I remember playing an MMO that didn't have quests.
So do I, was the best mmo I ever played too.
Have the days of the Epic Questline disappeared from MMO's?
- Thread starter Newbie007
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So do I, was the best mmo I ever played too.
To date C'Thun is probably one of my favourite boss kills, when that guy died I swear I had heart pulpertations
We only ever killed him once! The lasers and tentacles just seemed too much to get everyone to do properly at once. It was so frustrating - most attempts someone would **** up right near the start and things would fall apart rapidly. The one time we killed him, everyone lived. Everyone except me
I keeled over in the stomach about 5 seconds before he went down!!! Grrr, but yes C'Thun was my second most memorable kill.My other memorable moments are more social: an early raid to Crossroads via Theramore when our max level was about 22. Jeez it took so long to get through duskwallow marsh with crocs munching level 12s for snacks
Or our regular fishing competition and fancy dress party (a way of getting people together to fish up Stonefish), or level one races where we each had to make a new level one on a random server one evening and then get from say Stormwind to Theramore before anyone else (no help allowed obviously, much drinking and merriment on Vent)I miss the slower pace of Vanilla WoW actually. In a dungeon party now, it's such a manic clickfest chainpull speedrun that you don't get the chance to chat and laugh with people. And much as the dungeon finder made it easier to do multiple runs in dungeons, it utterly destroyed the social aspect of building a group. It was fun to get a good group together, and if you could all play and had fun together you would do several dungeons or do some quests together, even if it was nothing to do with your own advancement. Yeah, that's what i really miss, the fun of building a group with maybe one mate and 3 randoms, until you get a nice tight group together and then spend the evening together playing the game. I haven't felt that in WoW in years!!
I'm currently juggling it at all atm, MoP will give me the chance to get out of the hardcore scene though.
I remember helping the person on my old server do parts of the quest back in vanilla wow. He use to spend about 10 hours per day grinding the mobs for rep to get to friendly so he could continue with the quest.
Back when that quest started it had some really hard requirements. It started with the head of the broodlord, which meant that you had to do well in blackwing lair (2nd boss was very hard to get right pre AQ40 loot) and ended up getting items from ragnaros, nefarian and numerous custom made elite mobs dotted around the world.
Was a good quest to be a part of, even in such a small way. Can't imagine doing it myself though.
I'm not sure people would accept the early days of EVE nowadays, at least not on a large scale. It was buggy, time consuming (travel without autopilot, having to close 10-12km every gate) but, it worked for a number of people. Content was minimal, but players make most of the content in the game and that drove it's success.
It's a fascinating model, one that clearly works for CCP financially and works for the playerbase. I fired up a trial account the other day and was amazed at the concurrent users, 36k I believe. I remember the landmark announcements of 10k, 11k etc. 36k is a hell of an achievement for a single server enviroment (in simple terms at least) and only strengthens the community feel to it.
In my opinion this is the next step already; 36,000 people on one server is something all developers should strive for. Yes EVE's solar systems are somewhat limited, suffer from lag when big fleet fights take place (used to crash at what, 500 players?) but the community is there, in one place, in one world. Whether it is techincally possible now, I haven't the faintest idea, but one of SW:TOR's biggest failings was their need to instance and limit an already small server population.
CCP have been succesful on their own terms, they've not made 100s of millions like WoW does, but they have taken a small slice of the mmo market, made it their own and have gradually improved it over a long period of time and, most importantly, grown their playerbase overtime.
So to get to my point, I think there is a market for mmo's to have the epic quest, the epic feel, but WoW has soaked up so much time from people over the last few years, we are all a bit worn out.
Developers need to bring something new to the table (not just story, but that is a step in the right direction) - GW2 promises a lot, Planetside 2 touts 1000 v 1000 v 1000 player battles and I do have hopes for Titan. Blizzard will have learnt a lot from their days with WoW, have new technology at their disposal and could make something new and exciting.
Make it massive, in fact make it fappin huge and make it bloody multiplayer.
I didn't start playing EQ until the launch of the UK server Venril Sarthir in 2002, before that I was messing around in E&B
Hardest element of the line for me was Chardock strangely enough.The quests I remember more fondly are the ones that you are able to level with, Coldain is a perfect example, you start the line when you were 30ish, and kept coming back periodically until you could do the last element at 60 with a raid group.
Didn't/Don't the majority of WoW 'legendary' quest items required a raid group to start with (apart from the ICC 5 man drop in LK), including the latest rogue daggers? I've stopped playing so have no idea on what is required for the daggers quest chain tbh.
2 million subs since Cata launched, 20% of the population lost through one expansion. 100,000 last quarter despite everything they threw at the playerbase? Guaranteed D3 access, shiny mount in the bargain, biggest content patch of the expac..yes I would say they are haemorrhaging subs. ..Cataclysm is an apt name.
The Multiplayer element of modern MMO's is disappearing for me, the genre is becoming more and more single player with a smattering of coming together as it were.
I agree that MMO's have been made easier for the majority of the playerbase to have access to all aspects of the game, what I don't agree with is the way in which they have handled it. Instead of 'dumbing down' Raid encounters why can't they keep Raids 'harder' and introduce epic questlines for those that don't/can't raid so the non raider has something to do and has access to comparable loot?
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sadly thanks to a lot of kids or grownups who act like kids crying and shouting at the devs "i want it easy or i dont play WAAAAAAAAA" the days of the epic quest lines are behind us.
However a significant number of those are in Asia where Cata isn't even out. It means they are tired of WotLK. I know a few people like myself didn’t stay in Cata for long but they had already given up by then an only came back for the months around launch.
People would still play Eve if it was new.
Eve is such a harsh game most casual's don't stay around long, CCP won't pander to them.
Eve to me is where all the casual's go to die. Then crawl back to wow because they have no ship.
Well the way subs are counted in china/asia is dodgy to say the least anway.....1 person, 8 toons =8 subs
Spent two weeks preparing, arranging meets with guild mates, getting potions and other stuff for the hunter bow/staff quest line @ level 60 in WoW. Immense sense of accomplishment once I got the stuff.
What I think back then that made it way cooler was the lack of wowhead-type proper databases with perfect instructions for everything, and the only way to really find out how to do the encounters was asking other people who had done them.
What I think back then that made it way cooler was the lack of wowhead-type proper databases with perfect instructions for everything, and the only way to really find out how to do the encounters was asking other people who had done them.
Its all about access.
There are still large scale, epic/legendary quests even in the latest expansion of wow and similar to the old epic quests of Everquest unless you are in the right sort of guild, without the right sort of support your chances of completing the quests are close to zero.
It is also worth noting that in the original incarnation the final step of the Water sprinkler was quite a toughie, the final stage was simplified twice.
Originally the creature you needed to kill was dragon being on a 3-7ish day competitive spawn in the back end of a high level dungeon. So either you needed scouts in the dungeon to see if the mob was up and when it spawned call your guild in (if it was within your "prime" time), or you needed to camp at the spawn loc with support to keep everything clear and hold the spot. Remember this was a competitive spawn in an open dungeon. 24hours a day, mobs spawning every 20 mins or so to relieve the boredom.
Servers were world wide, so euro off time was generally either west coast US and the Hong Kong. Server and guild relations were key to either an orderly queue (a list) or KS'ing, "training" and lag inducing madness.
This sort of final step of a quest induced all kinds of drama, little of which was epic.
Myself, having completed this quest after they had "dumbed" it down once, so now the final creature spawned in an open zone (skyfire), rather than Sol B, after a 6 day 14 hour camp, yes it felt good. More so because so many people helped, stopped by and chatted and helped pass the time, mostly though I felt tired and very shortly after I went to sleep...
The quests have not been dumbed down, far from it, the legendaries in WoW for example require friends/community/guild to get together do something epic and it takes a while to achieve.
What has changed is access and definitely player expectation, not everything needs to be epic, you don't for example generally have a Sunday roast every day, but you do like to eat. Players want to log on and play, be doing something meaningful within 5 minutes, the "McDonalds" MMOs... which is why everything is metric'd and marketed and pyschanalysed.. it is less like play and more like psychology of play.
Whichever way, you certainly don't need to have to camp Ragefire for 6 days only for him to spawn at 2am on a tuesday morning, all your guild mates to be asleep and then have to watch as <Stars> come in and trounce your camp...
But hey we stole their mod rods at Kael, so honors even
(not checked for spelling, missing words, or grammar)
Hmm someone else is ex-Tide on here then
While I enjoyed the process, my biggest memory of getting my EQ Wizard Epic and helping guildmates was one mostly of camping in expectation of a spawn and monitoring spawn timings that we had locked down like a hawk. I must have killed every Phinny spawn every 12 hours for 6 weeks solid before I got that damned Blue Crystal staff, only to have the quest gnome eat all 4 staffs in one go...
Coldain was epic with the ring event and Vex Thal key was just a very long process. I enjoyed the Sleepers Tomb keying process as there was a decent balance between demand and availability.
It was fun playing spotter and racing other guilds to contested named mobs, locking a spawn to our timezone it certainly made the rewards and effort all the sweeter.
Would I go back there now? Hell no, my wife would kill me.
Coldain was epic with the ring event and Vex Thal key was just a very long process. I enjoyed the Sleepers Tomb keying process as there was a decent balance between demand and availability.
It was fun playing spotter and racing other guilds to contested named mobs, locking a spawn to our timezone it certainly made the rewards and effort all the sweeter.
Would I go back there now? Hell no, my wife would kill me.
I think many of us who started playing MMOs in our teens ~10 years ago, are now at a stage in life whereby we can't dedicate the time that we used to. There are games out there that cater to the hardcore market and its no coincidence that they have no player base.
People with a massive amount of time to dedicate to MMOs are in the majority these days and majority rules; especially when they are the ones with the money.
People with a massive amount of time to dedicate to MMOs are in the majority these days and majority rules; especially when they are the ones with the money.
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Gone unfortunately, or at least on the level that they were in stuff like EverQuest. I spent sooooo long completing my Druid epic that when I finally got it, it was a proper sense of accomplishment... which might be quite sad as it's a game, but I don't care 
Epic questline fave: Star Wars Galaxies, doing my Knight trials. Epic, epic quest line, I think I got attacked by more Bounty Hunters doing that questline than I did in my whole time as a "visible" Jedi. Doing the Bull Rancor trial alone I lost 2 AV-21s and about 4 Swoops, damn ****s shooting my speeder first! Loved it
wow certainly took the community and ripped it out of mmos
i dont remember any mmo in the last 5 or so years having any kind of community spirit like the old days, you used to be able to make almost life long friends in mmos aswel these days everyone prefers to solo or stick to whatever guild they are in