Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[kazroth]

Originally Posted by Messianic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Kope [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Messianic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Excellio [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by fadetree [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by fadetree [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Excellio [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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.