Ego and Zoff unleashed the greatest Everquest drama around Kerafyrm
History repeats itself, also in online role-playing games. While some are now thinking of WoW Legacy or Classic servers, where MMO history can be reviewed, other MMORPG veterans are thinking of the grandfather of WoW: Everquest. There, in April 2022, the absolutely greatest drama that can happen on an Everquest server repeated itself recently: The sleeping dragon Kerafyrm was awakened. We’ll try to explain what happened to you in an understandable way (via PC gamers).
Kerafyrm, the sleeping dragon
Kerafyrm was originally a dragon believed to be immortal. He slept in the Norrath region of Kerafyrm’s Lair, also known as The Sleeper’s Tomb, and would only awaken if the four Warden, four ancient dragons in the zone, were slain. This unique event per server has consequences: When Kerafyrm awakens, the Warden never appear again and with that they also disappear as a source of very good loot. The sleeper himself also disappears from the game. Of course, this in turn presents a dilemma for high-end guilds that have been farming the warden for a long time: do you wake Kerafyrm or let him sleep?
Kerafyrm on official servers
The dragon was awakened on almost all Everquest servers by the year 2000 (via The Annex). However, on one server, Karana (now The Rathe), an agreement was in place among players: only three of the Warden would be killed, leaving Kerafyrm dormant for eternity. After a while, however, the members of Nightbane, one of Karana’s dominant guilds, decided to launch the Kerafyrm script. The dragon awoke and launched his devastating campaign through Norrath to Skyshrine and vanished forever. The Nightbane guild thus marked Karana with a virtual “I was here” stamp – and disbanded shortly after the event. Those of Karana who kept the deal must have raged.
Kerafyrm on the unofficial server Project 1999 Green
Fast forward to 2022: Everquest has only been on the Project 1999 Green fan server for three years (buy now ) played with the first two expansions (as a reminder: Everquest now has a few more expansions in store). The dominant guild is called Seal Team, which has regulated all gameplay in the Sleeper’s Tomb for quite some time and had a virtual monopoly on Warden kills. Apparently, Project 1999 Green also applied the same rule: stay away from Kerafyrm. You can probably now guess what happened: Seal Team woke the dragon and all the Warden’s epic loot is history on the server forever. But is it really that simple?
“You took Kerafyrm from us!”
For Seal Team’s critics, it’s as clear as nails: Seal Team has been dominating the Tomb for months now, but lately other guilds have managed to snatch some Warden spawns from Seal Team. Meanwhile, the Seal Team folks were selfish enough to decide to wake up the sleeper so no one else on the server would get good loot. Point. But of course there is another side of the coin.
“We were forced to do it”
Imagine what it would be like if you spent months grinding the same high-end bosses, week after week, month after month. Eventually you’ll have collected whatever loot the bosses have to offer, and even in a non-instantiated and competitive raid environment like Everquest’s, you may eventually want to face the real challenge. At least that’s how some members of Seal Team must have felt.
Tensions arose within the guild; there were players who wake up Kerafyrm and then again players who wanted to let the dragon rest. In the end, a splinter group from Seal Team set out in a night-and-fog operation to break into the crypt of Kerafyrm. The guild leadership noticed this and now had to make a difficult decision: did the players wake up Kerafyrm or did they always have to reckon with splinter groups from their own ranks threatening to activate the dragon? They chose the former. Youtuber LevelUpLarry captured the whole story in a video that was as neutral as possible:
And the moral of the story?
Making boss loot inaccessible after a one-off event might not have been the wisest decision of the developers, as any MMO player and probably any designer will be aware of these days. The idea of one-off events, on the other hand, has also found imitators after Everquest’s Kerafyrm – the most prominent WoW example is probably the opening of the gates of Ahn’Qiraj and the associated quest series around the awakening of Eranikus in Moonglade. What do you think of such one-off events in MMOs?
Reference-www.buffed.de