This is where in my opinion EQ will always be better than WOW. Bring your friends. All your friends. Bring their friends. Bring their friends' friends. Those early EQ raids where the only player limit was not crashing the zone is what it was about. Even little Timmy got to be in on a Vox raid.
EQ did so much right. Rare spawn drops that were sought after expansions later. A game design that basically forced you to be social. A combat system where people could chat between pulls, a game design where being blackballed from society for being a <insert shitty behavior> mattered.
Video game companies cannot let people work for free. Old lawsuits against AOL and Origin have precedence that you basically can't use volunteer labor without getting into serious trouble with labor laws.
The cyber that would go on during trash clears in EQ was memorable. The EQ gameplay made the game more accessible to soccer moms and shit playing druids and shaman.
I've been lamenting that, this "data driven development" for a long time. But it goes further than that, because even once in a while they stumble upon some "fun" accidentally.
I think the entire issue surrounding Soar is over blown as fuck. If Alpha had its NDA up - Retail players would have gotten Soar in its nerfed state and everyone would be happy with it.
I am not that invested in the upcoming expansion, and I also think it may have been another overblown issue. It was a cool racial ability, but at the same time it would have had no impact on raiding or instanced PvP, so players were not that understanding of a nerf initially.
It's not so much a graphical issue, but more like a network code issue. That code has never been built for players moving that fast. Even taxi rides peaked around 400 to 450% movement speed, IIRC?
Wouldnt network code be the same across the game? Just to reiterate why I have this suspicion - Dragon Riding/Flight in the Dragonflight expansion has ZERO pop in at 930%. This is just my theory based off the evidence that Ive seen - so it could very well be something else. But this just seems the most logical to me.
Therein is the problem. For the most part, until Cata, I felt you could drag your social group through content with time. You might be behind and some encounters like Kaelthas, Yogg, Mimiron hard, or Lich King really made you want to boot your 54 year old grandad Hunter that was just fun to be around but wanted to stay warm in fires, but overall you could compensate. I think Mimi hard and Lich king heroic were the only two I think we had to come up with reasons to sit people. Completed optional content. I don’t think we did Yogg + 0 when it was relevant. My guild was semi casual by then. We were mostly content with LK normal 25, but we did push on because we liked each other.
Me and my wife actually had this conversation a few days ago and it brought up an interesting question. Would the social aspect of EQ be as successful as it was if something like Discord existed back then? Part of the allure of 'chatting' between pulls was the anonymous nature of it, where you were only typing in a chat box and the immersion was thus still intact. I wonder if that's gets broken once you introduce voice chat into the equation.
Good point. We first adopted teamspeak for WoW. I never liked voice chat with strangers, I would rather type. With friends/guildies I preferred voice.
