AoC: I think about stuff
I had a flashback playing Age of Conan with the boys last night. At level 14, we entered a non-exclusive outside elite instance. We wandered, died a few times, and finally found a good spot, on a long set of stairs, to pull to. The stairs had a resurrection plate at the top, so that was convenient. My Guardian would go out and pull a couple mobs to the boys, on the stairs, where we would beat them till somebody died. The flashback was of EQ. That’s how we often worked in EQ. I specifically remember a spot on the moon where Mike’s Shaman would pull bugs to Mark’s Priest and my Enchanter. The play style was very similar. But, in AoC, there is no death penalty to speak of. In AoC failure is an option.
We fought there, on the stairs, until I got too bored. We all dinged 15, and moved to a indoor elite dungeon. We were crawling through when another player showed up and started ‘helping’. I’m sure she wanted a group invite. We are kind of picky, so we left the instance, it was getting late anyway.
This morning I realized that even the dungeon encounter was much like EQ. When you were dungeon crawling in EQ, you often came across other groups or players you had to work around. Though we played on EQ Test where there was plenty of room for everybody. I know on EQ production-servers it often got ugly in dungeons with groups working the same area. Usually on Test, if there was somebody in the dungeon you wanted, you just moved on to a different dungeon.
I’ve not decided on AoC yet. The EQ model worked well for a long time. EQ eventually created instanced dungeons, which we used extensively. The instances kind of killed the EQ community. We’ve been playing WoW for years now, almost exclusively instances, without meeting anybody new.