1 Reason WoW didn't ruin MMO's, it made MMO's mainstream by going Mainstream.
before WoW a game was considered good if it had a couple of hundred thousand players, WoW actually opened up the whole idea of MMO's to millions, if WoW had never happened, i am almost certain, that the majority of present day MMO's and those still in development, would never have happened.. it also continues to give those MMO's with poorly thought out implementation a continual kick up the rear to improve themselves, Blizzard are setting the pace imo..
Depending on your point of view, every one of the three positives listed by the OP are two edged swords that did as much damage to MMORPG gaming in general as they did help the genre.
It made one group of MMO buyers happy (unfortuantely, the larger, more causual audiance) and in the same turn alienated another segment of the market.
That would be fine btw, if every developer since then didn't keep staring at WOW's sub numbers and keep trying to build their games to steal their customer base from them.
Instead they largely end up picking up the scraps and we who are looking for a more challenging MMO experience continue to sit on the outside hoping one day at least one major developer will come to their senses and take a shot at winning our business back.
Our "niche" might be much larger than most people think.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Originally posted by whisperwynd Originally posted by lizardbones
A friend of mine calls this the, "I'm a special snowflake syndrome". Being a special snowflake made people useful, regardless of their social deficiencies. There's a limit on how many special snowflakes you can have though.
For every happy little snowflake, there were a bunch of unhappy snowflakes...they were superfluous in the grander scheme of things because the first set of snowflakes had already filled the special snowflake niches in the game's ecosystem.
Now, nobody gets to be a special snowflake, but more people can participate. If someone is a jerk, they are easily replaceable because you don't have to find a special snowflake to fill their role.
It's a trade off really. I really enjoyed being the group's mana battery in WoW on my Shadow Priest. Everyone was pretty OK with my priest not being a healer...especially the other healers. So I always had a spot, and that meant that other people didn't. The same thing happened with other people too...we had a core group that always went on raids, and a bunch of extras. After the mana battery thing changed, I wasn't a special snowflake anymore. I noticed that a lot of the 'extras' got to go on raids a lot more too. In my opinion, that's better overall, even if I didn't have a guaranteed spot.*
* I did have a spot actually, I got really good at healing and managing myself during encounters. But it was kind of a relief to know that if I didn't feel like logging in, somebody else could fill in on raids and I wasn't ruining a night's activity for 9 to 24 other people.
WoW actually increased this attitude though, because now showing off your e-peen while being condescending without the consequences of such behavior is more alllowable. Nobody wants to play a game where they don't feel special about their character. Masochism is not that rampant yet. It's not the feeling of always being useful that really matters but that your actions matter and have a community of people that know you and how you behave, not some random internet user that plays the same game. You said it yourself, you adapted from spriest to become a healer and stayed within that core grp of raiders. Seems like being a special snowflake again. I
You could do a whole Psych paper on people playing WoW and how messed up their social interactions are. Maybe that would be a Sociology paper. Whatever. WoW is an extreme example of using a game as a substitute for self esteem in a lot of ways. However...that doesn't have much to do with people being not being able to participate in something with their friends just because they chose the wrong class.
Prior to things become more homogenized, I was a special snowflake because I chose to play a Shadow Priest. I may or may not have been all that good at managing my character, not standing in a fire, under the dragon's feet, etc. But if I was logged in, and a raid was happening, I was in it. Other people did not go because I was there on my Shadow Priest.
After the classes got more homogenized, I was not denying other people a spot in the raid simply by logging in. I had to prove my usefulness by actually doing something and being useful. I actually earned a spot in the raids, I wasn't given a spot in the raids because of the class I chose to play. More importantly (to me) I could opt out of the raid and if there wasn't another priest, there was another shaman or pallie that could heal in my place. It was kind of nice to be able to go off into the battlegrounds instead of raids every night. I think overall that it worked out better for the game. It certainly worked out better for me.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
You could do a whole Psych paper on people playing WoW and how messed up their social interactions are. Maybe that would be a Sociology paper. Whatever. WoW is an extreme example of using a game as a substitute for self esteem in a lot of ways. However...that doesn't have much to do with people being not being able to participate in something with their friends just because they chose the wrong class.
Prior to things become more homogenized, I was a special snowflake because I chose to play a Shadow Priest. I may or may not have been all that good at managing my character, not standing in a fire, under the dragon's feet, etc. But if I was logged in, and a raid was happening, I was in it. Other people did not go because I was there on my Shadow Priest.
After the classes got more homogenized, I was not denying other people a spot in the raid simply by logging in. I had to prove my usefulness by actually doing something and being useful. I actually earned a spot in the raids, I wasn't given a spot in the raids because of the class I chose to play. More importantly (to me) I could opt out of the raid and if there wasn't another priest, there was another shaman or pallie that could heal in my place. It was kind of nice to be able to go off into the battlegrounds instead of raids every night. I think overall that it worked out better for the game. It certainly worked out better for me.
Wasn't trying to denigrate you or anything, but you're talking about raids, the smaller % of the mmo population and where the 'community' we were refering to is somewhat there. Though you have to almost take raiding like a part-time job and if you aren't in the core raiding group then it falls to either waiting for pugs or as you said, friends.
It was like that in older games too, at endgame you had little choice, whether it be instances WoW-style, or World bosses which you had to wait to spawn. You got a guild, got known and became 'one of the crew'.
The homogenized subsequent path it took, as you put it, makes it that now you can simply leave the guild if they don't like you or you are a proverbial asshat, and just join another with practically total anonymity.
You can literally grind pugs for vp and get top rated gear and still pug ZA/ZG afterwards.
Special snowflake or not, it still makes it easier to be uninvolved or a jerk as a whole to your fellow players ingame. That's one of the points we were exploring.
Going mainstream means dumbing down to appeal to the lowest common denominator... which is exactly what has happened in the industry. For years most MMOs have bee rehashes of the same tired, old, and brain dead simplistic gameplay that has left a good chunk of gamers wanting more. But the industry doesn't provide, because it's convinced that developing bland and wisely 'accessible' MMOs is the path to profit.
The only way to get non-MMO gamers to play MMOs, is to dumb down MMOs to appeal to that crowd... which kind of kills the whole point of an MMO.
WOW reigned in the crappy aspects of EQ and UO and made MMOs attractive to a lot more people. The old niches still exist but they are a hard sell to developers and a majority of players.
WOW definitely helped motivate publishers to take chances on new MMOs. I'm positive some MMOs never would have been developed if it wasn't for the success of WOW.
The only thing WoW controls is itself. It does not make other companies do what they do. People that blame WoW for the crop of uninspired games (for the most part) that have followed it are the same people that blame anything big and successful for everything. The only thing WoW eventually ruined at least in my opinion was itself. Hopefully some developers are bringing some games to the table with original ideas and formulas, we shall see.
Wow, I must say that MMO players are the hardest buunch of people to make/keep happy. All I see on this site is negativity of the highest degree - Why a game sucks or will fail, most post are before the games even come out. It's sad.
WoW didn't ruin MMO's... the players did. It seems that no one is happy with anything anymore. Check it out for yourself... take a look around one day and weigh the positive post with the negative. You will be suprised how generally uphappy most MMO'ers are.
I quit WoW many many times and I'm now back in there and having a great time. For ME at least, WoW didn't ruin MMO's, it saved them. Without it, I would be playing a single player game.
You know what? There is actually a reason why all you hear on forums is complaints... And its not what you are describing! The "Happy" MMO players are (gasp!) PLAYING, and having fun! While ignoring the freaking Trolls that inhabit the forums.
And the only problem with that is that, sometimes the Devs "listen to the Trolls"... /doublefacepalm
Originally posted by whisperwynd Originally posted by lizardbones You could do a whole Psych paper on people playing WoW and how messed up their social interactions are. Maybe that would be a Sociology paper. Whatever. WoW is an extreme example of using a game as a substitute for self esteem in a lot of ways. However...that doesn't have much to do with people being not being able to participate in something with their friends just because they chose the wrong class.
Prior to things become more homogenized, I was a special snowflake because I chose to play a Shadow Priest. I may or may not have been all that good at managing my character, not standing in a fire, under the dragon's feet, etc. But if I was logged in, and a raid was happening, I was in it. Other people did not go because I was there on my Shadow Priest.
After the classes got more homogenized, I was not denying other people a spot in the raid simply by logging in. I had to prove my usefulness by actually doing something and being useful. I actually earned a spot in the raids, I wasn't given a spot in the raids because of the class I chose to play. More importantly (to me) I could opt out of the raid and if there wasn't another priest, there was another shaman or pallie that could heal in my place. It was kind of nice to be able to go off into the battlegrounds instead of raids every night. I think overall that it worked out better for the game. It certainly worked out better for me.
Wasn't trying to denigrate you or anything, but you're talking about raids, the smaller % of the mmo population and where the 'community' we were refering to is somewhat there. Though you have to almost take raiding like a part-time job and if you aren't in the core raiding group then it falls to either waiting for pugs or as you said, friends. It was like that in older games too, at endgame you had little choice, whether it be instances WoW-style, or World bosses which you had to wait to spawn. You got a guild, got known and became 'one of the crew'. The homogenized subsequent path it took, as you put it, makes it that now you can simply leave the guild if they don't like you or you are a proverbial asshat, and just join another with practically total anonymity. You can literally grind pugs for vp and get top rated gear and still pug ZA/ZG afterwards. Special snowflake or not, it still makes it easier to be uninvolved or a jerk as a whole to your fellow players ingame. That's one of the points we were exploring.
Unless everyone is keeping a tab on the 2,000+ active players on each server, everyone more or less has anonymity. There are a few well known people, but that's it. People have always been able to leave and join guilds if they wanted to...nothing new there. It's always been that way. With class homogenization you just won't get into the next guild or cement your spot in your existing guild just because you rolled a Shadow Priest.
Now, I'm not so sure about the rest of the game's influence being good or bad. Do I want to see a whole bunch of games just like WoW? No, of course not. Do I want to see millions upon millions of dollars being pumped into the MMORPG industry? Yes, yes I do. There has been more development in the last five years on MMORPG than there has been in the 10 or 20 years prior and I think a lot of that is because of Blizzard and WoW.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
If WoW didn't happen, I gurantee we would still have mmorpg today.
if this is true then.... blame all other mmorpg developers for not being capable of making an mmorpg better than WoW in every aspect of the game....
why its so hard to get over the fact that WoW is still the mmorpg that pulls more audience because its better made than all these new generation mmos trying to get easy money and then fail....
its been almost 6 months that i dont re-sub to WoW but i havent found another mmorpg that keeps me interested as much as WoW has done it..... so i have been playing only console games till GW2 and TSW come out (although im sure those 2 wont do the trick either.... much less SWtor)
Love it or hate it, if it wasn't for WoW HUGE success, we probably wouldn't be seeing the likes of SWTOR, TERA, GW2, SW etc coming out.
WoW brought MMO's to the forefront and captured a whole new audience that didn't play them before. Because of that, we'll all reap the rewards of other companies trying to cash in.
Totally wrong, saying that its to say that GW1 was succesfull thanks to WoW existence, also i dont recall any mmo wich such marketing as WoW so i think thats a key too in the WoW succes, still dont pretend to say that WoW is the "mentor" of anything because is it not.
If WoW didn't happen, I gurantee we would still have mmorpg today.
if this is true then.... blame all other mmorpg developers for not being capable of making an mmorpg better than WoW in every aspect of the game....
why its so hard to get over the fact that WoW is still the mmorpg that pulls more audience because its better made than all these new generation mmos trying to get easy money and then fail....
its been almost 6 months that i dont re-sub to WoW but i havent found another mmorpg that keeps me interested as much as WoW has done it..... so i have been playing only console games till GW2 and TSW come out (although im sure those 2 wont do the trick either.... much less SWtor)
Take that feeling you've got of being without a game for six months and multiply that by 10+. That's an approximate average of how long old UO/DAoC/EQ/SWG etc. fans have been waiting for a new game that keeps them interested.
As much as I am hoping for and looking forward to SW:TOR...
EA really contributed majorly to the fall of the MMORPG genre and to its present state of affairs.
They acquired Origin Systems, makers of Ultima Online, as they were in the process of making Ultima Online 2 - oh all the things that game could have been...
But Origin was bought by EA, UO2 was scrapped...
Some time later, Origin works on UXO, Ultima 10: Oddessy which for all intents and purposes would be UO2 - oh all the things that game could have been...
Origin is pretty much shut down by EA, because the Origin studio in Texas was forced to close and most if not all of the employees did not WANT to move away from their homes and communities and families at EA's bidding to go where ever EA wanted them to pack up and move to, so they quit.
Two games... from the Godfather's of the MMO genre, ruined and scrapped by EA's short sighted greed.
They could have been game changers... major leaps forward in the genre... we could be having an entirely different conversation about MMOs today.
I believe EA is no longer "the evil Empire" of the gaming industry, after the collaspe of WAR and some either public failures, I think they've really shifted their focus to enabling developers to excel, rather then trying to push and guide and force their agenda.
Unless everyone is keeping a tab on the 2,000+ active players on each server, everyone more or less has anonymity. There are a few well known people, but that's it. People have always been able to leave and join guilds if they wanted to...nothing new there. It's always been that way. With class homogenization you just won't get into the next guild or cement your spot in your existing guild just because you rolled a Shadow Priest.
Now, I'm not so sure about the rest of the game's influence being good or bad. Do I want to see a whole bunch of games just like WoW? No, of course not. Do I want to see millions upon millions of dollars being pumped into the MMORPG industry? Yes, yes I do. There has been more development in the last five years on MMORPG than there has been in the 10 or 20 years prior and I think a lot of that is because of Blizzard and WoW.
In as much as I agree about the development, where has it gotten us, the gamer? Which game came out post WoW which offered as much Blizz did. That logic would only be supported if the genre kept rising from title to title.
Instead we get subpar games with the high hopes that the next one will be 'the One'. Blizz got a game out and did wonders, but it's out now and simply saying it's because of it that we have great development is false. As there is no way to prove otherwise since we can't go back in time and change it.
Anything from the past can be said to good or bad for the future, it's all perspective. Right or wrong means very little in its debate as everyone will invariably take sides and argue it.
As for the leaving guild or not, the anonymity was less there when the community as a whole built up those relationships rather than pick and choose out of the litter based on ilvl and availability. This progression is one of the problems I see in Mmo's today. No building of reputation WITHIN the game server's community.
Originally posted by rojo6934 Take that feeling you've got of being without a game for six months and multiply that by 10+. That's an approximate average of how long old UO/DAoC/EQ/SWG etc. fans have been waiting for a new game that keeps them interested.
That sucks. It really does.
To be honest, though, there isn't much that can be done about it.
Even though they sometimes pretend that it isn't true, all companies main goal is to make money for their shareholders (whether private or public).
Why would someone make an oldschool game that brought in a couple hundred thousand (At most!) players when WoW is sitting over here with 12 million?
In order for the "oldschool" game to be successful, it will still need an enormous budget...But it won't turn a profit since it won't attract that many players.
This is the problem!
In order to make a game "better" than WoW, you need a lot of money. To earn back that money, you need a lot of players. To get a lot of players, you need to make the game appeal to a broad demographic.
Unless a rich individual that doesn't mind bleeding money every month decides to release an "oldschool" game, I don't see those styles of games making a resurgence.
As for the leaving guild or not, the anonymity was less there when the community as a whole built up those relationships rather than pick and choose out of the litter based on ilvl and availability. This progression is one of the problems I see in Mmo's today. No building of reputation WITHIN the game server's community.
But WoW had this and had this in spades back in the days of Vanilla/Classic and Burning Crusade.
Good tanks/healers were a rare commodity that was covetted and carefully courted.
Good DPS that could do more for a raid/group then do damage were a dime a dozen.
Players had rep and skill mattered.
Then came the LFG tool and cross-realm LFG... completely ruined that. It still exists to some extent at a raid-wide level, as in you don't get invited to tank or heal for a guild's raids unless you can prove your skill...
but how do you prove that skill anymore or "get recruited" without server-only small group content? The entire dynamics of the community has shifted and all thanks to WOTLK and the LFG tool and cross-server queue...
Ruined the game IMO.
Then, of course, you combined that with GearScore and the Acheivement system, both also came around during WOTLK which meant you had to prove you had already done content before you'd be invited to do content...
But how would you ever do content if you were required to do content... before you could do it?
Again, this perfect storm, tri-fecta of terrible FAIL that hit WoW during WOTLK completely ruined the game.
Ulduar was some of the best raiding the game had ever done.
Originally posted by rojo6934 Take that feeling you've got of being without a game for six months and multiply that by 10+. That's an approximate average of how long old UO/DAoC/EQ/SWG etc. fans have been waiting for a new game that keeps them interested.
That sucks. It really does.
To be honest, though, there isn't much that can be done about it.
Even though they sometimes pretend that it isn't true, all companies main goal is to make money for their shareholders (whether private or public).
Why would someone make an oldschool game that brought in a couple hundred thousand (At most!) players when WoW is sitting over here with 12 million?
In order for the "oldschool" game to be successful, it will still need an enormous budget...But it won't turn a profit since it won't attract that many players.
This is the problem!
In order to make a game "better" than WoW, you need a lot of money. To earn back that money, you need a lot of players. To get a lot of players, you need to make the game appeal to a broad demographic.
Unless a rich individual that doesn't mind bleeding money every month decides to release an "oldschool" game, I don't see those styles of games making a resurgence.
We've all seen how well the inumerable WoW knock offs have done recently so your argument really isn't very well substantiated. Why would someone make another WoW clone when they keep failing? In WoW's current state it really shouldn't be too hard to build something that's more immersive but developers aren't aiming for that.
Hell, I never said they needed to build a copy of an old school game either. You assumed that's what I was saying. I said nothings managed to hold the majority of old school mmorpg gamers interest that has launched within the last 5 - 6 years. A brand new game with new, well thought out, mechanics could come along and give us something refreshing.
Take that feeling you've got of being without a game for six months and multiply that by 10+. That's an approximate average of how long old UO/DAoC/EQ/SWG etc. fans have been waiting for a new game that keeps them interested.
Bingo.
Each of those games were the pinnacles of their prospective fields of play, whether it was RP, immersion, PvP/RvR, w/e, WoW took all those elements and dumbed them down for the ultra casual. It increased popularity by bringing in new users sure, but the people who were happy with its predecessors were dissapointed in what they saw as subpar elements/gameplay to what they'd been playing before, only now there wasn't a playerbase or community to go back to - those old games were not getting new players and were in a perpetual state of decline.
The result is, unless we want to game in a ghostland, old MMO's shadows of their former selves, we're stuck with this peer network inside of a mini game that is WoW. New games try to replicate success and design their games after this embarrassment of an MMO and fail because they're just more of the same. People who want something different won't support them, and they lack the content/support/community to gather those who are interested in what WoW has to offer. Time will eventually crush this cycle, but in the meantime most of us are stuck.
Originally posted by whisperwynd Originally posted by lizardbones
Unless everyone is keeping a tab on the 2,000+ active players on each server, everyone more or less has anonymity. There are a few well known people, but that's it. People have always been able to leave and join guilds if they wanted to...nothing new there. It's always been that way. With class homogenization you just won't get into the next guild or cement your spot in your existing guild just because you rolled a Shadow Priest.
Now, I'm not so sure about the rest of the game's influence being good or bad. Do I want to see a whole bunch of games just like WoW? No, of course not. Do I want to see millions upon millions of dollars being pumped into the MMORPG industry? Yes, yes I do. There has been more development in the last five years on MMORPG than there has been in the 10 or 20 years prior and I think a lot of that is because of Blizzard and WoW.
In as much as I agree about the development, where has it gotten us, the gamer? Which game came out post WoW which offered as much Blizz did. That logic would only be supported if the genre kept rising from title to title. Instead we get subpar games with the high hopes that the next one will be 'the One'. Blizz got a game out and did wonders, but it's out now and simply saying it's because of it that we have great development is false. As there is no way to prove otherwise since we can't go back in time and change it. Anything from the past can be said to good or bad for the future, it's all perspective. Right or wrong means very little in its debate as everyone will invariably take sides and argue it. As for the leaving guild or not, the anonymity was less there when the community as a whole built up those relationships rather than pick and choose out of the litter based on ilvl and availability. This progression is one of the problems I see in Mmo's today. No building of reputation WITHIN the game server's community.
And yet the money keeps rolling in. New games keep getting developed. Without all that money being thrown around the industry, we would see very little new development. There have been some (ok, several) bad starts (WAR, STO, CO, etc.), but the money keeps coming in, and games keep getting developed. The current progression is something that would have happened regardless...WoW didn't start it, they're just a weird blip in the middle of the MMORPG progression path. Without WoW, there would just be a lot less money floating around and the progression path would be a lot slower.
Your last paragraph kind of highlights the issue that homogenization* is supposed to fix...lack of participation. A lot of people just didn't participate. It's a trade off between having a few special snowflakes doing stuff versus a bunch of similar snowflakes doing stuff. In my opinion, more participation is better.
* There's other stuff, like a dungeon finder and slimming down talent trees, etc. I'm just trying to stick one thing.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
But WoW had this and had this in spades back in the days of Vanilla/Classic and Burning Crusade.
Good tanks/healers were a rare commodity that was covetted and carefully courted.
Good DPS that could do more for a raid/group then do damage were a dime a dozen.
Players had rep and skill mattered.
Then came the LFG tool and cross-realm LFG... completely ruined that. It still exists to some extent at a raid-wide level, as in you don't get invited to tank or heal for a guild's raids unless you can prove your skill...
but how do you prove that skill anymore or "get recruited" without server-only small group content? The entire dynamics of the community has shifted and all thanks to WOTLK and the LFG tool and cross-server queue...
Ruined the game IMO.
Then, of course, you combined that with GearScore and the Acheivement system, both also came around during WOTLK which meant you had to prove you had already done content before you'd be invited to do content...
But how would you ever do content if you were required to do content... before you could do it?
Again, this perfect storm, tri-fecta of terrible FAIL that hit WoW during WOTLK completely ruined the game.
Ulduar was some of the best raiding the game had ever done.
This I agree and why I preferred vanilla. I could have explained better the community building thing, as in vanilla you did make a name for yourself. Where WoW is today however it is no longer the case.
Still, when you look at the timeline of games since UO, EQ and WoW to now, you see the disintegration of communal interpersonal relationships and a very cold, gear oriented, 'of the masses' mentality. "I am NOT a number!" seems aptly used here though I doubt many will get that reference. lol
Hell, I never said they needed to build a copy of an old school game either. You assumed that's what I was saying. I said nothings managed to hold the majority of old school mmorpg gamers interest that has launched within the last 5 - 6 years. A brand new game with new, well thought out, mechanics could come along and give us something refreshing.
The old school niche audience isn't asking for "new" and 'well thought out" though, that's the problem.
Generally speaking, they are asking for the same old, stale mechanics that were proven without a shadow of a doubt to be bad design and unpopular.
We only tolerated them back then because there wasn't anything else and because they still offered enough great stuff that no other game in no other genre could offer.
What we really need is a fresh take on those old mechanics, not a rehash of them, because a rehash of the old mechanics is no different then the army of games that are coming out now that are just rehashes of the same "new" mechanics from the current generation.
What we really need is the best of the new, the best of the old, combined in a way that is truly refreshing and unique and different, yet still familar and fun and can be popular and well thought out.
We need.. The Perfect MMORPG but how do you define it? By just repeating 10 year old bullet points on the back of some old game box?
This I agree and why I preferred vanilla. I could have explained better the community building thing, as in vanilla you did make a name for yourself. Where WoW is today however it is no longer the case.
Still, when you look at the timeline of games since UO, EQ and WoW to now, you see the disintegration of communal interpersonal relationships and a very cold, gear oriented, 'of the masses' mentality. "I am NOT a number!" seems aptly used here though I doubt many will get that reference. lol
I am a free man?
The question is how much Wow itself have created this type of community.
Before Wow MMOs were mostly if not only played by people known as "gamers and geeks" (if you read this forum you are one of us). But Blizzard got regular people into playing and I am not sure how that affected the community.
Surely the materalistic view Wow have on gear (stuff is more important than skill) and it's rewarding of egoism affected the community in some way but I am not sure how much.
We've all seen how well the inumerable WoW knock offs have done recently so your argument really isn't very well substantiated. Why would someone make another WoW clone when they keep failing? In WoW's current state it really shouldn't be too hard to build something that's more immersive but developers aren't aiming for that.
Hell, I never said they needed to build a copy of an old school game either. You assumed that's what I was saying. I said nothings managed to hold the majority of old school mmorpg gamers interest that has launched within the last 5 - 6 years. A brand new game with new, well thought out, mechanics could come along and give us something refreshing.
There really is no need to take such a hostile tone...
To counter your argument a bit:
1. I said nothing about "WoW knock offs". I stated that for a game to do well, it needs a big budget and a large playerbase. Said playerbase typically comes from broad appeal.
2. Again, I never stated that developers should be pumping out "WoW clones".
3. You may not have said it explicitly, but when you cite 4 of the most "hardcore / oldschool" games of that era, what else is anyone else supposed to assume? You can't get mad at people for drawing the most logical conclusion if your words are misleading.
4. "New, well thought out mechanics" are very hard to come by for a couple of reasons. They take a load of time and effort to conceptualize. They also take a load of time and money to implement.
If you reread my post without the jaded glasses, you'll notice that I have nothing inflammatory or derogatory in there. I'm merely saying that, as an investor, new ideas are HUGELY risky. Not only are they risky in and of themselves, they must compete with a giant behemoth.
The old school niche audience isn't asking for "new" and 'well thought out" though, that's the problem.
Generally speaking, they are asking for the same old, stale mechanics that were proven without a shadow of a doubt to be bad design and unpopular.
We only tolerated them back then because there wasn't anything else and because they still offered enough great stuff that no other game in no other genre could offer.
What we really need is a fresh take on those old mechanics, not a rehash of them, because a rehash of the old mechanics is no different then the army of games that are coming out now that are just rehashes of the same "new" mechanics from the current generation.
What we really need is the best of the new, the best of the old, combined in a way that is truly refreshing and unique and different, yet still familar and fun and can be popular and well thought out.
We need.. The Perfect MMORPG but how do you define it? By just repeating 10 year old bullet points on the back of some old game box?
Definitely not.
My thoughts exactly. Asking for a remake of EQ or UO is not the least more innovative than a remake of Wow.
The genre needs to move on and give the players new experiences, not remaking the same old games over and over, but most old schoolers seems to be stuck in the past.
I loved Meridian 59 and the other old school games but that doesn't mean I just want to go back to them, we need the MMOs of the future, not the MMOs of the past.
Comments
before WoW a game was considered good if it had a couple of hundred thousand players, WoW actually opened up the whole idea of MMO's to millions, if WoW had never happened, i am almost certain, that the majority of present day MMO's and those still in development, would never have happened.. it also continues to give those MMO's with poorly thought out implementation a continual kick up the rear to improve themselves, Blizzard are setting the pace imo..
Depending on your point of view, every one of the three positives listed by the OP are two edged swords that did as much damage to MMORPG gaming in general as they did help the genre.
It made one group of MMO buyers happy (unfortuantely, the larger, more causual audiance) and in the same turn alienated another segment of the market.
That would be fine btw, if every developer since then didn't keep staring at WOW's sub numbers and keep trying to build their games to steal their customer base from them.
Instead they largely end up picking up the scraps and we who are looking for a more challenging MMO experience continue to sit on the outside hoping one day at least one major developer will come to their senses and take a shot at winning our business back.
Our "niche" might be much larger than most people think.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Nobody wants to play a game where they don't feel special about their character. Masochism is not that rampant yet. It's not the feeling of always being useful that really matters but that your actions matter and have a community of people that know you and how you behave, not some random internet user that plays the same game.
You said it yourself, you adapted from spriest to become a healer and stayed within that core grp of raiders. Seems like being a special snowflake again.
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You could do a whole Psych paper on people playing WoW and how messed up their social interactions are. Maybe that would be a Sociology paper. Whatever. WoW is an extreme example of using a game as a substitute for self esteem in a lot of ways. However...that doesn't have much to do with people being not being able to participate in something with their friends just because they chose the wrong class.
Prior to things become more homogenized, I was a special snowflake because I chose to play a Shadow Priest. I may or may not have been all that good at managing my character, not standing in a fire, under the dragon's feet, etc. But if I was logged in, and a raid was happening, I was in it. Other people did not go because I was there on my Shadow Priest.
After the classes got more homogenized, I was not denying other people a spot in the raid simply by logging in. I had to prove my usefulness by actually doing something and being useful. I actually earned a spot in the raids, I wasn't given a spot in the raids because of the class I chose to play. More importantly (to me) I could opt out of the raid and if there wasn't another priest, there was another shaman or pallie that could heal in my place. It was kind of nice to be able to go off into the battlegrounds instead of raids every night. I think overall that it worked out better for the game. It certainly worked out better for me.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Wasn't trying to denigrate you or anything, but you're talking about raids, the smaller % of the mmo population and where the 'community' we were refering to is somewhat there. Though you have to almost take raiding like a part-time job and if you aren't in the core raiding group then it falls to either waiting for pugs or as you said, friends.
It was like that in older games too, at endgame you had little choice, whether it be instances WoW-style, or World bosses which you had to wait to spawn. You got a guild, got known and became 'one of the crew'.
The homogenized subsequent path it took, as you put it, makes it that now you can simply leave the guild if they don't like you or you are a proverbial asshat, and just join another with practically total anonymity.
You can literally grind pugs for vp and get top rated gear and still pug ZA/ZG afterwards.
Special snowflake or not, it still makes it easier to be uninvolved or a jerk as a whole to your fellow players ingame. That's one of the points we were exploring.
That's reason #1 for me why WoW did ruin MMOs.
Going mainstream means dumbing down to appeal to the lowest common denominator... which is exactly what has happened in the industry. For years most MMOs have bee rehashes of the same tired, old, and brain dead simplistic gameplay that has left a good chunk of gamers wanting more. But the industry doesn't provide, because it's convinced that developing bland and wisely 'accessible' MMOs is the path to profit.
The only way to get non-MMO gamers to play MMOs, is to dumb down MMOs to appeal to that crowd... which kind of kills the whole point of an MMO.
WOW reigned in the crappy aspects of EQ and UO and made MMOs attractive to a lot more people. The old niches still exist but they are a hard sell to developers and a majority of players.
WOW definitely helped motivate publishers to take chances on new MMOs. I'm positive some MMOs never would have been developed if it wasn't for the success of WOW.
You know what? There is actually a reason why all you hear on forums is complaints... And its not what you are describing! The "Happy" MMO players are (gasp!) PLAYING, and having fun! While ignoring the freaking Trolls that inhabit the forums.
And the only problem with that is that, sometimes the Devs "listen to the Trolls"... /doublefacepalm
It was like that in older games too, at endgame you had little choice, whether it be instances WoW-style, or World bosses which you had to wait to spawn. You got a guild, got known and became 'one of the crew'.
The homogenized subsequent path it took, as you put it, makes it that now you can simply leave the guild if they don't like you or you are a proverbial asshat, and just join another with practically total anonymity.
You can literally grind pugs for vp and get top rated gear and still pug ZA/ZG afterwards.
Special snowflake or not, it still makes it easier to be uninvolved or a jerk as a whole to your fellow players ingame. That's one of the points we were exploring.
Unless everyone is keeping a tab on the 2,000+ active players on each server, everyone more or less has anonymity. There are a few well known people, but that's it. People have always been able to leave and join guilds if they wanted to...nothing new there. It's always been that way. With class homogenization you just won't get into the next guild or cement your spot in your existing guild just because you rolled a Shadow Priest.
Now, I'm not so sure about the rest of the game's influence being good or bad. Do I want to see a whole bunch of games just like WoW? No, of course not. Do I want to see millions upon millions of dollars being pumped into the MMORPG industry? Yes, yes I do. There has been more development in the last five years on MMORPG than there has been in the 10 or 20 years prior and I think a lot of that is because of Blizzard and WoW.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
if this is true then.... blame all other mmorpg developers for not being capable of making an mmorpg better than WoW in every aspect of the game....
why its so hard to get over the fact that WoW is still the mmorpg that pulls more audience because its better made than all these new generation mmos trying to get easy money and then fail....
its been almost 6 months that i dont re-sub to WoW but i havent found another mmorpg that keeps me interested as much as WoW has done it..... so i have been playing only console games till GW2 and TSW come out (although im sure those 2 wont do the trick either.... much less SWtor)
Totally wrong, saying that its to say that GW1 was succesfull thanks to WoW existence, also i dont recall any mmo wich such marketing as WoW so i think thats a key too in the WoW succes, still dont pretend to say that WoW is the "mentor" of anything because is it not.
Umm...yeh....#1 - Making MORPGs more mainstream was not a good thing.
That's what destroyed the genre.
Take that feeling you've got of being without a game for six months and multiply that by 10+. That's an approximate average of how long old UO/DAoC/EQ/SWG etc. fans have been waiting for a new game that keeps them interested.
As much as I am hoping for and looking forward to SW:TOR...
EA really contributed majorly to the fall of the MMORPG genre and to its present state of affairs.
They acquired Origin Systems, makers of Ultima Online, as they were in the process of making Ultima Online 2 - oh all the things that game could have been...
But Origin was bought by EA, UO2 was scrapped...
Some time later, Origin works on UXO, Ultima 10: Oddessy which for all intents and purposes would be UO2 - oh all the things that game could have been...
Origin is pretty much shut down by EA, because the Origin studio in Texas was forced to close and most if not all of the employees did not WANT to move away from their homes and communities and families at EA's bidding to go where ever EA wanted them to pack up and move to, so they quit.
Two games... from the Godfather's of the MMO genre, ruined and scrapped by EA's short sighted greed.
They could have been game changers... major leaps forward in the genre... we could be having an entirely different conversation about MMOs today.
I believe EA is no longer "the evil Empire" of the gaming industry, after the collaspe of WAR and some either public failures, I think they've really shifted their focus to enabling developers to excel, rather then trying to push and guide and force their agenda.
In as much as I agree about the development, where has it gotten us, the gamer? Which game came out post WoW which offered as much Blizz did. That logic would only be supported if the genre kept rising from title to title.
Instead we get subpar games with the high hopes that the next one will be 'the One'. Blizz got a game out and did wonders, but it's out now and simply saying it's because of it that we have great development is false. As there is no way to prove otherwise since we can't go back in time and change it.
Anything from the past can be said to good or bad for the future, it's all perspective. Right or wrong means very little in its debate as everyone will invariably take sides and argue it.
As for the leaving guild or not, the anonymity was less there when the community as a whole built up those relationships rather than pick and choose out of the litter based on ilvl and availability. This progression is one of the problems I see in Mmo's today. No building of reputation WITHIN the game server's community.
That sucks. It really does.
To be honest, though, there isn't much that can be done about it.
Even though they sometimes pretend that it isn't true, all companies main goal is to make money for their shareholders (whether private or public).
Why would someone make an oldschool game that brought in a couple hundred thousand (At most!) players when WoW is sitting over here with 12 million?
In order for the "oldschool" game to be successful, it will still need an enormous budget...But it won't turn a profit since it won't attract that many players.
This is the problem!
In order to make a game "better" than WoW, you need a lot of money. To earn back that money, you need a lot of players. To get a lot of players, you need to make the game appeal to a broad demographic.
Unless a rich individual that doesn't mind bleeding money every month decides to release an "oldschool" game, I don't see those styles of games making a resurgence.
But WoW had this and had this in spades back in the days of Vanilla/Classic and Burning Crusade.
Good tanks/healers were a rare commodity that was covetted and carefully courted.
Good DPS that could do more for a raid/group then do damage were a dime a dozen.
Players had rep and skill mattered.
Then came the LFG tool and cross-realm LFG... completely ruined that. It still exists to some extent at a raid-wide level, as in you don't get invited to tank or heal for a guild's raids unless you can prove your skill...
but how do you prove that skill anymore or "get recruited" without server-only small group content? The entire dynamics of the community has shifted and all thanks to WOTLK and the LFG tool and cross-server queue...
Ruined the game IMO.
Then, of course, you combined that with GearScore and the Acheivement system, both also came around during WOTLK which meant you had to prove you had already done content before you'd be invited to do content...
But how would you ever do content if you were required to do content... before you could do it?
Again, this perfect storm, tri-fecta of terrible FAIL that hit WoW during WOTLK completely ruined the game.
Ulduar was some of the best raiding the game had ever done.
We've all seen how well the inumerable WoW knock offs have done recently so your argument really isn't very well substantiated. Why would someone make another WoW clone when they keep failing? In WoW's current state it really shouldn't be too hard to build something that's more immersive but developers aren't aiming for that.
Hell, I never said they needed to build a copy of an old school game either. You assumed that's what I was saying. I said nothings managed to hold the majority of old school mmorpg gamers interest that has launched within the last 5 - 6 years. A brand new game with new, well thought out, mechanics could come along and give us something refreshing.
Bingo.
Each of those games were the pinnacles of their prospective fields of play, whether it was RP, immersion, PvP/RvR, w/e, WoW took all those elements and dumbed them down for the ultra casual. It increased popularity by bringing in new users sure, but the people who were happy with its predecessors were dissapointed in what they saw as subpar elements/gameplay to what they'd been playing before, only now there wasn't a playerbase or community to go back to - those old games were not getting new players and were in a perpetual state of decline.
The result is, unless we want to game in a ghostland, old MMO's shadows of their former selves, we're stuck with this peer network inside of a mini game that is WoW. New games try to replicate success and design their games after this embarrassment of an MMO and fail because they're just more of the same. People who want something different won't support them, and they lack the content/support/community to gather those who are interested in what WoW has to offer. Time will eventually crush this cycle, but in the meantime most of us are stuck.
Instead we get subpar games with the high hopes that the next one will be 'the One'. Blizz got a game out and did wonders, but it's out now and simply saying it's because of it that we have great development is false. As there is no way to prove otherwise since we can't go back in time and change it.
Anything from the past can be said to good or bad for the future, it's all perspective. Right or wrong means very little in its debate as everyone will invariably take sides and argue it.
As for the leaving guild or not, the anonymity was less there when the community as a whole built up those relationships rather than pick and choose out of the litter based on ilvl and availability. This progression is one of the problems I see in Mmo's today. No building of reputation WITHIN the game server's community.
And yet the money keeps rolling in. New games keep getting developed. Without all that money being thrown around the industry, we would see very little new development. There have been some (ok, several) bad starts (WAR, STO, CO, etc.), but the money keeps coming in, and games keep getting developed. The current progression is something that would have happened regardless...WoW didn't start it, they're just a weird blip in the middle of the MMORPG progression path. Without WoW, there would just be a lot less money floating around and the progression path would be a lot slower.
Your last paragraph kind of highlights the issue that homogenization* is supposed to fix...lack of participation. A lot of people just didn't participate. It's a trade off between having a few special snowflakes doing stuff versus a bunch of similar snowflakes doing stuff. In my opinion, more participation is better.
* There's other stuff, like a dungeon finder and slimming down talent trees, etc. I'm just trying to stick one thing.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
This I agree and why I preferred vanilla. I could have explained better the community building thing, as in vanilla you did make a name for yourself. Where WoW is today however it is no longer the case.
Still, when you look at the timeline of games since UO, EQ and WoW to now, you see the disintegration of communal interpersonal relationships and a very cold, gear oriented, 'of the masses' mentality. "I am NOT a number!" seems aptly used here though I doubt many will get that reference. lol
The old school niche audience isn't asking for "new" and 'well thought out" though, that's the problem.
Generally speaking, they are asking for the same old, stale mechanics that were proven without a shadow of a doubt to be bad design and unpopular.
We only tolerated them back then because there wasn't anything else and because they still offered enough great stuff that no other game in no other genre could offer.
What we really need is a fresh take on those old mechanics, not a rehash of them, because a rehash of the old mechanics is no different then the army of games that are coming out now that are just rehashes of the same "new" mechanics from the current generation.
What we really need is the best of the new, the best of the old, combined in a way that is truly refreshing and unique and different, yet still familar and fun and can be popular and well thought out.
We need.. The Perfect MMORPG but how do you define it? By just repeating 10 year old bullet points on the back of some old game box?
Definitely not.
I am a free man?
The question is how much Wow itself have created this type of community.
Before Wow MMOs were mostly if not only played by people known as "gamers and geeks" (if you read this forum you are one of us). But Blizzard got regular people into playing and I am not sure how that affected the community.
Surely the materalistic view Wow have on gear (stuff is more important than skill) and it's rewarding of egoism affected the community in some way but I am not sure how much.
There really is no need to take such a hostile tone...
To counter your argument a bit:
1. I said nothing about "WoW knock offs". I stated that for a game to do well, it needs a big budget and a large playerbase. Said playerbase typically comes from broad appeal.
2. Again, I never stated that developers should be pumping out "WoW clones".
3. You may not have said it explicitly, but when you cite 4 of the most "hardcore / oldschool" games of that era, what else is anyone else supposed to assume? You can't get mad at people for drawing the most logical conclusion if your words are misleading.
4. "New, well thought out mechanics" are very hard to come by for a couple of reasons. They take a load of time and effort to conceptualize. They also take a load of time and money to implement.
If you reread my post without the jaded glasses, you'll notice that I have nothing inflammatory or derogatory in there. I'm merely saying that, as an investor, new ideas are HUGELY risky. Not only are they risky in and of themselves, they must compete with a giant behemoth.
My thoughts exactly. Asking for a remake of EQ or UO is not the least more innovative than a remake of Wow.
The genre needs to move on and give the players new experiences, not remaking the same old games over and over, but most old schoolers seems to be stuck in the past.
I loved Meridian 59 and the other old school games but that doesn't mean I just want to go back to them, we need the MMOs of the future, not the MMOs of the past.