You kidding me I loved having no maps, it made playing fun I was the gps for my guild in eq so I remember lots of nights of having to go you need to turn right ahead. I don't Fin care that there is a dragon on that door, turn right $^$#$. It made life fun, and yes EQ will always be one of the best mmo's ever. I'd play it now if my ex roommate had not stripped my characters for one of his alts then forgot all the gear was mine and sold it. I refuse to start over when I have three naked lvl 70's
Wait a second. Why wouldn't you want to start over? I thought the game is the shizzle
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
So force people to download a map online and print it up instead? Thats fun. Looking at a printed up map with pencil notes on it doesn't make the game harder. Just extremely DUMB. Besides, you don't HAVE TO use an ingame map. Just don't press the M key=) No compass or coordinates also doesn't add difficulty. It adds tedium and annoyance, since tracking party member would be a real PITA. Tedium is NOT difficulty. Besides, you can remove the compass in a lot of MMOs with add-ons now. Problem sloved;)
Thats why MMOs evolve. Features people want get added.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Totally agree. People are like water and will take the easiest route. Everquest had the best design. Wow is bittersweet because it brought a ton of attention to the genre but "watered" it down to the point of extreme boredom for anyone not brand new in the mmo market. This is why the wow clones do not work...the best easy mmo around is WoW and no1 will beat it in that genre. Eve online figured this out already. And hopefully Aion did too
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Boring, like fun, is subjective. I wish folks would get this. I personally find ez mode solo quest grinders to be 100% BORING TIME SINKS.
At least EQ had a solid sense of earning and achievement, of exploration and co-op play based community, and of of risk vs reward, which is a lot more then what can be said of just about every post WoW MMORPG.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
And this is why every nearly every MMO that has come out in the last 4-5 years is crap. People don't want to spend the time to level their character, they don't want to have down time where people actually talk to each other, they don't want to have to wait for an item to drop. They want a single player game where everything is easy to get but they can show all the other people playing their own single player games how awesome they are by being the 100,000th person to get uber item X.
I played vanilla WoW and quit to go back to EQ. When BC came out I played for a month or so and quit to go back to FFXI. Earlier this year, I decided to play again. I levelled from 1-80 in a month and a half, raided for a month and a half, and ran out of things to do. That is just poor game design. The only reason I played WoW, and kept going back, was to play with friends I made in EQ. All in all I played WoW actively for a year and a half and have not made one "friend" in that game.
People ask why grouping makes a great MMO. MMO's are supposed to be social games hence why there is a persistent world with persistent characters. These games were designed around people interacting, not just mindlessly killing each other yelling "BOOM headshot!" then going back to running around solo exp grinding.
WoW was the coming of the end for this genre. It took everything that made EQ great, and removed it. It removed fear of death, high valuation of items AS you levelled. Interdependency between people. Meaningful travel. Down time which facilitated talking with your group members. The need to know your class, to manage your mana, to watch your aggro, everything that made the difference between an average player and an outstanding and memorable character in previous MMOs.
To the people who say PVP is the end all and be all of MMO's, why is that? Why is it that PVP is the hallmark of an MMO? What meaningful value does PVP bring to WoW? How does getting ganked, or ganking someone in an online game make it superior to killing a mob, or getting killed by a mob in the same game? It's almost never a skill based PvP system, it's a numbers based system. There is never a fair fight in an MMO, and all you PVP purists who say otherwise are fooling yourselves. Either one person or group out levels the other, or one side has more numbers than the other. No one will enter pvp unless they are assured a win, it's human nature. If you want a pure skills based pvp game, go back to FPS where it is truly an even playing field. MMO's are not the forum for such activities.
In conclussion, EQ was awesome, WoW is lame, Square-Enix is now getting my $$
Sorry in advance for the long post, but I wholeheartedly agree with the OP. Everything that made EQ hard made it great.
I /palmface at the current generation of MMO player who are like "I just want to kill stuff and get loot". Well WTF, if your looking for instant gratification you should be playing an FPS. MMO's like EQ were designed to be played for years, not max level in a couple months. Gamers like these have ruined the MMO genre, think the barrens in WOW. The devs totally dumbed down everything to easy mode to appeal to the short attention span masses. Most WOW players probably don't even realize they are playing a very dumbed down easy-mode EQ.
The death penalty was no big deal. If you weren't a reckless idiot you didn't die much. However you REALLY cared if you died in that game, because it meant something. You would sneak through a zone praying your invisibility didn't pop because you knew you would be running back naked if it did. You were actually scared of dieing! Ever remember being scared of dieing in any game? EQ's the only one I can think of. You could lose your corpse and might even need a full group to recover it. EQ was the only game I ever played where being reckless had repercussions. In modern MMO's you can just go anywhere you want knowing that when you get killed you'll just appear back at you bindpoint no worse for wear. Players exploit this as a teleport nowadays.
The lack of maps and HUD's was great. You had to actually explore and memorize zones. HUD's are for flight sims as far as I'm concerned. If people can't learn a zone by sight their not a very good gamer IMO.
The mixed level mobs in zones was a great design. This forced you to pay attention to your surroundings and watch you back. This also got higher level players to hang in the zones to help the newbies and it promoted socializing between levels. Just hanging out at the docks in Ro protecting newbies from the specters and giants that were drug there was very rewarding socially and fun. I got experience, made friends, and maybe recruited a newbie player for the guild. The whole world was dangerous, there were no safe areas. Even in you own city different factions might hate you and attack.
I loved that mobs never forgot you till you zoned. That really made people pay attention to their aggro management. That was funny stuff when some mob would drag a bunch of his friends to your group because someone in your group aggroed him 20 minutes ago.
No MMO to date has had a wider variety of skillsets then some of the EQ classes had. Sure the melees were boring but the casters were awesome. My Druid could DD, root-rot, kite with DD'd or DOTS', charm kite, AE kite, fear kite, combo melee-pet-spells. Bards and Necros also had a wide variety of ways of dealing with a situation. There were so many different ways of doing things. The crowd control was great in EQ the way you could manipulate the size of the mobs agro radious or completely mez them.
None of the things I mentioned killed EQ. What killed them was difficulty for some classes to solo at high levels and too much focus on raiders. Although if you like raiding no MMO to date has done it better then EQ. Their world also got too big, spreading the playerbase too thin. I would still play EQ but the graphics are just too dated, I'm an SLI kinda guy. I swear though if SOE could do something like the original EQ with modern graphics they would be number one again. I do believe there are plenty of MMO players looking for a challenge and who are sick of dumbed down for the masses easymode MMO's. That's why people hop from MMO to MMO so much anymore. Their too easy which lessens any sense of accomplishment and makes them boring. I totally miss the fear of death, anxiety, and sense of accomplishment EQ had. The only MMO's that were actually challenging and innovative since EQ were SWG pre CU and EVE. Everything else is just dumbed down EQ with different graphics.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging. Yes it is because you needed someone to keep you safe.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging. Agree
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind) Yes it is, and very challenging. Obviously you don't know the implications that CR brought to the game.
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging. Agree, but it's part of the whole hardcore system. This means, if you are a priest, you are a priest and hardly will be anyhing else. In modern games, if you are a priest, half of the party have also a priest alt, so you are nothing special, and you have a warrior alt, so the warrior is not special. If it takes a lot of time to be something, then you are commited to that class.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes. Agree. But one thing does not deny the other.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
actually mapless raids/ dungeon sound fan..it is a dungeon after all.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
actually mapless raids/ dungeon sound fan..it is a dungeon after all.
but no world maps sucks ballz
I agree it "sucks ballz" for the kind of people that would say "sucks ballz" as an argument.
Maps don't cover everything that explorers might know. Location of mobs/rare mobs. Resources, quests ... Depending on the map, these may or may not be on there.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
thats why if you read all we wrote about,i said do a seperate server those like me who wants its less easy mode (meaning no in -game map,no coord,no compass craftabable end game item,no add-on i might forget some but you get the idea)
and you would get the server you always wanted full of toy
that way everybodys happy
can it be done i dont know but having ,rp server,pvp server,barebone server not limit would make a nice adition i believe
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
And this is why every nearly every MMO that has come out in the last 4-5 years is crap. People don't want to spend the time to level their character, they don't want to have down time where people actually talk to each other, they don't want to have to wait for an item to drop. They want a single player game where everything is easy to get but they can show all the other people playing their own single player games how awesome they are by being the 100,000th person to get uber item X.
I played vanilla WoW and quit to go back to EQ. When BC came out I played for a month or so and quit to go back to FFXI. Earlier this year, I decided to play again. I levelled from 1-80 in a month and a half, raided for a month and a half, and ran out of things to do. That is just poor game design. The only reason I played WoW, and kept going back, was to play with friends I made in EQ. All in all I played WoW actively for a year and a half and have not made one "friend" in that game.
People ask why grouping makes a great MMO. MMO's are supposed to be social games hence why there is a persistent world with persistent characters. These games were designed around people interacting, not just mindlessly killing each other yelling "BOOM headshot!" then going back to running around solo exp grinding.
WoW was the coming of the end for this genre. It took everything that made EQ great, and removed it. It removed fear of death, high valuation of items AS you levelled. Interdependency between people. Meaningful travel. Down time which facilitated talking with your group members. The need to know your class, to manage your mana, to watch your aggro, everything that made the difference between an average player and an outstanding and memorable character in previous MMOs.
To the people who say PVP is the end all and be all of MMO's, why is that? Why is it that PVP is the hallmark of an MMO? What meaningful value does PVP bring to WoW? How does getting ganked, or ganking someone in an online game make it superior to killing a mob, or getting killed by a mob in the same game? It's almost never a skill based PvP system, it's a numbers based system. There is never a fair fight in an MMO, and all you PVP purists who say otherwise are fooling yourselves. Either one person or group out levels the other, or one side has more numbers than the other. No one will enter pvp unless they are assured a win, it's human nature. If you want a pure skills based pvp game, go back to FPS where it is truly an even playing field. MMO's are not the forum for such activities.
In conclussion, EQ was awesome, WoW is lame, Square-Enix is now getting my $$
Thank you and good night.
Eondil Ebonmist - The Tribunal (EQ)
Elenim - Shiva (FFXI)
Mewt - Steamwheedle Cartel (WoW)
dont try!i ve been trying to explain it to some of them but most never had say eq1 eprience and i dont mean the bog era i mean when player had it hard for various reason.lot want free-realm but wrapped in wow shell ,i dont mind that
but can the player that want to search a bit etc have lets say a barebone server a la eq1 (not the bug mind you lol)
Sorry in advance for the long post, but I wholeheartedly agree with the OP. Everything that made EQ hard made it great. I /palmface at the current generation of MMO player who are like "I just want to kill stuff and get loot". Well WTF, if your looking for instant gratification you should be playing an FPS. MMO's like EQ were designed to be played for years, not max level in a couple months. Gamers like these have ruined the MMO genre, think the barrens in WOW. The devs totally dumbed down everything to easy mode to appeal to the short attention span masses. Most WOW players probably don't even realize they are playing a very dumbed down easy-mode EQ. The death penalty was no big deal. If you weren't a reckless idiot you didn't die much. However you REALLY cared if you died in that game, because it meant something. You would sneak through a zone praying your invisibility didn't pop because you knew you would be running back naked if it did. You were actually scared of dieing! Ever remember being scared of dieing in any game? EQ's the only one I can think of. You could lose your corpse and might even need a full group to recover it. EQ was the only game I ever played where being reckless had repercussions. In modern MMO's you can just go anywhere you want knowing that when you get killed you'll just appear back at you bindpoint no worse for wear. Players exploit this as a teleport nowadays. The lack of maps and HUD's was great. You had to actually explore and memorize zones. HUD's are for flight sims as far as I'm concerned. If people can't learn a zone by sight their not a very good gamer IMO. The mixed level mobs in zones was a great design. This forced you to pay attention to your surroundings and watch you back. This also got higher level players to hang in the zones to help the newbies and it promoted socializing between levels. Just hanging out at the docks in Ro protecting newbies from the specters and giants that were drug there was very rewarding socially and fun. I got experience, made friends, and maybe recruited a newbie player for the guild. The whole world was dangerous, there were no safe areas. Even in you own city different factions might hate you and attack. I loved that mobs never forgot you till you zoned. That really made people pay attention to their aggro management. That was funny stuff when some mob would drag a bunch of his friends to your group because someone in your group aggroed him 20 minutes ago. No MMO to date has had a wider variety of skillsets then some of the EQ classes had. Sure the melees were boring but the casters were awesome. My Druid could DD, root-rot, kite with DD'd or DOTS', charm kite, AE kite, fear kite, combo melee-pet-spells. Bards and Necros also had a wide variety of ways of dealing with a situation. There were so many different ways of doing things. The crowd control was great in EQ the way you could manipulate the size of the mobs agro radious or completely mez them. None of the things I mentioned killed EQ. What killed them was difficulty for some classes to solo at high levels and too much focus on raiders. Although if you like raiding no MMO to date has done it better then EQ. Their world also got too big, spreading the playerbase too thin. I would still play EQ but the graphics are just too dated, I'm an SLI kinda guy. I swear though if SOE could do something like the original EQ with modern graphics they would be number one again. I do believe there are plenty of MMO players looking for a challenge and who are sick of dumbed down for the masses easymode MMO's. That's why people hop from MMO to MMO so much anymore. Their too easy which lessens any sense of accomplishment and makes them boring. I totally miss the fear of death, anxiety, and sense of accomplishment EQ had. The only MMO's that were actually challenging and innovative since EQ were SWG pre CU and EVE. Everything else is just dumbed down EQ with different graphics. I still await the next challenging MMO.
mm soe could probably bring eq1 graphic up to date with 09 often gcard do lot of stuff it self like i use mgcard to process eq2 graphic cause the suplied graphic is regular but by replacing all with my gcrard graphic are lush.and since most game are nvidia friendly i bet if they called nvidia to change some code to what would be needed so that nvidia card could replace the graphic we would have nice graphic without too much work from soe or nvidia
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
Apparently "many of us" is not many enough. There is nothing you can do. The trend is to have MMOs that are more fun & less boring.
I *am* LOLing & playing modern MMO .. voting with my wallet. Sue me.
Everquest was a great game, but it was great for many reasons other than it actually being the best mmo design.
It existed in a period of time that was somehow different than what we have now. Spoiler sites had not yet ruined all the mystery in the games. There was no manual or descriptions to explain what anything did in the game, so the community had to band together to figure it out on class forums, etc. The majority of the players were all from the same demographic and shared similar tastes. Spending 6 hours online sitting in the same spot of a dungeon was acceptable, because players didn't know any better. I would never call that brilliant game design, but it was fun back in the day.
I will always have great memories of how things were back then, but the game was such an extreme I would never want to go through it again. All the great memories don't hide how the game design fostered such a poisonous and bilefilled community and the aggrivation the mechanics of the game caused. Everquest is really a very flawed game design wise if you really look at it. It was so much fun, because it was so new and different and the people involved were on the cutting edge of the genre.
Todays mmo market is just the pendulum swinging to the opposite extreme of what original EQ offered. Eventually things will swing back and the two styles will blend into something much better than either extreme. If we all are lucky the market will offer games of both extremes AND a blend of the two so there are options for people of every playstyle.
And this is why every nearly every MMO that has come out in the last 4-5 years is crap. People don't want to spend the time to level their character, they don't want to have down time where people actually talk to each other, they don't want to have to wait for an item to drop. They want a single player game where everything is easy to get but they can show all the other people playing their own single player games how awesome they are by being the 100,000th person to get uber item X.
Crap for you. Fun for a lot more peole.
I can't believe people defend down time. If you think staring at a spell book is gameplay, i think a wall will just be fine. Thank you developers are not listening to people you. Even SOE changed that staring at the spell book thing.
Current Gen MMO players just can't handle being challenged every step of the way.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
actually mapless raids/ dungeon sound fan..it is a dungeon after all.
but no world maps sucks ballz
I agree it "sucks ballz" for the kind of people that would say "sucks ballz" as an argument.
I think most of the people that really dug EQ weren't aware of the options at the time.
I was one of the first to play EQ. I loved the environment, the chick toons and the potential that the game hit me with. Some of the long runs and prolonged/dangerous explorations were fun and the isolation/non-combat time did contribute to a sense of immersion in the world or whatever. But I hated the class arrangements and the melee system and the game's idea of 'fairness' (warriors in pvp for ex).
If you want cooperative, try WoW arenas or BGs. Those aren't necessarily the be-all/end-all but they blow away anything in EQ in terms of team play (which has NOTHING to do with "Massively multiplayer" unless you want to call counterstrike a MMO but that's another argument).
Comments
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
Wait a second. Why wouldn't you want to start over? I thought the game is the shizzle
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
So force people to download a map online and print it up instead? Thats fun. Looking at a printed up map with pencil notes on it doesn't make the game harder. Just extremely DUMB. Besides, you don't HAVE TO use an ingame map. Just don't press the M key=) No compass or coordinates also doesn't add difficulty. It adds tedium and annoyance, since tracking party member would be a real PITA. Tedium is NOT difficulty. Besides, you can remove the compass in a lot of MMOs with add-ons now. Problem sloved;)
Thats why MMOs evolve. Features people want get added.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Totally agree. People are like water and will take the easiest route. Everquest had the best design. Wow is bittersweet because it brought a ton of attention to the genre but "watered" it down to the point of extreme boredom for anyone not brand new in the mmo market. This is why the wow clones do not work...the best easy mmo around is WoW and no1 will beat it in that genre. Eve online figured this out already. And hopefully Aion did too
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Boring, like fun, is subjective. I wish folks would get this. I personally find ez mode solo quest grinders to be 100% BORING TIME SINKS.
At least EQ had a solid sense of earning and achievement, of exploration and co-op play based community, and of of risk vs reward, which is a lot more then what can be said of just about every post WoW MMORPG.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
And this is why every nearly every MMO that has come out in the last 4-5 years is crap. People don't want to spend the time to level their character, they don't want to have down time where people actually talk to each other, they don't want to have to wait for an item to drop. They want a single player game where everything is easy to get but they can show all the other people playing their own single player games how awesome they are by being the 100,000th person to get uber item X.
I played vanilla WoW and quit to go back to EQ. When BC came out I played for a month or so and quit to go back to FFXI. Earlier this year, I decided to play again. I levelled from 1-80 in a month and a half, raided for a month and a half, and ran out of things to do. That is just poor game design. The only reason I played WoW, and kept going back, was to play with friends I made in EQ. All in all I played WoW actively for a year and a half and have not made one "friend" in that game.
People ask why grouping makes a great MMO. MMO's are supposed to be social games hence why there is a persistent world with persistent characters. These games were designed around people interacting, not just mindlessly killing each other yelling "BOOM headshot!" then going back to running around solo exp grinding.
WoW was the coming of the end for this genre. It took everything that made EQ great, and removed it. It removed fear of death, high valuation of items AS you levelled. Interdependency between people. Meaningful travel. Down time which facilitated talking with your group members. The need to know your class, to manage your mana, to watch your aggro, everything that made the difference between an average player and an outstanding and memorable character in previous MMOs.
To the people who say PVP is the end all and be all of MMO's, why is that? Why is it that PVP is the hallmark of an MMO? What meaningful value does PVP bring to WoW? How does getting ganked, or ganking someone in an online game make it superior to killing a mob, or getting killed by a mob in the same game? It's almost never a skill based PvP system, it's a numbers based system. There is never a fair fight in an MMO, and all you PVP purists who say otherwise are fooling yourselves. Either one person or group out levels the other, or one side has more numbers than the other. No one will enter pvp unless they are assured a win, it's human nature. If you want a pure skills based pvp game, go back to FPS where it is truly an even playing field. MMO's are not the forum for such activities.
In conclussion, EQ was awesome, WoW is lame, Square-Enix is now getting my $$
Thank you and good night.
Eondil Ebonmist - The Tribunal (EQ)
Elenim - Shiva (FFXI)
Mewt - Steamwheedle Cartel (WoW)
Sorry in advance for the long post, but I wholeheartedly agree with the OP. Everything that made EQ hard made it great.
I /palmface at the current generation of MMO player who are like "I just want to kill stuff and get loot". Well WTF, if your looking for instant gratification you should be playing an FPS. MMO's like EQ were designed to be played for years, not max level in a couple months. Gamers like these have ruined the MMO genre, think the barrens in WOW. The devs totally dumbed down everything to easy mode to appeal to the short attention span masses. Most WOW players probably don't even realize they are playing a very dumbed down easy-mode EQ.
The death penalty was no big deal. If you weren't a reckless idiot you didn't die much. However you REALLY cared if you died in that game, because it meant something. You would sneak through a zone praying your invisibility didn't pop because you knew you would be running back naked if it did. You were actually scared of dieing! Ever remember being scared of dieing in any game? EQ's the only one I can think of. You could lose your corpse and might even need a full group to recover it. EQ was the only game I ever played where being reckless had repercussions. In modern MMO's you can just go anywhere you want knowing that when you get killed you'll just appear back at you bindpoint no worse for wear. Players exploit this as a teleport nowadays.
The lack of maps and HUD's was great. You had to actually explore and memorize zones. HUD's are for flight sims as far as I'm concerned. If people can't learn a zone by sight their not a very good gamer IMO.
The mixed level mobs in zones was a great design. This forced you to pay attention to your surroundings and watch you back. This also got higher level players to hang in the zones to help the newbies and it promoted socializing between levels. Just hanging out at the docks in Ro protecting newbies from the specters and giants that were drug there was very rewarding socially and fun. I got experience, made friends, and maybe recruited a newbie player for the guild. The whole world was dangerous, there were no safe areas. Even in you own city different factions might hate you and attack.
I loved that mobs never forgot you till you zoned. That really made people pay attention to their aggro management. That was funny stuff when some mob would drag a bunch of his friends to your group because someone in your group aggroed him 20 minutes ago.
No MMO to date has had a wider variety of skillsets then some of the EQ classes had. Sure the melees were boring but the casters were awesome. My Druid could DD, root-rot, kite with DD'd or DOTS', charm kite, AE kite, fear kite, combo melee-pet-spells. Bards and Necros also had a wide variety of ways of dealing with a situation. There were so many different ways of doing things. The crowd control was great in EQ the way you could manipulate the size of the mobs agro radious or completely mez them.
None of the things I mentioned killed EQ. What killed them was difficulty for some classes to solo at high levels and too much focus on raiders. Although if you like raiding no MMO to date has done it better then EQ. Their world also got too big, spreading the playerbase too thin. I would still play EQ but the graphics are just too dated, I'm an SLI kinda guy. I swear though if SOE could do something like the original EQ with modern graphics they would be number one again. I do believe there are plenty of MMO players looking for a challenge and who are sick of dumbed down for the masses easymode MMO's. That's why people hop from MMO to MMO so much anymore. Their too easy which lessens any sense of accomplishment and makes them boring. I totally miss the fear of death, anxiety, and sense of accomplishment EQ had. The only MMO's that were actually challenging and innovative since EQ were SWG pre CU and EVE. Everything else is just dumbed down EQ with different graphics.
I still await the next challenging MMO.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
I think you are mistaken WoW for a game that is hard.
A raid may not kill a hard-mode boss the first time around, give it TIME and they do it.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging. Yes it is because you needed someone to keep you safe.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging. Agree
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind) Yes it is, and very challenging. Obviously you don't know the implications that CR brought to the game.
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging. Agree, but it's part of the whole hardcore system. This means, if you are a priest, you are a priest and hardly will be anyhing else. In modern games, if you are a priest, half of the party have also a priest alt, so you are nothing special, and you have a warrior alt, so the warrior is not special. If it takes a lot of time to be something, then you are commited to that class.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes. Agree. But one thing does not deny the other.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
actually mapless raids/ dungeon sound fan..it is a dungeon after all.
but no world maps sucks ballz
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
actually mapless raids/ dungeon sound fan..it is a dungeon after all.
but no world maps sucks ballz
I agree it "sucks ballz" for the kind of people that would say "sucks ballz" as an argument.
Explorers usually don't have a map I think, otherwise they wouldn't be called explorers.
Again if you don't like to explore then you want a map.
Maps don't cover everything that explorers might know. Location of mobs/rare mobs. Resources, quests ... Depending on the map, these may or may not be on there.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
thats why if you read all we wrote about,i said do a seperate server those like me who wants its less easy mode (meaning no in -game map,no coord,no compass craftabable end game item,no add-on i might forget some but you get the idea)
and you would get the server you always wanted full of toy
that way everybodys happy
can it be done i dont know but having ,rp server,pvp server,barebone server not limit would make a nice adition i believe
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
And this is why every nearly every MMO that has come out in the last 4-5 years is crap. People don't want to spend the time to level their character, they don't want to have down time where people actually talk to each other, they don't want to have to wait for an item to drop. They want a single player game where everything is easy to get but they can show all the other people playing their own single player games how awesome they are by being the 100,000th person to get uber item X.
I played vanilla WoW and quit to go back to EQ. When BC came out I played for a month or so and quit to go back to FFXI. Earlier this year, I decided to play again. I levelled from 1-80 in a month and a half, raided for a month and a half, and ran out of things to do. That is just poor game design. The only reason I played WoW, and kept going back, was to play with friends I made in EQ. All in all I played WoW actively for a year and a half and have not made one "friend" in that game.
People ask why grouping makes a great MMO. MMO's are supposed to be social games hence why there is a persistent world with persistent characters. These games were designed around people interacting, not just mindlessly killing each other yelling "BOOM headshot!" then going back to running around solo exp grinding.
WoW was the coming of the end for this genre. It took everything that made EQ great, and removed it. It removed fear of death, high valuation of items AS you levelled. Interdependency between people. Meaningful travel. Down time which facilitated talking with your group members. The need to know your class, to manage your mana, to watch your aggro, everything that made the difference between an average player and an outstanding and memorable character in previous MMOs.
To the people who say PVP is the end all and be all of MMO's, why is that? Why is it that PVP is the hallmark of an MMO? What meaningful value does PVP bring to WoW? How does getting ganked, or ganking someone in an online game make it superior to killing a mob, or getting killed by a mob in the same game? It's almost never a skill based PvP system, it's a numbers based system. There is never a fair fight in an MMO, and all you PVP purists who say otherwise are fooling yourselves. Either one person or group out levels the other, or one side has more numbers than the other. No one will enter pvp unless they are assured a win, it's human nature. If you want a pure skills based pvp game, go back to FPS where it is truly an even playing field. MMO's are not the forum for such activities.
In conclussion, EQ was awesome, WoW is lame, Square-Enix is now getting my $$
Thank you and good night.
Eondil Ebonmist - The Tribunal (EQ)
Elenim - Shiva (FFXI)
Mewt - Steamwheedle Cartel (WoW)
dont try!i ve been trying to explain it to some of them but most never had say eq1 eprience and i dont mean the bog era i mean when player had it hard for various reason.lot want free-realm but wrapped in wow shell ,i dont mind that
but can the player that want to search a bit etc have lets say a barebone server a la eq1 (not the bug mind you lol)
mm soe could probably bring eq1 graphic up to date with 09 often gcard do lot of stuff it self like i use mgcard to process eq2 graphic cause the suplied graphic is regular but by replacing all with my gcrard graphic are lush.and since most game are nvidia friendly i bet if they called nvidia to change some code to what would be needed so that nvidia card could replace the graphic we would have nice graphic without too much work from soe or nvidia
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
Apparently "many of us" is not many enough. There is nothing you can do. The trend is to have MMOs that are more fun & less boring.
I *am* LOLing & playing modern MMO .. voting with my wallet. Sue me.
Everquest was a great game, but it was great for many reasons other than it actually being the best mmo design.
It existed in a period of time that was somehow different than what we have now. Spoiler sites had not yet ruined all the mystery in the games. There was no manual or descriptions to explain what anything did in the game, so the community had to band together to figure it out on class forums, etc. The majority of the players were all from the same demographic and shared similar tastes. Spending 6 hours online sitting in the same spot of a dungeon was acceptable, because players didn't know any better. I would never call that brilliant game design, but it was fun back in the day.
I will always have great memories of how things were back then, but the game was such an extreme I would never want to go through it again. All the great memories don't hide how the game design fostered such a poisonous and bilefilled community and the aggrivation the mechanics of the game caused. Everquest is really a very flawed game design wise if you really look at it. It was so much fun, because it was so new and different and the people involved were on the cutting edge of the genre.
Todays mmo market is just the pendulum swinging to the opposite extreme of what original EQ offered. Eventually things will swing back and the two styles will blend into something much better than either extreme. If we all are lucky the market will offer games of both extremes AND a blend of the two so there are options for people of every playstyle.
And this is why every nearly every MMO that has come out in the last 4-5 years is crap. People don't want to spend the time to level their character, they don't want to have down time where people actually talk to each other, they don't want to have to wait for an item to drop. They want a single player game where everything is easy to get but they can show all the other people playing their own single player games how awesome they are by being the 100,000th person to get uber item X.
Crap for you. Fun for a lot more peole.
I can't believe people defend down time. If you think staring at a spell book is gameplay, i think a wall will just be fine. Thank you developers are not listening to people you. Even SOE changed that staring at the spell book thing.
Adversity breeds community. Hardly a revelation.
You are confused between challenging and BORING TIME SINK.
Sitting down 10 min staring at a spellbook waiting for mana to regen is NOT challenging.
Camping waiting 30 min to get a shot at a boss is NOT challenging.
Harsh death penalty is NOT challenging. (just more grind)
Requiring a player to play straight 6-10hrs to achieve something is NOT challenging.
Example of challenging:
Hard-mode boss fight that is unforgiven on mistakes.
for me when i say hard , i mean just this
no map,no add-on craftable compass,no coord thats just it the rest is finae as it is but with just those i mentionned i can say it would make game way more fun
LOL .. that is not hard. That is freaking boring. Anyone with half a brain can read a compass and draw maps but why would i want to do that? If i want to draw maps, i would become a cartographer.
I play MMO RP GAMES to kill stuff & get good loot. I don't want a navigation game. Just make the encounters interesting with different challenge levels. It is pointless & boring spending hours trying to get to where you are going. It is more fun to jump in and start the encounters.
Imagine a group going to a dungeon. First you got to ask if someone in the group knows the how to get there. Probably boring to you but it's really a nice thing, needing people's knowledge to get somewhere. Then you got to get the group together. Probably some people have to go help others to lead their way / fight the mobs to the meedting point. Then when the group is together, make sure the nobody goes astray during the trip. All this is probably boring and a nuissance to you, but it added a lot to the game for many of us.
So go away with your LOLS and your encounters and play some shitty single player MMO thanks.
actually mapless raids/ dungeon sound fan..it is a dungeon after all.
but no world maps sucks ballz
I agree it "sucks ballz" for the kind of people that would say "sucks ballz" as an argument.
sorry im not 1337 enough oh great one.
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
I think most of the people that really dug EQ weren't aware of the options at the time.
I was one of the first to play EQ. I loved the environment, the chick toons and the potential that the game hit me with. Some of the long runs and prolonged/dangerous explorations were fun and the isolation/non-combat time did contribute to a sense of immersion in the world or whatever. But I hated the class arrangements and the melee system and the game's idea of 'fairness' (warriors in pvp for ex).
If you want cooperative, try WoW arenas or BGs. Those aren't necessarily the be-all/end-all but they blow away anything in EQ in terms of team play (which has NOTHING to do with "Massively multiplayer" unless you want to call counterstrike a MMO but that's another argument).