Love 'em or Hate 'em, <Triality> retired from EQ

Hellfire Club is recruiting...

http://thehellfire.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1532

gdi mintalie...

I miss my bacon, I ate it all.

I agree 100% on this ...

The people predicting EQ's demise have been dead wrong for 14 consecutive years. Its good to be consistent.

No. From what I heard, it was more like a marriage that ends by both parties involved discovering that they mutually have had enough, want out and amicably choose to quietly walk away. Staggered content was a change and changes seldom happen without some folks who chose to bow out rather than get on board.

It's always bad for the community when a long-standing guild folds. I sincerely wish all the Triality folks the best wherever they end up.

Its not only bad for the community when things like this happens, its also bad for the game. I dont know all of the details on why they closed up shop, but I bet that the overall direction of this game had something to do with it.

Triality isnt the first or the last guild of its kind to close its raiding doors. More are coming I am sure. Soon too I bet.

The few years I spent in Triality were some of my favorite of my EQ career. I left due to RL issues and a miscommunication, but still had (and will have) a huge amount of respect for the guild and it's members.

"I sincerely wish all the Triality folks the best wherever they end up." Well said, Ronak.

Sorry to see you go Triality, always loved reading your main page.

Yet another big raid guild falls in EQ. Maybe we'll get smaller size raids now? Or will that take a few more collapses?

Just wait till EQN hits, I would imagine this will be happening a bit more as people can't field 54.

Yeah. EQ isn't going anywhere. It's just changing - for the better, or the worse, but it's staying.

I didn't follow Triality but I do know what a guild breakup is like personally, as many do, I imagine. It sucks.

i'm curious to where some of you are going. fatbuk said on quarken's peace out post that ... actually, i'll copy and paste ftw!

the buk said: "... moving the guild on to a better game and I'm looking forward to a new set of challenges."

i'm curious to what game. or is that a waiting for EQN? inquiring minds and all that.

Hello Kitty Online Adventures

On that note, large guilds dying are never really a good thing. Like others, I also suspect more to follow suit. RIP

Thanks for the supportive posts, I know we haven't been fan favorites for many years but it's good to see that people know what us not raiding in Everquest means to the game. 11 years is such a long period of time it's impossible to muster enough words to talk about it but I'll hit on as many posts as I can.

For those that don't know me, I was one of the original members of Triality and eventually became the guild and raid leader. To do a brief history recap to snap things into perspective.
In 2002 I joined Triality and my first raid was Velks lab, I was a rogue named Dalnoth and my first piece of actual raid loot with Triality was a Skyshrine quest breastplate from the halls of testing.

Triality quickly rose from anonymity on our home server on Vazaelle and raiding out-dated content to actually killing our 4th elemental boss to gain access to the plane of time on November 8th.

Many were shocked that we killed the Rathe Council prior to coirnav but a euro guild on our server use to go down to Coirnav's lair prior to us having the force on to learn the event and actually kill the Trigger to blow the spawn. So needless to say everyone was quite baffled when we had skipped Coirnav and went strait to the hardest raid encounter in the game.(If you look to the left of the Corny blue dwarf in the front you'll see a Handsome Skeleton!)


On December 23th'd we concluded our unprecedented expansion clearing with a kill on Quarm. This was the first time Triality had finished an expansion while it was current content.

The momentum we took into Gates of Discord quickly allowed us to become the top Raiding guild on Vazaelle as we started to gain notoriety aquiring Server Transfers for applicants, which was almost unheard of at this point in the game.Although greatly improving our raiding Triality came up short of any real World-wide Notoriety at this point and funnily enough the entire guild was oblivious to "Guild Rankings" at this point out of our own server.

Going into Omen's of War the same thing really applied, even though Triality holds Worldwide first Kill Rankings for 5/6 Muramite Proving Ground trials, most were oblivious to how success the guild actually had become because our goal was to always raid to the best of our ability, our way, and have fun doing it. Triality was home to 3 of the fabled Epic 2.0's well before any other guilds and solved the puzzle that was the rogue 2.0



and released that information to the community as soon as I completed the Quest. We did not Sandbag Epic Info.

EF raid for epic 2.0:
http://www.thesafehouse.org/forums/showpost.php?p=201653&postcount=35
Missing NPC Information:
http://www.thesafehouse.org/forums/showthread.php?t=14438&page=2


This is where the guild hit a rough spot. We were down to 38 active raiders and the Original Guild Leader had announced his retirement along with almost every officer. I volunteered to start leading raids to keep the guild going, assumed guild leader and with the help of a great group of people, hard work, and 5 months of slave labor we were able to rebuild the guild into what most people know Triality as. From the end of Prophecy of Ro until Seeds of Destruction were the guilds golden years for sure.

Sprinkled in between the Worldwide first kills that were raining for our guild during this time period we saw just to name a few things; myself being contacted by Forbes magazine's Tara Weiss for an interview regarding guild leading and Quarken brought a new way of showing everyone how Triality does things. Everyone thought that nobody wants to look at 12 polygon character models, sprinkled in with blow up sharks and construction paper trees that accompany the Everquest atarii 2600 graphics but he said nae screw that. Q went to work taking music that was passionate to us and summed out how we like to play the game and decided to start filming atarii 2600 live action and created what turned into an everquest spectacle.

This post is already getting entirely too long and im not even 1/2 done with the guilds history, the point I was trying to illustrate is that nobody ever did it like us and our devil-may-care attitude coupled with the innovation of our Leadership and players innovated the raiding game. There have been well over 1,200 people to cross Triality's doors over the past 11 years and some of the games most prestigious players came from our guild. If they like to admit or talk about it or give credit where credit is due is irrelevent, The other Triality-Lifers know them. The know-how and skills they learned in our guild helped them become great.

During our later years we had turned into the bad boys of Everquest due to our suspension, and while certain Shepard Staff IRL Wielding individuals will fixate on this one stain in a very rich history and disregard anything out of pure immaturity, our positive impact on the game and the attitude and innovation we played with is undeniable. Nobody sails for 11 years without hitting the rocks once or twice.

Another huge positive of our guild in the past 3 years was we were not scared of poorly geared applicants. We as leaders realized that if you want to build a solid foundation you need to start from the ground up, good players don't fall from trees fully geared. We recognized this and helped turn some of the best returning players into all-stars. If we used the same policy as other guilds who may shun away applicants because they don't buff to 120k and don't have advanced innate charisma 15 done we would have lost on A LOT of good players. If any guilds out there are looking for advice, don't be afraid of taking a chance on an applicant because of gear. They could be the next you.


As the GL and Longest standing member of Triality, I'd like to thank everyone throughout the past 11 years for your love and hate. It meant the world to us.

Thank you Everquest for 11 great years.



To answer a few questions:

How did the guild go about doing this?:

It was an amicable shake hands and walk away situation for most parties involved. There were some hurt feelings but that was to be expected, over-all I think everyone is going to be a lot happier now that they have the freedom to do what they want with their gaming in the way that they want. The core members have experienced a lot of things together and our relationships as friends (For the most part) Transcend the game. We've experienced the best of times and The worst of times; Lost close friends to tragedy in real life and made friends that will carry on throughout our lives. Everyone who was Triality feels the same way. For us the people became > game.

Why did we decide to pack it up?

There's many factors and you can't trace this back to just one cause but i'll try and hit a few. large part of it was logging in to be miserable every night. It's not fun only have 3 relevant raids worth doing and then wasting the rest of the raid time farming for apps/alts. Lots of people were very disinterested in the game which doesn't offer a very healthy guild environment. 75-85% of the guild logged in to raid and did nothing else after our characters had raid required AA's/Augs. The usual issues that plague guilds were definitely adding up for us people were not logging in because they were disinterested with the game and it made things doubly hard on the people who did put in work. We were facing another rebuilding process only a year after VoA where we did it then to regain Relevency in the guild rankings getting back up to 3rd, The thought of having to do it again in this game with the state it's in and having to go through the usual things associated with that, didn't appeal to any of us. Most of us had already done such a rebuilding proccess several times and most importantly I genuinly wanted people to be happy and lots were not. It's important to realize that as a leader and even though people are dead loyal to you, You can give them a salute and a nod and cut them loose to find their own happiness.

What's Next?

Some of our diehard and core members still like raiding in EQ but wanted to keep doing it without the hardships the guild was going through so they have moved to other guilds to do that.
A large core of us have been working on continuing the guild just not in EQ1. I'll post more about that tonight for those actually interested because we're actually having a guild meet in another game tonight and I don't want to post here before we flush things out in house.

I'm a bit biased, but the Solteris video is my favorite. Names on or not, I can name the majority of the members in that video just from seeing their toons. Definitely bittersweet.

The current game is way more stressful then it use to be. When your a raidleader and want/ push to be best in game. The ranking is more battle of hours and competition is hard to pull out of some people these days. The community of players is very split now you have hardcore and casual raiders. With exception of few guilds that have recruiting power to keep 54 hardcore. Many guilds have the divide of 2 style players and with constant flow content releases its dividing the guilds more and more. The real battle in eq these days is trying to keep guilds together not really winning raids.

What everyone wants to know is....what is to happen to the Wall of Shame?!?!?!?

Who ever thinks the game is not dying needs to shake their heads. Sure it's a slow death, but dying it is. The ONLY reason the population of the servers "seems" to have stayed the same is that people are boxing more and more to get things done. Without all them boxers, this game would have been dead long ago.

The game has been "dying" since day 1. It's the nature of the beast.

GL to triality's members and all that.