It's kind of funny how many people post about how easy it was and how it just required time. Having played those games and modern games I have to disagree. I've already posted many fairly good arguments on why it was more difficult, but people seem to ignore it and just post the same thing again. That is less proving a point and more I know everything so if you don't know it was just tedium and time then you are an idiot. Those of us who were there and actually played a lot know IMO. That is why we are so passionate about it. Those who played those games and went to games like WoW know how much easier it was to accomplish pretty much everything in game and bit wasn't just a factor of time or overcoming boredom lol.
There's another aspect to this argument about 'hard' and that is games are meant to be hard and fun, a challenge for a group of people that takes time to master, but also fun which means the game should reward gradual progression and not punish those who fail (e.g gear caps or fights so convoluted that mistakes are punished with total failure). Repeating the same content over and over for 6 months was never fun in a game, but games from the last decade revolved around this idea, stretching and stretching and stretching content where the point isnt to enjoy the encounter together - its to get one over on each other, competing to be top god on meters and gear and getting ever more powerful. Its a system quite frankly that has forgotten its rpg roots.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
The thing is the games I played early on didn't ask me to do that. In fact most early games weren't quest driven themeparks. They were attempts to mirror open world sandbox.
Oh? And which games were these?
Ultima Online (which I think still has a sub system in place after all these years)..completely open world, no leveling , skill based system with pvp as end game...I mean come on, What is harder to beat now a days (and same with back then) an individual person or a created "AI"....And before you start with the "gank fest" comments..there were plenty of 1 v 1 fights to be had back then...Oh and did I mention the player made weapons that were better than loot weapons you found on npc's? Well..at least until they started introducing the loot weapons afterwards..still..there ya go.
My apologies I missed this earlier so will respond here. UO, Lineage and AC were some of the earliest mmorpgs I played regularly. I did also play Neverwinter on AOL but that is more of a proto-mmorpg. There were several others I tried back in the early days and dozens I've played since but those early games might have had in the entire game a dozen of what we would call quests.
It's kind of funny how many people post about how easy it was and how it just required time. Having played those games and modern games I have to disagree. I've already posted many fairly good arguments on why it was more difficult, but people seem to ignore it and just post the same thing again.
Because it's completely subjective.
Take tab based combat for example. Out of all the genres I've played where the combat is done in real time, MMORPGS with tab based combat, especially the old school ones, have to be the ones that require the least concentration/thinking whilst engaged in combat.
I could easily read a book whilst engaged in combat and succeed in EQ and SWG, it wasn't a problem for me.
Tedious is relative though. Yes EQ / Lineage (I'm sure there were more) could be considered extremely grindy on the surface.
But the fun came form the community, when you're talking to a group, laughing in server (/general) chat, or talking in guild....it doesn't really matter.
Those older MMO weren't action MMO where you were wacking away at keys, you had time to chatter most of the time.
I find running from Quest to Quest NPC more tedious than grinding mobs and talking to people.
I don't think most people are looking for a glorified chat room in games anymore. I know I'm certainly not. There is no novelty to online interaction anymore and in fact a lot of people are kind of sick of things like Facebook and Twitter and the last thing they want to do is be forced to interact with a bunch of strangers in their game time especially whne a lot of the population of MMOs are kind of mouthbreathers.
I remember the era when just talking to people on the internet seemed cool but that's gone forevever I think. Games need to provide compellinfg gameplay now. Not just excuses to socialize.
I have to agree. The novelty of online interactions with strangers is pretty outdated in the eyes of many who entered into the genre during the beginning. This is especially noticeable with how xenophobic guilds tend to become over time. Sure there are the mega-guilds that have a lot of player churn, but the smaller to mid-size communities seemingly become less open to newcomers, unless the person in question has connections to a member of that community.
The community as a whole is extremely toxic, which doesn't really help the situation either. The toxicity became very prevalent with the rise of having to follow the "meta". As the players became more sophisticated with their approach of building the perfect character, elitism and class exclusion became commonplace within gaming. People couldn't play specific classes and/or builds because they didn't follow the preferred method and those who wanted to play to have fun found themselves becoming excluded more and more. Which lead to the rise of solo gaming in mmos; because why deal with a bunch of elitist pricks when you just want to have some fun.
Unfortunately, community isn't fun anymore. Community tends to be more tedious than anything.
It's kind of funny how many people post about how easy it was and how it just required time. Having played those games and modern games I have to disagree. I've already posted many fairly good arguments on why it was more difficult, but people seem to ignore it and just post the same thing again.
Because it's completely subjective.
Take tab based combat for example. Out of all the genres I've played where the combat is done in real time, MMORPGS with tab based combat, especially the old school ones, have to be the ones that require the least concentration/thinking whilst engaged in combat.
I could easily read a book whilst engaged in combat and succeed in EQ and SWG, it wasn't a problem for me.
If players wanted penalties for death they would play Darkfall and Mortal Online. Since no one is playing them I would say that the vast majority of gaming world doesn't want death penalties. If it bothers you so much just hit yourself in the foot with a hammer every time you die. Or give all your stuff away ingame and start new. You can put penalties on yourself there is freedom and you choose not to take any penalties because you have not been forced to.
It's kind of funny how many people post about how easy it was and how it just required time. Having played those games and modern games I have to disagree. I've already posted many fairly good arguments on why it was more difficult, but people seem to ignore it and just post the same thing again.
Because it's completely subjective.
Take tab based combat for example. Out of all the genres I've played where the combat is done in real time, MMORPGS with tab based combat, especially the old school ones, have to be the ones that require the least concentration/thinking whilst engaged in combat.
I could easily read a book whilst engaged in combat and succeed in EQ and SWG, it wasn't a problem for me.
How many dungeons did you complete in Everquest?
You're getting into specifics now though. You originally argued that mmos have become easier as a sweeping general statement. Immodium mentions that tab targeted combat isn't exactly hard, which it isn't, as an example of how older mmos weren't harder in all aspects.
I could counter and ask how many of the elite WoW raids did you complete? Like Naxx in Vanilla WoW, which something like 1% of the population saw. How many Mythic Raids have you completed in WoW? How many level 50 fractals have you completed in GW2?
MMOs aren't, in general, any easier now than they have been in the past. Yes, specific types of content were challenging in older mmos, but there is specific content that is only able to be completed by a vast minority in mmos now too.
I started playing MMOs with Asheron's Call back in 1999 and I have played a large number of mmos between then and now. I don't recall any of them being particularly hard in general. A good amount of them had some extremely tedious systems that were huge turn offs. I would also say that things like character progression were artificially longer back in the day too. It didn't make it any harder, it just took longer.
I could easily read a book whilst engaged in combat and succeed in EQ and SWG, it wasn't a problem for me.
I'd love to know what EQ content you did too, because there wasn't a single raid in Inktu'ta, Txevu, Tacvi, Dreadspire, ToB, Demiplane, CoA, AG, FC, Discord (SOD), etc......where you could AFK even for a second. I know all of those raids like I do the back of my pocket.
Those raids were quite a step up in difficulty from the raids I see in MMO today.
raids prior to GoD, yes, they were easier, but EQ was in it's infancy back then, dev didn't even have a proper editor for raid content until PoP, and you're talking like 10% of EQ's existence, other PVE MMO like WoW didn't even exist back then
It took a second expansion for the first guild to beat Tacvi, Ceistus Dei
I wonder why WoW happened, and why it happened so well. Hmmm....
That's easy, a majority of the gaming population lack patience, perseverance, and persistence, so modern games are designed to allow for their shortcomings.
Hey, when you are as great as I am, it's hard to be humble...so I'm not.
I guess it's a chicken and the egg thing. My take on it is that it was made based on the feedback of the people playing the MMOs that came before it. If that's not correct, then my guess is that the WOW dev team was a pack of incredible psychics.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Too many players "been there, done that" I'm beginning to feel it too. With each subsequent MMO I play, it's now associated with a growing feeling of repetition.....or maybe I am losing my desire to "push through" the same routine over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over..................................................................
Sometimes I think I should call it quits. But why? I can still come back between content patches between my favorite games. The alternative is that I don't play. That doesn't make anyone any money.
I can agree that mmorpg is kinda easier/friendly nowdays after wow.. My first mmorpg was anarchy online and thats why it was my best mmorpg experience, the game had alot of bugs but was somthing new.. in the begining it was a complex game, u had so much skills to choose from and you could pick wrong.. u had some reset points to use so u had to choose careful when u build your char.. and there was ton of different setup, ways to go with skills, weaps and implants etc etc... and if u dident "save" ur xp at a place, u could lose all the xp u grinded for hrs.. and some zones was pvp, so u could get really mad if u died because of a player killed u while u grindend xp..
And there was alot more about the great game..
1 thing was.. u could build ur char in some specials ways that u could hide from other players.. not like wow, go stand next to another player and check his items/skills.. mmorpg need complexity when u build ur char and u shouldent be able to watch someone else build.. the "skill" is to build ur own char and use it in a way that fits u and how u use it in combat..
like a FPS game, all players have equal setup and u only have ur own skills to win over the other player/ai..
A good mmorpg should have alot of skills/items etc to choose from, a deep complex char building system.. I dont want to be a copycat from another player.. wont be fun in a long run. Like I started a hunter in wow, my most importend stat then was agi, then stam.. that aint "hard brain" activity at all..
But i guess company want to earn alot of money and i understand them that.. most of the players dont want to get home after work and get another "hard" day into the game.. so why not make it a bit simpler than real life? like.. sry.. wow..
Take another example from anarchy online.. they hade the title system from pvp.. when u killed someone with the same title or 1+/-, u got points from that player and after some kills u would get a new title.. or the other way and lose that title if u died.. in wow... again.. u dident care if u died in BGs.. u wouldent see that guy again after the match end, and u couldent even talk to that guy.. and that sucks..
Here is another example of pve.. u can solo all the way from lvl 1 - max in 99% of the mmorpg games.. not sure about EQ.. but again.. in AO u needed a team to do that, u could do it by ur self but the mobs had so much hp and u didnt do so much dmg alone.. and when u team up.. guess what..? u get new friends! you talk to other ppl.. not only when u do raids.. even when u doing some boring quest/grinding.. but now when u can solo everything.. its getting boring kinda fast.. and again.. game creators dont want ppl to wait all day to get a team just to get some lvls.. so they make it more friendly..
I could go on all night but its getting late.. I hope camelot unchained will give us (or me) back the oldish style what i call a real mmorpg.. where u use ur brain to build ur char, and play the class the way u want to play it..
I could easily read a book whilst engaged in combat and succeed in EQ and SWG, it wasn't a problem for me.
I'd love to know what content you did too, because there wasn't a single raid in Inktu'ta, Txevu, Tacvi, Dreadspire, ToB, Demiplane, CoA, AG, FC, Discord, etc......where you could AFK even for a second. I know all of those raids like I do the back of my pocket.
Those raids were quite a step up in difficulty from the raids I see in MMO today.
raids prior to GoD, yes, they were easier, but EQ was in it's infancy back then, dev didn't even have a proper editor for raid content
It took a second expansions for the first guild to beat the Tacvi, Ceistus Dei
Your under the illusion that I think WoW or any new tab based combat system is hard. WoW, EQ, LoTRO, SWTOR any tab target combat is casual combat for me. They're all universally easy.
Obviously, that's playing with skilled players. And that's why I PUG a lot, as playing with new, inexperienced players I know it will be a challenge and more of a social experience helping them out.
Or maybe healing classes (shaman in EQ) are just easy classes to play and I should pick a role I'm not used to for a challenge.
Think it was a bit of both considering it was a group focused mmo. On top of that the game had a lot of layers, it wasn't as straight forward as that. IMO you really had to know your class in solo and group play, it was also skill based as well.
Well being skill-based is only relevant to how much a skill an individual requires.
If Solo Mob A requires you to interrupt him 3 times over the course of a 60 second fight or you lose, that's exactly as much skill required as Group Mob B which requires you to interrupt him 3 times over the course of a 60 second fight (even though Group Mob B is casting 3x as often because it's designed with the assumption that 3 members of your group are actively interrupting.) So Group Mob B isn't actually harder than Solo Mob A, even though he casts 3x as often and probably has 3x the hitpoints, because you always group against group mobs.
So being group-focused doesn't factor into a game's skill requirement. Also can you point to any guides that exhibit the "know your class" bit? I've searched around a bit but never found an EQ class guide that was remotely as deep as this. Granted most MMORPGs fall short of that bar.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I could easily read a book whilst engaged in combat and succeed in EQ and SWG, it wasn't a problem for me.
I'd love to know what content you did too, because there wasn't a single raid in Inktu'ta, Txevu, Tacvi, Dreadspire, ToB, Demiplane, CoA, AG, FC, Discord, etc......where you could AFK even for a second. I know all of those raids like I do the back of my pocket.
Those raids were quite a step up in difficulty from the raids I see in MMO today.
raids prior to GoD, yes, they were easier, but EQ was in it's infancy back then, dev didn't even have a proper editor for raid content
It took a second expansions for the first guild to beat the Tacvi, Ceistus Dei
Your under the illusion that I think WoW or any new tab based combat system is hard. WoW, EQ, LoTRO, SWTOR any tab target combat is casual combat for me. They're all universally easy.
Obviously, that's playing with skilled players. And that's why I PUG a lot, as playing with new, inexperienced players I know it will be a challenge and more of a social experience helping them out.
Or maybe healing classes (shaman in EQ) are just easy classes to play and I should pick a role I'm not used to for a challenge.
I'm just going to agree with Flyte27, I just don't think you were part of any raiding guild in EQ doing current content.
There were plenty of casual group players in EQ, the guilds doing the raid content when it was current were rare, we were the only guild with a Txevu key on the server for months.
I think people often fail to realize the early audiences for most mmorpgs were in fact the players or pnprpgs/ttrpgs(pen and paper or table top depending on your prefered choice of title, either way same thing). As this was the audience, the early games were designed to simulate a great deal of what we expected in our pnprpgs. As the general gaming audience became players in these games the designers chose to change to accommodate their new wider audience rather than develop for a niche inside the niche market.
I'd be very disappointed if I ever sat down for a pnp game and was tasked with going to kill 200 gnolls to "level up" and, having done that, go knock down 250 gnoll lords, this time. Repeat until we run out of bestiary.
PnP rarely, if ever, has character development as the goal - that's more of a side effect. "Grinding" isn't a core concept of PnP - you do what you can with what you have. You might actually fail.
The thing is the games I played early on didn't ask me to do that. In fact most early games weren't quest driven themeparks. They were attempts to mirror open world sandbox.
First of all - yeah, those games DID ask you to do that. It was simply implicit, instead of some NPC with an exclamation mark explicitly telling you to do it. This is an implementation detail - not a meaningful difference. Unlike a well-run PnP campaign, every one of those games included "grinding" as a core aspect of gameplay.
We can replace a few nouns without changing the semantic meaning a lick.
Go smith 200 daggers to "skill up" and, having done that, move on to... whatever it was gave the most efficient smithing/ingot after that.
It's not fundamentally different from, "Go kill 200 gnolls to level up." Same concept, different nouns.
Go grind shit, so you can go grind more, different shit, so you can grind more, different shit. The model is entirely reliant on giving the player a series of increasingly tedious (not difficult - tedious) chores to complete to continue their advancement.
AC? Same story. Anyone who ever played it at length wound up in a highly optimized patron-vassal chain with sternly enforced ratio rules. Fire up VTank and farm those tusker guards (those mini golems on Ulgrim's Island were the shit, too). Gotta keep the XP flowing.
I liked both of those games. Neither were designed to cater to a PnP audience. Mechanically speaking, both were every bit as character development centric as EQ. The one thing they did have going for them was entertaining PvP (though, in AC's case, that was almost entirely by accident ).
Its when the bitter old school vets got hit in the face with the reality the mmorpg genre is passing them by and leaving them in the dust.
Now this statement is a lie like a lot of their talking points, but they keep spreading their hate across the Internet because they can't let something that passed them by go.
I wonder why WoW happened, and why it happened so well. Hmmm....
That's easy, a majority of the gaming population lack patience, perseverance, and persistence, so modern games are designed to allow for their shortcomings.
Hey, when you are as great as I am, it's hard to be humble...so I'm not.
I guess it's a chicken and the egg thing. My take on it is that it was made based on the feedback of the people playing the MMOs that came before it. If that's not correct, then my guess is that the WOW dev team was a pack of incredible psychics.
No, they weren't psychic, they asked the people who weren't playing MMOS why and what they wanted and hence you got WOW.
Things designed for the masses never turn out well for those with more eclectic tastes.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Nowadays it's a bunch of casuals just rolling up and posting the same tired nonsense. Can't they think for themselves? Are they not capable of assessing a timeline of events and identify whether or not what they say holds any basis in reality?
I remember when it took a minute to get online and then with just a single phone call, boom disconnected. Lost all my xp everytime. Getting information took so long people opted to looking in actual books . . . made of freakin paper! And sometimes you would get papercuts, hardcore as hell.
And now modern internet use is dumbed down beyond anything I could have imagined, and they literally let anyone on these days. They want everything on a silver platter, it's so disappointing. What happened?
I'm not even talking raid content here. I know most people did not complete even small group dungeons in EQ. Usually they were long, windy, complex, had lots of adds, respawns, other players wandering with trains, and a still penalty for dying. This made completing a dungeon fairly hellish even at low levels if you were of appropriate level to be in said dungeon. Most people in EQ would go back and camp low level dungeons where the difficulty became at least less risky. I don't believe there was raiding in original EQ. All I recall was people who were max level ganging up on the priest of discord because they didn't have much else to do at the time. Raiding didn't really exist yet. Once the raids came into EQ even less people could complete all the content. I mostly stuck to the outside world unless a dungeon was below my level. I only went into dungeons and raids a few times and usually had some fairly bad result like losing levels and even my corpse/items sometimes.
I remember in the first weeks of Vanguard's launch, and people were already crying about having to run for 20 minutes. People complained non-stop until they were forced to make travel easier.
I think you answered your own question.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
I'm not even talking raid content here. I know most people did not complete even small group dungeons in EQ. Usually they were long, windy, complex, had lots of adds, respawns, other players wandering with trains, and a still penalty for dying.
nod, I think we dragged half the server through Tipt trials and MPG trials
there were very few groupers who made it through them without help from raiders, but the ones that did had a challenge
I don't think every challenge needs to be beaten by everyone, just like I don't think every raid should be beaten by everyone, an item is no longer special, if it is common, if there is no thrill and no sense of accomplishment, then it's not worth making content.
I'm not even talking raid content here. I know most people did not complete even small group dungeons in EQ. Usually they were long, windy, complex, had lots of adds, respawns, other players wandering with trains, and a still penalty for dying.
nod, I think we dragged half the server through Tipt trials and MPG trials
there were very few groupers who made it through them without help from raiders, but the ones that did had a challenge
I don't think every challenge needs to be beaten by everyone, just like I don't think every raid should be beaten by everyone, an item is no longer special, if it is common, if there is no thrill and no sense of accomplishment, then it's not worth making content.
That's generally how I felt when playing the game. If you could beat it then you deserved the rewards. If you couldn't then you didn't. It was fun to play WoW and be able to beat the less complex, instanced, small group dungeons, but it definitely grew stale after a while. EQ always had that mystique for me because there were always many things (not just a few) that I couldn't achieve. Things that made the world feel a bit more exciting (dangerous) to me. For instance in a an adventure you don't expect to instant travel somewhere and get unlimited quick retries at a mob. The journey itself is long, dangerous, and there is a still penalty for failing.
Comments
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
UO, Lineage and AC were some of the earliest mmorpgs I played regularly.
I did also play Neverwinter on AOL but that is more of a proto-mmorpg.
There were several others I tried back in the early days and dozens I've played since but those early games might have had in the entire game a dozen of what we would call quests.
Take tab based combat for example. Out of all the genres I've played where the combat is done in real time, MMORPGS with tab based combat, especially the old school ones, have to be the ones that require the least concentration/thinking whilst engaged in combat.
I could easily read a book whilst engaged in combat and succeed in EQ and SWG, it wasn't a problem for me.
The community as a whole is extremely toxic, which doesn't really help the situation either. The toxicity became very prevalent with the rise of having to follow the "meta". As the players became more sophisticated with their approach of building the perfect character, elitism and class exclusion became commonplace within gaming. People couldn't play specific classes and/or builds because they didn't follow the preferred method and those who wanted to play to have fun found themselves becoming excluded more and more. Which lead to the rise of solo gaming in mmos; because why deal with a bunch of elitist pricks when you just want to have some fun.
Unfortunately, community isn't fun anymore. Community tends to be more tedious than anything.
I could counter and ask how many of the elite WoW raids did you complete? Like Naxx in Vanilla WoW, which something like 1% of the population saw. How many Mythic Raids have you completed in WoW? How many level 50 fractals have you completed in GW2?
MMOs aren't, in general, any easier now than they have been in the past. Yes, specific types of content were challenging in older mmos, but there is specific content that is only able to be completed by a vast minority in mmos now too.
I started playing MMOs with Asheron's Call back in 1999 and I have played a large number of mmos between then and now. I don't recall any of them being particularly hard in general. A good amount of them had some extremely tedious systems that were huge turn offs. I would also say that things like character progression were artificially longer back in the day too. It didn't make it any harder, it just took longer.
I'd love to know what EQ content you did too, because there wasn't a single raid in Inktu'ta, Txevu, Tacvi, Dreadspire, ToB, Demiplane, CoA, AG, FC, Discord (SOD), etc......where you could AFK even for a second. I know all of those raids like I do the back of my pocket.
Those raids were quite a step up in difficulty from the raids I see in MMO today.
raids prior to GoD, yes, they were easier, but EQ was in it's infancy back then, dev didn't even have a proper editor for raid content until PoP, and you're talking like 10% of EQ's existence, other PVE MMO like WoW didn't even exist back then
It took a second expansion for the first guild to beat Tacvi, Ceistus Dei
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Sometimes I think I should call it quits. But why? I can still come back between content patches between my favorite games. The alternative is that I don't play. That doesn't make anyone any money.
I can agree that mmorpg is kinda easier/friendly nowdays after wow..
My first mmorpg was anarchy online and thats why it was my best mmorpg experience, the game had alot of bugs but was somthing new.. in the begining it was a complex game, u had so much skills to choose from and you could pick wrong.. u had some reset points to use so u had to choose careful when u build your char.. and there was ton of different setup, ways to go with skills, weaps and implants etc etc... and if u dident "save" ur xp at a place, u could lose all the xp u grinded for hrs.. and some zones was pvp, so u could get really mad if u died because of a player killed u while u grindend xp..
And there was alot more about the great game..
1 thing was.. u could build ur char in some specials ways that u could hide from other players.. not like wow, go stand next to another player and check his items/skills.. mmorpg need complexity when u build ur char and u shouldent be able to watch someone else build.. the "skill" is to build ur own char and use it in a way that fits u and how u use it in combat..
like a FPS game, all players have equal setup and u only have ur own skills to win over the other player/ai..
A good mmorpg should have alot of skills/items etc to choose from, a deep complex char building system.. I dont want to be a copycat from another player.. wont be fun in a long run. Like I started a hunter in wow, my most importend stat then was agi, then stam.. that aint "hard brain" activity at all..
But i guess company want to earn alot of money and i understand them that.. most of the players dont want to get home after work and get another "hard" day into the game.. so why not make it a bit simpler than real life? like.. sry.. wow..
Take another example from anarchy online.. they hade the title system from pvp.. when u killed someone with the same title or 1+/-, u got points from that player and after some kills u would get a new title.. or the other way and lose that title if u died.. in wow... again.. u dident care if u died in BGs.. u wouldent see that guy again after the match end, and u couldent even talk to that guy.. and that sucks..
Here is another example of pve.. u can solo all the way from lvl 1 - max in 99% of the mmorpg games.. not sure about EQ.. but again.. in AO u needed a team to do that, u could do it by ur self but the mobs had so much hp and u didnt do so much dmg alone.. and when u team up.. guess what..? u get new friends! you talk to other ppl.. not only when u do raids.. even when u doing some boring quest/grinding.. but now when u can solo everything.. its getting boring kinda fast.. and again.. game creators dont want ppl to wait all day to get a team just to get some lvls.. so they make it more friendly..
I could go on all night but its getting late..
I hope camelot unchained will give us (or me) back the oldish style what i call a real mmorpg.. where u use ur brain to build ur char, and play the class the way u want to play it..
gn!
//uberfixx rk2
Obviously, that's playing with skilled players. And that's why I PUG a lot, as playing with new, inexperienced players I know it will be a challenge and more of a social experience helping them out.
Or maybe healing classes (shaman in EQ) are just easy classes to play and I should pick a role I'm not used to for a challenge.
If Solo Mob A requires you to interrupt him 3 times over the course of a 60 second fight or you lose, that's exactly as much skill required as Group Mob B which requires you to interrupt him 3 times over the course of a 60 second fight (even though Group Mob B is casting 3x as often because it's designed with the assumption that 3 members of your group are actively interrupting.) So Group Mob B isn't actually harder than Solo Mob A, even though he casts 3x as often and probably has 3x the hitpoints, because you always group against group mobs.
So being group-focused doesn't factor into a game's skill requirement. Also can you point to any guides that exhibit the "know your class" bit? I've searched around a bit but never found an EQ class guide that was remotely as deep as this. Granted most MMORPGs fall short of that bar.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There were plenty of casual group players in EQ, the guilds doing the raid content when it was current were rare, we were the only guild with a Txevu key on the server for months.
Problem is, those games don't actually represent a departure from what I said. I'll recap:
First of all - yeah, those games DID ask you to do that. It was simply implicit, instead of some NPC with an exclamation mark explicitly telling you to do it. This is an implementation detail - not a meaningful difference. Unlike a well-run PnP campaign, every one of those games included "grinding" as a core aspect of gameplay.
We can replace a few nouns without changing the semantic meaning a lick.
Go smith 200 daggers to "skill up" and, having done that, move on to... whatever it was gave the most efficient smithing/ingot after that.
It's not fundamentally different from, "Go kill 200 gnolls to level up." Same concept, different nouns.
Go grind shit, so you can go grind more, different shit, so you can grind more, different shit. The model is entirely reliant on giving the player a series of increasingly tedious (not difficult - tedious) chores to complete to continue their advancement.
AC? Same story. Anyone who ever played it at length wound up in a highly optimized patron-vassal chain with sternly enforced ratio rules. Fire up VTank and farm those tusker guards (those mini golems on Ulgrim's Island were the shit, too). Gotta keep the XP flowing.
I liked both of those games. Neither were designed to cater to a PnP audience. Mechanically speaking, both were every bit as character development centric as EQ. The one thing they did have going for them was entertaining PvP (though, in AC's case, that was almost entirely by accident
The answer is simple....
Its when the bitter old school vets got hit in the face with the reality the mmorpg genre is passing them by and leaving them in the dust.
Now this statement is a lie like a lot of their talking points, but they keep spreading their hate across the Internet because they can't let something that passed them by go.
Things designed for the masses never turn out well for those with more eclectic tastes.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Nowadays it's a bunch of casuals just rolling up and posting the same tired nonsense. Can't they think for themselves? Are they not capable of assessing a timeline of events and identify whether or not what they say holds any basis in reality?
I remember when it took a minute to get online and then with just a single phone call, boom disconnected. Lost all my xp everytime. Getting information took so long people opted to looking in actual books . . . made of freakin paper! And sometimes you would get papercuts, hardcore as hell.
And now modern internet use is dumbed down beyond anything I could have imagined, and they literally let anyone on these days. They want everything on a silver platter, it's so disappointing. What happened?
I think you answered your own question.
there were very few groupers who made it through them without help from raiders, but the ones that did had a challenge
I don't think every challenge needs to be beaten by everyone, just like I don't think every raid should be beaten by everyone, an item is no longer special, if it is common, if there is no thrill and no sense of accomplishment, then it's not worth making content.