Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[fadetree]

Some people want an actual sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, not to mention the thrill of actually doing something 'dangerous'. In order to generate that, you need to impose difficulty and the real potential of loss. In a digital game ALL difficulties are by definition artificial. There is a line, however, at which difficulties are too, well, difficult. It's a race between how determined you are and how bad the difficulty is. The job of the designer is to draw that line correctly. Often if an imposed difficulty has some kind of real world corollary, like travel distance or mob 'level', it enhances the experience while still being functional as a difficulty. If it appears random or nonsensical then you can easily get into the 'annoying' category. For people like these, the game is actually about what you DON'T have and CAN'T do (yet), not what you do have and can do.

Some people want to spend as little time as possible, and encounter as little difficulty as possible, and still have fun. They don't want to bother with any difficulty above the most modest, and they want what they want when they want it. They (apparently) aren't willing to trade the possibility of any kind of actual loss ( i.e., time or money) in order to gain potential satisfaction at completion. They don't want to be annoyed, and they don't want to suffer through random crap. At its extreme, they want a big red WIN button. For these folks, the game is about what they CAN do right now.

Although I am biased towards the first group, I think both are perfectly legit, and a hard-core difficulty wonk is not necessarily any cooler than the guy soloing Cazic on the EZ server after an hour.

Observing the MMO gaming trends, I have to say most people are in the second category. The reason that EQ1 is still being played at all, and especially the amazing creation of this server, is that some people are in the first category. Enough to support a new game that costs xxxx million to create? No way. Enough to support the continued existence of servers like these? You bet.