no game competes with WoW because the WoW audience are easymode basterds. EQ2 is too hard for them to be playign they would get confused trying to find the mobs they need to kill, and they would whine because the have a experience penalty in death. not gonna make other comparisons you guys catch my drift anyway. Yes im a ex-WoW player and ive quit because blizzard has made content too easy nowadays and evrything is unbalanced (no plans of returning...) Dura Dwarf warrior Outland EU
The fact that nobody could even do the achievement lists 5 months after launch (out of those 5 million players), shows that the challenge in the end game of Wow is fucking hard.
Show me another game where only 1 team of 2, 3 or 5 persons get the Brutal Gladiaor title in a rated ladder based PvP out of 200.000 players (20 servers clustered). Being Brutal Gladiator is a unique title on a server (and a lot of servers don't even have the title).
The same with PVE Raids these days.
Blizzard is the first mmorpg maker where some bosses are SCALED in difficulty, making for a very very small percentage to have the fantastic black or red dragons in its end game. Downing a boss on easy mode is to let everyone enjoy the scenery, but that's NOT the aim of the game anymore.
The aim now is prestige of downing them in a hard setting with all achievements up (like downing Sart has 8 different hard modes).
On my server only ... 0.3% of the Raiders could do all these Raid achievements. That's perhaps 0.01% of total players on a server.
Easy? Only for those not daring the difficult challenges in the Raid or PvP competitions....The others show off with their red and black dragons. Show me your armory and I'll laugh with the "easy" boosts.
No longer the gear is elite, it's the titles and mounts that do the shows these days. And everyone can look at the armory how poorly 99% of the people play. ))
Wait? So the point of raiding now and what decides its difficulty are optional achievements which give you nothing? So your saying if a game made an achievement for a raid that was beat 90 bosses in 3 seconds which would be impossible, then it would therefore be the most challenging end game out there? I'm sorry but that doesn't make any sense.
BAsed on numbers Since TBC the raids have gotten easier. Look at vanilla wow, how many progressed, look at TBC slightly more did, Now in northrend you have guilds full of retarded monkeys clearing every raid.
youve said exactly what i wanted to say.
the achievments are meaningless its show to show your epeen to other players. and with a good grind most of em are not a chalange
the brutal gladiator. m8 let me tell you that me as a PVE prot warrior almost had the gladiator title season 1 (i was off by a few), yes things have changed now i know that but its not a chalange.
people with brutal gladiotor stuff have: no job, too much time on their hands, good gear, and are concentrated enough not to fuck up shit. and alot of luck is also a part of PvP (you cannot control absolutely evry aspect of the whole fight)
Vanila WoW was hardcore PVE we had to do bosses night after night after night.
in tbc it went down hill with a few walls here and there. raids now are nothing. the difrent achievment settings are a aim then but as far as i know most of the guilds on my server now have completed alot of it. so your server m8 must be bullshit.
The only hardcore PvE in Vanilla WoW was couple of bugged BwL fights, C'thun before it got nerfed and couple of Naxxramas fights. The rest was easy and cleared very fast. I was raiding from early 2005 and really don't know about this night after night raiding. Maybe if you were in some mediocre casual guild. But the real hardcore guilds cleared the content fast. As I said only exception to this is C'thun and The Four Horsemen. And those are just 2 fights. Both M'uru and Kil' Jaeden are better and harder if you are really looking for something hardcore.
Xeniar is correct, MANY raiding guilds that were hardcore raided night after night after night, maybe stopping once or twice during the week, if that. Take for example the original Naxxramas race, between Nihilum and Death and Taxes. They were, at the time, the two top guilds in the world. They were the most driven, arguable the best. (on a side note, a player on my old server transferred over to D&T to become a third string pally healer-he got extremely geared extremely quick then sold the toon for almost $2k)
I know that during that race, D&T raided every single day, up until they cleared the instance. There motto was: If you get burned out or want to quit, well we have thousands of applicants ready at the drop of a hat to fill your spot. Naxxramas, not only required 40 people as opposed to today's 25 man raids in WoW, also required stacking frost resist, and having some mandatory classes in the raid, unlike today.
The four horseman, to this day, hold the title for the longest time an encounter lay undefeated from the first time it was encountered, at 7 weeks. So, really you could say that the hardcore guilds were raiding 5-6 times and week for several months. Yea pve is simple once you understand the strategy, but people didn't understand the strategy for months during naxx.
no game competes with WoW because the WoW audience are easymode basterds. EQ2 is too hard for them to be playign they would get confused trying to find the mobs they need to kill, and they would whine because the have a experience penalty in death. not gonna make other comparisons you guys catch my drift anyway. Yes im a ex-WoW player and ive quit because blizzard has made content too easy nowadays and evrything is unbalanced (no plans of returning...) Dura Dwarf warrior Outland EU
The fact that nobody could even do the achievement lists 5 months after launch (out of those 5 million players), shows that the challenge in the end game of Wow is fucking hard.
Show me another game where only 1 team of 2, 3 or 5 persons get the Brutal Gladiaor title in a rated ladder based PvP out of 200.000 players (20 servers clustered). Being Brutal Gladiator is a unique title on a server (and a lot of servers don't even have the title).
The same with PVE Raids these days.
Blizzard is the first mmorpg maker where some bosses are SCALED in difficulty, making for a very very small percentage to have the fantastic black or red dragons in its end game. Downing a boss on easy mode is to let everyone enjoy the scenery, but that's NOT the aim of the game anymore.
The aim now is prestige of downing them in a hard setting with all achievements up (like downing Sart has 8 different hard modes).
On my server only ... 0.3% of the Raiders could do all these Raid achievements. That's perhaps 0.01% of total players on a server.
Easy? Only for those not daring the difficult challenges in the Raid or PvP competitions....The others show off with their red and black dragons. Show me your armory and I'll laugh with the "easy" boosts.
No longer the gear is elite, it's the titles and mounts that do the shows these days. And everyone can look at the armory how poorly 99% of the people play. ))
Wait? So the point of raiding now and what decides its difficulty are optional achievements which give you nothing? So your saying if a game made an achievement for a raid that was beat 90 bosses in 3 seconds which would be impossible, then it would therefore be the most challenging end game out there? I'm sorry but that doesn't make any sense.
BAsed on numbers Since TBC the raids have gotten easier. Look at vanilla wow, how many progressed, look at TBC slightly more did, Now in northrend you have guilds full of retarded monkeys clearing every raid.
youve said exactly what i wanted to say.
the achievments are meaningless its show to show your epeen to other players. and with a good grind most of em are not a chalange
the brutal gladiator. m8 let me tell you that me as a PVE prot warrior almost had the gladiator title season 1 (i was off by a few), yes things have changed now i know that but its not a chalange.
people with brutal gladiotor stuff have: no job, too much time on their hands, good gear, and are concentrated enough not to fuck up shit. and alot of luck is also a part of PvP (you cannot control absolutely evry aspect of the whole fight)
Vanila WoW was hardcore PVE we had to do bosses night after night after night.
in tbc it went down hill with a few walls here and there. raids now are nothing. the difrent achievment settings are a aim then but as far as i know most of the guilds on my server now have completed alot of it. so your server m8 must be bullshit.
The only hardcore PvE in Vanilla WoW was couple of bugged BwL fights, C'thun before it got nerfed and couple of Naxxramas fights. The rest was easy and cleared very fast. I was raiding from early 2005 and really don't know about this night after night raiding. Maybe if you were in some mediocre casual guild. But the real hardcore guilds cleared the content fast. As I said only exception to this is C'thun and The Four Horsemen. And those are just 2 fights. Both M'uru and Kil' Jaeden are better and harder if you are really looking for something hardcore.
Xeniar is correct, MANY raiding guilds that were hardcore raided night after night after night, maybe stopping once or twice during the week, if that. Take for example the original Naxxramas race, between Nihilum and Death and Taxes. They were, at the time, the two top guilds in the world. They were the most driven, arguable the best. (on a side note, a player on my old server transferred over to D&T to become a third string pally healer-he got extremely geared extremely quick then sold the toon for almost $2k)
I know that during that race, D&T raided every single day, up until they cleared the instance. There motto was: If you get burned out or want to quit, well we have thousands of applicants ready at the drop of a hat to fill your spot. Naxxramas, not only required 40 people as opposed to today's 25 man raids in WoW, also required stacking frost resist, and having some mandatory classes in the raid, unlike today.
The four horseman, to this day, hold the title for the longest time an encounter lay undefeated from the first time it was encountered, at 7 weeks. So, really you could say that the hardcore guilds were raiding 5-6 times and week for several months. Yea pve is simple once you understand the strategy, but people didn't understand the strategy for months during naxx.
No, he is not correct and if you were there yourself as I was , you would know. He said that Vanilla WoW was hardcore. No, it was not. There were 2 bosses that were hardcore and those were C'thun and The Four Horsemen. Both Nihilum and Death and Taxes were raiding night after night on those 2 bosses and that's it. Every other boss in Vanilla WoW was killed very fast and in terms of fight complexity Vanilla bosses were inferior to TBC bosses by far - 2 exceptions are posted above. People should really take away those nostalgia goggles they are wearing when trying to prove a point. And all this is coming from a raider in 1 of WoWs top world guilds.
Originally posted by Bellise No, he is not correct and if you were there yourself as I was , you would know. He said that Vanilla WoW was hardcore. No, it was not. There were 2 bosses that were hardcore and those were C'thun and The Four Horsemen. Both Nihilum and Death and Taxes were raiding night after night on those 2 bosses and that's it. Every other boss in Vanilla WoW was killed very fast and in terms of fight complexity Vanilla bosses were inferior to TBC bosses by far - 2 exceptions are posted above. People should really take away those nostalgia goggles they are wearing when trying to prove a point. And all this is coming from a raider in 1 of WoWs top world guilds.
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
Haven't read all before this so maybe someone else mentioned it but I assumed that the continuing success to WoW is the social aspect. The peer pressure aspect.
I assume many start to play and continue to play WoW because all their friends do. It doesn't even matter if a player and all their friends are bored of WoW and would have more fun playing another game, the fact is they're established and having fun as a group together, its a social thing, why leave.
Its not about the game. Its not about whats more fun. WoW at this point functions more as a social network than as a game, imo.
Haven't read all before this so maybe someone else mentioned it but I assumed that the continuing success to WoW is the social aspect. The peer pressure aspect. I assume many start to play and continue to play WoW because all their friends do. It doesn't even matter if a player and all their friends are bored of WoW and would have more fun playing another game, the fact is they're established and having fun as a group together, its a social thing, why leave. Its not about the game. Its not about whats more fun. WoW at this point functions more as a social network than as a game, imo.
Amazing, isn't it? Paying $15 a month to do something you can do for free on Facebook.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Haven't read all before this so maybe someone else mentioned it but I assumed that the continuing success to WoW is the social aspect. The peer pressure aspect. I assume many start to play and continue to play WoW because all their friends do. It doesn't even matter if a player and all their friends are bored of WoW and would have more fun playing another game, the fact is they're established and having fun as a group together, its a social thing, why leave. Its not about the game. Its not about whats more fun. WoW at this point functions more as a social network than as a game, imo.
People left Ultima online when all their friends where playing.
They left everquest when the same applied then.
You can see the decline in many mmos and combine that with record breaking sales of mmo releases and what do you have?
Maybe people have not left for other games, because other games just don't measure up. We can speculate that millions of people won't give up a game (despite it happening in many other mmos previously) or we can just look at the condition most games are released at to see how they compare.
Two mmos last year got somewhere around a million people each to try them in the first couple of months when they released. I think that shows that people are willing to leave for a new game, but what is being offered just does not compete with the current marketplace.
Haven't read all before this so maybe someone else mentioned it but I assumed that the continuing success to WoW is the social aspect. The peer pressure aspect. I assume many start to play and continue to play WoW because all their friends do. It doesn't even matter if a player and all their friends are bored of WoW and would have more fun playing another game, the fact is they're established and having fun as a group together, its a social thing, why leave. Its not about the game. Its not about whats more fun. WoW at this point functions more as a social network than as a game, imo.
People left Ultima online when all their friends where playing.
They left everquest when the same applied then.
You can see the decline in many mmos and combine that with record breaking sales of mmo releases and what do you have?
Maybe people have not left for other games, because other games just don't measure up. We can speculate that millions of people won't give up a game (despite it happening in many other mmos previously) or we can just look at the condition most games are released at to see how they compare.
Two mmos last year got somewhere around a million people each to try them in the first couple of months when they released. I think that shows that people are willing to leave for a new game, but what is being offered just does not compete with the current marketplace.
Yep, how can you compete when the majority of WoW's customers are (presumably) satisfied?
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Originally posted by Bellise No, he is not correct and if you were there yourself as I was , you would know. He said that Vanilla WoW was hardcore. No, it was not. There were 2 bosses that were hardcore and those were C'thun and The Four Horsemen. Both Nihilum and Death and Taxes were raiding night after night on those 2 bosses and that's it. Every other boss in Vanilla WoW was killed very fast and in terms of fight complexity Vanilla bosses were inferior to TBC bosses by far - 2 exceptions are posted above. People should really take away those nostalgia goggles they are wearing when trying to prove a point. And all this is coming from a raider in 1 of WoWs top world guilds.
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
I am not arguing that it was not tough. But I really wouldn't give Vanilla WoW as the example of how hardcore raiding should look like. Sure, there were some interesting encounters - the ones I mentioned or Vaelastrasz - but overall the first raids and encounters were tank and spank fights with very little creativity or complexity. Note - I am not saying it was bad or anything, hell I have fond memories of doing Molten Core or BwL or any other Vanilla WoW raid, but I don't let the nostalgia to prevent me from seeing that those raids lacked a lot. Burning Crusade introduced us to more complex fights overall than Vanilla WoW and raiding also got harder. And I still think Sunwell Plateau was better dungeon than Naxxramas. Killing Kil'Jaeden , hell that was the most epic moment in WoW to this day for me.
And to talk about point of easy raiding in WotLK. I'll judge that after we finish Icecrown.
Because they suck. Too many incompetent game designers who think they are up to the task and fail miserably. In the process wasting half a decade of their life on trash, I can only imagine its a great blow to their ego which is why they cling so hard to their failed ideas.
let me tell you why. Blizzard created its own market.. im not talking about the mmo market.. because when blizzard came into the so called "MMO" market all the games out at the time have been pretty much the same as they are coming out now. They are what I call Traditional MMOs. WoW being far from a traditional MMO because its not a niche. where MMO's before wow were considered niche games where they are not for everyone..
Now what blizzard did was create an MMO for everyone stepping out of that niche. They got about 90% of their players that have never before played an MMO before to play wow and love it ( i know i cant prove that but its an an estimate off the top of my head)
They loved it because it was catored to them. It was very easy to pick up and play from the very first time you log in.. They did everything right to cator to the casual gamer aswell as i guess a more hardcore gamer who raided 5-7 nights a week.. They didnt care about the bugs because they were not THAT noticable.. I personally dont remeber ANY bugs at launch that took away from the gameplay.. The only bug I remember is the pally seal bug since I played a pally as my first toon. I didnt know it was a bug because it didnt seem like one. The seal just did alittle to much damange..
The reason no game can compete with wow is because the people that are playing wow are not looking for a new mmo. They love what they have and they wont leave for a wow clone because they got the best one already.. There is a game that will take a big chunk of the players from wow and thats blizzards own next MMO.
Originally posted by Bellise I am not arguing that it was not tough. But I really wouldn't give Vanilla WoW as the example of how hardcore raiding should look like. Sure, there were some interesting encounters - the ones I mentioned or Vaelastrasz - but overall the first raids and encounters were tank and spank fights with very little creativity or complexity. Note - I am not saying it was bad or anything, hell I have fond memories of doing Molten Core or BwL or any other Vanilla WoW raid, but I don't let the nostalgia to prevent me from seeing that those raids lacked a lot. Burning Crusade introduced us to more complex fights overall than Vanilla WoW and raiding also got harder. And I still think Sunwell Plateau was better dungeon than Naxxramas. Killing Kil'Jaeden , hell that was the most epic moment in WoW to this day for me.
And to talk about point of easy raiding in WotLK. I'll judge that after we finish Icecrown.
Plenty of truth in your words, but I still think that for its time wow was well above par. Today vanilla wow may not be what hardcore raiding should look like, but for the time it was pretty hard.
Even though the core concept of most fights were tank and spank, almost every single fight was different. There was usually some trick, movement, placement or specific tactic that was different from almost any other boss fight. Even with prewritten strategies there were far to many guilds that could not complete encounters.
Burning crusade did a nice job of expanding on raids with new mechanics and such. Blizzard really did a good job with that one.
Lich king is to easy, because blizzard was stupid and tried changing to much to fast. Just like a few other games did, they revamped classes, talents, raids, buffs all the while adding new levels and trying to balance it and make an expansion at the same time. The only think that is making lich king "easy" is that player character balance is off. Way to much dps, healing, mana and threat generation.
let me tell you why. Blizzard created its own market.. im not talking about the mmo market.. because when blizzard came into the so called "MMO" market all the games out at the time have been pretty much the same as they are coming out now. They are what I call Traditional MMOs. WoW being far from a traditional MMO because its not a niche. where MMO's before wow were considered niche games where they are not for everyone.. Now what blizzard did was create an MMO for everyone stepping out of that niche. They got about 90% of their players that have never before played an MMO before to play wow and love it ( i know i cant prove that but its an an estimate off the top of my head) They loved it because it was catored to them. It was very easy to pick up and play from the very first time you log in.. They did everything right to cator to the casual gamer aswell as i guess a more hardcore gamer who raided 5-7 nights a week.. They didnt care about the bugs because they were not THAT noticable.. I personally dont remeber ANY bugs at launch that took away from the gameplay.. The only bug I remember is the pally seal bug since I played a pally as my first toon. I didnt know it was a bug because it didnt seem like one. The seal just did alittle to much damange.. The reason no game can compete with wow is because the people that are playing wow are not looking for a new mmo. They love what they have and they wont leave for a wow clone because they got the best one already.. There is a game that will take a big chunk of the players from wow and thats blizzards own next MMO.
thats just my 2 cents.
I can only second this. Thankyou for writing out my thoughts ;p this would have taken forever to do.
I was one of these people who started wow as first real mmo aswell, jst as 90 percent of my friends did aswell. Ever since I got tired of WoW ive been looking around for a new one, but so far no mmo has really been able to keep me hooked as WoW did.
+ i want blizzard's new mmo too =^) ( god im gonna get a lot of hate with this post )
I give you the ONE and most important reason for me and why I just LOVE to play this game. The control of your avatar when you fight . In Wow you are your avatar. In other mmorpg's I play with a puppet that hangs there as a kind of hopping/popping/jumping thing with absolutely no connection to it. ---- Easy to say but I think it is a "coat" that hides MANY qualities other mmorpg makers just can't grasp. Just a few examples: the blend in of your avatar in the scenery. In Wow my human takes about one to 2 steps per stair. In War you have a dwarf who "floats " above the stairs and taking sometimes 5 steps at once. Do YOU know many midgets in RL that take 2 meter steps on a stair at once ? The same with the combat system. In Wow it is a natural thing you control things. NO need even to look at those famous timers. You feel the combat of a rogue putting his kidney shot or the mages" fireballs going off. You never have to watch the off timers. You just know the spells fire off with ALL surround feedback needed. No other mmorpg gives me this feeling. Not even remotely. Wow is the closest to FPS of all mmorpg's and it is even better because of the building up of your character. I love the tactical/strategical maps and fights of the BG's yes. Far more than the maps of TF2 or CS. It is this micro scale that does it (and then you build upon these stones .....). ----- The real polish of Wow lies in the details. How in the world could you compete with a perfect control of your avatar ?
I have to agree with this man, wow responsiveness and combat animation is second to none. When you tell your avatar to swing or punch, you can actually see your character pivot shifted weight and swing at your opponent. Further more, unlike many of the other MMO out there, there animation is fast paced and the damage and animation sync perfect. This level of polish alone give you a great sense of immersion compare to the so called top moo. As much as I love vanguard and EQ2 which I consider to have a much better PVE and crafting experience. I could never get the same level of immersion as I did with wow because the animation is just so horrible. The character movement in those two later game don't seems as natural and nothing more than puppet on the string. The attack animation is just as bad, when I fire my arrow as a ranger/hunter in all three of the game, only in wow where the enemy actually takes damage when the bullet travel to the enemy. Both of the other game, the ammo didn't even left my bow and the enemy already taken damage and chasing after me. I know is is minor detail to most, but those are the kind of detail and really make you feel as though you are your avatar and not just you controlling a puppet in a game.
It mainstreamed MMOs by some odd chance lucky formula they created (probably not so much luck as smart design because blizzard has top talent) and a) people are playing WoW and won't leave that for these new MMOs, that arguabley are very similar to WoW, and surely not by coincidence b) WoW's success was really just a fluke, a stroke of luck. Why does anything become popular? I mean it's the same way with anything, especially in the entertainment industry. I mean there are actors, bands, etc. out there that probably aren't the "best" but for some reason they became popular, either by a certain random quality that people liked or just because they were lucky. c) Too many companies try to follow in the footsteps of WoW and are overshadowed.
Time is the only thing that will change WoW being the frontrunner. Most likely it'll be another random occurrence of an arguably well designed, mainstream game or perhaps a new MMO by blizzard! maybe WoW 2! (doubt they would do that actually, that would be stealing from themselves essentially as far as sub #s go).
These are all speculations of course but who knows, I don't think there's any one reason like I said. Things just lined up for them and they ran with it.
Highest number of subs does not equal "best" MMORPG. It does make it the most popular, as well as one of themost profitable most likely. WoW introduced an accessible game at just the right time; while EQ2 created a new engine (that half of the computers at the time couldn't run on decent settings) and group-required content all over the place, WoW came in with a game that almost any machine could run, with tons of solo-friendly content. Add in the PvP opportunities they created over time, and they suddenly had a game with polished PvE and some PvP elements. WoW isn't #1 due to the graphics, or the engine, or the content, or the features. IT is #1 because it does everything just well enough to keep people coming back, and maintains a large enough playerbase that both new and returning players can jump in and have people to play with. WoW will, in time, die (by that I mean fade into relative obscurity with drastically diminished subs). People will continue to play the original WoW and lament on how much better things were "back then", just as today's purists talk about UO, DAOC, and EQ1 during their primes. However, I expect Blizzard will have a new MMORPG out long before then.
Hats off to you, what a brilliant discussion.
There is no need for a game to be technologically advanced, for me at least. I just want some good time in the game. Heck, I have good time in tetris or pac-man, even now, if played occasionally. WoW provided enough variety to allow something to be done whatever my mood or game time duration. WoW provided a game where a large variety of gamers will be interested in. That is a good game for a lot of people, not the "best" in whatever weird dimension, but a wide appeal.
Come to think of it, when I go out playing basketball, do I need to check the leather quality of the ball, the sewing work, the quality of wood used in the door of the stadium, or the design of the staircase leading to the carpark? Come on, if I have a nice time in the game, if its easy to find people to play with, if the environment is light, with everyone wearing a big smile, if everything falls into place leading to a good moment of gaming, what else is there that I need to care about. When the game is over, its gone. When I log out of WoW, I forget it.
Originally posted by Bellise No, he is not correct and if you were there yourself as I was , you would know. He said that Vanilla WoW was hardcore. No, it was not. There were 2 bosses that were hardcore and those were C'thun and The Four Horsemen. Both Nihilum and Death and Taxes were raiding night after night on those 2 bosses and that's it. Every other boss in Vanilla WoW was killed very fast and in terms of fight complexity Vanilla bosses were inferior to TBC bosses by far - 2 exceptions are posted above. People should really take away those nostalgia goggles they are wearing when trying to prove a point. And all this is coming from a raider in 1 of WoWs top world guilds.
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
I am not arguing that it was not tough. But I really wouldn't give Vanilla WoW as the example of how hardcore raiding should look like. Sure, there were some interesting encounters - the ones I mentioned or Vaelastrasz - but overall the first raids and encounters were tank and spank fights with very little creativity or complexity. Note - I am not saying it was bad or anything, hell I have fond memories of doing Molten Core or BwL or any other Vanilla WoW raid, but I don't let the nostalgia to prevent me from seeing that those raids lacked a lot. Burning Crusade introduced us to more complex fights overall than Vanilla WoW and raiding also got harder. And I still think Sunwell Plateau was better dungeon than Naxxramas. Killing Kil'Jaeden , hell that was the most epic moment in WoW to this day for me.
And to talk about point of easy raiding in WotLK. I'll judge that after we finish Icecrown.
Raiding in Wotlk now is not too tuf. Why? Because they only release the easy raid zones. They have Urudar (how to spell?) coming up which I heard is tougher, and Icecrown citadel will be next which will be even tougher.
Its good WoW provides raid zones for various types of players. There will be those who struggle against 10man naxx all the way. There will be those who will put Icecrown on farm status very soon. There will be those in the middle. With this way of progressive release, there will be something for most of the people. Good thing about WoW, they allow a lot more subscribers to experience the "end stuffs". The same for DAoC, in which almost everyone can go out and try the frontier.
I remember the TBC days, up to the before Wotlk release. There are still PUGs and small guilds struggling to clear kara, and there are guild who find Sunwell easy. I expect something like that with wotlk eventually.
Originally posted by Bellise No, he is not correct and if you were there yourself as I was , you would know. He said that Vanilla WoW was hardcore. No, it was not. There were 2 bosses that were hardcore and those were C'thun and The Four Horsemen. Both Nihilum and Death and Taxes were raiding night after night on those 2 bosses and that's it. Every other boss in Vanilla WoW was killed very fast and in terms of fight complexity Vanilla bosses were inferior to TBC bosses by far - 2 exceptions are posted above. People should really take away those nostalgia goggles they are wearing when trying to prove a point. And all this is coming from a raider in 1 of WoWs top world guilds.
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
I am not arguing that it was not tough. But I really wouldn't give Vanilla WoW as the example of how hardcore raiding should look like. Sure, there were some interesting encounters - the ones I mentioned or Vaelastrasz - but overall the first raids and encounters were tank and spank fights with very little creativity or complexity. Note - I am not saying it was bad or anything, hell I have fond memories of doing Molten Core or BwL or any other Vanilla WoW raid, but I don't let the nostalgia to prevent me from seeing that those raids lacked a lot. Burning Crusade introduced us to more complex fights overall than Vanilla WoW and raiding also got harder. And I still think Sunwell Plateau was better dungeon than Naxxramas. Killing Kil'Jaeden , hell that was the most epic moment in WoW to this day for me.
And to talk about point of easy raiding in WotLK. I'll judge that after we finish Icecrown.
Raiding in Wotlk now is not too tuf. Why? Because they only release the easy raid zones. They have Urudar (how to spell?) coming up which I heard is tougher, and Icecrown citadel will be next which will be even tougher.
Its good WoW provides raid zones for various types of players. There will be those who struggle against 10man naxx all the way. There will be those who will put Icecrown on farm status very soon. There will be those in the middle. With this way of progressive release, there will be something for most of the people. Good thing about WoW, they allow a lot more subscribers to experience the "end stuffs". The same for DAoC, in which almost everyone can go out and try the frontier.
I remember the TBC days, up to the before Wotlk release. There are still PUGs and small guilds struggling to clear kara, and there are guild who find Sunwell easy. I expect something like that with wotlk eventually.
This is basically what I was trying to say. It is by no means bad that the entry level content in WotLK is easy, it's good. What I was trying to point out with my last sentence is that we are at the start of this expansion. It is too soon to judge the raiding content. I will personally judge raiding in WotLK after all raiding dungeons have been released and cleared.
I've been a Warcraft fan since 1996 but I never played WoW (lol) so I don't even know if it's good or not but its success though is not surprising at all. Just look at Blizzard's past games. Yeah I'm going blind folded here, but I'm assuming WoW as well is a product of quality.
Diablo 2. Never played online, but I heard tons of people still play it even today.
Warcraft 3, land of the dota fanatics. More people play dota than the main game. (Like the case with HL and CS)
And...
Starcraft. An entire frigging nation known as South Korea behind it. Even the games are even televised over there. It's fucking crazy.
Now let me ask you this, can advertisement alone achieve this?
Wanna talk about their announced "we have THAT many millions subscribers"? Easy statistic basics: You count ALL the Subscribers you EVER had no matter if they are still active or have left the game like for ages.
Blizzard spells out - what they do not count - in their PR announcements
excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
Yes, excludes free promotional subscriptions, but does not exclude initial free month players.
30 days is a long time. Do you know how many people quit or sign up for an MMO in 30 days?
They take one day, then bombard the TV and Internet with banners, Ozzy commercials, whatever other crap they lure people in with. On day 29, they compile all those numbers, 95% of which have not played since the day after seeing the commercials, combine that number with all the gold farmers, multi-boxers and angry teenagers' subscriptions... and you end up having a pretty impressive, albeit completely unrealistic, number.
This is lame analysis.
They run a commercial, on day 29 they take a snapshot on day 31 all are gone. This is your storyline.
Stupid! The sub base runs from a few millions years back to 12 million now. You are telling us that blizz is replacing their entire batch of sub every month with fresh inputs, only to lose them all by the end of the month. So for a year where the monthly sub is 6million, they need to draw in6 million fresh per month = 72 millon players to cover the year. By now, with 12million concurrent sub, they need 12 million people to buy the box at the beginning of the month and for every month, so 144 million people a year.
How many 114 million people you can corn in a year, and by now its 4.5 years.
You are out of your mind. Try to cook up a better story next time.
Because nothing as good as come out as of yet...it's like the movie "The Dark Knight," after seeing that movie I didn't feel like there would any good movies to come out for a long time so I stopped going to movies for a while, and since then no good comic book hero movies....not even Watchmen.
=/
Right now players are waiting for a game to one up WoW, will it happen? Maybe! Has it happened? No! Was WoW perfect? Hell no! I always saw how the game mechanics could have been a lot better. Plus without orcs and elves since I'm kinda growing tired of J.R.R. Tolkien based fanatasy games.
Do other companies have what it takes to step up to the plate? They haven't done it yet, or maybe the right company hasn't had its chance to spread it's wings! Will it happen? Actually I think the question that should be asked is will it happen before MMOs start to dry up if they do.
Chances are WoW was meant to be one of those cultural moments/freak accurancies like disco was in the 70s (lol), atleast for gamers, and it might never happen again, or as big. Blizzard might even fail to make their next MMO as big just how Hollywood fails to make sequals better than the original.
Because nothing as good as come out as of yet...it's like the movie "The Dark Knight," after seeing that movie I didn't feel like there would any good movies to come out for a long time so I stopped going to movies for a while, and since then no good comic book hero movies....not even Watchmen. =/
Right now players are waiting for a game to one up WoW, will it happen? Maybe! Has it happened? No! Was WoW perfect? Hell no! I always saw how the game mechanics could have been a lot better. Plus without orcs and elves since I'm kinda growing tired of J.R.R. Tolkien based fanatasy games.
Do other companies have what it takes to step up to the plate? They haven't done it yet, or maybe the right company hasn't had its chance to spread it's wings! Will it happen? Actually I think the question that should be asked is will it happen before MMOs start to dry up if they do.
Chances are WoW was meant to be one of those cultural moments/freak accurancies like disco was in the 70s (lol), atleast for gamers, and it might never happen again, or as big. Blizzard might even fail to make their next MMO as big just how Hollywood fails to make sequals better than the original.
That is true, but seeing how every single game they do so far one up their last. I would like to give them a benefit of a doubt that the next one going to out do this one also. The greatest and most annoying thing about blizzard is their totally insane development cycle. Combine that with virtually limitless fund, they tend to spend as much time and money needed to developing a great game. Even if it mean increasing the development time by twice as much just to polish it up some more (great example of this would be starcraft 2). Then you have relentless testing. Beta after beta to try to fix all the kinks and smooths out the bumps. Like for starcraft, blizzard spend that last year or some having the korean pro game beta test their game for them to make sure that it is up to expectation and all the units are balanced. I understand why so many people would consider wow a fluke when it success is so overwhelming. However if you look at blizzard track record, how can anyone say that wow is a fluke when every single game blizzard push out is an instant hit.
Currently, blizzard is the only company that I will autotamically buy the collector edition of any games they make and I don't even have to bother knowing anything about it to do so. That is the level of trust that I and so many other gamer have in blizzard game.
Because nothing as good as come out as of yet...it's like the movie "The Dark Knight," after seeing that movie I didn't feel like there would any good movies to come out for a long time so I stopped going to movies for a while, and since then no good comic book hero movies....not even Watchmen. =/
Right now players are waiting for a game to one up WoW, will it happen? Maybe! Has it happened? No! Was WoW perfect? Hell no! I always saw how the game mechanics could have been a lot better. Plus without orcs and elves since I'm kinda growing tired of J.R.R. Tolkien based fanatasy games.
Do other companies have what it takes to step up to the plate? They haven't done it yet, or maybe the right company hasn't had its chance to spread it's wings! Will it happen? Actually I think the question that should be asked is will it happen before MMOs start to dry up if they do.
Chances are WoW was meant to be one of those cultural moments/freak accurancies like disco was in the 70s (lol), atleast for gamers, and it might never happen again, or as big. Blizzard might even fail to make their next MMO as big just how Hollywood fails to make sequals better than the original.
That is true, but seeing how every single game they do so far one up their last. I would like to give them a benefit of a doubt that the next one going to out do this one also. The greatest and most annoying thing about blizzard is their totally insane development cycle. Combine that with virtually limitless fund, they tend to spend as much time and money needed to developing a great game. Even if it mean increasing the development time by twice as much just to polish it up some more (great example of this would be starcraft 2). Then you have relentless testing. Beta after beta to try to fix all the kinks and smooths out the bumps. Like for starcraft, blizzard spend that last year or some having the korean pro game beta test their game for them to make sure that it is up to expectation and all the units are balanced. I understand why so many people would consider wow a fluke when it success is so overwhelming. However if you look at blizzard track record, how can anyone say that wow is a fluke when every single game blizzard push out is an instant hit.
Currently, blizzard is the only company that I will autotamically buy the collector edition of any games they make and I don't even have to bother knowing anything about it to do so. That is the level of trust that I and so many other gamer have in blizzard game.
Well until a gaming company can come out to be this particular and have to funds to back it up, my guess is it's not going to happen...Personally I believe in uncertainties and that's why I say I'm not sure if Blizzard can one up WoW. I try to avoid making an opinion or come up with a conclusion as much as possible...leaving open the door for possibilities...it's just the way I think.
But I'm pretty sure Blizz has what it takes to keep pulling Pixars so yeah I agree with you there.
Do I wish other companies could do this? Hell yeah! That means we can see more variety and not have to keep waiting for Blizz next MMO. I think Blizz has even gone so far as encouraging this and that's why they spoke so highly of Bioware making Swtor.
Now as for Bioware having what it takes to make a successful MMO in the tradition of Blizz...only time will tell...and it might not happen...lol
Comments
lets not forgot Guild Wars is the online game to even come close to having the player base of WoW. They put together a great game.
The fact that nobody could even do the achievement lists 5 months after launch (out of those 5 million players), shows that the challenge in the end game of Wow is fucking hard.
Show me another game where only 1 team of 2, 3 or 5 persons get the Brutal Gladiaor title in a rated ladder based PvP out of 200.000 players (20 servers clustered). Being Brutal Gladiator is a unique title on a server (and a lot of servers don't even have the title).
The same with PVE Raids these days.
Blizzard is the first mmorpg maker where some bosses are SCALED in difficulty, making for a very very small percentage to have the fantastic black or red dragons in its end game. Downing a boss on easy mode is to let everyone enjoy the scenery, but that's NOT the aim of the game anymore.
The aim now is prestige of downing them in a hard setting with all achievements up (like downing Sart has 8 different hard modes).
On my server only ... 0.3% of the Raiders could do all these Raid achievements. That's perhaps 0.01% of total players on a server.
Easy? Only for those not daring the difficult challenges in the Raid or PvP competitions....The others show off with their red and black dragons. Show me your armory and I'll laugh with the "easy" boosts.
No longer the gear is elite, it's the titles and mounts that do the shows these days. And everyone can look at the armory how poorly 99% of the people play.
))
Wait? So the point of raiding now and what decides its difficulty are optional achievements which give you nothing? So your saying if a game made an achievement for a raid that was beat 90 bosses in 3 seconds which would be impossible, then it would therefore be the most challenging end game out there? I'm sorry but that doesn't make any sense.
BAsed on numbers Since TBC the raids have gotten easier. Look at vanilla wow, how many progressed, look at TBC slightly more did, Now in northrend you have guilds full of retarded monkeys clearing every raid.
youve said exactly what i wanted to say.
the achievments are meaningless its show to show your epeen to other players. and with a good grind most of em are not a chalange
the brutal gladiator. m8 let me tell you that me as a PVE prot warrior almost had the gladiator title season 1 (i was off by a few), yes things have changed now i know that but its not a chalange.
people with brutal gladiotor stuff have: no job, too much time on their hands, good gear, and are concentrated enough not to fuck up shit. and alot of luck is also a part of PvP (you cannot control absolutely evry aspect of the whole fight)
Vanila WoW was hardcore PVE we had to do bosses night after night after night.
in tbc it went down hill with a few walls here and there. raids now are nothing. the difrent achievment settings are a aim then but as far as i know most of the guilds on my server now have completed alot of it. so your server m8 must be bullshit.
The only hardcore PvE in Vanilla WoW was couple of bugged BwL fights, C'thun before it got nerfed and couple of Naxxramas fights. The rest was easy and cleared very fast. I was raiding from early 2005 and really don't know about this night after night raiding. Maybe if you were in some mediocre casual guild. But the real hardcore guilds cleared the content fast. As I said only exception to this is C'thun and The Four Horsemen. And those are just 2 fights. Both M'uru and Kil' Jaeden are better and harder if you are really looking for something hardcore.
Xeniar is correct, MANY raiding guilds that were hardcore raided night after night after night, maybe stopping once or twice during the week, if that. Take for example the original Naxxramas race, between Nihilum and Death and Taxes. They were, at the time, the two top guilds in the world. They were the most driven, arguable the best. (on a side note, a player on my old server transferred over to D&T to become a third string pally healer-he got extremely geared extremely quick then sold the toon for almost $2k)
I know that during that race, D&T raided every single day, up until they cleared the instance. There motto was: If you get burned out or want to quit, well we have thousands of applicants ready at the drop of a hat to fill your spot. Naxxramas, not only required 40 people as opposed to today's 25 man raids in WoW, also required stacking frost resist, and having some mandatory classes in the raid, unlike today.
The four horseman, to this day, hold the title for the longest time an encounter lay undefeated from the first time it was encountered, at 7 weeks. So, really you could say that the hardcore guilds were raiding 5-6 times and week for several months. Yea pve is simple once you understand the strategy, but people didn't understand the strategy for months during naxx.
The fact that nobody could even do the achievement lists 5 months after launch (out of those 5 million players), shows that the challenge in the end game of Wow is fucking hard.
Show me another game where only 1 team of 2, 3 or 5 persons get the Brutal Gladiaor title in a rated ladder based PvP out of 200.000 players (20 servers clustered). Being Brutal Gladiator is a unique title on a server (and a lot of servers don't even have the title).
The same with PVE Raids these days.
Blizzard is the first mmorpg maker where some bosses are SCALED in difficulty, making for a very very small percentage to have the fantastic black or red dragons in its end game. Downing a boss on easy mode is to let everyone enjoy the scenery, but that's NOT the aim of the game anymore.
The aim now is prestige of downing them in a hard setting with all achievements up (like downing Sart has 8 different hard modes).
On my server only ... 0.3% of the Raiders could do all these Raid achievements. That's perhaps 0.01% of total players on a server.
Easy? Only for those not daring the difficult challenges in the Raid or PvP competitions....The others show off with their red and black dragons. Show me your armory and I'll laugh with the "easy" boosts.
No longer the gear is elite, it's the titles and mounts that do the shows these days. And everyone can look at the armory how poorly 99% of the people play.
))
Wait? So the point of raiding now and what decides its difficulty are optional achievements which give you nothing? So your saying if a game made an achievement for a raid that was beat 90 bosses in 3 seconds which would be impossible, then it would therefore be the most challenging end game out there? I'm sorry but that doesn't make any sense.
BAsed on numbers Since TBC the raids have gotten easier. Look at vanilla wow, how many progressed, look at TBC slightly more did, Now in northrend you have guilds full of retarded monkeys clearing every raid.
youve said exactly what i wanted to say.
the achievments are meaningless its show to show your epeen to other players. and with a good grind most of em are not a chalange
the brutal gladiator. m8 let me tell you that me as a PVE prot warrior almost had the gladiator title season 1 (i was off by a few), yes things have changed now i know that but its not a chalange.
people with brutal gladiotor stuff have: no job, too much time on their hands, good gear, and are concentrated enough not to fuck up shit. and alot of luck is also a part of PvP (you cannot control absolutely evry aspect of the whole fight)
Vanila WoW was hardcore PVE we had to do bosses night after night after night.
in tbc it went down hill with a few walls here and there. raids now are nothing. the difrent achievment settings are a aim then but as far as i know most of the guilds on my server now have completed alot of it. so your server m8 must be bullshit.
The only hardcore PvE in Vanilla WoW was couple of bugged BwL fights, C'thun before it got nerfed and couple of Naxxramas fights. The rest was easy and cleared very fast. I was raiding from early 2005 and really don't know about this night after night raiding. Maybe if you were in some mediocre casual guild. But the real hardcore guilds cleared the content fast. As I said only exception to this is C'thun and The Four Horsemen. And those are just 2 fights. Both M'uru and Kil' Jaeden are better and harder if you are really looking for something hardcore.
Xeniar is correct, MANY raiding guilds that were hardcore raided night after night after night, maybe stopping once or twice during the week, if that. Take for example the original Naxxramas race, between Nihilum and Death and Taxes. They were, at the time, the two top guilds in the world. They were the most driven, arguable the best. (on a side note, a player on my old server transferred over to D&T to become a third string pally healer-he got extremely geared extremely quick then sold the toon for almost $2k)
I know that during that race, D&T raided every single day, up until they cleared the instance. There motto was: If you get burned out or want to quit, well we have thousands of applicants ready at the drop of a hat to fill your spot. Naxxramas, not only required 40 people as opposed to today's 25 man raids in WoW, also required stacking frost resist, and having some mandatory classes in the raid, unlike today.
The four horseman, to this day, hold the title for the longest time an encounter lay undefeated from the first time it was encountered, at 7 weeks. So, really you could say that the hardcore guilds were raiding 5-6 times and week for several months. Yea pve is simple once you understand the strategy, but people didn't understand the strategy for months during naxx.
No, he is not correct and if you were there yourself as I was , you would know. He said that Vanilla WoW was hardcore. No, it was not. There were 2 bosses that were hardcore and those were C'thun and The Four Horsemen. Both Nihilum and Death and Taxes were raiding night after night on those 2 bosses and that's it. Every other boss in Vanilla WoW was killed very fast and in terms of fight complexity Vanilla bosses were inferior to TBC bosses by far - 2 exceptions are posted above. People should really take away those nostalgia goggles they are wearing when trying to prove a point. And all this is coming from a raider in 1 of WoWs top world guilds.
'Most powerful is he who controls his own power.'
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
Haven't read all before this so maybe someone else mentioned it but I assumed that the continuing success to WoW is the social aspect. The peer pressure aspect.
I assume many start to play and continue to play WoW because all their friends do. It doesn't even matter if a player and all their friends are bored of WoW and would have more fun playing another game, the fact is they're established and having fun as a group together, its a social thing, why leave.
Its not about the game. Its not about whats more fun. WoW at this point functions more as a social network than as a game, imo.
Amazing, isn't it? Paying $15 a month to do something you can do for free on Facebook.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
People left Ultima online when all their friends where playing.
They left everquest when the same applied then.
You can see the decline in many mmos and combine that with record breaking sales of mmo releases and what do you have?
Maybe people have not left for other games, because other games just don't measure up. We can speculate that millions of people won't give up a game (despite it happening in many other mmos previously) or we can just look at the condition most games are released at to see how they compare.
Two mmos last year got somewhere around a million people each to try them in the first couple of months when they released. I think that shows that people are willing to leave for a new game, but what is being offered just does not compete with the current marketplace.
People left Ultima online when all their friends where playing.
They left everquest when the same applied then.
You can see the decline in many mmos and combine that with record breaking sales of mmo releases and what do you have?
Maybe people have not left for other games, because other games just don't measure up. We can speculate that millions of people won't give up a game (despite it happening in many other mmos previously) or we can just look at the condition most games are released at to see how they compare.
Two mmos last year got somewhere around a million people each to try them in the first couple of months when they released. I think that shows that people are willing to leave for a new game, but what is being offered just does not compete with the current marketplace.
Yep, how can you compete when the majority of WoW's customers are (presumably) satisfied?
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
I am not arguing that it was not tough. But I really wouldn't give Vanilla WoW as the example of how hardcore raiding should look like. Sure, there were some interesting encounters - the ones I mentioned or Vaelastrasz - but overall the first raids and encounters were tank and spank fights with very little creativity or complexity. Note - I am not saying it was bad or anything, hell I have fond memories of doing Molten Core or BwL or any other Vanilla WoW raid, but I don't let the nostalgia to prevent me from seeing that those raids lacked a lot. Burning Crusade introduced us to more complex fights overall than Vanilla WoW and raiding also got harder. And I still think Sunwell Plateau was better dungeon than Naxxramas. Killing Kil'Jaeden , hell that was the most epic moment in WoW to this day for me.
And to talk about point of easy raiding in WotLK. I'll judge that after we finish Icecrown.
'Most powerful is he who controls his own power.'
WoW has titties. No other game can offer tits.
Because they suck. Too many incompetent game designers who think they are up to the task and fail miserably. In the process wasting half a decade of their life on trash, I can only imagine its a great blow to their ego which is why they cling so hard to their failed ideas.
let me tell you why. Blizzard created its own market.. im not talking about the mmo market.. because when blizzard came into the so called "MMO" market all the games out at the time have been pretty much the same as they are coming out now. They are what I call Traditional MMOs. WoW being far from a traditional MMO because its not a niche. where MMO's before wow were considered niche games where they are not for everyone..
Now what blizzard did was create an MMO for everyone stepping out of that niche. They got about 90% of their players that have never before played an MMO before to play wow and love it ( i know i cant prove that but its an an estimate off the top of my head)
They loved it because it was catored to them. It was very easy to pick up and play from the very first time you log in.. They did everything right to cator to the casual gamer aswell as i guess a more hardcore gamer who raided 5-7 nights a week.. They didnt care about the bugs because they were not THAT noticable.. I personally dont remeber ANY bugs at launch that took away from the gameplay.. The only bug I remember is the pally seal bug since I played a pally as my first toon. I didnt know it was a bug because it didnt seem like one. The seal just did alittle to much damange..
The reason no game can compete with wow is because the people that are playing wow are not looking for a new mmo. They love what they have and they wont leave for a wow clone because they got the best one already.. There is a game that will take a big chunk of the players from wow and thats blizzards own next MMO.
thats just my 2 cents.
Plenty of truth in your words, but I still think that for its time wow was well above par. Today vanilla wow may not be what hardcore raiding should look like, but for the time it was pretty hard.
Even though the core concept of most fights were tank and spank, almost every single fight was different. There was usually some trick, movement, placement or specific tactic that was different from almost any other boss fight. Even with prewritten strategies there were far to many guilds that could not complete encounters.
Burning crusade did a nice job of expanding on raids with new mechanics and such. Blizzard really did a good job with that one.
Lich king is to easy, because blizzard was stupid and tried changing to much to fast. Just like a few other games did, they revamped classes, talents, raids, buffs all the while adding new levels and trying to balance it and make an expansion at the same time. The only think that is making lich king "easy" is that player character balance is off. Way to much dps, healing, mana and threat generation.
I can only second this. Thankyou for writing out my thoughts ;p this would have taken forever to do.
I was one of these people who started wow as first real mmo aswell, jst as 90 percent of my friends did aswell. Ever since I got tired of WoW ive been looking around for a new one, but so far no mmo has really been able to keep me hooked as WoW did.
+ i want blizzard's new mmo too =^) ( god im gonna get a lot of hate with this post )
I have to agree with this man, wow responsiveness and combat animation is second to none. When you tell your avatar to swing or punch, you can actually see your character pivot shifted weight and swing at your opponent. Further more, unlike many of the other MMO out there, there animation is fast paced and the damage and animation sync perfect. This level of polish alone give you a great sense of immersion compare to the so called top moo. As much as I love vanguard and EQ2 which I consider to have a much better PVE and crafting experience. I could never get the same level of immersion as I did with wow because the animation is just so horrible. The character movement in those two later game don't seems as natural and nothing more than puppet on the string. The attack animation is just as bad, when I fire my arrow as a ranger/hunter in all three of the game, only in wow where the enemy actually takes damage when the bullet travel to the enemy. Both of the other game, the ammo didn't even left my bow and the enemy already taken damage and chasing after me. I know is is minor detail to most, but those are the kind of detail and really make you feel as though you are your avatar and not just you controlling a puppet in a game.
It mainstreamed MMOs by some odd chance lucky formula they created (probably not so much luck as smart design because blizzard has top talent) and a) people are playing WoW and won't leave that for these new MMOs, that arguabley are very similar to WoW, and surely not by coincidence b) WoW's success was really just a fluke, a stroke of luck. Why does anything become popular? I mean it's the same way with anything, especially in the entertainment industry. I mean there are actors, bands, etc. out there that probably aren't the "best" but for some reason they became popular, either by a certain random quality that people liked or just because they were lucky. c) Too many companies try to follow in the footsteps of WoW and are overshadowed.
Time is the only thing that will change WoW being the frontrunner. Most likely it'll be another random occurrence of an arguably well designed, mainstream game or perhaps a new MMO by blizzard! maybe WoW 2! (doubt they would do that actually, that would be stealing from themselves essentially as far as sub #s go).
These are all speculations of course but who knows, I don't think there's any one reason like I said. Things just lined up for them and they ran with it.
Hats off to you, what a brilliant discussion.
There is no need for a game to be technologically advanced, for me at least. I just want some good time in the game. Heck, I have good time in tetris or pac-man, even now, if played occasionally. WoW provided enough variety to allow something to be done whatever my mood or game time duration. WoW provided a game where a large variety of gamers will be interested in. That is a good game for a lot of people, not the "best" in whatever weird dimension, but a wide appeal.
Come to think of it, when I go out playing basketball, do I need to check the leather quality of the ball, the sewing work, the quality of wood used in the door of the stadium, or the design of the staircase leading to the carpark? Come on, if I have a nice time in the game, if its easy to find people to play with, if the environment is light, with everyone wearing a big smile, if everything falls into place leading to a good moment of gaming, what else is there that I need to care about. When the game is over, its gone. When I log out of WoW, I forget it.
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
I am not arguing that it was not tough. But I really wouldn't give Vanilla WoW as the example of how hardcore raiding should look like. Sure, there were some interesting encounters - the ones I mentioned or Vaelastrasz - but overall the first raids and encounters were tank and spank fights with very little creativity or complexity. Note - I am not saying it was bad or anything, hell I have fond memories of doing Molten Core or BwL or any other Vanilla WoW raid, but I don't let the nostalgia to prevent me from seeing that those raids lacked a lot. Burning Crusade introduced us to more complex fights overall than Vanilla WoW and raiding also got harder. And I still think Sunwell Plateau was better dungeon than Naxxramas. Killing Kil'Jaeden , hell that was the most epic moment in WoW to this day for me.
And to talk about point of easy raiding in WotLK. I'll judge that after we finish Icecrown.
Raiding in Wotlk now is not too tuf. Why? Because they only release the easy raid zones. They have Urudar (how to spell?) coming up which I heard is tougher, and Icecrown citadel will be next which will be even tougher.
Its good WoW provides raid zones for various types of players. There will be those who struggle against 10man naxx all the way. There will be those who will put Icecrown on farm status very soon. There will be those in the middle. With this way of progressive release, there will be something for most of the people. Good thing about WoW, they allow a lot more subscribers to experience the "end stuffs". The same for DAoC, in which almost everyone can go out and try the frontier.
I remember the TBC days, up to the before Wotlk release. There are still PUGs and small guilds struggling to clear kara, and there are guild who find Sunwell easy. I expect something like that with wotlk eventually.
When you have the volume of guilds attacking raid content that there are in a game the size of warcraft it isn't surprising that encounters do not go very long being undefeated.
Vanilla wow was pretty tough for its time. Sure encounters got better, but there were a lot of challenging encounters. Vaelastrza for example was a major pain in the ass for a great number of guilds.
Maybe it isn't hardcore if your view of hardcore is the extreme of stumping everyone for months in a game with millions of people, sure. Few things in when viewed in that manner are going to be.
Not that I see how this is where other games failed to compete
I am not arguing that it was not tough. But I really wouldn't give Vanilla WoW as the example of how hardcore raiding should look like. Sure, there were some interesting encounters - the ones I mentioned or Vaelastrasz - but overall the first raids and encounters were tank and spank fights with very little creativity or complexity. Note - I am not saying it was bad or anything, hell I have fond memories of doing Molten Core or BwL or any other Vanilla WoW raid, but I don't let the nostalgia to prevent me from seeing that those raids lacked a lot. Burning Crusade introduced us to more complex fights overall than Vanilla WoW and raiding also got harder. And I still think Sunwell Plateau was better dungeon than Naxxramas. Killing Kil'Jaeden , hell that was the most epic moment in WoW to this day for me.
And to talk about point of easy raiding in WotLK. I'll judge that after we finish Icecrown.
Raiding in Wotlk now is not too tuf. Why? Because they only release the easy raid zones. They have Urudar (how to spell?) coming up which I heard is tougher, and Icecrown citadel will be next which will be even tougher.
Its good WoW provides raid zones for various types of players. There will be those who struggle against 10man naxx all the way. There will be those who will put Icecrown on farm status very soon. There will be those in the middle. With this way of progressive release, there will be something for most of the people. Good thing about WoW, they allow a lot more subscribers to experience the "end stuffs". The same for DAoC, in which almost everyone can go out and try the frontier.
I remember the TBC days, up to the before Wotlk release. There are still PUGs and small guilds struggling to clear kara, and there are guild who find Sunwell easy. I expect something like that with wotlk eventually.
This is basically what I was trying to say. It is by no means bad that the entry level content in WotLK is easy, it's good. What I was trying to point out with my last sentence is that we are at the start of this expansion. It is too soon to judge the raiding content. I will personally judge raiding in WotLK after all raiding dungeons have been released and cleared.
'Most powerful is he who controls his own power.'
I've been a Warcraft fan since 1996 but I never played WoW (lol) so I don't even know if it's good or not but its success though is not surprising at all. Just look at Blizzard's past games. Yeah I'm going blind folded here, but I'm assuming WoW as well is a product of quality.
Diablo 2. Never played online, but I heard tons of people still play it even today.
Warcraft 3, land of the dota fanatics. More people play dota than the main game. (Like the case with HL and CS)
And...
Starcraft. An entire frigging nation known as South Korea behind it. Even the games are even televised over there. It's fucking crazy.
Now let me ask you this, can advertisement alone achieve this?
Blizzard spells out - what they do not count - in their PR announcements
have a look for self, how Blizzard defines subs
eu.blizzard.com/en/press/080122.html
excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
Yes, excludes free promotional subscriptions, but does not exclude initial free month players.
30 days is a long time. Do you know how many people quit or sign up for an MMO in 30 days?
They take one day, then bombard the TV and Internet with banners, Ozzy commercials, whatever other crap they lure people in with. On day 29, they compile all those numbers, 95% of which have not played since the day after seeing the commercials, combine that number with all the gold farmers, multi-boxers and angry teenagers' subscriptions... and you end up having a pretty impressive, albeit completely unrealistic, number.
This is lame analysis.
They run a commercial, on day 29 they take a snapshot on day 31 all are gone. This is your storyline.
Stupid! The sub base runs from a few millions years back to 12 million now. You are telling us that blizz is replacing their entire batch of sub every month with fresh inputs, only to lose them all by the end of the month. So for a year where the monthly sub is 6million, they need to draw in6 million fresh per month = 72 millon players to cover the year. By now, with 12million concurrent sub, they need 12 million people to buy the box at the beginning of the month and for every month, so 144 million people a year.
How many 114 million people you can corn in a year, and by now its 4.5 years.
You are out of your mind. Try to cook up a better story next time.
Hmm, well this is an easy question....
Because nothing as good as come out as of yet...it's like the movie "The Dark Knight," after seeing that movie I didn't feel like there would any good movies to come out for a long time so I stopped going to movies for a while, and since then no good comic book hero movies....not even Watchmen.
=/
Right now players are waiting for a game to one up WoW, will it happen? Maybe! Has it happened? No! Was WoW perfect? Hell no! I always saw how the game mechanics could have been a lot better. Plus without orcs and elves since I'm kinda growing tired of J.R.R. Tolkien based fanatasy games.
Do other companies have what it takes to step up to the plate? They haven't done it yet, or maybe the right company hasn't had its chance to spread it's wings! Will it happen? Actually I think the question that should be asked is will it happen before MMOs start to dry up if they do.
Chances are WoW was meant to be one of those cultural moments/freak accurancies like disco was in the 70s (lol), atleast for gamers, and it might never happen again, or as big. Blizzard might even fail to make their next MMO as big just how Hollywood fails to make sequals better than the original.
That is true, but seeing how every single game they do so far one up their last. I would like to give them a benefit of a doubt that the next one going to out do this one also. The greatest and most annoying thing about blizzard is their totally insane development cycle. Combine that with virtually limitless fund, they tend to spend as much time and money needed to developing a great game. Even if it mean increasing the development time by twice as much just to polish it up some more (great example of this would be starcraft 2). Then you have relentless testing. Beta after beta to try to fix all the kinks and smooths out the bumps. Like for starcraft, blizzard spend that last year or some having the korean pro game beta test their game for them to make sure that it is up to expectation and all the units are balanced. I understand why so many people would consider wow a fluke when it success is so overwhelming. However if you look at blizzard track record, how can anyone say that wow is a fluke when every single game blizzard push out is an instant hit.
Currently, blizzard is the only company that I will autotamically buy the collector edition of any games they make and I don't even have to bother knowing anything about it to do so. That is the level of trust that I and so many other gamer have in blizzard game.
That is true, but seeing how every single game they do so far one up their last. I would like to give them a benefit of a doubt that the next one going to out do this one also. The greatest and most annoying thing about blizzard is their totally insane development cycle. Combine that with virtually limitless fund, they tend to spend as much time and money needed to developing a great game. Even if it mean increasing the development time by twice as much just to polish it up some more (great example of this would be starcraft 2). Then you have relentless testing. Beta after beta to try to fix all the kinks and smooths out the bumps. Like for starcraft, blizzard spend that last year or some having the korean pro game beta test their game for them to make sure that it is up to expectation and all the units are balanced. I understand why so many people would consider wow a fluke when it success is so overwhelming. However if you look at blizzard track record, how can anyone say that wow is a fluke when every single game blizzard push out is an instant hit.
Currently, blizzard is the only company that I will autotamically buy the collector edition of any games they make and I don't even have to bother knowing anything about it to do so. That is the level of trust that I and so many other gamer have in blizzard game.
Well until a gaming company can come out to be this particular and have to funds to back it up, my guess is it's not going to happen...Personally I believe in uncertainties and that's why I say I'm not sure if Blizzard can one up WoW. I try to avoid making an opinion or come up with a conclusion as much as possible...leaving open the door for possibilities...it's just the way I think.
But I'm pretty sure Blizz has what it takes to keep pulling Pixars so yeah I agree with you there.
Do I wish other companies could do this? Hell yeah! That means we can see more variety and not have to keep waiting for Blizz next MMO. I think Blizz has even gone so far as encouraging this and that's why they spoke so highly of Bioware making Swtor.
Now as for Bioware having what it takes to make a successful MMO in the tradition of Blizz...only time will tell...and it might not happen...lol
WoW is the most succesful mmorpg out there. Whether it's the best comes down to personal opinion.