So what's the big deal?

[Xilren's Twin]

Design is nice. A single original idea is nice too though.

I saw all WoW had to offer before it was even in Beta. It doesn't have a single novel element to it. I can just imagine myself playing it rather than actually playing it and save myself some time and money.

If it makes you feel any better, that was my impression as well.  I avoided the beta and resisted both WoW and EQ2 thinking neither would be different enough from EQ/DAoC to warrant playing.  I think largely I was waiting for the other shoe to drop once the games went live, which with mmorpg seems like a safe bet. EQ2 seems to have lived down to my low expectations, but...the worst thing I heard about WoW was the sever downtime, and that seems to have stabilizied.  If people are mad b/c they want to play and can't for technical reasons, thats a far cry different than people being mad they dont want to play the game as designed. 

I even stayed out of the forums here for lack of interest, but since Guild Wars is still a few months out I was looking for something new to play since CoH is something I play sporadically.  I had no real intentions on what, but I noticed the stores i frequent couldn't keep WoW in stock while eq2 was camping the shelf space like it would give them J-boots.  Took me a week and 4 trips just to find a box.  As unscientific as that is, I took that as a postive sign that if the game is good enough for the "timmy's" of the world, they couldn't have screwed it up too badly.

So i used a gift cert and figured if i get a month out of it that was ok.  I've honestly been plesantly surprised.  I am also trying very hard not to spoil the game for myself (i.e. places like thottbot and the like).  It's just easy to pickup and fun to play if you like EQ-style mmorpgs.  It will be just as easy to put down if I decide to play something else; it's a game not a life committment.

So yeah, originality would be nice and all, but alone it makes for short lived success if you can't execute well.  As long as it's fun, i'll pay.

Xilren 

[Jayce]

Innovation without being good is just stapling wings on a dog.

 Sigged!

But as to the rest of it, I think that some of you put too much faith in endlessly innovating.  It's just like movies, TV, or any other art form: you'll have 99% old tried and true formula, sometimes more and sometimes less well executed. That remaining 1% will be impossible to categorize or predict.

[Threash]

I'm not going to relist all the very good reasons people have already posted, instead i'll give you some examples.  Last night in Blackrock Depths our priest decided to start drinking, the more he drank the lower level the mobs conned.  Thats a very, very small detail but its fucking genius and every moment is filled with details like that.  No matter what you are doing they manage to sneak in little tidbits of fun, be it pop culture references (i was shooting ghosts with "egan's blaster" in stratholme last night) to quests that draw you in and even make you care about the NPCs involved (like the darrowshire series which starts as just finding a little girl who happens to be a ghost, then finding her favorite toy, and ends with an epic fight reliving the battle of darrowshire in which you try to change history and keep her father alive quantum leap style).  I know whatever im doing ill have fun, leveling is not work, tradeskills are not work, raiding is not work, they are FUN.

[Morfiend]

I'm not going to relist all the very good reasons people have already posted, instead i'll give you some examples.  Last night in Blackrock Depths our priest decided to start drinking, the more he drank the lower level the mobs conned.  Thats a very, very small detail but its fucking genius and every moment is filled with details like that.  No matter what you are doing they manage to sneak in little tidbits of fun, be it pop culture references (i was shooting ghosts with "egan's blaster" in stratholme last night) to quests that draw you in and even make you care about the NPCs involved (like the darrowshire series which starts as just finding a little girl who happens to be a ghost, then finding her favorite toy, and ends with an epic fight reliving the battle of darrowshire in which you try to change history and keep her father alive quantum leap style).  I know whatever im doing ill have fun, leveling is not work, tradeskills are not work, raiding is not work, they are FUN.

I was doing the darrowshire questline last night. As a little side note. Every time you pick up a quest item of that questline, you get haunter for 10 minutes. What this means is periodiclly a ghost will run up next to you and say some thing like "Please, you have to end our suffering" or some such. No real effect, but It makes you think about the quest and the story behind it a bit more.

More please.

[jpark]

The comments above are very good.  And exhaustive.

So I will offer something "soft".  WoW is charming.  A work of "art" in the broadest sense of the word.  We can talk about specific features in WoW but in the end this misses the point:  the overall experience of this game is more than its component parts, and like art, if you're not responding to it - it's just not for you.  You're reaction is just as valid as anyone else's, even if it is completely the opposite, but this cannot necessarily be reconcialiated in all cases by doing a feature review.

[Threash]

I'm not going to relist all the very good reasons people have already posted, instead i'll give you some examples.  Last night in Blackrock Depths our priest decided to start drinking, the more he drank the lower level the mobs conned.  Thats a very, very small detail but its fucking genius and every moment is filled with details like that.  No matter what you are doing they manage to sneak in little tidbits of fun, be it pop culture references (i was shooting ghosts with "egan's blaster" in stratholme last night) to quests that draw you in and even make you care about the NPCs involved (like the darrowshire series which starts as just finding a little girl who happens to be a ghost, then finding her favorite toy, and ends with an epic fight reliving the battle of darrowshire in which you try to change history and keep her father alive quantum leap style).  I know whatever im doing ill have fun, leveling is not work, tradeskills are not work, raiding is not work, they are FUN.

I was doing the darrowshire questline last night. As a little side note. Every time you pick up a quest item of that questline, you get haunter for 10 minutes. What this means is periodiclly a ghost will run up next to you and say some thing like "Please, you have to end our suffering" or some such. No real effect, but It makes you think about the quest and the story behind it a bit more.

More please.

I had forgotten all about the ghosts, it was freaky having a few at a time following me around and cheering me on.  At one point, i believe during the villains of darrowshire part of the quest there are good and evil ghosts fighting around you as you try to recover an item, and you can't affect them in anyway.  Tonight while running blackrock spire during the Rend Blackhand event which consists of fighting wave after wave of orcs + dragon kin while a boss looks on and shouts instructions at them like "Concentrate your attacks on their healer!" and when that didn't work he yelled at the next wave "FOOLS KILL THE ONE IN THE DRESS!!!".  I've been laughing about it for like an hour.

[El Gallo]

WoW is successful because it is better than Everquest, while the other games that sought to take over from Everquest were simply worse than Everquest was.

The charm/character/atomsphere point is an important part of EQ's success.  Those lovingly handcrafted zones sucked you in right away.  Even those who love to excoriate EQ, like my buddy Sky, will say "damn, some of EQ's zones were just great".
 No other game seems to have realized this was important.  SWG, for example, oozes "we don't give jack or shit about character, art, charm, or atmosphere" from every pore of it's soulless, bloodless, modular, randomly-generated husk of a body.

WoW is the best thing to ever happen to the genre.  It's time to grow up.  Nice ideas with shitty execution get you a pat on the head from your teacher, but they get you fired in real life.  Developers used to make games to get props on mud-dev, and fuck those disgusting peons who buy the product.  No more.  It's time act like grown-ups now, motherbitches.  You work for me, and I expect results.

[jpark]

WoW is the best thing to ever happen to the genre.  It's time to grow up.  Nice ideas with shitty execution get you a pat on the head from your teacher, but they get you fired in real life.  Developers used to make games to get props on mud-dev, and fuck those disgusting peons who buy the product.  No more.  It's time act like grown-ups now, motherbitches.  You work for me, and I expect results.

Agreed.

Now this touches on a more sophisticated point that cuts across industries.  You have a gold standard and you want to beat it (e.g. EQ).  You can take two routes:  try and shoot the lights out with something completely different or tweak the existing game for better performance.  The latter approach has greatly reduced risk through increased ability to execute.  Ideally, you would tweak the game and offer a very few select features that might depart from the gold standard.  In WoW this is likely its pvp system, which is a big leap from EQ (as the standard) while all the other features are just tweaked (overall fit is important too).

In my industry we go through this all the time (investments).  Want to beat the S&P 500 index?  You can have a totally different product portfolio (win big or lose big), or you can tweak the existing one by placing a few bets not in the S&P500 (low risk moderate gain).  Take that as an analogy not a derail.  Carefullly pick what you want to innovate:  tweak most features and offer very few new ones.  This gets back to risk management in any undertaking - whether it be a game, clinical study or investment portfolio. Carefully pick what you want to innovate, since to manage your risk the remaining 95% has to be a tweak.

[Paelos]

I'm still amazed that we are all fellating an MMOG so hard. Well except schild and Windup.

[schild]

I'm still amazed that we are all fellating an MMOG so hard. Well except schild and Windup.

Say it with me: Online Gaming is the future of gaming. It's not like some sort of large scale nostradamus outlook. It's merely the obvious. Anything that sets back the progression of online gaming into new and unknown territories pisses me off.

Though, I think Infected for the PSP will make enough waves that some interesting shit might happen.

[Train Wreck]

Once upon a time, The Sims Online and Star Wars Galaxies were looked upon as The Future.  Even if you expected them to suck, you figured they'd make assloads of money.  Well the former tanked miserably and the latter is chugging along in mediocrity, while World of Warcraft conquers the universe.  My question is, why?  The gameplay doesn't seem vastly different than that of the competition, and Warcraft can't be THAT much a better gaming brand for name recognition than Star Wars or Sims.  So why is this game kicking so much financial ass?

One of its greatest assets is that WoW is EXCEPTIONALLY friendly to the casual player.  When a character is rested, they gain 200% xp on kills.  The more hours they are logged out, the longer the bonus lasts.  The bonus lasts until a certain amount of xp is accumulated, so it basically has the effect of reducing the amount of xp needed to level.  But better than that is that leveling just doesn't take very long, even without the bonus.

This means that new character abilities are always just around the corner, unlike games like EQ, which typically required weeks of hard work (at least to casual players) before they could get their new set of spells.  In WoW, new skills are learned on an almost daily basis, usually with at least three becoming available every other level.  It's not unlike Diablo II, actually.  (Compare that to EQ, which usually made you wait *at least* 4 levels to have anything more to look forward to than extra hp and mana, and usually took well over a week, if not a month.)

Also, Death is almost completely painless.  In fact, the only "punishment" is having to run for 2 - 5 minutes to your corpse.  You don't even have to loot yourself and re-equip.  There is no equipment decay (unless you chose to res at the graveyard for whatever reason), and even better, no xp penalty.  Yes, in games like EQ, all yor hard work could actually result in you having less xp after a playing session than when you started, especially since corpse recovery often left you vulnerable to getting killed several times.

You also get to experience what makes your class unique much sooner than other MORPGs, which tended to give the character classes their big shiny near the end of the threadmill, whereas the WoW character classes are different from the get-go.  And it's not just a case of different spells being called different things but essentially being the same spell.  Even though Warriors and Rogues are both melee characters, they are played in very different ways.

I'm also a big fan of the game's auction system.  What better way to make sure items sell at a realistic market value than seeing how much players are willing to spend?  It's dynamic and very responsive to market trends.  As a newbie, I put a stack of 20 copper bars at a starting bidding price of 5sp, and by the time the 8 hours were up, it had climbed to 40sp, which is what copper was going for at the time.  Maybe it was an unintended asset to the economy, but other online games I've played suffer from players not charging enough for items, because its "understood", "going rate", didn't always reflect market realities.

[Threash]

Actually there is a 10% equipment decay on death, 25% if you use the spirit healer, no penalty at all for pvp deaths though.

[Train Wreck]

I hadn't noticed.  I figured the damage was included in the original ass-whoopin.

[WayAbvPar]

I hadn't noticed.  I figured the damage was included in the original ass-whoopin.

You obviously haven't had a sickening chain of deaths in an Elite instance yet! 

[Jayce]

Say it with me: Online Gaming is the future of gaming. It's not like some sort of large scale nostradamus outlook. It's merely the obvious. Anything that sets back the progression of online gaming into new and unknown territories pisses me off.

Yes, but think how different Zork or Wizardry were compared to, say, Daggerfall or KOTOR.  Refined, yes, but at the core, the gameplay has been similar through the history of adventure games.  Once in awhile something hithero unheard of comes along and creates a new genre (Populous), but more often the innovative ones have their uniqueness to rely on, and little else (Fable).

So in sum, say it with me: innovation isn't everything.

[Righ]

Unfortunately, it proves to investors that there's still money left in EQ-Style games and the VCs are going to look at it and say, wow, MUST INVEST IN MMORPGS.

Essentially, through no fault of their own and by creating the most successful purely North American MMORPG - they've stagnated the genre by about 3-5 years.

If the VCs are not interested in MMOGs, the genre is finished. So kudos to Blizzard. They've hardly stagnated the genre. Games that are not fun to play for one reason or another have stagnated the genre. SW:G is more at fault for holding back virtual worlds by being a chore to play, and Shadowbane is more at fault for ruining the market for PvP by being too buggy to play and for the cost of loss being too high. When somebody makes a fun game that is better than the current model, you can have a point. Until then, you're just part of the bleating class.

[WindupAtheist]

I'm still amazed that we are all fellating an MMOG so hard. Well except schild and Windup.

I might go back, but keep my UO account open at the same time.  Then I can kill stuff and gawk at the shiny in WoW, and do other stuff in UO when that bores me.

[Signe]

I haven't gone down on WoW in weeks.  I'm fiddling with CoH for a bit.

[HaemishM]

I haven't gone down on WoW in weeks.  I'm fiddling with CoH for a bit.

There's just something not right about that phrasing.

[Train Wreck]

You obviously haven't had a sickening chain of deaths in an Elite instance yet! 

I had two in the Dead Mines.  That was enough for me to say "Fuck it" and let the angel res me.

[MrHat]

I haven't gone down on WoW in weeks.  I'm fiddling with CoH for a bit.

There's just something not right about that phrasing.

MMOWhore?

[ajax34i]

Essentially, through no fault of their own and by creating the most successful purely North American MMORPG - they've stagnated the genre by about 3-5 years.

Innovation is not like Moore's Law: you can't guarantee that you'll have twice the innovation every three years or whatever.  The absence of WoW would not have guaranteed innovation, and thus you can't say they've stagnated the genre.  Personally, I think they're keeping the genre afloat (without them, it would have gone the way of the spaceflight sim like Freespace 2, dead), and thus they're allowing innovation to take place, if it can.

[RhyssaFireheart]

You obviously haven't had a sickening chain of deaths in an Elite instance yet! 

I had two in the Dead Mines.  That was enough for me to say "Fuck it" and let the angel res me.

Unless I"m being severely camped, or just cannot make it back to an instance entrance for some reason, I will never use the angel res.  All you have to do in an instance is hit the portal, then recall out from inside the instance itself.  All of the ones I've been in so far (not all of them admittedly) have clear drops, so this is the easiest way to avoid taking the bigger 25% hit on res.

And two deaths in an instance run are nothing in the scheme of things, unless you're trying to solo it.  I feel for healers, especially druids.  We were on a BRS run last night in a raid of 10 and the biggest casualty was the druid 3x.

As for the topic at hand, pretty much everything positive that's been said so far.  I like not being able to play for almost a week due to RL and logging in to almost a full bar of blue xp to look forward to.  This past Friday I felt like I was grinding my way through level 52 because I just could not seem to complete any Un'Goro quests, then I had help with a few, got some other things done and BAM!  Suddenly I'm only 4 bars from level 54 and I'm still in the blue.  Talking to a few guildies, it's like they've gotten to 60 almost by accident, where you suddenly realize you only have 6 more bars to max and you didn't even realize it.  That is goodness all around.  I might actually max out a char for the first time in the 6 games (AC1, DAoC, AC2, SB, L2 and WoW) I've played.

[Train Wreck]

You obviously haven't had a sickening chain of deaths in an Elite instance yet! 

I had two in the Dead Mines.  That was enough for me to say "Fuck it" and let the angel res me.

Unless I"m being severely camped, or just cannot make it back to an instance entrance for some reason, I will never use the angel res.

I was being severely camped by a named char and about 8 others, as if I were dropping loot for eBay.  They way I died in the first place is that they all popped at once.  I knew I wasn't going to make it out without numerous more deaths.  Even then, it only costed me about 10s to repair my equipment, and I believe it was well worth the saved time.

[Paelos]

Death really doesn't matter either way until level 35. At that point the penalties get a little sharper. By the time I was 45, rezzing by angel was not an option with my pocketbook.

[Morfiend]

Death really doesn't matter either way until level 35. At that point the penalties get a little sharper. By the time I was 45, rezzing by angel was not an option with my pocketbook.

When ALL my gear is 100% broken, it costs me at lvl 60, 4 gold to repair. Thats not bad. I never worry about rezzing at the angel. I dont like to, cause its kind of like admitting I cant handle, but I will do it if it saves me a huge run or some thing.

[Jayce]

When ALL my gear is 100% broken, it costs me at lvl 60, 4 gold to repair. Thats not bad. I never worry about rezzing at the angel. I dont like to, cause its kind of like admitting I cant handle, but I will do it if it saves me a huge run or some thing.

I'm the same way.  With these games, I've learned that I'm a casual and should take all the time advantages I can get.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I was being severely camped by a named char and about 8 others, as if I were dropping loot for eBay.  They way I died in the first place is that they all popped at once.  I knew I wasn't going to make it out without numerous more deaths.  Even then, it only costed me about 10s to repair my equipment, and I believe it was well worth the saved time.

Well, were you inside the instance or in the outside portion of Deadmines?  I was working under the assumption that you were in the instance itself, in which case you will automatically res once you reach the portal and be back at the beginning of the instance.  But if you were in the outer portions of Deadmines, then I can see why you might have problems ressing in the middle of named mobs.  Still, need to res at the limit of your range and just start running in cases like that.

[WindupAtheist]

So in summation, it somehow took the industry half a decade to realize:

Everquest - catass = win   :-D

[Ironwood]

So in summation, it somehow took the industry half a decade to realize:

Everquest - catass = win   :-D

Well, I suppose.  Speaking as someone who purchased yesterday and spent a couple of hours on it last night with the bruv and wife, I have only one thing to say :

It's a fun online game.

I haven't seen one of those since UO.

[atricks]

   What are some of World of Warcraft's weak areas?   It's not a perfect game, but a lot of the weak areas seem to be technical.

 Server stability is a big one, I gave up playing last night because the login kept hanging on authentication.  Mind you, 3 months post release, things like this still happen regularly.  Serverside lag still happens quite a bit.
 
   The interface, the default one, is rather lacking.  They did give the ability to modify it through code, but that brings up other problems and I'm curious how many support issues they have are directly related to people not knowing how to use addons like cosmos properly.   If the interface wasn't so limited to begin with it would be less an issue.

    The patching system is a step backward, they are treating it like patching a single player game and it doesn't work.  Preloading larger content before a patch release, using more of their own bandwidth, and creating a checksum system similar to other games would go a long way in helping that part.   The torrent based system they have for larger patches is just piss poor.

   Level spread is still a problem, if your friend outlevels you by any significant margin, forget playing with them.
 
   The official forums for wow are down an awful lot (which may be a good thing, if you read it too much you can feel the intelligence being sucked from your mind)
 
    There is no long term plans on the website beyond the next content patch, and so far I haven't seen a real direction in where they want to take the game, so this is a big wildcard.

    Am I missing anything?   The game overall still is great, but it's nowhere near perfect.

[Dren]

Level spread is still a problem, if your friend outlevels you by any significant margin, forget playing with them.

I've never seen this problem myself.  I hunt with a friend of mine that is consistently 8 levels higher than me.  I guess it all comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice in exp for having fun with friends.  If you are all about the powergaming and constantly having to see numbers go up on your stats, exp, damage, etc then, yes, you can't group with high level disparity. 

I do not see this being fixed anytime soon by anyone (even outside of WoW) in an item-centric game.  Yes CoH has side-kicking, but it doesn't have items (just buffs) and can scale accodingly.  I suppose if WoW scaled item drops so that lower level chars being side-kicked up don't get uber drops automatically that might work, but half the fun of taking on high level content is to get the lottery jackpot, so that would come out flat I would think.

Most of the time I hunt with my friend to experience new areas and fill out my maps.  I can heal him and that goes a long way to helping him, and I typically get some experience to reward me somewhat.

I just do not consider this a weakness with WoW.

I agree with your other points though.

[Xilren's Twin]

   What are some of World of Warcraft's weak areas?   It's not a perfect game, but a lot of the weak areas seem to be technical.
...
The game overall still is great, but it's nowhere near perfect.

I also hear the "end game" it rather lifeless but that doesn't bother me; never been much of a raid game advocate (too damn time consuming).  And it's hard to predict it's longevity as since it is fairly painless to level up, whats to keep people around for years as opposed to months.

Agree overall on the technical issue, but I think it's much easier to work out those than it is to patch fun into your game design (i'm looking at you HAM)  Now there are limits of course (sb.exe sb.exe sb.exe), but on the whole, the fun game part gives you some slack to work out the other issues.  It's not a lifetime pass though, if your sever is consitently hosed you'll eventually either move or quit.

I dont think anyone would say it's perfect, but at the same time I don't think any veteran mmorpgs are deluded enought to expect perfection.  But what it is, is a a great distance away from the other end of the spectrum, "the buggy, unfun, pull-your-hair crap filled mess" one most have come to expect.

It's fun so lots of people play it.  Can't get much simpler than that.

Xilren

[Sky]

It's fun. I've learned to not question things beyond that.

And as others have noted, it's not very tedious nor punitive. The combination of the two is plenty for me.

[blindy]

WoW does some things well, and some things it doesn't do that well, like any other game.  Since enough other posters have covered what it does do well, I'll cover what I didn't like. I personally found leveling to 60 to be something of a grind.  At some points it was better than others.  There were spots that I ran out of quests that I could solo and just grinded on mobs, for instance in the high 40s and again in the high 50s (in the high 50s there were actually a bunch of quests in plaguelands I could have solo'd, which I finally realized at 59, but the quest npcs were spread all over the two zones, not in a nice town where you could go and get all of them, and I don't like exploring that much).   I'm fully aware that this is at least partially a result of me pushing myself to hit the cap, and if I had played more casually I might not have experienced this, but I didn't want to play casually because of pvp considerations (and I'm already "time-starved", limiting me to about 3 hours a night and binges on weekends).

Quest based leveling is an improvement over the camp and kill method, in my opinion, but it's still not what I would call fun.  There's a few select quests in WoW that I enjoyed, but 99% of them are the same old kill x/collect Y quests.  There's nothing particulary fun about killing gnolls in Feralas to complete a quest when I've already killed gnolls in Mulgore to complete a quest.  And I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate collect quests where you need 5 items, but the mobs are uncommon, and the drop % is low.  The witch doctor quest in Stonetalon is a good example of this, because you need 30 eyes from elks, and 5 items each from slimes and panthers. Elks are plentiful and always drop 2 eyes, but the cats and slimes are less plentiful and drop nothing the majority of the time.  It probably evened out with me having to kill about 15 of each, but the panthers and slimes annoyed me, and the elks didn't.  For that matter, I completely prefer kill quests over collect quests; kill quests are group friendly, collect quests are not.  But that's a seperate issue.

Other people may enjoy the diablo-esque loot system where some boss mobs have a 1% drop chance of a super good (i.e. purple) item, or any world mob has a .0000001% chance of droping a blue/purple item, but I personally don't.  If there's an item I want I'd like to be able to work towards it in a reasonable fashion, not kill the same crap over and over and hope I get lucky. 

And then there's the pvp system, which is the reason I'm playing WoW over CoH (which I enjoy more on a purely pve basis).  Battlegrounds may or may not be an improvement (and I hope they are), but right now it's just blah.  There's no point to it.  People don't want to suffer penalties when they die to a higher level player, but right now with no penalties and no rewards there's no bite and there's no gain, it's just there.  Control of leveling areas is impossible, because no matter how often you kill someone they can be back again in 2 minutes rushing you during a pull. That could be somewhat forgiven if the actual fighting was fun.  It can be at times, but often for me it's fairly lackluster. Not to mention that I get a ton of system lag in large scale pvp battles (though I'll have to see how yesterday's patch effected things) making it impossible to effectively melee for me (as a warrior).