Why did some EQ players dislike WoW?

[NegaStoat]

I played through the launch of original EQ through to Luclin. It had its charm in PvE which mainly came down to the sense of competition between guilds for targets. Dark Age of Camelot drew me away in a hurry because its promise of PvP between realms seemed pretty tight. For a while it was. I would claim that it was City of Heroes that drew away a BIG stake of the PvE player base of both Everquest & Dark Age of Camelot when it offered a lengthy Beta test. Don't kid yourselves - CoH broke some stupidly massive ground for the PvE MMO scene for its time.

World of Warcraft did have some cartoony graphics and it also had spoon fed leveling on the rails. From what I recall at the time, those were the two key elements that drove people away from it. Well, the ones that were seeking something else that felt more challenging. But I don't know. On both the EQ and WoW based forum boards I didn't really see a fair number of posts from upset players that said something along the lines of "I'm heading back to EQ, this is dumb."

[Ghost of Starman]

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

World of Warcraft did have some cartoony graphics and it also had spoon fed leveling on the rails. From what I recall at the time, those were the two key elements that drove people away from it. Well, the ones that were seeking something else that felt more challenging. But I don't know. On both the EQ and WoW based forum boards I didn't really see a fair number of posts from upset players that said something along the lines of "I'm heading back to EQ, this is dumb."

If anyone was driven away from WoW during classic is was an extreme minority, vanilla WoW was an excellent evolution of the MMO genre for the vast majority of players.

It got rid of some of the most tedious elements of EQ (like extremely painful CRs and the almost complete inability of some classes to solo) which the majority of people didn't enjoy, while improving raid and dungeon boss mechanics, instancing them so you got to actually experience all the content, made it so you actually moved through a zone instead of camping in one spot for hours, etc.

the classic WoW servers would have been a blast except for the horrible, horrible player base and Blizzard refusing to change things. Level 60 mages shouldn't have been able to run people through low level zones for XP, world buffs should not have been a raiding requirement, and the worst of the worst was the whole community was overrun by an extreme min-max mentality to where you would only bring specific classes to raids to steamroll them as fast as possible. The game was the same, but the player base sure wasn't,

[unsunghero]

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

the classic WoW servers would have been a blast except for the horrible, horrible player base and Blizzard refusing to change things. Level 60 mages shouldn't have been able to run people through low level zones for XP, world buffs should not have been a raiding requirement, and the worst of the worst was the whole community was overrun by an extreme min-max mentality to where you would only bring specific classes to raids to steamroll them as fast as possible. The game was the same, but the player base sure wasn't,

I think this is a phenomenon that will affect any game that was released so long ago. People had been playing classic WoW era on Nostalrius (sp?) and other private servers for a decade before classic launched. So these people became the authority on exactly how to min/max everything, and then put all that information online

No game will ever be able to escape this anymore. It’s just like if they released a new Green, everyone will know exactly where to level and exactly what to farm and everything is now basically a speed run, shaving smaller and smaller amounts of time off in regards to getting what you want in game

That’s why people are nostalgic for vanilla WoW and EQ, because it was in an era where this wasn’t possible. That era is long gone and is never coming back