Happy Birthday EQ

EverQuest is 5 – hurrah and raise a flagon of Bleeding Brain!

Let’s see, in human years it would be toddler, in dog years it would be middle aged, in MMORPG years – who knows.

Anyway if you’re visiting Norrath during March celebrations are a-foot. These include: Fabled NPCs, Scavenger Hunt and my personal favourite “Skeletons Marching: They're marching, and they are angry!” is this a parade? w00t!

Comments

[Edward Castronova]

1.

In videogame years, a 5th birthday makes EQ a Methusaleh. But UO and Lineage are even older.

[Nathan Combs]

2.

I played EQ the first year it was out: was there for the first day the servers went live. Wandered off after that, and occasionally wonder about it.

Has anyone sat down and documented the evolution of the game over 5 years: articulated broad-stroke observations about how the game changed both in terms of the game and the player community?

I imagine that the game evolved considerably over that time. Would be interesting to understand how the forces evolved, and what the countering strategies in game design were, along the way.

-nathan

[greglas]

3.

It would be great to see that kind of history published along with a collection of academic papers on EQ. I haven't got around to it yet, but Eric Hayat and Edward Wesp presented a paper at Princeton that is coming out in Postmodern Culture, and will examine the "racial" systems in EQ.

Ted, Nick & TL all have written EQ-specific articles... Think there would be a market for that kind of book?

[Ren]

4.

...and thus the dawn of the great TN publishing empire began...

[Ren]

5.

Today is the day.

There is a list of fun and amusing EverQuest facts doing the net rounds a the moment, see here: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/everquest/news_6091457.html

Here are some _highlights_
"If stacked end to end, the total number of EverQuest boxes created would reach a height of more than 265 miles, which would stretch out of the Earth's atmosphere and past the orbit of the International Space Station."

Mmm, you gota love PR departments I suppose.

"There are almost 12 million characters created by players within the game. Of these 12 million, more than 3 million have been played in the last six months."

Now this pokes its nose into the interesting category.

[Lee Delarm]

6.

Everquest, the dogpile that it is IMHO, still retains one of the top player populations of all time. I would also dare to say I believe it's the only one that has gone through an ENTIRE re-work of it's graphics engine (with the arrival of Luclin).

It's customer service is bad, they representatives STILL believe they can "stamp out" eBay sales (5 years later and it's only increased) and they've added 3,278,187,472 expansions which would total what I would refer to as an "assload" of money if you had been playing the game the entire time and buying all expansions. Let's seeeee...

(these figures are not meant to be accurate or truthful or funny or anything else that might offend someone)

$10 a month X 12 Months X 5 = $600 in monthly fees
$50 for original game + $150 = $200 for the game and all expansions

$600 + $200 = $800 total spent

That in itself tells me that a character that's been played since day one should be worth no less than $800.

Some of these http://www.mysupersales.com/ characters are pretty old then ;)

P.S. Would anyone like to do a price analysis of what types of classes/races go for the most money and why? Everquest would probably be easiest because of it's large black market. Don't forget to stick on one server when pricing or do a seperate analysis for each server!