Blame people that buy pre-orders, life subs, collectors editions, and regular accounts of games that copy WoW. Companies make what people will buy. The market has shown people will shell out for these games even if they leave in a few months. How many bought SWTOR...what makes you think another company will not copy with the pitch to investors that they can get the same sales, but their game will keep people. If people never bought then investors would not invest in those games.
Yep.
WE decide what games are going to be made. WE do. If gamers are happy paying for the garbage that's out these days then that's exactly what they're going to keep pushing on us.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
What is that? What about smooth game play, excelent pvp, 1000 of achievements, huge worlds, fantastic sound. Dude you cant finish only all achievemnets in 10 years . Nothing will replace wow for long time
To the author, did you ever do Sunwell? Heroic Ragnaros? Lady Sinestra? To say that WoW's encounters are all simplified is a falacy. It's the same idea that just because leveling and 5-man dungens are easy, the whole game is easy. The real concept behind WoW, as expressed from the developers themselves, is "easy to play, hard to master".
Before you go on saying how encounters are so simplified, you should experience the more complicated ones. You know, Spine of Deathwing, for example, took one of the most hardcore gaming guilds in the planet more than 300+ attempts to defeat.
Both your examples - EVE and Guild Wars - have better and actually WoW equivalent predating databases for quests, items, etc. The lack of Armory type character lookup is not a disadvantage - rather means that those games do not reward having to copy the gameplay style of other people in order to have fun. I am going to be frank, I can disagree on every point you raise in the article and contrary to my usual disposition, I am going to state the obvious - it doesn't look like you've touched or showed interest in any other game than WoW, or never bothered to check community have to offer.
WoW made carebear MMO's popular, they took out the risk, accommodated to noobs and everybody followed suit.
Yes it's popular, but many gamers only grew up playing that kind of MMO, those who say they don't want an MMO to be a second job, nor do I, but I would like some challenge. As an Ultima Online player for a large part of my life I liked having a challenge to collect gold, armour and weapons - If you were willing to deal with the risk you would get rewarded and thats how I feel MMO's should be.
If done right I feel you could accomodate everybody, balanced pve and pvp, player driven economy, quests, etc... Shame that no developers are willing to take a risk, but as more and more MMO's are released and go F2P, it'll have to change sometime... (Much like how the FPS market is getting bombarded)
For the amount of money they have made with this game over the years look at it.....
Right. Their legacy is they made alot of money with it and the reinvestment in it was pathetic. If they consider themselves the leaders of the genre they haven't acted responsibly in any way shape or form it could be argued.
With what they have made in just raw cash they could have developed 2x GW1, 2x GW2 , a SWTOR, 8 or so expansions and had enough left over to send enough to completely wipe out Greece's debt issue.
Instead we got Dumwing and Pandas with pokmon and farmville and a cash shop in a subscription game. Over streamlined mechanics and homogenization of all the classes.
The game sucks in my opinion and the "Talent" in Blizzard has been long long gone.
Blizzard craptivision is the new Zynga. And it shows.
I hate it for the simple fact it made brainless suits believe the MMO market was far bigger than it actually is.
When will they and gamers accept that WOW was a fluke its a freak its not the 900lb Gorilla its not the one to topple its nothing more than a freak occurence and nothing will ever hit those figures again.
Now can we please be content with 500k playerbases and MMO's in there own niche again and not every damn thing trying to be a carbon clone of the freak.
I knew that I could come to the comments on this article, and see a whole bunch of people who have absolutely no idea how WoW came to make the billions of dollars it has made, but are instead completely convinced that it was all due to luck, advertising, Warcraft RTS fans, the phase of the moon, etc. etc.
I knew that I could come to the comments on this article, and see a whole bunch of people who have absolutely no idea how WoW came to make the billions of dollars it has made, but are instead completely convinced that it was all due to luck, advertising, Warcraft RTS fans, the phase of the moon, etc. etc.
No, I don't agree with you.
Back in the day, the talent trees were big and had some complexity. You could customise your character just how you liked it.
Some realms were different and very atmospheric. Duskwood and the Plaguelands, for example.
All this slowly started changing after Vanilla WoW.
After a point, all the weaknesses of WoW showed through. Particularly the "kill 20 beasts in a field" quests.
It is the perception of most that Blizzard have lost their way further with Pandas.
On a personal note, I had to change my characters name (after 3 years) because a computer program thought my name was controversial. Personally, I thought that Cracky was a good name for a mage.
I knew that I could come to the comments on this article, and see a whole bunch of people who have absolutely no idea how WoW came to make the billions of dollars it has made, but are instead completely convinced that it was all due to luck, advertising, Warcraft RTS fans, the phase of the moon, etc. etc.
No, I don't agree with you.
Back in the day, the talent trees were big and had some complexity. You could customise your character just how you liked it.
Some realms were different and very atmospheric. Duskwood and the Plaguelands, for example.
All this slowly started changing after Vanilla WoW.
After a point, all the weaknesses of WoW showed through. Particularly the "kill 20 beasts in a field" quests.
It is the perception of most that Blizzard have lost their way further with Pandas.
On a personal note, I had to change my characters name (after 3 years) because a computer program thought my name was controversial. Personally, I thought that Cracky was a good name for a mage.
Talent trees have always been more of a perception of choice than an actual choice. It's much like what people state that the new system promotes choice versus previous systems.
The worst part of the talent system is the massive amount of developer hours needed to make each investment worth the choice. Many of the talents included in the trees were point-sinks (forced to take to get to the next teir or dependant talent) thus the illusion of choice.
It is true that there were more choices in previous systems but Blizzard began to errode those with the release of Cata which forced you to invest 31 in a single tree before you could attempt to hybridize.
Some people just dont understand. He wasn't saying a harsh dp is a bad thing, Just that most players dont want or need one. Sure u have the nitche group of players who want harsh dp but the truth is the majority of people playing mmo;s dont
To each there own but in the end the truth is part of the allowing people who arent computer geniuses or hard core gamers who spend 150 hrs a week playing games access is that it also made it so players didnt need to spend 5 hrs finding there body and didnt have to re do every thing to get there gear ack cause they were to late getting to there body so they lost it all.
I am saying that not everyone likes what u like, And a harsh dp is a very minority gamer group. Id say 90 pct of mmo players dont want or need a harsh dp to play a game, just because it gets some persons heart beating rapidly doesnt mean it does everyones
Really in the end wow and every other mmo is a game, That means they should be fun and not a frustrating punishment that gets 2 pct of the population off on the harsh dp.
As I see it, WoW itself has had little effect on other MMOs, it's more that WoW's success has had a massive effect on the design decisions of other MMO developers, where instead they should be attempting some sort of innovation and then trying to emulate Blizzard's more successful business decicions, like actually marketing the game outside of cliqueish venues like blogsites that cover MMO development. Unfortunately, Videogames, like any other industry, are not about making fun, or making new, or making exciting... they're about making money. As long as Video game development is approached as an industrial practice, just like any other segment of the entertainment industry, any positive experiences outside the investor's bank account will be a secondary effect at best, and likely accidental or opposed during development.
Like music and movies, or even the automtive industry, mediocrity and substandard durability will actually be rewarded on an industrial level, allowing industrial support of the latest disposable fad, only to be replaced by industrial support of the next fad, so as to sell new copies of new games as often as possible. Increases in marketing hype and decreases in development quality will continue to show that this process makes more money, and makes it faster than any traditional approach of providing top notch quality products and service to a consumer based that has been taught to appreciate neither, but to drool over high end graphics in a video segment that consists of no actual game footage.
If brute force isn't working, you're not using enough.
Blame people that buy pre-orders, life subs, collectors editions, and regular accounts of games that copy WoW. Companies make what people will buy. The market has shown people will shell out for these games even if they leave in a few months. How many bought SWTOR...what makes you think another company will not copy with the pitch to investors that they can get the same sales, but their game will keep people. If people never bought then investors would not invest in those games.
Yep.
WE decide what games are going to be made. WE do. If gamers are happy paying for the garbage that's out these days then that's exactly what they're going to keep pushing on us.
No, WE really don't.
WE are the junkies. They are the drug dealers.
They say, "This is what I got.", and WE say, "Whatever, man! As long as the pain stops!"
If, by some miracle, WE break the habit, they won't try to win us back with something new, they'll just move to another genre and leave this one in shambles.
They're locusts like that.
If it stops making money, trying something new is still too risky. They'll see MMORPGs as a fad who's time has passed. Safer just to find another genre that seems profitable and move on to the next cornfield.
No, the devs are the ones that have to take the first step for things to be different.
(Reason for editing: I added a comma where there wasn't one. God, I'm becoming an English teacher! )
Holy crap Victor...do you know ANYTHING about the history of MMORPGs?
Everything you credited WoW for was done by OTHER games first...and if you fall back on "WoW popularized it" you are basically saying something along the lines of Ford didnt invent the automobile because someone else sold more.
well Ford didn't invent the automobile he was beaten to it by a German bloke called Benz by close to 100 years.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.
For me WoW made everything easier and reduce how fun the game was.
The WoW effect
1999-2004 games = Fun and challenging
2004-2011 games = Easy, no challenges, No penalties and not very fun
This is just my option, Because WoW was the first game to advertise on TV globaly it was the reason why it got so many subscribers, and because of this all the games afterwards basicly copied them (Clones). Almost no one knew about MMORPG before blizzard advertised WoW. If WoW didnt advertise like they did i doubt they would of gotten the amount of subscribers than they did and the entire mmorpg market would be compeltly different and i reckon it would of been better than it is atm if Blizzard didnt advertise WoW.
For me WoW made everything easier and reduce how fun the game was.
The WoW effect
1999-2004 games = Fun and challenging
2004-2011 games = Easy, no challenges, No penalties and not very fun
This is just my option, Because WoW was the first game to advertise on TV globaly it was the reason why it got so many subscribers, and because of this all the games afterwards basicly copied them (Clones). Almost no one knew about MMORPG before blizzard advertised WoW. If WoW didnt advertise like they did i doubt they would of gotten the amount of subscribers than they did and the entire mmorpg market would be compeltly different and i reckon it would of been better than it is atm if Blizzard didnt advertise WoW.
For me wow made everything better.
1999-2004 - mmo world was grey and boring and there was no real competition
2004-2012- WOW did what nobody did before-complete mmorpg with first real pvp challenges , for me is Arena in wow Alpha&Omega of fantasy genre mmo pvp. 2vs2 3vs3 5vs5 -to get ranking ove 2,2 k you must be really good player. WOW is pure quality and he will stay a standard for success in mmo for long time. Huge , huge lands and so much to explore, 1000 of achievements, epic invasions of enemy faction cities, every class has his own place in pvp or pve and nobody is useless, game play is so smooth and so fluid in every situation, so many mounts of every kind, best auction house system, so many battlegrounds you cant be bored even in bg type pvp, every class is so specific that you want level every one of them, amazing sound and music, so many raids and we can count forever.
To the author, did you ever do Sunwell? Heroic Ragnaros? Lady Sinestra? To say that WoW's encounters are all simplified is a falacy. It's the same idea that just because leveling and 5-man dungens are easy, the whole game is easy. The real concept behind WoW, as expressed from the developers themselves, is "easy to play, hard to master".
Before you go on saying how encounters are so simplified, you should experience the more complicated ones. You know, Spine of Deathwing, for example, took one of the most hardcore gaming guilds in the planet more than 300+ attempts to defeat.
WoW has basically killed any innotive thinking in the MMO developers. For each new MMO that comes out its a near clone or copy of WoW. And due to this people will log on and moan about it not being WoW. Then quit the game.
And those that try to move away from this cloning/coppying of the mechanics are seen as being to difficult to play because people have been handed everything to them on a plate in the WoW universe. So with each patch they are dumbed down so more poeple can play them without learning the mechanics. SWG anyone ?
Its only now we are starting to see devlopers move away from the WoW template because nearly all the MMO's that came out that used the same kind of mechanics are now failing, even WoW is starting to fail.
This is down to one reason, and that is the mechanics are built round a class/level system. All games built round this type of system will eventualy fail due to people getting to max level doing all the raids hundreds of times with various classes. And they get fed up and look for a new game. The sandbox MMO has players who will stay with the MMO for far longer, but usualy these type of games have a steeper learning curve which most new players are either to stupid to learn due to being brain killed by WoW. Or they just want instant gratification without having to put in the time to actualy earn their way in the game world.
Thankfully this year we may see some big changes to new MMO's and I can't wait to see how these games do. I hope they will wake up the developers and get them thinking again.
To the author, did you ever do Sunwell? Heroic Ragnaros? Lady Sinestra? To say that WoW's encounters are all simplified is a falacy. It's the same idea that just because leveling and 5-man dungens are easy, the whole game is easy. The real concept behind WoW, as expressed from the developers themselves, is "easy to play, hard to master".
Before you go on saying how encounters are so simplified, you should experience the more complicated ones. You know, Spine of Deathwing, for example, took one of the most hardcore gaming guilds in the planet more than 300+ attempts to defeat.
Blame people that buy pre-orders, life subs, collectors editions, and regular accounts of games that copy WoW. Companies make what people will buy. The market has shown people will shell out for these games even if they leave in a few months. How many bought SWTOR...what makes you think another company will not copy with the pitch to investors that they can get the same sales, but their game will keep people. If people never bought then investors would not invest in those games.
Yep.
WE decide what games are going to be made. WE do. If gamers are happy paying for the garbage that's out these days then that's exactly what they're going to keep pushing on us.
No, WE really don't.
WE are the junkies. They are the drug dealers.
They say, "This is what I got.", and WE say, "Whatever, man! As long as the pain stops!"
If, by some miracle, WE break the habit, they won't try to win us back with something new, they'll just move to another genre and leave this one in shambles.
They're locusts like that.
If it stops making money, trying something new is still too risky. They'll see MMORPGs as a fad who's time has passed. Safer just to find another genre that seems profitable and move on to the next cornfield.
No, the devs are the ones that have to take the first step for things to be different.
(Reason for editing: I added a comma where there wasn't one. God, I'm becoming an English teacher! )
There's probably more useful info in this post than in any professional article.
Full loot corpse run in the middle of a dungeon which takes 30 minutes to get in the middle of with 10 minute spawn time and a "vitae" penalty of -10% of your overall stats each time you died making you grind on previous teared monsters to get your strength back up and more often than not using your inferior gear in the bank because you failed to recover your corpse in time. Those were the days.
Comments
Yep.
WE decide what games are going to be made. WE do. If gamers are happy paying for the garbage that's out these days then that's exactly what they're going to keep pushing on us.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
What is that? What about smooth game play, excelent pvp, 1000 of achievements, huge worlds, fantastic sound. Dude you cant finish only all achievemnets in 10 years . Nothing will replace wow for long time
I think the word achievement is turned on its head when its used in a gaming context.
I think "Bender Badges" is more suited. Collect them all.
To the author, did you ever do Sunwell? Heroic Ragnaros? Lady Sinestra? To say that WoW's encounters are all simplified is a falacy. It's the same idea that just because leveling and 5-man dungens are easy, the whole game is easy. The real concept behind WoW, as expressed from the developers themselves, is "easy to play, hard to master".
Before you go on saying how encounters are so simplified, you should experience the more complicated ones. You know, Spine of Deathwing, for example, took one of the most hardcore gaming guilds in the planet more than 300+ attempts to defeat.
Both your examples - EVE and Guild Wars - have better and actually WoW equivalent predating databases for quests, items, etc. The lack of Armory type character lookup is not a disadvantage - rather means that those games do not reward having to copy the gameplay style of other people in order to have fun. I am going to be frank, I can disagree on every point you raise in the article and contrary to my usual disposition, I am going to state the obvious - it doesn't look like you've touched or showed interest in any other game than WoW, or never bothered to check community have to offer.
WoW = recycled watered down bull puck.
WoW made carebear MMO's popular, they took out the risk, accommodated to noobs and everybody followed suit.
Yes it's popular, but many gamers only grew up playing that kind of MMO, those who say they don't want an MMO to be a second job, nor do I, but I would like some challenge. As an Ultima Online player for a large part of my life I liked having a challenge to collect gold, armour and weapons - If you were willing to deal with the risk you would get rewarded and thats how I feel MMO's should be.
If done right I feel you could accomodate everybody, balanced pve and pvp, player driven economy, quests, etc... Shame that no developers are willing to take a risk, but as more and more MMO's are released and go F2P, it'll have to change sometime... (Much like how the FPS market is getting bombarded)
For the amount of money they have made with this game over the years look at it.....
Right. Their legacy is they made alot of money with it and the reinvestment in it was pathetic. If they consider themselves the leaders of the genre they haven't acted responsibly in any way shape or form it could be argued.
With what they have made in just raw cash they could have developed 2x GW1, 2x GW2 , a SWTOR, 8 or so expansions and had enough left over to send enough to completely wipe out Greece's debt issue.
Instead we got Dumwing and Pandas with pokmon and farmville and a cash shop in a subscription game. Over streamlined mechanics and homogenization of all the classes.
The game sucks in my opinion and the "Talent" in Blizzard has been long long gone.
Blizzard craptivision is the new Zynga. And it shows.
I hate WOW despite having never played it.
I hate it for the simple fact it made brainless suits believe the MMO market was far bigger than it actually is.
When will they and gamers accept that WOW was a fluke its a freak its not the 900lb Gorilla its not the one to topple its nothing more than a freak occurence and nothing will ever hit those figures again.
Now can we please be content with 500k playerbases and MMO's in there own niche again and not every damn thing trying to be a carbon clone of the freak.
The biggest negative wasn't mentioned in the article - it's the the "kill 20 beasts in a field" quests (that repeat everywhere).
I think the guy who wrote the article is being paid by Blizzard to help market WoW.
There was only one paragraph about end-game bosses that was genuinely negative.
MUME was better and had awesome pvp.
I knew that I could come to the comments on this article, and see a whole bunch of people who have absolutely no idea how WoW came to make the billions of dollars it has made, but are instead completely convinced that it was all due to luck, advertising, Warcraft RTS fans, the phase of the moon, etc. etc.
No, I don't agree with you.
Back in the day, the talent trees were big and had some complexity. You could customise your character just how you liked it.
Some realms were different and very atmospheric. Duskwood and the Plaguelands, for example.
All this slowly started changing after Vanilla WoW.
After a point, all the weaknesses of WoW showed through. Particularly the "kill 20 beasts in a field" quests.
It is the perception of most that Blizzard have lost their way further with Pandas.
On a personal note, I had to change my characters name (after 3 years) because a computer program thought my name was controversial. Personally, I thought that Cracky was a good name for a mage.
Talent trees have always been more of a perception of choice than an actual choice. It's much like what people state that the new system promotes choice versus previous systems.
The worst part of the talent system is the massive amount of developer hours needed to make each investment worth the choice. Many of the talents included in the trees were point-sinks (forced to take to get to the next teir or dependant talent) thus the illusion of choice.
It is true that there were more choices in previous systems but Blizzard began to errode those with the release of Cata which forced you to invest 31 in a single tree before you could attempt to hybridize.
Some people just dont understand. He wasn't saying a harsh dp is a bad thing, Just that most players dont want or need one. Sure u have the nitche group of players who want harsh dp but the truth is the majority of people playing mmo;s dont
To each there own but in the end the truth is part of the allowing people who arent computer geniuses or hard core gamers who spend 150 hrs a week playing games access is that it also made it so players didnt need to spend 5 hrs finding there body and didnt have to re do every thing to get there gear ack cause they were to late getting to there body so they lost it all.
I am saying that not everyone likes what u like, And a harsh dp is a very minority gamer group. Id say 90 pct of mmo players dont want or need a harsh dp to play a game, just because it gets some persons heart beating rapidly doesnt mean it does everyones
Really in the end wow and every other mmo is a game, That means they should be fun and not a frustrating punishment that gets 2 pct of the population off on the harsh dp.
As I see it, WoW itself has had little effect on other MMOs, it's more that WoW's success has had a massive effect on the design decisions of other MMO developers, where instead they should be attempting some sort of innovation and then trying to emulate Blizzard's more successful business decicions, like actually marketing the game outside of cliqueish venues like blogsites that cover MMO development. Unfortunately, Videogames, like any other industry, are not about making fun, or making new, or making exciting... they're about making money. As long as Video game development is approached as an industrial practice, just like any other segment of the entertainment industry, any positive experiences outside the investor's bank account will be a secondary effect at best, and likely accidental or opposed during development.
Like music and movies, or even the automtive industry, mediocrity and substandard durability will actually be rewarded on an industrial level, allowing industrial support of the latest disposable fad, only to be replaced by industrial support of the next fad, so as to sell new copies of new games as often as possible. Increases in marketing hype and decreases in development quality will continue to show that this process makes more money, and makes it faster than any traditional approach of providing top notch quality products and service to a consumer based that has been taught to appreciate neither, but to drool over high end graphics in a video segment that consists of no actual game footage.
If brute force isn't working, you're not using enough.
No, WE really don't.
WE are the junkies. They are the drug dealers.
They say, "This is what I got.", and WE say, "Whatever, man! As long as the pain stops!"
If, by some miracle, WE break the habit, they won't try to win us back with something new, they'll just move to another genre and leave this one in shambles.
They're locusts like that.
If it stops making money, trying something new is still too risky. They'll see MMORPGs as a fad who's time has passed. Safer just to find another genre that seems profitable and move on to the next cornfield.
No, the devs are the ones that have to take the first step for things to be different.
(Reason for editing: I added a comma where there wasn't one. God, I'm becoming an English teacher!
)
well Ford didn't invent the automobile he was beaten to it by a German bloke called Benz by close to 100 years.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.
For me WoW made everything easier and reduce how fun the game was.
The WoW effect
1999-2004 games = Fun and challenging
2004-2011 games = Easy, no challenges, No penalties and not very fun
This is just my option, Because WoW was the first game to advertise on TV globaly it was the reason why it got so many subscribers, and because of this all the games afterwards basicly copied them (Clones). Almost no one knew about MMORPG before blizzard advertised WoW. If WoW didnt advertise like they did i doubt they would of gotten the amount of subscribers than they did and the entire mmorpg market would be compeltly different and i reckon it would of been better than it is atm if Blizzard didnt advertise WoW.
For me wow made everything better.
1999-2004 - mmo world was grey and boring and there was no real competition
2004-2012- WOW did what nobody did before-complete mmorpg with first real pvp challenges , for me is Arena in wow Alpha&Omega of fantasy genre mmo pvp. 2vs2 3vs3 5vs5 -to get ranking ove 2,2 k you must be really good player. WOW is pure quality and he will stay a standard for success in mmo for long time. Huge , huge lands and so much to explore, 1000 of achievements, epic invasions of enemy faction cities, every class has his own place in pvp or pve and nobody is useless, game play is so smooth and so fluid in every situation, so many mounts of every kind, best auction house system, so many battlegrounds you cant be bored even in bg type pvp, every class is so specific that you want level every one of them, amazing sound and music, so many raids and we can count forever.
+10
WoW has basically killed any innotive thinking in the MMO developers. For each new MMO that comes out its a near clone or copy of WoW. And due to this people will log on and moan about it not being WoW. Then quit the game.
And those that try to move away from this cloning/coppying of the mechanics are seen as being to difficult to play because people have been handed everything to them on a plate in the WoW universe. So with each patch they are dumbed down so more poeple can play them without learning the mechanics. SWG anyone ?
Its only now we are starting to see devlopers move away from the WoW template because nearly all the MMO's that came out that used the same kind of mechanics are now failing, even WoW is starting to fail.
This is down to one reason, and that is the mechanics are built round a class/level system. All games built round this type of system will eventualy fail due to people getting to max level doing all the raids hundreds of times with various classes. And they get fed up and look for a new game. The sandbox MMO has players who will stay with the MMO for far longer, but usualy these type of games have a steeper learning curve which most new players are either to stupid to learn due to being brain killed by WoW. Or they just want instant gratification without having to put in the time to actualy earn their way in the game world.
Thankfully this year we may see some big changes to new MMO's and I can't wait to see how these games do. I hope they will wake up the developers and get them thinking again.
i second the motion.. 10+
There's probably more useful info in this post than in any professional article.
Full loot corpse run in the middle of a dungeon which takes 30 minutes to get in the middle of with 10 minute spawn time and a "vitae" penalty of -10% of your overall stats each time you died making you grind on previous teared monsters to get your strength back up and more often than not using your inferior gear in the bank because you failed to recover your corpse in time. Those were the days.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.