Lost Company

Weekly: Who's up for MMO'ing together? PDF Print E-mail
  
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 01:58

So lately I've been getting mindbleedingly bored, hopping between MMOs every month or so for about a year now. So few games are fun enough to solo through the barren lower levels, consistent in gameplay so that you don't hit a brick wall where you can't solo anymore, or have to start raiding to advance. In the past year I have played:


Hellgate London- R.I.P.
Ragnarok Online- only can be entertaining for so much time still
Maplestory- again, entertaining until the grinding sinks in and the general population being about 12
Everquest- The 51/50 server that gets players past the low level grind intrigued me enough to try out this game again, but it suffered the same problem as before that every 5 levels the monsters you are hunting get a raid tier stronger.
Shards of Dalaya (Custom Everquest Server)- This is one of the few games I have gone back to many times. XP bonus for leveling up tradeskills, same XP gain per player for a 2 person group as a full 6 person group, along with no XP loss on death (instead has nonstacking xp debt). Only downside is the necessity to 2box for certain classes unless you always group, and the time it takes to form groups for the lower levels. A much better experience than everquest itself.
Everquest 2- With the tweaks and rebalancing it has gotten over the years, this ended up being tied for the most fun game I played the past couple years along with Hellgate London. I love the achievement system it uses, getting achievement xp for exploring, killing nontrivial named monsters the first time. It gives a purpose to exploring. I initially picked it up for the crafting system, as I had been looking for a game with a decent one, but the regular pve ended up being great as well. But I ended up letting the subscription run out as almost any mmo gets boring when you play it by yourself.
Asheron's Call- Also a great game, but it just isn't the same experience as it was 9 years ago, it has been reduced to a grindfest without attack abilitys, just autoattack and heal (or sometimes just being effectively immune to what you are fighting.)
LOTRO- I picked this up for a month to play with most of the dev group as we ended up having some extra free time due to certain events, but as per usual, a lot of time ended up being spent soloing, I ended up outleveling most of the group and got burned out. The legendary weapon system seems great though, if I put in the effort to solo grind through another 10 levels to get there.
WoW- I raided in WoW for 2 years before getting married and having a kid, and have gone back to it a couple of times and it just isn't as fun as it used to be, to much was changed and the inability to consistantly raid killed it for me. The changes going in with the next expansion sound great but I would have the same raiding issues, and my guild is down to about 5 of its original members, when it started out with myself and 4 RL friends who leveled up through all of the dungeons together.

In addition to those I played several free mmos (Luminary, Dungeon Runner, Combat Arms(FPS but it still kept my attention for a while), Vanguard trial(played 1 day before uninstalling), Dungeon Fighter Online(still playing the japanese version, as having to translate as I go is better than the localized version)) and probably 100 decent flash based games, but the most common quitting factor besides a game just being terrible was being forced to solo because of the lower population levels, or being unable to solo to progress. So I figured why not ask you guys to see if we can get a lot of people together on an MMO, even if it doesn't seem like it would end up being AC2 any time in the near future, and form up a guild and play together. Post any game you would be up for joining up on, if enough people are interested I will throw a multiple choice poll up with everybody's ideas and we can vote for all of the ones we would be willing to play and go with the one the most of us would do.

Myself, I would play EQ2, Shards of Dalaya or LOTRO, or something someone else suggests that isn't WoW.

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 21 October 2009 02:00 )
 
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