Just shy of 11 years ago, on November 13th, 2004, Gaff and I and a few other friends and acquaintances, an odd group made up of people from EverQuest and TorilMUD players, decided to hop into the just launched EverQuest II in order to see what it was about.
The game had been up for a few days at that point, but just as we rolled into to town SOE, having learned from their EverQuest days, was already rolling out a couple of fresh servers to accommodate the expected influx of players. One of those second round servers was Crushbone. We rolled up their, opting for the Qeynos side of things, and formed a guild.
Our day one guild on Crushbone… I left and came back at one point…
Unfortunately, while SOE seemed to be planning for another EverQuest style launch, with plenty of growth, that wasn’t how things played out. I’ve been down this road before here, but needless to say there ended up being little call for more rounds of fresh servers. There was even a previous consolidation of servers years back.
We persisted for over a year in the game, though our ranks were whittled down by defections to WoW as time moved on. The game was rough, awkward, and in a constant state of change over that first year. But we rode it out, and it was something of a bonding experience, the sort of thing that happens with shared adversity. We held together through two adventure packs and into the Desert of Flames expansion, but by the time Kingdom of Sky hit, which brought with it a horrible server lag issue that persisted for quite a while, we were folding up shopOur guild still stands, the Knights of the Cataclysm, though nobody still on the roster is active any more. I think we all ended up in WoW on one server or another, even Wooflin, our guild leader, who used to rail against Blizzard and their cartoon, easy-mode MMO. A few of us collected on the Eldre’Thalas server, but for the most part we were scattered to the winds, never to group up again.
Possibly our last raid group as a guild…
l’ve been back to EverQuest II multiple times over the years since that great departure, but it has never quite been the same. For more than a year we were, as a group, as a guild, pretty much committed to this as our one and only game as we struggled with the crafting system, the market, five minute group-only buffs, and a quest journal that could only hold 20 quests… which included collection quests, heritage quests, and everything else that fell in that category,
So when I think of Crushbone, I think of those times, rose colored glasses worn proudly, in full on nostalgic denial mode, and call them “the good old days.”
The server being merged, along with Oasis and Butcherblock, into the new Maj’Dul server doesn’t change those memories. And it likely won’t change much of anything for me, as my more recent and higher level characters are on the Freeport server. But the name disappearing does make me reflect on those times.
We shall see how the merger fares.
Addendum: EQ2 Wire, as usual, has some helpful info.
Meanwhile…
I haven’t see a final Twitter update, but I was able to log in at around 8pm PDT and access all of my Crushbone characters. I had to choose a UI layout for each, which was easy for most, but a couple I hadn’t logged in since I last reinstalled, so I could just choose the Crushbone version of the same character. Fortunately I tend to use the same layout most of the time, so one character is as good as another. (One long neglected character had about 10 minutes of update messages to cycle through as well.)
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I find it quite instructive how your first run on EQ2 lasted a lot longer than mine and yet I ended up playing far more through the life of the game than you. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that when Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally threw in the towel just after the Splitpaw Saga, around July 2005 we went not to WoW but back to EQ.
Had we gone to Azeroth I wonder if we’d have ended up spending years there instead of, as we did, dotting back and forth between EQ, EQ2 and Vanguard (EQ2.5) pretty much all the way until GW2 finally took over.
Steamfont long ago merged with Oasis so I have characters now on Maj’Dul. I’m giving it a while before I log any of them in. Best to let things settle.
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@Bhagpuss – I think it has a lot to do with the people I played with sticking with the game. As I will say in Friday’s post, which is already written and queued up because I will be out of town, as much as I like to potter around as a solo affair, I don’t really like to play completely alone. I’ll stick with a game longer if I know somebody else who is playing.
My returns to EQ2 have often been marked by Gaff, who got me to play EQ2 back in 2004, jumping in for a bit, going totally overboard, burning himself out, and then leaving at just about the time I’ve gotten warmed up, after which things tend to wind down.
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Butcherblock has been my server since day one (which for me was back in 2006). I did have a stint on Nagafen, but it’s getting rolled into one of the other servers with the PvP functionality switched off.
I haven’t logged in since the merger, but friends report a healthier population and actual zone chat, which hadn’t really been a thing since a long time ago. It would be nice to see that, but I still don’t play it as often as I should.
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