i dont think anyone has the attentionspan to decode this jumbled mess, whoever did this is such a turboautist he had no interest giving the meme some structure and form, the only way you can appreciate this is if you are also a turbo autist
Jeff Kaplan's influence in shaping the future of MMOs is massively overstated in this silly meme
it's true though that Blizzard didn't do themselves any favor hiring a creative writer with exactly 0% success rate as quest designer
>Jeff Kaplan's influence in shaping the future of MMOs is massively overstated in this silly meme
The point it's making is correct, though. Raiding Black folk who demand whole game revolves around raiding made WoW, when literally no one you talk to about their favourite mmo moments will tell you >ah yes I loved spending 10 hours fighting this boss!
people will tell you about their pvp fights, or friends they made, or something weird happening in the world, which was all sacrificed by wow (and wow clones) to try and push people into endgame raiding, because it was a game designed by poopsock raiders and every game that tried to copy it thought that's what people wanted, when it was always a very loud and obnoxious minority of homosexuals that 90% of actual mmo players (socials, explorers, pvpers, roleplayers) hate.
You can see it in the success of final fantasy 14 which doubled down on casual audience and succeeded in what was deemed an impossible marker. Impossible because people keep trying to make the worst aspects of WoW work instead of making a cool highly interactive and/or immersive, and/or comfy world for players to frick around in.
It did, though. Locking any sorts of meaningful power progression behind raiding gear meant you were raiding or you just accepted you will never be competitive.
You were just young, stupid and didn't know it yet.
There's a reason most MMOs with any sort of significant following today largely abolished this idea.
6 months ago
Anonymous
If you're playing WoW to compete, you aren't playing casually. You don't need to raid to have fun with WoW and it caters heavily to this crowd. If you want to be competitive, you are not part of that casual crowd and should not pretend to be. If you are jealous of people with raid gear that is your problem.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Not that anon, but how is WoW fun without raiding? All I see people do in the game is create a new character, level up as fast as possible so they can reach the endgame sooner, raid to get the best gear and either drop the game until new "content" releases, do the same with a enw character or play pvp but only when having the best gear possible. For all the hours in the game I've spent, I've never seen anyone interacting with other players outside of roleplaying servers.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>Not that anon, but how is WoW fun without raiding?
Explore, kill shit outside, group up for instances, follow questlines for their own sake, develop tradeskills and engage in incidental PvP. There are plenty of rewards for playing this way. This is how the game was played at release. That's a big part of why it was so insanely successful. There were MMO vets from other games like Everquest that understood and (more-or-less) correctly predicted what the raid meta would be like and played that way from day one, but they were the minority. The game was not actually designed for them and the first expansion was not released until 3 years later.
And three years is a long fricking time to play a game. If if the original joy of the game is gone after three years but you can't stop grinding for new gear because you're an addict, that's a you issue. Or worse, you never got to experience the fun of the original game because you went in with a brain-sick metagaming mindset from the outset, that's still not the fault of the game itself.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>The game was not actually designed for them
To clarify, the game was not designed EXCLUSIVELY for them. The fact that the high-end raid content existed and that's how you got the best gear does not affect the enjoyment of the low level game UNLESS you are a seething try-hard who desperately wants the best gear and the highest status gold star achievement without having to invest anything or be good at the game.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>Not that anon, but how is WoW fun without raiding? All I see people do in the game is create a new character, level up as fast as possible so they can reach the endgame sooner, raid to get the best gear and either drop the game until new "content" releases, do the same with a enw character or play pvp but only when having the best gear possible. For all the hours in the game I've spent, I've never seen anyone interacting with other players outside of roleplaying servers.
which version of wow are you talking about? retail has been that way already since the original WOTLK, including the entire 2019 classic release, but vanilla was exactly as the above anon described
the 2019 classic release was a shitshow that looked like vanilla but the experience had little resemblance with the original, which made it even worse than retail because it wasn't designed to be played like that
there are many reasons why it's almost impossible to replicate the original wow experience, but Blizzard did nothing to mitigate the effects of releasing a solved game that's been played by autists nonstop for 15 years
looking back, 2019 classic was a blatant cashgrab, especially since they had 3 whole fricking years to plan it out better, which led to completely devaluing the product and people forgetting how the game was really played and loved
6 months ago
Anonymous
Nta but for once in the last 10 years, how is literally any of that Blizz's fault? The fact that people don't play MMOs like they used to is not because of anything Blizz themselves did, and if you change vanilla then it's not vanilla anymore. You can't fix the problem with Classic unless you have a fricking time machine.
There's a reason people say, "Vanilla didn't change, you did".
6 months ago
Anonymous
>Blizz's fault
Somewhat unrelated to your argument (sorry), but this reminded me I do blame Blizzard for not cracking down on third party forums that got bigger than the official forums (MMO champ, subreddits, etc) and at least TRYING to keep the out-of-game community on battle.net. I remember that realm forums just up and died around Cata and the sense of community-per-server dissolved overnight.
Before classic was even LIVE there were zillions of dingalings trying to snag the "official" [realm name] subreddit/discord and watching it was really cringe.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>Blizz's fault
Somewhat unrelated to your argument (sorry), but this reminded me I do blame Blizzard for not cracking down on third party forums that got bigger than the official forums (MMO champ, subreddits, etc) and at least TRYING to keep the out-of-game community on battle.net. I remember that realm forums just up and died around Cata and the sense of community-per-server dissolved overnight.
Before classic was even LIVE there were zillions of dingalings trying to snag the "official" [realm name] subreddit/discord and watching it was really cringe.
you can't unlearn and unsolve the game or delete all the information floating around the internet but there were many other things Blizzard could do to make it resemble the original experience more closely
1. police the servers with human GMs to avoid the botfest they immediately became on launch. hell, i would've fricking done it for free
2. disable all the addons that automate and trivialize leveling and grinding
3. disallow multiboxing
4. implement changes that prevent spellcleaving and meleecleaving (they did this but in SoM, way too late)
5. disable world buffs, at least inside raids
6. improve itemization (they did it half-heartedly in SoM and totally fricked up by including PvP gear at launch)
7. fix memespecs and shake up the metas
and tons of shit without turning the game into retail
and if they were serious about it, they would've follow the OSRS road and continue developing the game horizontally and never open outlands, northrend, chinaland or whatever else
instead, they saw the opportunity to make a quick buck with the inadvertent support of all those screaming idiot autists who wanted #nochanges and completely missed the point
why the frick would you want a great game to remain stale and frozen in time instead of wanting its development to continue?
6 months ago
Anonymous
So basically you're saying, have blizz like the kind of overly controlling jannies everyone here hates for the sake of the game's purity. The only thing I agree on is better bot policing because bots aren't even players, they shouldn't be there.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>have blizz like the kind of overly controlling jannies everyone here hates for the sake of the game's purity
It's pretty much the only situation I would willingly submit to ironfisted jannies. An unofficial community gathering point (leddit, discord) is subject to rule by sperglords rather than people who have to remain transparent in their actions/policies to stay employed. I will always choose the devil I know.
6 months ago
Anonymous
So basically you're saying, have blizz like the kind of overly controlling jannies everyone here hates for the sake of the game's purity. The only thing I agree on is better bot policing because bots aren't even players, they shouldn't be there.
there's always the chance you might get a limp wristed power hungry spaz as a GM but i don't see any other solution to the bot problem
botters are bound to defeat any automated tracking system sooner than later and they don't even care if their bots are eventually banned as long as they break even
the Classic shitfest proved that it's impossible to prevent bot infestations without human intervention
only a human GM can spot and ban bots fast enough to make them unprofitable but Blizzard decided it's cheaper to shit on their own product by keeping a skeleton crew than offer quality services
6 months ago
Anonymous
No the reality is, Blizz doesn't care about bots since at the end of the day, a bot is paying a subscription too, and banning them just makes them pay another 15 bucks for a new one.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Very legit post. They were fricking up long before they started stumping for certain political faction.
Not to mention gutting crafting and actual RPG builds and stats, of which track they were on still during TBC because they were far more influenced by Diablo 2 at that time.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>3. disallow multiboxing
Agree on most points except this one.
Fine to put some kind of threshold to prevent blatantly cancerous behaviors that hurt others but if somebody wants to chill and run two sessions simultaneously that should be fine.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>how is WoW fun without raiding?
There are several questlines in WoW that are really fun to play through, be it due to gameplay of those quests and/or the writing and voice acting. The Death Knight starter zone where you are evil and working for the Lich King and slaughter families in their homes as they scream and then your redemption at Light's Hope Chapel. The Crusader Bridenbrad questline in WotLK felt heavy story wise. The invasion of Gilneas in Cata from with the multiple POVs (worgen starting zone as Alliance then Silverpine Forest as Horde) was good. Stonetalon Mountains questline in Cata with general Krom'gar was good. Wandering Isle was good. Lots of good questlines in MoP. WoD's levelling storyline was excellent. The Legion class order hall storylines were generally fun. Etc.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>slaughter families in their homes as they scream and then your redemption at Light's Hope Chapel
you are not killing them at their homes, it was a few run away civileans or workers, peasants on farms outside. And the light hope chapel part sucked. Why was the showrd ashbringer purried instantly, how did some guy named tirion that made you kill grind for hours in classic to "prove yourself" or whetever that butthole had in quest text >but he wrecked the shit outta that guy
that was stupid powerhomosexualry in full display. OP giant guy you convert/return to the "good" crusaders from the scarlet crusade gets one shot by a mage and then that mage gets oneshot by tirion. Well I guess that hundred/s of hours requied to reach that make the sunk cost fallacy sink in.
Only thing I kind of enjoyed was the blackrock depts class and cooking quests, except when they were complete grindfests, also it was funny how thrall wanting to rescue the dwarven princess was completely forgetten about by allience. That was like 2% of my total time in wow classic and this is without talking about the bugs and bad things happening during them.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Power progression for raids, and for vanilla wow each new raid saw less and less players complete it. The meat of vanilla wow was quests, dungeons, and pvp.
The endgame content focus didn't truly kick off until it's first expansion, which set the precedent for wow ever since.
Typing this out I realize the similarities between mmos and rts, they both went all in on competitive gameplay and are now gasping like dead fish.
Took me 20 seconds.Zoomers are fricking moronic and you should have a nice day.
Yeah the problem isn't that it's a jumbled mess the problem is that it's dripping with jealousy and intense seething butthurt. EQ, FFXI, and WoW all had enough content to keep casual players occupied for years. More than most single-player games. To make an image like that you had to be obsessed with raiding guilds that rejected you.
>rush through the new content in a few days and complain online about not having anything to do in the game
I'm sure this Tigole guy is a massive c**t, but he's not the reason we're stuck with a massive ammount of players doing that with every single game in existence. Each new generation of players has a shorter attention spam and expect more and faster rewards with less and less effort. This shit goes beyond MMO's. just look at the ADHD fest that is the Super Mario flick.
WoW was too dominant and created a sustainable market model that clogged the pipeline of 1. Iterative development, 2. Player/world turnover
If we started from zero, as a group, exploring a new world every year or two, we would have a greater sense of community and belonging on a game-by-game basis. New mechanics and methods of interaction would thrive as fresh titles came into view every year. Vertical and horizontal progression would intermix as communities waxed and waned and moved to the next game. Innovation in world design would mean an interesting new journey every time. Instead, stagnation poisoned the waters of this genre as WoW maintained (and continues to maintain) a tolerable level of success with minimal change. The genre and its players are trapped in a twilight of near-death, unable to rot in the earth and provide nutrients to the seed fresh ideas, worlds, or communities.
Even if wow were to die today, the sustaining model would continue.
>2. Player/world turnover >If we started from zero, as a group, exploring a new world every year or two
This is/was never going to happen. Like so many MMORPG idealists, the very first thing you do is engage in wishful thinking about how large populations of people can behave. And on top of that you imagine a world of friendly cooperative competition between companies producing MMOs that are perfectly happy to lose their hard-won players to a competitor after a year. You haven't really considered how hard requirements of the genre lead to constraints in gameplay mechanics. >greater sense of community and belonging on a game-by-game basis
Wishful thinking aside, it's nigh-impossible to recreate the "sense of community" that classic MMOs had because any modern MMO is going to be filled entirely with "MMO fans."
Classic MMOs attracted a diverse playerbase. A wide variety of players tried them out-- players that today would instead be playing one of the myriad of other game genres that did not exist back in 1995-2005 (or maybe even not playing games at all and just socializing on discord/twitch/facebook/instagram/tiktok or whatever other online platform that did not exist when classic MMOs dominated the market).
>This is/was never going to happen. Like so many MMORPG idealists, the very first thing you do is engage in wishful thinking about how large populations of people can behave. And on top of that you imagine a world of friendly cooperative competition between companies producing MMOs that are perfectly happy to lose their hard-won players to a competitor after a year. You haven't really considered how hard requirements of the genre lead to constraints in gameplay mechanics.
You just repeated the exact same thing I said. I didn't post a call to action. I described how wow indefinitely stagnated the genre by collecting all the money and players and putting them in a box. The flow of players will never be the same because the money that goes with them needs to be trapped in another company's box, even after escaping from wow. Thus answering the OP question.
>You just repeated the exact same thing I said.
No, because I didn't say anything about WoW. WoW is 100% totally incidental when it comes to the doomed nature of MMORPGs.
>And on top of that you imagine a world of friendly cooperative competition between companies producing MMOs that are perfectly happy to lose their hard-won players to a competitor after a year. You haven't really considered how hard requirements of the genre lead to constraints in gameplay mechanics.
This is a good point, no one wants to "live in" MMOs anymore and GaaS like Monhun filled this niche for me a bit.
The only thing separating the two genres is sense of community vs. random lobbies.
IMO the only way to combat that, since wow essentially went to random lobbies is unique content and dynamics per server. That means AI and procedural stuff which would create the persistent changes people wanted since vanilla and have been faked through things like WoW phasing forever.
Builder games like Minecraft are an interesting contrast here because that is literally all they offer is permanence, the gameplay sucks, the menus are jank, combat is worse than any elder scrolls ever was etc. Valheim edges more toward being an RPG but it's still too niche and shallow.
>Builder games like Minecraft are an interesting contrast here because that is literally all they offer is permanence
Minecraft-like games offer creativity. This is huge and something that many game devs and most fans don't understand (unless they grew up playing Minecraft and even then they may not be able to articulate it).
And you can have creativity without permanence. I could imagine, for example, an EQ/WoW style MMO that designed its gameplay around encouraging camps (rather than discouraging it in favor of dungeon crawls). The classic pattern in Everquest was to dungeon-crawl to the desired loot drop, "break" the camp by splitting up the spawns, and then just sitting on the spot and pulling as many respawns into your slaughter zone as possible.
Imagine a game where you dungeon-crawled to a spot and then actually dug in, building some fortifications that the dungeon residents would subsequently attack in repeated waves. Then when you left, the fort would gradually decay and revert to the original topography until another group came in and started building.
Granted this is a half-assed idea I came up with there are a lot of problems to solve and details to flesh out. But it's a "road not taken" and therefore has potential I think. The road MMOs actually took was to discourage "camping" in favor of instanced dungeon crawls (which led to groupfinders and lobby-style gameplay and all that)
I signed up for Ashes alpha after watching the caravan video haven't even bothered in a long time.
>camps
Yeah I did that stuff a bit in EQ on my Iksar necromancer but then had a life and career and shit, lost a hot ex over it first unfortunately. I have long held that procedurally generated enemy camps that grow by themselves to invade player run towns would be the way to build an mmo. I had these thoughts long before procedural was even a term and neural networking was more in vogue. AoC seems to be doing this kind of stuff.
They'll likely fall into the overbloat and underreach finances of every other MMO to try this and implode in tears like usual but they really are checking a lot of my personal boxes off.
>no one wants to "live in" MMOs anymore
This is exactly it. A MMO is nothing without its rpgays and people who are using it as a avatar+chat program. I really miss nights in the 00s when I'd be having "dinner" with people while I ate at my computer and typed in multiple chats about all kinds of stuff. I'd honestly argue that people in the 00s who early adopted to the idea of "my friends live in my computer" had a healthier social life than those who did not. When I read about the adult loneliness epidemic I simply can't relate because I'm still talking to most of the dorks I met nearly 20 years ago online.
Now the genre is just a magnet for antisocial spergs and normies who think roleplaying is weird.
back in the day, there were limited choices to pursue the social aspect in front of a screen, so lots of normies logged into wow
today there are countless apps that offer this function without the need to engage the complex mechanisms of an mmo
the golden age of mmos has come and gone and there's no going back, they will forevermore be populated by dysfunctional dregs and autists
I love roleplaying but I could never connect with people who live on discord and while I know memespeak I don't really enjoy living it all the time nor being disgusting since it's unimaginative, repetitive internet speak shit. Social media is either boring people that take pictures of their food and try to one up each other on their fake lifestyle for internet points, leftists trying to push their insane e-religion, or e-prostitutes.
I'm a genx dork that bonded with my college buddies over shit like road trips to anime conventions and weekly manga/vhs/bideogaem hauls when you had to leave your dirt farms and buy them IRL.
Having a career and chasing a couple of terrible women to other states strangled both my hometown boy outlook and any long term friend prospects as we all had our own lives so I've been the proverbial island for a long fricking time.
Actually having a decent time in New World rn because the pop is small and the game is underrated since expansion fixed a lot of release issues apparently..I ignored it as usual mmo trash on release. I think Amazon will keep pouring money into it for better or worse at least. Combat is like ESO but if ESO were instead good. Notably has no endgame raids but endgame open world pvp instead really. Everything is 5 man and the raid interface only exists for those pvp mode and some open world boss type stuff.
I get older, /fitter/ and more wealthy for no goddamn reason now beyond backstopping my family's problems and give less and less frick about other people though.
There was experimentation before WoW, back when revenues were relatively lower and devs had more leeway to be creative.
Then WoW happened. 12 millions players paying $210+ per year to play the game ($15 monthly sub and a box expansion every other year). And that's not even getting into merchandising. WoW was the pie that every company in gaming wanted in on, and they thought that the answer was to make WoW clones, so the only big budget MMOs that got greenlit were WoW clones. Experimentation only happened in small games that didn't get enough funding or marketing to make it in that oversaturated environment.
>2. Player/world turnover >If we started from zero, as a group, exploring a new world every year or two
This is/was never going to happen. Like so many MMORPG idealists, the very first thing you do is engage in wishful thinking about how large populations of people can behave. And on top of that you imagine a world of friendly cooperative competition between companies producing MMOs that are perfectly happy to lose their hard-won players to a competitor after a year. You haven't really considered how hard requirements of the genre lead to constraints in gameplay mechanics. >greater sense of community and belonging on a game-by-game basis
Wishful thinking aside, it's nigh-impossible to recreate the "sense of community" that classic MMOs had because any modern MMO is going to be filled entirely with "MMO fans."
Classic MMOs attracted a diverse playerbase. A wide variety of players tried them out-- players that today would instead be playing one of the myriad of other game genres that did not exist back in 1995-2005 (or maybe even not playing games at all and just socializing on discord/twitch/facebook/instagram/tiktok or whatever other online platform that did not exist when classic MMOs dominated the market).
SWG should have dominated the market but Sony had no idea what it was sitting on
WoW was the perfect intersection between a hardcore autism game and a casual game. It also just controlled so smoothly compared to it's contemporaries which all felt like janky dogshit whereas to this day WoW feels incredibly smooth. WoW also had what turned out to be a very timeless easy on the eyes art style.
I wonder how would mmo scene be like if there was no WoW, and EQ2 did not became wow level popular.
Looking back 2000-2005 was golden age of mmos due to many different games competing with one another. Post 2005 it was just wow and games trying to clone wow. I miss shadowbane, asherons call, swg, anarchy online..the only one that survived that butchering was eve
Not any different.
The biggest cancer to the genre is free to play cash shop games which did not come from WoW.
FFXI would have been the most successful I think. Who knows what FFXIV would have looked like.
Guild Wars might have been a little more successful, hard to say how much it was influenced by WoW though.
EQ1 had already blown it and was declining well before WoW released.
EQ2 had mediocre game design and awful, cringe marketing and was never going to be top dog.
SWG was always a failure to capitalize on the Star Wars brand, this was known or suspected before WoW unequivocally proved the market was much bigger than anyone had imagined.
Most other MMOs in this era were EQ-derivatives anyway, slightly different flavors of the same basic ideas.
PvP is never very good in MMOs.
Online multiplayer matured enormously in the late 2000s, after the big wave of post-Everquest MMOs. MMOs had been way ahead of the curve in the early 2000s, but by the 2010s the rest of the industry had caught up. You had games like Dark Souls with clever invasion mechanics, you had FGC coalescing around Street Fighter IV, you had MOBAs like League of Legends, you had multiplayer Minecraft servers, and so on.
If anything, the genre probably would have died off sooner had it not been for WoW keeping it alive.
It went f2p after Defiance flopped. Trion had their fingers in too many cookie jars. Reminder that Defiance has a sci-fi tv series tie-in. Both the game and show flopped. Trion even tried to make a Defiance 2, instead of saving Rift, which only existed to milk cows, by selling raid gear and churning out new raids. Plat inflation to sell ReX, and nonstop cash shop updates. Then they tried selling new souls and a new class that made the other four classes obsolete.
Before f2p, an /argument/ could be made; it was better, or at least as good as WoW. However, the players playing WoW at the time had no reason to leave, and after being invested in the game for what, five years to a decade at that point? Why would they? Why would they go to any other MMO? The only reason they tried FF14 was because Shadowlands was the absolute nadir of Warcraft.
Automated systems ruined the game, like dungeon finder or whatever.
I miss having to go into towns and chatting with people around your level to go do things with you.
I'm sad that it now tells you exactly where to go on the map for every quest. It feels like doing busywork for a piece of software in stead of adventuring and paying attention to the world. My 2 cents.
That's a two sided coin, because it's great for immersion and MMOs are about communication and cooperation, but the flipside is that most people in there are insufferable morons and making a party manually if you don't have a guild or irl friends to play with you makes it an insane chore, so that prepping for the dungeon can take up a few very boring hours
Yeah I agree. I think the high was the sense of exploration and adventure. The world itself felt tough & scary which made exploration challenging and very rewarding. Now everything feels like a fricking iPhone game.
There was experimentation before WoW, back when revenues were relatively lower and devs had more leeway to be creative.
Then WoW happened. 12 millions players paying $210+ per year to play the game ($15 monthly sub and a box expansion every other year). And that's not even getting into merchandising. WoW was the pie that every company in gaming wanted in on, and they thought that the answer was to make WoW clones, so the only big budget MMOs that got greenlit were WoW clones. Experimentation only happened in small games that didn't get enough funding or marketing to make it in that oversaturated environment.
The real answer is that it's a dead-end genre with inherent instability and intractable fundamental problems.
Early MMOs thrived on early-internet, pre-facebook optimism and wonder that no longer exists.
I've been disappointed several times before to where I ignored the last 20 mmos completely but Ashes of Creation looks fun from what little I've seen of alpha >action-y but with cooldowns i guess >doesn't look bloated with 30 button dps strings >graphics are nice but not overly shooting for the maximum detail stars much like wow was in 1.0 >traditional classes, looks like trinity to me but with a job system i heard, no dumb korean translation names but cleric wizard etc >procedural events spawning >some fancy stuff with ai maybe to grow enemy camps or whatever
If I had, not a dream list per se, but a minimally acceptable mmo list to sustain the genre with a few advancements, that would cover the list.
god damnit, WoW as an MMORPG is dead to me, especially the MMO part, they killed everything that made it social
but seeing shit like this always makes me just want to quest through all the zones
I always hated the players who wanted a single-player WoW, and if I think about it I still do, but it feels like that's the only way to actually enjoy this game now
I probably won't resub, trying to subsist on custom wacraft 3 campaigns instead but goddam
>they killed everything that made it social
They didn't kill everything that made it social, times have changed. Back in '06 youtube was just starting out, you didn't have websites dedicated to min-maxing and optimizing the shit out of the game.
Back then there was a reason to socialize. Blizzard didn't kill WoW, the players did.
Ok anons
How would you fix this "wiki/YT/instant min-max guide" problem that plagues games and its communities, like Wow or other multiplayer or even singleplayer games? >randomization >patches with fake patch notes >fake wikis founded by studio themselves >constantly changing gear/abilities values (on weekly or even daily basis) >terrorist attacks on real world infrastructure
Thats all I can come up with.
>How would you fix this "wiki/YT/instant min-max guide" problem that plagues games and its communities
You can't, its a problem totally outside of game design and more the result of our current society at large >You will never experience again the joy and wonders of exploring an expansive magical world filled with mystery and adventure with both friends and strangers you met along the way
>How would you fix this "wiki/YT/instant min-max guide" problem that plagues games and its communities, like Wow or other multiplayer or even singleplayer games?
You can't. The people playing MMOs aren't teenagers with unlimited free time anymore. They're working adults with jobs and families and have limited free time. Progressing in an MMO takes a long time so naturally the players are going to want to maximize how much they accomplish in any single play session. Adults are also more recluse and have a harder time making friends than kids. They're not going to play around just for fun. If an adult makes a "friend" with another person in a game, it's a transactional, mercenary partnership. They rarely really care about each other. They view each other as a means to an end. Ie, networking with good tanks so you can get into groups and progress.
the heart of MMO socialization was forcing people to group to level. having to sit there for hours in the same spot and pull then recover mana did two things. firstly it made it the norm to play with random strangers since the time investment meant that it was really hard to coordinate premade groups unless you wanted to only pay a few hours a day. secondly downtime made you chat with these random people.
you lock people in a room and you get society. wow didn't have this, you solo and the only grouping you do is raiding where you don't have time to just chat idly for hours a day with strangers. the interaction you do have is much more forced to be on the game itself.
the most modern pve MMO that did this right I'm aware of was ff11. it was just the normal way to do things pre wow, I remember doing it in the 90s in the first mmos I played before uo even came out. they was at least an 8 year period where that was how mmos worked before WoW came along
You didn't play vanilla wow at release.
But more importantly, you can't lock people in a room for their own good in a free market.
People put up with the bullshit in Everquest because there was nothing better. The lure of the online virtual world overcame the hardships. After the 2000s, the world was different and no one would subject themselves to the harsh conditions of Everquest simply for the opportunity to socialize online.
This is true. I played MUDs and pseudo MMOs like Legends of Kesmai and then UO before EQ released and none of them required grouping to the extent that EQ did. I was used to being able to play mostly solo and playing with others at my discretion. Because I had already been playing online games for years, interacting with random strangers from around the world wasn't a novelty for me. I fricking hated EQ because of its forced grouping dynamic and insane amount of downtime. All I could think was, "why is this game wasting so much of my time? why do so many people seem to love it?" I dropped that shit pretty quick. I enjoyed vanilla WoW much more. Blizzard hit a sweet spot between being able to progress on your own, but presenting challenges along the way that required grouping if you wanted to do them.
>you lock people in a room and you get society.
You're right and that's why people also remember high school (somewhat generally) more fondly.
Computers in EQ era could run: EQ, without other shit, and your phone all competing for social attention.
So it is not possible to "lock people in a virtual room" anymore even in VR.
There's no solution to this societal issue of fractal society that will come from video games. Video games are part of the problem.
You could recreate a very advanced EQ style game with all modern amenities yet keep the core idea of your ass is sitting in a camp while the bard and enchanter regen you and slowly turn death spawn into xp turnstyle and everyone will tab out to do better stuff.
It might be better to make an mmo that tries to match like minded people somehow to encourage the friends aspect first before trying to break it with gameplay, almost like tinder without roasties and paypig farming scammers governing it for video games but people aren't really ready for that yet and pretend digital relationships have some more years left in them before the whole thing burns down.
Custom campaigns and bnet custom maps were the peak of gaming. The bnet maps also spawned several genres. The most fun I've ever had online was playing wc3 custom games. >footman frenzy >ring wars >wotj >BA >Darkdeeds/werewolf >sheep tag(?)
There's more I'm forgetting but those are the ones I remember most. End of an era when bliz killed wc3 to replace it with cancer.
they game was built around soloing to the level cap of course that's how you play it. any partying from the early days was from people used to other mmos that did not catch on yet. the wow formula is to solo via quest chaining to the cap then raid and level salts. that is essentially what wow invented and what makes a wow clone
>they game was built around soloing to the level cap of course that's how you play it.
you're describing retail, vanilla wow was markedly different
sure you could solo to 60, but the rewards were inferior to duo or trio grouping for outdoor elite quests, which were themselves inferior to 5-man grouping for instances
vanilla wow encouraged grouping especially in pvp servers which gave a huge edge over solo players
nowadays there are tons of guides on how to streamline and optimize the shit out of solo leveling routes but that's just 20 years of experience playing the game to the point where players know it better than the devs themselves
WoW was the perfect intersection between a hardcore autism game and a casual game. It also just controlled so smoothly compared to it's contemporaries which all felt like janky dogshit whereas to this day WoW feels incredibly smooth. WoW also had what turned out to be a very timeless easy on the eyes art style.
wow looked just fine and still does, and the art direction was on point unilke every other garbage mmo that's been published over the years, are you blind or plain moronic?
you're in the wrong board animehomosexual
>Western "DnD" idea of fantasy
Jacking off to le ebic neep on sam'o'rye and shitting on Western culture and mythology won't make your dog-eater crush frick you
WoW's combat is dogshit but the setting at least isn't afraid to have guns and wacky mad science alongside knights and orcs.
How the frick is that fundamentally different from every JRPG that ever had airships, robots/golems and fricking gunblades? The director having a wiener small enough to fit in your defective mouth?
Except several did and FPBP stands here. The majority of MMOs added something after WoW - either better mechanics, better gameplay, better customisation whatever. Then they surround their good things with outdated dogshit.
literally give me an mmo with the theme park scale of Warcraft, The community aspects of FF, The Action Combat of Terra, the RvR of Warhammer, the personal stories of Star Wars and the exploration puzzles of GW2, and the potential/ creativity elements of Wildstar and I will buy a lifetime subscription.
There are people still playing. Once you reach the city (note that if you choose to start in Prophecies, you don't reach the city until many hours in, whereas in Factions and Nightfall you reach Kaineng and Istan much more quickly) you can find other players and can ask for an invite to an active guild and ask for help if you get stuck on certain missions.
I actually played WoW for the first time in 2023, WotLK classic. I really do feel like the only reason this was considered good was because it was a product of its time.
Social shit with the boys nowadays is Valorant or Deep Rock Galactic coupled with gay discords.
MMORPGs, a la WoW, no longer have a reason to exist.
>Social shit with the boys nowadays is Valorant or Deep Rock Galactic coupled with gay discords. >MMORPGs, a la WoW, no longer have a reason to exist.
Pretty much. Also you are no longer 13 with infinite time after school so games like league of legends / deep rock / valorant / valheim, even shit like counter strike / overwatch are a lot more feasible to enjoy in terms of requiring much less time investment to actually have fun with the games
The open world aspect had since been done much better by the entire crafting/survival genre, or even single player games like assassins creed
The social aspect for most people had been replaced by social networks like facebook / twitter / instagram
MMOs just stagnated and never evolved, the same as strategy games who's playerbase had slowly drifted into more specialized genres (city builders / starcraft / mobas)
I’m surprised til this day that mmos are so stuck on combat. It’s the singular purpose of every mmo. I can see it being a big part of games but they really need to evolve. Like you mentioned survival and base building. I didn’t play a ton of black desert but it sounds like they had some job systems that allowed role play that didn’t involve combat. I’m kind of amazed no mmo has figured out a way to harness both user generated content, like what Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all exist on, or figure out any other mechanics for their game other than pvp or the typical combat. Priority number one should be adding alternative ways to get lost in a world. Hunting, gambling, crafting, commerce, something. I have no desire to ever play wow because I’m not 12 and have no reason to chase gear.
>I really do feel like the only reason this was considered good was because it was a product of its time.
You are correct that it was a product of its time, but it was a GOOD product of its time. The MMORPG genre was doomed for the reasons you mention but dismissing the good qualities WoW launched with is low-IQ.
Basically the last chance for the genre is the upcoming MMO set in the League of Legends world. >Riot has infinite money. >Belongs to China, so absolutely doesn't give a frick about political correctness, or pandering to coomers. >One of the most popular and recognizable IP in the world, so guaranteed a huge audience. >Can afford to hire any and all talent they want, along with an army of Chinese programmers.
If they frick it up, it's basically over for the genre. Since there is no such thing as a "niche" MMO due to their costs, it'll completely fade away, with only a handful of titles remaining.
if Riot ever publishes its mmo, it's going to be the biggest flop in the history of gaming
Blizzard is bad enough at writing, but Riot is on another level of trash when it comes to storytelling
coupled with horrible indie-level graphics that literally make your eyes hurt, a Riot mmo will be nigh unplayable
Capitalism
Developing and consistently updating a decent game is expensive. Hosting servers is expensive. It's safer to make a skinner box than an interesting MMO.
Simple as
Consumer AND Developer racial & gender demographic shifts...
Dead super culture (soulless populace) META gaming because theyre spiritually sino-asiatic arriviste bugs.
Burgeoning internet = Lightning in a bottle
back in the day, there were limited choices to pursue the social aspect in front of a screen, so lots of normies logged into wow
today there are countless apps that offer this function without the need to engage the complex mechanisms of an mmo
the golden age of mmos has come and gone and there's no going back, they will forevermore be populated by dysfunctional dregs and autists
Classic Wow was 90% White. Only rich non-whites could afford a decent computer and a high speed internet connection, along with a subscription to play it.
I've always enjoyed EVE Online & Wurm Online, although I spend more time on Wurm these days given that the invested time/effort is the only means of improving your account unlike EVE which largely takes the opposite approach of idle skilling.
Both are massively driven by their communities rather than dev-produced events. Both require subscriptions and both offer something for free players to dip their feet in. Both are from the 2000s.
Well it casualized the genre when it honestly needed casualisation, like when old MMOs had harsh death penalties, you die and your character progress is gimped? The game is literally over, why would anyone that hasn't already still play? And things like character collision boxes enabling all sorts of griefing.. The rest of convenience updates to the game since TBC were pretty redundant though and really undermine the whole interactive world aspect making it not really meaningfully different from a single player RPG.
i started wow about a month ago today since i never had a chance as a kid and recently had a bunch of free time to kill. i started with the retail version and was so turned off i felt almost physically nauseous (i know i know) because of the amount of popups and info being presented that i didn't even understand. it was like those parodies of the call of duty screen.
anyways i tried the classic version and immediately fell in love. I could see why people would get into it back then. The music, atmosphere, everything was really captivating. I was lucky to get into a very social and helpful guild very early on and that created maybe a small piece of the social aspect that hooked so many people 20 years ago. Unfortunately as an anon above noted, most of the people playing these days are "mmo" people and as someone new to mmo's, i find them to be pretty repulsive individuals for the most part. most of them do NOT seem to enjoy the game at all. they are just addicts. anyone know what I mean here? like they play out of obligation not because they enjoy going through the content or world.
>have never even read the quest text
i was seeing this this guy in chat who vehemently argued that there was zero story at all in wow. not in the sense that it was bad therefore zero, but there literally was no such thing at all. It's just objectively not true. it's like he forgot there was dialogue. i play really slowly and read all the quest dialogue. A lot of it is pretty decent for what it is actually. and there are some pretty interesting zone stories that i found engaging enough as it gave me context.
i specifically really liked how in the barrens you uncover that the pigpeople were getting more powerful for some reason and encroaching more and more into horde lands, and then as you do the razorfen quests you discover that they are actually being helped by the burning legion to create undead superpigs. That was pretty neat. Every zone is like that and i really like that. It's not great by any means but it's good enough to keep me in the world.
I'm happy to see that new players can still reach back through time and touch the soul of the game. If you can stomach retail's rapidfire tutorial popups it also has zones with mostly self-contained stories, although half of them are inundated with memes that were outdated when the content was new. Of them I remember Feralas and Eastern Plaguelands being pretty cool. If you are a druid the one in Feralas actually has CONTINUITY with an aspect of your class story in Legion.
anyone excited for SoD tomorrow? As a new player I am super stoked to be able to play vanilla on a completely fresh server with new content and tweaks to the meta. Idc about the details of it. It just sounds fun. Can't wait to be able to do all the raids that i missed out on.
Oh also, for me it's the troll hunter. I think his animations are the most full of sovl.
Classic was shit because the community was a bunch of exploiting, abusing and cheating parse homosexuals from retail who played a 15 year old wonky mmo devoid of any difficulty like some chink esl shit and to create positive feedback about this autism they forced everyone else to play like them, destroyed the economy and everything in the open world from questing to world bosses and turned classic realms in 10/90% imbalanced shitholes where everything solely happens in dungeons because you would get griefed away outside instantly. Besides without buying gold and botting playing just normal was borderline Impossible.
These people havent left. And they will completely destroy whatever blizzard throws out for everyone who isnt a sweatlord. Besides the fact that som is nothing but a bad, streamlined copy of private servers.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>And they will completely destroy whatever blizzard throws out for everyone who isnt a sweatlord.
The real question is, why hasn't Blizz tried to just straight up make an ACTUAL sweatlord game like EVE? Just give them the game they want. The reason is because these supposed "sweatlords" don't want a game where there's actual consequences for fricking up, they would riot if something they spent weeks grinding for gets blown up in 20 seconds by a suicide ganker
6 months ago
Anonymous
it wasn't retail gays who did that, it was pserver dregs who had been playing the same essentially abandoned version of wow for 10+ years straight and had discovered every single way to cheese the game
those were the ones who screamed nonstop at the mere idea of the slightest change and ended up playing it in a completely different way to how it was originally played
imagine the moronicness of defending their autistic cheating and exploiting as "emergent gameplay"
let's see how many of them are going to last at 25 level cap in SoD before fricking off to whatever nochanges pserver is up now
6 months ago
Anonymous
I played blizzlike servers for a decade before classic came out.
3 vanilla 2 TBC 2 wotlk
Not one had a classic community and the parsing shitshow was brought from retail. I actually went back to pservers after classic like many others and guess what? No parsing, no speedruns, no resource mafias, no fury tanks, barely any bots, forbidden boosting, forbidden gdkp.
This kind of cancer community is an isolated phenomenon of Blizzards servers. Apparently nowadays healers on retail get kicked if they dont dps inbetween heals in random groups.
>And they will completely destroy whatever blizzard throws out for everyone who isnt a sweatlord.
The real question is, why hasn't Blizz tried to just straight up make an ACTUAL sweatlord game like EVE? Just give them the game they want. The reason is because these supposed "sweatlords" don't want a game where there's actual consequences for fricking up, they would riot if something they spent weeks grinding for gets blown up in 20 seconds by a suicide ganker
Its still wow sweatlords obviously. Casual as frick and more interested in abusing mechanics than in playing the game sweaty but normal. The amount of gold moved around in classic is Impossible without literal cheating. Boosting is only possible by abusing pathing etc.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>healers on retail
Healing on retail is a trust exercise I now refuse to do with pugs. I like that it's less braindead but the second I have to stop what I should be doing to hardcast a heal into some moron who took avoidable damage I stop having fun.
While encounters aren't tuned to include healer dps (like XIV is), in a """good""" group you should have the breathing room to DPS and because of that healers who just want to heal get bullied by spergs.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Thats exactly why I stopped healing in classic completely (after over a decade of even leveling as healer).
Its cancerous enough if its a good group to "use every gdc" like in some gay rhythm game but my experience was that 99% of players in casual groups are not good. Not even closely. They just lackluster copy the behavior of some homosexual streamer shit earning money with wow so they obviously treat it like work. Which for classic ended in me as a healer having to carry some spastic "furry prot" and his gang of moronic dps mongs who all are way below the item and skill requirement to pull things like this off but think since Asmongold or whatever these subhumans are called tanked with a 2h sword and leather it should be also possible for them in their green/blue quest garbage and without even knowing how to tank as long as they copied the specc from some guide.
This btw also being a pure retail problem. Not once in all the time I spend on private servers have I met people who were delusional like this.
6 months ago
Anonymous
which ones did you play at and at what level? I also played in a bunch of pservers and didn't see anything like that either because I never went past 50 in any of them
but furyprot came from pservers, there are still posts in dead pserver forums discussing exactly that
speedrunning was a thing in pservers, the turbo autists from APES and Progress and all those guilds didn't come from retail, they came from pservers
spellcleaving, speedleveling, exploiting worldbuffs, stacking warriors in raids, almost everything that was meta in Classic came straight from pservers
retail gays stayed in their lane in the beginning and jumped in Classic only when they saw how popular it turned out
all the other things you mentioned that made the game a shitfest was Blizzard exercising zero control over the servers
overpopulation brought bots, gold buying, resource camping and mafias, and sharding doesn't do shit when you let 20k+ toons in a world designed for 2-3k players max
now i play on Nyctermoon with bots for hire and ironically the experience has been the closest to the original vanilla i've ever had
6 months ago
Anonymous
>Typing this out I realize the similarities between mmos and rts, they both went all in on competitive gameplay and are now gasping like dead fish
Because competitive alwas means someone will take it too serious and those someones are 0,1% of the population but tend to force the complete playerbase into their habit of turning games into work or some olympic tier obssesive sports shit.
Mostly rather obscure and localized mini projects with <1000 players all Blizzlike.
More notably probably Atlantiss TBC, some Blizzlike Wotlk I forgot the name of which also did the 3.3.5 server move and died after Naxx. Always max level. Turtle actually for some years already but it got chinked hard and the people behind it are scamming fricks who overdid it and so its off the table now.
I mean yes, the scene obviously came from private servers and not vanilla but the thing is that they never did this competetitive "we frick your game up if you dont do our meta" shit. It was more like some crazy guyss who just did their thing because they got bored after decades of the same stuff and started playing around. The problem is that retailers took what they saw about boosting and speedrunning in some youtube videos because they completely forgot how to play a game without metagaming everything and with the goal of breaking it for everyone else to profit from that thanks to moronic retail culture, flooded the servers and fricked everything up. Speedrunners on Pservers never bothered me or my guild with their bullshit.
The scene of abusing the wonky engine came from private servers but the mindset of playing a piss easy mmo as competetitive e-sport and forcing everyone to pull along is definetly a retail thing.
Thats also where rampant third party cheating came into play because at some point everything is allowed if you just "win" the game and if you have to pay four accounts plus the gold and botting to get that edge you do so.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>he problem is that retailers took what they saw about boosting and speedrunning in some youtube videos because they completely forgot how to play a game without metagaming everything and with the goal of breaking it for everyone else to profit from that thanks to moronic retail culture, flooded the servers and fricked everything up. Speedrunners on Pservers never bothered me
Every single thing related to speedrunning and "e-sports" and streaming is a cancer and one you can't even blame devs for.
Basically we have a gigantic digital stinking shanty town of near homeless neets all dreaming of playing video games instead of a real job.
I watched one guy in an mmo trying to stream "died at a boss at level 30 come hang out" for hours on the most banal and mediocre shit, inside the game where people were doing more interesting stuff for themselves already.
This overlaps with neetdom and troonyism, shit if you're too boring to stream maybe some breasts will help out!
It's not just a wow problem you can find it in all MP games when you try to unwind after work and you get matched with some butthole jumping three stairs to cut a half second off this run time like it's his job. Because it is his (pathetic) job.
I'm playing it with some friends so it will probably be a week or so of fun before the magic leaves us.
Classic was shit because the community was a bunch of exploiting, abusing and cheating parse homosexuals from retail who played a 15 year old wonky mmo devoid of any difficulty like some chink esl shit and to create positive feedback about this autism they forced everyone else to play like them, destroyed the economy and everything in the open world from questing to world bosses and turned classic realms in 10/90% imbalanced shitholes where everything solely happens in dungeons because you would get griefed away outside instantly. Besides without buying gold and botting playing just normal was borderline Impossible.
These people havent left. And they will completely destroy whatever blizzard throws out for everyone who isnt a sweatlord. Besides the fact that som is nothing but a bad, streamlined copy of private servers.
is spot on about the state of the classic community.
your guy claiming there is zero story in WoW may have been wrong, but whatever is there is plain bad
still, the quality varies from placeholder quests hastily done to get you going about in the world, to rather well made quests like the chains in Darkshire
some writers were visibly better >in [insert area] you uncover that [insert mobs] were getting more powerful for some reason and encroaching more and more into [insert faction] lands
this template is used again and again everywhere in the game, no matter the race you play
the stories being generic and mundane actually a good thing since you can skip the details and insert yourself into the world more easily
what's really good about WoW is the timeless color palette, the great music, the smooth gameplay and the overall high production value
i have an unopened collectors edition of this game in my cellar, i got it through work where they sold the CEs for the normal price
i was completly into wow at the point and thought "ill play warhammer eventually" but never did, after that i hoped that maybe the OG CE would be worth some money but then the game died after what like 4 years lol
vanilla wow was a nice balance between qol and adventure
every patch and expansion ended up metagaming the player base itself and they never just focused on creating a world again
and every mmo focuses more on the metagame of being an mmo rather than their world as well
I made a Forsaken Warlock but it took two hours just to reach level 5 and finish Tirisfal questing since everything was being camped. Every skeleton, zombie, bat, wolf, spider, and scarlet crusader spawn. Even the crate spawns were being camped and the crates had a 5 minute respawn timer so that took a while. And that was Tirisfal, which was nothing compared to the number of players in Elwynn or Durotar or Mulgore. Can't imagine how bad Barrens questing would be since you would have everyone converging there in preparation for Ashenvale. It would be nice to get to the big PvP wars happening Ashenvale while everyone is still checking out SoD, but getting that point right now with so much competition would be tedious. Best bet for progressing right now would probably be to play late night or in the morning while everyone is asleep or at work.
>Be a faceless drone slaving for a fraction of gold. >for the eventual joy of wow endgame >as you hand all the credit and goods to assmoan anyway
Why not just move to china?
For real though there is so much better stuff to play out there.
Go make a better name for yourself in New World, or Remnant 2 is a blast right now.
I genuinely don't get the wow mindset anymore as a former wow player. >friends and social scene
It's all depressing boomer washouts or zoomers watching a third stream in the other window while giving money to assmoan for shoutouts or whatever so I don't see how people do it for this either.
Do you have a potato rig that limits your choices? I'm honestly asking you.
been playing since yesterday now and it's been a blast
the server is packed with players but you can finish quests and progress easily because of the dynamic respawn rates
there's new quirks for every class that are subject to change at any time which makes it almost as interesting as it was in og vanilla; tank shaman is now a thing
they should've done this shit many many years ago
they gave warrior some pvp utility, damage boosts, and made full prot more viable iirc (it was a bit dogshit in vanilla).
wouldn't know because I'm not playing one currently
even if they implement it they'll nerf it as soon as it appears to become too op
last night they nerfed hunters hard because they could tank dungeons with their dogs better than anyone, and didn't give a frick about everyone who cried murder
right now SoD feels like a PTR and it extra fun because it's knocking pserver meta homosexuals off balance
>classic
struck the perfect balance where the world feels dangerous and you can get around that by getting more levels or gear
the game is simplistic and intuitive, if you are a casual gamer its the perfect mmo
>retail
at this point you can split wow into two different games, retail is a fast paced roller coaster experience with minigame after minigame
its deep, complex and if you want to min/max you either have to treat it as a full time job (like the RWF/MDI guys do) or you have to read guides and look at logs and use 3rd party tools like simcraft
its the perfect mmo if you are a hardcore gamer
honestly struggle to graps how people play classic seriously with speedruning raids, grinding bis, maximizing world buffs and consumes, nor can i understand peope who play retail casually, who just fly around and do world quests and raid Normal 6 hours a week
blizzard, liken nintendo are one of the few aaa companies that care about stuff like having responsive games. most (if not all) other mmos have inputs that don't feel as good as wow. maybe wildstar was close.
>
Jews
Every single time
It would if that image wasn't pure delusional cope
>oyvey shut it down.
i dont think anyone has the attentionspan to decode this jumbled mess, whoever did this is such a turboautist he had no interest giving the meme some structure and form, the only way you can appreciate this is if you are also a turbo autist
Jeff Kaplan's influence in shaping the future of MMOs is massively overstated in this silly meme
it's true though that Blizzard didn't do themselves any favor hiring a creative writer with exactly 0% success rate as quest designer
>Jeff Kaplan's influence in shaping the future of MMOs is massively overstated in this silly meme
The point it's making is correct, though. Raiding Black folk who demand whole game revolves around raiding made WoW, when literally no one you talk to about their favourite mmo moments will tell you
>ah yes I loved spending 10 hours fighting this boss!
people will tell you about their pvp fights, or friends they made, or something weird happening in the world, which was all sacrificed by wow (and wow clones) to try and push people into endgame raiding, because it was a game designed by poopsock raiders and every game that tried to copy it thought that's what people wanted, when it was always a very loud and obnoxious minority of homosexuals that 90% of actual mmo players (socials, explorers, pvpers, roleplayers) hate.
You can see it in the success of final fantasy 14 which doubled down on casual audience and succeeded in what was deemed an impossible marker. Impossible because people keep trying to make the worst aspects of WoW work instead of making a cool highly interactive and/or immersive, and/or comfy world for players to frick around in.
WoW didn't revolve around raiding at release. People who think that are seething incompetents obsessed with players who are better than they are.
It did, though. Locking any sorts of meaningful power progression behind raiding gear meant you were raiding or you just accepted you will never be competitive.
You were just young, stupid and didn't know it yet.
There's a reason most MMOs with any sort of significant following today largely abolished this idea.
If you're playing WoW to compete, you aren't playing casually. You don't need to raid to have fun with WoW and it caters heavily to this crowd. If you want to be competitive, you are not part of that casual crowd and should not pretend to be. If you are jealous of people with raid gear that is your problem.
Not that anon, but how is WoW fun without raiding? All I see people do in the game is create a new character, level up as fast as possible so they can reach the endgame sooner, raid to get the best gear and either drop the game until new "content" releases, do the same with a enw character or play pvp but only when having the best gear possible. For all the hours in the game I've spent, I've never seen anyone interacting with other players outside of roleplaying servers.
>Not that anon, but how is WoW fun without raiding?
Explore, kill shit outside, group up for instances, follow questlines for their own sake, develop tradeskills and engage in incidental PvP. There are plenty of rewards for playing this way. This is how the game was played at release. That's a big part of why it was so insanely successful. There were MMO vets from other games like Everquest that understood and (more-or-less) correctly predicted what the raid meta would be like and played that way from day one, but they were the minority. The game was not actually designed for them and the first expansion was not released until 3 years later.
And three years is a long fricking time to play a game. If if the original joy of the game is gone after three years but you can't stop grinding for new gear because you're an addict, that's a you issue. Or worse, you never got to experience the fun of the original game because you went in with a brain-sick metagaming mindset from the outset, that's still not the fault of the game itself.
>The game was not actually designed for them
To clarify, the game was not designed EXCLUSIVELY for them. The fact that the high-end raid content existed and that's how you got the best gear does not affect the enjoyment of the low level game UNLESS you are a seething try-hard who desperately wants the best gear and the highest status gold star achievement without having to invest anything or be good at the game.
>Not that anon, but how is WoW fun without raiding? All I see people do in the game is create a new character, level up as fast as possible so they can reach the endgame sooner, raid to get the best gear and either drop the game until new "content" releases, do the same with a enw character or play pvp but only when having the best gear possible. For all the hours in the game I've spent, I've never seen anyone interacting with other players outside of roleplaying servers.
which version of wow are you talking about? retail has been that way already since the original WOTLK, including the entire 2019 classic release, but vanilla was exactly as the above anon described
the 2019 classic release was a shitshow that looked like vanilla but the experience had little resemblance with the original, which made it even worse than retail because it wasn't designed to be played like that
there are many reasons why it's almost impossible to replicate the original wow experience, but Blizzard did nothing to mitigate the effects of releasing a solved game that's been played by autists nonstop for 15 years
looking back, 2019 classic was a blatant cashgrab, especially since they had 3 whole fricking years to plan it out better, which led to completely devaluing the product and people forgetting how the game was really played and loved
Nta but for once in the last 10 years, how is literally any of that Blizz's fault? The fact that people don't play MMOs like they used to is not because of anything Blizz themselves did, and if you change vanilla then it's not vanilla anymore. You can't fix the problem with Classic unless you have a fricking time machine.
There's a reason people say, "Vanilla didn't change, you did".
>Blizz's fault
Somewhat unrelated to your argument (sorry), but this reminded me I do blame Blizzard for not cracking down on third party forums that got bigger than the official forums (MMO champ, subreddits, etc) and at least TRYING to keep the out-of-game community on battle.net. I remember that realm forums just up and died around Cata and the sense of community-per-server dissolved overnight.
Before classic was even LIVE there were zillions of dingalings trying to snag the "official" [realm name] subreddit/discord and watching it was really cringe.
you can't unlearn and unsolve the game or delete all the information floating around the internet but there were many other things Blizzard could do to make it resemble the original experience more closely
1. police the servers with human GMs to avoid the botfest they immediately became on launch. hell, i would've fricking done it for free
2. disable all the addons that automate and trivialize leveling and grinding
3. disallow multiboxing
4. implement changes that prevent spellcleaving and meleecleaving (they did this but in SoM, way too late)
5. disable world buffs, at least inside raids
6. improve itemization (they did it half-heartedly in SoM and totally fricked up by including PvP gear at launch)
7. fix memespecs and shake up the metas
and tons of shit without turning the game into retail
and if they were serious about it, they would've follow the OSRS road and continue developing the game horizontally and never open outlands, northrend, chinaland or whatever else
instead, they saw the opportunity to make a quick buck with the inadvertent support of all those screaming idiot autists who wanted #nochanges and completely missed the point
why the frick would you want a great game to remain stale and frozen in time instead of wanting its development to continue?
So basically you're saying, have blizz like the kind of overly controlling jannies everyone here hates for the sake of the game's purity. The only thing I agree on is better bot policing because bots aren't even players, they shouldn't be there.
>have blizz like the kind of overly controlling jannies everyone here hates for the sake of the game's purity
It's pretty much the only situation I would willingly submit to ironfisted jannies. An unofficial community gathering point (leddit, discord) is subject to rule by sperglords rather than people who have to remain transparent in their actions/policies to stay employed. I will always choose the devil I know.
there's always the chance you might get a limp wristed power hungry spaz as a GM but i don't see any other solution to the bot problem
botters are bound to defeat any automated tracking system sooner than later and they don't even care if their bots are eventually banned as long as they break even
the Classic shitfest proved that it's impossible to prevent bot infestations without human intervention
only a human GM can spot and ban bots fast enough to make them unprofitable but Blizzard decided it's cheaper to shit on their own product by keeping a skeleton crew than offer quality services
No the reality is, Blizz doesn't care about bots since at the end of the day, a bot is paying a subscription too, and banning them just makes them pay another 15 bucks for a new one.
Very legit post. They were fricking up long before they started stumping for certain political faction.
Not to mention gutting crafting and actual RPG builds and stats, of which track they were on still during TBC because they were far more influenced by Diablo 2 at that time.
>3. disallow multiboxing
Agree on most points except this one.
Fine to put some kind of threshold to prevent blatantly cancerous behaviors that hurt others but if somebody wants to chill and run two sessions simultaneously that should be fine.
>how is WoW fun without raiding?
There are several questlines in WoW that are really fun to play through, be it due to gameplay of those quests and/or the writing and voice acting. The Death Knight starter zone where you are evil and working for the Lich King and slaughter families in their homes as they scream and then your redemption at Light's Hope Chapel. The Crusader Bridenbrad questline in WotLK felt heavy story wise. The invasion of Gilneas in Cata from with the multiple POVs (worgen starting zone as Alliance then Silverpine Forest as Horde) was good. Stonetalon Mountains questline in Cata with general Krom'gar was good. Wandering Isle was good. Lots of good questlines in MoP. WoD's levelling storyline was excellent. The Legion class order hall storylines were generally fun. Etc.
>slaughter families in their homes as they scream and then your redemption at Light's Hope Chapel
you are not killing them at their homes, it was a few run away civileans or workers, peasants on farms outside. And the light hope chapel part sucked. Why was the showrd ashbringer purried instantly, how did some guy named tirion that made you kill grind for hours in classic to "prove yourself" or whetever that butthole had in quest text
>but he wrecked the shit outta that guy
that was stupid powerhomosexualry in full display. OP giant guy you convert/return to the "good" crusaders from the scarlet crusade gets one shot by a mage and then that mage gets oneshot by tirion. Well I guess that hundred/s of hours requied to reach that make the sunk cost fallacy sink in.
Only thing I kind of enjoyed was the blackrock depts class and cooking quests, except when they were complete grindfests, also it was funny how thrall wanting to rescue the dwarven princess was completely forgetten about by allience. That was like 2% of my total time in wow classic and this is without talking about the bugs and bad things happening during them.
Power progression for raids, and for vanilla wow each new raid saw less and less players complete it. The meat of vanilla wow was quests, dungeons, and pvp.
The endgame content focus didn't truly kick off until it's first expansion, which set the precedent for wow ever since.
Typing this out I realize the similarities between mmos and rts, they both went all in on competitive gameplay and are now gasping like dead fish.
>Jeff K's influence in shaping the future of MMOs is massively understated in this silly meme
Based and TOMORROWIND pilled.
Took me 20 seconds.Zoomers are fricking moronic and you should have a nice day.
Yeah the problem isn't that it's a jumbled mess the problem is that it's dripping with jealousy and intense seething butthurt. EQ, FFXI, and WoW all had enough content to keep casual players occupied for years. More than most single-player games. To make an image like that you had to be obsessed with raiding guilds that rejected you.
>rush through the new content in a few days and complain online about not having anything to do in the game
I'm sure this Tigole guy is a massive c**t, but he's not the reason we're stuck with a massive ammount of players doing that with every single game in existence. Each new generation of players has a shorter attention spam and expect more and faster rewards with less and less effort. This shit goes beyond MMO's. just look at the ADHD fest that is the Super Mario flick.
>just look at the ADHD fest that is the Super Mario flick.
That is literally a children's film its for babies
NTA but that's the point. Modern children's entertainment is sensory overload and it's probably damaging attention spans.
If you played a different MMO with your friends when you were young you would say that one was better.
that's bullshit
wow was the most popular mmo because it was the best for a number of years
now it's grindslop for trannies and furries
>wow was the most popular mmo because it was the best
And McDonald's is the best restaurant, right?
not being able to use analogies should disqualify you from anything but mindless hard labour
>"popular = good"
>NPC detected
WoW was grindslop for trannies and furries in 2004. That's why it was popular.
WoW was too dominant and created a sustainable market model that clogged the pipeline of 1. Iterative development, 2. Player/world turnover
If we started from zero, as a group, exploring a new world every year or two, we would have a greater sense of community and belonging on a game-by-game basis. New mechanics and methods of interaction would thrive as fresh titles came into view every year. Vertical and horizontal progression would intermix as communities waxed and waned and moved to the next game. Innovation in world design would mean an interesting new journey every time. Instead, stagnation poisoned the waters of this genre as WoW maintained (and continues to maintain) a tolerable level of success with minimal change. The genre and its players are trapped in a twilight of near-death, unable to rot in the earth and provide nutrients to the seed fresh ideas, worlds, or communities.
Even if wow were to die today, the sustaining model would continue.
>2. Player/world turnover
>If we started from zero, as a group, exploring a new world every year or two
This is/was never going to happen. Like so many MMORPG idealists, the very first thing you do is engage in wishful thinking about how large populations of people can behave. And on top of that you imagine a world of friendly cooperative competition between companies producing MMOs that are perfectly happy to lose their hard-won players to a competitor after a year. You haven't really considered how hard requirements of the genre lead to constraints in gameplay mechanics.
>greater sense of community and belonging on a game-by-game basis
Wishful thinking aside, it's nigh-impossible to recreate the "sense of community" that classic MMOs had because any modern MMO is going to be filled entirely with "MMO fans."
Classic MMOs attracted a diverse playerbase. A wide variety of players tried them out-- players that today would instead be playing one of the myriad of other game genres that did not exist back in 1995-2005 (or maybe even not playing games at all and just socializing on discord/twitch/facebook/instagram/tiktok or whatever other online platform that did not exist when classic MMOs dominated the market).
>This is/was never going to happen. Like so many MMORPG idealists, the very first thing you do is engage in wishful thinking about how large populations of people can behave. And on top of that you imagine a world of friendly cooperative competition between companies producing MMOs that are perfectly happy to lose their hard-won players to a competitor after a year. You haven't really considered how hard requirements of the genre lead to constraints in gameplay mechanics.
You just repeated the exact same thing I said. I didn't post a call to action. I described how wow indefinitely stagnated the genre by collecting all the money and players and putting them in a box. The flow of players will never be the same because the money that goes with them needs to be trapped in another company's box, even after escaping from wow. Thus answering the OP question.
>You just repeated the exact same thing I said.
No, because I didn't say anything about WoW. WoW is 100% totally incidental when it comes to the doomed nature of MMORPGs.
it isn't wow's fault
it's the failure of other studios to produce an equally good or better mmo than wow
May it serve as consolation that somewhere in the Platonian realm floats an MMORPG that's better than WoW
>And on top of that you imagine a world of friendly cooperative competition between companies producing MMOs that are perfectly happy to lose their hard-won players to a competitor after a year. You haven't really considered how hard requirements of the genre lead to constraints in gameplay mechanics.
This is a good point, no one wants to "live in" MMOs anymore and GaaS like Monhun filled this niche for me a bit.
The only thing separating the two genres is sense of community vs. random lobbies.
IMO the only way to combat that, since wow essentially went to random lobbies is unique content and dynamics per server. That means AI and procedural stuff which would create the persistent changes people wanted since vanilla and have been faked through things like WoW phasing forever.
Builder games like Minecraft are an interesting contrast here because that is literally all they offer is permanence, the gameplay sucks, the menus are jank, combat is worse than any elder scrolls ever was etc. Valheim edges more toward being an RPG but it's still too niche and shallow.
Monster Hunter is not a ~~*GaaS*~~. have a nice day, bandwagoning poserhomosexual.
Frick off I don't care about your gameboy fetish, boy. If World wasn't a gaas it sure looked enough like one to where I'll call it one anyway.
>Builder games like Minecraft are an interesting contrast here because that is literally all they offer is permanence
Minecraft-like games offer creativity. This is huge and something that many game devs and most fans don't understand (unless they grew up playing Minecraft and even then they may not be able to articulate it).
And you can have creativity without permanence. I could imagine, for example, an EQ/WoW style MMO that designed its gameplay around encouraging camps (rather than discouraging it in favor of dungeon crawls). The classic pattern in Everquest was to dungeon-crawl to the desired loot drop, "break" the camp by splitting up the spawns, and then just sitting on the spot and pulling as many respawns into your slaughter zone as possible.
Imagine a game where you dungeon-crawled to a spot and then actually dug in, building some fortifications that the dungeon residents would subsequently attack in repeated waves. Then when you left, the fort would gradually decay and revert to the original topography until another group came in and started building.
Granted this is a half-assed idea I came up with there are a lot of problems to solve and details to flesh out. But it's a "road not taken" and therefore has potential I think. The road MMOs actually took was to discourage "camping" in favor of instanced dungeon crawls (which led to groupfinders and lobby-style gameplay and all that)
I signed up for Ashes alpha after watching the caravan video haven't even bothered in a long time.
>camps
Yeah I did that stuff a bit in EQ on my Iksar necromancer but then had a life and career and shit, lost a hot ex over it first unfortunately. I have long held that procedurally generated enemy camps that grow by themselves to invade player run towns would be the way to build an mmo. I had these thoughts long before procedural was even a term and neural networking was more in vogue. AoC seems to be doing this kind of stuff.
They'll likely fall into the overbloat and underreach finances of every other MMO to try this and implode in tears like usual but they really are checking a lot of my personal boxes off.
I miss the Iksar
Best lore for a lizardman race ever imo
>no one wants to "live in" MMOs anymore
This is exactly it. A MMO is nothing without its rpgays and people who are using it as a avatar+chat program. I really miss nights in the 00s when I'd be having "dinner" with people while I ate at my computer and typed in multiple chats about all kinds of stuff. I'd honestly argue that people in the 00s who early adopted to the idea of "my friends live in my computer" had a healthier social life than those who did not. When I read about the adult loneliness epidemic I simply can't relate because I'm still talking to most of the dorks I met nearly 20 years ago online.
Now the genre is just a magnet for antisocial spergs and normies who think roleplaying is weird.
I know this is the truth but it still hurts.
I love roleplaying but I could never connect with people who live on discord and while I know memespeak I don't really enjoy living it all the time nor being disgusting since it's unimaginative, repetitive internet speak shit. Social media is either boring people that take pictures of their food and try to one up each other on their fake lifestyle for internet points, leftists trying to push their insane e-religion, or e-prostitutes.
I'm a genx dork that bonded with my college buddies over shit like road trips to anime conventions and weekly manga/vhs/bideogaem hauls when you had to leave your dirt farms and buy them IRL.
Having a career and chasing a couple of terrible women to other states strangled both my hometown boy outlook and any long term friend prospects as we all had our own lives so I've been the proverbial island for a long fricking time.
Actually having a decent time in New World rn because the pop is small and the game is underrated since expansion fixed a lot of release issues apparently..I ignored it as usual mmo trash on release. I think Amazon will keep pouring money into it for better or worse at least. Combat is like ESO but if ESO were instead good. Notably has no endgame raids but endgame open world pvp instead really. Everything is 5 man and the raid interface only exists for those pvp mode and some open world boss type stuff.
I get older, /fitter/ and more wealthy for no goddamn reason now beyond backstopping my family's problems and give less and less frick about other people though.
I wonder how would mmo scene be like if there was no WoW, and EQ2 did not became wow level popular.
Looking back 2000-2005 was golden age of mmos due to many different games competing with one another. Post 2005 it was just wow and games trying to clone wow. I miss shadowbane, asherons call, swg, anarchy online..the only one that survived that butchering was eve
Not any different.
The biggest cancer to the genre is free to play cash shop games which did not come from WoW.
FFXI would have been the most successful I think. Who knows what FFXIV would have looked like.
Guild Wars might have been a little more successful, hard to say how much it was influenced by WoW though.
EQ1 had already blown it and was declining well before WoW released.
EQ2 had mediocre game design and awful, cringe marketing and was never going to be top dog.
SWG was always a failure to capitalize on the Star Wars brand, this was known or suspected before WoW unequivocally proved the market was much bigger than anyone had imagined.
Most other MMOs in this era were EQ-derivatives anyway, slightly different flavors of the same basic ideas.
PvP is never very good in MMOs.
Online multiplayer matured enormously in the late 2000s, after the big wave of post-Everquest MMOs. MMOs had been way ahead of the curve in the early 2000s, but by the 2010s the rest of the industry had caught up. You had games like Dark Souls with clever invasion mechanics, you had FGC coalescing around Street Fighter IV, you had MOBAs like League of Legends, you had multiplayer Minecraft servers, and so on.
If anything, the genre probably would have died off sooner had it not been for WoW keeping it alive.
what went wrong with Rift?
back in the day, we thought for a flashing moment that it would prove better than WoW
It went f2p after Defiance flopped. Trion had their fingers in too many cookie jars. Reminder that Defiance has a sci-fi tv series tie-in. Both the game and show flopped. Trion even tried to make a Defiance 2, instead of saving Rift, which only existed to milk cows, by selling raid gear and churning out new raids. Plat inflation to sell ReX, and nonstop cash shop updates. Then they tried selling new souls and a new class that made the other four classes obsolete.
Before f2p, an /argument/ could be made; it was better, or at least as good as WoW. However, the players playing WoW at the time had no reason to leave, and after being invested in the game for what, five years to a decade at that point? Why would they? Why would they go to any other MMO? The only reason they tried FF14 was because Shadowlands was the absolute nadir of Warcraft.
Also raidgays, fpbp.
Automated systems ruined the game, like dungeon finder or whatever.
I miss having to go into towns and chatting with people around your level to go do things with you.
I'm sad that it now tells you exactly where to go on the map for every quest. It feels like doing busywork for a piece of software in stead of adventuring and paying attention to the world. My 2 cents.
That's a two sided coin, because it's great for immersion and MMOs are about communication and cooperation, but the flipside is that most people in there are insufferable morons and making a party manually if you don't have a guild or irl friends to play with you makes it an insane chore, so that prepping for the dungeon can take up a few very boring hours
Yeah I agree. I think the high was the sense of exploration and adventure. The world itself felt tough & scary which made exploration challenging and very rewarding. Now everything feels like a fricking iPhone game.
There was experimentation before WoW, back when revenues were relatively lower and devs had more leeway to be creative.
Then WoW happened. 12 millions players paying $210+ per year to play the game ($15 monthly sub and a box expansion every other year). And that's not even getting into merchandising. WoW was the pie that every company in gaming wanted in on, and they thought that the answer was to make WoW clones, so the only big budget MMOs that got greenlit were WoW clones. Experimentation only happened in small games that didn't get enough funding or marketing to make it in that oversaturated environment.
it made the most money so it had no reason to change and other mmos had every reason to copy it
The real answer is that it's a dead-end genre with inherent instability and intractable fundamental problems.
Early MMOs thrived on early-internet, pre-facebook optimism and wonder that no longer exists.
>t. guy who never got it in the first place
Idiot you have no ides
Ragnarok was better before the f2p updates and whatever came after
I've been disappointed several times before to where I ignored the last 20 mmos completely but Ashes of Creation looks fun from what little I've seen of alpha
>action-y but with cooldowns i guess
>doesn't look bloated with 30 button dps strings
>graphics are nice but not overly shooting for the maximum detail stars much like wow was in 1.0
>traditional classes, looks like trinity to me but with a job system i heard, no dumb korean translation names but cleric wizard etc
>procedural events spawning
>some fancy stuff with ai maybe to grow enemy camps or whatever
If I had, not a dream list per se, but a minimally acceptable mmo list to sustain the genre with a few advancements, that would cover the list.
Because they all where trying to BE that.
>Why did MMOs never get better than this?
They didn't have a Blizzard quality art team.
god damnit, WoW as an MMORPG is dead to me, especially the MMO part, they killed everything that made it social
but seeing shit like this always makes me just want to quest through all the zones
I always hated the players who wanted a single-player WoW, and if I think about it I still do, but it feels like that's the only way to actually enjoy this game now
I probably won't resub, trying to subsist on custom wacraft 3 campaigns instead but goddam
>they killed everything that made it social
They didn't kill everything that made it social, times have changed. Back in '06 youtube was just starting out, you didn't have websites dedicated to min-maxing and optimizing the shit out of the game.
Back then there was a reason to socialize. Blizzard didn't kill WoW, the players did.
Ok anons
How would you fix this "wiki/YT/instant min-max guide" problem that plagues games and its communities, like Wow or other multiplayer or even singleplayer games?
>randomization
>patches with fake patch notes
>fake wikis founded by studio themselves
>constantly changing gear/abilities values (on weekly or even daily basis)
>terrorist attacks on real world infrastructure
Thats all I can come up with.
>How would you fix this "wiki/YT/instant min-max guide" problem that plagues games and its communities
You can't, its a problem totally outside of game design and more the result of our current society at large
>You will never experience again the joy and wonders of exploring an expansive magical world filled with mystery and adventure with both friends and strangers you met along the way
>How would you fix this "wiki/YT/instant min-max guide" problem that plagues games and its communities, like Wow or other multiplayer or even singleplayer games?
You can't. The people playing MMOs aren't teenagers with unlimited free time anymore. They're working adults with jobs and families and have limited free time. Progressing in an MMO takes a long time so naturally the players are going to want to maximize how much they accomplish in any single play session. Adults are also more recluse and have a harder time making friends than kids. They're not going to play around just for fun. If an adult makes a "friend" with another person in a game, it's a transactional, mercenary partnership. They rarely really care about each other. They view each other as a means to an end. Ie, networking with good tanks so you can get into groups and progress.
You can't for the simple reason that people don't use the internet the way they used to. You're asking to change the culture, not the game.
the heart of MMO socialization was forcing people to group to level. having to sit there for hours in the same spot and pull then recover mana did two things. firstly it made it the norm to play with random strangers since the time investment meant that it was really hard to coordinate premade groups unless you wanted to only pay a few hours a day. secondly downtime made you chat with these random people.
you lock people in a room and you get society. wow didn't have this, you solo and the only grouping you do is raiding where you don't have time to just chat idly for hours a day with strangers. the interaction you do have is much more forced to be on the game itself.
the most modern pve MMO that did this right I'm aware of was ff11. it was just the normal way to do things pre wow, I remember doing it in the 90s in the first mmos I played before uo even came out. they was at least an 8 year period where that was how mmos worked before WoW came along
You didn't play vanilla wow at release.
But more importantly, you can't lock people in a room for their own good in a free market.
People put up with the bullshit in Everquest because there was nothing better. The lure of the online virtual world overcame the hardships. After the 2000s, the world was different and no one would subject themselves to the harsh conditions of Everquest simply for the opportunity to socialize online.
This is true. I played MUDs and pseudo MMOs like Legends of Kesmai and then UO before EQ released and none of them required grouping to the extent that EQ did. I was used to being able to play mostly solo and playing with others at my discretion. Because I had already been playing online games for years, interacting with random strangers from around the world wasn't a novelty for me. I fricking hated EQ because of its forced grouping dynamic and insane amount of downtime. All I could think was, "why is this game wasting so much of my time? why do so many people seem to love it?" I dropped that shit pretty quick. I enjoyed vanilla WoW much more. Blizzard hit a sweet spot between being able to progress on your own, but presenting challenges along the way that required grouping if you wanted to do them.
>you lock people in a room and you get society.
You're right and that's why people also remember high school (somewhat generally) more fondly.
Computers in EQ era could run: EQ, without other shit, and your phone all competing for social attention.
So it is not possible to "lock people in a virtual room" anymore even in VR.
There's no solution to this societal issue of fractal society that will come from video games. Video games are part of the problem.
You could recreate a very advanced EQ style game with all modern amenities yet keep the core idea of your ass is sitting in a camp while the bard and enchanter regen you and slowly turn death spawn into xp turnstyle and everyone will tab out to do better stuff.
It might be better to make an mmo that tries to match like minded people somehow to encourage the friends aspect first before trying to break it with gameplay, almost like tinder without roasties and paypig farming scammers governing it for video games but people aren't really ready for that yet and pretend digital relationships have some more years left in them before the whole thing burns down.
>custom wacraft 3 campaigns
are there some good ones, I loved Warcraft 3 but I never got into custom games much, please redpill me on this
>he missed the Garena days
You had to be there anon.
Custom campaigns and bnet custom maps were the peak of gaming. The bnet maps also spawned several genres. The most fun I've ever had online was playing wc3 custom games.
>footman frenzy
>ring wars
>wotj
>BA
>Darkdeeds/werewolf
>sheep tag(?)
There's more I'm forgetting but those are the ones I remember most. End of an era when bliz killed wc3 to replace it with cancer.
they game was built around soloing to the level cap of course that's how you play it. any partying from the early days was from people used to other mmos that did not catch on yet. the wow formula is to solo via quest chaining to the cap then raid and level salts. that is essentially what wow invented and what makes a wow clone
>they game was built around soloing to the level cap of course that's how you play it.
you're describing retail, vanilla wow was markedly different
sure you could solo to 60, but the rewards were inferior to duo or trio grouping for outdoor elite quests, which were themselves inferior to 5-man grouping for instances
vanilla wow encouraged grouping especially in pvp servers which gave a huge edge over solo players
nowadays there are tons of guides on how to streamline and optimize the shit out of solo leveling routes but that's just 20 years of experience playing the game to the point where players know it better than the devs themselves
not even remotely true, that started in wrath and onward.
PServer, free camera mod if u just want to look around
They did, dungeons and dragons online.
Wow is the most basic baby mmo ever made.
SWG should have dominated the market but Sony had no idea what it was sitting on
>EQ
>EQOA
>EQ2
>SWG
>all completely fricking ruined
How did SOE do this?
WoW was the perfect intersection between a hardcore autism game and a casual game. It also just controlled so smoothly compared to it's contemporaries which all felt like janky dogshit whereas to this day WoW feels incredibly smooth. WoW also had what turned out to be a very timeless easy on the eyes art style.
It looked primitive even when it was released, terrible art direction, dumb Western "DnD" idea of fantasy, grindy gameplay.
But disgusting stereotypical neckbeard nerds still cling to it as some kind of apex of MMOs because they've never grown up.
wow looked just fine and still does, and the art direction was on point unilke every other garbage mmo that's been published over the years, are you blind or plain moronic?
you're in the wrong board animehomosexual
He's clearly just trolling
this board is frequented by so many cave dwellers that you should take everything they say at face value
Either way, wasn't really worth a reply imho, but it's not a bad thread overall so whatever.
>Western "DnD" idea of fantasy
Jacking off to le ebic neep on sam'o'rye and shitting on Western culture and mythology won't make your dog-eater crush frick you
WoW's combat is dogshit but the setting at least isn't afraid to have guns and wacky mad science alongside knights and orcs.
How the frick is that fundamentally different from every JRPG that ever had airships, robots/golems and fricking gunblades? The director having a wiener small enough to fit in your defective mouth?
>WoW's combat is dogshit
Not for an MMO at the time, it wasn't.
>but the setting at least isn't afraid to have guns and wacky mad science alongside knights and orcs.
That's why it's shit.
>Why did MMO's never get better
Except several did and FPBP stands here. The majority of MMOs added something after WoW - either better mechanics, better gameplay, better customisation whatever. Then they surround their good things with outdated dogshit.
literally give me an mmo with the theme park scale of Warcraft, The community aspects of FF, The Action Combat of Terra, the RvR of Warhammer, the personal stories of Star Wars and the exploration puzzles of GW2, and the potential/ creativity elements of Wildstar and I will buy a lifetime subscription.
>The community aspects of FF
Classic EverQuest, and WoW Classic. The best MMORPGs. Why? Because they are social and dangerous.
how dead is guild wars 1 if I want to get it from steam? I hear it's good as single player too so maybe it's not a big deal
There are people still playing. Once you reach the city (note that if you choose to start in Prophecies, you don't reach the city until many hours in, whereas in Factions and Nightfall you reach Kaineng and Istan much more quickly) you can find other players and can ask for an invite to an active guild and ask for help if you get stuck on certain missions.
interesting, i guess ill be buying it then, thanks!
it did before it even came out
FF11
I actually played WoW for the first time in 2023, WotLK classic. I really do feel like the only reason this was considered good was because it was a product of its time.
Social shit with the boys nowadays is Valorant or Deep Rock Galactic coupled with gay discords.
MMORPGs, a la WoW, no longer have a reason to exist.
>Social shit with the boys nowadays is Valorant or Deep Rock Galactic coupled with gay discords.
>MMORPGs, a la WoW, no longer have a reason to exist.
Pretty much. Also you are no longer 13 with infinite time after school so games like league of legends / deep rock / valorant / valheim, even shit like counter strike / overwatch are a lot more feasible to enjoy in terms of requiring much less time investment to actually have fun with the games
The open world aspect had since been done much better by the entire crafting/survival genre, or even single player games like assassins creed
The social aspect for most people had been replaced by social networks like facebook / twitter / instagram
MMOs just stagnated and never evolved, the same as strategy games who's playerbase had slowly drifted into more specialized genres (city builders / starcraft / mobas)
I’m surprised til this day that mmos are so stuck on combat. It’s the singular purpose of every mmo. I can see it being a big part of games but they really need to evolve. Like you mentioned survival and base building. I didn’t play a ton of black desert but it sounds like they had some job systems that allowed role play that didn’t involve combat. I’m kind of amazed no mmo has figured out a way to harness both user generated content, like what Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all exist on, or figure out any other mechanics for their game other than pvp or the typical combat. Priority number one should be adding alternative ways to get lost in a world. Hunting, gambling, crafting, commerce, something. I have no desire to ever play wow because I’m not 12 and have no reason to chase gear.
Anon, these games will just go the route of UO, where a guild conquers the whole game world and everyone qu
its after relentlessly being ganked.
>I really do feel like the only reason this was considered good was because it was a product of its time.
You are correct that it was a product of its time, but it was a GOOD product of its time. The MMORPG genre was doomed for the reasons you mention but dismissing the good qualities WoW launched with is low-IQ.
I mean Shadowbane was better
Basically the last chance for the genre is the upcoming MMO set in the League of Legends world.
>Riot has infinite money.
>Belongs to China, so absolutely doesn't give a frick about political correctness, or pandering to coomers.
>One of the most popular and recognizable IP in the world, so guaranteed a huge audience.
>Can afford to hire any and all talent they want, along with an army of Chinese programmers.
If they frick it up, it's basically over for the genre. Since there is no such thing as a "niche" MMO due to their costs, it'll completely fade away, with only a handful of titles remaining.
if Riot ever publishes its mmo, it's going to be the biggest flop in the history of gaming
Blizzard is bad enough at writing, but Riot is on another level of trash when it comes to storytelling
coupled with horrible indie-level graphics that literally make your eyes hurt, a Riot mmo will be nigh unplayable
Capitalism
Developing and consistently updating a decent game is expensive. Hosting servers is expensive. It's safer to make a skinner box than an interesting MMO.
Simple as
Creating an MMO is way more expensive then any other game genre so you don't want to risk with being to innovative.
Consumer AND Developer racial & gender demographic shifts...
Dead super culture (soulless populace) META gaming because theyre spiritually sino-asiatic arriviste bugs.
Burgeoning internet = Lightning in a bottle
Hope that clears things up
try to clear up the mess in your head first and get off Ganker for a while to learn how to articulate yourself before posting here again
Good post.
a lot of reasons, mostly because they forsook the world and social aspect for the sake of chasing numbers
back in the day, there were limited choices to pursue the social aspect in front of a screen, so lots of normies logged into wow
today there are countless apps that offer this function without the need to engage the complex mechanisms of an mmo
the golden age of mmos has come and gone and there's no going back, they will forevermore be populated by dysfunctional dregs and autists
Classic Wow was 90% White. Only rich non-whites could afford a decent computer and a high speed internet connection, along with a subscription to play it.
retail's playerbase is also predominantly white, there's other reasons that made it into a shit game
It did
I've always enjoyed EVE Online & Wurm Online, although I spend more time on Wurm these days given that the invested time/effort is the only means of improving your account unlike EVE which largely takes the opposite approach of idle skilling.
Both are massively driven by their communities rather than dev-produced events. Both require subscriptions and both offer something for free players to dip their feet in. Both are from the 2000s.
Well it casualized the genre when it honestly needed casualisation, like when old MMOs had harsh death penalties, you die and your character progress is gimped? The game is literally over, why would anyone that hasn't already still play? And things like character collision boxes enabling all sorts of griefing.. The rest of convenience updates to the game since TBC were pretty redundant though and really undermine the whole interactive world aspect making it not really meaningfully different from a single player RPG.
i started wow about a month ago today since i never had a chance as a kid and recently had a bunch of free time to kill. i started with the retail version and was so turned off i felt almost physically nauseous (i know i know) because of the amount of popups and info being presented that i didn't even understand. it was like those parodies of the call of duty screen.
anyways i tried the classic version and immediately fell in love. I could see why people would get into it back then. The music, atmosphere, everything was really captivating. I was lucky to get into a very social and helpful guild very early on and that created maybe a small piece of the social aspect that hooked so many people 20 years ago. Unfortunately as an anon above noted, most of the people playing these days are "mmo" people and as someone new to mmo's, i find them to be pretty repulsive individuals for the most part. most of them do NOT seem to enjoy the game at all. they are just addicts. anyone know what I mean here? like they play out of obligation not because they enjoy going through the content or world.
most of these old wow veterans who play classic have never even read the quest text
>have never even read the quest text
i was seeing this this guy in chat who vehemently argued that there was zero story at all in wow. not in the sense that it was bad therefore zero, but there literally was no such thing at all. It's just objectively not true. it's like he forgot there was dialogue. i play really slowly and read all the quest dialogue. A lot of it is pretty decent for what it is actually. and there are some pretty interesting zone stories that i found engaging enough as it gave me context.
i specifically really liked how in the barrens you uncover that the pigpeople were getting more powerful for some reason and encroaching more and more into horde lands, and then as you do the razorfen quests you discover that they are actually being helped by the burning legion to create undead superpigs. That was pretty neat. Every zone is like that and i really like that. It's not great by any means but it's good enough to keep me in the world.
I'm happy to see that new players can still reach back through time and touch the soul of the game. If you can stomach retail's rapidfire tutorial popups it also has zones with mostly self-contained stories, although half of them are inundated with memes that were outdated when the content was new. Of them I remember Feralas and Eastern Plaguelands being pretty cool. If you are a druid the one in Feralas actually has CONTINUITY with an aspect of your class story in Legion.
good to know.
anyone excited for SoD tomorrow? As a new player I am super stoked to be able to play vanilla on a completely fresh server with new content and tweaks to the meta. Idc about the details of it. It just sounds fun. Can't wait to be able to do all the raids that i missed out on.
Oh also, for me it's the troll hunter. I think his animations are the most full of sovl.
Classic was shit because the community was a bunch of exploiting, abusing and cheating parse homosexuals from retail who played a 15 year old wonky mmo devoid of any difficulty like some chink esl shit and to create positive feedback about this autism they forced everyone else to play like them, destroyed the economy and everything in the open world from questing to world bosses and turned classic realms in 10/90% imbalanced shitholes where everything solely happens in dungeons because you would get griefed away outside instantly. Besides without buying gold and botting playing just normal was borderline Impossible.
These people havent left. And they will completely destroy whatever blizzard throws out for everyone who isnt a sweatlord. Besides the fact that som is nothing but a bad, streamlined copy of private servers.
>And they will completely destroy whatever blizzard throws out for everyone who isnt a sweatlord.
The real question is, why hasn't Blizz tried to just straight up make an ACTUAL sweatlord game like EVE? Just give them the game they want.
The reason is because these supposed "sweatlords" don't want a game where there's actual consequences for fricking up, they would riot if something they spent weeks grinding for gets blown up in 20 seconds by a suicide ganker
it wasn't retail gays who did that, it was pserver dregs who had been playing the same essentially abandoned version of wow for 10+ years straight and had discovered every single way to cheese the game
those were the ones who screamed nonstop at the mere idea of the slightest change and ended up playing it in a completely different way to how it was originally played
imagine the moronicness of defending their autistic cheating and exploiting as "emergent gameplay"
let's see how many of them are going to last at 25 level cap in SoD before fricking off to whatever nochanges pserver is up now
I played blizzlike servers for a decade before classic came out.
3 vanilla 2 TBC 2 wotlk
Not one had a classic community and the parsing shitshow was brought from retail. I actually went back to pservers after classic like many others and guess what? No parsing, no speedruns, no resource mafias, no fury tanks, barely any bots, forbidden boosting, forbidden gdkp.
This kind of cancer community is an isolated phenomenon of Blizzards servers. Apparently nowadays healers on retail get kicked if they dont dps inbetween heals in random groups.
Its still wow sweatlords obviously. Casual as frick and more interested in abusing mechanics than in playing the game sweaty but normal. The amount of gold moved around in classic is Impossible without literal cheating. Boosting is only possible by abusing pathing etc.
>healers on retail
Healing on retail is a trust exercise I now refuse to do with pugs. I like that it's less braindead but the second I have to stop what I should be doing to hardcast a heal into some moron who took avoidable damage I stop having fun.
While encounters aren't tuned to include healer dps (like XIV is), in a """good""" group you should have the breathing room to DPS and because of that healers who just want to heal get bullied by spergs.
Thats exactly why I stopped healing in classic completely (after over a decade of even leveling as healer).
Its cancerous enough if its a good group to "use every gdc" like in some gay rhythm game but my experience was that 99% of players in casual groups are not good. Not even closely. They just lackluster copy the behavior of some homosexual streamer shit earning money with wow so they obviously treat it like work. Which for classic ended in me as a healer having to carry some spastic "furry prot" and his gang of moronic dps mongs who all are way below the item and skill requirement to pull things like this off but think since Asmongold or whatever these subhumans are called tanked with a 2h sword and leather it should be also possible for them in their green/blue quest garbage and without even knowing how to tank as long as they copied the specc from some guide.
This btw also being a pure retail problem. Not once in all the time I spend on private servers have I met people who were delusional like this.
which ones did you play at and at what level? I also played in a bunch of pservers and didn't see anything like that either because I never went past 50 in any of them
but furyprot came from pservers, there are still posts in dead pserver forums discussing exactly that
speedrunning was a thing in pservers, the turbo autists from APES and Progress and all those guilds didn't come from retail, they came from pservers
spellcleaving, speedleveling, exploiting worldbuffs, stacking warriors in raids, almost everything that was meta in Classic came straight from pservers
retail gays stayed in their lane in the beginning and jumped in Classic only when they saw how popular it turned out
all the other things you mentioned that made the game a shitfest was Blizzard exercising zero control over the servers
overpopulation brought bots, gold buying, resource camping and mafias, and sharding doesn't do shit when you let 20k+ toons in a world designed for 2-3k players max
now i play on Nyctermoon with bots for hire and ironically the experience has been the closest to the original vanilla i've ever had
>Typing this out I realize the similarities between mmos and rts, they both went all in on competitive gameplay and are now gasping like dead fish
Because competitive alwas means someone will take it too serious and those someones are 0,1% of the population but tend to force the complete playerbase into their habit of turning games into work or some olympic tier obssesive sports shit.
Mostly rather obscure and localized mini projects with <1000 players all Blizzlike.
More notably probably Atlantiss TBC, some Blizzlike Wotlk I forgot the name of which also did the 3.3.5 server move and died after Naxx. Always max level. Turtle actually for some years already but it got chinked hard and the people behind it are scamming fricks who overdid it and so its off the table now.
I mean yes, the scene obviously came from private servers and not vanilla but the thing is that they never did this competetitive "we frick your game up if you dont do our meta" shit. It was more like some crazy guyss who just did their thing because they got bored after decades of the same stuff and started playing around. The problem is that retailers took what they saw about boosting and speedrunning in some youtube videos because they completely forgot how to play a game without metagaming everything and with the goal of breaking it for everyone else to profit from that thanks to moronic retail culture, flooded the servers and fricked everything up. Speedrunners on Pservers never bothered me or my guild with their bullshit.
The scene of abusing the wonky engine came from private servers but the mindset of playing a piss easy mmo as competetitive e-sport and forcing everyone to pull along is definetly a retail thing.
Thats also where rampant third party cheating came into play because at some point everything is allowed if you just "win" the game and if you have to pay four accounts plus the gold and botting to get that edge you do so.
>he problem is that retailers took what they saw about boosting and speedrunning in some youtube videos because they completely forgot how to play a game without metagaming everything and with the goal of breaking it for everyone else to profit from that thanks to moronic retail culture, flooded the servers and fricked everything up. Speedrunners on Pservers never bothered me
Every single thing related to speedrunning and "e-sports" and streaming is a cancer and one you can't even blame devs for.
Basically we have a gigantic digital stinking shanty town of near homeless neets all dreaming of playing video games instead of a real job.
I watched one guy in an mmo trying to stream "died at a boss at level 30 come hang out" for hours on the most banal and mediocre shit, inside the game where people were doing more interesting stuff for themselves already.
This overlaps with neetdom and troonyism, shit if you're too boring to stream maybe some breasts will help out!
It's not just a wow problem you can find it in all MP games when you try to unwind after work and you get matched with some butthole jumping three stairs to cut a half second off this run time like it's his job. Because it is his (pathetic) job.
I'm playing it with some friends so it will probably be a week or so of fun before the magic leaves us.
is spot on about the state of the classic community.
your guy claiming there is zero story in WoW may have been wrong, but whatever is there is plain bad
still, the quality varies from placeholder quests hastily done to get you going about in the world, to rather well made quests like the chains in Darkshire
some writers were visibly better
>in [insert area] you uncover that [insert mobs] were getting more powerful for some reason and encroaching more and more into [insert faction] lands
this template is used again and again everywhere in the game, no matter the race you play
the stories being generic and mundane actually a good thing since you can skip the details and insert yourself into the world more easily
what's really good about WoW is the timeless color palette, the great music, the smooth gameplay and the overall high production value
They did. This game is superior to WoW.
Your game died.
i have an unopened collectors edition of this game in my cellar, i got it through work where they sold the CEs for the normal price
i was completly into wow at the point and thought "ill play warhammer eventually" but never did, after that i hoped that maybe the OG CE would be worth some money but then the game died after what like 4 years lol
vanilla wow was a nice balance between qol and adventure
every patch and expansion ended up metagaming the player base itself and they never just focused on creating a world again
and every mmo focuses more on the metagame of being an mmo rather than their world as well
Started playing SOD. What do i think of it?
I made a Forsaken Warlock but it took two hours just to reach level 5 and finish Tirisfal questing since everything was being camped. Every skeleton, zombie, bat, wolf, spider, and scarlet crusader spawn. Even the crate spawns were being camped and the crates had a 5 minute respawn timer so that took a while. And that was Tirisfal, which was nothing compared to the number of players in Elwynn or Durotar or Mulgore. Can't imagine how bad Barrens questing would be since you would have everyone converging there in preparation for Ashenvale. It would be nice to get to the big PvP wars happening Ashenvale while everyone is still checking out SoD, but getting that point right now with so much competition would be tedious. Best bet for progressing right now would probably be to play late night or in the morning while everyone is asleep or at work.
This is probably the worst server to play on considering the Asmon spergs
>Be a faceless drone slaving for a fraction of gold.
>for the eventual joy of wow endgame
>as you hand all the credit and goods to assmoan anyway
Why not just move to china?
For real though there is so much better stuff to play out there.
Go make a better name for yourself in New World, or Remnant 2 is a blast right now.
I genuinely don't get the wow mindset anymore as a former wow player.
>friends and social scene
It's all depressing boomer washouts or zoomers watching a third stream in the other window while giving money to assmoan for shoutouts or whatever so I don't see how people do it for this either.
Do you have a potato rig that limits your choices? I'm honestly asking you.
>New World
lol
lmao even
It's legit good since the expansion.
I can't answer to their bad launch as I ignored it along with every other thinking person.
No it isn't and it never will be.
been playing since yesterday now and it's been a blast
the server is packed with players but you can finish quests and progress easily because of the dynamic respawn rates
there's new quirks for every class that are subject to change at any time which makes it almost as interesting as it was in og vanilla; tank shaman is now a thing
they should've done this shit many many years ago
So does the warrior heal now by flexing his pecs at and boosting the morale of wowgays?
they gave warrior some pvp utility, damage boosts, and made full prot more viable iirc (it was a bit dogshit in vanilla).
wouldn't know because I'm not playing one currently
even if they implement it they'll nerf it as soon as it appears to become too op
last night they nerfed hunters hard because they could tank dungeons with their dogs better than anyone, and didn't give a frick about everyone who cried murder
right now SoD feels like a PTR and it extra fun because it's knocking pserver meta homosexuals off balance
>classic
struck the perfect balance where the world feels dangerous and you can get around that by getting more levels or gear
the game is simplistic and intuitive, if you are a casual gamer its the perfect mmo
>retail
at this point you can split wow into two different games, retail is a fast paced roller coaster experience with minigame after minigame
its deep, complex and if you want to min/max you either have to treat it as a full time job (like the RWF/MDI guys do) or you have to read guides and look at logs and use 3rd party tools like simcraft
its the perfect mmo if you are a hardcore gamer
honestly struggle to graps how people play classic seriously with speedruning raids, grinding bis, maximizing world buffs and consumes, nor can i understand peope who play retail casually, who just fly around and do world quests and raid Normal 6 hours a week
ff11 was a better eq clone, daoc was better pvp game eve online was better, ro was better, lineage 1 was better
a lot of other pre wow mmos I would consider to be on par overall like cox. WoW really was only good at being easy to play
Aion was really close at some point, but they messed up too early.
Lol at thinking Warcraft was ever a good game and not already dumbed down from UO's sandbox of possibilities.
blizzard, liken nintendo are one of the few aaa companies that care about stuff like having responsive games. most (if not all) other mmos have inputs that don't feel as good as wow. maybe wildstar was close.