[kuyzat]

I have played EQ1, WoW and EQ2 in the past couple of months and they all have their cool things but ALL 3 fail miserably at the one thing that matters the most to me: grouping. Will VG fail there as well?

When EQ1's progression servers went live this summer I jumped at the chance to play EQ1 again with lots of people starting from scratch. In the 1st couple of weeks it was madness with newbie zones crowded like nothing I had ever seen, some of them with over 500 newbie characters. Everything was alive with lots of chating, grouping, trains, people running around and interacting in every possible way. All the things that social players, such as myself, love. You could go to zones like Unrest or Mistmoor and quickly get a group without a problem. I hadnt had that much fun in a long time. But very quickly it all faded. Most people were just checking out the progression server and quicky left. To make things worse, the freaks were unlocking expansions as if they were playing a Nintendo Gameboy and once Kunark was opened the original zones started dying out fast. The larger the world the thiner the butter is spread. No longer was it viable to go to a dungeon and shout LFG because there wasnt anyone around. The final blow came from hotzones, imho an incredibly stupid concept as it is implemented atm, which made it so that there would be 70 ppl in a Overthere but no one in SolA. All that combined with people not using the LFG advanced tools (which are ok but ppl are just lazy) made it impossible to group anywhere but at that one hotzone for your level. It seems ppl are so used to trampling over low and mid level content they want nothing but the fastest track to end game. Such lack of patience. So, with great sadness, I left EQ1, yet again.

Next I tried WoW once again (lost count), I thought maybe this time I could find a new server, with plenty of young characters to group with. I specifically searched within the recent servers for the one with the most people and even sided with the Aliance (I prefer Horde) to have the most people to play with. Sure enough there were tons of people around at peak time, but at 4-8am when I play the most there are maybe 200-300 people online even on those servers (about 10% of the peaktime population). My copy of the game is for Europe, where I live, and Blizzard forces me to buy a US copy in order to play in the US servers. Big mistake. The customs in my country are a very serious threat to imports from the US and I would risk waiting for a month and paying an extra 50-100$ to get the game through customs so I couldnt avoid the offpeak problem. Still, there were some people around since the server was very young but in WoW you can do just fine soloing all the way to 60 so the vast majority of people dont bother to group until they are forced to at lvl 60! Meeting stones?! what for!? no one uses them. I tried for a while but I cant stand soloing to 60. I did it once with my 1st character when the game was new but now its just too painfully boring.

Enter EQ2. In EQ2 I am allowed to pick a server anywhere so I chose an american one, hoping it's peak hour would be closer to my (un)usual play time. So far so good. And lots of new stuff! The devs have been hard at work improving the game and it is much better imo. I wish I could continue playing EQ2, i like it. But who am I going to group with past level 10? Ghosts? In Commonlands there were 4 people lvls 10-16 and in Wailing caverns, the dungeon around my level, there were 3... In fact, in the whole server there were 18 people LFG. I know some ppl dont use the LFG tag but I dont think the problem would be solved even if they did use it. Am I doomed to solo to max level? Is that supposed to be fun? What are the Devs doing about it?

And how are Vanguard's devs planning to solve the above issues? Fun group gameplay without people to group with is worth absolutely nothing. Devs keep telling us how absolutely huge the world will be... do they mean absolutely hugely empty? How are we going to find groups in Vanguard? Where will players gather? How crappy will server populations be at offpeak hours? Will we still be able to group at low and mid levels in server 1 or more years old? Remember VG has been designed mostly for grouping, with soloing being much less effective (Amen!). I still have faith in Vanguard but I am worried. When will I stop doing minor errands for NPCs and start playing, laughing, cursing, training, living with other players again?!



progression servers = original content back from the launch in 1999 progressively unlocking each subsequent expansion (there around 12 now).
hotzones = zones with extra exp, double I think.