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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: etc.

Fay didn't know that when he used various strategies in the game, the developer of the game stood behind him.

In 2000, the "millennium bug" problem did not wreak havoc on technology. Tina Fei and Seth Meyers wrote the variety show Saturday Night Live, and the music of the rock band Creed became a circular "divine comedy" in shopping malls across the United States. In San Diego, Calif., instead of going to the cinema to see Denzel Washington's movie "Glory," Geoff Zatkin often goes to the Game Empire game store to see how players play his new online game, "EverQuest," developed with colleagues.

However, some players are not satisfied with simply playing "endless quests".

Why does a game developer not stay in the company and have to go to a game store? Of course, it was because at that time, there were no laptops dedicated to playing games, wireless networks were far from universal, and even the concept of telecommuting did not exist.

Game Empire mainly provides a variety of game parties, competitions, courses and other activities, and covers physical puzzles, chess and cards, models and other areas. "at that time, our development tools were very old!" Zatkin recalled with a smile.

Endless Mission is the first large-scale 3D multiplayer online game in history, but the development team is small and resources are tight, and because there is no object to refer to, most of the time they can only cross the river by feeling the stones. The game uses a self-developed engine, but the team does not have enough time to build the reporting tool. If Zatkin wants to see how players play the game and whether the system is working properly, he must use the game administrator character (GM) and then cast a super invisibility spell to teleport himself to various areas of the game world and stand there to watch the player fight monsters.

In many ways, endless Mission is a real experimental product, with each member of the development team holding multiple roles. Zatkin, for example, is responsible for designing the spell system from beginning to end. "once producer Brad McQuaid came to me and asked me how many spells you were going to design, and I replied 450, and then he didn't ask any more questions. He thought there were only about 50."

The spell system can help the development team better observe the behavior of players, and in the end, most of the abilities of the game GM are spells designed by Zatkin.

At that time, endless quests was a revolutionary game, and Blizzard got a lot of inspiration from the development of World of Warcraft. At that time, Australian player Greg Schutter created the profile website Caster's Realm for endless quests, including a detailed list of all the spells in the game. By collecting patches from the Beta server, the site has obtained a lot of such information, but it is also risky to do so.

"I remember one year, around April Fool's Day, I released patches on the test server, weakening the most popular spells of almost all classes and strengthening only one class's unique spell." "I posted it directly, without any captions, and I wanted to kindly remind players that everything we put into the Beta version was for testing only," Zatkin recalled. "that was the only time I got a call from my boss at 1: 00 in the morning. Brad asked me on the other end of the phone, 'the forum is about to explode, what have you done?'"

As "endless quests" quickly became popular around the world, Zatkin needed a better way to get to know the players, and Game Empire offered him the opportunity. Game Empire is a bit like early Internet cafes, offering Internet-connected computers, attracting many players, including Magic professionals, tour champions of the desktop chess game Warhammer 40K, and a group of future game developers, many of whom are obsessed with "endless quests."

One such player is David Fay, who loves Warhammer and Cyber Genesis and persuades Game Empire owners to install "endless quests" on all the computers in the store. At the beginning of this century, it was impossible for ordinary players to open multiple secondary accounts at home. At that time, computers were very expensive, and they still paid to surf the Internet by the hour. It took a lot of time to develop a character in "endless tasks." In addition, there is a lack of information about the game, and few people know which quests provide the most experience, where to get resources, and what the effects of various spells are unclear.

Considering these circumstances, many players regard Game Empire as an ideal place to exchange skills and experiences. In the store with eight computers, Fay often exchanged experiences with others and developed some very good combat strategies. Fay didn't know that when he used various strategies in the game, a developer of the game stood behind him.

Player Faye's endless quest includes a little-known quest: if players travel from Carradine, the capital of the dwarven kingdom, to the Ocean of tears, they can buy some Chiola nuts from a friendly elf. When you take a boat back to the Dwarf Queen (it takes more than an hour to get back and forth), you can give nuts and a bottle of water to the mysterious character Tumpy Irontoe, in exchange for a bottle of medicinal wine. Then you need to take the medicinal wine to the free port to find a thirsty dwarf (it takes about an hour) and give it to the other party in exchange for some cash and experience.

It was the dwarf NPC who almost destroyed the game's economic system. Fay found a more efficient approach. " I recruited all the members of the local guild and asked a few tailors to make bags and six people to go to the dock to collect nuts, so we didn't have to take a boat and saved a lot of time. In addition, I had four winemakers squatting at the brewery station to know exactly when that guy would show up, so we could make wine quickly. " He recalled. The plan was so successful that it soon became Fay's way to make money-he started selling full-level characters on eBay.

On the Internet at that time, the digital commodity trading market was like the wild west. EBay and other sites have not yet begun to regulate digital transactions, and game developers are far from this concept. Research by an associate professor of economics at California State University in Fulton shows that the gross national product of "endless tasks" is between Russia and Bulgaria, and the platinum nuggets in the game are more valuable than the Japanese yen or the Turkish lira.

Fay's action was ingenious, but it didn't last long. About a month or two later, the news spread, and many players began to use the same method to earn gold coins and experience. Of course, Zatkin, who spied on it, also discovered the secret.

The "endless Mission" data station has long been out of operation, but you can still find the historical information you want in the Internet Archives. "GM is starting to appear and will attack the guy who does the task!" Fay said sadly. In order to be able to secretly "open" during the GM break, he changed his sleep time, but that was still not enough. It wasn't long before endless quests went out of service, and when players returned to the game about an hour later, they saw a patch that read: "the Tumpy Medicinal Wine quest has been removed."

This cat-and-mouse game of wits will last for several months. Fay found many other shortcuts to quickly accumulate experience by exploiting vulnerabilities, such as repeatedly dueling with magical pets to improve the character's combat skills, but these vulnerabilities are always quickly fixed by the development team.

Interestingly, Fay and Zatkin gradually became friends with Zatkin out of a common love for Warhammer 40K, endless missions and other games, and he finally discovered the latter's true identity. "I remember a few months later, Jeffrey invited me to attend a LAN party at his place of work. I didn't know he was working at Sony online Entertainment until he drove me to my destination." Fay recalled.

In 2011, "endless Mission" entered the GDC Online Hall of Fame. Faye's love of the game never faded. When Zatkin and Greg Schutter co-founded the data company EEDAR in 2006, he immediately decided to invite Faye to join the team. "David is very good at dismantling the content in endless tasks, so in my opinion he is the number one candidate." Over time, EEDAR became one of the industry's leading gaming market research companies and was acquired by the NPD Group in 2016.

Fay, who later became a game developer, joined Amazon Game Studios in 2017 as a senior designer and head of product management for the online game New World. During the New World test, Fay worked with many players to look for weaknesses in gameplay and the economic system. "to do this job, I need to combine my knowledge as a player and developer with my skills to run the company and lead the team." He said.

In the past decade, many changes have taken place in the game industry. However, it is still an almost impossible challenge to keep developers ahead of players.

This article is compiled from: http://www.pcgamer.com/ in-the-early-days-of-everquest-a-cheater-and-designer-waged-a-secret-war-from-a-san-diego-gaming-store/

Original title: "In the early days of EverQuest, a cheater and designer waged a secret war from a San Diego gaming store"

Original author: Russell Adderson

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