Maybe you remember, in the glory days, MMOs were so hard that....

Abuz0r

1) Nobody was max level.

2) You shared your account with 2 ppl so as a team you could have the best character.

3) If you died you were so screwed.......

What else...?

Blueliner

I don't recall that at all and i been doing MMOs since OU started, they were harder than now, but not THAT hard.

LordZeik

4) That only the weak and worthless shared their accounts to strive for max level.

hallucigenocide

5) your mouse had to have an armed escort

Flyte27

I don't remember ever playing an MMO where no one was max level except maybe the first few months of UO and EQ when not many people knew what they were doing.

I do remember the large amount of increased time that it took to get to max level in certain games and that's why some people shared accounts.  They wanted to get to be the first to get to max level on the server and a single person would die playing non stop for a month or two.

Krimzin

People didnt do stupid shit and risk dying. Not when 1 death would equal 8 hours of grinding. Without risk what fun is there. Oh we died 10 times.. lets keep banging our heads against the wall. I think not.

maybebaked

You played video games and didn't circle-jerk about the good ol' days.

Abuz0r

It's just things you don't do, or even need to do know that every game is super easy mode now.  Everybody wins and everybody gets a prize! 

jesteralways

That you spent 1 week waiting for a boss to respawn on world, then 10 hours recruiting 80 people, then 15 hours wiping and finally when you quit you thought :"hey at least 79 other failed like me and quit" and that was your only consolation. 

Arglebargle

Those old games were so hard (ie chock full of design flaws) that after investigation, I didn't play them for years!

 

In the beginning days of the genre those early designers tried all sorts of different ideas.   There weren't that many examples to build on.  So a lot of avenues were explored.  Some of their ideas were counter-productive.   It was not all gold wonderness.

bingbongbros

7. If you died three times on any character the dev company deleted your account, and had you arrested by the police.

Axehilt

In the "glory days" MMORPGs were more characterized by their timesinks than really being all that difficult.  Their combat was fairly trivial to master, because it was usually quite shallow.  While ostensibly a mob's HP and DPS might be balanced to make the DPS race tighter than the easier content in modern games, the challenge wasn't really centered around combat skill so much as avoiding getting into a fight you couldn't manage.

Chrisbox

Originally posted by Torval

Originally posted by Blueliner
I don't recall that at all and i been doing MMOs since OU started, they were harder than now, but not THAT hard.

Lineage was like that. No exaggeration. A death at level 49+ could take a couple weeks or longer to recover from. You could delevel. Very few people were at the level cap. Compared to the general population it was virtually no one.

I don't consider them the glory days, but it was one of the better mmos I've played for many of those design ideas. It's just that they were crudely or poorly implemented and taken way too far. That killed a lot of the long term fun. That and letting bots run rampant. Oh, and the time sinks were there purely to keep players paying their monthly rent.

Lots of good designs in those early games. Lots of bad ideas.

This ^^^^^

Ehliya

For me it comes down to this EQ2 memory:

Waiting for an hour for an orc boss to spawn that I needed to finish a quest line, my character sat in a ruined tower talking with another player through the EQ2 night cycle and into the early dawn.  We had a pleasant IC chat as we waited which was an experience that was more common in ye olden days.  Then our mutual joy as the orc boss spawned at last.

Nowadays?  First off, responding to the "I want it now" crowd such quests have been made trivially easy.  Second, you can now usually solo most of the time.  So no need to wait means no real chance of downtime to socialize, and no need for other players to do the quests means everyone just rushes past each other without a word.  Boosting the "XP per minute" rate has become the Tin God of MMORPGS - to the detriment of slower pace and human interaction.

 

DarLorkar

Just like the OP..people keep giving examples of tedious time sinks and calling them hard.

 

Nothing hard about tedium , and or, time sinks other than staying awake.

 

 

Abuz0r

Yes, I miss the old tedious time sinks there was such a greater sense of accomplishment when you really had to work for it.

Loktofeit

 

For the nostalgic EQers here. 

 

Gestankfaust

Originally posted by Blueliner
I don't recall that at all and i been doing MMOs since OU started, they were harder than now, but not THAT hard.

Then you are full of crap. That's how it was back then. You DID reach max...but that's not the point the OP was making. There was no race to the end....open your eyes

Loktofeit

Originally posted by Gestankfaust

Originally posted by Blueliner
I don't recall that at all and i been doing MMOs since OU started, they were harder than now, but not THAT hard.

Then you are full of crap. That's how it was back then. You DID reach max...but that's not the point the OP was making. There was no race to the end....open your eyes

I didn't get that at all from the OP.  I read it the same way Blue did, which was that, in the glory days, MMOs were so hard that nobody was max level, if you died you were screwed, etc. 

 

Gestankfaust

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Gestankfaust

Originally posted by Blueliner
I don't recall that at all and i been doing MMOs since OU started, they were harder than now, but not THAT hard.

Then you are full of crap. That's how it was back then. You DID reach max...but that's not the point the OP was making. There was no race to the end....open your eyes

I didn't get that at all from the OP.  I read it the same way Blue did, which was that, in the glory days, MMOs were so hard that nobody was max level, if you died you were screwed, etc. 

 

They were as hard as the OP said then....agreed? There weren't a ton of people...even talking about being at max

Sunnyguy46

Originally posted by Vardahoth

Originally posted by Abuz0r

1) Nobody was max level.

2) You shared your account with 2 ppl so as a team you could have the best character.

3) If you died you were so screwed.......

What else...?

4) Gear didn't drop (except for end game raidbosses), or gear had a 0.1% chance to drop. You actually had to gather 100,000 mats to craft it.

5) No auction house, all items were non-bound and sold using player trade shops (and haggling scamers).

6) There were no instances or open-world-boxes to play in. Setup spies to camp raids and enemies for pvp.

7) You actually had to form parties to level (from mid-level to max level).

8) Open world raid bosses had a 12-18hr window spawn, and end game ones had 2wk window spawn. PvP for the 2wk ones was immense.

9) You had to give a 15-30 minute warning to your grind party when you were going to leave so they could find a replacement. Then go back to the beginning and help them spend another 20 minutes getting the replacement to your parties grind spot (while keeping 1 person there so nobody takes the spot).

What a nightmare. No wonder games like that are dead now.

Abimor

I remember in DAOC having my girlfriend playing a healer her dad playing a necro  while I ran my pally to lvl up for hours and hours every day for a pretty long time. Having a necro with a healer was considered a blessing in that game.

Aelious

Originally posted by bingbongbros
7. If you died three times on any character the dev company deleted your account, and had you arrested by the police.

 

This gave me a good laugh, thanks for that!

 

While I do think that encounters can be more challenging, therefore more rewarding, the extreme consequences for not succeeding only need to go so far.  The question to ask is if the title is fun to play already.  Aspects such as encounter difficulty and reward/consequences add flavor at that point.  The main advantage for the MMO classics was lack of competition.  Not to say that they are not good, which is also subjective, just that aspects of them were both good and bad so not all the features need to be carried over.

Wizardry

MMO's were so tough back then i had to run 5 miles to the generating plant and hand crank 500x the generator then run back home UPHILL to turn on the hand made computer.

To play the games were really tough let me tell ya,we had to fuel our bodies with 5000 calories to even think about the chore at hand.25 Snickers bars,12 cups of coffee here i come.

The combat,battles oh man were they tough nothing like the easy mode of today's games.We had to fight 25 mobs at once and 200 more  would link from every inch of the game,including from underneath the map where another 500 were stuck waiting to come out.

Xp oh man was xp tough to come by.We used to kill mobs for 36 hours straight all 5000 of them and only gained 1/10th of a level,then we would die 47 times and lose 3 levels.

Ya kids now a days have no idea how tough it was back then,god bless old school gaming and god bless Connor McGregor !!.

 

Velocinox

The joke is nothing is stopping you from recreating those difficult times in any game released today...

 

Did your character die? DELETE IT.

Are you camping a boss? SIT IN FRONT OF IT FOR 12 HOURS BEFORE YOU KILL IT.

Are you leveling too fast? DON'T KILL ANYTHING.

Miss being a wizard in EQ? PROP UP A BOOK IN FRONT OF YOUR MONITOR AND STARE AT IT FOR HALF AN HOUR AFTER EVERY KILL.

 

knock yourselves out. It's all in your hands. [mod edit]

CalmOceans

yes