There's also that whole question of "Time". I work full time and live alone. There is simply not enough time for me to sink hours into an MMO anymore. When I was younger and unemployed, I could "afford" to sink 5 hours a day into WoW, but these days? Nah.You live alone? You have *plenty* of time. Try it while being a single father of 5 or something :) :P
You live alone? You have *plenty* of time. Try it while being a single father of 5 or something :) :PWell yeah, that's of course worse. But living alone also means that there's no one else doing laundry, dishes, taxes, bills, cleaning and stuff. So a lot of time goes to house work. ;)
There's also that whole question of "Time". I work full time and live alone. There is simply not enough time for me to sink hours into an MMO anymore. When I was younger and unemployed, I could "afford" to sink 5 hours a day into WoW, but these days? Nah.That's what the weekends are for.
That's what the weekends are for.Criminals do not have weekends. Therefor neither does the Police. I work mornings, evenings, nights and weekends. All varying on a week-to-week basis.
Oh but then you can play with a taser! That should be fun too!That's what the weekends are for.Criminals do not have weekends. Therefor neither does the Police. I work mornings, evenings, nights and weekends. All varying on a week-to-week basis.
Guild Wars 2 Angry ReviewWOW that review was glowing. He could not find enough good things to say about the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax-_06Acj8Y
Guild Wars 2 Angry Review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax-_06Acj8Y
Maybe after college I'll give MMOs another look, but I'm happy with what I have now to enjoy the experiences of the games I got.Aww, he thinks he'll have more time after college. That's so cute :) .
Isn't it?Maybe after college I'll give MMOs another look, but I'm happy with what I have now to enjoy the experiences of the games I got.Aww, he thinks he'll have more time after college. That's so cute :) .
Well, there is a plus, Isaac. You won't be paying 15$ a month for something you won't be able to play due to a crazy schedule.
Maybe after college I'll give MMOs another look, but I'm happy with what I have now to enjoy the experiences of the games I got.Aww, he thinks he'll have more time after college. That's so cute :) .
Good thing Guild Wars 2 was released when it was. I didn't think it would be possible.. but I'm getting a bit bored of AI War. According to Steam I've played it 1143 hours. Some of that is afking ofcourse. But I've played the last ~700 hours of AI War without playing any other game every day when I'm not studying.Um, yea, I suggest a break :) Glad you've gotten that much time out of it, but I imagine you'll get more total if you break it up with other interesting games.
This is where I've been for the past several weeks. In case anyone was wondering why I completely dropped off the forums.I thought maybe you'd found that a gelatinous cube requires more than a mop to clean up ;)
Now if you want to talk about a real grind, I can think of a few from my WoW days that would make your eyes bleed.Most likely. Pretty much every MMO I've ever tried besides GW1 and 2 have elicited such an immediately negative and vile response from me that the acrid smell of hatred emanating from my twitching body was probably almost palpable.
Edit: I get what you're saying, when the story has weird breaks in it, it can be jarring. "The monsters are coming, we've got to warn the town! Go, now, there's no time!" (Recommended level, 2 levels above you) But that doesn't make the other stuff between it filler, it just means that games are games and game mechanics never map on to our expectation of reality exactly the way we'd like them to.Actually, I'd make the argument that the current design mechanics of an MMO (including most of the content of GW2) don't reflect reality at all.
There are some things in life which we enjoy doing which don't really have stakes, such as going on a nature hike (though this can be somewhat dangerous depending), but usually those aren't the types of things that we work towards and obsess over, those are just a break from the things we really care about.Unless you're one of the few who has gone into e-sports, video games fall squarely into this. People don't play them to put food on the table or a roof over their heads. They fulfil the esteem needs of Maslow's hierarchy: you feel great when you beat a hard boss, solve a challenging puzzle or go up a level. But there are other ways of fulfilling those needs. Obsessing over a game can be dangerous, as seen in those gamers who have died by ignoring their physiological needs. Was the potential reward worth dying for? I doubt it.
Would you rather play a game where you had to spend hours upon hours of killing mobs just to gain a single level, and dying gives you an XP debt? That is a classic definition of "grinding", and I can name a number of MUDs and MMOs that do that. The thing is, most players in that type of game tend to go after the weakest mob that will still give them XP because, while humans like getting rewarded for what they do, they are also risk-adverse. Why go after a golem at your level that can potentially kill you and set back your progress when the mushrooms four levels lower can be slaughtered by the dozens before you need to stop and refill your HP, and they give XP at a faster rate?False Choice Fallacy - A type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.
Also, there are other penalties that MMOs use to punish dying. Item durability loss is a gold penalty, weak at early levels, but painful at high levels. Corpse running is a time penalty, time you could have spent towards advancement. Worse, a party wipe in a dungeon means you have to do much of it all over again. EVE Online is one of the biggest punishers: lose your ship, its equipment, its cargo, all the costly implants you stuck in your character's head and have to buy a new clone to avoid skill loss.I think corpse running is definitely a little silly, and really only acts as a time tax for messing up, but for example having to reset the dungeon after so many deaths seems fair to me. The alternative, which is just being able to respawn over and over until you blunt force the dungeon trivalizes the importance of it. Whatever happened to the gamers that loved a challenge? When we were young we played all kinds of games that made you restart a whole level when you lost, and we loved them. I think games have become much the worse for straying away from that.
Unless you're one of the few who has gone into e-sports, video games fall squarely into this. People don't play them to put food on the table or a roof over their heads. They fulfil the esteem needs of Maslow's hierarchy: you feel great when you beat a hard boss, solve a challenging puzzle or go up a level. But there are other ways of fulfilling those needs. Obsessing over a game can be dangerous, as seen in those gamers who have died by ignoring their physiological needs. Was the potential reward worth dying for? I doubt it.Once again you're committing a logical fallacy by making a Straw Man Argument.
I never said that this was a better solution.Nor did I posit it as a solution, mearly an alternative. I didn't say it was the only one, though you think I implied that. It was more to illustrate the point that as stakes rise, people become risk adverse and pick lazier courses of action.
Professional gamers who take their job very seriously (hence huge stakes) typically do not commit suicide. They play and become successful, or quit and find something else to do. These are driven people with goals, and I don't think you can call using video games as your profession an unhealthy thing to do.That's why I said they are the exception, not the rule. The average gamer isn't earning money by playing video games. So why are they playing? I think it's most likely to have fun. And you don't need high stakes to have fun. Sure, they enhance that feeling of accomplishment, but sometimes you don't want the extra challenge that comes with them. If I come home from work frustrated, I'm not reaching for AI War, I'm going for Minesweeper. Two minutes for an advanced round means I'm sacrificing very little time for a small boost when I've cracked the puzzle.
As I said before, levels in an RPG create an illusion of achievement. Deep down inside we all know we haven't achieved anything.The same could be said for playing any game where you don't get a tangible benefit in the real world. Yet here we are, on a forum for playing with Skinner boxes. There is a small emotional benefit from them that is variable on both the type of box and the personality of the user. But nobody is arguing that any one or even all of the boxes will fill all your needs.
I mean, buying the expansion is going to require the base game to run anyway and trying to double dip on new players to require them to buy both the base-game and expansion as separate purchases won't win you any fans.Granted, BUT I feel like there should be some sort of discount (even up to 50%) to those who already own the base game. I mean it's only fair right?
As for me, I definitely regret buying that expansion because I only lasted another month before quitting for a while. I never should have bought it but I thought some friends were going to keep playing. When they didn't, I lost the last bit of interest I had in it.That's really sad to hear, and really sad to know that they didn't reduce the grinding at all in the expansion (which was my main beef with the game). The grinding was just extremely intense, I don't know what else to say. For a game that marketed itself as "the end of grinding", I don't know if I've ever had to grind that much in any MMO I've ever played.
QuoteAs for me, I definitely regret buying that expansion because I only lasted another month before quitting for a while. I never should have bought it but I thought some friends were going to keep playing. When they didn't, I lost the last bit of interest I had in it.That's really sad to hear, and really sad to know that they didn't reduce the grinding at all in the expansion (which was my main beef with the game). The grinding was just extremely intense, I don't know what else to say. For a game that marketed itself as "the end of grinding", I don't know if I've ever had to grind that much in any MMO I've ever played.
Perhaps it wasn't supposed to feel like grinding, but it did. Then again, when I played the servers were already dying, so things could have changed with the huge influx of players during the F2P transition. A lot of the game's "quest areas" (or whatever they're called) were really made for a lot of people at once.
First, force people to pay full price for the game.Except no one is forcing anyone to pay full price for any game. I get what you're saying but it should be clear that of course companies are going to expect a price when they launch the title and expect you to pay for it if you want to play.
Then, when you find that method to be unsustainable, make it free to play. Then create an expansion with all the content and features the original was supposed to have, and charge people full price for it again. But ignore the original paying customers because, "They should have gotten their money's worth".It's not the greatest thing to do to your customers, I won't dispute that. But I've seen worse behavior. This is an MMO which has a general acceptance that you're going to pay money to play on it. And considering that if people had been paying a subscription to play GW2, they would have paid $500+ by this point. ($15 per month for three years). In addition to the initial asking price of $50/60?. And let's be real, you don't need the $100 version of the expansion, that's a bonus to those willing to pay the money. But it generally seems like a silly thing to do. Should they get a discount? It's extremely debatable. But the thing is, they technically gave people who bought the original game a bonus. Even if that bonus wasn't that great to you, they did at least try.
Can you imagine if Uber had done this for Planetary Annihilation? There would have been an absolute outrage. PA:Titans was free for all the Kickstarter backers and less than $10 for anyone who already owned the game. People wanted to kill them. Maybe things are different in the MMO world, I don't know. I just highly doubt this model would have succeeded in any other case.
Except no one is forcing anyone to pay full price for any game. I get what you're saying but it should be clear that of course companies are going to expect a price when they launch the title and expect you to pay for it if you want to play.Wording here. I should have said "ask".
It's not the greatest thing to do to your customers, I won't dispute that. But I've seen worse behavior. This is an MMO which has a general acceptance that you're going to pay money to play on it. And considering that if people had been paying a subscription to play GW2, they would have paid $500+ by this point. ($15 per month for three years).Well that's my point though. Most of the paying customers had quit before it went free to play, in large part because of the game's problems. The F2P transition was, in some ways, a last ditch effort (that worked). So the idea that you would have been using the paid account for 3 years seems a little farfetched to begin with. I mean ideally that's the way it works, but ideally Uberent would have had a better release with the original PA.
But the thing is, they technically gave people who bought the original game a bonus. Even if that bonus wasn't that great to you, they did at least try.A bonus over the free to play users? Certainly (my god if they didn't at least do that, it would have been practically unforgivable). But technically, the Free to play users who went on and bought the expansion got a bonus over the original purchasers. They paid $10 less, got the original game + the massive amount of expansion content.
Planetary Annihilation is not an MMO, it's a traditional RTS that I'm assuming has no or limited server costs.I agree with most of what you said in your last paragraph, but perhaps not this part. I'm pretty sure PA has some substantial server costs, because the entire game is hosted on their servers. You can't even play single-player without using an Uberent server. That's because the entire design was centered around server-side hosting, which would prevent the inevitable lag problems that most RTS games have in multiplayer, when one person's computer can no longer handle the strain and slows down everybody else. And given that their servers simulate Solar Systems, I would imagine that the cost of this is not negligable, but obviously not on the same scale as an MMO, I'll grant you.
Honestly, I think the problem with GW2 is that its all so meaningless and the combat is just rinse and repeat spells until all creatures in the area die. I just hate the combat if I'm being blunt, it's far too steeped in WoW's to be enjoyable. I think the WoW combat model needs a complete and total re-thinking to make it less about standing in one place and beating the crap out of anything that moves. That's what kills me too because it clearly tries to make the player move around but then there are abitrary limitations to dodge rolling and most of your spells require you to face the target and be within range of them and there's not a lot of reason to move around.
Oops, I completely forgot about the always online component. I have no idea how as we discussed that at length....QuoteExcept no one is forcing anyone to pay full price for any game. I get what you're saying but it should be clear that of course companies are going to expect a price when they launch the title and expect you to pay for it if you want to play.Wording here. I should have said "ask".QuoteIt's not the greatest thing to do to your customers, I won't dispute that. But I've seen worse behavior. This is an MMO which has a general acceptance that you're going to pay money to play on it. And considering that if people had been paying a subscription to play GW2, they would have paid $500+ by this point. ($15 per month for three years).Well that's my point though. Most of the paying customers had quit before it went free to play, in large part because of the game's problems. The F2P transition was, in some ways, a last ditch effort (that worked). So the idea that you would have been using the paid account for 3 years seems a little farfetched to begin with. I mean ideally that's the way it works, but ideally Uberent would have had a better release with the original PA.QuoteBut the thing is, they technically gave people who bought the original game a bonus. Even if that bonus wasn't that great to you, they did at least try.A bonus over the free to play users? Certainly (my god if they didn't at least do that, it would have been practically unforgivable). But technically, the Free to play users who went on and bought the expansion got a bonus over the original purchasers. They paid $10 less, got the original game + the massive amount of expansion content.QuotePlanetary Annihilation is not an MMO, it's a traditional RTS that I'm assuming has no or limited server costs.I agree with most of what you said in your last paragraph, but perhaps not this part. I'm pretty sure PA has some substantial server costs, because the entire game is hosted on their servers. You can't even play single-player without using an Uberent server. That's because the entire design was centered around server-side hosting, which would prevent the inevitable lag problems that most RTS games have in multiplayer, when one person's computer can no longer handle the strain and slows down everybody else. And given that their servers simulate Solar Systems, I would imagine that the cost of this is not negligable, but obviously not on the same scale as an MMO, I'll grant you.
Anyway, you're right about one thing: If I don't like the way they do business, I don't have to purchase the expansion. I do think the way they did it was a little scummy. I see no harm in giving a hefty discount on the expansion for those who already owned the original game (hell, when Titans did it, people STILL complained as if Uber had shot their dogs and stolen their girlfriends), but in the end what happened happened so, it's up to the customer now whether to encourage it.
I will say one other thing though: I still remember the ORIGINAL Guild Wars. Back when it first came out. Now THAT was different... there wasnt really anything else like it. Why they couldnt have just stuck to the formula it created initially, I dont know. At least we'd have something INTERESTING on our hands maybe.Oh man, the original Guild Wars was an amazing game. So ahead of it's time. So ahead of its time in fact, that nothing has even been able to replicate its virtues, not even Guild Wars 2.
But the grind is so mind-numbing that I basically have to run YouTube/Netflix/Hulu on the other monitor to keep interested in the game. I know for some on here, *cough* Managarmr *cough* that's nothing special but I don't do thatHey now! It's not my fault my brain is overactive and 90% of all games don't manage to keep me interested or engaged enough. :(
personally I just like listening to things in the back ground when I play games unless I really dig the games soundtrack then ill just listen to that in the background instead.But the grind is so mind-numbing that I basically have to run YouTube/Netflix/Hulu on the other monitor to keep interested in the game. I know for some on here, *cough* Managarmr *cough* that's nothing special but I don't do thatHey now! It's not my fault my brain is overactive and 90% of all games don't manage to keep me interested or engaged enough. :(
I'm glad that I never played WoW. It does not seem like a good MMo but everyone pretends it is.
I like the comple combart from Mabinogi but I don't know if it is similiar to WoW (i doubt it).
Generally it is a Rock-Paper-Scissor System. Diffeent abilities negate other abilities. Autoattack beats Smash, Smah, a slower but stronger version of the standard attack, beats defense, Defense beats the normal attack. Counterattack beats both normal attack and smash, windmill beats counterattack. And Normal attack beats windmill. And don't get me started on the non-standard attacks.
I do however think that int he last years Mabinogi kind of suffered from the typical MMO illness, that it tries to copy other stuff. it ran multiple Anime-crossovers which certainly don't fit the game or its lore. And they launched a new "class", the ninja, which is more like the Nauroto interpretaion of ninjas.
There were also the dual gunners along the way, who are no brainers to use compared to the complex arhers that existed before. I hink Mabinogi tried to make the game more intuitive and engaging for newer players that complained the system was hard to learn because it wasn't like other MMOs.
Someone once told me that "With WoW, the REAL fun begins at level 60!!!!111", since the devs went totally overboard with the blasted raid stuff. And so other games now do that sort of thing too. Where the entire game may as well JUST be raids, because that's all the devs actually care about. So every other part of the game... mindless grinding. See, I'd rather have a game where the real fun begins at level 1... maybe I'm just crazy. And when you DO raids, you cant even see what's going on! You just watch arbitrary little meters and occaisionally hit buttons. Ugh. I dont know if GW2 had that issue, I never got particularly far in it.Don't even get me started on World of Warcraft.
To be honest I wouldn't play Everquest either in the year 2016, but it came out in 1999, so its very dated. It was the birth of a genre, what else would you expect? It set the tone for what became the most profitable gaming market of all time, and for that reason alone it was a masterpiece, even with all its bugs and design problems.
Aside from that, Everquest had very different goals as a game than modern MMOs do. It was much more about being part of a fantasy world, enjoying the scenery, and having a life outside of your own life than pointless achievements, leveling up, dungeon crawling, gear seeking, and high-level raiding. EVERYBODY role-played. There was no such thing as roleplay servers, people just knew that's what you did. My step-brother played a sexy rogue character and all the guys would shower his female character with gifts and levels just to win her favor. My dad made this giant ugly Ogre called "mesexy" (or something to that effect) who went around the world speaking in Ogre, coming on to anybody he met.
Goal-based gaming is what WoW turned the MMO genre into, that's not what it originally was.
So if you are looking for a co-op questing experience, or have a group of max-level characters (because you and all your friends have spent 10 billion dollars purchasing WoW and all its expansions), then dungeon raids or loot-hoarding would be not all that different than your typical ARPG co-op experience.
But that wasn't what Everquest was originally about. It would be more like you and a group of friends traveling the world together, meeting new people, and getting into hilarious situations just for the hell of it, not because you had any specific goal in mind. Leveling up and doing quests would just be a bonus.
To be honest I wouldn't play Everquest either in the year 2016, but it came out in 1999, so its very dated. It was the birth of a genre, what else would you expect? It set the tone for what became the most profitable gaming market of all time, and for that reason alone it was a masterpiece, even with all its bugs and design problems.
Aside from that, Everquest had very different goals as a game than modern MMOs do. It was much more about being part of a fantasy world, enjoying the scenery, and having a life outside of your own life than pointless achievements, leveling up, dungeon crawling, gear seeking, and high-level raiding. EVERYBODY role-played. There was no such thing as roleplay servers, people just knew that's what you did. My step-brother played a sexy rogue character and all the guys would shower his female character with gifts and levels just to win her favor. My dad made this giant ugly Ogre called "mesexy" (or something to that effect) who went around the world speaking in Ogre, coming on to anybody he met.
Goal-based gaming is what WoW turned the MMO genre into, that's not what it originally was.
So if you are looking for a co-op questing experience, or have a group of max-level characters (because you and all your friends have spent 10 billion dollars purchasing WoW and all its expansions), then dungeon raids or loot-hoarding would be not all that different than your typical ARPG co-op experience.
But that wasn't what Everquest was originally about. It would be more like you and a group of friends traveling the world together, meeting new people, and getting into hilarious situations just for the hell of it, not because you had any specific goal in mind. Leveling up and doing quests would just be a bonus.
I still remember, one of the most difficult moments for me one of the few times I played WoW. This was back after Burning Crusade had been released, but perhaps before Wrath, I'm not sure. This was before the mindless grinding matchmaking dungeons you could use to level yourself up all the way to the highest level by drooling on yourself to victory. At that time, I mostly explored the world and did random quests to level up.To be honest I wouldn't play Everquest either in the year 2016, but it came out in 1999, so its very dated. It was the birth of a genre, what else would you expect? It set the tone for what became the most profitable gaming market of all time, and for that reason alone it was a masterpiece, even with all its bugs and design problems.
Aside from that, Everquest had very different goals as a game than modern MMOs do. It was much more about being part of a fantasy world, enjoying the scenery, and having a life outside of your own life than pointless achievements, leveling up, dungeon crawling, gear seeking, and high-level raiding. EVERYBODY role-played. There was no such thing as roleplay servers, people just knew that's what you did. My step-brother played a sexy rogue character and all the guys would shower his female character with gifts and levels just to win her favor. My dad made this giant ugly Ogre called "mesexy" (or something to that effect) who went around the world speaking in Ogre, coming on to anybody he met.
Goal-based gaming is what WoW turned the MMO genre into, that's not what it originally was.
So if you are looking for a co-op questing experience, or have a group of max-level characters (because you and all your friends have spent 10 billion dollars purchasing WoW and all its expansions), then dungeon raids or loot-hoarding would be not all that different than your typical ARPG co-op experience.
But that wasn't what Everquest was originally about. It would be more like you and a group of friends traveling the world together, meeting new people, and getting into hilarious situations just for the hell of it, not because you had any specific goal in mind. Leveling up and doing quests would just be a bonus.
And that's what got me into WoW. I played on an RP server and had a lot of fun roleplaying, because that was what I enjoyed. When RP more or less died out after Burning Crusade I started trying to actually play. I tried PVP and raiding and while I did enjoy raiding as a tank or healer, DPS was mindboggingly dull. Eventually the casualization of raid content and even worse gear grind got to a point where I just didn't want to bother anymore. So I left for good. Still it was two overall fairly enjoyable years.
ugg that's awful blizzard really do seem to get away with a lot of bullshit don't they at times? makes me hope they don't screw over watch up.I still remember, one of the most difficult moments for me one of the few times I played WoW. This was back after Burning Crusade had been released, but perhaps before Wrath, I'm not sure. This was before the mindless grinding matchmaking dungeons you could use to level yourself up all the way to the highest level by drooling on yourself to victory. At that time, I mostly explored the world and did random quests to level up.To be honest I wouldn't play Everquest either in the year 2016, but it came out in 1999, so its very dated. It was the birth of a genre, what else would you expect? It set the tone for what became the most profitable gaming market of all time, and for that reason alone it was a masterpiece, even with all its bugs and design problems.
Aside from that, Everquest had very different goals as a game than modern MMOs do. It was much more about being part of a fantasy world, enjoying the scenery, and having a life outside of your own life than pointless achievements, leveling up, dungeon crawling, gear seeking, and high-level raiding. EVERYBODY role-played. There was no such thing as roleplay servers, people just knew that's what you did. My step-brother played a sexy rogue character and all the guys would shower his female character with gifts and levels just to win her favor. My dad made this giant ugly Ogre called "mesexy" (or something to that effect) who went around the world speaking in Ogre, coming on to anybody he met.
Goal-based gaming is what WoW turned the MMO genre into, that's not what it originally was.
So if you are looking for a co-op questing experience, or have a group of max-level characters (because you and all your friends have spent 10 billion dollars purchasing WoW and all its expansions), then dungeon raids or loot-hoarding would be not all that different than your typical ARPG co-op experience.
But that wasn't what Everquest was originally about. It would be more like you and a group of friends traveling the world together, meeting new people, and getting into hilarious situations just for the hell of it, not because you had any specific goal in mind. Leveling up and doing quests would just be a bonus.
And that's what got me into WoW. I played on an RP server and had a lot of fun roleplaying, because that was what I enjoyed. When RP more or less died out after Burning Crusade I started trying to actually play. I tried PVP and raiding and while I did enjoy raiding as a tank or healer, DPS was mindboggingly dull. Eventually the casualization of raid content and even worse gear grind got to a point where I just didn't want to bother anymore. So I left for good. Still it was two overall fairly enjoyable years.
There were several cool areas along the way, but the coolest place I had discovered so far, around level 60, was this Arachnid zone called Silithis. It was this huge landscape of giant, gnarly tentacles, hives of dangerous insects, and mountains of bugs flying around that could be seen from miles away. It was a really cool place, and I wanted to discover it more. It was also the home of one of the original game's toughest dungeons, which I was excited to try.
I never got the chance, and the reason why is extremely cringeworthy, I'm warning you now.
You see, when it was just the original game, before any expansions, Silithus had some of the best gear and quest rewards for simply completing quests in that area. That's because it was one of the highest level areas, so it makes sense. But what Blizzard had done, with their expansion of Burning Crusade, was create a massive inflation of power so extreme that there was absolutely no reason to do any of the Kalimdor quests once you reached level 58 and could travel to the Outland. It was absolutely pointless to ever visit Kalimdor again. The weapon and armor rewards you got from completing the most basic, braindead quests, were tiers and tiers better than anything you could get, even in the most dangerous places on Kalimdor. Even if I had attempted to solo the Silithus dungeon ON MY OWN, the rewards I would get would pale in comparison to what I was getting for the most inane and simple quests in the Burning Crusade content.
Blizzard had obviously increased the power of their items astronomically for the BC, probably as an incentive for people to buy the expansion, as their (literally years) of hardwork grinding out the best gear through the hardest bosses would be totally meaningless, and they'd have to buy the expansion in order for their character not to be a uselessly weak scrub. So there was no point for me to do the Silithus content. In fact, there had been no point of me doing anything except reaching level 58 as fast as possible because apparently that's when the real game began.
Oh man, it was one of the most disappointing moments of my gaming life. I quit shortly after that.
ugg that's awful blizzard really do seem to get away with a lot of bullshit don't they at times? makes me hope they don't screw over watch up.It depends on what you mean by "screw it up".
Quoteugg that's awful blizzard really do seem to get away with a lot of bullshit don't they at times? makes me hope they don't screw over watch up.It depends on what you mean by "screw it up".
The thing is, Blizzard has no problem making competitive games which require "skill". (And they clearly have no problem making PC games so mindless you can complete them on dance pads)
The issue is, there's no inbetween. It's either hardcore competitive to the point of insanity, or mindless grinding to the point of euthanasia.
Take Starcraft 1/2 for instance. Well Starcraft 1 was just an originally a fun little strategy game that kids played in the '90s together. Originally the game required so much micromanagement not because it was a design decision, but because it was made with a simplistic UI and RTS engine limitations which were common back in 1998. It's not like they were intentionally trying to make the game require high APM, that was more or less an accident. Then it started getting super competitive in South Korea, and Blizzard saw an opportunity for profit and that's where the game (and it's sequel) headed.
Suddenly, Blizzard's philosophy was now designed around requiring players to have a high APM on purpose (*facepalm*). I guess that increased the skill gap...or something. Anyway, as a result of these design decisions, competitive Starcraft players are in their prime during their young adult years and into their early twenties, when their reflexes and eye-hand coordination are at their peak. Once they start hitting their mid-to-late 20's, you can more or less kiss it goodbye. The physical and mental strain Blizzard puts on the player in order to keep the game "competitive" literally causes their biological window to be very short, a time after which they will no longer be able to keep up with all the incoming teenagers appearing on the scene.
So take your pick, either mindless grinding in the form of WoW or Diablo, or APM to the point of often causing carpel tunnel syndrome and hospitalizations in games like Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3.
There's no middle ground.
Oh, there *was* going to be a middle ground, in the form of Overwatch. With its cartoony style and Team Fortress 2 like mechanics, it was the perfect casual shooter with a competitive side for the people who wanted it. That had been the original design goal, and it was announced to be free to play to facilitate that. Everyone could get a group of friends together and have fun in a goofy, intense, and mildly competitive arena setting with tons of different classes and content to keep them busy. But then! Suddenly Blizzard decided that's not what they were going to do anymore. The game needed to be COMPETITIVE, so they removed the free to play and added a $60 price tag over night (I'm not making this up). Now suddenly it's going to be the new COD or Counter-Strike of the cartoony Blizzard world, and only the serious pay for entrance to this grand arena. Anyway, more facepalm from my end. Initially I was very excited but I no longer have an interest in it.
What we really need are emergent gameplay opportunities in the PvE area. I don't know of any MMORPG games that are doing that.I think this was the whole idea of "RIFT", a game in which while you were casually farming or traveling across some random PvE zone, a giant inter-dimensional portal could open up, and tons of dangerous monsters spilled out, prompting people to come from all over to shut it again. Unfortunately I think this mechanic was too gimmicky to have any merit.
I just want to say, the "grinding" aspect in MMOs is wanted.
Grinding is defined by repetitive tasks given to a player to make progress, often with no new challenge or variety.
An example of grinding would be farming the same mobs for three hours because they give the best experience or some drop needed for progress. MMORPG gets a lot of flak for this kind of gameplay.
I'd be interested to know how that happened. I thought GW1 was pretty successful.
What we really need are emergent gameplay opportunities in the PvE area. I don't know of any MMORPG games that are doing that.EVE?
I keep bringing up City of Heroes, and I'll do so here again, because again, it was the one that got this right. You still had to constantly clobber things to get experience, but the way it worked meant that you didn't have to just pound easy rats over and over and over. You could get a constant CHALLENGE out of it. In most MMOs, grinding is necessary in part because it tends to be suicide to attack even a single foe that's at all higher level than you. But in CoH, this wasnt the case. You were EXPECTED to constantly take on challenging, and DANGEROUS foes. If you tried to grind against repetetive easy things? Your experience bar would fill so ridiculously slowly that you could be there for decades. Enemies either were capable of constantly being a real threat to you, or they offered no experience. In addition, every mission you did always had a boss at the end, and bosses were dangerous even by themselves, yet always had friends backing them up. Considering though that this game actually involved skill, instead of repetition of ability strings, you could overcome these challenges, and maybe even take on harder missions (enemies that were even higher level, compared to yours), for even more XP. This is one reason why I stuck with that game until it's demise: there WAS NO BORING PARTS. There was no "the REAL game starts at level 60!". No. The real game started at level ONE. And just kept getting better.Uh, it causes me so much despair when you bring up City of Heroes. I never got a chance to play it (personally I find superhero games to be like most made-from-movie games, extremely gimmicky and profit-driven). I had no reason to think that a superhero MMO was actually going to somehow be good. When you talk about it though, it sounds like I missed a once in a lifetime experience, and that makes me sad.
But now? It's been a LONG time since WoW achieved absolute domination of the genre, and the trend of copying it was already set in stone... so the always-derpy suits decided THAT was the thing to do, instead of being innovative again, because if WoW prints money, CLEARLY copying it would let them print money too. Exasperated sigh. And then they stand around like concussed chickens wondering what went wrong.Ugh but the whole f*cking appeal of GW2 was supposed to be this MMO for people who hate MMOs. It was literally in their development trailer. "If you like MMOs, you'll want to check out GW2. If you hate MMOs, you'll DEFINITELY want to check out Guild Wars 2." They spoke as if the entire design goal of the game was to do something spectacular and amazing and new, and what did they really accomplish? What did they add to the formula?
Wow. This looks like a modern MMO that isnt terrible!I'll throw in an update on Black Desert here while you guys keep talking about GW1 and CoH:
But... yes, I'm a bit put off by the fact that it's a Korean MMO due to grinding. I usually cant tolerate grinding. So that's unfortunate. I guess it's not time to jump back into the genre yet after all. Feh.
I miss the old days, when the genre wasnt awful.
I'll throw in an update on Black Desert here while you guys keep talking about GW1 and CoH:
So currently I've gotten to lv 13 in 7.5 hours according to the ingame function that describes how long your character has existed, though not because I was grinding the entire time. Mainly most of that time was me running around trying things (and soon after rebinding keys to work better), wondering how it played so well at only 30fps, trying to fish (not too difficult), finding out the game has climbing (Climbed up some rocks, on some roofs, was awesome after expecting the usual bad platforming all mmos use, even gw2 and its jumping puzzles) failing to milk several cows (minigame was harder than it seemed), stabbing things with a frankly overpowered wizard dagger (I know its a melee skill on a squishy wizard who really should just avoid getting so close because things hurt and everything else has some range to it, but 550% x2hits damage with guaranteed crit, and I can use it from the start? That is one hell of an emergency dagger.) finding all the npcs in the village and camp to complete (entirely optional but rewarding) knowledge sets, and being unimpressed by the voice acting. The last of those is ok at best.
Oh, and I have a donkey. The donkey can gain levels of its own that do...something, has its own little storage, and doesn't immediately vanish when you dismount. Doesn't feel like the last korean mmo I'd played at all, which I believe was tera. Certainly less flashy except in the spell effects, but then again almost everything is less flashy than tera.
so has anybody here played star wars galaxy? I wouldn't be surprised if not since its not meant to technically exist any more but I'm just curious really.
well the funny thing is that the version I've played is maintained by a group with nothing to do with ubisoft at all after they closed the game due to wow being a thing this group took over it and you can play it with an emulator and I think you need its disk I'm not 100 percent its just that my friend who introduced me to it said I needed to and lended me his disk I have no idea what your talking about with butterflies and auto replace I mostly just murdered jobber bandit guys near near the outskirts of the city and sold random junk to make the money I was needing more profitable than questing and much more fun the quest was either I could deliver something to a persifick point on the map(which while I found relaxing payed pittance) and a type of quest were you fought a den/hive type thing which spawned things which took FOREVER! sadly since I remember really enjoying the combat.I'll throw in an update on Black Desert here while you guys keep talking about GW1 and CoH:
So currently I've gotten to lv 13 in 7.5 hours according to the ingame function that describes how long your character has existed, though not because I was grinding the entire time. Mainly most of that time was me running around trying things (and soon after rebinding keys to work better), wondering how it played so well at only 30fps, trying to fish (not too difficult), finding out the game has climbing (Climbed up some rocks, on some roofs, was awesome after expecting the usual bad platforming all mmos use, even gw2 and its jumping puzzles) failing to milk several cows (minigame was harder than it seemed), stabbing things with a frankly overpowered wizard dagger (I know its a melee skill on a squishy wizard who really should just avoid getting so close because things hurt and everything else has some range to it, but 550% x2hits damage with guaranteed crit, and I can use it from the start? That is one hell of an emergency dagger.) finding all the npcs in the village and camp to complete (entirely optional but rewarding) knowledge sets, and being unimpressed by the voice acting. The last of those is ok at best.
Oh, and I have a donkey. The donkey can gain levels of its own that do...something, has its own little storage, and doesn't immediately vanish when you dismount. Doesn't feel like the last korean mmo I'd played at all, which I believe was tera. Certainly less flashy except in the spell effects, but then again almost everything is less flashy than tera.
So... it DOESNT play like a traditional Korean MMO? Hm. Might be worth checking out really. I'll maybe look into it. I have to stop obsessively playing SUPERHOT first though, which I picked up yesterday. Apparently that title must be capitalized at all times. No idea why.so has anybody here played star wars galaxy? I wouldn't be surprised if not since its not meant to technically exist any more but I'm just curious really.
I've played it, a long time ago when it hadnt been out all that long. It was very.... strange. It had very, very bizarre forms of grinding. I tell ya, running around stabbing butterflies for XP doesnt exactly feel like Star Wars. Nor does sitting in a cantina making things on your feet (really, auto-replace?) over and over. The class system was weird. The combat was also weird, but kinda interesting. I heard that later on some aspects of the game got an overhaul, but I was already out of it by then.
One big thing I do remember though: originally you couldnt play as a Jedi at all, until someone unlocked it, which apparently was a monstrous pain in the butt. When someone finally DID unlock it and had become one, she was CONSTANTLY hunted down and killed over and over and over and over and over again by other players. The whole system for it just sounded so bloody stupid. Dunno if THAT ever got fixed.
I actually got into ridiculous situations with groups of players that didn't quite understand the benefits of this, because I could hold and control more enemies than the group's tank could. One group actually kicked me because of this. The tank was supposed to tank! I was ruining everything!
I actually got into ridiculous situations with groups of players that didn't quite understand the benefits of this, because I could hold and control more enemies than the group's tank could. One group actually kicked me because of this. The tank was supposed to tank! I was ruining everything!
I found the game boring after a while. It was a "beat 'em up" game and no loot to look forward to. You could only do enhancements or whatever they're called. The character designer was so advanced, and yet they couldn't follow it up with the same kind of customization through achievement. Oh, and your comment about being kicked, I get kicked several times a day on a regular basis for not following meta.
hey a couple of thingsIt's still around. Arenanet has designed their servers to support the game "forever" (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/17/guild-wars), according to a press release a few years ago.
1 what you say of guild wars 1 actually sounds like super fun makes me wish I could still have a go at that(I assume its not supported any more)
wait really?! is it still that popular a game 0_0? still looks like it should run decently ill have a go at it when I'm in the mood for it.Quotehey a couple of thingsIt's still around. Arenanet has designed their servers to support the game "forever" (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/17/guild-wars), according to a press release a few years ago.
1 what you say of guild wars 1 actually sounds like super fun makes me wish I could still have a go at that(I assume its not supported any more)
I'm not sure what the playerbase looks like anymore, but it's definitely still going.
You can pick it up on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=guild+wars), including any of the expansions, or you can buy it straight from their website (http://store.guildwars.com/store/gw/cat/categoryID.67871700).
Video game movies are few and mostly terrible. I'd be surprised if GW1 had a movie.true true more curious than anything not that they have to be