I don’t have any hard facts either but if everyone you know has played EQ then that just means you’re of a certain age. I would be willing to bet many people 30 and below have never seen EQ.
EQ may have paved the way for WoW, but as has been said before, it’s simply not possible for more than about 5% of all WoW players to have played EQ. The ones that did play, however, are always talking about how wonderful it was to camp zone bosses for 36 hours straight!
I’m way old, but my first MMO was Dark Age of Camelot. And though strictly speaking I “played” EQ, it was a trial, and I only played it about 3 hours before deciding it was too backwards to fiddle with.
JM1
5922
Yes, in my experience EQ & DAOC players are the ones most likely to bang on about those games, so it seems like there’s loads of them. The relative success of those two compared to WoW tells the story though.
Because if number of people playing is how you measure the quality of a game farmville wins.
Lorini
5924
Razgon, you don’t need a Phd to figure this out. If WoW has 11 million subs and the best EQ could do was 450 thousand subs then you divide 450 thousand into 11 million and you get (voila!) 24. What this means is at best 24% of the people who are playing WoW played EQ. And probably a lot less. So…you’re wrong :)
I played EQ and hated it. I cut my teeth on Ultima Online, a much different and in my opinion greatly superior game. When UO went into decline with the Trammel patch I tried many alternatives but nothing gripped me until WoW came out. It was the first one to be as solo-friendly as UO had been, and also the first since that game to actually let me tab out as needed. I hated how games like EQ and DAOC locked you in and made it impossible to check your email, browse the web, etc.
Of course, I miss the mad chaos of the old UO. I’d love to take WoW and, just for a day, make it like UO in early 1998. Hit that raiding group with a band of pkillers, kill them all and take all their stuff. OOOoooOOO all you want, your epics are mine now.
I guess he was following the principle of “never letting the facts get in the way of a good story”
:D
JM1
5927
Well it helps if you try and keep it in the same genre, no? So Farmville is the best Facebook game. WoW does so many things better than DAOC/EQ - it doesn’t actively hate its users - that it earned the playerbase it currently enjoys.
Remember in EQ when task-switching was considered a bannable exploit?
Yeah, fuck SOE forever.
I don’t doubt that, but I don’t necassarily think popularity is that accurate a measure of quality. I suppose my coment was meant simply imply that saying something is more popular is a pretty thin argument for why it is better, that’s all.
Nobody’s arguing over which is better. The argument is about how many people are playing, so yes popularity is what’s in question here.
In my reality (insert smiley face here) that calculation means EQ had 1/24th of the number of people in WoW, which means it’s more like 4% (450,000/11,000,000).
But I would speculate that if you exclude the Chinese subscribers to WoW and assume that more or less all of the EQ subscribers were non-Chinese, the numbers come out to 450,000 EQ players out of ~6 million WoW players, which is around 7.5%. Still, that’s a pretty small percentage of WoW players who played EQ.
JM1
5932
Not the sole measure, but it is certainly a good indicator. WoW was the first MMO to really try and make playing the game entertaining, rather than a hamster wheel wrapped up in a series of mind-bogglingly awful chores. EQ and co had things to recommend them but there is just so much awful.
So would you argue that since they are so popular, it’s a good indication that McDonalds burgers must be the best burgers?
Wait are you saying that alt-tabbing was bannable? Like minimizing the EQ window to look something up on the internet?
Or is task-switching something else?
Just a recommendation for anyone starting out with this trial offer. I recommend rolling troll / undead cause those two factions got alot of changes to their starting quests. The whole undead story line from silverpine to hillsbrad to plaguelands is very well done. Not sure which races were updated for alliance I believe the gnome stuff should be redone and a heard good this about questing is westfall / red ridge
Razgon
5936
Okay okay, probably not mostly everyone then.
One thing though - If EQ had a max sub of 450.000, then that doesnt mean that they had 450.000 total unique players is all I’m saying. Its been around for quite a few years, so the number of people who have played it, has been racking up for quite some time.
WoW has every unique player there is, though ;-)
And yeah, as someone mentioned, its probably also very much an age thing.
Everquest locked you out of Windows when you logged into your account. It was impossible to tab out without the use of a third party program, which was bannable (at least when I tried the game). In fairness to SOE, Ultima Online was riddled with exploits as a result of its easy customization, but give me a game with a few exploits any day over one which locked me out of my computer. It’s probably the single biggest reason I didn’t pursue any of that generation of games (since Dark Age of Camelot had the same limitation at the time).
I can’t remember if anybody actually got banned for it, but the ability to Alt-Tab was completely disabled and you had to resort to a third-party utility to re-enable it. Some people did indeed want to Alt-Tab in order to switch to something like ShowEQ and cheat, but a lot of people just wanted to dual-box, or, y’know, actually do something else in Windows…
And it’s obviously crazy to claim EQ was more popular than WoW in absolute numbers; I think his point was just that EQ maintained a population that was considered high for the era despite lacking all of the solo-friendly aspects of later MMOs, and it was at least partly due to that group dependence effect. I do kind of miss that sometimes; I wind up soloing my way through a lot of the zone content since there’s no real point in grouping up to do it since it’s so trivial, but you feel awfully lonely at the end.
JM1
5939
I’m talking about World of Warcraft. Not burgers. World of Warcraft is a very good game - better in many ways than DAOC and EQ - and the numbers back that up. It is popular precisely because it appealed to the people who were turned off by the myriad un-fun issues with the earlier games, yet retained a lot of what made people enjoy DAOC and EQ.
If you reply with yet another attempt to use the popularity argument in an unrelated field I will be forced to kill you with my mind.
But if an argument cannot be applied in other circumstances how can you determine it’s validity.
I’m not saying that WoW is better or worse than EQ…having never played EQ I have no idea. I just don’t think that saying because something is more popular it is better is universially applicable. That means it’s not a very good argument for quality. Pretty sure that McDonalds proves that point rather handily (whether you want to admit it or not).
