QUOTE (Rory @ Jun 10 2004, 12:53 PM)
The thing you need to understand about Everquest is that, in the end, its a game about patience and efficiency. It is not really a game about danger or excitment. You spend a lot of time waiting: waiting to join a group, waiting to be ressurected, waiting for someone to teleport you somewhere, waiting for your xp bar to fill up so you can gain level X, waiting for a creature to spawn, etc. The perfect group isn't the group that fights the hardest monsters; its the group that gets the most xp. That usually means you fight one monster at a time, you never take on more than you can handle, and you make sure no one ever dies. Furthermore, theres usually one thing you are responsible as a member of a group, whether it be fighting, healing, buffing, and doing direct damage, so fights get very repetitive. If I'm the highest level fighter, my job is to take hits. If I'm the wizard, my job is to cast 1-2 damage spells and then meditate. If Im the cleric, my job is to heal. If Im the bard, my job is to sing certain songs, and so on.
If fights start to get interesting, if you start having to improvise tactics, if you barely survive a fight... well, that means you're doing something wrong. Because if there's one thing a whole lot less fun than doing the same thing over and over again, its dying. Not only do you lose xp when you die, but it also takes up a lot of time (travelling to find your corpse, getting a cleric to resurect you so you can regain xp, etc). If enough people die in a group, they might just give up and leave.
That sounds a lot like FFXI, but I never found myself to get impatient with that game at all, or angry or anything like that. Yes, it does take a long time to gain levels, and deaths aren't nearly as annoying as Everquest sounds... do you HAVE to be resurrected in Everquest? There's no homepoint you can go back to or anything? Everquest doesn't sound all that interesting... then again... I never was all that interested in that title.
![tongue.gif](http://www.chefelf.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)
And yes, it does cost a lot, but that filters out all the annoying morons who stalk and bother you constantly. If they have to pay a lot for it, why would they bother? The lack of annoying kids and equally annoying teenagers is very nice. I'm not saying you don't run into them, because you do, but in much less numbers... I think the payment acts as a filter to keep out non serious-players. Unless they're dumbasses with a lot of money, now that's another story. lol