Brad McQuaid Site Updated

[TKarrde]

As someone who's been following this thread for a while now, all I really have to say is this:

Everything good about EQ is foisted on every person involved in the design besides Brad. Everything bad about EQ is foisted on Brad.

He's become the obvious (And exceedingly easy, after the steaming pile of shit that was Vanguard) scapegoat for, well, everything. Every bad feature in EQ? Brad's fault. Every bad feature in EQ that got copied into WoW? Brad's fault. Every good feature in EQ? MUD designer/rest of EQ design team's success. Every good feature copied from EQ into WoW? MUD designer/rest of EQ design team's success.


So is the truth that Brad had too much control in EQ? Too little control? That everything bad is because of him? That everything good is because of him?

Either position is equally absurd. Any rational observer looking at this mess is going to come to the conclusion that Brad had a lot of good ideas, and a lot of bad ones. In a position where he had people vetting his shit, more of the good ones came through than the bad ones, and mediocre ones were refined into decent ones. In a position where he had complete control, even his good ideas were overshadowed by his bad ones.

Even if he had an equal number of good and bad ideas, having that many bad ones will sink the ship. And most people will never come up with 90% good ideas, 10% bad, so anyone being an absolute dictator in design is a terrible fucking thing, be it Brad McQuaid, Richard Garriot, or any other fucking person.

I know it's too much to ask that either side on this debate starts to calm down and think rationally, but c'mon... You have to at least acknowledge that you're being ridiculous. Both fanboys and anti-fanboys.

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by TKarrde

.

You are both right, and wrong. But one thing that isn't wrong:

The guy flat out lied to his co workers, and worse, the entire gaming community. He fucked over that same gaming community. And took people for their wallet knowing full well what the fuck he was up to.

Him, and his "business" ideas which damn near screwed this entire genre up the ass, can get fucked. And anytime this prick decides to make another run at doing it again, which is the reason this thread is here in the first place, I'll be there.

This guy doesn't deserve jack shit. And the fucker still has not apologized. He keeps pointing blame at everyone but himself.

And while we are at it, I can tell you what we can thank Brad for.

Expansions released 70% with artifical bugs in place to finish content and stall players for the sake of revenue.

Watching other companies do the same as a result which kept the MMORPG genre a basket of unfinished bug ridden titles through 2004. And again when he came back with Vanguard and showed us all the true meaning of what he is capable of.

Laughing at all the lies told players over the course of EQ via his mouth piece, Ester the Tester for the sake of a buck.

This guy wouldn't know honest if it came up and bit him in the ass. And he never will.

The prick should never be considered by any company.

He is a fucking laughing stock. Inside the industry, and out. And that is exactly where this dipshit belongs. Out of it. And anyone showing their face to defend the guy should be fucking ashamed of thesmelves.

[Arbitrary]

Originally Posted by TKarrde

I know it's too much to ask that either side on this debate starts to calm down and think rationally, but c'mon... You have to at least acknowledge that you're being ridiculous. Both fanboys and anti-fanboys.

"Over 80% of the people who bought Vanguard and tried to play it quit by level 2 or 3"

-Brad McQuaid

[EtadanikM]

Originally Posted by Utnayan

Oh give me a fucking break, kiddo. Threat (Called aggro back then) amounted to a shitload of broken mechanics where you told your raid to hold back while the tank got aggro and once they did, it was fucking over. Now, remind you, I am talking about the days when McQuaid was in control of this bitch. Not 15 expansions later.

Aggro = threat. There is almost no difference. Both are represented internally by a number that is based on damage + specific threat generation abilities. Taunt works slightly differently in WoW than it does in EQ, but other than that the mechanics are the same. Just because EQ was simpler does not make the concept "broken." "Hold back while the tank(s) get aggro" is the same way you deal with fucking Patchwerk. People can and do screw it up by stealing aggro in the middle of the fight because they did too much DPS and/or timed their aggro reducing abilities wrong.

Are you seriously fucking saying that World of Warcraft stole the "threat" feature from another MMORPG?

Yes. You're clueless if you think otherwise. Almost every single aspect of the threat system in WoW is the same as EQ's. You're trying to tell me WoW came up with all this independently when its lead developers were hardcore EQ raiders? If so I've got one word for you: head-up-in-ass.

Oh you are right. I was a necro. So I was the one class that could solo with my beat down pet and with an undead charm before it was nerfed I could solo in Lguk. Then came the fun shit. The raid game. The reason to play in the first place.

There's your problem right there. You played a necro - while thinking that raiding was the only reason to play EQ. I would empathize except I think you missed the boat on this one. It's like playing a prot warrior and wondering why you can't Arena.

Oh Christ please tell me what was the initial plan then? Befause those two expansions were planned and that content was planned. Therefore, that raid content was planned. And so was Vox. Or are you going to tell me something different?

The continents were planned. Raids-as-core-gameplay? No, I don't think it was planned. Nothing in the game suggested it. There was no raid UI. No raid-specific mechanics. No loot distribution methods. Raid class balance made no sense. Hell, they fucking capped mob hp at 32k. It was obvious they didn't think it through and was learning everything as they went along.

Are you seriously defending these mechanics? Are you fucked in the head?

Because you have to be fucked in the head to point out the reasoning behind a mechanic, right.

And here is how it panned out for me.

Play a Paladin. Get hit with a fucking experience nerf because I played a hybrid (Another ingenous idea from the one fucked Oxy busher). Start a Necro because I thought a skeleton pet looked cool. Level it to 50 than 55 and quit realizing the class sucked ass. Start a warrior where I wouldn't have to wait in a corner for a group for 5 fucking hours, I could get one in 2. Rinse repeat.

Watching you try to defend these mechanics reminds me of someone. An infalliable fucking idiot that didn't know his shit stunk back then either.

Look, it's obvious that you didn't enjoy your time in EQ. I did. If you prefer to think that I am fucked in the head because I did, go ahead. I won't lose sleep over it. The fact remains that you are talking about mechanics and design principles that you didn't even bother to understand. You went in with a one-track mind and was surprised that you played a game you fucking hated for, what, five years? I don't know, but that's pretty deranged.

Here is my contrast. The only fucker I knew from WoW was Kaubel (Dextor) who was in my old guild Excelsior from the Mith Marr days. I came to WoW and met some of the collest fucking people on the planet who are now in my guild. I didn't know Wodin, I didn't know Gurgthock, I didn't know Zoid... Christ I could name 60 Million people. Are you fucking trying to guise a bullshit interdependence system as a scapegoat for forming a community?

Why not? There isn't a day that goes by when I don't hear someone bitching about WoW's lack of community. My own experience validates this fact. You want to pretend that game mechanics have no bearing on community formation? You might as well believe the sun revolves around the earth. That's how common sense this shit is.

Niche? It's become mainstream and opened up the entire market because people do not want the bullshit that EQ brought into it. We don't want to shit our pants on a God Damn corpse run. We want to log in and play the fucker. This isn't about e-peen anymore, it's about having a family and wanting toenjoy MMORPG's without having to set aside 8 hours a day to advance a character half a bar of experience.

I'm glad you enjoy WoW. I do, too. I also enjoy EQ. I don't think it's necessary to shit on the latter because you enjoy the former. I think it's necessary for you to realize that you were not the type of people who should've been playing EQ in the first place, and to leave it at that.

This is why there needs to be market-niche and market-dominant games. People like you.

And you are speaking to a forum of which the entire concept of EQ was born upon. Listen up: It wasn't that hard of a game. And what was intended as design, never came to play on the battlefield. No matter how hard you wanted to believe it.

So your whole argument is that efficiency didn't matter? You gotta be kidding me. I'm starting to question whether you even played EQ seriously.

Are you delusional? Sebilis was camped to fuck and back because loot was exchanged in design from VP and Seb and back and forth. No one gave a fuck all about HS (Because there was nothing fucking there besides XP)

If by nothing fucking there you mean some of the best loot in the game, sure.

TT? What the fuck are you talking about? Chardok didn't come into play until AFTER the revamp, otherwise no one fucking went there. BW was more of a solo ground than Skyfire ever was because where were more places to situate. Karnors was for massive XP.

This proves to me while I may be clueless over anything post PoP, you are fucking clueless anything Pre-Pop.

So was this with your necro or your warrior? I'm trying to understand how your experience could've been so difference because Sebilis was never as crowded as you insinuate when I played. In order of how crowded the zones were, it was Karnors > Sebilis > Burning Woods > Howling Stones > Skyfire > etc. Oh, and I forgot one: City of Mist. There were plenty of choices for grinding, and since there was no AA, you basically went after the camps that dropped the items you wanted. There was no true progression, at this point. It was all based on preferences and loots. As a caster the loots didn't even matter. You were after the spells, which meant that you parked your ass in Skyfire and Burning Woods more often than not, since those were the easiest ways to get spells until you could group/raid Sebilite juggernauts.

And who gives a flying fuck all? The encounters are designed around it.

I do, because you're trying to act like WoW invented all this shit in a vacuum. They nerfed drinking in battle because it made encounters difficult to balance, and it made encounters difficult to balance because efficiency mechanics were what they started off designing around. Why? Because they were fresh out of EQ raiding and wanted to translate that to WoW.

Just so I know what you are talking about.... Which raid was this? And let me clue you in, Cheal wasn't even in the game yet.

Vox.

Reading this makes me laugh. Obviously you may have picked up on a raid game after the fact as Soygen has suggested, but it's pretty much common knowledge that none of this bullshit mattered in anything PoP. I would love to see the examples of fights where it did.

Which fight did it not matter in?

Name a single raid where none of the things I said applied.

And while you may have a point on anything more than PoP, you definitely show your ignorance on anything in the early days - especially when it comes to why people flooded Sebilis because it was a loot exchange with VP. And at the time of it's early beginnings, a lot of the loot there was brought over to VP because it was thought of as too high powered. But you didn't know that. Which disqualifies you from even discussing what this thread is about in the first place. Brad McQuaid's impact on MMORPGs.

Your grasp of logic is amazing. Truly so, that you could disqualify an argument based on a strawman that you created out of thin air - since when was this about whether there was a loot swap between VP and Sebilis? Kunark was released with a fudged loot table, but this has little to do with whether Sebilis was overcrowded because it was fixed before most players got to it. And since when was I talking about Brad? Unlike you, most of us do not have enough insider infos from ex-employees to make a proper judgment of Brad's character. He might indeed be as much of a douchebag as you say he is. This does not, however, prevent us from making statements about EQ.

[Tyen]

I welcome our new EQ3 overlords.

[EtadanikM]

Originally Posted by Utnayan

Then you are right. But you know what is also right? The fact that McQuaid was also gone, and all his bullshit decisions were also no where to be seen. Which is the entire purpose of this trademark comeback marketing thread which backfired up until two pages ago and the bandwagoners came on right?

I was there when he was. My opinion on his assanine delivery of design still stands. And his impact on design later collect now also stands. So does the good ol' boys club, as they now infiltrate this very thread and try to turn his bullshit artist career around back from anonymous chat handles. (Oh Hi to you Etad).

I have an idea. Let's call this what it should be called. "Brad McQuaid Site Updated: On VaultFohguild.org"

You're delusional. Delusional and paranoid, in fact, which is after all what got you into this mess in the first place. I could care less about Brad. I didn't even play Vanguard. From where I stood in the early days of EQ, Zatkin was my idea of someone who knew his shit. Brad was just an icon, the company's spokesperson, if you will. What design decisions he made are irrelevant to me, because I'm not here to discuss Brad, I'm here to discuss the game, EQ.

Insofar as the game is related to Brad, you may make whatever inferences you desire. But as a matter of rhetoric, in no way should my appreciation of EQ detract from your hatred of Brad. I mean, that's your whole purpose for being here, isn't it? Who the hell is a good ol' boy? I'm trying to resuscitate Brad's reputation? You've got to be kidding me.

[Bloodget]

Guys, you are trying to argue with Utnayan?

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by EtadanikM

Aggro = threat. There is almost no difference. Both are represented internally by a number that is based on damage + specific threat generation abilities. Taunt works slightly differently in WoW than it does in EQ, but other than that the mechanics are the same. Just because EQ was simpler does not make the concept "broken." "Hold back while the tank(s) get aggro" is the same way you deal with fucking Patchwerk. People can and do screw it up by stealing aggro in the middle of the fight because they did too much DPS and/or timed their aggro reducing abilities wrong.

And my point is thank God every fight isn't like this. In EQ 99.9% of the raid fights were boring as fuck. Pre=PoP. Do you really think going AFK for 45 minutes during Ssra is good design?

Almost every single aspect of the threat system in WoW is the same as EQ's. You're trying to tell me WoW came up with all this independently when its lead developers were hardcore EQ raiders? If so I've got one word for you: head-up-in-ass.

I dfidn't say this. What I find hilarious is you trying to imply that the aggro system in EQ worked so well they copied it in WoW.

There's your problem right there. You played a necro - while thinking that raiding was the only reason to play EQ. I would empathize except I think you missed the boat on this one. It's like playing a prot warrior and wondering why you can't Arena.

No. Because as a prot warrior I have a choice to do that, or go to an arms build, or a fury build. It's fucking broken mechanics and horseshit design that broke an entire class (And many others). Your comparison isn't even in the same fucking ballpark here pal.

The continents were planned. Raids-as-core-gameplay? No, I don't think it was planned. Nothing in the game suggested it. There was no raid UI. No raid-specific mechanics. No loot distribution methods. Raid class balance made no sense.

Like that ever stopped them from making a group centric game without those same tools to create groups in a timely matter. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You sitting here telling me that raids were not in mind when half the damn expansion was already under way when Vanilla launched (Including layouts for VP) is fucking retarded. SoE did everything so hap hazardly with the entire game that it's no wonder why no systems were in place. That doesn't mean they didn't intend to go down that route. They just sucked at having forethought around design specifics to cater to those mechanics.

Hell, they fucking capped mob hp at 32k. It was obvious they didn't think it through and was learning everything as they went along.

Well no shit. They didn't think anything through.

Because you have to be fucked in the head to point out the reasoning behind a mechanic, right.

Are you going to reply to it or just deflect it? So yes, the answer is, you are defending bullshit mechanics.

Look, it's obvious that you didn't enjoy your time in EQ. I did. If you prefer to think that I am fucked in the head because I did, go ahead. I won't lose sleep over it. The fact remains that you are talking about mechanics and design principles that you didn't even bother to understand. You went in with a one-track mind and was surprised that you played a game you fucking hated for, what, five years? I don't know, but that's pretty deranged.

I never said I hated it. I played it and liked the game too. I also used to eat corn flakes for breakfast too. Until I was introduced to pop tarts. I liked the game, and hindsight is 20/20, but you are defending shit mechanics and thoughtless design decisions that broke the game for many classes, made it hilarious as well, but also was the biggest fucking retarded game space there was out there. It did well and people played it because there was jack shit better out there. And the fact that the market thought to be capped at 400k all fighting over each other exploding to over 10 fucking million shows just how fucked the game was.

Why not? There isn't a day that goes by when I don't hear someone bitching about WoW's lack of community. My own experience validates this fact. You want to pretend that game mechanics have no bearing on community formation? You might as well believe the sun revolves around the earth. That's how common sense this shit is.

I am not saying that WoW doesn't have a lack of community. Sure it does. But there are more than just 2 indpendant variables floating around like a fart in the wind. Christ if I threw the population of Mal'Ganis on Mith Marr, I wouldn't know 90% of the fucking people because there is just too many fucking people! Again, short sighted thought. Some dipshits out there think that just because you have some instanced content and accessibility that those are the sole reasons behing a lack of community. If you took out the instanced and forced everyone to stand around, you still wouldn't have a fucking community because of what I stated above.

And to add to that, think of ways to create a community following without tedious bullshit playing into it, and you will have the golden ticket. Christ you think this is bad? Just wait until KOTOR Online hits the shelves.

I'm glad you enjoy WoW. I do, too. I also enjoy EQ. I don't think it's necessary to shit on the latter because you enjoy the former.

I shit on the latter because I look back and realize it could have been 50 times better. And it should have been. And then I look to who this thread is about, and I know why it wasn't any better.

So your whole argument is that efficiency didn't matter? You gotta be kidding me. I'm starting to question whether you even played EQ seriously.

Please tell me what was so hard in joining a seb group, watching a cleric sit in a corner and stand up to heal every so often while the chanter mezzed mobs and the tank pressed taunt over and over. This is resource management? And don't tell me it was anything more than that, because if you think so, you must have played with retarded fucking chimps out of a shitty air force experiment.

If by nothing fucking there you mean some of the best loot in the game, sure.

Are you just fucking replying to reply? Read what that reply was about. DO I have to hold your hand through this?

So was this with your necro or your warrior? I'm trying to understand how your experience could've been so difference because Sebilis was never as crowded as you insinuate when I played.

And when did you play? When it launched? Which server? I was on Mith Marr - populated as fuck. Seb was camped constantly with at least 10-15+ sitting on their ass in zone in waiting for a spot in a group to open up, or for someone to yell "Crypt open" to get their own going. Which would take hours. What server were you on and what time of the day and which time zone were you in where this didn't happen? Or were people just too busy to get their keys to enter it.

In order of how crowded the zones were, it was Karnors > Sebilis > Burning Woods > Howling Stones > Skyfire > etc. Oh, and I forgot one: City of Mist.

On Mith Marr CoM was a ghost town. As was HS.

Vox.

Good. Now explain to me how you think that raiding wasn't part of the plan when it was smack dab in the original with Kunark raid content already being designed for March 2000.

Which fight did it not matter in?

Name a single raid where none of the things I said applied.

Vox, Nag, Trak, Gore, VS, Tormax, AoW, Dain (The only trick to this fight was using a broken mechanic to bug the guy down) ... Need I go on? All these fightys were about were having the proper gear on, Chealing a main tank, and watching 30 others DPS and kill it. Period. Where is the resource management in this and what were so hard about the above (And more I didn't list) encounters?

Nothing was difficult about these encounters. Unless you played with absolute retards who fell asleep when it was their turn to heal.

Since when was this about whether there was a loot swap between VP and Sebilis?

Did you take the reply out of context? Read back, carefully, and figure it out.

Kunark was released with a fidged loot table

Kunark, Velious, and everything else was released with loot tables that were EMPTY and not finished which defauled to a cloth cap drop of which Ester said, "Yep, that is working as intended." Again, look back to why I brought up Seb and VP loot mixing, and why Seb was overcamped. It went directly to your argument about resource management when I said that the zone managed itself because people were begging for spawns to kill.

[CylusSoulreaver]

For fuck's sake, can people stop responding with a hacked-up, quote infested post? Aside from the fact that most of the shit spewed here just isn't enjoyable to read in the first place, y'all have to make it worse by quoting and responding line-by-line.

[EtadanikM]

Originally Posted by Utnayan

And my point is thank God every fight isn't like this. In EQ 99.9% of the raid fights were boring as fuck. Pre=PoP. Do you really think going AFK for 45 minutes during Ssra is good design?

I wouldn't have if I actually AFK'd for 45 minutes during Ssra. No offense but who the fuck did this? Ssra was not a trivial fight for most guilds that attempted it for the first few times. Beyond the 4k DD + stun + 95% aggro reduction on MT angle you had to crowd control eight insta-respawning snakes that procced anti-healing curses that needed to be either cured or healed through. Unless you were running with way too many healers that was a mana drain you could not avoid.

Think back to EQ. I know it's hard. But how much mana/tick could a healer regen? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't much. Clarity was only 10 mana/tick. Full sit meditation, something like 30. If you had multiple bards, you could add an additional 15. CH cost ~350 after specialization reductions. Do the math. No fucking way you were gaining mana through challenging fights unless you brought a fuck ton of healers. I know guilds that could afford to do that. Most guilds couldn't. The failure to prevent guilds from stacking healers was what ended up making raid restrictions and enrage timers a necessity, but the idea that this = most guilds did not suffer mana problems is inane. Most guilds did not field ten clerics. They were fortunate to get five or six.

Look, no one is arguing that EQ raiding was the apex of MMO gameplay. But your hyperboles strain your credibility. The Temple of Ssraeshza was no Vex Thal. The fights there actually required strategy. Many of the core principles associated with raiding were developed in it and PoP. Things like offtanking, ranging, tank rotations, using charm, fighting against charm, mana drains, bane weapons, timed encounters, decursing, and so on. EQ's basic mechanics and technology did not support WoW-style twitch fights. I'm sorry if this means EQ could've been "fifty times better than it was if not for McQuaid."

I dfidn't say this. What I find hilarious is you trying to imply that the aggro system in EQ worked so well they copied it in WoW.

What is so hilarious about the truth? Does WoW have an aggro system or doesn't it? Was it inspired by EQ or wasn't it? You tell me.

No. Because as a prot warrior I have a choice to do that, or go to an arms build, or a fury build. It's fucking broken mechanics and horseshit design that broke an entire class (And many others). Your comparison isn't even in the same fucking ballpark here pal.

My comparison is completely valid if you assumed the following: that raids weren't supposed to be the core of the game. When it became apparent that raids were going to become the core of the game, necros complained and eventually got fixed. By the time Shadows of Luclin rolled around we were fine, and stayed fine. And I don't mean this in the mana dumping sense.

Original EQ wasn't about raids. Necros were great, even overpowered, during original EQ. We were not bad during Kunark, either. Sure, VP and dragon fights were fucked, but very few people ended up doing them, and hell, the mobs had 32k hps and there was no raid restrictions. You didn't need much to justify your presence. Velious was when the shit hit the fan, because it was all raids and dot stacking wasn't even implemented. Luclin and up, we were back to being good DPS.

Like that ever stopped them from making a group centric game without those same tools to create groups in a timely matter.

Yet they did have the notion of groups, and the mechanics associated with it (exp sharing, group damage, group buffs, group window, etc.) What did they have for raids?

Nothing.

You want to know why? Because they were modeling their shit off of Sojourn. Sojourn had "raid mobs" that were really just multi-group mobs that took maybe a dozen or two people. They had no sense of the fifty-man, seventy-man raids that would eventually come to dominate EQ. Nothing prepared them for it.

Well no shit. They didn't think anything through.

They were limited by technology, and by the fact that they were the first to tackle these issues. Are you going to sit there and tell me Blizzard "didn't think anything through" with Warcraft 2 and that's why it was so bad compared to Starcraft?

Are you going to reply to it or just deflect it? So yes, the answer is, you are defending bullshit mechanics.

Read it again. I already acknowledged that soul binding has no place in a market-dominant game. But there were legitimate reasons for its existence if you assumed a certain type of community for your player base.

I never said I hated it. I played it and liked the game too. I also used to eat corn flakes for breakfast too. Until I was introduced to pop tarts. I liked the game, and hindsight is 20/20, but you are defending shit mechanics and thoughtless design decisions that broke the game for many classes, made it hilarious as well, but also was the biggest fucking retarded game space there was out there. It did well and people played it because there was jack shit better out there. And the fact that the market thought to be capped at 400k all fighting over each other exploding to over 10 fucking million shows just how fucked the game was.

...

I shit on the latter because I look back and realize it could have been 50 times better. And it should have been. And then I look to who this thread is about, and I know why it wasn't any better.

When did I defend shit mechanics? I provided an explanation for why the mechanics were what they were to show that the devs weren't fucking retards. They targeted a particular type of player with the resources at their disposal, and insofar as they failed, it was because that particular type of player wasn't the majority of the market. Nobody, not even McQuaid, thought that EQ was going to be BIG. They thought it was going to be a more popular version of Sojourn. They designed it for those sorts of players, and it was successful with those sorts of players.

You're acting like EQ should've been WoW. But the technology wasn't there. The hindsight wasn't there. The Bnet crowd wasn't there. Do you blame ID Software for Wolfenstein 3D sucking donkey balls compared to Half-Life? Read some of your own previous posts in this thread. EQ was certainly no work of art, but it does not deserve to be slammed as the game that people played only because they didn't have a choice.

You always had a choice. You could choose not to play. That's what you - what we all - choose when dealing with shitty games. EQ was not a shitty game. Blizzard certainly didn't think so, or else they would never have been inspired by it.

I am not saying that WoW doesn't have a lack of community. Sure it does. But there are more than just 2 indpendant variables floating around like a fart in the wind. Christ if I threw the population of Mal'Ganis on Mith Marr, I wouldn't know 90% of the fucking people because there is just too many fucking people! Again, short sighted thought. Some dipshits out there think that just because you have some instanced content and accessibility that those are the sole reasons behing a lack of community. If you took out the instanced and forced everyone to stand around, you still wouldn't have a fucking community because of what I stated above.

If you required everyone to group from level one and up, the only people who remained after fifty levels would've been people with a bunch of friends. You'd have a community, then, instead of a bunch of loners crying about the lack of community. This is called selection by design.

No, this would not fly in today's industry for a game that aspires to market-dominance. But EQ, when it started, didn't have to compete with WoW. It was free to develop a selective game, and that's exactly what it was.

Please tell me what was so hard in joining a seb group, watching a cleric sit in a corner and stand up to heal every so often while the chanter mezzed mobs and the tank pressed taunt over and over. This is resource management? And don't tell me it was anything more than that, because if you think so, you must have played with retarded fucking chimps out of a shitty air force experiment.

Did you try to break the mushroom king camp with a single group? How about doing juggs? How about crawling through HS? Guardian wurms? Deep Chardok? The challenges were there. Whether you tackled them... I don't know.

Are you just fucking replying to reply? Read what that reply was about. DO I have to hold your hand through this?

Your reply was:

Are you delusional? Sebilis was camped to fuck and back because loot was exchanged in design from VP and Seb and back and forth. No one gave a fuck all about HS (Because there was nothing fucking there besides XP)

You tell me whether my reply is relevant.

And when did you play? When it launched? Which server?
I was on Mith Marr - populated as fuck. Seb was camped constantly with at least 10-15+ sitting on their ass in zone in waiting for a spot in a group to open up, or for someone to yell "Crypt open" to get their own going. Which would take hours. What server were you on and what time of the day and which time zone were you in where this didn't happen? Or were people just too busy to get their keys to enter it.

Bertox, April 1999. Eventually moved to Seventh Hammer. Was first to enter HS on my server (as far as I could tell). Among the first to enter Sebilis. For the time I was there (a few months), Sebilis never became as crowded as Lower Guk. Not even close. Yes, there was typically a crypt group, and a group camping the necrosis scarab, and sometimes disco as well. But the rest of the zone was mostly free. Given that some of the best loots in Sebilis were zone-wide drops (ie Siblisian Berserker Cloak), that = plenty of free content.

But people are sheep. So they'd rather sit at zone-in afk for when a spot in crypt opens, then form their own groups to go elsewhere.

Vox, Nag, Trak, Gore, VS, Tormax, AoW, Dain (The only trick to this fight was using a broken mechanic to bug the guy down) ... Need I go on? All these fightys were about were having the proper gear on, Chealing a main tank, and watching 30 others DPS and kill it. Period. Where is the resource management in this and what were so hard about the above (And more I didn't list) encounters? j

Do you even read what you write?

Venril Sathir was about CHing the main tank? What the fuck? How did you ever manage to kill him? Zerg with 30 people?

Vox and Nagafen were about CHing the main tank? Trak, Gore, Sev, and Talendor were about CHing the main tank? Are you high? What kind of people did you run with that you could resist the AoE Fears and Breaths 100% of the times, such that your clerics could sit there CHing the main tank? Do you even know that Trak banished?

I'm not saying these fights are hard, but they were not "let's CH the main tank and whack happily away at them for five minutes until they died." Your failure to distinguish this simple fact makes me question your credibility.

Nothing was difficult about these encounters. Unless you played with absolute retards who fell asleep when it was their turn to heal.

Since you've demonstrated an absolute lack of understanding for any of the aforementioned encounters (with the possible exception of Dain), I don't even feel compelled to respond to this.

Did you take the reply out of context? Read back, carefully, and figure it out.

Your point was that everybody crowded into Sebilis to exploit the bugged loot table. My point is that by the time most people made it into Sebilis, said loot table was fixed. I know, because I was one of the first people on my server to enter the zone.

Kunark, Velious, and everything else was released with loot tables that were EMPTY and not finished which defauled to a cloth cap drop of which Ester said, "Yep, that is working as intended." Again, look back to why I brought up Seb and VP loot mixing, and why Seb was overcamped. It went directly to your argument about resource management when I said that the zone managed itself because people were begging for spawns to kill.

On my server, at least, nobody was ever begging for spawns to kill in Sebilis. There were always patches of the zone that nobody even bothered to go to. The popular camps were covered, but Sebilis was HUGE. That zone could've supported a hundred people, unlike Lower Guk. There was rarely that many people there, unless some guild was raiding juggs/Trak.

[Tyen]

Hey retards, cut it out before the overlords slay you.

[EtadanikM]

Found a VS guide from olden days. This was archived at Graffe's Wizard Forum, so to give you a taste of what old EQ raids were like and to prove that Utnayan is talking out of his ass, I'll repost it here.

Venril Sathir Guide - By Claud Shadowflare of Xegony

Way back in the day I was the "VS Guy", who was responsible for many a Xegony wizard gaining his Gnarled Staff. While those days are behind me, I still know a hell of a lot about this fight, and can offer you the following advice.

About Venril Sathir
Venril Sathir has approximately 18khp. However, he procs a 1500 point lifetap fairly often, and is irresistable, as lifetaps go. He is level 55, although that's pretty meaningless. He doubles for around 300, and is a warrior.

Killing Venril Sathir

Set-up
Set up in the "prep room" (EQ Atlas Location #13). You'll need 3-4 groups (judging by where you say you are in the game). Aim melee heavy; rogues, monks, and rangers are great for this fight. You'll want a 60+ warrior (or as close to one as you can get), although he can be tanked by a 60+ ranger or a 60+ monk (in a pinch). You'll want at least 2 enchanters with Rune V, a few healers (druids, clerics, shamans, won't matter too too much). Sit any mages you have in the corner and have them cry to themselves after summoning mod rods and focus items. Other than that, they're useless for their fight; I'll explain why pets = bad later. A necro or two is nice for twitching your enchanters.

As far as buffing goes- ONLY, I repeat, ONLY HP buff your MA and your puller. No one else will need it. Here's the reason- if someone pulls agro off VS (which is VERY, VERY bad), they are probably dead. HP buffs for them = more lifetaps for VS. If they pull agro, tell them to stand and take the death with a smile, they earned it. Tell them that not getting HP buffs is incentive to get agro. Give out hastes to all your melees, and don't bother with clarities/KEI's; it's a 60 second fight, so they won't be necessary, and it's just more time you're wasting before the fight. Hit your MA and puller with Rune V, and your MA also with Spellshield.

Now here's to dispell the whole rune/spellshield myth that has been perpetuated since the NPC lifetaps got fixed. You CAN stop VS's lifetap with rune, but not with spellshield. The reason why rune works is because when an NPC has a NATURAL proc (not one on a weapon, like Nortlav the Scalekeeper in the Hole), if his attack lands on a rune, it's counted as a miss. If you doubt me, test it out on Tro Jegs in Scarlet Desert, Golems in Plane of Valor, those bastardly giants in Plane of Storms... etc, etc, etc. Spellshield will help reduce the damage the lifetap does, but VS will still be healed for the full 1500 hp.

Place an evaccer in as many groups as you have evaccers. I will explain later.

Pulling
I'm not sure how this goes since the recent harmony changes, but I believe it's still pullable by a ranger, druid, or monk with ease. Pull VS's 4 guards first. Kill them. There is nothing too tricky about this part.

The Fight
You'll be using a MA strategy. There will be no SA- if your MA dies, VS is going to lifetap himself to full by the time you can recover, and it's just not worth the effort. AGRO IS CRITICAL IN THIS FIGHT. In case you didn't get that the first time, If you screw up agro, you w[/i][/u] VS will enter from one side of the room (it's pretty obvious which one); have your MA positioned in the middle of the room, and everyone else pressed against the back wall, STANDING. The MA will intercept VS from the puller, trigger auto-riposte/block/parry once VS attacks him, and wait 10 seconds, so he can build up agro.

Your highest level enchanter will start chain casting rune towards the end of the 10 seconds. Unless your enchanters are the same level, a rune rotation will not work. The lower level enchanters' rune will bounce off. Don't worry, so long as your MA doesn't totally suck, they won't get agro. Have your necromancer twitch the first enchanter; when he runs out of mana (the enchanter, not the necro), have him call a switch to the next enchanter. The necro will then, if he knows what's good for him, switch twitch targets to the 2nd enchanter, who will start runing the MA.

Healers will all be targetting the MA and hitting him with small, short heals, like Divine Light. No complete heals, if you need to be doing that, you're dead. Tell them that under no circumstances are they to heal anyone but the MA or the puller.

After 10 seconds or so, or when the warrior is convinced he has solid agro, he will call in the rest of the melee. They will all set up shop behind VS. You cannot be riposted when you are behind an NPC. If you get riposted, you can be procced on. If you are procced on, you have just healed VS for 1500hp and hurt your raids chances of success. Part of your job as raid leader will be to stand away from the fight and yell and curse at anyone who steps even close to the front of VS. This is why pets are bad- they WILL get in front of VS, despite whatever their owners plead to you with; they WILL get riposted, and hence they will be nothing but clerics to VS. No pets. (Note: I prefer limiting the raid to 24 people, just because when you get too many melees, they invariably edge closer to VS's front, because melees are stupid and don't understand that not hitting VS at all is better than hitting him, getting riposted, and healing VS for 1500hp. That call is up to you, but I strongly recommend limiting your raid size.)

I usually told a little white lie here and told the raid that VS had an AE breath lifetap that hit players in front of him; thus, if they were in front of him, they could heal VS just by being there. It worked amazingly well.

Now, since all of your melee are BEHIND Venril Sathir and NOT GETTING AGRO (stresses importance), they will be slightly pushing Venril Sathir. It is the MA's job to work VS around in an oval around the room as VS gets pushed.

The only magic that will land on VS is lure based magic. Hence, he's unslowable, unstunnable, unsnareable, unrootable, you get the idea. Use a magic based lure, it seemed to work best for me. Don't get agro. Even at the end, if you get too excited and try to burn him down, you can still screw up the entire fight by pulling agro off of VS. If he ping pongs, the raid is dead. I've seen many a VS at a sliver of life pop back to full health because someone blew their load early. Don't be that person. Just for that reason, I like to set up right near VS- if for some reason I do pull agro, which I shouldn't be lest I want to look like a total dumbass, I won't pingpong VS and he'll only get 1500 out of me before I die.

Fucking Up
So you followed everything above to the letter, and you still died. It will happen. Small screwups turn the tide of a VS fight, but here's some advice on how you can mitigate how bad a failure is.

If your MA bites it during the fight, EVAC. Don't ask questions, don't try to set up a SA, just do it. Before you can get rune going on an SA and have him get solid agro, VS will have healed himself to full life. So since you're starting over again anyways, it's best to only have to rez a couple people rather than an entire raid. Evac to the front of the zone and run back. Rez your dead, buff them, let them med up (if need be), and engage again. If you're good, you can engage VS again before his guards respawn. You don't NEED to have your MA's auto-riposte/block/parry disc up- that's merely helpful in the agro gaining process, but by no means is it necessary. If it hasn't popped yet but everything else is ready to go, go to it. Just start small heals a little bit earlier.

Review
The important points to drive home to your raid:

-Agro is critical. If you fuck it up, your raid will fail. If you can control it, you will eventually succeed.
-Positioning. If you're in front of VS, you're his cleric. If you're behind him, he can't riposte you.
-Agro is critical.
-Healing and Runes. Short, small heals only; no complete healing. Use Rune V, and no rune rotation unless both your enchanters are the same level.
-Did I mention that agro is critical?

No aggro? No strategy? No tricks? This was the first major raid boss in Kunark, released in April 2000. No, it's not Ragnaros, but at the time, at least, it was no walk in the park, either. Anyone who has access to the old archives of sites like Allakhazam can see the comments by EQ's version of noob guilds crying about how hard the raids were.

[ToeMissile]

Originally Posted by EtadanikM

No tricks?

Silly boardie, tricks are for kids.

[Neric]

Originally Posted by Utnayan

In EQ 99.9% of the raid fights were boring as fuck.

You should make a difference between beating an encounter for the first time and farming it over and over again. Some encounters were indeed terrible all the way. Plane of Time comes to my mind and VT wasn't very interesting either.

Most Velious encounters were pretty much straight forward. Luclin added another dimension to the mix and that shouldn't be forgotten. You couldn't beat these encounters with just a MT and a cleric chain anymore.

PoP started out pretty well also, but they released it before finishing PoTime (just like the did with Luclin and VT) and the outcome was the same. Zero ideas, just braindead waves of trash with no concept whatsoever.

Originally Posted by EtadanikM

Found a VS guide from olden days. This was archived at Graffe's Wizard Forum, so to give you a taste of what old EQ raids were like and to prove that Utnayan is talking out of his ass, I'll repost it here.

Not sure if that really proves your point. Venril Satyr was the only really tricky mob in Kunark.

[Horse]

Originally Posted by EtadanikM

The continents were planned. Raids-as-core-gameplay? No, I don't think it was planned. Nothing in the game suggested it. There was no raid UI. No raid-specific mechanics. No loot distribution methods. Raid class balance made no sense. Hell, they fucking capped mob hp at 32k. It was obvious they didn't think it through and was learning everything as they went along.

Nah. You need to look into the inspiration for EQ if you believe they stumbled onto the idea of many people grouping together to kill one thing.

In fact, a lot of the disdain for Brad in general comes from the idea that he used the pot of gold as a toilet, and with those resources it "could have been done better." You mention all that raid shit as non-core and them winging it, but really it was core and took them a fuckload of time to do it justice. Some think they never really did until post WoW.


Didn't think it through and learning by doing does not mean it wasn't the plan or focus from the outset.

Besides, scale is nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if solo trash mobs have 32k hps now. Nothing to do with GOSH WHATS RAIDING?


Your other points might be valid but I remember all of the raids as simply more complex versions of group/solo targets. VS is far in advance - in the first expansion and is when they started that sort of thing. It was also an interesting gimmick as late as POP, so they really didn't have too much innovation in raid bosses... VS was rather unique and an exception.


It also depended on your role. You are really hyping up EQ as this amazing orchestration of classes weaving abilities amongst each other... if you were class X you did job Y on every single fight. Just because mana regen was hard (i don't see how, zerg guilds did and could exist, botting did and could exist) doesn't make pressing a CH macro unique. Nor does tweaking the cast timing on it. Another thing to realize is that the way content was structured, guilds could be happy getting trash from current expansion to beat content from TWO EXPANSIONS AGO. Yes, I got the sword from PON hedge that was better than the sk epic before i did my epic. And at the time we were working on velious content with a few luclin bosses tossed in the mix. VT key? Errrr never needed to even set foot in VT because of how pop worked with drops.



I played a shadowknight, and rarely offtanked. One time I got to main tank and it was insane to see all the casts on me... buuuuut... i was doing the exact same thing I did when I dpsed except I had my back in a corner.

So there's a bit of matrix-colored glasses on your part if you think most of the people saw the intricacies of EQ. I remember by and large pulling strategies and the occasional positioning strat. There really wasn't much to it in my environment... we had a large guild that could easily cap one and fill a good chunk of a second.

We weren't cutting edge or racing, but none of the encounters were difficult for us at any time, it was an issue of mobilizing faster than guilds that did "video gamey" things like have alts for summons / spies and of course MQ, and waiting our turn under people who either started months before us and were thus months ahead on content, or the occassional competition for key mobs and such.


Maybe at a leader / organizer level it was insane but the few classes I played and knew personally had fairly monotonous roles and essentially did the same thing in every fight. There really were no "avoid this stuff" or tricky mechanics type fights up till GOD...

trust me, i was in a guild of housewives, retired dudes and crying baby AFK LOL and our brick wall was everything about GOD where small scale skill was required and then insane situational awareness. POP sounds tricky on paper but it ended up being IF CLASS X then do ABILITY Y. Even coirnav and council.