[Zuranthium]

Originally Posted by Ekco [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

the designers didn't have a unified vision, and the one they had is nothing like the game we ended up with.

EQ as we know it can literally be more attributed to the people in the guide to dev pipeline who were kids addicted to raiding at the time than the original design doc presented to smed

Wrong. It wasn't until Luclin era that those people you talk about were handling the game. They, and raids, didn't even exist when the game was being released.

The original designers very much had a shared vision of creating an interactive fantasy novel come to life, a 3D dungeons and dragons game with thousands of players, a realistic MUD. And that is indeed how the game played in 1999.

There were of course some disagreements about specifics, but that doesn't change the overarching goal of what was trying to be created. And it's important to consider how the game should be shaped in order to keep that vision alive. There are tons of things the designers would have changed if they knew the ways the game would eventually devolve, and if they had the technical capability and creative solutions to fix those problems and allow EQ to be the living RPG experience it was meant to be.

Originally Posted by WarpathEQ [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I never once encountered mob rotations during this era on live.

Then you never interacted with the Play Nice Policy. That was how everything in game was handled after they stopped allowing DPS to decide everything.

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

We raced for mobs on live, albeit in luclin. But there was quite literal guild mobilisation races through Ssra come raid time. Faking out other rogues saying traps were down to get their members cursed. It was complete chaos.

Early morning the US guilds would be online trying to stop the korean guild from wiping everything out that spawned post patch.

That is not FTE racing, and not classic era either. That's trying to kill content before other guilds are there after repop.

Whenever two raid forces were at the same spawn at the same time, GM's made them start rotating, unless they wanted to agree to roll for it every time.

And US guilds didn't have the majority of their players online during a typical weekday morning. People were at work (and on weekends often had other commitments), this is well documented by Legacy of Steel.

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

And everything that could reasonably be killed, like clockwork, was killed.

Nope. Raid targets were frequently up for many hours before being engaged, this is extensively documented. Not just the top end Velious targets either. Things like Vox were being left up for considerable amounts of time during that era.

Originally Posted by Solist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is P99. It emulates (mostly) EQ. It isn't meant to emulate the terrible play that existed back in the day. It's such a dogshit argument to try and compare what we did/didn't do then to now.

Classic developer decisions were based on how people played at the time. You're clueless or in denial if you think those devs would look at the way people play now and say "yep, that's definitely what we want the game to be." They were suspending guilds in classic just for using wall tricks.