The Dragon Gamers Weren't Allowed To Kill
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ต.ค. 2022
- The first 1,000 people to use my link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/manykudos09221
🐣 Twitter: / manykudos
📸 Instagram: / manykudos
👙 Merch: crowdmade.com/collections/man...
🔴 Patreon: / manykudos
🍖 Beef Boys Podcast: / beefboys
📹 Twitch: / manykudos
🎮 Discord: / discord
If there's one thing I've discovered, it's that MMORPG's and drama go together like feet in shoes. Something about a group full of shut-in players being forced to work together seems to bring out the best and worst amongst us, and todays story is no different. In 2003, players of the classic 3D MMORPG Everquest took it upon themselves to kill the un-killable dragon. The prismatic dragon Kerafyrm was never designed to be killed, and in fact, was meant to be so powerful that players would have no chance to - as it was important for the story that he not only lives, but that players get a taste of just how powerful he was. Still, gamers are a fickle bunch, and if we're told we can't do something, that only makes us want to do it even more. So when a player on a chaotic PvP realm set out to wake Kerafyrm in order to troll his former guildmates, they instead decided to prove their worth by doing something nobody had ever done before: kill the un-killable dragon.
Massive thanks to the incredibly talented Scratch2D for the illustrations in this video: / scratch2d
Reference list: docs.google.com/document/d/1f...
Big thanks to LevelUpLarry for his fantastic Kerafyrm footage: / leveluplarry
#skillshare #manykudos #mmorpg - เกม
![Runescape's Many Scandals [Ft. Josh Strife Hayes]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cZ8Gp5-buT4/mqdefault.jpg)
A small tidbit I love about this story that gets overlooked is that all the Everquest servers are named after the gods of the setting. Rellos Zek - the server where hundreds of players volunteered to sacrifice themselves, repeatedly, for hours, all to kill an "unkillable" foe - takes it's name from the evil god of war and wanton slaughter.
blood for the blood god indeed
He cares not who the blood flows from, only that it flows
One can tell that much from the fact that it was lawless server with constant slaughter and corpse looting fiesta
You are at 666 thumbs up i will leave it as is its perfect
@@spicesmuggler2452 sorry i broke it
Another thing that wasn't really mentioned is in EverQuest you lost experience out of your bar when you died so those thousands upon thousands of death were actually killing thousands upon thousands of XP grind hours these players would have to spend to get back to the max level
Another thing of note this wasn't a new raid strategy it was frequently employed by super low level guilds who had access to one or two chain-res enabled clerics
And everyone would bind themselves outside vox or negaffans lair and mass zerg a boss
But the idea that this low level strategy worked on the biggest baddest thing is ridiculous and I love every second of it to this day
I did mention the xp loss originally but it kind of killed the pacing of the section of the video it was in so I cut it. That's super interesting about the strategy though!
That sounds almost poetic. Against the biggest boss even the biggest guilds were tiny ants, so they fought like tiny ants and attained victory the way the ants would.
@@LanceThumping Love the way you put this. Beautiful brain.
@@ManyKudos It probably should have been kept in. The fact that death has such a huge penalty and these players had to sacrifice entire levels to achieve this is pretty incredible.
@@arandombard1197 I went down to 56 even with 99 cleric res learning how to pull ToV North as the guilds Monk
I like the idea of people pressing 1 repeatedly until they die and then having to run back 67 times to the boss once they get 1 shot.
alt+1 or just pressing q
@Bully Maguire 🅥 no
@@ThatPianoNoob don't acknowledge the bots, just report and move on
There's a boss in OSRS which can work this way. The Corporeal Beast deals huge amounts of damage, but usually only to one player at a time, chosen at random. Solo kills are still possible though, through one of two methods:
1. Run into the room repeatedly using special attacks which drain all of the beast's stats to zero. Then kill a chicken with 2000 hp (most other solo bosses in the game have 250-750 hp, so this is a lot).
2. Drain only its defense (or, until recently, use a special weapon designed to pierce defense so you don't need to), deal as much damage as you can, teleport out when you run out of heals, restock, and teleport back with the boss having healed about 200 hp. Repeat until the boss dies.
Bro that is just me and souls games
My favorite part of the story will always be that it was *Rallos Zek* that did this, the jankiest, trolliest, least-regarded bunch of threeheads and trogs ever to stink up the game. It wasn't Fires of Heaven or Legacy of Steel. No it was a bunch of crap goblin guilds made of people whose #1 top skill was to strip naked and stuff everything in an unlootable bag at 3% health. Out of this tribe of literal murder hoboes comes one of the best stories from the entire game.
If they knew how to read they'd be very upset 😡
Judging by your description of them, this is exactly what I'd like expect of such a feral, unhinged group
@@SomnusLucisCaelum It took a special someone to play everquest pvp. That game was hard enough.
Its not cheating. Its "crowdfunding a raid"
flashmob!
@@jcmick8430 exactly 💯
Loving these videos
Huh
egg
Egg
You still exist? A relic of the Filthy Frank era? Let's see what you've been up to.
Holy shit. You haven’t been mainstream in years! I bet I can surprise some of the kids in the world with your videos, now!
Considering how much death hurt in EQ, that amount of deaths shows true dedication.
Not all that bad with 96% clicky rezzes tho actually
@@Jabberwocky818 It’s been a while since I played EQ, but as far as I remember good rezzes were really expensive, too.
@@Seldarius Cleric epic had a rez that you just had to click and after 10 seconds you get back 96% of the xp you lost from the death. As far as difficulty to obtain, cleric epic was mid-tier difficulty, it didn't even involve a trip to Fear/Hate/Sky planes.
@@Jabberwocky818 Yeah, clerics in those guilds likely all had epics 1.0. Though a 4% xp loss, if you're dying every 10-15 minutes over a 4 hour period (and that's only for the actual kill, not counting the 3 hour the previous day), i imagine a lot of people still lost a few levels
@@yeti25934 Well that's about 20 deaths. Each death you lose about 1/5th of your total experience at level 60. So you're basically losing less than 1% of your level per rez. Which means a total of less than 20% exp loss throughout the 4 hours. Not really that bad.
If they didn’t want the Sleeper to be killed… why didn’t they simply make it unkillable? Like, literally immune to all damage?
The developers hadn't leveled up enough to unlock the unkillable program skill.
These early games had a lot more in common with DnD than more modern ones. There's nothing that can't be killed in DnD
Because if you just make the target immune to all damage, players won't engage with it because they know its just railroad bullshit. At that point you just go a step further and make it a cutscene, why even involve the player at all?
If you are into old school RPGs you will know why. There simply was a different attitude with these kinds of developers who were all basically huge DnD nerds. There is this hilarious story about griefers in Ultima Online where the Developers tried to fix it only for new exploits to arise prompting another fix which in turn got exploited again. It was an arms race of devs vs griefers. Now the devs could simply make it so players can't interact with each other in any negative way but that would be no fun would it.
@@Jadinass tbh Guild Wars 2 is pretty fun and they have made it so players can't negatively interact. Though taking the gatekeeping out of the game mechanics puts it into the community, which leads to some pretty toxic events as soon as any hardship appears.
Having played Everquest for a long time, I can tell you that SoE were terrible at implementing encounters, patches, etc. If they didn't want progression to happen till certain times... they just made encounters impossible. I remember when Serpent Spine came out and there was an encounter that SoE hadn't completed with release. Instead of tuning the encounter or making it known in patch notes/broadcasts they just made it so the mobs would just disappear and respawn randomly. The whole thing would just disappear and reset. So many high end guilds were pissed. Not to mention that whole Earthen Council during Planes of Power that became a massive roadblock and caused Fires of Heave and Crimson Tempest to boycott and demand changes from SoE. BTW The guild leaders for both those guilds went on to become long running employees of Blizzard and helped create WoW.
I hate it on some level but on another level... I like the idea of impossible encounters. Games should let players know it's virtually impossible, but let them be creative and find work arounds. I think a lot of games are getting stale because they're made to be easy. I dunno, I like it in principle. But I hear you, this wasn't meant to make the game deep, it was just out of SoE's trying to train track the game.
Alex Afrasiabi, the guy who is credited with just how bad the story is now. He gave the devs an ultimatum to fix the game in 14 days or his entire guild would quit. Funnily enough, he created what was considered an impossible boss to beat, C'Thun. The GM of the elitist jerks ended up doing a copy paste of his ultimatum to which Alex read and called them retards. The GM of elitist jerks is Ion Hazzikostas, the current lead dev.
damn i remember FoH and i wasnt even on that server. i played Rathe for a long time starting in late 2000 and remember so many good times with people that sadly arent here anymore.
i lost my original account and ended up making another and still hop online here and there to mess around and look for old friends.
Shoutout to Tigole, leader of Legacy of Steel, a guild responsible for many world firsts in the game, who was so disgusted by the state of endgame content (or, rather, the lack thereof) that after writing a lengthy and comprehensive forum post outlining all the shortcomings of SoE's core game design, later went on to be one of the lead designers of World of Warcraft.
You might know him better as one Jeff Kaplan. And yes, his old screen name was an abbreviation of Tig Ol' Bitties. You're welcome.
Furor and the like are the reason eq had mistake.
I really love these videos about oldschool MMO shennigans. Would love to see one on FF11 and the fiasco that was absolute virtue, or the pandemonium warden.
How good huh? Something about classic MMO's just brought out the best and worst in people. This bold new frontier that neither the developers nor players knew how to navigate
@@ManyKudos devs: I always wanted the freedom to do "x" in the game;
Players: huh they let you do "x?" I wonder if I can "y" with that...
Ah Absolute Virtue, the boss that the devs very much never intended players to beat as they knew perfectly well the precise method to beat the boss that they required was impossible to do if you have any latency at all (aka: only the devs could beat with that method)
And then the resulting multiple tantrums the devs threw when people found other ways to win.
@@kalierdarkekd "heres a video on how to kill the boss"
"we tried and that doesnt work, so look at this way we did that"
"hey you cant do that"
Oof. If only the people in charge had had the chutzpah to let the dragon die the first time and de-spawned him at 0%, and then scrambled to create some sort of celebration in the server to reward the players for killing him and re-tool the storyline around the event... the players would have loved it, and the money would have rolled in for the next event...
They couldn't retool the storyline, it was scripted. After Kerafyrm went on his rampage in Sleeper's tomb and despawned, the servers were scripted to have him go all throughout Velious killing players until he finally flew off into space to find Veeshan, the Mother of Dragons.
There was a ton of lore around Kerafyrm, all of Velious was basically set up around him
Have confetti come down like when you win a trial in ace attorney
@@straightupanarg6226 If they had the power to interrupt their script and make the dragon disappear at 25% health like they did, couldn't they have waited until 0% and "killed" the dragon?
I thought that the only reason the game runners decided to pull the plug at 25% is because they didn't want to let the players appear to defeat the dragon, because they had other future storylines planned involving it. I assume this is why some manager panicked and had them disappear the dragon at 25% health.
Every server was pissed at SoE for the despawn, I recall so many people emailing and contacting support before they respawned him on Zek. I don't know if anyone really believed their claim that they thought the raiders were exploiting but we were all satiated when they reset the encounter for the second try. They f'd up and they knew it lol.
@@straightupanarg6226 "Yeah, yeah, fuck the story I am killing it anyway lol"
- Any player against its lore-strict DM
Who would have guessed that Kerafym's loot were the friends we made along the way.
The One Piece... EXISTS
As a warframe player, I'm very familiar with developers pulling bullshit on clans that do a little too well. But this was on another level, holy shit
Warbros #1
Rest in pepperoni StalinGulag.
I know this is 6 months old, but I never heard of this. There a video title I can search up to learn more?
@@Probroscis essentially there are many examples of warframe devs not even properly understanding there own TOS and in the instance there was a man nicknamed stalingulag that went by the username for many years on warframe that one day warframe devs just decided to suspend his account and tell him essentially no we will not let you change your name, stay permanently suspended and get bent.
@@jamesgames08wow I wonder why a company recently acquired by a Tencent shell company would spontaneously ban someone named stalingulag
In all honesty, this also seems like something a dungeon Master would do if his party ignored most of the story he had planned out.
I have always felt my job as a player in D&D is to find the edges of the GMs plans and then walk over them, forcing the GM to react on the spot.
Maybe it's because I started out as the GM for my group and I would always be prepared for pretty much any shenanigans my players would try, and on the rare occasion they did something I wasn't prepared for, it was immensely fun for me to have to react on the fly to it.
A good example of this is a fight with an underdark area with a dragon I came up with. I had planned for them to lose the fight and escape through a small hole in the ceiling of the gigantic cavern the fight took place in.
One of my players casualty asked "what happens if this dragon is exposed to sunlight?" To which the answer was "direct sunlight burns it" and then another player said "so it won't chase us if we leave through that hole?" To which the answer was "no. It would likely die if it did so"
Immediately, the first player said "I fire magic missiles at the ceiling, right at the lip of the hole"
I thought "fuck, what do I here?" And then said "you cause a few chips of stone to fall off the ceiling" hoping this would disuade them from continuing down that path but the others all saw what he was up to and immediately started attacking the hole with everything they had.
I was forced to go along with it, eventually they managed to do so much damage to the ceiling that part collapsed in, sunlight poured in and they forced the dragon to stand in it while it fought them. Clever buggers. They easily won the fight after that with the dragon taking 50 burn damage every turn, and managed to get the loot they weren't supposed to be able to access for like another 3 sessions.
Was the most fun Ive ever had being a GM. When I gave up being GM to be a player instead, I made it my mission to find things the GM hadn't planned for, it makes the game ao much fun.
A shitty GM forces players on a rail.
@@bipolarminddroppings I've been listening to a group of three idiots drive their GM mad by doing this exact thing, they're running through a bunch of official stories and in one they just avoid the main quest because they're too afraid (they randomized every stat, including classes, needless to say it didn't start well)
They then try to take over the closest village, which unsurprisingly doesn't exist because the scenario starts fairly near the cave involved, and had no other info about the surrounding lands
i remember planning an ambush, an undead army waiting at the bottom of a river. then a player, a day early, decided to cannonball into the river
I panicked a little, composed myself, thought for a minute, and then went, "Roll initiative"
Needless to say, that was not what they were expecting, but I wasn't either so I had to roll with it
@@maxhill7065 now that just sounds like being assholes. That's far beyond finding the edges of the scenario and having some fun.
You gotta know your GM and how far you can push them before its not fun for them any more.
I started an impromptu raid of Orgrimmar that grew way out of control by just suggesting it in Stormwind world chat in WoW many ages ago and it's still the most proud moment of my life.
At first we were trying to kill the main Horde NPC for everyone to unlock a special mount, but it devolved into a violent sacking pretty quickly until enough people had their blood fill and left that our raiders could no longer fight against the increasingly numerous Horde players and the sacking ended.
I love that stuff man, I remember going on a world tour to get the war bear mount, felt so badass rolling up into these capital cities to take out the faction leaders
Love your content man! Those big moments when you're a small part of a big thing with lots of random people capture the best feeling in gaming, in my opinion. Those childhood MMO momentd had a feeling nothing else has ever quite captured.
Man I love the wild shit they had in old games, I think it was EverQuest or Ultima where they tracked item dupers to the source and theatrically demolished their player owned houses in a giant sting operation
I may or may not have been a part of something like this and Im still scarred by it all to this day lol
The mere title of this video immediately made me think of that guy who managed to kill ...what was his name, Lord Blackthorn? Some super important NPC, I think?
@@eyesfullofsky9776 lol I think Ultima Online players managed to kill Lord British himself, while Richard Garriot was playing him. I don't remember the details since I wasn't playing MMOs at the time and I'm really just half-remembering an old Cracked article about it, but it would be like if somebody figured out how to kill Hironobu Sakaguchi's Lala in FFXIV. Totally wild.
@@4QIcehole God, I regret reading Cracked so much back in the day after slowly, piece by piece, finding out how full of shit they were. So many of their "fun facts" were just pure made-up bullshit lol. It makes me cringe to think about how much absolute nonsense Cracked was spouting, and how I parroted all of it.
@@Just.Kidding At least you realized the error of your ways ever. I hope you didn't lose friendships over it.
Final fantasy 11 had a similar controversy with more spicy moments and less happy endings, the devs did not like the fact that players could kill their absolute virtue boss so they would do server rollbacks, ban players, and even delete skills.
This was the reason FF 14 failed, before beeing reborn.
Appearantly it was FF 11-2.
@@shimaphys gameplay wise it is almost exactly like ff11, it did do some pretty cool things such as no loading screens between zones but it's bad management is what ultimately killed it.
@@shimaphys Yep! FFXIV 1.0 had the same director and many lead game designers brought straight from FFXI, and they all had zero regard for how the MMORPG genre as a whole had changed and evolved over the years. FFXI was able to get away with what it did because the market was brand new, so they had the luxury of being able to throw shit at the wall to see what sticks. FFXIV 1.0, like FFXI, launching in 2002 wouldn't be nearly as contentious. But in 2010, after World of Warcraft and others had refined the MMORPG? That's just unacceptable.
@@shimaphys The reason it failed was shitty code and rushed development. The game itself was not a failure.
@@MyVanir well according to the website polygon from 2014:
"Beginning with a history of Final Fantasy 14, Yoshida noted that the game originally launched in 2010 to an extremely negative reaction from both fans and press. It had a Metacritic average of 48 and suffered from unstable servers - up to 400 crashes per day! - a lack of content and minimal story in a franchise known for having plot as one of its core parts.
Yoshida pointed to three main reasons for Final Fantasy 14's failure in that first form. First, the team had an "unhealthy obsession with graphical quality." In a series of videos comparing the original version of Final Fantasy 14 to A Realm Reborn, he showed that the core game may have looked slightly better, but its areas were also empty and it took up a lot of processing power.
For a specific example, Yoshida showed a screenshot of a flowerpot outside of an inn in the first form of Final Fantasy 14. He called it "the loveliest flowerpot in an MMO," but then revealed its heavy cost: That single flowerpot contained over 1,000 polygons and 150 lines of shader code, meaning it took up as many resources as a single player character.
In order to accommodate such heavily detailed graphics, the original team made compromises that went against the reasons why people play MMOs. For example, they limited the number of player characters on screen at any one time to 20. While this allowed the game to look beautiful while still running, it lost sight of how great it is to log on to an online game and see dozens of players running around at once.
The second reason for Final Fantasy 14's failure according to Yoshida was the lack of MMO knowledge and experience amongst the game's developers. Yoshida noted that because MMOs are so time- and resource-intensive to create, not many Japanese teams make them, which means not many Japanese people - developers or otherwise - play the genre.
Square Enix was able to create a huge success in Final Fantasy 11 in spite of this problem, but they ignored massive changes in the MMO market in the eight years between the launch of 11 and the launch of 14. What Yoshida called "Square Enix's unique culture" allowed the 14 team to fixate on graphics while ignoring the fact that ever since World of Warcraft MMOs had been all about content volume.
Yoshida said Square was also stubbornly adhering to policies that had proven successful for them in the PlayStation 2 era. At that time, Square's development process was solidified as employing teams of highly-talented "masters" to "craft" each game. But in the PlayStation 3 era - and with titles like Final Fantasy 14 going to PC as well - the size of team needed ballooned. They didn't have enough "masters" and didn't know how to incorporate new technologies into their process, which led to longer development periods.
Yoshida said this issue has impacted Japanese development as a whole, but he believes A Realm Reborn managed to avoid it.
Yoshida's final reason for Final Fantasy 14's failure was Square's mindset that every problem could be patched. The game had major flaws in its design from the start, but they believed that once it was up and running, they would be able to figure out a solution within that framework one way or another. It was a lack of planning, according to Yoshida."
I played Everquest like 2 decades ago and remember hearing about The Sleeper and that nobody had killed it. Being a kid, I wasn't updated on how it progressed from there.
Great video, thank you Pappa Kudos.
I'm so glad this story had a happy ending where the devs finally gave in and let the players have their well-earned victory. Stories similar to this like Absolute Virtue are so disappointing, the devs never accepting when they're beaten by a method they hadn't considered. It's great that these devs eventually realized that the unkillable monster being killed is WAY cooler.
That kill belonged to the first group. The developers shouldn't have cheated.
He's not exactly the most popular guy in the world right now, but something Spoony once said always stuck with me and always held true: "If you stat it, they will kill it." If even the possibility of victory exists, people will go to incredible lengths as well as clever workarounds to achieve it. Because they know its possible at all. Thats one good thing you can say about Humanity, some of us refuse to let the odds stop us.
Man, I knew about the devs Thanos snapping Kerafym out of existence mid-fight for a long time now, but I never knew there was such an epic tale surrounding the event. One create a killer epic fantasy show/story about this!
Oh yeah, this stuff was pretty legendary. Everyone was talking about this even if they didn't play EverQuest.
Mostly because it probably reminded people of an earlier incident. Please make a video about how Lord British got killed in Ultima Online.
Haha lord British dying was the funniest shit at the time
Whats funny about that is that he was supposed to be immortal in pretty much all the games in the Ultima series. But even before Ultima online, people figured out how to kill him with a loose brick above his head. Don't feel too bad for him though, the character of Lord British is kinda a mad Monarch.
Stories like these are really cool and kind of make me want to play an mmo, but then I remember they’re not like this anymore and also I’d have to play the most boring genre of games
I run into that same problem all the time lol
I'll hear these great stories about fun times in MMOs, pique my interest, then remember that MMOs are fucking horrible. Dungeons and Dragons Online is the only one that ever held my interest, and that's just cause all the dungeons and open areas are instanced, so the design is party based, and much tighter
@@perryborn2777 Instance based MMOs are actually the norm now. FFXIV, Lost Ark, SWTOR, hell modern WoW. The things happening in these MMO stories can't happen in modern MMOs by design. Including something like Dungeons and Dragons Online. Unfortunately.
@@ryudhal yes and no. It's social interaction that is at the heart of these things. Still get than in an MMO. Just need one wherethe devs aren't afraid of their players. First big VR MMO gonna change lives just wait 20 years
Those illustrations are great!! Really added that extra wee touch to the video
My uncle always said an extra wee touch is always good
You ought to do a video on FF11's superbosses, or tales. I know it's not as big as its younger sibling, but FF11 really just seems like a different breed of MMO than anything else in the market right now. With devs actively going "Nah, this doesn't count. You need to do it OUR way" every time someone beat that one boss. Their way being "no way".
Which is ironic since the devs themselves showed a way to beat the boss.......and then nerfed it when people started to try it.
I knew Stinkfist from a nude trolling guild on Mortal Online, a full loot PvP MMO. They were definitely a character, and always down to rustle jimmies at scale.
I was playing on Bristlebane when this all went down. The whole sequence of events was absolutely legendary. The shitstorm that followed the despawning, the caving and ultimate reset, the second run, all of the stories shared from the players on that server. I had heard and always thought that his dropped a water pod or something inane like that, but I guess he had nada. But still, it was something... at least within the world of Norrath. I never had any interest in playing on a pvp server, but I was jealous of those folks that day.
I was on the Seventh Hammer. Was crazy, What time to play mmos.
I'd love it if you could do a video like this about Morpheus' Assassin event in The Matrix Online as it was a similar situation that he destroyed almost every player that came up against him in the open-world event
I was actually looking into doing a Matrix Online video, that game had some wacky stuff in it
@@ManyKudos it was the first MMO I played as a teen and I was so obsessed with The Matrix movies, so it was great. But yeah, there's plenty of good stuff to talk about! One particular memory is the end of server parties before the game was going to get shut down. We all jumped off the roof right at the end and got a server message saying "Wake up" as it turned off
@@noodle2904 Thats actually a pretty neat little way to send off the game. Its a simple little bit of dialogue, but it does a lot in context for a Matrix fan I imagine!
This is like the inverse of the last Guild Wars 2 expansion, where the final boss was fully intended to be killed, couldn't be killed, and the devs were like "meh, not our problem, git gud," until the players who finally did beat it explained how terribly it was implemented and the devs finally retooled it to be less unbeatable. It still drops lame rewards though, and there aren't any GMs handing out rare loot to compensate players for their lost time.
I miss the glory days of MMORPGs.
"I miss the glory days of MMORPGs"
Whine about it nostalgiatard.
Guild wars 2 was so good at release, the expansions ruined it, unfortunately
The unsealed dragon defeated every other server except one, you think you'd use it as story/building / lore if one server did manage to beat him, maybe give that realm a spinoff / diverging timeline in the story.
I remember this. It was the most exciting event we had ever heard of. We were all in cross-server channels and our updates were basically in chat and most were like 25%… 24% etc. It was a let down the first night, but when they respawned it.. it was like best encounter EQ ever had.
this story reminded me of the .HACK// backstory where Balmung and Orca killed a legendary dragon that wasn't supposed to be killed, "The One Sin". i wonder if the devs of that game were using Everquest as a reference.
The idea of dying in battle against a seemingly invincible dragon only to be stolen from death's door just to die again seems equal parts comical and horrifying
The Lord British Postulate: "If it exists as a living creature in an MMORPG, someone, somewhere, will try to kill it."
~ Mike Schramm on a March 28, 2007 post of the WoW Insider talking about the slaying of A'dal of Shattrath City
I still remember this event, it was the one time every server on everquest followed an event, every server announced every percentage they took him down.. that night they respawned the sleeper I had hopped servers and stood in pok eagerly listened to ooc as he fell. I remember the server wide announcement the next day and still remember standing in pok when I read it... this was the most impactful event ever inside everquest...
The award goes to you for the biggest lie ever told.
@@Wr41thgu4rd I don't understand what you think was a lie, the event happened while I was heavy into playing while I had a character on Prexus or Luclin hard to recall which with all the merges, but there was active tracking of Zeks fight in the general chat channel and on the second try many people hopped over to a low level toon to follow the fight directly from zeks general chat. the fact it seemed every server was following the event was an awe inspiring event that burned itself into my memory. i was not a participant in the fight, but I was a witness to how all the servers were following it.
Man that's a good memory. RZ was at capacity that night from the influx of new characters. The fight was aprox 3 hours iirc, and the reward was 3 AA for everyone that participated. Didn't matter what server you played, the cross server channel had everyone in it and someone was giving the play by play. After the sleeper's defeat, there was cheering from everywhere. The chat channels spammed so fast it crashed people.
Good times, never got that kind of feeling from any other mmo.
These niche moments of gamers coming together to collectively accomplish something through brute force and a dumb idea is the antithesis of the nerd stereotype and I love it
This game was 70% of my internet entertainment back in the day I don't forget the lag and the oh crap I am dead after a few minutes of going to the bathroom my best friend and I decided to work together on the same profile so we could get snacks, go to the bathroom, and grab something to drink
Also the year this happened it happened near my birthday unintentionally became a late birthday present been years since I thought of this
The bit about Stynkfyst is backwards. AD, Wudan and MiM decided to wake the sleeper, Stynkfyst asked if his guild The Spirit of the Bamboo could be included and they said no. That's why he teamed up with The Curse (a pvp guild unrelated to the other 4) and tried to wake him up first.
I was there. It really was a great set of battles, and a great memory we all cherish. Thank you for covering our story.
Lots of single-player games do this, too. It feels like getting robbed.
i died at the 'i don't speak latin' joke. it was so absurd.
stuff aside, this is probably some of the highest quality content on youtube. i am so glad i found this channel through the recommended. keep up the great work
Everquest (EverCrack) will always have the love/hate, but mostly love in my heart. I played it for 8 years straight probably and average of 13-15 hours a day. I had a long distance relationship in the game with another player who I spoke to on the phone. I had a huge group of friends that I will never have again and no longer have. I had adventures that were truly dangerous and succeeding was truly rewarding. I had misery and failure and the risk of losing, literally, years of work if I failed. I had loneliness and challenges before I gained the friendships, but remember the details of my adventures well as they were full of emotion and wonder. The world as a whole was dangerous. The risks of dying were real and punishing. The grind to power was insane. THIS was a true HARDCORE MMO and the first and original. So many memories, both good and bad. It is as if I lived a completely different life and I still have a head full of memories from it. Nothing will ever compare to Everquest for me.
I started college in September 2003 and due to the place's Internet, I couldn't play EQ anymore (probably for the better in retrospect, I was already sinking plenty of time into it). I heard stories of this not long after I started, and I was absolutely speechless, because I was fascinated not just with EQ but with its lore, and Kerafyrm most of all. I wasn't exactly a veteran, started playing just after Shadows of Luclin was released, but I consumed every bit of knowledge I could find. To me, Kerafyrm himself and the story of the players who did the impossible exemplify more than almost anything else that EverQuest was truly a once-in-a-lifetime event and there will never truly be another game like EQ.
Was part of the sleeper kill crew in Wudan, cool video thank you for making this!
It would be interesting if story based events like this affected a server in different ways. If the world of the one server that managed to kill the boss ended up having a different story branch than every other server would be pretty cool.
I'm surprised to see someone talking about this 20 years later. I'm Zenthious of Wudan. I was there for both attempts, and was one of the lucky ones to receive a weapon drop before they stopped dropping. One thing I can say for EQ is that the live GM events, and flexibility to change the story and just go with it was great. No other game that I know of has done that to that level. Someone needs to come along and make another MMO with that kind of live acting/GMing in it again. The other thing that still gets me is the dynamics of the full open PVP. I've never seen politics like that in a game since. Some boss mobs only spawned once a week or every couple of days. So, we literally had wars outside of zones to decide who was going to get the raid that day. Original EQ up to Velious was awesome. It's crazy to think about now, we had to get 50-100 people coordinated to do some of those raids. It was also much harder on PvP because we couldn't use AoE spells in the same way as PVE servers. That was another reason why that server was so far behind on finishing content at the time. More difficult raids, and intense bouts of PVP. With as much enmity as there was between some of those guilds. It's a wonder we kept the wardens up as long as we did.
Those massive outdoor pvp-battles in Velious, just to get a chance to raid. I recall just running around changing parties constantly to give people a speed boost to reach the casters. Good times :) /Gaillodar the bard
Why does this sound so epic that I wanna see a movie based off of this event?
That’d be a boring fucking movie
We can't let our dragon die or it ruins future plans - Dev
Sabotages game and risks unsubs.
or
Let the players win.
Later have the dragon resurrected and come back for it's revenge.
I'm gonna be real with you. This actually makes such a cool idea for a story. Two factions with similar intentions, but opposite ideology and execution. The Ascendant Dawn, a federation of warriors dedicated to making sure the dread phantom known as the Sleeper is never awoken, for it is unkillable, and it will surely destroy the world, versus the Brethren, a radical faction who broke away from the Ascendant Dawn, who seeks to topple the Dawn, release the Sleeper, for the sole purpose to kill it and free the world from it's threat, for if it bleeds, it can die...
I love how this video's atmosphere intentionally mimics that of a fantasy story or the recounting of some mythological story.
Not very unkillable is it?
Just like you
I am coming for you
Shoulda taken notes from the Titanic, the moment something’s labels ‘un-whatever’ it becomes a challenge
Fuzzy wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, was he?
What kind of supply lines were required to keep the healers fueled up enough to keep rezzing people landing one hit per life?!
The cleric epic was capable of an infinitely usable 0 mana cost 96% res with I think a 10s cast time. So essentially, a good number of epic clerics with enough mental fortitude to stay in the fight and make sure to focus rezzing any other epic clerics when they inevitably bit the dust. And a loooooooooot of warm bodies otherwise, hahah.
Knowing it was about the Sleeper from the thumbnail makes me feel old af.
Also would like to say that the direction, editing, writing and quality of the channel seems to go up every video. I have been watching for a couple of years and you have climbed up the ranks quality wise. Pound for pound pretty tough to beat. Alright nice n baked now time to watch the vid haha
Love your content man! Always stoked when a new video pops up. Great hearing all these stories from old games. Speaking of SOE. Im sure there are some golden stories from Star Wars Galaxies. Their Star Wars MMO. Always drama there. It was nuts.
I am confused, yet amused over the use of the Chunky Spyro Reignited mod for the thumbnail.
You can blame Internet Historian for that
@@ManyKudos
Fat dragons are rarely seen because they get stuck in caves.
If they really wanted the dragon to be unkillable they would've made it immune to damage entirely.
Then they wouldn't have the illusion of a chance that would intrigue the player. And the idea to just implement an HP floor of 1% wasn't as common in the past.
You don't fully understand. At the time The Sleeper existed, the strongest bosses in EQ had around 2 million HP. The Sleeper had around 300 million. His regeneration was so high compared to the damage capable of being done to him that most of the time he simply regenerated more than anyone could hurt him for. He was immune to the most damaging attacks in the game, and it made classes like Wizard completely pointless to be there. He had two different instant-kill attacks, and his normal attack did 7k damage. Which at the time basically just meant 'all his hits are one-hit'. When you die in EQ you lose all of your stuff and have to go back to recover your body and you lose 8% of your current XP. Not 8% of your current level, *all* of it. You also get nerfed for 2 minutes with death sickness that makes you weaker. If a cleric revives you instead, you lose between 2-3% of your total XP and you get a debuff for 4 minutes that makes you weaker and slower. If the cleric runs out of mana because you just died a dozen times in a row, you'll have to run back all the way from your respawn point no matter how far away that was before you could rejoin the battle. And there effectively wasn't fast travel at the time. At any point the Sleeper wasn't actively engaged in combat, he would execute his script, which meant starting down his path through multiple zones on a rampage, killing everything he saw. Even if you did damage to him, if you wiped then by the time you found him again he'd be full health again. And if he made it to the end of his script, he despawned forever. Even with the cheese mechanic that kept people on the battlefield, with everyone involved constantly losing XP (and if they ever went lower level than a skill or ability they'd learned, they'd lose access to it), and with sheer numbers overwhelming the actually fairly restrictive MP system, it's still believed they only succeeded in killing the Sleeper because Sony had recently nerfed mob regen into the ground.
They did not need to give him an immortal flag, because they'd already made him unkillable.
@@Thedarkbunnyrabbit They clearly didn't make him unkillable enough!
@@Nekrotix12 Well, until they nerfed the regen it would have been impossible to beat him even with the strategy employed. Still - even using the most advanced possible strategies, like boxing the Sleeper in his chamber and keeping the doors closed so he couldn't leave and continue his script, and having like 200 people in the raid when normal raids were around 12 people - out of all the servers they only succeeded in doing it once. If anything, that's actually better for the story than it never happening, and an important thing to understand about EQ is that it really _really_ focused on the RPG aspect. Story continued, bosses died and never came back, and players actively shaped the world - including when there was an event similar to BFA except whatever side won in each zone would actually change the allegiance of that zone forever.
@@lpfan4491 See Deathwing in Cataclysm on WoW. He would just randomly show up to a zone and kill everyone. You couldn't interact with him so it wasn't memorable, interesting, or fun.
oh god, this brings me back...me and my dad sunk HOURS into this game, we remember hearing the story, being shocked a PvP server managed this...and being on late when they got their round 2, and hell..even though we weren't on the server, the cheering...
Man I miss the classic MMO's, it really was about leaving your mark in a fun world while screwing around with the gang. Mine was Guild Wars, I still remember my little guild of bros triumphing over Dhuum, Kanaxai, Urgoz, Mallyx, and Duncan the Black. Half the battle was getting to the boss himself, the elite areas were no joke. Felt great to win over genuinely tough (and long) boss fights as a team. Miss that guild...
I'm guessing you're not a fan of new MMOs?
@@littlemoth4956 Not really. Guild Wars 2 and Lost Ark were the most recent ones I've gotten into and I played a lot of both, but I quit them much sooner than I did Guild Wars. The original Guild Wars nailed a lot of things I like: short grind to max, interesting story, thoughtful buildcrafting, and fun PvP. I think the most important thing Guild Wars got right that no other MMO's do is the 8-skill build. Having that hard limit on your character's build makes players get really creative with what they can work with. There's no multi-bar, auto-attack, damage spam builds. Players always had to be thoughtful when carefully choosing their skills to bring in.
I remmeber back in Tibia we had a server-wide riot against a player killing guild that turned into a 2 month long civil war.
@@littlemoth4956 If a MMO restricts PVP to consent or certain areas then it has no chance to create communities.
New ones are completely sanitized, making them considerably less fun.
A heartwarming tale from the test of time, gamers overcoming the seemingly impossible...
I wish i was a part of that
This humor is right up my alley. Can't believe I'm only just now seeing these videos.
This was one of the best gaming culture videos I've seen in a long time, you just taught me about a whole part of EverQuest that I never knew about even though I've spent every day of my life playing games. Thanks for the video, it was awesome
I played EQ back in the day, and I remember this happening. It was huge- The controversy had people pointing out that if the devs wanted something actually unkillable, they needed to make it something that couldn't be targeted by any attack. Instead, they just gave the Sleeper about 2 billion hit points and instant-kill damage, but players found a way.
Also to note, that raids in EQ typically didn't have more than a couple dozen members usually, so this 200+ player zerg-rush was the largest organized effort pulled off by the players in addition to the most difficult so far.
So weird to see my moderator name on here. My memory is pretty foggy from back then, but I believe we weren't sure if he was safe to kill as we never intended for him to be killed. The decision was made that players cared less about killing the dragon over server rollbacks, which would inevitably happen if something went wrong.
That's sick. I'm glad the devs saw the light and at tried to make things right. That BS post about despawning him due to a glitch is some real corpo think-tank sewage. Like the people who thought it'd be a good idea to put out that statement had only convinced themselves that it's be considered legitimate.
A similar thing happened on my first day playing Tera.
A LV. 80, endgame boss monster just _showed up_ in the tutorial island. Me and a bunch of other newbs crashed into the thing for hours until eventually we took it down.
There was, of course, no reward for killing it, but that didn't make it any less worth it!
I was on the Seventh Hammer server when this happened. Everyone was talking about it! It was friggin nuts! Everyone who played EQ knew how impossible The sleeper was and as soon as the raid started it went cross server wide. When he was finally killed we all sent cross server messages of congrats! These guilds were considered the best in the game. Was an epic story. EQ did some crazy shit back in the day. You should talk about the plague they unleashed on the mainland. That was a cool story. Back then, the mods actually wrote stories for the game. Was a great time for MMOs. ps. still have my EQ character. lvl 75 Iksar Shadowknight named Sathir Emeraldeyes.
History is truly written by the victors, and said victors seem fairly willing to omit that they got duped into this (admittedly epic) way of breaking the story by a pissant troll that they thought wasn't worth the time of day.
Also, have you considered covering the . . . jeez, I think it was EVE Online where a battle between multiple guilds ended up costing the participants more real-world money than the GDPs of several countries combined?
using the wayback machine, you can see an old EJ thread called "The Most Important Event in Raiding History"
Really great read that includes a TON of behind the scenes info.
I can't link it because yt is weird, but definitely take a look.
This is a great channel! always admire these guys who just have a mind for content, the aussies are some of the funniest youtubers, "the Internet historian" being one.
Soon as I saw the title, I knew this was gonna be about The Sleeper. Evercrack ate up an enormous part of my life for several years.
Same here.. And actually still does. Been playing a private classic server for the last few years after having quit for decades lol
This is best telling of this story I've seen in awhile. Excellent work.
I still go back and play Everquest from time to time. One of my all time favorite games...been playing it since 1999 on and off.
The fact that they removed then re-added the boss and didn’t give him any loot is infuriating
EQ's version of the Asheron's Call Shard event. Those devs though handled that situation both much more gracefully, and with a story valid solution.
Mmorpg lore tickles a nostalgia bone in my body like no other. You are doing the world a most wholesome service with these videos man.
Everquest was a bit before my time (I was more of a Tibia kid growing up), but the amount of strange shenanigans that went on there is a great example of early MMO culture. I absolutely would have been enthralled when I was young lol
I remember when my dad was raiding in EQ1 and on his server - E'ci, his guild, and rest of the server working together, got the Sleeper down to 14% and the server was kicked off to stop the Sleeper from being killed.
Lol I remember this. Frankly, it was a HUGE douche move of SoE to simply death touch Kerafyrm right as they were about to reach victory. Even if there was no loot on it, why not let them find out?
Everquest had some "1 time only" events that where pure chaos but fun. Unleashing the hardest raid boss evil gods in a noob zone as a Halloween event for example, but flagging them so you didn't loose exp, and having them drop their usual loot when the players overcame them. It's more that by winging it live stuff like this happens. It really wasn't that strange or as big of a deal as it was made out to be.
At that time most players where begging for groups to complete their epics, grinding out the last of their exp for the level cap, or timing spawns of bosses that dropped good items. The whole dragon bit was only for a select few "top guilds" anyways.
Amazing vid lmao I love these MMO stories. You should consider looking into some of the shit that’s happened on EVE online. Lots of sweaty gamer war stories to choose from.
Would've been really funny if the devs just despawned the dragon again at 1%.
Kerafym: aw shit guys sorry left my loot in my other trousers
For some reason this video never showed up on my feed and I had to search you out to find it. Strange since I’ve been a long time subscriber and I have my alerts turned on.
8:37 Rest In Plagiarism, Internet Historian 😢
and fascism
Ahh yes. I remember Yoshi's Fart & Go on Steam. Very fun game.
I knew it! Saw this already, but didn't think that it was only 2 months ago
There were global chat channels back then and I was in one following this accomplishment unfold live up to the uproar the GM despawning him caused. It was a legendary gaming moment. I had multiple screenshots of the even up to until a few years ago then that HD died with them in it :(
This was literally a battle where it went "Some of you will die but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
This just goes to show yet again: if you don't want something to be killed in a game, don't give it stats. If it can take damage, players WILL find a way to kill it
There was this protest in EVE Online. The players would attack a NPC space station. It could only be hit with missiles, and missile were the ones that lagged server the most. We made the location unplayble for two days. The first day the station had lost around fifth of its health. However the server would restart for maintenance once a day and reset its health.
bad idea - MatPat discussed this and this is a terrible idea in ideology and practice.
"When was the last time you heard of someone beating Everquest?" "When was the last time you heard of someone PLAYING Everquest?" "Ah, fair enough."
another banger bro, love these videos
Remember guys: If you don't want players to kill a character, don't let them fight it to begin with. They WILL find a way to kill it if they can fight it.
Hit it till it dies is such an underrated strat
I really enjoy this channel! thanks for the great content!
Wow this video is 14:53, which reminds me of the fall of another seemingly unkillable thing (RIP Costantinople)
the first players to beat the Lich King in WoW also *technically* cheated, they used items that were bugged and made the fight easier for themselves.
Green Bombs and resetting platforms to make the area bigger, OH MY!
@@moonflowerpalace3872 Yeah agreed, they got punished far too hard, shoulda just hotfixed it and let it be.
@@Whitewingdevil If you do stuff like this against other players this is often grounds for being banned in any PvP situation. Since world first and server first are players competing it is in clear violation.
It isn't doing it to cheese the fight others already legit won, it is breaking the rules to win first.
Ah yes the most effective strategy invented: human wave tactics.
TBH this was actually a really cool story. The fact that a server of people came together in the open world to try and kill the unkillable with inly one chance to do so and succeeded is amazing
It worked for the USSR.