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One of the best parts of those difficulties was that markets emerged from within the player base to provide conveniences around them.

Necromancers could summon a player's corpse if they were within some distance, like 500 meters. So Necros would camp out near famously tricky areas, and offer to pull corpses for 10 platinum pieces ("10pp") a pop.

Enchanters and Druids were the only classes with a teleport spell, so likewise they'd charge a small fee to teleport players across the continents, like from Qeynos to Freeport. Sometimes a chanter would spend an hour or three grinding out teleport runs like an Uber driver (we didn't know that analogy - uber wouldn't exist for another 10 years!) to make some extra cash.

And there was no auction house at all. The de facto auction location was a big cave in the desert outside Freeport. Players would all meet there and post in the general chat, hawking their goods:

    someguy: WTS Swarmcaller LEGENDARY bow for ranger 1k
    coolwizard: WTB pally helmet
    lesscoolpriest: WTS leather pelts 5g each

As a kid, I'd spend time in the that zone just trying to swap and find good deals, buying low and selling high, just because I found that lots of fun. I never really was great at that - there were always a few legendary big-deal traders who had tons of capital and thus tons of good equipment.

Fun times. I miss that sort of emergent magic.

That was wizards and druids. Wizard spires and druid rings. Enchanters made money casting a spell to cause faster mana regen.

Ah, that's right! Thanks!

I remember seeing my first guy with a flaming sword, likely the only one on the Mithaniel Marr server at the time, in that improvised shouting market in Freeport, that was such a thrill.

Back in the day I hated EverQuest because it killed Ultima Online. It’s funny you mention how hardcore EQ was because UO was even harder. In the early days you could be killed and your entire corpse robbed clean, people could even butcher up your body into discrete pieces and feed them to pigs, or carry your head around like a trophy or turn it in for a bounty if there was one. Also if someone got your house key and they found your house they could just bust in and loot it dry. And if you were killed somewhere like a deserted island that had no place to resurrect you were basically stuck there till someone came to get you. It was so dangerous.

But then games like EQ came out and made things easier for players, and that put pressure on UO devs to make their game easier, and eventually with time UO became a boring safe game rather than a true virtual world.

I remember how completely disgusted with EQ 'carebears' the UO community was. It was telling though that asherons call, which was a bit closer to UO than it was EQ, was never as successful. People want boring, safe experiences.

Great game though, AC.

> People want boring, safe experiences

Looking at the popularity of the Soulslike games, I don't think that's true. I think what people want is a system which feels fair.

A big part of fairness is not letting randoms online destroy your stuff & progress. Stories about UO often fall into that vein. Ways in which some player made life hell for another player. Honestly doesn't sound like much fun to me. I can see why many players wouldn't want to be part of such a system.

UO sounds like it was modeled off real life then

That's a decent point, except that I don't think the souls experience is actually very 'fair' - it's in fact pretty far on the 'safe' scale! I get as many attempts on a boss in a souls game as I want. My skills increase every time and the boss stays the same. this is inevitably a situation I will win, it's just a matter of time. It feels more fair to me because I have a feeling of 'earning' it, but it wasn't very fair to the boss at all!

In actual reality we are wired to seek unfair situations - we intrinsically prefer scenarios in which we have an unfair advantage. Scenarios in which the advantage is unknown or in which we even are disadvantaged are fundamentally unsettling to us because we have been programmed by billions of years of evolutionary programming to avoid those kind of scenarios! Games that present us with these kind of unfair advantages disguised as 'fair' are in fact wildly popular for exactly that reason.

Community is what forms whilst cooperatively solving issues, many of which are NOT the actual raid bosses, etc.

Much of that is dead now, unless you are in or can join a community that preexists.

I remember using my bear in WoW to tank as a hunter because we got bored waiting for a tank to become available and one of the dps suggested we try because getting another dps was easy and it was better than sitting around stormwind.

Yep. I remember shaman tanking, and warlock tanking as well.

If you didn't care how fast the instance or non-instanced outdoor "dungeon" was progressing (and you had to manage a certain speed, or you'd eventually get swamped by respawns, when that was still a thing), you could do it as long as the group could balance aggro (and/or kite, when that was also still a thing), with damage and healing. We did some really wacky group compositions back then, because that was what we had. And the old talent-trees encouraged it, as a shaman or paladin or druid (or even warrior) could take some talents to let them tank better, while still keeping their character viable for solo-questing or as a dps. And the game and other players didn't actively punish you for being sub-optimal. (I.e. you could, to an extent, successfully aim for breadth instead of depth, because other players were more accepting of the trade-offs involved, for a variety of social and practical reasons.)

I leveled my pally back in the day as a holy/prot hybrid pretty much exclusively via group questing and dungeon runs. Having decent gear for both roles and understanding the abilities was even more important than talent choice, although good talent choice helped. I remember a great deal of my healing set was leather or cloth, because that's what had the best stats for it, which in turn made it problematic to switch roles mid-fight. I suspect that today, even if I could re-build the character as a working hybrid, it would be an unpopular choice because I wouldn't be as fast as a specialist. But "In the Good Old Days" success and good play still mattered.

Had some fun years playing Planetside (2? It was on PC) until my clan (D2A) died off due to lost interest around the time the planet exploded. It was amazing in Planetside to have our clan organize hundreds of people to form into platoons and take over continents. I was also into Destiny 2 on PC for a while when it came out, but I was in a few different raiding clans and they all died after just a couple of months, like going from thousands of active players to under 50 dead. I’ve played Diablo seasons with a couple of coworkers and that’s been fun, we don’t get to the top 100 or whatever globally but still got to the point where we were pushing GR 100+ levels using pretty standard Icy Veins builds. It was fun, but no one can usually find 20+hrs/week for video games anymore. Some of my D2 clan mates were college students so they’d play for 40-60hrs/week and get through all new content / raids in a week or two, then it’d take the rest of us a month or so to catch up.

Recall spending an hour putting together a group for a dungeon in wow. 30 minutes getting to dungeon. All because we needed nature resist for a a new dungeon. Then spending 5 hours working together. because we all so happy to have a functional group.

The fun part is the priest core was the only group that for our nature resist gear. So we tanked that week.

WoW had that really well figured out.

I remember when I played both that and FFIX. I'd spend 7 hours looking for a group in FF on a Saturday, get to the dungeon, wipe right away, level down and the group would disband. Logging on became more and more rare but wow wasn't punishing.

I think there's a big gap to be filled with a good rogue MMO. Persistent world states. One requiring the coordination of large groups of varying levels, and high stakes. But no progression curves that take grinding time.

"it's wild to think of how hard core EQ was at the time. ... For example, if you died, your corpse was where you died. You reappeared with literally no gear. If that was deep in a dungeon (Sebilis anyone?) then recovering it might be nontrivial. This led to corpse-run ("CR") groups. If you failed to get your corpse within a week it would disappear taking all your stuff."

This was and still is completely standard on MUDs, which Everquest and pretty much all other MMO's were strongly influenced by.

Not just strongly influenced. Those early MMOs were often called "graphical MUDs".

Indeed, Dark Age of Camelot was a direct successor to the Darkness Falls MUDs. Its gameplay was essentially the same, it just rendered the world in 3D rather than text.

EQ was practically a graphical Diku MUD.

Great summary, I had a similar experience to yours, including the epic Freeport run, dungeon mob trains, waiting for the right named mob to spawn in Guk for that epic + strength belt for my pally. What a magical time. I remember being so new to the online experience, and the social aspect of it, that my first interaction with anybody in the game was my pally in the newbie zone in Freeport attempting a conversation with a mage's elemental without realizing that was a NPC. Lots of rats and bats were slain that day.

I always wondered why I could never ride the dragon again with anything that came since. Was it because I was much younger when I played EQ for the first time, so nothing to do with the game, but all to do with me? Was it the kind alternatives on the market for gaming experiences? But I think you're right, it likely was about the comparative undersaturation with social experiences on the Internet of 1999. The best I had going on for me sociall online were a couple of friends I had added on IRC from my months of playing Myth The Fallen Lords online. What an era.

Which dragon would then-you actually enjoy chasing in todays modern-oversaturated online socialized world?

Not going to bed until I get my rotting corpse! multiple 30min corpse runs and at 3am I get my corpse only die again before I make it out of the dungeon. Those were the good ol days.

One thing that made EverQuest good were the sounds. They were mesmerizing at times.

> Levelling too slow? Eliminate it. Um, what? That's half the game

That's weird. The vast majority of my time in MMOs is raiding, not leveling. Leveling is boring, filler content. I don't know why it should have such a strong emphasis in any game.

Great post. There are lots of parallels here with technology creeping into real life.

Automation replacing human contact (ticket counter closures). Convenience replacing experience (empty high streets)

Change works both ways.

Nobody plays the hardcore games. There is Mortal and Mortal 2 and most people hate them.

hardcore mmo player/fan here :

I am re-writing a long rant that I just deleted in response to this; but let me distill it as concisely as I can :

Star Vault repeatedly mismanaged Mortal Online, burned lots of members of a small niche community with repeated character wipes and hacking incidents, and did not take the appropriate steps to address issues that finally resulted in the total loss of confidence in the persistent world by many early fans.

After all that -- and with Mortal Online I about 30% done with respect to the early crowdfund goals, they announce Mortal II and divert an already small staff elsewhere , throwing the early game into maintenance.

tl;dr : people play these games, but they can only take so much abuse.