What Made Classic Great?

[bix]

The original game pigeon-holed people into roles based on their classes, but there were at least 4 or 5 different roles (tank, puller, healer, damage-dealer, crowd control, de/buffer, corpse retriever, etc.). Because content was difficult to move through as well as being plentiful with regular expansions, that meant a player would not have the option of jumping in. Instead, the 'right' thing to do is to find a replacement for your role within your group before leaving. If you were deep within a dungeon, that might not even be an option. If someone had a mishap, then a corpse retrieval was a necessity and the group progression would stall due to that corpse retrieval. Invariably, one of the most demanding part about EQ was its time and the commitment to that frequent/consistent time. Relationships were cultivated and names were remembered. If you wanted to be douchy, your name and rep would be circled around the server to the point where you might be shunned. Leaving a guild was an event as opposed to a server message. Finding a new guild that aligned with your playtime and skill-set was an involved process. That made EQ a true community.

The content was varied and vast enough that people could spend months within a zone on a regular schedule before advancing to the next set of zones. And if you had cultivated a good group, you would find yourself in dicy situations with a high degree of challenge - and all of that with some good friends made the game fun. EQ did have excellent end-game content, but the time sink in leveling meant that a significant portion of EQ was actually just leveling and exploring, rather than chewing through the content. That also meant you might still be chunking away at a raid level content from several expansions ago.