People that never played classic EQ

[Laugher]

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

I was just curious about people that play p1999 but never played classic EQ back in the day (too young, never tried, etc.).
What brought you here? What do you like about it? How different was it going from more ez mode MMOs to this. "An even con monster! That should be an easy solo!"

I played eq from 1999-2004/5 or so. Never really could get into another mmo, stopped playing anything for years, and then found this server last year and loving it.

What brought me here ironically was my guidlie Zealen on Prexus around LoY. Dude was an iksar necro but lvled like it was 2000; never invested time in newer xpacs just kept on keeping on in the ones he had. Did most of my leveling pre-velious before Depths of Darkhollow/double xp highkeep instance weekened happened (ikr not classic)

[Cyph]

I'm the opposite; only played EQ back in '99 and none of the expacs. I've dabbled in other MMOs but frankly, nothing has kept my interest for long.

[webrunner5]

This game, P1999, IS hard if you never played it before. But if you have been playing EQ for years it is not hard. Now if you want to play 20 alts and try to get all of them to 60, well it would be really hard.

When I started in early 2000 I didn't know shit. So it was hard as hell, because nobody knew shit. Different story here now.

[Tulnavara]

Originally Posted by webrunner5 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Now if you want to play 20 alts and try to get all of them to 60, well it would be really hard.

You're confusing difficulty and time consumption.

[Eliseus]

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

You're confusing difficulty and time consumption.

That's the whole point I've been getting at that seems to blow right over everyone's head. YES EQ will take you MUCH longer than most, if not all MMOs, to get anywhere. NO IT IS NOT HARD.

There is this human flaw for nostalgia that usually consists of "when life was better". There is this idea for a lot of people who played EQ that it was "hard" in comparison to other MMOs, therefore it was better. So their nostalgia gets the better of them. I do admit, there may be certain aspects that could be considered "harder", which was pointed out in my previous points, but overall, no, EQ is not harder. And trying to point out how long it takes for some of you to level because auto-attacking x mob over and over while you pick your nose with the occasional running to zone line because some idiot/idiots in your group don't know how to play does not constitute any level of difficulty that is superior to the complexity of mechanics that exist in modern day MMOs. It just doesn't and if you think so, well, you are probably bad at playing games in general.

[iruinedyourday]

I think once you've mastered it its not hard. Like anything that is hard.

But man turn EQ on for the first time, not knowing how or where to go and nothing is there to tell you what to do?

Hard.

I can beat ninja gaiden, doesn't mean that game is easy.

[Kimja]

I played classic ERA, and it was my first MMO experience. EQ is what made me love MMOs, and nothing has ever come close to the challenge that EQ provided. I met so many friends in EQ that I still talk to today.

P99 is no different. I love community here, and although the raid scene is a bit skewed, this server is by far the SECOND best MMO I've ever played (sorry devs, classic EQ beats you)!

[Oooruk]

You need to remember that when EQ first launched almost all the players had never played an mmo before. There was no consolidated source of information like there is today (the wiki), people were on dial up connections, it was 1999 and the internet wasn't even totally accepted by mainstream society.

Imagine rolling as a level 1 character in this environment. Imagine rolling a shaman, getting to level 5 and trying to figure what spells you need to buy or that you can even BUY new spells. Every single game mechanic needed to figured out and learned, every single class and their role needed to be figured out and learned. People who say EQ "isn't hard" take all of this for granted today. Back then a very small proportion of the population even used the internet, let alone knew how to play games. Today peoples grandparents are playing games on tablets.

Then along comes DAoC (which is way, way harder and more competitive than EQ could ever have hoped to be. In fact no pve game even holds a candle to daoc in terms of "hardness"). In DAoC I pretty much intuitively what each class would do, how to play the game, how to spec (to a certain extent), so starting seemed "easier".

Now comes WoW. I had mastered how to play MMOs by this point. At launch I knew what every classes role was and how to spec them, how to gear them, how to work the economy, how to form a group, how to lead a raid, all of this from launch. Yes some of the encounters were "difficult" but once you'd beat them they became "easy".

In conclusion, what I *think* people mean by difficulty is that when EQ was out none of us knew what we were doing and had to learn how to play games. When WoW launched we were MMO masters and could easily burn through content.

[forensic]

EQ is hard because there is a lot more to it than just "the mechanics". Learning to play EQ is about learning hundreds of different idiosyncratic bugs about everything. It's about learning to find your way without maps or wikis or websites.

Remember back when there were no maps for EQ, or when the maps that people made would be very inaccurate? The EQAtlas maps are still inaccurate in many ways for many zones.

This makes EQ harder than games that had database websites at launch like WOW. I remember DAOC had all the game's math publicly known and published on easy to use websites in beta.

EQ is hard because you had to figure it out yourself. p99 is still hard because you still have to figure out many things yourself. EQ gives you lots of room to be a terrible player or to dominate the game.

For instance, you can totally fuck yourself over in EQ by picking a bad race/class combo, choosing bad stat allocation, and then using the wrong gear. It's very easy for a newbie to gimp themselves.

Twinks can make the game Easy Mode by using high level items at low levels. But people who don't twink or don't have the knowledge of the best ways to twink can gimp themselves and be useless.

In EQ you can play your character so poorly that no amount of time investment will allow you to level. Your lost xp to gained xp ratio can be more than 1 because you're not able to effectively manage aggro, or avoid adds, or strafe-run to the zoneline to avoid deaths.

In WOW, by comparison, there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO NOT TO WIN. In WoW it doesn't matter how bad you are, you will still gain levels and win the game. WoW holds your hand which is what makes it easy.

Wow's actual encounter mechanics at the high end are better designed, but this doesn't make wow harder, because those mechanics are easy in all games. EQ is not hard because it has difficult combat mechanics, it's hard because it has difficult game mechanics as a whole, is riddled with bugs, and doesn't hold your hand or teach you anything.

In EQ you're on your own and without a lot of effort and knowledge it's easy to be a perma-noob. In 1999 there were many many people who would play for a year and never made it past level 20.

In wow, everyone makes it to max level. It's just a matter of time. There is no strategy involved.

Which brings me to my final point... EQ is about strategy far more than tactics. WOW might make you dodge the AE of some raid boss and so on according to a script laid out by the devs, but in EQ most wins are determined before the fight.

Some classes have major tactical skill involved, where good tactical play means the difference between winning and losing: enchs are my favorite example of this. If you're not a twinked ench with dominating gear, there are very sensitive timings to everything and not timing it right is the difference between death and victory.

To say that all of EQ is autoattack is to show that you haven't played all the classes. The autoattack amount varies greatly.

Back in wow I wrote a macro to play my rogue (before they nerfed this in-game feature) and all I had to do to be maximally effective was spam 1 button. In addition, since the game was wow and everything is hand-holded, there are few bugs, everything is on a clear questline, etc, there was nothing else to do either. Group composition in wow doesn't really matter because Blizzard designed it to not really matter--you can make do with anything. The instances that you go questing for are always the perfect level range and no amount of skill or planning can allow you to take on content that is harder for your level and so on.

Anyway to say that EQ is easier because the COMBAT mechanics are SOMETIMES simpler is to totally miss the point of what makes EQ hard. It's not just combat mechanics but everything else that you do in the game from travel, to pulling, to group composition, to twinking/not-twinking, to choosing where to level, how to level, managing your group, managing your time, avoiding XP loss, etc.

If you want to see how hard EQ is just get any person whose first MMO was WOW and throw them into EQ *WITHOUT* giving them any advice or inside knowledge. Throw them into the game blind without the help of any wikis or twinking or expert advice or clarification. See how they do.

I've done this experiment and it's always crash and burn... they don't make it to level 2 before saying "Wow games used to be HARD"

[Non Quixote]

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

To say that all of EQ is autoattack is to show that you haven't played all the classes. The autoattack amount varies greatly.

Agreed, if all someone is doing in EQ is autoattacking, they're almost certainly doing it wrong.

I didn't get into EQ at the launch, in fact I didn't subscribe until Luclin came out, so P99 is the closest that I've been to "classic" EQ. I did play classic WoW, beginning a few months before BC went live. Admittedly I wasn't a dedicated WoW player, I only logged in when I was bored with EQ or tired of LFG. Still, I played that WoW account for about a year, left and then re-subbed in the middle of WotLK, then drifted in and out until just a few months ago. EQ on the other hand I played for almost 8 years straight, from 2001 to 2009.

I found the levelling in WoW PvE to be butt easy. Bread crumb quests that rewarded great xp for minimal effort, along with rewarded gear that was at least good enough to get you through a few levels plus fair to decent coin. The few "group" quests in WoW were easy enough for you and a friend or two to power through in a few minutes.

You could push more buttons in WoW if you wanted to, but most just macro'd a one button rotation that worked pretty well for most classes.

Tie into a mob or mobs that are beating you into jelly? That's okay, just run away because in WoW they'll give up after a few dozen yards. Heck, even if you die it isn't like there's any real penalty.

I could go on, but I'd just be repeating what most have already said. There's a reason that WoW was referred to as the "kiddy pool" of MMOs almost from launch.