Drops:

Everquest mobs are notorious for dropping junk loot. By the time you’re strong enough to kill a creature, you usually have better equipment than it does. That means the items you receive have no use for you except to sell to a vendor or another player, or hand down to one of your lower level characters. Some people spend their EQ career farming easy monsters to sell the equipment to newbies. The more powerful equipment is classified as No Drop, which means that once you’ve picked it up, you can’t drop it, you can’t sell it and you can’t trade it to another player. The DESTROY button gets a lot of use at the high end.

WoW (again) has a different approach. Creatures drop upgrades for your character: decent weapons, better armour, and of course there’s the quests as well. You’re getting new equipment every 30-60 minutes, unlike EQ, where a solo player will be farming easy creatures for days hoping to collect enough cash to buy an upgrade from another player. The feeling of progression is far superior. And when you do need to replace an item? Even the Soulbound (WoW’s equivalent of No Drop) equipment can be sold to merchants.

Friends and grouping:

Wow has much less focus on grouping than other MMORPGs. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve barely had to group as I can solo level 13-14 mobs with my level 11 druid. There’s upsides and downsides to this. Many people have serious problems finding groups in EQ, and are forced to sit and wait for hours with their LFG (Looking for Group) flag up, because they simply can’t achieve anything without one. On the other hand, you can do so much in WoW by yourself that you really don’t have much contact with others unless you specifically go looking for it. I guess it’s better to have the ability to play the way you want to, not the way the designers would like you to, so WoW wins again.

The WoW friends list is pretty spiffy, allowing you to invite friends into your group no matter where in the world they might be. Currently the group limit is set to five, but I’ve usually only grouped with one or two other people. Like I said, the content’s geared to be soloable - extra people just make it even less stressful.

That will do for the moment. I might add some more thoughts later on, after I’ve reached level 12.

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