You Could, But Should You?

MMO Folklorist has an excellent post up right now, with the enticing title "10 tips for playing old MMOs". It's a good read, offering excellent advice, all of which I heartily endorse. I would, however, add an eleventh tip of my own:

#11 - Don't.

No, seriously, don't bother. It's too much like hard work. Who even has the time? 

And you'll regret it. It'll feel bad. You won't enjoy it. 

If it's an old game you never played, it'll be weird and discomfiting. If it's an old game you never played but always wished you had, it'll be weird, discomfiting and disappointing. If it's an old game you used to play but haven't for years it'll either be exactly the same, if it's been in maintenance mode, and you'll very quickly remember why you stopped playing in the first place, or it'll be completely different, if it's been in continual development since you left, and you'll feel disoriented and betrayed.

About the only way you're likely to have a constructive and satisfactory relationship with an old game is 

1. If you never stopped playing it
2. You approach it like a research project

Even then, it's a long shot. The former most likely means you're a bitter vet, for whom nothing the devs do is ever going to be good enough. The latter will leave you emotionally disconnected, experiencing the game purely in the abstract, missing out on all the reasons people played it in the first place. 

Is that too negative? Probably. But it's something I was thinking as I was I playing EverQuest II all week, in preference to any new hotness I could have been enjoying, like Honkai: Star Rail, for example, a game I've played precisely twice so far, despite really enjoying it each time.

The main reason I was thinking along those lines was because, yet again, I've found myself drawn, entirely unintentionally, into levelling up a new(ish) character on a new (to me) server, while still trying to progress my regular characters on my regular server. It's made for some unexpected comparisons and given me a few unforeseen insights.

For example, it's made me more aware than ever of just how fiendishly, ferociously, frankly insanely complicated levelling a character in an older mmorpg can be. 

No, that's unfair. Not "can be". Is. 

There's no way around it. The whole affair is ridiculously overwrought. No-one who doesn't pretty much devote their life to it can possibly understand it all. Even most people who play more than a reasonable person should will only have a clear grasp of a subset of the mechanics and systems involved. I'd be very surprised if even most of the devs could tell you how parts of the game they don't personally work on function from the perspective of the player.

Let me make it clear at this point that I have absolutely no intention of giving chapter and verse on any of these operations. I sat down today intending to write a post about my latest tussles with the Overseer system, a relatively new, relatively straightforward feature that, from the frustrated queries and wholly inadequate replies I see, still manages to defeat most most players. But even to do that would require a series of posts, A series I don't want to write and no-one wants to read.

I can tell you in a sentence how to get the most out of the Overseer system, though. Keep bloody using it. It's that simple. Don't try it, find it gives you nothing worth having and isn't any fun, then drop it, complaining it gives you nothing and isn't any fun. It's like any other muscle. You have to work it and it hurts. But when you've built it up you can do things with it you couldn't do before.

It's taken me a month of doing all my permitted ten missions every day to hit the point where, finally, I'm just beginning to see the rewards. For at least three weeks I got next to nothing worth having and watched my bags fill up with stuff I had no use for until I had to get one of my less-played characters to come and take several hundred unwanted items off my hands and store them in her bank. 

Finally, just last week, I got a couple of drops I wanted: better missions. That's all I'd been plugging away for because I know how Overseer works. The good stuff comes from the higher quality missions and access to the higher quality missions comes from the lower quality missions so you have to do a lot of lower quality missions you don't otherwise want to do before you can start doing the higher ones you do.

Also, you only start out each season with two of the lowest quality missions so at first you can't just log in, set your ten mission max and call it a day. The lower quality the mission, the shorter the time it takes to run and the faster the cooldown, so you have to keep checking back so you can recycle those damn two hopeless missions five times in a day if you can stomach it to get your ten.

Gradually more missions drop and better ones and they last longer and cooldown more slowly and finally you hit the point where you have more good missions available than you can do in a day and then you're sweet. I'm betting most players give up long before then.

I am, after a month, almost at the sweet spot now. I know, from experience, that from here I will pass through the very satisfying stage when lots of good stuff starts dropping, then to the point when I have almost all the good stuff I can possibly use, except for a smattering of goodies the rng fairy has seen fit to deny me. 

I will then keep plugging away in the hope of getting those, diligently setting my ten daily Overseer missions, cackling whenever I get something I want, until the cackling turns into curses and I can't be bothered any more. It takes a few months. 

That's one of the simpler progression systems. Easy to learn, easy to do. Does it sound like something you, who don't already play the game, want to be doing? No, of course it doesn't! And neither do most of the other necessary progression systems, of which there must be dozens by now. 

If you want, as people blithely announce in general chat that they do, to be competetive at endgame or even just to get invited into at-cap Heroic groups, you need to understand and pursue separate and complex progression systems involving not just your basic character level and your gear and your many, many AAs but your spells and abilities, your mercenaries, your familiars and your mounts, most of which have advancement trees of their own as well as their own gear to be managed and upgraded and even adorned. 

Oh yes, Adornments. There's a viciously complex mesh of dropped, quested and crafted gems to be slotted into your gear, some of which are absolutely essential, as well as a newish raft of temporary adornments that buttress the old ones. These days, there are also vast quantities of consumables that feed directly into the effectiveness of your character. The days of being able to ignore potions as some kind of luxury are long gone.

If you want to get involved with tradeskills, you can near-enough duplicate all of that because EQII genuinely has crafting as a full career option. You can be a crafter and only a crafter if you want and you'll have nigh-on as much to do as any adventurer. Well, at least until you hit that endgame grind. I imagine. Don't look at me. I'm a casual. I don't know what the real players do.

As a solo or casual adventurer, you can't really ignore tradeskills, anyway. Not unless you're planning on putting a lot of time and effort into making money instead. If you have to buy all the things you need that crafters make you'll be spending a lot. Much more economical, at the very least, to level up the craft that makes your skill and spell upgrades. 

Only, once you do that you'll find your crafter needs other stuff that crafters use so you'll either have to buy that too or make it yourself, except the tradeskill you chose probably doesn't make the thing you want, so you might as well make another character and have them level up that craft... And then there's Adorning and Transmuting and Tinkering that anyone can do, which don't count as core tradeskills but which actually make things no-one can do without, like those pesky Adornments and the materials used to make them and the storage bins to put the materials in...

Oh, and did I mention that as well as having their own 125 levels of questlines, crafters also have a completely separate, full set of gear, into which you can fit a completely different set of Adornments? And so on and so on and so on. Doesn't it sound a lot more sensible never to get started on all of this in the first place?

If you're determined, at least you'd want to be where everyone else is. A busy server means more competition over prices on the Broker, more people to answer polite questions in chat, more offers of help and encouragement. You're a lot more likely to find a guild willing to show you ropes and hold your hand. If you're determined to try one of these old games, don't do what I just did and start on a dead server.

In my defence, I didn't know it was going to be dead when I went there. I didn't even think about it. As I posted at the time, I was focused on the ruleset, not the population. 

I did have at the back of my mind the Firiona Vie server in EverQuest, which uses a very similar ruleset and which, specifically because of that, has long been one of the busiest. It is something of a truism, though, that what works for EQ doesn't always carry over to EQII. Apparently free trade is one of those things.

On an average day on Isle of Refuge, where I moved Mitsu when she got kicked off of Kaladim, a /who all search returns fewer than 50 names. The one and only time I've seen the search hit the 100 character cut-off was late on a Saturday night on a holiday weekend. By contrast, Skyfire, my main server, usually considered to be, at best, Medium population, never shows fewer than a hundred players, even in the depths of the night for the USA.

I see people all over the place on Skyfire. There's never no-one at the East Freeport bank, for example, and often there are other people running around whichever zone I happen to be in, even if it's not one in the current expansion. The place feels lived-in. 

On Isle of Refuge I see no-one. I can and do go days without running into another player. General chat, always buzzing on Skyfire, is largely silent. With horrible irony, the Broker on the server where you're allowed to trade almost anything is both far more expensive and far less stocked than on the one with the usual restrictions. Even the basics, like large-capacity bags, are hard to come by - and teeth-grindingly overpriced if you can find them.

 

All of which is fine by me. If I get the time I'll do another post about how much fun it is to level a character on a server where I pretty much have to rely on my own resources. It's more like the old days than most things, if only because it reminds me of my time on Test, where double figures of players online at once was an event and finding anything you wanted on the broker a miracle.

It isn't, however, an experience I'd recommend to someone seeking the supposed lost pleasures of an older mmorpg. To get anything out of an experience like that, you're probably going to want all the help you can get and it still won't be nearly enough.

Which is why, much as I love the older games, I can't in good conscience recommend playing them any more. Not, that is, unless you're doing it already. Or, of course, if you think you're up to it. If that's what you think, knock yourself out. Just come in with your eyes open.

And after all, you might as well give it a try. What have you got to lose? Only your time. And your patience. And quite possibly your sanity.