Miss my Shadow Knight. You don't often find anti-paladins in rpg's, especially an MMO setting.

What made it hard was dying over and over to newbie trains and not getting groups for days on end. The game was unforgiving in a way that the new generation are not.

Everquest was pretty hard. Or maybe unforgiving is the better word. It was easy to lose hours of experience.

I started playing on PvP servers. People could loot your equipment. Unless you had it in a container. So if you thought you would die you'd start bagging all of your equipment.

Also, it's hard to believe that this is what EQ looks like after graphical upgrades.

*facepalm*

This video is pure fail.

The premise is great, as EQ was definitely harder 'back in the days', but this is NOT EVEN REMOTELY 'back in the days'. The progression servers were an attempt at nostalgia that didn't quite cut it for me and quite a few others.

BTW, it's pronounced "Toonahhrree".

The following reasons are why EQ was harder back in the days:
1. Lag from the ultra-fast 14.4Kbps modem speeds
2. Holes in the world that have since been patched
3. Ultra-busy GMs and customer service (real fun when you fall through the world and can't get your corpse).
4. Much harsher corpse system, including no ability to drag (only to pull the corpse to you, which everyone macro'd so it was essentially like corpse dragging today), and the almost-guarantee of your own death when trying to recover your own corpse. /consent was a BEEYATCH when you had to trust the corpse dragger not to loot your corpse!
5. NO MONEY! Research the controversy of the plague rat tails that came later in the game. If you weren't a caster-for-money, such as a Shaman, Druid, or Chanter, you had to farm your own cash, which was ULTRA slow. And even for the casters it was often long hours of work, tho with much greater reward.
6. NO GEAR! The gear you could get before the first expansion was minimal at best, often requiring many, many, many hours of crafting or huge wads of plat to get. "Why yes, I would like to pay 100 plat (ie, potentially 30 hours of work) for that +1 to DEX ring!"
7. Camps. Don't even get me started on this. I get so much nerd rage TO THIS DAY about camps.
8. Binding. Nothing like having to pay a caster for where you're going to be resurrected, and then forgetting all about it until you're about to die and you realize you're literally a 30 minute's run away from where you bound.
9. Much harsher death penalties. I remember losing a LOT more XP when I died. I think if you died at 50 you'd lose a whole level, but don't quote me on that.

None of the above would you have experienced much if AT ALL on the progression servers. Gear was better, cash farming easier, corpse retrieval barely needed, never see all camps in a zone taken, etc.

To be honest, the reason it was "more difficult" was that they didn't pander to their players. They made you work for what you got, whether it be your XP, your cash, or your quests. Quest tracker? Yeah, that pen and paper next to your keyboard. Travel? Use autorun and pray you don't get creamed by the level 30 rare monsters in the level 10 zone. Crafting something? Better know your recipes.

Hell yeah, I miss it.

everquest was a total time sink and while there were aspects that could become tedious depending on which class you chose (looking for group,xp grinding,pp farming),i feel this was counter balanced by how grouping and forming alliances was intrinsically part of the game.
you couldnt do anything worth a crap by yourself.
that kept the douche/dick ratio super low.
i remember a 35 bard who kept training us in HHK when we were lowly lvl 20's.turns out he was training all the lower level zones.i still remember his name "bartlbee".he never made it to lvl 40 because people remembered him and refused to group with him or assist him in any way.

in everquest you NEEDED other people to progress in content,so being a dick just meant you were not going to have access to higher tier gear and zones.(remember farming keys for raids?)

i started playing EQ just after luclin came out and it took me over a year to cap at lvl 70.i played WOW for 6 months and have 3 lvl 85's (hunter,shammie and a ret pally).the only challenge WOW offers for me at high end content is PVP and that game is infested with douchebags and dickweeds.
why?
because you can solo all the way to 85 and dont really need anyone and when its time to go for the epic 85 gear just have good dps and your good.

so yeah.
i miss the sense of accomplishment when you grinded xp for 2 days to ding a level.i miss that sense of apprehension running through a zone that may have mobs that can one shot you,because there was a real sense of anxiety if you died you lost not only time to find a rez,or run back to corpse,but an asston of hard earned xp.
or being able to help a friend who once helped you as the scout for his thurgadin giant war (awesome quest btw).

in everquest you formed alliances and relationships,because you had to if you wanted to get the good gear.everquest took patience.

i still remember a pally i leveled my ranger with.i had found the giant stronghold KAEL and was excited to show him,so he followed me to this city in the side of a mountain (forgot the zone),but i had failed to remember that there was a huuuge cliff and he followed me right over the edge.we both fell to our deaths and he took a screenshot of our dead bodies cuddling (it appeared that way).
to our chagrin there was an entire raid group that saw the whole thing and from that point on,any toon that jumped off a cliff was called 'pullin a shak and ames".

what other game can give you that kind of notoriety?

good times my friends...good times.

I remember trying EverQuest. At the beginning, it gave me a quest to head north to the temple of some such. I wandered around for a while, since there was no compass and I had no idea where to go. I tried to use a "direction" command or something, to find out what direction I was facing, but it continually told me I failed to discern which direction I was facing. (I didn't have enough points in not being retarded, I suppose)

About 20-30 minutes later, a player helped me get to said temple. Then the NPCs gave me a quest, but it was at this point that I got really bored and decided to play something else.

There are a lot of people that loved EverQuest and I wouldn't want to minimize that. But it wasn't designed well enough for me... It didn't cross my time vs fun threshold.

*I* managed to figure it out. Think about that next time you look in a mirror