WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Try again.
Originally posted by Darksworm
Originally posted by Sephiroso
Originally posted by CalmOceans
I haven't read everything, but I tend to agree with most points.
"The problem is they have no idea of what went before them and what we experienced. They will never know the thrill of earning the right to exploring new worlds and the pulse pounding feeling of risking everything by dying and possibly losing years of your characters life."
I agree with this because I don't think people who haven't played MMO pre-WOW understand this point.
When you ran through kithicor forest in Everquest, you felt fear, when you did some of the later raids in Gates, you could feel your heart bounce in your chest, there was a lot at stake, the game was more brutal and harder. The game made you care about your character and friends mattered.
Flat out lies. You ran the border lines and if you pulled aggro you went to the next border, no fuss no muss.
Raids were nothing but zergs with 0 challenge. You just kept throwing bodies at it till they died, yay loots.
The game didn't make you care about your character anymore than most games did, the game just made you take less risks solely because of the exp penalty and the possible loss of your loot if you didn't /loc where you died and lost your body.
There were low level leveling areas like High Hold Keep through Kithicor and also Riverdale was there, with a low level dungeon near it. A lot of people who ran through Kithicor at low level risked a lot, so they would wait at the zone-in until it was day time in game (when the most dangerous MOBs despawned) and then run the zoneline to HHK or Riverdale. At night time it was very dangerous, especially considering those players were often < level 20 and Kithicor was a level 40+ zone.
Not everyone had SoW and Levitation all the time there, and due to the design of the game some players could barely see there because they didn't have Infravision or Ultravision (i.e. Human and Dwarf characters).
Even then, we could use different examples...
I remember one of the best leveling spots I was shown was in the middle of the ocean. I was getting great XP there, until I died and had to get a Paladin to come help me get to my corpse (Rez me, cause XP loss :-P ). It took about 20 minutes there, but I made a friend that I stayed in touch with for over a year that day!
There was also this Iksar Necromancer named Nomadl that summoned my corpse for me when I first started playing and fell down the well in The dungeon off of the Commonlands (forget the name) and got killed by the skeletons down there (I was level 13, I almost can't believe I remember this stuff). It took me like an hour to find someone to help me get my corpse, and he offered to do it if I'd get the coffin for him. I *still* haven't forgotten his name... And that was almost 15 years ago!
The interesting thing is that most of my fondest memories from those older games were interactions with other players... Something I cannot really say the same for in the newer MMORPGs.
I do think that MMOs making the move to console has the potential to make them a bit more "social" again. Since a lot of the communications etc. is built into the core console services (XBL/PSN Voice Chat, Messaging, etc.).
You're saying low level people running around in a high level zone risked a lot? Just like in any mmo where if you're a lower level character trying to get from 1 place to another super far and you had no choice but to pass through higher level zones you'd get 1 shot if you got hit? Mkay....
Okay...someone helped you, as if that doesn't happen nowadays...
As if you can't make new memories with players nowadays...that says more about YOU than it does about the game.
What WoW 'did' to the MMO genre is actually no different than what Survivor 'did' to television, which mimics (hear me out on this) what happens at a real life flea market/bazaar.
I make my living selling at a local flea market, which in reality is more or less a bazaar. When someone begins selling something new, and others notice that something on someone else's table is selling very well, they'll imitate that person and begin selling it as well (assuming they can get their hands on said product)
For instance, 6 months ago, someone brought out brass knuckles 'belt buckles'. People would buy them, sometimes 2 at a time (one for each fist I guess) Before long, half of the regulars were selling brass knuckles belt buckles. Eventually someone began selling crappy little crossbow pistols. It took about a month, but now most people are hawking crossbow pistols.
It's no different than anything else. Other TV networks saw the success of Survivor and began putting out their own survivor clones. Eventually it branched out into other things that took off.
What is happening in the MMO market is more or less the same thing that always happens. People imitating what they see as success,trying to grab a piece of that pie.
There will probably never be a massive success on the scale of WoW. However, once WoW is finally put in a coffin and lowered into the ground (or at least the subscriber numbers dip low enough), companies will stop trying so hard to imitate it.
The biggest issue with MMO games is the amount of money it takes to keep one going, which is why most of the companies try to play it safe. A normal single player game can be sold for years after its expiration date, but an mmo is more or less dead once its servers go dark (side from private servers).
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
SWG would have survived well if they fixed their game and kept to the vision - a sandbox Star Wars world.
EQ2 would have done better if it stuck to it's Everquest roots (more hardcore party based PvE).
WAR would have been good if they focused on the RvR and left the quests/dungeons/raids to WoW.
AoC would have been good if they embraced the brutality of the IP with open world FFA PvP (with consequence) instead of trying to appease the masses with generic quest driven PvE.
SWTOR would have been good if they embraced the story and character building in true Bioware fashion rather than watering everything down to include WoW-like elements.
Rift could have risen further if they had focused on the public event/rift/invasions and more unique class building system then trying to chase the WoW-model of dungeons/raids and instanced PvP.
etc. etc. etc.
None of these games "failed" or under-performed directly because of WoW - they did the damage to themselves by trying to be like "that other guy" and simply not doing a very good job at it.
You can't blame WoW for its success, you can definitely blame the fools trying to break off their piece of it and failing.
It amazes me that you think it was that simply. It is impossible to link any 1 thing to the success or failure of a game. This type of thinking is asinine at best. There are so many more things: such as release date, server loads, game difficulty, game replay-ability, cost, customer support, economy and so many other things that contribute to the outcome of a game.
As to the OP original points. Most are valid. In the end the whole genre has degraded, much the way the entire internet society has. Anonymity breeds behavior that wouldn't be tolerated if no such anonymity existed.
Just because I'm a gamer doesn't mean I drive a Honda.
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Try again.
Originally posted by Darksworm
Originally posted by Sephiroso
Originally posted by CalmOceans
I haven't read everything, but I tend to agree with most points.
"The problem is they have no idea of what went before them and what we experienced. They will never know the thrill of earning the right to exploring new worlds and the pulse pounding feeling of risking everything by dying and possibly losing years of your characters life."
I agree with this because I don't think people who haven't played MMO pre-WOW understand this point.
When you ran through kithicor forest in Everquest, you felt fear, when you did some of the later raids in Gates, you could feel your heart bounce in your chest, there was a lot at stake, the game was more brutal and harder. The game made you care about your character and friends mattered.
Flat out lies. You ran the border lines and if you pulled aggro you went to the next border, no fuss no muss.
Raids were nothing but zergs with 0 challenge. You just kept throwing bodies at it till they died, yay loots.
The game didn't make you care about your character anymore than most games did, the game just made you take less risks solely because of the exp penalty and the possible loss of your loot if you didn't /loc where you died and lost your body.
There were low level leveling areas like High Hold Keep through Kithicor and also Riverdale was there, with a low level dungeon near it. A lot of people who ran through Kithicor at low level risked a lot, so they would wait at the zone-in until it was day time in game (when the most dangerous MOBs despawned) and then run the zoneline to HHK or Riverdale. At night time it was very dangerous, especially considering those players were often < level 20 and Kithicor was a level 40+ zone.
Not everyone had SoW and Levitation all the time there, and due to the design of the game some players could barely see there because they didn't have Infravision or Ultravision (i.e. Human and Dwarf characters).
Even then, we could use different examples...
I remember one of the best leveling spots I was shown was in the middle of the ocean. I was getting great XP there, until I died and had to get a Paladin to come help me get to my corpse (Rez me, cause XP loss :-P ). It took about 20 minutes there, but I made a friend that I stayed in touch with for over a year that day!
There was also this Iksar Necromancer named Nomadl that summoned my corpse for me when I first started playing and fell down the well in The dungeon off of the Commonlands (forget the name) and got killed by the skeletons down there (I was level 13, I almost can't believe I remember this stuff). It took me like an hour to find someone to help me get my corpse, and he offered to do it if I'd get the coffin for him. I *still* haven't forgotten his name... And that was almost 15 years ago!
The interesting thing is that most of my fondest memories from those older games were interactions with other players... Something I cannot really say the same for in the newer MMORPGs.
I do think that MMOs making the move to console has the potential to make them a bit more "social" again. Since a lot of the communications etc. is built into the core console services (XBL/PSN Voice Chat, Messaging, etc.).
You're saying low level people running around in a high level zone risked a lot? Just like in any mmo where if you're a lower level character trying to get from 1 place to another super far and you had no choice but to pass through higher level zones you'd get 1 shot if you got hit? Mkay....
Okay...someone helped you, as if that doesn't happen nowadays...
As if you can't make new memories with players nowadays...that says more about YOU than it does about the game.
Yes, there was no other way to get to HHK from Commonlands than through Kithicor Forest. Literally, no other way. You had to go through it.
The same way you may have to go through the ghetto of a city with a high crime rate to get form point A to Point B, with no other route to your destination, you had to go through Kithikor.
Secondly, running the walls wasn't always a surefire way, as MOBs could spawn close enough to the wall to agro you, and depending on your character, you may not even see them.
Thirdly, unless you were clueless, you knew all you had to do was wait a few minutes outside the zone and check the ingame time. Once it was daytime in game you could run the wall with virtually no risk. The risk of Kithicor was largely at night, when the higher level undead MOBs spawned.
Yes, someone could help you. You could have a high level character run you through and kill all agros. You could have a Druid or Ranger SoW and Levitate you. You could get Ultra Vision from some other class. You could even get a high level mage to run across the zone and then Call of the Hero you to the zoneline.
You didn't HAVE to run through Kithicor when it was most dangerous, or really at all, if you didn't want to. It's also not like HHK was the only place to level in that level range. There were quite a few other places to go :-P
No, it says more about the attitude of the average MMORPG player in these games these days. I haven't changed much. Other people are just not as interested in socializing and forming those kinds of bonds in games as they were back then. They are too busy hopping from game to game to care about that. They don't even know if they'll care about the game the next day :-P
I don't need a game to make friends. I have enough already. I don't even play MMORPGs currently, because I don't find much fun with the ones out there and none of them really engage me the way those older games (EQ, DAoC, etc.) did - largely because player attitudes are different. The games these days are more solo oriented and people tend to have very little patience and tolerance. It's just, massively different.
The social aspect of the game is what was most different than other games at the time. It was revolutionary back then. It's what drew me to this genre. The games these days are no different than playing an FPS with voice chat for the most part. I'm not interested in that. They're too shallow, too "fast," and not "epic" enough for me. Also, a lot of people in these games... are like you. Read your posts, then think about it ;-)
I play single player RPGs and Adventure Games on my PS4 now (my present to myself for kicking the MMO habit) and that's what I'll be doing until another game worth my attention comes out.
You can do what you please, but do stop talking about that which you are completely clueless about. It sounds like you just read a few things in some forum archives and decides to regurgitate them here.
Also, if you don't think EQ raids didn't have mechanics since ... forever (Add Spawns, AoE fear for Nagafen and Vox, two of the earliest raid, for example), you're a complete liar and probably never played the game at all, nevermind raided in that game. Really, just stop. There are raid encounters in EQ expansions from a decade ago that are more complicated than some of the latest encounters in WoW on Mythic Difficulty. You just don't come across as credible in any way whatsoever when you try to speak of WoW raiding comparative to EQ's.
EQ2's raiding was also pretty good. WoW raiding is completely trivialized to a large extent (not completely) by the hand holding mechanics they've baked into the game, and the DBM and other add-ons. At this point it's all about who is better at slamming out a DPS rotation and following directions like a lemming (watch any Twitch Stream). Back in the EQ days, we didn't have that. We wiped until we learned the encounters. You got better, you didn't just load an additional add-on to make up for your lack of ability to pay attention.
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were before WoW, you liar.
EverQuest also had an entire expansion of Instances called Lost Dungeons of Norrath *years* before WoW was released. So, that wasn't taken from WoW either.
The reason for going instanced had less to do with design and more to do with Quality of Life. When all of your raid content is Open World, and you have 10 guilds trying to progress... Problems arise when i.e. the one European Guild on the server is farming all the end game raids on European time.
You want players to have to pull all nighters to try to kill a raid?
Guilds were having to put Plane of Time on a schedule with other guilds, forcing them to take sometimes 4-5x longer to gear up than possible because they had to share the zone with other guilds to be fair - especially when those other guilds raided in different time zones than they did.
Monday - Guild A
Wednesday - Guild B
Friday - Guild C
etc.
Sometimes upwards of 5+ guilds were farming the zone. So you're progressing at the rate of 1 raid per week there when you should be doing 2-3 raids per week there, and you're now farming for alts and boxes in elemental planes cause no one in your guild needs it (which, BTW, is also on a rotation... for the same reasons).
??
This is why they went to instances in Gates of Discord. Quality of Life, for their players.
The only reason why people liked the Open World raid content in EQ, was because it made it easy for top guilds to farm content on spawn and basically keep guilds under them from progressing (and eventually passing them, in some cases).
EQ wasn't a PvP game, where... you'd want it to be Open World so that you could fight other players over it. People abused the open content to grief others, especially on servers like Antonia Bayle where there were top Euro and US guilds, and one guild had i.e. Solusek Ro spawning on their time zone and would kill it on spawn to prevent the other guild from getting into the Elemental Planes.
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were before WoW, you liar.
EverQuest also had an entire expansion of Instances called Lost Dungeons of Norrath *years* before WoW was released. So, that wasn't taken from WoW either.
The reason for going instanced had less to do with design and more to do with Quality of Life. When all of your raid content is Open World, and you have 10 guilds trying to progress... Problems arise when i.e. the one European Guild on the server is farming all the end game raids on European time.
You want players to have to pull all nighters to try to kill a raid?
They went instanced because it was causing too many issues. Plane of Time and Elemental Planes weren't instanced, but they later instanced the Plane of Time as well (after GoD was out a bit, IIRC) because people who wanted to progress in GoD needed PoTime gear (Uqua+) and it was a huge hassle having to coordinate "who's day is it" with other guilds just to farm the content (and it made gearing up take sometimes 5-6x longer than it otherwise would have, since the bosses were on a respawn timer, obviously).
Dealing with ctual mechanics look more like this. Even with those simple mechanics that the early WoW raids had, they were far more difficult than most of EQ1's, including Gates of Discord and Omens of War.
Raids were nothing but zergs with 0 challenge. You just kept throwing bodies at it till they died, yay loots.
Btw everyone, just so we avoid further things like this from people who never raided Everquest.
Everyone who has an opinion on EQ raids, I want to see some post PoP gear so we know you're not lying or pretending.
Picture + name so people can take you serious.
Thanks everyone.
Here is mine:
While I did not raid EQ, and I am not commenting on the state of its raids, I must say that you claiming that someone must post a picture of their raid gear or else they cannot comment on the raids is kind of silly.
There are plenty of ways one can educate themselves on the complexity and mechanics of any raid encounter ever created, thus giving them the ability to compare "toughness".
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were before WoW, you liar.
EverQuest also had an entire expansion of Instances called Lost Dungeons of Norrath *years* before WoW was released. So, that wasn't taken from WoW either.
The reason for going instanced had less to do with design and more to do with Quality of Life. When all of your raid content is Open World, and you have 10 guilds trying to progress... Problems arise when i.e. the one European Guild on the server is farming all the end game raids on European time.
You want players to have to pull all nighters to try to kill a raid?
They went instanced because it was causing too many issues. Plane of Time and Elemental Planes weren't instanced, but they later instanced the Plane of Time as well (after GoD was out a bit, IIRC) because people who wanted to progress in GoD needed PoTime gear (Uqua+) and it was a huge hassle having to coordinate "who's day is it" with other guilds just to farm the content (and it made gearing up take sometimes 5-6x longer than it otherwise would have, since the bosses were on a respawn timer, obviously).
Because the GoD bosses had AoEs, Knock Backs, Add Spawning in Waves. Same for the OoW bosses. You even had to use Charm and Mezzes/CC, etc.
You still have no clue what you're talking about, and are basing your opinion off of badly recorded videos on YouTube, since you obviously never played through those raids yourself.
I have. You're lying.
First boss in Tacvi had several mechanics, the MOB was perma rooted for most of the fight IIRC, it spawned adds, and untargetable Adds that AoE'd. It also FD'd etc. It was anything but trivial when it was first put in the game, and the game didn't tell you when the Adds were gonna AoE, like *some* games do (even graphically telling you where it's gonna hit, Lol).
You're just 100% completely wrong about raiding in that game. WoW is (and was, back then) cake compared to that. Raiding in EQ, especially post-PoP, was more akin to Heroic-Mythic level raiding in WoW. You didn't get the lower difficulties, and guilds progressed at a much slower rate compared to the rate the average guild progresses in WoW.
As for pulling the MOB into a corner... Certain classes relied on positioning to maximize their damage, like rogues. MOBs had mechanics like Riposte and Rampage/AE Rampage. Mobs had AoEs, etc. Positioning is also important in WoW, so I'm not sure why pulling the MOB into a corner (when there will be other mechanics happening in other areas of the room) is a bad thing. In many cases the MOBs were pulled to certain places because the guilds tried other ways of killing it and failed, and decided that was the best way for them to do it - of course, other guilds likely followed that strat once they got wind of it, but it did not in any way trivialize the content... There were many encounters where the MOB wasn't tanked in a corner, or where the MOB was perm rooted and couldn't be moved at all :-P
I'm not sure why you people who were bought up on WoW think that WoW invented "raid mechanics" and "scripted encounters." That was in those older games years before WoW was released.
Originally posted by VengeSunsoar Actually ldon only came our 1 year before wow.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were before WoW, you liar.
EverQuest also had an entire expansion of Instances called Lost Dungeons of Norrath *years* before WoW was released. So, that wasn't taken from WoW either.
The reason for going instanced had less to do with design and more to do with Quality of Life. When all of your raid content is Open World, and you have 10 guilds trying to progress... Problems arise when i.e. the one European Guild on the server is farming all the end game raids on European time.
You want players to have to pull all nighters to try to kill a raid?
Guilds were having to put Plane of Time on a schedule with other guilds, forcing them to take sometimes 4-5x longer to gear up than possible because they had to share the zone with other guilds to be fair - especially when those other guilds raided in different time zones than they did.
Monday - Guild A
Wednesday - Guild B
Friday - Guild C
etc.
Sometimes upwards of 5+ guilds were farming the zone. So you're progressing at the rate of 1 raid per week there when you should be doing 2-3 raids per week there, and you're now farming for alts and boxes in elemental planes cause no one in your guild needs it (which, BTW, is also on a rotation... for the same reasons).
??
This is why they went to instances in Gates of Discord. Quality of Life, for their players.
The only reason why people liked the Open World raid content in EQ, was because it made it easy for top guilds to farm content on spawn and basically keep guilds under them from progressing (and eventually passing them, in some cases).
EQ wasn't a PvP game, where... you'd want it to be Open World so that you could fight other players over it. People abused the open content to grief others, especially on servers like Antonia Bayle where there were top Euro and US guilds, and one guild had i.e. Solusek Ro spawning on their time zone and would kill it on spawn to prevent the other guild from getting into the Elemental Planes.
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were before WoW, you liar.
EverQuest also had an entire expansion of Instances called Lost Dungeons of Norrath *years* before WoW was released. So, that wasn't taken from WoW either.
The reason for going instanced had less to do with design and more to do with Quality of Life. When all of your raid content is Open World, and you have 10 guilds trying to progress... Problems arise when i.e. the one European Guild on the server is farming all the end game raids on European time.
You want players to have to pull all nighters to try to kill a raid?
Guilds were having to put Plane of Time on a schedule with other guilds, forcing them to take sometimes 4-5x longer to gear up than possible because they had to share the zone with other guilds to be fair - especially when those other guilds raided in different time zones than they did.
Monday - Guild A
Wednesday - Guild B
Friday - Guild C
etc.
Sometimes upwards of 5+ guilds were farming the zone. So you're progressing at the rate of 1 raid per week there when you should be doing 2-3 raids per week there, and you're now farming for alts and boxes in elemental planes cause no one in your guild needs it (which, BTW, is also on a rotation... for the same reasons).
??
This is why they went to instances in Gates of Discord. Quality of Life, for their players.
The only reason why people liked the Open World raid content in EQ, was because it made it easy for top guilds to farm content on spawn and basically keep guilds under them from progressing (and eventually passing them, in some cases).
EQ wasn't a PvP game, where... you'd want it to be Open World so that you could fight other players over it. People abused the open content to grief others, especially on servers like Antonia Bayle where there were top Euro and US guilds, and one guild had i.e. Solusek Ro spawning on their time zone and would kill it on spawn to prevent the other guild from getting into the Elemental Planes.
Yup, and that is touted as "golden years of MMOs"
Once has to wonder - what are they smoking
Complete Open World progression content only works in small games with small populations. EQ was at the height of its popularity back then, and with guilds wanting to progress the Achilles Heel of that type of design became evident. You cannot have a game, where people basically can't play it because they didn't wake up early enough to kill the MOB.
That's why they went to instanced content. However, much of the leveling areas remained open world so you still got to group with other people, around where other groups were and the social interaction therein was still as rich as it always was.
The only thing they removed was the massive headaches it caused for raid progression.
From a Social Aspect, and a Role Playing Aspect, and an Epic Character Development aspect... I do think that was the height of the genre, however demographics change and with that comes a change in perspective and wants. Games these days are catering to that. May be bad for us (who preferred the other system, even though those games were by no means perfect), but they go where the money is.
Even still... without XP grinding and open world farming of loot ... an Open World is largely useless because no one really stops to do anything of worth in it. We see how it is today. The games spend all this budget on developing huge zones, put quest hubs in them, and after the players level through them they never go back except if a later quest sends them there for an update, or they roll an alt. The longevity of content has taken a huge hit in these newer games.
There were horrible aspects of EQ, like some of the spawn camps (Quilmane) and [earlier on] Hell Levels (level 38 takes you one day, level 39 takes you one week, etc.), but I think from a social standpoint the game was much better designed than most of today's titles; which is why it has stood the test of time.
WoW was responsible for MMO trouble to the extent that it raised the bar to unreasonable heights for those coming after. The expectation that you could get millions of subscribers lead to unrealistic goals. WoW is unique; a right-time, right-place occurrence.
If you aim for realistic high end goals of 200-500k subscribers, and budget accordingly, you can succeed. Same goes for smaller games, with corresponding budget sizes. Of course, this presupposes that you can actually deliver something interesting.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
I just read over the article, along with the other 9,001 people and started to analyze what was being discussed, I would argue maybe it's time to codify a set of what's ethically acceptable in a "game" in terms of psychological experimentation, conditioning and such. There are things that are going on that in other areas would never be allowed in say medicine or psychology. There aren't s set of practices and ethical guidelines like say the APA has http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=1
without what's acceptable to be done, tested or used on a population anything is allowed. Perhaps these things are causing real psychological harm, behavior pattern changes and cross lines. I mean you can use MMO's as a giant unregulated clinical trial without some ethical framework.
WoW collected some of the best elements of the genre, and cut out the cancers that were keeping it back. Add in a lot of streamlining and a few nifty new features, and voila, a record breaking success for WoW.
Well done, Blizzard! I salute you!
lmao, huh? New features? Name them, I dare you.
WoW brought NOTHING original to the table. And it collected a lot of the worst elements too. (EQ style raiding, linear tierred gear grind, instanced dungeons, shallow class system). It was basically EQ with the best bits AND the worst bits shaved off, leaving a great big boring nothing for most people.
People forget most of the success came from being the first big budget MMO with a multi million dollar ad budget from a beloved company and a 6 year dev time.
Brought better raiding to the table. It's raiding was identical to EQ's raiding, as WoW's lead designers were all former EQ raid leaders. Nice try. Battlegrounds for balanced pvp. It was not the first game to have battlegrounds, nor would many agree that their version of battlegrounds were the best or balanced. WoW is a PvE game and the PvP portion always felt underdeveloped and unimportant. Made instanced dungeons because open world pve dungeons just turned into multiple hour waits or dealing with wipes because a group deeper in fucked up and trained you. Several games had instanced dungeons before WoW, and they were only necessary if your MMO was poorly designed like EQ. Which, WoW was, because it was basically EQ. DAoC never needed instanced dungeons, because there were never multiple hour waits because that's not how the loot system worked or the xp system.
Instanced raids in general because Zergs happened all the time and you can't properly script a fight against a zerg, GW2 showcased this. Not only was it not the first, second, third, or even fourth MMO to have instanced raids, it IS possible to have uninstanced and challenging raids, if the AI is dynamic enough. There were some raids in DAoC that only ever got completed once or twice ever on a server, and it wasn't because of some artificial instanced/gear limit like WoW has, it was because of the AI, and the players had to be at their best to get through it. Zerging never worked in that encounter. Stop pretending the dozens of pre WoW MMOs were all jsut like 1999 EQ.
Yea all of those were pretty new features that WoW showcased.
Try again.
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were before WoW, you liar.
EverQuest also had an entire expansion of Instances called Lost Dungeons of Norrath *years* before WoW was released. So, that wasn't taken from WoW either.
The reason for going instanced had less to do with design and more to do with Quality of Life. When all of your raid content is Open World, and you have 10 guilds trying to progress... Problems arise when i.e. the one European Guild on the server is farming all the end game raids on European time.
You want players to have to pull all nighters to try to kill a raid?
Guilds were having to put Plane of Time on a schedule with other guilds, forcing them to take sometimes 4-5x longer to gear up than possible because they had to share the zone with other guilds to be fair - especially when those other guilds raided in different time zones than they did.
Monday - Guild A
Wednesday - Guild B
Friday - Guild C
etc.
Sometimes upwards of 5+ guilds were farming the zone. So you're progressing at the rate of 1 raid per week there when you should be doing 2-3 raids per week there, and you're now farming for alts and boxes in elemental planes cause no one in your guild needs it (which, BTW, is also on a rotation... for the same reasons).
??
This is why they went to instances in Gates of Discord. Quality of Life, for their players.
The only reason why people liked the Open World raid content in EQ, was because it made it easy for top guilds to farm content on spawn and basically keep guilds under them from progressing (and eventually passing them, in some cases).
EQ wasn't a PvP game, where... you'd want it to be Open World so that you could fight other players over it. People abused the open content to grief others, especially on servers like Antonia Bayle where there were top Euro and US guilds, and one guild had i.e. Solusek Ro spawning on their time zone and would kill it on spawn to prevent the other guild from getting into the Elemental Planes.
Yup, and that is touted as "golden years of MMOs"
Once has to wonder - what are they smoking
Complete Open World progression content only works in small games with small populations. EQ was at the height of its popularity back then, and with guilds wanting to progress the Achilles Heel of that type of design became evident. You cannot have a game, where people basically can't play it because they didn't wake up early enough to kill the MOB.
That's why they went to instanced content. However, much of the leveling areas remained open world so you still got to group with other people, around where other groups were and the social interaction therein was still as rich as it always was.
The only thing they removed was the massive headaches it caused for raid progression.
From a Social Aspect, and a Role Playing Aspect, and an Epic Character Development aspect... I do think that was the height of the genre, however demographics change and with that comes a change in perspective and wants. Games these days are catering to that. May be bad for us (who preferred the other system, even though those games were by no means perfect), but they go where the money is.
Yeeeeeah, disputes over camp spots werent a thing....From a social aspect that is called anti-social.
Fact is that Blizzard took EQ and made it tons better. In every aspect. Thats the fact those "jaded vets" cannot get over.
Guilds were having to put Plane of Time on a schedule with other guilds, forcing them to take sometimes 4-5x longer to gear up than possible because they had to share the zone with other guilds to be fair - especially when those other guilds raided in different time zones than they did.
Monday - Guild A
Wednesday - Guild B
Friday - Guild C etc.
Sometimes upwards of 5+ guilds were farming the zone. So you're progressing at the rate of 1 raid per week there when you should be doing 2-3 raids per week there, and you're now farming for alts and boxes in elemental planes cause no one in your guild needs it (which, BTW, is also on a rotation... for the same reasons).
This is why they went to instances in Gates of Discord. Quality of Life, for their players.
The only reason why people liked the Open World raid content in EQ, was because it made it easy for top guilds to farm content on spawn and basically keep guilds under them from progressing (and eventually passing them, in some cases).
EQ wasn't a PvP game, where... you'd want it to be Open World so that you could fight other players over it. People abused the open content to grief others, especially on servers like Antonia Bayle where there were top Euro and US guilds, and one guild had i.e. Solusek Ro spawning on their time zone and would kill it on spawn to prevent the other guild from getting into the Elemental Planes.
Yup, and that is touted as "golden years of MMOs"
Once has to wonder - what are they smoking
Instead of instancing raids, could it be possible to make the zones scan, register and scale content based on who is in them these days (I am fairly certain the technology would not have handled them back then)? Wouldn't it then be possible to have truly MMO-EPIC raid battles if multiple guilds showed up, and yet a typical raid if 1 guild showed up, and typical one-raid party worth of content to make certain groups would have a hell of a time attempting such content (or even more content if more groups showed attempting to trick the system)? I am guessing in this day and age, the answer is likely yes, so long as the MMORPG does not go with quite top of the line graphics and audio.
GW2 has already done it. But you have to be in on the development of MMOs, not lamenting 15 years ago all day.
At the end of 2014, Blizzard Entertainment celebrated the 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft. There can be no doubt that WoW is a juggernaut that changed how we play and how we think about virtual worlds and MMORPGs.
But not all change is beneficial and not all success is healthy.
Amid the accolades and self-congratulatory celebrations going on there is unreported dark side to the triumph of WoW and it has come at a high price. It is this: the fantasy MMORPG that some of us used to know and love has all but evaporated and turned from an experience rich with social interaction into one devoid of it.
As WoW has systematically obliterated every MMORPG that came before it, the fate of the entire genre is now symbiotically linked to WoW. Look at your average MMO today and chances are it’s just another WoW clone with a different skin, story and setting.
Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, the reverse is also true. This essay will attempt to explain the destructive legacy of WoW and in particular how Blizzard caused the widespread decline of social interaction in MMORPGs.
Has the success of WoW destroyed the genre you loved, or improved it?
Just a mention, there are MMOs out there that are completely different then WOW, and not a themepark, AND thriving.
To answer your question: WOW has improved my genre, the sandbox and in my case, the sandbox sci fi.
By keeping the 'wow community' in their game, my favorite game EVE Online is mostly clean from any 'cataclysmic' easy to play mode and Blizzard players that are used to play games where they can reach all in 1 day. The ones that are there are cannon fodder.
I like a challenge in my games. I Hope WOW stays forever, God forbid if it dies out and they flock to my fav game.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
At the end of 2014, Blizzard Entertainment celebrated the 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft. There can be no doubt that WoW is a juggernaut that changed how we play and how we think about virtual worlds and MMORPGs.
But not all change is beneficial and not all success is healthy.
Amid the accolades and self-congratulatory celebrations going on there is unreported dark side to the triumph of WoW and it has come at a high price. It is this: the fantasy MMORPG that some of us used to know and love has all but evaporated and turned from an experience rich with social interaction into one devoid of it.
As WoW has systematically obliterated every MMORPG that came before it, the fate of the entire genre is now symbiotically linked to WoW. Look at your average MMO today and chances are it’s just another WoW clone with a different skin, story and setting.
Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, the reverse is also true. This essay will attempt to explain the destructive legacy of WoW and in particular how Blizzard caused the widespread decline of social interaction in MMORPGs.
Comments
WoW's raiding was not identical to EQ's raiding. WoW introduced actual mechanics you had to be aware of and you couldn't zerg a raid boss in WoW unless it was an overworld one like Cerberus event raid boss or the spirit dragons. Very few raid bosses in EQ1 did you have to deal with adds. About the only time you did is if you fucked up a pull. Not until after WoW released with its clearly superior raiding did you start seeing actual mechanics to EQ raid fights for the most part.
As for the rest of your comments, i said no mmo has used instances to the same degree and quality that WoW used it.
Try again.
You're saying low level people running around in a high level zone risked a lot? Just like in any mmo where if you're a lower level character trying to get from 1 place to another super far and you had no choice but to pass through higher level zones you'd get 1 shot if you got hit? Mkay....
Okay...someone helped you, as if that doesn't happen nowadays...
As if you can't make new memories with players nowadays...that says more about YOU than it does about the game.
What WoW 'did' to the MMO genre is actually no different than what Survivor 'did' to television, which mimics (hear me out on this) what happens at a real life flea market/bazaar.
I make my living selling at a local flea market, which in reality is more or less a bazaar. When someone begins selling something new, and others notice that something on someone else's table is selling very well, they'll imitate that person and begin selling it as well (assuming they can get their hands on said product)
For instance, 6 months ago, someone brought out brass knuckles 'belt buckles'. People would buy them, sometimes 2 at a time (one for each fist I guess) Before long, half of the regulars were selling brass knuckles belt buckles. Eventually someone began selling crappy little crossbow pistols. It took about a month, but now most people are hawking crossbow pistols.
It's no different than anything else. Other TV networks saw the success of Survivor and began putting out their own survivor clones. Eventually it branched out into other things that took off.
What is happening in the MMO market is more or less the same thing that always happens. People imitating what they see as success,trying to grab a piece of that pie.
There will probably never be a massive success on the scale of WoW. However, once WoW is finally put in a coffin and lowered into the ground (or at least the subscriber numbers dip low enough), companies will stop trying so hard to imitate it.
The biggest issue with MMO games is the amount of money it takes to keep one going, which is why most of the companies try to play it safe. A normal single player game can be sold for years after its expiration date, but an mmo is more or less dead once its servers go dark (side from private servers).
Again, you're comparing to 1999 EQ, not the later expansions that introduced instanced raids with more complex mechanics EXACTLY like WoW used.
And I see your arguments changed now. Instead of "WoW brought new things to the genre!" your argument is "WoW did everything better!" which isn't even something worth debating.
It amazes me that you think it was that simply. It is impossible to link any 1 thing to the success or failure of a game. This type of thinking is asinine at best. There are so many more things: such as release date, server loads, game difficulty, game replay-ability, cost, customer support, economy and so many other things that contribute to the outcome of a game.
As to the OP original points. Most are valid.
In the end the whole genre has degraded, much the way the entire internet society has. Anonymity breeds behavior that wouldn't be tolerated if no such anonymity existed.
Lets see your Battle Stations /r/battlestations
Battle Station
Yes, there was no other way to get to HHK from Commonlands than through Kithicor Forest. Literally, no other way. You had to go through it.
The same way you may have to go through the ghetto of a city with a high crime rate to get form point A to Point B, with no other route to your destination, you had to go through Kithikor.
Secondly, running the walls wasn't always a surefire way, as MOBs could spawn close enough to the wall to agro you, and depending on your character, you may not even see them.
Thirdly, unless you were clueless, you knew all you had to do was wait a few minutes outside the zone and check the ingame time. Once it was daytime in game you could run the wall with virtually no risk. The risk of Kithicor was largely at night, when the higher level undead MOBs spawned.
Yes, someone could help you. You could have a high level character run you through and kill all agros. You could have a Druid or Ranger SoW and Levitate you. You could get Ultra Vision from some other class. You could even get a high level mage to run across the zone and then Call of the Hero you to the zoneline.
You didn't HAVE to run through Kithicor when it was most dangerous, or really at all, if you didn't want to. It's also not like HHK was the only place to level in that level range. There were quite a few other places to go :-P
No, it says more about the attitude of the average MMORPG player in these games these days. I haven't changed much. Other people are just not as interested in socializing and forming those kinds of bonds in games as they were back then. They are too busy hopping from game to game to care about that. They don't even know if they'll care about the game the next day :-P
I don't need a game to make friends. I have enough already. I don't even play MMORPGs currently, because I don't find much fun with the ones out there and none of them really engage me the way those older games (EQ, DAoC, etc.) did - largely because player attitudes are different. The games these days are more solo oriented and people tend to have very little patience and tolerance. It's just, massively different.
The social aspect of the game is what was most different than other games at the time. It was revolutionary back then. It's what drew me to this genre. The games these days are no different than playing an FPS with voice chat for the most part. I'm not interested in that. They're too shallow, too "fast," and not "epic" enough for me. Also, a lot of people in these games... are like you. Read your posts, then think about it ;-)
I play single player RPGs and Adventure Games on my PS4 now (my present to myself for kicking the MMO habit) and that's what I'll be doing until another game worth my attention comes out.
You can do what you please, but do stop talking about that which you are completely clueless about. It sounds like you just read a few things in some forum archives and decides to regurgitate them here.
Also, if you don't think EQ raids didn't have mechanics since ... forever (Add Spawns, AoE fear for Nagafen and Vox, two of the earliest raid, for example), you're a complete liar and probably never played the game at all, nevermind raided in that game. Really, just stop. There are raid encounters in EQ expansions from a decade ago that are more complicated than some of the latest encounters in WoW on Mythic Difficulty. You just don't come across as credible in any way whatsoever when you try to speak of WoW raiding comparative to EQ's.
EQ2's raiding was also pretty good. WoW raiding is completely trivialized to a large extent (not completely) by the hand holding mechanics they've baked into the game, and the DBM and other add-ons. At this point it's all about who is better at slamming out a DPS rotation and following directions like a lemming (watch any Twitch Stream). Back in the EQ days, we didn't have that. We wiped until we learned the encounters. You got better, you didn't just load an additional add-on to make up for your lack of ability to pay attention.
Yes, that "later" came after WoW and it still wasn't as good as WoW and EQ ended up losing its "soul" and became a mere shell of its former self because it started trying to copy WoW's success but failed to do so.
Gates of Discord and Omens of War were before WoW, you liar.
EverQuest also had an entire expansion of Instances called Lost Dungeons of Norrath *years* before WoW was released. So, that wasn't taken from WoW either.
The reason for going instanced had less to do with design and more to do with Quality of Life. When all of your raid content is Open World, and you have 10 guilds trying to progress... Problems arise when i.e. the one European Guild on the server is farming all the end game raids on European time.
You want players to have to pull all nighters to try to kill a raid?
Guilds were having to put Plane of Time on a schedule with other guilds, forcing them to take sometimes 4-5x longer to gear up than possible because they had to share the zone with other guilds to be fair - especially when those other guilds raided in different time zones than they did.
Monday - Guild A
Wednesday - Guild B
Friday - Guild C
etc.
Sometimes upwards of 5+ guilds were farming the zone. So you're progressing at the rate of 1 raid per week there when you should be doing 2-3 raids per week there, and you're now farming for alts and boxes in elemental planes cause no one in your guild needs it (which, BTW, is also on a rotation... for the same reasons).
??
This is why they went to instances in Gates of Discord. Quality of Life, for their players.
The only reason why people liked the Open World raid content in EQ, was because it made it easy for top guilds to farm content on spawn and basically keep guilds under them from progressing (and eventually passing them, in some cases).
EQ wasn't a PvP game, where... you'd want it to be Open World so that you could fight other players over it. People abused the open content to grief others, especially on servers like Antonia Bayle where there were top Euro and US guilds, and one guild had i.e. Solusek Ro spawning on their time zone and would kill it on spawn to prevent the other guild from getting into the Elemental Planes.
Still consisting of little more than pulling to corner and dpsing the bosses down. How am i a liar again?
Dealing with ctual mechanics look more like this. Even with those simple mechanics that the early WoW raids had, they were far more difficult than most of EQ1's, including Gates of Discord and Omens of War.
While I did not raid EQ, and I am not commenting on the state of its raids, I must say that you claiming that someone must post a picture of their raid gear or else they cannot comment on the raids is kind of silly.
There are plenty of ways one can educate themselves on the complexity and mechanics of any raid encounter ever created, thus giving them the ability to compare "toughness".
Because the GoD bosses had AoEs, Knock Backs, Add Spawning in Waves. Same for the OoW bosses. You even had to use Charm and Mezzes/CC, etc.
You still have no clue what you're talking about, and are basing your opinion off of badly recorded videos on YouTube, since you obviously never played through those raids yourself.
I have. You're lying.
First boss in Tacvi had several mechanics, the MOB was perma rooted for most of the fight IIRC, it spawned adds, and untargetable Adds that AoE'd. It also FD'd etc. It was anything but trivial when it was first put in the game, and the game didn't tell you when the Adds were gonna AoE, like *some* games do (even graphically telling you where it's gonna hit, Lol).
You're just 100% completely wrong about raiding in that game. WoW is (and was, back then) cake compared to that. Raiding in EQ, especially post-PoP, was more akin to Heroic-Mythic level raiding in WoW. You didn't get the lower difficulties, and guilds progressed at a much slower rate compared to the rate the average guild progresses in WoW.
As for pulling the MOB into a corner... Certain classes relied on positioning to maximize their damage, like rogues. MOBs had mechanics like Riposte and Rampage/AE Rampage. Mobs had AoEs, etc. Positioning is also important in WoW, so I'm not sure why pulling the MOB into a corner (when there will be other mechanics happening in other areas of the room) is a bad thing. In many cases the MOBs were pulled to certain places because the guilds tried other ways of killing it and failed, and decided that was the best way for them to do it - of course, other guilds likely followed that strat once they got wind of it, but it did not in any way trivialize the content... There were many encounters where the MOB wasn't tanked in a corner, or where the MOB was perm rooted and couldn't be moved at all :-P
I'm not sure why you people who were bought up on WoW think that WoW invented "raid mechanics" and "scripted encounters." That was in those older games years before WoW was released.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Yup, and that is touted as "golden years of MMOs"
Once has to wonder - what are they smoking
Complete Open World progression content only works in small games with small populations. EQ was at the height of its popularity back then, and with guilds wanting to progress the Achilles Heel of that type of design became evident. You cannot have a game, where people basically can't play it because they didn't wake up early enough to kill the MOB.
That's why they went to instanced content. However, much of the leveling areas remained open world so you still got to group with other people, around where other groups were and the social interaction therein was still as rich as it always was.
The only thing they removed was the massive headaches it caused for raid progression.
From a Social Aspect, and a Role Playing Aspect, and an Epic Character Development aspect... I do think that was the height of the genre, however demographics change and with that comes a change in perspective and wants. Games these days are catering to that. May be bad for us (who preferred the other system, even though those games were by no means perfect), but they go where the money is.
Even still... without XP grinding and open world farming of loot ... an Open World is largely useless because no one really stops to do anything of worth in it. We see how it is today. The games spend all this budget on developing huge zones, put quest hubs in them, and after the players level through them they never go back except if a later quest sends them there for an update, or they roll an alt. The longevity of content has taken a huge hit in these newer games.
There were horrible aspects of EQ, like some of the spawn camps (Quilmane) and [earlier on] Hell Levels (level 38 takes you one day, level 39 takes you one week, etc.), but I think from a social standpoint the game was much better designed than most of today's titles; which is why it has stood the test of time.
Never mind. Not worth it.
WoW was responsible for MMO trouble to the extent that it raised the bar to unreasonable heights for those coming after. The expectation that you could get millions of subscribers lead to unrealistic goals. WoW is unique; a right-time, right-place occurrence.
If you aim for realistic high end goals of 200-500k subscribers, and budget accordingly, you can succeed. Same goes for smaller games, with corresponding budget sizes. Of course, this presupposes that you can actually deliver something interesting.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
I just read over the article, along with the other 9,001 people and started to analyze what was being discussed, I would argue maybe it's time to codify a set of what's ethically acceptable in a "game" in terms of psychological experimentation, conditioning and such. There are things that are going on that in other areas would never be allowed in say medicine or psychology. There aren't s set of practices and ethical guidelines like say the APA has http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=1
without what's acceptable to be done, tested or used on a population anything is allowed. Perhaps these things are causing real psychological harm, behavior pattern changes and cross lines. I mean you can use MMO's as a giant unregulated clinical trial without some ethical framework.
Yeeeeeah, disputes over camp spots werent a thing....From a social aspect that is called anti-social.
Fact is that Blizzard took EQ and made it tons better. In every aspect. Thats the fact those "jaded vets" cannot get over.
GW2 has already done it. But you have to be in on the development of MMOs, not lamenting 15 years ago all day.
Just a mention, there are MMOs out there that are completely different then WOW, and not a themepark, AND thriving.
To answer your question: WOW has improved my genre, the sandbox and in my case, the sandbox sci fi.
By keeping the 'wow community' in their game, my favorite game EVE Online is mostly clean from any 'cataclysmic' easy to play mode and Blizzard players that are used to play games where they can reach all in 1 day. The ones that are there are cannon fodder.
I like a challenge in my games. I Hope WOW stays forever, God forbid if it dies out and they flock to my fav game.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
Then you would love WoW, as it contains the hardest raid encounters ever released.