f13.net

The thread in the WoW forum got me thinking, but the topic turned out to be more general than WoW-related.  Most MMOG's seem to have some form of raiding or another, although there are exceptions to this.  It's not so much the merits of raiding vs. not raiding or whether it's personally fun that I'm interested in at this point, though.  The question is more along the lines of whether the game before the raiding properly coincides with the raiding.  As has often been observed, upon hitting max level and beginning to raid, the game changes a lot.  Some games prepare their players better for this change, and others seem to do rather poorly.

Since WoW was what prompted this line of thought for me, I'll take it as a first example.  WoW up to level 60 is extremely casual-friendly and very easy.  There are almost no consequences to death, repair costs are barely worth noting, running away when you get in trouble usually works very well, and if you fail to kill an elite or named, you can try as often as you like, or you can just bypass it.  Inside instances, running away doesn't work and you can't bypass some things, but most of the other rules stay in place.  Instances are completely optional though, since you can progress your character without them - until you hit level 60.

WoW raids are among the easiest of all MMOG raids, and the consequences for failure are low.  Pretty much like the rest of WoW.  But repair costs start to climb at these levels, and you're *not* gaining money on a raid.  In a lower instance, you typically gain money from the things you kill, at least enough to cover repairs unless you are very very foolish and die very very often.  On a raid, the money intake is rarely equal to the money output.  Even if you happen to only die once or twice on a given raid, the amount of cash you take in is unlikely to cover it.  You also don't get to bypass the mobs, but nor do you get to advance your character in much of any other way.  And finally, the mobs are harder.  Not equal to some raids in other games, but they still require coordination and intelligence among 20-40 people.  You can't run from raid bosses either, and each wipe takes usually 15-30 minutes to recover from, depending on the organizational skills of your raid (and sometimes, the reset time on the event).  Raids are therefore unforgiving and tend to plant your face into the ground over and over until you learn to not be an idiot and not screw up, and overall execute flawlessly.  There seems to be a very wide gap between the easy pre-raid game and the relatively unforgiving (in comparison) post-raid game.

To contrast, we look to the granddaddy of raiding games, and still probably the best on the block if your interest is in raiding: EverQuest.  Modern day EQ has taken on a LOT of softening up to make it more attractive to the WoW crowd and people who like things easy, but its roots are still there.  From the moment one first set foot in Norrath in the early age, the game made it brutally clear that this is an unforgiving world and you're gonna get the everlovin' shit beat out of you on every mistake you make.  From the very moment the newbie died in Greater Faydark and popped back, naked at her bind point with no clue where her body and even her newbie weapon was - without which she could not even kill a spider - the game started beating the idea that this is going to be HARD into her skull.  Throughout all of EQ, you learn that a mistake means death, death means lost experience, it means a corpse run across gods only know how many zones brimming with hostile enemies that can now crush your naked pasty ass into the dirt.  The game taught you from day 1 that mistakes and stupidity and screwups are not tolerated and that you will be paying the price for making them.

By the time you were ready to face Vox and Nagafen you knew this was going to be hard, you knew that you were going to be dying over and over to kill these dragons and that you were going to have to learn to execute flawlessly in order to do it.  By the time you stood in front of the portal to the Plane of Fear, you had been well educated that if you made mistakes once you stepped through that mighty gateway, you and your whole raid would be dead in there, and there would be no way in hell you could fight back to your corpses after that wipe other than relying on the benevolence of another guild.  The raids were brutal and unforgiving, but so was every inch of the game from the start to the end.  Many things changed between EQ grouping and raiding to be sure, but unlike WoW, the punishment for failure was beaten into you from day 1.

WoW seems to have a disproportionately large population of idiots among its raiding base.  That's what I've seen, and that's what a lot of people who have raided in WoW have seen and told me about.  Things that no EQ raider would even think of using voice comm for have the community considering teamspeak or vent a 'requirement' in order to be successful at raids of such complexity.  The people need to be yelled at - quite literally - to perform simple tasks that EQ raiders tend to accomplish by memorization.  The same people, significant percentages of the raid, not reacting to situations they've experienced dozens of times in the past until yelled at by a raid leader.  I wonder if much of this isn't simply because the game has taught them they don't need to give any effort.  They're not expected to perform, mistakes are forgiven, and so on.  Then raids are tougher, they're more unforgiving, they plant faces into the ground over and over and they're not quite sure why, because they're doing everything right just like they always did.

It seems to me that if a game is going to have difficult raids that require you to execute flawlessly, not make mistakes, learn your place and your role and not screw around, then the rest of the game should also teach you the same lessons, and if the rest of the game is easy, forgiving of mistakes, and generally doesn't punish you for failure, then raids should be equally easy and forgiving.  There's already enough of a difference going from leveling to equipment grind, going from small groups to huge raids, and all the other vast shifts in focus that comes when the game switches to raiding without suddenly expecting people to perform to the best of their ability when 'meh' used to be good enough.

Should the games really be bringing us up with expectations of one level of difficulty, then dumping 'hard mode' in our laps along with a whole bunch of other changes we were only slightly prepared for?

Raiding and 'the rest of the game' should be completely different things, imo. Having it so intertwined with how the rest of the game works, be it easy or hard, assumes that everyone should want to move on to raiding later on. It assumes that raiding is necessary, and what everyone is ultimately playing these games for.

Your memory of EQ is different than mine, though I never raided in WoW so my perspective isn't the same as yours. Yes EQ was much harder compared to WoW but there were plenty of idiots in EQ. Remember KC? For many people in their mid to late 40s to early 50s that was their first real "dungeon" group experience (though technically KC was considered outdoors) and it showed. In other words lots of people managed to get to their 40s and beyond without learning proper grouping skills.

For Fear raids there was a seemingly never ending stream of idiots, at least on my server, who would jump through the portal before the word was given, train the break group causing a wipe and then kept going through to try and recover their stuff (not that they could get out even if they did manage to loot their corpse). At least PoH was better in that you could control who went up there. However, for some fricking reason, there were always people who did not understand simple instructions like "DO NOT STAND NEAR THE WALLS" -- that was seemingly beyond their reading comprehension or something. So while I agree the EQ taught people to fear death early and often it really didn't force people to learn raiding skills until you actually started raiding -- same as with WoW.

Hmm, that's an interesting line of thought, but it seems to me that's pretty much what these games expect anyway.  If you don't raid, you have almost no path for further advancement.  If you want to continue playing (and advancing) then you raid.


Oh, I completely agree that both games have always had a decent proportion of idiots, but it has seemed to me that the percentage of idiots is much higher in WoW than in EQ.  All raids have always been about cat-herding.  I've heard many other people who've played both games say the same thing, so it seems like it's not just a personal difference in views.


It's not so much raid skills I'm saying you have to learn in EQ, but simply doing things right and generally not making many mistakes.  Just a general attitude of 'pay attention and don't screw up, or else' that you saw in EQ from the start, but don't see much in WoW.  The 'or else' in WoW is only the most tiny of inconveniences, until you get to raids.  And you're allowed more mistakes before the 'or else' even presents itself.

In the early days of EQ, Raiding also had its share of idiots. The playerbase has not gotten collectively dumber nor younger. There's just a hell of a lot more people raiding in WoW now than there ever was in EQ.

The big difference is that you're looking through a lens of years of EQ and its well established incrementally-growing playerbase versus the just-under-two-years WoW where new people still have been entering all the time. Some of those who skyrocket to the endgame for Raiding realize they're not really supposed to be there because they lack the discipline, focus or interest. Others get there and it takes them time to realize these things. Still others get there and do have all of these, so get picked up by raiding guilds.

It's not about the players. It's about the recruiting and pruning policies of large and/or raiding guilds. Pickup raids are always going to have their share of uncontrollable freakshows. But "pickup" and "raid" should never be in the same sentence. Raiding is like Major League Baseball as Pickup Raids are to Little League. You don't take a Little League team and expect them to compete competitively against something an MLB team is competing. You've got to know your teamates well, and it takes time and consistency to achieve that.

The rest is just frustration. EQ or WoW or DAoC or CoH or AO or AC or DDO or FFXI or GW.

They already are. Lots don't survive that transition. For every account WoW has I'd say they've lost one as well. This is why I think they'll hit 10 million box sales with Burning Crusade. There's a lot of people that don't want to raid at all, whether in a 5, 10, 25 or 40 person group. It's not just about the time nor focus requirements. It's just boring.

I think designing PvE games to be punishing is an absurd concept. Do you think corpse runs in EQ made game more fun for anyone?

Gotta disagree..  Vox and naggy are mind-numbingly simplistic.  The simplest raid in WoW -- hell, most single-group dungeon bosses starting with Wailing Caverns  -- are vastly harder and more complex than any raid that existed in EverQuest from the day its servers opened through the end of PoP.  GoD+ I have heard go somewhere beyond "mindlessly trivial" but I never experienced them firsthand.  The only thing hard about vox or naggy was getting everyone to log off to preserve their buffs and all relog at roughly the same time.   There's not a single strategy you need to learn other than "have your clerics count to x and hit CH" to get you through everything Velious, Luclin, and most of PoP had to offer.  Late PoP had a little strategy, but compared to Twin Emps of C'thun, they are a complete joke.

EQ is the worst of both worlds.  If a game is easy, it's alright to be unforgiving because it takes a lot to fail.  If a game is hard, the game should be that much more forgiving if you fail, since so much of the fun in a hard game is trying random crazy shit that's likely to fail. (Darktide falls into the latter category, IMHO)

A game that's hard and unforgiving is just annoying pissant bullshit.  I wouldn't pay for it, anyway.

Why just PvE? Oh, because the killer gets fun out of killing in PvP. Well, turns out people got fun from your PvE misfortune too, not least the developers, and those that then took your spawns.

There are a lot of "punishing" mechanics that make sense in PvP but absolutely none in PvE.  Long travel times, for instance.

PvE with or without meaningful consequences for death?  Tough call.  Make death matter and it lends a feeling of accountability to the immesion, but at the burden of frustrating players.  Make death harmless and the players check their brains at the door before logging in.

Tell you what: Gimme a game with a 100x accelerated grind and permadeath.

At one time, I thought about that with WoW, but then realized that raiding is just for the purpose of being able to raid more. It's almost a totally self contained advancement scheme -- it need not apply to everyone. It doesn't need to apply to pvp at least. You don't need to raid in order to stay competitive in the battlegrounds. Some of that gear would help, but you don't need it. Some of that gear isn't even that good for pvp at all.

You can still win matches with normal gear and a good team. You could also just do some 20 man (and less) raiding and bail out once you get Tier 0.5 (at least for some classes, that'll function as good gear for pvp). And if you play long enough, you can also remain competitve with a blue pvp set. That's still kind of practical, unlike getting the purple stuff.

Unfortunately, battlegrounds and raiding are the only real endgame options in WoW. Crafting doesn't make much of a difference -- Which would be a nice third addition. Also, I'll be the first to admit that the idea of battlegrounds suck compared to meaningful, 'endgame' world pvp.

I'm sure there are some people who get their rocks off hanging around Goldshire too.

And last, but not least, like someone else mentioned, there's always expansions.

The problem with that feeling of accountability is that players will keep their brains, but they'll bring their egos along as well - and I'd rather play with brain-dead goof-offs than people who think "what you do in the game actually matters" any day of the week.

The solution, IMHO, is to make death harmless and allow the players to be brainless - but then make it so that you're not typically relying on other players for your survival.

There we've a difference of niche.  Lucky for you that your model is a pretty common one to find in MMORPGs, where mine doesn't seem to survive beta.

*deleted for lack of relevance yet*

El Gallo, I meant hard on a 'what happens when you screw up and lose' basis, not so much of a complexity basis.  Although yes, GoD and beyond got a lot more complicated - and difficult to execute.  They're still improving a lot in the latest expansions, though I think the Trials of Mata Muram have been the most complex and involved so far.

Sinij, no, not really, but I do think they educated the player on the death consequences.  And yeah, as much as I like challenge in my games, I agree sometimes EQ was just too tough, but what I'm looking at in this line of thought is whether or not the toughness of the game before the raids was equivalent to the toughness of the raiding game.  I think part of the thing with EQ is they didn't really look at the raids as a separate thing or something that would develop and expand the way it did.

Geldon, interesting idea.  I like the general thought of a game that has the most drastic consequences for death, but advancement is fast enough so you can hit max level in a week or two.  And Tele, I don't really see the point of removing all reliance on other players - why have an MMO then?  I'm not sure I agree with forced grouping - I even soloed through most of my EQ levels by playing a Druid and a Bard, but removing all reliance on other players for all aspects of the game just seems like...playing a single player game.  What's the use of the other players, it's like, Oblivion.

In general I still think that the percentage of players who are idiots in raiding is proportionately higher in any game where raiding is generally harder than the rest of the game.  To bring in another example, FFXI is in some ways even more punishing than EQ was when you die.  I never made it as far as raiding in FFXI, but I've talked to those who have and the answers are similar, less idiots there than in WoW.  I don't think I've played any other games with raiding, at least not up to any noticeable level.  Anyone else seen any correlation between the ease of the pre-raid game and the idiots in raiding?

Corpse runs sucked and sucked hard. But, it did give you a feeling of danger because you wanted to avoid that if at all possible. The result was that sweaty palm feeling of anticipation that I have missed since.



If you make death harmless, there is no fear. I need a sense of accomplishment to feel good about the time I have spent and no matter what level I have in a game, it is those times I have cheated death that I remember than the last "ding". I don't think it is a matter of "what I do in the game matters to you", I think it is "what I do in the game has consequences to me".

Shit, firedrill.

I'll be honest, this kind of player mentality pisses me off because it leads to corpse runs and other timesinks that I don't have time for. I don't find spending 15 minutes after I die getting back to where I started to be fun or to add to my sense of accomplishment. Fuck, I don't play these games for a sense of accomplishment, I play them for fun and the mechanics you EQ-vets like drive me up the wall. (I'm assumnig you're an EQ-vet simply because I see this in alot of people whose first major MMO was EQ.)

That's exactly the point. These games already have significant barriers for players. Beyond time and subscription fee, what else do you need to reduce the number of players in this genre even more?

Screw death penalties. There's too many ways to die. Even if you've got perfect code, a pure internet connection, the servers are wonderful and the client PC is more babied than a 57 Chevy, characters will still die for reasons beyond the player's control. Because in any game including other players, every element connected to that player connects to everyone else.

CRs and potential item loss worked for us nuts who loved this genre more than logic should have let us, but there's better ways to facilitate social interaction than force people to be even more scared to log in at all (because logging in could lead to death and CRs and item loss).

It's not bad to want this stuff of course. Just don't expect this in games striving for some measure of popularity :)

I don't think it's endemic to EQ players or playstyles.  Ironically, this is a way in which EQ is more like UO than anything else.

In UO it was the PKs who would cause lost equipment/CR OR the sense of satisfaction from having successfully survived an encounter.  In EQ it was similarly difficult but it was "only" the environment causing it.

Just this thread alone shows a definite divide between those who welcome a steep failure slope for the accomplishment, and those who think they are nuts and can't imagine how that could be considered fun.  I don't really think it's casuals vs ubers either, because I'm casual in time commitment but I fall into the first camp.

I think that the two will never agree on one game, just because even if most of the game is easy but to get the best rewards you have to go through the difficult stuff, "easy-mode" players will complain because they aren't allowed the coolest stuff on account of their playstyle.

edit: Someone please come up with a good name for these two camps.  "easy-mode player" is pretty charged, I admit...

Because if you feel like it, you can interact with other players in a persistent-world setting?  It seems almost like you're starting with the implicit assumption that other players are shitstains and you'd only interact with them if the game "forced" you to.


We completely disagree on this fundamental level.  If you don't have guilt about the time you spend ingame, why is a sense of accomplishment in any way necessary?  You play all sorts of other games without a "sense of accomplishment" at the end - why not MMOs?


Why not just give the best rewards to easier players as well - offer them the proverbial soloable or duo-able version of Blackwing Lair?

Because if you do that, and the only reason to do the 40 man raid is because you really want to do a 40 man raid rather than making people feel compelled/coerced to, almost nobody will do the 40 man raids.  I'd argue that the vast majority of people who do 40 man raids don't find them fun; they just want the best stuff (And on a less generous note, some of them only want the best stuff if the best stuff will stay rare, so that they can wave their e-peen around).  If you made those raids truly optional, the numbers would drop off dramatically.

I'm sorry if I come off sounding strident about this, but I truly believe that this whole idea that "harder difficulty should mean better reward" is a frame cooked up by the catasses.  There's no reason that a MMO has to operate that way.


Oh, and I also agree.  Camp names, please.

"Climb the Mountain" players vs "Enjoy the Ride" players?

"Mountain-climbers" vs "Vacationers"?

Accomplishment is what some people consider fun, no matter how grueling the game.  For an RL example, you said it - mountain climbers.  Do you really think climbing Everest is an enjoyable experience?  Yet, people do it.  It's not that these people feel guilty unless they have some sort of accomplishment, they feel like they didn't have any fun.  Disneyland is just not appealing to them.

The idea behind the sense of accomplishment is that you take something inherently difficult and conquer it, because it's there.  If there is a junior version of content with the same rewards, it's no longer inherently difficult.  You just turned from someone who likes a challenge into a masochist, which I admit is a fine distinction, but an important one.

This, I think, is an interesting line to go down.  Climbing Everest vs Climbing Everquest.

I'm not sure your "if there's a junior version with the same rewards" analogy holds up, though.

Climbing Everest nets you nothing except... the sense of having succeeded at something difficult.

Climbing a smaller mountain nets you nothing.

Doing the 40 man raid nets you UberGear, and the sense of having succeeded at something difficult.

Doing the hypothetical 2 man raid nets you UberGear.

In the Everest example, the only difference between Everest and the smaller mountain is the sense of accomplishment.  And yet, people still climb Everest.

If people would stop doing the 40 man raid if the rewards could be obtained in an easier fashion, there are then 2 possible explanations for why people stop:

1.  They weren't really having fun in the first place, and just felt like they "needed" the gear.  They won't be disappointed if you can get the gear in an easier fashion.

2.  They were doing it for the sense of accomplishment, but their sense of accomplishment is directly tied to the rarity of the gear, and so even if it was a hard battle they lack the sense of accomplishment because they could have gotten the gear elsewhere easier.  They don't want the gear to be easier to obtain.

Via Occam's Razor, I'm willing to bet that the majority of 40-man raiders are group 1, not group 2, and would appreciate an easier way to get the gear.



On a side note - I'm doing an "accomplishment for the sense of accomplishment" feat right now in Asheron's Call - levelling up a character entirely via quests, using no spoiler-sites or buffbots and no magic skills, and only using quest gear/weapons/armor.  I've spent the last two months playing my guy.  I don't feel that my accomplishment is lessened simply because someone could have used loot gear and buffbots and uber hunting grounds and had a character that's more powerful in a single day.  I do it because it's fun regardless of what other people get or don't get.

Far more people -- a thousand times more --  climb smaller mountains every year than climb Everest. Some people obviously feel it's a waste of time to climb anything but Everest, but I note that the people who feel that way tend not to climb mountains at all.

"Brock... you're fired..."

Think beyond the directed-play experience. There's other ways for players to feel "together". They could be off playing their own games and only come together for community and economy. The dynamics of these alone are "massive" in their own way. It's only the diku-inspired games of the last eight years that drive this impression that the only way people come to together is if they're forced to play the exact same game, in a hive-mind sort of way.

That's the reason why MMORPGs mostly appeal to a specific type of player within the total gaming community.

There are players in EVE who rarely interact with anyone outside of the market -- or who spend all their time 'troid fucking, or on hour-long treks across the universe with trade goods. There were players in SWG who NEVER interacted with anyone other than their vendors and harvestors (save for posting hunting contracts). A friend of mine spends more time day-trading the AH in WoW than he does doing instances or quests.

Games have more players, and happier players, the more playstyles they allow. Stuff like the WoW fishing tournament draw in suprising number of players who otherwise might not have logged on that day.

"Massively Multiplayer" merely means inhabiting the same online reality -- it doesn't necessarily require interaction. I find WoW one-dimensional (if a well-done one dimension) because it lacks a lot those 'mini-games'. No high-end gear to craft, no homes to decorate, no real tools for trading (and not enough markets to do so -- crafting once again), no poker or gambling -- the new Arenas in TBC might flesh that out a bit, though.

The more "Games" you pack into an MMORPG, the bigger your potential world (and audience) can be. Of course, you can go too far -- too much scope, not enough polish. You either get crap, or something so confusing or muddled only the dedicated will search out the nuggets of fun. 

Crap... I have started this reply at least 3 times only to have fire drills and sstaff meetings interrupt me...


Name a few, because I am not sure I agree at all. I play all kinds of games and each one of them has a sense of accomplishment, no matter if it is self imposed or part of the game dynamic.




Don't assume I meant that I wanted corpse runs or that I am an EQ catass type. Pretty far from the truth actually. I meant there should be some penalty for dying because without one there is no cost for failure. Without a meaningful failure, there is no meaningful success. If I win everytime no matter what I do, where is the fun in that? Sounds like a recipe for immediate boredom.

Maybe its just that we don't have a common definition for the word "accomplishment", because I cannot see how you can have fun in a game if you have no way of measuring or tracking accomplishment (and I still mean by my own mechanism or by some game imposed mechanic).

I've long been fine with the penalty of death being nothing more than needing to do something over, after first traveling back to that location. Why can't we integrate some of what the Consoles have done for ages with their save points? That's effectively what we've got with games like WoW and GW anyway. Death is having lost, having to repair stuff, having to maybe run back and rez, or to rez your entire party. The penalty is already there, in the form of Time lost. What else is needed? How is adding yet another penalty beyond this anything more than arbitrary and punitive?

A good point; however, once you get past that momentary exception, the core single-focus experience that WoW comes back. SWG and Eve are better examples, as you note, because the games within them are truly different from each other. Crafting is not mining is not ratting is not bounty hunting. However, because of the types of total experiences they are, the barrier is still pretty high, because all of those activities require a semi-fierce dedication if you wish to have some sort of relevant sense of place in comparison to other people doing the same activities.

I'm talking about environments that don't have games where success is measured by time, something more open ended. It's why I go back to Neopets. There's very little that connects players to each other beyond the trade-based economy and the sharing e-peen waving of trophies. But for them, it's more than enough.

One fun bit out of social psychology - different groups of college students were asked to do repetitive and mindless tasks for $20 payoff.

First group was asked to do it for 15 minutes before they were paid, when questioned most replied that it was boring but was worth it for $20.

Second group did the same task but for 3 hours, when questioned most replied that they found competing task 'challenging' and that they ‘earned’ their reward.

Third group was asked to do the average number of repetitions with the same task as Second group did, most of them replied that task was ‘extremely boring’ and $20 was too little pay for their time.

Moral of the story – internal motivation can make you do stupid shit for prolonged time and feel good about it.

Well, I was more making the case for expanding the game past the basic Diku kill-loot-heal-repeat process. Not getting rid of it, but adding either totally seperate or complimentary "games".

Kill-loot-repeat is a "mini-game". So is "gather-craft-sell". The two are generally bundled together -- generally with the crafting to make the killing easier/quicker and get you better loot or make you a better killer. But that neglects the notion that crafting -- to the folks that like it -- is more of a compelling game than "kill-loot-repeat". So is "trading" and other market manipulations. So is PvP. So is socializing. So is making money, decorating homes -- all that crap. Gambling, games-within-a-game -- it's too often neglected.

MMORPGs don't have to be just an MMO version of a RPG with the kill-loot-repeat concept. Why not add in some of the Sims (building of homes)? Throw in some of Railroad Tycoon (making money/crafting/building). Don't make any of it necessary -- don't force someone there to PvE to grind crafting to get his kills on. But don't make the crafter do the same.

You've got people in WoW who organize naked elf footraces, or daytrade on the AH, or create mods to allow them to play poker. Why the hell not put some of that directly in the game?

I think WoW has polished the Diku model so thoroughly that I think it's time to branch out. Integrate that polished combat component into something bigger. More varied. Nothing you have to do, but with choices to take all sorts of paths. What harm is there in having some fierce craftards working their ass off on a crafting mini-game you find mind-numbling boring? Best case, their fierce competition means high-quality crafted goods (at a low price) to supplement your killing. Or gambling? Heck, I'd love to supplement my gold supply by teaching idiots not to try to fill inside straights. :)

WoW is so fubar'ed in this respect, there's no point in even talking about it. I mean, you pretty much have to be a raiding-oriented player to get the best recipes (and there aren't that many good ones to begin with). Crafting will never branch out into something on it's own.

I didn't mean to imply WoW had high-quality crafted goods -- I was thinking more of the SWG model in that respect. WoW's crafting is an afterthought -- my only goal with crafting is to accumulate all the recipes for a given profession. Mostly, however, I simply make something to supplement my gear until I find something better.

Well, my alchemist is a bit different -- but that's a consumable. WoW's crafting does suck -- about the only real fun is the Gnomish engineering line, because you can get some fun trinkets. :)

I didn't mean to imply to that you implied that :).  My point was more about your comment about WoW "branching out". I don't think Blizzard could do that even if they wanted to. A lot of things are integrated with and serve the needs of one gameplay type and playerbase. If you alter it, you'll either break something or piss all of these other shitheads off. Or both.

Would be nice if they learned their lesson when designing another, future, MMO however. But then again, what lesson do they really have to learn? The formula they've used has worked out extremely well for them.

Maybe “Travelers” vs “Vacationers”? One big divide is between people who come to MMOGs to play in the moment, and those who play with the past/future in mind. For the former, they are just looking for fun “now”, and to walk away from it unchanged. A vacation. Something that doesn’t leave much mark on your past, or any consequence in your future.

But the online worlds that MMOGs create can provide adventures that change something about how you see the world. Which is what I think of the purpose of ‘traveling’, as opposed to just vacationing, is. Really adventurous travel has its tough moments, but that is a big part of expanding what you know about yourself. In a real adventure, you end up somewhere else than where you started, and someone else from who you started.

I can only assume that people who are looking for pure non-stop fun have never experienced that in MMORPG world, and don’t know what they are missing. Some people on this board seem to get it, and some don’t. And as for the people looking for a bigger sword to expand their e-peen, well that’s another dimension entirely. 

There's just too much implying going on here ;)

Oh I see. Yea, I've wondered since SWG was being met with derision whether it wouldn't just be smarter for a company to launch a game for one type of audience (in the case of this genre: diku) and then over time replace certain features with ones that would allow the integration of more virtual lifestyle-like systems.

Start with a proven success and use that to bankroll into innovative thinking. I thought SOE would do that with EQ1, and they did, after a fashion. But they ended up just focusing on new ways to play the same game. WoW could do one better by enhancing and introducing different games.

Though it's not like they'd need to.

Why not just add in the innovation right from the start alongside the proven method? No need to start off by limiting options then opening them later...

The problem is that the more you add into your feature list for launch, the more money and team size you need to pull it off. And the more complex your final test becomes, because it's attempting to integrate a wider array of features. So, basically, if you want a broad featureset all complete and well playing, you need to convince management or VC folks that it's worth the even greater risk.

Scaling into innovation meanwhile means you can focus specifically on the known desired features and therefore tap a well-defined market. With the success you gain here you can fund the innovation you want later. Some of this innovation will be appreciated by your existing players, but it can also be used to market the game to new players, getting a potential bump in PR (good PR) and therefore raising awareness of your game which may have begun to plateau in interest due to age and the launch of other titles.

In a way, SWG would have served as a great example of this had it come out right. One of the problems was that the most polished system (resources, crafting) was one with a relatively narrow appeal (relative to what the success of the brand should have driven). Had they launched with combat being awesome, supported by a good narrative based questing system (not just spamming mission terminals for what felt like procedurally-generated test) and with well-integrated PvP, they could have gained their initial success and then launched a good crafting resource system and then vehicles and then Cities and then JTL, all of which radically changed the game.

So it's not just a matter of what you launch, it's when you can afford to launch it and in what order best serves the amount of type of players you want in your game.

Can you really scale your way into innovation? Are you really going to gain new customers with this new innovative game play or just retain your existing ones longer, or none of the above? There needs to be a business case to support new innovations and I wonder if adding them in afterwards is enough of an event to attract new customers (subscriptions) and pay for the development. Some of the meta games discussed here are (IMO) not big enough to be that big splash to generate that good PR and attract new customers who were not interested enough in your base game to subscribe. I guess you are banking on enough people in the undecided category who need very little to tip them into committing cash.

No easy answer to that really. "Innovation" has very broad definition. Look at the iPod. It wasn't the device nor iTunes software. It was the entire ecosystem that included a music industry convinced their songs would move at $0.99/ea. That was the coup. MP3 players existed and are easy to make by themselves.

Now, in this genre? People return to games all the time. New players come to the game all the time. The marketability of a game never stops as long as the game itself keeps pace with convention. Fun never gets old. It just gets redefined by newer entrants into the space.

What would be more innovative, something to compel players who aren't here? Well, depends on how many you want to attract. For example, any new growth WoW enjoys is going to be incremental anyway. Do they want the Eve player? Why bother? Not only is Eve fundamentally different, the players themselves want completely different things (or, well, the same things, but gotten very differently). And they're just not that many of them. Eve "done right" is still no more than 125k subscribers, and the game already done right. Same question could be asked of the SL player or the ATITD player or the SWGUO player.

What about new players though, the players WoW itself chased and who are being targeted by so many companies unwilling to come to this genre as it is defined today? WoW minigames? WoW PDA games? WoW cellphone adventures? WoW board games? As long as they interface with the game world itself, and everything done remotely ties back in, why not? This was what I think SOE missed when they extended the brand to other genres and platforms. EQ, like Warcraft, is a game system first, lore second. If you offer more games based on that lore, you need to offer those games based on that game system as well. Otherwise, you're asking your current cash cow to take time away from the experience they love to go play a momentary distraction.

Darn, something up with yr blog link, can't comment, so responding here:

that's the obvious problem for niche and small/new MMO entrants -- identifying what players want and ensuring there's enough of them of sustainability.  I like the idea of trying to cater to certain players, because that's pretty much what providers are doing already with all the new Korean grindy and PvP MMO's coming up.  I just would like an MMO that caters to the special-snowflake me.  But there's the rub -- building the perfect customized widget for everyone, right?  So I want to agree with you, but I'm just not sure about whether you can offer a specialized game and survive.  "Specialized" could just translated into, "biased" if you think of certain MMO's being tilted towards achievement, combat etc.

Secondly, from a PjM point of view I think you are right about the incremental approach in complexity.  Read this from a guy who's designed&built MMO+ sized systems. (http://solvetherealproblem.blogspot.com/2006/08/desirable-system-qualities_14.html)  Starting small and introducing complexity is the way to go.  But again, I'm wringing my hands: how can small providerX launch their title with a small or a limited set of functionality and not get blasted and dismissed by the early adopters?  Who really have a lot of influence in shaping opinions?  Even if they are wrong?  The Eve example or even EQ2 kind of, makes sense of just running a business well for awhile and how players get attracted to other good players.  But is Eve really a realistic or reproducible business model?  Again, I want to agree with you but it just seems really risky or just hard to launch something with stuff "missing".

I agree that it's critical to nail the core features that form the backbone of your game.

However, I disagree that is is possible to grow into real innovation.

The issue here is one of interdependence. SWG couldn't have been done by cutting out the crafting system from launch, any more than you could integrate a crafting system like that into WoW. How on earth would you retrofit deformable terrain into WoW? That's just one example of the many prerequisite features that are needed to replicate that system into WoW' framework. Do you remove the auction house in WoW in order to provide scope for merchants?

To grow into a given feature, you have to have the right foundation to build on. By targeting your scope narrowly at the outset, you usually preclude even the possibility of adding certain sorts of features later on.

LOL! I forgot to give the entry a title :) Fixed it.

Better conversation here anyway ;)

But see, we actually agree. The game with "great questing and great combat" I reference is, of course, the likes of GW and WoW ("great" is debatable of course, but the game to which I compared it was SWG, so yea, WoW is great, much better on those two features). What Blizzard et al is what everyone else does: identify an audience and give them a game. What Blizzard does better is more deliver the more appropriate experience.

And when I say "audience", I mean a certain span of players. The WoW player is pretty much not the Second Life player for example. WoW didn't target world builders. The business reality for this space though is that there's a hell of a lot more WoW players than SL players.

But that brings us around to the core question: does player count matter the same to everyone?

This is the reason I only am mildly curious about MMOGchart. The number of subscribers between all these games is irrelevant to me. Linden Labs is not complaining about the money they're making any more than CCP, eGenesis or Blizzard is. Different companies, different goals, different needs. There's room for all of them because "MMOG" is a stupidly-vague catchall term that basically includes as its demographic anyone with an internet connection and a willingness to fork off money for a digital experience. MMOGs are not a target market. They're a meta-market, with sub-targets within. As such, every game breaks down into different sub categories. The number of players in Eve is irrelevant to the number of players in WoW. Identify you player, give them their game, scale your business for success.

The key isn't to launch with a small or limited set of tools expecting to scale over time. It's to launch with the right tools for the playerbase you want and can expect to get. Then, based off of that success, you introduce new features and systems that grow your playerbase even more.

Like WoW for example. If they wanted to add housing and player vendors and space combat, they could. Would that bring in 6 more million users? Probably not. But it would contribute to retention, and that can be as important in this genre of game jumpers.

I'm having deju vu here. Man, I wish I could remember where we discussed this before!

SWG's crafting and WoW's have very different requirements. The latter is built mostly on the consumables really, whereas in SWG, everyone was walking around with something that was crafted. It was a more purely integrated system. More importantly, the motivations of play in each game are very different. WoW players by and large live off of game direction mostly, playing an RPG to "win". SWG was more a sim by comparison. Doing nothing in SWG was still doing something. Doing nothing in WoW is not advancing, in a game all about it.

But there's some cross-over. Housing, for example. If WoW introduced controlled housing (no blight, no content blocking) with a vendor system, that wouldn't be enough. They'd need to also model, in 3D, every piece of quest junk we've ever picked up so we could decorate the places. Vendors would be linked to the AH, but would offer other services as well, maybe even Enchanting and Smithing. Maybe that's enough, maybe not, but it would be very different, allowing players to personalize a game they otherwise can only do by battling loot tables.

They could extend into some other features as well, other lifestyle components that probably wouldn't appeal to the majority of the players, but would offer alternative things to do that are just as relevant. We already see how many players want a broader experience in WoW. The game that launched opened their eyes to a new genre (or a better way to play it) but now they want more. To get that more they currently have to make a big sacrifice, be it games with far less fun combat, far slower advancement, gimped PvP or whatever. So instead of branching out, some choose to stay and accept the relatively gimped lifestyle tools. People did this in EQ1 too. Can't count how many weddings I attended. I'd say more actual people did that sort of stuff in EQ1 than they did in games built for that sort of thing, because the latter generally lacked where EQ1 (and now WoW) shined: the game-directed fun factor.

Complex? Way much. Needed? Maybe not. They're successful (as was EQ1) already. An interesting thought experiment for those with more time to think than to actually pull something like it off? ;) Yes. Will I ask myself rhetorical questions and answer them? You bet!  :-D

You can add them in new content, you just can't retrofit them to old content. WoW is adding flying mounts in their expansion, but they are only usable inside the new continent, because the old content has been created with limited player mobility in mind. So I'd say the more directed (i.e. less worldly) your play experience is, the easier it is to add new features.

Same as JTL for SWG.

However, I often wonder about that "limited mobility" in the old world thing. I think the current engine would handle flying mounts just fine. Even though the griffons/bats/airship in game now all travel along prescribed paths, it is rendering everything in real time.

The reason I think flying mounts are being restricted to Outlands is because it's yet another compulsory feature to get people to buy the expansion. I could imagine within six months or so we'll get a "surprise" patch announcement.

Actually, I don't think it is.  I forget where I read it - might have been here - that the current areas have lots of "facade"-type graphics that are displayed to you when flying.  If you somehow ended up in a section of the sky not currently reachable by griffin/wind rider, you'd see gaping holes in the backgrounds.

This is why all the NPCs fade out then back in when you land.

There's lots of land that's effectively empty but surrounded by steep mountains, Stormwind only has one side, the airport near Ironforge has a bunch of NPCs dancing but is inaccessible and so on and so on. Could it be fixed? Probably. Would it be worth it? Probably not.

To put the World-vs-Game debate in programming terms: in a World every module is connected to every other module, but in a Game every module is connected to at most 3 other modules. That is why Worlds collapse under their own weight once they go beyond certain complexity.

That was posted in an interview (or Q&A) with one of the WoW devs. It was in responce as to why flying mounts wouldnt work in the pre-expansion lands.

Let's agree to highly disagree on this.  WoW's questing and combat, if marketed as a single player game, would be considered by many to be almost unplayable.  People only give it a pass because the bar for MMO content is set so low.

Blizzard's first stab at questing was in Warcraft 3 as the Rexxar campaign.  Folks thought it was pretty novel, fun and accessable.  If you played it you'd see it relates very closely to WoW's current method.

Neither method is in any way shape or form different from your traditional RPG quest interface, with one major exception.  You don't have to just miraculously know that you need to talk to NPC Smith to get the nob-slobbering quest.  He has a pretty gold ! to let you know it.  Accessibility, amazing.

No, it's not going to be amazing to the folks who preferred the arcane process of either finding the right keywords, or decrypting the byzantine language some dev felt he HAD to put in as a quest 'hint.'   However, spoiler sites made both such quest irrelevant in 1999, so why pretend like they don't exist and keep them.  Just toss it into the game and remove an inaccessibility folks bitched about from the game.

I think there are more elegant ways to steer people to quests than the exclamation points, IMHO; everything from barkeep rumors (as AC does) to lore imparted in some way (monster utterances upon death, etc.) that leads you to the quest, or just talking to the interesting NPC hanging out in town. 

The whole goal should be that the game isn't absurd if you don't have spoiler sites - the goal should not be to dumb it down so much that everything is just as easy without a spoiler site as with.

I think that by this you put yourself in at least as small a niche as anyone who can't do without massive grind/open PvP/combat of any kind/permadeath/name your niche characteristic.

The popularity of spoiler sites, even for single player games, leads me to think that the mainstream wants hints.  They want to participate in a storyline, not attempt to be a (RL) supersleuth or play "find-the-NPC-needle-in-the-world-haystack".

Telemediocirty describes WoW fairly well. Spoiler sites will give you details, but for the most part, WoW quests, as well as the NPCs that give them is pretty well delivered. Some areas are weak but for the most part it's a vast improvement of almost any MMORPG that preceded. The game doesn't really require hint sites in the way EQ did. But even as easy as it is, it's still not handed out on a silver-spoon to everyone. Even your purest narrative-based RPG has a support spoiler site or 12. Can't please everyone.

And thanks for clearing up the question about current WoW supporting flying griffons. Learn something new every day :)

I agree, I don't think the WoW quest system is a bad one.  I may have a few personal tweaks I prefer, but on the whole their quest system (as opposed to the quest content itself, which I think is abominable) is reasonably well done.

I don't think the existence of spoiler sites suggests that games should design themselves to eliminate the need for spoiler sites, and that that'll be wildly popular if they do.

Just because someone doesn't want giant exclamation marks over NPC heads doesn't necessarily mean they want what you suggested. Its possible, through NPC placement, dialogue, etc, that quests be made known in a less "silly" way than the giant floating symbols. Not to mention if you want it to feel more like a "storyline" than it should be more than just NPCs standing around acting like quest-vendors. Only reason you had to be supersleuths to find quests in games like EQ is because it seemed like they went out of their way to make them unaccessible, such as putting them on some random island in the middle of the ocean or hiding on the top floor or a house with no purpose other than to hide the quest giver. I'm pretty sure that you could put in barkeeps or some other NPC type to tell you about quest givers without it being particularly "niche" or requiring lore of any type. In fact, I think it would be a pretty good idea:

Each town/outpost/whatever would have one. You talk to this NPC, and he'll ask what kind of quest type your looking for. Raid, Group, Solo adventure, Instanced, etc would be different options. He'd tell you who to find (and where to find, of course) for the types of quest your looking for. If you're goal really is to make quests easy to get and simple to find, I'd think this would speed up even WoW's quest-gathering time.

Yeah because that whole mechanic was GREAT in SWG, AO and CoH.  Wait, no, it sucked.

The quests are distributed among NPCs because it allows a narrative to be crafted around that NPC.  If you have a 'mission spitter' then one of two things is going to happen. 

1) The quests are going to be unmitigated suckdom like SWG, AO and CoH quests. You'll see the flavorless bland framework for what it is, and get bored quickly.  I know I sure as hell did, but it was the only way of getting missions so I kept at it.  I hated it all, though.  Even the storyline mission in COH felt too formulaic and contrived because of this mechanic.

2) That quest terminal is going to shoot people off to NPCs that have unique narratives. Thus you have added a step in the process that's just a hassle for both the dev team and the players.

We're coming up on the whole "Game" vs "world" brick wall again. Once again I'll take the "Game" one.

I don't think this is the way it was overtly developed. This was the outcome, but I think they honestly didn't know better. I would imagine that someone in the design sessions thought it would be an immersive activity to have a conversation with an NPC and get a quest from them. Good idea in theory, bad idea in practice because you get something like this:


Extremely frustrating and subsequent development focused on how to make the quest acquisition process easier and more straightforward. So, we have arrived at yellow exclamation points and hopefully we are on the way to something better. Didn't EQ2 try and have NPC's holler at you as you were walking by? Who knows where the next iteration will find us...

Yes, except the "broadcast" radius didn't take line of sight into account so you would get people talking to you from inside buildings when you were outside and couldn't see them.

That's a beautiful thing.  In a comedy gold sort of way.


I don't know that this complaint is endemic to the quest delivery method.  The giant exclamation mark method would suck similarly if the quest text was uninspired or seemed to be generated from a template.

No one will be nominating the WoW writers for Pulitzers anytime soon, but Blizzard seems to at least have hired writers, as opposed to having developers or someone's 14-year-old son (who got an A in English!) write the stories.

Not all that realistic, but works better than missing something just because you didnt go in some building. Hey, if you use your imagination, you could almost see them leaning out the window to summon you inside.

I just struggle with how you walk the line between trying to create an immersive game experience where things should be somewhat hard, and creating a game experience where everything is overt. My mental model at the moment is that the latter is about fun in the activity to complete the task and in the former, some of the fun is in the discovery of the task in the first place.


edit - added quote for reference

One thing you can do is casually lead players to certain quests even without an NPC for them.

Case in point:  Today I talked to an NPC who's been in AC for a long time.  Apparently, they recently added a new quest linked to him - so after the stuff he always says, he tells me what's been on his mind lately, and tells me that the bad guys are "North west of here" and I should go find them.

So I start running northwest of town, looking for something out of the ordinary.  About halfway to what is actually my quest destination, I come upon an odd group of baddies, and a note on the ground.

The note on the ground is the journal of A Different Bad Guy, talking about where they established their Secret Lair.  But rather than telling me where the lair is, it's a five-page 1st-person travelogue detailing a week of the Bad Guy's travels from start to finish - including doubling back, dead ends, etcetera.  If I follow the note and retrace his steps, I can eventually find my way to his fortress - a different quest entirely.  A quest that has no NPC - rather, they put the note in the path one would take to find the bad guys in the original quest I was on, and so you're likely to stumble upon it.

If I wanted to, I could flip to a spoiler site and find the source of the "treasure hunt" directions, and just run there.  Or, I could spend twenty minutes or so retracing the bad guy's steps.  I did the latter, and the devs left visual clues along the way; random NPCs, such as farmers who had been ingame for 5 years or so just sitting out in the wilderness tending their farm, doing nothing special but buying and selling cabbage, had been slaughtered by the Bad Guy as he came along.  I was literally able to follow the trail of destruction to its source, and thus find the bad guy's fortress.

That was a hell of a lot more fun for me than just clicking on a guy with an exclamation point above their head.  It also fed into a feeling that I'm playing in a constantly evolving world, where even the oldest content isn't 'static' forever.

Just because some players doing that quest took the easy way out and looked up the location on a spoiler site doesn't mean I want to.

You have a very good point about the writing.  Perhaps that's CoH's problem, I'm not sure and honestly not being a dev I don't care much.  "I didn't like it" is enough for me as a simple player in the world.

As a system; for now the little ! works in Guild Wars and WoW to provide both the ease of transaction that is "hey here's the quest" and the atmosphere that is the individual quest giver without the problem eval lists above.  No dobut someone will come up with something better in the future that removes the ! that I suppose y'all hate from an "immersion killer" factor.

Well; that and that it removes the exploration factor, as eval pointed out.   WoW has some exploration to find quests, but that's once again because the quest giver is off in some hole you wouldn't normally wander to.  (Or because the quest is a random drop in the zone.)

The key is to get the player to the first Quest giver, which is even what EQ1 did after a while buy giving you a note in your backpack. WoW does this too. The reason I think WoW (and GW) works well is because of the quest-lines process. In EQ1, you hit the powerlevel cycle of Nro>Oasis>LoIO etc because you heard it from other people. In WoW you level up through Elwynn>Westfall>Redridge>Duskwood>STV etc because that's where the quests and NPC dialog lead you. If you want to be lead.

Exclamation points are not a requirement for this. They just make it easier for players to easily see who to talk to.

Yea, as Trippy said, no line of sight. Plus, while the voiceovers were cool and unique, and I appreciate the effort, they were annoying in their repetitiveness. So lots of people turned them off, thus minimizing their effectiveness as a Quest-origination tool. Plus, because they haven't enjoyed the incredible revenue and profits I think they expected, they haven't really kept up with VO recording for every NPC introduced. In a game with so many NPCs, that can get very costly.

See, I would have loads of fun doing a quest like that. The sad point here, however is that there are tons of players who probably wouldn't have even made it to the "talk to the NPC" step unless he had a giant exclamanation over his head or was glowing or something, nontheless read anything on a note they'd find on the ground. But see that kind of person is mostly found in the greatest common denominator group which is the target audience for most MMO's now it seems.

I'm not sure why the handholding "!" quest givers and quest chaining is all bad. Like any good RPG, I think it's a plus that quests are interrelated and that each quest giver sends you to the next one; that most of them are in clearly labeled in areas that everyone passes through. If you ever played FFXI, you can understand my frustration. There was nothing to deliniate quest givers out of the several hundred NPCs in town, and if you didn't meet the prerequisites they just wouldn't give the quest to you. You ended up having to spend an hour on Allakazham doing searches to try and find them, or spend two hours in game talking to every single fucking taru in windhurst. Maybe that's fun for some braindead masochistic fuckers, but it wasn't fun for me.

It also pisses me off when I examine someone, notice a cool item, think "hrm, where did they get that?", hit thottbot, and find that it was some random fucker out in the middle of the mountains that I never stumbled across and would have never found. I'm looking at you, Mark of the Chosen.

I know there is a subset of the population, the explorers, who delight in finding that random valley that no one ever goes to. I, however, like to be led through the game. I like to have a purpose beyond "see what's over that next hill!", even if it is just to whack 15 foozles and bring back 15 quillboar kidney stones. Quests that interlock with each other or that send you to different zones increase the immersion of the game. Everything from Redridge's plea for help to the multi-chain quest lines with the king of Stormwind helps to flesh out the world. If these quests or quest givers were obscured I'd have never done them. If they were only limited to the region where they were given, I probably wouldn't have traveled to the other continent, discovering more of the world in the process. I wouldn't have needed to.

Well there's no reason it needs to be that difficult. Those are symptoms of bad quest design.


Well if he had gone to that random place in the middle of the mountains, and all that was there was gnoll #3,478 then that's boring. However that guy went out there and the developers thought it be cool to put Larry the Gnoll out there with his special weapon in case anyone found him. I don't see why its a problem to throw a few bones at the explorer types especially since its most likely that the best items aren't from the NPCs out in the random mountains/deep forests/caves, etc.


If the only purpose a game has given you is that, then the game has failed to create compelling storyline.


No one's saying that the quest givers shouldn't send you to other ones and that quests shouldn't be easily available. But since immersion seems important to you, isn't that being taken away by just a bunch of NPCs standing around with exclamations waiting for you (or whoever else) to get their vendored quests? Like I've said, there are better ways to hand out quests and get players to find them by placement of the NPCs, scripted stuff, maybe using the in-game mailbox like WoW recently has been doing, that keeps immersion. And believe me, I love chain quests and quests that send me off to the far reaches of the world to do stuff, but why make it feel like I'm playing connect-the-exclamations instead of really questing? It seems like no one is willing to put any effort into a game anymore.

But then again, I've never understood the desire to be lead around by the nose through something. Gives me flashbacks of going to Disneyland as a kid on that car ride where you can steer the car, but its always on tracks... its rather disappointing.

I was using that as an example of the common thought process of an explorer, which I am not. It may not be, in fact, what they think, but that's what it seems like to me.
Well, no, I don't expect epic storytelling from an MMOG. It's not *really* why I play the game. I do the quests because it not only gives me experience but also (hopefully) tells a mildly entertaining story. Sometimes they are 'Oh, my foot is sore, please bring me fresh bandages', and sometimes they are ones like the uldaman quests that tell backstory of the game, or the onyxia quest line, or any number of other well designed quests. I'm not looking for immersion so much as to be entertained; In WoWland, people with something to say have ! above their heads. That doesn't break any sort of immersion for me. I think "Great! It saves me time and I can get right on with the content." That is, to conquer new zones, kill my mobile bags of improvement, and to socalize with some friends while doing it. It's also nice to know *why* i'm going to kill onyxia, other than she's got a nice head item and an 18 slot bag.

If you're not an explorer, use the spoiler sites.  Don't ruin everyone else's fun by having things toned down.  Having optional spoiler sites that you can use if you want is part of the fun.

Frankly, I think Blizzard already makes huge concessions to your playstyle by posting stats of the loot rewards for upcoming quests before they hit the live servers.  That would be absolutely unheard of in any MMO I've ever played.

I am an explorer primarily, but I still use the spoiler sites and think that WoW has a good balance in that area.  I haven't been able to explore most other MMOGs as deeply as I'd like because of lack of time.  So be careful how you swing that "everyone" word.

Also, not all "explorer types" are exploring the same things.

I think you guys are really close to the "core" here. Its in the nature of humans that we approach from different angles. And as we can we observe other approaches. The reason we see this as fun is this is core to being a human. This is how we survived as a species (As a spices..Gawd spell checker save me ). Heres a core element. We like what we can succeed at.

The spell checker let me down here. Prolly not its fault.

I understand that everyone approaches a game at different angles. The problem becomes when people who want a certain angle start changing games to only be fun for them.

Not sure if you've read Raph Koster's book "A Theory of Fun", but another core element he posits is the human desire to learn and experience new things (patterns) until the point where they've fully understood that pattern. This is one of the reasons I think a lot of players get all pissed off at 60 in WoW for example. They realize the only way to continue is not only a time investment beyond what they've spent, but to be doing so in the same experience again and again, where the only difference is whether someone is on their toes or not.

So we could say we like we can be successful at learning.

You can actually get up there. There's a tunnel that seems to go down to IF (blocked off), several of the usual-template-type buildings (all with closed doors), a Flight point with griffons and a couple of NPCs with e different type of <subname> which I've forgotten. You can also jump down to those farms in the mountains south of Menethil. There's another tunnel there (that leads to falling off the world) and much of the area is barely textured, but you can get to the top of the hills where the orcs hang out in the pass from Loch Modan to Wetlands.

The airfield looks pretty much ready for use. They'd just have to open the tunnel to IF, (or finish the interior), open the buildings, and fix up the tunnel near the farmhouse.

Care to share how? :)

http://www.wowwiki.com/Ironforge_Airport

There's a video link, that's your best guide. I watched it through once, then alt-tabbed between the game and the video in steps.

I've made it up there a few times. Its cool once, but then its really pointless. It used to be open in beta, but then they closed the tunnel that goes down to IF for release for some reason. Would be cool if it had something to do with the flying mounts...

I've read most but not all of this thread.

In comparing WoW vs. EQ in terms of player mindset I think of it less in terms of difficult per se and more in terms of "safety".

EQ and Shadowbane are not 'safe" games.  In the latter you can be mercilessly ganked in the former you can make mistakes that can cost your character very dearly (e.g. falling into the giant pit in EQ where corpse recovery is not possible for those < 50 which I did at level 23).

In Wow you can complain if someone screws you in a trade.  In EQ it is up to you to appeal to the resident gaming community to eventually get player justice (example:  A paladin accidently gave a quest component for his epic in the trade window to another player in the raid - after a week of jeers in the bazaar at the recipient player he returned the goods).

WoW has guard rails, cushions and danger signs.  EQ does not mark things - and leaves you to your own devices.

In this sense EQ is more of "world" than WoW.  The safety provisions of WoW protecting players from the game - and even from griefing by each other - are equivalent to the invisible terrain barriers none of us liked in Guild Wars.  Arbitrary barriers - affecting the actions of our played characters - make the world less immersive.

I love WoW.  But in some ways EQ is more of a "world" because it is unsafe - and truely feels (or did) uncharted.

I agree with ya, jpark. For someone who's primary interest in MMOs is the immersion factor, the alarming tendency in MMOs since EQ2 to corral you into safe paths without true world geometry breaks the illusion for me. Let's not blame WoW, however. DAoC and AO started this trend.

I enjoyed the danger in EQ. Very seldom was a zone "level 20-25" or "level 34-38". Zones had multiple camps, multiple points of interest, and often HUGE level differences. Because of this, my favorite zone in EQ was probably the Lesser Faydark. On my newbie ranger, I really enjoyed hunting the level 11-14 mobs in that area, and using my tracking skill to find the rare Crookstinger, or the queen spider, or the fairy chick that dropped that neat bow. All the while, avoiding agro brownies (insta-kill hit and run squirrelpeople), and that damned black horse.

The way that games segment themselves today, making one place clearly for this level, then you move on to the next place, then to the next place, never really experiencing danger unless you over-step your bounds and go somewhere too high level (after which you'll go back to the place that was designed for people of your level). It provides "safety", which has been the theme in these past few posts, but humans are kind of strange in the way that we value safety and danger.

One of our basic desires is safety. In fact, according Maslow it's our second most important need. So here we are challenged with the fact that danger is "fun", but our basic need is for safety. So I suppose the best way to do this is to create safety somewhere inside of danger? Using EQ as an example again, traveling was often dangerous. However, once you found a camp somewhere inside a zone you were pretty safe. Finding the camp was the dangerous part. This satisfied both the need for danger to have fun (explore at your own peril), and safety as a human need (sit at the same camp for catasstastic long periods of time).

Perhaps the danger in WoW is being ganked while in your safe little corner of the world? I'm not sure. I never really played WoW so I can't comment.

There isnt a ton of this in WoW, but they did add some higher level mobs to some areas. In Silverpine, the second Undead zone, there is a level 24 Elite mob called Son of Aurgal, a big ass werewolf. Since the zone is aroun 11-18, he would just fuck you up. Also, he wandered over a very large portion of the zone. It really gave the feeling of being hunted while you level there. When I was level 35 or so, I went back to the zone and spent several hours hunting him down and killing him as payback for all the times he killed me as a lowbie.

From what a guildie said (no idea if it's true, of course) there's a level 35 gold elite named "Mor'ladim" or something like that that has the most kills in the game. He wanders the graveyard at Raven Hill, where the mobs are mid-20s. He's got an insane aggro range, and he's right in the middle of a bunch of things people need at. I spent a LOT of time running away from him, and he follows you a long way.

I thought Gadgetzan Bruiser was #1, though I can definitely see Mor'Ladim being on the 'top 5' list.

What aggros him? I know I've never fought that guy. Mor'Ladim, on the other hand -- anyone questing in Raven Hill has had to run away from that guy. I suspect most have died at least once to him.

If he was a level 28 gold elite, wouldn't be so bad...

That's an interesting way to consider things, and I think I agree.  One of the things EQ introduced, starting in the Planar Age, was invisible guard-rails.  A lot of zones had invisible barriers that prevented you from falling or going places beyond the normal design of the zone.  Eryslai, the Kingdom of Wind (the Plane of Air) was probably the most notable contrast of this, especially if compared to the Plane of Sky, where falling is a constant danger, and the only way back up is to get a wizard to port you back.  Not to mention, back then, zoning out deleted all your keys, so you couldn't just get a port back up and use the keys that you'd gathered to get back where you were.  In Eryslai, all possible places to fall off are ringed by invisible barriers that prevent you from doing so.  It gives the appearance of danger, but as soon as you learned you couldn't fall, it felt fake, instead.  This trend continued all the way up to Dragons of Norrath.  Depths of Darkhollow once again reintroduced the danger of falling, as does Prophecy of Ro.  There are again zones where you can fall off the path, the Hive and Dreadspire Keep in particular.  Hopefully they've gotten rid of the guard-rails for good.

Mor`Ladim is an interesting observation in WoW.  Raven Hill did feel a little more dangerous than most places in WoW, primarily because the only graveyard was clear at the other end of the zone.  Dying in the Raven Hill cemetery meant a run across the entire length of Duskwood to get back to your body.  PvP tended to feel more dangerous despite the fact that you lose even less when dying in PvP.  On the other hand, the lack of a penalty sometimes made it feel unimportant, while other times it was more fun.  I'd say the severity of the penalty in that case is very subjective and situational.  In some situations a penalty is good for the experience, in others it's not.

The segmentation of games is also an interesting factor that I'd never really considered.  Besides EQ telling you that the world is dangerous and dying is a bad thing, it also seemed more like a world because there were dangers all over, instead of every area being clearly sectioned off for your particular level range.  Lesser Faydark is one example - the Plains of Karana are another easy one, with wandering hill giants.  The Commonlands, and the danger of Griffon attack.  Oasis, Spectres, and Sand Giant trains.  In most other games I've played, there are very few of these types of situations where the low-level zone has occasional patrols of a high level monster, but in EQ they were pretty much the norm.  I can think of examples of this behavior all the way up to newer zones, like the giant that patrols the Broodlands, although they have gotten more rare - partly because most zones in recent expansions have been targeted at the highest level players.

that damn dragoon son of a bitch in the commons.

Non-duel PvP aggros the Bruisers.  Hunters in particular would tap you and FD to drop aggro when you engage, leaving you to deal with 2-4 55 Elite bruisers.

Anything feels more dangerous when it includes a 20 minute run for failure :)

Mor'ladim's easily got more kills than, say, Fippy. EQ had a lot of those. WoW adds them for flavor. I imagine Mor'ladim had a lot of kills, but as the collective knowledge of players increases, so does the avoidance of him. Odd though that WoW has been still on the top of the PC sales charts. String of multiboxers?

High turnover, probably.  I haven't seen or heard anything on # of boxes sold (or really looked), but I bet it's twice or more their highest active subscription rate.

TRAIN TO ZONE!

And so on.  There are no trains in WoW - so for most players there is no "reality" that the actions of players in their vicinity could set in motion events that effect everyone.  In other words, with WoW's current death penalty, the game would change if "training" were possible (right now it is rare and requires skill).

When you have no "social guardrails" as in EQ - you get community.  Without them, as in WoW, community does not quite develop.

There's also air elementals in westfall that are about 5 levels above the average for the zone. 5 levels isn't much but untwinked they will still mess you up. Same with the elite loch ness monsters in Lakeshire (and the barrens oasis one) and who can forget Stitches in duskwood.

None of these are quite up to EQ's hill giants and griffons in the common lands or sand giants in oasis but they do provide some zone killers in various newbie zones. There's even a group of high 20 elite horde npc's wandering around Loch Modan that will mess up your day if they spot you.

Ah, that explains it. Me being a hunter in a PvE realm, and not an ass.

that damn minotaur hero in steamfont.

I only played EQ for a short time, but weren't there some skeletons in the barbarian newbie zone (evil composers or something).

There, I fixed your post to be in the proper form. Now on to the next one...


that damn Holly Windstalker in Qeynos Hills.

Freakin level 40 griffons in East Commons! That only lasted a year or so, because the blood baths were truely impressive.

Best blood bath I ever saw was when that nasty curse got out of a WoW raid dungeon and started infecting NPCs in Stormwind and IF. One tick was enough to kill anyone below 50 or so, and it had a nice wide range. The piles of bodies was quite impressive.

I've kited Dreamstalker to the Crossroads. That was quite a mess.

I still remember the pile of bodies around the lifestone in Ayan Baqur after someone lured the white rabbit down there.

Do you mean the griffons being L40 only lasted a year, or that you think the Griffons were removed?  They're still there, and on a spawn cycle with some of the wandering mobs. They were L30-32 as far as I remembered, it's just that when the game was new there wasn't anyone capable of killing them.  Much like the Hill Giants in West Commons or East Karana (fuckers!)   

When I quit playing, though, the average lifespan of any of those mobs was only a minute or so.. leading a lot of folks to think they weren't there.

We're talking EQ1 here right? The griffons in east commons were gone for years. I think they removed them sometime after Kunark's release. There was much celebration at the time and it did happen all at once, after a patch. The tunnel was no longer used after Luclin, so I doubt very much that there were people hanging out in east commons with the explicit goal of eliminating the 3 or 4 spawns of griffons there used to be. They may have brought them back, in a limited capacity, but I haven't played EQ1 in two years.

Hmm I don't remember them removing griffons and I started playing right around then, too. But of course I may have missed it being a newb at the time and all. I know that me and some of my friends recently re subbed to have some low level fun a few weeks ago and they certainly were still there.

The best mob had to be Sergeant Slate, though. He was one major badass if you were an 'evil' alignment and people would constantly train him right into the tunnel where everyone was trading. Always fun to watch.

They must have removed the griffins after Luclin, not that I spent a lot of time in EC after Luclin.  Or immediately prior, really.  I think I was cooking pandas on the other side of that kobold dungeon.  BUT I think I would have remembered the griff removal.

I don't think they did.  Like I said, they shared a spawn with some wandering mobs (the same also being true of the Sand Giants in Oasis as well as the others  mentioned.)

 It was death in the first year or two as commons was where most noobs congregated, so the trigger mob got killed often enough.  However, after Paludial Caverns (aka XP-fest 2000) nobody kills stuff in commons so you're just not going to see it. 

There's one easy way to find out for certain, but I really don't want to reinstall/ patch/ pay for a month to break out the old druid. Anyone still playing and has an AOE class?

Dungeon trains, I think, are one of the best community-building tools around.  They take on a "So, how about that local sports team?" kind of quality, something for everyone to gnash about next to the watercooler bindstone.  A few games I've played recently have tried to remove them, in an attempt to make everyone feel like others aren't infringing on their play experience, but I think that's shortsighted.  A game doesn't work as well if the players don't have any points of common reference to bitch about together.

 :roll:

Roll your eyes if you must, but I think we all remember things like Fansy from back in the day.  Hell, I remember, even though I never reallyplayed EQ. I'd rather have a game that gives me strong memories, even if some of them were frustrating ones, than one like Space Cowboy - which despite its pretty interesting combat system  has not yet given me a single real "take-away" memory from my time playing.  I attribute a lot of that to the fact that nobody can do anything to the monsters that affects anyone else, except for ten of you taking down an ubermob together; most of the time, it's like we're all playing a single player game in parallel, and just watching each other play as we go.

And there is where just about all of your arguments fall apart.  That and the fact that you lack basic empathy.

You know what, most of us that played EQ hated trains.  Most of us hated being the brunt end of griefing fucktards.  Most of us hate goddamned scammers.  People didn't like losing hours of playtime to some fucking jerk that thinks the game is his own personal playground of misery (hey, ringing any bells?). 

Sure they're funny to read and some of the stuff that they pull off is incredibly complex and does take a modicum of creativity.  However, that doesn't excuse the fact that people on the receiving end hated every second of it.  You may think that someone needs to be griefed or is better for it (we've heard it, so fucking spare us), but that doesn't make it so.

Nostalgia is fine and dandy, but it often falls flat upon revisting.   Everyone that remembers Karnor's castle would probably rather eat glass than exp in a zone line group there.   

Not everything that we take away from these games has to be misery. And for those of us that aren't fundamentally broken as human beings, we're managing quite fine.

I sympathize somewhat with your line of reasoning - and I'm not saying that the game has to provide a lot of those kinds of moments.

Hell, one might argue that it's best off if the game has those features at the start, but then the devs remove them under pressure - so people don't have to deal with them anymore, but they still have the memories.

But also, a lot of what you're describing in EQ was painful for other reasons that are outside the scope of what we're talking about - the awful death penalty, for instance.  AC still has trains to this very day, but the death penalty is much lighter, so it doesn't feel as bad when you die - it's just "LOL train" and then get on with things.

Trains can still be a communal event even if they lack EQ's nasty sting of death.

I have to agree with Telemediocrstrider on this one. Maybe not on the EQ trains, since I also wasnt there, I wont tell you that you liked it. But I do agree that when people can effect others, you can have much more exciting and memorable experiances. To this day UO still is the shining star in my memory of online gaming. The fact that some one could kill me and loot me, it made it more exciting. Yes, I spent time as a PK and a griefer (never super nasty), and I didnt like to be greifed, but for me it made the world more exciting and more alive.

The funny thing is, I played, and I never took my train experience away as misery. I can't tell you how many times I'd make my way down some relatively easy hallways in a dungeon, to see a horde of undead or something running down the hallway chasing someone and thinking, "Holy crap! What am I getting myself into?" That only helps set scene/mood for where you are. And of course the social aspects already mentioned.

See, my first thought was "fucking moron", followed by a quick FD. Then me having to drag some dumbass's corpse back to the zone line.  Then having to wait for my group to get rez'd because they all bit it.  Then listening to my group and the moron spit back and forth over OOC. 

You're acting like a train was a magical, beautiful moment to be experienced and savored for it's majesty (I had a bunch of obscene analogies I was going to insert here, use your imagination).  For me it was just a constant, annoying occurence and made me cry in joy when MMOs starting instancing dungeons.

However, small scale social aspects are about the only ones I tollerate.  I'm quite affable on a group or guild scale, beyond that I just get stabby. 

The problem is that you were playing a game with rezzing and complicated corpse recovery, so those duties were shunted onto you - the problem was not the train itself.

The joy in the moment is sort of like Johnny Depp in Pirates 2 being chased by all the islanders; you're going one way, and you see a huge Wall Of Many Bad Things That Will Eat You coming at you, and all of a sudden it's "go the other way and quickly!".  It's very Benny Hill.  You can almost imagine Yakkety Sax playing in the background.

That may not be the best explanation for why it's fun, but it's off the top of my head.

No. The problem was the trains itself. But not just the trains, because those were a symptom of the bigger issue.

EQ wasn't about socializing any more than WoW. Socializing is what happened as emergent behavior after the fact, or because just enough interaction is required to get people together. Remember, a lot of people were expected to play these games with a core group of folks they already knew (ala D&D). They needed ways to talk, but it literally took years for things like LFG tools to come along. And those came along when devs woke up and realized just how many people were falling into these games by buying a random box-o-MMO at retail instead of Diablo.

Diku-inspired games are about acquisition (XP, gear, whatever). EQ was all public space though. So now a bunch of people broken down into sub-social-groups were in the way of other people vying for the same content. That doesn't build community. It builds Lord of the Flies.

Instantiating content, loot-rolling systems, scheduled events and raidIDs and all that shit was built because RPG-based item acquisition by itself is not great fun for thousands of people when there's only a few dozen things to get. It sets up competition in a system not designed for it, one of the basic problems people (rightly) had with Trammel as well. There was little one could do against an asshat except ostracize them. And that only works for as long as the local community gives a shit, or even remembers.

If you want a PvE-centric item-based game, you need these tools. You can't expect people to wake up one day and be all happy-go-lucky about their progress upward being thwarted by the mistakes of people they don't even know. This genre just keeps growing, more people keep coming in, by the millions, and this awakening hasn't happened.

And I can't even recommend those people who weren't there go back and play EQ1. Why? Because even EQ1 has changed so much, to fix these problems.

There may be a game or three someone can point to as an exception. I invite them to do so here, because I think we'll find that each game has a specific reality to it that makes it very different from trains to zone. For example, if someone were to say Eve, they can't ignore that the vast majority of stuff used in Eve is built by other players. Lose it and replace it. It's not uber, but just like pre-Trammel UO, it gets the job done and is cheaper/easier to replace if you know the right people and/or are part of the right group. And, of course, you can't ignore just how few people actively play Eve in comparison to anything that smacks of EQ.

A little on both sides here, which qualifies me for just about every job in Washington.

I think you (the plural you) are creating a false dichotomy between "memorable moments" and "annoying moments". Memorable times come from intense emotional experiences, both good and bad -- so annoying experiences qualify just as much as magical, beautiful moments. Some people tend to gloss over these unpleasant experiences with the thin veneer of nostalgia.

The danger quotient is one that I remember with both good and bad feelings. It made me feel great when I escaped mortal danger with a huge penalty, yet made me curse the fucking game when I failed. Both memorable in their own rights. But, it had that golf-like feeling... you know, that one straight long drive is enough to get you to come out the next time, no matter how horrible you hit all other 100 strokes.

Another way of looking at trains is a mechanic to see player actions materially affecting the world (zone) for other players.

I support trains - it brought danger - and it built a sense of community.  You can't have one without the other.  WoW has no real danger compared to EQ - and no real community as a result (it has other strengths but this is its major Achilles heal).

If you're not a fan of trains - let's restate this in broader terms - should the actions of other players affect the world in a way that affects your game play? (of course there are degrees of this)

WoW has a great mechanic here - but not widely used - where players can initiate or choose to participate in ongoing events and disputes (e.g. the Centaur battles on orc outposts in the Barrens).  However, whlie these events take place - players have a choice about whether they are caught up in it.

I'd say that the answer to that can be either yes or no (hey, edlavallee, can I be vice president?).

If no, you don't want people to screw up your game, then play something like WoW, where they can't.  I don't know if this has a detrimental effect on the community (there are a million reasons why WoW could have a relatively weak community), but even if it does, that's a price a lot of people are (obviously) willing to pay.

If yes, you do want other players to impact your game, then make it an open PvP system like EVE or something.  If someone is being a dick to me, I can shoot them.  Simple, relatively fair, relatively straightforward.

Putting in stuff like trains seems like the worst of both worlds.  You've got jackasses screwing up your game, but you can't do anything about it (unless you want to be a jackass yourself).  Someone trains a bunch of mobs on me, what can I do?  I can't attack him, I'd have to try and use some cheap ass loophole myself (like trying to train mobs back at him).  Game systems like that tend to weed out the meek people who don't fight back, and they reward the vengeful "VICTORY AT ALL COSTS" hardcore types who exploit the systems as far as they can.  That's a community I don't want to be a part of.

I like danger, but I don't see why "danger" should be so one sided. Competition between equal parties should be "dangerous" and exhilarating enough. Why does "danger" have to be getting 10 mobs trained on you? Or why does "danger" have to be an enemy player character 50 levels higher than you? Or worse, an enemy player character 50 levels higher than you who's also looking to train 10 mobs on to you?

Why can't it be dangerous enough with one equal level player popping on the minimap, ready to attack you? I could fear any one given player in, say, Battlefield or Counterstrike, and find it "dangerous" if they spot me.

If a game can't accomplish that level of "danger", then it's a worthless piece of shit.

Ah, I am oh so very big on vengeance.  Nothing more fun than sicking an angry dragon upon those who have wronged you, even if you have to die yourself to accomplish it.  :heart: Gorenaire.

I do so miss the Kunark Age, at times.

Because very few people want open PvP like that. Which is why "danger" gets implemented in other ways. The only game that accomplished that for me was Shadowbane, but it also had glaring class imbalances so that's where a lot of the danger was coming from. But its the same deal... "Hmm, never seen this guy here before, better pull out my sword and hope for the best"

Sure, very few people want a game like that, but I'm just speaking to some of the people here...Who seem to want "danger" enhanced in far more severe and extreme ways than just the threat of equally powered matchups and opponents.

Either way though, the truth is, nobody who wants trains actually wants "danger". They just want others to have that feeling of danger. Which is a completely different thing. If they themselves wanted danger, then they wouldn't be the ones advocating for mob trains to begin with. "Danger" would be letting other players gear and xp in these dungeons you like to train them in, and then facing them in a fair fight afterwards. Wanting mob trains, otoh, just shows that they want the most pussified, imbalanced gameplay possible.

[edit] Umm...A few edits.

Part of me thinks that trains are just bad game mechanics and ripe for exploitation be the dickheads out there. However, dicks will be dicks whether they can train you or not.

The other part of me thinks that if I were a mob and I was chasing someone out of my house/castle and I could not catch up to them, it would make me very angry. And, if I were sauntering on my way back to my lovely home and noticed some intruders whacking on my servants, I would certainly head on over there to expel the interlopers (I am fondly remembering Mistmoore here). Wandering placidly back to my spawn point is not all that realistic. Too bad the dickheads feel the need to use this game mechanic to rain grief on my parade.


edit: oh crap, I said realistic, I better do some damage control. Is it more PC to say immersive? How about that then...

The argument about trains isn't really the issue. Trains were the result of poorly coded AI manipulation. But what the trains did for the emotions of those involved are what is important. I would not want to play an MMO that I could not become emotionally involved in. I do not play them "just for fun", either. I have plenty of other games that fill that void in my life. Trains, while "bad" in and of themselves in EQ1, represent a focal point on which emotional situations were formed. Everyone who was trained had the same feeling of frustration, the trainee had a feeling of glee, and those who avoided it had feelings of superiority and tact.

I would not advocate trains to be reimplemented in any modern game, but I feel that a system that causes these emotional situations are important for an MMO to really be a "second life", separate from your real one. Whether it be PvP or NPC danger, it is important that players have both the ability to impact each other negatively as well as positively. Without one, the other seems significantly less important. Sure, this will not be for everyone who takes part in this genre; many people play WoW as "just a game", and perhaps that is the reason behind it's success. However, for those of us who look to MMOs as a separate world for a separate life, it is not possible to be fulfilled without experiencing both bad and good, and having those experiences be the direct result of the society that these games, and these games alone, have the ability to create.

If you're only there to play with your friends... why be "massive?"

While 'equally powered matchups' may be great for certain games, they just don't really make sense in the world of an MMOG.  If I'm wandering with four friends and we come across two enemies, that's not an equally powered matchup, but it is the situation that came about without being artificially set up or contrived.  If I'm wandering alone and run into ten enemies, same thing.  As Damijin said, it's two different mindsets and types of players, those who want the game to not feel like a contrived pre-arranged thing, and those who want 'just a game' and thus want every situation to be 'fair' to them.  As is often said, life isn't fair, so for MMOG's that are attempting to imitate a life for your character, fairness is irrelevant.  MMOG's that don't mind being contrived and are just a game must pay close attention to fairness, because games should be fair.  Equally powerd matchups just seem silly, as this comic illustrates quite clearly.  http://play-closeup.blogspot.com/2005/10/one-shots-3.html (http://play-closeup.blogspot.com/2005/10/one-shots-3.html)

I don't think trains are either poorly coded or bad game mechanics.  In fact, like Edlavallee says, they make sense.  They aren't coded in a complex and safety-net manner like say, WoW mob chasing is, but EQ's train and agro system is just fine the way it is and it's exactly what one would expect monsters to do.  In some ways, I also distinctly agree with the 'chases you forever until you zone' mechanic, too.  Or at least, large areas of influence, much larger than WoW's chase range.  If you want to escape, you have to basically, 'get out of the mob's territory'.  Same idea as in WoW, but the 'territory' is ridiculously small there.  And on the way back to their spawn point, if a mob spots something they want to attack, they shouldn't ignore it and shuffle on back to their spot.