What happened with the poppulation

[Roth]

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

I never argued against playing EQ or that it's fun: I enjoy it and play on both Teal and Blue currently.

For your first point: I think a lot of developers anticipate and build for emergent game play, emergent gameplay is a good element that a lot of games try to promote. In fact, the amount of emergent game play/flexibility in classes in EQ seems a lot more limited than many other games IMO. That being said: EQ did nerf things, and not just emergent elements. And because we're playing in a specific time line we don't see all the nerfs and balances that the developers took.

And I would agree EQ tends to be simpler than modern MMORPGs, allowing it to be a little easier to play casually while advancing (even without a tutorial) and a more relaxed pace for an MMORPG, but many games in general you can simply set your own pace no matter what. That being said: I would argue that content pacing is *very* slow compared to other games. You can spend hours (days) sitting in one spot waiting for access to a specific monster or piece of loot, and generally you do this at a point where combat against the target is easy or totally trivialized making the waiting, not the fighting, the task that is being rewarded. Sure high end items/raid bosses etc. drop loot without being easy fights but generally rare drops from monsters leveled 20-40 will be camped by people who can farm them with little to no risk, which brings up the slow pacing again: not only can it take hours or days of camping your monster but that can be camped by an individual or rotation of individuals which locks out content to you.

Is it the worst game? No, not even in the same dumpster fire ballpark as ET.

Overall I'd say it's about average in terms of mechanics and gameplay, and there's nothing wrong with liking a game that isn't the best of the best... but arguing it's significantly above average seems a bit wonky. There are reasons EQ died out and WoW went on strong beyond just SOE's internal politics. And what one person (or 2500 people) enjoy does not dictate what good, general gameplay principles are. Feel free to enjoy games with bad design principles, not everything you enjoy has to be the best type of that thing.

The reality is there aren't better alternatives to eq. Wow is not even remotely the same experience as eq. Elder scrolls online isn't even playable. You're using a fake metric of good or bad as in "more advanced, easier, more fluid" = better when in reality whether something is good or bad is based on the value of the entire experience. Based on your metrics all the transformer movies would be the "best" movies since they spend money on known actors and special effects.