Chronoportals — A Stitch in Time
Many of EverQuest 2’s most dedicated players owe their gameplay roots to the original EverQuest and still carry strong memories of the patience and community the original game required. Soloing was almost unheard of. Camping mobs for hours (or days), the difficulties and perils of travel, and contested spawns of much-needed named mobs were all experiences players would not soon forget. It sure was a different game before WoW forced all MMOs to become approachable and remove any aspect that might be considered as a “waste” of the player’s time.
When we heard about Chronoportals, a live event running on EQ2 servers that celebrates EverQuest’s 12 year anniversary by bringing players back to an earlier time to experience memorable encounters from before the Shattering, we hoped that the event might go that extra mile and include a real impression of how the world looked in EverQuest, and revisit some of the original zones.
However SmokeJumper has explained to us that such was not in the cards. Dedicating a bunch of time for the art team to create or “devolve” existing zone art to harken back to the old Norrath just wasn’t a possibility with the current schedule. I guess I’d hoped that at least they’d get the sky sorted out, rather than a post-Shattering Luclin.
Still there are some humorous elements, including a Beastlord Vha Shir and EQ1-style Ranger in the Sinking Sands , and a surprise waiting for those who interfere with a ritual in the Feerrott. The difficulty is definitely up there with what you’d expect of an event nostalgic about a game that required grouping. In fact this has been a source of derision towards the developers — with players demanding that these zones be soloable and scalable to any level. I’ve personally been able to duo every zone but Lavastorm with my 90 Ranger and a 90 Coercer, but groups of players at the appropriate level would certainly be a lot more fun.
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:
This was an event that the team decided to just relax and have a bit of fun with after the pressures of launching DoV. 4-5 designers spent a few days cobbling these together as a way for us to a) remember the old days fondly, and b) say “Happy Birthday” to the original EverQuest game.
That’s all they’re intended to be. We hope you enjoy them in the spirit they’re intended.
Now we get back to work on the “real” stuff.
We hope that we’ll continue to see more events like this (and the Aether Flying Races) in the future. A little bit of art time would have really made a huge difference here. As it is, the rewards in these 8 portals have been tremendous, so players are hitting them up every day.
Chronoportals — a fun event that would have been even more engagingwith a bit more nostalgia factor.
Tags: chronoportals
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Comments (18)
CrisuKomie
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And thank god WOW came along and did that for MMO’s.
Why’s the hell would I want to play a game where my time is actually wasted doing nothing?
Thats stupid. End of story.
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Steve
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Just because you don’t like the style of play a game had does not make it stupid.
That attitude however is ignorant and typical of the modern MMO/RPer that WoW has brought to the market. End of story.
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Miragian
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I think camping to a degree isn’t a bad thing, but having spent days at the Ancient Cyclops camp I’d say it does a limit to how much sense it makes.
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Lathain
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Hard, rare long borring camp lead to everyone dont look exactly same… Clone war.
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alan`
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To be honest it was a silly mistake to not have a solo version of the zones forget the loot that of course should be hobbled but to exclude soloers is frankly not on,the game is in dire need of keeping hold of ALL it’s players.
The flying races are just such an event that set EQ2 apart everyone could have a go then back we go to the dark days of the TSO xpac,no sorry soloers not needed go elsewhere.
Oh well lets hope they learn though i doubt it oh and before the flames start i will say this i did the event with my guild as i always do,just feel sorry for the soloer.
And on camping the ONLY time it was ever good was in a master rangers camp in SWG now that was brilliant.
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Murfalad
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I hopped onto on poorly equipped level 40 Mystic and just asked in 1-9 chat for somone to group with for the Antonican Chrono-instance (I tried it solo and got flattened!).
After a few requests I started getting replies, and after an hour or so of gameplay (and learning the hardway to read what Holly does say about animals 🙂 ) I have to say the event was great fun. Even though I never played EQ1 I can appreciate the Nostalgia, the loot is somehow both far from bis, but also decent and attractive for several of my characters – perfect.
I do hope they include more events like these every so often (maybe this should go in next year with the art update Feldon mentions), all in all I’m seriously impressed by the work of the EQ2 Dev team seen so far this year, if we now got some new servers I think life would be just about perfect.
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Iceey, 90 Necro of BB
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New servers? After we just got through merging servers because of low population? And the merge was because people were, and servers were in need of more people on them. Im afraid I dont understand your comment of being in need of new servers.
The ONLY way I could see this as a NEED, is if they were to put a couple servers on the east coast instead of them all being located on the west coast.
As that would help with ping, lag, etc… I have a 25 meg down 2.5 up, but still maintain a ping of 170-240. Rediculous….
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Feldon
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The plan is to replace the server hardware of the other servers. Already, Antonia Bayle and Nagafen are running on a new server cluster and they are completely lag-free. Nagafen has had PvP Warfields of 150 players with no server-side lag at all. We can’t seem to go above 50 players in a Public Quest on the other, older servers without massive server-side lag.
I can see why Rift calls new game worlds “Shards” rather than Servers because to say Butcherblock is a ‘server’ suggests it’s 1 box. In actuality, when you login to Butcherblock, you aren’t playing on one physical “server”. You are playing on a cluster of different computers. Also, when you port into your guild hall, you’re firing up an instance on a Zone Server. At any one time, you might be communicating with 3 or more different pieces of hardware at SOE Operations.
I believe one of the things Zoltaroth has been working on is caching on the Zone Server for housing so that when you switch from your Prestige House back to your regular House, you’re not constantly starting from scratch at SOE’s end. If the Zone Server ‘remembers’ all your house items in all your houses and keeps that in memory, you can port between your houses a lot faster. Only when you port out of your house would that be dropped from memory. At least this is my recollection of what he was saying.
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Shaun
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They should have had one server with same rules as ORIGINAL EQ1 (not today’s shadow)
EQ2 GFX/UI with original ruleset / penalties! I AM THERE!
This way we can play what we want , hardcore or ezmode! /laughs
I think many would play on it, all the kids can play on normal servers. x wowers /laughs louder
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Charn
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Original penalties in EQ2? Uhhhh . . . having to click on your “shard” (a ghostly image of yourself) was bad enough (because sometimes it would get stuck on moving platforms, in walls, under the world . . . ) but lest we forget, if someone in your group died, EVERYONE shared in the death penalty . . . even if one person was just stupid enough to not be paying attention and fall off a cliff; ALL of the group members would receive experience debt, regardless of reason.
Having to make a /disband macro because you knew your group was going to wipe and you didn’t want ALL that debt from the entire group’s death (it was bad enough just getting exp debt from yourself) was just a horrible, horrible idea. Especially when you had people lose their nerve and /disband too soon when, if we had actually stood and fought, we might have all made it. No one liked playing “disband chicken” in hopes you would win or /disband before you died (you could not /disband from a group if you were dead, you had to do it before you died or you were stuck in the group and got everyone’s death who didn’t disband).
MAYBE, if you wanted to bring back the ghostly shard (and the max was 3, so you COULD ignore getting it and just deal with added debt) I might be able to deal with that *as long as the ghostly shards weren’t as glitchy as they once were). But ALL the old ruleset and penalties . . . I think they went the right direction there.
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Brienae
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My husband and I ran all of the chronoportals just the 2 of us (90 troub and 90 monk)I recieved a lot of gear for my alts who are 20s, 32, and 46. We ran the last one with a 90 fury and 90 coercer. I do wish they scaled down so that lowbies could experience all of them.
Also on servers I could have sworn I heard them say they were giving Crushbone new hardware as part of the merge. Did this happen or was it forgotten?
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Breanna
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You really have to be kidding Nagafen has new hardware? and NO lag, U must not play here for sure… the public quest are a total joke with the lag feast we have, if more than 50 in the zone, and when pvp hits my super pc that normally runs smooth, with at least 85 fps slows to 1 fps… not even playable, much less fun.
But on the topic of the event, even with 10 level 90 toons I find them fun. Something to do when not raiding. Most of the new zones I find a very shallow loot table.. not offering much. And I see guildies log on and say hmm bored and log off more an more. On raid days everyone is on and ready to roll.. non raiding days are filled with boredom..
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Feldon
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I’m not kidding. It was widely publicized. Nagafen and Antonia Bayle are on top-of-the-line hardware now. Gaige’s entire guild moved to AB and are now able to raid completely lag-free. Warfields on Nagafen handle 100+ players with little difficulty. There are some design problems with the Storm Gorge PQ, but if you are having FPS problems at Ring War, I’d suggest your PC settings are too high.
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Feldon
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Crushbone got newer hardware. But it’s not the top of the line Oracle servers that Antonia Bayle/Nagafen got.
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Murfalad
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If you are seeing low FPS then your machine cannot handle it, nothing the server does delays how often your screen updates.
And I’m really hoping that they can get the approval for at least Splitpaw and Unrest with new hardware.
Personally I think they need to go for new hardware all around though, both from a reliability point of view where if its getting 6 years old it should be replaced anyway, and from a gameplay point of view. We’ll see I guess, where there are questions how much support EQ2 does get in the upper management (the mobile phone apps and facebook app show its treated as a priority since they are expecting the money spent on this to be a good investment) for me outlaying onto a lot of new servers would make a statement that they want a return on investment back in the years to come.
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Murfalad
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Its interesting actually with the servers-shards thing how WoW has changed its lag-meter, now they measure both the ping to the main server, and the ping to the local server (the instance I guess).
It also makes me wonder what it would take for WoW to support really large public quest type events, whether they would find themselves splashing out big time on new servers? Or are they continually keeping their servers updated, from my experience it seems like they do not update so its likely they have a large stock of aging server hardware.
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CrisuKomie
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to Murfalad:
WOW has already done something similar to public events. World events, where you’d easily have 200 to 300 people in a zone. The zone would be incredibly laggy, but you’d still be able to do stuff.
Thats why I scoff at SOE and EQ2 when there are 30 to 40 people in a public quest area and it’s lagging so bad that nothings registers with the servers. Honestly, if this game didn’t go free to play, it would of been shut down by now. Look at how bad EQ1 is right now, it’s like a f*cking ghost town.
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CrisuKomie
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Also, to Murfalad:
Blizzard constantly updates their servers. They updated damn near every server with new and better hardware a month or two before Cataclysm launched.
They typically do that 3 or 4 times a year, and always right before an expansion launches.
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