To the OP you are obviously an experienced MMO'er, why are you still playing the Fisher Price version of Everquest?
This is a valid point that gets bought up often when I lurk WoW's forums. Sometimes the only tangible feedback is the one an MMO comapny can't ignore: hits to the pocketbook.
I can't say I know enough specifically of what the OP's talking about. I bought WoW when it first came out expecting it to be more like Warcraft. At the time, I didn't have a lot of MMO experience. I cancelled after about level 25 or so and came back to try Battlegrounds.
All I can say is... eh. Frustrations like what WoW and SWGers go through is why I left MMOs. I don't have time and patience for being jerked around in a video game and it's more and more apparent others aren't either.
WoW wouldn't have sold so much if it wasn't part of Blizzard's Warcraft franchise.
EDIT: I confused "playing" with "paying" in the quote. My bad. I fail at reading.
blizzard died when some of their team broke of and created the greatest company known to man
When I did play GW that was awesome. PvP was challenging enough without infringing on those that were PvErts. It started getting stupid when everyone started arguing to have the game "thier way". But in the beginning it was golden.
Well,it's a start. WOW is heavily oriented around PvE play anyway.
That tower thing in EPL sounds pretty good,especially if both sides actually make the most of it and start having wars over them. PvP in WOW on a decent scale can exist; one time on my server a massive (yet laggy) war between Alliance & Horde occurred in Silthius,all organised on the realm forums and everything.
The Alliance camped Gadgetzan long before it started,so it started out mostly the Horde flocking in to being ganked en masse,but eventually the Horde turned the tables and then the chaos began.
Eventually it spread to spontaneous raids on capital cities,populated towns (The Crossroads,etc) and all had a great time.
Now,if people take this event's knowledge and apply it to the new towers,no matter how 'worthless' they are,a small spark of hope of PvP will be ignited. And then the Blizzard devs will take that and maybe add MORE outdoor PvP events. Eventually they may achieve something good PvP-wise.
So perhaps you should contribute a little to these seemingly 'pathetic' additions,and maybe they'll flourish into something more. Just my 2 cents. From a 1 year+ WOW player who retired before 1.11,but knows to what extent PvP must be generated in the WOW world.
Originally posted by Suitepee Well,it's a start. WOW is heavily oriented around PvE play anyway. That tower thing in EPL sounds pretty good,especially if both sides actually make the most of it and start having wars over them. PvP in WOW on a decent scale can exist; one time on my server a massive (yet laggy) war between Alliance & Horde occurred in Silthius,all organised on the realm forums and everything. The Alliance camped Gadgetzan long before it started,so it started out mostly the Horde flocking in to being ganked en masse,but eventually the Horde turned the tables and then the chaos began. Eventually it spread to spontaneous raids on capital cities,populated towns (The Crossroads,etc) and all had a great time. Now,if people take this event's knowledge and apply it to the new towers,no matter how 'worthless' they are,a small spark of hope of PvP will be ignited. And then the Blizzard devs will take that and maybe add MORE outdoor PvP events. Eventually they may achieve something good PvP-wise. So perhaps you should contribute a little to these seemingly 'pathetic' additions,and maybe they'll flourish into something more. Just my 2 cents. From a 1 year+ WOW player who retired before 1.11,but knows to what extent PvP must be generated in the WOW world.
I'm (or better was) an avid pvp'er in wow. also tried the towers in epl (on the PTR).. it was fun at first, but with the incoming alliance zerg it became a bit annoying. after some time it felt like an never ending arathi basin - standing in front of a tower guarding a flag (as if there not already enough flags in wow ), even attacking became boring. so I logged off. on the live-servers ppl will try it, have some fun with it and go straight back into the BG's to farm honor.
blizzard effectively killed world-pvp a long time ago. DK's and the honor-system keeps the ppl in the BGs, and even if DKs are removed - world-pvp doesn't yield as much honor as a bg-match. maybe the old ss/tm would revive it a bit, but since this will never happen again (it's against their "design philosophy") world-pvp is officially dead. but hey, it will be fixed in the expansion ! preorder now !
PS: look what they did to alterac. ppl were too dumb to work together or even listen to someone with knowledge, so games lasted hours - got changed, now it's a stupid race. wow will only evolve when blizzard stops to cater the dumbest carebears
EDIT: don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with ppl that prefer pve, but even there is a line. I just can't stand dumb ppl (which I met a lot in wow and alterac especially).
Originally posted by Rekindle no offense if you want risk and reward and fun in PvP you're not going to get it from a game is so carebear like WoW.
Thats because the game is devoid of any risk what-so-ever. Whats the worst possible case scenario upon death? There's a graveyard within 20 seconds of every instance, and many cases the mobs either do not repop inside, or do so on a very long timer. Sure you'll lose a few gold on repair bills, but let's be honest....what else is gold for in that game? If your in the end game raiding, your not spending money on upgrades. My Co-Leader of our guild had around 7000 gold when we quit from crafting Lionheart Helmets. There was nothing to spend it on except for the occasional enchant, a few mana pots, and repairs. All reward and no risk practically, which means that the reward part is diminished by the fact everyone wins all the time. Its the same as a little league baseball series where thy give trophy's to every team regardless of place. You got rewarded, but the value of that reward is less when you know everyone else is getting it to with no risk at all.
World of Warcraft is developed by people who are former EQ players, have an obsession with 40 man end game content, and have no interest in pvp whatsoever. Hence, WoW will always be a pve game with a pvp sideshow. Upon coming to this painful realization, I canceled my account. Don't expect them to incorporate true world pvp, don't expect them to incorporate risk, death penalties, or flowing fronts. Its simply not on their agenda. And though thousands of people are canceling their accounts as we speak, its a drop in the bucket amongst the millions of people who could care less for world pvp themselves. End conclusion: find another game.
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign." -baff
They were saying there would be all sorts of fixes from 1.12 but all that is happening is cross-server BG's. This pisses people off and makes their "The expansion will fix everything" meme even more ridiculous.
The silithus pvp is so amazingly and mindbogglingly wrong. The thrust of the ideas behind are almost completely the opposite of what they shoud be. This basically confirms what people already had a sneaking suspicion/sinking feeling about, namely that they don't know what they are doing. They can no longer make excuses or tell themselves Blizzard makes quality stuff but it takes time. Well its been more than a year and you got what 95% of the WoW's population seems to think is half-assed crap.
So yes it is a blunder because it tips their hand. They shovel out so much hype and many people are happy to lap it up. But 1.12 is so completely and obviously bad and lacking in what they promised that it actually seriously erodes their PR strategy. For those that care 1.12 put things into a starker picture. Its an answer to their questions and the answer is "You are screwed and now you know it". They used to suspect it, but now they know it.
And Tseric's response to "sandlol" was "banlol". No, I'm not kidding. That was the proverbial final straw for me. So my response to that brief exchange was "cancelol gfy". Its been a long time coming...
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign." -baff
Originally posted by Theodoryk And Tseric's response to "sandlol" was "banlol". No, I'm not kidding. That was the proverbial final straw for me. So my response to that brief exchange was "cancelol gfy". Its been a long time coming...
Yea, I saw that. I think that Blizzard employees have a hard time dealing with criticism. They were under the impression that people were so desperate for world pvp that they would lap everything that was thrown at them. This, however, was not the case.
People openly ridiculed Blizzard for their latest blunder and rightfuly so. A lot of people waited for the return of world pvp, me included. Hell, for a lot of people the promise of the return of world pvp was the only thing that kept them going. I, for example, loved the SS/TM zerg fest. In my opinion, it was one of the best things in WoW when the honor system was in it's infancy and there were no dishonor points. It was like a true battleground, not this instanced capture the flag bullshit. Armies lined up, attacked, were pushed back and came back for more. That was what I envisioned when I first heard of World of Warcraft all those years ago. Although, I thought that we would be able to capture and hold towns, which sadly is not the case.
Sure, there were downsides to town raids. Server lag (caused by crapy server hardware), the quest givers were killed because they attacked every red name in sight. However, all of this could've easily be fixed with decent hardware and passive, non-attackable quest givers. What did Blizzard do? They added dishonor points for killing civillians (aka quest givers). That particular blunder has effectively ruined world pvp for pretty much everyone because a trigger happy AoE'er would give every one in the group dishonor points and as such hindering their advancement in the honor system. Not to mention that the quest givers still attacked everything in sight! In other words, you couldn't even defend yourself because you'd get a dishonor point.
Hense why a lot of us patiently waited this patch and world PvP thinking that it would bring back town raids and put the war back in Warcraft. What we got was a slap in the face.
So yea, I guess "cancellol" is the only viable option at this point.
PS: I'm not even going to get into the rogue review, eventhough my main is a rogue.
I think you've summarised the issue very nicely Heartless, well done. I still can't comprehend why they didn't just make the civilian npcs passive, and have done with. The only reason I can come up with is that it was their intention from the very beginning to kill world pvp. Which is.....completely out of tune with what their paying customers wanted, to put it lightly.
Blizzard nerfs fun, its a statement which was written over a year ago on the WoW forums, and it holds true today. It sometimes seems that the dev team is removing or nerfing anything in the game which is unique, fun, or potentially risky. I mean come on, they even removed riding goggles from the game. They removed the riding goggles, but left the carrot on a stick? Its like, "Are you mocking me?"
Regarding the Rogue review, I feel your pain. I've had a Rogue sub at 60 for several months now, and had a front row seat for the slow and painful downfall of that class. Remember when Rogues were still viable in group pvp? Yah, good times.
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign." -baff
Originally posted by heartless ...because a trigger happy AoE'er would give every one in the group dishonor points and as such hindering their advancement in the honor system. Not to mention that the quest givers still attacked everything in sight! In other words, you couldn't even defend yourself because you'd get a dishonor point.
I still rub my head when I think about things like this, what the hell was going though their heads when they came up with this?!
Yeah, it amazes me how much they've managed to mangle PVP, even though just random PVP with the pre-honor rules was pretty fun.
For some serious world PVP, I'd make a new server type. Completely remove all of the raids (everything above UBRS), and completely remove DKs. Either remove BGs entirely, moving the BG rep gear to a a static honor point targets, or just massively reduce the honor points from BGs, and maybe increase rep gains. Let anyone transfer in, but no raid gear allowed (transfer could let you swap raid gear down to dungeon gear if). I'd actually resubscribe to WOW at lest for a while if they made a server type along those lines, though obviously it's not going to happen.
Originally posted by heartless Originally posted by Theodoryk And Tseric's response to "sandlol" was "banlol". No, I'm not kidding. That was the proverbial final straw for me. So my response to that brief exchange was "cancelol gfy". Its been a long time coming...
Yea, I saw that. I think that Blizzard employees have a hard time dealing with criticism. They were under the impression that people were so desperate for world pvp that they would lap everything that was thrown at them. This, however, was not the case.
People openly ridiculed Blizzard for their latest blunder and rightfuly so. A lot of people waited for the return of world pvp, me included. Hell, for a lot of people the promise of the return of world pvp was the only thing that kept them going. I, for example, loved the SS/TM zerg fest. In my opinion, it was one of the best things in WoW when the honor system was in it's infancy and there were no dishonor points. It was like a true battleground, not this instanced capture the flag bullshit. Armies lined up, attacked, were pushed back and came back for more. That was what I envisioned when I first heard of World of Warcraft all those years ago. Although, I thought that we would be able to capture and hold towns, which sadly is not the case.
Sure, there were downsides to town raids. Server lag (caused by crapy server hardware), the quest givers were killed because they attacked every red name in sight. However, all of this could've easily be fixed with decent hardware and passive, non-attackable quest givers. What did Blizzard do? They added dishonor points for killing civillians (aka quest givers). That particular blunder has effectively ruined world pvp for pretty much everyone because a trigger happy AoE'er would give every one in the group dishonor points and as such hindering their advancement in the honor system. Not to mention that the quest givers still attacked everything in sight! In other words, you couldn't even defend yourself because you'd get a dishonor point.
Hense why a lot of us patiently waited this patch and world PvP thinking that it would bring back town raids and put the war back in Warcraft. What we got was a slap in the face.
So yea, I guess "cancellol" is the only viable option at this point.
PS: I'm not even going to get into the rogue review, eventhough my main is a rogue.
Great post agree 100%.
------------------------------ You see, every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You spread to an area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.-Mr.Smith
Originally posted by Pantastic Yeah, it amazes me how much they've managed to mangle PVP, even though just random PVP with the pre-honor rules was pretty fun. For some serious world PVP, I'd make a new server type. Completely remove all of the raids (everything above UBRS), and completely remove DKs. Either remove BGs entirely, moving the BG rep gear to a a static honor point targets, or just massively reduce the honor points from BGs, and maybe increase rep gains. Let anyone transfer in, but no raid gear allowed (transfer could let you swap raid gear down to dungeon gear if). I'd actually resubscribe to WOW at lest for a while if they made a server type along those lines, though obviously it's not going to happen.
Many people would like a server like this. I truly beilieve Blizzard won't do it becauce it would be admitting that that they were wrong. A server like this would essentially take out 90% of the additions since release. Basically only DM and mauradon would stay.
If these servers became popular how would that reflect on Blizzard's ability to add to their own game? Imagine 30-40% of their populace dislike 90% of their new content to such an extent that they not only do not do it but actually reroll on a new server type to escape it. That would be utterly damning.
Originally posted by paranoidpvp blizzard died when some of their team broke of and created the greatest company known to man
Haha paranoid, this is exactly what I was going to say...
It's obvious that all the talented WoW designers were the ones that left and went to work on GW.
No they left and went to like 6 different companies, God and Heroes has Steig Hedlund as lead design, Hellgate: london is most of the old Blizzard North team, Red 5 studios etc.
The ArenaNet guys left pretty early into WoW. Yeah they worked on it, but ANet formed in 2000. So by release they had been gone a while.
It's a shame they would rather censor and ban their paying customers who have clearly told them what they want, then admit the entire idea is a train wreck in the making. They really should just drop the entire thing and start over. I mean it would probably only take about 5 minutes to think up a better idea
Originally posted by Paragus1 It's a shame they would rather censor and ban their paying customers who have clearly told them what they want, then admit the entire idea is a train wreck in the making. They really should just drop the entire thing and start over. I mean it would probably only take about 5 minutes to think up a better idea
Honestly, I have no faith in their creative abilities whatsoever. They took an awesome game concept with limitless potential and turned it into crash-landed smurf space marines from another dimension killing each other over sand. A first grader could probably come up with something more interesting and appropriate.
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign." -baff
Honestly, I have no faith in their creative abilities whatsoever. They took an awesome game concept with limitless potential and turned it into crash-landed smurf space marines from another dimension killing each other over sand. A first grader could probably come up with something more interesting and appropriate.
so true. after reading gestalt11's post about kaplan and how he became lead designer (I knew parts of it before, he just summed it up very good, kudos), it came to my mind: these ppl are not dumb or stupid - they're just clueless. there are ppl who are able to create a fun game and keep it fun, some ppl don't. looking back the 2 years there was almost NOTHING creative or "new". only regurged content and gameplay. after I found this, it became even clearer. seems like they started on the expansion right after release to milk more money ouf of the players.
btw, I'm curious if the expansion will be released this year. they promised so many fixes in it which they try to implement (sandlol v2), it will propably never be finished. especially after it became obvious that ppl don't just want a higher lvlcap with 5 raiddungeons to start farming again. If the expansion isn't exactly what they told (stupid mistake, telling almost nothing so ppl start dreaming and are dissapointed later) it will crash & burn.
Honestly, I have no faith in their creative abilities whatsoever. They took an awesome game concept with limitless potential and turned it into crash-landed smurf space marines from another dimension killing each other over sand. A first grader could probably come up with something more interesting and appropriate.
so true. after reading gestalt11's post about kaplan and how he became lead designer (I knew parts of it before, he just summed it up very good, kudos), it came to my mind: these ppl are not dumb or stupid - they're just clueless. there are ppl who are able to create a fun game and keep it fun, some ppl don't. looking back the 2 years there was almost NOTHING creative or "new". only regurged content and gameplay. after I found this, it became even clearer. seems like they started on the expansion right after release to milk more money ouf of the players.
btw, I'm curious if the expansion will be released this year. they promised so many fixes in it which they try to implement (sandlol v2), it will propably never be finished. especially after it became obvious that ppl don't just want a higher lvlcap with 5 raiddungeons to start farming again. If the expansion isn't exactly what they told (stupid mistake, telling almost nothing so ppl start dreaming and are dissapointed later) it will crash & burn.
When I got tired of WoW back in december of 05 (partly because of the Honor Grind, partly because I was tired of being shat for trying to gear my druid the way I wanted, and mostly because I had no interest in raiding) I jsut stopped playing and started to try out Guild Wars. Guild Wars is a very intersting and very very well designed class system. As a computer programmer I very much admire how they used an few elegant mechanics to to make their skill/class system incredible versatile and almost infinitly variable.
The excellence of the Guild Wars class system is not immediately apparent. It takes alot of time to realize the intricacies. This is often the case of an elegantly designed system. By elegant I mean the computer science sense: something that is simple yet powerful.
As I researched and considered the Guild Wars system I began to think about the WoW system. Comparing them there are some obvious differences and the WoW classes fall short in many ways. However that sort of thing didn't really bother me as there good points and bad points to each design and I understand and can guess at many of the decisions and reason why WoW chose the model they did. I would have gone a different way, but out of personal preference not because I think they made the wrong decisions.
When I first started playing WoW, in March of 05, I looked into it with a critical and jaded eye. I played MUD's for years and knew many of the pit falls games like this fall into. I was also aware of the whole raiding scene in Everquest and how tied in it was with the powergaming trends of online games. So before getting into I made sure that it seemed like the designers were commited and able to keeping the various parts of the game balanced and reasonable. Unlike some I understand balance is about not falling down and not actually about standing rigidly straight with both hands at exactly the same level. Therefore most class tweaks did not really bother me. Also from MUDs I was very used to various classes not being exactly what you might wish. I would have preferred if there were no raids in WoW at all or that they give exactly the same rewards as other dungeons. However I understood they were trying to balance many things and Moten Core was not ridiculously better(at least for most things), although it was clearly better.
In the beginning it seemed like most anything that seemed like trouble was kept within reasonable bounds. Maybe one class had some nice stuff in one regard or had somewhat of an advantage or raiding was better than other things. But most stuff was in striking distance in some way. Something were better or advantagous but most things were not out of hand. It seemed like things had been designed to not be out of whack and they were making careful efforts to not be out of whack.
Come back to January after thinking about GW and WoW comparing and contrasting them. Seeing some actually well done innovation rather than just a copy of a copy of DIKU MUDs. Thinking about the patches and the trends. AQ was out and now raiding was not only getting clearly out of whack with the rest of the game and affecting the rest of the game, but they were already planning on another huge raid. The honor system was an awful grind that had obvious and far reaching effects of PvP gameplay. Things players had predicted from teh start. The game was no longer balanced it was obviously off kilter. Off kilter in such a way that every aspect of the game was affected by it. No more World PvP, low BG's flooded with twinks, high BG's nothing but a farm fest, people being told to do just one spec in 5-man's because that is what raiders do, guilds deteriorating that would have otherwise stayed together, and on and on.
I know enough about online games to know that no matter what you only so much input. You do have some some. I and a few others managed to convince a class dev on my old MUD that his design for the class was somewhat lacking in certain areas and that some of his balancing penalties were heavier than he had anticipated, but that took over a year and he certainly didn't see things exactly my way in the end. And on other classes stuff and other aspects of the game I certainly disagreed and always did. So I know that what you have in a game is what you have and even if you know and can prove the Devs are wrong that means squat. You simply can't expect things in an online game to suddenly change in fact the sensibilites and design trends of designers tend to be extremely static.
It was clear that the trend was raid after raid, grind after grind, and increasingly meaningless(dare I say even carebear, although i hate terms like that) pvp. So I canceled, because I knew from previous experience that the way things are going is what is imporant. Even if its obvious to 80% of people that something is dumb, the direction the Devs take indicates what they think is correct. And they will do what they think is correct. I knew that the direction they were taking was fundamently against what I wanted.
But I was still unsettled. It didn't seem to follow. I was pretty sure I was not that far off on my initial thoughts. I wasn't all that bitter like some people. I had made my piece with leaving characters and online games a number of years before. I often would feel the urge to go back, but eventually I learned you can never really go back, just like anything in life.
The thing that got me wasn't the details of how WoW had changed over that year. The itemization trends, class changes those all followed similar patterns. Its was the larger more general trends. PvP is WoW was obvously never meant to be cutthroat but it was meant to be somewhat carebear without being complete crap. Yet its moving towards the extreme of carebearness. Everything in WoW initially seemed to be designed with the idea of "Moderation in all things, with many things to do" and this a very good paradigm. Yet they were moving more away from this. Or at least they were allowing certain aspects of the game to be exempt from that idea and thereby removing the idea entirely from the rest of the game.
So I trolled some forums and did some research. After finding out just who and how many left and just who is lead design now it began to make some sembelance of sense. Whoever was responsible for steering the ship was steering in a somewhat different direction. And although, like a large ship, an MMO takes a long time for course corrections to take effect, the effects of a course correction are not as simple or linear as a ships course. The person(s) who was effecting this was not really wise enough to understand just how these course corrections were affecting the game and they were most likely also not concerned or perhaps did not evebn understand the implication of certain aspects (namely PvP mentaities). Not only were they not wise enough, and this is wisdom not intellect, but from what I found out it seemed more than likely that almost all the people who did not really agree with this new course had pretty much just left. So not only was there a not so wise person(s) at the helm, but you have no one with any real input actually capable of understanding or explaining a number things to that person(s).
I don't know if this is Kaplan or not. He is Lead Design and therefore he is responsible, but Rob Pardo and Kaplan were old EQ guildmates and Kaplan succeeded Pardo as Guild leader. One is VP of design and one is Lead Design (promoted when Stieg Hedlund left), I doubt that is coincidence. However they also aren't drooling morons. Pardo has a long history of game design at a very successful company, Kaplan well he has very little experience but he does have a Master degree in Creative Writing. Now I havea Master's degree myself and so I'm not gonna say OMGozrs he r smart, but he's should at least be moderatly intelligent. It is probably true that no matter what given Kaplan's past he would always emphasize raiding and PvE over everything else especially PvP, but that doesn't mean that completely clueless crap like Silithus would get released. In any company there are various people of influences who opinions matter. Kaplan is Lead Design, he steers the ship, he can nix or put in what ever he wants, he determines tasking. But I doubt he is such a raving moron that if the PvP Lead strongly advised something he wouldn't at lest make some concessions towards it. He may not give them enough time or support to do it well or whatever. The Silthithus stuff is so offbase that is should be clear that, even if Kaplan is a complete purple pride loot whore uber raider, there is also no one else with significant influence, someone who opinon matters, who is taken Seriously (with a capital S) that understand these things either. That in short they, as an organization, are clueless when it come to this. Those that had a clue are gone. When you consider that many of the things that required a clue all started to change at the same time and that this happened within about a year of Kaplan becoming Lead Deisgn and many many Blizzard employees leaving the two seem rather significant.
I don't know what happened, but something did happen and its had far reaching effects that have taken a while to come to full fruition. It may have even been incremental. Maybe it started with the Anet guys leaving just because they wanted to control their own destiny, then maybe Blizz North left because of Vivendi problems, and then maybe Steig Hedlund got tired of the "Raid or Quit" lobby of Kaplan, Furor, Pardo and said screw this everyone else is leaving so am I and the the Red 5 guys left as well. I don't know I am just making stuff up. My point is that something like that seems to have occured, one regime was supplanted by another. It either just faded away or was overthrown but that is what seems to have happened. And like an regime change it takes a while to change or convert all the various department heads in the beauracracy and chagne all the paper work and all the other little details.
Comments
I can't say I know enough specifically of what the OP's talking about. I bought WoW when it first came out expecting it to be more like Warcraft. At the time, I didn't have a lot of MMO experience. I cancelled after about level 25 or so and came back to try Battlegrounds.
All I can say is... eh. Frustrations like what WoW and SWGers go through is why I left MMOs. I don't have time and patience for being jerked around in a video game and it's more and more apparent others aren't either.
WoW wouldn't have sold so much if it wasn't part of Blizzard's Warcraft franchise.
EDIT: I confused "playing" with "paying" in the quote. My bad. I fail at reading.
Guild Wars is still an MMO.
Guild Wars is still an MMO.
Well,it's a start. WOW is heavily oriented around PvE play anyway.
That tower thing in EPL sounds pretty good,especially if both sides actually make the most of it and start having wars over them. PvP in WOW on a decent scale can exist; one time on my server a massive (yet laggy) war between Alliance & Horde occurred in Silthius,all organised on the realm forums and everything.
The Alliance camped Gadgetzan long before it started,so it started out mostly the Horde flocking in to being ganked en masse,but eventually the Horde turned the tables and then the chaos began.
Eventually it spread to spontaneous raids on capital cities,populated towns (The Crossroads,etc) and all had a great time.
Now,if people take this event's knowledge and apply it to the new towers,no matter how 'worthless' they are,a small spark of hope of PvP will be ignited. And then the Blizzard devs will take that and maybe add MORE outdoor PvP events. Eventually they may achieve something good PvP-wise.
So perhaps you should contribute a little to these seemingly 'pathetic' additions,and maybe they'll flourish into something more. Just my 2 cents. From a 1 year+ WOW player who retired before 1.11,but knows to what extent PvP must be generated in the WOW world.
I'm (or better was) an avid pvp'er in wow. also tried the towers in epl (on the PTR).. it was fun at first, but with the incoming alliance zerg it became a bit annoying. after some time it felt like an never ending arathi basin - standing in front of a tower guarding a flag (as if there not already enough flags in wow
on the live-servers ppl will try it, have some fun with it and go straight back into the BG's to farm honor.
blizzard effectively killed world-pvp a long time ago. DK's and the honor-system keeps the ppl in the BGs, and even if DKs are removed - world-pvp doesn't yield as much honor as a bg-match. maybe the old ss/tm would revive it a bit, but since this will never happen again (it's against their "design philosophy") world-pvp is officially dead.
but hey, it will be fixed in the expansion ! preorder now !
PS: look what they did to alterac. ppl were too dumb to work together or even listen to someone with knowledge, so games lasted hours - got changed, now it's a stupid race. wow will only evolve when blizzard stops to cater the dumbest carebears
EDIT: don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with ppl that prefer pve, but even there is a line. I just can't stand dumb ppl (which I met a lot in wow and alterac especially).
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Unfortunately finding a better game than wow is more difficult than one would think, I have tried countless games to no avail.
Anyway I guess I will keep trying to find a new game to get into, the search continues... dun dun dun...
Peace out
On the moon, nerds have their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks!
Which ones have you tried?
World of Warcraft is developed by people who are former EQ players, have an obsession with 40 man end game content, and have no interest in pvp whatsoever. Hence, WoW will always be a pve game with a pvp sideshow. Upon coming to this painful realization, I canceled my account. Don't expect them to incorporate true world pvp, don't expect them to incorporate risk, death penalties, or flowing fronts. Its simply not on their agenda. And though thousands of people are canceling their accounts as we speak, its a drop in the bucket amongst the millions of people who could care less for world pvp themselves. End conclusion: find another game.
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign."
-baff
They were saying there would be all sorts of fixes from 1.12 but all that is happening is cross-server BG's. This pisses people off and makes their "The expansion will fix everything" meme even more ridiculous.
The silithus pvp is so amazingly and mindbogglingly wrong. The thrust of the ideas behind are almost completely the opposite of what they shoud be. This basically confirms what people already had a sneaking suspicion/sinking feeling about, namely that they don't know what they are doing. They can no longer make excuses or tell themselves Blizzard makes quality stuff but it takes time. Well its been more than a year and you got what 95% of the WoW's population seems to think is half-assed crap.
So yes it is a blunder because it tips their hand. They shovel out so much hype and many people are happy to lap it up. But 1.12 is so completely and obviously bad and lacking in what they promised that it actually seriously erodes their PR strategy. For those that care 1.12 put things into a starker picture. Its an answer to their questions and the answer is "You are screwed and now you know it". They used to suspect it, but now they know it.
sandlol
I think that summarizes my thoughts on the next patch pretty well.
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign."
-baff
Yea, I saw that. I think that Blizzard employees have a hard time dealing with criticism. They were under the impression that people were so desperate for world pvp that they would lap everything that was thrown at them. This, however, was not the case.
People openly ridiculed Blizzard for their latest blunder and rightfuly so. A lot of people waited for the return of world pvp, me included. Hell, for a lot of people the promise of the return of world pvp was the only thing that kept them going. I, for example, loved the SS/TM zerg fest. In my opinion, it was one of the best things in WoW when the honor system was in it's infancy and there were no dishonor points. It was like a true battleground, not this instanced capture the flag bullshit. Armies lined up, attacked, were pushed back and came back for more. That was what I envisioned when I first heard of World of Warcraft all those years ago. Although, I thought that we would be able to capture and hold towns, which sadly is not the case.
Sure, there were downsides to town raids. Server lag (caused by crapy server hardware), the quest givers were killed because they attacked every red name in sight. However, all of this could've easily be fixed with decent hardware and passive, non-attackable quest givers. What did Blizzard do? They added dishonor points for killing civillians (aka quest givers). That particular blunder has effectively ruined world pvp for pretty much everyone because a trigger happy AoE'er would give every one in the group dishonor points and as such hindering their advancement in the honor system. Not to mention that the quest givers still attacked everything in sight! In other words, you couldn't even defend yourself because you'd get a dishonor point.
Hense why a lot of us patiently waited this patch and world PvP thinking that it would bring back town raids and put the war back in Warcraft. What we got was a slap in the face.
So yea, I guess "cancellol" is the only viable option at this point.
PS: I'm not even going to get into the rogue review, eventhough my main is a rogue.
I think you've summarised the issue very nicely Heartless, well done. I still can't comprehend why they didn't just make the civilian npcs passive, and have done with. The only reason I can come up with is that it was their intention from the very beginning to kill world pvp. Which is.....completely out of tune with what their paying customers wanted, to put it lightly.
Blizzard nerfs fun, its a statement which was written over a year ago on the WoW forums, and it holds true today. It sometimes seems that the dev team is removing or nerfing anything in the game which is unique, fun, or potentially risky. I mean come on, they even removed riding goggles from the game. They removed the riding goggles, but left the carrot on a stick? Its like, "Are you mocking me?"
Regarding the Rogue review, I feel your pain. I've had a Rogue sub at 60 for several months now, and had a front row seat for the slow and painful downfall of that class. Remember when Rogues were still viable in group pvp? Yah, good times.
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign."
-baff
Yeah, it amazes me how much they've managed to mangle PVP, even though just random PVP with the pre-honor rules was pretty fun.
For some serious world PVP, I'd make a new server type. Completely remove all of the raids (everything above UBRS), and completely remove DKs. Either remove BGs entirely, moving the BG rep gear to a a static honor point targets, or just massively reduce the honor points from BGs, and maybe increase rep gains. Let anyone transfer in, but no raid gear allowed (transfer could let you swap raid gear down to dungeon gear if). I'd actually resubscribe to WOW at lest for a while if they made a server type along those lines, though obviously it's not going to happen.
Yea, I saw that. I think that Blizzard employees have a hard time dealing with criticism. They were under the impression that people were so desperate for world pvp that they would lap everything that was thrown at them. This, however, was not the case.
People openly ridiculed Blizzard for their latest blunder and rightfuly so. A lot of people waited for the return of world pvp, me included. Hell, for a lot of people the promise of the return of world pvp was the only thing that kept them going. I, for example, loved the SS/TM zerg fest. In my opinion, it was one of the best things in WoW when the honor system was in it's infancy and there were no dishonor points. It was like a true battleground, not this instanced capture the flag bullshit. Armies lined up, attacked, were pushed back and came back for more. That was what I envisioned when I first heard of World of Warcraft all those years ago. Although, I thought that we would be able to capture and hold towns, which sadly is not the case.
Sure, there were downsides to town raids. Server lag (caused by crapy server hardware), the quest givers were killed because they attacked every red name in sight. However, all of this could've easily be fixed with decent hardware and passive, non-attackable quest givers. What did Blizzard do? They added dishonor points for killing civillians (aka quest givers). That particular blunder has effectively ruined world pvp for pretty much everyone because a trigger happy AoE'er would give every one in the group dishonor points and as such hindering their advancement in the honor system. Not to mention that the quest givers still attacked everything in sight! In other words, you couldn't even defend yourself because you'd get a dishonor point.
Hense why a lot of us patiently waited this patch and world PvP thinking that it would bring back town raids and put the war back in Warcraft. What we got was a slap in the face.
So yea, I guess "cancellol" is the only viable option at this point.
PS: I'm not even going to get into the rogue review, eventhough my main is a rogue.
Great post agree 100%.
------------------------------
You see, every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You spread to an area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.-Mr.Smith
Haha paranoid, this is exactly what I was going to say...
It's obvious that all the talented WoW designers were the ones that left and went to work on GW.
If these servers became popular how would that reflect on Blizzard's ability to add to their own game? Imagine 30-40% of their populace dislike 90% of their new content to such an extent that they not only do not do it but actually reroll on a new server type to escape it. That would be utterly damning.
Haha paranoid, this is exactly what I was going to say...
It's obvious that all the talented WoW designers were the ones that left and went to work on GW.
No they left and went to like 6 different companies, God and Heroes has Steig Hedlund as lead design, Hellgate: london is most of the old Blizzard North team, Red 5 studios etc.
The ArenaNet guys left pretty early into WoW. Yeah they worked on it, but ANet formed in 2000. So by release they had been gone a while.
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"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign."
-baff
so true. after reading gestalt11's post about kaplan and how he became lead designer (I knew parts of it before, he just summed it up very good, kudos), it came to my mind: these ppl are not dumb or stupid - they're just clueless. there are ppl who are able to create a fun game and keep it fun, some ppl don't. looking back the 2 years there was almost NOTHING creative or "new". only regurged content and gameplay. after I found this, it became even clearer. seems like they started on the expansion right after release to milk more money ouf of the players.
btw, I'm curious if the expansion will be released this year. they promised so many fixes in it which they try to implement (sandlol v2), it will propably never be finished. especially after it became obvious that ppl don't just want a higher lvlcap with 5 raiddungeons to start farming again.
If the expansion isn't exactly what they told (stupid mistake, telling almost nothing so ppl start dreaming and are dissapointed later) it will crash & burn.
so true. after reading gestalt11's post about kaplan and how he became lead designer (I knew parts of it before, he just summed it up very good, kudos), it came to my mind: these ppl are not dumb or stupid - they're just clueless. there are ppl who are able to create a fun game and keep it fun, some ppl don't. looking back the 2 years there was almost NOTHING creative or "new". only regurged content and gameplay. after I found this, it became even clearer. seems like they started on the expansion right after release to milk more money ouf of the players.
btw, I'm curious if the expansion will be released this year. they promised so many fixes in it which they try to implement (sandlol v2), it will propably never be finished. especially after it became obvious that ppl don't just want a higher lvlcap with 5 raiddungeons to start farming again.
If the expansion isn't exactly what they told (stupid mistake, telling almost nothing so ppl start dreaming and are dissapointed later) it will crash & burn.
When I got tired of WoW back in december of 05 (partly because of the Honor Grind, partly because I was tired of being shat for trying to gear my druid the way I wanted, and mostly because I had no interest in raiding) I jsut stopped playing and started to try out Guild Wars. Guild Wars is a very intersting and very very well designed class system. As a computer programmer I very much admire how they used an few elegant mechanics to to make their skill/class system incredible versatile and almost infinitly variable.
The excellence of the Guild Wars class system is not immediately apparent. It takes alot of time to realize the intricacies. This is often the case of an elegantly designed system. By elegant I mean the computer science sense: something that is simple yet powerful.
As I researched and considered the Guild Wars system I began to think about the WoW system. Comparing them there are some obvious differences and the WoW classes fall short in many ways. However that sort of thing didn't really bother me as there good points and bad points to each design and I understand and can guess at many of the decisions and reason why WoW chose the model they did. I would have gone a different way, but out of personal preference not because I think they made the wrong decisions.
When I first started playing WoW, in March of 05, I looked into it with a critical and jaded eye. I played MUD's for years and knew many of the pit falls games like this fall into. I was also aware of the whole raiding scene in Everquest and how tied in it was with the powergaming trends of online games. So before getting into I made sure that it seemed like the designers were commited and able to keeping the various parts of the game balanced and reasonable. Unlike some I understand balance is about not falling down and not actually about standing rigidly straight with both hands at exactly the same level. Therefore most class tweaks did not really bother me. Also from MUDs I was very used to various classes not being exactly what you might wish. I would have preferred if there were no raids in WoW at all or that they give exactly the same rewards as other dungeons. However I understood they were trying to balance many things and Moten Core was not ridiculously better(at least for most things), although it was clearly better.
In the beginning it seemed like most anything that seemed like trouble was kept within reasonable bounds. Maybe one class had some nice stuff in one regard or had somewhat of an advantage or raiding was better than other things. But most stuff was in striking distance in some way. Something were better or advantagous but most things were not out of hand. It seemed like things had been designed to not be out of whack and they were making careful efforts to not be out of whack.
Come back to January after thinking about GW and WoW comparing and contrasting them. Seeing some actually well done innovation rather than just a copy of a copy of DIKU MUDs. Thinking about the patches and the trends. AQ was out and now raiding was not only getting clearly out of whack with the rest of the game and affecting the rest of the game, but they were already planning on another huge raid. The honor system was an awful grind that had obvious and far reaching effects of PvP gameplay. Things players had predicted from teh start. The game was no longer balanced it was obviously off kilter. Off kilter in such a way that every aspect of the game was affected by it. No more World PvP, low BG's flooded with twinks, high BG's nothing but a farm fest, people being told to do just one spec in 5-man's because that is what raiders do, guilds deteriorating that would have otherwise stayed together, and on and on.
I know enough about online games to know that no matter what you only so much input. You do have some some. I and a few others managed to convince a class dev on my old MUD that his design for the class was somewhat lacking in certain areas and that some of his balancing penalties were heavier than he had anticipated, but that took over a year and he certainly didn't see things exactly my way in the end. And on other classes stuff and other aspects of the game I certainly disagreed and always did. So I know that what you have in a game is what you have and even if you know and can prove the Devs are wrong that means squat. You simply can't expect things in an online game to suddenly change in fact the sensibilites and design trends of designers tend to be extremely static.
It was clear that the trend was raid after raid, grind after grind, and increasingly meaningless(dare I say even carebear, although i hate terms like that) pvp. So I canceled, because I knew from previous experience that the way things are going is what is imporant. Even if its obvious to 80% of people that something is dumb, the direction the Devs take indicates what they think is correct. And they will do what they think is correct. I knew that the direction they were taking was fundamently against what I wanted.
But I was still unsettled. It didn't seem to follow. I was pretty sure I was not that far off on my initial thoughts. I wasn't all that bitter like some people. I had made my piece with leaving characters and online games a number of years before. I often would feel the urge to go back, but eventually I learned you can never really go back, just like anything in life.
The thing that got me wasn't the details of how WoW had changed over that year. The itemization trends, class changes those all followed similar patterns. Its was the larger more general trends. PvP is WoW was obvously never meant to be cutthroat but it was meant to be somewhat carebear without being complete crap. Yet its moving towards the extreme of carebearness. Everything in WoW initially seemed to be designed with the idea of "Moderation in all things, with many things to do" and this a very good paradigm. Yet they were moving more away from this. Or at least they were allowing certain aspects of the game to be exempt from that idea and thereby removing the idea entirely from the rest of the game.
So I trolled some forums and did some research. After finding out just who and how many left and just who is lead design now it began to make some sembelance of sense. Whoever was responsible for steering the ship was steering in a somewhat different direction. And although, like a large ship, an MMO takes a long time for course corrections to take effect, the effects of a course correction are not as simple or linear as a ships course. The person(s) who was effecting this was not really wise enough to understand just how these course corrections were affecting the game and they were most likely also not concerned or perhaps did not evebn understand the implication of certain aspects (namely PvP mentaities). Not only were they not wise enough, and this is wisdom not intellect, but from what I found out it seemed more than likely that almost all the people who did not really agree with this new course had pretty much just left. So not only was there a not so wise person(s) at the helm, but you have no one with any real input actually capable of understanding or explaining a number things to that person(s).
I don't know if this is Kaplan or not. He is Lead Design and therefore he is responsible, but Rob Pardo and Kaplan were old EQ guildmates and Kaplan succeeded Pardo as Guild leader. One is VP of design and one is Lead Design (promoted when Stieg Hedlund left), I doubt that is coincidence. However they also aren't drooling morons. Pardo has a long history of game design at a very successful company, Kaplan well he has very little experience but he does have a Master degree in Creative Writing. Now I havea Master's degree myself and so I'm not gonna say OMGozrs he r smart, but he's should at least be moderatly intelligent. It is probably true that no matter what given Kaplan's past he would always emphasize raiding and PvE over everything else especially PvP, but that doesn't mean that completely clueless crap like Silithus would get released. In any company there are various people of influences who opinions matter. Kaplan is Lead Design, he steers the ship, he can nix or put in what ever he wants, he determines tasking. But I doubt he is such a raving moron that if the PvP Lead strongly advised something he wouldn't at lest make some concessions towards it. He may not give them enough time or support to do it well or whatever. The Silthithus stuff is so offbase that is should be clear that, even if Kaplan is a complete purple pride loot whore uber raider, there is also no one else with significant influence, someone who opinon matters, who is taken Seriously (with a capital S) that understand these things either. That in short they, as an organization, are clueless when it come to this. Those that had a clue are gone. When you consider that many of the things that required a clue all started to change at the same time and that this happened within about a year of Kaplan becoming Lead Deisgn and many many Blizzard employees leaving the two seem rather significant.
I don't know what happened, but something did happen and its had far reaching effects that have taken a while to come to full fruition. It may have even been incremental. Maybe it started with the Anet guys leaving just because they wanted to control their own destiny, then maybe Blizz North left because of Vivendi problems, and then maybe Steig Hedlund got tired of the "Raid or Quit" lobby of Kaplan, Furor, Pardo and said screw this everyone else is leaving so am I and the the Red 5 guys left as well. I don't know I am just making stuff up. My point is that something like that seems to have occured, one regime was supplanted by another. It either just faded away or was overthrown but that is what seems to have happened. And like an regime change it takes a while to change or convert all the various department heads in the beauracracy and chagne all the paper work and all the other little details.