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Guildie posted an FoH Youtube Nostalgia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_b9n76F5KQ&feature=related) video. Besides the music, which I loved, it got me thinking about EQ1 again. Yea, yea, the game pissed most of us off in some form. But in terms of where the genre is 10 years later, it either outright invented, merely popularized, or single-handedly caused the creation of a lot of the stuff newer players take for granted.

Yea, I'll be the first to say this genre has gone easy-mode. But then, what constituted as "hard" back in the day is the sort of thing we'd institutionalize people for even considering in 2008.

So let's talk about that (until this devolves into the Den :wink:)

I'll start with stuff that has since been devolved out of the popular end of the genre (the one with all the players, both in WoW and in the microtrans games that share some of the diku conventions). I'm missing a lot, so feel free to add:

• XP loss on death. Yea, ain't missing that.
• Level loss due to sufficient XP loss. I think this is the single biggest contribution to the Grind mentality. Christ, they created a Cleric Epic just due to this, and we made all the Clerics get one, poor bastards.
  
• Item loss due to really unfortunate death. This wasn't pre-Trammel UO where you just went back and got your 17th set of full GM crafted gear. This was shit you camped for 40 hours lost in the lava river you fell into due to a lag spike outside of wherever-that-was.
• Attackable NPCs. First step in the new game world is probably to turn around and take a look. You have a 50% chance of deciding to turn left. You hit A to do that, like you did in Doom before it. Except here, A is the Attack key, and you're probably standing near your Trainer or a guard. And then you respawn in from death.
  
• Actual relevant NPC factions. This is a sort of unfortunate devolution. Nowadays you pick a side at character creation and that's that. Back in the day you could (almost) choose any Race and eventually become friendly with any Faction. Imagine being able to start as an Orc but eventually gain entry to Stormwind. Even EQ2 made it more contrived with it's Betrayal quests.
• Mobs that don't give up. Nowadays mobs will mostly rubberband back to their "home". In EQ1, if you got in over your head, you had to run for a zone boundary to enter an adjacent zone. Meanwhile, the other people who did that before you are probably sitting on the side you just came from, and have just gotten wtfpounced by the mobs that followed you. If you've been there, you felt it in Crushbone, Blackburrow and particularly Unrest (which was a mess unto itself anyway). The closest analog in WoW is in Raid instances. Imagine that, in public spaces, all the time.
• Spellbook meditating. Nothing says "fun" quite like having a) a mana bar that could take a full four minutes to recharge (while being depleted in about four abilities); and, b) having to stare at your spellbook for the entire time.

Stuff that was added because of EQ1 and/or what players did there:

• Ingame maps. What? Everyone didn't like going to EQAtlas and printing out their own custom-created MS Word files? (yes Sky, this was before I started using Excel :-) ).
• Ingame quest trackers. I'm actually having a hard time remembering in what game this first appeared. I don't remember one in early UO, AC1 nor EQ1, though this did come later in EQ1, I think in the Legacy of Ykesha expansion. Pretty sure it was in DAoC.
• Alt-tab. SOE used to do everything they could to keep you from alt-tabbing. Then they and everyone else capitulated. But at least they had zone-wide chat and dedicated guild chat. Even UO didn't have that. I still remember having AIM up all the time when playing.
• Instances. EQ1 caused the creation of these, if only to keep players from griefing each other from Vox and Naggy spawns.
• Mobs that give up :-)
• Hotkey bars. You need more abilities. In early EQ1, you were lucky to have six accessible abilities and 8 spell slots. IIRC.

I have some fond memories of EQ1 - when I wasn't LFG :)

To your point about factions:  I played a troll and decided to find every quest that allowed me to build faction with the good races.  I had a hoot - I  could sit in the Elven, Dwarven and human cities, beside a guard, and watch other players boggle at the fact I strolled around unharmed by the guards.

I never did crack Halas though.

In a sense, to me, I created "my own  game".  I spent months doing low level quests, and finding the right balance of faction that allowed me to advance my standing as good.  To me my fun was not the gear (although I did raid) but this set of faction accomplishments which was a source of much amusement when I finished them.

Because of the long leveling curve in EQ - it helped build community - it was much harder to retreat to an alt if you decided to be a jerk in a particular toon.  I miss the community of EQ the most.  With the option of server transfers and name changes in many games today - I feel community has really suffered in successor games.

EQ1 was not friendly, but it allowed this open ended game play in a sense.

On a separate note - EQ was "dangerous" - and I do miss that.  There are too many safety rails today, and sometimes, that dampens that sense of exploration.

Rallos Zek was its own special little place.  It was a one item loot PvP server (could only attack +- 4 levels from you).  Several fun factors:

1)  You couldn't loot something your victim had in a bag.  When you were ganked, it was a furious exercise in bagging all your equipment.

2)  De-leveling.  I'd be impressed if anyone remembers this one.  It takes a hardcore pker to go from level 50 to level 5.

3).  Naked casters.  Every single fucking halfling and gnome was a psychotic ganker.

4)  Mob training.  At one point, a level 5 bard could go into a zone like Oasis and use his run spell to stay in front of all the sand giants.  Then, he'd run the giants through groups.  It added depth to PvP, and I wish an MMO would bring this back.

Me and my brother got bored with high level PvP, so we created eternal level five naked wizard pks and camped Faydwer forest.  Elves had naturally low hp, so we'd go around rooting and ganking level 1s fighting bats.  Everytime we killed someone, we told the zone "X has died for his crimes against the Faydark."  I kept all the level 1 robes I got as trophies.  The high point of this was when someone told me that I killed them literally five seconds after they spawned on RZ for the first time, and because of me they were never pvping again.

In 2000, they put in the Sanctuary patch (no PvP on RZ until level 20) and that was that.  It wasn't pre-Ren UO, but it was something.   :-)

Sure as hell did.  I still won't pay any money for an SOE game to this day because of how poorly EQ1 was run and handled.  Even Grimmy has almost given up on me ;-)

Just in case anyone has any positive feelings of nostalgia, I was told recently that EQ now has removed all level, flagging, pre-quest, and related requirements for content more than 2 years old.

That means:

--Anyone can hit up Plane of Time (although at this point no one should want to for the loot, it is a pretty cool zone in some ways)
--Anguish, without having to do trials or sigs.
--Tacvi (while the flagging was pure hell, the zone itself was quite fun, and had some interesting raid mechanics)
--Prophecies of Ro (another with a decently mind numbing and frustrating flagging path)

The only one of those things i recognize is time :(

Good old Fansy the bard. (http://www.notaddicted.com/fansythefamous.php)

Sadly The Quon's website doesn't work anymore, I loved that.

Yeah. I jumped from UO to DAoC, and only went back to give EQ a try for a few weeks.

The only thing good about those few weeks was the group that I hooked up with to bash mobs.

Every single part of the game I either didn't care or hated.

Never understood what other people saw in it.

I joined Fenin Ro on day 1 because it was being advertised by beta players as the "Roleplaying Server".

I remember people being shouted down for talking OOC in General Chat. I joined an all dwarf guild and had a blast for many months. I remember stumbling around in Feydark because i couldn't actually see shit.

Later I would quit Fenin Ro and go to the Test server looking for a tighter community.

I once camped that island cyclops for 36 hours straight for the JBoots quest, then disconnected when he finally spawned  :ye_gods: I got back in just in time to keep him from being KS'd, but I almost lost my shit on that one.

Just the memory of sitting in a group for hours camped along the outside wall of Unrest, with dozens of other groups, is so different from games nowadays.

For better or worse, EQ forced you into a community of players unlike anything around today. WoW is basically a single player game compared to EQ, at least 1-69. I hardly remember doing ANY questing in EQ, it was solo or group grinding.

Ah there's something that's been removed from the genre.  Different "Sights"   Or does EQ2 carry on the torch of, "Oh hey you're a human, you're going to be fucking blind 1/3 of your gametime.  Here's a light item to always take up a bag slot for you!"

Yeah, don't miss that much.  It's most of the reason I only played Half Elves or Dark Elves.

I do miss kiting, though.  Even if it wasn't an intended mechanic, quad kiting and bard kiting were both damned fun. There was an art to keeping track of the mob spawns in an area as you ran around like a fool so you didn't pick-up additional mobs.

"Twink" buffs and in large part "twink" equipment.  The rise of BoE items and "you must be x" for spells means no more level 1 players taking-down level 10-20 mobs on damage shields with an insane number of hit points for a noob. 

Needing to stay logged-in to sell your stuff.  Ah, what a pain in the ass it was to adventure, knowing that 3k plat item was sitting in your bank, missing potential buyers.  No, I didn't have an account solely for selling stuff or dual-boxing with.

"Squishy" warriors. Everyone likes to bitch about how healers aren't effective in solo PvE or take forever to kill stuff in solo PvE.  They all forget the days when things like Warriors couldn't even solo "green" or "grey" level mobs.  The day my level 53 warrior was pwnd by a Hill giant was the day I rolled up a fucking druid.

"Dangerous" mobs in low-level areas. We've mentioned this before.  Things like the griffins in East Commons. The Hill giant in West Commons.  "SPECTER AT THE DOCK!"  "Slate to the tunnel!"  Night in Kithikore.  These were worldly bits I'd love to see even in my "games" as they added a level of teamwork and a reason for higher-levels to intermix with lowbies and help out from time to time.  (Wow did nice adding-in the Void Reaver in Hellfire, but that's it.)

That's it for now, not going to wrack my brain too hard as I'm already late for work.

I can't watch those nostalgia videos without feeling a profound loneliness that I can only compare to what a former cult member must feel. I think EQ is both a great and truly significant milestone in the evolution of online gaming, and for me there will never be another one like it. That having been said, the game itself was a total pile of shit, but it benefited as much from a lack of true competition as it did from the basic flaws in human nature to which it was ideally suited towards exploiting.

I think at some point I'm going to try EQ1 as a fresh never-played-before newb.  Just to see.  Fuck it.

I only played EQ1 for about 20 minutes, but I spent a couple years in AC1.

Perching, actually using the terrain to your advantage, has been totally removed from everything, and it's awful.

It's not an "exploit" that my arrows can shoot the guy standing below me as I stand precariously balanced on top of some odd rock formation.

There was a spot in AC1, a few clicks out from one of the towns that will always be one of my fondest memories, the golem shrine.  Just a shrine, out in the middle of nowhere, with some golems that spawned on it, and you had to jump up/down/run around to get them stuck in places they couldn't hurt you so that you could kill them while 1/5th of their level.

Bring back npcs that get stuck on terrain, bring back letting me perch on top of a rock formation while I dodge your ranged spells/attacks.

(AC1 had dodgeable projectiles, when fired, projiles would extrapolate your position based on current vector and speed, and fire it to there, so you could strafe back and forth to dodge, great fun)

Stopped playing UO because all my friends left to play EQ1.  I played it for 3 months.  I have nothing good to say, sorry.

- I was able to play with all my friends in UO despite skill level differences, etc.  Now, once you fell behind by just a few levels, you just couldn't "hang out" anymore.  It was a race and if you lagged behind, you had to find a new set of friends.
- Forced grouping hooooooo!  Suckity suck suck.  Wait 20 minutes LFG so I could camp mobs for another hour before I had to log.  If I didn't die, I gained a bit of level bar.  If I died, the entire night was worthless.  More often than not, I ended up with less experience than I started that evening.
- Camping.  Seriously, this was the start of it and I absolutely hated it.  Only FFXI was able to make it even worse.  At least they had those combat combo moves that were interesting for awhile.
     "Ok, we killed everything here, let's find another group of them"
     "No Dude, just sit down and rest a bit, we'll kill the next spawn right here."
     "How long do we do this?"
     "Forever."
- Lost.  Always lost.  Always running.
- Not only lost, but scared.  Yeah, this is fun at times, but not nonstop.
     "Hey, this is a nice new area-----WHAM!"
     "What the hell is killing me?  I don't see anything.  WTF!"
       ----You were killed by a Pixie--- (They were like 3 sprites tall on your screen....I never could see those damned things.)
- That leads me into Powerless.  I always felt meek and weak.  Again, FFXI took this to a new level later (full group to kill a hare anyone?)

So basically during my time in EQ I was lonely, bored, lost, scared, and felt weak/worthless.  I know thousands felt otherwise, but from a casual player's perspective playing casually for 3 months (just to give it a chance,) that's what I came up with.

I remember seeing someone yelling in general chat OOC HELP!  It truly made me laugh outloud.  I also remember running up to an NPC and typing Hail to see if it had a quest and learning that a was the default attack key.  The other fun thing was the constant rain of newbie wood elves learning that their starter city was lethally devoid of safety rails.

I logged in a couple days ago just to update and get away from WoW for a bit. I've got a lowbie mage on Combine that I had parked out in W.Karena. Fired up an air elemental and went hunting. Saw a yellow con scarecrow and figured what the hell, sicced the pet on him and started nuking. Mana went down real fast, pet died and I thought 'oh heck, here we go...run for the guards.'...but nothing happened. The mob just sauntered off into the distance. I probably could've medded up, cast another pet and taken him. I've never seen that happen in EQ1 before. I'm definately going to see if that was a fluke or if they've changed the mob code to be less aggressive.

Fondest memory of EQ1 - being one of the first to find Stonebrunt Mountains. I remember racing my lil' druid through the Hollows and desperately trying to find the new exit. Found it, and then basically lived there for 15 levels or so. Got a bitching cool set of blue wicker armour out there. Also where I learned to kite. Great fun. I wonder if they ever did anything with the hidden cave in the east....

Memories.....

Walk up to the priest of discord.

Me: "WFT the guy just killed me"

Friend: "What did you do?"

Me: "I typed: hail"

...

Me: "I think I missed the H key"



I remember the j-boot quest and the paladin armor quest making me cry.  I remember spending days at the aviak tree.  I remember winning my first FBSS in L. Guk.  I remember being utterly amazed standing outside the high elf city.  I remember orc hill and crushbone making me feel anxious and excited.  I remember being in the crypt deep in Sebilis afraid that we'd wipe.  I remember playing in first person and spending hours staring at that damn spellbook.  I remember Unrest and Mistmoore in their train-filled glory. 

There were a lot of wonderful things about EQ and many equally as horrifying.  I loved that the game brought us all together.  I think that sharing pain with a group of others is a bonding experience.  I've only experienced the type of friendships in grad school, med school, and EQ... funny how that is. 

I'm always amazed that I tolerated all of the roadblocks in EQ now that I look back on it.  It was certainly a different era. 

 

The type of things EQ got away with would never work in a market that's competitive as it is now. See Vanguard for a concrete example.

Bad Memories:

Buggity bug bugs bugs: Dying to lag or bugs was a common occurrence. Things like the fall for 10,000 damage bug, the lag off a cliff bug, the shit you just looted disappeared bug. Which leads into...
Assy McAssenstein GM's and GM Policies: Worst Customer Service Ever. With the exception of one GM on Karana who later got transferred out, I never had one positive experience with SOE GM's. Not fucking one. It was always a bout of ulcer-inducing uselessness.
2 A.M. Raid failure corpse runs on a work night: Die corpse runs, die. It wasn't bad enough I could lose a level and/or all the "progress" I'd made that night, now I had to try to pry my cold, lifeless body from under a dragon to make sure I didn't lose every fucking one of my items. Yeah, Fuck You, Brad McQuaid.
Kill-stealing, raid-hopping shitheel guilds: My dragon, bitches. My dragon.
Epic weapon loot-whoring: Seeing good friends and people I thought had half a shred of decency bitching about someone else in the guild getting a tiny piece of the 50-billion step epic quests ahead of them and leaving the guild over it was rough. Everyone's inner asshole came out when the epic pieces dropped.
13-hour Plane raid camps: Once a plane was "broken into," all the fun evaporated. Pull, mez, kill, rinse and repeat and hope you win the lewtz lottery. Fuck you, Brad McQuaid.

Too many good memories to mention them all but:

The wonder of exploration: EQ1 wasn't the only MMOG that gives with the WOW I'VE NEVER SEEN THAT wonder, but it certainly was one which made you want to find out what was over that hill. There were so many little spots of interest in the world both with and without explanation that you could always find something interesting to see. Zone design was mostly fantastic, though creature spawns were sometimes badly done. Places like the chessboard in Faydwer, the tree city of Kelethin, the entire Lake Rathe zone, the mountain pass from the Karanas to Highhold, some of the ruins of Kunark, it was all very wondrous and worldly. Which led to...
Fantastic Dungeons: Let's face it, the only good thing missing from most of the dungeons in EQ1 was instancing to keep the tards to a mininum and dispense with trains. Level design was mostly great. Places like Unrest, Mistmoore, Runnyeye (a criminally underused zone), Permafrost, Solusek B, that lizard temple in Ferrot, the dark elf dungeon in Lavastorm, they were just all fantastic, with their own stories and quirks. The only game since that has gotten close in level design is some of the instances in WoW.
Factions: Though a pain in the ass, the various factions of NPC's were interesting. That went a long way to adding worldiness to a very linear, kill kill kill game. Hard-coded factions like Horde/Alliance just don't have the same OOOMPH.

Looking back and remembering some of the zones, I've got to agree on the design bit, Haemish.  Some of them, like Karanas, were simply ass in terms of design - "Oooh a flat  area."  But they always had interesting little bits and features to them.  Old World WoW has this, too, but they're all hidden on flight paths so you can't ever interact with them. That's sad. Some of the mountain areas in EQ were the best. You would spend all your time running around gulleys and valleys and find whole camps of untaken mobs or little bits you simply didn't know were there before.

Ditto on the Dungeons.  So many of WoW's fail to use multiple corridors and tricky rooms with any real effect.  The BC ones in particular are guilty of this, where it's literally a "run this path, kill everything along it and then hearth out at the end."  I hated BRD for it's length, but if it were broken-up into 'wings' off of that central room it'd still be 100X better than Hellfire or the TK instances.

Stuff that was in FFXI because it was in EQ1. I speak of the NA launch +6 months; I disregard everything that may have changed since I quit.


Stuff that was also in FFXI because it was in EQ1:

I tried EQ again a few months ago... it was fun. The original zones looked TERRIBLE due to their age... the newer zones were ok though. It was fun... I didn't mind all the hardcore stuff you guys were complaining about... the only real problem I had was the almost total lack of players at low levels. It's not fun to level to 70 solo. So I quit.

Thanks for making this topic.

I still fire up EQ now and again and play. EQ was easily the best game I have ever played. What led me to play the game was an article in gamepro magazine, the article talked about how the game was so hard you would probably die over and over unless you could make friends and team up against the harsh world, and i remember thinking holy shit that sounds cool. I think when it comes to death penalties that a lot of people don't realize (maybe I am just old), but I can remember back in the day when I used to go to arcades, and play NES games. You had 3 lives (if the game was generous) and in the case of arcade games every death cost you another quarter (at least EQ didn't charge your credit card every time you died). I think the death penalty in EQ was an attempt to emulate the harsh penalty of death found in other games in the only way they could for a game like EQ (perma death, or 3 lives obviously wouldn't work so exp penalties were the next best thing). At any rate I never had a problem with the death penalty, and I am not trying to brag or nothing, but maybe the people I played with weren't complete tards so death was infrequent.

At any rate I still remember the first time I logged in (think it was October 99). I was a human monk in freeport, it was dark, and it was storming, all I had was a shirt and a note telling me to go talk to some guy in the monk guild. After stumbling around due to the fact I couldn't see shit I finally found the monk guild and damn if it didn't feel like a huge accomplishment, and that is when I got hooked on the game. It felt so damn immersive. I remember walking around the east commonlands and going into inns and chatting with people, and being asked to join groups to go fight in far away places. I remember my friend who was a barbarian warrior wanting to join up with me so I told him to just leave Halas and head for Freeport not knowing that the trek would be insanely difficult, but somehow I managed to help him get from Halas to Freeport at level 13 (white knuckled keyboarding ftw).

I remember my first in game friend was a dark elf enchanter named Straud. Noone back then knew jack shit about how enchanters worked so he just acted like a gimp wizard, but since he was a cool guy we brought him along anyway. Then we found out about clarity so we helped him power level to 29 so he could give people caster crack. I think he made thousands of platinum just standing around casting that on people (the stein of moggok quest was his other money maker if anyone remembers that quest).

I also remember standing around in the EC tunnel trying to trade my way to a full suit of crafted armor (minus the breastplate that thing was a bitch to get and noone would sell one back then) and a langsaxe of the wolves for my warrior buddy (we started out with our 200 platinum "life savings" and traded our way to thousands of plat worth of gear and weapons heh). I remember also doing something akin to smuggling where we would go camp gear in runnyeye and then haul it over to the faydark area and sell it for twice the price you could get in EC.

When I think back on EQ it was a game you had to immserse yourself in. If you could do that it was fun and honestly to this day I still don't understand why people have such hatred for the game, to me it was never that bad. I ran into very few bugs, I suffered maybe one death to linkdeath that I can remember, but it wasn't game breaking, and I only lost one corpse in the entirety of the game (and I used to lead Fear portal break ins, which was a very real possibility of corpse loss), when I jumped down the well in befallen to "see what was down there" (luckily it had only my noob items on it). Maybe my experience was different because I brought several friends into the game with me and made good friends in game so I was actually having fun. I never had to lfg either, probably due to my reputation, as soon as I logged in I got group invites because I could pull shit faster and safer than most people could even dream of.

If you trace the roots back to P&P gaming, experience is granted based on risk.  If you're shooting something with no risk, there should accompany no reward (beyond discovering that you can do it to begin with).  I'm surprised you didn't play AC2.  There were entire guilds that PL'ed people this way.

Not worth it. If you remember the review of EQ1 that was posted on the main page about a year ago, it was a pretty accurate representation of what a new player would feel in this day and age. You just had to be there back in 1999.

One of the factors that ultimately led to the decline of the game was the fact that as time went on it became increasingly hard to crack the cutting edge of raid content (which for me was the primary source of fun in the game.) The levels weren't so hard to get, but the AAs, gear, and special quests/flagging were a chasm separating the new player from the majority of the population in the game.

Unlimited AAs as they were in EQ1 were just a plain bad idea, especially as the game became tuned for people with 100s of them. Tying the AAs to levels as WoW has done is a much more elegant solution.

And similar to removing the flagging requirements, there should have been some "fast track" to gearing up to a semi competitive level.

Hmm, let me try an old fashion Pro/Con list for this to gather my thoughts on the old beast.

Pro:
-Playing the market.  First it was East Commons tunnel.  Then it was the bazaar.  Buying low and selling high was all too easy.  I turned 10k seed money into 220K + equipping my twink + friends' mains with anything we ever needed. WoW's economy is a different beast and one that isn't as appealing as EQs due to many factors.
-Selling my monk.  Selling all my plat the second time I quit.  Using this money to pay rent in college.
-Twinking.  You could make ridiculous twinks.  I had a warrior with dragon haste, near end game weapons,  and a funal tunic that soloed to 50 with little effort.
-Trains.  Humor value.   
-Dungeons that just weren't just a pathway to loot.  You just don't see anything like Sebilis or Guk anymore.   I like a series of encounters as well as the next guy, but there's nothing that resembles dungeon crawling anymore.
-The ring war. That was some cool shit.
-Epic quests.  A true sense of accomplishment, even if many of them had a lot of the annoying shit listed below.
-Memorable zones and environments.   I really wish EQs zone/environment designers could work with a game that wasn't so punitive.

Con:
-Hitting A when targetting my druid class trainer after gaining a level.  Seconds later I had to fucking run back to the Oasis for a couple hours of soloing crocodiles to get it back. 
-Non solo friendly leveling for most characters unless you were lucky enough to A) have a fungal tunic B) have a character that can equip a fungal tunic.
-Travel times. 
-Non instanced PVE.  Non instanced high level raiding.  A single dickhead uber guild could just about lock down an entire server.
-Raiding as a job.  See the above.  In order to even get table scraps you had to be on call like you were a goddamn ER doctor.
-The possibility of complete item loss. Nothing like being up until 4am when you've got class at 8am because you're trying to get your fucking corpse out a plane.
-XP loss at death.  You could lose hours.
-Camping and grinding.  If I ever have to park my ass in a dungeon and do the same 10 pulls for 4+ hours at a time.
-AA points.  Let's make leveling go to infinity!
-The spellbook.
-The motherfucking grind. Hell levels.  What fucking asshole decided a mathematical glitch should become a feature?  I remember being happy when I could bubble ding (wasn't that 1/10 of your level) in 4 hours.  I wish I could travel back in time and slap myself.
-Feign pulling.  Yah, I like watching a raid from my stomach.
-Rare mob camping.  Love/hate here, but mostly hate.  I watched my roomie camp a griphon spawn for about 14 hours straight.  I remember people camping Raster in Guk for days. (I got him in 5 minutes after some dude crashed. HAH)
-The introduction and proliferation of the ranter, celebrity guild leader. Fuck Furor, Tigole and Thott.  God, I knew Thott when he was a shitty scrub in UO.
-No ingame mapping at all. I had books of printed maps. I got lost so goddamn much. 
-A general catering to the hardcore.  Casuals and low level players got table scraps.

I put up with EQ because I was a bored college student with gobs of free time on my hand.   I suppose I should thank EQ for showing how you shouldn't do something. I will never, ever play anything that even smells like a return to the days of old.   I don't mind DIKU at all, I just like that it doesn't hurt as much to play anymore.  I'll never list this game on any best MMO list mainly that I left this game despising the fact that I played it for as long as I did. 

Viva easy mode.  Hard mode just leaves you burnt out and a bitter.

Yeah they got a little silly with the turrets that autofired though.  But AC1 had some great high risk perching spots.  There was the very bottom of the olthoi dungeon, where 5 minutes of running at full speed while jumping chasms and avoiding angry things that can 2hit you eventually led you to a pit that they would fall in and you could snipe from above, assuming that you paid enough attention not to get jacked by the respawns next to you every couple minutes.

All the rock formations and whatnot around the world that you could run up on and kill the local fauna from, thing to hide on top of as shit tosses war spells at you.  It wasn't high risk, but I can't think of any zero risk spots either.

AC2 had a lot of nominal risk areas.  Nothing was completely risk free, however, especially on Darktide.  Most areas had ways you could die from mobs, mostly through being an idiot or not knowing the proper way to get the mob stuck on the pixel/edge/tree/wall/invisible wall.

Oh right, I suppose I should  mention I played exclusively on Darktide, so I have no idea if this shit seemed all kinds of broken on the carebear servers.

And while I agree that alot of the "get mob stuck on invisible wall stuff" is lame, there is just somthing especially awesome about running away from a 15 foot golem at level 5 and getting him stuck by running under something or through something that he's too big to fit thru, to turn around and blast it as it marches in place trying ever so hard to get you.

In rosy hindsight, I have fond memories of the bad visibility in EQ. Some of my most memorable moments as a newbie were tied to it.

a) Creeping round Nektulos Forest, hearing spiders but not able to see them. Even with Dark Elf vision, that place was dark and foggy.

b) Wandering the Commonlands on my human monk, with just a small lantern. And hoping those lions I could hear roaring weren’t too close.

c) Running across the Plains of Karana for the first time. Came upon the Wizard towers, looming out of the fog, lit my lightening, in a massive rainstorm. First ones I had seen. Epic.

Went back recently on a free trial thing. All that fog and stuff is gone now. Ran down the path from High Pass. It was terrifying on my TNT2 card with high walls and big drops and fog that started fifty feet in front of my face. On my modern graphics card, with a huge draw distance and no fog, all that stood out was the low poly count of the mountains. The artists sure did a great job on some of those zones, but they were tuned to bygone tech.

A bad memory is a great gift in life. I mostly remember the highlights, and the crap that drove me away is long forgot.

I don't like talking about EQ1 on F13.net because I disagree bitterly with many of the posters - the ones who think it was only successful because there was nothing else, that it wasn't really that good and that fans are looking through rose-tinted glasses.

I think EQ1 was a masterpiece. But like someone else said, you had to be there. Today, EQ1 is about as different from its original incarnation as SWG. They lost me around the Planes of Power expansion, by designing progress around artificial hubs and filling the old world with click-to-teleport stones.

So many people mention the sense of threat and wonder in travel and exploration. It was as real as a lowbie in East Commonlands as it was as a raider crossing Western Wastes. You had to keep your wits about you and learn how to survive.

No matter how "powerful" you became, the world was still threatening, full of stuff that could swat you like a fly. There were no tethered mobs, aggro lasted until cleared by magic, death or a zone line. That brought trains, fear and panic.

Death in a difficult to reach place was your worst nightmare and it was possible to lose everything permanently if you did not recover your corpse. It was intense. The group/raid dynamics were fantastic because everyone feared what would happen without good teamwork.

Places in the game were lovingly crafted, full of character and loved by players. Later, when the zones got bigger and the mobs more generic, it felt less like EQ1. It did not rain loot and there were truly rare objects that could change your gameplay (speed boots, haste items, underwater breathing, levitation, invisibility, shrink). There was a sense of wonder about people having those things.

There was also collision detection between characters. A troll or ogre could annoyingly block your path. You jostled for position around a mob. You were a physical mass in a persistent world.

What I find interesting about this thread, as a UO vet, is the number of people that say they enjoyed the 'danger' of some of the zones. Some of the same people did not like the danger of being a possible PK target in a UO dungeon.

Just saying...

PvP risk is not the same as PvE risk.

Guild Wars has almost all of those Archery and Height mechanics. Much of the PvE and PvP revolves around the ranged people gaining the best spots while having their approaches protected and physically blocked by the front line folks. The difference is probably that the Mobs in GW are smart enough to not stick around if they can't reach the thing pummeling them from above.

Different bows have different Flight Speeds, Ranges and Arcs, you get accuracy/dmg bonuses for being high compared to the target and vice versa for being low.  You can strafe dodge shots coming from the far and high arcs, you don't dodge much from pointblank flat shots though. You can also gain cover from arrows, but if the Arc is high enough, you can shoot 'over' that cover.
 
It's really quite interesting and fairly in depth.

Something I haven't seen yet:

Advanced controls/options for groups and raids. It was a pain in the ass to lead a raid or a group because of how crude those systems were. And then there's the lack of loot messages.

My girlfriend still teases me to this day over how angry I got when some asshole in my group looted a TBB from the ghoul supplier and pretended it was that lame weight reducing bag everyone already had. And I admittedly did go a little off the deep end, following him around for a day with a /shout macro I made to expose him. But screw you Vykyng, you had it coming.

I agree with both statements. You could die more often in UO (PKs, bad choices), but you stood to lose a lot more in EQ1 (XP loss, maybe-level loss, nekkid corpse runs, impossible rezes, etc). Different types of risk.

Neither of which exist today. Not that I'm complaining of course. I'm no longer in my late 20s with a life all about me. In my late 30s, I likes me my easy-mode games. Most of my own nostalgia for EQ1 comes with the lifestyle I remember having too.  :grin:

Frankly, I'd advise against it. Not unless you already have contacts or friends in the game to set you up with some tradable high end (at least to level 50) twink items. And even then you had better select the correct class (a somewhat "soloable" class) like a Necromancer or Druid.

1) EQ1 is a hardcore forced grouping game. At times, it really does feel that you can't even wipe your own arse without a full group.
2) The game was not meant to be solo-ed. In fact there are active roadblocks to discourage soloers in the game.
3) That said, some classes can cope being alone better than others. Necromancers and Druids. Others, are like the fabled snowball in heck - soon to be reduced to mush and vapor.
4) Levels 1-60 players are scarce (mostly 2 boxed alts), all the zones catering for newbies are likewise deserted. At least it was the last time I check on the Quellious server (Feb 2008 - I doubt anything has changed and in fact could be worse).
5) Your best bet if you want to start totally fresh is to play the new starting race - The Drakkin that comes with the 12th expansion - The Serpents Spine.

Basically, its a forced grouping game with no one to group with 1-60 these days IMHO. The devs painted themselves into a corner when they put in unlimited aaxps with ever increasing levels (as someone said above). Basically your going to be looking at the very least A MONTHS PLAYED (720 hours at the keyboard) of steady grinding of levels/aaxp before you can even look at the much praised EQ1 end game. Exaggerated? No, in fact I'm being conservative - my char had 1 YEAR played (8760+ hours) before I retired the Enchanter at L71 with 1,500+ aaxp = and thats an average hard core raider (all the epics and raid gear). EQ1 learning curve is a grinding curve - and a true newby is looking at a sheer 90 degree cliff face with no easy hand holds.

===============

Having played both EQ1 and WoW, I have come to the conclusion that WoW did not revolutionize anything. They just took out all the suck and pain points in EQ1 (of which there are far too many to start listing), turned on easy mode solo - and started raking in the money. And then theres the organized PvP aspect of WoW, unlike the tacked on, unbalanced crap that is EQ1's PvP.

You know, EQ1's suck and pain problems can be fixed right now,  if some Dev had the will, balls and the pull but frankly I doubt it ever happen given that EQ2 is in place. Its a dying game - last I heard, the sub numbers are well below 100K and trending down fast (no sauce - just guildy forum gossip I still keep up with).

My favorite part of EQ was that playing some of the classes well took a bit of skill. I loved playing my chanter and routinely saving the entire party's ass with some well timed and well targeted mezzes. I DIDN'T like having to teach 90% of the PUGs I joined how to not wipe the party by not fucking with the mezzed mobs.

I will admit that I sort of miss trains. They were really amusing to see, and even more amusing to lead (providing that you survived).


Edited to add- I miss mob camps that were there because that is where the mobs lived, not because the guy in the closest town had a quest to kill them. I am really sick of the 'every mob has a purpose' design of the newer games. It destroys the sense of world; everything feels like stops on a tour or an amusement park. I also liked that many zones had one or two drastically higher critters running around that would wtfpwn people who weren't paying attention. Going back and killing them once I was leveled really felt like an accomplishment, and it was fun to save the current n00bs.

It's funny that you say that when I've always thought it was one of EQ's great design flaws. The insta-death mobs and incredibly harsh death penalty penalized exploration to such a degree that everybody played it safe all the time. Maybe you're looking back through rose-colored glasses.

I dont know, I liked the Son of Arugal in Silverpine.....Same shit....

Basically, don't we have enough hand holding these days? Maybe you should get your shit pushed in once in a while, just to put you in your place  :)

Yeah it did, but there was something about fighting giants in Oasis and having to worry about whether a spectre was going to come down off that hill and smack you silly that was exciting and fun.

Or fighting crocs only to have a giant come! Oasis was a fun zone  :grin:

I like a world with danger. PvE is just so mindnumbingly boring when done 'safely'. I need something unpredictable to get my blood rushing (or at least to keep my eyes open).

The problem with the WTFPWN insta-death wandering monsters in a zone had nothing to do with the monsters themselves, or the fact that they killed you. The only problem with that type of mob is the death penalty. We all know just how bad EQ1's death penalty was, and that's what made those kinds of mobs irritating. You take away the harsh death penalties of EQ and those crazy wandering mobs are just as fun as the Spectres in Oasis without the irritation of losing a level.

Perhaps, but the combination of the two really, really sucked.

Yes, it did. But removing the death penalty actually made it a design feature later on and in other games (kill X mobs to spawn the Y mob, and other such triggered events).

I was always annoyed by it, but not because I got deaded often by them (the only dead Bard is an afk Bard). It was because they'd always show up during a close fight, which I could have won if I didn't hafta beat feat for the zoneline.

Mostly you lost that level because you failed to insure against it. You did not have an XP buffer to cope with a death. You ran too close to the spectres or stood where people brought trains. There were people who rarely died those kinds of deaths, because they thought ahead better than we did.

The EQ death penalty was fine. It stung like hell. You needed to learn from your mistake so it didn't happen again, or you would suffer more. Anyone who ended up with 10 corpses and two levels lost in trying to recover a corpse, was doing it wrong. Harsh, but fair. Success was so much sweeter because of the bitter taste of failure.

You can come back at me about dying to a bug or lag, which happened, but most deaths were as I described.

WoW and EQ2 are so bland in comparison. Respawning with all your gear and XP, minus a few gold for repairs, is a death penalty designed to accommodate the player who would otherwise lose 10 corpses and two levels. It's seen as a better commercial decision, but is it really? I went looking for the adventure in those games, and there isn't one.

This makes me remember how one traveled in EQ1...hugging the zone walls. We don't do that anymore.

The first sentence is the reason the second sentence is wrong :-)

You didn't plan against dying. You just played hyper conservatively until you built up that cushion. This was probably the single biggest early contributor to the grind mentality of the game. Efficiently gaining XP is the second reason of course.

I do agree on the relative safety-net nerf worlds that are EQ2 and WoW. But I'll never want an EQ1 like penalty again, even if it means we took a step back from the holodeck  :grin:

Yes.  XP loss and threat of total item loss is not fun to me.  I don't care what it adds in accomplishment and tension, it's not fun.  It's added frustration and a direct time penalty to the limited time I have to work with. 

XP buffer.  Fuck that shit. Never again. 

I disagree with what you said.


Yes, it really, really, really fucking is. Not only has the market spoken on this issue, I have as well. My time is too goddamn precious to spend 2 hours REGAINING a level I already earned by REDOING the same content over and over if I happen to die.

Look, death in an MMOG is penalty enough. You failed. Failure is a penalty. For those who want more punitive measures for failure when playing a game, I suggest a hammer and a map to your genitals.

I said this would happen:


The same people continue to make the same arguments about EQ1.


You did exactly that for the lengthy time you played EQ1, because it was a well-designed game. In the end, you advanced, despite all the trouble along the way.

MY TIME is too precious to waste searching for excitement in loot dispensers designed for pissants.


Same old line, same old response: if EQ1 felt like hammering your genitals, you were really bad at EQ1.

Speaking as an (apparent) pissant, I didn't play EQ. I do play WoW. A big part of what makes me decide to play a game or not these days is "does it have a shitty death penalty?"

So, if they want my money - and I assume they do - then getting rid of shitty death penalties a la EQ is a good choice. I don't think you could solidly make the argument that shitty death penalties attract more players than they drive away, so even if they lose your $15, they're gaining $150 from me and my 9 pissant friends.

Bullshit. In the long term, you decide to play the game based on whether it's a good game or not. It can have a tough or weak death penalty and still be a good game.

EQ1 was at its best during the era when they completely ignored the bitching on the forums. I left when they started changing the game in response to the message boards. If you're a professional game designer, it's because you're good at designing games - you should trust your instincts, not those of the players. I want to play what you think up, not what my peers want.

A vast community of whiners is probably a sign of a healthy game. It means people are playing and being challenged.

I first played WoW in beta in June 2004. It had a different death penalty at that stage of beta (I'm sorry I can't remember what). It was revised and made weaker before retail, with the minor decay penalty added at the end of beta. SWG also had a strong death penalty in beta and in the first few days of retail, removed because the game was unfinished and there were corpse bugs.

It seems designers think tough death penalties are a good starting point, but they're being talked out of it. However, as the market for these games grows and people become better at them, players will need bigger challenges. MMORPGs thrive on envy and awe of those more powerful - a harsh death penalty is one thing that can divide players into those who advance skilfully together, and those who aspire to it.

Wow, I totally and unequivocally disagree with everything you said. You're like my polar opposite. Moreover, the market disagrees too. I'm not saying you're wrong, you find your fun wherever you like, just that your needs are unlikely to be served by any MMO in the future, ever again.

Why the heck do you think players want to be divided like that? I think you are gravely overestimating the number of people who want to chase that shiny carrot all the way to the golden poopsock.

If player skill was the prime determinant of success, even then I could point to non-existant death penalties in other genres, ones where actual tactical skill plays more a part than the aggregate time investment made to swing deterministic events more in your favor.

In these sorts of debates, I find often that people who claim to like punitive death penalties view death as some rare occurence entirely based on a certain group of players wanting to play stupid and crying about it when they can't.

I disagree with this, and in fact find it sort of rose-colored elitist. EQ1 did not force players to play smarter. It forced them to play more conservatively. Had this resulted in better tactical decision making, that would be good. What it actually seemed to result in though is most players being afraid of their own shadows enough that they wouldn't even try an encounter until they could read the entire win condition on Allakhazam.

Is that a better game? A meta puzzle creating a world based more on fate than player decisions?

I do not think so. Newer "easy" games don't punish players not because a few core EQ1 players whined. They do so because they want more players to pay for the chance to figure stuff out as they go. Yes, there's still players who won't do anything they didn't read about on WoWhead. But for the very many millions of folks playing nowadays, that never were going to play 10 years ago even with the rigs and finances to do it, they have an opportunity to experiment more freely.

That this experiment is happening in systems that are more contrived and linear in other ways is what I find unfortunate. But it's not the death penalties that are the prime contributor to the lack of immersion. It's choice altogether that's been subjugated. But nothing short of UO2 with Blizzard's budget and a huge IP will help prove the veracity of that, imho.

Well "better" is difficult to define. I certainly didn't like it, although I was addicted like a starving fiending crackwhore. Quality is subjective, but if you judge success financially it certainly hasn't proven to be a successful model and there won't be any more games like EQ.

Just to be clear, I don't judge quality by revenue. That's Brad's fallacy. "We're making so much money, I must be a game god!" No. WoW isn't a great game because it's successful, it's successful because it's a great game.

EQ was successful because it was first.

Thats right. But given that it doesn't seem like it will ever happen, this is just an article of faith.

Wall-hugging was for classes that actually died from time to time. The only time I needed to do it on my EQ main was in zones way about my level with see invis mobs.
...
Mind you, my main was a shadowknight and their survivability made WoW paladins look like squishy casters in comparison. Third-best tank (out of three), crappy DPS, soloed like a crippled necro...but harder to kill than a zombie cockroach.  :grin:

Alchemy, Working as Intended!

Yeah, I played a Shaman in '99.  I left when I determined the only impact stats like Agility had for a Warrior was the rate of skill acquisition (bounded to 5 points per level) meaning it was literally irrelevant in the steady state that comprised 99% of your game experience - and that developer explanations for the impact of character statistics were completely incorrect (if you don't know what your game is doing, I'm not going to pay to figure it out for you).  It also didn't help that I taped two keys down on my keyboard to level swimming while I went out...  I returned to ask myself: "I'm paying for this why?"

But the designers never have as much contact with the actual operation of the software product they've released as do the customers (in aggregate), unless the product is wildly unsuccessful of course.  Being a professional game designer only means you are paid to design games and imparts no qualification on the quality of those games.  We merely assume bad game designers eventually stop being paid for what they do, and I suspect that's the exception rather than the rule since the feedback loop for quality in software is particularly bad.  CMs who know how to filter the gnashing of teeth among the masses are useful in part because the enemy has more time than you do.

I played a shaman too. I was the guy that proved that stats were worthless in EQ, one of the first fledgling theorycrafters. I was really into it at the time.

They definitely don't want to be divided like that, but I think they need to be divided like that through design. WoW and EQ2 do it, just not to the extent I think they should.

I'd also rather players be separated more through skill than time/grinds. I agree with what WayAbvPar said about enjoying the skill it took to play an EQ enchanter well - that skill was more meaningful because of the fate the enchanter was preventing. If you had that enchanter in your regular XP group, you advanced faster than pickup groups, maybe even rescued a pickup group's corpses on your way in. That sort of skill benefit seems absent from current games.

"Warning: MMORPG's are not intended to be a source of self-esteem."

Should be stamped on every game box for every hardcore who wants to put their cock in a meatgrinder and then be given a fucking medal for it.

I spent almost a week sitting in a room killing 3 bards with a 6 minute respawn time. I was anonymous and wouldn't tell anyone where I was, because I was scared they'd steal my awesome XP spot. EQ was just plain unhealthy.

That esteem delusion is not isolated to hardcores. It drives the majority who think they are getting closer and closer to esteem, just not as fast.

Do you really think that self-esteem/validation issues drive most MMORPG gamers? Sense of accomplishment is a big part of MMO's sure, but other than the (relative compared to EQ1) hardcore raiders banging themselves against brick walls in WoW I don't remember many that cared what position they were in compared to others.

Yes, it was. For me it was a full-blown addiction I couldn't quit for a while, but so were SWG and WoW. That's the warning for the box: this game may be addictive, please remember your priorities.

When I talk about advancing faster than others, I don't necessarily mean being first - I mean being rewarded for doing it well.

Nearly every game is based upon some kind of ding-gratz, but that is distinctly different from rankings, competition, and envy.

I have to believe those characteristics are a subset of the larger population of players.

I should have said the majority of those who are playing the game that way, not just a simple majority. A huge number players do focus on accomplishment though.

For me it was about guild accomplishments, not individual goals. My character was a troll warrior called Grozzer, whose equipment was the guild joke. There was a crappy axe that dropped in Chardok and everyone passed on it, but it was an upgrade for me so the raid leader said "Axe of Grozzer". From then on, shitty loot was called "[Item Name] of Grozzer", a term that is still used in our guild, several characters and games later.

But my presence as the crappy fourth-best tank was still important for the guild to progress, and as an explorer-type I wanted to experience more, so it was about helping the guild get there. That's ultimately a delusion like individual progress, but it was fun.

AMG, the big thing in AC1 beta / early launch was to get to Arwic Mines at level 3-ish, run up on the mine carts, and the Lugians wouldn't know how to path up to you.  You'd have to run from spot to spot trying not to get crushed by Lugian boulders, making sure you didn't move in a way that let the Lugians path up to you.

Once you hit around level 16, run down into the second level of Lair of Death, run between the vats in the corner of the large room.   Then you had to go pull soldiers/nobles to the safe spot without getting 1-hit in the back.

I never had a problem with most of the issues EQ had which are listed in this thread. But then I didn't catass levels. I had a level 12 with 14 days played on the PvP server and probably 7 other similar characters with less play time.

Blind was probably my favorite spell in the whole game and it was a level 1 or 4 spell? The best bug was probably when a character could be feared by someone of similar level and then any level character could attack and kill them like they were a mob. The worst nerf was when they made Charm not work on other players.

The SK was the best tank for the standard group grind pre-PoP (I stopped playing right before it came out so I don't know what changed since then). You had 2 FDs for pulling (yes it wasn't quite as reliable as a Monk's) and far superior aggro management tools to a Warrior (the multiple debuffs generated incredible amounts of hate).

The death penalty was also why there was a "holy trinity" in the game and why people would sit on their asses for hours waiting for just the right group composition before trying anything difficult. If you didn't have a Cleric max rez it really was worth standing around doing nothing rather than risk dying and having to get that experience back.

Karnor's is where I would go to practice my train derailment skills. I would plant myself in that middle corridor just past the "split" zone line exits and try to hold up as many as I could on my Bard or Enchanter. As a sidenote I actually really liked that zone though I know lots of people hated it because of all the n00bs there. Camping upstairs and beating on the giant hands or better yet beating on the skellies in the basement was great fun (the crunching noise they make when hit is still my favorite sound effect from that game).

As a former paladin, I have to say that hands down the best single group tank was the warrior/SK/paladin who knew what he or she was doing and had good gear.

And making the case for the paladin's general abilities:
-Pulling was admittedly difficult in comparison to an SK. Having FD would have been nice, but after I learned a zone well that really didn't matter. I'd still have to resort to an occasional root for CC.
-Aggro management was easy because of the unwarranted ammount of hatred that stun would provide (and I had 3 banks of stun spells.) Blind was good for this as well, but only if you trusted your group a lot.
-Survivability was very high with self heals and LOH

Again though, it came down to skill and gear. I think I did pretty well with what the paladin had to offer (I don't remember any complaints.) The fact that I had awesome gear like Palladius' Axe of Slaughter didn't hurt either.

For me, EQ peaked in Velious. Luclin was a horrible fall from glory, and PoP was only decent. And that's when I quit too.

That's an interesting way to put that; "you had to learn how to survive." This is fun, in anybody's book. Yet it's not in any new games. Survival is inevitable. The game holds your hand through everything, and never throws a curveball. WoW is a good example. There's only one real danger; that Felreaver in Hellfire Peninsula. Everything else is a matter of choice.

Well, relative choice. You can choose to venture into Kharazan, just as you can choose to walk across the East Commons. But Kharazan is easier to avoid.

I once found an island in WoW that I didn't know existed. I called up a friend to help me explore it. We stood on the shore together, and after a few minutes of silence, she barfed out every statistic and coordinate of the entire island. It would have been funny, if it didn't spoil the excitement for me.

So...what does this tell us? People have fun figuring things out, yet current trends are moving away from that. Do we want the devs to hold our hands, and make us think we're figuring things out?

Yup Pally was very good too. I would put them behind SKs just because of the lack of FD. Pallys actually had the best aggro management tool in the game against regular mobs with their Root spell. With Root the mob will/would always attack the closest target no matter what the hate level was at but trying to explain to people that if they would just step back a few pixels the mob would stop beating on them was a difficult concept for most to grasp.

I still say Warriors were the worst of the three all else being equal. Yes Taunt was brain dead simple to use but beyond that Warriors were stuck with things like Beg and Kick to generate additional hate beyond what they could do with their weapons. Nor did they have the extra utility abilities like dealing with runners whereas the SK had snare and the Pally root/stun.

"do we want the dev's to hold our hands" - We keep hearing this same question from different people.  This continues to be my answer: I don't want to play a game that punches me in the nuts because I took risks or because I played it like a game and not like my life depended on every decision.  My gameplay ranges from "unwinding from a long day" to "looking for a challenge".  In WoW you can achieve the latter by taking on more mobs then is healthy, or getting in a group and hitting an instance.

In EQ1 "unwinding from a long day" did not exist during the time that I played it.  Gameplay was monotonous and at the same time a single slip-up could cause you to be set back a couple hours to a couple days - which is just demented if you think abou it.  Leaving it was a hard decision, as there litterally were no other games tht were available to play when I left (I had joined UO early, and the lag and flat out unplayability during the first couple months of launch made me swear off it forever).  When I left EQ I promised myself that I would never ever play a game where the developers obviously just flat out hated the player-base.  Not to mention fucking Abashi... oops.

Any old game is going to get measured in every way. Didn't take long for the mystery to get taken out of EQ1 either.

The key isn't to try and make the game random for everyone. It's to let those who hit EQAtlas exist alongside those who want to learn the world through sheer exploration in meaningful ways.

I do not like the game holding my hand. I like sandbox games and figuring out which monsters are cool to tame, and what resources are found where, and which enemies I should hunt to get *foozle*.

I do not like walking up to an NPC and being killed because I didn't know how to talk to him. That's fucking retarted, frustrating, and a hint that the game is made by morons.

I like the illusion that I'm a competent adventurer doing things in another world. I do not like harsh penalties for trying new things or exploring. I do not like games that are so railroaded that if you don't have X class or Y spec, you may as well not log in that night.

After UO, DAoC and EQ felt like the railroad games. You bash X level mobs, level up, move to the next camp, and bash X+1 mobs until your fingers bleed or you pass out. At least WoW makes that shit painless and fun instead of kicking me in the nuts over every xp point.

rantrantrant

WoW isn't fun to me either. Even if it is less grindy, it's the same old, uninteresting bullshit.

That's pure EQ1 whineplay forum rationale, that the devs somehow "hated" the player base. Those devs loved what they were doing and constantly showed it, roleplaying their GM events, adding to the game and expanding the lore.

The moaning from the forum-posting minority was embarrassing. People would cry over much-needed nerfs as if the world was ending. I know there's an argument that nerfs are always bad, but I totally disagree - balance the game, make me weaker if you must, but do what's right for the game. I won't go around posting that you "hate" me.

(edit - I've gotta go sleep off my evil cold/flu thingy of death. Night all. EQ1 thread camp is free!)

My 2 coppers to toss at random into this.

* EQ had the best 'world' experience of all the MMORPGs.  Bar none.  As was said above, when I travelled from Faydark to Halas on foot at lv14 to sell a pile of Minotaur Axes, I felt like I had made an epic journey.  I felt the same at lv60 running the gauntlet of Siren's Grotto to head across Western Wastes to ToV.  I felt like Western Wastes was the end of the world.  Plans of Karana were monotonous and dull, but they still felt like I was travelling across the steppes or something (they should have added in some Mongol-style roaming bandits).  None of the other zones in all the other mmorpgs I've played that same feeling of 'world'.
* EQ had some great sprawling dungeons as has been noted. 
* EQ popped my mmorpg cherry, so a lot of my memories are rose-coloured.
* Having said that,
* 'Camp check' sucked balls.
* Losing 1/2 a bubble of xp for death sucked balls.  And I played a cleric.
* Having to go /anon all the time because I was a cleric and got constantly spammed with rez begging sucked balls.  Both for me and the poor shmucks who lost xp.
* The death penalty meant most people were too scared to try something vaguely hard or interesting.  It did mean when you did it and succeeded it was a fantastic rush, but for every just getting through by the skin of your teeth in Seb, there was 10-15 hours of sitting against a zone wall somewhere while a monk dragged 1 mob at a time to you.
* Froglocks.  FFS I was sick of that model.
* Having an unknown world was great before Allas came along.  Of course, that horse has long bolted now.
* Spending 6 hours straight killing mobs to get about 20% of a level in XP sucked balls.

EQ had great worldbuilders for a while there.  But they also had way too many cockblocks which we put up with due to lack of 3D-based competition without open PvP (remember in 1999/2000 open PvP was a big deal in mmorpgs, thus the priest of discord).

Just a random thought:

How much of the 'easy mode' that's labeled to MMOs (hell, all games) these days is directly attributed to the fact that we're a whole lot more experienced in the 'way things are' because studios can't seem to break out of the 'this is the way it has been done, this is the way it shall always be' mentality?  (Whoa, run on sentence from hell)  Which alternatively begs the question:  Who is more at fault for that:  players or devs?

Anyway, what I mean is, we know work arounds to design intentions (or errors).  We're all intimately familiar with control schemes.  Cool downs.  Whatever.  There's not a single MMO on the market, or in the near future, that everyone on this website couldn't instantly sit down and know how to play - with the exception of EvE - and tell you the shortest path of least resistance from 1 to 50 or 60 or whatever.  Every MMO plays the same. 

We've all been there done that been given the tshirts. 

It's hard to challenge people that have played through the biggest cockblocks and nut punches ever - whether those cockblocks were intended or just a side effect of shit game design is irrelevant.  After xp / level loss, thousand hour grind times, what happens if I do this moments, we've pretty much seen it all.

What would challenge you, that you would be willing to put up with now that you're older / married / have kids / full time job / etc?

I've never used the term "easymode" for any of these games. Because they're not. Not even noob island in WoW is easy. It's hard for me to play through any of it.

Also, since none of these games will ever accomplish anything as dynamic or involved as the storytelling in single player RPG's, then the only real value I can find in them is pvp. Especially large scale pvp, since that fills a niche that fps games can't.

Therefore, all I want to do is play in large scale pvp fights. I want a leveling process that, at best, only takes about 3 days to get there. Enough time to get acquainted with your character build/game mechanics/etc.. Anything more than that is unnecessary tedium. And hard.

Well said about learning to survive. Some people are just too fucking stupid to play these games. I mean seriously the fucking Fel Reaver? That is the best example from WoW and even it is a bad one. You can hear the damn thing from a mile away it is impossible to get killed by it if you're not afk. I mean seriously if anyone here got killed by the Fel Reaver while at the controls, then you need to put down the 40 and go blow your brains out over the open sea before you hurt someone attempting to use your brain.

As for what I would like to see to make games challenging again. Lets start with going back to first person perspective (I wanna see dungeons like the ones in EQ again and third person view won't allow that kind of map design due to the camera issue), and with new shader tech it should be possible to have pitch black dungeons, and other underground areas where you need to light the way with a torch or some other light source. Make it so the player doesn't know whats around the next corner (have to rely on other information like sound). No GPS, no maps (unless they're made by players using an in game skill). And oh yeah, bring back trains.

When it comes to the death penalty there should be some kind of sliding scale to determine how harsh it is. If you're in a harsh area maybe make the death penalty less harsh to encourage exploration. If there is one thing EQ did wrong it is the fact the death penalty at low levels was admittedly harsher than it was at high levels (at high levels who didn't know at least one cleric who could rez). At low levels you didn't have access to 96% exp rezzes (unless you were a twink). If there is gonna be a harsh death penalty then maybe it could scale to some degree so low levels don't get fucked over so badly. By high levels if you still don't understand the game mechanics then you definately should eat harsh death penalties (including corpse loss in my opinion).

I was going to keep this a secret, but I guess I can let you guys in on it.

I'm working on a new MMO, it's all pretty hush-hush right now, and theres only about 40 of on the team, I'm heading up the design team.

We've got a brilliant mechanic that I think you'll all enjoy, every time you try to play our game, a midget runs up and stabs you in the cock.  Every time you get that urge again, he stabs you even harder, in more of the cock.

We figure this should easily net us more subs than Vanguard, take that, Braddy boy!

Well...I didn't mean it like that; it's an honest question, because it's something I don't know the answer to. :)

I suspect players do in fact want to be led by the hand, but think they're figuring it out for themselves. We like Portal, for example, to show us how to use the gun, but we really think we figured it all out ourselves. We didn't. Valve put little pictures on the floor showing us exactly what to do. But we think we figured it out on our own. We think we're smart. That's fun.

WoW takes it a bit too far. You can never say in WoW "I discovered a really cool area to hunt!" because the game told you where to go and what to do when you get there. EQ takes it even farther; every time you level up, a pop-up appears in the middle of the screen, interrupting your play, and says "You are level 8! Now go to Crushbone!"

The point of most of our Shaman buffs was that the others felt better about themselves. Mostly placebo. Nothing more, nothing less. I had people swearing Acumen improved their combat performance. Try talking somebody out of it, they were all on about hidden game mechanics. So I prided myself on keeping all buffs up an running and died a little inside every time I thought about the usabilty vs mana ratio.

Still, I didn't love any other class since then. Because I could do all this and still be FM soon afterward doing the Cannidance. I miss the Cannidance, it was my revenge on those people asking for their silly buffs. Yeah, turn off your sound or suffer!

The thing about SOE devs NOT hating the players?....

Most EQ veterans will know what I mean - but a bit of a recap for noobs:

As a veteran of not one BUT TWO Raster camps - I respectfully disagree.
Monk Epic 1 - Celestial fists (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=761)
Monk Epic 1 (good way beyond the other epics)
26+ hours non-stop in a cave in Guk? I have known people who have camped that sucker for 1 whole week (non-stop!)! And people invent rituals around the camp, killing the place-holders (got to keep killing them in a certain sequence - though it probably did nought to make it spawn) to keep from going insane. And then theres the OTHER Monks waiting in line for it. You can't log out for baths, meals or bio in case you loose your place in the queue! The second time around, I gave up at the 12th hour and paid some guy a few thousand plats to MQ the sucker (I hear that MQs have been nerfed too - but not the camp).

As a veteran of at least 2 pre-change Ragefire camps and at least one post Kunark Ragefire I respectfully disagree.
Cleric epic - MUST HAVE ITEM - ALL CLERICS MUST HAVE ONE - GUILD WILL NOT RECRUIT OR RETAIN WITHOUT EPIC1.
Now the thing is, after Kunark and release of the epic1s. Every guild who raided or even thought of taking on anything bigger than a single group mob needed rez stick clerics. The rez spell was mana intensive - an ordinary cleric (Kunark days - not now) could only cast the spell only 2 or at most 3 times before you went OOM. And before the days of C1 or C3 (extra mana regen spell) had to med up for at least 30 mins before you can cast the spell another 2 or 3 times (typical raid size - 50+ yes that big and up to 72+). Yes, EQ1 downtime... (/sarcasm breeds community...). So in that 30 mins of medding you have the respawns that wipe the raid all over again. The cleric epic 1 rez stick is unlimited 96% exp rez - EVERY 10 SECONDS! Yes, overpowered "must have" with SOE designing raids around its availability....

Cut to the chase - Cleric epic cockblock camp - The Dragon Ragefire - 5 days at least in Sol B. Then they moved the Dragon Ragefire to an outdoor zone (as a concession) - YOU STILL NEEDED TO CAMP THE FIVE DAYS! No logging out for bio, meals or baths - you can get a guildy to log you in in shifts but the cleric has to be PHYSICALLY THERE TO HOLD THE CAMP! The physically there to hold the camp aspect is the reason why they moved Ragefire to the outdoor zone - the cleric can't hold the SolB camp solo (Fire giants ever few hours) - so I participated in some of the most boring camps in my life, I jumped into lava so I could bring up my bandaging skill past 200 - bring a mage to summon bandages. The camp was so bad and the SOE was completely deaf to the complaints (you know, if it was complaints on the SOE forums - its always the "minority"... Fucking SOE spin) - someone managed to get the BBC to actually report it on the mainstream news:

Cyber heroes forced to wait for glory (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2129912.stm)

The quest was changed right after that bad publicity to make Ragefire triggerable. Yes, way to go for "listening to your players" SOE. I see in the BBC news report about your new MMOG Star Wars Galaxies... Good luck with that, I'm sure you will listen when you you put in New Game Enhancements...

=============

So yeah background done.

I'm reminded about that WoW South Park episode:
Blizzard executive: Don't You have a World of Warcraft account?
WoW Dev: NO! I have a fucking life!

EQ1 devs LOVED THE GAME - HATED THE PLAYERS! I'm sorry, but thats all there is to it. I don't deny there is love and passion there but its the sort of love that thinks that a non-existent 0.001% spawn rate is a good rate for the JBoot sand giant in Ro. That 1-2 week camps are a great idea to balance the game. Its the sort of the love of the gameplay "elegance" that does not take into account the RL consequence of the players. Yes, I've been to a SOE fan-faire and met them (Vegas is nice - the faire was an excuse to go to Vegas) - nice people in person - but they do personify the philosophy - "design the game FOR DEVS (the Vision tm. ) not the players".

If akin to parental love, well, all it does is leave burnt out, bitter and angry children that can't wait for the parents to develop Alzheimers so that they can put them into a shithole nursing home in hope that they will be eaten alive by fire ants.

Frankly, after EQ1 - I've never touched another SOE game since then. Okay, I played the SWG free month and ran away screaming in terror (/sarcasm "yea - NGE goodness! Its only the minority whining!"). Apart from that, I've kept to my vow to steer clear from ALL SOE games, and I'm not the only one to hold on to that thought.

I took time off work to camp Ragefire for my Cleric epic :ye_gods: on top of having guildies camping the room when I couldn't stay awake. Fortunately I was on one of the "civilized" servers that had a list that everybody followed so we never had to deal with spawn stealing and crap like that. And this was one of the things that SOE actually didn't just ignore. Brad posted a long message explaining how everything was "working as intended". Basically he intentionally setup this system to control the rate of Cleric epics entering the game since he felt that having a mass proliferation of them would trivialize the game, if I remember correctly.

Which I fully believe because the relatively useless Shaman epic (a clickable dot that only made good damage later in its course) had no such horrendous camping times. Mine was the first the guild did, and it was on the side ("Well, we oughta do fear anyway", "Well, we do City of Mist anyway").

I seriously do not understand how any of you managed to play that game.


I'm trying to imagine it, I can't.


Too Broken.

lol, "whineplay".  It's dead dude, the game is dead, just give it up.  I'm not trying to change the game to easymode, which I know would cut into your sense of achievement.  Unfortunately virtually no one plays the game anymore, which I understand also cuts into your sense of achievement, but that is the nature of online games and the "achievement" you imagine that you are getting.

Really, I was just saying what my experience was - that's how the game play felt to me.  Punitive.  Like the design was intentionally punative... which is what I got from the early notes on the Vanguard design.  Fortunately for me, your demographic is so small, it didn't even justify keeping to the Vision for Vanguard.  Fewer games with "Vision" means more choice for me.

[I don't know how you wandered to ramble about nerfs, as I never mentioned them and I'm not talking about them]

"Roleplaying GM events" - lol, get off the crack, the "roleplaying" consisted of insta-gibbing people until a critical mass of bodies and angst was reached, and then allowing themselves to be killed.

you know, i never played eq1. But reading some of this insane shit you had to go through to get "such and such" epic.

It's not that the Devs hated the players, if you camped a spot for 5 days to get the epics, you hate yourself.

That must be why people still play this game, The shame they feel.

I've run a system with millions of users before. It's literally impossible to care about that many people. You're just a statistic. Devs don't hate you; it's more like apathy. They care about the system because it's what they work on every day. Customer Service Reps are there to make it seem like who is running the system cares what you think. What they really do is summarize all the feedback into a few sentences which may or may not be taken into consideration.

Epics were added in via expansions. I really doubt any dev ever camped for 5 days. It's more like a spawn % number was changed in the database until it seemed right from an overall game design perspective.

Going back some to the argument that the death penalty in EQ1 was good because it taught players to learn I just want to point out that the easymode penalties in WoW and EQ2 are still enough to cause player frustration. Expectations get changed with new mechanics. Dying 8 times in 30 minutes in EQ2 still sucks. PUGs break up over it. Maybe they last a little longer than they would in EQ1, but the penalty is enough to make people try different tactics after a few deaths.  That is all a death penalty really should do.

As far as raiding, the lighter penalty makes raiding that much more accessible to casual players. My guild has certainly called raids because half the raid has broken gear and the timers on repair kits have no refreshed. It doesn't happen often because if you watch your gear go from 100% to 40% in 10 minutes, you try something different.

As Raph has written extensively, games are fun when we have to learn to play. A death penalty only needs to push peole in that direction. Anything more severe and it only becomes a fun detractor.

I found the perfect game for you people who thought EQ was hard.

http://www.scssoft.com/busdriver.php

Have fun! Maybe theres even a short bus for you to ride.

In all seriousness though it sounds like some of you have major problems. EQ didn't make you camp jack shit, you made yourself camp those horrendously long times. I completed 3 epics between me, and my friends (necro epic, cleric epic, and warrior epic). We didn't camp any of them. We had strategically located scouts that we would check every few hours. Once we knew the mob was up we sent out the call to kill it. When it came to Ragefire iirc he had a fairly set spawn time so we just made sure to show up in force when we knew he was about to spawn. We got him the first time and didn't have to camp more than a few hours. If someone sat in that room for 3 days or whatever the spawn time was thats their problem. The designers never intended people to sit there all day.

Your experience was atypical.

So you free-for-all'd the epics like the fishbone earring?  I'm sure your guild was well liked on your server.  Actually, if more people did that the Customer Service costs associated could have had an impact on the spawn timer (or brought instanced content earlier).


Which is exactly how they were blind to the inability to train the Alchemy skill for Shaman.  The internal developers and testers would just create a lvl 25 Shaman with Alchemy and, surprise surprise the trainer would train additional levels just fine.  Everything was working once you had the skill, you just couldn't get the skill if you played a character up through the levels.  It was impractical to test the end to end scenario, even once, but that really should have been a warning sign that something in the overall design wasn't quite right.  To test an epic quest they probably just put their character at the last stage of the quest, triggered the NPC, and completed the quest.  It may have actually been a lot of fun being on-demand and providing instant gratification, leaving a disconnect between internal agents who know it works and is fun and external agents who can't stand the bugs and pacing.  The respawn timers weren't considered for user experience (especially in competitive scale), just the raw rate of resource introduction into the system (unless you are not being charitable and you really do believe the developers were out to get each and every one of the players personally).

Thing is, I managed to play EQ for 4 years without camping much of anything; I simply didn't go for epics. Min maxers, sure, they needed their epics, but some of us managed just fine with raid dropped stuff. Folks that embittered themselves by camping have noone but themselves to blame. Not that camping is evil in and of itself. I knew plenty of well adjusted happy folks who didn't mind sittin for hours waiting on a spawn while chatting and doing stuff IRL  to pass the time. Just not my game, I knew that if I did it I'd hate the game and leave my online social group, so I just stuck it out without the leet gear, which was perfectly alright since I was getting decent enough gear from raids and tradeskills.

Except Clerics.

That was the ONLY Epic that was ever actually considered Mandatory by any guild that raided. It was nice to have them when they were cutting edge and uber, but even after 3-4 more expansions made old Epics mere show pieces through mudflation, you still made sure to epic out any new clerics.

Like I said before, you just had to be there. All epics were highly functional pieces of gear when they first hit the scene - just about the best you could have until the end game of Velious. They obviously intended to limit the rate with which they were acquired - ok. Beyond that however, I think some devs were less capable or more sadistic than others, and the epic quests ended up being made by several different people. My paladin epic was quite easy in comparison, and was accoplished by doing content my guild was already working on. Monk, enchanter and cleric epics though - those were the bad ones.

It's a sad commentary on the state of the game at the time that it took so long for Ragefire to be fixed. It's because of debacles like this that casual observers conclude the game was only successful because it lacked competition, or that it's players were addicts (both are somewhat true.) Those people wouldn't have gone through that agony if they didn't enjoy the end result.

I will tell you that the enjoyable "end result" had more to do with social ties and/or greed than engaging gameplay, but that is apparently a perspective that not everyone shares.

I've said it before, I don't like to be challenged in MMORPGs. I like the illusion of challenge and competency, but there's a break point (and it is different for different people) where it goes into frustrating land and I drop out.

Guitar Hero 3, perfect example. I mastered "medium" and halfway through "hard" I got frustrated.

P.S. EQ wasn't hard, it was tedious. Important difference there.

It's almost impossible to remember a game where just about everything that was wrong never got dealt with. At all ever. Where "quality of life" stuff was considered a bad thing by the devs.

The boats. The boats were an irritant, but then they stopped working at all. You couldn't tell that of course, you'd sit there for an hour and then someone would send a tell that the boat was broken. The answer? gnomes. Put in some teleport gnomes. But don't replace the boats with them, keep using the boats and then make players call a GM if the boats break and he'll drop a gnome. If he can verify the boat is broken. *runs screaming into the night*

If a dev posted that today, his playerbase would drop to zero. Not because they'd quit, but they'd laugh themselves to death.

Magician was hard to get cause nobody wanted to go that far through the Plane of Sky/Air and then sit there and camp mobs until that piece finally dropped.

Surely that comes down to how the guild is run? Ours was focused on equipping members, to increase the power of the guild and progress further in the raiding game. It made tactical sense to get almost everyone their epics (until later loot surpassed epics for some classes), so we did those annoying bits because it brought us closer to being able to kill bigger bosses.

To get better Equipment to kill even bigger bosses.

Thats why I quit Everquest, not all those evil things SOE did, but the retardedness of the raid endgame.

I was well aware we were getting equipment to kill bosses, to get even better equipment, to kill even bigger bosses, etc. That was where I wanted to go in EQ1 as an explorer type - the places I couldn't yet reach. It required me to behave like an achiever type though. I wasn't particularly good at that, so I was among the lesser tanks in the guild, but we were always going somewhere.

Again, being an Aussie-based guild in a non-instanced game probably added some motivation - our peak evening hours were the US early morning (pre-dawn) so as the dominant guild in our time zone we could go around killing everything that was up. The US guilds tried to keep respawns within their own hours and shut us out, but they couldn't keep it up. So there was also a kind of "PvE as PvP" motivation - Aussies vs Americans, and a smaller nation is always prouder to beat a bigger nation.

You were on Trib, too, weren't you Tale? I know someone else was and I seem to remember it being you.

Atypical in the sense we had enough foresight to plan shit? It was stupid to camp ragefire. He can be tracked from the spider area right before the fire giants. We set a tracker there, checked it periodically, and if he was up we called in our guild and raced to it. If we got there before others we won. Turns out when he spawned we were the only guild there, the dude who was camping it couldn't find any help. We did the same thing with the stupid green dragon for my friend's warrior epic. We put a lowbie on a separate account at the dragons spawn point, and if he died we knew the dragon was up, then port guild in and kill before anyone else. Did the same thing with my necro epic. I found out when the golems died in plane of fear, then I organized a raid to take them down when they spawned (they had a static 3 day spawn). I call that being smart, and being efficient with my time.

Seriously it was never the designers intentions for people to camp shit. I wish people would quit blaming the developers for their own sloppy play. If you camped shit (especially for days at a time) you were doing it wrong.

Honestly there was a lot of fun in EQ, but it seems like a lot of you who played it found every way possible to make it hard, or boring. How many of you ever crawled through a dungeon? That was how they were meant to be played and thats how me and my friends went through just about every dungeon. We did that at least once for every dungeon and it was fun as hell. If you sat at the docks in oasis and pulled crocs, and then south karana with aviaks, then onto the next shitpile outdoor zone to level then again you were doing it the most shitty way possible. You should have tried going to najena, or befallen, or sol a.

If you just tried to level as fast as you could, then get mad at every death then again thats your fault. Me, and my group of friends explored, took our time to level, made sure to see as much content as possible. We still leveled fast as hell though because we were actually in dungeons where the exp was better. We approached the game like a session of D&D. We crawled through dungeons, got some loot once in awhile, and had a blast kicking back, slamming mountain dews, while shooting the shit with each other in party chat or on special occassions I would even host EQ lan parties now that was fun as hell.

Now the whole point of my post here is to show the other side of the coin. To show how EQ was fun, and I feel bad for you guys that never got to experience it.

And yet your ENTIRE explanation for how you got around the camping is that you metagamed the system with lowbie alts on separate accounts. You DID camp the fucking spawn, you just didn't do it with your active character. You were doing it wrong TOO.

The intention of the developers was that you wouldn't get so fucking obsessive about the epics that you camped everything. Clearly that was a delusion, because the game was tailor-made for obsessive compulsives.


See above. The game was built for obsessive compulsive behavior.


I ran a sort-of casual guild. I made specific guild events that would gather groups for the sole purpose of crawling dungeons that most people didn't get to experience. I tried to lead my people away from the typical Guk or outdoor camps, because they really bored me to tears and they were overcrowded. Out of a 60-person or more guild, we would usually get enough people for 1 not-full group. It was easier and more efficient to find a spawn in a dungeon or outdoors and camp the shit out of it. And yes, it ruined the game for me (along with the lewt whoring).

But once the developers started tuning all the new content for raid-equipped groups with the release of the Kunark expansion, there was no going back. You either had to equip with medium to top end gear, or you were never going to see even normal dungeons in Kunark, much less raid content.


I did experience it, and I tried to make sure others experienced it too. I led server-wide initiatives to do dungeon crawls, and often got 30 to 40 people to turn out. I led an open dungeon crawl raid into Najena for anyone from levels 15-20 to join, as a sort of "early raid training" and had a blast. I did the same for Mistmoore in the 20's, and a few other dungeons that were less populated for the level ranges I was targeting. But the vast majority of the servers all geared towards camp/level/raid as fast and as efficiently as possible.

People wanted that easy camping experience, and part of that was the raiding gear requirements. The other part was the very punitivie death penalty which forced you into NOT DYING as the only means of decent progression.

Your experience was atypical in that:

1) You didn't give a shit about who was in Fear when the next 3-day timer was up.  This kind of stuff got to vandetta-level shit quiclky like intentionally wiping another guild the next time they were in Fear, which wasn't hard.
2) You had enough folks on at any given moment to take-down a raid spawn.


I did the crawl thing many places. Befallen, Sol A, Mistmoore Castle, Karnor's, Plane of Innovation, Ssra Temple.  Hell, all of ToV could be called a Crawl since you "had" to do it that way.   It was fun, yes. It still wasn't a game I'd want to play again, now that I'm older and have other things required of my time.

Good I am glad I am not the only person who got to experience crawling through the dungeons the way they were meant to be done.

You're right I suppose in a way we were camping stuff, but we never actively just sat there doing something boring waiting for a spawn thats insane.

As for the way my guild operated. The whole server operated on a might makes right basis. If you arrived first in force you got the mob. We had no rotations like other servers, and I think it worked out pretty good. Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. When I led my fear raids there was noone else in the zone. I never steamrolled anyone. The rules were simple. If you got there first with a force that could take out the mob you got it. Sitting at a spawn by yourself that you can't kill by yourself gave you claim to jack shit on my server. Had I arrived to kill the golems and there was already a force there capable of taking them out we would have left.

Fuck might makes right. Up the ass. Until it bleeds. And dies from blood loss.

I was on a rotation server. I fought hard against and with other guilds to keep the rotations active because my guild and a lot of others would have been shit out of luck on raid content without rotations. Hell, we had to ally with 2 or 3 other guilds to actually do any raid content simply because we were casual about leveling speed and took anyone who wasn't a complete tool as a member.

What the rotations DID do positively is they allowed a lot more people to experience some decent raid content (that isn't an oxymoron) without having to suck uber elitist guild cock to do it. Unfortunately, the rotation tended to wear down to a nub anyone brave/stupid/unfortunate enough to have to keep track of it. It turned the fun of dungeon crawling and tactical execution of raid strategy into a science of tedious project management and social networking with OCD douchecunts.

Heh, I remember the rotations. We had a website called something like rathecalendar.com where all the guilds planned out who would take each day in fear weeks in advance. Good lord that was some ridiculously stupid fucking shit.

When i betad Vanguard it was like this. Walk all the way down to the bottom if a dungeon (cuse the 5 groups killed everything already), and wait in line.

Fun, and immersive.

Couple of quick remarks:

As a Game Player

--it sounds as if all those complaining about the death penalty taking "hours/days/weeks" to recover from simply were either a) idiots who couldn't do risk vs reward assessments, or b) playing way beyond their characters level. I played an enchanter old school (back when even level mobs would kill you within 10 seconds or so depending on the zone), and I rarely died. Maybe I was just a better/more skilled player.

--epics: note the word--I'll type it again: epics. With the one exception of raid guilds and the cleric (and arguably enchanter pre-PoP), no one -had- to have their epics. Verant screwed up with the cleric epic and how it was required for raid wipe recoveries, but other than that, they were intended to take a long time, and not be something everyone had.

As a Game Developer

--I've mentioned this before, but not having some sort of death penalty that rewards those that play conservatively is like not having some form of travel cost--it limits, and in some cases destroys, mid- and end game mechanic availability. You can't not have a death penalty, or you get PvE griefers, "1 in a million chance" item campers, and quite a few others issues. Without a travel cost of some sort, you limit anything that is territory based, from area/region sovereignty to a viable location based free market economy, to siege warfare (look at how shadowbane worked--ONE stealth summoner could seed an entire raid force to attack in under 5 minutes).

--you can make a game to cater to the masses, or cater to the skilled. You can't do both reliably without severely restricting the game itself. WoW did an admirable job of trying to do both, but it has many core issues as well.

Just my thoughts, being an experienced EQ player from 1999 all the way through this year (off and on in some cases, I admit!).

Was a monk on Tallon zek pvp server

1) naked casters
2) item loot that hurt melee far more than casters
3) cross teamers = pvp immune healers
4) training zone lines
5) long ass run across the karanas(sp?)
6) zone plugging in pvp
7)  yeah i remember de-leveling
8) WTB a bind plz
9) endlessly practicing skills, I can remember the direction skill and not knowing where the fuck i was going because my compass skill or what not was too low.
10) The jungle/forest of Death outside of high pass keep/hold the one with the undead skelly warriors/captains that came out at night..... Holy shit that was by far the most evil zone i have seen in any mmo.  If you wanted to go from the west side of the continent to the east you simply had to pass through this zone, and if it was nightime oh god the pain.

despite that as my first mmo (i played UO less than a week), I have a lot of fond memories.

One thing i really enjoyed was the smack talk that would occur on the pvp servers. with chat open to everyone regardless of faction/race etc.  that made for some fun times.  I can understand why games have done away with it, but it was very satisfying to be able to send a tell to someone you just kiilled :)

All of this assumes people are competing against one another. Most people do not care that you have X armor and it took you X hours to do. Some of us play to have our own fun, and could really care less about competition between other players that, frankly, have no bearing on my enjoying the game (Except in games like EQ and Vanguard, see my other post in this thread).

This: no one -had- to have their epics.

Your right, and wrong IMO. Some people don't care (i'm going out on a limb here, and saying the majority.) Others do, and i think you did say this. But i dare to say, that breed of player is gone, or has grown up. BUT, i have never equated Time with Challenge. Implying that skilled = those with time to over come such cockblock, kinda makes me sad. Reading your thoughts on Epics, and the death penalty, and travel times basically implied this.

So, i think you are talking about a minority that like to compete against others in some sort of MMO fashion show (Barring the side affect of developers creating objects like the one you talk about in shadow bane, thats not the problem, its a side affect.). I think your first line in the "as a developer section" really only matter to this type of person. Everyone else just wants to have fun, play the game, and adventure with others ETC...


There is no reason, EVER for an accomplishment to take hours in one sitting. EVER. and i bet none can come up with a valid reason for it. The only people who would EVER do it, are people who want to compete VS. other players in "The uber fashion show" race..

Anyway... let the ripping apart begin.  :grin:

Also.. you were an Enchanter, Stephen.  One of THE most imbalanced classes ever in any game.  Or did we alll just choose to forget that whole "holy trinity" and the times that Enchanters were soloing whole sets of Planes-Level spawns thanks to mez/ charm?

Not to mention Enchanter was the one class with almost all of the "OH SHIT" cards in regards to grouping. The only one they didn't have was Feign.  If a group with an enchanter died, he had critical resists or the group was in way, WAY over its head.  It was quite different from being a warrior wandering around and getting wtfpwnd by a green mob, or a mage who could distract with the pet and run for the hills.

Name a diku that isn't this exact model. They're all about getting better in order to become more efficient about getting better.

I'd maybe agree if EQ1 did anywhere near an adequate job of telling you what you had a reasonable chance again and you were rewarded with meaningful advancement at greater frequency. EQ1 went too far into the land of "don't try anything even questionable" and only improved at later levels when players were conditioned into thinking "don't try anything risky without a Cleric with clickstick and a 'chanter".

Or, said another way: WoW with EQ1's death penalty still wouldn't be as sadistically punitive as EQ1 was.

I'd say one in ten gamers knows that the holy trinity was tank/heal/CC and not tank/heal/dps.

As a former guild leader of a pretty casual, fun-focused guild, I would say it WAS the majority, at least of those who hit level 40 or higher.

On the subject of wandering rare supermobs, I read somewhere (far too lazy to find) that WAR plans to bring this back in a limited fashion.  I believe the example was a newbie area where a cave complex has a tunnel leading to a small room empty almost all the time.  Using a varying combination of static and randomized spawns, a powerful vampire might spawn there and have a trophy (char. decoration, no stats) or a quest.  This is to encourage veterans to explore all areas while avoiding the Son of Arugal problem. 

Yes. You can also blame me for the other Aussies being on Tribunal - I suggested it.

In 1999, before web messageboards took off, there was an Aussie EQ mailing list called EQOZ. We were spread across all servers and there was nobody to group with in our time zone. There was a small Aussie guild on Tarew Marr called Southern Legion and some wanted to unite there, but that meant abandoning lots of levels to start at level 1 in a guild where others were already in the 30s and 40s. I pointed out there was a new server called Tribunal where we would all be equal, and we had a vote ...

The Tarew Marr Southern Legion guys knew how to make a guild, so SL was born on Tribunal, based purely on nationality/time zone, with more than 200 members by Christmas 1999 (and me as a strict asshole officer trying to police guildchat spam). Eventually our level 50s joined a raiding alliance, then started raiding themselves, got sick of having to discuss loot rules with people who were still level 20, and split to form Aurora Noctum as a "STFU and raid" guild.

What a load of steaming shit. Especially that last paragraph I didn't bother quoting. I expect better from you of all people than such blatant e-peen measuring.

EQ in terms of the system was at it's best when Brad et al were long gone, and the designers had fucking alienated the majority of the playerbase with GoD and decided to react by making the game far less punitive and fucked up in the expansion that followed. Unfortunately, it was too late as WoW and EQ2 came along and decimated EQ1 a few months later.

EQ the experience was at it's best when I was a newbie, playing with my friends in an entirely new kind of game - a computer 3-d Dungeons and Dragons where you jumped on whenever you like, explored a huge world, didn't need a GM and so forth. If WoW was my first game, I'd probably feel the exact same way about it.

EQ1 was the best thing going for a long time, in spite of the harsh death penalty and other bullshit like that, not because of it.

No offense but I hardly think paying for an extra account as a way to work around to an intentional limiting game design should ever be considered a good thing, whether it's this or RvR spying in DAoC.


Actually, i agree with this to a point.  I dont think the developers had any idea how many people would in face, camp for not only hours but DAYS just to get whatever items was considered a must have.  But, the reason why so many of these items were considered must haves that people were willing to camp for was due to trying to lessen other punishing designs factors in the game.  i.e. JBoots for travelling speed that didnt suck, rez sticks so death penalties and raid wipes were bearable, Rubicite, FBSS, SSoY, etc etc  I think once people figured out how much of a difference equipment made in EQ, they started justifying the most insanse behavior to get it because at the end of the day, i think most players did enjoy EQ, they just wanted to lessen the painful parts to enjoy it more.

Everquest was a clownshoes example of what was "intended" versus what actually happened in the game. The disconnect from reality was simply amazing.

All you guys who were playing EQ instead of UO (yes even the ganky pre-Tram game) are cockmunchers responsible for ruining the genre.  That is all.

 :oh_i_see:

Well, I started with UO, but it was not really fun being ganked and killed the minute you step out of town and getting taunted with "Everybody has a rune to escape that situation, noob."

The Sociopaths in EQ had to rely on more indirect measures to ruin your day. And it started later (I guess starting in not so populated Halas helped some). So maybe you should direct your anger towards people who think it should be fun being their victim.

Thats why I always say the players ruined the game for themself. No sane person could anticipate what lengths players would go to to achieve the ridiculous goals and epeen contests they set for themself. It was in concept a roleplaying world, and we made a skinner box out of it because we liked the shiny and the ding sound too much.

Yeah. Not only things like Alchemy working as intended, but things like Kiting, FD pulling and so forth that were unintended and nerfed repeatedly before the devs eventually just gave up and realised that some shit was out of their control, and later embraced the game as it had evolved rather then fighting the playerbase every step of the way.

Also WoW Blood Elves rule. Anyone who played EQ is an old nerd like Gary Gygax. He's dead. AC is for Armor Class, there's no game called Asheron's Call. AO stands for Adults Only. UO must be Marvel Universe Online without a Spiderman license?

MUD! Yeah, mud wrestling is oldschool, from when they used to drink beer and get stoned.

I have it on good authority that all you needed to do was L2P and STFU, newb.

OH GOD WHAT HAVE I BECOME?!


You're right, I should probably make a thread about that someday.   :oh_i_see:

Been drinking tonight? Nice rant, but it doesn't make much sense...

I was just emphasising how irrelevant we and this thread are in the face of 10 million+.

But yeah (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&q=%22fanchon+ferrandi%22+partners&btnG=Search).

Shameful confession time:

I met my girlfriend on EQ  :awesome_for_real:

And we were previously members of competing uber-guilds  :awesome_for_real:

This was us: http://www.fohguild.org/forums/retard-rickshaw/4416-gm-grog-what-fuck-shit.html  :awesome_for_real:

The thread in that link is the very essence of why instancing was conceived and is now the standard.

You can want players to police themselves. And heck, some of them even will. But you can't expect all of them to. And all things being equal in a game, power goes to who gets there first and/or griefs the best.

Well, shit. As an old D&D grognard, I could see that Everquest wasn't about role playing and adventure. It was about dinging and gratzing. The only mechanics that existed were ones that made combat and advancement happen. Tradeskills were anemic and "the world" consisted of polygons and reputation tracking.

If you provide a baseball field, baseball bats, and baseballs, it's kind of nutty to expect people to then play poker.

In this case the players realized its easier to club the other team over the head with the baseball bats.

In the D&D I remember, leveling up was a background activity that provided a bit of structure, not the point of the game. If EQ had wanted to replicate that, they would have severely capped how quickly you could level, and made it a background activity.

But that would have meant aiming at the casual player market. People who would log on a couple of times a week to play it as an adventure game. Once you allow people to level 60 hours a week, you have to put in all the grind and timesinks that drive the casual player away.

One day we might see an adventure based MMORPG. But not from the current crop of designers, who all come from a background of playing 40 hours a week. Maybe from some TV people, who are comfortable with the concept of people being entertained by their product just a few hours a week?

There's already several 'adventure' games out there like that.  They get ignored because they're free-to-play flash games like DragonFable, however.

Every single adventure was handcrafted for the specific characters you brought to them... and then dynamically managed by a person. No MMO, hell no RPG, is ever going to do that for you. This genre has roots in D&D, but more on the stats side and what devs played when they were younger, than in any real sense of homage. Heck, even DDO isn't the authentic D&D of which you speak.

And nobody's driving the casual players away from WoW. It's because those players don't give a shit what the endy-end-enderson gamers are doing. WoW compartmentalized a lot of things, including the rewards. Your average player still kicking around through the early-BC stuff doesn't give a shit about what drops from wherever the FoH-like folks are. Many times they don't even know about it. This is what a lot of people miss, because it was missed in EQ1 too. Unless you're part of a raiding guild or one about ready for most of its members to hit the cap, the endgame means dickall to you, as do the sycophants complaining about it on the oboards.

Indeed! I did that endgame raid thing once in Everquest. Since then I do the parts that are fun for me (levelling to the level cap, questing and doing group content) and go before I get frustrated and hate the game that entertained me for longer than most single player games.

You're welcome, bitchtits.

This is a great point. I played EQ from before Kunark up until Gates of Discord and I played it a lot. In all that time I went on like one naggy raid and that is it, no other raiding. Maybe that's why I don't have all the angst against EQ and think it was a great game that I don't have the time for anymore.

Raiding broke the achievers against the rocks of insanity.  :awesome_for_real:

We still haven't answered the most important question:  why do beggars love pumas?

Non-instanced dungeons + cockblocking a-holes + trains + corpse runs definately upped the stress levels into a realm that WoW can't even dream about but after playing wow for a few years I have decided that something of value and substance was lost during the elimination of these things. 

Also I am quite surprised that WoW hasn't implemented an EQIM type of feature that works on mobile phones and shit.  I was pretty much over ICQ and stuff before EQ was even released but the ability to chat in guild chat while not in the game was pretty cool.

EQ did two things that still haven't been surpassed by anyone else - their whole chat system (including the EQ2 stuff which is pretty much the same system ported across) and their LFG interface.

Refresh my memory (actually, I have almost zero memories of EQ :grin:). Personally, I never found it easier to LFG than in City of Heroes.

AC is also for Auto Cannon!


I got nothing.  :sad:

LOTRO.

I am not sure if you can say that EQ1's chat and lfg systems are notably superior or better than the norm for MMOGs released after 2000. IIRC, EQ1's chat system (with /rs /1 etc.) came in after several expansions (PoP?) and the expanded lfg system much later. The point is, I think they either copied the chat and lfg stuff from someone else (AC? DAoC?) or if they did pioneer it - it has been so copied by everyone else, it has become the norm for other MMOs. 

As for the playability of EQ1, I agree 100% with a short 'to the point' re-review posted in F13 a few months ago:
EverQuest: A Retrospective Look At Why I’m So Great And This Game Sucks (http://www.f13.net/index.php?itemid=622#more).
STOP HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY.

Come on! Everquest IS the game that defined gathering 12 gopher nuts  with a drop rate of 1/1000 as "fun".* Its just having fun the wrong way!

EQ1 was like bad sex. Its like heavy BDSM sex with heavy weights attached to your genitals and the occasional goatse dildo painfully rammed up your butt. Some bits of the sex was great ~ they DID get some of it right, and SOME people can't think of having sex any other way as the present playerbase still exists. People got used to it as did the industry, BUT the moment someone took all the bits that worked, removed all the sadistic rubbish and packaged it into a polished game, the stampede to the door was deafening (I was there when GoD was released and WoW & EQ2 opened several months later - the Quellious server pop was literally halved)

I have a pet theory that SOE actually did intend to retire EQ1 and migrate people into EQ2 - "Norrath without the sadism" when GoD (the most disastrous expansion ever produced (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_of_Discord)) was released. The plan I theorize was to turn the pain knob all the way to 11 by releasing a completely F-ed expansion and have people move into the shiny new multi-million $$$ investment EQ2. Of course the plan went awry for SOE when people preferred to give their money to Blizzard.

*I stole that line from some blog comment - one of you guys probably coined it.

I don't know man, while I agree with you on principal, that review seemed a little over the top harsh (which I think was the point.) To take it seriously is a little bit like wanting to kick grandpa down the stairs.

(http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/a/a9/Fritzlbitchesdontknowboutmycellar.jpg)

Apparently it didn't lose enough or you wouldn't have put in a few years  :grin:

Most people couldn't goddamned wait to jump ship from EQ1 to a better game, those that remained that is. It just all the way the hell until WoW to get there.

Now we're back to that in-between-EQ1-and-WoW-like period where the genre splinters between various smaller gatherings around games that focus on smaller parts of a total experience. Until Blizzard finally gets around to housing, real crafting and the "real" PvP the small contingent is looking for. Or until someone out WoW's WoW.

*reads wiki article*

They actually named a place "The Abysmal Sea"???  :ye_gods:

 :grin:

I dunno I still play EQ 1, and I take breaks every now and again but ultimately I enjoy it. Why? Here's why.

1. I *enjoy* the grind which doesn't exist really anymore after sitting through the annoyance-that-is-WOW-and-all-it's-repeatable-content. I like quests but every damn thing is a quest and that to me is overkill. Sometimes a woman just wants to go out there and massively kill everything in sight. -Everything-

2. Very few people scream and cry anymore. They no longer expect perfection or decency out of SOE, they knowingly and willingly accept mediocrity and bathe happily in it's blood.

3. The Exp/Death issue. There are so many ways to gain experience including an AA that allows you to double the amount of EXP you get for a small period of time, who cares now? You can level from 1 - 70 in like two days if you spent 18 hours at your keyboard.

4. Senses of humour. Sorry guys, but in no other game to date with the exception of Camelot have I found a more funny, loose bunch of morons this side of the nuthouse. People who are now playing EQ are basically not the new subscriber. They are the old player that either has the AA's and has the experience and maybe took a long break, have seen the raid side of things and are now just there to enjoy themselves. Yes, there are massive raids still happening, but hey.. you don't *need* to raid unless you want those high end nifty items people still talk about and meh - there's enough now to keep people mildly amused.

5. It's easily playable. It's basically idiot proof but you have to know how to play your class. Well..you had to know how to play your class. Now.. that's kind of a joke I think so scratch that.

But mostly, it's about the enjoyment. The bullshit that seemed to exist a few years back when the players were so damned serious seems to cease to exist. Where I am, on Maelin, it's full of my ex idiot Karana people and even they are laid back. I can log in, and just enjoy my game experience and I'll get to the levels when I get there. In the meantime I can actually enjoy the groups and see the new worlds and just.. chill out. Oh, and it's pretty, lately.

I don't ever remember enjoying EQ1 as much as I have in the last few months of playing it again, in part because I know what to expect:

The "grind" which basically doesn't exist anymore.
Not the greatest gameplay in the world.
Ineffective and unsupported customer support, I.E. the.. "Customer Wha?"
A pretty world with a storyline that's been kind of consistent and not really all that repetitive.
The ability to kind of fashion my character and my playing style to a very laid back atmosphere and not have to worry about what items and loot I am/am not getting.



On a side note:

Being a druid and having everything summon is vile.
Being a druid and having everything quad for 1200-1600 is vile.
Stabbing a rhino in the ass with my dagger is fun.

You could say that for just about any MMO nowadays, which is a good thing in my opinion, something truly indicative of the genre.

Us ADHD folks are always interested in chasing the next big shiny, particularly when they talk about something different. But, at least in the West, the vast majority of players don't really work that way. They find a game they and their friends love, and stay there until collective boredom. On a personal note, most of the people I've played MMOs with went from EQ1 to DAoC to WoW and that was it.

It also really helps a game when it is no longer under the collective spotlight. It's not that nobody cares about EQ1 anymore. It's more that it's not the big sheriff in town that requires constant challengers. WoW took that mantle. And while WoW is a fine game, it's never ever going to be as good as the millions of screaming sycophants want it to be. And someday some new game will become that and the WoW veterans will be hanging out in chat channels while they grind quests happily chatting with other veterans who couldn't care any less about the rest of the genre.

In my opinion, games get better when they're no longer #1. This is because they've shed the players who aren't happy. They only have left those who like what is, people who don't have unrealistic expectations for what should be.

--r, b
EQ's LFG system was to flag you as LFG. That was it. Maybe they added one later, but when I played it was /lfg and /who all lfg (or given travel times /who lfg since anyone in another zone was going to take decades to get to you anyway). Most groups formed by people shouting in ooc or shout. If they grafted a system on it was after my day. (DAOC was the first game I played that had any sort of lfg system and the more they evolved it, the less people seemed to use it.)

LOTRO's system is to flag you as lfg and put up one and their new innovation is to flag one and only one quest you want to take. The LFG channel is limited to one zone. Utterly useless. When I have been active, almost every group i've gotten has been from the player channel glff (global looking for fellowship) even though only a fraction of the players even know about it. I've gotten some groups from the normal lff channel and I have gotten exactly 0 from the lff system.

Two of the weakest systems I've come across in any game.

COX has the best system I've seen and everyone seems to use it--very easy combination of function and simplicity. EQ2's simply having a channel for every ten levels is equally efficient.

Shouldnt this be in green? Does lotro's lfg even work across zones yet?

Numtini: Ya they added a lfg system just before pop iirc. It was great. It had filters, let you list quests or areas and even let you use your ignore list to block who could see you were lfg. It also let you see into what groups were already formed and looking for someone.

CoX was a good system though quite basic compared to what they eventually came up with in EQ1. God, I wish WoW had copied that instead of inovating their own retarded system.

As to the chat system, the things I missed from the EQ1 system were the convenience tools they added over the years, like /tt(tell target) and /rt(Target reply). As a cleric, sending tells to targets and targeting people who sent me tells were just so convenient it's easy to miss them when they aren't there.

You must've quit EQ before Luclin (or was it PoP..), then.  EQ expanded on the LFG tag to produce something akin to the CoX system, but with comments you could add to yourself. ("looking to do xyz." "won't heal" "only looking for attunement to <whatever>"   IIRC it allowed the same filtering by class/ level/ zone as CoX as well.   As you say, it was a very simple to understand system. 

Fuck, WoW HAD a similar system in beta, but then ripped it out for just the flag.  Then they removed the flag.  Their current system, while technically better, is crap because you can only flag and search by all-too-specific filters, ( <xyz> dungeon, <abc> quest - and that quest has to be in your log... so you can't offer to help with other's quests unless you hang in that area.)  You can't just throw up a flag to say "I'll do whatever, I'm just looking to hang with folks for a bit."

Have you used it since the update to it, and the quest tracker and quest window?

I'm not so sure a flat system like EQ's lfg would work in the modern area of games. In EQ LFG usually meant "looking for grinding" if you wanted a dungeon you were already in that dungeon, though this would not work with a game like wow because you couldn't '/who molten core' to see who was waiting in line to camp the next maggy spawn.

Let's say I'm j.random priest looking for a specific dungeon, just flagging lfg is going to get me nonstop spam from people looking for a thousand different thing, heck often i get spam just standing still as a healer.

My brain's a little fried right now and while I agree wows current lfg system is bland at best, I'm just not sure a simple lfg tag and search can work in any modern instanced mmo as well as it did in eq

It wants to be what EQ1s current system is: a flag plus a bunch of options and a customizable text field, to be searchable with filters game wide.

Anything less is something done in haste and at the expense of prioritization.

I really didn't see much difference, but I played for only a few days after the last patch (largely because I was tired of not being able to find groups).

Honestly, I'm pretty convinced that a global chat channel is the best option. Most of my WOW instance groups came from spamming the LFG channel or seeing someone asking. I downloaded one of the mods that joins you to it automagically.

I'd actually like to play some EQ. I really, really enjoyed that game but I never raided.

Here's a question for some of you that still play: Can you find groups at lower levels or would I have to solo to 60?

You can add comments in CoX as well.

Honestly, not a lot of groups at lower levels but you are always fighting BY people. Which, if you just want the socializing.. there's always a comedy somewhere. And, although there aren't a lot of groups.. there are a lot of helpful people. More so now than ever. It's very odd.

But if it's grouping you are looking for, yeah, you won't be a cheeky monkey.

I didn't remember that at all.  Ok then, EQ and Cox have the same system.. or near about.   Either way all games since have pretty much failed on this, and it's really irritating.

One thing I really liked that i only remember from DAOC was being able to flag a group as looking for more. EQ2 might do this, but nobody uses it. But that let the searching go two way. I don't know how many times I have gotten a tell in COX asking who the group leader was and if there were any spaces. Be a lot easier to have an apply to group button or something.

There is also a Looking For Guild System now. You plug in your level, your AA's and so forth, and it provides you with a list of guilds.

Unfortunately, SOE dropped the ball and forgot to add a place for people to list who to contact.. (it's nowhere I've ever seen)

But they get some small clapping for providing it.

PlanetSide takes this one step further. Not only can you see what squads are LFM a squad leader can set his/her squad as "auto-join" and people can invite themselves into it -- no need to even bug the squad leader. Of course PS is an MMOFPS so you don't typically have the group composition issues as you do in MMORPGs.

(http://pandadesigns.com/f13/coh_searchui.jpg)

The LF Guild system in EQ2 is pretty borked. They list by guild level, which means at the top of the list of guilds are lots of raiding guilds that aren't actually accepting members at all or who are looking for an 80th pet/wis/rez/buff mystic with 140AAs and fully geared who can raid at some god insane time of day. The little guilds taking newbies get listed way down or more likely not at all. Which is kind of backwards since if you're a serious raider you're probably going to know all the guilds and what they want and the newbies are the ones most likely to use the built in system.

In EQ1 it's just very basic. Lists guilds, time zone, small description with a larger one upon click to view. Beyond that, yeah..that's it.

I don't recall the one in EQ2 but it sounds less useful than EQ1 which isn't a good thing in any manner of speaking.

WoW is a better game but EQ had a tighter community.  Pretty sure the EQ community was not entirely the result of it's demographic and size, I think the gameplay was just geared more for it than WoW is.

The better game aspect of wow had me logging 70 or so days played over 3 years, the stronger community aspect of EQ had me logging 300+ days played over a 5 year period.  Then again I suppose having already been to see the wizard and taking a peek behind the curtain may have beefed up my immunity to the WoW addiction a fair bit so days played may not be a fair comparison.

I wonder if you could automate that aspect by listing yourself as a Healer or Tank or DPS, whatever. Give the 4 or 5 basic party roles, and then set your party to autoinvite one Healer or whatever.

Setting aside the general suckiness of PUGs for a moment...

If I was build an lfg tool today I would be handing rewards (buffs/teleports/badges).  To the point where people who were just grouping with their friends would still want to always use the lfg tool to set it up.  It needs to be the default way of making groups.

I think of all of the MMORPG's out there to date, the strongest community outside of the UO Community has always really been the EQ community. I'm sure I'll get disagreements with this but for a game that has managed to sustain a form of life for as long as it has, with the die-hards still basically playing and/or coming back..it's pretty impressive. Though with respect to games like DAoC - it's a similar community in terms of loyalty and die hards. 

I'd be interested to see what the numbers look like of people "returning" to EQ.

The more often the average person is logged in, the higher the server/bandwidth costs. So I guess "better game" wins commercially if there's a flat monthly fee, while "better community" wins if it's time charged. EQ was just flat fee (or a higher flat fee for a premium server). WoW has time charging in Asia, flat fees everywhere else. I wonder what community is like in WoW in time charged countries - much weaker?

This I very much agree with. Getting folks to actually USE the LFG tool, is practically as difficult as constructing a proper tool to begin with, if not more so.

Loved the big world, it was a lot of fun wandering around not really knowing where I was going and some of the locations were just plain beautiful. Having to get through a dangerous area to bind in another place was some of the best times I've had in a MMORPG.

However, I have the sense of direction of a blind wombat so having to do corpse runs made me quit that game. Hell, I had to play pretty much nothing but trolls since I got lost in almost every other starting city and often couldn't find the trainer/exit (halfling city was OK too).

They put in Corpse Summoners inside the guild lobby. Losing your corpse will never happen again unless the server eats it.

I sorta wish they hadn't done that actually. It's things like that and falling to your death for 15000000000000000 points of damage while running along a flat surface that just made it fun.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
(http://hetstence.com/blog/media/inigomontoya.jpg)

Well. I have issues. My type of "fun" is the beat your head against a brick wall type..

Different strokes an' all.

It certainly explains that whole "Married to haemish" thing.

Okay, so I just started up again. Do we have any active players, and on what server?

Also, I'm started a new character instead of using my old ones to re-learn the game. I'm plan on completing the tutorial since I hear that n00b zones are deserted. Once I hit level 10, I assume there are groups to find at that level... right?

I'd respond but I was distracted by your avatar.

Unrealistically bouncy.


----> Active player. On Maelin.

Okay. Maelin.

But as far as the grouping... I hit level 10 and then show up at the tunnel in EC looking for a group. Will I find one or is everyone level 9000?

Yeah about the tunnel...

It's a nice thought ;-)


You won't find many level 10's looking for groups because the leveling dynamic has changed a lot. It's easier now to get through lower levels but they've compensated for it a bit by making mobs a bit harder.

At this rate if you logged on tonight and played for like two hours, depending on how old your account was and how equipped you were, at 10..you could get to like 20 in an hour.

Did something happen to the tunnel or Commons in general?

Also, what's your name in game so that I can bombard you with questions?

I had a 63 ranger when I quit. He had maybe 30 AAs.  If I logged him on, what would I do?

Also, I just found a sweet private EQ server. The people who run it seem like they are all about the spirit of the game versus numbers and third party data loggers and whatnot.

Shards of Dalaya: (http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/ (http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/))

I'll be logging in to it tonight and I'll let you know what's what.

Alysiia KillerTomato.


And well, they kinda changed things. I mean there is A tunnel..

But it'll never the same tunnel..

And the commonlands?

Just one long zone. It's something to see.

Okay, so I've been playing on a private EQ Classic server. I am having a great time.

Apparently, the only way to play is own or attain a copy of Everquest Titanium, which is the version that includes every expansion. Once installed, do not patch. From here, you redirect your client to a private login server where you'll find 20-30 private shards listed. All instructions can be found at the EQ Emulator site.

I play on a recently opened "classic" server. The idea behind it is that anything newer than what was added during Velious will never be seen in game. Currently, we're still old-world Norrath, with the requirement to open Kunark being the downing of the dragons or four more months. At our rate, Kunark will be open at the time requirement. I really am having a lot of fun here, though it lacks a lot of players. We peak at 40-50 online. Sadly, there are people who log in 3 clients and play with themselves. That's not so bad for right now, since we lack players, but it irritates me either way.

If you were ever a fan of EQ as it was originally, I suggest you give this a shot. It's a lot of fun to have the content to yourself most of the time. If we had enough players, Bat Country could do some cool things!

I think whenever you end up playing on a private server, it represents a personal problem. This applies to any game.

Well, to be fair, it's not like a played EQ from release until now and have drifted on to a private server. I've only recently stumbled upon it and play there because it's the game I remember and on top of that, it's free.

Plus, there are far fewer asshats there.

Unless your definition of asshat is someone who plays EQ, UO, or WoW ^_^

Or EVE or AoC.

They are all the same.

Online gamers are  :awesome_for_real:.

Why even bother with a thoroughly castrated and diluted online game in this case... Go play Oblivion!

You advised he play a diluted and castrated console game. That's not weird, at all.

I play Online Games despite other people, not because of them!

It used to be the other way round, but Online people broke me.

50 people sound about right to me.

I've never made it past level 25 or so in any game other than Asheron's Call or AO. That being said, there's a lot of content that I've never seen in pretty much every MMO I've played. While EQ is clearly designed to be massively multiplayer, having fewer people log on turns it into something more like multiplayer Oblivion, and that's something that I enjoy.

I play MMOGs for the MMO part, asshats or not. A private server would completrely defeat the purpose for me. I like seeing other players running around in AoC, even if they are killing the mobs I need on White Sands!

Pretty much. I do wish that somebody besides Raph would brainstorm other types of interactions between players outside the Group or PvP paradigms we've got stuck in now.

Shit, something like Player Cities seems to be a herculean task to get flying. Only a few MMOGs have even tried it so far.

I play MMOs for the asshats. They amuse me. PuGs can be alot of fun at a bearable level of asshatting.

What I can't stand are the whiners. Those passive aggresive turds who can't stop bitching about losing the flag, or not getting the roll for thier purple monkey beater.

Makes me cranky and stabby.

"Their".

Also, "aggressive".

Lastly, describe in single words only the good things that come in to your mind about your mother.

(http://www.synthstuff.com/mt/archives/dino-book-02.jpg)

Really, just play the actual game.

Private shards are just icky.


That's my tagline for the day.. "Private shards are just icky."

If Creationism were really that rad, I'd convert.

Your care bear is freaking me out.

 I played ( and loved ) EQ from closed beta all the way until I jumped ship for DaOc. From the perspective of a Human Monk ( BLIND!! ) I actually appreciated the touches like that. My Monk still has her pre nerf guise of the deceiver to help with that ;-) I remember HATING the original UI that shipped with the game, thankfully that improved.

 Dislikes - CAMPING !! Ninja Looting - East Commons Bazaar spam - whispered Hey man, can I get a SoW?

 Loves - Taking my lil Druid on a Wanderlust for 2 full days and not seeing another player ( Back when world pop was visible -- Quellious had 200 people on in a heavy day ) - As was stated before exploration with that sense of danger was the single best thing about that game. I remember VIVIDLY the first time I saw the giant bridge to Karana .. blew me away. The Doon showed his ugly head and I was a sprinting lil freak :D Quad Kiting while whole groups looked on in wonder.

 Anyone remember the Golden Bear that lived in Kith Forest before they changed the zone ?

I *think* you can get the classic experience and also experience the joy of sending SoE money (and saving yourself the shame of admitting to yourself that you play on a private server!) by playing on the EQ Mac server. At some point long ago, SoE just stopped giving the Mac server expansions and patches. I want to say Velious, but it may have been Luclin or even PoP which would make it less cool.

Fake edit: http://www.eqmac.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7328 Al'Kabor server. Goes to PoP. 20% xp bonus. All original zones as of that time. If I had a mac or any idea how to run a mac OS on my PC, I would probably try it out. But I have issues.