Grinding IS a play style. Not everybody likes to quest.

I will agree that a "Share Quest" button would be terrific.

The sad thing is that EQ can and does support group updates like that. It's basically completely up to the dev who makes the quest line on how they do updates. And unfortunately, most of them choose the types of updates that make doing the quest as a group take 3-6x longer than doing it for one person.

I don't think the quest system is that clunky. If you are in an HA or mission, everyone gets credit for any objective completed. If you are on a solo kill quest, anyone grouped on the same quest gets kill credit if they are close by. If the mob drops a quest item, every single quest I've done in TDS has the mob dropping multiple copies of the item for everyone grouped with the quest.

The ONLY situation that you a have to repeat are hails (hah, annoying), and picking up an item from the ground or doing an /inspect. And ground spawn quest items respawn in like literally 5 seconds. It's really not that bad, even for boxer

My alt guild's name is Never Quest.

/shrug

I don't have TDS, and I'm not high enough level for it anyway, so I can't speak for that. But doing quests in Bloody Kithicor as a group has been pretty annoying. The majority of the quests there involve things like killing a guy and looting his (singular) head.

I tougth that everQUEST meant long, complex, involving quests like the kunark epics... back in the day where you actually had to research stuff in-game to figure out what's the next step... not just move from area to area killing/looting NPC.

That's probably one of the main issue I have with that elephant-in-the-room... transforming quests into a mere '' go there, kill X, come back'' with an arrow over his head...

This exactly.

As for the original topic -

I'm glad to see other people voicing this. I remember back when WAR came out and some old EQ buddies and I started playing it, once we got a few quest hubs deep many of us realized we missed camping - that is to say, sitting in one spot for the evening shooting the breeze while we kill a steady stream of mobs.

Now I'm not going to sit here and say "Don't add new quests! RAWR!!!" but I did want to /sign on as another player who generally prefers the camping playstyle.

You're losing those long old quest feels because we have repositories of information out there and everyone already knows where to go and what to do because of stuff like beta. Just face that we aren't gonna get the "discovery" type ones back. PoWar is a good try though and enjoyable. Anyway, I absolutely hate grinding, it's unfun and I fall asleep. Tasks/missions are fun because you actually do something and move around.
Also, even though I do enjoy the questing, the flagging should go back to JUST the missions next time.

You don't want to do quests? Fine, seems like I can also make plenty of experience just grinding away at camps, so what's the difference? There is certainly not enough quests to keep somebody busy for the entire time between expansions.

I really don't care if people grind or quest. I like questing, and I actually think TDS was a decent compromise. You didn't have to do a huge number of quests to get access to Arx, and I thought the quests you did do gave a bit of flavor to each zone and did a decent job of showing off the zones. I enjoy running the quests because it gives me a bit of feel for the story of the expansion, which to me has always been a fun part of EQ.

I guess one thing that I'm a bit lost on though, since when does grinding equal socialization? I mean, I understand being in a group and chatting it up with friends, but is this not also accomplished via tells, fellowship, guild, various voice-chat providers, and even custom chat channels? Can you not also socialize via questing? Is there something inherent in questing that makes socialization more difficult? If it's because you have to move, does that mean your grind group puller is out of luck when it comes to this socialization?

It seems to me that the battle cry for the grinders in this thread isn't so much "I WANT TO GRIND AND SOCIALIZE, LET ME DO IT!", as it is "I want to sit in one spot because I haven't figured out how to move around zones and continue to socialize with friends."

The old school quests did involve grinding and camping too. Some were designed to be difficult but many were just designed poorly.

These are a relic of an older, more crude, everquest. People like these partly because they were difficult which made them feel more rewarding. But without having a progression server with a big population, no one wants to sit and camp a placeholder for days alone in an empty zone with nothing going on. Or killing for weeks and weeks alone in the same spot waiting on a rare drop from a rare mob. That's questing AND grinding, and it sucks, in my opinion. Nostalgic for me for a few hours, tops

Great thread.

The bees-knees of EQ for me was crawling deep into a dungeon and holding a camp until a few of us had a chance to "/ran 100" on a rare item or two, be it a quest drop or powerful upgrade. Think Unrest, Sol B, Guk, KC, Chardok, CoM, Seb, Velks, Kael, Ssra, BoT... It was about exploring, holding ground as a balanced group (or sometimes unbalanced for the challenge), social downtime and focused "watch my back, I'll watch yours" up-time. Raids were social pull-and-move-at-your-own-pace guild events. I honestly have no idea how today's raids are designed, as I stopped raiding in the middle of DoN (too emote dependent) and have only experienced RoF's version of NToV since. The task-based group game started to become really stale for me during CoTF. I spent one evening task-crawling in ToR when it was released and haven't logged on since.

I'm getting there quickly myself. Really getting fed up with what EQ has become. It's hard to just say screw it and walk away after playing off and on for the past decade and a half. But, seriously, maybe this game just isn't for me anymore.

Something i wish SoE did was take some of the older out dated zone and revamp them to what ever the level cap is. Like they did in Rain of Fear with Kael EW and CC i would go in there and camp for hours .

I hear what your saying about the social aspect of /tell or general/guild/fellowship, I'd just add that if you kept on that same train of thought that you could also say "why even play the game with your friends?" Why not just text them or skype while you play a different game altogether? The answer to me is obvious and that is that we like to actually be involved and engaged in the manner that MMO's allow us. To be a "team" and do something together and get phat loots.

This game is always more fun when we are accomplishing something as a "team" and you get that sense of doing something that you normally could not because of the strength of that team.