Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[Scavrefamn]

Raids killed EQ.

If raids hadn't been such a huge focus in PoP and GoD, EQ would have been fine.

[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.

[kazroth]

Envino, your post brought a tear to my eye. You definitely get it, my friend, see you in game.

[azeth]

The sole-killer of EQ was itemization. All arguements can be boiled down to this.

To be honest, the only expansion hat didn't suffer from poor itemization after Velious, was surprisingly Luclin. (given I quit the moment my guild killed Quarm, like within 25 minutes of it)

Luclin, however, introduced us to the first hints of pussification - The Nexus and Bazaar.


edit:

In hindsight, we ignore the fact that Kunark class armor was outdated the minute Velious opened. Somehow, early EverQuest didn't suffer. Whereas when PoP opened we really began to question the direction of the game.

I remember clearly thinking the first time I saw Plane of Fire loot, "So I've raided enough to have geared myself out in VT and Ssra gear, in addition to having spent a hundred or more hours gathering key pieces... for what?"

[Messianic]

Azeth - you play at all anymore?

I still remember making my first 500-1k cleaning up the HK bodies you made :P

[azeth]

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

Azeth - you play at all anymore?

I still remember making my first 500-1k cleaning up the HK bodies you made :P

I don't at all my friend, I don't even have it installed any mas.

Battlefield + Civ V occupy some of my free time lately, I don't know what happened to my gamer personality.

Gone with my youth I suppose.

[WizardEQ]

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

[Danyelle]

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

The sole-killer of EQ was itemization. All arguements can be boiled down to this.

To be honest, the only expansion hat didn't suffer from poor itemization after Velious, was surprisingly Luclin. (given I quit the moment my guild killed Quarm, like within 25 minutes of it)

Luclin, however, introduced us to the first hints of pussification - The Nexus and Bazaar.


edit:

In hindsight, we ignore the fact that Kunark class armor was outdated the minute Velious opened. Somehow, early EverQuest didn't suffer. Whereas when PoP opened we really began to question the direction of the game.

I remember clearly thinking the first time I saw Plane of Fire loot, "So I've raided enough to have geared myself out in VT and Ssra gear, in addition to having spent a hundred or more hours gathering key pieces... for what?"

I gotta agree with this

Basically anything I could say or any argument I could make has already been made (and in fact I may have already posted earlier in this thread and forgot lol) so basically let me boil this down as best I can.

Flames aside, most people that assume Luclin killed EQ are either jumping the gun, or mad about the graphics change. Plain and simple. The ONLY difference (again...graphics aside) that Luclin introduced was AAs, Bazaar, and Nexus. Now I get a lot of crap for liking Luclin so let me lay out my reasonings in detail and maybe, just maybe, people can understand my thoughts on the matter.

The Bazaar I didn't like, I liked the convenience however it killed several aspects of trade in EQ. A good example would be you could no longer barter prices down on someone. It also became a little harder to buy low and sell high, which is one of the primary methods of dosh attainment in EQ. The Nexus I wasn't bothered by. Why? Because there was one spire per continent (which, with the sole exception of Faydwer and Odus, required you to make a long and/or dangerous trip to reach) and then it also wasn't instantaneous. There was quite a long delay between arriving and getting ported, unless you got lucky on arrival time (which the same could be said for boats...). AAs didn't bother me either. In fact having something to shoot for besides the level cap, not to mention the debates over which ones to get and when to get them or what level to start grinding them, added a bit more substance to EQ imo. Long story short, the only thing I didn't like about Luclin was the Bazaar. That's it. And, in my heart, Luclin is still Classic. This is of course an opinion but whatever I'm entitled to state it as much as I am to have it.

For me Planes of Power was the actual start of EQ's decline. A decline that finally hit rock bottom with Gates of Discord. Every once in awhile a good expansion still shows up (I for one actually liked Seeds of Destruction, and The Buried Sea brought back boats..despite the fact that it doesn't really matter because lolPoK but still..) but ultimately the "magic" as earlier referenced could not be recaptured by GoD...it was gone. It was still very much a good game...but it was not the same. By any means. They began to stop putting new things in that benefited the game, and instead put things in that casualized the game (*COUGH*corpse summoners*COUGH*) until eventually there was no challenge. It became a WoW-clone grind fest.

That's my 2 cents

[aerah]

I really think Velious was the shining example of what an expansion should have been. When Velious was released, I was a rogue and barely of level to get a group at the Ry'Gorr fort in the East Wastes. I spent equal time in Velious and old-world and Kunark dungeons leveling the rest of the way to 60. Velious also re-defined the raid scene, while still strengthening the idea of the community. I spent countless hours farming class armor at the ToV exit (Kael faction represent) and had a fun time doing it. Keys for the content were simple-enough, kill a dragon - turn in an item. Done. The Coldain ring was probably one of the best events I've ever done in EQ, just because it was the first time something like that was implemented. It also got the whole zone involved.

My beef with Luclin wasn't the bazaar (EC did the same thing, bazaar just made it easier and you didn't have to sift through posts on your server board to find things), or cats (who cares, if someone wants to be a cat that's their own problem), or the nexus (Velious introduced quest hubs where lighties and darkies congregated) ... it was the artificial time sinks that really felt like they were time sinks. For some reason, farming armor didn't bother me. Farming ore for shissar bane weapons? That blew. Farming whatever for seru bane weapons, even worse. The VT key was a terrible, terrible waste of time as well. In addition to all that, if I wasn't doing things to help people get keyed, I was soloing (with a second cleric account logged in healing me) in whatever zone had the little mushrooms and fungus beasts to AAs. With that, the sense of community was diminishing quickly. So while the raid content was fun enough (even though VT was just a huge zone to exploit aggro radii), and I did love my lunar fungus tunic, I didn't like the lack of innovation in the Luclin expansion.

With the sense of community gone, the final straw in my (and a lot of my friends'/guildies') EQ existence was PoP. The idea of back flagging, combined with progression choke points that could be blocked by one person effectively ended progression and we all ended up quitting or cutting our play before the 5:1 rule was implemented. As a pretty hard core raiding guild, I imagine that it should have been viewed as one of the best expansions - but the flagging system was a hurdle that no one really wanted to deal with anymore. Lacking the sense of community, having the raid arena taken EQ offered no more magic.