People get mad sometimes when we talk about WoW in here (
), and believe it or not, I can understand that. This is an EQ2 place, and there are people who love EQ period, no matter what. And actually, that's okay. I can understand that, too.
Even though you might not like me saying this, I think that there is (finally) some healthy competition to SoE will be a really, really good thing for mmo's, now and to come. In the past I've been chastized by many players who explain to me "Evil, this is capitalism - Sony reacts to market pressures" and etc. and so on.
If only this were the case - in the past there has been no pressure. In old EQ Verant stubbornly held onto their "creative vision" for the game, which included a very, very slow pace of play. Why??? Hell, I don't know. Ultimately I think it was ego. They could, and they did. EQ had no competition back then, so market arguments were flawed. With high barriers to entry, it was really hard to get in and have a go against the giant. AO was pretty cool but never recovered from its technically flawed opening - and its sci fi theme just didn't appeal to the masses. Other games - just never could cut it. Because there was no real market force at work, no real competative pressure, Verant and Sony left some *obvious* game flaws to fester for years. Finally we got more hunting zones w/ Kunark. But the slooow boat (almost an hour of RL time sometims to get places), serious downtime between fights (zzzzzzzz), no player market, no zoning pets, no rent items go poof if u go LD, etc etc. - these were left unfixed for ages. And the first attempt to fix movement was an insult - a teleport hub on a TIMER. Took 15 min to get up and 15 min to get down. Gah!
Where were the market forces pressuring them? They obviously weren't pressured, even though zillions of players hated this aspect of the game (druids were thick as flies back then - hell I played one so I could self teleport). I can still remember those Verant guys looking down their noses at us players, telling us they knew better. Finally, Verant lost EQ, and Sony fixed these problems, after about 4 years. Why? I'm not sure, but either they were losing players or feared losing players - that's my guess, anyway.
W/ PoK they almost made it too easy. You TP up, buy or beg buffs, get buffs on your pet - and if you can twink, get some uber gear - and go slaughter stuff. When I remember, thought, back to my first char, a Wood Elf bard, still fighting w/ a rusty long sword at lvl 4... still barely able to kill an orc pawn... hah. No, it's finally playable now. Imo at least. That is a danger, that the company freaks out and overreacts - but hopefully,now that we have some real market forces, that won't happen, either.
Personally, I think it's a wonderful thing that SoE is getting their little red wagons kicked around by WoW and Bliz. I have no love for Bliz either way - and havne't played WowW - but the point is this, that hopefully some real competitive forces right at the start with force SoE to face reality and realize that EQ2 has some serious problems. You can laugh at me and call me an idiot, but I don't think Sony's ever taken a blow like this before. Verant could tell us "they knew what was good for us" because they were so far ahead (they knew they had us hooked, even with all the problems). Sony can't do this w/ EQ2. Well, that's my thoughts for now on this issue. Here's hoping.