I haven’t written much about our adventures on the Aradune server in EverQuest largely because we haven’t had very much time to adventure on the Aradune server in EverQuest.
Our experience has been the same as everyone else who wants to sit down and play a video game for a little while. You start up the game and then find out how many hours it will be before you can play that game. Usually it’s two to three. Then when that magic moment comes and you can log in — and you have no warning that it’s coming — you have some small amount of time to choose a character and enter the game before you’re tossed out into the login queue once more. For another several hours, probably more of them now.
This happened to me. I was in a two and a half hour queue. I left the computer to go continue working on building my 3D printer for awhile. My BF yelled at me to come log in to EverQuest. I missed what he was saying, and he came into the kitchen to tell me to log in. I ran to the office. The game was at character select. Before I could press the button to enter the world, though, it tossed me back to server select. He was logged in. It was another three hours before I could enjoy grouping up with him.
Once we’re in game, it’s fine — it’s actually exactly what I was hoping for. As an SK and a shaman, we’re fine off by ourselves or in a group. He’s taken up tailoring and smithing, and I’m working on baking, just as we planned. I spent a couple of hours running a bard on the Erudin to Qeynos mail run for some early plat with which to buy some basic armor, just as I’d done in the Mangler trial run.
It’s the queue. It really is. You can’t log in and join friends because you’ll never get in in time. One person in the orc group above had to leave to reboot his router. Never saw him again. Once in, you don’t want to log out. I saw… hold on, let me go check something.
Yup, they’re still there.
This bot team has been camping the SE undead camp in Nektulos forest for the past couple of days. They are still there; I just now took this picture, Monday morning. A skeleton spawns. They stand together, send in their pets, nuke, then when the skeleton is dead, they sit down. They have not moved an inch from this spot. I don’t know when they first got here, but they were here every time I checked yesterday and are there right now.
It’s a popular camping spot. I don’t resent them taking it. I just resent that they are clearly bots and are not leaving the game to let actual players in.
This little bot team is over on the wall by the same camp. They haven’t moved at all. Same as the necro duo — they were there all day yesterday and are still there right now. Four characters, probably waiting for the other bot team to leave the camp. And taking up four player slots that real players could take up.
Not sure why the bots didn’t all go to Rizlona, where they are encouraged. But this is the way things are in Aradune. Overcrowding from players wanting to test themselves on the new time-locked progression server, and bots taking camps to get money and items to sell to the players. The price of Krono, the real money currency in EverQuest, is rapidly rising. I think 400 plat is the going rate.
Well, we’re level 10 now, we’ll be out of Nektulos Forest soon, and maybe the bots will be discouraged when we get to actual dungeons. Because bot groups can be trained. Not that I would ever do, or encourage, such a thing. Shadow Knights do get feign death, though. FD is never, ever to be used to grief players. Doing so can get you bounced back to the login queue. It would be really, really bad.
So, who or what is Abashi?
Glad you asked!
Abashi, AKA Gordon Wrinn, was an early producer on EverQuest and perhaps the first example of a modern community manager that I can recall. By “modern CM”, I mean a person who becomes the focal point of every bit of vile and hate the player base can bring to bear. As EverQuest matured and turned its focus from slow paced, social adventuring to raiding, the Verant staff rebalanced classes and items to reflect the new reality.
This made some people really angry. And Abashi bore the brunt of this vitriol. He also tended to get into shouting matches with players, which didn’t help things. He was eventually promoted into a non-customer-facing position, and in the fullness of time became one of the lead programmers on EverQuest II. I’d love to link some of the better fights from the old unmoderated EverQuest forums, but those were shut down entirely. When they were brought back up, years later, they were very tightly moderated by a trained community team.
It was a different time. Some players are still just as toxic, but CMs have come to expect that now.
The real life Abashi, Gordon Wrinn, isn’t doing all that well right now. According to the article in the link, Abashi started a GoFundMe to help him recover from alcoholism. And if his Twitter is any indication, he still spends a lot of time being angry on the Internet. I’m glad he’s still with us, though.
In my mind, Abashi is as much a part of my memories of early EverQuest as Aradune was. So, Darkpaw Games, here’s my request.
Bring up a new TLP server. Make it clear that there is no boxing allowed at all. Not two characters max, as on Aradune (so many characters being followed by their personal bot — perfectly legal on Aradune). No bots. No boxing.
Call the new server Abashi, and give a free one-time transfer to the new server from Aradune. And then in the fullness of time when the player population drops enough so that people can just log in and play, consider merging them again.
Please? I just want to play the game.
The Aradune server is going to be something of a test I think. This is the first time in a couple of years they have launched a real progression server with restrictions on boxing. They did a lot of work, the zone instancing and the queue, five years back when they launched the Ragefire server to try and avoid spinning up another server… and then they had to anyway with the Lockjaw server.
They have avoided the extra server option since then. But now, with Aradune, they might have to… if somebody there will make the call. Holly Longdale had a good feel for these situations and communicated with the players often during these times. With her gone, we will have to see how Jen Chan handles this. I hope we’re not back to the “ignore it and maybe it will go away” era that we had for a stretch under SOE.
At this point, I’m thinking that they believe the queues will drive the faint-hearted away. Queue was only a couple hours tonight, so it’s getting better, though of course not nearly where it should be.
Five days in, though, and guilds are already clearing Fear and Hate. Maybe those folks will just get bored and leave.
The problem is they’ve been bitten so many times by this. That’s why there were so many progression servers and so many of them were all but empty. I’d have thought the solution was to start with more servers but make it very clear there would be mergers as soon as the combined population dropped to below the appropriate level for a single server. To do that, though, they’d have to start with multiple servers using the same ruleset. They tend to do what they’ve done this time and have two or more launch at once but with different rule sets, which makes it very contentious indeed when they have to merge.
The curious thing at the moment is that it’s by no means only Aradune that’s busy. Most of the production servers are either at High or Medium in my time zone, which is off-peak. I’m guessing some of those Mediums go to High when I’m asleep. I’m also seeing lots of people talking about EQ right now. It seems to be having something of a resurgence of interest all round.
Also, it’s so nice to read someone other than me going on about the great forum meltdown and SOE’s bizarre take on community management. I often reference those absurd times when I’m writing about EQ but I hardly ever see anyone else remembering what it was like. Abashi was a positively terrifying person to be fronting the company even in thiose days, when confrontational community managers were kind of a thing. When Absor took over from him there was a palpable sense of relief all round, although by contemporary standards even Absor would be considered abrasive and harsh in the role, I think. I hugely prefer the much more lighthearted, humorous approach that’s in fashion nowadays.
The reason they gave for taking down those forums was that they would scare away any new players sincerely looking for actual help 🙁 I’m sure someone has archived those forum threads. They were epic.
I don’t know why EQ is so popular all of a sudden. D&D is popular again. Magic: the Gathering is popular again. All the things that were popular 20-30 years ago are back for some reason. I guess we Gen X are the new Boomers.