I Want to Play EQ In Its Entirety

[drew0987654]

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

As others like fastboy said, there are already guilds doing this, like one I am in on Trakanon:

Lost In Progression

We are going through all eras, and recently opened Luclin. Most new folks are raid-ready in a few days to a week, since our goal now is to make it easy to join us raiding by using mercs to catch up rather than disallow them and make well-intended people quit.

Many of the rules mentioned we do follow, with some practical exceptions.
- we use PoK, AAs to current cap b/c it isn't worth trying to police things like that (and w/o EQPlayers, Magelo or a tool like my old guild Wrathful Inquisition used to have, there is no way to make it easy or fair)
- we use mercs to level (but prefer guild grouping), and never for raid or epic content unless it is on group-farm status
- we sometimes use high-level unguilded alts to check on non-instanced raid content availability, so we don't waste a night just looking for something in-era to kill (until Time B anyway)
- no ooe gear or zones, that we do check on
- we just opened up Luclin mounts (but no stats or market mounts)
- we have each era's criteria for advancing to the next era mapped out in a list before we begin it (like all nameds, events, keying, epics we want to do, including how many times minimum, whether whole guild or at least one member does it, etc.)
- we vote on everything, like when to unlock once criteria met, policy changes, etc.
- we round out raid force with alts if needed
- most members are veterans of many eras (classic through Deathknell is common)
- the main goal is to experience all the raid content of each era, while maintaining in-era rules and conventions as much as is possible (and practical) given the current EQ state.

Even though we know the fights, sticking to the most important era limitations makes for interesting if not challenging content. Sure, we waltz through some things, but we can also wipe to others. And we are only in Luclin, which everyone knows doesn't have the relative difficulty of PoP, GoD or OoW onward. The OP factor lessens as the eras do.

I would recommend taking a look at our site or talk to someone in-game before trying to start another progression guild up.

just to be helpful, the site didn't tell me much. I would have had to create an account there just to view the forum or even apply to the guild. I did research on it though and found out that you guys started this january and recently got into luclin after less than 5 months in. you must almost be on PoP by now.... I can see how a new progression guild would fuck things up for you, but how many new players could you even get with how fast you're going and the fact that you're already almost done with luclin anyway? it doesn't seem very possible to catch up b4 you guys are in lost dungeons of norrath at the very earliest, and that would involve playing nonstop or getting PL'd, but someone willing to get PL'd doesn't seem much like the sort of person who would want to sign up in the first place.

I'm not even going for a progression guild here, just a guild that ignores the hand-holding features and everyone who uses them. it was just falsely assumed that I was going for a progression guild, probably b/c I said I wanted to play through everything in this game.

[redgiant]

Originally Posted by drew0987654 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

just to be helpful, the site didn't tell me much. I would have had to create an account there just to view the forum or even apply to the guild. I did research on it though and found out that you guys started this january and recently got into luclin after less than 5 months in. you must almost be on PoP by now.... I can see how a new progression guild would fuck things up for you, but how many new players could you even get with how fast you're going and the fact that you're already almost done with luclin anyway? it doesn't seem very possible to catch up b4 you guys are in lost dungeons of norrath at the very earliest, and that would involve playing nonstop or getting PL'd, but someone willing to get PL'd doesn't seem much like the sort of person who would want to sign up in the first place.

I'm not even going for a progression guild here, just a guild that ignores the hand-holding features and everyone who uses them. it was just falsely assumed that I was going for a progression guild, probably b/c I said I wanted to play through everything in this game.

For the record, I'm sympathetic to most of the things you wish were doable today:

But ...

You could play naked and not have 1/4th of the trouble killing mobs. Relative mob strength and game dumbing-down have no way for players to counter it.

Just emulating a death penalty and corpse run is hard to do:
- Resurrect at your bind point (which I assume would not be PoK)
- Inventory everything you have on
- Die to guards on purpose maybe 2-3 more times to make the XP loss about what it would have been long ago
- Get SoW from a selfcast or guildmate (b/c there are no general buffers around any more)
- Run naked all the way back to wherever you were (using no maps of course)
- Hope you don't need to take any boats (you will be forced to suffer the indignity of a TL instead)
- Kneel at your where your corpse would have been, pretend to loot the pretend corpse while putting on your inventory again

And that is just one small attempt to emulate one original gameplay concept. No matter what you try, it just won't feel as epicly painful as it really was.


IMPEDIMENT #1: The game play itself has changed and become much too easy to emulate the myriad difficulties we used to endure.

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Then there's the player base. People today just will not do what you ask. They don't think the same, they have gotten used to a spoon-fed game world of MMOs in the past decade, they are used to linear quest hubs not exploration/grinding camps, they aren't into grouping as the norm like it used to be, they don't even think paying a consistent and equal mere $15/month is fair (despite is being about the cost of one movie ticket today).

You can thank WoW for the devolution. They started the whole push for dumbing down mechanics, originally in the name of better gameplay and less hassle, and later in the name of letting 2-year olds play it. And they were right, in a business sense. Retaining the old MMO soul was never their goal nor responsibility, making money was. But if it hadn't been WoW, it would have been some other game; it was bound to happen as tech and the Internet advanced on us.

Today's MMO audience is conditioned to believe an MMO is a collection of single-player experiences that happen to be going on simultaneously, and every individual is The Hero instead of working collectively to be one. It is what the developers wanted to instill, b/c it is easier to create, tune and run MMO worlds that operate like that than the ones we had over a decade ago.

You will not change that, nor find enough other people who will do what it would take to combat that mindset. The game will fight against your mindset at every turn.


IMPEDIMENT #2: The game goals aren't the same as your goals, and in many ways are directly counter to them. Games devolved in lock step with the growing but devolved available audience for business reasons.

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If you sat in a movie theatre today with the typical MMO player base, you would walk out before the previews were done. If 1% of MMO chat were said in any public venue, you would be thrown out or arrested. Yet we are for some reason expected to tolerate the ridiculous mismatch of personalities while in a game.

This is a big deal for mature players, but the immature ones are either oblivious or don't care. The social balance of ostracizing assholes by not grouping with them is gone, since grouping is no longer needed. There is no penalty for a bad reputation now.

Developers of a game would rather have a million compartmentalized assholes soloing than a thousand happy, cooperating players.


IMPEDIMENT #3: Old-school MMOs were very dependent on the mindset of other players around you to be successfully immersive. And most of those players around you today are sociopaths, children or both, with no natural ostracizing in-game to keep them on the fringe of play.