I just don't see the idea of "grind" relating to "fun" and "trying to ease up the grind and make a smoother playing experience" relating to "easy-mode designed for little kids." Now, that's not to say WoW isn't pretty much an easy-mode game. It is. But it's pretty ridiculous to consider all MMOs after EQ to be kiddie easy games just because they're not as absurdly grind-intensive.
I just don't see the idea of "grind" relating to "fun" and "trying to ease up the grind and make a smoother playing experience" relating to "easy-mode designed for little kids." Now, that's not to say WoW isn't pretty much an easy-mode game. It is. But it's pretty ridiculous to consider all MMOs after EQ to be kiddie easy games just because they're not as absurdly grind-intensive.
I can agree with him, that a longer leveling curve makes for a significantly different (and definitely not worse) experience in an MMO. However, obviously this can be done well or done poorly. The "grind" in EverQuest wasn't as bad when you could find a group right away, immediately delve into a dungeon, sit around for a few hours slaughtering monsters before finding a replacement and gating out. This actually helped the community a ton, because often you'd find the same people at different camps, fostering relationships.
However, it failed, in that a few select classes had unique and necessary roles, making it extremely difficult for other classes to find groups. Like I mentioned earlier, playing a ranger was painful early on, because you were weaker then a warrior in melee and a weaker caster than a druid. While some think that speeding up leveling would alleviate this (and in practice it would, because classes become more balanced and more desirable overall at later levels), I tend to think that rebalancing the lower levels would do the same while still preserving the leveling "experience".
Of course, I see "grinding" in games like World of Warcraft fundamentally different from that in EverQuest, because in the former you do it mostly solo, because groups tend to be filled with idiots. The later had a more mature community, and you had to form groups, so a night of playing was split evenly between killing monsters and socializing. I'm sort of rambling now, aren't I?
Well, we're not even just talking about leveling. They were also mentioning equipment and stuff.
I really can't fathom how 20+ hours of camping (with competition) could equate to fun, and that was what some of the more uber gear in EQ required. You had raiding gear too of course, and raiding in EQ was a hell of a lot harder (and not from a grinding standpoint, just from sheer challenge and the organization required) than in WoW, but I seem to remember epic weapons requiring some absurd stuff.
As for WoW, I like the leveling in that because you can solo and do quests to gain levels. That is fun for me. Sure, in EQ you had the solo classes like Druid and Necros for kiting and reverse kiting, but all the other classes had to go through considerably more to solo. (Keeping in mind here I stopped playing right after Planes of Power came out, so things may have changed) You can pretty much solo with anything in WoW.
Although to be honest soloing with a Necro was some of the most fun I've ever had. Reverse kiting was fucking awesome and I haven't played an MMO yet that has something comparable. Whats not to love about casting Fear and DoT+Slow on a mob and watching him run away while your skeleton beats him to bloody death?
I was so fucking scared of the water in EQ because of Faydedar and the Firepot room.
I was so excited when I finally made my way to the firepot room and bound myself there. I felt like a total badass, I never rebound my soul until PoP came out (and I was really disappointed because all that time and effort I spent trying to get there had been wasted).
I was so fucking scared of the water in EQ because of Faydedar and the Firepot room.
I was so excited when I finally made my way to the firepot room and bound myself there. I felt like a total badass, I never rebound my soul until PoP came out (and I was really disappointed because all that time and effort I spent trying to get there had been wasted).
I could still probably get there, even after all this time. (Not like it's that hard, just get off the boat right away and follow the zoneline. Good old zonelines.)
But oh man. Actually using the thing. So much time was wasted hovering above those combine spikes afraid to go under the water, worried that I might spot that fucking monster. I wasn't even that worried about dieing, just something really freaked me the hell out about maybe seeing him at the bottom.
I bound my soul there once or twice, but wasn't one of the lucky ones who had it there when they made it so you couldn't bind in that zone. That was a real pisser.
The "grind" was never really the reason EQ was challenging. The "grind" isn't even all that bad, I might even argue it's considerably easier, especially if you have some people to power level you where it just becomes absurdly easy.
On the new progression server myself and some buddies were near the top of the levelling pack and we were by no means super hardcore, we played maybe 6-7 hours a day. Nothing like some of the insane 20 hour kids out there. We just played efficiently, always had our group, and knew how to play our characters.
We hit 50 in under 4 days played and 60 in around 7 days played or so. A pretty decent WoW player would probably hit 60 in around 6-7 days played. The grind really isn't all that bad.
Regardless, the challenge and fun of EQ comes from the inherent combat system itself. Fights are far longer, players live far longer, and everything is balanced around "longer fights." Fighting completely untwinked against a large group of wizards and shamans in Solusek A is ridiculous and one of the most challenging things in the game, probably.
And then there is the death system. Ohhhh, the death system. I used to get beyond angry with it at times when we'd be on completely insane corpse runs, but looking back and after playing WoW and coming back to EQ again I can see why it was so amazing -- that sheer sense of fright. Pulling a mass of mobs was completely intense, we'd do everything we could, utilize every inch of our mana and skills to keep mobs locked down and control everything because we knew that dying would matter. Dying would suck. We did NOT want to die.
What happens in WoW? We just jump off the side in BRD (back when that was new) and jump in the lava for kicks and run around spawning all of the dragon whelps for jokes and no one cares because nothing happens. We just come back with all your stuff and no one cares. It removes that sense of challenge and fear and urgency to succeed.
Raiding was another big reason EQ was challenging. No other game has compared to EQ's raids, and again - is it a smart business plan? Not really, even someone that loved the game as much as I did can't handle the amount of time required anymore. But when you play WoW and feel like you want a little more of a challenge, think about the EQ fights. We got the first Cursed (in Ssra) kill on our server and it was a nonstop fight that took about 90 minutes. 90 minutes of nonstop battling with one monster.
Temple of Veeshan, when it was new, was enormous insane dragon battle after enormous dragon battle and each fight usually lasted over 40 minutes. It was exhilerating, it was intense, and the slightest screwups in mob control or heal rotation 35 minutes in and everything would crumble.
Is WoW a bad game? No. But it has NO WHERE near the challenge that EQ had. Is that bad? Not according to the 20 times more people (or more) that play WoW than ever did EQ. Would they enjoy EQ if they tried it? Probably not.
Is EQ a bad game then? No, it's just a little harder and more unforgiving. It's not the best business plan anymore, and it's not a game I can really stick with again now that I have a real job and a life, but I'll be damned if it wasn't one of the most rewarding MMO experiences I've ever had.
Meh, there's some pretty silly ideas being thrown around in those threads.
People are wanting half or more of the expansions but without PoK books. Give the transportation back to the druids and wizards (this part I like) but lets keep these vast expanses of game space.
This whole "classic" server idea isn't appealing to enough people for that. In my opinion, it needs to be limited to *only* vanilla EQ. People are going to power game and quit, so what. I thought the whole point of this was to re-live the experience from those classic dungeons. Give everyone Kunark and Velious and how many people are going to bother with upper guk and unrest? I started during Kunark and never saw a group in Unrest. So many of these zones go unused (possibly for a reason) because of too many options. They need to condense and control the population so that the intertwined community comes back.
If the pure vanilla server goes well, open up one with only kunark enabled and allow transfers, or at the very most unlock kunark on the same time table as it was before, after a year.
Maybe I'm just forgetting about overcrowded zones, (hah, moat camps in Karnors....what a waste) but giving out the expansions too soon only creates ghost towns in other zones.
Then you're left with the class balance issue based on expansion though. I know there were comments about Rangers not coming into their own until what, SoL? I know the common joke about a shadowknight's roll in much of ToV was to go feign death in the corner and stand up when it's time to loot.
Enh, maybe it's best left as nostalgia. Those days of being scared shitless during PoF break-ins, and pulling Ice Giants before Vox will never be the same.
Regardless of whether or not I have the stomach for the more "hardcore" aspects that EQ had (travel times, mob camps, death penalty, corpse runs, etc..), I have way more respect and more of a lingering sense of positivity about the game in retrospect than I do about WoW.
Some would try to dismiss it as "first MMO syndrome," but I played AC for about a year before I even tried EQ, and even then never really succeeded. (As stated before, highest char was a 52 bard. And btw, speeding around as a bard with some hot drums was probably more fun than anything I did in WoW, lawl.)
I'm sure EQ sucked because I did quit it, but I feel like they built something somehow "better" than what Blizzard did with WoW. WoW never felt like it had any real life in it, it always felt like a bland easily-consumed mash of the crap anyone would eat.
Including me for like 120 days of /played, but I still couldn't tell you why I bothered playing it so much. EQ will have a place in my MMORPG memories, but WoW really doesn't despite playing it for way more time than I did EQ. WoW didn't do anything unique to merit it, I suppose.
<snipped idiocy>a spell memorization system that's not liquid monkey ass<more snipper idiocy>
Okay, look. You're missing the point of the spell system. EQ doesn't let you cast any of your 400+ spells at any given time for a reason. Ever wonder why Divine Aura and Divine Barrier (cleric invulnerability spells) have 15 minute reuse timers? So that you can't just pop it any given time in a battle. You ahve to decide, in advance to use up two spell slots for those spells, so they're up when you need them.
That's the entire point of the way EQ spells work. You need to balance and adjust them for what you're doing; if you forgot to mem gate when the shit hits the fan, you might be fucked. If your druid doesn't have evac on his spellbar you better not need it, because the 20 seconds or so it takes to pop up is enough time to wipe.
Sure, it sucks when you need to cast 10-12 buffs on yourself, some of which last maybe 30 minutes, tops. But they introduced spellset memorization for that. You mem a set of buffs, cast them, then mem your regular spells and you're off to the races.
Allowing you to cast any spell at any time without memorization would be terrible. It'd overpower certain classes; necros would have access to 5-6 dot lines AND 4 nuke lines AND every one of their utility and pet spells, all at once, which would be just ridiculous. Necros are built around having to pick and choose your dots and nukes so that you can efficiently handle what you're fighting.
If there's anything EverQuest does absolutely 100% correctly, it's the spell memorization system. Players ahve to plan and prepare and strategize to kill efficiently in a group or solo, and it's a direct result of having limited spell options.
You're wrong about everything you've said in this thread, and this is just the most glaring example of how worthless your opinion is when it comes to MMO designs that aren't WoW.
I played EQ a lot for the first few years, but eventually just got tired of all the grinding (and keep in mind I’m referring to the days when EQ still had hell levels). I also played a lot of WoW, but decided that the boring endgame did not justify the work it took to get there. Based on my previous MMO experience, I would pick up any MMO that offered some sort of non-grinding based advancement. Am I reading the devs post correctly if I think that one of his ideas was a server where characters automatically level up over time, regardless of the amount of time spent playing, so that people who have a life can still experience levels 35+?
I played EQ a lot for the first few years, but eventually just got tired of all the grinding (and keep in mind I’m referring to the days when EQ still had hell levels). I also played a lot of WoW, but decided that the boring endgame did not justify the work it took to get there. Based on my previous MMO experience, I would pick up any MMO that offered some sort of non-grinding based advancement. Am I reading the devs post correctly if I think that one of his ideas was a server where characters automatically level up over time, regardless of the amount of time spent playing, so that people who have a life can still experience levels 35+?
In EVE your character still learns skills while you're logged off. I think. Or something.
Whats not to love about casting Fear and DoT+Slow on a mob and watching him run away while your skeleton beats him to bloody death?
I miss those days. WoW Warlocks could do that for a while, but Blizzard nerfed it to shut up the carebears and crybabies
So many hours spent fear kiting on my shadowknight. I felt like such a badass when I could take down giants even though there were necros doing it 4 times as fast 5 levels before me.
I had fun in eq, when I didnt work fulltime and when I had regulars to group with. Then they started merging servers, suddenly you were on a foreign server with refugees from a dozen different ones, and nobody knew anyone outside their guild.
To me, everything after Velious was unnecessary. Except playable frogloks. I didnt play after dragons of norrath though, so whatever.
Kita is basically right about everything in that post, but I would settle for no more XP loss when you die. Also, when I started it was 9.98 a month, they arbitrarily raised the price to $13, charged me 3 months after I had cancelled and uninstalled, and basically told me to go fornicate myself, I'm not getting a refund.
FandyienBut Otto, what about us? Registered Userregular
edited August 2007
Am I one of the few people who actually enjoyed camping? The best MMO I've ever played, hands down, possibly even the most fun I've had in a videogame was in EQOA for the PS2. That was an enormous timesink, but something about that game made it absolutely perfect.
To be honest "camps" wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that I never got a camp. That's why I ended up making a bard on SZ, so I could swarm kite mobs for exp and just train people if they were camping something I actually wanted. Even if I couldn't kill someone they couldn't kill me either and they had little choice but to leave or be aggravated all day long~
48 Ranger with dual SSoY's LFPartner to farm sand giants, PST
Man I remember twinking out a warrior with full crafted and two SSoYs, Hooded Dhampyre Cloak, FBSS, etc. before Kunark.
People fuckin' hated me.
Ahhh loved me the yaks, had one and a bloodclaw stilletto, along with a cloak of flames from naggy.
hated doing the epic quest tho.. not as hard as some of the classes but the ragebringer looked like shit. fear the green dot particle effect.. I blame the thieves den message board for giving that imput on how it should look. Douches .. we want something subtle for the effect.
I'm looking for a group to meet up once or twice a week for a couple hours of grouping good times. The idea being that this way everyone levels together. We roll into a zone, work it for however long, and move on, preferably sticking to the classic with probably Kunark and Velious.
If this sounds like a good time, let us know. So far there's been a little interest but I haven't heard from most of the guys in a couple days so I don't know if they're still interested. BEAST! and I are definitely in so far though.
Posts
I can agree with him, that a longer leveling curve makes for a significantly different (and definitely not worse) experience in an MMO. However, obviously this can be done well or done poorly. The "grind" in EverQuest wasn't as bad when you could find a group right away, immediately delve into a dungeon, sit around for a few hours slaughtering monsters before finding a replacement and gating out. This actually helped the community a ton, because often you'd find the same people at different camps, fostering relationships.
However, it failed, in that a few select classes had unique and necessary roles, making it extremely difficult for other classes to find groups. Like I mentioned earlier, playing a ranger was painful early on, because you were weaker then a warrior in melee and a weaker caster than a druid. While some think that speeding up leveling would alleviate this (and in practice it would, because classes become more balanced and more desirable overall at later levels), I tend to think that rebalancing the lower levels would do the same while still preserving the leveling "experience".
Of course, I see "grinding" in games like World of Warcraft fundamentally different from that in EverQuest, because in the former you do it mostly solo, because groups tend to be filled with idiots. The later had a more mature community, and you had to form groups, so a night of playing was split evenly between killing monsters and socializing. I'm sort of rambling now, aren't I?
I really can't fathom how 20+ hours of camping (with competition) could equate to fun, and that was what some of the more uber gear in EQ required. You had raiding gear too of course, and raiding in EQ was a hell of a lot harder (and not from a grinding standpoint, just from sheer challenge and the organization required) than in WoW, but I seem to remember epic weapons requiring some absurd stuff.
As for WoW, I like the leveling in that because you can solo and do quests to gain levels. That is fun for me. Sure, in EQ you had the solo classes like Druid and Necros for kiting and reverse kiting, but all the other classes had to go through considerably more to solo. (Keeping in mind here I stopped playing right after Planes of Power came out, so things may have changed) You can pretty much solo with anything in WoW.
Although to be honest soloing with a Necro was some of the most fun I've ever had. Reverse kiting was fucking awesome and I haven't played an MMO yet that has something comparable. Whats not to love about casting Fear and DoT+Slow on a mob and watching him run away while your skeleton beats him to bloody death?
"Fuck! I just fell off the boat."
I was so excited when I finally made my way to the firepot room and bound myself there. I felt like a total badass, I never rebound my soul until PoP came out (and I was really disappointed because all that time and effort I spent trying to get there had been wasted).
But oh man. Actually using the thing. So much time was wasted hovering above those combine spikes afraid to go under the water, worried that I might spot that fucking monster. I wasn't even that worried about dieing, just something really freaked me the hell out about maybe seeing him at the bottom.
I bound my soul there once or twice, but wasn't one of the lucky ones who had it there when they made it so you couldn't bind in that zone. That was a real pisser.
On the new progression server myself and some buddies were near the top of the levelling pack and we were by no means super hardcore, we played maybe 6-7 hours a day. Nothing like some of the insane 20 hour kids out there. We just played efficiently, always had our group, and knew how to play our characters.
We hit 50 in under 4 days played and 60 in around 7 days played or so. A pretty decent WoW player would probably hit 60 in around 6-7 days played. The grind really isn't all that bad.
Regardless, the challenge and fun of EQ comes from the inherent combat system itself. Fights are far longer, players live far longer, and everything is balanced around "longer fights." Fighting completely untwinked against a large group of wizards and shamans in Solusek A is ridiculous and one of the most challenging things in the game, probably.
And then there is the death system. Ohhhh, the death system. I used to get beyond angry with it at times when we'd be on completely insane corpse runs, but looking back and after playing WoW and coming back to EQ again I can see why it was so amazing -- that sheer sense of fright. Pulling a mass of mobs was completely intense, we'd do everything we could, utilize every inch of our mana and skills to keep mobs locked down and control everything because we knew that dying would matter. Dying would suck. We did NOT want to die.
What happens in WoW? We just jump off the side in BRD (back when that was new) and jump in the lava for kicks and run around spawning all of the dragon whelps for jokes and no one cares because nothing happens. We just come back with all your stuff and no one cares. It removes that sense of challenge and fear and urgency to succeed.
Raiding was another big reason EQ was challenging. No other game has compared to EQ's raids, and again - is it a smart business plan? Not really, even someone that loved the game as much as I did can't handle the amount of time required anymore. But when you play WoW and feel like you want a little more of a challenge, think about the EQ fights. We got the first Cursed (in Ssra) kill on our server and it was a nonstop fight that took about 90 minutes. 90 minutes of nonstop battling with one monster.
Temple of Veeshan, when it was new, was enormous insane dragon battle after enormous dragon battle and each fight usually lasted over 40 minutes. It was exhilerating, it was intense, and the slightest screwups in mob control or heal rotation 35 minutes in and everything would crumble.
Is WoW a bad game? No. But it has NO WHERE near the challenge that EQ had. Is that bad? Not according to the 20 times more people (or more) that play WoW than ever did EQ. Would they enjoy EQ if they tried it? Probably not.
Is EQ a bad game then? No, it's just a little harder and more unforgiving. It's not the best business plan anymore, and it's not a game I can really stick with again now that I have a real job and a life, but I'll be damned if it wasn't one of the most rewarding MMO experiences I've ever had.
People are wanting half or more of the expansions but without PoK books. Give the transportation back to the druids and wizards (this part I like) but lets keep these vast expanses of game space.
This whole "classic" server idea isn't appealing to enough people for that. In my opinion, it needs to be limited to *only* vanilla EQ. People are going to power game and quit, so what. I thought the whole point of this was to re-live the experience from those classic dungeons. Give everyone Kunark and Velious and how many people are going to bother with upper guk and unrest? I started during Kunark and never saw a group in Unrest. So many of these zones go unused (possibly for a reason) because of too many options. They need to condense and control the population so that the intertwined community comes back.
If the pure vanilla server goes well, open up one with only kunark enabled and allow transfers, or at the very most unlock kunark on the same time table as it was before, after a year.
Maybe I'm just forgetting about overcrowded zones, (hah, moat camps in Karnors....what a waste) but giving out the expansions too soon only creates ghost towns in other zones.
Then you're left with the class balance issue based on expansion though. I know there were comments about Rangers not coming into their own until what, SoL? I know the common joke about a shadowknight's roll in much of ToV was to go feign death in the corner and stand up when it's time to loot.
Enh, maybe it's best left as nostalgia. Those days of being scared shitless during PoF break-ins, and pulling Ice Giants before Vox will never be the same.
Modern WOW raids floor anything EQ had in terms of complexity and skill required.
Sadly, no... But here's a list of what you will get out of Rock Band:
[too much to fit in a sig, thats what]
Some would try to dismiss it as "first MMO syndrome," but I played AC for about a year before I even tried EQ, and even then never really succeeded. (As stated before, highest char was a 52 bard. And btw, speeding around as a bard with some hot drums was probably more fun than anything I did in WoW, lawl.)
I'm sure EQ sucked because I did quit it, but I feel like they built something somehow "better" than what Blizzard did with WoW. WoW never felt like it had any real life in it, it always felt like a bland easily-consumed mash of the crap anyone would eat.
Including me for like 120 days of /played, but I still couldn't tell you why I bothered playing it so much. EQ will have a place in my MMORPG memories, but WoW really doesn't despite playing it for way more time than I did EQ. WoW didn't do anything unique to merit it, I suppose.
Okay, look. You're missing the point of the spell system. EQ doesn't let you cast any of your 400+ spells at any given time for a reason. Ever wonder why Divine Aura and Divine Barrier (cleric invulnerability spells) have 15 minute reuse timers? So that you can't just pop it any given time in a battle. You ahve to decide, in advance to use up two spell slots for those spells, so they're up when you need them.
That's the entire point of the way EQ spells work. You need to balance and adjust them for what you're doing; if you forgot to mem gate when the shit hits the fan, you might be fucked. If your druid doesn't have evac on his spellbar you better not need it, because the 20 seconds or so it takes to pop up is enough time to wipe.
Sure, it sucks when you need to cast 10-12 buffs on yourself, some of which last maybe 30 minutes, tops. But they introduced spellset memorization for that. You mem a set of buffs, cast them, then mem your regular spells and you're off to the races.
Allowing you to cast any spell at any time without memorization would be terrible. It'd overpower certain classes; necros would have access to 5-6 dot lines AND 4 nuke lines AND every one of their utility and pet spells, all at once, which would be just ridiculous. Necros are built around having to pick and choose your dots and nukes so that you can efficiently handle what you're fighting.
If there's anything EverQuest does absolutely 100% correctly, it's the spell memorization system. Players ahve to plan and prepare and strategize to kill efficiently in a group or solo, and it's a direct result of having limited spell options.
You're wrong about everything you've said in this thread, and this is just the most glaring example of how worthless your opinion is when it comes to MMO designs that aren't WoW.
I miss those days. WoW Warlocks could do that for a while, but Blizzard nerfed it to shut up the carebears and crybabies
So many hours spent fear kiting on my shadowknight. I felt like such a badass when I could take down giants even though there were necros doing it 4 times as fast 5 levels before me.
What were those things, 8/22? Remember when that was such a sick ratio?
To me, everything after Velious was unnecessary. Except playable frogloks. I didnt play after dragons of norrath though, so whatever.
Kita is basically right about everything in that post, but I would settle for no more XP loss when you die. Also, when I started it was 9.98 a month, they arbitrarily raised the price to $13, charged me 3 months after I had cancelled and uninstalled, and basically told me to go fornicate myself, I'm not getting a refund.
Man I remember twinking out a warrior with full crafted and two SSoYs, Hooded Dhampyre Cloak, FBSS, etc. before Kunark.
People fuckin' hated me.
EQ was so fun
http://www.notacult.com/?page=stories
So great, even if the rest of the Flowers are kind of meh.
Ahhh loved me the yaks, had one and a bloodclaw stilletto, along with a cloak of flames from naggy.
hated doing the epic quest tho.. not as hard as some of the classes but the ragebringer looked like shit. fear the green dot particle effect.. I blame the thieves den message board for giving that imput on how it should look. Douches .. we want something subtle for the effect.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=35132
I'm looking for a group to meet up once or twice a week for a couple hours of grouping good times. The idea being that this way everyone levels together. We roll into a zone, work it for however long, and move on, preferably sticking to the classic with probably Kunark and Velious.
If this sounds like a good time, let us know. So far there's been a little interest but I haven't heard from most of the guys in a couple days so I don't know if they're still interested. BEAST! and I are definitely in so far though.