WoW killed hte social element of the modern MMORPG. It's success as a Anti-Social RPG made evey other game studio envious, so now they're all trying to reproduce its success. Secondly, now our genre is choking to death woth gamers who's first mmorpg was WoW, so to them, this is normal.
Frank 'Spankybus' Mignone www.spankybus.com -3d Artist & Compositor -Writer -Professional Amature
Lots of great replies guys and gals. One word that stuck in my head was *QUESTS*. As i think back many times i grouped with people in dungeons or on camps and we ground mobs for both group and camp bonues ala DAOC. We logged on and we ground mobs for exp for hours on end and talked as much.
Most times with the objective of leveling it was much better to grind then waste the time on pointless quest lines where the reward didnt warrant the time sink of travel. As a duo we could fight a mob neither of us could solo with ease. More exp. Of course some downtime between pulls allowed us to converse.
Another reason was a more aged player base. When i first started playing DAOC i would say the average player age was 25+. It was much an adults game while many of the adults allowed there children to play occasionally. Like the gaming community most of the kids were well behaved.
But back onto the gazillian quests list. In Wow i could follow a pre written quest list with no regards to story at all. I could level extremely quickly and if getting to max level was the goal, i could get there faster by myself because there was no exp bonus for grouping really and a partner didnt increase my kill speed per say. It did take away from my exp points though and yes grouping hurt my leveling speed.
Difficulty did of course promote grouping, grinding was less boring with a friend to talk to when you were medding as we like to call it recovering health and mana. So now the next question is why don't you play a proven game instead of the so called latest and greatest. DAOC is undeniably the BEST PVP game online yet its population is what hurts it. If that game had 80k regular players it would just destroy games like WAR or WOW for that matter from a PVPer perspective. One of the sole reason i personally dont subscribe is lack of players. So why don't we play the best games of their genre anymore as they are still there to be had for our playing pleasure.
Oh the flashbacks of one death equalling 2+ hours of exp grinding or one bulb of exp after grinding elite mobs for over and hour lol..
I thought on this.
You know I was a quester and trophy hunter in DAoC. DAoC has a ton of quests and trophy mobs some of those quests and trophies were just so involved that most would not even try them. I mean I went 5 months trying to finish one(zirtzirt) level 40? quest badger, 3 years for (Spat the cat) and I had a couple in my quest journal I never did complete after 6 years. They just never popped when I was on.
Some of my friends also had those insane quests and they also never got them complete LOL. BUT! we would camp a spot of days waiting for that one rare occasion the quest mob would pop. Think about that a minute. Six to ten people needing a solo quest mob camping a spot chatting and killing for days on end in a battle group. And you know how I met these people? Going to look for that solo insanely rare spawn mob. Players looking for that trophy all together and then rolling on it . Spat was level 12 mob it took me 3 years to get him I was level 50 with RR4 yet I was in a BG with 11 people. Quest done and I lost the roll on him but it was fun as hell.
The quests did not kill the social aspect in so much as maybe the speed and easiness of the quests killed the social aspect.
Comments
WoW killed hte social element of the modern MMORPG. It's success as a Anti-Social RPG made evey other game studio envious, so now they're all trying to reproduce its success. Secondly, now our genre is choking to death woth gamers who's first mmorpg was WoW, so to them, this is normal.
Frank 'Spankybus' Mignone
www.spankybus.com
-3d Artist & Compositor
-Writer
-Professional Amature
I thought on this.
You know I was a quester and trophy hunter in DAoC. DAoC has a ton of quests and trophy mobs some of those quests and trophies were just so involved that most would not even try them. I mean I went 5 months trying to finish one(zirtzirt) level 40? quest badger, 3 years for (Spat the cat) and I had a couple in my quest journal I never did complete after 6 years. They just never popped when I was on.
Some of my friends also had those insane quests and they also never got them complete LOL. BUT! we would camp a spot of days waiting for that one rare occasion the quest mob would pop. Think about that a minute. Six to ten people needing a solo quest mob camping a spot chatting and killing for days on end in a battle group. And you know how I met these people? Going to look for that solo insanely rare spawn mob. Players looking for that trophy all together and then rolling on it . Spat was level 12 mob it took me 3 years to get him I was level 50 with RR4 yet I was in a BG with 11 people. Quest done and I lost the roll on him but it was fun as hell.
The quests did not kill the social aspect in so much as maybe the speed and easiness of the quests killed the social aspect.