Whether it's a horrible glitch, a rude or disruptive player, or just something stupid you've done, we've all had bad times and problems in this game. So I thought it would be a good idea to see what sort of things have happened to people while playing. So feel free to post one (or more) of your worst experiences while playing Everquest. One of the worst things I can think of to happen to me was back when I first started playing in 2002. I was walking through the Lake of Ill Omen after coming out of Cabilis, and as I was walking past a tree I suddenly got stuck. I wasn't stuck on the tree, I was literally stuck standing within maybe a foot of the tree and couldn't do a thing. I didn't know what to do at all, so I was stuck there for quite a while. If it wasn't for a friend of mine that had a wizard, who knows how long I might have stayed there. Just to share a moment I've had lately, a couple days ago I finished the Celestial Fists epic for a monk I made on a new server. Well I had all sorts of problems doing it (both my fault and the game's fault), so I'll just make a list of them. The placeholder for an iksar betrayer in Chardok wasn't spawning at all the first day I tried. The NPC named Lheao in Timorous Deep wasn't spawning the first day I tried that part. When speaking to the Astral Projection in Overthere I forgot to hand him the quest item, but still said the phrase to make him disappear which forced me to wait on a re-spawn. When doing the final turn in to Kaiaren in Trakanon's Teeth, he attacked me because I had the wrong book. Luckily the right book was from the triggered version of the same NPC in the same zone, and is triggered by handing the book I already had to the normal Kaiaren (which I had just done). So all I had to do was FD so not to kill Kaiaren (or I was screwed), then run over to the triggered version and hand in the book I had, then run back to the normal version and hand him that book. Luckily the normal version stayed up when the triggered version was spawned, and I was able to get the epic!
General chat on any server is a pretty horrifying experience most of the time these days. As far as actual gameplay goes, attempting to do the druid 1.5 pre-quest and foraging in Plane of Growth. It took over a week of sitting in PoG foraging. It was nightmarish.
Seeing friends being unable to play EQ and quitting the game after the infamous transition to DX9 in 2004, in the middle of what was already the worst expansion ever, GoD. I could almost feel the game dying.
The entire experience of the DSH anniversary quests. Never seen as much training, kill stealing and jerkish behavior in ~13 years previously.... Watching a flame suit get fluxed 8 times before a lone wizard killstole it from one of the groups was the antithesis of fun.
1999 - Camping Jboots in najena on Rallos Zek for 26 hours straight, only to have a few groups of SIN members come in and kill the entire line of people waiting. Came back the next day and got them on my second kill. At the time it was the worst experience ever but I wound up meeting two of my best gaming buddies because of it. I still speak to them nearly 15 years later which is pretty cool.
I killed a named (or even a raid mob) in Devastation - it took me around 25 minuted, a guidmate, beastlord, came few minutes after this and killed a toughter one in less than one minute. It was in UF era. I took a 6 months break from eq after this.
Oh and honorable mention for spending 70 hours camping jade of the ether named in devastation to spawn ONE name total, and that name was killed by zone trash before I could pull it. But everyone has horror camp stories so /shrug
In Luclin, I replaced my credit card(canceled and got a new one). I didnt register the new card with sony (was waiting for them to tell me to pay again). Something with billing on their side screwed up, because I actually went a few months without paying. Then one night I died and logged off without getting my body. Next morning, my account was banned. I find out they were blaming me for somehow getting a few months of play time free. As in I hacked somehow thier system and took advantage of it.... /boggle By the time I got my account back, my body (and all my gear) had long since rotted. GM's said that they couldn't find any files with my characters gear on it. So a billing screw up cost me my epic and all my gear.
Plane of Fear raids that lasted 24 hours with multiple guilds trying to rescue each other. I remember it more fondly looking back than I did at the time. Another time in the same zone we managed to drop Cazic Thule in a tree. No one could reach him to loot, and he rotted lol.
Playing on the Fippy Darkpaw server: - poop-socking raid bosses for over 24 hours - losing raid bosses to /random - losing raid bosses to Lord of the Rings trivia - losing raid loot to vindictive GMs - rampant, unpunished hacking - raiding with alts because officers were all suspended (multiple times) - broken raid zones, events, and expansion releases - being stalked by another player But more than anything, watching your friends/guildmates screw each other over, purposefully, either to be vindictive or to "get ahead". Disgusting.
Besides the multiple times being notified that a friend had died? Being a guild leader and finding out that two of my officers were having an affair. One of our members - a coal miner - came down with cancer. He and his wife played a lot of EQ. When he was in the hospital battling for his life, his wife was on EQ. It was a real shock when she said she had put the kids in the car and driven to Florida to move in with her new boyfriend. It was an offline problem, but out of respect for our sick friend I booted both officers and their alts from the guild. He eventually recovered (from the cancer, anyway). In the divorce settlement, she got the kids and he got her EQ account so that he wouldn't have to see her again in-game.
I had just purchased an expensive DX8 video card two weeks before that EQ patch. That memory still hurts.
Guardian event in DSH before they changed it, when there was so many people that it wasn't letting anyone zone in until someone left the zone. At least twice the zone crashed and we had to start over. When we finally did kill it (after like 6-8 hours or something) and the guardian ran up a wall on low health and nobody could get to the corpse, they had to have GM's come in and have everyone pretty much stand in line just to have the GM flag everyone one at a time. Top that! /drops the mic and walks off
Zoning into Relic years ago to kill Porthio. Upon zoning in, there's 1 monk at the zone in spinning around in circles. Once you get to Portho you realize he's dead but his tiger is still up... Ok, you move the raid up to the dragons; all dead! That was a sucky time for open zone raids.
I somehow got stuck in a crack, in Lair of Splitpaw back when i was in my 30's on my paladin. Nothing I did worked to try and get unstuck. I started freaking out because I didn't know what to do and none of my friends, who had been playing far longer than I, were on. Funny, looking back, I don't know how I ever got out. Other than this minor crisis, I can't remember ever having a bad experience, per say.
Being forced to choose, when raid bosses were a week long spawn in non-instanced zones, between screwing other people out of content or losing out myself. There's a few other things but they come down to the people involved instead of the game itself.
OK, this made me laugh. I logged on one evening, and saw most of the guild ('The Honorable Few') was in City of Mist, so I popped on over there to help out with whatever was going on. It was getting Jade Reavers for Druid/Ranger epics, I asked who we were getting it for, and was immediately accused of being 'greedy' by the guildmaster, a Ranger, who was the one who called the guild out there... He kept being a selfish jerk after that, so I left that guild soon after. Then there was the GM who told me despite repeat petitions 'Maybe the zoneline doesn't work the way you think it does' when my monk was stuck in the qeynos sewers; but then the next week: From Sep 11th, 2001: Reactivated broken zone line between Qeynos to the Sewers. A dead halfling was stuck in the drainpipe and has been removed. My happiness at being vindicated was short lived on that one =P
for the JotE camp, how about spawning the , killing him, and the zone does a takeover while his pher is down and having to wait for a gm to reset it or another day for another takeover... or the wonderful task of trying to trigger a takeover in devastation. oh when my bard was still like lvl 10 or so, just got a full suit of banded, feeling pretty spiffy, deciding that the bard mail delivery quest sounded great and headed to qeynos from freeport through highpass for the first time, and falling off the cliff and spending 3 days trying to get BACK and find my corpse safely... cuz i got lucky the first time and everything was camped so nothing agro'd. first couple rounds of Fabled with the days long lists for the drops...
