Why EQ1 was better then WoW - Fear.

[Mosg2]

My memories coincide pretty strongly with Malgor. I get choked up just thinking about all the friends I made and the sense of wonder I found in EQ.

[Khatovar]

I don't go in for nostalgia. I can go on and on about the Reedshark that ate me so many times that I rerolled, or that time I took the random portal to VoD and got wasted by a swarm of Banderlings, or those Hollow Olthoi that came out of nowhere and melted my face everytime I tried to get into the guild house. But it's obviously not that great if we're all talking about the good ol' days in games that still exist but we don't play.

Fact of the matter is, It sucked spending half an hour buffing. It sucked having to waste an entire pack's worth of space to carry Death Items so that when you DID die out in the middle of nowhere, you didn't drop all the crap you were wearing. It sucked having a death penalty and no longer meeting the requirements for your gear, so you had to go out there far less powerful, in substandard gear, with no buffs and a Vitae Penalty to face a mob that just kicked your ass in hopes of getting your stuff back.

I had plenty of "fear" situations in WoW. Especially in Vanilla when I was using a druid to heal my husband's shaman "tank." Or when we went in to the newly released WSG in our handful of blues and faced the Helmet Crew, the #1 progression guild on our server. Ahh, those were the days. Back when druids were only resto and only for Innvervate. The real healing was left to priests. The real tanking was left to warriors. The real DPS was left to mages and rogues. If you were real nice, they would let you raid with them. If they were real desparate, they'd let you run a 5man with them.

[katsurahama]

I forgot all about the death items.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Some valid points. Mostly nostalgia. My EQ Ranger had 168 days played before I quit the ever crack. However compared to other games. EQ1 was just mean and brutal. Having a mob jump out and loose hours of time is not fun. Loosing a corpse and all the gear that took the last 2 years to acquire is not fun. Non instanced dungeons that had each mob camped regardless if it dropped gear or not is not fun. Dying and loosing 10% of your xp that you spent the last 2 hours getting, not fun. You dont have 1000aa points so you cant join the raid is not fun.

Level 15 in Oasis and hearing the stomp of a Sand Giant was scary. Getting 1 shot by anything 10 levels higher than you was scary. The quest system while flawed was very cool. Having to talk to npc's and figure out key words was cool. Learning to keybind auto attack off of the A key was fun. Nothing like typing out "hail" and the merchant one punches you in the face, when press the 'A' key.

Wasn't it Kunark or the one after that had the sleeper zone boss and once he was killed he never spawned again? Ahh the good old days.


Im enjoying wow far more than I ever did eq. I like that it doesnt require 40h a week. It used to, but im glad blizzard changed it to the more casual scene it is today. Also I get to enjoy and see the game, something I never got to do in EQ because It took 2 hours to run from Qeynos to Freeport, then another 30 min to get to Unrest.

[Tonuss]

Wasn't it Kunark or the one after that had the sleeper zone boss and once he was killed he never spawned again? Ahh the good old days.

That was The Sleeper's Tomb, added with the Velious expansion. There was a super-duper ultimate dragon who was imprisoned and kept in some sort of stasis by four warders. If you managed to kill all four warders, the Sleeper would be awakened. He would pretty much stomp a mudhole in everyone's ass, then begin a short event where he went through several zones and stomped additional mudholes along the way. Eventually he would despawn and both he and the warders would never spawn again.

Waking the Sleeper was a way for progressed guilds to grief the guilds that were behind them, as the warders dropped some very awesome weapons and items. A top guild could farm the warders for gear (always leaving one up until the next reset) and once they had what they wanted they could release the sleeper and the option to gear up was lost for anyone else. It's possible that they changed this, I recall hearing about some servers where SOE reset the zone after the Sleeper was released.

***

I'll say again-- EQ punished players. Everything was time-consuming, everything seemed difficult to do without a decent group. A lot of my nostalgia for EQ comes from the fact that it was my first MMORPG and everything seemed so big and scary and utterly wonderful. The game could be exciting, and also nerve-wracking. Because it was so punishing, you really felt good when you accomplished something. Being called a "good player" meant something.

I remember that my friends and I were exploring Paludal Caverns, which were pretty empty at the time (this was before players realized how extremely high the exp bonus was, after which every last inch of the zone became perma-camped). We took a wrong turn and scattered as the mobs killed us, and then we had to try a corpse run. I was particularly worried because I had put all of my money (a whopping 54 plat!) on my character and I stood to lose some cool items and all of that money, which really was a lot of money at the time, at least for me. Well, we died a few times trying to find our corpses, which just made the anxiety worse. All I know is that when I finally got to my corpse, looted my items and cash, and got out alive, it was an incredible adrenaline rush. That is what EQ did to you.

WOW changed a lot of things for the better. Traveling in EQ meant that you might spend 30-40 minutes (or more!) just getting to your destination. Sorry, but that's just goddamn retarded. WOW's current system of insta-ports to every location does ruin the immersion somewhat, but it's way better than waiting on a dock for 10-20 minutes, then sitting on a boat for 15-20 minutes, then running for 10-15 minutes, and praying that you don't die the whole while. And if you forgot to bind nearby and died...

EQ was an amazing game. WOW is better. Not in every way, but WOW doesn't grab you by the collar and punch you in the face until you're spitting up teeth. EQ did that to you, and for some reason we loved them for it.

[Mosg2]

Nothing in WoW has ever felt as magical as the time I played EQ. Starting with PoP the game lost some of its luster for me so I moved on. WoW is better than post-PoP EQ for me but nothing has compared to that first year/year and a half when everything was new. I still remember my first 30 hour binge for raiding Hate--I was the guild Monk. Fun times!

The fear thing is pretty significant. The consequences in WoW feel so unthreatening that they're laughable.

[Fat Tire]

I look back with the same fondness for certain things in wow as I do EQ. I miss the crossroads raids, the TM/SS battles and in general the smaller world instead of the huge monster azeroth has become. One thing I will always miss and look back on with great fondness is doing the quest line for the Lok'delar, Stave of the Ancient Keepers. To me that was an epic journey worthy of anything in EQ.

[Toned]

I miss the free $$ from selling plat after EQ was on it's way down.

What I miss most is the bard class.... Tone Deaf was my toon for years along with many others (when I left the game I was 18boxing).

[Fat Tire]

I miss the free $$ from selling plat after EQ was on it's way down.

No different than it is now with wow.....

[Toned]

No different than it is now with wow.....

You don't seem to understand... The time vrs reward of WoW Gold is no where near worth it.

Blizz actively checks for hacking (warping, duping items, etc etc... all things possible in EQ)... Sony took years to finally start detecting people.

Having full groups on multiple servers farming millions of plat a week was thousands of dollars a month.
Completely automated. I only did this because EQ was getting bored and I needed something new. I still like WoW and have a reason to play it the Risk vrs the reward in WoW is not worth it at all.

Anyways im pretty sure this is against forum rules so I'll stop talking about this subject. If this post gets Moded I understand.