The community is only bad if you aren't in a guild or don't have a good group of friends. It's like going to a major city and saying the community is terrible because all the people sleeping on the streets smell bad. The 'good' and nice WOW players don't bother with trade chat or general chat, so basically the only people you see there are the rejects. The vast majority of players never use trade chat,.
The game is too easy? There are definitely challenges, and the boss fights in ANY wow endgame dungeon or raid is vastly more difficult than anything in other games. Games like AOC are still at the point where every boss has a basic melee attack and a ton of hps.. and you just grind them all down without any tactics. Imagine if every boss mob was patchwerk. WOWs fight are detailed, reactionary and compicated. IT's funny, in WOW, we use patchwerk often in conversations because it is such a 'simple' fight.. In other games, patchwerk is the norm.
When people say that WOW is too easy, they mean that WOW took away the boring parts. Yes when you die, you don't have to regear your character. Yes, the deathrun is fairly short. Yes you level at a nice pace. The 'hard' games aren't hard, they are just tedius. They make you repeat things, or run all the way across the map for no reason other than it makes it 'hard'. These are games, they are supposed to be fun, not tedius.
I liked playing wow...for a while. The main thing I have to say that's anti wow is once you reach the level cap (which happens relatively fast). You reach level 80, and you've got some rep to grind, but honestly within a week or two you've got all your rep. What you're left with is raiding ICC. With the WoW lockout system you're left with just raiding ICC for a few hours...then waiting until the following tuesday to do it again. Depending on your guild setup you may have a 10 man and 25 man raid to do again, but it's the same deal.
I REALLY LIKE the wow gameplay! But the unfortunate thing is that you're restricted in how often you can enjoy it! You do your 10 man icecrown citadel run (which is honestly fun!)...on x day (tuesday reset), you do your 25 man icecrown citadel run (which still, is fun!) on x day....and then you've got your continuations for both. But honestly, what ends up happening is that you just wait for the next night to meet with your raid buddies to continue your raid at level 80, with nothing else to do otherwise.
So you, as a wow player, think "okay, It'll be fun when it's 7 pm server time!" ...then "Okay it'll be fun when it's 7 pm server time on wednesday!" and so on.
The raiding truly is fun. There just isn't enough of it because of the weekly lockout system. You end up having fun for a couple days, then waiting 3-5 days before you can honestly play again. The ugliest part is if you feel frustration with your raid partners. I won't get into that, but as an avid mmorpg player since the UO/Mud days, I will say that it's VERY easy to get frustrated with your guild/raid buddies...mostly because there is seriously nothing else to do!
Overall. I would say WoW really is an excellently made game, but a poorly made game when it comes to longevity. I enjoyed WoTLK....for a few months. I really don't have interest in the upcoming cataclysm expansion, and I hope I covered the reasons why I'm not looking forward to it.
I played WoW for quite some time, thanks to the nudging of friends. However, I didn't truly enjoy it very much, and don't play it any longer. Is there anything "wrong" with the game? Nope. It's just a matter of opinion, and I have enjoyed other MMOs more. Variety is the spice of life, takes all kinds, cliche` cliche` cliche`, ad nauseum. Nothing has to be bad about a game for someone's preference to lead them elsewhere.
I will tell you what I don't like about WoW. But let me say first that I don't hate it, and it's a great game for those who like that style.
But what I don't like is:
the level grind, it's too much for my tastes and
means that the game is played as a directed experience through predetermined zones which means that
any social interaction is dependent on staying within the same levels as others, leading to
breakdown of many guilds, innability to stay with friends, which leads to
no social meaning deeper than a message board, which in turn
leaves the game feeling like a game instead of a world.
I think that you can have the same experiences as WoW, the same fun and excitement, in a worldly game, but with the added benefits of freedom and deeper social ties that can influence the game world in ways that WoW can't.
WoW's levelling up is easiest and franly the most diversed. Right now, you do not even have to pve to level up if you wish. Quite the contrary, WoW's levelling is among the easiest and Blizz provides the largest options of activities during that very very short levelling process.
Predetermined zones? They are zones, alright. You need not go through it the way others do. I do not, for my crafter, he sneaks around and harvest and gets killed, sometime deliberate, so as to spawn in a convenient point to hit a mailbox and mail back to ore. You choose to follow the zones, stop blaming.
You choose to join raiding guilds, you are bound to find people with similar gear + level for that raid. Join a social guild, join a local family guild, join a levelling guild. I have found a crafter's guild in which we trade & share materials, share crafting levelling option (I craft tailor, i give you products to level up enchanting..., I am tailor, when I need low level tailoring pieces, I let you do it for me so you can level your lower tailoring skills). Come on, be imaginative. You can figure it out? so blame blizzard, it is an easy scapegoat.
You need a guild for a message board? You use it only for message board?
Few game feel like a world any more, since the demise of old SWG.
The problem with WoW can be summed up in two words. The Community. That's it. The problem is that the people who play the game weren't really all that nice to me when I tried it. What's the point in playing a multiplayer game when the people you play alongside don't like you and won't be nice to you while you play?
First, there are always people who do not welcome you, somewhere, somehow. There are times you run into warmer people. What do you do? Quit everything because there is a less welcoming guy, or try to find warmer bodies?
Second, how large is the WoW community? Do you need to stick with those who expressively do not welcome you?
Third and foremost, you are part of the community, you contribute to how it looks like. If everybody do not welcome you, time to think why.
For me I started to hate WoW when imo it became a lobby game. When you hit 80 it didn't feel too much different from Global Agenda, you stand in a main city and queue up for things like dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, arena.
In Global Agenda you stay in the dome and queue up for pve missions or pvp missions, it's the same thing but people complain that GA has no open world but yet they'll do the SAME thing in WoW.
The problem with WoW can be summed up in two words. The Community. That's it. The problem is that the people who play the game weren't really all that nice to me when I tried it. What's the point in playing a multiplayer game when the people you play alongside don't like you and won't be nice to you while you play?
I sympathize greatly, but this is also a problem you could have in any game. Or on the internet in general. In fact it's pretty much a guarantee that you will experience it, often. I had some bad experiences playing TF2 for the first time. The solution is always the same: ignore the haters, and find new companions.
I continue to wonder if the community in WoW is really worse now than when it launched, or if that's just nostalgia. Maybe it's a little worse, but I can't quantify this. It's just a gut feeling with no clarity. I certainly remember my raiding and the friends I made in my guilds very fondly.
The only reason why people hate WoW is because they blame it for ruining the MMO industry. Open your eyes people. WoW did not ruined the industry single-handedly. WoW isn't responsible for what other developers do. It is the developers putting out the crappy games trying to copy WoW who ruined the industry. They should have been smart enough to realize that a WoW clone won't ever succeed. But they didn't and this is what we get today.
The only reason why people hate WoW is because they blame it for ruining the MMO industry. Open your eyes people. WoW did not ruined the industry single-handedly. WoW isn't responsible for what other developers do. It is the developers putting out the crappy games trying to copy WoW who ruined the industry. They should have been smart enough to realize that a WoW clone won't ever succeed. But they didn't and this is what we get today.
True (but clones can succeed, the EQ clone Wow did pretty great).
It is not Wows fault that people like Mythic, Turbine and the rest tried to remake it, it is the fault of devs with no new ideas.
Not that Wow had much of those either but at launch it was far superior to the other similar games out there. I don't think it is that now, I don't think it is even close to being the best now but in mid 2004 it was.
The secret to really get many subs is releasing a game that is better than all it's competitors at launch, not after years of patching and expansions. Good programming also helps and Blizzard have good programmers. and if you actually make a Wow clone that is the best game out there it will sell great but so will of course any game that is the best out there...
But that at launch condition is really important, games like AoC and Vanguard can never really recover from the bad launches. Games with good launches but wasn't the best game out there at launch can do pretty good but still not become huge.
Guildwars had a good launch, 7 million copies sold (yeah a B2P is not great to compare but it still has at least some value) and still high on X-fire after all these years and the devs focus on GW2 the last few years.
LOTRO launched ok but with very little content, typical medium sized game.
Eve actually managed to get pretty large after a lot of work but it's bad launch followed it a long time.
I'll just answer this from my own perspective, as I assume everyone else has.
For ME....
The end game grind was MIND NUMBING. If I had had to grind rep with even ONE more faction, I would have probably gone completely and utterly batcrap crazy. Okay....craziER....whatever.
I got so sick and tired of collecting emblems...o m g. And every upgrade to armor felt pointless until you had the BEST. I couldn't even get excited about upgrades eventually, because there was always another one I needed to get, and of course, every single time, more enchants and gems....blah.
The first 10 times of running any of the dungeons and raids, was admittedly pretty fun. After about the 10th time, I could do them blindfolded and with one hand. Okay...not literally...but almost. They became horribly boring. Bosses ALWAYS do the same exact thing, it's just a matter of memorizing it and then dealing with everyone who doesn't do what they're supposed to do, and then after a while....even that ended, as everyone learned what, when and how. One of the things I like about EQ2 is that the bosses have some sort of table of things they MIGHT do....it's not the same every single time. More like the "Wizard of Oz" fight at Karazhan but not with set scenarios, more randomness. Actually, now that I think about it, Kara was QUITE fun. But, even then, once you learned the different scenarios, it too became old hat. I understand this is a problem in most MMOs. If you're going to require people to run things 100s of times to get gear......that's how it's going to end up.
Crafting was SO BORING. I know not everyone likes the mini game variety of crafting, but I do. I want more than having all the mats, pushing one button, then walking away to make lunch while my character "auto crafts." B O R I N G. And yet still...I had max crafters of every profession but engineering (because my partner had engineering). Seriously...that's just too easy, too simplistic, imo. But...I never had to buy much on the AH. If it had to come from a profession, I could make it. Self-sufficiency shouldn't be THAT easy in an MMO, imo.
No player and guild housing. THIS....for me....is completely unacceptable, particularly in a game that has had six years to remedy this sad fact.
No one raids opposing faction cities anymore for FUN. Once people get the achievement....that's it. Along with achievements, all of the spontaneous PvP ended. Actually....it might have been before that when it STARTED coming to an end, but after that...it was over. No more Southshore / Tauren Mill football game either. No one has "time" to just HAVE FUN with PvP now that it's all boxed off into instances.
The game kept getting easier and easier, being "dumbed down," as some like to say. Removing almost ALL of the random elite mobs during the leveling up process....that made me sad. I remember running into them while questing and that surge of adrenaline I'd get when I accidentally ran into one rounding a corner or something and realized I would have to fight....or run.
I could really keep going, but I'll stop. For me....WoW started with a bang and I loved it...for years. The more Blizzard changed it, the less I liked it.
And, the part that ISN'T Blizzard's fault (totally)....the community....is the worst I have ever played with....EVER.
The only reason why people hate WoW is because they blame it for ruining the MMO industry. Open your eyes people. WoW did not ruined the industry single-handedly. WoW isn't responsible for what other developers do. It is the developers putting out the crappy games trying to copy WoW who ruined the industry. They should have been smart enough to realize that a WoW clone won't ever succeed. But they didn't and this is what we get today.
True (but clones can succeed, the EQ clone Wow did pretty great).
It is not Wows fault that people like Mythic, Turbine and the rest tried to remake it, it is the fault of devs with no new ideas.
Not that Wow had much of those either but at launch it was far superior to the other similar games out there. I don't think it is that now, I don't think it is even close to being the best now but in mid 2004 it was.
The secret to really get many subs is releasing a game that is better than all it's competitors at launch, not after years of patching and expansions. Good programming also helps and Blizzard have good programmers. and if you actually make a Wow clone that is the best game out there it will sell great but so will of course any game that is the best out there...
But that at launch condition is really important, games like AoC and Vanguard can never really recover from the bad launches. Games with good launches but wasn't the best game out there at launch can do pretty good but still not become huge.
Guildwars had a good launch, 7 million copies sold (yeah a B2P is not great to compare but it still has at least some value) and still high on X-fire after all these years and the devs focus on GW2 the last few years.
LOTRO launched ok but with very little content, typical medium sized game.
Eve actually managed to get pretty large after a lot of work but it's bad launch followed it a long time.
@OP- Community was 90% of the reason I couldn't stand WoW. The other 10% is hard to explain, the game itself did not have any feature that grabbed or impressed me. I suppose the game itself wasn't for me, but I can get used to a game for an awesome community. That's what really matters to me.
@OP- Community was 90% of the reason I couldn't stand WoW. The other 10% is hard to explain, the game itself did not have any feature that grabbed or impressed me. I suppose the game itself wasn't for me, but I can get used to a game for an awesome community. That's what really matters to me.
Interesing you mention this, because....the only reason I ended up playing WoW FIRST, was because I had played in the open beta for WoW, EQ2, and GW, and I had CHOSEN EQ2 as "the game for me." However...I wanted to play it with the graphics pumped up, SO....I literally ORDERED a brand new custom made computer from a computer boutique (the only time I have or WILL ever do that) so I could have a top of the line machine to run EQ2. I ordered the computer in Nov. and had to wait until Feb. for it to be delivered (was waiting on the latest nVidia cards).
So....I ended up playing WoW first, because, as we all know....it could run on a calculator, which, at the time, is pretty much what I had. Once my new computer arrived, I started playing EQ2, and....since my family had also started playing WoW WITH me (it was both my son's and partner's FIRST MMO ever), they had gotten "into" the game, so, as a family we continued to play WoW, and I played BOTH WoW and EQ2 from then on out. By February of THIS year, even my family was done with WoW, so now....we're all playing EQ2.
My story in a nutshell, not that anyone asked. LOL
There are people who hate popular things, its just the way it is. I hate Apple products personally for this very reason.
i hate the apple products not because its popular but for their insane pricetags.......600€ for a goddamn phone.....WTF?
I SO agree. Insanity.
There are also people that love popular things JUST because they're popular. They want whatever is the latest fad because....
"But Moooooom, everyone ELSE is DOING IT!" Well...I'm not 13 any more and I don't do things now just because "everyone else is doing it." By itself....that is no longer a good reason for doing ANYthing, in my opinion.
Granted, there are people that really enjoy WoW still, and there's nothing wrong with that. BUT....there is also nothing wrong with NOT enjoying WoW. And I would imagine that most people have more of a reason than "it's popular" for not liking it. Many reasons have been listed just in this thread.
It's like the Apple comment above. I would LOVE to have an iPhone4, BUT....not at the price they are. That's not an excuse or a "not liking the popularity," that....is a REASON.
Blizzard doesn't seem to care about the customer anymore. Blizzard is providing very little content through the course of the year, which is really frustrating.
Professions have become homogenized, classes are now becoming more homogenized (cataclysm) also. Too many things have been turned into "reward city," so Battlegrounds aren't designed for pvp, they're designed for pvp encounters that last 15-20 minutes so that players can be rewarded, whether they win or lose.
Blizzard doesn't seem to care about the customer anymore. Blizzard is providing very little content through the course of the year, which is really frustrating.
While WoW of today and EQ of 2003 are very, very different games, the fundamental attitude of their playerbases is very similar.
I don't hate on anyone but I think the position of WoW today is pretty weak and has been for a couple of years now, in that there's a lot more ex-WoW players than current ones and people are generally unhappy but keep playing because there's nothing else out there of comparable quality for the typcial gamer.
But, I have confidence. WoW has completely reinvented with every expansion and I'm sure Cataclysm will be no different. The people who are benefiting the most under the current system get shafted, and the whole expansion is structured in a way to appeal to whoever Blizzard decided they want to chase for the next couple of years.
Classic was "Raid or Die", BC got rid of the 40-man guilds entirely and gave us multiple paths into the endgame. But progression was still pretty much impossible for casual players - heroics were pretty tough even for geared players (well, some of them) and you couldn't raid beyond Karazhan without a dedicated raiding guild. So we got WoTLK which was all about accessability. But they made the game *so* accessable that the community itself started gating content (aka Gearscore), everything except the current-tier raid became irrelevent, and lot of high-end players lost interest and quit because normal modes no longer carried any sort of elite status and the hard modes were still too hard. So, it seems Cataclysm is going to take the difficulty back up a couple of notches, hopefully bring back some semblance of progression, move the focus of pvp back into the BGs (since most people hate arena but like to BG, even if it's just casually), and a lot of the core mechanics (and the gameplay areas themselves) are being rolled back to something resembling Classic in an attempt to grab returning players - I don't know anyone who played in 2004 who still plays today, though I know many who are very interested in checking out Cataclysm.
I do think the stakes are higher for Blizzard this time around - there's been no content updates in quite a long time now (except Ruby Sanctum which doesn't really count) and even the most seasoned WoW fans are checking out other games while they wait for Cataclysm to launch (just read Tobold's blog, lol).
I've recently started playing WoW again with my girlfriend (it's the only game she likes so far). As someone who was a WoW player for a few years..to a WoW hater..now back again. I've wondered am I really angry at WoW? Or am I angry that the genre itself hasn't innovated much since WoW came out? I've played more MMO's than I care to list...but I haven't played LOTRO, FFXIV and many of the F2P games.. but thats it.
Here are some points I've used in the past and I'll debunk my own:
WoW is too easy. Can anyone on this forum honestly say any MMORPG was hard? When I say hard.... I mean truly difficult not just longer or more tedious. I see the insta gratification kiddies line being thrown around like political circles throw around democraps and rethuglicans. So you kill 10 monsters versus killing 100 to level (for example) either way I as a player I have thoroughly proved I know how to kill said monster... what's more difficult really? I think this is more of an emotional response and a case of rose colored glasses. I've raided in EQ1(up to Luclin), AoC and DAoC .. it was not at all difficult; in fact I'd say easier overall. This also might be a case of the ease in which you can find info on MMO's nowadays.
WoW has the worst community. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you the WoW community is some bastion of polite civilization. I am going to tell you that the community in every game I have ever played is roughly similar. I remember trolls in EQ trash talking constantly and people generally being shitty to eachother. How about the raid guilds that used to run by other lesser experienced guilds at a raid boss (remember open dungeons) and ninja the kill? Then they would be "nice" and give the lesser experienced raid..have whatever they didn't want.. Wow how nice! /sarcasm. DAoC didn't have much better of a community either. I had to quit a character because someone *accused* me of ninjaing with no proof.. just an accusation (they couldn't even provide a ss)... and boom I can't even pvp... on a midgard healer.
So I'm just wondering wondering if the WoW hate (which is considered cool apparently) and how older games were so much better is a lot like the old guy's description of his youth in this clip:
EQ was pretty difficult. Sometimes it took a cry to all guilds on a server to go get the corpses of a failed raid before their bodies rotted into nothingness. Corpse rotting, ques for high end gear, quests that couldn't be redone, a pretty unforgiven crafting system... yeah I'd say some games were a lot harder than they are now.
I really don't have a problem with WoW, even though it was a game I passed myself. Parts of the fanbase, well we could all do without some of them. I suspect that's where the hate out there stems from, the fans that can't seem to use a sentence without WoW in it, comparing every game out there to WoW, trying to claim games that are older than WoW, copied WoW, and my favorite, acting like WoW was the first..
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Originally posted by KingKong007 The only thing wrong with WOW is that the damned game is just too BIG in the playing field. There isn't even something remotely coming in its neighbourhood. That's not Blizzard's fault. It is the so called "industry" which simply excels in putting out mediocre and really very bad game designs.
The main thing is that, actually, there is X demand for a game with most of WoW's features, and most of that demand has been met by WoW. It's like opening an anonymous fast food near a McDonalds, you might still survive and make yourself a decent living, but you can't really hope to steal all the McDonalds' customers, you must be real crazy to think that.
You can either make a somewhat different game for the part of audience that can't stand some WoW features (like cartoony graphics or arena based pvp), or find an untapped niche for a completely new type of gameplay, or make a new game better than WoW at being WoW (but chances are, you will fail miserably, as you need to provide most of WoW's features implemented in a decade of development and expansions, and improve them significantly over WoW's as well to guarantee a better environment for players to switch their subscription, as probably 95% of WoW players can't or won't keep a double subscription).
The only reason why people hate WoW is because they blame it for ruining the MMO industry. Open your eyes people. WoW did not ruined the industry single-handedly. WoW isn't responsible for what other developers do. It is the developers putting out the crappy games trying to copy WoW who ruined the industry. They should have been smart enough to realize that a WoW clone won't ever succeed. But they didn't and this is what we get today.
True (but clones can succeed, the EQ clone Wow did pretty great).
It is not Wows fault that people like Mythic, Turbine and the rest tried to remake it, it is the fault of devs with no new ideas.
Not that Wow had much of those either but at launch it was far superior to the other similar games out there. I don't think it is that now, I don't think it is even close to being the best now but in mid 2004 it was.
The secret to really get many subs is releasing a game that is better than all it's competitors at launch, not after years of patching and expansions. Good programming also helps and Blizzard have good programmers. and if you actually make a Wow clone that is the best game out there it will sell great but so will of course any game that is the best out there...
But that at launch condition is really important, games like AoC and Vanguard can never really recover from the bad launches. Games with good launches but wasn't the best game out there at launch can do pretty good but still not become huge.
Guildwars had a good launch, 7 million copies sold (yeah a B2P is not great to compare but it still has at least some value) and still high on X-fire after all these years and the devs focus on GW2 the last few years.
LOTRO launched ok but with very little content, typical medium sized game.
Eve actually managed to get pretty large after a lot of work but it's bad launch followed it a long time.
@OP- Community was 90% of the reason I couldn't stand WoW. The other 10% is hard to explain, the game itself did not have any feature that grabbed or impressed me. I suppose the game itself wasn't for me, but I can get used to a game for an awesome community. That's what really matters to me.
hmm maybe I am confused but I think he was calling WoW a clone of EQ... no?
Comments
The cartoony graphics are pretty bad. I feel like I'm walking around waiting for an anvil to drop on my head. Loses all immersion for me.
Really wish this didnt get moved.
The community is only bad if you aren't in a guild or don't have a good group of friends. It's like going to a major city and saying the community is terrible because all the people sleeping on the streets smell bad. The 'good' and nice WOW players don't bother with trade chat or general chat, so basically the only people you see there are the rejects. The vast majority of players never use trade chat,.
The game is too easy? There are definitely challenges, and the boss fights in ANY wow endgame dungeon or raid is vastly more difficult than anything in other games. Games like AOC are still at the point where every boss has a basic melee attack and a ton of hps.. and you just grind them all down without any tactics. Imagine if every boss mob was patchwerk. WOWs fight are detailed, reactionary and compicated. IT's funny, in WOW, we use patchwerk often in conversations because it is such a 'simple' fight.. In other games, patchwerk is the norm.
When people say that WOW is too easy, they mean that WOW took away the boring parts. Yes when you die, you don't have to regear your character. Yes, the deathrun is fairly short. Yes you level at a nice pace. The 'hard' games aren't hard, they are just tedius. They make you repeat things, or run all the way across the map for no reason other than it makes it 'hard'. These are games, they are supposed to be fun, not tedius.
I liked playing wow...for a while. The main thing I have to say that's anti wow is once you reach the level cap (which happens relatively fast). You reach level 80, and you've got some rep to grind, but honestly within a week or two you've got all your rep. What you're left with is raiding ICC. With the WoW lockout system you're left with just raiding ICC for a few hours...then waiting until the following tuesday to do it again. Depending on your guild setup you may have a 10 man and 25 man raid to do again, but it's the same deal.
I REALLY LIKE the wow gameplay! But the unfortunate thing is that you're restricted in how often you can enjoy it! You do your 10 man icecrown citadel run (which is honestly fun!)...on x day (tuesday reset), you do your 25 man icecrown citadel run (which still, is fun!) on x day....and then you've got your continuations for both. But honestly, what ends up happening is that you just wait for the next night to meet with your raid buddies to continue your raid at level 80, with nothing else to do otherwise.
So you, as a wow player, think "okay, It'll be fun when it's 7 pm server time!" ...then "Okay it'll be fun when it's 7 pm server time on wednesday!" and so on.
The raiding truly is fun. There just isn't enough of it because of the weekly lockout system. You end up having fun for a couple days, then waiting 3-5 days before you can honestly play again. The ugliest part is if you feel frustration with your raid partners. I won't get into that, but as an avid mmorpg player since the UO/Mud days, I will say that it's VERY easy to get frustrated with your guild/raid buddies...mostly because there is seriously nothing else to do!
Overall. I would say WoW really is an excellently made game, but a poorly made game when it comes to longevity. I enjoyed WoTLK....for a few months. I really don't have interest in the upcoming cataclysm expansion, and I hope I covered the reasons why I'm not looking forward to it.
I played WoW for quite some time, thanks to the nudging of friends. However, I didn't truly enjoy it very much, and don't play it any longer. Is there anything "wrong" with the game? Nope. It's just a matter of opinion, and I have enjoyed other MMOs more. Variety is the spice of life, takes all kinds, cliche` cliche` cliche`, ad nauseum. Nothing has to be bad about a game for someone's preference to lead them elsewhere.
instancing the best parts of the game
(taking away the MMO from the best parts of the game)
......and along with it, causing most every 'MMO' afterwards to do the same thing
(taking MUCH (not all) of the MMO'ness out of the entire MMO scene)
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Corpus Callosum
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WoW's levelling up is easiest and franly the most diversed. Right now, you do not even have to pve to level up if you wish. Quite the contrary, WoW's levelling is among the easiest and Blizz provides the largest options of activities during that very very short levelling process.
Predetermined zones? They are zones, alright. You need not go through it the way others do. I do not, for my crafter, he sneaks around and harvest and gets killed, sometime deliberate, so as to spawn in a convenient point to hit a mailbox and mail back to ore. You choose to follow the zones, stop blaming.
You choose to join raiding guilds, you are bound to find people with similar gear + level for that raid. Join a social guild, join a local family guild, join a levelling guild. I have found a crafter's guild in which we trade & share materials, share crafting levelling option (I craft tailor, i give you products to level up enchanting..., I am tailor, when I need low level tailoring pieces, I let you do it for me so you can level your lower tailoring skills). Come on, be imaginative. You can figure it out? so blame blizzard, it is an easy scapegoat.
You need a guild for a message board? You use it only for message board?
Few game feel like a world any more, since the demise of old SWG.
First, there are always people who do not welcome you, somewhere, somehow. There are times you run into warmer people. What do you do? Quit everything because there is a less welcoming guy, or try to find warmer bodies?
Second, how large is the WoW community? Do you need to stick with those who expressively do not welcome you?
Third and foremost, you are part of the community, you contribute to how it looks like. If everybody do not welcome you, time to think why.
For me I started to hate WoW when imo it became a lobby game. When you hit 80 it didn't feel too much different from Global Agenda, you stand in a main city and queue up for things like dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, arena.
In Global Agenda you stay in the dome and queue up for pve missions or pvp missions, it's the same thing but people complain that GA has no open world but yet they'll do the SAME thing in WoW.
The only thing wrong with WOW is that the damned game is just too BIG in the playing field.
There isn't even something remotely coming in its neighbourhood.
That's not Blizzard's fault. It is the so called "industry" which simply excels in putting out mediocre and really very bad game designs.
This site mmorpg.com is representative for the state of this industry: catching money from advertisers who simply can't deliver.
Like those same compnaies are catching undeserved money from unaware players.
That is the sad truth about this site and the MMO's.
I sympathize greatly, but this is also a problem you could have in any game. Or on the internet in general. In fact it's pretty much a guarantee that you will experience it, often. I had some bad experiences playing TF2 for the first time. The solution is always the same: ignore the haters, and find new companions.
I continue to wonder if the community in WoW is really worse now than when it launched, or if that's just nostalgia. Maybe it's a little worse, but I can't quantify this. It's just a gut feeling with no clarity. I certainly remember my raiding and the friends I made in my guilds very fondly.
The only reason why people hate WoW is because they blame it for ruining the MMO industry. Open your eyes people. WoW did not ruined the industry single-handedly. WoW isn't responsible for what other developers do. It is the developers putting out the crappy games trying to copy WoW who ruined the industry. They should have been smart enough to realize that a WoW clone won't ever succeed. But they didn't and this is what we get today.
True (but clones can succeed, the EQ clone Wow did pretty great).
It is not Wows fault that people like Mythic, Turbine and the rest tried to remake it, it is the fault of devs with no new ideas.
Not that Wow had much of those either but at launch it was far superior to the other similar games out there. I don't think it is that now, I don't think it is even close to being the best now but in mid 2004 it was.
The secret to really get many subs is releasing a game that is better than all it's competitors at launch, not after years of patching and expansions. Good programming also helps and Blizzard have good programmers. and if you actually make a Wow clone that is the best game out there it will sell great but so will of course any game that is the best out there...
But that at launch condition is really important, games like AoC and Vanguard can never really recover from the bad launches. Games with good launches but wasn't the best game out there at launch can do pretty good but still not become huge.
Guildwars had a good launch, 7 million copies sold (yeah a B2P is not great to compare but it still has at least some value) and still high on X-fire after all these years and the devs focus on GW2 the last few years.
LOTRO launched ok but with very little content, typical medium sized game.
Eve actually managed to get pretty large after a lot of work but it's bad launch followed it a long time.
I'll just answer this from my own perspective, as I assume everyone else has.
For ME....
The end game grind was MIND NUMBING. If I had had to grind rep with even ONE more faction, I would have probably gone completely and utterly batcrap crazy. Okay....craziER....whatever.
I got so sick and tired of collecting emblems...o m g. And every upgrade to armor felt pointless until you had the BEST. I couldn't even get excited about upgrades eventually, because there was always another one I needed to get, and of course, every single time, more enchants and gems....blah.
The first 10 times of running any of the dungeons and raids, was admittedly pretty fun. After about the 10th time, I could do them blindfolded and with one hand. Okay...not literally...but almost. They became horribly boring. Bosses ALWAYS do the same exact thing, it's just a matter of memorizing it and then dealing with everyone who doesn't do what they're supposed to do, and then after a while....even that ended, as everyone learned what, when and how. One of the things I like about EQ2 is that the bosses have some sort of table of things they MIGHT do....it's not the same every single time. More like the "Wizard of Oz" fight at Karazhan but not with set scenarios, more randomness. Actually, now that I think about it, Kara was QUITE fun. But, even then, once you learned the different scenarios, it too became old hat. I understand this is a problem in most MMOs. If you're going to require people to run things 100s of times to get gear......that's how it's going to end up.
Crafting was SO BORING. I know not everyone likes the mini game variety of crafting, but I do. I want more than having all the mats, pushing one button, then walking away to make lunch while my character "auto crafts." B O R I N G. And yet still...I had max crafters of every profession but engineering (because my partner had engineering). Seriously...that's just too easy, too simplistic, imo. But...I never had to buy much on the AH. If it had to come from a profession, I could make it. Self-sufficiency shouldn't be THAT easy in an MMO, imo.
No player and guild housing. THIS....for me....is completely unacceptable, particularly in a game that has had six years to remedy this sad fact.
No one raids opposing faction cities anymore for FUN. Once people get the achievement....that's it. Along with achievements, all of the spontaneous PvP ended. Actually....it might have been before that when it STARTED coming to an end, but after that...it was over. No more Southshore / Tauren Mill football game either. No one has "time" to just HAVE FUN with PvP now that it's all boxed off into instances.
The game kept getting easier and easier, being "dumbed down," as some like to say. Removing almost ALL of the random elite mobs during the leveling up process....that made me sad. I remember running into them while questing and that surge of adrenaline I'd get when I accidentally ran into one rounding a corner or something and realized I would have to fight....or run.
I could really keep going, but I'll stop. For me....WoW started with a bang and I loved it...for years. The more Blizzard changed it, the less I liked it.
And, the part that ISN'T Blizzard's fault (totally)....the community....is the worst I have ever played with....EVER.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
I'm sorry, EverQuest WoW clone?
EQ2 launched before WoW.... EQ2 - Nov, 8 2004 WoW - Nov, 23 2004
I'm sorry just had to point this out....
@OP- Community was 90% of the reason I couldn't stand WoW. The other 10% is hard to explain, the game itself did not have any feature that grabbed or impressed me. I suppose the game itself wasn't for me, but I can get used to a game for an awesome community. That's what really matters to me.
Interesing you mention this, because....the only reason I ended up playing WoW FIRST, was because I had played in the open beta for WoW, EQ2, and GW, and I had CHOSEN EQ2 as "the game for me." However...I wanted to play it with the graphics pumped up, SO....I literally ORDERED a brand new custom made computer from a computer boutique (the only time I have or WILL ever do that) so I could have a top of the line machine to run EQ2. I ordered the computer in Nov. and had to wait until Feb. for it to be delivered (was waiting on the latest nVidia cards).
So....I ended up playing WoW first, because, as we all know....it could run on a calculator, which, at the time, is pretty much what I had. Once my new computer arrived, I started playing EQ2, and....since my family had also started playing WoW WITH me (it was both my son's and partner's FIRST MMO ever), they had gotten "into" the game, so, as a family we continued to play WoW, and I played BOTH WoW and EQ2 from then on out. By February of THIS year, even my family was done with WoW, so now....we're all playing EQ2.
My story in a nutshell, not that anyone asked. LOL
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
i hate the apple products not because its popular but for their insane pricetags.......600€ for a goddamn phone.....WTF?
There are also people that love popular things JUST because they're popular. They want whatever is the latest fad because....
"But Moooooom, everyone ELSE is DOING IT!" Well...I'm not 13 any more and I don't do things now just because "everyone else is doing it." By itself....that is no longer a good reason for doing ANYthing, in my opinion.
Granted, there are people that really enjoy WoW still, and there's nothing wrong with that. BUT....there is also nothing wrong with NOT enjoying WoW. And I would imagine that most people have more of a reason than "it's popular" for not liking it. Many reasons have been listed just in this thread.
It's like the Apple comment above. I would LOVE to have an iPhone4, BUT....not at the price they are. That's not an excuse or a "not liking the popularity," that....is a REASON.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
Blizzard doesn't seem to care about the customer anymore. Blizzard is providing very little content through the course of the year, which is really frustrating.
Professions have become homogenized, classes are now becoming more homogenized (cataclysm) also. Too many things have been turned into "reward city," so Battlegrounds aren't designed for pvp, they're designed for pvp encounters that last 15-20 minutes so that players can be rewarded, whether they win or lose.
Why do people hate Wow?
Why do people hate the Wii, or the Iphone, or the Yankees, or 'insert popular thing'?
Because everyone hates you when your on top. It's cool to root for the underdog, to despise the popular kid in school. It's really that simple.
While WoW of today and EQ of 2003 are very, very different games, the fundamental attitude of their playerbases is very similar.
I don't hate on anyone but I think the position of WoW today is pretty weak and has been for a couple of years now, in that there's a lot more ex-WoW players than current ones and people are generally unhappy but keep playing because there's nothing else out there of comparable quality for the typcial gamer.
But, I have confidence. WoW has completely reinvented with every expansion and I'm sure Cataclysm will be no different. The people who are benefiting the most under the current system get shafted, and the whole expansion is structured in a way to appeal to whoever Blizzard decided they want to chase for the next couple of years.
Classic was "Raid or Die", BC got rid of the 40-man guilds entirely and gave us multiple paths into the endgame. But progression was still pretty much impossible for casual players - heroics were pretty tough even for geared players (well, some of them) and you couldn't raid beyond Karazhan without a dedicated raiding guild. So we got WoTLK which was all about accessability. But they made the game *so* accessable that the community itself started gating content (aka Gearscore), everything except the current-tier raid became irrelevent, and lot of high-end players lost interest and quit because normal modes no longer carried any sort of elite status and the hard modes were still too hard. So, it seems Cataclysm is going to take the difficulty back up a couple of notches, hopefully bring back some semblance of progression, move the focus of pvp back into the BGs (since most people hate arena but like to BG, even if it's just casually), and a lot of the core mechanics (and the gameplay areas themselves) are being rolled back to something resembling Classic in an attempt to grab returning players - I don't know anyone who played in 2004 who still plays today, though I know many who are very interested in checking out Cataclysm.
I do think the stakes are higher for Blizzard this time around - there's been no content updates in quite a long time now (except Ruby Sanctum which doesn't really count) and even the most seasoned WoW fans are checking out other games while they wait for Cataclysm to launch (just read Tobold's blog, lol).
EQ was pretty difficult. Sometimes it took a cry to all guilds on a server to go get the corpses of a failed raid before their bodies rotted into nothingness. Corpse rotting, ques for high end gear, quests that couldn't be redone, a pretty unforgiven crafting system... yeah I'd say some games were a lot harder than they are now.
I really don't have a problem with WoW, even though it was a game I passed myself. Parts of the fanbase, well we could all do without some of them. I suspect that's where the hate out there stems from, the fans that can't seem to use a sentence without WoW in it, comparing every game out there to WoW, trying to claim games that are older than WoW, copied WoW, and my favorite, acting like WoW was the first..
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
The main thing is that, actually, there is X demand for a game with most of WoW's features, and most of that demand has been met by WoW. It's like opening an anonymous fast food near a McDonalds, you might still survive and make yourself a decent living, but you can't really hope to steal all the McDonalds' customers, you must be real crazy to think that.
You can either make a somewhat different game for the part of audience that can't stand some WoW features (like cartoony graphics or arena based pvp), or find an untapped niche for a completely new type of gameplay, or make a new game better than WoW at being WoW (but chances are, you will fail miserably, as you need to provide most of WoW's features implemented in a decade of development and expansions, and improve them significantly over WoW's as well to guarantee a better environment for players to switch their subscription, as probably 95% of WoW players can't or won't keep a double subscription).
The people I think, especially higher level people. They tend to be a holes to newbies.
hmm maybe I am confused but I think he was calling WoW a clone of EQ... no?