Camping

[PinkRose]

Camping in EQ2 made me cry; I'm sure I would have given up in EQ in short order.  While I can see the camping times being good opportunities for roleplay, I just have this idea that something required to advance a questline shouldn't take hour upon hour of waiting for the random number generator to pop up the right value. If I want to roleplay, I'll happily do it without needing forced downtime to do it in.

Same goes for travel.  While I think EQ2 went a bit too far when they made every port reachable from every other port in a single zone-in, the stories I have heard of the long EQ boat rides where again you are forced to pretty much just sit there until the game decides you've waited long enough make me glad I wasn't there.

I didn't want to defile the lovely nostalgia post Mixxi made so I thought I would start a new thread,

I don't see camping for hours any difference then doing multiple "kill x creatures" quests, except that in one you move and one you don't. When one breaks any RPG game down, it's all the same, kill things, level up, kill other things. Camping in EQ just gave a focus for the guild, sort of. We all knew that if wanted to, we could go meet Jebbar in Lower Guk this month, or head to Kunark for a Pearlesant Shard hunt for the Epic Sprinkler.
And it caused us to group up, take turns together, spend time together.
The boats were a pain. Horrible, Awful. But it gave you a chance to RP with random strangers, as you might while waiting for or riding in an elevator nowadays. You got to get your story out there and hear others stories. How often do we talk to non-guild members these days?
Along the same lines, our EQ server only allowed 1 character. ONE. Only one. Can you imagine? But that kept us in-character. We got deep in our backstories and involved in each other's stories. I don't have a clue which and how many characters Bou has in RIFT. That removes us just a bit from each other's characters.

Not to say we can't do all of this in other newer games. But the speed (or lack there of) of EQ added to the experience.

[Lyrima]

While most everyone here was immersed in EQ, I was playing Asheron's Call.

The main issue there was death.  You died? You lost everything.

Corpse Run were words we all used...and I relied on the generosity of strangers more than once to make my family commitments when I gamed for ONLY A MINUTE, died and desperately had to get my items back before logging.

Because there was a timer.  You didn't get your stuff before logging out, it might not be there when you got back ig.

Made LOTS of friends and met loads of folks I never do in the current games we play.

That said?

I prefer not to be beholden and the stress about being ig with young children who might need me at any moment made gaming a lot less fun for me.

[Scrib]

I understand Lyrima's perspective. Time is so short now, unlike when I could safely play for hours on end in EQ.
Even in Rift, I generally avoid doing dungeon groups because I can't commit to finishing them with any certainty.
I remember those corpse runs, especially when they happened right before I intended to camp for the night.

Despite the ease of play in Rift meaning I can log in for 30 minutes at a time, I am all too aware that it feels more like playing an offline game with computer generated NPC's in the 'public groups' than with real people, and I'm paying the price of a new game every month or two for the privilege. Cancelling my account and quitting mmo's altogether has crossed my mind more than once.

While I certainly can't say I enjoyed not being able to find guild groups that often (time zone issues), I much preferred the old style of being able to chat while waiting for health/mana to return, or waiting for spawns. Carefully taking on the entrance of Plane of Innovation (I think it was) with Kerys (Circle of Sisters), or partnering with Baers somewhere, was a lot more fun than the way these games work now.

[Noa]

I prefer not to be beholden and the stress about being ig with young children who might need me at any moment made gaming a lot less fun for me.

Yes. And not just gaming. =(

[Jezerai]

The problem I have with Rift and even with EQ2's last expansion, is that it's just not that hard.  I like a challenge and I don't mind if I die repeatedly until I figure out how to get through whatever difficulty I'm trying to get through.  I like death that means something and that you try to avoid.  I just am not really finding that these days and I think it's because the MMOs are making their games easier to play and easier to level.  I kind of get the impression that that's what people are missing when they wax nostalgic about camps. 

[Askari]

Most of the bad memories of camping in EQ have faded. I'm left with a fond feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment from the "completion" of camps.

When my first character on Mith Marr successfully got her Journeyman's Boots in Najena! When she got her Efreeti Boots in Solusek! Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

It was that ecstatic feeling of, "FINALLY", that I remember fondly. That satisfaction when you could open up your character's paper doll, look at your top-level gear and... remember exactly where it dropped, who you were with, how many weeks it took to get.

And the joy of being there when friends who helped you get your gear...actually got theirs. And the long conversations that would occur while waiting sometimes 20 mins for the camp to respawn, only to have a placeholder show up, starting the cycle anew. And when the boss actually showed up, he'd drop the common loot. <sigh>

The tenseness as people start fading from the group, and the initial break-in team gets smaller and smaller. "Crap, we've been deep in this dungeon for five hours, we're down to three people, and may not be able to handle the next respawn. If someone falls asleep, we're doomed. And how the heck will we get our corpses?"

Yeah. The memories of boredom and frustration have faded, but the fond memories of adventures shared and accomplishments achieved still linger.

[Mixxi]

Camping and corpse runs did have their moments. When our group wiped in the Nobles'  Room in Sol A (or was it B?), non-invising Mixxi had to do the corpse dragging, for some reason. After stepping aside for me to train through them during my drags to the zoneline, one of the evils in the other group that was in there helped me get the rest of the corpses out. First evil I'd actually interacted with much.

Years and years later, I bump into the evil guy's player. Turns out he's the father of my son's best friend. Creepy scary coincidence, but FV people pop up in the oddest places.

The pain of camps and corpse runs definitely got you more familiar with a greater section of the server population. I do feel very disconnected in Rift and all the other MMOs I've played since, including EQII. I doubt I'll ever have a story like that to tell about Rift.

[Jasyn]

But I have found that the Saga style of RP, which is my favorite, is not something that you can easily find in other guilds.  I'm just not that into "spatial" RP.  I get bored sitting in taverns and the storylines I have found there seem to be over-dramatic and have a soap-opera tinge that I am not fond of.  That seems to be what passes as RP much of the time.

This.

I can only take "tavern" RP for brief periods. I love RPing in groups while questing/dungeoning, and guild channel RP.

^ Stolen from another thread.  This is what I enjoyed about some of the "forced breaks" that you could find in classic EQ.  It was easier to pepper RP into your adventures without having to sit around in a city or tavern or guildhall to get your fix, and it was more immersive than channel RP.  While there may have been fewer goal oriented tasks to engage in outside of finding that sweet spot to go earn xp or getting some piece of loot to drop, EQ2 and other MMOs since then have taken things to an opposite extreme with their rapid fire ADHD pacing.  And while you can always try to keep your channel RP as as a backup or substitute, in our new age MMOs, this very fast pace keeps people distracted enough that they really can't focus on particpating in the channels well enough... unless they're sitting in a city or tavern or guildhall somewhere.  Back in the day, intertwining the gaming aspect with the RP aspect so flawlessly kept everyone fully vested in each other and their activities.  I see far too much separation of these aspects today in general than I'd like.

Traveling and adventuring in groups could be fun (because you had to do it together to get there rather than allow your scout or emissary to do it for you and magically pull everyone into your destination), and it wasn't uncommon to find folks lingering in certain geographic areas for extended stays because traveling was such an event, so you could often reconnect with them.  There was a certain sense of togetherness fostered by that sort of environment, and it gave everyone the opportunity to get to know each other better.  However, that being said, if you got separated or left behind or were trying to reunite with friends who had wandered to far off lands, or had to do any of this alone (outside of traveling by yourself to a strange new land on that initial scary trip), the fun factor quickly dropped to zero.

Some of the things I'd like to have back, in a careless implementation, could simply wind up being those same things that annoyed me most all over again, so I often find myself trying to reconcile this contradiction, wondering, in an age where we collectively have less time to sink into our hobbies than we did in younger days, how can the next great MMO possibly recapture the best of both worlds?  I'd really like to see someone try (AND succeed) because someday, I'd like to go back there again without having to go ALLL the way back there again--if you get what I mean.

[PinkRose]

I often postulate that when we are all sitting in our retirement homes, we'll be connected to heart mopnitors, BP monitors, Oxygen tanks and and cerebral Super-computer, jacked-in to some kind of super MMO, sort of like "Second Life" but less XXX and more RPG.
Then we'll have all the time for camping we want.

[Alirrin]

I often postulate that when we are all sitting in our retirement homes, we'll be connected to heart mopnitors, BP monitors, Oxygen tanks and and cerebral Super-computer, jacked-in to some kind of super MMO, sort of like "Second Life" but less XXX and more RPG.
Then we'll have all the time for camping we want.

I have had the same thought. 

[Jasyn]

Sweet.

[Mixxi]

I often postulate that when we are all sitting in our retirement homes, we'll be connected to heart mopnitors, BP monitors, Oxygen tanks and and cerebral Super-computer, jacked-in to some kind of super MMO, sort of like "Second Life" but less XXX and more RPG.
Then we'll have all the time for camping we want.

I may have mentioned it here before, but we've been dealing with my parents' resistance to living somewhere where they can have more support services. My son's response to the whole drama was, "You won't be like that, Mom. But you will be all--'PLEASE don't send me to THAT place! They only have dial-up!' "

How well my (now adult) children know me...