Creating Content for the Majority

Keen and Graev's recent blog, while stirring up some fond memories of DAOC, also reminded me of my annoyances with my current game EQ2, as well as previous MMO's.

As I mentioned before, EQ2 recently released epic quests for each class. Whenever someone obtains their epic, a message is broadcast to everyone with their name, guild, and a link to the weapon they've acquired. On our server, only one raid guild has been able to acquire these. It's getting to where I'm starting to get annoyed each time I have to see the message. I'm certain it's no exaggeration that 95% of the players will likely never acquire these. All this effort and time creating content for such a small player base. And for what purpose? To annoy the majority and appease the few? I'm starting to get that discouraged feeling I had in EQ1 all over again.

Which is why I had mentioned in Keen's post that DAOC was the most enjoyable PVE experience for me. We obtained epics with a group of three. And why is this such a bad thing in other MMO's? I had a blast doing these. No camping of mobs hoping the right one spawns after eight hours. Just a fun series of challenging dungeon crawls. None of this carrot on a stick nonsense. The carrot was finally obtainable.

Conquering keeps and such is a different matter. I understand the need for volumes of people when you're taking over territories. And even DAOC gathered large forces for taking down a dragon. But it was for the experience of doing it and not to benefit one single individual with some wonderful armor piece few will ever see. We all pay the same fee and all want nice stuff without having to sacrifice our families to acquire things.

DAOC had added raid content in the form of the ToA expansion, which gave a select few an advantage over everyone else. But when players left in droves, they did eventually implement classic servers which included everything but ToA, and these servers did really well. I think had EQ1 added pre-PoP servers a couple years back, they would have also been successful, but think it's a bit too late for that now.

Mythic created one of the few MMO's with the majority of its players in mind, and that is why I will be trying Warhammer.