For the old schoolers

Remember when groups had a dedicated "puller" as you sat back and farmed the same spot for hours upon hours, and for the new guys it was for XP not loot dare I say it?

Nothing like the early days of DAOC PvP when you would have hundreds of people seiging a castle!

How about a dedicated player to help restore mana?

Sitting for ten minutes to get your health back up .. don't miss that one so much!

What do I miss the most? I miss that people were dedicated to their class and the game and small changes didn't matter because it was more about the people you played with. You actually felt like you accomplished something in those games.

I remember the days when it took you a weekend to reach level 10. Your first quest was for level 10 and you often needed a friend. The days gone, when if you died, you lost exp (and possibly drop a level).

Days when if you wanted to explore anything beyond level 15, you'd have to go in groups just to safely travel the road of that area.

You and your group played all night to defeat a single villain, travelling the world together and going into......<insert horrid place here>

I'm painting a horrid picture, but it was great fun!!

For those who don't recognise it, it's FFXI. Personally, it was my first MMO love, Where storys and communities counted more than addons and go faster features

x

No, rarely. If I did, it was in a safe place and the calculation of risk was taken beforehand.
(EDIT: If you count this game? Not much before it. Now...all the time unfortunately.)

I'm guessing you didn't play UO, the reference is apt. Crafters, most anyhow, didn't have any kind of combat ability. If you were dedicated to the craft and a player killer ganked you, you were SoL. Just the way it was. The reward was mining, the risk was obviously getting ganked. Again, why do you assume I was alone all the time? Maybe I'm not as "charming" as you to have friends? *eye roll*

I played a bard, one of the best on Bertoxx, extremely well geared, highly skilled, and very well known. That had nothing to do with it. Talk to any old EQ player and ask them if corpse runs were upsetting or not. I guarantee you there's not a single one, unless they enjoyed the digital scenery and danger of dying again trying to get that corpse in lava, ad infinitum, that enjoyed it.

Perma-death was too hardcore for me apparently. Just not enjoyable. There's nothing worse than losing hours of game play to someone else that had days if not months of time to level gain ahead of me. Just no interest in that rat race. Let alone the prospect of losing days if not months of game play to a horde of lowbies that just started. No thanks. More power to you if that's your thing. Dealt with it in EVE one time, got podded, done. Not worth going back to that.

No, but thanks for looking it up first before commenting on it...this whole post you've put on so far seems to be a personal attack. If you'd read my post in full I was explaining why MMOs today lack in community, etc. Go look this one up before you assume. You know what they say about the word assume, right?

(EDIT: To save you time, though I don't know why I'm giving you the convenience of this. "Black barring" was when someone would take your attributes to 1. Basically destroying your health (through over damage), and putting it into an almost negative state. This would cause you to have 1 health, 1 action at times. Making you completely useless in a fight. It happened often. To restore this 'black bar' back to show red health and green action, you had to sit in a cantina and have a performer either dance for you or play music for you while you went afk for 30-45 minutes. Was it fun? Not at all. Did it give me time to do something else. Yes. Was the game amazing pre-cu/nge? Absolutely. Not everything about every game is fun though, and that was a horrible system often times tipping the battle completely by one combat medic, very overpowered, that would black bar every single person by throwing multiple DoTs on them and wrecking a whole pvp team, upwards to 30 people.)

A simple LFG tool works wonders. You'd be surprised. Did you even play EQ? Do you have any objective reference to quote anything I said? I'm curious.

Again, games today are lacking in many regards. The final verdict is that games today lack community. For all the gaming flaws they possess, to include UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, CoH/CoV, SWG, Tabula Rasa, WoW, Horizons, Shadowbane, EQ2, LoTRO, Vanguard, Lineage 1&2, PoTCO, EVE, DCUO, Fallen Earth, and now SW:TOR. All of them had some feature or another that I enjoyed thoroughly. Most of them lack in one way or another.

When you speak of "hardcore", I would list the games out of there that you have actually played. There's a static definition of "hardcore". Some define it as PvP with no limits, death with penalties, etc. Others would define it as a permanent death, loss of level and a stiff penalty for 'losing'. Still others would define it as raiding on constant, beating the end game content with as much prowess as your raid group can muster as fast as possible.

I define "hardcore" as being dedicated to the game, opposing the odds presented and continuing through the mass of game objectives thrown at you to make you fail, thus overcoming them. This applies to any of those above aspects. So yes, I'd say I'm a pretty 'hardcore' gamer. Your post against mine makes me feel that you looked little into the point of it, and instead are trying to pick apart things I found flaw with in games. It doesn't matter, I still find flaws with those games. I've been good at many of them, and great at some. Few of them have I been utterly bad at. Well, apparently with the lack of community here, the consistent trolling, i.e. what I feel is being presented to me now in a form of passive aggressive statements made against my own personal game-play style, not knowing me at all...just assuming, I am apt to stick with the statement that made you smile.

Keep the cookie. Now you're just being condescending. Thanks for proving my point though.

Riiiiight... awesome...

There are actually some UO devs on the BioWare team running things.

Ok, I think we have a misunderstanding here. I wasn't trying to judge you or implying things about your lifestyle or gaming habits. All I was trying to say is that I don't have that much free time anymore and the effect of new responsibilities.

When I was in high school and college, I could game for 6-12 hours non stop. Was it healthy? Of course not but I didn't care at all. The "bright side" about that was it made things way easier to know the other mmo players, my guildmates and the mmo ingame possibilities/features. I could raid 3-4 times every week, I could farm mats or loots for hours upon hours, I could chat until dawn about silly things. In a sense, it was great and I miss it.

Back to present. I'm done with the monster camping and the extreme grinding. Waiting for hours for the "Giant Pink Flying Pig Kingslayer" to spawn or completing the same instances countless times, I just can't "afford" it anymore. Also, I just feel it doesn't worth it anymore because my priorities changed so much. It's one of the reasons why I love SWTOR: it takes much less time to reach the same goals (endgame gear, raid completion, titles, bonuses, etc.).

it was the absolutely EPIC stories, the best crafting system ever seen (absolutely ridiculous at times, too) and yes, the community. the grind you 'took' because it was the way it was and it was the same in every other game (not forgetting to mention final fantasy games have always been mindless grinds half of the total playtime)
I most certainly wouldn't have minded if the quests actually gave you exp aswell but that wasn't the case.

I guess I gave the wrong impression. It's just that in this game, like you say they are just troopers with an attitude and not the bad azz Jedi hunters we all have to come expect from.

I play(ed) a Shield Tech and absolutely loved the class as it pertains to this game.

It's just that I felt more like a mercenary that works for the Empire as a trooper equivalent more than a free roaming relentless hunter of Jedis.

OP,

I enjoyed EverQuest too. It has gone F2P, so feel free to go play it again. Just don't forget your rose-colored glasses.

I do miss the slower pace of things and the more epic feel of the uncertainty of exploration. I liked how dark meant DARK where you couldn't see in front of you.

The problem is that people don't seem to want that type of game anymore. Publishers don't want to release a game where the maximum subscriber base is going to be around 400k. Even though you can make a healthy profit with that, publishers don't want to waste their time on anything that they can't hope for WoW-level profits.

Companies like EA and Activision do not make games. They make investment decisions that they think will pump up their stock values. They couldn't care less what the actual product does as long as it brings in the $$$$. A game that only brings in $$$ is a failure.

I'm all for things being more difficult, NOT ridiculous.

I could play PnP AD&D with some sadist DM for that lol!

if those days were so "good" then more games would be like them. to bad those days sucked real nuts