f13.net

EverQuest: A Retrospective Look At Why I’m So Great And This Game Sucks

Submitted by the "contest winner." Also known as we are lesion.


You'll get to actually see this at level 300, in a raid group the size of Zambia.
I’m fighting The Combine again, but it’s not because I’m attending a sneak preview of HL2: Episode 3.  No, I’m playing EverQuest on a “Progression” server, which is code for firmly planting the serpent’s ass in its mouth and hitting it with spurs.  I am pissed off.  The capitalization of the game title pisses me off.  Everything about my life right now pisses me off.  I now have Sony-induced seasonal affective disorder.  St. John’s Wort is the only thing between me, my car and a concrete wall.


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STOP HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY.

Awesome.

That review was a blast to read!

You had me at "needle-laden scrotum". Well done.

Funny shit.  I played for 6+ years and have seen almost everything in the game up to Prophecies of Ro. 

The one redeeming aspect of EQ is it's raiding.  If you find a good group of people, enjoy raiding, and have the patience of a fucking saint EQ provides a great experience.  Watching guild mates flounder and quit during 2 months of failed Uqua attempts was great. 

Never mind the ugly/dated graphics, convoluted lore, and the pissing away of HUGE amounts of time.

Although not exactly a balanced review, or one that describes any of what made Everquest the game it was back in the day, it does do a good job of describing the current game. I was expecting more of a rant of the 10gigs it installed on your drive or the 10 hours spent patching, though.

BTW lesion the reason your graphics look like ass is that you didn't enable the Luclin character models (not that it helps much).

Should the front page article have UBB code in the tagline?

I wanted to get in here before Captain Wet Blanket, but I missed it.  Anyway, good job.

I read tao's blog post before doing this and figured I could skip all the glory-day facts. I had screenshots of the install but figured nobody would care, since every game these days takes up more real estate than my massive :awesome_for_real:. Looks like I was wrong. Glad people enjoyed it.

You turned me into a bobble head!  Dammit!   :heart:

If you like ugly fat chicks stomping on your balls, having your balls stomped on by ugly fat chicks is fun. For everyone else its fucking horrible.

Suddenly, the overzealous bleatings of Geldonyetich v1.0 in support of Vanguard make a little more sense.  It's easy to say McQuaid successfully made a better EverQuest when the original EverQuest is that.

What?  Wait.  What?

I covered my mouth throughout, also typing w/ one of those rubber fingers on is fucking hard.

Good show sir, enjoy the blue name you earned it!@!!

Tao, are you serious? The article is supposed to be fucking slanted. Read some more English before you start posting dumbass uninformed shit like this. Fuck.

I firmly believe EQ1 isn't fun. IF IT WAS VANGUARD WOULD HAVE SUCCEEDED. ROFLLULZ!

Oh, and geldon said it first. I was too busy bleeding from my eyes and raging because you can't detect tone in an article.

What the fuck are you talking about? I actually thought it was a funny read, that accurately describes the current state of the game from someone who'd never played it. I know English just fine, but I wouldn't exactly say that lesion actually gave it a chance, let alone knew any of what made EQ the game it was back in it's early days.


I can detect tone just fine, I just expected him to at least rant about something that was actually relevant to the history and changes to the game, and next time Cmlancas maybe read all of what I posted trying not to take things out of context. The fact that he's complaining about graphics and not using the updated Luclin models (his screenshots) means he didn't even seriously TRY.

It was funny, but the article didn't actually say anything that any WoW player attempting a 10 minute look at Everquest wouldn't (except of course leaving out the massive installation shit).

I found the part where he was killed by the guard especially funny, but that's because I DID play EQ, so I know better than to wander around as an evil race, and not expect to be insta-killed.

late edit because UBB kicks my arse

I found it amusing.  Everquest was ALWAYS shit.  Its revelation in 99-00 was NO RAMPAGING PKS.
Once you got past the fact random assholes wouldn't kill you you were left with a grindy suckfest with horrible controls, terrible combat, awful world design, and just general awfulness.

A year or so back I tried a free server with expedited XP gains.  It sucked even HARDER.  Its probably the worst pro MMORPG I have played.

That's right, the bug laden multiple game system fuckball that is Star Wars Galaxies is more fun.
The weeaboo megagrind furry animu grindhell of Final Fantasy 11 is better.
The epic failure game known as Asheron's 2 is better.  (Actually its World of Warcraft 0.8.)
The buggy Anarchy Online is better.
The paid Diablo Phantasy Star Online/Universe games are way better.  (Counting it as bad from a MMORPG standpoint.  Much better as local multiplayer and solo games.)
Dark Age of Camelot is better and I only played it in its first month.
Gemstone 3 is not better.  So Everquest does beat ONE game.
Earth and Beyond was better.
Shadowbane was better.

(Note that I am not saying any of the above titles were GOOD, just better than EQ.)

And Asheron's Call, City of Heroes, Ultima Online Renaissance era, and World of Warcraft are good. By MMORPG standards and conventions anyhow. 

lol, unfortunately no MMO thats as old as EQ is fun to play at lower levels. You have to have a capped out character. Starting those games new is a bitch.

That took about 30 mins to 'research' and about 15 to 'write', right?

I'm looking forward to something remotely interesting on the fronts page that is not an interview, but it will never happen...

The Wii is an excellent gaming system!

Well obviously if you don't like raiding you won't like EQ.  I can name entire genres of games that are about as fun for me as having my balls stomped by ugly fat chicks, most sports titles for example.

That said I’m in no way defending EQ.  Getting to the level cap and to a point you can even think about starting some of the compelling content is such a painful experience at this point I could not with a clear conscious recommend the game to anyone.  And besides, I’m sure WoW has better raid level crap than EQ does by now.

FIFY.

Also, I was trying to be a little funny and it came out snarky. I used to be in your shoes when I felt nostalgic about EQ1, but having returned to it five years after I first played it, realized that just because it was my first did not make it the best.

 :hello_kitty:

I could see that I Am Lesion didn't fully research the game and is indeed giving the "WoW player attempting a 10 minute look at EverQuest" perspective.  However, whether it was deliberate or not, here also is the genius of the thing. 

We who had played EverQuest since 1999 have our perspectives altered by the knowledge of how it was and perhaps how the game has evolved over the neigh-decade since then.  This knowledge is beneficial to our better understanding of EverQuest, true, but it also robs us of being able to correctly see the game as it would be witnessed by some new player trying it out now.

The new player, with fresh eyes, can really give us a better perspective the current state of EverQuest than somebody who has learned to ignore all the problems they've long compensated and made mental excuses for.  (For example, insta-kill guards based on race with no in-game warning this will happen ahead of time.)

Somehow, I managed to miss Ultima Online when it was in its heyday.  (I think I had too antiquated of a computer at the time.)  To me, Ultima Online is an mess of inconsequential game value.  I've read about the virtual worldly aspects with academic approval, but I can't play the game without furrowing my brow in disapproval: the underlying mechanics feel about 8 years too late to be worthwhile.  To players who had grown used to its flaws, there's actually something of value of there, but my relative fresh perspective can't see it.

Games do not require research to evaluate, they require playing.

This is the day f13.net officially hit mmo status, feel free to unsub any time if it sucks so much.  Nobody even wants your shitty stuff.

Well, it's not better than Gemstone4...which is the same exact game as Gemstone3....sort of....

God, a GS4 review could be funny at this point. I think I might be the longest-tenured player of that game on f13.  :geezer:

Uhm, no. His lizard avatar is rendered with Luclin models.

You're not looking hard enough through EQ-Still-Rocks glasses, Engels!  :uhrr:

We're not just talking about playing and evaluating though, we're talking about writing a review.

Reviews do require some sort of research, especially when they're reviews of games that has some signigifance historically. Unless of course you happen to be such an excellent and funny writer that people are enjoying the writing itself rather than the content. Generic rage and overwrought putdowns do get a lot of mileage here at f13.net, so I guess some people give this 'writing' a pass grade, but I personaly don't see why this is on the front page and all the other shit people talk in threads is not. There's nothing that special about it.

So like I said, get better shit on the front page or just stick to posting interviews.

Now please excuse me while I go kill myself for disagreeing with some of you. Life is hard.

Oh, I don't know.

It's about Everfuckingquest 1 maybe? We have people on this board who have had 2 kids since it came out. You want a 4 page review on the fucker, write it. No one else thinks this shit is worth 4 pages or worth discussing the history of Everquest 1. This is merely another nail in the coffin for that ugly, unplayable, piece of dinosaur shit.

Maybe you didn't get any of that though.

If it's not worth a proper review why is it frontpage?

Obviously it's your site and you can do whatever you like. Thankfully one of the things you seem to like doing it letting people say what they think. This is what I think:

That if you're not going to put some time and effort into what you're writing, or if it's not breaking news, or if it's not full of insight, then don't put it on the front fucking page.

Just start a thread:

Welcome to the gaming industry. Those things happen once every 3 months and there's a lot of websites.

But you already knew that.

As such: You must've really, really fucking loved EQ.

Never played it. Never had any desire to. Thus never saw the point of this review. Maybe if people were thinking "hmm, maybe I should play Everquest!" it would be a suitable warning. But was anyone?

It was entertaining.  That's the main thing I look for in a front page article.  As such,  :thumbs_up:

I don't understand why people who have never submitted articles (at least not that I know of) get all pissy and jealous when other people get something frontpaged.  It's not like it's hard.

Hmm, if I'm giving the impression I'm mostly concerned with having a go at we are lesion then I apologise. I am more expressing confusion at the point of this article being a frontpage review, rather that a topic discussion starter in MMO general or something.

I agree with lamaros on the pointless point, but I'm a fan of any posts over no posts unless they're abject shit (man that sounds haughty). I had hoped that the title would convey the level of seriousness and relevance found within.

Did it too require a 3-4 sentence macro string in order to fire an arrow from a bow?

Shit, even Ultima 1 in 1981 didn't require that many commands to shoot one.

I thought the same thing but since I stopped playing about the time I got tired of moon cats, I wasn't entirely sure.  Now that I think about it, it's pretty obvious they are not screens of the original models.  Also: Luclin models don't make Tox suck any less.

Insert <this site has a front page?> joke here.

Seriously though, did you miss out on your chance to bitch about the frontpaging of the Vanguard review? (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9266.0)

Which is pretty accurately defined as "playing and evaluating."


No, no they don't. You play the game, then you write about how good it was. That's what a review is. It isn't a hisorical treatise on EQ. You play the game, you form an opinion, you write it up. That's the process of reviewing.

I await the surely-to-come review of Star Wars Galaxies with bated breath.

Most game writers wish they could say so much with a single tiny screenshot and photoshop.

Nope, no more nocking. As long as you had the arrow in your offhand (for a normal bow at least, not crossbow), FIRE worked just fine. My rogue could snipe from the shadows with a bow, so it was fairly neat.

You always fondly remember your first. EQ popped my MMO cherry. I had dabbled with other MMO's (M59, Legends of Kesmai (sp?) and a few others, but EQ was the one that grabbed me. I still have a paid sub and go back in from time to time, but damn it's painful. I pretty much left about 2 years ago for WoW and CoH and now find myself so far behind it's not funny (56 Beastlord). The only areas that have any activity are the tutorial and whatever is the high end playground right now. Everything in between? Ghost town. I'd play EQ again if they did two things:

1.) Reduce downtiime. It's gotta be doable. Bring it up to or close to WoW speed.
2.) Make green and blue mobs GREEN AND BLUE MOBS! If I con something and it says I'm better than it, it shouldn't eat my face in 3 seconds. Even when I have my Snoopy dog attacking it.

Ok, 3 things:  3.) Make it so my warder/pet/whatever can grab and hold aggro. EQ had the nasty habit of putting the aggro right back on the player if they got too close no matter how much damage the pet had done or was doing.

These 3 things would make the game fun and playable again. It ain't hard Sony. Learn from the masters at Blizzard.

Oh yeah, 4.) Make it so the damn MOBs don't chase me ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE ZONE! Actually it is kinda funny to see newer players come in and discover that the werewolf in West Karana ain't givin' up and they're pretty much screwed.  :evil: Me, I don't care. I got teh SoWz. Even underground, teh SoWz, I haz dem.

They do give up, but you have to be running faster than them (or at least they did back when I played). That's why there's "SOW PLZ".

Whoa. 
Hey. 
It's another Schildclone review.  But without Portal references.
Cool.

Schildclone? Neg. This is tradmark lesion. Go read his posts. Hilarity abound.

Here is the review that some people were looking for:

Well, I played EQ1 for 20 hours so far and it still sucks. But clearly I'm just not to the awesome part yet. I'll keep at it and write back in six months!

The article is amusing.
It doesn't actually say anything about Everquest and it's clearly from someone who could see some ancient petroglyph and can only come up with: "what's the big deal? My son can draw better than that".

Amusing, though.

For the records, I submit a Vanguard review for f13 in january. It never made it to the frontpage because of broken English and because it sucked, filled with false hopes and silly childish enthusiasm. But as far as I know, and according to Yathzee's Portal review too, negative articles are way more funny and popular than positive ones, no matter what they are about or if they make any sense. Enter we are lesion and his everquest "review".



EDIT: petroglyph, not petrogliph

I wrote one and submitted it to Schild, but it was just the word 'Marrow' written 1500 times.

The twitch is a lie.

Nice job, lesion. Quite funny.

We have a frontpage? (for Hutch)

Also, good review. I was entertained, which I know was your goal when you wrote that. For me. For me, specifically, to be entertained.

Oh, and to piss off Lamaros.

Honestly the fact that it pissed off Lameros makes it that much better.  Good show.

The Luclin models sucked anyway.

Petroglyphs may be interesting historically but nobody can seriously argue they are good by today's standards.

He's reviewing playing EQ as a new player today. That's the context of the review.

Liar! I would've frontpaged that.

Too late now.

Eidos paid for this review, I just know it.

...In a society turned upside down, gamers return to Everquest in droves when they realize that it is actually the funnest game ever, breaking subscription records previously set by World of Warcraft and leading to a unified world MMOGovernment?

Heh.

That didn't seem so much a review to me. I read it more like a state-of-the-industry, how far we've come, kinda thing.

That said, I resubbed to EQ1 about a month ago, and I'm loving it again. I dunno why. I just want more worlds to explore I guess. And the whooping cranes and cuckoo forest sounds soothe me.

Some people are in to whips, chains and other forms of physical pain that can be self inflicted.  There is no need to feel bad about enjoying Everquest Slyfeind.

Yup, it was an entertaining read, but Lame made it all that much better.

"Historically" is the keyword here and EQ doesn't aim expansions at new players anyway. Playing the new player card in 2007 is the quick way to a cheap joke. That would have been a great forum post, but as a frontpage article? Empty smartassing.
EQ set a milestone in coop videogaming and fixed in stone the rules for what is the today 10million customers beast we all know. Why should you judge that by today standards?

I'll try another metaphore. Would you judge an old basketball player's whole career by mocking his last goofy years spent trying to help his franchise reach the playoffs? Yeah, I guess you do. Yay, great fun! <laughter>

Bad analogies ftw?  People deteriorate with age, technology improves.  Games should, for the most part, do nothing but improve with age.

SOE stopped investing in "improving" the game by the 3rd expansion (Luclin - theres 14 now). Luclin actually UPDATED the player models to look creepy ass like that - and it was a failed update at that since the animations were broken from start and never fixed (whats that you say about improving? how about 7 year old uncompleted "improvement" projects and unfixed bugs?).*

As for the review - I enjoyed it, kinda spot on - the game stopped catering to newbs long ago.

You'll get to actually see this at level 300, in a raid group the size of Zambia.
Newbs will never see it - not unless they plan to invest A YEAR OF PLAYED TIME to reach the level and CAMP (fucking played months of extra mandatory WAITING) for the relevant flags. Either that or E-Bay a char.

Its a raiding game now, all the casuals have been leeched away by WoW.

I quit over a year ago, and even before then I kinda realized -
STOP PLAYING THIS GAME, YOU. STOP HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY.

PS:
* you want gory details? check out the half-assed retarded stabbing motion whenever someone uses a hammer (broken 2HB animation). Better yet, why does everyone run like having a massive stick shoved up their asses (broken run animation). They actually had "fixes" in for a while but they "fixes" were pulled because they actually looked EVEN WORSE than the broken animations - game testing for teh win!

In a nerdy luser sort of way, I have to ask.

Why would an Iksar end up to killing newby trash in Toxxulia?

NOBODY plays in Toxxulia - been like that since 1999. Erudites kill themselves falling off boats rather than play in Toxxulia (before insta POK ports). Toxxulia is a big solid ball of meh... easily the worst newby ground in the entire game. Aye well, if your gonna make a point that newbies are not warned about one of the worst ever zones in the game - it does make sense somehow. Did someone steer you to that zone as a hazing ritual? I dunno, just seems kinda odd that the reviewer found the worst possible newb  zone for newbs in the game.

Iksars have better starting grounds and newb quests in their hometown Cabilis.

Actually, the Warrens, and add on zone (after expansion 7?) just outside of Tox through Paineel (evil Erudite city) has some of the best drops for low level characters near level 5. On the progressive servers, which doesn't feature the newb tutorial caves and starts characters in only the regular cities, this is a decent place to venture to.

The Warrens? The place with the Kobolds? I think that's been in the game much longer than expansion 7. I played there when Velious was out.

Confirmed, it was between Velious and LDoN somewhere.

I tried using a bard in there....the agro was just silly.

Actually, I wasn't  sure when it was and was guessing near the 6th or 7th expansion that Warrens was added as a free zone, so because I was still guessing (and it was near 6 am after being up all night) I did include the ? in there.

It still was not released during Velious (expansion 2), and upon going to clear where my memory was fuzzy (and obviously other EQ people) it was actually added between expansions 4 and 5 just prior to expansion #5, Legecy of Ykesha the Froglock expansion.

Stonebrunt Mountains (the other added zone with Warrens) specifically had the Path to Gunthak in it featuring the Froglocks, but even if my fuzzy memory wasn't perfect, neither was any of yours. If it matters any, my guess and recollection was closer than yours cmlancas.

English, do you speak it?


He said he played there when Velious was out, not WHEN it came out. That would seem to say it came out at some point in time after the release of Velious, but not very long after that point.

It was in between Luclin and Velious. It may have been during Luclin, but not after, only because I quit after Luclin came out. Either way, this is turning into a sissy slapfight, and I'd rather not go there.


(But Tao is still wrong)   :grin:

It started out as a sissy slapfight.

"It's not a review, he only talked about his impressions of the game as it is now!"  is arguing because he likes the game but feels he has to use a red herring (that you need to consider historical context to appreciate the current experience) to justify his opinion.

I had a lvl 54 warrior which I stopped playing shortly after Kunark (and made a sweet 1500 bucks off of when I quit).  The state of the game now limits my interest in original EQ far more than any positive experiences I may have had 6 or 7 years ago.

I fondly remember the Warrens and the adjacent zone (can't remember what it was called now). Used to practically live out there with my druid. And the Warrens was possibly the best source of free booze there was. All the kobolds drank like fishes. I spent two hours in there one day just getting bottles of adult beverage for a guild picnic. Then one guildy drank himself to death. :D Another set up a duel between herself and herself (two boxer). The guild mistress (druid) tried dueling one of the higher mages and she accidentally dotted herself. I think she was drunk in game and in RL. Happy days. Just don't see that in WoW these days.

Thanks for writing the review I hoped for :)

Haha. Who cares? It sucks NOW, so please STOP REMEMBERING FUN THE WRONG WAY.

"Remember when" is the lowest form of conversation.   :oh_i_see:

So an 8 year old game sucks by today's standards. What next, a Pong review?

What? Shut up! STOP POSTING THE WRONG WAY!  (Oh sorry but I am having fun doing this)

People are still paying money for EQ.  Once people stop paying for it, you can declare it too old to be worth making fun of any more.  Until then,  :dead_horse:

Uhh, 1999 saw the release of games such as Rollcage, Midtown Madness, Kingpin, C&C Tiberium Sun, Darkstone, Mechwarrior 3, Hidden and Dangerous and System Shock 2, all of which I remember enjoying. And I hear Planescape: Torment was good, too. I posit that all of those were better games than Everquest. But don't take my word for it, here's what Gamespot had to say (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/everquest/review.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=gssummary&tag=summary;review):

"[EQ] is loaded with problems"
"at its best, EverQuest is picturesque and realistic. Then again, other parts of the game look silly or downright bad"
"all of [the audio is] repetitive, so you'll be turning down the volume before long"
"you can't realistically cultivate more than one or two characters"
"EverQuest isn't for casual game players, as it demands a huge time commitment"
"gaining experience is a terrifically boring process"

and

"Then again, if you're picky about details, EverQuest may not be for you. There's no denying that the game is very rough around the edges, and you'll know it from the moment you start the game and must sift through its lackluster menus. The actual interface isn't much better, the manual is even worse, the game is loaded with hilariously bad textual errors, and all in all, it's guaranteed to frustrate you regularly. If nothing else, you should expect to get killed a lot, at which point you must make the arduous journey to retrieve your belongings from your corpse. As you grow more powerful, you'll die less frequently, but you'll lose experience when you do, and reclaiming your pricey equipment will be much more critical. It'll also take a lot longer to heal all your hit points between fights, since you'll have more of them, yet your healing rate remains constant."

As an RPG EverQuest wasn't very good. Their saving grace was always the MMO.

As an X Y wasn't that great. The saving grace was the fact it was Z. Still, for hindsight perspectives, lets just judge it on X.

Brilliant.

Actually it pretty much sucks by all standards.  I'm sorry I played EQ because it was The MMO for a bit, I didn't get to L50, it was a painful painful game to play.  But for real, there are people still paying a monthly fee to play this game.  If that doesn't call for mockery what does?

I would review 3d-pong and point to the fact that it is awesome as proof that those guy(s)/gal(s) deserve to get VC money to make the next big AAA MMO over everyone whose gotten $$$ to make the next big AAA MMO whose name isn't Blizzard and/or CCP.  But what would that have to do with anything you say?  Who cares because your idiots defending EQ1!!!eleventy!!@1!

You are all still missing the point.

EQ brought to the masses the concept of coop videogaming. Suddenly it wasn't anymore about hotseats or a handful of players over a slow network. It was about hundreds massively cooperating to beat the game, and EQ was pretty good at its job.

I laugh at those of you who loved it and spent time with it in 1999 and now say it sucks. Congratulations, you've just been Schildified. EQ rocked when it came out and that's why you played it. And actually it kept rocking until imitators were able to come up with more polished clones of it.

P.S edit: Hoax, "defending" EQ1 is different from defending diku. And the fact that EQ1 was a great game doesn't mean they should keep redoing it. I don't judge game, books, or movies based and what sprung from them and I am afraid this is the mistake you and a few others keep doing.

Falconeer.

I was in the EQ beta. I thought the game was a steaming pile of shit from Day 1.

I didn't make it far enough to find fun. Even back then I felt fun should find me.

People who say EQ was good as a game absolutely fail on the 'game judgement' meter, because it wasn't. It was only good at attaching a fantasy grind to a chat room. Everything else was smoke and mirrors.

Why once again it sounds like "Schild didn't like it THEN it was obviously steaming shit"?

Many great games are just a mystical mix of simple ingredients and EQ was definitely one of those.
Fantasy Grind + Chat + Massive Coopeartive Challenges + Ok Lore = 1999 fun.

How many times do I have to point out that Planescape and Deus Ex came out in 1999? (well, deus ex was 2000, when most of you all were still fucking around in EQ1).

Neither of those two let people play together against the machine. And it's not like anyone is saying they weren't awesome.

Anyway fine.

A lot of people liked EQ back in the day, because....

Back in the day, people were new to online gaming and naive.


It's not 1999 anymore.



I mean, FFS, I took a rogue, a ROGUE, to level 65. Name a class that was more painful to play.

The only thing EQ did was capitalize on the fact that then and now there are many people who really want to be involved in a cool online world.  Where their avatar interacts in cool ways with others and the world itself.

EQ is only noteworthy because back then 500k+ people were willing to try anything that promised some kind of virtual experience.

WoW is noteworthy because it is good enough that many of those 500k+ can stomach playing it even though they are (or should be) burned out on the Diku mechanics.  It also introduced god knows how many people to the quest for a good MMO, or true 3d web, depending on what you think people are actually looking for when they play MMO's.

Neither are special games, both suck when you compare them to actual games that are fun to play (read: games that aren't MMO's).  Being the first piece of shit smelled by gamers doesn't deserve special credit, being the most polished piece of shit ever to reflect light doesn't deserve much more special credit.

I will maintain until I die that nobody plays Diku's for the gameplay, its the social/achiever bullshit.  There are fighting games so good that you can enjoy them on a visceral level playing practice mode against a computer that is just standing there.  Its that much fun to watch your character respond to your will and to master new methods of dealing out punishment.  EQ/L2/AO/WoW/Whatever are so fucking far from this it is staggering.


I can't wait for Chris Hansen to start fucking with WoW players...  That'd be awesome.

The "masses"? You have to be kidding me. The first introduction to "coop videogaming"? Please.

I've never played EQ1. I was playing MUDs around that time and remember people quitting them to play EQ and then coming back.

I loved RPGs, I loved online gaming, I loved certain MUDs that were similar in ways to what EQ1 supposedly was. But I remember it having bullshit system requirements and not that great art design coupled with rather boring seeming gameplay and I never even bothered trying it.

Persist in thinking EQ1 was a fun game if you like, but if you're not prepared to admit that it was because you have poor taste or had never played a multiplayer game before yourself, and not because EQ1 was actually awesome, then you're saying just as much useless rubbish as this review was.

Coop gaming? How about Ikari Warriors?

Fail.

How about the Original Mario Bros? Not that anyone really liked it.


Or maybe...


pong?

Exactly, so what's the point of judging it by today standards?
It's not 1949 anymore. Are you supposed to write a review of the Dodge Coronet now? Maybe a negative and snarky one comparing it to the Caliber?

And Lamaros,

I am not kidding you. EQ's 500k sounds a little more than the handful that were playing on your MUD at the time. You didn't try it and still you are talking? And I was wondering why people were giving you a hard time.

I multiplayed since I can remember, ponged when it was time to pong and kept on multiplaying ever since. My avatar is all about multiplaying and you should know better. In fact I always had a hard time enjoying solo videogames.

And to me EverQuest will always be crap compared to Ultima Online (which is a different beast, definitely not about cooperating to beat the game), but saying it wasn't a great game is just being forgetful or just not that much into cooperative gaming. Or, third option, someone who talks without knowing. Like you, who didn't play it.

Are you kidding me? Lamaros quoted what he wanted. I said:


Mass coop.

Because it's today and they still want money for the game and 15 a month for the sub?  So therefore reviewing it in todays terms is relevant to todays market?

Um, Duh?

Edit:  Put it this way, how fucking stupid would it look to review it on 1999's terms now?  The thing doesn't exist in a vacuum.

I agree. Of course, because I never played it my reasoning is therefor faulty. Despite that reasoning having nothing to do with playing it..

But then, if my reasoning is faulty then you're also wrong..


I know people who played it. I've read about it. I've played WoW and other MMOs which are supposedly 'it but better'. For my understanding of it in all those senses it was not much of a gain on a MUD. We're talking a MUD where 25 people played "coop" (co-op?) against the system. Where the server had 15k+ active users. But of course 500k spread over a number of servers divided up into raid groups of 40 is earthshatteringly different.


Good for you?

We can talk about a couple of things:

1. How the game plays now.
2. How the game played then.
3. How the game has changed since then.
4. How the game 'changed gaming'.

This review was 1, pre-conditioned with "it sucks" and was thus pointless.
Schild and other are saying that it sucked then. You're disagreeing. But your disagreement is not just about the game and how it played then. It's on a faulty construction of 4.

A good construction of 4 might be an interesting article.
A good construction of 3 might be an ok article.

But the original review and the shit you're spouting is neither here nor there.

So, you wanted a little  :pedobear: on EQ action.  :raspberry:

I still don't get what the fucking point is of all this griping.  It was a review solely for the purpose of entertainment coming from a goofy forum poster that won the sucker for free.  He had no other agenda going into the game than finding fun.  He didn't need to validate his purchase by killing 6.022 * 10^23 bats, rats and kobolds.

And fuck this 8 year old game nonsense.  It's been releasing 1-2 expansions a year since it came out and not one of them apparently improved the newbie experience.  It's had over 10 chances to become a game that could actually draw in more subscribers instead of dooming itself to death by attrition. EQ has failed miserably since other games came along and started dwindling its numbers.  EQ2 managed to reinvent itself and right the ship in short order, but apparently the hard core, mass coop pioneer decided to ignore all of the plainly obvious writing on the wall and continue to pump out content that only catered to its neckbeardy pod people.

And why the hell is Falconeer pretending like UO never existed.

Here's a free review of currently day  (pick one) UO/AC/SB/AO/Horizons:

IT SUCKS.

Pong wasn't co-op, it was PvP.

EQ was different in scale. I played a lot on some of the more popular MUDs back in the day like Arctic and MPV and on those you might have 100 - 200 people total on a server during prime time spread across all the rooms. In EQ you would have 100 people in a single "room" beating on a dragon and 300+ in a single zone and thousands on the server in total.

Medievia back in the day had up to 600 players online at the same time, had groups of 15-25 working together against the game, had 100+ players in certain zones at times, and had many other things beside.

I'm not disagreeing that EQ1 did some new things in terms of scale, just that an increase in scale isn't as amazing as Falconeer is making out (and that it's not necessarily a defense to the criticism that the game sucked).


And here I've been saying I don't understand what the point of this "EQ Sucks!" review was. Pointless griping about a pointless review? Ain't the internet grand.

You guys are arguing about EQ's past etc.

Let me clue you in - EQ has NO FUTURE.

(http://www.geocities.com/eqdoktor1/miscpix/eq000810xt9.jpg)

the latest in EQ E-Peen (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=72012;mid=119648148288875973)

Thats 1000hp gear there (unaugmented) - one month into the new expansion with corresponding increases in yard trash/casual gear coming out of the zones. We used to joke about 1000hp gear and now its here. Gear like this is essentially "god-mode" to other 95% game NOT in the latest expansion (available for $39.99). The Gods of Plane of Time will be like unto Fippy running down Qeynos (EQ geeks will know what I mean).

I believe there is enough former EQ players in these forums to realize what has happened and know the implications. Its itemization gone mad.

What we have here folks is that the devs at SOE has finally hit the panic button.

When an MMOG is completely bankrupt of ideas, the easiest way out is keep printing out the currency of the realm - in EQ's case - e-peen gear. This is hyper mudflation guys.

Bankruptcy of ideas and design - the easy way out - just hyperinflate gear.
Death throes? IMHO I think yes - your mileage may vary.

Because they were completely different.
EQ was about beating the game together, co-operative in a much more visceral way. In UO you couldn't win because the players were the content. And there was so much more stuff to do solo (not co-oping) than EQ.

But don't get me wrong: UO was ten times better than EQ in my opinion, it's just that I can't see reasons to run a comparison here. Someone wants to write a snarky UO review based on Kingdom Reborn? Meet me there.

And don't get me wrong 2: I never thought EQ was awesome. It was just a great, unique game. Totally denying that greatness sounds like negationism to me.
While denying that without having played it and based on "friends told me" sounds like royal turdness, Lamaros. Don't you have anything better to do during the day than make a fool of yourself over the internet? Because it's a pain to try explain you the difference between a healthy and well known MUD and a game with boxes in every store's shelves across the world and newspapers talking about it. That's what I meant when I said "brought massively co-oping to the masses".

But it wasn't. Read the old Gamespot review ignoring all the MMO stuff and you're left with a bad RPG with some good eye-candy (for its day).

Only difference to reviewing it today is that you are forced to ignore the MMO part.

EQ was the best MMO of its day, but the MMO part is ever only 50% under the developer's control. Reviewing an MMORPG based only on its MMO is next to pointless; you might as well be comparing paying subscriber numbers.

That loot screenie is...I don't know what. Jeebus.

Said it yourself.

it would be a lie to write a review today and say:

"EQ is a revolutionary and unique title.  You should buy it and check it out because it is a paradigm shift in online gaming."

Which is what you are advocating should be said.  Every point you are making is past tense.  True yesterday, not true today.

If you want to write an homage, write an homage, but that would not be a 'review' in the full context of suggesting the quality of the game to those unfamiliar with it.

You want another indication of the death kneel of EQ, go to any of the 'uber-guilds' websites and check out the recruitment requirements. 1200+ AA a minimum. There is absolutely no way someone could pick up EQ1 today and even hope to reach something close to that before the next 6 expansions are out and the new requirement is 1800+.

I should write a counter review of EQ2 but I don't think it will be as funny as I'm actually enjoying playing it.

Good god. That guy have over 23000 hit points. I think there were early raid mobs that had that many. Heh.

The stats bonuses on that weapon are equal to initial character stats. I remember 200 being a tough stat level to reach unbuffed and I got my guy to 62. I like his "SHIT" hotkey in the lower right.

My favorite thing about EQ1 nostalgia is this:  RAIDING IN EQ WAS FUCKING STUPID.

Raiding period isn't my favorite thing, but god raiding in WoW is about 1,000 times more refined and more better.

For real, no cap on the # of players?  Fucking kidding me?  I watched some EQ1 raids, I've never seen multiplayer gaming that looked so utterly fucking boring and stupid.  EQ1 raiding is fun the wrong way.  Period.  To say otherwise is to prove nobody should listen to you about anything else ever again.  The zone raids were cool back then, but the actual raid boss fights?  No.  Bad shit.  Very very bad shit.  Even the ones that spawned lots of adds were pretty fucking retarded.  But if you watch a video today of 100+ PC's fighting ONE mob and think that was good gaming?  Get your head checked.

I said it so many times: one thing is the fact that I think it was a great game and half of the argument here is that it NEVER was, which I think it's simply not true. But the discussion sprung from the "review" itself: I can't see reasons to write an homage as much as I can't see reasons to write a review of it now. As I said before it would be like writing a review of a 10 years (probably much more than that) old car. What's the point?

I did. And reviews were pretty good. Gamerankings says it has 87.3% with 27 reviews and the score is hindered by a couple of late (2002) 65 - 70% ones. One of, if not the, highest score ever for MMOs (not counting godlike WoW).

Old Gamespot reviews?

Here it is. (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/everquest/review.html?mode=gsreview). Score is 8.4 which sounds far from suck.


Or IGN (http://pc.ign.com/articles/152/152252p1.html), for that matters. - 8.4 score.


Or All RPG (http://www.gamerankings.com/itemrankings/launchreview.asp?reviewid=83889) which said, on the supposedly poor RPG aspect of the game:


And so on for a few other reviews I was able to dig up. ALmost all of them mention having LOTS of FUN and great immersion (which I always thought and still think was great)

(http://www.harnmaster.it/forum/uploads/post-8-1196842650.jpg)

Of course there are gripes about too much zoning, boring combat, too long leveling curve and bugs and network issues. But that's pretty much it. It's ok that it sucked for so many of you, to each his/her/its own, but well maybe you are all remembering things the way you want to and not actually the way they were.

Dude won a free copy. Plus you can still buy and play it today. For full price.

Dude, you are too diehard for me. I give up.  :heartbreak:

Nope.  i remember it pretty much always chugging enormous amounts of buffalo cock.
Once the newness of OMG NO RANDOM GANKAGE!! wore off the game quickly lost its luster.  This took about a month.

Check out his keys on the left - mend, feign death etc.  He aint even a tank, hes a monk with 23K health.

If they had revamped the rest of the game in such a way that it was possible for a new player to reach the endgame in a semi-reasonable amount of time, would mudflation even matter?  I mean this sort of game is ALWAYS about getting weapons with bigger damage numbers to kill monsters with more hitpoints, pretending the two don't cancel each other out, and being able to curbstomp everything beneath your level.

I mean if the level cap is 700 and everyone has weapons that do twelve billion damage, who cares?  As long as the grind were adjusted such that a guy could walk into the game with some hope of actually reaching that cap, and the endgame monsters all had the trillions of HP needed to stand up to those weapons, what's the difference?

See a pattern?

Fuck having a hope of reaching the cap. That's where Grind To Fun comes from. Even WoW's recent leveling adjustments point to games where you have to work until you're allowed to play the game.

Barf.

You mean you should have fun right out of the box? THAT'S CRAZY TALK!!!

I'm not going to slog through the ridiculous arguements about wether EQ was or is a good game, by any standards. Some people adored it for years, others never took to it. It doesn't make you a 'bad person' one way or the other.

What is probably true, however, is that without EQ, there would be no F13. No EQ, no LtM, no LtM, no Waterthread, no Waterthread, no F13.

LtM started bitching about UO, not EQ.

Well, I will let Lum correct me, but although perhaps UO spawned the awsomeness, EQ fed the rant beast far more satisfactory meals than UO.

Months ago the articles about Brad McQuaid & his sodomizing of the VG team drew me to F13, & yesterday the article about his baby, Everquest brought me back.  Having come full circle in life, I decided to register for the forums, I had no choice. 

EQ was a great game, but only because it provided players with something to bitch about.  The thing that made the game great was the community.  The community existed because

1)  The servers were relatively small.  So players bitched about overcrowded camps, & server queues.

2)  Slow travel from point a to b made us rely on druids/wizzies to port us, or druids to SoW us.  Which made us complain about how shitty it was that it took us 20 minutes to get to somewhere, where we couldnt find a group.

3)  Forced grouping.  Which in turn made us bitch about how hard it was to get groups, & how much we wanted to solo. 

4)  We had what... 5 channels for chatting?  Guild, party, ooc, shout, auction? 

5)  Extraordinarily slow leveling, hell levels, & harsh death penalties. 

6) Total obfuscation & denial from the crack dev team at Verant then later Sony.

7) Fucking item camps.  Standing in line for J-boots in drelzna anyone? 

8) PoH PoF

And this is the first year....

Everyone bitched so much about how all of the above sucked in EQ we got DAoC & later WoW.  Now everyone wants to think back to the "good ole days" & natter on about how great EQ was.  Misery loves company & we were all fucking miserable in Norrath.  Everyone bitched about all of the above "features", and now we have MMOs like WoW, that we can experience from 1-70 without ever actually having to speak with another person!

EQ was a success because it was the only game in town.  It could suck as much as it wanted but scads still packed in nightly to get butt raped by trains from Oasis to Karana!  Now we have games that are much more fun, much higher quality, but with crappy communities. 

Oh well, thats why there are guilds.

Mocking EverQuest is a bit like going to the natural history museum to see a horse-drawn chariot and yelling, "OMG, this sucks, cars are so much better!"

Except horse-drawn chariots don't have elf tit.

That's a really fucking terrible analogy.   :ye_gods:  Go sit in the corner and think about what you've done.

I feel good with what I've done under the understanding that all analogies suck.

Anywho, the point is that EQ (like Ultima Online) is a over-patched mess residing on fossilized remains of 1999 when its core gameplay was actually interesting.

Actually, I need to clarify further with what provoked my mind with the thorny stick of discontent.

See this post (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=11505.msg376213#msg376213), with all the review scores on the bottom.  Looks good for EverQuest, doesn't it?  Now, look at the date next to those reviews.  Ah, that explains it.  Most of them are 1999, even the latest review is four years old.

It really is the chariot in the museum.  It's fucking old.  Even with a dozen expansions sitting on top of it, the state of gaming has moved on.  (I wish I could say the state of MMORPGs have moved on, but a lot of them are still imitating EverQuest.)

So, if you pull some kid raised by wolves out of the forest and show him a chariot pulled by horses he's going to go, "Arrroooowww" and want it.

Still doesn't make it a good method of transportation now though so you should probably smack him on the head when he lunges for it and point him at the Lotus Espirit that he didn't see when he walked in.

WHICH IS THE POINT OF A REVIEW.

SMB3 is older than EQ.  Know what I would put in a review of it?  "HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE BEST PLATFORM GAME I HAVE EVER PLAYED."

I replayed SMB3 after I played NSMB because I was pretty sure that it was better but I needed to make sure that wasn't nostalgia.  Nope.  It's better.  If someone asked me to recommend a platformer, especially a Mario platformer, that's the one I'd pick.

Old games are not irrelevant just because they're old.  You might be able to argue that BAD games are irrelevant because we should all just try to forget about them, but comparisons to chariots and whatever are dumb.  Also, I would TOTALLY ride a chariot to work if I had something to pull it with.

Well, I forgot the third cornerstone of my point that actually makes it work.   :uhrr:

Here's the thing: This thread. If we divide this thread into two camps (as we Americans like to do about everything) there's the camp that says, "EverQuest sucks and I hate it" and then there's the camp that says, "What's the matter with you, EverQuest is the cornerstone of MMORPGs and we wouldn't be where we are today were it not for that."

The point I was trying to make is this: You're both right.

On one hand, EverQuest is what defined the graphical Diku and it couldn't have done that if it sucked.  WoW is successful because it's the best damn EverQuest ever made and there's still a lot of people who will jump on board with that idea.

On the other hand, if you play EverQuest today and you had no pre-existing experience with EverQuest, you will likely have the same impression as I Am Lesion did.  What seemed acceptable in 1999 is a mess of strange gameplay mechanics and guard rape.

The differentiating factor between the two camps is whether or not you've the nostalgia to understand WTF EverQuest even was when, back in 1999 when the Romans used it to grind their loot, it was the best thing 3v4r.  (Except if you hated it, in which case you were probably playing Ultima Online or Asheron's Call which was used for the same purpose by the Franks and Gauls, respectively.)

Today, you might still like playing EverQuest because you've a better appreciation for how it was back when the tribe would need something to do when hunting bison was boring.  However, you really can't blame the current generation of gamers for pointing out that there's better things to do because, when you get right down to it, using the horse-drawn chariot when you've got a car in the driveway is either an act of extreme nostalgia or masochistic environmental friendliness.

You didn't say anything new there.

Okay, how about this then.


They are when there's genuinely better versions of the exact same game available.

Then that wouldn't be just because it's old, would it?

You don't have to be an eight-year-old game in order for the gaming world to have successfully copied and innovated you into oblivion... but it helps.

You forget the most important camp: The one that says "who gives a shit if EQ sucks or doesn't suck, writing a review of something just to say it sucks in mildly funny ways is a kinda silly thing to frontpage, a silly thing to complain about too, but hey, people like to get riled up over nothing and pointing this out will generate some more mindless blather for a page or two."

The fact you are being serious about this topic is absurd: EQ sucked. This review sucked. My complaint about the review sucked. The fact you think you can argue your way out of all this suckiness and make some sort of point sucks.

Regrettably acknowledged.

I think you're at the wrong site.

If you're going to butcher a quote in such fashion at least adjust the grammar.  :ye_gods:

Ah yes, the perennial classic: To Butcher a Quote: How to Design Box Art In the Gaming Industry

I stuck with UO until DAOC came out. I knew Everquest was a steamer when I saw my roommates playing it.

Ah, but you played DAOC, so there must have been something you liked about it.   :oh_i_see:

there was a contest?

RvR.

On one hand, I should be sympathetic to EQ people.  I am, after all, the guy who still plays UO.

On the other hand, fuck EQ people.  Anyone still playing EQ when there's such a thing as WoW is sick in the head.  Give me a UO style game that is as much improved as WoW is over EQ, and I'll drop UO in a heartbeat.

For me, the difference between WOW and EQ is the rush to max your character. In WOW, I felt like I was grabbed by the throat and kicked in the ass and dragged down the road until my character was maxed, and there could be NO STOPPING IT!!! In EQ, I just don't feel that. A few days ago, I was sitting in the Qeynos tavern waiting for that horrible once-a-day spawn for a quest that had nothing to do with me, and I just watched the NPCs do their repetitive little interactions, and I started to feel drowsy and complacent, and still I waited. I never saw the damn spawn, but I didn't feel rushed towards it. The game let me take my own damn time with it.

There's a push for games to be CONSTANT FUN! That's understandable, but CONSTANT FUN doesn't necessarily mean all action, all the time. I don't want to get psyched up for a good game; I want to relax with a good game. I can't kick back and relax in WOW. Tabula Rasa and Hellgate are the same way. If I want to relax, I have to log off, and that's an exit point for me.

I have no words.

I get what he's saying, I don't get the EQ1 love but I felt similarly in FFXI at times, WoW is very much OMGgoGOgo & when you get down to it just doesn't feel like much of a worldy place.  However, there is nothing that says slow painful punishment grinds need to go hand in hand with fleshed out virtual worlds.  AO is a decent example (dunno about after they raised the cap to L7,000) of a more worldy game that didn't have a super-awful grind.  Of course it also had zero minigames and didn't work for shit at release.  Also I tried to play it in 2007 and the UI was so fucking ugly I almost puked on my kb.

Couldn't you get the same effect in WoW by just not doing quests?  I don't see how cockblock = world.

It's hard to describe, but without sufficient "worldly" aspect to appreciate, there's little incentive to sit around and relax in it.

The trouble is that "worldly" is also fairly subjective.  I've seen people claim that WoW was the mostly worldly MMORPG ever, which floors me because it looks like the whole thing was conceived by Fischer Price to me.

Not true.  He just described how his incentive to sit around was that his stupid quest wouldn't spawn.  If his quest had spawned he'd presumably have done the quest rather than sitting around "appreciating" the world.

What this tells me is that it doesn't matter if the game is worldy or not; the important thing (if you're a goddamned masochist, that is) is to have lots of cockblocks in the game so you have nothing to do but stare at NPC animations for an hour.

It's not that he specifically enjoyed sitting around just to wait for a quest to spawn.  It's that he wouldn't have been able to enjoy being forced to sit around unless the world were sufficiently worldly.

What you said made no sense.  If you "enjoy" being "forced" to sit around, either you're not really enjoying it or you're not really being forced.  You can't have both.

Well, I'm going to butcher it further through the lost art of the analogy.

If you're at the DMV to renew your license and forced to wait 3 hours then the system has already failed.  However, if the interior of the DMV office has a widescreen TV playing your favorite demo reels of cosplaying midget porn, the fact that you're being forced to wait and irrational amount of time is undermined by the entertainment factor.

an irrational

I'm really quite meticulous about keeping my messages readable, but forget to hit the preview button and I'm screwed.  To this day, I'm not sure why irrational fear of my editing my messages a dozen times, strictly because I like to improve it's readability, justifies taking it away form me.

The argument being made in the context of EQ is (to use your analogy) like saying that because people wait in 3-hour lines at the DMV, it logically follows that the DMV is a fun place to be.

Do you spend your free time at the DMV?  If not, your analogy fails utterly.

What you're arguing is that there is a hypothetical version of EQ (like your DMV with the midget porn) in which the cockblock might be partially mitigated by having something mildly entertaining to do while you're being cockblocked.  Somehow this hypothetical version of EQ that's a bit less sucky than the actual one is being used as proof that the actual EQ is a really fun game, and that it's because of the cockblocks, not in spite of them.  Does that about cover it?

I don't really bother to continue discussions with people who can't be bothered to read the entirety of my first sentence.

I think that may be it. I was sufficiently entertained by the NPCs, so that I could appreciate the forced downtime...and technically it's not forced, because I didn't have to do the quest. I chose to wait for that specific spawn. I don't think that's enough incentive for other players though, and I don't know if other players even want that. 8mil+ people seem to like being led through the content. If I did the same thing in WOW, I would be sitting in a tavern while NPCs had exclamation points above their heads, which screams to me "THIS IS WHAT YOU MUST DO NOW."

There is an exception though; 40-man raids. Every 40-man I've been in, there's been at least one mom watching over her baby, and there was this weird moment where I imagined a husband and wife in the middle of Molten Core who had no choice but to take their child with them, and the whole guild was protecting the baby from the monsters. Anyway, everybody has to face that once in a while if they raid; bathroom breaks, cat jumps on the keyboard, whatever. Downtime lets us appreciate the world and the social ties and all that crap, but I'm sure there's a line separating it from cockblocking.

Oh sure, justify yourself in edits, now I know how it feels.  Curse my snippy reply reflexes. 

I'll take one more run at it, then.

Cockblocks are bad, nobody is saying they're good, however, they are more tolerable if you enjoy the atmosphere.

Are you kidding?  That was the only part of your post I agreed with.


I only wish it had stayed lost.   :grin:

I'm bad at this today.  I should take a break from posting for awhile.

What I meant to say is the second sentence, particularly the bolded part.
Meant the point out that nobody's saying cockblocks are good.  I emphasize this later when I say:

Really?


This is masochism, plain and simple.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It's there, right there, that the misunderstanding has taken place.

You've read that to mean: "Slyfiend loves cockblocks"
What he was trying to write was: "Slyfiend does not like cockblocks, however, they were more tolerable because [worldly aspects ect]"

This is clarified further in that message he posted about 15 minutes ago that we buried.

WoW, for many of us, lacks as much of this insulating "worldly" substance and that, combined with its rapid fire quest structure, fires the player through it like a lubricated slippy slide.  While nobody likes chafing on cheap plastic, it's tolerable if you like where you are (http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=8767863).

The anecdote given as proof that EQ has this "worldiness" was a story about an hour-long cockblock.  Whether or not the intent was to say that cockblock = world, that's what was presented.

Now, perhaps the thing that makes EQ "worldy" is these NPC animations that were mentioned briefly in the context of that cockblock.  I haven't seen these animations, so perhaps they are awesome.  YouTube vid plz?  Then we can have someone post a vid of some NPC animations from WoW and we can compare.  My suspicion is that they aren't all that different, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

These days, I tend to realize that "what's being presented" is a difference between "what was written" and "my interpretation of what was written", so I wouldn't go assuming that he presented anything in particular.  For example, pouring over the original message further reveals he was talking about an all-day cockblock that never materialized and not an hour-long one.  Further, the overall push of his post, from start to finish, really wasn't specifically about that so much as the tendency of WoW to rush you along so quickly you can't really savor the experience much.

In conclusion, forums still suck for conveying even the simplest of rational points.  But I've written a crappy Blog entry (http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/2007/11/illiterate-literacy-what-i-learnt-about.html) on that already.

Just because you suck at something doesn't mean it's bad.  I find it hard to believe you don't understand why they took your edit post ability from you.  This whole page of the thread is basically you trying to justify a losing position with minor edits to your original premise rather than just going, "Yeah, saying a cockblock could be justifiable and fun just because it's not the worst cockblock it could possibly have been was probably a bad idea."  Even better you finish off not by admitting you're being a fool but by blaming the medium.

Seriously, write a note to yourself to come back and read this page of the thread in about 10 days.

There's not much to it; people go up and down stairs, and in and out of the tavern. There's the thieves' guild racketeering going on, and the bar maid is being romantic with a merchant from Highpass...then she turns around and acts like she's in league with the merchants of Qeynos, trying to drive her "lover" out of town. A tailor enters, has a drink, then leaves. Then an erudite vomits in a nearby pond. Then they do this all over again. This kinda stuff happens in WOW and DAOC all the time, too; little Billy stealing his sister's doll in Stormwind, the marriage in Tir na Nog, etc etc.

I spent about two hours in that tavern; in case anyone's wondering, it's for The Eye of Stormhammer, (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=432) and I play a druid, so it was completely pointless to bother with that quest anyway. So maybe it's because I was doing something pointless to begin with, that I thought the NPCs chatting among themselves was so damn enthralling.

I rest my case.

I rest my case as well.  You EQ people are fucking sick.  :uhrr:

Hm. The only cockblock (and necessary one) should be the installation process.

That being said, EQ had too many installation processes.   :grin:

FIFY.   :awesome_for_real:

I've had a fun regression today to my v1.0 ways, but the main focus of my upgrade has been in realizing that trying to clarify a point 50 times to somebody who is convinced I'm arguing with them is pointless.

 :hello_kitty_2:

You deserve a goddamn award, geldon. Bravo.

Geldon's avatard and Hello Kitty are in sync.  I can't stop looking.

Not quite.  If you stare long enough, they go out of sync briefly.  Then they appear to go back into sync, but in the opposite direction.  I think it's hypnotizing me to kill.

Yes, yes, it's all going according to plan.

 :hello_kitty_2: :hello_kitty_2: :hello_kitty_2: :hello_kitty_2: :hello_kitty_2:

Okay, in an attempt to re-rail this into a semi-interesting conversation that was developing...

What about LoTRO? Does it strike the balance between EQ1 and WoW? Is it too much like WoW to give the perception of a world as EQ1 did?

Or was EQ1 more of a world because you ended up spending so much time in specific locations that you began to know every twist and turn, nook and cranny? For me, at least, I can probably recall travel directions to almost any location I have ever played in the world of EQ1. In WoW, you probably don't need directions, but it seems that people move through the zones much quicker than EQ1. Not that that is a bad thing, it just causes a lower knowledge of the geography of the world. What else made the immersion of the world in EQ1 better? Or was it really better?

LOLZ

It's probably justified to level a, "He lova the cock" accusation towards anyone who thinks it's cool to be forced to wait for hours for something in an MMORPG.  But that wasn't what he was saying.  :grin:

We were talking about RPGs?  :ye_gods: