Finding some original classic chat boards ...
 

After seeing posts of what is and is not classic, and reading posts about what is classic that will be changed, I wonder if any of the original classic chats are kept in an archive so we can compare our beefs to theirs.

When Everquest launched, did everyone beef about the hybrid experience penalty? Or is this something we know more about now and only beef about it because we understand the dynamics better?

Was the darkness for humans complained about as much?

etc.

No, because no one knew about it, and there was no way to prove it for a while, until the protocol was hacked.

People did gripe about the lack of night vision, and the questionable judgement about started Erudites in a dark noob zone (some supposition was that due to their high int, the decision to not give them a racial vision was done far too in the development phase to change anything).

To add to that, Verant/989 was belligerent about so many things that it took the anti-TOS network sniffer tool to prove some of the assertions about things.

IIRC correctly, which I might not...

I don't think they realized they'd fucked up the XP bonus to hobbits vs humans until then.

It was a long time after Alchemy was given to Shaman that they acknowledged it was broken after a certain level (they had been testing by using admin only tools to create characters of a certain level, rather than leveling them up, where the bug was manifesting itself)

Other things which I've forgotten

Right. It was impossible to kill 10 level 1 mobs as a level 1 troll SK and as a level 1 halfling warrior and notice the difference in rate of leveling.

People did that, to help with figuring out what the protocol was. But there wasn't the general knowledge of this issue until way later.

Yep.

People werent MMO scientists in 1999. Maybe a few, but mostly not.

TBH, it depends on who you're talking to when you use forum posts as evidence. Some people will use forum posts to back up their own argument for their idea of a selectively classic experience, but if you try and use them to back up your own opinion they will say they aren't valid evidence because they are just posts from random players who don't know what they're talking about lol

When the ShowEQ guys got going in late 1999 and started looking at xp gains as sent to the client, that's when people started becoming aware of xp penalties etc. Before that it was really just myths and rumors.

I played in Beta. There was a beta only message board that Verant ran, where the Devs would post a LOT of stuff. GZ posted so much good stuff there back in the day. That board stayed up for YEARS past launch, with very little posts on it, but a TON of archival info.

I kick myself for not making a mirror of it. I wonder if someone was smarter than me, and did mirror it.

I find it hard to believe that the EXISTANCE of the penalty was in dispute. It was a massive penalty, 40 percent. Maybe the extent of the penalty was up for debate, but it had to be obvious very early on that these classes leveled a lot more slowly.