WoW is what did Blizzard in. It turned them from a great company that developed innovative and mesmerizing titles into a revenue stream generator governed by bean-counters. There's no way Blizzard ever produces another risk-taking innovative game again. They'll always go for the revenue stream now, using time-tested conventions to try to paddle into the middle of it. This is what happened to Bungie also after Microsoft bought them out. Halo was a great revenue producer but it broke no significant ground over what the Marathon series had already taken in the early to mid-90's. Bungie has gone a decade now without producing anything worth playing for original value.
To their credit, when World of Warcraft first came out, it was a nice change of pace for MMORPG scenery. Before then, the likes of DAoC and Everquest ruled the scene, and hours of grinding and exp penalty on death was taken as a norm. Sure, these games did have rather expansive world of their own, but then who really cares about the lore behind the love story between Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox? (And that is the original EQ to boot - EQ had a lot of other quality contents as well.) That was a rather harsh world, where you, by yourself, cannot do a damn thing. Really. (Of course, unless you happened to be overpowered necromancer. But then, things weren't as easy as a walk in the part with them either.) You HAD to play nice with other people since - once you got a bad name going around, that character is as good as useless. Nobody will play with you in their party, and nobody will help you. Now... their system made much more sense, but since the world was not an instanced copy of itself, that made the entire guild thing much more important. There was one God (=uber mob, with kickass loot) at all times, and if your guild killed it, then nobody else could until the server reset. (For various reasons - i.e. maintenance, upgrading machines, patches, what have you.) And the whole scenery was about to change; enter WoW. This was like playing Diablo in Everquest setting, to put it shortly. You could do a lot of things by yourself, and each dungeon had an exact replica of itself whenever you reset the dungeon and entered. I don't know about you, br4d, but if you ever played EQ, I would have to assume, at some point in your EQ career, you either farmed or tried farming FBSS - there was going to be ONE camp throughout the entire server, and you would have to wait for your turn. Not much so with WoW. Each dungeon is instanced, and you could keep on running the same dungeon till you got the loot you wanted - without having to wait for your turn. Having the members would be the challenge, but the mob wasn't. This applies to raid level dungeons too - each guild will be given a fair and square shot, and there is nothing you can do as a member of competing guild to stop the other guild from advancing. (This is a stark difference; during PoP era in EQ for instance, one of the biggest challenge for up-and-coming guilds was Rallos Zek, the god of War. He was the linchpin in the further progression, and he had a very good tanking sword on the drop table. As such, the higher guilds would make it a rule to kill RZ on a regular basis so the new guilds cannot progress further - at least until THEY are done farming far ahead; by then it wouldn't really matter, since new expansion would be just ahead.) ------------------------------------------------------------- So... was this a welcome change from head to toe? I'd have liked to say that was the case, but it is not. Since you could do a lot by yourself, that in turn meant you didn't have to depend on others as much as you had to in the previous situations. That opened a whole new dimension for retards and dumb fucks to stay in the game, without having to really learn to coexist with others. Another problem - even though this was unintended problem, I suppose - was that, this instanced dungeon had an accelerating effect on contents consumption. This only makes sense, if you think about it; let's go back to the PoP example again. When the upper guilds kept killing RZ for their own good, that also slowed the contents consumption at the higher end, whether they intended it or not; the new-coming guilds were given very sparse chance to even try RZ, much less to succeed at them. Anything beyond? It was left untouched by most even by the time PoT was conquered. That didn't matter much; top-end raiding guilds found their thing to do (which is, obviously, raiding) and lower-end guilds that didn't really intend to raid heavily found their own things to do. (Exploring, crafting, etc - you name it.) In case of WoW, everything was streamlined, but was easy; and as a result, with instanced dungeons, that accelerated the speed at which the contents were consumed. ------------------------------------------------------------ I would like to believe that, had WoW stopped expanding after WotLK expansion, things would have been much better. (Same with EQ; after Scars of Velious expansion, things went downhill. Coincidentally, both SoV expansion and WotLK expansion are both 2nd expansion packs - with the most success as expansions.) By now, things look like utter shit. Make no mistake - there is no turning back. The population has reached the swansong stage; most of them have at least 3-4 lvl 85 toons raiding heavily. Not many start anew these days. As a game that thrives on the infusion of new blood, this means death knell. WoW was, when it first came out, very innovative and fun to play. I still remember my first SM run with my tauren warrior; you were supposed to be lvl 38-40 to be there, but I made my first run with 35 warrior. Things were very difficult, but it was very fun too. At that time, WoW really looked like Diablo 2 in EQ setting; here, what I am trying to convey is that, the mobs were generally very strong - especially in dungeons - and you had to play with deliberation and care. One bad pull, with some other things gone wrong would certifiably result in wiping the group. These days, it's not much so; the game was distorted so much to the point where you just do not know where the fun factor comes from. You do not get any sort of feeling of 'accomplishment' after successfully completing a dungeon run. In that regard, I would have to say the continued mismanagement of WoW did more harm than the original concept of WoW itself.
You think Einstein didn't know much about QM when he blasted it? You should have very hard time understanding that part too then, I suppose?
So i've been doing Butcher runs to improve my gear so I can survive Act 2 inferno. I've been getting crap after crap even with all Magic Find gear and 5 stack NValor. They are making it impossible to get good gear. The endgame so gear depended but they are making almost impossible to get quality gear unless if you go to the AH. Stupid
thats because the drop rates suck after the first time you kill a boss. they wanna eliminate the "meph runs" from D2 and make you fight elite mobs instead
It's all right. Nobody blames you for your stupidity. Rather, American education in general is going to hell in handbasket. You happen to be one of the victims.
WoW was great for soloists but it still had lots of content that really were small group content on the landscape. Not that you couldn't solo with the right class and gear but things went much more smoothly with the tank-heals-DPS troika on hand. EQ had almost no soloable content beyond level 24 or so unless you were 8 levels above it. Necromancers and Druids had different rules and some of the other caster classes came close but basically you didn't stand with anything close to your level and win. That made the landscape exciting. As opposed to being just a grind place with little or no risk involved. The death penalties made you really think about what you were willing to try and the consequences of failure. This made finding good guild mates an imperative and the guild I was in from 1999 to 2002 had about 150 committed players of whom I knew most on a grouping basis. We ran 70+ person raids every week, several times a week at the peak, and had almost a party atmosphere going on during them. No kids played at all. The youngest guild mates I remember were in their late teens and early 20's. Almost everybody in the guild was from late 20's to early 40's and from a D&D roleplaying upbringing. EQ was like crack because it was not hard at all compared to D&D. Hard is not death penalties. Hard is having your party have to carry your lifeless corpse around for half the evening trying to find a Bishop to raise it. Hard is not being unable to solo dark-bue con mobs. Hard is having any random kobold toddle up to you and roll a 6 a couple of times in a row causing your party to have to carry your corpse around for half the night looking for a rez. This was the great thing about EQ raiding. You could not farm any place for loot. You got one whack at the boss and if you wiped you were done because odds were that some other guild would kill it before you got reassembled. The first time my guild broke the Plane of Fear I had 12 corpses stacked like cord wood waiting for rezzes. I lost two levels on the night during the clear, representing about three weeks of grinding time to recapture. I got about half of that back on the rezzes at the end of the night. If you really liked this kind of game then WoW was a killer. The reason was that WoW was too easy and the penalties and rewards for accomplishing or failing to accomplish something were to small to represent a real achievement. I camped J-boots and FBSS on my Monk. I camped a host of other things on various toons in EQ and I eventually got all of them. It took a lot of time camping and I got a lot of kills and learned to better play the toons as I was doing it. I camped with a couple of other people most of the time and the story-telling in those camps was amazing. It was roleplaying at it's best and eventually the damn Ghoul Assassin would spawn and then eventually he would drop what you were looking for. The deaths in those camps and there were a lot of them due to trains and such made the investment of time worthwhile. The FBSS was a good sash. It was not god loot though. It did not make my character invincible or even strong enough to beat a dark blue most of the time. It did however make him better and it made him better enough that it was worth getting. This is later in EQ history than I participated in. I did run a few PoP progression raids but only after I had returned near the end of EQ's dominance of the MMO market. I ran these raids in massive PUG raids because by then there were only a few raiding guilds per server, if that. WoW represented a degradation of the overall genre of MMO's. It encouraged kids to play, which was a hugely negative thing in a genre that had been adult-only to that point with rare exceptions. It cheapened the risk/reward matrix because kids won't stick it out and do hard things to get decent rewards. It began the trend towards elitism in small groups and raids because kids just do that kind of crap when they think they have an edge. When the late teens and early 20's were in the minority the MMO's were strong social exercises in cooperative gaming with shared challenges and rewards. When that same age bracket became the average player with lots of younger players beneath them these games became Lord of the Flies incarnate. EQ was the last MMO that had MUD-flation in check. WoW got broken almost immediately with the rewards out of Blackwing Lair vastly exceeding the available rewards anywhere else in the game. From then on every expansion upped the rewards heavily while cutting back the number of players who could participate in raids. This took the Lord of the Flies dynamic and accelerated it dramatically. If you were down the damage meters you had trouble holding onto spots in raids. An error or two would get you quietly black-listed and excluded. I sat in officer chat in multiple guilds and watched most of this go by and eventually just stopped raiding when I couldn't find a civilized guild to raid with. The only way to get MMO's back to where they were originally is to flatten the content out dramatically. No leveling at all. Just rep progression and minimal gear improvements. Tons of content that is accessible to every player in the game with all new content immediately accessible to everybody who buys it. Tiered content that can be run easy, challenging or hard depending on what people want out if it. No god swords. Gear should be secondary to player's skill levels at wielding it. Make players determine their challenge level, that being the level at which it is fun to be challenged. Keep bringing out new content with different types of challenges. Let players buy keeps with the rep and gold they accumulate instead of leveling. Let PvP flow out of that process eventually. A living world that is fun for everybody who plays in it. Not a long grind to level x and a horribly small and constrained endgame waiting for the next expansion to give you content you will burn out on in 6 weeks.
I can see how the American education system factors into a debate about a bad game that you continue to play even after admitting it sucks.
Dear br4dw4y5ux: why am I not surprised at all to find that you have played EQ extensively as well? (LOL) --------------------------------------------------------------- One of the worst aspect of WoW that is most overlooked is that, it shrank the leveling process considerably. It curtailed the leveling process to the point where doing a few quests in any given zone will certifiably get you out of the zone within 2 hours. And, since they ran out of ideas to put necessary contents in, they came up with this bullshit idea called HEROIC DUNGEONS. (Just where have I seen that shit before? Thank god, I don't have to run the same fucking dungeon in FOUR DIFFERENT DIFFICULTY LEVELS THIS TIME.) Now... why are they critical? Simple. 1. Since you do not get to play your character long enough, a. you don't get to know the extent of your own abilities and b. you don't get to interact with other players c. most of the low-level zones are dead zones with very few players in between. (The catch is, those few are Chinese gold farmers.) 2. Why was Heroic dungeon necessary? That's because they (= blizzard) wanted to set up some criteria for the raid content, but there was no way they could put the items within the given context - you know, the items that will be acting as the entry point for novice raiders. So, instead of coming up with more contents, instead they went the cheap and easy way; heroic dungeon. Now, that heroic dungeon was instanced as well, so they put a manual cap on heroic dungeon (you can only run any given heroic dungeon once a day.) Just what a piss-poor design, don't you think? ---------------------------------------------------------- The WoW during the original days had strong feel of EQ and to some extent, DAoC (PvP warfare between Horde and Alliance was more or less influenced by DAoC - or that was my impression.) Just, I felt that the world was too small, and the leveling process didn't offer anything more than "It's easy, it's simple and it is not ho-hum grind!" catchphrase. Also, since they charged you (incrementally, if you recall) to reset the skill tree, that meant you had to follow mostly used cookie-cutter builds. Not much room to be wild and do something creative. (I just don't understand who comes up with these idiotic ideas.) By now, raids are run by pick-ups, and raid items are sold by in-game currency. These strategy sites would post the cookie-cutter strategies then everybody would read them and do their part respectively. I don't know if that's how you call fun raiding experience. (In my days with EQ, we may have been killing many raid bosses, but we would be using our own strategies, while other guilds would use their own strategies. Maybe this concept is too old-school for today's gaming world, I guess.) --------------------------------------------------------------- So in that regard, your indictment of WoW is a correct one. I myself finally quit playing WoW about a year ago, since - let's face it. That game sucks. It's not like what it was like when I quit playing EQ. I had some personal problems then (job transfers and whatnot, school issues, etc), and many people on my guild (we even met the entire guildmates in person a few times to have real good times.) wished me well; some I still keep in contact till this day. I doubt if I ever had anything half close to that in WoW environment. (And you shouldn't expect that either.)
1. I don't play it any more. That game was uninstalled a few weeks ago. (If I kept on playing, I'd have more than mere 3.5M of gold, wouldn't you think?) 2. You don't seem to understand a very simple concept about knowing the stuff if you want to have a public say about it. That concept is a learned concept obviously; so I had to doubt your education.
