Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[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.

[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.

[kazroth]

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

Honestly, i'm not sure SoE made any mistakes that, at the time, the people involved in the field of MMOs would have done differently. Their goal was to make as many people as happy as possible.

People who say "greed" was the problem usually haven't looked into it deep enough to really see all the facets of the decline. The number 1 reason I found after discussing it with people who played through Luclin and beyond was The infinite creation of needless hurdles - the time commitment for some of the luclin and post-luclin content was so insane (counting AA grinding as one of the worst - the talent system was a massive improvement to the endless AA grind) that it turned people off.

Simultaneously, EQ became a massive, unending timesink yet possessing none of the original hurdles people complain were removed - i.e. transportation, corpse runs, etc. Which is it? Was it too easy and catered too much to the casual player, or was it too difficult and too much a timesink for high end players? Well, it can be both - but in retrospect our vision is a lot clearer than theirs was at the time they made these decisions.

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) - it didn't take long to travel from, say, Darnassus to STV if you were high enough level - and after you did it once, it didn't take as long because you had the flight points. See the balance?

EQ attempted to find that same balance and failed. It's like balancing on a razor's edge, and it wasn't because of "money-grubbing" or some other unsatisfying, oversimplified answer (if they wanted only money, wouldn't they have made changes with more longevity?). They just missed the mark.

Excellent response. To be honest, none of us can really say what the climate was like at the "EQ headquarters" when all these decisions were being made. Company climate can make a huge impact on the product that gets put out. I think the previous poster made a point that the vision got lost somewhere - and that's not to say it got lost in the "money" aspect (EQ was a product, money had to be made or it failed as a product) - but the root of what made EQ what is was got lost in the developers' minds. They saw other MMO models and rather than trying to separate from the pack, they let the beta wolves rip out their aging throat.

Or was it the suits who were simply dictating company policy? "You will implement this, WoW has it - and it will be implemented in 6 months for our next expansion." So many good companies have been destroyed by this kind of policy. Look at Ford during the 60s/70s (think Pinto) or Kodak (one of the largest companies on the planet, today financially bankrupt - loss of ethics is so key to these failures).

Anyone have any insight into the internals of the company at this time? Would make for a hell of a book.

[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.

[Excellio]

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

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.

And there it is. It is about money, and it really needs to be about money. I'm not sure what the operating costs are for this P99 server, but I'm sure it's significant. I can't imagine the costs of developing, publishing, marketing the game, and then maintaining the ongoing server to run the game.

When people (like me) complain that SoE made decisions based solely on money, we can't really take issue with that while remaining fair. If the development of EverQuest wasn't about making money, it would've never been created, or if it had been, it would've been on such a small scale that I certainly would never have heard of it. It was the prospect of profits that made the game accessible to most of us.

[kazroth]

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

And there it is. It is about money, and it really needs to be about money. I'm not sure what the operating costs are for this P99 server, but I'm sure it's significant. I can't imagine the costs of developing, publishing, marketing the game, and then maintaining the ongoing server to run the game.

When people (like me) complain that SoE made decisions based solely on money, we can't really take issue with that while remaining fair. If the development of EverQuest wasn't about making money, it would've never been created, or if it had been, it would've been on such a small scale that I certainly would never have heard of it. It was the prospect of profits that made the game accessible to most of us.

Yep, as I was saying on a D3 forum; unfortunately, a lot of recent trends in the gaming market just don't match up to most of our (our being players of a 13 yo game) desires. Good post.

[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