Ah heck, let's talk about EQ1

[Trippy]

Mind you, my main was a shadowknight and their survivability made WoW paladins look like squishy casters in comparison. Third-best tank (out of three), crappy DPS, soloed like a crippled necro...but harder to kill than a zombie cockroach. 

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

[Trippy]

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

[Trippy]

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

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

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

[Dtrain]

Mind you, my main was a shadowknight and their survivability made WoW paladins look like squishy casters in comparison. Third-best tank (out of three), crappy DPS, soloed like a crippled necro...but harder to kill than a zombie cockroach. 

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

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

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

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

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

[Slyfeind]

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

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

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

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

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

[Trippy]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Typhon]

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

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

[Venkman]

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

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

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

[Ratman_tf]

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

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

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

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

rantrantrant

[stray]

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

[Tale]

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

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

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

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

[pants]

My 2 coppers to toss at random into this.

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

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

[SnakeCharmer]

Just a random thought:

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

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

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

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

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

[stray]

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

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

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

[krazyk]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Nerf]

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

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

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

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

[Slyfeind]

Well said about learning to survive. Some people are just too fucking stupid to play these games....

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

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

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

[Tebonas]

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

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

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

[Ubvman]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyber heroes forced to wait for glory

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

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

So yeah background done.

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

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

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

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

[Trippy]

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

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

[Tebonas]

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

[Fordel]

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


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


Too Broken.

[Typhon]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mrbloodworth]

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

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

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

[Krakrok]

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

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

[shiznitz]

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

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

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

[krazyk]

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

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

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

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

[sam, an eggplant]

Your experience was atypical.

[Lightstalker]

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

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

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

[Engels]

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

[Merusk]

Min maxers, sure, they needed their epics, but some of us managed just fine with raid dropped stuff.

Except Clerics.

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

[Dtrain]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ratman_tf]

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

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

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

[Numtini]

t's a sad commentary on the state of the game at the time that it took so long for Ragefire to be fixed. It's because of debacles like this that casual observers conclude the game was only successful because it lacked competition

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

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

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

[Trippy]

Monk, enchanter and cleric epics though - those were the bad ones.

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