Carry On Camping: WoW Classic, EverQuest

As I play WoW Classic I find myself comparing just about everything with how it would have been in EverQuest around the same time.  Based on not much more than memories, never to be trusted, it's probably not a very accurate comparison but it fascinates me.

Memory aside, direct comparisons with what we think of as classic EverQuest are misleading. During the period WoW Classic attempts to recreate, sometime around September 2006, EQ was a very long way from its own "classic" era. And I'd known many different iterations of Norrath by then.

A History Lesson

By September 2006 I had played EQ for nearly seven years, on and off but mostly on. I'd spent almost a year in Dark Age of Camelot, then returned. I'd moved to EverQuest II for about eight or nine months from the November 2004 launch until the following summer but came back to EverQuest at the end of the Dragons of Norrath expansion, staying for the start of Dungeons of Darkhollow.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I barely touched DoN but we played quite a lot of DoD, leaving only when the Shroud debacle reached an unbearable nadir. I won't go into what happened. It's something best left forgotten. We then returned to EQII for maybe another nine months before switching back to EverQuest for The Serpent's Spine expansion at precisely the period Classic emulates, September 2006.

In a number of ways, The Serpent's Spine was a reboot for EQ, as can be seen from the launch day patch notes. The expansion not only added a new race and starting city but also a complete new leveling path to the raised cap of 75. Even now, more than a dozen years later, new players are funnelled into Crescent's Reach in the hope they'll follow the route set out for them more than a dozen years ago.

Among other things, racial xp penalties were removed, AAXP at low and middle levels was increased, the "con" system was revised to include a new xp step and most significantly by far, major changes were made to the way a character recovered health, mana and endurance after combat:

"*** Downtime ***

As EverQuest has grown over the years, the amount of downtime imposed upon players has grown as well and we'd rather players find challenge in the fights themselves than in the time between them. Toward that end, we've created a new system that is simple to use, but powerful and flexible enough to control downtime as the game continues to grow....

Once you have been out-of-combat for a sufficient amount of time, you can sit down (or be on a non-moving horse) and begin to rest. While resting, you enter an accelerated regeneration state that will quickly recover your mana, health, and endurance".

This was big. It meant that classes that had been unbearably slow to solo since launch, particularly those with no means of healing themselves, like Warriors and Rogues, could, at least theoretically, make some xp by soloing.

Soloing in EQ vs Classic. Now there's a case for comparison...

 These changes didn't come out of the blue and neither were they a direct response to the vastly more casual-friendly behemoth in the room. EQ had been tiptoeing towards greater accessibility for the more casual player for quite a while.

The infamous "lose your corpse and everything on it" death penalty, always an outlier in normal gameplay but nevertheless at the back of everyone's mind as they played, had been completely removed with the addition of Shadowrest in April 2004, long before WoW was in anyone's thoughts. The almost equally infamous lengthy travel times had been reduced a little with 2001's Shadows of Luclin and rendered almost trivial in the eyes of some veterans by Planes of Power the following year.

All of this is by way of saying that any parallels I attempt to draw between the two games likely to be both highly subjective and prone to temporal inconsistencies. Even so, there are some things that stand out as major divergences on what has otherwise been a surprisingly similar journey.

Camp Check!

One such is the concept of "camps" and "camping". In the EverQuest of 2006 this amounted to something akin to holy writ. Wikipedia, which has a lengthy entry on "Camping", much of which relates to first person shooters, where the term has a somewhat different meaning, has this to say about EQ:

"The MMORPG EverQuest, when first released, had advancement through the game painstakingly slow for most, requiring many hours of slaying NPCs to advance in level. As a result, players quickly realized that camping in one spot and having a single player, referred to as a "puller" because he or she would leave the group to "pull" a mob back to the group, was the most efficient way to gain experience. In fact, the prevalence of camping became so strong in EverQuest that some of the game's playerbase and critics jokingly refer to the game as "EverCamp".

Out of this practical solution to a percieved problem, a complex etiquette was born. Although there was no formal requirement to adhere to the norms of behavior players sought to establish, in the days when most people remained on a single server and reputation counted for plenty, social pressure to conform was immense.

On arriving in a zone, if you planned on settling in a particular spot, it was common practice to make a "camp check" in /ooc or /shout. You'd literally call out "Camp check?" and back would come the replies - "Ramp", "South Spires", "Three spawn" and so on. In some zones there could be a dozen or more recognized camps, all with nicknames you'd soon learn if you stayed there for a few levels.

This tower had a camp name (not that sort of camp!) but I can't remember what it was.

It was also polite, although less frequently done, to tell the zone when you were leaving a camp. "Ogres free" was all you needed to say. Someone would then call back "Taking ogres" and the wheel would turn.

In the most popular zones at busy times there would even be lists. You'd take a number from whoever was claiming a camp you particularly wanted and they'd tell you when a spot in the group opened up and it was your turn to take it. If it was a solo camp each player would pass on the name of the next in line to be invited to take over when they left.

This worked surprisingly well, in part because of the reputation issue but also because of the Play Nice policy. This was introduced some time around EQ's second expansion, Scars of Velious, and was somewhat controversial. It was also very successful in managing both expectations and behavior.

As well as laying down the kind of rules you might give to your eight year old before allowing them a birthday party, the Play Nice policy had a very effective way of enforcing good behavior. To quote Allakhazam, "Camping is not specifically endorsed by the EQ EULA, and in the case of GM arbitration, you may be ordered to share your 'camp' with someone else."

This meant that most disputes were settled in conversation between players because no-one wanted to risk the arbitrary ruling of a GM. And there were, in those days, plenty of GMs available to come and lay down the law.

No Camping Here!

I can't speak for Vanilla WoW itself, or indeed for other servers in Classic, but on the Hydraxian Waterlords RP server the concept of a "camp" is utterly unknown. I spent an hour or so in Westfall yesterday, completing quests I'd taken a few levels earlier, when they were much too high for me. I had, among others, fifteen Defias Headbands to collect and twenty Harvest Watchers to kill.

The zone was busy but not insanely so. Both Defiants and Watchers have been placed by some helpful designer in a number of discrete locations that I cannot think of as anything but "camps". Some, like the one in the illustration at the top of the post, are literally camps. With tents!

I feel sure that, coming from EverQuest as many of the original WoW devs did, this placement is no co-incidence. Vanilla WoW zones are laid out very much like EverQuest zones and I'd lay odds it was expected that players would approach them as EQ players had.

And maybe they did. I'd be interested to hear from someone who was there. However it was back in 2006, in Classsic it's a free for all. No-one calls camps, no-one respects camps. Camps do not exist.

I was lucky enough to have the pictured camp to myself for about half an hour, during which time I held it and also picked off Defias mobs from the much bigger camp behind me. I was able to keep my camp mostly to myself by managing the spawn so that there were rarely any mobs standing, waiting to be pulled.

I'm a tailor, not a fighter.

When players ran by there was usually nothing to see so they ran on. A few seconds later a Defias would spawn and I'd pull it, even if I hadn't quite downed my current victim. That way I almost replicated the EQ experience.

A few times, however, while I was engaged with one mob and missed I my rotation, a passing player would grab a freshs pawn from the camp and kill it. This is entirely acceptable in Classic. There then being nothing else fot them to kill, off they would run, presumably wondering why I was still standing there, staring at some empty tents.

All of this is not to say Classic players on my server are rude or inconsiderate. Far from it. Kill-stealing is as beyond the pale as it ever was in EQ. If there's an unfortunate confusion and two players attack the same mob, one will back off immediately.

I also received plenty of buffs as I stood vigil over my camp. A camp no-one else even seemed to notice existed as a specific location in its own right.

It's hardly surprising. A couple of days ago I grouped with another player to do the Gnoll Paw quest. We ran between multiple camps of gnolls and took whatever we could find. At least two other groups were doing the same. It all worked out well, largely because WoW players like to keep moving and spawns are realtively fast.

The only time anyone complained was when a mage arrived and began pulling four gnolls at once. My partner just said "Mages :( " and we moved on, while I got quad-kiting flashbacks from Velious-era EQ.

It's one difference between two cultures that look so similar from the outside yet so different from within. I've spotted many more. I may write them up but Classic is moving on apace. I find a dozen triggers for posts every time I play. And I'd rather be playing than documenting every last little thing I notice.

Time to go log in. Those wool bags aren't going to make themselves and neither are the two more levels my Warlock needs before the game will allow her to tailor them.

There's another thing - tradeskills tied to adventure level. I've got something to say about on that.

Another day.