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EverQuest Players Defeat 'Unkillable' Monster
Thanks to Got Game? for their posting discussing the in-game slaying of Kerafyrm, aka The Sleeper, in PC MMO EverQuest. This event, commemorated with a screenshot on the site of one of the guilds involved, is notable because the players "...killed what Sony Online Entertainment intended to be unkillable. But rather than actually make it untargetable, Sony just gave it a hundred billion hitpoints. For those non EQers out there a reference scale: a snake has about 10 hitpoints. A dragon has about 100,000. A god has 1-2million." So, it took "close to 200 players almost 4 hours to beat the thing down into the ground", after an earlier failed attempt where the guilds "beat it down to 27% and then it mysteriously disappeared. Without dying. It seems that one of the Game Masters at SoE reset the zone because 'they thought the encounter might be bugged'."
So what treasure did he leave behind? Hwo much experience? Etc.??? And yes I read the linked articles and none of them mention anything... and if he dropped nothing then that sucks almost as bad as Sony resetting the zone...
While it is all good and well that they bonded together to put the smack down on him, is there anything unfathomably cool to show for it?
The monster was kind of like an Agent from the Matrix. Even though it was "all powerful" and supposedly impossible to kill, it was still bound by the laws of system. Same as an Agent. Instead of running away from it, some users decided to go all "Neo" on it and take it down. Not bad.
One of my guys here at work is an evercrack addict, and he was saying that the dragon that was killed was a set-piece for a quest/storyline that was running.
It'll be interesting to see how they rewrite the quest/story to relfect the realities of the situation....
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
Everything in Everquest has an innate regeneration level. For players this is only a few hitpoints every 6 seconds (a game 'tick') whereas NPC's generally regenerate much quicker, and moreso the higher level the NPC is. This is basically there to stop low-level players from killing high-level monsters by doing a series of kamikaze attacks on the NPC. Also, it should probably be noted that once this particular NPC spawns, it goes on a scripted rampage across several game 'zones', killing everything in its path until it reaches another high-level dragon NPC, and they duke it out.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
One of my DMs was fond of saying: "If you give it hitpoints, the players will kill it" when describing god design. I guess he was right...
--
$tar -xvf
i think it's pretty d*d funny that the one thing gameplayers could agree on for an in-game large-scale social goal was to thwack the monster meant to be part of the permanent landscape. Somewhere, an executive is going mad under their desk, whispering things about a revolution...
i wonder whether such things will be deliberately introduced into future games, as a quiet little way to increase teamwork?
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
It depends whether the NPC in question had been thought of when the engine was written, or whether it was added later. I don't know how often Everquest developers update the client, but if it had no concept of "invincible", it's possible that they would decide a client update would be too much effort, and stick to things the client could already do.
I used to make mods for X-Wing vs TIE Fighter; admittedly, the available tools were all reverse-engineered, so we never really knew for sure what the engine was capable of, but it was pretty limited in areas Totally Games (the developers) hadn't needed.
One of the early XWvTF missions that used add-on models was the Death Star trench run from A New Hope. The Death Star was represented by a square something like a hundred miles wide, with a trench running across it (10 polygons making up 5 rectangles - "ground" to the left, "ground" to the right, and two sides and a floor for the trench). A few other mod makers (including me) used the same mesh as a convenient representation of "the ground" in other ground-based scenarios.
It turned out that the XWvTF engine didn't have a form of invincibility that was useful; the "invincible" flag in mission files actually meant "no collision detection", and flying down the Death Star trench pursued by TIE fighters would be no fun if you flew straight through it whenever you should have crashed, so people usually just gave it a few million points of hull strength instead.
In the sequel, X-Wing Alliance, "invincible" was implemented in a much nicer way: invincible ships could get hit, they could lose shields, they could even be seriously damaged (slightly alarming in one mission where you fly alongside Luke Skywalker), but they never dropped below 1% hull strength.
(If you still play XWvTF or XWA, see my linked homepage for some old custom models and an XvT mission pack)
1.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All into the Impossible
Rode almost two hundred.
"Forward, the Heavy Brigade!
"Charge the dragon!" they said:
Into the Impossible
Rode almost two hundred.
2.
"Forward, the Heavy Brigade!"
Was any wizard dismayed?
Not though all guildsmen knew
Someone had blundered:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to go and try:
Into the Impossible
Rode almost two hundred.
3.
Dragon to right of them,
Dragon to left of them,
Dragon in front of them
Fumed and thundered;
Stormed at with sword and shell,
Boldly they fought and well,
Fought with old Kerafyrm
Fought at the the mouth of Hell
Fought almost two hundred.
4.
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed spells they turned from air,
Pelting the Dragon there,
Charging a Fortress, while
All the world wondered:
Plunged into fire-breathed smoke
Through 2 billion hit points they broke;
Dragon unkillable
Reeled from their mighty stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they returned back, but not
With a bit of loot
No rust-sword for the bold
Almost two hundred.
5.
Quiet to right of them,
Quiet to left of them,
Quiet behind them
No mighty thunder.
No "Jolly good!" and "well!"
No grand applause to tell
How they had fought so well
Came, killed old Kerafyrm
Came, did the Impossible.
All that was left for them,
For almost two hundred, then,
Was burnt Dragon.
6.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Dragon Slayers,
Nearly two hundred!
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*grin* I learned that to make a decent quest on AnotherMUD I had to make it exceptionally tough - and I learned the hard way. Nothing like seeing the players swarm over hours of preparation in no time at all, and having it go to waste.
I only managed to make one quest that was tougher than the players, and I recompensated everyone who tried it - I thought getting to the final creature was insanely difficult and the final creature itself was virtually impossible, I had to log off for a bit... When I came back all the surrounding creatures had been slaughtered, but the final creature had a big chest full of corpses and equipment from all the players who tried and failed.
The important thing any game designer should remember is to NEVER underestimate the players. Some people will go to incredible lengths to achive the impossible and go that extra mile. For an example see the Lytha way for Thief: The Dark Project.
People are crazy. ;)
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Hi,
They gave Sleeper total immunity to spell damage and an insane ammount of hit points and an insane regeneration rate. Apparently, it was vulnerable to summoned creatures thus all the magic users who could, made them.
Sleeper was weaker, but upgraded a couple expansions ago and then he was wakened on virtually every server. This one server may well be the last holdout - no one woke him there. Time passed. Sleeper was not upgraded, but players were.
Thus the inevitable happened.
As for invulnerability, they can make a creature untargetable - and thus unkillable. I suppose you could argue that some kind of area of effect attack would injure it, but Sleeper is/was immune to spell damage...and that doesn't leave much.
I have no problem with just having a really nasty monster in the game, but they should have planned for it to be killed and given it loot. Best loot from Velius expansion, which I guess would seem a bit gimpy now, would have made people think more highly of the development team, because at least they had thought it out.
It goes to show how much time these people have on their hands. Perhaps more things like this could be introduced with commensurate loot.
This was on a PvP server, by the way, so all those people spent all that time in close proximity to one another and at any time they could have started smacking each other. They didn't. It is a great feat of organization and dedication.
Further, after the first time they got the guy down to 27% health and the zone was reset, the people were all given complete resurections (e.g. death with no losses) by a GM *and* a few points (called AA points or alternate advancement points) to make up for all the losses they took in those initial deaths. That was pretty kind of the GM's...given the fact that they probably brought the zone down intentionally to prevent the people from killing it.
I think there was a quote at the time Sleeper was upgraded that it would take so many people to take it down that the zone would crash - and that was probably true at that time. Perhaps it would have taken, say, 600 people, and that will bring down zones in Everquest, I think. (A zone is just sort of a patch of virtual space. All space is divided into "zones".)
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
The fact that the proles rebelled and killed the unkillable God when they were supposed to be killing each other. It is insurrection at its best.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
Reminds me of "Harry" in Asherson's Call which was a shard that had to be destroyed as part of the story line. On the thistledown server a band of PK's got together and protected it 24hours a day long after it had been killed on the other servers. So the devs had to actually force it to be killed by spawning in Admin control monsters and getting one person on the server to volunteer to be the villain. They even made a statue to commemorate the event in the game.
It's interesting that the story says that the beast had 100 billion hitpoints. This wouldn't fit into a 'long' on a 32-bit architecture. So either is EQ using more than 32-bit numbers for hitpoint counting, or it was something like 2147483647 (2^31, two billion) hitpoints and they actually managed to underflow the counter ...
That "Lytha Way" reminds me of some recent guest articles on diabloii.net, in which an expert Diablo II player describes how he completed the game on Hell difficulty with the following strange characters:
- A melee-only Sorceress whose name I forget: her primary spell was Teleport (for targeting purposes), with Enchant (extra damage) in a secondary role
- Gunter, the Barbarian who wanted to be a wizard: a Barbarian with no melee ability whatsoever, using only warcries and the fire spells provided by the items he was wearing
- Maldar the Magnificent, the compassionate, pacifist Necromancer: completed the game without killing a single monster, except those that had to die in order to complete quests (quest bosses and so on). His primary spells were Bone Wall (summon a wall), Bone Prison (trap a monster), and Dim Vision (target monster can't see).