On the 16th of March 1999 a new game was launched: EverQuest!

10 years later tens of thousands of players all around the globe are still wandering the lands of Norrath, so a celebration was indeed appropriate

10 years of EverQuest - this means almost 10 years of raids, from those first feeble attempts on Naggy and Vox over the really massive raids during PoP (sometimes 100+ players) till today.

For me (as for most members of raid guilds probably) raids (and of course my friends) are what keeps me playing this game after all these years, a game which certainly doesn't look as good as some of the newer rivals or attract the mass media - when did you last read an article about EQ in a games magazine, even when a new expansion has come out? Seriously, SOE, you guys need to make some advertising for this game, some hot girls are always good for ads, and we in RF have some ladies who would probably be suited very well:

Well, anyway, coming back to raids: What raids do stick out in your memory? Those that were attempted and won on the first or second go, or those that made you swear and scream in front of your PC, because you wiped again, until you finally were able to win after numerous tries? For me certainly the second part is what raiding is about - that exhilaration when everything falls into places, when on that one evening after endless tries you just reap the reward for all the hard work and your 'brothers in arms' cheer together with you in joy over a well-deserved victory.

Raids that brought that feeling to me were numerous over all those years, but some will always stick to my mind: bringing down the Rathe Council in PoP, finishing Uqua in GoD, beating the performer (pre-nerf) in DoDH or Aprosis in TBS. For other people certainly OMM in OoW will stand out, a mob Raging Fury had over 70 tries on until it finally went down.I can only imagine the great feeling of accomplishment at that moment, as I wasn't in a bleeding edge guild at that time and we struggled with the Jelvan-script. All those raids had one thing in common: they were hard and challenging and needed a full and focused raid force to finally see the loot chest:

Fast forward to the current expansion: all the raids in SoD were simply too easy, the only mildly challenging event being the Zek brothers in the Earth Theme - and the trains of our leet puller team. Listen to Yakha teaching a new app the secrets of the trade:

The Devs have admitted at the Fan Fair that raids in SoD were undertuned, and promised us that the next expansion would see more of a challenge to raid guilds. How much this is needed can be easily seen by the 'solution' they provided for the lack of content and challenge in SoD: they simply took those all-to-easy raids, cut the maximum number of players by one third and VOILA: SoD raids in 'Hard Mode' were created. How 'hard' those raids even with only 36 people are, can easily be seen when you look at the fact that the same day they were patched in, Raging Fury went ahead and cleared the complete tower as 'First guild serverwide' (yay us and the time zone advantage!) and grab the fat loot:

And here are the stats of the charm:

While it was nice to link those first new items and get tells from people from other guilds from numerous servers, nonetheless I myself wasn't overjoyed. This had mainly two reasons: first it didn't feel like such an achievement, as it just showed that the Tower of Discord with 54 people was indeed the Special Olympics of endzone raiding (after being handicapped by 1/3 it was still comfortably doable), second and much more important: I felt with those people who had to sit outside on the bench. Those people had brought us to that point where we were actually in the endzone, they had worked as hard (or farmed as long) as those who were inside on that evening. Our guild (as most successful guilds) has full or close to full raids most of the time, even in the summer period and after 6 months of farming the same content.

All those who were now only cheering from the side would have had a much better chance to be inside the raid, participating actively and working towards the common goal, if instead of an arbitrary cut of participants the difficulty of the raids themselves would have been raised.

The Devs assured us during the Fan Fair that this change of the raid size was merely a fast patch for the obvious lack of challenge and content and that raids in the next expansion 'Underfoot' would still have the size of 54 (and would be tuned more appropriately). Let's hope they stick to their words, the big raids are what makes EverQuest unique among all those MMORPGs on the market. Speaking of the new expansion (the 16th since the release of EQ back in 1999): during Fan Fair a few very early zones were shown, as the name suggests it will be set in the realm of Brell Serilis, so I certainly hope we get the chance to kill some dorfs (maybe even unDead dorfs? A paladin's dream!). It is supposed to have 13 new zones and one entrance will be through 'The Hole'.

I have been mentioning the Fan Fair a few times in this posting, this has a fairly simple reason: Raging Fury attended it this year in even bigger number than in 2008: eight Furies assembled in hot Las Vegas this June, six of them from Europe!.

OK, one of the persons on the picture is actually not from RF (Vilianna had to leave early), but nonethelss I think this shows the enthusiasm and passion for this old game which many of us share, being able to pay for such a trip or not. It also shows the friendship one can achieve across borders and time zones with fellow players from around the globe, a friendship people who call it 'only a game' can hardly understand. This is why people like us take this game so seriously, debate with passion and criticize changes we dislike so harshly.

So let's hope that indeed the chant celebrating the tenth anniversary of EQ from this year's Fan Fair will become true: '10 more years!'

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