I wonder how you guys did it in the past ...

[Lokked]

Multibocks, I get it. EQ's questing system was ahead of its time and didn't have access to the proper technology to make it work (Natural Language Processing). That technology still isn't developed enough for use in games. Luckily on my bard I did not have to partake in any of that crap until I did my Epic.

Up until recently, Planeshift (Free, open-sourced MMO developed by a community made up of Randoms - http://www.planeshift.it/) used this exact same sort of word-search questing system, until the most recent patch when it was removed, due to user complaints. They used a NLP Engine, but it was community designed and not very good.

A person could go on and on about how tough things used to be in MMOs. EQ for example:
10% of your level's worth of XP loss on death, to the point where you can Delevel.
30min - 1hour Corpse Retrieval runs, gear stays on corpse when you die, gear was everything.
Class imbalance to the extreme. Some classes couldn't solo effectively past lvl 20. Almost no classes could solo anything that gave XP at the higher levels.
No Life-bars, no Target Indicator (if you are taking damage, you are the target), No Numerical Indications on anything.

When you think about the way things are progressing, the question I have is When will developers stop making things easier? How much further along this path can they go?

I think its just like using Game Genie The game was entertaining before, but you pop in the Game Genie, Cheat, and then the game's entertainment value lasts for about 10 more minutes before dieing completely.

[lacitpo]

Maybe I can add to this nostalgiafest

• Playing a Night Elf Hunter, thinking I was unique in planning to be a "damage dealing machine"
• Not knowing I could get a pet until about lvl 25 as a hunter and it taking almost 2 hours to hoof it back to the starting zone to do the quest
• Installing Cosmos UI without any understanding of what addons did and how to use them
• Addons that would walk your character from one zone to another for you
• Addons that could handle conditional statements in combat meaning you could create a single button that was more efficient at DPSing than a human player ever could be as long as you mashed the hell out of it.
• Raiding MC with absolutely no clue what I was doing. Basically just point and shoot with little to no strategy
• Tier 0 and 0.5 gear and working so hard to get it.
• Being so proud when I saved the 1000 gold to buy my epic mount.
• Using feign death and goblin jumper cables to save the raid from a wipe many many times.
• Having to read quest text to figure out where to go to do quests.
• The ability to scale any hill or mountain side in the game via glitches in the textures.

Vanilla wow was the most fun for me, but I think that is the same way you remember things better than they actually were. The game as it stands today is the best it's ever been IMHO. I long to return to the vanilla days when druids, paladins, priests, and shamans had to heal in raids or stay at home, warriors were the only viable endgame tanks and raiding was something you replaced your girlfriend or wife with.

But those days weren't that great. The game was just exciting and new to me and I didn't have a yardstick to measure it with. Now I see the major improvements with every class having 3 viable specs, and the content being more accessible.