About EQResearch and Torven

This site is authored by Torven of the EQ Emulator community. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. People like to blame me for emu server nerfs.

EverQuest is a special game. Games like it are not made anymore. Because nothing has replaced EverQuest for me, I joined the effort to try to preserve it. MMORPGs are under constant pressure to be more “mass market” and I posit that this is what ruined the genre because that means more isolated players and less challenging games. The paradox is that chasing money results in homogeneity which results in poor sales. The primary motive should be making a great game, even if it ends up somewhat niche. EQ was created by people who made what they wanted to play, not by people trying to get rich. That’s why it’s good and worthy of preservation.

This site is dedicated to preserving the earliest eras of the game. I am not interested in later eras, which I feel have betrayed the original design in the pursuit of mass market appeal. I am willing to include later era research if I find some that needs a home however.

Check the postmortem article I wrote here for my long critique of what EverQuest did right and wrong.

The Need For This Site

Why does this site exist? Why not just hand the research over to the emulators? Because the emulators often refuse it. There are various reasons as to why.

Sometimes they just don’t have enough interest to put in the effort of implementing it. It’s not a trivial amount of work and they aren’t getting paid. I had been a developer for The Al’Kabor Project because much of my work simply would not have been implemented if I hadn’t of put it in myself. TAKP is PoP era so I can’t put in older era stuff into the other servers because I don’t work there. Wanting all servers to benefit from the work is another reason for the site.

Another motivator for me to make this site is the emu servers refuse to incorporate a significant amount of research because they have decided not to be accurate for one reason or another. Some changes would cause a mass exodus of users if they were implemented. I’ll give you one related example: mousewheel camera. If that were removed from the most popular emulated server, a lot of players would simply quit, even though it’s out-of-era. There are certain game mechanics I have discovered that would not be tolerated well. Some of these were implemented on Quarm and TAKP and were later removed. Thus there is a need for a server agnostic store for this research, because no servers today are seriously dedicated to being a hyper-accurate recreation.

Another reason is that some particulars lack sufficient evidence to be conclusive. This makes adding certain changes a subjective decision. In these cases I will list all of the available evidence without reaching a verdict.

Even if the emulated servers adopt the research, code and data are fragile and it’s easy for it to get damaged by accident. Or it was just implemented incorrectly to begin with.

Lastly I just wanted to dump my knowledge onto the Internet before I lost it. (either by forgetting it or by death) A lot of players would be interested in some of these topics like how AC works, so it’s not just a site for emu developers.

What’s Here

This site is a repository for my work going back to 2013 when I started trying to preserve EverQuest. Most of it had been publicly available but not in an accessible format.

This site will not have searchable item or quest databases like Allakhazam. These things are already available and easily accessible. This site will instead describe the most obscure game mechanic intricacies. Many of the things outlined here were not previously published anywhere or at least not before I published them. I have threads on EQ Emulator’s forum describing a lot of what’s on here and that is where I published a lot of my research before making this site, but hosting it here allows me to update the documentation with new information.

Details about the game that can be found here and not elsewhere include:

• Actual NPC statistics (very close approximations anyway, in a few cases precise)
• Melee combat logic
• Statistics logic (e.g. what ATK actually represents, what Agility does etc)
• Spell resist logic
• Descriptions with evidence of long lost gameplay behavior that everybody forgot about
• Video and zone captures of revamped zones in their older states
• Hate system mechanics
• Old EQ’s Experience system, including Luclin era changes that were previously unknown
• How all the above changed over time

One thing I loved about EverQuest is that they tried to keep many things mysterious. Sony wanted players to figure things out on their own. That is a large reason why so much research is needed to recreate the game and why it took many years. Unfortunately since there is no live classic server to observe anymore, many of the minor details were lost to time but I did what I could. The Al’Kabor server being stick in PoP era for a decade was a huge reason why much of this was possible.

Torven’s Online Gaming History

My history includes having installed the game on launch day, March 16 1999. I rolled an Erudite Wizard because Erudites had the highest intelligence and so Erudite was the obvious choice, even though my friends were in Faydwer. This inspired me to travel to the other side of the world within days of launch. This was particularly dangerous back when there were no maps and nobody knew the zones. Wizards do not get invisibility until level 16 so I did not have it. Or bind for that matter. When I arrived at Butcherblock somebody shouted “wow an Erudite is here” or something similar. Being the only Erudite in Faydwer and leveling in Crushbone was a very impressionable experience for me. This is the kind of thing that other games don’t allow for and a reason I adore EverQuest.

Before EverQuest I had played MUDs for several years, mostly Aardwolf which was very solo oriented and might be more akin to WoW than EQ. I had made maps of some Aardwolf MUD zones and some are still available online. I also wrote a small Aardwolf news page. I did play Sojourn MUD for a brief period as well which is the MUD that inspired EQ in many ways. I can’t say I remember much of it. I was also very into the BBS scene which I remember fondly, particularly MajorBBS door games including the very MUD-like Tele-Arena and of course MajorMUD. Also Galacic Empire, Barren Realms Elite, Legend of the Red Dragon, Trade Wars 2002, VGA Planets.

In EverQuest the first guild I joined was the guild created by the Wizards of the Coast employees in Seattle, which was called Phoenix. I first started out on the Solusek Ro server but as the server ended up being crowded, players there were given the option to move to a new server just prior to Kunark’s launch. I and some friends of mine took the opportunity and moved to Druzzil Ro where I immediately joined the guild Hoss which had also moved over and which Phoenix had done joint raids with so I was already friendly with. I stayed with Hoss until my retirement.

Another thing I deeply miss about older games is the lack of spoilers and data mining. Back then you got to experience things before hearing about it, which nowadays is rare. Imagine trying to figure out how to get inside Sebilis then once inside having no idea what the layout is or what drops. I liked to make maps and when Kunark opened I hugged zone walls in the dungeons and did /locs while the log was running then imported the locations into CAD software to form maps. Some of my maps are still online. I also made a hand-drawn Fearplane map during classic era which is featured on Project 1999’s wiki. I was a little obsessed with the zone and the idea of a brutal break-in process before accessing a loot pinata was highly intriguing to me.

Hoss was a very successful guild. They had a reputation for doing more with fewer. An anti-zerg guild, if you will. At first we didn’t have enough members to do the largest raids, like Trakanon. However slowly we started poaching quality players from the larger guilds which enabled us to compete on the highest end content. Defeating bosses like Venril Sathir and the Queen in Chardok with a small force before the larger guilds did earned us respect which garnered interest from other skilled players.

Hoss ended up server firsting Vyemm, Vulak and Ventani on Druzzil Ro. Vyemm we had server firsted with only 40. After that we were the dominant guild on the server and remained so until WoW’s launch. During PoP era the elemental planes were our private playground for many months and Time was to ourselves until 2004. At peak Hoss was a top 10 guild across all servers when we defeated some phase 5 gods before most of the other guilds. We were also the guild that won the Curt Schilling jersey contest which was given to the first guild to win the Miragul LDoN raid. As I recall it wasn’t even the hardest LDoN raid and not that difficult for us. A friend of mine still has the jersey.

I originally played a wizard but I had always done a lot of two boxing. I obtained another account from a friend of mine which had a level 50 enchanter on it. In late Kunark I started leveling a warrior. Starting in Velious I would two box a wizard and warrior on all raids. Eventually my warrior became the main. In late PoP I became the guild’s Main Tank. My gearing strategy was to equip for hate generation first, followed by AC. I stacked Combat Effects for proc rate, and I eventually ended up having the most AC of any warrior in the world for a brief time circa early GoD.

In World of Warcraft I joined Fires of Heaven since I knew some folks in the guild, as the guild had taken in several Hoss members in EQ. I was with them during beta plus a bit over one year of post-launch. I left due to some misunderstandings, after which I primarily just did battlegrounds and wrote addons, the most famous of which being Preform AV Enabler which had several million downloads, until I heard about Project 1999 about a year after they launched. I made a druid there. I was almost Project 1999’s first 60 druid but was beaten by somebody who 3 box powerleveled himself plus I had jury duty.

Later I discovered The Al’Kabor server, about a year before it shut down, and played that extensively during that short period and made several YouTube videos of it. When they announced the shutdown of the server it hit me that classic EQ was really about to die and it instilled a strong desire to try and preserve it. During that last month I spent all day every day collecting as much data from the server as I could and started talking with The Al’Kabor Project guys whom I joined shortly thereafter. Originally my job was focused on NPC statistics but my role grew over time and I ended up fine-tuning a lot of the core game mechanics by writing some of the server logic myself. My increasing workload resulted in my doing almost the entirety of the Planes of Power content there which I am proud of.

Now I’m making this site. My dream is to see a real attempt at a classic EverQuest experience recreated. Current emulators don’t meet my rather high standards. Hopefully the future superintelligent AI overlord can one day make a server that forces the stone UI in first person, has only 6 buttons on the hotbar and puts in the spell resist floors so level one bats can resist your root spell.

Contacting Me

Currently the best way to contact me is via Discord. My unique username is torven99 there.