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I've been trying to reflect on what made the community feel cooperative and altruistic and whether a game like that work nowadays.

An obvious factor is the severe consequences of death. What every player has in common is knowing that dying sucks and you'll likely need help with corpse runs.

All classes offer something that others need or want. Even solo characters need others. SOWs, ports, corpse finding and retrieving, summoning items.

Remember how fast your first Selo's run felt?

[2/5]

What I like about EQ is that classes are specialised and can be played very well or very badly.

Getting a rogue in your group is good, but a good rogue is invaluable, and after a few hours in Splitpaw with one, the next day you'd run across zones and zones to group with them.

Someone good at what they did was not easily replaced. People would not want to play with you if you kept training them or didn't work as a team.

[3/5]

The difference in a group playing their roles well vs not is like walking on air vs through oil.

When people don't break mezz, pets are controlled, fleeing mobs are snared, broken charmed pets stunned, buffs refreshed. Perfection.

Then when chaos hits, everyone can be the hero and prevent a wipe.

The tank who grabs the aggro. The cleric who pulls off their last CH just in time. The chanter who mezzes a room of mobs before the rest of us mere mortals can blink. A well-timed evac.

[4/5]

With other games I've tried, I feel you often become good at the game as a whole then can pick up any class easily.

Choosing one class over another often feels only slightly different, and grouping feels like playing next to rather than with each other.

I have played and enjoy #p99 but it doesn't fit well into my adult life. Everything requires serious investment of time. I want a game that improves on EQ's (many) flaws but maintains that feeling of togetherness and community.

[5/5]

@vicious_crockery #FFXI used to be a lot like that, and at the time it was generally agreed that the harshness of the game forced people together.

But later, so much about the game changed that the community shattered, the biggest blow being Trusts... and FFXIV poaching a large portion of XI's playerbase didn't help either. Nor did people mistakenly thinking the servers were shut down when console support ended...

@vicious_crockery I do still play FFXI lightly. Unfortunately, it's darned near impossible to find anyone who wants to group up outside of endgame, and non-jerks to play with in endgame. If not for the fact that my roommate and a friend of theirs still play, and playing some during a free period was what let me become able to sleep again after the Pinkerton incident, I probably wouldn't be playing currently.

@vicious_crockery OTOH, FFXI's take on Red Mage is near-perfect to the point of my learning something about game design from it, and I don't personally know of another game that lets me play something quite like Rune Fencer. ...I just wish RUN had existed in the Classic era. (At least RDM did.)

@pteryx I start replaying FFXIII recently after many years so now I am in a FF kind of mood I might check out FFXIV out of curiosity and see what it’s like. I’ll let you know if I do!

@vicious_crockery FFXIV isn't to my own taste. It's more in the WoW school of MMO design than the EQ school like FFXI.

XIV comes across to me as more of a single-player game with chatrooms and a content subscription than an actual MMO. It's a more twitch sort of game, and the design centers more on the bosses than the PCs. It definitely has the better story by far, though!

(Besides, *its* take on RDM irritates me for just being a DPS with a good heal.)

@vicious_crockery (Oh, *and* I hate how I can't even talk about FFXI anymore without someone or another, if not the whole audience, mistakenly thinking I'm talking about FFXIV...)