f13.net

 
Not exactly groundbreaking news, but a worthwhile clarification.

Goodness, but WoW is shaping up to really, really suck.

Instanced good.

Guild instanced bad.

So they are trying to make Everquest LDoN with prettier graphics?

Meh.

That is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying someone to develop original content! =)

99.99% sure that he means "you" as in "one" as in "wow, instancing makes it easy for us to make cool raid targets because you damn players cannot just zerg it to death with 70 people" rather than "you" as in "this will let you guys design your own content."

Can someone translate that into English for those of us who have never played a game with "raid zones" or "instancing"?

Raid zone: think a place that is meant to be done with more than one group.

Instanced zone: think private copies of the same zone.  You and I both zone in to the Rat Lair.  The lairs are identical, but we are in different copies of it.

Instanced raid zones are designed to (a) avoid the "lots of guilds fighting over who gets to fight the rat king" problem and (b) to give designers the power to limit the number/type of people in the zone so they can make the Rat King fun for 20 people to kill without having him zerged by 100 dumbasses.  These are both widely considered to be significant problems with EQ.

Ah, thanks.  So "guild instance lines" means that a particular guild is in control of that particular zone/raid and if you aren't in a guild, you will never get to do it?

That seems somewhat lame for those of us rebel individualists.

I am not sure how they will handle that.   I presume that if guild A is in an instance, that Guild B could do it at the same time, so there is no "control" issue (they also probably mark the guild as being unable to restart the instance for X amount of time after they try or after they win).  

But whether or not you have to be in a guild to trigger an instance, I don't know.  Even if you can trigger an instance, if everything in there is designed to be fought by 20 people cooperating with each other, your rebel individualist is probably in line for a quick death.

Instancing implies that two (or more) guilds could be in multiple and separate instances of a zone at the same time.  The same raid experience, the same zone.  Equal but separate.

No, it means that that guild controls that copy of that zone.  You and your guild can enter your own copy of that zone and both Guilds can kill the Uber King at the same time without stepping on each others toes.

Rebel individualists will have to find buddies to raid with, thats standard.

Based on what?  The presence of raids?

No, based on the fact they're trying to replicate an endgame that took three years to finally not suck. Again, this game is going to blow hard, and I have history on my side.

I can honestly say I don't mind instancing or guild oriented lines to major raids. What I do mind is having these raids get larger than the 20-30 people mark. If they are planning on making the "cool" raids be something that can only be done by 50+ groups, there is no way in hell I'll ever get to be a part of one, or so history dictates due to my time schedule.

I can organize 20 people and get them moving to accomplish something in under two hours unless the content requires more killing/traveling time, but I can't do the same with 40 anywhere near as easily.

All that said I'm happy that they are focusing on higher-end content because that is something SWG never made an incentive, unless you count grinding as end-game. I get the distinct feeling by the lack of discussion on PvP that it will be god-awful for 6 months to a year before it finally gets balanced, incentivized, and retooled at least once. The question will be if I can enjoy the other content in the game while I wait for that function to be ready, or if the other content will just make me not care much about PvP (which is unlikely). In any case, if WoW remotely resembles the suck-fest that is the DAOC-ToA expansion, you will not find me wildly supportive. All the same, I'm watching Beta closely for nuggets about melee, crafting, mining, and PvP which I love. Also, I really hope they don't try to get too screwy with guilds like SWG did. KISS should be the mantra there.

"guild" instancing is stupid because it just means you're going to have people quitting their guild, joining a guild, going back to their original guild just to help on a raid. It's a silly thing that is a needless and predictable irritant.

Instancing doesn't have to be private btw. It sounds like that's what it will be in WOW, but AO instances public dungeons. If they get overcrowded, they create a new one. But it's multiple groups and complete strangers inside. Best of both worlds.

So in your opinion a better answer from Blizzard would be:  Raids are hard so we're not going to try, please enjoy our high-level fishing endgame.  

Potential players in a PvE MMOG (yes, its a PvE MMOG) want to raid.  You're asking Blizzard to shoot themselves in the foot.

ToA is an hymn to the grind. It's completely built around "grind" as a concept. For now WoW is built around a treadmill, but NOT around a grind. Even the highend PvE content seems aimed to fun and ease of play instead of just catassing.

What scares me is still the PvP but the PvE should be fun and not revolutionary.

I guess what I was referring to was the inability for an "ad hoc" group of 20 people to go on a raid with no guild affiliation.  Maybe that will still be possible.  I like pick up groups better than guilds.

Oooooh, Tigole is talking about raiding. Yeah, I want to play that game.

Oh wait, I did, in 1999.

I presume (well, hope) that they will flag people on an individual rather than a guild basis to (a) let Abagadro's Team Libertarian have a go at it and (b) keep people from changing guilds to re-farm instances.

And Joe, please tell me you weren't implying that Luclin raids are better than Velious ones.

Obviously WOW is a mmorpg for players who love EQ, but hate SOE.

The biggest challenge (in my opinion) for any developer is how to deal with power gamers. Those people burn though content at an amazing pace, and then threaten to quit if more content isn't added quickly. The devs have no choice (with bean counters breathing over their necks) but to add raid zones, in order to keep the power gamers happy and paying.

Will it even take a week for the first WOW players to max out their main character?

Raven

I refuse to pay any attention to a press release that uses the word 'cool' that fucking much.  How informative it that?

I can see him on an interview:

So, tell me about character creation:
"It's really cool."

Okay, and what is the treadmill like?:
"We set it up and designed it to be incredibly cool."

Allright, what is the endgame?:
"Raiding like everquest, with instancing like everquest... BUT its like really extremely COOL!"

Death penalty?
We here at WoW don't like lame death penalties, so we made sure our death penalty is COOL.  It is really awesome dude.


Fucking braindead idiot.  Why they let him out of his cage to ook at the other monkeys is beyond me.

Its very easy to level early on, i got up to level 7 in about 4 non consecutive hours. However you can only get up to level 30 right now. 31-60 might be a DAOC curveball they threw between 40-50. Right now most people are of the opinion its a fast leveling game but since no one, not even the alpha testers have seen what life is like after 30 its hard to say.

Hard to say, since the current level cap is 30 and the announced final cap will be 60.  We know that it typically takes longer to get from, say 50 to 51 than it does to get from 20 to 21.  The question is how much harder.  There are certainly level 30s out there now, but the rate of exp gain is still fluctuating.  From the official forums:



but also



so who knows.  Note that  the XP change implied above isn't necessarily an OMG SLOW THEM DOWN thing... Bliz may have accelerated alpha leveling to test mid-range content and then set it to something closer to normal for beta.

 
That statement right there is kind of scary.  It looks like this game is uber guild or bust.  Maybe thats not real different from EQ and DAoC, but it sounds like now you won't even have the option of tagging along.

Hmm...

Sounds like a precursor (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-general&T=3615&P=1&ReplyCount=21#post3615)<- to the end content.  Overall I like the impression, but not the timeline.  However, since it is instanced, I can see the option of getting a schedule to try and tackle it as the old sunday night DnD fest.

I still like the WOW I am seeing, more so than any other game on the table now.

I get the impression that you'll be able to very easily ruin WoW for yourself if you read too much about the quests beforehand.  I feel like I'm reading about a movie I haven't seen.  I don't want to know anything about these quests until I do them.

if its guild only now, I bet with enough complaints they'll change it and institute visitor passes of some sort or keys like AO

Imho - they should let em burn out.  Power gamers are a very small, vocal, high maintenance part of a user base.  90% of people take months of normal playing to get to where the catasses get in a week or so.  So let Furor rant and carry on about lack of high end content, watch him threaten to quit 2-3 times and not do it, and just concentrate on the vast majority of your player base.

Of course, Tigole is in the dev team, so this may be a waste of time even thinking about this.

Threatening to quit is a playstyle choice.  I'd guess that a very high percentage of the people who threaten to quit never do.

If everyone quit who threatened to, the MMOG space would be a barren wasteland.

hmm so basically WoW is a carbon copy of EQ with a bit of extra stuff.

I would have expected something more from blizzard

The cartoon version, with a less harsh death penalty and more "fun" (read easier).  But they have an undead race and exploding sheep, so thats something.

Yeah, just like FF11 is a carbon copy of EQ. -__-

There's also no guarantee they won't slash XP gain right before release, like certain recent SOE games...

Surely this is inevitable ?  I always thought that this had nothing to do with balancing, fun, or anything else but simply to set the levelling to a point where you can get viable beta feedback.  Bitchslap me if I'm wrong...

Oh, and thanks for taking my point and running with it Joe ; as a consumer of these products am I supposed to be impressed with the 'new shiny' ?  We've seen this.  We've done it.
Where's our new design ?

If anyone could do this correctly it's blizzard, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Don't think this quite needs a new thread, so I'll just tag to the end of this one. This is the write up I said I'd do, based mostly on questions/answers here. More of the new stuff is towards the end:
http://www.lananfrank.net/lana/wow/review.htm

That's a very good preview. Thanks for posting it.

Raven

I think they have made the greatest innovation this genre has seen in forever: they are actually aiming to release a game that has extensive content and mechanics that are not only present, but have actually been polished a few times.  WoW right now is in better shape, content and polish wise, than SWG was months after it was released, to say nothing of the release day status DAoC (best job so far on release mechanics, but no content), AC (decent content, mechanics a complete joke), AC2 (hahahahhaha), SB (hahahahhah), or AO (not enough space to fill in an adequate number of "ha's" to express AO's release-day status).

And it isn't going to be released for half a year from now, if not longer.

Every company aims to release a game with what they think is extensive content and stability. Why would they aim for anything less? Until I play it, it's just Blizzard blowing smoke up our ass this week instead of Raph, NCSoft, or whatever the flavor of the week may be.

Remember David Allen and the original Horizons? Ok, good, now take a step back and stop trusting Blizzard and the hordes of fanbois that will come with them.

Yo, try reading more than the first line.  The argument is not "this game will probably be the most polished and content rich MMOG at launch because Blizzard and the Easter Bunny promised me that it would."  The argument is "this game will probably be the most polished and content rich MMOG at launch because it ALREADY IS as or more polished and content rich than most of the other MMOGs were when they were released and WoW still has 5+ more months of beta to go."

/Sigh. That's not an argument. That's a statement, and it seems to have flown way over your head, but my response was, in short, 'I don't believe you.'

Why? Because I stopped listening to fans and developers a long time ago when it came to statements like that one. I have to play it for myself to believe that kind of hype.

For example, Lineage 2. I preordered the game just to get into beta before the open beta while it wasn't completely populated with dipshits. I found out the game had zero content until the endgame. Most of the reports previous to that pointed in the oppisite direction. If I play WoW and see that the quests are more than, "Go to the mysterious and dark hydra pit, he has been devouring the children of this fine city. Save them, but don't make a martyr of yourself! Oh and while you're down that, grab the chalice and some hydra scales/fur/whatever. It will help you on your way" etc. Then I might be inclined to like WoW, but given Diablo 1 & 2 and *Craft, I have no reason to believe otherwise.

All of Blizzard's games seemed polished because they were so simplified. They took the complexity of other games and washed it until it was smooth - sure, I enjoyed them, sure they were fun. But with an MMORPG where I'm expected to pay on a month to month basis I need more than simplistic fun. Unfortunately I have no reason to believe that Blizzard can deliver on that front - as much as I want them to.

Couple that with the installed fanbase for WoW and it leaves me with no choice but to call 'shannanigans' on anyone who says:



However, I will admit WoW should be very stable - Blizzard knows server software. But if history proves anything, it will also cater to simplistic fools. I'd prefer unstable innovation to shiny & now-stable EQ with more purple and green. (Has anyone else noticed a LOT of purple and green in most of the screenshots?)

Could you please change your avatar? Every time I see it I think I'm going to read something funny or interesting. Unfortunately your posts display neither of these qualities. I wrote some long bullshit about how you're wrong about a lot (all?) of the stuff you talked about but it’s quicker to just call you a fucking idiot and be done with it.

I made most of the same arguments about SB in beta before they released the 3.5 patch that fucked everything up.

In other words, what you've said about WoW has been said about most other betas here, including ones that launched in a state that can kindly be called shitty.

Then why are you talking about WoW?  It isn't out yet, and it sounds like you don't have a beta slot.  Lets just assume that you hate all unreleased games, then you can go do something else with your time.



I don't get the whole blizz fan hate thing.  Yes, there are idiots posting on forums.  Yes, they have a rampant sense of self-entitlement and no real understanding of the development process.  This is different than [insert name of MMOG] how?  And how will this difference make WoW suck?

Watching WoW be developed is the inverse of watching SB through beta.  With SB, all the information that came out was bad.  Screenies, game mechanics, reports of instability, etc. etc.  In response people kept explaining away all the bad news, and I started to wonder, if this game was so hot why was all the pre-release info so damning?

Here - IMO - just about all the info coming out looks great, and people are explaining away all of that to make it look bad.   People who already hate blizzard and hate PvE - ::shock::  - they don't like Blizzard's PvE game.  Now we're at the point where people are actually of the opinion that the game will suck because the fanbase is stupid - as if other MMOG playerbases were Rhodes Scholars.

Part of SB's biggest problems aside from the typical bugs was the fact that a lot of its fanbase not in beta were complete cockmongers who only wanted to pwn at will.

I see the same thing in larger numbers on WoW boards. Nothing makes a PVE game more unbearable than idiotic turds on Jolt Cola and two hours of sleep running mob trains over you at midnight because they feel the camp of uberness is theirs by right.

Just passing by to say that I've tried the game for a few minutes and I'll play a few hours this night.

From the simple presentation point of view (interface, *client performance*, first steps and raw graphic) WoW completely and largely BLEW all my expectations (in a good way).

Really. As you log in the world feels fucking /amazing/. I've never felt this sense of wonder before. I've created a dwarf and the zone where you start feels incredible. Everything, from the size of the trees and buildings, the clip plane, the hills etc... gives you a new feeling compared to what I played till now. It's not that the 'level' is bigger. It's how things are put together that it makes you feel like in a world of giants.

And it's even more amazing when you go inside the buildings. There is an impressive quality of detail. And for quality I mean the raw graphic talent. Graphic has never been important for me but even this aspect alone makes a 'world' you really *don't* want to leave. I passed my first half-hour just wandering around in awe because I simply wasn't able to do anything else. In other games you start doing things, here I could just go around to explore and see "what's behind that hill".

This on a geforce 3, with a 2400+ Athlon processor, plugged in a very old motherboard. All settings possible cranked up:
It moves WAY BETTER than DAoC.

I'm already planning an humongous review for the next days, focusing of what isn't being told on other reviews I've read. Also focusing on what I don't like. For example the char creation is really worst than DAoC and I feel forced to crate my dwarf. Everything else just looked uninspired or terribly ugly. You go through the combinations but you'll finish to like just a pair of them. It also feels like playing LEGO. At the end, all you can change is the *head* of a character and it feels quite wrong.

But again. It triggered on me something that died in me years ago. The immersion. The breath in the cold, light shining on the textured terrain (incredible, you have to see this), footprints, an amazing clip plane (both for the world and PCs/NPCs), critters and an organic world design. It feels *different* from other games. I always cared just for the gameplay but here the gameworld has *value*. It isn't just the "frame" in which you play. Not olny it feels completely out of scale compared to, say, DAoC. But it blews completely something "nice but soulless", like SWG.

I expect a "spoiled" effect. I don't think I'm able to go back to the games I still like. It feels like a wet dream. This is right what you were dreaming to live as a kid and it has still the same emotional effect now, that I'm unable to be excited or surprised about a game..

Again, this is just the "feel" I had as I started, I don't know anything of the value of the game itself. But the graphic is 2000 times better than what I expected (forget the screenshots), and, despite this, the engine runs *perfectly* (while SWG, for example, runs like *crap*). So not only the graphic quality is out of scale, but also the performance is. This is, by far, the best looking game. And it's also smooth where other engines just run bad. So it's something you *can* play and live.

The controls are also a good improvement over DAoC (the "feel" of the toon is better due to a few tricks with the camera and the animations). If you played it you'll feel absolutely comfy with WoW. I redefined a few keys and I was basically playing the same game.

That's certainly true Haemish, they could always make the game worse as the beta goes along.  I don't recall anyone saying SB was "polished" at any point of the beta, I just remember a lot of "promising" talk, but then again I didn't follow the game that closely.

Nevertheless, based on first hand accounts from people I have gamed with for years, WoW is in better shape today than many MMOGs were on release day.  They could make a killing by running a server load check and releasing the game as soon as it even sort of passes (see: SWG or AC2 except without the "make a killing "part).  They aren't.  They could hold people to a NDA until the bitter end to hide all the failures of the game (see: just about every other game).  They aren't.  These three things don't guarantee shit, but they are at least a very promising start.

Now, the dreamers around here who think that the industry should move from churning out Model T Fords to flying cars from the Jetsons in one leap won't be happy.  But they won't be happy with anything other the next bowl of cheeba.  I, one the other hand, think that if the industry could make the leap from a Model T to a Maserati it would be a stupefyingly amazing achievement.  Hell, pulling off a base model Saturn at this point would be beyond all reasonable expectations.

There will always be the two extremes in pre-release MMOs, the doomsdayers and the fanbois. They will always exist whenever there is uncertainty in how the game is going to turn out for launch. What intrigues me about WoW that didn't intrigue me about other games:

- The doomsdayers are having to work harder at pointing out why WoW will suck. The stability issues are getting better than average reviews from beta, which is something that I've never really heard from other games. Largely, you have to look at the high level stuff as the question mark and PvP, but the low-level fun content is getting good PR. Frankly, the biggest hits are lodged at the community at large which in my opinion is could only be marginally worse than every other game's l33t squads. If you are tired of dumbasses in game, then don't bother with multiplayer.

- There is a non-NDA beta, which not only inspires confidence in the project but also the idea that you can get more than just one viewpoint on the game. Frankly, with that beta, inevitably you will find out both sides of the good and bad from both the extremes, and hopefully the middle ground. Open information is good and will only serve to middle the largely vocal hype/bash outliers with quantity. The only thing that bothers me is that PvP is tightly guarded info-wise, which in my book means it will suck. Past experience favors the doomsday group when something is not reported on much as a key feature, like PvP.

- The length of development seems to be a good sign that WoW isn't trying to be quick and dirty with the testing process. I don't get the sense of a "shove it out the door" policy yet, but that's not to say it won't show up. Certainly, it's really too early to bumpfuzzle Blizzard on their cycle, but it shows promise, and should things turn tide we would hear quickly.

I'm not licking my chops over the impending feast yet, but I am actually paying attention to some of the info coming out of this development. I won't be making any pre-orders or first month subs, but I do think this game has solid odds on being fun while not revoluationary. If that's the case I'll give it a whirl for a while.

The thing is, (and i say this after having followed seriously the development of War3 & D2, as well as floating around in the Starcraft scene for a long time) Blizzard games are very much in the "holy shit, this is actually good!" stage during producation, with all sorts of wonderfull design ideas, lots of optimism, etc, etc..
However, they also have a very nasty habit of falling apart at the seams when released. They will still have a lot of teh shiney, but will often lack the core elements that made the original fun.

The flaw with that argument being that Wow has no original, but i'm still highly sceptical of their ability to balance the game in favour of fun & skill requiring gameplay (in recent memory, the jumbled up heap that is War3 doesen't help).

Were you born this stupid or did you have to work at it?  What are you using to create this 'theme of sucktitude upon release' with?  A statistical sample of 1?

The list of super-successful upon release blizzard games pretty much dwarfs any other development house, unless theres been a spate of 5 or 10 really sucky blizzard games that I missed while I was in a coma after being burned horribly in that car fire...

Oh jeez, for a minute there i almost thought you were trying to hurt my feelings.

I guess i should clarify by asking what you consider successful?
Unless i'm hideously misinterpreted the point of Waterthread, we aren't talking about commercial success.

Frankly, I'm not sure what Blizzard game you could consider a failure, regardless of what barometer you used to measure success. Sure, the sequels might not have fallen terribly far from their originals, but even D2, SC, SC2, and WC3 are still fun and enjoyed by millions to this day. Commecial successes? Check. Critical successes? Check. Enjoyed by players? Check. Longevity? Check.

Sure, none of their games cure cancer or inspire people to start down the path of becoming a bodhisattva. But then again if you're expecting that from a computer game you're a f*cking retard. By any definition of the word game, everything they've released has been an earth-crushing success.

I agree. To me a good game is one that is fun to play, and keeps me entertained.

All of the above games. Check.

Well, think of it this way (and i know you'v heard this all before):

Britney Spears is commercially successful. Everquest is "fun" and very, very successfull. Et cetera..

And while i'll freely admit to enjoying watching & listening to Britney Spears, this does not her a good musician make.


When i say that Blizzard's games have sucked i'm speaking from a comparitive point of view. Warcraft 3 is not a bad game. For the casual player to load it up, find a quick match and spend twenty-five minutes watching pretty colours flashing on the screen, this is a great step towards making a highly marketable & profitable product. Which is what Blizzard have done.
And therefore, unarguably, they make hugely successful products.

However, this also means that you are basing your opinion on the lowest common denominator. A prime shining example of which, i believe, is demonstrated only a few threads down.

During the War3 development cycle several changes were made throughout, the effect of which was something not unlike the Vatican proclaiming from tomorrow onwards, that Jesus was in fact gay.
Two of the biggest i can remember was that the fifth race was being cut, and the introduction of creeps (iirc this was sometime around the half-way mark. I could very well be wrong though, since i'm fuzzy on the subject).

Now obviously to little Billy this makes no difference whatsoever. He is still going to drag his parents to the Store, buy W3 and click repeatedly on the Night Elf archers while leaning dangerously close to the monitor and breathing raspingly. For him the game is fun.
However, if i list you some of the biggest complaints made against W3 made by player much more skilled than i, perhaps you will understand where i'm coming from:


the introduction of auto-cloning & auto-casting (albeit necessary & logical in some case e.g. Healing).

the shockingly, shockingly terrible economic structure.

for a game based around micro, abysmally slow and clumsy unit movement.

terrible pathfinding.

horribly cluttered-up spell effects and badly chosen unit-size vs screen-size ratio (don't get me started on air units).

Blizzard's insistance on doing absolutely nothing about maphacking and their mediocre efforts to curb it (although i don't know what the situation is atm).

the generally bad in-game mechanics desicions (e.g. creeps, upkeep, the way armour works).

the shocking racial balance issues that took them iirc seven patches and an expansion to correct (once again this could be wrong and there may still be some imbalances left. Having only recently started playing again, i'v not followed the scene for a while so take this /w a grain of salt).


Now i realise that none of the above may make any difference to you simply because you are not aware of these issues, and they do not interfere with you having a "fun" time. And they do not get in the way of Billy's fun time, but surely you must agree that equating yourself with Billy Jr. is not a reasonable idea?
But they do with mine. And they also interfere for a great deal of people who prefer to take their games not just for face value but with just a smigeon of seriousness on the side.

Now, when you compare the above list with, ooh.. say Starcraft, you get what.. ?
Perfect balance, almost perfect GUI (W3 did improve this in several aspects), depth and intellegence of gameplay unrivalled by any RTS and i daresay very few other games. A few bugs Blizzard was/is too lazy to fix, a few underused (due to various in-game mechanics) units & a thriving and mature (by Blizzard standards =) ) community and compeditive scene.

Now surely, people asked, after the phenomenal success that was Starcraft, surely Blizzard would build on it and totally own the living shit out of everything by whacking us in the face with Warcraft 3?

*bzzt* wrong answer.. I guess people didn't learn from Diablo 2.

And yes, i could very well strech this post out and list, point by point what people felt was seriously wrong with D2 (anyone remember the GuildHalls?), apart from the cheats, but the end effect is still the same. Heck, i remember a couple of threads before the F13 merge, where people here on WT consistently rated Diablo above D2, for a variety of reasons.


And this brings me back to my original point. I'm sure Wow will be great fun and will be popular and i might even subscribe to it for a few months. But after the initial shiney factor wears off, you'll see the seams appear.

Here’s the thing though: out of the stuff you listed, the only thing that’s an actual problem is the cheating. The rest of it’s pretty much personal preference. I’m sorry, but using a list of “problems” topped with “I don’t have to give each individual caster orders for each individual spell” as a downside is insane. That’s the sort of stuff that makes it better, just not for the very few people capable of micromanaging fifty units fast enough for them to be effective. I’m sure those guys are annoyed that unit speed was slowed down to curb opening rushes and other design decisions that help the non-elite were made, but that sort of stuff is what makes Blizzard good at making games.

I’m praying that WoW will be at least as “crappy” and “unfun” as Diablo 2 and Warcraft X. If that’s the case, it’ll give me something to do for the next several years. Unfortunately, from the sounds of the raid crap they’re peen waving about, they’re going the route of catering to the self-styled elite to the detriment of making a “game”. Threads here and many other places indicate that hours of camping and mandatory grouping is not what most people are looking to get into now. Sure there are exceptions (Mesozoic, I’m looking at you), but people are starting to demand the ability to lead an actual real life without falling hopelessly behind their single friends and co-workers in what is ultimately supposed to be a relaxing pastime. Being able to order 50 different units to cast 50 different spells in 60 seconds doesn’t make you a better tactician, it makes you a better hotkey-pusher. Camping shit hours on end with “guildies” or whatever doesn’t make you skilled or equal an accomplishment, it makes you a f*cking loser at life. Welcome to the realization that most people here could have earned at least a Masters with the time they’ve pissed away on “virtual worlds”. That’s why those of us with actual lives want a game, not a virtual c*ck-stroking to make us feel like we’re doing something vaguely equal to making our lives not be a total waste.

*edited to clarify that by "you" I don't mean anyone in particular like Megrim or Mesozoic, it's simply the way I write. Although, if you think camping shit in a game makes you skilled or whatever, I am actually talking about you. All of you who think that way, and I'm doing it all at once.

When you tell us that something is bad, it's much easier if you actually compare it to something - not just say that they suck from a comparative point of view.



Ah, change is bad! And it is bad - why? If something doesn't work - why not cut it? The error must be that they didn't detect it earlier. Of course, for those who wanted War2 with better graphics - it must have been a tough blow...



Because, they want what is best for the game - and not what suits their playstyle and is best for them?



The auto-casting could be seen as an attempt to take the focus away from micro? The slow movement could be seen as an attempt to take the focus away from micro?

In what way is the economic structure shocking? With the exception of the reduced number of units (which, one could say, takes the focus away from zerging and micro) it isn't very different from war2 or starcraft...



Compared to?
Admittedly, I did easily lose overview in large battles - but that happens in most other games as well.



Here's a hint - there is no central game server in war3. The map data has to be hosted somewhere, no matter where they put it - it will be decoded.



Bad for whom? Creeps and upkeep added tiny bits of strategy to a game that is mostly tactics. I fail to see the problem with armor; it was rock/scissors/paper with a couple of units that arguably got assigned wrong armor type.



Easily shocked? The biggest imbalance was in the minds of the players. Once the rumor of a nerf came - the counter strategies came as well. Huntress got their damage reduced with 1 point and suddenly they didn't pwn anymore?



They're wrong - I'm right! It's just a game, deal with it.
Hint: Just because someone is elitist doesn't mean they're right - that goes for both me and them.



Playstyles!
One playstyle worked better for SC, one worked better for War3. The games resemble each other quite a bit imho; the main difference is which playstyle is most efficient.



There are still close to 100k D2 accts online at peak. That's after they've banned everybody - twice. The reason Diablo is considered better is because it had a much better atmosphere and cooler monsters. The game mechanics in D2 are superior in almost every way.



I guess I'll try to make a point as well, since I've SB'd your post :)

We have a bunch of MMOGs today that have essentially identical interfaces. Those interfaces are very complex and difficult to use for people who are not used to them. This, in turn, might be part of the reason why the genre isn't recruiting as many new players as expected. I expect Blizzard to present a more polished and easier to use interface. This might bring more people to the genre.

The LCD today is gamers; the casual gamer is still a gamer. We need a (popular!) game or two where the LCD is the newbie. WoW could be it, but probably isn't - with the endgame being raids.

If I don't like the game, so be it - but it will hopefully increase awareness of the genre, maybe increasing the willingness to invest in games that are not just crappy eq ripoffs. Which in turn will increase the chance of someone making a MMOG I'll actually like.

At least I can hope...

This argument is crap.  Spears is targeted at 13-year old girls.  Its not rocket science to realize that a forum full of +/- 25 year old gaming men are not fans of Spears's music.  Or that people who have played the shit out of EQ are tired of it.  So, wow, I guess commercial success is bad.  

CORRELATION DOES NOT = CAUSATION.

I'll talk to my friend on who's 16th on the USWest FFA ladder(LemmingInstinct) about all the stuff you've talked about but from what I've heard from him other than the cheaters he doesn't see much wrong with wc3. Even from looking at the ladder pages there's a pretty even distrobution of races in the top places.

Back on the main topic, I'm putting faith in Blizzards simply because they've been known to pull games in the past(War of the Clans I believe) because they felt it was just the same game rehashed. If you can pull a game that has already had previews done in magazines for it I think they'll be wary about releasing an MMOG that's not up to blizzard quality.

Arguing against a sample size of 1 is pretty silly.  Ultimately, if that single sample is you, that is all that matters.  Everyone on the planet could love the game, but if you don't, that is the only person that matters.

I didn't like WC3, didn't like D2 (I would have liked it 5 years earlier than it was released).  Never played much SC because it just didn't appeal to me.  I am not a big RTS fan anyway so that is no big surprise.  Loved Total Annihilation and like some of the C&C games (original and generals).

I hope WoW is a good game, but don't know if I will play it or not.  My wife is very turned off by the graphics.  I don't see myself ever bothering to buy it unless I make beta and it is great.  The odds of that are about the same as a shark eating me in my office cubicle.

I don't know if anyone else has realized this but perhaps Blizzard isn't shooting for long term subscriptions (2 year +).

Maybe they're aiming to provide gamers with a solid 5 or 6 months of gaming, then the gamer can move on.  I don't remember reading anywhere (and I've been reading alot) that there is a 3 or 4 or 5 year story arc involving X and Y and the great war.  Maybe that's what the end game means, you play through the content for one side (ala WC) then play through the content on the otherside (WC) then if you like the multiplayer (PvP, Raiding) you can stay on, otherwise move on like all their previous games.

Edit: Hahaha, "The odds of that are about the same as a shark eating me in my office cubicle."

Wanna bet that once you can play the game you'll look at it in a complete different way?

Really, from the outside, depending on your background, you'll feel worried about the content, the balance of PvP and so on. Once in, the game "seduces" you in a complete different way than any mmorpg to date.

This happens way before you can even start to think about what made you feel so immersed. It's the first time I caught myself *playing* instead of studying what's good or bad.

Man, I love reading posts by angry.bob ... I agree with everything you just said ...

... hopefully, in 2005, by the time the game is released, Blizzard won't have given in to the whiners ...

See, your just not reading very carefully here.  I didn't say whether I would like it or not after I played it.  I am probably never going to play it.  Maybe if they offer a free trial some months down the road.  But I don't know any local friends who are getting it, and I won't get it unless I can test it out first.  So the game could give you blowjobs and it won't get my money until I try it.

If they do a City of Heroes or lineage type thing where a preorder gets you in a beta then maybe.  I can preorder fr $5 at EB and if I don't like it I can cancel.  No more than SWG.  But the odds of WoW doing an all preorder beta are probably back along the lines of the shark in my cubible consuming me again.

And I really could not care less about your opinions on the game Hrose.  I have disagreed with about 99% of the things you have said regarding mmogs.  And the 1% that I don't disagree with contradict something else you have said previously.  Not meant as an insult.  We just have totally divergent tastes.  Hell, your liking the game probably lowers my odds of liking it.

But again, for the reading impaired.  Me not pay if me not play first.  That will go for all future mmogs.  Couple this with the corrolary that I won't go to a mmog website prior to beta and I have mmog piece of mind.

Que?

I'm the one whining for "30-minute content."  Perhaps you have your geologic eras confused.

I think Kat said they are going to do a Open Beta near the end to stress test the servers.

Yeah, but I said I would like to play the game.  :)

No way an open beta for WoW will be anything but a server death sentence.  I could play progress quest now and relable the button you click as "Login" and get the same experience.  :)

That will prevent what you said. The open beta is a way to have a smooth launch. If they can survive that, they'll survive everything. We'll see how it will go.

I will also paste something I wrote commenting here and there and it's a point where I was able to explain another point completely new with my experience in mmorpgs:

Levelling is the *consequence* of your play session, not its cause. When you log off you aren't happy because you gained a bit of exp or RPs. You just had a lot of fun. It could be at level 1 or 40, it's still the same fun. You don't feel like doing this and this so you are able to reach a point where the fun is "supposed to be". Without never reaching it.

That sounds fan-fucking-tastic. It sounds like what I've been looking for since UO got boring.  I will however, remain skeptical until I can actually get my hands on it.  I mean afterall, you did like DAoC for an extended period of time.

Fuck yeah, thats what the devs have been saying for a while, and my friends and I have all agreed that if they can pull this of.. ie, leveling as a side effect of having fun, then we will love it.

Make games fun not work.

What he said. Twice. In bold.

Something I'm considering (but it's early to figure out since I passed only a few hours in the game) is the risk.

I actually love that the game is so playable. When peoples say that levelling is fast, isn't just about mobs giving out more experience. It's about fighting easily, you gain a good amount of exp by killing easily mobs a few levels higher than you, having fun with your style and buff (think about a mix of FFXI and DAoC, just a bit more fast paced and lively). You can chain kill various mobs in just a few seconds and it's rare that you have to sit and wait.

You also loot a lot of meat and stuff from corpses that allow you to heal during the downtime. You are also packed with equipment. It's great having to check constantly your equipment, choosing better looking parts.

There are tons and tons of different things to wear, and many slots. All these things have a personalized texture. You *cannot* see necklaces, rings or cloaks but you *can* see belts and bracers, for example. The equipment is also layered so you can wear bracers and over them the gauntles. Or a shirt and over it an armor and so on.

But even here, the game is terribly generous at giving you stuff to manage and it's all there available to you, as the quests. You don't need a zerg and a few hours to go questing or find a loot.

Lately I levelled a Paladin on DAoC from 20 to 36 and I have just 2-3 pieces of equipment, and playing for hours and hours on the same spot, killing the same monster. This simply doesn't happen in WoW. You walk around just to see what's behind an hill and you kill wandering mobs. The whole place feels very lively, packed everywhere with monsters and critters. There's not the concept of a "spot" where you have to go and stay. It feels more like a promenade (some on the forums are complaining about this too much walk).

The death penalty is so minimal that it doesn't exist, in particular when the exp isn't your focus. The main part is to respawn at the city when you are far away exploring.

Oh, and you can also go nekkid and punch at the monsters. I loved this, there are unarmed skills and the combat animations are definitely fun, you see even the blood spurting around. :)

P.S.
Related to what I wrote here, just read on the official forum from Katricia:
I want to take a moment and thank everyone for the thousands of /bug and /suggest reports that you’ve been sending in. I also want to let you all know that these reports do not go unheard. We’ve got a team of good folks that go through them every day. The reports are sorted and sent to the development team for fixes and their consideration.

As an example, a sampling of your /bug and /suggest reports that are planned for implementation in the next push are listed below:

Suggestions:
# Equipped cloaks will be visible.
# Darnassus, Stormwind, Orgrimmar and Undercity have all undergone layout changes to be easier to navigate (eventually all major cities will be overhauled)
# As a ghost, you can now reincorporate from a further distance from your corpse, and you will reincorporate with 50% health and mana
# More recipes are being added for many of the tradeskills.
# A new spawn system is being put in place to help prevent monsters from spawning on top of players

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=8756#post8756

HRose you gota fucking stop man.

Your turning jaded cynical assholes in to almost fanbois, and we haven't even played the game yet.

Bah, I hope I get in the third phase of beta, you're really making me want to try this.

I can't believe people can still get excited reading others opinions of games after a few hours of play.  The raves here on SWG were deafening early on.  Joe had a fricking hardon for HORIZONS after seeing a shiney dragon.

The game might be real good, it might not.  But the staggering odds are that anyone here won't be playing until launchday (or a few days after as the servers die).  Open beta for a game like this will be utterly crushed unless they do open beta with 40 servers.  It is nothing against blizzard or their game at all, but just the logistics of 200-400,000 people trying to log on for some free gaming.  Heck, lineage2 has a tiny niche following and you can't log into that to save your life.

Just calm down and count the game as vapor until you can get your paws on it.  No reasons letting others work you into a froth on generalizations that could be said by any fanboi of any current game.

But.... GIMME GIMME NOW NOW NOW NOW, MUST HAVE! SHINY NEW NEW NOW GIMME!!1!1@!2!11!

WOW WILL ROK. GIMME!!121!


err.. hurmph. Sorry. My inner fanboi is fighting like mad to come out.

I shall try my best to stay jaded. We all know what happens when you actually start to get excited, it bends you over, and each race gets a turn ass raping you, with no lube.

I wanted to show my character, it's awesome.
When he fights with a 2H axe he seems Wolverine, he bends forward and crouches to the ground, holding the axe with both hands behind him.

But there are also bad things about the game. For example the chat is painful. There's no way to filter anything, nor modify the font size. You have loot, exp, chats, global trade, guild, server messages etc... all in the same window, and it shows just 8 lines. It's harder than in FFXI to follow a discussion and there's no way to extend it. You cannot even use the history, there's no way to resend something.

P.S. Just noticed that when you are idle for a bit the character sit down on its own after a yawn. :)

The biggest turn-off for me is the style of character graphics.  The catrooney/animae-ish avatars were and are a pretty big turn off to me.  I had written off the game for that reason until people started telling me about it.  The gnome avatars are particularly egregious, but at least I won't be playing with them as an Orc.  Of course, this is all extremely subjective.

I will take a game with distasteful shiney if the mechanics are good.

Having seen 2 extremely fucked up high-res korean videos of WoW, I would also say the biggest turn off - besides the userbase - is the graphics. I mean they are REALLY fugly. It was ok in Warcraft III, but for an MMO - I think fucking not. I'll take the City of Heroes graphics over those any day. Nay, I'll take the goddamned SW:G graphics over those. Ick.

Oh, and HRose won't be turning me into a fanboi, I mean seriously, all the shaking fake boobies in south miami wouldn't get me excited over an MMORPG from Blizzard. It just won't happen. While everything in the game seems polished, happy, and smooth, it still doesn't account for the fact Blizzard sucks at balancing, sucks at stopping cheaters, sucks at crowd control, and now sucks at graphics.

It's too bad I'm an MMO Whore, or I'd write this one off forever.

First a precisation. The screenshots, even the best ones don't give even an idea about how the game "feels". It really makes an amazing effect when you notice the difference and I've seen many, many screenshots.

Then I would put the style between Joe Madrueira and Tim Burton's "Nightmare before Christmas". It's not a childish style, it's absolutely inspired and epical. Surely nothing, not even a pixel, feels generic.

It was inspired when Warcraft 3 came out. Now it's old and busted.

As much as I want to be exicited about WOW, I am sadly forced to remain skeptical.  You see, the majority of these favorable reviews neglect to mention the one fatal flaw of the MMOG in question - the players.

Quite a few people have already belabored that point within this and other threads so I won't retread familiar ground.  However, having played D2 a great deal and suffered under the tyranny of many an asshat in UO (IPY and pre-UO:R) and in SB (War server), I can safely say that players can make or break your game just as easily your mechanics.

I mean, imagine it, the very floodgates of the blizzard forums opened, wide and true to unleash a veritable deluge of idiocy upon server after server.  This is the kind of stuff Steven Hawkings has nightmares about.  Universal implosions of idiocy to the third degree.

Put that all in perspective and then try to salvage your optomism.

Trust me, it's rather difficult.

Well, look on the bright side, once you get to the PVP, you will have the chance to kill at least 50% of them.

The players can have an adverse effect, but really, I doubt you will see many more idiots then any other mmog, I mean, what, maybe WOW will have 95% idiots instead of 92.5%?

Still, you find who you enjoy, and strive to kill every one else. Thats what I do.

I took your vehement opposition to any sort of player-driven conflict to mean you were in the leveltastic Raids-R-Us camp since the exclusion PvP or AvH would leave nothing else for the end/metagame except 1) Leveling until the soft cap meant you would never hit the next level and 2) Raids. As big a fan of 30-minute content as I am, there does need to be something more to do than an endless series of short quests - besides f*ggy raids. Because when you boil the fat from the meat there is no way even a “hardcore” casual player who’s normal gameplay session lasts a few hours every night is going to have the connections to participate in one.

No, it is exactly the same as every other fucking dwarf in the game with a 'different' head.  I put different in quotes because others will have the same head as you as well.  It is like saying "my barbie doll looks awesome" when it is exactly the same as all the others.

The combat he already described as a mix of ffxi and daoc.  That hardly exites me.  DAOC combat SUCKED IMO.  I have talked to others who explained the combat.  It is standard autoattack with weapon speeds and hotkeys to press from time to tome.  Whoop.  (yeah there are stances and such that add SOMETHING at least)  I am just so f'ing tired of autoattack.  There has got to be something better damnit.  (this goes for eq2 as well which sounds like ffxi combat)

The game may be good, but not by anything you have said.  You can't describe indescribable things, so don't bother trying.  I am going to CoH next, should keep me busy till EQ2 or WoW come out.  I realize I am critisizing you for praising WoW while I am praising CoH, but CoH is a week away from their preorder beta where anyone can spend $5 to get a preorder box and try the game on the 7th.  It releases on the 25th of april (less than a month) for preorders.  WoW has no release date and a very limited beta at this point with no set plans for an open or preorder beta yet.  Or I should say limited in proportion to the amount trying to get in.

I would like to hear about the game, but please shut off the damn fanboi-ism.  It is fucking grating and annoying, and in the end makes me dislike the game more.

See, this is more about your misconception of PvEers than it is about me.  ;)  As for my "vehement opposition to any sort of player-driven conflict," thats just not true.  I just don't want to get bravely ganked by a 55 Mage while my Druid gathers herbs.  Not wanting non-consensual PvP does not mean that I want "faggy raids," whatever that means.  

I want engaging quest content to experience with friends and new acquaintances.  A good proportion of those quests have to be able to be done quickly, because I'm an adult who rarely has 4-hour blocks of time to spend gaming.

Hrose, thank you for all this information. I was getting more and more excited about this game just reading about the customization. That is one of the main things I care about in a MMOG... looks. I want there to be some sort of difference between character looks.

The rest of the info.... man, so good.

The look of this game IS quite good, screenshots don't do it justice. When walking around the world, the combination of the ambience and overall look makes it is completly engrossing.

Love it!!

A friend of mine who was also skeptical about the graphics style told me that they look much better when moving.  I can't imagine ever taking those gnomes seriously even if they moved like Baryshnikov, but hopefully he is right.  I need someone I know in D.C. to get in so I can go watch over their shoulder.  I can't believe I just wrote that.

I, too, am worried about the horde of assmonkey diablo types who may play.  Especially because this is a game that is easy to solo in, so there is not much in the way of community standards enforcement.  Mandatory grouping, enormously long treadmills and organized raiding may suck ass, but they have proven to be a better (if accidental) mechanism to enforce player justice than any other.  Anyway, hopefully the monthly fee will keep them out, and most of the rest will voluntarily segregate themselves in the PvP server ghettos.

For now I don't know. They seem like in the usual mmorpg. The point is that I played these three days absolutely alone, like if it was WoW RPG. I explore the world and do things, go questing on my own. Sometimes I could go to a mine and meet other players there, cooperating to go inside (since these spots are defended). I've met friendly peoples offering equipment and so on.

The game doesn't ask you to be an ass. You don't need to fight for spots or to fill indispensable roles in a party. The game simply doesn't need you to be a problem for someone else. You play in awe, along with everyone else.

The way you play this game is completely different from any other mmorpg to date. It still based on the same ideas as always but you finish to live in here as an "experience", not as a treadmill to reach a point. It is a lot more near to a single player rpg with a multiplayer addition than a mmorpg.

Players around you just add to your enjoyment, making the game more alive and friendly.

Welcome to the primary reason early AO lagged like hell when you were in a populated area. That there is going to suck when the flood gates open, even if it looks cool now.