f13.net

Here you go. Your very own thread about how much WoW sucks and kills babies and rapes dogs.


Post Hate Here

(http://www.tactical-graphic-design.com/download-clipart-files/valentine-love-romance/clip-art-valentine-heart-cupid.gif)

We've got a lot of material to sort throught.  When complete, it could be one hell of an epic.

Edit: This might be a tad mean spirited.. there's a lot of people here with irrational levels of hate/love towards certain things.

I hate your love for hate.

I Love your hate for love.

PSP

X-Box 360

Do I have to make the following topic then?

"All you fuckers are paying for the exact thing you railed against 4 years ago."

explain, then discuss.

Shift key plz.

Postcount++

I wasn't aware all of "us fuckers" were rallying against fun for the last 4 years.

Fedex quests.
Kill 50 Rats.
Item based gameplay.
Min/Maxing.
Uberguilds.
Typical PvP.
Queues.
Horrible Development Cycles.
Exploits.
Gold Farming.
Oh, and elves. Lots of elves.

Yes - but the blond elves are not in yet. You can still laugh at the hunter name legolass.

Fedex quests.
- I don't mind them. In fact I like them. Good for getting people to explore the game areas and learn their geography instead of sitting on their asses camping the <mob name> till they ding.

Kill 50 Rats.
- Well Implemented. Good for getting people to explore the game areas and learn their geography. Gets them moving around and whacking different foozles instead of sitting on their asses camping the <mob name> till they ding.  DAOC had a nice set of ideas here as well with the varying improved XP amounts given by uncamped mobs as well.

Item based gameplay.
- Might need some clarification here. I've always been attracted to computer games where your character is constantly improved. Levels, items, etc are a good way to do this. It's the gameplay carrot. I balance my WoW-type games with a healthy dose of online FPS, where the only constant is your own skill (and it's imporvement).

Min/Maxing.
- Meh. Play how you want. People min/max in all games. You've mentioned you've got a passing interest in Warhammer. I've played it for nearly 20 years now. Want to see some min/maxing, look at WHFB/40k. Or MTG, or GW, or... ..

or, you know, play how you want.


Uberguilds.
-They don't bother me in WoW. I play on a PVE server, so I can't be randomly ganked by catasses as I head to where ever I'm going, and unlike in EQ where they could cockblock others from content, +1 instancing FTW~!


Typical PvP.
-Easily ignored if you're not into PVP. If you're after fantastic MMORPG PVP, I don't think it's been done yet?


Queues.
-Agreed. EQ never had queues. And queues at +1yr into the game is just unacceptable.


Horrible Development Cycles.
-Mixed on this. Blizzard take their sweet fucking time on new content, but on the other hand, they always have. More to the point, the 5 or so new dungeons patched into the game since release for free would have been released as "expansion" +$ content in a SoE game.

The original EQ did release new zones or revamp older ones occasionally, but they were often very Meh. Such as the snow-ass mountains through The Hole, or Veksar which was okay, (but which was supposed to be included in Kunark and I believe included in their "x new zones" count at the time). For the last couple years the new zones have always been Meh, and simply tied to creating hype to sell the latest you-need-to-buy-it-if-you-want-to-keep-playing-(with-your-guild/friends) expansion. New Neriak Forest? New Lavastorm? Ledaria's Landing? meh.


Exploits.
-Not good, but they're exploits and obvously not deliberate. Pretty much every game suffers from these. Wall Hack anyone? Aimbot maybe?


Gold Farming.
-Agreed. I've never seen it so large or so blatant. But I think this is directly tied to the game's success, as well as the rise of sites like IGE and Yantis which simply didn't exist years ago.


Oh, and elves. Lots of elves.
-I like Elves okay.


oh, and postcount +1. Like anyone gives a shit about postcount. ooh! my e-peen on forum-site #2498175 just got a millimeter bigger~!
My skill at Life has improved (2)

Okay, but were you complaining about them back in EQ?  Cause lots of the people talking about how awesome WoW is were, and schild is right in saying they're praising the same stuff they were bitching about a few years ago.


Hm.  Mostly, I think, the problem is that items aren't just a bonus, they're MUST HAVE OR YOU ARE WORTHLESS.  Which, I agree, is pretty shitty.  Looking at classic stories, folks like Arthur, sure they have Excalibur... but he's not also carrying two magic rings, a magic necklace, magic helmet, magic chestplate, magic sleeves, magic leggings, magic boots, magic trinkets, magic gloves, etc etc etc.  That's sort of a separate issue, though.  I think the problem here is that items=time played>skill.


Arguably, but that still doesn't explain why WoW gets so much praise then- if it's not rising above the failures of the past, why do we care?  If you want PvP, and WoW's PvP is as mediocre as the PvP available in all MMOGs...?


Well yeah, that's the joke.

(Note: I apologize for doing what I did to this thread.  I did not intend to channel TFWSNBN.)

I cannot in good conscience harbour my silence any longer.  

Schild deserves compassion and understanding in his plight.  Yes plight.  In your chorus of defense against WoW you have failed to look at the man behind theses prescient words.  Failed to explore the depths of his wisdom and whether extraneous machinations have otherwise affected his erudite judgement.

Apologies Schild, but to quote him in a confidential email:

"Ya Jpark leveling my Paladin to level 60 in WoW took a lot out of me. I love the game, but the class broke me.  Last time a I level a damage specced Paladin in WoW."

That cat is out of the bag.  Schild does not hate WoW per se - he is burnt out from less than judicious class choice with a rather ironic choice for talent specs.

Fedex quests.
Okay, but were you complaining about them back in EQ?  Cause lots of the people talking about how awesome WoW is were, and schild is right in saying they're praising the same stuff they were bitching about a few years ago.

=> Honestly? I can't recall but I don't think so. I'd been playing at level 60/65/70 for so long before i left EQ that I can't say this stuff has bothered me for a long time. Pair that with a Shadowknight horse, prenerf CoS and a 2-boxed Druid (Ports + Flight of Eagles + instant invis AA) and travel has been pretty trivial in EQ for a long time. And I was far from uber. Leveling up, I don't think I really noticed things like that first time around when it was all new to me.



Item based gameplay.
Hm.  Mostly, I think, the problem is that items aren't just a bonus, they're MUST HAVE OR YOU ARE WORTHLESS.  Which, I agree, is pretty shitty.  Looking at classic stories, folks like Arthur, sure they have Excalibur... but he's not also carrying two magic rings, a magic necklace, magic helmet, magic chestplate, magic sleeves, magic leggings, magic boots, magic trinkets, magic gloves, etc etc etc.  That's sort of a separate issue, though.  I think the problem here is that items=time played>skill.

=> It just depends on the mindset you have playing the game. And I do agree with your formula above, but it's not bothering me since I don't PVP and just play with friends and another bunch of fun raiding casuals my group has just recently met up with who live in the same city. There's some guys talking about how no class should have less then 5k hp in another thread on here, but they're playing a different kind of WoW to me. I'm not competing with anyone.



Typical PvP.
Arguably, but that still doesn't explain why WoW gets so much praise then- if it's not rising above the failures of the past, why do we care?  If you want PvP, and WoW's PvP is as mediocre as the PvP available in all MMOGs...?

=> I'm not a PVP-guy, so I'll bow out of this part of the discussion. I played WSG a few times and it was fun to play a Team Fortress map in a MMORPG, but outside of that I really have no experience with PVP in these games.



oh, and postcount +1. Like anyone gives a shit about postcount. ooh! my e-peen on forum-site #2498175 just got a millimeter bigger~!
My skill at Life has improved (2)

Well yeah, that's the joke.

=> No really! It did get bigger!



Oh, and Schild: When you resub to WoW next time, try rolling up a mage or Rogue. Very different to Pally and way fun to level up (though I enjoyed levelling my Pally) but with the bonus of not being generally shit on like Pallys once you hit 60.

Azazel pretty much summed up the way I feel about Schilds list.

And I disagree with most of what Llava then refutes, but I don't wanna Bruce it up.

Basically, the fedex quests are fun and rewarding in WoW.  There's only a few I can think of that felt tired and cliche.  The Kill 50 rats quests - yeah, there ARE a few too many.  Whatcha gonna do ?  It's a balance of good versus bad and I think there's enough content so that you don't really have to do as many of these quests as other games force you to.

I wholeheartedly reject the notion that items matter.  Totally.  I have had my shanker since lvl 50 and it's the same dagger I am using today.  Similarly, I upgrade my other items 'driftingly'.  I feel no need whatsoever to keep up with the Jones. I'm a well adjusted 31 year old bloke with a great family, TONS of money and a lovely house.  Virtual items can suck my cock and it just DOESN'T affect my gameplay or fun.

PvP.  I enjoy it.  Fuck you if you don't.  Show me better.  Could they do better world stuff ?  Sure.  Who gives a crap ?  What they have is fun.  Suck it up.

FUN.

THE GAME IS FUN.  I AM IN A GOOD GUILD WITH NICE PEOPLE AND I'M HAVING FUN.  WE KILLED TWO BOSSES TONIGHT IN ZG AND IT WAS FUN.  FUN !!!!!  IT DISTRACTS ME FROM WORK AND THE SOCIAL PRESSURES OF BEING SURROUNDED BY FUCKING SCOTS.  IT'S FUN !

Oh, and I demand more epic poetry in this thread.

EQ, AO, DOAC, hell even UO ?  Not as fun.  Sorry.

(ok, maybe UO.  It's hard to remember.)

Must resist... must... resist...

Suffice it to say that I'm with schild on this one.  WoW just never grabbed me. 

Still, for $15 a month it's cheap entertainment if you're having fun.   Different strokes for different folks! (/insert Gary Coleman photo here)

Haiku summation of Ironwood's post:

I like PvP
Could they do better world stuff?
Sure, who gives a crap?

What they have is fun.
Fuck you if you don't have fun.
I'm a fucking Scot.

Long story short, it's a game and as long as people are enjoying it, they can enjoy it.

The reason this thread sprang fully formed from the brow of Zeus was because someone who didn't like it kept coming over to chat to those who did and all he could repeat was 'no, I don't like it', 'It's rubbish', 'how can you play this' and 'that sounds awful'.  With the prime offender being 'it's only because it's companyx that made this that you like it.  That's the only reason it's made it.  You're all brainwashed.  It's rubbish.'

Let's be honest here;  if that was a bloke in a pub, you'd deck him.  Especially if he went on to tell you about how 'ConsoleX is just the best and screw you if you don't agree' all the while not seeing the irony.

Or maybe that's just me.


It is me, isn't it ?

Oh well.

That's Fucking Epic.  That's getting printed off in Purple and wall-mounted it's so fucking epic.  That'd drop off Hakkar, it's so epic.

Cheers man.

what's this mean? quoting and replying to bits piecemeal?

also, who is Bruce?




I'll take that. I hated EQ2 but if someone else thinks it's the Dog's Bollocks, more power to them. Same with Vanguard, even if I won't be going near it with a 10-foot pole.

This is how I feel about WoW. I couldnt have said it better. I just really in general have a lot of fun playing the game. And thats the reason I play games in the first place. My guild is working on BWL, not ZG, but its still fun for me.

Also, about killing 50 rats. In WoW, you get a quest to help an orc get revenge for his slain wife, by killing 25 rats and 25 ratfinks. You then return and get a nice chunk of exp, and some times a decent item.
In EQ, you went and sat in the same spot killing the same rat over and over for no reason other than to level. Yeah, it comes down to the same thing, but it doesnt feel the same to me.

Well put, Morphiend.

I think my fake interview with Badthing and Killbotx pretty much summed up my feelings on WoW. It's a good game dominated by polarized nutballs who try to outshout the other side in blatant personal attacks.

Kinda like Congress.

I refuse to be an apologist for WoW, but I do want to see Schild write an epic on how Blizzard has misled the common MMOtard into thinking they like the same shit they've always hated.

Fedex quests.
-Agreed they suck, you break it down and the quests in WoW for the most part are the same old same old.  The only thing WoW does right on the quest front is, some are funny, some are random and there are tons and tons of them.  Finishing a quest is like a mini ding, more dings = more satisfaction from time invested.  We are all just hamsters on a wheel...

Kill 50 Rats.
-See my above comments.

Item based gameplay.
-Agreed, see the warrior class.  WoW sped up combat the point that some people can indeed suck at it.  People who dont bind keys auto suck at pvp this is a nice plus as well.  Without people who can suck there can't be people who can pwn.  I like some skill disparity in my game.  Unfortunately WoW did go the gear > skill route like all MMO's tend to.  Unfortunately nobody can agree on a great simple way to get away from this (first you have to get rid of levels, develop alternative reasons for the LCD to play the game etc etc)

Min/Maxing.
-Too broad, not even sure what you are saying here.  Min/Max'ing will always exist in every system ever made.  At least the classes actually have better pvp balance then any MMO with a traditional class system ever made.

Uberguilds.
-These will always exist also, in any competition there will be people who take it more seriously.  This is like crying that there are CS:S servers where they kick anyone who isn't good enough to play there.  Or that you can't automatically get into a clan that participates in league games.  I'm sorry that some people try harder?  Besides there are uber guilds out there who aren't complete super douches about their dkp systems.

Typical PvP.
-Agreed, they dont do anything special, BG's are not special instancing while effective at removing some of the woes associated with the poorly designed systems of the past will never be special to me.

Queues.
-Suck balls, not sure how much this has to do with the game.  You know what sucks more?  The wait at retrieving characters is up to 20min followed by a 20min wait while looking at a full blue bar after you pick a character.

Horrible Development Cycles.
-When you think about it they have added several dungeons and the BG's hell they needed to add the honor system.  I wish they developed more faster but as long as the new content never starts sucking and they dont go EQ1 on our ass and make their flagging system any more retarded I'm ok with it.

Exploits.
-???  Which ones are we talking about.

Gold Farming.
-As long as there is a grind that is long enough that people who just want to play would rather invest RL cash to save themselves the hassle there will be gold farming.

Oh, and elves. Lots of elves.
-Yeah elves and UD, fucking tons of them.  If UD could be hunters I would stab myself in the face right now.  If blood elves get hunter or rogue I will stab someone at blizz in the face.

Actually, to be fair, I just read the "save my n00b ass" thread, and actually, I'll agree with Schild on his point over there - long bullshit keying quests are a bullshit pain in the ass. WoW's not as bad as EQ1 (yet) - Vex Thal anyone?

EQ1 PoP Progression at least kind of made sense as an epic quest to get to Time, but it's poor implementation + atrittion + backflagging (+ some pig-headedness) means my old non-hardcore raiding guild still isn't in time (we were on the cusp of it right when the release of WoW and EQ2 took 60% of our guild away)

Seeing that it's again in WoW in such an annoying way isn't a good sign for the future, because as mentioned in that thread, once you're flagged/keyed for someplace, you don't mind helping people a few times, but when you're doing your tenth backflag run it becomes really fucking tedious and you'd just as rather not log in...

I played an Undead Rogue for the only 28 days I spent in the game. It was far from robot Jesus. It was a very nicely flavored same pile of shit I'd been consuming for the last 9 years.

Edit: And if you know me, you'd know I never played a Paly. I judge a game based on the rogue experience. I judged WoW to be recycled shit streamlined with a constant ding to make you feel like you've achieved something. On top of that, it wasn't a complete virtual world. I had no house to pimp, I was less than enthralled with the gathering/crafting (i.e. it was shitty and the best gear was still dropped), and the biggest mob at that time was......a dragon? A DRAGON? Christ. That's original. Wait? To top it all off it took a zerg of Koreans to kill it at the end of beta? I'd seen everything, I'd seen it all. I was done.

I can't take the rest of your points remotely serious because you said this:


No. No. No. No. No. Vote with your wallet.

As Fedex quests didnt really exist in EQ I think people weren't complaining about them. In fact, so few quests existed in EQ the complaints were more about the lack thereof than any lack of orignality on them. I don't remember a single kill 50 rat quest in EQ either for that matter.

I never said EQ. I said the last 4 years. Since the beginning of Waterthread. I've read probably every single post on these two boards, the only thing WoW did to change all the gripes and complaints was make the dings closer together and speed up combat a bit. Which is pretty much the traditional Blizzard move when they enter a genre. Streamline the best parts of the game and make the worst parts more backroundish. By offering better loot, that 50 rat quest doesn't look so bad. By offering insane raid drops, raid doesn't look so bad.

It doesn't change the fact that you're still raiding for one or two great items and working to get to the raids.

It doesn't change the fact that you've just killed 50 rats for an item.

It doesn't change the fact that you're doing an (albeit short) grind to get to an endgame that hasn't changed since well....since.

Deep down, my dislike of WoW all stems from the fact that it's not Starcraft 2.

After Blizzard makes Starcraft 2, I can start liking their games again.  Until then, every game they put out just makes me bitter that they could have made Starcraft 2 instead.

There, I've admitted it.  Carry on with your rational discussion.

I started playing new characters everytime I got up to the raid levels, had fun stealthing a lot of quests as a rogue, was able to solo more content than most other MMO's would allow, had some fun in the BG's, and stopped playing when the game wasn't that fun to me anymore.

My biggest problems with MMO's tend to be games with forced grouping and no quick solo content for when I don't have a lot of time to play.  I'd still be playing FFXI if it wasn't for those problems.  CoH was pretty close to what I wanted, but there wasn't enough diversity in the mission.  I wouldn't even care about the grind in CoH if there was just more stuff to do mission-wise.

I'm playing FFXI again.  :-P But I'm playing classes I know people want so I don't get stuck waiting for groups. (Red Mage main) Also soloing is easier now, you get more XP and you can also get items that give you more XP on top of that. In addition there are some items that do things like let you warp around to different outposts and such. It's definitely a bit friendlier. (Though still very much a group centric game, which is fine by me - I get bored soloing in MMORPGs)

It's actually pretty amazing going back to FFXI. I forgot just how much of a world it feels like compared to EQ2, WoW and their ilk. Especially moving from EQ2 to FFXI. It's just things like the towns in FFXI actually feel like they are towns rather than random houses and shit.

After the job system I'm not sure I can play any other game. The job system is the ultimate treat for those with alt-itus.

As far as the grind goes if I'm having fun I don't care. My goal is not to reach the "end game." (To me end game is roll another character or stop playing) When it starts being work I'll unsub again.

The fun in WoW never even really started for me. It was just blah the whole time.

D&D Online I think could be pretty entertaining given 6 more months of development. I found it oddly addicting for some reason, and not in the usual ding gratz sort of way.

I should point out- I don't think WoW is a bad game.  I enjoyed it.  I had fun.

But I'm under no illusion that it's a much more polished version of DAoC, which was a slightly more polished version of... well, need I go on?

I believe it was Schild who said it, and I agree, that WoW will be ultimately healthy for the MMG industry, in that it has announced "Innovate, or be crushed without mercy."  Because why would I pick up another standard MMG when WoW has polished the formula about as much as it can be polished?

I agree with Schild on principle.  But I still think it's a fun game- largely because I don't viciously hate that game model.  I don't even dislike levels.

All that said, CoV is better, nyeh!  (Though lately I've had my eye on FFXI,  which I never played.  There's no trial for that, right?  Papa likes to taste before he devours!  ....... I love being creepy.)

Can't speak for the rest of this, but...

I would complain about fedex quests across zones where I could arbitrarily die.

I would complain about killing 50 rats and sitting for 5 minutes between each one.

But what I would complain about would not be fedexing and killing.

--GF

WoW absolutely has FedExes in zones which are very dangerous.  I remember doing a number of these on my Rogue, wondering how anyone without Stealth got by.

Though I remember moreso having a really hard time with Kill 50 Rats when I'd find a rat, pull it, and fight it to 50%, then fucking Kil'Jaeden himself would happen to be wandering around and just aggro me cause I was near.

And, of course, there are no rats to be found outside of Kil'Jaeden's aggro range.

How do you people get by without Stealth, Sprint, and Vanish?

I'm a warrior. We can usually get by a nasty confrontation by burning a timed skill like Shield Wall or Retaliation. If I have to run, I hamstring, and THEN run.

I never had any problem with aggroing guaranteed death monsters while killing quest monsters outside of maybe of the Graveyard in Duskwood, where Mor'Ladim (a surprisingly powerful and fast hitting elite undead mob) regularly educates people on why you don't develop tunnel vision while grinding.

Sons Of Arugal will teach you all you need to know about that.

The evil fuckers.

I remember doing an alliance quest to collect 4 types of booze that took me into duskwood about 5 levels earlier than I had any business being there.

Yup, and you can usually get away with it if you stay on the path and keep your eyes open.

Ugh, I just remembered the land of wandering aggro, that damn bear cave in the NE newbie area.  Some Furbolg thingy. A temple thing.  Whatever it's called.  I ran out of there so many goddamn times with 20 bears chasing me.

Supreme Commander. (http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/supreme-commander/632026p1.html)

I find WoW dull. I was in closed beta for six months (from June 2004), and I handed my account to a drooling friend because I wasn't using it enough. Came back just before retail and started enjoying it, played a bit after retail then got bored with it again. But WoW was still what all the cool kids were into, so I returned and did the grind to 60, raided MC and Onyxia a few times but found it dull, and haven't played since September.

I was a hardcore EQ raider from 1999-2002 so I feel I've been there, done that. After EQ I was a hardcore SWG PvP raider until my field doctor/carbineer became meat for unkillable, inescapable jedi. My SWG PvP guild was a spin-off from a top-five EQ guild so they got beta invites from Tigole, and turned into a WoW uberguild (but not in my time zone, so I can't join them). If the SWG from mid-2004 still existed I would have returned to it in the hope they would fix bugs, but we all know what happened with that. The December rumour about NCSoft taking over old SWG code and hosting a few servers sounded ideal, but it was probably a myth.

Blizzard did an awesome job of turning level grinding and questing into a fun game with the quality of its single-player titles, but the world is unconvincing. Mobs are on boring back-and-forth paths you can instantly spot, everyone is on almost exactly the same quest progression through the same bland instances (I hate hearing "I need to do instance X"), the player is given far too much information about game mechanics in the name of convenience, most raid fights are puzzles with only one tactical solution, and I feel like I'm playing a giant tutorial for new MMOG players. Been there, done that, and find it hard to understand why EQ veterans could get so obsessed over an unimaginatively-populated brown cave like Molten Core and Onyxia the rigidly scripted dragon. No, I haven't done BWL, because sticking around for all the MC/ZG/Ony raids to gear up was unappealing.

It is the slickest and best MMOG product on the market, great for the millions of noobs for whom it's a revelation (I'd say 500k vets and 4.5 million MMOG noobs is about the population split), but it offers nothing new. I'm an explorer type, so I want a wide MMOG frontier full of mystery and new ideas. WoW isn't it, but neither is anything else on the near horizon. The cool kids will probably have me playing WoW again soon.

You could always wait for Vanguard.

*cough*

Here's the thing, I can accept that people have different tastes and that no game is for everybody.  If you played to 60 though either you found the game entertaining, or you played for 60 fucking levels despite not having any fun.  One just makes you a whiner for enjoying a game long enough to get that far and then complaining that the game didn't entertain you forever.  The other makes you fucking stupid for investing that much time into something you weren't enjoying because all the other kids were doing it.

Luckily, I whine because people won't admit there's nothing new there and just say "it's fun." I don't buy that brand of poo. And that's the reason I got this thread. Luckily I've not had to post much. People are doing my work here for me.

Something doesn't have to be new to be fun.

Your problem mate is you can't stand being wrong.  So far as I know, all the impressions you had of this game in beta have not changed at all.  Including the one - you know - where you said it was bug ridden and not ready for release.

Come into the light.  Paladin  :-D

I can stand being wrong. I've admitted numerous times it's the best Dikuclone out there. Unfortunately, it's a dikuclone with things I like a LOT that are missing. Like housing. I love me some housing. Also, I know Blizzard and their rate of change. There is no way the game has been changed in anyway that will make a difference in my opinion. That's simply not how their patches work.

And stop calling me paladin! The light touches me in bad places.

In this particularly case, for me, ya. One of the main reasons i'm having fun in EQ2 is that I like the world more and I have people to play with that have schedules as wonky as mine. Also, housing. And since there aren't 5 million people, it isn't a big endgame raid item whoring clusterfuck.

What's the big deal about housing? It's just a pain in the ass as far as I'm concerned.

Housing. Is. Awesome.

I'll admit, I enjoyed decorating my house in DAOC.

I don't just want a house, I want a little farm to retire to.  Preferably with pets.

I would have quit SWG at least four months earlier than I did if not for housing.

I just liked having some portion of the game world, even if it was a very small one, that I had ownership of and that was unique.  You could go to every gun shop in the galaxy and none of them would look exactly like mine.  Hell, I probably even have a picture of it somewhere.  (rummage)  Yep, here it is:

(http://www.leadtogold.com/clanp4/swg/deeshop/shop.jpg)

A friend of mine logged in on the free trial to check out the NGE and informed me that my shop is still completely intact, a year and a half after I unsubbed.  I find that very satisfying, even if I never plan to log in ever again.

Well i enjoyed the hell out of WoW twice, once on my level 60 horde mage and once on my level 60 ally rogue. And i just finished cancelling my account. I don't hate raiding, in fact i quite enjoyed the Scholo/Strat/BRS/DM progression and MC was fun at first. But there's nothing else to do, and the contrived BG PvP makes me ill. To each their own, i got a great years entertainment out of it.

If small to medium sized group of people here started playing FFXI I'd probably go back, but I don't see that happening.  Even when I played a White Mage it was still a pain finding groups some times and there seemed to be quite a few jackasses on the server I was on.  I'm kinda curious about their next MMO, Fantasy Earth.  It's supposed to have some strategy elements involved.  Don't know if it's going to come to the US at all though, or if it will join the likes of Uncharted Waters Online as JP MMO's I'd like to try but can't.

My post also contained lines like "Blizzard did an awesome job of turning level grinding and questing into a fun game with the quality of its single-player titles". I had some fun on the way to 60, though the last few levels were a chore, but my motivation was that my friends seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the level 60 game. Unfortunately I didn't.

Ok so you had fun for close to 60 levels before you got bored with the game.  I guess maybe I just don't understand what more people would want out of a game.  Does anyone here seriously expect to someday find the video game equivalent of the Everlasting Gobstopper?  Short of adding different kinds of gameplay ala Jump To Lightspeed, I fail to see how or why any game would remain entertaining for any long period of time.  Hell, check out the /played time on your WoW character and then try to think of how many other games have actually held your attention that lone.

My advice would be for people to stop looking for one game to devote their lives to.  Find games that'll interest you for a month or two (or whatever) and then move the fuck on.  When you stop playing a single-player game you just move onto the next one.  You don't sit around and lament that the game is no longer fun to you.  If someone tries a game and just hates it, that's an opinion I can respect.  If someone wants to bitch about a game after 100+ of playing... well then remind me why anyone should care I guess.

If you play through a MMOG once and find it fun but are uninterested in endgame content or replaying what you've done, why are you paying a monthly fee?

You shouldn't.  And that's why it's reasonable to expect entertainment for more than 60 levels in WoW.

Hell, in DAoC the entertainment doesn't start until after the levels.*

*Or "didn't start", maybe they've made the trip to 50 more fun.  Faster and less mind numbing does not necessarily equal more fun, though.  Just less mind numbing.

Or expect to unsub once you've played as much as you want to play.  I don't understand why so many people dislike the idea of a subscription-based game having a finite length.  As long as you don't do something retarded like pay for a year's worth of a game that has six months worth of gameplay, why does it matter?

Funny i was just chatting with a guildie about this. DAoC and Shadowbane i HATED until level cap and then the fun began. WoW was the exact opposite for me - i LOVED 1-60 but after a few months the endgame bored me.

I will second the fact that it was awesome value for that time though, and i recommend it to people who ask. It's just not as long legged for me as MMORPG's have been.

Generally, most MMO's offer up a free month when you buy the box.  Hell, a lot of them these days are even offering access to beta, and head starts.  If you play enough in that first month you could end up canceling before you've even paid your first month subscription.  Or you can play until you get bored, cancel, and subcribe again if you get the itch to play.

But you're not entitled to endless fun just because you choose to keep paying the monthly fee, because the basic gameplay typically doesn't change and you're going to get sick of it at some point regardless.  Again, using the example of playing up to level 60 in WoW and then burning out...  how many hours of /played time is that typically?  I'm willing to bet it's a lot more hours than most people here would put into 90% of the single player games they play.  Even if you don't stick around for month after month of endgame you're getting more hours of content than you would with most other games.  That's how you justify the monthly fee.  I spent 50 on the game, maybe 45 total on the monthly fee... so for close to the cost of two new games I probably got more hours of entertainment. 

Want to bitch about value?  Complain about most $50 (and now $60 with the 360) games out there being way too short and then I'll probably care.  Think $15 bucks a month though entitles you to a game that will be fun forever and I'll tell you you're fucking dreaming.

FIFA: Road to World Cup on the 360. What a fucking ripoff. No club teams, no tourneys other than WC qualifying and then you can't even play in the WC. Back to EB with you. Serves me right, i knew giving EA money would result in tears.

Agreed.  And many people want to claim that because MMOs are a service, they should get entertainment value equal to other services they pay for, like TV.  Perhaps if we had tons and tons of people paying $75+ per month for an MMO, they'd be able to hire enough content people able to keep up with players.  Or at least do a better job than they do now.  The problem is, no one is willing to pay $75/mo for a game.  Why they do it for TV, I have no idea.

Alkiera

And just like with television, eventually the characters have been developed, the stories have been told, the content has been used, and your $75 a month cable bill goes towards paying for a different show about 6 single friends living in New York.

Nothing is endless.

Um.  If you're going to start talking about TV's, you need to realise the enormous importance of networks and Advertising subsidies.

We want neither in Mmmogs.

As far as monthly fees go, I think SOE has the right idea with their Station Pass.  A bunch of different kinds of MMO's for about $22 a month.  Their failure is that few of those games are any good.

Man I just so hate housing in a game.  The last thing I need is some other useless thing to waste my time when I log in.  My character doesn't need a place to live while I'm offline (and he certainly doesn't need a place to sit and stare at walls when I'm online!).  A place to store stuff can be accomplished with a bank or more bags or whatever less pain in the ass system the developers want to use.  I don't need another money sink.  I do not play to interior decorate.  I don't care for any more virtual e-peen collectors garbage to have (I'm rich in game, my house is teh big!!!1!).  I don't need an excuse to not cancel my account when I'm done with the game (I'm bored to tears by this game, but I'm going to pay $14.95 X 20 ad nauseum so that my e-peen city doesn't poof!).  I HATE the clutter housing puts in game (SWG sucked ass because of all the buildings anywhere I ran).  Housing fucking sucks, I hate it, I hope it stops being a "feature" that is added to these games.

I agree with cevik. Now I must go wash myself because I feel dirty.

The Jobe city appartments in AO were cool. 

Otherwise - housing is a blight.

I thought about it.  I agree ads in games would frequently suck.  "You are now zoning into the Wailing Caves... Why not go grab a refreshing Coca-Cola?"   Yikes.


Yes.  And to further play with that analogy...

People expect $15/mo to entertain them for 80+ hours a month.  The average TV show, which probably has similar staff size(actors, writing/directing staff, camera/stage crew, etc) provides appriximately 4 hours of new content per month(one new episode per week).  Now, your cable bill includes dozens and dozens of these shows...  but costs 5x what an MMO does.  Do any MMOs really provide 4 hours of new content per month?  I mean real content, not camping Foozle in dungeon_A to get the rare drop for the key quest so you can open the door to dungeon_B.  I mean, say, 4 new WoW-style instances that take an hour each to complete, have their own storyline and whatnot.  Or even two that take 2 hours each.  Is that even possible?  I know Blizzard has added a few dungeons since release.  EQ2 has had a couple Adventure Packs, and an expansion.  Do they add up, time wise, to 4 hours/month from their respective release dates?

From another standpoint, would it be legitimate to take an MMO, release it with enough dungeons/zones/whatever to explore and do things in for, say, 15 hours, then add a few(4+) hours of new areas and whatnot every month?  This is on top of the whole 'virtual world' kinda setup... crafting, markets, items, etc.  Just regularly introduce new stories to work through and areas to check out.  Have the advancement curve, if any, be such that the initial content is enough to get you to some balance point, and then you reach a point of diminishing returns.  I'm talking like a UO level of balance here, where time played is not the primary power factor.  A complete newb might be owned by a vet, but someone who's played for a couple weeks (up to the 'balance point', soft cap, whatever you wanna call it) ought to at least have a decent chance in a fight.  The itemization curve would be pretty low.  Include more variables on items, so you have different options that don't affect the power level a huge amount.

I think most of the inital development of such a game would be on game systems(skill sets, combat, markets, housing, etc), and content development systems.  You need to make it very easy to add art assets(to avoid the 'every dungeon looks the same'), and to add new dungeons/areas/items/quests/etc.  And have a mechanic in the game for people to be able to find this new content without having to read patch notes.

The biggest problem would be, IMO, finding some way to satisfy those players who insist on playing 80+ hours a month.  In fact, I'd agrue that this is the same problem for all MMOs...  IMHO, the solution is to re-train the userbase to play less.  Offline training like Eve, offline tasks like ATitD.  All the 'My, this is certainly boring' tasks, make them be done by your character while offline...  I think this is one of the biggest problems of the medium.  You have the people who play the game like it's a job, so you either design for them, and get complaints from casuals that it's like having a job to play, or you don't, and they say there's nothing to do, and leave.  Something needs to be modified within the base levels of the medium to work towards having the time your are online is always fun, but that there is encouragement to NOT spend all your time online.

Sorry about the length, ADD people.

Alkiera

VOTED: BEST COMMENT OF THE THREAD!  Oh why can they not get a Starcraft MMO going!?!

They're still coming up with plans on how to put elves in. Once that's done.. watchout.. 5 year develop cycle coming your way!

Housing helps give players the "special snowflake" feel. In games with limited character customization, housing offers people some sense of being unique in a generic mmog world.  I personally like housing in games. Especially games where character customization is ass.  I think WoW would benefit greatly from housing in 2 regards: 1) it might alleviate the obvious lack of character customizability and 2) it would give players something else to do when they finish the 1-60 trip.  I could easily go off on some diatribe about housing being more attractive to players more connected to their avatars rather than those that merely control their avatars, but that's Terra Nova territory.

On a side note: I've been struggling lately with the fact that I really enjoy EQ2 but hated WoW.  I can't really put a finger on why.  The PvE isn't really any better.  The quests aren't really much better.  Both are improvements over the tired Diku paradigm.  Perhaps it's some combination of the lack of cartoonish graphics coupled to some sad attempt to recapture the nostalgia of early EQ.  I've been playing EQ2 with a RL friend that I played in early EQ with as well... that could be part of it.  I prefer the class interactions, I enjoy the landscapes, and I like the subtle connections to EQ storyline.  Yeah... it's probably nostalgia. 

Blue boobie elves that shoot guns while wearing lingerie.

The new content that's so far been released with WoW appears to be aimed at the top tier catasses.  As long as this doesn't continue, I have no problem with it, given the lack of endgame stuff for catasses to do at release.

(No, 20 man raids instead of 40 man raids is not what I'm talking about when speaking of noncatasses).

But I do hope that Blizzard understands that 90% of their customers are not in that top tier, and will go away unless given new shinies.  I'm not hopeful however I tend toward cynicism.

Re: housing.  I don't want to see houses cluttering up zones, but I have no problem with housing zones a la DAOC.  It's another way to customize.

Speaking of which, why don't more games allow plastic surgery, hair dressing, or tailoring of armor type of crafts so that people could, if they wanted to, look how they want to?  I thought SWG was really onto something with that but it went nowhere, correct?

Being that I still draw the line between "world" MMOs and "game" MMOs, I have a mixed feeling on housing. In a "world" MMO, I feel it's essential, it's part of my character.  It shows off the journey I've made in the game better than any gear my character can wear. 

In SWG I started off with a modest house on the shores of a Naboo lake. It was small, we as a group were still fairly unfocused, but it provided a home and helped us feel our way through the game.  Later we moved to Tatooine and formed a corporation.  I moved up from a small house, to a medium sized single story house that allowed me to flourish as a droid engineer.  The house was one part show room, one part parts warehouse and one part domicile.  Later when we became a city on Corellia, I moved back into a small house due to zoning restrictions and by then had given up the dream of being a droid engineer.  A smuggler doesn't need the comforts or the visibility that a larger house draws.  This was very similar for me in UO; my house tended to mimic my character in design and function.

In a "game" MMO like WoW, I really don't give a shit. It never mattered for me in AO or EQ2 and it never appealed to me in Dark Age.  It wasn't a reason I quit AC2, SB, or EQ. Being a character in with a narrative is not a concern for me in the gamier MMOs.  I want to meet new and exotic flora/fauna and kill the ever living crap out of it.  Anything that does not further me in this area is fluff and honestly I'd rather the developers not put any resources toward it.  As useless as I want them to go is 0.0 dps pandas and holiday celebrations.

Sure a troll hut might be neat for a few minutes a week, but if it for one second slows server performance or contributes to some sort of landscape blight, I want it gone and the guy responsible for it crucified.  If housing isn't part of my story and isn't an integral part of my journey, it really isn't going to influence my love for the game one way or another.

Endless fun?

No, probably not.

But people are over in the D&D forum right now saying the exact same thing that I said- the trip from 1-10 is fun, but it's short and there's nothing to do afterwards, so it's not worth the monthly fee. Why is this different?  1-60 in WoW isn't much longer, depending on how you play. Hell, I got to 41 in under 2 months.

Have a place to dump my crap does not make me a unique and special snowflake.

In your case, no.  If housing only serves as an extra container then it hasn't been properly implemented.

Cevik's comments mean nothing. I'm happy with instanced housing. I don't need people to see my house like a fucking obelisk on a hill.

But if you saw an obelisk on a hill for sale, you know you'd buy it.

Then what is "properly implemented"?

I've told you all the reasons I hate housing, so far the best defense of housing in this thread (other than the obligatory "no, you're wrong"s that always come when you let a bunch of retards post their inner most thoughts on teh intarweb), has been "Housing. Is. Awesome.", and that's a direct quote.

Exactly how is housing awesome?  Or is this strongbadia where stuff is just awesome in it's awesomeness?

Lineage II? WoW?

As for housing, I'm not personally interested, though if it could be done in an instanced way so as to not clog the world up with useles shit, (as in EQ2) then I say go for it.

I had an awesome time when I started playing WoW, right up to when my guildless Pally hit 55 or so and I saw the end of the fun I'd been having was imminent, since my thoughts on the few WoW options at 60 at the time were:

1) I'm not interested in PvP.
2) If I want to raid, I can go back to EQ1, raid with my guild twice-weekly, have a huge choice of targets.
3) Since there's no more "ding", quests become meaningless.
4) Faction grinding sucks ass. I'd hoped I left that behind in EQ.
5) At 60, you can still work to improve your character with AAs in EQ.

So I went back and played EQ1 with my bro again for a couple of months, until he suddenly died and I got to be the one who found his day-old corpse and contact everyone in the family and his wife who was interstate. Since we were super-close and played EQ1 together for pretty much 5 years, Norrath is just too painful for me to go back into. Since I'm on break and have lots of spare time, (and honestly, I need the break from an intensive 6 months of uni with the death in the middle of it - working over this summer would be a bad idea.) I decided to play WoW again as a timesink to get my mind off things. So I limped the rest of the way to 60, though looking at that list of why WoW at 60 is a pretty average game, all of them are still true (to me) today.

So why am I playing it again, still?

1) The wife started playing it with me, gave it a try thanks to the $2 14-day trial. It's a hell of a lot of fun playing mages side by side, and it's social, and fun to spend time together in a new way.
2) A few RL friends started playing their 60's again, so we can almost put a group together.
3) We met another (larger) nice bunch of guys in the same city as us, and have started playing and raiding with them.
4) When our holidays end, I may or may not stop playing. It's not a huge concern. I'll play until it bores me again.

I agree that the game is great fun from the start till the mid-fifties, and is seriously lacking once you reach 60. To this end, I only play my mage with my wife, and I'm levelling up a rogue other times. I log on my Pally to PL my wife, farm, raid/instance run every few days or when a friend needs help on something.

But, you know, It's cheap entertainment. When it stops entertaining me, I'll stop paying and playing. If I could stop playing EQ where I had 5 years of my characters, I can certainly give up WoW with only a few months on them. In the meantime I'm not buying a new PC or console game every other week, and enjoying myself.

..and yeah, if it wasn't for the personal bit I mentioned above. I'd be playing EQ over this summer break, not WoW. Much more to do at max level, and honestly, a better game at that point. Lucky I'm playing WoW in alt-land.


off the main topic a little...

And Schild, I genuinely enjoy this board, and my views and opinions are real (ie my posts aren't trolling), but don't take anything I say too personally. My f.13-ing is as much self-distraction for my brain as is my WoW-ing. ie I believe what I said about "whores", but I don't actually give a fuck about that forum mod chick. Sharing this stuff with you here? It's the anonymity of the internet in a way. 95%+ of the people here couldn't give a shit about my problems, and thats why I can talk about them. Ahh Schild, you with your sometimes-wacky sometimes completely insane, steadfast opinions and ideas, provide an excllent virtual brick wall to bang my head against at times. Most entertaining.

..thats where on the doll I was touched, since you asked before.  :-P

Man that middle part got heavy.

Yeah, it sucks. But it's all wrapped right up in my MMOGing and why I'm playing the one I'm playing now.

Neocron, AO and EQ2 went with the instanced housing route (btw, while y'all may have hated it, Neocron had instanced housing, customizable missions and FPS combat before those other big MMOGs had it - not quite sure why it never hit the big time... oh yeah, shite character models) and that makes all the difference. They are neat in concept and those who want to use them can without the houses inhibiting the play of others. If you choose not to have a house or apartment in those games, you can simply not use them. In EQ2, you can entirely get rid of your house. Sure, you may still get items every now and then that are placeable in a domicile, but you can either (a) not do those quests or (b) get the experience and cash and destroy (or sell if possible) the item. Housing in EQ2 does not get in the way of those who do not want it. Although I will admit that the newbie storyline quests make you go into it 3 times. And with Neocron, you never had to use your apartment although it was essentially your bank.

I dont think Margalis checks on this forum so I'll say it.  FFXI had good housing, I dont know if any other game comes close to that but I doubt it.

It was good because the housing mini-games in FFXI were fun complex and rewarding for those who wanted to participate.  Otherwise it was just a place where you could store items and get some minor buffs from furniture.  Plus moogles are great.

That did irritate me quite a bit.

I for one explained why I think it's awesome, with a screenshot even.  (I don't expect you to agree that it's awesome, since you said you're not interested in interior decorating.)

You are right, I did disregard the fact that you did defend housing and I'm glad you enjoy it.  Have you ever tried The Sims?  It was made for you.

I have a new game.  It's called "let someone mention something they like and make fun of them for it."  Wanna play? 

I like Gilmore Girls.

In all honesty, I wasn't making fun at all.  You said you enjoyed a gameplay style, I mentioned another game with the exact same gameplay style and asked if you liked it.  I was mainly curious because I'd be interested in knowing if the playstyles are similar enough to capture your interest.

As I said above, I don't get any enjoyment from interior decorating, and what I take from this thread tells me that the only good use of a house is to decorate it (for whatever reason, schild says it's not to impress people, but I have no clue what else it could be for).  So it's safe to assume I will not like housing, even if "properly implemented".  It's okay though, I don't like a lot of things.

If you want to make fun of me, I'll give you material.  I played the sims long enough to make two chicks fall in love for the lesbian sex aspect, and then I locked their neighbor in a room with no doors and sped up time until he died.  Surely decorating houses in a mmog is much saner than I.

I'm on Sam's side here. Well implemented housing adds to a game. AC1 did the best job of it in my opinion:
 > multiple types of housing: off map apartments, houses, villas, and castles
 > not everyone got to have a house (especially the big ones) so it created an economy around them
 > pre placed  - no blight because the devs placed them all in organized communities

Now why did they matter? Small houses and apartments were essentially just about storage and epeens, but the bigger houses were where you and your guildies gathered. It was a huge influence on the social aspect of the game. You just seem to bond better with people in your guild when your characters are in the same area rather than just chatting through channels.

There had to be an in game reason to use the guild houses, and in AC there was. You had group storage, guild vaults, bind points, and in the case of Darktide, the guild house was a safe refuge.

AC1 got a shit load of things right, and this was one of them.

Housing isn't the core gameplay of a combat-centered mmog, it's a feature.  I figured that your recommendation of the Sims was sarcasm as you'd certainly realize that a game like AO and the Sims had very contrasting styles despite the fact that both had a housing component.  

Housing is a bonus.  It's a feature within a game that can be treated as its own mini game.  For people that enjoy the immersion and/or distraction an mmog can be from the real world, it's nice to have a portion of that virtual world that is uniquely your own.  I'm not a rabid housing fan, but see the value and enjoy being given the option to have my own piece of the virtual world to paint/decorate/design.  As long as it isn't mandatory and doesn't affect the performance of the rest of the game, I don't see how it's even an issue.

And it's certainly not a make or break feature either.  Which was my point.  I personally think the drawbacks of housing are more than the actual benefit of housing.  Others think houses make a nice touch (I do find it interesting that every game listed with "good housing" was a game I skiped, and none of the games I played with housing are considered to have had decent housing in this thread, perhaps that is why I'm biased).  But either way, in the mmogs we play, I hardly see where housing is gonig to make a game (such as EQ2) or break a game (such as WoW), if you don't like the game, the presence of housing will not affect your decision much, if you do like the game, the absence of housing isn't going to affect you much.  I do not see a reason to believe that "Housing. Is. Awesome."

Noone here thinks housing is a make or break feature.  Housing just has the potential to make a good game better. 

I don't recall saying housing was awesome.  I just felt that some titles would benefit from its addition.  Are we disagreeing?

I think cevik is referring to this post:

The housing is awesome comment came from schild.  I personally think that WoW would worse if housing was added.  Just give me more bank space if you want to give me more storage, as I said above.

EDIT:  What I am saying:  Housing, when done right, adds very very little to the game.  Housing, when done wrong hurts the game.  Most developers do things wrong, rarely do they do things right.  Housing has a net negative effect due to this axiom.

Can you cite some examples?  DAoC housing helped the game.  UO's housing was a great feature.  Housing in CoH/CoV, SWG, AO, and EQ2 all seem to be nice additions.  I can't really think of a good example of a game where housing was a game breaker and I've played nearly all of them.  Maybe we just see the effects differently.

SWG's housing DESTROYED the game.  Everywhere I went there were crappy little houses planted, annoying the hell out of me.  It hardly felt epic to stand next to some "uber" beast in someone's back yard.  I hated the housing in that game, it was the most annoying thing ever.  My house was a place to store all the crap I didn't want to carry, thus is looked like my college apartment, with shit strewn all over the floor.  Much like my college apartment, there was a bug that didn't allow you to pick half that shit up ever, so it was all lost to me.  I believe that bug may have been fixed months after I quit.

UO's housing caused the real estate market in that game to become outrageously stupid.  It was also another eye sore.  If you started the game too late you never had a chance to buy a lot (unless you were willing to spend real life cash on it), thus it created haves and have nots.  The housing market forced people like Angelstorm to activate 20 accounts for years and years, only to speculate on the outrageous prices of lots that she had reserved.

I quit DAoC and CoH before they had houses.

I never played EQ2.

AO's housing seemed nice because nothing else in the entire game worked for the first 2 years.  So at least when your big boobed chick alt got stuck in her apartment because the door wouldn't open, you could take all her clothes off and masturbate.

I'd argue that SWG was just a bad game.  I think that housing actually may have retained many players longer than they would have otherwise stayed.  Of course, neither of us has anything but anecdotal evidence to support this unless Raph wants to pipe in.


Ask yourself this: Why were people speculating on the housing market?  Because player housing was a valuable and attractive component of the game.  Players were willing to spend a lot of real life cash to obtain quality housing in UO.  Thank you for making my point for me.

It's a very valid question.  I actually did play the Sims for a while and I liked it for a while, but I got fed up with it after about a week.  

The problem with the Sims is that there's no goddamn point.  There aren't other real people around to appreciate the aesthetic of my house.  My house doesn't serve any larger purpose, like being part of a virtual economy.  I can't walk around in my house and see what it actually feels like.  It didn't feel like I was contributing to a 'world', and it didn't feel like I was exercising any creativity.

Really, the Sims was just a cleverly disguised but extremely shitty RTS game once you managed to peel back all the layers.

Housing sprawl was one of UOs biggest failures. Housing in SWG was built on a good idea, but there was nothing to make players socialize around them. Plus the damn sprawl of harvesters.. ugh.

AC did it well, but unfortunately most of you never played it.

I have no doubt you are right, hence the net negative effect that housing has on games.  Unless you think that people continuing to pay for defunct games that they no longer play because they are afraid they will lose their virtual items a good thing?


Percieved monetary value in virtual items isn't postive thing.  I far from made your point for you.  In fact, the system had a very negative effect on the overall game.  People who did not have the material assets available in real life to obtain a luxury virtual item were left out.  People do not play games to have their real life inequalities translated into a game, in fact they play games for exactly the opposite reasons.

Much like raiding has a net negative effect on the game, though perhaps a small minority enjoys it and will argue until they turn blue that it has a positive effect, housing has a net negative effect on games.

Horizons had the best and worst ideas for housing.

Devs set up where houses can go, how many and how the town will look when complete on the most base level. You can make your houses as nice as you want. That's awesome.

You have to build your house. Not awesome.

People play games to have fun.  If housing makes the game fun for some players, those players win.  If housing brings the developer more money from retention, they also win.  You didn't like the effect housing had on the game and left.  You did the right thing by voting with your wallet. 

I personally think that housing in SWG should have been restriceted to "housing only" areas and agree that it was poorly implemented.  I do have to admit that SWG combat was so awful, that housing and character creation were about the only redeeming qualities I found in the game.  However, I really don't think that housing broke SWG though... I actually think that housing was a broken element in a badly broken game.  In some ways the way housing was broken may have even helped SWG.  You got to scout out and pick your own site... which was more fun than almost any other feature.  Like I said... this is just an opinion thing.


I still don't see your argument. It had a negative effect on the game how?  UO wasn't successful?  You not liking the effect housing had on the way you played the game doesn't make housing a broken element.  My point was that the fact people were willing to spend real life cash on virtual items signifies that the virtual items have value.  These items can only have value if they are desirable. If housing was undesirable, it would have no value in game let alone outside of it.  I understand that your point is that were it not for housing that UO would have been driven in another direction, but that's not how it happened.  Housing was immensely popular and people did everything they could to ensure both a nice house and a good location.  Isn't that an obvious statement that a large number of people both felt that it was an important aspect of the game and something that they enjoyed?  

(http://www.f13.net/schild/swg00.jpg)

(http://www.f13.net/schild/swg01.jpg)

(http://www.f13.net/schild/swg02.jpg)

SW:G housing was awesome. Letting people build anywhere and turn the entire game into a concrete jungle was complete lack of forethought. There should have been places you could build. Little pocket areas, away from content. And once one person from a guild built something there, only guild members or friends of that original person could build there. And all the extra guild stuff should have been instanced out of a PA hall - except for things like the field hospital and forward outpost. My favorite thing to do in houses of my guilds crafters was hide in the equipment and talk to them. More often than not I could scare the hell out of them. I need to dig up the screenshots of us imperials hiding in rebel mission terminals.

But you have yet to explain how anyone can have fun with a house, minus schild's exploiting the lack of collision detection in SWG, which again hardly seems like it's worth the negative effect houses have on games.

I've listed a dozen negative things houses bring to the game (inflation of economy, real life gold trading for outrageously limited real estate markets, urban sprawl with houses causing the game world to become blighted and ugly, houses only having no real use minus being a container, bugs with houses, the list goes on and on), and you keep saying, basically, "sure those things can be bad, but the positives outweigh the negatives."  Yet you haven't listed any positive effects housing has on games (minus the "increases subscriber retention" which is probably neutral at best).


It didn't effect the way I played the game at all, it had an overall effect on the economy of the game that caused outrageous inflation, and created a caste system of haves and have nots.  That is not positive for ANY game.  The success of UO has nothing to do with it, lots of successful games have crippling bugs and horrible features, just ask schild about WoW sometime.

EDIT:  Just FYI, the argument "UO was successful, UO had houses, therefore houses are good" is silly on many many levels.

EDIT2:


Handing out free epics in WoW would probably be one of the most popular decisions the devs could ever make.  The popularity of the dev team would skyrocket.  However, handing out free epics would not be good for the game.  Popular things are not always good for the game.

Cevik, my problems are on core design decisions and lack of innovation - your problems are on how people use the design decisions to further themselves and put down the little man. Also, you're a bit loony.

Ahh, so you are a supporter of uber guilds and high end raiding now?

Or is it only a core design decision when it's a system you don't like?

The core design decisions enable that shit. Of course people will make use of it. I hate uber guilds and raiding. Fix it at the core.

You liberals love putting words in people's mouths. /bait

Edit: In other words, there are probably ways to let raiding and uberguilds exist in a world without fucking it up for the most part, but it would take real thought on the matter - something that Blizzard doesn't do. There's money in uberguilds - I'll admit it. Vanguard exists for that reason - though it'll fail in a spectacular way, for they aren't Blizzard. Point being, the problems are merely a byproduct of bad design decisions that were easily taken advantage of - like housing in SW:G.

Edit Again: Woops, postcount ++ I guess.

How does raiding and uberguilds hurt the average/casual player in WoW other than the fact that 100% of the content generation is not aimed at them? 

I'm curious to see your response.  Please, go into to details and cite some personal experience.   

And, as I have said above, there are probably ways to put housing into a game system without fucking it up.  Unfortunately developers fuck everything up so it's pointless.  Since, as I said above, I see no real benefits of housing, I hope that they stop putting it in games.  Because to date they've fucked up every attempt, and to date they have shown me no real desireable reasons to have housing in games.  You may differ, and I was asking for reasons that you actually like housing, but so far all you've done is tell me that my reasons for hating houses are loony.

Just like the typical conservative, as soon as you realize you're dead fucking wrong, you just flame the other guy and hope no one notices.

UO was successful primarily because it was the only kid on the block.  I'm not stupid enough to make a causal relationship as stated and feel a bit insulted.  At least I made an attempt at a concrete view while your points have been anecdotal at best.  For the record, UO was a shitty game on many levels and quite frankly, a game I really didn't care for.  I was attempting to point out that housing was immensely popular in UO dispite the fact that you didn't like it.  Most players went out of their way to have a good house in a good location.  The fact that people started paying stupid sums of real life money for houses seems to support my stance with more than an anecdote.    

Asking why people think housing is fun is like asking someone why they like candy.  Some people do, some people don't.  I happen to think that WoW is a derivative piece of trash yet the market figures indicate that I'm not with the majority.  It's all about opinion.  The bottom line is that game developers have been adding housing to many mmogs since UO.  I would assume that housing is implemented because it adds value to the product.  Why do you think so many mmogs have housing?  If it is ruining or having no effect on games, then why would all of these development houses waste the resources?

Tell you what - explain to me how anyone can have fun with whacking foozles, and I'll explain to you how anyone can have fun with a house.   :roll:

Hey, let's not make stupid sweeping statements unless you've played all the games with housing, k? Thanks.

Stop playing games.


Therein lies YOUR problem.


I don't even have to tell you that lonely dude, playing the game alone, with no friends, in no guild, who just wants "fun" is fucked the moment he walks into an auction house. Uberguilds, for the most part, control market value thereby cutting off the possibility of independent crafters. There are ways of fixing this - assigning value to items - say something requires 2 generic metal and 1 generic cotton to make. That two metal and cotton has a total value of 100. The level 60 crafter who made it, because he's level 60, can add a certain percentage - say 20% above the cost of the materials - or even 50%. Games need more market control. You can't expect guilds full of schmucks to understand economics. Yes, I realize that some laws of economics continue to show themselves in online games. But these are fake worlds, not the real world, the developer needs to stop allowing this invisible hand bullshit.

If by "uberguilds" you mean "IGE" then you'd have a point there.

IGE can't be in everywhere, all the time, everytime.

Well, this doesn't really happen in WoW I'm afraid.  There's really no market control by higher level guilds.   Molten Core capable guilds (which is really any group of lvl 60 schmoes nowadays) don't monopolize the epic crafting recipes and put them on the market for disgustingly high prices to fund their war machines.  The market is pretty much dominated by female night elf rogues in Mauradon/Dire Maul level gear or as I like to call them "asians".  EQ and WoW are similar in the way that it only takes a dedicated individual to wreck some havok on a economy.  This hasn't gotten as bad in WoW mainly due to some mechanisms in place that EQ didn't have the luxury of having at the time.

Different games have had differing problems for when casual collides in the same "fun" space as the hardened catass, but for the most part, WoW does a pretty decent job of keeping the two spaces separate except in the instance where they collide in battlegrounds. Then they can expect to be on the short end of the equipment stick to either the raid guild or the premade battleground farmers.  But then, I think as a casual, you've got to live with lowered expectations of success (or do the lvl 29 battlegrounds, power creep isn't going to be so pervasive there).

There can be some design decisions and mechanisms in place for leveling the playing field, but you're going to need to make it a conscious participation choice (as the lvl 29 BGs already are) as to not alienate the entire achiever segment of your playerbase. Have a battleground where there's a set group of gear that everyone has to pick and choose from.  Have a solo capable level 60 dungeon.  Have a solo/duo dungeon the size of Molten Core and as epic in scale.  Unfortunately there's already that content available (D2 *cough*), so Blizzard is instead focusing on what they believe is their money making segment. Now, I'd be completely FOR a lot of changes, a lot of challenges more on the personal level than the group level, but I know what I'm playing. 

I rambled a bit and lost some focus (tired, avoiding working, about to go home), but I think my key point is: you rail against WoW because there are a lot of fundamental things you HATE about the MMO genre and have decided, like some, to pick on the easiest, largest target while having a noticable lack of knowledge about your target.   There are some people here that can tear into WoW for the evils it's bringing upon the genre and how it's eating babies, but coming from you it would sound like me railing against the current incarnation of AC, EQ2 or hell, UO.   Everything I dislike about WoW and things I'd like to see changed would run pages long, I'm sure yours would to.  Which one would be a better, more insightful read?

WoW isn't picked because it's the easiest largest target.

It managed to exacerbate all the problems by streamlining them.

Yup, we're almost ready to five man this.

Actually, the not awesome part was YOU couldn't build your house.  YOU had to find 3+ different crafters to come by and stages and build the pieces of your house... carpenters, stonemasons, blah, blah, blah.  Realistic?  yes.  They even helped some by allowing you to put up prices on a stone on the property, and crafters wandering by could see if their craft was needed on that property, and if so, was the price worth it, and work on it in exchange for cash the owner had left there.  Which would be great once an area has started establishing itself...  but crappy trying to find crafters until it does, unless you already have a guild structure to help.  OMG, another MMO featuer that pretty much requires a guild to do easily... Shocking.

In fact, Horizons had a lot of great ideas, and many were actually implemented.  Unfortunately, they also had skull smashing lag, and some other general bugginess.  And it was a level-grind-fest.

Alkiera

90% of my problems with WoW are with the players. The game itself is fine.

I can honestly say that WoW is the best PvE based mmog on the market.   I just don't happen to like it. 

My greatest love for WoW is that it has demonstrated to future investors that the MMOG pie is bigger than they had anticipated. A larger pie means that companies wishing to make a niche mmog may get enough investor interest to develop a game aimed at a small percentage of that large pie while still providing a decent return on investment. 

Must be quitting time... that barely made sense.

Most of SWG's problems came from being an unfinished game. I don't think it would have been a bad game if the original team was able to finish its work (then again, it was so ambitious they might never have finished). Somebody said "release now, ready or not" and we got a Star Wars game where the only means of travel at first was walking. Some classes, such as Bio-engineer, were almost non-functional on release. Core decisions such as death penalty mechanics were still changing, and many other elements with potential were unbalanced or broken. Then it was handed over to an almost totally new team (the live team) who always seemed out of their depths. They finished the dev team's work on vehicles and player cities, then went off on tangents like adding more hairstyles for image designers while the unfinished game limped along.

Housing itself was good, but player cities turned housing into something awesome. Well-run player cities became the core of the game for the remaining players. You had the roleplayers living out their fantasies (remember the regimented stormtrooper city on Tatooine visited by Vader? That was on my server). And you had the PvP cities, the kind where I lived and raided, with military bases that could be permanently destroyed (at a faction point cost that really hurt) by an enemy attack. Battles to save bases became the core of the game for me: I remember one of our surprise attacks turning into a four-hour struggle in a ravine next to a player-owned base, with about 40 players on each side, doctors dragging the unconscious back behind lines and reviving, poisons and diseases flying and being cured, and laser bolts filling the air. My side eventually lost and I was chased down in the desert, but I was so happy and full of adrenaline. That was the kind of thing player cities could produce, on which they never capitalised ... and then they destroyed these communities by changing the entire game twice for the worse.

Player Cities turned the game into an urban wasteland. Not something awesome. Too many, too everywhere. Completely uncontrolled. It was fucking Star Wars: Jackrabbits.

What's so hard to figure out about the concept of canceling your sub when you're done with the game?  If games required yearly subscriptions I could understand your point, but you need only pay a subscription fee during a month you plan on playing the game.  If D&D is short and you don't feel like making alts, you can cancel before your free month is up.  If you play it for two months, you cancel at the end of the second month.  At no point are your forced to keep subscribing to a game you aren't playing.  6 months down the line when more content has been added, you can resubscribe for a month.  I don't know, do some people here stay subscribed to games for months even if they aren't playing or something?

examples, give them.
no sound byte quality crap
put up or shut up

OMG I POEMED IT.   Really, I want the full "WoW is killing the genre" diatribe* with specifics.  Enough clever, glib shit.  I really want to see this because I don't think you can do it in a way that doesn't sound like a fairytale.

*Bonus points for structuring it like an epic poem. 

Is Signe going to be healer?  Who's tanking?

Tell us why you quit WoW before?

If my market economy example isn't base enough for you, I don't know what to tell you. Oh right, almost everything I hear about WoW is that the game starts at level 60. If that's the case, I want level 60 out of the box, an uberguild of henchman and the ability to solo that oh so interesting raid content I hear about. How's those upper level small group solo quests going? Well? Tell me when you're pimped out in that high end gear that's necessary to compete. K?

That's funny, almost everything I've read here says the game STOPS at 60.  We must be reading different forums or something.

Alkiera

What exactly have you heard that would suggest that the game starts at 60, because that's pretty much when it ends for me?

I don't know about anyone else but for me the game started at lv. 1.  Then it gets better when my characters can get into AB.  Then it ends when my characters get into the mid-50's and I start again or cancel.  I'm not really into big raids and PVP doesn't really get any better at lv. 60 so I'd rather not have a lv. 60 out of the box, and I'm not exactly sure why you would since it doesn't sound much like raids appeal to you either.  The early game though is pretty fun.

The game is fun before 60, it only 'begins' at 60 if raiding and purples are your thing.  Fuck, if anything hitting 60 kills it because you have to compete in PvP with the folks who DO get their e-peen on with the purples.  Prior to that I've heard very very few complaints.  Hell, it was enough to keep you amused up to 60.

Because I played a game for 6 months solid and simply burnt out?  Nothing's fun perpetually.  I had other issues, but they all stemmed and were amplified from one core issue: I played way, way too much WoW. 

I'll probably hit the burnout loop sometime before the expansion, at which time every tiny issue will have become an elephant. 


 :roll:  We're going to need some more DPS.  NO PALADINS.

True, but large, well-run player cities were not like that. I'm thinking of rival cities called Mos Veris Imperium (imperial) and Mos Vegas (rebel) on Tatooine on Valcyn server. Each had about 150 citizens, and their inhabitants lived in them to defend them against large-scale PvP attacks, buffs were free to overts (in Veris at least), the cantinas were actually used, and so lots of people from other cities in search of action hung around too. Roleplayers came along and did events in Veris, griefers tried to destroy it all and failed, leaders had mini-political careers in the cities. For about a year, this rivalry overcame the lack of point in the GCW and the game in general, but everybody's gone now.

How the fuck were there PvP attacks on cities?  Houses are indestructible.  Set them to "private" and go inside.  Threat eliminated.

Schild, I think it's not so bad that you don't like WoW.  But when you don't even seem to understand WoW, that's when I get screwy.  You don't seem to be coming from an informed viewpoint, merely one of dislike.

And I can't take you seriously when you say 'WoW is just a goddamn Diku clone guys, which is evil and awful and we don't need.  When I'm playing EQ2......'

Er.  Logic disconnect there.

WoW is a game you don't like and don't play.  I don't see the point in commentary on it from that stance.  I dislike Curling and don't play it.

I'm sure as fuck NOT going to go to the Curling thread and keep interjecting my uniformed and killjoy positions on the game.

I say all this with love, of course.

Raiding was my thing in other games. I enjoyed it even if it failed, and if it was successful I enjoyed seeing other people get the loot, even if I got nothing. Maybe it was my guild, but WoW seemed to have more loot fever and e-peen obsession than previous games. Everyone seemed to have a menu of what they wanted, and got mildly frustrated when someone else got it. For once, being 60 was not the start of the enjoyable part.

Bases (destruction sequence triggered with a team of the right classes, and completed if you held it successfully during the destruction countdown). For some reason both sides continued to place the large detachment HQ bases within their cities. It was a source of pride to defend one that had survived for months, leading to bigger attacks and stronger defense. The benefits of bases were easy access to factioned mission terminals and recruiters in your city, but I think the main reason for placing several at a time in each city was to perpetuate the war (and have the city with the biggest e-peen, I guess).

Same with me on the raiding, and I enjoy it in WoW as well. I know what you mean about the lists and frustration, though.  In large part it's been my experience that the people like that weren't raiders, or weren't able to raid in other games OR this is their first MMO.

 The (very few) vets of raiding I've come across are like me, and know that they'll get their shot eventually, and seeing it go to someone else who's there frequently just means things will go smoother later due to the added mana/ dps/ whatever.  Hell, one of the officers in my guild, who is there all the time, was arguing vhemently against DKP and collecting those crappy ZG tokens because he didn't see it as fair.  'Nobody comes away with loot!'   Yarg.

Loot Raiding is the total suck.  Like you, our guild is currently in the throes of a huge argument over whether or not to implement DKP.

I HATE DKP.

It assumes that everyone's a greedy cockmunch.  I don't think it has a place in our guild.  Guess what ?  The greedy cockmunches WHO ARE ALREADY IN 2 RAIDING GROUPS OUTWITH THE GUILD disagree.

 :roll:

No, see, DKP is about putting the guild first, the fact that it's a way of awarding loot is secondary.  With DKP you're ensuring that your people who are there the most often are getting loot, so the guild can make the best use of it.   

Suppose you get material drop for that Legendary mace (Hand of Sulfuras?).  Is it better for the guild that the tank that's there all the time to pick it up or that random guy who's only been seen twice in the last two months or the tank who's there often, but rolls on every damn thing that drops and has unusual luck with the dice?  Stuff like that is why DKP was created back in EQ.

To me, DKP is about putting the members in charge of what they get instead of the officers.  It's also about strangling future arguments about loot in the cradle.  It's the anti-drama pill.

Look, really, don't get me started.


Especially since you both just contradicted each other...

This picture was back when bases were kind of broken (i.e. you could pick up the panels and hide them etc) but defending them was a big thing. I think this screenshot was the day before I quit due to some hurricane or rather knocking out my power for way too long, but we had an outpost and hospital. Defending it was by far the best thing in the game. I had lots of customers who were rebels and every time a rebel force was coming for us, we'd get tipped off and assemble. We were ruthless and had overpowered weapons and way too many smugglers (2 - which was way too many with the way panic shot worked). To say the very least - you can not have this sort of fun in a game without housing. Also, our base was out in the middle of flatlands on naboo in the boondocks. It was an ideal location, never an eyesore, and completely organized. It was in the same shape as the mall in Washington DC and instead of a washington monument, we had a forward outpost. Anyway, yea, it was good fun and had nothing to do with e-peen. Mostly because "Player Cities" as they know them now, did not exist. It was my like refugee camps.

Also, on the topic of DKP. I've said it before and I'll say it again, goddamn that is an insulting self-inflicted mechanic. Guilds that need to use it should be ashamed.

Not really, but you don't want to discuss it, so  :-D

Now this sounds like a game I would have enjoyed immensely.  Unfortunately, I played SWG the first month of release, which killed any desire whatsoever to play it again.  Really was a shame, too, since it had several great things going for it.

It sounds like there was a sweet-spot between intitial release shittiness and post-NGE frustration, assuming you were with the right people on the right server. 

I thought SWG sounded interesting, and planned on getting into it once they ironed out the bugs and  frankly, finished building the game.  Never has patience paid off so well.  A penny saved is a penny earned, etc etc. 

The sweet spot was right before the player cities/vehicles update. Combat still sucked though.

It wasn't ever particularly sweet, because the game was always broken and unbalanced in so many ways. For example, to be effective in PvP you had to be able to attack the mind bar, which was smaller and harder to heal than the health and action bars, so as a carbineer I was useless (only had random-pool attacks that sometimes hit mind). I could knock people onto their backs occasionally and run away or get someone else to kill them, which was OK because I was primarily a doctor. There were bugs and exploits with bases, e.g. you could buy defensive turrets that fired at approaching enemies, but depending on the latest patch those were either simple to exploit and destroy, or impossible to approach because the rate of fire was increased too far.

The live team usually took weeks/months to fix the simplest exploits like being able to shut down a base destruction countdown with a character that was not PvP flagged. Each base was destructible for a two hour window per day, supposedly determined by the time you originally placed it, but the times shifted due to bugs (then you got raided at 4am and lost months of work). One guy had a bugged gun that spammed area-effect mind poison that killed in two ticks, meaning the fight ended if he was online (took a year for the devs to remove it). Other patches, people could be griefed by incapacitating them three times instead of deathblowing them, causing permanent damage to their gear.

But when you got around stuff like that and had the right people, yes it was sweet.

Aye.  The player base in my view for EQ/EQ2 has always been better than WoW.  But that's not enough :)

I was on a server with a high Asian/European population and even higher guild drama quotient (The Nameless. Legacy of Steel's home server) in Everquest.  Nothing since has made me hate people as much, not even AC2's Darktide server.

You must have not played Diablo2 enough.

Of course, outside of all the exploits the real problem with the GCW in SWG is that it meant nothing.  It didn't matter at all whether one side wiped all the bases of a faction off a single planet or more, because there was no tracking and no advantages or penalties provided.  Outside of any modifiers, there's not even any basic tracking, like the kind Mythic provides, so players can know, other than pissing off another guild, what the real motivation should be to destroy a base or stronghold.  All you produced in SWG PvP were personal vendettas between guilds and people, and t3h hat3 was exponential because of base destruction.  On Kettemoor, there was a general detente after awhile to get away from "basewars".

Yeah we had personal vendettas and hate, but we also had these guys (http://swg.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=13&id=25&colid=6643) (I posted about them on Corp and it got slashdotted, Wired did a story, etc) and a roleplayed storyline (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Valcyn&message.id=79483&view=by_date_ascending&page=1) on the server board that meshed with the basewars (some of the same participants - raid one day, roleplayed trial of a traitor the next).

LOL. They (or at least ex-LoSers from EQ) were my SWG guild, Renraku :) After SWG, that particular group of ex-LoS members became Ravage (http://www.ravageguild.net) in WoW (but I went back to my Aussie EQ guild).

[EDIT] OMG I think I can bring this nearly back on topic.How then did you feel about Tigole being involved with WoW?

Not particularly happy because the way he got the job wasn't 100% on the up and up.  LoS had a sizeable number of Blizzard employees as members including at least one developer and serveral artists. I don't remember exactly what he was hired for, but apparently his English degree was enough qualification. 

Plus, you know, there was that whole thing about him walking over the average player or anyone not in his guild his entire time in EQ.  At least everytime I have to clear trash mobs in MC or BWL I can aim my hate at an actual human being I never liked in the first place.  Luckily instancing has helped separate some of the intra-faction drama he seemed to revel in.  I can blame him for Lethon fight though, can't I?

Trash mobs suck. 

How about "We railed against it because its implementation 4 years ago was not fun."

WoW is fun. It isn't great innovation, or good server architecture, or meaningful PVP. But it is fun. That's all that matters.

Actually, if it meant less ball sucking, I'd have no problem with advertising subsidies and networks in MMOG's. I really wouldn't. But it would have to be done right. In sci-fi MMOG's, ad banners and flying blimps with logos and shit make sense. In fantasy MMOG's, /pizza is evil evil death. Fantasy MMOG's can use interstitial type ads, email marketing and other things to make that shit work and pay dividends.

But if it's used like /pizza to pad some marketing twat's budget or some CEO's bottom line, fuck it in its tiny stupid ass.

/pizza was the most uninvasive advertising in the goddamn world. That's all I ask of advertising.

Uh, it was not promoted in such a manner at all, and it only made the MMOG stereotypes worse. So, I disagree.

But it wouldn't be.  You know it wouldn't be.

It makes the devs focus about 80% of content creation on the raiders, who at best make up something like 10% of the user base. The casual player gets fuckall for new content, unless they choose to start trying to play like the uber guilds and raiders.

I don't care about how something is promoted. I care about how it's displayed in game.

And MMOG stereotypes? Shit, they do it to themselves. Wasn't there a guy complaining about a XXXX shirt not being offered on the WoW boards? WTG d00dz. I'm in your base supplementing your calorie intake, fattie.

10% might be a little on the low side. If we measure the populance in WoW who are enjoying raiding, or has it as a goal to one day reach it, I think the numbers would be fairly high. Most of the people who I know who dislike raiding alltogheter in WoW are MMORPG veterans, which is a minority in WoW. I know a fair share of MMORPG veterans in WoW who enjoys raiding in WoW as well.

Yes, I know. /sadf

As far as housing, I've never been a user of housing. The apartments like in Neocron that are just storage space and decorating practice, I just really never needed. But when you start talking about bases and capturable/attackable structures, THAT is useful housing.

And Cevik? Shadowbane had housing. Personal houses AND your player city. The housing made it something worth playing, at least until you figured out just how fucked up the whole system was.

Also, Neocron didn't fail because of ugly models (though that helped), it failed because it had five treadmills instead of one and you needed to ride at least 2 or 3 of them before you could even be rewarded with a goddamn pistol.

While it might have been promoted annoyingly outside the game, inside the game it was totally unintrusive. As for making the MMOG stereotype worse? Who outside of other computer game geeks even knows what a MMOG is, let alone a stereotype of a player of a subgenre of games.

You're assuming we all think we're as bad as each other.  I refer you to the word 'Catass'.

which post is the "catass" replyi to?

That'd be you.

But I wasn't calling you a catass.  I was saying that there's grading of stereotypes even within the gaming geek community.  It's also usually totally misrepresented.

Just like the whole /pizza advertising thingy.

Pizza Hut could become the biggest pizza chain in the world ten times over if they got /pizza into WoW.

However, since its Blizzard, its likely that they would include a favored local pizza shop and say "delivery not available outside OC".

As a Nameless alumnus, I agree.  I almost had to learn Chinese and I still gave up before level 40.  On the other hand, asians have a hard time detecting manginas.

I have less respect in general for Blizzard after hiring someone whose handle is a joke you might find funny when you are thirteen... and letting him use it in company correspondance.


Truly, battle.net is much worse than anything I have ever experienced in a MMOG.

I might dislike WoW more if I was able to log in.

From Slashdot:


AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Fuckers.

"I want join big american party."

Emphasis mine.  And, "I do not think that word means, what you think it means."

At least, the quote from the second article would seem to NOT indicate a contrast between the two articles, but rather a similarity in thought.  Go Go Internet Journalism!

Alkiera

Chinese players are having a hard time getting groups in WoW. That's shocking.

Almost as shocking as Arabs having a hard time getting on planes.

Who is driving!  Oh my god bear is driving!

Your just a tiny bundle of internet racism fun arentcha Paelos?

I mean seriously first the Aussies now the Chinese?  Frankly gold farmers almost never group and the reason they would likely be booted would be they almost always have shit gear because they dont do quests.  That only applies to "pro" gold farmers, which dont need fucking groups anyways because they are botting multiple pc's for lewtz.  In WoW there is no way to tell if someone is American or not because the l33t kiddies (myself included) dont try very hard to speak proper english 90% of the time to begin with.

Alkiera:  I think they're saying that the attitudes on the American servers contrasted with the tone of the Eurogamer article, which was probably sympathetic to non-english speaking gamers.  The un-asked question is "why are non-english speakers on an english server?"

The Austrailian and the Chinese aren't races. They are nationalities. Also, try to argue that Chinese farmers aren't busting/manipulating economies. I haven't been able to mine thorium in any capacity since last summer.

I have pretty much given up on getting those last 3 skillups in blacksmithing because of this. The only way to get a stack of thorium without frantically running around the burning steppes or silithus checking the same spawn points over and over for 3 hours is to pay MeRikeyRuinUrGame 8G for a stack on the AH.

I remember people telling me the economy wasn't getting fucked. How are gold farmers any different than an uberguild? Aren't goldfarmers just a giant super organized highly motivated uberguild?

Because uberguilds run in instances. They can ruin pvp if they get involved in it with their gear, but they typically don't keep you from getting at popular mobs or anywhere near a mine.

I went to Azsharra the other day to try and get some felcloth. I found one of the camps had a 57 Troll Rogue running around it, and after watching it for a short time realised that it was a total bot, running to specific waypoints, turning unnaturally (ie: dead stop, wheel left, move off), moving to the next one and the next one and so on.. I wrote up a GM ticket, and shortly after, a priest came by and said that the same farmerbot had been there 12 hours ago..

The GM got back to me an hour or so later, when I'd long left the area and thanked me for ym ticket, etc. I ran over to the camp spot again, and lo and behold, the fucker was still there, doing the same thing. Thanks GM!

The farmerbot was called Abenjaya, on Proudmoore (horde), fyi.

Ameirican.

No group for you!

That's retarded.  The farmers won't want to join your group.  They have their own groups where the loot rules are already inscribed on stone.  Why the fuck would they join your n/g system ?

 :roll:

From Slashdot:


Now, thats funny. Several people on all servers I played on, have been butchering the english language far more than I will ever be able to.
I am quite sure most of them are native speakers. :evil:

edit: unfucked the quote

I quote the first poster on that Eurogamer article:


Pretty much sums it up for me.

LOL, Internet.

/agree with DerHelm - in my experience the non-native English speakers (if they have been at it for a while) are generally better than some people who are the products of the US public education system.

edited because I came across as hasher than I intended

Someone I know personally is nearly unintelligible in MMOG chat.  He speaks perfect English, better than me even.

The GM/bot anecdote pisses me off.  Glad I play on a PVP server where anybody in contested is likely to get ventilated before the day is through.

Yeah on a pvp server I only get pissed if there is an alliance farmer and no horde around to kick his teeth in.

Just tap his mobs first, free loot.

Last bot I tried that on was intelligent enough to not attack after it was locked-out.  It had started the charge on the mob and everything.

Might get lucky, though, in which case, Loot away!

No, haven't heard of that one.

Problem is, as you figure out ways to grief them, they code around that for the next generation.  You all saw the video where the mage managed to pull a bot out into the ocean deep enough that rezzing would cause it to die from fatigue, right?  Well they fixed that glitch right after, and bots won't follow a mob for more than a few yards now.

Really, the only defense against botting is an active GM team dedicated solely to that in conjunction with banning of accounts by credit card and billing address rather than simply turning-off one account at a time.  However, you're just not going to see that in any game of size because there's too many other problems to deal with.

The farming has seemingly moved hard-core into Dire Maul.  The market is being flooded with Aces of Warlords and DM quest books. Hoo-ray.  Hopefully that stuff will deflate to the point where I can buy it for my twinks and not feel bad.

This thread has become sentient. /luv

I must admit, when the idea first came into being I didn't think it would end up being THE WoW thread...

I just think everyone settled on the worst thing about WoW: the other players.  And the worst of those other players: gold farmers.

piabxw "[Ace of Warlords] buy now, keke la~"

Rang Rang bitch!

English motherfucker do you speak it?!

Apparently there's a teleport hack.  (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=6719951&p=1&tmp=1#post6719951)

Didn't know this existed until I read the thread and :roll:  it's popular with the gold farmers.   :-o 

If it's true, no excuse for having something like that in the game for so long. However, it's interesting that only now is it being used to exploit farm the Tribute run in DM.  I guess it takes an increased Ace drop rate and some planning to figure out how to exploit the encounter to have it be completed by only hunters and rogues in green Mauradon quality gear.

Sigh.

Hax.

The worst idea Blizzard had with the game was letting people post as more than one person on their forums. That alt-bullshit makes the most epically hard to read forum even harder to read. The shit goes down like castor oil with nails in it.

Epically isn't a word. But it should be.

It's a Blizzard game, what did you expect?

Those forums are a clusterfuck on every single level. Design, implementation, moderation, posters, community managers and so on. All equally shitty. Actually, shitty doesn't quite convey how I feel about them. But I'll leave creative expletives to Haemish.

I only have two questions about the WoW-forums

1) why they don't restrict poster account to being, say, level 15 minimum is beyond me.
2) why people bother to read that shit at all. I mean, if you read and post on those forums with any regularity, you deserve to lose your sight.