Personally, I'd prefer for the wow fans to stay right where they are... all we need is EQN going live one day and nothing but general chat about how it's not WoW... i'll pass on that. Let them play, realize that it's fuckin hard and quit, thus leaving a solid fan base in EQN.
Well to be honest, when I left EQ2 a lot of the talk in general
WASabout how EQ2 wasn't WOW...you already have ingrained WOW hatred that is waist deep (often from people that haven't even played WOW), and all that a bunch of WOW exiles showing up would do is give those homers someone to take their vitriol out on instead of repeating anti-WOW talking points ad nauseum.
I can't wait to watch a bunch of EQ1 diehards trying to giving ex-WOW players a fuckton of shit, when many of those WOW players have been searching for a decent game for years now. How many MMOs have we seen in the last handful of years hit release, an inrush of WOW players comes in, then they get run out of town on a rail by the diehard fanbois? I've seen it in EQ2 where people would bitch about having lower pop than WOW but then attack anyone who even mentions that they had played WOW...I saw it in AOC as well. There is nothing quite like hearing a game's population whine and cry about needing more players, the studio institutes a limited time free-play event to draw new players in (similar to AO "Froobs"), then immediately the same asshats that whined about their server being low pop go out of their way to shit all over the influx of ex-WOW players (many of whom then leave and those fanbois then go back to bitching about having a low pop again).
Altering EQ code was hard. Remember the whole rigamarole on HP where mobs above 32767 HP had in fact "100 HP", so that the % health was correctly reported, because no dev wanted to touch the netcode with a 10-foot pole?
I don't remember that from EQ1 myself, but it is funny how I see "32767" and choke on my coffee. I'm not a programmer and I've only ran into this in my PLC coursework (for example integer files ranging from ?32,768 to +32,767 from 16 bit I'm assuming) but I wonder why it defaulted to 100hp (wouldn't it have been hilarious to see HP overflow and wrap around to -32,768?)
That's what I've been hoping for a long time. I want to see a game where there's no such thing as respawns even, at least not like we know them. Something radically different, part of a large, huge world. McHuge Large even.
I'd also love moving away from typical number-based progression that go up with every expansion (items, levels, etc), and the game be more about adventuring, exploring, building, etc, but that may be asking a bit too much for the genre.
That shouldn't be asking too much; many of us have talked about similar games for a long time now but I'm not going to get my hopes up about seeing anything like that in the near future. I'd love to see a game without raiding as we know it, more negative reinforcement instead of
"push button, receive bacon"design, fully player crafted economy and less predication on dropped loot (though dropped clicky or unique items would be fun, along with crafting mats), player created society on a level past EVE, removal of character levels, etc etc etc.
The fact I didn't get penalized is my reward.
This is why I mention operant conditioning and negative reinforcement. The way I think traditional raid mobs/bosses should work (dragons, giants, deities, etc) is that instead of killing them repeatedly every week for loot, they should be nigh unstoppable and rare, and used specifically to destroy the things that players create. So [Mistwalkers] puts in the time to build a keep, it's all snazzy looking...but eventually some "raid boss" spawns and heads off to attack items of interest that are relevant to a creature of it's scale. Such as heading towards towns, cities, redoubts, keeps, etc and smashing players and NPCs on their way there kind of like a Fansy train of sand giants running over people (choo-choo motherfuckers!). Picture Smaug waking up and rapetraining Dale for example, only let's imagine something like Lord Vyemm leaving his lair and deciding it wants to attack the keep that Mistwalkers built and pretty much be an asshole until it's ran off (or, if possible, killed). Sure it might actually drop loot if killed, but you
REALLYwant to run it off or kill it so that you don't have months and months of hard work ruined in an afternoon (like a Minecraft creeper on steroids). Especially if you have enemies in the game (let's imagine some group of Euro faggots) that when/if they find out that your keep is getting assailed by a dragon decide that it would be a good time to make a push at your defenses...