I played EQ2 at launch for two years straight. I have always said this and will say it here again, the community on several of it's servers is absolutely toxic. I only continued playing after the first year because I loved the game so much. But after the third expac I threw in the towel on my defiler and started playing WOW. After all the negatives I heard about WOW I was prepared to live without general chat. I find in WOW however due to the sheer amount of people playing, it is possible to find an adult group of folks to guild and play with. Sure theres toxicity in WOW, but again, due to the vastness of subs you can find your own little space with like minded folks that are mature. I have been in 3 raid guilds in WOW over the lst two years, all mature, helpful folks, some of which I am still in touch with ingame to this day. Back to EQ2...
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off). For example: you no longer want to be in a guild so you inform the GL and you move on. In too many cases the GL of the guild you left will make sure to bad mouth you so its harder to get into a new guild. Lots of cowardly behaviour too, people will badmouth you anonymously and get several of their guildmates to do so as well. I dont know how many times I saw GLs boot people from a guild while the person was offline. ALot of this goes on in the game forums and then translates into the game.
In short to me EQ2 is like Paris...beautiful place, but the people gotta go! Its the main reason I havent bothered to go back even tho OVERALL Eq2 has more to keep me interested (great crafting, housing, etc.)
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off).
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off).
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
thats a shame that many of them are 25 yet have the mentality and act like they are 5.
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off).
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
I see polls that say Obama has a 60% approval rating too but that doesnt make it so. Who did the pollsters interview? I would guess most people intereviewed were 25+ yrs old. There are many ways to skew a pole and the pollsters know all the tricks. Remember the '04 elections? Had Kerry winning right up until the end. However having said that if only 5% of WOW players are children, 5% or 10 million is still a large number, that is if you believe WOW has 10 million subs.. which is another estimate i truely doubt.
Originally posted by grandpagamer I see polls that say Obama has a 60% approval rating too but that doesnt make it so. Who did the pollsters interview? I would guess most people intereviewed were 25+ yrs old. There are many ways to skew a pole and the pollsters know all the tricks. Remember the '04 elections? Had Kerry winning right up until the end. However having said that if only 5% of WOW players are children, 5% or 10 million is still a large number, that is if you believe WOW has 10 million subs.. which is another estimate i truely doubt.
If you actually read the article instead of just dismissing it out of hand you could see that people run an application that collects this kind of data for Neilsen. They did not interview anyone, just collected data from computers running the application. Sure poll or surveys of this sort can be done improperly or miscalculate, but it sure is far more reliable that some idiot who makes biased claims that 90% of the players are 18 or younger.
Political polls are a completely different beast than collecting data on what games people play.
I find it hard to believe that many people play wow also, but there are almost 500 servers just for western players. The math adds up even if you want to ignore the legal issues.
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off).
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
thats a shame that many of them are 25 yet have the mentality and act like they are 5.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
Precisely, and EQ2s small community lends itself to abusive behaviours. People in the game do act out in ways because they know it will have effect due to the small community. And fankly, I have played many MMOs, the elements that I mentioned before I found consistently in EQ2. Racist jokes, sexism, bad mouthing, I have never seen this type of behaviour on a consistent basis the way I saw it in EQ2. Everyones experience is different of course, and this was mine. And whats with the WOW bashing? Not sure why WOW gets trashed every time theres an issue. WOW is big enough where you can find a great group of people and ignore the stypidity. Theres no where to go in EQ2.
I played on Everfrost (now EF and Grobb merged) since launch, and yeah there were some assholes who thought they were better than everyone else, but you will find that in any game. Most players are mature (some egotistic), but for the most part, my favorite gaming memories were made in EQ2.
My suggestion is to find a good guild that you can joke around with on TeamSpeak and /gu chat with. From past experiences, the conservative players are found in guilds in which you get a slap on the wrist for cussing in guild chat in--stay away from these.
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off).
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
An interesting article but nowhere does it say this chart has anything to do about the demographic of wow game players.... This chart is the age of all game players and wow represents around 5% of the game play base this data represents. The most popular game being solitare and having more then 10x the volume of players then wow...
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off).
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
An interesting article but nowhere does it say this chart has anything to do about the demographic of wow game players.... This chart is the age of all game players and wow represents around 5% of the game play base this data represents. The most popular game being solitare and having more then 10x the volume of players then wow...
So you conclusion is bogus.
From the same article. Here you can see that the majority of people they researched fell into the 25-54 age range. 1,100,000 (males+females) out of 1,800,000 (total unique from december last year).
Again, this is not my conclusion, but that of someone working at Neilsen. I just happen to agree with it and think it applies to most pay to play mmos.
They are the complete opposite of wow, they are older waaaaaaaay more conservative and generally untolerant of ppl they think will ruin thier game or attempt to challenge any view they have of thier "perfect" world. That said I played wow for a period of 4 months about 2 years ago so I am not a wow fanboy before you flame me. I used that just as an example of a generally accept "bad" community. In reality I believe eq 2's community is equally as bad in a different way.
In my experience, the EQ2 community is far more helpful and friendly than any other MMO that I have played. All games, of course, will have helpful people, but I have found that EQ2 has a far larger percentage that go out of their way to help others (even perfect strangers). And, yes, the overall player base is more mature (regardless of age). However, you will always have some idiots in any large group of people.
i don't think that anyone playing EQ2 thinks that it's "perfect", but they do like it better than the other options that are available. It sounds like you were trying to convince people that certain things needed to be changed and people disagreed with you. If you are suggesting something that they feel will ruin the game, of course they are going to speak out against it. That doesn't make them intolerant. it just means that they didn't like your ideas. Just because YOU think they are good ideas, does not mean that they are. The EQ2 community is just as diverse as any other community, but what they have in common is that they prefer EQ2 over other MMO's, and they don't want to see it changed into some other game.
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off).
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
An interesting article but nowhere does it say this chart has anything to do about the demographic of wow game players.... This chart is the age of all game players and wow represents around 5% of the game play base this data represents. The most popular game being solitare and having more then 10x the volume of players then wow...
So you conclusion is bogus.
From the same article. Here you can see that the majority of people they researched fell into the 25-54 age range. 1,100,000 (males+females) out of 1,800,000 (total unique from december last year).
Again, this is not my conclusion, but that of someone working at Neilsen. I just happen to agree with it and think it applies to most pay to play mmos.
My point was that they don't give you any breakdown of how many people in various age groups play wow vs eq2 which was what this discussion was about... This just shows the top games for that age bracket without showing the top games for say 15-20 or any other age group. So you can't really conclude what the top age bracket is that plays wow or eq2?
Also 185K pcs are being tracked by megapanel application?! Gamers are notoriously picky about spyware and software installed on their computers. I gotta wonder how they convinced people to install this software and run it? 185k isn't a small number so what segment of the population is running it? Is it running on adult computers or your kids computer? Does anyone on this forum run this software? Does Nielson pay you to run it?
The discussions on 1-9 and 70-79 on AB this weekend have gone from bad to worse. It started off with the usual trolling of everyone that asks a simple question and now evolves to CONSTANT racism and biggotry. Someone will suggest a trolling topic and they'll roll with it for 4 or 5 hours at a time, if I logged in to EQ2 for the first time and saw this sort of bollocks barrons chat then I wouldn't stick around. Older, smarter people can be much more offensive than little kids that just shout curse words and knowing better doesn't seem to be a factor.
Pretty ashamed to be an EQ2 player and I spend most of my time ingame with no chat channels at all - kinda hard to find a group when LFM chat is mixed in with intolerable trolling.
-- Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
I wasn't making the wow vs eq2 comparison by age demographics, because honestly I think it is silly to think that the players in either game are very different. Someone with almost no exposure to wow made a claim that 90% of wow players are under 18 and I think that neilsen has a bit more credibility than that or most of the speculation on this site. The chart I posted above does show the majority of wow players in the 25-54 bracket which was my point and not much beyond that.
What age groups play eq2 is anyone's guess lacking a similar study, but I would think it is the same as any other pay to play mmo and dominated by adults. I wouldn't be ignorant enough to say eq2 is full of children who ruin the community and if I did it would be easily pointed out for the obvious trolling that it is.
I don't think the original posters story is untrue in the least and most likely not a result of his/her actions. On the other hand I don't think it is representative of the whole eq2 community either. All mmos have good and bad in them. Different community sizes will offer different strengths and different weaknesses.
For the record, when I last played eq2 a couple months back my experience was pretty positive. I met 2 veteran players in the newbie area who were really helpful and just fun to hang around, but that is generally the experience I have in any game I play.
I reactivated EQ2 and have been playing for about 2 weeks now, and I have to say I found the community to be suprisingly horrible. I'm currently playing on nagafen, so I doubt the community on my server is typical of the PvE servers, but still I was suprised by the level of immaturity, anger and hostility. It's dissapointing, because the game looks great visually (thanks to the advice from the sticky on these forums), has great races and classes, and lots of content... but I like to have the option for at least a little PvP occasionally, and EQ2 is very all-or-nothing in that aspect.
Nagafen. That server is the worst of the worst. [Carotidcutter] memes, trolling, false suicide threats, etc etc. all over that server.
Currently playing: EverQuest II
Tried: EVE Online (will return someday), Final Fantasy XI (didn't like, sorry)
I wasn't making the wow vs eq2 comparison by age demographics, because honestly I think it is silly to think that the players in either game are very different. Someone with almost no exposure to wow made a claim that 90% of wow players are under 18 and I think that neilsen has a bit more credibility than that or most of the speculation on this site. The chart I posted above does show the majority of wow players in the 25-54 bracket which was my point and not much beyond that. What age groups play eq2 is anyone's guess lacking a similar study, but I would think it is the same as any other pay to play mmo and dominated by adults. I wouldn't be ignorant enough to say eq2 is full of children who ruin the community and if I did it would be easily pointed out for the obvious trolling that it is. I don't think the original posters story is untrue in the least and most likely not a result of his/her actions. On the other hand I don't think it is representative of the whole eq2 community either. All mmos have good and bad in them. Different community sizes will offer different strengths and different weaknesses.
For the record, when I last played eq2 a couple months back my experience was pretty positive. I met 2 veteran players in the newbie area who were really helpful and just fun to hang around, but that is generally the experience I have in any game I play.
ok I'm gonna beat this to death.... What part of that article says that the majority of wow players are in the 25-54 age bracket? i'm not saying that isn't the case mind you just that the article doesn't say that and you are speculating that that is the case. What the article says is that the 25-54 age group play spend more time playing games then other age brackets.
just looking at males you got 20 roughtly in the 25-54 bracket, will the 3 younger brackets are maybe 3,4,4 for a total of 11.
Now when you look at the breakdown of games being played by people in the 25-54 bracket you see that of that bracket 675K are wow and other games account for more then 9M players. Or about 7% so that 20 number is really a 1.4 contribution. So now the question is how does game play break down for other age groups? If that other 11 group has a greater percent of game players playing wow then it could easily be a greater percent overall.
Further I'd question the distribution of the data collection across gamer computers and age brackets. Someone older is more likely to participate in this data collection then some teen or a college kid. Thats my opinion but I think it has some validity since older people tend to be a bit more stable and consistent and probably more willing to participate in something like this.
In any event, I'm not arguing a conclusion one way or the other. I'm just saying that your materials do not back up your conclusions and that you are speculating about something without facts even in your supporting document that back your conclusions. The data in this report is not complete enough to draw any conclusion what group are predominant wow players. It could be that people in the 12-24 bracket don't play solitare, freecell, hearts, or pinball nearly as much as older computer users. Perhaps wow is the top game in the 12-24 bracket and represents 30-40% of the games played in the top 10??
I don't really want to get dragged into this sideline, but I would like to add that I used to be on the Nielsen Panel for a month or so (as an experiment, we forced a direct fabrication on their web browser usage) and found their data collection methods to be only slightly more reliable than the crap provided by sirbruce at mmogchart.com.
Even if I didn't have personal knowledge of how Nielsen works, I'm quite confident that I would find those numbers highly suspect as they contradict my personal experience.
i played eq2 off and on from launch and ive been on a bunch of servers. started on najena and it was fun. quit came back to nagafen, it started ok. and as it grew it got really really bad. then moved to antonia bayle. people there were pretty snooty and stuck up and clashed with who i am
so i moved to crushbone. met a lot of cool people, met a lot of douche bags. just most of the people there make eq2 a job not a hobby. every guild i was in demanded that all members grind out those city writ thingies for guild xp to get to guild lvl 80. you know how boring that crap is? super boring!
ok I'm gonna beat this to death.... What part of that article says that the majority of wow players are in the 25-54 age bracket? i'm not saying that isn't the case mind you just that the article doesn't say that and you are speculating that that is the case. What the article says is that the 25-54 age group play spend more time playing games then other age brackets.
Ok, ignore the chart showing minutes played. That just shows a trend that most pc gamers are adults.
Here is how I came to my conclusion, and keep in mind this is only for north america since that is where the data comes from. Figure 6 is from the article near the bottom.
Looking at this chart you can see the following
It is for the time period of december 2008
It is only for the age group of 25-54
It counts unique players, not multiple accounts, not minutes played.
It has a line item for number of players of world of warcraft
So from this chart you can see that there were 428,621 unique female and 675,713 unique male or 1,104,334 total unique players in the age group of 25-54 that accessed world of warcraft last december.
Also in the article was the following statement
"In total for December 2008, Neilsen shows more than 1.8 million unique persons played world of warcraft"
Now some simple math:
1,104,334 total players age 25-54 [divided by] 1,800,000 total players for all age groups = 61.35% of the players were age 25-54. Which shows a clear majority of players are 25-54 in age. The last 39% would be spread across 18 and under, 19-24 and 55+ respectively. However it doesn't matter what that breakdown is since they can not be more than 61%.
every guild i was in demanded that all members grind out those city writ thingies for guild xp to get to guild lvl 80. you know how boring that crap is? super boring! so i quit again
Ive been in 5 different guilds in EQ2 on Blackburrow Server
I was **never** asked to grind writs by any of them and they were all under level 50 guilds
Comments
I played EQ2 at launch for two years straight. I have always said this and will say it here again, the community on several of it's servers is absolutely toxic. I only continued playing after the first year because I loved the game so much. But after the third expac I threw in the towel on my defiler and started playing WOW. After all the negatives I heard about WOW I was prepared to live without general chat. I find in WOW however due to the sheer amount of people playing, it is possible to find an adult group of folks to guild and play with. Sure theres toxicity in WOW, but again, due to the vastness of subs you can find your own little space with like minded folks that are mature. I have been in 3 raid guilds in WOW over the lst two years, all mature, helpful folks, some of which I am still in touch with ingame to this day. Back to EQ2...
In EQ2 I found alot of backstabbing, racism, sexism, cliquish behaviour and reputational risk (if you managed to piss some people off). For example: you no longer want to be in a guild so you inform the GL and you move on. In too many cases the GL of the guild you left will make sure to bad mouth you so its harder to get into a new guild. Lots of cowardly behaviour too, people will badmouth you anonymously and get several of their guildmates to do so as well. I dont know how many times I saw GLs boot people from a guild while the person was offline. ALot of this goes on in the game forums and then translates into the game.
In short to me EQ2 is like Paris...beautiful place, but the people gotta go! Its the main reason I havent bothered to go back even tho OVERALL Eq2 has more to keep me interested (great crafting, housing, etc.)
Current Games: WOW, EVE Online
you mean lack of EQ2 community? the servers are all empty pretty much
No. They aren't.
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
thats a shame that many of them are 25 yet have the mentality and act like they are 5.
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
I see polls that say Obama has a 60% approval rating too but that doesnt make it so. Who did the pollsters interview? I would guess most people intereviewed were 25+ yrs old. There are many ways to skew a pole and the pollsters know all the tricks. Remember the '04 elections? Had Kerry winning right up until the end. However having said that if only 5% of WOW players are children, 5% or 10 million is still a large number, that is if you believe WOW has 10 million subs.. which is another estimate i truely doubt.
If you actually read the article instead of just dismissing it out of hand you could see that people run an application that collects this kind of data for Neilsen. They did not interview anyone, just collected data from computers running the application. Sure poll or surveys of this sort can be done improperly or miscalculate, but it sure is far more reliable that some idiot who makes biased claims that 90% of the players are 18 or younger.
Political polls are a completely different beast than collecting data on what games people play.
I find it hard to believe that many people play wow also, but there are almost 500 servers just for western players. The math adds up even if you want to ignore the legal issues.
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
thats a shame that many of them are 25 yet have the mentality and act like they are 5.
Agreed.
Precisely, and EQ2s small community lends itself to abusive behaviours. People in the game do act out in ways because they know it will have effect due to the small community. And fankly, I have played many MMOs, the elements that I mentioned before I found consistently in EQ2. Racist jokes, sexism, bad mouthing, I have never seen this type of behaviour on a consistent basis the way I saw it in EQ2. Everyones experience is different of course, and this was mine.
And whats with the WOW bashing? Not sure why WOW gets trashed every time theres an issue. WOW is big enough where you can find a great group of people and ignore the stypidity. Theres no where to go in EQ2.
Current Games: WOW, EVE Online
I agree and there no need for someone to go to any game community creating a topic
WATCH OUT FOR XX COMMUNITY !
my EQ2 experiences have been nothing like the Ops or Broomy -- for the better
EQ2 fan sites
I played on Everfrost (now EF and Grobb merged) since launch, and yeah there were some assholes who thought they were better than everyone else, but you will find that in any game. Most players are mature (some egotistic), but for the most part, my favorite gaming memories were made in EQ2.
My suggestion is to find a good guild that you can joke around with on TeamSpeak and /gu chat with. From past experiences, the conservative players are found in guilds in which you get a slap on the wrist for cussing in guild chat in--stay away from these.
Just my 2cp,
Aarinak
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
An interesting article but nowhere does it say this chart has anything to do about the demographic of wow game players.... This chart is the age of all game players and wow represents around 5% of the game play base this data represents. The most popular game being solitare and having more then 10x the volume of players then wow...
So you conclusion is bogus.
---
Ethion
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
An interesting article but nowhere does it say this chart has anything to do about the demographic of wow game players.... This chart is the age of all game players and wow represents around 5% of the game play base this data represents. The most popular game being solitare and having more then 10x the volume of players then wow...
So you conclusion is bogus.
From the same article. Here you can see that the majority of people they researched fell into the 25-54 age range. 1,100,000 (males+females) out of 1,800,000 (total unique from december last year).
Again, this is not my conclusion, but that of someone working at Neilsen. I just happen to agree with it and think it applies to most pay to play mmos.
In my experience, the EQ2 community is far more helpful and friendly than any other MMO that I have played. All games, of course, will have helpful people, but I have found that EQ2 has a far larger percentage that go out of their way to help others (even perfect strangers). And, yes, the overall player base is more mature (regardless of age). However, you will always have some idiots in any large group of people.
i don't think that anyone playing EQ2 thinks that it's "perfect", but they do like it better than the other options that are available. It sounds like you were trying to convince people that certain things needed to be changed and people disagreed with you. If you are suggesting something that they feel will ruin the game, of course they are going to speak out against it. That doesn't make them intolerant. it just means that they didn't like your ideas. Just because YOU think they are good ideas, does not mean that they are. The EQ2 community is just as diverse as any other community, but what they have in common is that they prefer EQ2 over other MMO's, and they don't want to see it changed into some other game.
I challenge you to show me any community where this doesn't happen, gamewise or other. This is called human nature, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately too true, it just happens more when the majority of players are under the age of 18, like WoW.
Actually someone from Neilsen ratings just posted numbers that show most wow players by far are 25 years or older. Both by unique visitors and minutes played. I bet the numbers are similar in most pay to play mmos.
blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040609_fnl1.pdf
I agree with Darwa that people are the same everywhere, but would go one step further to say that certain game mechanics can bring out various behaviors in people. For example roleplay servers tend to be more friendly, but to much contested content can bring out the worst in people ala original everquest.
An interesting article but nowhere does it say this chart has anything to do about the demographic of wow game players.... This chart is the age of all game players and wow represents around 5% of the game play base this data represents. The most popular game being solitare and having more then 10x the volume of players then wow...
So you conclusion is bogus.
From the same article. Here you can see that the majority of people they researched fell into the 25-54 age range. 1,100,000 (males+females) out of 1,800,000 (total unique from december last year).
Again, this is not my conclusion, but that of someone working at Neilsen. I just happen to agree with it and think it applies to most pay to play mmos.
My point was that they don't give you any breakdown of how many people in various age groups play wow vs eq2 which was what this discussion was about... This just shows the top games for that age bracket without showing the top games for say 15-20 or any other age group. So you can't really conclude what the top age bracket is that plays wow or eq2?
Also 185K pcs are being tracked by megapanel application?! Gamers are notoriously picky about spyware and software installed on their computers. I gotta wonder how they convinced people to install this software and run it? 185k isn't a small number so what segment of the population is running it? Is it running on adult computers or your kids computer? Does anyone on this forum run this software? Does Nielson pay you to run it?
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Ethion
The discussions on 1-9 and 70-79 on AB this weekend have gone from bad to worse. It started off with the usual trolling of everyone that asks a simple question and now evolves to CONSTANT racism and biggotry. Someone will suggest a trolling topic and they'll roll with it for 4 or 5 hours at a time, if I logged in to EQ2 for the first time and saw this sort of bollocks barrons chat then I wouldn't stick around. Older, smarter people can be much more offensive than little kids that just shout curse words and knowing better doesn't seem to be a factor.
Pretty ashamed to be an EQ2 player and I spend most of my time ingame with no chat channels at all - kinda hard to find a group when LFM chat is mixed in with intolerable trolling.
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
I wasn't making the wow vs eq2 comparison by age demographics, because honestly I think it is silly to think that the players in either game are very different. Someone with almost no exposure to wow made a claim that 90% of wow players are under 18 and I think that neilsen has a bit more credibility than that or most of the speculation on this site. The chart I posted above does show the majority of wow players in the 25-54 bracket which was my point and not much beyond that.
What age groups play eq2 is anyone's guess lacking a similar study, but I would think it is the same as any other pay to play mmo and dominated by adults. I wouldn't be ignorant enough to say eq2 is full of children who ruin the community and if I did it would be easily pointed out for the obvious trolling that it is.
I don't think the original posters story is untrue in the least and most likely not a result of his/her actions. On the other hand I don't think it is representative of the whole eq2 community either. All mmos have good and bad in them. Different community sizes will offer different strengths and different weaknesses.
For the record, when I last played eq2 a couple months back my experience was pretty positive. I met 2 veteran players in the newbie area who were really helpful and just fun to hang around, but that is generally the experience I have in any game I play.
Nagafen. That server is the worst of the worst. [Carotidcutter] memes, trolling, false suicide threats, etc etc. all over that server.
Currently playing: EverQuest II
Tried: EVE Online (will return someday), Final Fantasy XI (didn't like, sorry)
ok I'm gonna beat this to death.... What part of that article says that the majority of wow players are in the 25-54 age bracket? i'm not saying that isn't the case mind you just that the article doesn't say that and you are speculating that that is the case. What the article says is that the 25-54 age group play spend more time playing games then other age brackets.
just looking at males you got 20 roughtly in the 25-54 bracket, will the 3 younger brackets are maybe 3,4,4 for a total of 11.
Now when you look at the breakdown of games being played by people in the 25-54 bracket you see that of that bracket 675K are wow and other games account for more then 9M players. Or about 7% so that 20 number is really a 1.4 contribution. So now the question is how does game play break down for other age groups? If that other 11 group has a greater percent of game players playing wow then it could easily be a greater percent overall.
Further I'd question the distribution of the data collection across gamer computers and age brackets. Someone older is more likely to participate in this data collection then some teen or a college kid. Thats my opinion but I think it has some validity since older people tend to be a bit more stable and consistent and probably more willing to participate in something like this.
In any event, I'm not arguing a conclusion one way or the other. I'm just saying that your materials do not back up your conclusions and that you are speculating about something without facts even in your supporting document that back your conclusions. The data in this report is not complete enough to draw any conclusion what group are predominant wow players. It could be that people in the 12-24 bracket don't play solitare, freecell, hearts, or pinball nearly as much as older computer users. Perhaps wow is the top game in the 12-24 bracket and represents 30-40% of the games played in the top 10??
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Ethion
I don't really want to get dragged into this sideline, but I would like to add that I used to be on the Nielsen Panel for a month or so (as an experiment, we forced a direct fabrication on their web browser usage) and found their data collection methods to be only slightly more reliable than the crap provided by sirbruce at mmogchart.com.
Even if I didn't have personal knowledge of how Nielsen works, I'm quite confident that I would find those numbers highly suspect as they contradict my personal experience.
i played eq2 off and on from launch and ive been on a bunch of servers. started on najena and it was fun. quit came back to nagafen, it started ok. and as it grew it got really really bad. then moved to antonia bayle. people there were pretty snooty and stuck up and clashed with who i am
so i moved to crushbone. met a lot of cool people, met a lot of douche bags. just most of the people there make eq2 a job not a hobby. every guild i was in demanded that all members grind out those city writ thingies for guild xp to get to guild lvl 80. you know how boring that crap is? super boring!
so i quit again
Ok, ignore the chart showing minutes played. That just shows a trend that most pc gamers are adults.
Here is how I came to my conclusion, and keep in mind this is only for north america since that is where the data comes from. Figure 6 is from the article near the bottom.
Looking at this chart you can see the following
So from this chart you can see that there were 428,621 unique female and 675,713 unique male or 1,104,334 total unique players in the age group of 25-54 that accessed world of warcraft last december.
Also in the article was the following statement
"In total for December 2008, Neilsen shows more than 1.8 million unique persons played world of warcraft"
Now some simple math:
1,104,334 total players age 25-54 [divided by] 1,800,000 total players for all age groups = 61.35% of the players were age 25-54. Which shows a clear majority of players are 25-54 in age. The last 39% would be spread across 18 and under, 19-24 and 55+ respectively. However it doesn't matter what that breakdown is since they can not be more than 61%.
Does that answer your question?
Ive been in 5 different guilds in EQ2 on Blackburrow Server
I was **never** asked to grind writs by any of them and they were all under level 50 guilds
some guilds want writs --- some guilds dont care
EQ2 fan sites