/vr/ - Retro Games

Like if I make a new character I can take a totally different path from 1-60. Fight in totally different zones.

If I make a enchanter I can grind solo making monsters my pet having them fight until both are low then killing my pet for the xp too. The charm can also break and it can shit on my face. How fucking cool is that? You also have a spell that makes Mana Regen faster and are a master of crowd control.

Play a bard and solo kite swarm the entire zone. At 60 I can do this for money to power level people. You also do a okay job at filling just about every role in a group.

You can be a druid and port people around for money because fast travel doesn't exist.

You can be a necro and summon people's corpses to you because when you die all your items drop and you gotta get your body somehow.

You can be a mage and summon items and play the unreplaceable role of summoning players to you so you can get your force to the fight fast.

Notice how all the roles play important parts, literally everything in the game requires working with other players, from travelling to recovering from death. Every class plays a critical part. Even the lowly ranger plays a critical role of being able to track mobs.

Does any mmo even come fucking close to this amount of immersion and team work?

>>4874782
>Why had no mmo come close to capturing the level of exploration, teamwork, epicness of everquest?
Because most people don't want to put up with the bullshit design aspects required for that. Everquest's philosophy was the mud philosophy of:

> your class sucks
> your character sucks
> you can't do anything fun without help and even if you can
> fucking up is going to cost you multiple hours of progress.
> Rewards will be drip-fed to you more slowly than you ever imagined possible.

Some pros and cons related to this.

> PRO: Items carried legit in-game social status
> CON:
You'll be happy with an item that grants you a trivial amount of mana that will never make the difference in a battle, ever.

>PRO: Enforced Cooperation
>CON:
The most effective means of cooperating often results in mindless, repetitive resource optimization for hours on end.

> PRO: Non-instanced content makes the world seem real and meaningful
> CON:
Also means you have to deal with kill-stealing assholes, trains, crowded zones, and zones designed for multiple levels at a time making it hard to ever do a real dungeon crawl without getting in over your head.

> PRO: Politics, reputation and social interaction
> CON:
Obnoxious "social zones" with community rules and fucking wait lists to get into massively overpowered groups that rip the loot-bearing mobs to shreds before their feet hit the ground. Then, in those zones, having to listen to babies bicker and argue about which mobs 'belong' to which camp and other nanny bullshit.

> PRO: Game world populations segregated by natural barriers.
> CON:
Spending an entire 2-hour play session doing nothing but travel.

For most people, games like WoW eliminated most of of those CONS while sort of keeping the rest of the gameplay intact or enhanced. So of the 450,000 subscribers that EQ had during its peak, only a small handful are still interested in playing.

>>4874903

Yeah live did have a lot of these issues and project 1999 is kinda the right size the servers should be. Enough people you can find a group, not so many people you're fighting over entrance mobs.

I think that got better by the time pop dropped and there was plenty of spots to xp at.

Travel is a pain in the ass but I feel like you appreciate the world a bit more, you had to figure out how to get across zones with mobs that can kill you even at Max. You that mini dopamine shot just getting to where you had to go.

Eq was by no means perfection which is why I'd love someone to take a stab at something similar again.

Wow I played during uh catalysism but I hit max soloing, did all the raids (not all heroic though) and was bored in 3 months. Gear was meaningless because even if I get heroic gear the next expansion will have better drops in the xp areas, everything is no drop so even during that expansion it's not like I can now duo a mob with a valuable drop because they don't really exist. Money is kinda meaningless because everything is no drop and fairly easy to obtain.

I mean the major benefit is I was playing with friends in under a week. Downside is I got bored before even my 3 month sub was up.

What I realized playing eq is despite all the pain and bullshit game play mechanics when you succeed it's rewarding as hell. Like I won a fungi the other day, not even that rare or worth that much but man it felt really good.

I think there is a room for a mmo that is hardcore, like you don't need to hit half a million or take down wow, just enough to pay the bills and have a healthy server pop. I'd have more faith in pantheon if it wasn't fucking Brad.

i wish this board had a eq/p99 general. ive tried several times but there just isnt enough people on this board that play. and you are correct, i cant play ANY mmo because they are all just too piss easy push right to win bullshit. even live is still good with so much content it would take years just to master 1 class to be good enough to get into end tier raiding guilds.

>>4874975

I'm more of a fan of shit up to pop. After that things got kinda wacky. I really enjoyed my time on project eq when they weren't even done pop - way back (before even p99 existed )

Pop was sorta the best time since you had plenty of shit to do - if you weren't raiding you could be grinding AA and there was a good couple thousand to get before you hit diminishing returns. It was fun being able to be retarded powerful once you hit a few thousand aa. I guess it broke the game a bit.

Velious raid gear was still decent like I used bow of destroyer from tov for a long ass time due to the low delay + endless quiver ment you would be out dpsing groups due to crits.

Plenty of shit to do in luclin - ssra was pretty cool. Grinding those weapons was a huge pain in the ass though. Pop had all the planes and trials which were pretty neat.

Kinda sad I didn't get to play eqmac more. I'm sure the game was a total mess like p99 is since it was stuck at pop until the end but it would have been a cool experience. I think fuckers were denying pixels to the very end there. Probably some retardedly maxed out people too. Bis everything, every aa. I mean it's nutty some of the people on p99. Just getting a epic for many classes involves joining am and waking up to batphones for a few months and you're just bidding against people who want to mq shit for money.

I guess it's hard to do a eq thread since everyone is busy actually playing or shit posting on the p99 rnf board. Holy fuck are those guys savage. Shits not healthy but sure entertaining to watch. Only forum that comes close was the darkfall forum where the mods gave up and basically let people shit talk the developers and company. Some hurtful stuff said. Poor tasos.

its mostly nostalgia but its also ambitious and full of soul that has its rough edges but still has a unique feeling other mmos lack

>>4875145

I mean nostalgia gets you to install but something else keeps you camping fungi for 10 hours straight or getting up in the middle of the night to down a target.

Mental illness maybe.

>>4874936
>Eq was by no means perfection which is why I'd love someone to take a stab at something similar again.
Maybe it'll happen, but I don't think so. EQ landed at the perfect time where lots of players were looking for an online RPG experience and willing to tolerate EQ's bullshit to have it. Some played just because it was an online social experience. In 1999 there was no social media. There was no facebook, no twitter, no instagram, not even myspace or friendster.

And a lot of the things that made EQ so memorable require having those bullshit mechanics in place AND require a lot of people willing to tolerate them in order for the "massively" part of the game to work like it's supposed to.

> I think there is a room for a mmo that is hardcore
Perhaps. But it seems that it would need to have some major improvements to the fundamental engine that are still kind of difficult to do over the internet.

You need a viable Z axis, for one. This one I'm sure is doable. You also need a real physics engine that can work in a client-server environment. This one is trickier. I know games that do it, but latency is always an issue. EQ had neither of these things and severely limits the depth of content possible.

>>4875095
>I'm more of a fan of shit up to pop. After that things got kinda wacky
PoP was the nail in the coffin of the original EQ experience, which had been withering since Luclin. PoP itself was a blast, but it was a theme park that felt like a completely separate world from the original.

>>4874782
is it cool when i start with everquest this evening?

>>4875806

Yeah it definitely was but I think that was okay it was sorta a cool idea and they were able to do all sorts of different things they couldn't have done otherwise.

PoK and the bazarr was kinda a mistake if you ask me. I get why they did it but it killed some aspects of the game. Made travel fairly trivial.

After pop things got kinda wacky as they attempted to compete with WoW. Still some good shit in there.

>>4875803
Maybe you're right. No one has been able to successfully do a full drop pvp mmo since no one wants to lose all their shit when they die and want safe spots. Darkfall was the last to have a bit of success but really crashed and burned in the end. The remakes sound promising but probably have shit populations because it's two studios making the same game fighting for a pretty small niche.

Still you have games like Eve online that are hardcore as fuck that manage pretty decent populations. I think there is still a market for a game with cruel mechanics but high reward.

>>4875803

What do you mean variable z axis anyways?

there will never be another MMORPG where the majority of people arent concerned with end game content.

if you played during the Kunark years you were part of somthing special, this game is, and always will be, my favorite of all time. The experience playing this early on was something else.

>>4876371
By "viable Z axis" I mean you need a game where the Z axis is fully implemented with stuff like gravity, falling damage for enemies, realistic line-of-sight rules and ballistics, etc.

EQ got most of the way there but when it came to actual combat was very fuzzy about its Z-axis. It always felt like enemies and players existed in a mostly 2D plane and height differences were largely ignored once combat started. In extreme cases you had mobs hitting players through the ceiling or floor.

> I get why they did it but it killed some aspects of the game. Made travel fairly trivial.
Actually the more I think about it, the more I think that the Lost Dungeons was when I knew EQ was done. The concept was good. EQ really needed some instanced content by that point and the old world areas needed some love. But the execution was just abysmal. The dungeons felt procedurally generated. The Wayfarer guild was a ridiculously implausible insult to players, and the entire quest dynamic felt like playing skee ball in an arcade then turning in your tickets at the counter for stuffed animal prizes. Rather than revitalizing old areas, LDoN made a mockery of them and shattered any immersion that might have remained for me.

>>4876363
>I think there is still a market for a game with cruel mechanics but high reward.
They have to be cruel in the right way. EQ got a lot of mileage out of scarcity. Modern gamers, even hardcore ones, aren't likely to tolerate that unless it's done in a really clever way.

Dark age of Camelot was better

all this game needs is a fucking map and modern ui

What about Runescape? Minus the teamwork.

>>4876447

Yeah the z axis stuff in eq is a total mess. You make it seem way less horrible than it really is. Mobs that get stuck falling down agroing the entire zone, mobs disappearing because they fell through the floor and agroing the zone.

Smart z mechanics would be really cool and could make for some pretty neat tactics.

I stopped playing mostly after pop my friend tried to get me to do ldon stuff but I didn't really get into it.

>>4876452

Yeah agreed. Everquest got away with alot of bullshit because it was the only 3d mmo out for a long time.

>>4876587

Never played. Heard realm vs realm was cool.

>>4876614

It had a in game map later on. Fucking godsend because checking /loc all the time and comparing it to paper maps sucks. My least favorite aspect of p99.

>>4876657

Runescape was literally the game people who couldn't pay a sub, or had parents who wouldn't let them install games (and it was a javaapplet ) played. I don't get the love of that game.

What about FF11? It's an EQ rip, i can relate to most things you mention about EQ and i never even got to play it. In the same way i can't play mmorpgs anymore because they're just bland and shallow compared to 11, all its issues notwithstanding.

>>4876849

Never played ff11 but I have heard that.
It had cross play with PC and PS2 right? Always thought that was pretty rad.

I played eq online adventures for a laugh. Apparently that game had a pretty dedicated community. They are trying to bring it back and have emulated servers

>>4876849
I tried out FF11 after playing EQ for several years. I didn't play it long enough to really get to a point where it seemed different from EQ in any substantial way. The main things I noticed:

>FF11 was, overall, a more beautiful game
Though it had an oddly bland and brown color palette for a Final Fantasy game. FF11 also had the advantage of coming out three years later.
>Presentation was more dramatic in terms of dialog and cutscenes.
EQ was more lore-focused than story-focused, and NPC interaction tended toward WRPG-style, exposition-heavy text dumps that many players just ignored. EQ had a few scripted events but there was no cutscene mechanic at all like FF11. But really, since only a tiny percentage of your play time in this kind of game is really spent on story/dialog, I'm not sure it made much of a difference.
>FF11 had an amazing auction/market system.
Buying and selling stuff in EQ was fun in because it was so organic-- you had to watch zone-wide chat to see people advertising items for sale. This made the "auction zones" (which were determined organically by players on each server) feel truly alive. It was fascinating to zone-in to Greater Faydark or East Commons and see the public channels absolutely crammed with vendors advertising loot for sale. And then there was the experience of visiting higher-level dungeon zones where you might see some rarer items for sale. Later on EQ added an auction zone, where basically you could configure your character to work like an NPC vendor.

This system, while charming, was highly inefficient. FF11 solved all those problems with a streamlined auction system that both allowed people to automatically buy and sell by setting prices and bids, but also made market information available like recent sale prices and such. And this was all fairly close to launch, I don't know how they might have improved it over the years.

>>4877970
>long enough to really get to a point where it seemed different from EQ in any substantial way
To clarify, I never leveled high enough to change jobs or multiclass in a meaningful way. Any grouping I did felt virtually no different from EQ in terms of how the group dynamics worked.

I guess one more difference is that EQ had a clearly PC-oriented interface design that made heavy use of keyboard shortcuts and mouse buttons. FF11 had a menu system that to me felt kind of awkward for an MMORPG.

>>4874782
>exploration
Huh? The game is pretty small. Maybe you're confusing extreme death penalty and glitchy aggro-through-walls shit resulting in slow travel for most classes with "exploration". Also, everyone just pulled maps off Allakhazam.

>teamwork
Less teamwork than most MMOs. You just had your role and you did it. Not much need for communication while you just sat there for hours camping the same spot. Raids were trash that didn't require much in the way of tactics, too.

>epicness
Nice nostalgia goggles. Sounds like you played it when you were 12 and it was your first online game.

>>4878331
>Not much need for communication while you just sat there for hours camping the same spot.
Not everyone played EQ like a lazy scrub.

>>4874782
UO was better, it did things we have yet too see in another mmorpg.

>>4874782
All MMORPGs (more-pigs) are a waste of one's finite lifespan.
In a world where everyone is a hero, there can be no meaningful adventures to be had.
Enjoy your grind.

>>4876839
Runescape was brutal and unforgiving, had interesting quests, good exploration and shit to do. It just didn't have teamwork except for PvP.

>>4878331

I dunno world is pretty huge. You don't get across the world instantly even with ports. Zones are pretty massive with lots of stuff in them.

Yeah everyone pulls maps out but knowing a area or dungeon took a good amount of time, even with the in game map. I feel like you either played a ton got bis and know every quest, or you really didn't play much.

If you just do easy shit and your raid just zergs sure. If you're doing more challenging content you really have to work as a team. Most of the game requires other people. Most MMOs you can do the majority of shit alone.

>>4874975
Maybe try a retro mmorpg general instead of specialized shit

>>4879262

I'd post in this general

Final Fantasy XI was an improved EQ clone that kept the good parts while cutting out the bullshit. Fight me

>>4874782

>>4874782

>>4879643

Are the servers still up or are there any emu servers with a non shit pop?

>>4880521
nasomi.com
Over 1000 online often enough these days.
There was a server that was technically better but it died and had low population to begin with, best not fragment things further.

>>4881606

That's pretty solid. Can you connect with a PS2 cause that would be rad

>>4874782
>Why had no mmo come close to capturing the level of exploration, teamwork, epicness of everquest?
They have, and in some cases they even managed to do it better. Even it's competition at the time of it's release, Ultima Online, was considered to be the more complete experience. It had more to explore and more teamwork was required to get anything done in it. And nothing will ever top the "epic" sort of feeling you got from playing Ultima it in it's heyday.

Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, Dark Age of Camelot and Guild Wars all managed to surpass both of them in terms of gameplay though. They not only managed to push the genre forward, they also didn't directly embrace the core values of Everquest and thus gave us a more truly unique experience with each release.

On the other hand, the game that did come as a successor to Everquest was World of Warcraft. Which means Everquest is responsible for inspiring Blizzard to create World of Warcraft, which was the beginning of the end for MMORPGs as a genre. Companies continue to attempt to replicate the success of World of Warcraft to this very day, and in many ways, are simply trying to replicate the success of Everquest. Which is to say that Everquest is directly responsible for the degradation of the genre it helped to build in the first place.

I always thought vanilla WoW offered the perfect moderated experience that Everquest was trying to give without the bullshit.

Shame they fucked it up more and more with every WoW expansion. Even BC was a step in the wrong direction.

>>4881902
Infographic is a ridiculous troll, I hope you don't believe anything in it. Bigole Titties bitched about a lot that got fixed for the thousands of players who came after them. Far more than 1% of players reached max level and joined guilds that did end-game content. (That the pic mentions "raid instances" is a red flag that it was made by a WoW baby who never played EQ or UO for that matter). There were no instances, period.

The reason EQ went down the shitter is mudflation and failure to maintain their vision, particularly starting with the Luclin expansion. Luclin was a shitshow, and it wasn't just the fact that the end-game raid content was literally unfinished. As in, the zones were built and put into the game but the encounters hadn't been implemented yet. Devs through up a convoluted keying mechanism to keep anyone from getting there before they could finish. Obviously, Tigole and Furor and all the uberguilds bitched about this, why shouldn't they? But Luclin sucked for everyone:

1. Luclin introduced a GPU-intensive graphical overhaul and new character models that no one asked for and were ugly as sin.
2. Luclin added a new class no one asked for in a game where abilities were already spread too thinly across too many different classes (it wasn't an accident that WoW launched with just 9 classes).
3. Luclin's zone design was lazy. You had zones like Fungus grove, where you could literally pull dumb, easy mobs endlessly for hours on end with no downtime and get lots of experience for it. You had zones like The Grey where an AoE group could trivially wipe out hundreds of xp-bearing mobs (the whining when that was nerfed went on for years).
4. Luclin's lore was retarded and bore no relation whatsoever to the core EQ setting. Instead of expanding the world, it was just a tacked-on extra thing that didn't really fit or feel like EQ at all. But it had loot and XP so players went anyway.

>>4881902
>Star Wars Galaxies
Saying that it "surpassed EQ in terms of gameplay" requires really torturing that term. SWG was an innovative game with some great ideas but most people found the game too empty and the gameplay too boring. Of course it's a tragedy what actually happened to SWG, but let's not pretend the game didn't have some major drawbacks in terms of appealing to anyone other than a small niche of people interested in playing a Star Wars game centered around tradeskills and crafting.

>>4882537
It's a tragedy what happened to all of them because they dared to not follow in Everquest's footsteps. They did something different, and while they were successful in their own right, they would never manage to hit the stride that World of Warcraft did thanks to continuing it's legacy. All of the games listed had what were considered healthy populations for an MMORPG before 2005 with many of them having thousands of players online across several servers. Once WoW released and started divulging subscriber info, the notion that a few thousand players was an acceptable number vanished for MMORPGs forever. It was no longer acceptable for an MMORPG to have just 100,000-200,000 concurrent subscribers. By the end of 2005, WoW had skyrocketed to nearly 5 million subscribers and it was still going up. It set a horrible precedent that not even Everquest's development team managed to find an answer to, and many development teams have tried to replicate their success in the last decade and a half but have failed, sometimes spectacularly so.

And to imply that SWG only ever appealed to some niche enthusiasts is just silly, because when it released in 2003 it was ridiculously popular mostly thanks in part due to it's interesting gameplay, especially so concerning trade and crafting, but combat received enthusiastic feedback too. It was considered to be one of the best MMORPGs available on the market. That is, until they shot themselves in the foot with their NGE patch towards the end of 2005 in a desperate attempt to appease shareholders who didn't understand and didn't care that it was a different sort of game than WoW and Everquest. So they tried to conform to the Everquest formula and it was received so poorly that people still to this day recognize it as the biggest farce in MMORPG history.

>>4882910
Everquest had already killed itself and was bleeding subscribers. WoW just vacuumed them up.

>it's interesting gameplay, especially so concerning trade and crafting, but combat received enthusiastic feedback too
The problem was lack of content. People played SWG and got bored because worlds were empty or unsatisfying. They weren't willing to wait around for player-made content to fill in the gaps so they went back to EQ or FFXI or UO or DAoC or wherever they'd come from.

Say what you will about classic-era Everquest, they went all-out trying to design compelling content. They weren't always particularly original, but at the time that hardly mattered. Norrath was dense with outdoor zones and dungeons explicitly designed for player experience. You could hunt easy mobs outdoors in North Karana, but would risk being flattened by huge Hill Giants or mature Griffons that appeared sometimes. Or you could head into dungeons like Permafrost or Runneye or Guk. My favorite expansion (Velious) was virtually nothing but a huge pile of new content and has some of the coolest and most memorable zones in the game like Velketor's Labyrinth and the Temple of Veeshan. To get to ToV you had to progress through all of the Velious zones, the last of which is a desolate, frozen wasteland populated by huge ice age creatures and usually very few player characters.

>>4882971
>2003 it was ridiculously popular
Also, the problem is that it wasn't ridiculously popular by standards that would be appropriate for the strength of the brand. SWG wasn't even as popular as Everquest. Star Wars should have buried Everquest, a no-name generic fantasy IP that didn't exist before 1999.

>>4882971
I'm not saying Everquest is bad. I'm just saying that, as time went onward, it became increasingly archaic compared to it's competition. In 1999 it's only real competition was Ultima, which between the two, I preferred Ultima but even I had to relent by the turn of the century. Ultima, by 2000, had become increasingly dated, populations shifted, guilds that were once top contenders began to fragment and disappear for greener pastures. So I jumped on the bandwagon for about a year and enjoyed what I saw. Everquest definitely had some really solid content in it. It also had some incredibly janky stuff too. There's already been some things pointed out in this thread about it. Overall, I can see why it succeeded and paved the way for Warcraft. I wish it hadn't, but I don't hate the game. However, by 2001, DAoC hit retail and for somebody like me, as somebody who cared a lot more about interacting with other players and occasionally fighting them (rather than AI monsters) it wasn't long before I cancelled my subscription to Everquest. Everquest became old news to me, and when FFXI (2002), SWG (2003) and CoH (2004) eventually came out there was so many better alternatives to Everquest that I rarely thought twice about it. I went back a few times over the years to check the game out when a new expansion pack would drop, but that was only because I had the SoE station pass that allowed me access to all of their subscription based games.

In short, everything Everquest had to offer could be done in better ways elsewhere by 2005 at the latest.

>>4882501
Can you post comparison pics or video of Original VS Luclin models?

Imo what killed MmORPG’s as a whole are “instances”

The fact that a single guild could dominate an entire server added such a cool element in EQ.

People were literally revered in EQ if you had that guild under your name

>>4880521
>>4881606
The current state of the official servers is that the old content from levels 1-99 serves as a tutorial you can complete in a week or so, and the current endgame is a microcosm of what the full experience USED to be like. It's not ideal, but /in my opinion/ it's still preferable to playing on a private server which suffers from the fact that the structure of the game was not designed to function with such a low population

>>4883330

I think the core problem has always been players feel entitled to see end game with minimal effort. If the content is easy then you have to instance since there is way too much competition.

If that content is easy to do what are you working towards? You got no bragging rights.

It's a even bigger problem with pvp since you have no reason to pvp other than for the lols. Like it was pretty cool in shadow bane to be camping a contested spot and having another group come in and fight you for it.

I'm definitely not shitting on wow though people like that and it's a model that clearly works. My thing is just like developers should mix it up a bit because it should be clear by now you can't just copy wow mechanics, slap on a new setting and expect folks to flock over. Just because cod is a huge success doesn't mean Arma can't exist too.

>>4882501

Lol didn't know that tidbit about luclins end game content. I left live around kunark. Played some of luclin on a emu server and those ssra weapons were a huge pain in the ass.

I like the idea of keys but it's really annoying when you go want to go and do old content. Apparently they did put in backdoors to many dungeons later on but like too late. I mean when pop is out and you wanna go shit around hs you really going to do that massive pain in the ass keying quest? Even seb key is too much work just to fuck around.

Least they could have done is had keys for old dungeons drop. Most people will have the key anyways but alts or new players won't.

>>4883283
As you can see, the old models were nothing special, but the wood elf had a cute curved spine and natural posture. What you can't see is that she also had a very natural idle animation. Her other animations were also as good as you could expect for a game made in 1999.

The horse-faced Luclin wood elf is posing awkwardly like she has a pole shoved up her rectum. The spine is perfectly straight in the back and she has a saggy pancake ass. She does have huge tits and visible cleavage. You can find some decent-looking pictures of luclin character models from just the right angle to look flattering. But in game they looked terrible. She had no idle animation. She stands stock-still in that pose until she moves or casts a spell or something. The animations when she did move were cringy as hell.

Also, the increased poly count of the Luclin model was a double-edged sword. In a game where having 30+ characters on the screen at a time was common, more than a handful of these new models was enough to freeze up anyone with older video cards.

>>4883283
Here's the best-looking picture of a Luclin model that I could find. And from my recollection, this is as good as it gets. The big-chested Dark Elf girls looked OK (still had pancake ass though).

I think the male models looked kind of bad in both, but the postures and animations in the original game were superior to the Luclin versions.

>>4883330

>The fact that a single guild could dominate an entire server added such a cool element in EQ.
This was mostly not a cool part of EQ. It was cool that the elite players got elite rewards. It was also cool that guilds engaged in politics and negotiation with each other. But cockblocking and all the other underhanded bullshit that went on did not make for a good gameplay experience.

> I think the core problem has always been players feel entitled to see end game with minimal effort
Instancing happened because players paying a subscription fee feel entitled to have a chance to see content that they are prepared to take on and not have to sit around doing nothing because their guild doesn't have packet-sniffers set up on every worthwhile boss in the game and the resources and organization to kill it 5 minutes after it spawns.

Instances allow developers to tailor content for a single group moving through a dungeon, where the content escalates in difficulty towards a boss encounter that is guaranteed to be there. In EQ, even if you found a zone that wasn't overcamped. You'd fight your way to the boss room only to find a high level mage or necro sitting there camping the spawn point for the rare drop.

Now I'll agree that instances come with load of drawbacks too numerous to mention here. But the problems they solve are serious and not at all due to any kind of unreasonable expectation or entitlement from players.

>>4881721
I'm not sure anybody has ever tried, since PS2 support was only officially dropped a few years back it may be possible that a final version PS2 install might work with it but even so somebody would have to write the PlayOnline replacement software for the PS2 to connect to a private server. So as things stand with existing software, it is not possible. But it would indeed be rad.

>>4883343
I wouldn't consider 1000 concurrent players low pop, though. That's not 1000 losers idling at endgame doing nothing else, that's hundreds in every level range all wanting to party.

Honestly, if you factor in dual-boxers, bazaar mules, bots, non-playing idlers and such there are probably more actual players on Nas than on any single Square Enix server. Official servers have double the connections and but half the actual players, mark my words.

>>4884070
>factor in dual-boxers, bazaar mules, bots, non-playing idlers
Factor OUT, rather.

>>4883669
Yeah I think it was common for mid-tier guilds to just abandon Luclin when PoP came out.

>>4874782

>>4883343
>levels 1-99 serves as a tutorial you can complete in a week or so
wow that actually makes me want to play it and stop after 99 then so I can see everything I missed.

>>4884856

I guess keying wasn't worth it? Ssra had some really solid drops. I guess tov was still solid drops and probably less hassle.

>>4885478
Yeah. Of course each guild would make their own decisions but many that I saw just didn't waste time trying to farm keys for Ssra and just did PoP and NToV.

I quit shortly after that, though, so I can't say how Luclin fared in the long run. PoP's level cap increase changed a lot of the perspectives on the old high-end raid content.

>>4884870
You know people shit on FFXI for having no real PvP elements like EQ but in retrospect I think that's part of what made it so great. The whole theme of the game was collaboration, bringing people together rather than dividing them into factions. It's part of what gave the game a great community.

>>4885618
PvP is cancer in games, especially when nothing but an arbitrary number is a stake. Now if PvP was restricted to hardcore-only with full loot and permadeath, then it would be worth it.

>>4882501
>ugly

I still remember the old human models that were used for the NPC taverns

>>4874782
>project 1999
How autistic are they with their rp rules. I see a lot of rules listed on their naming page.

>>4885618
EQ was mostly PvE and the game was designed primarily around cooperative play. There were only a few PvP servers and only a small fraction of the playerbase played on those servers. Each server had different rules, some of which included limited looting rights on players that you killed (eg coin or coin and 1 item). I forget the specific ratio but I think it was something like 4 PvP servers and 40 PvE servers.

PvE servers did have competition like guilds competing for spawns and players bickering over kill stealing and that kind of thing.

DAoC had 3-way realm vs realm PvP.

Also, just to touch on City of Heroes. I never played that game, but my recollection is that people I knew who went to play it had a blast for like 3 weeks before getting bored.

It seemed to me that CoH was sort of a poor fit for an MMORPG and would probably work much better in a more traditional multiplayer format.

>>4885621

Pvp is only bad when there is no point to it. Like you have to be fighting over something, camp disputes, terrority (providing that has any value other than looking cool) personal feuds, etc.

In my opinion the only time lootless pvp works is when there isn't instances and the majority of pvp is to settle disputes over camps or targets. The whole fte or dps race is kinda retarded. Let people duke it out and the remaining party kill the target or a third comes in and snipes it over their dead bodies.

Full loot pvp is neat though since the economy becomes pretty viberant since you are constantly farming new sets of gear to bank. Also adds a real cost to guild vs guild wars.

>>4885997

Not that retarded. Worst case a GM will make you change your name. It's really just to stop names like 'ihazcheezeburgers forlunch' names but even those get by.

Some guy named wutang got his name changed though.

Rule enforcement ( other than rmt, boxing, cheating/mq2 ) is pretty inconsistent.

>>4886234

What was the reward for winning rvr in daoc?

The whole rule lawyering in eq is probably it's least enjoyable feature. Almost all the drama on p99 is that sorta shit.

>>4874782
modern devs are afraid to make a game with real consequences for failure

and real commintment required to reach the top

>>4886342
Something similar to AAs that were global outside of a few class specifics iirc.

Ownage of keeps+ towers granted you a way to teleport to them to move through the realm easier, that also applied to the enemies area, if you took a keep+ towers belonging to it, it opened a portal to the keep until one was taken. After certain keeps were taken each team had unique relics granting 10% melee dmg and 10% spell damage to everyone on the team that held them. If you had everyone's relic you were 30% stronger in both fields, but you couldn't store the relics together, one per keep outside of the two you have by default..thus making it easier to retrieve themand to stop a realm from getting wtf strong.

Later in DAOC they added extra realm points for defending (i might be wrong there, might have always been there) They also added chanpion levels. I'm missing a few things but there wasn't much reward for PVP. In fact, in DAOC, "best in slot" did not exist like it did in EQ for most classes. Templates were generated and a crafting system that allowed you to pick particular stats on an item dominated with a few items here and there from PVE. Min/maxing was a very big deal in DAOC. Like EQ's community, daoc had a great one as well and the hostility between the three teams was high. I can even recall players that would not associate with others if they found out they had another account that had an opposing realm on the same server. Some took it even as far to not speak to players that had any opposing faction on any server.

I'm exhausted, sorry if that was hard to read.

>>4886473
Actually it all comes down to money.

The sad fact is that a gear treadmill game where you just have all the players re-sub for 3 months at a time to devour new story content is more profitable than making a balanced, consistent world for a core playerbase

>>4884870
Literally this and the Nasomi private server allows you to play a much closer to classic version of the game that would fulfill OP's desires.

>>4886474

Daoc sounds legit. Too bad it died - what's the story with that anyways?

>>4888018
There's a game in development, Camelot Unchained, that's a spiritual successor to it. That's all I know; I played DAoC for like a month back in the day, but had to stop cuz it was a huge time sink.

>>4889065

Yeah I know about that, but I wonder why they just like died and had to turn to Kickstarter. It was a pretty popular game back in the day

Anyone here play p99? Xp weekend was lit

I've heard that Dragon Quest X is a worthy follow up to old-school MMOs like EQ and FFXI. I know it's not retro, but I only bring it up because it's extremely difficult to find English information on it besides a few vague recommendations.

Unfortunately, it's never been released outside Japan. And if they game is truly as community and collaboration focused as they claim, then even playing on the Japanese servers wouldn't get you the full experience unless you can communicate with the Japanese players.

I found Everquest to be less "epic" and worse for exploration than Ahseron's Call or even UO. It has it's charm and there are some interesting things it does. But it's also sort of garbage at the same time.

That being said, here's some dwarf boobs.

>>4891280
I would play p99 if they started fresh server.

>>4874782
I tried playing this, as it has everything I want from an mmo. I just can't get around the god awful control scheme. If I knew someone who'd played a lot of this game that I could ask what button to press everytime I wanted to do something I'd eventually get it, but it's unbelievably convoluted.

>>4874936
>I think there is a room for a mmo that is hardcore, like you don't need to hit half a million or take down wow, just enough to pay the bills and have a healthy server pop.

i think there is too but i think the problem is that i feel you kinda need a publisher for an MMO to cover things like servers and most MMO publishers aren't going to take you seriously and/or pull the plug if you don't make the numbers WoW or <insert NCsoft game here> are making. something that you can't promise with a traditional hardcore MMO.

>>4891563
I found EQ to be very epic, if you played into the high level raiding game. Here are the parts that seemed particularly epic to me:

Classic EQ:
>Lady Vox and Lord Nagafen
>Plante of Hate
>Plane of Fear
>Plane of Sky
I've never had a multiplayer experience quite like a Plane of Sky raid. You would spend several days fighting weird, difficult enemies and progressing through floating island each with their own gimmick. Bringing in reinforcements was expensive and impractical, so usually the raid force would dwindle slowly over time until only the most hardcore and dedicated made it to the end. And then when you were done, you just jumped off the edge and landed back in the mundane world.

Kunark:
Perhaps less "epic" than other expansions, but instead with a fantastic "wilderness" and "wild lands" feeling about it. You had raid-tier Dragons like Gorenaire and Severilous openly roaming outdoor areas, and many great "decaying ruins" themed zones. Veeshan's Peak was an epic, dragon-filled zone.

Velious:
The most epic expansion, in my opinion. First you had the imposing, ice-covered landscape and many well-designed outdoor zones to travel through. In that setting you had three cities:
>Thurgadin (Coldain Dwarves)
>Kael Drakkal (Giants)
>Skyshine (Dragons)
The rivalry between these three factions set the stage for some great quests and raiding. Both Kael and Skyshrine were remote, imposing zones that were both great for raiding and exploring (as you could be on either faction).
Some other notable epic high-end zones included:
>Dragon Necropolis
>Plane of Growth
>Velk's Lab
But the real epic zones in Everquest were:
>Temple of Veeshan
>Sleeper's Tomb
ToV in particular. For me, the epic feel of raiding the North Wing of Temple of Veeshan in EQ has yet to be topped in any RPG.

I've been looking around for a classic MMO to play on my P3 PC for shits.
Project 1999 and Star Wars Galaxies Awakening seems like one of the only classic MMOs that have private servers that are not aiming to emulate the current versions of the games.
Any other known classic MMO servers out there?

>>4892164
NToV has to be my favorite raid. Slaying all the other Dragons to get to the final one was epic. PoM inside of ToV, had some epic resist clickies that stacked with other resist spells, I used those for junk buffs against others in PvP

>>4892170
There's also something about the design of raid mobs at that point that was more "raw" and real than what came later. You had a dragon, with a pile of abilities, and that's it. While it was clear that certain encounters were probably designed with certain tactics in mind, it was all basically the same core gameplay that you had from the start.

But that was really the extent that they were able to push the core mechanics and keep the game interesting. So with Planes of Power they introduced scripted battles with features like "spawns adds at 75% and 35% health" and similar triggered scenarios that really emphasize team coordination and planning. That's not to say those battles aren't a lot of fun, but it does give the game a bit more of a "theme park" feeling than what you had in classic EQ raid mobs.

>>4877970
About FF11's auction system: it went downhill. Since most players relied on the automated Auction House information about pricing, the marked was easily manipulated by Real Money Traders, for real world profit. It took something in the ballpark of half a decade for Square Enix to start really cracking down and removing billions (of gil) from the economy.

>>4879235
>In a world where everyone is a hero, there can be no meaningful adventures to be had.

So, like the real world?

>>4892169

UO shards, shadowbane has a emu server I believe, ac has some servers I think.

P3 is probably pushing it though to be honest, just asking for viruses running winxp/windows 2000.

>>4892185

Pop was definitely more theme park ish but the encounters we're a lot harder. Like plane of Justice you had to really be on your best because if you don't keep the dps up you just fail.

Pop had some super cool zones though. Poi had all those gear dudes, justice was a huge jail maze. Plane of time was just a wacky zone.

Only thing I didn't care much for was PoK which made travel trivial and pointless since all the spells and trainers were there. They also had the guild hall thing where all your buffs remained and that dude you could pay for corpse summons. (Maybe that came in later than pop)

Some of the epicness of eq was you always have to move slow through zones even at max so they feel bigger. Some zones with crazy powerful mobs you can't even get close to without a raid force. Zones like charas where you agro on zone in and navigate and key for each of the wings.

Fuck man I love eq.

>>4892910
>but the encounters we're a lot harder.
Scripted encounters was the right way to go, I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying there's something about the old-style dragon encounters that were nothing more than just mobs with lots of hp, damage output, and AoE abilities.
>Some of the epicness of eq was you always have to move slow through zones even at max so they feel bigger.
Yeah ToV really felt that way, as I mentioned up here:>>4882971. One of the best things about Velious was its linear(ish) zone-connection scheme and the rule where you had to reach a zone on foot before you were allowed to be teleported there. This meant the only way to get to ToV was to go through Iceclad, East Wastes, Kael Drakkal, Wakening Land, Skyshrine, Cobalt Scar, Siren's Grotto, and Western Wastes, in that order.

It wasn't hard or tedious for anyone moderately adventurous, but it kept the scrubs out of zones like Western Wastes and ensured they felt appropriately remote, unwelcoming, and dangerous.

>>4892962
Only thing I hated was waking the Sleeper. Only a handful of people got Primals, then woke him up to stop everyone else from getting them. Other than that everything about Velious was amazing. The Quests, Factions, New recipes.

>>4874975
eh i prefer the more casual focused MMOs because the ones that are hardcore usually end up not being as fun as people make them out to be.

for example an MMO like EVE sounds like fun based on all the stories but the game is practically a spreadsheet simulator.

i can get why people would prefer the more hardcore ones but they feel too much like a 9 to 5 job that i have to pay to work at.

>>4892886
Win98se in the machine
Not like it's my real machine, if it gets anything on it reimaging from a backup takes about 10 minutes, and it's jailed in it's own VLAN away from my other PCs. Since it's Win9x I just assume the thing has 20 viruses on it at any given time lol

>>4893048
I can see how some people might have that preference but I do like the idea that MMOs somewhat reflect the natural world, where only the most dedicated can become a master at something, as opposed to a game where every player becomes a master wearing ancient armor at some point along the journey. I think making it so not everyone can accomplish the biggest tasks makes it feel more authentic and rewarding

>>4893091

I'd just toss it and buy a duo core or whatever. No point in keeping a P3 around shit will cost more in power than anything.

>>4891432
You're not missing anything. It's development was handled by the same people who did FFXIV 2.0 (YoshiP and his team) and it's essentially just a slower, less intensive version of FFXIV. The mechanics are incredibly similar to the point where it's basically just been copy pasted in many areas. Here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8QvxpRtcZA

>>4893689
Find me a core 2 duo board with an ISA slot under $500 that downclocks to 100 mhz so I can also play DOS games on it and we'll talk on that matter.
Guessing you want me to toss my CRT monitor too

>>4894317
It looks better than FFXIV to me at a glance. Menu based combat instead of a constant "rotation," no boss gimmicks or twitch AoE avoidance

>>4894715

Dunno why you need a Isa slot but check AliExpress for industrial PC's.

Or you could just keep that machine for dos shit and play MMOs on a machine made this decade?

Anyone play on a p99 red?

>>4897004
I used to with the UBN crew from Live.

My problem with MMOs in general is that, ironically, they're some of the loneliest games I've ever played. Unless you specifically start playing with a group of people, tons of MMOs just have hundreds of players walking around doing their business, not talking to anyone. As a teen, I'd always try to start conversations with everyone and got told to fuck off. It's the worst when a game allows you to be self-sustaining, why even remain online at that point?
Of course, even if you started with a group of friends, 80% would stop playing after a week, so you'd be fucked anyway.

I don't know, I guess I'm too insufferable even for online friendships, but I could just never get involved with any MMO past Runescape.

>>4897314
Did you play Everquest? That is one thing the game was good at, at least it was back in 1999-2001 when I played. You were forced to cooperate with other players, and the community was young and still developing conventions.

The game wasn't exactly hard in terms of complexity, but it wsa demanding and fuckups could be very costly. You did have to coordinate with your group and talk to each other. Every so often in a random group you might meet someone cool, who happened to be leveling at about the same pace as you, that you could make a real connection with. And then from there you might get into a guild. Once you were in a guild, there'd be more opportunities so long as it wasn't a complete shit guild.

Also even if you didn't get into a guild, if you were talented, people would often remember you and give you priority on pickup groups over others. Server reputation was real and for the most part people couldn't just change their names or switch servers to escape a tarnished rep.

>>4897346
This, so much this. Toxicity was punishing on the Blue servers. Be good all you want, but no one would take you if you were a little shit unless they had no other choice. So if you were an in demand character like a Enc, or Cleric... people would tolerate it... theres tons of DPS and Pullers, but if you were nice and fair with loot or even just cool to talk to, youd be chosen over an overgeared elitist.

WoW had that feeling in Vanilla before all the LFG tools, cross server BGs and stuff. People would call the other team out on the Server Specific Forums, it was a good time. Now games like nu-WoW, FF14, ESO and all that no one wants to deal with others or make friends its kinda sad. Online but might as well not be.

>>4897390
I love how it seems to be common sense that cooperative MMORPGs died out because less profitable than those that weren't, when all the most popular ones were highly cooperative and only died out due to age, radical changes, or other inherent issues.

>>4897314
I mean that's specifically a thing with the newer generation of MMOs that started with World of Warcraft. Before that they often had the reverse problem, that if you were just playing by yourself you couldn't get ANYTHING done. This was frustrating when you'd try to schedule a few hours to play in the middle of the week, only to find you couldn't make any progress because it took all those hours just to gather enough people to help.

>>4897576
The shift from community oriented to solo oriented in terms of profitability is mostly coincidential if you ask me. The real shift in profit comes from maintaining a persistent balance of horizontal progression, which is arguably better as a "game" but only maintains a small shardcore playerbase, to rapid production and consumption of vertical "treadmill" content, where players can quickly reach the new level cap and do all the story content, unsub for a while, then resub when it comes time for the next content drop.

>>4897390
>WoW had that feeling in Vanilla before all the LFG tools, cross server BGs and stuff.
True, although you had to multiply the number of shitters, crybabies, faggots and fucking bizzaro tards by a factor of 10 or so. I still remember this one group just dissolve into chaos in front of me. They were all retards. One of the retards was an oblivious airhead, and the other seemed to have legit anger management issues and flew into all-caps rage every time the airhead did something stupid, proceeding to do something equally stupid himself.

There were morons and assholes in EQ, but the sheer range and volume of obnoxious trash players that flooded WoW in the early days is hard to overstate.

>>4897390
>>4897701
Notably, none of those retards would ever be veterans of a parent-generation MMO. You could always tell when someone knew what they were doing and how to handle basic human interaction, most of the time they'd have played EQ, DAoC, or Asheron's Call.

Will never forgive myself for rolling a fucking warrior in P1999. Now I am at lvl 17 and don't have the willpower to proceed killing Karana bandits fir their belts over and over again. Still I agree the sense of exploration is awesome Estate of Unrest and the road to it through Dagnor's haunt me to this day. Oh and also the time I had to navigate with a bro out of the bottom of Runnyeye on a corpse run through the wave of gnolls.

>>4897390

Wow didn't really have that at launch. Like more than now but not really.

>>4897314

Reason people like eq is because you don't need real life friends or cross game friends because you just meet folks doing the same shit as you.

I log on and people hit me up to rep in groups, duo, etc and I have a good list of none shitty people who I msg when I log on.

Live had a way more hardcore reputation thing where you could get black listed for something (eBay, ninja looting, being a prick, etc) and you would be fucked. People legitimately remembered you and passed on that info - even at low levels. Less so on p99, though you tend to remember people who suck at their class.

You just sorta meet friends who grind at the same time as you, who play for similar stretches as you, hang out in certain zones, camp certain items.

You're never lonely in everquest however the downside is you end up with massive amounts of drama ( see rants and flames forum on p99 - those guys have some serious mental health issues)

>>4897803

Wait until you want your epic.... Basically your only option is to join aftermath and use a batphone for a few months.

>>4898369
>batphone goes off
>stuck at work
>miss another spawn cycle for a epic piece

Every time.

>>4898403

Nah more like
> Batphone goes off
> Log on and kill spawn for epic drop
> Don't have enough dkp and someone who is going to sell a mq wins.

Getting the spawn is easy, grinding the dkp you need to bid on anything not so much.

>>4898410
I played on p99 Red. I was like 1 of 3 Druids so most pieces I got by default. I was working when things I needed dropped though.

>>4898440

Oh lol, I'm surprised the mobs weren't still up. I'd love to play on red since I never did pvp on live but that server is dead as fuck

>>4898452
We would clear anything that could benefit our enemies and lock down the timer. And if we knew they were raiding something else we would run in, wipe them and finish their raid to slow the progress its how PvP works mostly at high end.

>>4898473

You have enemies? That server barely hits 100 people at prime

>>4899078
We have been PvPing each other for years. Most of us know each other or of the Guilds they were in before and after the Zek merge. Just read the Red99 forums it gets pretty toxic, they dox each other... some guilds were well known hackers, or scammers. Some are well known to RMT, the grudges people hold there are serious.

>>4874903
Uh yeah, pretty much this. Good summary. In a lot of ways Everquest is awesome, and does things way better than WoW for example, but yeah some of the design aspects were absolute horseshit.

You know what made my 16-year-old self quit? I took my level 52 monk (my highest level character after two years of playing) to Velious, because I heard of this gem-farming spot. I spent over TWO WEEKS there, coming home as fast as possible from school and just waiting in ques for a chance to fight these gem-dropping monsters. When I finally got my chance some other guy just started stealing my kills, and at that point I just quit and never looked back.

>>4892116
it's actually not that bad once you get used to it after three weeks m8

>>4898359
>Wow didn't really have that at launch.
My impression of WoW at launch was that there were at least two big categories of player: the MMO Veterans who were checking out the game with a bunch of their friends from the old game. Often, entire guilds moved to WoW. The other (larger) category was players new to the genre.

It's hard to speak for the latter group, but for the former, there was definitely less in the way of that long-term social bonding that happened in EQ. The dynamic you describe where you bump into the same people periodically and build friendships didn't seem to happen in WoW. I would meet people for groups and even chat a bit (sometimes about the MMOs they'd played before). I don't know if that was just me having a different mindset and a bunch of existing connections or if that was typical. Certainly the pace and speed of leveling was a factor. EQ was so slow that I had lots of downtime to socialize. In WoW I spent a lot more time actually playing the game and a lot less time in any one particular area. But then, also, in EQ I hit the level cap for several expansions and played for 3 years. WoW I quit after a few months and was only in my 40s or something like that.

That said, every so often I see people on /v/ talk about WoW classic in terms lot like I describe Everquest, so it could be that for some it was a mindset thing as much as game design.

>>4899093

Yeah I figured if blue is as toxic as it is red is a zillion times worse. Nice thing with pvp is you actually can get revenge unlike blue where people resort to lawyer questing and shit to make guilds eat a raid suspension.

Kinda surprised there isn't more mq2, showeq shit going on in p99. Mainly showeq for high-end raiding. Mq2 is less useful when you're only playing one character. Maybe showeq is just too hard to catch so it's not mentioned much and everyone who uses it is very hush hush.

Still can't believe people rmt p99.... I feel like the admins make it out to be way bigger than it is because it gives legitimacy to the game and believing you /will/ get caught deters enough people from buying pp or items.

I looked at the prices and they are pretty low considering the amount of effort required to farm 100k pp. Like it's really not worth the effort of selling it. Full characters maybe if you can get a few hundred, but even then we are talking thousands of hours of work.

P99 is a strange place.

>>4874782
I know what you mean, I've had simillar thoughts trying to break into today's mmos. Said fuck it tonight and broke out my titanium edition. To Norrath I go.

>>4900623

Wow's game play just doesn't facilitate making friends through grouping. Everquest worked well partly because you play for long stretches in the same area because travel is slow so usually you camp out wherever your grinding.

People just say wow classic was more social probably because it was in comparison to now, but that's not saying much.

I think perhaps the single biggest design mistake they made with Everquest was designating a "crowd control class" and loading up Enchanters with all the CC abilities as well as the massive performance-boosting mana buffs.

Not everyone wants to play crowd control and that's fine of course, but the fact is that dealing with adds was easily the most exciting and dynamic aspect to Everquest combat. The fact that the Enchanter (and to some extent, Bard) made all the other class crowd control abilities completely redundant made the gameplay really lopsided in practice. In fact, one enchanter often made an even additional enchanter redundant.

"Everyone can solo" issues aside, this was something that Blizzard clearly recognized, and WoW didn't launch with anything like the enchanter class. Several different classes had situational or otherwise limited crowd control and that was it.

>>4900950
DON'T GO INTO THE SEWERS UNDERNEATH QEYNOS!!

>>4901798

You can make the same argument about clerics. Realistically you don't always have a enchanter and even if you do you're still going to be rooting and stunning.

I'll admit enchanters have way too many roles they are best in the game at, but a dedicated crowd control class is a good thing.

I think blizzard excluded a class like this because is a hard class to play overall so they either make the content easier and have good cc players smash it or make it harder and have the majority of folks not be able to do it.

Enchanter is one of the coolest classes in any mmo I gotta say.

>>4900643
Red99 had a bad RMT problem for a while, we suspected for a long time one of the GMs was stripping players accounts that got banned and selling their gear for cash. Im not sure if it was ever proven.

>>4903454
Clerics are only exciting to play when crowd control fails and those are usually the situations when Druid and Shaman emergency healing comes in very handy. Also, coordinating healing between multiple healers in situations like that (to avoid wasting mana) requires at least some cooperation beyond "wait until the enchanter says it's OK to do anything."

> Realistically you don't always have a enchanter and even if you do you're still going to be rooting and stunning.
Groups with no enchanter were always more fun. It's why almost everyone except enchanters loved raiding NToV. The issue is that chanter-less groups are always considerably less effective even if you manage to bum mana regen. Realistically, few groups would ever be willing to venture into a dangerous area without one.

> Enchanter is one of the coolest classes in any mmo I gotta say.
Well, yeah, the problem is that coolness comes at the expense of every other class.

>>4903726

I dunno what you doing but you aren't doing hard enough content if you don't have enchanters.

Sounds like you just got a axe to grind

>>4903564

Yeah I heard rumors GM's will put up rmt trades, take people's money then ban the accounts.

I'm sure blue has some shady shit going on. Fact they have a dll that is effectivly spyware is kinda sketch

>>4903920
>I dunno what you doing but you aren't doing hard enough content if you don't have enchanters.
Well yeah I said almost exactly that. And are you telling me you never did any duo/trio groups a couple of buddies? I certainly did and those were always fun.

>Sounds like you just got a axe to grind
Why would I have an axe to grind in a 20-year old game? I am making an analytical case that mez, as implemented in EQ to enable a "crowd control class" is an unbalanced ability. Do I need to spell it out from first principles?

(1/2)

1. Tactical Decision-Making (TDM) means making decisions about unit placement and who takes what actions against which mobs during a battle. This encompasses both pre-planned tactics and reactive tactics based on changing or unexpected battle conditions.

2. Everquest's combat engine is a real-time RPG system, not a true action game. The gameplay is primarily oriented around real-time TDM and resource optimization with occasional demands on reflexes and timing (mostly healing and aggro management).

3. In most cases, a single target encounter is trivial for any reasonably appropriate group with more than elementary skills at healing and aggro management. Minimal TDM is required. Usually the most TDM you'll see in a single target encounter something like deciding whether a debuff is worth the mana or not. No matter how fast the pulls come in, killing one enemy at a time in a group of 5+ requires no TDM and only rarely requires much in the way of aggro management or healing skills. Really, the only tactical decision you make is whether you have the resources to kill another mob yet or not. It's trivial.

4. Trivial means boring, something you want to avoid in a good game.
(continued)

>>4906301
(2/2)

5. Tactical Decision-Making demands ramp up significantly when there are multiple enemies present. You must allocate resources to each target in the most effective way possible and mistakes carry a significant penalty, possibly even a full wipe. Generally speaking, this means focusing damage on one target while fending off secondary targets as efficiently as possible.

6. When mez is not on the table, this means using tactics such as: off-tanking, which means you need someone to off-tank and handle healing; root, which requires good spacial awareness and is unreliable(meaning you always need a backup plan if it fails); snare kiting requires even more spacial awareness and a good amount of open space. Multiple un-mezzed mobs being present opens up the AoE damage, which gives casters another tactical decision to make. Not only does this increase TDM demands for other group members, but skill demands as well (eg managing aggro with AE nukes is more difficult than ST nukes).

7. Except where enemies have full immunity or extreme resistance, Enchanters have superior solutions for fending off secondary targets. They can typically handle this role entirely by themselves so long as the main tank follows the enchanter's direction about which enemy to attack next and everyone else follows the lead of the main tank. Mez renders off-tanking, AoE damage, root, and snare-kiting pointless or even counter-productive (though snare is still important to prevent runners). The defensive abilities of anyone other than the main tank become largely meaningless.

8. With mez, encounters are reduced back to 5v1 single-target slaughter. The most exciting and challenging features of the game engine are factored out by the actions of a single player.

9. Avoiding a scenario where one class reliably trivializes gameplay makes for a better game.

I missed out on this game, when I was young I wanted to play it but the boobs on the cover always made my mom think it was a porn game or something and she wouldn't let me get it.

It's a real shame too since MMOs are always impossible to recapture, even with private servers. Admin corruption is a given and complete theorycrafting on endlessly farmed, stagnated content just kind of ruins the game. You really need a time machine for this.

Imo mez was not a sure fire way of crowd control, and if a single mob was broken out of the mez the party could be wiped.

>>4907518
>if a single mob was broken out of the mez the party could be wiped.
This is a reasonable drawback in theory. In practice, it results in very boring gameplay because the way to avoid problems with mez is to do nothing and wait the call to assist (and to have a hotkey with an /assist macro to be sure you have the right target). Making the routine behavior for what should be the most exciting and challenging moments of the game be: "stand still until the call is made to attack the primary target" is an legitimate design issue. No Pets. No DoT spells. No AoEs. No debuffs with a damage component. Whole swaths of abilities you simply can't use on secondary targets because the risk of breaking mez is just too high. In the case of pets, they often were simply banned altogether until the "/pet hold" ability got added later on.

>>4907468

P99 is a pretty good substitute for that. Only thing that's not authentic is the fact we know everything about every aspect of the game.

>>4908298
My brother still plays EQ (though I think he played progression server on live, not P99). I can't confirm this but he says it was easier to get into a good guild if you knew what you were doing, partly because the ratio of talented players to shitters is a lot better than it was back in 1999-2000. Most elite guilds often had extremely strict entry and participation requirements, the specifics depended on which server you happened to choose. A lot of otherwise capable players settled for second-tier guilds that usually wound up crammed with a lot of mediocre (at best) players.

Also he says voice chat helps a lot.

>>4876839
Interesting how people use different xyz axes; when describing a 3d scene as a person looking at the horizon, I always think of x = across the screen/width, y = up/down/height, z = into the screen/depth. So 2D games allow movement horizontally (walk along x) and vertically (jump y), but has no depth (no movement in and out of screen)

>>4909290
Yeah that makes sense. I'm used to (x,y) denoting a position of an object on a plane that's usually either a top-down or purely abstract view . For me, the side view or 1st person perspective is the unusual one, and even then it's not often that I think about coordinates in side-scrolling platform games. I imagine the "forward/backward" and "up/down" dimensions as projected onto the flat 2D monitor, where each (x,y) pixel is just a flat plane.

Meanwhile tactical RPGs almost always use a 2D grid at least. And a 3D game like Final Fantasy Tactics uses Z as the height dimension. The /loc command in Everquest assigns elevation to the z axis as well.

>>4908451

EQ isn't really a hard game. I think 99% of the criteria for joining a top guild is being able to meet raid attendance and listen to what people say.

Most people join second tier guilds because they don't want to commit to playing at crazy hours and being available at a moment's notice.

Like if you are a retard and don't listen and cause raid wipes yeah you won't last long. Most people don't mind explaining a encounter. Takes less time than a wipe.

>>4909628
>EQ isn't really a hard game
It's hard enough that there's a noticeable difference between a truly elite group or raid that understands all the mechanics and resources at their disposal and can both execute sophisticated tactics and adapt to unexpected situations on the fly, versus a group that simply knows how to follow directions for a strat they read about on the wiki.

And I think you vastly underestimate the number of retards (or more accurately, half-assers that don't really think much and can't handle more than simple directions) that played on live when it was popular. Causing a raid wipe is just the worst case scenario. There are plenty of little minor things that people fail at that results in raid leaders tending toward least-common-denominator zerg tactics and generally taking a lot more time and manpower to accomplish what the elite guild can do in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the manpower (assuming similar gear and levels).

>>4910962

>>4909643

Yeah for sure, and when you're a small group it makes all the difference, but I don't think any guild is going to deny you just because you're new.

The tight nit pickup farm crews won't take you but that's another story that mostly comes down to having bis gear. (Which you wouldn't get unless you were good at pixels)

>>4909290

Don't even get me started on the retarded /loc output

Y,x,z who the fuck thinks this shit up?

>>4874782
I unironically think Shroud is pretty good at capturing an old game feel, as long as you aren't gay and just look everything up.

RIP :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk_kB80kaFg

>>4913801
XYZ worked because sometimes if you were in Gfay etc you had to know they were elevated off the ground to know they were up in the trees

>>4916360
problem is that for some reason everquest put y before the z.

>>4916407
sorry, y before the x

>>4915978
>>4915982
what?

>>4874782
Asheron's Call came out six months later.

>>4916429

Someone who pointed out a ridiculous amount of bugs on p99 got banned from the forums.

He was the autistic hero we deserved. :(

When should I move from Estate of Unrest to Mistmoore, lads?

>>4897390
>ESO
I have made a lot of friends on this game using the dungeon finder and guilds.
UESP's guild is great and friendly. We do trial nights every week on TS and its the comfiest thing out there.

>>4918282
20 if a healer type
22 if melee or pal/sk
war might need 23/24 or maybe 22 if you have good gear or at least a wurmslayer for agro

>>4917119
Why did he get banned? Fought over a bug or what?

>>4918584

No clue - no one explained in the p99 thread.
It was just a suspension though. I think the only way to get banned from the forums forever is doxing.

>>4879235
Shit like tribia and ultima online are probably more your speed then. Those felt way more open ended. About it being a wast of my time yeah honestly sinking that many hours into one game is probably not worth it.
Think of all the games you could be playing right now. Then some of them have paid subscriptions making it cost dosh to fucking play the game.

>>4909362
Please explain "Z fighting" to me anon. GPUs have to take the xyz world of your game and project it onto the xy plane of your screen, so z (depth) is lost. What is this called... "rasterization"?

>>4897390
>>4897576
similar to what >>4918415 said i've met people in games both in & out of an LFG tool. hell, in GW2 i've met alot of people without ever grouping up with them.

i think the people who say "the sense of community" in MMOs died with the implementation of LFG tools probably wouldn't have ever really interacted anyone if there wasn't any downtime between dungeons & raids.

>>4921303

I don't think it's the loss of LFG tools it's the loss of long term grouping. I just spent ~6 hours grouped with the same 4 people.

Every other mmo I have played you run the dungeon and then it's over. Most of the content in general promotes short interactions like this. EQ encourages you to play a long time because once you find a good group you tend to stay as long as RL permits.


Other thing is because a good group is the difference between 5% of your level and 30% you tend to remember people and add them to friends and they do the same.

not saying these are deep friendships or anything, but you end up always having peeps who want to do similar shit as you online at any time.

>>4921301

I think he means you can like push a mob over the cliff and it will fall and take damage.

EQ had a wonky z system where shit would agro you from above or below. And you couldn't hit them but they would hit you or would start training the zone.

Lot of time you gotta camp out because a mob bugs out and goes into a wall or falls through the floor and will train the zone if you don't camp off agro

>>4922928

Lot of the 'skill' in eq is just dealing with weird bug mechanics.

It's not really a bug but mobs can gate and will end up training the zone and wiping your group (and summoning people) so when that happens (because poeole didn't push or stun fast enough) everyone camps immediately

What are some good lasting mmos to play today? Private serrvers included. I'm getting really bored of the modern mmos.

>>4925483

Everquest project 1999. Currently 1176 people on right now.

>everyone here actually hates everquest
That's so 4chan

>>4916010
Really cool.

>>4926102
It looks fun but from what I've heard it sounds too competitive, guilds camping spawns and stuff like that.

>>4927106
If you really want to raid but have some value of your precious time on earth, you might not enjoy p99.

>>4927106
Haven't encountered any of that and I haven't been camping specific stuff. Lot's of helpful people around, it was a good low lvl experience for me. Some assholes, but that's similar to what I remember of EQ in '98 - '99

t. lvl 42 enchanter

>>4922928
>>4921301
Yeah exactly. If a mob is standing on a ledge and you shoot it with an arrow, it's a total crapshoot whether the mob will try to find a path down to attack or just run towards you like the fall isn't even there. It depends on the pathing rules of the zone as well as the situation. Furthermore, if the mob gets stuck pathing to you, it'll sometimes just warp to your location (which is usually preferable to having it run off randomly and aggroing the rest of the zone). As the other anon mentioned, it gets really bad if the mob is underneath you or on the floor above you, because it'll just start hitting you from 100 yards below or through the ceiling/floor where you can't get at it.

The main point is that this entire philosophy ruled out use of the Z axis in any real tactical way. Either you could find a spot to exploit pathing or you couldn't, and pathing was arbitrary and only loosely related to the actual terrain. If your exploit was too egregious (eg. get a mob stuck in a wall), you could get reported and suspended. The game was really focused around aggro management, healing, and mezzing/disabling enemies with spells. You couldn't put archers on high ground. You couldn't rely on trenches or uneven ground to slow down an enemy. Sometimes you could duck behind a wall to evade an AoE, but even that was situational (only applied to indoor zones I believe).

>>4926821
I played EQ for 2 years it has a lot of great qualities but it also had a lot of bullshit.

>>4921537
>EQ encourages you to play a long time because once you find a good group you tend to stay as long as RL permits.
This is also part of the reason why I'll never go back to playing an EQ-style MMORPG again. Yes, you could meet people in those great, 6-10+ hour groups. But that usually means you just burnt yourself out for an entire day on what was probably a relatively mindless grind when you actually looked at your time spent.

>>4927106

1-60 isn't like that at all.

If you want to gear with the very best items from this era you have to join aftermath and attend lots of raids and build dkp. That said I think all the guilds raid at least once a week and most don't have raid attendance requirements.

But play, join a nice guild who can help, get to 60 and then you will have a good idea of what you want to do. Getting to 60 is going to keep you busy for a long ass time so I wouldn't worry too much.

>>4927497

I mean yeah but MMOs are kinda a huge time sink in general.

What makes eq super comfy is watching TV shows,movies or listen to music at the same time.

>>4927490

Yeah curious how pantheon will be. If they do it right it should basically have all the stuff that makes eq awesome with far less bullshit.

It's really hard to do stuff like have death be a major consquence but not involve a ton of bullshit.

>>4874782
>Me and a bunch of other oldfags keep coming back to this because we're unable to let go of our nostalgia and nothing else is the same.

>>4909643
Well said. Even the difference between bleeding-edge-content pros and the so-called "midcore" folks who are always playing catch-up is gigantic. Good players bring out the best in each other, and together they become great players. Mediocre players drag everyone else down to their level. EQ was truly a team sport.

I haven't played since 2013, and I really miss it. Pic related was the world's only kill on Sanctum Somnium 5 before it got nerfed into oblivion. I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember it like it was yesterday. Same with other things like our first Rallos Zek kill. And there was our first Kerafyrm kill, which ended while I was tanking with Deflection while I was deep in the purple club. Gave a whole new meaning to "tanking the floor."

I haven't had any MMO experience since EQ that could even vaguely compare. No moments or events or achievements that have stuck with me. Everything is so vapid and shallow now. Things in EQ felt like they mattered. They had weight.

>>4931196
why is that on a post card?

>>4931239
You've never heard of Post Secret? It's an ancient blog that people send postcards with secrets to, like that one. Most of them are sad, some are funny, and the rest are just super dumb.

>>4931238
thats called a false sense of accomplishment. take one step outside your door and your title as Dragonking Slayer of elder Gods means shit.

>>4927106
>competitive

anon it's about exploring the world around you & really soaking in the atmosphere of norrath

you could literally take years to get to max level and still not see everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwV1j1L9Kgg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pib1DwGsqE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEI5VkWB_xM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRMYvM5TDNs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yk8_KxVvj0

>>4931273
>it's about exploring the world around you & really soaking in the atmosphere of norrath
This. It's a very different design philosophy compared to post-WoW MMO's. Today, any given zones exists for the explicit purpose of providing you a stack of kill and fetch quests such by the time you complete all of them, you will have leveled from X to Y, and you will have been put on the rails to the next zone in the level sequence. It's a treadmill philosophy whose only goal is get you to the level cap in as direct a way as possible.

EQ Zones were sandboxes full of lore and flavor text that didn't necessarily lead you to any power-ups and bonus XP. Or maybe they did. Who knows? Maybe that weird symbol on a rock is just the graphic designer's little signature. Maybe it's something more. Maybe you should investigate. Ya know, it kinda looks like that other thing you saw in that other place not too far away. Coincidence? Or Illuminati confirmed? The world was a character unto itself, and interacting with it was its own reward. Also, since there were no glowing yellow exclamation points, and your quest journal was a pad of paper on your desk, you really had to pay attention and take stock of the world around you and what NPC's had to say.

You needed to immerse yourself in the world in order to gain mastery of it. And you wanted to immerse yourself in the world because it was fun and interesting.

>>4931339
Bang on post.

>>4931273
>>4931339
I agree with what you say. I played EQ back in 1999, DAoC and WoW, but EQ holds a special place luring me back to P99 and playing the Kelethin theme makes me want to log on and farm wasp wings in GF..

When I coudn't logon I used to scoure every EQ website for information about mobs, zones, loot to read and know more about everything. EQ drew me in where the other games did not so much.

I think the lack of railroading and the level of harshness attracts a kind of gamer (or masochist). What other MMO game had the same allure that EQ had..

EQ only had success because it had zero competition at the time. and no those 2d browser games did not count.

Now, 20 years later your dragon kill points dont mean shit
those co-workers you called friends moved on or got worse than you or worse yet still play live with their 6 boxed team or struggling to nostalgia on p99
and most of all, those memories you think you have is just a sad reminder that was how you spent your youth, your one and only youth.

>>4932514
>Relying on DKP instead of distributing things in a strategic fashion that best helps the guild advance.
Wow, that must have been awful. No wonder you hate the game so much.

>>4932542
Oh yeah everyone was so kind and knightly at the time and a loot council surely was never corrupted once in the history of EQ.

thanks for reminding me of that

>>4932546
Did you even play when Kunark was released m8

>>4932542

Loot council is just a popularity contest. Nothing stops guild leaders from pooling their dkp to gear someone.

Loot council just ignores people who aren't chatty in /guild and results in people jumping ship once they get what they need resulting in another new person gearing while your alt sits gearless.

Dkp is the incentive to show up when you don't need anything from the mob.

>>4932546
Literally this. Numerous stories of corruption.

>>4932514

> Projecting this much

Most of us didn't let pixel lust ruin our lives.

>>4933516
Those things only apply if you have a craptacular guild. We ran on a loot council for years and years without so much as a hiccup. Well, correction, one hiccup: Rogean (the guy who created P99) came back to Live, after a long break, and he rejoined us. We got his gear up to speed, and he promptly hopped the server to our main competitor. Because he's a massive faggot, and he burned us. Whatev, only set us back a couple days. The lost loot didn't matter. Loot comes, and loot goes. It was the personal betrayal that stung.

Maybe our guild was just special in its ability to have people trust each other, and everybody live up to that trust.

>while your alt sits gearless.
If you're at the point where gear is going to alts, who cares where the drops go? And if mains still need it, why do you expect it to go to your alt?

>Dkp is the incentive to show up when you don't need anything from the mob.
Playing with your bros and advancing the guild are all the incentive you should need.

>>4933584

Not saying loot council doesn't work ever, just 99% of the time it goes to the officers friends/popular people. Besides if y'all tight you can just pool dkp or not bid on stuff so the guy who needs it wins.

It's far more important on a timeline locked server like p99 where people mq shit, people have multiple alts, etc so pp is pretty important if you're not in the very top guild. Like good luck getting a warrior epic if you're not in am. You gotta buy that shit with so you gotta make coin somehow.

Shitty rogean did that. Don't hear many positive things about the guy.

>>4931242
There are a lot of accomplishments in life that don't mean shit to anyone outside a small niche.

>>4931242
>implying

you never spent month's hunting a particular mob for their loot,I waited for this slime for little over two years underneath the sewers in freeport it was worth it for the slime backpack

>>4935815
Well done, sir. I spent a year at level 52 trying to get my books from Vox and Nagafen. And I think my guild did about 45 kills of Emperor Ssraeshza before he dropped his sword. Totally worth it, though. Fiery Defender and Sword of Ssra are still the most aesthetic weapons in the game.

Oh, and the hours that went into my Ashbringer (before the fixed the spawn rate of the Knight of Dread Sun) and Loyalist Shield of Honor. LSoH is still one of my all-time favorite quests in the game.

>>4936090

>>4936092

>>4935838
>>4935815

The sock is real

How does p99 compare to official servers? I never played everquest before, is the official server more suitable for new players?

>>4937882
No, unless you enjoy paying money for an old ass game using the "updated" shit models.

>>4937882

Totally different games at this point. 20 expansions really changes shit. There are the new timeline locked servers which I hear are good but p99 is legit and alot of fun.

Always groups to be had, ports on demand ( /who all dial ) raid targets go down as they pop. Ec is always packed.

It's free so give it a go if you have any interest.

>>4936090
>playing live

they changed so much over the years isn't not even remotely the same game you remember

>>4938616
I agree. I played both live in 1998 and the p99 server, the experience from lvl 1 to 40 is similar. Maybe a bit more helpful people around.

>>4939646

P99 folks are pretty nice and helpful overall. It's a solid community.

>>4939646
>>4941002

im a big fan of p99 and always end up back there whether i take months or years off

regarding the raid scene; instead of arguing over which guild gets to raid why dont they just "turn on pvp" in those specific boss areas and let nature decide

>>4941959

Always wondered the same. It would make raids pretty interesting

>>4874782
honestly, i feel liek the early days of perfect world came very close to that eq style. just as with eq tho, i quit pw somewhere in end game because of forced cooperations. and with that you inevitably landed into ingame politics with people that are SRS BZN. i never returned to these kinds of mmo's when vindictus came out.

>>4935838
>be bard
>mrw get your guilds first and only acrylia handled broadsword

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K0Rs0oarO0

>>4932542
dkp>loot council
loot councils give out gear based on dickfeels and appeasing tryhards. Dkp lets the true no lifers aka your core get shit done.

>>4944557
I remember on project 99 there was this troll warrior killing orcs for months at end near the border of kithicor

later on that same troll was just messing around in rivervale,talk about dedication

>>4874782
Modern MMORPGs are being made with mass appeal for normies in mind. That means no difficult shit like teamplay, learning or any sort of problem solving allowed. The game will be force fed down the players' throats every step of the way so that there isn't any chance that they'd leave because it was too difficult. And then they fill the game with semi-mandatory daily activities so that normies keep logging in daily and have to keep their sub running.

>>4945683

normies truly are the NPCs of reality

>>4944557

Well honestly what's my incentive to show up to a raid where I don't need anything? Or have to compete with someone who spams /guild to get noticed instead of actually getting shit done?

I mean unless it's a super tight guild where you know every single person in the guild well, loot councils are just a good way to cause grief (or get all the best loot if you're leader/friends with officers)

There is a reason all the top guilds are DKP.

how does modern EQ2 compare with modern EQ?
I haven't played either but am interested in trying one out, solely to explore a world and story that has been built upon over many years
end-game raid content and server population isn't a factor for me

>>4946451

better off at project1999, its from an era before everything tried to be WoW and best community no contest

>>4946473
what exactly was made worse in modern EQ that 1999 preserves?
I know about the death mechanics being softened significantly but that's the extent of my knowledge

>>4946490

Instances, solo play (mercenaries)
>>4936092
Bizarre auction house, easy travel (PoK books) graphics updates and zone overhauls.

Death isn't really a big deal in eq providing you can get your corpse. If you can't get it yourself a rogue can, if a rogue can't a necro can summon it. When xp loss really matters (50+) there are plenty of clicky clerics around so you can get a 96%. People only think death is bad because there is a consequence at all.

Never played eq2 so can comment. I heard it got better later on but by then it was too late.

P99 is free, tries to replicate the game at one of the best eras in the game (first two expansions) some think luclin and pop era was better (3rd and 4th) but no one argues things got better after that. P99 has a pretty decent wiki with quest info, loot tables, and other relevant stuff like Peggy cloak spawn cycle and that sorta thing.

>>4946512
I'll give P99 a try then, thanks
only reason I was shying away from it a bit was because of what I heard is a slightly complicated install which is gonna make it difficult to convince some friends into playing it if I wind up enjoying it

>>4946550

if your friends are too dumb to install then they wont stick with it anyway, you have to be able to read map coordinates and memorize alot of info

>>4876839
Runescape was also popular among people who maybe didn't have computers or internet at home or weren't allowed to use them. A lot of kids went to the local libraries here to play it for example. Sure it meant that the average age of the player was lower but it was truly remarkable in that it was a 3d mmorpg that ran in your browser and it was f2p.

Runescape ultimately played like shit and I moved on from it after like the first year but it did have some cool things going for it.

>>4909290
>>4909362
Different game engines and 3d modeling programs use all kinds of different xyz setups. I think the x+ right, y+ up, z+ forward is one of the more common ones. It makes sense in that if you think your screen is your xy plane and z gives it depth.

>>4879235
It is the modern MMORPG where everyone was made the hero and they lost track of what MMORPGs were all about. The old ones were more about a load of people going on an adventure in a fantasy world and interacting with each other.

>>4882059
I think the one wrong step vanilla WoW took was the massive amount of instanced content. While sure I had a lot of fun playing through them ultimately I think instanced content has no place in MMORPGs.

>>4882537
SWG in many ways was released ahead of its time. They had to cut down hard in features because the tech just wasn't there yet and they couldn't sustain large servers with the shit they had envisioned.

>>4892156
Covering the server side is much easier today than it used to be. Sure it still costs a lot of money but for a smaller team making a smaller game that isn't intended to hit 1m subs on launch it shouldn't be that bad.

>>4897701
>but the sheer range and volume of obnoxious trash players that flooded WoW in the early days is hard to overstate.
I think that had a lot to do with how it pulled in such massive amount of people, often total normies who didn't really have any prior video gaming or online gaming experience.

>>4946512
>When xp loss really matters (50+) there are plenty of clicky clerics around so you can get a 96%. People only think death is bad because there is a consequence at all.
This is overstated. Yeah, the xp penalty is minimal when there's a cleric around, preferably in your group. On raids the worst thing about dying was having to loot all the shit off your corpse without screwing up your inventory organization.

But clerics really aren't always available and handing out free rezzes and no one likes to fucking plead and grovel to an unfamiliar one. And until you get that rez, you're looking at penalty that's probably costing anywhere from 2-5 hours of XP gains.

>>4947042
>I think the one wrong step vanilla WoW took was the massive amount of instanced content. While sure I had a lot of fun playing through them ultimately I think instanced content has no place in MMORPGs.
It's really a catch-22. Instanced content facilitates a much more creative level design and a better dungeon crawl experience. But it kills the sense of it being a persistent online world rather than just a multi-player RPG.

>They had to cut down hard in features because the tech just wasn't there yet and they couldn't sustain large servers with the shit they had envisioned.
I think it was also a mistake to rely so much on player-made content but ymmv I suppose.

>>4946490
Another thing about modern EQ is that all players start in the same place, which is something they kind of had to do for the sake of grouping and declining new player population it but totally kills some of the coolest aspects of the original game.

In original EQ, each region of the game had its own distinct feel and culture. This wasn't just determined by the NPCs, architecture and landscape, but also by the actual player populations. Because travel wasn't trivial, there was a strong tendency for low-level players to stay near their starting city at first. In the Qeynos-Surefall area, High Elf, Dwarf, and Gnome players were uncommon and it was extremely rare to see any Dark Elves, Trolls, or Ogres as the local guards were usually hostile to those races. The dominant population of the region were the low-fantasy races: Humans, Barbarians, Half-Elves, and Erudites.

On the other side of the Antonica continent, the Freeport area was still human-dominant, but was also centrally located and near some of the best high-level content (Lower Guk and Sol Ro) so you tended to see a lot of every race, including Dark Elves which were nearby. Freeport felt very cosmopolitan. Halflings were isolated in their own hometown in the middle of the continent, and no one would see them until they started traveling.

Then on the Faydwer continent you had all the other high fantasy races like Dwarves, Gnomes, and Elves and more magical enemies like fairy dragons and such.

As you gained levels, you'd find players traveling more to seek out interesting zones, but you'd still see mild tendencies even into the mid levels. Karanas and Splitpaw were more likely to have humans and barbarians while Unrest was more likely to have Elves and Dwarves.

Starting everyone in the same place ruins this dynamic.

>>4947095
>But it kills the sense of it being a persistent online world rather than just a multi-player RPG.
IMO it's too big of a sacrifice. I'd rather look into alternative ways of making the content work in a non instanced way.

>>4947095
There's a great blog post in the internet somewhere by one of the developers of SWG where he goes through a lot of the development and talks about stuff like the map creation and how they had to simplify pathfinding (which led to somewhat similar height problems as EQ). They literally had to cut down on tech because the servers back in the day couldn't handle it.

I don't have it bookmarked but it shouldn't be too hard to find.

Fuck yeah, Everquest!
If anyone ITT is on p99, I'm a Halfling Druid named Trillbo. We can level together or something

>>4874782
>Why had no mmo come close to capturing the level of exploration, teamwork, epicness of everquest?
Basically, Everquest didn't give nearly as much of a shit about making their game accessible to a wide audience. Which was fine, since D&D nerds loved that stuff, but it was inevitably going to make an extraordinarily niche game that only a handful of people would care about. In some ways it's still better than something like WoW, but EQ is clunky as shit

>>4947085

There are almost always clerics in every high-level zone and because p99 has been around for so long chances are someone has a cleric alt.

If you're actually looking at 50+ xp loss just log off before the 3 hour timer.

I'll agree before 50 it sucks but still usually a cleric shows up before the 3 hours.

>>4946550

There are some installers but really you extract the p99 zip in your folder and change a line in the eqhosts file.

>>4947085

Also wtf kind of asshole epic cleric wont click if the corpse is next to them?

>>4947120

The whole faction thing is pretty cool. Like you can become friendly as a darkelf in Freeport by grinding a ton of faction (or become Kos by killing fp guards). Made illusion spells and clickies have a real gameplay purpose. All the little things like that are what make eq so cool.

>>4947594

So your a port & ptog bot?

>>4947594

i just started an erudite cleric named Pheseas, add me to frens

>>4947120
Travel being non-trivial was really important. The world felt huge and dangerous. Fast travel just shrinks the world tremendously. Also waiting for boats made for great social time.

>>4947042
Yes, the current schtick in MMO's structuring their story like a Final Fantasy game where you are the Chosen One destined to save the world is just awful. Leave that nonsense to the console JRPG's.

>>4948075

Level 6 doing good bruv if I see ya I'll give you hb and naltron

where should I download titanium from?
I was going to just grab the first torrent on TPB but the comment section is full of people claiming they're having issues with it and one guy claiming it has a trojan

>>4948392

those are (((lies))), thats were i got it

>>4948075
>phesease

Feces

is there a 4chan guild on 1999?

>>4948392
>>4948787

Yeah pretty sure I got titanium from there. It's a very old torrent I believe. Once you install from the isos you can just copy the eq folder between computers.

>>4948392
anon it's the go to for playing project 99 m8 just do it

>>4949090

u can start one!

>>4950393

id join if there is one

message Pheseas in game

lv10 cleric

>>4874782
UO was WAY better but too difficult for normies

>>4950784

apples to oranges.

PVP attracts a different mindset and audience than PVE. Probably the closest we got post UO was Darkfall.

>>4949218
>>4950087
the second torrent listed, uploaded by CaseyEQ, has some texture packs pre-installed

>>4950784
then why didn't they make an underworld clone but with multiplayer involved

Man I fucking loved starting in Halas.

One of my best mains I had, a female high elf, I leveled to about 5 and then main the trek on foot all the way to fucking Halas from gfay because I liked starting there that much.

Orc Wall used to be the shit. Crazy level progression where when you were a lowbie and grouped with some yellows/reds for a few hours

>>4952605

how do people on new servers afford to buy their spells without help from high levels or alts?

everything weighs so much for looting trash cant be the way to make plat at low levels, whats the secret?

>>4952605
good luck gaining faction it's a nightmare for troll & darkelfs I tried for the longest time using invis potions then trading them into the warrior but she'd insta stab me everytime

>>4899204
I was the guy that stole your shit, and you were a bitch then and still are

>>4899204

How the fuck did you hit 52 being this big of a bitch?

People steal kills. Get over it or qq to a gm.

>>4953031
I'm lousy with making money in any game, so I was dirt poor in EQ. As a consequence, I had to save up and buy the important spells first. Once you can kill mobs with weapons, that will help, those sell for a relatively good amount. Or you can look around in GF and see what everyone else is advertising, some low level stuff sells for a good amount of plat to high level who cannot be bothered to farm it themselves.

>>4953031
Back on live in the original game, I killed willowisps for lightstones and turned in the greater lightstones to the Karana gypsy for the concordance of research which sells for 8-10pp to a vendor. A lot of people collected bone chips and sold stacks to necromancers, not as profitable as when there are lots of high level necros with more cash than time, but could still be done.

After that, killing Hill Giants and fighting in dungeons where fine steel dropped.

In other words, like pretty much everything else in EQ: grind.

just installed 1999
what class should I pick

>>4953473
Take a few minutes to read this:
>http://wiki.project1999.com/Players:Newbie
It covers the basics.

>>4953480
thanks
I made a cleric high elf
I got myself stuck in a wall, is there a way to suicide?

>>4953532
nevermind I figured out the /rewind command

>>4953532
Enjoy Felwithe and Greater Fay, watch out for the orcs!

>>4953565
I got lost while killing skellies
found a route to the next zone, went exploring there, brownie scout came out of nowhere and 1 shot me
dropped all my things and don't know how to get back so now gotta grind for some more gold so I can have a weapon and armor again

>>4953962
Isn't there an item that can point you towards your corpse? Or is it just a necro spell?

>>4953473
Dark Elf Shadow Knight

>punch wasps for a while after losing weapon, takes like 10 minutes just to kill one but I need to make money to buy new weapon
>someone comes up and casts a shield of thorns buff on me
>everything that attacks me dies immediately
>kill every enemy in sight until it wears off
>get lost again
>find town again
>guy on bridge killing the guards, asks me to vendor some swords for him in exchange for half of what they're worth
>now have 30 plat
>enemy drops I was going to vendor were only worth about 10 gold
fun game
thanks for reading my blog

I plan on trying out Everquest soon. How is the live game? Is it better to play live or Project 1999?

>>4874782
Because you literally have to have no life to extract some semblance of fun out of this game.
People with non-subhuman level IQ quickly realized this and now won't touch life-sucking MMOs anymore, but they may be fine with casual MMOs (FF14 or nu-WoW).

Honestly can't say I'm surprised.

>>4954105
welcome to project1999 EQ sould like you get the jist of it

>>4954114
Live has been modernized like any long lived MMO which usually means that it has lost everything that was once good about it.

>>4954105
>get lost again
Greater Fay is a big zone, follow the paths and don't stray from them too far in the beginning. You'll want to learn the path to Kelethin.

>>4954115
At least the MMORPGs of old give you a sense of accomplishment. They are life-sucking but putting hours into them can easily feel like it's not a waste. FF14 or nu-WoW just feel like a terrible waste of time. Like they've gotten to a point where they are just really bad games. If I just want to play a game there's like a thousand better ones within my grasp.

Ultimately all gaming is a waste of time.

>>4955401

all time is a waste of time

>>4874782
>Why had no mmo come close to capturing the level of exploration, teamwork, epicness of everquest?

EQ will probably never have a close competitor because it's not easy enough for the plebs. WoW was pure pleb material - it was instantly accessible for everyone. EQ, at least back then, made you feel like *you* were entering a dangerous and challenging world. Other "mmos" build a world around you, catering to your every AD/HD need.

The game really had an immersive quality. Great music and sound effects. There was a real sense of danger in many zones, especially for the lower levels.

I still have an account I use occasionally on Project 1999.

Pic related: it's me pulling the AoW.

>>4956552
Can you explain to someone who hasn't played EQ what made it difficult?

>>4956870

have to have situational awareness, good memory, commitment, and patience

harsh penalty for failure, exp loss and perhaps loss of all your gear if youre really dumb and careless.

Hours and Hours of work can be lost if youre careless and dumb

overall the game is great at keeping normies away

>>4956870

that goes for project1999 not nu-EQ

>>4956870
when you died you actually had a chance to lose all of your gear and gold for good

There was also a time when you were unable to simply transfer items between your own characters unless you gave them to another human player to hold between switching characters.

I can remember a few times i left a backpack of items in an area far off the beaten path with both my characters camped right there. However, if you exit back to the home screen from character selection you’ve effectively logged out and the items will disappear...

Lost more than a few items with a wrong mouse click lol

I put my cleric on pause to try out the necromancer class
the dark elf starting zone makes me want to kill myself, I spent like an hour just trying to find the guy to turn the scroll in to before googling a map
coming back here for buying spells and quest turn ins is tedious

>>4957042
If nobody ever died, no one would really notice the harsh penalties. While certainly a pleb filter it was just one of many things that made EQ difficult.

>>4956870
Beyond death penalty stuff and general hardcore attitude :

1. As level increased, enemies were balanced to be very strong vs a player of the same level. While some classes could sometimes solo equal-level mobs, most classes would reliably lose if they tried to go toe-to-toe with one. Even if you could solo a mob, it would take a lot of mana/HP and a flawlessly executed tactic. The tactic itself might not be particularly difficult, but there was little room for error or bad luck. Enemies were fast, aggressive, and had high damage output.

2. So you mostly had to work together to beat XP-bearing mobs. Fighting more than one enemy at a time was always a risk and mistakes were always costly, even in a full group. Even as many as 3 enemies could cause a wipe if you made mistakes. If 3 mobs come into camp and 2 of them decided to start pounding on the cleric or enchanter, you might only have a few seconds to respond, and a failure there could lead to a full wipe.

3. EQ gave no shits about running a train on you. If you allowed a mob run off deeper into the dungeon, it might come back with 10 red-conning buddies who would pound your entire group into the dirt in a few seconds. This went for any kind of mistakes pulling or navigating a dungeon. Enchanters and Bards had some amazing crowd control abilities but even they had limits.

4. Outdoor zones that allowed for easy pulling and solo kills also usually had high level menaces that would randomly fuck you up if you didn't stay wary of them like Hill Giants or Holly Windstalker in Qeynos Hills who would aggro if she saw you hitting a wolf. In the original game, meditating casters were not allowed to see the environment and had to stare at their spellbook, so needed someone else to keep a lookout.

>>4957272
Yea Kelethin (dark elf town?) sucks for that, you get turned around quick.

Also to that last comment lol yea forgot about having to look at your spell book when meditating.

Fuck..all this talk got me sad I’ll necer experience that feeling again. Honestly when I first bought EQ at Kunark and loaded up my first barbarian walking around Halas I was kinda like wtf is this..shitty graphics, kinda obscure controls etc.

Fast forward a month and it had become my favorite game of all time and will probably stay that way forever. Back to those days of sitting on the ramp dishing out SOW’s or finally fighting deep In blackburrow

>>4957554
Neriak is Dark Elf starting zone, and Nektulos is their newbie zone. It's very dark and difficult to see.

>>4957534

Nice thing about eq dungeons and encounters were they didn't try (or didn't successfully) to design a specific group size or whatever. If you figure out how to beat the system and duo a mob you shouldn't be able to all the more power to ya.

Bard kiting to split all the trash mobs, doing da/db idol trains to pull targets to the zoneline .

They let you really play with the mechanics.

>>4876410
this

modern EQ isn't as bad as people claim
some of the major changes are really nice to have, like reduced downtime between fights as some classes were extremely unfun to play (wizard)
stuff like mercenaries and more readily available teleporting were needed because of a shrinking player base
and there's a ton more content to explore than in 1999 where you'll be seeing the same content forever that you've already seen for years
classic EQ was really only great when you had the hundreds of spare hours to invest

>>4960242

It's really just that it's a different game so if you're looking for the everquest people know and love that's kunark, vel, luclin and pop.

Honestly most people aren't going to run out of shit to explore for a long long time. Everquest is a big game.

So I mean eq on live is probably fine but it's a different experience.

>>4960242

I think daybreak should take the best aspects of the last 20 years of eq and make a new game and have that be eq3. There are tons of good ideas and cool content in later expansions but also a lot of dumb shit.

We don't need something radically different or bleeding edge graphics just the cream of the crop content and mechanics.

>>4961108
I'm personally hoping that this is what Pantheon ends up being. The game is still years away from full commercial release, so it's pure speculation as to what the finished product will look like. But their monetization model seems to be built around catering to a small, highly devoted, niche clientele, rather than mass market appeal. At the very least, they have made the correct first step by explicitly not being a WoW clone. My cautiously optimistic dream is that it will basically be EQ with 20 years of technological enhancement instead of 20 years of inscrutable spaghetti code.

>>4961182

Yeah I'm in the same boat. I just am skeptical they will actually be able to deliver. They seem to be doing all the right things from what I have seen from the developer casts but my fear is they will run out or money and have to force a release possiblly putting in some cash grab mechanics. SoE had a big cash flow and could eat the loss for years. At some point ready or not they are going to have to release a product or end up going bankrupt.

Biggest wildcard is Brad not flaking out and disappearing when things get tough like he did with vanguard.

>>4961329
>Biggest wildcard is Brad not flaking out and disappearing when things get tough like he did with vanguard.
That, or leaving 2 or 3 years after the game gets released to go start another project. I seriously expected the game to be vaporware after he spent a bunch of years trying to get investors on board. That he's still here and the project is still alive gives me hope that he's personally invested (emotionally and financially) enough to see it through to completion.

>>4874782
Because it's already been done, and because people already have a backlog of time sunk into it, which a future MMO can't rely on to get people to keep sinking in time.
It's the same reason you'll never get pre-2007 runescape community, or club penguin, or anything like that back. To plagiarize /a/: You can (not) redo.

>>4961445

Unless pantheon is a incredible success beyond anyone's wildest dreams he's not going to start something new. He is personally invested because this is his last chance, if this fails he's not going to have another chance at running the show. After vanguard failed so miserably and the rumors about him, he's lucky he got this chance. I really hope pantheon is a success.

>>4957272

How goes the grind?

>>4963941

not him but going well, made my cleric about a 2 weeks ago and am having fun grouping up at a popular outdoor camp, then once we get a full team, moving into a nearby dungeon for dat exp and dat exploration/fun

>>4963961

What level?

>>4963967

17 about to hit 18 tonight, probably gonna hang out in Guk

name is Pheseas

>>4963976

Lower Guk is a good spot, A nice wr bag drops there and a good pp belt. I forget what level lguk is. Pain is it's undead and live mobs so you gotta be careful. Death in lguk fucking sucks i would bind at the zone line in uguk.

Other good place is solb. Some okay pp drops, next to druid rings, some high levels hangout there. (Good for buffs and reses)

>>4963941
I got my necro to level 6 then wanted to try out wizard
got sick of wizard real fast and made a shaman because I hear they get some good movespeed buffs
shaman is currently level 5

>>4874782
what's with the reddit spacing? Fuck off and take your trash game with you

I fucking hate grinding based MMOs but surprisingly for me , Lineage II was my favorite MMO ever, even more than Dark Age or Everquest. Also the people were pretty cool, made some real friends there.

>>4964935
He's writing full paragraphs that are much easier to read when double-spaced. You must be pretty new if you can't properly identify plebbit spacing.

Whats your guys thoughts on Pantheon? I watched recent stream where they had bunch of twich normies being raped in pre-alfa test or something and it really looked like eq with better graphics.

>>4965017
not going to be finished in my lifetime

they have so little to show currently, every stream they show off the same quarter of a raid and the same unfinished city and the same generic zone
the classes look alright but they're not being very original, the selection is borrowed 1:1 from everquest
the race selection and designs however are excellent

>>4874782
UO was better

>>4965267

Apples to oranges man.

UO was cool too make a thread.

>>4964354

Bard gets the fastest movement speed buff. Unlike bard though Shaman is a super useful class end game. The main issue is their spells cost a fuck ton. The best spell torp is 100k so start saving.

Sha can make sow pots though which sell for 100pp a pop.

Minions of Mirth and Second Life did it.

>>4968419
Minions of Mirth was alright
it was pretty much just an Everquest clone with multiclassing and 20x more bugs and even worse balance but it had a charm to it
it's a shame they shut down the servers

>>4968851
> 20x more bugs
It was the base game example for the Torque mmo kit, but it did have a charm to it for sure. I didn't know the servers shut down though?

It's a shame developers don't release the server code (or a binary) and database when they shut down MMOs.

Everquest and p99 mostly lucked out because eqmac was stuck in time to pop so they were able to do all the packet sniffing needed to get a good base and then let the people who lost jobs, friends, family, significant others have it mean something by contributing their vast knowledge of every miniscule detail digging through patch notes on waybackmachine to confirm.

Games like the matrix online? Yeah that's never going to happen, but it's a shame because you can't even play and learn first hand from their mistakes.

I feel bad for the developers who have a piece of their live lost forever. Maybe they aren't proud of it but for a 6 months or however long they really believed.

>>4969571
what the fuck does mac eq have to do with anything
showeq/eqemu predate PoP by years

>>4969625

? It was the only source available to actually go and grab pcaps when someone actually wanted to get a era accurate database? Otherwise you're just baseing that shit off showeq pcaps people forgot to delete. (Literally what is happening with eq online adventures server emu)

P99 doesn't even have a 100% accurate database.

bumping with trolls!

>>4971420

Dat hp Regen

>>4946948
>A lot of kids went to the local libraries here to play it for example
Brought up a whole lot of memories with this part.
I remember playing it at my local library when it had that mix of 3d terrain and 2d sprite player models.

I also remember feeling like hot stuff tromping around the cow pastures wearing a full set of bronze armor that I made despite the folks passing by in their full rune armor

Could someone tell me about any famous ogre raids or anything like that? Any stand out player driven events? I just wanted to ask because I enjoy hearing stories from someone's perspective rather than reading a wiki.

>>4972473

They had a thing on live where GM's could play as monsters. So you could just get fucked where mobs don't path or fight a smarter mob.

Seemed like eq had GM's who just loved the game and had as much fun planning events as players had doing them.

I saw a funeral in nro once. They told me not to kill mobs there out of respect. I did anyways.

EQ next with the 'smart' mobs that used machine learning or something to adjust their strategy or move to another area if people are slaughtering them.

There were some cool events I remember in north ro where the NpC would lead a group of players to kill the giants

Also a few different random NPC events in everfrost

It would be pretty cool because you would see whatever happen go down In the chat across the zone and then you’d have to find out wherever it was happening.

I remember some cool stuff in the Karanas planes as well

Guild vs guild wars we're pretty cool.
Sadly they don't have that on p99 yet.

----

Lol <core> got another 30 day raid suspension. They had like 4 days between the last ban. What a bunch of morons.

>>4974592

guild vs guild wars is the final solution to the p99 endgame petition-quest problem

should have pvp enabled in contested raid zones and let the strongest earn the spoils

prob wont happen because too many of the guilds have women leads or officers


If any project1999 devs are reading this; please just do it and dont consult the community

Oh god how could I forget as well, fucking arena battles!!!

Jesus, this was literally a pilgramige to watch server wide duals in the arena. If you were not that high you’d have to track down and teleport to the zone adjacent to the arena

As far as I remember it was class VS same class. Man..everyone sitting around on the sidelines while two warriors went at it was crazyyyyyy dual wielding the one red and one blue sword VS another ogre with battle axe, fuck what a memory

These were server wide run events not just impromptu. The GM’s would teleport or freeze any idiots who would run into the ring

God what a game..

>>4974615

They will never do gvg as a solution to disputes because it's not classic.

I agree that's the way it should be though.

>>4974698

P99 blue did this.

>>4974207
>They had a thing on live where GM's could play as monsters.
That's a pretty amazing idea. It would add a real sense of danger to the world if, from a players perspective, a monster can intelligently hunt them own or ambush them.