Originally posted by Furiant At this point I would pay any subscription fee for a clone of WoW Vanilla. I miss it more than I've enjoyed any game in the past 6 years.
Yea. Wait until people start telling you to take off your rose colored glasses. Or, my personal favorite, "if you like wow (eq) so much, why dont you go play it!". Etc, etc.
I find it odd that people miss Vanilla WoW. Their reasons for missing it is "Well it had more community and it was harder!" Why would you ever play WOW for those two reasons? If you value those things in an MMO, Vanilla WoW was probably the worst choice you could have made at the time.
I think that many times, when the term "WoW Clone" is used in derogatory fashion or when hatred is spit at Blizzard or WoW, it generally comes from jealousy. I would like all of the anti-WoW fanbois to name one, just ONE, mmo that has even sniffed the success that WoW has had.
What does success have to do with anything? The most successful musicians are not the best musicians, the most successful fast food chains are not the best food. It seems subscription numbers is the only thing WoW fans can lay claim to to defend their game. The gameplay doesn't stand up on its own.
I think that most of the WoW haters wish their game was a "WoW Clone" in terms of playability a nonsense word, if you mean how casual it is, or good for casual players, there are literally hundreds of WoW clones that are just as casual, and tons of games aimed at younger audiences that are even more casual than WoW, ease of UI control most MMOs these days have the same UI that WoW has, which is a pretty shitty UI. And WoW is not the only MMO to allow custom UI by any stretch, flow of combat again, dozens of other MMOs have this, stability of economy not only is that laughably false, but that's not really a big selling point, size of player base not relavent even a little, unless you're pointing out how obnoxious most of the WoW community is, next, and responsiveness Yes, WoW is responsive. NO WoW is not the only responsive MMO, or the most responsive. . Again, much of the hatred simply comes from jealousy. No, it comes from how shitty the genre has become after WoW's success. Even if you like WoW, how can you possibly say its a good thing that all MMOs after it are just copy and pasted WoW clones? There's already a WoW for people who like WoW. How many so-called "WoW killers" have we seen over the past several years? None, because WoW is a fluke that sprang from timing and marketing, not its design or features. No sensible person ever used the word WoW killer. Do a little research and you'll find that almost all of those games are f2p now.
Do a little research and you'll realize that WoW has very little to it that deserves praise.
But instead they eliminated real world pvp, turned pvp into battleground bs, the game was dominated by raiding or arena bs, just bs after bs. I can't even sound intelligent when I talk about it because of how stupid it all was and how it's just not even worth my time trying to pretty up my language. It's just so stupid. And game after game tried to copy them but just failed, over and over. Until we get to 2014. Nearly 10 years after it's release and the mmo genre is a wasteland of non-mmos, because even the definition of the term has been completely corrupted in it's wake by names like guild wars and neverwinter.
So angry, but true. However if I don't think its fair to blame WoW for the genre degeneration. Things just happen, and in retrospect it is always easy to see what went wrong.
IMO, Blizard DID create something new. How else do you go from EQ topping out at 1 million subs, to WOW getting 8+ million right out the gate? Their IP did help them, but for the most part, they intentionally removed parts of MMO gaming that turned many of the folks that tried n' dumped UO & EQ. I remember seeing an interview from one of the Blizzard guys that worked on WOW where he said their express intent was to go out and remove the time sinks, remove the harsh pentalties, make things more user friendly....remove all of those "barriers to entry".
WOW didnt have 8 million out of the gate but it did grow to that
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
now if someone cloned vanilla wow, that would be a different story ... but they are cloning the less popular new-age wow [mod edit] .. yes I know .. hardmodes .. you'll forgive me if I don't find a few challenging end game raid encounters as enough content to warrant me spending $15 a month on.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity. I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
Originally posted by Furiant At this point I would pay any subscription fee for a clone of WoW Vanilla. I miss it more than I've enjoyed any game in the past 6 years.
Yea. Wait until people start telling you to take off your rose colored glasses. Or, my personal favorite, "if you like wow (eq) so much, why dont you go play it!". Etc, etc.
I find it odd that people miss Vanilla WoW. Their reasons for missing it is "Well it had more community and it was harder!" Why would you ever play WOW for those two reasons? If you value those things in an MMO, Vanilla WoW was probably the worst choice you could have made at the time.
One thing that comes into mind is gear progression. In vanilla wow you did appreciate every single improvement in your gear for making the game easier for your toon. You wanted to do the tough group quests, and you wanted to behave yourself to get groups in dungeons where the good stuff was. Sometimes you stopped questing to collect mats for a craftable upgrade to improve your performance, or farmed something for selling it in AH to fund your next upgrade you've seen in there.
Not to mention PvP where everyone wanted to have best gear possible in order to survive when attacked by an enemy. Or when fighting in battlegrounds your gear came from dungeons, quests, and crafting, not from some vendor collecting stupid badges. In full blue gear you were a god in PvP.
In MoP the game is already easy enough to forget gear progression for levels 1-89; mobs will die in seconds and most quests are about clicking sparkling objects on the ground. Doing any professions (except maybe enchanting) while leveling makes you look like a noob. In fact, even doing quests makes you look like a noob since you should be standing in a city and queueing for random dungeons to be efficient leveler.
I think WoW was successful because it correctly captured the essence of a very fun lore setting (Warcraft), and it made things both easy for new players and hard for veterans.
WOW was successful PARTLY because it's IP (The success of the Warcraft RTS series was good enough to get folks interested)...but I would venture to say that a large portion of the 12+ million peak of subs probably never played the Warcraft RTS game.
WOW was successful because it removed all the barriers to entry (that's business lingo for high learning curve, pain points, punative play environment) that caused the many many people that tried games like UO & EQ, but quit soon thereafter because they did not have the time, patience, or emotional fortitude to stick those games out.
The problem I see with most MMOs is that they simply do not usually have the same IP behind them. SWTOR had the IP, got the biiiiig numbers at the start...but the game was not an MMO, so it failed medium/long term. Games like GW2 simply did not have the IP, and others like TSW failed a bit in both IP and gameplay (I still find TSW the most mind-blowingly-epic story-based MMO out there, but stopped after finishing the quests...).
I think SWTOR is the perfect example how IP doesn't affect the long term success, if the game isn't designed right. People not only jumped on the SW:TOR wagon because of the IP, but also because people have been waiting for something new for several years now, and was being published by Bioware & EA (who also have a good track record with games). Yet it was largely the same experience as playing WOW. How exactly was it not a MMO?
A WOW clone needs to have a BIG IP and a GREAT gameplay (not only fighting, but having a well rounded system). ESO has some potential to be a true modern WoW-clone, same with EQN...Wildstar less so imo (from this perspective).
Ultimately how you define a "WOW Clone" is up to you, but in referece to how the OP is using the term, it's in relation to people branding other similar combat oriented, linear themepark style MMOs, with a level / gear based progression model.
That's the "cloning" part...the fact that they all have roles based primarily around combat, that use a level / gear based progression system, in an environment that is very palatable to casual gamers (lack of risk vs reward or punative systems for bad play). In addition, the primary driver for content creation is heavily driven by the developers, with very little content creation in the hands of the playerbase.
Put simply......you run quests & raid dungeons so that you can level & gear sufficient enough to qualify for the next tier of quests & dungeons, which reward you with levels & gear sufficient enough to qualify for the next tier of quests & dungeons...rince & repeat.
Lets be fair tho: MMO players are some of the biggest whiners out there! They will trash every goddamned game/story/word/world, usually just to justify their miserable existence of a 30-year-old who realises he's mostly unemployed and has no real future, yet tries to find some meaning in smashing pixels 10 hours a day for years on end...
I'd like to refine this assessment of "MMO players" a bit. I think you have a lot more whining from the current generation of MMO gamers, because of games like WOW & it's big tent approach. You have WAY more casual gamers playing MMOs these days (because of WOW), who also get their entertainment from many other sources....and essentially don't have to "put up" with mild inconvienences....because they can just go play an iOS game, social media game, or watch a movie.
If you look back at the folks that stuck games like Ultima Online out (when the MMO player base was MUCH more aligned in wants & needs), if you didn't like something...you either stuck it out and adapted, or you quit MMO gaming altogether. Most adapted and did a lot less female dogging.
I think vanilla WOW got it exactly right. It was a refined version of earlier mmo's which removed the major irritations; but it was not the horrible easy-mode, overly-simplified game that most mmo's (including later iterations of wow) have become.
Obviously many people agreed given its unprecedented and never repeated popularity.
Originally posted by Furiant At this point I would pay any subscription fee for a clone of WoW Vanilla. I miss it more than I've enjoyed any game in the past 6 years.
Yea. Wait until people start telling you to take off your rose colored glasses. Or, my personal favorite, "if you like wow (eq) so much, why dont you go play it!". Etc, etc.
I find it odd that people miss Vanilla WoW. Their reasons for missing it is "Well it had more community and it was harder!" Why would you ever play WOW for those two reasons? If you value those things in an MMO, Vanilla WoW was probably the worst choice you could have made at the time.
Not necessarily....there wasn't a whole lot out at the time of the first release of WOW.
At this point, Ultima Online had changed into a 2D version of WOW (with it's radical revamp of combat & itemization design), Star Wars Galaxies also changed drastically, removing many of the sandbox elements that made it a good 3D alternative for traditional MMO types. Lineage 2 was also out around that time, but was plagued with BOTs....and was maybe a little too dependent on groups & community (due to Korean influence)
Things like LFG, and crazy padding of stats, due to gear progression eventually made it so that you really never had to join a guild....unless you wanted to experience raid content....and you don't even need a guild to run raids in WOW's current form.
The huge commercial success of WOW had every other existing game racing to radically alter their systems to match WOW, and future games for the next 10 years would all look the same.
now if someone cloned vanilla wow, that would be a different story ... but they are cloning the less popular new-age wow [mod edit] .. yes I know .. hardmodes .. you'll forgive me if I don't find a few challenging end game raid encounters as enough content to warrant me spending $15 a month on.
Vanilla WoW was not more popular. It didn't top 7 million until just before TBC launched. It is still roughly the same popularity today as it was at the end of Vanilla, and more popular now than it was during the first two years of release.
The WoW clones really started coming out of the woodwork during the Lich King - when WoW topped 10 million for the first time.
So.....they copied the MORE popular new-age wow of the Lich King era, instead of the LESS popular vanilla WoW.
Truth is most know what game Wow was copying,their devs were playing that game ...EQ.
Nobody except those that made the decision what Blizzard was trying to do,but what it did do is make the game easier and by a lot.Nobody has ever really sat down and asked Blizzard why they did the low end graphics or did they think as long as they were better than EQ ,that was their aim.
There was EQ,that was the elite game,what EQ2 did was bring us the best graphics this genre had ever seen.However i came from FFXI before either EQ2 oe Wow and FFXI had ZERO hand holding,no connect the dots with yellow markers,it was the type of game i wanted and loved it.
Wow did almost nothing to change from the EQ mold,what they did do is forget what type of game they were suppose to be making>>>>a MMORPG.Instead they created a game that was 95% solo,and everything was a follow the yellow markers around so no RPG either.When you role play a certain class,that does NOT mean follow someone else's yellow markers around.Even worse is EVERY single player is following those same yellow markers,really pathetic when you think about it.
It is like NOBODY is playing THEIR own game,they are are following each other through the same guided path.Then the ONLY part they decide "hey we might want some team play since this is a MMO,they make it in instances LMAO.Like i said nobody knows their true intentions or the why but i will assume it was all to save money,the low end graphics and the instancing all did that.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Wow discarded systems from previous games that didn't work well, and tuned the working parts well enough to essentially define how they worked (in all new titles) for the next decade.
Uh... not really. They discarded most of the complicated features, whether they worked well or not (like player housing), and released a version of EverQuest, with both the best and worst parts removed.
WoW's design is not noteworthy, it's marketing was.
Originally posted by Jafotron
Think someone made a good point, between WoW clone and Theme park clone. Yea there are games that have outright copied Wow, but when people call something a Wow clone and i look at it, and it has one or two features in common, but has so many things that make it it's own game
Seriously? What AAA MMORPG in the last 8 years would you say only had one or two features in common with WoW? The only one I can think of is Vanguard, and no one accused it of being a WoW clone.
Maybe you never played pre WoW MMOs, so you aren't aware just how radically different MMOs used to be from one another, and see the tiny insignificant differences as bigger than they are. GW2 is the only themepark I've played that I wouldn't call a WoW clone. Games like LotRO are just WoW with different art styles and one or two gimmicks.
I agree, you missed the next part where i said "upcoming games" and gw2 is the kind of games i meant, they have distinct ideas but people choose to brush them aside and only focus on what makes it similar to Wow.
WoW did not advance the MMORPG genre, it made it go "backward". It took single player elements and put it in an MMORPG to draw single player games to play them. It made death not matter, it make leveling quick and linear, it made so that your action have no persistant effect, such as PvP.
It effectively took the first step with Ultima Online, in creating a persistent online world and said: No this is bullshit, we should just create games, not virtual worlds. And by its success basically said to everyone that virtual world gaming, which was the true innovation, is crap and then dragged the once promising MMORPG into its infantile state and into single player, casual gaming.
WoW is entirely bad and detrimental to the evolution of gaming and has basically killed any promise of virtual world gaming. It removed the Massively from MMORPG.
But instead they eliminated real world pvp, turned pvp into battleground bs, the game was dominated by raiding or arena bs, just bs after bs. I can't even sound intelligent when I talk about it because of how stupid it all was and how it's just not even worth my time trying to pretty up my language. It's just so stupid. And game after game tried to copy them but just failed, over and over. Until we get to 2014. Nearly 10 years after it's release and the mmo genre is a wasteland of non-mmos, because even the definition of the term has been completely corrupted in it's wake by names like guild wars and neverwinter.
So angry, but true. However if I don't think its fair to blame WoW for the genre degeneration. Things just happen, and in retrospect it is always easy to see what went wrong.
This is true...if it weren't Blizzard, it would have been somone else.
It's not that games like Rift, Warhammer, and SW:TOR are "bad".....just that they were beat to death, before they even released the game.
Had Trion released Rift in 2004, IT would be the game that caused the traditional MMOs, and all that is good & holy . lol
Eventually, someone would have looked at the MMO genere pricing model (box sale + monthly re-occuring fee) & looked at how small the MMO playerbase was, in comparison to other casual game generes.....and created an unholy marriage between the two.
Another sign that WoW destroyed the MMORPG genre is that a game like Skyrim, a freaking single player game, is a better virtual world game than any of the MMORPGs released in the last decade or so.
Originally posted by Zorgo Originally posted by azmundaiit is a bad thing.if i wanted to play wow, i would play wow. now if someone cloned vanilla wow, that would be a different story ... but they are cloning the less popular new-age wow that is geared for people with downs syndrome .. yes I know .. hardmodes .. you'll forgive me if I don't find a few challenging end game raid encounters as enough content to warrant me spending $15 a month on.
The WoW clones really started coming out of the woodwork during the Lich King - when WoW topped 10 million for the first time.
and its been in decline ever since. it topped 10 million because the end of TBC was the height of the warcraft experience. nothing had been dumbed down yet. the game has become completely about endgame .. it wasnt like that even in TBC, though TBC was a bit more like that it still took months for most people to level ... now they are selling levels. they used to fight leveling services .. now they are selling levels ...
i feel like im taking crazy pills.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity. I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
I like wow and all, its great for what it is, but giving them credit for taking the best from EQ AND UO? I don't think so. UO is representative of another way to go with MMO's that still to this day hasn't been given a fair shot. When some skilled developers with good leadership and strong financials takes a shot at perfecting what UO started we will see the next truly great MMO.
I think that many times, when the term "WoW Clone" is used in derogatory fashion or when hatred is spit at Blizzard or WoW, it generally comes from jealousy. I would like all of the anti-WoW fanbois to name one, just ONE, mmo that has even sniffed the success that WoW has had.
What does success have to do with anything? The most successful musicians are not the best musicians, the most successful fast food chains are not the best food. It seems subscription numbers is the only thing WoW fans can lay claim to to defend their game. The gameplay doesn't stand up on its own.
I think that most of the WoW haters wish their game was a "WoW Clone" in terms of playability a nonsense word, if you mean how casual it is, or good for casual players, there are literally hundreds of WoW clones that are just as casual, and tons of games aimed at younger audiences that are even more casual than WoW, ease of UI control most MMOs these days have the same UI that WoW has, which is a pretty shitty UI. And WoW is not the only MMO to allow custom UI by any stretch, flow of combat again, dozens of other MMOs have this, stability of economy not only is that laughably false, but that's not really a big selling point, size of player base not relavent even a little, unless you're pointing out how obnoxious most of the WoW community is, next, and responsiveness Yes, WoW is responsive. NO WoW is not the only responsive MMO, or the most responsive. . Again, much of the hatred simply comes from jealousy. No, it comes from how shitty the genre has become after WoW's success. Even if you like WoW, how can you possibly say its a good thing that all MMOs after it are just copy and pasted WoW clones? There's already a WoW for people who like WoW. How many so-called "WoW killers" have we seen over the past several years? None, because WoW is a fluke that sprang from timing and marketing, not its design or features. No sensible person ever used the word WoW killer. Do a little research and you'll find that almost all of those games are f2p now.
Do a little research and you'll realize that WoW has very little to it that deserves praise.
Perhaps you yourself should "do a little research" and find that most people, myself included, never intimated that WoW changed or introduced anything to the genre - in fact, I would surmise that the original EQ would be more accurately described as an innovator than WoW. However, WoW has done quite a bit to deserve praise for keeping its players around and interested.
And apparently it has done quite a bit more than whatever game you're such a raving fanboi for. Just because you don't like WoW most certainly doesn't detract from its success or from anything I said.
"Do a little research", sir, and you'll discover also that the word "WoW killer" is thrown around time and time again and yet, to this point, has ALWAYS failed to live up to itself. So whether you like the game or not, there are evidently quite a number of things it does right. Whether it deserves praise for innovation or originality is moot now, over nine years after its inception. How about you just get over your dislike of it, eh?
"Why would I want to loose a religion upon my people? Religions wreck from within - Empires and individuals alike! It's all the same." - God Emperor of Dune
The problem is that the term "WoW Clone" is over used. Many games have come into being with the promise of a new "WoW" experience but failed miserably to deliver on that promise. Therefore, those games are more like cheap imitations than clones. They only appear to be similar on the surface, but they aren't really. So now the term "WoW Clone" is spoken like a curse around these boards, but the truth is, there aren't many. One of the better "WoW Clones" out there (Rift) actually met with a respectable level of success.
Its funny it would seem most mmo gamers don't know what they want, too long to progress (like ffxi) then it's too grindy, too different (like TSW) it gets axed as well, too much like WoW and it's a WoW clone.
Often times people hold the old games in nostalgia because the mmo genre was still fresh, if the devs were too far off the beaten path it's a huge risk, that usually doesn't end well. After all it was Yoshi-P who coined the term themepark, guess you should of known what he was making.
I think the content locusts would be better off playing the grindy games rather than the themepark models which they seem to despise from the get go. And let casuals keep at the themeparks.
People may want to polish it all they want. The fact that the term "WoW clone" has become an insult shows the widespread dislike towards the way WoW evolved.
I think that many times, when the term "WoW Clone" is used in derogatory fashion or when hatred is spit at Blizzard or WoW, it generally comes from jealousy. I would like all of the anti-WoW fanbois to name one, just ONE, mmo that has even sniffed the success that WoW has had.
What does success have to do with anything? The most successful musicians are not the best musicians, the most successful fast food chains are not the best food. It seems subscription numbers is the only thing WoW fans can lay claim to to defend their game. The gameplay doesn't stand up on its own.
I think that most of the WoW haters wish their game was a "WoW Clone" in terms of playability a nonsense word, if you mean how casual it is, or good for casual players, there are literally hundreds of WoW clones that are just as casual, and tons of games aimed at younger audiences that are even more casual than WoW, ease of UI control most MMOs these days have the same UI that WoW has, which is a pretty shitty UI. And WoW is not the only MMO to allow custom UI by any stretch, flow of combat again, dozens of other MMOs have this, stability of economy not only is that laughably false, but that's not really a big selling point, size of player base not relavent even a little, unless you're pointing out how obnoxious most of the WoW community is, next, and responsiveness Yes, WoW is responsive. NO WoW is not the only responsive MMO, or the most responsive. . Again, much of the hatred simply comes from jealousy. No, it comes from how shitty the genre has become after WoW's success. Even if you like WoW, how can you possibly say its a good thing that all MMOs after it are just copy and pasted WoW clones? There's already a WoW for people who like WoW. How many so-called "WoW killers" have we seen over the past several years? None, because WoW is a fluke that sprang from timing and marketing, not its design or features. No sensible person ever used the word WoW killer. Do a little research and you'll find that almost all of those games are f2p now.
Do a little research and you'll realize that WoW has very little to it that deserves praise.
Perhaps you yourself should "do a little research" and find that most people, myself included, never intimated that WoW changed or introduced anything to the genre - in fact, I would surmise that the original EQ would be more accurately described as an innovator than WoW. However, WoW has done quite a bit to deserve praise for keeping its players around and interested.
And apparently it has done quite a bit more than whatever game you're such a raving fanboi for. Just because you don't like WoW most certainly doesn't detract from its success or from anything I said.
"Do a little research", sir, and you'll discover also that the word "WoW killer" is thrown around time and time again and yet, to this point, has ALWAYS failed to live up to itself. So whether you like the game or not, there are evidently quite a number of things it does right. Whether it deserves praise for innovation or originality is moot now, over nine years after its inception. How about you just get over your dislike of it, eh?
I'm not sure I agree with the "WOW clone" label that we slap to every new MMO; or the "wow killer" label for that matter. Similarities are inevitable in MMO's, but to credit WOW as the sole proprietor is a little too much with the broad strokes. I have played WOW since 2006, and gradually, in my opinion, it has slowly drifted from its own model of success. While I am sure WOD will bring people back and will be a commendable expansion, it is hard to say that it is going back to its roots. WOW is a game whos roots have been transplanted beyond being able to resemble TBC, or even WOTLK. With Wildstar, the game most often referred to as a WOW clone, I definitely see the similarities, but I also see the innovation and clear path of what this game is trying to be; it knows its identity. It captures those moments of classic WOW, while finding its own niche. With the plethora of sandbox and theme park MMO's on the horizon in 2014/15, there is something for everyone. These upcoming games provide data for the MMOs to come, to make better games for the casual and hardcore alike. "WOW clone" "shmowclone", its all for the greater good.
Comments
I find it odd that people miss Vanilla WoW. Their reasons for missing it is "Well it had more community and it was harder!" Why would you ever play WOW for those two reasons? If you value those things in an MMO, Vanilla WoW was probably the worst choice you could have made at the time.
Do a little research and you'll realize that WoW has very little to it that deserves praise.
So angry, but true. However if I don't think its fair to blame WoW for the genre degeneration. Things just happen, and in retrospect it is always easy to see what went wrong.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
I don't see how facts are going to help!
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
it is a bad thing.
if i wanted to play wow, i would play wow.
now if someone cloned vanilla wow, that would be a different story ... but they are cloning the less popular new-age wow [mod edit] .. yes I know .. hardmodes .. you'll forgive me if I don't find a few challenging end game raid encounters as enough content to warrant me spending $15 a month on.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
One thing that comes into mind is gear progression. In vanilla wow you did appreciate every single improvement in your gear for making the game easier for your toon. You wanted to do the tough group quests, and you wanted to behave yourself to get groups in dungeons where the good stuff was. Sometimes you stopped questing to collect mats for a craftable upgrade to improve your performance, or farmed something for selling it in AH to fund your next upgrade you've seen in there.
Not to mention PvP where everyone wanted to have best gear possible in order to survive when attacked by an enemy. Or when fighting in battlegrounds your gear came from dungeons, quests, and crafting, not from some vendor collecting stupid badges. In full blue gear you were a god in PvP.
In MoP the game is already easy enough to forget gear progression for levels 1-89; mobs will die in seconds and most quests are about clicking sparkling objects on the ground. Doing any professions (except maybe enchanting) while leveling makes you look like a noob. In fact, even doing quests makes you look like a noob since you should be standing in a city and queueing for random dungeons to be efficient leveler.
That is boring.
I think vanilla WOW got it exactly right. It was a refined version of earlier mmo's which removed the major irritations; but it was not the horrible easy-mode, overly-simplified game that most mmo's (including later iterations of wow) have become.
Obviously many people agreed given its unprecedented and never repeated popularity.
Not necessarily....there wasn't a whole lot out at the time of the first release of WOW.
At this point, Ultima Online had changed into a 2D version of WOW (with it's radical revamp of combat & itemization design), Star Wars Galaxies also changed drastically, removing many of the sandbox elements that made it a good 3D alternative for traditional MMO types. Lineage 2 was also out around that time, but was plagued with BOTs....and was maybe a little too dependent on groups & community (due to Korean influence)
Things like LFG, and crazy padding of stats, due to gear progression eventually made it so that you really never had to join a guild....unless you wanted to experience raid content....and you don't even need a guild to run raids in WOW's current form.
The huge commercial success of WOW had every other existing game racing to radically alter their systems to match WOW, and future games for the next 10 years would all look the same.
Vanilla WoW was not more popular. It didn't top 7 million until just before TBC launched. It is still roughly the same popularity today as it was at the end of Vanilla, and more popular now than it was during the first two years of release.
The WoW clones really started coming out of the woodwork during the Lich King - when WoW topped 10 million for the first time.
So.....they copied the MORE popular new-age wow of the Lich King era, instead of the LESS popular vanilla WoW.
[mod edit]
http://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of-warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/
Truth is most know what game Wow was copying,their devs were playing that game ...EQ.
Nobody except those that made the decision what Blizzard was trying to do,but what it did do is make the game easier and by a lot.Nobody has ever really sat down and asked Blizzard why they did the low end graphics or did they think as long as they were better than EQ ,that was their aim.
There was EQ,that was the elite game,what EQ2 did was bring us the best graphics this genre had ever seen.However i came from FFXI before either EQ2 oe Wow and FFXI had ZERO hand holding,no connect the dots with yellow markers,it was the type of game i wanted and loved it.
Wow did almost nothing to change from the EQ mold,what they did do is forget what type of game they were suppose to be making>>>>a MMORPG.Instead they created a game that was 95% solo,and everything was a follow the yellow markers around so no RPG either.When you role play a certain class,that does NOT mean follow someone else's yellow markers around.Even worse is EVERY single player is following those same yellow markers,really pathetic when you think about it.
It is like NOBODY is playing THEIR own game,they are are following each other through the same guided path.Then the ONLY part they decide "hey we might want some team play since this is a MMO,they make it in instances LMAO.Like i said nobody knows their true intentions or the why but i will assume it was all to save money,the low end graphics and the instancing all did that.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I agree, you missed the next part where i said "upcoming games" and gw2 is the kind of games i meant, they have distinct ideas but people choose to brush them aside and only focus on what makes it similar to Wow.
WoW did not advance the MMORPG genre, it made it go "backward". It took single player elements and put it in an MMORPG to draw single player games to play them. It made death not matter, it make leveling quick and linear, it made so that your action have no persistant effect, such as PvP.
It effectively took the first step with Ultima Online, in creating a persistent online world and said: No this is bullshit, we should just create games, not virtual worlds. And by its success basically said to everyone that virtual world gaming, which was the true innovation, is crap and then dragged the once promising MMORPG into its infantile state and into single player, casual gaming.
WoW is entirely bad and detrimental to the evolution of gaming and has basically killed any promise of virtual world gaming. It removed the Massively from MMORPG.
My gaming blog
This is true...if it weren't Blizzard, it would have been somone else.
It's not that games like Rift, Warhammer, and SW:TOR are "bad".....just that they were beat to death, before they even released the game.
Had Trion released Rift in 2004, IT would be the game that caused the traditional MMOs, and all that is good & holy . lol
Eventually, someone would have looked at the MMO genere pricing model (box sale + monthly re-occuring fee) & looked at how small the MMO playerbase was, in comparison to other casual game generes.....and created an unholy marriage between the two.
My gaming blog
The WoW clones really started coming out of the woodwork during the Lich King - when WoW topped 10 million for the first time.
and its been in decline ever since. it topped 10 million because the end of TBC was the height of the warcraft experience. nothing had been dumbed down yet. the game has become completely about endgame .. it wasnt like that even in TBC, though TBC was a bit more like that it still took months for most people to level ... now they are selling levels. they used to fight leveling services .. now they are selling levels ...
i feel like im taking crazy pills.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
Perhaps you yourself should "do a little research" and find that most people, myself included, never intimated that WoW changed or introduced anything to the genre - in fact, I would surmise that the original EQ would be more accurately described as an innovator than WoW. However, WoW has done quite a bit to deserve praise for keeping its players around and interested.
And apparently it has done quite a bit more than whatever game you're such a raving fanboi for. Just because you don't like WoW most certainly doesn't detract from its success or from anything I said.
"Do a little research", sir, and you'll discover also that the word "WoW killer" is thrown around time and time again and yet, to this point, has ALWAYS failed to live up to itself. So whether you like the game or not, there are evidently quite a number of things it does right. Whether it deserves praise for innovation or originality is moot now, over nine years after its inception. How about you just get over your dislike of it, eh?
"Why would I want to loose a religion upon my people? Religions wreck from within - Empires and individuals alike! It's all the same." - God Emperor of Dune
Its funny it would seem most mmo gamers don't know what they want, too long to progress (like ffxi) then it's too grindy, too different (like TSW) it gets axed as well, too much like WoW and it's a WoW clone.
Often times people hold the old games in nostalgia because the mmo genre was still fresh, if the devs were too far off the beaten path it's a huge risk, that usually doesn't end well. After all it was Yoshi-P who coined the term themepark, guess you should of known what he was making.
I think the content locusts would be better off playing the grindy games rather than the themepark models which they seem to despise from the get go. And let casuals keep at the themeparks.
Pot meet kettle
"Those who stay will be champions"