I played wow in beta and then when it released for about a year. It was fun but ya the social aspect of the game disappeared unless you had a tight knit guild. Players in the guilds I was apart of was like living in a big city, you might not bump into the same person again for a while. It was like recruiting ghosts, play hard and quit. It was like working for a company that has so much turn over that it feels like a completely different company socially after a period of time, it's very weird and disheartening especially if you make good friends with someone and they disappear. Anyways, I had so much history into EQ that I had a hard time sticking with any game long term other than EQ. This still holds true.
Always felt like WoW was heavily game-ified whereas early EQ felt a little more like a traditional roleplaying game. Like, everything in WoW was heavily structured, from the quest formats to the spell/ability rotations. EQ quests were a little more open ended and ability usage felt a little more like a strategic choice at times rather than just being "this is my ideal rotation for every situation". Obviously EQ was a long ways off from, say, tabletop D&D, and early WoW wasn't nearly as template as it is now, but they did seem to strive for fundamentally different paradigms.
I was hanging with a group in 2004, and Gates of Discord was the current release, it was overpowered for level 65 characters to some degree and many thought it would have been better as a level 70 release. The people I used to group with, basically their whole guild went to WOW, did see a few once in a while, but, probably the difficulty of GoD expac factored into the exodus.
in eq when you started you had to fight and work and own a shiny rusty long sword by the time you were level 5 and that felt great. in wow when you started, did 3 steps, talked to 1 npc and had a new sword with double the stats you had at first and that made you a lot more powerful already. for my wife and me there was no sense of accomplishment in wow. Second thing we did not like was the lack of community feel that eq had and still has. Without a guild or a lot of good friends, eq was a real struggle, same situation in wow, it was no problem at all. So the urge to find a group of friends just was not there. Third we felt wow was a pvp game that had pve added to it. With that i mean, a pvp game needs classes to be balanced against eachother, which, for us, made the game dull ( at least the pve part), in a full pve game, you get several classes that have very specific skill sets which are almost useless in pvp, but work wonders in pve. ( like tanks, healers, you know it ). Lastly, the split between alliance and horde really turned us off in 2 ways. One it basically meant when you made an alt on the other side, you could not group with your friends all of a sudden. Two because making 2 sides in a game leads to childish crap like annoying the other side or killing quests mobs or stuff. i personally tried to like wow 2 more times, since friends asked me to come and play, but the last time i hit lvl 75 or so in 3 days soloing and got totally bored with it again. Since Wow we also tried other mmorpgs, but in the end, the guilds in eq, the classes and the combat system is what keeps us going back to eq. btw this is not meant as a start to a discussion over pvp vs pve, or other crap, it is purely how my wife and feel about it. Rox
I tried WoW as my wife pretty much gave up EQ for WoW at the time. The trolls looked incredible bad in that game and who wants to play a cow? The game play was to easy and spoon-fed in my opinion. I always teased my wife saying " Well did you go touch that tree and get your epic weapon yet"? A lot of my EQ friends went to WoW and never came back and I never understood why. This game is more D&D that game is more Candyland.
This happened in all MMOS right after Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Not a WoW thing. PS if you watch the first ten minutes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and don't laugh, you're an undead.
This post like a lot of the others here is pretty spot on. I didn't say anything about the alliance split, but that too harms the game's ability for players to connect.
When Wow came out, I was raiding in european based guild Forsaken Realm on Mithaniel Marr server. Great group of people and we did pretty good competing on timezones against an asian alliance raiding before us and Afterlife and other US guilds raiding after us. I think when WoW came, it was so hyped and so many people talking about trying it out, that it was also an attempt to keep people together, openly stating that Wow models looked like crap and this was definitely not something for any hardcore EQ players WoW ended up taking so many of our players anyway that our guild couldnt show a raidforce anymore when , and I guess I felt betrayed. I was not done with EQ - not even close. So I hated WoW for making our guild collapse and eventually the leftovers moved to AB server for a new home among fellow euro players and started raiding MPG trials / Anguish there with Raging Fury For RL reasons I ended up taking a long break from EQ. During this period I played some WoW with some reallife friends and we had a great time grouping in WoW. It was an easy approachable game for a casual player and lots of fun to be had even if you didnt have the perfect group. So really hated WoW - but for different reasons. Its not a bad game really Eventually, when i came back out of retirement, there was no question to go back to EQ again. It will always be the #1 game
I enjoyed WoW for the soloable questlines that could take you through the story. That being said, the graphics were cartoonish, and the community wasn't there like EQ because of the ease of solo play. Sure, I was in guilds, even raid guilds, but there wasn't the...friendliness and cooperation that I have always felt in EQ. On top of that, I played on an RP server, which was fine at first, but turned into a h e n t a i fest rather quickly.
I tried it on launch but I was already heavily invested into EQ by that time so the biggest appeal was a lot of non-gamers I knew had been sucked into the hype and were ready on day one to try it, that was a good laugh for the first month or so until they slowly started to quit one by one. The casual guild I was in at the time decided to leave EQ for WoW en masse and it suited a lot of the members but I was used to the unforgiving aspects of EQ so I was less than engaged. Got my Hunter to about level 50 if I recall and had a catastropic hardware failure while playing and after a few weeks when the new PC arrived I didn't bother to re-install as I felt I couldn't justify two MMO subs. I didn't like the three-gear-upgrades-in-one-day aspect, hated "repairing" and the shoulderpads had to be some sort of tedious dev joke that got out of hand.
Not a reason I dislike the game but relating to toxic players I had a RL friend who began playing EQ with me. We hadn't really gotten much past trying characters in tutorial when some of her other friends found out and mercilessly harassed her to stop playing EQ and come play WoW with them. After several months of play she was dumped from a guild group and PK'd . Her "friends" didn't actually want her to play with them they but they didn't want her playing EQ. These were not middle schoolers either despite the juvenile behavior. These were people in their late 20's to mid 40's acting like this. I suppose an equally valid question would be why do some WoW players hate EQ?
Too cartoonish and didn't like the character graphics. Bad enough EQ has some foolishly oversized weapons.
I’ve enjoyed both. Never “hated” either one. Started with EQ when I was younger and didn’t really try out WoW until about 2007-2008. The graphics from WoW I enjoyed more. Was just more pleasing. More detail imo. I tend to go back and forth between the games. I’ll play one or the other for 1-2 years, then take a break and go back to the other one for 1-2 years or so with gaps of playing neither as well. For me, what determines which game im subbed to all depends on how much time I’m allocating to games. If time is tight, WoW is my go-to since it’s a lot more solo friendly. I can play for 30 minutes and feel like I accomplished something. Some times it feels like it takes me 30 minutes to even get to where I wanna go in EQ. Then finding my camp, and praying it’s not taken. Or being able to find a group of im not playing a molo friendly class. But at times where I want to actually work towards something, regardless of difficulty or time, EQ is my go to. I’m always pulled back to it at one point in time or another. I love the depth and the difficulty that’s associated with the game. I’ve got a baby on the way, but I’m still leaning towards EQ. Especially with the release of lvl 100 Heroics, I feel like I’ll actually be able to do something and catch up with the end game group and experience the game soon and not get caught at my roadblocks that I’ve hit in the past. But at the same time….WoWs classic Wrath is about to be released and that’s also my favorite point in WoWs history. /shrug
Plan and simple. wow was made for kids and people with little to no time. its setup so you can log on for a 1 hour and get alot done and fee good. Not like eq where it takes a bit to get stuff done and feel like you work for it.
I played WoW back in around 2009-10, because I was a self employed PC Tech, and I told my wife I could make WAY more money on supporting the gamer than the cost, and I was wildly correct. But I missed Everquest, and finally came back 5 years ago, and have been here ever since. I never felt comfortable with WoW, and especially after Wrath of the Lich King. It just never felt like a game that was worth spending money on. When I came back to EQ, I played free for a month, and have gladly paid my share to keep it alive ever since. I still have some friends on a few servers.
I enjoyed both, but I currently only play Everquest. WoW was nice because I could level without a group. Really, the two shouldn't even be compared because they are basically different genres at this point. WoW played more like a single player game for about 99% of the content before end game and Everquest has always been about grouping 100% of the way through.
I couldn't get into the graphics. I didn't realize it was going to be such a big thing. I didn't play (Edit: The original, not WoW) Warcraft, but played a ton of Starcraft. Little did I know that this Warcraft thing was about to take over the world. I also didn't like how "easy" it was. But that was 18 years ago, when being good at EQ felt important, haha. When New World came out, I didn't mind at all that I could out run mobs, and solo things. Things change I guess.
A guy I knew who was crazy about Wow for many years. I finally got him to try EQ. He did like it, but it was nice to finally show him where a lot of there original ideas (and from DAoC) came from. Not to take credit away from Blizzard at all. But it's no secret, WoW owes a lot to EQ.
