He Played EverQuest For 100 Hours - Should You?

Playing Devil's Advocate, where are the 300k viewed Youtube videos on how great Everquest is?

the guy who made the video and the TLP servers all require all access to be able to play pn them so they would count as "member only"

More devils advocate: how many of those views are from people actually interested in EQ vs people who watch all of his videos because they subscribe/follow him regardless of its content

On examining his channel I realise I've seen a couple of his Worst MMO Ever? videos which seems to be his thing. Thanks to my patreons etc, etc.

lol

Get a guild and a friendlist instead of being a one man show. I can (and do) log onto any of 6 servers and can find grroups at any level range.

Garbage in, Garbage out.

Crybaby didn't even have to do corpse runs naked.


Wimp.

Let's talk about our 1999 first 100 hours.

/consent <playername> grants LOOT RIGHTS and you had to trust another player to retrieve your stuff if your corpse was in a bad place.

EQ isn't a bad game, though some bad things can happen for sure.

The old text echo for a null /who all friend was

"You have no friends! Go Make some!!"

EQ was never meant to be easy.

Yup! If I remember rightly, the first thing I did in EQ was to create a barbarian, ride the little ferry to the Halas, and then accidentally attack an NPC and was killed immediately.

been there, done that

haha alt o - keys tab - remove the letter A as autoattack. (wasn't even an option back then)

if mistyped /sy or such instead of /say, the first time you typed an A i n a sentence... lol

I'm pretty sure many of us would feel differently about EQ if the first several dozen level were essentially a solo game. Things were hard back at the beginning, but there were lots of other players going through the same thing. The fun came from doing those hard things together. A naked corpse run was fun because your friends were coming to help you out. You were motivated to get your corpse so you could fight with them again. But if you had to do everything alone for weeks and weeks in deserted zones, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.

A newbie having to level themselves up for weeks doesn't sound like much fun. I'm not sure that the experience at the end would be worth it. They might as well just play some other game which is fun from the start and have fun the whole time.

If he wanted 100 hours of bad gameplay, he should have been around when there were more than 1 Zek server and the person that killed you got all of your loot.

I haven't watched the video, just going off of people's comments here:
1) It sounds like he didn't try to make friends to group with (I am sure he ran into SOMEONE during his 100 hours of playing). Did he happen to mention what server he did this on?
2) FTP is awful and doesn't do the game justice. If he really wanted to get the real experience he should have paid for it, even if it were only a month.
3) The paid lowbie experience isn't as tough as it used to be, with LotD, Journeyman Mercs, and other things opened up in the recent years.

I would challenge him to try again, this time doing it with a one month sub.

1) He did run into someone, a Froglock necro who was roughly in the same boat and did play with them when he could per his own statement. There was another character he ran into as well and grouped with. He highlighted for him that those were the two most enjoyable parts for him precisely because he had another person to talk to and play with rather than being alone.

He also actually does mention that reaching out to guilds and friends would probably get you better results than him. He also stated, somewhat accurately, that a lot of the community is "outside the game" - in regards to how people tend to find each other on discord or the forums primarily, or if they do meet in game they stay connected via those methods less so than the game itself pushing this to happen naturally. Because he is in the EU timezone himself, he was playing on Antonious Bayle.

2) I do agree FTP is awful because I have tried to play without subbing several times myself. No AAs and no Prestige gear on FV with a guild that wants to give you stuff and help you out was MISERABLE for multiple reasons lol. He mentions the subscription being needed for other servers, and for AAs, but I feel like he also could have pointed out you get an even better Mercenary and even better gear returns as well -- granted, a newbie or returner may not have known about those perks either.

3) He actually commended on Mines of Gloomingdeep and Mercs being a huge boon to newer players because it points you in the right direction and helps with the initial learning process on Live servers. He was also totally lost when he DID sub and try two of the timelocked servers -- Oakwynd, due to the lack of Gloomingdeep in particular lol. Mischief was where he met one of the other players he did end up playing with for awhile. In a live stream he did when he played the game awhile back he actually praised Gloomingdeep as a "Tutorial done right" precisely because it is giving you a really good rundown of gameplay expectations.

I do kinda agree this is a game where one NEEDS to sub, even more than EQ2 which is kind of in a similar boat. I also don't exactly disagree with the sentiment that having friends right out of the game is a big boon since the game doesn't organically push people to group much anymore. At least not until after a long lonely journey, and even then people will often tell you to "just box".

The tutorial NPC Secalna Galnor in PoK directs players to the guild boards in the lobby and on every server I'v ever played on, newplayers chat is perma camped by players in family style, even some who raid all are welcome type guilds. Anyone, on any server, can roll level 1, ask in newplayers and read the guild boards in the lobby. EQ players all KNOW how hard it is to noob, true noob EQ and are a helpful crowd. Many players are altoholics, many players have a lowbie they intend on leveling even.


MMORPG =/= solo to raids.

Though you can now with mercs and Overseer.

Collections are OP for Krono.

Anyone can get a guild. Anyone can make a friendlist. Plenty of people play free until they max out on XP even players with all access accounts who are boxing do until the character is caught up anf facing current content requirements.

He is obviously not a total newb to EQ, he knew enough to download a map pack and installed it properly. but playing mostly solo for 100 hours with a free to play account would be torture to anyone.

Thanks for clearing some of that up for me.

With regards to this, he had done a prior Live Stream where he came back to the game and did Gloomingdeep with some other members of his community occasionally popping in to talk to him and stuff, and one of them at the time had told him about map packs so he reached back out when he was doing this as he didn't do so last time. Someone even tried to trade him a boost on that stream lol.

No worries. I do tend to watch his content casually but as an old EQ player myself I was curious how it'd go based on his couple of past experiences with the game lol, so I probably paid more attention than I'd like to admit.

There is a lot wrong in the video but the person making it isn't an expert in EQ and I think it does show some gaps to how the game teaches newer players. There are also people who may try EQ who are way less experienced with games in general and will struggle much more.

I think it's important to see how the game is being viewed from the outside and try to improve the tutorials and new/returning experience. TLPs seem like the perfect way to start with a decent sized community when they are new but most new players don't start there and end up in a ghost town for the majority of their leveling. Leveling does take a long time still without knowledge/help.

Many of the clunkiest things from early EQ are solved later and we often forget how many little annoying things there are at the start. Some of these things are used to sell items like bags for TLP etc to bypass the annoyance. I know there are plenty that want that pure classic feel but you have to admit it is not very friendly to new players.

Some form of cross server looking for group would help combine the starting level lower populations across the game but I know it is also a big project. I had hopes for personas filling some of this gap as people level their alt/persona more being near those lower levels for awhile but it is being limited behind buying slots and may not even go live this year if at all.

How appropriate is it for a true newbie to play on a TLP? Even though there are lots of people, they are all experts at EQ. I'm thinking it might be a like a newbie basketball player going to the corner lot where people have been playing for 20 years. In general, how accommodating are TLP players to total newbies who don't know anything about the game? Will the TLPers be understanding of the newbie mistakes and take the time to help them along?

Good points. I just think you stand a higher chance if you see people in general and TLP is much more active, until later on where it gets top heavy as well.

That's certainly one way to look at what he does.

His own take on why he does what he does is that he really likes MMORPG gaming but would like for the games to do better, most of his tear downs do come with suggestions for improvements, this is something that was largely missing from this video, he did praise the find system & zone finder but other than pointing out what he saw as obvious faults I didn't see him make many constructive suggestions on improvements.

The best thing Josh said about his time in EQ was that it’s meant to be treated as a hobby. All your time is meant to be spent around EQ. For better or worse that’s been historically true.

TLP is the best place for newbies socially, but the worst for actual gameplay. As Josh mention the social aspect of the game was his favorite part. For any hobby, it’s best to be done alongside folks virtually or in-person, regardless of experience.