They apparently tried wiping it twice due to bugs and then decided to completely shut it down. Ouch. I feel their pain. I'm sure they'll get it ironed out. I know how difficult it is to make sure everything is working as expected.

https://twitter.com/everquest/status/601241588178821121

what exactly is ragefire ? diablo seasons for everquest ??

From what I gather it's an official classic Everquest progression-locked server.

considering the circumstances in which the bug popped up, it is totally understandable that they didn't catch it when the server was in beta.

for this server they implemented new code to instance multiple copies of each newbie zone once they get a certain number of characters in them, so that the server wouldn't start out with the usual problem of 300 level 1 characters in every newbie zone instantly clearing every mob the moment it spawns. they tested the instancing in beta, to make sure that new instances open up as they are supposed to. they didn't, however, realize that they should test what happens when someone creates a new character that is going to spawn in a zone that has split into instances.

greater faydark was, of course, the first zone to reach the character cap and split off into instances. and then, once the first instance was full, the server got confused and thought that every new character that spawned in an instance was supposed to be a level 85 Heroic character (the ones you can pay like $35 for in the marketplace).

big clusterfuck, totally understandable that no one would think to test that, and totally understandable that the situation never popped up in beta. i really felt bad for the devs, to be honest. they're short on people because of lay offs earlier this year, and now they sorta fucked up the launch that was supposed to prove themselves to their new parent company Daybreak Games.

people are still throwing money at them despite the shitty launch, though. when i woke up at 10AM the server was at capacity, and it took me several minutes of trying before i was able to log on.

Instancing, ugh... they deserve it.

That's a peculiar bug. I wonder why they became level 85 heroic characters....

they're *only* instancing newbie zones. i.e. Greater Faydark, Steamfont Mountains, Nektulous Forest, Toxxulia Forest, etc. and none of the newbie dungeons are instanced. there's been about 60-70 characters in blackburrow steadily since thursday night.

server has been at max capacity consistently, too. some people report having to spam the "PLAY EVERQUEST!" button for hours before they get on (i've been getting on within a minute or two every time, though, so IDK maybe they're just unlucky or dumb). as a result, once people got online, they were just going AFK when they were done playing, rather than logging off and potentially not being able to get back on later. people bitched about this, of course, because hardcore everquest fans bitch about everything. so the devs wrote some code to boot AFK people, took the server down for 30 minutes last night to patch it in. nothing blew up after that. i thought for sure it would introduce some new, horrible bug, but it went fine.

hopefully they open a second server, though. the only place i've found so far that isn't atrociously overfilled with players is Befallen.

Maybe some kind of integer underflow, like the one that caused Ghandi to be a super-aggressive SOB in Civ.

Haha, could be! Truly one of the greatest bugs in history.