The only reason why people hate WoW is because they blame it for ruining the MMO industry. Open your eyes people. WoW did not ruined the industry single-handedly. WoW isn't responsible for what other developers do. It is the developers putting out the crappy games trying to copy WoW who ruined the industry. They should have been smart enough to realize that a WoW clone won't ever succeed. But they didn't and this is what we get today.
True (but clones can succeed, the EQ clone Wow did pretty great).
It is not Wows fault that people like Mythic, Turbine and the rest tried to remake it, it is the fault of devs with no new ideas.
Not that Wow had much of those either but at launch it was far superior to the other similar games out there. I don't think it is that now, I don't think it is even close to being the best now but in mid 2004 it was.
The secret to really get many subs is releasing a game that is better than all it's competitors at launch, not after years of patching and expansions. Good programming also helps and Blizzard have good programmers. and if you actually make a Wow clone that is the best game out there it will sell great but so will of course any game that is the best out there...
But that at launch condition is really important, games like AoC and Vanguard can never really recover from the bad launches. Games with good launches but wasn't the best game out there at launch can do pretty good but still not become huge.
Guildwars had a good launch, 7 million copies sold (yeah a B2P is not great to compare but it still has at least some value) and still high on X-fire after all these years and the devs focus on GW2 the last few years.
LOTRO launched ok but with very little content, typical medium sized game.
Eve actually managed to get pretty large after a lot of work but it's bad launch followed it a long time.
@OP- Community was 90% of the reason I couldn't stand WoW. The other 10% is hard to explain, the game itself did not have any feature that grabbed or impressed me. I suppose the game itself wasn't for me, but I can get used to a game for an awesome community. That's what really matters to me.
hmm maybe I am confused but I think he was calling WoW a clone of EQ... no?
Hmmm, yes, I think so. I see it now. It was rather late last night when I read it so my brain must not have processed it correctly.
Thank you for pointing this out, and sorry to original dude I 'corrected'.
Lot of people hate on WoW irrationally, that's for sure.
Me, I think it's great, it attracts all the new to mmo peoples and the less desirable old players, keeping many, more serious mmos slightly cleaner
WoW for me is the "newbie island" of the mmo world, eh?
On a more serious note..
From the mmo industry standpoint, I can see why people are annoyed though, all those big name dev teams look at wow's budget and numbers, and think "hey! let's try this too!", then make a rather watered down please-everyone casual game that just doesn't really cut it. So from that respect, one could say WoW's responsible for the loss of AAA title development of deeper, more complex games. But eh, if it wasn't wow, it would have been something else... these big guys want their big money, so want their massive amounts of players eh?
It's like ah.. a cartoony giggle-happy nintendo game vs a dark adult orientated complex horror game on a ps3 or something heh
On a side note about Pre-BC and BC, please don't even compare the two. Pre-BC raiding required strategy for the raids, I don't even believe you collect resistance gear, get attuned, farming rep with AD to get the recipes for your guild to beable to kill Sapphiron.
Litteraly working to get tier 3, to have an expansion come right through and replace our T2/3 with whites. (99% of the WoW population didn't care because they didn't make it that far) They complained on how it was too hard to get into a guild because they couldn't follow strategies. Now the strategy is "Alright we are going to do a tank n spank, make sure to move to the left every now and then for it whips"
I can guarantee you that the twins would rape a good 90% of anyone that tried today. Also if you think the emperors were hard, try the horsemen I'd love to see any of the players do that. Of course you can't now, reduced the difficulty of Naxx by ten fold.
Guys like this. Who think they are better than you because they don't have jobs.
Actually I teach music, Guitar, Violin, Piano. It is a side job while I put out samples to movie companies to be put in as a background music artist. Thank you for your joke though, seriously. I've done more with my life than you have guaranteed. I've graduated from my music school in Hollywood.
I've recently started playing WoW again with my girlfriend (it's the only game she likes so far). As someone who was a WoW player for a few years..to a WoW hater..now back again. I've wondered am I really angry at WoW? Or am I angry that the genre itself hasn't innovated much since WoW came out? I've played more MMO's than I care to list...but I haven't played LOTRO, FFXIV and many of the F2P games.. but thats it.
Here are some points I've used in the past and I'll debunk my own:
WoW is too easy. Can anyone on this forum honestly say any MMORPG was hard? When I say hard.... I mean truly difficult not just longer or more tedious. I see the insta gratification kiddies line being thrown around like political circles throw around democraps and rethuglicans. So you kill 10 monsters versus killing 100 to level (for example) either way I as a player I have thoroughly proved I know how to kill said monster... what's more difficult really? I think this is more of an emotional response and a case of rose colored glasses. I've raided in EQ1(up to Luclin), AoC and DAoC .. it was not at all difficult; in fact I'd say easier overall. This also might be a case of the ease in which you can find info on MMO's nowadays.
WoW has the worst community. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you the WoW community is some bastion of polite civilization. I am going to tell you that the community in every game I have ever played is roughly similar. I remember trolls in EQ trash talking constantly and people generally being shitty to eachother. How about the raid guilds that used to run by other lesser experienced guilds at a raid boss (remember open dungeons) and ninja the kill? Then they would be "nice" and give the lesser experienced raid..have whatever they didn't want.. Wow how nice! /sarcasm. DAoC didn't have much better of a community either. I had to quit a character because someone *accused* me of ninjaing with no proof.. just an accusation (they couldn't even provide a ss)... and boom I can't even pvp... on a midgard healer.
So I'm just wondering wondering if the WoW hate (which is considered cool apparently) and how older games were so much better is a lot like the old guy's description of his youth in this clip:
Sorry, but World of Warcraft's community is not even remotely similar to any other game in existence -- what you have there is a collection of children from 4Chan and the entire Battlenet all in one game -- sorry, but that's completely wrong.
To list a few problems:
It's Activision's game now. Don't try to tell me Activision has no creative control over Blizzard, because Real ID was definitely an Activision move.
The game is easy, but WoW players are the most handicapped players in the history of video gaming. Ever. They fail in ways you never thought possible, and I always walk away from a raid astonished at the level of stupidity I just witnessed. For example...the buff received from Icecrown Citadel is now 30%, and people are still wiping even after successfully completing the entire raid and killing the Lich King. Really? ...Really.
Resilience.
PvP is unbalanced, and Blizzard doesn't care. Working hard for your gear is not something I'm totally against, but when you just got that last piece of the set you need, Blizzard introduces the next set. It's a never-ending cycle where, if you want to stand even a remote chance in PvP, you need to be playing non-stop, all the time, and have the best gear 100% of the time. Unless you play a Paladin.
Arenas and Battlegrounds annihilated any amount of "fun" World of Warcraft had to offer, in terms of PvP. World PvP is the only thing MMORPGs have going for them. If you disagree, go play a first person shooter. Because any kind of instanced PvP with objectives is just trying to emulate what has already been done in first person shooters, minus the class balance.
Blizzard doesn't moderate the game what-so-ever. Actually, I'm pretty sure when they partnered with Activision they lost the ability to ban players completely.
Blizzard knows nothing about how to design new content. Instead of making the game more challenging and therefore interesting, they design some sort of a neat little raid dungeon and instead of actually using their noodles to design content the real way, they make players grind, grind, grind, grind, GRIND for new sets of gear so that they will be able to experience it, rather than their skill alone determining if they can play the game or not.
These reasons are of course just the tip of the iceberg. How the game managed to become so popular by now is absolutely mind-boggling.
"Syndrome: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super-- [chuckles evilly] Syndrome:--no one will be. "
For gamers who have played more than one MMO, they tend to look at WoW as "too easy" and therefore not worth respect. They come from other MMOs where people say "This is too grindy, difficult, long, hard, etc" and other people quit. Very few people have ever quit WoW and claimed it was "too hard" as a reason.
Games like Eve, FFXI, EQ1, DAOC, etc.. don't usually have people going "Hey, this game is too EASY and start ripping it because of that only. People will usually say they don't like that game or this game, but never give too easy as a reason. With Wow, it's the handy excuse. Most won't even admit the good points of the game in any form whatsoever. Later, they'll curse Blizzard for making a MMO for the masses that "any moron not braindead" can play and max and "dumbing down" the industry.
Simply put, it doesn't make the experienced gamer feel that good about themselves.
Wow allows a 75 yr-old grandmother to max to 80 solo just as well as a 12 year old kid, they say. If you want to buy a Pegasus, you don't have to work for it.. just buy it. Even the raid content for the so-called "heavy raiders" isn't really that hard with all the add-on mods that say "Hit THIS button in 10 seconds according to them. Ok.. hit THIS one NOW, then RUN!"
Wow allows everyone to be a 'good player' for the most part, they'll say, so there's nothing special about it. They say this without realizing that's the one thing that makes WoW such a 'special game'. Since most experienced gamers have a certain amount of epeen, their epeen is no bigger than most others in Wow so it's despised.
Those that tend berate WoW because it's too easy, generally want to feel more special than someone else, but in Wow that's really not that possible.
(*In before "WoWfanboy". Stopped playing after TBC)
This might be nostalgia, but I think current WoW has changed too far from the original premise.
Server communities were actually very good places to be in, in vanilla; at least for my server, but with all the X realms stuff that seems to have deteriorated quite a bit.
There are a lot of things WoW shines in more than any game I've tried however: they have uncomparably smooth gameplay and a lot of little things which have been very cleverly done.
Just the way you go through quests in every zone and the way those follow up, each leading to some sort of conclusion in the instanced dungeon that many zones have, has been a very smart thing to do for example.
Saying WoW is way easier than other games is really showing ignorance, as a lot of monsters in WoW have way more varied abilities in normal combat and the PvP actually brings in twitch elements besides pure buttonmashing, which is not something many MMO's have.
Large parts, such as the progressions have become 'easier' as time went by though, with the removal of elite world mobs for example.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Server communities were actually very good places to be in, in vanilla; at least for my server, but with all the X realms stuff that seems to have deteriorated quite a bit.
Well, many of the original Wow players had play some other MMO before, but today have the majority started with Wow. Also many of the earlier MMO players were old pen and paper RPG players and they know the importance of helping eachother.
I think it partly is the instances both in Wow and other MMOs that messed up the communities, and dungeon finders doesn't help either. Modern MMOs seems to reward people who act like jerks in a way older didn't, if you acted like that in Meridian or EQ you would't get any group after a while but now people suddenly can log out halfway in a dungeon cause they got the loot they wanted and don't feel that they have to help out with the rest of the dungeon.
Wow is not the only culprit here and there have always been some jerks in all games but Wow is the worst one.
Guildwars 2 is trying some things to get the communities better, stuff like no loot stealing and full xp for all, grouped or not. Hopefully it will work, things are getting worse and worse.
And I don't think it the younger generation who is ruder, something in the games promote this behavior.
If you can't pinpoint something wrong, you start complaining about "community".
Actually Wow introduced much too hardcore mechanics since TBC.
Arena and crazy 25 man heroic fights are too much too handle for the simple folks around here.
These folks just want time sinks: you kill 154 monsters at the rate of 3 minutes per monster.
That's no challenge, that's just a waste of time.
Challenge is what players make. Grandma won't be playing the Champions League Arena play or kill the Lich King on 25 man Heroic.
But grandma can kill 154 mobs for hours on end in the old games alright.
Wow is simply too hard for the old time bragging guys. That changed in TBC. That was bad.
comon, if you class WOW as 'difficult to play/takes effort' even in Vanilla or post Vanilla.......then you really need to open your eyes and try other games.
Onyxia/BWL/AQ40/Naxx40 were easy...just a little bit of coordination on teamspeak and done.
Lich King did not take any effort, we downed him soon after release of the instance and I must say I get waaaaay more challenges in Everquest 2 and by playing my good old EVE.
WOW is as arcade as it gets. That's why it was so popular. But don't call it difficult, it was always easy.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
If you can't pinpoint something wrong, you start complaining about "community".
Actually Wow introduced much too hardcore mechanics since TBC.
Arena and crazy 25 man heroic fights are too much too handle for the simple folks around here.
These folks just want time sinks: you kill 154 monsters at the rate of 3 minutes per monster.
That's no challenge, that's just a waste of time.
Challenge is what players make. Grandma won't be playing the Champions League Arena play or kill the Lich King on 25 man Heroic.
But grandma can kill 154 mobs for hours on end in the old games alright.
Wow is simply too hard for the old time bragging guys. That changed in TBC. That was bad.
comon, if you class WOW as 'difficult to play/takes effort' even in Vanilla or post Vanilla.......then you really need to open your eyes and try other games.
Onyxia/BWL/AQ40/Naxx40 were easy...just a little bit of coordination on teamspeak and done.
Lich King did not take any effort, we downed him soon after release of the instance and I must say I get waaaaay more challenges in Everquest 2 and by playing my good old EVE.
WOW is as arcade as it gets. That's why it was so popular. But don't call it difficult, it was always easy.
I think the man means the challenge of getting a Gladiator title and doing heroics 25 is simply another kind of diffculty than can be found in the usual MMO's.
If you can say with a straight face that every new 25 Heroic Raid is a walk in the park, you are simply lying. Stats prove that alright.
And as for PvP ratings: the system awards only a Gladiator title to less than 0.5% of its players. Wrathful Gladiator this season is even unique - meaning only one team - will get it on an average server size of 15/20 servers.
Nothing is "easy" when you can only get ONE unique player title out of 200.000 players in a competition.
Hell, other MMO's don't even have 200K players total.
Only so few make it to this rather unique champ status ... and the probability stats say : you are not one of them (0.0001% chance).
So people that say something is "easy" while they can't even touch the most difficult competition title are on the same level as Mrs Grandma ?
I think so. If I can't do it, I can't brag about it.
- I don't want to play a cookie-cutter class that has a role to fill in a group.
- I don't enjoy the combat. It is too easy. Auto-aim is generally tab+1+2+3+4 . ... and repeat this process for every add.
- I don't like the mobs AI. They do not feel real at all and do not like the mechanics of pulling aggro in EQ clones anymore.
- No risk vs reward. Worse thing that can happen is having to do the same thing over again. Not much of a thrill in that.
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I could take everything all the bad changes Blizzard implinented if it was'nt for the community which really is either populated in the greater part by immature adults or kids .I really could'nt stand it anymore I've not been in a school playground for many years and nor do i wish to repeat the experiance in a virtual enviroment . Would'nt touch another Blizzard game ever be it single player or mmo . Even though they are riding high now I can't wait to see them crash even if it takes 20 years .
There is nothing bad about it, I've spent thousands of hours loving the game. How many other games can I say that for? Blizzard has done a wonderful job maintaining and updating it. If anything, It's getting outdated. Both in looks and mechanics, but it's the best at the best at what it does.
This is MMORPG.com. If there aren't people bitching about an MMO then the rapture and ORDER TO THE UNIVERSE HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM EXISTENCE!
Playing: *sigh* back to WoW -------- Waiting for: SW:TOR, APB, WoD --------- Played and loved: Eve and WoW -------- Played and hated: WoW:WotLK, Warhammer, every single F2P
Biggest problem I have with WoW is that some players are so DIE HARD that they refuse to try anything else. That would include members of my family LOL! Personally I couldn't get past level 30 before the boredom and tedious repetition set in.
12 skill slots, when you only have like 20 skills? And many of these do not synergize. It's not like there're any real builds, because that's all based on set-in-stone trait building, which you have very little freedom to change.
Far too slow beginning. Considering the magnitude of events in TFT, I would expect to do some character building and a smidgeon of grinding until the story picks up at maybe lvl 30 or 40. NOPE! You have to buy a whole other game and go through that! There's no real continuous plot in WoW classic. I wouldnt mind if it didnt pick up after TFT but at least had some good storyline, like a good filler.
Terrible and repetitive quests, WoW classic = 100% grinding. No thanks.
Somewhat awkward story. Kael'thas isn't exactly a Burning Legion person made of pure evil, he's just pissed. Not enough to summon Kil'jaeden and then get them both killed...wtf
Not enough armor and weapons. Or spells. Or good quests/raids. Or much of anything.
To be honest, WoW did a favor to everyone. Everquest was a niche mmorpg with a few hundred thousand players.
WoW got released and we're getting flooded with MMORPGs, the market is saturated, people keep pumping bad idea after bad idea and is making good companies bankrupt. If you like any other mmorpg that got released after WoW got out, you have Blizzard to thank for making MMORPGS mainstream. Hate them or not, they stirred up the market big time.
just doesn't really have depth. Its why theres so many casual players- they play get bored after a month, and then relog multiple months later in the same process.
Cross realm dungeons with folks who can barely communicate. Now I loved LDoN in EQ1 but the whole lobby plus insta dungeon just kills the community and social aspects of the game. That was the final nail in the coffin for me. Well that and I remember on my RP server 2 weeks-8 Months after WoW came out how we had a great community filled with fun goofy and mature folks. Now I'd rather clean the toilets at Mos Isles than interact with 90% of the WoW community.
12 skill slots, when you only have like 20 skills? And many of these do not synergize. It's not like there're any real builds, because that's all based on set-in-stone trait building, which you have very little freedom to change.
Far too slow beginning. Considering the magnitude of events in TFT, I would expect to do some character building and a smidgeon of grinding until the story picks up at maybe lvl 30 or 40. NOPE! You have to buy a whole other game and go through that! There's no real continuous plot in WoW classic. I wouldnt mind if it didnt pick up after TFT but at least had some good storyline, like a good filler.
Terrible and repetitive quests, WoW classic = 100% grinding. No thanks.
Somewhat awkward story. Kael'thas isn't exactly a Burning Legion person made of pure evil, he's just pissed. Not enough to summon Kil'jaeden and then get them both killed...wtf
Not enough armor and weapons. Or spells. Or good quests/raids. Or much of anything.
Bottom line: TOO TEDIOUS! especially lvl 1-60
What's with people on this site thinking MMO's have to be a "story"? Should be a "world", not a "story."
For some games that's fine, where you create the story. But you're missing the purpose of WoW. Warcraft has a story, a huge one, one that's been explained through 5 games and several books and comics. One that WoW was supposed to continue. That was the purpose of WoW. So rather than introducing a new hero, you are the hero, make yourself the next Thrall and see how it works from step 1. Step 2 was then how you would gain power and control, but that came too late and by the time you were involved in the Warcraft lore you had to buy another game
the thing that ticked me off is this, death kights and paladins being playable on both sides. I just liked knowing that paladins were aliiance, shamans horde. and death knights should be exclusive to the undead.
Grind raid x 25 times -> Get new Hat -> repeat for shoulders, legs, hands, etc etc... -> "*Woot!* Can do new very slightly different raid" -> Grind raid x25 -> Get new hat -> ... ... ... and repeat ad infinitum.
... ... not that the above is any different from any other game I guess.
Well, let's be honest here, WoW did lower the difficulty bar quite a bit compared to older MMOs, right from the start. And it only got easier and easier with every patch.
I don't even want to go back to EQ, the epitome of "unfair". A game where you lost your gear if you could not retrieve it in time. A game where you could slip through the cracks in the world and be gone (including your hard won gear). EQ was not "hard". EQ was simply and plainly unfair because you "lost" often to game mechanics, glitches and bugs. Ok, you could also abuse them. Granted. But hey, they often designed encounters so that you HAD to abuse them to be able to beat the encounter!
But I want to cite Dark Age of Camelot. Pre-Atlantis times (before it got ruined and reduced to the sorry state it is in now). DAoC was "harder" than WoW in the sense that you first of all did not get past level 20 if you could not play your class sensibly enough to be valuable in a group. Because you did not level sensibly alone past 20. So if you encountered someone at level 40, you KNEW that he knows how to play. Else he wouldn't be 40. The reasons for this are many.
First of all, tanking 5+ enemies was but a wet dream. You could maybe tank two enemies. If you were a really good player who knew exactly just how much aggro each of the mobs produces that you try to hold. Because there was no red flashing portrait telling you that the healer is about to peel aggro from you. Unfortunately, in a full group (consisting of 8 players, and you needed them!), you usually pulled 3-5 mobs. Which meant that you needed good mezzers who kept the other mobs occupied. Because a hit to a caster meant that his spell breaks. No "chance to break". No "setback". It simply fizzles and he gets a few seconds delay before he can try again. In other words, your healer does NOT heal at all when he got aggro. Mages die to trashmobs in 2 hits. At level 30. At 50, maxlevel, they were usually oneshotted by trashies. And they could easily dish out more damage than the tank could taunt for, so they had to learn just how much damage they may dish out so they stay alive. The same applies to healers, who had to know just when and how much they may heal if they don't want to find a rezzer (for the party, not just themselves, a dead healer was a wipe. Period).
The list goes on. Of course, in the wake of WoW and its success with the "easy road" formula, DAoC got dumbed down as well. Just like every MMO. So yes, WoW kinda ruined the MMO genre for those of us who don't just want MMOs as a toy to keep their hands busy while they're watching a movie.
Now, DAoC wasn't hard by any standard either. Yet apparently it was still "too hard" so people didn't stick around ... probably because they noticed they can't get past level 20 because they were too stupid to play their role and got kicked out of every group. That doesn't happen to you in WoW. If anything is an indicator, it's the fact that the random PUG assembly tool, aka DF, actually produces something that works more often than it falls apart. What does it tell you about a game when you can slap together 5 people who never played together before and they can easily mop the floor with any boss the DF tool deems "appropriate level" for them?
And yes, that in turn has a direct effect on the community quality. If being an a..hat, a griefer, a need-roller or whatever other unpleasant personality one might have, if that means you cannot get a group anymore, it means, in a more group and team oriented game (as the "old school" MMOs were), that you can just as well stop playing. You cannot do anything anymore. Worse, in EQ you were often dependent on other players to recover your gear after a wipe. Try to find anyone willing to invest hours to stage a rescue mission if you're a sociopath, good luck!
The community was "better" In old MMOs not because the people were better, but simply because only the people who could get along and show some team spirit would stay, because being a self centered idiot meant that you could not play sensibly. You needed the other players, and they're not NPCs, they don't forget that you called them names the other day. And the community being much smaller than it is in WoW (especially now that you do not only have one server but a whole collection of servers and their players to play with), it means that word spread quickly and the chance that any given random group at your level contains at least one player who already knows you and informs the rest of the people that you're an "undesirable" person is pretty high. It's not that people behaved better back then. it's simply that only those that did behave stayed.
No.....just no that's not right at all. FLYFF RUINED IT! MAPLE STORY RUINED IT! Essentially all these stupid little cartoony MMOs made for 9-year-olds so there couldnt be any swearing or violence beyond goofy whacking sounds that sound like they came out of PowerPoint. I want an MMO that is as bloody as Mortal Kombat, Halo, Resident Evil, Gears of War. When I slice somebody with a giant axe, there should be a sign of a wound. Essentially, Guild Wars with blood, gore, swearing, and more horror from time to time(it still has to have all the other game mechanics be good
Umm... neither of the games you mention is so successful what game makers all over the world go "Oh look! That's the formula! We gotta do the same and we'll also have that many people playing".
That's what WoW is. Successful. And hence its formula gets copied. And yes, WoW is as cartoony as the games you mention. With the same "bonk" sound effects found in cartoons. It's colorful, it's PG, you needn't look elsewhere for a successful game to copy that lacks any kind of gore and blood.
Comments
Hmmm, yes, I think so. I see it now. It was rather late last night when I read it so my brain must not have processed it correctly.
Thank you for pointing this out, and sorry to original dude I 'corrected'.
Lot of people hate on WoW irrationally, that's for sure.
Me, I think it's great, it attracts all the new to mmo peoples and the less desirable old players, keeping many, more serious mmos slightly cleaner
WoW for me is the "newbie island" of the mmo world, eh?
On a more serious note..
From the mmo industry standpoint, I can see why people are annoyed though, all those big name dev teams look at wow's budget and numbers, and think "hey! let's try this too!", then make a rather watered down please-everyone casual game that just doesn't really cut it. So from that respect, one could say WoW's responsible for the loss of AAA title development of deeper, more complex games. But eh, if it wasn't wow, it would have been something else... these big guys want their big money, so want their massive amounts of players eh?
It's like ah.. a cartoony giggle-happy nintendo game vs a dark adult orientated complex horror game on a ps3 or something heh
Actually I teach music, Guitar, Violin, Piano. It is a side job while I put out samples to movie companies to be put in as a background music artist. Thank you for your joke though, seriously. I've done more with my life than you have guaranteed. I've graduated from my music school in Hollywood.
Sorry, but World of Warcraft's community is not even remotely similar to any other game in existence -- what you have there is a collection of children from 4Chan and the entire Battlenet all in one game -- sorry, but that's completely wrong.
To list a few problems:
It's Activision's game now. Don't try to tell me Activision has no creative control over Blizzard, because Real ID was definitely an Activision move.
The game is easy, but WoW players are the most handicapped players in the history of video gaming. Ever. They fail in ways you never thought possible, and I always walk away from a raid astonished at the level of stupidity I just witnessed. For example...the buff received from Icecrown Citadel is now 30%, and people are still wiping even after successfully completing the entire raid and killing the Lich King. Really? ...Really.
Resilience.
PvP is unbalanced, and Blizzard doesn't care. Working hard for your gear is not something I'm totally against, but when you just got that last piece of the set you need, Blizzard introduces the next set. It's a never-ending cycle where, if you want to stand even a remote chance in PvP, you need to be playing non-stop, all the time, and have the best gear 100% of the time. Unless you play a Paladin.
Arenas and Battlegrounds annihilated any amount of "fun" World of Warcraft had to offer, in terms of PvP. World PvP is the only thing MMORPGs have going for them. If you disagree, go play a first person shooter. Because any kind of instanced PvP with objectives is just trying to emulate what has already been done in first person shooters, minus the class balance.
Blizzard doesn't moderate the game what-so-ever. Actually, I'm pretty sure when they partnered with Activision they lost the ability to ban players completely.
Blizzard knows nothing about how to design new content. Instead of making the game more challenging and therefore interesting, they design some sort of a neat little raid dungeon and instead of actually using their noodles to design content the real way, they make players grind, grind, grind, grind, GRIND for new sets of gear so that they will be able to experience it, rather than their skill alone determining if they can play the game or not.
These reasons are of course just the tip of the iceberg. How the game managed to become so popular by now is absolutely mind-boggling.
"So what's truly bad about WoW?"
Remember the line from this guy?
For gamers who have played more than one MMO, they tend to look at WoW as "too easy" and therefore not worth respect. They come from other MMOs where people say "This is too grindy, difficult, long, hard, etc" and other people quit. Very few people have ever quit WoW and claimed it was "too hard" as a reason.
Games like Eve, FFXI, EQ1, DAOC, etc.. don't usually have people going "Hey, this game is too EASY and start ripping it because of that only. People will usually say they don't like that game or this game, but never give too easy as a reason. With Wow, it's the handy excuse. Most won't even admit the good points of the game in any form whatsoever. Later, they'll curse Blizzard for making a MMO for the masses that "any moron not braindead" can play and max and "dumbing down" the industry.
Simply put, it doesn't make the experienced gamer feel that good about themselves.
Wow allows a 75 yr-old grandmother to max to 80 solo just as well as a 12 year old kid, they say. If you want to buy a Pegasus, you don't have to work for it.. just buy it. Even the raid content for the so-called "heavy raiders" isn't really that hard with all the add-on mods that say "Hit THIS button in 10 seconds according to them. Ok.. hit THIS one NOW, then RUN!"
Wow allows everyone to be a 'good player' for the most part, they'll say, so there's nothing special about it. They say this without realizing that's the one thing that makes WoW such a 'special game'. Since most experienced gamers have a certain amount of epeen, their epeen is no bigger than most others in Wow so it's despised.
Those that tend berate WoW because it's too easy, generally want to feel more special than someone else, but in Wow that's really not that possible.
(*In before "WoWfanboy". Stopped playing after TBC)
"TO MICHAEL!"
This might be nostalgia, but I think current WoW has changed too far from the original premise.
Server communities were actually very good places to be in, in vanilla; at least for my server, but with all the X realms stuff that seems to have deteriorated quite a bit.
There are a lot of things WoW shines in more than any game I've tried however: they have uncomparably smooth gameplay and a lot of little things which have been very cleverly done.
Just the way you go through quests in every zone and the way those follow up, each leading to some sort of conclusion in the instanced dungeon that many zones have, has been a very smart thing to do for example.
Saying WoW is way easier than other games is really showing ignorance, as a lot of monsters in WoW have way more varied abilities in normal combat and the PvP actually brings in twitch elements besides pure buttonmashing, which is not something many MMO's have.
Large parts, such as the progressions have become 'easier' as time went by though, with the removal of elite world mobs for example.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Well, many of the original Wow players had play some other MMO before, but today have the majority started with Wow. Also many of the earlier MMO players were old pen and paper RPG players and they know the importance of helping eachother.
I think it partly is the instances both in Wow and other MMOs that messed up the communities, and dungeon finders doesn't help either. Modern MMOs seems to reward people who act like jerks in a way older didn't, if you acted like that in Meridian or EQ you would't get any group after a while but now people suddenly can log out halfway in a dungeon cause they got the loot they wanted and don't feel that they have to help out with the rest of the dungeon.
Wow is not the only culprit here and there have always been some jerks in all games but Wow is the worst one.
Guildwars 2 is trying some things to get the communities better, stuff like no loot stealing and full xp for all, grouped or not. Hopefully it will work, things are getting worse and worse.
And I don't think it the younger generation who is ruder, something in the games promote this behavior.
If you can't pinpoint something wrong, you start complaining about "community".
Actually Wow introduced much too hardcore mechanics since TBC.
Arena and crazy 25 man heroic fights are too much too handle for the simple folks around here.
These folks just want time sinks: you kill 154 monsters at the rate of 3 minutes per monster.
That's no challenge, that's just a waste of time.
Challenge is what players make. Grandma won't be playing the Champions League Arena play or kill the Lich King on 25 man Heroic.
But grandma can kill 154 mobs for hours on end in the old games alright.
Wow is simply too hard for the old time bragging guys. That changed in TBC. That was bad.
comon, if you class WOW as 'difficult to play/takes effort' even in Vanilla or post Vanilla.......then you really need to open your eyes and try other games.
Onyxia/BWL/AQ40/Naxx40 were easy...just a little bit of coordination on teamspeak and done.
Lich King did not take any effort, we downed him soon after release of the instance and I must say I get waaaaay more challenges in Everquest 2 and by playing my good old EVE.
WOW is as arcade as it gets. That's why it was so popular. But don't call it difficult, it was always easy.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
I think the man means the challenge of getting a Gladiator title and doing heroics 25 is simply another kind of diffculty than can be found in the usual MMO's.
If you can say with a straight face that every new 25 Heroic Raid is a walk in the park, you are simply lying. Stats prove that alright.
And as for PvP ratings: the system awards only a Gladiator title to less than 0.5% of its players. Wrathful Gladiator this season is even unique - meaning only one team - will get it on an average server size of 15/20 servers.
Nothing is "easy" when you can only get ONE unique player title out of 200.000 players in a competition.
Hell, other MMO's don't even have 200K players total.
Only so few make it to this rather unique champ status ... and the probability stats say : you are not one of them (0.0001% chance).
So people that say something is "easy" while they can't even touch the most difficult competition title are on the same level as Mrs Grandma ?
I think so. If I can't do it, I can't brag about it.
- I don't like the art (too cartoony)
- I don't want to come across 12 yr olds
- I don't want to play a cookie-cutter class that has a role to fill in a group.
- I don't enjoy the combat. It is too easy. Auto-aim is generally tab+1+2+3+4 . ... and repeat this process for every add.
- I don't like the mobs AI. They do not feel real at all and do not like the mechanics of pulling aggro in EQ clones anymore.
- No risk vs reward. Worse thing that can happen is having to do the same thing over again. Not much of a thrill in that.
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I could take everything all the bad changes Blizzard implinented if it was'nt for the community which really is either populated in the greater part by immature adults or kids .I really could'nt stand it anymore I've not been in a school playground for many years and nor do i wish to repeat the experiance in a virtual enviroment . Would'nt touch another Blizzard game ever be it single player or mmo . Even though they are riding high now I can't wait to see them crash even if it takes 20 years .
There is nothing bad about it, I've spent thousands of hours loving the game. How many other games can I say that for? Blizzard has done a wonderful job maintaining and updating it. If anything, It's getting outdated. Both in looks and mechanics, but it's the best at the best at what it does.
This is MMORPG.com. If there aren't people bitching about an MMO then the rapture and ORDER TO THE UNIVERSE HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM EXISTENCE!
Playing: *sigh* back to WoW
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Waiting for: SW:TOR, APB, WoD
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Played and loved: Eve and WoW
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Played and hated: WoW:WotLK, Warhammer, every single F2P
Biggest problem I have with WoW is that some players are so DIE HARD that they refuse to try anything else. That would include members of my family LOL! Personally I couldn't get past level 30 before the boredom and tedious repetition set in.
12 skill slots, when you only have like 20 skills? And many of these do not synergize. It's not like there're any real builds, because that's all based on set-in-stone trait building, which you have very little freedom to change.
Far too slow beginning. Considering the magnitude of events in TFT, I would expect to do some character building and a smidgeon of grinding until the story picks up at maybe lvl 30 or 40. NOPE! You have to buy a whole other game and go through that! There's no real continuous plot in WoW classic. I wouldnt mind if it didnt pick up after TFT but at least had some good storyline, like a good filler.
Terrible and repetitive quests, WoW classic = 100% grinding. No thanks.
Somewhat awkward story. Kael'thas isn't exactly a Burning Legion person made of pure evil, he's just pissed. Not enough to summon Kil'jaeden and then get them both killed...wtf
Not enough armor and weapons. Or spells. Or good quests/raids. Or much of anything.
Bottom line: TOO TEDIOUS! especially lvl 1-60
To be honest, WoW did a favor to everyone. Everquest was a niche mmorpg with a few hundred thousand players.
WoW got released and we're getting flooded with MMORPGs, the market is saturated, people keep pumping bad idea after bad idea and is making good companies bankrupt. If you like any other mmorpg that got released after WoW got out, you have Blizzard to thank for making MMORPGS mainstream. Hate them or not, they stirred up the market big time.
just doesn't really have depth. Its why theres so many casual players- they play get bored after a month, and then relog multiple months later in the same process.
Cross realm dungeons with folks who can barely communicate. Now I loved LDoN in EQ1 but the whole lobby plus insta dungeon just kills the community and social aspects of the game. That was the final nail in the coffin for me. Well that and I remember on my RP server 2 weeks-8 Months after WoW came out how we had a great community filled with fun goofy and mature folks. Now I'd rather clean the toilets at Mos Isles than interact with 90% of the WoW community.
For some games that's fine, where you create the story. But you're missing the purpose of WoW. Warcraft has a story, a huge one, one that's been explained through 5 games and several books and comics. One that WoW was supposed to continue. That was the purpose of WoW. So rather than introducing a new hero, you are the hero, make yourself the next Thrall and see how it works from step 1. Step 2 was then how you would gain power and control, but that came too late and by the time you were involved in the Warcraft lore you had to buy another game
the thing that ticked me off is this, death kights and paladins being playable on both sides. I just liked knowing that paladins were aliiance, shamans horde. and death knights should be exclusive to the undead.
but thats just me
I can ask you a question for your question. What is an mmo game without the players?
Grind raid x 25 times -> Get new Hat -> repeat for shoulders, legs, hands, etc etc... -> "*Woot!* Can do new very slightly different raid" -> Grind raid x25 -> Get new hat -> ... ... ... and repeat ad infinitum.
... ... not that the above is any different from any other game I guess.
Ascension - EU Mature, Friendly, Laid Back SW:TOR Guild now recruiting.
Well, let's be honest here, WoW did lower the difficulty bar quite a bit compared to older MMOs, right from the start. And it only got easier and easier with every patch.
I don't even want to go back to EQ, the epitome of "unfair". A game where you lost your gear if you could not retrieve it in time. A game where you could slip through the cracks in the world and be gone (including your hard won gear). EQ was not "hard". EQ was simply and plainly unfair because you "lost" often to game mechanics, glitches and bugs. Ok, you could also abuse them. Granted. But hey, they often designed encounters so that you HAD to abuse them to be able to beat the encounter!
But I want to cite Dark Age of Camelot. Pre-Atlantis times (before it got ruined and reduced to the sorry state it is in now). DAoC was "harder" than WoW in the sense that you first of all did not get past level 20 if you could not play your class sensibly enough to be valuable in a group. Because you did not level sensibly alone past 20. So if you encountered someone at level 40, you KNEW that he knows how to play. Else he wouldn't be 40. The reasons for this are many.
First of all, tanking 5+ enemies was but a wet dream. You could maybe tank two enemies. If you were a really good player who knew exactly just how much aggro each of the mobs produces that you try to hold. Because there was no red flashing portrait telling you that the healer is about to peel aggro from you. Unfortunately, in a full group (consisting of 8 players, and you needed them!), you usually pulled 3-5 mobs. Which meant that you needed good mezzers who kept the other mobs occupied. Because a hit to a caster meant that his spell breaks. No "chance to break". No "setback". It simply fizzles and he gets a few seconds delay before he can try again. In other words, your healer does NOT heal at all when he got aggro. Mages die to trashmobs in 2 hits. At level 30. At 50, maxlevel, they were usually oneshotted by trashies. And they could easily dish out more damage than the tank could taunt for, so they had to learn just how much damage they may dish out so they stay alive. The same applies to healers, who had to know just when and how much they may heal if they don't want to find a rezzer (for the party, not just themselves, a dead healer was a wipe. Period).
The list goes on. Of course, in the wake of WoW and its success with the "easy road" formula, DAoC got dumbed down as well. Just like every MMO. So yes, WoW kinda ruined the MMO genre for those of us who don't just want MMOs as a toy to keep their hands busy while they're watching a movie.
Now, DAoC wasn't hard by any standard either. Yet apparently it was still "too hard" so people didn't stick around ... probably because they noticed they can't get past level 20 because they were too stupid to play their role and got kicked out of every group. That doesn't happen to you in WoW. If anything is an indicator, it's the fact that the random PUG assembly tool, aka DF, actually produces something that works more often than it falls apart. What does it tell you about a game when you can slap together 5 people who never played together before and they can easily mop the floor with any boss the DF tool deems "appropriate level" for them?
And yes, that in turn has a direct effect on the community quality. If being an a..hat, a griefer, a need-roller or whatever other unpleasant personality one might have, if that means you cannot get a group anymore, it means, in a more group and team oriented game (as the "old school" MMOs were), that you can just as well stop playing. You cannot do anything anymore. Worse, in EQ you were often dependent on other players to recover your gear after a wipe. Try to find anyone willing to invest hours to stage a rescue mission if you're a sociopath, good luck!
The community was "better" In old MMOs not because the people were better, but simply because only the people who could get along and show some team spirit would stay, because being a self centered idiot meant that you could not play sensibly. You needed the other players, and they're not NPCs, they don't forget that you called them names the other day. And the community being much smaller than it is in WoW (especially now that you do not only have one server but a whole collection of servers and their players to play with), it means that word spread quickly and the chance that any given random group at your level contains at least one player who already knows you and informs the rest of the people that you're an "undesirable" person is pretty high. It's not that people behaved better back then. it's simply that only those that did behave stayed.
No.....just no that's not right at all. FLYFF RUINED IT! MAPLE STORY RUINED IT! Essentially all these stupid little cartoony MMOs made for 9-year-olds so there couldnt be any swearing or violence beyond goofy whacking sounds that sound like they came out of PowerPoint. I want an MMO that is as bloody as Mortal Kombat, Halo, Resident Evil, Gears of War. When I slice somebody with a giant axe, there should be a sign of a wound. Essentially, Guild Wars with blood, gore, swearing, and more horror from time to time(it still has to have all the other game mechanics be good
Umm... neither of the games you mention is so successful what game makers all over the world go "Oh look! That's the formula! We gotta do the same and we'll also have that many people playing".
That's what WoW is. Successful. And hence its formula gets copied. And yes, WoW is as cartoony as the games you mention. With the same "bonk" sound effects found in cartoons. It's colorful, it's PG, you needn't look elsewhere for a successful game to copy that lacks any kind of gore and blood.