It was still somewhat of a nuisance in FFXI though because (at that time) it didn’t scale your armor or abilities down meaning you had the hassle of having to keep multiple sets of armor at various level tiers. I hear that’s not the case anymore, but I stopped playing a long time ago.

I did go to the link you had it is the same game I played back then. It looks like they kept updating it after I stopped playing it in 1998.

It does just amaze me that it’s still played though. It always had a strong community though.

The same goes for Lars’ comments on EQ2 auto-mentoring; look at what City of Heroes/Villains has done in this area, it may probably be quite close to what he wants. But I think one important piece here would be that the developers would have to let go of the idea that players need to progress through content in a certain order. They could hint at an order, but it would really be up to the responsibility of the players to choose.

When a defined progression path becomes more important than teaming and social aspects is when we get the situations which plague a number of MMOs.

If Champions Online is becoming a mission grind like LOTRO and perhaps WoW, then I am a bit disappointed. But will wait and see for myself at some point. I’d rather hope for a Guild Wars model for missions, combined with some of the good points from City of Heroes/Villains missions.

(And, for the record, that was 100% honest curiosity.)

My first MMO, Nexus: Kingdom of the Wind, was a social MMO. There was plenty of fighting, and you had to do a lot of it to progress, but mostly what you did was hang out with other people, and then go in big crowds to decimate an area of all life, and then maybe attend a wedding or a tournament.

In EverQuest, while there were quests, the usual play style was to group up with some folks, find a nice comfy dungeon spot, and camp rare drops (and xp, though xp was very slow in EQ). Given EQ’s generally slow pace back then, you chatted a lot with your group and through the zone and generally just had a good time. Other times you’d be in a hunting group that would go to a usually overland zone and just kill whatever you came across — Rathe Mountains, for instance, was famous for that.

DAoC had many of the same characteristics as EverQuest, but after you finished the newbie levels, groups tended to shift between normal killing and camping rare drops into small group PvP or massive armies meeting on the battlefield. You never quite knew what would be happening in a night of DAoC.

In fact, until I played WoW, I’d never played a game like it. And I LOVED WoW! But then I got bored with the quest grind. EQ2 was great, but then it started going the WoW route and I got bored with ITS farming and quest grind. Since grinding quests is SUCH a non-starter with me these days, I’m not going to bother with any games with that as their main feature.

Been there, done that.

What else is there, if not quests and experience gain? Combat for its own sake? Walking around looking at things? Making in-game money for… what? PVP?

The “quest grind” -is- the game to me. I study every bit of NPC text with interest, I enjoy the feel of performing a task for a reward. I’m now wondering what alternate style of play I’m missing.

I can’t imagine this game would be that old though. I must be thinking of a different game? But I’m pretty sure that was it. I’ll poke around more.

@Graktar — that’s good news!

Whoa, hold up a minute. People are still playing The Realm!?! It’s amazing that it’s still going on since it’s launch in 1996! Really though…people are still playing that?