Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[Excellio]

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

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)

But shouldn't it take a while? I see what you mean about needless hurdles, because you really shouldn't have to prove anything about your knowledge of the map once you've made the trip many times, but by the time you're that guy, in classic EQ, you most likely have the money to buy a port, or perhaps have joined a guild and one of your guildmates will port you.

The travel restrictions primarily affect new players who haven't made the contacts to arrange for a port whenever they want one. When a lvl 60 is waving around 100pp for a port, I'm sure there's a lvl 34 Druid or Wizard somewhere who will come pick him up.

To suggest that it wasn't about money is true, to an extent, I guess. I agree that any other developer would've gone a similar direction, but that's the trouble. Comparing SoE's means of making more money to any other developer's means of reaching that same goal, well, yeah, they'll end up going a similar direction.

I believe that EverQuest was a challenging game that required a lot of patience, and did feature many, many needless hurdles that added little/nothing to the experience, yet still sapped hours of your real life time. And I believe that SoE understood that as a business, you need to sell something more appealing to the customers, so they replaced the player-driven solutions with new stuff that was actually part of the game. Instead of scrolling through auctions in EC, there was a Bazaar that enabled you to buy rare and coveted items at level 1. Instead of building relationships with porting classes and learning techniques to obtain a port (like going to rings/spires, sending tells to porters to request a pickup), we now have a zone that not only enables you to travel much more easily, but also replaces the home cities altogether by selling all of the spells, supplies and other items that you used to buy from merchants in the guild where you turned in your tattered note.

Yes, there were many needless hurdles in Classic EverQuest, but with a bit of creative thinking, the players devised ways to overcome those issues and still enjoy the game. The changes with which I take issue are the ones that welcome in the players (and their credit cards) who lack the creativity, social skills and capacity to appreciate the player driven systems.

[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]

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?

[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.

[envino]

I'm sure all this has all been said, but this is a subject that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. You can't really point to a specific moment in time that EQ went wrong, it's more the evolution of the philosophy, a chipping away, until one day you wake up and the "magic" that was classic EQ is gone.
I lay the blame, mostly, on the day that WoW launched, and everybody saw the megabucks that rolled in as a result of that.
WoW is a great game, but WoW has no magic. Wow is a cartoon colored cheap thrill that is fun for awhile, but soon becomes a treadmill of gear up, wait for the new expansion, quest through that as fast as you can, so you can gear up for the next expansion. That's it. It's easy, it's accessible, its fun for awhile, but it ain't Magic. It's because of that ease and accessibility that WoW makes billions - and this is the problem - developers aren't trying to make gaming magic, they are trying to make billions of dollars. People like those of us on this site that like our games to have "it" are a minority, most people want a quick, easy thrill ride that requires no real investment, on then its on to the next big thing. EQ2, SWG, WoW, Swtor,Lotro, Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, Warhammer Online, Conan, et. al. All big budget beautiful games, completely devoid of Magic.
You see, Magic (that's what I'm going to call the "it" that EQ had in the old days) is hard to attain, both for the developer of the game, and for the player.
The first thing you need to do to get the magic mojo, is that you need to achieve immersion. The world needs to seem large, dangerous, challenging and interesting. Immersion is inconvenient and time consuming, and the majority of people won't play a game that is at all inconvenient. Most concessions to convenience kill immersion.
Fast travel is the perfect example of this. In WoW, I can get anywhere in under 5 minutes with a combination of teleportation and a flying mount. All this does is make the world seem not like a world at all, but a lobby with portals to rooms to instantly go see.
In counterpoint to fast travel, you have classic EQ. Anybody who has done the Stein of Moggok quest understands this. I did this quest ONCE, 11 years ago, and I still remember it. Why? Because it was immersive and fun, and amazing, and it was a !@#$%^&*. The most difficult part, as a DE necromancer, was the travel. I remember having to go all the way from Neriak to qeynos one night, to get a certain fish that was only found there. This is travel at its finest, overland, through extremely hostile territory, where the penalty for failure is to so the whole thing again, only this time naked. I did it. I did it alone. I used every trick in the book. I hid. I sneaked. I prayed. I ran. I fought. I trained to zone, I feigned death. In the end, after an hour or so of sweaty palmed adventure, I arrived in qeynos. What a thrill! That same quest, in WoW? Port to a nearby zone, ride my flying mount for 2 minutes, land in the city, buy what I need, hearth back. 10 minutes tops. No immersion whatsoever, give me my trinket now. I still have that stein of Moggok in the bank, I logged back in not long ago to check on it.
Corpse runs also add to the immersion. Death needs to sting, and it needs to sting badly. Otherwise, why have it at all? Death in WoW is so unnoticeable that it is no penalty at all. Consequently, living in WoW has no sweetness. Live or die, who cares. Give me my trinket. Nobody ever quits WoW out of frustration. Most quit from sheer boredom.
Running is inconvenient, boats are slow. Immersion is magic. Ports instead of boats, teleporting everywhere, the guild lobby instead of corpse runs - these were the killers of EQ immersion.

The second ingredient of magic is community. Friends. Enemies. Frenemies. I cant remember who I grouped with last week in WoW. On p99 I instantly recognized a name I hadn't seen in 10 years. You need to need people. They need to need you. That is Magic. Lets start out with WoW again. To find a group, you push a button. Bam. Insta-group, with insta-people in an insta instance. You rarely speak to these people, they arent even on your server usually. Lets run through this thing as quickly as possible and give me my stuff. That's it. Contrast that with EQ - This tale is an old one, and as common as dirt on the plains of Karana. One day I fell into the pit in Befallen, like many a moron before me. I had absolutely no chance to get my corpse back, it had my hard earned harvester on it, my cool black robe that took me weeks to get, everything valuable in my EQ life. I needed my stuff back, and I needed help to get it. Desperate, I stood by the entrance, and I bawled for help. SK by the name of Sutekh shows up, accompanied by his friend khisanth the wizard. These guys arent much higher level than me, but they are game to help me, so we start out. After hours, after wiping, and calling in the big guns to help us out, we FINALLY got my corpse out of there. A bond was formed that day that lasted for years, until khisanth got too sick to play from an illness, and Sutekh pretty much quit with him. I spent the next 3 years in the company of those guys off and on. THAT is the EQ magic. It takes effort to get to know people. It takes effort to ask for help. Its inconvenient to depend wholly on someone else. Its what being a human being is all about, and its what EQ tapped into. Magic.

Community builders are:

Not being able to solo very well. Most people will solo if given the choice between that and finding a group, especially if its just as easy to progress that way.

Needing others to rescue you, and being in a position to rescue others. In a modern MMO, there are very few things you can't do for yourself, and these are generally trivial. In EQ, oftentimes you needed someone to help you get back EVERYTHING you own. And, just as often, someone was there to do it.

Needing to interact with others in general. Needing buffs, needing groups, needing help, needing advice, not being an island unto oneself.

I know this is long and if you've read this far, you're an old-school EQ player for sure, with an attention span longer than that of an earthworm. The problem is, there are few of us, so few in fact, that catering a game to us is financial suicide. Modern MMO's aren't communities, they are conveyor belts, millions get on one end, millions get off the other end when they are done. Old EQ was more than a game, it was an extension of life, and that, my friends, is magic.

Can I say this did it or that did it? No. It was a slow dying of the light.

Which brings me to Project 1999. This is the place for us, for sure, we who know what magic is and how to keep it. I'm so very glad I found some "keepers of the flame" here, and I hope we can keep it up for many years to come. Ill be donating regularly, and trying to recruit more players, because this is like a rebirth to me, a chance to go home again, and I want it to last a long time.

[Messianic]

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

...

Love this post. Long, but good.

[WizardEQ]

envino, great post! Hit the nail on the head with what Classic EQ was and still is on P99.