Why did some EQ players dislike WoW?

Why did some EverQuest players dislike WoW when it came out? What were the reasons they gave? How did WoW affect EQ’s playerbase? Just trying to understand for academic purposes. Please keep this mature.

Horrible graphics, simple minded gameplay. Yes the character models were and are stupid and despite the fact that events could be difficult there was little real depth of game play

Think mostly because of how "cartoony" it is which generally means for kids, probably also that half of EQ quit to play it instead and it's cool to hate on the popular things

WoW chose a cartoon-like "stylised" aesthetic that grated on many EQ players who far preferred the western fantasy aesthetic that EverQuest was aiming for even if it fell short of it in many ways, the aesthetic which Keith Parkinson managed to capture really well in his artwork for the game, EQ players basically hoped to play a game that evoked his kind of fantasy stylings.

WoW's artists chose their aesthetic because it would age well, the more realism an aesthetic has the more subject it is to advances in technology causing its look to age faster, and they had a good point because that's true, though once technology reaches the point where graphics are very close to realistic, arguably with engines such as Unreal 5 they are getting to that point, even realistic graphics will eventually reach a point where they will age far more slowly as advances become less & less noticeable.

Then you have the more "hand-holding" approach WoW took with "quest-here" symbols over NPC heads and the fact they build in a single-player path through the game's levels that many EQ players saw, at the time, as an inferior approach.

Personally I quite enjoyed WoW but what it lacked was the community EQ had built through hardship & adversity and that heavy dependence upon other players to get pretty much anything done - which worked well when all of the servers were heavily populated & became a sore point when they started depopulating quickly.

Back in 1999 EQ was a much superior game to WoW. It was (and still is) more complex, intricate, elaborate and involved game than WoW. And back in 1999-2000 when players went to WoW from EQ they were seen as fleeing from a top-tier universe to cartoonish simplified zerg-game:
https://i.imgur.com/i520DFK.jpg
And it still remains so. EQ rulez and WoW is an inferior escape candy-land for those who can't master EQ.
Those are the reasons.

It’s really difficult to move on from an MMO that feels comfortable. I like WoW as a game, but I never really got settled into such a massive community. EQ is smaller and easier to find and make friends. WoW just felt too big and too hard to find a good guild.

EQ launched in 1999. WoW launched in 2004.

EQ and WoW are great MMOs. I've enjoyed both for hundreds (thousands?) of hours each.

I'm more active in EQ (currently playing guild wars 2 right now, another great MMO) because it has better boxing capability.

WoW does a ton of things better than EQ, but the stack of features, abilities, group dependencies in EQ make it more engaging for me personally. The biggest thing WoW has that i wish EQ had is difficulty modes, there is very little nontrivial content in EQ.

WoW is in many way a better game overall than EverQuest, but EQ was 5 years established when WoW launched. Many people stayed with EQ because they had established relationships. Some stayed for the higher difficulty. Some stayed because although WoW had better graphics, they were not very realistic graphics.

EQ2 also launched at the same time as WoW. EQ2 also pulled a chunk of EQs player base. EQ2 offered the graphics that WoW and EQ1 did not. I haven't played EQ2.

The affect was significant as felt by the difficulty finding PUGs. It went from very busy and active to less so. PUG were still possible, but took much more effort and were not always immediately available.

I think the big problem with WoW is that it is not built on the social platform EQ was. I very much like WoWs PvP arenas, the fact that joining a queue jumps you to the PvP, the pet battles are cool as I am a fan of Pokemon, and so on. However, when I do try to play EQ, it's a quick pickup group, a cycled dungeon zerg that has no challenge, and people who don't talk to me.

WoW feels in many ways a lot more like an Xbox CoD match with an Avatar lobby (CoD WW2) than an actual MMORPG at times. Even though the game is active, it's easy for me to feel like I'm not a part of the world, and instead of playing a MMO, I'm playing Skyrim with an advanced AI running my group.

Note, I have only given WoW a few dozen hours of my time, whereas the hours I have in EQ are probably in the thousands.

When World of Warcraft was released in 2004 it absolutely decimated Everquest's playerbase. It continued to bleed the population along with Everquest 2 for the next couple years.

i played about 8 months' worth of EQ2 and enjoyed the game but ultimately, it wasn't quite what i wanted. Given all the free time in the world, i would play a variety of MMOs along with all the other games i dabble in, but alas, as a full time working adult, i have just enough free time in my life for one MMO, given that i'm not max efficient with my time or networking, and i like a slow pace and a sandbox feel.

Those would be a few of the reasons i did not get into WoW. Another would be the hardware i had at the time. Further, like many others i prefer the art style of EQ, the difficulty, the mechanics. Most the classes at the time were not button frenzy chaos.

Now, i think of Blizzard as a great company despite the ire it gets from it's own fanboys. Warcraft and Starcraft are both fantastic game series and i enjoyed them immensely. i had friends who played WoW and i watched plenty of it, and videos too. At the time, after years of investing into my fellow players and my toons in EQ, i did not see a good enough reason to abandon them for something with a less serious tone.

Though, to be honest, i think i would have been decently happy and entertained had i got into WoW, but i doubt i'd still be playing it today as much as i play EQ.

Shame that "Bring the Player not the Class" pretty much killed all the synergy in WoW

EQ was a "new kid in town" back in 1999. After Meridian 59
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_59
https://mmos.com/wp-content/gallery/meridian-59-overview/meridian-59-player-attack.jpg
was malnutritioned by 3Do (I've started playing it in 1996) and UltimaOnline being around the EQ felt somewhat different. Not nearly as engaging as PvP-centered M59 (in my opinion the first and still the best real-time PvP multi-player game) and not as cheater-heaven as UO. and EQ was and still is a very elaborate and evolved single-player/group open-ended adventure, which naturally incorporates raids and community interactions.
And Warcraft II appeared on Battle.net in 1999 same year as EQ, and the first cross-migration between the games started to happen.
WoW was indeed released in 2004, but at that time for true EQ fans the word "Warcraft" was already a deragatory term. Since "Orcs & Humans" is was just an unsuccessful parody to Dune II.

After the WoW scandals, I am glad my money went to EQ.

Going to ignore modern Blizzard and the problems it has faced.

WoW was a very different beast when it came out compared to EQ. In between the launch of EQ and WoW we had multiple other large MMORPGs release such as DAoC, FFXI, Runescape, AC1/2, and EVE so the market had already fractured the playerbase up and you really had a lot of options depending on what sort of game you were looking for. EQ was just going into the Omens of War expansion following a pretty dreadful GoD expansion which definitely sent some people looking at the new shiny toy on the market.

At this point EQ is still a pretty slow-paced game compared to other stuff on the market. Classes are starting to get more abilities but most combat still boils down to "pull mob here and autoattack it until it's dead, heal the tank". Raid mechanics have gotten more complex than in previous expansions but it's a slow process and some people actually don't want more complex mechanics they want the simplistic gameplay that EQ rolled out from the get go. A lot of players liked the slower style combat as it allowed them to be more social with their groups, chatting getting to know people etc. So transitioning to a game like WoW that expected nearly every class to be button mashing, constantly moving around in dungeons, and generally more twitch-style gameplay was a big adjustment that some didn't choose to make.

Art style is an obvious one, it's a stylistic choice but one that turns some people off. I've heard countless times about how WoW is a "kiddie" game because of just the way it looks from people that have never played it. Compare it to something like Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike, both are FPS but one goes for more realism and the other is over the top cartoony. Both are great games but some may find them unpalatable.

There were also a lot of technical issues when WoW launched. Server instability, massive bugs, long queues, these could have all put off players dipping their toe into the water.

WoW had a lot of hype with it's launch. WC3 had been a massive commercial success and gave the game a great foundation for lore and story, and at the time Blizzard was a golden child of the industry so it's no surprise how big it blew up.

I enjoyed WoW back in 2007. The world felt cohesive, integrated, and polished. The standout turn-off for me was the spoon-fed gameplay. There was very little to explore about my character's power or 'discovering' the lore. It was like taking a test that had all the answers filled in. I got bored and left WoW, never to return.

I have played Everquest since beta and never NOT played it in one form or another since it began. I loved the thread from D&D quantifying individual statistics like strength, wisdom, intelligence etc and EQ took that to a whole new level and made the play the focus and not the dice.

A couple background things...

When EQ started it was pretty bleeding edge and even owning a PC that could run it made EQ less for little kids and EQ especially at the beginning was a bit... rough around the edges.

Player corpses rotted if unlooted in time, /consent playername involved that player LOOTING the corpse.

If you were an a$$hat, everyone on your server knew it by sundown.

These facts made for a very different from any other game, ever, community of players than any game before or since. The level of maturity even now is drastically higher than any other MMO.

I liked the realistic scaling, the medieval armor types with pretty spot on historical looks.

Due to the cartoonish graphics and the number of 12 year olds I knew who played World of Warcraft I avoided it, even though I'm an avid gamer for all games, I took a pass on WoW until one year, at the very tail end of Warlords of Draenor, WoW went on a holiday sale for 12 bucks and the wife and I figured what the hey.

I farmed 14.4 <trillion> , with a capital T "Artifact Points" to advance the class based legendary artifact class weapon. The following expansion, Legion, it was all taken away and they did a "Stat Squish" (Take everything away and you restart as a noob again basically, like if Everquest deleted levels 61-120 and restarted evryone in Prophecy of Ro.

Oh and while we played, we bought, paid cash for "Flying" mounts, except, the loophole is, there's no flying in new expansions until you've beaten ALL the content AND they stagger release the content to prevent them being used basically until the expansion is spent.

WoW has lost a LOT of it's player base over this endless P!$$ing contest based entirely on developer hubris and forcing players to walk through to ensure they see eveything (except the money they spent on a "flying" mount) and doubling down on their dumb decision.


All this from a lead developer named Ion Hazzikostas who is in, get this, a guild called <Elitist Jerks> and he utterly lives up to the name. What a turn off he is.

/dubs in Wyatt Chang "Do you not have PHONES"

Developer Hubris is MMO cancer.


I never even logged back into the game.

I still have prenerf Circlet of Shadow I looted as new content 20 years ago and it's the same, on the same character who looted it back then. Characters the have gained flags over the years still have the same flags, same gear, same levels and everything. The zones and progression in Everquest matter more as it will be there next year and the year after.

Talk about stability!

Everquest is a FAR deeper game content and lore wise. It's developmental arc has remained rather consistent in treating the existing playerbase with dignity and respect (mostly) /waves buhbye to "that" dev who fittingly works over at WoW now.

One other thing that ruins WoW

Sharding

In Everquest you log in to a server. That server has it's own social scene, guild scenarios, economy, personality and history.

The same players join the same server together.

Not so in WoW. As you run through the open world, to reduce how many servers WoW actually uses, players from ANY server can be merged into the same zone you are in and competing for the same 12 mobs for a quest, and utterly incapable of inviting to guilds or anything like that as they're from another server, but servers in WoW are meaningless as communities anymore, you play with everyone and 90% of them you will never meet or even see again does not make for community building.

WoW players calling characters 'Toons' was enough for me to have zero interest in trying it out.

Inferring the responses might not be "mature" is not a good way to start a conversation and could be construed as condescending.

I did not try Wow until ~ 2010-2013.

I really loved the solo play and most of the quests really didn't take much of a group so it was all fairly easy. The main turn off for me was the WoW community itself. The random group queue system is great but has way too many elitist a$$hats.

The final nail in the coffin was the lack of depth. I basically did everything from zero to hero in about 6-9 months. The raids were decent but didn't feel nearly as challenging/rewarding.

I actually liked WoW when it came out, as did almost everyone I played EQ with. What I, and many of my guildmates at the time didn't like and just couldn't get past was the way people that played the game acted. The sense of community and social aspect we were used to with EQ just wasn't there. Players were inherently anti-social, relying more on the semi-automated systems of the game instead of chatting about things. If that was different, I might have actually kept playing for longer than the initial luster.

I genuinely never understood the "it's too cartoony" argument. Seems pretty childish to worry about how "cartoony" something is. These days that attitude makes me think of flerfs and their insane way of ignoring things like diagrams by calling them cartoons.