Slip Sliding Away: WoW Classic, EQII

So, I kind of stopped playing WoW Classic. How did that happen?

I certainly wasn't planning on stopping. Up until I wasn't playing any more I'd been enjoying myself. Sort of. Self-evidently, not enough.

The thing is, Classic had slowed down. A lot. In a reply to a comment I made on his post about the fifteenth anniversary of EQII, Wilhelm said:

"I think WoW was really the sequel to EQ. It was an obvious upgrade/development of EQ and even the Blizz team has recognized this up on stage at BlizzCon. It was EQ without the suck, to borrow the phrase from DAoC. It has changed a lot over the years, but WoW Classic has given us a glimpse of how it took the EQ idea and ran with it. Even things people complained about in WoW, like instanced dungeons, were lifted straight from EQ."

And that, really, is the problem. What I always enjoyed the most in EverQuest were the early and middle levels. The starting areas, Qeynos Hills, East and West Commonlands, Steamfont Mountains, Butcherblock, Oasis, The Karanas... all those amazing, atmospheric, immersive open zones, where you could roam and explore and lose yourself in another world.

The expansions managed to extend that experience, re-making it, fresh and new, keeping the impetus going for years. Rise of Kunark was almost literally another EverQuest added to the first. Shadows of Luclin was a third. They could quite easily have been released as sequels, not expansions.

By the time EQII arrived in late 2004 it might as well have been EQ4 and WoW could have been EQ5. And all of them had the same fundamental drawback, at least as far as I was concerned: the fun came in inverse proportion to the number alongside your character's name.

As was discussed at inordinate length around this corner of the blogosphere back in August and September, WoW Classic reminded us of the reasons many of us fell in love with the genre: the worldbuilding, the pacing, the immersion, the need to think and plan and consider. The satisfaction of setting and meeting achievable goals in a manageable timeframe.

At the beginning of the journey, all of those pleasures and more come thick and fast. Every session is a round of markers met; improvement is continual and ever-present.

As the levels tick by, things slow down. Plenty of people found it slow going from the start but in the forties and fifties time crawls. Also, the exhilarating freedom that so exemplified the early game begins to dissipate. The choice of zones in which you could adventure narrows just as the time you need to spend in them increases.

Meanwhile, the invisible hands of the game gods begin to pull on your puppet strings. Where once your destiny was your own, now it seems written in code. Quest after quest directs you on where to go; the slow-going travel that once seemed natural and organic when it was your choice becomes onerous and artificial, imposed from above.

Every second quest seems to involve travelling halfway around the world to speak to someone who then sends you on to the next stop on what feels like an increasingly arbitrary journey, mostly in circles. Where early on you found yourself tasked with taking messages to the next village, now everyone you need to speak to seems to have vanished into the forests or the swamps of a faraway land. Every item so vitally needed for the next step of the ill-understood errand you've foolishly agreed to run for a stranger is only to be found on another continent, in some obscure corner that they can only describe in the vaguest terms.

Meanwhile, the game gods have become increasingly impatient at your lack of interest in the tests they created for you. Quest after quest seeks to send you underground, into dungeons filled with vicious creatures far beyond your capacity to handle. Only by banding together with others can you hope to survive, let alone prosper.

As you approach the level cap, both games ramp up in similar fashion, each level requiring palpably more effort, time and patience than the last. The difference I perceive is this: in the original EverQuest and for its first several expansions the game's developers really didn't care what you did while you played. They laid out the buffet: it was entirely up to you what you chose to consume.

Some of the "suck" Blizzard endeavoured to cut from the fat of EQ was that lack of direction. WoW Classic starts out feeling wide-open but in fairly short order, certainly by the mid-30s, it becomes apparent that there are expectations. There's a path you're expected to follow and the quests you take provide the map.

It is entirely possible to side-step all of that, should you wish. Many people choose to level their characters mostly or entirely by running instanced dungeons. It's equally feasible to ignore both quests and dungeons altogether, roaming the world like a one-person Golden Horde, laying waste to all before you. Grinding mobs to level, more prosaically.

WoW Classic, though, doesn't have the infrastructure that made mob grinding such a pleasurable pastime in EverQuest. As we discussed at length, the communities of the two games, springing as they did from the same rootstock, grew in very different directions.

There are no camps in Classic. You can't roll up at a handy spot, start killing and expect to have others come join you, settling down for a full session of chat, banter and occasional thrills as new acquaintances and old friends drop in and out. Everything in WoW is much more functional.

Before I stopped playing I spent several sessions in Felwood. There are a number of quests there which require you to kill twenty or thirty mobs of specific types in specific locations. These are all quests that would go much faster if people grouped up to do them in the way it was widely reported to be happening, routinely, in the game's starting zones.

By the forties, no-one is doing that any more. Not on Hydraxian Waterlords at the hours I play, they aren't. Instead we have anything up to half a dozen individuals all competing frenziedly to tag each required mob as it spawns. Occasionally a small group might roll in, usually a trio for some reason. They will proceed to monopolize the area until all of them are satisfied, while the ungrouped players who were already there make do with any odd spawns the incomers miss. Then the mini-group will leave and we all carry on as we were.

Only once in several hours over several days did I get an invite from anyone to join them at one of those hunting grounds and that, as sod's law would have it, was when I was just running through on the way to somewhere else. And, of course, I didn't send out any invites either. We are all culpable for the culture of our servers. And it seems we're all either socially inept, bloody-mindedly stubborn or just plain lazy.

The upshot of all this is that although I was still enjoying myself when I played, I was increasingly finding my enjoyment frustrated and obstructed by the mechanics of the game, by the behavior of others and especially by my own lack of desire to engage with anything remotely uncomfortable.

Still, I would have carried on logging in every day, chipping away at the levels in pursuit of my declared intent to get my Hunter to 60 before cancelling my subscription, had it not been for EQII's fifteenth birthday and the Dragon Attack event.

I only popped over to see what it was all about and to get some background and some screenshots for a blog post. I had no intention of staying. But I played EQII all last weekend and then every night this week after work, killing dragon after dragon after dragon.

In seven days I've taken so many characters through the required four kills to get the mount/illusion I've lost count. I think it's eight but it could be more. I've logged in characters on different servers to do the event and last night I even logged in my old account, put my level 95 necromancer on follow and two-boxed my way around the spires until she, too, was able to fly as a dragon.

For the first few days I was aware I wasn't playing Classic. I'd played it almost every day since launch so I felt the lack like a chore not done. By Tuesday, though, I wasn't pretending to myself that I'd do "just one more dragon" then go level up some more in Azeroth. I was at a point that I've reached so often, where I stop playing a particular MMORPG long before I'm bored or frustrated with it, without ever really deciding to leave.

After a full week of nothing but dragons I think I might have burned out on that event for a while. But I have a huge pile of dragon parts piled up waiting to be crafted and I know that while I'm doing that I'll hear "dragon up!" in chat and the cycle will begin all overt again.

It's hard to resist a call to arms, especially when it's framed with such inclusive, dynamic urgency. Chat is buzzing with common purpose in the way Classic's was six weeks ago and isn't any more. In WoW, last week when I was playing, I regularly went the best part of an hour without seeing a single person speak in general chat.

Few people need to call out to random strangers any more. Almost three months in, social networks are established. Everyone's guilded. Everyone has a friends list. Surprisingly, I'm in a guild. Actually, I'm in two. I had loads of speculative invites, all of which I turned down until I got one from a gnome-only guild and another from one for banker-alts. I accepted both. I even talk to people in them.

Even so, I don't want to take it further. To get the most out of Classic now those wonderful early levels are done I know I'd need to move into group content and I'm just not interested at the moment. It would be the worst time.

Most of my gaming is happening after work, when I'm usually tired - sometimes very tired indeed. The prospect of locking myself into sessions where other people will be relying on me to stay for a couple of hours or more, doing things that might require real attention and care, seems deeply unattractive.

Especially when compared to a place where I can come and go at will, with no penalty and no guilt. Where my presence is welcome (every EQII public event always wants more people) but not missed. Where I can feel sufficiently active to be engaged but not so active as to be unable to relax. And, crucially, where every battle ends with a genuine chance of a worthwhile reward.

After the Dragons and the puppets (didn't mention them but they're still in play, too) comes Frostfell and the expansion. It's a lot of competition for a game where my horizons seemed to have narrowed to grinding mobs for xp and materials that my crafters can't even use unless they, too, grind more levels.

This is almost exactly what happened on my original WoW run back in the Wrath of the Lich King. era. I began to run out of steam in Un'Goro Crater, struggled through Burning Crusade and tapped out at 72 in the first or second zone of the third expansion. I lasted six months there but if it hadn't been for Battlegrounds it might have been less.

Which doesn't mean I'm done with either WoW or Classic. I am still going to get to 60. And I will certainly be back when Battlegrounds appear. Whenever that is.

For all its many merits, though, I don't think Classic is going to be a permanent home. More like somewhere I visit now and again. EQII, it seems, has triumphed once more. No matter how many times I drift away it always pulls me back.

Carry On Camping: WoW Classic, EverQuest

As I play WoW Classic I find myself comparing just about everything with how it would have been in EverQuest around the same time.  Based on not much more than memories, never to be trusted, it's probably not a very accurate comparison but it fascinates me.

Memory aside, direct comparisons with what we think of as classic EverQuest are misleading. During the period WoW Classic attempts to recreate, sometime around September 2006, EQ was a very long way from its own "classic" era. And I'd known many different iterations of Norrath by then.

A History Lesson

By September 2006 I had played EQ for nearly seven years, on and off but mostly on. I'd spent almost a year in Dark Age of Camelot, then returned. I'd moved to EverQuest II for about eight or nine months from the November 2004 launch until the following summer but came back to EverQuest at the end of the Dragons of Norrath expansion, staying for the start of Dungeons of Darkhollow.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I barely touched DoN but we played quite a lot of DoD, leaving only when the Shroud debacle reached an unbearable nadir. I won't go into what happened. It's something best left forgotten. We then returned to EQII for maybe another nine months before switching back to EverQuest for The Serpent's Spine expansion at precisely the period Classic emulates, September 2006.

In a number of ways, The Serpent's Spine was a reboot for EQ, as can be seen from the launch day patch notes. The expansion not only added a new race and starting city but also a complete new leveling path to the raised cap of 75. Even now, more than a dozen years later, new players are funnelled into Crescent's Reach in the hope they'll follow the route set out for them more than a dozen years ago.

Among other things, racial xp penalties were removed, AAXP at low and middle levels was increased, the "con" system was revised to include a new xp step and most significantly by far, major changes were made to the way a character recovered health, mana and endurance after combat:

"*** Downtime ***

As EverQuest has grown over the years, the amount of downtime imposed upon players has grown as well and we'd rather players find challenge in the fights themselves than in the time between them. Toward that end, we've created a new system that is simple to use, but powerful and flexible enough to control downtime as the game continues to grow....

Once you have been out-of-combat for a sufficient amount of time, you can sit down (or be on a non-moving horse) and begin to rest. While resting, you enter an accelerated regeneration state that will quickly recover your mana, health, and endurance".

This was big. It meant that classes that had been unbearably slow to solo since launch, particularly those with no means of healing themselves, like Warriors and Rogues, could, at least theoretically, make some xp by soloing.

Soloing in EQ vs Classic. Now there's a case for comparison...

 These changes didn't come out of the blue and neither were they a direct response to the vastly more casual-friendly behemoth in the room. EQ had been tiptoeing towards greater accessibility for the more casual player for quite a while.

The infamous "lose your corpse and everything on it" death penalty, always an outlier in normal gameplay but nevertheless at the back of everyone's mind as they played, had been completely removed with the addition of Shadowrest in April 2004, long before WoW was in anyone's thoughts. The almost equally infamous lengthy travel times had been reduced a little with 2001's Shadows of Luclin and rendered almost trivial in the eyes of some veterans by Planes of Power the following year.

All of this is by way of saying that any parallels I attempt to draw between the two games likely to be both highly subjective and prone to temporal inconsistencies. Even so, there are some things that stand out as major divergences on what has otherwise been a surprisingly similar journey.

Camp Check!

One such is the concept of "camps" and "camping". In the EverQuest of 2006 this amounted to something akin to holy writ. Wikipedia, which has a lengthy entry on "Camping", much of which relates to first person shooters, where the term has a somewhat different meaning, has this to say about EQ:

"The MMORPG EverQuest, when first released, had advancement through the game painstakingly slow for most, requiring many hours of slaying NPCs to advance in level. As a result, players quickly realized that camping in one spot and having a single player, referred to as a "puller" because he or she would leave the group to "pull" a mob back to the group, was the most efficient way to gain experience. In fact, the prevalence of camping became so strong in EverQuest that some of the game's playerbase and critics jokingly refer to the game as "EverCamp".

Out of this practical solution to a percieved problem, a complex etiquette was born. Although there was no formal requirement to adhere to the norms of behavior players sought to establish, in the days when most people remained on a single server and reputation counted for plenty, social pressure to conform was immense.

On arriving in a zone, if you planned on settling in a particular spot, it was common practice to make a "camp check" in /ooc or /shout. You'd literally call out "Camp check?" and back would come the replies - "Ramp", "South Spires", "Three spawn" and so on. In some zones there could be a dozen or more recognized camps, all with nicknames you'd soon learn if you stayed there for a few levels.

This tower had a camp name (not that sort of camp!) but I can't remember what it was.

It was also polite, although less frequently done, to tell the zone when you were leaving a camp. "Ogres free" was all you needed to say. Someone would then call back "Taking ogres" and the wheel would turn.

In the most popular zones at busy times there would even be lists. You'd take a number from whoever was claiming a camp you particularly wanted and they'd tell you when a spot in the group opened up and it was your turn to take it. If it was a solo camp each player would pass on the name of the next in line to be invited to take over when they left.

This worked surprisingly well, in part because of the reputation issue but also because of the Play Nice policy. This was introduced some time around EQ's second expansion, Scars of Velious, and was somewhat controversial. It was also very successful in managing both expectations and behavior.

As well as laying down the kind of rules you might give to your eight year old before allowing them a birthday party, the Play Nice policy had a very effective way of enforcing good behavior. To quote Allakhazam, "Camping is not specifically endorsed by the EQ EULA, and in the case of GM arbitration, you may be ordered to share your 'camp' with someone else."

This meant that most disputes were settled in conversation between players because no-one wanted to risk the arbitrary ruling of a GM. And there were, in those days, plenty of GMs available to come and lay down the law.

No Camping Here!

I can't speak for Vanilla WoW itself, or indeed for other servers in Classic, but on the Hydraxian Waterlords RP server the concept of a "camp" is utterly unknown. I spent an hour or so in Westfall yesterday, completing quests I'd taken a few levels earlier, when they were much too high for me. I had, among others, fifteen Defias Headbands to collect and twenty Harvest Watchers to kill.

The zone was busy but not insanely so. Both Defiants and Watchers have been placed by some helpful designer in a number of discrete locations that I cannot think of as anything but "camps". Some, like the one in the illustration at the top of the post, are literally camps. With tents!

I feel sure that, coming from EverQuest as many of the original WoW devs did, this placement is no co-incidence. Vanilla WoW zones are laid out very much like EverQuest zones and I'd lay odds it was expected that players would approach them as EQ players had.

And maybe they did. I'd be interested to hear from someone who was there. However it was back in 2006, in Classsic it's a free for all. No-one calls camps, no-one respects camps. Camps do not exist.

I was lucky enough to have the pictured camp to myself for about half an hour, during which time I held it and also picked off Defias mobs from the much bigger camp behind me. I was able to keep my camp mostly to myself by managing the spawn so that there were rarely any mobs standing, waiting to be pulled.

I'm a tailor, not a fighter.

When players ran by there was usually nothing to see so they ran on. A few seconds later a Defias would spawn and I'd pull it, even if I hadn't quite downed my current victim. That way I almost replicated the EQ experience.

A few times, however, while I was engaged with one mob and missed I my rotation, a passing player would grab a freshs pawn from the camp and kill it. This is entirely acceptable in Classic. There then being nothing else fot them to kill, off they would run, presumably wondering why I was still standing there, staring at some empty tents.

All of this is not to say Classic players on my server are rude or inconsiderate. Far from it. Kill-stealing is as beyond the pale as it ever was in EQ. If there's an unfortunate confusion and two players attack the same mob, one will back off immediately.

I also received plenty of buffs as I stood vigil over my camp. A camp no-one else even seemed to notice existed as a specific location in its own right.

It's hardly surprising. A couple of days ago I grouped with another player to do the Gnoll Paw quest. We ran between multiple camps of gnolls and took whatever we could find. At least two other groups were doing the same. It all worked out well, largely because WoW players like to keep moving and spawns are realtively fast.

The only time anyone complained was when a mage arrived and began pulling four gnolls at once. My partner just said "Mages :( " and we moved on, while I got quad-kiting flashbacks from Velious-era EQ.

It's one difference between two cultures that look so similar from the outside yet so different from within. I've spotted many more. I may write them up but Classic is moving on apace. I find a dozen triggers for posts every time I play. And I'd rather be playing than documenting every last little thing I notice.

Time to go log in. Those wool bags aren't going to make themselves and neither are the two more levels my Warlock needs before the game will allow her to tailor them.

There's another thing - tradeskills tied to adventure level. I've got something to say about on that.

Another day.