Late Saturday afternoon, I noticed a ping up on Discord from Project 1999.  I have their announcements channel piped into one of the news channels on my own Discord server.  While I have never quite gotten around to playing there, but I keep an eye on P99 and its project, it having been acknowledged and designated as legit by Daybreak back in April of 2015 in an announcement by no less than Smed himself.

Generally P99 is pretty quiet on their announcements channel, and when they do broadcast something it are generally server related events, like bonus xp on a holiday weekend, and are generally just reposts of what goes up on the front page of their site.

This one was a little different.

Hi Everyone.

A lot of things have happened over the last few months. I’m not going to get into that here, but rather I’d just like to reassure everyone that Project 1999 will continue to be available. The Loginserver and EQEmulator website will also stay online, and you will still be able to log in regardless if your loginserver account was created there or on the Project 1999 website.

Thanks.

My first thought was that there has been a lot going on for the last few months with the Daybreak lawsuit against THJ, so maybe someone needed some reassurance.

But that message seemed oddly specific.  The post was a couple hours old by the time I saw it, so when I started looking around I immediately saw a story about the EQemu community had been posted over on Massively OP.

There it was mentioned that Akkadius, who runs hosting for some of the emulators, including THJ, was going to shut down operations and close their Discord server, suggesting that fear of litigation was motivating the move.

“So I’m done. I’m stepping away from EQEmu, winding down my projects and the services I’ve hosted, and moving. As I step back, most services I run will shut down within 72 hours, by Monday Midnight, Tuesday morning. I’ll try to ease the transition where I can, but many things will simply go offline. […] As the Court has not addressed the scope of the injunction, as recently requested by THJ, my time here as run its course.”

There is more over at MOP, but this looks to be the central point.  While there is no indication that Akkadius was in any immediate peril, as the individual hosting the THJ server it is certainly plausible to think that lawyers had been in contact for information about the server and any payments that may have gone to them to support the heavy load that THJ brought, a situation that can make one think twice about life choices in the best of circumstances… and all the more so since it has been revealed how much THJ was making off of their server.

That is an unfortunate turn of events, not something that should make anybody happy, but an understandable (if sudden) response when you think you might be standing in the splash zone of a lawsuit with hundreds of thousands of dollars in play.

While Akkadius only hosted a few emulators, the fact of those going down or needing to swap hosts was certainly enough reason for P99 to reassure its audience that it was not on the list.  The EQemu server status page shows P99 and most other servers are still up and running.

I then bounced over to Reddit to see what was going on, only to find that the long running r/everquest subreddit had been made private with this message posted when attempting to access it.

This, of course, immediately got picked up in the r/mmorpg subreddit where THJ partisans piled on blaming Daybreak for ordering the closure, aided by the inflammatory title of the post:

Daybreak Studio forces Everquest subreddit down after THJ emu backlash

This was, of course, a lie.  Kolamer, one of the subreddit moderators and an apparent partisan in favor of THJ, had removed the other mods and closed the subreddit on their own as a petulant act of vandalism, shitting on the community it served.

Kolamer even had the nerve to show up in the r/mmorpg thread to clarify that Daybreak had nothing to do with the incident:

I want to set the record straight here. Daybreak did not force me to do anything with the EQ subreddit page. I have not been in contact with them in any way, so the title of this post is very wrong.

Did Kolamer restore the r/everquest subreddit, explain their actions, apologize, or do anything else that actually mattered?  No.  Just another child throwing a tantrum over a toy they want but cannot have.

And that is the story for many of the louder voices in the THJ community.  It is all hate and blame for Daybreak and threats to never give them any money ever again while being pretty much unable to acknowledge that THJ was in the wrong in any way.

Some members of the wider EverQuest community put together an alternate subreddit, r/EQGame, for the community to use while the drama of r/everquest gets sorted.  It includes a rebuilt helpful links post that includes the emulator scene.  The community over on Reddit will reform and move on in one subreddit or another.  We’ll see who returns.

Related: