im just going to lay it down everquest was just to me wide open, i mean, it seemed if someone wronged you
you could do something about it. training was rampant and kill stealing was prevalent. i guess it was just so much fun screwing someone over and taking what was theres. and never again, in any other games where there designed camping spots where you would sit in one area because it was stragically better there. for whatever reason, and im not saying that camping in one spot for hours and hours was a great idea but i think it established a relative role for everyone in the group, not just a tank or healer. i believe that games now build there dungeons more for an all inclusive player base. for example, in any given game if your going to do something like kill a named boss or break a room you need a tank and healer. so they see this and theres no way around not having someone that can tank and heal so two slots taken right there. i remember myself in everquest building groups and you knew what the best combinations were. i think that alot of people were left out and they are trying to rectify that. and a few aspects are suffering because of that. i mean mob agro in any game now is a joke there really is no splitting involved anymore now there just leashed together with a boss or named mob or there single pulls. my point for this is i think it made for a more exciting experience if you had a bad puller you could easily wipe or if your group was good you could compromise for a bad pull. in early stages of eq everyone one had one job and it seems that developers don't like that so they are giving each combination of classes more things they can do. perfect example you can solo in any MMO now with out a major problem. its efficient enough to level if you dont have alot of time to commit to the game at that point. that reminds me i hope in every future game there is a mentoring system ( i think you guys covered this ) i really like vanguards, it just splits your exp between you and your chosen partner. i think its a great way to keep players playing that have to do something for a week or even longer so if its finals week or you have to go out of town you can come back and be right where everyone else is exp wise. player trading, now i mean items with some kind of importance not the guy who is sitting there auctioning leather set pieces or whatever. the reason i liked player vs player trading with no assistance was because you could always make some quick money if someone was underpricing something that maybe dident know the right value of that item that they were selling. it almost was like an unofficial skill. and it gave yet another thing for players to do. say they only have a 20 or 30 mins to log on they can try to work some deals make some money and it was a positive. i might be biased toward direct player trading, but in early everquest there was the so called black market and im talking about selling currency or items for real money online. and it is nothing like it is today. today gold is cheap in any game. there are some high end or rare loot cards in WoW that will sell for something substantial. but nothing like early everquest. i started playing eq at 14 a year later at 15 i learned how to make money by selling intangible items over the internet and i remember trying to convince my parents to set up a paypal account in my name, so i could do this and they were at such a disbelief that someone would spend real money to buy something that was in a game. so needless to say they did not set up my account and kept yelling at me to stop playing everquest and to get an after school job. well that wasent going to happen. thank god for money orders because the first time i came back to my house with over $2000 dollars in cash my parents thought i was dealing drugs. needless to say they got on board and thanks to everquest i never had to get a job until college. it payed for my car, car insurance for over 3 years and money in my pocket. when you can sell 100k for 1000 dollars US on ebay in about in hour thats pretty good. so direct player trade was very favorable to me since i could invest my time find good deals and benefit from that. this brings up another thing i haven't seen in other games. everquest really had was unique items. there were not alot of them and it took some time and luck to acquire them. they werent just dumped into the market like alot of items today so that everyone can have them. and im not saying like oh games suck because there are no broken items. but once again im probably extremely biased again because i had all of these items. i dont even know how items like Manastones and Circlets or Shadows made it out of beta testing. there items that truly broke the game and i just thought that was the greatest thing. it was even more beneficial when they thought it would be a great idea to take those items out of the game, and leave the ones that had alreay been looted in the game unchanged. so it was really just more money in my pocket. as i write this it sounds like i played eq to make money which was complety not true. i didn't start playing this game thinking that i would be able to make a ridiculous amount of money. it just kind of fell into place and i think its one of those topics that people wont talk about and something that game developers know all to well what can happen. so i think items suffer in lack of creation and players suffer in lack of feeling like there character is less unique. i think they have failed at that aspect of uniqueness in newer games. now mob camping, i was referring to boss mobs more than common mobs. in everquest if you really wanted to advance you would need to clear the end game content. all of the really high end content in the game for about 3 or 4 expansions was on days if not a week respawn. this is where people liked everquest alot or hated everquest alot. basically the game is making you suffer through no-fault of your own. clearing the Planes and naggy and vox and even into trakanon and sleepers tomb Veeshan's peak. you couldent do by yourself or with 10 or 20 or even 30 people you really needed a solid group of players that were descent and had the time to play and when i mean time to play i mean like 50hrs a week. thats about the average time for a top 10 guild of 50 players or so. and this is why new games have pushed so strongly into instance zones and boss's and raid mobs. there trying not to exclude people, hence there customers form playing the game so they will take it down a notch, and try to level the playing field. it just seemed everquest to me, if your an asshole you liked everquest, if you were a honest person you dident like it as much. i'll give one last example of some of the awful things i use to do in eq to in so many words just fuck people over for my benefit. when kunark came out there was a hammer that droped. when you would equip this hammer and attack something there was a random chance that you would be ported to the Overthere. alot of melees had this hammer just so they wouldn't have to carry gate potions or if they ran out or for whatever reason. so anyway i had a monk one of the top on the server that i use to just run around and check all the money spawns so to say, and there was kind of an unspoken rule in everquest if someone was at a camp before you. you would let them have it or give them first shot at whatever they were trying to kill but since i was an asshole, i would basically roll in there see someone camping something i wanted and i must have done thins 100 times. since they were there fist i would simply ask them to send me a tell when they were done camping whatever they were camping and then after that i would say oops i ran out of gate potions can i duel you so that my OT hammer can proc and ill get outa here. so they would agree and then i would switch out the hammer and beat the shit outa them and take the camp so...im and asshole i loved everquest and it truly was a game where you could do anything to anyone with little or no repercussions. i want to close out this email with my final topic "quests or questing". Ever"Quest" it has quest in its name yet unlike games today where there are and endless amount of quests to do, mainly for experience. the word everquest was tuned more toward using the word quest as a journey a unique and mysterious adventure. not at all in the sense of " go here and turn this in and then bring it back to me". everquest was more about the adventure then questing. it was more apart of the picture. and i know people use the word hard when they talk about everquest and truly questing in everquest was hard, hard in the sense that it could have been done alot better. quests were so vague in the description that its nearly impossible to figure out how to complete them. when i say hard im trying to say that probably what made it hard was that it wasent designed as well as it could, so you had to work around or break the game to complete it and that just required a little more effort on the players part. i think questing in games today have lost alot of mystique because the main reason why people quest today is jsut for one simple reason experience. really i blame everquest for making me hate questing since the quest system was so unforgiving, god forbid you turn and item in at the wrong time or to the wrong npc, your not only going to lose that item but the only way to retrieve that item is to kill the quest giver and loot it back. having said that it was something that was under much fire before everquest was released into an external beta. should it have been changed? yes. was it, no. but as pertaining to the topic about killing 100 orcs or 15 i think that was a little over exaggerated example, since in everquest there was no multiple mob kill quest. there was no benefit for killing orcs, (and i know it was just an example) the only real benefit was if you kill the death fist orcs in and around crushbone and collect there belts you could turn them into a npc for exp which was pointless after about level 9 or something. why not take another page from everquest and try to implement it into other games. lets not forget early on every mob in everquest had a chance to randomly drop a Box Of Abu-kar which was a 10 slot, giant Compactly, 100% weight reduction. i though that was a great way when people traveled place to place by foot or via porter. before the whole PoK system of books. if a mob crossed your path you would just kill it and maybe you would be rewarded with something worth while for your effort. I enjoyed the mini cast and look froward to future topics.

Ayen