The Angry Raider

EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft are such different games. Sure, there are similarities, and if you take them at face value then you might even be inclined to say that there’s nothing remarkably different other than the graphical style.

But when you play these two games, when you dig a little deeper, you find that they have vastly different cultures. The players in EQ2 seem more helpful, more courteous. The game supports a more social aspect via its superb guild system and LFG tools. While in WoW I’ll see hundreds of offtopic conversations scroll by in general chat, EQ2 has significantly less chatter. People communicate via party and guild chat.

A lot of this has to do with EQ2’s bloodline (EverQuest) versus WoW’s bloodline (the RTS Warcraft games, new-to-MMO players). And of course we can’t discount sheer numbers: WoW’s 10 million+ subscribers compared to the 200,000 in EverQuest 2. But sheer numbers don’t explain why so many WoW players chat ad nauseum about topics ranging from President-elect Obama to last night’s episode of 24. In my opinion, WoW just isn’t enthralling enough. You run around with QuestHelper telling you what mobs you need to kill and where to kill them so you can get your next level and start raiding. Then when you’ve raided and have everything you want, you stand around in Shattrath City or Dalaran with nothing to do but chat in the Trade channel. Yet so many people keep doing it, keep playing WoW until they get burned out and quit entirely.

Being an EQ2 player in this WoW zeitgeist forces a sort of defensiveness that gives way to the "you just don’t get it" sentiment. Any time I espouse the virtues of EQ2 to a WoW-playing friend, I get rolled eyes and pfft noises. While they admit that their drug of choice is no longer giving them the fix they need, they’re so committed to that drug that they refuse to see what other games are like, dismissing them outright or finding some strange little fault that shouldn’t eclipse a game’s value or fun-factor.

Yet at the same time, I realize that if these people don’t want to give EQ2 a shot, then no amount of convincing on my part will be effective. They don’t want to hear about the virtues of this game; they can’t be troubled with finding out more about what it offers, like player housing and guild halls and so on. Or maybe they just don’t care about those things, instead preferring to grind for gear and PVP in the same old battlegrounds over and over and over.

To each his own. Their loss. Et cetera.

Changing gears…. Last night I joined one of the largest guilds on my server (Old Timers Guild on Unrest) and visited our guild hall. The people who built the guild hall put countless painstaking hours into designing an environment that is so rich and enthralling that I was agape as I toured it. Even though I had only been in the guild for a few minutes, I felt so welcome and so connected. And visiting the guild hall just cemented that sense of belonging: here was a place where we could all convene and use as a starting point for our adventures in Norrath.

I think I’m just the type of player that wants to be part of a guild and look at my MMO experience as one involving lots of other people. The little things like an automatic message to the guild when I ding a level in armoring or when I loot a legendary item make for such an immersing experience.

I just wish my non-EQ2-playing friends could understand that.