Is there any repository of the history of Al'Kabor/EQMac? Or maybe old guild forums that are still online and can be read (even news posts, etc)? There are a lot of things I've read in passing here on the forums about the 10 year history of EQMac, and it has really piqued my interest into how things progressed on the server. For example, it's my understanding that Quarm was never killed. I'd love to know more about the attempts that went into this - assuming he was attempted at all. It's just my curiosity, I guess. So if there's anything available that I can check out - or if someone who was around for it is in the mood to act as historian - I'd love to read a bit.
http://www.takproject.net/forums/in...f-things-specific-to-alkabor.2138/#post-10857 This tells a bit about the uniqueness of AK.
I am happy to prattle on a bit about the weirdness that was PoP in general, and Quarm in particular, on AK. When Sony decided that Everquest: Mac might be a good idea, they didn't go and rewrite the game from the ground up. Instead, they paid a contractor, Westlake, to port the existing client to OSX and run with the existing PC code base. Thus the PPC client (not the one we use here; Hobart developed an Intel client in 2011 when Apple retired Rosetta support) was born. To facilitate development of the client, they went with an arbitrary date to "freeze" the server-side code the Mac client was going to work with. That date was PoP's launch (or possibly a week or so afterward) at the end of October of 2002. Thence comes the weirdness. PoP didn't work perfectly the day it launched. Nobody made it into the elemental planes for a couple of months, and nobody beat Coirnav or the Rathe and entered Time until after the next expansion, LoY, had launched months later. By then, a lot had been fixed, and a lot had been changed. To make PoP function more or less properly, Hobart ended up patching in some newer content - mostly in form of selected zone data from July of '03, and a summer '03 update to the spell database - in addition to doing a small amount of custom, Mac-only work on the server. This is the source of the occasional true AK-specific odd mechanic - though mostly when people say that an Al'Kabor feature or bug never existed on PC, they're wrong; in most cases, it just existed briefly around PoP's launch, as with e.g. perma-pac (bug, fixed December '02) and slow-reversers (feature, removed January '03). So, the planes! At first, most of them weren't accessible and the access quests weren't working. Lots of early players leveled to 65 in PoN, and did it without any of their 63+ spells! But once access issues were ironed out (and custom AK-only level based access was implemented for a few, including one plane, Tactics, that was flags-only in "real" PoP), things mostly worked pretty well up to the EPs. At which point, oh, man. The very best and most ludicrous elemental plane was PoEarthB. First of all, the lock was broken - you could zone in as soon as you made it into the EPs, although Tem did the Mystical Arbitor (key event) once before raiding the place anyway. So you zone in, and make your first fun discovery, which is that the 29 mobs that've got to be simultaneously dead in order to open the first door are on Rathe time, respawning every 7 minutes rather than once every half hour. Play a little longer, and you'll discover that mobs aggro through the section walls and regen is broken on most trash (though not the bosses!), meaning that if you train yourself through a wall and wipe, anything damaged in the process will summon the next time it aggros! Spawn and clear the minis in the second section and you'll trigger Warlord Gintolaken, the most difficult (actually defeated) raid encounter on Al'Kabor. The version of this guy most guilds (all of 'em?) saw on PC was a poodle compared to our Ginto. Both versions have a boatload of hit points, proc a snare + slow, AE ramp, and memory blur themselves periodically. The difference was that while the PC version announced a blur every once in a blue, our Ginto blurred silently as often as he wanted, which turned out to be quite a lot. To add insult to injury, the only reliable means of slowing Ginto was an LoY-era rogue poison that conveniently didn't exist for us. After finally beating Ginto with the largest raid Al'Kabor had seen to date, we headed down to the Rathe. At which point we learned that, surprise! Our version didn't fleck. When the first EQPC guilds killed Ginto and met the Rathe, they found 12 arboreal buzzsaws like little green Magmatons who respawned every 7:45 and all had to be killed at once. The communis opinio was that the event was either impossible, or impossible without 40 clerics. Multiple revisions and three months later, the key to the event went in: the six unmezzable Councilmen would play a little emote ("The ground shudders beneath your feet as flecks of dirt and stone fall away from one of the Rathe") several times as their health went down, leaving them quadding for 880 (as opposed to an initial 2964) under 6% health. The first version of the "post-fleck" Rathe was only beaten by one EQPC guild, Afterlife, and probably didn't fleck all the way down to an 880 max hit; the version everybody else beat is the one I described. The "flecking" Councilmen also stop randomly shadowstepping people on their hate list at low health, which helps to make them manageable with a small team. So, we were screwed. We gave it a number of tries, and had some success with a "summon-kiting" strategy: a well-geared tank, especially an ogre with frontal stun immunity, could run repeatedly out of combat with a snared and rooted Rathe CM and only eat a round of melee every 6 seconds. We could keep one of these tanks up reliably with 3 healers, instead of the 8 (at least) required to keep a non-defensive tank up on a pre-flecked CM indefinitely. We actually thought we had it! Or at least, that we'd kill it once, eventually, and then dry up and blow away as a guild because we'd never be able to repeat it once every 4 months as a backflag. Unfortunately, no. Get enough players and enough Councilmen busy in PoEB, and the (rooted, snared) Councilmen started randomly warping on top of people at unpredictable intervals. Game over; we've reached the end of Al'Kabor's playable content. Hobart, to the rescue! Three shakes of the magic wand, and PoEB is updated to its July '03 state, two months after the flecking adjustment. Goodbye 7-minute doormen, goodbye hard Ginto, hello to the EQPC version of the Rathe event. So of course we beat it, zoned into Time, and found a zone full of naked human model-mobs. No problem, we've got Hobart on the line! He patched in a fix, we went back, and found a zone with no mobs in it at all. Okay, maybe third time's the charm. There were three major iterations of the PoTime backend. The first was like any other zone in the game: a persistent, shared-space kind of affair. It was the version of Time people found when they first broke into the place in May of '03. The second version was "semi-instanced": still a persistent, shared space with one set of walls, one floor, and so forth, but it remembered your guild's progress and attached it to your raid ID, so Long Paw of Fippy could raid Monday, then Frumious Bandernatch could start with the place fresh on Tuesday, and Fippy could return on Wednesday to pick up more or less where they left off. SOE patched this version in in August '03, and spent the next year or two trying to make it actually work consistently (the zone liked to lose either your save state or your raid ID, or to refuse to attach half of your raid to the correct ID, et cetera). The third version was fully-instanced, and came years later. Knowing that the second version was unlikely to work well for no upside (we were the only guild in Time, and when that changed, well, we'd shared VT successfully with Destiny and DC for years), we asked Hobart for the first version, which is what we got. For the most part, it worked great! The phase repop timers and loot tables were a bit different than the Time most people would recognize, but our version (e.g. with three-day rather than five-day respawns on phases 2 and 3, and two rather than three drops per god) matched accounts of the early days of the zone. There were some issues. Phases 2 and 3 automatically triggered as soon as the fifth phase 1 trial popped, forcing us to work out a P1 strategy that accounted for stuff spawning on the other side of the clocks (we did Undead last and just offtanked the last mob of the first wave while the team cleared the P2 event). With no short-term buff window for bard songs and HoTs and no working Celestial Renewal AA, some of the gods were a little hairy. Vallon Zek's aggro-increasing effect, meant to help keep him on the tanks with his 30 second stun + FD spell going off, turned out to be an aggro-reducing effect, which really hurt. But everything was beatable! Until Quarm. I understand that on EQPC, walls started blocking AEs at some point in Time? Obviously, this wasn't the case on AK: there are no LoS-strict zones in the expansion at all. But the real problem with Quarm is that all of his effects were fully revamped at some point after our code date. Our versions were ... unfriendly. For one thing, all were unresistable and uncurable. For another, one of these unresistable effects was a 300' AE stun. It started at 6 seconds, and probably would have increased to 12 and then 18 seconds as heads died. We never found out, though, because it turned out that 6 seconds of unresistable AE stun were enough
That is absolutely fascinating! Thanks for taking the time to type it up! Of course it begs a follow up question...when we get to PoP on here, has there been any discussion of how the "unkillable" version of Quarm will be implemented? I can see value in keeping with the "as close to Al'Kabor experience as possible" model, for accuracy, but I also see the, "it would be kinda nice to actually kill the sucker" line of thinking, as well. Possibly this is in the category of "we'll figure it out when we get there..." I'm just curious. I'll always remember my first Quarm kill with a full raid of 72, I'm guessing (unless the server pop grows considerably) it would probably take some coordination between raiding guilds on Takp to handle many of the EP/Time encounters. I'm really interested to see how that works out.
I can't imagine the devs would go with an unkillable Quarm just because AK had him that way. We also had a loot piñata Xegony with no adds, and I'd be surprised to see her again, either There will be a huge number of these decisions for the Devs to make with PoP, though, many of them not nearly as cut-and-dried as Quarm or Xegony. It'll be an interesting conversation, I think!
I remember reading a lot of comments from Hobart over the years when I would venture into the Mac section on the SOE forums...any clue what happened to him after the server was shut down?
i hope they instance potime here on takp... and I hope they keep potime exactly how it was on AK (no los) but minus Quarm's AE stun. i wanna see the challenge tem had, and I say instance so the max is 1 raid. if people could farm the end game bosses with ease then this server will just turn into p99, at least on AK after 10 years no one had Quarm loot, which kinda gave a reason for people to progress their characters even when potime flagged
Our PoTime was also unique in that you could bind inside Time B. Same as all of our Elemental planes for that matter. So during many of the fights we would bind our clerics at the center table in P4/5 to recover quickly. Eventually Hobart accidentally fixed PoTime P2/3. He had no idea why it was fixed but it stopped immediately triggering upon entering the final trial of Phase 1. Our Phase 2 was limited to 3 loots, 1 per section rather than 5, 1 per boss. Rock men dropped a single loot each at the end of Phase 3 also, rather than 2 loots each. Quarm... Really that version and those AEs shouldn't exist again lol. The stun is what made it absolutely ridiculous. Without being able to wall the AEs I don't see either version being viable. Here's a post I made on Temerity's boards right after we called it a night on Quarm: Basically, with any one of those AEs being unwallable and Unresistable, the fight was as far as we could tell, unwinnable without some cheese strategy like healing through the floor or something. One thing RW touched on, the non working Celestial Renewal AA. That was an absolutely huge factor in the difficulty of the zone. To survive most encounters with heavy AEs, MGB HoT rotations were necessary. However because we never got the patch changing Celestial Renewal AA from a 72min recast single target to a 15 min recast group buff... We were forced to use Ethereal Elixir, a level 60 group HoT spell that sucked 2000 mana from a MGBing cleric. That's 1/3rd of your mana gone at the high end cleric, more like 2/5ths for all our alt cleric boxes. It killed the longevity of most of our CH chains. Druid SotW could only take you so far. Many like Bertox and Terris required stacking both SotW and EE to cover the damage.
Nice, Darch, I forgot about the specifics. LOL at the unresistable -35o mana/tick DoT that can't be cured and lasts an hour an a half.
Our client doesn't support instancing, so that likely won't happen. We have left the instancing code from EQEmu in our codebase because we still want to try to use it somehow. But, it will likely be a GM only thing as it would be a total hack on the client side. EQEmu clients all support an instanceid, so that is used in addition to the zoneid and the client knows exactly where to go. Our client only supports the zoneid, so we will have to somehow trick it into going to the appropriate instance. It likely won't be very stable. And yes, PoP will require a lot of discussion among devs and players. It will probably be an expansion where we bend the recreate AK as it was rules a bit, to make it more playable. Hobart would have continued to improve it had AK stayed up, so we can continue his work.
Hobart always seemed to want to fix the bugs present in PoP but didn't have the time (or ability?) as a one man show. Hopefully devs here follow in that intent and we end up with a fully functioning expansion. I know if I were a dev it'd feel weird to finish all of my work with broken content
instancing even on eqemu has some issues and I personally don't like to work with it. It would have been better if Expedition were put in I think.
Beastlords on Al`Kabor also didn't have MGB, so we didn't have access to MGB paragon of spirit. That would've helped a lot with both AEs and cleric mana pools. Good write-up, Raven. Yoyo kiting tikis with a bunch of ogres was hilarious. I liked that strat. P.S. hi folks Nice to see this cozy little corner of the internet is in good hands.
On one hand... I want to experience a real Xegony encounter... On the other hand, I loved having a loot pinata mob on Al'Kabor that always dropped silk legs. I always viewed it as a little reward for dealing with a PoP which had almost no 85/15 gimping in rule, forcing a constant back flagging cycle. Hobart actually hacked us to get MGB available for Beastlords near the end of Al'Kabor. However that lasted only for a short time before the sunset.
Did we ever sniff out the other 13 slow reversers in the PoP 17, besides Laef, Hibdin, Magmaton and Fennin? I feel like the field2 magman named reversed too, but beyond that the clockwork remembulator device is drawing a blank.
No, I suspect most of them were in PoTime. (Auliffe reversed, too.) Also, oh my god! We drew Pithy out of hiding!
Hello old friend! 'Gadzooks' sounds like a gnome gname to me, ehh? Did you finally see the light? To the OP, The old EQMac.com forums were probably the richest repository of Al`Kabor history, but they're now sadly defunct. I don't know if anyone took Nikolai (owner of EQMac.com) up on his offer to give out copies of the archive when he took the site down. Possibly Zamiel?
We've tried contacting Nikolai a dozen times and he always acts like he's going to send the db to someone and never follows through. It's extremely frustrating.
It was a moment of weakness The new Pru is a halfling, too. I think the problem of scrubbing users' personal data from the DB turned out to be more hassle than Nik was prepared to deal with, so it's been back-burnered for the past couple of years. Who knows when or if he'll get around to it. (Zamiel was banned here, so I don't think he hangs around the boards.)
I'm sure Zamiel would absolutely love to be the arbiter of EQMac's archive. But as it stands you can use the way back machine to view the titles of topics on the forum however you can't actually view any of them unfortunately. I do enjoy perusing the raid forum to see guilds asking for Vallon Zek to be left up along with LiS and other first attempts for guilds.
That one (only) time we got to Quarm was brutal. 3 attempts and they all sucked. Needed a mage/ranger army. Stuns got progressively longer as he lost HP and lots of adds.
No. He was too resistant to MR-based slows, and the shammy DR-slow didn't land either. I'm not sure if he was actually immune (in the high-resist sense; he wasn't flagged unslowable) to both or just resistant enough that landing one was wildly improbable - I know someone did land a magic slow on the "effectively unslowable" chieftain (Galronar, I think) once or twice (out of probably 40 or 50 kills).
oh whoops maybe I'm thinking of trident of the deep sea (although I swear wavecrasher used to be cold based slow as well). I remember it landing pretty much every proc to slow gintolaken. edit: yeah i must have been thinking of trident of the deep sea, coz wavecrasher is showing as always being magic based slow.
Huh! I'd completely forgotten, but you're right: Rysia had the Club of Slime from PoEa, so I'll bet Ginto was 10% slowed when we killed him. (Though then again, maybe not, because another AK quirk was that archery wouldn't work if you cornered or even walled a mob, which meant that we fought Ginto in the open and meleeing him without dying to AE ramp was a very iffy proposition as AE ramp range was about a hair's breath smaller than his hit box.)
Yeah we always cornered him and used pets as a guideline for max melee range. You wanted to be at the range where "you are too far away to hit your target" message happened, but still were landing melee swings. Honestly once you got good at being able to find that range the fight wasn't unbearable. We added him into our farm rotation while we were being blocked out of plane of time (our competing guild would kill coirnav trigger with 1 group to prevent us to getting into potime). We had mgb celestial healing though, I'm pretty sure I've seen where AK didn't have that, it made a big difference.
Yeah, we killed him for loot a few times after the zone update to the July '03 state. It was really night and day. With the blur mechanic nerfed, we wrote off archery DPS, cornered him, and killed him like a normal boss with the odd wrinkle of losing aggro on the tank periodically. The pre-nerf Ginto was a completely different kind of fight. Even if we'd wanted to corner him, we couldn't have, because he'd blur, and blur again, and be AE rampaging in the middle of the clerics or the casters. Everyone had to fan out in a circle around Ginto and the tank, and attrition of clerics and DPS was inevitable. Ginto would move to go after someone, and everyone else would have to re-center the circle in order to stay out of AE/AE ramp range of the new target. The rot was constantly falling apart and reforming as clerics had to duck, run, and spot. It was a frustrating, edge-of-your seat kind of fight because you could everything perfectly and still lose because Ginto just took it into his head halfway through to absolutely refuse to pay attention to the tank. One of the things I liked best about the fight, actually, was how box-unfriendly it was. I think Zetro put it pretty well:
Those raid boss earth giants in PoEarthB slow mitigate to 35% on Live, so if AK's slow mitigation were the same, your 10% slow proc would have been reduced to 3.5%. PC EQ also had the archery issue with walls well into PoP. (dunno when it was fixed) I recall discussing cornering/walling vs. not for PoTime encounters. I almost always advocated for the former. Archery damage was so ridiculous that I thought the bug actually resulting in balancing it.
