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

[Shadey]

[QUOTE=Hasbinbad;289171]What ruined Everquast?


..wait for it..

..waaaaait for iiiiiit..

Now I personally didn't care for the race and didn't play one as an alt. But I did like the Beastlord class and had a Iksar BST that was a blast to play.

Though I think there were quite a few people that liked the race a lot. To each there own on that one IMO. I don't think it hurt nor made the game better. Was kinda neutral for me. heh

[nicemace]

bstlords were zz.

i just made one to get my epics at level 1.

[Dazen]

Releasing expansions every 6 months and WoW

[Harm]

World of Warcraft was the EQ killer. EQ1 deserved to die long before that, but everything else was even worse than EQ1 was at that time, until WoW. It took 3 hours of playing WoW for me to know that I wouldn't play EQ1 ever again. At least until this classic thing.

[mwatt]

It was a combination of things, including aging, competition and mismanagement among others. The biggest specific issues were:

1. Bifurcation of the player base due to keying and most new content being geared towards raiders.

2. Loss of the Vision (tm). I refer not simply to the loss of Brad, I mean the core ideas and approaches that Brad was certainly a part of and ultimately took credit for. Examples of this loss are things like PoP Books, theme disruption (cats on the moon), soul binders, etc.

3. Competition from something new, easier and targeted at a mass audience - i.e. WoW.

4. EQ2, which contributed towards splitting the player base.

[Bigcountry23]

People say it was the release of expansions every six months, but I think there it more to it than that. Yes, the expansions were buggy as hell and they did not devote enough people to fixing the bugs because everyone was already tapped for another money grab six months down the road, but that was not the root of the problem. The root was story (and the lack there of) and how it was lost with each expansion. Kunark and Velious had great stories (land thought to be lost or unable to be access due to weather rediscovered, and how the rediscovery impacted the continent itself and the rest of the world, including the kidnapping of Tunare's chosen one, FV.). That kind of story telling started to slip away with SoL (hey... we found a way to go to the moon, yay. Why are we there? Um, hey look a cat!) and completely dissolved with PoP (ummm, yeah here, you now have instant access to the whole world, quit your bitching about ports and slow boats). Does anyone even know the storyline for POP and why you were trying to go to the various planes? Follow that up with what had the potential to be a Lorefest (LDoN had the fallen Elvish cities, expanded areas of GUK, Orc and Goblin fortresses within the mountains...). While I hate to admit it, WoW is popular with certain factions because of their ability to tell a story and continue the nutritive thread from expansion to expansion. Something EQ was sorely lacking.

[Hasbinbad]

It was furries on the moon guys.

Moon furries.

That's all.

[Daywolf]

SOE

[Humwawa]

I think if you look at Planes of Power as the ending chapter of EQ, the expansion makes a little more sense, even if the ending itself is a tad confusing (I still have no idea what the hell Quarm is).

You get to PoP, and you have full access to the world. You've earned it after your many years of gaming. You progress through the Planes, which are the manifestations of concepts and natural forces; the paragon realms of all you've fought before.

You face the gods - not their shadows. You destroy them. You break the makers of the world, and for what? To destroy some divine construct fed by the power of avaricious deities who confines a mad god (I think?).

TL;DR? You killed the god damned gods. Really killed em. The End. Credits roll.

[burnsai]

The game was made way to easy .. the only thing that I wish p99 had was shared bank I think that should have been in classic...