Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[Vexxar]

Changing all the zone models killed it for me, just wasnt the same game after that

[Kevlar]

Luclin was bad but I played through POP. POP was well done, it was interesting battling all the EQ gods. Then the cheaters became rampant and the monsters with even worse names than the ones in Luclin came out in Gates of Discord. What a crappy expansion. Lost Dungeons and Ykesha were pretty bad too, getting rid of the cohesive world and replacing the game with instances. I guess they tried to out WOW world of warcraft, but it ruined the game and ruined what made EQ fun.

[Ikonoclastia]

To me it came down to betraying the customer base that had supported them for the customer base that they hadn't tapped into (casuals).

I think they saw that for every 1 customer they had who liked the difficulty of EQ there were many times more who would play if that difficulty was removed.

Would have been a smart move had Blizzard not seen that earlier and made a superior casual game.

Thats why we got instances, portals, etc etc, of course as someone mentioned above, if you get casuals you also get rampant cheating, ebaying, plat buying because of the "I work / study / rape hamsters 24/7, why should I work for stuff in game" mentality that comes with the casual crowd.

[Scavrefamn]

Bazaar was absolutely awesome, one of the best changes to EQ.
AAs were awesome.





Focus on raiding = Insta fail which killed the game.

This started with PoP and killed the game in GoD.

[Goraith]

It started going bad with Luclin and Pop was terrible. I hated AA's and the planes flagging was horrible. I'm sad just thinking about it.

[Excellio]

Originally Posted by medievalerror [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

where/when do you think EQ Live went wrong?

SoE dev #1: We need a new expansion for EverQuest! Someone come up with some ideas for what this game needs!!

SoE dev #2: ... Cats.

SoE dev #1: ... Cats?

SoE dev #2: Yes. Cats. And they live... on the MOON.

SoE dev #2: Love it! Now get to work finding ways to ensure that players never enter any of the original game zones for any reason!

[fadetree]

Once the 'suits' got involved, money became the only focus. The 'Vision' became "We envision more money".

The problem was when they started focusing on how to attract more people. They asked people who left "Why did you leave?". Answer : "Too hard and we are bored". So they made everything easier and destroyed what made the game great. The question they should have asked was to the people who didn't leave : "Why did you stay?"

[Excellio]

Originally Posted by fadetree [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Once the 'suits' got involved, money became the only focus. The 'Vision' became "We envision more money".

The problem was when they started focusing on how to attract more people. They asked people who left "Why did you leave?". Answer : "Too hard and we are bored". So they made everything easier and destroyed what made the game great. The question they should have asked was to the people who didn't leave : "Why did you stay?"

The trouble was making the game so much easier. Is the Bazaar a convenience? Absolutely. But before the Bazaar, I was trying to research a Mage spell that required Gloves of Rallos Zek. And I eventually did stumble across some (I got them off of an Aviak, if I recall). Even if I hadn't looted it, I would've been just as satisfied to be in EC when someone was selling it.

That sense of satisfaction is lost in the Bazaar. One can buy all the hard-to-come-by items in one place. Because of the increased availability, prices plummeted, making gear that was worth several hundred platinum available to any lowbie with 5pp in the Bazaar. This inevitably led to everyone being (what I'd call) twinked.

And then there's PoK. Not only can you get around the world without the help of a porting class, but PoK offered more destinations than a porter. It's not just a functional problem, either. PoK is a ludicrous concept. As a Wood Elf, if I decide to walk into Oggok or Neriak, I'll be attacked because they just don't like Wood Elves there. But in PoK, every race and class seems welcome in all parts of the zone, making me wonder why they included NPC guards in the zone at all. And then to cap it all off, you used to visit your home city, to buy spells and supplies, or at least, a friendly race's home city. But after PoK, there is little reason to ever travel to any of the existing cities, which is why hardly anyone ever does. I don't know for sure because I played so little of post-PoP EQ, but wasn't there an NPC in a zone adjacent to PoK that would summon your corpse for free, with no additional penalties or anything?

These measures did work to broaden the base of gamers who would play EverQuest because it opened the game up to people who weren't particularly creative or good at playing MMOs.

[Messianic]

Honestly, i'm not sure SoE made any mistakes that, at the time, the people involved in the field of MMOs would have done differently. Their goal was to make as many people as happy as possible.

People who say "greed" was the problem usually haven't looked into it deep enough to really see all the facets of the decline. The number 1 reason I found after discussing it with people who played through Luclin and beyond was The infinite creation of needless hurdles - the time commitment for some of the luclin and post-luclin content was so insane (counting AA grinding as one of the worst - the talent system was a massive improvement to the endless AA grind) that it turned people off.

Simultaneously, EQ became a massive, unending timesink yet possessing none of the original hurdles people complain were removed - i.e. transportation, corpse runs, etc. Which is it? Was it too easy and catered too much to the casual player, or was it too difficult and too much a timesink for high end players? Well, it can be both - but in retrospect our vision is a lot clearer than theirs was at the time they made these decisions.

The EQ model was mostly what made WoW so wildly successful. They were able to balance difficulty without needless hurdles - it takes a LONG TIME to travel on foot from odus to faydwer or odus to kunark (thinking in terms of the longest possible distance you have to travel without player/pok/translocator assistance) - it didn't take long to travel from, say, Darnassus to STV if you were high enough level - and after you did it once, it didn't take as long because you had the flight points. See the balance?

EQ attempted to find that same balance and failed. It's like balancing on a razor's edge, and it wasn't because of "money-grubbing" or some other unsatisfying, oversimplified answer (if they wanted only money, wouldn't they have made changes with more longevity?). They just missed the mark.

[Excellio]

Originally Posted by Messianic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The EQ model was mostly what made WoW so wildly successful. They were able to balance difficulty without needless hurdles - it takes a LONG TIME to travel on foot from odus to faydwer or odus to kunark (thinking in terms of the longest possible distance you have to travel without player/pok/translocator assistance)

But shouldn't it take a while? I see what you mean about needless hurdles, because you really shouldn't have to prove anything about your knowledge of the map once you've made the trip many times, but by the time you're that guy, in classic EQ, you most likely have the money to buy a port, or perhaps have joined a guild and one of your guildmates will port you.

The travel restrictions primarily affect new players who haven't made the contacts to arrange for a port whenever they want one. When a lvl 60 is waving around 100pp for a port, I'm sure there's a lvl 34 Druid or Wizard somewhere who will come pick him up.

To suggest that it wasn't about money is true, to an extent, I guess. I agree that any other developer would've gone a similar direction, but that's the trouble. Comparing SoE's means of making more money to any other developer's means of reaching that same goal, well, yeah, they'll end up going a similar direction.

I believe that EverQuest was a challenging game that required a lot of patience, and did feature many, many needless hurdles that added little/nothing to the experience, yet still sapped hours of your real life time. And I believe that SoE understood that as a business, you need to sell something more appealing to the customers, so they replaced the player-driven solutions with new stuff that was actually part of the game. Instead of scrolling through auctions in EC, there was a Bazaar that enabled you to buy rare and coveted items at level 1. Instead of building relationships with porting classes and learning techniques to obtain a port (like going to rings/spires, sending tells to porters to request a pickup), we now have a zone that not only enables you to travel much more easily, but also replaces the home cities altogether by selling all of the spells, supplies and other items that you used to buy from merchants in the guild where you turned in your tattered note.

Yes, there were many needless hurdles in Classic EverQuest, but with a bit of creative thinking, the players devised ways to overcome those issues and still enjoy the game. The changes with which I take issue are the ones that welcome in the players (and their credit cards) who lack the creativity, social skills and capacity to appreciate the player driven systems.