what really made eq fun: grief.

[kudos]

What a horrible article.

[ex-genj]

Everyone has the same exact cookie cutter loot because of the absolutely retarded lack of a cap on the number people allowed to raid level 60 instances and the fact that 3 months after release you can still cheese "5-man quests" by leaving raid groups.

[Goofy]

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||||| sure made EQ fun.

[Wrathcaster]

I can't believe microsoft is actually going so far as to classify and interpret leetspeak. I mean seriously, what the fuck.. Know what your child is saying? Are they expecting parents to sit over their child's shoulder while they are playing WoW and make them log off anytime they mention "pwn" or "l33t" because it may denote that they are engaging in less than sterling online activities, or even talking about it?

I swear, people these days are getting more and more pitiful in their quest to fucking limit and legislate themselves to idiocy. What would the internet be without the l33t dudes to embarass it?

The sad thing is, thousands of people have probably read that article, and you know at least one aging yuppie fucktard is going to absorb the whole thing and give his kid a "time out" and a parental permaban the next time he sees his kid say something that isn't microsoft approved. What complete and utter bullshit.

Personally, when/if I have children, I'll fucking staple their eyelids to their foreheads, strap them to a computer chair, and wage an assault on their minds with a constant montage of the goatse series, tubgirl, asco, the screenshot section, and worst of fucking all, Sam Deathwalker's myriad of retard-approved homepages.

That's what I fucking call parenting. Bitches

[ZamEq]

Lack of competition is what's killing WoW for me on top of content issues and connected to it - the utter lack of any sense of community.

In EQ I played on 2 different servers. One from the day it opened to 2 years in and another the day it opened for about 3 years. Each time, I met more cool people than I could hope to remember. I also met more assholes than I'd have liked to. The point though, I actually interacted with people. You know, the point of online games?

In WoW I think I met maybe 1 new person on the way to 60. Why? How about the fact that grouping up for anything outdoors makes my xp hit the shitter? The fact that the only spots you'd "want" to group is for instances and right up til 50s any loot you get in them can easily be replaced within 5 levels save the very rare item, so why bother riding the Disneyland ride more than once? Or maybe it's because you can hit 60 in 8 days played? Or is it because the average player is named motherfucking "Nukey" or "Leetone." Then on top of this, even raids are instanced? This is an MMORPG right?

Anyway I guess my point was instancing on top of many, many other things in WoW has totally destroyed any sense of community an online game can ever hope to have. In fact the only time I ever remember feeling community in WoW was back before Auction Houses in Beta 2. It was fun sitting around Stormwind and chattin with people and selling off items in the auction channel with duels around the clock. It was like WOW's EC, but they had to get rid of that shit ASAP and put in Auction Houses because it actually made people interact.

The problem with raid instancing is how much the value of loot diminishes too, not just the value of kills. If every player has the best weapon in the game, well that weapon isn't really so special anymore now is it, so who cares? Who cares who got that server first when 100 other guilds are 1 foot behind? It's like trying to muster the energy to be happy you wasted weeks of your life to beat a little kid in a boxing match.

With WoW I feel like everyone on the planet woke up a millionaire. Sure it's cool at first, but pretty soon you realize everyone just owns everything they ever wanted and you're nothing special next to any other person, and don't really have a hell of a lot to strive for anymore. Maybe I played EQ for different reasons, but for me it was People > being first to learn encounters > first kills > loot. To me the satisfaction just isn't there in this game, period, and I don't see how it ever will be.

[PatrickStar]

I feel I just won the lottery if 1 of the 4 members in my instance knows what the fuck they are doing with their character. Hunters who run ahead, pull a mob and then send in their pet that say, "LOLZ, why do the mobs love me??" just fucking KILLS me. Even in EQ it wasn't this bad. I bump into a retard every turn I take.

[Lenardo]

the problem isn't a lack of a community, it is the fact that we have on one hand a community the moved over from OTHER communities (eq daoc etc) and we have a group of players who have never done that...

plus how long did it take for a community to be formed for eq- i started playing eq 6 months post release and the community for eq was still very "new" its like that for wow currently.

the game is 3 months old (post release) - hte community is still in its infancy.

our opinion is Biased BECAUSE we've had over 5 YEARS with the EQ community... we've experienced the infancy childhood, teen years and are now in the adult/middle age... a mature formed community.

wow hasn't reached that stage and won't for a while.

unfortunately blizzard has dropped the ball on a few things, when they get them right, then it'll be good,

but consider this- almost every change eq2 is making, is to make he game more like wow in it's "style" of fun gameplay - not time intensive- more relaxed on what you can and cannot do etc...

Personally i am in wow for the long haul. i've Watched and experienced the game from the F&F alpha thru release and i haven't come close to experiencing everything that hte game offers...

[Ham n Cheese]

Originally posted by findar
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu.../griefers.mspx


sure you may want to deny it, but nothing was more enjoyable then knowing that there was someone else you could fuck with/go head to head against.

Wrong. For me it came down to a few things.

The community was obviously one of them, I really thought I hated EQ and it's "n00bs", but WoW makes these people look like Top Tier Guild leaders in comparison. I've met the dumbest gamers in my life while on WoW. Not to rag on everyone though. There are still quality players in WoW, you just never get to meet them because grouping is so discouraged in this game. Unless you're going to an instance (which most people only do for quest rewards it seems) you don't really interact with anyone but your guild and people you knew before playing WoW. There's no reason to.

Item Variety. In WoW I'm wearing basically the same armor, with basically the same stats I was at level 20. "Of the monkey" "of the whale" etc etc, from 15 to 60 there's a very good chance you'll wear something with almost the same name as that first set of stat armor you put on. Not only that, unless you go to an instance and hope the bosses drop something different, you'll be hoping that every 1 in 5000 mobs you kill will drop something different... even it's someting simple like the same stats with an increase in +2 str! I feel in WoW there's basically only one suit of armor you should be wearing for your class most of the time. I need AGI because I'm a rogue and grouping isn't encouraged so I also pick up STA for soloing. So I feel like I've been wearing "blah blah... of the monkey" this entire game, and my only options (outside of insanely rare drops that don't really add to it or instances) are to sub one of those stats (sta or ag) with Spirit, INT, STR, etc. Almost every item in WoW up to 50 right now is just a rehash of the others, or old ones.

Challenge. Like I mentioned in the other thread, the only thing that's made me stop and think for half a minute was the Uldaman ending event. Besides that if I need to finish a quest and it's an elite mob +3> levels above me at the end of it all, I buy a heal potion or just use evasion. Hell you can even solo quests with good rewards that require you to enter an instance your level (mark of the chosen). And that's not just limited to rogues, anyone go engineering and make a cloaking device, you don't need it long. I know a lot of you are thinking I haven't seen any of the high end yet because I'm not 60. But, in EQ you didn't have to wait until 60 to be challenged, or to feel like you actually accomplished something. I could be on a Vox/Nagafen raid now in EQ or in a Plane (yes planes weren't added until later, but that was 7 or so years ago, no excuse for Blizzard to be at the same problem as Verant/SOE at that time). Even breaking the ghoul lord room initially felt like you could easily die any second. Let's not forget you can get 60 in 2-3 weeks if you wanted (not PLed~).

It's just a shame that EQ is nothing like it used to be and EQII would take 10x as long playing to discover if these qualities exist in it. Those 3 were big things I liked about EQ, I was never into griefing.

I've babbled on long enough and probably repeated myself and made 100 typos by now...

[bosch]

"Thank you drive through the instance" (If you are lucky enough to not have the Blizzard-made cockblock of the raid bug not effect your guild)

HAHAHAHAHA. Funniest thing I've read here in awhile....well, since yesterday when FuckYou posted the patch timer.

[Salizar]

Originally posted by Ham n Cheese
It's just a shame that EQ is nothing like it used to be and EQII would take 10x as long playing to discover if these qualities exist in it. Those 3 were big things I liked about EQ, I was never into griefing.

Don't be fooled... EQ2 leveling can be just as fast as WOW...
I'm a semi casual player... 3-4 hours a night plus what ever I can squeeze in on the weekends(late nights)...
I played EQ2 for the first month and was able to get my Mage to 43 before throwing in the towle (too many bugs, which have no been fixed)...

While Playing EQ2 I meet toons more people that I have ever meet playing WOW. I had a large group of people on my friends list, that I hadn't known prior to EQ2, that knewn their game and were extreemly coherent players...
In the same time playing WOW, I've been ninja invited to well over 30 guilds, all of which have been turned down. Guilds in EQ2, just as in EQ, you actually OMG have to know someone or at least prove your self before you were invited... wow...
I can only say I have 2 people on my friends list that I enjoy grouping with...

You can defenitly tell the 'noise' level between the two games.

[Zehn - Vhex]

The think the vast majority of players would tend to disagree though. I mean, let's be honest, if people enjoyed griefing so much why did half the servers have calendar systems for Vox/Nag/PoF/PoH?

I stated it in another thread, a game spawning a real version of a dungeon for guilds to compete in, and then until it respawns having an instanced version for those who don't want to deal with competition would be optimal.

The thing that frustrates me most about alot of the MMO community these days is that people can't seem to grasp the concept that not everyone thinks like they do. If you're not spot on with eachother, aparently you're both stupid faggots.

[Suineg]

Originally posted by Zehn_Druidbane
I stated it in another thread, a game spawning a real version of a dungeon for guilds to compete in, and then until it respawns having an instanced version for those who don't want to deal with competition would be optimal.

Wouldn't work. Everyone would just say they want the competition but do the instance.

The way to make that work though is to make instancing for raid targets BUT when a guild kills lets say Ragnaros. Then Ragnaros is dead in all instances for 5 days.

So there you are fighting in your instance trying to kill as fast as you can because you know that guild B is over in an instance also doing the same thing. All of a sudden you have a zone emote saying fuck off cause Ragnaros has been killed you slackers. Better luck next time.

There you have it no griefing and no lag from guilds waiting for you to die so they can run in. You still have competition though. You could make it include mini-bosses as well. Server comes up and MC is fully popped. First guild to kill a boss despawns the other instances entirely. They then have a certain time period in order to clear the zone or the other instances will reset.

Really a lot of options just noone thinks outside the box.

[robbrown]

Griefing aspect of EQ sucked, pure and simple. The fact that a guild could literaly hold the rest of the server back was rediculous. I did enjoy the competition aspect of it, but that race always turned personal and guilds always did shit out of spite. It was not healthy, it was player driven cockblocking.
A good mix of FFA mobs as well as instance content would be nice, but all of one or the other isn't good.

[Scaffa]

The think the vast majority of players would tend to disagree though. I mean, let's be honest, if people enjoyed griefing so much why did half the servers have calendar systems for Vox/Nag/PoF/PoH?

Most of those servers also had contingents who went directly against those reservation systems, Bristlebane definetly did. I was blacklisted for a while for signing up to an FCFS raid, so was Shaof and a bunch of others. The people who scheduled these (Rordin and Tanana) were/are complete power hungry fucks.

That might not be intentionally to grief though, scheduling one week NPC's was stupid. If you didn't adhere to them you never got a chance, where as by all rights you could just go kill the dragon when it was up.

[Zehn - Vhex]

I'm mostly thinking about the Kael situation. Basically there are/were 5-10 mid-sized "casual" guilds that were up to that point, but couldn't really progress because they couldn't gather and field the 30-50 people they need in the same time 3 friends 4-boxing can drop said mobs.

Some people enjoy competition and the 'challenge' that comes with racing to mobs. Other people just want to game and have a good time.

Let's think of it this way...let's look at WoW and now let's pretend the General in UBRS is on a 1 week spawn timer and only drops 3 keys per kill. Does that make UBRS suddenly more fun? Only 1 group of people gets to enjoy the content once per week.

If however once per week, a 'real' version spawned in which the chance for the boss mobs to drop their better/rare loot tables is increased, or the mobs are given an extra loot slot, etc...etc...you would see competition.

The power gamers who want an 'edge' on the competition get it, while the casual gamers who just want to game with friends and not worry about a bunch of 2-boxers timing the spawn get what they want as well.

It's a win-win situation for everyone involved.