This is the boat I'm in. I'd love to see a game like EQ again. But I'm also very realistic, knowing I'll never play that game for any long length of time due to time. Plus, I just don't have that kind of patience anymore. I don't think it's a reach that a good majority are like me, especially on this forum. The second obstacle this game is going to have is everyone has an idea of what defines 'hardcore' and believe it or not, those ideas are not the same. Everyone has this romanticized idea of what Everquest was but I think it varies greatly depending on who you ask.
I don't think anyone wants all of EQ's time intensity back. WoW made some good changes to the industry, the problem is that many of the changes seemed to become forces of nature and went entirely too far, eventually causing problems of their own. I don't think it would be productive for Brad or the designers here to say "everything that's happened in terms of time investment reduction since 99 has been terrible"--in fact, it would be as unproductive as the recent MMO genre throwing every old "hardcore" system under the bus in the rush to make everything more time accessible.
I think there is a decent middle ground between where the genre is today and where it was during EQ. My sweet spot would shade between VG and WoW vanilla. The main thing though is that the industry, I think, needs to be far less afraid of asking for more time than it currently is. During the "evolution" from EQ, sure, time accessibility was paramount--the problem is, time investment has been reduced and made immensely more fungible through
everyiteration since then, and we've long since passed the point where it's healthy. At this point, a lot of the changes seem destructive to the core of what makes an MMO. But again, I don't think a total dial back to EQ is in the best interest of anyone. There are whole, huge, shades of time intensity between McWoWPanda, Vanilla WoW and EQ--and exploring them should be the goal.
In my opinion though? The focus on time difficulty as being the depth gauge of how "accessible" your MMO is, has really had a lot of adverse effects on design lately. And beyond what most people suspect, I think. One example is that time difficulty was replaced by reaction/twitch difficulty in a lot of areas. So there was less down time and trash clearing time, but far more difficulty on each boss, which is evident by just the variable creep in scripted encounters (which was needed to defend against extremely fast content consumption). And on the surface this seems great--but does that really make your game more accessible after a certain point? When I was running a guild in WoW, I had to cut dozens of good people because they simply were not "skilled" enough to processes all the reactions in some of the more complex fights. These same people could have easily devoted more time to the game, but more skill was something that had a relatively hard cap on it. I mean, what's easier to ask for..."He bud, you need to get another level to make this fight easier" Or "Hey you really need to watch those 8 void zones while completing your 9 million button rotation better and memorizing the phaser beam patterns directed at your balls."
I think, in some ways, MMO's that ask for more "time" based difficulty, or "strategic" difficulty (Like building up abilities, AA's, levels ect for an encounter--rather than just practicing on the encounter)--might find that, up to a certain point, it makes them more accessible overall than a lot of modern MMO's. For a great many people, defeating a mega boss by putting in some extra farming or leveling or even trash clearing, might be a lot easier than learning how to dodge 300 million pools of fire while ducking under ice comets--even if farming/leveling is more time intensive overall. (And it would probably feel a lot better for the players to put in work at defeating a harder encounter, rather than having a switch which activates ultimate pussy mode so they can beat it while breathing through their mouth, which is how WoW currently "fixes" this connundrum of skill/tactical learning vs strategic/preperation time.)
Again though, it's all a balance. Right now, it just seems so skewed in the direction of time conservation that increasing time required, while reducing things like twitch difficulty, might just help MORE people play. But that doesn't mean you want to go all the way back and recopy every problem EQ had. Rather, you want to take a different arpoach to fixing it, maybe find some middle ground between Mcdungeons and 10 hour raids. That's what I'm hoping for, anyway.
