Poopsocking: a metaphorical term for maintaining an uninterrupted physical presence during a game while neglecting hygiene
The term poopsock originated during the earlier years of Everquest 1 and carried into the beginning of Everquest 2. In original EQ1, all content was “contested” meaning every zone was open to the public and there were no private instances. If you went to Nagafen’s Lair to seek out the fabled Golden Efreeti Boots from the Efreeti Lord Djarn, you were competing with anyone else who decided to show up. Now you could form a group with other players and divy up loot as you wished, but the game had no mob tagging system. If two groups both attack the same mob, the group that did the majority of the damage earns the loot rights regardless who attacked first. Players often form camps for mobs meaning they set up in a specific area and kill a set group of NPCs on loop while farming for XP or specific items. It is important to note for the following discussion that this is an entirely antiquated system for mob tagging. The majority of MMOs will lock an encounter to the first group to hit the mob.
It is from this contested zone system that “poopsocking” arises. While I can not find any definitive source proving someone actually pooped in a sock instead of leaving their PC, it is plausible to assume it has happened at least once. Many of the major NPCs that players hunt for the best loot may have multi-hour respawns and stepping away for even a few moments at the wrong time could lead to you losing your camp of the mob. While many mobs had specific exact respawn timers, there were a select few that had spawn window, meaning they could spawn at any time during a set time range after death. This was extremely relevant for raiding in EQ1. Given that EQ1 did not have private instances, all raid mobs were contested. Raids of up to 72 or more players would form up when the call went out that a raid mob had spawned. A guild would then race another guild to be the first one with a strong enough force to pull the mob. However, the damage rule still applied for these raid mobs. Even if you weren’t the first raid force to show up and pull, if you did the most damage your force got the loot.
Ultimately, this raiding system led to what became known as poopsocking. Guilds would park players at the spawn points for raid bosses and have a rotation of people watching the mob at any given time. If another guild showed up in force to watch the same mob, the original guild would match them until you had two full raid forces camped out waiting for something to suddenly spawn. Lets look at the The Statue of Rallos Zek for example. This mob had a 5 day +/- 8 hour respawn window. So you would know that sometime between 4 days 16 hours and 5 days 8 hours it would spawn, creating a 16 hour poopsocking window. On a side note though, this mob is special in that killing it would spawn the Avatar of War which is what people really wanted loot from. However, the AoW would spawn in a different location often leading to guilds playing chicken over who would pull the Statue and who would wait to steal the Avatar while the first raid recovered.
In 1999, we of course did not have systems such as Discord. Raiding guilds often had a phone network setup which they would refer to as “The Batphone”. In 1999, text messaging as a means of communication was brand new and it didn’t really take off in the gaming space until 2000. The Batphone refers to a system in which players would have a list of people they were responsible for calling when a raid mob spawned. Each subsequent player who was called would have their own list of people to call. The system allowed for a chance to quickly mobilize players at any given time to kill a raid boss. The system eventually evolved into including texts or group chats, before finally becoming utilized in Discord Servers. On emulated servers such as Project 1999, raiding guilds utilize discord channels and Discord Bot alarm systems when a command is typed into chat. Modern players will sit muted in a channel called “Batphone” and go to bed with headphones or their phone on speaker so that they may be woken up at anytime.
Poopsocking as a system is controversial and does not exist in modern games. The system leads to drama, FOMO, and frustration about active raiding hours. Everquest 2 changed the raiding system to include private instanced raid zones where guilds can kill their own mobs without needing to rely on poopsocking or Batphones. However, they still kept a variety contested raid mobs in the public zones with respawn timers ranging from 8 hours to 10 days. This created a system with opportunities for every level of raider. In my opinion, it leads to some of the very best server interactions an MMO can have. I’ll share some stories from my time contested raiding with Reverb another day.