I rolled my warrior, Loredena, on the Tribunal on 9/1/99. A coworker had convinced me to play EQ by telling me ‘it’s D&D online!’. Despite a confusing UI, corpse-runs, blind Barbarian in Halas and everything else that went with a new online game, I was immediately enthralled. While Lore was my much-loved main, played most days, I rolled up other avatars to play with friends. With Traveller (my coworker) and his friend Nine, I played a dwarven cleric named Serenya on Sunday afternoons, eventually joined by Sisca with his wizard. With Traveller, Nine’s sister Bobaloo, and their friend Hammey, I rolled a different dwarven cleric named Velma (on Fennin Ro) to play one night a week as part of the Scooby group (we had Daphyne, HE enchanter; Scrapy, dwarf warrior; Scooby, WE druid; Shaggey, barb shaman; and Phreadd, human paladin)
By the time we stopped playing six years later, Serenya was 65, Loredena was 55, and Velma was 52 - we had moved Scooby group to the Trib, and I switched to playing Serenya with them. While Lore wasn’t played as much, those two once-a-week groups were still going strong, right up until the end.
In the years since, I would occasionally log in just to look around, but I never tried to play. Until this spring. I have been reading the blogs of
Tipa and
Stargrace for awhile, and they began writing about EQ Nostalgia. From their posts and the ensuing wave of nostalgia a new guild was born,
Nostalgia on the Luclin server, and Sisca and I decided we wanted to be a part of that.
It started out as two once-a-week groups, one each on Tuesdays and Fridays, with Tuesday rarely having a full group, and Friday having as many as 2 full groups. First Sisca and I leveled up a berserker and beastlord to 25 for the Tuesday group, and then we ended up leveling a mage and druid to 40 for Fridays. The leveling was amazingly fast (50 within a couple days played)! We spent the first 10 levels in the tutorial (nicely done) and then moved on to the Serpent’s Spine zones. They were hotzones, with plenty of mobs, tons of quests, and good gear and drops. As soon as we could join the groups, we found the levels were flying by there as well! As soon as we hit 50, it was agreed the Friday group would hold at 52 for a few weeks - we killed Vox and Naggey with 6-12 people 3 or 4 times apiece, partly for the nostalgia, and partly to get epic drops for folks. Then we leveled to 55, and held there a bit to give everyone a chance to catch up - one thing about these weekly groups, on any given week we range from 4 to 8 people, and the group makeup switches up a fair amount, so we need to give folks who can’t play every week a chance to catch up.
I’ve noticed that between returns to college, holidays, and burn-out, that the numbers are dropping again. But we’re still having a lot of fun (now leveling to 60!) and once or twice a week isn’t a huge commitment so we continue to hang out.