Home › Game Forums › Everquest
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
POK was the problem
pencilrick
Member Posts: 1,550
in Everquest
POK and those portal books killed off the starting zones. Tutorials buried the newbie experience.
While people clamor for classic servers, I think it's not so much the elimination of all the expansion material they desire as cutting things off right before the introduction of POK.
My saddest day of EQ was logging on to find Freeport and the East Commonlands empty. POK had arrived.
Comments
The problem now is that the game is so large, with all the expansions, that without instant PoK stones and the like, casual players would spend most of their time travelling or waiting for people to travel to them. Still, I do prefer the game prior to PoK, but the change did help facilitate more casual play which is good news for people who at least try to maintain a healthy social life.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
People say about the pok stones but there were pots prior to that? But yeah I agree I think Nexus and PoK were awful additions and awful zones. Though it is probably true there were some tricky design decisions to be made with continuuing expansions.
I want the ships back. I hadn't played for a while a couple of years ago and stood on the dock ay Qeynos for a few minutes before someone told me the ship no longer worked and to talk to the gnome. I quit soon after that, and while I have been back I still miss that ship.
""But Coyote, you could learn! You only prefer keyboard and mouse because that's all you've ever known!" You might say right before you hug a rainforest and walk in sandals to your drum circle where you're trying to raise group consciousness of ladybugs or whatever it is you dirty goddamn hippies do when you're not busy smoking pot and smelling bad."
Coyote's Howling: Death of the Computer
Using levels is also a huge problem for MMOs designed to last.
Unless you have multiple, differing level 1-60 experiences, people aren't going to want to do 1-50 more than a few times. Hence, in each new expansion, you can't just have 1-50 content. Which means you need to extend the level cap.
Then, as we've all seen happen with EQ, the lower levels become deserted. New players are forced to level through content that is old and unused, largely on their own.
You can get rid of levels altogether, or you use the re-mort system of MUDs and FFXI, or you can make expansions which require you to make a new character to play in, etc. The last of those options isn't so bad either - D&D has had players roll new characters for years and years. Typically players starting a new campaign start with new characters. Why not do it with MMOs?
But one things for sure. Realising expansions with nothing but high-end content has been proven to be short-sighted.
At the release of PoK, EQ sees a HUGE increase of players running around everywhere, playing with friends and making friends.
PoK helps the game.
Raiding is what kills grouping.
Prior PoK, newbies hardly see raiders, talk to them, or see their loot... See, when the newbies see me in EC, they think I was reflecting the endgame. They see someone extremely pointless, but funny and happy and helping them around...happy to AoE C3 in their hunting zone. They figure...eh, if someone as pointless as Ano is happy in the late game, I prolly can to.
PoK main flaw is that it show to the players, more directly, what the game was all about. Putting a more direct and forward contact with raiders would be a good idea if the design is strong...but in a design where you are forced into raiding...you see you will have to bear 23-100 players like that at once for hours...this is what the game is all about...and then you wonder why they quit? :P
If I would have been able, to counter, in PoK, with a link of group gear equal or better to what the raiders where linking, the game would be healthier today than ever, and WoW wouldn't be alone up there. But the devs decide grouping stuff must be weaker...it was soo much weaker that I was shy to even link it. So all they see was Uberguilds links. If any grouper link their stuff, it was immediately countered with 2-7 raiders links to real gear. They have to raid. It was clear.
In EC, when a raider say something like: We clear XYZ first, I was able to say, I solo XYZ before anyone in your guild. And this was pleasing the common folks. And any argument would always end with tons of STFU nubs coming from the newbies, aimed at the raiders....but that is old memories now. :P See, players where believing, that their gameplay was a valid option back then. Blame me if you want, I was also believing it.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
Before POK, Norrath was a world with cities and starting areas that meant something. After POK, Norrath was a PVE version of Guild Wars in a sense; just another game.
And while POK may have facilitated grouping, it killed the magic of EQ for many of the veteran players. As I said, the first time I logged in and saw an empty Freeport and empty East Commonlands, my heart sank and I knew this game would never be the same again.
I have to disagree with this thread. I remember playing during the time PoK came out and it was what everyone was raving about. Before PoK, it was impossible to get groups in a timely manner without a wizard or druid. I made a druid before then just to be able to port other accounts and my friends and also made a few plats on the side. It was very expensive for other non porting classes and often groups would disband while you were running to join them because it just took too freakin long to get to them.
Now, I will agree that PoK could have been done better. The ports were all geared around newbie starting zones and not around the high end content areas. This was a big mistake because porting from spot to spot did not become a big issue until later in levels. It would have been much better served by putting port location in higher level content areas and I feel even better served making similar level solo quest to be completed before you could use them. This would have alleviated the porting issues and made it where you had to first visit the location at least once the long way in order to complete a port quest to gain access to the local port locations.
Anyhow, what's done is done and now EQ1 suffers big because it's just too difficult to get a class from 1-70 and beyond. Once you do get to the 70's, it takes forever to get enough AA's, gear, etc.. to actually be competitive enough to be invited to groups where most of the people who play regularly are at now. Best thing I think they should do is what has been done in EQ2; enable a mentor feature and have lower level quest count towards AA exp only as I think many higher levels would be willing to do low level content for this reason. It would also help to fluctuate the population to group in areas that are never used anymore for the reason of completing quest higher levels never did.
Sad news is, I feel SOE sees EQ1 as a man lying in a nursing home, waiting to pass on. They fail to realize that EQ1 is one of the few MMO's available that requires very little system resources and therefore would appeal to many people in America who can't afford a high end system as well as third world nations where they just don't have the income to buy a brand new multi-core system. There's always potential out there. What SOE really needs are some entrepreneur managers to break into these markets! Microsoft has already been doing this with the Xbox 360 and they are having phenomenal success in India and other nations.
Till then, Sony in general is stuck in 1st gear over revving their engines and not getting anywhere fast. Maybe given the current trends happening in the markets it will sting them enough to open their eyes and look at new ways of doing business.
Interesting reading. By the way I just remembered another thing about PoP which people miss. PoP was an expansion that was unlike any other prior to it; you barely had to traverse though zones to get to other ones like what was usual with the previous Everquest expansions. Like Luclin, Velious, Kunark they all were big sort of landmasses which by travelling gave you that sense of location.
Then, because of the level cap rise and the best xp bonuses being found in PoP (which was basically first and foremost a raid expansion) people were unwillingly locked into a completely different experience than that of the Everquest they had played and enjoyed. At this point, the game completely changed and SoE reacted and resolved by simply doing patchaids, in terms of quickly adding dungeons/group content for the grouper(LDoN) and then deciding to focus their efforts mainly on the raiding audience.
But PoK and the Bazaar where heavily populated. Players can't be at 2 places at once. It is normal that they move to other zones eventually.
I prefer to see 50 persons in PoK, and 2 in EC and 1 in Freeport, then 5 everywhere including all starting cities. The link is stronger, peoples are together.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren