You’d get a party and wander around trying to find an open farming spot (or try to displace an existing group if you were feeling particularly evil), and hang out there basically until the group fell apart. Back in the Shadowlands era of Anarchy Online, the way to level was to grind out big stony-looking guys called “hecklers” or “hecks” for short. Similar to Sam, I think I did a lot more of that in “open world” camping. (Unrelated, I also remember the giant trains of mobs coming back out of TOTW). Carving out small spaces in virtual worlds helped create communities, and I feel like developer-driven stories rob the genre of what I always viewed as the primary content: human interaction.Īndy McAdams: I think the only game where I would have done this was Anarchy Online – and outside of Temple of the Three Winds, I can’t recall any instances of doing it. In fact, that’s how I met some of my first virtual friends (and also how I learned one had passed away). In a true MMO, I’ll meet other people looking for the same item I am, and when that game gives players their own loot tables, you at least can make a temporary friend, if not befriend someone for the long haul. I don’t meet new people very often and it’s boring for me, but it’s efficient. For example, in Monster Hunter, if I need parts from a certain small creature, I may pop around the map to get it, but after a while it’s easier to reset the map than continue to farm. I actually miss dungeon camping, to a degree. Heck, I could say this about areas in Pokemon Go, in that locals know which areas have the best spawns, or may flock to a certain park based on spawns. In some ways, that’s still true in newer MMOs, but it’s usually related to PvP events (like the Gurabashi Arena) or open-world PvP games. Even Asheron’s Call 2, which had quests that almost got you to the cap without needing to grind before World of Warcraft did it, had camping, but for a different reason: rare loot. It was practically required before MMOs got quest-to-level heavy. Where do you stand on the concept of camping a spot in MMO dungeons? Have you ever done it, and was it enjoyable or preferable over other types of dungeon content? Are there any MMOs still doing it well – or with a plan to try it again? Is MMO dungeon-camping ever coming back, and why or why not? So let’s do that for this week’s Massively Overthinking! And quite a lot of listeners chimed in to agree! I thought it’d be worth opening it to even broader discussion.
Our chatter, however, centered on the idea that people simply wouldn’t put up with that type of gameplay anymore, in an instanced dungeon or an open-world one. That sort of system fell by the wayside for multiple reasons, as second-wave and third-wave MMOs either didn’t rely on static dungeons for leveling or loot content or locked those dungeons behind instances that didn’t respawn or expected players to keep moving and finish endbosses to win. In EverQuest, the system was much more rigid, as communities even named the best spawns and set up rotating lists of players who wanted to join the group at each spawn. In vanilla Ultima Online, you did see dungeon crawls, but most of the time, people would just try to claim a small corner of a dungeon with a single spawn, and they might even attack you if you tried to yoink the spot. Different MMOs back in the early days handled this differently, of course. A while ago on the MOP Podcast, Justin and I randomly wound up on the topic of camping in MMOs – not pitching a tent and peeing behind a tree but the rather old-school MMO idea of taking your group to a specific spot in a dungeon and staying there for hours.
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