# 7 - Nickolai - Born 9 March 2000 - 29 days 1 hour

 

Nickolai was my final - and for a very short while most successful - attempt at making a truly capable and enjoyable solo character. This time I not only did my research, I was able to run the suggestions I found through the filter of three months' personal experience, most of which told me anyone who really wanted to solo was playing a Necro.

I mean, everyone knew that. Why it took me three months to come around to the idea is something I can't explain at this distance in time. I imagine I had my reasons and I imagine they were crazy.

What didn't seem to be such common knowledge was that there was one server you could play on that came with a permanent bonus to xp. I think it was 50% but it could even have been double that. In 2000 that was a huge advantage. Why would anyone even think of playing anywhere else?

I found out soon enough, after I re-rolled yet again, this time on the Test server. Yes, the xp was very obviously much better than on all the other servers I'd played on and since I'd gone there to solo it really didn't matter much that the population was very, very low. So what was the catch?

If the xp was so good - and Good XP was the driving motivation for just about every player not already at the cap - why was the population on Test so low? Two reasons, the main one being that most people just didn't believe their characters would be safe there. The first question prospective players always asked was "Are there wipes?" and even though the answer was "No", hardly anyone believed it. 

As things turned out, they were right to be wary. But we'll get to that.

The other reason the population never really grew was that even those brave enough to roll there rarely stayed long. In 2000, EverQuest was in a frenzied and perpetual growth phase. The game was being changed and updated constantly amd the Test server was ground zero for development. 

Developers were literally using the server as their test-bed for everything they wanted to try, meaning it was very common for there to be multiple updates in a single day. That would have been disruptive enough, especially given that some of them introduced bugs and glitches or broke content or systems but the real problem was that every update meant the server had to be taken offline, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours.

Never knowing when you'd have to log out at a moment's notice or how long it would be before you could get back in again was, to put it mildly, less than ideal in a game like EverQuest, where half a session might be taken up just by finding a hunting spot and setting up. Worse still, even if you managed to avoid being mid-fight when the server went down, meaning you didn't have to log back in at your bind spot with a corpse recovery as a welcome back gift, you could still find yourself with less xp than you used to have.

At the time, EQ saved character progress regularly but not continually. You used to see a little message in your text box every so often saying "Character Saved", showing your data had been banked. If the server went down after you'd just gained some decent xp but before the next save, you'd lose the lot.

There were workarounds. The server also saved your character every time certain details changed, one being how much money you had. When I was hunting I used to drop one copper piece on the ground every so often and epecially after anything significant had happened, in the hope doing so would force the server to save my progress. It worked, too... so long as I remembered to do it.

Dropping coin didn't do much to help when there were actual roll-backs though, and those weren't all that unusual either. All things considered, the bonus xp you got for playing on Test barely covered you for the xp you lost from playing on Test. 

And yet I loved it there. It was perfect for a soloist. Hardly anything was ever camped. Nobody trained you. Everyone tended to be laid-back and philosophical because anyone who wasn't didn't last more than a few sessions. I'd probably have played there for years if it hadn't been for one thing... The Great Character Wipe Of 2000.

In 25 years, EQ's Test server has infamously only ever been wiped once and I was there when it happened. Okay I wasn't actually there. I was asleep because it happened in the middle of night, UK time. I didn't find out about it until the next day, when I tried to log in and discovered I didn't have a character any more.

The Wipe happened on June 20th 2000. Nickolai was probably in the low 20s by then. It was a devestating experience for me and a huge scandal for the game, not least when the wipe was later revealed to have been an unauthorised power move by an individual dev, related to internal politics at Sony Online Entertainment not, as was first claimed, a necessary act for the health of the game.

There was an outcry and recriminations and all kinds of hysteria until SOE caved and agreed to re-instate all the characters that had been wiped. I can't remember how long that took but it was weeks rather than days as I recall. By then, I'd already gone back to playing my Live characters and I wasn't willing to risk going back to Test.

I was far from alone in not trusting SOE to keep their promise never to wipe Test again. Fortunately, the outcry was such that there was also a one-time option to transfer your character to another server instead of going back to Test. Prior to the wipe, there had always been an absolute ban on any such transfers because of the perceived advantage the accelerated xp offered. 

Fairness was a huge issue in EQ at the time and any hint of favoritism would be greeted with howls of rage. Even with the exceptional circumstances, the offer wasn't welcomed by everyone on Live. Years later, a scandal blew up in EQII over devs secretly granting transfers to Live from Test to their pals so a certain degree of cynicism may have been justified. I was playing on EQII Test in the middle of that shit-storm too.

Misgivings aside, transfers were offered and Nickolai grabbed one before someone thought better of it. I moved him to Lanys T`Vyl alongside Rachelsunday, who became his PA and gofer for a while since, as a necro, there were plenty of places he wasn't welcome. Someone else got the job later.

I carried on leveling Nickolai for a while. I remember spending some time in North Karana (Most of my characters did, eventually.) but beyond that my memory fails me. I don't quite know how he eventually made it all the way to 48. I guess I must have played him some later on but I have no recollection of when or where. 

I know I always wanted to play a Necromancer to high levels but somehow it just never happened. To that end, I even remade Nickolai a few years later, in 2006, as Nickolaivitch, who we'll meet very briefly when this series gets to #20, although given I remember almost nothing about him, that's going to be a short post.

Nickolai, though, I will always remember fondly as the character who introduced me to the joys of the Test server, where Mrs Bhagpuss and I later spent many happy hours, in both EQ and EQII. There's a very different feeling to playing on a server with such a small, dedicated community. It's a lot like living in a village, with all the positives and negatives that entails.

I'm happy to confirm that neither server has ever suffered another wipe. There was only ever that one and even though it was traumatic at the time, all these years later I'm quite glad I'm able to say I was there on the one occasion it happened. It was a like being present at a historical event. 

And that's sort of the point of playing these games, isn't it? To have never-to-be-repeated adventures. I thought so back then, anyway. Now I think I'd rather settle for a quiet, comfortable, safe life.

I'm getting old.