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Everquest Journal Two
This is where Everquest succeeded perfectly in my view. The high end game consisted mainly of large raids which was 2 or more groups acting together to achieve a common goal. This meant to get invited on a raid you needed to have a good reputation. This was an instance were player justice actually worked. You rarely encountered an unmitigated jerk at high levels. The downside was that reputations were fragile. You could be nice to everyone you meet except to one guy then that one guy would bad mouth you to everyone he met. For clerics this was a serious issue because high levels clerics were pestered constantly by requests for ressurrects from other players. A ressurrect would allow a dead player to regain some lost XP.
A cleric could go out of his way to resurrect ten of eleven people, and the only thing anyone would remember is the one guy he didn’t resurrect. This is why clerics almost exclusively set their online status to ‘ANON’; so they could avoid tells from strangers requesting a res and not have to deal with being besmirched by someone they’ve never met. To be fair, I also encountered many polite players who were courteous with their requests and acceptance of being denied.
I mentioned earlier that Cazic had a central courtyard which made it easy to get to certain camps. The flipside to that was that players could easily get from those camps to the zone line. These players were usually followed by a train of monsters. Trains were when 2 or more monsters would be following a fleeing player to the zone line. A good train could wipe out just about everyone in Cazic. It was considered bad form to train, but if you gave sufficient warning by shouting ‘TRAIN TO ZONE’ most people would let it pass because everyone at some point would be the conductor of a train.
Even as deadly as a train could be, they did provide a great deal of excitement. I remember countless times being near the zone line and helping fight back a large train. It was like Custer’s Last Stand. Occasionally a really fleet footed character would manage to get the boss MOB of Cazic to the zone. The Avatar of Fear himself would be swatting down adventurers at the zone line. The AoF dropped the highly prized Rubicite Breast Plate and Thalian Claws. Neither of which I was ever able to acquire.
Toxxulia Forest Toursim Board
Eventually I moved on to Lower Guk, but it was here that I finally got fed up with having negative faction. Everyone else could just walk down to the Lower Guk zone line, but I had to wait for invisibility or get a speed enhancement before making a mad dash. It might not have been so bad if clerics had an invisibility spell, but since they didn’t it made traveling overtly difficult when everyone else could just mosey around areas too dangerous for me. So at level 29, I decided to switch races. A very daunting decision at the time because getting to level 29 had taken me about a month and a half already.
Thus one late night, my dark elf cleric Zehail was retired and my erudite cleric Zygote was born. Also factoring into my decision was a better knowledge of stat points. For my dark elf I had invested points into agility and strength. This turned out to be a waste for a cleric. So the next time around I put as many points as I could into wisdom, and the rest into strength. I also liked the idea of being an erudite because there was only like four or five erudite clerics on my server at the time. The biggest drawback was having no night vision. Ugh! To say Toxxulia Forest was excruciatingly hard to navigate at night would have been an understatement. That aside it was rather fun to start over with decent gear.
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