[EQ] Cheaters Nostalgia; EQ1's Greatest Exploits/Rumors.

[Darkko]

HOLY FUCK, I found them! Seriously, I don't know where they came from. apparently they are now hidden files. I had an idea after the great story by Goliath, tried it out and found them. WOW, I'm happy , Pics inc soon maybe

Edit* they appeared to have been waiting to be written to a CD. I must have been in the process of burning them and then I forgot about them. So for 4 years now they have been waiting for me to find them, lol

[gersrfc]

Originally Posted by Goliath

It's the most tragic thing that has ever happened to me or will ever happen to me. Yes, even if that happened... Or that... Or that... Whenever anything bad happens to me in life, I am able to pick up and keep on truckin', because I say to myself, I say, "It's not like you just lost 2,000 Everquest screenshots from the greatest days of gaming that will ever exist and the greatest time you'll ever have of your life." And then I get a natural high and sew my legs back on from the near fatal car accident I just had and sell my kidney to buy a new car. And life is good, because after all, it's not like I just lost my Everquest screenshots.

What The Fuck???

[Zignor 2]

Wow.

I mean, I lost probably 80% of my old EQ screenshots to a hard drive crash (I cancelled my cable service and had *just* downloaded them from my online backup to be transfered elsewhere), so I'm well versed in the pain, but that post may be the saddest thing I've ever read on the internet.

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by gersrfc

What The Fuck???

Read some Kurt Vonnegut.

[Arcarsenal]

Dev revealed Ancient Cyclops spawn cycle

"There's one spawn in South Ro with a 30.66666666 minute repop time that has a 10% chance of being the ancient cyclops, but he has to spawn at night. He's on the same spawn table with a_desert_madman, a_dervish_cutthroat, a_sand_giant, and a_mummy."

[FulorianC]

Yeah, that was breaking news... two pages back.

[ruination]

Originally Posted by Goliath

I was about 14 at the time of Kunark. I was sharing a computer with my sister who only used AIM. I thought the world was unjust that we had to take turns of 3 hours each and she had nothing legitimate to do. I had orcs to slay in Oasis, bandits to arrest in Butcherblock and undead to purge in Unrest and giant bumblebees to kite in the Burning Woods. I had 8 characters that had 8 million things to do. All she had was pubescent boys to talk to on AIM.

I worked for my dad for an entire summer doing ridiculous interior remodeling in old rich ladies weird smelling houses. At the end of the summer I bought my computer. It was the happiest day of my life. I could now play Everquest a solid 14 hours a day.

The family computer my sister and I were sharing was moved to my sister's room. A couple of weeks later I wanted to transfer my screenshots only to find that the bitch deleted them the second the computer went into her room. I did not even know that she knew how to fucking delete shit.

The saddest part is is that I was - key happy. I pressed the - key for just about anything. And you can be sure if it was something, I had at least 10 copies from different angles. The computer's hard drive was 40gb and my screenshots were around 2.5gb (remember screenshots in EQ save as BMP and are huge). Anyways I had over 2,000 from like EQ release till mid Kunark.

It's the most tragic thing that has ever happened to me or will ever happen to me. Yes, even if that happened... Or that... Or that... Whenever anything bad happens to me in life, I am able to pick up and keep on truckin', because I say to myself, I say, "It's not like you just lost 2,000 Everquest screenshots from the greatest days of gaming that will ever exist and the greatest time you'll ever have of your life." And then I get a natural high and sew my legs back on from the near fatal car accident I just had and sell my kidney to buy a new car. And life is good, because after all, it's not like I just lost my Everquest screenshots.

I FEEL YOUR PAIN HARSK. Or varsk. whichever faggot you were.

[Zmak]

Originally Posted by fùtbol

If the music inspired old memories, check out EQemulator. While most who played EQ know of it or have tried it, it has grown tremendously and the servers are truly amazing to date. There are 2 servers in particular; an old world - PoP era server, and an old world/Kunark PVP server. Both servers have 100-180 players on average at all times, minus US work days which is a given. The up to PoP era server even has its own economy, that's as real as an experience you can get. It's pre TSS, pre 3% regen of all pools, the daggers, rusty swords, etc all look like shit, which I've come to enjoy again haha. Also, since you can run it via EQLindows (yes not eqwindows, but EQlindows, new version since EQW has been broken), you can delete your new spell graphics and have close to somewhat classical casting graphics. None of these new gay ass spell graphics, bard songs pulse golden again, life taps look sick, cleric aegolism lines look as they used to, nukes look insane.

Check it out if youre looking for casual fun, it's an entirely different game than live has become. It's fun and a challenge it's slow paced, and you can box easily on it with EQL since the client is that of the DoD one, its not very memory intensive at all.

EQ is the main reason the majority of us lerkers came to troll these forums, log onto Emulator and play a few hours a week on one of those green legit servers, it's fun and refreshing and while you cant bring back the golden days of EQ, it's close enough that you're able to pretend.

From an EQ junkie since 99, Sayonara!

the POP-era server, is it ProjectEQ / PEQ? I just got my system setup with titanium, and played on stormhaven last night. PEQ is apparently down at the time, over 24 hours now. They think it's an ISP issue.

[Loveless]

If ever I loved anything, it was this game. My only regret was never having a reasonably stable domestic situation ever for the bulk of my raiding days with Da`kor--it could have been so much more awesome, I could have perhaps had even more fun.

[Trebla]

I know it's an old thread, but thought people might be interested in learning more Velious and earlier secrets...

Prathun popped in to this thread.

I've always been curious about the elusive Vaniki, myself.

There are five spawns that can appear as Vaniki. The respawn time is 122 hours. Each spawn point has a 10% chance to spawn as Vaniki. Vaniki is unique, so there can only ever be one of them up at any given time. If the spawn is not Vaniki, it will appear as an unkillable invisible man placeholder. In either case, Vaniki or placeholder, the NPC will despawn 122 hours later.

This implementation makes the Vaniki NPC rare and essentially uncampable.


When these 5 spawns initially trigger (not when the zone comes up - there is a delay before they will appear) there's a ~41% chance that Vaniki will be in the zone. 122 hours later, if there is no interference, all 5 will despawn, and 122 hours later they will respawn. Each spawn location operates independently of the others, making the behavior of the system more complex if Vaniki is killed since the slain spawn will no longer occur synchronously with the other 4.

Later clarified that these are RL hours, not in-game hours. Other theories about Vaniki's spawn cycle simlpy appeared to work based on small sampling of test cases.

The code behind it:

ZCD_DESCRIPTION1 NCD_1 NCD_2 NCD_3
NECRVaniki1 100 57868 103
NECRVaniki2 100 57868 103
NECRVaniki3 100 57868 103
NECRVaniki4 100 57868 103
NECRVaniki5 100 57868 103

These are the placeholders for Vaniki.

NCD is a contraction of NPC command - it's a string of (usually) sequential behaviors that an NPC follows. So mobs that spawn with NCD 100, 57868, and 103 will perform the following, in order:

100 Goto Spawn
57868 Wait - 5d 2h 0m 0s
103 Depop

Placeholders that are not Vaniki are non-combatable invisible men. Therefore, you cannot accelerate their respawn by killing them.

And a little math...

Each NCD entry has a unique identifier and "Wait - 5d 2h 0m 0s" happens to be 57868. The value of that number is meaningless. The DURATION field holds the wait time.

5490000 Uzuns = 439200 seconds = 122 hours

(There are 12.5 Uzuns in a second. This unit of measurement was created early in EverQuest's development when it was determined that seconds were not granular enough for design. The name is coined after Roger Uzun, one of the game's original coders.)

(There are 3600 seconds in an hour. But you already know this. SMILEY )

NPC_CMD_ID 57868
NPC_CMD_DESCRIPTION Generic - Wait - 5d 2h 0m 0s
CMD_TOKEN 57
X 0
Y 0
Z 0
DURATION 5490000
PPT_ROUTE 0
PPT_NUMBER 0
COMPLETION_FILE_NAME

Aristo popped in with a comment on Raster (bold by me)

He is not broken. He works as described above. While we don't try to throttle items with extreme rarity now, that was the intended method for dealing with him then, and I don't forsee it changing in his case.

With very rare mobs like this, there is a lot of room for assumptions to "appear" correct, especially since no one player is going to record thousands of trials to get a statistically accurate sample. Take Raster of Guk as another example. The theory in my guild was that you could only kill the placeholder if it was night and there were minotaurs up in the pit. When I got here and was able to look it up, it's just that he's a 5% spawn on that table. He has the same 5% spawn chance any time it pops, but that's rare enough for theories to take hold.

[Hatorade]

I barely did Dragon Necropolis so had no idea how rare Vaniki was. I think the second time through we downed him while I was on my rog/cleric and looted that. I was happy for sure but didn't know until later just how lucky I was haha.

[IruleYcauseImSweet]

The classic PVP emulator server is getting wiped very soon. This news is great if you want to start off fresh.

What they plan on doing is having a classic pvp progression server. Starting with classic and ending with velious. I cant wait for everyone to be crowded in the low end zones and just have mass pvp.

Tallon Vallon Zek: Everquest Classic PVP

[Hatorade]

Oh god, PvP at level 3 make me want to not do this. SK death touch on wizards and warriors swing and miss over and over then hit for 1 followed by a kick for 1. Pretty sure mages and casters will dominate everything until melee gets at least POP gear. Seeing as how you can't get PoP gear, I may roll a ranger for the LULZ.

[Tangurena]

Originally Posted by Cantatus

Ok, I just remembered a rumor that maybe a former guide/GM can confirm or deny for me:

I'm not sure where I heard this, but supposedly in the GM zone there was an NPC named after a developer that had died. The rumor that I heard was that if someone killed the NPC, that person would be removed from the guide/GM program and get banned from EQ.

Asherah The Torch Bearer. It wouldn't surprise me if you got banned for /killing her. There was no possible way that you could kill her in combat. Not with a 10 delay piercer that procked a 500hp harm touch at every swing (see picture for that secondary weapon). If you ever saw some link going around for a no-rent weapon that procked HT, that is it, in her secondary. Asherah roams the zone. If there is some test npc, she'll aggro and kill it. Llara the Mysterious was the 2nd memorial NPC. Llara hung out at the pool in the back, and if you got birthday or wedding cake from a guide, that's the "vendor" they came from.

Originally Posted by Ashes Emberblade

There was a rumor that there was an invisible banker in befallen that would turn copper into plat. Was that true?

No. It was a pricing bug in the steel used in Karana cultural fletching, and in particular, this recipe. The rumor of the banker in befallen (or najena in some variants) was a cover-up.

Originally Posted by Sajko

You could make a certain arrow with Fletching made with components bought from NPCs and the finished arrow would sell(to the NPC) for more than the components cost.
I had macroquest set up with a script to buy components and make arrows and sell them back while I was asleep. Only used it for a little while and made a couple of hundred k.
A friend had 2-3 accounts set up and running this thing and made lots and lots of plat.

If you macro-quested it, you could easily raise several thousand plat per hour, however it required warping, which made it easy to spot. Any Karana worshipping character could get to 188 smithing for less than 1kpp (they'd be turning a profit starting around 140-150). The wood-elf cultural fletching had the same bug when first introduced, but since there are so many woodies, that got discovered and fixed within days. The Karana one was obscure enough it endured for months.

When SZ was new, there was another pricing bug with fish rolls. Sold for more than it cost to make. This was uncovered when someone was walking around in plate armor long before (like day 4 or something like that) the devs thought that the server could support smiths capable of making fine steel plate armor (which at the time was the best that players could make).

Originally Posted by Xusilak

Camping in the corner in sirens grotto for a free TL across the zone.

That dropped you at the succor point. And that sort of thing happened in every zone (until fixed). Siren's grotto was the only place that folks tried it out, mostly because it was a serious pain in the butt to players.

Originally Posted by Spankes

Didn't GMs have a sort of invis that see invis couldn't see through? There were lots of times Saiphos (server gm) would come to our raids and say random shit to us before dropping his invis to hang out. Anyway, the point is, all those times "GMs were watching you" they already knew exactly what you were doing, maybe they just liked to torment people in their free time~

With lower level guides, the command was /hide. It made one invisible to everything except other guides and GMs. Senior guides had another version that made them invisible even to regular guides (but not to other seniors and GMs). Anyone using ShowEQ would have seen the guides, but not the GMs (because the char info wouldn't be leaving Sony's servers).

Originally Posted by Jysin-DW

The only exploits I remember were the Trakanon bug. After the target thing was fixed, if you were a guild officer you could still type /guildinvite Trakanon_01 and that would work. You would basically get a message like "Player not found" if he wasnt up or you would get "Cannot invite NPCs" if he was up. Good times.

This was fixed at the same time you could not /guildinvite GMs and guides. Even if the GM was hidden, if you knew their name, you could see if they were in the zone by trying to /guildinvite them.

[Tangurena]

Originally Posted by Hake

There once was this guy who pushed a player vendor that was selling items in the bazaar, all the way into the bazaar arena (before revamp). I think the crazy fellow used some sort of KB to very slowly push the vendor, and then he killed him in the arena. If I remember correctly, the vendor stayed online -afk - and his corpse poofed.

The vendor/player was Raulpiley. The server Luclin. The knockback happened to be a troll belly (when floaty lev makes you go up, you ignore most geometry, but coming down, you'll bounce off things). His corpse didn't poof, it just got buried in a pile of ogres or trolls or some other player corpses (artfully arranged to make it harder for him).

Originally Posted by LadyVex

Pushing people into the arena wasn't hard in the bazaar; I think there were several ways but the easiest was just to simply buff the person with spirit of the eagle and then push their character while they were levitated. They had that buff inside that zone that made it so you weighed nothing (But zone out and you couldn't move a muscle if you had too much plat or items) and it was very easy. The initiated a change a bit later that you couldn't buff people while in vendor form or something like that.

Fixed by making it so you cannot cast levitate spells on other folks in the bazaar.

Originally Posted by Concrete

There was a way to crash Sleeper's Tomb which I tried once, But I can't remember exactly what it was. Might have been agroing the entrance mobs and zoning out or using OT hammer or some shit, then pulling the plug. We farmed it a bit that day.

/TGB a group, when one member of the group was dead (this was when /tgb was new). Before doing that, camp out the folks who looted good stuff, then bang, reset the zone. Everyone not camped out gets set back an hour or so. That's long since fixed.

Originally Posted by Masakari

How did people make a lot of plat in Everquest? Even around the Kunark/Velious era - I always had like 100pp on me and I thought that was pretty good.

I made a ton making leather padding. Farm the parts in Everfrost, then run stacks and stacks of it to the tunnel in EC. Each combine of fine steel plate armor required one leather padding. I couldn't keep up with the demand, so I made several RL friends hiring random newbs to farm the spiderling silks and animal pelts needed. Some guilds wanted stat foods, so I hired more newbies to slaughter rats for rat meat for rat kebobs. Back in '01, I could easily make 100pp an evening on level 1-5 mobs and some hustle.