tradeskill history

[Milry]

I know this website is itself a running history of tradeskills,but I'd love to see the venerable hard-shell tradeskillers build a review of what tradeskills were in the past,say,pre-Kunark and then, what happened next? When could you get beyond 200, Velious Era or from the very earliest days? When did the massive ts quests come in? Velious? When were the trophies added? And then what? Stuff like that. I love reading everyone's experiences and old stories and I love the tradeskill community, so I'm hoping someone takes up this thread and runs with it.
Please do. Or has someone already compiled this and where might I find it?
Thank you all.

[Pootle]

Well i started playing EQ at the begining of Kurnark. At level 10 i started tradeskills, smithing was the first one i tryed. After traveling accross Antonica to find some Sharpening Stones (they were only sold in a couple of places).

Now to set the scene, I am on a PVP server. Any non-shortie can attack me, i am level 10 druid. Running to Freeport in those days was pretty big adventure. If anyone killed me they could take any money i was carrying and back then even a couple of plat was big money for a level 10. Even running from the bank to the supplies vendor was a risk.

After sharpening rusty weapons, i pretty much moved to Freeport. It was the place to be for smithing. Metal bits, metla bits and... more metal bits! Then on to... well i forget, it was 3 years ago... files, scalars, etc.

Anyhow, you dont wanna hear every step i took, but after a little smithing i branched out into all the tradeskills.

Here are some of the Joys i remember from early tradeskilling.

> Put the wrong components into the container, put in a stack rather than a single item. Click Combine and POOF.... you lost everything!

> Need to buy 100 of something froma vendor... get clicking, you cant buy a stack of things, click 'purchace' 100 times.

> want to pick up one item from a stack, there is a handy slide bar rather than numbers. This is what you have to use on your money too.

Ok, here are some of the good things....

Newbies still used their newbie areas, TONS of spider/ling silks on every vendor. There was no market for tradeskill supplies due to no Bazaar. People still hunted in the Karanas.... I could go there and offer 5 or 10plat for stacks of spider silk, or simply hit the vendors for as much as i could buy.

Velious.
Huge influx of tailoring recipies, but at the time they were too high for me to attempt. BUT, i was leveling there, and collected and saved a lot of wyvern hides. Cobalt Scar was a quad kiters paradise, and hides were sold to vendors or people who asked for them in the zone. Life was good. There were still no big tradeskill quests (appart from shawl, but that didnt attrack too many non tradeskillers to start) so components were still cheap and plentifull.

Luclin
OMG.... Acrylia Rockhopper tailoring. I was selling cloaks for over 10k each. a 10wis cloak was an insane item for wis casters.... Yet still not many tradeskillers, so most of my guild handed me stacks of rockhopper hides for nothing.

Then came Solstice earing, Bazaar and eventually Aid Grimmel....
All of a sudden tradeskills were no longer a love of a select few, and became a way to get uber loots. The rich decided to power through, and the rest decided that a flawless rockhopper hide was worth 500pp.

Here ends my story.

[Heartsong_Steelsoul]

One of the big things my hubby talks about (started a month after release versus my Oct 99 start) is when there were five or six brewed beverages and that was IT. And how the brewers' mailing list was so sure that what turned out to be the Stein of Moggok quest was going to have some new recipes...

But yes, back in the day when spiderling silk had no purpose, silks and pelts didn't stack, and you could actually sell raw silk armor to players... when the highest skill in anything except jewelcraft or fletching was considerably lower than 200 - 168 for brewing, 175 for smithing, lower for tailoring, end of chocolate stuff for baking...

They may even still have the "old" jewelcraft (now ancient) on Castersrealm, which started out as a jewelcraft page.

[Chenier]

Before the bazaar, there was EC tunnel and "Faymart" (usually your server had one or the other).

I remember trying to sell cured silk in the EC tunnel. =)

And yeah, stacking pelts. One of the last pelts to not stack were sabertooth and excellent sabertooth hides. I had two mules in the Freeport bank FULL (go go 8 slot vendor purchased bags!) of saber hides....bout had a heart attack when those started stacking.

And Cobalt Scar. When Velious came out, it was DANGEROUS! Oh noes! I remember watching my bf play with this buddies (he, a wizard, their "jeep" tank - a ranger, and crazy pulling cleric) killing wyverns as a group. One pull, bf bind sighted on the cleric....and bing, bing, bing, chain aggroed the entire cliff of wyverns. "I got some" "GET THE !^&@ BACK HERE MAN, I'M EVACING!"

Later CS was camped like nobodies business - with a list. I remember HUUUGE fights over who was where, you're stealing my mobs, etc. If I was lucky enough to get the north and south otter camps, I wouldn't leave until I was comotose. Have friends bring me empty mules from my second account so I could fill them up and never leave.

And I remember being so mad when the Solstice earring came out that I wasn't at a high enough level to make a fortune off of it. I know that there were people in those first two weeks who make millions of plat - just right place, right time, and perhaps, the right investment of stored components (can anyone say iron oxide?). And seeing whole guilds, even uber guilds, out in Steamfont killing everything that moved to collect iron oxide? hehe...

I also remember the tradeskillers in my guild working as a team on various parts of the Solstice earring...a big group of Tunare priests hanging out in Bazaar, imbuing emeralds and making CE's while other made dust, ran supply runs, made chains....it was crazy.

Ah, and the smithing nerf, when they reset the trivials on fine steel from 242 to 178ish or something. Everyone was going like mad to skill up themselves or a smithing mule (this was pre-NTCM AA's). The fires in bazaar forges burned brightly and continuously. Leather padding was at a MAJOR premium. I remember going to Feerot with a buddyto farm spiderling silks for my then guild smith...

good memories...many of them, I wouldn't want to live through again, but good memories still. =)

[Taushar]

Some of my memories of tradeskilling.

- You were only allowed to have two containers open at one time. That meant if you were smithing, you had the forge and one bag. you had to close the bag before you can open another one.

- Not many things stacked. That meant you had to run around a lot buying/selling things as you made them.

- I hated to use the slider to choose a single item. You could not even enter a number. You had to slide to the number you wanted. Click select was god sent.

- Losing stacks of things with a single click. I lost a lot of things that way.

- Container ate anything that wasn't used for tradeskills. For example, if you had a deluxe sewing kit (used to be called large sewing kit and it's not sold anymore) and had some stuff in it. Instead of close button you clicked combine button, you lost everything inside that container.

- Hidden forge above the bank in Felwithe (anyone remember that? It took SOE years to remove that one. "There is no hidden forge in Felwithe" was a quote from one of the developers even though I can find it fairly easily).

- Before they fixed the bug, you were able to leave a no drop item in a container, like a forge, and have someone else take it from it. It was that was for a while before they fixed it.

Well, that's all I can remember for now. It was definitely different in the "old" days.

Taushar

[Dumpty]

"And how the brewers' mailing list was so sure that what turned out to be the Stein of Moggok quest was going to have some new recipes..."

Actually just recently discovered is the fact that it IS a recipe, hehe

[Nairn Niteraven]

My first character (and I still have her to this day) was a little Gnome Wizzie that I made at release, sometime in 1999.

The main reason I made her was to try something called "Tinkering". I enjoy it in RL, so that might be fun.

Information about it was scarce as hens teeth for weeks/months, and even then, it probably wasn't right. I don't remember being able to make a single thing, or if I did, it was extremely simple. Either you had no recipe or had no idea where to find the stuff to make it.

People were running around all over the place trying to find some recipe book that they'd heard about, but nobody could find. It was actually kinda neat, like a treasure hunt.

There were no online maps, 1 or 2 sites even devoted to Everquest, so unless you played then, you have no idea what a god send EQTraders is to Tradeskillers.

As is said above, containers ate what you combined, hardly anything stacked and as I said, there were esstially *no* recipes.

All in all it was fun and I don't regret it a bit, but I don't want to go back

[Koru]

I remember being laughed at a lot because I did trade skills. Tailoring was absurdly difficult due to lack of pelt stacking. Not that the skill could be taken very far though due how few things there were to make with it. Silk recipes weren't added until later on. So I'd make studded leather and reinforced leather. Mostly small and medium sized since druids were the ones who were most interested in them. Was a major pain since bonings and studs didn't stack either. Later the bags were discovered, and great deal of disappointment over quivers - which at the time did not do anything other than hold arrows.

After the silks were added I'd often be found in EK buying out the vendors of silks. Spent quite a lot of money vendor mining there and wow, I tell you, any tradeskiller worth his or her salt would collapse dead on the spot of shock if they could pull now the amounts of silks we used to get from vendors then. I'd often run out of money buying the silks before I could buy them all. I'd run out of this money making the multiple walks back to Rivervale to bank mind you, not just the cash on me.

Then there was smithing, I never did that much because it was so horribly expensive. It cost at least a THOUSAND! platinum! A huge fortune in those days. The highest you could make was banded, and there was quite a bit of demand for it. I know I saved and scrounged to get such incredible armor. It had chain graphics! Woohoo! A sure sign of a successful adventurer.

I did bake though, not that the skill was of great value since at the time all food and drink lasted as long and there was no stat food at all. People would stock up on muffins and milk for a couple of silvers. Baking was only a curiosity, everyone knew there wouldn't be any use for such a silly skill in the future either. But I still baked, because it was fun to munch down on some hot'n'spicy toelings with halflings in the group. Past a certain point we could only make chocolate items for skill. Now keep in mind that at the time brownies were leathal to most of us. If my 50th lvl came across a brownie in Lfey it was time to run very very fast. So if you could track you hunted the Gfey brownies and if you couldn't you'd kill Nillipus when he was up and if you were based around Rivervale/FP area at that time.

Brewing was slightly better since getting roaringly drunk was the hobby of choice on raids. But again, no stat drinks and the only reason people did brewing was to call themselves master brewers. Another novelty skill everyone knew would never have any use in the game.

JC was a bit different. A horrible money hog and something best left to people who knew the very high level enchanters and who had incredible amounts of plat.

Pottery only had use in making baking implements. There were no poison vials, no idols of any kind to make. Now on the other hand some of the pottery combines would yield a profit on sellback. This was the only way you'd see money out of that skill at that time.

It was very different. A lot of the items a new player can sell for 10-40pp now was vendor fodder at that time. A whole lot of it didn't stack, and even more had no use. That was added later. Plains pebbles, tea leaves, spider silks and spiderling silks to name some examples were all vendor junk. There was nothing to use any of them in for quite some time. In some ways the lack of stacking made many skills easier and harder at the same time. Finding the pelts to tailor for instance wasn't too hard a lot of the time, only very few people would even bother to keep them so you'd find components on vendors a lot. On the other hand managing non-stacking pelts, studs and boning could easily drive you insane. But back then, you had to be far more than just a little crazy to do tradeskills other than JC and smithing.

[burnttoastv]

I started playing shortly after the release of Velious and did not get into smithing for a few months, so I have observed some of the nonstacking issues but didn't have a reason to gripe about them yet.

My biggest memory was the race before the smithing nerf. Once the blue diamond cultural plate came out it seemed all smiths were sure fine plate would be nerfed although nothing official was said. The quite bazaar where I could smith without too much lag (bazaar Trader mode wasn't running when Luclin first came out) and no fear of wieght reduction was taken over by those racing to get thier skills up to 200+ before the suspected nerf hit. After a loan from a couple people and using some borrowed equipment I turned my lvl 12 mule enchanter/smith into a clicky machine. For one month I sat in front of forges pounding out 5-10 skillups a night in fine plate almost every night until I quit at 3am the night before the fateful patch that changed the trivials with 219 skill and a wrist that hated me very much. Leather padding had gone from 100p for a stack that month to 400p a stack I remember on Drinal.

At 219 skill I also shocked one of the people who gave me a loan with a Blessed Full Mithril breastplate for his cleric as a thankyou gift a few days later.

I wonder how many of those people are still in game who pounded away that night to beat the clock.