Culture shock coming from WoW

[Lowako]

WoW is enjoyable for different reasons than everquest. As a result, the different games attract different playerbases. I do agree that the sense of community in the modern era of WoW has been essentially non-existent.

Something I've personally never understood is why some everquest players call WoW an easy game and act as if playing everquest is the pinnacle of MMORPG skill. Even the easiest WoW raid tiers have been immensely more difficult than anything that exists in this era of everquest. The main complaint seems to come from the idea/mechanic of welfare pixels, but welfare pixels for welfare players gets welfare results. Actual good players use welfare pixels to kill harder content because they play better then welfare players, then actual good players get better pixels. I don't really see an issue with giving people shitty items for little effort when you can put in more effort and get better items to get better results. An item having a green/blue/purple/orange/grey nametag is meaningless.

[Sorn]

Originally Posted by jackd104 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think a big factor as that the demographic on p99 skews older and more mature.

No adult in their right mind would enjoy interacting with insecure teenage boys (or particularly aggressive girls) in a game where you can't hold them accountable for the dumb shit that spews out of those garbage holes they call their mouths.

Luckily for the rest of the world, the majority of teenagers grow the rest of their brains (literally - your brain is only fully developed at age 25) and become sensible people. That doesn't stop them from being a menace in MMOs before that point, though.

[Samoht]

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

Something I've personally never understood is why some everquest players call WoW an easy game

Have you ever died in WoW? Raised a tradeskill? Taken a boat from one continent to the other?

All of these things are punishing in EQ and simplified in WoW. That's what makes WoW easier.

And the raid mechanics in WoW aren't necessarily harder, either. It's just punishing to get something wrong. The more players in a raid, the more likelihood of one person getting it wrong. Even then, they still find a way to hold your hand while doing it. The last time I raided in WoW, everything was telegraphed well in advance with a big warning across your screen to get out of the way. I'd call it faster paced, but not necessarily harder.

[Necrostoner]

Have you seen my baseball?

[EQBallzz]

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

Have you ever died in WoW? Raised a tradeskill? Taken a boat from one continent to the other?

All of these things are punishing in EQ and simplified in WoW. That's what makes WoW easier.

And the raid mechanics in WoW aren't necessarily harder, either. It's just punishing to get something wrong. The more players in a raid, the more likelihood of one person getting it wrong. Even then, they still find a way to hold your hand while doing it. The last time I raided in WoW, everything was telegraphed well in advance with a big warning across your screen to get out of the way. I'd call it faster paced, but not necessarily harder.

Agree with you. I think the raid mechanics initially in WoW were pretty fun and solid. Molten Core, Onyxia, Blackwing Lair, Karazan were all amazing. As time went on they tried to be creative with new and different mechanics (so props to them for trying new things) but the end result was just annoying because they created too many single points of failure that was impossible to recover from.

In many of those gimmicky raids in WoW if one person didn't jump, rub their stomach and pat their heads while running in a circle and clicking a lever at the exact right time the whole raid would wipe with no chance to recover. Sometimes not even related to skill but lag would cause constant wipes. That isn't fun. It's tedious and breeds much discontent in your guild/raid. Not good design IMO.

[Rygar]

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

Have you ever died in WoW? Raised a tradeskill? Taken a boat from one continent to the other?

All of these things are punishing in EQ and simplified in WoW. That's what makes WoW easier.

And the raid mechanics in WoW aren't necessarily harder, either. It's just punishing to get something wrong. The more players in a raid, the more likelihood of one person getting it wrong. Even then, they still find a way to hold your hand while doing it. The last time I raided in WoW, everything was telegraphed well in advance with a big warning across your screen to get out of the way. I'd call it faster paced, but not necessarily harder.

I think it is unfair to compare current state of WoW to what p99 is (retro EQ). EQ Live with their mercenary forces (although I've never played it) seems insaaaaaane easy mode to level and get AAs.

While I never played 'vanilla WoW' I hear from a friend that played since launch that tradeskills were hella harder (now you can max out in like a day or less, thanks auction house), exp loss used to be insane and you earned back at a slow rate, and repairs were crippling to your pocket book and could actually destroy your gear if you waited too long. Earning gear, even in instances, was really hard to do (didn't always make it to the end before dying), epic pieces were rare.

Sure they had flight paths, but you needed to run to those town first to discover them before they could get linked, I'm pretty sure you couldn't get a port to some area at level 1, you had to crawl there yourself. Lets not pretend that sitting on an EQ boat is any kind of fun or 'look at how hardcore I am!'. Sure it adds some immersion and gives the illusion of a bigger world, but we all know they are the bane of EQ and we avoid them like the plague.

From all accounts it seems like classic WoW was more in line with EQ Velious / Luclin era, which most of the forum users seems to praise.

I admit the quest system with the Exclamation points on the map is super easy mode, but EQ quests really suck for working 'just in the game'. I'm willing to bet nearly everyone uses the wiki to figure them out as some of the hints are super obscure or misleading.

[Samoht]

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

I think it is unfair to compare current state of WoW to what p99 is (retro EQ).

What about my post indicated that I wasn't comparing classic WoW to classic EQ?

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

While I never played 'vanilla WoW' I hear from a friend that played since launch that tradeskills were hella harder (now you can max out in like a day or less, thanks auction house), exp loss used to be insane and you earned back at a slow rate, and repairs were crippling to your pocket book and could actually destroy your gear if you waited too long. Earning gear, even in instances, was really hard to do (didn't always make it to the end before dying), epic pieces were rare.

None of these things are true. Tradeskills have always been easy in WoW.

Death in WoW didn't use your bind spot as a place for you to reload on death. (That was used for a free teleport back to a chosen city.) Instead, you were sent to the nearest "graveyard" and just had to walk a few steps back to your corpse. You didn't even have to recover your gear. Just click "Yes" on the Resurrect now? popup. There was never an EXP loss on death in live WoW.

Repairs were just a gold sink for people who had really good gear because the cost scaled with gear quality, so poor players had negligible cost.

Some classic instances were grueling, but only in length, so they eventually started piecing wings into separate dungeons to make it manageable.

"Epic" has a completely different meaning in WoW. It's a level of gear quality (purple). There were some quests like Thunderfury, but those were designed to be extremely rare and not a defining feature of your class. They were more like PoSky or Dozekar tear quests.

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

Sure they had flight paths, but you needed to run to those town first to discover them before they could get linked, I'm pretty sure you couldn't get a port to some area at level 1, you had to crawl there yourself.

Mages could open portals between major cities. Level 1's could corpse walk between flight paths if they really wanted them, but the questing and zones were so streamlined that it wasn't necessary because you didn't need a specific flight path until you were of the appropriate level to quest there.

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

Lets not pretend that sitting on an EQ boat is any kind of fun or 'look at how hardcore I am!'. Sure it adds some immersion and gives the illusion of a bigger world, but we all know they are the bane of EQ and we avoid them like the plague.

Including boats was mostly making fun of how hard it has been to implement them correctly and accurately on P99. Still, using boats in WoW was more like using Luclin spires than like using boats in classic EQ.

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

From all accounts it seems like classic WoW was more in line with EQ Velious / Luclin era, which most of the forum users seems to praise.

The only similarities are in the praise, though. Classic WoW had instanced dungeons for raids and 5-man groups from day 1. Those weren't implemented in EQ until LDoN. EQ didn't have maps until Luclin. The EQ Task system was similar to WoW questing. I don't remember exactly when that came out, but that's when they started using the glowing path to show you were to move to find NPCs or quest items. Basically any quest in WoW has always been like that.

[Rygar]

Well it appears my friend gave me bad information regarding vanilla WoW death and tradeskills, I'll take your word for it so apologize for the misinformation. Perhaps she wanted it to sound more hardcore than it is today? Who knows.

And it is strange to hear mages could open portals, I never saw this the entire time I played (I suppose Dalaran or whatever the floating city just had portals to every single city, so everyone just bound there to get around). Although a warlock and a mage were maybe the only 2 characters I didn't max level out.

Regardless of your thoughts on repairs, it was one of those 'this is annoying' type things about WoW that made it slightly harder (or at least had to work around it). Same thing with spell reagents running out. It also helped keep down inflation (lots of things did). Removing those things were the beginnings of pandering to the 13 year old base.

Me comparing Vanilla WoW (again just from what I heard, started during Lich King) to Velious / Luclin just meant that the game was polished enough and still hard.

FYI thought you were comparing current WoW to p99 because of the lack of community it now has and thinking death back then had exp loss similar to EQ. Am told having a solid guild and buddies to instance with back then was a real hoot, had a strong community. I even felt it was good during Lich King, lots of folks helped me out and ran me through instances to get gear. But with every patch it became clear the game degenerated further and further.

[loramin]

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

I hear from a friend that played since launch that tradeskills were hella harder (now you can max out in like a day or less, thanks auction house), exp loss used to be insane and you earned back at a slow rate

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

Well it appears my friend gave me bad information regarding vanilla WoW death and tradeskills, I'll take your word for it so apologize for the misinformation. Perhaps she wanted it to sound more hardcore than it is today? Who knows.

I found this rather amusing. One of WoW's "selling points" from before it even launched was that death didn't cause XP loss, so there is no way your friend could possibly remember anything about losing XP on WoW (unless maybe they played in very early beta or something). Which means that your friend is probably actually remembering Everquest or another MMOG of that era, and it's seeping in to their memories of WoW.

And I love the idea of EQ corrupting WoW memories without the person even realizing it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

P.S. Just to double check my memory I googled WoW death XP loss and this was one of the first results:

I've been leveling 2 chars 90-100 and one mage 30-100 through Invasions and I literally die inside when I've been soloing an elite or boss and I die at 2% and I don't get the xp.

That's right, they're complaining not about losing XP from death, but about not getting XP from a mob they failed to kill before they died. "WoW problems."

[ZiggyTheMuss]

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

I found this rather amusing. One of WoW's "selling points" from before it even launched was that death didn't cause XP loss, so there is no way your friend could possibly remember anything about losing XP on WoW (unless maybe they played in very early beta or something). Which means that your friend is probably actually remembering Everquest or another MMOG of that era, and it's seeping in to their memories of WoW.

And I love the idea of EQ corrupting WoW memories without the person even realizing it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

P.S. Just to double check my memory I googled WoW death XP loss and this was one of the first results:



That's right, they're complaining not about losing XP from death, but about not getting XP from a mob they failed to kill before they died. "WoW problems."

Yep I was gonna respond to this same post. I played WoW from launch for about 8 months or so and quit before the first expansion dropped. There was NEVER exp loss. People called the game "EQ on training wheels."

I left EQ for WoW back in 2004 along with a lot of EQ players, simply because it was "not EQ." I was burned out and wanted to try something new. It was fun and a LOT more casual so I enjoyed that part. There was literally nothing harder about WoW except for some of the raid content as other people have mentioned.