If I never hear the words "Camp Check" in an MMON again I will be happy. Fuck Lower Guk SSOY/HBSS camps.
I am more of the opposite, I like that the world is filled and not instanced. I spent hours just chatting with other people waiting for camp spots, usually the solo camps as groups tended to move on when camps were full. It was where I learned to solo, by looking at what others did. What worked and what did not. Pet chaining and the likes. This because often some classes could solo where others could not. I played a mage, I usually found mages camping the places I wanted to camp.
And I do not agree that Vanilla WoW was EQ. EQ had danger from the start that proceeded through the entire game. WoW had, as others have stated, difficulty when you started doing group content and heroics/raids. Before I ever got to heroic/raid content in EQ, it scared me with orc pawns, spectres, sand giants, hill giants, dvinn, Grimfeather, werewolves.... So many mobs that roamed zones that outright oneshot me. And when Grim started chasing you, it usually ment death. He was crazy fast. Or that named necro gnoll that roamed NK that just dotted you and moved on because you were dead the moment he did.
It did not take long playing WoW before it was apparent that dying was meaningless, and odds were, you would not die at all until you hit the dungeons. And early on in WoW (I started playing on release day), even pug groups were filled with EQ players that knew what they were doing. Groups that played like experienced EQ players made the early dungeons I played redicilously easy. I am sure it became harder, but I never got to that point. Never felt right for me.
The two things I remember most about WoW when I started it. It had no weather and there was no darkness. Two things that struck me as natural and "wow a game can have this?" when I first started EQ. It was downright strange to not have it when I started WoW. WoW had tons of upgraded features, but some things just felt like they were missing. A combined effort to add/remove features to make a better game that ended up making it feel more like a game and less like a world. But that is all personal preference, and I am sure the WoW way caters to more. I just prefer Kitchitor over Duskwood. One scary, the other one is safe to bring your kids to, like a haunted house in a Disney park. Sure, you might get a jump scare, but nothing that will scar you for life.
In WoW, it was fun exploring a new world, but it never felt dangerous to do so, so the thrill wore off. I played as a Paladin, and the shield usually lasted long enough to run out of any mobs aggro range. I usually filled out the map of every zone as I entered it. Was rare to find areas outside of dungeons I could not fully explore, and death never once was a consern because I never decked out in purples to where it would cost enough gold for repairs to be noticed (and by the time you got to that point, you would have more gold anyways). Dying solo only ment running back and progressing afterwards. Even zerging if I found some named I wanted to try kill, which as a pally I usually could as long as they were only +4/5 levels above me. In EQ it was the polar opposite. Zones felt scary, I got lost all the time, and I remember being chased sooooo many times, from so many different mobs. Even meditating in EQ, staring at a spellbook was scarier than anything I experienced in WoW. Camping the gnolls in North Karana hearing "thump, thump", not knowing if it was an elephant or a roaming cyclops that would destroy me.
WoW made it so that you only had to group for dungeon content, and at no point soloing would dying ever require help from others. In EQ you grouped because soloing was scary. If you died it ment you HAD to get help if you did not have the ability to ressurect yourself. You had to contact someone else. Exp loss was too great to not ask for help, and even pay for it, not to mention if you could not get back to the corpse alone. No, to me EQ and WoW vanilla were very, very different games. Both good, and as games go, WoW probably better than EQ, but they certainly did not feel the same to me. The first thing I ever did in EQ was accidentally hit A and get killed by my trainer. By the time WoW came around, people could not even make that mistake anymore.
The PvE MMOs I have tried since EQ (nearly all of them) have all felt like they have added the children padding along the sides of the bowling lane to make sure the ball will eventually bounce at the pins. Fun, but overall less rewarding.
