Originally posted by Killbane Burning crusade was definantly the golden age for wow. I started during BC and it took a lot of time and effort to earn your levels and progress. Every xpack after that just felt more and more like it was being handed to me and I wouldn't even have to do more than a quarter of the quest before I moved to the next zone. Everyone cries about a grind and if it takes a lot of work to earn something but yet since hardly any games in the US offer the grind anymore people burn through it so fast and the games are so easy that players just move on. Players need a grind whether they want to admit it or not they want to feel like there effort is accomplishing something. If it takes no effort they won't commit in the long term. The trick is to make it hard make it take a long time but be fun at the same time. That was BC for me since nothing else seems to hit the mark so I moved on.
It's interesting.
I remember people who started with vanilla would say the same exact thing, but starting with BC.
It's like we're all a bunch of drug addict, we're always looking for that next hit that will give us the same feeling we got on our first. Some of us even reaching a point that we've witched drugs altogether, and are still trying to get that same feeling back; unable to accept that it's unlikely to happen and if it does, we won't notice until a few years down the road.
I think that's perfectly normal of us.
Edit: Some people become a little more bitter then others, unfortunately.
there is only one problem and only one solution about wow or every wow style mmo. its only a word and mostly is a feeling. EPIC!
all ends when you stop feel epic. this is the point that you blindly play the game until you quit.
was tbc something special? imo, not at all. did it make you feel epic? HELL YES! despite you knew that you may never experience all the current content? HELL YES AGAIN!
if you want to make ppl feel epic you must accept that not all ppl will have access to all content of the game, or all gear and weapons. is this bad? for some maybe. for me not at all, even if i will be at the casual side, that will never reach top notch raiding or end game gear and weapons. i can feel epic for those that have the ability to be there. i can feel epic just to imagine how it will be to fight one of those epic fights, holding in my hands the sword of the final boss... but i cant never feel epic when every one, including me, farting in the face of the last boss dropping it dead. thats not epic at all.
anyway i like mop more than any other wow expansion but i never felt, even for a single moment, epic. either for me or for anybody or anything else in game. and thats a game breaker, either it concerns wow or any other mmo.
ending with a question. do you think if wow had as much accessible content as it was until tbc, would have 8.3m subs today?
the constant gear grind, only for them to patch the game and make it obsolete, or easier to acquire after i worked my ass of for items drove me away from this game. The last straw was when i worked my ass off raising 500 gold to get my mount, only to spend it and then they patched it and made it super cheap. I hit cancel and never looked back.
they are spoon feeding their community into a downward spiral and now i hate this game with a passion.
They didn't made it cheap! They reversed the prices between riding skill books and mounts.
Instead of having cheap riding skill books and ridiculous expensive mounts, after years they finally reversed it by making the skill books expensive, but the mounts cheap.... so people could collect tons of different mounts they like.
Much much better imho. You still need to grind your ass off for the skill books, but at least you can collect tons of different mounts at a reasonable price.
So Exedus stopped raiding. Thats wlnot that interesting really is it? I know and knew who they are but what gives if they quit they quit. Everyone quits and comes back or moves on they are real people too
Originally posted by Kyleran So I came to this realization just before BC came out, which makes me look smart and these folks look like slow learners.Hard core raiders indeed.
So, because these people decided to play in a way that you dont like you feel the need to insult them?
That because they didnt think like you they are stupid?
Good insight, and I agree that there will have to be some shift in how content is generated for players in order for a new game to be successful (and i don't mean break even).
What I'd like to add is that this reluctance we see players in new "Themepark" MMOs is because the fatigue experienced in WOW transcends specific games, but carries over to similar gaming experiences. We've seen it with Rift, Warhammer, GW2, SWTOR, and every other linear item progression based MMO that has tried to leverage the success WOW has had in the MMO market. Once the new textures, player models & names of cities wear off (during the first month), you end up realizing that you're running the same darn delivery or "kill 10 of these" quests that you ran in WOW.
I completely agree with your point that any burnout experienced in WoW transcends all games of the same genre. When I was done with WoW at the end of WotlK, I also couldn't get into other games I tried, like Rift, Aion or SW:ToR. The burnout extended beyond just WoW. (I found the burnout on quests worked similarly to the burnout on the raid treadmill.) League of Legends filled my MMO void during this gap, as it was a refreshing and new type of game. It wasn't until GW2 came along that I was actually able to get back into an MMO, and that's because it's different enough in some key areas that the quest/gear treadmill burnout just didn't apply.
Originally posted by Kyleran So I came to this realization just before BC came out, which makes me look smart and these folks look like slow learners.
Hard core raiders indeed.
Let me get this straight....you assume people raid because they don't realise they are chasing a carrot,?
Can it not be because they enjoy the challenge, competitiveness, and comrodory?
Didn't you read the OP, that's exactly what it is saying.
The treadmill moves to fast, slow it down. To paraphrase.
They want to slow down how often you get the next carrot. It's just one idea for alleviate the chasing part of it, without removing it.
I read that a guild who raided for almost 9 years is stopping.
There is no denying brun out, iv taken quite a few breaks from WoW...but my point is that its arogant to assume raiders dont realise that they are on a tradmill....trust me...they are fully aware...
Didn't you read the OP, that's exactly what it is saying.
The treadmill moves to fast, slow it down. To paraphrase.
They want to slow down how often you get the next carrot. It's just one idea for alleviate the chasing part of it, without removing it.
I read that a guild who raided for almost 9 years is stopping.
There was a lot more to it then that.
It had everything to do with repeatedly grinding gear only to obsolete the gear they already had, and indeed many of us didn't need nine years to "get it".
Raiders have been complaining about doing what they like doing since BC released. They want a progression and they want it to be infinite, without it obsoleting any previous progression.
How does that not sound like a pipe dream to more people? Why does it take some people so long to figure it out?
The whole point of WoW is to collect gear; how much gear can you possibly put on your toon? What else are you going to raid for in WoW? 3 months or a year to progress through the next tier doesn't really matter, as soon as people start taking old gear and discarding it for new gear, and as long as they've got some period of time between when they do this that they aren't doing it -and there's always going to be groups like the OP is talking about, that make it a point to work through the content as fast as possible because that's the point of "competitive raiding"- you're always going to have people looking for a solution to "the problem".
Many people figured out a long time ago that the only solution to this problem is to not raid.
Is the OP not "raising a problem", are they not attempting to offer up a solution to "a problem"? I'm not sure why it would shock anyone that some people identified this problem 9 years ago. 9 years is a long time to take to figure something out.
Didn't you read the OP, that's exactly what it is saying.
The treadmill moves to fast, slow it down. To paraphrase.
They want to slow down how often you get the next carrot. It's just one idea for alleviate the chasing part of it, without removing it.
I read that a guild who raided for almost 9 years is stopping.
There was a lot more to it then that.
It had everything to do with repeatedly grinding gear only to obsolete the gear they already had, and indeed many of us didn't need nine years to "get it".
Raiders have been complaining about doing what they like doing since BC released. They want a progression and they want it to be infinite, without it obsoleting any previous progression.
How does that not sound like a pipe dream to more people? Why does it take some people so long to figure it out?
The whole point of WoW is to collect gear; how much gear can you possibly put on your toon? What else are you going to raid for in WoW? 3 months or a year to progress through the next tier doesn't really matter, as soon as people start taking old gear and discarding it for new gear, and as long as they've got some period of time between when they do this that they aren't doing it -and there's always going to be groups like the OP is talking about, that make it a point to work through the content as fast as possible because that's the point of "competitive raiding"- you're always going to have people looking for a solution to "the problem".
Many people figured out a long time ago that the only solution to this problem is to not raid.
Is the OP not "raising a problem", are they not attempting to offer up a solution to "a problem"? I'm not sure why it would shock anyone that some people identified this problem 9 years ago. 9 years is a long time to take to figure something out.
I dont think anybody is shocked, please re-read my entire post.
This is the corner that these modern "Themepark" type MMOs work themselves into.
The "endgame" of this brand of MMO is essentially getting gear (from raids & highly competitive PvP scenarios) that will give you stats that will enable you run future raids that will give you gear that will enable you to run future raids, etc, etc.
That's a very boiled down scenario....but after running the track for 3+ expansions.....all the cheap little gimmicks they add to raid content to disguise the fact that you're on a gear treadmill fade much quicker.
And as vet players have spent more & more hours perfecting the raiding process, they demand more content in shorter cycles, which...ironically, just speeds up the eventual burn-out process that much faster.
To the OP's point of making content harder....it's not as simple of a fix as you think.
WOW has been able to appeal to a massive casual crowd, while also satisfying "hard-core" players with competitive raiding & PvP. Probably sensing that the 1-2% of dedicated raiding community was getting board & stale, they attempted to inject new blood into the raiding scene by lowering the amount of time, coordination, gear requirements to experience raid level content....so that more of the general playerbase could participate. (Also see LFR system)
In doing so, they've have accelerated the fatigue level of a larger percentage of the playerbase with this VERY iterative dungeon crawling process.
Because there is so little content in Themepark MMOs left up to players to generate, once everyone has run a raid level dungeon 50+ times, there is nowhere else to go. Where a sandbox MMO would allow individual players to persue their own goals @ their own pace (build a house, build riches, build a name in the crafting community & economy, etc.).....themepark MMOs heard everyone into only a handfull of archtypes, most of which include engaging in combat to collect 10 wolf pelts or killing a boss 100 times to get a piece of gear.
I agree with pretty much everything you say (mostly because most of your post just agrees with mine ). I never thought there was an easy solution though. I just pointed to the BC era as an example of what I believed to be the best iteration of such a treadmill system. In addition to the extreme difficulty of some of the content, I think the fact that so much content was available at the launch of the expansion was also a huge contributing factor to the expansion's lasting power. Perhaps the attunement criteria had something to do with it too. If you look at the raids and dungeons on the wow wiki, you very quickly see how there was just so much more in BC - and that it was almost all made available immediately upon the xpac's release. It was just the difficulty and attuning requirements that made it take so many groups so long to get through it. It felt like one continual purpose throughout the xpac, all leading to Illidan.
Take WotlK, by contrast (an expansion I still enjoyed immensely at the time.) There was only Malygos, Sarth, and Naxx (which was just a redone older raid) at launch. And they were all significantly easier than anything in BC. I remember clearing 8 bosses in Naxx the very day I hit level 80 with just a raid of 7 people, wearing nothing but quest gear and a few heroic pieces. It was a blast in the moment, but ultimately very sad for the state of content difficulty. Many people got bored and left before Ulduar even came out (which actually ended up being the great redeeming surprise of the expansion.)
All that is to say, there's something to be said about difficulty.
Concerning your point about filling in the gaps with sandboxy elements and player generated content, I think this is a great idea. There's such a split between the sandbox and themepark communities because players love to create dichotomies where there don't necessarily have to be any. I think it's perfectly feasible to have a hardcore raid progression treadmill system as well as lots of player generated content.
Some took issue with something another poster wrote, that I happen to think made a lot of sense.
If the OP had been writing about a "top competitive PvP" guild that was calling it quits due to the required gear grind, I wouldn't agree with that poster.
However, the OP was the same complaint raiders have been making since BC released. It may be sensible to someone that likes raiding, but for those of us that it feels a little to much like playing fetch and we're the dog we may not.
No one complains they burnt out on "comradery", it's always the gear grind. The whole point of raiding is the gear grind though.
The game earns up to 100 times what other mmos make yet they put out content at no faster pace. Blizzard has been scamming it's player base for years.
and i guess you are one of the smart guys who are not scammed, while more than 12m ppl got scammed by blizzard all these years, right? how egoistical...
The game earns up to 100 times what other mmos make yet they put out content at no faster pace. Blizzard has been scamming it's player base for years.
and i guess you are one of the smart guys who are not scammed, while more than 12m ppl got scammed by blizzard all these years, right? how egoistical...
nowhere did he suggest, imply, or state he wasn't scammed.
I think the gear grind worked years ago but the magic is starting to wear off. I sure hope we get some creativity-inspired developers in the years to come. The themepark-geargrind is never going to make it big like it did for WoW and it is time for something new.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
Where did you get that wrong information from? And the whole "that includes Vodka too"...Vodka IS Exodus. Im going to assume I misunderstood your post, because that info is somewhat easy to find.
In any event, the top few guilds in the world raid 14-16 hours a day during progression....I'm suprised they even lasted as long as they did, or that even more havent put a stop to their insane schedule either.
Originally posted by Kyleran So I came to this realization just before BC came out, which makes me look smart and these folks look like slow learners.
Hard core raiders indeed.
Let me get this straight....you assume people raid because they don't realise they are chasing a carrot,?
Can it not be because they enjoy the challenge, competitiveness, and comrodory?
Didn't you read the OP, that's exactly what it is saying.
The treadmill moves to fast, slow it down. To paraphrase.
They want to slow down how often you get the next carrot. It's just one idea for alleviate the chasing part of it, without removing it.
I read that a guild who raided for almost 9 years is stopping.
There is no denying brun out, iv taken quite a few breaks from WoW...but my point is that its arogant to assume raiders dont realise that they are on a tradmill....trust me...they are fully aware...
Just to quickly address each of you, since many of you seem to be putting words in each others mouths and mine, when I really don't think there's any actual quarrel to be had.
@Kyleran, certainly everyone full well knows that they are enthralled by the pursuit of gear. It's impossible not to realize it. They're not slow learners. Raiding just remains fun to them despite the eventual arbitrariness of gear. It's no different than level processes whereby players become more powerful only to then face more powerful enemies. Relative to enemies, players' power remains exactly the same, thereby seemingly negating the notion of progress. Players know this, and can still have fun leveling.
Doodphace's alternative reasons for raiding are absolutely valid. The competitiveness of fighting for server firsts can be intoxicating, the challenge enthralling, the comraderie exhilarating. All of those things are what made raiding so successful. Nobody raids only for gear. So no, I (the OP) never said that, as Uhwop was quick to counter. I did make the rest of the points you mentioned, Uhwop, but I never said the gear treadmill (the topic of this discussion) was an exhaustive or exclusive reason for raiding. It can, however, be the exclusive reason some quits raiding.
And then to counter one over-simplification, doodphace just had to use one of his own... The original post was maybe 5% about a guild that had raided for 9 years and then stopped. The 95% bulk was about the concept that players - especially the more hardcore players - can get burnt out faster in a gear treadmill system when smaller pockets of content are released more frequently, thereby making a commonly regarded good quality of MMOs a counterintuitive bane for many players.
Comments
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
It's interesting.
I remember people who started with vanilla would say the same exact thing, but starting with BC.
It's like we're all a bunch of drug addict, we're always looking for that next hit that will give us the same feeling we got on our first. Some of us even reaching a point that we've witched drugs altogether, and are still trying to get that same feeling back; unable to accept that it's unlikely to happen and if it does, we won't notice until a few years down the road.
I think that's perfectly normal of us.
Edit: Some people become a little more bitter then others, unfortunately.
Let me get this straight....you assume people raid because they don't realise they are chasing a carrot,?
Can it not be because they enjoy the challenge, competitiveness, and comrodory?
there is only one problem and only one solution about wow or every wow style mmo. its only a word and mostly is a feeling. EPIC!
all ends when you stop feel epic. this is the point that you blindly play the game until you quit.
was tbc something special? imo, not at all. did it make you feel epic? HELL YES! despite you knew that you may never experience all the current content? HELL YES AGAIN!
if you want to make ppl feel epic you must accept that not all ppl will have access to all content of the game, or all gear and weapons. is this bad? for some maybe. for me not at all, even if i will be at the casual side, that will never reach top notch raiding or end game gear and weapons. i can feel epic for those that have the ability to be there. i can feel epic just to imagine how it will be to fight one of those epic fights, holding in my hands the sword of the final boss... but i cant never feel epic when every one, including me, farting in the face of the last boss dropping it dead. thats not epic at all.
anyway i like mop more than any other wow expansion but i never felt, even for a single moment, epic. either for me or for anybody or anything else in game. and thats a game breaker, either it concerns wow or any other mmo.
ending with a question. do you think if wow had as much accessible content as it was until tbc, would have 8.3m subs today?
imo, not a chance.
Didn't you read the OP, that's exactly what it is saying.
The treadmill moves to fast, slow it down. To paraphrase.
They want to slow down how often you get the next carrot. It's just one idea for alleviate the chasing part of it, without removing it.
They didn't made it cheap! They reversed the prices between riding skill books and mounts.
Instead of having cheap riding skill books and ridiculous expensive mounts, after years they finally reversed it by making the skill books expensive, but the mounts cheap.... so people could collect tons of different mounts they like.
Much much better imho. You still need to grind your ass off for the skill books, but at least you can collect tons of different mounts at a reasonable price.
That because they didnt think like you they are stupid?
I completely agree with your point that any burnout experienced in WoW transcends all games of the same genre. When I was done with WoW at the end of WotlK, I also couldn't get into other games I tried, like Rift, Aion or SW:ToR. The burnout extended beyond just WoW. (I found the burnout on quests worked similarly to the burnout on the raid treadmill.) League of Legends filled my MMO void during this gap, as it was a refreshing and new type of game. It wasn't until GW2 came along that I was actually able to get back into an MMO, and that's because it's different enough in some key areas that the quest/gear treadmill burnout just didn't apply.
I read that a guild who raided for almost 9 years is stopping.
There is no denying brun out, iv taken quite a few breaks from WoW...but my point is that its arogant to assume raiders dont realise that they are on a tradmill....trust me...they are fully aware...
There was a lot more to it then that.
It had everything to do with repeatedly grinding gear only to obsolete the gear they already had, and indeed many of us didn't need nine years to "get it".
Raiders have been complaining about doing what they like doing since BC released. They want a progression and they want it to be infinite, without it obsoleting any previous progression.
How does that not sound like a pipe dream to more people? Why does it take some people so long to figure it out?
The whole point of WoW is to collect gear; how much gear can you possibly put on your toon? What else are you going to raid for in WoW? 3 months or a year to progress through the next tier doesn't really matter, as soon as people start taking old gear and discarding it for new gear, and as long as they've got some period of time between when they do this that they aren't doing it -and there's always going to be groups like the OP is talking about, that make it a point to work through the content as fast as possible because that's the point of "competitive raiding"- you're always going to have people looking for a solution to "the problem".
Many people figured out a long time ago that the only solution to this problem is to not raid.
Is the OP not "raising a problem", are they not attempting to offer up a solution to "a problem"? I'm not sure why it would shock anyone that some people identified this problem 9 years ago. 9 years is a long time to take to figure something out.
I dont think anybody is shocked, please re-read my entire post.
Ah good old Wow.
The game earns up to 100 times what other mmos make yet they put out content at no faster pace. Blizzard has been scamming it's player base for years.
You stay sassy!
I agree with pretty much everything you say (mostly because most of your post just agrees with mine
). I never thought there was an easy solution though. I just pointed to the BC era as an example of what I believed to be the best iteration of such a treadmill system. In addition to the extreme difficulty of some of the content, I think the fact that so much content was available at the launch of the expansion was also a huge contributing factor to the expansion's lasting power. Perhaps the attunement criteria had something to do with it too. If you look at the raids and dungeons on the wow wiki, you very quickly see how there was just so much more in BC - and that it was almost all made available immediately upon the xpac's release. It was just the difficulty and attuning requirements that made it take so many groups so long to get through it. It felt like one continual purpose throughout the xpac, all leading to Illidan.
Take WotlK, by contrast (an expansion I still enjoyed immensely at the time.) There was only Malygos, Sarth, and Naxx (which was just a redone older raid) at launch. And they were all significantly easier than anything in BC. I remember clearing 8 bosses in Naxx the very day I hit level 80 with just a raid of 7 people, wearing nothing but quest gear and a few heroic pieces. It was a blast in the moment, but ultimately very sad for the state of content difficulty. Many people got bored and left before Ulduar even came out (which actually ended up being the great redeeming surprise of the expansion.)
All that is to say, there's something to be said about difficulty.
Concerning your point about filling in the gaps with sandboxy elements and player generated content, I think this is a great idea. There's such a split between the sandbox and themepark communities because players love to create dichotomies where there don't necessarily have to be any. I think it's perfectly feasible to have a hardcore raid progression treadmill system as well as lots of player generated content.
Some took issue with something another poster wrote, that I happen to think made a lot of sense.
If the OP had been writing about a "top competitive PvP" guild that was calling it quits due to the required gear grind, I wouldn't agree with that poster.
However, the OP was the same complaint raiders have been making since BC released. It may be sensible to someone that likes raiding, but for those of us that it feels a little to much like playing fetch and we're the dog we may not.
No one complains they burnt out on "comradery", it's always the gear grind. The whole point of raiding is the gear grind though.
and i guess you are one of the smart guys who are not scammed, while more than 12m ppl got scammed by blizzard all these years, right? how egoistical...
nowhere did he suggest, imply, or state he wasn't scammed.
I think the gear grind worked years ago but the magic is starting to wear off. I sure hope we get some creativity-inspired developers in the years to come. The themepark-geargrind is never going to make it big like it did for WoW and it is time for something new.
the quitting includes Vodka too -- a #3 guild
http://dbdguildh.guildlaunch.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9319927
EQ2 fan sites
Vodka Tier 10 = 23rd
Vodka Tier 11 = 6th
Vodka Tier 12 = 4th
Vodka Tier 13 = 11th
Vodka Tier 14 = 4th
Vodka Tier 15 = Merged with Exodus....8th place
Where did you get that wrong information from? And the whole "that includes Vodka too"...Vodka IS Exodus. Im going to assume I misunderstood your post, because that info is somewhat easy to find.
In any event, the top few guilds in the world raid 14-16 hours a day during progression....I'm suprised they even lasted as long as they did, or that even more havent put a stop to their insane schedule either.
Just to quickly address each of you, since many of you seem to be putting words in each others mouths and mine, when I really don't think there's any actual quarrel to be had.
@Kyleran, certainly everyone full well knows that they are enthralled by the pursuit of gear. It's impossible not to realize it. They're not slow learners. Raiding just remains fun to them despite the eventual arbitrariness of gear. It's no different than level processes whereby players become more powerful only to then face more powerful enemies. Relative to enemies, players' power remains exactly the same, thereby seemingly negating the notion of progress. Players know this, and can still have fun leveling.
Doodphace's alternative reasons for raiding are absolutely valid. The competitiveness of fighting for server firsts can be intoxicating, the challenge enthralling, the comraderie exhilarating. All of those things are what made raiding so successful. Nobody raids only for gear. So no, I (the OP) never said that, as Uhwop was quick to counter. I did make the rest of the points you mentioned, Uhwop, but I never said the gear treadmill (the topic of this discussion) was an exhaustive or exclusive reason for raiding. It can, however, be the exclusive reason some quits raiding.
And then to counter one over-simplification, doodphace just had to use one of his own... The original post was maybe 5% about a guild that had raided for 9 years and then stopped. The 95% bulk was about the concept that players - especially the more hardcore players - can get burnt out faster in a gear treadmill system when smaller pockets of content are released more frequently, thereby making a commonly regarded good quality of MMOs a counterintuitive bane for many players.