no global ooc in offpeak killed the game

[stormlord]

I'm a classic fan, no doubt about it, but I had my reservations about removing /ooc this soon. If it were me, I would have done it when peak was 1000+. Nonetheless, I'm a classic fan. Now that global chat is removed, I play the game that way. There's the /who command, which I try to refrain from using, and then there's irc and the forums for auctioning, both of which I've also refrained from using. Why? Because they don't feel classic to me, even though they were available in 1999. It's not the way I want to play the game. Still, it would help me to find what I'm looking for if I did. Lord help me! You can't treat an old dog new tricks. Don't pity me.

So I have sat in EC for a long time. I never went to EC in 1999. In fact, the only trading zone I knew in my career on live was the bazaar. So being in EC these past couple days was a completely new experience for me. My thoughts are mute. I don't know whether I hate it or like it. I suppose it has opened the door for people to try new things to keep others entertained. It's boring sitting in a zone trying to find what you want because you refuse to use irc or the forums. One options for me is to adventure in other zones and try my luck at finding the items I want. The other is to stay here and either: a) attempt to find ways to entertain myself in-game b) browse the web. So far, I've mostly browsed the web with "/log on" for searches. However, the opportunity to create new amusements in EC so that people don't get excessively bored is there for enterprising souls.

I almost wish EQ had a card game or something that we could play in EC while waiting, but that's not the only thing that could be fun. Honestly, there's no rulebook on how to create an mmorpg. Nothing says we have to kill things when we're logged in or play card games when we're not killing things. D&D is combat-oriented, but mmorpgs could be anything we want them to be. They just have to be interesting. Personally, I don't think EQ was developed for non-combat related fun. So people have to get clever to make it fun. I wish sometimes that the new mmorpgs would revisit some of the things EQ did, but add a framework that's more friendly to creative people so that they can create new forms of entertainment to occupy us when we're not in combat. Imagine a new mmorpg that had corpse runs, but did it in such a way that it's fun. Corpse runs don't have to be automatically a bad idea. It's all in how you implement the idea. Same for everything else. Nothing necessarily has to be boring. There just needs to be a developer ready to make it fun. Which costs money.

Things I can think of off the top of my head to fend off boredom in EC:
1) Tell a story
2) Gamble
3) Make a game for people to play
4) /duel someone or manage a series of matches and reward the champion
5) Tell a story, but this time use actors (players) and a scene that exists in the zone
6) Find a creative way to reward new players

I'm sure there're many others. It's a pity that we have to invent ideas though. It'd be so much easier if they gave us a way to create new card games, or new games for that matter. There're many players who have the skill to accomplish something like that. An arena in EC would be a nice attraction for duels and fights, but it's hard to manage something like that. You get what I'm saying? There's no limit to what could be done to occupy people while they wait for a trade.