I remember having one of those days. First raid force wiped on entrance, another raid force wiped on entrance attempting a rescue, then another. It wasn't 24 hours but it was a long night. Started at 6pm, by 2am everyone gave up on the raid it it went into recovery mode. Someone finally made it to the safe spot with a vox ress stick. I along with another monk spent the next few hours slowly and very carefully standing, running, FD and targeting corpses in 3rd person view. Repeatedly sending tells for consent, and we eventually had HUGE piles of corpses. We'd move like 15 feet, FD, click/corpse on each corpse until all were in the safe spot. Got a cleric ressed with the ress stick and the chain reaction of resses began, though many people had fallen asleep by then. I think about 10 resses in someone decided to wander and got agro. What's he do? trains the safe spot. Thankfully a cleric got camped out and I got FD away from potential AOE to spot for him to log back in. What a night that was. The think the next worse experience I had was the system message that the sleeper had been awakened - more specifically the guild feuds that followed between my guild and two others (mainly just one other).
My original PoP guild slowly falling apart when we failed to kill Xegony after numerous all-evening attempts and beginning a slow and painful backslide rife with finger pointing, forum warring and censorship, political upheaval, proxy bidding to destroy your enemies' gear plans, clique wars, slander, character assassination, rumor mongering, and then finally the eventual fracturing. Guild failings are one of the most difficult aspects of this game for anyone who goes down with the ship (in my opinion), but this particular one was on a whole different level. It was a glorious mess.
my worst experience in eq was when I was very young and I had just been given a combine sword and this merchant says thank you ill put that to good use "it had fallen through inventory" so, I said give it back wench and smacked her.(level 15 druid should not be smacking a npc) anyways she almost killed me in one hit. so I took off running all through south qeynos trying to find a way out finally I zone and then about 2 minutes later a gm contacts me and drags me into a room full of kittys on the wall and proceeds to tell me how I single handedly killed anyone zoning into s qeynos with said train of mobs and that they had to shut the zone down and restart it because of my disruption and politely asked me to explain myself...so I explained what happened and I told him it was bs this wench stole my weapon and even to add insult to injury she thanked me for it and then beat me to within inches of my life, he said umm you do realize that's not a real person that's what we call a npc non player char.... I was dumbfounded.. id never heard of this before and argued bs she was talking to me and explained again how she even thanked me for the weapon but wouldn't not give it back and at that point there was a long pause " secretly I think there was several gm laffing there behinds off at the new mmo person " then he said you are free to go have a good evening and ported me to gfay bindpoint.
Most of the warrior epic was a nightmare of drama and infighting. Lowlights included looting a Spiroc Wingblade one day and being told to it the next day so the guild could have the first Iksar warrior on the server with his epics and camping Severilious for weeks and then having to fight other warriors in the guild for the one scale it dropped, made extra lousy when one of the guys I beat out immediately deguilded. Oh, and the general joys of being an officer in a feeder guild during PoP.
During the first or second fabled event I was camping the fabled jboots. There was a long line and people would get a number when zoning in. I was maybe number 15 or 20 on the list. Everyone on the list was in the small room waiting for the spawn with one suspicious looking wizard not on the list sitting in the corner. After 12 or 14 hours it was my turn to loot. I was tired having not slept the night before and had to go to work in that next hour. I was lucky to have cut it so close I thought. As soon as it was my turn the afk wizard decided to come online and start killing the room and sitting in the ph spot. Everyone in the room asked if he knew there was a line and number system set up and he said no. Basically he felt since he was parked there the next spawn was his. Needless to say an argument resulted and luckily the people in line talked some sense into him. The whole thing ended with name calling and even a duel. I was at the point where if he would have KSd the drop I would not have had time for another ph cycle because I had to leave for work. It would have been 14 hours and a nights sleep wasted. This happened around 2004 or 2005 on the 7th hammer.
Well, the story wasnt only my worst experience, but topped in more than just in the "worst experience" category. It was short before Kunark expansion release, like 3 days before it went live. I was level 50 on my Ranger toon, and most of my guild also were level 50 - all of us trying to beat dead time until the new expansion goes life enabling us to level 50+. We spent our time in Nagafens Lair at the death beetle camp, killing for experience and loot. Nothing special, Everquest business as usual. My experience bar was nailed down at 100% in level 50 and i wasnt expecting anything but some minor loot. Out of a sudden the bell sound of level up disrupted the boredom of slaying blueish mobs. I was just wondering why i leveled up, never expected that. I told the group "errmm .. guys .. DING .. im 51 .. wtf?". All tests like "/who all 51" were performed, and at the end it was clear: My ranger was the first level 51 on Solusek Ro, but 3 days before it should have been enabled! Panic on the server! As there is already ONE level 51, everybody started killing mobs everywhere to become 51 also. I couldnt play anymore, because i received so many tells, that answering them all interrupted my game play and i left dungeon. After like 2 hours i decided to go /ano, to find calm and peace again. From "congrats dude" to "u ****** were the last to deserve being the first to level up". I had a "/reply Thanks!" button on that evening. I was even the center of discussion on other servers. Then i found out, that for whatever reason i couldnt go /ano! I kept getting tells and tells and tells ... Then a real GM - not a guide - showed up and told me WHY i leveled up. Because i was helping out in the volunteer programm and something wasnt setup correctly which enabled me to level. So he set me back to 50 with like 50% exp and told me, not to level up again accidently. The nearly 1000 tells this evening, being cheered and hatred over tells, the many many questions everybody asked for getting more detailed information on how to level up and such, was one of my best but also most annyoing and worst experiences ever. But after this long time i nearly could write a book about Everquest and its splendid community and great people.
Just thought I'd share another thing that happened that really wasn't all that bad, but it really ticked me off. I had a SK several years ago that I named Magneeto, and I played it for quite a long time and it seems like I got it around level 60. Then one day I log into the game and don't see Magneeto in my character list, because they changed the name without warning and without telling me. What really made me mad is that I did a petition asking why my name was changed when I had seen far worse names, and they just told me to report any offensive names that I see.... what?? I'm not going to report anyone just for their freaking name, that's just silly. I said to hell with EQ and tried Warcraft for a few years. Oh and by the way, my first character in Warcraft I named Magneeto out of anger for what SOE did. Another similar story is with a monk I have. His original name was Haywud Jablome, which I actually kept for a pretty long time (seems like it was a couple years). Then one day while in the bazaar a GM sends me a tell asking me to change the surname. Of course I was annoyed that they let me go for so long using the name, but at least this time they said something first instead of just changing it and not saying a thing. I can see why they would want that changed because some people might not like it. Guess SOE has no sense of humor, or some punk reported it as offensive... whatever. It just ticks me off to see names now that are far worse than either of the ones I had changed, but I'm not a jerk that's going to report someone just because of a name. You see people that just flat out use some famous person's name, or other names that might be the same (or similar) to something with a copyright on it. Oh well, I guess SOE just randomly picks what names are acceptable and which ones aren't.
Lots of stories come to mind, but here are a few that first jumped out at me: I wanted to play a dwarf and had to find my way to Freeport to play with friends. Not realizing that I could get bound other places I rode the boat back to freeport every time I died for a LONG time. Back when /consent was actually consent to loot your corpse and not drag it, I had someone offer to loot my stuff for me so it wouldn't rot, then held it for ransom until I agreed to pay him some cash to give it back. Had a lot of fun in befallen my first time there, until we realized there was a rogue working on his lockpick skill, and we went past the locked door with no key to get back after he left. We had to beg and plead to get someone to come let us out. Having my friend try EQ for the first time at my house on my account. He wanted to play a halfling rogue, so I loaded up on orc belts for him to turn in for some free xp. He made a character, and at level one ran run from Rivervale to Freeport (luckily he didn't travel through Kithcor at night) and I gave him several backpacks full (we picked an abandoned building in the city and dropped them on the ground and camped/came back to pick them up before anyone else found them). He went up to the guard captain and began to type /hail without hitting the enter key first, and "A" turned on autoattack. One dead level one halfling full of orc belts. He decided he didn't want to play anymore after that. I went to the shaman BotB event on the Tribunal server with a rogue friend of mine. We were really low level at the time compared to everyone that was competing. It was in the arena on the stage in the middle which was flagged for pvp. They had everyone sit on the edge of the platform to watch, while the shaman contestants did battle in the middle. At some point we realized that we could pvp with others in the same area, so he and I got the bright idea that I would use my flash of light spell (blind) and he would use his intimidation skill (fear), and between the two of us we'd send someone running randomly off in different directions. It was fun, until we accidentally sent a couple of people out into the middle of the contest, and after the GM DT'ed them, he figured out what we were doing and he ported me to Veeshan's Peak and made me sit there with no hope of zoning out until the event was over. I tried a PvP server once, and got up to about level 10 or so. I decided NRo was a much better hang out spot for killing than East Commonlands, because there were less people there. When I was resting I had a naked human come up and ask if I had seen his corpse, which I hadn't. After I said no he decided to try and attack me because he was a few levels higher than me. When I almost had him dead he took off running into the dunes. As I was chasing him I happened to come across his corpse, so I sat down and decided to wait for him to come back. I got reported for corpse camping. My older brother decided he wanted to try EQ after I had gotten a few levels and finally had some PP to my name. I decided I'd help him out, so I gave him 500pp, which at the time was a TON of money. He decided to go to a merchant in freeport and buy leather pants and a plate helm because they looked cool. And the worst one was probably camping Stormfeather for 18 hours straight after a server reset. I skipped guild raids, and stayed up the entire night to make sure I didn't miss it. I fell asleep about 20 minutes before he was due to spawn, and I woke up to the sound of griffon wings and someone else killing him.
This is a funny story to look back on, but at the time it was definitely not a good experience. Back in 1999-2000 I was part of a Rogue only guild on Mithaniel Marr called Silens Dauthus (yes, a rogue only guild). We had our first big "raid" as a guild, where about 10-15 of us, mostly under level 25, all went into RunnyEye. Our big kill of the night was an Evil Eye. After our "raid", a bunch of us decided to head back to Freeport to hang out and have a few in game drinks and play around in the arena in West Freeport. We were all having a blast, when we noticed a high level gnome caster (I think it was a wizard) was hanging out in the arena with us too. He invited a few of us to a group, and myself and one other guildy accepted his invite and joined the group. Back then this was pretty common, because it made it easy to chat with people around you. Well what I thought was just a friendly group invite quickly turned to anything but. Once we accepted his invite, the gnome was able to bind us right in the middle of the arena. He then proceeded to kill me over and over again, rooting me the moment I respawned in the middle of the arena. This went on for nearly half an hour before I finally got lucky enough to resist a few spells and make it to safety. I don't remember the gnome's name, but I absolutely still remember his guild tag, which I believe still exists today on a different server. If anyone in <Cats in Hats> knows someone who used to play a gnome caster back when your guild was on Mithaniel Marr, please /smack him for me a few times.
Mine isn't NEARLY so drastic, but this reminds me of when we were raiding Ashengate West, and Arcekor dropped for us for the first time. A ranger outbid everyone, and the warriors threatened to go on strike over a ranger winning an aggro weapon. 12-hour PoTime raids when the zone kept crashing, finally finishing with Innoruuk because our initial 80-some raiders had tapered off too far to fight Quarm. (We'd done the Phase 1 trials about 4 times in one night at that point, I believe.) Other times included my little frog shaman growing up in Innothule... at a time when graphics were bugged and I couldn't see Kobold models. I would die to mobs I never saw. Or the same little shaman zoning into East Karana, and slipping down the slope a little. Not enough to kill him, but too far to climb up, and high enough to die climbing down. "Ah, but I have levitation!" So I cast the spell, not realizing that I was still slowly slipping down the slope. I 'finished' casting, and off I ran... about a foot before falling to my death. Long corpse run. The worst, of course, is seeing a guild you liked falling apart. I've been through several guilds which either died out slowly from members quitting EQ or moving to other guilds, or guilds which imploded spectacularly due to internal issues.
To run to Paineel with bard speed not managing the corner and fall into the Hole with no possibility to get your stuff back. The corner and I are still enemies 14 years later 17 hours corpse recovery in Fear loosing 4 level
My mage needed Staff from Phinny.. We send in like 2 groups to attack him. In the process I died. I hear that the staff dropped.. So I get rezzed, go to loot it, and his corpse is bugged underground. GM said too bad. I never got another staff to drop ever again
Worst experience? Leading a raiding guild. The extreme selfishness, the greed, the drama, the lying. It made me hate players in general. I'd respect a player more if they were honest about what they were saying instead of lying to make themselves look good/benevolent for being a jerk, spread rumors, go on hearsay, put on amazing displays of stupidity by members and threats to ruin the guild. It made me take a long break from the game.
A vast majority of my worst experiences over the last decade in this game start with some thinking this is his game in which he can choose what ever he wishes to do. His thinking of whether its his mob his camp or his zone. No matter if I was there for the last 6 hours or not. And there is the occasional roll back that causes me to petition a drop I JUST got after camping it for a week.
It was a few weeks after the launch of Sullon Zek team-based pvp server. Our guild decided to team up with 2 other iksar-only guilds and run all the way to rivervale to wage war on the neuts. We got cheers from the dark elf lowbies as we ran in our little lizard army, and we soon had the zone-in from Rivervale to Kithicor on lockdown. Piles of dead noob halfling druids everywhere. It was my favorite EQ memory... ...until 3 neutrals that had been PL'ed to near-max level by multiple people playing on the accounts 24/7 showed up and killed us all. That was worst memory
I was stationed in Beijing, China. My subs ran out, since they were 6 months. I tried to renew from my flat, but I got banned instead. They thought I was a plat farmer even though I was a US national on a Dip passport. I spent 2 hours on the phone, convincing some wonk in San Diego that I was not a Chinese national running a plat farming sweat shop. 1 month and 50 dollars of long distance later, they reinstated me, only to block me one month later since software doesn't seem to have a good memory. It only sees Chinese IP address as being Danger Will Robinson. I got a VPN and anther 50 dollars in phone calls and walla...fixed it but the VPN was dogpoop slow. This was Underfoot era too. People did not want to go back and reflag. Chapped my anus. You have to remember, the air in China...well, its healthier to smoke 2 packs of Marlboro Reds a day than breath that S. EQ was a good stay inside activity when the "fog" was bad. Then I went home and all was bliss. Honestly, the game has never been bad to me. A bad day of EQ is better than a good day at work quite often. That's my worst EQ story.
Worst experiences, 54 man raids where i'm the only person drunk and everyone else is sober and angry cos someone keeps breaking mezzes(pre mezz break messages content).
As a dwarf cleric, doing the final turn-in for the epic, and for whatever reason, the NPC ate all the pieces! Our guild was on a rotation, and this was the first time our turn had come up after "the change". I immediately thought of all the wonderful people who spent day and night with me in Skyfire, killing endlessly, all the telephone calls I got in the early AM when it popped, and that warm and fuzzy seeing a whole guild ready to kill, and then poof! This horrible feeling was short-lived though, thanks to a quick response from a GM, who promptly restored my items, and epic was in hand.
