Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Yeah, I've seen the "well, actually, EQ wasn't that difficult" trend over the last few years. I strongly suspect half the people trying to retcon EQ into an "actually not that difficult" game either didn't play 1999-2000 EQ or don't remember what it was like. People jump on P99 or some other emu now and play EQ and think, "hey, EQ isn't that hard," without realizing that they are employing 20+ years worth of game knowledge/strategies/practices that most people back in 1999 and 2000 didn't know and weren't using.

You could even break it down and acknowledge, yeah, sure, there were ways to make the game much less "difficult," even in the early years. You could primarily XP in groups (as opposed to solo or duo) and you could stay at the ZL and farm trash mobs, like Fogel said. I guess you could say playing that style wasn't technically "difficult" in that there was a relatively low chance of death, but progressing in the game like that took forever. And in EQ everything, including difficulty, was measured in time.

Progress was difficult in EQ. It took a long time to get levels and cool items, especially in the early years. You could lose 8 hours worth of XP on one bad death and a few failed corpse runs. You could lose your entire corpse and all your items in the Plane of Fear. The best EQ players were the most efficient ones. I'm not just talking about how much time you could dedicate to playing, but how much progress you could make in the time you spent online.

I get that some people want to define "difficulty" in some narrow, twitchy, button pushing combo way. That's definitely one type of difficulty, but it's not the only one. EQ was always you vs. the clock rather than you vs. the NPCs.

Utnayan said:

Hey Convo tell your buddy he doesn’t have to worry about jack shit if he doesn’t try to snowball people’s asses in this thread.

Of course he won’t listen to that and will likely be a cuck, so I look forward to the fallou…. Fallen.

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Didn't convo go to work for them also? or still does? I remember someone earlier in this thread getting a job with them. He's basically their PR rep for this forum.

I wouldn't trust anything said from anyone drinking that kool-aid.

Arden said:

Progress was difficult in EQ.

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Ya but not because the game itself was. You literally had dudes solo 36 man boxing an entire raid force and solo clearing PoFear lol.

Arden said:

It took a long time to get levels and cool items, especially in the early years. You could lose 8 hours worth of XP on one bad death and a few failed corpse runs. You could lose your entire corpse and all your items in the Plane of Fear. The best EQ players were the most efficient ones. I'm not just talking about how much time you could dedicate to playing, but how much progress you could make in the time you spent online.

I get that some people want to define "difficulty" in some narrow, twitchy, button pushing combo way. That's definitely one type of difficulty, but it's not the only one. EQ was always you vs. the clock rather than you vs. the NPCs.

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Things taking a long time is not the same as being difficult dude. That is artificially induced "difficulty". There was no aiming and no dodging other than moving around a wall to avoid an AE every same exact amount of seconds. There were very few abilities in general and very few reactionary skills necessary. Good bards, enchanters and clerics were the only classes that really resembled anything close to skill based difficulty.

Yea.... a lot of the old school EQ people here that I've played other games with are... really bad at video games. Like... painfully bad. And I'm not even all that good at them.

My time at the beginning of Legion with the FoH guild was enough to give me PTSD. And I hadn't played WoW since Cata at that point or many video games at all in general in that ~5 year absence from WoW.

EQ was literally braindead to play.

Artificially induced difficulty? As opposed to what? Organic, non-man made difficulty? You guys crack me up.

Arden said:

Artificially induced difficulty? As opposed to what? Organic, non-man made difficulty? You guys crack me up.

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I think you're confusing the word difficult for challenging. EQ was not challenging. Getting an fbss was difficult due to its rarity, not because killing the mob that dropped it was actually difficult itself. Almost every single mob in EQ was tank and spank. No dodging, no aiming, almost zero actual skill whatsoever was required. Click on target, hit a button or two, wow difficult!

VT is a good example of what I mean by artificial difficulty. Giving mobs 10x more hp's doesn't make them more difficult, it just makes them take longer and more tedious to kill. Your idea of "difficulty" seems to be making things more tedious whereas my idea of difficulty is requiring the knowledge of and the skill to predict/avoid/mitigate boss mechanics.

A lot of eq difficulty was an almost pvpve type. People fucking up near you wiping shit out. Guilds contending for limited raid targets and shitting on each other. Trying to grab targets over many interested others. I played on tallon zek and often felt like things seemed LESS competitive at times than friends on blue servers because actual pvp let you settle shit.

Actual challenge I didn't personally feel like I encountered until the god 6man ikkinz trials. Just getting back inside while naked could be rough, nevermind the content. There were some hard or tricky things before then but nothing for real imo.

I personally liked the player made challenge. It's what kept me coming back, usually guilding with hardcore degens. Popping a proc aa with a push weapon to smack goats up walls while people die next to me and I dont heal because our best dps is a mage and the opponent has more monks? Riveting gameplay. Dodging shit markers while mashing a heal spell on global cd as korrupt and I think it was noodle scream at morons for not dodging environmentals? Fucking boring.

Early era EQ is really all about your level of knowledge, not actual actions or gameplay (for the most part).

I think the barrier to entry was super low, so you could play one handed while watching shit and be fine... but there was definitely an element of skill visible by some players who pulled off shit way above the ordinary.

Foler said:

Izo in your medical opinion would you classify this as a “back-breaker”?

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Indeed.

yerm said:

A lot of eq difficulty was an almost pvpve type. People fucking up near you wiping shit out. Guilds contending for limited raid targets and shitting on each other. Trying to grab targets over many interested others. I played on tallon zek and often felt like things seemed LESS competitive at times than friends on blue servers because actual pvp let you settle shit.

Actual challenge I didn't personally feel like I encountered until the god 6man ikkinz trials. Just getting back inside while naked could be rough, nevermind the content. There were some hard or tricky things before then but nothing for real imo.

I personally liked the player made challenge. It's what kept me coming back, usually guilding with hardcore degens. Popping a proc aa with a push weapon to smack goats up walls while people die next to me and I dont heal because our best dps is a mage and the opponent has more monks? Riveting gameplay. Dodging shit markers while mashing a heal spell on global cd as korrupt and I think it was noodle scream at morons for not dodging environmentals? Fucking boring.

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Raids competing and such I can see some challenge there, as long as it just didn't turn into poopsocking. While trying to wipe another raid is funny sometimes, I wouldn't put it as challenge or difficulty. But a clean, everyone rushes to log in, mobilize, get to mob and win, definitely.

Granted I basically had none of that, I was on The Rathe, and they had rotations for as long as I could remember once I started raiding.