When I worked at Massively, I was being paid to play SOE games — but I posted my articles about it on Massively, so it was clear they were paid for.

I don’t have the time to play every MMO that comes out — to really play an MMO, you have to devote a significant amount of time to it, you can’t just dabble and hope to get the full experience. Pretty much all I can do is sit on the outside and marvel at the enthusiasm, sit in my carebear EQ2 and group and raid and decorate my home and collect titles and make new and interesting outfits to wear and write stories about my characters and wonder when the next game will come out that could ever compete with it?

But even though I don’t play WAR, I don’t think that should disqualify me from talking about it :)

True, the nerd fanatics are out in full force for this one, but they are loyal to the brand, not paid advertisers. But, they just want people to see the same shining light that they see when they play WAR. This does tend to put the normal people off from trying the game and it does more of a disservice than not.

I don’t think this will ever change. As you stated, it happened with EQ, WoW and now WAR, people are just rabid about their games. If your not playing our preferred game, your a heretic and should be burned at the stake. The fact is, you have to decide for yourself and stop reading all the nerd fanatic’s websites.

Trying out the game for yourself is the only true way to see if you will like it and sometimes you just have to take that chance. I’ve tried several different MMO’s till I found WoW, Which I still like, and now I have found WAR. In another year who is to say what will be on the horizon, maybe DC online.

But more on your point, you do prefer PvE, so it’s only natural you returned to EQ when more PvE content was available. The reverse probably happened for more PvP-minded people, who liked to try the PvE of EQ, but ultimately would come back to DAoC for the better PvP.

Just a quick example, I logged on two nights ago and asked in guild chat if any RvR was happening. Jobildo let me know he had a group, and without any further hassle, i type /join Jobildo, get into the warband, and in a few minutes of travel, I’m with the warband and in RvR, despite it being in a different teir/pairing.

Same type of situation happened last night with Aria and I in the Dark Elf area. We were happily questing along in our two person open group, ran into a fresh and empty PQ, and starting killing the regular mobs to finish our influence for the chapter, knowing we could not finish the PQ as we can’t duo a hero class mob. Randomly two people join us, and now it becomes possible to actually finish the PQ and get some bag loot in addition to influence. As we continue the PQ, two CoW members also join up as they saw Aria and I in the area through the guild tab (again using /join, making it instant). Now with 6 people, instead of one PQ and back to questing, Aria and I traveled with our group, and ended up going to chap 3 and doing two more PQs start to finish in about a half hour, ending our game night. So rather than our plan of finishing all the quests in chapter 2, the mechanics in WAR made it so we spent some time with guild members and two others working as a group on some PQs, all without any real effort or ‘LFG’ spam.

DAoC picked up lots of bored or just pissed-off EQ players — I was one of them — the bored ones. As a high level druid at that time, I had very little options in EQ except to solo, and soloing is boring. No raid guilds were taking druids. I REALLY liked DAoC, but I didn’t stay more than a year. The PvE just wasn’t up to the standard of the PvP, and the PvP was absolutely dominated by griefers. I kept hearing about the changes coming to EQ with Luclin and the lure of a superior PvE game brought me back (yes, I guess I am a carebear). I rerolled as a rogue and enjoyed EQ a lot more. I returned to DAoC twice more to try out different classes (Minstrel, Cleric, Friar, that one with the golem pets; Bard on the Hib side, Shaman as a Middie), but the PvP, when it wasn’t being picked off by a stealther, were confused lagfests at Emain Mecha. I leveled up a Hib Lurikeen Enchanter and had some fun in the battlegrounds once they implemented all the new BGs with the central keep. That was pretty much the best fun I had in DAoC, but EQ just wouldn’t stop pulling me back with raiding (as a rogue) and its superior PvE and grouping.

So while DAoC had the numbers for awhile, it couldn’t keep them. Even while I was in DAoC, most of the people were wishing for a slightly more open sort of PvP, and almost everyone was looking forward to Shadowbane.

But anyway, I have to agree slightly with Hudson and Jobildo that currently, the stuff about WAR is reaction rather than hype. In particular, you use the ‘War is Everywhere’ tag line that Mythic used, but now that people are playing the game, they can see that indeed, in WAR, combat is all over the place, and not just at the cap like it is in other games. The conflict pulls you in at all times, be it PvE style with PQs, or PvP style with RvR areas and scenarios.

All that said, these last few posts have been great fun, and I fully understand your take on the whole thing. And like I said before, I would highly recommend you get a box and at least mess around with WAR for an hour or whatever a week. It’s very, very interesting to see the social changes happening to people early on in the game, and just watching groups form and carry people from one PQ to another, or an RvR group slowly growing into a warband (raid group) as people get more and more caught up in the fight. Just seeing the whole WoW mentality slowly melt away has been really interesting for me. People learn to stop spamming ‘LFG’ and instead just auto-join. It might seem like a silly thing to write here, but when you see it in-game, and see how common it is for lvl 1-4 characters, and how different people act even at level 5-10, its an amazing change.

But this is precisely the problem that I see people talking about now and then — people tend to clump up, so there will be really popular places but increasingly, empty places where few people come, or they come and then leave because there aren’t many other people there. In these places, you probably will end up having to be more proactive and make your own groups, but eventually they will just become dead areas as attention inevitably shifts to the high level game.

WAR seems like it will be really susceptible to this sort of thing.

Ill give you that. BUT, the mechanics in this game make grouping MUCH MUCH easier than WoW. WoW avoided what you stated there by having so MANY FREAKING PEOPLE. In WAR, open grouping is a god send. Im not hyping it, just saying that from my experiences, I have found groups so fast, no matter where I was.

However you have a good point in what you stated.