Where did EQ Live go wrong?

[The Revanchist]

You're playing a server that's emulating Classic to a T. Why do you expect them to magically fix things that were meant to be broken/not in the game?

[Farrakhan]

Velious was epic. To use a poker term, "the nutz". Things started to do down hill with Luclin and PoP.

I didn't mind AAs that much. But with Luclin and PoP, Everquest turned into Evereasy for me. Just got bored.

But no MMO since has come close to meeting EQ pre-Luclin IMHO (though I did enjoy Age of Conan for awhile). Aion wasn't bad either.

[bigups43]

I think that a game like this is inherently flawed when it comes to expansions and content. New content can be generated, yes, but it would make sense for it to be more difficult than what was already in the game. In order for that to happen the gear that comes out will need to be better, or the content will be too difficult. Now, think about gear. If an expansion comes out then you would assume that gear would be better, or else wheres the motivation to go seek out the new gear, if what you have is just fine. So now, if theres good gear, then content needs to be able to challenge the players with the new gear, or they will be OP and plow through content.

Its a problem of causality. One will always cause the other. Gear will eventually become OP, or content will become insane, or abilities will become OP. In order for everything to stay balanced they all need to progress at the same speed. A game like Everquest will always (given enough time) become like it is now, on live. It cant stay the same, or people will lose interest.

Thats where EQ went (is) wrong IMO. Its a systemic problem. Its like the cyclical debt problem in western economies. Yeah, we can reinvent many many times, but eventually its going to catch up with us.

[mwatt]

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

Velious was epic. To use a poker term, "the nutz". Things started to do down hill with Luclin and PoP.

I didn't mind AAs that much. But with Luclin and PoP, Everquest turned into Evereasy for me. Just got bored.

But no MMO since has come close to meeting EQ pre-Luclin IMHO (though I did enjoy Age of Conan for awhile). Aion wasn't bad either.

Only one other game I ever played had the same sort of feel that classic EQ had: Vanguard. That game was introduced early and was too buggy to make it. Itemization was also incomplete and clearly not hand tooled but script driven. If these flaws had not been present, that game, also started by Brad McQuaid and cohorts, would have been "EQ3" and done very well. But alas, SOE bought it and then slowly destroyed it. They fished a drowning butterfly out of a pond... and then they proceeded to pull off its legs and wings, one by one.

[Cyph]

I remember playing Vanguard for a bit and could see that it had an enormous amount of potential. Unfortunately, given the buggy state of the game, and in its later years, the lack of players, it never had a chance. It was the closest thing to EQ.

[Grozmok]

Vanguard was totally the spiritual successor to EQ live for sure.

Too bad egos, crappy technology and executive infighting killed it.

The only thing good about that game was the diplomacy system.

Rest of it was shite.

[bigups43]

I played vanguard from beta, and loved every minute of it. It did have a lot of problems, but they were almost entirely fixed by the time I had stopped playing. The raiding was super fun, and the progression lines were as well. The game has so much potential, one just has to tough out the problems. IIRC the game is running very well at this point and I would encourage anyone to try it.

[Kika Maslyaka]

Originally Posted by bigups43 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think that a game like this is inherently flawed when it comes to expansions and content. New content can be generated, yes, but it would make sense for it to be more difficult than what was already in the game. In order for that to happen the gear that comes out will need to be better, or the content will be too difficult. Now, think about gear. If an expansion comes out then you would assume that gear would be better, or else wheres the motivation to go seek out the new gear, if what you have is just fine. So now, if theres good gear, then content needs to be able to challenge the players with the new gear, or they will be OP and plow through content.

Its a problem of causality. One will always cause the other. Gear will eventually become OP, or content will become insane, or abilities will become OP. In order for everything to stay balanced they all need to progress at the same speed. A game like Everquest will always (given enough time) become like it is now, on live. It cant stay the same, or people will lose interest.

Thats where EQ went (is) wrong IMO. Its a systemic problem. Its like the cyclical debt problem in western economies. Yeah, we can reinvent many many times, but eventually its going to catch up with us.

I agree.
Another significant contribution to the decline was that each expansion that added low level zones, added better items that could be obtained in previous expansions at same level. This immediately led to "ghosting" of older zones. Creation of universal faction city-hubs also cause player population to concentrate into only 1-2 areas of the world, causing ghosting of the old cities.

This was caused more by the corporate greed that anything else - if SOE would only be releasing expansions that only add to the higher end difficulty, low end player simply would not buy them( and as we know, back in the day the player distribution over the levels was very well spread, and speed of leveling up was rather slow). Hence, we observed how each new expansion that added a new race, added better and lucrative newbie/low/mid range zones that previous world had, including better items and XP modifier. This trend started all way back from Kunark, and little by little kept building up, until old world was completely abandoned.

EQ may have preserved the old world, if would have done what WoW did - re-haul old zones every time new expansion comes out, and equalizing older zones in terms of difficulty/loot and XP with any new zones of the same level range. Of course this would require man-hours to be invested, and Verant/SOE have demonstrated over the years a very strong unwillingness to go back into things already released and fix/adjust older content, which includes things like quests that have broken for years, imbalanced rewards that didn't worth the difficulty of the tasks given, etc.

[maahes]

Post PoP. PoP was the single greatest xpac for any game ever. It was so good that it destroyed the game. Any thing they released after PoP was going to be garbage. We left shortly after completely our GoD trials.

[Erazmus]

Luclin for me. I think the idea behind LDoN was cool to bring back high levels to the old world. But it was too little too late.