I was just talking with a friend about MMOs and he said:

What bums me most about “newer” games (WoW/EQ2/Etc) is that they are heavily “tiered” instead of seamless. Meaning that the quests you do or gear you get is totally replaced as soon as you hit the next tier making players realize that anything that comes before max level is useless, hence the problem.

One could argue that EQ1 was the same, but in fact, it wasn’t. Upgrades were much harder to get and you would upgrade different slots asynchronously, making it a non tiered game.

That got me thinking about the days when I was playing EQ as a Warrior and one of my biggest complaints was how little options there were. You get some Crafted (the name of the armor from quests) around 20-30 and they were just about the best you could get until they opened up raids like Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate. There used to be Rubicite but it was removed from the game.

My beef was there was little other gear to look forward too (pre-Kunark). I can remember asking for more gear options. I think I even suggested that every ten levels or so you’d have a set of gear to look forward too. I can remember being so bored of seeing that blue armor on my Warrior.

Am I taking credit for the tiered system? No, now that I have it, I don’t want it any more.

Is having 14 tiers of armor better than having only a couple?