Is the Game Dying already?

Chalybos · May 2014

It's easy to burn out. I went all FPS for about half of a year the first time I walked away from MMO's. Needed a break. Of course that was after a couple years of EQ and maybe 6 years of EQ2, plus a few (ha!) other games thrown in.

What makes this deceptive is the megaserver thing, as pointed out already. Is there room for improvement? Always. Are there issues? Yes. Did a boatload of players leave when their month was up? Of course - they always do.

People speak fondly of EQ. So do I. But that game was 99.98% grind. I committed genocide on goblins. And giants? I can still hear their groans as they drop. The past is always rosier than the present.

I do miss corpse runs, though.

Cogo · May 2014

Ahh, the hours! Almost DAYS camping "sage" in Lower guk just to get that awesome int hat!

And in the start of EQ, there where no euro servers, so I was in an american guild. Raids started 23:00 euro time and ended 05:00 euro time.

I still recall waking up in plane of hate, drooling at the keyboard with the whole raid gone and pissed at me, lol.

What I miss the most from EQ, was the system of "dying". Loosing exp so you even can delevel. And loosing so much it could be a whole days work of exp.

You paid that cleric who had the biggest res spell quite a lot to res you.
Or later, paying the necro so he could summon your corpse that was loooong down in a dungeon.

I wish more MMOs had a bigger pentalty for dying, so they would do everything in their power not to die. NO ONE in EQ ever did less then their best to stay alive. Or in dungeons, even sacrificed themselves so the cleric could live and res everyone.

Trains in Karnor castle anyone?

Reyeme · June 2014

To be honest people are already bored and it's not just the lack of content which is the problem. The problem I think can be broken down into four areas:-

1. PvP/Cyrodil
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PvP is boring to say the least, you've got two real choices - zergs (which now give hardly any points) or small gang fights (which are harder to form and usually involve you running into a zerg after a few good fights). Added to that the PvP armor is beyond a joke to grind up (100k per item for the basic vet 1 stuff/600k per piece of vet 10 stuff).

2. Questing/Leveling
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Zones are boring, quests get quite similar and it's very easy to miss a few which if done in a few zones means you could be trying to do the last fight as low as 44/45. Added to that the vet levels put Aion to shame in terms of grind, taking over a zone after the first vet rank to gain the next one, don't know what they were thinking with that one, the only place people seem to like that level of grind is Korea!

3. No Team Tools
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By this I'm referring to things like the raid window in WoW which tells you things about the character allows you to group characters together, mass invites and the like. There are none in this game, there is also not much to help you find a group apart from spamming chat (which a lot of people turn off) or being lucky enough to get into an active guild.

4. Lack of Group PvE Content
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I'm referring here to lack of group quests as part of the main quest lines, the over-abundance of public dungeons and the lack of instanced group dungeons. Seriously the first two M's in MMO stand for massively multiplayer so wouldn't it be a good move to ensure there is plenty of meaningful multiplayer content to encourage people to group up and quest together? The whole reason WoW raiding worked was you had to grind through 5 man dungeons first, then the smaller 10 man raids, then you'd have the skill and gear requirements for a 'real' raid. There is none of this kind of progression in TES online and for one thing it puts off hardcore oriented players like myself who really keep the game going by giving more casual players something to aspire to be like.

In conclusion this game could have been great, in fact the first 17 levels available for the BETA were great and very well tuned by the time it hit retail, it's just a shame they didn't let us play more so we could have pointed out what was wrong. I doubt there would have been many positive points about the end game in it's current shape but would have given you the opportunity to resolve this without alienating your player base. Harsh as it sounds this will be f2p within the next six months, just as EA failed with SWTOR, Zeni have done a similar thing with TES Online.