What's funny is that if you try researching resist gains and damage, the ONLY place it's mentioned is here.. absolutely no other site, anywhere on the net that I've found, asserts that magic resist gains are based on damage received.
You, nor anyone else, has posted any proof that gains were damaged based, and unless there's another topic about it that I didn't see while searching the forum where you "first speculated this and then notified Derrick, he quickly checked the demo scripts and confirmed it", Derrick's only comment has been "From the OSI code it appears the value sent to the resist function was the damage before it was reduced to one." .. which doesn't really say anything specific in layman's terms to me about the gains.
What we do know:
The only patch note that even mentions resist is from 1997:
"Magic resistance is now difficulty based--it only improves if you resist tougher spells--based on spell damage and spell level. "
Therefore "It's not that "no one discovered this", it's simply that a magic arrow would gain more resist than a 1 dmg meteor swarm." is completely wrong. circle 7 > circle 1.
"spell damage" in the same sentence cannot be used as the holy grail for your claim either, as it doesn't specify damage taken.. it's just as likely to assume that it's meant the maximum possible damage of those "tougher spells" because obviously higher spell = higher
possible damage.
I won't get into the chances to resist or the damage received based on your resist value, because those are undisputed...
So Meteor Swarm Circle 7 qualifies for "spell level", 59 hp maximum damage based on 0 resist qualifies for "spell damage", and:
The spells Earthquake, Chain Lightning, and Meteor Swarm all have an added wrinkle. The nature of these spells is that they are area affect spells. As such, anyone standing in the area of affect receives a portion of the damage. This means that using these spells against large groups is rather ineffective, as the damage sustained by any one target is very low.
qualifies for resisting tougher spells, even though the damage has been distributed to many players.
[hey, is this a bug report too? currently EQ does 50% to all players... should it be more proportionate to the number of players affected?]
Let's face it, stop trying to change something you can't prove. IMO the more logical and reasonable reason for there (possibly) not being resist parties back in the day like we do them now are 1) sure, maybe nobody really tried it...
2) even in a guild, play style was more solo, your macroing was done solo, everything was solo.. the occasional sparring session to raise melee was about the only thing you did with another person.
3) economical costs. its much easier to play here and come by massive amounts of gold then it ever was on OSI. on OSI the largest house i ever owned was a large brick, and i think i bought it on ebay or something, i dont even remember.... now ive got.. well it doesnt matter. the point is a good resist session here costs > 300K in reagents, if you convert that to a real world inflation type of thing that would be like 5 mil on OSI in 1999.. not many people had that kind of money to throw away and that's why you didnt see resist parties like on UOSA.
i dont know much about > t2a game changes, i didnt play, but unless you can point out some contrary evidence that this is not how it was prior to this point, and the game changed at this time, a 2003-era (i believe) article on stratics about going to trammel and raising resist because you'd take no damage completely destroys your claim that it's damaged based.