[August]

Well, rambling responses inc:

1) Death penalty. The death penalty in EQ sucks. It's such a harsh penalty that the actual cause of the penalty needed to be rare. This meant that encounters had to be approached with a lot more caution - and that they couldn't be *too* hard. For progressive raiding, this is a bit of a problem. I probably wiped 250+ times to Ragnaros before our guild got him down. If that had been EQ, Ragnaros would have had to have been much less difficult - you can't CR that many times when you have to rez. And in reality, it's just a substitute - step. If you're raiding in EQ, you probably have the zone cleared. You probably have clerics nearby with click sticks. The reality is that it's just extra time you have to take to try again. Rezzing with a penalty (which is also a money siphon - brilliant) with your gear makes the game let you spend more time in enjoyable activities (actually playing) than sitting around. Unpopular opinion of mine for sure - don't get me wrong - I LOVE the death penalty in most aspects of classic EQ, but it just doesn't really fly with progressive raiding (at least in classic era when only one class had rez).

2) Itemization. WoW had way more itemization than EQ did, and had more textures than EQ did. You all just know all the items in classic EQ because there's *so few of them*. Concerning unique graphics - in vanilla wow I can think of a TON of items that had their own special graphic.

3) Class homogenization - probably my biggest pet peeve. They did this so you don't have to spend more time 'leveling' replicate characters as well as keeping you more interested in the focus of the game: The end game. EQ to me was about the journey up. WoW was about what you did once you got there. To that end...

4) Leveling - Dungeon Finder facilitated getting to the end game quicker - period. In a game where leveilng isn't important, are we that surprised that they made it even easier / anonymous.

5) Instancing - Face it guys, EQ would have been instance if made today. You can only put so much static content mobs into a world for a given population. We already see this in p1999 - rotations, forced respawns, this is all because we don't have instancing. No instances is great for the 'i want everything and nobody else should get it' attitude, but if you want to appeal to a common userbase, you need to make the content you spend millions developing available to anyone. There's nothing wrong with a few static mobs (like they did in Vanilla WoW) - but the world has to be a LOT bigger, or there has to be limited population, to do away with instances all together.

6) Auction house / Bazaar - Again, it's all about instancing. When resources are very plentiful and you have a huge economy with 50k+ on a server, shouting in a zone just doesn't work. I love the charm of a tunnel, but in any modern MMO with large playerbases, it's not going to cut it.


I know I used WoW a lot, but that's the game that ultimately pulled me away from EQLive. I was in PoT when FoH left Veeshan for good. I was the recipient of a LOT of stuff from people leaving as they 'were never coming back'. A lot of the things that EQ had trouble with, WoW corrected up front. It was a very good game originally - no class homogenization, dungeons were not in a dungeon finder, gear was well stratified and there were plenty of 'epic' quests that rewarded unique loot (including your class-sets 0.5, 1, 2, 3). Hell, it wasn't even really outlined how to get to max level at first (I grinded 52-60 in felstone field, what what).