After the announcement of this expansion + Paladin Retribution-damage getting buffed in the future, it tickles my urge to start playing again. I need an income of real money first though...
I already started pestering my wife to join me on my quest to finally hit 70 (given that she's got 3-4 70s already, haha)... Stoked to see Arthas show up, and some spiffy sounding stuff in the pipe. Inscription sounds really cool.
old shit in a new wrapping..
It's just so happens to be the best old damn shit 
But I'm still looking more forward to Age of Conan..
That trailer has sparked my old WoW flame again as well, damnit.
I've been playing around with the idea of installing WoW again for days, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Dilemmas. Decisions. Argh.
Every patch hurt the game a little, and the current expansion killed the game. My activity went to a complete lull; I cancelled my account 5 weeks ago, and haven't thought once about going back. And I was unhealthily hardcore before. Three (count ‘em) max level warlocks, two max level warriors, a max level priest and more alts you can shake a stick with “sad-bastard” engraved on it at.
I was so sourly disappointed about the first expansion. If you want my breakdown on why it completely failed, and even if you don’t, here’s the list.
[*:34tgy34b]New raid sizes destroyed guilds. Yeah, turns out they weren’t such a good idea after all as they killed all existing teams. No matter though, because you made raid content more accessible right?
[*:34tgy34b]Inaccessible raid content, spend the best part of a couple of months trying to get enough people to jump through all the hoops to actually get inside. But once they’re in?
[*:34tgy34b]No difficulty curve, the first proper raid zone in the game was on equal difficulty of the final zone in legacy. How are new guilds going to get off the ground if they have to tackle that level of content at the start? They don’t.
[*:34tgy34b]No tuning of content, the content was left utterly broken for months after release unless it was proving to be too easy, they seemed more interested in getting out content one guild on a soap-box would see than their actual playerbase. We killed Ragnaros 30-somethingth in the world. Yay for us. The world didn't weep for us having no new boss to focus on.
[*:34tgy34b]Heroics, I'm not even going to comment on the reputation grind. Why do the bosses get a tiny nudge in difficulty but the hoards of trash before them is now capable of killing your entire group 5 times before your trigger happy mage manages to type out “oops”?
[*:34tgy34b]But hey you don't need to do PvE anymore, right? We have PvP gear in battlegrounds to idle for and competitive PvP in arenas! Shame we upset all game balance even more than a Might of Menethil Arms Warrior could hope to. Did you believe us when we said we designed it for groups? Buffed Warriors, Shadow damage synergy? When are we going to fix this? Never.
[*:34tgy34b]Casual content. Casual apparently means reputation grind.
I can't imagine this expansion doing anything but continuing the trend, except with the possible advantage you invested less time in your character before it got wiped this time around. The only thing in that article that will be relevant 2 months after you have the expansion is the new battleground and Death Knight – which sounds to me like “DPS Warrior” leaving them with room to fix the current one, which is still in a mess after the initial design of “best at everything but healing.”
For me to go back that speech needed to include two things:
The mention of two opening PvE instances, both with no attunement and requiring the same level of gear to enter; The first being tank and spank with bells on and the second being the “look what we can do” encounters.
And then something about their late realisation PvP is still about the Warrior class and how buffed and geared he is. And hints they might actually do something about PvP teams that completely circumvent the PvP mitigation stat making up most of your item budget.
If they're going to continue running it into the ground. I'll continue being disinterested.
I'm not a fan of massive raids either, but they are a fundamental part of the game. The number of raid guilds post-expansion was depressingly low. Why was there no Molten Core 2?
They seemed more focused on showing people how they can make 25-man content hard for all the naysayers.
Plus getting geared up as a 'casual' is easy. Instead of relying on weekly random drops you grind reputation for raid compareable content, do PvP for raid compareable content or take up professions for raid-superior content. No self-proclaimed casual can complain about gear gaps anymore.
Very good discussion. I am a casual WoW player on a PvE server but I can understand many of your points, Taylor. The high-man Raids don't seem to be happening as much as I would have thought based on what I read about TBC. I of course started playing after TBC came out so I don't really know what it was like before. My old guild collapsed because as we all got into our upper 40s and 50s we started to realilze that we did not have enough people to be a good end game guild.
So now about 7 of my closest guildies and I all ended up joining another guild with about 40 lvl 70's plus a hundred more characters. No doubt there are alts but not to many people have more than 1 lvl 70 alt. And still, there is talk that the guild doesn't have enough people to regularly do raids, certainly not the 25-man stuff.
At lower levels (40's / 50's) , I hardly every went on any raids in Azeroth as a casual player and I'm realizing what a shame because I hear it is the most fun when you have a good group of people.
...so yeah, I can see your point of how WoW is really "casualizing" relative to the hardcore potential of the game and MMO genre. As a casual player I don't mind that much, but I would like to do more raids where I don't need 25 people in at lvl 70.
i've never played wow before, but from what i hear here it sounds like there's a huge gap between the casual and the competetive player. i dont think that any game should have that, especially not a mmo.
the most things i hear that people do in wow is raids. having played several mmos (dark age of camelot and city of villians among others) and been a raid leader, i know from experience that raids aren't for. it's not what you want to do with your end game character. you want the fun part, which i see as pvp/rvr.
my question here is, do you people do the raids for the fun part, or are you striving for something better, i.e. pvp or ? i know that mythic made dark age of camelot's end game much more casualized by adding single group (8 person raids) so that people could do those instead of spending days and weeks on huge raids where your chances of getting the items you need are slim. the good part in this was that people who played the game, both hardcore and casual, had an easy way of getting the items they wanted and proceeded to the pvp.
Quote from Senturait sounds like there's a huge gap between the casual and the competetive player. i dont think that any game should have that, especially not a mmo.
I think any game that has a competitive community latch onto it is going to have that disconnect, regardless of genre. Generally speaking, many of the features that draw a competitive community to a game are counter to features that provide wider accessibility to casual audiences. The Quake series (even Q4 to an extent) remains popular with competitive players thanks to precise and twitchy movement and controls, some intricate trick movement options, and a general perception of being a "skill game" (this debate is always entertaining). Q3, generally the highest pedestal of DM among the hardcore community, was basically a commercial failure, though, as the casual gamer had no interest in any of that. Q4... well, failed for a number of other reasons, but can be considered a similar story.
Natural Selection was just ugly, with a gap that grew into constant bickering and bitter debate between "pubbers" and "clanners" that runs to this day, nearly 5 years post-release. It's cooled greatly since I was last involved with NS, but was a terrible thing to happen to the community.
Which do you pick as a developer? That Blizzard has balanced the two as well as they have is pretty incredible, but the gap remains.
With the introduction of Arenas in WoW, the gap between casual (like someone who doesn't raid and do battlegrounds) and competetive players grew to the size of Grand Canyon. If you don't have Arena-gear and engage in PvP-combat while, say.. questing, and your opponent is fully geared up in Arena-armor and weapons (with stamina-enchants on every peice), your odds to win is much much lower, since they add Resilliance which reduces damage taken and chance to get critically hit.
But later people found that you can get amazing gear in Arena by just teaming up with a few friends and don't put any effort into it, since you'll get a bunch of points anyways, however it takes much longer than winning matches but it works.
There is some good discussions going on here and many people got some very valid points.
Quote from Senturathe most things i hear that people do in wow is raids. having played several mmos (dark age of camelot and city of villians among others) and been a raid leader, i know from experience that raids aren't for. it's not what you want to do with your end game character. you want the fun part, which i see as pvp/rvr.
my question here is, do you people do the raids for the fun part, or are you striving for something better, i.e. pvp or ?
You say that raiding is not what you want with your end game character - that is a statement I VERY much disagree with. Raiding is exactly what I want with my endgame character, it's actually what I want with all of my characters.
When raiding is done with a good group on the same skill level, age and ambition level as you it is by far the most fun part of the game imo.
My current issue with WoW is that I want to spend my time raiding and it is incredible hard to achieve that goal. A big part of this issue was introduced with TBC for a lot of the reasons Taylor mentioned. Main issue being smaller raids and less raid instances, creating for much less flexible raiding.
zacker: that is why i left an open bracket option, so you could insert whatever interest you had at end game point.
that aside, i never actually imagined that people enjoyed raiding. having played mmos for as long as i have (some 4 years total), i long for something more sophisticated than just an endless grind of items/experience/whatever else. i just fail to see this as 'fun'. sorry.
i see that people's opinion differ, so on top of my previous question, let me ask: what are you going to do when you've gotten all the items you initially started raiding for?
PS: zacker are you ever on irc? i reckon we have a mutual friend irl ;o
With the introduction of Arenas in WoW, the gap between casual (like someone who doesn't raid and do battlegrounds) and competetive players grew to the size of Grand Canyon. If you don't have Arena-gear and engage in PvP-combat while, say.. questing, and your opponent is fully geared up in Arena-armor and weapons (with stamina-enchants on every peice), your odds to win is much much lower, since they add Resilliance which reduces damage taken and chance to get critically hit.But later people found that you can get amazing gear in Arena by just teaming up with a few friends and don't put any effort into it, since you'll get a bunch of points anyways, however it takes much longer than winning matches but it works.
Battleground gear from honour rewards is only slightly behind arena gear, except the epic items which are on par and actually complementary, and I would call it casual. Craftable items are above the first few tiers of raid content, especially for casters, and reputation awards are at least comparable.
Casual content isn't bad because they slack behind in terms of gear; this was the problem in legacy but not in the expansion. The problem is "casual content" is a slew of reputation grinds and when Blizzard wants to add more casual content they just throw a few new bars into your reputation panel. You still geared up faster than the average raider doing this, but it was tedium and largely the fault of their poor raid design.
Quote from Senturathat aside, i never actually imagined that people enjoyed raiding. having played mmos for as long as i have (some 4 years total), i long for something more sophisticated than just an endless grind of items/experience/whatever else. i just fail to see this as 'fun'. sorry. i see that people's opinion differ, so on top of my previous question, let me ask: what are you going to do when you've gotten all the items you initially started raiding for?
I could see how that would apply to Everquest but the bosses in WoW are actually quite involving and fun to kill. I fell asleep routinely on the trash mobs leading to them, though. Ragnaros rising out the lava, one-shotting a previous boss and unleashing the fury is probably one of the better ‘game experiences’ out there.
It’s true most people went into raiding because it was the easiest way to gear up. In the current expansion they made it so PvP and reputation grinds (casual content!) is also viable. So for some reason decided to make raid content the slowest and most drama-heavy way to gear up, and make raid content initially so hard it was impossible for a new group to get started. Each patch added a new raid instance literally 3-4 guilds in the world could enter, all other players got reputation bars and items added too vendors.
To hammer home the err in raid design: It took us three weeks back in the day to learn Lucifron, back when Molten Core was hard and was missing two bosses. The fight was like this:
You pull Lucifron by having hunters (rangers) direct him and his two additional guards to three separate warriors (tanks). You kill each guard in turn then focus Lucifron. We didn’t have a mod for dispelling back then so people were assigned groups to dispel – Lucifron randomly put damage and mana cost debuffs on people and his additionals could Mind Control making the pull the most important part.
The equivalent boss in the expansion is either Maulgar or Hydross, try putting these into a paragraph. There's goddamn diagrams.
http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbgu ... H85v3Fu9qF
http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbgu ... H85v3Fu9qF
Eventually we conquered 11 bosses in Naxx (for non-geeks this is impressive) but we initially had trouble with an encounter that is simply: tank, spank and dispel. How in the living hell is a new guild going to start off on either of those two? Well as evidenced, they don't. But was blatantly obvious before implementation
To be quite honest my fondest memories playing this game were definitely back at the initial release, with one and a half raid instances nobody entered, supposedly amazing blue sets and PvP having no reward whatsoever except the satisfaction of killing someone. You just filled your time with fun stuff like arena tournaments and Hillsbrad fights. This stuff doesn’t happen anymore, because people feel compelled to grind things to get shiny items. People only do PvP because killing someone is part of a treadmill and they do it in battlegrounds because it has the most turnover. It’s soulless. When I made my Warrior I got some arena gear and full PvP while interacting with 2 other people and never leaving Stormwind’s War Room (no fighting in, etc). Then I quit.
Quote from Senturathat aside, i never actually imagined that people enjoyed raiding. having played mmos for as long as i have (some 4 years total), i long for something more sophisticated than just an endless grind of items/experience/whatever else. i just fail to see this as 'fun'. sorry.
I have the same feelings for playing, just the completely other way around. I consider most of WoW to be a fairl boring grind, I long for something sophisticated than that. This sophistication I have found in raiding.
Quote from Senturai see that people's opinion differ, so on top of my previous question, let me ask: what are you going to do when you've gotten all the items you initially started raiding for?PS: zacker are you ever on irc? i reckon we have a mutual friend irl ;o
First of all I don't really raid for items, I raid because it's fun and challeging. Second, there will always be better items in the even harder instances to strive for, if that is what you want.
As for your last questions: I haven't been on IRC for years, but yeah we do have a mutual friend - if you are talking of Kasper Videbæk that is.
i've avoided wow basically for the fact that it's the kind of game id get sucked into and have a wall of 87 pcs to play a ton of accounts simultaneously. i choose to look at it from the outside and call it lame while on the inside yearn to play the apparent goodness that it is.
bic that was my initial feelings towards wow, but i soon realized from seeing friends playing it that the way you do things (raid, grind), that hte game simply wasnt meant for me.
zacker: well alright. as i said above the game just pulls on different strings than i've seen other mmo's do. if you enjoy raiding, then i cant really say anything against it. it is a matter of opinion. :\
and also, yes, i meant Kasper.
I think if you tried WoW’s raid content with a capable group you’d be pleasantly surprised. The fights are scripted and genuinely enjoyable. It’s not some scaled up mob with more health you beat like a loot piñata for 3 hours with a battalion of people like in EQ1 and FFXI.
Though that said it's impossible to simply dive into that content now, so it's moot.
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