I've Never Played EverQuest

[Tenderoni]

I have really fond memories of EQ. I was pretty young when I started playing (Wiki tells me Luclin was '01, so I would have been 11... wow.) and yeah, it was really great. I played VERY casually, as you can imagine. I had a really great guild called Arbiters of the Apocalypse who were one of the launch guilds on my server and it was all just friendly and cool.
RP was kind of more incorporated into the general flow of the game. People took things very seriously. My GM had his character married to his wife's character, in game, near a waterfall in Rivervale.
Kinda weird imo.
Also, you didn't so much "quest" as you did run to a zone, call an LFG, get invited to a group and then farm until your eyes bleed.
The auction system initially was great. People would call out for buffs in PoK (where everyone hung out) like Spirit of Wolf for faster travel... or the one that makes you float as well, which I can't remember.
I remember that each class would have an "epic" weapon, for which you needed to do a crazy long quest and it took forever. Looking back on it, they looked pretty terrible but hey... It was all about status I guess.
Oh, and there were hardly any item level requirements. People would twink out their level 1 char with stuff that a level 50 could have been wearing, which was kind of hilarious.

Ah, fond memories. - Oh and SURNAMES. I want a surname bad.

[Deleted]

I only played EQ2, but the community there was the best I've come across in an MMO. However, the game itself wasn't as good as WoW, in most respects.

[Tenderoni]

I gave my account to a friend when I went to Iraq, and coming back to find my druid went from 60 to 47. He sold my xp to a necro for those rez orbs or whatever they were.

hahaha I forgot about that.

[Singularity]

I hear people talking about how Everquest was a superior game in regards to customization (gear, spec, etc..). How balanced were the classes in EQ? I think it is safe to say that Blizzard did an amazing job to make every spec viable (yes, currently some specs are too powerful, but that's just a matter of tuning numbers.). At the end of Wrath you could basically raid with every spec without losing 3000 DPS. How was the situation in EQ? Was every spec capable of doing good DPS or was the game dominated by two or three classes?

[Deleted]

i never played EQ but i have played loads of other MMO's
i find for the most part ppl are ppl and ul get dicks in every community,
i did find quite alot of wowbashing, and ppl telling ppl talking about wow to stfu

[Deleted]

The EQ and WOW communities are FUNDAMENTALLY different. I've played EQ for roughly 10 years with few breaks, in everything from slack-type social guilds to top3 world raidguilds, raiding 6 days a week. I more or less quit for good about 2 years ago. The reason why I kept playing in the end was the community, not only because it was fun around the people I was guilded with.. but also all the other people I've come across. The game kept me playing because of its community. Whereas, I like WOW, yet, the few times I've cancelled my subscription was because I was tired of playing with asshats. So yeah I actually stopped playing because of THIS community. Sure, there are some asshats in Everquest as well, but they're usually in their own clique and you can ignore them perfectly fine.
Furthermore, I have to look hard in WOW if I want to find a player my age or older.. and I was/am one of the youngest players in my Guild in Everquest. I'm not saying this is the cause, but it sure is food for thought.

One more anecdotal kind of thing.. I've given Everquest one more try when its most recent xpac was released in the end of 2010.. but found myself mostly hanging around in places akin to Ogrimmar/Stormwind (yes, the Guild Lobby!). My main character is Enchanter, so I'm a buffing class. People come up to me and ask "Could I get a buff please? Will pay and come to you", and that was NOT AN EXCEPTION. Whereas in WOW, when you could still buff random people, all that happened all the time was "Kings", and if there was no Kings after 3 seconds "KINGS", 3 seconds more, "KINGS N00B YOU'RE BUTON BROKEN OR WHAT STUPID ASSHOLE".

As for adventuring, It usually takes a long time to form a random group in EQ, so there are a lot of multiboxers and cliques too. But once you're in a group, you don't /q because "your cat's on fire" after 3min because you don't like the place they've decided on exp'ing at. You don't rage because someone pulled an extra add and killed the cleric and then everyone else. You stick together as a team for maybe hours. People who leave used to tell their group way beforehand, so that either they or the one who was gonna leave himself can find a replacement in time.

Edit:

I hear people talking about how Everquest was a superior game in regards to customization (gear, spec, etc..). How balanced were the classes in EQ? I think it is safe to say that Blizzard did an amazing job to make every spec viable (yes, currently some specs are too powerful, but that's just a matter of tuning numbers.). At the end of Wrath you could basically raid with every spec without losing 3000 DPS. How was the situation in EQ? Was every spec capable of doing good DPS or was the game dominated by two or three classes?

I can't really agree with this, there isn't much customization in Everquest as everyone can potentially buy ALL the "talents" (Alternate Advancement points) available to their class, and not only a subset of them like talents in WOW. In the end game, everyone has the same gear.. all you can do for customization is dye your armor (for a while now) and modify the look of your weapon (kind of a recent thing).

Blizzard will never be able to balance classes because they're balancing around not only pve, but also pvp, utility and probably a lot of other things. What you get as result is everyone being equal, with the exact same buffs, etc. In EQ there not only is only pve (the now sole pvp server is basically ignored, which is good!), but the dps classes do dps, the utility classes have utility, etc.

No one really cries because clerics don't nuke hard enough, or that tanks cannot CC. In the first few expansions, there was only one single class viable to be a healer, the cleric. Shamans and Druids were utility. The dps game was obviously "dominated by 2-3 specs" (Rogue, Wizard, Berserker) because there were only that many classes that were supposed to be dps and dps only. In the big picture however, it's much easier to balance stuff around 54 man raids in EQ than it is for 25 and 10 man raids (or even 2v2, 3v3, 5v5 arenas) in WOW.

[Ohforfsake]

It is funny how all thoe games communities is so bitter and bent on bashing WoW and WoW players Ive played a lot, and they all share the same tune. Like, the most common swear is something like "go play WoW baddie", or "lol wow fan". Seeping envy and jealosity to WoW's tremendous success and huge subscribers base is poisoning those communities.. And dont you dare to admit that you are playing WoW or try to compare them, they will eat you alive and unload a truckload of trolling and verbal filth on your head. And of course they can babble endlessly of how this game X is million times better than WoW, and how WoW is only good for infants and too easy and cartoonish and so on, and its commercial succes is atrocity and the ridicule of fate, nothing more %)

After reading some of those chat channels for a while.. I'd trade them for WoW's trade trollng or even barrens chat gladly. At least people here seem to be pleased with themselves and the game rather than seep poisonous hatred and envy all around..

[Deleted]

It is funny how all thoe games communities is so bitter and bent on bashing WoW and WoW players Ive played a lot, and they all share the same tune. Like, the most common swear is something like "go play WoW baddie", or "lol wow fan". Seeping envy and jealosity to WoW's tremendous success and huge subscribers base is poisoning those communities.. And dont you dare to admit that you are playing WoW or try to compare them, they will eat you alive and unload a truckload of trolling and verbal filth on your head. And of course they can babble endlessly of how this game X is million times better than WoW, and how WoW is only good for infants and too easy and cartoonish and so on, and its commercial succes is atrocity and the ridicule of fate, nothing more %)

After reading some of those chat channels for a while.. I'd trade them for WoW's trade trollng or even barrens chat gladly. At least people here seem to be pleased with themselves and the game rather than seep poisonous hatred and envy all around..

This is what I've also witnessed in all the games I've tried that came AFTER World of Warcraft. Conan, Warhammer, Aion, you name it. But what was before WOW has mostly remained in its state and still isn't like that: EQ, FF11, ..

[BukkaKid]

Little children didn't have computers back then. It was adults playing. Much less whining was heard, raiding was for the hardcore. No one held your hand while you played and gave you gear because you had a temper tantrum.

Gameplay wise it's like comparing a Model T to a Viper, EQ is the foundation for every MMO since and ones to come. Two creators of WoW came from Everquest. WoW is beautiful in it's simplicity and it's ease which players can ease themselves into. The graphics are wonderful and fights are actually engaging.

As for the Community, Everquest had it better by leaps and bounds. People would wait patiently for you to join their group, sometimes trips would take in excess of 30mins but no one complained. 'Camping' spawn points for mobs or loot was respected; people would jot down a list and inform you when they were leaving so you could take over. Recovering corpses was sometimes a pain, but garnering help was almost always met with a few generous souls willing to take the time and effort to help you.

IMO, Everquest was a better game because of the people that played it, not by how many play it.

[gynshon]

IMO, Everquest was a better game because of the people that played it, not by how many play it.

Wow, you hit it right on the nose there. So many aspects of EQ I miss.

[Kezaren]

Everything I've read from the people here waxing nostalgic for the good old days when "Death meant something" and "You had to earn your gear" and all that stuff is interesting because all those reasons are the same reasons that Everquest was an awful, boring, impenetrable, unfair, arcane nightmare of a grind and one of the most insipid games I've ever endured. This was my experience about 10 years ago with the Ruins of Kunark bundle I got into the game with. World of Warcraft didn't even exist at the time to compare it to and I was sorely disappointed with every way EQ was designed.

It's easy for me to see how World of Warcraft came to exist through inspiration with Everquest, because at the time, I, too, was envisioning my own MMO that would do the opposite of what Everquest had done so that it would be a game worth playing. I actually did a lot of thinking about that MMO of mine. I wrote down pages and pages of design for it. A month or two ago, I found the notebook I had written that in, and surprised myself. I had developed a very slick interface, a player progression system that is unique to this day, and I had even laid out plans for what is almost identically the Auction House, back before there was such a thing. It's been my life-long dream to get into game development... I've lost a lot of hope over the years, but if I could find a way to do it, that MMO I designed still has some pretty cool ideas in there (if I do say so myself).

I know different people like different things; I don't actually have an issue with you if you liked Everquest, okay? It's not a big deal.