“The Surprising And Allegedly Impossible Death Of EverQuest’s ‘Unkillable’ Dragon”, 2016-11-24 (; backlinks):
[“Kerafyrm, The Sleeper, Re-Revisited”] …The other day, I heard a piece of virtual worlds lore that brought me back to those times: On EverQuest, in November 2003, nearly 200 players came together to defeat the apparently invincible dragon Kerafyrm, known as “the Sleeper”, against Sony Online Entertainment’s designs. The story has everything: warring factions, a tomb, an invulnerable dragon, surprising partnerships and a panicked multinational corporation; and, as of a few days ago, it would have remained relatively unknown had I not received an encrypted PGP message from the moniker “Master Control Program.”
…In EverQuest lore, he explained, the crystal dragon Kerafyrm was imprisoned in “The Sleeper’s Tomb”, an icy cave, because he was the child of two dragons from warring families. As the developers’ script went, when players entered the Sleeper’s Tomb and killed the dragon’s 4 warders, Kerafyrm would awaken. Then, he would kill everyone in sight before rampaging across the world.
…Players present for the Sleeper’s awakening on all others servers were immediately demolished in one or two fell swoops. As a result, the dragon was widely believed to be invincible across EverQuest’s 400,000 subscriber base. But by the time Rallos Zek decided to wake the Sleeper, the leading guilds were immeasurably stronger than other servers’ had been when they ventured into the Sleeper’s Tomb.
…Waking “the Sleeper” Kerafyrm was a one-time-only event on each server, and Rallos Zek was the last one on which Kerafyrm still slept…“Although the guilds were killing each other all the time, we had agreed not to wake the Sleeper”, Jon remembered. It was their one pact, and not one made out of mutual respect: Once the Sleeper went on his rampage, players couldn’t farm his 4 warders for loot—powerful armor that protected the guilds from each other.
…At the level 65 cap, as powerful as can be, they did about 3 damage per hit. The Sleeper, on the other hand, doled out many thousand damage per swipe.
“It was really boring and intense at the same time”, Jon said. “I died all the time. As a druid, I could barely do anything.” Every 72 minutes, Jon would bolt into the middle of the battle and cast a damage shield that reflected the Sleeper’s attacks back at him.
“We expected to die”, Jon remembered. After all, this was the beast considered invincible by every server who had encountered him. Kerafyrm’s area-of-effect attacks would wipe out swarms of players at once with just one blow. But, at equal pace, healers were casting “resurrect” on the dead. With each passing minute, it slowly dawned on the players that their attacks were, in fact, doing damage, as long as they stayed alive. The Sleeper, it appeared, was mortal. Greedy, players were expecting some d—n good loot for their trouble.
After 3 hours, Kerafyrm’s health was depleted to about 26%. He was going to die. And, when he did, he wouldn’t go on his rampage, as he had on every other server, and trigger the rest of the storyline.
It was completely off-script. What would happen to EverQuest’s precious story?
Players soon got an answer. With only a quarter of his health left, the Sleeper suddenly disappeared.
…Enraged, players flocked to in-game Customer Support GMs. Jon still has a screenshot of his chat log with the GM Zaltaran, who told him something unfathomable at the time: that the despawning orders came from the top, Sony Online Entertainment.
“The word I have is that development didn’t want the Sleeper killed. . . so the zone was repopped on orders from management”, Zaltaran explained. “What I do know”, he continued, “is that the zone was designed where the Sleeper itself was not intended to be killed.” An uproar overcame Rallos Zek that echoed across the internet.
“We felt like we’d been robbed”, Brian, a member of the Ascending Dawn guild told me 13 years later. “I think they were surprised we were winning. There was a lot of speculation.”
…“The SOE CS [Sony Online Entertainment customer service] team believed that players were taking advantage of either a bug or an exploit during the November 15th, 2003 Rallos Zek Sleeper raid”, he said over e-mail. “Per the CS policy regarding exploits, a customer service representative despawned the boss.”
…On November 17th, 2003, Rallos Zek’s 3 governing guilds reconvened to slay the Sleeper, which Sony resurrected after an apology. They would do it for real this time. Nearly 200 players collected in the Sleeper’s tomb—enough to cause major zone lag, weighing heavily on S2003 servers. Retired EverQuest players emerged from multi-year breaks to witness the fall of the Sleeper. To ease the burden on EverQuest’s engine, the guilds convened on MSN Messenger or AIM to talk strategy. Onlookers from every other servers eagerly lurked on these chatrooms.
The new Sleeper still wiped out a hundred players at a time. Clerics cast over a thousand “resurrect” spells. Nearly 3 million damage was done to its icy body (some say its health was one billion).
But 4 hours in, a wizard named Trylun got the sought-after Sleeper killshot. The Sleeper, EverQuest’s allegedly unkillable mob, finally died. Over 400 players congratulated Trylun. SOE even jumped in to say their congratulations, although nobody can be sure whether they were sincere.
Across the internet, MMORPG players who had heard about SOE’s brutal despawning celebrated.