World of Warcraft killer?
 

Blizzard released World of Warcraft in 2004. In computer gaming terms, that pretty much makes the game a senior citizen. Yet, 5 years, 2 (soon to be 3) expansions, and 11+ million subscriptions later, it's still going strong despite a number of more recent big-budget MMOs being released.

Where competitors such as Warhammer, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Aion, and others, have failed (i.e. they have a fraction of the subscribers), there still remains a huge opportunity to dethrone the King of MMOs. Some 11 million subscribers paying at least $10 a month is no small sum.

So what is it going to take to do it?

• What is your wishlist for the "next-gen" MMO that will ultimately dethrone WoW?
• What are your gripes about WoW?
• What's missing from MMOs?

Me, I'm a classic PRGer. So I'd like to see a more immersive and expansive "adventure-based" MMO. The thing I don't like about WoW is that it's so damn busy. Everywhere you turn, there's some "mob" to run into. Azeroth is literally teeming with life, and that gets annoying because it's unrealistic. I want to be able to strike out into the wilds over great expanses without having to fight all the time I'm doing it. I want an epic journey. I don't mind running into things, but it shouldn't be every 10 feet. I'd rather more open spaces and perhaps getting mobbed when you do run into things (i.e. things that travel in groups). It should be the case that you fight more than one thing at a time in most situations. Build the game around that.

Also, the mobs are too bound to their "script." You can literally bludgeon an orc to death, while dozens of others will mill about within sight and earshot and not even know you're there. WTF? Oh, right, you didn't cause enough "threat." And you were too far away to trigger it.... okay.... :confused:

Also, the quests are really repetitive. High-level quests have the same feel to them as low-level quests, except there are more "points" at stake. So what? You're doing basically the same thing. I want more quest innovation.

Okay, that's just a few. I won't steal all your thunder. What do you want in an MMO, and what will it take to make WoW look its age finally?

The only, and I mean only mmo that could give WoW a run for its money is Star Wars: The Old Republic. There are a few reasons for this;

1. Bioware makes good games, but they can't end games/write endings worth a shit. No endings are really required in MMO's, hence, no problem. (Unless you consider end game/level cap the end, but that shouldn't be a problem)
2. Lots of voice acting. It will make quests actually worth paying attention to..
3. On the note of quests..they are really revolutionizing the quest system
4. Companions. They are giving people sidekicks. Pretty cool in my book.
5. Graphics. WoW is starting to show its age, and ToR looks to be a very nice step up without requiring a mega setup.

ToR isn't without its problems though. Lore and realism amongst them. First things first, lightsabers should be one hit kills, they are not. They should get around this by giving people personal shields (the tech was then abandoned/lost before a new hope). And several other small things, but I think they will do a decent enough job of addressing these issues.

Anyways, I think ToR is has a decent chance of taking in a base of atleast 3-5 million users within a year. Now that MMO's are more mainstream, I think that user base is a bit more realistic. I don't see it going much higher than that though.

Also, at the same time as ToR launches, a lot of WoW players will be looking to jump ship. I know I still play WoW, but if a new, better, more fun game came out, I'd leave.


The second option, is blizzards new MMO. Personally, I'm hoping its a steampunk MMO, but it's probably a sci-fi one.

In the way distant future, the Warhammer 40k MMO might be interesting, but, that's a long long way away (2011 at best, realistically, late 2012)

The MMO market is an interesting thing, regardless of what the WoW killer is, it needs to launch as a polished game that does not focus on "gathering" quests, and grinding.

Innovation is the key, and polish is a must. Combat must be fluid, and smooth from the get go. WoW has such a head start, that any studio is going to have their work cut out for them.

It's possible that a company other than blizzard will kill, or atleast seriously injure WoW. Other than Bioware however, I don't see it happening.

Just my perspective though.

In my observations, all the competitors to Blizzard have been their own worst enemy. There is no sense in trying to be a "WoW killer" because that kind of result is, honestly, completely up to luck. You'll probably give a billion reasons why WoW succeeded, but I dare you to follow them exactly and come up with the same success. If there really was a formula for it, well... there isn't. Rather, the previous "WoW killers" like Warhammer failed because they couldn't even survive in a world without competitors - terrible support, buggy, high latency, load-dependent gameplay, no solutions in sight. There are games like EVE that are still going strong because they do what they do right. So, my approach to this all is to not think in terms of the next WoW, but rather hope that the next game to come out actually has its shit together. Let luck and circumstance decide if they beat WoW or not.

I don't think WOW is really showing it's age. The game's cartoonish gaphics and excellent animation gives it staying power. What's going to hurt wow is that it's becoming extremely formulaic. I think only Blizzard is capable of creating a WOW-Killer.

TOR is probably going to be liked by a lot of people. I'm skeptical though. I don't think I'm going to like it. Dunno why, The camera and animation just doesn't look very good to me and I've found if developers can't do that right, they're unlikely to get other aspects of the game right. (By "right" I mean to my liking...)

Honestly, I don't know what I want from the next big MMO. I just want it to be fun, and easy to look at for LONG periods of time.

If you played wow from the beginning there were entire expanses where there was not a single mob to kill for big stretches. The world was quite epic and expansive.

But it got boring. It got boring to spend 30 minutes traveling to get to a an instance for a raid. There were no summoning stones, lock resources were not able to summon 40 people on a daily basis.

Even just flying from the top of Azeroth to the bottom took about 20 minutes.

So while it was expansive and more realistic, it was also very very desolate and boring.

But, Cyn, I'd rather see more of a balance. I'm not suggesting the world be empty for even a few minutes at a time. We run into things every couple of seconds (or a few seconds) in many if not most areas. Seriously, Azeroth doesn't have the resources to adequately feed the creatures that populate it. I suppose it's a good thing that we kill all that we do.

As it is now, it's kind of silly. It needs a better balance of adventure and action.

* * * * *

I too see ToR as something hopeful. Definitely in the right direction. It might even get me to jump ship.

Even if it isn't a WoW killer, I think it strikes a fine balance of classic elements and some innovation.

* * * * *

And, guys, don't hold back on me. What do you want to see? What are you tired with? What annoys you? What do you long for?

How do we make MMOs better?

The world of warcraft killer wont be compared to world of warcraft, hopefully. Even blizzard themselves have some out and said that nobody is going to get anywhere by copying them.
They also said they're working on their own next gen MMO, because if anybody can cannibalize their own playerbase, it's them.

One thing that I want to see..

Making a difference. I hate running the same instance over and over again without a lore reason why I am.

In WoW it is easy, just make all instances you beat keepers of time instances. You have to go back, and fight one extra boss at the end, a keepers of time boss.

It makes no sense that the lore of wow says all these bosses are dead, yet you can still go back and fight them.

Use phasing, or something of that sort to make players boss fights matter. If someone doesn't kill ragnaros atleast once a week, he raids org and rapes people for 6 hours straight.

That's one thing that annoys the shit out of me, no matter what you do, you don't make a difference. We've been running the same BG's over and over again, and noone ever wins. Player actions should matter.

There is only one company that has the potential to create a game that can dethrone WoW (in my opinion), and that company is the very same company that makes WoW. A "World of Starcraft" or a "World of Diablo" would have the potential.

And, as far as features that would make the game/genre better:

I've found one of the more annoying things about WoW in particular is that eventually everyone looks the same (this was at least true for back when I played. I don't know how it is now). I think a good idea for a solution would be to allow the players to customize the way their equipment looks. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the designs Blizzard created for some of those epics are pretty badass looking. I always just found it annoying that my badass looking T2 Paladin looked the same as all the other T2 Pallies (I told you it had been a while since I played).

I generally agree with you BG. I want to get back to more Pen and Paper roots (to a degree). I want to get rid of levels (pointless when you really thing about them all they do is divide the player base). I want many ways to gain power/experience. I want it to be story driven where the player actually has an impact on the game world. I want, good, meaningful pvp. There's already a bijillion deathmatch games out there.

I want huuuge customization, think city of heroes at minimum. I want crafting to be fun and worthwhile. Aion's gliding system (not their whole flying system tho) as partial mounts was awesome, include that. I want personal storylines/quests/npc archenemies/and companions I can design, probably all through an instance, but whatever. LESS instances! heh. There should only be instances when you have to have them.

The only reason old world wow could get boring (b/c of the big travel times and large expanses I mean) was because it was so dang level and item driven. If you base the game more on socialization, story, plot, pvp, etc. those problems cease to exist. Look at original EQ (before planes of power) that was 10x worse in WoW in that department yet those were the best gaming days of my life. People mattered in that game. I can still remember the crazy fantasy names of my friends (hey Nawflem!) from that game(10 years ago!) Not so on just about any other game I've played.

I've kind of already mentioned this, but after playing 10 years of games, dozens of MMOs, and playing pen and paper RPGs, the thing I'm sick the most of is levels! They are so effing pointless, arbitrary, and unrealistic!

I don't think WoW will never be dethroned at least not anytime soon, there will be other games people may leave WoW for but its to big to just fall.

Oh it will, thats what they thought about EQ and the Titanic but they both fell :P

Though WoW will prob be around for another 3-5 years.

Borderlands by gearbox tweaked, cleaned up, balanced with a UT levels added for PvP play. I would be in heaven!

Good point.

Around? Maybe. Where it is today? I find that hard to believe. In another 5 years, WoW might seem as old to us as Unreal Tournament seems today.

Unreal Tournament's a fun game--even today, maybe. And at the time of its release, it blew people's minds. But how many hours are you playing it these days? (Especially with Unreal Tournament 3 around.)

How is WoW going to look on its 10 anniversary?

Unreal Tournament (1998)

Fallout 3 (2008) [For 10-year compare and contrast]

BG, compare it to Unreal 3 which is leaps and bounds visually different. Unreal 3 is a different game, not a patch or expansion.

WoW, in just 5 years has continued to push the envelope of it's graphics. One just has to look in Azeroth, travel to Outland, then to Northrend. While the style is the similar, the total amount of polygons, textures, etc are constantly being pushed the envelope.

When you walk in Azeroth, there's always a fog off into the distance. Outland and Northrend, you could push that really far out.

While my machine was able to do BC without issue with all the graphics turned up. I upgraded the vid card for WotLK. The Ony patch 3.2, whelps now make it look like I'm back at MC with all the visual lag. I wasn't planning on upgrading cards until Cataclysm or Diablo3 whichever comes out first. Diablo3 was a plan for a full PC upgrade.

Since Cataclysm is a full Azeroth rewrite, I expect it to take advantage of increasing the polygons and textures.

Yeah, I admit that each expansion looks nicer. But how much of that are mere improvements on the same basic construction?

The thing to look at as well is the difference in gameplay within games that have 10 years between them.

I don't mean to suggest that graphics are the only difference.

The next big thing will win us over mainly in the gameplay department. I'm quite confident of that.

How different is the gameplay in Unreal? Isn't it basically the same?

Isn't Team Fortress the Counterstrike mod just the same basic gameplay with some gameplay enhancements but mostly better graphics?

I'm not so sold on the game play department changing all that much. Driving games are still driving games, with some tweaks and changes. You get something radical like Burnout that turns that on it's head, but it's still a driving game.

The reason I believe that is that there is too much at stake. Games cost millions for development. No one wants to risk too much to make such a game changing paradigm.

Also, WoW has so many different aspects of it as far as gameplay is concerned. As I looked over a list of MMOs, while LOTR is on the top, I found it boring to play.

There are so many different ways to play WoW. Some of the friends that I know like to play the quests. They make character after character and do the quest lines. Others like to PvP. Others like gather mats, make goods and, to play the auction house. Some like to play the end content, and others like to be the best of the best and race to be the first to complete the end content.

While some lament at the dilution of gear, I must admit that it's not as frustrating running 4-5 hour instances every week (I'm looking at you MC) and still not get your full tier set after 8 months. The ability to get tokens for running and getting your gear via vendor is a huge game mechanic changer.

Now this wasn't in BC. I got tired of running Karazhan and eventually gave up playing the game altogether for 1 year. So I never go to see the end game content of BC. I believe that it was more due to 10 man vs. 25 man and being sat out most of the time, so I was bored. Never was able to get a 2nd 10 man group going.

While I lament the loss of the 40 man, since that was so epic, the ability to scale down to 25 to 10 is just awesome. I can play the content at a level that I feel comfortable with and move forward every little bit.

Pretty much, but when you compare UT to something like Fallout 3 (both top-rated games for their respective times), you see a host of gameplay differences. Even when you compare Fallout (1997) to Fallout 3, you see differences. Fallout was about the same time period in gaming as UT.


These are all games that are great for their time, but the difference in gaming experience is marked. I'm not just talking about control patterns, weapons, and whether they're in 3D. I'm also talking about the overall gaming experience: world immersion, how the world/characters respond to your inputs, the overall "feel" to the movement and controls. You can't say that the gameplay package in this respect hasn't changed much since the late nineties. Maybe we're reaching a plateau. Is that what you're suggesting? Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. Maybe the next big innovators are working to spring the next big thing on us.

This is partly true. I remember playing the first ever Test Drive (1987) and Need for Speed (1994). Driving is driving, yes, but you can't say the original Need for Speed is anything like Need for Speed: Underground or any of the games thereafter. The biggest differences in those games are gameplay related (read: they're more immersive).

Of course there is much at stake. But what makes more sense: innovating in an industry fuelled by innovation, or copying some other successful model where other copycats failed fairly miserably? It depends, doesn't it? Some companies don't mind reinventing the wheel and making money at it. However, others would prefer to take those risks and come up with the next big thing. It's only a matter of time.

And this is why WoW has had so much lasting power. Much of this was enabled by changes in the technology and distribution of gaming. But I can't see how this will last forever.

Maybe we have hit a bit of a plateau in terms of gameplay, but I refuse to believe it will last for long. I've been gaming since the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 (maybe you have too). I was there when the Sega Genesis "blew the doors off of" the NES with its 16-bit graphics. With each hardware innovation comes a new generation of games made possible by better hardware capabilities.

It can be said that even hardware improvements are plateauing. Maybe they are, but there is still some room to move. We're just now heading into quad-core mainstream acceptance (and the multiple cores will only become stacked: octo-core anyone?). This opens up new opportunities for game developers to make smarter games in ways that were virtually impossible before: high graphics, highly interactive world environments, and high artificial intelligence all at once.

This begs for the next generation of gameplay innovations.

I give WoW extra time because MMOs are the exception to the general gaming rules. You can't compare MMOs to how games like Fallout and UO did back when. People get attached to their characters which creates nostalgia which keeps people coming back periodically even if they don't play much. This doesn't mean much for smaller games, but with such a huge subscription base its going to take quite awhile for WoW to run down. The other reason I give WoW extra time, is there's like, what? 1 good MMO on the horizon? TOR. And it takes a long time to develop new ones plus about another year of live time to take away/compete from WoW.

And lets be clear, when I (we?) say "fall" I don't mean overnight drop or even over a month. MMOs never drop out that quickly (even if there's an initial surge to try the new game, there's usually an "aftershock" of going back to the old before leaving it for good), even low sub ones. I think there are even some EQ, AO, AC, and DAoC servers still up. So coming up for a definition of failure might be important to this subject.

I put forward that to fall (not just fail, i.e. have been popular enough to fall in the first place) an MMO needs to lose more than 51% of its player base over a period of a year.

As to the concern that genres don't change much, and a racing game is still just a racing game; I'd say that an MMO is so much more complex than a racing game. It's really an amalgamation of nearly every genre. It reflects real life. It will never stop evolving. Plus, an argument can be made that most genres there has been a real life activity that it was already based off of. Racing is obvious, shooter games=hunting, etc. So in a sense those games have been around for quite awhile.

MMOs on the other hand, are only a decade old. The closest analog in history (D&D) is still only ~30 years old. Still very very young compared to the other genres. Sure most of them are centered on fighting, but that does not define the genre. Not in the same way a gun defines an FPS. I'd say MMOs are just in their infancy, and we have yet to see what they will turn into.

FWIW I've been playing before the 64 and 2600, basic text adventures and non-graphical games, from football to adventure.

The only frontier I see to gaming isn't so much the immersiveness as the Wii and Project Natal


Look at the gaming history cannon and you'll see that the games haven't changed all that much. The game is the same, the graphical wrapper has. Now that doesn't mean that small advances to AI and gameplay haven't been added, but the most important thing to most is the visual.

If it was all about gameplay then many of us would still be playing sidescrollers and shooters. Following what I mentioned, sidescrollers turned into 3D platformers, but what about shooters? They just fell off into oblivion.

Today's gaming isn't about the game. It's about a whole franchise and back story. It's a whole world you're creating.

This is why Popcap games and Facebook games have caught on like wildfire. There's no care about anything except to just jump in and play a game for a few minutes.

I think the only game that can kill WoW at this point is WoW itself. Everquest, for me anyway, just got to the point where there was TOO MUCH content. Before you could finish the current expansion there was already a new one out and the next well on the way. I just stopped caring about all the new stuff they were adding because i hadn't explored what they gave me already.
Thousands of new items and locations to learn? Everything you've explored becoming completely obsolete and useless. All the old zones/areas becoming completely abandoned.

WoW has learned from the mistakes of other games quite a bit. Their expansion content comes out at a nice, careful pace and has been thoroughly bug-checked. The old cities retain most of their traffic between expansions (mainly by keeping them the only place to access the Auction House.) They've made endgame content available to everyone with the addition of Heroic dungeons and Regular dungeons, using the same content on different difficulty levels. A large variety in pve and pvp play. They've also maintained a minimal amount of "feature creep" and "mudflation".

And, yes, there are many people who still play the original Everquest.

I'd disagree, Cyn, to an extent (about the games not changing). Just the advent of the internet has made gaming more about playing with and against real people. That changes the atmosphere and gameplay quite a bit as your allies and opponents are now strangers (rather than friends sitting next to you or AI).

Also see games like Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, etc. These are games that have made vast strides and improvements to gameplay. Don't tell me that these are equivalent to mario bros or original Doom :)

I laugh hysterically at the proposition that WoW has in any way had "slow" or "tempered" mudflation. One piece of my gear now has more total stats on it than my entire gear set did at level 60. WoW's mudflation has been so out of control, in fact, that the devs have twice had to put in artificial band aid brakes on gear (tank gear specifically) so that they could still design challenging encounters.

That fairly minor side point aside, I don't think there's any use talking about a WoW killer. WoW has long since acquired a life of its own in terms of membership and playerbase. Its main competitors are going to be Blizzard's own properties, in SC2 and D3 when those come out. I doubt very much you will see any game achieve the same level of marketplace dominance until Blizzard releases a new MMO, and even then, WoW's going to be pretty crazy hard to top.

I don't know. I think bioware has a very similar following/rep for making quality games as blizz. So if TOR comes through I could see it being the next big thing.

D3 maybe, slightly, but SC2? Doubt it, totally different genres. But you definitely have a point. I think those games will help dilute/weaken WoWs sub base. Then when something like TOR comes along with enough clout it could have the strength to knock WoW on its butt.

Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don't think a star wars mmo will have the same level of appeal across a wide audience as azeroth's easily digested fantasy world. I don't doubt it will be popular and I don't doubt it will be successful but I don't think it's going to reach the same audience as wow.

I'm sorry, did someone just doubt Star Wars' mass appeal?! :P

There was way more doom and gloom about WoW's beta. People thought the cartoonish graphics and all the fudged up lore would put the masses off. Boy were they wrong.

EDIT: that isn't to say I think it will be a "WoW killer," I have a sinking suspicion TOR will end up too much like LOTR (I still have hope for it tho). But I don't doubt its mass appeal. So far it is the only MMO that I have heard people talk about IRL, before its even been released, and without me having brought it up.

Your average player getting pwned 18 times in 5 minutes is off putting to many starting players in the playing against strangers. I know many players who don't bother to do any PvP gaming from WoW to CODMW2

It's a bit more exciting with co-op play but trusting my game time experience with someone who doesn't know how to play and keeps getting me killed is equally frustrating.

This is why wow-heroes and achievements have a place in helping determine if someone is at least makes a simple cut with gear check and having at least some experience.

Now the content release is an interesting component, because those long time players know that once patch release happens the older content turns into dead space. Finding 5 man for Outland is time consuming if you aren't in a guild. and why you doing that anyways when you can just grind out the levels and move on to the next zones. TOC and Ulduar are still sought after but who wants to go to Naxx anymore.

Heh, WoW can be a lot like the real world of job hunting: everyone wants experience, but if you aren't given a chance, how will you get any experience in the first place?

I suppose there are "training guilds" out there. Maybe I'll give them a shot one day soon. My priest just hit 73.

I just thought of this as I was starting to finish up quests in Icecrown. Get yourself there. You'll see some very different kinds of quests. Some quite innovative.

It's a phased area so you'll see nothing for the beginning, but then as you move from phase to phase, you'll see the place teeming with undead. And then, when you aggro them, you'll probably die because they don't just sit there while you pound on the one guy... they generally mob you.

They fixed alot of what you're talking about in WotLK as far as questing is concerned.

The other part about phasing is that you can't leap ahead like you did in other zones where you just completely leapfrogged a set of quests. No here the entire area doesn't spawn anything if you haven't completed quest chains. This is a little frustrating when it comes to questing with friends since they can be in a different phase than you.

I will agree with this, having played through WotLK. I really enjoyed questing in this expansion. I am really looking forward to Cataclysm, and though I don't play WoW now, I plan on going back sometime in the future.

I'm not sure there is a WoW Killer. I've tried other MMORPGs...none of them get the mix as right as World of Warcraft does.

WoW is quality in every aspect. As soon as another developer can ooze quality in every single aspect of a game, we'll have a WoW competitor.

The thing about WOW and Blizzard is that if something causes their game to start failing, They will change it. Be it graphics, balance, or gameplay, they'll at least work on changing it enough to keep people from leaving. Other games abandon their work after a few years, Starcraft had a patch 11 years after it's release, Diablo 2 had a patch 9 years after release and expects another this year. I can't think of another free to play online game with that kind of dedication. It should be even stronger for a game that's taking peoples money every month.

I guess I can throw some things out there I think would be cool in a game if they could ever be done right.

I want soft level caps. Cap the quest XP at 50, raid quest up to 55 and when you get there the XP per level just skyrockets where only a few HARDCORE people are able to get 60 before the expansion hits and gives quest XP to 55 and raid quest XP to 60 and hardcores being able to grind to 65 or so..

I want to see HUGE procedurally generated worlds, items, creatures mixed with innovative story telling and questing and graphics. Procedurally generated "good" graphics? haha...

Ever-changing landscapes and stories. Procedural generation could do this. Raid a town, Do you take it over and take a % of the income or just burn it down? I want to see a lot of Megaton(fallout3) like changes in an MMO, preferably with even more of an impact to the game than that decision which I shall not spoil. :) I'm not saying it should be an easy task to make big changes such as moving or taking over a town. I just think it should be possible.


Things that my next MMO MUST have is a solid, user friendly, responsive user interface. WoW has a great UI and it's made better by tons of addons to make any flaws easier to deal with.

The next MMO I play needs to have good animation and camera. I just cannot play a game with flawed animation or camera for very long especially 1000s of hours. Character movement animation is the most important. A character that "floats" because his run animation and actual movement speed aren't synced is one of the most annoying things for me. I can't enjoy a lot of games to the fullest because of horrible 3rd person character animation. Oblivion, Fallout3, Everquest, SWG, COH all had crappy PC animations. I forgive FO3 because it could be played as an FPS but Melee SUCKS in first person and that hurt Oblivion for me but I only managed 110 hours in that game. WOW did animations right. Characters stuck to the ground, laggy people didn't blink across your screen, Animations flowed together well enough. TOR looks good in this department mostly, The strafing and full speed walking backwards sucks but It's not nearly as bad as some games. I'm not a big fan of the free camera either. I like my auto adjusting smart camera from WOW more than anything.

Damn, That last paragraph is too hard to read. I was just gonna delete or re-write it but meh, I'm lazy. If you can decipher it, GG. If not, NP!

Lots to talk about here. Great topic!

First is why WoW became so popular. I think it had a lot to do with multiplayer online gaming getting pretty big right in the early 2000s when WoW was announced. WoW is developed by Blizzard who is undoubtedly the biggest and most popular PC developer in the world. The game already had an incredible amount of hype before it was released because it was a Blizzard game. Combine Blizzard quality with the fact that the world was "ready" for a huge MMO and there you go. It sounds weird but in the late 90s and early 2000s, not everyone had PCs, and not everyone spent a lot of time on the PC. In the early to mid 2000s, this began to change. E-commerce started booming, MySpace and social networking sites started to flourish, and all of a sudden every kid was on the PC all the time, and this is only around 2002-2004. In 2004-2006, people old, young, of every country started using computers every day. Look at Facebook. Everybody is on it. Everybody. Everybody has a reason to be on the PC a lot now, which makes them more susceptible to activities such as MMORPGs.

Blizzard either knowingly or unknowingly launched a perfectly polished, cartoony, run on any piece of shit PC developed by the most popular PC developer ever, right at the time when it became socially acceptable to spend hours upon hours on the PC without being looked at funny.

This is why WoW succeeded. WoW launched at the right place at the right time with the perfect combination of quality, polish, low system specs, and casual content.

So, if you think about it that way, WoW can't be beaten because the world will never be in a place like that again. It IS normal for people to spend hours on a PC everyday now and Blizzard got first dibs on reeling people in.

Now, my complaints about WoW, even though I haven't played since BC came out. I played the game religiously for years. I was a hardcore raider for over half of my time spent playing it, and a hardcore PVPer the other half. I loved the game, I loved playing it and spending time with it, it was my life. I don't regret it, but I do have insight into what could have kept me playing it even today.

1. Character customization. WoW has none. Grats I can change my hair and face. What? We should be able to change height, girth, weight, faces, hair, everything. Every night elf looks the same and that takes away from the experience.

2. Armor and weapons. Sure they look cool, but everyone has the same shit. There is no reason for tiered armor sets in WoW. Why can't there be multiple viable armor sets for a level 60 warrior? Why is it only 1 set that should be used? If you mix in match then you look like a circus freak. Players should be able to wear unique armor that not every night elf warrior in Stormwind is wearing. I played Everquest for a year straight when it came out and from level 1-50 I never saw a single wood elf ranger that looked like me.

3. Classes and races. Here is the big one for me. Why are we limited to so few class and race choices? Everquest excelled here. In WoW you could pick from 5 or 6 races and 7 or 8 classes when it came out. In Everquest there was twenty different races and twenty different classes to choose from. You wouldn't believe the pride of being a wood elf ranger when you saw another like yourself maybe once every few days. In WoW you're a carbon copy clone, swimming in a sea of night elf warriors everywhere you turn. This takes away from the game and needs to be addressed. I know it's very hard to balance 20 classes and races, but man does it add value to the game. This could be fixed by having master classes. At level 40, a warrior turns into a Knight, Berserker, or Fighter. Then a Berserker at level 60 can turn into a Myrmidon or Axemaster. Being a night elf warrior from 1-80 is boring, especially when every other warrior on the server has the same body as you, and on top of that they're wearing the same armor. Blah.

4. The world needs to be bigger. Yes, bigger. WoW seems huge, but when compared to Everquest, it's an absolute joke. The world of EQ was so huge that it felt like a real world. WoW feels like a console videogame with different levels. In EQ, sailing across a vast ocean to a different continent took 30 minutes at the least. This sounds tiresome and boring but it gave a sense of awe when playing. What if something happened out here? I can't see land in any direction. We're actually in dangerous territory! Danger doesn't exist in WoW. That's another problem. I didn't really like EQ taking away 50% of your EXP for that level upon a single death, but it did add a sense of realism and stakes for the world. You cared more for your character because you had something to lose.

Exploration is absent in WoW. You can run across a zone in 5 minutes or less. Zones need to be big enough that they take much longer to traverse. Can you imagine walking across a giant jungle that took 20 or 30 minutes to get through and eventually stumbling upon a city that you had never been to before? Exploration doesn't exist in WoW and there is no reward for it. When a new zone comes open you just run through on your mount, get the flight paths and continue on your way. This detracts from the game. The environment needs to be awe-inspiring and simply breathtakingly huge. Playing WoW doesn't feel like being in a world, it feels like being in Mario with flight paths taking you from level to level. Travelling from Stormwind to Ironforge doesn't feel like an epic journey, and it should. Traveling period should feel epic in a fantasy game. I understand Blizzard's decision to shorten travel time in the game so people can get stuff done faster but in my opinion it really does take away from the grandiose feeling of exploration and trekking.

5. Crafting is pathetic in WoW. The only way to obtain really cool items in WoW is to get them from raiding or other dungeons. Why can't I craft my own awesome items? What if I don't want to raid to get a cool item? Why can't I started up my own business selling useful items to players? This is partially included in WoW, but it's nothing compared to how it could be. I also hate the bind on equip system and soulbound on pickup system. Loot is too easy to come by so it's basically trash once you've outleveled it. Items on your character should be magnificent and extremely rare and mean something once you obtain them. They are assets. You can trade them and sell them and buy them. It creates a player-driven item economy which is how it should be, not an economy built on low level greens and gathering professions.



WoW did a lot right but I think a lot of it was simply when the game released. It does have the best control scheme in the history of RPGs IMO. The camera is beyond perfect and the fluid animations are still above average (gasp). When you fight in WoW, you're actually fighting, shooting spells, swinging swords, etc. Other games are still struggling to make this work.

I'm sure I'll add more to this later.

I have to disagree with you on everything there.

not gonna do a point by point but turning the game in to work isn't fun, it's bullshit. I don't want a virtual job, and I find the exploration in WoW to be fine, I understand the concept of instant gratification and it's not that... There is just no point in having an MMO where people have to wait 45 motherfucking minutes for their healer to travel across a fictitious ocean to stab some motherfucking loot pinata in the asshole with a buster sword. Seems like groups tend to have ADD and shit anyways and get tired of waiting for that 5th party member after 5 minutes as it is. The zone transitions are the only thing that piss me off, particularly in outland where I go from a red fiery barren wasteland to a blue mushroom lagoon to a freaking purple lightining storm of a zone so abruptly I feel like I turn my screen in to a bag of skittles.

WoW isn't the 1st game or mmo for that matter to promote hours of time invested, it's far more forgiving and you get much further for the time you put in, that's it's success. EQ, UO, SWG, FFXI, all major hits, all had many many players who spent many hours, but they were PUNITIVE AS FAWK in the gameplay mechanics.

EQ had you running around in the dark looking for your goddamn corpse like a naked baby
UO was just brutally lawless and it was nothing to lose all your gear to some jerkoff who was having a bad day
SWG forced your login habits via maitenence & depreciation of your career based structures
FFXI just took a shit in your mouth anytime you died with a nice smack in the face and xp deduction (yay deleveled!) punitive crafting system (yay i just lost a month's worth of farming in mere seconds on a failure) completely unintuitive (oh guess I have to look up a guide online to avoid trying to make things that are int he sweet spot and wont destroy all my items or the ones i can make but wont give me a skillpoint)

The classes & races make sense, given the pre-established lore, I mean for crying out loud it was based on an RTS game, that right there usually means they're about as shallow as a kiddie pool when it comes to character development. This is why blizzard RTS games shine against the competition, they have character development and hero based game mechanics that draw you in on a more intimate level with your characters, even the grunts had personality, you spent time clicking on them over and over just to hear them get pissed off at you. But they hear you, they're doing whatever they can now to go ahead and appease the ADD gamer or the people who are like "AMG I HAVE TO BE MOR SPESHUL THAN YOU" and write in a bunch of new "lore" to allow for... tauren paladins, amongst other things... *sigh*


My problem with wow (despite the fact that I keep playing it off and on purely out of fictional social obligations) is that the traditional MMO model is built on community and intimacy.

The "Vanilla" generation of wow is looked back upon by many of us vets because of that, getting an epic piece of gear was just like "HOLY SHIT GUYS! LOOK AT THIS OMGOMGOMG" because it was you vs 40 people vs bosses that didn't have a bunch of "how-to" videos and strat sites.

You'd see someone wearing epics hit the auction house and literally people would just stop and shit bricks and start spamming "damn you have nice gear, wish I had that" etc...

people dueled in front of their respective capital cities and earned their cred that way in the pvp community, bg's and ranks came out, I got Knight-Champion, on a high pop server, I was going for rank 10 but I couldn't swing it as a full time student with a part time job, I didn't get any sleep. That race was self induced torture, and I loved every second of it.

Now? you run a fucking nonheroic 5 man and get epics, who the fuck cares? Legendaries don't even have the same meaning, Sulfuras and Thunderfury weren't just a personal effort, often times they weren't even just a guild effort, but a server effort. The call would go out on the realm forums and people would offer their help in the quest to finish those iconic weapons.



Now? nobody knows who you are unless you're a freaking self absorbed movie editor or real life celebrity who dropped his characters name/server info in an interview (yes I play on the server with Chris Kluwe of the vikings)

Blizzard gives you the ability to microtransact the death of the community

$$ race change
$$ name change
$$ gender change
$$ server change
$$ faction change

who the fuck is going to keep track of that?

the achievement system is pretty much worthless, Why have "points" if there is no way to redeem them?

I'm with Shauk most of what you said is very much pre-BC and definitely pre-WotLK. Even the idea where they gave you no flying mount until 77 was an interesting mechanic. It was annoying but it did bring back a lot of the original game flavor of exploration. I can't tell you how many different mountains I climbed and hidden areas I went looking for just to get the Explorers achievement and tabard. The Achievement system is kind of yet another game that some people play and they tagged it up with some nice little things like 310 flying mounts.

Comparatively, it seems WoW is designed for more action-oriented, pwn-seeking, stat-boosting type players. At least it is more catered to that. I have little interest in raiding and arenas. I don't get all geared up about getting the best gear. I don't subscribe to multiple RSS feeds at Elitist Jerks.

In a game with the quality and appeal of wow, I want more adventure, exploration, realism, and ... epicness. I want a more immersive experience where I feel like I'm in a dangerous world as Lasereth pointed out.

Now that I think of it, we're spoiled: we have a public transit system and a teleportation service at our fingertips. It's like we're too afraid of the fantasy world, and so we keep our waterwings on.

I understand why they're there. But surely you can make a game experience with some balance. Do you really need to go everywhere and anywhere at any given time or any given night? This isn't Toronto or New York City. This is (ostensibly) a vast fantasy world. Why is it so... hospitable?

Maybe I'm not after a game with wide appeal...fine. But what should I be playing instead of WoW? Is there something of comparable quality that has what I'm after, or should I bide my time and wait for someone to fulfill my wishes? Maybe I should have given LOTR Online a bit longer.

You both disagreeing with me is exactly why WoW is so popular and why it will never be beaten, even by its own successor. Blizzard has given the majority what they want.

---------- Post added at 10:50 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:49 AM ----------

YES.

You're exactly right. There is no adventure, exploration, or realism in WoW. Sure there's epicness, but it's because of who you're playing with and the accomplishments you've achieved, not the actual game. And I totally agree with the transportation. Let us port and fly everywhere because god knows we don't want to EXPERIENCE THE WORLD OF AZEROTH!

I really disagree.

Take a walk in Icecrown in your best gear at level 80 once you've phased into the zone that has all the wandering dead. You'll last maybe 5 minutes. Its just not safe to walk in that zone, even if you bring a healer with you. One can easily get overwhelmed. I kept getting killed last night for stupid reasons, but that was me making stupid mistakes that I could make in Outland at level 70 that I painfully paid the repair bills for last night.

Your complaint of out leveling your gear, well if you've trying to level a new toon, you can get BOA (bind on account) gear that transfers to your other characters, so you don't worry about the gear while leveling. Just level and grind through because most are just trying to get to lvl80 anyways.

WotLK changed WoW more fundamentally with the tokening system to get different equivalent gear, creating heroics and hard modes, which drop better gear from bosses and bring back life into instances to continue the challenges.

I expect Cataclysm to do more of the same.

---------- Post added at 11:09 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:59 AM ----------

and c'mon taking 20 minutes to getting to Scarlet monastery is not fun. you can't even say that with a straight face that every time you wanted to play the first 20-30 minutes of your gaming time would be eaten up by having to commute to your destination... really? are you serious?

Several months of getting to Dire Maul for 10 man raids, and then getting to MC and taking 20 minutes to get there. So the tank you're waiting for finally logs on, and you still can't play for another 20 minutes because he has to get to the destination?

I can't tell you how boring it is sitting there waiting... and waiting some more... when you are in lower guilds that have to pug people. Raid time at 7 with first pull at 8:30 because you finally got all the people you needed? That's boring and wasteful of everyone's time.

I just find that WoW has taken the "RP" out of RPG. It's more of a fantasy FPS or action game.

When you start using language like leveling, grinding, DPS, tank, BOA, "must be geared," pug, LFG, LF2M, etc. etc., it kinda takes the roleplaying out of it and makes it a game about points, stats, and wo0t!

Maybe I'm just a different kind of hardcore. I'm more of an RP'er than a PVP'er or statmonkey.

I need a game for my kind of hardcore. Lasereth, you want to help me design something? :P

Why does the game have to be about destinations only? I know WoW is built around that. But games don't have to be.

I'm willing to drop my dime on the first MMO game developer who can adequately and elegantly design elaborate random encounters and offshoot quests/adventures based on randomness and your characters' input/reactions.

The Scarlett Monastery is basically a theme park.

back in the day it was the only place that helped on grind out gold to get a mount. and gold was really hard to get back in those days. Now with Hallow events it's still a drag to get there. Today the lifted summon stone requirements so it will get ported over just like you guys hate. But see that's the rub, you don't have to take such kinds of transport, you can walk, you can ride, you can fly (except in azeroth)

And I think that's just a different kind of hardcore. The EJ guys have their theorycrafting and spreadsheets, it's WoW hardcore. DDO tried, I found that boring like LOTR.

As I explained to a good friend of mine who insisted that questing was the only interest in Wow, when he saw some lady fall of the pipe getting from one Naxx room to the other. He said to me,"But she's level 80 why can't she play better?"

I explained to him that anyone can get to level 80. It takes real talent to be able to gear up via instances and get into the end game raids. At that point, you get to see yourself against other players and compare your play style against a different talent build. Things like wowstats allows you to super analyze how you fared against a boss in comparison to another of your class.

In PvP you can square off against singles, teams, or whole groups of people. You can do it in many different games from flag caps to resource caps. Strand of the Ancients allowed for defend the castle and use of seige weapons. The Isle of Conquest lets one lay waste from above in zepplins to the pvpers below. Wintergrasp was just an expansive pvp zone that was just epic when it was in it's heyday with up to 4 40 man raids against 4 40 man raids.

The problem is that MMORPG is an oxymoron

You can have an MMO and you can have an RPG, but it's not feasable to be both, and the reason I say that is Dragon Age pulls off the RPG mechanic awesomely, but that's because it's a single player game, You dont have to wait for the rest of your party to log in, or to travel from the other side of ferelden to continue your adventure, check their auctions, get their newest gear enchanted, finish the quest they were on before you logged in, finish the dungeon they were on before you logged in, finish cybering that night elf before they gain use of both hands for your raid, etc..

What's the point of trying to force an RPG playstyle in an MMO environment where everyone seems to suffer from ritalin withdrawals?

Borderlands is only a four player rpg type shooter and it's extremely annoying to try to sync up with people and their quests logs because the 1st person to the NPC will complete that quest dialogue before you can even read wtf the outcome of your quest was.


RPGS are good solo or on paper (because pacing is moderated by a GM, you can't make him skip his narration, or cut your party members off in the story advancement cuz they're all right there sharing the same input), I just think it's quite impossible to pace the RPG playstyle properly in an MMO fashion.

No. I refuse to believe that MMORPG is an oxymoron. WoW made it one with their product, perhaps.

I just think that game developers haven't made one that works as such yet. I know that the average player in the "MM" part of the MMORPG will have less patience than a flea, but that doesn't mean RPGs have to be boring in a multiplayer context. It just has to be built appropriately.

I doubt it's impossible to create an online world with strong RPG elements that won't please a wide audience.

The bottom line is if you get bored at anytime..."You don't have to be here." Go off and find something you want to do in the world. Let people make their own experiences. WoW has unfortunately funnelled their experiences into a set number of game modes that are compartmentalized and repetitive.

They already have (original EverQuest), its just most people missed out on it for several reasons. 1. most didn't know about it. 2. it wasn't socially acceptable at the time 3. most of the expansions ruined it, especially planes of power so it only existed for a couple years or so, 4. most don't know roleplay, and 5. most don't get PvP


The problem with today's audience is that they expect roleplaying to be handed to them ala a set of hard coded options because they have no experience roleplaying themselves. If a developer creates a proper MMORPG with all the tools and open endedness a good roleplayer needs the rest will follow. We shouldn't have too many problem teaching the newb elite raiders how to have fun ;)

Old EQ was such an adrenaline rush. I remember this one zone that you could only travel during the day because the undead came out at night and killed anyone they caught. This led to socializing at the safe area/zone entrance until daybreak, huddling together in the night. It was picture-esque roleplay. Instead of seeing it as an impatient omfg what a waste of time thing it was a chance to meet new characters.

Before all the crazy expansions that game was about having fun, people weren't as obsessed with stating out and leveling, etc.

I remember coming across a (PC) roleplaying an evil cleric that would heal his orc (NPCs) "allies" when you fought them, but he was part of my racial alliance (this was one of the pvp servers) so I had to find someone else of another race to form a temporary alliance to take down the evil cleric and "banish" him from the zone. Instead of crying to a GM about griefing this was instead turned into an awesome roleplay experience and was fun instead of "nerdrage omfg /wrists." Instead of getting phat loots which I'd replace in a few levels from this I got a memorable experience.

Another time a high level troll warrior came into the low level starting zone and started going to town on anyone who ventured out alone. Again, instead of /nerdrage: oh noes a challenge, the entire zone of lowbies banded together and took him on like some epic raid encounter! He got many of us, corpses littered the ground, but in the end we brought him down. So much fun, and someone even got some nice loot (one of the pvp servers that allowed looting).

I literally have dozens of these *very* memorable experiences from original EQ. I played WoW just as long and can't remember even one nearly as good. I *really* hope another open ended/challenging/roleplayable MMORPG comes out again so the rest of you can know what a true MMORPG is all about.

PS Shauk I'm a little surprised at some of your comments after hearing your positive review toward Demon Souls being a nice challenge.

Demons souls was a single player game, not even comparable.

MMO's revolve around real world co-ordination & scheduling with other people, usually a LOT of other people, throwing arbitrary 45 minute travel times for the sake of an expansive world feel is artificial and pisses people off.

just read this whole thread, it was a good read. i'm inclined to agree with all the points made that would make a better game. i have a few to add/expand on too.

1) lately i've switched over to d&d online. it's a lot like wow just without the pvp. i'm liking it because it's modelled exactly off the pen and paper games i played as a kid in terms of monsters and rolls for actions.

2 things about it that are BETTER than wow to me are the variety of quests and the traps. the traps are awesome, there's tons of different kinds, and you really jump when you spring one. straight up indiana jones.

they go hand in hand with the philosophy of making quests require a certain class to get through them. i like ddo that way. some are so monster heavy you need a tank, and some are so trap heavy you need a rogue. it makes you feel more special when your party relies on you that way.

another big area thats kind of been mentioned is A.I. I want mobs that react smarter. that help their friends, take cover, flank, etc. this is a big area wow could improve on.

finally, i'm an alt-o-holic, and i'd love to see more abilities and class/talent specialization. people in wow spec more cookie cutter than their gear even. i think they could take pages out of ddo and runes of magic to help that along.

I think it was in reference to the challenge aspect. The thing about the real world coordination and scheduling is a problem in WoW because in that game, you control the world as though you were some kind of visitor in a theme park. A more authentic experience would be something that is constantly attempting to control you, except you do what you can to prevent that from happening. Much of that will involve either being extremely goddamn resourceful as either a lone wolf or a leader, helping out those in the vicinity who will either band with you, abandon you, or simply cause more problems.

WoW doesn't value spontaneity. Which is why I often see broadcast over channels: "Must be geared. Must know the battles."

What? You must know exactly what to bring? You must know the battles? What is this, an adventure or a history exam?

* * * * *

Zeraph, I'm really sorry I missed out on that EQ experience. I also pine after similar experiences I've had playing on an RP world via Neverwinter Nights. It was a really small scale, and had limited mechanics, so I'd like to see anything similar on a larger scale.

I think it comes down to preferred gaming experiences. Some really enjoy the canned experiences that WoW offers. Some, like me, don't take it too seriously, and are just looking for some fun gaming. But I'm sure there is a swath of people who want to see something really geared up towards a multiplayer world that responds in ways we've never seen before. I can't quite ariticulate how it would work at the moment. All I know is that there must be something more sophisticated coming down the pipeline. I wonder what Blizzard is unhatching with their next-gen. I wonder how TOR will play overall. The next couple of years should bring us something, I hope.

Maybe I should just see if there's anything quaint happening on a Neverwinter Nights 2 server in the meantime.

Zeraph, WOW doesn't lack special moments. My friend and I were leveling alts in Northrend. My level 70 Death Knight and his 70 Rogue had just finished a quest and while mounting up on our ground mounts we see this level 80 rogue dismount from his flying mount and disappear in mid air right above us. We both got mounted and took off toward town before he could lock either of us down. We see him reappear and mount back up on his flying mount and he's catching up to us. I hit Path of Frost and we both take off running across the lake while mounted. I tell my friend as soon as we hit land, dismount and stealth and we're going to take him. I hit land and turn around to get him in line of sight. My friend hits land and stealths. As soon as to rogue's in range I hit him with my only ranged spell which puts him in combat and prevents him from stealthing. He comes at me and I blow my defensive cooldowns and then my friend jumps in and goes all out on the guy. The 80 rogue blows his defensive cooldowns while still doing a lot of damage to me even through my tanking and completely defensive playing. I'm hanging around 50% to 75% health getting lucky with Death Strikes, Rune Tap, Health pot, and Mark of Blood. All of those are health restoring cooldowns if you aren't up to date on WoW spells. After about 20 seconds the rogue's at about half health but he doesn't have any cooldowns left and I don't either. This is when he made a mistake. He must have figured I could hang out at 75% health forever and he switched to my attacking my friend as soon as he was about to start doing massive damage to me. My friend blows all his defensive cooldowns and about we get the rogue down about the time my friend runs out of defensive abilities. Now, This example wasn't a 20 vs 1 but it's just one of the many things in the game that make me say Feck ya!

I thought that story was shorter, hmm..

Anyway, WOW has it's moments. I've had some awesome times the last couple months PVPing on my feral druid with my friends. Just Lock + Feral druid in BG is about 90% chance to win. Throw in our Priest and we don't lose. Throw in our mage/prot warrior friend and we just dominate ANY BG - even AV and Isle. The last few months has been almost as fun as the classic days leveling with the TFP bunch on Bleeding Hollow.

I can see WOW going for at least another 5 years. Sure people that's played the game for years will leave but there's going to be people to take their place and new content to play. People that haven't played classic WOW aren't really at a disadvantage compared to people who did. Each Expansion is a fresh start or new end game and sometimes refreshing the old world like the next expansion. Heck, Even small changes to the leveling system made it more fun to level characters. The new quest hub they added in Dustwallow marsh a while back, increased XP from quests and kills along with heirloom items means you can skip some of the really stressful leveling areas that just aren't fun. My last character with 20% xp from heirlooms skipped Western and Eastern Plaguelands, Blasted Lands, Badlands, Burning steppes, Silithus, and barely touched Winterspring. He hit 70 in Nagrand and skipped Stonetalon, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley. He hit 80 in Zul Drak leaving a completely untouched Storm Peaks and Icecrown. Doing those quests at 80 made me a few thousand gold which is still funding my PVPing.

Icecrown has some really good quests. I wish there were more quests like them in less nasty areas. It really is one of those areas where you think you have it under control and you get knocked back or pulled into a group of mobs and you're lucky to survive. The only thing about those quests though is that with the extreme use of phasing it's not as easy to get the group quests finished because you can only have people that have that part of the quest to help. Actually, It's kind of lead me to meet a few people because instead of just finding someone and getting it down super quick and disbanding before even talking to them, You'll find someone 2-3 steps behind or ahead of you and you can help each other get caught up and you actually spend time and talk to them. It goes against the instant gratification effect blizzard likes to give players but I think it may be better in the long run.

ok.. Nuff said.

Like BG said it was more in reference to the challenge aspect. Also, the point I've been trying to get at is that it has only about 1/10th to do with the 'expansive world' part of the equation. The issues you brought up only come up when their is such an extensive focus on gearing up and leveling up. i.e. traveling gets in the way of it. But what if travel was an inherent/fun part of the game? It's a very rough correlation but think of real life and how road trips can be fun.

Try to imagine what an *extensive* MMORPG would be like with no gear or levels, sound boring? Ok, now imagine real life, except you can do anything you want, play any role you want, and not have to deal/feel any of the real suffering or real consequences. Sounds a lot more interesting now, no? Of course the ideal game could still have some form of levels and gear, it just needs to focus on it a lot less, or rather, focus on the other parts equally rather than completely pushing them to the side.

You can have an extensive big world and have fun too. They just need to make it so that the travel experience itself is just as fun as the rest of the game by doing the things (and a few others) I've talked about. An MMORPG can be challenging, big, *and* fun.

Reese- I had moments like that as well when I played WoW, otherwise I wouldn't have played it for ~3 years, but tbh they didn't hold a candle to my old EQ experiences.


(I so wish I could design an MMORPG, I have soooo many ideas).

Yes!!!! I did the same thing. EQ brought moments that I still remember to this day, 10 years later. I agree with Baraka -- you're controlling the world in WoW; in EQ the world is controlling you, just like IRL. EQ felt like you were living in true, living world where real danger is around the corner, not just a roflcopter repair bill and a short hike from the graveyard.

WoW does feel like a theme park.

It's really hard to describe the feeling of playing Everquest but it was totally different from WoW (in a good way). Traveling through unknown lands to some place that you had no idea what to expect was actually fun. Traveling in WoW is boring, I totally agree with that. Running to SM is ridiculously boring. Running to MC is boring. These are real complaints, but what I'm saying is that in EQ, it wasn't boring. EQ found the perfect way to give depth to the world. In EQ, you respected the environment and respected the game world because you knew it had power over you. In WoW, it's let me hop on my mount and plow through 50 mobs at once because I'm so fast, and even if I do die, I just have to pay some gold and be on my way.

I do like that Blizzard is trying to make the game more open to people with short amounts of time to play, but something was lost in the transition.

Because it's annoying to have someone join your group only to cause you to fail. You can take 40 level 80 well geared people to AQ40 which is Pre-BC, and if they do not know the fight, they will not clear that instance. Period. It is important to know how to fight the twins, if you don't, you fail. It doesn't take everyone either, just some, but when it's no one, you can't fake it, til you make it. It's fail from the beginning they just didn't know it yet.

Naxx is a good example. I only have 3 hours of game time an evening. I don't want to spend 2 hours to get only 1 wing down. That's a waste of time. It's also a waste of time to explain the encounter to someone who isn't prepared, especially when there are intricate multiphased fights that require different tasks or focuses for each member.

It used to be that you had to buy a book from Brady Games that explained how the encounters worked. Today, you've got Tankspot.com, WowHead.com, wowwiki.com not only do you have descriptive written strats, but you have people who have taken video of the encounters for you to watch, listen, and learn.

Now there are plenty of people that will explain it over and over because they pug so much. I left a guild that did just that. It took many hours extra to do things that good players that learned and understood their characters and the encounters would.

Yeah, exactly Laserath, WoW is like a theme park. It's like the difference between astronaut camp (WoW) and actually going into orbit around the earth (EQ). One might be a nice way to spend a weekend but the other would yield life long memories.

And to be clear, running around in WoW was very boring 95% of the time.

Cyn, not harping on you specifically, because I was the same way when playing WoW (better know your stuff, don't wipe the group) but don't you see something inherently wrong with that picture? Doing homework for a game? Not sure how we could fix that either, that's a tough one. Perhaps much more randomness so its impossible to "study" for anything. Like literally, somehow balance it so that random boss abilities and encounter powers were randomly paired with dungeons. A programming nightmare but talk about replayability! Basically same skins and atmosphere to keep with lore and quests but everything else would be different, different passageways, different mob types, etc.

There's something inherently wrong with protecting my game time to make sure that I control the quality of my experience? This is magnified in a 25 man group because you're begging on 24 other people's time. 10 man, 9 people, 5, 4 more people...

Seriously I'm not interested in playing in an instance with someone who doesn't understand the mechanics of the fight. Encounters aren't all tank and spank zergs. There are some that require uses of strategies, there are some that require splitting up into 2 teams each team doing something different in different locations. Why am I going to risk failure when I only have 3 hours of play time?

I'm not so happy to pug with people, in fact a successful pug gets a name on a friend list and usually that's where I'm looking for people second to looking within the guild.

Blizzard tries to deal with some of this via the new Dungeon Finder which replaces the LFG tool.

I think this was in reference to how the game is constructed, not in how you structure your own time. We get why you do what you do. This isn't a flaw in players like you; this is a flaw in the game. You have to study, know, and have experience in a particular raid in order for it to succeed. You basically have to know pretty much what is going to happen or it's not worth your time.

Don't you find that boring and repetitive? And a little bit unrealistic, if not plastic and prepackaged?

It doesn't seem that way. You seem to enjoy it regardless. Well, then, let me ask you something else: Wouldn't you enjoy an alternative that was dynamic and spontaneous on a grand scale?

I personally see little value in replaying the same battles over and over again. I'd rather dynamism and the surprise and novelty factor of randomness: essentially a world that is alive and constantly evolving.

Yes, WoW is like a theme park.

PUKE!!!!! Seriously??? Traveling in WoW is so boring that they're taking it out of the game? Now it's even more like a level-based console game. There is no world to explore now, no moments of grandeur while traveling with friends, just instant-port to the dungeon, do it, go back to the auction house.

There is so much wrong with that. In EQ, porting was sacred, it cost you a lot of money to take a precious port, and only certain classes could port. They used this port ability to make money and finance themselves, while other classes used THEIR useful abilities to finance themselves. No class is special in WoW. Everybody can port home, and making a portal as a mage is a joke of a cost, and now you can simply go directly to the instances and back. It shouldn't be like this.

I'm beginning to think more and more that the huge amount of classes and races available that all have distinct, useful, and individual skills are what makes MMORPGs fun and engaging. In WoW everything and everyone is the same, chasing after the same thing in the same way.

Lasereth, at this point in WoW's history, everyone is just after the end-game anyway, right?

Isn't that why it's easier to be low levels now? And why mounts are cheaper and can be obtained at lower levels? And why teleporting has been slowly opened up?

Well this patch pulled me out of my anti-wow mode long enough to try it, I actually enjoy the new LFG tool. Cry all you want, but it's nice to get 3 runs done in an hour because it cuts all the bullshit timesink mechanics out. I'm finally getting the game time I pay for in that month. The way I see it, i'm making up for the last 5 years of manual travel time.

what realistic? you mean that there aren't dragons walking around in the world and people just can't conjure firebreathing dragon heads to bonk you on the head?

It's a game, it's a game dynamic. Every boss encounter isn't identical, but it is predictable to a point, but that doesn't mean that it can be completely succeeded on first try.

No I don't want a game dynamic that is always evolving and random because then it isn't a puzzle to figure out. If there's no need for strategy then it's a matter of just zerging right on through. It's a matter of having a random encounter that wasn't as hard a particular time.

You're interested in just about 1/2 of the game itself since you're not interested in raiding. Raiding at 10 man level is not the same as raiding at the 25 man. The encounters are more random as you would put it, and even add the hard modes, even more random. Sartharion 3 drakes up is a nice challenge to just differentiate from regular Sartharion. Ulduar with hard modes, really challenging. Heroic 25 man Trail of the Crusader, 50 attempts per week first 3 bosses on a 9 minute timer, requiring you to down the bosses perfectly in roughly 2 minute timers until the next boss. Don't down it, next boss shows up and you deal with all of them.

Also, since they patch pretty often releasing new areas and instances. There is still the Sunwell area where I haven't complete, same with Black Temple from BC. While it is somewhat easy, again like with AQ40 it's not an instant win. Heck even BWL can't be completed by geared 80s unless they know the fights.

Cyn reread what I said, I agreed with you and said I did the same thing in WoW.

I don't think anyone wants instant wins. In fact I want the exact opposite. We don't want repetitive encounters we need to study out of game for... And how wouldn't it be a puzzle? It'd be a new puzzle every time. A puzzle isn't a puzzle if you already know the answer like WoW.

We seem to have a communication problem.

rubik's cube is still a puzzle even if you know the answer. getting it done in the most efficient time, or while playing guitar hero makes for a different challenge but still doesn't change that it's a puzzle.

I don't study for the encounter any more than I am just being aware of what to expect. I just died from something as simple as not hiding behind a rock in one of the new instances. Sucked to be me, the rest of the guildies forged on and downed the boss. I felt stupid for not knowing to hide behind the rock even after DBM announced it as a raid warning.

---------- Post added at 05:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:32 PM ----------

knowing the answer doesn't mean you can execute the answer.

No, but some semblance of space and time should be maintained, even in a fantasy world. WoW has everything set in a jack-in-the-box.

This is beside the point. I know why it is what it is, but I want something else.

It can be both dynamic and a puzzle to figure out. A strategy can be applied to something not very predictable. There's Plan Bs and Plan Cs, and maybe even a Plan9, and other what-ifs. If you know how the the enemy already works down to the stats, you just need the stats to match them and a bit of skill to win. Is there any learning going on in the process? Are there any surprises and overcoming any real challenges?

The WoW model of canned experiences will get old before much longer, especially if something groundbreaking comes along.

I bet you I'd have fun doing this. I just don't know if I'll ever get into it. I don't know the first step in getting there. (Do I need to put together a resume?)

But this talk of 10-man/25-man and "bosses" on timers.... I get it. But I really do think there is far more to come in gaming in the near future. It's just a matter of time.

The original Castlevania was fun and challenging. [And, yes, so is the "predictable" win of the Rubik's Cube.] But it's not the kind of game I'm interested in anymore. Things change; they get more elaborate; and they tap into our imagination, our need to analyze things, and how much we like to process information and solve things...and beat them.

Games have gone from simple puzzle-type entities to something far more. They're social, even. The next generation of games will bring us something closer to reality. By this I don't mean the mundane. I mean something more akin to the physics that we understand all too well, and the sophisticated way the elements of the universe respond to our words and actions, whether they are inanimate objects or fantastical lifeforms.

I'm guessing five years from now, we'll be looking at WoW as something quaint and nostalgic. I'm sure you'll still be able to play it if you really wanted to.

But something else is coming. It has to. There's no reason to stop at WoW.

I think the difference between us is some of you are asking for things that have no bearing on character development or efficient use of time, in fact, quite the opposite, you're requesting features that would increase the amount of time you spend not gainfully playing your character. Stuck on a ship, or on a journey somewhere.

there is a balance when it comes to strategy. If it's stupid enough that you can brute your way through it without knowing the encounter, it's not going to be fun or hold my attention. If it takes a while to co-ordinate the execution, it's going to be much more meaningful to everyone who downs it.

the thing is, you want your groups to be equally skilled.

After you're past the "experience" of downing that boss, you're now expected to be able to repeat that performance. You and your peers have proven to eachother that you have what it takes to work together to overcome that strategy.

Dont kid yourself, not everything in this game is reduced to boss killer websites, even with those sites up there, there are many guilds who still have not completed Ulduar, or ToC, even after reading or watching the video, simply because they play with less skilled/nongamer oriented individuals.


I was in the 3rd most advanced guild on our server (which as of the end of the 3.2 cycle was #3rd most progressed realm in the US) so I'm rather familiar with progression raids and mindsets. (everything is in a scramble right now since apparently damn near all the raiding guilds have cleared the 4 bosses up on the 1st day.)


Back to the original subject, I don't think wow will be dethroned by any upcoming MMO's on the horizon at the moment. The only MMO franchise that stood a chance to get ME was the Fallout franchise and that's so mired in legal bullshit and conflict that it'll likely never make it past the concept art stage.

They've already said, whoever cannibalizes the WoW playerbase, isn't going to do it by imitating WoW.

That said, I'm pretty tired of MMO's I play through the dungeons a few times and get some average gear and then I usually kick off for a few months and wait for the next thing to interest me. I pretty much had my pickings in ulduar and didn't feel like fussing with the ToC patch, My gear is fine for ICC apparently since I geared my character well.

Some of the new instances are big enough that you drive siege weapons or mounts. Walking through Ulduar is humongous. Ice Crown Citadel is equally huge so far.

I don't need to travel the zones again and again and again....Do you think that people who live in Hawaii actually just keep paying attention to the scenery? i did that over and over for questing. i don't see the point for raiding or even doing the heroic dungeons. Nothing is stopping you or a person like you from walking from point A to point B.

---------- Post added at 07:31 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:27 PM ----------

and here's what my guild's link has for tonight 10 man ICC. I don't see how much this is really like studying your opponent. I don't think reading a little to know what to expect is such a burden.

BTW WoW will be around for 10 more years. Guarantee it.

It wont be the same wow, i'm sure. They've talked about doing a graphic overhaul to try and keep it visually relevant.

Though I still remember the old Ogre models vs the new ones. What an outcry that caused...

The alpha screenshots of wow were a lot higher polycount than the current release so it's fairly safe to say they have a nice amount of those art assets taken care of already.

EQ is around 10 years later with a playerbase still in the hundreds of thousands. WoW's playerbase is still growing...in 10 years I wouldn't be surprised if 1,000,000 people were still playing it.

Shauk and Cyn, I don't get it. Are you defending WoW? Or arguing it is the perfection of gaming? This thread is about what the next gen is going to be about. Its not an attack on WoW. I don't care what item or product you name, something better will come along. Despite how it may sound this is not a review of WoW, Laserath, me and BG have all been players of WoW and enjoyed our experience. This thread is about speculation and WoW need not be defended.

Shauk- You're looking at it wrong about "optimizing" your time. Your making gaming sound like a job. It's about having fun. The zen quote about life being about the journey and not the destination really applies here. If the end objective is fun, then it doesn't matter how you get there whether it be traveling on a boat or whatever. The end objective is not about killing the boss or getting max level and all loot. Think about how long you'd play an MMORPG if you were completely maxed out from second 1 of playing.

Again, (to cyn and shauk mostly) this has nothing to do with creating scenery. It's about creating atmosphere and mood. Gaming is like making love; its important to set the atmosphere and mood with a little music and a conducive environment, ya dig?

Speaking for myself, I don't think the game needs me to defend it, it's doing fine regardless of my input. I think it's doing what it's doing correctly, despite the dissent. I hate the game but that's just personal reasons. Nothing they do will change the fact that it's simply there to devour your time and take your money.


The only reason people are going on about what WoW is doing right is because people are trying to suggest that doing things to the contrary would make for a better next gen game, I disagree,. That's all. Again, not defending wow exactly, but acknowledging that I would prefer wow's way of handling certain aspects of the game compared to the ideas presented in this thread.


I'm the kind of person who has fun by being challenged, and finding myself in the unique position to "be that guy" to turn the tide, the hero, and play in just the right way to overcome the odds.

Sometimes I wind up in severely undergeared situations, where my healer can't possibly be expected to keep me up. That isn't fun.

Sometimes I wind up in severely overgeared situations, where the challenge is completely nonexistent and we just rape everything in our path. That isn't fun.

Sometimes we're adequate, and something goes horribly wrong. and everyone but me dies, and I go through an impossible sequence of kiting, evasion cooldowns, pet management, consumables and environmental manipulation to finish off the encounter.

THAT is the only time I have fun. That is the spontaneous situation I enjoy.
Everyone can know the fight, but thngs can still go wrong.

There is nothing skillful about flying/boating from point A to point B in an MMO, environments are non interactive eye candy and I don't find staring at them, be it from the back of my achievement rewarded proto-drakes, or on the rails of a predetermined scheduled ferry, to be challenging, rewarding, or enriching my gameplay.

The only thing I looked forward to on the boat rides in FFXI was the pirate attacks, and even that was pretty static.

They can do that, but the option to bypass it in favor of efficiency needs to be present for me to consider it fair to all parties involved. Some of us don't get off on the polygon simulation of traveling.

Again I think we're confusing the distinction between RPG and MMORPG

The only time we give a goddamn about our "environment" is when we're solo playing (ok maybe duo-ing), farming, questing, etc...

When you have 5+ people involved, environment takes a back seat, you are there to do a task, you are there to overcome the challenge inside the chosen instance, you put your game face on, and bring forth your knowledge of the class to the table to make sure the other sad sacks who got saddled with you are not viewing it as a misfortunate situation instead of an enjoyable experience.

While it's all well and good that you think that, you're absolutely wrong if you think all WoW players think that. The backlash over the 1 room raid that was ToC should tell you everything you need to know about how WoW players feel about atmosphere. People bitched endlessly about how boring MC looked. Same with AQ40. Even worse with ToC. People who play this game care ENORMOUSLY about how the environment looks, no matter how many other people they're playing with. One of the things that has really set apart the good raids from the bad is how immersive and real they've felt other than as a place to kill some mobs.

i am a WoW player from the start and whats getting me looking else where is the peaple playing it. there getting rude snobby and plain assholes on the 2 servers i play on. Now with all the addons it almost plays itself. ive gotten to the point that im looking elsewhere becouse of the players.

I don't think that anyone here has said that it's how all players think. It's simple to believe that there is going to be a selection of 11M that do, and a selection of 11M that don't. To call it a backlash, means something more than just complaining, and I don't see any or have never seen any backlash. Backlash implies a lot more than just complaint, but also that something would happen to affect change by the complaint, even acknowledgment that there was some flaw or issue.

During MC most subscribers computers couldn't handle the existing polygon count. No vanity pets, no extra this or that... it was a freakin' cave. It was also no the end. Just like AQ40 was not the end, and ToC isn't the end.

TOC was probably the most imaginative in the circles and articles that I've read because no one expected that line of the story to unfold. Not only that but the idea that there were no trashmobs, just boss after boss after boss was pretty different after playing Naxx for 6 months.

And that's what I think the NEXT game would require. The benefit of scaling up and down for the user base that it wants to have. Not everyone wants to have powerful computers with next gen vid cards to see the beauty of the game. Some just want the game play. Some what the lore. Others want the combination. Some want the hardcore experience, others want the ability to have the experience without the timesink.

I just want to make sure I'm clear one more time cause it still doesn't seem like I am. I don't want particularly high end graphics or time-sinks or scenery. In fact if a game came out with graphics circa original WoW (or even original EQ, so long as its 3D) but had the gameplay and immerisiveness I was looking for I'd have no problem playing it. Time-sinks for the sake of time-sinks are dumb. But when I play an MMORPG I want to feel like I'm part of an epic, breathing, living world. That's just not the case with any current MMORPGs. They all feel the complete opposite of real. More like playing Call of Duty with dragons.

In WoW, even after spending over 3,000 hours on my Warrior before BC came out, I sat in IF trying to see how many flips I could do in a row with my NE. I did that because the actual game outside of raiding was boring. No reason to go anywhere because it wasn't fun or engaging. Just being in the game world itself was bland and felt static. Raiding I admit was fun but there has to be more than that. Players should want to leave the AH and travel the world if there's nothing left to do, just to explore and discover new things, and in WoW that wasn't possible. Part of it I think is the third person perspective that let you pull the camera all the way back so you're sorta detached from the world, almost like playing an adventure game. I don't see a way to combat this while making the character control system as perfect as WoW's but it's something I hope is revolutionized in the future.

Yeah, that's a great point actually. I really miss the first person perspective even though most games do it rather horribly. That's just one of those mechanical/programming things we'll have to wait for some genius to come up with a solution.

I don't think 3rd person view is the problem. A lot has changed since Classic, Lasereth. You can spend a couple hours a day doing daily quests. Wintergrasp every 2ish hours gets you out of town for some PVP. They just added a new fishing tournament for Wednesdays at primetime instead of Noon Sunday and that kinda gets people out of the city.

I'd like to see even more though. I think they need to up the rewards for ALL PVP areas to max level to attract people to them. The PVP zone in Grizzly hills is REALLY fun but the rewards take quite a few visits and since it's level 76 I've outleveled it on all my characters before I ever got to buy a piece of gear from them. Just Up the cost of the items and make them require honor and their tokens and scale the gear with other level 80 PVP gear. That'd keep people coming back.

I think they need to other events throughout the day too and the rewards need to good enough to get people to leave town.

I thought I've traveled most of Northrend, and here I just discovered a new place. Hrothgar's Landing. I don't know what quests are here. but it's brand new to me.

i found a place, didn't catch the name, had some tauren in a cave, little spark flame elemental things and weird rifts in the air. looked like a good place to farm fire.

some cave in far N.E. Storm Peaks. Never been in that one before.

Nobody is ever there either.

MC wasn't as boring as the actual trash in there. Earth elemental #275721 and Fire elemental #257473 and then bosses that used the same model only... *gasp* bigger.

ToC is visually boring, agreed, but then again, I dont expect much from an arena type raid. (this is also why i prefer BG's vs arena)

I thought AQ40 was awesome. Screw everyone else.

AQ 20 was my favorite zone and 40 my least ;) Ha.

I just loved AQ40's 1st boss, back then ret paladins were shunned, looked down upon, and not taken in to raiding guilds.

I had the fortunate occurance of being MC'd by the boss, which had the wonderful side effect of making me as big as the boss. Our mages were quite stupid and just allowed me to run around smashing the raid with my sulfuras, our raid leader nearly had an anuerysm because our mages let it happen and didn't poly me at any point. Of course it was only after I violated his face that he said anything about it.

I found it to be a point of joy because even though I was tolerated with my off spec, I wasn't entirely embraced, and upset many of the "pure dps" classes with the fact that I would outdo them on the meters so i'd still catch a snide comment here and there about me being the "Retardin"

It feel so good to kill them. so good.

I pretty much stopped playing WoW right around the time the BC talents came out and Ret pallies became ball-smashing freak-shows. Is that still the case these days?

Yes and no. Seal of command does less than it used to back in the ball smashing days, and the pve dps seal is worthless in pvp. They're still hard as hell to kill

Sigh, I just realized how far away the old republic probably is. Closed beta hasn't even started yet :( So knowing bioware might be up to 2 years till release. I'm guessing CB won't start till Jan or maybe even March of next year. They did open up sign ups for it though a month or two ago, so sign up if you haven't. I usually try to ignore games until their out, but meh I'm bored. I'm liking the looks of the ideas floating around on their forums though. The community already seems quite strong for a game not even in CB yet.

So back to the subject. I'd like to see spellcasting be more of a thinking man's (or woman's) game. Spell choice, some sort of preparation, etc, rather than just blasting with fireball for the nth time. I want creative purposes to spells that don't just give X amount more damage.

I'd like to see puzzle rooms, or encounters based more around traps and such, rather than just npc X. Personally I'd like a "kid*" unfriendly game. One than punishes random reckless behavior. For instance hunter-stalker mobs that only strike when you're alone, or trap rooms.

I'd like to see some sort of randomized stat loot system like Diablo2. On the otherhand, I'd like a reward for every person for every major encounter of some kind. Exact rewards would vary of course, but I'd like to see a loot system to reflect this. I am so sick of dealing with ninja looters taking rare items that don't benefit their class. So whenever the treasure chest or mob was looted all loot would be preassigned to make sure everyone got at least one reward, but there'd be a trade drop down menu so you could switch loot with someone if you both agreed. This would take care of those rolling shenanigans I've had so many headaches over the years from.

Mounts, mounts, and more mounts. I want mounted combat, different types of mounts, different stats on mounts, attacking mounts, different uses for mounts. Underwater mounts, flying mounts, maybe even burrowing mounts. Pets and summons, everyone should be able to summon something or have some sort of animal companion that can help them fight. Of course they'd have restricted uses (to keep down the clutter), especially in groups. For instance in PvP and boss encounters there could be an anti summon spell that kills all summons in an AoE. They'd mostly be useful for soloing and flavor.

Unique travel encounters. I want there to be certain places that require certain groups or spells or rituals to reach and that have dangerous encounters along the way. For instance, to travel to the plane of fire you'd have to find an elementalist to cast the spell, and then brave the fire elementals that may come out to eat you. No easy flight path for you.

I want more horror elements. Not in the gore sense, but in the Doom3, or RE, or Silent Hill where things jump out at you and scare the shit out of you.

I want there to be some kind of mob scaling so that a horde of zombies is always dangerous and there is no point in your progresssion that you can walk up to 56 zombies and 1 shot them in an AOE. Sure you should feel like youre growing in power, but the scaling is ridiculous in current games. Even level 1 monsters should still pose *some* kind of threat.

*Kid in quotes since plenty of adults are responsible for such behavior too.

I thought this was funny. I found this on Reddit a while ago.


>>LINK<<

Along these lines, I really liked the combat Heroic Opportunities you could complete with groups in Everquest 2... depending on which class in the group starts it, and the order of the classes that follow, you could massively increase the group damage, healing, buffs etc etc. That was fun.

From http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Heroic_Opportunities

"Opportunities begin when a group member uses their starter ability, then members of the group advance the starter chain to pick a table to roll an effect from, then advance the finishing chain to trigger the effect. Advancing chains is done by using spells and combat arts with particular opportunity symbols and sometimes in particular orders. The opportunity system uses symbols/icons which can be found in most spell and combat art examination windows as the second icon down on the right side. When the opportunity ring flashes a particular symbol, any spell or combat art that is represented by that symbol can be used to choose that option (for starter chains) or fulfill that requirement (for finishing chains). Valid abilities will flash on players' hotbars as well. Abilities that are used to advance the chain also cause their normal effects."

Sounds interesting, didn't play EQ2 though, so not sure. My only caveat with that type of a system (its sounds like anyway) is it may become too commonplace and and formulaic and too much of a requirement for everyone to participate in and lag spikes might ruin the chain or some newb. On the other hand if the complicated stuff is kept to the major spell casting classes then hopefully only people good at that kind of thing will keep up with it to end game. As I'm not sure I'd want it to be a requirement for everyone, for every tough encounter.

Although I'm definitely not averse to more advanced tactics. And maybe something along those lines could be developed so long as it didn't rely on the weakest link in the chain kind of thing (by making several people able to complete each step).

I can just see it:
"Dude, hit your ice spell, ice ice!"
"Dude, wtf!"
Group dies.
"what happened? Sorry was afk."

So to sum up, tough encounters, but encounters that don't exploit the weakest member of the group. I like it when the good players can take up the slack.

Sounds like Viscidus

Viscidus - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

He sounds really neat, wish I could have fought him. In other news does WoW ever have an original idea? :P It's art and style is 90% from fantasy warhammer and half the ideas are from D&D or other games. I can't really fault them too much though, especially the ideas as that'd be dumb not to capitalize on. But I always thought it was a little weak how much stylization they took from warhammer (which was around on tabletop before its MMO came out before anyone says WoW came out first).

Warcraft itself is 15 years old. but all that stuff kind of borrowed from each other, making slight tweaks and adjustments to make it slightly different.

I don't know what you guys are talking about. This is all a ripoff of Tolkien, who, in turn, ripped off the authors of the classics and the periods of antiquity.

It's all good.

I'm talking more about style; that's different than a green dude that's called an orc and tends toward chaos. I don't have a problem with those standards. Also, I played warcraft too, and there's very little similarity in there between it and WoW. WoW is a heck of a lot more fleshed out I mean, obviously the orcs are fairly standard and what not.

I wish I could find the old warhammer thread where someone detailed out all the similarities between em and clearly showed that warhammer had developed the style first. Keep in mind warhammer was around in the early 80s, way way before warcraft I came out.

So we've been talking about gameplay, but what about business models? What do you want to see? ~$50 + free month + ~$15 each month after? Free to download and play at low levels but pay per month to unlock the rest? Cash shop? Pay per content unlock ala guild wars?

I'm really not sure personally. I really, *really* dislike the current popular model of $50 + $15 per month (especially when you throw in the $40-50 expansions). Seems like a total ripoff (I could be totally wrong of course). In the old days it made sense because of how insanely costly bandwidth was. Now though servers, bandwidth, and even employees are all cheaper. Yet the costs haven't gone down at all. Basically stayed the same (in time with inflation).

Cash shops generally suck, though I suppose if they did it right... so long as you didn't get any undue advantages and still paid reasonable amounts.

I'd like to see some sort of hybrid system. I think MMORPGs should definitely be free to download and initially play. They tend to end up that way pretty quickly anyway. The reason being is that unlike most games, MMORPGs rely on new people way way more, otherwise the game becomes quite stale and goes in a downward spiral (see warhammer).

So for costs, I'd say some sort of low monthly cost, about 5 bucks or so. Then add a cash shop, but only for non essential items, just for a way for the company to make extra cash for those with money to burn. Also, some sort of content unlock, not a lot at once, but many mini-expansion like unlocks here and there for ~$10 instead of doing full expansions that cost $40 one month and $10 6 months later. This will also help keep long boring dry periods away and let people play more at their own pace.

So in summary, use every option available but scale down the $ way more. Best of all worlds hopefully. Leave some parts of the game perma unlocked so people can come back and visit friends without paying per month, this hopefully wets their apetite as well as keeps the game populated. I'd probably still be playing WoW if they had used this model. I think all MMOs need some sort of free (but not fully unlocked) way to go back and check things out.

MMORPGs are like social networks such as facebook or myspace, they need a way to pull people into the drama. Esepcially to draw old players back between major expansions. The best way to do this is to make some parts of it free (and not just trial accounts for new players).

As much as I am hoping for the best for TOR, i will support Blizzard until it crumbles in the mmo world. Now this scenario seems almost impossible with a company with such history but there is something about dual-wielding purple lightsabers that just makes me want to close my Battlenet account, take a trip down to bioware HQ and smuggle myself into the building :paranoid:

No one has a single opinion on the business model aspect?

I've been gnawing on it for some time now and with the development costs and overhead costs in the millions I'm having a hard time with any other business model. I don't like the idea of advertising in my MMO or video games that aren't natural so sports games it makes sense. Other than that, I don't see how they can keep the revenue to get the development dollars to further production on the game.

I see nothing wrong with the monthly subscription model, even in addition to single-sum payments for major expansions. I see the subscription cost as necessary for maintaining the world, tweaking it, fixing it, and the number of little goodies that Blizzard creates/runs each month. I see $15ish per month as reasonable for a game that has the extremely high ongoing play value as WoW. I'm just waiting for something better to come along that deserves my $15.

But why do you guys think they deserve the $15 a month? I'm not saying its not worth $15 a month to an individual (since it often is, myself included) but I don't see how its possible that costs are still that high per month.

The math is pretty easy to do for total sum. Anyone know the current subscription number blizzard has? Pretty sure its in the millions per month. Where is all that money going? Programmers don't cost millions to pay. Bandwidth doesn't. I can't prove it but I have a feeling $15 is a total ripoff.

I remember when, it was either EQ2 or WoW was in beta and they were considering going below 12.99 a month (the current cost of EQ1 at the time) but decided to go with 15 a month once they each heard the other was willing (I think they made a deal behind closed doors). If they were considering less and still wanting to see a profit, I can't see it costing more than $10 a month. Probably more in the ballpark of 6-8$.

Especially when one considers all the free MMORPGs out there that still make a profit when only like 30% of the player base is paying for cash shop items.

The upkeep costs for your free MMO's compared to WoW are probably night and day difference, with the amount of server hardware it must take to run all of the servers they have up, and in all the various places they now keep servers in addition to the cost of the number of GM's to support a playerabase in the millions plus funding development for future expansions then throw in all the money they blow to put on Blizzcon every year which is a loss for them despite how much people spend to go there. Also theres marketing costs throw in the WoW commercials and the ads you see for it everywhere... I'd say it adds up.

As for my personal opinion as to why it DESERVES $15 dollars a month? I'm with the crowd that looks at it this way, as a gamer on average playing regular games even if I ONLY purchased a new game every 4 months which would be a rarity considering how short most single player games are that'd be close to equaling out what I'd spend on WoW. As most WoW players can tell you chances are if you play it you won't be bothering spending your time on much else because of the time investment and wealth of things to do in the game. So in the end by spending 15 a month on this and not buying any other games I'm really saving myself money in the long haul.

WoW -> Info -> F.A.Q. -> General
I don't pay $15/mo. I pay $12.99/mo. And if I could pay a yearly amount at $11.99/mo I would. If I was to play the game every DAY once a day for 1 year for 365 days a year, it's not even $0.43 a day. There's no single bargain for entertainment than that. Not even your cable bill hits that price point.

Even if you were to pay the full $15 you're talking $0.49 per day to play the game.

How is that a rip off if you were to just play every day for one single hour of game play?

Since I'm in the middle of spec'ing out a new rig, I'm looking at the cost of what it costs for me to play the game including the hardware and software costs, and quite honestly there are people who spend more on golf clubs and all the greens fees in a year than what I will spend on a good rig and the associated subscription and upfront Blizzard costs.

Overall, I think that the business model is fair and hits that profitability price point. So long as they continue to pump out good content and support as far as hardware is concerned, meaning pushing my own graphics cards and hardware to the limit as new tech comes out, it's in the millions for development costs.

I know someone who is at the a college that pumps out the workers for Blizzard and the like down south and it isn't much different now than it is for the movie industry as far as content and story telling, then you still have to have the technical people to engineer the back end tech to support and scale to the story telling. Make a bad one like Matrix Online and you never get a core of players that make the investment worthwhile.

Man I wish I had been able to hop into this thread earlier.

Reading back on all the fun stuff from EQ makes me wonder how it fell off...

I remember playing with Lasereth many times, we both agree that being in first person made you almost feel a "connection" with your character.

I started playing WoW and never felt the same connection there. Anymore it definitely is a stats race rather than enjoying a world and enjoying your character.

I really liked how things in EQ weren't "soul-bound" I remember giving my Necromancer's pets weapons...the better the weapon the more damage he'd do. Also swapping weapons with a friend was awesome (I beat Lasereth in a duel with his own weapon...couldn't beat him with mine :no:)

I also miss that every class had it's own niche...all the classes in WoW seem to be getting more and more homogenized. Example, Rangers could actually track things, specific things, including other players bodies - you got paid money for this if you could help another player find their body that was way out in the middle of nowhere.

Biggest reason I play WoW now is that I loved the world from playing Warcraft 2 and 3. The stories are awesome, the characters are awesome. I just wish it had more of a "fantasy-realism" feel to it.

I really love this thread. I had so many great memories of my time in EQ. Great old friends, a world that took my breath away.
Anyone remember seeing hill giants in the distance and being blown away by the size?
Stepping foot for the first time into Gfay and realizing i was stepping into a whole new world!
I may be sadistic because it did have its evil faults but i wouldnt mind playin classic before any expansions EQ (maybe kunark)


Oh well its in the past im very much looking forward to SWTOR. Ive long since given up on WoW. After playing and quitting 4 different times i just have no energy to do the same shit over and over again!
Raiding is subpar every instance is so scrypted its like the same movie over and over again!
I just wish SWTOR would hurry up. Though i know bioware does nothing before its 110% ready