We have long discussed on here the relative merits of the themepark, but I am asking is it now dead? With the selling of gameplay for cash, gear for cash and the lottery gambling we need a new name for these games.
The Cashpark is what I am suggesting as that is what they have become. We used to complain about themeparks being on rails, the small worlds and so on. But now its not about the ride, its all about what you will pay. This has always been there in F2P of course, it is not new. But now it is so in your face, themparks have just become an advert for their cash shop.
It used to be a question of gaming ethos, what makes a good game and is there something anti-gaming about cash shops. Now the game is the cash shop, the themepark is just bit of dressing up to disguise that. There always were to an extant but now they are all but naked in the display of their wares. The sandbox gets no free card here, it can be just as deserving of a new name like the Cashbox.
You may well say, 'but we can play for free', it is that sort of thinking which has lead to subpar games which exploit gamers. Games which are becoming more like fruit machines you can't win every year.
And this leads to the likes of a 15 year old boy spending $46,700 on a game and he is hardly the first. You can't do that with P2P:
You're confusing a genre with a payment model. Theme park is a genre, not a payment model. Hell anything, and I do mean anything, can have hidden fees associated with it. Unlimited data? Unlimited Texting? Free nationwide calling? All of these things are not truly what they say. Caveat Emptor.
F2P is indeed F2P. You don't have to buy a Patrons pass, purchase run speed, et al. The game itself is free, you are choosing to play it on a different level, for which there is a fee. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you can't play a game for free to the same degree that you can for money. Some people have issue with this, others don't.
Don't delude yourself into thinking a subscription game frees you of such nickel and diming either... they have just as many opportunities to get you to pay more just like any other payment model. Some people spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on cosmetic items... things that have nothing at all to do with character progression... above and beyond their subscription fee. This is a personal choice. You have the freedom to do so. That's why it exists. That's why it will only get bigger as time goes on. Used to be no one purchased anything over the internet... now it's the predominant shopping model. Times change, expect your games to change right along with them.
If it's ded, give it more money and see if that rezzes it.... if that don't work, loot the corpse.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
If anything cash shops are a much bigger threat to sandboxes, will people still want to compete in the economy or the territorial control game when it may be possible to just buy huge advantages with real money? At least in themepark only PVP is really directly competitive. In sandbox you're competing with someone most of the time you're in the game.
You're preaching to the choir with me about cash shops but there's enough whale suckers out there that I don't expect companies to abandon this business model unless the average MMO gamer wakes up and refuses to put up with it anymore.
Also I don't think themeparks are dead but there's just a glut of them on the market right now. Hopefully we won't see any new themeparks until some of the current ones shut down (at least WoW clone themeparks. I suppose other types of themeparks are possible).
Everything is cyclical. When I started playing MMO's it seemed everything out was 'do what you want to do' starting from UO. Yea, there was EQ but it's nothing like Theme Park MMO's of today.
Once WoW hit it big most company's tried to copy its success; so for the past 10 years everything has been the same. If you read or watch any sort of MMO news, you seem to be seeing anything being developed is going 'sandbox' rather than Theme Park.
The popular TP mmo's out now will continue to be around until their company shuts them down, but it seems like anything coming out in the next few years or so will not follow the 'WoW model'.
And once that get tiresome I'm sure will start seeing new Theme Park mmo's.
Originally posted by boxsnd A better question would be: Was the themepark ever alive? WIth one success (WoW), one barely alive (FFXIV) and hundreds of failures I would say no.
Dude seriously what planet do you live on?
First of all FFXIV is not "barely alive". It is a huge success and one of the most populated mmos out there. And I can easily count more than 5 successful theme park right now.
1. Everquest 1
2. WoW
3. FFXIV
4. FFXI
5. Swtor
6. Gw2
7. Teso
And wth even Everquest 2, Rift, Lotro, Tera, Aion and many others.. Each one of them are successful mmos. Top 7 games that I counted are games which didn't gave up their payment methods and still became a success. I know that Swtor turned f2p. But it is actually still a p2p game. You can't play it as a f2p player. It is like a trial or something. I don't like it as a game personally but I can accept its success. It is still a p2p game with a huge playerbase. And everquest 1 is an exception. I don't think I need to explain why...
A better question would be: Was the sandbox ever alive? Because I never seen an mmo except Ultima, Eve and Darkfall UW became a success. Don't tell me ArcheAge please... I don't wanna laugh with my ass right now.
You might not like the theme park genre but you HAVE TO ACCEPT its success.
MMO payment models will keep evolving, just as they have since MMO's first appeared. Players may play games with terrible Cash Shop implementations, but as soon as some developer launches a good game with a more attractive revenue model, players will embrace it.
What makes you think there is a good microtransaction model?
Lets look at cash shops as a spectrum. I think it is pretty obvious that on one end is the term free and the other end is the term expensive. Developers and gamers want microtransaction games to fall on opposite ends of this spectrum, and placing the game somewhere in the middle leads to trust issues with players.
Originally posted by boxsnd A better question would be: Was the themepark ever alive? WIth one success (WoW), one barely alive (FFXIV) and hundreds of failures I would say no.
Barely alive? The last official numbers had FFXIV at 1.5 million subs and climbing.
While the MMORPG graveyard is filled with failed themeparks, it also has lots of successes. WoW and FFXIV, obviously but Rift seems to be doing well and while LotRO is on the decline, it's also been running for almost ten years at this point. There's also lesser known games like Wizard101 and Pirate101 that are both themeparks and both doing well (though catering to a different demographic).
Saying themeparks were never alive is borderline trolling.
Originally posted by boxsnd A better question would be: Was the themepark ever alive? WIth one success (WoW), one barely alive (FFXIV) and hundreds of failures I would say no.
Barely alive? The last official numbers had FFXIV at 1.5 million subs and climbing.
While the MMORPG graveyard is filled with failed themeparks, it also has lots of successes. WoW and FFXIV, obviously but Rift seems to be doing well and while LotRO is on the decline, it's also been running for almost ten years at this point. There's also lesser known games like Wizard101 and Pirate101 that are both themeparks and both doing well (though catering to a different demographic).
Saying themeparks were never alive is borderline trolling.
The ratio of successful to failed themeparks is very close to 0. If anyone in this thread is trolling it's the people claiming ESO, Rift, Aion, TERA etc. are successful games.
Originally posted by boxsnd Originally posted by dreamscaperOriginally posted by boxsndA better question would be: Was the themepark ever alive? WIth one success (WoW), one barely alive (FFXIV) and hundreds of failures I would say no.
Barely alive? The last official numbers had FFXIV at 1.5 million subs and climbing.While the MMORPG graveyard is filled with failed themeparks, it also has lots of successes. WoW and FFXIV, obviously but Rift seems to be doing well and while LotRO is on the decline, it's also been running for almost ten years at this point. There's also lesser known games like Wizard101 and Pirate101 that are both themeparks and both doing well (though catering to a different demographic).Saying themeparks were never alive is borderline trolling.The ratio of successful to failed themeparks is very close to 0. If anyone in this thread is trolling it's the people claiming ESO, Rift, Aion, TERA etc. are successful games.
Yes they are successful.
These games still got a very healthy population, still getting new content all the time and the companies earn enough money from them.
So what is the problem here? Non of these games needs to be a WoW killer to become successful.
We're not talking about that they're good or not. We're talking about the success rate here. And if they can make reasonable profits for their companies, It is a success.
Like it or not, this is the reality. Sorry but this what you're doing here is pure trolling.
Themeparks are not dead, and they will never die. there are to many people out there who like to have their hand held and like easy games, themeparks will allways be around.
as for myself i will never touch another themepark again, they are all the same and just way to damn easy.
The fact is that so many other genres give you the themepark experience better, faster and cheaper than these big, clumsy, staff-heavy and expensive MMOs really can. Action/Adventure has gotten much, much better in recent years; a lot have multiplayer capability and avatar customization. Modding keeps games like Skyrim fresh. And multiplayer options in games like Minecraft means that MMOs no longer have a deadlock on things like persistant worlds. If anything, MMOs have proven themselves to lack persistence, as any long time fan of CoH, SWG or WAR will tell you.
Sandbox might still have a chance, but themepark is like a battleship at the dawn of World War II...they are still big and impressive, and there are still designs on the books that are in the process of getting laid down, but they seem to be more trouble than they are worth as other options look more viable.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Hey this is easy....NO, themeparks are not dead, they are the number 1 money makers in the mmo industry.
Originally posted by laokoko "if you want to be a game designer, you should sell your house and fund your game. Since if you won't even fund your own game, no one will".
The vocal people on forums wanting sandboxes may make it seem like it's dead but most people are too busy playing their favorite theme-parked mmo to bother posting. Only a tiny portion of player populations are on forums (Except when the server is DOWN!)
Meanwhile, sandbox games being made by indies get little support by the playerbase and generally fail, so themepark-style is mostly where it's at still in the mmo world. The big name companies do themeparks, because that's more like the style of game on consoles and so where the biggest player base is and therefore the most potential earnings for the company.
EQ wasn't a themepark in any shape or form. Why people say this makes no sense to anyone who played it.
You had a handful of quests in the beginning, and 99% of your time was spent exploring and grinding. EQ couldn't have been further removed from a themepark, if EQ is a themepark then you never played it. EQ didn't even have a map. You weren't helped with anything in EQ, you had your levels, skills, and hopefully you liked grinding, other than that EQ had nothing to guide you or tell you how to play.
EQ did have a few quests later on that were improtant, 1.0, 1.5, 2,0 and 2,5 (dreadspire keep page) like epic quests, but none of those quests were explained, an NPC just told you cryptic stuff, and it took some epics months before it was finally figured out. The Quests weren't "Go find some gnolll hides", they involved raids, and they took weeks to complete.
As a comparison for people who never played it, Arecheage is a themepark compared to EQ. You have quests, guidance, silly NPC with question marks, help during quests, maps etc.
.
You can call EQ lots of thing, Grindfest, Raidfest, Evercrack, one thing it wasn't is a themepark.
Everquest has always been a weird name for EQ, since you grinded instead of doing quests. EQ never had many quests compared other games until much later on where basically every MMO introduced thousands of quests. I think I did 2 quests in EQ by the time I was lvl 60 and started raiding PoTime and tried to get my charm statue which involved a long quest.
We have long discussed on here the relative merits of the themepark, but I am asking is it now dead? With the selling of gameplay for cash, gear for cash and the lottery gambling we need a new name for these games.
The Cashpark is what I am suggesting as that is what they have become. We used to complain about themeparks being on rails, the small worlds and so on. But now its not about the ride, its all about what you will pay. This has always been there in F2P of course, it is not new. But now it is so in your face, themparks have just become an advert for their cash shop.
It used to be a question of gaming ethos, what makes a good game and is there something anti-gaming about cash shops. Now the game is the cash shop, the themepark is just bit of dressing up to disguise that. There always were to an extant but now they are all but naked in the display of their wares. The sandbox gets no free card here, it can be just as deserving of a new name like the Cashbox.
You may well say, 'but we can play for free', it is that sort of thinking which has lead to subpar games which exploit gamers. Games which are becoming more like fruit machines you can't win every year.
And this leads to the likes of a 15 year old boy spending $46,700 on a game and he is hardly the first. You can't do that with P2P:
We have long discussed on here the relative merits of the themepark, but I am asking is it now dead? With the selling of gameplay for cash, gear for cash and the lottery gambling we need a new name for these games.
The Cashpark is what I am suggesting as that is what they have become. We used to complain about themeparks being on rails, the small worlds and so on. But now its not about the ride, its all about what you will pay. This has always been there in F2P of course, it is not new. But now it is so in your face, themparks have just become an advert for their cash shop.
It used to be a question of gaming ethos, what makes a good game and is there something anti-gaming about cash shops. Now the game is the cash shop, the themepark is just bit of dressing up to disguise that. There always were to an extant but now they are all but naked in the display of their wares. The sandbox gets no free card here, it can be just as deserving of a new name like the Cashbox.
You may well say, 'but we can play for free', it is that sort of thinking which has lead to subpar games which exploit gamers. Games which are becoming more like fruit machines you can't win every year.
And this leads to the likes of a 15 year old boy spending $46,700 on a game and he is hardly the first. You can't do that with P2P:
Gold can't buy everything in the cash shop, they are designed so only cash is king.
You have pointed out to me a conflict of interests. Why allow players to make or find anything in a MMO which is useful ? That's not using the cash shop, that's not what they want. So in the future credits will only get you below par items, or you will need CS items to craft the best gear. A F2P MMO is not going to want gaming systems which allow you make your own items unless it gets bite of the cake. That's the direction of travel and it will only go further down that line.
Yes and No.
The Cash Shop must never be seen to sell the "Best Gear" directly, that's a complete no-no for most players. So what is actually done is that the Cash Shop becomes a means for players to acquire ingame gold so that they can BUY the BiS items on the AH with ingame gold. Look, no P2W in the Cash Shop !
Most games with Cash Shops also use some form of alternate "currency" that you spend in the Cash Shop, You buy "diamonds" or "jewels" or some other tokens for real money. Then you spend that alternative currency in the shop. This removes the feeling of spending "real" money when buying, so buying happens a bit easier. It's also a hassle to convert the token amounts back to real currency every time.
Additionally, the developer can then sell bulk amounts of alternate currency with a significant discount, allowing the player to "save" a lot of real money. This encourages people to buy a lot more currency than they would have originally, because it's such a "good deal".
The most successful Cash Shops are those that can fool the players into spending freely without any guilt, or at least allow them to claim that the $100's of dollars they're spending doesn't give them anything any other player cannot earn through "regular game play"...
You get it, the suckers don't.
This is the best description of how the system works that I have yet seen.
Originally posted by CalmOceans EQ wasn't a themepark in any shape or form. Why people say this makes no sense to anyone who played it.You had a handful of quests in the beginning, and 99% of your time was spent exploring and grinding. EQ couldn't have been further removed from a themepark, if EQ is a themepark then you never played it. EQ didn't even have a map. You weren't helped with anything in EQ, you had your levels, skills, and hopefully you liked grinding, other than that EQ had nothing to guide you or tell you how to play.EQ did have a few quests later on that were improtant, 1.0, 1.5, 2,0 and 2,5 (dreadspire keep page) like epic quests, but none of those quests were explained, an NPC just told you cryptic stuff, and it took some epics months before it was finally figured out. The Quests weren't "Go find some gnolll hides", they involved raids, and they took weeks to complete.As a comparison for people who never played it, Arecheage is a themepark compared to EQ. You have quests, guidance, silly NPC with question marks, help during quests, maps etc..You can call EQ lots of thing, Grindfest, Raidfest, Evercrack, one thing it wasn't is a themepark.Everquest has always been a weird name for EQ, since you grinded instead of doing quests. EQ never had many quests compared other games until much later on where basically every MMO introduced thousands of quests. I think I did 2 quests in EQ by the time I was lvl 60 and started raiding PoTime and tried to get my charm statue which involved a long quest.
EQ was a themepark through and through. Loot driven, everyone in the class the same with almost no variation, mobs typicaly (there were only a few that didnt) got harder the further from the starting zone you got, and absolutely no impact on the game world. You went from zone to zone, dungeon to dungeon just killing mobs ad nauseum. A complete themepark.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Comments
You're confusing a genre with a payment model. Theme park is a genre, not a payment model. Hell anything, and I do mean anything, can have hidden fees associated with it. Unlimited data? Unlimited Texting? Free nationwide calling? All of these things are not truly what they say. Caveat Emptor.
F2P is indeed F2P. You don't have to buy a Patrons pass, purchase run speed, et al. The game itself is free, you are choosing to play it on a different level, for which there is a fee. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you can't play a game for free to the same degree that you can for money. Some people have issue with this, others don't.
Don't delude yourself into thinking a subscription game frees you of such nickel and diming either... they have just as many opportunities to get you to pay more just like any other payment model. Some people spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on cosmetic items... things that have nothing at all to do with character progression... above and beyond their subscription fee. This is a personal choice. You have the freedom to do so. That's why it exists. That's why it will only get bigger as time goes on. Used to be no one purchased anything over the internet... now it's the predominant shopping model. Times change, expect your games to change right along with them.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
To me, themepark is definitely not dead.
It depends what the the developers bring to the table.
You can have a few unknown zones in your path for you to explore, and 1 wrong move, wham! you're 1 shot by a rabbit.
This will makes you wana come back again when you have level further to see how hard it actually is.
Or most players will bypass a pond, but whoever dive in will set off another quest chains.
The ideas is limitless even in a theme park world, is just how much the devs wana do it.
And if the game is interesting enough, it have no need to go f2p.
Of course, i hope that devs will pay more attentions to small little details, and revisit old worlds more and improve it, like what WoW have done.
On a side note:
Different gameplay caters to different players, if you like to group most of the time, there's games out there that do that.
Likewise if you like solo most of the time, there's also games like that.
Don't condemn another game just because its not your preference, because you will be directly or indirectly killing this genre.
RIP Orc Choppa
If anything cash shops are a much bigger threat to sandboxes, will people still want to compete in the economy or the territorial control game when it may be possible to just buy huge advantages with real money? At least in themepark only PVP is really directly competitive. In sandbox you're competing with someone most of the time you're in the game.
You're preaching to the choir with me about cash shops but there's enough whale suckers out there that I don't expect companies to abandon this business model unless the average MMO gamer wakes up and refuses to put up with it anymore.
Also I don't think themeparks are dead but there's just a glut of them on the market right now. Hopefully we won't see any new themeparks until some of the current ones shut down (at least WoW clone themeparks. I suppose other types of themeparks are possible).
DAoC - Excalibur & Camlann
Everything is cyclical. When I started playing MMO's it seemed everything out was 'do what you want to do' starting from UO. Yea, there was EQ but it's nothing like Theme Park MMO's of today.
Once WoW hit it big most company's tried to copy its success; so for the past 10 years everything has been the same. If you read or watch any sort of MMO news, you seem to be seeing anything being developed is going 'sandbox' rather than Theme Park.
The popular TP mmo's out now will continue to be around until their company shuts them down, but it seems like anything coming out in the next few years or so will not follow the 'WoW model'.
And once that get tiresome I'm sure will start seeing new Theme Park mmo's.
Dude seriously what planet do you live on?
First of all FFXIV is not "barely alive". It is a huge success and one of the most populated mmos out there. And I can easily count more than 5 successful theme park right now.
1. Everquest 1
2. WoW
3. FFXIV
4. FFXI
5. Swtor
6. Gw2
7. Teso
And wth even Everquest 2, Rift, Lotro, Tera, Aion and many others.. Each one of them are successful mmos. Top 7 games that I counted are games which didn't gave up their payment methods and still became a success. I know that Swtor turned f2p. But it is actually still a p2p game. You can't play it as a f2p player. It is like a trial or something. I don't like it as a game personally but I can accept its success. It is still a p2p game with a huge playerbase. And everquest 1 is an exception. I don't think I need to explain why...
A better question would be: Was the sandbox ever alive? Because I never seen an mmo except Ultima, Eve and Darkfall UW became a success. Don't tell me ArcheAge please... I don't wanna laugh with my ass right now.
You might not like the theme park genre but you HAVE TO ACCEPT its success.
Well, let's see,
What are some of the more populated MMOs currently?
WoW?
GW2?
SWTOR?
FFXIV:ARR?
What makes you think there is a good microtransaction model?
Lets look at cash shops as a spectrum. I think it is pretty obvious that on one end is the term free and the other end is the term expensive. Developers and gamers want microtransaction games to fall on opposite ends of this spectrum, and placing the game somewhere in the middle leads to trust issues with players.
Barely alive? The last official numbers had FFXIV at 1.5 million subs and climbing.
While the MMORPG graveyard is filled with failed themeparks, it also has lots of successes. WoW and FFXIV, obviously but Rift seems to be doing well and while LotRO is on the decline, it's also been running for almost ten years at this point. There's also lesser known games like Wizard101 and Pirate101 that are both themeparks and both doing well (though catering to a different demographic).
Saying themeparks were never alive is borderline trolling.
The ratio of successful to failed themeparks is very close to 0. If anyone in this thread is trolling it's the people claiming ESO, Rift, Aion, TERA etc. are successful games.
DAoC - Excalibur & Camlann
The ratio of successful to failed themeparks is very close to 0. If anyone in this thread is trolling it's the people claiming ESO, Rift, Aion, TERA etc. are successful games.
Yes they are successful.
These games still got a very healthy population, still getting new content all the time and the companies earn enough money from them.
So what is the problem here? Non of these games needs to be a WoW killer to become successful.
We're not talking about that they're good or not. We're talking about the success rate here. And if they can make reasonable profits for their companies, It is a success.
Like it or not, this is the reality. Sorry but this what you're doing here is pure trolling.
Themeparks are not dead, and they will never die. there are to many people out there who like to have their hand held and like easy games, themeparks will allways be around.
as for myself i will never touch another themepark again, they are all the same and just way to damn easy.
It isn't dead, but it's dying.
The fact is that so many other genres give you the themepark experience better, faster and cheaper than these big, clumsy, staff-heavy and expensive MMOs really can. Action/Adventure has gotten much, much better in recent years; a lot have multiplayer capability and avatar customization. Modding keeps games like Skyrim fresh. And multiplayer options in games like Minecraft means that MMOs no longer have a deadlock on things like persistant worlds. If anything, MMOs have proven themselves to lack persistence, as any long time fan of CoH, SWG or WAR will tell you.
Sandbox might still have a chance, but themepark is like a battleship at the dawn of World War II...they are still big and impressive, and there are still designs on the books that are in the process of getting laid down, but they seem to be more trouble than they are worth as other options look more viable.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Originally posted by laokoko
"if you want to be a game designer, you should sell your house and fund your game. Since if you won't even fund your own game, no one will".
No they are not dead. There is to many people who play them that the industry will keep making them.
Plus a cash shop is going to be then norm as developers have learned that it brings in more money.
Look at Revenue from themepark-based games
Look at Revenue from Sandbox-based games
That's one perspective on it.
The vocal people on forums wanting sandboxes may make it seem like it's dead but most people are too busy playing their favorite theme-parked mmo to bother posting. Only a tiny portion of player populations are on forums (Except when the server is DOWN!)
Meanwhile, sandbox games being made by indies get little support by the playerbase and generally fail, so themepark-style is mostly where it's at still in the mmo world. The big name companies do themeparks, because that's more like the style of game on consoles and so where the biggest player base is and therefore the most potential earnings for the company.
EQ wasn't a themepark in any shape or form. Why people say this makes no sense to anyone who played it.
You had a handful of quests in the beginning, and 99% of your time was spent exploring and grinding. EQ couldn't have been further removed from a themepark, if EQ is a themepark then you never played it. EQ didn't even have a map. You weren't helped with anything in EQ, you had your levels, skills, and hopefully you liked grinding, other than that EQ had nothing to guide you or tell you how to play.
EQ did have a few quests later on that were improtant, 1.0, 1.5, 2,0 and 2,5 (dreadspire keep page) like epic quests, but none of those quests were explained, an NPC just told you cryptic stuff, and it took some epics months before it was finally figured out. The Quests weren't "Go find some gnolll hides", they involved raids, and they took weeks to complete.
As a comparison for people who never played it, Arecheage is a themepark compared to EQ. You have quests, guidance, silly NPC with question marks, help during quests, maps etc.
.
You can call EQ lots of thing, Grindfest, Raidfest, Evercrack, one thing it wasn't is a themepark.
Everquest has always been a weird name for EQ, since you grinded instead of doing quests. EQ never had many quests compared other games until much later on where basically every MMO introduced thousands of quests. I think I did 2 quests in EQ by the time I was lvl 60 and started raiding PoTime and tried to get my charm statue which involved a long quest.
Brilliant post OP. I'm about to read the story now.
edit - you post was better than the article...
So then, is a free form, do what you want the way you want type of free 2 play game properly called ...
... a Cashbox game?
:P
(oh, I read a little further, and I see you have that covered! )
You get it, the suckers don't.
This is the best description of how the system works that I have yet seen.
EQ was a themepark through and through. Loot driven, everyone in the class the same with almost no variation, mobs typicaly (there were only a few that didnt) got harder the further from the starting zone you got, and absolutely no impact on the game world. You went from zone to zone, dungeon to dungeon just killing mobs ad nauseum. A complete themepark.
You already said in the past you never played Everquest.
EQ had some of the most diverse classes in the MMO genre. There's no game which has so many diverse classes, and more importantly, roles, as EQ.
EQ has 16 classes, and anyone who played it will tell you they all play differently.