Everquest is the Most Revolutionary MMORPG of All Time

For clarity of this debate a definition: MMORPG - Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game MUSH - Multi User Shared Habitation MUD - Multi User Dungeon My opponent contents that EverQuest is truly revolutionary to the MMORPG market. However this claim is over inflated. The majority of what EverQuest did was blend elements of a much larger movement of MUDs and MUSHes with more advanced computer graphics found in first person shooters such as Halflife, Quake, Duke Nukem and Doom. While this was an advancement for MUDs that made the genre of online roleplaying more accessible to a graphic based audience it did not really change the nature of the game. In a MUD as in Everquest you received quests from non-player characters, you would then complete these quests and gain experience and items for both the monsters you killed (called MOBs from the days of MUDs where MOB was short for MOBILE) and as you increased in level you trained skills and professions in order to make your character more powerful. In fact, compared to some of the available MUDs that are still active EverQuest was very limited in scope. On MUD in particular that is far more advanced that EverQuest in terms of everything except graphics is Achaea. Achaea (http://www.achaea.com...) boasts over 40 different skill sets each with unique abilities and spells, an indepth fighting system that requires direct player interaction a model that is comparable only to Age of Conan in the MMORPG realm. Player elections where actual players can rise to positions of importance and true power within the world setting, player created content such as houses, 12 playable races, 17 included player vs. player games, 15 playable classes, and many more features than EverQuest really had. EverQuest took it and the ideas of MUDs and placed them in a 3D environment, but that alone doesn't merit the title of most revolutionary. Now, on the other hand, World of Warcraft has several features that makes it far more revolutionary than EverQuest. One glaring example is the creation of instanced dungeons. What this means is that at the same time 100 different groups can enter the 'same' dungeon but each group is placed into their own copy of that dungeon. This has huge ramifications on gameplay and is something not even accomplished in the most advanced MUDs. This eliminated the need for the practice of spawn camping, a problem in MUDs that was further increased in EverQuest where there were far more people on any particular server. By instancing their dungeons World of Warcraft was able to create fantastic dungeon events that each player could view on their own without having to worry about kill stealing or outside interference. This is truly revolutionary as no other game before had tried a similar tactic and since it has been done by Blizzard it has been adopted by many other MMORPGs with Age of Conan going as far as even creating a single player adventure at the beginning of the game to function as a tutorial, the ultimate in instance play. Several other features of World of Warcraft, the implementation of an honor system for world PvP and the inclusion of arena play and PvP Battlegrounds are all revolutionary showing that World of Warcraft is not one to simply rest on their past accomplishments. Their dedication to constant innovation and refinement make them at least as revolutionary as EverQuest.