It struck me last night, as I was pulling Unrest for our fireplace room group, that it was the experience of taking a camp and pulling mobs to it for the group to kill — probably EverQuest’s core gameplay — is precisely the gameplay feature that no other MMO has valued enough to include in their game.
Group content in other MMOs seems to be highly curated; you start at the beginning of the ride, are taken past visually stunning wonders and carefully choreographed boss encounters, and then are delivered to the end, given some gifts, and are set free to go on your way. Certainly World of Warcraft was that way when I played, and Final Fantasy XIV is definitely that way. Significantly, Final Fantasy XI Online was not that way. It leaned into the EverQuest model of finding a camp and pulling to it.
My point is not really that there are “theme park” MMOs out there, which has been obvious for a very long time. My point is that EverQuest is not a theme park, and that that whole style of group adventuring has largely disappeared from the world. If you want a social MMO where you largely stay in one place and chat while mobs are brought to you to kill, you kinda have to play the original classic EverQuest. “Live” EverQuest has forgotten its roots and (the last time I played, during the Underfoot expansion) is very much focused on curated adventures.
I spent a lot of time Thursday night farming Squire Wimbley in East Karana for his Raw Fine Hides, the one farmed component I needed for my spell research. Before Kasul got home from work yesterday, I’d logged in my magician and taken those hides and made the crafted-only spells I was missing. First I gained as much skill as I could by preparing the hides and doing some of the sub-combines, but was still well short of the skill necessary to make the spell crafting trivial. It took two-three tries per spell. At the end of the day, I went from having a nest egg of about 140 plat to just three plat (though part of that was spent in buying some vendor spells I also needed).
During that long, long camp, all I had to keep myself occupied between Squire pops and watching my reputation plummet (now max KOS to pretty much everyone in western Antonica) was watching the chat channels and thanking the enchanter/druid who came by every so often to buff me. (Seriously, dude. You were awesome.)
After reading some chatter about pet and player illusions, I figured I could part with a little bit of my nine thousand Fippy Bucks and turn my pet into a spider and me into a mysterious Siren Sorceress. Unfortunately, Daybreak didn’t see fit to give the sorceress any sitting animations, and since a caster spends most of her time sitting on her butt, it’s kinda immersion breaking.
So what’s third wave adventuring, anyway?
The way I see it, the powergamers logged in to Aradune when it went live, and didn’t log out until they were level 50. They did whatever they had to do to level quickly. Six boxed, abused XP potions, anything they had to do. This was the first wave, when most of us were just trying to get into the game.
Second wave was when the first wavers started leveling up their twinks. I met a lot of second wavers on my mage. People in full sets of gear from Sol B and Lower Guk; twin Ykeshas, stuff like that.
Third wavers are just regular non-powergaming people. Still wearing their starter gear in many cases. Weren’t able to play much due to the Aradune issues. Just here for the classic EverQuest experience — many of them had played casually as kids and are experiencing it now as adults for the first time.
These third wavers — these are my people. When I finally do go looking for a guild, I’m going to be looking for people like that.
Current level tally:
| Character | Class | Level |
|---|---|---|
| Nashuya | Shadow Knight | 23.9 |
| Dunkela | Magician | 28 |
| Kanad | Shaman | 23.5 |
My past peeks into these sorts of servers generally confirms your observation. There are some people who are really into it, and they come back for the next round when a new server opens.
Unrest. Now there is a place that sparks a lot of memories.
It was certainly also normal practice in Dark Age of Camelot, a year after EQ. I remember some stultifyingly dull group camps there. I remember hours of camping a spot and pulling in EQ2 in 2004/5. Three of us spent whole evenings on a beach in Antonica, pulling turtles, which were group mobs then, as all overland mobs were, trying to get spell drops.
I think WoW must have put the death knell to pulling and camping although even there it was by no means absent. When I played WoW Classic last year I wrote about how pulling to a camp both worked and didn’t work. In some zones it’s clear the Blizzard devs actively set out to make it difficult, if not impossible. Westfield is a prime example. The way mobs respawn, the way agro works, the requirements of quests in the immediate area, all make it clear you’re meant to circulate, not stay in one place.
In other zones, though, Wetlands being one I spent many evenings camping, you can set up camps and pull just as though you were in EQ – if you want to. It’s not exactly efficient but it’s entirely possible. I did it solo and I saw people doing it in groups, particularly when they were farming for crafting mats as you were on poor old Squire Wimbley.
I think the main reason it’s largely gone is that most people never did like it much. It’s too static and once the novelty of being able to talk to strangers on the internet wore off the long hours in a camp dragged. Everything is more kinetic now, for better or worse. Also much more narrative-driven.
You know, I forgot entirely about DAoC. Yeah, that was definitely camp central. But the camps were a little more interesting because there would always be rumors of enemy faction in the area, especially bards and rogues with stealth.
I do not remember camping in the usual sense in EQ2; normally we would just roam around a zone. You couldn’t really pull because of the aggro radius thing.