AllakhazamFollow

It's no big deal and has nothing to do with our decision to not do a Vanguard site. That decision was solely a factor of not being able to get enough people into the beta to start a site and also my playing both lotro and vanguard and deciding lotro was by far the better game and the one we wanted to use our resources toward.

Some background is in order. Once upon a time there was a game called Everquest. It was an amazing game unlike any we had seen up to then, but not without some serious flaws. One flaw was in the quest system. To get a quest in Everquest, you had to walk around a town and walk up to every NPC, click on them and hit "H". They would then say something to you. You then had to try out every possible response to what they said until you happened to hit upon the right combination of key works in the right order and they then would talk back to you. This would continus until you got a quest. Quests were hard and extremely vague. They often took days to work through and involved literally hours of mindlessly running around or sitting in a single place killing the same mob over and over. When you were done you would finally return to the quest giver and 9 times out of 10 he would thank you, pat you on the head and give you the in game equivalent of a nickle. I got frustrated with the quest system and began a site where I posted up full walkthroughs of the quests with what to say, who to say it to, what to kill and what the ultimate reward was. This did not fit into Brad McQuaid's vision of the game and he expressed a serious dislike of our site, despite the fact that over time most of the players started to go there and look up the quests.

By the time Everquest released its first expansion, Allakhazam had become the indisputed leader for EQ information. We not only did quests, but items (showing what to kill to get the item, which was supposed to be secret), trade skills (originally the idea was players would just try different combinations and discover how to make things), mobs and more. Illia had come aboard and databased everything as well. It was frankly already far bigger than I had ever imagined the site would get when I started it.

There was a weekend long party for the expansion release being held in Las Vegas, so I decided to go. At the party, I was introduced to the commnunity manager for EQ. While we were talking, he saw Brad and said I just have to introduce you to him. So he went up to Brad and said I want to introduce you -- Brad started to stick out his hand -- to Allakhazam. Brad snapped his hand back down, turned his back and walked away. I actually found it more amusing than insulting.

So anyways that's my story of the first time I met with Brad McQuaid. Years later I met him again and told him about that time and he didn't remember it. As I said, it's more of an amusing anectdote than anything serious. I would very happily deal with Brad or anyone else at Sigil. In fact, I had always gotten along very will with the folks at Sigil. Jeff Butler has his own Allakhazam story that is also very amusing.

Agreed.

I can understand the whole 'idea' of wanting people to experience Evercrack Everquest without having any idea of what to do or how to go about, but he should have realized that it was somewhat unrealistic for anything but the short run.

I'm an FFXI player, and I can honestly attest that even with this site, the game tends to fustrate me quite abit from time to time. I couldn't imagine stomaching a game such as EQ for too long without being able to ultimately see if what I was doing would be worth it in the end (even just for storyline reasons).

Gah, a nerve in my neck twitched when I read that. Containers eating your stuff was just WRONG on so many levels.

God forbid you hit that Combine button by mistake when using a tradeskill container as a bag (cause bags were just too expensive). Gawds, that sucked.

To be fair, I always understood and sympathized with "The Vision" to some extent. EQ was obviously designed by P&P RPG nerds who wanted to create an immersive first-person world that was, for all intents and purposes, like living in an AD&D world. You'd want to buy rations despite their lack of a practical benefit because, well, that's what adventurers did in town. You'd want to canvass the town, talking to NPCs for quest leads because that's what the DM had you do in AD&D.

Furthermore, I bet the EQ guys not only played RPGs, I bet they played with those cumbersome rules regarding weapon type vs armor type and weapon delay affecting initiative and how much your chain mail slowed down your axe swings and all the rest of the crap most of us threw out for a straight THAC0 system. I think they zealously created and wanted to preserve an online AD&D style world, they just didn't realize that, to most people, that wouldn't make for a fun computer game.

Edited, Apr 30th 2007 12:26pm by Jophiel

I have always assumed that whoever made that credit card commercial with the slaying of the dragon had to have played EQ.

Ahh, to be back in Freeport making Batwing Crunchies again...

I'd forgotten about the *** quest system.

The travel & binding system was the worst part of EQ for me. I couldn't play for long sessions, so I'd basically log in, run for half an hour, fight for 15 minutes, run back to somewhere safe, and camp. meh.

Nexa

Unsatisfying for nearly everyone.

The purists were pissed that the hard-core people blew through content quickly and changed it from 1999 EQ to 2004 EQ in a matter of a few months. Population dropped and the hard-core people got stuck in GoD due to low numbers. From what I hear, they recently combined the servers and finally got out of GoD.

It was a half-assed experiment and had tons of stuff to annoy the purists such as hot zones, focus items, special hot zone drops, researchable spells from later expansions, etc. It was as if SOE told the "Classic server!" guys "Ok, we'll give you kind of what you want and then ***** it up enough that you won't want to touch it."

That's depressing...when I first it, I had thought that it would be a TRUE going-back-to-roots for the game, and I'd get a chance to go ride the boat/see Sleeper awaken/all the other stuff that I had missed out upon when the game first came out and my parents still thought that the internet was 'evil' after a bad experience with AOL.

I had kept up with the game off-and-on since it started, and so when I finally was able to play...I realized I was too far behind the curve to really be able to be able to catch up and still maintain something of a social life.

Kinda glad I didn't now.

MacGyver Online! Give me a piece of pelt, some bone chips, a ration, a rusty sword and I'll make you a car! And if you have some whiskers I can make you a bungalow out of the remains.

That's depressing...when I first it, I had thought that it would be a TRUE going-back-to-roots for the game

You mean people exploiting the **** out of bad pathing and dupe bugs?

Massive class balance problems? Idiots blowing high end raid content on purpose?

Oh, those were the days!

Nah, I mean a Norrath like how it was back in terms of gear and content available as it was at release, but patched and balanced as it is today.

It doesn't exist.

It never existed. 99% of people who would want to play without gear inflation or instancing or whatever they think the 'problem' is with the modern game weren't around to realize it was just as much of a problem three days in.

Honestly. There weren't any 'good old days'. The sentiment seems to be that people feel they can never be elite players because they didn't have the chance to start from scratch. Not so.

That doesn't even make sense. ???