) If you have to ask whether the drama involved happened too recently, it probably is. Drama has to be old enough for all parties involved to look back and laugh at. 3.) Be chill. This isn't a thread about "my choice of mmo addiction is more X than your choice of mmo addiction." No one cares. None of us should be emotionally invested in these things to the point where we feel the need to defend or self-flagellate over them. Just share stories and laugh. 4.) If you make a post like "I wish Game X dictated the future of MMOs instead of Game Y," please recognize two things. One, we've all read that same post before, so add substance as to what mechanic or idea you wish was more prevalent. Two, one of these hack MMO developers would have stolen that idea if it was actually good to begin with. Here are my dumb EQ posts which prompted this thread.
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Sep 19, 2021 11:25
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Here's my last PoP era EQ rant and it's about all the missing stuff. First, I want to give a lot of credit where credit is due. Most of the PoP content in entry tier zones is there. The dev team definitely wanted a good entry experience for people breaking into PoP and it's certainly there. There really only is a couple changes that had to be made or things that had to bee added to the entry zones. But PoP suffers from the same problem Luclin did. The endgame was unfinished and untested while there are loose threads and a distinct lack of the character we found in Vanilla/Kunark/Velious. PoValor was probably the first place where the cracks started to appear for most people. You had all these cool named skeletons in the camps and some dropped jack squat on release. It wasn't until later that the Ornate Horn of the Valorous and a couple other items, which already existed in the loot db (found via scraping originally on PC servers, via item db number id linking on AK), were added to their drop tables. Fun fact about PoP brass instruments is the PoFire Blaring Horn of Fire from the Fennin event never dropped until the zone file was updated on AK, implying it had the same problem. The same problem happened in HoHa, where all of us on AK knew there was a really rare drop (Wrulon Eye earring) from trash, people had spent months worth of played time killing the trash that years worth of data from PC servers showed where the item drops, the item exists in the loot db (proven through item linking using db numbers), and yet it wasn't linked to any mob and could never drop until the zone was updated. Similarly, small changes had to be made to higher tier raid encounters. Grummus in PoD was fine, but it was clear less QA was performed in Crypt of Decay. People were able to z-axis exploit one of the mini named encounters (which I think people also pulled off with Mujaki in PoNa) and Bertox required several changes (he originally pathed through his halls and was a crazy bottleneck in early PoP) before becoming what he is today. It gets a little more extreme as you get into the elemental planes. I already mentioned all the pathing issues, but there was also something seriously broken with the literal water in PoWater. Water in every other zone acts like a line of sight barrier to prevent people from killing underwater NPCs from the safety of dry land. PoWater has a dry area for its zone in and graveyard. So you pop in on this little sandy beach and there's this tiny pool you hop in that is the first cave of Depth 1. Every single mob in Depth 1 with the exception of the Trilouns (little water goblins) is some sort of fish/turtle that can't leave the water. It was possible in the launch version of PoWater to pull any fish/turtle (including the named mobs that dropped class specific pet weapons) to the little entry pool and arrow them from above water while they sat there and took it. You try this in any other zone and the mob runs off after you leave the water or you get there generic you can't see your target message. But these idiot fish just sit there and take it. This is happening in a time where ranger bow DPS is finally a class defining feature and with elemental crafted bows taking them to the top of the charts. An unscrupulous ranger could make easily some of the safest and fastest AA exp in the game just clearing out Depth 1. But it doesn't stop there with the glaring errors. PoAir is a pain in the rear end to raid. It's a bunch of islands and castles linked by large bridges, reminiscent of PoSky in both appearance, tedium, and in-era difficulty. It even required a necrovac giving it full PoSky PTSD. Before all that you had to go through all these events where you had to kill the Avatars of Dust, Mist, Smoke, and Wind. Pull a bunch of mobs from a specific castle, pop the avatar, kill the avatar, get a part of the key to Xegony. Splitting the stuff in the castle can be a nightmare, especially the Avatar of Smoke who casts a long range single target spin stun. Sigismond, the Avatar of Dust, was always the biggest bottleneck because of the amount of CC and coordination required. For our guild on AK, we literally did it once to key the necrovac and called it good. The event was such a hassle to pull off and the Risk vs Reward was so skewed that we were better off bashing our head against a wall then get even the best drops from Sigismond. All of this culminated in the most broken encounter among the elemental gods. After completing these painfully difficult PoAir events you get access to this giant island that is simultaneously hilariously weird and pants shittingly fear inducing. Xegony, this gigantic elf-like woman in a night gown with butterfly wings and a massive sparkly wand is on this cloudy platform with a literal army of PoAir trash mobs lined up in regiments in front of her. All the trash is untargetable and does not agro. The original intention, and the way it worked on PC servers after being fixed, was that waves of these mobs would come to attack the raid as the fight progressed. On AK and at release, you could pull Xegony off the platform just right and there would be zero interaction from the waves of mobs. In fact, it was the only way to engage Xegony at all because the entire script was busted. On AK, it got to the point where if we had a low turnout out raid, Xegony was the default encounter and we had cloth pants patterns and Vests of Phoenix feathers going to alts or rotting. There were even internal arguments over just opening her up to offnight raids because she was seen as such a pushover (like literally possible to do with 2-3 groups). You might be wondering why only cloth pant patterns were rotting since, for the longest time, every elemental god has had a random chance of dropping any elemental pant mold/pattern. Well launch PoP wanted to torture plate and chain classes because Rathe was the only god that dropped the elemental plate pant mold, Coirnav was the only one who dropped chain, Fennin was the one who dropped leather, and Xegony was the only one who dropped cloth. You can see why tank classes had a conniption over this itemization decision, especially in light of the pre-nerf Rathe encounter. But I'm about to bring this thing full circle. In my first post I brought up Furor's infamous "one week," rant. It was about PoTime and it was after LoY launch. What he was complaining about was the fact that it took more than 60 people to kill Rathe and then your introduction to PoTime is these trials which only allow three groups per encounter. 18 people. What he didn't mention was that you can run them concurrently and that the original intention was that a large raid would bust through all these by splitting up and meeting in the next area for the next Phase. The encounters themselves worked and the script on release was fine, but the drops you see are not the items that were originally in the item db. Stats were very different, with STR and STA (two stats that everyone had already maxed prior to PoTime or even the Elemental Planes) being wildly over-represented. There were odd hiccups here and there with the encounters later in PoTime but nothing too out of the ordinary for your average EQ encounter. But again, all this amazing loot with game changing Mod2s like strikethrough were completely absent (fun fact about mod2s, a rough draft of them could be found in earlier versions of the spdat used to scrape spell information). Some of the item defining clickable effects were even missing. The sweet cherry on top of all these itemization woes was the final combine for all the chest pieces (with correct mold/pattern, emblems, and components) yielded no successful combine. At launch, there was no class specific chest piece for end game PoP. But that wasn't even the best part of PoTime. Quarm. On initial release he was a broken big rear end Doug model. The first "working," Quarm was completely unslowable (assumed to be a reverser!) with massive unresistable AEs (including an AE stun) that were not blocked by line of sight from zone walls. Based on spdat info it was presumed these AEs increased in severity at certain HP thresholds when one of the other AEs was lost. It took three fixes (slowable with no AE stun, then inclusion of line of sight blocking from zone walls with AE stun) before he was finally brought to his current form. It's so clear that the detailed and well thought out work was invested early on in PoP. You notice the entry level zones of PoP have all these fun events evocative of The Caller Cycle in FG or The Plate Cycle in KD while being unique. Meanwhile the elemental planes have exactly one example of that. PoJ has 8 trials before you unlock the tribunal, PoInnovation has two scripted events (combat testing and Xanamech), PoNa has four events (Deyid, Mujaki, Hedge, and the Hobgoblin caves), PoStorms has a bunch (giant forts, turkeybees, the forest event, the frog cave)... The elemental one I mentioned? Yeah it's a direct copy of the FG Caller Cycle but in PoWater. PoJ, arguably the first zone you spend any time getting experience in, relative to the rest of PoP has the most character with a whole bunch of prisoners with backstory that they recite in their native language, with a crazy tunnel system filled with bugs breaking into an eternal prison, on top of these wildly different trials. None of that character exists outside of superficial asset design the further you get into PoP. PS: I forgot to mention the Pit War in PoTactics, infamous on AK as an exploit unscrupulous people used to skyrocket their AA exp. The devs never learned their lessen from Sanctus Seru that it's a bad idea having two opposing factions close in proximity that are easily charmable. It was possible to take a charmed pet in the PoTactics pit on one faction, have it attack a mob of the opposing faction, break charm while the pet was casting a spell, and just watch as the two groups of NPCs kick the poo poo out of each other while the person who charmed the NPC just soaks up all the exp. Vinestalk fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Sep 19, 2021 |
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Sep 19, 2021 12:20
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i'm incredibly stoked for this thread and the op is a gentleman and a scholar I want to add a couple of my own EQ things to the pile: there was a zone in the first expansion called the Plane of Mischief, a presumably endgame zone with a bunch of broken rear end quests, barely any hostile mobs and the entrance was at the rear end-end of one of the top raid zones of the expansion past a ton of drakes and dragons that see through invisibility and are capable of annihilating you in an instant. When people first entered this zone, it was extremely unfinished and it went through several revisions over the course of the expansion until 2-ish expansions later when it got completely gutted and redone to be a more standard exp grouping spot and I have a hypothesis as to why there was such a thorough revamp: you could get pretty decent, completely risk-free mostly-afk exp in this zone by exploiting some uncommon mob behaviors. this wasn't an issue during the expansion when it came out because there was nothing to do with surplus exp once you were max level, but the two subsequent expansions added Alternate Advancement points where you could grind out new abilities ranging from basic "you take less damage / you deal more damage" to gamechanging stuff like "you can now cast your group buffs on every single person in range / you can now dump enormous mana regen on every single person in range every 15 minutes or so / every once in awhile your melee attack takes half the mobs health off if it's undead" so grinding exp once you were level capped was heavily incentivized and the places where you could get good exp were limited, there were no instances and the vast majority of the good exp spots were locked behind raid progression, so enter Plane of Mischief: the idea here is that in the rear end-end of the zone there was a section of castle called the Alice in Wonderland wing that started out with tiny rooms and tiny mobs and as you progressed through identical hallways everything got bigger until you reached the end and all the furniture towered over you (presumably this is ripped from a scene in Alice in Wonderland but i've never read a book). in the largest room there were 2 archers permanently rooted on top of some tables and here's where poo poo gets weird: EQ tracked mob archery attacks as separate entities from whatever was shooting them, meaning that they could aggro mobs that get in the way and they also didn't contribute to the amount of damage done to the target for the purposes of calculating who gets exp+loot when the mob dies. This dumb rear end zone just gave you a room with a ton of kiting space and clear line of sight and two high level archers that CANNOT EVER MOVE so basically you'd drag mobs into the room and piss off the archers so they both start shooting your target, the archers win because it's 2v1 and they're among the higher level mobs in the zone, then you just repeat this until you've cleared out the entire wing of mobs and turn the archers on each other. the respawn time was several hours, so you'd ideally do this before work/school/waiting for laundry/whatever other important poo poo you had going on then once the area is cleared out you just leave or log out the real pro move to maximize your zero-effort exp grind was to set your bind point to the hallway outside the archer room since that spot was like a 5 minute run to a common port hub where you could pretty much always find someone to teleport you back to civilization, then you just gate back before you log for the night and hop back in the next morning for a quick exp run. these mobs also dropped valuable tradeable quest components so you could get some pretty okay cash by doing this, but this one spot is very likely the reason the developers changed the zone so thoroughly
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Sep 19, 2021 12:49
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One more weird EQ thing: Here's what I did to pay for most of college by playing a video game instead of working a real job This was during the era Vinestalk is talking about, during the Planes of Power expansion you would acquire your new PoP spells by killing rare spawns and looting non-tradeable spell runes, you then turn these in to one of the various classes spell vendors in the Plane of Knowledge and out pops a random tradeable spell of whatever level the rune was - so you had to kill harder mobs to get the higher level spells and it was entirely random what one you got out of that levels spell set but you could pick which classes spells you wanted to target by just going to different class vendors I played a Necromancer which was a class with several important features: life drain abilities, high mana regen, invisibility, the ability to charm (mind control) undead and feign death Here's what you did: do whatever you can to gain access to the Plane of Tactics, somehow acquire a copy of the PoP Undead Charm and get one of the items that instantly casts some form of invisibility on you. The invisibility is important, because if you go invisible your charm immediately breaks and the mob that used to be your pet is now hostile towards you. The Plane of Tactics had a pit in the center that was brimming with all kinds of mobs on several unrelated factions with a bunch of mob-filled hallways where several rare spawns can spawn, but more importantly you would occasionally find an undead that can be charmed AND is a spellcaster The reason you want a spellcaster mob is because if you break charm while a mob is casting a spell, its AI is not smart enough to cancel the cast and swap targets back to you, instead it will finish casting on whatever it had targeted before you broke charm. The idea is this: you get your undead wizard to cast a damage ability on a mob of a different faction, then mobs of faction A (your former wizard pet) will assist your former pet while mobs of faction B will assist his target - then you apply 1 point of damage to every mob in the pile and just keep dragging more and more mobs into the clump (feigning death every time you screw up and just tossing more damage out when you pop back up), grinding the entire zone to a screeching halt for anyone unfortunate enough to be trying to use the zone while you're farming This spot gave absurd EXP but it was also a source of some rather nice tradeable gear AND spell runes! You just clear out mobs for awhile until you either screw up and die or someone starts yelling at you to stop stealing the entire good part of the zone, take your loot + spell runes and then get ready to sell all the plat you make for $$$ which goes towards textbooks and living expenses edit: you would also max out your alternate advancement points super quick here because of the volume of mobs being slaughtered that you get full credit for, someone far more greasy than I could probably have sold group slots to people wanting to be powerleveled but I just gave those spots out to people who promised not to talk about what I was doing blatman fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Sep 19, 2021 |
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Sep 19, 2021 13:03
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awesome thread. since we're on the topic of EQ. I heard once that a lot of the EQ sounds were from a commercial sound pack in the popular 90s , which is why you here the quest trumpets, dings, spooky forest sounds and whatnot in all sorts of other media like radio advertisements, sampled in music, etc. does anyone have more information or background on that?
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Sep 19, 2021 17:05
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I've often wondered what EQ might have become if Luclin had never happened and PoP were released in an actual finished state. I don't know that there would/could have been a redeemable version of SoL: the new models were one of the worst things the devs ever did and the raid scene seemed to embrace and magnify all the worst elements of Kunark (endless key camps) and Velious (boss fights that take an hour of AFK auto attacking). I liked the alt advance point system in principle, but in practice it just meant more grinding, mostly for tiny incremental upgrades. PoP had such amazing potential, though. The aesthetics were great and did a nice job offering a concrete payoff to a bunch of the god-related lore, and the raid encounters actually tried doing new/different things. It's a shame the whole thing was so rushed (and/or mismanaged, probably?) that at least half of its end-game content didn't function on a basic mechanical level.
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Sep 19, 2021 19:27
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I sometimes wonder what EQ would have been like if the devs didn't shift their focus almost entirely to raid content in a game that predated instancing tbh, I feel like PoP would have been phenomenal if the best exp zones weren't locked behind months of open-world raid encounters that higher tier guilds are incentivized to farm (either to keep you out of the good zones, or because it's goddamn Rallos Zek and he drops the good warrior weapon) the expansion was awesome looking with a rad story though, just most players didn't get to see most of it
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Sep 19, 2021 20:07
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As someone who bounced off EQ pretty hard back in the day, what would be (or is there at all) a decent way to run around its world and look at all this cool sounding poo poo without actually putting months of time into doing so? The stories about breaking it are all great.
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Sep 19, 2021 20:34
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I knew I was hooked in EQ when I was brave enough to take my first character, a level 10 high elf paladin, to a strange and dangerous new city called Freeport. I made it past the roaming ogres in Butcherblock and made it all the way to the docks. I got on the boat and decided to explore the lower hold of the ship. A few moments after zoning into the Ocean of Tears, I fell through the bottom of the boat. I swam and swam, my stamina eventually depleted, and I gave up, sinking to the bottom of the ocean. It was devastating. I tried to get my corpse back somehow, but failed. I wandered around Faydwer naked and afraid until I realized the only path forward was to roll a new character. A hard lesson learned, but it defined that game (and all MMOs) for me forever.
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Sep 20, 2021 00:16
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cmdrk posted:awesome thread. i dont have any specifics on it but i can tell you if you show this clip (from 1994) to anyone who ever played a lot of EQ it will gently caress with their brain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEItCGjqcmc
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Sep 20, 2021 00:24
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Never forget the "it's time to slay the dragon" commercial.
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Sep 20, 2021 00:27
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I have that handy too, its a pretty frequent reference on mischief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CHG_To7Ag
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Sep 20, 2021 00:33
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There used to be an iksar monk named Irontail I think that had his own ezboard where he posted his adventures in the plane of mischief. Also where people worked on figuring out the puzzles there. Sadly it looks like there are no archives of the board, at least my few minutes on google proved fruitless.
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Sep 20, 2021 00:38
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Since it will come up eventually, here's Fansy the Famous Bard: https://www.notacult.com/fansythefamous.htm
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Sep 20, 2021 03:01
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napster of meat posted:Since it will come up eventually, here's Fansy the Famous Bard: https://www.notacult.com/fansythefamous.htm [Thu Jul 05 00:19:35 2001] Vehementer tells you, 'nice rear end hole' [Thu Jul 05 00:19:46 2001] You told Vehementer, 'Thanks! I'm a virgin'
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Sep 20, 2021 03:56
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Ad by Khad posted:I have that handy too, its a pretty frequent reference on mischief 
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Sep 20, 2021 04:24
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Dizz posted:[Thu Jul 05 00:19:35 2001] Vehementer tells you, 'nice rear end hole' lmao I’m very excited for this thread. I only started playing MMOs with SWG so I love hearing about wacky stuff from the earlier days.
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Sep 20, 2021 04:26
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Zil posted:There used to be an iksar monk named Irontail I think that had his own ezboard where he posted his adventures in the plane of mischief. Also where people worked on figuring out the puzzles there. the ezboard is lost to time but planeofmischief.com is still around with a lot of that old info! http://www.planeofmischief.com/ quote:Site best viewed in 800x600
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Sep 20, 2021 05:27
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Ad by Khad posted:i dont have any specifics on it but i can tell you if you show this clip (from 1994) to anyone who ever played a lot of EQ it will gently caress with their brain Yeah, I was listening to a random electronic album at work and around the 18 minute mark I started questioning my sanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEdUddGvoac
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Sep 20, 2021 05:28
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Orv posted:As someone who bounced off EQ pretty hard back in the day, what would be (or is there at all) a decent way to run around its world and look at all this cool sounding poo poo without actually putting months of time into doing so? I haven't played retail since the mid-2000s, but I've heard it doesn't take much effort to go through all the old content. There's also a shitload of info out there about making your own sever based off the platinum client and giving yourself GM powers/items. Ad by Khad posted:i dont have any specifics on it but i can tell you if you show this clip (from 1994) to anyone who ever played a lot of EQ it will gently caress with their brain It is pretty wild hearing, for example, the spooky whispering that I remember from Unrest and PoHate show up in the title sequence of Supernatural. loving wild. Kaysette posted:lmao Share some SWG, my friend. I got a couple other effort posts I think I could make. One would be about the effect parsing and magelo had on EQ during the game's heyday. The other would be about project 52 and the overwhelming cries of nerf monks.
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Sep 20, 2021 08:09
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apparently the EQ devs recently added a feature for normal servers that allows you to make an instance of any of the old open-world raid content except it's extremely broken and barely works when they get around to fixing it you could level a dude up on the Test server for zero dollars, use the serverwide xp bonus to grind up high enough to solo everything and then just go on a grand tour, punching dragons and gods left and right
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Sep 20, 2021 11:02
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recently got tricked into playing p99 and while i don't know much about everquest as a whole, it still amazes me that they don't at least implement tons of future expansion Quality of life stuff into the '99' servers. even if you want to debate whether something can be improved upon it shouldn't be hard to revise things and add it so you can have an enhanced experience with less crust and jank.
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Sep 20, 2021 15:05
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I'm curious if anyone else ever experienced something similar in EverQuest... I had a level 7 or so Wood Elf Bard back in classic EQ. I couldn't find a group so I was soloing goblin camps in Butcherblock mountains. It was extremely slow but reliable XP and okay loot - cloth armor, backpacks, the occasional cracked staff. Out of nowhere an item dropped that I had never seen before. "Box of Abu-Kar" https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=2369 It's a box with giant size capacity that gives 100% weight reduction. I loot the box and close out of the game to research it because it was impossible to alt-tab out of the game at the time. I look it up on Allakhazam and the various EQ forums and realize this thing is rare and highly sought after. So I log back in and head to East Commons tunnel and /auction WTS Box of Abu-Kar and suddenly I'm flooded with offers. I ended up clearing a couple thousand plat. It still blows my mind that this super valuable item dropped off a random level 6 goblin in Butcherblock Mountains. I still have no idea if it was some kind of bug or if it was a completely random drop and I was super lucky.
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Sep 20, 2021 15:25
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i think early on it was designed as an extremely rare drop. or maybe someone traded it to a mob and was trying to kill it on an alt to transfer?
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Sep 20, 2021 15:30
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Alright, here's a fun broken thing from SWG pre CU. Area attacks looked for what I called "collisions" at the time but essentially it was looking for the presence of mobs - - dead or alive. It would then dispense damage one attack per collision to all living mobs, but it seemed to only work in small enclosed spaces. There were somewhat static imperial and rebel bases with fast or near instant spawns. As you can imagine, you could penny-macro insta killing mobs after you got it rolling. Our guild would sit in one of these trading off shifts and never really letting it catch up until downtime. You could also try to lure faction pvp into the kill house, it was a wild ride but again a different time in MMO history. We got reported numerous times and it was just laughed off till fixed. Given the sandbox nature of the game it wasn't some insane super server breaking advantage, just a quick farming quirk.
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Sep 20, 2021 16:52
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Orv posted:As someone who bounced off EQ pretty hard back in the day, what would be (or is there at all) a decent way to run around its world and look at all this cool sounding poo poo without actually putting months of time into doing so? I just did this myself. You'll want to install eqemu on your machine and run a server, then download a client. I used the EQ Titanium client, which is what P99 uses (the most popular eq emulator currently), but it only gets you access to the first 10 expansions. Honestly, the first 5 expansions are all that really matter anyway. Run the server, connect with your client, set yourself as a GM and you have a pretty good recreation of a lot of the content. You can run around as whatever race and class you want and fight poo poo or use your GM powers to roll through everything and check it out. Here's the EQEmu install guide, there's a package for Windows that does everything for you all in one go - https://docs.eqemu.io/server/categories/installation/server-installation-windows Ehud posted:I'm curious if anyone else ever experienced something similar in EverQuest... This happened to me! I was killing poo poo in the newbie yard in Qeynos, when a bat or a gnoll or whatever dropped some magic cloak with stats. I sold it for 50pp or something, which was a huge windfall for me and my buddy and let us actually afford spells. I always figured some higher level dude had just stopped by and dropped it onto a mob out of charity.
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Sep 20, 2021 18:01
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Another fun thing to do you could do with an enchanter, is charm a low level mob give it all kinds of buffs give it summoned mage weapons and then break charm by zoning. It would turn into pretty much a newbie blender. Really made breaking an orc camp a nasty surprise.
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Sep 20, 2021 18:17
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Speaking of Everquest history a former EQ dev is doing tons of long interviews of former EQ/Vanguard programmers/artists/producers and even the original composer. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFl_3ktLNPYUeicLmhSvB1Q/videos They run up to 2 hours so there is massive amount of really neat information about dev/lore/people involved etc. Not sure if anyone is taking point form notes of all of the videos though. I've only had time to watch a couple: Tools were loving atrocious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSwlYjROw84 Someone hacked Brads account and started mass banning a rival guild https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t__5bTvAaQc More info about Conquest being banned in sleepers tomb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTWdpXvxneQ Mounts were pushed in SoL by a Sony higher up who didn't play games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTWdpXvxneQ Shorter video about Project M (man that was fun the week or so it was in the game) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF_qJxw5bCg Justaddwater fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Sep 20, 2021 |
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Sep 20, 2021 20:59
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I made a post back in 2018 about how much I loved EQOA, which imo is really a criminally underrecognized entry in the seriesFrog Act posted:EQOA was really good because it was like an EQ lite that I found extremely graphically pleasing on account of its use of bright primary colors (presumably to accomodate the slowness of the PS2). It had a lot of stuff that was just taken directly out of EQ classic, like the general zone of Norrath, the classes, the cities, and many of the abilities, but the gameplay was fundamentally different. It was made to be played with a controller so you had a tight rotation of spells that functioned like the regular spellbook, but both physical and caster classes had a nice array of them. Every class had a unique and useful role like in regular EQ and they were mirror versions slightly tweaked - like Shaman had better debuffs and a set of very cool pets (bears and wolves instead of just one wolf) and they had both SoW and a spirit wolf travel form.
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Sep 20, 2021 21:20
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Re: old plane of mischief. I was one of those knuckleheads that bound there the first time we broke into North Temple of Veeshan because I was a wizard and could teleport out whenever I wanted. Or at least until the revamp well into LDON Era. It was such a weird place and there was almost nothing that was straight aggressive once you got past the flowers in the front yard. I think a big part of the magic was that the loot tables were hot nonsense and for a long time people weren't sure if it was intended or if it was part of unmarked quests / box combines. Turns out it was both if project 99 is to be believed. And by the time that people really started to figure out out and the knowledge went wider, they changed the zone, moved the entrance to Great Divide, and made it way less interesting. Edit 2 - also the rewards for plane of mischief were really not great given what you had to do to get there. It was more like a fun post raid vacation spot. And also most of the mobs there were single groupable, you didn't need to roll raid deep - partially because hard melee couldn't bind there and partially because it was literally a joke zone in the back of the second hardest raid dungeon of the expansion. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Sep 20, 2021 |
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Sep 20, 2021 22:53
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Vinestalk posted:I haven't played retail since the mid-2000s, but I've heard it doesn't take much effort to go through all the old content. retpocileh posted:I just did this myself. Thanks to you both, I'll have to mess with this this weekend.
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Sep 20, 2021 23:49
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if you're gonna mess around in eqemu just be aware that the zones from the original game and first two expansions can really look like poo poo in those later clients. you'll see a jarring mishmash of high-res models and textures mixed in with the old stuff. lighting/particle effects can look hosed up due to changes in the rendering engine over the years. there isn't much you can do to fix it, at least not easily. it's absolutely worth dicking around in though. the game has some masterpieces of dungeon design. check out Kedge Keep sometime (lmao)
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Sep 21, 2021 00:23
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This is bringing back fond memories of when my raiding alliance finally took down xegony and my job as a bard was to.... mana song the clerics CHing the tank while the rest of the raid dealt with the ads. good 1.5 hours of boredom
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Sep 21, 2021 01:38
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Justaddwater posted:
I loved playing as an NPC for that brief moment in time. I wish they did something more with it.
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Sep 21, 2021 01:48
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Anyone remember this animation from the old EQ days? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR5y_VpHp8o
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Sep 21, 2021 04:25
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Nunes posted:Anyone remember this animation from the old EQ days? They also did Has Anyone Seen My Corpse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW_yVGPd0ns
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Sep 21, 2021 04:33
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blatman posted:apparently the EQ devs recently added a feature for normal servers that allows you to make an instance of any of the old open-world raid content except it's extremely broken and barely works They’re gonna have to implement some sort of fix. The AOC instance feature was working fine from our perspective on the tlp but when they added it to the free servers it started bugging out for everyone, mostly in terms of properly registering correctly flagged players. It’s caused some fuckery on the TLPs where it had been working just fine. Set our raid back about two hours (been a fun a launch :eyeroll: ). Good ole 22 year old spaghetti code. You should be able to do that on test right now just fine especially since it generally doesn’t care about old flags, which is the big bug I’ve been reading about.
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Sep 21, 2021 09:23
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All right. In the ancient days of EQ, people swung at poo poo and were content at knowing that they were able to kill it faster than they were being killed. Got to loot the mob instead of your own corpse? Mission loving accomplished. But with the expectations that certain classes were capable of doing more damage than others, and without any means of proving it, the intrepid began looking for answers. This is when a select few started looking at the log file. A text document that was generated when you typed "/log on" that catalogued everything that showed up in your text boxes. For those that remember the old days of EQ, in an era where there was literally one text box superimposed over a scroll, sometimes that document was the only way you could immortalize some of the hilarity or wisdom you came across in the world. Our original pioneers began to use this document to scrape information from the world that was otherwise not readily available. The first group to try this were a small handful that used scripts and basic programming skills to just extract data from their text files and leave it at that. They used it to figure out how much damage output and HP early raid encounters had. But some of our pioneers looked at this text document and thought "how can I prove I poo poo on all these other nerds?" When people realized that more information could be gleaned by filtering out less text from the text box, you could then have an approximation of everybody's damage. It was flawed, because a player's access to this text information was based on proximity. For example, a wizard collecting data from max casting range had no clue what the damage output of the rogues were doing while they were positioned directly behind the encounter. But this parsing revelation, and with increased customization of the UI and text information that came with Velious, led to an explosion in the availability of these chat log programs. But they all ended up falling to the log parser to rule them all. Yet Another Log Parser. YALP gave people what they wanted. It put all that amazing data into pie graphs and tables of digestible numbers which let you know you were king big poo poo of gently caress mountain. The official EQ forums were flooded with people parsing information and using it to argue mechanics. Each class had an unofficial offsite forum and information repository that became echo chambers of "this poo poo needs to be fixed," and "we don't do x as well as class y, wtf?" Imagine giving a chimp an abacus, poking the chimp to agitate it, and throwing it in with the rest of the other chimps. They don't know how to use that loving thing, they're just going to beat the other chimps with it. That was the impact the parsing proliferation had on the EQ community. You had armchair statisticians making conclusions based off of flawed proximity data. You had massive assumptions being made off of overnight parses gathered on a green NPC with zero mitigation/defense. You had people altering text files, parsing it, and posting false data to gently caress with people. Turmoil! It wasn't all bad, though. Because a lot poo poo was also uncovered via parsing to that got broken things fixed. With the advent of AAs came the introduction of modifiers to stats that weren't always coded correctly or properly tested themselves (fuckin Luclin, man), the community stepped up and helped fix a ton of the aspects of the game. There was also a massive bug that had been in the game since the very beginning which impacted every melee character that wasn't uncovered until almost a decade after initial release. Haste was considered one of the most important things to pick up if your class swung a weapon. FBSS? A market defining item in classic. Kunark release? RBG and Siblisian Berserker Cloak are THE items if you couldn't get an RBB. Yeah, every melee class was hunting their own other stats, but if you didn't have a haste item as a melee class then people probably didn't take you seriously. Enchanters, shamans, and bards? Some of the most in demand classes for groups BECAUSE they offered a haste buff that stacked with the haste on your worn items. The Eyepatch of Plunder and its notoriously lovely and contested Stormfeather camp? A clickable haste buff. The monk epic that people tortured themselves camping raster for? A clickable haste buff. The weapon delay and itemization of entire expansions depended on the idea that capped worn haste and buff haste lowered the delay by an expected amount. The Mosscovered Twig from Kunark, a 3 damage and 10 delay weapon, completely removed from the game because the devs learned they needed a limit on how fast people could swing a weapon. And they didn't even know all those numbers were bullshit. This bard named moejoejoejoe does this deep dive in 2007 where he hastes himself and just swings at a dummy mob for hours on end. He does this because he got this weapon upgrade with lower delay and he expected to see a spike in his DPS but ends up seeing jack squat. So while he's hitting this dummy he's changing how much he is hasting himself and he's changing which weapons he's using to look at how quickly he is actually swinging. He finds out this convoluted rear end game is just rounding up the entire time. If you have a 20 delay weapon, you will swing it at the same speed if you are at 89% haste or 101% haste even though the haste cap is 125%. The 25/25 Possessed Sacrificial Cleaver from a Ring War-like event in Luclin (not even from Vex Thal!) does more DPS than the 29/30 sword that drops from Rathe or the 20/20 Edge of Eternity from Plane of Time. Years worth of work determining the stats on dropped items and the expected power creep of players over time is thrown on its head. The fallout from this is so big the dev team scrambles to fix it in the next patch. They have to rig it so all those little decimals points they were previously rounding up get turned into a swing. So, while parsing played a big impact in the game, there was never really a big gatekeeping aspect to it. Parsers were never integrated into the original EQ UI during my time. You always needed to tab out and load up a program to run a parse on a text file. Later iterations became real time parsers with audio cues, but they were all external programs. The DPS meter gatekeeping stuff came with WoW. However, gatekeeping was still a huge aspect of grouping and applying to guilds at the high end. The way this was done was through magelo. Back in the early days of EQ, gear had distinctive colors and, in some cases, graphics. You knew a Kunark era paladin was hot poo poo when they walked around in a set of blue and gold armor and a fancy rear end sword because only Valorium mixed with Deepwater armor and Fiery Defender looked that way. You could also inspect people and check out their gear, but it didn't show stats and let's just say there was a weird culture around inspecting people without permission during early EQ. But seeing another character's gear changed as players became more comfortable utilizing unofficial resources (Allakhazam, parsers, offsite class forums, etc...). I want to say around Velious or early Luclin is when Magelo launched. Create a character on their website and load it up with the gear you have in EQ and it did a reasonable job approximating your stats. Holy poo poo! You could change stuff up to get an idea how certain gear upgrades would impact your stats, you could look at how AAs might change things, you could provide context for all those parses and discussions you had on your class forums, you could just show off your gear to a buddy you know on another server. Features got added to this, like ranked lists for top HP/AC for warriors in the game or on a server. People could search for other players based on name and server. With PoP, you could see what flags and keys people had updated. And all this poo poo began opening a can of worms. Want to raid with our guild? Link your magelo. Oh, you want to tank for our Ssra basement group? Link your magelo. You'd like to join this pickup raid? Link your magelo. Wait, you want to roll on this drop? Link your magelo. It was the progenitor of the Item Level. And when people started making fake magelo accounts and people cried about authenticity, magelo started forcing players to have an authentic account by playing with a proprietary program running which gathered info on your character. And people agreed with this because "wait, is your magelo authed?" A lot of these early ventures into understanding the game and navigating it and building a community around it were things that informed design decisions in WoW and FFXI and consequently every MMO after. It's always interesting hearing these modern debates of WoW vs FFXIV around DPS meters and remembering all the dumb poo poo I used to use YALP for.
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Sep 21, 2021 10:17
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The mosscovered twig was also so dominant because of the way bonus damage was calculated, namely that it was just a flat modifier on top, so something that applied it twice as often or more became exceptionally silly. It was a 10 delay weapon in a world of 25-30 delay weapons.
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Sep 21, 2021 13:38
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I am so excited for this thread because stories about old MMOs are my favorite. I'd like to share some that I recently wrote up in a different thread about the first MMO I ever loved, Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds.Harrow posted:I have so many stories that I've probably posted in this thread before, it was a wild game and I loved it. Harrow posted:One other Nexus thing that went away while I was playing was the market. And here's one on the theme of "what the hell were they thinking": Harrow posted:Every class in Nexus had one subclass that didn't require roleplaying and wasn't a player-run organization, you just had to do a quest once you were max level to join up. These were named after Four Symbols in Chinese constellations. The Warrior one was Chung Ryong (Azure Dragon), Mage had Ju Jak (Vermillion Bird), Poet had Hyun Moo (Black Tortoise), and Rogue had Baekho (White Tiger). These had their own special abilities as well and were generally more designed for combat than the roleplay subclasses because, well, if you weren't into roleplaying you were probably more into doing dungeons and fighting bosses. Harrow fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Sep 21, 2021 |
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Sep 21, 2021 14:04
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