Miscellaneous: Experience Death Penalty should be doubled on Green until [June 1999] era

[Sunderfury]

I originally found this list from Brad himself listing all changes made to the game up until sometime in December 1999, one piece that particularly stood out to me that I remember from live was the original death penalty being higher:

<snip>
ALL MELEE:
+ Purchasable Potions added, giving more versatility to melee
classes and adding a money sink to the game to help the economy

ALL CASTERS:
- Removal of Manastone
+ Made it such that you can see meditating (levels 35+)
+ Implemented Specialization

ALL:
+ HALVED experience loss death penalty
- Removal of weightless box spawn
+ Purchasable weightless box added
- Introduction of Frenzy code (after level 19)
+ New emotes and animations
<snip>

I did some digging to try and dig up the original patch (they are not all archived on alla or the other sites)

I was second guessing myself wondering if this was just a change from beta to live, but this thread clearly states that this was a change that went live after beta and the live servers had launched.

May 27, 1999:

I'm just curious why you chose to do this. This game has been in
development for several years now and has been through a beta. It seemed
that you had worked hard on striking a good balance in the game between
making it challenging and fun at the same time. So why the change all of
a sudden? I know some people have complained about the penalty being too
severe, but I've seen just as many people express the view that the
penalty was just right. Don't you feel that this move waters down the
game and makes level advancement less rewarding? And don't you think
there needs to be some fear of dying for there to be a true roleplaying
experience?

Because there's a HUGE freakin' difference between the amount of
bullshit that beta testers will put up with versus what the average
consumer will put up with.

I'm not Brad (so sorry) but I'll take a guess. The reason most beta
testers probably thought it was ok, is b/c they are more "serious" gamer
on average then the general public. This change was aimed at mollifying
the casual gamers who complained that the penalty was "too harsh" or
made the game "just to hard". Verant needs to appeal to the more casual
gamers to keep the product viable, so they eased up a bit on death.

I'm pretty certain this patch occurred on May 25th, 1999, as evidenced here:
5/25/99:

Verant is puting in a new patch tonight. The one change that I care about
is that dying will result in XP loss that is 50% less than it was before
the patch.

Another mention in this thread that started May 21st, 1999 complaining about too steep exp loss, and then later comments in May 27th, 1999 stating that the loss is less after the patch (but still complaining, go figure):

: I can't imagine where you get this "heavy penalty for death" nonsense. Death
: in EQ is trivial. Try Legends of Kesmai or Drakkar where you lose stats and
: everything on you drops to the floor where every passing critter or player
: can pick it up and walk off with it.

I agree. Actually, I didn't mind the exp loss before the patch. (well, I thought it
was reasonable)

Another thread here, and even included a message from Brad McQuaid himself (apparently this patch also introduced the Frenzy code, although buggy initially):
Thank god! 50% exp loss cutdown on dying:

Now I can continue playing without the feeling that I'm wasting my time.
For the past week, I would play my lvl 14 paladin for hours at a time, then
I would die and lose about half a bubble which took a LONG time to get.
Then usually on my way back to corpse I'd die again. So that's a full
bubble. So in fact, I just wasted my whole day running 2 steps forward and
3 steps back. This is exactly what this game needed.

The exp point penalty reduction is a NICE change, but if you didn't read
the patch messages closely you could have easily missed it. It should
have been in bold letters, or italics (maybe even Helvitica...) with
stars around it.

(including brad's mention of exp reduction for reference)

Brad McQuaid
5/26/99
No, that's not why we lowered the exp penalty. The frenzy incident was an
error on our part -- we purposely reactivated the code to tune some of the
higher lvl dungeons and didn't realize (oops) the effect it would have on
some old data (meaning lower level NPCs). We put in a temp fix tonight
(only making frenzy work for higher level NPCs) and Ryan is staying late to
change the old data such that only high level NPCs that we want to will
frenzy (yes, that still means crocodiles, btw).

For the life of me, I cannot find the actual patch notes from May 25, 1999. By all indications, this seems like a major patch. Obviously has EXP penalty change, frenzy code, I've also seen mention that this patch 'fixed' enchanters with stuff such as the tash line and let the class function better, and even that the PC spell resistance system was changed (saw a few mentions that pre-patch partial resists were not possible).

If anyone finds the actual patch message I'd love to read it over as it can help cut through some of the noise from fact or fiction on the other changes.

But one thing seems for certain: EXP death penalty should double until [June 1999] era on green. I say June since it was end of May it went live, not sure how specific you have changes coded in.

[loramin]

This one is going to be painful ...

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[Dolalin]

Green is going to be serious hard mode EQ. Love it.

[nilzark]

Careful, we might scare off 'casual' gamers. Haha

[Jimjam]

I'm gonna come out as a newb here, but what does it mean when NPCs frenzy?

[Dolalin]

This link explains Frenzy, JimJam.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!se...4/Sa51Q6xZ5aQJ

Read that thread to the end and you'll see why oasis crocs con scowling but don't attack: it's a fossilized exception to the aggro/frenzy change they're talking about.

Here's a shortcut to the post from Brad if you're lazy.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt....4/CzF4sU5uw20J

[Sunderfury]

I don't think the oasis crocs attacked prior to frenzy, they always had that 'con scowling, but don't attack', but after this patch they started aggroing (which was a bug that was fixed via emergency patch).

Here was his explanation of the frenzy code, I guess I would interpret this as a chance for some high level NPCs to treat players with 'undead agro' (agro anyone) and also assist mobs of the same type even if they are normally passive.

> By frenzy you mean making NPC attack on sight?

Kind of. Frenzy is a term we use to refer to an NPCs propensity to sometimes
attack a player. NPCs can be set to always attack or to frenzy, which means the
server randomly decides at intervals whether or not to attack a nearby player.
It will also cause one NPC to assist another NPC if it is being attacked and is
nearby.

In any case, after todays code change, this typically only happens with some very
high level NPCs.

[Palemoon]

good find, the harder the better

[Nirgon]

Ya the frenzy thing, I remember npcs randomly taking a few seconds to notice and attack, other times instantly

[AbstractVision]

This is wonderful.

Everquest isn't hard enough anymore.

I'm not being sarcastic.