Funny SZ stories

[Kevynne]

http://ralloszek.stephans.org/rz/gui...s+of+Happiness

[Kergan]

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

RZ was definitely its own thing. Now that I think about it, the turtle fights are the Lodizal battles that happened pre-SZ when velious came out. Pvp wasn't completely borked yet and I still had fun in those days (Dark Carnival), but even RZ lost its charm as expansions rolled out.

SZ had its own charm but honestly the team disparity kinda ruined things for me. It was fun trashing entire goodie guilds with a handful in luclin, but after a while it became old hat and lost its appeal. Too small a guild to do the big bosses and no reason to get bigger since we didn't need more people for pvp, just pve, and frankly, EQ pve isn't worth the poopsocking required. Not when other games beckoned.

Yeah pretty much how I felt too. My bro stuck around and joined Hate and I'd play his beastlord sometimes in PoP - some of the raids were actually pretty interesting and fun.

SZ was sorta fucked long term from the get go with a complete lack of team balance. Neutral team managed to put up a mild fight early mostly due to DB exploiting but were quickly steamrolled and never really did shit again until Legends server let them get flagged.

There was more PVP there than RZ ever had though (or here). A combo of no level range, PVP "rewards" with coins and hardcoded teams.

[AzzarTheGod]

Forgot about that skyshrine/WL quest exploit early on. At least made things somewhat competitive.

Those Ruin bluebies were fierce. I'm bias but I give DBC leadership a pass for telling people to use as much hacks as they felt comfortable with. Gods work against the zerg.

[Kergan]

DBC was a guild full of no talent scumbags. Was definitely a lol moment watching my beastlord pet literally solo Gayrage in PVP.

[cronik]

They had a few decent pvpers (peeps like Marcus the shammy on RZ, and a few duos), largely because they spent so much time pvp'in, but they were asstards, one and all.

The "leadership", aka gayrage, gave the blessing to exploit because they're asstards, not because of imbalances of teams.

I forgot about the legends fiasco. What a joke that whole thing was.

[AzzarTheGod]

Yeah Ruin wasn't completely zerged up with a new pile of blue zergs joining every week and socking to max level.[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Hacks were sanctioned by grayrage because of the amount of socking Ruin was doing and how large their recruitment pool was due to being on evil team. I remember sitting there being shell-shocked by how many sockers Ruin was attracting with 100 guys in skyshrine and the sentiment was that something had to be done about it, and fast. It was the gut check that the staff couldn't do.

I'm glad it led to Ruin getting the absolute shit kicked out of them for a few solid months. Neuts wouldn't have been shit without DBC putting a dent in Ruin's momentum and the server would have been boring.

The ends justify the means in this case. Blue dominating the reddest server around just wasn't acceptable.

[cronik]

Why not it works here.

I agree tho Ruin was ghey. We had no interest in being a big guild or apart of one. Hell we had no interest in players who weren't in the top 10% or so. We despised zergs as much as anyone, and the fact that they worked, which is probably why we got so much gratification out of kicking the hell out of the goodie zergs.

Neuts had genuinely solid teams but the good teams were largely horrible and Zerg-like (read:azn). If we had it to do over we probably would have done neutral... It's not like evils helped us hold luclin zones (we did bracelet farming a lot, pulling bosses all the way out of the backs of their caves), so we could have done that and most of the other content we did as a self-contained unit almost as easily on neutral as we did on evil. Oh well.

[AzzarTheGod]

True.

And good team had some really cool people who stuck around. I got to know Prophets (? memory is not the best on good's top guild due to significance of holding such a memory) after the merge on Zek.

I joined up with PDM initially then my crew moved over to <Hate> after they kicked the scumbag officer Ealill and his Wudan cronies out of the guild.

<Hate> was a lot more cool and normal. Less people with mental illnesses and on disability than PDM and had Ealill and his shitbags not been granted leadership status in <Hate> on merge, we would have been in <Hate> from day one of Zek.

I have no idea how many true evil team players were in <Hate> on Zek, but from what I understand it was not that many outside of the core.

A few of us guildmates went to Hate leader Scowl's house once. He wouldn't answer the door and had his Aunt/Mom/Sister/Cousin tell us he wasn't home. We made sure to let her know he was a huge EQ player and had invited all of us over. She was like Oh yeah hes on the computer a lot.

[cronik]

I never played anywhere near that long, so it's always interesting to hear the aftermath. Hell, I never played live again after I left SZ like 6-10mos in, once the writing was on the wall for the server death. Non-evils were leaving in droves for Legends, which left the people who stayed in worse straits than ever... Gear differentials also started making the fights pretty one-sided, as I'm sure everyone here is all-too familiar with (Empire).

Anyways, what's interesting to me is how many hardcore pvpers continued to play EQ after Luclin sent the message that devs no longer cared about pvp balance and how abilities like manaburn would pan out. I left to play other games while attempting to life, but what was it about EQ that kept so many playing for so long even after Luclin? i mean velious was bad enough since it catered to the zergs so much (DKP is the worst thing ever created in MMOs and I'm glad I never took part in it), but at least pvp was functional at least, and the grind not truly horrible yet.

Probably why myself and so many others were interested in Discord... Classic only permadeath? Hell yea, even if it only lasted a weekend for me before some perma group or mob took me down, just playing early era would be exhilarating, back before gear was such a huge factor and skill (and opportunity) determined the victor. I still remember the nervous adrenaline shakes I'd get from pvp back then, and once that feeling was largely diminished, it was time to play other games. Did people hang on to EQ because they remembered the old times?

Sorry, rambling and reminiscing. And sad that discord didn't deliver, and r99 never could... Not with velious era rewarding zerg behavior over pvp skill. Velious era gear is just such a hard obstacle to surmount if you're undergeared. :/

[Chronoburn]

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

Yeah Ruin wasn't completely zerged up with a new pile of blue zergs joining every week and socking to max level.[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Hacks were sanctioned by grayrage because of the amount of socking Ruin was doing and how large their recruitment pool was due to being on evil team. I remember sitting there being shell-shocked by how many sockers Ruin was attracting with 100 guys in skyshrine and the sentiment was that something had to be done about it, and fast. It was the gut check that the staff couldn't do.

I'm glad it led to Ruin getting the absolute shit kicked out of them for a few solid months. Neuts wouldn't have been shit without DBC putting a dent in Ruin's momentum and the server would have been boring.

The ends justify the means in this case. Blue dominating the reddest server around just wasn't acceptable.

Please don't defend Grayrage. Lets also not forget that DBC broke up over a Bio Orb while Ruin was rolling in Vulak loots. The only thing that put a dent in Ruin's momentum was the core of them cashed out.

The only person I know that defends grayrage .... wait, Syft, is that you?