What caused the decline of EQ as the #1 MMO?

[BlackBellamy]

I left to go to DAoC. Still no better PvP game out there.

[Malrubius]

The little-know 86th expansion, Goobers of Gaydark.

[Branaddar]

I think there were a multitude of factors that swayed a number of people. For me it was a mix of:

- Rapidly released expansions making me feel like I was always 10 miles behind where I wanted to be
- The lack of proper direction on the Monk class (are we pullers? dps? why is a bard easily able to out-pull us when they can kite solo and provide awesome group benefits? etc.) SOE lost sight of what they wanted Monks to be in the game, and as such, we went from primo pullers to mediocre pullers and alright DPS.
- Too many AAs. I'm all for keeping XPing after level cap, but the sheer number required to be a "good" monk was staggering. I liked it better when all I had to worry about was skill and equipment.
- Too many boxers, too many soloers and mercenaries. Nuff said. I almost never got groups outside of "pity" spots in guild groups.
- All my old friends quit. I played EQ for the community and the friends I made over the years. Most of them quit.

I came back for the Combine. An expansion every month meant I was always behind. Again.

Resubbed to EQLive after that after meeting my wife, we tried to play on her server with some RL friends and that didn't go so well. We moved back to my server, got in a decent raiding guild and were having fun again... until the guild fell apart.

Came back yet again for Mayong, which was a lot of fun for a while but again... mercs and boxers meant it was hard to meet people.

I think my issue isn't with EQ per se, as much as the players who play MMOs these days. There's no more sense of a close community in any large server/game anymore. It's all about the small circle of friends you had going into it, or the guild you join.

I remember when people knew me. Not because I was ubar or an asshat or anything, just because I talked to and met a lot of people and had a reputation as a helpful, skilled and friendly Monk.

No disrespect meant to any of the newer MMO players, but I miss the old days when MMOs were a niche market.

[astuce999]

Community - Community - Community.

To me the decline of EQ had everything to do with all aspects of the game that reduced the need for a community.

In no particular Order

-Boxing
-3+ Hour Buffs
-Pok Books
-Instances
-AA's that blurred the lines (shaman rez... really?)
-Guild Hall and Lobby

EQ as a single player game, even classic EQ... isn't that much fun, or at least, isn't fun for long. It's all about meeting people, making friends, making enemies, having rival guilds, the drama, the passion, relying on other classes for pulling, CC'ing, rez'ing, healing. Some classes are better indoors, some outdoors, some are too fat to fit in a hall in a zone, traveling is long unless you have a porter or at least selo's, buying and selling is difficult even when going to EC tunnel. I can go on and on and on but it all boils down to this;

Community, Community, Community.

Astuce Subterfuge
Bard of the 40th Song
Sapientia

[Qaedain]

I think it was confluence of many factors:

• WoW's introduction attracted all the casual players that were simultaneously necessary for EverQuest's survival, but turned off by the relative difficulty.
  
• Sony's money engine hit full steam, which abandoned the very heavy MUD/D&D influence that made Vanilla+RoK+SoV feel so coherent and complete.
  
• It was the first large MMORPG. Indeed, one of the first titles even to be considered an MMORPG. By the beginning of its decline in 2004 and 2005, it was likely that EQ's number was simply "up." People wanted something new.
  
• Successive post-SoV expansions moved the focus further and further from the solo and group content that made the game feel so "personal." The game became focused on the guild and their microcosms, which killed the need for a server-wide community.
  
• Starting with Planes of Power (though I love that expansion), and continuing with Gates of Discord and Omens of War, the game became quite hostile to players. Zones were densely-packed with mobs that could kill virtually anyone in a quad, the number of see invis mobs increased dramatically and zones felt relatively smaller by virtue of their density. Intra-zone travel became challenging.
  
• The preeminence of keying and flagging. There's a time and a place for keys, but they should feel like a very special accomplishment. It should be meaningful for the player to receive a key, and that's done by incentivizing through the quest to obtain it and the rewards that lie beyond. Unfortunately, Sony started putting flags and keys on everything, which forced players into the rat race of repetitive timesinks. Tipt? Vxed? VT? Zones should have natural barriers to entry--requiring a Wizard, difficult mobs, requiring a good group comp--not artificial ones merely to prop up content that would otherwise be dominated in short order.
  
• The death of high fantasy seemed to cement the decay that began in 2004 and 2005. After Velious, the game diverged into the SoL/GoD/OoW content that didn't look anything like the high fantasy D&D/MUD players are accustomed to--the same theme that made the original EverQuest so flavorful. This feeling made a resurgence in Planes of Power (I liked this expansion), but it was hamstrung by keying and hostility to the player.
  
• Server transfers and renames late in Live also had a deleterious effect on the game. A move to keep up with the Joneses (World of Warcraft), EverQuest and WoW both gave people the ability to shed their bad reputation, destroy the community or find greener pastures at the drop of a dime. The magnificent thing about EverQuest is that you were your name: your actions, habits and words followed you everywhere. You could not, after all, change your name or hop servers after you ninja looted a Trak BP; you repented mercilessly, or you got blackballed. Keeping a consistent user base is essential, and EverQuest succumbed to the dollar and forfeited that.

I could go on and on.

[Branaddar]

I notice a lot of people saying "community" in one form or another. I don't think that's something we'll ever get back, regardless of the game or the expansions available in it.

Old school MMOing is dead. The once-niche game market has become one of the biggest and attracted millions of players that wouldn't have played before.

Yeah, we always had our share of asshats and casual players and all that, but at least they tended to be people that at some basic level had a sense of a community in their actions.

These days, nobody "cares." "It's just a game" gets thrown around, or "I don't care what you think, I don't know you IRL" and the like. I sound like an MMO addict decrying those points, but I think they're at the core of developing a quality community in an online game.

I don't think we'll ever go back to how we remember the "old days" in any MMO new or old.

At best, we'd need another hard community-driven game to almost force it on people. It'll weed out the anti-social types who give up after a few months. Vanguard had the right idea, just a shame it got pushed out the door before it was finished properly.

[SchadenFreude]

To add to the points that Qaedain made:

Sony killed EQ by pursuing the guide program instead of paying unbiased individuals to administer the daily requests that occur as a course of normal business. Sony had a runaway smash success. A cash cow. A money machine that, even today, is still generating positive cash flow. Sony got greedy and, instead of supporting the paid GM positions, they opted for the Guide System. It was cheap (free!) labor to them. The repercussions, however, were devastating the instant an alternative became available.

The guide program killed EQ, plain and simple. Every single time a new MMO would be announced, the hard core gamers I knew would publicly state their displeasure with the way Sony ran the game, and would bail for greener pastures. When the new MMO proved to be less of an EQ substitute than they would willingly accept, they returned. Eventually, one MMO proved to be an adequate substitution: WoW.

WoW is, in my opinion, a very weak and watered down version of EQ. It is enough, however, to satisfy the EQ addiction for the majority of the discontented EQ playerbase. When Sony saw that WoW was soaking their player base, their first reaction was "lets be more WoW-like". This did nothing but accellerate the deterioration of the EQ player base, for obvious reasons. Why stay around and deal with the bullshit when you can get a similar game experience without the favoritism crap dished out by the unpaid guides that infested every Sony server?

[Cogwell]

You guys can argue about what killed EQ for you, but it is simple fact that EQ didn't decline in any financial sense until WoW was released in November 2004.

I am one of those many people who left EQ for WoW at that time, and unlike most ninnies here I have no problem saying that I enjoyed WoW for a long time. That generation of games has a lot on EQ1, especially graphics and interface. Enjoying WoW does not preclude you from enjoying classic EQ. Both have their merits.

[jilena]

Uh. A bunch of ex EQ players made a much better game with a much greater appeal to the masses.

While I don't think WoW's instanced silliness will ever replace the social clusterfuck created by EQ's shared content (i.e. WHY I play on p99), the rest of the game was a significant improvement for most people.

[loobusk]

...when they allowed those erudites in.