Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Not everything about the "good" old days was "goo

    • 159 posts
    April 22, 2020 10:16 PM PDT

    I had a bit of a tug of war in my own mind trying to come up with the best topic title for this post. I seen a video the other day from Bazgrim that you can see here > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJg04axYzic < < <.  He made some good points. To me anyways he made some good points. You'll have to judge it for yourself.

    I like to talk first about the term old school and how it relates to Pantheon..  Now I need to talk about the saying " the good old days" because I think that saying goes hand in hand with the term" old school.  When I was a child my grandparents use to tell me that " not every thing about the good old days was good". Not have air conditioning, indoor plumping, and electricity was a good thing. So with that said. When people like myself use the term " old school" we do not mean we want all the bad things that have since been greatly improved upon from the past. When I say old school. I'm personally talking about having a slower pace and bringing back teamwork and the need to talk to each other. In turn making friends.

    Now when it comes to Pantheon I do NOT want it to be 100% like EQ was. I think there's a misunderstanding if you believe that when the older people like myself that use the term old school mean that. Let me elaborate if I may.

     

    I hate the way EQ did corpse runs ( CR's) I do not want to die and respawn outside of a dungeon and have to fight my way back into that dungeon and how every deep into the dungeon my group was NAKED just to recover my gear. Dying repeatedly many more times in the process of trying to get our gear because we are NAKED and the truth is. In MMO's gear does matter. That does NOT build friendship. It personally makes me want to rage quit. So keeping true to the title. When I say old school a.k.a good old days I do NOT want to relive CR's that I used here in my example to try to make my point.

    I want the game to thrive and pull in the older people like myself along with the younger generation. I'm vary aware of the fact that life doesn't stop and things change. Some for the better and other for the worse. However I'm old school and I'm NEVER going to stop using that term. Heck I wrote this in a larger font because I'm old and the larger font helps my eyes. ( Old school )

    Now I have to say that when "some" people use the term old school they do literally want Pantheon to be tick for tack like EQ was. However this is when you need to have the ability to discern for yourself. If you are able to discern for yourself you'll have no problem being able to sort out the two different group of people that use the term old school.

    I want Pantheon to be fun. I want Pantheon to be Pantheon. I don't want it to be any other game. I trust the VR team to deliver a fun game.

     

      Meanwhile I say stay safe and make the best of the times that we are going through now. I love my people and we will get through these trying times together.  

    • 67 posts
    April 23, 2020 12:26 AM PDT

    I agree! Especially Corpseruns are a thing, where i remember really good and really bad situations.

    On the one hand, i remember that there were friendly guys helping me out to get my corpse out of a dungeon, or I could help somebody who was really thankful and a reallyl cool guy.

    On the other hand I remember dying on my way to the corpse multiple times, wasting 2 or more hours, almost forgetting where all of the corpsees where (ok, this did not happen too many times), looking for a cleric because not finding one would mean hours of wasted time exping. 

    So there are two sides. Thinking of corpseruns in the "good old times" i first remember the good times, and then the bad ones. However, there are more bad memories ... 

    Dont get me wrong: Dead should be meaningful! It jsut should end in pure frustration.

    • 273 posts
    April 23, 2020 5:53 AM PDT

    I don't think that's an uncommon sentiment, it's what the devs have been saying since the beginning, that the goal of Pantheon is to return to old school in terms of social gameplay, not a carbon copy of EverQuest. There are definitely people here that do want it to be a 1:1 facsimile of EQ, because for whatever reason they've determined that EverQuest is the only MMO to be a truly social one, and if that's what VR did, the game would flop harder than any other modern MMO.

    There are plenty of other old school MMOs that captured social gameplay in different aspects just as well. World of WarCraft with the dungeon crawl and raiding, Star Wars: Galaxies with crafting/player economy, Asheron's Call with world puzzles and exploration, Ultima Online and PvP. Each one of those games was different in their own right, but still supported old school social gameplay the same as EQ did. I would much rather see VR build on the aspects that those games did right and combine them into Pantheon, while still preserving the group play that EQ did so well, than a straight port of EQ.

    • 3852 posts
    April 23, 2020 7:39 AM PDT

    I heartily agree with the general concept. Many things in the old days were very poorly done. Not because the developers were stupider than we are now. But because we have had over 20 years since 1999 to see what works and what does not work and learn from the experience. Because we have had 20 years to improve our technology and engineering so that we can do with trivial ease things that weren't even dreamed of then. 

    What was that famous airplane - The Spirit of Seventy-six? 

    Pantheon should not be a remake of Everquest or Vanguard even if that was possible. It should and hopefully will be the Spirit of Ninety-nine.

     

    • 2756 posts
    April 23, 2020 8:59 AM PDT

    Yup, agreed. Whilst I want an 'old school' game from Pantheon, I recognise a lot of what EQ was was awful.

    It's a very tricky line to walk, though, between improving on 'old school' and adding in conveniences and other features that are to the detriment of the 'good' side of old school.

    Also, what was good or bad is somewhat subjective and there have been many arguments in the forums because what one person found a fundamental old school aspect that they consider essential another will consider an awful feature that desperately needs to be improved/updated/fixed.

    With your example of naked corpse runs, some will defend that to their last breath. Personally, I feel that corpse runs needs to be 'hard' (as does everything - I think a high level of challenge is fundamental to 'old school'), but can some or all gear be kept and some other aspect be added in order to keep death something we greatly fear?

    Add in some other aspects and mechanics: -

    Auction Houses
    Fast Travel
    Instancing
    Powerleveling
    Twinking
    Soloing
    Global Cooldowns
    Down-ranking
    Appearance Slots
    Cosmetics
    Cash Shops
    PvP
    Maps
    Limited Action Slots
    Reactive Combat

    and a dozen others and you will get 1,000 pro and con arguments between fans all claiming they want 'old school' back.

    Personally, I think as long as the devs keep in mind that we want Pantheon to be challenging and to encourage (and even require) community and to maintain an immersive experience, then we can't go too far wrong. I believe they *do* have a decent overall vision in mind when developing Pantheon. It's the reason I decided to back it, not because I was expecting Everquest Redux.

    • 888 posts
    April 23, 2020 9:22 AM PDT
    I think most people, myself included, agree with the idea that we want the feel of those old MMOs, but that we also recognize that they had weakness is well and that we aren't insisting all the annoyances be deliberately programmed in too.

    On specific issues like corpse runs, there are many ways to make death matter without resorting to a game mechanic that induces rage in players. For instance, if you don't / can't recover your corpse, have all the items return to town after 18 hours, where they were "dropped off" by an adventurer (this is the lore explanation) and you can get it back after paying a fee. This means you still need to do a corpse run it you want to keep adventuring that day, but if you can't, when you log on the next day, you can actually play the game.

    Anyone who insists on a full recreation better be playing on dial-up at 800x600 with the graphics set to the absolute worst settings, otherwise they're being hypocritical.
    • 1785 posts
    April 23, 2020 9:26 AM PDT

    Vander said:

    When I say old school. I'm personally talking about having a slower pace and bringing back teamwork and the need to talk to each other. In turn making friends.

     

    I think the best thing we can all do on these forums when we talk about what we like or don't like is to be specific.  When we start trying to use shorthand or labels like "old school" or "hardcore" we run into problems because those words mean different things to different people.  You've provided a good example of this.  This is even true when we talk about mechanics.  Consider the "auction house".  Different games have implemented that in very different ways?  Which one do we mean?

    Disposalist is right that people are going to argue the pros and cons of anything that gets posted because we all have different perspectives on those things.  Even if we all agree at a high level that we want a group-focused game, it's not a simple equation.  For some people, group focus means that they can do things out in the world solo but when they go to a dungeon they need a group.  For others, it means that they should need a group at all times.  This is just another example.

    • 1315 posts
    April 23, 2020 9:30 AM PDT

    @Counterfleche

    Hmm that could be pretty great if a local NPC would create a “corpse recovery” quest after a body could no longer be resurrected for exp.  Players could pick up the quest then if they can find the corpse basically drag it back to the NPC for a reward, if no one finishes the quest in x hours it is considered to have been completed by an NPC adventurer.  Once their body was dropped off the dead players could ransom their gear back from the NPC.

     

    • 945 posts
    April 23, 2020 10:35 AM PDT

    Agreed - I would still be playing EQ if not for some of the more antequated mechanics like CRs and the ability for a single player to grief an entire guild for hours in some situations and completely pointless time sinks.  I didn't mind it so much when I was able to play for 6-8 hours at a time, but once my time became valuable (instead of spending money to stare at a nearly motionless screen waiting 40mins for a boat), and sleep became more of a necessity to function optimally in a life with responsibilities, my priorities changed dramatically.

    • 1273 posts
    April 23, 2020 10:36 AM PDT

    Such a fine balance.  I don't know the answer but I sure hope we get it right.  There, that's my awesome contribution :)  lol

     

    Edit:  Ok, I will add that some of my best memories of EQ were corpse runs.  Some of them are great stories...and really, isn't that why we play these games?  To create stories and memories?  So, I'm adding that I really don't mind naked corpse runs.  If they come up with a different solution I'm ok with that too!


    This post was edited by Ranarius at April 23, 2020 10:37 AM PDT
    • 2756 posts
    April 23, 2020 11:08 AM PDT

    Ranarius said:

    Such a fine balance.  I don't know the answer but I sure hope we get it right.  There, that's my awesome contribution :)  lol

    Edit:  Ok, I will add that some of my best memories of EQ were corpse runs.  Some of them are great stories...and really, isn't that why we play these games?  To create stories and memories?  So, I'm adding that I really don't mind naked corpse runs.  If they come up with a different solution I'm ok with that too!

    Whilst I don't want to start an argument about CRs, it is a great example of one of the 'good old days' mechanics and the arguments that surround them.

    Your comment brought to mind another aspect of the 'old school'-or-nothing attitude that sometimes appears: That there can be no middle ground. That if you aren't for it, you are against it.

    Some people don't want corpse runs at all.

    Some people love naked corpse runs, or at least feel they are essential to the fear of death penalty.

    But, some people love corpse runs, but just wish they weren't naked...

    What these forums should be (and sometimes are) great at are discussing the detail of the opinions and options and trying to come up with a hybrid (or even different) solution that might keep everyone happy. It so often ends up with some arguing "we must have naked corpse runs!" and others "we must have no corpse runs!" with everyone in between getting accused of 'pandering' or 'diluting' or 'being too hardcore' or 'elitist'. It's exasperating.

    • 133 posts
    April 23, 2020 12:32 PM PDT

    I would have to agree. The idea of a corpse run and losing hours of experience in a matter of seconds is nothing more than just angering and infuriating. Considering just how long it took to get levels in EQ, the fact that you could spend a month getting half a level, only to have it taken from you in a single swipe of a boss claw, then spending hours doing a corpse run is not punishing anymore, it's just down right stupid and tedious. once you died, you pretty much were guaranteed to not be redoing whatever encounter you were doing with your group that night, because of corpse runs and the loss of EXP. Though, I do agree that death does have to have a meaning, but what EQ did was just going overboard. You had already lost the encounter, why punish a person so heavily even after that. Losing the encounter is more than enough motivation to get back up and try again and go over the strategy and see what happened. losing it, on top of possibly losing a level or two, and then making you run back to get your corpse with nothing on you, that's like kneeling down at the side of someone hit by a car, and slapping them in the face because you felt that they needed to be reminded that somehow this was their fault. Death needs to mean something, I get that, but something a little less discouraging of playing the game at all, and a little more encouraging to try the encounter again.

    When I think of old school or a harken back to it, I think of the social aspects is brought, but I also think of how much time I have and hearing the stories I have of EQ...if we were using that as the only reference, I would be fully against the whole grouping thing. Grouping took hours depending on who was on and what time it was, you needed a group to get anywhere in the game; and even when I played P99 with my husband and my mother in law, even the three of us wasn't enough to play the game. It was tedious and boring, and it didn't feel social to me, it felt forced. I'm not saying that everything should be soloable, right up to the bosses in dungeons and raids, but what I would like to see is a strong urge to have a group, but if you only have an hour, you can solo and get something done, anything done really. There needs to be a balance to this and while I love the idea of going on adventures and exploring the world with groups and friends, if I don't have the time to wait for them between when I get home from work and when I have to go to bed for school the next day, I want to be able to feel like I did something in the game and not just sit there wasting what little precious time I have. I don't want to be able to solo a dungeon, that's just dumb, but I want to be able to complete a quest or two before I have to go to bed. The huge reliance on grouping in EQ also forced people to multibox and have whole other accounts to just fill voids they had no time to wait to fill. It was a workaround to soloing and it was hugely present from what I can gather from stories from my husband, and even other friends that played outside of him. It seems that it was a constant problem and that the only way on could solo to any degree was to have a second computer fill the void for the cleric or whatever in order to get anything done.

    Another thing when I think back to old school is the pacing and encounters being separate adventures. I played D&D, I know that a slower pace and taking one's time was almost essential in playing the game. You have to take the time to really think things through and even work out a puzzle and riddles.(which I was always asked to do because it's one of the talents I was gifted at birth...why it couldn't be math is beyond me but, here we are LOL!) It took time, which I am alright with. Now with EQ reading things and hearing stories, it took WAY too long for ANYTHING to get done. It could take months to gain even a quarter of a level, it took and hour or so for a single boat to reach a dock, it then took another half hour 40 minutes to travel said boat, which right there was a waste of possibly 2 to 3 hours. It took people way too long to get from one place to another. It was tedious is all that was. I do like pacing; I do want the game to be a little slower than what WoW and that have turned into now. I don't want to be able to bang through 15 quests in an hour, but I don't want to spend hours doing only 2. I don't want to gain 3 levels in an hour, but I don't want to spend months gaining only 1/4th of a level either. I do advocate for mounts in this respect as well simply for the fact that time is an issue for a lot of people these days.

    As for the encounters, I love the idea of an open world, and D&D offered me that. You could interact with the world around you and use it as you saw fit, you could also use it when it came to battle too, if you knew how to. Though what I also liked about D&D is that you didn't have to deal with someone else coming in and possibly ruining that adventure for you. EQ had open world and you could have someone that wasn't from your group come in, kill your boss fight, and take everything you had work hour for from you. I hate that, I detest that. when I was playing and listening to friends and family's stories, I had made the suggestion then, why didn't they just do what they did with zones and cities, instance them? My husband just shrugged his shoulders and said "They should have, probably would have made things a little better for people" When WoW instanced dungeons and encounters like that, it was great, no one could come in and ruin all the work you had put in to getting the group together, meeting at the summoning stone if one couldn’t get there for whatever reason, figuring out what needed to be done and how to do it all, fighting all the way to the boss, and taking the victory away from you. I love the idea of having the world open around you and being able to see people playing along side you in different groups, but I also don’t want to have it so that one person can ruin and entire times worth of planning and fighting to steal your boss.

    Now, I do like what EQ did in the fact that guards helped and patrolled their roads and that, and that you could anger them to the point they would kill you. I do think that if they smacked you once and moved on would have been better, as a guard wouldn’t just outright kill one of their civilians for simply upsetting them. I do like the fact that they became leery of new people and people that were of a negative faction group. Though with faction, it seems to be something that is rather hard to do so that it flows well. There are a lot of inconsistencies with it that make it feel out of place. Players can play with anyone else of any other race, but everyone else in their race hates one another. It makes it hard to go into a city you need to get into, but you can always work on faction, right? Well I guess, but if you work on Faction A to get something from the city you need, it drops your faction with Faction B which you kind of need as well. I guess a rouge could fix that in that maybe they have the ability to keep faction or lose a lot less of it when working on other factions. It would give a very good reason to have a rogue in the group, being the only person able to get into any city anywhere. Now whether or not they are known for nefarious reasons in those cities is up to the Devs I guess lol. Sorry, I’m rambling; but my point is, when I do think of old school I tend to think of things like faction and how it hasn’t really been done in any other game outside of EQ. Granted it was basic and it can greatly be improved on, but it was something that drew attention.

    There are a ton of other things I could list here…but I feel that this is long enough and I feel that if I add anymore I will get some sort of reprimand for it being this long. But there are a ton of things that a lot of other games did that did them WAY better than EQ, but there were some things that EQ had the right idea on and just didn’t have the tech to flesh them out to their full potential.

    • 1479 posts
    April 23, 2020 1:28 PM PDT

    Corpse run is the easiest argument of all, people that hate it will allways rally against it, and people that love it (or it's consequences) will rally for it. That's endless and unfortunately not a point in any matter due to how it's split perceived by people.

     

    I like what it brought in the game, because dying was unforgivable, now I am not against another methode to render the same effect. But TBH an exp debt is completely forgettable and forgivable and would leads to nothing but "bah, dead again" feeling.

     

    I don't want dungeon progression to be "saved" or even "safe" when a group wipes. I don't want us/them to respawn at entrance fully geared with only buffs to be brought back, or free of any inconvenience. Time is not an issue (corpse decay was **** to me as an example), because that's what playing and planning carefull is for : Saving time and trouble. If your play session is short then be more careful than ever and don't engage in long run activities with potential drawback.

     

    I simply don't see much of an elegant way to reproduce the same behaviour without putting corpse run back in place.

    • 2130 posts
    April 23, 2020 2:36 PM PDT

    OCastitatisLilium said:

    the fact that you could spend a month getting half a level

    Is this novel of a post just a meme?

    • 133 posts
    April 23, 2020 2:44 PM PDT

    Liav said:

    OCastitatisLilium said:

    the fact that you could spend a month getting half a level

    Is this novel of a post just a meme?

    Umm, I'm a little confused. Can you clarify it for me please? I'm not understanding what you mean.

    • 633 posts
    April 23, 2020 2:47 PM PDT

    OCastitatisLilium, I'm assuming you're exagerating to make a point.  It took me playing an average of about 5 hours a day back in 1999 about 6 months to get to level 47 before I switched characters.  Generally I found that a death mostly knocked off about an hour's worth of XP.  I never truely found corpse runs that bad either.  There were some raids that would end up costing you hours of time if you wiped at a bad spot (especially Plane of Fear), but in general everywhere you went there were at least a couple of other groups around and I never had any problems getting back to the corpse, possibly losing an extra half hour to do it.

    I'm not advocating for or against corpse runs, just stating that I feel some points made here are very exagerated.

    • 2752 posts
    April 23, 2020 2:57 PM PDT

    kelenin said:

    It took me playing an average of about 5 hours a day back in 1999 about 6 months to get to level 47 before I switched characters. 

    I'd say it is important to keep in mind the era there too, in games/gaming mindset and the internet/information. Leveling in EQ would be trivial and take far less time if it were released for the first time today. 


    This post was edited by Iksar at April 23, 2020 2:58 PM PDT
    • 133 posts
    April 23, 2020 3:07 PM PDT

    kelenin said:

    OCastitatisLilium, I'm assuming you're exagerating to make a point.  It took me playing an average of about 5 hours a day back in 1999 about 6 months to get to level 47 before I switched characters.  Generally I found that a death mostly knocked off about an hour's worth of XP.  I never truely found corpse runs that bad either.  There were some raids that would end up costing you hours of time if you wiped at a bad spot (especially Plane of Fear), but in general everywhere you went there were at least a couple of other groups around and I never had any problems getting back to the corpse, possibly losing an extra half hour to do it.

    I'm not advocating for or against corpse runs, just stating that I feel some points made here are very exagerated.

    I was going based on what numbers I could find and from stories people had told me when they played when the game first came out. On average I found that it took almost a year to get from level 1-20 at the beginning, that was with people that had jobs, lives, school, and other such things. I know my math isn't great, but that's about roughly what I had figured it out to be. Some of it, yes, exaggerated, but sadly from what I'm reading, not all of it. most claim to be playing at 6-12 hours a day when they could, and even then that took them 6-8 months to get to somewhere around max level, before the first expansion came out; but they seem to be the people that didn't do anything else for days. I was exaggerating some, but I was also going based on some numbers. Granted, those numbers are hard to find and there were a few sources that didn't seem too accurate that I omitted, but I did do some research for it and it doesn't seem too far off, especially at higher levels for the average person.

    • 2130 posts
    April 23, 2020 3:09 PM PDT

    OCastitatisLilium said:

    I was going based on what numbers I could find and from stories people had told me when they played when the game first came out. On average I found that it took almost a year to get from level 1-20 at the beginning

    Who the **** is telling you these stories?

    • 133 posts
    April 23, 2020 3:18 PM PDT

    Liav said:

    OCastitatisLilium said:

    I was going based on what numbers I could find and from stories people had told me when they played when the game first came out. On average I found that it took almost a year to get from level 1-20 at the beginning

    Who the **** is telling you these stories?

    Friends, family, again things I could read and get my hands on. I never played original EQ, I played P99 and the EQ as it is today, I have been told that's a little different so my sense of leveling would be slighlty skewed. Some people it took 8 months to get to 20, some it took a little over a year. I have read where people did sink hours upon hours a day into it, 6-12 hours and they seemed to get to max in 6-8 months, but they seem to be the ones that did nothing else. People that had full time jobs, school, kids to take care of, households to take care of, they seem to be the ones that it took on average a year. Again, there isn't much out there that you can read, so sadly this is all I have to go on. Stories, recountings, memories. I do wish that someone would have documented something down as they played and had it be accurate, but unfortunately this is all I have to go on.

     

    Edit: The more I think on it, if I could do a poll on here for the people that played EQ when it first came out, how long it took to max with how many hours a day they spent, I could only assume it would be the most accurate numbers to go by for averages. Sorry, didn't mean to edit this in this late lol. Though I guess we could do where they left off and at what level...I don't think polls are permitted here though, or threads asking for this info.


    This post was edited by OCastitatisLilium at April 23, 2020 3:28 PM PDT
    • 1785 posts
    April 23, 2020 3:27 PM PDT

    I leveled slower than most in EQ and had what I consider a "moderate" play schedule - usually 3 hours or so on weeknights and longer on weekends.  1-20 took a couple of months.  1-50 took a year, maybe a little longer.

    The key to success in Everquest was in being willing to group up with strangers.  Something that more recent and more "accessible" games have really trained us not to do, I'm afraid.  The worst part about that is that when you've been avoiding randoms for years because they were more or less guaranteed to be terrible people or children (or both) it's really hard to break the habit even when you try.

    As for corpse runs - they were not as bad as they are sometimes made out to be.  Like anything else, you learned how to deal with it as part of the game.  Sure, everyone had a bad one every now and again but at least back in the 1999-2004 timeframe, server communities were generally very helpful for corpse runs.  Individual players, groups, and guilds would pitch in to help someone recover their corpse if it was in a really bad place - all that person generally had to do was ask for help.

    I'm not necessarily on one side or the other in the debate about most game features.  I want VR to make the choices that are right for Pantheon, and that preserve the tenets they're trying to build for.  I have opinions like anyone else but I'm far more concerned about the end experience than I am about the nuts and bolts that make it up (mostly).  But I do think that it's counterproductive for us to dismiss things out of hand, or paint pictures that are either far bleaker or far rosier than they really were.  Every game ever released has done some things right and some things that could have been better.  Pantheon should do its best to learn from all the games that came before it, avoid some of the pitfalls, and find unique and improved ways to fit the Vision.

    • 633 posts
    April 23, 2020 3:31 PM PDT

    I can confidently say that on my server, there were level 50s by the time I had been playing for a month, and the game had come out 3 weeks before I started playing, so it took powergamers less than 2 months to get max level.  By the time I was high enough to go to Lower Guk (around level 38, no idea how long it took me to get to that level), Guk and Sol B were so overcrowded during prime-time you had to ask groups to put you on a list so that as people left you could get into a group.

    Perhaps these people you were talking to or read about were one of the many people who had a habit of playing characters up to mid-levels (20-30 range) and then starting new characters over and over again because they enjoyed the lower level content more than the higher level content.  I had a lot of friends who did that.

    You also have to consider a large number of people didn't think of raiding as the "meta", so getting to max level was not important.  People would spend time doing naked halfling runs from Rivervale to Freeport, go to in-game weddings, participate in drunken run contests in Kelethin, just explore because the world was fantastic, doing quests or spending time helping friends out with quests and other frivolous but very enjoyable things.  People didn't log in, do upkeep (bank, merchant) and then find a group somewhere and start knocking out XP until it was time to log out.  People enjoyed the social aspect of the game significantly more than people do today.  This is actually part of the reason it took me so long to level up, because I did spend a lot of time participating in non-leveling activities.

    That being said, when Kunark came out and the max level went to 60, each level was a huge grind.  It took far longer to gain a single level than it did before.  I'm pretty sure that it took me about 3 months to get max level as a casual gamer.  I didn't go hard-core into raids and such until I was in the mid 50s.

    • 2756 posts
    April 23, 2020 3:41 PM PDT

    @Nephele has the key. A 'social' game is not one you just play with your friends, it's one where you play with strangers and *become* friends. Or not. I had so much fun in pick-up groups (PUGs) back in the day. I often did it in preference to guild activities, because it added social (and tactical) unpredictability and fun. Most times it was great. Sometimes it was frustrating. Always it was at least interesting and most times fun, even on the rare occasions it went bad.

    There's a lot about EQ that wasn't great, but being *forced* to group up for most content was one of the aspects that may well have seemed difficult, sometimes, but was one that played a great part in making the game what it was.

    One of my biggest gripes as MMORPGs 'modernised' over the years was they made it less and less challenging so you didn't need to group up and, guess what, eventually, even if you could, people didn't bother.

    Some games that started off needing groups, or at least a couple of friends (LOTRO) intentionally made changes so most of the content could be soloed, never mind not needing friends. Ruined it.

    Making MMORPGs soloable or easy or both have opened them to a bigger audience. And ruined them. If you don't like to play with strangers *shrug* there are a ton of soloable MMORPGs out there for you, you lucky thing! Also a ton of great single-player RPGs.

    It is no coincidence that VR are *intentionally* targeting a niche audience and hold Challenge and Community as paramount in the vision.

    • 1479 posts
    April 23, 2020 4:23 PM PDT

    Liav said:

    OCastitatisLilium said:

    I was going based on what numbers I could find and from stories people had told me when they played when the game first came out. On average I found that it took almost a year to get from level 1-20 at the beginning

    Who the **** is telling you these stories?

     

    It actually took me a year to reach lvl 20 (and a surname) with a character. But the reasons were easy to understand :

    1) I was young and my playtime was random and rarely more the a couple hour

    2) I changed character 4 or 5 time before settling on one

    3) I died a lot during exploration / reckless curiosity

    4) This type of game was really new to me. Usual games were if you loose you reload a save and try again, but here the negative consequences were costly, I didn't get much of the game before a few years after that.

     

    I still played it, resubbed after pauses and was eager to discover new areas and gear I could use and exploit. It's fond memories because I achieved goals I liked, wanted, and I didn't care about max level race / best items ever. I just played and it was challenging enough back then for me to like it.

     

    The toons I did at later date levelled close to max within  a few months at most. Faster pace, better knowledge and basic gear to cover their first thirties at least.

    • 1785 posts
    April 23, 2020 4:58 PM PDT

    MauvaisOeil said:

     

    It actually took me a year to reach lvl 20 (and a surname) with a character. But the reasons were easy to understand :

    (list of reasons)

    You forgot the most important reason for not grinding levels in EQ.

    Fishing

    :)