Vanilla EQ to SoV was barely two years though. If you add SoL and PoP to the Golden Age then you get another two more years or so so they have a point.Define progress. Relatively speaking, you started off with Shakespeare and you're now watching a down-syndrome Elmer Fudd cartoon in this modern gaming industry.
The integrity of EQ's gameplay lasted well past vanilla, into RoK and SoV.
I do personally consider vanilla WoW to be only the first 6 months or so or however long it was until the release of battlegrounds. Once those started coming out it completely turned the PvP climate upside down besides maybe in a zone or two.
It does make one wonder what they're getting at.The fact that you think root DOTing and snare kiting are exploits says quite a bit about the validity of your opinions regarding early era EQ.
Remove those uses and snare is completely useless in the intended tank and spank while roots utility is greatly curtailed.
This board keeps showing it's bluebie heritage and both your post and the ones you're replying to it show it. The game world and PvE was window dressing to me even if it was most of what I did, what was the core of EQ to me as a Rallos player was the atmosphere the game and community created between PKs, Anti's and Powergamers.The funny thing is that most of the people who were good at EQ back in the day *did* move on and become good at other games. Its the guys that required 10 years to actually achieve anything in the game that romanticize it the most because it literally was this huge chasm of difficulty that they overcame. The rest of us just played the game and moved on.
It's why I feel I'm more flexible about what I in MMOs, and while I'd like them to be retro like EQ, so long as they recreate that open world and player driven competition over content, I'm for the most part happy.
The WoW devs said ages ago that when the first mulled over the idea of creating the game they asked themselves what kind of MMO they wanted to create and everyone agreed that they wanted to make an improved EQ clone with all the rough edges smoothed out.I wouldn't use the word"regressed", maybe"stagnated"would be a better word. No one has really shaken things up or succeeded at creating an entirely new paradigm. Even WOW design is strikingly similar to EQ1 design on a ton of points, people just tend to get hung up on a lot of minor stuff.
Classes being able to solo content is a fantastic example - it exists in both EQ1 and WOW, only WOW decided to go with more class parity as opposed to the EQ1 design of"certain classes can solo, but the rest of you retards are screwed". One would think that WOW allowing everyone to solo instead of just certain classes would be an improvement, yet we frequently hear people complain about this as if WOW screwed the pooch by doing so. Yet...I don't think I've ever heard any of the people who attack WOW for allowing everyone to solo ever say something like"Yeah, NO ONE should be able to solo, ever: NERF DEM DRUIDS, BARDS, NECROS, ETC". So in the end it seems like people are wanting to be able to selectively "break" a game instead of marginalizing how important that was by allowing everyone to do it. Which is fine, except for the minor issue being that people tend to whitewash this kind of thing and ignore the fact that the design itself was awful and that it was inherently broken to allow only certain classes to break content, all so that those people can have access to classes that allow them to do exactly that.
Even though at the time I thought that WOW was a huge departure from EQ1...and on a number of fronts, it was...over time I've come to realize that it's probably still similar enough to EQ1 design that a lot of our debates are largely meaningless. I don't think that the genre is stagnant because WOW was so different from EQ1 that a return to EQ1 design is what we need, I think the genre is stagnant because the opposite is true: even with the differences that exist WOW is still similar to EQ1, as is almost every other MMO that has come out in the last decade or so. The genre is stagnant because everything that comes out is a rehash of a rehash of a rehash, and playing the umpteenth iteration of a level, item and progression based MMO with only a few differences from other level, item and progression based MMOs is one of the most boring and soul crushing things that someone can do.
Even if you remove the exp penalty and keep corpse recovery in it still stands. Anyone who doubts that should think about how many exped in Velks at kobolds and beyond.3) massive dungeons and death penalties- i lump these two together because without a death penalty, then the size of the dungeon wouldn't really matter. as much as people hate them, without a death penalty, no fear exists in the game, and without the fear of losing, the thrill of winning is nonexistent.