Are Massive Online Games Getting Worse?

by Loral on October 17, 2006

One day in the city of Erudin, a young cleric of Quellious had a dream. He wanted to travel from his homeland of Odus to the faraway dwarven lands of Kaladim. It would be a long journey, one filled with unimaginable dangers. He had no way to teleport, no magic stones that shifted him from city to city with a touch, not even a reliable method to bind in the cities along his journey. With nothing but a few spells and a cracked staff, the cleric Ciric spent a week traveling across two oceans, the plains of Karana, the forest of Kithicor, and through the cities of Qeynos, High Keep, Rivervale, and Freeport. It seemed as though he had a lioness on his arse the whole way yet he survived his journey and to this day I still share his tale.

I will warn you ahead of time. This article will likely spawn more questions than answers. You won't learn where to get all of the shiniest treasures held within the Serpent's Spine. You won't learn what powerful dangers lurk in Ashengate. Today we're going to step back for a moment and consider the history and future of Massive Online Games.

Long ago I read an article entitled "Voice Chat in MMOGs? Not Yet, You Fools!" by Richard Bartle, the designer of the first multi-user dungeon back in 1978. The article was my first glimpse at some theories that new technologies and new advances in MMOs, in this case voice chat, might actually be more harmful to a game than helpful.

More recently, Bartle wrote another article entitled "Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies". Again I raised an eyebrow at some of the statements made. The article implies that many of the more recent improvements to MMOs might actually do more harm to the long-term benefit of the game than it will to help. Examples include instancing, death recovery, and instant travel.

I don't agree with everything in the article and I'm not sure the theory that short-term improvements to massive online games have done harm, but it did bring up some interesting questions.

When we look at recent games like World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and the recent revisions of Everquest, we see a game with many improvements over first generation massive online games. We have teleportation stones, griffin rides, LFG windows, instanced dungeons, corpse summoning, PVP restrictions, no-drop loot, and many other features that have streamlined these games to widen the audience. Many of the rough edges are gone but perhaps it was those rough edges that made the game exciting in the first place.

No, I'm not waving the "SOE is dumbing down the game!" flag. Many of these improvements have made the game a lot more enjoyable to a lot more people. I can't imagine playing EQ without the corpse summoner, knowledge stones, or instanced dungeons. I like those features. Yes, a lot of players jumped over to the Progression servers to see EQ back the way it was back in the old days, and many of them came running back to the game we have today.

No improvement comes without cost, however. There is something lost for the ease of griffin travel in World of Warcraft. Unlike EQ's Knowledge Stones, a player must at least travel to a griffin master by foot before gaining the ability to fly on griffinback, but how much different would the world be if travel took far longer in Azeroth than it does today? How would we view the scope of the world? Would the game's slower pace result in stronger social ties between players in a group? Would travel itself be the primary source of adventure instead of the destination?

What of instancing? The convenience of a spawned world built for one specific group is strong enough that all three of the top fantasy MMOs in the U.S. include it. Yet what price do we pay for these conveniences? It is hard to find a feature that does more to break the metaphysical nature of the game than instancing. How clumsy do we feel when we try to explain instances using examples from real life? And what of the lost social opportunities? How many friends did you miss meeting simply because you never occupied the same dungeon?

The Everquest design team has moved away from instances with the past three expansions. In Prophecy of Ro, the result was all but completely disastrous. Static and instance zones alike see little use. Overland zones in Prophecy, Depths of Darkhollow, and Dragons of Norrath, were little more than travel conduits to the instances of these expansions.

The Serpent's Spine broke away from instances almost completely and with much more success. Well designed overland zones now host as many as three dozen players in each of the expansion's thirteen zones. The popularity of the zones sometimes results in complaints that Everquest is returning to its former overcrowded state, but how do such complains sound to SOE? Perhaps they sound like success.

Richard Bartle talks about the memories formed from massive online games and the catalysts for these memories. Players don't remember playing through scripted events nearly as well as they remember interactions with other players, especially the unpredictable ones. It is the sharp-edged rubbing of a MMO's population that creates the most dynamic and unique situations. When you remove those sharp edges and stick those players in smooth, clean instances where no one bumps elbows and no one gets hurt, that's when the life is removed from a MMO.

I say these words only as one theory. I'm not sure I believe them. The numbers for World of Warcraft subscribers prove them wrong. I don't know how many people played Richard Bartle's MUD but I'm guessing it wasn't ten million. I've spoken out against soloing as a basis for progression in a MMO, it would seem contradictory to the purpose of a MMO in the first place, but again the numbers prove me wrong. I enjoy WOW as much as the next guy and a lot of it has to do with the convenience afforded by soloing.

A few days ago Blizzard announced a new LFG tool for World of Warcraft to help players find groups and groups to find players. On the surface it appears to be a clone of the LFG window SOE added to Everquest a few years back.

I can't help but wonder if this tool is the right answer. Do we really need another widget? Will another UI box help us? Couldn't Blizzard have come up with something new or found a better way to direct players into groups and into content? SOE found a new way to get groups together in Everquest, they did it with good solid huntable and rewarding content. I'm guessing the Burning Crusade will have lots of that as well, I only wish they could have been a bit more creative about getting groups together than another UI box full of drop-down menus and tabs.

Every feature added to a MMO also takes something away. The smoother the world gets, the more common our experiences will be. Maybe this is what happened to EQ over the past few years. The game got smoothed out and streamlined and now everyone does monster missions until they join the high-end raiding game. What will a new window or a new portal stone do to the long-term future of a MMO? It isn't known, but we do know that nothing is free.

One day as a young paladin on a forgotten server, I stumbled into the dungeon of Befallen. I cut down a few skeletons, explored some broken rooms in a shattered temple, and soon I spotted a well. I peeked down the well. My footing slipped. Seconds later I found myself broken and ripped apart by ghouls twice as powerful than I was. A powerful cleric of Tunare, one of the unimaginable thirty second level, came to my rescue. He looted my broken corpse, cut down a troll shadowknight, and returned to the entrance of the dungeon with my banded mail and bronze mace. That encounter changed my whole view of Norrath for the rest of time.

What stories will the new adventurers of Norrath share?

Loral Ciriclight
17 October 2006
loral@loralciriclight.com

Comment Posted by: Moorgard on October 18, 2006 12:58 AM

You can't go home again.

The genie is out of the bottle. Some of the conveniences of modern MMOs have become such staples--even to many "old school" gamers--that future MMOs which eschew them will be seen as dinosaurs and throwbacks. The mass market just won't accept it.

That said, there will always be a segment of the player base (which is disproportionately vocal on the boards) that enjoys what I call "playing the interface." They love complex UIs and obscure data, taking pleasure from finding ways to min/max their experience. As time goes on, there will be fewer and fewer games that satisfy these folks, making them more and more cranky (/wave FoH boards).

No, every MMO doesn't have to be "dumbed down" (a stupid phrase, by the way), but these games will get generally more accessible in order to appeal to a wider audience, and a certain segment of die-hard players is going to resent such evolution in any form.

Comment Posted by: Synthalis on October 18, 2006 04:28 AM

So you fell down that well to Loral. That's kinda cool. I met my first really good friend while playing my enchanter in EQ under the same circumstances back in 99 prior to them taking out the abilty to loot other peoples corpses. Those ghouls are hell.

First Loral, thank you for linking those two articles. Second thank you for bringing up this topic.

Moorgard, your attitude is understandable given where you work and what you've been doing for the last few years. It's a reflection of the fact that the genre is referred to as MMO's now, and not MMORPGs

Let me restate that so it's a little clearer. The original appeal, indead the original marketing message of Everquest in the days of the Vision(tm) was that it brought all the fun of paper and pencil Role Playing Games, to an interactive persistant 3D world. The computer would with the assitance of the designers fullfill the role of the Game Master, while the players would be free to explore the game world and meet tens, hundreds, even perhaps thousands of like minded Role Players. The original market base was seen as the Dungeons and Dragons, Champions, Heros, and GURPS player.

Fast forward to april 2001, Diablo 2 had become the single most popular "massively multiplayer online" game. Billed as a role playing game, the game itself was designed with a competative ladder system, very limited grouping, and no common non-combat or social areas, i.e. actual role playing was minimal and was actually dismissed as dumb. Success in the game was based on acrual of better gear, and more points for stats and skill trees. Success became the primary factor, being social was dismissed.

As the Diablo 2 generation of players started to explore the other online games thier market began to infiltrate the online Role Playing Games. Everquest added Alternate Ability points, and "Boss Mobs" became a core focal point of game design.

In the case of Everquest, so systemic was the issue that the player base called out for Role-Player only servers. The RP Server on EQ is at least per it's player base concidered one of the most social and stable player bases left.

More recently Blizzard, also in responce to popular outcry created a series of RP servers.

In a nutshell, Moorgard, while it could be said that these ease of access concepts do indeed "open the market". One could also suggest that should a company decide to once again make it thier Vision to create a MMORPG, rather than yet another MMO, they would find a very viable and very loyal long term customer base.

In closing, I would have to agree with many of the points in the articles. The social or role playing aspects of the games where and to my mind still are the most important factors toward real true and meaningful fun in the games. Without them, or with the focus being placed on "success", then the games boil down to nothing more than minorly elaborte first or third person shooters with very poorly designed and often bandaided "lore".

Comment Posted by: Loral on October 18, 2006 07:44 AM

Welcome home, Moorgard!

I don't think it's a matter of deciding that these features shoudn't be there or not. You are right in saying that they are part of the institution now and there is no way a MMO can be successful without some basic concepts.

However, there are new ways to incorporate these things into a game that may add the feature without breaking the physical metaphor of the game.

It was the LFG window in Warcraft that pushed me to write this article in the first place. It is so devoid of creativity for a world that is so clearly creative in many other ways. There are dozens of different ways they could have approached the problem of groups that wouldn't have led them to another stupid UI window.

I've always liked the idea of an adventurers tavern built for players to gather and socialize. The tavern master can share tales of wonderous adventure and guide the players into near by ruins. These tales would take a party from the tavern directly into their own instanced dungeon for a quick 45 minute adventure.

Yes, I'm breaking two of the things I discussed in the article, instant travel and instanced content, but getting out of the LFG window and into a physical gathering location seems a lot better than another UI window.

Back in the old days of EQ, players used to gather by the dozens in the East Commons tunnel that lead to North Ro. That was our bazaar. That is where players gathered to sell things. Everyone there was active, no one was AFK for long periods because being AFK meant not being able to buy or sell anything. The tunnel wasn't built to house two hundred players but the players turned it into their own gathering place. It became something they created instead of something added by the designers.

The new bazaar in EQ is great. I can go there and look up ten times the items I used to find in the East Commons tunnel. It's become sterile, though. It is something clearly built for me to go buy items. It might have three times the people in it but ninety five percent are dead ghosts. Now I can click a check box and I don't even have to see them.

I realize I'm just staring up at the sky and shaking my fist. I don't really have a clear thought or clear recommendation on any of this. I love EQ today much more than I loved it back six years ago and many of the features I talk about here are features I've loved and asked for in many other articles.

I am learning, however, that new features don't always help the game. Designers today have to be more creative and come up with more in-game ways to add the required features of a MMO without turning it into an on-the-rails arcade game.

Comment Posted by: Talaen on October 18, 2006 08:17 AM

What puts the RPG in MMORPG is immersion. When you play the game and you really feel like you are there, in that world, and not just playing a game. There's a lot of things that factor into immersion. Part of it is having a big world. The bigger the world feels, the more it draws us in, and makes us want to stick around and explore. Yet for players who don't have a lot of time to play, it can be frustrating when the people we want to play with are an hour away from us in the game world by foot.

Thus, we get methods for faster travel. Wizard Spires. Griffon Rides. Portal Stones. To some extent these are a necessary evil, one that you have to have in order for your big world to be playable. But where's the limit? Where do you draw the line and say "this is hurting the game more than it's helping". Where does the ease of travel start to work against the big world you've created?

By the same token, players like to interact but not many of them like to compete. There's nothing more frustrating than taking a few friends to a dungeon where you have something you wanted to accomplish, and finding that you're at the back of a long line, or having to defend your "claim" of a monster or an area against rude, obnoxious other players who wouldn't think twice about killing you or stealing it, or both. Instancing allows you and your group or raid to experience an adventure without having to deal with the added pressure of player population. Anyone who's ever played through a good instance in any game can attest that this is a lot of fun. But how much instancing is a good thing? What's the price we pay in player interaction, when everyone is doing the instances and no one is out there meeting new people, making new friends and enemies alike?

One thing that everyone should remember about MMORPGs: People play them for themselves. Each of us has our own goals and objectives; we need other players to help make the world feel real and help us achieve those goals, but most of us don't want those players to be in the way of those goals. To this end, we want tools and technologies that enhance our ability to play cooperatively with other players, accomplish our goals, and become immersed in the game world. We don't want tools and technologies that hinder us or detract from any of these things.

Likewise, it should be remembered that by nature many players are not social. They won't go form pick up groups unless they have a need to. I don't think anyone's taken a poll, but I'm willing to bet that if you did, you'd find that many more "experienced" players eschew pick up groups altogether, preferring to group with real life friends or with guildmates. That's the real danger here. The bells and whistles and shiny graphics and cool scripts and such are what bring us to the game - but it's the community that forms, whether that's groups, guilds, or otherwise - that keeps us there year after year. Any feature added to the game, such as an LFG window, or a travel mechanism, or the decision to instance a zone or encounter, needs to be viewed from the standpoint of how it will help or hinder the formation of player relationships and communities. That's going to be different for every game, but I submit that a well crafted game will do everything it can to encourage players to meet and interact in a collaborative way, rather than forcing them to fight for limited resources, spawns, etc. Unless of course, the point of the game is fighting for limited resources.

Comment Posted by: Gyo on October 18, 2006 10:14 AM

Bartle's statements are narrow-minded and do not reflect reality.

Teamspeak and Ventrilo and online chat are here to stay. More and more guilds are using and even requiring voice.

It's contradicting to talk about the social aspects of the game, yet decry bringing players even closer together via voice.

And what really shows that those statement's are not consistent with reality is that it is the PLAYERS pushing voice, not the MMO makers.

As for the WoW griffins, again the contradiction is to talk up the social aspects of the game, yet decry those functions that have a direct effect in enabling the socializing.

"Hey want to group with us in zone XXXX?"

"Sure, give me 30-45 minutes to run to you...and since I only have 1.5 hours to play, that'll give me about 45 minutes to play with you..."

Clearly Loral, you do not remember the frustration of trying to find a port to join up with your friends. I understand the counter-argument is to make friends with a porters, etc. But it's kind of nice to choose who I socialize with for myself and not be forced into it by the game. Think about it.

The comment that players are not going to remember events are truly narrow and tell me that Bartle's comments are just shy of worthless.

Try telling a guild that has beaten a really hard event that they won't remember it. I know I'm going to have a hard time forgetting my guild's first-time wins over several encounters. Quarm/Bartx/MPG Trials/Vish/Etc just to name a few.

Loral, you are a huge advocate for groupable content for the masses(thank you!), do you not see Bartle's shortsightedness concerning content?

As for instancing, I think it is way to easy to bad-mouth it without thinking about the ramifications of not having it. Where would a casual player with a limited amount of time to play be without it? Answer honestly.

You are a champion of the casual player in my eyes (thank you!), but lack of instancing forces the casual player out of the game on so many levels. If you have a guild that is casual and can only raid once a week, instancing provides the content for you and provides a way to progress if that is your desire. Groupwise it is much the same, have a limited amount of time to play? Instancing is very nice.

You can talk "what-ifs" all day long in providing content to replace instancing, but it's just a "what-if" and not based on what's actually available. Oh and what is available is PoR, and that non-instanced expansion makes DoN, LDoN and even GoD look like home-runs.

If you do not intend to play and merely want to socialize, you don't need EQ, you need a chatroom.

Some of us want to both socialize AND play the game.

Lastly, his ideas on permanent death are just flat out ridiculous. MMO immersion != throw-away characters.

Sorry fella, Everquest meets Counter-Strike isn't the key to success. While you were typing out your thesis, you missed Planetside...Big hit? Not so much. Some of us kind of like investing in our characters for the long-haul.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Bartle is a supposed MMO founder, yet he's stuck sniping at today's games via two-bit websites instead of working on successful MMOs himself.

Loral, make your own statements. Some of us like YOUR take on the game, not links and comments to someone with really innane opinions.

Bartle can stick to text-muds, he clearly doesn't have a clue about today's MMOs.

Oh and if the Firiona Vie (RP) server has the most stable population, also consider that it probably only loses out to the PVP server in LEAST amount of players...If the RPG aspect of the game were sooooo popular, that server would be overflowing.

Most of us aren't interested. We roleplay by immersing ourselves in the game by playing our characters, killing dragons, etc. Not by talking funny, dissing dark elves, and refusing to group with ogres.

Don't like it? That's fine, more power to ya, but the facts say you are in the minority.

Comment Posted by: Tuppet on October 18, 2006 10:52 AM

um... the Bartle article is dated, July 2003. =(

Comment Posted by: Tuppet on October 18, 2006 10:57 AM

"Yes, I'm breaking two of the things I discussed in the article, instant travel and instanced content, but getting out of the LFG window and into a physical gathering location seems a lot better than another UI window."

In WoW, you talk to an NPC to enter the battleground queue. Is this more of what you're after, rather than using a LFG window?

Comment Posted by: Talaen on October 18, 2006 11:08 AM

Actually I think that Bartle has a very good point when it comes to voice, albeit from a point of view that most players don't think from. Simply put, voice chat is dragging the real world into the game world in a way that is immersion-breaking for many players, for one reason or another. I don't agree with everything he says, but I do agree with his premise, which is that requiring voice chat for normal play in these games is a bad idea.

Consider the casual player who has a wife and kids at home, and has to go afk every so often to deal with them, and is often only half able to watch the screen - enough to be able to play, but not enough to really be able to talk a whole lot. A requirement for voice chat would be a game killer for this person, because there's simply no way for them to use it without shutting out the rest of their environment.

From my experience leading raids in all three of the big fantasy MMORPGs, using voice chat is actually a crutch (I'm sure many people will take issue with me saying this). Short-term, yes, it enhances response time and your raid works better as a team, but over time it leads to people becoming reliant on it and actually paying less attention to what's going on around them, because they expect someone else to notice it and say something. You can achieve the same benefits without using voice chat simply by putting together a good raiding group and raiding together on a regular basis. The only time I advocate using voice chat in an MMORPG is in the very few games where you physically cannot type and play at the same time - such as spaceflight in Star Wars: Galaxies, for example, where most players have their hands on a stick rather than the keyboard.

As a social tool voice chat is going to be hit or miss. There are just as many people that think it's the best thing since sliced bread as there are people who really would rather not use it, because their home environment isn't right for it, or just because of personal preference. I think it would be interesting to see how the Asian market uses voice chat, since MMORPG play over there takes place more often in cybercafes as a communal experience rather than at home as a private experience.

Comment Posted by: Talaen on October 18, 2006 11:10 AM

To get back on topic, I think WoW finally went with the LFG window because the meeting stones just flat didn't work. I have to say, of every game I've played, I prefer EQ1's LFG window, where I can add a note saying what I'm after. Sure it's a little /ooc, but it's better than getting 9 billion tells for groups for things other than what I want to accomplish for myself.

Comment Posted by: Gyo on October 18, 2006 11:45 AM

Talaen, you are getting caught up in Bartle's blinders and you don't realize it.

It's very narrow to consider voice from the 'immersion' aspect alone. You have to take into account the social aspect.

That social aspect is 'getting to know the person behind the toon'. Fan Faires are popular. Real-life guild get togethers happen all the time. EQ doesn't just bring people together in-game alone.

I say voice allows for far more socializing than text does.

MANY of us like to get to know the person behind the character and actually /gasp TALK with that person (people) while playing.

The part that both you and Bartle miss is that neither EQ nor WoW require voice, yet voice is immensely popular.

Again, I don't think it's a coincidence that Bartle doesn't work for a successful MMO.

Hell, it's not surprising that he doesn't appear to have done anything since text based muds...I'd be willing to bet he doesn't even like the idea of a 3D based MMO.

Bartle can keep his little dark room with his text only game and talk to no one. I'll continue to enjoy playing EQ and talking to my friends.

Comment Posted by: Talaen on October 18, 2006 12:25 PM

Actually, I've got no problem at all with having voice chat as an option for players to socialize and get to know each other - just like there's an /ooc channel in most games.

My problem is with requiring it. There are a lot of people who are unable or unwilling to participate in voice chat for a variety of reasons. Are these people then to be excluded from the game/guild/group?

I've seen voice chat used in EVE Online as an excuse not to have to type. I literally had other players say to me, "I don't want to type, so if you can't be in our teamspeak server, you can't be in our group".

That has nothing to do with socializing and everything to do with playing the game.

Other than that, I have no problems with voice chat - heck, I even went and bought a new headset the other day so that it would be easier for me to talk in ventrilo with some of my EQ2 guildmates (though they don't know it yet).

Comment Posted by: wiggles on October 18, 2006 12:32 PM

MMO's are graphical chat programs that give you something to look at/do while chatting. I still remember in March 1999 playing EQ and someone telling me I didn't speak (type actually) like a wood elf. I'm still boggled by that to this day.

Anyway, everyone gets a first time with these things where everything is new and wonderful. Then you "grow up" and fall in line with the adults. Kind of like graduating and joining the workforce.
The shine comes off and you're min/maxing, only joining perfect groups, getting asap to max level and "raiding".

I remember reading a thread on the Vanguard forums where someone laid out their plan for his guild to reach the top level as fast as possible and begin raiding. He saw no reason to even bother with the mid-level multi-group content being created because better gear would drop from the top encounters. I don't think he's alone in this menality and the game isn't even out yet!

Are Massive Online Games Getting Worse? Yeah, unfortunately. Still doesn't mean you can't have some fun in them but they aren't getting better that's for sure.

ps. "these games will get generally more accessible in order to appeal to a wider audience" is in fact 'dumbing down'.

Comment Posted by: Talaen on October 18, 2006 12:34 PM

To add: The reason I say I agree with Bartle's premise that voice chat is a bad idea right now, is that I don't think players will effectively police themselves and be fair-minded about its application. In short, it will end up doing more harm than good. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's a great social tool, and everything to do with the fact that humans by nature are lazy, and what starts out as an enhancement and a nice-to-have becomes a requirement in order to play - eventually one that shuts out a portion of players.

Comment Posted by: Talaen on October 18, 2006 12:41 PM

Wiggles: There's a lot of players who would really like for the journey to matter as much as the destination. But there's just as many players who value the destination over the journey. The two philosophies will always be in conflict.

The way to minimize this conflict (you can never eliminate it, only minimize it) is to make sure that a game has multiple destinations that are all equally appealing. In other words, add breadth instead of depth (you still have to have depth though). Then it doesn't matter so much if a few people rush to the end of one path or another, because there are multiple paths to choose from, and so the net effect is that more people are doing more things anyway - which makes for a more immersive game world for everyone. The whole rushing to the end thing only becomes a problem when the average new player, through observing their peers, feels like that's the only, or the "right" way to play the game.

Comment Posted by: RosesAreRed on October 18, 2006 01:48 PM

Are MOGs getting worse?

They are certainly different and that's probably better AND worse.

I enjoyed the tale of the Befallen rescue. I'm sure many, if not all, of us have many similar tales of the kindness of strangers. And in the early days, when items poofed from a corpse after ... (I forget how many minutes but it wasn't very long if you had to journey across a continent or stumble around in a sewer to get your stuff back) ... it was very important to choose your friends carefully because you depended on each other for everything.

My first guild invite (and it was an RP guild) I said sure I'll join. What's a guild? Oh .. we are going to raid? Terrific! Exciting ! What's a raid? If you die in the raid we will bring a cleric to rez you. WOW! Awsome!! What's a rez? Is that cheating?

It's good fun to remember our adventures, mistakes, victories and the friends we made but I agree, there is no going back now. For one thing, players coming to EQ from other games will make comparisons. We had nothing to compare EQ with. We (and I include the devs) all learned together.

I also like the idea of a LFG Tavern (zone).. it would be less bland than the LFG window and could be off POK - handy to the Bazaar and the Guild Lobby - so long as it was large enough to support a crowd and LOOKED like a tavern (unlike the old casino idea in Shadowhaven which was reached via a narrow stair case and included a couple of bedrooms in addition to the cramped gaming room).

The Guild Halls are popular gathering places but only include guildies so there isn't opportunity there to meet & hook up with new players - unlike the old favorites of the Nexus/East Common Tunnel/Wayfarer Camps/Windmill in LOIO/Dock in Oasis/Bank in FV etc.

Comment Posted by: Swyyw on October 18, 2006 01:54 PM

There was one thing about Ultima Online that was totally awesome, and that was the ability to write books. Not only write books, but put them in the world. Need a guild charter? write it down on a parchment and put it in your guild hall (and lock it down so people can read but not pick it up).
I think this is a fine example of how a game feature allows the players to find creative uses for it. Since then though (and the 2nd gen of mmo's), the emphasis seems to be put on a more controlled and clear game experience. Long gone is the time when you were set free in Norrath, without any directions other than finding your guildmaster.
Of course, the interface changes are made for the convenience of the players. The chat channels were most welcome for guilds raiding the same zone, as there was no need anymore to use /ooc and /shout to communicate in a raid.

But I think that this interface thing is a component in a broader trend. A trend of going away from MUDs as an inspiration, and getting more aspects of single-player role-playing games into the MMO genre.
Like single-player RPGs, the new MMORPGs offer a more directed and less confusing (for new players) experience, with a tutorial, a quest journal, easy travel, more information given by the UI, etc. The players are also given everything to be more self reliant.
Which is good or bad, depending on your tastes, and your playing times. I'm myself completely solo allergic. I don't understand people who enjoy soloing in EQ, because I don't, but I understand it is a matter of taste. I do play actual solo (single-player) games, when I want to play alone.
Of course, soloing is something that has to be possible if you want your game to be open to a specific type of player, and it is justified in any MMORPG to be able to catch up with friends, for instance. But they could offer other mechanisms.
Anyway, I'm just rambling. Well to sum up my opinion, I think that playing MMORPGs gets pretty pointless, or at least, not really more fun than single-player games, when the game is not conceived as an immersive world with other people living in it, a sort of alternate reality, but as a solo game with some chatrooms and a few group opportunities. I think that you somewhat kill the first M of MMORPG if you offer a game completely gravitating around single-player and >> instanced << group content.

On the subject of all those things killing the sense of being part of a world, in a word, immersion, I'd say yes and no.
No, because I think that this is a natural trend as the population of EQ evolved. After all these years, people have their close circle of friends, or they private clique of bots, and they don't want/need to join pickup groups anymore. They also have seen everything in the world, so a journey through zones they know too well is just boring.
Yes, because I think that group instances and easy travel are encouraging this.
My point is, the immersion was wearing off by itself, and therefore the game was changed to accomodate what was becoming annoyances.
Too bad for new players, I suppose.

Did EQ feel more alive 6 years ago? absolutely. But I think the new MMO trends are only partly to blame. It's an old game, with veteran players who know every detail of how it works, there's no place for immersion anymore.

Comment Posted by: Treboc on October 18, 2006 03:10 PM

I've always viewed each change to EQ, be it bad or good (from my perspective) as something to adapt to. I believe that each tool or change in of itself is not positive nor negative but rather how you, and the player base affected by it, uses it. I use voice chat to a limited extent, as I find it does help with co-ordination, but that you usually have to have it just as controlled and disciplined as a text chat channel (expecially when raiding) for it to be of any real benefit. I do feel closer to some of the people that I Voice Chat with, but I believe its a tool and that it should be used for specific things. Each person will have a different use for it (some for raiding, some for chatting, etc.) but to make it mandatory when there is no need for it to be would not be a good thing.

Concerning Instanced content... I believe the DoD expansion has a nice mix of it. You have normal zones of various challange levels, a few exploration quests, and some nice mixture of lore related instanced missions. The problem I find though is that they made the instanced missions that gave far more superior rewards then the normal zones. Some were quite a bit tougher, and the rewards should be better. But to me the instanced missions should be more about unlocking raids, learning additional indepth lore, and discovery. The main standard zones should have been more to do with gear and exp rewards.

I believe everything should be in moderation in MMORPG's. Too much of one thing tends to do more harm them good. Too much instant travel harms just as much as too little.

Comment Posted by: Kyriaki on October 18, 2006 04:02 PM

The problem with Instancing to date is in it's limited format, to wit a given area (usually a dungeon) is created that physically seperates the people in that instance from the rest of the game world.

Instancing can have a much broader and more inclusive feater that still allows for the benefits of instancing (that of content devoid of competition) yet still keeps the players within the overall local community.

A new version of instancing should not be a wholly separate dungeon, but specific locked areas within the overall dungeon. The Hedge Maze in Plane of Nightmare is a fledgling example of this. The areas are seperate from everything else in the zone, yet still included within the zone. In a dungeon setting, you can have dozens of instances (halls, caverns, bunkers, etc) branching off from various areas of the main dungeon. These areas only give access to those who need to go there (quest, mission, etc.)

The content is still seperate, it is still mostly uncontested, yet does not remove that subset of players from the local community. You are still physically there with everyone else...just doing something very specific.

Imagine all the labyrinthine tunnels of Miragul's Menagerie snaking underneath/around Permafrost or miles of catacombs physically underneath Mistmoore Castle.

Comment Posted by: unknown_guild on October 18, 2006 06:58 PM

I'd mostly support Synthalis' view. Well expressed and showing a long term view of this game genre.

If you know a little about Bartle, then you'll know his "Players Who Suit MUDS" work.

In a basic sense I'd suggest that MMO's are moving more toward the 'active' end of his graph. That less and less is being done to facilitate the socialising and exploring of the game, more for PKing and achieving.

It's entirely fair to say that an MMORPG has less to appeal to the mass market than other MMO genres . We really have to be clear that just because a game contains elements of Tolkien-esque fantasy, or simulated dice rolling, that does not make it a roleplaying game. This includes many of the single player 'RPG' genre games as defined by magazine reviewers and games marketing staff over the years . Defined as such because the game mechanics were based on pen and paper D&D mechanics, not through any inherent roleplaying aspect.

MUDs however are an arena for roleplaying and as such Bartle's comments are valid. He's talking about persistant virtual worlds, social interaction and immersion.

Early EQ was an extension of the graphical MUD. Today's MMO offerings are less and less so.

We've experienced the advent of reduced travel times, addition of instances, tools which are bourne of the world of computer interfaces rather than of narrative discourse, etc. And what we essentially have is a multiplayer game which gains its title of 'Massive' from the fact that the 'lobby' whereby teams or groups are formed is subsumed into the game world, rather than sitting outside it in an abstracted environment.

Not to mention that by providing the facility for shorter, rewarding, in-game experiences the market has opened to more and more players who take a smaller 'bite' of the proverbial pie. Which is great for a subscription based business, but terrible for the concept of persistence.

MMOAG (Adventure Games) is what I would suggest modern 'MMORPG's have become. Log on, attend a self-contained event (or string of self-contained events), then log off again.

It's not really that MMOGs are getting worse at all. It's just that people are playing MMOFPS or MMOAG instead of RPGs.

Persistence, continuity and environmental immersion have been eschewed in favour of mass market appeal and bite sized chucks of content.

Though frankly, who can blame the video game companies for doing so? How many of them still cater for the platform game market on the PC? The endevour has to make financial sense after all.

Moorgard makes some interesting points, but I'd suggest that it's less about desiring the 'good old days' of obfuscated commands and poor interface design ('Inmates Are Running The Asylum' style). It's really about playing a different genre of game, albeit one that retains the tag of 'massively multiplayer online'.

- After re-reading the previous poster's comments I suppose most of this in support of what Swyyw submitted too (but heck, I'm going to hit post anyway) -

Comment Posted by: sabrexlanys on October 18, 2006 07:37 PM

I found voice chat in DDO more immersive rather than less. Sure you aint RPing but having a rogue yell "Trap..Trap..Trap" just before stumbling into a head chopping blade communicated both the info and the emotion was fantastic. However Team speak raiding where the chat is either for simple commands or general trivia to pass the boredom is not enhancing of the experience. My view is voice chat makes good content better and bad content worse.

Comment Posted by: Loral on October 18, 2006 07:59 PM

I was worried that writing the article the way I did implied I had a clear point of view in one direction or the other. I don't. I see both sides of the debate about instancing and voice.

Just recently I joined a guild that uses Ventrillo to communicate in groups and raids. I found myself having a lot of fun and feeling a lot closer to the other players than I did just in text.

Except I didn't feel like Loral the high elf cleric. I felt like Mike, the thirty something techie.

There are some direct and practical reasons why voice is bad. You can't hide your sex at all. You often can't change your age or what part of the world you're from. All of the ability to buffer yourself from your character begin to disappear. Roleplaying seems a lot more silly in voice than it does in text.

Still, it is very convenient and I find myself having a lot of fun with voice. Something is gained by its use but something is also lost and these losses should always be considered as new features are added. I'm glad EQ doesn't include voice from the onset. I'm sure Xbox Live games will almost always include it and no one will have a choice.

I like the idea of persistant books and I wish there were such things in EQ. I hate most of the UI windows in EQ simply because there is no real in-game metaphor for them. There is one I like a lot, however, and thats the new T-King style spellbook. It looks and acts like a real book and as far as I know, it is the only interface that makes sense.

If I had one point to make it would be that all MMOs spend more time consolidating and simplifying the UIs and more time putting emmersive features into the game.

Comment Posted by: xsi on October 18, 2006 09:06 PM

I hate voice chat in its current state. I find that it ends up being incredibly divisive, where those who lack headphones and microphones or are simply more comfortable typing end up left out in the cold, because the majority of the dialogue ends up being voice-only.

If they could devise an intelligent means to automate voice-to-text and text-to-voice, I'd be fine with it... it's the divisive nature of the current implementation that I dislike. (Incidentally, I'd probably pick from a list of 'canned voices' for the text-to-voice setup too to try and match the character I was using)

As far as the rest of the article... it's hard to say. I do feel that much of EQ after the half-finished Luclin has felt like a game instead of a world to me, and that at least some of that likely comes from innovations and tools that break the immersion even as they are making it easier for me to get to the action. However, as a casual player who plays for a few hours one or two times a week, I cannot really afford to spend half of that time travelling to the content. Similarly, going from static zone to static zone looking for something that is not camped, only to have my play time ruined by someone with a bad attitude and too much free time is not fun. Instances are definitely better from a convenience and frustration factor, but maybe not from a memorable playtime perspective.

I've recently started wondering if my wife and I should simply look for a different experience... maybe sticking to non-MMO co-op RPGs or something. Maybe the genre itself needs to split along those lines... with games more explicitly targeting different playstyles?

Comment Posted by: concerned1 on October 19, 2006 03:25 AM

loral i was wondering what kind of guild did you recently join? a casual or high end raid type?

Comment Posted by: pondon on October 19, 2006 07:14 AM

Neither. He joined a family guild. All guilds in EQ are Family guilds (although each one thinks they are the only one to meet that criteria).

Comment Posted by: Loral on October 19, 2006 07:33 AM

I joined Vinceremo, the guild my wife joined about three months ago. They're a three-day-a-week raiding guild at the Anguish / Yar'Lir / Tunat level.

Comment Posted by: menleniel on October 19, 2006 12:27 PM

I can't deny voice chat has its uses. But it certainly lessen the immersiveness of the game for me. I"m lucky my guild makes it optional. I'd love to see it used for the raidleader to give instructions but the times I've used it it seems to be for general chat than anything else. No one seriously roleplays anymore but I don't need to know the rl names etc, of the people I play with. Enough of that comes out on the guild boards.

Comment Posted by: Coray on October 19, 2006 04:04 PM

I recently returned to playing EQ, and it's interesting to see how the game progressed.

I think making a game easy to play, does not preclude making the game a challenge.

A lot of the things you talk about or that people talk about as possibly dumbing down the game, really are things which make it easier to play. You often hear the stories of people with an hour to play, and it used to take that long to even get started, as there was no ease of play involved at all with EQ.

Blizzard struck an amazing balance between these two, you could just log on for an hour and get experience and feel like you did something and that it wasn't necessarily trivial, and at the same time, there were a lot of challenging areas, with commeasurate rewards.

EQ was always balanced towards the challenge direction, not because you had to travel, but because you had to group and go into a dungeon to level, and it was not as easy as say pulling singles all day long in an outdoor zone.

Unfortunately I think in many ways Sony has flopped the other direction with EQ and has in fact dumbed a lot of it down. The biggest offender I've found so far besides the lack of old type social dungeons, has got to be the monster missions.

I think even you Moorgard would admit it was dumbing down the game if you went through and played a Butcherblock monster mission. Literally it's like Sony said, if you can find two other random people of any level who will join you, and you invest 45 minutes of your time, we'll give you a lot of experience and even an item.

The problems are numerous here, first that you aren't really playing the game as it is. When I did this mission I ended up as a cleric and my mind was blown at my mana regen, I literally could not get under 90% when I tried. You can sit there and chain cast heals and never have to worry about it. Combine that with the fact you don't even have to play your class, you can get to 75 having never played your class as it really is!

If you die here, you don't need to be resurrected, as a cleric you don't even get that ability, because as part of this mission (maybe others I have no clue) you just respawn back at the zone with no experience loss or anything.

Finally the coup de grace of this idiocy is that this mission is so trivial that blindfolded monkeys could do it in their sleep. End result is even in the most horrible groups I can conjure up, we had to sit there for 25 minutes waiting for the mission to end.

There are people who grow up using this path of least resistance and end up higher level with absolutely no idea what the game is really like and unable to deal with it. Just yesterday we had a great group going and experience was great, but then I of course ended up killing two people which happens in real groups. One of them instantly suggested we go to butcherblock and do the monster mission. We all laughed at the idea and he ended up getting himself killed again soon after, and then opted to leave to do his cakewalk experience. Obviously in this isolated instance it's meaningless, the guy was dead weight but I see it all the time, virtually every group I've encountered.

Imagine telling someone that you could play a roleplaying game where you don't really even have to play your class, you can pick others out, where you had mana, but you don't really have to pay attention to it, you can cast whatever you want as many times as you want, and when you died you just respawned 30 seconds later about 100 feet away from where you died. At where at the end of an adventure like that you got a good amount of experience and an item, and they'd wonder what idiot came up with that.

And I too wonder that.

Comment Posted by: treboc on October 19, 2006 05:17 PM

Yes, monster missions are very different. The first batch of them from the DoD expansion were used heavily to farm levels and AA. What resulted was a very large amount of Low Level 70's. People that had the level but not the spells, gear, or experience to play that class. Which did more harm then good in my opinion. When the next expansion came out the Monster Missions in them had harder time limits, death limits, etc. Most were still pretty straight forward and rewarding.

They were designed to allow you to play with friends who were lower levels and for you to have a little fun factor (being able to play as Naggy for instance). And if you used them to gain AA's... and you didn't do them in moderation, they were pretty good.

I've used them to get specific drops for guild members (like the AC Augs). But I know people who play the same one over and over again for hours on end *shudder*

Comment Posted by: Anthy on October 20, 2006 12:59 PM

A lot of the 'improvements' to make a game easier to play are definitely as Bartle puts it 'short term good, long term bad'. Not all of them necessarily are, and it depends on the game as to what is good and bad for it.

As to the topic of the WoW LFG window, given the context of the game and the functionality it improves, that's an entirely positive change - and something that should have been in the game at launch. Given the nature of WoW, that isn't a detriment to the game either long-term or short-term. It makes finding and making groups easier, which allows groups to form between players that otherwise may not have grouped together. I, along with many others, won't stand around shouting for a group, I'll just go find something to do, limiting my exposure to other people to pretty much my guild and anyone else who is already my friend.

In another game, an LFG window may infact be detrimental. Old UO is a good example (Circa 1998 or so, before The Second Age). The atmosphere of the game was such that to talk to someone, you had to be in their physical presence. Finding someone often necessitated asking around to see if anyone had seen them recently, traveling to various locations they're known to hang out at. The small population (80,000 or so across 5 servers) at the time along with this served to make the game completely different from modern MMO's (or the UO of today, for that matter). The context of the game the feature is being introduced to is a very important part of determining whether or not the feature is truly good for the game or not.

The sad part is that almost every MMO seems to be aiming for huge megasuccess. Perhaps that's all there's room for, but I think there's plenty of room for the smaller MMO's that are profitable on a small scale, nowhere near WoW or even EverQuest, but with 100,000 or even 50,000 or less subscriptions. Features that are unpleasant to the masses would find excellent use in games that are designed to be smaller and need to worry only about keeping a small (in relative terms) number of players happy.

Muse Anthy Himemiya,
Bard of Azure Shadows,
Herald of Veeshan,
Dreadmistress of Lanys T`Vyl

-Do you honestly think that we believe ourselves evil? My friend, we seek only good. It's just that our definitions don't quite match.-
Ailanreanter

Comment Posted by: Redcloud on October 22, 2006 05:47 PM

Funny that you, of all people, would return to archaic, outdated, player level contact, rather than UIs and instances. What made you change your mind?

Clearly all the features you mentioned, asked and got were sterile from day one.

Comment Posted by: Sunshadow on October 23, 2006 02:53 AM

Instant travel via POK or spires has not really had the effect of reducing travel to group times in my experience. In my early days before Luclin there was a constant chain of Wizards and Druids porting around and one could get anywhere for about 20pp. The advantage with this is that the portal locations are usually a lot closer to where you actually want to be. However with Luclin there 2 classes where nerfed and in reality are now rare classes (especially Wizzy's). So now if I want to get to MPG, I have to run from DS or spam for a port or use GH.

The real change that effects travel times is the guild hall portal, which when you consider what it costs, would make it worthwhile for Wizzy's and Druids to be able to effectively offer their services instead.

From a purely imersion point of view, I find the POK books to be totally bogus. I would much prefer it if these were replaced by Gnomes like the boats. This at least is much more believible from a game point of view, especially if you had to pay a nominal fee for thr service.

As to voice in game, no way. My main is a female DE Necro and I like to tease the guys in my group just for personal giggles. That would be ruined by my thick male Aussie accent.

For me what I see as a with EQ an other is that the world doesn't change it just gets bigger. The bigger it gets the less contact with people you have. EQ currently has nearly 400 zones people can play in. Most of these zones are ghost towns which are rarely used but they do suck people out of the population. It also increases the need for instant travel as zone design now days is linear in that the hardest zones are multiple zones from the pok book in a straigh line. Imagine if you had to run from Frostcrypt to RSS. Yes it would take an hour or more. However if zones were designed more like The Broodlands where 1 zone is the hub this would be less of an issue.

Comment Posted by: Tuladen on October 23, 2006 12:54 PM

"Yes, a lot of players jumped over to the Progression servers to see EQ back the way it was back in the old days, and many of them came running back to the game we have today."

And many are still there, and many more are playing EQ again on these servers for the first time in years, and sometimes for the first time ever. Unless you have numbers to back it up these kind of comments frustrate me. I was done with EQ until these servers, and they still are captivating to me, and seem to have no shortage of players on them. You could be right, of course, but without any data it just sounds like you are emotionally biased against them.

Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on October 23, 2006 02:51 PM

Some may think its bad, but I think voice and game pads are the future. Actually, I imagine marvels of voice and Nintendo’s Wii’s possibilities.

With the Nintendo Wii you can wield the controller as if it was a magic wand or staff, or as if it was a sword or mace, with the attached “nun-chuck” used for movement. That level of interaction alone would add more to feeling in character for me than typing a few silly “Ye”s or “Thee”s

On the voice part, I tried my brother’s Xbox live once. I didn’t really played long with it but I toyed with the voice masking options. I managed to make my voice sound like a woman perfectly, to the point people would not believe I was a guy every time I told them, perhaps some experienced players may notice a stamp sound that would give me away, but certainly it would be more than enough to add role-play strength on to games. There were quiet a few voices, and I bet it would not be too hard to make “ogre like” voices and so on. An automated voice system may be able to detect if your voice is actually male or female and tweak it to the character’s appropriate race’s sex if so needed, so that a 12 year old girl will sound like an elder battle worn male dwarf without her having to select much other than the race and character sex.

I have still to try out the X360 but I cant imagine it getting any worse, needless to say I’m exited about the release of Phantasy Star Universe, not only it gives you voice chat via Live, but the character will move it’s lips and you will be able to control facial emotions while talking. Now if only they had the Wii’s controller…

Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on October 23, 2006 02:55 PM

>And many are still there, and many more are playing
>EQ again on these servers for the first time in
>years, and sometimes for the first time ever.

I don't see them opening a third server. Don’t take me wrong, I don’t mean there are not players that enjoy the server ideal, but truth is they are a very small minority. Yea they are enough to keep two servers running, but do you think they would be enough to support an entire MMO game's upkeep?

Comment Posted by: Phred on October 27, 2006 03:17 AM

People that slag off WoW's bird transportation system always leave out one crucial detail. That is that you have to journey to the location first on foot to be able to use it. Done at a low enough level that journey can be easily as fraught with peril as the journey from Qeynos to Freeport. And really, how many times do you really want to make that trip. Before they put books in I used to put my character on autorun all the way across the commonlands because it was damn boring. Birds still take time, unlike portal books in EQ, so the travel time is still there, just reduced considerably in time. Best travel system I think I could imagine for a game really. Forces you to explore to start with then let's you skip it before it get's tedious.

Comment Posted by: Stamp Mcfury on October 28, 2006 06:35 PM

I'll admit it one of the things I missed from EQ was sitting in Cazic Thule, how the hairs on my back would stand up when someone /y "Throne room train to zone!" Also having to negotiate how to share a spawn with another group.

However it is easy to forget the the druid would would train your party causing a wipe, or the player who was 20 levels higher that you coming in and kill stealing your named spawn, or the mage who would Kill steal from your party in Aviak Village.

I think we tend to look at those times like we rememise about our childhood. Alot of people who want to go back and re-live it. They tend to forget how how going to school, living under your parents rules, and yearning to grow up.

A LFG will be a good addition to WoW though, still a little out dated how many people still run pugs nowadays.

Comment Posted by: Arrogathor on October 30, 2006 02:08 PM

I am currently playing on the European server in EQ. I am a member of a tiny little guild that can never get a full group together, even when a guild activity is posted in the MOTD a week in advance. Most newly recruited members seem to spend most of their time crying about how their gear is not good enough. How did I get stuck in this mess?

Well, I got irritated with an officer in a raiding guild sufficiently to where I just would not log on and put up with the unpleasantness. After all, watching TV was more fun than that. No choice there. Does anyone really believe that putting up with incompetent silly people is what EQ is about or that 'uber' raid gear is worth the pain? I have been a supervizing NCO in charge of targeting nuclear weapons on nuclear submarines. Excuse me if being 'uber' in EQ is just not worth tolerating arrogance and incompetence in my 'superiors'.

So I played up a traderbot to lvl 15 on each server to see how fast I could do the newb armor quests and how cute the half elves could look in their newbie armor.

Then the Progression Servers opened and I played a female half-elf paladin up to lvl 45 or so, and she was always ranked in the top 8 or 10 pallys on The Sleeper whenever I checked the boards. But I was not in one of the two guilds that was the first to do the main raids and unlock the servers, so I just quit playing her. My original plan had been a gnome mage anyway, but Steamfont mountains was just too crowded to play in in the first days of the servers.

So I started a gnome mage on Antonious Bayle and someone started spamming the channel with invites to a guild. Promising it was a big and good guild. Lol, I thought, why not and I joined.

I like the leader, she has a big heart, and we play Drakkin we made together two or three days a week when her college schedule lets her play. My cleric and her ranger frequently ding the next level on the same kill. Something to do that is fun. Exploring the quests, killing the mobs, seeing the sights. Of course to avoid leveling problems separating you, you have to agree to only play those toons with each other. How hard is that? You can always play a different toon when the other is not on.

At other times I explore Serpents Spine with my lvl 69 mage, soloed him to 50 or so with no twinks but what I could self-twink him with. Never did MMs till lvl 66 or so. There are lots of things to do in EQ. You can always do a Dain, Dain 1 is fast, and gives good xp, and you get proud of your ability to play each of the characters well. Also, taking a toon from lvl 1 to whatever and doing it better than you did the first time is fun.

This morning I shrouded to a skeleton wizard to kill kobolds in Steamfont mountains. Why? To open my next undead shroud and farm steamfont spring water for my Gnome mage tradeskilling. I am not sure that there is any practical game use for unlocking all the shrouds but it is interesting and an hour or two gave me about 12% towards unlocking the next.

Then I did Dains till the server went down. You can always do quests. The rewards for quests in Goru Kar mesa are quite good for a non-twinked mage in a small guild. I am wearing almost entirely earthmelded gear in those slots it covers. The stats are poor but mana and hp regen are remarkable. SOE decided to make the game faster paced. It is mana and hp regen and his pet which make a mage in any case, not stats. Give me resists over stats any day. Int is easy to keep close to the cap for your level.

Of course, you can always tradeskill. I raised my tailoring to 131 after camping crystaline crawlers in crystal caverns for a day or two. Camping things myself, I actually made more than I spent. Had to do it for a quest I was working on.

I get tired of hearing peeps complain about not having uber gear. Not being able to solo. LoL, only necros and druids are 'supposed' to be able to solo.

I have been in three real raiding guilds, one of fun, one was not, and one was interesting. You should not judge yourself by what other people have or do. Just find some peeps to play with and play with them. When you are tired of silly people, do quests or tradeskills or something.

Uber high end raiders are frequently the worst and least competent players in the game. Either they are incapable of playing in a group at all, and inevitably turn any group into a mini-raid, feeling that adding 3 more peeps and going into raid mode and killing the xp for all involved is a good thing, or they are just incompetent at playing in a group at all. Their gear is so good that they have forgotten how to play well and just uber their way through all the mobs. Some of these people are friends of mine, but that doesn't change the fact that uber gear has made their play sloppy and incompetent.

This server is strange. The General channel is usually down or too full to be joined. About 20% of the people doing pickup groups which means generally one in each group seems to be working for a chinese company farming plats and equipment to sell on the internet. Loot stealing is commonplace and very widely practiced in zones like WoS before TSS came out. May be still, I have not been to WoS since TSS came out except to pass through it once to and MPG group.

The instanced server for this server was virtually broken recently. There would be a 30 minute or half an hour wait for any and all instanced zones, from your guild hall to DoN.

For many, Dain's are the only thing to do. You can always get a group. You get xp that is three or four times what you would get killing dark blues in a regular xp group in any other zone. Of course, as instanced zones like that suck people into them, you have fewer regular groups, and it is harder to get a regular group, and you are forced to do Dains to advance.

TSS is fun and quite scenic, but the lt blue mobs eat my lvl 66 air pet alive. They hit too hard and do too much dps. No light blue should kill a dark blue that easily. You can do a two or three hour camp on the gnolls in the Steppes and get almost the same xp you get from doing 1 Dain 1. In the same time you can get 4 times the xp doing dains, and in the Steppes you have peeps insisting that smudged runic parchments should be sold in the bazaar and split later, when, of course, it is a pickup group and you may well never see them later. Greed before need seems to be the motto of about 20% of the pickup players on this server.

All in all, I ended up here by accident. I have some friends and am having some fun, and will stay as long as that is true, but it seems a very strange and weird place to me. Still, I am not KSing, or whining about bad gear, instead every two or three days I find a new aug or a new quest with slightly better gear. I do tradeskills. I play with small groups of friends. I enjoy beating my previous timer score periodically when I do dains, and I am curious about the different shrouds. Lots of things to do and certainly not enough time to do them all.

Comment Posted by: boggle on October 30, 2006 05:06 PM

"Uber high end raiders are frequently the worst and least competent players in the game. Either they are incapable of playing in a group at all, and inevitably turn any group into a mini-raid, feeling that adding 3 more peeps and going into raid mode and killing the xp for all involved is a good thing, or they are just incompetent at playing in a group at all. Their gear is so good that they have forgotten how to play well and just uber their way through all the mobs. Some of these people are friends of mine, but that doesn't change the fact that uber gear has made their play sloppy and incompetent."

This makes me laugh.

Comment Posted by: Skuz Bukit on October 30, 2006 07:57 PM

"Uber high end raiders are frequently the worst and least competent players in the game. Either they are incapable of playing in a group at all, and inevitably turn any group into a mini-raid, feeling that adding 3 more peeps and going into raid mode and killing the xp for all involved is a good thing, or they are just incompetent at playing in a group at all. Their gear is so good that they have forgotten how to play well and just uber their way through all the mobs. Some of these people are friends of mine, but that doesn't change the fact that uber gear has made their play sloppy and incompetent."

You're grouping with the wrong "Uber high-end raiders" then, whilst in any guild there are inevitably a few players that are lazy, or sloppy, there has to be a majority of good players or else they would simply not progress, whilst it is true the Raidleader will instruct them in what is needed to be done, he cannot micro-manage every individual about every detail their class is involved in.

I'll send you this invitiation, I play on the Antonius Bayle server, & I am an "Uber high-end raider" invite me to your group on a fri/sat & I'll show you just how incompetant & lacking in group skills I am.

Comment Posted by: Softcore Nonraider on November 1, 2006 07:26 AM

Skuz Bukit wrote:

"You're grouping with the wrong "Uber high-end raiders" then, whilst in any guild there are inevitably a few players that are lazy, or sloppy, there has to be a majority of good players or else they would simply not progress, whilst it is true the Raidleader will instruct them in what is needed to be done, he cannot micro-manage every individual about every detail their class is involved in."

Unfortunately we only have the uber high end raiders to tell us that they wouldn't be progressing if the majority of their zerg^H^H^H raid wouldn't be very skilled.

It is possible that with skills being sloppy their ability to self-reflect has also gone down.

Comment Posted by: lord hauser on November 1, 2006 12:48 PM

Actually,eq instance zones at times can be harmfull if its in too high quantities.

Remember ldon? it was the worse piece of crap ever to be made.The exp and loot for a ldon was ridiculous and pointless.

Don at least has a good reward sistem and has better exp.

As for group zones,i think the way to solve the problem is we need a bit of everything.

Some instanced zones
Some Zones to group in
Places to solo for those casual players
Raids for guilds to go to wich don't require hardcore raid guilds.
Very hardcore raids for Diehard players so they can go.

Don't you see people? if you have too much instanced zones,it can be bad sometimes cause some instanced groups take longer unless its a god because god doesn't have a timer.You can just play inside a god zone forever and not have to worry.

I remember when ldon came out,if i was lucky i could get 3 groups a day.I worked till 7:30pm on mondays and tuesdays and got home at around 8:pm and might have been finished taking a bath or a shower by 8:15.

Now if you spend 45 minutes every time you wait for a group only to get a group wich fails then wait another 45 minutes for a stupid instanced,it turns out as a waste of time.

As for transports.

Too many stones can be bad,cause in truth it makes people too lazy to help out some people and they just say,go to port here and run there and do that.
In one case:You have a corpserun in a zone wich is unportable and 2-3 clerics are in the same zone 1 arriving to a group 2 wich are grouped already.

You will find that most of the time they are too lazy to rez you and will ask you to go to the guild lobby and summon your corpse by paying 170pp each time.

If you calculate the cost,it would come out to be expensive if it was alot of times and you would be seriously pissed that sometimes people were too lazy to help out a person.

Guildlobby made people get too lazy.

One of the main issues before port stones was greed.You would find many people who were greedy and wanted to hurt the eq population by taxing them at high prices for a port to your destination.

The middle ground should be:not too many ports but not too little.

Comment Posted by: lord hauser on November 1, 2006 12:57 PM

I remembered another thing,quests and spells are suposed to be for all players,not just the ebayers and hardcore raiders.

I've found 2 expansions of eq to be ineficient in ways wich they shouldn't be.

OOW(Omens Of War)the spells of level 68-67 were sold for 5-15k per spell,66 Spells at time have sold up to 25k per spell.
The kills sometimes were ridiculous because you would find some people who only wanted the runes to sell them,and not for spells.And Worse of all it only dropped off named wich most of the time was unsoloable and required a group.
I think spells should be bought by npcs at a fixed price instead of being sold by greedy players who want to get rich by ripping off players.

The main problem with availability of stuff was mostly with the expansions:Omens Of War and Planes Of Power.

Comment Posted by: Sunshadow on November 1, 2006 04:37 PM

After playing TSS for a few weeks, I must say the idea of a quest has definately degraded into simple tasks for the most part except for one or two. This has created a mentallity of knock over the easy ones and leave the harder ones. Since the easy ones give out rewards disproportionate to the effort required. Are these rewards/incentives to buy the new expansion, maybe! or are they designed to cater to the percieved Mass Market desires?

Comment Posted by: Skuz Bukit on November 2, 2006 06:21 PM

"Unfortunately we only have the uber high end raiders to tell us that they wouldn't be progressing if the majority of their zerg^H^H^H raid wouldn't be very skilled."

"Zerg" raiding all but died with PoP, modern raid encounters in eq are incrementally more complex, with many different facets to each, these days it is hard to say one encounter is like another, though each may share an element or two of another raid, & the way recent encounters are designed means pretty much everyone has to be 100% on the ball.

Comment Posted by: Horzek on November 2, 2006 11:52 PM

I wondered how the game would go once TSS was out and players had some new challanges. It has been a few weeks now and most of my raiding guild has worked thier way up to level 75. Unfortunately I am not one of them although I did squeek up to 74 some how. The reason that I have not made level 75 is because I despise level grinding. At one time I didnt mind but the longer I play the more tedious it gets to the point I would rather do about anything else.

What I find has come to me in EQ now is just the level grinding I despise and added to that a level of tedium I had not previously known. My guild worked very hard to get into Demi Plane and now I find that I really dont care for the zone at all. Why did I put all that time and trouble into something that in the end is also very tedious and largely annoying.

I think it is time I posted a reminder, especially to the folks at EQ / SOE to get their resume's up to date. I am hearing that players are leaving EQ in droves now and I sure see why. Each time I log into the game I find myself getting angry and frustrated. Why for example does a mob have to chase you to hell and back? Cant they just let creatures stop chasing you and go back to thier spawn points after a fair chase? I really like the way that is handled in WoW these days.

The whole death thing still stinks to high heaven. I would glady place my clicker in my back pack and let it rust if I didnt have to go back to the lobby each time I died in an unpleasant place. Once again I believe the WoW gang got it right. I do give some credit to the EQ folks for improving things as far as deaths are concerned. In raids I dont mind ressing up but when Im just trying to get to an encounter with my friends I dont have all night to mess around dieing and running from see invisible mobs.

I believe at least with spells a great leap forward has been made. Not all the spells are worth much but at least I could go get them all right away once the expansion came out. I look back at the Depths of Darkhollow spells and to this day I have not gotten a single cleric spell from that expansion. They were far too hard to get and not one for my class was nearly worth the trouble in my opinion. Class defining spells have been so hard to get for so long I had to wonder if they would ever make them reasonable. Now, I actually have most all the spells for all my past 5 levels although the ones in my backpack for when I hit level 75 are going to gather a fair amount of dust before they get memmed up.

What I am finding is that EQ has just gotten too tedious to play. When I played WoW I was doing quests left and right and it was a major part of my game play. When I played EQ I was avoiding quests for the most part becasue they tended to be a giant pain to do and the rewards usually stunk to high heavens. I grant you there were a few rewards that were very outstanding but when time versus rewards were considered I would liken EQ quest rewards to a person who starts a job flipping hambergers and expects to someday be the CEO of McDonalds.

For my gaming doller I want something I can get in and play for an hour or two and get out. I dont mind the raiding environment so much now that I have put some serious time into that avenue as well but it just has to be balanced. I do have a life outside the gaming and there are other things I want to be able to do. Yes, I expect to have my cake and be able to eat some too.

I go back to Lorals basic premis for this article, Are Massive Online Games Getting Worse? My answer as far as EQ goes is a resounding YES. To be fair though, I tried several other online games and none has held my so tightly as EQ has. I know they all "borrow" from one another hoping to creat what we think of as the " Next Big Thing" and once in a while many of them get something right. Far too often though they manage to get it completely wrong. Good examples are SWG which when it came to tedium got so bad I was only able to tolerate the game for a few short months.

I dont propose any answers to this at all. I know what is not fun though and I also know that as my gaming experiences expand there are some things I refuse to tolerate any longer. I will not tolerate having to kill 6 million wart hogs in order to collect enough chin hairs to sew together a fancy custom wart hog cape.

While IM now looking carefully for that NBT in gaming I guess I can catch up on my other projects. House painting and fixup will no longer have to be put off for years while I wait for a certain dragon to spawn and thousands of other equally deserving clerics to stand in line for their shot at that epic weapon.

Comment Posted by: Newtubbe/Kristaa of Xev on November 3, 2006 04:53 AM

I miss the days in EQ where you would mash your sense heading button hoping to get the right direction and plot your course on a printed map from eqatlas.com.

The fun of a good old fashioned corpse run... I have played since 2000 and the game is just to easy now.

When is the last time you ran to your destination in EQ? heh try it one day. dont take the stone. try a luclin nexus. or just run. There are places out there that very few that still play have seen and still remember.

Comment Posted by: Miriamele/Briony on November 3, 2006 01:58 PM

In regards to the LFG tool in WoW -- the thing is, Blizzard TRIED something different before. Meeting Stones. You click a stone, the games puts a party together for you. The thing is, no one really used the stones. People like having the ability to pick and choose who they group with. So after trying something new, they are going back to the tried and true method established by EQ long ago.

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