EQ Never

Ukerric

Ukerric

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Grim1_sl said:
Obviously, the devs involved would have restrictions in the tools that prevented that. EQN isn't the minecraft mmo, Smed only uses that as an example because there isn't anything else to reference at this point. EQN will have some sort of world building tools apparently, but they will be very limited.
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If you want a "minecraft MMO", you can apparently check Wurm Online, on which the creator of Minecraft worked (before creating Minecraft proper).
 
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supertouch_sl

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Agraza_sl said:
I agree that the copycats should end. I thought ToR was actually a decent attempt at stepping away from WoW, but many saw it as a WoW in space. I want more games along the lines of MineCraft and EVE. I like building things, and I'd like to do it in a persistent multi-player environment. Thus my interest in the likely unimpressive SimCity game about to release. But EVE and MineCraft have not been financial colossi, and so I don't expect the investors of the world to rush to back them. That's why I'm all for evolutionary design. Find something that works, and fix the problems it has while adding experimental qualities. Unfortunately many of the WoW clones skip the step of "fix the problems it has". They go right on to adding experiments. So they're doubly flawed games, both by their heritage and novelties. You can get money telling people you can make WoW better. People with money probably know what WoW is. This willingness to invest in failure is apparent. So use that willingness, but actually make it happen. You won't make it better by just tacking shit onto WoW like Eeyore's tail.

EQ has a solid basis, but since it's WoW's daddy, it would probably benefit the most and suffer the least from embracing its similarities to WoW. Unfortunately many proponents of an EQ3 incorrectly perceive EQ's liabilities as its assets. It is nowhere near the market success it once was, and its developers (EQ and EQ2) tend to share the opinion of the playerbase that it should strengthen its faults at the expense of embracing newer designs. My biggest issue is transparency of mechanics. EQ and EQ2 are fucking opaque as all shit. Most of the players, many even at the high end, are complately unaware of how to play their class. Developers consistently expose alarming ignorance of basic game mechanics as well. I assume the fault in this lies in both incompetency and resulting turnover of the developers themselves. I cannot appreciate not exposing how shit works to preserve some ill-conceived notion of mystery, especially when the developers are then found to be the ones in the wrong after the few bright players backwards engineer how shit truly works.

It's not like the EQ developers (or players) are unique in their ineptitude concerning class mechanics. WoW's devs (and players) are notoriously bad players. They cannot correctly balance difficulties because their internal team cannot come close to the best player guilds, despite having the game's blueprint laying about them. They balanced the first raiding hard modes with the idea that we would beat them after later content was released. They were beat within a week of their own debut. They then kneejerked in the other direction and balanced the next big bad so he was mathematically impossible, and didn't concur with the player's argument that it was such at first. Internally they weren't able to beat either one, so how could they easily tell? EQ's devs take it a step further though, by obscuring game mechanics to give themselves breathing room to balance shit terribly.
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having everything safe and calculated doesn't make a good mmo. i suggest you read about the psychology of mmos and why people really play them.
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

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supertouch_sl said:
having everything safe and calculated doesn't make a good mmo. i suggest you read about the psychology of mmos and why people really play them.
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You could have fooled me, because 10 million people are playing a safe and calculated MMORPG right now as we speak, and when they weren't calcuated, they were unsafe and inaccessible. And we saw about a 430k cap in the genre.

Not that I agree with it one way or another. I think there is a place for both.
 
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supertouch_sl

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Utnayan_sl said:
You could have fooled me, because 10 million people are playing a safe and calculated MMORPG right now as we speak, and when they weren't calcuated, they were unsafe and inaccessible. And we saw about a 430k cap in the genre.

Not that I agree with it one way or another. I think there is a place for both.
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yes. it was capped at 500,000 for a variety of reasons. it existed during the genre's infancy, it wasn't developed by a company with an illustrious history, and millions of dollars weren't put into marketing the game across the globe.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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Utnayan_sl said:
You could have fooled me, because 10 million people are playing a safe and calculated MMORPG right now as we speak, and when they weren't calcuated, they were unsafe and inaccessible. And we saw about a 430k cap in the genre.

Not that I agree with it one way or another. I think there is a place for both.
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I think it was a bit more than 430K at the time. Remember EQ was not the only mmorpg on the block back then. we had AO, DAOC, AC, Shadowbane, and not to mention the asian mmorpgs like Final Fantasy before wow even came out. To say that the genre was capped at 430K is being a bit disingenuous isnt it?

And lets not forget the entire notion of PC proliferation at the time either. It wasn't until the early 2003-4 when the big cheap PC explosion happened making PCs and internet a common thing.

Face it WoW is an anomaly which will probably never happen again.
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

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supertouch_sl said:
yes. it was capped at 500,000 for a variety of reasons. it existed during the genre's infancy, it wasn't developed by a company with an illustrious history, and millions of dollars weren't put into marketing the game across the globe.
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It was really due to barriers to entry (Gameplay wise) in my opinion. But I was referring to your comment that we look at the psychological make up of MMORPG gamers and I would challenge you, to find today, the real numbers between accessibility and hard core make ups. With that said, you mentioned infancy of the genre, and from a monetary fiscasl sense, these games were above and beyond more accessible. I played NWN on AOL for $3.95 an hour. Shadows of Yserbuis in TSN/INN was $49.99 a month and I typically went over alotted time. When a game came out that was $9.89 a month for unlimited play and a box sale, sold.

mkopec1_sl said:
Face it WoW is an anomaly which will probably never happen again.
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I would like to see what happens when someone breaks the mold from the theme park style MMORPGs. There are a lot of things to still be designed which can break the genre out again. Cross platform gaming for instance, tying games together, and new emerging technology. While I may have been a bit off on the 430k portion, (We agree I think on the fact that the market was thought to be capped where it was at and wouldn't move, and that number was obviously a lot lower than the actual cap after some different games came out) it was blown a part once, and I believe it can be blown out again. But it isn't going to be a WoW clone that does it. And it most certainly will not be a venture back into Diku MUD territory.
 
mkopec

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Utnayan_sl said:
It was really due to barriers to entry (Gameplay wise) in my opinion. But I was referring to your comment that we look at the psychological make up of MMORPG gamers and I would challenge you, to find today, the real numbers between accessibility and hard core make ups. With that said, you mentioned infancy of the genre, and from a monetary fiscasl sense, these games were above and beyond more accessible. I played NWN on AOL for $3.95 an hour. Shadows of Yserbuis in TSN/INN was $49.99 a month and I typically went over alotted time. When a game came out that was $9.89 a month for unlimited play and a box sale, sold.
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Well you obviously were one of the privileged. Because in 1999 only some 40% of households had PCs and only 47% of those had internet. Compared to almost 70% in 2005 with most of those households having an internet connection.


http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119358&page=1

http://www.bls.gov/cex/twoyear/200607/csxcomputer.pdf

I think the barrier for entry was the PC and internet connection, not EQ being too hard, lol.
 
Soygen

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Yeah, the late 90's is pretty much the birth-years of internet gaming. When I was getting into Everquest, basically none of my friends(save for one) had a PC that could even play it.

I think before I had internet access, I was paying something retarded like 300.00 bucks a month for The Sierra Network. That had to have been like an entire paycheck for me back then.
 
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Deisun_sl

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I still remember lagging out during raids before they implemented the chat filters. My 28.8k modem would get flooded out with all the text. Fun times.
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Utnayan

Utnayan

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mkopec_sl said:
Well you obviously were one of the privileged. Because in 1999 only some 40% of households had PCs and only 47% of those had internet. Compared to almost 70% in 2005 with most of those households having an internet connection.


http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119358&page=1

http://www.bls.gov/cex/twoyear/200607/csxcomputer.pdf

I think the barrier for entry was the PC and internet connection, not EQ being too hard, lol.
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And where in the World is Carmen San Diego sold 4 Million starting in 1985. 7th Guest (It's barrier to entry was needing a CD ROM Drive) still sold 2 million released in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...PC_video_games

Internet connectivity was not a barrier since EQ ran on dial up. If you remember the late 90's, you could go into any PC store and grab a free month of internet from the many brochures lined up with CD's. You could get unlimited dial up access for $9.99/month-$19.99/month.

I think you are really reaching if you are going to blame the lack of market realization with the MMORPG genre in that time frame on a lack of technology in the homes. It didn't stop other games from blowing that out of the water.

Two things happened with WoW, which I know you do not agree with. Accessibility and Quality. By quality I realize that the game definitely had it's fair share of growing pains with regards to split instances, server issues, etc. But from a content perspective, it was complete. Meaning for the first time in an MMORPG, I didn't have to worry about turning in quest items that I worked on for long periods of time, poofing. Or getting to level 34 in DAOC and seeing an entire 33% of the game shipped unfinished, including it's staple RvR.

These things turned gamers off from the genre. Theme Park MMORPG was just at the right place at the right time.

That doesn't mean it cannot happen again.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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Well well just agree to disagree. Comparing an internet game in 1999 to an internet game in 2005 is like comparing a 1990s Motorola flip phone to a blackberry in 2003.
 
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supertouch_sl

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dude, only a small segment of the population even knew what an mmo was in 1999. they were mostly nerds who convened somewhere to play d&d. it had no foreign servers. it attracted maybe 1,000 players outside the u.s. it had no marketing. as you can see, it didn't operate under ideal conditions.
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

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mkopec_sl said:
Well well just agree to disagree. Comparing an internet game in 1999 to an internet game in 2005 is like comparing a 1990s Motorola flip phone to a blackberry in 2003.
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Well, I can admit there may be a bit of fuzziness on my part as well. I was running on a 14.4k HST/V.32/V.32 Bis back when they were 900 bucks for an external (The longer sleek black ones), had registered for Kali to play C&C, Warcraft 2, etc. And was playing TSN's Shadows of Yserbius and AOL's NWN religiously. I was most definitely an early adopter back then. By the time I got to EQ when it launched, I was probably thinking so much time had passed that more people had adopted the tech.
 
Mr Creed

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Utnayan_sl said:
Internet connectivity was not a barrier since EQ ran on dial up. If you remember the late 90's, you could go into any PC store and grab a free month of internet from the many brochures lined up with CD's. You could get unlimited dial up access for $9.99/month-$19.99/month.

I think you are really reaching if you are going to blame the lack of market realization with the MMORPG genre in that time frame on a lack of technology in the homes. It didn't stop other games from blowing that out of the water.
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I think you are overestimating the availability or cost internet at the time, and more importantly: how much more crazy the idea of the MMO game was in 1999 as opposed to 2004.

Cue pointless personal experience: When EQ came out I read about it, was intrigued but realized that I pay for internet by the minute and would have to pay for EQ on top of it, and went back to replaying Baldurs Gate and Diablo 1. Of course I was in school then, but some friends of mine were playing UO so it wasnt even a totally new idea. Still I didnt get it until about a year later (and then only out of frustration about the last delay of D2). Kunark had just come out at the time so EQ was already in full swing.

Contrast the above to 2004 where everyone that played games had heard of MMOs in some kinda way and anyone into gaming had internet, multiply by 100 because /blizzard/ and you have a much higher interest in the game as opposed to EQ. Thats like you said the right time and place but also the right company andd franchise. Take WoW out of the picture and I doubt EQ2 would have exploded the same. It might have doubled up on EQ1 maybe but not the 3-5 mill that WoW got quickly.
 
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Man0warr

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Large scale raids (Vox/naggy) in early EQ were pretty much unplayable as a monk until I upgraded from 56k to ISDN. You pretty much buffed up groups one by one and then logged off until every group was buffed up, then your laggy raid would zerg and hope you won.

Grouping and and stuff was fine though.

I think Southwestern Bell started offering affordable ~500k ADSL around mid 2000-2001, this is in Dallas.
 
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Deisun_sl

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With mega titles like Starcraft, Diablo and Warcraft already in their pockets, Blizzard had a MONSTER pool of gamers eagerly awaiting something like WoW. It was the perfect stage for Blizzard to catapult the MMO scene into what it became. They were very good at making good games and everyone knew it. They definitely grabbed the bull by the horns and didn't let go, but I still feel like they influenced the genre negatively on some game design decisions. Unfortunately their incredible success influenced other game companies to copy some of those game design decisions that are plageuing us with new MMOs today.
 
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