I think one of the key differences is there is always something to do in WoW, I’ve never had an empty quest log except when I started a character (and once during the DK chain probably). Everquest didn’t show quest locations for one, second you had to know what to say (not that difficult) and then on top of that a lot of the quests were only group, or the only ones you could find were much higher leveled. There were large, large gaps where you had nothing to do but grind. One of the things that draws people (at least me) into WoW was everything feels like it has a purpose, you’re not just killing boars, you’re killing boars for <NPC>. Even if you don’t read the quest dialogue you’re killing boars for <quest>, and if you are just grinding it’s for <money> or <rare drop>, you always have small goals to accomplish, not just “because it’s the only thing I really CAN do right now.”
I followed the game on the forums for a long time, originally it was meant to be a niche game, fill a gap similar to the one UO had before the whole Trammel thing, but add a little more PvE focus for fun. Then they panicked when they realized how small that niche actually was and tried to “WoWify” it, not that they’d admit they were trying to get that audience (and, in fact, comparing any aspect to WoW was a great way to start a debate about the game’s intended audience on the forums). Hell, there were flamewars when screenshots of NPCs having indicators they had a quest over their heads ohnoes.
I was there for a while so let me explain it:
The people who do this generally fall into two camps:
The asshole for the sake of being an asshole crowd.
The so-called “Real PvP” crowd.
The first one is self-explanatory, they were the crowd that was generally thought of by the others as “you’re on my side but I wish you weren’t.”
The second is the one that is more “back to the basics” PvP, longing for the UO days with Guild wars and such. These guys are usually honorable but use dishonorable tactics, they’re not doing it to be assholes, but to start world PvP. They want to lock down an area because they want a FIGHT over the area. They’ll lock down a copper node just because they want 6 guilds to come to free it up and start a world war. In fact, if you team up with 4 other low levels and kill them they’ll often whisper and congratulate you. They think battlegrounds are the wrong direction and the world should be a giant battleground. They miss the AO, AC, and UO aspects where nowhere was safe, where there was a sense that you might have to pay escorts or join a good guild. They felt that it built a better sense of community. They realize they’re kinda being assholish, but feel it’s the only way to catalyze a strong community, and think it will weed out the idiots you see at higher levels in WoW, and they DO like a fair fight, these are the people you’ll see leading Battlekeep sieges and stuff, they just want battlekeep sieges outside of the border lands, they want group based, survival-of-the-fittest gameplay where even a high level can’t feel safe in a low level zone because of guilds “taking” towns over the globe.
It’s not an assholish ideal, just a radically different playstyle than the majority of the modern community has.
Played EQ1 from near the beginning to about when WoW came out. (Quit EQ/MMOs all together until a bunch of friends that were playing DAOC moved to WoW)
EQ1 seemed very rich in lore - which I miss. I really liked all the dragons and fairies. Zoning sucked, and it really sucked if you ended up getting turned around and getting stuck in that train of mobs you were trying to avoid. I don’t know how many times I cursed out my computer zoning into and out of Mistmoore - until I finally got a new computer.
I was one of the lucky ones to have the ‘of the Nexus’ title when SoL came out - free nexus port necklace! I totally loved the options available to being a shaman, and a barbarian to boot! It sucked dieing on a raid, and you’d de-level - DOH! No group Focus. Some of the most proud accomplishments I remember from EQ were fighting dragons for hours upon hours - then being able to sneak into Plane of Mischief, or getting a key to sleeper’s tomb. I loved exploring the Hole on my halfling for the shaman epic - that place was really cool too. Oh! How about dying in places where you needed your gear to breathe - ie: The Grey if you died in the snake temple or something and had to hold your breathe, oh and btw hope the entrances weren’t full of mobs.
WoW makes it so much easier for anyone to pick up the game and play. EQ it took forever to do anything really. It really was like walking uphill both ways in the snow to school. After PoP and GoW (EQ xpacs) it seemed like a really dumb game - even with close to 250+ game days played.
You have a point. But my experience in AoC with the more assholish players made me stop playing. Well, the lag issue is what nailed it for me, and theres a very slim chance that I’ll feel the desire to go back. As I said, the fact that the assholish PvPers made it hard to level out of the starting area really made a difference. The game wasn’t really ready when it launched and it showed. I don’t know if they’ve solved any of the lag issues. A lot of people I saw on the forums left quickly saying they’d rather wait for Warhammer Online. I don’t know what the state of that game is. I may load my copy over the Christmas Holiday when I have time from work and check it out.
I have never really PvP’d that much. But tonight I was playing WoW and my lvl 31 rogue was in Menethil Harbor when a group of high level horde came in and begin killing all of the NPCs. I’d never seen it happen, I was always somewhere else when I’d see the alert that “<location> is under attack!”. It was pretty funny to watch them go around slaughtering everyone. A few higher level alliance players were around and fought back and foolishly I jumped in and tried to backstab a horde attacker. He one shotted me. I rezzed but now I was flagged at PVP so when I came back they just killed me again. I wasn’t going to return to my corpse until it was safe but a few higher level guys came in and one of the rezzed me as they chased the horde off. Now, that was fun, really. Whats not fun is in AoC when you’re level 6 or so trying to kill a few stupid gators for a quest but can’t because a level 19 character keeps killing you when you rez.
As for not having a thing to do, CoX can fall into the trap. I’ve had a few times when I had missions that were too difficult at my level to solo and had to grind it out. **CoX **has the problem (IMHO its a problem, YMMV) of having missions that kind of force you to team. I don’t like being pushed into having to team up. Too many bad experiences with it in that game. If I want to turn lemons into lemonade I can at least say that when i have i have been on good teams in CoX I always add the players to my list so I can team with them again if the occassion arises.
And WoW players seem to have a different mindset…if you’re doing the same difficult quest in my experience they’ll team with you until its done and have no bruised feelings if you leave after the quest is completed. In CoX I’ve had too many people get upset if I tell them I want to go solo after we finish a certain mission. Thats odd to me since there really is no “phat lewt” to get in CoX. I sell almost everything I get in that game. The WoW forums were a gathering place for jerkish behavior last I went there (which has been about a year) and the CoX forum community seems to have a low opinion of them. But in the game I have met a lot of nice people so the forum really isn’t representative of the players.
I’ll have to look into Warhammer some more. Is it a WoW wannabe or does it offer new stuff? The only thing i asked my wife to get me for Xmas is Wrath of the Lich King. If Warhammer turns out to be a dud at least I’ll have that to play. (I give it a month or two until I burn out on the Sword and Sorcery and play CoX again…i go in cycles like that)
One thing both CoX and WoW have that is a minor peeve and can’t be helped is the guild/supergroup invites. Its no big deal, and maybe there is a way to autodecline them that I don’t know about. In CoX I hated it because 99% of the time you were only asked to join a supergroup for the prestige points. In WoW I’m not sure what bonuses the guild gets. Both games…the invite comes from people i don’t even know. Never met or played with. I joined a guild in WoW when I started because my friend and the First segeant were in it. The guild was mostly military guys from all over so there was a bond there. (the guild no longer really functions. Both my buddy and former 1st sgt are deployed and the other members that were the core probably have deployed or PCSed somewhere). I joined a supergroup in CoX because a player I had teamed with several times asked me…he was a good guy, a great tank character and we all had fun. I won’t join a group just because i’m invited. I have to know what I’m getting into. (Case in point…I started in AoC soon after it launched. I joined a group that soon demanded that I be around at certain times and get ventrillo. Or be kicked out. Hello. I have a fuckin’ job and how the hell do you know if I can aford a headset or mic? I quit the group right then. Its a game…guild/group leader or not, you ain’t telling me what I have to do)
From what I see about EQ in this thread I don’t think I would have liked it. But i think other MMOs have built on what it what started. I looked forward to DnD online, but it was pretty bad. I would have thought that with a premise of DnD which has name recognition and a fan base, the (then) recent popularity of the LOTR movies, the fact that the Single player ***Neverwinter Nights Games ***were popular and a backstory built in they’d at least have a decent game. (IMO they screwed up using Eberron as a setting. *Forgotten Realms *would have been so much easier and more compelling to their base fans. Hell, it could have been a near WoW clone and still attracted hardcore Sword and Sorcery fans)
The Main Point of the games is not at issue. I’ve indicated that both games have essentially the same possible methods of play, not just the “main point” but the various other side methods listed by LotL, among others.
Your remaining points, stripped of the biased commentary, are the point that has been made here. I’ve already acknowledged that point. I see that this is true. I understand that “ease of use” is a large part of what is driving the popularity. I’ve not argued this is not the case, I’ve not said I don’t find that a good reason to use the game, indeed, I’ve avoided making commentary one way or the other on the subject. So I’m not sure I understand either your implied criticism, or your hostility.
There are some that literally do force you to team up, usually requiring two people to click on two different glowies at the same time in a mission. Annoying as hell.
I’ve noticed this as well. I think it’s because WoW does a better job of emphasizing the quest for the quest’s sake. I want to kill Hogger but can’t, you want to kill Hogger but can’t, let’s kill him together. I also may not be following the same quests you do, so one of us is bound to have to disrupt his schedule to work with the other. Further, say your new friend only has a quest in the middle of a quest chain left, which you haven’t started yet. Why would you spend time helping him do that quest when you get nothing but kill XP out of it? Quests also grant you a reward beyond the XP, so there’s a reason to do just one; I’m doing this quest to get that new two-handed sword, for example.
In CoX, the fact that you don’t get as much phat lewt is, IMO, precisely why people get annoyed at doing only one mission. All there is is the XP, which a single mission doesn’t grant all that much of, so teaming up for just one is kind of worthless. Missions are also very light on content; you race to the door, you go in, you spend 15 minutes, and you’re done. Not only that, but the power you have available when you get 6-8 people together is significant, and most people want to use that for as long as they can. A single mission is barely anything, especially since large groups can just plow right through them.
I think I’m kind of rambling, so I’ll hide behind an analogy of my perception. WoW quests are like steak dinners. There’s no trouble in gathering together a bunch of friends for an enjoyable meal, each person having a single large cut of meat. CoX missions are like hot dogs. While you might gather together a bunch of friends for a barbecue and have a grand time chowing down on mountains of hot dogs, it’s much weirder to get your friends together to have a single hot dog each. (Unless, of course, that hot dog was an Archvillain.)
Well, on PvP servers in WoW griefing does happen a bit, but for the most part you can ignore it. In AoC you DO know there were PvE servers, right? You won’t get ganked on those (in fact, I also found the game nearly unplayable at launch due to your reasons, I quit because my friend didn’t like it and had no one to play with after that).
It happens everywhere, generally if I’m in a group and I had fun and it was a good group and people went out of their way to help me (which happens on occasion) I’ll say “anything you guys want to do?” Sometimes I’ll get a couple hours of fun, once I actually leveled a hunter from 1-15 with 2 others I never met because we all got stuck on the same Echoes Island quest. But I have been berated for leaving right away, usually it’s either because I didn’t feel comfortable (the group was all people that clearly knew each other in real life and were using each other’s real names and i felt kinda weird), or because it was my last quest of the day.
The WoW forums are weird, some forums are TERRIBLE (the “OT” Off-Topic forum was fun in a purely 4chan sort of fashion), and in General every thread is hit-or-miss, in fact lore threads can get vaguely SDMBish in rationality. You really have to sift through it, which can be a chore depending on how muhc information you want, the Guide forums are really, really good. If you want to feel good about yourself though, go wait for some newbie mage get yelled at for using a Strength dagger and then calmly explain to him his class stats, you WILL feel like a better person and have a free “smug and superior” license for the rest of the day.
WAR’s main focus is battleground PvP, it had a lot of great ideas, but various factors made them fall apart. I personally couldn’t get a character very far, it felt like WoW done on a lower budget, but I may renew once they smooth stuff out. One big issue was public quests, they’re quests with multiple stages many people are meant to participate in, but the problem was even one freaking week after release every time I entered a PQ zone I was the only one bothering, the idea was awesome but they underestimated the will of the players to do them. This sticks as a description fora lot of their ideas.
People who randomly invite are universally hated, they don’t get anything but more members (though occasionally in WoW you ARE asked to sign a charter, which you need 9 signatures to start a guild, sometimes people want a small guild just for friends and they get sigs and then tell the other people they’re free to leave if they want). I personally think guilding has gotten a liiiiiitle bit out of hand recently in WoW. Nowadays there are, I kid you not, application processes, these are worse than job hunting. You have to go through interviews show your highest gear, send references, tell your raiding experience, some people even have resumes ready for apps. And a LOT of guilds forbid you form applying to other guilds during the app process. And then, even after accepted, you’re told to be certain places at certain times and meet certain requirements they don’t place on “graduated” guild members as a freaking [del]pledge[/del] trial member before you can even get DKP credited to you for raid gear. I say screw that process, it may mean I’ll never get to see high end raid content (which believe me, I REALLY want to see), but so be it.
I didn’t think DDO was so bad, the main problem was it was a complete grouping game. I would have played it had I had a regular group. If my friend, his brother, and a mutual friend would have been on we still would have been short on some content (I think raids are 10 in that game), it’s not the best game for community, if you didn’t get in the cliques early you were screwed. It was pretty fun and if I got some friends who wanted to play it I totally would start it up again with a regular group (though admittedly it may have gotten a little better since I only played in BETA).
I’m not accusing you of anything, but the bolded words by me are my problem. Sure I can go to a PVE server. Its just that to me PvP means playing against another player, not let me continuously grief people who can’t possibly stop me, with no consequences in the starting area. The “Its a PVP server!” excuse is just tha…an excuse for being a jackass. I said in a thread months ago it is like kicking a puppy. Thats my opinion, and because of it I dumped AoC. Even if the lag issue were fixed I’m not sure I’d want to play a game with so many jackasses in it. I don’t mined being ganked if I even have a sliver of a chance of winning in a starting area. When you have ten levels on me, we all know I’m toast. Gankers use the PVP server excuse way too much. Its saddening to know there are that many pathetic people out there that need to basically be assholes to feel that they have any power.
That kind of atmosphere is not worth my 15 bucks a month. I found it funny that many people in the godawful AoC forums called me all kinds of sissy for that feeling when in RL I do army stuff all day that would make most of them piss their pants. I hope they enjoy the game…I’ve enjoyed some PvP in the game. But for the most part it wasn’t fun. I didn’t particularly like the atmosphere or attitude of most of the players I’d met and the issues with the lag made it not worth the time.
If someone helps me on a quest, I’ll ask if they need my help to do anything in return. I generally don’t ask for help, but I’ll try to repay people that help me out. I used to feel bad about bailing on groups, but then I figured life is too short and its my freakin’ dime. If I want to or have to leave I will. as much as we all talk about stats and missions and ettiquette in the end its still just a game o games. If its not fun for you don’t do it.
Th
I’m not that much of a geek.
Hmmm…I may hold off on Warhammer, then. I’m not a big team-up guy in the first place.
I started a supergroup in CoX with myself as the only memeber. I did it becuse (its not hard in CoX) to keep the invites away. All of the stuff you mentioned…thats BS. I’m not going to work that hard at a game to join a guild. Frak, I can find RL friends if I want to do all of that stuff. My dream guild would be like “Solo if you want, but if you need help or want to team call one of us. If not, just join us on our maybe twice a month raids or gatherings”. Who the hell wants to have a game they’re paying for feel like work?
My problem with DnD stemmed from the controls. I’m bad at keypad controls. There was no mouse control in movement. I’m also more familiar with Forgotten Realms than Eberron. So that was a bit of a turn off. It sounds minor but they never hit the "Man, this is gonna be great!"feeling when you start off in a new game.
Everquest was an amazing game world but a pretty shitty game.
Way back in the day, when an awesome RPG computer experience was AD&D Gold Box games on my Commodore 64, I’d dream about what it’d be like if you could play AD&D on a computer. But real AD&D where it felt as though you were descending into a dungeon or bartering in a town’s market or casting fireballs. When Everquest came out, over a decade later, it was everything I had dreamed of and more. And it was obvious that McQuaid and the other developers had the same dreams way back when. They were determined to make Norrath an immersive world, not just a game.
So you didn’t know exactly how much mana you had because “real” wizards didn’t quantify their magical powers like that. You had to carry food and drink just because that’s what living people need to do. No one would yell “I have a quest!” at you; you had to talk to people and see if you could figure out what they wanted. You found out who sold your spells by checking vendors or asking other people of your class and learning that, on the other side of the world, there was a woman who sold a spell which would make your life a lot better. Except there was no quick travel because Norrath was a world and traveling from one end to the other required boat rides and long treks across hostile terrain. You learned how to fashion armor either by trial & error or by buying introductory books from vendors which gave hints on how to fashion tattered leather gloves from old wolf pelts. Advancement was slow. Healing was slow. Regenerating mana was slow. Many classes required help from other people to advance. It was easy to become over-encumbered. You had no maps unless you hand-drew them. Because it was a real world.
It was everything I thought a RPG world should be and I loved it. But it was shitty game design. Eventually you realized that you were spending significant portions of your gaming time waiting on boats or taking long trips to meet up with friends. Or trying desperately to catch up in levels because your friends had more play time than you and realizing that you could never match them.
WoW fixed a lot of that. The game was significantly easier to progress in. Both because of easier mechanics and because many of the time sinks were removed. It’s a better game but it never felt the same to me.
Modern Everquest is almost nothing like it was back when we were waiting for Kunark to be released. Death is a joke – when you die, you reappear at your bind point with all of your gear and your spells still memorized. You still take xp loss unless you get a resurrection but it’s trivial to get one most of the time and you can even hire mercenary clerics who will resurrect you. Money is weightless. Regeneration time is greatly decreased via Out of Combat regen and gear with +HP/Mana regen being easy to get. Travel is done now via book portals, Guild Hall portals, self Gate abilities, etc. Potions to heal you, increase your mana regeneration, haste your attack speed, etc are cheap and plentiful. Spells which were once rare drops or required long quests are now researchable. “Hot Zones” with additional xp bonuses make levelling much quicker. So on and so forth.
They’ve definately learned from their previous over-reaching to make it a “real world” but I’m sure it’ll always be far too little too late. On the other hand, EQ still has more spells, abilities and neat depth to it than I’ve seen in any other game.
People will sometimes also look for charter sigs for a ‘guild of one’, so to speak. One way of avoiding the random invites and unguilded hate.
As far as the application process goes, it makes sense sadly. I didn’t know it had gotten that bad, but then I’m in a large, friendly raiding guild and it’s been a while since we’ve had to go actively recruit. When you’re working on high end content, sometimes you just need the best you can get to stand a chance, and the guilds that are doing that generally don’t need to look hard for new members. So ya gotta weed out the weak ones somehow. My guild isn’t nearly as bad as you describe, but as I said it’s been a while since we’ve brought in anyone who wasn’t an RL friend.
This is the same principle slot machines work on. Early slot machines just had the one big payout, and the designers quickly discovered that people would put a few coins in and give it a few spins, and give up if they didn’t hit. So they implemented numerous smaller awards to keep the excitement level up. Keep letting people “win” $2-$10 over and over, and they’ll keep putting their nickels in.
This is exactly what I noticed while watching the WoW cinematics yesterday. The graphics in the cinematics are much more polished and realistic, and it just jumped out at me that the movement of the characters looked very stiff and unnatural. But in actual gameplay, the movement doesn’t seem unnatural at all.
All I can say is that I despised EQ, never played EQ2 (my comp is crap), and I LOOOOVE WoW.
EQ was a thankless grind of clunky interfaces and lousy information flow and undoable content if you didn’t care to group. I spent more time farming silkworms on the moon and selling the silk at the bazaar than I did playing the actual game, because at least if I was farming silk and selling it I didn’t have to reconstruct 32 separate conversations from my log in order to figure out how to make myself a set of fist weapons.
WoW, on the other hand, and ironically, is easier to immerse yourself in because your “housekeeping” is pretty much taken care of by the game, so instead of constantly, painstakingly going back over your chat logs with NPCs to figure out what to do next, you can just open your quest log and it’s RIGHT THERE! You can go about your business without playing some medieval version of a paper chase.
What are you looking for DSYoungEsq, absolution? You ask a question, and every time someone responds with an answer, you argue with it: “But EQ2 does that too!” Very well then, “Go forth son, and WoW no more”. There. You are free to enjoy the undoubtedly superior game that is EQ. Your knowledgeable and savvy gamer status is forever enshrined in SDMB lore, you are without peer on the realms.
That’s a mite unfair, I think. Granted, his posts read a little pushy to me, but it seems fair to want to understand why one game is succeeding mightily while another, similar to the first, isn’t, especially if you find you prefer the second more.
