Both

What about Ultima Online? It wasn't nerfed down or put in to easy mode until well after its popularity peaked.

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SageGaspar

I think devs don't go after the "hardcore" money because everyone has a different definition of hardcore and they're all fuckin' impossible to please. Do you go for the couple hundred thousand that will show up, play around with the dressing room, poke around the zones, solo for a while, do some groups, do some quests, and log off at the end of a couple hours having enjoyed themselves... or do you go for the couple thousand that'll spend ten pages writing essays disagreeing with each other on a finer point of a finer point of the game?

EQ2 is sorta a potpourri of things for all sorts of playstyles and players. There's lots of stuff to solo, easy and challenging group zones, easy raids for guilds that wanna get a big group of players together and try something new, more challenging raids for them to progress to, Claymore for those of us that enjoy long timesink quests, a bunch of HQs and old familiar locations for nostalgia... and the player that likes screwing around with everything will enjoy themselves and never run out of crap to do.

Meanwhile if you talk to the hardcore solo guy that wants to solo their way from 1-70 doing nothing but interesting content they bitch about lack of reward: solo is the most challenging playstyle because you don't have five or god forbid 23 other people backing you up!!!

If you talk to the hardcore group guy you'll get bitching about how much content is locked away in raids and how it's not fair that you have to raid to finish up this questline... pssh it's not like they're hard anyway, I've been on one of them once in EQ1 and everyone was just autoattacking through the MA.

For the hardcore casual guy (the dude that apparently never has more than 15 minutes to play but a post count in the billions), Gfay being fifteen minutes from KoS by foot is a deal breaker.

To the hardcore raid guy everything's too easy, classes are worthless if you don't want them in your optimal 24 man raid, and every overpowered item destroys the delicate balance that the fabric of the universe rests upon. The hardcore camping/grinding guy thinks everything is "dumbed down" since it doesn't take a huge time investment.

Ya they will try to throw in cool items with interesting procs, hard raid zones, balancing stuff: it doesn't hurt and that's probably the more fun stuff for someone designing encounters or items. But if there's mainstream content that is not fun for the majority I'd expect it to get changed. In six months to a year when VG begins to emerge from post-release alpha I imagine they'll be hoping on it to suck up the subscribership for the people that want timesinks and contested everything. That seems to be the whole SoE strategy, diversify on their station pass to attract as many people as possible under their flagship.

Malachani

Vanguard is being dumbed down by the minute. The once-time consuming travel has been negated to almost nothing by a port system and purchasable 10-minute duration flying mounts. The Grind exp has been cut in half, and then cut again by another 1/3. The contested are a yawnfest of nothing but autoattack for 10 minutes and it dies.

It will never be what Brad promised.

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Windraa

Never trust the words of a madman

RadarX

UO was a pioneer MMO also remember. Would it have been as popular if there was....any competition? I can remember when UO was the only game in town like that. Even EQ1 had little in the way of competition.

It's a much more competative and larger market now. It's really hard to compare.

SageGaspar

The level grind is easy, but it is packed chock full of faction grinds, item grinds, quest grinds, all sorts of grinds, contested for your pleasure. My guildie has been camping a level 20 crafting manual for over 32 hours real life time now, the PH spawn is a half hour, the named pops less often than the PH, and the named has two or three items on the loot table it apparently drops much much more frequently than the crafting manual. There's a cleric that logs in on the hour or so to check if the PH is up... and we've been there on and off for two or three weeks now.

The higher level you get, the worse the faction grinding and camping becomes. One of the ultimate high level quest mobs with a decent loot table gets taken down every couple hours when he spawns by people that are uberer than thou. Travel time was a concession made to keep the game on life support with the population dwindling to nothing because of bugs... with lots of people it's a 50/50 if you're going to CTD on chunk, even more people would've been bye-bye months ago after getting dropped in the middle of an ocean on a boat ride or CTDing three or four times on the way to a group.

Anyway, VG fucked or not, I think EQ2 has chosen a pretty clear development direction with all their new content since KoS from when they nerfed raid zones, made contested epics instanced, and made PHs count for updates in the newest one.

winwin

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Mallard

I just LOL`ed in RL. Cochy you better watch out bro.

Cochy

The way you talk all the time makes me think you used to be a guy...

But seriously shouldn't you be in game instead of "wasting" your time on this forum.

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Widem

wow i cant believe i didnt put 2 + 2 together to remeber what winwin was.