So, who haven’t we beat up yet?

Okay, I admit it. I am an EverQuest player. Have been for over four years now, in fact, since shortly after the game was released. I hadn’t even heard about it at the time; I was just bored and looking for something new to play, picked up the box while browsing at Future Shop, and thought “Huh, might be worth a try…”

Now, four years layer, I have a highest-level character, a guild full of long-time (gamewise) friends, decent gear, and an obscenely large amount of total time spent in-game. And yet I haven’t been in EQ for more than an hour in the last three weeks.

What the hell happened?

First, a bit of background may be necessary. EQ, like most other computer RPGs, is based on advancement. You beat stuff up and take their money and gain levels and equipment, so you can beat up tougher stuff and take their money and get more levels and equipment, and so on. You start out fighting by yourself — it doesn’t take an army to kill a rat, after all.

As you become stronger, the monsters you fight will become stronger as well of course, and they get stronger faster than you do. Fights become more difficult, you die more often, and the rate at which you advance begins to slow down dramatically. At this point it becomes more practical to fight in groups. By now you’ve probably met a number of other players and made some friends, and if your schedules align well enough and they’re also interested, you can team up and start fighting tougher monsters more efficiently. Eventually having a group is going to be almost mandatory, since the monsters will be so tough that you have a slim chance of defeating them alone.

A regular group of specific players can be hard to maintain, though. People often only have three or four hours to play, and what are the odds you’re going to find a group of friends who play the exact same hours you do all the time? What happens when people’s real lives interfere or they just lose interest or something and you’ve only got half the group online? Instead it’s beneficial to have a larger pool of people who know and trust each other and from which you can see who’s available and invite them to your group. Thus was born guilds, where large numbers of players are united by something or other (exactly what is different from guild to guild). There are also targets which are too difficult for a single group alone, and a guild made it easier to collect the larger number of people necessary for those encounters.

There are a few different things that keep things interesting along the way. Anything repeated too much would become boring, after all. First, there is simply the feeling of accomplishment of having reached a new area and defeated an enemy for the first time. There are numerous different areas and dungeons with their own unique feel to them and population of enemies. Second, there is the hope of getting a new piece of equipment to make you stronger. They’re often a random chance of being found on certain creatures, so there’s always the anticipation of the next kill maybe having something you want. Third, the tactics necessary to fight efficiently will change as you progress, and there’s always room for practice and improvement. And fourth, it’s an opportunity to hang out with friends and chat or just enjoy working together.

There’s still a finite amount of ‘content’ to experience though. Eventually you’ll hit the highest level, get the best equipment, and have seen every area. To keep players interested, there have been a number of expansion packs released with new areas, new monsters, higher levels, more spells, etc. Ideally, there is enough new stuff in each expansion pack to keep players interested until the next expansion is released, not-so-coincidentally keeping the money flowing in to Sony…

And there our troubles begin. The first expansion pack, Ruins of Kunark, was pretty much just an extension of the existing game. It still played pretty much the same way, just in new areas, and the level limit was raised to 60 to give people something to work towards. There was one important new feature introduced, though: the concept of areas with restricted access. You could not enter an area called Veeshan’s Peak until completing a rather annoying quest requiring you to gather pieces from various areas. It wasn’t really a difficult quest, but it required deliberately sitting in one spot and killing a specific monster over and over and over again until the ‘special’ monster appeared and you killed it and got the quest piece. It could take dozens of hours of rather boring fights to get these pieces. However, it was just one zone out of 25 or so added with Kunark, so there was still plenty of other things to do. Not many people wound up going there in the end.

The next expansion pack, Scars of Velious, also added a restricted-access area called Sleeper’s Tomb. However, to enter this area you had to kill certain dragons which held the key piece, and these dragons only appeared once a week. This area also let you get weapons which dramatically increased the killing power of melee classes, so demand to get in was high. There was intense competition between the guilds to get to these dragons first whenever they appeared, and much bitterness was caused as a result. Often one guild would get to the dragon, start preparing to fight it, and some other guild would blow right past them and begin their own attack. This further encouraged the development of the ‘uberguild,’ a guild with large numbers of players on at any time and who are willing to drop whatever they’re doing and mobilize towards a new target at a moment’s notice. Still, there were a number of other areas for players who didn’t or couldn’t get into that competition.

The third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, took this to extremes. Although there were a large number of new zones, a lot of them were for lower level players and most of us long-time players were already too high to get much benefit out of them. There was again a restricted access zone, Vex Thal, where the equipment you could get was insanely powerful, and the entrance requirements were extreme. You had to collect 10 shards from various areas, some easy to get but others extremely rare. You also needed two drops from the toughest ‘boss’ monsters of various zones, and for one of them you needed to collect even more pieces to get a key just to get in to the area to fight him. And then you needed a good 60 or more people for the fight. About the only people who could do this easily were the uberguilds which had already been developing.

Luclin would have been a complete disaster for the rest of us if it were not for one new feature they added: alternate skill points. Although the level limit was still 60, you could divert the experience you earned into gaining skill points instead of levels, and then spend those skill points on various new abilities. For example, as an enchanter I could buy the ability to cast a spell on a large crowd of people instead of just my group, or the ability to regain mana faster, or the ability to extend the duration of a spell, etc. People wanted these new abilities badly enough that they were willing to stick through the same old areas, churning out experience points, until the next expansion.

Planes of Power. And here is where the story goes to hell in a handbasket. Planes of Power added more spells and alternate skills, which was great for everyone. But, of the 20 or so zones PoP added, *all but four of them were restricted access*. To gain access to the rest of the zones, there were generally two options: you could either defeat a difficult ‘boss’ creature, or you could perform a quest that required various rare items. The quest allowed single groups of people to advance to other zones, but with a couple caveats: the pieces were a pain in the ass to collect, like the original Veeshan’s Peak quest, and you could not progress past any zones which you accessed via a quest. For example, if from zone A you get access to zone B, and then from zone B you get access to zone C, and you did the quest in zone A, you would be let in to zone B. But, you would not be able to proceed from zone B to zone C — in order to do that you would have to go back and complete zone A the ‘proper’ way by killing the boss creature.

The net result of this was that people started getting split up. Joe would want to go hunt in Plane of Storms, but the group couldn’t go because Bob didn’t have access to that area yet. So, Joe would start avoiding groups with Bob because he didn’t want to be held back. The more split up people became, the less organized as a whole the guild was, and it became more difficult to do the fights necessary to advance. The uberguilds in the meantime, having been fairly strong to begin with, were just blowing through everything at a much faster rate. People would get frustrated at their own guild’s inability to advance and would leave and join the uberguilds, leaving their original guilds even weaker.

And, well, that’s largely what’s happened to me. Succoring Winds is a great bunch of people, but we’ve never really been strongly organized. We can’t compete against the uberguilds, and we keep losing people to them, making things even worse. I will not bring myself to do that; as successful as the uberguilds are, they’re more like military forces than friends. They tell you when to play, where you will be going, what equipment you will be getting, etc., and that’s just not my style. I will not be a cog in the machine.

So, what does that leave then? Not an awful lot, unfortunately. If most of Planes of Power is out of reach, then that just leaves the older expansion areas. There’s only so many times you can do them over and over again though. There are quests to help give long-term goals, but I’ve done most of the ones I’m interested in already. I can’t go forwards, and there’s just nothing else left to do. Why even bother logging in anymore then?

There may be hope on the horizon. The next expansion pack, due out later this year, is adding a lot of dungeons meant for old-style single-group exploration rather than the massive, army-like raiding prevalent now. With a lot of friends having left though, the question is, will there be anyone left to group with then?

Then again, nothing lasts forever.