March 16th, 2001

It was almost 2 and a half years ago that I was born again.

Born again not in the religious sense, but in the sense that I became the incarnation of all my childhood fantasies. I became a Wizard!

The date was November 19th, 1998 when I opened up an email to be greeted with the following...

"Greetings! You have been selected to be one of our testers in our Phase III test of EverQuest."

Little did I know that those few words would signal a change in how I played games from that point on. For the next 2 years and more I would devote thousands of hours to just one purpose... the world of Norrath. Thus did my career in EverQuest start.

Today, EverQuest celebrates its second year birthday since first being released to the public on March 16th 1999. To commemorate this milestone, I am writing this editorial to try and convey to all of you just what EverQuest has meant to me. Hopefully some of you will be able to relate to my own experiences and take those same feelings away with you after reading this.

The Present

I will begin with a look at EQ today. As of the time I am writing this, EverQuest boasts an astounding 360,000 active subscriptions, with as many as 89,000 players online at once during peak hours. No other single online subscription based game in history can boast such numbers. Despite all the challenges facing Verant in keeping this game entertaining and appealing to an aging player base, it still continues to grow daily in success and defies all estimates made during it's humble beginnings. No one really knows just when this game will plateau in numbers, let alone when it will decrease. But one thing is for sure; EQ will be around for a long time yet.

However, despite all these amazing numbers, a visit to any popular EQ message board will overwhelm you in a flood of anti-Verant flames, and rants about everything from the trashing of a player's class to the abuses by Game Masters (GM's). It is a paradox that at the peak of its success, EverQuest also suffers from the worst amounts of bad feeling and bad publicity in its two-year history.

Why is this?

I have a theory that might explain this. I believe that EQ was just too good in its design, but that other "infrastructure related" aspects of the game were never developed enough. One thing common among all those who have ever played EQ, even the worst of the public flamers, is that EQ is a truly wondrous game. It is a near perfect balance of graphics, fun, entertainment and most importantly (in my opinion) community that almost everyone falls for it the first time they log in to Norrath. No where else can you play a game where you slay dragons one moment and then sit down and chat with a dozen friends from all around the world the next moment.

But EQ's success is also it's own worst enemy. None of the talented creators of this game had any clue they would create a game so popular. This became readily apparent when on the day EQ launched; the servers all crashed from the overload of so many people. Over the next week it was almost impossible to connect to the game as UU.net's routers struggled to handle the hordes trying to play. Initial reviews of the game were lukewarm or outright negative and John Smedley struggled to stem this negative tide from washing the game into the oblivion. And he succeeded.

Today EverQuest is a huge success. But there is really no way to explain why. You either hate the game or you love it. I find it very funny when I tell people or show them the game and they say "Ever what?" or ask, "What do you do in this game?" While those that play the game know it intimately. There seems to be no middle ground, as EQ isn't the type of game you can just run one night and play for an hour to pass time. Playing EQ is like planning a trip...

• Step One: Plan to be undisturbed for at least 3 or 4 hours (all day and/or night would be better!);
• Step Two: Make a fresh pot of coffee;
• Step Three: review all your notes and material. Print out and sort any maps, lists, quest information you might need this session so it is within easy reach while playing;
• Step Four: Run the patch program and get any new files needed. Run the game;
• Step Five: Load your character;
• Step Six: Sit and heal/med fully and do a '/who all friend' to see if anyone is online who can help you on corpse recovery. (NOTE: You almost never end a game of EverQuest alive and well. You usually play and play and play until you have finally died one too many times or lost one too many levels or got pissed off just enough times to make you log out in disgust and exhaustion!)
• Step Seven: Recover your corpse (Can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours depending on location and help available)
• Step Eight: Now the REAL game begins! Find your friends/guildmates. Plan something. Travel. Kill. Level. Loot. Chat. Repeat as necessary or until the situation described in Step Six happens.

This is EQ in a nutshell. Hard to believe the game is so popular! Yet it is and no one can really say why.

Constantly during the last two years, any successes with EQ have been balanced by problems in an almost perfectly even ratio. When the game launched, the numbers of players trying to log on caused the network to collapse. When the game matured a bit it became obvious that balance issues had to be addressed as certain classes could solo with ease while others could not. When more and more people began to play, customer service became a huge issue as no one really planned on how to handle the inevitable issues of problem players, kill stealing, harassment etc. When the populations swelled even more, the servers themselves became unstable and new servers had to be opened up and /movelogs had to be made. When the population started maxing out in levels months earlier then anyone had planned for and when all the zones had been conquered, new expansion areas had to be made with higher level caps and massive amounts of new content to keep the more mature players interested.

All this and more Verant did, and EQ still remains the top in its genre of games because of it.

Now let's go back two and a half years ago...

The Beginning

It is 1998 and I am beginning to hear rumors of a game in development that will allow thousands of people to play online together in a huge role playing fantasy world. Online games are just coming into their own about this time, and I have been trying various examples of them out, including another title made by the same company, Tanarus.

Tanarus was my first real experience with playing online against dozens of others in real time. Unlike a lot of EQ players I never played MUD's or other multiplayer RPG's, but rather my experience has been in RPG console games and single player PC games. When I heard about EQ I was intrigued. Besides being a computer user for many years I was an avid book reader, and for over 20 years I have read literally thousands of fantasy and sci-fi novels. Here was a chance to become the characters in all those books I enjoyed! So off I went to put my application in on the EQ beta tests.

The email came soon after and I happily downloaded the over 280 Megs of files needed for my new life. I carefully read all the readme files that where included in the download, and studied all the different races and classes I could play before ignoring them all and making myself a Human Wizard. There was never a chance of me being anything else back then. My name was different though, and after long and careful thought, I decided on "MadWand". For those who do not know, Madwand is the title of a book by Roger Zelazny and also a description (in said book) of a Wizard who has taught himself how to use magic. I completely enjoyed the book, and I fancied that name for myself because I imagined my character as being this powerful magic user who, with no help from any others, taught himself and grew in power to eventually became one of the most powerful users in all the world. A small ambition for sure.. hehe.

Those days during the beta were magical. Everything was new and unique and there were no guides, maps, quest spoilers, hint books, uber guilds, or anything else like what there is these days. When you traveled the land, it was by foot, not by logging in a guild mule to teleport your group somewhere. A powerful weapon for any neophyte wizard was a runed totem stave. Monsters were everywhere, and venturing into a forest at night was an invitation to be lost for hours on end. The scale of the land was truly awesome!

It is hard to explain to someone starting EQ today just how it was then. Today, any new player logs on for the first time to see hundreds of other players in zone that are only a few levels above them but wearing armor from the planes, and talking of places that were only legend to us back in those early days. EQ has changed a great deal.

More then a Game

It was during those fun days of beta that I began to think beyond EQ as just the game. The ability to have guilds in the game was being fine-tuned and I had dreams of starting my own. I had also just started to learn a bit about how websites were made and I thought it would be great to have one for my own guild. So during that first month after EQ came out, I created a guild and started my first website.

I won't bore you with all the details of my guild or the site, but for me, anyhow, it was EQ that opened up the world of the internet to me as my guild opened up the world of playing with numerous friends online. If I hadn't started the Seekers of Lore and made that first website, I would have never had the chance to meet my friend and partner in this guild, Sorontar, and gone on to expand both the guild and website to successful ventures.

This site has never made us any money, but that wasn't why we did it. We did it to have fun, and to learn a bit about running a site. We did it because we met hundreds of real people through our guild and retained numerous friendships from them. Both Sorontar and I feel great pride when we look at this site getting thousands of visitors a day, and at our guild, which is still going strong on several servers. Even though I rarely play the game much anymore, and do not participate in the guild, I still benefit from EQ every day.

I am not alone in this. EverQuest has evolved a huge following of people who take the game outside the computer. Fan Faires happen regularly all over the world. During a previous search, I found more then 600 active EQ websites. Popular literature, cartoons and other material have been spun off from the game. It's amazing just what is out there that deals with a simple computer game!

Where Does it Go From Here?

I made a mistake a few months ago when I had stopped playing EQ actively. I thought then that the game was in a decline. To me, the numbers seemed to be showing that a lot of high level players were leaving and over-all the game was in a steady decay. But I was very wrong.

After the Scars of Velious was released this past December, new subscriptions soared, and instead of tapering off, the numbers of players playing has grown to where nightly almost 90,000 people can be found online at once! That is equivalent to the whole of a mid-sized modern city's population online together playing a game where you kill monsters! Truly unbelievable!

So how can Verant top that? With EQ II of course!

Despite claims of denial, it is a poorly kept secret that a sequel to EQ is in the works. Verant is also currently working on several other big Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG's for short). They will use all the experience gained from the problems and successes of EQ and make a whole new generation of online games. Games such as Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, EverQuest II and Sovereign will no doubt lead the way in the future of world wide internet entertainment.

As for the original EQ; well that remains to be seen. My own belief is that despite the current numbers, EQ has just about reached a summit. (I think I was only off by a few months in my earlier pessimism. SoV gave EQ a shot in the arm, sort to speak.) To me, it seems that right now the producers are in a race to introduce more new content into the game faster then players can get tired of it. I shake my head when I look at the huge numbers of items and quests thrown into the game in just the past several months. When in the past, Verant maintained that even a single powerful item could unbalance the game, nowadays they throw them at you at a staggering rate! When before you had to work at it to earn something as simple as your first magic weapon, nowadays you can have one within an hour of your birth. Rewards no longer seem to mean anything, and discovery has just been turned into who can find the loot the fastest. That's why I don't play much anymore. Instead I now work on another website; one devoted to the upcoming Verant game, Sovereign.

Whole new generations of players are enjoying EQ, and I am sure that it will still be going strong, even years from now. EverQuest remains a unique phenomenon, a game that nobody can truly decipher. And we can hope the next batch of games from this talented company are even half as good and addictive as this one!