Quote:
Originally Posted by Messianic
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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)
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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.