Originally posted by Josher None of iWOWs problems are ignored. The thing is, other MMORPGs have problems and they outweigh whatever they do well. AC and its world events are completely OVERSHADOWED by rampant boting and cheating. SBs great concepts are completely negated by a horrible interface, bad graphics and bugs galore. Eve's cool community and open PvP is sadly made worhtless because the game itself is so slow and boring. Those are important issues. WOWs queue aren't really so bad when you consider what other MMORPG made you go through in that same time period. You have to put it perspective. Its balance issues are so minor compared to current balance issues in other MMORPGs. Every person who seems to think WOW has class balance issues also for some reason, always seem completely ignorant of other classes abilities. How convenient is it for someone who doesn't know much to think something isn't fair?
LOL, everytime I try to take you seriously josher you go and say things like that, "WoWs problems are OK because you know, they aren't really that bad, I mean, yeah, they aren't". You continuously bash EVE too lol, EVE being boring is how you feel about the game, it's not fact, and after so many people pointing it out I have yet to see you admit such. It's about ratings isn't it? Be careful man, your bias is showing and it's pretty damn big too!
Originally posted by Josher Saying that if WOW didn't have a the Blizzard name is actually what doesn't matter because its hypothetical and no one will EVER know.
Oh please, don't kid yourself .
---------------------------------- MMOs Retired From: Earth and Beyond, Project Entropia, There, A Tale in the Desert, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, City of Heroes/Villains.
LOL, everytime I try to take you seriously josher you go and say things like that, "WoWs problems are OK because you know, they aren't really that bad, I mean, yeah, they aren't". You continuously bash EVE too lol, EVE being boring is how you feel about the game, it's not fact, and after so many people pointing it out I have yet to see you admit such. It's about ratings isn't it? Be careful man, your bias is showing and it's pretty damn big too!
Originally posted by Josher Saying that if WOW didn't have a the Blizzard name is actually what doesn't matter because its hypothetical and no one will EVER know.
Oh please, don't kid yourself .
If 20 kids are given 2 flavors of icecream and 19 of them think vanilla is boring and Tuttifruity is more fun, whats the consensus? The 19 kids must be nuts, because acoridng to some here, 1 opinion means more than 19 when debating what most people think.
According to you, mass opinion means nothing, which means you're the type of person who can't separate your ideas from everyone elses around you. You bring up hypotheticals and use them to argue. You're basically impossible to reason with, so why waste the time anymore. Enjoy living in fairyland.
"Most people find Eve a boring game" is about as true as the sky is blue. But, I'm sure the sky is red in fairy land=) Its like having a discussion with a child holding his fingers in his ears. You can only block out reality for so long. WHy bother.
95% of gamers are casual.... What statistics are you quoting or are you just pulling numbers out of where you sit? I would hazzard the guess that most casual gamers do not play mmos because of the recurring fees and because of the amount of time that must be put into an mmo. Yes, many casual gamers get into mmo's but the majority of which are rapidly left behind by friends and guilds that have more time to spend in the game then others.
Most companies want to primarily make money. There are some companies that are still trying to make games though. Bioware and Lionhead studios are 2 companies that I can name off the top of my head.
Your definitions of what constitutes good and bad do not invalidate any other persons opinion. There are many people that have been gaming most likely alot longer than you, and thus have a wider experience to draw upon for making a judgement call.
Your definition of a casual gamer is flawed. If people game looking for a stress filled environment then those people need to seek psychiatric help.
As to your definitions of good and bad... 1) see above. 2) just because you feel a certain way does not reflect the feelings of 95% of the gaming public, you are just another person no better than anyone else but because you believe you speak for not just 51% of gamers but nearly every gamer in the entire world shows that you have an overinflated sense of self and that your ego is wildly out of touch with reality and you should go outside and see some sun.
If someone dislikes something about a game and therefore thinks it sucks does not make their thinking flawed. They think it sucks its their perogative to have an opinion. Now as to your example I think you are misreading, or only reading what you want. The complaints you have quoted (without source) are wide and encompasses many games that have been released recently. They may name those things because of an overall frustration with the been there done that. Your ideas of an alternative are shortsighted and ill thought out. There are many ideas some being undertaken at this very moment to break out of the rediculous mold that developers have been too cowardly and have lacked too much in the creativity department to undertake. Thankfully there are pioneers out there, that are gamers, and that feel something must change and are trying to do something about it.
About your empirically derived opinions. Well there are 3 definitions of empirical first off. And with the tone of your post I am assuming that you are refering to the most common one which is :capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment. As in Empirical laws in science.
You state breadth and depth of wow, your experience must be EXTREMELY limited to believe that there is depth to that game and for the lack of experience you can be forgiven. For coming off like your opinion is more valid than anyone elses you can not be forgiven. You fail to cite specific examples in how wow is deeper than any other game, how it is broader/more encompassing than anyother game. And graphically what game is it better than that has come out in the relative same time and what criteria are you using apart from opinion?
What does wow do bad? Maybe its not intrinsically bad, but it is nothing new. Everything done in wow has been done before and with considerably more depth and thought. For example crafting, crafting in wow is pointless and stripped down to be a nonessential. Combat has little to no strategic depth to it. PVP is unbalanced and individual class talents are incomplete/useless. This is proven with the changes that just went live with hunters, the second revamp of druids and paladins. nothing has been addressed to the shaman's being highly favored by the designers and coders of wow bringing them in line with the rest of classes in the game. And I guess you have never read the forums at worldofwarcraft.com as there are hundreds and thousands of posts about what should be fixed and addressed. But then again your experience in WOW is highly limited so much of what you are talking about you have failed to notice or live with for any given amount of time.
Ran out of code? Well like I said you havent experienced the game to be able to speak on this but coding is only limited by the imagination of the dev team. If blizzard ran out of code then they ran out of creativity which given what I have seen from blizzard is a distinct possibility.
Wow may have the most subscribers for a north america game, but jerry springer also gets very high ratings in the number of people that watch it. Does that mean that because of a large subscriber base the game is good? Not in my book. look at the subscribers to the Enquirer vs Time. Is the enquirer a better magazine or source of news than Time?
You say it does everything right for the casual gamer.. How is it a casual gamer to spend 3-7 hours in one instance, several times a week? How is it that the only way to be competitve is to go through the instances because items are bop and friends and guilds can not assist casual gamers in keeping them competitive. I think your view of what a casual gamer is is flawed, or you feel that the game is build for a casual gamer without being one. if you arent one then how can you make a judgement call on what is right for a casual gamer?
Your post is redundant and your logic is faulty as you can provide no concrete examples to back up anythign that you have said. you quote numbers and statistics with no basis in reality and show that you are biased. If you do not like what people have bashed about wow then you should respond to them with factual statements rather than trying to sound like someone (who I might add has little experience with what you are trying to defend) who believes they are right and anyone that disagrees with them is wrong.
Things in WoW that were promised for launch are only now starting to make their way to live, MANY issues with lag and faulty ai are still unadressed, the customer service is atrocious, and the character classes are still, almost a year from release, not balanced appropriately. The community in WoW is one of the worst I have ever had the displeasure of meeting and is only rivaled by lineage2 in the amount of filth and grieving that is present in the game. Try playing on a RP server when Tichondrius or other large servers are down and hearing the cries of Roleplayers are the sux, rpers are ph4gs etc etc etc. Get to level 60, spend a couple of weeks getting to ragnaros in molten core only to have items pilfered by one of your own guildies that does this not because of need, but to cause problems for everyone else then turn and brag about it in ironforge and on the forums.
People like to complain when things don't go their way. SO, we hear "The PVP sucks because you can't loot the loser! WAAH!". What if YOU were the loser?!
Obviously the person complaining didn't give that much thought, or they simply wanted to vent about a game that recently frustrated and had nothing legit to post about (like me, I'm very bored right now with nothing better to do ), or they figured out a way that they could get what they want if the system was implemented by using various glitches and mods.
Enjoy the game for what it is, and if that's not possible, then don't play it. Of course, nobody's ever heard that phrase before! Right, I know it's difficult to put down an addicting game, even if you hate it.. especially after forking up $65.00 to play it for the first month...
severius, don't bother to answer, Josher. He just keeps spouting out his naive and distorted views and keeps ignoring or (deliberately?) misunderstanding points and arguments. I agree to most of your post, yet I don't think anything of it will help to start making him think about what he wrote. Luckily I wrote my posts at work, else I would have been forced to sent him a bill for wasted life time.
------------------------------------------------------ Originally posted by Mandolin
Designers need to move away from the old D&D level-based model which was never designed for player vs player combat in the first place.
Originally posted by Cryomatrix Hey guys, This is my 2nd new topic post, my first new topic was just a post about why I thought WoW might be unsatisfying to some people
Good games dont need some die-hard coming to defend them. To put it kindly, wow caters to a large portion of the gaming industry with broad needs and no specifics in mind. There's no point you prancing around because it offends you that x% of the market doesn't like wow, if it was the game to end all games then everyone would like it, deal with it. Games address peoples imaginations and passions, so just how you wasted 90 minutes of your life writing a page of A4 on here, some people will write a paragraph to put you in your place.
-- Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
I've said it before but, which MMORPG within 10 months of release has...
Has a battle system with as many USABLE skills, secondary effects, where position actually matters, controls VERY well, has items & trinkets usable in battle, scrolls, potions, food and drink and moves as quickly. Its not AC. Its not EQ2. Its certainly not FFXI, L or L2. Its not SB. Its not UO. Its not even COH. GWs is pretty varried, but its not a MMORPG. WOWs classes don't overlap like the newer ones Mythic added. Its more balanced NOW, than some current games that've been around for years.
Fun PvE and PvP that is actually balanced fairly well? Balance is not opinion. Its just what is. Priests can beat Warriors. Warlocks can beat anyone. Hunters can beat Mages and on and on. Theres issues, but they're so minor compared to say what Mythic went through the 1st 2 years. Really, its the only comparable game out there that delivered both PvE and PvP in the same game that people actually enjoyed. Group PvP is very balanced and simple duels can go either way any time. ALl complaints about balance ALWAYS come from ignorance, but I said that previously.
Has as many forms of travel, uncluding 16+ different ground mounts, 4 different air mounts, plus air travel, boats, gates, summoning and on and on. I'm sure someone will say but, "the mounts are all the same." Well, name another game that has as many? You can't. How is that SIMPLISTIC? Name a game that does travel better with so many different options? You simply CAN NOT name a game because it does not exist.
Has as many quests? EQ2 is the only one. I'm sure someone will they're all the same also. Well, you can still take away the repetative gathering quests and ONLY included the unique ones and you'd STILL have just as many in WOW. If you dissagree, you simple haven't played the game enough to see them. Remember, don't compare 4 years of content and multiple expansion to 10 months. Compare apples with apples.
Underwater sections that are actually well done and not clunky.
Has as detailed a world, graphically, that doesn't have huge wasted space and is still large? Maybe EQ2.
Is considered fun to play by most people playing MMROPGs even if only for a few months. I know this doesn't matter to some people but go find a bad OFFICIAL review of WOW on the web from anyone who isn't just bitter about the genre completely. Every bad review comes from people who really don't like anything very much at the moment. Yes, reviews don't matter to anyone except those who actually like profitable games=)
You can solo to max lvl OR group any time you want. Both modes of play are very viable. Never been done in a MMORPG.
Has as many unique dungeons within its 1st year? Never been done.
Lets you gain items, ranks and Reputation just through PvP that opens up more content.
3 different server rulesets. Remember, not even a year old.
Blizzard still has had problems with Customer service, but those problems are not as bad as the first year of EQ, DOAC, AO, AC2 and a slew of others, or subscriptions would've dropped off. AO a had HUGE backlash when Funcom dropped the ball. WOW is not perfect because no game is. Its just really well done for such a short time and it can only get better. Other MMORPGs simply can't get any better because they already passed the point of no return. If they do, the effect can't help the game.
You may call it opinion, but black and white is black and white. Its all in the game and theres no refuting it. Other games do certain things better. Thats ok though. None do it all at "well" to "geat". Theres nothing really that BAD in WOW. It all works. You just can't say that about other MMORPG. WIth every good, there comes something that just breaks somethign else. Crafting, although important to some of you, doesn't effect game sales all that much. It has to be good and it has to work. It doesn't have to be great. A crafting system can always improve.
I'm done posting in this thread because it seems no one can refute anything without bringing up opinion and using that to debate. You can't debate with opion. Use the facts. I just did above.
Sorry, but using Jerry Springer doesn't matter because its not quality programming and NO ONE actually says it is. Loads of people know that WOW is a quality MMORPG. If you don't think it is you're just in the vast minority and thats ok. No making fun. No name calling. No using hypothetical examples. Use the facts. Use previous MMORPG examples and history. Be mature.
Why is it that, whenever someone says "World of Warcraft isn't all that", someone has to go and say "World of Warcraft is better than anything out there so STFU!"?
First part: Spells, Skills, Usable things in combat, ect.
Items
So you can use things in combat. I wonder what other MMORPGs let you do that? (sarcasm) Star Wars Galaxies? Nahh, you can't use medical items in combat to heal yourself (potions) or buff yourself as a doctor (buff spells), now that I think about it, Everquest 2, Final Fantasy XI, and UO don't have any items or spell-like actions that you can use in combat! (/sarcasm). OK, so every major MMO on the market now DOES have some way to do EXACTLY what you can do with trinkets, secondary effects, spells, and potions in World of Warcraft. Blizzard simply split them into categories: Food and Drink as "non-combat regenerate/buff items"; Potions as "instant in-combat regenerate/buff items"; Trinkets as "equipped constant effect / combat instant items".
Skills
In World of Warcraft, you choose a class and you're stuck with it until you decide to make another character. Sure, you can have up to 10 characters on one server, but.. as a priest or warlock, you'll never be able to lift a two-handed sword, only stare at it, perplexed, as you ponder it's meaning. As a paladin, you can't possibly decipher the purpose of "bows" or "guns". Sure, you can reset your talent points whenever you want (IE: you're level 60, made unwise choices, so you unlearn your talents and make a commonly used build for that class... like everyone else...). In the end, everyone's using the same skills, just in different ways. What about other games? SWG for example: you start as a basic class, but you can abandon skills in favor of new ones for free at any time and you can even become something completely different if you want... like a swordsman gets sick of being melee based, so he adds a tad of marksmanship to vary the gameplay. You can't do that in WoW last I played.
PvE and PvP
PvE
I Don't believe that any MMO has even semi-entertaining PvE, and WoW doesn't break that mold. I don't know where you get "fun" from doing the same thing over and over... but then you might be one of those annoying people who listen only to "no no no" on their ipods wherever they go.
PvP
This is the best part of the game. You get to test your skills and practiced combos against another player and you can try your best to defeat them! I mean... really, everyone's at level 60 during that giant raid on Orgrimmar in your group, so it'll be an even playing field when the anti-raid group from the horde blackens the horizon to match your party's vast strength... right? Well, no. The classes are not balanced, and some peeps are fully automated with macros and mods, and with only one click of a button they can level anyone they face while going to the bathroom. SO FUN!!!
Travel
Walking.... and lots of it, at least until you're level 40, then you blow all your hard-earned cash on a mount that refuses to spawn in combat when you need to get away quickly (GAH!!! *is level 42* level 60 shamie coming... **starts spawning mount** spawn mount.. please... **frost shocked** NOOO!!!). The flying things are all the same, just with different pretty colors , and you can't control them, so where's the fun in that?! Boats are just platforms that move and teleport you to a different continent (oh wait, there are only two...). I think that's very simplistic.
OK, I'll name a game: SWG (I use this as a reference a lot, because it has the potential of a good MMO, but the devs made many-a bad choice). You can buy a vehicle (many to choose from) to go quite a lot faster than walking (instead of a pathetic 80% increase after breaking the bank), you can fly in space in a starfighter to go from planet to planet instead of waiting for a shuttle (IE: waiting for a boat to go to one of two continents in WoW).
Quests
Yes, these are a very good part of the game! But it's all over so quickly, and a good 97% of them are not repeatable! It's good to have unique quests AND repeatable ones for people to get some extra spending money from, with a good boost to experience too! After all the quests that are possible to be done are done... you run out of things to do. (So I sold all my stuff and gave the money (25011 gold) to a newbie before I quit, because I didn't want that week's worth of work to go to waste ).
Underwater
This was one thing I was very happy about in WoW. YOU CAN SWIM NOW!!! YESS!!!! Other MMOs didn't offer a very good alternative to this.
Detail
The major MMOs truly out-do WoW in this aspect. The graphics are tooney and you can see polygon glitches often (where the pixel shader goes insane and does too much or too little). EQ2, SWG, MxO, ect. all have better visuals (imo). If you like cartooney/glitchy, then WoW would be a good choice for you in this department.
Land Size / Expansiveness
There's too large and wasted space... and then there's too small and "been there done that". I'd say World of Warcraft is a bit smaller than the name would suggest. I'd run into the same horde group dozens of times in The Hinterlands and Searing Gorge while grinding for experience. It's just too often... they even left me alone after a while (after killing me repeatedly, say 6-8 times, I forget) because they got sick of my death animation (or something) .
Group / Solo / Max Level
EQ2, SWQ, UO, and MxO, ect. offer the same deal. You can solo and group whenever and you can actually get somewhere. However... some games, like SWG, don't have a "max level". You simply master something, get sick of it, and move onto something else with that same character, instead of mastering something, getting sick of it and staying there unless you make a new character to follow a different class. In WoW, level 60 is the pinnacle of divinity for all players who aspire to it, but also the death of their fun, as in their journeys, they've done everything there is to be done (except perhaps, solo a boss, which is impossible unless it's around 1/2 of your level...).
Customer Service and Overall Satisfaction
World of Warcraft has quite a bit to offer for ONE-TIME (After hitting level 60 for the third time, I threw in the towel and tried other games, seeking something entertaining to do while having too much free time on this awesomely long work-free vacation). WoW has began the descent into mediocrity, with the devs augmenting the unce-damned ideas of games long past to their lumbering war engine they call "original", much like all the verbiage I'm throwing into this post (it's all been heard before).
Opinions?
Black and White is an interesting game where you're a god and you-.... oh right, metaphors. Well, you're merely using facts to support your opinions by twisting certain parts of them to be in favor of WoW. If something bad was noted, it was compared to other game's flaws (some not even on topic) and if there was something good about it, nothing was put in the picture to allow World of Warcraft to soak up the glory as it sat upon the "pedestal of gloating might".
The Decent, The Bad, and the Hideous
There are many critical flaws in WoW, like the balance issue, but what game DOESN'T have that problem? They're slowly trying to fix it, but as long as there are players who demand and protest when the game barely peeks it's head out of the workshop, it will never get better! Let us all remember Star Wars Galaxies, in it's glory days as the greatest MMO for less than eight months... when people demanded NERFING and it all blew to dust.
Being Mature
Making fun, calling names, hypocrisy. To be honest, you showed quite a few examples of these behaviors. Making fun in the first paragraph " It's not this. It's not even that. It's certainly not this.", that was like saying "it's not these lowly things! It's THIS!!".
"Name a game that does travel better with so many different options? You simply CAN NOT name a game because it does not exist." Ah, hypocrisy at it's finest. You immediately assumed that nobody would speak up, so you wrote out that last part to call it a statement. That's a tad hypocritical, as it conflicts with "being mature".
Ok, Josher. Since you made a lot clearer and definitely more intelligent post than your former ones I'll respond to this, eventhough you again ignored the (to me) important issue of "casual gaming" which was brought up by me and severius. Also, I will leave out other games here, since WoW has to stand for itself and comparing all the time is pointless after a point. Why? There are games which make things better than WoW and other things worse, and if soembody likes those things that are well done by a game and has little "contact" with that game's bad sides (which ofc may be there and pissing off other players) then he will look down at WoW as inferior. So therefore, no comparisons.
Design The problem with WoW, the point where it ultimately fails (at least sofar) is that it's way overdesigned. It tries to cater (successfully) to the broad masses and therefore it uses the most "acceptable" features possible. So, ie as to not piss people off, you got essentially no death penalty (don't tell me that bit of repair cost is a penalty), idiot proof quests (I actually don't believe that people still had to ask in general chat about some quests), not too complex item creation (we dont wanna fry the fragile brain of the customer), no player market whatsoever (due to binding items), and a few things that slipped my mind (covered by a very merciful veil of forgetting). These are "facts" too, partly even confirmed by you (item creation). Additionally PvP is pointless since there are (yet) no real aims to follow, especially not for a casual gamer, because then you are always behind (pointwise) to those people who are not necessarily better, but simply have more time to play (not leveling, only getting "pvp rewards"). PvP is reduced to a joke, where not player skill counts, but quality of macros and ganging up on the target.
Epic Story WARcraft (stressing the "War" here) has so much potential in its storyline for large scale betrayal, intrigues and, yes, *wars*. Yet nothing of that feeling ever emerged in WoW. You can't influence the world to any extent, quests which are there "to save the king/druid circle/poor virgin/etc" lose its meanign if everyone you know has done so too. The world is static, without any "life", and even the conflict between Alliance and Horde can't alleviate this. So you achieved in killing all the NPCs/Players in Stormwind? So what? Soon they will respawn and everything is back to normal, after the attacking force gets bored or logs off to go sleeping. The nice shops are still there, the city still survives unscathed.
Frustrated anyone? No possibility of loss (xp, items) means less "frustration", though it also means less feeling of achievment. In all 6 months of WoW I never had any situation where I had a "omg this was exciting" feeling, because there was absolutely no risk involved (ok, one time, but still there was no risk). So why are there so many subscribers playing? Don't they want to achive something? Sure, but please keep in mind that humans also always try to go the easy way, and they forget that its only through negative experiences that we value the positive ones. If we only have positive experiences (no death penalty, no risk at all) then the game gets stale (the same can be applied to RL too, btw). And no, aside from stupid players or technical issues I had not what you could call "negative ingame experience". Its a big selling argument that you can't lose anything, so numbers again don't tell us a thing about the quality of a game. WoW is like Disneyland, where you go from attraction to attraction being safe all the time from the attractions.
Hey, I saw your face before A minor point, I admit yet something that is very imprtant to RPGs - Character Customization. You can change too little in your apperance, that it actually hurts. Never did I have the feelign that my character was an individual (no, equipment is not everything). I won't even go into not being able to choose at least some basic stats or distribute some attribute points, and choose some skills to personalize your character a bit.
No, my son you don't get that fine meat, you are too young One other, I admit minor nitpick, is the fact that certain food can be only consumed at certain levels. *bumps head on desk* Another proof that leveling systems are crap, too arbitary, and often result in involountary comical situations, removing a great deal of the "immersion" into the game world.
About soloing WoW Do the Deadmines at level .... lets say ....25 (max. where it is sensible to do them), please do a vid and send me the link. I'd love to see *that*. Avoiding instances and all Elite quests is a way to solo ofc, but that is like only eating the cherry and not drinking the cocktail.
Pluses Plus bad community, plus bad patching system, plus bad customer support (if you deny that then you really live in fantasy land). Also since most people responsible for creating their franchises left Blizzard, it remains to be seen how the company will develop in the future. Yes they *may* add more good content, but taking announcements or "possibilities-that-are-there-and-just-need-to-be-used" as actual changes or features goes a bit too far. It only counts what's actually in game.
So looking at WoW alone and even if it would be the only MMORPG on the market - as a (role playing) game it would still be lacking.
------------------------------------------------------ Originally posted by Mandolin
Designers need to move away from the old D&D level-based model which was never designed for player vs player combat in the first place.
Josher, that last post was one of the most intilligent posts I have read on this topic so far. gratz. The two posts that follow obviously cannot follow you and again decide to look like idiots.
Originally posted by Azirophos Design The problem with WoW, the point where it ultimately fails (at least sofar) is that it's way overdesigned. It tries to cater (successfully) to the broad masses and therefore it uses the most "acceptable" features possible.
So designing for the masses is a bad thing? I am confused. Azirophus, should mmorpg.com only talk about games you like and not mmorpgs that the masses like? We don't want mmoprg.com overdesigning their website with "acceptable" features that the majority like.
Epic Story WARcraft (stressing the "War" here) has so much potential in its storyline for large scale betrayal, intrigues and, yes, *wars*. Yet nothing of that feeling ever emerged in WoW. You can't influence the world to any extent, quests which are there "to save the king/druid circle/poor virgin/etc" lose its meanign if everyone you know has done so too.
Ok, so apparently PvP wars at Tarren Mill don't float your boat. Or in world raids of Undercity or SW. So I again understand you, WoW is a broken game because everyone has an oppurtunity to complete a quest? WoW is unplayable because two other players logged in happens to have the same epic item as you? Maybe you cannot influence the world the way you liked, but if you havent seen a guild corner a market on materials in the AH, by tripling the price, well that is some serious in world inflluence :P
Frustrated anyone? No possibility of loss (xp, items) means less "frustration", though it also means less feeling of achievment. In all 6 months of WoW I never had any situation where I had a "omg this was exciting" feeling, because there was absolutely no risk involved (ok, one time, but still there was no risk).
You are always at a risk of wasting time walking to your body or getting corpsed camp hence, wasting even more time. And as you said it yourself, you have had moments that were still exciting even though you did not "lose XP or items". So I can understand your arguement, you want players to LOSE XP and ITEMS because this will make the game better. Adding frustration is what WoW needs so it will be better?
Hey, I saw your face before A minor point, I admit yet something that is very imprtant to RPGs - Character Customization. You can change too little in your apperance, that it actually hurts. Never did I have the feelign that my character was an individual (no, equipment is not everything). I won't even go into not being able to choose at least some basic stats or distribute some attribute points, and choose some skills to personalize your character a bit.
Ok now your nitpicking. Again, aside from the fact you can equip your toon to look diferent, choose from different build trees, different professions that can augment your toon, character customization is nonexistant. Again, this is not a flaw, this is to streamline leveling, toon creation, and get players playing the game.
No, my son you don't get that fine meat, you are too young One other, I admit minor nitpick, is the fact that certain food can be only consumed at certain levels. *bumps head on desk* Another proof that leveling systems are crap, too arbitary, and often result in involountary comical situations, removing a great deal of the "immersion" into the game world.
I will not even comment on this.
So looking at WoW alone and even if it would be the only MMORPG on the market - as a (role playing) game it would still be lacking.
You said it, its lacking but it definitely is NOT the worse game out there. In fact, probably the best game out there right now. My question to you and all other haters, How long did you play the game? I bet it was months. The longest I ever played a game I didn't like, had to be 30 minutes. LOL
I spent a total of 113 HOURS in queue for AV battlegrounds, I never even seen the place with my own character.
Such a HUGE part of the game only available to a few lucky, the horde and those who ended up on the very few balanced servers make this game SUCK in the PvP area like no other game have sucked before it.
There, I just bashed WoW and I am NOT going to jail for it so the OP is WRONG.
I very very much doubt I will ever go back to WoW, I had a fair bit of fun getting to 60, enough to get my moneys worth i suppose but with no big guild and an alliance char on an unbalanced server continuing would be like giving away 15$ a month and get absoutely zero in return.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Originally posted by Jerek_
I wonder if you honestly even believe what you type, or if you live in a made up world of facts. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Plasuma!!! Items So you can use things in combat. I wonder what other MMORPGs let you do that? (sarcasm) Star Wars Galaxies? Nahh, you can't use medical items in combat to heal yourself (potions) or buff yourself as a doctor (buff spells), now that I think about it, Everquest 2, Final Fantasy XI, and UO don't have any items or spell-like actions that you can use in combat! (/sarcasm). OK, so every major MMO on the market now DOES have some way to do EXACTLY what you can do with trinkets, secondary effects, spells, and potions in World of Warcraft. Blizzard simply split them into categories: Food and Drink as "non-combat regenerate/buff items"; Potions as "instant in-combat regenerate/buff items"; Trinkets as "equipped constant effect / combat instant items".
What is your point? Items are as good as WoW compared to other games? WoW took the best ideas out of the other games? You know how to make a poor openning arguement?
Skills In World of Warcraft, you choose a class and you're stuck with it until you decide to make another character. Sure, you can have up to 10 characters on one server, but.. as a priest or warlock, you'll never be able to lift a two-handed sword, ...
Ok, so in order to be the perfect MMO, cloth wearers should be able to wield two handed swords? I know that is not what your are getting at, I will give you more credit then that. But like you said, if you want to take a break from playing a mage, go reroll a rogue. It's not difficult to level and if anything, it will help save up rested XP on your main. Again, this is not a flaw by any means. Why would I want my warrior spec'd tauren to suddenly turn into a heal bot? I would rather role a new priest.
PvE and PvP PvE I Don't believe that any MMO has even semi-entertaining PvE, and WoW doesn't break that mold. I don't know where you get "fun" from doing the same thing over and over...
Ok, thats an opinion on two levels. One, that you think PvE is repetative and two, well you don't like it. I have had great fun PvEing especially with a fun group. And if I even go do a quest over for loot, its still fun because the group is usually different. Again, I am not arguing PvE is fun, that is an opinion, but I can safely say, the majority of players do not have a problem with it, or they would have stopped playing. And last I checked, I don't have that hard of a time finding a group for quests.
PvP This is the best part of the game. You get to test your skills and practiced combos against another player and you can try your best to defeat them! I mean... really, everyone's at level 60 during that giant raid on Orgrimmar in your group, so it'll be an even playing field when the anti-raid group from the horde blackens the horizon to match your party's vast strength... right? Well, no. The classes are not balanced, and some peeps are fully automated with macros and mods, and with only one click of a button they can level anyone they face while going to the bathroom. SO FUN!!!
* sigh * You cannot one click multiple actions, maybe if you actually tried macros you would know this. Class balancing is not perfect, but what game is? And it has only been 10 months... Balancing happens over time and really, class balance is NOT broken or we would have 10,000 players playing not 1,000,000.
Travel Walking.... and lots of it, at least until you're level 40, then you blow all your hard-earned cash on a mount that refuses to spawn in combat..
Obviously you have not played other MMOs where you would have to wait for load when walking into a new area. I agree the walking does suck, but again, not enough to stop the 1,000,000+ playing the game. In fact, it makes getting the mount that much better. And it should break your bank. Unless you plan on saving the gold and passing it on to your virtual kids, I'm not sure what the arguement is?
Quests Yes, these are a very good part of the game! But it's all over so quickly...
Sounds more like you had a lot of fun in quests and wished they were longer. Much props to the quests designers at blizzards.
Land Size / Expansiveness There's too large and wasted space... and then there's too small and "been there done that". I'd say World of Warcraft is a bit smaller than the name would suggest. I'd run into the same horde group dozens of times in The Hinterlands and Searing Gorge while grinding for experience. It's just too often... they even left me alone after a while (after killing me repeatedly, say 6-8 times, I forget) because they got sick of my death animation (or something)
It might seem small/big (not sure what you are saying exactly) because... no, not sure what you are saying. Its too big and too small? Seeing the same ppl in the same area cuz you are in the same area tends to happen. I'm sure if you left Hinterlands or where ever you were, you probably wont see them since... well they are at Hinterlands.
Group / Solo / Max Level EQ2, SWQ, UO, and MxO, ect. offer the same deal. You can solo and group whenever and you can actually get somewhere. However... some games, like SWG, don't have a "max level". You simply master something, get sick of it, and move onto something else with that same character, instead of mastering something, getting sick of it and staying there unless you make a new character to follow a different class. In WoW, level 60 is the pinnacle of divinity for all players who aspire to it, but also the death of their fun, as in their journeys, they've done everything there is to be done (except perhaps, solo a boss, which is impossible unless it's around 1/2 of your level...).
So this game you dislike so much, you played til level 60? Imagine what you might have done, had you liked this game... maybe played it to its max level... and well, liked it! I will not argue this point because if at level 60, you don't know what to do *cough* BG/HL Raid/In World Raid/Help Lowbies/KoS tag a guild or player *cough* then I guess you don't know.
Had a blast. I hope you marry up because your gene pool could use all the help it can get.
So designing for the masses is a bad thing? I am confused. Azirophus, should mmorpg.com only talk about games you like and not mmorpgs that the masses like? We don't want mmoprg.com overdesigning their website with "acceptable" features that the majority like.
I did not say designing for the masses is bad, I did not say I want MMORPG.com to talk about the games I like, actually I never even mentioned their website or MMORPG.com, ffs. And what do game features have to to with website features? I did not say I hate or don't like WoW, I just pointed at some errors in the design and gameplay. Learn to read (a side note: normally, I don't give a piss about it, but you even misspelled my name). You can like a game and still be critical toward it. Criticism does not equal hate or dislike.
Basically you do the same as Josher, use some things that you think works fine and politely ignore the rest. Also, you write down the usual blah, blah as answers and if you see something that doesn't suit your argumentation then its not worth a comment. Alright, at last you succeded in what not even Josher could. Im out of this thread. This amount of ignorance (or bad reading skills) is sickening.
Josher asked for one thing that I totally agree with him. Be mature. Calling somebody an idiot is not mature, and does nothing to prove your point - only that you are yourself what you called others.
Good day, my dear sir.
------------------------------------------------------ Originally posted by Mandolin
Designers need to move away from the old D&D level-based model which was never designed for player vs player combat in the first place.
Design The problem with WoW, the point where it ultimately fails (at least sofar) is that it's way overdesigned. It tries to cater (successfully) to the broad masses and therefore it uses the most "acceptable" features possible.
And this is bad?
You seem to be obvious to fact that Everquest II and Guild War didn't get as many number of players as anticipated for one simple reason...they cattered their games for certain social groups or players rather than all groups. Granted that GW was more successful than Everquest II, it's sales have drops (almost to a halt) because it has the same features as MMORPG (thus the reason many consider it an MMORPG), lack replayability content & repetitive gameplay and causal gamers do not make the majority of the market. (In the same 3 month time period as WoW, GW only amassed 600,000 players where as WoW had report having 1 million players between Nov to Jan.)
WoW, on the hand, took the smart route and create servers for all types of gamplay, created quests for hardcore and causal gamers (Underground instances for the Hardcore gamer and simple outside tasks for the causal gamer.), which attracted a lot of players.
So, ie as to not piss people off, you got essentially no death penalty (don't tell me that bit of repair cost is a penalty), idiot proof quests (I actually don't believe that people still had to ask in general chat about some quests), not too complex item creation (we dont wanna fry the fragile brain of the customer), no player market whatsoever (due to binding items), and a few things that slipped my mind (covered by a very merciful veil of forgetting). These are "facts" too, partly even confirmed by you (item creation).
As fingaz said, the last thing Blizzard wanted to do is frustrate the players by making leveling and item creation extreme difficult.
Additionally PvP is pointless since there are (yet) no real aims to follow, especially not for a casual gamer, because then you are always behind (pointwise) to those people who are not necessarily better, but simply have more time to play (not leveling, only getting "pvp rewards"). PvP is reduced to a joke, where not player skill counts, but quality of macros and ganging up on the target.
PvP is a lot better than some MMORPGs (and MORPGs) I've played in the past. PvP in NeverWinter Nights was extremely imbalanced. The four dominanting classes were Wizard, Sorcerer, Cleric and Rogue and that was due to regular skills (stealth) and abusing magic enchantments or uber spells. (stack protection spells, non-saving spells, etc.)
Guild Wars is not too much of a case of imbalancement, but rather an issue that the class powers (the strength of each individual class) in the game were too black and white. Despite GW fanboys arguing that the game requires skill, it really doesn't. Skill, in the game world, is in-game experience and knowledge being applied to a game-related situation. In GW, not having certain classes in your group or not possessing a certain "skill" can cost you the battle. So the battles are, more or less, decided by dumb-luck such having the right character build (or team build) and/or you (or your group)have the right "skills." (This perspective is the complete opposite for the opposing team you are up against.) And because of that no one can truly dominate PvP or say they were the most skilled since you go into the fights blind.
This is not the case with WoW since PvP is based on the indivdual level, class, class build and skill. Your class determines how fair well against another class, a Rogue and Hunter can easily defeat almost any spellcaster class. Level plays a mild part in whether you win or not. There have been fights were low level warriors have defeated high level mages. (By 10 levels.) Certain Class builds you create also increase your chances of winning, though, it creates an imbalance issue at the same time. The popular Assassin/Stuble Rogue build are extremely overpowering due to their stunlock and players often use this build in PvP, but it's the only build that fairs the best in PvP. The same goes with the Arms/Fury Warrior Build. Lastly, Skill does comes into play because at one time Rogues dominated even over the Warrior class, but now with the Arms/Fury build, a warrior can end a fight in few blows to cloth-wearers and leather wearers.
It only feels imbalance for most players who use classes who do not specialize in taking out other class. (i.e Paladin) I do admit that it's saddening that such classes get the shaft, but I'm pretty sure Blizzard is trying to come up with ways for those class to be more effective. You'll have to keep your fingers crossed.
Epic Story WARcraft (stressing the "War" here) has so much potential in its storyline for large scale betrayal, intrigues and, yes, *wars*. Yet nothing of that feeling ever emerged in WoW. You can't influence the world to any extent, quests which are there "to save the king/druid circle/poor virgin/etc" lose its meanign if everyone you know has done so too. The world is static, without any "life", and even the conflict between Alliance and Horde can't alleviate this. So you achieved in killing all the NPCs/Players in Stormwind? So what? Soon they will respawn and everything is back to normal, after the attacking force gets bored or logs off to go sleeping. The nice shops are still there, the city still survives unscathed.
Again, I refer to Guild Wars and it's linear storyline. You can't diverge from the original storyline, you cannot be evil or good, you are good automatically. This makes the story easy to follow, but boring as the story's concept is a cliche of a lot of past epics scenarios. (Which all involve war.) If you are looking for a game that changes the major storyline with each decision you make then play a console game.
Story-quest wise, almost every MMORPG (and MORPG) uses the same type quests so you can't fault WoW for doing that. Nor should they (the quests) effect the enivornment around you. If you want to play game were the decisions you make effect the enivornment around you (ala Fable) then play a console game. Such features would make the game hard for new players to adjust. Imagine logging in for the first time to find a nice playable enivornment in the Alliance district then the next week you find yourself standing in a ruin starting point that once was a Alliance territory and face to face with high level Horde players who are ready to pummel you into the ground. That would make the gameplay frustration and the story difficult to follow. Majority of the players would leave on the account that game changes to rapid and sudden for them to adapt, making for extremely imbalancing gameplay PvE and PvP wise.
Frustrated anyone? No possibility of loss (xp, items) means less "frustration", though it also means less feeling of achievment. In all 6 months of WoW I never had any situation where I had a "omg this was exciting" feeling, because there was absolutely no risk involved (ok, one time, but still there was no risk). So why are there so many subscribers playing? Don't they want to achive something? Sure, but please keep in mind that humans also always try to go the easy way, and they forget that its only through negative experiences that we value the positive ones. If we only have positive experiences (no death penalty, no risk at all) then the game gets stale (the same can be applied to RL too, btw). And no, aside from stupid players or technical issues I had not what you could call "negative ingame experience". Its a big selling argument that you can't lose anything, so numbers again don't tell us a thing about the quality of a game. WoW is like Disneyland, where you go from attraction to attraction being safe all the time from the attractions.
At one time they did have XP-Lost and you would get de-leveled, but that caused a lot of frustration and harm glitches involving equipment with level requirements. So WoW changed it to where you loss the XP-Rest and damage to your equipment. And as fingaz said, lost time means lost of XP you could have gotten if you hadn't died. You may also not benefit from completing a task with a group if you die beforehand meaning you'll have to wait for a respawn or redo the whole quest/instance with another group.
Hey, I saw your face before A minor point, I admit yet something that is very imprtant to RPGs - Character Customization. You can change too little in your apperance, that it actually hurts. Never did I have the feelign that my character was an individual (no, equipment is not everything). I won't even go into not being able to choose at least some basic stats or distribute some attribute points, and choose some skills to personalize your character a bit.
If you master certain trade professions, you can make your own normal clothing or your armor. You don't have to look like the next person. Tabard also have individuality in terms of clothing. As for personal character features that's where I agree with you and my suggestion to Blizzard would be to add more minority looks and hairstyles. WoW is too "white" in terms of it's character generator. I would like to see a set of braids for human players, "faids," half-bald half braid Asian hairstyles, etc. And more weapon choices and the number of weapons available in that category wouldn't hurt either.
No, my son you don't get that fine meat, you are too young One other, I admit minor nitpick, is the fact that certain food can be only consumed at certain levels. *bumps head on desk* Another proof that leveling systems are crap, too arbitary, and often result in involountary comical situations, removing a great deal of the "immersion" into the game world.
Level caps system prevents power gaming. It would become extremely imbalance pvp wise if a level 1 paladin could kill a level 10 warrior easy because he's wearing uber armor and using an weapon he got from his fellow guild member. PvE wise, it would allow players to farm easier, which is what Blizzard doesn't want. A player market would be point pointless if you could give your player weapons/armor from your last character. (Which is why GW economy sucks) Lastly, why would a level 6 warrior want a watermelon with level cap of 30 that restore 3,000 HP when a level 6 warrior barely has 600 HP?
About soloing WoW Do the Deadmines at level .... lets say ....25 (max. where it is sensible to do them), please do a vid and send me the link. I'd love to see *that*. Avoiding instances and all Elite quests is a way to solo ofc, but that is like only eating the cherry and not drinking the cocktail.
You can only solo certain instances with certain class and they have to be certain levels to do them. (A Rogue would probably need to be level 30 to solo with excellence.) The simple outside quests are much easier to complete because you have access to towns and players roam nearby.
Pluses Plus bad community, plus bad patching system, plus bad customer support (if you deny that then you really live in fantasy land). A
Guild Wars, hands down, has the worse community because they have no in-game moderation, they are a divided community within the same server (as if they have a choice) and a rigid economy were high-end items are sold for almost little to nothing.
So looking at WoW alone and even if it would be the only MMORPG on the market - as a (role playing) game it would still be lacking.
You're look at this from console game rpg perspective and I'm sorry to say WoW (and any other MMORPG or MORPG.) will never live up to any console game rpg. Most MMORPGs, including WoW, are completely different from your average console rpg in everyway as they don't force you down a linear storyline or cause drastic changes to your enivornment.
In World of Warcraft, you choose a class and you're stuck with it until you decide to make another character. Sure, you can have up to 10 characters on one server, but.. as a priest or warlock, you'll never be able to lift a two-handed sword, only stare at it, perplexed, as you ponder it's meaning. As a paladin, you can't possibly decipher the purpose of "bows" or "guns". Sure, you can reset your talent points whenever you want (IE: you're level 60, made unwise choices, so you unlearn your talents and make a commonly used build for that class... like everyone else...). In the end, everyone's using the same skills, just in different ways. What about other games? SWG for example: you start as a basic class, but you can abandon skills in favor of new ones for free at any time and you can even become something completely different if you want... like a swordsman gets sick of being melee based, so he adds a tad of marksmanship to vary the gameplay. You can't do that in WoW last I played.
First off, you actually can diverge without resetting your talent tree(s), but it depends on the server you are on or how much you plan to PvP or PvE. I was a Assassin/Combat Rogue mostly for PvE purposes because I sucked at the stun-locking method and I seldomly PvP. The build was quite effective PvE wise and didn't require much stealth.
Secondly, from your paragraph, it sounds like you want classes to be more DnD style where you can learn every passive skill of another class. This would make class imbalanced at the core. Axe wielding Rogue or Double-Handed Sword Rogues could do frightening damage when using melee-based builds. There is already a complaint with the Sword & Club Rogue build and Swashbuckler Rogue Build because they can dish out a lot more than a Warrior can dish out in melee. The same thing happened in Neverwinter Nights with the Cleric class when they acquire martial weapons or exotic weapons passive skills; they ended up fighting better than the Fighter class.
WoW did a good job dividing responsibilities up between classes.
The problem with WoW, the point where it ultimately fails (at least sofar) is that it's way overdesigned. It tries to cater (successfully) to the broad masses and therefore it uses the most "acceptable" features possible.
So ultimately failing because it tries to cater to the broad masses does not mean designing for the masses is bad. Wow... how did you ever come up with that. That has got to be a higher plain of thinking.
I did not say I want MMORPG.com to talk about the games I like, actually I never even mentioned their website or MMORPG.com, ffs.
I will be the first to apologize for my error. I did not know you could not comprehend analogies.
Basically you do the same as Josher, use some things that you think works fine and politely ignore the rest.
If you mean both Josher and I use things that work like... making sense, then yes you are correct. But you are wrong about politely ignoring the rest, as I apparently can't ignore your lack of constructive arguements.
Alright, at last you succeded in what not even Josher could. Im out of this thread. This amount of ignorance (or bad reading skills) is sickening.
Again we agree that this lack of ignorance is sickening and I am glad you are doing us all a favor by not ever commenting on this thread. I can only hope you can do the same for all threads so the amount of ignorance can be reduced.
Ok, ok, I am being mean. Seriously I do not think you are an idiot Azirophos. In fact I commend you for posting. I just want to point out that you should really be careful of what you post and be ready for "haters" to flame you. I would not want you to stop posting because I am being a smart @ss. In fact I hope you dissect these comments and throw it back in my face.
I didn't think I'd need to make this clear, but when I said in my OP that I am basing my things on assumptions, that means that I am presuming my statistics are true. If you think critically, this means that I have no hardcore evidence because if I did, I would have put them up there. This means that I based a large portion of my argument based on something that without evidence I thought was true. Now this is extremely stupid on my part. It doesn't mean my stats are right or wrong, but an intelligent post would have hardcore facts over assumptions. If you are going to post then why did you make the post in the first place, then you'd have to read somewhere between posts 20-60 where I explained why I wrote the post. Of course it would have been better if I wasn't hallucinating due to lack of sleep.
It's kind of funny how i got bashed between posts like 2-20, then I didnt' get bashed from posts 20-61, and then I get bashed again from posts 62 to present.
I do want to respond to Azirophus though. Thanks for the well-thought out post but I would take your comments and call them part of the design, not part of the problem. One thing I think we truly need to internalize which I don't think most people do is that Blizzard is all about the money, do you think they give a damn if WoW is good or bad? They only care if the game brings in the money and to bring in the money you have to cater to the majority of your audience.
Companies worldwide specifically cater to their assumed audience. Look at the commercials that you see on TV and look at how they change depending on what station or TV program you are watching. Each TV program has its own audience whether it be football or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and thus the commercials shown will be catered to that audience.
So Blizzard tailored their game for that purpose, now Azirophus, what you see as a problem, blizzard sees as the crux of its design. Now I'm going to bring up WoW cannot be bashed legitimately again but let me put that statement into perspective.
1. I truly don't believe that WoW cannot be legitimately bashed, it is just more fun to set that as a goal and to argue it, i do believe they come close to it. Essentially, in my oft-bashed opinion I think WoW can only be bashed legitimately if you bash it on a goal for the game that they screwed up. For example, I will harken back to Josher's automobile example between a Toyota and a Ferrari.
I think most people bash WoW in a manner that is similar to someone saying Toyota's suck because they do not reach 62 mph or 100 km/hr in 3.6 seconds. Essentially they are bashing Toyota for something it was not meant to do. WoW makes the game easy and lvling to 60 is a joke well that's part of the design. So a lot of the things I've been reading from people about why WoW falls short or whatever, are reasons that I believe were built into the design. Of course this isn't true 100%, wait lines for BG is probably one thing that wasn't part of the design, the redundancy of the quests is another thing, but then some people may not think the quests are redundant, it is all a matter of opinion.
I just read CaptainRPG's last post and he nicely showed a point that I unsuccessfully tried to make in my OP and if you look at Azirophus's points and how he bashes WoW on certain things and then CaptainRPG showed how the alternative would be even worse. That was a point I was trying to make is that people will bash things in a game and not even think of the implications of their suggestions. For example, Azirophus said well a priest could never pick up a two-handed sword, well if Bliz allowed that, then there would be no individuality in classes and that would break the game.
I guess to reiterate my main point is that Blizzard's main goal was to attract as many people as possible because money is their end goal so if you want to bash WoW on how they unsuccessfully tried to attract people then that is legitimate but don't bash WoW on something it wasn't trying to do. Since, I believe they succeeded in doing that, there is a point on a graph that says "cannot be legitimately bashed" and WoW comes asymptotically close to it.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying since WoW has so many subscribers the game is awesome and is flawless, but I am saying that due to the 4 million subscribers WoW's main goal of attracting the masses has succeeded with flying colors and that it is hard to bash them on what they have tried to do.
Cryomatrix
Catch me streaming at twitch.tv/cryomatrix You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Comments like, "WOW is too easy to level in", or "Theres no FFA PvP" or "You can't impact the world enough" are just mindless, pointless bashes. All by design or features that actually make it a good game that people are having fun in. 4 million.
Comments like "WOW's battle system is simplistic" or "WOW has crappy graphics" or "WOW gets boring at 60" are all just ignorant lies and pointless opinions. WHo cares if you think the graphics are cartoony? Who cares if you THINK it gets boring or is simplistic. Thats not a problem with the game. Its a problem with you.
Something like, "WOW lacks decent lighting or environental effects which ruins immersion" or "WOW has a REALLY bad patching system" or "WOW's community isn't all that great" are complete truths because they actually have some proof behind them.
See the difference between bashing and constructive criticism?
Fingaz, responding to the end of the post (the other stuff was well pointed out, thanks for actually taking the time to read and respond to the post ):
I made it to level 60.. multiple times! 3 times to be precise! Warrior, Hunter, and Mage.
I believe that I saw this game through the eyes of a powerleveller (MUST.. MAXIMIZE.. STATS!!!) instead of through say.. the eyes of a more casual player (oh, hey, that's neat). I did all the dungeons I possibly could with my guild (lvl 60 raid group, not "elite", but still good in many respects) in the shortest amount of time possible. Uldaman (at level 48) should have been an adventure and a half, but we took the "back-way" and the boss fight with the dungeon was only about a 30 minute journey. With "fast-text" on, and a trackball at the speed of light, I ground through countless quests, taking in only things I saw when I died after being jumped by horde raid groups on my way to complete them. The game just went by too fast for me. So I expressed my opinion, the opinion of a powerleveller.
The second time around, some friends started playing, so I deleted all my stuff and started fresh, only to find that I was doing the same thing as before! So I stopped myself (again) and I am now trying to resist buying another subscription.
I helped lowbies (sold all my stuff and gave all the money to passersby lower than 20, wearing only a stylish black shirt and myrmidon's leggings... this was when I was deleting my old characters to try again in hopes of "turning over a new leaf"). I achieved the rank of Sergeant Major and was involved in quite a few successful (and unsuccessful) raids against the horde capitals. I tried to do BG and one of those other PvP mini-game thingies, but the wait was too long for CTF game that only lasted around 5 minutes (I could go outside or play Halo for that, without waiting...).
I don't know why you automatically assume from the last paragraph that I didn't play it to max level. I just realized how much end-game material it lacked when I got there.
What the heck do you mean "Marry Up"?! I'm fine with my marriage. **cough** I'd just hate to see more cynical hard-core defenders of over-rated games like you out there. **cough**
i prefer eve to any mmog out there but that does not mean i am going to start saying wow sucks.
if you like a game you like it, and if you don't like a game keep it to yourself or better yet why doesn't every body get together and bash the shit out of every goddamn game in existence just to justify the need to bash games. maybe the staff of mmorpg could be so good as to put up a folder just for whiners that way whenever you have a sob story you need to get off your chest you can go whimper in a corner special made for you.
Originally posted by pistolier i prefer eve to any mmog out there but that does not mean i am going to start saying wow sucks. if you like a game you like it, and if you don't like a game keep it to yourself or better yet why doesn't every body get together and bash the shit out of every goddamn game in existence just to justify the need to bash games. maybe the staff of mmorpg could be so good as to put up a folder just for whiners that way whenever you have a sob story you need to get off your chest you can go whimper in a corner special made for you.
Originally posted by blackwolf082 Originally posted by pistolier i prefer eve to any mmog out there but that does not mean i am going to start saying wow sucks. if you like a game you like it, and if you don't like a game keep it to yourself or better yet why doesn't every body get together and bash the shit out of every goddamn game in existence just to justify the need to bash games. maybe the staff of mmorpg could be so good as to put up a folder just for whiners that way whenever you have a sob story you need to get off your chest you can go whimper in a corner special made for you.i agree
I despise people like you CaptainRPG. Cryomatrix made his opinion known without bashing anyone, and he made some good points. You, it seems, couldn't handle that and had to do some bashing of your own. He has every right to express his opinions, as do you. However, if you can't do it without bad mouthing someone, then just keep your pie hole closed. I see your type everywhere, you spend 3/4 of the day playing mmo's so you believe your some kind of guru, better and more knowing than anyone else (classic self-loather). And yes I'm being hypicritical becuase I'm bad mouthing you, but hey, you deserve it. That being said let's address some of your gripes about Cyromatrix and WOW.
1. You told him to, "Come back when you've played for a month."
- Well I have. I've played almost since it's launch, and watched others as they played the beta. I guess you could say I've experienced it since it's infancy. My main is lvl 60 and I still love it. You know why? Because it's still a game in it's infancy. Every time I turn around Blizzard is adding new content. New instances, new quest, new items, new factions and even just some all around fun stuff (I got a real kick out of the snowballs last x-mas). Not to mention that Blizzard is constantly refining and fine tuning the game. I've been level 60 for several months now, and I still have yet to visit two or three of the instances. I've sampled most MMORPG's and most of them go stagnant after about a year. Blizzard shows no signs of letting that happen with WOW.
2. "Less than 40% of the people who play video games, are casual gamers."
- To be frank, I think both of you are just constructing stats to suit your own needs. First of all, what is a "casual gamer?" I don't see why your definition should be any better than his. As to your comment about Blizzard lying, I could really give a damn. And the paladin NEEDED to be nerfed, I'm glad they did, even as I'm trying to level my secondary which is a pally.
3. I recognize that in the later part of your post your simply addressing various common complaints, "Socialism, Freedom, etc..." I realize you may not have been stating your own opinion about these issues, but rather making the opinions of others known. With this in mind I'll simply state my own opinion on these issues and set what I think of you aside.
- To those that say " there's to much grinding." If you don't want to, you need never grind in WOW. There are enough quest for any level that grinding should become a matter of choice. To those that say, "soloing is too easy." This is a partial truth. It is true that in most of WOW you can go about completing quest on your own provided your in an area where the mobs are near your own level, but I've never seen anyone that could solo an instance on their own, and if they could then they're too high of level to be in that instance anyway. In truth, I don't understand why this is even an issue; if you want to solo then it is indeed possible, and if you don't it should be fairly easy to find a partner or even a group to help you out. To those that say,"everyone's a jerk." Again, another partial truth. There are alot of jerks playing WOW, I'd even go far as to say there are more playing WOW than playing most other games. However, there is a good reason for this. You find jerks playing any MMO, that's just the way things are. If you don't it means that the popularity of a game has died down enough that only the hardcore fans of that particular game remain to play, these remaining players take the game serious enough that most of them aren't going to play the jerk. Why does it seem like there are so many more on WOW? That's simple, there are more people playing WOW than most MMORPG's. If someone did a study into it, I'm fairly certain that the percentage of people that could be classified as a "jerk" playing WOW would be very close to the percentage of "jerks" playing any other MMORPG at the height of it's popularity. To those that complain that, "there's too much ganking." If you really can't take getting ganked then you should be playing on a PvE server instead of a PvP server, plain and simple. This complaint is by far my biggest pet peeve. On my way to level 60 I was ganked many a time, but if you don't like it, then do something about it. There is never a lack of people willing to help you take care of that pesky rouge or warrior that's been hounding you. Also anyone that says theyhaven't camped a corpse, or hounded a particular player, is either lying or doesn't know what they're missing. I'll say it, I've done it on occasion, it's fun, for a time. But I think blizzard has done a good job of disuading players from this type of conduct. First off, there is little benefit from ganking, you don't gain anything out of it (aside from a sinister feeling of accomplishment, hey sometimes it's fun to be bad). The implementation of the Honor system also helps in this reguard. It keeps the incentive of PvP and discourages upper levels from picking on lower levels. To those that say, "rogues or pallys or shaman are overpowered." All I can say is tough. I do believe some classes to be overpowered, but there is no class that is so overpowered that they can't be defeated. And yes, I have made this same complaint to myself when I've been particularly stomped on by one particular class or another.
All in all, it is my opinion that WOW is the very best MMORPG out there at the moment, although GW is starting to turn my head a bit. What do I base my opinion of WOW on? One thing, and one thing alone, I have fun playing it, plain and simple. What it comes down to is this do you have fun playing this game? If yes, great. If no, simple, don't play.
Comments
LOL, everytime I try to take you seriously josher you go and say things like that, "WoWs problems are OK because you know, they aren't really that bad, I mean, yeah, they aren't". You continuously bash EVE too lol, EVE being boring is how you feel about the game, it's not fact, and after so many people pointing it out I have yet to see you admit such. It's about ratings isn't it? Be careful man, your bias is showing and it's pretty damn big too!
Oh please, don't kid yourself----------------------------------
MMOs Retired From: Earth and Beyond, Project Entropia, There, A Tale in the Desert, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, City of Heroes/Villains.
MMOs Currently (worth) Playing: None.
MMO hopefuls: Age of Conan.
If 20 kids are given 2 flavors of icecream and 19 of them think vanilla is boring and Tuttifruity is more fun, whats the consensus? The 19 kids must be nuts, because acoridng to some here, 1 opinion means more than 19 when debating what most people think.
According to you, mass opinion means nothing, which means you're the type of person who can't separate your ideas from everyone elses around you. You bring up hypotheticals and use them to argue. You're basically impossible to reason with, so why waste the time anymore. Enjoy living in fairyland.
"Most people find Eve a boring game" is about as true as the sky is blue. But, I'm sure the sky is red in fairy land=) Its like having a discussion with a child holding his fingers in his ears. You can only block out reality for so long. WHy bother.
I will point by point make disagreements.
95% of gamers are casual.... What statistics are you quoting or are you just pulling numbers out of where you sit? I would hazzard the guess that most casual gamers do not play mmos because of the recurring fees and because of the amount of time that must be put into an mmo. Yes, many casual gamers get into mmo's but the majority of which are rapidly left behind by friends and guilds that have more time to spend in the game then others.
Most companies want to primarily make money. There are some companies that are still trying to make games though. Bioware and Lionhead studios are 2 companies that I can name off the top of my head.
Your definitions of what constitutes good and bad do not invalidate any other persons opinion. There are many people that have been gaming most likely alot longer than you, and thus have a wider experience to draw upon for making a judgement call.
Your definition of a casual gamer is flawed. If people game looking for a stress filled environment then those people need to seek psychiatric help.
As to your definitions of good and bad... 1) see above. 2) just because you feel a certain way does not reflect the feelings of 95% of the gaming public, you are just another person no better than anyone else but because you believe you speak for not just 51% of gamers but nearly every gamer in the entire world shows that you have an overinflated sense of self and that your ego is wildly out of touch with reality and you should go outside and see some sun.
If someone dislikes something about a game and therefore thinks it sucks does not make their thinking flawed. They think it sucks its their perogative to have an opinion. Now as to your example I think you are misreading, or only reading what you want. The complaints you have quoted (without source) are wide and encompasses many games that have been released recently. They may name those things because of an overall frustration with the been there done that. Your ideas of an alternative are shortsighted and ill thought out. There are many ideas some being undertaken at this very moment to break out of the rediculous mold that developers have been too cowardly and have lacked too much in the creativity department to undertake. Thankfully there are pioneers out there, that are gamers, and that feel something must change and are trying to do something about it.
About your empirically derived opinions. Well there are 3 definitions of empirical first off. And with the tone of your post I am assuming that you are refering to the most common one which is :capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment. As in Empirical laws in science.
You state breadth and depth of wow, your experience must be EXTREMELY limited to believe that there is depth to that game and for the lack of experience you can be forgiven. For coming off like your opinion is more valid than anyone elses you can not be forgiven. You fail to cite specific examples in how wow is deeper than any other game, how it is broader/more encompassing than anyother game. And graphically what game is it better than that has come out in the relative same time and what criteria are you using apart from opinion?
What does wow do bad? Maybe its not intrinsically bad, but it is nothing new. Everything done in wow has been done before and with considerably more depth and thought. For example crafting, crafting in wow is pointless and stripped down to be a nonessential. Combat has little to no strategic depth to it. PVP is unbalanced and individual class talents are incomplete/useless. This is proven with the changes that just went live with hunters, the second revamp of druids and paladins. nothing has been addressed to the shaman's being highly favored by the designers and coders of wow bringing them in line with the rest of classes in the game. And I guess you have never read the forums at worldofwarcraft.com as there are hundreds and thousands of posts about what should be fixed and addressed. But then again your experience in WOW is highly limited so much of what you are talking about you have failed to notice or live with for any given amount of time.
Ran out of code? Well like I said you havent experienced the game to be able to speak on this but coding is only limited by the imagination of the dev team. If blizzard ran out of code then they ran out of creativity which given what I have seen from blizzard is a distinct possibility.
Wow may have the most subscribers for a north america game, but jerry springer also gets very high ratings in the number of people that watch it. Does that mean that because of a large subscriber base the game is good? Not in my book. look at the subscribers to the Enquirer vs Time. Is the enquirer a better magazine or source of news than Time?
You say it does everything right for the casual gamer.. How is it a casual gamer to spend 3-7 hours in one instance, several times a week? How is it that the only way to be competitve is to go through the instances because items are bop and friends and guilds can not assist casual gamers in keeping them competitive. I think your view of what a casual gamer is is flawed, or you feel that the game is build for a casual gamer without being one. if you arent one then how can you make a judgement call on what is right for a casual gamer?
Your post is redundant and your logic is faulty as you can provide no concrete examples to back up anythign that you have said. you quote numbers and statistics with no basis in reality and show that you are biased. If you do not like what people have bashed about wow then you should respond to them with factual statements rather than trying to sound like someone (who I might add has little experience with what you are trying to defend) who believes they are right and anyone that disagrees with them is wrong.
Things in WoW that were promised for launch are only now starting to make their way to live, MANY issues with lag and faulty ai are still unadressed, the customer service is atrocious, and the character classes are still, almost a year from release, not balanced appropriately. The community in WoW is one of the worst I have ever had the displeasure of meeting and is only rivaled by lineage2 in the amount of filth and grieving that is present in the game. Try playing on a RP server when Tichondrius or other large servers are down and hearing the cries of Roleplayers are the sux, rpers are ph4gs etc etc etc. Get to level 60, spend a couple of weeks getting to ragnaros in molten core only to have items pilfered by one of your own guildies that does this not because of need, but to cause problems for everyone else then turn and brag about it in ironforge and on the forums.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
People like to complain when things don't go their way. SO, we hear "The PVP sucks because you can't loot the loser! WAAH!". What if YOU were the loser?!
Obviously the person complaining didn't give that much thought, or they simply wanted to vent about a game that recently frustrated and had nothing legit to post about (like me, I'm very bored right now with nothing better to do
), or they figured out a way that they could get what they want if the system was implemented by using various glitches and mods.
Enjoy the game for what it is, and if that's not possible, then don't play it. Of course, nobody's ever heard that phrase before! Right, I know it's difficult to put down an addicting game, even if you hate it.. especially after forking up $65.00 to play it for the first month...
severius, don't bother to answer, Josher. He just keeps spouting out his naive and distorted views and keeps ignoring or (deliberately?) misunderstanding points and arguments. I agree to most of your post, yet I don't think anything of it will help to start making him think about what he wrote. Luckily I wrote my posts at work, else I would have been forced to sent him a bill for wasted life time.
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Originally posted by Mandolin
Designers need to move away from the old D&D level-based model which was never designed for player vs player combat in the first place.
Good games dont need some die-hard coming to defend them. To put it kindly, wow caters to a large portion of the gaming industry with broad needs and no specifics in mind. There's no point you prancing around because it offends you that x% of the market doesn't like wow, if it was the game to end all games then everyone would like it, deal with it. Games address peoples imaginations and passions, so just how you wasted 90 minutes of your life writing a page of A4 on here, some people will write a paragraph to put you in your place.
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
I've said it before but, which MMORPG within 10 months of release has...
Has a battle system with as many USABLE skills, secondary effects, where position actually matters, controls VERY well, has items & trinkets usable in battle, scrolls, potions, food and drink and moves as quickly. Its not AC. Its not EQ2. Its certainly not FFXI, L or L2. Its not SB. Its not UO. Its not even COH. GWs is pretty varried, but its not a MMORPG. WOWs classes don't overlap like the newer ones Mythic added. Its more balanced NOW, than some current games that've been around for years.
Fun PvE and PvP that is actually balanced fairly well? Balance is not opinion. Its just what is. Priests can beat Warriors. Warlocks can beat anyone. Hunters can beat Mages and on and on. Theres issues, but they're so minor compared to say what Mythic went through the 1st 2 years. Really, its the only comparable game out there that delivered both PvE and PvP in the same game that people actually enjoyed. Group PvP is very balanced and simple duels can go either way any time. ALl complaints about balance ALWAYS come from ignorance, but I said that previously.
Has as many forms of travel, uncluding 16+ different ground mounts, 4 different air mounts, plus air travel, boats, gates, summoning and on and on. I'm sure someone will say but, "the mounts are all the same." Well, name another game that has as many? You can't. How is that SIMPLISTIC? Name a game that does travel better with so many different options? You simply CAN NOT name a game because it does not exist.
Has as many quests? EQ2 is the only one. I'm sure someone will they're all the same also. Well, you can still take away the repetative gathering quests and ONLY included the unique ones and you'd STILL have just as many in WOW. If you dissagree, you simple haven't played the game enough to see them. Remember, don't compare 4 years of content and multiple expansion to 10 months. Compare apples with apples.
Underwater sections that are actually well done and not clunky.
Has as detailed a world, graphically, that doesn't have huge wasted space and is still large? Maybe EQ2.
Is considered fun to play by most people playing MMROPGs even if only for a few months. I know this doesn't matter to some people but go find a bad OFFICIAL review of WOW on the web from anyone who isn't just bitter about the genre completely. Every bad review comes from people who really don't like anything very much at the moment. Yes, reviews don't matter to anyone except those who actually like profitable games=)
You can solo to max lvl OR group any time you want. Both modes of play are very viable. Never been done in a MMORPG.
Has as many unique dungeons within its 1st year? Never been done.
Lets you gain items, ranks and Reputation just through PvP that opens up more content.
3 different server rulesets. Remember, not even a year old.
Blizzard still has had problems with Customer service, but those problems are not as bad as the first year of EQ, DOAC, AO, AC2 and a slew of others, or subscriptions would've dropped off. AO a had HUGE backlash when Funcom dropped the ball. WOW is not perfect because no game is. Its just really well done for such a short time and it can only get better. Other MMORPGs simply can't get any better because they already passed the point of no return. If they do, the effect can't help the game.
You may call it opinion, but black and white is black and white. Its all in the game and theres no refuting it. Other games do certain things better. Thats ok though. None do it all at "well" to "geat". Theres nothing really that BAD in WOW. It all works. You just can't say that about other MMORPG. WIth every good, there comes something that just breaks somethign else. Crafting, although important to some of you, doesn't effect game sales all that much. It has to be good and it has to work. It doesn't have to be great. A crafting system can always improve.
I'm done posting in this thread because it seems no one can refute anything without bringing up opinion and using that to debate. You can't debate with opion. Use the facts. I just did above.
Sorry, but using Jerry Springer doesn't matter because its not quality programming and NO ONE actually says it is. Loads of people know that WOW is a quality MMORPG. If you don't think it is you're just in the vast minority and thats ok. No making fun. No name calling. No using hypothetical examples. Use the facts. Use previous MMORPG examples and history. Be mature.
**sigh**
Why is it that, whenever someone says "World of Warcraft isn't all that", someone has to go and say "World of Warcraft is better than anything out there so STFU!"?
First part: Spells, Skills, Usable things in combat, ect.
Items
So you can use things in combat. I wonder what other MMORPGs let you do that? (sarcasm) Star Wars Galaxies? Nahh, you can't use medical items in combat to heal yourself (potions) or buff yourself as a doctor (buff spells), now that I think about it, Everquest 2, Final Fantasy XI, and UO don't have any items or spell-like actions that you can use in combat! (/sarcasm). OK, so every major MMO on the market now DOES have some way to do EXACTLY what you can do with trinkets, secondary effects, spells, and potions in World of Warcraft. Blizzard simply split them into categories: Food and Drink as "non-combat regenerate/buff items"; Potions as "instant in-combat regenerate/buff items"; Trinkets as "equipped constant effect / combat instant items".
Skills
In World of Warcraft, you choose a class and you're stuck with it until you decide to make another character. Sure, you can have up to 10 characters on one server, but.. as a priest or warlock, you'll never be able to lift a two-handed sword, only stare at it, perplexed, as you ponder it's meaning. As a paladin, you can't possibly decipher the purpose of "bows" or "guns". Sure, you can reset your talent points whenever you want (IE: you're level 60, made unwise choices, so you unlearn your talents and make a commonly used build for that class... like everyone else...). In the end, everyone's using the same skills, just in different ways. What about other games? SWG for example: you start as a basic class, but you can abandon skills in favor of new ones for free at any time and you can even become something completely different if you want... like a swordsman gets sick of being melee based, so he adds a tad of marksmanship to vary the gameplay. You can't do that in WoW last I played.
PvE and PvP
PvE
I Don't believe that any MMO has even semi-entertaining PvE, and WoW doesn't break that mold. I don't know where you get "fun" from doing the same thing over and over... but then you might be one of those annoying people who listen only to "no no no" on their ipods wherever they go.
PvP
This is the best part of the game. You get to test your skills and practiced combos against another player and you can try your best to defeat them! I mean... really, everyone's at level 60 during that giant raid on Orgrimmar in your group, so it'll be an even playing field when the anti-raid group from the horde blackens the horizon to match your party's vast strength... right? Well, no. The classes are not balanced, and some peeps are fully automated with macros and mods, and with only one click of a button they can level anyone they face while going to the bathroom. SO FUN!!!
Travel
Walking.... and lots of it, at least until you're level 40, then you blow all your hard-earned cash on a mount that refuses to spawn in combat when you need to get away quickly (GAH!!! *is level 42* level 60 shamie coming... **starts spawning mount** spawn mount.. please... **frost shocked** NOOO!!!). The flying things are all the same, just with different pretty colors
, and you can't control them, so where's the fun in that?! Boats are just platforms that move and teleport you to a different continent (oh wait, there are only two...). I think that's very simplistic.
OK, I'll name a game: SWG (I use this as a reference a lot, because it has the potential of a good MMO, but the devs made many-a bad choice). You can buy a vehicle (many to choose from) to go quite a lot faster than walking (instead of a pathetic 80% increase after breaking the bank), you can fly in space in a starfighter to go from planet to planet instead of waiting for a shuttle (IE: waiting for a boat to go to one of two continents in WoW).
Quests
Yes, these are a very good part of the game! But it's all over so quickly, and a good 97% of them are not repeatable! It's good to have unique quests AND repeatable ones for people to get some extra spending money from, with a good boost to experience too! After all the quests that are possible to be done are done... you run out of things to do. (So I sold all my stuff and gave the money (25011 gold) to a newbie before I quit, because I didn't want that week's worth of work to go to waste
).
Underwater
This was one thing I was very happy about in WoW. YOU CAN SWIM NOW!!! YESS!!!! Other MMOs didn't offer a very good alternative to this.
Detail
The major MMOs truly out-do WoW in this aspect. The graphics are tooney and you can see polygon glitches often (where the pixel shader goes insane and does too much or too little). EQ2, SWG, MxO, ect. all have better visuals (imo). If you like cartooney/glitchy, then WoW would be a good choice for you in this department.
Land Size / Expansiveness
There's too large and wasted space... and then there's too small and "been there done that". I'd say World of Warcraft is a bit smaller than the name would suggest. I'd run into the same horde group dozens of times in The Hinterlands and Searing Gorge while grinding for experience. It's just too often... they even left me alone after a while (after killing me repeatedly, say 6-8 times, I forget) because they got sick of my death animation (or something)
.
Group / Solo / Max Level
EQ2, SWQ, UO, and MxO, ect. offer the same deal. You can solo and group whenever and you can actually get somewhere. However... some games, like SWG, don't have a "max level". You simply master something, get sick of it, and move onto something else with that same character, instead of mastering something, getting sick of it and staying there unless you make a new character to follow a different class. In WoW, level 60 is the pinnacle of divinity for all players who aspire to it, but also the death of their fun, as in their journeys, they've done everything there is to be done (except perhaps, solo a boss, which is impossible unless it's around 1/2 of your level...).
Customer Service and Overall Satisfaction
World of Warcraft has quite a bit to offer for ONE-TIME (After hitting level 60 for the third time, I threw in the towel and tried other games, seeking something entertaining to do while having too much free time on this awesomely long work-free vacation). WoW has began the descent into mediocrity, with the devs augmenting the unce-damned ideas of games long past to their lumbering war engine they call "original", much like all the verbiage I'm throwing into this post (it's all been heard before).
Opinions?
Black and White is an interesting game where you're a god and you-.... oh right, metaphors. Well, you're merely using facts to support your opinions by twisting certain parts of them to be in favor of WoW. If something bad was noted, it was compared to other game's flaws (some not even on topic) and if there was something good about it, nothing was put in the picture to allow World of Warcraft to soak up the glory as it sat upon the "pedestal of gloating might".
The Decent, The Bad, and the Hideous
There are many critical flaws in WoW, like the balance issue, but what game DOESN'T have that problem? They're slowly trying to fix it, but as long as there are players who demand and protest when the game barely peeks it's head out of the workshop, it will never get better! Let us all remember Star Wars Galaxies, in it's glory days as the greatest MMO for less than eight months... when people demanded NERFING and it all blew to dust.
Being Mature
Making fun, calling names, hypocrisy. To be honest, you showed quite a few examples of these behaviors. Making fun in the first paragraph " It's not this. It's not even that. It's certainly not this.", that was like saying "it's not these lowly things! It's THIS!!".
"Name a game that does travel better with so many different options? You simply CAN NOT name a game because it does not exist." Ah, hypocrisy at it's finest. You immediately assumed that nobody would speak up, so you wrote out that last part to call it a statement. That's a tad hypocritical, as it conflicts with "being mature".
Well that was fun ^_^
Ok, Josher. Since you made a lot clearer and definitely more intelligent post than your former ones I'll respond to this, eventhough you again ignored the (to me) important issue of "casual gaming" which was brought up by me and severius. Also, I will leave out other games here, since WoW has to stand for itself and comparing all the time is pointless after a point. Why? There are games which make things better than WoW and other things worse, and if soembody likes those things that are well done by a game and has little "contact" with that game's bad sides (which ofc may be there and pissing off other players) then he will look down at WoW as inferior. So therefore, no comparisons.
Design
The problem with WoW, the point where it ultimately fails (at least sofar) is that it's way overdesigned. It tries to cater (successfully) to the broad masses and therefore it uses the most "acceptable" features possible. So, ie as to not piss people off, you got essentially no death penalty (don't tell me that bit of repair cost is a penalty), idiot proof quests (I actually don't believe that people still had to ask in general chat about some quests), not too complex item creation (we dont wanna fry the fragile brain of the customer), no player market whatsoever (due to binding items), and a few things that slipped my mind (covered by a very merciful veil of forgetting). These are "facts" too, partly even confirmed by you (item creation). Additionally PvP is pointless since there are (yet) no real aims to follow, especially not for a casual gamer, because then you are always behind (pointwise) to those people who are not necessarily better, but simply have more time to play (not leveling, only getting "pvp rewards"). PvP is reduced to a joke, where not player skill counts, but quality of macros and ganging up on the target.
Epic Story
WARcraft (stressing the "War" here) has so much potential in its storyline for large scale betrayal, intrigues and, yes, *wars*. Yet nothing of that feeling ever emerged in WoW. You can't influence the world to any extent, quests which are there "to save the king/druid circle/poor virgin/etc" lose its meanign if everyone you know has done so too. The world is static, without any "life", and even the conflict between Alliance and Horde can't alleviate this. So you achieved in killing all the NPCs/Players in Stormwind? So what? Soon they will respawn and everything is back to normal, after the attacking force gets bored or logs off to go sleeping. The nice shops are still there, the city still survives unscathed.
Frustrated anyone?
No possibility of loss (xp, items) means less "frustration", though it also means less feeling of achievment. In all 6 months of WoW I never had any situation where I had a "omg this was exciting" feeling, because there was absolutely no risk involved (ok, one time, but still there was no risk). So why are there so many subscribers playing? Don't they want to achive something? Sure, but please keep in mind that humans also always try to go the easy way, and they forget that its only through negative experiences that we value the positive ones. If we only have positive experiences (no death penalty, no risk at all) then the game gets stale (the same can be applied to RL too, btw). And no, aside from stupid players or technical issues I had not what you could call "negative ingame experience". Its a big selling argument that you can't lose anything, so numbers again don't tell us a thing about the quality of a game. WoW is like Disneyland, where you go from attraction to attraction being safe all the time from the attractions.
Hey, I saw your face before
A minor point, I admit yet something that is very imprtant to RPGs - Character Customization. You can change too little in your apperance, that it actually hurts. Never did I have the feelign that my character was an individual (no, equipment is not everything). I won't even go into not being able to choose at least some basic stats or distribute some attribute points, and choose some skills to personalize your character a bit.
No, my son you don't get that fine meat, you are too young
One other, I admit minor nitpick, is the fact that certain food can be only consumed at certain levels. *bumps head on desk*
Another proof that leveling systems are crap, too arbitary, and often result in involountary comical situations, removing a great deal of the "immersion" into the game world.
About soloing WoW
Do the Deadmines at level .... lets say ....25 (max. where it is sensible to do them), please do a vid and send me the link. I'd love to see *that*. Avoiding instances and all Elite quests is a way to solo ofc, but that is like only eating the cherry and not drinking the cocktail.
Pluses
Plus bad community, plus bad patching system, plus bad customer support (if you deny that then you really live in fantasy land). Also since most people responsible for creating their franchises left Blizzard, it remains to be seen how the company will develop in the future. Yes they *may* add more good content, but taking announcements or "possibilities-that-are-there-and-just-need-to-be-used" as actual changes or features goes a bit too far. It only counts what's actually in game.
So looking at WoW alone and even if it would be the only MMORPG on the market - as a (role playing) game it would still be lacking.
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Originally posted by Mandolin
Designers need to move away from the old D&D level-based model which was never designed for player vs player combat in the first place.
Josher, that last post was one of the most intilligent posts I have read on this topic so far. gratz. The two posts that follow obviously cannot follow you and again decide to look like idiots.
So designing for the masses is a bad thing? I am confused. Azirophus, should mmorpg.com only talk about games you like and not mmorpgs that the masses like? We don't want mmoprg.com overdesigning their website with "acceptable" features that the majority like.
Ok, so apparently PvP wars at Tarren Mill don't float your boat. Or in world raids of Undercity or SW. So I again understand you, WoW is a broken game because everyone has an oppurtunity to complete a quest? WoW is unplayable because two other players logged in happens to have the same epic item as you? Maybe you cannot influence the world the way you liked, but if you havent seen a guild corner a market on materials in the AH, by tripling the price, well that is some serious in world inflluence :PYou are always at a risk of wasting time walking to your body or getting corpsed camp hence, wasting even more time. And as you said it yourself, you have had moments that were still exciting even though you did not "lose XP or items". So I can understand your arguement, you want players to LOSE XP and ITEMS because this will make the game better. Adding frustration is what WoW needs so it will be better?
Ok now your nitpicking. Again, aside from the fact you can equip your toon to look diferent, choose from different build trees, different professions that can augment your toon, character customization is nonexistant. Again, this is not a flaw, this is to streamline leveling, toon creation, and get players playing the game.
I will not even comment on this.
You said it, its lacking but it definitely is NOT the worse game out there. In fact, probably the best game out there right now. My question to you and all other haters, How long did you play the game? I bet it was months. The longest I ever played a game I didn't like, had to be 30 minutes. LOL
I spent a total of 113 HOURS in queue for AV battlegrounds, I never even seen the place with my own character.
Such a HUGE part of the game only available to a few lucky, the horde and those who ended up on the very few balanced servers make this game SUCK in the PvP area like no other game have sucked before it.
There, I just bashed WoW and I am NOT going to jail for it so the OP is WRONG.
I very very much doubt I will ever go back to WoW, I had a fair bit of fun getting to 60, enough to get my moneys worth i suppose but with no big guild and an alliance char on an unbalanced server continuing would be like giving away 15$ a month and get absoutely zero in return.
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Originally posted by Jerek_
I wonder if you honestly even believe what you type, or if you live in a made up world of facts.
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** sigh **
What is your point? Items are as good as WoW compared to other games? WoW took the best ideas out of the other games? You know how to make a poor openning arguement?
Ok, so in order to be the perfect MMO, cloth wearers should be able to wield two handed swords? I know that is not what your are getting at, I will give you more credit then that. But like you said, if you want to take a break from playing a mage, go reroll a rogue. It's not difficult to level and if anything, it will help save up rested XP on your main. Again, this is not a flaw by any means. Why would I want my warrior spec'd tauren to suddenly turn into a heal bot? I would rather role a new priest.
Ok, thats an opinion on two levels. One, that you think PvE is repetative and two, well you don't like it. I have had great fun PvEing especially with a fun group. And if I even go do a quest over for loot, its still fun because the group is usually different. Again, I am not arguing PvE is fun, that is an opinion, but I can safely say, the majority of players do not have a problem with it, or they would have stopped playing. And last I checked, I don't have that hard of a time finding a group for quests.
* sigh * You cannot one click multiple actions, maybe if you actually tried macros you would know this. Class balancing is not perfect, but what game is? And it has only been 10 months... Balancing happens over time and really, class balance is NOT broken or we would have 10,000 players playing not 1,000,000.
Obviously you have not played other MMOs where you would have to wait for load when walking into a new area. I agree the walking does suck, but again, not enough to stop the 1,000,000+ playing the game. In fact, it makes getting the mount that much better. And it should break your bank. Unless you plan on saving the gold and passing it on to your virtual kids, I'm not sure what the arguement is?
Sounds more like you had a lot of fun in quests and wished they were longer. Much props to the quests designers at blizzards.
It might seem small/big (not sure what you are saying exactly) because... no, not sure what you are saying. Its too big and too small? Seeing the same ppl in the same area cuz you are in the same area tends to happen. I'm sure if you left Hinterlands or where ever you were, you probably wont see them since... well they are at Hinterlands.
So this game you dislike so much, you played til level 60? Imagine what you might have done, had you liked this game... maybe played it to its max level... and well, liked it! I will not argue this point because if at level 60, you don't know what to do *cough* BG/HL Raid/In World Raid/Help Lowbies/KoS tag a guild or player *cough* then I guess you don't know.
Had a blast. I hope you marry up because your gene pool could use all the help it can get.
Another one.....
I did not say designing for the masses is bad, I did not say I want MMORPG.com to talk about the games I like, actually I never even mentioned their website or MMORPG.com, ffs. And what do game features have to to with website features? I did not say I hate or don't like WoW, I just pointed at some errors in the design and gameplay. Learn to read (a side note: normally, I don't give a piss about it, but you even misspelled my name). You can like a game and still be critical toward it. Criticism does not equal hate or dislike.
Basically you do the same as Josher, use some things that you think works fine and politely ignore the rest. Also, you write down the usual blah, blah as answers and if you see something that doesn't suit your argumentation then its not worth a comment. Alright, at last you succeded in what not even Josher could. Im out of this thread. This amount of ignorance (or bad reading skills) is sickening.
Josher asked for one thing that I totally agree with him. Be mature. Calling somebody an idiot is not mature, and does nothing to prove your point - only that you are yourself what you called others.
Good day, my dear sir.
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Originally posted by Mandolin
Designers need to move away from the old D&D level-based model which was never designed for player vs player combat in the first place.
Skills
In World of Warcraft, you choose a class and you're stuck with it until you decide to make another character. Sure, you can have up to 10 characters on one server, but.. as a priest or warlock, you'll never be able to lift a two-handed sword, only stare at it, perplexed, as you ponder it's meaning. As a paladin, you can't possibly decipher the purpose of "bows" or "guns". Sure, you can reset your talent points whenever you want (IE: you're level 60, made unwise choices, so you unlearn your talents and make a commonly used build for that class... like everyone else...). In the end, everyone's using the same skills, just in different ways. What about other games? SWG for example: you start as a basic class, but you can abandon skills in favor of new ones for free at any time and you can even become something completely different if you want... like a swordsman gets sick of being melee based, so he adds a tad of marksmanship to vary the gameplay. You can't do that in WoW last I played.
First off, you actually can diverge without resetting your talent tree(s), but it depends on the server you are on or how much you plan to PvP or PvE. I was a Assassin/Combat Rogue mostly for PvE purposes because I sucked at the stun-locking method and I seldomly PvP. The build was quite effective PvE wise and didn't require much stealth.
Secondly, from your paragraph, it sounds like you want classes to be more DnD style where you can learn every passive skill of another class. This would make class imbalanced at the core. Axe wielding Rogue or Double-Handed Sword Rogues could do frightening damage when using melee-based builds. There is already a complaint with the Sword & Club Rogue build and Swashbuckler Rogue Build because they can dish out a lot more than a Warrior can dish out in melee. The same thing happened in Neverwinter Nights with the Cleric class when they acquire martial weapons or exotic weapons passive skills; they ended up fighting better than the Fighter class.
WoW did a good job dividing responsibilities up between classes.
So ultimately failing because it tries to cater to the broad masses does not mean designing for the masses is bad. Wow... how did you ever come up with that. That has got to be a higher plain of thinking.
I will be the first to apologize for my error. I did not know you could not comprehend analogies.
If you mean both Josher and I use things that work like... making sense, then yes you are correct. But you are wrong about politely ignoring the rest, as I apparently can't ignore your lack of constructive arguements.
Again we agree that this lack of ignorance is sickening and I am glad you are doing us all a favor by not ever commenting on this thread. I can only hope you can do the same for all threads so the amount of ignorance can be reduced.
Ok, ok, I am being mean. Seriously I do not think you are an idiot Azirophos. In fact I commend you for posting. I just want to point out that you should really be careful of what you post and be ready for "haters" to flame you. I would not want you to stop posting because I am being a smart @ss. In fact I hope you dissect these comments and throw it back in my face.
I didn't think I'd need to make this clear, but when I said in my OP that I am basing my things on assumptions, that means that I am presuming my statistics are true. If you think critically, this means that I have no hardcore evidence because if I did, I would have put them up there. This means that I based a large portion of my argument based on something that without evidence I thought was true. Now this is extremely stupid on my part. It doesn't mean my stats are right or wrong, but an intelligent post would have hardcore facts over assumptions. If you are going to post then why did you make the post in the first place, then you'd have to read somewhere between posts 20-60 where I explained why I wrote the post. Of course it would have been better if I wasn't hallucinating due to lack of sleep.
It's kind of funny how i got bashed between posts like 2-20, then I didnt' get bashed from posts 20-61, and then I get bashed again from posts 62 to present.
I do want to respond to Azirophus though. Thanks for the well-thought out post but I would take your comments and call them part of the design, not part of the problem. One thing I think we truly need to internalize which I don't think most people do is that Blizzard is all about the money, do you think they give a damn if WoW is good or bad? They only care if the game brings in the money and to bring in the money you have to cater to the majority of your audience.
Companies worldwide specifically cater to their assumed audience. Look at the commercials that you see on TV and look at how they change depending on what station or TV program you are watching. Each TV program has its own audience whether it be football or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and thus the commercials shown will be catered to that audience.
So Blizzard tailored their game for that purpose, now Azirophus, what you see as a problem, blizzard sees as the crux of its design. Now I'm going to bring up WoW cannot be bashed legitimately again but let me put that statement into perspective.
1. I truly don't believe that WoW cannot be legitimately bashed, it is just more fun to set that as a goal and to argue it, i do believe they come close to it. Essentially, in my oft-bashed opinion I think WoW can only be bashed legitimately if you bash it on a goal for the game that they screwed up. For example, I will harken back to Josher's automobile example between a Toyota and a Ferrari.
I think most people bash WoW in a manner that is similar to someone saying Toyota's suck because they do not reach 62 mph or 100 km/hr in 3.6 seconds. Essentially they are bashing Toyota for something it was not meant to do. WoW makes the game easy and lvling to 60 is a joke well that's part of the design. So a lot of the things I've been reading from people about why WoW falls short or whatever, are reasons that I believe were built into the design. Of course this isn't true 100%, wait lines for BG is probably one thing that wasn't part of the design, the redundancy of the quests is another thing, but then some people may not think the quests are redundant, it is all a matter of opinion.
I just read CaptainRPG's last post and he nicely showed a point that I unsuccessfully tried to make in my OP and if you look at Azirophus's points and how he bashes WoW on certain things and then CaptainRPG showed how the alternative would be even worse. That was a point I was trying to make is that people will bash things in a game and not even think of the implications of their suggestions. For example, Azirophus said well a priest could never pick up a two-handed sword, well if Bliz allowed that, then there would be no individuality in classes and that would break the game.
I guess to reiterate my main point is that Blizzard's main goal was to attract as many people as possible because money is their end goal so if you want to bash WoW on how they unsuccessfully tried to attract people then that is legitimate but don't bash WoW on something it wasn't trying to do. Since, I believe they succeeded in doing that, there is a point on a graph that says "cannot be legitimately bashed" and WoW comes asymptotically close to it.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying since WoW has so many subscribers the game is awesome and is flawless, but I am saying that due to the 4 million subscribers WoW's main goal of attracting the masses has succeeded with flying colors and that it is hard to bash them on what they have tried to do.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Comments like, "WOW is too easy to level in", or "Theres no FFA PvP" or "You can't impact the world enough" are just mindless, pointless bashes. All by design or features that actually make it a good game that people are having fun in. 4 million.
Comments like "WOW's battle system is simplistic" or "WOW has crappy graphics" or "WOW gets boring at 60" are all just ignorant lies and pointless opinions. WHo cares if you think the graphics are cartoony? Who cares if you THINK it gets boring or is simplistic. Thats not a problem with the game. Its a problem with you.
Something like, "WOW lacks decent lighting or environental effects which ruins immersion" or "WOW has a REALLY bad patching system" or "WOW's community isn't all that great" are complete truths because they actually have some proof behind them.
See the difference between bashing and constructive criticism?
Fingaz, responding to the end of the post (the other stuff was well pointed out, thanks for actually taking the time to read and respond to the post
):
I made it to level 60.. multiple times! 3 times to be precise! Warrior, Hunter, and Mage.
I believe that I saw this game through the eyes of a powerleveller (MUST.. MAXIMIZE.. STATS!!!) instead of through say.. the eyes of a more casual player (oh, hey, that's neat). I did all the dungeons I possibly could with my guild (lvl 60 raid group, not "elite", but still good in many respects) in the shortest amount of time possible. Uldaman (at level 48) should have been an adventure and a half, but we took the "back-way" and the boss fight with the dungeon was only about a 30 minute journey. With "fast-text" on, and a trackball at the speed of light, I ground through countless quests, taking in only things I saw when I died after being jumped by horde raid groups on my way to complete them. The game just went by too fast for me. So I expressed my opinion, the opinion of a powerleveller.
The second time around, some friends started playing, so I deleted all my stuff and started fresh, only to find that I was doing the same thing as before! So I stopped myself (again) and I am now trying to resist buying another subscription.
I helped lowbies (sold all my stuff and gave all the money to passersby lower than 20, wearing only a stylish black shirt and myrmidon's leggings... this was when I was deleting my old characters to try again in hopes of "turning over a new leaf"). I achieved the rank of Sergeant Major and was involved in quite a few successful (and unsuccessful) raids against the horde capitals. I tried to do BG and one of those other PvP mini-game thingies, but the wait was too long for CTF game that only lasted around 5 minutes (I could go outside or play Halo for that, without waiting...).
I don't know why you automatically assume from the last paragraph that I didn't play it to max level. I just realized how much end-game material it lacked when I got there.
What the heck do you mean "Marry Up"?! I'm fine with my marriage. **cough** I'd just hate to see more cynical hard-core defenders of over-rated games like you out there. **cough**
WoW this game really does suck
i prefer eve to any mmog out there but that does not mean i am going to start saying wow sucks.
if you like a game you like it, and if you don't like a game keep it to yourself or better yet why doesn't every body get together and bash the shit out of every goddamn game in existence just to justify the need to bash games. maybe the staff of mmorpg could be so good as to put up a folder just for whiners that way whenever you have a sob story you need to get off your chest you can go whimper in a corner special made for you.
i agree too
bah, it's all oppnion. that's the point of these bloody forums. quit worrying about what everyone else thinks and do your own thing.
I despise people like you CaptainRPG. Cryomatrix made his opinion known without bashing anyone, and he made some good points. You, it seems, couldn't handle that and had to do some bashing of your own. He has every right to express his opinions, as do you. However, if you can't do it without bad mouthing someone, then just keep your pie hole closed. I see your type everywhere, you spend 3/4 of the day playing mmo's so you believe your some kind of guru, better and more knowing than anyone else (classic self-loather). And yes I'm being hypicritical becuase I'm bad mouthing you, but hey, you deserve it. That being said let's address some of your gripes about Cyromatrix and WOW.
1. You told him to, "Come back when you've played for a month."
- Well I have. I've played almost since it's launch, and watched others as they played the beta. I guess you could say I've experienced it since it's infancy. My main is lvl 60 and I still love it. You know why? Because it's still a game in it's infancy. Every time I turn around Blizzard is adding new content. New instances, new quest, new items, new factions and even just some all around fun stuff (I got a real kick out of the snowballs last x-mas). Not to mention that Blizzard is constantly refining and fine tuning the game. I've been level 60 for several months now, and I still have yet to visit two or three of the instances. I've sampled most MMORPG's and most of them go stagnant after about a year. Blizzard shows no signs of letting that happen with WOW.
2. "Less than 40% of the people who play video games, are casual gamers."
- To be frank, I think both of you are just constructing stats to suit your own needs. First of all, what is a "casual gamer?" I don't see why your definition should be any better than his. As to your comment about Blizzard lying, I could really give a damn. And the paladin NEEDED to be nerfed, I'm glad they did, even as I'm trying to level my secondary which is a pally.
3. I recognize that in the later part of your post your simply addressing various common complaints, "Socialism, Freedom, etc..." I realize you may not have been stating your own opinion about these issues, but rather making the opinions of others known. With this in mind I'll simply state my own opinion on these issues and set what I think of you aside.
- To those that say " there's to much grinding." If you don't want to, you need never grind in WOW. There are enough quest for any level that grinding should become a matter of choice. To those that say, "soloing is too easy." This is a partial truth. It is true that in most of WOW you can go about completing quest on your own provided your in an area where the mobs are near your own level, but I've never seen anyone that could solo an instance on their own, and if they could then they're too high of level to be in that instance anyway. In truth, I don't understand why this is even an issue; if you want to solo then it is indeed possible, and if you don't it should be fairly easy to find a partner or even a group to help you out. To those that say,"everyone's a jerk." Again, another partial truth. There are alot of jerks playing WOW, I'd even go far as to say there are more playing WOW than playing most other games. However, there is a good reason for this. You find jerks playing any MMO, that's just the way things are. If you don't it means that the popularity of a game has died down enough that only the hardcore fans of that particular game remain to play, these remaining players take the game serious enough that most of them aren't going to play the jerk. Why does it seem like there are so many more on WOW? That's simple, there are more people playing WOW than most MMORPG's. If someone did a study into it, I'm fairly certain that the percentage of people that could be classified as a "jerk" playing WOW would be very close to the percentage of "jerks" playing any other MMORPG at the height of it's popularity. To those that complain that, "there's too much ganking." If you really can't take getting ganked then you should be playing on a PvE server instead of a PvP server, plain and simple. This complaint is by far my biggest pet peeve. On my way to level 60 I was ganked many a time, but if you don't like it, then do something about it. There is never a lack of people willing to help you take care of that pesky rouge or warrior that's been hounding you. Also anyone that says theyhaven't camped a corpse, or hounded a particular player, is either lying or doesn't know what they're missing. I'll say it, I've done it on occasion, it's fun, for a time. But I think blizzard has done a good job of disuading players from this type of conduct. First off, there is little benefit from ganking, you don't gain anything out of it (aside from a sinister feeling of accomplishment, hey sometimes it's fun to be bad). The implementation of the Honor system also helps in this reguard. It keeps the incentive of PvP and discourages upper levels from picking on lower levels. To those that say, "rogues or pallys or shaman are overpowered." All I can say is tough. I do believe some classes to be overpowered, but there is no class that is so overpowered that they can't be defeated. And yes, I have made this same complaint to myself when I've been particularly stomped on by one particular class or another.
All in all, it is my opinion that WOW is the very best MMORPG out there at the moment, although GW is starting to turn my head a bit. What do I base my opinion of WOW on? One thing, and one thing alone, I have fun playing it, plain and simple. What it comes down to is this do you have fun playing this game? If yes, great. If no, simple, don't play.