EverQuest II Becomes a Teenager

Part of me feels a need to mark these sorts of anniversaries.  Thirteen is significant in that is the age at which one passes into the tumultuous teen years, hormones all in a rage and stuck in between being…. and wanting to be… both a child and an adult.

I don’t have a stock EverQuest II graphic

EverQuest, the progenitor, went Free to Play on its thirteenth birthday, striking out to remake itself in a new mold like many a teen.

But MMORPGs are not people, and thirteen isn’t really the start of the teens for games the genre.  MMO titles crow up fast and adulthood can be reached in just weeks or months.  If anything, thirteen is well into middle-age, when routines have been establish, destiny pretty much set, and you have a stable of acquaintances who’ve already made up their mind about you long ago.  EverQuest going free to play at thirteen was not an act of teen rebellion but a bowing to reality.

Now EverQuest II is thirteen, as WoW will be in a couple of weeks.  I don’t know that there will be anything truly special about this turning of the calendar for either game.  But I am in a nostalgic mood.  It is autumn, I am back playing WoW and I have been poking my nose into TorilMUD again, having gotten ZMud up and running once more. (Expect more MUD posts.)

As part of all of that I was digging around and came across a Microsoft Word document.  It was a summary of EverQuest II from a person who had been in the beta and sent to a member of our Shades of Twilight guild on TorilMUD to convince them to come and play EverQuest II.  The document was passed on to Gaff who passed it on to me.  It is the answer to the question, “Why did you run off to play EverQuest II?” for our guild.

We ended up in a mixed group of migrating EverQuest players from a guild and our TorilMUD guild coming together to form Knights of the Cataclysm on the Crushbone server back on November 14, 2004.

Our day one guild on Crushbone

Crushbone had just been stood up, a second round server to hold the influx of players coming to the new game.  We got there largely due to the document I am including after the cut.  I do not know the original author’s name nor am I posting with their permission.  I am justifying this as a bit of history that describes a lot of the things that were in place in EverQuest II at launch.

Many, many words after the cut.  Real life names redacted.

This is Fine Meme meets World of Warcraft

I was trying to hit an old news item on the World of Warcraft site and ended up with a server error instead.  As it turns out, the Blizzard team likes to inject pop culture references and memes into their server errors as well.

This is fine… and will never be edited and abused for some hated game mechanic

I was trying to find that infographic Blizz did after they hit the 100 million account mark back in 2014, but I guess it went up in the fire.  I know it was a thing, there is still a mention of it over at Polygon.

As for why I was looking for that infographic… these memories just pop into my head now and again.  Also it was referenced in something listed as a related post earlier this week.

Addendum: And, in case you’re dying to use this, I pulled the base image out of the source.

This is fine