General Discussion

Which MMORPG -- overall -- is the hardest to reach Master/Epic/Level 100 status?

Not just with grinding, but with everything. No game store for cheap leveling and uber weapons, that 1/2 to 3/4 of the players either bought their epic gear in the store; or got it from guild members as a "faction perk".

Name it!

Wthout a doubt, EVE online.

The complexity of the economic model and combat, the length of time it takes to train up the skills require to fly the uber ships (you'll be able to afford to buy the ship a long time before you can actually fly it).

anarchy online is pretty hard to master, tons of classes and races with no restrictions to combine those two

also at very low lvl theres some insane twinks out there that take months of work to make

Well, Although I enjoy a challenge as much as the nest guy, In the end difficulty of mastery should never get in the way of enjoyment of gameplay. to me, I always thought that the games with significant PvP aspects are inheritly more difficult because the bar is raised to a different tier when your ultimate opponant is another player.

That said, I agree that EvE is probably one of the most challenging games out there.

Torrential

None of them are hard.  Some of them take a long time.

Eve has no way to reach a "final level" the developers purposely put in more skills than is possible to achieve and since its time based advancement this is a hard limit not some target they thought people would never reach.

Eve can be hard in 0.0 but that is only because you are dealing with strategy and tactics against other people.  The game itself is has a good amount of information to deal with but is not hard.  Becoming a pre-eminent corporation in 0.0 basically requires the ability to wage a successful campaign of warfare and diplomacy  along with all the logistics and personel management that entails across many multiples of systems.

even tho i only played for about a week, Everquest classic was pretty hard.  To me it was so complex for an MMO and it was one of the first MMOs i ever played too

EVE will easily be the most difficult to master.  There is so much information out there for it, and so many things you have to understand about it.  Players who have been playing for a year or longer are still learning things about the game.

Once upon a time, it would have been Star Wars Galaxies, especially if you were playing Jedi:

It took me six months just to unlock this class and then another eighteen months of solid but not uninteresting grinding to get the character to full power, a complete jedi template. After that, I was ready to begin the Jedi Knight trials, which would probably have taken me another month.

What happened instead was that SOE changed the game and made Jedi a starter profession, thereby effectively wiping out two years of gameplay for me and many others.

Runescape is the hardest game to master completely.

Out of the many millions of people who have played Runescape only a dozen have mastered it. It takes about 5 years to master Runescape. But, if you don't want to master it completely, just get really good you can get away with 2-3 years. It depends on how many hours you grind a day.

Runescape is harder than any mmorpg. We are talking about 650 hours to get a skill to max level and there are about 20 skills......

Just the fact you people say EVE is hard to master is about the most hilarious thing ever.  EVE is barely an RPG you don't EARN experience you PAY for experience.....more subscription time u have more experience you get....Yeah thats time consuming not difficult.  I would to say have that Asheron's Call with its innovative skill system that many copied.  Its real-time real-world physics system,  no more Tab targeting homing attacks you actually had to aim...Almost every other MMO on the market is simply just a time sink grind fest.