/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.8468579]

What went wrong?

[Anonymous No.8468620]

>>8468579
As bizarre as it sounds now, the developers thought of it as a sandbox style game (before we had such catagories) where you're just supposed to fuck around, try shit, talk to random strangers, then reroll a new character when you get bored
When the game design became completely taken over by tryhard raidfags in PoP, that was the beginning of the end

[Anonymous No.8468758]

>>8468579
Luclin graphics and PoP flagging/railroading. Perfect how it is, turbo neckbeard raid scene aside, Vanilla through Velious.

[Anonymous No.8468786]

>>8468579
Anarchy Online was better

[Anonymous No.8468795]

>>8468620
>>8468758
This, people started taking it too seriously and you couldn't have fun anymore. As more MMOs started to arise, one could simply go eslewhere.

[Anonymous No.8468797]

>>8468620
I would love to go back to the days of just talking to randos while killing stuff with no real direction in the game. I feel P99 is full of try hards and retail is to different for me.

[Anonymous No.8468849]

>>8468620
This is what I liked about old Tibia. Sure there was always power levellers and good items to hunt but alot of the time people just made their own fun role-playing and messing around

[Anonymous No.8468892]

>>8468620
Funnily enough WoW also started as the sort of game where raiding wasn't really expected of everyone but it ended up the core focus because of the faggot playerbase.

This is why MMORPGs should be games where getting to the level cap takes forever. People can't get autistic about endgame if they're too busy leveling up and having fun.

>>8468797
I think it just tends to happen that once people know the game you can't really go back (even if you don't know it). The way they play it has changed and that affects your experience.

[Anonymous No.8468905]

>>8468892
>This is why MMORPGs should be games where getting to the level cap takes forever. People can't get autistic about endgame if they're too busy leveling up and having fun.

OSRS disproves this

[Anonymous No.8468931]

>>8468905
It's funny to think that Runescape was designed not even expecting people to ever reach 99 in a skill in mind, and now people grind for the fucking EXP cap for no reason, and then when they hit the exp cap they just make a new character and do it again, all while never interacting with other players or the world around them (99 is almost exactly 13m exp, and the exp cap is fucking 200m)

I have no idea what's wrong with people who play Runescape like that. I used to think the game was fun but that's like half the playerbase now.

[Anonymous No.8468960]

>>8468905
>>8468931
It's a game made for chinese bots.

[Anonymous No.8470969]

Played it when I was in middle school, I was a gay monk lol. Met a cop on there, told me he he played so much he could have gotten $15,000 in overtime pay instead of playing.

[Anonymous No.8471020]

I'll confess: the cover girl made me coom buckets. I even purchased the extension in which she was captured by a lizard man just so I could coom some more.
I didn't even like the game, UO was better.

[Anonymous No.8471796]

>>8470969
>told me he he played so much he could have gotten $15,000 in overtime pay instead of playing.

Yeah that checks out. Evercrack ruined peoples lives back then.

[Anonymous No.8471846]

The rise and fall of the MMO genre is a fascinating case study in human nature. We can never have nice things, because there are just too many autistic tryhard faggots who will inevitably warp the meta and spoil the fun for everyone else.

Early MMOs were all like this- Great when they were new, they were this interesting online social phenomena where everything was unique and exciting and there was fun to be had just exploring and making friends. Then they inevitably descended into what we have today, where it's all just about min/max autism or eRPing in /w and no inbetween. There was no way of stopping it.

It's sad but that's exactly why real life is the kind of mess it is.

[Anonymous No.8471915]

raids and raiders ruined mmos

[Anonymous No.8471931]

>>8471915
>4chan before Chanology ruined MMOs.
Not so fast.

[Anonymous No.8471938]

>>8471915
Correct. I was so pissed off when they added raiding to OSRS. It's like that shit is the only content anyone can ever come up with for a multiplayer game.

[Anonymous No.8471985]

>>8468579
Sony sold the studio.

[Anonymous No.8472000]

>>8468892
WoW outright hired raidfags from top EQ guilds to design content for the game based on proto eceleb bullshit and nepotism even back in vanilla. They brought that shit upon themselves and I have no idea what they were thinking.

>>8471846
I remember doing FFXI in the early 2000s when that dropped, and people would immediately worship some bizarre fantasy version of a meta based entirely on hearsay and belief rather than hard data. It didn't take long for people to go "WTF THIS JOB SUCKS! NEVER INVITE <x job> TO YOUR PARTY THEY'RE GARBAGE" based on nothing. It was min/max autism without any actual numbers, just people posting highest burst damage numbers on forums without context and using that to judge others.

[Anonymous No.8472017]

>>8468579
Nothing, it was extremely successful.

[Anonymous No.8472036]

>>8468797
This is how most of my low level groups work, get to the camp and its either nostalgia or general chat. Blue is sorta dead, but Green can let you relive the old life, if only for a bit (the closer you get to 60 the more tryhard things actually are).

[Anonymous No.8472227]

>>8471020
UO was the best game ever

[Anonymous No.8472402]

>>8472000
>t didn't take long for people to go "WTF THIS JOB SUCKS! NEVER INVITE <x job> TO YOUR PARTY THEY'RE GARBAGE" based on nothing. It was min/max autism without any actual numbers, just people posting highest burst damage numbers on forums without context and using that to judge others.
I remember shit like that happening in so many different games back then and it was all hearsay because theorycrafting and minmaxing based on facts was barely a thing. It's funny how easily people grasped onto some random views of a game. With these classic versions of more and more games happening it's been interesting to see a bunch of those old myths get debunked. Even WoW that had a huge active pserver community had a bunch of shit debunked and reinvented when Classic came out. All the pserver communities kept believing on the old "meta" and never experimented enough to figure out how wrong they were. Same shit happened with TBC classic but I'm getting offtopic here.

Maybe slightly more on topic I feel like the old experiences provided by old MMORPGs are being overtaken by games like Rust, Ark, Conan Exiles, Valheim and Wurm Unlimited. The idea that you can host a server for a relatively small group of players and play the way you like while providing a lot of those old gameplay loops it's like as close as you're going to get to those old experiences because you can play without minmaxing faggots on your server. While I wish we could return to the glory days of MMORPGs I just don't think that's happening and maybe this is an acceptable alternative. I sure had a blast playing Valheim with friends and it evoked a lot of those exploration feels I got from old MMORPGs.

[Anonymous No.8472446]

>>8468620
Close, but incorrect due to seething jealousy. What actually went wrong with EQ:
1. Expanding too fast (after kunark and maybe velious. The OG game did run out of content for the player base)
2. Expanding outward for fast cash instead of cultivating the world holistically for the long haul
3. Designating a crowd control class/role
4. Luclin models

But the final bullet to the head was Plane of Knowledge. That's the part of PoP that killed EQ, not the raiding.

[Anonymous No.8473129]

Offtopic, but what do you guys think about Asheron's Call?

[Anonymous No.8473246]

>>8473129
I think of it as an MMO I never played because I didn't hear about it until after my friends and I were already addicted to Everquest.

[Anonymous No.8473384]

>>8472402
>Even WoW that had a huge active pserver community had a bunch of shit debunked and reinvented when Classic came out. All the pserver communities kept believing on the old "meta" and never experimented enough to figure out how wrong they were. Same shit happened with TBC classic but I'm getting offtopic here.
the WoW classic stuff was funny to me because i had a friend who would never shut up about how hardcore vanilla WoW was so i can only imagine his disappointment when things didn't turn out to be the ballbusting experience he remembered.

like hearing about how people were literally breezing through the endgame of classic with less than half of the required party size within weeks of the game going live is pretty hilarious.

[Anonymous No.8473737]

>>8468620
how was PoP any more raid centric than Velious?

[Anonymous No.8473746]

>raiders ruined EQ
Haha, you guys must've never got past level 20. Entire game was a shitshow. So fun putting your name on a list to get invited to a frenzied ghoul group that was never actually going to invite you because the camp was controlled 24/7 by a single guild/RMT group and the "list" only existed to satisfy the play nice policy which actively prevented you from just bringing your own group in and stomping them in a dps race.

[Anonymous No.8473750]

>>8471915
No, they didn't.
>>8471846
The problem with MMOs is not the try-hards "warping the meta." It's everyone else getting bored and quitting because the gameplay itself isn't fun anymore (read: was never really that fun in the first place but you didn't notice because you were addicted to the social elements.. This is especially true with Everquest, where all the worst parts of the meta were caused by the game itself.

Everquest gameplay is padded to the absolute extreme and has been since the very beginning. Everything takes forever. Combat is insanely repetitive. If you are in an xp group and are one of the 5 people who aren't the puller, your job is absolute monotony. And even then, there's a good chance even pulling is boring because you're just sitting at the zone wall of an outdoor area. This is not caused by "try-hards" this is caused by EQ's extremely unforgiving combat design coupled with harsh punishments for failure. Dungeon crawling is more exciting yes but that's not saying much. Dungeon crawls still usually devolve into extreme monotony unless someone fucks up.

>Then they inevitably descended into what we have today
Yes, but it's not because of there are "too many try-hard faggots" it's because those are the only people left after the novelty wore off and the bulk of people moved on to games that weren't so insanely tedious. The real fascinating "human behavior" phenomenon is how long it took for this to happen and how many people stayed addicted to chasing the rewards.

[Anonymous No.8474029]

>>8473384
In his defense I can say it was more difficult back then but for factors like people having shit tier PCs and internet connections and the game being in an earlier patch with a lot worse class talents and skills but mainly it was that nobody knew how to play, how the bosses worked and people just all around sucked. Like people are just on average better at games today because the way people play has changed. WoW itself was never difficult.

Though arguably mmorpgs probably shouldn't be difficult in that sort of skill execution way. IMO it was always better when the difficult part was the time investment and effort spent in your character and all the knowledge you had of the game world.

[Anonymous No.8474031]

>>8474029
In infrastructure was worse too. No easy voice communications or uder-friendly social platforms to help people get organised or know what is going on.

[Anonymous No.8474045]

>>8474029
It's less about skill execution than knowing what to do under pressure.

[Anonymous No.8474302]

>>8474029
>IMO it was always better when the difficult part was the time investment
i feel like it depends on how much of a time investment for me.

a large reason why i prefer more "casual" focused MMOs is because the more "hardcore" ones felt like working a 9 to 5 job that you had to pay for the privilege to work at.

[Anonymous No.8474468]

>>8474031
Yeah that's true too. We did use ventrilo in the early 2000s and I think teamspeak was around then but getting people to use that shit and getting them to configure it right was a nightmare. I remember making a step-by-step guide picture because my friends and guildies were too stupid for it. The absolute shit tier quality of microphones people had didn't help.

Discord is an absolute game changer too. Guilds used to have websites and forums and irc channels and you'd actually login into the fucking game to see what's going on. The sort of raid-logging that was so prominent in WoW Classic wasn't much of a thing back then. People played to socialize. Like >>8473750 points out most mmorpgs are kinda shit as games. I think there was something special about the mindless farming of monsters that games like Ragnarok Online had and the party elements of many games were cool even if they often ended up with a "puller meta" like EQ. It really was the social elements in the early era of internet that made them great.

>>8474045
But when those under pressure moments only happens when someone fucks up it's not really a great way to make a game difficult. Sure its cool as hell to survive from a major fuckup but it's not really a thing you can design around.

>>8474302
Does it only feel like a 9 to 5 job because you feel like you're expected to be at the level cap instead of casually playing an amount of time that's more appropriate to you? These older mmorpgs weren't designed with the expectation of everyone reaching level cap so it taking a long time to level isn't necessarily hardcore. It's just a difference in how the game divides its content and time spent.

Where it gets tedious for me is when some leveling spot is so much better than the rest that you end up spending a huge amount of time grinding in that one spot. It's up to the developer to provide enough variety of content so that the player doesn't get bored because of the slower pace.