For me, it wasn't just one major screwup or bad expansion. EQ2 used to be excellent, but it's been terribly mishandled for years now. Pretty much everything SOE does with EQ2 nowadays is half-assed, or broken, or useless, or just outright bad for the game. Years of appalling development by SOE have brought the game to a point where my guild and I just don't like it anymore.

I know that's vague, but if I get too specific I'll talk for an hour. :p

Really then that explains why there are still supporting and making expansions for Everquest 1.

Its like Atari, Atari 5200 was badly done while the 2600 lived on more.

i don't know why anyone would play everquest 1 these days. after every fight i had to sit around waiting to heal for a long time without anything to do. maybe i just don't know how to work the game correctly. EQ2 was a huge improvement IMHO

EQ2 has a lot more following. I don't know what irked Mentalepsy, and I was never a hardcore EQ2 player. That's probably why I liked many of the things they changed, such as making travel a lot faster over the years. Still, at this point in time I'm not playing much of anything, let alone MMO's. Only playing Gabriel Knight 1 a little bit here and there, and occasionally trying a new game for 20 minutes or so.

I don't have a problem with making the game less of a pain in the ass; honestly if I had played the game at launch, I probably would have hated it (I started right when Echoes of Faydwer came out). There have also been some nice features added over the years, like guild halls. I also agree that the improved fast travel options were much-needed, especially since "travel" in EQ2 generally just means sitting through a bunch of consecutive loading screens. That's not "dumbing down" the game, that's just making it waste less of my time. :p

I have a lot of issues with the current state of the game, but my three biggest gripes in brief are: 1) the irreparably broken itemization and mechanics, which cause major and varied problems at all level ranges; 2) the poor showing and even cancellation of new content in recent times (especially Skyshrine), and the reckless obsoleting of still-current-level content; 3) the very poor handling of feature development (Age of Discovery is still badly underdeveloped, and in the interim we've gotten baffling dead weight like SOEmote and the station cash minigames).

I've never liked SOE's handling of the game in general, but the past year or two has really been where I have really started to see it as careless and destructive, rather than just clumsy. There's still some quality gaming to be had at the lower levels (say, 1-70), but even that is a mess nowadays.

I was quite disappointed with Dungeon Maker. I bought AoD because I love this kind of tool and I that was really a half baked attempted. I couldn't create anything worthwhile and didn't enjoy any user created dungeons. Haven't tried it recently, though.

At least Beastlords are cool.

In an expansion full of letdowns, DM was the biggest. You can come up with some creative designs if you work at it (I built two dungeons that I'm very pleased with, though only a handful of players ever saw them), but the editor is suffocatingly limited. Building a cool dungeon is moreso about working around limitations, rather than mastering a toolset, and even then you can only create the most basic sort of content.

Of course very few people put even that much effort into it. Almost every player dungeon is just an idiot grind zone, and the hall of fame only showcases the most efficient grinds, since I guess that's what most players care about. I realize most player-built content is going to be crap, but with DM, finding the good stuff is next to impossible.

DM should have been a killer feature for EQ2, but it's really just a diversion, and it's been almost completely ignored since it launched. Even if we take the limited editor as given, it's still lacking countless features and fixes that should have been in at launch. Player-created content is a big deal - if they weren't going to do it right, they shouldn't have bothered.

The biggest thing that got to me in EverQuest 2 was the AA grind and the fact that it was a real pita to work on it solo, very slow going and as such alt-unfriendly. Then to ice this cake, the gated advancement so you had to have a high number of AA per toon to advance to the level cap. When they did that I canceled.

I guess I'm not the typical MMO player anymore where I like to play casually and shy away from groups and raids with the associated drama over deaths and loot, etc. So maybe what I hated was no big deal for other people but it really sucked for me as so many AA was like adding that many levels for one character to earn and yet, not providing the content to earn them with for all types of players. I felt they really half-assed the quest content in recent expansions.

With SOE there is way too much obvious focus on money grabs and not near enough focus on quality, carefully designed, fun gameplay and content.

My "late" childhood: Icesus, ShadowGate, BatMUD.

Wish I had the time to get back in to MUD's again... Well, suppose I -could- start idling around...

I haven't played many MMOs, since I prefer single player.

I tried out WoW for a while, didn't like it all that much.

I played DDO for quite a while, it was really fun levelling to 20, doing new missions, exploring new zones and beating new dungeons. Once I had done all the content, though, the grind needed to be able to do the most difficult stuff wasn't very interesting to me.
Plus it's a game where grouping is absolutely necessary at higher levels, PUGs often suck and my guild broke up, so I quit. I'd like to go back someday though.


At the moment, I'm playing The Secret World, which imo would easily win the "Best MMO to turn into a single player game" category if it existed. The story and setting are really interesting, and they also matter. There are much more varied missions than most MMOs. And the classless character system is really open and interesting.
It does have accessibility problems though, as the game really sucks at selling itself early on, and the tutorials suck. Still, once you get past that, it's a really good game, and completely soloable, except for the dungeons.

I rarely play on MMORPG anymore. When I did I played NWN online and Team Fortress 2.

The 280 wall was probably not a good idea. It didn't really affect me because my three characters were all past that point, but we had some newer, very casual players (playing a night or two a week, or less) in our guild with 100-150 AA. I felt bad for them being arbitrarily shut out like that. I understand the content balance issue that SOE is facing, but this was not the way to fix it.

It sucks that AA has basically become a tedious grind reserved for marathon sessions on double XP weekend. It's not nearly as bad a grind as some other games I've played, but there's no reason for it to be as steep as it is.

I agree that it's not worth the aggravation. I love group content and coop play, but I hate playing with random people. I've been very lucky in that I've found a small group of people to play with who are very good players, but also very laid back. We're all former raiders who got tired of the stress and drama. We've been playing together for several years, first EQ2 and now Rift.

Given a decent editor, there will be decent player-built content. The MMO I played most was City of Heroes, and while its editor is far from perfect (and DM is better at adding low level details) it's a lot better for telling stories, which is what makes good player created content. While there was a ton of farming content, it was also not hard to find good playable content, and some of it was even highlighted by the devs.

I agree with everything you say about DM. It looks like it was built up front for grinding. You have to grind just to get more objects to produce better dungeons. Granted there was something similar in City of Heroes, but the basis was a lot better.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the Neverwinter MMO will be like in this respect.

I only played the low levels, but modern EQ2 is so much more solo friendly than it was in 2005-6 when I first played it. Back then at around level 10 and up most of my time was spent trying without success to avoid mobs (and going back to my spirit shards when I couldn't).

As for alt friendliness I find it's quite good for that. The shared bank makes creating alts and having them take care of each other pretty easy. As I said, I only played the low levels. At these levels EQ2 is pretty good for altoholics except for the limited number of characters (compared to a City of Heroes subscription; now that was a game for altoholics).