Abefroman
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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Fair enough. I really hope you understand why some things are the way they are from a design perspective. You can't have EQ dungeons without significant downtime for instance.
EQ Never
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Muligan
Trakanon Raider
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Great points Qwerty indeed and I liked the CT example. You're right in saying there are others, i'm sure we can think of a plethora of examples all very similar. The funny part in all of this is thinking back to what you had when you played EQ for the first time. No twinking gear, probably bought some banded off someone, and you probably didn't have a weapon worth writing home about... It was awesome. I really had all of these memories flood back when I rolled on EQMac. Sure you get MGB'd and maybe someone shares some gear but walk into Unrest like a moron and see what happens. It only gets better on the way up. I think if you take Lower Guk, Sol B, and Sebilis you can get an understanding of what's missing in today's games.
We need classes to matter again, i'm talking specific classes... If you design dungeons to where you need puller, tank, dps, cc, slows, heals and ensure that every class and fulfill a number of those roles you'll get close. There was an art to all of these abilities and you made a much better living if you were good at it. I was fortunate to have the time to be a good healer and there was several much better but speaking from my experience, when I logged on, the tells were there telling me to get somewhere because they knew I could play my role. I'm sure many of you experienced the same thing. Dungeon Finders wouldn't work in EQ because you couldn't risk grouping with an idiot.
We need classes to matter again, i'm talking specific classes... If you design dungeons to where you need puller, tank, dps, cc, slows, heals and ensure that every class and fulfill a number of those roles you'll get close. There was an art to all of these abilities and you made a much better living if you were good at it. I was fortunate to have the time to be a good healer and there was several much better but speaking from my experience, when I logged on, the tells were there telling me to get somewhere because they knew I could play my role. I'm sure many of you experienced the same thing. Dungeon Finders wouldn't work in EQ because you couldn't risk grouping with an idiot.
LachiusTZ
Rogue Deathwalker Box
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Oh the memories of lower guk.. bad.. all bad. frog king.. days of cr.. all bad...but it makes the loot that much better.
But that's the weirdest thing, the way things are today make the most sense. WoW took EQ's crappy old borked design and basically tweaked everything to be better. But..... it's only really better on paper. In reality I just don't really like their finished game and I couldn't wait to get back to EQ.
I suppose it had to happen too. They were logical changes, we just had to see them to know how they would work. For example in EQ people complained about TEH GRIND! So WoW made the endless quests. At first it seems so much better. But it never lets up. They never end... you just keep getting more and more and more chores. Eventually the questing becomes just as big a grind as EQ ever was, only at least with the EQ way, you can sit in one place without having to constantly run around clicking bushes and talking to npc's and shit. It was less manic, and you also had far more places to choose from as well.
As far as I'm concerned, all their changes were very sensible. EQ's grind sucks, fix that with an infinite number of quests! EQ's death penalty is too painful, fix that with the ghost thing! EQ's travel was a chore, fix that with the rentable mounts and later your own flying mount! EQ's dungeons were overcrowded and people were getting in each others way - fixed that with instances.
Problem is, they are all like engineering solutions to everything, and the result is that everything works too well, is too easy, and there are no real obstacles left. EQ was a game made almost entirely out of obstacles, and only now in hindsight can I see that it was the annoying as hell nature of EQ which made it so special. It made me determined to not be beaten.
I want a future game that at least understands this. I don't even care if it doesn't go quite as hardcore with the death penalties and whatever else. But they have to at least remember that EQ was a total pain in the balls to play, every single aspect of it was just hard. These new games eased everything but they became like a completely different experience and now I miss that old way.
Cinge
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Yet EQ's population continued to dwindle with people bailing for WoW whos subs continued to grow. I am not sure how that equates to "only on paper".
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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- 312
All the nostalgia is well and good but seriously, anyone that thinks camping for a rock to pop and get an item for a literal 7 calendar days can go fuck themselves. That isn't challenge. That's tedium. Camping a named for 24 hours that you kill in 2 minutes isn't challenge. It's tedium.
I'm all for meaningful classes, slowing the leveling curve down, rare loot being rare, etc. Its all the other crap that people look back fondly on as said above. You couldn't devote that much time to any game nowadays. And if you can, no wonder no games are good enough for you.
I'm all for meaningful classes, slowing the leveling curve down, rare loot being rare, etc. Its all the other crap that people look back fondly on as said above. You couldn't devote that much time to any game nowadays. And if you can, no wonder no games are good enough for you.
Sometimes its all about the luck
Back from vacation. Miss me?
We've argued with idiots (probably the same ones) about the 'risk vs challenge' or 'tedium vs challenge' debate countless times. I recall Zehn and I going to and fro on this for ages before I was black handed. He and the others are and were always wrong.
Mechanically, you can boil down anything to a tedious, time-consuming process. The point that never got hammered into their thick skulls was that it was never about time lost. Just because WoW has a pussy death penalty doesn't make WoW less tedious than EQ was. Both are tedious, or both are not. The only difference is where it, if you do indeed choose to call it tedium, exists.
Do you think learning a specific boss fight is skill? It isn't, and it never was. Learning to dance dance and max your dps rotation via EJ and addons was never about skill - it was always abouttime spent, just like a fucking corpse run. The difference, again, is where the time is spent. In EQ, the bar to be good in a purely 'push-button' perspective was not very high, and the difficulty lied in the social aspect of the game - making friends, avoiding enemies, playing together in the sandbox of a world. That 'playing together' was the challenge, and the risk came from fucking up through some social mechanic in that world (e.g., a friendless warrior losing his corpse deep in sola is gonna have a hell of a time getting it back).
WoW is the total and complete opposite. A friendless warrior has the same experience as a warrior with dozens of friends. Blizzard all but axed every social mechanic that existed in MMOs and replaced it with menus and queues that removed the risks those social mechanics brought to us as gamers. That's Blizzard's biggest flaw and why, although WoW is a good game thanks to their engineers and animators, their game designers fucking suck as MMO designers.
There's never been any skill needed in WoW, only time spent. Would you rather spend all that time learning your Simon Says dps rotation orpossiblynot having to spend as much time if you don't fuck up as a corpse run in EverQuest?
WoW is a better game from an engineering perspective, but EQ was fucking lightyears ahead in terms of design, and nothing has came close since.
We've argued with idiots (probably the same ones) about the 'risk vs challenge' or 'tedium vs challenge' debate countless times. I recall Zehn and I going to and fro on this for ages before I was black handed. He and the others are and were always wrong.
Mechanically, you can boil down anything to a tedious, time-consuming process. The point that never got hammered into their thick skulls was that it was never about time lost. Just because WoW has a pussy death penalty doesn't make WoW less tedious than EQ was. Both are tedious, or both are not. The only difference is where it, if you do indeed choose to call it tedium, exists.
Do you think learning a specific boss fight is skill? It isn't, and it never was. Learning to dance dance and max your dps rotation via EJ and addons was never about skill - it was always abouttime spent, just like a fucking corpse run. The difference, again, is where the time is spent. In EQ, the bar to be good in a purely 'push-button' perspective was not very high, and the difficulty lied in the social aspect of the game - making friends, avoiding enemies, playing together in the sandbox of a world. That 'playing together' was the challenge, and the risk came from fucking up through some social mechanic in that world (e.g., a friendless warrior losing his corpse deep in sola is gonna have a hell of a time getting it back).
WoW is the total and complete opposite. A friendless warrior has the same experience as a warrior with dozens of friends. Blizzard all but axed every social mechanic that existed in MMOs and replaced it with menus and queues that removed the risks those social mechanics brought to us as gamers. That's Blizzard's biggest flaw and why, although WoW is a good game thanks to their engineers and animators, their game designers fucking suck as MMO designers.
There's never been any skill needed in WoW, only time spent. Would you rather spend all that time learning your Simon Says dps rotation orpossiblynot having to spend as much time if you don't fuck up as a corpse run in EverQuest?
WoW is a better game from an engineering perspective, but EQ was fucking lightyears ahead in terms of design, and nothing has came close since.
Sometimes its all about the luck7 days isn't that bad some items took weeks of non stop camp.
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=3677
Lol there is still people on alla, in 2013, discussing this assholes spawn mechanics
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But camping stuff is fun because you can watch tv and don't actually have to play the game! And yes that is sarcastic but that same argument was used fucking last page. If I want to watch TV then I just watch TV, if I want to play a video game I play a video game. I don't need to play a video game that has so little to do I have to watch TV at the same time. That's why I dislike forced downtime. If I want to take a break, I will, guess what, take a fucking break. I don't need to have stupid mechanics preventing me from playing the game when I want to play it. I'm ok with timesinks that actually still involve playing(running back to your corpse, no fast travel etc), but shit like sitting to regen mana after 2 fights or waiting for the respawn of something are fucking retarded. I don't get how having to not play the game can even be considered something positive.
EQ was hard because you had to make friends and avoid people you didn't like? Are you fucking high eq didn't even have a map. LOL engineering pffft.
Also people who say wow takes no skill blah blah shit weren't clearing naxx in the day promise you that.
Quaid
Trump's Staff
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Hmmmm... Headset = headphones? Last I checked one has a mic and one doesn't...
This is a stupid argument based on personal preferences...
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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- 312
I get what Dumar is saying. In the end it all boils down to time spent. I just get bent out of shape when people say that camping a rock is challenging. It's not in the slightest. Camping rare names can be and knowing you class, role and executing it or facing death and getting to do a CR. I even can see what they're saying there.
I trashed WoW a lot when it came out. It was ez mode. Graphics were kiddy etc. I played EQ2 and EQOA before that. We camped in EQOA and grinded mobs. I had no issue with that either. There's only so many ways to disguise grinding.
I dislike the uniqueness of the classes in WoW. It makes for easy balance but I've encountered more unique mechanics in WoW than I ever did in EQ2 or EQOA so I apologize for insulting what I didn't understand. It's still not my cup of tea but its not easy mode if you're doing the challenging stuff.
I trashed WoW a lot when it came out. It was ez mode. Graphics were kiddy etc. I played EQ2 and EQOA before that. We camped in EQOA and grinded mobs. I had no issue with that either. There's only so many ways to disguise grinding.
I dislike the uniqueness of the classes in WoW. It makes for easy balance but I've encountered more unique mechanics in WoW than I ever did in EQ2 or EQOA so I apologize for insulting what I didn't understand. It's still not my cup of tea but its not easy mode if you're doing the challenging stuff.
The problem with comparing modern MMO's terrible DDR hotbar combat to everquest is that everquest is something out of 1999. I kind of expect 10+ years of progress, and instead I feel like we're worse off. What a lot of you guys don't seem to realize is that most of us don't want everquest as it was in 1999. I don't want to sit for 23 minutes waiting on a mob, and I don't want to stare at my spell book to med for 35 levels. I want something new, fun and interesting, because even the fact that we're comparing games made 13 years later to freaking EVERQUEST is pretty shameful. And I can't speak for others, but thats certainly the only reason I'm even paying EQN a modicum of attention: Because it's promising a new experience. That said, I do want something that captures that same "spirit" that EQ did, but I'm not asking to go back to the dark ages.
It'll probably fail to deliver, I don't doubt that, but last week I played the FF14 beta and it was basically indistinguishable from wow in 2004. I ran from ? to !. I collected bear asses. I played DDR hotbar combat. I was bored shitless. I'm not pining for a return to some of the terrible mechanics of 1999, I'm pining for the same sort of experience that EQ1999 and wow in 2004 gave us: something fresh and new. Because this genre has been painfully stagnant, and I doubt I'm the only way who feels that way. This is 2013, and I feel like every genre of video games has stuff I love to play, except for MMORPGs. I feel like they've stagnated and failed to move forwards in any meaningful way for a long time.
It'll probably fail to deliver, I don't doubt that, but last week I played the FF14 beta and it was basically indistinguishable from wow in 2004. I ran from ? to !. I collected bear asses. I played DDR hotbar combat. I was bored shitless. I'm not pining for a return to some of the terrible mechanics of 1999, I'm pining for the same sort of experience that EQ1999 and wow in 2004 gave us: something fresh and new. Because this genre has been painfully stagnant, and I doubt I'm the only way who feels that way. This is 2013, and I feel like every genre of video games has stuff I love to play, except for MMORPGs. I feel like they've stagnated and failed to move forwards in any meaningful way for a long time.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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