I Heart Greater Faydark!

As many of you have probably read on one blog or another, it is Everquest's 10th anniversary today, although I doubt that most of the WoW population will understand the massive (no pun intended) impact that the game had on the world of MMOs. You see, Everquest set the precedent for what WoW would become today. It did not do this, however, by succeeding in catering to the player base the way WoW does. Instead, WoW learned from the mistakes of EQ, which is why it has been able to retain and grow it's customer base to the enormous online community we have today. I know many of you are probably shocked that I say that WoW listens to it's players, but believe me, WoW is Mother Goose in comparison to EQ. In fact, if I had to say that any other MMO killed EQ, I would probably have to proposition that it was WoW in the Library with a candle stick. 

I'll start off by saying that I was once an EQ player, and a hardcore one at that. I know you can't tell that by the VERY subtle tributes I give it by naming all my characters after EQ deities (Quellious, Cazicthule, and so on...). I started playing EQ when I found out about it from a friend, right after the expansion Ruins of Kunark came out. I decided to give it a try, so I rolled a druid on the Quellious server named Astrael ( No, I did not name it Quellious, that would have been tacky :P). When I started playing the game, I wasn't terribly impressed with the graphics. In fact, they were outdated even by standards in those days. However, after I had played the game for about an hour, it drew me in more and more. My druid grew and grew, and eventually he was level capped, which in Everquest takes about 4 to 5 times longer than in WoW. I soloed most of the content up to level 55, and had no trouble finding raids to heal or dps ( you could do both at the same time), and eventually I got my Epic 1.0. A little later on, Planes of Power came about, and we conquered them without much trouble too. However, after the first 3 or 4 expansions, the game became very hostile towards even the solo classes. The normal mobs were becoming stronger (they quadded for about 500 per hit, which comes to about 2k health per second out of an 8k health pool). Things got so ridiculous at the time Dragons of Norrath came out that I, like many players, altogether quit. We complain about welfare epics today, but we disregard that EQ required you to do an 8 hour raid per night to clear a dungeon (which was not instanced by the way), and the chances that you'd get the nice gear from the three bosses there were about 1/52, as that's how many players were in the raid.  Of course, not all raids were this long (OK, maybe just Vex'Thal), but all of them had about 50 players, so gearing was definitely an issue. I won't even go into the corpse runs, the exp loss on death and the fact that there was only one acceptable raid healer, the cleric. But in spite of all my beef with EQ, I want to wish it a Happy Birthday, and I hope that they will come out with EQ III that will blow away all other MMOs :P