My first experience with the MMORPG series Everquest began in November of 1999, the month I was born. At the time, my father was in the Army and had recently started raiding in Everquest in his spare time where he played a Dwarf Warrior named Burck. For the first few years of my life, I have vague memories of watching him raid through vanilla, Ruins of Kunark, Scars of Velious, Shadows of Luclin, and the Planes of Power expansions. A few years later, Everquest 2 would release in November of 2004. My dad and now I would make our first characters release date. My original characters have long been lost to time, but his original Wood Elf Dirge named Breytec can still be found on the account. We played together for many years before eventually moving onto World of Warcraft with my uncle during Wrath of the Lich King, but I still find myself drawn back to Everquest every couple of years.
Most of my playtime was when I first returned from WoW during the Destiny of Velious through Altar of Malice era of the game which concluded in late 2014. Only being 14 at this time, I was still too young to really appreciate the game or participate in it’s end game content. The next time I returned for prolonged period of time was during the launch of the Varsoon Time-locked Expansion Server. These TLE servers have special rulesets and progress through the expansions every few months starting with the original content. They serve as the original “Classic” servers that have recently ballooned in popularity with World of Warcraft. Varsoon was the first server in which I raided in EQ. I had found myself in a semi-casual guild called Dominion who I played with for a few months in 2022. Ultimately though, it was the start of my graduate school program that prevented me from actively playing past a few months.
An important context surrounding these TLE servers is that for both games, they hold the majority of the player population. EQ2’s live servers (servers releasing the newest expansions each year) are plagued with massive pay-to-win money sinks and stat bloats. While the game started with players rarely hitting for more than a few thousand damage with their biggest attacks, the current damage values for live have reached 100’s of trillions. (They also only just added commas to tooltips and damage numbers this past year) Any new player who wishes to start on the live servers would need to invest several hundred or even a thousand USD to even begin to compete in end game content. Players often rush to the TLE servers to avoid these issues and have a fresh start that lasts for a couple of years before they burn out, only to repeat the cycle again for the next server.
During the Summer of 2024, Everquest 2 launched their first “Origins” server called Anashti Sul. The server was the responsibility of a sole developer who had restored a 2006 database for the game. For the first time, a server for Everquest could exist not only on a separate database than Live but on one from the original era of the game. The server promised to be a true “Classic” experience where items had the original stats, classes had original abilities, and zones looked as they did when the game first launched. The launch day for the server was the biggest launch of any new EQ2 server since the original servers, and the server currently now supports a couple thousand players. However, I did not join during the launch period. Having only found out about the server a few months later, I first started playing in January of 2025 where I made a dirge named Breytec and joined a guild called Reverb.
Before I get into the stories during my time with Reverb, I’d like to discuss the server itself. While the server was initially promised as a true classic experience, the final product was not quite that. Instead, we got something entirely “new” and never experienced. While the database may be from 2006, the game contains features or updates from up through the first few expansions. Additionally, updates that should have occurred to change classes as we unlocked new expansions were not applied. This creates a version of the game in which we have classes with abilities that have never existed in the current content.
For example, lets look at the Brigand class. For the uninitiated, the Brigand is a single target melee class which specializes in debuff abilities that increase damage taken by players. In the first expansion, Desert of Flames, the Brigand gains an ability called “Amazing Reflexes” which causes the Brigand to become immune to area of effect attacks as long as they are not being directly targeted by the mob. This ability can be maintained indefinitely and has no cost. During the original Echoes of Faydewar expansion, this ability was nerfed into the version of it that exists on Live servers. The Brigand now has a chance on hit to become immune to area of effect attacks with a very good uptime for the ability. However on Origins, we did not receive this nerf due to the developer not wishing to update the database. This has now created a meta in which Brigands are some of the best DPS as they never have to joust in and out attack ranges for AoE attacks. This is further complicated by a strange bug occurring for Brigands in which their main hand attacks have 3x crit chance and their offhand attacks have 1/2 crit chance, but I’ll save a discussion on the implications this has had on the server for another post.
The Origins server experience has been a strange one given it’s unique game state, but I do believe it to be the best experience I’ve ever had with the game and its community. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be diving into some of the bizarre design choices of its primary developer Caith, my experiences within Reverb from new member to now co-lead, my thoughts on various server drama, the infamous Rammjuice figure, the prophecy that spanned the first few expansions, and my general musings on interactions with Everquest players.