How are they doing as far as subscriptions go?
I realize this is entirely subjective, but do any dopers have predictions for the longevity of either?
Is one’s content edging out the other? I’ve got both, but haven’t played either in a while and am thinking about diving back in, wondering which would be more worthwhile and satisfying.
Thanks for any info / opinions.
It’s not even close. From here (EQII is on the 100,000 to 200,000 chart and WoW is on the 200,000+ chart), as of July of this year, Everquest II had about 275,000 subscriptions. WoW, on the other hand, had 2 MILLION subscriptions. Overall (Market Share by MMOG chart), World of Warcraft is the second-largest MMORPG in the world, with only the Korean phenomenon Lineage II having more subscribers.
You would think Sony would have learned some lessons, but I’ve just gotten done last week revisiting EQ2 for the first time in about 5 months, and it’s like I never left. Other than finally patching the game to end the tedious need to recover your body (or “shard” as the were calling it in EQ2), not much else has changed significantly.
To my way of thinking, the real problem with EQ2 remains the same as from EQ1: unless you intend to spend hours and hours staying at the forefront of the game, levelling up faster than anyone else, it simply becomes a boring exercise in patterned repetition. For example, tradeskilling never changes; when you level-up you make the same things, just with different names. The ingredients are nominally different, but in reality they are the same, e.g.: electrum followed by gold, etc. The recipes involve the same steps, the same type of ingredients, and yield the same results.
I’m with DSYoungEsq. I played EQ for years. I was in both the WoW and EQ2 beta. Every once in a while, I dust off my EQ2 subscription and see if anything’s changed. Nope. Never does.
WoW is a delight; you can login, find something to do almost immediately, and have fun doing it regardless of if you have 30 minutes or 5 hours to play. The world is gorgeous and huge, but travel isn’t all that painful. Finding your friends and getting a group (if you want one, it’s easy to solo) is fast and easy. The quests generally have a good story behind them, and many of them are humorous.
In comparison, EQ2 does the same thing EQ1 did, perhaps slightly better. Graphics-wise, the world is huge and pretty, in a much more realistic way than WoW’s cartoonish dreamy quality. EQ2 vs. WoW graphics aren’t a matter of one is better than another, they’re just very different styles. Grouping seems necessary after the first few levels, and like EQ1, groups aren’t always easy to find. The quests are sometimes OK, but a lot of them are dumb. Case in point: the “citizenship” quests your low level characters pretty much have to do. Most of them involve going into sewers (or tunnels, or basements) and killing rats, snakes, goos, etc. all of which drop “tokens” that you take back to an NPC to complete the quest. Why in the world does a rat drop a token? Why does the NPC want the tokens? How bloody hard would it have been to make the quest make sense - like, “We have a big rat problem, go kill ten of them and bring me the skins as proof.”
It’s that kind of stuff that drives me nuts in EQ2. Just like EQ1, they just don’t seem to pay attention to the details the way WoW does. Just as a comparision, most of WoW’s newbie quests involve first killing wolves or bugs or something outside, and bringing their pelts back. Then you progress to finding a cave-full of baddies outside town, and you kill a few low level baddies. You progress rather quickly to the point where you’re killing the higher level baddies, and end up killing the head baddy. All of which is done solo and within an hour or so. It’s a nice progression, you get to explore something besides sewers, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment - you get to kill the Boss Baddy at the end, and you don’t have to spend 2 hours waiting for a group to form up to go do it.
I don’t play WOW, but I have played EQ and EQII (beta). I really love the EQII world but the game play sucked for me after about level 14, I was spending all my time either trying to find a group or grinding through a crawl. It got boring pretty fast. I had pre-ordered EQII, I never opened the box. 
World of Warcraft has 4.5 million subscribers worldwide.
Thanks for the information, delving back into WoW!
6 months after my cite, another 2.5 million subscribers. EQII doesn’t even have a chance to catch up.
I have to disclaim here that I’ve never played EQII because my computer won’t run it at all. WoW may run a bit spottily on a non-optimized machine, but it will run, and playably if you stay away from Ironforge or Orgrimmar. Another data point in WoW’s favor, really.
I’m with DSYoungEsq. I played EQ1 on and off since release, and was swept up by the hype of how much better EQ2 was going to be and signed up shortly after it was released.
It is better in some respects than the first one was, but it still falls into the same traps that EQ1 and Dark Age of Camelot fell into: nothing to do at the end game.
I’m sure eventually they’ll release more expansions that offer a multitude of places to go, but it never seems to change that it’s all just the same thing with a different background. As it stood a couple of months ago when I cancelled my account, once you reach level 50 (and through 60), the game is nigh unplayable unless you belong to a guild, and not very enjoyable unless it’s a largish guild that regularly raids. The object seems to be to devote large amounts of time to getting to and killing one particular mob in the slim hope that it drops something you can use (and wrest from everyone else that can use it), so that when you fight it again the next day you have a slightly better chance at survival.
Oh, and look cooler than everyone else.
Is that currently paying subscribers, or just total subscriptions (including cancelled) since they launched?
If it’s currently paying, that is insane. That means they’re bringing in $45 - $55 million per month! :eek:
From the same cite:
I was an EQ1 nut who got into EQ2 - got new computers just to play it.
Two months later I quit.
A while after that I tried WoW. I can’t say enough good things about it.
Really, it’s one of the most stark, perfect examples of the importance of game design I have ever seen. EQ2 has stanning graphics. Lots of great sound, including a lot of speech. The race/class options are far more varied, and you can customize your appearance to an amazing extent (something WoW is woefully lacking in.)
But… WoW is just a better *game. *