EQ Never

Dragoon_sl said:

Instancing kills any community. Why do you kids champion this HORRIBLE game design tactic?

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I agree, it's tacky and I hate it.

As soon as I started hearing about EQ2 releasing with Commonlands_2 and Commonlands_3 etc.. my interest plummeted. As far as I'm concerned, instancing is completely unnecessary. If Vanguard did one thing right, it was to prove to the world that you can get by without it. If each race has its own starting area (and it should), then it wont be overcrowded, even in the first weeks. If the zone is like WoW with linear on-rails hub to hub gameplay, then it could still be an issue. But EQ was never like that, you had a huge forest to randomly explore so people just spread out all over the place. Vanguard used the same principle more or less and it worked perfectly.

I remember recently playing it, and with all the new F2P players, some of them were asking if the dungeons were instanced and if not, how could that even work. I explained to them in chat that there was no instancing, and the caves actually existed in the same world we are in right now. In fact when you are running through a forest, there's a chance that under the ground where you stand, is a huge dungeon with players in it. People thought it was very cool, and it is.

Soygen_sl said:

GoD did far more damage to EQ than OoW.

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It was PoP that made me quit. I never liked the super serious big guild and raid related focus. I also didn't like SOE's expansion policy in general.

Soygen_sl said:

Indeed. Instancing is completely unnecessary when you have 86 people playing your game.

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Hur hur hur. It was full during beta and early release, and it may only have one server now, but that's full too. You can clearly see how the world works just fine with thousands of people and yet no instancing.

Soygen_sl said:

Yeah, PoP was probably disappointing if you didn't raid. I was very active in end-game EQ, so I really liked that expansion

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The problem for me is that the population was always at the end of the game, so the expansion packs were always playing catch up. In the weeks before the release of a new expansion, a lot of the hardcore players (which was a large percentage of the game), were twiddling their thumbs just waiting for the expansion to arrive. On release day, the entire world emptied and everyone went to the new promised land in search of the phattest loots and best exp.

I hated that because I wasn't in a big guild so we were always still working through old content and the whole thing became obsolete and we all felt like we were playing alone in the kiddy pool. But we got by, we teamed up with other smaller guilds to become big enough to succeed in Kunark and then Velious. But when PoP came along, the entire thing was just tuned for the big uber guilds, all the smaller guilds just got screwed by it. Half the people I knew, quit within weeks of it. All the lone ranger type players and supremo quad kiting wizzy/druids just had nothing to do and quit. All the small guilds ended up completely pointless, and most of their players had to go through that difficult conversation with their e-friends about how I am going to miss you guys but I really want to join X BIG GUILD because I want to see the new content, etc.

It sucked. But even worse, was how they *forced* everyone to buy the expansions, by making all the previous content obsolete and withholding things like extra bank slots or whatever. It's hard not to do that with higher level stuff, but they could have at least attempted to scale things more gently instead of just adding +100 to all the stats, and they should have left some of the older world zones as hot spots for XP, rather than just purposely making everything a ghost town except their new product that was a must-have for everyone.