Faded memories with no proof

[wuanahto]

hybrids not having mana until level 9

[wuanahto]

sol ro temple's "A Torch" not dropping off goblins in everfrost

[Wakanda]

There's so many things that have been lost to time. It's really frustrating to have people tell me I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about etc. For instance, when I first started playing on P99, I was so confused that the Bronze armor looked like Golden Efreeti armor because I remember it disctinctly looking orange colored. Similarly with Ravenscale being nearly jet black, whereas Ravenscale on P99 looks more like regular blackened iron.

I made threads about this, and had people gas light me that I'm just misremembering or that it always looked this way but our graphics cards sucked back in the day etc.

And then I go over and play on TLP... and gasps... bronze armor is the same vivid orange I always remembered it being and Ravenscale is suddenly borderline jet black with very little visible detail. Just as I remembered.

We all know Charm ain't classic either, but also...

Rogues could never backstab from the front. When I point this out, people use duels as an example where this is possible. I totally remember backstabbing people from the front. As far as I'm concerned I actually invented this on my server and I actually don't remember if anyone I ever dueled even figured out how to do it because I would regularly beat higher level Rogues with better gear by doing this.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I never met anyone who was able to backstab mobs from the front trying the exact same technique. I tried an insane amount of times and never got it to work. So did my Rogue friends (several of which actually play here on P99), and we were never able to get it to work despite seeing random troll posts on the forums claiming otherwise.

Is there any evidence of this ever working? And if it did work, then why in the world would SOE add an AA called Chaotic Stab? The ability that allowed Rogues to backstab from the front for reduced damage. No rogue in their right mind would take Chaotic Stab if they could just backstab from the front for full damage anyways. Yet this quickly became a core ability after being added to the game.

Armor was also KING. I remember thinking this was so dumb and BORING as a kid. I wanted BIG STATS and thought serpentine bracers were the best item in the game. And then I tried wearing AC instead of all these huge stat items and suddenly I stopped dying.

Was confusing when I started playing on P99 and items like enamelled breastplate were regularly passed over for the Sol Ro quest items. That was never the case on real EverQuest. I remember it was the meta to see warriors in full crafted armor with the black breastplate because of this. Also remember Tree Weave being a huge deal when it came out in Kunark for that same reason.

A lot of items that were ultra rare on real EverQuest seem to be super common on P99. I remember spending MONTHS getting full woven shadow from the plane of hate despite being the only rogue in the raid and raiding almost daily/nightly. Because it was a fairly rare drop. I had cleric friends who spent years trying to get the ethereal mist stuff. Meanwhile you see an entire set of it drop in a single raid now. I actually never saw the Cleric or Shaman belts that drop in Plane of Fear, but now they seem like one of the most common items in the game?

I remember spending an entire summer break in Lake of Ill Omen killing everything in the Sarnak Fort on my high level monk trying to get a Sarnak Station Earring to drop. I also leveled every single character I had in the Sarnak Fort. And I never once saw the earring drop. TBF I've never seen one drop on P99 either, but I hardly mess with Sarnaks, but people I've talked to make it sound like this is a super common item on P99? Can't confirm or deny whether or not that is true, but I was starting to think they weren't even a real item 20+ years ago.

Treant Fists were also ultra rare (IDK if yall remember when they had a complete heal on them?). I remember the first time I saw Treant fists on P99 Green I was so excited but the person told me they were always super easy to get (I think he's referring to his experiences on P99 Blue because these were borderline impossible to get and I had a friend who quit playing the game after months of camping the alchemist in Beholders Maze only for him to never spawn). I assume the Allakahsam (sp?) site is gone? I was going to link from comments back in the day where people were complaining about this, but I can't find the site at all now.

I also was one of the only high level monks on my server at the time (yes, I mentioned having a friend quit playing his monk because of Treant fists, but by the time my wave of players got to level 50 and started raiding, I was one of the only monks around). I remember having people freak out at how much damage I did because there wasn't really a lot of information on if Monks were good at high levels or not. Even I didn't know my character was going to start punching harder and harder as time progressed.

But I don't remember Monks ever being tanky. And we actually built our characters tankier back then monks do on P99 (I'm talking about classic / pre kunark). Shiverback armor was always considered bad compared to Froglok Crown, Gatorscale Leggings, Azure Sleeves, Treant Fists etc because it was low armor compared to most stuff and "AC IS KING." Yet despite building tanky AF I never felt like a tank and regularly had to use feign death to drop aggro during fights because if I didn't I would die to regular mobs our group pulled. I remember if our tank left the group, our group might actually fall apart and despite the fact that Rangers had the reputation of being paper tanks, asking them to tank because they were slightly better at it than I was as a monk.

Yet on P99 I leveled my first character to 50 with an untwinked Monk wearing mostly cloth armor as my tank. I remember being so confused at how tanky this monk was in Sol B because I lived there on my Monk and definitely couldn't tank the mobs there.

I could probably ramble on and on and maybe I will think of other stuff to ramble about in the future, but another weird thing people don't remember is how people used to camp every thing in the entire game. I remember it was common to be in Neriak 3rd gate and seeing high level players camping the ghouls outside of the necro / sk guild.

I also remember when Rubicite dropped temporarily from Najena and I don't even think I can find any evidence of this. I remember when it happened there was no patch notes about this or anything, and I didn't even believe my real-life friend when he told me this, and then I went there and realized it really did. I camped it until I had a full set of it, but the breastplate never dropped. We were just killing trash mobs to get the regular pieces since we weren't high level enough to kill any bosses / didn't even know the dungeon and were prob too scared to explore, but I always wonder if the breastplate would have dropped if we managed to kill a boss.

Also I see a lot of people on this forum imply that the GMs were super cops and that if you stepped out of line and intentionally trained someone, ninja looted or KS'd then you would get banned. In my experience you could basically get away with murder. If I had a time machine and could travel back to the year 1999 or 2000 or 2001, I doubt I could get banned from EQ even if I tried. I remember people constantly intentionally training, KS'ing, stealing named mobs, making death threats, ninja looting, scamming etc. and the GMs never did anything.

I remember spending days getting a GM to take me seriously about this dude training my group in OT on top of him stealing all of our mobs. I remember when the GM finally got back to me he basically said unless he witnessed it happening there was nothing he could do etc. By this time the dude's not even online anymore, it took me hours to even get a GM response etc. Like I'm sure there was instances where GMs banned people for being bad, but in my experience, the community was almost entirely policed by itself and calling the cops on people was virtually a waste of time. Think that's why flame boards were so popular (notice how modern MMOs dont really have flame boards?).

Also another thing I notice that is distinctly different about P99 compared to my server 25 years ago is that there are a lot of European / UK / Hawaiian players on P99. When I was a kid if I REALLY wanted something (ie. Dyllin Starsine in Highpass Hold), I could set my alarm for like 3:30AM on a week night, and more often than not, if I showed up at those hours, I could get what I was after. On P99, particularly when it was more hopping, this strategy didn't work because it was a true 24/7 community with all the different people from around the world who play it. This isn't a bad thing by any means, but it's something I noticed.

[wuanahto]

rabbit stew coming in stacks of 2

[wuanahto]

or 6

[Duik]

I recall thinking if i didnt have my spellbook in my invent i couldnt cast spells. I dont even know what book it was i had. On many CRs i would not even sit to open spellbook untill i got to my body.

I believe one of my hilarious friends told me that and is still laughing.

I finally did work it out. I was so fucking gullible.

[cd288]

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

Also I see a lot of people on this forum imply that the GMs were super cops and that if you stepped out of line and intentionally trained someone, ninja looted or KS'd then you would get banned. In my experience you could basically get away with murder. If I had a time machine and could travel back to the year 1999 or 2000 or 2001, I doubt I could get banned from EQ even if I tried. I remember people constantly intentionally training, KS'ing, stealing named mobs, making death threats, ninja looting, scamming etc. and the GMs never did anything.

Yeah dude unfortunately we had to actually see it happening not just take you at your word. But if we saw it happening then yeah we would 100% issue warnings and third warning resulted in a ban. We were able to witness things a lot more frequently than the staff on P99 can because there was a large roster of volunteer guides and hired GMs, so it wasn't uncommon to get someone caught if they were consistently doing things. If they did it once, then yeah you're probably not getting caught and it's not like fraps was a thing. In certain instances (such as high value things like raid targets) we might look at logs. In any case, you're misconstruing what people push back on. People push back on the idea that there was zero enforcement, which there decidedly was not once the PNP came out.

As far as graphics, I wouldn't use TLP as a supporting point as they don't use era accurate stuff. At any rate, graphics are something that you should be able to provide examples of if you care to spend the time (it will probably be a slog, but I assume you could eventually find something on the wayback machine).

Anecdotes about drop rates etc. is harder to prove, but the frequency on P99 is probably pretty easily explained by level of knowledge etc. For instance, on live you didn't have guilds on a weekly Sky rotation clearing all of POS like it was nothing (on most servers at least). You didn't have multiple guilds able to efficiently and easily clear the Planes.

[cd288]

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

I recall thinking if i didnt have my spellbook in my invent i couldnt cast spells. I dont even know what book it was i had. On many CRs i would not even sit to open spellbook untill i got to my body.

I believe one of my hilarious friends told me that and is still laughing.

I finally did work it out. I was so fucking gullible.

Honestly I would love if this was the reality lol. Make CRs hard for everyone!

[Goregasmic]

Originally Posted by cd288 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Anecdotes about drop rates etc. is harder to prove, but the frequency on P99 is probably pretty easily explained by level of knowledge etc. For instance, on live you didn't have guilds on a weekly Sky rotation clearing all of POS like it was nothing (on most servers at least). You didn't have multiple guilds able to efficiently and easily clear the Planes.

I don't remember the exact timeline but on the rathe the attainable raid bosses/zones were on a big rotation. IIRC some point there was 25+ raid guilds on the trakanon one. This would "dilute" the loot and make it seem more rare than it actually is. There's 500-700 players on green spread into a handful of major guilds. Back then on live it wasn't rare to see 3000+ players on a server and many more guilds. So you'd get to see a raid drop once every couple months sometimes, if it actually dropped.

And yeah, for the "current" content usually only the top 1-3 guilds could manage it if even. I was in a top3 guild and I think we were wiping on vindi post velious.

And he remembers earring of station being rare but not here but I investigated that particular item a couple weeks back and most people agreed it takes several thousand kills to get one on p99. Might have been a lesser known item back then or have less terminally online people going after it. The general knowledge base back on live was terrible.

[Jimjam]

Stuff was rarer on live cos 2 years on p99 is nothing, but on live that was Luclin.