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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BiggusGeekus" data-source="post: 2312877" data-attributes="member: 1014">I think EverQuest is the most notorious simply because it was the first MMORPG to really hit the mainstream.  There have been a few papers written on it, the most interesting was comparing the dollar-to-platinum-piece economy to other real life economies.I think what makes EQ addictive is the inital poor game design.... bear with me here ...I went to an EQ convention in 2000 and had a chance to talk with some of the original producers.  Their concept of how people would play an MMORPG was nothing like what the reality turned out to be.  They figured that people would use the downtime between combats to roleplay and chat.  They didn't think that people would camp spawn points, because that was boring compared to exploration, right?  They didn't work to hard on class and race balance because they figured that people would play what they wanted to play.  They wanted travel between newbie starting areas to be hard to create the feeling like these places are all really far away.Well, it didn't work out that way.  People got bored during downtime.  Camping spawn points is amazingly more efficient than wandering around killing what you find (trust me, I tried).  Class balance was a huge issue, and not being able to get to other starting areas without exceptional difficulty (this was LONG before the plane of knowledge) meant a huge crimp on where a group of real life friends could begin.But what all of this did mean is that people tended to form on-line  friendships and relationships.  So the game took second place to hanging out with your on-line friends and accomplishing goals as a guild.  The friendships and, yes, peer pressure, are what really drove EQ for a lot of people.  Currently, I'm playing City of Heroes.  I like it much better than EQ.  However, there's no need for me to be on for my friends.  They'll manage if I don't show up.  There's also no pressure for us to be the same level as each other (almost a requirement in EQ).  So I can go a couple of weeks without playing CoH and no one cares.  In EQ I had guildmates who got pissed if I took a break to go jogging and I was forever relegated to second-teir status because I wouldn't raid on Friday and Saturday nights.  So, like I said.  I think EQs addictiveness ironically stems from poor game design.</blockquote>

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