Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[medievalerror]

EQ Live is often a sore subject for many of us, particularly those who started playing at the beginning. I am wondering, where/when do you think EQ Live went wrong, if you think it did at all? What made you stop playing? What changes, expansions, etc., did you hate? Just curious! Myself, I would have to say Planes of Power (as a wizard, I hated the fact that one of my class's main selling points, porting, was essentially nerfed).

[Hamahakki]

Cats on the moon

[Vondra]

AAs encouraging you to endlessly continue playing your main, making time spent playing an alt feel like you were wasting time.

Not to mention alienating new players due to a widening disparity in power as a result of this along with a lack of low levels to group with since the majority of people are busy on their max level mains.

[bluejam]

Luclin.

[Zugbug]

SoE

[medievalerror]

Ouch. That's 2 against Luclin (not sure when AAs came out?). Poor Vah Shir!

[Rikimeru]

id say mostly pop but a little luclin.

[Vondra]

Ouch. That's 2 against Luclin (not sure when AAs came out?). Poor Vah Shir!

AA points came out in Luclin too.

[Caridry]

AAs encouraging you to endlessly continue playing your main, making time spent playing an alt feel like you were wasting time.

Not to mention alienating new players due to a widening disparity in power as a result of this along with a lack of low levels to group with since the majority of people are busy on their max level mains.

this plus bazaar

[Mardur]

Luclin was the first mixed bag expansion. All of Kunark and Velious were generally entertaining, but with Luclin came the dumb cat race, the dumb bazaar, the dumb teleportation system, and dumb zones like Paludal and Vex Thal. I generally like it though because AAs were awesome and Ssra was when raiding really took off.

Planes of Power was the same way. Plane of Knowledge was retarded, but the raiding progression (minus the endless backflagging at first) was EQ at its finest.

I quit playing twice in GoD (original and first progression servers) because the theme of the expansion really nerfed my class (shaman). It's hard going from being slightly OP Kunark -> Velious to completely OP Luclin -> PoP to poor buff/heal bot in GoD. Shaman weren't nerfed directly, but the content shift to low hp high dps mobs doesn't mesh well with slows and insane mana regen. Compare that to a fight like Seru that can last 20-60 minutes, where a single shaman can heal the raid, cure curses, keep slow up, and still be on top of damage charts by the end. Also Uqua really crushed the spirits of any raiding guild I was in because it was just so damn hardcore. I still have a lot of respect for GoD because of just how difficult it was, but that expansion is still pretty much the end of EQ for me.

What class you played had a lot to do with it I think. You can't be a shaman and hate AAs because some of those abilities were completely game changing like Canni 5 which was like obtaining an FT200 item and Virulent Paralysis which let you solo literally any mob in the game that didn't summon.

[Daldaen]

Yes, because planets cannot have moons that orbit them with a feline-humanoid species in them... in a fantasy game?

[medievalerror]

I must say, I liked the Vah Shir and absolutely LOVED the Luclin graphics (I immediately switched to Iksar on Live in part because of how much I loved their new look in particular--I cannot bring myself to play one in the original graphics b/c the aesthetic is such a downer for me). I do think that many of the Luclin zones began taking a radical turn that represented a downward slope in EQ. (If only we had the option of using Luclin graphics on P-99 it would be perfection!).

[webrunner5]

The main problem was they got rid of the need for Porters and Crack dealers. Druids, Wizzys, and Enchanters. Luclin expansion I think killed pretty most all of it. I think Bazaar was both a good and bad thing. Mostly bad.

Then the Merc's got rid of the the need for Healers. So the need for anyone in a group went to poop. So everyone 4 boxed to hell and back. They made a pot for every thing. And started the Marketplace. So now you spend more money buying XP and Haste pots a month then the cost of the game. Pretty smart of Sony!!!

[Daldaen]

What crack dealers are you talking about? Bazaar was a nice idea, implemented poorly. Having to leave your character on afk was stupid. But it would've been great if you could set it up to do that without your character being there.

Mercs were an addition to SoD, around 2008-2009 iirc... way past the scope of the Luclin discussion but I guess that could qualify for when EQ live when wrong.

[medievalerror]

We need not only discuss Luclin, it just seems to me that for a lot of people that's where things really started to change.

[mwatt]

There is no single reason, it is a combination of things. My own vote for the biggest issue was the disparity in gear and power between two "types" of players that occurred due to "forced" raiding and keying that later expansions brought on. As new expansions came out, they had to be tuned to those with the powerful gear, leaving "casual" players unable to effectively play. Unfortunately, the players that tended to be able to gather power need to play as expansions kept getting more difficult, are also players that tend to burn through content and then leave.

On a somewhat different topic, I thought AAs were great.

[astuce999]

The biggest mistake that caused the decline of EQ was implementing characteristics that diminished the need for a community; the need to rely on (or compete with) other people.

People will point to PoK books or Bazaar or instances or mercs or guild hall or certain AA's (among others) as the scapegoats; the common denominator is that it all took away from the immersion that gave EQ its unique feel, which is having to interact with other players.

'Stuce

[Edrick]

Two biggest complaints I have about how EQ Live went wrong.

First is the progression. This hit really hard at Planes of Power. There was a very harsh progression that you could not deviate from, your only way to get into raids you weren't flagged for was to fall into the 85/15 rule. Everquest's biggest strength during classic, Kunark, and Velious was that it wasn't so linear. All you needed to get into Veeshan's Peak was the key. The key was a long, difficult quest, but most of it you could do on your own. In Velious, to get into Sleeper's Tomb you needed a key you could get from killing dragons or certain giants. If Velious was remade today, you would have to complete 6 tasks in Iceclad Ocean to get access to eastern wastes, then complete another quest chain to choose which faction you want, then complete a number of instanced raids to work you way up.

The other is mudflation. This wasn't a problem during classic, Kunark, and Velious, because all stats mattered. Once we got to Planes of Power, you didn't have to worry about making sure you got enough of a certain stat, since eventually all of your equipment will have maxed them out. Items were losing their "individuality" and just becoming something with every single stat vomited onto it.

[Daldaen]

Mudflation I definitely agree with, progression I'd tend to disagree though.

A players without Veeshan's Peak key can't do anything with a guild who wants to raid it. He can't zone in for rotting items, he can't help them out on events, nothing. He is forced to sit out and work on the long boring quest by himself or with other unkeyeds while his guild does VP (or any keyed zone for that matter).

Whereas in PoP if you were just a fresh noobly app who had no keys or flags, you could still tag along in that gimp space with the 85/15 rule or more specifically 5/1 flag:unflagged ratio. The problem with PoP was the layering of it. Missing one flag from say Bertox meant you were screwed for the rest of your flagging through until your guild went back to kill Bertox.

Had they figured out a better backflagging method (IE doing a raid a tier above, flags you for all the previous tier raids) that would've been excellent. PoP raiding encounter wise, was easily the most vast amount of raiding available in a single expansion. Ranging from 2 group events to events that guilds would get over a full raid (72+) and still wipe to due to failures of CC / Tanking / Healing / DPS etc.

Another minor issue I had with PoP was the lateness that they came out with the relaxing of the flagging rules. IE when it was new only PoJustice / Innovation / Nightmare / Disease were available to non-raiders.

Later on they opened up CoDecay, PoStorms, PoValor, Hall of Honor, Bastion of Thunder, and PoTactics based on level requirements (keeping the elemental planes and Sol Ro's tower still locked). Had they done that off the bat it would've been much better off. Instead of making those require raid flags to enter.

[Edrick]

Good comments. It was definitely annoying having to backflag in case you missed some early raid. I remember our guild working out agreements with other guilds earlier in progression to allow our members/apps to piggyback for backflags. If your guild was raiding elementals, it was a large time investment to go back to an earlier raid, say Bertox, and flag one or two people.

I liked that expansion enough even though the exploration aspect of EQ had been discarded at that point. Despite the extreme convenience of PoK books, I hated what they did to travel/exploration in the game.

[Fultun]

hindsight is 20/20.


That being said, I recall players all giddy about the PoK teleport books because it meant no more looking for a druid/wizzy and no more donations.

Same with the potions, and other things that came out.

They all seemed like great ideas that solved the things we found annoying in the game, that looking back now we find made the game what it was.

Death penalties, EQ2 tried to soften the blow, but in the end as with the games that followed (ie: WoW) lack of death penalty, for lack of a better term, pussified the game. "Just run in and attack, no biggie, we can see what happenes and change tactics with each try".

We all got happy when we looted that rare loot from a mob on a raid. We had something that not everyone had. Later games took that away for the most part and made everything obtainable with just a little effort. Maybe they had a rare loot, but the stats of it weren't all that different from what everyone else could obtain. Again. this was stuff many comlained about in EQ, but seeing what it has become you realize there was excitement in those rare loots.

EQ did a lot of things right, but at the time, people found certain things annoying or frustrating, and thought it would be better if it was different. Once different was offered, we realized what made EQ the draw that it did.

But how do you add content, without destroying the original content. It is a game developers nemesis to have to add to his/her game.

[visage]

IT went wrong the moment Wow came. IT was the end of EQ community and people envolved into WOW shitards , when they came back to EQ they converted them all into faggots

[eqravenprince]

I left to go play Dark Age of Camelot in October 2001. EQ never felt the same when I came back.

[Lulz Sect]

luclin, PoP exponentially

[Skekekke]

I wouldn't say "EQ went wrong," it's still a successful game. So to say it failed, we are blinded by our one sided "classic or die" opinion.

The game didn't fail, it just changed, not instantaneously (well kinda, stats drastically changed when GoD came out), but over time. People are still paying to play it, and it's numerous expansions.

What happens when we get to the point when Velious is capped out? What happens when there's nothing more to do, just the same thing over and over? Make another toon? Twink it to hell and back? Get bored and quit, or release a new expansion, and retain players? That's all EQ did, try to retain it's players (Marketing) and keep the shareholders happy.

[cliveceps]

I agree with a few of you guys that what made EQ great was the need for community and to rely on each other. The Bazaar turned people into robots. It also eliminated the rarity of a lot of items - much like the Internet did to baseball cards.

PoK books made the world feel much smaller. Running from Grobb to Freeport on a level 1 troll used to be an awesome achievement - now it's a 300 ft walk and 2 clicks. There's also kind of a natural progression to these types of video games. I remember thinking the ghoul lord was difficult for a group of 40's, then I was soloing it, then I was 3 manning Kunark dragons, etc. It cheapens your experience.

I think SOE lost their raiding population when every key became a huge grind, and every fight became a 60 minute epic where one mistake would cause you to spend hours reclearing and trying again. The amount of trash mobs got ridiculous. I remember spending hours and hours clearing trash in Vex Thall and Plane of Earth more than I remember the actual boss fights. WoW gave people a way out, promising to fix every mistake EQ had ever made. Of course it didn't do that, but there were some improvements and the PVP element drew a lot of people towards that game.

[triad]

IT went wrong the moment Wow came. IT was the end of EQ community and people envolved into WOW shitards , when they came back to EQ they converted them all into faggots

lol


cat people where the flag of downfall i personally played classic-darkhallow or the dragon one idk .. another issue was their whorish pumping of exp that even wow is starting to do i loved pop for some reason and would go back and forth raiding and causaling keeping me gimped in the AA sense but it was a slow death imo that took a major blow on the moon and bled out

[sedrie.bellamie]

I stopped playing around 2005 or 2006 and really liked the planes of knowledge for how simple it made moving around. But at that point in EQ I was not playing with other players. From 1999 to around 2002 I was really active on the Karana sever and the Nameless but never to high of level. I always enjoyed the right of passage it was for my characters to go to places like the oasis and find groups.

But my later on experiences with EQ changed with more content. I remember when Velious came out and the old world and Kunark just died off. And then by the times of the planes the old world was empty except for people factioning or working on epics.

My last few years in EQ my friends and I stayed pretty low level and stayed in lower guk pretty much exclusively. We were bound at the pots in TD and could use those to get to gfay to click the PoK book. I remember buying some clarity potions but it was all about getting KEI and awesome shaman buffs that would last hours.

My highest character was a 55 troll shaman that I didnt level past that just so I could farm AAs in lower guk. Sounds stupid I know but it was fun. My friends where a cleric, a shadow knight, and a monk.

When we would LAN we would set these characters up at some loot spawns. I remember using the Shaman to kill some gnome on the moon behind a locked door. The gnome dropped some boots that sold for like 300 plat. So the shaman would sit in the locked room and kill the gnome, bear form allowed the shaman to pop its head partly out the door. The cleric would then take the boots and sell them. The monk we would stock up with dispell stones and have him solo the efferti in sol b. Then the shadow knight would usually solo some named giant in velious, I don't remember the zone name but it was a huge tower and the shadow knight could single pull him to the bottom.

We would get these guys in their place and then use other computers to play something like Quake or Counterstrike. Maybe just play the Dreamcast or just get drunk and watch the Ali G HBO show.

The end of Everquest came when it just lost its fun. When you can no longer kill the same pixels over and over. And that is what I like and p99. I can kill the same pixels over and over again.

Like how some people replay Chrono Trigger or whatever game, over and over again. Playing p99 is like a trip in the way back machine that is something special.

[Sizzle]

AAs encouraging you to endlessly continue playing your main, making time spent playing an alt feel like you were wasting time.

Not to mention alienating new players due to a widening disparity in power as a result of this along with a lack of low levels to group with since the majority of people are busy on their max level mains.

This, but the issue wasn't really the Alternate Advancement. This issue was more so how the system was approached and how it STILL has not been overhauled. Its a stupid system, people grind out thousands of AA points to spend on things. Why not just overhaul the system now and make it so that you do not need to grind a million AA points to compare with others.

Yes, I know the less AAs you have the faster they go, but really? Who wants to grind thousands of AA points and spend thousands of AA points? It is dumb. AA, originally an O.K. idea, however, approached very very wrong.

[Thulack]

This, but the issue wasn't really the Alternate Advancement. This issue was more so how the system was approached and how it STILL has not been overhauled. Its a stupid system, people grind out thousands of AA points to spend on things. Why not just overhaul the system now and make it so that you do not need to grind a million AA points to compare with others.

Yes, I know the less AAs you have the faster they go, but really? Who wants to grind thousands of AA points and spend thousands of AA points? It is dumb. AA, originally an O.K. idea, however, approached very very wrong.


Took me 24 hours /played to get a toon from level 1 to 85 with 500aa. The grinds not hard aslong as you have friends along the way and xp flies by compared to here. SoE hasnt gone wrong yet in my eyes other then tryin to make the game easier which i can live with for now. With the latest xpac people are complaining it is harder now but in my eyes thats a good thing. The last xpac to come out was a complete joke and any semi serious player had it done in a month.

[maahes]

AA's were a double edge sword. The way EQ did them is the only way they should ever be done. However, it did stop people from playing alts which in turn killed the fun for leveling a new toon. Everyone on the server was in 3 - 5 zones grinding AA's. And the rest of the world was a ghost town.

[falkun]

I liked the concept of AA, but letting them run rampant instead of forcing specialization (like limiting the number you can get, a la talents in WoW) was a bad decision IMO.

The final straw for me quitting EQ was when OoW came out. I thought about buying the expansion, but then I realized I had hardly played at all in GoD territory, why should I buy OoW?

[Daldaen]

Well yes it is a double edged sword:

Do I continue playing my level 60 where exp yields almost 0 benefit to me or do I get bored and quit because I don't like leveling alts (This describes lots of people).

Once you max out your gear in the feasible ways you can, at level 60 there isn't much you can do the progress your character other than raid.

Personally I like AAs just because of the depth it brought to the game and helped get rid of annoying pain in the ass stuff. Mass Group Buff for example.

[medievalerror]

I agree that items began to matter less and less. If only there was a way to play classic EQ with Luclin graphics, I'd be sold completely!

[Raavak]

Everyone was 3 to 5 zones grinding AA's.
They obsoleted zones every time there was an expansion. Was eerie visiting like EC, GFay, or Oasis and being the only person in the zone.

[eqravenprince]

What happens when we get to the point when Velious is capped out? What happens when there's nothing more to do, just the same thing over and over? Make another toon? Twink it to hell and back? Get bored and quit, or release a new expansion, and retain players? That's all EQ did, try to retain it's players (Marketing) and keep the shareholders happy.

I honestly feel that the server will remain strong even at capped at Velious with no future additions. Some of the hardcore raiding population will eventually get bored and leave, but I do not think they represent the core player here.

[Grozmok]

Luclin ruined some of the player models for me forever, but I still enjoyed playing my Troll as how I envisioned him. Fat with big ears, a long nose and Popeye forearms.

*shakes fist at SOE*

I think the raiding and high end content ruined the game. After a while, there was no one left to roleplay with, as casual gamers had moved on and the hard core stuck around to raid.

Not to mention, the game required some serious amounts of free time.

[funhorroryes]

why does everyone bag out SoE and POP...

honestly they werent as good as the previous expansions but i must say i quit AFTER pop and i had a mighty mighty fun time during luclin and POP, everyone just thinks they sucked because of the gay models that where assosciated with them.

honestly, PoP and SoE where fucking epic expansions, stop joining the bandwagon, anyone who experienced the endgame of any of these expansions will understand

[fischsemmel]

honestly, PoP and SoE where fucking epic expansions, stop joining the bandwagon, anyone who experienced the endgame of any of these expansions will understand

Endgame does not an expansion make?

Seriously. Even on p99, there are far more players leveling alts and powerleveling friends and grouping in oasis and mistmoore and south karana than there are people at 60 killing gods and dragons. And that was even moreso the case on live servers. But yeah, totally. Pop was great because some of the tiny percentage of people who raided the planes liked it.

[Atmas]

The cats didn't really bother me and Vex Thall was mind crushingly unimaginitive but on the whole I loved Luclin. Ssra was awesome AAs really brought it together for my primary class (Wizard) and the loot was sweet.

I liked PoP too. More awesome AAs, nice lore. It also had a few downsides like the stupid travel anywhere PoK but for the most part I liked it.

GoD killed the game for me. I actually played till OoW came out but GoD content ruined the game. Partially due to it's horrid content and partially due to beating Plane of Time being such a good ending point.

I didn't play it much but OoW seemed like a decent expansion actually.

[Swarws]

Vah Shir was a blunder.. AAs were Great. and PoP was the best expo in EQ.. Luclin as a whole was kinda shit.. If they skiped Luclin and went straight to PoP it would a been far better. The Flagging and raiding system in PoP was fantastic. It gave you a reason to keep revisiting old bosses and allowed for distinct separation between casual and hardcore players. Not to mention the fights started to become less tank and spank and more interesting and AAs were great. They allowed people to advance their character beyond just the level limit and allowed for some cool new skills to be put in. It was a great way for more casual players to have things to do besides raiding.

[Grozmok]

Don't get it twisted, I had a great time playing PoP.

[Nagash]

Luclin was the first mixed bag expansion. All of Kunark and Velious were generally entertaining, but with Luclin came the dumb cat race, the dumb bazaar, the dumb teleportation system, and dumb zones like Paludal and Vex Thal. I generally like it though because AAs were awesome and Ssra was when raiding really took off.

Planes of Power was the same way. Plane of Knowledge was retarded, but the raiding progression (minus the endless backflagging at first) was EQ at its finest.

I quit playing twice in GoD (original and first progression servers) because the theme of the expansion really nerfed my class (shaman). It's hard going from being slightly OP Kunark -> Velious to completely OP Luclin -> PoP to poor buff/heal bot in GoD. Shaman weren't nerfed directly, but the content shift to low hp high dps mobs doesn't mesh well with slows and insane mana regen. Compare that to a fight like Seru that can last 20-60 minutes, where a single shaman can heal the raid, cure curses, keep slow up, and still be on top of damage charts by the end. Also Uqua really crushed the spirits of any raiding guild I was in because it was just so damn hardcore. I still have a lot of respect for GoD because of just how difficult it was, but that expansion is still pretty much the end of EQ for me.

What class you played had a lot to do with it I think. You can't be a shaman and hate AAs because some of those abilities were completely game changing like Canni 5 which was like obtaining an FT200 item and Virulent Paralysis which let you solo literally any mob in the game that didn't summon.

Did you read my mind? You just wrote, almost word for word what I wanted to post. I was playing a shammy too and felt exactly the same way as you about this too.

[gloine36]

Biggest problem I had was the Internet connection and my own PC hardware. Dial up killed me more than anything in EQ, DAOC, and EQ2. I live in a rural area and we didn't get the speed to play MMO's well until 2007. I loved EQ right up until Luclin and then it faded for me because I had problems playing due to technical issues. I switched to DAOC which I thought was an outstanding game, but its first expansion ushered in the same technical problems again.
I really liked EQ2 but again, expansions and its video requirements ended up killing that game for me too. You really have no idea how much I like broadband unless you've played MMO's on dial up for a long time. That and having an improved PC helps. It may not be top of the line, but it plays games well.

[Grozmok]

^
That's a bummer, I was running DSL back in 1998.

:D

[Nirgon]

Cats on the moon

This and when they put PoK books in, oh and when you could use PoK to get to Nexus.

The world just felt small : / and beast lords were a bit short of how cool they could have been.

They needed to set up AA limits like in EQ2 for starters, I think.. or if you got certain AA's you couldn't get others? Or if you earned those AA's you could build saved sets of them to swap between every so often for free.

The arm chairing goes on and on, but the "when" question is answered with that I think.

[Grozmok]

This and when they put PoK books in, oh and when you could use PoK to get to Nexus.

The world just felt small : /

This.

That's the biggest issue I have with newer MMORPGs, everything is omg-impulse-ADD-personality-gotta-have-it-now-omfg get you there in a jiffy.

[Nirgon]

I mean getting "ported up to the moon" was OK, it could have been implemented better ....

But connecting it with PoK... woof.

It's funny too, Ssra temple was such a great raid zone but there were so many unused and pointless elements to Luclin... it was really just AAs, Ssra and VT for a WHOLE xpac..

Comparatively? Look at Velious.

[Edrick]

I mean getting "ported up to the moon" was OK, it could have been implemented better ....

But connecting it with PoK... woof.

It's funny too, Ssra temple was such a great raid zone but there were so many unused and pointless elements to Luclin... it was really just AAs, Ssra and VT for a WHOLE xpac..

Comparatively? Look at Velious.

Velious was incredible. I wish all EQ expansions had as much effort put into them as Velious seemed to have.

[Nirgon]

Well, the only way to go was up with their stats and they didn't retune the old encounters. Part of the magic I guess was lost when Trakanon started getting solod by druids and pallies for me.

[Andaryel De'Vir]

For me, it started with Luclin, but as others pointed out, Luclin was a bittersweet experience. I quit for awhile simply because my computer couldn't run it, and I didn't dig the whole 'cats on the moon' idea. My biggest beef with it was the very beginning of the "must level in new areas, old areas are shitty exp now" trend. Beloved old areas were empty because the moon was better exp. Meh. However, if the exp was kept comparable to pre-Luclin levelling, I would enjoy Luclin very much. Because:

1) AA's were the most amazing implementation I have ever experienced in any MMORPG. I didn't find that they reduced the number of lower level groups, either, as few people were willing to keep grinding the same high level areas constantly for their AAs. I've found people still played their alts plenty to shake things up and keep the game fun.

2) The bazaar GREATLY improved the game for me... sure, the fact that I had to keep my computer running while I was sleeping, and let my character sell in the meantime, was a bit lame. Still, when they implemented the search function, I probably spent more time on bazaar trading than I did on levelling.

[Darkatar]

IMO AA's were ok, cats on the moon was ok, even nexus was ok. BUT. Bazaar and POK? not ok.

[falkun]

it was really just AAs, Ssra and VT for a WHOLE xpac...Comparatively? Look at Velious.

While I want to agree with you on the surface, I don't think that is true. Browsing the EQMac forums, I've heard of an "inner akheva" zone or event that I didn't know about Luclin from Live. There was also a bunch of bosses that smaller guilds could do in Luclin while the big guys were in Ssra. Don't get me wrong, Velious is still a better expansion than Luclin IMO, but Luclin gets a bad rep because of the Nexus, Baz, VT, and "cats on the moon". It had some good gems, I wish I had found more of them when the content was relevant.

[Pscottdai]

Just not getting the whole cats on the moon hate.... The Kerrans on Kerra Isle had to have relatives some place. If the Va Shir hadn't been a playable race would you guys of been ok with it then?[/

[falkun]

No, you are making the point most people have against Vah Shir anyways: Why weren't they just started on Kerra Isle? Why did they have to start out on the moon?

[nymphloa]

This really is a good question, and although I was still playing Live until I found this server I always had a hankering for the good old days. What killed it for me would have to be PoP, ok Luclin was bad with the introduction of the Bazaar and having a few static ports back down to certain location on the surface.
But for me the introduction of the Plane of Knowledge in PoP slayed the adventure in the game, the guild hall then took the fear from death. I was a warrior and I would commonly do the "Warrior Port" if I was too far from a book, simply die...appear in the Guild Hall, summon my corpse with the NPC and then pop my cleric merc to 96% rez me....Ooo the horror lol...hell they even ended up giving Druids and Shamans the ability to rezz lol.

[webrunner5]

I too wonder about the hate of the Cats on the Moon thing lol. I loved playing a Beastlord. I think one of the nicest classes in EQ overall. That started in Luclin I think. The Cats Cat pet is awesome looking.

[Faisca]

I was never too fond of cats, frogs and such as playable races myself. I don’t see the appeal of those, but I guess someone coming out of kinder garden may have a different view.

All the original races were humanoids and that’s what made sense to me. They started ruining it with the lizard race that came with Kunark.

I guess pandas were not popular back then. ;)

[falkun]

The appeal of the frogs has to do with the fact that the two stereotypically classic dungeons, Classic's Guk and Kunark's Sebilis were overrun by frogloks. In their prime, these two (3?) dungeons catered to players from the 20th to the 60th levels, and dropped some of the best loot in the game. Players spent a lot of time killing frogs, and after having them flip over dropping Ice comets and other hard hitting nukes on you, you develop Stockholm syndrome with your webbed feet attackers and you want to become one.

...then they give them to you as a hunchbacked, deformed playable race and you realize they aren't as cool as the ones you used to fight.

[Pscottdai]

I was never too fond of cats, frogs and such as playable races myself. I don’t see the appeal of those, but I guess someone coming out of kinder garden may have a different view.

All the original races were humanoids and that’s what made sense to me. They started ruining it with the lizard race that came with Kunark.

I guess pandas were not popular back then. ;)

Nice little rude comment there especially since I was already 30 when EQ launched. To each there own but IMO to be so closed minded about a "fantasy" world that only humaniods should be playable is kind of silly .

[falkun]

To be fair, the frogloks and iksar and drakkin and whatever else are still pretty "humanoid". They are bipedal creatures with 2 legs, 2 arms, and a head. I wish fantasy games would get outside of the "torso+head+2arms+2legs" theme, but then we usually start thinking "alien" territory.

[Brimacombe]

World of Warcraft

[Faisca]

Nice little rude comment there especially since I was already 30 when EQ launched. To each there own but IMO to be so closed minded about a "fantasy" world that only humaniods should be playable is kind of silly .

Yeah, right.

EQ would have been so much better if they had made a playable race out of a giant beetle. :rolleyes:

To be fair, the frogloks and iksar and drakkin and whatever else are still pretty "humanoid". They are bipedal creatures with 2 legs, 2 arms, and a head. I wish fantasy games would get outside of the "torso+head+2arms+2legs" theme, but then we usually start thinking "alien" territory.

Sorry, but froglike creatures and creatures with tails don't qualify as humanoids to me. :D

[falkun]

Yeah, right. EQ would have been so much better if they had made a playable race out of a giant beetle. :rolleyes:

Sorry, but froglike creatures and creatures with tails don't qualify as humanoids to me. :D

http://www.geekalerts.com/u/jabba-the-hutt-figurine.jpg
Compared to that very recognizable alien, frogloks are humanoid.

[ownrage]

http://www.geekalerts.com/u/jabba-the-hutt-figurine.jpg
Compared to that very recognizable alien, frogloks are humanoid.

sow pls!

[Nirgon]

Yeah Froglok poorly implemented I think as a race.. shoulda had their city as a branch off of guk. I didn't like Grobb being taken back either.

[Edrick]

http://www.geekalerts.com/u/jabba-the-hutt-figurine.jpg
Compared to that very recognizable alien, frogloks are humanoid.

Where did you find this picture of me?

[hynch]

I liked Luclin even though the over feel of the expansion didn't match EQ. I enjoyed the AA's and I don't think they went overboard with them until PoP. I think Luclin still had many of the elements of classic EQ. VT was a lot like VP and ToV, there was plenty to explore and see around the continent, and there was plenty of content for lower levels to enjoy.

PoP is where the game turned into an endless AA grindfest and high level raid fest. If you couldn't raid you grinded (ground?) AAs. If you could raid, you still grinded AAs but you also dedicated yourself to raiding. If you were low level, you spent 99% of your time in the classic zones. The PoK books really took away from the depth and immersion of the world as well. The nexus portals weren't anywhere near as bad since you still had to travel to them and then wait on them to port you.

Beginning with and forever after PoP it was obvious that Sony only cared about pumping out the next big raid encounter and gear set for everyone. Don't get me wrong, I loved raiding in EQ, but I didn't want to spend my entire time getting AAs and going to raids. I was a major alt player and once PoP hit I found I had to abandon my alts or be left behind on raids.

[Volibear]

For me it was the class I played, Being a magician brought absolutely no enjoyment. Mod rod, Mod rod, Mod rod. Really got old. If I would of played a melee I probably would never of left

[SyanideGas]

Luclin was pretty crappy,with the new graphics and such..Though PoP had some really legit raids.

[Brimacombe]

Well, what I noticed from going back to live is a lot of content was tailored specifically for one time one place. When I went to live during the Underfoot expansion everyone was rusting at the top and the content for about 40 levels was geared for full groups of raid geared twinks. They never readjusted the content from when it was cap. This was a major turn-off as a returning player. I made it to cap so I could finally group, but by the time I got there the taste was so ashen that I soon after quit.
As far as where EQ went wrong, I cannot say. I was 29 at the time and the travelling bug bit me and I moved to New Orleans and RL was too interesting.

[Clint]

Cats on the moon

Yaup. Pretty much this.

[Dravingar]

To be fair, the frogloks and iksar and drakkin and whatever else are still pretty "humanoid". They are bipedal creatures with 2 legs, 2 arms, and a head. I wish fantasy games would get outside of the "torso+head+2arms+2legs" theme, but then we usually start thinking "alien" territory.

Think of the quad wielding DPS that could happen.

Also, everquest went wrong when it let retards run amok aka late PoP/Onwards. Even though cat people were stupid as fuck.

[Slippery]

Nobody would play anything but that ^. Lol.

[JoeyD]

EQ Live went wrong when they started selling druids like me out, Plains of Power totally screwed everything for my port grind.. Pointless money hungry expansions.

[Dravingar]

EQ Live went wrong when they started selling druids like me out, Plains of Power totally screwed everything for my port grind.. Pointless money hungry expansions.

I honestly wonder if half of the people who bitch about how PoP "ruined my druid/wizard" actually played the class as a main and not a whored out bot for cash. Porting people is fucking retarded to do full time and was not a function of my class, I liked luclin/PoP because that's when a druid came into their own and was able to do things unique and not just derpa derpa, i'm the 6th slot of the group and here to port the group out of chardok.

[kaev]

This.

That's the biggest issue I have with newer MMORPGs, everything is omg-impulse-ADD-personality-gotta-have-it-now-omfg get you there in a jiffy.

Don't blame the game companies for that. It's the players (aka "the market" in corporatespeak). I was playing on Tunare server from July of '99 and that attitude was most definitely already strong and growing steadily stronger among the players during Kunark. Even before Kunark's release the in-game community started going to shit, long before SoE transformed the game into something unrecognizable.

There was an occasional localized renewal of community. I played on Stromm server when it opened with the LoY expansion and there I had a good six months or so of tremendous fun. This was well after Luclin & PoP had supposedly "ruined" EQ. Then the server community's attention shifted to the end game (in all its variety, raiding was not everybody's end game by any means), players focussed on their little niche interests and the broader community went to shit just as it had during the 4 months or so leading up to the Kunark expansion way back at the beginning.

SoE did plenty of stupid things with EQ, but it was the players that "ruined" EQ. The funniest part is that they (we) did it over and over again. (Should be saying "changed" really. My/your fun may have been ruined, but the game is bigger than you or me. We're not the only ones playing it.)

[Kieren]

It went bad after EQ2 & WoW came out. Most people left. 2002-2004 was great!! :-)

[Xatava]

EQ live went wrong with LoY. What was that piece of garbage, $30 for 5 useless zones and a playable froglok that looks worse than the original guk model? Oh yeah, and it provided maps to make life easier for people using macroquest. Whoopie.

[Dravingar]

EQ live went wrong with LoY. What was that piece of garbage, $30 for 5 useless zones and a playable froglok that looks worse than the original guk model? Oh yeah, and it provided maps to make life easier for people using macroquest. Whoopie.

Only reason I bought that shitty expansion was it doubled your bank space.

[The Revanchist]

You're playing a server that's emulating Classic to a T. Why do you expect them to magically fix things that were meant to be broken/not in the game?

[Farrakhan]

Velious was epic. To use a poker term, "the nutz". Things started to do down hill with Luclin and PoP.

I didn't mind AAs that much. But with Luclin and PoP, Everquest turned into Evereasy for me. Just got bored.

But no MMO since has come close to meeting EQ pre-Luclin IMHO (though I did enjoy Age of Conan for awhile). Aion wasn't bad either.

[bigups43]

I think that a game like this is inherently flawed when it comes to expansions and content. New content can be generated, yes, but it would make sense for it to be more difficult than what was already in the game. In order for that to happen the gear that comes out will need to be better, or the content will be too difficult. Now, think about gear. If an expansion comes out then you would assume that gear would be better, or else wheres the motivation to go seek out the new gear, if what you have is just fine. So now, if theres good gear, then content needs to be able to challenge the players with the new gear, or they will be OP and plow through content.

Its a problem of causality. One will always cause the other. Gear will eventually become OP, or content will become insane, or abilities will become OP. In order for everything to stay balanced they all need to progress at the same speed. A game like Everquest will always (given enough time) become like it is now, on live. It cant stay the same, or people will lose interest.

Thats where EQ went (is) wrong IMO. Its a systemic problem. Its like the cyclical debt problem in western economies. Yeah, we can reinvent many many times, but eventually its going to catch up with us.

[mwatt]

Velious was epic. To use a poker term, "the nutz". Things started to do down hill with Luclin and PoP.

I didn't mind AAs that much. But with Luclin and PoP, Everquest turned into Evereasy for me. Just got bored.

But no MMO since has come close to meeting EQ pre-Luclin IMHO (though I did enjoy Age of Conan for awhile). Aion wasn't bad either.

Only one other game I ever played had the same sort of feel that classic EQ had: Vanguard. That game was introduced early and was too buggy to make it. Itemization was also incomplete and clearly not hand tooled but script driven. If these flaws had not been present, that game, also started by Brad McQuaid and cohorts, would have been "EQ3" and done very well. But alas, SOE bought it and then slowly destroyed it. They fished a drowning butterfly out of a pond... and then they proceeded to pull off its legs and wings, one by one.

[Cyph]

I remember playing Vanguard for a bit and could see that it had an enormous amount of potential. Unfortunately, given the buggy state of the game, and in its later years, the lack of players, it never had a chance. It was the closest thing to EQ.

[Grozmok]

Vanguard was totally the spiritual successor to EQ live for sure.

Too bad egos, crappy technology and executive infighting killed it.

The only thing good about that game was the diplomacy system.

Rest of it was shite.

[bigups43]

I played vanguard from beta, and loved every minute of it. It did have a lot of problems, but they were almost entirely fixed by the time I had stopped playing. The raiding was super fun, and the progression lines were as well. The game has so much potential, one just has to tough out the problems. IIRC the game is running very well at this point and I would encourage anyone to try it.

[Kika Maslyaka]

I think that a game like this is inherently flawed when it comes to expansions and content. New content can be generated, yes, but it would make sense for it to be more difficult than what was already in the game. In order for that to happen the gear that comes out will need to be better, or the content will be too difficult. Now, think about gear. If an expansion comes out then you would assume that gear would be better, or else wheres the motivation to go seek out the new gear, if what you have is just fine. So now, if theres good gear, then content needs to be able to challenge the players with the new gear, or they will be OP and plow through content.

Its a problem of causality. One will always cause the other. Gear will eventually become OP, or content will become insane, or abilities will become OP. In order for everything to stay balanced they all need to progress at the same speed. A game like Everquest will always (given enough time) become like it is now, on live. It cant stay the same, or people will lose interest.

Thats where EQ went (is) wrong IMO. Its a systemic problem. Its like the cyclical debt problem in western economies. Yeah, we can reinvent many many times, but eventually its going to catch up with us.


I agree.
Another significant contribution to the decline was that each expansion that added low level zones, added better items that could be obtained in previous expansions at same level. This immediately led to "ghosting" of older zones. Creation of universal faction city-hubs also cause player population to concentrate into only 1-2 areas of the world, causing ghosting of the old cities.

This was caused more by the corporate greed that anything else - if SOE would only be releasing expansions that only add to the higher end difficulty, low end player simply would not buy them( and as we know, back in the day the player distribution over the levels was very well spread, and speed of leveling up was rather slow). Hence, we observed how each new expansion that added a new race, added better and lucrative newbie/low/mid range zones that previous world had, including better items and XP modifier. This trend started all way back from Kunark, and little by little kept building up, until old world was completely abandoned.

EQ may have preserved the old world, if would have done what WoW did - re-haul old zones every time new expansion comes out, and equalizing older zones in terms of difficulty/loot and XP with any new zones of the same level range. Of course this would require man-hours to be invested, and Verant/SOE have demonstrated over the years a very strong unwillingness to go back into things already released and fix/adjust older content, which includes things like quests that have broken for years, imbalanced rewards that didn't worth the difficulty of the tasks given, etc.

[maahes]

Post PoP. PoP was the single greatest xpac for any game ever. It was so good that it destroyed the game. Any thing they released after PoP was going to be garbage. We left shortly after completely our GoD trials.

[Erazmus]

Luclin for me. I think the idea behind LDoN was cool to bring back high levels to the old world. But it was too little too late.

[danceparty]

every time i would get my toon decently equipped with a current expansion's gear, then another expansion would come along and all my shit would be ghetto again. just got tired of the arms race. quit at towards the end of POP. ...looking forward to this server maxing at velious...gearing up with all the velious goodies and then just enjoying the content till for ever.

[Galelor]

GoD. shaman/druid/knights became almost obsolete. Raid encounters were fun after various retuning...

[Grozmok]

every time i would get my toon decently equipped with a current expansion's gear, then another expansion would come along and all my shit would be ghetto again. just got tired of the arms race. quit at towards the end of POP. ...looking forward to this server maxing at velious...gearing up with all the velious goodies and then just enjoying the content till for ever.

This.

This is pretty much the EXACT path I followed when I quit playing in 2004.

[Faisca]

Perhaps, in some cases, EQ Live didn’t go wrong at all.

After some time playing the same game people will get fed up with it eventually, and sometimes a change in the game, even if a small one can be the last drop in a full glass and an excuse to quit.

[Grozmok]

The problem, I think, is that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

In a group centric game like EverQuest, the model requires a constant influx of new players. New players have rely on the existence of other lower level players to group with (for the most part) or they're pretty much screwed. As the player base ages (meaning: gets to higher levels), typically there are not enough new players and alt characters for new players to group with.

This pretty much fucks the new players, giving them a poor experience which will only entice them to want to quit.

p1999 is no different. Playing my level 6 Necro, I found that there aren't enough players already exping in Befallen. That the best exp dungeon in the game, but no one is really doing it. So I can either find a new place to exp or try and get a group of my own together or form a 'PUG', which can be a bit of work. In the end, I had to get some friends together so we could do it. Bring your own group was pretty much the only feasible solution.

[eqravenprince]

All games - people will leave them at some point mainly due to needing a break.

Great games - people will come back to play.

Bad games - people will not come back to play.

With that being said, EQ was a great game up to Velious. It was no longer great with Luclin and Pop, wasn't bad, but wasn't great anymore. After PoP, the game just turned bad altogether.

[medievalerror]

I LOVED the Vah Shir, though yes it would have made more sense for them to start on Kerra Isle. Never did play Beastlord. That said, I HATED the Frogloks. Here's what they should've done: Instead of having them look so completely different than the old school froggies, they should have given you the option of playing one looking like the older frogloks (e.g., old graphics vs. Luclin). Second, rather than having them start in Rathe Mountains or taking over Grobb, they should have started in the Froglok city that was in Swamp of No Hope (or did anything good drop there? IDK).

[Lenowill]

It got ready to jump the shark when Luclin launched, then actually jumped the shark after PoP was done.

As I understand it, PoP was kinda-sorta designed to be "the end" of EverQuest, with the intent being that people would then move on to the up-and-coming EverQuest II. I don't know if that's a fact or not, but it seems to be true, given just how "end-game" PoP felt. It was a fitting conclusion to what had led up to it. Both in terms of Lore and Gameplay, Plane of Time felt like the final zone of EverQuest, and Quarm felt like the final boss.

I think, after that, the game pretty much jumped the shark. I loved a lot of EQLive content after PoP (LDoN and DoN are two of my favorite expansions, about as near to my heart as Kunark is) but it really did become a totally different game from then onward. The high-end focus, gear resetting, and endless streams of new (and often not that useful) AAs turned the game into an increasingly silly grind and arms race, as others have noted.

Of course, Luclin laid the groundwork for a lot of the "endgamey" changes that would be consummated in PoP (AAs, travel made easier for unsociable players, the Bazaar).

Personally, I feel like the original trilogy is indeed a good "stopping point" for this server. Velious era was a solid game that still felt cohesive, and wasn't setting up for drawing the game and its world toward some epic conclusion. So I support that notion.

I'd also like to eventually see a server that used Luclin as a stopping point, though, and perhaps one that used PoP/LoY/LDoN as a stopping point as well. There are several good "stopping points" in EQ's history - points when the game's flavor was fairly cohesive and sensical.

[Craigmandu]

The expansion Luclin is what started EQ down the road of no longer being the dangerous, exciting and high risk game that it started out as.

PoP further relished Kunark/Velious completely obsolete, as players in the upper level range but not quite yet at the highest level, simply piggy backed in the starter planes for the great xp and the easy items that outshined even some raid items in previous expansions.

Since EQ is going F2P, I started a trial account to see how the start of EQ is now. Made an iksar SK and literally went from 1-19 in about 4 hours...it felt cheapened and the starter items were better than endgame items in the kunark/velious era. It just feels cheap and easy now. I liked it much better when Velious was the endgame.

[fischsemmel]

1-19 in about 4 hours

and I think most people on live right now would laugh at that for being slow.

[fischsemmel]

It got ready to jump the shark

actually jumped the shark

pretty much jumped the shark

I don't even...

[acid_reflux]

and I think most people on live right now would laugh at that for being slow.

Yep. Get a duid to ds you in the drakkin starter area and about an hour you can hit 20, although that's pling.

[Lulz Sect]

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2009/4/16/128843913361914873.jpg

[kilyen]

i liked the AA idea and also the bazaar
ports during luclin wasent so bad 1 nexus spire on each continent and you had to wait a good 15 mins between portal in the nexus

it was the graphics luclin introduced that killed it for me i HATED it and its only gotten worse since

[Rubexcube666]

I just did 1-19 in over 48 hours.... I'm damn proud of Sowfastt!

*pets baby druid*
to the oasis!

[Thorfin]

Def started to taper off half way thru Velious but as soon as Luclin was out i was done. Cats on the Moon, bazaar mechanics fucked private traders(IMHO), and worst of all graphics turned the game into a goddamn cartoon. so yeah Luclin

[Littlestgnome]

Luclin, and honestly I don't think it was all to do with the features so much as it just felt like a half-finished and half-assed expansion.

[SamwiseRed]

i would say luclin EXCEPT beastlord was coolest class ever made. sony had thier dirt paws wrapped around EQ from day one so in essense it was fucked from the start

[DarkwingDuck]

GoD, but it all went down hill lunclin/pop.. the old world died.. and the twinks went rampent on luclin

[RiffDaemon]

For me, EQLive going wrong is a three-phase deal.

1) PoK books. Those insta-ports completely killed the size of the game and ruined taxi classes.

2) Tiered spells. The Rk. I, II, and III stuff just grates my nerves. If you want the raiders to have higher damage spells than the rest of the rabble, then just do like you did with Ancient spells and such back in OoW.

3) Remodeling old zones. So yeah, you want to progress the game and have the new content be at least comparable to other MMOs; but for the love of the Rathe, leave the old zones alone. If you want to instate some alien demon race that lives in crazy towers in the air, then go for it; if you want their realm to be accessible from Freeport, then go for it; but don't obliterate Freeport for the sake of remodeling it to make it "easier on the eyes" to new players. I doubt PoR brought any new players anyway.


But still I play on ....... *sigh*

[Craigmandu]

and I think most people on live right now would laugh at that for being slow.

You are probably right...that was with me also looking around, figuring out where I was, since I had never been to mines of gloomingdeep before etc.... And I had no others around to give me any damage shields etc... so yea it probably was relatively "slow"...

But to compare...I started this Necro on 1999 the other day and I'm just now level 6. That is what I missed most about EQ, compared to WoW etc... The investment in your character MEANT something to you. Losing xp, the danger factor...and the fact that regular snakes if they are even/yellow can and sometimes will kick your ass if you don't pay attention.

I like the leveling to be challenging, dangerous, and have penalties for failure...when they started dumbing down the game, putting in graveyards, making it too easy for death not to matter and travel no longer to be dangerous at all, it loses its risk factor.

Velious for me was the expansion the game should have stopped with (even though I know they could never have stopped, it was too much of a money machine).

[Raavak]

Velious for me was the expansion the game should have stopped with (even though I know they could never have stopped, it was too much of a money machine).
They could have kept expanding but kept it in theme I think, but kept getting crazier and crazier ideas. Pretty soon EQ wasn't EQ anymore.

[Galelor]

For me, EQLive going wrong is a three-phase deal.

1) PoK books. Those insta-ports completely killed the size of the game and ruined taxi classes.

2) Tiered spells. The Rk. I, II, and III stuff just grates my nerves. If you want the raiders to have higher damage spells than the rest of the rabble, then just do like you did with Ancient spells and such back in OoW.

3) Remodeling old zones. So yeah, you want to progress the game and have the new content be at least comparable to other MMOs; but for the love of the Rathe, leave the old zones alone. If you want to instate some alien demon race that lives in crazy towers in the air, then go for it; if you want their realm to be accessible from Freeport, then go for it; but don't obliterate Freeport for the sake of remodeling it to make it "easier on the eyes" to new players. I doubt PoR brought any new players anyway.


But still I play on ....... *sigh*

Not meant to derail, but point 1 is taken way out of context of the expansion. While the PoK books ruined the 'port for cash', it by no means ruined Druids and Wizards. These classes did very well in those expansions (specifically druids.) Additionally, evac/succor became useful imo.

[RiffDaemon]

Not meant to derail, but point 1 is taken way out of context of the expansion. While the PoK books ruined the 'port for cash', it by no means ruined Druids and Wizards. These classes did very well in those expansions (specifically druids.) Additionally, evac/succor became useful imo.

Yeah, I didn't mean to say those classes became useless. I meant to say they ruined the taxi part of the taxi classes.

[Raavak]

Yeah, I didn't mean to say those classes became useless. I meant to say they ruined the taxi part of the taxi classes.
A dev at a fanfaire defended the PoK books by saying the day PoP came out you finally saw druids and wizards drop from being perpetually anonomous.

[acid_reflux]

A dev at a fanfaire defended the PoK books by saying the day PoP came out you finally saw druids and wizards drop from being perpetually anonomous.

I played a druid on live. 02-04. Joined right after luclin released. I did the port bologna for a few levels but i didn't make a business out of it. If I had ported people before then i would port those people on request if i wasn't in group.
When pop came out i wasn't upset about the loss of taxi business. I had more time to do whatever.
I also got some unsolicited business, from people that knew me, to power level alts for whatever they felt like paying me. I did alright by my standard.

[Morsakin]

Honestly I think it came down to the apparent fact that they realized the success of the game in the Velious-era, and attempted to expand and "improve" the game with an unnecessary and poorly implemented graphics overhaul, combined with derp-level extravagance (see: cats on moon with snake men and VT, which had next to no interwoven-lore before hand, almost as if they wanted to keep it some surprising yet secretive zone), all the while throwing content out that stressed time sink after time sink. (VT key, and once you finally get in....clearing VT trash for hours)

There was also a noticeable transition in the way raid encounters were mechanized, in that they became more focused on error correction or outright prevention to the point that you simply needed to find a strat to negate a particular trait of the encounter you were raiding, and the rest was cake. I believe Thott phrased it correctly when he stated that prior to Luclin, the aggregate hp levels of a raid would fluctuate based on AE's, adds, etc. to a much higher degree than they did once Luclin gear, spells, and the aforementioned boss mechanics were introduced.

Mobs began having ridiculous amounts of HP, yes, but the raid as a whole was exposed to less individual danger, lessening the likelihood of someone dying because they didn't have their resists at or near cap, or because the individual was an inbred degenerate who couldnt stay out of AEs and such. The only thing that increased was (typically) damage to the MT and a few individuals dealing with adds, with a possible quirky effect thrown in (Aggro reduction spells on Emp, for example, forcing you to pick up aggro on the fly). Other than that, I think most of you can agree that killer AE's (like VP AE's relative to kunark gear) had gone the way of the dodo at this point, with lower thresholds being created to prevent the thin line you'd otherwise walk when it came to simply being able to effectively engage raid targets. (Oh nos guys, an AE G. Flux in end-game Luclin that doesn't even possess a dispel or noticeable damage component.....how will we survive against this overgrown CoM goo?)

In short, end-game raids became dull and uninviting, with little room for ingenuity or creative adaptation. The only fun part was dealing with encounters that had previously been untouched or at the very least weren't well documented, as is the case for everything in the MMO communities these days. If I hadn't been raiding in such a setting with TR, I would've lost interest long before I did.


I will admit that there were some "fun" encounters post Velious, but nothing in Luclin stands out in my mind as particularly challenging or difficult, aside from gear, retardation, and patience (pre-nerf Seru~~ FU 2.5 hour CH rotations) checks.

[acid_reflux]

One clear through vhex thal with some mage coth mules in tow trivialized the time sink. The coth mules were placed out if line of site of various boss mobs... full raid forms up behind a pillar stacked on top of each other... whamo boss dead.. rinse repeat. Tank puts atten ha ra next to a wall. Melee dps push her into the wall. Cone shaped aoe nullified... burn. That place was autopilot. The key quest was more difficult.
Exploitation of game mechanics in luclin was the problem imo. If you tried to tank 'n spank em out in the center of the room you got yourself a game.
After getting one character elemental flagged via pug raids wore me out. I felt i beat the game right there... and the raids were conducted without vent or ts. I could not stomach one plane of air raid. Dropped the game shortly after g.o.d. was released. Mudflation sux.

[Daldaen]

Eh too many people here seem to think time consuming = challenging.

Mindlessly killing hours of trash in Vex Thal isn't challenging. Nor is running across 20 zones that are all green cons to you.

Generally speaking I like games that challenge me, not ones that I zone in with a max force and 1 shot every single raid mob. Raid events that make me think outside the box, on tanking, healing, positioning, CC, etc.

And Classic - Velious raiding isn't that at all, its stack on resist gear and corner tank. Luclin introduced more interesting events, where you needed bane weapons or there is a sequence of killing you need to do to unlock the boss and whatnot.

Planes and Gates both expanded on that and made raids actually challenging which I liked. But I may be alone in that :/.

Mudflation, meh, its just gear. While I understand not looking at EVERY piece of the gears stats is upsetting to some, most of it was just a transition. You no longer needed to try to max out your main stat in PoP... but now had Mod2s and foci to worry about, etc. It always transitioned into a new piece of gearing that you needed to focus in on as older ones like stats / resists were obsoleted.

[Deadmantis]

I actually enjoyed Luclin, PoP, LoY and LDoN. I kept playing after GoD came out but did not partake in much of the content, it felt like they were getting too far from the original. OoW pretty much did it for me, never went back after that.

[Galelor]

Eh too many people here seem to think time consuming = challenging.

Mindlessly killing hours of trash in Vex Thal isn't challenging. Nor is running across 20 zones that are all green cons to you.

Generally speaking I like games that challenge me, not ones that I zone in with a max force and 1 shot every single raid mob. Raid events that make me think outside the box, on tanking, healing, positioning, CC, etc.

And Classic - Velious raiding isn't that at all, its stack on resist gear and corner tank. Luclin introduced more interesting events, where you needed bane weapons or there is a sequence of killing you need to do to unlock the boss and whatnot.

Planes and Gates both expanded on that and made raids actually challenging which I liked. But I may be alone in that :/.


I agree that the raids ingenuity and diversity was WAY better after Velious. I raided through a lot of the EQ content and we all know that keying/trash clearing is no fun, but this introduced much more exciting raid content.

That said, the group game and non-purist game suffered greatly because GoD was over-tuned. That is where I remember seeing the largest exodus from the game.

[garyogburn]

Anyone who thinks Luclin was the downfall of EQ is just flat out wrong. AAs were a godsend, Vex Thal was an awesome reward for raiders, and beastlords were an awesome class. Killing Emp was an accomplishment not many games can duplicate today, and nothing pre luclin had that kind of engagement.

Gates of Discord was when it hit the wall. It was all downhill after that.

[Zuranthium]

It started going downhill after 1999. There was a huge influx of new players in the beginning of 2000, as a result of getting Everquest as a holiday present, and most of them looked at the game as something that needed to be rushed through and "beaten" to be enjoyed. With information about the game accumulated on the internet and being able to twink themselves easier as a result of existing players having items to give away, these players made the game environment less immersive.

Kunark was brilliantly designed in terms of zone construction and creatures and lore, it was a great addition to the game in terms of continuing to broaden Norrath, but it created huge problems in terms of class balance, grinding, and twinking. It took forever to level up once you got into the 50's, further reinforcing the new mentality that you need to grind grind grind, and many players were finding themselves frustrated at how their class was becoming less and less exciting to play (and undesirable for groups), despite needing to put more and more time into it. On the twinking side, new items in Kunark were destroying the lower-level game with players able to rush through content far more easily and quickly than they should have been able to. In combination with new zones that offered more plentiful hunting grounds, most of the old world zones started dying.

Velious was also another wonderfully designed addition to the game, in zone design and creatures and lore, but it continued to build upon the problems created by Kunark. Combat encounters became more and more repetitive (monsters had such ridiculously high HP and resists) and the necessity of having a few select classes in order to even experience the content became a larger problem. The immersive quality of the game continued to drop, with so many zones being completely abandoned (or very nearly) and twinking/powerleveling continuing to rise.

Luclin was terribly designed. Totally wrong for the feeling of Norrath and it further pushed the game into a grind grind grind mentality and continued to destroy the feeling of a living, breathing World, with the way that it allowed you to almost completely ignore all the game content from Original EQ/Kunark/Velious.

Planes of Power obliterated any sense of living, breathing World. Instant travel to almost everywhere and one single, sterile zone that everyone flocks to. Hated the design of the planes I saw too. So terrible.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath deconstructed even basic player interaction in the game, with instanced zones where you just get together with your party and never see anyone else.

In order for the spirit of EVERQUEST to truly survive, for an MMORPG to truly live up to its namesake, the content needs to be constantly changing. Players shouldn't be able to go online and read what they need to do in order to complete a quest. The game should force each individual character to go to different places in order to obtain something and the way NPCs fight and interact should be changing semi-frequently. Going into the same dungeon should be a different experience every month. The combat system should certainly be far more advanced than it was in Everquest and there should be far more customization involved with individual characters, not just physically (there needs to be a set power cap on items in the game and players should choose their equipment based upon look rather than NEEDING any specific item in the game for their character to be competitive) but also in terms of viable ways of engaging in combat with every class and using different class combinations to form a party.

[ArumTP]

Guildwars 2?^

[Littlestgnome]

Eh too many people here seem to think time consuming = challenging.

Mindlessly killing hours of trash in Vex Thal isn't challenging. Nor is running across 20 zones that are all green cons to you.


People tend to blame the "newbies" for all of EQ's poor and/or short-sighted decisions but this is one I firmly place on the heads of the hard core and long-time EQ gamer. They were the ones who'd rode the boat and crossed the zones a hundred times before and were demanding easier travel. They especially wanted such things for their re-rolls so they could get to their preferred levelling zones quicker.

People new to the game didn't know any better but were more than willing to go along with the complaints because it allowed them to use the same levelling path the grinders used.

The key to remember is that travel was not simply about "time sink". A level 1 player did not simply think about how long it would take to run from Qeynos to Kelethin. They had to consider the risk of the zones they intended to traverse, how much help they might need to successfully make the journey, and of course the penalty of failure. For those who did make it, completion of the journey usually brought on a great sigh of relief and a certain sense of accomplishment no spire trip (or book click later on) could ever hope to provide.

Luclin inflated the crisis in two ways really. First of course, they added the spires. But second and more important, they gave low entry luclin zones huge exp bonuses. It made it far too enticing for ALL players to gain just enough levels to get into Paludal Caverns where exp flowed like gravy over biscuits. And once there it was generally accepted to go to Netherbain followed frequently by Dawnshrouds.

It was not long before newbies had to follow suit because most of the old world 10-30 zones were now completely barren. If you wanted or needed a group -- and most newbies did at this point -- you were all but resigned to going whereever the masses were. And no matter how whiny people are now about the moon, that's where they were back then. Plus by this point all old world newbie quests were ridiculously outdated compared to what could potentially drop or be quested for in the Luclin zones. Even if you were determined to stay in the old world, you likely did so at the expense of easier gearing and monitary gain.

Removing fast travel certainly wouldn't have cured all these ills. But it did it's part in adding to the issues all the same. The PoK books made it that much more profound. But more to the point, removing the "time sink" of travel removed other key components of early level decision making. Gone was the need to build up before branching out. Gone was the threat of "if I get killed a continent away from my bind point I'm screwed". The fears that were such important aspects of what made Everquest feel like a true adventure were forever compromised and later on removed entirely by the manner in which they implimented fast travel.

[MissingNo]

^^ What this guy said; I like it.

I can give firsthand experience for this. I played classic through PoP. When Luclin came out I went with the leveling path described above because the exp. in fact did flow like gravy over biscuits. I could have chosen not to, but the gravity of the benefits would have given me dissonance if I avoided them.

When PoP came out and the world became smaller, the adventure aspect went away. There weren't any more level 1 gnome races from ak'anon to .. Odun?(erudite city).

One of the reasons that this game was great was the journey (character leveling), and in the time of achieving that you become part of the community through the people you meet. Giving faster exp and less travel time shortens that journey. Sure, there is end-game content, but I spent 95% of my eq life sub-max level.

[Zuranthium]

Guildwars 2?^

I very much doubt Guildwars 2 will be like what I describe. A lot of their design choices - ie a plethora of mechanical technology - strays from the classic fantasy feeling to begin with. I don't think that game is going to have any dungeons either (or at least not any that even come close to the brilliance in Everquest). I doubt the World as a whole is going to be as overtly dangerous and mysterious as it was in Everquest. Part of that is because it's going to be too soft in terms of non-PvP character interaction; everyone is on the same side and always works together. They are also going to be breaking the flow of the game with cinematics. They are going in the right direction with the dynamic content and character storylines, but I don't believe it's going to be a wholly immersive experience.

[Davardo]

Cats on the moon! OH my! So bad!

What about kerra?

Not a valid reason.

[Daldaen]

--Snip for length--
Yes the fear of travel was a huge part of the game. So was the leveling decisions of build up before branch out. But, this is the thing that pisses me off.

Build up before you branch out. Check out East Commonlands. The number of alts there begging for buffs off high levels. From all races, Iksars, Erudites, Wood elves etc. Races that don't even start remotely close to EC.

So they get a port, bind and SoW in 10 minutes and that fear is lost and they all just congregate to the fast exping of "buff me with all your druid buffs thanx"

It was pretty rare to see a non-barbarian/erudite/half-elf/human in Blackburrow. So too was it pretty rare to see a non-gnome/dwarf/high-elf/wood elf in Crushbone. But it happens all the time in P99 cause people know that if they just get a SoW/Bind/Port from a friendly druid they can go wherever they want and not fear travel at all. And thats what most resort to. Sending people like myself tells for ports, binds, and sows.

Which is fine, until those exact people crusade against Luclin for it ruining the 'fear of travel' lol. Or against PoP for PoP books etc.

As for the go to where people exp argument, that just came natural with... better gear + more zones. If you add more zones, there is no way the existing zones + new zones will hold a population and sustain it unless more people join the game to fill those new zones.

[ArumTP]

Id like to point out that server population dictates where it is viable to hunt. There has always been too many newbie zones in this game. Give everyone a PoP travel book on character creation for all I care. The world needs to be "small" for a small server population.

[Zuranthium]

But, this is the thing that pisses me off. Build up before you branch out. Check out East Commonlands these days...the number of alts there begging for buffs off high levels. From all races, Iksars, Erudites, Wood elves etc. Races that don't even start remotely close to EC.

So they get a port, bind and SoW in 10 minutes and that fear is lost and they all just congregate to the fast exping of "buff me with all your druid buffs thanx"

It was pretty rare to see a non-barbarian/erudite/half-elf/human in Blackburrow. So too was it pretty rare to see a non-gnome/dwarf/high-elf/wood elf in Crushbone. But it happens all the time in P99 cause people know that if they just get a SoW/Bind/Port from a friendly druid they can go wherever they want and not fear travel at all. And thats what most resort to. Sending people like myself tells for ports, binds, and sows.

Yeah, these issues need to be addressed if the original quality of Everquest is ever to be recreated and maintained. Don't allow characters to get a teleport until they reach a certain level. Don't allow buffs to have an effect on a player that is vastly level inappropriate. Don't allow equipment to give players stats that are vastly level inappropriate.

As for the go to where people exp argument, if you add more zones, there is no way the existing zones + new zones will hold a population and sustain it unless more people join the game to fill those new zones.

Id like to point out that server population dictates where it is viable to hunt. The world needs to be "small" for a small server population.

I don't agree with this, however. I mean to a certain extent, yes, there needs to be a high enough base line amount of people in the area of the game you start out in for it to be viable to hunt there (if your class can not solo very well). Otherwise, though, there is no reason for zones to go extinct or for everyone to flock to a couple choice zones. It comes down to (1.) The zones being balanced properly in terms of risk vs. reward, (2.) The player profession and content design of the game being balanced properly such that a wide variety of class combinations form into strong parties, without any specific class ever being absolutely essential outside of epic encounters (3.) Content not being static and every single character needing to go to different places in order to fulfill their "quests".

[Bazia]

Cats on the moon! OH my! So bad!

What about kerra?

Not a valid reason.

A.) They weren't on the f'ing moon.
B.) Cat people are cool just not the Vah Shir models (if they were kerra isle models and had a starting zone on Odus it woulda been $)

[Davardo]

A.) They weren't on the f'ing moon.
B.) Cat people are cool just not the Vah Shir models (if they were kerra isle models and had a starting zone on Odus it woulda been $)

C.) What lives on moons that you know of? Nothing? So why are Vah Shir so bat shit crazy? It's just something people bitch about, any sensible person see's it as the reaching that it is.

EDIT: Also there is lore about luclin, it was unknown of because of Veeshans Veil or whatever that surrounded Norrath, completing the Plane of Sky and defeating the dragons removed the veil or some shit.

[ArumTP]

Cats on the moon was a problem because it created yet another need for newbie/low/mid/mid-high zones that we didn't need, in a time we already seemed spread thin.

[stormlord]

I'd have to say mudflation. It destroys old content. And then companies try to replace said content with a mediocre effort. It's usually something like 3-5 pieces of content for every 20 pieces of old content. It's also much faster experience to boot. The goal is to level up players. They also do this because they want to have updated graphics and mechanics. Since it would be a lot of work to update all of the old content, they almost always choose to just make something new. And for the same reason that it's too much to update, it's also too much to replace 1 to 1, so it's usually much less than what was previously offered. Most MMORPGs are guilty.

I could say this for every MMORPG. The answer is probably a diverse one. But the way I'd go about doing it is to prepare in advance and to have methods ready when population or dynamics change. For example, the people who designed Anarchy Online never thought it would last beyond 4 years. So their design included this expectation. Most MMORPGs make disposable content and do not intend on ever updating most of it.

And something else is when companies shift their ideas... (explained below)

Anarchy Online had a very robust design concept early on that removed a lot of grind from the gameplay. You could solo your way to max level. There was much less downtime. But then they saw how successful EQ was and decided to make the Shadowlands expansion. They wanted to pull players from EQ and have a more open world feel to things. Shadowlands depended a lot more on groups (teams) and added more downtime and did not have a grid or many of the other characteristics associated with AO in its earlier evolution. As a result, the expansion was mostly a failure. AO failed its audience and did not anticipate changing trends. This is another thing that MMORPG companies do time and time again and it usually has bad consequences.

Companies succeed when they do it right the first time. When they do it afterward it usually just fractures the community and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the game. Eve-Online is a exception. My advice to companies is KNOW WHO YOU ARE and be comfortable with your own skin. It's good to learn from others and it's good to try to attract players from elsewhere, but if you lose yourself in all the mess then you'll lose your players too. In the end, a company needs some confidence in itself. Do not look at what others do TOO MUCH. Be yourself.

I guess this is similar to what people call "vision". The problem with vision is it can be terribly wrong. While it does give a creator confidence and can keep a good idea going for a long while, it can also cause a bad idea to stubbornly stick around. So I am unsure whether to say a company or a group of developers should have a "vision". If Anarchy Online had had a vision and kept it then maybe they never would have made Shadowlands. Maybe they would have expanded on their original ideas rather than abandoning them. But it could also have turned out bad. Maybe they would have held onto something that did not work and could not persevere. Bottom line, a company should not let its vision and confidence blind it, but neither should it shift around too much.

[Littlestgnome]

Check out East Commonlands. The number of alts there begging for buffs off high levels. From all races, Iksars, Erudites, Wood elves etc. Races that don't even start remotely close to EC.

So they get a port, bind and SoW in 10 minutes and that fear is lost and they all just congregate to the fast exping of "buff me with all your druid buffs thanx"

It was pretty rare to see a non-barbarian/erudite/half-elf/human in Blackburrow. So too was it pretty rare to see a non-gnome/dwarf/high-elf/wood elf in Crushbone. But it happens all the time in P99 cause people know that if they just get a SoW/Bind/Port from a friendly druid they can go wherever they want and not fear travel at all. And thats what most resort to. Sending people like myself tells for ports, binds, and sows.

Which is fine, until those exact people crusade against Luclin for it ruining the 'fear of travel' lol. Or against PoP for PoP books etc.

As for the go to where people exp argument, that just came natural with... better gear + more zones. If you add more zones, there is no way the existing zones + new zones will hold a population and sustain it unless more people join the game to fill those new zones.

There is a huge difference between players of today utilizing other players/friends/coin for their travelling and levelling needs and the ability for any level 1 to traverse the globe without so much as having earned a single copper or speaking with another player. And again, the idea of that level 1 doing so without any fear of death, repercussion or even time constraint makes the game as a whole less potent than it was before. The Nexus started this trend and PoP compounded the matter exponentially.

The exp argument is not a mere matter of spreading the population too thin because now there's more zones. If the newer zones were on equal footing with their predecessors then this would be a more accurate claim. That was not the case however. Luclin made it so that anyone NOT levelling in the new zones did so at a clear dissadvantage whether it was via the potential item drops or the sheer exp gain potential, and it did so almost from the very first level of the game. The exp modifiers alone made Paludal the premiere choice for anyone over level 10. And again thanks to the spires this zone was readily available to virtually all playable races without even the slightest fear or effort. To make it even more enticing a city that could be bound to and was friendly to all was a mere zone away. The only thing left to complain about was the time it took for unassisted players to get there to which Sony responded with the PoK books which took even that consideration out of the picture.

[Kika Maslyaka]

http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2003/gu_20030101.jpg

[jainiseq]

EQ went wrong when they started replacing content instead of adding new content. Instead of oasis...there was Pauludel Caverns. Instead of Overthere... there was Netherbian Lair.
I'm sure we can all come up with more examples... but that's the bottom line if you ask me. They kept fixing things that need not be fixed.

[BrandeX]

I LOVED the Vah Shir, though yes it would have made more sense for them to start on Kerra Isle. Never did play Beastlord. That said, I HATED the Frogloks. Here's what they should've done: Instead of having them look so completely different than the old school froggies, they should have given you the option of playing one looking like the older frogloks (e.g., old graphics vs. Luclin). Second, rather than having them start in Rathe Mountains or taking over Grobb, they should have started in the Froglok city that was in Swamp of No Hope (or did anything good drop there? IDK).

That is just like AxClassic server.

[BrandeX]

I guess this is similar to what people call "vision". The problem with vision is it can be terribly wrong. While it does give a creator confidence and can keep a good idea going for a long while, it can also cause a bad idea to stubbornly stick around. So I am unsure whether to say a company or a group of developers should have a "vision". If Anarchy Online had had a vision and kept it then maybe they never would have made Shadowlands. Maybe they would have expanded on their original ideas rather than abandoning them. But it could also have turned out bad. Maybe they would have held onto something that did not work and could not persevere. Bottom line, a company should not let its vision and confidence blind it, but neither should it shift around too much.
http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2002/gu_20021025.jpg

[Vexxar]

Changing all the zone models killed it for me, just wasnt the same game after that

[Kevlar]

Luclin was bad but I played through POP. POP was well done, it was interesting battling all the EQ gods. Then the cheaters became rampant and the monsters with even worse names than the ones in Luclin came out in Gates of Discord. What a crappy expansion. Lost Dungeons and Ykesha were pretty bad too, getting rid of the cohesive world and replacing the game with instances. I guess they tried to out WOW world of warcraft, but it ruined the game and ruined what made EQ fun.

[Ikonoclastia]

To me it came down to betraying the customer base that had supported them for the customer base that they hadn't tapped into (casuals).

I think they saw that for every 1 customer they had who liked the difficulty of EQ there were many times more who would play if that difficulty was removed.

Would have been a smart move had Blizzard not seen that earlier and made a superior casual game.

Thats why we got instances, portals, etc etc, of course as someone mentioned above, if you get casuals you also get rampant cheating, ebaying, plat buying because of the "I work / study / rape hamsters 24/7, why should I work for stuff in game" mentality that comes with the casual crowd.

[Scavrefamn]

Bazaar was absolutely awesome, one of the best changes to EQ.
AAs were awesome.





Focus on raiding = Insta fail which killed the game.

This started with PoP and killed the game in GoD.

[Goraith]

It started going bad with Luclin and Pop was terrible. I hated AA's and the planes flagging was horrible. I'm sad just thinking about it.

[Excellio]

where/when do you think EQ Live went wrong?

SoE dev #1: We need a new expansion for EverQuest! Someone come up with some ideas for what this game needs!!

SoE dev #2: ... Cats.

SoE dev #1: ... Cats?

SoE dev #2: Yes. Cats. And they live... on the MOON.

SoE dev #2: Love it! Now get to work finding ways to ensure that players never enter any of the original game zones for any reason!

[fadetree]

Once the 'suits' got involved, money became the only focus. The 'Vision' became "We envision more money".

The problem was when they started focusing on how to attract more people. They asked people who left "Why did you leave?". Answer : "Too hard and we are bored". So they made everything easier and destroyed what made the game great. The question they should have asked was to the people who didn't leave : "Why did you stay?"

[Excellio]

Once the 'suits' got involved, money became the only focus. The 'Vision' became "We envision more money".

The problem was when they started focusing on how to attract more people. They asked people who left "Why did you leave?". Answer : "Too hard and we are bored". So they made everything easier and destroyed what made the game great. The question they should have asked was to the people who didn't leave : "Why did you stay?"

The trouble was making the game so much easier. Is the Bazaar a convenience? Absolutely. But before the Bazaar, I was trying to research a Mage spell that required Gloves of Rallos Zek. And I eventually did stumble across some (I got them off of an Aviak, if I recall). Even if I hadn't looted it, I would've been just as satisfied to be in EC when someone was selling it.

That sense of satisfaction is lost in the Bazaar. One can buy all the hard-to-come-by items in one place. Because of the increased availability, prices plummeted, making gear that was worth several hundred platinum available to any lowbie with 5pp in the Bazaar. This inevitably led to everyone being (what I'd call) twinked.

And then there's PoK. Not only can you get around the world without the help of a porting class, but PoK offered more destinations than a porter. It's not just a functional problem, either. PoK is a ludicrous concept. As a Wood Elf, if I decide to walk into Oggok or Neriak, I'll be attacked because they just don't like Wood Elves there. But in PoK, every race and class seems welcome in all parts of the zone, making me wonder why they included NPC guards in the zone at all. And then to cap it all off, you used to visit your home city, to buy spells and supplies, or at least, a friendly race's home city. But after PoK, there is little reason to ever travel to any of the existing cities, which is why hardly anyone ever does. I don't know for sure because I played so little of post-PoP EQ, but wasn't there an NPC in a zone adjacent to PoK that would summon your corpse for free, with no additional penalties or anything?

These measures did work to broaden the base of gamers who would play EverQuest because it opened the game up to people who weren't particularly creative or good at playing MMOs.

[Messianic]

Honestly, i'm not sure SoE made any mistakes that, at the time, the people involved in the field of MMOs would have done differently. Their goal was to make as many people as happy as possible.

People who say "greed" was the problem usually haven't looked into it deep enough to really see all the facets of the decline. The number 1 reason I found after discussing it with people who played through Luclin and beyond was The infinite creation of needless hurdles - the time commitment for some of the luclin and post-luclin content was so insane (counting AA grinding as one of the worst - the talent system was a massive improvement to the endless AA grind) that it turned people off.

Simultaneously, EQ became a massive, unending timesink yet possessing none of the original hurdles people complain were removed - i.e. transportation, corpse runs, etc. Which is it? Was it too easy and catered too much to the casual player, or was it too difficult and too much a timesink for high end players? Well, it can be both - but in retrospect our vision is a lot clearer than theirs was at the time they made these decisions.

The EQ model was mostly what made WoW so wildly successful. They were able to balance difficulty without needless hurdles - it takes a LONG TIME to travel on foot from odus to faydwer or odus to kunark (thinking in terms of the longest possible distance you have to travel without player/pok/translocator assistance) - it didn't take long to travel from, say, Darnassus to STV if you were high enough level - and after you did it once, it didn't take as long because you had the flight points. See the balance?

EQ attempted to find that same balance and failed. It's like balancing on a razor's edge, and it wasn't because of "money-grubbing" or some other unsatisfying, oversimplified answer (if they wanted only money, wouldn't they have made changes with more longevity?). They just missed the mark.

[Excellio]

The EQ model was mostly what made WoW so wildly successful. They were able to balance difficulty without needless hurdles - it takes a LONG TIME to travel on foot from odus to faydwer or odus to kunark (thinking in terms of the longest possible distance you have to travel without player/pok/translocator assistance)


But shouldn't it take a while? I see what you mean about needless hurdles, because you really shouldn't have to prove anything about your knowledge of the map once you've made the trip many times, but by the time you're that guy, in classic EQ, you most likely have the money to buy a port, or perhaps have joined a guild and one of your guildmates will port you.

The travel restrictions primarily affect new players who haven't made the contacts to arrange for a port whenever they want one. When a lvl 60 is waving around 100pp for a port, I'm sure there's a lvl 34 Druid or Wizard somewhere who will come pick him up.

To suggest that it wasn't about money is true, to an extent, I guess. I agree that any other developer would've gone a similar direction, but that's the trouble. Comparing SoE's means of making more money to any other developer's means of reaching that same goal, well, yeah, they'll end up going a similar direction.

I believe that EverQuest was a challenging game that required a lot of patience, and did feature many, many needless hurdles that added little/nothing to the experience, yet still sapped hours of your real life time. And I believe that SoE understood that as a business, you need to sell something more appealing to the customers, so they replaced the player-driven solutions with new stuff that was actually part of the game. Instead of scrolling through auctions in EC, there was a Bazaar that enabled you to buy rare and coveted items at level 1. Instead of building relationships with porting classes and learning techniques to obtain a port (like going to rings/spires, sending tells to porters to request a pickup), we now have a zone that not only enables you to travel much more easily, but also replaces the home cities altogether by selling all of the spells, supplies and other items that you used to buy from merchants in the guild where you turned in your tattered note.

Yes, there were many needless hurdles in Classic EverQuest, but with a bit of creative thinking, the players devised ways to overcome those issues and still enjoy the game. The changes with which I take issue are the ones that welcome in the players (and their credit cards) who lack the creativity, social skills and capacity to appreciate the player driven systems.

[kazroth]

Honestly, i'm not sure SoE made any mistakes that, at the time, the people involved in the field of MMOs would have done differently. Their goal was to make as many people as happy as possible.

People who say "greed" was the problem usually haven't looked into it deep enough to really see all the facets of the decline. The number 1 reason I found after discussing it with people who played through Luclin and beyond was The infinite creation of needless hurdles - the time commitment for some of the luclin and post-luclin content was so insane (counting AA grinding as one of the worst - the talent system was a massive improvement to the endless AA grind) that it turned people off.

Simultaneously, EQ became a massive, unending timesink yet possessing none of the original hurdles people complain were removed - i.e. transportation, corpse runs, etc. Which is it? Was it too easy and catered too much to the casual player, or was it too difficult and too much a timesink for high end players? Well, it can be both - but in retrospect our vision is a lot clearer than theirs was at the time they made these decisions.

The EQ model was mostly what made WoW so wildly successful. They were able to balance difficulty without needless hurdles - it takes a LONG TIME to travel on foot from odus to faydwer or odus to kunark (thinking in terms of the longest possible distance you have to travel without player/pok/translocator assistance) - it didn't take long to travel from, say, Darnassus to STV if you were high enough level - and after you did it once, it didn't take as long because you had the flight points. See the balance?

EQ attempted to find that same balance and failed. It's like balancing on a razor's edge, and it wasn't because of "money-grubbing" or some other unsatisfying, oversimplified answer (if they wanted only money, wouldn't they have made changes with more longevity?). They just missed the mark.

Excellent response. To be honest, none of us can really say what the climate was like at the "EQ headquarters" when all these decisions were being made. Company climate can make a huge impact on the product that gets put out. I think the previous poster made a point that the vision got lost somewhere - and that's not to say it got lost in the "money" aspect (EQ was a product, money had to be made or it failed as a product) - but the root of what made EQ what is was got lost in the developers' minds. They saw other MMO models and rather than trying to separate from the pack, they let the beta wolves rip out their aging throat.

Or was it the suits who were simply dictating company policy? "You will implement this, WoW has it - and it will be implemented in 6 months for our next expansion." So many good companies have been destroyed by this kind of policy. Look at Ford during the 60s/70s (think Pinto) or Kodak (one of the largest companies on the planet, today financially bankrupt - loss of ethics is so key to these failures).

Anyone have any insight into the internals of the company at this time? Would make for a hell of a book.

[Kope]

I've noticed a reocurring theme from the posts here.

Many people said Luclin started it, Pop expanded that and GoD killed the game.

IMO luclin had some problems but also had some great ideas.

Generally people really enjoyed pop except for the PoK books.

Now on to the point of my post:

Generally the only reason people can come up with for disliking GoD are the names, and the zones. It's relatively well known that GoD was an expansion before its time so it was too difficult for the currently geared and leveled playerbase to enjoy it at the time.

Heck, when GoD came out, most of the servers hadn't done PoTime yet but people were still trying to push their way into the new zones. I never thought GoD was a bad expansion, it was actually quite fun when you got into it, but it was just released too early.

[Messianic]

I've noticed a reocurring theme from the posts here.

Many people said Luclin started it, Pop expanded that and GoD killed the game.

IMO luclin had some problems but also had some great ideas.

Generally people really enjoyed pop except for the PoK books.

Now on to the point of my post:

Generally the only reason people can come up with for disliking GoD are the names, and the zones. It's relatively well known that GoD was an expansion before its time so it was too difficult for the currently geared and leveled playerbase to enjoy it at the time.

Heck, when GoD came out, most of the servers hadn't done PoTime yet but people were still trying to push their way into the new zones. I never thought GoD was a bad expansion, it was actually quite fun when you got into it, but it was just released too early.

I felt Luclin was actually a really awesome expansion except for the bazaar (although i'm conflicted on that), pok books, and the nexus. Most of the leveling zones, etc were really, really awesome. Underground zones, more noob areas, etc...

And people express so much incredulity of "Cats on the Moon," but they don't complain about stuff like humanoid frogs being the primary mob in arguably the top end-game dungeon in Kunark, or Lizard-people, etc. I think people making fun of "cats on the moon" became more of a catchy way to insult something but there are plenty of equally or more ridiculous things in game that people don't insult quite as much.

FF2 went to the moon. What's wrong with that?

[Excellio]

FF2 went to the moon. What's wrong with that?

Yes, yes they did. And in keeping with tradition, I vote that we official change the class name from "Bard" to "Spoony Bard"

Oh, and FF2 did it in a giant mechanical whale, when they could've just used magic or something.

[fadetree]

Some people want an actual sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, not to mention the thrill of actually doing something 'dangerous'. In order to generate that, you need to impose difficulty and the real potential of loss. In a digital game ALL difficulties are by definition artificial. There is a line, however, at which difficulties are too, well, difficult. It's a race between how determined you are and how bad the difficulty is. The job of the designer is to draw that line correctly. Often if an imposed difficulty has some kind of real world corollary, like travel distance or mob 'level', it enhances the experience while still being functional as a difficulty. If it appears random or nonsensical then you can easily get into the 'annoying' category. For people like these, the game is actually about what you DON'T have and CAN'T do (yet), not what you do have and can do.

Some people want to spend as little time as possible, and encounter as little difficulty as possible, and still have fun. They don't want to bother with any difficulty above the most modest, and they want what they want when they want it. They (apparently) aren't willing to trade the possibility of any kind of actual loss ( i.e., time or money) in order to gain potential satisfaction at completion. They don't want to be annoyed, and they don't want to suffer through random crap. At its extreme, they want a big red WIN button. For these folks, the game is about what they CAN do right now.

Although I am biased towards the first group, I think both are perfectly legit, and a hard-core difficulty wonk is not necessarily any cooler than the guy soloing Cazic on the EZ server after an hour.

Observing the MMO gaming trends, I have to say most people are in the second category. The reason that EQ1 is still being played at all, and especially the amazing creation of this server, is that some people are in the first category. Enough to support a new game that costs xxxx million to create? No way. Enough to support the continued existence of servers like these? You bet.

[fadetree]

Yes, yes they did. And in keeping with tradition, I vote that we official change the class name from "Bard" to "Spoony Bard"

Oh, and FF2 did it in a giant mechanical whale, when they could've just used magic or something.

Whale? lol really?

[Earshel]

Personally, I feel that EQ Live went wrong when they removed the arena from the bazaar. It's where I spent most of my time and I was absolutely crushed when they did. That's when I stopped playing every day.

[Excellio]

Observing the MMO gaming trends, I have to say most people are in the second category. The reason that EQ1 is still being played at all, and especially the amazing creation of this server, is that some people are in the first category. Enough to support a new game that costs xxxx million to create? No way. Enough to support the continued existence of servers like these? You bet.

And there it is. It is about money, and it really needs to be about money. I'm not sure what the operating costs are for this P99 server, but I'm sure it's significant. I can't imagine the costs of developing, publishing, marketing the game, and then maintaining the ongoing server to run the game.

When people (like me) complain that SoE made decisions based solely on money, we can't really take issue with that while remaining fair. If the development of EverQuest wasn't about making money, it would've never been created, or if it had been, it would've been on such a small scale that I certainly would never have heard of it. It was the prospect of profits that made the game accessible to most of us.

[Excellio]

Whale? lol really?

Oh yes! In the American version of the game (Final Fantasy II for the SNES), the official name of the ship is "The Big Whale", while in the newer released that more closely resemble the Japanese version (Final Fantasy IV for the Super Famicom), the name seems to have changed to "The Lunar Whale".

There's even a fat bird on board the Big Whale that will hold items for you if you run out of room in your inventory.

[kazroth]

And there it is. It is about money, and it really needs to be about money. I'm not sure what the operating costs are for this P99 server, but I'm sure it's significant. I can't imagine the costs of developing, publishing, marketing the game, and then maintaining the ongoing server to run the game.

When people (like me) complain that SoE made decisions based solely on money, we can't really take issue with that while remaining fair. If the development of EverQuest wasn't about making money, it would've never been created, or if it had been, it would've been on such a small scale that I certainly would never have heard of it. It was the prospect of profits that made the game accessible to most of us.

Yep, as I was saying on a D3 forum; unfortunately, a lot of recent trends in the gaming market just don't match up to most of our (our being players of a 13 yo game) desires. Good post.

[Scavrefamn]

Raids killed EQ.

If raids hadn't been such a huge focus in PoP and GoD, EQ would have been fine.

[envino]

I'm sure all this has all been said, but this is a subject that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. You can't really point to a specific moment in time that EQ went wrong, it's more the evolution of the philosophy, a chipping away, until one day you wake up and the "magic" that was classic EQ is gone.
I lay the blame, mostly, on the day that WoW launched, and everybody saw the megabucks that rolled in as a result of that.
WoW is a great game, but WoW has no magic. Wow is a cartoon colored cheap thrill that is fun for awhile, but soon becomes a treadmill of gear up, wait for the new expansion, quest through that as fast as you can, so you can gear up for the next expansion. That's it. It's easy, it's accessible, its fun for awhile, but it ain't Magic. It's because of that ease and accessibility that WoW makes billions - and this is the problem - developers aren't trying to make gaming magic, they are trying to make billions of dollars. People like those of us on this site that like our games to have "it" are a minority, most people want a quick, easy thrill ride that requires no real investment, on then its on to the next big thing. EQ2, SWG, WoW, Swtor,Lotro, Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, Warhammer Online, Conan, et. al. All big budget beautiful games, completely devoid of Magic.
You see, Magic (that's what I'm going to call the "it" that EQ had in the old days) is hard to attain, both for the developer of the game, and for the player.
The first thing you need to do to get the magic mojo, is that you need to achieve immersion. The world needs to seem large, dangerous, challenging and interesting. Immersion is inconvenient and time consuming, and the majority of people won't play a game that is at all inconvenient. Most concessions to convenience kill immersion.
Fast travel is the perfect example of this. In WoW, I can get anywhere in under 5 minutes with a combination of teleportation and a flying mount. All this does is make the world seem not like a world at all, but a lobby with portals to rooms to instantly go see.
In counterpoint to fast travel, you have classic EQ. Anybody who has done the Stein of Moggok quest understands this. I did this quest ONCE, 11 years ago, and I still remember it. Why? Because it was immersive and fun, and amazing, and it was a !@#$%^&*. The most difficult part, as a DE necromancer, was the travel. I remember having to go all the way from Neriak to qeynos one night, to get a certain fish that was only found there. This is travel at its finest, overland, through extremely hostile territory, where the penalty for failure is to so the whole thing again, only this time naked. I did it. I did it alone. I used every trick in the book. I hid. I sneaked. I prayed. I ran. I fought. I trained to zone, I feigned death. In the end, after an hour or so of sweaty palmed adventure, I arrived in qeynos. What a thrill! That same quest, in WoW? Port to a nearby zone, ride my flying mount for 2 minutes, land in the city, buy what I need, hearth back. 10 minutes tops. No immersion whatsoever, give me my trinket now. I still have that stein of Moggok in the bank, I logged back in not long ago to check on it.
Corpse runs also add to the immersion. Death needs to sting, and it needs to sting badly. Otherwise, why have it at all? Death in WoW is so unnoticeable that it is no penalty at all. Consequently, living in WoW has no sweetness. Live or die, who cares. Give me my trinket. Nobody ever quits WoW out of frustration. Most quit from sheer boredom.
Running is inconvenient, boats are slow. Immersion is magic. Ports instead of boats, teleporting everywhere, the guild lobby instead of corpse runs - these were the killers of EQ immersion.

The second ingredient of magic is community. Friends. Enemies. Frenemies. I cant remember who I grouped with last week in WoW. On p99 I instantly recognized a name I hadn't seen in 10 years. You need to need people. They need to need you. That is Magic. Lets start out with WoW again. To find a group, you push a button. Bam. Insta-group, with insta-people in an insta instance. You rarely speak to these people, they arent even on your server usually. Lets run through this thing as quickly as possible and give me my stuff. That's it. Contrast that with EQ - This tale is an old one, and as common as dirt on the plains of Karana. One day I fell into the pit in Befallen, like many a moron before me. I had absolutely no chance to get my corpse back, it had my hard earned harvester on it, my cool black robe that took me weeks to get, everything valuable in my EQ life. I needed my stuff back, and I needed help to get it. Desperate, I stood by the entrance, and I bawled for help. SK by the name of Sutekh shows up, accompanied by his friend khisanth the wizard. These guys arent much higher level than me, but they are game to help me, so we start out. After hours, after wiping, and calling in the big guns to help us out, we FINALLY got my corpse out of there. A bond was formed that day that lasted for years, until khisanth got too sick to play from an illness, and Sutekh pretty much quit with him. I spent the next 3 years in the company of those guys off and on. THAT is the EQ magic. It takes effort to get to know people. It takes effort to ask for help. Its inconvenient to depend wholly on someone else. Its what being a human being is all about, and its what EQ tapped into. Magic.

Community builders are:

Not being able to solo very well. Most people will solo if given the choice between that and finding a group, especially if its just as easy to progress that way.

Needing others to rescue you, and being in a position to rescue others. In a modern MMO, there are very few things you can't do for yourself, and these are generally trivial. In EQ, oftentimes you needed someone to help you get back EVERYTHING you own. And, just as often, someone was there to do it.

Needing to interact with others in general. Needing buffs, needing groups, needing help, needing advice, not being an island unto oneself.

I know this is long and if you've read this far, you're an old-school EQ player for sure, with an attention span longer than that of an earthworm. The problem is, there are few of us, so few in fact, that catering a game to us is financial suicide. Modern MMO's aren't communities, they are conveyor belts, millions get on one end, millions get off the other end when they are done. Old EQ was more than a game, it was an extension of life, and that, my friends, is magic.

Can I say this did it or that did it? No. It was a slow dying of the light.

Which brings me to Project 1999. This is the place for us, for sure, we who know what magic is and how to keep it. I'm so very glad I found some "keepers of the flame" here, and I hope we can keep it up for many years to come. Ill be donating regularly, and trying to recruit more players, because this is like a rebirth to me, a chance to go home again, and I want it to last a long time.

[Messianic]

...

Love this post. Long, but good.

[kazroth]

Envino, your post brought a tear to my eye. You definitely get it, my friend, see you in game.

[azeth]

The sole-killer of EQ was itemization. All arguements can be boiled down to this.

To be honest, the only expansion hat didn't suffer from poor itemization after Velious, was surprisingly Luclin. (given I quit the moment my guild killed Quarm, like within 25 minutes of it)

Luclin, however, introduced us to the first hints of pussification - The Nexus and Bazaar.


edit:

In hindsight, we ignore the fact that Kunark class armor was outdated the minute Velious opened. Somehow, early EverQuest didn't suffer. Whereas when PoP opened we really began to question the direction of the game.

I remember clearly thinking the first time I saw Plane of Fire loot, "So I've raided enough to have geared myself out in VT and Ssra gear, in addition to having spent a hundred or more hours gathering key pieces... for what?"

[Messianic]

Azeth - you play at all anymore?

I still remember making my first 500-1k cleaning up the HK bodies you made :P

[azeth]

Azeth - you play at all anymore?

I still remember making my first 500-1k cleaning up the HK bodies you made :P

I don't at all my friend, I don't even have it installed any mas.

Battlefield + Civ V occupy some of my free time lately, I don't know what happened to my gamer personality.

Gone with my youth I suppose.

[WizardEQ]

envino, great post! Hit the nail on the head with what Classic EQ was and still is on P99.

[Danyelle]

The sole-killer of EQ was itemization. All arguements can be boiled down to this.

To be honest, the only expansion hat didn't suffer from poor itemization after Velious, was surprisingly Luclin. (given I quit the moment my guild killed Quarm, like within 25 minutes of it)

Luclin, however, introduced us to the first hints of pussification - The Nexus and Bazaar.


edit:

In hindsight, we ignore the fact that Kunark class armor was outdated the minute Velious opened. Somehow, early EverQuest didn't suffer. Whereas when PoP opened we really began to question the direction of the game.

I remember clearly thinking the first time I saw Plane of Fire loot, "So I've raided enough to have geared myself out in VT and Ssra gear, in addition to having spent a hundred or more hours gathering key pieces... for what?"

I gotta agree with this

Basically anything I could say or any argument I could make has already been made (and in fact I may have already posted earlier in this thread and forgot lol) so basically let me boil this down as best I can.

Flames aside, most people that assume Luclin killed EQ are either jumping the gun, or mad about the graphics change. Plain and simple. The ONLY difference (again...graphics aside) that Luclin introduced was AAs, Bazaar, and Nexus. Now I get a lot of crap for liking Luclin so let me lay out my reasonings in detail and maybe, just maybe, people can understand my thoughts on the matter.

The Bazaar I didn't like, I liked the convenience however it killed several aspects of trade in EQ. A good example would be you could no longer barter prices down on someone. It also became a little harder to buy low and sell high, which is one of the primary methods of dosh attainment in EQ. The Nexus I wasn't bothered by. Why? Because there was one spire per continent (which, with the sole exception of Faydwer and Odus, required you to make a long and/or dangerous trip to reach) and then it also wasn't instantaneous. There was quite a long delay between arriving and getting ported, unless you got lucky on arrival time (which the same could be said for boats...). AAs didn't bother me either. In fact having something to shoot for besides the level cap, not to mention the debates over which ones to get and when to get them or what level to start grinding them, added a bit more substance to EQ imo. Long story short, the only thing I didn't like about Luclin was the Bazaar. That's it. And, in my heart, Luclin is still Classic. This is of course an opinion but whatever I'm entitled to state it as much as I am to have it.

For me Planes of Power was the actual start of EQ's decline. A decline that finally hit rock bottom with Gates of Discord. Every once in awhile a good expansion still shows up (I for one actually liked Seeds of Destruction, and The Buried Sea brought back boats..despite the fact that it doesn't really matter because lolPoK but still..) but ultimately the "magic" as earlier referenced could not be recaptured by GoD...it was gone. It was still very much a good game...but it was not the same. By any means. They began to stop putting new things in that benefited the game, and instead put things in that casualized the game (*COUGH*corpse summoners*COUGH*) until eventually there was no challenge. It became a WoW-clone grind fest.

That's my 2 cents

[aerah]

I really think Velious was the shining example of what an expansion should have been. When Velious was released, I was a rogue and barely of level to get a group at the Ry'Gorr fort in the East Wastes. I spent equal time in Velious and old-world and Kunark dungeons leveling the rest of the way to 60. Velious also re-defined the raid scene, while still strengthening the idea of the community. I spent countless hours farming class armor at the ToV exit (Kael faction represent) and had a fun time doing it. Keys for the content were simple-enough, kill a dragon - turn in an item. Done. The Coldain ring was probably one of the best events I've ever done in EQ, just because it was the first time something like that was implemented. It also got the whole zone involved.

My beef with Luclin wasn't the bazaar (EC did the same thing, bazaar just made it easier and you didn't have to sift through posts on your server board to find things), or cats (who cares, if someone wants to be a cat that's their own problem), or the nexus (Velious introduced quest hubs where lighties and darkies congregated) ... it was the artificial time sinks that really felt like they were time sinks. For some reason, farming armor didn't bother me. Farming ore for shissar bane weapons? That blew. Farming whatever for seru bane weapons, even worse. The VT key was a terrible, terrible waste of time as well. In addition to all that, if I wasn't doing things to help people get keyed, I was soloing (with a second cleric account logged in healing me) in whatever zone had the little mushrooms and fungus beasts to AAs. With that, the sense of community was diminishing quickly. So while the raid content was fun enough (even though VT was just a huge zone to exploit aggro radii), and I did love my lunar fungus tunic, I didn't like the lack of innovation in the Luclin expansion.

With the sense of community gone, the final straw in my (and a lot of my friends'/guildies') EQ existence was PoP. The idea of back flagging, combined with progression choke points that could be blocked by one person effectively ended progression and we all ended up quitting or cutting our play before the 5:1 rule was implemented. As a pretty hard core raiding guild, I imagine that it should have been viewed as one of the best expansions - but the flagging system was a hurdle that no one really wanted to deal with anymore. Lacking the sense of community, having the raid arena taken EQ offered no more magic.

[envino]

In hindsight, we ignore the fact that Kunark class armor was outdated the minute Velious opened. Somehow, early EverQuest didn't suffer. Whereas when PoP opened we really began to question the direction of the game.

I remember clearly thinking the first time I saw Plane of Fire loot, "So I've raided enough to have geared myself out in VT and Ssra gear, in addition to having spent a hundred or more hours gathering key pieces... for what?"

Yes. You can do this once in awhile, every couple of years maybe, but every 6 months? Im perfectly happy for this thing to end at Velious and then just chill. Wow has this problem right now, the second you get all geared up and happy it starts all over....its like running a marathon where they move the finish line just as you reach it every time. But, there is nothing much else to do but get gear, unless you enjoy killing 10 rats over and over.

[Scavrefamn]

The Bazaar was one of the best things to happen to EQ.
No idea why people bash the bazaar.



I absolutely positively 100% agree with Envino's post, brilliantly put(If I may, I would love to quote it sometime in a video or something :P)
I also stand by my earlier statement with a minor change;
Raiding was the main source of EQs problems.




Remember the EQ player summit that was held with the developers shortly before the EQ mass exodus?
I DO!

It was attended by the top raiders of the top level guilds in all of EQ.
Basically these guys said that everything EXCEPT for raiding was pointless and needed to be streamlined so more people could hit the higher end raids.

Don't believe me? Google it.
These raiders and raiding in general are the cause of EQs demise.

[Danyelle]

The Bazaar was one of the best things to happen to EQ.
No idea why people bash the bazaar.



I absolutely positively 100% agree with Envino's post, brilliantly put(If I may, I would love to quote it sometime in a video or something :P)
I also stand by my earlier statement with a minor change;
Raiding was the main source of EQs problems.




Remember the EQ player summit that was held with the developers shortly before the EQ mass exodus?
I DO!

It was attended by the top raiders of the top level guilds in all of EQ.
Basically these guys said that everything EXCEPT for raiding was pointless and needed to be streamlined so more people could hit the higher end raids.

Don't believe me? Google it.
These raiders and raiding in general are the cause of EQs demise.

This is how shit like GoD was formed.

[Barrier]

After PoP was when it started going downhill for me. I mean seriously. There are mobs stronger than the Gods of Norrath? Was that what they were trying to tell me (and sell me)? I ended up lasting to about The expansion that got us to 80? Maybe 85 and then me and my 800 AAs said f this and quit for good.

[porigromus]

I think AAs should have been obtained by higher level grouping with lower level system. A end level players stats and abilities' power level is reduced to the groups level while grouped. They still obtain the same abilities but they are not as powerful.

When they are grouped and they are in this reduced stats and abilities mode, they are obtaining AAs.

[Barrier]

Every server had the guy that was THE tunnel seller. We had one and when Bazaar hit, he quit, I think. That was pretty sad because everyone knew him.

Envino's post was a very good post. My previous post was a quick off the cuff response. I loved Pop even though it was hard as hell. Was the flagging idiotic? Sure at times. The screwed up projections that you had to hail and sometimes they were bugged and if you hailed them more than once you stole a flag chance from someone else. That sucked. I hated that, because you always had someone hailing them over and over and many times it was a backflagger from another guild. And they never stayed up for a very long time, either.

I hated instances. Yeah, they stopped all the ya ya-ing that we even have now on this server - When a warrior in one of the raid guilds declared Trak is FFA, the sever blew up. RnF went ballistic after that but it was funny and fun (for the ones not involved, maybe the ones involved didn't like it).

One thing my casual raid guild did was raid one expansion behind. Sure it was not as hard in anyway to be raiding stuff designed for characters 5 levels lower, but you didn't all have to be geared real high. I stayed for the friends. I didn't have a problem with AAs at first. You could have 200 or so and you had all the AAs you needed and you didn't need all the TS stuff and other weird AAs. But then it became a huge timesink to get all the AAs. Expansion after expansion. I didn't mind the time sink to level, but the added time sink to get the AAs wore me out. I was in a guild with a warrior who maxed his AAs and levels almost it seemed two weeks after the expansion was out. He did that for however many expansions all the way to Omens, I think, and then he finally quit. Kandraax on Lanys. He was one of the top warriors across all servers - for AAs. He always had all AAs and the total amount banked as well.

Anyway, AAs ruined it for me eventually.

[necrosaurio]

Anyway, AAs ruined it for me eventually.

You wouldn't believe how much of a grind AAs are now. Before, AAs were an extra, now you need lots of AAs to simply be able to function at your level.

Some classes have 8000+ AAs.

I tried PLing chars in Live. It took about three times longer (or more) to get 750AAs than to get my SK to level 73. As a tank you NEED the AAs to be able to last more than 1 hit.

Itemisation also went completely wrong. All items now give more or less the same +stats per tier. There no longer is a need of choosing between different items depending on the main stat, just get a higher tier and everything will be better. Don't even bother looking for armor from a previous expansion, it will be rubbish.

For me, another annoyance are augments. You can barely function without having an augment on each slot, which means adding 20 more items . Of course, there are melee augments and caster augments... and that's it. Everybody looks for the same things.

Finally, level limited spells such as charm and mezz are horrible unless you keep up to date. Back when there were 50 levels, you would get a spell that lasted for 10, 15 or even 20 levels. Now, unless you have the first spell from the new expansion, you can't even function in the lowest tier because everything is higher level, which prevents you from grouping unless you have friends to take you along.

[Huggz]

Is that a gram of cocaine and your horrible teeth? Tell me that isn't you... oh lord.

[xarzzardorn]

seriously though it was Uqua + WoW

[webrunner5]

[QUOTE=Excellio;601021]And there it is. It is about money, and it really needs to be about money. I'm not sure what the operating costs are for this P99 server, but I'm sure it's significant. I can't imagine the costs of developing, publishing, marketing the game, and then maintaining the ongoing server to run the game.

I think I heard once awhile back that the server cost was like $500.00. I may be mistaken. Not sure if that is a week, month??

[Arclanz]

Nice post rez. One thing killed EQ. Alienating their players either by mudflating their gear faster than they can replace it; or by continually changing the game mechanics so the EQ of today differs from EQ last year. We are now on version 18 of Everquest, yet they still call it Everquest. Rediculous. The game is retardedly different. SOE could not have screwed this up more. Wisely managed, EQ would have millions of subscribers today.

[Houdiny]

Most of the consensus I get from players in game say PoP killed it for them. I found PoP to be one of the better expansions. Gave people a reason to EXP while max level. The raiding was great. I loved the encounters. And the progression, nothing felt better than your guild entering the PoTime for the first time. The accomplishment, the rewards to come. Was a great feeling.

There are a lot of things SoE has done to EQ I didn't approve of. But in the end I kept on playing it. I think I quit after the Seeds of Destruction expansion finally. Went a long way with it. Had a lot of fun. To me it was more about the relationships built playing the game. I was in one solid guild for many many years. And I didn't want to leave the game simply because of them. I think the people that were in great guilds (not just successful) found ways to enjoy the game even in it's later stages.

But alas one day I woke up, most of the original crew was gone. Seen pieces of gear with over 1k hp/mana on them and said...this is getting out of hand lol

[fadetree]

I liked PoP ok. Hated stuff after that.

Insane gear inflation, blurring the lines between classes, removal of travel, huge amounts of AA's needed to do anything, the ridiculous defiant gear dropping like rain all contributed to me quitting live. But the final straw was the Mercs...I just couldn't believe they did that. It's just a fundamental violation of what EQ was all about.

I suppose they figured that since they weren't getting many new subscribers, they might as well trash the low game and focus all on the raiders, butchering the low game so that any fool could get to max level in no time. Of course, once there, they have to grind eleventy billion AA's.

[Raavak]

I liked PoP ok. Hated stuff after that.
EQ had started to go wrong by PoP, but really, after you've gone to their planes and killed all the gods, and quad-god Quarm, everything else seemed kind of pointless. Storyline-wise it started hurting.

[toddfx]

Make another toon? Twink it to hell and back? Get bored and quit,

Twinking is one aspect that is always overlooked in threads like this. Of course it is the players choice, not the game developers, but to me twinking is definitely a factor which degrades the true experience of EQ or any game for that matter.

In my book, twinking is cheating. It is a blurry line indeed, but twinking your level 1 character with 10k worth of gear seems pretty disgraceful. I can admit I have done my share of twinking (and PLing, etc.), but looking back on all my EQ experiences, the best have ALWAYS been the FIRST characters on said servers.

I certainly know it is very difficult to resist the urge to transfer over just a few hundred plat for provisions, but the instant you do even that, the entire game changes. It's no longer about finding your way in the rough, collecting all the loot you can (and loving it), and steadily building a character you can be proud of. It leads you to overlook and bypass 90% of the things you would have been excited about if you were playing the game like it was meant to be played.

Over-twinking your young characters takes away everything there is to look forward to other than that next DING sound, and dramatically accelerates the gap of time before you run out of worthy content and get bored. Maybe that is the way some people like it. But to others, it's the surefire way to get burned out.

Anyway, I know this is not 100% on topic, but in my personal experience twinking and taking big shortcuts is definitely an aspect (which was directly accelerated by numerous expansion features) that contributed my past EQ experiences to go wrong. :eek:

TL;DR: Blame it on the damned expansions! :cool:

[Dullah]

Cats on the moon
This.

It went wrong when verant (mcquaid and crew) no longer had creative control. They made the game great. Their absence made it suck.

[Arclanz]

I feel the same way, Todd! (and also guilty of (very) little twinking and PL'ng*, myself)

Came back to EQ for LDON, and when I saw a paladin slay undead for 5k, I suddenly felt moved to play my main again. I two boxed my 65 Cleric to get my Paladin from 55 to 60 and about 100 more AAs. AAs were a lot more time consuming back then. One AA per hour was considered very good at that time.

[Houdiny]

I don't buy the whole "twinking ruins games" factor. I tend to lean towards it helping more than hurting. And here is why.

We all play this game, and the objective to the game is to get experience and level up and achieve nice things. There are a handful of people who have no interest in this at all, but to my experience playing MMO's these are few and very far between. The status quo is level up, have fun, get stuff, enjoy the game.

And here is where I lose this argument. If someone is twinking a character they are making life on them much easier, and the groups they attend. I ran into a few monks with Fungi tunics leveling up and it was great. We didn't have enough players for a full group and the fact that the monk could tank and not need much if any healing allowed me to enjoy a group that otherwise wasn't going to happen.

Not to mention that when you are looking for people to fill a group roll the majority of people don't take whoever is available. They take the best fit for their group. What's going to reward them the best exp and the best chance of items dropping.

Twinking and re playability is essential to EQ I think. It is one of the reasons the game has stayed alive and going for so many years. While others without twinking and re playability have faded away into the sunset. I'm not saying that is the only reason why but I think it plays a large part in the longevity of Everquest.

[SirAlvarex]

For me it was a combination of PoP books making the world seem smaller, and just plain better games coming out at the time. I loved DAoC pre-expansions. SWG was tons of fun pre-NGE. Everquest 2 was also awesome for a few expansions (then kicked up again after Kunark was released).

Then I kind of out-grew the whole experience with college. Now I play EQ because it's the ultimate carrot on the stick game. It's hard to earn stuff, so when I do end up getting some planar gear/that epic drop, I feel awesome.

Oh, and the sandbox nature of everything is killable, and we're all given a set of tools and can use them how we wish. Hell, in some games the idea of "fear kiting" or "snare kiting" is considered exploits. Here it's just a great way to XP.

So I don't think EQ went "wrong" for me until PoP. And even then, it was only "more wrong" than the other options at the time. I never played after PoP, so I don't know how terrible it really got.

[webrunner5]

I think the twinking thing is way over the top on a group setting. Solo I think it does help a lot. But in a group I don't think it makes a tinkers damn. Ever notice if you are solo in a zone you can kill a mob about as fast as a 3 person group can at the same levels?

I have never asked what gear a person has here or on live for a invite. Most people on here pretty much suck for gear. Big deal. Who doesn't want nice gear, but group wise I think it is pretty much a waste.

[Droog007]

I just want to chime in and say that I too think Shadows of Luclin was the beginning of the end. I didn't mind the premise of cats on the moon and much of the content was actually pretty cool. No, what killed it for me was the new models. Bandy-legged dwarves built to sit astride horrific horses... /vomit. I had to put my lovely pot-bellied troll on a strict diet in order to get standing med.

The original EQ designers did some masterful work with very limited polygons.

I wouldn't mind if we got some basic AA's at some point, but I love the idea of stopping at Velious.

[Daliant17447]

What killed the game for me, in order:

1) Luclin Models - (specifically the dwarf model) and the necessity to use the new model if you wanted to use a mount.
2) Bazaar - The death of EC tunnel really took away a great part of what EQ was.
3) Plane of Knowledge portals - One of the great things about EQ was the need to rely on other people to get things done, it forced you to interact with other players in the game and be social. PoK was one of the first "self sufficient" features implemented that took away from the need to interact with other players.
4) Each new expansion (starting with PoP imo) made all previous expansions obsolete and empty - I personally feel like instead of releasing an expansion with all new zones, they should have instead added new raid encounters and dungeons and such to the old zones to bring life back to them.
5) Lost Dungeons of Norrath - Never cared for the instancing or augmenting system
6) Ykesha Armor Dye system - One of the things I loved about EQ was the ability to glance at someone and be able to tell what kind of gear they were wearing and be able to quickly tell who was a noob and who was elite.

[Vicatin]

What killed the game for me, in order:

1) Luclin Models - (specifically the dwarf model) and the necessity to use the new model if you wanted to use a mount.
2) Bazaar - The death of EC tunnel really took away a great part of what EQ was.
3) Plane of Knowledge portals - One of the great things about EQ was the need to rely on other people to get things done, it forced you to interact with other players in the game and be social. PoK was one of the first "self sufficient" features implemented that took away from the need to interact with other players.
5) Each new expansion made all previous expansions obsolete and empty - I personally feel like instead of releasing an expansion with all new zones, they should have instead added new raid encounters and such to the old zones to bring life back to them.
4) Lost Dungeons of Norrath - Never cared for the instancing or augmenting system

Pretty solid list.

I played EQ since release, and quit around LDoN.

Think of it like this. When EQ was built, it was a 1 story house, instead of building infrastructure, they simply built story after story on to this house. At first, it held up, supporting story 2, 3, and maybe even 4, but after awhile building more stories straight up and not building any new infrastructure at the foundation made this little EQ tower topple.

[choklo]

I agree with everything you said Daliant, but I'd like to add one more point. If you took a break or weren't "hard core," it was a b_tch to catch up. The entire back flagging thing was a failure.

[falkun]

6) Ykesha Armor Dye system - One of the things I loved about EQ was the ability to glance at someone and be able to tell what kind of gear they were wearing and be able to quickly tell who was a noob and who was elite.

This is true, but with only 1 armor texture per race per armor type, you can only do so much blue/green/gold/silver/green plate before it all looks the same. I did like that WoW's armor sets were all unique, but then they started going to the tiered system with different colors and now I think you can even put old graphics on new pieces, so its virtually the same as the dyes. Basically, armor stagnation is an eventuality and there is nothing that can be done about it.

[Lagaidh]

While I don't wholly like the different feel the game took on in Luclin, it still seemed mostly like the game it was supposed to be. I loathed the bazaar. Planes of Power was alright too even though I understand the arguments against transport books. Gates of Discord was a mistake; it came out too early. Omens of War had its moments.

What killed live EQ for me was the constant moving of the goalposts that began to happen with GoD. Expansions were dropping too fast for me personally and I felt like I was constantly playing a game of keeping up instead of tuning out in a fantasy world. It became a second job. Do you have these AAs? What about these augments? Oh and you need this focus effect and that piece of base gear. You didn't do all that? Hm. There may not be a spot for you in the next raid then, Fred over here would be a better offtank for the team.

Fuck that. I know tanking is a gear dependent profession, but before the expansions and different ways to squeeze stats on your character began plopping out of SoE's studios like so many blobs of feces from the back of a rhinocerous, you had a range of options you could employ and be viable. When min/maxing became the only way to contribute to your team I was pretty much through... 2005ish.

[djstaid]

I think Luclin was the beginning of the end. Seems a lot of people on here feel that way as well. I even enjoyed Luclin, but I knew that it was just going to get worse. PoP was really where I stopped enjoying the game as much.

I continued to play here and there until around GoD. I left for a few years and then my buddy brought me back to start fresh. Rolled a new necro and got all the way to 60 something and just completely lost interest.

Just a shame that it took me this long to find P99. That would have been awesome to start this up a few years ago. Such a shame that EQ went the way that it did, but Sony tends to have that effect on games.

[Xadion]

EQ Ended with PoP for me...it was a good place to end and made since with the story/timeline... the story and xpacs just got insanely convoluted after PoP

Luclin hung on because it was a full level xpac much like kunark- PoP ended a lot of people because it was a raid level xpac as was everything that was not half-assed :-P

I liked everything from classic to pop- some dragons and dundgens stuff was fun- but ehh instanceing was fun but not...

[lawll]

EQ went down hill with kunark imo. That's when the mmo market shifted from roleplaying a hero to getting fat loot and cock blocking raid mobs.

[Noselacri]

The game tried to be too mainstream, but it didn't have a mainstream playerbase. WoW did and succeeded with that model, but it didn't suit Everquest. EQ was about the spirit of the game, the world and the community. It's why people tolerated sitting in the same camp for six hours at a time, day after day. It's why people accepted that some levels could take weeks. It's why it was okay that others could interfere with your ability to raid. Then they took away the reason why these things were acceptable, so they had to change those things as well, and in the end the game just wasn't recognizable.

Instances were good because the game needed it at the time, but it would have been better to keep the game like it was back when instances weren't necessary. I think they started to approach this problem even in late Velious, though - raid gear was too far ahead of tradeable gear, but only a tiny percentage of the population had access to it. There wasn't enough content for the whole server, but it was no longer possible for those with access to it to spread the rewards around.

Suddenly there was only one way to be someone: join a serious raid guild. There used to be that, then trading, and finally being good at playing the game, since gear didn't make quite so much of a difference. As the endgame gear started to become vastly superior and available only to the elite, the majority lost their reason to play the game. Instead, SoE tried to make everyone an elite, but it just made everything feel so underwhelming and pointless. By then, the game had lost the integrity that makes people care about it, so most left.

[lawll]

EQ was about the spirit of the game, the world and the community. It's why people tolerated sitting in the same camp for six hours at a time, day after day. It's why people accepted that some levels could take weeks. It's why it was okay that others could interfere with your ability to raid. Then they took away the reason why these things were acceptable, so they had to change those things as well, and in the end the game just wasn't recognizable.



People only stuck with EQ because nothing was remotely close at the time. The mass exodus after wow came out pretty much says thats what the players wanted in a mmo game.

[Atmas]

Historically when asked this question I had answers similar to other people:Complaints such as the addition of PoK which made travel trivial. Adding GoD which "streamlined" raid content, actually just making it boring cut and paste content. Or just going past PoP which was an epic storyline where you killed the gods, a good finish. Some people didn't like Luclin because going to the moon broke their opinion of the fantasy motif.

But the truth is that it was an inevitability.

At any point you add new content it either is on par with old content gains giving you a sense of new encounter but no stat gain or it gives you stat gain thus eventually trivalizing the importance of old content. The thing is neither of these are sustainable, as eventually with the former you grow tired off the repetitve re-hashing of new encounters for no progression or with the later the feeling that you are just doing tier after tier for a systematic x% increase in stats to do new content.

Take a thing like AAs, some people (myself included) loved them because you had an oppurtunity to increase your characters power, others hated that it was just forced added objectives for progression. Much like other forms of Artwork whenever something is added it polarizes people.

Velious was a great expansion but you couldn't do another 5 expansions on similar premises of progression. Some people seem to feel like the game would keep going indefinitely if no content was added. I think the turnover rate and impending soaring numbers and eventual decline with the launch of Velious will be a testament to the fact that you are basically damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[Houdiny]

People only stuck with EQ because nothing was remotely close at the time. The mass exodus after wow came out pretty much says thats what the players wanted in a mmo game.

Not sure I agree with this entirely. I think WoW released at the best possible time and had some things go it's way to become what it is. Couple of things I think affected it that weren't necessarily because of EQ.

WoW released at a time when people had devoted more time to EQ than most generally any other game they had ever played. At first EQ was new to them, and they played it religiously. Then came along something new. Much like DAoC it took a lot of EQ players initially. The thing WoW had was a niche market. The casual gamer. A lot of people simply did not have the time to devote that EQ requires. So they played WoW because they could accomplish a lot more for their time invested.

And once the ball got rolling so many people started playing WoW that everyone else fell in line and played it because that is where everyone was at. If you can play a game with several of your friends opposed to a game you couldn't your going to choose the game where all your friends are.

There was no doubt WoW had some very intriguing features and things that other MMO's didn't. But it didn't take long for every MMO to copy and paste all the features that people liked. So it wasn't so much the features that kept people playing. It was an easy playing environment, with a vast subscription base, and most of all it didn't require a monster of a computer to run (not that EQ did) but other games released after WoW were graphics intense and had several issues. With WoW you could basically go out and buy a Wal Mart machine and run it fairly well.

I think there was many things that added to WoW's success. I refer too it as "the perfect storm". As a game, the lore isn't all that great, graphics are sub par, and gameplay is average at best. I tried it a couple of different times because all my friends were playing it. But it didn't take me long to get burnt out on it. The recurring theme was people left the game and you knew they were going to be back.

Another variable I think plays into it is the fact that many people started playing WoW because the MMO industry had gotten so big. And there was so many people playing it that for many WoW was their first MMO experience. And we all know how that first experience feels. It's hard to let go. I remember playing Counterstrike and the guys in my clan disappeared to play WoW. A kind of game they had never even tried. They mostly played FPS's It was amazing to me at the people who were actually playing the game.

But as I said once you have 3 or 4 million subs everybody you know is playing it and it's "the place to be"

[lawll]

So WoW's success has nothing to do with the amount of polish that no mmo game has ever seen. One of the most flexible game engines ever made that gets updated every expansion (looks nothing like it did back in 04). Huge amounts of 3rd party addons that's still has better support that any other mmo. So screw all the milestones that blizzard has met with WoW, I hate it because the got rid of they grind and went straight to the point. Also EQ is just a very unforgiving game. Raiding in WoW is wayy more complex then just tank and spank aoe fearing dragons. You seem very bias with blizzard/wow totally skipping over everything good it has done for the mmo world.

[Houdiny]

So WoW's success has nothing to do with the amount of polish that no mmo game has ever seen. One of the most flexible game engines ever made that gets updated every expansion (looks nothing like it did back in 04). Huge amounts of 3rd party addons that's still has better support that any other mmo. So screw all the milestones that blizzard has met with WoW, I hate it because the got rid of they grind and went straight to the point. Also EQ is just a very unforgiving game. Raiding in WoW is wayy more complex then just tank and spank aoe fearing dragons. You seem very bias with blizzard/wow totally skipping over everything good it has done for the mmo world.

Oh I'm sure I am somewhat bias. I wont argue that. And I do think WoW has brought some great things to MMO's. I noted that. There are some great things that WoW has done. Their subscription numbers and longevity alone indicate that. I am not saying WoW is a bad game either. It's just easier for people to play. Pull up your map, run around grabbing the blinking quests, then go where the blinking tells you to so that you can complete said quest then follow the blink to turn it in.

It brought about a solo mentality that was not prevalent with EQ. Sure people in EQ solo'd but you had to be the right class. And even then it was conditional. Everything about WoW tailored to the casual gamer is all I'm saying. And I do think WoW has a lot to do with the good in MMO's. But it also has a LOT to do with the very bad in MMO's also. If I wanted to solo my way to max level on every character I started I wouldn't pay $15 a month to play an MMO. I would simply get a RPG off the shelf at Wal Mart. The true definition of the MMO is exactly what it stands for...massive mulltiplayer online. It's a bunch of people working together to accomplish things. Not running through grabbing every quest in sight and completing it like a mindless zombie.

The endless amounts of fly by night companies developing up half ass games. Everyone wants to get in the market because they see the money being made from WoW. You don't have people like Brad McQuaid pouring their visions into a game completely ignorant to the financial side. You get companies rushed by investors to get their product out and compete with WoW. And it always fails. And of course this isn't Blizzard and WoW's fault. It's the idiots who can't grasp what makes a business prosper.

A few friends of friends tried making a transition from WoW to many other games over the years. And it never lasts more than 2 days. They get sick and tired of adventuring around finding the NPC they are after. If it isn't spoon fed to them they give up. I enjoy running around exploring stuff. I like seeing the game the devs make for us. I like finding little things that a dev went the extra mile to create. And I will be the first to admit I am probably in the minority with that. But a lot of aspects of MMO's these days are overlooked because everything is so linear. Go here, do this, go there, do that. It's cheaper, easier to develop, and much quicker to make. And therefor to me simply not as good. If I want to take a group off the beaten path and exp somewhere nobody else does I should be able too.

And I'm no SoE fan boy either. I'm not tooting their horn by any means. I have my beefs with them as well. And I also like some of Blizzards games, and like them as a company. I just think a lot of WoW's popularity had to do with it being so easy a caveman can do it.

And on a last note, EQ raiding is more than just Dragons and fear. Should try life outside of Kunark/Velious. I ran into many many complicating strats along the way in EQ until I quit live. Sure at the beginning the strats were easy. But that was when MMO's were new. All of them started getting more complex. It wasn't like WoW created tough raiding. MMO industry evolving has done that.

[Zithax]

Art in Luclin was a real dissociation from classic EQ, that and the first gimmicky concepts were introduced.

[kaev]

People only stuck with EQ because nothing was remotely close at the time. The mass exodus after wow came out pretty much says thats what the players wanted in a mmo game.

_Some_ people, not all. There's no denying that WoW had (and has) a much broader appeal than EQ, but broad != universal. AFAICT, a fair few of players who abandoned EQ when the game became unrecognizable to them, never played WoW or did not stick with it if they did (the former is my experience.) But it's not correct to generalize that either.

But, as I said in my earlier post, it's the players who really changed the game, Verant/SOE just went along with the crowd. It wasn't Verant/SOE that created thousands and thousands of Gnome Necromancers when some website pronounced that the "best" race/class option. It wasn't Verant/SOE that filled the planes with PUGs full of shit-talking loot whores in the weeks/months leading up to Kunark. Just as it isn't the P99 staff that filled this server with stupid numbers of solo-kiting Bards and ridiculously over-geared Monk twinks.

You want to know where EQ Live went wrong? Look in the mirror.

[raptorak]

I think EQ went wrong when they made the melee classes - they suck balls and melee combat is no fun at all, and the warrior class has to be the most boring implementation of a warrior in any game I have ever played. You only have to play WoW for 5 minutes as a warrior/rogue to see that the melee system is far more dynamic and interesting, and for that WoW killed Everquest.

Want to have fun as a melee you better roll a hybrid - OH WAIT - 40% exp penalty in a game with ridiculously slow levelling.

A decaying skeleton hits you for 2 points of damage!
You try to hit a decaying skeleton, but miss!
A decaying skeleton hits you for 2 points of damage!
You try to hit a decaying skeleton, but miss!
A decaying skeleton hits you for 2 points of damage!
You try to hit a decaying skeleton, but miss!
A decaying skeleton hits you for 2 points of damage!
You try to hit a decaying skeleton, but miss!
A decaying skeleton hits you for 2 points of damage!
You slash a decaying skeleton for 1 point of damage!
A decaying skeleton hits you for 2 points of damage!
You are unconscious!
A decaying skeleton hits you for 2 points of damage!
You have been slain by a decaying skeleton!

It is a shame really, because the casting classes in this game are awesome as is the whole world, most of the Classic zones and atmosphere.

[Houdiny]

I guess the biggest difference is play styles. Me and a couple of my buddies love a game that knocks ya down and kicks dirt in your face. We like a challenge. Everything is so much more rewarding. It's hard even getting a group, let alone one in a good place with a drop you might need. But when u get an awesome group you never want to leave.

With WoW it had so many things to aid the casual guy. The auto dungeon finder, the ability to log in with a few minutes to spare and still get something accomplished. Which is the cats meow for casual players. But not everybody likes that.

So I guess I am in the minority. I played WoW to max level early on when the game initially released. I raided a bit and then quit. I went back a couple times starting new characters but it just didn't grab me.

But yes WoW has done many many nice things for the MMO industry. It got a ton of people involved that never would be that's for sure. I think that is more Blizzards marketing scheme then the game though. Not many MMO's are out there and in your face like Blizzards. You go to wal mart there is boxes after boxes, all kinds of gameplay cards so even a kid can play it. They did a great job of making sure their product was in the publics eye. Something a lot of MMO companies don't do. They just offer downloads.

[azeth]

WoW killed Everquest..

Debatable. WoW was released 11/2004.. Sony had driven EQ into the ground by that point.

Consensus is EQ peaked at Velious, trailed off at SoL, picked up with PoP and the rest is history from 2003 on.

This is ridiculous revisionist history, but if somehow WoW premiered in 2002 or earlier, it wouldn't have been nearly as successful initially. WoW really hit the jackpot with both timing (absorbing jaded ex-EQ players), and recognizing that the masses have interest in gaming for 1-2 hours at a time.

[Lagaidh]

One more thing I'll say is WoW had PvP in Wintergrasp that is the only PvP to ever hold my interest for more than a single session...

[Supreme]

Legacy of Steel had several Blizzard employees in the guild. As a result it was of no surprise that WoW addressed alot of the gameplay issues EQ had.

But Luclin and the "Bazaar" with instancing really killed EQ. Took away social aspects of the game.

[kcabeblli]

I played WoW for 6 years and EQ for the first 4ish years and WoW never once made me feel like I did playing EQ. I miss things like being able to buy twink gear and sitting in the tunnel trading.

I miss grinding in CS on Wyverns on my Necro and running around tracking shit on my Druid. I cant say I miss anything about WoW really. WoW is a great game and is 10 times more polished than most MMO's to date and I had fun playing it but they restricted so many things to make things "fair" because crybabies wanted casual this and casual that. Hell, in EQ a set of twink gear can last you 50 levels but in WoW everything is NO DROP so you can only use it till you get an upgrade in a level or 2.

Having an epic weapon in WoW didnt mean shit because it only lasted till next raid. I remember having my epic on my druid in EQ and it lasted till PoP when I got the scimitar in PoValor I think.

I do like WoW but i'm done with it and thats why I came back here. I'll play GW2 and this till EQnext releases and im sure ill be 40 by then heh.

[choklo]

One thing EQ did well(largely) was challenge players. No, it's not THAT hard, but it's a lot harder than most other MMO's. If you don't do your job or pay attention, you can expect to die or get booted from your group. I think Dark Souls was in this same ballpark. I loved it and recommend it to all. It's not an MMO, but it's a blast and challenging.

[Breeziyo]

I think Dark Souls was in this same ballpark. I loved it and recommend it to all. It's not an MMO, but it's a blast and challenging.

http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee35/Hellfire5794/1333829115976.gif?t=1345251218 Sums up the game.

[choklo]

That clip rocks. Makes me want to fire up my PS3 again.

[Arteker]

Debatable. WoW was released 11/2004.. Sony had driven EQ into the ground by that point.

Consensus is EQ peaked at Velious, trailed off at SoL, picked up with PoP and the rest is history from 2003 on.

This is ridiculous revisionist history, but if somehow WoW premiered in 2002 or earlier, it wouldn't have been nearly as successful initially. WoW really hit the jackpot with both timing (absorbing jaded ex-EQ players), and recognizing that the masses have interest in gaming for 1-2 hours at a time.

isnt aslso a douche move from wow they send beta test to many of the top eq high ranking guilds . for free.

myself got a beta key for euro servers months ebfore the release.

[Buttcheeks]

Luclin...

The new models and animations were bad.

I like Kerrans as a slender race, but Vah Shir being huge and buff was weird.

Cats on the moon, of course, made no sense to me lore-wise.

Interaction with other players was changed to interaction with NPCs. No more asking for teleports. No more buying or selling things in EC or GFay.

Luclin had some cool things about it, but it just felt too much like a space station. It didn't make sense that powerful NPC wizards would just stand around outdoors, teleporting people there (but only there) for free, regardless of their race or class. It would have been really cool if you had to go to Erudin, Neriak or Felwithe and talk to the Wizard Guildmaster to get teleported.

Cat people can't be monks? But they can be bards? C'mon! /Gob

[rhinowls]

I didnt start eq until Luclin, so my breaking point was GoD. I did come back and work my way with my guild through DoN content, but the shine wore off though my guild was awesome and filled with RL friends. I hated when they started changing old world zones and particularly the starting city revamps. I've meandered through half a dozen other MMOs mostly soloing because i havent found a community like my old guild since, mostly just ignorant jagloads. Started here yesterday and I forgot how hard low levels were and how scarce money can be. I got so used to the cookie cutter, select one of these text choices, every quest giver has a giant indicator world we've moved to that this is refreshing and infinitely frustrating for me at the same time as I dont remember everything i used to about this game. I am looking forward to getting my shiny new iksar sk his Greenmist someday. Well and I have to load up the software on my desktop once i get home from this trip, because this crappy old laptop locks up the app everytime i die.

[Telin]

When the magic started going away for me was:

1) The new Luclin models lacked a lot of creativity. They were way different from the original artistic models. They should have just created an updated version of the classic models. They were oversized for the environment. The animations were terrible. Spell casting animation was lazy. They always leaned like they had one leg shorter than the other. And they sat leaning over like they had hemorrhoids.

2) Revamping of classic zones. Now they could've done a much better job. They could have used the old zones' characteristics and replicate them the best of their ability with improved textures and rounding off the boxiness. Instead they made everything bland and oversized as if somehow that was more impressive. It created so many empty spaces that you lost your curiosity to explore. Architectural structures starting looking the same. Every city building looked copied and pasted. There was no uniqueness.

3) New music. The original melodies were brilliant. (Thank you Jay Barbeau.) I could actually enjoy myself while the songs were looping. The music actually changed in the zone depending on where you were. So they blended in perfectly with the environment. When those PoP mp3s came out, I couldn't stand listening to the songs more than once. They were either slow and drawn out or so overbearing (combat music) that you couldn't think.

4) Instant teleportation stones. One of the best things about classic was the necessity to have to travel through new places or rely on others to get you there like wizards, druids, and bards. If you were new to the game, you would have missed a lot of content because you could bypass a lot of zones. You kind of lost your connection with the environment and your character because of this.

I could go on.. lol

[dredge]

.

[Ryndar]

GoD

Finding shit more powerful than the GODS themselves living on Norrath the whole time was kinda stupid to me.

[Kika Maslyaka]

GoD

Finding shit more powerful than the GODS themselves living on Norrath the whole time was kinda stupid to me.

umm its not stupid if you keep in mind that they came from a different realm, where "animals are more powerful than your gods" to quote Mata Muram.
Plus, Inny/CT were already complete wussies by the time Velious raiding was out. So yeah, shit stronger that gods was pretty common since classic time.

[Autumnbow]

Luclin was when things started to go wrong. I guess the teleporting in those 4 areas was okay, because you still had to a wait a while and it was only those 4 places. But including the bazaar was a bad idea, and the worst part was that there was no pvp in the Nexus or the bazaar. The new graphics were bad for some races (short races), and not too terrible for others, but their introduction meant that no one would ever get cool and unique armors like in Velious ever again. I really liked the vah shir, and the beastlord class; don't really get the whole "Omg cats on the moon is so dumb!" argument.

Luclin did have some very great raids, and I have mixed feelings about AAs. To me, as a very casual player, it kind of felt like a slap in the face. I was like level 50 when Velious released, and level 58 when Luclin released, it was like being max level had become literally unattainable. They introduced some great and arguably needed skills, for casters and hybrids, but I don't understand why they couldn't have just given the classes those skills. I suppose they wanted to keep people playing, and it gave the more hardcore a reason to continue playing their mains, which was good (but not for the low level population).

PoP is where everything but the raiding scene died. Instant ports in every city, to a zone where pvp was disallowed. Just terrible.

[Kika Maslyaka]

Luclin was when things started to go wrong. I guess the teleporting in those 4 areas was okay, because you still had to a wait a while and it was only those 4 places. But including the bazaar was a bad idea, and the worst part was that there was no pvp in the Nexus or the bazaar. The new graphics were bad for some races (short races), and not too terrible for others, but their introduction meant that no one would ever get cool and unique armors like in Velious ever again. I really liked the vah shir, and the beastlord class; don't really get the whole "Omg cats on the moon is so dumb!" argument.


PoP is where everything but the raiding scene died. Instant ports in every city, to a zone where pvp was disallowed. Just terrible.

They were suppose to re-do the Velios textures using Luclin engine, and the point of a new engine was : ability to add new texture faster, easier and in great quantity, per official SOE statement.. Which they never did of course=)

PoP was the gold era of EQ raiding - it improved raiding 10000% No more tank and spank fights, and plenty of targets to choose from even for non uber guilds.

[azeth]

Instant ports in every city, to a zone where pvp was disallowed. Just terrible.

Damn if PoK and PoTranquility were PVP enabled that'd have been intense.

[Slave]

There is a giant nebulous monster in the room whenever MMORPGs are discussed, and it is an absolutely vital mechanic that can change the entire course of a game, yet it is nearly never referenced. This problem has been alleviated and partially solved by some more modern games, but I'm not sure that EverQuest could do it except by having a radically lower population.

The problem is this: the entire multiple server paradigm.

What people love about EverQuest anymore isn't JUST that there's only one Vox on your server. Right now, SHE IS THE ONLY VOX IN EXISTENCE for a cool, Classic EQ experience.

When resources are limited, they are more valuable. When they are absolutely UNIQUE, their value is almost impossible to overestimate. The awesome thing about EVE Online was this:

EVE Player 1: Oh man I was in this amazing battle last week in Curse region where like 8 carriers jumped in and saved a Titan.
EVE Player 2: DUDE I WAS THERE!!

WoW Player 1: Oh man I was in this awesome dungeon last night...
WoW Player 2: Cool! What server are you on?
WoW Player 1: Broken Skull, it was wild!
WoW Player 2: Oh ok, I'm on one of the other 100 servers. Never mind.

EQ Live went wrong even before they launched the game, in the multiple server model. There's really no coming back from that... it needs to be a fundamental part of game design from inception.

[Kika Maslyaka]

ehem, I really want to know how you plan to fit 100k players with pre 1999 tech into a single server?
Zones were laggy and crashing with 40-60 people in it allready, and servers were only at 3.5k max

[Slave]

ehem, I really want to know how you plan to fit 100k players with pre 1999 tech into a single server?
Zones were laggy and crashing with 40-60 people in it allready, and servers were only at 3.5k max

Wire graphics, I don't care. Give me the world to play with.

[Autumnbow]

Yeah you're right, there wasn't a giant fucking arena in the Bazaar.. Oh and the giant fucking arena in the Bazaar wasn't one zone over from the Nexus either.

Don't blame the developers for being terrible because you were terrible at EQ1 back in the day. Just because you weren't 60 when Velious came out or when Luclin came out doesn't mean it was anyone else's fault but your own. Some people had the required amount of gameplay, some people didn't maximize and group up with quality groups, either way the game was never designed for everyone to be at max level before the next expansion came out, until Velious hit. Even then, future expansions weren't always dependent on you being at max level. PoP had zones a sub-60 could exp in that were some of the best exp spots around.

There's no reason to be rude, honestly. The arena in the bazaar was a nice touch, but it didn't make up for the bluebie hand-holding that took place there and in the Nexus. I don't understand how a red player could ever substitute real pvp with an arena lol.

And I said I had mixed feelings about the AA system, not that it was all bad. Being a casual player does not translate to being terrible at EQ, lol. It was nice getting into the upper 50s, and thinking "Almost there!" I was excited about not needing to level anymore, and it discouraged high levels from making alts. For most higher level people, I'm sure AAs were a good thing.

[Kika Maslyaka]

Wire graphics, I don't care. Give me the world to play with.

there are text based mmos still out there where everyone in the same world. maybe you should try those out, see how popular they are ;)
EQ wasn't the first mmo neither, but it was the first one to use best 3D graphics possible for MMO to support hundreds of models.
Thats why it killed all the previous text mmos and Ultima

In the same way WoW brought this to a next level they gave you more bang for your buck, allowing people with older PC play a modern game (compare to EQ2 that still lags at max setting on modern PCs today).

Visual and ease of access are what brings people in (specially today).
Of course its the content that makes them stay, but its always starts with visuals.

[Slave]

there are text based mmos still out there where everyone in the same world. maybe you should try those out, see how popular they are ;)
EQ wasn't the first mmo neither, but it was the first one to use best 3D graphics possible for MMO to support hundreds of models.
Thats why it killed all the previous text mmos and Ultima

In the same way WoW brought this to a next level they gave you more bang for your buck, allowing people with older PC play a modern game (compare to EQ2 that still lags at max setting on modern PCs today).

Visual and ease of access are what brings people in (specially today).
Of course its the content that makes them stay, but its always starts with visuals.

Three of the most successful MMOs of all time were 2D graphics. Runescape, Diablo, Ultima Online. I'm sure I don't even know half of them. Mostly 2D. What brought people in was the gameplay. What created gamers in the first place were the games you mentioned. Text games. ASCII games. MUDs that began to bring people together in a way that they'd never experienced. It wasn't the graphics.

There was a time when people preferred content over visuals. That may have changed for the bulk of humanity, but I was there, man. I was THERE. And we are still the greatest generation.

The Arch Mage

[SCB]

Three of the most successful MMOs of all time were 2D graphics. Runescape, Diablo, Ultima Online. I'm sure I don't even know half of them. Mostly 2D. What brought people in was the gameplay. What created gamers in the first place were the games you mentioned. Text games. ASCII games. MUDs that began to bring people together in a way that they'd never experienced. It wasn't the graphics.

There was a time when people preferred content over visuals. That may have changed for the bulk of humanity, but I was there, man. I was THERE. And we are still the greatest generation.

The Arch Mage

For someone who claims to have been THERE, you have a weird tendency to remember Diablo as an MMO when it most assuredly was not. Also, apparently Runescape is something other than a laughing stock?

Weird.

[Kika Maslyaka]

ehem Diablo is NOT an MMO :rolleyes:

Now want to compare Ultima numbers with EQ numbers?

the text muds are still out there btw

[huggies]

SoE

soe may have done things wrong but they created the best progression based system for mmos ever

AA points

anyone who thinks aa points are bad is a nub

they also made planes of power the best expansion for any game ever, anyone who thinks it sucks is a nub and no one cares about them.

[skourg3]

I felt like EQ started to go downhill around GoD. I started at the beginning of Velious, so I can't speak for a whole lot before that, but Velious and Kunark content was pretty fun to go back and do.

I enjoyed Luclin; they did some really cool things. There was that monster war in that one low-level zone where owlbears and grimlings and such invaded each others caves. Ssra was awesome. The VT key quest was annoying, but pretty neat how it forced you into so many zones. VT itself was pretty boring simply because every boss fight took half an hour, much less the trash between it, but overall was okay. There were also a lot of side bosses in Luclin that were pretty fun. There were also some places you could level for awesome XP.

PoP was the pinnacle of EQ for me, especially after they removed the flagging req for PoV, BoT, PoS, maybe one other I'm forgetting. There were lots of cool things scattered around; PoJ was interesting, the stampede in PoT was cool, BoT was a lot of fun once everyone could get in there, etc. Things got to be pretty grindy once you got to the elementals because it took so much gearing (not to mention the occasional backflagging week) to get down the ele bosses, but they were also really fun and great XP. Except PoAir, that was awful. I didn't like how PoTime was instanced, though at 72 players it wasn't a huge deal. I dislike the instancing more in hindsight for it's affect on future MMOs like WoW.

The offshoot expansions were just alright. LoY added some content but was underpopulated in the higher-level stuff (like Hate's Fury). LDoN added some neat stuff that was somewhat enjoyable to grind out.

Then GoD hit. GoD wasn't bad, I found a lot of the single-group flagging zones to be pretty fun, but unless you had the right group for them it just ended up being more painful than it was worth. I only did one or two GoD raids before quitting the game, so I can't speak much after that, but GoD killed almost all interest I had in the game. It was sad.

[Kika Maslyaka]

LDON was a smart step to give smooth leveling content to casual players that game was lacking since day 1. Unfortunately it was repetitive, while pretending to be original (10x copy paste zones in 5 themes), and it was a band aid on an issue that was an inherit design flaw (game catering to hard core grouping and raiding, rather than casual playing).

GoD was the point where that design flaw was multiplied to a degree of 10. The difficulty was for the kind of player who were already elemental geared, yet it allowed open access to everyone, pretending to have casual zones in 45+ range, which pissed people off. The expansion was clearly over 65+ difficulty, yet the level cap wasn't raised until OoW (which was essentially quick fix to GoD failure), and only Elemental/Time+ guilds truly enjoyed.

It was beautifully done, the zones were awesome (specially after LDON copy and paste approach), the lore and theme was amazing. But it was unplayable and unusable by majority of players, even majority of raiders.

[HeallunRumblebelly]

I felt like EQ started to go downhill around GoD. I started at the beginning of Velious, so I can't speak for a whole lot before that, but Velious and Kunark content was pretty fun to go back and do.

I enjoyed Luclin; they did some really cool things. There was that monster war in that one low-level zone where owlbears and grimlings and such invaded each others caves. Ssra was awesome. The VT key quest was annoying, but pretty neat how it forced you into so many zones. VT itself was pretty boring simply because every boss fight took half an hour, much less the trash between it, but overall was okay. There were also a lot of side bosses in Luclin that were pretty fun. There were also some places you could level for awesome XP.

PoP was the pinnacle of EQ for me, especially after they removed the flagging req for PoV, BoT, PoS, maybe one other I'm forgetting. There were lots of cool things scattered around; PoJ was interesting, the stampede in PoT was cool, BoT was a lot of fun once everyone could get in there, etc. Things got to be pretty grindy once you got to the elementals because it took so much gearing (not to mention the occasional backflagging week) to get down the ele bosses, but they were also really fun and great XP. Except PoAir, that was awful. I didn't like how PoTime was instanced, though at 72 players it wasn't a huge deal. I dislike the instancing more in hindsight for it's affect on future MMOs like WoW.

The offshoot expansions were just alright. LoY added some content but was underpopulated in the higher-level stuff (like Hate's Fury). LDoN added some neat stuff that was somewhat enjoyable to grind out.

Then GoD hit. GoD wasn't bad, I found a lot of the single-group flagging zones to be pretty fun, but unless you had the right group for them it just ended up being more painful than it was worth. I only did one or two GoD raids before quitting the game, so I can't speak much after that, but GoD killed almost all interest I had in the game. It was sad.

POV, BoT...I don't think storms ever had a flag, but perhaps o_O. Also CoD, HoHonor, and PoTorment and PoTactics to my memory.

edit: these flags were still required for raid progression however.

[Vladesch]

Non instanced raids and cockblocking were a definite nail in the coffin for me. You could say I suppose that it went wrong right from the start when they didn't instance the raids, but that never seemed to be an issue (for me at least) until Luclin.

Being on Asian time, nothing was ever up. The "race" which so many people seem to enjoy (not that I can figure out why) just wasn't an option for us. Everything was killed a few hours before we logged on. Pretty much killed our guild.

I ended up moving to another server, and things weren't so bad.

Then oow came out, and I found to get my top mez spell I had to get a drop off a raid mob 3 times to unlock it. I could only get a group in a level appropriate zone with my guild since I couldn't mez anything. Good one SOE. Unlock a basic bread and butter spell behind a raid mob, but make me do it 3 times.

At that point WOW came out. Never looked back. Having my guild split up through cockblocking was a profoundly upsetting experience, and SOE can go die in a fire.

Liked the bazaar. POK books were irrelevant by the time they came out. (noone went to the old zones anyway) Who cares about cats and frogloks.

[eqravenprince]

Non instanced raids and cockblocking were a definite nail in the coffin for me.

I agree that cockblocking is an issue. Without instancing you end up competing against other players which I have no desire to do. If I wanted to compete against other players, I would join a pvp server.

[Diggles]

I agree that cockblocking is an issue. Without instancing you end up competing against other players which I have no desire to do. If I wanted to compete against other players, I would join a pvp server.

lol

[cken]

mercenary is murderer of killing the original spirit of EQ live, and that's the reason why i quited EQlive

[kaev]

mercenary is murderer of killing the original spirit of EQ live, and that's the reason why i quited EQlive

At that point you're exhuming the rotted corpse from a 6 year-old grave. Velious was the wrong turn with it's raid focus, Luclin was more of the same with "Cats on the Moon" for added extra-special loathsomeness, and then PoP redefined "group content" as "content for groups of raid-geared players, the rest of you can come back 3 expansions from now you're not important go away"

[Novacain]

i say i had fun up the end of pop, Gates is what i hated. in pop there where so many levels of raids where if you where the front runners you didn't sit there block other guilds you where off doing your own thing, hell we had friendships where you could get backflaging from other guilds.

[eqravenprince]

mercenary is murderer of killing the original spirit of EQ live, and that's the reason why i quited EQlive

Mercenary was a neccesary evil by that point in EQ because you had no one to group with. It wasn't that bad of a solution given the state EQ was in. It gave everyone the ability to solo.

[porigromus]

The problem, I think, is that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

In a group centric game like EverQuest, the model requires a constant influx of new players. New players have rely on the existence of other lower level players to group with (for the most part) or they're pretty much screwed. As the player base ages (meaning: gets to higher levels), typically there are not enough new players and alt characters for new players to group with.

This pretty much fucks the new players, giving them a poor experience which will only entice them to want to quit.

p1999 is no different. Playing my level 6 Necro, I found that there aren't enough players already exping in Befallen. That the best exp dungeon in the game, but no one is really doing it. So I can either find a new place to exp or try and get a group of my own together or form a 'PUG', which can be a bit of work. In the end, I had to get some friends together so we could do it. Bring your own group was pretty much the only feasible solution.

That is why I think games should encourage players to replay low level content. If this server ever implements AAs. I would hope the only way they could be obtained is being a max level character that joins a group of (1 or more) legitimate low level players of certain levels to obtain certain AAs. There must be at least 3 members to the group.


Example: To obtain AA: "Insert Description Here", a player must be max level that has joined a group of players level range 1-10 and obtain X amount of XP. The player will be reduced to that level while with group. The group must have a legitimate new person between levels 1-10 and must consist of 3 or more players. (This can be fulfilled with 1 legit player from that range and 2 max players that there level has been reduced. etc etc)


There has been various games that have made a similar system to promote low level play. It would be tough here because of power leveling. Preferably I think they should remove the ability to power level like WoW did.