I've played Just about Every MMORPG that's Ever Been released. So I think I made a pretty good list ^_^.
by 'hardest' do you mean 'most challenging' ?
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
Not to let too much of the geek out, but i smell a sampling error coming into play when you put a poll that lists one of the options as darkfall, in the darkfall fourm area
WOW: LvLing a Holy Pally from 1-80 in Full Cloth and all talents dumped in the holy tree while doing no instances or mob taging
no: wow is the most dumbed-down, easy MMO ever made, which is of course a good part of the reason it became so popular and is so widely hated as well.
double post ftw. And - concerning game mechanics - LotRO is a LOT easier than WoW. No big raids, almost no item prerequisites, easy leveling, close-to-no death penalty, not PvP at all. WAR is another example of a game that is essentially easier than WoW...
Don't be fooled, getting to the absolute endgame encounters in WoW requires huge amounts of time and dedication. That doesn't make it as 'hard' and frustrating as losing a T2 fit 2 billion ISK ship in EvE; but it's definitely not the lower end of the 'hard game' scale...
i'd say Wurm online was pretty hard. EvE is up there too but the huge amount of guides and mods/programmes you could get sort of offset the difficulty.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds -Solid non level based game -Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
Agree EQ1, first thing that came to mind. You had to be on your toes (TRAAIIN). And corpse runs made you wanna avoid death at all costs.
Yeah definately Everquest, if you couldn't get back to your corpse before it decayed you lost all you gear. That game was harsh on so many levels, which was probably why it was so addicting.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
Fact that you omitted everquest 1 in its original form sort of killed the poll as it is the front runner. Forget pvp ,this game was unforgiven.firstly, to level was a real nightmare and most classes could not even solo the green con mob so required a group.many classes would not even find a group.it took ages to travel anywhere so even if you form a groupa a particular dungeon ,since it was not instanced and there were certain camps you could actually have a "filled " dungeon and needed to travel 1 hour to get to another and sometimes people die travelling there. death meant a massive blow to the already slow experience so a single death could mean losing a whole day of experience gathered.you would be naked and spawn at your home town and cannot get to your body because it was in a bad spot or you needed to run thru dangerous territory. to get some exp back you needed a priest to rezz you when you get the body to a safe spot and needed to drag it to him. at times your body is lost in a raid and there no one to retrieve it even with a sk corpse summoning as the entrance had raid mobs at the zone entrance and i think all old timer eq players have actually lost all their stuff to decay of the body at some point and some of the loot was so hard to gather.. the list of things go on and on and it was truely a unforgiven world to play.you could actually lose level due to death back then!
EQ 1 in it's prime was definitly the toughest mmorpg to play.
I can still remember the pile of countless corpses of my, lowbe at that time main, necro inside Solusek's Eye which was the result of a single bad pull.
Not to mention the Rathe Council.......................
U should just remove WoW from this list by the way, even though a nice and succesful game it is the definition of trivial MMORPG, who would call dificult a game that takes you less than 3 weeks to lvl cap at release... (could have been even less i dont remember)
Well what some people consider "hard" is perhaps not so difficult for others.
I would say most of the early MMO's were "hard" simply because nobody knew what they were doing. The mechanics of how things worked.. the best places to level.. or the best ways to raise skills.
The one thing many of those early MMO's had... major penalties for various things.
That's probably what made them difficult... things that happened really did have an affect.
Lose your stuff..
Lose a level .. (and access to your new shiney toy because yolu are a level to low now)
Spend your skill points realize you messed up.. your character is hosed and you don't have a reset or enough of them (early anarchy online..)
I think the fact most games have almost no negative consequences these days is part of the problem.
If by definition hard equals timesinks my vote go to Anarchy Online. I gave up camping the Notum Scourges for a Spirit Shroud (endgame twink item). Must've killed 1k+ of those damn mobs. If you talk about borked droprate, that one is a clear winner. To top it off, the mob itself is highly bugged and sometimes didn't spawn at all, or way below ground level. Bloody Funcom must've thought the droprate was ok cause it's been raised on the official forums multiple times. The official reply was the droprate was ok and wouldn't be touched. Ofcourse you had the asshats coming in saying they got it on the first kill so the droprate was ok, maybe even too high.
Pfft...One of the reasons that game is dead for me now. Never seen that low droprate, on any mob, in any mmo ever again. Kinda laughable to read people complain ingame they have to kill 30 mobs for 10 questdrops
Edit:I hate the new edit message setup Why fix that which isn't broke?
I think Anarchy Online should have earned a spot on the list. Not only did the game introduce players to an overwhelming skill system and a challenging interface, but there were no guiding quests, long distances to run until you made the millions of credits necessary to buy a flying vehicle (which you had to camp random shops for hours to find) and a very complicated implants system. And the random missions either sent you to the other side of some really hostile territory, or took forever to give you one more accessible.
3rd party tools helped with the mission system and the implants, but even then the implants were mind-boggling for most.
Love the game though, and it has a very loyal community. And they've improved on almost all accounts, with better starting areas, quests, pre-made implants, etc. But at launch (and ignoring other issues), I'd argue it was one of the hardest MMOGs to wrap your head around.
Comments
by 'hardest' do you mean 'most challenging' ?
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
EQ 1, totally agree
for more reasons then id like to remember.
WOW:
LvLing a Holy Pally from 1-80 in Full Cloth and all talents dumped in the holy tree while doing no instances or mob taging
no: wow is the most dumbed-down, easy MMO ever made, which is of course a good part of the reason it became so popular and is so widely hated as well.
EvE. Nuff said.
Not to let too much of the geek out, but i smell a sampling error coming into play when you put a poll that lists one of the options as darkfall, in the darkfall fourm area
Excellent list... But I miss tonns of titles, and I wonder why some are actually there...
Go on and troll a bit more
no: wow is the most dumbed-down, easy MMO ever made, which is of course a good part of the reason it became so popular and is so widely hated as well.
double post ftw. And - concerning game mechanics - LotRO is a LOT easier than WoW. No big raids, almost no item prerequisites, easy leveling, close-to-no death penalty, not PvP at all. WAR is another example of a game that is essentially easier than WoW...
Don't be fooled, getting to the absolute endgame encounters in WoW requires huge amounts of time and dedication. That doesn't make it as 'hard' and frustrating as losing a T2 fit 2 billion ISK ship in EvE; but it's definitely not the lower end of the 'hard game' scale...
M
i'd say Wurm online was pretty hard. EvE is up there too but the huge amount of guides and mods/programmes you could get sort of offset the difficulty.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
Sexy Beach the MMO
Or, wait, what was the question again?
Yeah definately Everquest, if you couldn't get back to your corpse before it decayed you lost all you gear. That game was harsh on so many levels, which was probably why it was so addicting.
I'll go with EVE.
I never played EQ1 unfortunately.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
EQ 1 in it's prime was definitly the toughest mmorpg to play.
I can still remember the pile of countless corpses of my, lowbe at that time main, necro inside Solusek's Eye which was the result of a single bad pull.
Not to mention the Rathe Council.......................
U should just remove WoW from this list by the way, even though a nice and succesful game it is the definition of trivial MMORPG, who would call dificult a game that takes you less than 3 weeks to lvl cap at release... (could have been even less i dont remember)
Well what some people consider "hard" is perhaps not so difficult for others.
I would say most of the early MMO's were "hard" simply because nobody knew what they were doing. The mechanics of how things worked.. the best places to level.. or the best ways to raise skills.
The one thing many of those early MMO's had... major penalties for various things.
That's probably what made them difficult... things that happened really did have an affect.
Lose your stuff..
Lose a level .. (and access to your new shiney toy because yolu are a level to low now)
Spend your skill points realize you messed up.. your character is hosed and you don't have a reset or enough of them (early anarchy online..)
I think the fact most games have almost no negative consequences these days is part of the problem.
If by definition hard equals timesinks my vote go to Anarchy Online. I gave up camping the Notum Scourges for a Spirit Shroud (endgame twink item). Must've killed 1k+ of those damn mobs. If you talk about borked droprate, that one is a clear winner. To top it off, the mob itself is highly bugged and sometimes didn't spawn at all, or way below ground level. Bloody Funcom must've thought the droprate was ok cause it's been raised on the official forums multiple times. The official reply was the droprate was ok and wouldn't be touched. Ofcourse you had the asshats coming in saying they got it on the first kill so the droprate was ok, maybe even too high.
Pfft...One of the reasons that game is dead for me now. Never seen that low droprate, on any mob, in any mmo ever again. Kinda laughable to read people complain ingame they have to kill 30 mobs for 10 questdrops
Edit:I hate the new edit message setup
Why fix that which isn't broke?
---
Grammar nazi's. This one is for you.
There are no "Hard" MMOs. Some just take longer.
I think Anarchy Online should have earned a spot on the list. Not only did the game introduce players to an overwhelming skill system and a challenging interface, but there were no guiding quests, long distances to run until you made the millions of credits necessary to buy a flying vehicle (which you had to camp random shops for hours to find) and a very complicated implants system. And the random missions either sent you to the other side of some really hostile territory, or took forever to give you one more accessible.
3rd party tools helped with the mission system and the implants, but even then the implants were mind-boggling for most.
Love the game though, and it has a very loyal community. And they've improved on almost all accounts, with better starting areas, quests, pre-made implants, etc. But at launch (and ignoring other issues), I'd argue it was one of the hardest MMOGs to wrap your head around.
Poll is meaningless without EQ1
/thread