Hmm, well, you might be barking up the wrong tree with me on that subject. I prefer pugs because it adds random elements of problem solving. I like the chaos and the hassle, it's my favorite part of the metagame. Actually, much of what you described sounds like pack mentality.
I can understand that. So you're more of a WoW enthusiast instead of an EQ enthusiast.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
We tend to speak as through solo and a full group are the only options. You can get a lot done as a duo or as three people. That's probably not going to bring down any bosses, but not every evening has to be about killing bosses.
Also, you can start out as 2-3 people and pick more up as the evening progresses.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
You didn't have to play 10 hours a day, people just did, and if they're neglecting people, they'd be neglecting people no matter what was their fixation.
You did if that's what your group did. You found a group and you leveled up with it.
Funny, I never leveled any of my half a dozen characters that I hit cap with (on multiple servers) with the same group of people. I almost played with different people every day exclusively before reaching 50/60 and doing "end game" content. Neither did I play for 10 hours a day (Senior year of HS, college and PT jobs saw to that).
You leveled 6 characters to 60, at less than 10 hours a day/less than obsessive amount of time playing and you NEVER... EVER... grouped with the same person twice... NEVER. Did you end game? Did you raid? Where you playing solo and turns out today's games were actually made with YOU in mind?
Sorry I find your claim to be less than credible. Especially if you did any raids. This is the wall of false agenda/nostalgia that hopeful old school devs are going to smack into when they realize nobody is playing their game.
I played with different people every day, yes. What you are describing smacks of the premade grouping of power gamers of today, and sounds woefully ignorant of how it actually worked 20 years ago.
Yes, over the course of the first 3+ years, I did not have premade groups. EVER. I had an extensive friends list, but I often did not play at the same hours or same number of hours every day. Did I play with some of the same people from day to day, of course. You're throwing up strawmen. I didn't say I never played with the same people, only that we did not have premade groups or pre-planned play sessions. My family would have killed me for monopolizing our only dial-up internet connection.
I also mostly soloed my first wizard to cap by summer of '99, so that whole forced grouping thing goes out the window. With all the free time of a HS senior, I still had a pt job and enrolled myself in a computer programming class in VB, yet I had more than enough time to hit cap on my first character.
Sorry pal, it was never as bad as you make it sound. The average person played no where near 10 hrs a day, and most were still able to have multiple characters at cap after playing for a few years.
You didn't have to play 10 hours a day, people just did, and if they're neglecting people, they'd be neglecting people no matter what was their fixation.
You did if that's what your group did. You found a group and you leveled up with it.
Funny, I never leveled any of my half a dozen characters that I hit cap with (on multiple servers) with the same group of people. I almost played with different people every day exclusively before reaching 50/60 and doing "end game" content. Neither did I play for 10 hours a day (Senior year of HS, college and PT jobs saw to that).
You leveled 6 characters to 60, at less than 10 hours a day/less than obsessive amount of time playing and you NEVER... EVER... grouped with the same person twice... NEVER. Did you end game? Did you raid? Where you playing solo and turns out today's games were actually made with YOU in mind?
Sorry I find your claim to be less than credible. Especially if you did any raids. This is the wall of false agenda/nostalgia that hopeful old school devs are going to smack into when they realize nobody is playing their game.
Yes, over the course of the first 3+ years, I did not have premade groups. EVER. I had an extensive friends list, but I often did not play at the same hours or same number of hours every day. Did I play with some of the same people from day to day, of course.
Then you lied in your last post.
Dullahan said: You're throwing up strawmen. I didn't say I never played with the same people,
Actually...
Dullahan said: Funny, I never leveled any of my half a dozen characters that I hit cap with (on multiple servers) with the same group of people.
That's exactly what you said. Now you're lying about lying. This isn't straw man, it's fact. You misrepresent the truth. And if you do it with the proof on the same forum page as your lie, then you'll do it about your experiences in EQ. Your credibility has now hit rock bottom.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
No, I said with the "SAME GROUP OF PEOPLE." Not with the SAME PEOPLE.
Words have meaning. Same group of people, means something different than same people. You can play with some of the same people, without a group being comprised of the exact people. What you are trying to suggest is that I said I played with 100% different people every time I grouped, but that isn't what I said.
You didn't have to play 10 hours a day, people just did, and if they're neglecting people, they'd be neglecting people no matter what was their fixation.
You did if that's what your group did. You found a group and you leveled up with it. Maybe that got you into a guild but you typically ended up with some favorite players. And since it was so group oriented you were at the mercy of the most obsessive of the group. Sit out more than a few times and you fell behind and catch up wasn't possible unless you were the most obsessive one.
That's the difference. You may be OCD in your life, and game to an unhealthy degree, but in a group focused game you're pretty much locked into getting with a group that works for you and never letting go. So if you're not OCD and you want to have a life, well forget it, because you need to keep up with the most OCD in the group you like. So otherwise healthy individuals get trapped into the schedule of an unhealthy gamer.
Or... you end up in the group roulette that WoW became, (not as easy in EQ because there was no group finder.) and in the group roulette you ended up getting the people that were focused on speed running and premium ability. Which made people sick of that system too.
So in group focused games, you have a choice... Get with a group you like and give up your life to make sure you're ready when they are ready, and you keep up... OR group up with people you don't necessarily like so you can play the game... and that doesn't sound like good 'social fun' to me.
But this is all academic. Because what people of that era in MMOs really want is the past. And no matter what game is made, no matter to what parameters a game is held, it's not going to be the past, and it will never satisfy them like when it was all new and unfamiliar. It's just not going to happen, and the ones to suffer won't be the players jumping ship for the next dream of time travel back to their past. It will be the devs investing time, money and effort allowing these dreamers to chase an ephemeral phantom.
wow this is kind of crazy, what you are describing i have never done before in any MMO and i played EQ for about 5 years back in the day lol
sure i played with the same people sometimes, i met people i liked in game and added them to my friends list, especially if it was a good group.
but did i roll around with the same exact group make up every day and was forced to play longer than i wanted out of fear of losing my spot?
not once, not ever. the closest thing to that is sometimes i would find a really good group and by choice i would stay in it longer than i normally would and just be tired the next day at work.
even in my guild where i was one of the few shaman i never grouped with the same people.
most of the groups i was in had people on stand by waiting to take over if a member of the group needs to log out. so i'm not really sure what you are talking about here, sounds to me like you may have played EQ a certain way and assumed that's how everyone played it.
You didn't have to play 10 hours a day, people just did, and if they're neglecting people, they'd be neglecting people no matter what was their fixation.
You did if that's what your group did. You found a group and you leveled up with it.
Funny, I never leveled any of my half a dozen characters that I hit cap with (on multiple servers) with the same group of people. I almost played with different people every day exclusively before reaching 50/60 and doing "end game" content. Neither did I play for 10 hours a day (Senior year of HS, college and PT jobs saw to that).
You leveled 6 characters to 60, at less than 10 hours a day/less than obsessive amount of time playing and you NEVER... EVER... grouped with the same person twice... NEVER. Did you end game? Did you raid? Where you playing solo and turns out today's games were actually made with YOU in mind?
Sorry I find your claim to be less than credible. Especially if you did any raids. This is the wall of false agenda/nostalgia that hopeful old school devs are going to smack into when they realize nobody is playing their game.
I played with different people every day, yes. What you are describing smacks of the premade grouping of power gamers of today, and sounds woefully ignorant of how it actually worked 20 years ago.
Yes, over the course of the first 3+ years, I did not have premade groups. EVER. I had an extensive friends list, but I often did not play at the same hours or same number of hours every day. Did I play with some of the same people from day to day, of course. You're throwing up strawmen. I didn't say I never played with the same people, only that we did not have premade groups or pre-planned play sessions. My family would have killed me for monopolizing our only dial-up internet connection.
I also mostly soloed my first wizard to cap by summer of '99, so that whole forced grouping thing goes out the window. With all the free time of a HS senior, I still had a pt job and enrolled myself in a computer programming class in VB, yet I had more than enough time to hit cap on my first character.
Sorry pal, it was never as bad as you make it sound. The average person played no where near 10 hrs a day, and most were still able to have multiple characters at cap after playing for a few years.
Same experience here, in DAOC as well as SWG, even being in active guilds I rarely ran with the same group make up, it was always a mix of different people on different days at different times. Whoever's schedule I meshed with is who i ended up with on a given day.
We had regular PVP groups ( I led one), even then it was rarely the same group make up, it totally depended on who was on. We didn't expect people to be on at given times.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
You might not find that kind of actual experience, 'from that period' type of knowledge in a Wikipedia search...
Sigh. I played all of those, admittedly UO the least (hours vs weeks or months)... and EQ wasn't the "forced group" game people claim it was. Most people were just new to the genre and their memories of it were affected by their proficiency. I was playing graphical online multiplayer rpgs from 91, onward. I'm familiar with their nuances, thanks.
'84 for for me, and '88 was when I began working in the industry for Simutronics on Gemstone 3. Been at it ever since...
I hadn't even thought to wiki it. Do you want me to do that? I might find 5 other games, the names of which are on the tip of my tongue. They were mostly asian, though.
I remember many games that you could add... Legends of Kesmai (tile-based) while it was in beta, the Realm, Neverwinter Nights on AOL, but I think you can find something thinner than a hair to split if you really wanted...
The bottom line was EQ was the AAA of its time, there wasn't much competition and what was there was pretty much group only (by default, not counting the incredibly inefficient corner cases I'm sure you're to bring up.) as well. If you were going to get a group the easiest to find was in EQ, and at the time getting a group was the only ticket to the show. If you didn't get a group then you were Kiting, a Necro, or a Cleric bashing skeletons for 10 hours a day or more. (Literally... 10 hours. if you had a life, you didn't play MMOs back then.)
Which by the way, is the worst thing to ever happen to MMOs. The days of reading about parents locking their children in a closet so they can play with their group?!? Glad it's dead and gone, and I hope that it never comes back. It was a life-sucking genre and the rose colored morons that want to bring that level of personal decay back into their lives have simply forgotten the bad aspects. Just get a smack habit, it's less self-destructive.
[mod edit]
what do you care what people do as their hobby? i worked a full time job the entire time i played EQ. there were people that played it all day and night but you didn't have to.
i'm not sure why you even care what people do as their hobby and no i do not agree it's better to shoot heroin, that's the worst advice you could have possibly ever given.
any credibility you may have had went out the window with that gem of a statement, i don't care if it was made in jest or not.
My EQ experience was much different. I would log on, usually with no idea what I would be doing that night. Sometimes my guild invited me to something. Sometimes a friend. Sometimes a friend's guild. Other times I looked around for a group, found none, and did something on my own.
That is part of what made EQ different than many modern games, where people tend to be on a direct path to a specific goal for that day. It is more productive, sure, to always be able to plan and predict, but it feels less like an adventure (to me anyway).
Remember the scene in The Hobbit where the dwarves all come spilling into Bilbo's house unannounced? EQ always felt like that to me. I never knew what was going to happen next.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Comments
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
Also, you can start out as 2-3 people and pick more up as the evening progresses.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Yes, over the course of the first 3+ years, I did not have premade groups. EVER. I had an extensive friends list, but I often did not play at the same hours or same number of hours every day. Did I play with some of the same people from day to day, of course. You're throwing up strawmen. I didn't say I never played with the same people, only that we did not have premade groups or pre-planned play sessions. My family would have killed me for monopolizing our only dial-up internet connection.
I also mostly soloed my first wizard to cap by summer of '99, so that whole forced grouping thing goes out the window. With all the free time of a HS senior, I still had a pt job and enrolled myself in a computer programming class in VB, yet I had more than enough time to hit cap on my first character.
Sorry pal, it was never as bad as you make it sound. The average person played no where near 10 hrs a day, and most were still able to have multiple characters at cap after playing for a few years.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
Words have meaning. Same group of people, means something different than same people. You can play with some of the same people, without a group being comprised of the exact people. What you are trying to suggest is that I said I played with 100% different people every time I grouped, but that isn't what I said.
[mod edit]
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
sure i played with the same people sometimes, i met people i liked in game and added them to my friends list, especially if it was a good group.
but did i roll around with the same exact group make up every day and was forced to play longer than i wanted out of fear of losing my spot?
not once, not ever. the closest thing to that is sometimes i would find a really good group and by choice i would stay in it longer than i normally would and just be tired the next day at work.
even in my guild where i was one of the few shaman i never grouped with the same people.
most of the groups i was in had people on stand by waiting to take over if a member of the group needs to log out. so i'm not really sure what you are talking about here, sounds to me like you may have played EQ a certain way and assumed that's how everyone played it.
We had regular PVP groups ( I led one), even then it was rarely the same group make up, it totally depended on who was on. We didn't expect people to be on at given times.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
what do you care what people do as their hobby? i worked a full time job the entire time i played EQ. there were people that played it all day and night but you didn't have to.
i'm not sure why you even care what people do as their hobby and no i do not agree it's better to shoot heroin, that's the worst advice you could have possibly ever given.
any credibility you may have had went out the window with that gem of a statement, i don't care if it was made in jest or not.
That is part of what made EQ different than many modern games, where people tend to be on a direct path to a specific goal for that day. It is more productive, sure, to always be able to plan and predict, but it feels less like an adventure (to me anyway).
Remember the scene in The Hobbit where the dwarves all come spilling into Bilbo's house unannounced? EQ always felt like that to me. I never knew what was going to happen next.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests