Quote:
Originally Posted by Kayso
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I don't get the problem with the PoK books. They isolate players from one another?
/auction WTB Port to DL
/invite Druid_01
hand druid 50p
port
/g Thanks
/disband
Wow! What a meaningful and lasting relationship I've made. My game experience is so much richer for having a good friend like Druid_01. What a marvelous adventure! Good times. Good times.
Not a shot at Uteunayr, BTW. A lot of people say the same exact thing.
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I keep trying to write a response, but I swear it gets too wordy even for me. Let me try and break it down even further. Also, just because I write something lengthy here, doesn't mean I felt I was being attacked.
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Just trying to explain the logic.
It matters on 2 big fronts: Chance encounters, and reputation.
1) It doesn't matter if you make a meaningful and lasting relationship with the person. The mere act of having a social exchange has positive mental benefits to human beings due to the way our brains evolved, as we are a social species.
Chance meetings are known to have a statistically significant increase to feelings of social trust and political efficacy. Similarly, such encounters will still appeal to the psyche of the player, as this game is inherently a social one.
2) Reputation matters. If you're a total dick to people, consistently, you're going to find yourself getting less porters wanting to help you, less necros wanting to summon your corpse, less clerics wanting to rez you, and so on. So, instead of being a complete asshat to anyone you meet (as is the case in many MMOs today), people approach situations more reasonably.
When they introduced PoK books, and Luclin portals, and Priests of Luclin, what happened was a reduction into how much people had to care about their reputation. Most games today don't make players need other players, and so the player is free to be a dick to anyone else they meet.
Now, I often hear that people say "but then you're just forcing people to be nice!" Well, that may be true. That's how life tends to work. We are connected, socially, to other people in complex webs of interdependence, and so we are not always totally free to act however we want. If we are free to act however we want, we get League of Legends like behavior. What this does is creates a behavioral spiral, as someone who would be decent is dragged into the shit storm that is un-restrained shitty behavior.
However, if the shitty behavior comes with reputation cost, the average person (who I believe is more than fine being a reasonable player) is not dragged down, and you can get a very positive community, like Classic EQ had.
EverQuest had a lot of ways early on to push for reputation costs. You couldn't just pay $10 and change your name, like you can on WoW and most other games today. Further, to replace a level 60 toon was a major endeavor. So, your name counted.
Additionally, it took time to get places. So porting was necessary if you were ever in a rush, so you wanted to be on good terms with some druids, and preferably not be a douche to them.
Trading was face to face, so if you were that asshole, you weren't going to get many traders. This was curbed significantly by trader alts, but they weren't as prominent on live as they were here (although it did occur).
Corpse summons, rezzes... All of these things are shortcuts to what is a very long and arduous game. If you want to get anywhere fast, you needed to be relatively decent to others.
Even grouping emphasizes the need to have a good reputation. You get known as a lazy asshat, guess who's not getting invited to the group next time?
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Additionally, servers were made up of ~2000 players at peak hours? And there wasn't as much class clustering, it was far more diffuse. So you have approximately 154 of any class online at a time. Across 60 levels? And then of them, how many are /a or /r because they don't want to port or anything like that?
It created hardships at times, because some days, there simply wouldn't be porters around, or rezzers around. But that's the rough EQ game we all know and love. When they made these stones and things, they took away how much a player relies upon others, they made the game a bit easier and more convenient, but it ultimately meant players were not held accountable to the social mechanisms that the game used to have.