Originally Posted by Uteunayr
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I have thought a lot on this subject, and when I think of EverQuest, I think of community. I think about what we have now in most MMOs, and how it has been destroyed through instancing the world. But I know EverQuest was a game that lived in a duality.
I once wrote on the /r/EQNext page about how I believe The Oasis of Marr, from a design standpoint, is the most telling, and wonderful zone in EverQuest. What you have in EverQuest, more than any other MMO today, is a system which Keohane and Nye would refer to as "Complex Interdependence". Normally, you have a system in which no one individual can do it all on his or her own, and they rely upon others in some way or another. You need to meet your friend? Well, you need a druid or wizard to help you. Your corpse is trapped down a well? Well, you need a necro to help you. You died and need a rez? Well, you need a cleric to help you. So this created a system in which players really relied upon one another, rather than needing to act independently of one another in a more greedy fashion, as we see exemplified in modern WoW.
This complex interdependence not only works between classes, but between levels, as higher levels tended to rely upon the lower levels to farm their bone chips, their bat wings, and all that good stuff, while at the same time, the lower levels relied upon the higher levels selling their bronze armor, their buffs, and all that good stuff.
So if you were a douchebag, and a notorious one, you were held socially accountable to people, as you'd start getting less and less help from others around you. People would be nicer to one another, not only because they are good people, but because it is a rationally smarter thing to do, given you must rely on others.
Further, lower level players and higher level players always interacted amongst each other while leveling. You had a Necro, a Cleric, someone on Spectres, an enchanter killing Giants, some high levels dishing out clarity, or killing Cazel while the low levels kill alligators and orcs. That's a level of interconnection you don't see in many games anymore. Instead, you have designated "Area A" for levels 1-5, Area B for 6-10... etc.
The issue I see is that there is very little need for interdependence, as most guilds can be more or less self-contained as you gain more and more power, and as the server continues on and content doesn't come quickly (which is in no way a rag at the speed of Velious, I completely understand, I am just saying that this is an outcome of that understandable fact), it allows for clustering of power which breaks down the complex interdependence between players. So complex interdependence has broken down on the server a good bit, but it also hangs on as many people are here due to nostalgia for this experience. EQ officially destroyed it with the Nexus and the Plane of Knowledge, which gimped a lot of the player interdependence. It was around that time, I believe, that they went to instanced raiding as well. Plane of Time, aye?
Most of that is not terribly relevant to the conversation at hand, but I truly believe that this is the single biggest philosophical contribution EQ did to online gaming, and it was shut down and destroyed by WoW's themepark model.
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01-03-2014, 08:17 PM
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