How was EverQuest able to come out with more content than World of Warcraft?

[Dacien]

And for fuck's sake, I'm doing my best to ignore this guy but he's just messing with everyone else. All this Strossus guy is doing is trolling and trying to derail the topic, he's not even attempting to add any actual debate to the thread. Can a mod please do something?

Report any posts you feel are in violation of our rules. This isn't my forum, so I don't have the authority to infract here.

[strossus001]

I also don't think Everquest was totally bad, but it was outdated, never innovated it's poor design schemes and was content to let itself be stuck with years-behind mechanics. Take what World of Warcraft did with Cataclysm. Everyone mopes and pees themselves because "There's no endgame" when they conveniently forget to mention Blizzard completely redesigned zones that were made way back in 2003/2004 and had incredibly outdated quests, scenery, direction, etc..

Blizzard just knows what to do (most of the time) to keep it's game going. Sony never cared to try anything that was much different from the start.

The end.

You've got no idea what you're talking about. Not even the slightest clue. "Years behind mechanics"? Years behind what game? EverQuest was the ONLY three-dimensional MMO of its time. It was the defining element in the MMORPG genre.

---------- Post added 2011-12-11 at 01:49 PM ----------

I already said that my warrior friend did NOT get his epics...that was part of my point. He was in the best guild in the game and still could not get his epics. Are you even reading other people's posts before you TRY to insult them? You're making yourself look really bad here.....

I don't think you're grasping this. The warrior that raided, that one you're not talking about, was the only one. Your friend didn't exist.

[Dacien]

Well the problem with this argument, now, is that that was basically what World of Warcraft was.

It was easier/harder in different aspects, but they were pretty much the same kind of game. World of Warcraft had some (or rather, a lot) of help from it's RTS games. I'm not sure what EverQuest had going for it, I'm not sure if it had some story or games before the MMO, so from my knowledge it was pretty much just popping up "from nowhere" where WoW had an already incredibly popular RTS series to base it's MMORPG upon.

But still, I think Blizzard was always just trying to expand on what it did and how it did it and change the way the game worked (for better or worse), where Sony was much more content to just keep doing the same thing over and over.

I'll be completely honest with you. WoW in early 2006 was miles more hand holding-ish than EQ was in 2001. And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, necessarily, but it's why so many gamers were able to pick up and stay with WoW. And by hand holding, I just mean the quests were obvious, where you were supposed to go was obvious, the dungeons were obvious, and your spells and abilities were very clearly described. Not a bad thing, right? Well all that simplicity steals a little something from the mystique, for me. It's worth the trade-off, though.

But this is why EQ never held on to a wide player base.

[Horrid Crow]

Lol EverQuest...

[Magzilla]

Take it from someone who's been back to EQ recently. It's a blast as far as single group content goes. There's a SHITLOAD of group content compared to WoW, and it has a more satisfying progression style to the higher tiered zones.

Grab a friend or two and with mercenaries (hired NPCs) you can do just about everything. Leveling is extremely fast now with mercs and hot zones (modified to give a lot more xp)

Shadowknight/Shaman is a brokenly powerful duo.

[snuffglops]

The end.

You've got no idea what you're talking about. Not even the slightest clue. "Years behind mechanics"? Years behind what game? EverQuest was the ONLY three-dimensional MMO of its time. It was the defining element in the MMORPG genre.

---------- Post added 2011-12-11 at 01:49 PM ----------



I don't think you're grasping this. The warrior that raided, that one you're not talking about, was the only one. Your friend didn't exist.

Fulorian. The guy's name was fucking Fulorian.Please do not feel stupid just because you're dead wrong. I can even give you his name in real life if you don't believe me. I love being right! whoooo!

[JimPaladin]

I'll be completely honest with you. WoW in early 2006 was miles more hand holding-ish than EQ was in 2001. And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, necessarily, but it's why so many gamers were able to pick up and stay with WoW. And by hand holding, I just mean the quests were obvious, where you were supposed to go was obvious, the dungeons were obvious, and your spells and abilities were very clearly described. Not a bad thing, right? Well all that simplicity steals a little something from the mystique, for me. It's worth the trade-off, though.

But this is why EQ never held on to a wide player base.

Well, like I said, there were differences in where World of Warcraft and Everquest were more complex/more simple than one another.

While I'm sure Everquest wins the award for "having the most complex, non-straightfoward things", WoW had plenty of their own. I mean, a good number of the dungeons were NOT very straight forward or clear. Look at any of the Blackrock Mountain instances. You wouldn't know what to do at all in them if you didn't have someone else guiding you, or if you read up on how to do it.

I didn't play Everquest much, and I certainly didn't play much of any of the End game, so I can't 100% speak for how indepth and complicated it could get, but it's wrong to just pass vanilla WoW off as a "your hand is held the entire time" game.

[Dacien]

While I'm sure Everquest wins the award for "having the most complex, non-straightfoward things", WoW had plenty of their own. I mean, a good number of the dungeons were NOT very straight forward or clear. Look at any of the Blackrock Mountain instances. You wouldn't know what to do at all in them if you didn't have someone else guiding you, or if you read up on how to do it.

That's true. UBRS comes to mind.

[Zao11]

How was EverQuest able to come out with more content than World of Warcraft?

The obvious answer is SOEs policy of quantity over quality. They took the game from a small company that had tons of ideas for the game(Verant, and what they called their "vision") and turned it into as much of a cash cow as they knew how. Expansions had to be churned out at a crazy rate of 1 every 6 months to a year.

The first two expansions were quite complete when released and included a lot of new content(Kunark, Velious). After that Luclin came out with major design flaws in the graphics engine and in the gameplay design(Vex Thal). I don't remember the PoP release very well, but it seems like there were complaints about unfinished/buggy raid content as well (Coirnav/Rahte Council).

The next 2 expansions were mini-expansions(LoY and LDoN). But at this point they are pumping out expansions at a rate of 1 every 4-6 months.

And then we come to Gates of Discord. The amount of bugs and lack of thought out design were almost funny. The raids were unbeatable by the top raid guilds due to bugs and due to a later revealed fact that the content was designed for a level 70 cap, but for whatever reason, they left the player cap at 65 when they released the expansion. A few of the big guilds left the game for the upcoming WoW- and made sure to stir up a lot of noise on the way out(including the guy that started the Thottbot website.)

The next 2 expansions were pretty solid in my opinion(OoW/DoN) with good group content RS/WoS/MPG/MPG Trials and fun raids, Trials/Anguish/DoN Dragons.

DoD was quite fun too, but probably less remarkable than the previous two.

At this point they are still sticking to the 6ish months per expansion release. The next 8 expansions were very similar in content design, at least as far as single group progression was concerned (tier 1,2,3,4,etc unlocked through solo and group tasks, each tier having its own quality gear and drops). And mostly generic AA rank upgrades (Combat Agility/Stability rank 35 or whatever) with a few original ones tossed in here and there. Spells again are rk. 1/2/3 and moslty are just upgrades of last expansions spells with very few new ones.

There were new zones and enemies and even some new ideas introduced during those expanisons(player housing, mercs, etc.) but from one expansion to the next it was a lot of copy/paste.

And one this about this comment:

In EverQuest, we didn't have to wait 4-5 months for a simple fix, it was generally fixed on the spot.

In my experience this wasn't even close to the case. Most bugs became a permanent feature of the game you just learned to live with. Gameplay bugs like NPCs warping if you step on a bump on the ground. Weird tactics like low level pet pulling or shadow-stepping through doors while 2x shrunk. AA problems like shield specialist adding a huge damage modifier. Even login issues like your character being stuck in the game world for an hour + after you DC/LD keep you from logging back in. All of those things took years to fix, if at all.

In my opinion the quality expectations of the next WoW expansion are so much higher than the expectations for the next EQ release that its not fair to compare them. And WoW has a much bigger player base to make a big deal about it if something isn't up to their standards.

[CptAwesome]

EQ has a LOT of content sure, but it's quality is nowhere close to WoW's in terms of the complexity of boss fights. All of EQ's "difficulty" comes from grinding and time based measures not actually challenging encounters. In terms of mechanics, you can take any end boss from any WoW raid and it will be harder than anything EQ ever put out.

[Drakain]

What I dislike about wow is an unending faction grind of repetitive daily quests and dungeon runs and the lack of fun things to do at cap other than raid.

Everquest regularly adds AAs, but those cap out pretty fast, too. Class balance is a mess and pvp is just awful. Crafting is a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS. However, Housing is fun if you like that thing and there always seems something to do. It's different than wow, but I wouldn't say better.

That said, when WoW releases content its invariably high quality content. Additionally, wow releases a lot of free substantial game update where you almost always have to pay for a game update from EQ.

I like WoW, and I think it's a great game. I'm ready for SWTOR to come out though.

[fwc577]

Furor was the warrior. Your friend didn't get his epics. Furor did. I'm going to guess that your 'my friend' testimony is contradict by facts and is therefore a lie or mistake. Take your pick. The same goes for 'XXXX company admitted this' claim.

$50 per expansion for World of Warcraft and a $15/month subscription fee compared to $20-30 per expansion for EverQuest with an $11/month subscription fee. It's some pretty simple math. Also, if you're trying to compare expansion costs, you should probably compare expansion costs over the full life of a game, not comparing a game to one twice as old.

So, I'm not going to read this entire thread but I am going to give my thoughts on EQ vs WoW from someone who played from the release of RoK to OoW.

The two games are completely and totally uncomparable. The only things that make them similar are the fact they are in a fantasy setting and their considered "MMORPGs" (although, what you did in EQ shouldn't even be considered an RPG because there really was no story element that the player had any part of).

Quest - Wow has a lot of quests, some of them are pretty brilliantly designed and are a lot of fun. Some have interesting mechanics that go beyond the kill X things and return it's furs. They have highly interactive quests. EQ, they had no quests, unless of course you talk about "legendary" quests. Those took months for people to solve becuase you would get this obscure dialogue things to say to people in order to figure out where to go and what to do next.

Leveling - You didn't level up by completing quests either, you leveled up by finding a group and then standing against a wall while a group member would pull the mob to the wall and your group would proceed to beat it down. Levels didn't take a few hours, they took days. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to create a character at level 1 now days and level him up to max level. To give you an idea of what it was like and why you needed a group, imagine in wow if every mob in the world was "elite" and depending on the zone, you had bosses worthy of raids also just randomly walking around. I know this is what eventually made me quit during OoW because I was tired of the crap.

Downtime - Originally, the game didn't have movable and customizable UI features. Instead, when when you needed mana, you sat down and meditated. And looked at your spellbook. Literally, imaging in order to regenerate your health and mana in wow you were required to open the map and sit there and stare at the map in the middle of your screen. Don't even dare think of walking away either, because unless you were actually inside of a city you could end up having something attack you and if you were sitting, you would automatically get crit. Eventually they added a few things and made the ui a little more customizable but the UI in that game was still shit.

Never-ending grind - You think 80-85 levels is bad? EQ introduced AA points, starting at level 51 you could put experience toward AA points, this was a system designed to help improve your character in other ways than leveling and gear. When I played, if you were with a good group who knew what they were doing, you could get AA at about 1 per hour. Now think about the fact that there are thousands of AA points to spend. This wasn't like running around and completing quests for XP either, it was sitting against a wall in a zone while someone pulled to the group and killed a mob.

Death - In wow you die, go to a GY, run back to your corpse and resurrect. In EQ, death was a friggen chore. You die and return to where your soul is bound, oh that just so happens to be on another continent, have a fun run completely in the nude. It happens too, you bind in say Cabilis, and you go to the Umbra in SoL for leveling you would have a good 1-2 hour corpse run back to your corpse,

Cabilis->Lake of Ill Omen->Firiona Vie->Dreadlands->Nexus->Netherbian Lair->Greig's end->Maiden's Eye->Umbral Plains

You did this run naked, where mobs ten levels below you would aggro and attempt to kill you and because you were naked it was easy for them to do so. You didn't have mounts, you didn't have flying mounts, you had to run. You didn't run across a zone either, you stuck to the fricken wall because if you tried to run through the middle of the zone, you were dead.

Models-The game reused the old models over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. All they would do is make the mob slightly larger from zone to zone. WoW does this sort of, but EQ was on a whole different level. An expansion would seriously contain 20 models total not including bosses that would get reused everywhere.

Zones-Everything was zoned, in the above example you had to zone into 9 different places. There weren't seamless zone designs.

Later expansions-Lets compare this to what Blizzard does today. When we get a new patch, we get that patch for free. In EQ, nothing was free. You want a new raid and 2 new dungeons and a handful of class changes? $15 dollars.

This game has a total of what, 22 major content patches as well as 3 Expansions. Imagine needing to pay the $20-30 per expansion than another $10-15 per content patch. Meaning just in patches and expansions alone you would have paid something in the ballpark of $300-$400 (as opposed to $199.95 price of just Expansions @ 39.99 per xpac). Imagine you wanted to play WoW today and you never played it before. You would have to pay Blizzard about $10 per expansion and $5 per content patch if they used the EQ model for a total of about $150. I am unsure if they offer them boxed up these days.

Auctioning - There used to be a time when there was no sort of auction interface and if you wanted to sell stuff you went to this little cave near a major city and everyone shouted in Trade chat what they were selling or they would say have a bag of stuff, come to the torch and open trade to see what I have. Thats how it worked in EQ, there was no auction house, you were looking for something particular, it wasn't a few minutes going to the AH, selecting your item, and then grabbing it from a mailbox. Then in a later expansion they introduced mechanics to an exisitng zone they had on SoL expansion known as the Bazaar. Here they had an auction window, only you didn't purchase stuff from that window, no, you had to go and find the person in the bazaar and it basically converted him into a vendor you could purchase stuff from. Oh, you also had to keep your computer up and running for this too. Got a lot of stuff to sell, setup your comp over night, windows update reboots your Pc, oops. Someone selling something you want to sell really bad? Just go find him in the bazaar and stand directly on top of him, depending on your race they might not be able to sell anything all night. although, the same could happen to you also. Oh, and lets not even talk about the lag. This was a small zone, you would have thousands upon thousands of people converge on this one location. This place made Dalaran look abandoned during its prime. EQ also didn't unload models, so you had to stare at the ground or you were going to lag like hell.

Looking for an item from a dungeon? You had to farm it. There was no instancing either, so you would often times have to fight another group over a farming spot. Oh, and you better hope whatever you were going to farm won't end up being ninja'd either. Oh, and then that mob that drops the piece of gear you want? Yeah, he might have a 12 hour spawn times, ie once every 12 hours. Same thing with boss mobs. You didn't just go get your weekly reset into a raid. No, when a boss spawned, everyone would gather and need to race to that boss. Incorrectly calculate the spawn timer? Your raid forms and the boss is either already dead or not going to spawn. Some people might think this sounds fun, but the truth is it's not. Unless your currently in a guild that is the #1 guild on your server as far as content, chances are you won't see very many bosses killed.

Find out one of your buddies plays but on a different server? Well damn, your out of luck. They had server transfers in EQ, but when you transferred servers, you transferred naked without gold.

Oh, and then EQ went and implemented their preferred subscribers program. Ie, pay $35 a month instead of $15 and your character got transferred (with all his gear) to a special server for special people with special spawns and extra content.


Imagine EQ as the old west, back when you could go out for a walk and get scalped by a fricken Apache which would completely ruin your day. Everyone back then knew who everyone else was, you had ties to your community because they were your protection in a hostile environment. Everything was a struggle. This is a good example of EQ. Then the army comes through, wipes out all the Apaches or puts them on little reservations, builds cities and roads and housing and parks. More and More people congregate to these "cities", you may not know your neighbor as well but at least your safe, at least you can have fun on your own.

This is the way you should compare and look at EQ vs WoW.

So to the question of, "In EverQuest, we didn't have to wait 4-5 months for a simple fix, it was generally fixed on the spot. So honest question, why is it so much harder for Blizzard to make content updates, or fix small problems now that technology requires less effort to do so? My personal guess is that modern MMOs have"

(Oh, and feel free to ask those who actually played Everquest how the first couple months of SoL launch went if you think EQ fixed things instantly)

Simple Fixes in EQ were simple because the game was far more simple (from a code standpoint) compared to wow. When you program and code, the more programming and code you have, the higher the chance changing one thing breaks something else. Wow is far more complex with many more complex systems working within the game than you realize. Not to mention, one mistake could affect millions compared to thousands in EQ. I have memory of things being changed resulting in stuff like items and other stuff completely disappearing from your character, imagine if in the process of adding void storage, blizzard launched it and after the fact everyone's entire contents of their banks disappear. This wouldn't be fixed overnight either, in EQ it would take about a week. Can you imagine how much harder it would be if you had more than 100x the customer base to fix this issue with?

EQ gets old quickly, but at the time, there weren't any other choices.

---------- Post added 2011-12-11 at 09:23 PM ----------

Take it from someone who's been back to EQ recently. It's a blast as far as single group content goes. There's a SHITLOAD of group content compared to WoW, and it has a more satisfying progression style to the higher tiered zones.

Grab a friend or two and with mercenaries (hired NPCs) you can do just about everything. Leveling is extremely fast now with mercs and hot zones (modified to give a lot more xp)

Shadowknight/Shaman is a brokenly powerful duo.

Back in the day there weren't mercenaries. you needed to sit around and find a group of players to go out with.

---------- Post added 2011-12-11 at 09:25 PM ----------

What I dislike about wow is an unending faction grind of repetitive daily quests and dungeon runs and the lack of fun things to do at cap other than raid.

Everquest regularly adds AAs, but those cap out pretty fast, too. Class balance is a mess and pvp is just awful. Crafting is a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS. However, Housing is fun if you like that thing and there always seems something to do. It's different than wow, but I wouldn't say better.

That said, when WoW releases content its invariably high quality content. Additionally, wow releases a lot of free substantial game update where you almost always have to pay for a game update from EQ.

I like WoW, and I think it's a great game. I'm ready for SWTOR to come out though.

good to know that AA's don't suck as bad as when they were first implemented.

They were the EQ equivalent of Gearscore as far as getting into raids. Nothing worse than getting denied to a raid because you didn't have 100 AA's

[Deleted]

10 pages of pink sunglasses nostalgia and nobody brought Dark Age of Camelot on the table. The game was similar awful in terms of pve grind and randumb pve encounters....but once you hit max, damn was the RvR fun.

Good times, good times.

OT:

I think its funny to even defend Blizzard with their lazy approach on WoW nowadays.
They don't care about wow like they'd care about Starcraft 2.
If you are subscribed to wow, you are most likely a walking money dispenser for Blizzard.

So yes, if trion and Sony could/ can release content faster than Blizzard, then it is because they cared/care more for their falgship game than Blizzard does.

[Wildmoon]

I have played EQ before. HM's mechanic in WoW is much more complex than EQ.

[Krimzin]

The thing is, most of the expansions for EQ were tiny and only had a handful of content most of the time. Even if they come with a lot of content, it was either incomplete or buggy to all hell. The sheer amount of detail and care that Blizzard puts into expansions is far beyond what Sony has ever done.

Sony believed in quantity over quality. Blizzard believe in quality over quantity.

Hell, most people probably don't remember the Planes of Power fiasco either.

This made me LOL IRL... I mean cmon.. You cant honestly believe that.

Blizzard doesnt believe in Quality or Quantity.. it believes in PROFIT.. period.

Last year blizzard Grossed over 1 Billion Dollars from WoW.. Thats Billion.. with a B.

Yet They struggle to release content.. yet EQ1 is still releasing 1 expansion per year. For the person who said that the EQ expansions were small, you should research before you speak.

WoW is and will always be the Goliath in MMOs because you can run WoW on any Comp.. heard rumors one guy has it running on a Toaster.

I have no issue with Blizzard. Im a realist. They are in this for one reason only.. to make money. Nothing wrong with that. I would love to see them get some true passion about WoW and really focus on making the game better instead of doing just enough keep their subscribers.. though recently seems they arent doing enough and subscriptions are showing it.

Just my thoughts.

[Netherspark]

The viciousness of people defending EQ here is astoundingly amusing, even more so because nobody's even been attacking it. "You don't agree with me so I must insult you!, rar!"

The thing is though, even with the above being true, this thread is not about 'Which MMO is better?" but instead "Why was EQ able to put out the same amount or more content in the same time frame as warcraft with less resources?" If you think the EQ content had less quality than the WoW content you clearly never played EQ or are just being a blind blizzard fanboy. EQ pioneered many of the things you enjoy in WoW today.

Yet you continously compare them and advocate your choice, insulting people whose opinion differs. And if you bothered to read rather than raging over pointless crap you would have seen me say that I never have played EQ. I also find it amusing that you use that as an insult.

The issue is not (as has been explained many times already) that Blizzard isn't capable of putting the same amount of content, of course they are. It's that Blizzard choose to not dilute the game and pour out so much that people get lost in it and never complete it. Blizzard also like to make current raids/dungeons/zones etc directly tied to current major events and storylines, they like to make them seem important at the time which keeps the impression of a progressing timeline, you can't do that by churning out too much content - they would run out of storyline and the plots will thin.

Wow is not aimed at the same people who play Everquest, it's not meant to be hardcore. If there was endless amounts of content then not only would quality decrease but the average player (the people the game IS aimed at) would end up never seeing it. Then why spend time making something so few will see?


Now one thing I do agree with is that Wow would be better with more things to do. More high level zones, some new dungeons every now and then, more than one raid per tier etc. but it's important not to overdo it, which no doubt is something that other games have done.

So the point isn't that Wow is incapable of doing this, they just don't see the point and niether do I.

[Burgsten]

I LOVE the whole, EQ bosses and content were so simple n stuff with things n places and such since I never played jack squat and have an opinion anyway.

(BTW I played back in the day, as in, when Cazic Thule was the place to go and Rubicite was the armor to have)

EQ was literally an Epic experience, took months to get really good and guild runs/raids consisted of HUNDREDS of people at a time to accomplish major boss kills and get loot that truly made your character Epic.

Twinking was insanely fun back when I played as well, even though, yes ECommons Spam sucked=P I LOL'd that you mentioned NTorch, brought back alot of memories.

Anyway, for those of you who blast the simplicity of the EQ boss encounters, I present 1 and only 1 example of a boss so Complex and Massive no boss Blizzard has ever created will ever compare, I give you... SHIT Specters to DOCKS

Sorry, couldn't help it, anyway, Go Kill Naggy/Voxx/Innorok/Cazic with your raid of people divided into single groups with Class Captains for every class typing out responsibilities, que-ing up heals so the tank didn't get 2 shotted....nevermind, you never really will understand unless you played it back then.

I quit when DAOC came out and never went back because I loved RvR so much... then Atlantis xpac came out and I was a sad MMO-less person for quite a while, until a friend got me to play WOW with him, comparing the two really isn't fair.

WOW essentially took alot of the good aspects of quite a few MMOs before it and made good with them, YAY for blizzard, but it will never reach the Epic scale that EQ did, nor the forced eliteness because if you werent Elite/Awesome at what you did, you never really accomplished anything but last Tiers stuff in EQ. There was no "No Raider Left Behind Act" aka LFR in EQ.

[fwc577]

I will agree with the sentiment that EQ had an epicness factor that WoW doesn't. Part of that i think is the fact the graphics are on a bit lower level than WoW. I remember the first time I killed AoWar in Velious and I remember how absolutely massive the boss was. Take a wow boss and double it's height easy. With that said, there would be some difficulty with a few of the bosses if they were so huge in wow. Also, i will never forget my first time heading to the elf city in the trees. That was fricken spectacular. I will never forget my times walking around MM castle hoping to be lucky enough to catch a peek at Mayong himself. There was stuff you would consider legendary in the game due to the sheer rareness of catching a glimpse.

With that said, I think that was more a product of the times. Video games of that calibre of epicness just didnt exist. Now we have all these newer games coming out that are pretty epic but it is a bit more commonplace than when EQ was in its prime.

As for your sentiment of "No Raider left Behind Act", that really isn't true. The biggest difference between EQ and WoW is the size of the community. In EQ the community was very small, everyone knew each other and everyone was helpful because of this. If you tried to screw people over, you could ruin your reputation and completely end your fun for good. WoW is so much larger and has a lot of people of varying skill quality so extra measures need to be taken for those players.

I didn't play this entire expansion. Yesterday I renewed my account. If I had skipped an expansion in Everquest, there is no way in hell I would return because the game isn't a solo, on your own type game. Being an entire expansion behind everyone would screw you over.

Your choices were also pretty much permenant. When I started playing the game I played a Shaman and then re-rolled a Bard and played those two characters (because I could solo level a bard). There was absolutely no way I could make the decision to roll a third character or tryout a new class. It is nice in wow that if I don't like the way a class is going I can play a different class and I'm not stuck with what I choose when I first started playing and had no idea.

[Mort459]

I'm sorry that you're a spawn of generation of the weak-willed, short-attention-spanned youth of today. You will most likely be unable to see my way of thinking because you want your purples NOW NOW NOW.

Dude, if you like stupid, infuriating bullshit, that's fine. You have every right to enjoy stupid, infuriating bullshit. I never got to Plane of Fear, but it sounds like my job, not a hobby. Most people enjoy a game to actually be fun, accessible and beatable. IT'S A VIDEO GAME. How are people WEAK-WILLED for wanting an accessible game. KILLING THINGS WITH SWORDS IS FUN. Your Corpse Decaying is not fun. That's why I ended up quitting EQ in the first place. I quit a HOBBY because it wasn't fun anymore. A HOBBY. HOW CAN YOU BE WEAK-WILLED ABOUT A HOBBY.

EQ was an awesome game for time, and i had hundreds of hours playing it having a good time, but this conversation is raising my blood pressure. I'm going to go play WoW and actually have some "weak-willed" *gasp* fun.

Do you drive a car? WTF YOU'RE SO WEAK-WILLED, YOU SHOULD WALK, GOD IS RUINING THIS GENERATION BY GIVING THEM CARS.

[Dacien]

Leveling - You didn't level up by completing quests either, you leveled up by finding a group and then standing against a wall while a group member would pull the mob to the wall and your group would proceed to beat it down. Levels didn't take a few hours, they took days. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to create a character at level 1 now days and level him up to max level. To give you an idea of what it was like and why you needed a group, imagine in wow if every mob in the world was "elite" and depending on the zone, you had bosses worthy of raids also just randomly walking around. I know this is what eventually made me quit during OoW because I was tired of the crap.

Death - In wow you die, go to a GY, run back to your corpse and resurrect. In EQ, death was a friggen chore. You die and return to where your soul is bound, oh that just so happens to be on another continent, have a fun run completely in the nude. It happens too, you bind in say Cabilis, and you go to the Umbra in SoL for leveling you would have a good 1-2 hour corpse run back to your corpse,

Call me a masochist, but I thought this was cool. It leant a lot of gravity to your experience.