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What ever happend to camping for xp?
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WoW is one of the KING's of downtime.. But then I guess that is a subjective view from one's personal viewpoint.. Such as.. Waiting for up to an HOUR in queue to start an instance run.. Looking for Raid is a total joke, and having raid lockouts is a HUGE downtime / time sink.. One raid per week??? Cooldown features???
WoW might be one of the best casual friendly games from start to end game, but once at end game, Blizzard puts on the breaks/brakes and CONTROLS how much content a player can conume..
Plus defining downtime is subjective as well.. Micromanaging one's character between combat is a gameplay feature.. No different then strategy games like Civ. by Sid Meier, or Starcraft series where workers have to collect resources.. It is clear that some only play for the pure hack and slash and everything else is a waste.. I think most people enjoy social interaction, as long as it's give the right playground that promotes it.. or at least not discouraging it..
But as for the OP's topic.. some like to play "go go go", and some don't.. It's a shame some have the view of "my way or the highway" attitude.. Walmart might be the largest store in the world, but that doesn't mean that Sears, Macy's and others are bad or wrong
PS.. walking from Sears to JC Penny's at the mall has downtime, cuz no way am I planning on running everywhere in life.. Downtime is good in my opinion, as long as it's not overdone.. (subjective).. lol What was that saying when I was in the service.. OH.. "Hurry up and wait", which was so true..
I might have played WoW myself if I weren't invested in EQ and then SWG.
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
WOW is not the king of downtime. When WoW came out everyone was shocked how little down time there was. In vanilla WoW which was considered to have the most downtime of all iterations of the game, you would kill a mob and maybe drink for 5-10 sec and you are back to fighting. Depending on your class, you might have absolutely no downtime (e.g. feral druids). In EQ the downtime was insane. 20 minutes staring at your spellbook jokes were made for a reason. WoW was like 90% action, 10% downtime. EQ was like 20-30% action, 70-80% downtime.
WoW was very hardcore at endgame during Vanilla and TBC. People with lifes didn't raid in Vanilla. TBC got a bit better with Kara but still the 25 man raiding was still pretty hardcore. Then WOTLK/CATA made the endgame quite a bit more casual and now with MOP/WOD, WOW has the most accessible raiding from current MMOs on the market.
Wait time to find a group is not downtime. You can do something else when waiting for the queue to pop up. Also I have never experienced 1 hour queue when playing dps. Never! If you are a tank/healer, queues are instant so no wait time whatsoever. Do you know how much down time there was in EQ raiding? Do you?
Raid lockouts are also not downtime, it just means you can't repeat the same raid again this week. For most people who don't play 20-30+ hours a week that's not an issue. For hardcore players, there are mythic raids which will take you much longer than LFR.
There is a huge difference between downtime in games like EQ where you just WAIT and as you put it workers in starcraft collecting resoureces. In Starcraft you don't have a single minute of downtime when you are not active. Hell, you don't even have 10 sec where you are inactive. Right from the start you are bombarded with managing your economy, scouting and deciding what your strategy will be for the game. Rushes happen often and crazy aggressive play has to be dealt with right from the start. As soon as the game progresses past the very early stage (the one you describe as workers collecting resources) you have to keep track of a billion things which are broadly categorised as macro and micro management and decision making. Basically your comparison to games like SC is ridiculous as those games have no downtime. You are constantly doing something. Whereas in EQ there is no reason behind the downtime other than slow down your progress and make you play longer so you pay the sub. The upside was that people socialised as it was so mindnumbingly boring to have to wait not doing anything.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
TY for the double standard rule book..
I'd say the opinion of whether raid lockouts can be considered downtime or not, is subjective. But waiting for a queue is irrelevant. Blizzard doesn't make it that way on purpose; if they had their way, no player would wait more than 30 seconds in a queue.
That's in no way the same thing as mechanically forcing downtime into gameplay activities.
And downtime is selective and subjective.. People love to yell and scream that EQ's combat had downtime.. Really? Tell that to the my groups puller and tank and other supporting DPS.. It all depends on the role you played.. If you were the puller, tank or melee dps, there was NO downtime at all.. The groups I was in, our puller (often monk) would be active non-stop.. Our tank never got a rest from one mob to the next.. Same said with many other classes.. Bards were the most active class I have seen.. There was no downtime twisting songs..
The only people that had any downtimes are those classes where "meditating" was required, and that a lot of times depended on supporting members and buffs.. I had very little med time when in a group with a chanter and bard.. Mana wasn't an issue, unless things went south.. So people taking hearsay or one bad group event and applying it to the game across the board is just bad and wrong.. I cant' count many more times of non-stop action, vs downtime..
But Blizzard does like those queue times.. There are ways to cure that problem, and Blizzard has NO INTENTION of addressing it.. Just like ALL these years it took them to add in "LFR".. and "lockouts" still exist.. Blizzard wants downtimes and time sinks until it cost them more accounts then it's worth.. Everything revolves around $$$$$$$
Lol you got this from Lineage 2 where 3,4 groups where coliding on each other to camp mobs and it turned out to be a half day pvp session. I see your wishes
WoW turned this in battlegrounds and rest tryed to copy wow and the whole industry of mmos colided
I'm sure games could find a godlen way to implement this, maybe upcoming games will do it
Queues are finding a group, not downtime. So if you want to bring queues into the conversation, you'd have to bring up how much slower it was to find a group in a chat channel, and then move to a location manually, than to find a group in literally the fastest possible way (queue) and magically teleport directly to where you need to be, which additionally means you're free to do whatever you want until the queue pops.
So queues are much better than what existed in older MMORPGs, even if we agree that WOW's content could be better at dynamically adjusting how many of each role is necessary so that queue times are faster for everyone (although to some degree that's self-selection: I tank or heal largely because DPS queues are long. If DPS queues were shorter, more players would DPS, which would drive DPS queues back up.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That is one old game design that should never return. Sitting around for hours waiting for a boss and/or killing the exact same things because there are few other options.
EQ was the first MMO to have elitist jerks dare to say that they own an area because they were there first and having a zone chat filled with angst and yelling over it.
So glad those days are over. Actually I am happy EQ did have that because it drove me to Asherons Call, a far better game.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Nah, there is no gameplay when in queue; literally all you do is wait doing nothing but check your phone, take a piss, change the laundry over etc. Waiting doing fuck all is downtime regardless of what you were told in class.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
"all you do is wait doing nothing" *proceeds to list a bunch of things that is expressly not doing nothing*
Thanks for the laugh.
So if you choose to do nothing while waiting for the Queue that is all you.
Before i had no choice except to sit and wait. The wait was often shorter ina group but there was still plenty of times when the healer was out of mana. When soloing I could not fight because my health or mana or both were too low so i had to sit and wait.