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My Quasi-Diatribe on Old School MMO'ers/EQ.
Hrimnir
Member RarePosts: 2,415
EDIT: For any new readers of this thread, this post is not another "zomg i love EQ so much everything about it was perfect!" posts. Yes, i loved the game. But this is a post saying here is how it was, here is what was good, here is what was bad, here are some things that should/would need to be changed, here are things that modern mmo's have done that was better, here is what would make a modern MMO that would appeal to "old schoolers".
I'm making this post as a new thread, though it originally started as a response to another thread regarding whether or not there was a market for old school mmo's. I believe because it expanded into something that wasn't 100% on topic, it was deserving of it's own thread.
Now, everyone assumes that because we're old school gamers that we would only be happy with a carbon copy replica of a game like EQ, but thats not true.
Of course there were things that most people didn't like about original EQ:
Corpse retrieval for example prior to the days of the graveyards was something most people thought was stupid.
I remember once almost losing my paladin in the plane of fear due to a failed raid, and my corpse was there for just over 6 days before we got our asses saved by some members of Afterlife, solution? Ability to easily summon your corpse, but make it costly enough that it isn't trivial, but also not unaffordable. Maybe say what you could make in 15-20 minutes of solo slaughtering equal level solo con mobs, something like that.
Certain things i loved about EQ:
Travel:
Yes, if you had to do it by foot, it was a bitch. But, if you needed to be somewhere quick, you coughed up the cash and paid a druid or a wizard for a port. I think this was a perfect system, it helped form a sense of community as well, because instead of like now, where there is always 1 super center of people hanging around in an main city somewhere, you could generally expect each ZONE to have a dedicated spot were people came to chill out, etc.
Factions:
Yes, factions in a PVE game, one of the coolest things about orig EQ. Why, you might ask, because it gave the world a feeling of being real. Hrmm, lets see, I'm a human paladin, i can't go into nektulos forest or neriak without risking having my ass handed to me. But, lets say I'm a human necromancer, well, they might still be aggro, but if i slaughter some human paladin guards, my dark elf/neriak faction goes up, and eventually, if i work at it, i can become non aggro and go explore the dark elf city, etc. Same thing applies to the languages. It was cool to be able to switch to your native language and chat with your friends in the middle of a public area and be safe in the assumption most people couldn't understand what you were saying. It added an element of realism and coolness. It really made it known that, ya, this guy may play alongside you, but he ain't no human, he's a dwarf damn it!
Other things that weren't necessarily stupid or bad design, but i can definitely see the reason for a change:
Economy/AH:
Originally EQ didn't have anything even resembling an Auction House. Was this *bad*? In many ways yes, but it opened up the opportunity for some really cool stuff. For example, a lot of times someone got lucky with an item they got in a dungeon run, but had a raid or something to go to, so they would hop in NFP, or EC tunnels depending on your server, and though it might be an item that would normally fetch 10kpp, he might sell it for 8500 or something like that so he could offload it quickly and get back to gaming. So, that meant you could do a lot of things. I for example in my mid 20's, spent about 3 weeks sitting in NFP and haggling/trading/buying low, selling high, etc etc. I started out with 1kpp and through the end of 3 weeks i had almost 100kpp and a few various items for my paladin. I promptly bought myself an RBG and my best friend in RL (whom played a warrior) a pair of SSoY's, things like that simply can't happen with an AH. But, on the flip side to that coin. An AH lets things be more fair overall, and lets everyone get back to actually playing the game sooner. So, i think most people would agree having an AH in an "old schoolers" mmo, would be a good thing.
Death Penalty:
Here is another thing people would necessarily change. Having a harsh death penalty is overall a good thing for old schoolers because it avoids wow syndrome, where you are max level, playing in some PUG, and there are 1 or 2 members of the group who are so incompetent at playing their class that they're causing you and your group to fail, get headaches, and generally nerd rage against the heavens.
This almost never happened in EQ, the only time it did is when you found some rich kid who bought a character. The thing was, it was so PAINFULLY obvious the person didn't play the character that you easily remember the person's name and blacklisted them. What this ultimately meant is that if you saw someone who was proper level for your group, you could generally expect them to be able to play their character at roughly a decent level. They may not be exceptional, but they would be functional.
Solution? Middle ground, admittedly, in orig EQ, if you died you generally lost at least 1 hours worth of good solid group XPing. Problem with it, was that generally nobody except the hardest core people were willing to take risks. I say, have the death penalty be enough that its gonna make you actually think before you act, but not so much that its a barrier to fun. So, lose maybe 15-30 minutes worth of XP, and maybe have to pay a fee of some sort to summon your corpse to a graveyard or something along those lines to get your gear back.
Instancing vs Non-instancing:
I know this is a touchy one, especially the super hardcore raiders who felt like since they were hardcore enough to be the first there to kill the dragon, they should be the ones who maintain control of its spawn until they choose otherwise.
Personally, i think most old schoolers would agree that instancing is fine for dungeons and dungeons only. I still think that it should be in combination with a kill timer, in so much that you can't just farm a dragon every day etc. The Devs can and should limit the influx of powerful items into the game.
Instancing for over world areas is friggin retarded. I *semi* understood it in orig EQ2 because a zone would get so damned overcrowded during launch because the entire player base was below level 20, etc. Then it made sense, but overall, no.
Items, Binding, Drop Rate, etc:
Another point of contention: Yes, its great for the casual gamer to have a wow like system where items are abundant, but are bound upon use. Old schoolers i think as a general rule HATE this. Why? There is no sense of pride in getting a nice item. None, whatsoever. In orig EQ, if you saw a warrior or ranger run by with a pair of SSoY's, as a low level you generally went "ZOMG, that guy had dual f*ckin yaks!". In a game like WOW, the only time you even had a smidgen of surprise was if you saw someone with one of the few orange con weapons in the game. Even then it was still like "meh /shrug".
Personally, i like how EQ changed during the end. world and dungeon dropped items were all non binding. So they could be resold, transferred to alts, whatever. Raid items were generally non tradeable, so they weren't binded, but they couldn't be sold on a market, etc. Yes, this system meant that in general as the game got older, that the "nice" dungeon type items from the original game became trivially cheap and new players could basically deck themselves out in what used to be awesome gear. Frankly, thats a good thing. Those people are going to have few chances at seeing those items in groups because there isn't enough of a player base at that level. So why not let them have easier access, its just gonna help them solo up to play with the rest of the server anyways. IMO this is a natural "life of the MMO" type of thing. As time progresses the majority of the player base reaches end game level and the lower areas/levels generally become ghost towns.
Rate of XP gain/leveling:
Another major point of contention. This is another area where the rest of the MMO landscape thinks that us "Old schoolers" would only be happy if it took 3 epochs to level to max level and you had to do it barefoot going uphill both ways with a gang of monkeys harassing you at every turn. This is not true. Do we want slower leveling than a game like WOW? Absof*ckinglutely, do we all want it like original EQ, hell levels and all? probably not. As always there is an area that needs to be a middle ground. Personally, and i think most old schoolers would agree. Even if someone is playing 20 hours a day, they shouldn't be able to make max level in less than a couple of months, ESPECIALLY if they're soloing. Maybe if a group of people did the whole 20hr a day thing then 1-2 months would be reasonable.
I recall somewhere reading that WOW orig was supposed to take something on the order of 200 hours of playtime to reach 60. I know i did it, with no assistance from higher level friends, i.e. via items of monetarily, in less than 100, solo. This is way way too fast. IMO a good rate of level for max level in an original non expansion game, would be on the order of 400-500 hours, for a reasonably good, seasoned MMO player. If the person was super new, but learned fast, it wouldn't be that much of a hindrance. But, it would be a hindrance enough that the super casual dumbass player who we all hate, would basically give up because they would die too often, and not see a good enough rate of XP gain. It would seem to someone like that to be an impossible mountain to climb.
The main advantage of a slower leveling system is two fold. First, as i said above, it weeds out the crappy players. Second, it makes it so that its actually worth your time to explore those low level dungeons, or go through them multiple times to get that new sword or breastplate. In a game like WOW, you're wasting time, because you might spend an hour and a half beating your way to the bottom of some dungeon, get some nice item, and you're replacing it 4 hours later because you've out level it, and a green you got from a quest reward is already better. ANY original EQ player will tell you that some of their fondest memories of the game occurred LONG before they were max level. This is important as it makes it about the journey and not so much the destination. This means that those hours of playing don't feel like work so much as FUN times. Who here who played EQ1 can't say they had a blast the first time they over aggroed Castle Mistmoore and had to run like hell back to the zone line screaming "train to zone!?!?!!!".
Another advantage of slower leveling that i just remembered. You actually SOCIALIZED with people and *gasp* made friends. ZOMG you say, an MMO that has....social... aspects to it? Its not just an over glorified single player game?!?!!.
Because it might take you 10 hours to go from level 21-22 you actually were there long enough that you might group with someone, log off for the day, log on the next day and be like "hey bro, wanna group up again?", and sometimes if that person happened to have a similar play schedule as you, you became long time grouping buddies/friends. This had a host of benefits. 1. It actually made you want to log on so you could socialize, and you knew you had someone to play with. 2. You got used to that person's play style, eventually you became a well oiled machine of death, and mere "normal" pick up groups could not compete with your awesomeness. The list goes on, but you get my point.
Grouping/Soloing:
I think this is probably the biggest area of contention between old schoolers and new schoolers. New schoolers/casuals tend to have this overwhelming desire for instant or near instant gratification. They want to log in, feel like they've accomplished something in 30 minutes of game play, etc. Old schoolers realize that you get a greater sense of satisfaction out of the completion of a long/longer term project/goal than one that is easily gotten. Soloing lends itself to the new schooler type of play style since they don't have to rely on other people.
Old Schoolers love grouping. Why? multiple reasons. First, it allows you to socialize with other people. Second, you get a greater sense of satisfaction out of teamwork, especially when successful Why do you think humans love team sports so much. This is also why raiding is so popular (yes loot is a big part of it, both grouping and raiding, but not all of it, unless you're playing WOW).
Do i think a game should be solo unfriendly? No. Even original EQ wasn't solo unfriendly. You could actually gain XP soloing, all the way to end game. Was it slower than grouping? yes, by a pretty healthy margin too. Is that the way it should be in a MULTIPLAYER RPG, yes, absolutely. You should always see better benefits in terms of both rate of xp gain, as well as rewards in the form of loot or gold for grouping and playing group content.
Anyways, I'm getting the impression I'm starting to ramble a bit and am losing cohesion, so I'll stop here. I'm sure i missed some points, but I'm curious as to the opinions to follow.
At this point, i'll leave you with some memories of mine in EQ in the form of screenies:
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Comments
Doesn't this mean every item can be traded or bought by gold? So any chump with some RMT-bought Gold can have any item in the game? Is there any pride in such a system?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
A few notes. I agree with much of what you said but as an old school person here to, There are things I think I might question.
As bad as I hated it, corpse retrieval is an absolute must in my opinion. Now, there should not be any chance that your going to lose your stuff on that character like they had in old eq, but Corpse retrieval is very much needed in todays games.
First, it stops zergs dead. You wont have any more zerging when you have to trek back to get your stuff. You SHOULD be penalized for screwing up.
Now, another thing you talked about is the social aspect. Very easily done in eq because combat speed was slow enough that you could actually chat while fighting. Todays mmo's is almost impossible to do that. combat speed is way to fast, they would have to slow it down a LOT in order to really bring back the social aspect.
I am the exact opposite on player run economies. I dont think there should be one. I hate player run economies simply because people are just freaking greedy. Well, there is a second part to this and that is gold sellers. Between greed and gold sellers, prices just go up and up and up. The only time they ever really normalize is when pretty much everybody has moved so far beyond the content, that it starts to drop. You get rid of player run economies, you get rid of the gold sellers at the same time. Its a win, win situation. At least, IMHO.
There is two things that EQ changed in its expansion packs and in EQ2 that I think is absolutely horrible and this again, goes back to player run economies. Making your spells drops off mobs. Worst possible thing they ever did. Put your spells on the vendor like it was in original eq and let you buy them.
Ah, and Train to zone!!!!!!! I used to laugh when you would see someones macro pop off and people would start asking questions. How big is the train? Do you think we can take it?
I can honestly say, and it is and isnt a high point when I can say that my group at the time may have actually had the highest number of deaths due to train size in any zone. We got around 100 people killed in that zone with our train. Granted it wasn't ALL our fault, some people didnt listen to our train to zone macro. I just know, as a cleric, I spent the next 30 minutes rezzing everyone in the zone lol.
Well an [old] EQ style would be good, but I wouldn’t change it much, just polish the good features of the game. MUD’s have been doing that for years, it’s what has kept people playing them for so long now. New features introduced/innovated, but don’t counter the existing ones, breaking them, changing the dynamics of the game.
I’d rather see a UO-SWG hybrid though, before their NGE changes. So more of a true sandbox with skill-tree features. Solo or group to the cap (grouping being faster), but the game really being centered around the sandbox for far beyond the skill cap. And no instancing, or very very very little - like for special events for guilds, not group dungeones etc.
M59, UO, EQ1, WWIIOL, PS, EnB, SL, SWG. MoM, EQ2, AO, SB, CoH, LOTRO, WoW, DDO+ f2p's, Demos & indie alpha's.
You can still play EQ1. The game is still running.
.
I tried it not too long ago. I didn't run into a single other toon the whole time.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
It is but a shell of what it used to be though. They have really dumbed it down to compete more with the instant gratification folks. Trust me, its NOTHING like it used to be.
As an old school EQ player (a hardcore raider at that too, who played for over 5 years with over a year /played on a single account) I simply can't understand why people get so nostaligic about these old mechanics. I just don't find them fun. Having to wait and pay (an absurd amount if you were low level) for a port someplace? Sure, it created hubs in zones and a need for classes to run around providing their services, but it was goddamn inconvenient when one wasn't around. While, I agree that risks in MMOs are almost non-existant now and there should be a steeper penalty on death EQ's was just flat out painful, I think 5-10 minutes of lost time + some XP and gold loss would be a better solution. Most of what you are asking for (a happy medium between WoW and EQ) exists already in EQ2 anyway.
Gear needs level caps too. Even EQ realized this with soulbound gear being more frequent in later expansions. It's ridiculous that you can sell items for $1,000 on e-bay (well, playerauctions.com) and people will actually buy it (I know someone who paid $1,000 for a Scepter of Destruction which dropped off the Sleeper Tomb's dragons...).
How did you have 1kpp at level 25? You should have had 20pp max, and that's if you started in later EQ expansions. I'm guessing you had a higher level character?
Play on that server they still support where the content is capped at Planes of Power and doesn't go beyond it. I didn't play EQ beyond LDoN, but nothing about that game then catered to the instant gratification folks so I'm sure you'd be happy playing on that server.
But can you play vanilla WoW?
EQ1 has changed a lot, more "modern" for some time. Modern does not mean good though. UO and SWG went through such changes as well (and DAoC from I hear), though even more aggressively. Rather than innovating/polishing on the things that worked, they changed it to something else like all the others. You should know this by now having been around these forums at least. When you played when no one was around, that was after the changes.
M59, UO, EQ1, WWIIOL, PS, EnB, SL, SWG. MoM, EQ2, AO, SB, CoH, LOTRO, WoW, DDO+ f2p's, Demos & indie alpha's.
Again, the very first expansion ruined it for me. When they made mobs drop spells, that was to much in my book. Besides, I am an eye candy freak and eq compared to today is absolutely horrid on the eyes.
I'm an 'old school' MMOer, but I hated EQ. For me nothing will ever compare to AC. WoW is 'essentially' the spiritual successor to EQ in that many of the systems were borrowed and modified from EQ. Sadly the closest thing to AC has been Darkfall, and in making it FFA PvP they prevented it from drawing a very large audience.
I'd say WoW more resembles EQ2. But EQ1 was pretty much going that way from the PoP expansion on. EQ2 took it further with the new system as it was able to. WoW is like that and much further. Anything pre-PoP EQ would be good, but the following expansions slid it into the ghost town it is. No biggy about the graphics.
M59, UO, EQ1, WWIIOL, PS, EnB, SL, SWG. MoM, EQ2, AO, SB, CoH, LOTRO, WoW, DDO+ f2p's, Demos & indie alpha's.
You (as in everyone who complains to bring back the old school) need to the come to the realization that you'll never get a MMO like EQ, AC, UO, Vanilla WoW, original SWG, etc. again. The closest you are going to get is from indie devs who are appealing to you, the niche, and even then you'll likely find something to nitpick there that doesn't match up to whatever crazy standards you imagined your old MMO to live up to. These mechanics were done away with because the majority of people simply didn't find them fun, and the developers realized they'd net more subscribers (it's all about profit, remember these are companies we are dealing with) by getting rid of these ancient harsh mechanics that penalize players more than reward them. Not everyone can devote the hours needed to play these older games, and not everyone wants slower combat for the sake of socialization (because for most, when playing a game, gameplay > socialization). UO, EQ, and SWG as well as indie games that try to target the niche (Darkfall) they filled may have been radically changed, but chances are they are closer to what you are looking for than the newer games being released this year, so why not just deal with that fact and enjoy these games for what they are?
Never played EQ, but it's interesting how similar FFXI was to what you're describing.
Anyone that played back in '04 remembers the insanely long trains in Crawlers Nest. Sometimes it would take hours for all the mobs to reset back slowly. It only took one person to zone in without realizing and screw up the reset and the wait would start over.
I also recall white mages charging 5k a teleport to help pay for a couple spells that unfortunately dropped off mobs that were camped non stop. Of course this ended once players started leveling multiple classes and anyone could just teleport themselves.
The player run economy is also a touchy subject. It hit it's boiling point in XI on Christmas of '05, when you almost had to rmt in order to be able to afford anything on the auction house. The greed shown at the time was beyond ridiculous but i guess should have been expected. At the time i enjoyed myself because i was making a boatload of money off of players not willing to wait it out. But in the long run, it hurt the economy and crafters for years after.
I can honestly say i miss the people and experiences i had at the time, but i don't miss these game mechanics one bit.
Wrong. They were done away with to appeal to CRPG style of gaming (and dumbed down noob gaming) which is mostly stale for many years other than a few sandbox CRPG's which got the most rewards. Morrowind and Oblivion ore sandbox CRPG's, Oblivion not only had best of the year awards but best CRPG of all time awards. This is how the oldschool games were as well, a formula that works, but abandoned for a recent trend that is garbage like 99% of CRPG's.
Fallacy. Many of the old school games you could log in and just play an hour. I did all the time, playing a couple games an evening in fact. Played them for years, got all the stuff that the people who played 16 hours a day for three months upon their inevitable burn-out got, and then more. Now all the games are burnouts as they made you all like those power gamers but with less time invested. The whole “time investment” thing was marketing hype to get you to think their games were better, to pull you to their games. Some things took time, but you could do other things when you didn’t have enough time to play (sandbox). And what about all the people that spend hours and hours playing WoW? See, just hype.
M59, UO, EQ1, WWIIOL, PS, EnB, SL, SWG. MoM, EQ2, AO, SB, CoH, LOTRO, WoW, DDO+ f2p's, Demos & indie alpha's.
If you played for 5 years then that's a load of bullshit. I found WoW boring and I played it for 5 months on and off, nothing possessed me to play it for 5 years. If you don't find a game fun why would you play it for 5 years?
I never played EQ but I think the later oldschool games like AO, DaoC, FFXI were good mediums. MMOs were progressing back then(1993-2003), removing needless/annoying hardcore stuff and adding good innovative features with each release, until WoW was released.
Well, i did actually mention that death penalties in orig EQ were too severe. As for ports, i highly disagree with you. 95% of the time there was a druid or a wizard just sitting in a zone /auctioning ports, it was never difficult to find one unless you were on at some wack ass hour of the night, even then, still wasnt too difficult especially if you just upped what you were paying a bit, nine times out of 10 some druid would stop their group kiting for a minute to help you out.
Level caps are one of the few things i forgot about. That ones a difficult point to argue, because there are merits, but requirements on both systems. In a modern MMO where loot is stupid common, yes, level caps are a must. In oriq eq where loot was overall pretty rare, even the moderately good items, i disagree.
As for how i had 1kpp, me and my 2 best friends in RL actually pooled our money, and we had gotten lucky on a few drops in some dungeon runs. 1 of us had to go on a vacation with his parents at the time for 3 weeks, we had at the time made a pact not to severely outlevel each other, so my enchanter friend tossed me his money, went on vacation, my warrior friend gave me his money and spent the time running around exploring (to this day he is just one of those guys, loves to run into super high level zones as a n00b and try to explore it), i decided to sit in NFP and try to make some money. It went a lot better than i expected. Also, we started playing about a month before Kunark hit, so this would of been about 2-3 months after kunark released.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I actually played FFXI at release for about 2 months. Though i love all the mechanics of the game, in particular i thought it was super badass that a lot of the group areas had a lot of elevation to them. I remember an orc camp area that was huge and just went up and up the side of this mountain till you got pretty close to the top. It was a good game, the only thing that really bothered me about it was 2 things. First, everything felt slow as molasses, you ran slow, you swung slow, you cast slow, etc. The other thing that annoyed me was those absurd quests you had to do every 5 levels before you could continue leveling up. They reminded me WAY too much of the EQ hell levels, but worse, because you had to get a group together for the sole purpose of that quest, and camp some rare spawn, just simply so you could level. EQ's hell levels were a bitch, but at least it was just extra XP time, so you could still do the same things.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Nice post! Brought back some memories. Was EQ1 perfect? He11 no. Did it do some things that made it a better MMO than today's gen? He11 YES.
What you don't realize and don't understand is that we will get games like that again. The idea that a game is going to come along and topple WOW and get 10 million subscribers is a MYTH. Its been proven time and time again that WOW's popularity is a one time fluke. The reason for this is that prior to WOW, mmo gamers were a very specific subset of PC gamers. WOW came along and made the game accessible to more people by taking all the best aspects of the PVE mmo's that existed at that point, which was basically EQ, got rid of the harsh parts of it, made leveling easy, getting items easy, etc. What this accomplished was getting the casual gamer to play MMO's. The mistake EVERYONE makes today is to make the assumption that 80% of wow players are MMO gamers, they're not. MMO gamers understand that there is a time investment, that you won't get near instant gratification. MMO gamers are not the same type of people who typically will log off wow and loadup modern warfare on their XBOX, or madden NFL 2010 or whatever. We like a very specific type of game. The vast majority of WOW's playerbase are just CASUAL GAMERS, they play whatever gets their rocks off for a short period of time, whether thats an FPS, WOW, a sports or fighting game, etc.
Before WOW the MMO market was moving into what its doing now, in that you are getting more niche/specialized games that appeal to a certain playerbase. Its been economically proven that an MMO can be profitable and worth creating with as little as 50k subs. Will those types of games get WOW size budgets? of course not.
You will have games that appeal to the super hardcore PVPers who want an open world, with pvp anywhere, and full loot rights, etc. You will have PVP games that appeal more to the coordinated effort PVPers, the people who liked DAOC. You will have PVE games that are more for the casual gamer, most likely to be developed by blizzard, and yes, they will have the highest numbr of subs, why, because they have far larger playerbase to pull from. You will have PVE games that focus on hardcore raiding, and forced or semi forced grouping, etc.
Every other entertainment market that exists in the world works this way. You still get people making super eclectic sub genres of sub genres of music, movies, etc. Because its still profitable to do so. And just because its a small subset doesn't mean its devoid of quality either. Not everyone is out to make the blockbuster movie of the year, just like now, not every developer is out to make the WOW toppler.
And, before you start thinking i'm wrong, take a look at Rift: Planes of Telara. That game has MAJOR financial backing, and has already been made perfectly clear that the game will be group centric, that you will be rewarded for grouping. It also has things that us old schoolers like, for example, no instanced over world zones. They've also made it perfectly clear that they have no intention of shooting for WOW like numbers. Right now the goal is to obtain and maintain ~1 million subs. Would they be happy with more? of course, but they're not making the same foolish mistake as games like Vangaurd, AoC, etc, did, thinking they were going to topple wow. So the investors all know that, and don't have that expectation.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Thank you. I think a lot of the responses ive gotten didnt even read the bulk of the work, they're just assuming that its another "EQ was so awesome, i want a replica of that!" posts. When for anyone whose read it, its obviously not.
Its just like you said, was EQ1 perfect? hell no, not by any stretch, but i and many other feel it did a lot of things right that MMOs today have gotten horribly wrong.
Really the only thing i can say about modern MMO's that is consistently better than old mmo's is the art direction and quality.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
No, in the orig game basically anything that came out of a dungeon or the regular world could be traded. But keep in mind, drop rates on even what would be considered decent items (think like blue con in WOW), were VERY rare. You might have 1 a day come into the entire server, if you were lucky. The really really nice items, think purple, were even more rare, because they were typically a rare drop off a rare mob. So, it might be a mob that spawns once a week, and has a 5% chance of dropping this item, and requires 10+ appropriate level people to kill.
This basically made costs for these items prohibitevely high for low level players.
Gold selling/buying wasnt really that big of a deal in EQ, even in later expansions like POP, etc. The reason for this ties back into all of the games other mechanics. People who will buy gold from a gold seller tend to be people who want instant gratification. So, they might buy the gold, get some low level character, equip it out of the ass, and then realize they still have to put 40 hours in to get to say level 15, versus 50 hours if they didnt have the super nice items.
The other thing, especially in the end game, is because it took so long, most everyone knew everyone, or knew someone who knew a person. So it was very easy to see someone was a character buyer or gold buyer, etc and you just blacklist them. Eventually those people gave up b/c they couldnt find a guild or group that tolerated their style of play, which basically amounts to cheating.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I mostly agree with Hrimnir's comments.
I would just like to add the following:
"Bind on equip" did not exist in EQ and it is very useful for making sure that crafted items are NOT recycled indefinitely between diferrent toons/players. This is important in a pve crafting economy where gear is not destroyed. Games like Eve do not need "bind on equip" as equipment is destroyed when a ship is destroyed.
Boosted regeneration when not in combat removes a lot of downtime waiting for hit points and mana to regenerate. This would make EQ a lot faster.
Solo
Only some classes could solo efficiently once they got past the early levels. Many classes could not solo at all.
Many players who played US off-peak when the player population was low, paid and simultaneously played two or more accounts because the class of their choice could not solo.
Travel
Druids and wizards were not always available or willing to port in the local area. New players could not afford to pay for ports. Running to a major gathering area such Greater Faydark could take 2 hours from some locations. Travel was a real pain for toons that did not have enhanced run speed and the ability to port. USA off-peak, when player populations were low was particularly difficult.
XP Rate
Grinding xp in a single area is extremely boring. I much prefer a game like Lord of the Rings online where the rate at which you level matches your progress through the quests and content. EQ did not have enough content to justify staying at the same level for so long.
In addition, you really only had time to level a single toon. If the developers changed something that made your chosen toon no longer fun to play, switching to a different class late in the game was not a viable option.
Not only was it slow to level, but some experience went to alternate experience levels at high levels. A toon with 900 AA's was equivalent to leveling a single toon to maximum level 5 times, a huge investment in time. This happened to me with my druid which had a "direct damage back up healer" build and then Sony made raid mobs virtually immune to druid damage spells forcing them to respec to a healer build or quit. Whereas, in Lord of the Rings Online, you can switch to a different toon (class) if you do not like changes to a particular class as it does not take a huge amount of time to reach maximum level.
The EQ xp grind was much slower than later games that are labeled as grind fests.
Reliance on other players
EQ was very sensitive to drops on player population.
For grouping you needed tank, healer, and slower. To group efficiently you also needed a haste and mana regeneration buff and for some enounters crownd control and puller.
Off-peak it was often difficult to find the right combination of players for groups.
Guilds that ran at off-peak times, usually did boss incounters with half as many players as peak-time guilds.
When players left to try WoW and EQ2, there were insufficient numbers left to form raids and groups were hard to find. This resulted in a second wave of disenchanted players leaving EQ.
Any game based around reliance on other players to play, needs to be resilient enough to handle fluctuations in player population.
EXACTLY. I have TRIED to get people to understand that very point (highlighted). People who play WoW like to CALL themselves MMO players, but....a vast majority of them never played an MMORPG before WoW. What WoW did was drag a whole lot of casual gamers into a new SUB-GENRE of MMOs. A great many of the people who play WoW never played an MMORPG before it, and most will never play another one AFTER it. They're not necessarily partial to MMOs, they are partial to WoW and Blizzard's "brand" of MMO.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
MMOs are mostly dead. like my tag line says, theyve turned into little more than console games with a chat box. Frankly if this next batch of games disappoints me like others have over the last 5 years, Im done. This is a joke with no punchline.
If you're bored with MMOs, you're bored. But to call them dead is ridiculous, given that they're more popular than ever.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver