Quote:
Originally Posted by maestrom
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I've been in this debate a few times over the past few months on the live forums leading up to the completely failed launch of the shitshow that is the latest round of progression servers.
Instancing did not kill Everquest. The people that were "harmed" by instancing were either RMT, who make money off of scarcity and the ability to deny access to content to others, and trolls who get off on taking from other players but don't want to play a real PvP game like Ultima Online (at the time).
Instancing did not make the encounters easier. It did not change the amount of hitpoints targets had. It just meant that you didn't have to deal with getting griefed (as anyone who has been a few guilds behind the top in PoP will tell you, people killing triggers at 2am so your guild couldn't flag was ridiculous).
The "evidence" cited by many people who think instancing ruined the game is dubious at best. They claim that EQ subs dropped off a lot when instancing was released. This is kinda true, but it ignores a lot of other things that were going on at the time. Many mechanical updates were made to the game around the release of GoD that made it impossible to play on many older computer. Some people were faced with upgrades of hundreds of dollars or buying a whole new computer in order to continue to play. Also, many of the mechanical changes completely broke many zones. There were screen shots of my guilds main tank sitting in Fire with literally every monster in field two on him, but not able to get to him because they had fallen below the world.
There was also the launch of the WoW beta, which took many people from my guild and most of my RL friends that played EQ. This was, I think, the biggest killer to EQ. Althought WoW wouldn't launch officially for another 9 months or so, new people were being added to the beta every couple of weeks it seemed, which took a huge chunk out of EQ. It's worth noting that many of my friends cited instancing as a top 5 reason they picked WoW over EQ.
I never understood why people thought Bazaar was such a bad thing. It made trading easier. You could still negotiate with traders, i often did.
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Boom. Hit the nail on the head. EQ was awesome in PoP. Could argue it fell off from there but I even enjoyed OoW a lot. After that I kinda stopped enjoying it very much and quit around Prophecy of Ro. People point fingers at bazaar and pok books and instancing. What really "killed EQ" is WoW. (Which btw is a game with lots of instances and an even easier version of the bazaar)