Is WOW fucked long term?

[Lyion]

It isn't up to me to make a shitty game challenging.

If you only advanced as far in EQ as you did in WoW, you should have raised the exact same complaint. EQ was no more challenging than WoW unless you made it so. The major skill EQ demanded of you was an ability to herd cats in order to get a raid to follow orders.

Levelling in WOW is ten times easier than EQ, allowing for everyone and their brother to be 60 in a short time. EQ at least had challenge to levelling and a penalty for death. You go to Guk and get an add and die, you have CR and exp loss. You screw up in WOW, big woop. There is no sense of danger.

To level decently in EQ post the initial fixes, a group was optimal. In WOW levelling was always better solo for me on my Paladin, Warrior, and Mage than in a group. Groups just seemed to slow me down. My cleric was one of the first to 50 and it was a looong time before there were many. In WOW 60s are the norm.

You fucked up in Fear, it cost you levels, time, and frustration. Likewise, Hate initially was very challenging. Nothing in WOW has taken any amount of time or challenge to complete and all the content has been used up. This was not really a problem with EQ.

I had more fun grouping in EQ. I just think it had a better long term vision initially. Blizzard knows games and I'm sure they'll continue to tune and add to WOW. But to me WOW right now is just an EQ clone with a lot less content and mediocre DAOC wannabe PVP.

I figured shortly after the game was released they'd have a cool Hero system and other things implemented. I was wrong and thus I've taken a break from WOW.

[Insanityfair]

It isn't up to me to make a shitty game challenging.

If you only advanced as far in EQ as you did in WoW, you should have raised the exact same complaint. EQ was no more challenging than WoW unless you made it so. The major skill EQ demanded of you was an ability to herd cats in order to get a raid to follow orders.

Levelling in WOW is ten times easier than EQ, allowing for everyone and their brother to be 60 in a short time. EQ at least had challenge to levelling and a penalty for death. You go to Guk and get an add and die, you have CR and exp loss. You screw up in WOW, big woop. There is no sense of danger.

To level decently in EQ post the initial fixes, a group was optimal. In WOW levelling was always better solo for me on my Paladin, Warrior, and Mage than in a group. Groups just seemed to slow me down. My cleric was one of the first to 50 and it was a looong time before there were many. In WOW 60s are the norm.

You fucked up in Fear, it cost you levels, time, and frustration. Likewise, Hate initially was very challenging. Nothing in WOW has taken any amount of time or challenge to complete and all the content has been used up. This was not really a problem with EQ.

I had more fun grouping in EQ. I just think it had a better long term vision initially. Blizzard knows games and I'm sure they'll continue to tune and add to WOW. But to me WOW right now is just an EQ clone with a lot less content and mediocre DAOC wannabe PVP.

I figured shortly after the game was released they'd have a cool Hero system and other things implemented. I was wrong and thus I've taken a break from WOW.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but with the DoN expansion isn't that what guild hall is for? You can buy stones and summon yourself there or something for a rez? The danger isn't there as much anymore I don't think =/

Correcting myself, you have to be in a guild, but still, not that hard.

[Langston]

You're totally overlooking that when EQ first came out, no one knew anything about MMOs or how they worked. Go back and read my post...

[Malluas]

i would say all MMORPGs after the first couple of fights against a group of mobs.. an uber, or whatever.. becomes easy.

Back when Shock first beat Dozekar it was likethat was challenging.. the next time it was like.. did they nerf him?

Same with Vyrem .. damn great fight... next time was "ok next". Same with tormax and everything else.

I would think once you find out how to beat Rag-whatever in Molten Core.. it will be farmed and get super easy.

Its the same with Guild Wars ... Riverside (a mission) was ungodly hard.. now i can solo the groups of 3 easy (got owned first time around).

Practice makes Easy

[xaoshaen]

Levelling in WOW is ten times easier than EQ, allowing for everyone and their brother to be 60 in a short time. EQ at least had challenge to levelling and a penalty for death. You go to Guk and get an add and die, you have CR and exp loss. You screw up in WOW, big woop. There is no sense of danger.

Well it's certaintly faster to level in WoW, but I'm not sure it's easier, simply because I didn't view levelling in EQ as challenging, so much as repetitive.

To level decently in EQ post the initial fixes, a group was optimal. In WOW levelling was always better solo for me on my Paladin, Warrior, and Mage than in a group. Groups just seemed to slow me down. My cleric was one of the first to 50 and it was a looong time before there were many. In WOW 60s are the norm.

Bad groups do slow you down, no question. A good group or partner can be significantly better than soloing, though. Both of these traits remind me of EQ, with the exception of some classes that were crippled in soloability.

You fucked up in Fear, it cost you levels, time, and frustration. Likewise, Hate initially was very challenging. Nothing in WOW has taken any amount of time or challenge to complete and all the conent has been used up. This was not really a problem with EQ.

I don't know about that. Fear was pretty beastly for sure. As a monk, I never had much of a problem with Hate, but I know people who did. Have you tried running five man groups in the high end dungeons Lyion? Did you make it to a Molten Core raid? I've done the prior, but work's kept me away from the game for a while, and I haven't had a chance to do MC yet. Quite frankly, the instanced dungeons in WoW beat the hell out of EQ's dungeons. There's definitely a time and frustration risk in the high end dungeons, though no exp loss save for opportunity cost. In some ways, I think they should have kept the full respawn cycle in place in lower instances. At the very least it would have given the masochists something to do.

I had more fun grouping in EQ. I just think it had a better long term vision initially. Blizzard knows games and I'm sure they'll continue to tune and add to WOW. But to me WOW right now is just an EQ clone with a lot less content and mediocre DAOC wannabe PVP.

I have to disagree on the long term issues. Once you hit 50 in EQ there was nothing to do but camp Vox and Naggy or hit the planes over... and over... and over. What was challenging initially became tedious quickly. I enjoy the WoW PvP system, and am definitely looking forward to battlegrounds. I have to point out that it took DAoC PvP quite a while to become decent. The early system was almost unplayable. WoW is starting off from a stronger foundation (as it should be, given it's chronological advantage), and I hope they'll continue to build on it.

[Lyion]

Except before more than two guilds had killed Vox and Naggy, Kunark came out and added a ton of stuff to explore and kill. EQ had a seamless upward path which enabled the game to be exponentially more fun with its first expansion and it influenced heavy community.

Likewise, DAOC had to rely on many nerfs and PVP fixes to get to where they were going, which was the Realm Rank system and their endgame.

WOW could do the same, but in my mind things hinge on what that first 'kunark-like' release will be for them. The initial release was entertaining but very limited, similar to EQ. The big question for me is what's next?

I've done Molten Core. I had a level 60 Paladin in beta, and a few 40s and one low 50 character in WOW right now. My interest just really isn't in the game. It doesn't 'do' it for me right now.

[Arlos]

Except that only applied to Nameless, Lyion. Original servers, like Veeshan, etc. had about an entire year of original EQ before kunark came around. They were slaughtering Naggy/Vox for a long time before the planes were even introduced, and had those planes in farm status for months and months before Kunark ever showed up. Yes, if you first started playing EQ on Nameless, the first expansion was timed well. That's not a universal condition, however.

How much Molten Core have you done? Cause to me, that's easily as challenging as Fear or Hate were. Do note that I do NOT equate challenging with "chance of losing all your gear and 3 levels worth of XP", but instead how much skill, planning and teamwork it takes to overcome the obstacles of the zone, and kill The Big Stuff. In that, MC easily has Hate especially beat, where the only thing you needed for a good Hate run was a skilled monk and pull team. Fear took a bit more work, because the break-in was rougher, and you had more chaos to deal with til you had cleared out a empty area, that's true. Really, though, neither was as challenging to beat at the time as, say, Veeshan's Peak was in Kunark, which itself paled compared to beating the Avatar of War pre-luclin. (and not just with the giant tanking, us and FOH did it with PC tanking too.) Again, my view of what was "challenging" is, I am sure, skewed by the guild I was in. If my experience with those planes had been with, say, Scions of Veeshan instead of LOS, I might have a different view of their difficulty rating.

When it comes to bosses, though, WOW has EQ beat hands down in terms of planning/coordination/skill required. There are some boss encounters in MC that are set up such that if even 1 person fails to pay attention, it can kill the whole raid. I've had a great deal of fun in MC so far, and we've only progressed to the point of downing Lucifron this last Sunday. (yes, we're nowhere near as hardcore as we were in EQ, we're way behind the major raiding guilds) I'm really looking forward to whatever new raid stuff they put out, based on what I've seen of it so far.

-Arlos

[Tikker]

I want to clear something up here, no one's disputing the difficulty/fun factor of the WoW raid encounters


They're well done

The rest of the game isn't as well done

in EQ, you could get a char to 60, then reroll, and hit a completely different set of dungeons than you did the first time

You can't do that in WoW.
You end up repeating the EXACT same content, over and over again, with each char you re-roll

that's where I lose a lot of interest


In EQ, you had choices where you could lvl up


In WoW, (horde) you know you're going to do ragefire, WC, SFK, RFK, etc etc etc

Was EQ difficult? not particularly, but individual mobs were a lot stronger than individual mobs in WoW
I dunno, it just impressed me more in EQ when I could kill 2 mobs at once.

In WoW, if you die to less than 3, you suck/lagged/etc

[xaoshaen]

Arlos pretty well summed up my point of view on the subject. In fact, a the Nameless' relatively fresh start was one of the reasons I restarted there shortly after it opened. A friend of mine was interested in playing, and I didn't want to introduce him to a server as farmed out as CT was.

I have to add, I'm pretty impressed. I was Horde in the beta, but I had no idea people made it deep into MC in the beta. My group was still in BRS when open Beta started.

[Arlos]

So switch to Alliance, and get a complete different set of lower level dungeons. There weren't THAT many different ones in EQ anyway, not that people used. Unrest, yes, Mistmoore, not so much, the Gnoll one by FP yes, the Goblin one in the middle of the continent, hell no, Najena, hell no, Paw, almost never except the first few initial mobs, Cazic Thule yes, Sol A sort of, Kedge almost never, Upper Guk sometimes, and then at the high end EVERYONE got funneled into Sol B or Lower Guk.

Pre-Kunark, they got so crowded, especially on the older servers, that a L1 could've zoned into LGuk and run untouched to the ghoul lord room, because there wouldn't be a single mob up anywhere. Sol B, that same L1 could run from zonein to just before the Fire Giants, for the exact same reason. How many times would you have people be sitting on their asses on "waiting lists" for specific spawn camps?

-Arlos

[xaoshaen]

I want to clear something up here, no one's disputing the difficulty/fun factor of the WoW raid encounters

They're well done

The rest of the game isn't as well done

in EQ, you could get a char to 60, then reroll, and hit a completely different set of dungeons than you did the first time

No, no you couldn't. In EQ's first incarnation you could level a character to 50, having spent the majority of your time in a total of two damned dungeons. I know you're not going to compare WoW's first content release to EQ and it's expansions, because that would be just silly.

In EQ, you had choices where you could lvl up

Care to name those choices?

In WoW, (horde) you know you're going to do ragefire, WC, SFK, RFK, etc etc etc

As opposed to the Blackburrow, Befallen (for some), Runnyeye, Unrest, Sol A, Sol B, Guk cycle? Permafrost was occasionally visited, but until Kunark came out, people primarily used it for item farming.

Was EQ difficult? not particularly, but individual mobs were a lot stronger than individual mobs in WoW
I dunno, it just impressed me more in EQ when I could kill 2 mobs at once.

In WoW, if you die to less than 3, you suck/lagged/etc

If you just bottom feed, true. If you actually get a decent group and push things a bit, the game changes immensely.

[xaoshaen]

So switch to Alliance, and get a complete different set of lower level dungeons. There weren't THAT many different ones in EQ anyway, not that people used. Unrest, yes, Mistmoore, not so much, the Gnoll one by FP yes, the Goblin one in the middle of the continent, hell no, Najena, hell no, Paw, almost never except the first few initial mobs, Cazic Thule yes, Sol A sort of, Kedge almost never, Upper Guk sometimes, and then at the high end EVERYONE got funneled into Sol B or Lower Guk.

Pre-Kunark, they got so crowded, especially on the older servers, that a L1 could've zoned into LGuk and run untouched to the ghoul lord room, because there wouldn't be a single mob up anywhere. Sol B, that same L1 could run from zonein to just before the Fire Giants, for the exact same reason. How many times would you have people be sitting on their asses on "waiting lists" for specific spawn camps?

-Arlos

Blech, how could I forget about the hell of Cazic-Thule with 30 people crammed into it. And you aren't kidding about being able to run through Lower Guk. Twinks did it all the time for the mask off the Assassin.

[Arlos]

Runnyeye, that's the name of the goblin one. And I did forget Permafrost, but again, no one ever went there unless they had to do a quest, or were on the way to Vox.

Yeah, I remember Cazic Thule at L30 as most of the server funneled into it, and then leaving there at 35th and going to Sol B or LGuk, where the real packs started. I can't even imagine how much worse it would've been on an original release server, which had many many times more high level population pre-kunark than Nameless did. Camps would be like 2 mobs. Instead of 3 rooms in Sol B, you'd have 1 group in each room. Most of your time would be spent waiting on your ass, twiddling your thumbs waiting for something to spawn. Ugh.

-Arlos

[Malluas]

lol thats how Fungus Grove (i think) was eventho it wasn't old world.

Dreadlands ended up getting that bad.. as did Kanors. I remember when karnor camps were like 1 group had like 3 rooms (named areas) then it was 1.. and people would get angry if you says you had more than one room hehe.

I am glad i was still leveling when Kunark came out.. i think i was lvl 29 when Kunark came out. Then i shot up from there quick.. from OT, to Dreadlands, to Karnors, to OS, to that place in the Overthere which i can't remember the name.

[xaoshaen]

Runnyeye, that's the name of the goblin one. And I did forget Permafrost, but again, no one ever went there unless they had to do a quest, or were on the way to Vox.

Heh, I'll never forget Runnyeye. That was where I first met Kyn, when he was working on his Treant Fists. I thought I'd play the hero and help him pull the Ooze in the Runnyeye sewers. Naturally I got rooted underwater and drowned. All rather embarassing.

The first time I walked into Sol B and was informed that King/Priest/Champion were being camped by three different groups, I knew it was time to go find something outdoors to solo. This thread is doing a great job of reminding me of all the things I don't miss about EQ.

[Lyion]

Most people were still levelling when Kunark came out, Mal. Very few were at 50, and most guilds had not reached Vox or Nagy. Nameless came out around Oct 1999. Kunark came out about five months later.

Unfortunately unlike the early high level tight community of The Nameless, there are oodles of 60s in WOW. There are tons of people with multiple 60s even. There is no accomplishment to levelling and right now and the complete lack of community or cohesiveness and overall suckiness of the high end player really leaves me with little desire to play.

Also, early EQ tried to do things like events <Hello, Shinobis> and had a lot more interesting changes ongoing and happening. WOW is static. Period.

In Early EQ I had grouped with pretty much every level 40+ on the server. We explored and adventured and there was danger and challenge.

WOW just isn't the same to me. It's fun and I'm sure it'll appeal to many, and to each their own. Its fast food and packaged for the ADD crowd.

[Langston]

Its fast food and packaged for the ADD crowd.

If you think sitting in a corner killing the same 8 MOBs over and over and over is a challenge, then I pity you. If you think that because someone could sit there and grind those 8 MOBs for hours means they have a better attention span, then I pity you. If you think that because it took months to grind enough iterations of those 8 MOBs to get to level 50 (or 60, 65, 70 whatever) that the game was better for it, then I pity you.

You just don't get it. A game is supposed to be fun... not work. EQ was work - it was hours upon hours of grinding for a level. It was hours and hours of camping for a spawn... only for it to not drop what you needed. It was hours upon endlessly stupid hours of killing green-con spiders (or rats, or whatever) for the 1500 silks you needed to skill up your tradeskills. It was hours upon hours of killing literally thousands of green-con mobs for faction to do a quest. YOU CALL THAT "BETTER"?

I pity you.

[Insanityfair]

Its fast food and packaged for the ADD crowd.

So...what exactly are you trying to say...?

[Langston]

What he's trying to say is since he doesn't like WoW any more, anyone who does obviously has a disfunction.

I.E., he's being a dick.

[Malluas]

Its fast food and packaged for the ADD crowd.

If you think sitting in a corner killing the same 8 MOBs over and over and over is a challenge, then I pity you. If you think that because someone could sit there and grind those 8 MOBs for hours means they have a better attention span, then I pity you. If you think that because it took months to grind enough iterations of those 8 MOBs to get to level 50 (or 60, 65, 70 whatever) that the game was better for it, then I pity you.

You just don't get it. A game is supposed to be fun... not work. EQ was work - it was hours upon hours of grinding for a level. It was hours and hours of camping for a spawn... only for it to not drop what you needed. It was hours upon endlessly stupid hours of killing green-con spiders (or rats, or whatever) for the 1500 silks you needed to skill up your tradeskills. It was hours upon hours of killing literally thousands of green-con mobs for faction to do a quest. YOU CALL THAT "BETTER"?

I pity you.

thats why i am playing Guild Wars now.. leveling it just a plus as you go thru missions and explore. Its fun (to me at least) and the "work" you have to do is pretty limited.

PvP is pretty nice in GWs also.

EQ after i got lvl 60 was fun.. but then the grind and work was over .. until the AAs ICK!

[Malluas]

lol.. if i had the money to pay monthlys i would play WoW to kick it with all the people i knew in EQ. thats why i would play it.. no other reason.

[Insanityfair]

What he's trying to say is since he doesn't like WoW any more, anyone who does obviously has a disfunction.

I.E., he's being a dick.

I have a disfunction.

[Langston]

No you don't... you just don't have Lyion's chip on your shoulder.

[Lyion]

What he's trying to say is since he doesn't like WoW any more, anyone who does obviously has a disfunction.

I.E., he's being a dick.

Where did I say I didn't like WOW? If you bothered to read my posts, you'd see I said it was fun and a better game than EQ. Try to get off the fanbois wagon.

It is made for the battle.net crew and caters to quick fixes and ADD people. If you don't see it you are just bullshitting yourself.

I'm sure you are doing dynamically NEW stuff every time you play WOW.
If you say PVP, then perhaps you should not have missed the DAOC bandwagon in 2001, chief.

One of us has a chip, and it aint me.

[Harrison]

He's defending his online life, don't hurt his feelings too much.